10 Contemporary Art Hangzhou Artists by Michael Young


Hangzhou, the capital city of Zhejiang province is one hour by bullet train west of Shanghai. For locals it has been a tourist hotspot for many years boasting West Lake as its main attraction. Celebrated by poets and artists since the 9th century, the lake’s temples, pavilions and placid waters also became a retreat during the 1950s for leaders of the Chinese Communist Party,


including


Chairman Mao, who took up part- time residence in the romantically named, Water Bamboo Residence – Liu Villa – on the lake’s south west shores. Today Hangzhou is also fast becoming the centre for e-commerce, too, with the online shopping behemoth Alibaba headquartered there. It occupies a 64-acre campus and has 14,000 employees. Hangzhou also boasts a large number of young artists, who study at the prestigious China Academy of Art (CAA), which was founded in 1928 and which is now one of China’s leading art schools. Most leave the city after graduation but a handful have remained including three, Wu Junyong, Cheng Ran and Zhou Yilun, who have become close friends, united not only by the excitement of visual art but also by their passion for tattoos. Animation artist and painter Wu


Junyong is the elder statesman of the group but only by a few years. He was born in Putian in Fujian province in 1978 and came to Hangzhou to study art at the CAA, graduating in 2000 with a BFA in printmaking and with a Master of Fine Art in New Media Art in 2005. He now teaches three days a week at the Academy and is, he said with a cheeky look in his eye, a popular teacher.


‘I have a happy


personality’, he confessed. He has lived in Hangzhou for 20 years with brief sojourns in Beijing and Shanghai along the way with Hangzhou remaining his favourite city. He has two apartments in a high-


rise block in central Hangzhou and lives one on the 24th floor, which he shares with his young son and mother. She is from the country and speaks with


an accent that even my


interpreter found incomprehensible. Junyong’s studio, although boxy and spartan, is on the 27th floor and offers fabulous views over the Qiantang River which spills into the Yellow Sea 100 kilometres to the east. Te studio has everything he needs; plenty of creative space and storage and a wall of windows that supply a soft even light. He has been in this studio for three years and said he enjoys the remoteness of living in the sky. Junyong speaks English haltingly and when he stumbles upon the right word it


bursts forth cushioned in


laughter. He favours black clothes and when I met him earlier this year he was dressed in black, a fitted business shirt, black trousers and sneakers. Perched firmly on his head was a trim black fedora which stayed in place for the length of our interview. He is small and slight, yet elegant with soft brown eyes that sparkle as he talks. For a 39 year old, he is trim, lithe and athletic, the result,


he said, of


afternoons spent at a local swimming pool.


But beneath this veneer of affability there lurks a hard hitting, yet subtle,


ASIAN ART NOVEMBER 2017 Wu Junyong in his studio


political artist whose work articulates the obdurate nature of public officialdom in China and how it exercises power. His paintings and animations are allegorical and rife with hidden clues and metaphors that a viewer must decipher. Even though Junyong’s work is a satirical commentary on China’s political system, his use of elusive signs and symbols allows him to stay one step ahead of the censors. ‘It keeps the censors at arm’s length,’ he said, when talking of the ambiguity of symbolism reflecting covertly on the failures of communism. ‘Censors will check words very carefully.


But with


symbolism and allegory everyone has a different narrative and interpretation. No one in authority can really say anything about what is going on in my work,’ he said mischievously. One character appears regularly in


Junyong’s work cavorting like an actor on a stage and wearing a pointed dunce’s cap. He told me that this hat in Chinese culture signifies excessive but false, flattery and praise. ‘In China, everyone is flattering each other including the government that excessively praises itself. Te hat makes you feel fabulous but most of the time the sentiment is fake. For 10 years the hat has been in my work,’ he explained. Leaning against the studio wall are


two drawings that illustrate Junyong’s artistic


disposition. One is of


Chairman Mao sitting in a chair with hair growing copiously all over his body. ‘In Mandarin mao can mean ‘hairy’. So, Chairman Mao is a hairy monster. I do not say he is good, or not good. It is just humour,’ he said. Tis drawing of Mao sits alongside one of Karl Marx taking a dump. It seems provocative in the extreme. Junyong shrugs and smiles impishly but says nothing more relying instead on images rather than words. Junyong’s other passion is tattooing and is one that he shares with friends Cheng Ran and Zhou Yilun not only as someone who has them all over his body, but as a practitioner applying them to other’s flesh. And he has applied numerous tattoos to both Ran and Yilun.


