The fate of China's first art rocket, Xu Bingtian, is full of unknowns, twists and turns, imagination and regrets. When artist Xu Bing and Yu Wende, who has been deeply involved in space art for 20 years, successfully launched it, the discussion around this event was far from over.
Doubt and confrontation
Before 2020, few people would associate the artist Xu Bing with words like space, science fiction, rockets, and NFT. Although these concepts have gained the enthusiasm of capital and made the hipsters who walk in various fields flock to them, just like the prudence revealed by Xu Bing's iconic round glasses, his scorching literary temperament has always been regarded as the mediator side of Chinese artists. Although there have been many cross-disciplinary practices in recent years, the beauty and coolness of a pure medium has never belonged to Xu Bing's methodology by leaping into emerging fields and then showing a pure medium.
This may be the reason why Yuwende ate the closed door for the first time. He is the founder of "Ten Thousand Households Creation", has been engaged in space-related work, accumulated a large number of resources in the field of space, he left the system, want to build a bridge between space and the public. He began working with artists before 2015, and his early forms were mostly created from recycled space materials, and for a field where ideas are ahead, the lag in time and space can often only scratch the itch of the shoe. In November 2019, Yu Wende came to Xu Bing's studio, hoping to find artists to cooperate and really launch a Chinese art rocket. At that time, the burgeoning private rocket industry had gained a lot of attention with Musk's social media activities, especially when he sent an electric car into space in David Bowie's Space Oddity music, which became a significant part of the field. While private rocket companies have also emerged in China to send satellites into orbit, no more creative plans have been exposed to the public.
"I wasn't very interested in it at first." Xu Bing's answer was not surprising.
Concerns come from two sources: the difficulty of realizing the "launch rocket" itself, and the other is that the artist is obviously interested in the more inconspicuous material around him compared to the rocket that carries the grand narrative. In the wave of science and technology in recent years, many people have come to Xu Bing and said, "Your work is very suitable for NFTs", such as "The Book of Heaven". A series of works dating back to 1987, it is a text created by him to imitate the Chinese character system, which makes Chinese incomparably familiar but incomprehensible, as if it were born with cryptographic properties. But let the comers spit and be passionate, Xu Bing is always noncommittal, and the self-consistency of art is always what he considers the most, and the same is true for the art rocket.
In doubt and uncertainty, Xu Bing got the approval of the rocket launch permit, and launching an art rocket into space can instantly become a fact. Xu Bing wanted to seize this rare opportunity - "the first art rocket in human history", but the artist's self-consciousness forced him to start thinking all the time: Why should art enter space? In the face of the aerospace industry and science, which expand the boundaries of human cognition, Xu Bing feels that "art is often less energetic than that.".
Confrontation and integration are often two sides of the same body that expand the boundaries of experience.
Grand and small
In February 2020, Xu Bing went to the United States for an exhibition, but encountered an outbreak of the epidemic and was stranded in New York. On a boring day, Xu Bing held a spoon in his left hand and chopsticks in his right hand, resting his head under the range hood, and his eyes focused on the "small chuckles" illuminated by the stove lamp, cooking food for his family in New York. This is something That Xu Bing has almost never done. He wrote: "Cooking and cleaning the room, things I never thought were worth taking seriously, became worth it then. The art that has almost occupied my life's energy has faded unconsciously, which is a rare feeling in this life, and I don't know if I am still me. ”
In those days, Xu Bing looked up at the size of the universe while communicating the art rocket project, and on the other hand, he had to devote himself to the trivialities of daily affairs while in prison, so the picture of "a father thinking about the boundary between art and technology cooking instant noodles for his daughter" became logical in Xu Bing's New York home.
Once upon a time, Xu Bing was considered to be the artist who understood the East and the West best, just like works such as "Earth Book" and "English Square Characters", he always created between continents and civilizations. But on the art rocket, Xu Bing needs to transform an extremely large and extremely small way of thinking, so that the body and mind are "stretching training" between the sky and the fertile soil (Xu Bing).
