“What Marco Polo Forgot”: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global
Author(s): Aihwa Ong
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 53, No. 4 (August 2012), pp. 471-494
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
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Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012 471
᭧ 2012 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2012/5304-0004$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/666699
CA✩ FORUM ON ANTHROPOLOGY IN PUBLIC
“What Marco Polo Forgot”
Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global
by Aihwa Ong
In 1995, Cai Guo-Qiang set adrift a Chinese junk on the Grand Canal in Venice, marking the seven-hundredth
anniversary of Marco Polo’s return to Europe. In 2008, as the world spiraled into a far-reaching financial collapse,
a historian warned that in the long haul, “New York could turn into Venice.” These two historical moments set the
stage for a discussion of how contemporary Asian art navigates the world of conceptual geography. An anthropology
of art expands beyond expertise on “native artifacts” corralled in Western collections to the active interpretation of
contemporary art alongside artists, curators, and critics in cosmopolitan spaces of encounter. Drawing on Cai’s
exhibition I Want to Believe, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2008, I focus on the contrasting
interpretations of Cai’s key installations, that is, the perspectives that dramatize different notions of the global. Is
contemporary art the latest form of Chinese entrepreneurialism or an expression of an emerging global civil society?
Or should modern Chinese art be viewed as a distinctive kind of anticipatory politics in undoing Western categories
of knowledge? In an art of assemblage and juxtaposition, how is China repositioned from an object of Western
knowledge to a tool of global intervention?
What Marco Polo Forgot
In 1995, artist Cai Guo-Qiang set adrift a Chinese junk on
the Grand Canal, Venice (see fig. 1). The event was the 46th
Venice Biennale. Marking the seven-hundredth anniversary
of Marco Polo’s return to Venice, Cai filled a junk with Chinese
herbs and medicines that Marco Polo apparently forgot
to take with him on his departure in 1291 from the port city
of Quanzhou (Cai’s hometown).
Cai’s staging of this epic encounter has drawn intense controversy.
An American scholar points out that in some Venetian
monastery, there is a record of Marco Polo bringing
back Chinese herbs. But anthropology goes beyond a literal
truth to look for meanings in acts of cultural negotiation. At
first blush, Cai’s installation seems to be an ironical commentary
for our times—that Marco Polo forgot to bring back
to Europe Chinese spiritual traditions embodied in the medicinal
plants. At the end of the twentieth century, a Chinese
artist seems to ask, “What can China give the world besides
opportunities for trade?” In the fall of 2008, as much of the
world spiraled into a financial crisis, the historian Niall FerAihwa
Ong is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the
University of California, Berkeley (Kroeber Hall, Berkeley, California
94720-3711, U.S.A. [aihwaong@berkeley.edu]). This paper was
submitted 28 I 10 and accepted 13 I 11.
guson (2008) warned that, with China as the global banker
to indebted nations, in the long run, “New York could turn
into Venice.”
The two historical moments—the opening of Europe’s
trade with China and the irony of Chinese state capitalism
saving Western capitalism—are geopolitical shifts marked by
Cai. These events raise the following questions: Is contemporary
art the latest form of Chinese entrepreneurialism or
an expression of an emerging global civil society? Or should
modern Chinese art be viewed as a distinctive kind of anticipatory
politics in undoing Western categories of knowledge?
In an art of assemblage and juxtaposition, how is China repositioned
from an object of Western knowledge to a tool of
global intervention?
From Structure to Juxtaposition
Like an “armchair Marco Polo,” Eric Wolf was a twentiethcentury
anthropologist tracing the itineraries of economic enterprises
beyond the Western world. In the 1960s, at a time
when anthropologists charted islands of culture, Wolf tracked
the spread of European capitalism around the globe, spawning
a mix of conquest, colonial adventures, and commercial production
(Wolf 1982). Called a “systems Marxist,” Wolf analyzed
the structural integration of entire regions into a single
modern world system. The dispersal of capitalist trade and
production, he argued, ultimately incorporated non-Western
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472 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012
Figure 1. Cia Guo-Qiang, Bring to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot, 1995. At the Grand Canal, Venice. For the exhibition Transculture.
Installation incorporating a wooden fishing boat from Quanzhou, Chinese herbs, earthen jars, ginseng beverages, bamboo ladles,
porcelain cups, ginseng (100 kg), and handcart. Photo by Yamamoto Tadasu, courtesy Cai Studio. A color version of this figure is
available in the online edition of Current Anthropology.
peoples at great cost to their well-being and cultures. Wolf’s
key achievement is his reorientation of the story of capitalism,
from one of Western self-narrative to a transnational story
involving a multitude of peoples, political struggles, and cultural
contestations. The expansion of European capitalism
subsequently destroyed non-European cultures and, in the
process, produced “the people without history,” as Wolf ironically
called them.
This Europe-centric vantage point is still influential in our
everyday thinking about the contemporary world. Scholars
and policy makers continue to be guided by ideas of global
transformation that view a progressive division of the modern
world in two halves: colonial and postcolonial, backward and
capitalist, the global North and the global South. Beyond the
optic of capitalism making the modern world, a newer discourse
of new humanitarianism also envisions a European
postsovereignty ideal that will spread the growth of multilateral
governance across the world. Both models of global order
based on borderless capitalism and transnational humanitarianism
fly in the face of actual world events, robust nations,
and geopolitical conditions. For instance, Wolf and others did
not foresee the rise of Asia as a global region that raises doubts
about the preeminence of North Atlantic nations and their
reigning ideas. Human rights theorists who talk about the a
“global civil society” do not sufficiently engage the realpolitik
of resurgent nationalisms (Held et al. 1999). Entrenched theories
of the world, defined by a singular system of political
economy or a transnational regime of virtue, are clearly inadequate
for engaging complex and dynamic conditions
transforming global relations.
Today, the future recedes because it is no longer forecast
by a sole historical horizon, an unchallenged cultural superiority,
or an overwhelming sense of moral certitude. Many
anthropologists no longer invest in theories of a world system
or in the inevitability of universal transformation according
to the precepts of Enlightenment ideals. We are skeptical that
social phenomena can be read as stabilized or neatly reproducible
structures or that social change can be thought of as
unfolding according to some prescribed futures. Our accelerated
interconnections have surpassed old geographies of
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Ong “What Marco Polo Forgot”: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global 473
East-West divisions, and the linear temporality of universalist
thinking, in its guise as hegemonic globalization, continues
to apprehend the world in terms of structural binarism and
predetermined outcomes.
Against such totalizing models of political domination, anthropologists
have turned to an ethnography of the local. They
seek to liberate non-European “others” from theories that
render them fixed and subordinated in global peripheries.
Leading anthropologists have called for presenting the local
in terms of cultural particularities or resistances that challenge
metropolitan power. Some have called for “the native’s point
of view” (Geertz 1973) or “letting the subaltern speak” (Spivak
1988), while others celebrate the local modification or even
rejection of foreign ideas and products.1
By privileging cultural
spaces, particularities, and agencies, these approaches unwittingly
reinscribe the binarism of a global North and South
and view new spaces of global encounter subsumed within a
hegemonic world system.2
But the framing of a capitalist
global versus a cultural local is overdetermined by spatial fixity
that does not engage complex transnational dynamics that
condition the politics of space and truth claims.
The philosopher Michel Foucault (1984) observes, “We are
in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition,
the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side,
of the dispersed. We are at a moment. I believe, when our
experience of the world is less that of a long life developing
through time than that of a network that connects points and
intersects with its own skein” (1). Practices of assemblages
and reassemblage, I argue, are key to our understanding of
the making and unmaking of contingent spaces that disrupt
old notions of spatial division and connection.3
In an earlier
time, world-exploring projects such as Marco Polo’s voyages
brought disparate peoples, places, and things into transborder
interrelationships, thus configuring a new space of intersubjective
exchanges. Today, in a world of far superior communications,
there are myriad projects that variously link
diverse actors and viewpoints and that in interaction crystallize
novel conditions of possibilities.4
I view contemporary art as a distinctive mode of space
rupturing and conceptual reconfiguration. Anthropologists
have argued that the modern art world and market are global
sites where bounded notions of observer and observed are
being challenged. As international museums and exhibitions
proliferate, George Marcus and Fred Myers note the increas-
1. Peter Worsley’s (1970) The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo
Cults” in Melanesia was an early study of cultural “resistance” to colonialism
and capitalism. There is great variation among cultural resistance
scholarship, including works on the “moral economy of the peasant”
associated with James C. Scott. Recent anthropological approaches to
“cultural globalization” focus on postcolonial resistances to new waves
of consumer goods and ideas. See, e.g., Inda and Rosaldo (2005).
2. For the paradigmatic formulation, see Marcus and Fischer (1986).
3. For an earlier discussion of assemblage and reassemblage as transnational
practices, see Ong (2005).
4. “Assembling the Global in Anthropology” series. Aihwa Ong, Stephen
J. Collier, and Janet Roitman, eds. Palgrave-Macmillan, New York.
ing role of anthropologists in mediating and critiquing Western
“appropriation” and appreciation of ethnographic artifacts
as “art” from the Third and Fourth Worlds.5
My
approach is very different, focusing not on the circulation of
indigenous art but on the circulation of contemporary artists
exercising novel ideas in spaces of global encounter. I see the
anthropologist as not merely an expert on “native artifacts”
installed in Western collections but a cointerpreter alongside
artists, curators, and critics of contemporary art, especially
that produced by non-Western artists.
The artist Sol Lewitt notes that conceptual art is art in
which the idea takes precedence over traditional concerns with
craftsmanship. It can be defined as “the idea that becomes a
machine that makes the art” (Lewitt 1967). There is a productive
resonance between this definition and what Foucault
calls criticism. Critique, he says, “consists in seeing on what
type of assumptions, familiar notions, of established, unexamined
ways of thinking the accepted practices are based”
(Foucault 1994:456). Conceptual art, I argue, as idea and
critique, can be viewed as a distinctive kind of anticipatory
politics that engages a given situation as a question; that is,
it is an art that simultaneously ruptures familiar modes of
reasoning while anticipating emerging problems. It is critical
therefore to consider non-Europeans and Europeans encountering
each other as equivalent actors in reforming the global
intellectual zeitgeist and in envisioning the world anew.
