A Shanshui Journey:
Contemplating Contemporary China’s Temporality
by Ke Ma
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts and Culture
in
Graduate School of Humanities Cultural Analysis
The University of Amsterdam Instructor: Niall Martin
Introduction………...………....1
1. From the Past to the Present: Contextualising Shanshui Art………5
Introduction………5
1.1 A Baradian Reading of Shanshui Art………...………7
1.2 The Death of Literati and Shanshui as a site of Nostalgia………..11
1.3 The Reflective Nostalgia: Aesthetic Dissensus………...15
Conclusion………...………...17
2. Way of Conflating: Shanshui as an Unreturnable Home………...18
Introduction………...………...18
2.1 The Uncanny as an Aesthetic Experience………….………..19
2.2 The Source of the Uncanny: The Past and Present………...23
2.3 Visual Rhetoric of the Uncanny: A Pretence of Realism………25
Conclusion………...………...……28
3. Revitalising the Ideal: Shanshui as a Performative Future ……….30
Introduction………...………...30
3.1 The Eight Views………...………..32
3.2 Framing a New Landscape………...………..34
3.3 The Ideal as A Process………...………38
Conclusion………...………...40
4. Questioning the White Cube: Shanshui Art as a Method………...42
Introduction………...………...…...42
4.1 The Role of Museum in Framing Shanshui………...44
4.2 The Museum’s Failure to Be a Museum………...47
4.3 The Paradox of Art and Shanshui in the Global Art World………50
Conclusion………...………...52
Conclusion………...……….…...…………..54
Introduction
At best, reflective nostalgia can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias.
(XVIII, Boym) Shanshui (“山水”) painting in Chinese translates literally as “mountain-water” painting. It refers to a traditional genre of Chinese ink painting depicting the natural world, including mountains, rivers, waterfalls, vegetation, and sometimes human beings, etc. This genre of art arose in the 5th century and matured in the Song Dynasty (960 – 1279). From then until the 20th century, Shanshui art underwent a relatively linear development. Despite the fact that Shanshui art includes a variety of artistic styles, there exist some shared visual features, which typically result in an experience of a homely and harmonious sensory feeling.
During the 20th century, the discourse about traditional Shanshui art experienced multiple ruptures due to international and domestic wars, political movements, and the processes of modernisation and globalisation. Consequently, the traditional practice of Shanshui art no longer exists in today’s Chinese society, though its fractured lineage still appears in a variety of cultural practices.
The reference of Shanshui can be identified in many domains. For example, in Chaoyang Park, Beijing, a new skyscraper plaza was erected that mimics the contours of mountains; in many rural sightseeing areas such as Guilin, Shanshui art is used rhetorically to promote tourism; many contemporary artworks appropriate elements of Shanshui, and art exhibitions are curated to revolve around the notions of Shanshui.
Considering the fact that Shanshui art is a genre of art that is imbued with a distinctive ancient Chinese episteme that no longer fully exists in modern society, this thesis sees the re-emergence of Shanshui art in contemporary China not only as the manifestation of traditional Chinese culture’s peculiar affinity with nature but, more crucially, a site on which a poetic Chinese past is constantly dreamed, imagined and utilised. Within contemporary Chinese culture, Shanshui has, to certain extent, come to function as a focus for nostalgia. And to begin an analysis of its cultural operation, consequently, it is useful to further press
that term.
Nostalgia (from nostos – return home, and algia – longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists. Originally, the term nostalgia was used as a medical diagnosis. In 1688, Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer suggests in his medical dissertation that “from the force of the sound Nostalgia… (it defines) the sad mood originating from the desire for return to one’s native land” (qtd. in Boym 3). Since the 18th century, however, the impossibility of exploring nostalgia as disease mobilized the term into the realm of philosophy, as “a sign of sensibility or an expression of new patriotic feeling” (Boym 11). Modern nostalgia, as Svetlana Boym suggests, exhibits “a modern yearning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values” (8). Along with the processes of globalisation and modernisation, this yearning has been ubiquitous and has pervaded many spheres. Very often, this historical mood is simply turned into a symbol that is packed with capital and ideology. “Nostalgia is to memory as kitsch is to art” (qtd. in Boym XIV) – historian Charles Maier’s observation touches the core.
However, aligning with Boym, I believe that precisely because the nostalgic manifestations “are side-effects of the teleology of progress” (10) and are “a longing for the space of experience that no longer fits the new horizon of expectation” (10), they also contain the sparkles of social critiques. Particularly, when nostalgia, as a concept that derives from the Western tradition, is mobilised into the Chinese context, its critical aspects might take different shapes. Hence, a nuanced analysis of the specificity of nostalgic manifestations can be productive and is perhaps much needed. With regard to Shanshui, the domain of contemporary art seems a productive area of investigation for it carries certain autonomous dynamics from which a critical reflection on a specifically Chinese temporality becomes possible.
Among many artworks of this kind, three recent examples will be discussed in this thesis. Artist Yang Yongliang’s Artificial Wonderland II: Travellers among Mountains and Streams (2014) appropriates Fan Kuan’s prominent Shanshui painting of the same name by replacing the ink strokes with the photographs of urban structures in Shanghai. Hao Liang’s Eight
Views of Xiaoxiang (2016) creates a novel version of “Xiaoxiang”, a prominent motif in
Shanshui art that designates an ideal world. Liang Shuo’s installation art Distant Tantamount
Mountain (2017) unfolds the aesthetics of Shanshui art in the emblematically Western
construct, the White Cube. Although the elements of Shanshui art are used differently in these artworks, they share one crucial similarity. That is, from the perspective of aesthetic experience, these contemporary artworks no longer merely produce the homely sensory feelings like the traditional Shanshui art. Instead, the strange disposition of the elements of Shanshui art produce confusing and uneasy sensory feelings, since they contain conflicts between the sensory presentation of the traditional Shanshui art and the factual ways to make sense of it. To read these unfamiliar re-compositions, I will use as the methodological lens what French philosopher Jacques Rancière called aesthetic “dissensus” in art, a concept that designates art’s re-framing of the common experience by creating “a specific form of sensory apprehension” (Aesthetics 29). Based on the nodes of sensory dissensus in the three artworks, I will discuss how Shanshui art is creatively and destructively used for critical contemplations about the Chinese temporality.
