DSL Collection

By Martina Koppel Yang

Waterbed
"I heard that art and cooking are two different ways to reach one and the same aim. Therefore it is no wonder that, always when I find painting is not going smoothly and my mind is somehow weightless; I go to a little bar and get some additional food. From there I can observe an old man who sits next to the door of the barbers on the other side of the street. I am sure he must be the owner of the shop. The inside and the outside of the shop are both yellowed: from the utensils to the seats, from the curtains to the wallpaper, everything looks a bit rusty …"

"I often gaze at him attentively; he too has started to look attentively at me. Sometimes, when we gaze at each other for a long time, our bodies are exchanged: he becomes an artist and I become the owner of the shop. And, indeed, his business of non-doing really resembles that of an artist, while my complex contemplations resemble those of a shop owner."

Shen Yuan wrote the short story A red cloak made from oddments, from which I cited the above passage, during her years as a student of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. In these few sentences, one can pick out most of the elements which continue to be important for her creative process today: a sensuous experience of her immediate environment, a corporeal expression, an interest materials and their transformation, a merging of images and a kind of realistic concreteness, which relates her installations and objects directly to life. These basic elements of her artistic personality were formed while she was living in China and are moulded by the very particular environment in which she grew up and her personal status. As a young female artist, she belonged to a small cultural elite, whom after the decade of the Cultural Revolution, were once again accepted and promoted. After the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Fine Arts Academies began to enrol students again in late 1977. Shen Yuan, who entered the Zhejiang Fine Arts Academy (today Chinese Fine Arts Academy) in 1978, belongs to that first generation of students enrolled, from which many of the most active and most outstanding contemporary Chinese artists have emerged. Within this small elite, she was furthermore one of the rare women who chose to study Fine Arts. Having grown up in a family of painters, she was already familiar with painting techniques, when she enrolled for the course of Traditional Chinese Painting.

The Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, traditionally the most progressive academy in China, adopted a rather tolerant attitude towards western modernism. Already, by the early 1980s, reformed its curriculum, putting more emphasis on individual creation than on realist academic training. It was therefore here, that many of the most progressive young artists in China had been educated. Most of the students had already been trained in artistic techniques as propaganda painters during the Cultural Revolution. To accomplish their technical skills was therefore a minor task. They spent most of their time reading and discussing newly translated western literature - books on western philosophy, art history and modern art. During her time at the Zhejiang Academy, Shen Yuan was part of this generation, who were inspired by the readings of Wittgenstein, Freud, Foucault, Suzuki but also by autochthon Chinese philosophy such as Chan Buddhism and Taoism. The works of Dadaists, Neo-Dadaists, Fluxus artists and Pop artists were as familiar to them as those of the early Modernists, such as the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Shen Yuan soon tried to broaden the formal and technical limits of Traditional Chinese Painting. In her early works, she integrated the technique of collage and inserted figurative elements into monochrome black inks. She, however, was not satisfied with sheer formal experiments. Similar to some of her colleagues, such as Huang Yongping, Gu Wenda, Wang Guangyi, Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi or Wu Shanzhuan, she looked for ways to overcome formal, academic and conceptual restrictions of the artistic language as such. However, her approach is very different from those of her male colleagues. Shen Yuan was less attracted by theoretical discussions, conceptual approaches, or deconstructive strategies. She was far more interested in how to relate art to life and how to make art a personal attitude, a way of living. In "A Red Cloak" she writes: "Artists create works of art. And this madman, this old man himself, was a work of art. Each artist desires to become a work of art. (…)"

Shen's quest for a proximity to life - for the ordinary and thus for the unassuming - could be read as a typically female standpoint, that is less linked with notions like political ideals and grand narratives. Those unifying discourses, often with utopian aims, which were typical of the so-called Humanist Enthusiasm of the 1980s, remain instead the domains of her male colleagues. Hers is a position that relates to the individual and to little narratives, and shows a strong decentralising tendency. Her very private act of writing was therefore an important way to articulate her attitude towards life and her view of her immediate environment. For Shen Yuan these images of every day life, which reappear constantly in her art, are highly allusive; it is the merging, overlapping and transformation of these images that generates meaning. After her graduation in 1982 she returned to her hometown Fuzhou in Fujian Province to work in a publishing house. Here she was close to the Xiamen Dada group, the artistic circle around Huang Yongping, who would later become her later husband. Based in the nearby Xiamen, this group have experimented with Dadaist happenings, readymades and non-subjective modes of creation since 1985. During her period in Fuzhou, she took part in several exhibitions, among them, Exhibition of Women of Fuzhou (1985), in which she showed her ink paintings. Besides painting, Shen Yuan continued to write short stories. In the late 1980s she also started to create objects. Her Waterbed that was exhibited in the exhibition China/Avant-garde (1989) makes a humorous reference to the latest fashion at that time of using waterbeds. On this image taken from everyday life, Shen Yuan superimposes another image inspired by the material used to make these beds. She seals living fish into a plastic bag filled with water and then puts the bag on a campbed like a mattress. In Chinese, the word for fish (yu) is homonymous to the words for wealth and comfort/ leisure, and thus a symbol for these notions. However, the death of the fish transforms the work into the image of putrefaction. The process of decay then, although visible, is enclosed and sealed off from sensory perception. However, the image of the process engenders various connotations and allusions.