Bringing What Marco Polo Forgot
The Rise of Contemporary Chinese Art
Western readings of Chinese avant-gardism either reject contemporary
Chinese art (CCA) as sham avant-gardism or celebrate
it for its presumed cosmopolitanism. A brief account
of the global emergence of CCA is in order. In the post-Mao
period, Chinese artists had newfound freedoms to experiment
with Western forms that broke with socialist or romantic
realism intended for educating the masses. By the 1980s, they
had found their own artist language to depict not “what the
world should be like, but what it is.”6
The rise of CCA is a
momentous development, as heretofore, Asian conceptualists
included only a few individuals, such as expatriate Japanese
artist Yoko Ono and the Korean artist Nam June Paik. Chinese
conceptual artists, variously inspired by Marcel Duchamp,
Andy Warhol, and Damian Hirst, had by the 1990s blossomed
on the global art scene.
China has a vast pool of contemporary art talent, with
5. For this reason, they claim that “anthropology and its traditional
subjects are increasingly involved in the production of art and the institutions
on which its production depends.” See Marcus and Myers
(1995:4).
6. “Orville Schell and Uli Sigg in Conversation.” Mahjong: Contemporary
Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection. Berkeley Art Museum, September
14, 2008.
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474 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012
artists creating a wide spectrum of installations, performance
art, and computer works. However, many artworks are highly
uneven in quality, and those exhibited abroad have been dismissed
as “formulaic and facile” in their blatant commercialism
(Smee 2009). One trend is a seemingly automatic copy
of Warhol’s style, by inserting images of Mao in novel contexts
(e.g., Marilyn/Mao by Yu Youhan). Western observers tend to
view the Warholian repetitive style in CCA as copycat techniques
intended for a commodity economy shaped by the
international gallery system.7
Though Warhol and Jeff Koons
have been criticized on similar grounds, they are also often
held up as exemplars that dramatize the banalities of affluence,
while Chinese artistic citations of Pop Art or global icons
such as Marilyn or Mao are condemned as crass commercial
opportunism with reduced aesthetic value.
Swiss collector Uli Sigg, whose collection includes Marilyn/
Mao, notes that there are about a hundred world-class figures
among the thousands of artists who traffic in trivial commercialization,
bad workmanship, and so on.8
The best works
have been snapped up by Western art collectors who began
to generate a market for CCA in the West. Art Biennales
further exposed CCA to international audiences, thus increasing
their demand by the global art market. American
collectors and curators have also begun to look for fresh art
in China, and to some extent India and other Asian countries
are considered the new sources of innovative artwork.
President Jiang Zemin’s 2002 visit to Europe had also intensified
global interest in modern Chinese art. Official China,
which had considered contemporary art incomprehensible
and ugly, began to sponsor it by building museums and tolerating
avant-gardism. The rapid conquest of global art markets
by CCA suggested the possibility that contemporary Chinese
artists can help raise China’s global image as a cultural
force. At the same time, however, the Chinese authorities have
retained the practice of deciding which artworks are banned,
that is, forbidden to be shown in public and yet not inaccessible
to foreign buyers. Here, the depictions of Mao in
compromising positions, such as swimming in a sea of blood
or kneeling in remorse for wrongs committed;9
Mao as Mickey
Mouse; or Mao as dolls with naked female breasts have been
banned from public showings. The Public Security Office, as
well as the developers that control the 798 Art District in
7. The practice of embedding foreign or borrowed elements in artistic
works has a long history in East-West trade. Think of the exports from
China in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, when Chinese ceramic
motifs and colorings were designed for the European markets; such Chinoiserie
elements and blue-white schemes became standard English and
Dutch china ornamentations.
8. “Orville Schell and Uli Sigg in Conversation,” Mahjong: Contemporary
Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, Berkeley Art Museum, September
14, 2008.
9. In Ash Red, a 2006 exhibition that was shut down, the artist siblings
Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang displayed paintings of Mao swimming in a
sea of blood. More recently, their sculptures of a kneeling Mao with a
removable head and of many Mao figures aiming their rifles at Jesus
Christ (echoes of a Goya painting) have also been forced underground.
Beijing, frequently pose guards or shut down exhibitions that
satirize Mao and other political figures. But the very vulnerability
of the most provocative art to state censorship engenders
the commercial art boom, as state repression seems to
intensify the global commercial interest in forbidden Chinese
art.
Many foreign collectors and curators attend underground
exhibitions and play the role of gatekeepers, whose criteria
and choices shape Western perceptions of modern Chinese
art. For instance, a New York gallery set up PaceWildenstein
in Beijing to collect works by painter Zhang Xiaogang and
performance artist (“mystical madman”) Zhang Huan. Besides
the obvious reason of their capacity to attract high prices,
Peter Boris of PaceWildenstein commented, “We are not
overly concerned with censorship. It creates a tension in China
that is absent in New York or London. It allows for heroic
art to be made. . . . In reality, we are witnessing the birth of
an emerging identity” (Lankarani 2008). The productive relationship
between state repression and an enhanced art value
for foreign buyers fosters a dualistic perception that Chinese
experimental art can be celebrated for its cosmopolitanism
or rejected out of concerns of its propaganda or mere art
entrepreneurialism. But much of their inspiration, I argue,
comes from attempts to reframe modern mainland experiences
and China’s relationship to the world.
Diaspora Artists and Cosmopolitanism
Thus, Western commercial and cosmopolitan interests, on the
one hand, and the Chinese state’s ambivalent relationship to
experimental art, on the other, have led to a bifurcated reception
of CCA in the United States. Innovative elements in
paintings and displays, for instance, are frequently read as
avant-garde impulses in an unambiguous support of cosmopolitan
freedom. A description of the Gwangju Art Biennale
2008 connects the florescence of Asian art to “global
formations of civil society, where relationship between state
& civil society hovers in a state of animation & contestation,
e.g. civil society as a platform of the global multitude.”10
This view of the rise of a global platform for civil action
is inspired by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) in
their book Empire. Invoking Immanuel Kant’s notion of
cosmopolitics, Hardt and Negri maintain that in a world dominated
by capitalism’s empire, denationalized multitudes gathering
in global sites of cities, exhibitions, and cultural fairs
create a space of “communication and collaboration in a common
political project” (Hardt and Negri 2000:218). The multitude
in its desire for liberation is united only by its hostility
to the system of national borders and its tenacious desire for
cosmopolitan freedom (Hardt and Negri 2000). This global
versus national framework underpins Western investments in
10. “Formations of Global Society and Domains of Public Culture.”
Report for the Seventh Gwangju Biennale, Beijing, October 28–November
1, 2008.
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Ong “What Marco Polo Forgot”: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global 475
experimental art as the medium with potential for spreading
communicability and commensurability in universal values.
It shapes a positive view of CCA as a vehicle that propagates
ideals of world citizenship.
At the same time, leading New York art critics have been
highly critical of the rapturous embrace of modern Chinese
art and its display in storied museums such as the Guggenheim.
They view CCA as sham avant-gardism developed in
response to global market interest. The critics cite shoddy
methods, art entrepreneurialism, and pretend or illusory
avant-garde messages (Schjeldahl 2008). Accusations of modern
Chinese artists as nothing more than veiled propagandists
of the Chinese state claim that the “Mao craze” was abetted
by European fascination with fascist art. Jed Perl, a New York
art critic, puts it this way: “There is a world of difference
between an icon freely chosen and an icon imposed from
above, and the difference has more than a little to do with
the difference between a liberal society and an authoritarian
society. Warhol’s way of blurring this distinction leads straight
to the political pornography that characterizes so much of
the new Chinese art” (Perl 2008). Perl’s judgment echoes the
kind of reflexive condemnation in the business world whereby
foreign managers wish to remake Chinese workers as neoliberal
subjects but these same workers and China are then criticized
as prime examples of neoliberal opportunism run wild
(Ong 2006).
Such criticisms are haunted by the apparent passing of
avant-gardism to Asian artists and the worry that the explosive
growth of Asian art markets threatens contemporary Western
art. Given that the innovative energy in avant-gardism now
arises in the East, will American critics be able to retain their
position as preeminent arbiters in the world of modern art?
Furthermore, the indirect style and allegorical tendencies of
Chinese modern art are unsettling established aesthetic
norms, thus undermining the authority of Western art ex-
perts.
In short, the overseas displays of Chinese conceptual art
have sparked events that arouse both hopes of cosmopolitan
commensurability and suspicions of sham art as propaganda.
Such contradictory receptions, I argue, are framed by Western
obsessions and fears of East Asia as an object of insurmountable
difference. On the one hand, there is the insistence on
the international relevance of neo-Enlightenment projects
now taken up by “the people without history” or from the
heretofore periphery; on the other hand, there is the expectation
that the Chinese experimental artist must take on the
tormented legacy of modern European history.
Indeed, Chinese experimental artists use their works to
interpret historical events—Marco Polo’s return to Europe,
the end of the Cold War, 9/11, and the rise of China—to
index shifts in global and national orders. The question therefore
becomes one of how conceptual Asian art in global contexts
can change Western perceptions of China and a Chinese
role in shaping the global. What are modern Chinese artists
bringing to the West that Marco Polo did not (see fig. 2)?
Instead of viewing non-European artists as cosmopolitans
or propagandists, we can regard them as catalysts of shifting
geopolitical perceptions. Adorno’s analytics of the political
are recast by Espen Hammer as an “anticipatory politics” that
responds to social configuration and are reached in a condition
of social uncertainty and exception (Hammer 2005:
120). As a form of micropolitics or immanent critique, Martin
Jay (2006) remarks, anticipatory politics “neither papers over
contradictions nor forces” and does not even point to their
positive or facile resolutions. It is an ethical practice that
“gains leverage by defying the reduction of experience to the
concepts that define it” (Jay 2006). I view conceptual art as
a distinctive form of anticipatory politics that confronts existing
social arrangements through border-rupturing experimentations.
By assembling and juxtapositioning disparate elements
(West-East, past and present, culture and technology,
etc.) in global spaces of encounter, modern Chinese art is
anticipatory of a new global, one that embraces inevitable
heterogeneity, subversion, and uncertainty. I next track an
aesthetic politics in Cai Guo-Qiang’s installations at the Guggenheim
Museum, against his critics who deploy notions of
Chinese threat and the absence of advocacy for a cosmopolitan
civil society in Chinese art.
