On the evening of June 10th, at the time of “World Cultural and Natural Heritage Day”, Professor Qiu Zhijie, dean of the School of Experimental Art of CAFA, who is also an artist and the curator of the China Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, gave a lecture at the Lecture Hall in the CAFA Art Museum. Focusing on the successful presentation of China’s intangible cultural heritage in Venice, he talked about the curatorial ideas of the China Pavilion and gave responses to the praise and criticism from the world.

Fan Di'an, Director of the CAFA, was making a speech

Keynote speaker: Professor Qiu Zhijie, dean of the School of Experimental Art of the CAFA, curator of the China Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017

Attending guests: (from left to right) Wu Jian'an, teacher of the School of Experimental Art of the CAFA; Chen Zhiyuan, from the curatorial team of the Venice Biennale; Keynote speaker Qiu Zhijie; Fan Di'ian, director of the CAFA; Wang Xiaolin, dean of the Teaching Affairs Department of the CAFA; Jin Rilong, dean of the Personnel Department of the CAFA; Yu Ding, dean of the School of Administration and Education of the CAFA.

Wu Jian'an, a teacher from the School of Experimental Art of the CAFA and the participating artist of the China Pavilion, was giving a speech.

At the beginning of the lecture, Wu Jian'an, a teacher from the school of Experimental Art of CAFA and an artist of the Chinese Pavilion, started the lecture and gave a speech. Then, for a detailed explanation of the China Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the keynote speaker, Professor Qiu Zhijie, systematically divided the lecture into three parts: The first part focused on the curatorial ideas and the formation of the presented works. The second part discussed issues on displaying intangible cultural heritage. The third part was about the external reviews of the China Pavilion and the corresponding responses. He said: “In this Venice Biennale trip, the feedback we have received is unprecedentedly polarized.“

First of all, “Continuum (不息)”, the exhibition theme of the China Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, is rooted in Chinese traditional culture. In Zhou Yi · Xi Ci Zhuan (周易·系辞传), it has “Circles of Life is the origin of all things (生生之谓易),” while in Zhouyi · Xiang Zhuan(周易·象传), it has “As Heaven’s movement is ever vigorous, so must a gentleman ceaselessly strive along (天行健，君子以自强不息).”“Continuum” is a very dynamic and positive image and have had a far-reaching influence on Chinese culture. This year’s theme “Viva Arte Viva” of the Venice Biennale also contains the implication of“Art Forever”. Qiu Zhijie said: “The chief curator, Christine Marcel, believes that ‘Viva Arte Viva’ involves two aspects: one is to hold an exhibition curated by artists. I am mainly an artist, and I think it matches the theme when I take myself as the curator. The other one is to discover and present the works of those artists who have been forgotten or passed away. At the same time, It hoped that the exhibition could expand it visions on Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Thus, we propose the ‘Continuum’ as the theme of the China Pavilion for this time.”

Topographic Map of the curation by Qiu Zhijie

Topographic Map of the curation by Qiu Zhijie (Partial)

The proposal of “Continuum” is firstly related with Mr. Xu Beihong’s painting, Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountains, which reveals that the Chinese do not care about “Immortality” but care more about “Continuum”. When the immortal Taihang Mountain and Wangwu Mountain encountered by the Chinese people generation by generation, they could only choose to give way. When the Chinese people want something to be last forever, they always think of leaving it to their children and grandchildren. This concept of inheritance from generation to generation has always been a unique way for the Chinese people to deal with problems.

“Continuum” contains the meaning of change. Chinese mythology is full of various archetypes of “change”, such as “Jingwei Fills the Sea (精卫填海)”, “Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountains (愚公移山)”, “King Yu Tames the Flood (大禹治水)” and “Kua Fu Chases the Sun (夸父追日)”. This kind of stories about people who persist in doing something has become the developmental gene of the Chinese people. The “Continuum” is our answer to the immortality. The historian Toynbee once listed 26 forms of civilization, of which only one ancient civilization survived after experiencing many hardships — that is Chinese civilization. The thinking mode originated from Zhouyi had led to a continuum of the Chinese culture. Unlike the ontology of the Western world that established on a fixed entity, that of China based on “variation”. In other words, the “Continuum” is a collective choice, a subconscious that continually connects the people both in ancient times and at present with the people of the future.

When the curatorial team and the artists began constructing exhibition ideas and selecting artworks, they first thought of two paintings, Li Song’s Skeleton Fantasy Show and Ma Yuan’s Twelve Images of Water Surging, which were also used in the foreword for the exhibition. Both of the two works revealed Chinese people’s unique view on time, life and death and other thoughts. The Chinese character “Yi”, meaning art, was initially an ideograph showing a person kneeled on the ground while planting grass. Even in the simplified Chinese character, we can still see the humble squatter and that blade of grass. Our “Continuum” is also built on a continuous interaction between the elite and the public. In the history of Chinese art for thousands of years, folk art played the role of eternal life and a maternal body. From the craftsmen in Dunhuang to the female embroiders in Suzhou, the creators of Chinese art are more than just pedants in the study, as we can always find our own cultural and artistic roots in folk communities when Chinese culture faces a hard situation of dying out. 

The Scene of the lecture

It is precise because of these reasons that the artists in the China Pavilion have been selected—Tang Nannan, Wang Tianwen, Wu Jian'an and Yao Huifen. Wang Tianwen, a shadow puppet master, comes from the rural northwest part of China; Yao Huifen, a Suzhou embroidery master, is from the delicate Yangtze River Delta; Tang Nannan and Wu Jian'an are two artists who were trained from the art academy. Wu Jian'an gains inspirations from Chinese paper-cutting and traditional mythology while Tang Nannan develops photography and video art from ink and water. The keyword among them is “cooperation”. Each artist in the exhibition of the China Pavilion has collaborated with other three artists to form a corporate creative network, which also revealed contemporary characteristics of the internet by exchanging a large amount of information.

