Two Lifeworlds, One Double Question Man

Jaspar LAU Kin Wah

History is like the lake of mahjong. If it can prove that you are a criminal then it also can prove your innocence. If it can prove that you are a rapist, then it also can prove that you are a lover. The tragedy for human being is: that the environment around us cannot prove that we are its rapists. Therefore, we can never become its lovers.

Wu Shanzhuan, Today No Water ― The Power of Ignorance1

In the short space of a few years following the rise of the ‘New Wave of ‘85’ art

movement in China, Wu Shanzhuan had already clearly developed, as art critic Li

Xianting put it, ‘a firm creative grasp of the Chinese cultural climate.’ It is ironic that,

given the exhibition slogan of ‘No U Turn’, ‘China/Avant-garde’, held in Beijing in

February 1989, was turned into a kind of retrospective platform. Wu Shanzhuan,

however, had no interest in exhibiting his past work for the occasion. Instead, on the

opening day of the exhibition, he insisted on setting up a stand right in the lobby of the

gallery where he hawked fresh shrimps trucked in from his hometown of Zhoushan. Not

long thereafter, in the wake of the events at Tien’anmen during the spring and summer of

1989, Wu Shanzhuan departed for the West, and thus disappeared for a time from the

contemporary art scene in mainland China. In the meantime, the term ‘Political Pop’

gained wide currency as a result of the ‘China’s New Art Post-1989’ exhibition (which

opened in Hong Kong in 1993 and subsequently travelled internationally). Wu’s work,

included in the exhibition under the Political Pop label, consequently became trapped

within this identification. While it certainly can be said that Wu’s art helped to inspire the

Political Pop movement, his cultural vision goes far beyond it.

After leaving China, Wu lived briefly in Iceland, subsequently settling in Hamburg,

Germany. Although during this period he was labelled as an ‘overseas Chinese artist’, it

was in fact not long after settling in Europe that he created ‘Red Humour International’; a

conceptual banner that tweaked his previously conceived notions and gave them a global

dimension, creating a comparative understanding between East and West. It was also at

this time that Wu became a close collaborator of the Icelandic artist, Inga Svala

Thórsdóttir. The Western art world, regrettably, was largely unfamiliar with Wu’s

‘deficit’ artistic vision, which was born specifically out of the condition of scarcity

(cultural and material alike) in China. The East’s eagerness to be accepted quickly into

the Western mainstream led many artists to compromise by accommodating the Western

Orientalist perspective, yet a critique of the West has not been thoroughly discussed. As a

result, Wu Shanzhuan’s enlightening vision for both the East and the West suffered from

serious critical neglect. Because of the aura of humour surrounding his work, people

tended to read the ‘exoteric’ rather than the ‘esoteric’ message in his art.

Even from his earliest period, Wu Shanzhuan had a strong tendency to incorporate the

(external) forms of readymade (pre-existing) objects from the non-artistic arena into his

work. This tendency was in large part derived from an appropriation of the philosopher

Karl Popper’s ‘Theory of World 3’, which Wu came into contact with during the period

of intellectual openness that characterised China in the 1980s. From the charged colour

spectrum of red, white and black to the logographic forms of Chinese characters, from

big character posters to the representative objects and behaviours of the ‘Big Yes Big No’

(Da Shi Da Fei) political line, throughout his artmaking Wu tracked the course of

China’s emergence from the crimson sequelae of the Cultural Revolution into the period

of open-market reforms. In particular, Wu used the synthetic language of his red/deficit

characters to characterize the essential deficit of meaning in the ideological rhetoric of

Chinese socialism (bright, big and shining/false, big and empty), and at the same time to

expose the complete inability of officialdom’s petrified policy-making systems to keep

up with the booming myriad self-motivated economic activities during this period.