As such, this thesis is a journey that explores the place of Shanshui in contemporary Chinese art and how it provides a site for reflection on a distinctively Chinese past. In making this journey I also examines what happens when Chinese artworks are brought into conversation with some Western theoretical concepts. Nostalgia functions here as my cross-cultural bridge, enabling me not only to bring these two aspects into conversation but also to make visible of the ways in which the contemporary discourse of Shanshhui intra-acts with the notion of modernity and its manifestations.
The thesis will be divided into two broad parts: a reflection about Shanshui as a site of nostalgia and the readings of the three contemporary Shanshui artworks. Chapter One will be devoted to the former, in which Shanshui of the past and present will be contextualised and the methodology to navigate in the three artworks will be considered. Chapter Two will take a close look at Yang’s artwork Artificial Wonderland II: Travellers among Mountains and
presents an uncanny sensory experience, which not only questions the current mode of urbanisation and modernisation but also unsettles the taken-for-granted “Chineseness”. Chapter Three will discuss artist Hao’s re-configuration of the Shanshui motif “Xiaoxiang”. In this painting series, the alternative visual arrangements of the Shanshui elements challenge the conventional paradigm that shapes the image of Shanshui as an ideal world. This move turns Shanshui into a site where the future can be contemplated. Chapter Four will explore Liang’s installation art Distant Tantamount Mountain. By relating to the traditional aesthetics of Shanshui, this artwork gives an institutional critique towards the ideology of the White Cube and the Western-constructed global art world.
To anticipate my argument, I would like to suggest that, firstly, the reemergence of Shanshui art in contemporary China can be conceived as a site of nostalgia where the reflection about temporality is carried out in two interconnected aspects. On the one hand, it deepens the critical understanding about contemporary China’s relationship to its history; on the other hand, it produces certain de-colonial dynamics that challenge Western-hegemonic modernity. Secondly, while the Western concepts retain their explanative and analytical power, they are also altered when they are put into the Chinese context. Nevertheless, it is precisely through this noisy encounter that a productive cross-cultural dialogue can be initiated.
Chapter One
From the Past to the Present: Contextualising Shanshui Art
In the 18th century, Chinese painter Zou Yigui, comparing the differences between the Chinese and the Western paintings, noted, “the Western artists excel in structure…the shadow cast is based on perspective. It is so real that one is tempted to walk into a landscape painting. Nevertheless, they do not have much merit in stroke techniques. Hence, those cannot be called paintings” (qtd. in Li 51). Although culturally biased, this claim indicates the hugely different aesthetic roots of the pre-modern Western and Chinese paintings. As a form of art that played one of the most crucial roles in Chinese art history, Shanshui art makes use of discernible and distinct visual arrangements in comparison with Western landscape art. Unlike Western landscape art, in which the realistic representation of the landscape once played an important role, Shanshui art has never sought to “objectively” represent Nature. From a macroscopic perspective, there are two shared visual features that can be regarded as the manifestations of such “non-objectiveness”. Firstly, the perspectives shown in Shanshui paintings are always multiple and scattered, which distinguish from the ways in which our naked eyes optically capture the space and the objects within a singular space-time. Secondly, there are extensive empty spaces – the areas that are not painted – remaining on the silk paper. To take the ancient literatus Guo Xi’s (1020 – 1090) painting Early Spring (1072)1 as an instance, from the bottom to top, the painting contains near, middle and distant perspectives. The depiction of objects such as mountains, trees, waterfall and streams from different optical perspectives breaks the spatial limit of the painting. In addition, there are a few spaces left empty, particularly on the upper part of the painting. With this, various scenes that could not be seen in the same moment and location by the naked eyes, are encapsulated into one.
Visual perception is more than a camera-like eye that mechanically registers light and colours; it also associates with complex neuronal activity that is concerned with cultural cognition and memory, just as Norman Bryson suggests, when “human beings collectively
1 See Fig. 1.
orchestrate their visual experience together it is required that each submit his or her retinal experience to the socially agreed description(s) of an intelligible world” (91). Indeed, the ways in which the world is perceived and represented can be specific to that culture, which is also exemplified in Shanshui art.
This chapter seeks to discuss the particularity of Shanshui art as well as its historical and social conditions, which, consequently, leads to the following questions: 1) What particular epistemological perceptions underlie the visuality of Shanshui art? 2) From which perspective can we perceive the re-emergence of Shanshui art in contemporary China as nostalgic? 3) How can we identify the criticality of these manifestations of nostalgia, particularly in the domain of art?
To address the questions above, I will divide the chapter into three sections. Firstly, I will discuss the distinctive elements of the aesthetics of traditional Shanshui paintings. Here, unlike most of the art historians who read Shanshui art through ancient Chinese philosophical concepts, I will use Karen Barad’s New Materialist terminology to elucidate the aesthetics of Shanshui, which will help make more explicit aspects of Shanshui art’s contemporary relevance. Slowly zooming out from the visuality of Shanshui art, I will then extend the discussion to the historical, social and political conditions of Shanshui art in order to comprehend the politics of Shanshui nostalgia, especially in the sphere of contemporary art. Finally, I will discuss the ways in which Rancière’s notion of aesthetic dissensus can be used as a theoretical lens to close-read the contemporary artworks about Shanshui and identify their political potentials.
1. 1 A Baradian Reading of Shanshui Art
As a pre-modern civilisation largely shaped by the practice of agriculture, ancient Chinese culture had a close affinity with nature. Shanshui art, consequently, is embodied with a unique understanding of the world. Guo, who painted Early Spring, was not only a painter but also a prominent Shanshui art theorist. He notes that, for Shanshui art, the depiction of the mountain should not be understood merely as a mimesis of the mountain per se, for “the
mountain contains in itself – holds together – the profusion of the world” (qtd. in Jullien 53). For him, without mists and clouds, the mountain would be “like a springtime devoid of vegetation”; without the waters, it would be “unappealing”; without the crisscrossing paths, the mountain would not be “animated”; and without the woods and forests, it would not be “living” (qtd. in Jullien 53). The emphasis on the interrelations between different elements that constitute the mountain suggests that, for Guo, nature is more of a set of relations than a self-contained object. In other words, nature is a manifestation of “a dynamic interaction of mountains and waters and, by resonating extension, Heaven and Earth, solid and void, light and dark, the enduring and ephemeral” (Hay, 450).
