JVAP 11 (2+3) pp.

193208 Intellect Limited 2012

Journal of Visual Art Practice

Volume 11 Numbers 2 & 3
2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jvap.11.2-3.193_1

Birgit Hopfener
Free University of Berlin

Embodied Criticality in
Moving-image Installations
by Wang Gongxin and
Zhang Peili

Abstract Keywords
This article will examine Wang Gongxins and Zhang Peilis moving-image instal- moving image
lations, critically reviewing their relationships with spaces they inhabit and are installation
inhabited by as a dominant issue in these works. I argue that both artists are performativity
globally engaged and art-historically informed agent, fully aware of the complexity embodied participation
of their living spaces in their transcultural and historical entanglements and there- spectatorship
fore that these artworks are constituted by interrogations of arts critical capacities.
Wang and Zhang seem to scrutinize and compare the critical potential of a repre-
sentational understanding of art that places its emphasis on objectification. In doing

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Birgit Hopfener

so, a distanced and analytic spectatorship is challenged in favour of a performative

concept that emphasizes the mediating quality of art through a participant viewer.
Their artistic interventions implicitly propose the concept of the artist and the viewer
as embodied participants and constituents of the artwork, as opposed to a dualistic
and distanced relationship.

(performative)

Introduction: Contemporary art and criticality

1. According to Georgio In the discourse of contemporary art there seems to be a dominant view that
Agamben, since the a commitment of art to criticality is obligatory. Since the conceptual turn in
birth of modern
science the western western art in the 1960s, arts potential function as a medium of public critique
understanding of has become a major criterion of artistic practice. In the dominant western
relating to the world
is dominated by the
understanding, the relationship between criticality and art is understood
Cartesian cogito as a discursive one that emphasizes cognition and knowledge and neglects
I think therefore sensual and bodily experience.1 To what extent might Zhang Peilis and Wang
I am. Since then
experience is coupled Gongxins works meet these expectations of western parameters of criticality
to knowledge and and how should we understand their focus on embodied modesof criticality?
has lost its bodily and In what ways may current dominant judgements of criticality be biased
sensual implications
to intellectual and because they are based on western concepts of criticality that are generally
rational domains (see understood in certain genealogies, knowledge and code systems?
Agamben [1993] 2007).
In order to understand how far modes of criticality by Chinese artists
articulate cultural differences, this article introduces a European history of
critique as proposed by the post-structuralist philosopher Michel Foucault.
His explanations on Immanuel Kants notion of Aufklrung/enlightenment
and his own understanding of critique that is still understood in the tradition
of the Enlightenment are also useful in order to grasp how Chinese concep-
tual artists in the mid-1980s and 1990s appreciated, translated and tailored
post-structuralist concepts of critique to deconstruct dominant understand-
ings of art at the time (Kppel-Yang 2003: 25, 188). As will be explained in the
following, early artistic interventions by Wang Gongxin and Zhang Peili were
also influenced by this intellectual climate and both are as will be shown
until now particularly interested in analysing and bringing to mind specific
power-structures.
The critical capacity of embodied states and modes in Wangs and
Zhangs artworks is analysed from close readings of selected artworks. In
order to conceptualize these artists articulations of criticality transculturally,
this article pursues a twofold endeavour. On the one hand it introduces Irit
Rogoffs concept of embodied criticality, understood as a critical reaction to

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the dominant cognitive-biased European genealogy of critique and attempts 2. See Hou Hanrus article
about de-ideologization
to analyse how far this concept could serve as an interesting conceptual tool tendencies in Chinese
to describe cultural difference when applied to embodied modes of criticality art of the 1990s
in the artworks of Zhang Peili and Wang Gongxin. On the other hand, it (Hou2002: 2439).
examines how a Chinese historical understanding of art was also interested 3. Gao Minglu was the
in bodily engagement and to what extent this should be taken into account first to coin the notions
of humanist art and
when discussing a Chinese genealogy of critique. conceptual art in a
Chinese context (see
Gao 2005: 124).
A brief historical outline of discourses of art and
criticality in contemporary Chinese art
Beginning in the 1990s, Zhang Peili and Wang Gongxin were among the first
artists in China to experiment with moving images. Both showed their works
in the first exhibition of Chinese video art entitled xianxiang he yingxiang/
Phenomenon and Image curated by Wu Meichun and Qiu Zhijie in the year of
1996 in Hangzhou (Wu and Qiu 2002: 51). Video works and moving-image
installations of the 1990s were predominantly interested in questioning reality
as ideological construct. Understood in the framework of contemporary art
history in China, this overall de-ideologization trend in Chinese conceptual
art of the 1990s2 can be traced to the guannian yishu/conceptual art current
that was formulated in critical opposition to the so called rendao or renwen
yishu/humanist art movement3 that dominated the beginning of contempo-
rary art since the end of the 1970s during the ba wu meishu yundong/85 art
movement (Gao 2005: 67) in the 1980s.
At that time early conceptual artists like Huang Yongping and Xu Bing
had studied and adapted post-structuralist theories and realized that symbolic
orders were not natural but constructed, therefore changeable and conse-
quently could be questioned. Armed with this new theoretical knowledge,
they negated the existence of an autonomous artistic subject in favour of
a de-centered understanding. Some of them also linked this de-centered
understanding of the subject to historical Chinese understandings of the self
and concepts of signification processes to further understand and legitimate
their new deconstructive concepts. In their opinion, only deconstructive strat-
egies could disclose how structures of ideology and power are produced and
received and therefore implicate the capacity of individual emancipation. They
questioned ideology, the official Socialist, as well as the humanist. In oppo-
sition to the humanist artists, art was not supposed to function as a tool of
constructive renewal and modernization of China but was obliged to be a
medium of cultural and political critique. As a medium of cultural critique,
early video artworks articulated their opposition to any utilitarian purpose of
art in terms of either political or economic means as well as Orientalist projec-
tions by a western audience (van Plas 2004: 1114). According to Martina
Kppel-Yang, the quality of immediacy inherent in the medium of video was
acknowledged by many artists in the 1990s as most suitable to critically reflect
on the perception of the rapid changes in Chinese society and its effects of
alienation (Kppel-Yang 2003: 1).
Articulations of scepticism about one-dimensional representation and
perceptions of reality were at stake in early video works. Zhang Peilis first
video work 30x30 (1988) is considered by some to be the first Chinese video
artwork. The video is a three-hour uncut documentation of a performance
shot from one unchanging angle. We see the lower part of the artist sitting on
the ground with crossed legs. He is wearing plastic gloves and is repetitively