In 1986 Wu had written a short text entitled ‘A World 3 Theory Concerning the

Expansion of the Territory of Painting’; a crucial document in understanding his artistic

philosophy. In 1994 the artist revisited this text, replacing every mention of the word

‘painting’ with the word ‘art’, thereby reaffirming and expanding the interpretive power

of the text. In Popper’s ‘Theory of World 3’, World 1 refers to the objective world of

material things, World 2 to the subjective world, and World 3 to the world of objective

products of the human mind, which once produced become detached from human

subjectivity and attain an independent existence (hence as if ‘discovered’). Wu

Shanzhuan considers the state of the ‘forms’ imprinted in World 1 by ‘things’ of World 3

to therefore be ‘at large’ (since the otherworldly idea that once lent the object its original

existence is autonomous, its material ‘copy’ in our world cannot be ‘reined’).

In his early works, Wu Shanzhuan regards the logographic forms of Chinese characters as

products of World 3. Relocating them in the concrete Chinese context, they highlight the

deficit of meaning in their usage.2 Like the political propaganda slogans painted on street

walls, the overloading of meaning onto words reduces them instead to pure gestural

signifiers that follow the official political line. This phenomenon is similar to the

situation that existed in communist Eastern Europe, exemplified in an anecdote writer

Václav Havel relates about the manager of a fruit and vegetable shop ‘who placed in his

window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!”.’3 In

Wu Shanzhuan’s work Swearing in Front of the Flag with False Chinese Characters,

1988, the discrepancy between its ‘Big Yes Big No’ rhetoric and the senseless words is

clearly demonstrated. Art historian Boris Groys’ observation of how the artistic practice

of Soviet artists was imbued with a bureaucratic (rather than an individual) language,

finds echo in the ‘rigid forms (for form’s sake)’ of Wu’s work The Meeting.4 Wu’s

stamping of his official chops onto everyday objects and vegetables (such as cabbage), or

the displacement of the temporal and linguistic context of the ‘Today No Water’

notification, both create a kind of détournement (or absurdity).

1 Wu Shanzhuan, ‘Today No Water ― The Power of Ignorance, Chapter 15’, in Please Don’t Move, Esslingen am Neckar, Bahnwärterhaus / Galerie der Stadt Esslingen, 1996, p.43. 2 Though ‘impoverishing’ is one way to allow meaning discrimination for language to function, according to Wilhelm von Humboldt, compared with the Indo-European languages, the Chinese language ‘suffers’ from the linguistic features of ‘phonic poverty’, ‘phonic isolation/monosyllability’. Yet compensation measures have been developed; particularly outstanding is the use of graphic elements of the Chinese script. See Kwan Tze-wan, ‘Wilhelm von Humboldt on the Chinese Language’, in Journal of Chinese Linguistics, June 2001, vol. 29, no. 2, pp 169–242. From his early writings, Wu’s understanding of the ‘deficit character’ seemed to have taken these linguistic facts into account as well. 3 Václav Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in Living in Truth, London, Faber and Faber, 1989, p. 41.4 Boris Groys, ‘The Russian Novel as a Serial Murderer’, Subjectivity, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2000, p. 252.

Wu’s red/deficit characters relates both to aspects of politics and of daily life: these are

very much interrelated because they are both ‘hangovers’ of the planned economy. In his

‘Daily-Life-Arts(-ism)’ philosophy, Wu turned the language of doctrinism into a

language that ‘promotes daily life’. In this shift, Wu sharply delineated the cultural

(political) factors involved in economic development: for example, seeing how the value

of a Renminbi banknote is guaranteed by the faith in ‘the solidarity of the workers,

farmers and soldiers’, reveals a legitimacy crisis of the reforming political economy.5 The

1988 photos of ‘standing and falling’, ‘borrowing and lending’, ‘buying and selling’ (as a

series) has a deep symbolic significance as an exemplary demonstration of the ethics of

fair trade, and even of good deeds beyond the sole pursuit of commercial interest. While

Political Pop merely juxtaposes political and consumerist symbols side by side on the

canvas, in Wu’s Selling Shrimp, the artist in a sense actualizes an economic activity,

turning the art space into a real market space, hence revealing a far deeper understanding

of one’s own (commoditized) condition.

