According to Zhao Zhao: New Works John Tancock
John Tancock
2013.05
Even as a student and probably long before Zhao Zhao seems to have had a rebellious streak. In fact, “streaking” as the act of running nude through a public place is known in the west is exactly what he proposed doing. While attending the Xinjiang Academy of Fine Arts, Zhao Zhao developed an interest in performance art. What he wanted to do was to run naked along Erdaoqiao Street where the residents were mostly Uighur ethnic and Muslim. For several reasons this was probably not such a good idea since displays of public nudity were frowned upon by the authorities and the explanation that public nudity was“ art” would have fallen on deaf ears. As it turned out, he did not have the opportunity to strip since he was arrested before it happened and had to explain to the agents who were interrogating him that he was an artist and not an activist.
As inconsequential as Zhao Zhao’s non-performance might seem, this youthful display of high spirits displays in embryonic form the range of concerns that henceforth were to characterize his diverse body of work. There is generally an element of bravado and risk-taking in what he chooses to do and a willingness to face the consequences if he is deemed to have overstepped the mark.The question of authority is another over-riding concern – who makes the rules, who enforces them? – not only in the field of art but in society at large.
In 2004 Zhao Zhao moved to Beijing from Urumqi. He grew up in Shihezi, a small town outside Urumqi, where his family had been sent for re-education during the Cultural Revolution. Ai Weiwei had also lived there for eighteen years so it was no surprise that he gave a warm welcome to this talented but unfocused young man, almost immediately employing him as his assistant for the video Beijing-Chang'an Boulevard (2004) and subsequently two more videos, Beijing: The Second Ring Road (2005) and Beijing: The Third Ring Road (2005). In a way, Zhao Zhao became the older artist’s apprentice and right-hand man, assisting him in many projects and traveling with him in connection with exhibitions to Austria and Germany, Switzerland, the United States and England.
After five years of provocative actions such as Locking a Door (2007) and mostly object-based art, Zhao Zhao has returned to painting in the Ping Pong series and monumental figurative sculpture in Officer. Why this return to painting in a colorful, decorative style and to the techniques of academic sculpture? What is going on? Has he suddenly decided that the time has come to pay homage to ping pong, China’s national sport, in paintings that nobody could object to? Likewise, has he reached the conclusion that his bad-boy activities of recent years such as breaking off parts of sculptures by Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kieffer to make new works are not going anywhere and that he should compensate for these youthful indiscretions by returning to an academic sculptural practice on a Chinese theme? Well, not exactly.
Naturally inclined to a healthy disrespect for authority, Zhao Zhao absorbed from his proximity to Ai Weiwei an awareness of the finer gradations of iconoclastic behavior. At its most obvious this could consist of giving the finger to symbols of power as he did in the Study of Perspective series of photographs (1995-2003). An attitude is expressed but nothing is damaged. Ai Weiwei’s engagement with cultural values is far more complex. On one hand in works such as Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) there appears to be a complete disregard for cultural heritage, a willingness to sacrifice an object that has survived for thousands of years to prove a point. Shocking as this might seem, the ceramics that were used in his works were distinguished largely by their age, and were readily available as the excavations necessitated by China’s construction binge in the 1990s and thereafter unearthed countless thousands of utilitarian vessels. On the other hand, he has created many new works from furniture and structural elements destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, rescuing the detritus of these wanton acts from permanent oblivion. He also has enormous respect for traditional craftsmanship as can be seen from ongoing collaborations with cabinet-makers, craftsmen in porcelain among others.
A deep fascination with iconoclasm also underlies much of Zhao Zhao’s work, and not only from a theoretical point of view.1 In 2007 for example, he made a necklace from stone he had broken off from Joseph Beuys’s project 7000 Oaks in Kassel, Germany. _e following year he made a set of eight“ Euro coins” from lead sheath he surreptitiously removed from Anselm Kieffer’s monumental work Volkzahlung, 1991 in the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin. At first glance this seems to be a sequel to notorious acts of vandalism in museums that have focused on artists ranging from Velasquez to Barnett Newman.2 When asked to account for his seeming disregard for the integrity of the works he utilized, Zhao Zhao remarked in a recent conversation that iconoclasm had nothing to do with it, vandalism even less so. Beuys and Kieffer are two of the artists he admires most and when he saw their works in person for the first time, he could not resist the kind of hands-on response that museums discourage.“ If you are really hungry,” he remarked, “and you see freshly baked-bread in a shop window, you break into the shop to eat.”3 Ironically, the work by Kieffer that Zhao Zhao coveted so much that he broke off a piece refers to the burning of books ordered by Hitler in Berlin in 1933, an attack on a sculpture that memorializes the most infamous period in the history of Germany.