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Birgit Hopfener

breaking and gluing back together a mirror. By destroying and re-constructing

images of reality he is critically reflecting on perceptions and representations of
reality. In the political context of the time, Zhang Peilis work can be seen as
an act of critical emancipation in the restrictive atmosphere in Chinese society
after the Tiananmen Incident 4 June 1989. It could also be read as a reactionto
the long lasting suppression of the individual subject and his/her freedom of
expression and perception of reality during the reign of Mao Zedong.
Zhang Peili takes up video to critically reflect upon peoples perception of
reality and the nave persuasion that reality represented by the medium of
video implicates objective truth claims. He questions effects and the rhetoric
of veracity in order to disclose their constructedness by critically reflecting on
videos indexical quality and its production of meaning through visual veri-
similitude. In an interview carried out in 2009 he makes this problematic
explicit:

Video was derived from reality, and reality was captured by video;
that is to say, video was used to record reality. However, video has
actually become a kind of dominant language that pervades peoples
consciousness. It creates realities, and these realities also influence
peoples lives or minds. The reality produced by video is sometimes
even more realistic than reality itself. At least, it gives people the illusion
of its own reality. This is why I have the following question: what is the
function of video and its relationship to reality? I dont think I can give
a simple answer to that question, or at least its very difficult to give an
exact answer.
(Zhang 2009: 5058)

The early moving-image installation The Old Bench (1997) by Wang Gongxin
can also be understood in this context of critically questioning representa-
tions and perceptions of reality. In an old wooden bench, he installed a small
TV screen showing a finger continuously touching the seat of the bench in
which the screen is installed. The works intentions seem to be to encour-
age the viewer to critically reflect upon possible relationships to reality and
its inherent structures of signification by offering the real object of utility,
the wooden bench, as well as visualizations of an indexical mode literally
expressed by the index finger touching the bench and temporalized visual
mimetic relationships with reality.

Embodied criticality Zhang Peilis and Wang Gongxins

moving-image installations
In the last section, I have already discussed bodily engagement with reality
as a dominant focus of critical reflection in both artists early conceptual
approaches. The following will look at other aspects of their work and practice
to further examine the idea of embodied criticality.

Zhang Peili
Since the beginning of his artistic career Zhang Peili has been preoccupied
with questions of representation and perception of reality between a bodily
engaged participative and an objective distanced viewer. In the 1980s before
he started to work with moving images, two artistic interventions can be

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 Embodied Criticality in moving-image installations

mentioned in this regard. His so called Grey Humor Paintings (huise youmo 4. Chi she xuanyan
(Manifesto of the Pond
yu yishu grey humour and art?) are stylized realistic depictions of objects Group) 1986.
of utility, for example gloves, or people, for example male swimmers in his
swimmer series, painted in cold, grey and blue colour tones and placed in
empty pictorial grounds suggesting a lonely and alienated atmosphere. By
painting in this manner he represents an experience of a distanced rela-
tionship between subject and reality. By means of exaggeration he critically
reflects upon the belief of objective depiction of reality and intends to acti-
vate the viewer to review his own concepts of relationality.
Irritated by the enthusiastic reaction of the audience when he first showed
his grey humor paintings to a wider audience in the exhibition 85 xin
kongjian/85 New Space (Smith 2005: 382), because most people only paid
attention and liked the artworks for stylistic reasons he changed strategy,
together with artist colleagues such as fellow artist Geng Jianyi. In 1986 he
was one of the founders of the artist group The Pond Society (chi she).
Zhang Peili was suspicious by the great sympathy the audience had for
the 85 New Space exhibition:

