杨勇和大尾象（节选）

作者：赖楚帆

文章首次刊载于《艺术新闻》2000年3月刊, p.126-127

“如果我们能得到我们想要的支持，那深圳会再出现十个Joseph Beuyses！” 杨勇如是说。他，二十四岁，是这座中国最年轻城市的年轻有为的艺术家，“这个地方将是中国的未来。”

杨勇出生于中国的中南部，四川省，主修油画。杨勇精通西方现代艺术并且从不回避最敏感的主题。在他四年前来到这座繁荣昌盛、蒸蒸日上的中国南部海岸的大都市后，他就开始了以Warhol/Paul Morrissey的模式拍摄录影作品。他的《1997.12.20 中国.深圳》既是一部记录现实平庸生活的短片：主角是他和一个长相迷人的四川女孩，而他们就是在他的住所里闲逛，听Trainspotting 的电影配乐录音，随口说着名字的游戏。之后， 杨勇转到了摄影，以他心目中的英雄南·戈尔丁的方式记录下深圳地下生活的原生态（当然他还列出来自Jeff Koons and Wolfgang Tilmans的影响）。最非同寻常的同时也是最具争议的是他拍摄的有关妓女的人物肖像作品，他还曾于1999年在广州博尔赫斯书店举办了自己的个展 “女人总是美丽的”。杨勇的主角既不是具有异国风情的交际花，也不是被受虐待的受害者，他专注的是从农村流入花花都市要试试自己运气的青春女子。“这是中国的现状，” 杨勇说，“她们是不是妓女并不重要，我只想展示出这些人们是怎样真实地生活着。”

在这种求大同的郁闷的气氛里，杨勇的作品代表了一种反抗的决心，不仅是反抗官方的正统派，同时还要与先锋派里的主流做抗争。近几年来，这已形成了一个新的南方前卫派，他们植根于快速发展的深圳特区。这座城市与香港毗邻，与中国已形成的文化中心相距甚远，被看作是文化的未开化之地。由于不能忽视的地区文化差异，也许正因为如此，艺术家们总是聚集在北方的北京和中部的上海，依此来显示他们心中对“文化中心”无法摆脱的观念。与之相反，深圳却独立地发展起来，西化的香港的文化传输和珠江三角洲的影响使得深圳从一个原本闭塞的乡下地方蜕变成了都市的标新立异者......

Yang Yong and the Four Elephants

Author: Jonathan Napack

Source: Art News American, March 2000, p.126-127

"If we can just get the support we need, we will create ten Joseph Beuyses in Shenzhen!" says Yang Yong, who, at 24 years old, is the senior artist of China's youngest city. "This place is China's future."

A native of the south-central Sichuan province who was trained in oil painting, Yang is a man versed in Western contemporary art and not afraid to engage with its most provocative themes. After his arrival in Shenzhen, a booming metropolis on China's south coast, four years ago, he began making videos in the Warhol/Paul Morrissey mode. His "1997.12.20 China Shenzhen'' is a Factory-esque exercise in real-time banality: Yang and an attractive, somewhat gaminelike Sichuanese girl are featured lounging about his apartment, listening to the Trainspotting soundtrack, and dropping names. Then Yang moved to photography, documenting Shenzhen's underground scene in the manner of his hero Nan Goldin (he lists as other influences Jeff Koons and Wolfgang Tilmans). Most extraordinary, and controversial, are his portraits of prostitutes, exhibited this year at Guangzhou's Librer-Borges, a bookshop-cum-gallery, as "Women are Beautiful, Always and Forever." Neither exotic courtesans nor brutalized victims, Yang's subjects are farmers' daughters drifting in the new urban economy. "This is the reality of China," says Yang. "I don't care if a woman is a prostitute or not. I'm just trying to show how people really live."

In a nation with an almost oppressive sense of conformity, Yang's work stands in gutsy rebellion, against not only official orthodoxy but even the mainstream avant-garde. It has also become symbolic of a new southern avant-garde that has, in recent years, taken root in the fast-moving Shenzhen region. A gleaming toy town of steel and glass that hugs the still-impermeable mainland-Hong Kong border, Shenzhen lies so far from China's established cultural centers as to be considered quasibarbarous. Despite the country's fractious diversity, or perhaps because of it, the artists who cluster in Beijing in the north, or Shanghai on the middle coast, often show an obsession with "the center." Shenzhen, in contrast, has been shaped by stubbornly independent and Western-oriented Hong Kong, which transformed it and the surrounding Pearl River Delta from rural backwater to urban trendsetter.