Socialism was fundamentally a revolutionary proposition put forth in the West as a

response to early capitalism. Consequently, China’s attempt to take a shortcut through the

stages of social development posited by Marx has proved to be a failure. Materialism

ironically created a deficit of material (goods), while idealism turned out to be less than

ideal (as compared with capitalism). The insistence on taking a ‘socialist path with

Chinese characteristics’ in truth constituted a reversion to capitalist society; thus China’s

contemporary time-space displacement has become ever more dramatic. Even though the

Tien’anmen democratic movements of 1989 ended in bloody suppression, in their wake

they helped to bring about a wave of democratic reforms in the socialist countries of

Eastern Europe. It was just at this time that Wu Shanzhuan, with his red/deficit character

artistic worldview, emerged from of the social context of China and walked straight into

the completely alien life of the West. Yet, quite unexpectedly, out of this additional layer

5 For example, in Wu’s ‘A Disaster Starting at the End of the Month: Business Art’, 1989, he wrote: ‘Every person has the right to enjoy the basic income for living promised to him by the nation … and he believes the nation should at least do something to protect him from suffering in the harmful effects of a business crisis.’

of displacement, Wu successfully created the unique double vision of Red Humour

International.

In an age nearly given over to a belief in the end of ideology (the triumph of the market),

a reiteration of Red Humour International ― calling to mind the Communist Third

International ― doubtlessly demonstrates a kind of untimely humour. But as Li Xianting

said of new Chinese art in his article ‘Departing from National Ideology’ (Zouchu Guojia

Yishi Xingtai), ‘What is political about it is just that it is apolitical’.6 Yet more and more

Western intellectuals point out a reverse concern. Theorist Slavoj Žižek, for example,

queries: ‘What if the political gesture par excellence, at its purest, is precisely the gesture

of separating the Political from the non-Political, of excluding some domains from the

Political?’. 7 In his eyes, ‘the very gesture of stepping out of ideology pulls us back into

it.’8 Exactly because of the displacement that occurs between East and West, the

ideological critique launched in Wu Shanzhuan’s artistic vision of the red/deficit

character remains effective and even timely in a Western context.

The first work Wu produced in the West was Selling Oneself at Large, conceived and

enacted in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1990. In this work, Wu walked to the local black market

with a sign hanging from his neck stating that he was selling himself for the daily market

price (with an additional discount). By positing a human being as a saleable commodity,

the work can be said to be Wu’s first response to a sudden confrontation with full-blown

market economics, which resulted in a ‘wholesale’ personal surrender (especially as

compared to Wu’s later works, which traded labour for earnings). With Selling Oneself at

Large Wu creates a depiction of the extreme contrast between the powerful market

system of the First World and a powerless individual of the Third World (categorized as

‘developing countries’). In the marketplaces of the West, all things become 6 Li Xianting: ‘Departing from National Ideology’ (originally in Chinese), in Der Abschied von der Ideologie: Neue Kunst aus China, Hamburg, Kulturbehoerde Hamburg, 1995, p. 12.7 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!’, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the New Left, London, Verso, 2000, p. 95.8 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Spectre of Ideology’, in The Žižek Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1999, p. 63.

commoditized, and everything wears a price tag; at the most extreme end, even people

are not excepted. As sociologist Georg Simmel suggests, the all-pervasive money ‘is the

equivalent for anything and everything’, measuring each ‘with merciless objectivity’.9

Wu Shanzhuan soon came to realize that nothing better demonstrated Western market

economics and yet was closer to daily life than the consumer heaven of the supermarket.

