Paisid Aramphongphan

　　“Pure Expectancy: Cui Xiuwen's Angel Series”

　　Final Paper, HAA 186p, Professor Wang

　　December 11, 2009

　　In Maoist China, as Richard Vine points out, image-doctoring and manipulation went hand in hand with the propagandizing of state ideology. Figures were literally erased from the photographic surface; “signs of bourgeois decadence” had to be removed. In its re-incarnation in the twenty-first century, though, image-doctoring, or more relevant to our time, photo-shopping, comes back in Cui Xiuwen's photographic series, Angels (2004) and One Day in 2004. Whereas the photo-editors of the old days scratched the surface of the negatives, or manipulated images in the dark room in a direct, hands-on contact with the emergent image, Cui's method of choice is digital, on-screen editing. The economic boom brought Chinese artists in contact with new technologies that are in turn re-shaping their artistic practice.

　　Cold and devoid of sentiments, the multiple image of the identical 13-year-old, placed seamlessly on top of the background, speaks of disjunction (Fig. 1-2). Her photographic subjects are placed in not only public but symbolic sites like in front of Mao's mausoleum (Fig. 4), but never seem aware of their surroundings. Her eyes closed, she inhabits an ambivalent space of private absorption in the public sphere, a performative enactment that does not address the spectator. In some images she seems conscious of her exotic pose, even coy, posing for a spectator that is not there, but in some others she looks on absentmindedly. In many her eyes are closed: a play on the moment of a budding sexuality, of a gendered self-consciousness (Fig 3-4). In No. 5 (Fig 2) the bright blue sky, the paleness of her flawless skin, the doll-like make-up, and the pristine white dress heighten the clinically surrealistic ambiance. The condition of publicness is complicated. Who is looking? And what is being looked at anyway?

　　Born in 1970, Cui Xiuwen is one of many avant-garde artists today who have been rigorously trained, particularly in oil painting, and in her case, graphic design, which she studied in university before enrolling at the Central Fine Arts Academy in Beijing as a painter. Vine writes that for artists steeped in the tradition of oil painting, enactment of scenes or “mise-en-scène” come naturally. This in turn provides a new twist on photography. Wu Hung has also pointed out the important contribution of contact with installation art and most significantly performance art in the 1990's. In fact the 1990's photographers, who deviated from the “documentary turn” or the more pictorialist art photography of the 1980s, were the first generation of photographers not associated with the photography establishment. Rather, they emerged onto the scene along with the performance artists. Many, like Xing Danwen, started by photographing their friends doing performance pieces in the legendary East Village. As for Cui Xiuwen, she first gained prominence as a painter in the late 1990s. Awareness of theatricality and self-reflexive probing of spectatorship have always been part of her photographic practice. Yet if other photographers of her generation, like Wang Qingsong, for example, go for the theatrical, what Karen Smith characterizes as “re-representations” in photography (Fig 5), Cui Xiuwen remains at the edge, performative but understated, putting the viewer in a complicated place, not identifying with the enigmatic figure, but also not quite a spectator (Fig 4). The slick surface of the image, gigantic in size and unified in its palette, and the multiple bodies, like a wall, both confront and close off rather than lets the viewer in. In this alternate universe, they are not objects of the voyeuristic gaze, so innocent and unaware, so unreal, yet paradoxically so close, out in the open, so many. If the documentary photograph asks to be looked at and taken as the real, if the mise-en-scène creates a distance between the spectator and the scene, allowing identification and observation without guilt, Cui Xiuwen's complex images of youth tinged with sexuality—for she is pregnant after all—makes one wonder, Is it even okay to look? The images foreground the complex condition of spectatorship, led by curiosity, if not fascination, but contaminated by guilt, put always at a distance. Theatricality, its being-staged-ness, looks back to the past, beyond the recent history of the documentary turn, towards the long history of the oil medium, and the artifice stands in contrast to the controlled artifice, the conscious manipulation of symbols and emotions, in “realist” photographs. Which medium, which tradition is more truthful? For in Cui Xiuwen, artifice as artifice is the name of the game, an important modification to the medium historically associated with veracity. But because of the closeness with oil painting, with performance art, one also begins to wonder about the claims to authenticity consciously made and/or concealed in other mediums too.

