头破血流

Well, my Renmin summer school course made it through the big centennial hoopla without incident. It certainly was a little strange meeting students the mornings of the days immediately before and after the grand celebration, but I decided it best not to mention it... and none of the students did either. (They had returned to their hometowns from Beijing just as commemorations climaxed.) Instead, they worked in groups to compile a list of works one might consult to make sense of the Anthropocene, which ranged from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring to Michael Jackson's "Earth Song" to Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man" by way of western and Chinese science fiction (on which more anon). Of recent Chinese history or thinking nothing.

I was most intrigued to learn of the work of conceptual artist Zhuang Hui (above), a years-long series of documented wanderings and deliberately futile actions in the desolate Qilian mountains near where he spent his youth. Zhuang’s work helps us to seek the balance between human and the world through the artist's personal behavior, a student (graduate in fine arts) explained, and discusses whether art can act as a lever to close the gap between human, civilization, nature and the universe. Online I found documentation of a solo exhibition of Zhuang's work - it just closed last week - which reminded me of the vitality of Beijing's arts scene, despite party bombast. In the show Zhuang linked to information about five remote sites he visited through QR codes, versions of which he also painstakingly carved in stone on site. A press release explains:

These sites lie deep within the Qilian Mountains, thus rendering the QR codes mysterious cultural “relics” for anyone who stumbles upon them, now or in the future, much like the large installation works created earlier by Zhuang Hui and which he chose to abandon in the Gobi Desert in 2014. The QR codes are functioning, not merely decorative, both in situ and in the gallery ...