In his work Red Humour International Supermarket, Wu covered photographs of shelved

products in a particular supermarket with red paint. By marking everything in red, Wu

created a strange space in which a wealth of material goods was contained within uniform

packaging (or perhaps a uniform brand). This space corresponded partly to the East and

the West, but fit into neither. However, instead of viewing it as a third, alternative choice,

this work can rather be viewed as a criticism that aims to kill two birds with one stone.

With the uniform application of red paint, Wu addresses the uniformity imposed by

ideology. As such, he points out that by putting a price tag on all things, the Western

market in fact is no more than another kind of hegemonic system in which market

economics and money are in total command.

Drawing from his experience of using red/deficit characters to highlight the ideological

excesses of Chinese society, Wu Shanzhuan saw a role he could play as an artist working

within the context of a Western society characterized by an abundant material wealth and

a recession of ideological critique. In her Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of

Mass Utopia in East and West, Susan Buck Morse not only characterizes both the

ideological propaganda of socialism and the commercial advertisements of capitalism as

empty promises in which no one believes anymore, but she also attributes the failure of

socialist imagery to the fact that ‘it mirrored the dreamworlds of capitalism too

faithfully.’10 From this perspective, in the absence of a foundation of both popular culture

and a consumer market, the positioning of Chinese Political Pop art as a ‘commodity’

bears more similarity than difference to empty political discourse. 9 See George Simmel (trans. M. Ritter & S. Whimster), ‘Money in Modern Culture’, in Simmel on Culture, London, Sage, 1997, pp 243–55; and George Simmel (trans. D. Frisby), Philosophy of Money, chapter six, section I, pp 429–45.10 Susan Buck-Morse, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2000, p. 207 and back cover.

Conversely, before his departure to the West, Wu Shanzhuan had already embarked on

his ‘Daily-Life-Arts(-ism)’, and allowed his works to assume the role of commodity (as

in Selling Shrimps). In this way he touched on the political implications of a more

fundamental integration of art and life. If the genealogy of contemporary art really

suggests that Marcel Duchamp paved the separate ways for Joseph Beuys and Andy

Warhol, then Wu Shanzhuan, far more than Political Pop, was in line with Beuys’

counter-reaction to Duchamp’s ‘Golden Touch’ nomination of everyday objects as

‘readymade’ artworks, even though Wu and Thórsdóttir used a statement of the most

banal common sense ― that ‘Most people (owners of things) choose not to be artists’ ―

to refute Beuys’ dictum ‘that “Everybody is an artist”.’

Based in the West, Wu Shanzhuan undertook a re-positioning of his thinking vis-a-vis

Duchamp, inspired in large part by his collaboration with Thórsdóttir. The strategy of

Duchamp — the selection/removal of the readymade (objects not having been produced

by artists) from the realm of everyday life and their insertion into the context of the art

exhibition — is surely a direction precisely contrary to that of Wu Shanzhuan’s ‘Daily-

Life-arts(-ism)’. But if in Selling Shrimps Wu had already appropriated/replicated the

action of a street hawker within the museum space, then the fundamental difference

between the ‘ready-made action’ of his ‘Daily-Life-Arts(-ism)’ and the readymade of

conceptual art, lies in Wu’s adopting the position of the labourer: the ‘Golden Touch’ of

nominating the readymade carries the suspicion of exploiting the surplus value of the

selected product from the labourer.

Wu Shanzhuan’s counter-reaction to Duchamp ― apart from the emotional complex over

labour ― also lies in Wu’s idea of a kind of ‘Userism’(Shiyong Zhuyi) seeking a ‘reuse of

conceptual art and its things’. Wu challenges the position of Duchamp as a paradigm for

contemporary (nominalist) aesthetics,11 and even further, challenges the ‘purposelessness’

of traditional aesthetics in a way that Duchamp did not. This is not the same thing as

substituting pragmatism for aesthetic value, because Wu Shanzhuan is specifically 11 See Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1996.

focusing on the readymade object as art alone. Rather, it is perhaps more closely

connected to the readymade object as representative of the surplus production of Western

culture, where, as Wu suggests, excessive production of everything is carried out to meet

the projected needs of reparation. In contrast to Wu’s idea of ‘a waste of space’,

concerning the suppression of his selling of shrimps in the Beijing National Art Gallery,

the action of putting an object as a readymade (suspended of usefulness) into the art

museum space could thus be another version of ‘a waste of space’.