Cai’s Spectacles in a Space of
Global Encounter
In spring 2008, Cai Guo-Qiang, an e´migre´ artist living in
Brooklyn, had a major exhibition in New York City. Called
I Want to Believe, the show is the first by a China-born artist
at the Guggenheim, and it delivered a mix of spectacular
paintings and installations redolent of transgression and
magic. A curator notes the “unique aesthetic iconography”
that draws freely on Chinese medicine, maritime history, Taoist
cosmology, fireworks, and Maoist revolutionary tactics
(Krens 2008:11). There is no time to go into the many exhibits,
including Cai’s famous paintings by gunpowder and
spectacles by fireworks. Cai has been viewed as an alchemist,
spinning gold out of dirt and dust (Chan 2008). He also
converts the American view of China as a cultural desert to
an impassioned debate about the nature of Chinese experimental
art. Is Cai a master of Chinese avant-garde opportunism
or an authentic champion of artistic freedom?
That April, I walked into a crowded audience at the exhibition
I Want to Believe. People were craning their necks to
look at a chain of American automobiles tumbling from the
ceiling. Electric light rods protruding from the cars emitted
flashing lights, thus heightening the image of a sequence of
car explosions. This vertical installation was called Inopportune:
Stage One, indicating the imageries related to acts of
terrorism and the violent uses of American technology (see
fig. 3).11
11. The Cai Archives provided images of installations from earlier
exhibitions, but they are the same as the exhibits I observed at the
Guggenheim Museum in 2008.
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476 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012
Figure 2. Cai Guo-Qiang, Bring to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot, 1995. Cai helping to load wooden fishing boat from Quanzhou,
Chinese herbs, ginseng (100 kg). Boat: 700 # 950 # 180 cm. Commissioned by the 46th Venice Biennale. Museo Navale di Venezia
(fishing boat), private collections (other components). Photo by Yamamoto Tadasu, courtesy Cai Studio. Figures 1 and 2 are of the
actual Cai installations that took place at the Transculture exhibition, 46th Venice Biennale, 1995. A color version of this figure is
available in the online edition of Current Anthropology.
In another room, there was a wooden Chinese boat, its
surface studded with approximately 3,000 arrows, that was
also suspended from the ceiling. Attached to the bow was an
electric fan, blowing a red Chinese flag (see fig. 4). The museum
copy notes that this work alludes to a legendary story
involving a Chinese general (Zhuge Liang, 1812–1834) who
provided a lesson on the importance of resourcefulness and
strategy. In order to produce tens of thousands of arrows for
an impending battle, Zhuge had his men fill 20 boats with
straw figures and set out just before dawn. War drums attracted
the enemies, who fired arrows into the straw dummies,
thus effectively delivering Zhuge with the weapons. The curatorial
statement notes Cai’s analysis of China’s emergence
in the late 1990s through a tactical borrowing of Western
technologies (Krens and Munroe 2008:204–205).
Whereas the work symbolizes technological borrowing, my
own reading finds a deeper message about mobile weapons
and different cultural deployment. Cai seems to set up a contrasting
parallelism between the installation of exploding
American cars and this display of a boat bearing stolen arrows.
Whereas American technology has been put to violent uses
by enemies (and Americans?) against the source country (i.e.,
in a kind of technological blowback), in Chinese hands, Western
weapons are combined with Chinese tactics to defend
Chinese lives. A historical continuity of guerilla tactics is invoked
in the display of an ancient Chinese boat sailing home
after using their weapons to disarm opponents, with the national
flag fluttering in the wind (also a condition of possibility
enabled by Western technology). In other words, technology
is meaningful only in the context of its strategic uses in anticipation
of specific political outcomes.
Another display featuring indigenous knowledge and foreign
technology depicts the ark used by Genghis Khan in his
invasion of Eurasia. The ark is composed of 108 inflated
sheepskins and three Toyota engines that are kept running to
keep the raft aloft (see fig. 5). Museum curators interpret the
juxtapositioning of Khan’s skills as a warrior and the tale of
“The Boy Who Cried Wolf” as a caution to Western audiences
about their fears of Asian dominance. Newsmagazine clippings
that line the gallery wall “document the mutual deThis
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Figure 3. Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage One, 2004. Nine cars and sequenced multichannel light tubes. Dimensions variable.
Seattle Art Museum, gift of Robert M. Arnold, in honor of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2006.
᭧ Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Photo by David Heald. A color version of this figure is available in the online
edition of Current Anthropology.
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478 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012
Figure 4. Cai Guo-Qiang, Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows, 1998. Wooden boat, canvas sail, arrows, metal, rope, Chinese flag, and
electric fan. Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in honor of Glenn D. Lowry. Photo by Hiro
Ihara, courtesy Cai Studio. A color version of this figure is available in the online edition of Current Anthropology.
pendence—characterized by attraction and repulsion—between
East and West in the era of globalization” (Krens and
Munroe 2008:193–197).
Again, the above reading seems to miss a more subtle and
hopeful message. Asia’s historical resourcefulness in using
technologies from different sources is exemplified by Kahn’s
success in enlarging his dominion. Today, Cai’s magic dragon
is an allegory of how our world is kept afloat by cross-cultural
technologies that animate ancient skills. The Toyota engines
allude to Asian companies making use of American technology
to provide affordable transportation for the world’s population.
Such novel combinations of disparate skills and artfulness
should be viewed not as dangerous but as
contemporary forms of cultural creativity that draw on disparate
skills from many lands to form, in often surprising
ways, bridges across political divides of time and space.
The broad reception of Cai’s works has been mixed. Cai
is recognized as head and shoulders above many China-based
artists. Nevertheless, some American art critics have characterized
Cai as a clever showman and sham artist who is overpromoted
by greedy corporations. They note his past as a
stage manager, identify technical flaws in his work, and criticize
the use of factory products, such as stuffed animals, in
his installations (certainly Warhol and Koons both used massproduction
techniques and faced similar objections). The
Guggenheim is vilified for using this avant-gardist opportunist
to “turn the museum into a space of corporate spectacle”
(Davis 2008). Because Cai refuses to speak on behalf of the
Chinese government or use the language of civil society and
human rights, he is viewed as lacking in ideology and interested
only in making a lot of money.
Cai’s most explicitly political work at this exhibition was
Rent Collection Courtyard, a pre-Liberation scene composed
of life-size peasants bringing rent to a landlord. As a reproduction
of an iconic socialist critique of feudal oppression
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Ong “What Marco Polo Forgot”: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global 479
Figure 5. Cai Guo-Qiang, Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan, 1996. One hundred eight sheepskin bags, wooden
branches, paddles, rope, three Toyota engines, and photocopies of various magazine covers and article clippings. Photo by Hiro
Ihara, courtesy Cai Studio. A color version of this figure is available in the online edition of Current Anthropology.
that originated in the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts in 1965,
Cai’s display is controversial on many fronts (see fig. 6).
In China, the original work has been used as a model for
political and educational purposes that give voice to peasants
and workers speaking out against class exploitation. In 1999,
the director of the Venice Biennale asked Cai to reproduce a
small-scale version of Rent Collection Court, perhaps as an
ironic appropriation of what Westerns viewed as a Maoist
propaganda showpiece. Commenting on this example of
socialist-realist aesthetics, Cai was reported as saying, “I do
not know whether it is the artists of the Cultural Revolution
or us who hold the strongest attachment to art, but the people
of that time believed in a new society and an ideal for mankind”
(Perl 2008). Invoking this quote, Perl, the New York
art critic, condemns Cai for his “Stalinist double-talk,” in
suggesting that only “proletarian art, the people’s art, is real
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480 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012
Figure 6. Cai Guo-Qiang, Rent Collection Courtyard, 1999. Realized at Deposito Polveri, Arsenale, Venice. One hundred eight lifesized
sculptures created on site by Long Xu Li and nine guest artisan sculptors, 60 tons of clay, wire, and wood armature.
Commissioned by the 48th Venice Biennale. Photo by Elio Montanari, courtesy Cai Studio. A color version of this figure is available
in the online edition of Current Anthropology.
art” and thereby seducing “the mass audience that visits today’s
tonier museums. . . . These artists have pulled off a feat
unprecedented in modern history: they have figured out a
way to be communist fellow travelers and capitalist fellow
travelers at the same time” (Perl 2008). Here is an instance
of an impassioned reception that sees the world in black-andwhite
terms. The liberal West has free subjects; totalitarian
China has robotic propagandist artists. Global spaces are now
dangerously connected by copycat Chinese artists and greedy
American collectors and curators who abet and showcase
them in Western centers of prestige. Perl’s rancor is framed
by an orientalist perspective incapable of viewing East Asian
subjects as having independent thought, creativity, and political
agency. The overseas activities of Chinese artists are
rejected as propaganda efforts to aestheticize the catastrophe
of the Maoist revolution and hoodwink free people everywhere
with the aesthetic virtues of totalitarian art.
While a conceptual work need not coincide with the intention
of the artist, good experimental art unfurls a chain
of ideas that takes us to different conclusions. Cai’s comments
about the artists who built the original Courtyard project
recognize their authentic passions, but such empathy for the
original artists who championed the suffering masses need
not be read as an automatic support for the totalitarian regime
that followed. First, the relocation of the Courtyard scene in
a startlingly different way challenges the claim about a restaging
of state propaganda. Especially for Chinese audiences,
Cai’s model of this icon of peasant suffering and cry for social
justice in prerevolutionary China can engender mixed emotions
that rupture links to past culture and past politics. On
the one hand, there is profound revulsion at the cruelties
associated with Chinese feudalism and relief that many of its
forms have been eliminated.12
On the other hand, the recreation
of an earlier socialist agitprop in contemporary times
outside China can be a jarring reminder of the political mistakes
and catastrophes that betrayed the dreams of the Chinese
masses. There is deep embarrassment (perhaps not limited to
ethnic Chinese audiences) in being forced to contemplate a
revolutionary piece that embodies an unyielding tendency
toward the past and the mindless adherence to the collective
will.
12. For mainland criticisms of Chinese feudal culture, see, e.g., Tu
Wei-Ming (1991).
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Ong “What Marco Polo Forgot”: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global 481
Figure 7. Cai Guo-Qiang, Head On, 2006. Ninety-nine life-sized replicas of wolves and a glass wall. Wolves: gauze, resin, and painted
hide. Dimensions variable. Deutsche Bank Collection, commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG. Photo by Hiro Ihara, courtesy Cai
Studio. Figures 3–7 are of Cai’s earlier works similar to the installations in the I Want to Believe exhibition at the Guggenheim
Museum, New York, 2008. Although my discussion is focused on the Guggenheim exhibits, Cai Studio furnished the images of
earlier installations. A color version of this figure is available in the online edition of Current Anthropology.
Furthermore, a close inspection of the display discloses that
the figures have been constructed of clay and wire, a technique
that shows them going through various stages of crumbling.
