Recycling Marx in the Age of Globalisation

By Marianne Brouwer

Ni Haifeng belongs to the generation of Chinese artists which is referred to as 'The Generation of '85' or the 'Heroic Generation'; it was the first to graduate from the art academies when they re-opened after the Cultural Revolution, and the first to create a revolutionary and independent contemporary art in China. The first time I met with Ni Haifeng's work (for one meets a work like one meets a person) was in the unforgettable exhibition 'China Avant-garde' that toured Europe in the beginning of the nineties. The work was a large installation consisting of dry tree leaves, stones, and soil over which had been written mathematical numbers, symbols and equations painted in red, black and white. These equations made no sense, however, and the symbols were mostly self-invented. Writing over objects, covering them with numbers and symbols to a point where the object itself all but disappeared, was one of the defining aspects of Ni Haifeng's early works. The most impressive was made in his native Zhoushan Island. It was literally a 'landscape painting', for Ni painted rocks, cliffs and boulders of the island's coast with red, black and white numbers, symbols and equations, so that the landscape seemed to consist entirely of enigmatic ciphers. He said of this work: "It was [...] a subversive act, in order to influence the perception of the viewer, and to undermine preconceived ideas about how to see a landscape. [...] Taking the 'real' landscape apart is to take apart a fictitious landscape which has been created through representation, through the classical image of brush painting, for instance, through photography, literature and so on. It has created or shaped a sense of reality, our knowledge of reality, or what we think we know as reality, or take for granted as reality." (1). Breaking down preconceived ideas, perceptions and art practices to reach what Ni Haifeng has called 'a zero degree of meaning' not only characterizes Ni Haifeng's work of the period. It was a liberating practice for many Chinese artists between 1985 and 1989, exuberantly and exitedly applied in order to create a truly Chinese contemporary art, often defying censorship as well.
In the early nineties Ni Haifeng went to live in Holland with his Dutch wife. Since then, his work has acquired additional layers referring to his new identity as a Chinese immigrant, and to issues of (post)colonialism and 'otherness'. Probably the most important work issuing from these questions is his 'Unfinished Self-Portait' (2003). Central to the work is a digital passport photo of the artist's face. Ni has 'broken down' his face into symbols and numbers, by substituting (part of) the sheer endless sequence of digital data that constitute the photograph's computer code. He paints this data in situ on walls, doors, windows and/or floors of exhibition spaces. 'Unfinished Self-Portrait' has been executed only in parts so far, because of the gigantic amount of symbols and numbers that constitute the digital code. But the method of reaching 'a zero degree of meaning' is the same here as with the early landscape painting.

Questions of identity and representation, issues of colonialism and globalism, exploitation and immigration, histories of cargo and trade are the overriding themes of the 'The Return of the Shreds'. And although 'The Return of the Shreds' consists of quite a number of separate, independent works, those works are so intimately related, and have been so coherently installed, that one gets the impression of looking at one single, complicated, multi-layered installation. The exhibition starts just before the visitor reaches the information counter of the museum. A wall covered with all sorts of passports, and a passage in which big boxes containing tea, chilli peppers and porcelain shards are on display, are right next to the display of post cards, books and other shopping items of the museum, so that the counter itself seems to be part of the show, comparable to the counter of an import-export firm in front of the entrance to its warehouse. The brick architecture of this annex of the Lakenhal Museum supports this impression, because it was once a factory of woollen blankets. To the right you see a number of vitrines with Chinese blue porcelain on display; further down is a space filled with pallets full of more blue Chinese porcelain and, in the back, one distinguishes looming mounds of textile shreds. There is also a video showing cargo ships at sea, and another with someone Chinese explaining about porcelain manufacture. A pair of silver coloured shoes is mounted on a wall opposite an old 'comptoir', a small office space near the entrance where traditionally the factory's clerk would have been sitting. Now there is a large format photograph of pages from Karl Marx' 'Das Kapital', as well as a series of photographs of what looks like a typical nineteenth century Chinese provincial town; a desk with books and other papers lying about completes the picture. This small office was called 'The Laboratory' of the show. It was shared between Kitty Zijlmans, Professor of Contemporary Art History at Leiden University and Ni Haifeng. Kitty Zijlmans invited Ni Haifeng for a year-long collaboration project, which enabled the realisation of 'The Return of the Shreds' amongst other things. Zijlmans and Ni used'The Laboratory' to exhibit documents of the collaboration process, such as shipping documents, other paperwork related to the making of the show, and a logbook kept by Kitty Zijlmans throughout the year of the project. The 'Laboratory' was also used to mount a small, ever-changing exhibition of some of Ni's other works, independent from but related to the theme of 'The Return of The Shreds'. Zijlmans and Ni had invited Roel Arkesteijn, who curated Ni's one-man show at the Gemeentemusum in The Hague in 2003, to curate this show.