In confronting the nominalism brought about by Duchamp’s readymade, in 1992 Wu

Shanzhuan put forward another interesting proposition, which he called ‘a method of

found-objects’ (shidao fa). As the Chinese literally means, Wu recommends that we

‘pick things up’ from the street, and assume that whatever thing we happen to pick up

might be a work of art, and therefore should be delivered to the lost and found. This

whole idea is in fact similar to placing the question of whether the readymade is art

within the context of Popper’s theory of falsification/refutation (a criteria for scientific

knowledge). Within this setting, Wu seemed to propose a ‘différance’ ― a reconciliation

with the readymade ― by allowing the suspension of status: ‘This might/might not be a

work of art’. Yet since there is a very slim chance that these object owners would reclaim

their objects and falsify each of these exemplary objects as non-art, to treat all these

‘found-objects’ from the street as art pokes fun at our contemporary tradition of (faith in)

artistic nominalism.

Wu Shanzhuan also identified other ways that readymade artwork problematizes

traditional aesthetics: for example, in using a mass-produced object as an art object, does

the original work still exist? In Wu’s sketches (also created around 1992) proposing

‘Times Zero’, he borrowed the grand scale of production, in this, the age of mechanical

reproduction, to disperse with the halo (aura) of an original artwork that the readymade,

stamped with the artist’s ‘Golden Touch’, still retained. But while Wu and Thórsdóttir

tried to put Duchamp’s readymade back to use, their endeavours brought about another

kind of question: is usage able to help define an object’s essence, or does the

manipulation of things only reveal our ideology? As Žižek states in his essay ‘Hegel’s

“Logic of Essence” as a Theory of Ideology’, the opposing standpoints of ‘ground’ and

‘condition’ mark the line between whether a ‘thing-in-itself’ exists ‘for us’ or ‘for

itself’.12

Popper’s ‘Theory of World 3’ originally presents itself as an epistemological argument

for human freedom. But implicit in Popper’s theory is an area of ambiguity in which the

objects of World 3 can ‘materialize’ as physical objects of World 1. The acceptance of

the readymade in the Western modern and contemporary artistic tradition has further

created a vulnerable point of entry by which the concrete things of World 1 can flow into

World 3, because of their status as art. But instead of an affiliation to the hierarchical

division of ‘superstructure’ and ‘base structure’, in the language of Marxist materialism,

Wu’s discourse in works such as Selling Shrimp, Showing China from Its Best Sides ’95

and Second-hand Water, 1996, rhetorically attends to both the ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’

benefit one could gain from his (and Thórsdóttir’s) works. The readymade’s ambiguous

status in the artists’ hands as a thing of both ‘World 1’ and ‘World 3’ exemplifies the

power of human free will (a nominalism, however nihilistic) overturning the determinism

of materialism.

Even though Plato was ironically top of the list in Popper’s vehement attack on the

enemies of an open society, Wu’s interpretation of the idea of the relationship between

