testing

Màn man zǒu

[slowly go along]

     cupping.

 

Yesterday I woke up to the sun breaking across a misted field outside of Beijing through my window on the train. I had spent the night half-asleep doubled over with my head on my hands because the train tickets from Xi’an to Beijing sell like Beijing is going out of style. all of the hard sleepers were taken. So I found myself sharing my tiny little table with two middle aged men, who turned out to be scroll painters who offered me an endless stream of cigarettes, peanuts, and Bái jiǔ the night before. Last night, after eating a hardy meal with my friends at the residency and catching up on everything that had happened since I have been away, I got a phone call from a number that I didn’t recognize. ‘Ní hǎo Ài Měilì!’. Ài Měilì is my chinese name. it means ‘love very beautiful’. it’s a princess name. i think it totally suits me. ‘Wǒ Ài Ài Měilì!’ ‘Ní hǎo Wǒ Péngyǒu’ ‘Tīng Bù Dǒng’ ‘Okay, Bye, Bye!’. [Hello Emily! Hello my friend! I don’t understand. Okay, bye, bye!] I didn’t know they would actually call me when I gave them my number. It was the conversation of my life.

 

      my first hard sleeper.

I have spent the last couple of weeks in transit with two dear companions. One of them, Alina, is one of my oldest friends, we used to walk to high school together. She is wrapping up a year in China on a Fulbright grant researching grassland policies and nomadic herding practices. Part of the inspiration for our trip was for her to gather interviews with herders in the area surrounding Kangding. My other companion, Zach, is a plant guy. He has spent the past few months in China working and learning on a handful of farms in China. Both of them speak excellent Chinese so my initial anxieties about traveling here were eased and in good hands. Magnificently enough, I think that my Mandarin has improved alot due to this adventure, even though over four of our days on the road were spent surrounded by Tibetan speakers and nearly half of our time was spent on the train or in a bus, passing the time eating seeds, carrying on the endless conversation about the mystery surrounding our respective futures, and trying to eat anything but Fāngbiànmiàn [instant noodles].

 

       KTV forever.the night before we had to catch our train from Xi’an to Chengdu. 

      The morning after KTV+the train. Chengdu.

   flowers.

   medicine.

      

Kangding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     crew.

 

From the moment that I struck out and began putting physical distance between myself and the residency, I felt the weight that had been pressing down on my head and my heart lighten and the further I went into the journey, the quicker and smoother the gears in my head began to turn and the lighter and healthier my spirit became. I found a confidence in myself and who I am trying to become somewhere in between talking and thinking with my two buddies, drinking beer, hiking, peering out the window, drawing, and eating everything you can possibly derive from a yak.

 

     yak everything.

     herder.

 

     wild ones.

     quest.

 

I do not even know the name of the place where we stayed in the mountains outside of Kangding, which is probably just as well. It is quite likely that we weren’t supposed to be there. I spent four and a half days in and around a lamastery without any knowledge of the time or the day of the week. The first time in my entire life that I did not really know where I was or when I was. I felt so calm and so safe. We woke up every morning to Patru, our friend and guide, urging us to rise from our row of mattresses packed into a side room on the top level of the old temple with butter aging in one corner and a pile of cabbages in the other.

 

     lamastery.

      

    Patru.

After peeling ourselves out of our sleeping bags and brushing our teeth and spiting into the drainpipe that ran out of the kitchen window and down to the courtyard, we would seat ourselves in the long common room just off of the kitchen. The short table at our knees was always graced with a combination of breads, yak cheese, yak butter, yak yogurt and sugar, and always bottomless bowls of yak-butter tea. The two young boys studying to be lamas were always doing their prayer chants behind a closed door right off of the living room. The sound of it set the tone of every day we spent there.

 

     commons.

    noodles.

When I was a kid I used to keep a sketchbook and I brought it absolutely everywhere with me. Before art school, everything felt so open to me. I just drew because it felt good, no justification necessary. because that was my way of interfacing with the world, how I could get to know it better. On some what of a whim, I bought one in Xi’an before we boarded the train for Chengdu from which we would leave for Kangding. For some reason I wasn’t perplexed by the idea of drawing just for myself. China has undone a slew of my hangups, art historical and otherwise. The sketchbook turned out to be the crucible for connecting with people with whom I could barely communicate otherwise. Patru would dare me to draw someone or something, and I would. Then they would pass it around for approval, and then I would ask them to draw something for me. Sometimes people worked into my drawings, or wrote on them in Tibetan.  It allowed me to stare deep into the faces of complete strangers that were offering me food and shelter for free because that’s just the way they believe one should live in the world. I never in my wildest dreams thought that observational drawing or portraiture would be capable of generating this quality of communion. When I was drawing, the intimacy I experienced with whomever I was studying felt just like when I am tattooing someone back in America. It is a quality of closeness and a dynamic of trust and friendship that is hard to come by.

