Beijing Platform Culture and Art Development CO., Ltd-Article-ANIWAR MAMAT: ON THE BORDERLANDS OF CHINESE CONTEMPORARY

ANIWAR MAMAT: ON THE BORDERLANDS OF CHINESE CONTEMPORARY

Bruce Doar

2011.08

Aniwar Mamat’s oeuvre is unique within Chinese contemporary art. Having travelled his own road leading to, and through, abstraction while retaining vigorous, but minimalist, elements from his earlier figurative documentations, Aniwar succeeds in sensually evoking desert landscapes, oases, city downpours, meditation spaces, and the wind. Aniwar, like many younger contemporary Chinese artists, is well travelled, including New York, Berlin, London, Vienna, Paris, Los Angeles, Sydney and Melbourne among his destinations. Yet Aniwar travels lightly, with only his worn sketchbooks, one or two volumes of edifying reading material, the barest equipment necessary to enjoy the finest of coffee while on the road, and an impeccable wardrobe comprising only one change of the finest Spanish or Turkish leather. Inspired both by Andy Warhol’s vision of art praxis as well as by the iconic and aniconic arts of Central Asia, Aniwar has the unusual distinction of bringing craft, rather than industrial, traditions into the purview of the Chinese contemporary, effecting a resilient harmony with underlying traditions with universal resonance while addressing very private concerns that serve as reference points for his informed vision. His uniqueness stems from his identity as a dignified outsider, and this is the source of his great personal and artistic strength.

Unlike many Chinese contemporary artists who move too effortlessly and almost viscously through fashionable media of the moment, leaving little trace of forethought or afterthought as they enthusiastically embrace and then unceremoniously dump items from a glistening smorgasbord, Aniwar’s cultural references do not evoke cultural destruction. Aniwar has eschewed fashionable waves of widely shared enthusiasms, the appeal of the obvious, the hysteria of the manifesto, and overstrained monumentality to unfold the sanctity of his own successfully contained and understated inviolate artistic spaces within which he seamlessly follows a personal logic grounded in the restrained sensuality of the visual. Unswayed by the incidental and the extempore, Aniwar nevertheless succeeds in documenting the moment, whether glimpsed in the splash of rain in a puddle, the pull of the wind, or the trajectories of shooting stars. Aniwar seems to stand outside things, unconcerned by history, events and politics, yet he succeeds in documenting micro-political contours through his “found” objects - an empty carton of eggs bearing his understated icons, a random pattern created by political pamphlets trampled by a crowd underfoot, or an old photograph submerged within a collage. Aniwar does not venture into unknown artistic realms without profound prior meditation and an instinctive strategy that guides and informs his every move. His work also acknowledges the existence of the unknown, happy to leave it undocumented and wary of pretending to understand (or delimit) it. For an artist, resisting fatal attraction is a remarkable achievement; the motivation in tackling the unknown can often simply be the intention to intrusively delineate and map what is essentially unknowable, with the result that the unknown is bruised, exhausted and familiar, but remains, still unknown. In contrast, Aniwar is an artist who appreciates restraint; it is the quality that prevents him from over-stating and over-producing, and it endows his work with rigor and consistency.

Aniwar’s art cannot be discussed without placing it within the framework of his personal visual history and explaining the influences shaping his images and bringing his genuinely unique vision to realization. Born in 1962 in Karghalik, a medieval Silk Road town near Kashgar, but to which Aniwar, as an adult, only returned in 2010 to produce his contemporary kigiz (felt) works, he later attended school in Urumqi, a city in Xinjiang commonly described as “more Chinese”. On graduation he first went to Tianjin, a city on China’s littoral, where he worked in one of the country’s leading carpet factories. (Ironically, in the mid 1980s all the carpets on sale in the-then large square before the main mosque in Kashgar were actually made in Tianjin.) Aniwar later attended the Central Minorities Institute in Beijing where he specialized in fine arts and found himself in a centre of artistic innovation during the ’85 New Wave art movement that swept Beijing and most large urban centres of China in the late 1980s.

Aniwar’s geographic move from China’s “borderlands” to its centre also represents a visually dramatic shift from the nation’s outlying wilderness to its inner core, from countryside to city, and from the silent desert to noisy metropolis, yet his artistic imagery has reversed this progression as his work advanced from voluptuous imagery to the use of increasingly minimalist and simplistic icons capturing the same sensuality, albeit with a more tuned approach in which the impact of each brush stroke is fully assessed. Aniwar makes the return trip to Xinjiang annually to visit family, but invariably extends each journey to encompass previously unvisited, remote areas of far-flung Xinjiang. These annual journeys are for Aniwar a spiritual pilgrimage of sorts and a return to his creative wellsprings, punctuating his international wanderings and enriching his visual spaces within a contemporary repertoire that transcends ethnicity and nation.