Guo’s understanding of nature as a set of relations reveals a tiny corner of the iceberg of Shanshui art – the inseparability of subject and object, the ontology of relations – that perhaps sounds unfamiliar to Western art history. Indeed, the representational framework, which is conventionally used to talk about paintings in the Western context, runs contrary to the aesthetics of Shanshui art. However, the recent developments in New Materialist discourse surprisingly shares some overlaps with the basic notions of Shanshui art. Consequently, it seems useful to consider how Karen Barad’s New Materialist terminology can help us to approach that iceberg and in doing so, help us re-examine the bridge that separates and connects the East and the West.
For Barad, the idea that “beings exist as individuals with inherent attributes, anterior to their representation” (“Posthumanist” 804), is a kind of Caucasian metaphysical presupposition that “underlies the belief in political, linguistic, and epistemological forms of representationalism” (804). Based on Swedish scientist Niels Bohr’s research in quantum physics, Barad proposes an epistemological framework in which things do not pre-exist but come into being as things, or strictly speaking, as “phenomena”, through the apparatuses’ filtering of the agential intra-action of the universe. In that sense, objects are not independent but inseparable from the observer. Or strictly speaking, there are no “objects” but only observed phenomena. Phenomena are also not independent because they are produced through/by apparatuses, a term that describes “specific exclusionary boundaries” (816)
through which phenomena take temporal shapes. To put it differently, apparatuses can be seen as physical, cultural, social or political “filters” that enable one to perceive a certain form of existence in a certain way. In addition, the apparatuses are themselves phenomena, and any particular apparatus is “always in the process of intra-acting with other apparatuses” (817), which implies that there are no static boundaries between different phenomena. Consequently, the world we perceive is not an exterior and pre-existing object but “an ongoing open process of mattering” (817), of which Barad calls “agential intra-activity in its becoming” (818). And within this intra-activity, every phenomenon is produced through the apparatus that is enacted by the agential cut in a specific space-time.
The ancient literatus Song Bing (375 – 443) noted, “Shanshui uses its form to flatter Tao”2 (“Painting Landscape”). Tao in Chinese literally signifies “way/path”. It is also a
philosophical notion that is closely associated with Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian thinking. However, due to the muddy overlaps of interpretations, Tao has almost become a notion that is undefinable. However, since both Tao and Barad’s epistemes reject the ontological existence of individual objects but affirm the immanent dynamics of the world, I propose to use Barad’s notion of ongoing movements of matter’s intra-active becoming to understand Tao in Shanshui art. To again consider Song’s suggestion, the aesthetic core of Shanshui art hence revolves around the ways in which a painting visually captures the dynamics of the agential intra-action of nature, of the world and of the universe, and the ways in which the viewer aesthetically receives the dynamics of mattering. The shared tropes of the multiple, linear perspectives and the blank spaces in Shanshui art precisely resonate with an understanding.
According to Barad, discursive practices and material phenomena are not external to one another but mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity. This understanding dissolves the divisions between the knower and the known, between the subject and the object. For Shanshui art, the multiple, linear perspectives also suggest such subject-object union. While the Western landscape artist usually tends to hold a static position to observe
and depict the apparatus-phenomenon that is frozen in that location and moment, Shanshui painters particularly emphasise the sensory experience of being immersed in nature. Indeed, the notion of travel/wander3 plays a crucial part in understanding nature. Guo explicitly explains the functions of travel/wander in terms of observing the mountain that, from below one can look up toward the summit, conferring on it "a lofty distance" (qtd. in Jullien 53). Nevertheless, it only offers the limpid aspect of the mountain. Standing in front of the mountain, one can examine its backdrop, conferring on it a "profound distance" (53) on it, but its aspect can be heavy and somber. And from the nearest mountains, one can contemplate the far-off mountains, conferring a "level distance" (53), and its aspect can be both bright and dark. For him, a singular perspective always intersects nature, and hence conceals nature’s dynamics of the agential intra-action. For him, to activate different apparatuses of the body and mind, namely, to initiate a variety of agential cuts, helps to better one’s comprehension of nature.
As “reality is composed of not of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena but of things-in-phenomena” (Barad, “Posthumanist” 820), differences and differentiations in Barad’s sense are not essential but temporal and relational, since “matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-acting becoming...a congealing of agency” (822). That is, matters we perceive as phenomena are not fixed objects but a phase of the process within the ongoing agential intra-action. The emptiness in the context of Shanshui resonates with this understanding of the nature of things. Ancient Chinese philosopher Laozi conceives the emptiness as a process of bringing about, not in an analytical manner, but from the perspective of efficacy. For him, despite the fact that emptiness is semantically oppositional to fullness, the two terms entail an unnameable dialectic interconnection that enables them to mutually (re)generate each other (Fan 566). Regarding Shanshui art, I propose to use matter’s different statuses of agential congealing to understand the concept and the visualisation of emptiness. As forms of matter are the basic units that have the potential to constitute any form of “things”, fullness can be understood as
“matter-as-phenomena”, which one perceives as concrete, graspable phenomena through his apparatus in that specific space-time. Conversely, “emptiness” in this sense, shall be referred to as “matter-not-as-phenomena”, which one does not (fully) perceive through the apparatus that he possesses in that particular space-time, even though its existence is epistemologically, although not logically, acknowledged. The empty space, namely, the space that is not painted, symbolically recognises the “matter-not-as-phenomena” and allows for the interdependency and interconvertibility of phenomena.
Regarding the aesthetic reception and judgment, Guo notes that, “among different Shanshui paintings, the most outstanding ones are those that welcome the viewers to live and travel/wander in the paintings”4 (32). Unlike traditional Western paintings that usually hang on the wall and require the viewers to gaze at the painting with disembodied eyes, Shanshui paintings are rolled in scrolls, which require the viewer to bodily move the scroll and to continually change their optic focal points in order to appreciate the painting. Dwelling in the paintings, one would attain not only the visual enjoyment of the painted mountains and waters but also the empty space for contemplation. In some of the Shanshui paintings, images of human beings – usually ordinary travellers – can be discovered when paying careful attention to detail since they constitute only very tiny spaces in the painting. This way of positioning human beings in Shanshui, again, suggests the merit of being a modest insider of the observed and being part of the dynamics of agential intra-action of the world. In this sense, Shanshui art is not so much a way of seeing that assigns the power to the disembodied eyes but rather a way of doing that requires the viewer to use different faculties to aesthetically step out of oneself and engage with matter’s intra-activity.
Having discussed the applicability of Barad’s concept of intra-agency to Shanshui, I will now zoom out and consider the use of nostalgia as a frame for Shanshui art’s operation within contemporary Chinese culture, particularly in the sphere of contemporary art.