There is a classic routine that has appeared many times over in the surprising (perhaps alarming) number of talent shows that I have witnessed. One person will face the crowd and the other will huddle behind them and stick their arms through the arm holes of the other person’s shirt and together, they will complete mundane tasks like preparing and eating a sandwich. The appearance is one of disconnect between the arms and the body though it appears to be whole. A sort of possessed-ness or the sense of being occupied and animated by something that doesn’t quite belong. I have been thinking of this image often and would like to combine it with the process of portraiture, self-perception, and translation. I will be the blind arms, responding to touch and to verbal direction. The artist will be anyone. Together, we will make their self portrait. I will be a representational machine, an interpreting channel between their uttered self-perception and its rendering on the page.

     

      

I came across two talisman in that place in the mountains. I was off by myself at one point, climbing along the bank of the river that ran below the lamastery. Several yards off, I saw a draw-string bag hanging from a bush and when I approached it, I realized that it was hand-stitched and that it had been bleached on one side by the sun. The other, was a whittled toggle, made to hold the door flap closed on one of the tradition black tents where the herders dwell. It had just been cast off alongside the path. One for carrying things and protecting them and the other, for holding things together.

ramen shmamen

When I was a sophomore in college, I lived in my studio during the spring semester. I don’t mean the figure of speech ‘I lived in my studio’, which some of my peers would obnoxiously deploy to describe what they considered to be good work ethic. I mean I really didn’t have a home or an apartment. I slept on a piece of foam in the corner under these tall storage shelves behind a cabinet so that my presence was semi-discreet. I washed my smelly feet in the deep sinks and ate too much malt-o-meal, and dehydrated black bean and split pea soup. It was actually pretty awful, though interesting in retrospect because it did absolutely entwine my life practice and my practice of art for the few months that I was there. Fortunately, I have grown to celebrate and pursue overlap, rather than total assimilation, between my work and my life. I don’t loathe the studio the way I did when I was living in it but I also don’t hold down much of a studio practice. We have a casual, loving, but open relationship. Work time often happens for me while I am consumed by other things, at a job, reading, washing dishes, or drinking with friends. The actual measurable production time is always much shorter than the preparation, the research, the thinking. A lot of times, I’m not even aware that I have begun working on a piece until I have been at it for several weeks or even months.

So, here I am at a residency in rural China that looks and feels very much like living in my studio. I eat ramen noodles for breakfast most days because I don’t have a very sophisticated cooking set-up and I don’t have a fridge so I have to eat everything that I prepare or it will go bad. I am pretty dirty all of the time because it is so hot here and I don’t really have a functional shower. I get up in the morning and come down my stairs and I am in my studio. I eat here, I write here, and I work here. It is a struggle to communicate with my peers so much that my appetite for stimulating dialogue is growing at an alarming rate.

So what am I doing here if I know myself to be an artist that works very slowly, mostly outside of the studio, whose development feeds on frequent dialogue, and needs dynamism in the day? I am always describing my work in terms of self-sabotage and that is exactly what this adventure is showing itself to be. This, is actually thrilling to me, however grueling the passing of time, the daily confrontation with the studio, or the persistent breakfast fare. I have succeeded in tricking myself into what appears to be the worse case scenario for my comfort zone. So, I am happy to report, this is probably a success. I may actually be pushing my unwilling practice towards, what I hope is, something like resilience.

the view to the right from my porch

the view out of my bedroom window

the view from my porch to the left

the view from my porch straight ahead

the first landing on the stairs up to my place

cat i over-photographed in 798 art district

cat house

Finally, some drawings that I have been working on…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

parrot baby/the king of cat

  

My friend Sun Ying's living room, this is the first table that I ate at in China.

I will mostly let these pictures stand along because it already feels like ages ago that they were taken. The feeling of already being in China for months is a blessing and a curse. On one hand I am experiencing endless generosity from my new peers, colleagues, and acquaintances in China. I have been met very warmly and have felt very lucky to be in an environment where I am encouraged to struggle with the language and invited to participate in lunchtime, morning tea, and drinking. On the other hand, I feel like the foreigner that I am. I know just enough Mandarin to sound like a baby and a parrot. I want desperately to engage in the passionate discussions over food concerning the future of China. alas.

My mind is expanding and exploding at an alarming rate which probably means that I am learning something. However, the combination of these elements and many additional intricacies of cultural difference and social engagement result in a feeling of extreme schizophrenia. This morning, I felt like a million bucks. This evening, I feel like I have been run through the mill. From previous experience I have high hopes that this will stabilize in time and that I will find a rhythm here that suits both myself and my surroundings.

(above and below) Lama temple. Sun Ying brought me here on my first day in China.

Sun Ying with incense

Lunch at a nearby vegetarian restaurant. My first meal out. Delicious!