The heart of 'The Return of the Shreds' - a space from which all other spaces radiate or lead up to- is almost entirely taken up by dozens of pallets loaded with Chinese porcelain. Hundreds of porcelain objects, all decorated with identical patterns of blue flowers on a white ground, are grouped on the pallets as though they had just been shipped in and await further distribution. The installation is called 'Of the Departure and The Arrival'. It is a reprisal of a very large work that was commissioned by the city of Delft and shown there for the first time in 2005. Ni Haifeng's project for the city of Delft proposed a modern recreation of 'Chine de Commande', involving the history of the V.O.C. and of the Dutch porcelain trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 'Chine de Commande' was porcelain for the West made to order in China. The trade was so lucrative, that it was worth the risks of the very long journey (around Cape Hope) by ship and the hazards of the route through China with an extremely fragile cargo. The originals were Western household objects, specifically tableware; dinner plates, gravy boats, tea cups, soup terrines and others. The designs and prototypes were shipped to China to be reproduced in porcelain. They were then hand-painted with blue or multi-coloured Chinese patterns and motifs and shipped back to Europe. Holland was not the only country which made a fortune through the porcelain trade. It was initiated by the Portuguese and its popularity can still be measured in England where anything porcelain is simply called 'china'. The famous 'Royal Blue Delft' was invented to replace the 'Chine de Commande' in later centuries. In his proposal for the project Ni Haifeng writes: "Delft Blue is omnipresent in Delft, so much so, that it has become a cliché; so is porcelain that has become a platitude in the national representation of China's cultural heritage. From this line of thought, I think it's interesting to adopt an ironical stance and make the project as one that adds a great amount of 'strange blue earthenware' to the already platitudinous 'landscape of blue'." (2). Ni asked the citizens of Delft to donate everyday household objects, the kind of 'realia' a city archeologist would come up with when digging for objects of modern daily life. In addition he went to the city's garbage dump and visited the town market to scout for the kind of objects that were characteristic for Dutch household life. The objects donated included such items as a broken umbrella, an egg beater, old waterbottles, a pair of skates, scissors, a discarded pan, a potato peeler, old shoes, a disused vacuum cleaner, childrens' mittens, an old telephone, a tube of toothpaste. Some people gave things of personal value, but most did not. The objects were flown to China and brought along the old V.O.C. land- and water routes to Jingdezhen, China's 'porcelain city', which was already famous in the seventeenth century. There, each object was carefully cleaned and cast in porcelain, which was then handpainted with a popular ancient blue Chinese flower pattern. Each object bore the same pattern, so that the entire collection looked like mass-produced china. Thus transformed and beautified, the objects were shipped by boat to Europe. The bigger part of them was put on display in the hold of a cargo barge that was moored in Delfshaven, the old seaport of the city, in front of the ancient V.O.C. headquarters. Simultaneously Ni Haifeng showed a small selection of his 'Chine de Commande' in the vitrines of the Delft Museum 'Het Prinsenhof', together with the Museum's collection of early Dutch earthenware. A video documentary that showed the transport routes filmed from ships, boats and trucks was shown on the boat. Another video was shown in the museum. It showed the process of the making of the 'Chine de Commande' in reverse, from beautified porcelain back to the original junk,
Though the project proposal and its consequent execution ring entirely plausible and historically sound, the objects that are its outcome are anything but that. The porcelain objects lying on the pallets are stunning and beautiful, but they are all rarefied junk. Why cast a potato peeler or a waterbottle in porcelain and hand-paint it with blue flowers? The metaphor, at once humorous and horrifying, of the entire enormous project is this: worthless western garbage has been lovingly and with great skill transformed into valuable goods by cheap Chinese labour, producing an enormous surplus value for the West - and this has been so for centuries. What use were gravy boats or soup terrines to Chinese culture then? What use, today, are broken umbrellas and old shoes? On the one hand it makes you feel ashamed to see what the good citizens of Delft donated, for it tells you something about a Dutch attitude, in my view at least, be it toward modern art in general or toward China in particular. On the other hand the reality of colonial trade, as seen through Chinese eyes, only appears because any meaning or value attached to these objects, has been radically altered by substituting what western culture believes to be meaningful or valuable, with something we know is worthless.