　　The image of a barren universe populated by identical, pregnant girls, “blind and groping,” their backs turned against history, as one critic puts it, poses questions about the female body, pregnancy, and sexuality, which in its social context relates to the one-child policy, instituted in 1979, incidentally the same year as the first exhibition of non state-sanctioned photographs. Cui Xiuwen reached thirteen, the age of her pubescent model, only a few years after the policy had been put in place. In an interview about her Angel series, she remarked, “From the first menstruation to the final curtain of menopause, women live with the possibility that every time they have sex they might become pregnant.” This possibility is further complicated by state policies that affect how citizens plan their private family lives. It is not so much that you could get pregnant, but pregnancy inevitably links the woman's body with that of the state , and by extension those of fellow citizens.

　　The one-child policy was successful in controlling rapid population growth, which would have been detrimental to the Chinese economy, but, as we know, it also resulted in abortions and abandonment of baby girls, not to mention, according to Vine, a surplus of 20 million unmarried males. What might it mean, then, to see rows of identical pregnant 13-year-olds standing in front of the mausoleum (Fig. 4)? She (or they) probably was a product of the one-child policy. Now copies of her are available, put together in the same image, but she is groping still, unaware of her surroundings, in front of a site of death if not decay. Even when she leans on a copy of herself (Fig. 2), or like in No. 6 (Fig 3) seemingly interact with her clones, it is not clear that there is any communication involved, any human relationships. What kind of loss, of sociality is being depicted within these scenes of expectancy? One could not help wondering further, Who is the father? All the images give us is multiple sameness and a space devoid of human presence, while the nation-state, history, the death of the Father, as symbolized in the background, still has much say over the body. Memories, loss, and the passage of time lie underneath this history of biopolitics , underneath the melancholic faces. And what of the surplus 20 million males? The answer the image provides seems to be copies of a sanitized female body, reproduced and reproducing, pubescent yet desexualized, partly because of that not-yet-a-woman stage, but also because of the ambiance surrounding her. If image-doctoring in the past usually involved absence of figures, here manipulation means multiplication, but the copies of copies are no less chilling than the absence of figures in the past.

　　The private experience of pregnancy constitutes the classic ambivalent subject position, as Melanie Klein's work on maternal ambivalence has shown. Although in Cui Xiuwen's work subjectivities are concealed underneath make-up and digital manipulation, the undercurrent of feelings, negative ones included, remain. What Harriet Evans calls the “born to be mother” ideology that governs feminine bodies comes crashing down. She may be born to be a mother, but the image does not read as such. If anything, the pregnancy, which in general circumstances would make her a “full woman,” embodying a “feminine ideal,” instead makes one think of, in Battiston's phrase, “missed purity”—a “purity” holding on to its last vestiges.

　　Yet if one's first instinct is to notice this missed purity, a loss of innocence, the next question is why? Why does “purity” in our contemporary discourse signify something outside the realm of pregnancy? Following that logic, what could a “pure,” “clean,” “innocent” female body look like but a completely desexualized body, thus losing its femininity ? And can one not posit further the connection between the problematic binary of pregnancy/purity and the worshipping of youth and virginity in a patriarchal society? The immaculateness of the images is not superficial, for when intersected with gender ideologies, it becomes clear that the cleaner, the messier. If we feel uncomfortable with the girl's pregnancy, it is not only because she is young or because pregnancy makes her all of a sudden impure, but because the questions of rape, pedophilia, and sexual violence, though never depicted, hover in the background. It is a question of consent, of the subject's self-knowledge, but of the viewer's doubting the subject being depicted.

　　On the level of the collective, if we admit that the pregnancy in the images also carry a symbolic, political charge, then a larger question is being posed as well. For, out of the womb of the unstereotypically maternal subject, doubted by but also eliciting concern if not sympathy from the viewer, there will appear a child, a future for the nation, but what kind? The manipulated images of the architectural background, too, speaks of this ambivalence, for although we can make out the locations, the background always appears abstracted, digitally manipulated, like what one would imagine it to look like rather than how it actually does (see especially Fig. 1). The cleanliness and the lack of details in the scenes evoke statis, frozen time.