It occurred to him that the slick stylisation in his own works had inad-
vertently resulted in a superficially seductive appeal. Once again Zhang
took up discussions with Geng Jianyi and a conclusion emerged one
that remains central to his oeuvre. Echoing Braques assertion about the
role art should serve to disturb Zhang Peili decided provocation was
all; that the complacency society exhibited towards the visual arts had
to be challenged.
(Smith 2005: 382)

The foundation of the Pond Group was the consequence of these consid-
erations. To avoid their art being misunderstood and occupied by political,
economic and stylistic interests they chose to give up conventional media
and instead engage themselves in performance and installation practices to
re-direct the attention of the audience to their main concern of the experi-
ence of reality, spectatorship, bodily participation and meaning (Lu 2007: 57).
By hanging real-size paper cut-outs in the form of Taiji-figures in a public
park and on urban walls in the city of Hangzhou their series of performative
installations entitled Taiji of Yang Family No. I. and No. II. (1986) intended to
engage the audience with a staged and artificial Taiji environment. The idea
was to experience oneself consciously in relation to a certain new and unex-
pected situation, to raise consciousness to certain power-structures and their
conditioning power, critically reflect upon differences between life and art
experiences and the relational, even transformational capacity of art as an
important part of society. In their manifesto the Pond artists wrote: Art is a
pond and our human existence is based on the carbon-dioxin formula.4 This
could be understood as life and the world are relational and in constant flux.
Nothing is at it appears, nothing is eternal and individual reality is based on
each persons perspective and conditioned through individual experience. In
saying this, their understanding of art resonates with the image of a pond in
so far as they understand experience of art as diving into lifes molecules and
sharing its relational qualities. In 1988 Zhang Peili decided to start working
with the medium of video. Referring to Qiu Zhijie it was this medium that
for Zhang was most suitable to work on questions of the body and bodily
relations to the world and reality respectively.

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Birgit Hopfener

In the centre of Zhangs work is the individual living in a world which

cannot heal the feeling of absurdity and apathy. Because of these words
expressing untrustworthiness of the world, the individual has to return
to his own body unceasingly. Therefore, he started to use video art as
medium in the late 1980s, being one of the earliest artists in this field,
but Zhang Peili doesnt intend to be a determinist of the technique nor
a futurist, on the contrary, he persisted in controlling this kind of media,
the video installations with utmost bodily ideas from the very begin-
ning of his usage. Zhang Peilis thoughts are constructed on this kind of
supposition: the bodily experience is based on complex cultural points
of view points and choice, but the medical body can never be completely
replaced by the political and economic one, while the body is sensitive,
frail and easy to be injured.
(Qiu 2007: 603)

Out of a distrust of an abstract and purely intellectual mode of perception,

Zhang seems to probe the capacity of bodily reaction as trustful indicators of
certain relationships between human beings and reality. The recurrent topic
in his moving images seems to be the negotiation between a distanced and
bodily engaged relationship to reality and its mediation through art.
A recurrent symbol of this topic, in this context is the utilization of plastic
gloves, which can be understood as standing for the ambiguity in-between
bodily engagement, and protection of direct body contact. He has painted
gloves in his grey humor paintings Series X? No. 3 (1986), displayed them
in different stages of processual and elapsing existence in Report on 1988
Hepatitis (1988) and has himself worn them in performances documented
on video such as in the already mentioned work 30x30 (1988) or Document
on Hygiene No. 3 (1991). In the latter the artist is busy with the seemingly
senseless and absurd activity of washing a chicken. Relentlessly and seem-
ingly against its will the chicken is forced to be washed with soap and water.
The close-up focus of the recordings of the forceful action and the tempo-
ralization through repetition engages the viewer bodily in this repressive
situation. He or she cannot but is experiencing the cruel act in real time.
Reality is not objectively represented but constantly produced anew for
the viewer becoming a participant of the situation. This capacity of affec-
tive and bodily engagement in reality in real time through moving images
that means temporalized and therefore enlivened images is a major topic in
Zhang Peilis work.
The video installation Uncertain Pleasures (1996) consists of TV screens
grouped in a half circle that show close-up recordings of a person hysteri-
cally scratching his naked skin until red. Letting the recorded images jump
from one screen to the other Zhang creates a timespace continuum that
spatializes the viewers experiences, which in effect engages the viewer bodily
and heightens their affective response of the situation. As Zhang himself
states, Time could be perceived, but could not be recorded, say nothing of
being restored. All the records of time are only records of perception (Zhang
2009:203). As this quotation of the artist underlines, Zhangs central interest
lies in the problematization of the experience of time and in this respect the
affection through art as lived experience.
His interest lies in the juxtaposition of represented and produced reality
and its effects for the viewer. In the video work Last words (2003) he decon-
structs Socialist ideology as represented in revolutionary movies from the