World 3 and World 1 (including particularly the understanding that an artwork is no more

than an ‘example’ of Art), invites a comparison to Plato’s two orders of reality; that of

the ‘Eternal Form’ and ‘Secondhand Copy’. Yet Wu’s subversiveness does not lie in a

single-sided proclamation of idealism, but even more in his affinity with George 12 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Hegel’s ”Logic of Essence” as a Theory of Ideology’, in The Žižek Reader, pp 228–29. According to philosopher Immanuel Kant’s epistemology, the ‘thing-in-itself’ behind the perceivable appearance could only be inferred from experience of phenomena, but are themselves not knowable. One could therefore argue that it is still a postulate concept ‘for us’ rather than purely ‘for itself’. From Wu’s adoption of the World 3 concept, it is not surprising that his ideological critique tracks the relationship between the idea and thing all the way back to ‘thing-in-itself’. Wu and Thórsdóttir’s Thing’s Right(s) exist in two different versions based on different existing texts: one is based on the visa application form of the United States and the other on the Human Rights Declaration of the United Nations. The two versions therefore also address the Realpolitik that gets in the way of the realisation of the idealistic charter of human rights.

Bataille’s critique of materialism as (itself) a form of idealism. The most direct paradox is

that it is only when we have recognized the power of ideas that the Marxist critique of

ideology can stand. From here we can begin to discern how Wu Shanzhuan makes use of

Russell’s Paradox to play with the question of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of ‘things’ and

‘concepts’.13

In the same vein, Wu’s idea of ‘bracketing’ all (readymade) things brings to mind the

‘bracketing’ concept of philosopher Edmund Husserl’s ‘phenomenological reduction’ and

his proclamation ‘To the things themselves!’.14 But as Žižek’s suggested, ‘Let the facts

speak for themselves’, is perhaps the arch-statement of ideology ― the point being,

precisely, that facts never ‘“speak for themselves” but are always made to speak by a

network of discursive devices.’15 Through turning the usual phrase of ‘Wu’s thing’ to

‘Thing’s Wu’ and advocating ‘Others are God’, Wu Shanzhuan seeks to eradicate such

hegemonic ideological concepts as ‘we are the world’ and ‘we are the masters of the

world’, and seeks to restore ‘rights’ to ‘things’.

13 Russell’s paradox, named after philosopher Bernard Russell, comes out of set theory of logic. The paradox addresses the case that a set appears to be a member of itself (if, and only if, it is not a member of itself). Since set theory was inconsistent, no mathematical proof could be trusted completely. (Similarly, concerning scientific knowledge, Popper suggested that despite the fact that we have to accept the view that no statement about the world could be absolutely certain ― causing a fatal blow to Logical Positivism ― falsifibility remains a methodological condition.) Wu’s bracket concept is also a kind of set, which paradoxically emphasises its openness (of everything). As for Wu’s phrase: ‘Is my biggest mistake posing answer before question?’, 1992, other than the paradox involved in structuring the sentence ‘(x) before (y)’, it also brings into view the question of essence and properties common in his later works with Thórsdóttir. 14 Edmund Husserl’s ‘transcendental phenomenology’ is a modern branch of philosophy that tries to delineate the intuitive foundation and verification of concepts and prior claims, objective contents of consciousness, and ideal meanings against psychologism. Its methodology of ‘phenomenological reduction’ suggested all assumptions regarding the external world be ‘bracketed’ (a suspension of belief), so the intentional consciousness is able to reconstruct one’s view of the world in a systematic, phenomenological way, free from conceptual presuppositions. Wu’s usage of the bracket also carries a sense of ‘abeyance’, but Wu again takes a humorous stand, suggesting that by putting his mind in brackets, ‘his mind (and also the concept) can relax’. It is not a ‘zero-degree’ for reorientation, rather a point-zero for a freedom of mind.15 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Spectre of Ideology’, in The Žižek Reader, op. cit., p. 64.

Just as Beuys founded a political party for animals, Wu promotes the rights of things. As

he states in ‘What are Thing’s Right(s)?’: ‘We believe that our understanding

(knowledge) of things allows us to use things any way we choose, forgetting that we

ourselves are also things ... ’.16 Only when we human beings are also ‘things’ are we then

made to relinquish the power to legislate for things as advocated by a human-centric

viewpoint. As Wu further writes, ‘idealism leads to the inequality of things’, ‘materialism

leads to the inequality of humans themselves.’17 ‘Thing’s Right(s)’ points us in the

direction of metaphorologist Hans Blumenberg’s idea of ‘de-anthropo-centrism’. Yet

whether Wu is wholeheartedly advancing modernity’s paradigmatic shift from ‘natural

rights’ to ‘human rights’ ― prioritizing ‘rights’ over ‘good’ [natural right] ― as

philosopher Leo Strauss diagnosed, is ambiguously open.