Recently Junyong has


bought himself the ‘finest Japanese tattoo machine’ and friends and acquaintances are only too anxious to have Junyong’s irrepressible and original designs inked indelibly onto their bodies and they include Cheng Ran and Zhou Yilun. From Junyong’s eyrie I crossed Hangzhou to meet the young film maker Ran at his three-storey studio. At 36, Ran is carving out a significant international reputation for himself


through his angst ridden films such as Diary of a Madman (2017) and Always I Trust (2014) that explore the concerns of young people while also reflecting his own precarious and existential slant on life. Tis might seem a common enough trope for today’s contemporary Chinese artists but Cheng’s work is anything but commonplace.


Influenced by


literature – he is a fan of the American writer Jack Kerouac – Western culture and European and American art house movies – think Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch –Cheng’s films are populated by seemingly crazy and unhinged characters who are sketched by Cheng with the ease of a passing voyeur. Tey also possess a curious otherworldly dimension too


easily


codified as surreal when in fact they are products of a sophisticated and unique cinematic language that Cheng has been developing since he purchased his first video camera for RMB700 on the Taobao website. Tey are non-linear and often multi- channel as was his recent extraordinary Diary of a Madman made during a three-month residency in New York last year at the New Museum supported by China’s philanthropic, K11 Art Foundation. In those three months, Ran made 15 video vignettes that were inspired by the 1918 novel A Madman’s Diary by Chinese writer Lu Xun. Cheng’s diary is an outsider’s view


Cheng Ran showing his tattoos


of marginalised New Yorkers and the habitués of the city’s hidden corners a million miles away from the tourist’s beat. His New York is a fantasy land where everyone speaks Mandarin and pigeons recite poetry. Rundown hotel rooms, stolen moments of love for both young and old, glass covered beaches and the Staten Island ship graveyard form the mundane yet stylised cityscapes across which Ran parades


a delirious cast of New


Yorkers. Into this melange he inserts the mysteries of chance like parenthetical thunderclaps and offers multiple endings that confuse with their poetical ambiguities.


‘Te


madman can be anybody. It can be a couple making love in the hotel. A young black guy sitting on the bridge. An old guy in an apartment. It can also be myself,’ he said. Cheng was born in Chifeng in


Wally, Cheng’s one-eared cat


Inner Mongolia and his world view was formed during the 1990s through


watching hundreds of bootleg and illegal DVDs. ‘I collected a lot of Indie films and movies from the 1990s,’ he explained. Now he has 3,000 and the collection is growing. ‘Tey helped my generation to learn many things about the world,’ Cheng added.


Cheng moved to Hangzhou, when he was twenty, to study painting at CAA. During his second year he realised that painting did not appeal to him and he dropped the course. ‘It was many years before I told my parents,’ he commented. Te academy was the same one that five years earlier in 1995 Yang Fudong had graduated having also studied painting. Te two later met by chance and Cheng was able to wrangle a part in Fudong’s epic film Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest 2001-06, in five parts, that retells the 3rd-century Chinese folk-story of a group of individuals who withdraw from worldly troubles in favour of leading a solitary life. Te part perfectly suited Cheng’s insouciant and bewildered looks. ‘Fudong’s work opened my eyes … I realised that this is art and that this was what I wanted to do,’ he said. He also worked with Fudong as a ‘gofer’ for five years. Ran considers Diary of a Madman the first part of an ambitious trilogy that he is currently embarked on. Part two was filmed last year in Jerusalem, where he fell ill either from recurrent bouts of anxiety, or from Jerusalem Syndrome (he is not sure which), the phenomenon where intense exposure to conflicting religions induces sickness in visitors. Tis malaise will now form an integral part of the finished movie. Te third part will tell the history of Hong Kong,


but


through the eyes of street dogs and Hong Kong’s colony of eagles that soar among the tallest skyscrapers. However,


they are not eagles at all,


but Black Kites. Te mention by Cheng of animals brought the conversation firmly back


View of Wu Junyong’s studio


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