Is the disintegration of both the peasant and rent-collecting
figures a subtle performance of the disintegration of the
socialist-realist dreams over the passage of time? By assembling
a propaganda icon in a novel context, while exposing
its material form to the natural conditions of deterioration,
Cai’s project subtly erodes Maoist thinking and juxtaposes
feudal violence with the larger revolutionary violence that
haunts this work. In Cai’s hands, Rent Collection Courtyard
is stripped of its original power, and in its undisguised banality
in the Guggenheim, the scenario becomes a message that the
revolutionary past and its utopian dreams should be allowed
to fade away. This oblique message about time and hindsight
destroying faith in revolutionary politics and state authoritarianism
is echoed, again in a paradoxical way, in another
Cai installation.
In Head On, 99 wolves suspended in a stream slam into a
glass wall (see fig. 7). Viewers tend to see this work as a
celebration of individual freedom that led to the fall of the
Berlin Wall. But in a recent comment, Cai notes that the work
can be read not as 99 individual wolves but as a single entity
in motion, one that repeats the same mistake over and over
again (Davis 2008). So a project that is widely interpreted as
individuals rushing to freedom can also be read as an oblique
criticism of the herd instinct of the collective that drives the
multitude to reproduce political disasters again and again.
Can it be that Head On uses Eastern Europe as the stand-in
for China and its disastrous blunders in recent history?
Although foreign audiences frequently miss the complex
links to traumatic events and revisionist remembering of recent
Chinese history, artists such as Cai trouble Western perceptions
of and demands on Chinese art to perform according
to their political assumptions. By challenging established
thinking about time and space, Cai enacts a form of aesthetic
politics in global sites that anticipates emergent experiences
of the global.
American curators who defend Cai want to promote Asian
artists as e´migre´ artists whose art expresses cross-border freedoms
and contributes to Western ideals of cosmopolitanism.
However, leading Chinese artists refuse to give comfort to
such assumptions about commensurable cosmopolitanism.
Arthur Lubow, a New York Times journalist, notes that Cai
is a global citizen who both discomforts his country and is
also “very patriotic” (Lubow 2008). And yet, Chinese artists
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482 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012
stir unease because of their attachment to China as the motherland.
Whereas in conventional anthropology of art, the focus
is on the “authenticity” of “primitive” objects, here we
have a new global situation where the problem is focused on
the “authenticity” of the modern artist, a criterion that does
not go with being an “authentic” Chinese subject as well.13
Authentic Artist, Inauthentic Chinese?
Such conceptual compartmentalization compels artists to
swerve between being framed as genuine avant-garde artists
(cosmopolitan) and being framed as authentic Chinese (Chinese
patriots)—but not both at the same time. Assumptions
about an artist’s distance or closeness to China as motherland
enact a moral audit of his or her art. The new twinning of
Chinese identity and global capitalist power also contributes
to such binary oppositions. The question of what is “Chinese”
in CCA is thus viewed as a source of geopolitical apprehensions
as well as global market value.
In 2005, an Italian collector who opened a gallery in Beijing
noted that “you cannot tell from their work that they are
Chinese. They express strong ideas with a lot of freshness”
(Lankarani 2008). Here is the familiar premise about the incommensurability
of being a Chinese and an avant-gardist.
Thus, Chinese artists have had to manage perceptions that
they are interested only in commercial benefits and/or propagandist
influence overseas. In Western contexts, many artists
claim that their “Chineseness” is incidental to their art, even
when global markets want art from China. At the same time,
the very “Chineseness” in CCA has been an irreducible part
of its cultural appeal to Asian collectors who may otherwise
have been indifferent to experimental art. This divergent valuation
of Chineseness—as having market value in Western
and Asian markets but questionable political valence in Western
art circles—has conditioned the more commercially
driven artists to be highly sensitive about their Chinese identity.
Given the politics of reception that require modern Asian
art to be either lucrative or avant-gardist, but not both at the
same time (as compared to Hirst’s works), Chinese artists
have become agile in dodging “Chineseness” as a damning
category. Cai was recently interviewed in New York about
how he sees himself as a border-crossing artist. Cai replied
that he checks all the boxes for “international,” “Chinese,”
“Asian,” and “contemporary,” but the most meaningful category
is as “a New York artist . . . [where] you can be a normal
person.”14
Here is an instance of the entrepreneurial artist
who wants to get passports and be welcomed in global cities
13. The debate on the political “authenticity” of the artist is an important
problem that is underdeveloped in conventional anthropology
of art, which tends to dwell on “authentic” versus “fake” art objects. See,
e.g., Morphy and Perkins (2006).
14. See Wall Street Journal–sponsored event, “Art without Borders,”
Summer Festival at the Lincoln Center, July 1, 2009. http://online.wsj
.com/video/art-without-borders/642509E4-957E-4A95-BC0C
-CD5BEC7D38D3.html (accessed July 3, 2009).
but who also knows how to play the Chinese card very well
when necessary.
The question is, Are these artists also troubling authoritarian
politics at home? What mode of politics is at stake
here? Indeed, the adjacency of world-renown Chinese artists
to the Chinese state is extremely troubling to Western observers
who seek in CCA explicit critiques of the Chinese
party-state. American obsessions about the threat of China’s
capitalism to Western avant-gardism and suspicion of Chinese
uses of art as propaganda can be traced to the uses of modern
art by state socialism and for the glorification of the Third
Reich. For art critics, there has been no problem with commissioning
ethnic Chinese artists such as Maya Lin to create
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial or I. M. Pei to redesign part
of the Louvre Museum for the glorification of France. But
contemporary Chinese artists who are nationals of China are
always already judged as compromised when they work on
national projects for China. The assumptions that one cannot
be both an avant-garde artist and a patriotic Chinese, or be
loved by Western art critics and love your Chinese homeland
at the same time, block more nuanced interpretations of modern
artistic experiments.
For American critics, the 2008 Beijing Olympics was a
global show put on by a fascist state, and many refused to
give it legitimacy by watching it. Thus, when Cai, Zhang
Yimou, and Ai Weiwei variously participated in staging the
Beijing Olympics, they were judged as selling out. Critics claim
that by taking a position of adjacency to the state, they lend
their talents to the glorification of China itself (Lubow 2008).
But one can also read the involvement of leading artists as a
way to convert a nationalistic show into a reimagination of
the global. Zhang Yimou, the film director in charge of the
Olympics cultural performances, said, “The Olympic circle is
round. The National Stadium is circular. There is Cai’s circle
in the sky. The circle is very important in Chinese thinking—
the sky is round, the earth is square. Round symbolizes limitlessness,
also fullness and completeness” (Lubow 2008). In
the opening ceremonies, Cai orchestrated the fireworks spiral
that suggested a dragon unfurling out of the “Bird’s Nest,”
that is, a pyrotechnical display of China’s spectacular but
peaceful rise in consonant with the Olympic theme of “One
World, One Dream.”15
Such a legend issued by another country
would be considered benign or a gesture to the Olympic
global spirit, but these Chinese displays have been received
as contamination by the state and not as a cultural celebration
that anticipates a globality of spirit transcending the Chinese
nation.
Chinese art is shaping global encounters that do not necessarily
produce the kind of commensurable politics Western
progressives associate with their ideal of a global civil society.
15. The slogan “One World, One Dream” is conspicuously borne on
a giant banner attached to a major viewing site of the Great Wall. Here
is a state promise that China’s new prominence seeks to promote global
solidarity rather than division.
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Ong “What Marco Polo Forgot”: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global 483
As anticipatory politics, experimental art tends to expose differences
and conflicts, to generate conditions of possibility
for new forces that do not fall neatly into a pregiven institutional
form. For instance, Ai had collaborated in the design
of the Bird’s Nest, but he disputed the image of the new
stadium as a container of Chinese culture or launching pad
for China’s political glory. Ai says that the design of the stadium
represents emptiness and that the conception “was free
of any obstructions of traditional notions” (Zhang 2008). His
refusal of Chinese elements is an interesting contrast to Cai’s
redeployment of the same in his art. But Ai’s iconoclastic
move is to break from contemporary Chinese politics (“We
must bid farewell to autocracy”; Ai 2008), a struggle depicted
in the elliptical web of steel columns that seems to strain to
contain intense activity within. Jacques Herzog, of the Swiss
Herzog and de Meuron firm that built the structure, notes
that “the building is made to be open. It is a work of public
sculpture” (Ouroussoff 2008:A1, A14). Although the Chinese
government built a fence around it, the Bird’s Nest anticipates
a new politics of public space (in sharp contrast to the massive
surveillance of Tiananmen Square). Ai feels that the state has
(temporarily) misappropriated his symbolism of the national
stadium (he refused to attend the Olympics). Clearly, the
designers view the Bird’s Nest as a free-flowing structure (redolent
of Taoism?) that transcends public-private divides and
reaches between national barriers for a new global openness.
The vector of ideas unleashed by Cai’s and Ai’s works disrupts
Western binarism and fears of Asia to suggest a new
configuration of global possibilities. Their projects are commentaries
on historical events that benchmark steps in the
arrival of a new global era. Asia as an object of Western
reflection is being taken up as an object of aesthetic revision
and intervention in our confrontation with global realities.
China’s leading public intellectual, Wang Hui, has observed
that “with Cai, ‘China’ or ‘Asia’ is no longer an object of
‘Western’ eyes. . . . Cai does not objectify his own experience
and tradition, but rather methodolizes them in order to observe
the world in which we exist. Precisely in striving to turn
‘China’ and ‘Asia’ into a method,” Cai’s style as an aesthetic
catalyst draws on a literary tradition of using civilization (wen)
to oppose savagery (Wang 2008:47–48). For this reason, perhaps,
Cai can be compared to a traditional Chinese healer, a
conjurer of possible futures out of the unpromising detritus
of materiality, culture, and history.
Conclusion: The Artist Problematizes
the Global
Marco Polo opened a route to China, but we are still grappling
with the concepts of the world as an interconnected mutuality.
Contemporary Chinese artists actively juxtapose Chinese and
Western idioms in works that rupture and animate the global
as a problem-space of ideas. CCA intervenes in the power
relations of global representations.