1. 2 The Death of Literati and Shanshui as a Site of Nostalgia
4 Translated from Chinese“世之笃论,谓山水有可行者,有可望者,有可居者,有可游者。画凡至此,皆入妙品。但可
Continuity has been generally regarded as a distinguishing feature of the pre-modern Chinese culture (Chen 65), which is also exemplified in the historical discourse of Shanshui art. However, throughout the past hundred years, this continuity, including that of Shanshui art discourse, has experienced unprecedented destruction due to a number of political and social revolutions and reformations. How should we view Shanshui – as a historical past – in the contemporary world? What dynamics are inherent in this site of returning, of nostalgia? In this section, some social and political contexts about the art discourse of Shanshui will be introduced and contemplated.
Before the 20th century, the artistic practice of Shanshui paintings witnessed a relatively steady, linear route of development. For the artistic production of Shanshui, apprenticeship played a crucial role in the teaching and practicing of the art form. Regarding artistic reception, it was usually appreciated and critiqued in private spaces such as the gardens of literati, libraries, etc. What is also crucial about Shanshui art discourse is the practioner: the literati, an intellectual/scholar-official stratum that played an important role in producing traditional Chinese culture. On the one hand, this social group was influenced by the Confucian school’s indoctrination that one should show “restraint over one’s personal desire, treat the world as one whole community and recognize one’s duty to the state” (66). On the other hand, Taoist and Buddhist thinking also let them seek a free life. Moving in between these two forms of thinking, being an ideal literatus therefore meant to be responsible for the world and at the same time to refuse to bow to the influential personages and the hegemonic power5. The general visuality of Shanshui art also reflects the circumstances and the worldview of this intellectual stratum. As a kind of art that depicts the natural instead of the social, on the one hand, it shows the literati’s aesthetic disengagement with the worldly life. But on the other hand, Shanshui art also indicates the literati’s vision of a harmonious social world. For example, the human figures depicted in Shanshui paintings are almost never high officials or noble lords but ordinary peasants, travellers etc., which indicate the literati’s close political stance with the common people. Many believe that the reason why Chinese
5 The legends about literati such as Fan Zhongyan (989-‐1052), Su Shi (1037-‐1101) and Wang Yangming (1472-‐1529)
traditional art, including Shanshui art, developed along such a unique and linear path is mainly because of the stability of this literati class (68). However, the radical changes in the past hundred years in China have disrupted the “organicism” of this literati tradition.
Many scholars believe that China has experienced “repeated discontinuity” (59) since the 1900s. That is, in this period, there was not only a complete break with a three-thousand-year cultural entity, but there were also “repeated fractures and rejections within the different periods in recent history” (59). The literati culture was first shaken by the abolition of the imperial civil-service examination system in 19056. From then until Mao’s rule, the literati class faded away and was slowly replaced by modern intellectuals who were usually specialised in some particular domains. Later in the Maoist political movements, the literati tradition was even more radically scattered. Particularly, the Cultural Revolution, which lasted for ten years, is usually regarded as the major factor that is directly responsible for the elimination of traditional Chinese culture, particularly the elitist culture. That is, this political movement not only destroyed a number of cultural relics but also degraded the whole intellectual class. In that period, the literati tradition was wiped out and the linearity of the discourse of Shanshui art was completely fragmented.
Boris Groys suggests, “the Communist community was in many ways more radically modern in its rejection of the past than countries in the West… (Hence) the post-Communist subject travels…from the future to the past, from the end of history, from posthistory, postapocalyptic time, back to the historical time” (155). Indeed, since the political and economic turn around the 1990s, studies of ancient Chinese civilisation have swept across the country. More and more discussions that aim at re-building Chinese cultural traditions are activated by people’s aspirations to find their cultural roots. As both an object of philosophical thinking that is alternative to and that questions the Western thinking, and as a type of visual manifestation that promises an aesthetic experience of dwelling and feeling at home in the agential intra-activity of the world, Shanshui art hence is generally seen as one of
6 The Chinese imperial examinations were a civil service examination system in the Imperial period to select
candidates for the state bureaucracy. This examination system can be traced back to the Han Dynasty (221-‐206). From the Tang Dynasty (618-‐907) to 1905 (the Qing Dynasty), the system was widely utilised as the ordinary people’s major path to the bureaucratic body.
those cultural roots. However, as the practice of the traditional Shanshui art was conditioned on a different historical specificity, it cannot be simply picked up and continued as an unbroken thread nowadays This aching dilemma of yearning for yet not being able to return to the past turns Shanshui art – as the material manifestation of the past – into an object of nostalgia. The contemporary cultural objects that incorporate Shanshui, consequently, can be seen as a site that is embodied with the nostalgic symptoms.
For Boym, nostalgia has two sides. She suggests that, as a historical mood, there are two kinds of nostalgia that characterise one’s “relationship to the past, to the imagined community, to home, to one’s selfperfection” (42). The first is the restorative nostalgia in which temporal distance is “compensated by intimate experience and the availability of a desired object” and the feeling of displacement “is cured by a return home, preferably a collective one” (44). More specifically, because “restoration signifies a return to the original stasis”, “the past for the restorative nostalgic is a value for the present; the past is not a duration but a perfect snapshot” (49). Moreover, the past to restorative nostalgia is not supposed to “reveal any signs of decay” but to “be freshly painted in its ‘original image’ and remain eternally young” (49). However, there is also a reflective nostalgia that focuses “not on recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth but on the meditation on history and passage of time” (49). It is to resist “the pressure of external efficiency and take sensual delight in the texture of time not measurable by clocks and calendars” (49). In the reflective nostalgia, the longing for the past and critical thinking are no longer opposed to one another, and nostalgia becomes “affective memories” that do not “absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection” (50). That is, for reflective nostalgia, the past bears the multiple potentialities and possibilities of historical development and has “a capacity to awaken multiple planes of consciousness” (50).
In this sense, the nostalgic site of Shanshui can be problematic and dangerous because it contains the seeds of cultural nationalism and fundamentalism (Gao 115). In addition, it might also run the risk of reducing traditions to a variety of cultural products for capitalist consumption. But on the other hand, it can also trigger critical visions and discussions about
how to see and what to do with the contemporary. Indeed, Chinese art scholar Gao Shiming proposes that contemporary discourses about the traditional shall be seen as a form of “re-construction” rather than “return”, and it is “a continually changing, wearing and tearing as well as developing history” (Gao 116). In this process, references to the past must also be “extended to contemporaneity, becoming part of the contemporary reality…of the ‘base’ for cultural creation, and of the shaping of the contemporaneity”(115). To a large degree, Gao also calls for reflective nostalgia.
