Us, Them – On the Art of Guangci and Xiang Jing

Gao Shiming

US – ON THE ART OF GUANGCI

“WHO ARE WE?”
The philosopher Richard Rorty asks us an extremely acute question. For Rorty, the question “Who are we?” is entirely distinct from the question “What is a person?” The latter is a standard metaphysical question, where the former is an entirely political question. The basic question of politics is indeed the difference between “us” and “them.” Of course we, living in poor times, do not need to divide people so sharply as politicians do. And yet we cannot stop uttering the word: “We… ”For the iconoclastic modernists, “we” hides on all sides of “I.” It is both the soil for the individual, and a way of burying the self in a crowd. For Guangci, “we” actually exists in the space below the leaders waving their hands from the Tian’anmen rostrum. The crowd’s impulse, felt by all those on the square, is precisely what cultural anthropologists refer to as “communitas.” “We” structures a complete body, and as an object of desire it refers to a prescribed return to an imagined collective, and to the self-subordination of the subject (Foucault explained his concept of the subject with reference to the linguistic undertones of subordination or subjection that the word carries), and the fervor amidst the failure in the self’s move toward unity.

GUANGCI: COLLECTIVE IMAGE – MONUMENTALITY – IMMORTALITY
There is a certain pathos of “collectivism” that runs through China’s art history between the 1950s and the late 1980s. Even if the artistic practice of the 1980s was in reaction and reform to the ideology of the previous thirty years, still in the works and texts of this period, the aura of totalitarianism shines throughout as overarching cultural narratives vie for greatness, and atop them floats the “specter of collectivism.” In the epistemological structures of the artistic reforms of the 1980s, there still exists deeply held thought patterns pertaining to totality and collectivity. Political movements, manifestos, and utopias are always the most moving of affairs. In the works of Guangci’s generation, the ideology of collectivism has been thoroughly undone, or rather, transmogrified. As someone who entered the art world as a young artist