　　Freud theorizes the uncanny as the moment of encounter with the repressed, which in Freudian psychoanalysis is never erased but always comes back in multiple guises, a perpetual drama of forgetting and surfacing, of absence and presence. So far we have been tracing the recent history of photography and the photographs' social background, but the image of the feminine also has a past which makes its appearance rather uncanny. In the 1960s and the 1970s, the Maoist ideology of gender equality, or to be precise, of difference elision under the sign of the masculine, produced a feminine subject that repressed her femininity—women wore clothes that resembled men's, no make up, as Mao proclaimed that women and men were equal because all were subjects of the socialist state. The problematic conception of equality and difference within this historical period has been discussed by many historians. What is particularly interesting in the context of artistic practice by women, post-Mao, is the convergence between the return of the feminine, or what Evans calls the “refeminization of the feminine image” in the public sphere and also in art making. The surfacing of the feminine, in addition, also rose along with the arrival of the market economy, as women, like Cui Xiuwen, gained independence and financial success. It is worth noting here, as Karen Smith points out, that photography was until recently an expensive medium in China. Not so long ago digital equipment would have been out of the question. Though analysis of the economic context would be outside the scope of this paper, the influx of capital and the rise of the feminine coincided under the rubric of the return of the repressed.

　　In another series published in the same catalogue, One Day in 2004 (for example, Fig 6-8) Cui Xiuwen specifically makes use of historical imagery: “white shirt, red scarf, skirt with a tartan pattern, round jet black hair,” as Maggie Ma puts it, which brings to mind the 1970s. At the same time, given the model's age and the clothes worn, more feminized than the more austere 1970's style, the image of today's Young Pioneers comes to mind (Fig.9.1, 9.2), a state-sponsored youth organization for elementary school students where the nationalist ideology of the communist state is taught. In One day in 2004 (Fig. 6) the lining-up of the girls evokes the official, public image of the school years that we see in yearbooks and historical documents. The juxtaposition of multiple bodies calls forth the multitude: conformity and sameness. Yet in another image (Fig. 7) her nascent femininity, her suggestive pose and the precariously short skirt point to a latent anxiety that comes with growing up, for both the subject and perhaps her parents. Cui Xiuwen's camera angles make this risque precariousness clear. Upon closer looking (Fig. 10) one notices that the girl is bruised. She has open wounds on her legs and wears an eye bandage. The sign of recent violence makes one pause and scrutinize, not only with curiosity but with dismay, but the precocious, latent sexuality that one may read into the images, made palpable by the traces of (sexual?) violence, makes the viewer step back in a kind of push and pull seeing.

　　Like the visibility/invisibility binary conjured up by the eye bandage she is wearing on one eye, concealment and gradual revelation structure how we read the images as history makes a comeback. The female red guards in their masculine dress were, according to Gao Minglu, known for their “violent tendencies.” Gender role, ideology, and the making of the nation-state have always been closely intertwined. In China, too, the emergence of women's organizations in early twentieth century went hand in hand with nationalism. Bruised, innocent, absent-minded, Ciu Xiuwen's girl in 2004 is as much an offspring of history as a contemporary young pioneer. The uniformity of the duplicated bodies in Cui Xiuwen harkens back to the days of social uniformity as sanctioned by the state, which cracks amidst sameness in Cui Xiuwen's photograph. In contrast, we may consider this 1958 photograph of “women militia,” in a rally “aimed at mobilizing the masses for the Great Leap Forward, which got fully underway in 1959” (Fig. 11). Unlike the row of girls in Cui Xiuwen's photographs, here the girls march forward in order to be looked at. Their audience can even be seen in the background. The image is full of presence, of crowds, of movement, whereas the alternate universe of Cui Xiuwen is quiet, isolated. And if the girls here are objects of the crowd's gaze, this is, generally speaking, not a voyeuristic gaze, but a neutral one of a multitude looking at its counterpart. The long-sleeve shirts and pants that they wear highlight this conscious downplaying of sexuality and difference. The image employs a strategy of uniformity that results in a picture of seeming solidarity, but exactly because of the difference within that sameness. The girls are not too different from one another to destroy the illusion of uniformity, but at the same time they are not duplicated images of one another. Their individual voices can still be heard, their facial expressions speak of different subjectivities, feelings, and memories. It is this difference within sameness that makes the image powerful against the backdrop of the period's political ideology. It is a visual embodiment of solidarity, of unity despite differences, of a conformity arrived at through a shared ideology, through work. If the sameness in Cui Xiuwen does not read as uniform, it is precisely because there is not enough difference.