It is what Zhao Zhao decided to do with the lead fragment that is most surprising. Rather than
treasuring it as a relic and hiding it away, he used it to make eight euro coins, the symbol of European unity that emerged so painfully in the wake of World War II. And the greatest irony of all – the Hamburger Bahnhof has just purchased this work for its collection, demonstrating remarkable sang-froid and a willingness to accept the inevitable by embracing it!
Other works produced between 2007 and the present are likewise antecedents of the new body of work in the current exhibition, notably Fragments, 2007, a shattered planar form in steel that anticipates the scattered limestone fragments of Officer. Toothpicks, 2007 which utilizes wood from Ai Weiwei’s Fragment, itself assembled from wooden elements from dismantled Qing dynasty buildings, only manages to squeeze toothpicks from Ai’s monumental structure while a piece of steel reinforcement from the Berlin Wall will be ground down to a needle by 2014 if all goes according to plan. Works of art or parts of a shameful symbol such as the Berlin Wall strangely end up as effigies of utilitarian objects. Other performancebased works such as Cobblestone, 2007 and On Guard, 2008, both of which occurred in Tian'anmen Square before anybody noticed them, were noteworthy for the humorous way in which Zhao Zhao chose to emphasize the overpowering symbolism of the location by the addition of a cobblestone and one more uniformed officer, both easily removed when the need arose.
With the Ping Pong paintings and Officer Zhao Zhao expands his range to comment in different ways on the question of authority, the rules and regulations of international table tennis that have enabled China to reign supreme for several decades in the paintings and the police officer as a symbol of the state’s maintenance of law and order in the sculpture.4 _e two bodies of work differ from each other in all respects, offering a nuanced view of Zhao Zhao’s attitude to different ways in which rules are enforced.
The paintings are large and heraldic, reducing the high speed excitement of a game of ping pong
to the careful placement of paddles and ball on unmodulated green backgrounds. On each canvas
different combinations of the three primary colors – red, blue and yellow – are used to represent the paddle. Occasional glimpses of the white of the raw canvas serve to delineate the contours of the paddles or define the shape of the ball. Here Zhao Zhao has established his own set of rules, echoing in their even-handed application the rules that define not only table tennis but games and athletic pursuits in general. Zhao Zhao views these paintings not as a patriotic gesture honoring ping pong but as recognition of an activity in which China excels by following international rules, creating new technique s when necessary such as Liu Guoliang’s development of the penholder technique that propelled it to even greater heights. _e standardized format and execution of the paintings follows what Zhao Zhao identifies as the outstanding characteristic of China’s national game, the willingness of all participants to follow the rules which apply to everybody.
Contrasting with the bracing simplicity of the paintings with their encoded message are the sculptural fragments scattered randomly over the floor of the gallery that are initially difficult to identify. Clearly, a catastrophe has happened but when and where? It does not take too long to put two and two together and note that if these broken parts were to be re-assembled, the figure of an officer would re-emerge. An officer? From what we already know of Zhao Zhao’s background, it is clear that he does have what we might politely call“ issues” with authority figures, dating back to the time in 1999 when he first tried to streak through the streets of Urumqi.
What happens to a person, an average man in the street, when he dons a uniform? Much has been
written on this subject and while in certain societies the uniformed policeman, the amiable English
“bobby,” the friendly US neighborhood cop or the helpful Japanese policeman in his Koban (police
box) can win the affection and respect of the general public, this is mostly not the case and is now
the exception rather than the rule. In China, policemen are everywhere and for a couple of hours on August 8, 2008 at the opening of the Olympics in Beijing, there was one more seemingly on duty, Officer Zhao Zhao. In a performance piece he bought a police uniform and stood at attention in Tian'anmen Square for two hours, nobody noticing that he was an impostor. _is was a performance that nobody really noticed, not even the thousands of policemen on duty who might well have arrested him if they had known what he was up to.
Emerging from recent experiences with the police, Zhao Zhao’s view of authority has darkened.
Donning a uniform for the second time and using his own features, he has become the subject of a life-size sculpture that nobody except the artist himself and his assistants ever saw since it was partially demolished as soon as it was completed. Observing political events in China at first hand and reflecting on history, he has created not a“ Monument to an Unknown Officer” but a critique of certain aspects of Chinese society and a commentary on the way in which throughout much of recorded history public sculptures nearly always outlive their relevance. For every Gattemalata by Donatello that has stood in the Piazza del Santo in Padua, Italy since 1453, there are countless thousands of monuments that for as many reasons have been sacrificed to the changing currents of history. On another level, Zhao Zhao’s sculpture may be seen as an acerbic statement on the current state of academic sculpture and the role of public sculpture in the twentyfirst century. Who deserves to be memorialized today and how?