The self-legitimation of the enlightenment of modernity inevitably has to face its own

groundlessness. As self-reflective as Pierre Bourdieu’s critical sociology is in querying

common sense, exposing the hidden strategies (systems/forms) of domination and

granting resistance protected by democracy, it inevitably has to face the dilemma that the

sociologist also exists within society. Philosopher John Rawls’ theory of justice

(typifying the modern priority of ‘rights’ over ‘good’), despite its formulation of ‘the veil

of ignorance’, has to admit its underlying adherence to the values of a liberal democratic

society in the end.18 Even though human beings and things seem to have struck a formal

equality, the discussion however turns full circle. The kind of rationality imbedded in

formal democracy is very similar to the monetary unit in market exchange (over non-16 Wu Shanzhuan’s manuscript, ‘Thing’s Right(s)’, 20 March 1992.17 ibid.18 In John Rawls’ theory about social justice, the philosopher proposed a hypothetical situation (‘the original position’) in which rational agents are placed under ‘the veil of ignorance’ (not knowing facts about themselves, so that no interest or bias is possible) to opt for different social principles. Despite its huge impact in reintroducing contractualism to modern political philosophy, Rawls finally had to admit this supposedly a-historical, impartial and pure proceduralist setting still assumed an image of the agent under the western liberal tradition. Wu’s statement of ‘power of ignorance’, is more a mockery of the dictum of ‘knowledge is power’, which sometimes placed too much faith in the power of abstract argument, as in Rawls’ case. By applying the phrase to the over-abundance of unskilled labour in mainland China, Wu is humouring the supposedly more ‘advanced’ ‘knowledge society’, which is flushed with cheap goods produced by cheap Chinese labour.

equivalence of contents), as well as to the communist totalitarianism that tried to

eradicate all difference of individualities in opting for idealistic formal equality. Žižek

even goes so far as to question whether the concept of ‘Otherness’ is only after all a kind

of abstract (redemptive) messianic promise.19

As Žižek has suggested, there is always a tension between formal democracy and its

concrete contents, while all the various ‘new social movements’, such as

environmentalism, feminism and pacifism, aim at challenging the traditional boundary

between the public and the private of formal democracy, putting forward the so-called

‘third way’. Wu and Thórsdóttir’s series such as Birds Before Peace (starting around

1992), Thing’s Right(s) and Second-hand Water (beginning around 1993) can be viewed

as an extension of the spirit behind the equal-rights movements of Western society.20 On

the other hand, the left-over mythology of the ‘national Thing’ (Guojia-wu), in claiming

its protection over a certain ‘way of life’, works against international solidarity with ‘the

other’;21 and this fact becomes a target in the interchangeability between Wu’s works

Kissing the Flag, 1995, and Kissing the Plant, 1995, or in the audience participation in

Buy Your Own Star into the Flag, 1995, revealing the ideology of the State in China.

Wu’s comparative cultural insights on East and West highlight the revenge of history,

constantly catching us with surprising paradoxes. In the case of the West, according to

sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, not only are conservatism and Socialism both just

variant versions in liberalism’s ideological family, but the celebration of the 1989

collapse of Communism as the final triumph of liberalism is a total misperception.

