I was introduced to Hu Xiangcheng’s work in 2006, when I was invited to the Yellow Box Symposium in Qingpu, Shanghai. In collaboration with the local authority Mr. Hu had designed a group of houses, South or Little West Gate (Xiao Ximen) in traditional (Chiagnan) style in which an exhibition “A Yellow Box in Qingpu” curated by Gao Shiming and Johnson Chang was being presented. It is one of the paradox- es of modern China that such a development should be funded by the local authority 1 with the aim of being taken over by a local developer to be used as a tourist centre. Delicate bamboo structures were embedded
in foundations more appropriate for substantial office buildings (such as the requirements of Shanghai’s building code) but nevertheless succeeded in creating a series of interconnecting dwellings, and a feeling of community reminiscent I its intimacy of the work of William Clough Ellis was concerned to create an Italianate fantasy in the rain shadow of the Welsh Mountains. Hu Xiangcheng is reminding the audience of what Chinese vernacular architecture used to be, and exploring what possibilities for different forms of exhibition and display might be created. Instead of a white cube – a yellow ‘cube’ (the yellow alluding to the wooden structure of contemporary building) which includes a whole gradation of space from the public (never a strong concept in traditional China) to the private. Traditional architecture was much closer to British Elizabeth than space in this.

The Yellow Box is a research project of the Visual Culture Research Centre of China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. Xiao Ximen presents the architecture of daily life, and artists are invited to “interpret and respond to this quarter of wood-framed vernacular space ... laden with cultural definitions... Nowadays, as people change their lifestyle, this type of architecture has become a symbol of home that we can only experience from exile”. How, the curators ask, do we retain “traditional visual memories and at the same time endow them with fresh significance and activity”.

I was able to see a number of his other projects in the Qingpu region. An evening series of performance events were held at the now abandoned Qingpu cement factory, where Mr. Hu had made an architectural intervention of a sunken terrace, in the shape of a pistol, in which was placed various items of home furniture, chairs and tables in his words ‘to bring back a touch of human warmth into an industrial ruin’. The precise symbolism of the pistol escaped me but it provided an effective amphitheater from which to observe performances on the stage erected on one side overlooking in Qingpu river.
A number of concrete pipes were left lying around, as though abandoned by the cement factory, recalling to my no doubt rather hyperactive imagination the industrial wastelands figured in many of Nagisha Oshima’s films (eg Cruel Story of Youth) or indeed the hiding place of the lumpen-proletariat in Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike. As project notes indicate, this cement factory was originally erected to provide a more modern building material, wood being seen as an old fashioned pre-revolutionary material. And yet in this installation
it is the old wooden furniture that still has life and the cement factory that has fallen into disuse.
Inside the main building he had installed a refrigeration unit with a conveyor belt which transports the melting ice (made from industrial waste water) on guttering made into the shape of the local canal system in Qingpu which over two decades has lost more than 80% of its canal system. As well as dramatizing this dramatic decline, programme notes also make the argument for a revitalisation of the remaining water resources; reopening a ferry line, creating public space on the banks of the river and the reviving the traditional architecture of ‘suspend houses’ which extend over the water. One of the buildings in the Qingpu development is of this sort.

This is a complex exercise of cultural memory, re- minding local residents of the vocabulary of traditional building forms. In this it links with the Yellow Box project of curators Chang and Gao who seek to recon- figure exhibition space along the vectors of traditional, Confucian influenced buildings, seeking a dialogue between these smaller scale intimate spaces and the headlong rush into modernity that surrounds them.

Hu Xiangheng is an established artist who spent a considerable amount of time living in China, as well as working in Tibet in the late 1970s and Africa in the early 1980s. As a painter he made extensive experiments with form colour and material, exploring interdependencies and connections with the material world that gave rise to them in many drawings and paintings recalling Tapies’s incised canvases which mix abstract figuration and fragments of objects – wood, metal etc. In other works Hu Xiangcheng constructs complex photomontage collage drawn from everyday city
life which juxtapose form colour and function of the represented objects to create impressionistic montage of city life. This is a kind of arte povera since it only takes a moment to cut out and juxtapose the image of a red strawberry or white lychee with a black and white image of satellite dish, construction materials, street traffic and so on, magazine photography mixed together with snapshots.
In more recent years as curator Lu Jie has written, Hu Xiangcheng has focused mainly on social reconstruction projects. Unlike its English translation with its binary opposition between a permitted framework (the code) and its violation. Its interest is in both temporary and permanent structures that enter into dialogue with the planning process:
“Through the use of a direct constructive intervention that cuts across government restrictions and legal regulations, the artist addresses the cultural conflict that occurs within rural areas during the modernization process, carving out a space within this conflict for traditional culture”. Western observers are perplexed by Contemporary Chinese contempt for traditional
art and culture, putting it down to the heritage of the cultural revolution or indeed a continuation of the communist ideology of a struggle against nature, of man’s ability to impose his will on the environment.

In Mao’s words from that time:” To struggle against the heavens is endless joy, to struggle against the earth is endless joy, to struggle against people is endless joy”. Lu Jie quotes Simone De Beauvoirs comment on visiting Beijing “This disdain for the picturesque, this confidence in the future assure me that I am in one of the progressive coutries” Hu Xiangheng’s project is about creating a dialogue between the westernizing juggernaut that China is embracing, with its often unimaginative incorporation of the worst of Western planning, and the practices which still exist in China today.

Much of contemporary Chinese art bases its success on production for the market. This artistic avant-garde has in the words of Lu Jie, “easily obtained elite status, consolidating its authority based on its success in the overseas market even as its interpretation of Chinese history becomes shallower and shallower’. Hu Xiangcheng however is part of a social avant-garde, a movement of artists and intellectuals concerned to interrogate Chinese history, including the history of the Communist period, through drawing attention to scale community and what we would recognize in the west as democratic activism.

In the west we would recognize this as a public domain, activist art practice however in China this form of art is not supported by the market in the same way, so it is encouraging that the Shanghai Art Museum chose to show a retrospective of Hu Xiangheng’s work. This indicates perhaps that there is a developing public consciousness of the politics of art practice in China. Art can be a form of production of knowledge and Hu Xiangheng’s work does exactly that. That struggles to do so in the face of the material production of contemporary China makes it all the more important.