This process began 15 years ago, when Deng Xiaoping carved out a pair of "Special Economic Zones" from the rice paddies and fish ponds of the delta, drawing billions of investment dollars from the former British colony. By the late 1990s, Shenzhen, which operates one of China's two stock exchanges (the other is in Shanghai), was itself moving into finance and high-tech and had established a reputation for unrestricted Western-style capitalism. New factories sprouted throughout the Delta and the provincial capital, Guangzhou, and the region began to attract the young and ambitious from all over China. 

For this generation of Chinese in their 20s and 30s, "going south" has meant something like what "going west" once did to Americans-redefining oneself, on one's own, away from family and, in the Chinese context, from the security and regimentation of the Maoist legacy. "Shan gao, huangdi yuan," so the saying goes, or "The mountains are high and the emperor is far away."

The freedom of the south coast, qualified as it is by Western standards, has created a culture of sex, drugs, nightclubs, and avant-garde fashion-driven to a large degree by easy access to Hong Kong's uncensored television. Guangzhou has China's liveliest press, although that means chatty lifestyle coverage not political debate. In more controlled cities like Beijing, most affluent people subscribe to Guangzhou newspapers. 

Fueled by this budding counterculture, the once-rustic frontier region has also become a center for artists seeking to break away from the northern avant-garde that has long been the representative face of Chinese contemporary art to the West. At such events as the Venice Biennale, China has usually been represented by artists like Chen Zhen, Wang Du, Huang Yong Ping, and Zhang Peili, most of whom made their names in Shanghai and Beijing in the 1980s and have since either relocated to or been active in Western Europe. But recently, younger artists like Yang have created something of a southern school, which, in its open examination of modern urban life, has begun to attract attention in such places as Finland and Switzerland.

Among the other prospectors of the new South China subculture is Zheng Guogu, 29, who lives in Yangjiang, a sleepy coastal town that rarely makes the news except to showcase People's Liberation Army drills to invade Taiwan. Like Yang, Zheng went to a traditional art school-he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Guangzhou in 1992-but became known through his experimental work. In 1996 he started making large photocollages, some of them similar to contact prints, others with jigsaw puzzle-like paper cutouts. They take the form of fictionalized "documentaries" about the trials of youth with such titles as Ten Thousand Customers and Life and Fantasies of Youth in Yangjiang. Recalling the Japanese "print club" machines so popular in Asia-which dispense instant souvenir photo stickers with "cute," kitschy backgrounds-Zheng's works build up a meticulously banal but ultimately authentic picture of private life on the South China coast. A similar photographer is Feng Qiangyu, who also lives in Yangjiang (although she studied in Beijing) and deals with personal identity and female sexuality in her work.

Chen Tong's Librer-Borges is the crossroads of the southern avant-garde. In addition to his role as critic and curator, Chen, 37, publishes the magazine Vision 21 and edits art theory books. "Guangzhou is small enough for people to meet one another," Chen says, noting that official restrictions are looser than in the north. "The politics here isn't real-just for show. The police never come to my openings. They mostly deal with traffic problems." He adds that, paradoxically, local insularity makes it easier for the avant-garde artists, most of whom come from elsewhere. The Cantonese who predominate in both Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta have their own distinct language and ethnic consciousness, although they still consider themselves Han Chinese. "They don't really like foreigners," says Chen, who comes from Hunan, the province immediately to the north of the delta. "They don't even like other Chinese. That gives us some space. We're not suffocating under a microscope like in Beijing."

The core of the Guangzhou scene is the group Da Wei Xiang, or Big-Tailed Elephant, a loose collective of four artists who have set out to rebel against the deadness of the new urban landscape. The varied output of the group, which was founded in 1990, constitutes virtually the only avant-garde work in the region to have received international attention, including a 1998 show at the Kunsthalle Bern. With the exception of the concept-minded Lin Yilin, the Big-Tailed Elephant artists have focused on photography and video, although much of what they have shown abroad has taken the form of installations. Two of the "elephants," Liang Juhui and Chen Shaoxiong, document urban change and desire, using photography, video, and other media in a conscious departure from the heavily cerebral and symbolic Beijing artists. Chen's "sight adjuster" pieces, little dioramas made from photographs thrust into the view frame of other photographs, give a toylike feel to the metropolitan panorama, while at the same time exploring how city dwellers perceive their environment.