As a distinctive form of anticipatory politics, Chinese art,
in addressing our global wounds and existentialist crisis, our
loss of old certainties in politics and beliefs, unleashes a spiral
of new ideas. Artists such as Cai take spatial and mystical
leaps that do not follow logically from sociological causes and
connections. The mobile art of anticipatory politics, through
its novel combinations and disjunctures, can heal global
wounds while anticipating new global possibilities. Chinese
artists subvert old categories without being frozen into a political
stance of being for or against China. Experimental Chinese
art problematizes established notions of global civil society
and avant-garde politics while proposing new ways of
thinking that do not settle for predetermined resolutions or
outcomes. Because anticipatory political art operates in the
vector space that takes multiple sites as points of reference,
it makes conflicts more visible and engages in a “continuous
criticism” (Foucault 1994:457) of institutionalized relationships.
It crystallizes conditions for reenvisioning the world as
heterogeneous and always in motion.
In closing, I call for an anthropological engagement with
art criticism that both interprets the art objects individually
and also critically engages with interpretations of nonEuropean
refigurations of the global. As rooted cosmopolitans,
mobile artists cannot be reduced to stereotypical figures
of a global civil society or of a particular culture or state.
Poised at the junction of nations, their novel reassemblages
of disparate cultural elements are involved in a continuous
interrogation of received categories that have long frozen our
picture of the world. Conceptual artists are exemplary figures
of what cosmopolitan anthropologists can and should be in
contemporary times. As anticipatory political actors in the
world at large, Chinese artists perform their role as “authentically
modern” global subjects. At stake are new ideas that
rethink the global.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of the article was presented as the Fifth Eric
Wolf Lecture (2009) at the University of Vienna. I thank Andre
Gingrich, Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian
Academy of Sciences, for inviting me to speak in Vienna, the
center of artistic experiments at the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury.
Comments
Lily Chumley
Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York
University, 239 Greene Street, New York, New York 10003, U.S.A.
(chumley@nyu.edu). 27 II 12
As Aihwa Ong suggests in her paper, international interest in
Chinese contemporary art is framed by curiosity about
China’s reform era, in particular curiosity about cultural
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484 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012
transformations resulting from structural transition. Englishlanguage
critical writing on Chinese art tends to refer to
“emerging,” “developing,” and even “burgeoning” sensibilities,
deploying the same spatial and temporal rhetorics that
journalists use to describe China’s “rise.”
The politics of desire that surround the transnational circulations
of images of resistance are an object of ironic reflection
among artists in China. Here is a joke: why is it that
even now, 35 years after his death, so much “contemporary”
art (especially in the ’90s genre called “Political Pop,” which
the collector Uli Sigg helped bring to international prominence
around the turn of the century) still depicts the face
of Chairman Mao? Answer: because he is the only Chinese
political figure that Western buyers can recognize.
Western buyers of Chinese contemporary art have been
consistently fascinated by work that seems to express political
opposition. But it is not always clear what these collectors
want Chinese artists to oppose or, rather, which object of
resistance they want to see in the images they purchase: the
communist past? the contemporary party-state? the excesses
of unregulated capitalism?
The confusion of oppositions in which post–Cold War Western
art collectors find themselves is paralleled in the oftenconflicting
political orientations and economic commitments
of many artists and intellectuals in China. This political ambivalence
is aptly described in a spoken-word piece by the
avant-garde musician Yan Jun: Fandui, fandui women ziji, fandui
yiqie, fandui women bu keneng fandui de yiqie (Oppose,
oppose ourselves, oppose everything, oppose everything we
cannot oppose). In this context, ostensibly political signifiers
such as Red Guards in green uniforms tend to operate ambiguously,
both at home and in the international art market. Inserting
such images into a Chelsea gallery, rather than “undoing
Western categories of knowledge,” may actually confirm them.
Certainly, many Chinese artists who came to prominence
in the 1990s (often as e´migre´s to the West) had personal and
political reasons for exploring the socialist iconography of the
Cultural Revolution. However, they also understood the inscrutability
of most of that iconography outside of China. In
a time when the market for Chinese contemporary art was
almost entirely foreign, the limitations of Western audiences
set limits to their explorations, in many respects more confining
than those set by censorship (given that many of these
artists were living in the West and that the Chinese partystate
apparatus has historically been relatively less concerned
with restricting niche genres). The work of becoming cosmopolitan
has never been equally distributed.
In a class in the Central Academy of Fine Arts that I observed
as part of fieldwork in 2008, a young woman made a
series of conceptual art pieces about Mao’s poetry. In one
piece she wrote lines from his famous poems on toilet paper,
in water. The teacher told her: “This is not your life. Why
make work about the past?” He insinuated that she was trying
to make something that would sell by repeating themes from
famous artists—integrating Xu Bing’s conceptual calligraphy
and the ironic Mao references of Political Pop. However, the
contrast between this student’s work and the famous art it
recalled is telling. Her toilet paper calligraphy was heavily
dependent on local references to specific texts and textual
practices. To the teacher, those familiar lines of poetry seemed
cliche´d, but for an international audience, they would seem
arcane and require rather more translation and interpretation
than many venues are willing to offer young artists. In contrast,
far from subverting “old categories” or problematizing
“established notions,” Xu Bing’s famous text pieces avoid presenting
Western viewers with the limits of their own interpretive
capacities. What at first looks like inscrutable Chinese
calligraphy turns out to be English after all, or else (in another
piece) illegible nonsense, which there is no need to read.
Cai Guo-Qiang presents an interesting case in this context.
Cai has persistently insisted on using textual explication to
communicate with foreign audiences. Most non-Chinese visitors
to the Guggenheim will be forced to read museum copy
in order to even begin to interpret the Rent Collection Courtyard
or Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows. It is not just a reference
but also a history lesson. In that sense, it is certainly
a “tool of global intervention.” But if this is an “anticipatory
politics,” what kind of politics is it? Cai’s reproduction of
Rent Collection Courtyard as a crumbling monument is evocative,
even haunting. But is it a challenge to the dominant
narratives of contemporary political economy, according to
which we find ourselves in a capitalism that appears, for better
or worse, as the “end of history”?
Sara L. Friedman
Departments of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Indiana University,
701 East Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, Indiana 47405,
U.S.A. (slfriedm@indiana.edu). 17 II 12
A quick glance at the daily news reveals considerable anxiety
about China’s status as a global power and growing EuroAmerican
dependence on a country that has married authoritarian
governance to unbridled capitalism. If the twentyfirst
century will be a Chinese century, what will this future
bring, and how will it differ from the previous “American”
century? Aihwa Ong insightfully interrogates this possibility
by asking how contemporary Chinese art challenges Western
categories of space, knowledge, and power by staging new
global configurations and imaginaries. As in her previous
work (e.g., Ong 1999, 2005, 2006), Ong integrates novel articulations
of people, places, ideas, and forces to expose diverse
formulations of the global with sensitive analytic flair.
Here, she examines both contemporary artworks and the presence
of Chinese artists in a marketplace formerly dominated
by Euro-Americans. These artists, Ong argues, radically unThis
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Ong “What Marco Polo Forgot”: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global 485
settle Western arbiters of artistic excellence by deploying a
form of “anticipatory politics” that shifts geopolitical orientations
and foreshadows new global possibilities.
Ong rightly takes to task Western art critics whose particular
brand of cosmopolitanism requires pigeonholing Chinese
contemporary artists as either nationalist propagandists or
advocates of global civil society and human rights. Although
the works of Cai Guo-Qiang and Ai Weiwei certainly offer
possibilities for transcending those binaries and Western-centric
global orientations, the artists persistently encounter their
own Chineseness as a problem around which they dance with
care and some ambivalence. Yet, their ability to subvert national
identifications may be more constrained than Ong suggests.
Cai, for example, literally embodies the burden of modern
Chinese nation building (his name, Guo-Qiang, translates
as “nation strengthening”). Hence, in Cai’s desire to neutralize
his Chinese origins, to be known as a “New York artist,” we
sense a struggle to escape his very personal inscription in the
nation.
At stake here is the nature of politics in “anticipatory politics.”
Contemporary art is a world of the elite, and the new
global configurations that Ong astutely finds in these works
speak to elite sensibilities more than to the aspirations of the
masses. Another approach to anticipatory politics addresses
how the urban poor strategize in relation to unexpected possibilities
that may create new opportunities for advancement
or simply reconfigure the contours of global marginality
(Simone 2010). This attention to the everyday practices and
experiences of politics offers additional insights into how different
visions of the global take shape along a continuum of
elite and popular interests.
Here I briefly sketch two lines of inquiry inspired by Ong’s
rich analysis. Contemporary art’s potential for political critique
emerges partly through its sheer materiality: defined by
presence, scale, and detail, these works thrust themselves into
the viewer’s sight lines and demand engagement. The medium
matters. Ong’s perceptive reading of Cai’s reassemblage of the
high socialist work Rent Collection Courtyard demonstrates
how his choice of clay and wire, media that slowly crumble
over time, critically redefines the revolutionary attack on feudal
oppression as a totalitarian project destined for the dustbin
of history. This critique, Ong argues, creates a conceptual
space for envisioning a Chinese politics that does not reject
the animating passions of the revolutionary past but recasts
them through the sobering reflections of a contemporary gaze.
Yet, if the reassemblage of this work in the Western-inflected
space of the Vienna Biennale unsettles existing cosmopolitan
frameworks, it does so by demanding commensurability primarily
from an exclusive group of contemporary art critics
and aficionados.
What does the staging of contemporary art mean for politics
on the ground as experienced by the artists themselves?
Ong concludes by identifying conceptual artists as “exemplar
figures of what cosmopolitan anthropologists can and should
be in contemporary times.” This suggestive equation underscores
the simultaneously rooted and mobile personas of Chinese
artists whose artistic vision and reception remain deeply
inflected by national politics. Ai Weiwei’s fate in the aftermath
of the Beijing Olympics provides a cautionary tale for the
future of cosmopolitan art and anthropology alike. Jailed for
three months in spring 2011 (ostensibly for financial irregularities),
Ai now faces restrictions on his movement within
China and internationally. His outspoken critiques of the Beijing
Olympics and iconoclastic artistic performances have
made him more rooted than ever before, and although he
has been commissioned to design a pavilion for the 2012
London Olympics, he is unlikely to see his work in person.
Whether the new global possibilities enacted through contemporary
Chinese art and its transnational encounters transform
politics on the ground is clearly an open question. As
anthropologists, how can we cultivate a sensitive eye for the
increasingly heterogeneous visions of the global emerging in
diverse contexts while also remaining attuned to the possibilities
and consequences of living those visions? Ong’s article
provokes us to ask how our futures as cosmopolitan anthropologists
will be shaped by our responses to this challenge.