These experiences finally allowed Xu Bing to decide the direction of creation, he set three keywords for the rocket, simply "launching human desires, crises, and unknowns into space", when it escaped the hustle and bustle of the ground to arrive in space, it was not against some cosmic rules, but expressing a kind of human humility.
On February 1, 2021, the "Xu Bingtianshu" rocket, which carries the dream of art and space technology, was finally successfully launched, leaving a curved white smoke left by the arrow body with the text "Tianshu" written on it, from the ground to the sky. Since only Xu Bing and two photographers were allowed to enter the launch site at the beginning of the epidemic, it was also changed that anyone could only watch outside the launch site, and the gray hair under the black hat brim was pulled backwards by the wind, "Here, here!" Xu Bing looked up and pointed to the direction that quickly flew away from the earth to remind the photographer. However, just 0.3 seconds before the first stage of rocket separation from the main rocket, everything was rewritten, and the rocket did not fly as expected, the boundary between the earth and the atmosphere, the "Carmen line", but just said hello to space. A sub-level arrow body eventually fell back to the waiting place on the Gobi, and around it, there was a huge crater with a diameter of 28 meters and a wreckage star point with a radius of several kilometers around it.
After the rocket launch, it first caused a lot of controversy among the people who paid attention to private rockets. "It's basically negative." Yu Wende said, "Some people describe the text of the "Book of Heaven" on the rocket arrow body as a 'ghost drawing symbol' dance, and the whole thing has not been objectively understood and evaluated, but is emitting negative and pessimistic emotions." "This may be another emotion hidden in the current situation of cross-border and joint names, after all, science and technology, science fiction, and art in a broad sense can be interpreted as words that are closely related to everyone, but in the field of deep study, the barriers of the industry are still natural barriers, and it is not easy to achieve true mutual understanding."
Due to the secrecy of the entire rocket launch, Yue Luping, who has been active in the field of art and technology, only saw this incident on the video website. In the video, a rocket enthusiast is full of many misunderstandings about this art rocket, including the artist himself, and some people even understand Xu Bing as China's Musk. He quickly sent a video for more than an hour to talk about the response and believed that Xu Bing was the most courageous artist of the era. He extended the whole event to a broader field, not only science and art, but also the differences between China and the United States, the creativity of entrepreneurs, and so on.
A few months later, around the "launch of art rockets", Xu Bing held an exhibition "Xu Bing: Art Carmen Line" at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing. From the simple punch card to take pictures, to the feats of watching the launch of rockets, understanding or not understanding, admiration or resentment, art rockets undoubtedly stirred up all kinds of social scene energy. And this different reaction to the same event can't help but remind the American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, in her book "The End of the Matsutake", in a brief pen and ink to describe such a thought-provoking and quite ideal material energy field: "In the current era of complexity, multiple species can live together without harmony and contention. ”
"Anyone can launch a rocket, but it is only a difference in conditions," Xu Bing said, "Of course, I agree, in fact, as a separate work of art, 'launching' a rocket in terms of innovation, using the old contemporary art standards, I think it really does not belong to creativity, nor does it meet the old standards of contemporary art." This is the thinking that has accompanied Xu Bing since the beginning of the project.
He doesn't want to be just a work that can only be established within an art system, "but it has a greater resonance and inspiration." On the whole, our old attitudes toward art, the boundaries of art, or who has the authority to identify art, art, and technology have become a very tired topic of discussion. But in the project of launching art rockets, I found that in the past, we didn't go deep enough into these old topics. Because there is a lack of a larger reference data to help us judge these topics, there are still larger fields outside of outer space and art systems. ”
"I like to pursue the simplicity of the work, and this simplicity finally leaves you with a feeling of doing nothing, but this kind of doing nothing often touches the more substantive part of art." 」
Written by: Li Jingyue Gerald Li
Editor: Juvan Zhu
Acknowledgements: Yue Luping
Photo courtesy of: Xu Bing Studio, Red Brick Art Museum
Fine Arts: Roland