The three artworks that will be discussed in the following chapters resonate with reflective nostalgia, for they all engage with Shanshui creatively and destructively. In other words, Shanshui emerges in their artworks not as a closed sign that points to a static, attainable custom but instead as a lens allows us to envision the current entanglements of the ancient Chinese civilisation, modernity, Communism, globalisation, etc. In their artworks, Shanshui is deconstructed and re-composed in order to unsettle and reshape the normative understanding about not only the historical past but also its relation to other discourses, such as urbanisation, modernisation, the concept of the ideal, the notion of art, etc. As such, I believe that Rancière’s account of politics and the aesthetic regime of art can provide us a method to productively tackle the artworks’ reframing of today’s Shanshui landscape from the perspective of aesthetics.
1. 3 The Reflective Nostalgia: Aesthetic Dissensus
Rancière categorises art in three different frameworks. First, there is the ethical regime of art that is “a matter of knowing in what way ‘images’ mode of being affects the ethos” (The
Politics 21). Second, there is the representative regime of art in which it is the notion of
representation or mimesis that organises “the ways of doing, making, seeing, and judging” (22). The third category is what Rancière calls the aesthetic regime of art, within which the “artistic phenomena are identified by their adherence to a specific regime of the sensible, which is extricated from its ordinary connections and is inhabited by a heterogeneous power” (23).
To more fully understand this aesthetic regime, some further notions need to be introduced. For Rancière, politics, the political and aesthetics can be examined through perspective of the sensory experience. He indicates that we are living in a time of consensus in which a general agreement on the distribution of the sensible is constructed and guarded by the police, his term for what is more commonly described as ‘politics’. In other words, this consensus can be seen as a machine of power that generates a seemingly natural and reasonable vision for different subjects. The aesthetics of politics challenges such consensus by forming certain collective political actions to reshape this taken-for-granted sensory experience. And the politics of aesthetics, which reside in what he calls the aesthetic regime of art, also intervene in that consensual distribution of the sensible. However, the ways in which dissensus is produced in this aesthetic regime are different from the aesthetics of politics. For the aesthetic of politics, a “we” who have a collective subaltern voice is always formulated to disrupt the consensus (Dissensus 141-142), but for the politics of aesthetics, art objects create dissensus by re-configuring, re-shaping and re-organising the world of common sensory experience as “the world of a shared impersonal experience”(141).
More specifically, in the aesthetic regime of art, “the property of being art is no longer given by the criteria of technical perfection but is ascribed to a specific form of apprehension” (Aesthetics 29), for artistic strategies revolving around the visibility of certain sensory experience are usually used in order to “change the frames, speeds and scales according to which we perceive the visible or to question the self-evidence of the visible; to rupture given relations between things and meanings and, inversely, to invent novel relationship between things and meaning that were previously unrelated” (Dissensus 141).
Consequently, the dissensus produced by the aesthetic regime of art does not come into being in the form of a didactic critique of politics but in the form of a re-distribution of a certain artistic mode of visibility. In this sense, art is political neither because of the “messages and sentiments it conveys concerning the stake of the world” (Aesthetics 23) nor it because art objects “choose to represent society’s structures, or social groups, their conflicts in identities” (23). Rather, it is political because of “the very distance it takes with respect to
these functions, because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space” (23). That is, although it seems that art belonging to the aesthetic regime only re-configures the general sensory experience on an aesthetic level, it also contains the potential to transform this altered sensory experience into the life form since a work of art always “fashions and sustains new subjects” (Tanke 103).
The three contemporary artworks can fit into Rancière’s conceptualisation of the aesthetic regime of art because they all break down the boundaries between art and non-art in different manners. And more importantly, Shanshui art emerges in these broken boundaries no longer as a snapshot of a lost past. Instead, the configuration of Shanshui art in each artwork is fragmental: it can be the notion of Shanshui, the silhouette of Shanshui or the episteme of Shanshui. In doing so, Shanshui becomes a field of creative reframing, a site of reflective nostalgia.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I contextualise the re-emergence of Shanshui art as a site of nostalgia from three aspects. First, I use Barad’s terminology to unveil and analyse the epistemological perceptions that underlie the visuality of the traditional Shanshui art. I argue that Shanshui art is enfolded with a set of understandings about the world that effectively question the representationalist assumptions, particularly the ideological subject/object division. Secondly, I give a historical reflection about the reasons why Shanshui art in today’s Chinese society has become a site of nostalgia. Based on Boym’s understanding about restorative and reflective nostalgia, I discuss the conditions under which the contemporary references of Shanshui contain creativity and criticality. I contend that, in the domain of art, the reference of Shanshui art can be examined through Rancière’s notion of dissensus. In doing so, I construct a theoretical framework in which the contemporary re-emergence of Shanshui in art is regarded as a form of re-distribution of the sensible in the site of nostalgia. In the following chapters, I will close-read the three artworks and discuss their specific ways of intervening the consensual sensory experience about and the emotional yearning of Shanshui.
Chapter Two
Way of Conflating: Shanshui as an Unreturnable Home
In an interview, Chinese artist Yang Yongliang said, “growing up in Shanghai, I was surrounded by lots of traditional architecture – and saw a lot of it removed. China has changed so much, dismantling its heritage in the pursuit of urbanization. I want to ask questions about these things, about consumerism and how we live today” (“Yang Yongliang’s Best Photograph”).
Yang’s experience with the urban transformation in China, particularly that of Shanghai, is not peculiar to him. Indeed, the social, economic and emotional impacts of urbanisation on Chinese people’s lives have become one of the critical features of contemporary cultural productions, including artistic productions. Against this social context, Yang’s artworks, mostly combining the elements of photography and traditional Shanshui art, can be seen as a response to the rapid transformation of urban space in China. Among them, Artificial
Wonderland II: Travellers among Mountains and Streams (2014)7 is an artwork in which Shanshui visuality is provocatively referenced. Based on literatus Fan Kuan’s painting of the same name8 that was created during the Northern Song Dynasty (960 – 1127), Yang’s photograph meticulously appropriates Fan’s portrayal of the natural landscape and translates it into a contemporary form.