The juxtaposition of his own 'Chine de Commande' and the earthenware collection of the 'Prinsenhof' in the Museum's vitrines, inspired Ni Haifeng to elaborate the idea. Its outcome was 'Shrinkrage 10%', which was specially made for 'The Return of the Shreds'. Four beautiful, old museum vitrines are aligned in a row; opposite stands a single vitrine. The latter contains a set of blue and white seventeenth century 'Chine de Commande' belonging to museum De Lakenhal, the other four show eight series of copies of the same set of porcelain, but from one vitrine to the next the set has substantially diminished in size. Porcelain clay shrinks some ten percent when fired in the kiln. The diminishment of each consecutive set of porcelain is obtained by casting new molds from the preceding set and then fire the clay. The issue of this work, however, is not at all the formal process of diminution by shrinking porcelain. Its bitter irony hits you when you turn from the last vitrine, containing the smallest, doll size version of the plates, cups and gravy trays to look at the vitrine containing the 'Chine de Commande' belonging to the museum. The effect is that you see the Chinese manufacture not only for the fakery that it is, but that you see it utterly dwarfed in comparison to the western museum collection of priceless originals which seems to tower above it, a forbidding and authoritarian presence. The sequence of the vitrines creates a visual perspective of power that is all the more impressive because it is told through the silent language of things. As a consequence the vitrines provide us with a perspective on time as well; a history of a progressive destruction of Chinese self-worth. One could extend this thought to issues of Orientalism and the way in which the cultural image China has of itself has been imprinted with the concept of 'Chineseness' invented by Western Orientalism. China is not just faking its own antiques; it is in addition faking a Chinese culture imposed by the West. The video of the Chinese man elaborating on the production of porcelain, shown on a monitor hanging in the little 'comptoir', is related to this installation. He is the director of the porcelain factory 'Haide Arts and Crafts' in Jingdezhen, explaining how to make excellent fake old porcelain.

At the far end the exhibition spaces open up into a big space with a very high ceiling, containing the installation that gave the exhibition its name, 'The Return of the Shreds'. The installation consists of enormous amounts of textile shreds that have been stitched together at one end to form a huge cloth that is hung from the ceiling. It spreads out from there to the floor like a trail ending up in mounds of loose shreds that all but fill up the rest of the space. All those shreds are left-overs from fabrics used in one of the countless Chinese sweat shops that currently produce design label clothes for the West. The ten tonnes of left-overs exhibited in 'The Return of the Shreds', equal the waste-material of aprroximately ten days of production by a single Chinese sweatshop. The carton boxes, in which the shreds have been shipped from China to Leiden, are stacked in the back of the exhibition space, behind the cloth curtain. A video projection on the boxes, which was shot in the swaeatshop 'Hope Textile Ltd', shows the brand names of the clothes, reading for instance "Originals", "Genuine Qualities Exclusive Treatment", or "Trash Style, Military Class-A no. 1 Cargo". The installation picks up on the theme of surplus value that has been introduced by 'Of the Departure and the Arrival', but this time it refers to all the designer brands -cheap or expensive- that have their clothes made in China by Chinese workers whose monthly earnings wouldn't suffice for a day's living in the West. The installation is equally referring to the times, when Leiden was an important center of cloth manufacture. The Lakenhal ('laken' means drape in Dutch) actually dates from that time. As the textile industry declined, however, weavers and drapers increasingly rebelled against the exploitation by their rich and powerful employers. The exploitation went so far, and was so well organized, that by the sixteenth century the former proud guilds had been reduced to a mass of desperate paupers. Europe's first true city proletariat, not only in the Netherlands, but even more so in Flanders and in Germany, was actually generated by the textile industry. 'The Return of the Shreds' is like a symbolic image of what is returning to haunt us again; the shreds of fabric like a ghostly army of human beings, whether they live in third world countries, or are the third world among the first - the invisible, infinitely adaptable resource material of our global economy.

