【Interview】Chen Xiaoyang: Explore more possibilities of art in cross-border

Fieldwork in Southeast Asia

Yangcheng Evening News: Why did you plan the "Pan-Southeast Asia Triennial"?

Chen Xiaoyang: I would like to see more examples of art involving society, and one of the most immediate ideas is to look at our neighboring areas. Guangdong is closely related to Southeast Asia, but in the past, domestic understanding of Southeast Asian contemporary art often went around to Europe, the United States, and Japan. We are so close, why not communicate directly? How to see more deeply and more concretely? Participatory art is a way to get in.

That's one of the reasons I'm involved in the planning of this triennial, hoping to create a platform for direct communication. There are many interesting discoveries during this period, for example, when carrying out this series of international academic forums, we found that researchers and practitioners from Malaysia and Singapore can communicate directly with Chinese, and it turns out that international conferences do not have to speak English. In the participatory projects, we found very close ties between Southeast Asia and Southern China.

Our understanding of the international world is also opened up in the individual cases of the exhibition. A "Punk Rock House" project discovered the tradition of local woodblock prints, bringing together residents of a Malaysian village to create a painting with their feet, trying to alleviate the contradictions left over from the community's history and transform the villagers who were intertwined with conflict into a friendly and mutually helpful community.

This in-depth fieldwork also connects our historical research and sees what is otherwise invisible, thus making a footnote to the overseas history of woodblock prints. Through such dialogue and connection, we can slowly shape the subjectivity of this area. It's like the local exhibition I've done in a community before called "Seeing Without Seeing." Art can help you open your eyes to these subtle things, to see a more holistic social structure, to see the connections between the various plates.

Get out of the dilemma of the homogenization of old public art

Yangcheng Evening News: How did "participatory art" enter the local area?

Chen Xiaoyang: The concept of participatory art was actually slowly put forward after practice. This practice requires stepping out of the art world. Because of my interdisciplinary background, I start from an anthropological perspective and approach, and place the action of art in a social context.

Participatory art believes that all participants are active. In the field of contemporary art, Beuys's statement that "everyone is an artist" can also be understood as: everyone has the ability to perceive art, which is a natural attribute of man. It's just that this property is often obscured by some stereotypical ideas. Therefore, in practice, the most important thing is the transformation of the viewing perspective. Participatory art requires practitioners to abandon part of the subjective expression that begins with the self.

Since the 1960s and 1970s, participatory art practices have taken place all over the world, from Latin America, Europe and the United States to many parts of Asia. After the 1990s, many artists in Japan and Taiwan also engaged in various participatory practices. At that time, there was more community art, a new type of public art. Old public art was more common in urban sculpture, but the generative mechanism of urban sculpture was top-down and often planned by the government. Urban spaces are littered with sculptures of goddesses holding balls, causing aesthetic fatigue. Public art is in the predicament of homogenization.

The participatory approach actually brings about a new type of public art, the creation of which is closely related to groups in public space. The public can even participate in the creative process and bring ideas together, which is a kind of public wisdom. Always believe in the wisdom of the "other." Later there were concepts such as interventional art. After 2015, the research and translation of some related practices in China began to increase, and more people participated in the sorting and research of such projects. Later, we found that "participatory art" is a concept that can describe this type of event more reasonably, and it has gained more and more recognition.

Yangcheng Evening News: How is the development of "participatory art" in various places?

Chen Xiaoyang: It can be said that in China, these projects in Guangdong are the most diverse, cooperating with different societies and institutions, covering practitioners of different ages. Perhaps because Guangdong's education system has more ties with Hong Kong, Macao and Japan, it has been influenced by cutting-edge ideas earlier, so it has remained in a relatively dynamic state. Judging from the several areas I have done now, Shunde has the best social foundation. Fujian, Jiangxi and Henan have similar attempts, and a well-known example is the Great South Slope Project of Xiuwu in Henan.

Artists are adept at discovering "useless" things

Yangcheng Evening News: What role do artists play in this?

Chen Xiaoyang: Compared with those non-profit organizations that are already practicing social practice, artists are better at seeing "useless" parts. Because art is the product of leisure, first of all it is "useless", but this "uselessness" can soothe people's spiritual world. Middle-class people will choose to soothe or heal themselves in the form of art, such as going to a concert or going to a painting exhibition. This was originally available in the countryside, but it was later interrupted.

We have been researching Leming Village for many years and found that it has a good cultural tradition. But because of the scarcity of resources, some traditions have waned over time. Once, our team found an abandoned corner cabinet in the garbage heap, very decorative style, only to find that there was a good woodworking tradition in the village. There are some things that are useless from the point of view of the moment, that have disappeared, but artists are very good at discovering these things. Later, this was curated into an exhibition called "The Corner Cabinet Project". Perhaps cultural archaeology is more focused on the object itself, and we are concerned with people.

Yangcheng Evening News: Anthropological and sociological methods are increasingly applied to the art world, why?

Chen Xiaoyang: This is a trend of thought. The anthropological shift in contemporary art began in the 1980s. After the end of World War II, postmodern theory became popular and people began to reflect on Western-centrism. The postmodernist approach to anthropology is just the right place to provide contemporary art with a perspective into the "other." From that time on, the art world began to pay attention to non-Western, non-male artists. For example, in 1989, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, an exhibition called "Magician of the Land" had 100 artists, 50 from non-Western regions. This can be seen as an important sign of the anthropological shift in contemporary art. In the 1990s, Western contemporary art activities once again focused on cultural pluralism and intercultural dialogue advocated by anthropology. Such a method slowly spread to China. After the millennium, anthropology became a form of manifestation in the art world.

At the same time, in the 1970s and 1980s, there were actually some European and American anthropologists who crossed the border with art, and they found art to be a good medium of communication. Anthropologists also began to discuss how ethnographic methods reconciled with the expression of artistic creation. This exchange is a two-way street.

Yangcheng Evening News: What do you think of this trend?

Chen Xiaoyang: The domestic anthropological community's attention to contemporary art began with the participatory art of rural construction, and the two disciplines naturally met. We hope that such cross-border exchanges and integrations will not weaken their respective disciplines, but will find more possibilities from them.

International academic forums in recent days are also arguing about this issue. Some people worry that if other disciplines come in, will art history be useless? In fact, interdisciplinary cooperation with history, sociology, anthropology, psychology and even medicine will not affect art research, but provide a lot of new perspectives and spaces. That's one reason we're bringing the Pan-Southeast Asia Triennial. I don't think we've done enough at the moment, and the exploration of genre differences and pluralism needs to be further advanced.