Fan’s original Travelers among Mountains and Streams is often described as one of the most representative pieces of Shanshui art. In Yang’s photographic artwork, however, Fan’s painting is overturned from two perspectives. First, instead of literally copying Fan’s image of the natural landscape, the content of Yang’s Shanshui is turned from the “natural” to the “artificial”. The objects presented in Yang’s work are no longer “natural objects” such as trees, branches, animals, etc. Instead, urban structures such as architecture, high voltage lines, electrical poles, demolition areas, constructions cranes and so on compose the contours of Shanshui. Secondly, the media used in Yang’s work are not ink and brush, but a number of photographs that were taken in the city of Shanghai. This artistic appropriation has been so
7 See Fig. 2,3,4. 8 See Fig. 5.
carefully executed that, from a distance, Yang’s Artificial Wonderland II: Travellers among
Mountains and Streams (Below shortened to Artificial Wonderland II) seems almost identical
to Fan’s depiction of the natural landscape. Only when stepping closer to the work does one realise that it is an uncanny megalopolis disguised in the poetics of natural landscape.
To use the trope of visual deceit to create the uncanny might be simple. However, precisely due to its simplicity, Artificial Wonderland II is enabled to straightforwardly engender its powerful effects like a machine, from which its mechanical system can be discussed. Hence, in this chapter, I would like to focus on the mechanism of the uncanny that operates in between the viewer and Artificial Wonderland II. First, I will introduce how the uncanny is perceived as an aesthetic locus of the artwork. Next, I will discuss the source of the uncanny that is used in Yang’s artwork. Last, I will further examine the ways in which the combination of photography and the traditional ink painting of Shanshui enhance the uncanny effects of the artwork. Along with the analysis, I argue that the artwork, as a form of uncanny being, questions not only the current mode of urbanisation and modernisation in China but also Shanshui art’s ideological relationship with “Chineseness”.
2. 1 The Uncanny as an Aesthetic Experience
Standing in front of Yang’s Artificial Wonderland II at a certain distance, a majestic contour of the natural landscape in black and white appears. For those who are familiar with traditional Chinese art, one can immediately identify the artwork as a reproduction of a typical Shanshui painting, or more specifically, Fan Kuan’s (950 – 1032) Travellers among
the Mountains and Streams. Having initially made the presumption that this artwork is
associated with the natural landscape, when the viewer moves some steps closer, a shocking emotion starts to creep over him or her. The presumption is overturned: the artwork depicts neither Shanshui nor the natural landscape. Apart from waters and stones, there are no flora and fauna residing in the majestic mountains. Instead, man-made modern objects such as skyscrapers, highways, voltage lines, electrical poles, demolition sites, construction cranes
Fig.2 Artificial Wonderland II: Travellers among
Mountains and Streams (2014) by Yang Yongliang
Fig. 3 Artificial Wonderland II (details)
Fig. 4 Artificial Wonderland II (details)
Fig. 5 Travellers Among Mountains and Streams by Fan Kuan (950 – 1032)
etc., compose a megalopolis that is disguised as natural scenery. Sharing the similar grains and shapes with the natural objects, these man-made objects are put in order so carefully that, from a distance, the viewer would take them for vegetation and stones. However, once one identifies the artwork as an image of a megalopolis, it also becomes strange. The image of the megalopolis looks real yet unreal. On the one hand, every part of the image is presented in a realistic, accurate manner. On the other hand, the spatial arrangement of the megalopolis is not plausible.
In trying to articulate this visual experience, one might use the psychoanalytic concept of uncanny, which means a kind of subjective feeling of being “not quite ‘at home’ or ‘at ease’ in the situation concerned, that the thing is or at least seems to be foreign to him” (Jentsch 2). Particularly in this case, the uncanny can be perceived as a form of “negative” aesthetics: of something that is grotesque and fearful. Although the degree to which different individuals will experience the uncanny might differ, the logic of its operation is similar. Sigmund Freud has analysed a set of instances that produce the uncanny on the aesthetic level, and based on those instances, he concludes that the uncanny is a class of things of which “the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs” (Freud 634). More specifically, the “uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (634). As we can see, for Freud, the uncanny does not reside in the perceived object itself. Rather, it is an emotional reaction that comes to demarcate the limits of imagination and the failure of possessing a cohesive symbolic order due to the sudden presence of something that points to a repressed past.
Moving back to Yang’s artwork, it is noticeable that neither Fan’s depiction of the natural landscape nor the cityscape full of construction sites is uncanny. In fact, they are both conceived typically, as something familiar.
Fan’s Shanshui art has been historically recognised as one of the finest examples of classic Shanshui painting. In the painting, the clusters of plants at the top of the mountain are like distant forest clinging to the perches. In the central axis, the middle mountain
majestically dominates the whole space. At the left side of the scroll, a slender white waterfall falls from the middle of the mountain. And at the bottom of the painting, a traveller, together with his domestic animals, walks along the path in a relaxed manner. As mentioned earlier, the traditional Shanshui art does not seek to objectively represent the nature. Instead, it is a visual form that expresses the dynamics of the agential intra-activity of the world, a harmonious bridge between the real and the spiritual, and between the mundane and the transcendental. In this sense, Shanshui is a visual imagination and realisation of an ideal space in which people can dwell with pleasure. Hence, the aesthetic effects that Fan’s painting generates are by no means strange or horrifying. Rather, it is supposed to emit a tranquil and welcoming aesthetic ethos.
Likewise, the photographs of urban structures per se are not uncanny, particularly for in the Chinese context. Since the “reform and opening-up”9 in 1978, China has witnessed unprecedented urbanisation. Particularly from 2001 onwards, the state has attempted to facilitate the growth of traditional as well as “modern service” such as finance, insurance, real estate, logistics, information services, etc. (Yeh et al., 2837). In the same year, China also entered the World Trade Organization that allows for greater access to foreign markets. Consequently, the job market in urban areas, especially in large cities, has further expanded (2838). On the one hand, the economic and political transformation has energised the rapid expansion of the city as well as produced a variety of city plans, which have consequently led to the continuous actions of demolition of the old and construction of the new. On the other hand, urbanisation has also become “an important economic index in the national vocabulary” (Ou 214). A city, therefore, “has to keep upgrading and expanding itself to alleviate the pressure on development” (214). Moreover, unlike more democratic states, the city planning in China is intertwined with both the capitalist market and the political power of the state, which can lead to effective yet sometimes unpredictable ways of space-changing. For example, whereas Pudong can serve as a great example of something being conjured into
9 The “reform and opening-‐up", started in December 1978, refers to the economic reforms termed “Socialism with
Chinese characteristics” in China.
being as if by magic, some urban construction can also be delayed due to the unexpected change of rules (Abbas 21). Despite the fact that this mode of development has led to an economic boom in the past three decades, the natural environment has witnessed unprecedented destruction and a variety of critical issues in urban space has arisen. Critiques towards the side effects of this mode of development are common, yet the scale and speed of this form of urban transformation have made the spectacles of mass construction a common experience in people’s daily lives.