The relationship between what is local, ethnic or national, on the one hand, and what is global or international, on the other, lies at the heart of the definition of what is “contemporary” in art, as opposed to what is simply “modern”. For all Chinese artists, this remains a problematic and challenging issue, unresolved by the intense debates that have addressed the topic since the mid-1990s. Yet Chinese artists continue to find themselves unwillingly swept up by curatorial concerns formulated elsewhere. Art is created, obviously, by individuals and individuals are shaped by different societies, cultures and concerns, all invariably leaving indelible visual traces. But the dilemma for artists is clear: international art may well result in the extinction of alternative visual histories and create a void for the personal, as art is reconfigured as design. Aniwar is well aware of these paradoxes confronting the contemporary Chinese artist and perhaps spelling the end for “Chinese” contemporary art. His reaction is philosophical, having learned well relativist cultural lessons from his close reading of the Taoist philosophical texts Zhuangzi and Laozi, but also practical, Aniwar having embarked on a close reading of the stratagems for all contemporary arts discussed and acted on by Andy Warhol, who is in many senses a latter day William Morris.

The geographical extent of China’s “borderlands” (variously construed by Chinese historians as the “Western Regions”, the Silk Road, the “Northwest” or more recently simply as “Western China” or “the West”) may be vague around the edges, but China’s borderlands remain a distinctive entity within 20th century Chinese visual history. Aniwar’s borderlands are clearly defined as Xinjiang, and he is highly knowledgeable about the visual legacy of a region where cultural sites from earlier centuries are visible, publicized, and more recently commercialized. In Republican China, the borderlands remained an elusive, yet attainable, zone within the realm of the exotic but they also defined, delineated, and nourished the wellsprings of Chinese patriotism and nationalism. For Chinese artists, in the late 1930s and 1940s, when China was cut off from the outside world by the Japanese occupation, the borderlands became a zone of visual inspiration, firstly for a wave of modern artists (including Dong Xiwen, Wu Zuoren, Chang Shuhong, Pan Jiezi, and Huang Zhou), and even for Zhang Daqian. Most of these artists had returned from Paris and other foreign centres, and venerated Gauguin. Forced to find equivalents of pure and primitive Tahiti, they found artistic authenticity in the marches of the upland steppes, the deserts of Gansu, and beyond. When I first met Aniwar in 1980s we would often dine in one of the restaurants of the Friendship Hotel beneath Huang Zhou’s giant paintings of camel trains crossing the Gobi Desert and of folk musicians from Xinjiang that adorned the foyers and dining rooms of that socialist caravanserai. Down to the early 1980s, China’s borderlands, periphery, and “national minorities” continued to fuel the nation’s imagination as a proxy for the wider world, access to which was denied to artists, and serve as a source of the visually exotic within China’s borders.

Aniwar has had the distinct advantage of growing up in Xinjiang, unlike earlier artists who made it a place of artistic pilgrimage, and while the urban furniture of Urumqi was no different from that of any other Chinese city, the dominant Uyghur culture of that time and the local oil and watercolour painting traditions drew heavily, but without acknowledgement, on the innovative Uzbek School of Soviet painting (of the 1920s and 1930s) and Russian influences (such as that of Pavel Kuznetsov from Saratov who first painted Central Asian figures and scenes), and paralleled the Russian traditions which informed Chinese academic painting from the 1950s to the 1970s. However, in the post-Mao era, Xinjiang artists, by and large, engaged in the representation and cultivation of a form of self-exoticization that resonated with the official state depiction of Xinjiang, but echoed a sensibility that was, by then, dated. Aniwar’s visual history has been nourished by “sunshine art”, the relics of ancient cultures, the resonances of the borderlands for Chinese modernist artists not from Xinjiang, or from his own ethnicity (as a Uyghur), yet by the 1990s he had transcended these referents and by now has been able to directly appreciate many of the masterpieces of world art; Aniwar has long since successfully absorbed and assimilated his personal visual spaces, so that now they remain only as an intangible presence in his work.

Aniwar’s move to abstraction was almost complete by the 1990s and yet in his early works of the late 1980s and 1990s the outlines of carpet, the curve of the duttar (“lute”), the sweep of a beauty’s tresses and the ubiquitous golden comb, the cornucopia of desert fruits, seeds and flowers, and the curves of bodies all seem apparent, but they enigmatically change and are highlighted as flashes of gold in a more saturated prism of vital colours and in more vivid contrast, as he encodes his earlier work and gives it a constantly wider frame of reference. This sublimation of imagery documents his progress and obscures the ultimate sources of his imagery, at the same time as it evidences his personal transformation over time. He detaches these bands of colour and marshals them like elements in a new language, through which he succeeds in expressing changes in the natural world. In his evocations of wind and rain what were once golden combs unsurprisingly become multicoloured isobars of emotion.