Sun Ying's guest room

DUCK/RABBIT

A drawing I found outside of an elementary school

map drawn for me by my seat-neighbors on the plane. A sweet couple. They were returning from a visit with their son who lives in Portland, Oregon. My Mandarin was as bad as their English. So, they drew me a map of their home in relation to the residency and invited me to visit...

Lunch

Breakfast. First flavor I couldn't handle: rice wine (in the bowl on the left)

After arriving at the Residency:

The view out of the window in my room

My bed. My mosquito net.

My work table on the first level of my apartment.

Where Amanda (my American comrade) and I take turns at miserably failing at cooking.

My hot plate set-up only has two temperatures: 600 and 1000. No compromise. We eat in the village for lunch pretty much every day.

Huang (left) and Jia Jia (right). Some of my new friends in Huangs apartment where I have learned to drink tea all afternoon until it is time to switch to beer. The word in Mandarin for drinking so much tea that you have caffeine jitters translates as 'tea drunk'.

I have tentative plans to interview one of my new friends (currently anonymous) for an article in the upcoming issue of the online journal Quodlibetica regarding their recent experience in prison due to some of their art work…

My steep stairs.

The bruise on the back of my left thigh from running/sliding down my stairs on my way back to a barbecue/dance party/drink-a-thon.

Here, they call Elvis Presley ‘the King of Cat’. That is one of my nicknames because of my hairdo. They also call me the Mandarin word for clumsy. Both very fitting. They also refer to me as ‘handsome’ and Amanda as ‘beautiful’ which I really appreciate. It is amazing to me that the folks here at the Residency perceive my gender identity more acutely and comfortably than the majority of my experiences with folks in America. In this sense, I feel very at home here.

More to come…

atchison in residence

I first became interested in traveling to China about a year ago when Cheng Xiaobei, the director of the Shangyuan Art Center Residency, visited Minneapolis and I had a chance to speak with her about the program. At that time my knowledge of contemporary China and its social and political history was limited to articles that I had read in the New York Times, National Geographic, and a basic generalist’s knowledge of World History. When I committed to applying for this opportunity, I began researching the history of post-Mao art in China and became fascinated with the contrasting historical trajectories of the Chinese avant-garde, and those of America and Europe. I also began the exercise of examining the history of class struggle in America next to that of China.

I will be an artist in residence at The Shangyuan Art Center (Located in Shangyuan Village, Beijing, China), from July 2 – August 27, 2011. From what I understand, during my two months at the residency, myself and one other artist will be the only Americans among about 23 Chinese artists. This residency is geared towards emerging artists and encourages a cross-disciplinary practice and the sharing of ideas. While in residence I will be provided a studio, an apartment, and exhibition space. I will be expected to spend my time at the Art Center reflecting on my art practice, researching, learning from my environment, taking risks in my work that I would not otherwise explore, and engaging with the other residents in cross-cultural and cross-discipline dialogue and group critique.

In my proposal that I submitted some months ago, I wrote:

 

In Shangyuan I will be investigating the power dynamics that emerge in instances of communication. Specifically, I will be surveying certain rare and perplexing circumstances in which the structure of these power relations transfigures from hierarchy to equilibrium. This will include searching for their formative influence(s) and imagining potential social and political ramifications. Due to the density of this idea, I am zeroing-in on interactions where dynamics of this quality emerge, and reducing the amount of variables that are present in order to distinguish what is extraneous from what is critical.

 

For example, in recent work I explore the implications of reading lips and speaking on someone else’s behalf or speaking in their place. In my video piece, being half of there, power is redistributed between the speaker and interpreter through the use of these models. I am delighted by the eternal failure of even knowing, with all certainty, what I really mean when I myself speak or gesture. Even though my head is my head, and my tongue is my tongue, it is strange to me, and it can turn against me and deliver me to the unknown. In Shangyuan, I will be in pursuit of this instability. I will be without the luxury of immediacy in communication. The otherness that I will experience while navigating unfamiliar cultural and linguistic terrain will challenge my critical framework and feed my research. This distancing from confidence and tempo in speech, gesture, and comprehension, will push the unutterable and poetic elements of my investigation to develop in intricacy as well as position.

 

I am always looking to offset any tendencies to normalize, form habits, or get too comfortable, so that I will continue to take risks and produce earnestly. In my art practice this looks like self-sabotage, cannibalization of my conceptual strategy, aesthetics, and ethical zeal. As with the psychoanalysis of patients and the cross-examination of suspects, I am trying to force a fault and create a slippage, in order to betray whatever hint of truth I unknowingly have the ability to affect in both my work and myself.

 

The only condition of the coming months upon which I can rely is that the proposal which I drafted above, and what I am thinking now, about what I will do, and experience, and explore while I am in China, will undoubtedly change. I am at ease with this indeterminacy.

 

I board my plane June 29^th. Stay tuned.