Borrowing his argument, these same events, quite to the contrary, represent ‘not the final

success of liberalism as an ideology, but the decisive undermining of the ability of liberal

ideology to continue its historic role’, marking our definite entry into the world ‘after

liberalism’.22 In the conclusion to his book on the contemporary Chinese arts scene,

mainland critic Lu Peng cited, alongside illustrations of Wu’s Speed of Democracy series, 19 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Preface: Burning the Bridges’, in The Zizek Reader, op. cit., p. ix.20 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Formal Democracy and Its Discontents,’ in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1991, pp 154–69.21 ibid, pp 165–6.

the claim of George Soros (the high-profile financier who is also a student of Karl

Popper) that market fundamentalism is now posing an even greater threat to open society

than any previous totalitarianism: this is surely no mere coincidence.

Back in China, the displacement in social historical evolution is even more bizarre, as it

is the Communist party (which theoretically aimed to abolish all private ownership) that

is currently hurrying to pass a law to protect private ownership in order to secure

capitalists’ investments: the Chinese title for this law, wu-quan-fa, is literally separated

from Wu’s ‘Thing’s Right(s)’ (wu-quan) by only the addition of the word for ‘law’ (fa).

What Wu and Thórsdóttir tried to achieve with Thing’s Right(s) is an equality between all

things: thus, despite similar wording, these separate proposals on ‘thing’ rights represent

two completely different relations between the subject and object. If Thing’s Right(s)

reflects another additional right of Western surplus society, then Wu’s word play in

overturning the Western invention of ‘copyright’ in protecting intellectual property to

that of ‘the right to copy’, addresses the harsh reality (without much concern as to

fairness) of the global economy currently faced by developing countries.

The Big Passport performance, 1990, undertaken by Wu Shanzhuan soon after his arrival

in the West, or the proposed Yellow Flying project, 1995, that he, Wang Guangyi and

others came up with (travelling around the world using only transit visas), may provide

evidence for what one mainland critic has suggested; that the art circle was among the

first to touch upon the problems of globalization and localization in China. Yet what is

even more important is not the question of who was chronologically first, but the depth of

those insights already captured in Wu’s thinking. Wu’s Today No Water series of

paintings (beginning in 1995), far from being one-dimensional, as they may appear at

first, represent a kind of mirror image that is at once flat and multi-dimensional, as if

reflecting the impossible compression of concrete content into formal democracy (an

entrenchment of its (il)logic rather than succumbing to the totalitarian single-point

perspective). In traditional dialectical logic (as of philosopher G.W.F. Hegel), the

continuous contradiction and higher synthesis resulted in a kind of pyramid model. Wu 22 Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Introduction’, After Liberalism?, New York, The New Press, 1995, p. 3.

Shanzhuan countered this mindset and proposed a reverse method of suggesting

‘example(s)’ that not only reversed the pyramid, but opened up its base (perspective) to

the infinite.

In the years immediately before and after 1989, Wu Shanzhuan crossed a space-time

continuum that was cultural and social, as well as physical, experiencing ‘the speed of

democracy’. On the basis of his Today No Water, which summarized his observations of

the state of Chinese society, Wu came up with the phrase of ‘Today Water Pipe is Under

Reparation’ in characterizing the reformism of the West. The notification with an

explanatory ‘reason’ reveals both a kind of rationalization, as well as a high respect of the

rights of the others, contrasting with the anomie of its Chinese version. By borrowing a

simple metaphor, Wu Shanzhuan pinpoints the cynical reason(s) and ideologies at work

in the societies of the East and the West. Wu’s blend proves the existence of alternative

ways to avoid running into the simple oppositional stance of internationalism

(westernization) and nationalism. Perhaps after Marxism’s three phases of social

evolution, the cultural philosophy of Wu Shanzhuan looks into the future with a motto of

‘Today More Water Pipes are Needed!’. If understanding that the true enemy of open

society is nothing but the sclerosis of democracy itself, Wu Shanzhuan has given us a

homeopathic prescription: ‘Just Add It!’.

21 January 2005, Hong Kong, first draft

25 April 2005, edit-ed version

Translated by Valerie C. Doran.