Ni Haifeng's fascination with numbers returns in two further installations entitled, respectively, 'HS 6403.99' and 'HS 0902.20, HS 0904.11 & HS 6911.10'. The initials HS stand for Harmonised Commodity Description and Coding Systems, which is a standardized number system belonging to a globally applied trading code. 'HS 6403.99' indicates a specific type of quality men's shoes made in China for exportation. In Europe the shoes are sold so cheaply that quality shoes manufactured in Europe are losing the competition. In Spain this led to demonstrations by angry workers burning the Chinese shoes. Ni Haifeng had a pair of Chinese shoes cast in bronze and coated with nickel . They hang on the wall with a small LED screen above them showing a video of the Auto da Fé of the shoes. It is an eerie sight to see those shoes, so beautifully enriched by their silver lustre as if to celebrate everything they stand for: human feet, walking, a good fit, burn in the video as if all these things were burned with them in the same process.
The installation 'HS 0902.20, HS 0904.11 & HS 6911.10' consists of three big wooden boxes. Two are filled with black tea leaves and red peppers respectively, creating splashes of intense colours in the show. The third box is filled with shards of broken porcelain. While the tea and red peppers are among China's traditionally most important export products, as much sought after in the seventeenth century as the 'Chine de Commande', the porcelain shards do not qualify as valuable goods. Unlike the tea leaves and the chilli peppers therefore, they don't bear an individual HS number. The only way to allow them to be shipped at all, was by allotting them the general code for porcelain (HS 6911.10).
Because of the number codes, the works invite a comparison with the 'Unfinished Selfportrait', and indeed I believe they are related, but as though through opposition. For the 'Selfportrait' opens out from the limited image of a passport photograph into what seems an infinity of symbols and a celebration of the act of writing them. Whereas the Harmonised System of global serial numbers and abstract codes on the contrary masks and depersonalises the individual goods they just indicate; tangible objects rich with colours and scents, with histories related to social communities and historical epochs, and the misery or beauty or value they have in the life of human beings. Individual goods deemed of no value, on the other hand, totally disappear from the system, since no specific HS number exists to specify their status. One wonders about the human beings who cultivate and care for these luxury goods; the centuries it took to develop their know-how. What value do these human beings actually have for the system and would they qualify for individual HS numbers?

The series of photographs hanging in the small 'comptoir' show a Chinese provincial town as it might have appeared in the early twentieth or late nineteenth century. Traditional houses with white, adobe walls stand out in the foreground. A pagoda, as well as some big traditional buildings with curved Chinese roofs appear silhouetted against the mountains in the background. In the middle ground are some nineteenth century western stone buildings with white colonnades and flags flying overhead, embassies or consulates obviously, for one can make out the Dutch flag and its French and English neighbours. These are like the kind of photos that would decorate the walls of an import-export firm, showing the faraway places with which it trades or where the firm had its branch offices. Except that these photos are not of any actual town but are photos of the filmset created for the epic Chinese film 'The Opium War' of 1996. It may serve to recall that the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century were the result of and the revolt against western, more accurately British colonial politics; they had made a fortune by swamping China with opium imported from India, and reduced an estimated two million Chinese citizens to junkies. In China, to this day, the loss of the Opium Wars and the enforcement of unequal treaties as well as the loss of Hong Kong to Britain, is seen as the beginning of a century of humiliation and degradation by western powers.