Aniwar’s ability to absorb, sublimate and reference the visual heritage of the borderlands and emerge as an utterly fresh contemporary artist whose vision is as relevant in New York as it is in Beijing or Berlin fully attests to the success a far-reaching artist who can be at home anywhere. The desert wellsprings of his art are fully expressed through his use of vivid and lively colour, his sensitivity to light and its subtle nuances, his iconic references (the comb, spatula, spoon, carding fork, lute) that are detached from their original cultural underpinnings and float freely in larger liberated spaces, and his attention to crafts (felt) that are some of the most ancient but are as resilient and useful today as they were three thousand years ago.

Aniwar’s reach back through history has now extended to the most primitive art and his increasing abstractions over the past decade and more have taken written language back to runes and on to Braille, as he continued to create linear force fields of moving energy moderated by deft diagonal interventions that are both unsettling and instructive. In the living relics of what might be termed intangible cultural heritage, Aniwar has inserted his bands of vibrant colour in what is one of his most remarkable iconic interventions to date. Aniwar’s decision in 2010 to use the medium of kigiz to document his abstract conceptions in a medium other than oil, acrylic, water-soluble oil, crayon, ink, pencil, charcoal, photography or installations, all of which he has worked in and mastered, has also been a contemporary exploration in an art form which brought him together with the artisans who still make felt in his home town of Karghalik. Aniwar has produced a video that documents and simplifies the process of wet felting, which he used to create his kigiz works. Felt is the oldest man-made fabric. Some of the finest and earliest examples of its use for rugs, wall hangings, sculpture, hair ornaments, saddle rugs and footwear were discovered at the Pazyryk barrow site in the Altai Mountains north of Xinjiang and are dated to around 500 BCE. The video produced by Aniwar opens with the artist in panama hat laying down the small strips of prepared felt of varying lengths, width, selvedge, and serration in his iconic colors of gold, green pink, orange and ochre in seemingly random, yet deliberately moderated, arrays resembling those in his most recent oil paintings and sketches. The limpid strains of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies accompany Aniwar as he scatters or neatly plants the seeds of his future rug across coir mats. We see Aniwar in the process of evoking a new Barbizon. The two artisans then cover the laid out strips with dyed and loosely fluffed woolen fleece which they card with a large tool resembling a rake (Uyghur: rezände). Pulsating music with an industrial rhythm joins Erik Satie as the artisans contain the piled fleece, folding its perimeter back and inserting more of Aniwar’s colored strips edging the work. Water is then sprinkled over the teased high woolen piles, completing the significant transformation in the process of “wet felting”. Further stages of rolling – by using hand rollers (Uyghur: shepsheq) - follow. The entire performance by Aniwar and his two artisans in Karghalik seems effortless, although the process of rolling is in fact quite arduous, and is strangely evocative of the sweeping of sand gardens by Japanese monks. We return to Gymnopédies and the performance piece with the “Golden Fleece” begins anew.

This art work has a multi-layered significance. The video itself presents a seemingly effortless pre-industrial craft process that belies the arduousness of the work involved. The process of rolling continues for days and, I am assured by someone who has participated in this village work that it leaves the artisan’s forearms chaffed and aching. The video is also quite short, again glossing over the complexity of the art, as presented in this endless loop which suggests that the process can be effortlessly extended into infinity. The music is also deftly selected to conjure up a simpler world. Erik Satie is overlaid with music evocative of a distant Industrial Revolution. Aniwar’s video is contrived to critique and provocatively question the ways in which we do things today. The resulting kigiz works are remarkable examples of contemporary textile art quite unlike anything seen in the traditional Central Asian repertoire.

The visual borderlands provide the enigmatic quality in Aniwar’s contemporary art that sets him apart from other Chinese contemporary artists, and in his most recent work we can also discern his visual beginnings. In 1985 Aniwar wrote a programmatic piece published in China Fine Arts, the newspaper edited by Li Xianting which almost single-handedly documented the ‘85 art movement, and in it Aniwar almost presaged his own artistic voyage that was only then just beginning in his description of a closed art space that simultaneously serves him as an “ideal world”. Filled with music and the musty aroma of fallen autumn leaves, the gallery intuitively leads viewers across palace carpets through a space illuminated by twenty-four candles. His closing sentence is an uncanny prophecy which has also served him as a credo: “We do not want to follow any school of thought or painting, and simply hope that our successes or failures will be of our own making”.

FURTHER READING:

Bruce Doar, “Carpeted Oases: Recent Paintings by Aniwar Mamat”, Meg Maggio ed., Aniwar, Courtyard Gallery, Beijing, 1989.

Ayxem Eli (University of Tasmania), “Towards the Opposite of a ‘Sunshine’ Art: Contemporary visual art in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China” (forthcoming).