　　In the aesthetic realm, within the trajectory of so-called feminist art in China, which Cui Xiuwen modifies and pushes in a new direction, essentialism has been part of the rise of the feminine. Gao Minglu among others has noted the emphasis on femininity in women's art, starting from the choice of medium: the use of traditionally feminine modes of making such as weaving, and the exploration of the “female consciousness” and experience starting in 1990s, informed as well by the history of recent feminist art in the West. Paradigmatic of this moment, for example, would be Yin Xiuzhen, who in her recent work creates a womb-like environment with used clothing (Fig. 12). For many women artists of in the 1990s and even now, Gao Minglu argues, hand-made, painstaking repetitive work signifies “self-cultivation of the soul.” Then came along artists like Cui Xiuwen, however, who shoots with a camera with assistants working on lighting, makeup etc (Fig. 13). She then goes on to manipulate images digitally on her computer. This is not to say that the process does not take time. Rather the end result, the slick surface and the clinical ambiance, offers no transcendence, no assertion of the artist' essential, gendered self. Even with pregnancy as a subject matter, the more common association of pregnancy with nature, maternity and the female body is made difficult to articulate, much different from the early 1990's work of Xing Danwen (Fig. 14.1, 14.2), who shows naked images of her pregnant friend while photographs of Mao can be seen in the back. The work engages with history, but in a more direct manner, visualizing the conflicting feelings of her friend and the artist herself, who grew up loving Mao in an era when one's body was conceived of as a public body. “Mao was our grandfather, an icon who filled us with love and respect,” she said. Under Mao, there was “no separation between the private world of the individual, the family, the body, and the public political realm.” For Xing Danwen, whose photographs are also large (54.4 x 163.8 cm) and who even in recent years does not employ much digital imaging , maternity as more conventionally understood and depicted is put on display in its most visceral level, while the social forces that press on the mother's body hover in the back. If Cui Xiuwen's mother-to-be appears desexualized because of her age, her seeming innocence and purity, in Xing Danwen, the mother's body, too large, too close to the viewer, also closes off sexual connotations because she is too real, too individuated, which in turn complicates its ideological milieu.

　　“Women never thought about their individuality because we all felt that we belonged to a unit: a family unit, a community unit, a social and political unit,” Xing Danwen said in an interview. The image of the woman, alone in her cramped apartment, evokes the private experience of pregnancy that cannot be conveyed visually, that is specific to each person. One senses, then, the disjunction between private and public experiences. The multiplied mothers-to-be in Cui Xiuwen, however, look introspective, in their private moments, inaccessible to the viewer, while their bodies are situated in public. One does not hear an individual voice, but neither is there a coherent unit. If pregnancy in the photographs of Xing Danwen occurs at its “natural” moment—the model is neither too young or too old—the artifice of pregnancy in Cui Xiuwen, for the 13-year-old model is not truly pregnant after all, makes one uneasy, in ways that the naked body of the mother-to-be of Xing Danwen does not. In the early 1990s, at the beginning of experimental photography, Xing Danwen presents the stark reality of pregnancy, but in 2004 Cui Xiuwen confronts us with contrivances.