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1960s and 1970s by assembling death scenes from famous films in a repetitive
loop structure. Through the absurdity of the action of revolutionary heroes
dying and coming back to life again the viewer is pointed to the construct-
edness of the signification structures of the reality represented in the film.
Important to note is that this deconstructive effect is not only negotiated at
the semantic level addressing the viewer intellectually but that the temporali-
zation of the images in loops as well as the presentation of the work on a big
screen related to the exhibition space engages the viewer bodily asking him to
share a real time experience.
The question about the effects on the viewer when confronted with of real
reality and recorded reality and their relationship is the topic in the video instal-
lation Baoxianqi 8/28/1994 (1994). It consists of TV screens randomly grouped
on the floor showing close-up video recordings of a woman eating grilled
chicken and electric stoves that are cable connected to the television sets on
which real chicken is cooking in real pots. Imaging the fragrance that is pene-
trating the exhibition space and from which nobody can withdraw and is there-
fore automatically called to experience himself or herself as part of the scenario.
The site-specific video installation Scenic outside the Window (2007) invites
the viewer to compare between represented and real experience of reality, in
order to negotiate and produce his or her own reality in-between. Shot at the
same spot the work juxtapositions projections of past recordings of weather
changes with real time weather experiences as seen through the window by
installing the projection screen right opposite the window. The negotiation of
time in between representation and the experience of reality and its effect on
the viewer is also critically reflected upon in the moving-image installation
Gust of wind (2008). Assuming that a catastrophic event was the cause of the
destruction, the viewer is confronted with the remains of a residential house.
Within the static ruins of a destroyed living environment, the chaos of broken
furniture is the only reminder of its former homely and inviting atmosphere.
This scenery at first sight does not encourage bodily participation but holds
the viewer at distance in a dualistic and oppositional spectatorship. When
approaching the five-channel video wall, which is part of the installation in
that it frames the remains in a formation of a half-circle, the first impres-
sion of a static representation of an irrevocable and fatal incident is put into
question: here the scenery comes to life again. By employing loops of moving
images Zhang Peili temporalizes the situation. Caused by a disastrous storm
the walls and the roof come down and the living room interior and the whole
house are destroyed, but also become whole again. Due to the spatiality of the
installation and the multiple perspectives of the images filmed from different
angles, viewers experience the processes of destruction and reconstruction.
They become engaged in a temporalized situation and experience themselves
as involved participants in the transformational process.
In Zhang Peilis installations, viewers are asked to understand themselves as
inhabitants of a reality that is continuously transforming. In Zhangs words:

I am trying to question the ideology of permanence and stability. Behind

the materials are time and the unknown power, which remain eternal.
Iused wind. However what is the wind? What does it symbolize? I dont
know. There might be another power behind the wind, which tries to
change things through the wind. I am not sure what this is either.
Idont want to deny real life or give up real life because of the unknown
power. My attitude is not religious, religion is certain and specific while

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my outlook is always uncertain. [] What I felt during the early stages

of my development, as an artist was that there is a kind of underlying
force or power. Sudden changes or disasters which have been caused
either by nature or human beings, made me realize that people live in
an illusion, and this feeling has become stronger. All these beautiful and
supposedly stable states are so fragile. They are just illusions, change-
able and destructive states are inevitable. They are the realities.
(Zhang Peili in Gladston 2009: 5058)

The emphasis on performative meaning production in order to criticize the

illusion of a seemingly fixed reality as a set and unchangeable truth follows
the aim of activating the viewer to experience and articulate his or her own
individual- and experienced-based reality in relation to other realities. The
video-installation Live report (2009) is an arrangement that consists of a ruin
of a burnt out van and its short-circuit recordings on a projection screen
behind. As soon as a visitor approaches the car he inevitably becomes part
of the artwork as proved on-screen. Quite literally and reminding one of the
famous early video installation TV Buddha (1974) by Nam June Paik, Zhang
conceptualizes the viewer as a participant and raises the awareness of the
transformational and situational quality of art and reality, respectively.
In a younger moving-image installation entitled Landscape with Round
Building (2008) Zhang continues to work on this argument. By using motion
sensors the images respond directly to the viewers bodily movements. On
LED screens 36 photographs of a construction site of a round building are
only visible that means come to live once the visitor approaches them and
vanish when he or she goes away. The visitor literally performs the piece and
experiences himself or herself as relational and constitutive element in the
transformational event that is the artwork.
In his works Zhang critically scrutinizes the nature of reality and human
beings relationships to reality knowing that the perception of an encompassing
and objective reality is not possible. Through juxtaposition of representation and
performative production of realities, he emphasizes the criticality of embodied
personal experiences of reality. Zhang articulates these ideas as follows:

the words opposite of reality are imagination, illusion, dream, memory,

history, and surrealism. These words show that reality is of the present
and directly linked to time. [] Comparatively, phenomenon, environ-
ment and the words like these seem to be something partial, individual,
accidental or temporary, while reality seems to be more so stable,
persisting, complicated, and even conceptual. Perhaps we can say that
the word reality is generated from phenomenon, surface, environment,
incidents, situation, accident, confrontation, sentiment, feeling, and
human relations and so on. Reality remains hidden somewhere among
all these words. [] All people are the concerned persons of reality,
though he or she may choose to act as the by-stander. Reality is both
the course of experience and the result of experience. Thus, all reactions
to reality are of these concerned persons.
(Zhang 2009)

To conclude, Zhangs work seems to centre on questions of how to critically

engage in reality negotiating viewer status between participative physical
engagement with and objectification of reality.