Laurel Kendall
Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History,
Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, New York 10024,
U.S.A. (lkendall@amnh.org). 22 II 12
Gunpowder Artfully Deployed
Witnessing the explosive presence of contemporary Chinese
artists on the international scene—sometimes literally explosive,
deploying gun powder—Aihwa Ong describes this work
as symptomatic of the destabilization of “old geographies of
East-West divisions,” revealing the “complex transnational dynamics
that condition the politics of space and truth claims.”
Ong takes Cai Guo-Qiang’s 2008 Guggenheim Museum retrospective,
I Want to Believe, as her primary focus, a mingling
of traditional motifs and modern technology that makes playful
and sometimes poignant allusions to Chinese history, both
recent and distant. An artful shape shifter, Cai’s work resists
easy characterization as “Chinese” or “Western,” “propaganda”
or “critique”; it is, in Ong’s terms, a “border-rupturing”
experimentation. I applaud Ong’s project and with it the
particular challenges that any consideration of contemporary
East Asia poses to tidy dichotomizations of the West and the
rest. While Ong is primarily concerned with the rise of Asia
as a contemporary global phenomenon, the region has always
defied easy disciplinary generalization—peoples with history
in spades and sometimes their own imperial projects. Ong’s
critique here puts indigestion to constructive use. But while
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486 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012
I applaud her “call for an anthropological engagement with
art criticism that . . . critically engages with interpretations
of non-European refigurations of the global,” all of this would
be greatly strengthened had Ong resisted some simplifications
of her own.
“Art critics,” and sometimes “New York critics,” are the
beˆte noire of Ong’s piece, and some do, as she says, describe
the work of contemporary Chinese artists as sham avantgardism,
blatant commercialism, or even veiled propaganda,
but critics seldom speak with one voice, and others seem
genuinely intrigued. Where critics repeatedly express puzzlement
that Cai Guo-Qiang or even the overtly dissident Ai
Weiwei can be simultaneously Chinese and cosmopolitan,
critical and deeply patriotic, some among them seem genuinely
intrigued by the capacity of this work to shake their
own preconceptions about a place called “China” (e.g., Cotter
2008, 2011; Lubow 2008). When Peter Schjeldahl (2008), writing
in the New Yorker, describes his own feeling of “provinciality”
on meeting Cai, “of blinking in the face of an intricate
sophistication that is grounded elsewhere,” he seems to be
navigating Ong’s reconfigured world map. A more nuanced
reading of art reviews and the possibility that at least some
critics “get it” would actually support Ong’s notion of borderrupturing
experimentations, testifying to the world-remapping
power of the work that she engages in her own com-
mentary.
In staking her own space, Ong is dismissive of the anthropology
of art and apparently has not drunk deeply from this
well. She observes that this field is concerned with the “authenticity”
of “primitive art,” perhaps not realizing that far
from policing this boundary, the work of Enid Schildkrout
and Curtis A. Keim (1990), Ruth Phillips (1999), Christopher
Steiner (1994), and others has done much to productively
muddle it. Nor is the anthropology of art solely concerned
with the morphing of ethnographic artifacts into museum
pieces, although much good work has been done on this topic.
The project initiated by Marcus and Myers (1995) also considers
the context of art consumption: the markets where art
circulates and the deployment of power within them (e.g.,
Geismar 2001). Ong’s throwaway comment about the gatekeeping
role of foreign curators and collectors seems naive
in the reconfigured universe that she invites us to contemplate:
Chinese artists exhibit in MOMA, the Tate Modern, and the
Guggenheim; Art Basil takes on a Hong Kong venue, art fairs
and new art districts sprout up in Asian cities, contemporary
Asian works command record prices in major auction houses,
and Chinese buyers are visible players in all of these developments.
The anthropology of art seems well positioned to
take on the ethnographic challenge of these developments.
Ong’s essay—focused primarily on the art itself—should energize
such a project, and the combustion of these two approaches
could be most illuminating.
Ralph Litzinger
Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University, 208 Friedl
Building, Box 90091, Durham, North Carolina 27708, U.S.A.
(rlitz@duke.edu). 24 II 12
Everyone is looking for something in the Chinese artist—
hero, survivor of a government crackdown, champion of the
marginalized, master, friend, and lover. Many are after the
next success story—that artist who might sell a piece on the
cheap and one day fetch a million dollars at a Sotheby auction.
With this provocative essay, Aihwa Ong examines emergent
global art spaces of capital, desire, and discourse. She calls
for a new anthropology of Chinese art criticism, much of
which has failed to see how Chinese artists are creatively
reconfiguring the global. She also provides us with a kind of
manifesto for how not to read the politics of the artist.
Ong’s intervention operates on many levels. As she details,
the global Chinese art scene is about many things, but her
main concern is the critics and experts who organize, stage,
and interpret the meaning of a piece of art or an exhibition,
thus her detailed focus on Cai Guo-Qiang’s Guggenheim exhibit
and the buzz that surrounded it. Ong probes the liberal
art scene’s obsession with finding artists and elevating them
as antistate dissidents, and she shows how Chinese artists are
often seen as commercial fakes or altogether inauthentic Chinese.
She is critical of the tendency to see Chinese artists as
participants in a progressive global civil society. These ways
of “framing” Chinese art, she argues, are inadequate to the
task of making sense of what artists such as Cai do when they
make art: undoing universalist thinking, disposing of wellworn
binaries, reconfiguring the global.
I find Ong’s arguments compelling. Questions remain,
however. Does the attention to the assumptions and discursive
orderings of the critic constitute a sufficient ethnographic
entanglement with the global scene of modern Chinese art?
Does the critic always write in English? What of art criticism
that circulates throughout the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan?
Does it traffic in the same universalisms and binaries? If part
of the project is to consider “how non-Europeans and Europeans
[encounter] each other as equivalent actors,” then
we also have to consider encounters in multiple languages,
locations, and scenes. I have often wandered into art “happenings,”
heady openings, and walked the back alleys of artist
enclaves in Beijing and other cities in China. In these varied
spaces one finds all kinds of characters and practices. We see
young entrepreneurs and experts on Chinese art, some European,
most not. They raise capital to open galleries, create
salons to discuss art; many travel the world, hopping exhibits.
Expat connoisseurs of Chinese art mingle with hipster Chinese
artists; languages, knowledges, dollars, and market skill all
mix and collide in these spaces of encounter. These spaces
surely have something to tell us about other ways in which
the global is being reconfigured.
How does the critic read the politics of the artist? Ong argues
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Ong “What Marco Polo Forgot”: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global 487
it is a mistake to find in artists such as Cai the making of a
progressive global civil society, where the multitude is said to
linger, remaking the world. The real object of critique here
is not just the art critic but also the work of Hardt and Negri.
Where Hardt and Negri might lead some to see the international
art exhibit as a space for the articulation of a common
political project, Ong sees their brand of theory enabling
a global-national binary and the reassertion of universal values.
This is a point for further debate. In this context, I do
not see much value in going after Hardt and Negri. Rather,
I think it makes more sense—which is what she does so well
in this essay—to focus on how some curators and critics, in
their relentless search for the political potentialities of modern
Chinese art, traffic in all kinds of high theory, which they
may or may not understand. Writing against the figure of the
global multiple, Ong wants us to discard, once and for all,
the global-national binary. For this framework, she asserts,
forces us to read artists such as Cai and Ai Weiwei as either
agents of the global multitude or always in an oppositional
stance to the Chinese state. Neither does justice to the complexity
of their work and the worlds they inhabit.
In the end, Ong wants us to see—one is tempted to say,
liberate—these artists outside and beyond the narrative confines,
the prison house, of Western universals and the philosophical
traditions of liberalism. Hers is a vision of the artist
as Taoist alchemist, blending styles, traditions, structure and
form, East and West, the economic and the political, the
complicit and the antagonistic. Cai and others are creating
new mappings of the world, new geographies of time and
space, and a new political sensibility that is decidedly not
reflective of a singular identity, history, or particularity. Their
work is indeed anticipatory of something new, perhaps of a
radically contingent and unpredictable mode of being and
acting in the world. Let us hope this mode of being and acting
in the world continues to stir up trouble.
George E. Marcus
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, California
92697, U.S.A. (gmarcus@uci.edu). 10 III 12
I want to explore briefly one set of issues stimulated by Aihwa
Ong’s essay that concerns a relation of paraethnography, so
to speak. Because of the strict word limit on CA comments,
I am unable to develop a second set of issues that concerns
the straightforward dimensions of an ethnography of Chinese
artists in the scope of the distinctive art worlds in which they
are situated and which they constitute for themselves, but I
just wanted to place it on the agenda for future discussion
of this very rich essay (with the example of work by Myers
[2002] in mind and, more recently, that of the narrative ethnography
by Marc Abe´le`s [2011b], of his experiences in Beijing’s
leading artist district, Pe´kin 798, occupying a former
huge factory complex; his ethnography offers invaluable perspective
on the mixed entrepreneurial/aesthetic/critical motives
of the Chinese artistic avant-garde outside the heated,
fearful cultural politics of their reception in Euro-American
art writing and commentary).
So, how do the contemporary practices and ambitions of
an anthropology of the contemporary (cf. Rabinow et al.
2008) align themselves with those of conceptual art, specifically,
the distinctive variety of it being produced by the cosmopolitan
and successful Chinese artists that Ong discusses?
More seems to be at stake than an ethnographic interest in
a global art world phenomenon coming out of China. Is “the
circulation of contemporary artists exercising novel ideas in
spaces of global encounter” a model for ethnographic method
as well as a subject of it?
Though anthropologists and artists have very different publics,
accountabilities, and forms of expression, they seem to
share deeper affinities of purpose and practice. “Conceptual
art,” as Ong argues, “as both ideas and critique, can be viewed
as a distinctive kind of anticipatory politics that engages a
given situation as a question; that is, it is an art that simultaneously
ruptures familiar modes of reasoning while anticipating
emerging problems.” This sounds a lot like latter-day
“anthropology as cultural critique,” having located its expressions
and purposes precisely in the same anticipatory temporality
of the contemporary as have the Chinese artists that
Ong describes. While, of course, conceptual artists and ethnographers
are not the same (see especially Foster 1995;
Marcus 2010), they crucially share an ethos of experimentation,
perhaps more derivative of the former by the latter.
By interpretative fiat that makes them subject to the ethnographer’s
gaze, and the artists become the surrogates of anthropologists
in contexts of spectacle and bold public appeal.