　　However, Cui Xiuwen does not alienate her viewer altogether. She described her image thus: “No longer wishing to see the outside world, reality, nor to be confronted by it or to have to deal with it.” Provocative but without aggressivity, Cui Xiuwen's approach creates an alternate reality based on the real, in which the universal condition of solitude and ambivalence can be felt. For a comparison, Chen Lingyang's work, 12 Flowers Month (Fig. 15-16), in contrast, is predicated upon the biological female body, and its intrinsic condition of menstruation—the private made public, in your face. The series of photographs plays on the association in Chinese culture of twelve different kinds of flowers, each of which blooms on a different month in a year. Thus, honing in on the typical associations of femininity with flowers and the physical, monthly reality of menstruation, Chen Lingyan's work announces femininity and brings with it the discourse surrounding the female body. The use of the oval-shaped, small mirror, what we would normally associate with make-up makes explicit the connection between the face and the genitalia. Perhaps they are not too far apart from the start, Chen Lingyang seems to say, especially given the theory of the voyeuristic gaze. In the most private moment one looks in the mirror to check on one's gendered appearance before being looked at/desired in public. Chen Lingyang chose to investigate notions of femininity by addressing these typical associations head-on, expanded by the inevitable passage of time, 12 months, and passage of bodily fluid, blown up by the shiny surface, the theatricality of each scene, the vivid colors. This comparison with Chen Lingyan brings to light Cui Xiuwen's subdued but no less explosive approach. If the temporality in Chen Lingyan highlights the specific, living body in constant change, the relatively static images, lifeless, in Cui Xiuwen hang in the air, cut off from visceral physicality, speak the language of the general and the impersonal, yet at the same time they surreptitiously delivers the punch.

　　And what of the fact that the 13-year-old model was chosen based on her physical resemblance to the artist? There is something to be said about the use of a beautiful adolescent girl, reaching puberty and becoming biologically ready for reproduction, in the photographs shot by an artist in her mid-30s without a child. According to one source at least, the national average of marriage age for women in China is now 28. This gender role-state-family matrix does not leave much space for non-reproductive sexuality, for one thing, but also for alternative decisions regarding gender roles in general, while the biological clock ticks. The model may be read as the artist' daughter, but also as her surrogate body—the mother/daughter dynamic makes the distance shorter than one imagines anyway. If a common strategy among experimental artists, as Wu Hung argues, is to insert their bodies into historical sites, in Cui Xiuwen, it is her surrogate that does the work, but within a mediated, quasi-historical universe. Discussing her work, Cui Xiuwen asked, “Can a woman choose to have a baby alone, single, because she bows to maternal instinct, and does not feel the need to be married? ” The image, though, shows a different story. Too young to embody maternal instinct, the 13-year-old carries pregnancy more like it is a question.

　　Karen Smith begins her catalogue essay for the photographic series by mentioning Cui Xiuwen's good looks and feminine appeal as part of her complex identity as a woman artist living in Beijing today (Fig. 17). For it is a fact, as Smith points out, that when Cui Xiuwen emerged onto the art scene in the 1990s with her erotic oil paintings, she became known as the beautiful woman artist who did “works of sexuality.” Thus from the start not only gender informs how she created work, but also how the public received it, and arguably how she positioned herself. In addition, Ciu Xiuwen arrived at the scene when what has been described as the “beautiful woman economy” was in full bloom (and still is), in which images of sexually attractive women as defined by a particular set of beauty standard proliferated in the media, be it in advertising, television shows, or beauty contests. According to Smith, Cui Xiuwen even accepted an invitation to appear in a cameo role in a television series back in the 1990s. The experience, in fact, was crucial for her practice. She learned the technology that she would subsequently employ when she abandoned painting and moved to video and, later, photography. And so it was that from the start media culture and technology played important roles in her work.

　　We can then consider here images of women in the media when looking at these highly polished photographs of the 13-year-old, like in Angel No. 1 (Fig. 18), who because of her reserved look, not to mention her pregnancy, might in fact fail the more exhibitionistic beauty standard of popular culture. Beauty contests, which have become hugely popular in China, deal principally with the display of the ideal female body for public view. Contestants, for example, would do promotional tour of recognizable attractions. The footage would then be televised. Beauty contests depend in part on the conflation of person and place, as geography is inscribed on the body. The row of girls in the photographs with nationally symbolic architecture in the background gains another level of meaning, based on the play on exhibitionism or lack thereof (Fig.1-4, Fig. 19). Cui Xiuwen's angels come with the baggage of uncanniness, intertwined with the artist' gendered subjectivity, with questions of age, pregnancy, womanhood, and politics, which the body barely holds together. The tension lies, as Cui Xiuwen puts it, in the act of “putting adult mentality on a teenage girl,” that is to say, incongruities and disjunctions, super-imposed. It is history, too, that is being pressed against the transient, blown-up image. At times one feels that this sterile alternate universe may not be able to carry the burden, to hold off the surfacing of pathos.