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 Embodied Criticality in moving-image installations

Wang Gongxin

I always try to find a popular subject for the viewer. The amateurs
appreciate the outside, but the professionals appreciate the inside. Culture
should be more open to the public, not centralized by a small group.
(Wang 2009)

Wang Gongxins concern is to create art as sites of communication. He wants

to create artworks that are accessible to an uninformed audience as well as
interesting for an intellectually more demanding viewer. Through strategies of
humour and surprise, he creates situations that engage the viewer as bodily
participant and function as shifter of situating anew formerly accepted posi-
tions and realities. Strategies that he recurrently works with in his moving-
image installations are the implementation of daily objects, the concept of
site-specificity, interventions, effects of monumentalism and an emphasis on
the role of sound.
In the aforementioned work The Old Bench (1997) and in Always Welcome
(2003) he enlivens actual dead objects by performing them in new situa-
tions that means within new space and time relations. While the bench is
animated by the looped projection of a finger touching it and as an element
in an installation that invites the viewer to use the bench as a sitting device,
the stone lion sculptures in Always Welcome, traditionally placed in pairs at
gates of important buildings in China as symbols of power and as guardi-
ans, are enlivened through digital animation. The lions, which are embodied
by two TV sets each, are not only moving, but also speak and engage the
viewer directly by addressing him or her with friendly welcome greetings. By
employing a loop structure, the action is temporalized and in consequence
enlivened. The viewer becomes a participant because he or she is invited to
touch the bench, or even take a seat.
Wang recurrently problematizes an understanding of art that emphasizes the
opening up of reality in real time as a tool to critically reflect upon seemingly
fixed relations and positions. Reflecting on his own positionality and by doing so,
inviting the viewer to participate in this process, he created the site-specific work
The Sky of Brooklyn: Digging a Hole in Beijing (1995). After having just returned
from a longer stay in the USA to Beijing in 1994 he problematized these new
spatial and cultural perspectives. In the ground of his traditional courtyard house
he dug out a three-meter deep hole. On the ground he placed a TV screen on
which he showed recordings of the sky of Brooklyn suggesting that the visitor is
able to see through the globe the sky on the other side of the world.
In Wang Gongxins site-specific moving-image installation It is Not About
the Neighbours (2009), we are asked to participate in the lively everyday life in an
hutong alley in the old city of Beijing. Wang has filmed a typical small kiosk that
sells noodles and bread out of a sliding window, and projects looped moving-
images of this shop and the activities of the vendors in a scale of 1:1 onto an
almost identical architecture next door. What is an abandoned site during the
day becomes enlivened when night falls and Wangs projections of the adjunct
business emerge from the dark and become visible (Ambrozy2010: 258).
By creating a site-specific situation, Wang triggers a living encounter
between the artwork and the viewer in the present. As the title of the instal-
lation already suggests, this work is not about the representation of the
neighbours the whatness but about the modalities the thatness and
howness of this unique experience of selling and buying bread, which is

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Birgit Hopfener

5. For further discussion one of the most ordinary activities of people living in this part of old Beijing.
of Wang Gongxins
emphasis on
The installation is not a simulation but becomes itself a reality in which the
experience-based viewer is involved and asked to participate by sharing its time and space. In It
approaches in his work, is not About the Neighbors, Wang communicates his personal experiences of
see Chen (2010).
daily life in old Beijing and in doing so he not only seeks to increase the range
of everyday experiences encountered by the audience but also to heighten
the awareness of ones living modalities and standpoint. By offering a real
and everyday situation in Beijing, this installation is a relational space of
identification in which the viewer is asked to evaluate his/her individual expe-
riences.5 Strategies of enlivenment as a means of interrogation of art and its
functional relationship to reality are central to Wang Gongxins overall oeuvre.
Integrated in installation works, he employs loops of moving images in order
to open up situational and social contexts within which the viewer is asked to
reflect on his/her conditions of perception and modes of inhabiting the world.
The video installation Relating Its About Ya (2010) consists of nine monu-
mental rectangular projections of images and sounds that at first sight do not
have any relationship in regard to content. The visitor is confronted by over
life-size, rhythmically enlivened images, sequences of people, daily objects
such as dinnerware or bamboo forests, overwhelmed by loud and dragging
sounds of techno music.
According to the artists and reflected in the title, the common denominator
of the image explosion is the sound of ya known from performances of Beijing
opera (Wang in Chen 2010). Similar to the structure of Internet searches, Wang
applies an algorithm that relates images to the expression ya. Such as the
expression of ya does not have a semantic meaning of its own, but is rather
a codified emotional expression that produces meaning in relation to an over-
all situation, Relating Its About Ya suggests a methodological approach that
focuses on the relational as the condition of possibility of meaning.
Wang invites the viewer to relate himself or herself constantly anew in order
to change his or her personal perspectives and ways of looking at things: Every
image, every color in Its About Ya and the way they relate to each other are
my own associations, but they are all open to interpretation. Im only offering
the audience a system of linking (Zhu 2010). Instead of following a fixed order
Wang Gongxin expects the audience to emancipate and to question their affili-
ated belongings and to articulate their own positions: Once I finish a work, I take
a step back and re-experience it as a visitor rather than as the artist. It no longer
belongs to me (Zhu 2010). In Wangs practice, he sees it as extremely important
to state and reflect individual approaches to evaluate things and reality, especially
as he says in contemporary Chinese society still patronized by collectivist subject
concepts (Wang 2009). Emphasizing the capacity of enlightenment through art,
he sees himself as an artist who demands the audience to emancipate.