In his fascinating book The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution, Dario Gamboni has written the definitive account of a subject that until its publication had never been accorded the attention it deserves. In his chapter on“ _e Fall of the Communist Monuments,” in Central and Eastern Europe, for example, he notes how this chapter in the history of destruction began with the revolution of October 1917 when Lenin’s decree of April 12, 1918‘ on the monuments of the Republic’ ordered monuments to the tsars and their servants that had no historical or artistic value to be removed and stored or recycled.5 Seventy years later with
the demise of the Soviet Union, the tables were turned and numerous monuments to powerful political figures of the recent past were removed from their pedestals and frequently destroyed. One of the most spectacular demolitions to have been recorded was the removal of the 14-ton statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky by Evgeny Vuchetich (1958) from its pedestal outside KGB headquarters on August 22, 1991.
It was not only political figures who had fallen from favor who suffered this ultimate indignity. In
France during the nineteenth century statues of‘ great men’ from all walks of life proliferated, most of which have since disappeared or survive only in partial form. Ways of dealing with monuments that have fallen out of favor range from total destruction to relocation, modification by replacing the textual part of the monument or preservation of only those parts of a monument that correspond to current taste.
Intuitively, Zhao Zhao has recreated the sequence of events that have befallen so many public sculptures where the decision to preserve, modify or destroy depends on many different factors, not always political. The first decision was to create a sculpture of a police officer, using traditional academic methods. Working with an assistant, Zhao Zhao participated in the modeling in clay of a life size (2.5m) standing figure, individualized by the use of his own distinctive features for the face of the sculpture. From this a plaster cast was made, not to be used in the casting of a bronze or carving of a marble but – and here Zhao Zhao the artist / provocateur shows his colors – to be pushed down, resulting in a number of pieces of random shape and size. Unlike the ping pong paintings, the element of chance is here a major factor. In this entire process Zhao Zhao was model, artist and this is where it becomes difficult to analyze his motivation, either iconoclast or vandal. That is to say, it is difficult to tell if he is re-enacting the reasoning process of the iconoclast, destroying his creation for a particular reason, or the blind range of a vandal. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere between the two.
This was not the end of the sequence of events, however, as the next step was to have these fragmentary forms carved in limestone, valorizing the random plaster forms that resulted from his deliberate shove of the standing figure. The same procedure was followed with the 6.8 m enlargement, resulting in even more imposing sculptural fragments. No doubt, Zhao Zhao’s Officer will lead to many different interpretations, just as Maurizio Cattelan’s notorious 1999 sculpture La Nona Hora (The Ninth Hour), a wax effigy of Pope John Paul XXIII being struck by a meteorite, will lead to different reactions on the part of atheists and Roman Catholics. When I asked Zhao Zhao how he thought people would respond to his Officer, he responded that everybody would have his own opinion and that this would depend on personal experience. In any society, the maintenance of law and order is of fundamental importance. As I write, there are unprecedented riots in London with widespread damage to property and looting and no end
yet in sight. In China with its vastly larger land mass and population, the problems are even greater. The uneven distribution of wealth between the coastal areas and the interior, the social problems that arise as millions of migrant workers swell the population of major urban centers, the injustices that occur as land is developed by speculators, to mention just a few of the most pressing concerns at the moment, are bound to result in conflicts between the authorities at national and local levels and millions of disgruntled citizens. The first face encountered by unhappy citizens is very often that of the police officer and the reaction of members of the general public who interface with them will depend entirely on the degree to which they feel their interests are either being protected or trampled on.
Zhao Zhao invites us to reflect on the meaning of the uniformed figure we see every day and yet do not see clearly. In the past sculptures representing individuals in uniform were generally memorials to distinguished soldiers who have made their mark on history but in this case it is an ordinary officer who has been displaced from his plinth, leading to speculation as to who he might have been and how he felt about his role in the maintenance of law and order.
On a more general level, as I have indicated, Zhao Zhao’s Officer may be seen as a reflection on
iconoclasm, the passing of time and the changing of taste. Rather than wait forty or fifty years to see this happen, Zhao Zhao speeded up the entire process to less than a few weeks from beginning to end. To the best of my knowledge this is the first time this has been done, a remarkably focused accomplishment for a young artist who first gained attention by attempting to streak along Erdaoqiao Street – unsuccessfully!