Diverged Tongue
Since 1990, Shen Yuan has been living in Paris. Her loss of language in this foreign environment is an experience that has marked her significantly. In her objects and installations of the 1990s, her interest in a semantic dimension of the process of transformation and of material is even more evident. She employs a kind of metaphorical material language, which is further enhanced through the use of Chinese epigrams as titles. The ambivalence accompanying these epigrams is mirrored in the process of transformation of the material. Whistle down the wind (bai fei koushe), which she created for her first solo exhibition in Paris in 1994, consists of a row of tongues made from ice. The tongues are supported on knives, which are slowly revealed during the melting process. The drops of melted ice are collected in spittoons. For Shen Yuan, melting is "the process of transformation from one image into another. An image of unassumingness is transformed into the image of menace - the knife." As the word tongue connotes the notion of language, the "melting of the ice tongue, which expresses the excessive wasting of one's words, signifies the loss of language."

Shen Yuan uses the image of the tongue in several installations. She gives expression to her infatuation with this image in her artist's book published by the Centre of Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu in Japan; it is designed as an illustrated glossary of the notion tongue. Diverged Tongue (Qishe), which she made in 1998 for her solo show in the CCA Kitakyushu is again about the loss of language: “The one with a forked tongue wishes to speak two languages with one tongue, but neither language is spoken clearly.” What makes Shen particularly interested in the tongue are the multiplicity of possible associations as well as a potential transformation of meaning. In her words: "I am interested in its associations with language and with the sense of taste, it thus has both spirituality and materiality." In this installation Shen moreover associates the tongue as a sensory organ with a children's toy: the tongue unfurls and extends, when air is pumped into it. Toys are of particular interest for Shen Yuan, as they are ready-made mirror images of reality with a highly allusive character.

The use of Chinese epigrams not only introduces imagery from Chinese culture into the field of contemporary art, but, by the ambivalence of these sayings, it also creates a space for a potential permutation of images and meaning. One such example is In Threes and Fives (san wu cheng qun) that Shen Yuan created in 1997 for the exhibition Parisien(ne)s at the Camden Arts Centre in London. Here she imagined the windows of the exhibition space as heads and fixed long braids made from flax to them. For Shen Yuan, the braid, on the one hand, is a symbol for the female, and, on the other, represents life in Chinese culture.

Un Matin du Monde
Shen Yuan went on from her personal contemplations about the loss of language in a foreign environment to observations and comments on her new cultural and social environment. She has also reflected more generally on the situation of the individual and of culture in the age of globalisation, as evident in Alley-battle (1997), which she produced for the exhibition Cities on the Move. The concept of association and merging of images remain the predominant features of these works. Demolishing the Bridge after Crossing the River, which she realised in 1997 in Asperen, Netherlands, is a bridge made from recycling containers and returnable glass bottles. The image of the bridge alludes to a passage, which in connection with the used materials, refers to the process of production, - from raw material to manufactured product to garbage - as well as to the process of recycling - the process from garbage back to raw material. The title, a Chinese epigram, adds a critical stance to this site-specific work, which also reflects the artist's impression of the little village in Netherlands.

Project for Lisbon (1997) is a non-realised project, which reflects on the role of the former colonial power Portugal at the time of emerging world trade. A large fishing net is suspended in the exhibition hall. Various objects, such as dishes and bowls in the style of Chinese export porcelain, are fixed with strings above the net, like buoys drifting on an imaginary sea.

Finally, Shen Yuan's installation One Morning of the world, realised for her solo exhibition in the Kunsthalle Bern in 2000, can be considered an attempt to transplant a visual memento of her hometown -of images, sounds and odours - into a western environment. It is a very literal attempt to put the question of identity, as well as her personal experience of the other into a concrete and sensuous image of life. Her installation reproduces part of a roof of a traditional Chinese house in the typical style of Fujian Province. To this fragment she adds sounds of everyday life and further details, such as spices and prepared duck, which have been put on the roof to dry. Shen Yuan then proposes these fragments of her personal memory to the spectator as an image that is immediately transformed by the perception of the viewer and by their different cultural background. The transformation this time is not a metaphorical one; instead it is the process of experience, the experience of the self in the horizon of the other. And art is the practice of creation and reception, which makes this experience possible.

"I often gaze at him attentively; he too has started to look attentively at me. Sometimes, when we gaze at each other for a long time, our bodies are exchanged…"