Its extremely important to constantly experience and make clear our

own individual artistic position. [] Doing art requires, from the very
beginning, a clear personal reason for doing it. If we dont pay attention
at stressing the individuality in order to lay the bases for something that
its not too vague, if there is no underlining of the self, then its easy
to do what everyone else does without having a personal opinion. As
a consequence, the environment could create us some obstacles. For
these reasons, artists should have clear in mind their positions and learn
how to put forth their aims.
(Wang in Chen 2010)

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 Embodied Criticality in moving-image installations

Also in line with the above, Wang articulates that his pursuit of art as never
purely self-referential but aware of its societal responsibility in its negotiation
with personal and collective societal interest.
What you actually are trying to do is turning a personal experience into
a common experience; you let the crowd, using your own experience, bring
into play their thinking and imagination and thus realize what they cannot
otherwise. I am not looking for a kind of art and literature that appeals only
the highbrows or an elite culture that cannot be reached nor understood
by common people. Certainly, its necessary to externalize a kind of respect
towards the individual value because your role is that of inducing people to
recognize those things that are in a sort of blind spot area. However, this is
not revealing something that they have already seen, your role is actually vital
and its what you are worth for. (Wang in Chen 2010)
By introducing and analysing artworks by Zhang Peili and Wang Gongxin,
I have shown that bodily engagement with reality has been a dominant focus
of critical reflection in both artists conceptual approaches. Both artists seem to
put forward an understanding of art as a site of real time experience through
the problematization of a temporalized and spatialized viewer experience
whereby the viewer is conceptualized as a participant versus a distanced spec-
tator. Reality is conceptualized in reference to graspable daily experience not
as an objective and distanced truth. The artwork is conceptualized as an event
that unfolds itself when performed by the visitor. The works are understood
as mediating experiences and the condition of the viewer-self as inhabitant, as
relational and constitutive element in a transformational event.
Both artists put their critical emphasis on reflecting conditions of
reality perceptions in sociopolitical as well as in phenomenological perspec-
tive scrutinizing questions of signification processes. The focus lies on ques-
tions of the situational quality of art and its critical capacity of positionality.
In order to create situations that enable real-time experience that means to
scrutinize the nature of reality and human relationships to reality through
embodied experience, they implement performative strategies of enlivenment
such as temporalization of images through structures of looping, short-circuit
video systems and site-specific interventions. The focus of criticality does not
lie on the represented what but the modalities of representation and experi-
ence. Opposed to an understanding of truth as a given value to that one
belongs or does not belong, Wang and Zhang seem to emphasize the rela-
tional quality of truth as the condition of its possibility what in consequence
demands a participating instead of a belonging quality of relationship.
Both of the artists and especially Wang Gongxin reject a self-referential
understanding of art. Through their artworks they consciously attempt to raise
the individual, political and societal awareness of the participant viewer.

Conceptualizing embodied criticality from a

transcultural perspective
To what extent can Wang Gongxins and Zhang Peilis concepts of embodied
criticality be conceptualized with western concepts and how far is it fruitful
to take into account historical concepts of Chinese art and its performative,
mediating quality?
Even though Foucault explicitly speaks about the modern western world so
far not much thought has been given to the fact that this understanding of criti-
cality is in fact not automatically universal, but has to be understood in a western

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Birgit Hopfener

6. Foucault can be genealogy of critique and presumed western conceptual categories and institu-
interpreted as arguing
that it is not so much a
tional structures and cannot be unreflectively applied to other cultural contexts.
matter of what we are I argue that in China in opposition to a European genealogy of critique
undertaking, more or as proposed by Michel Foucault, critique was not about taking oppositional
less courageously, than
the understanding we position and refusal of obedience to an institutionalized authority such as the
have of our knowledge Christian church, but rather about confusing and dis-harmonizing certain
and its limits. Our cosmic structures or societal hierarchies.
liberty is at stake and,
consequently, instead
of letting someone
else say obey it is The art of not being governed quite so much a
at this point, once
one has gotten an
European genealogy of critique as suggested by Foucault
adequate idea of ones Referring to Michel Foucault the modern western world is characterized by a
own knowledge and
its limits, that the general critical attitude. In Foucaults words:
principle of autonomy
can be discovered. One It seems to me there has been in the modern Western world (dating,
will then no longer
have to hear the obey; more or less empirically, from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries)
or rather, the obey a certain way of thinking, speaking and acting, a certain relationship
will be founded on
autonomy itself.
to what exists, to what one knows, to what one does, a relationship to
society, to culture and also a relationship to others that we could call,
lets say, the critical attitude.
(Foucault [1978] 2002: 191)