Yet, posing this affinity between the intellectual work of conceptual
artists and that of ethnographers does not necessarily
suggest partnership or collaboration, though those are possible
and have occurred (Calzadilla and Marcus 2006; Kester
2011; Marcus 2008, 2010; Papastergiadis 2012). Rather, it does
suggest a trading zone of methods (Galison 1997) in which
ethnographers in their own tradecraft might be encouraged
to ask what of the artists’ practices, designs, and stratagems
in producing spectacle might be incorporated in the far more
low-key ethnographic research process. In her essay, Ong provides
the impetus and some of the language to encourage
such an exchange or, at this juncture, such an appropriation
by ethnographers with the imagination for it and when the
opportunity arises.
Recently, in connection with a team ethnography project
situated in the headquarters villa of the World Trade Organization
in Geneva (Abe´le`s 2011a), I worked out a feasible
design for an installation as an intervention in fieldwork
(Marcus, forthcoming) that had become significantly blocked
by a culture of diplomatic discretion and secrecy (see Deeb
and Marcus 2011). We had considerable access but not
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488 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012
enough to overcome the formidable and contradictory constraints
that policies of transparency imposed on us. The controlled
spectacle of the installation artist within the space of
fieldwork promised to generate “data”—talk, reception, directed
engagement on the part of our subjects—crucial to
ethnography but otherwise blocked by the invisibilities of
transparency. Something like a controlled version of Cai’s act
of conceptual art in Venice, for example, is possible within
ethnography.
Perhaps this play within ethnographic method in terms of
the practices and imaginaries of conceptual art is occasional
and serendipitous and does not have much a future. More
likely, as in Ong’s suggestive arguments, is a capacity to perform
the ethnographic imaginary vicariously through what
conceptual artists are able to do—but ethnographers are not.
They share an ethos with an anthropology of the contemporary,
but they are operators for it in ways that ethnographers
mostly cannot be, who look on with admiration and,
perhaps, envy. As Ong concludes, “Because anticipatory political
art operates in the vector space that takes multiple sites
as points of reference, it makes conflicts more visible, and
engages in a ‘continuous criticism’ . . . of institutionalized
relationships. It crystallizes conditions for reenvisioning the
world as heterogeneous and always in motion.” This sounds
like what the project of the ethnography of the contemporary
would do if it could. Art is thus a spectacular extension of
the more subtle ethnographic, or a possible model for it.
What, then, is the proper or possible relation of anthropologists
to such artists, if the latter are to be more than just
the subjects of second-order ethnographic observation and
commentary?
Li Zhang
Department of Anthropology, University of California, 311 Young
Hall, One Shields Avenue, Davis, California 95616, U.S.A.
(lizhang@ucdavis.edu). 13 II 12
I read this provocative and well-crafted article with great interest.
As in most of her previous publications, Aihwa Ong
is never satisfied with focusing on specific ethnographic cases
of merely one place or group; instead, she asks important big
questions confronting anthropologists and other researchers
today across different regions. Her incisive analysis and bold
thinking provide us with productive interventions in current
debates on the shifting global configuration of power relations
and identity, cosmopolitanism, and the cultural politics of
contemporary art.
“What Marco Polo Forgot” is a piece of original and refreshing
scholarship that urges us to rethink global connections
through the lens of contemporary Chinese art at a time
when China is gaining an increasingly prominent position on
the world stage. It effectively challenges a series of entrenched
conceptual binaries that form the basis of a habitual way of
thinking through compartmentalization (i.e., cosmopolitan
vs. national patriot, avant-garde vs. authentically indigenous,
civil society vs. authoritarian state, and so on). In developing
the notion of “anticipatory politics” and pondering the new
political possibilities that the twenty-first century offers, Ong
highlights the techniques of assemblage and juxtaposition as
a way of understanding the contemporary world. These theoretical
insights, however, do not come from abstract claims;
rather, they emerge from her careful reading of the artworks
by Cai Guo-Qiang, an influential traveling contemporary Chinese
artist. Further, the divergent and controversial interpretations
of Cai’s bold art raise another important question
about what is considered commensurable and incommensurable
in the politics of identity today. Artists such as Cai
frequently disrupt the logic of Western identity politics by
refusing to follow the either/or mode of identification and
categorization that does not allow the possibility of one simultaneously
inhabiting multiple positions or speaking in
diverse voices (i.e., being a genuine cosmopolitan artist and
an authentic Chinese patriot, drawing from and glorifying
certain Chinese cultural elements while not being afraid of
making cultural critique).
Yet, a hegemonic paradigm of thinking about the world
and politics as shaped by unequal power relations and uneven
capitalist development continues to exist even though nonEuro/American
conceptual artists among others have begun
to challenge this dominant and often taken-for-granted
framework. While fully recognizing the significance of this
new critical trend and potential, I wonder whether Ong’s
reading is a bit overly optimistic about the degree and extent
of the impact such avant-garde artists might have. It seems
to me that there is a long way to go before we reach the point
where such challenges and cultural negotiations can take root
among a broader social spectrum at home and abroad and
thus destabilize the established global order of things. But
precisely for this reason, I agree with Ong that contemporary
anthropologists can and should play a more prominent role
in fostering a radically different way of thinking about the
world and envisioning a different future for a larger public.
While the article largely focuses on how contemporary Chinese
art can serve as a means of global intervention, it also
raises a crucial question of how it might alter the politics at
home. Like Cai, several other internationally recognized Chinese
artists all have a delicate and complex relationship with
a state that itself is also undergoing transformations. Yet, as
Ong rightly points out, such a complex relationship is often
not adequately recognized by ideologically driven Western
critiques that characterize any artistic participation in stateorchestrated
projects (such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics) as
a sign of “selling out.” Building on her observation, I would
like to take the argument even further. The notion of “selling
out” here suggests a mechanical one-way perspective on
power and social change in postsocialist China shaped by the
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Ong “What Marco Polo Forgot”: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global 489
lens of authoritarianism. For these critics, the Chinese state
remains a powerful figure that can co-opt even critical social
actors into its nationalistic projects with the lure of personal
fame and status. This interpretation fails to acknowledge the
possibility that the operating mode of state power is also
shifting and that such high-profile participants are also able
to transform partly the meanings of the projects involved.
Entrepreneurialism and political ambitions need not be mutually
exclusive for both the state and the artists. Another
intriguing issue explored in the article that could be unpacked
further is the unstable and sometimes unpredictable relationship
between market value and political stance, economic
capital and social capital for conceptual artists.
I have no doubt that Ong’s article will appeal to a broad
readership and stimulate further exciting and meaningful debates
among scholars, artists, and the general public about
how better to grapple with the complex conditions and new
possibilities of contemporary human existence through new
social imaginations and novel conceptions of the world. As
Walter Benjamin reminded us a long time ago, art has great
potential to transform politics and engender profound social
change.
Yujie Zhu
Cluster of Asia and Europe in a Global Context, Karl Jaspers Centre
for Advanced Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University,
Voßstraße 2, Building 4400, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany (yujie@
asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de). 22 II 12
What Can We Bring to the World?
As a China-born global artist, Cai Guo-Qiang is widely discussed,
especially after the first success of his work Bring to
Venice What Marco Polo Forgot in 1995. Cai’s work has been
criticized by both Western and Chinese art critics, and he was
even sued in 2000 for his work Rent Collection Courtyard.
Different from solely looking at the circulation of art, Aihwa
Ong uses an alternative approach to provide insight into the
notion of the circulation of the artist, Cai’s ideas in spaces
of the global encounter. This approach, similar to Latour’s
actor-network theory, aims to use the network of Cai to illustrate
the asymmetrical power relation between the Chinese
and Western media and the Chinese artist’s position in this
dynamic relationship.
As Ong points out, the different gazes of the Chinese and
Western critics are based on their expectation of how the
global Chinese artist should present. When Western critics
focus mainly on the authenticity of the art by judging him
as a “showman and sham artist,” they expect him to be an
“independent, creative, and political agent.” On the contrary,
the Chinese media, especially the Chinese artists, have their
own imaginaries of how Chinese-born global artists should
be. People expect him to present his art to change the Western
perception of China instead of selling China to satisfy the
Western media.
Thus, Cai has been trapped in a dilemma between both
sides due to his dualistic position as a pure avant-garde artist
or a pure patriotic artist. There is a popular Chinese saying
that influences the current generation of Chinese, which is “a
person’s character decides his destiny” (xingge jueding mingyun).
Being a global artist, Cai is trying to pave a way beyond
borders, of playing the Chinese role to shape Western perceptions
of China. Being a Chinese cosmopolitan artist, he
aims to search for a middle way in the process of dialogue
between the world and China. This approach is very close to
the Confucian’s ideology of “Doctrine of the Mean.” Through
his work, consciously or unconsciously, he presents the artistic
idea of value. Thus, as Ong states, Cai’s experience with the
world develops his lifelong pursuit of the artist career, which
connects to the past, the contemporary, and the future.
The critics from both sides (China and the global) and his
encounter with curators have forced him to create a certain
“emergent identity.” Being a cosmopolitan artist does not
mean that he has a position to be both a border-crossing
artist and simply a man. Cai’s dream to be “a normal person”
exactly presents his way of looking at the world and his art.
He is presenting his emergent identity to the world through
his “anticipatory” political position by “the dualistic perception
that Chinese experimental art can be celebrated for its
cosmopolitanism or rejected out of concerns of its propaganda
or mere art entrepreneurialism.”
In Ong’s article, the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony
perfectly presents this dualistic position and the complexity
of identity. The event, presented by three leading Chinese
artists, Zhang Yimo, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Ai Weiwei, showed
the asymmetrical power relationship between both sides of
the media and the dialogue between the world and China. If
Zhang presented the voice from the Chinese authority and
Ai used his idea of freedom “of any obstructions of traditional
notions” to refuse the contemporary China politics, Cai’s attitude
and his work indicate his identity as a mediator. His
approach showed the possibility to make a novel idea in the
space of global encounter and “methodolize” his experience
to observe and present the world, without being politically
for or against China.
Ong’s work does more than call for an anthropological
engagement with art criticism as a cointerpreter. Her approach
raises a similar question of being both a Chinese anthropologist
and a global anthropologist, that is, how to play the role
as a mediator for both Western and Chinese academia. Similar
to Cai’s case, the border-crossing identity leads such anthropologists
to acquire a dualistic position. Their work can be
interpreted as selling Western theories by the Chinese domestic
scholars or criticized as inauthentic without touching
the real ground by the Western scholars. Is it possible, as Cai’s
story illustrates, to use what they have learned and their cosThis
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490 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012
mopolitan experience and tradition, to present to both Chinese
and global academia? It seems that the Chinese global
artists or scholars can hardly be understood as “normal” people.