The work Yashan, co-produced by Wu Jian'an and Yao Huifen, is derived from Li Song’s Skeleton Fantasy Show. In the eight pieces of works of the same formation, attention is drawn to the needling technique of the Suzhou embroidery. In this creation, Ms.Yao Huifen abandoned the traditional methods of Suzhou embroidery that goes after harmony and turned to pursue contradiction and conflict. All the needling methods in the history of Suzhou embroidery revived in Yashan, and many new techniques developed.

In The Forgotten Sea co-created by Tang Nannan and Yao Huifen, the sheen of the silk and the texture of the ink created an excellent dialogue, producing a mysterious atmosphere. In the outdoor area of the China Pavilion, we embedded a light box in an arched window to display the Seven Mountains cooperated by Wu Jian'an and Wang Tianwen.

From the overall idea of the China Pavilion for this time, art is by no means an individual creation of an artist whose life and death is decreed by fate, but a collective production that lasted for thousands of years. Therefore, the exhibition team further transforms the image of “Continuum” into the substantial evidence in the archival section, where the mentor-disciple relationship of the four participating artists is shown. It is a cross-cooperation relationship map of the artists, and the archival part has also demonstrated the efforts of Chinese artists to return to folk culture in the past hundred years.

Exhibition Scene of the China Pavilion

After introducing the overview of the exhibits, Qiu Zhijie began to show the audience the general arrangement of the exhibition at the China Pavilion. “Literati Gathering, temple fairs, theater” are the three key words in this exhibition. The entire exhibition hall presents an extraordinary rich of details and visual effects. The whole space is used to its most while reveals a sense of relaxation. The use of this kind of space is to create an intersecting connection between the new and the old, elegance and vulgarity, China and foreign countries, forming an energy field similar to “Literati Gathering”. In the outdoor section, Tang Nanan’s “Global Beach Archeology Project” was made into a tent, in which the artists collaged the photographs of the objects that rushed on to the beach all over the world to make up a huge beach, and then asked people to analyze the drifting objects by using archaeological methods. Visitors can take a rest inside the tent and read the texts and images at the top of the tent. The spatial arrangement was a challenge faced by the curatorial team. Professor Qiu Zhijie introduced to the audiences that three sceneries simultaneously are shown at the China Pavilion: Scene A is a shadow play of “Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountains”; Screen B is a performance of “Jingwei Fills the Sea” played by the students from the CAFA and Chinese students studying in Italy; Scene C is the “Change of Roc” performed by a mechanical arm. The complex and varied forms of the exhibition show the difficulty of the planning and installation. The entire show consists of video and performance. The interaction of the video and the shadow play on the screen is an essential breakthrough for this exhibition.

Next, Qiu Zhijie gave an interesting response to the questioning of the Venice Biennale trip—“Don’t be old-fashioned! The Venice Biennale is full of intangible cultural heritage from various countries, isn’t it?” He believed that in all biennales, each pavilion was inseparable from the country’s own “intangible cultural heritage”. The Faust presented in the German Pavilion originated from Goethe’s work, and the Faust is an unquestionably German “intangible cultural heritage”. The core works of the Italian Pavilion derived from Western churches. While the embroidery and shadow puppets exhibited in the China Pavilion have also undergone contemporary reforms. For the 2000-year history of shadow puppet art that facing extinction, to have a performance shown in the exhibition marks an important and brand-new moment. Qiu Zhijie said: “At the time when the opening ceremony of the Biennale was about to begin, the organizer requested us to suspend the shadow performance in the China Pavilion. Otherwise, a large number of viewers would stay in the China Pavilion and miss the opening.”

In the last session, Qiu Zhijie invited Mr. Wu Jian'an, the participating artist, and Chen Zhiyuan from the curatorial team, to have an informal discussion to talk about the Venice trip from the perspectives of artists’ creation and curation. Inspired by this Venice Biennale, Mr. Wu Jian'an thinks that artists and audiences need to think about the questions of what is folk art? Where is the border between it and the so-called academism? Is “individual creativity” a myth that every artist has to embrace unconditionally? 

Professor Qiu Zhijie said: “Venice Biennale is different from the Olympic Games and the World Expo. Its intention is not to show national strength or to develop tourist destinations. Instead, it, using art, presents the problems and difficulties encountered by each country, and also the solution to these issues taken by each country’s artists, finally reaching a compromise in the course of the information exchange. In the process of rapid economic development, how to retain the artistic production mechanism of our ‘Continuum’ is a question we are facing now. Besides, people’s understanding of China has been enriched by using the methods of individualization and art to change the long-standing national stereotype.” Afterward, Professor Qiu Zhijie quoted Liang Qichao’s remarks in On Success and Failure, “Whoever makes the world great must first abandon the concept of success or failure. It is, however, absolutely difficult to do like that. We must know what’s happening around the world, no matter it is successful or not.”That is the summary of this curatorial experience of the China Pavilion.

Fan Di'ian, director of the CAFA, was giving a summary speech

At the end of the lecture, the director of the CAFA Fan Di'an took the stage and summed up the lecture. Dean Fan pointed out that what Mr. Qiu talked tonight was not only about the concepts and methods of the China Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, but also involved the question of “How we think about the contemporary trend of Chinese art in a globalized context today and the attitude and method of the dialogue between Chinese art and the world.” For us, this is very worthy of consideration.