He suggests that the history of a European critical attitude lies in the critical
contestation of the Christian pastoral as the beginning of a genealogy of
an art of governing men (Foucault [1978] 2002: 193). While these practices
of governing men were first not of relevance for a lot of people and were
only restricted to small, mostly spiritual groups this, according to Foucault,
changed with increasing pluralism in the fifteenth century when the religious
centre was questioned by diversification and secularization began (Foucault
[1978] 2002: 193). It was in this atmosphere, Foucault explains, that the critical
attitude was developed, when it became urgent to discuss questions of how to
be and not to be governed (Foucault [1978] 2002: 194).
According to Foucault, the European critical attitude means to question
subjugation by governmentalization and its inherent structures of power and
truth (Foucault [1978] 2002: 194). As he states,

I will say that critique is the movement by which the subject gives
himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question
power on its discourses of truth. Well, then! Critique will be the art of
voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability. Critique would
essentially ensure the desubjugation of the of the subject in the context
of what we would call, in a word, the politics of truth.
([1978] 2002)

This understanding of criticality is characterized by confrontational and oppo-

sitional questioning of authority in order to reach autonomy. Foucault also
sees this continued in Kants understanding of Aufklrung and the enlight-
enment attitude of sapere aude even though this understanding of critique in
Foucaults understanding explicitly emphasizes the critical reflection of the
limits of knowledge and not so much the emancipatory quality inherent in
the critical attitude.6 Foucault states convincingly that Kants rational under-
standing of critique has influenced Europes concepts of society, politics,

204
 Embodied Criticality in moving-image installations

economy, science as well as culture and art immensely and has accordingly 7. Well, now! Rather than
this procedure [Kants
produced specific structures of power and knowledge. Different from Kant, and his followers]
Foucaults post-structural concept of critique proposes to put less emphasis which takes shape
on knowledge and insight (Erkenntnis) than on the analysis of the relations as an investigation
into the legitimacy
between power, truth and subject.7 of historical modes
One would also consider the contents of knowledge in terms of their diver- of knowing, we can
sity and heterogeneity, view them in the context of the effects of power they perhaps envision a
different procedure. It
generate in as much as they are validated by their belonging to a system of may take the question
knowledge. We are therefore not trying to find out what is true or false, founded of the Aufklrung as
its way of gaining
or unfounded, real or illusionary, scientific or ideological, legitimate or abusive. access, not to the
What we are trying to find out is what are the links, what are the connections problem of knowledge,
that can be identified between mechanisms of coercion and elements of knowl- but to that of power.
It would proceed not
edge, what is the interplay of relay and support developed between them, such as an investigation
that a given element of knowledge takes on the effects of power in a given into legitimacy, but
system where it is allocated to a true, probable, uncertain or false element, as something I would
call an examination
such that a procedure of coercion acquires the very form and justifications of a of eventualization
rational, calculated, technically efficient, etc. (Foucault [1978] 2002: 200) (vnementialisation).
(Foucault [1978]
Wang and Zhang seem to critically negotiate criticality between a European 2002:200)
genealogy of dualistic critique as outlined by Foucault and an involved or
embodied criticality that implies critique not outside but inside, as criticality
of reality as lived. The following section will draw out Irit Rogoffs concept
of embodied criticality.

Irit Rogoffs concept of embodied criticality

Even though Wang Gongxins and Zhang Peilis works are about decon-
structing power-structures and therefore arguably disclose a post-structuralist
understanding of critique, the European genealogy of criticality as sketched
out by Foucault does not take into account embodied modes of criticality.
Irit Rogoff takes up her argument following Foucault and conceptualizes her
understanding of embodied criticality (Rogoff 2006: 1). Although Rogoff
appreciates Foucaults post-structuralist concept of critique as an important
and useful tool of cultural analysis, she conceptualizes embodied criticality in
opposition to critic as conceptualized by Kants Enlightenment (17241804)
and the post-structuralist critique put forward most famously by Foucault,
not as a distanced and static analysis of certain values or conditions and struc-
tures, respectively, that can be objectively identified, but instead as an actual
inhabitation of a condition in which we are deeply embedded as well as being
critically conscious (Rogoff 2006: 5). Instead of a former analytical function
Rogoff demands a performative function of observation and participation in
order for us to understand that meaning is not excavated for, but rather, that
it takes place in the present (Rogoff 2006: 2). Embodied criticality is acting
outside of structures of representation and objectification and in her opinion
it is only than that new subjects are produced, subjects that are able to deal
with the new that means complex globalized world as active and critical
participants.