Is today's globalised world so much better than the old colonial one? The copy of 'Das Kapital', lying open on pages of the chapter dedicated to commodities and money, is begging this question. But the thick layers of dust gathered on the pages, make you wonder who will listen to the old theories of surplus-value and exploitation today. Ni Haifeng writes: "Dustbins of History is one of the terminologies from Marx that I still remember from the politics class back in my primary school days [...] 'Capital, Critique of Political Economy', is one of the most widely quoted books in the last hundred years. Its strong analysis on early capitalist modernisation and its fierce denunciation of the dehumanising effect of money still bear no small relevance in the time of global capitalism. It is also the most dramatic book in recent political history. It was hijacked to inform the communist ideology of most socialist countries and their revolutions. The world has, of course, changed a lot since then and the citizens of the former socialist societies must have found that Marxism is more grimly relevant than it ever was under the communist rules. Now, rereading Marx is, to me, almost autobiographical; it is not unlike reading into my personal history. But it was also an almost sacred bible then, which now has become a book subjected to dust." (3).
The effects of globalisation on people are made clear in the display of some hundred and fifty (disused) passports of all sorts of people from all sorts of nationalities living in Holland. This is perhaps the least impressive installation of the show in visual terms, but it may well be its most revealing. For what does immigration and today's global displacement entail? An early work by Ni Haifeng entitled 'Made in China' shows what it means to say farewell to your life and home. It was included by Roel Arkesteijn in the show he curated for the 'Laboratory'. The work consists of a small, black, wooden crate filled with two kilograms of Chinese soil. Secured to the top of the box with a rope tied in an expert seaman's knot, is a perspex tube the size of a small telescope, containing the ashes of a map of China. The rope has a loose end, suggesting that you can hoist the crate on your shoulder the way sailors do with their kit bags. A small white porcelain dinner plate is placed next to the crate, with a few unburned fragments of the map lying on it. Ni made the work when leaving China for Holland in 1995. 'Made in China' is a most intimate, intensely moving work. It breathes everything he grew up with on his native island of Zhoushan, twelve hours by boat off the coast of Shanghai; the sea, cargo, ships. Each work in the show, each of its subversive techniques, shows us different aspects of what belonging to that other world must have meant to someone who has come to join our society, and what it must mean to be that other.

To consider the show as a kind of composite self-portrait of the artist, putting himself in the context of questions of representation, may not be its worst interpretation, but it certainly would be too limited. For its real question is a different one: how to represent those, who cannot represent themselves, and who yet produce all the things we need day after day: clothes, shoes, food? And, since the West has largely outsourced its labour to the non-western world, how easy is it for the West to deny any power of representation to those 'others' by simply looking away? All the easier, one might say, because they are 'others' only in a cultural sense (the 'otherness' of 'their' culture being dealt with in politically correct biennials and other globalist shows). In a globalist sense they are 'our' work force, its invisibility comparable to colonial times. It takes someone coming from amidst those 'others' to speak for them (but addressing us), who is generous and smart enough to translate his world for our western understanding, gently reminding us, that Marx may come to haunt us yet again.

1) Marianne Brouwer, 'A Zero Degree of Writing and Other Subversive Moments. An Interview with Ni Haifeng' in: 'Ni Haifeng, No-Man's Land', exh. cat. Haags Gemeentemuseum, eds. Roel Arkesteijn, Ni Haifeng, published by Artimo, Amsterdam, 2003, p. 51.
2) Ni Haifeng, 'Of the Departure and the Arrival', published by Gallery Lumen Travo, Amsterdam 2005, p. 9.
3) Unpublished statement by Ni Haifeng, 2007.

Previous, Next