Nevertheless, their continuous struggle with the situation
will never end. Thus, we return to the first question put
forward by Ong: What we can bring to the world and to the
global?
Reply
The above comments richly expand the conversation on contemporary
art on the world stage. In the essay, Cai QuoQiang’s
2008 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum was the
event that crystallized contested meanings of the global. I
deployed the global in many registers: as concepts of heterogeneity
and exchange and as emerging configurations of cosmopolitanism.
The plunge of world-famous Chinese artists
into the New York art scene also raises broader questions
about an anthropology of the global. I accept the invitation
to expand on the anticipatory strategies—crouching in the
wings, rupturing borders, messing with the props, and casting
spells—that deploy things Chinese as a global method.
Double Positioning
Mobile artists not only rupture national borders but also recast
them in relation to shifting norms of cosmopolitan art.
The Cai exhibition is the event and the field through which
contemporary Chinese art negotiates the forms, meanings,
and experiences of cosmopolitanism. Remarks on the double
positioning of mobile artists identify different kinds of cultural
sophistication in two very different milieus—New York,
China—and what the effects of the artworks may be.
It should be clear to the attentive reader that my focus is
on specific responses to Cai’s art at the Guggenheim and not
on implicating all New York curators and media scholars.
From her perch at the Museum of Natural History, Laurel
Kendall doubtlessly has a privileged view she is free to elaborate
upon, but it is not the subject of my essay. I have a
sense of the New York–Chinese art world. My sister works at
Wildenstein, New York City, which in 2008 opened a gallery
in Beijing devoted to works by artists such as Zhang Xiaogang
(see Ong 2010). This is a fairly new phenomenon. While there
is a contemporary Asian art expert, Melissa Chiu of the Asia
Society Museum, the Guggenheim Museum is the first of its
kind to only recently hire a senior curator of Asian art and
to seek exchanges with contemporary artists working in the
developing world.
More on target are remarks on how border-running artists
experience limits of interpretation by respective audiences.
Lily Chumley identifies “the politics of desire” among Western
buyers or critics who may not “get” the messages embedded
in Cai’s artworks. She captures the fluid ambiguity of the
artists, intended perhaps not to fully disclose the “history
lessons” but rather to disrupt Western expectations of political
opposition or resistance in the installations. The political significance
of Chinese art is less in embedded cultural messages
than in the act of challenging Western definitions of cosmopolitan
norms.
When it comes to potential audiences in the People’s Republic,
comments focus on the limits of artistic subversions
among the public. Obviously, international exhibitions arestill
mainly the stuff of elite cultural exchange. I agree with Sara
Friedman and Zhang Li that the masses in China may not
grasp any challenges to nationalist sentiments posed by Cai
or Ai Weiwei in their various works.
Rather, my point is that major Chinese artists are also
playing subterfuge with categories of the national and the
international among intellectuals and politicians at home. Instead
of anticipating “optimistic” effects of such artists
(Zhang), my attention is on the play of strategies that may
alternate between the alignment and the disarticulation of
artistic “entrepreneurialism and political ambitions” (Zhang).
In short, when it comes to the Chinese milieu of art reception,
I do not claim the artworks in question are transforming
politics “on the ground” (Friedman) or challenging the idiom
of “contemporary political economy” (Chumley). Rather, I
merely wish to highlight the role of artists in shaking up
conventional mappings of national and global spaces and how
we may think about cosmopolitanism today.
Anticipatory Politics
The politics of Cai and his colleagues therefore both disorder
and reorder geopolitical definitions of what is modern, contemporary,
and global in art. I am not able to examine the
burgeoning inter-Asian art markets, but New York is the preeminent
global site of art as “capital, desire, and discourse,”
as Ralph Litzinger notes. By staging their works in New York
(rather than, say, Hong Kong), Chinese artists co-construct
art cosmopolitanism beyond the “prison house” of “Western
universals and the philosophical traditions of liberalism” (Litzinger).
Indeed, there is perhaps no “correct” way to interpret
the work; the politics of anticipation surround how the intrusion
of Chinese artists into an elite West media center can
stir up unease and unsettling feelings about one’s location in
the shifting terrain and practices of contemporary art.
Here the comments suggest two ways of thinking about
the reframing of the global. First, paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan,
is contemporary art a particular instantiation of “the
medium is the message”? Is the reconfiguration of the global
context more politically fraught than the content of the art
itself?
Second, when it comes to the definition of modern Chinese
art, the politics of reflecting on the past moves forward by
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Figure 8. Jacob Ki Nielsen, Ph.D. fellow, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen, Urban Imaginaries poster, 2012. A color
version of this figure is available in the online edition of Current Anthropology.
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492 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Number 4, August 2012
engaging non-Chinese forms or styles of art. Such anticipatory
politics unsettle what is “Chinese” at home and in the world,
as well as conventional reception in international settings.
What Can China Bring to the World?
As different commentators note, by seeking to slip by judgments
of what is commensurable or incommensurable in art
practice, content, identity, and media power, the Chinese artist
operates as a mediator of value in the space of global encounter.
Yujie Zhu notes, in the search for a “dialogue between
the world and China,” Cai seems to pose the question “What
can we bring to the world?” Zhu seems to invite me to say
more about China as an unsettling and dispersing gesture.
Cai’s shamanistic style seamlessly circumvents old borders and
heals old wounds of East-West encounters. He returns ghosts
to the past (ghosts of Western obsessions about China, the
universal, as well as ghosts of Chinese narratives of the West,
cultural revolution, national identity, etc.). Cai’s works perform
Daoist flows of nowhere and everywhere, rupturing labels
that fix us to places and identities. His installations enact
the dance of dualities and the interplay of concepts and nonconcepts
in a constant process of appearance, animation, and
creation. Beyond the works described in the essay, Cai’s gunpowder
paintings, mushroom imageries, and fireworks art
express an animistic energy that unsettles spatial and temporal
orders in suggesting a world without beginning or end. Can
Daoist sensibility, a kind of thermodynamic theory of the
world, deconstruct contemporary cosmopolitanism and animate
a rethinking of the global contemporary?
The Cosmopolitan Anthropologist
George Marcus poses a provocative question of what is at
stake in an anthropological encounter with novel contemporary
art. “Is ’the circulation of contemporary artists exercising
novel ideas in spaces of global encounter’ a model for
ethnographic method as well as a subject of it?”
The question triggers another one. Are not anthropologists
presumed already to be cosmopolitan researchers, experimenting
with appropriate tools for studying globalized situations?
Like mobile artists, anthropologists unsettle designated
spaces (of culture, resistance, human rights, and power) by
being attentive to practices and ideas that shape emerging
spaces of the global. My view on contemporary ethnography
is that one needs to be skeptical of some of the hype and the
misnomer surrounding “ethnography” (the “ethnos” within
the disciplinary confines of territory, race, or culture has been
destabilized). Rather, stripped of its more precious claims, the
anthropological method is vitally based on (first- and secondorder)
observations, a low-flying technique that Stephen Collier
and I have called staying “close to practices” (Collier and
Ong 2005). Instead of describing an ethnos, anthropological
observations track the variability of practices and strategies
that destabilize concepts and social arrangements but also
conjure up new configurations of politics, ethics, and sociality.
So, while I greatly admire the incandescent effect of Cai’s
works on multiple publics, I am not proposing that the anthropologist
borrows the artist’s arrows for our decidedly less
flamboyant display of “the ethnographic imagination.” Whose
imagination, and from which vantage point have we collectively
been imagining the changing world? The ethos of experimentation
is coming from sites undergoing great transformation.
The anthropological method is challenged by an
array of startling changes and novel configurations not anticipated
in older frameworks, concepts, and obsessions. I
therefore see the anthropologist not as an envious bystander
but rather a cosmopolitan cointerpreter and comediator of
cosmopolitan artists. Exercising different sets of skills, anthropologists
and artists are engaged in contemporary venues,
having vital roles in molding international cultural conversation
and understanding (see Ong 2011a).
One kind of cosmopolitan ethnographic approach can involve
the study of art projects in an unstable field of power
that includes artists, collectors, curators, and critics. The interactions
of commentaries, political goals, and cultural sensibilities
shape emerging global forms that anticipate our overlapping
futures. It has been some time since the Cai
Guggenheim exhibition in 2008, but the sense of China’s
expansion into international art shows is still relatively novel.
Recently, the New York Times reports on the intrusion of
Chinese art into major New York museums, citing the reaction
of Fan D’ian, the director of the National Art Museum in
Shanghai: “For the Western point of view, the 20th century
is Western art, and the art of Modernism. I don’t think that
is fair. These days, when Western scholars discuss modernity,
they should also discuss Chinese modernity” (Perlez 2012).
These comments, perhaps, are pertinent as well for an anthropology
that would be contemporary.
From the vantage point of Southeast Asia as well, the sense
of being poised at a momentous juncture is palpable. On his
return trip to Venice, Marco Polo in 1292 stopped in Sumatra
and discovered evidence of Islamic culture. In 1511, Afonso
de Albuquerque arrived in Malacca (bearing gunpowder that
Marco Polo had encountered in China) and set off the first
salvo in the centuries-long Western rule of huge swaths of
South and East Asia. Five decades later, in 2011, Asian leaders
quietly noted the end of the long shadow of Western domination
of the region. The future, as reflected in the spectacular
skylines of Asian cities, is being reimagined rather differently
than through the lens of the past (see Ong 2011b).
For the cosmopolitan anthropologist, truly significant
cross-cultural debates, whether in art, anthropology, or the
social sciences more broadly, are haunted by the ghost of
civilizations vanquished and resurgent powers in contemporary
times. New ethnographic sophistication is needed to
grasp complex social practices circulating in heterogeneous
sites and conversations. For instance, by putting old ghosts
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Ong “What Marco Polo Forgot”: Contemporary Chinese Art Reconfigures the Global 493
to rest, do contemporary Asian artists also rethink “civilization”
as a modern force in Asia’s modernity (see Chakrabarty
2012)? Cai was born in 1957, in the ancient seaport of Quanzhou
on the southern Chinese coast. It is richly ironic that
his personal name, as Friedman points out, means “nation
strengthening” (an effect of the post-1949 mode of subjectification).
But wielding gunpowder, arrows, and fireworks,
Cai adroitly subverts and disperses disciplinary definitions of
culture and nation, carving a global space that is neither East
nor West but their radically reglobalized intermingling.
—Aihwa Ong
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