Since neither of the two kinds of visuality in Yang’s artwork is strange in itself, why is it that, as soon as they are conflated into one, one would feel unsettled? In the following part, I will examine the ways in which their combination can become a source of the uncanny.
2. 2 The Source of the Uncanny: The Past and Present
In Roland Barthes’ essay “Rhetoric of the Image”, he calls the immediate visual cognition of the image its denoted meaning. And on the second level, there is connoted meaning in which cultural contents are put into consideration (157). In Yang’s artwork, the audience’s first uneasy moment arrives when one cannot with certainty define whether the artwork represents the natural landscape (Shanshui art) or a cityscape (photos of urban objects), which corresponds to Barthes’ notion of denoted meaning. In the process, the artwork becomes “a distinctive kind of sign in that it draws more attention to itself” (Potts 31). But since this “short-circuiting” (30) of the semiotic process is typical of modern art, particularly abstract art, much elaboration is not needed. The secondary connoted meaning that we attribute to the work, however, shall be carefully considered.
Yang once said in an interview, “I hope all the Chinese can hold onto the roots associated with our own culture. If not, then what makes you Chinese? Just having a Chinese face doesn’t mean anything” (“Yang Yongliang: Bearing Witness”). No matter how problematic Yang’s definition of “Chineseness”, his words in some ways demonstrate a certain anxiety about the loss of cultural roots in contemporary China. Indeed, decades of wars, political reformations and revolutions, and most recently, processes of modernisation
and globalisation, have, to some extent, separated contemporary China from its various cultural traditions. Regarding the idea of using the lands, the logic behind the discourse of the Shanshui tradition and the logic behind the discourse of modern urbanisation are essentially different from each other.
For Shanshui art, the land, or the natural landscape, is not portrayed as a form of resource but a spiritual space where one can acquire the transcendental experience. And this experience also links to the aspiration of being a person of virtues10 (Escande 103). Here the
natural landscape is closely linked to the image of an ideal space in which people can dwell with pleasure. For modern urbanisation, however, the natural landscape is regarded as a kind of resource from which capitalist profits can be extracted.
When taking account of the two modes of thinking, we can see the artwork does not only semantically conflate the notions of the natural landscape and the cityscape. More crucially, this conflation paradoxically links an imaginary space from the past to a factual contemporary space. From the artwork we can see, the ideal space has been slowly occupied by the mass production of modernisation. From far to close, the diverse subject and objects – traveller, vegetation, horses – that used to be the key players in expressing the agential intra-activity of the world have disappeared, and the homogeneous man-made objects are mechanically expanding with scale and speed until the verges of the mountains are taken over. Perhaps the “traveller” in the title also refers to the viewer: he travels between the historical space and the contemporary space. On the one hand, the historical ideal keeps recurring in the contemporary space. On the other hand, the present is automatically eroding and engulfing that historical space. The fabrication between the two makes it difficult to clearly distinguish the past and present.
Freud has identified two possible sources that can shape the uncanny experience. First, the uncanny can occur when “infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression” (639). Second, it happens when “the primitive beliefs that have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed” (639). However, he also points out that
10 Translated from Chinese: “而中国山水画…使他（观者）感到在作品里神游，能体会无限经验：这种无限经验意
“these two classes of uncanny experience are not always sharply distinguishable” (640), since the primitive beliefs are most intimately connected with and based on the infantile complexes (640). In the case of Shanshui’s recurrence in Artificial Wonderland II, both sources are also closely intertwined. On the one hand, Shanshui recurs as something that has been repressed (and perhaps also surmounted) because the Communist rule has produced a rupture between the historical and the present. On the other hand, the ideal space of Shanshui, which is conceived as a pre-modern belief that has been surmounted (and repressed) by modern scientific thinking, is arranged in Yang’s work as something “actually happens” (Freud 639) in the present. It actually happens not because Shanshui is put into a contemporary exhibition space but because what constitutes the pre-modern Shanshui – the urban structures – is something from the present. In this way, the ideal Shanshui space that is thought to have been banished in the past, revives in the present as a ghostly apparition that disturbs the viewer’s cognition of time.
Earlier it is mentioned that the “traveller” in the title can refer to the viewer, but it shall be made clear that this traveller is different from the traditional Shanshui traveller. That is, whereas the traditional Shanshui painting invites the viewer to dwell in the dynamics of Shanshui, Yang’s artwork forces the viewer to travel. The viewer has to travel not because there are any promised transcendental potentials inherent in Shanshui but because there is no place for him to rest in time. In other words, the seemingly repressed and surmounted past has revived in the present, which compels the viewer to constantly travel in time without any terminals provided. And it is through this form of travelling – not being able to reach home – the uncanny starts to emerge.
2. 3 Visual Rhetoric of the Uncanny: A Pretence of Realism
In Freud’s examination of the uncanny in literature, he suggests that real-life experiences of the uncanny and those in fiction are different because fictions do not undergo “reality-testing” (640). Hence, in order to create an uncanny effect in fiction, according to Freud, the author has to “deceive us by promising to give us a sober truth, and then after all overstepping it”
(641). That is, the writer first has to pretend to move into the common reality in order to falsely give the reader a sense of security and familiarity, and once the reader is deceived, the writer can bring about events that never or rarely happen (641). From this process, the uncanny can be effectively energised because the reader would react to the invented event as if it is real. Although the cognitive process of reading an image differs from that of reading a text, Freud’s insight on the strategy of creating the uncanny – a pretence of realism – also echoes the visual rhetoric in Yang’s Artificial Wonderland II. Realism in the form of visual arts usually refers to the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, avoiding artificial conventions, dramatic elements, etc. Central to this visual rhetoric is perhaps Yang’s use of
photography and the photographs. Namely, on the one hand, the content of photographs –
the black and white urban structures – is used to substitute the ink strokes, as a medium to mimic Fan’s Shanshui painting; and on the other hand, the medium (the photographs) used to mimic the painting is also mediated by the nature of photography.