　　Cui said that her work dealt with the experience of growing up, not only as a girl but also as a nation, an interesting remark that brings to mind, on the one hand, the universal experience of the personal, for as Melanie Klein theorizes, we are perpetually dealing with ambivalence and are still, no matter how old, living the psychoanalytic drama of our earliest years. But, on the other hand, the scene is political, which then again is personal. The scene of the drama is the empty space in front of the Father's mausoleum. The father-daughter dynamic of the Mao years captured so clearly in a photograph in 1957 of “young women model workers” lighting Mao's cigarette resonates in Cui Xiuwen's work —a repetition with a difference (Fig. 20). The caption of the 1957 documentary image points out further that “to receive the title model worker was a coveted honor in Mao's time.” “Self-sacrifice” for the common political ideology, in particular, was especially valued. Besides the duties that they now carried out along with men, women in these years, of course, were expected to carry pregnancy also for the public good (but do not all mothers already self-sacrifice from the start?) They can claim to be the good daughters and women of the nation-state, and of Chairman Mao. In the image, though, young women gather around Mao, who keeps his face solemn so as to close off the sexual charge of the scene, while the smiling faces of the women around him depict daughters fighting for attention of the father, all trying to please, and all enjoying the act, outwardly at least. If any inter-subjective dynamic can be read through the psychoanalytic category of transference, here the father-daughter dynamic surfaces, sexualized and interestingly displaced onto the nation-citizen dynamic, all pivoted around the patriarchal figure of Mao. They look happy lighting his “cigarette.” The stark contrast to the images created by Cui Xiuwen is self-evident—no father figure, except his grave, no happiness, no good times, only the one daughter, multiplied, ambivalent, pregnant. The comparison with this photograph enriches the reading of Cui Xiuwen's images, for it makes clear the inter-subjective dynamic that returns or is transferred onto her images, and that the images actively displace and modify with the help of the singular yet multiple figure. They never speak to one another, but their interlocuter, occupying the other end of this dynamic, is present through absence: the father, real or symbolic, and the artist as a daughter, a mother, as herself. This setting in turn inevitably pivots back to the viewer. What role does one play, what subject position does one occupy?

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　　Battiston, Eleonora. “What Would You Like to Drink? Hot Milk!” Cui Xiuwen. Cui Xiuwen = Cui Xiuwen. Beijing: Marella Gallery, 2006, 4.

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　　Erickson, Britta. China Onward the Estella Collection: Chinese Contemporary Art, 1966-2006.Humlebæk, Denmark: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2007.

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　　Smith, Karen. "Zero to Infinity: The Nascence of Photography in Contemporary Chinese Art of the 1990s." Wu Hung, Wang Huangsheng, Feng Boy Ed. Reinterpretation: a decade of experimental Chinese art (1990-2000). Guangzhou, China: Guangdong Museum of Art; Chicago, IL, USA, 2002: 35-50.

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　　Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips. Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; New York: International Center of Photography; Göttingen: Steidl Publishers; Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art; New York : Asia Society, 2004. See also http://www.hkw.de/en/programm/2006/cultural_memory/texte_2/History_and_Memory.php.

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　　List of Illustration

　　1. Angel No. 2

　　2. Angel No. 5

　　3. Angel No. 7

　　4. Angel No. 3

　　5. Wang Qingsong, Dormitory, 2005

　　6. One Day in 2004 No. 2

　　7. One Day in 2004 No. 1

　　8. One Day in 2004 No. 3

　　9. Young Pioneers

　　10. Close up of One Day in 2004 No. 1

　　11. Xiao Zhuang, untitled, 1959

　　12. Yin Xiuzhen, Introspective Cavity, used clothing

　　13. Behind the scene, Angel series

　　14. Xing Danwen, Born with the Cultural Revolution, 1995

　　15. Chen Lingyan, Twelve Moon Flowers, 1999-2000: Camelia, color photographs

　　16. Chen Lingyan, Twelve Moon Flowers, 1999-2000: Narcissus, Magnolia, Lotus, and Orchid, color photographs

　　17. Cui Xiuwen and her work

　　18. Angel No. 1

　　19. Angel No. 9

　　20. Hong Ke, untitled, 1956