[-empyre-] New Media and the Cat and Mouse Game

Mon Nov 15 18:54:29 EST 2010

Hi All! Very sorry for my tardiness in joining this thread. I have been
dealing with something of a mini-crisis at our gallery due to a recent show
which deals with gender issues called Shifting Definitions.

Basically we¡¯ve been under intense surveillance from the cultural bureau
because one of our artists was blacklisted by the national security bureau.
On Wednesday, I had 10 different officials from various bureaus milling
around the gallery and asking to see my passport. They made us take down the
artworks of Shanghai based performance artist Wu Meng, whose ¡°Gravity¡± 2010
photographic series addressed such issues as the Deng Yujiao case (a
masseuse who stabbed an official who tried to rape her), child trafficking
in Hebei and the issue of the ¡°*hei hukou¡± *or undocumented people ¨C who
cannot obtain residence permits because they are considered illegal ¡°second
children.¡±

There was also the video work ¡°Lady¡¯s¡± 2000 by Beijing-based artist Cui
Xiuwen. I am sure that some of you are familiar with her work which showed
at the 2002 Guangzhou Triennale. In this piece, she takes a hidden camera
into a seedy Beijing night club and videotapes the women primping and
preening, counting their money and adjusting their clothes (and breasts) in
front of the mirror. These ¡°san-pei xiaojie,¡± are basically hostesses which
accompany clients, to sing, dance and drink (sexual services are often but
not always offered).

This issue of censorship made me think about the possibilities for new media
art to transcend state surveillance networks. The cultural bureau took away
a copy of Cui¡¯s video, but of course I still have a copy in my computer
which I can show to trusted individuals.

Wu Meng also came up with a clever solution to this issue. Wu Meng¡¯s
¡°Gravity¡± series was based on two earlier performances. The first one
happened in a lane off of Weihai Lu in Shanghai as part of the
Kiosk/Xiaomaibu project. Wu Meng wrote poems pertaining to the above
mentioned social issues and others (including the recent problems at Foxconn
and illegal land seizures) and printed them on clothes.

(Note: these are sensitive issues, but issues that have all been covered in
the Chinese media and Wu Meng dealt with them in a very oblique way.)

She hung the clothes on a bamboo pole as part of site-specific physical
theater performance in the lane. While lane residents will quite happily
gossip about their neighbors, they are less keen to talk about thorny issues
of social justice, but Wu Meng attempted to engage them in her light-hearted
performance. After this show, she was scheduled to perform again at the
German Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo. Despite demands from the national
security bureau to cancel the performance, she performed anyway in a cloud
of security guards and plainclothes police.

Even though this performance is intrinsically linked to ¡°Gravity¡± (she used
the same set of clothes for the photographs), we decided not to show the
video of her lane performance for fear of having the whole show closed. But
on the opening night, Wu Meng showed up with three small 15 X10cm video
players which she passed around to friends. In this way we could share the
video to those we trusted.

Ever since we were shut down for a month in May for showing Zhang Dali¡¯s
Second History series, we¡¯ve become very good at playing ¡°hide and seek¡±.
During our last show, ¡°Learning from the Literati,¡± we were told we couldn¡¯t
show foreign artists (the cultural bureau is surprisingly xenophobic!) and
thus we compromised by showing the works of two artists Sayaka Abe and
Girolamo Mari in the ¡°non-public¡± space of the gallery. We built a
three-channel video installation for Mari in our kitchen cupboard which
turned out surprisingly well as his voice beckoned viewers to pop their
heads around the corner and see what was in the kitchen. (Note: the cultural
bureau had no knowledge of the content of the foreign artist¡¯s works. They
banned them based on the fact that they were foreign.)

Obviously anything that is an installation becomes harder to do when
censorship is involved, but with the use of vpns (+youtube) and various file
transfer software (such as yousendit), such ¡°sensitive works¡± can be easily
shared. If a painting is seized, then it is sometimes a number of weeks
before it is returned to the gallery, but with digital media we have many
more options.

PDF catalogues are also a good solution. Often we don¡¯t want the catalogues
floating around where they could get into the hands of the plainclothes art
spies, but PDF versions help circumvent that problem.

Sadly, while digital technology makes censorship and seizures of work less
painful (no physical or monetary loss  due to the confiscation of the actual
object), it means that the art institution needs to make a decision as to
who to trust ¨C a somewhat stressful and paranoia inducing position.

If anyone has any similar experiences or useful strategies, I'd love to hear
them and I hope to have the chance to meet you all when you're in Shanghai.

Best

Rebecca

-- 
Rebecca Catching
Director OV Gallery
Shaoxing Lu 19C, by Shanxi Nan Lu
Shanghai, China, 200020
+86 (21) 5465-7768
Shanghai Mobile: +86 139 1637 3474
Skype: RebeccaCatching
rebeccacatching at gmail.com
rebeccacatching at ovgallery.com

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rebeccacatching at gmail.com
rebeccacatching at ovgallery.com
www.ovgallery.com
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