In terms of the use of the photographs, the pretence of realism is conspicuous. It is realistic in a sense that the contours of Shanshui are so carefully mapped out that, when the viewer stands in front of the artwork at a certain distance, he would take it as a reproduction of Fan’s painting. In other words, the artefact – Fan’s Shanshui painting – is truthfully represented at the beginning of the story, and this truthfulness only breaks down when the viewer comes close to the artwork. And such effect is perhaps created through the artist’s marvellous craftsmanship of playing with Photoshop software.
Regarding the use of photography, more specific discussion is needed. Many scholars have discussed the nature of photography and contend that this medium suggests a certain degree of “being real”. Barthes, for instance, thinks that the click of the shutter can truthfully capture a precise moment in time, and each singular image that is shot in a specific time and location assumes “an awareness of ‘having been there’” (159). In other words, a photograph is believed to have a special connection with reality because it requires the presence of the objects for its production, while a painting supposedly can depend wholly on the artist’s imagination (Savedoff 202). Hence, when the viewer looks closely at Yang’s artwork, the
realistic details of the urban structures force him to believe they are part of the real world. However, such a belief is questioned once the viewer pays more attention to the visual composition of the painting, in which the optical perspectives are, similar to other Shanshui paintings, continuous. And because of the multiple perspectives of Shanshui painting, the cityscape is not portrayed from a static optical perspective, which challenges the viewer’s assumption of the photographs being a window of the real world and decentre humans as the locus of vision.
In fact, for Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser, the belief in photography’s objectivity has always been delusional, because the discourse of scientific research and thinking, which is rooted in the invention and use of the camera, has never been neutral. For Flusser, the traditional image such as a painting is, ontologically, an abstraction of the world, from which human imagination is used (as a form of apparatus) to demarcate “the real world” (Towards 4). A photograph, as a form of technical image, is also an abstraction of the world rather than “a window of the world”. But this abstraction is more complicated in a sense that the direct source of abstraction is not the real world but the scientific theories: a form of conceptualised text (4). Namely, photographs are not the products of human imagination in a strict sense but a textual production based on the ways in which scientific theories conceptualise human imagination (“The Codified World” 40). And the scientific conceptualisation of imagination might be widely seen as neutral, but it is still a form of “apparatus” – according to Flusser – in which visual actualisation of an object is filtered and mediated by an apparatus whose logic is computational. Hence, regarding the artwork’s strategic pretence of realism, what is central to the viewer’s sensory struggle is actually a clash between the visual outcome of human imagination and a scientific conceptualisation of imagination, and between a pre-modern apparatus and a modern apparatus.
The use of the photographs and photography leads the viewer to doubt “what is real”, from which the tension between the past and present in the artwork is further increased. To put it differently, the inability to determine “what is real” constantly discourages and shatters the viewer’s faith to hold on to any coherent forms of temporality.
Conclusion
The merger of Fan’s Shanshui painting and the photographic urban structures has made Yang’s Artificial Wonderland II an indefinable “thing” in its perpetually automatic expansion. By using the trope of visual deceit, the artwork forces the viewer to constantly and restlessly limp between the past and present. On the symbolic level, there is a novel conjunction of Shanshui as a historical ideal space and the urban structures as a disputed contemporary space. This conjunction causes the viewer’s inability to anchor oneself in time. On a rhetorical level, there is also a meticulous combination between the Shanshui painting as an abstraction of imagination and the photographs as an abstraction of the scientific texts. This combination of media makes the artwork look real yet unreal, which further enhances the degree of uncanny. In this process of “the uncanny production”, Shanshui has played a crucial part. Firstly, it serves as a seemingly repressed and surmounted past that in a ghostly fashion is resurrected in the present. Secondly, the visuality of Shanshui – especially the spatial arrangement – deepens the degree of the uncanny through its rejection of the delusive “objectivity” – a form of modern scientific thinking.
Moving from the close reading to a bigger picture, the key question would be: what artistic significance is intrinsic to the uncanny? Perhaps it would be useful to think with Arnd Schneider’s proposal towards the concept of appropriation. For him, appropriation has always been involved with social and political dynamics. A crucial question for perceiving appropriation hence should be “who appropriates what, where and from whom?” (218). This implies a situating of appropriating practices in “different power relations, which go beyond the more formal approaches in art history where ‘appropriation’ has been defined as taking something out of one context and establishing it into new one” (218). To apply his suggestion to Yang’s Artificial Wonderland II, perhaps the strange mixture between the past and present precisely reveals the artist’s endeavour to de-stabilise the viewer’s rooted identity of being purely Chinese or being purely modern. Escande notes that “for the Chinese historical experience, the notion of ‘modernization’ is closely linked to ‘the Western’…hence, ‘modernization’, to some extents, means ‘unchineseness’. Similar to Japan, issues about
‘transcending modernity’ in China is perhaps associated with nationalism” (103). Indeed, in many Asian countries, including China, “the imaginary West has performed different functions in nationalist discourse. It has been an opposing entity, a system of reference, an object from which to learn, a point of measurement, a goal to catch up with, an intimate enemy, and sometimes an alibi for serious discussion and action” (Chen 216). Hence, if we see the realistic photographs of the urban structures as an entity pointing to the notion of the West/modern and Fan’s magical Shanshui painting pointing to the notion of Chineseness, the conflation of the two entities in one piece can then be seen as a form of aesthetic dissensus, for it disagrees with the ideological framework in which the West and modernisation are positioned at the opposite of Chineseness. In this way, the uncanny of Artificial Wonderland
II is political, for it dismantles the viewer’s taken-for-granted cohesive sensory experience
that is distributed by that oppositional relation. Is it the past or is it the present? The perpetual unclearness of time suggests the impossibility to differentiate the boundaries among Chineseness, modernity and the West. Therefore, despite the fact that the uncanny resides in Yang’s work, it imposes a negative – unhomely, uncomfortable – sensory experience upon the viewer, it also “aids to help create the fabric of a common experience in which new modes of constructing common objects and new possibilities of subjective enunciation may be developed” (Rancière, Dissensus 142). Indeed, for Artificial Wonderland II, this objective has been achieved: the uncanny has fully exercised its aesthetic power to transform one sensible world to another, in which new possible relationships between the past and present, between Chineseness and modernisation, from now on, can be differently rethought and renegotiated. In this sense, the nostalgic practice becomes reflective through the negation of the return to home. In other words, by problematising the ontology of “home” in the artwork, one is forced to see the unreturnable home as “the imperfect mirror images” (Boym 252) and “try to cohabit with doubles and ghost” (252).
