Liang Shaoji, towards a new interface between art and science
by Hou Hanru
2009-09-28
Liang Shaoji is certain one of the most unique, singular and even eccentric figures in the contemporary art scene in China. For the last three decades, he has been quasi-exclusively working on one unusual material – silk worm – with the most devoted passion and obsession…
As we all know, China has seen its contemporary art scene booming in the most spectacular way, both nationally and internationally, at the turn of the millennium, to become a major force to transform the global art world. The process has been extremely dynamic and even explosive, with much spot lights and noises. However, as a veteran in the scene, who started his long-enduring career in the mid-1980s, Liang Shaoji has stayed in a remote town a few hundred kilometres away from major urban centres like Shanghai and Hangzhou, where the art worlds have been highly globalised and constantly agitating… He has always preferred to focused on his deeply loving relationship with his silk worms, and by extension, the inseparable affinity between art and nature… He has chosen to hide behind the stage and plough his own private field – greened with bamboos, refreshed by the morning dews, blued by the clear sky, mystified by the game between lights and shadows in full-moon nights, and ultimately revived by the slow but beautifully rhythmed movements of the small worms that produce the most amazing form of life – silk – that renders our own life so warm and agreeable…Truly believing in the spiritual and material power of such an intimate merge and exchange between the work of nature and the human imagination, that is profoundly rooted in the Chinese minds and cosmos views, by turning it into contemporary forms of creation and presentation – actions, performances and installations, Liang Shaoji has endowed such a world with harmony, often considered as registered in the realm of the eternal, freshly alive and firmly contemporary. In other words, his work, infinitely innumerable but vividly relevant, has become an enlightening reminder of something crucially significant in our live, our relation with the world, that has been too often overlooked and excluded in the dominant system of the cult of a one-dimensional modernity…
I met Liang Shaoji for the first time in 1986 in the then newly established “Maryn Varbanov Studio for contemporary tapestry ” in the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now renamed China Academy of Fine Arts), Hangzhou. The studio was founded by the Bulgarian artist Maryn Varbanov, who, graduated in the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in the 1950s and achieved an outstanding career in the international scene of contemporary tapestry art, “returned” to China in the mid-1980s to introduce one of the most experimental and influential laboratories. Liang Shaoji embraced highly experimental forms such as installation and performance as well as traditional materials like bamboo and wool in order to convey his idealist goal to converge modernity and tradition. His work of this period referred to classical Chinese literature and philosophy such as Sun Tzu’s “The Art of Wars” and “Yijing (I-Ching)”. Soon, his focus shifted to a new dimension: direct contacts between man and nature without the textual and metaphoric inter-media or cultural filters. Since early 1990s, he has been continuously developing his “Nature Series” that, on one hand, consistently and exhaustively explores the expressiveness of some carefully selected but basic and “primitive” elements of natural production: bamboo, silk and silk worms, as well as water and cloud, etc., and on the other hand, infinitely expands his artistic forms and materials ranging from sculpture, installation, performance to multimedia… that this Resorting to both Chinese and Western philosophical and spiritual thoughts such as Zen Buddhism and Heideggerian Existentialism on the relationship between man and nature to pursue an eventual harmony of their coexistence, Liang Shaoji has never limited his reflection and artistic practice in the realm of the tradition. Instead, he actively embraces modernity and contemporaneity – especially their emphases on change, ephemeral-ness and unpredictability of things as the substance of nature – as a rupture with any static mode of existence. He states in his introduction to “Nature Series” that the new direction of his work to explore the “primitive elements” of nature actually allows him to make his work into a new space far beyond the conventional sites of art production. Instead, his work is now functioning as an interface between art and science, between biology and bio-sociology, between various forms of art expressions and the cosmos itself…
For the last twenty years, far from being seduced by the spectacular urbanisation across the booming China, Liang Shaoji has insisted to stay in his little town Linhai in order to remain as close as possible to nature. However, he has also refused to become a self-exiled, hermetic outsider of the technically and culturally mutating and globalising world. Instead, from his heaven which is so intimately merged with nature, he embraces the most advanced and up-to-date technology. Utilising the latest technological achievements in biology and bio-engineering he has re-founded the essential approach to realise his artistic visions: he has learned how to manipulate the DNA of silk worms so they can produced silks with improved and strengthened fibres, apt to generate all kinds of imaginative surfaces and structures. Amazing outcomes have been produced after years of enduring and devoted efforts. Different from normal scientific experiments, this work, through various forms of artistic process driven by imagination and poetry, has been turned into the very embodiment of the ontological significance of life. It’s about the true meaning of living in the world: constant negotiations and struggles between life and death, between endurance and fate, between pleasure and pain… By extending the exploration of natural elements through merging them with human bodies, like in an important part of his performances and installations, Liang Shaoji has succeeded in providing us the most radical experiences of the conditions of our existence in the contemporary world which is full of contradictions – the hegemony of the powerful, whether natural, human, or social, always ended up being challenged and defeated by the weak, fragile but ever-changing forces, just like life itself… And, this is indeed what ecology really means.
Liang Shaoji claims his art, ultimately, is to create a new form of ecological aesthetics, or eco-aesthetics. He says: “My art is based on the concerns with the eco-environment, concerns with life. It derives from reflections on contemporary eco-aesthetics. It emphasizes the interaction between nature and man, the spatial-timely changes in the process of art production as well as biological mediation…” (the artist’s notes on art). Today, we are deeply concerned with the ecological crisis of our planet. Liang Shaoji’s work reminds us that to take the challenge of solving the crisis is not only resorting to scientific solutions. Instead, we should start reflecting on the very relationship between our senses and the nature itself, namely our aesthetics. Poetry can certain do good to our world. The realm of beauty is the very starting point from where we can start looking at and treating our environment in a more relevant way…
San Francisco, 28 September 2009
Category:
Artist