Embodied criticality and its proposed (art) history

in China
While Rogoffs concept is developed in the context of a European geneal-
ogy of critique that has to be understood in the realms of representational
critique Wangs and Zhangs interest of embodied criticality might also be

205
Birgit Hopfener

understood as a critical reflection of the performative and mediating capacity

of a historical Chinese understandings of art.
Unlike the dominant European understanding of art that until the end of the
nineteenth century focused on the visual mimetic representation of the world,
the traditional Chinese concept was more interested in the bodily mediation
of world structures and rhythms. Until the 1960s Europeans primarily pursued
an explicitly object-centered understanding of art that implied a subjectobject
dichotomy and the persuasion that art objects are to be understood as concrete
visions of ideas in which truth and meaning can be identified. In contrast, the
Chinese conceptualized art as continuous, world opening events, that means as
locations in which the relationship between human being and world is articu-
lated and mediated. While Europe in the dominant tradition favoured analogue
images, China, especially in the art history of literati art, was more interested
in performative and effectual images. This approach implies not only differ-
ences in regard to modes of access to the world through art, that is, the relation
between art and world or reality, respectively, it is also grounded in different
conceptualizations of the world: whereas in the dominant European tradition
the world has been understood as objective and representational, in China the
world has been conceptualized as a transformational event (Obert 2007: 48).
The performative quality of the traditional Chinese understanding of art has
to be understood in reference to an understanding of the world as a trans-
formational process, which is continuously generated autopoietically by itself
(ziran). The life force qi is to be understood as the central aesthetic category of
life and the animate, as the location of self-referential reflection in which the
relation to the world is articulated and mediated. The most important premise
for Chinese traditional aesthetics has to be understood in this context. Xie He,
a literati scholar active in the sixth century, formulated the famous rule (fa) qi
yun sheng dong, which can be paraphrased as qi having to resonate in an image
in order for this image to be good, that means: effective (Obert 2007: 18183).
Even though this premise was modified over the centuries, the quintessence
was not questioned until the period of Republican China in the early twentieth
century, when these assumptions were radically challenged by European
cultural premises imposed by western imperialist forces. Traditionally, in
contrast to the European understanding, it was believed that human beings
do not stand in a dualistic and distanced opposition to the world. Rather, the
human being was understood as a relational part and participant of a world
conceptualized as resonant correlations (ying wu), connected through the life
energy qis pulse (Obert 2007: 37). In traditional aesthetics, the viewers expe-
rience was not just oriented towards the sense of sight, but had an important
bodily and thus performative aspect. The resonation of qi in the image could
be rephrased as an invitation to the viewer to participate in processes of corre-
spondent life force energy. In the act of perceiving, the viewer engages with the
breathing process of the artist mediated through the ductus of the brush. Thus,
the viewer also participates in the overall process of world transformation, since
the breathing of each human being is not separated from the rest, but gener-
ates itself in responsive relation to all transformational occurrences and events
that constitute the world. It is in this sense that images were understood as
enlivened, and therefore effective, because they not only visually represent the
world as transformational event but also actually invite the viewer to experience
this event by the means of art with their body. In the traditional understanding,
art had the function to effectively mediate life, and much emphasis was put on
production aesthetics, while the bodily effect on the beholder, understood as a

206
 Embodied Criticality in moving-image installations

relational participant, was constitutive for the works aesthetics. The precon-
dition for this understanding is that the perceiving viewer is affected by life
through art; that is, he or she is touched, which is the reason why touch and
affection play such an important role in traditional Chinese aesthetics.
This rather short and general outline already sheds interesting new light
on Wangs and Zhangs focus on bodily engagement from an historical
Chinese perspective. Furthermore, this performative and mediating quality in
Chinese art is also stated by Jonathan Hay, introducing a Song-dynasty land-
scape painting entitled A solitary temple below brightening peaks by Wang
Shiyuan (active ca. 9601006 or later). Applying the Buddhist understanding
of the image xiang he conceptualized the artwork as an embodied temporal-
ity that means opposed to an object-centred understanding of art as an event
(Hay 2007: 448). Hay understands The Solitary Temple as a depiction in a field
of potentiality that evolves and mediates not just one but different situational
truth (Hay 2007: 450, 452). The condition of possibility of meaning is the rela-
tional quality within the image articulated through resonances in brushstroke
and composition and the connectivity with the world and the viewer is achieved
through effects of temporalizations that allow the viewer to participate.
This article proposes that artworks by Wang Gongxin and Zhang Peili can
be read as works that mediate real life experiences and emphasize the viewer-
self as bodily inhabitant, relational and constitutive elements in a transforma-
tional event. The criticality both artists articulate is focused on an activated
viewer participant who constantly produces his or her individual reality in
relation to an ever-changing world. Interestingly, this understanding can be
contextualized in reference to the postmodern post-structuralist theoretician
Irit Rogoff and her concept of embodied criticality as well as to a historical
Chinese understanding of art as site of identification processes rather than as
an illustration of truth. Because art was and maybe still is not only understood
as a static representation of reality but known for its capacity of producing
pluralistic realities also at the borders, seldomly beyond official conventions,
Confucian Chinese rulers in the past and maybe also todays government are in
high respect and sometimes suspicious of arts potential power to cause chaos
and disturb political, societal and in the past also cosmological harmony.

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Suggested citation
Hopfener, B. (2012), Embodied Criticality in moving-image installations
by Wang Gongxin and Zhang Peili, Journal of Visual Art Practice 11: 2+3,
pp. 193208, doi: 10.1386/jvap.11.2-3.193_1

Contributor details
Birgit Hopfener is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Free University of
Berlin.
E-mail: birgit.hopfener@fu_berlin.de
Birgit Hopfener has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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