The fourth "elephant," 42-year-old Xu Tan, has moved into multimedia with his CD-ROM movie Made in China. Xu knows better than anyone that the delta's relative freedom is just that, relative-he lost his job at the Guangzhou Academy two years ago for dealing with homosexuality and prostitution in his video work. "After that, my ideas changed," Xu says. "Now that people have computers at home, I can reach them that way, rather than through exhibitions. You can put anything on a CD. The democracy of the medium is the beginning of political democracy. If everyone has a video camera and a computer, you can't control them the same way anymore."

Made in China is a dense, interactive journey through the maelstrom of urban China. There are endless scenes of night markets and city streets; a lovemaking scene featuring a 17-year-old prostitute ("she's only been doing this for a month," Xu explains); interviews with the novelist Mian Mian, who writes about her years of sex, drugs, and rock and roll in Shenzhen, and Coco Zhao, a Shanghai deejay who is one of China's few gay public figures; and haunting images of planes screaming over perfume bottles (it so happens that Guangzhou's airport is built next to a cosmetics market brimming with fake Chanel No.5).

"The northern sensibility is analytical, while southern art is sensual," explains Huang Zhuan, a professor at the Guangzhou Academy. Huang is often described as the city's critical guru and, despite his loathing of the comparison, is likened to Beijing's Li Xianting or "Lao Li," who has achieved international renown as the arbiter of the Chinese capital's avant-garde. "The fundamental difference is that Beijing artists think of the world as structured, and that structure is in their artwork, with a specific aim in mind," says Huang. "The southerners pay more attention to lived experience. When artists deal with sex or use their body in a performance, northerners will use it as a political symbol, for example, but southerners take it as part of nature, of being alive. They focus on their own personal experience as a form of deeper social change." 

While Beijing's artists may daringly critique politics and society, Huang adds, they still show habits ingrained by 2,000 years of autocracy. Foreigners saw the irony behind "Political Pop" paintings satirizing Maoist propaganda, but never saw the ambivalence, the attraction to such representations of incredible power (albeit a power enjoyed by one). In contrast, despite lacking overt politics in their work, these southern artists are more subversive in asserting the value of the individual as an autonomous, sensuous being. 

If the breakaway southerners are still little known to the local public outside of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, their work is attracting critical notice farther afield, including in northern China. In recent years, Zheng Guogu and Yang Yong have been invited to take part in Beijing underground shows-informal exhibitions held in temporary spaces that are excluded from mass-media coverage-like "The Corruptionists" in 1998 and last year's "Post-Sense, Sensibility, Alien Bodies, and Delusion." Along with several of the "elephants," Zheng and (in Helsinki) Yang were also included in Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru's "Cities on the Move," an interdisciplinary look at urbanism and the experience of contemporary city life that has traveled to the Vienna Secession, Bordeaux's Museum of Contemporary Art, London's Hayward Gallery, New York's P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and Helsinki's Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. 

Commercially, however, things have been tough. "We have the worst of Hong Kong and the worst of Beijing," says Xu Tan, referring respectively to indifference and politics. While subculture in lazy, dreamy Beijing is big business, with its thriving underground scene in art, jazz, rock, and fiction, the insular, business-minded Cantonese mostly ignore the artists in their midst. Commercial galleries abroad have yet to discover these artists, although Zheng Guogu did take part last year in group exhibitions at the Takashimaya department store's gallery in Tokyo and at Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong (pieces sold for $1,950 to $5,800).

Meanwhile, the Pearl River Delta has generated interest in itself as an urban laboratory for top planners and architects from around the world. Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has just completed a Harvard Design School research project on the delta, which will be published in June by Monacelli Press as Pearl River Delta: Project on the City. Based on fieldwork conducted between 1996 and '97, the project consists of a series of interrelated studies on the region, which is predicted to have a population of 36 million by 2020. Closer to home, Shenzhen's state-owned He Xiangning Art Gallery is quietly collecting contemporary art, and the mayor commissioned Japanese architect Kisho Kurokowa to develop plans for a new city center. Not to be outdone, the mayor of nearby Zhuhai has engaged Arata Isozaki to design an artificial "intelligent island," a utopian urban development in the Pearl River Estuary.

But for Yang and his friends, perhaps all of these big projects are irrelevant. "I came here because I needed a job and wanted to make money," says Yang. "I wanted to see reality, to learn about those things you can't learn about in school.