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JVAP 11 (2+3) pp. 117–133 Intellect Limited 2012

Journal of Visual Art Practice Volume 11 Numbers 2 & 3

© 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jvap.11.2-3.117_1

PART ONE

Zheng Bo 罗彻斯特大学University of Rochester

From Gongren to Gongmin:

A Comparative Analysis of

Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds

and Nian

从工人到公民：对艾未未的《葵花籽》和 《念》的比较分析

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KeyWords

Chinese contemporary art

public sphereAi Weiweiparticipation

关键词中国当代艺术公共领域艾未未参与性

ABstrACt

Through a comparison of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s two recent projects, Sunflower Seeds (2010) and Nian (2010), the author identifies two models of collective art-making. In one model, the production of the art object is situated in the private sphere; those participating in the production process are hired as workers (gongren in Chinese). In the other model, participants engage as citizens (gongmin in Chinese); the artwork serves to transform private opinions into public expressions. The author argues that the second model contributes to the develop-ment of the public sphere in China.

摘要笔者通过对中国艺术家艾未未最近的两个作品，《葵花子》（2010）和 《念》（2010）的比较研究，得出了集体艺术创作的两种模式。在第一种模式中，艺术品的生产被置于私人领域中， 那些生产过程的参与者是雇用的工人。在另一种模式中，参与者成为了公民；艺术品成为公开表达私人意见的渠道。笔者认为，第二种模式有助于发展中国的公共领域。

Figure 1: Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds (2010); 100 million sunflower seeds, porcelain, paint. Installation at Tate Modern, London, UK. Courtesy: Tate Photography.

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IntroduCtIon

On 12 October 2010, Ai Weiwei’s installation Sunflower Seeds opened at Tate Modern as the eleventh installation of the Unilever series. A 100 million porcelain seeds, life-sized and individually hand-painted, covered the vast floor of the Turbine Hall. Weighing over 150 metric tons, the seeds were manufactured by 1600 craftspeople in Jingdezhen, the capital of China’s ceramics industry, over a period of two years.

Exactly five months earlier, on 12 May 2010, without the kind of media attention that would be showered on Sunflower Seeds, Ai Weiwei’s studio posted a 220-minute sound work on the Internet. Titled Nian – which means both to read and to commemorate in Chinese – the mp3 file consisted of people reading 5205 names, those of the students killed by collapsed school buildings in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The names were read aloud by about 2000 anonymous Internet users who responded to Ai’s proposal posted online two weeks earlier.

This article will not amount to a full analysis of Sunflower Seeds and Nian; instead, it will focus on one particular aspect present in both projects: the involvement of people other than the artist in the production of the artwork. The 1600 craftspeople in Jingdezhen were employed as skilled workers. Their relationship to the artist and the artwork was primarily framed by the market. They had little access to the discursive arena where debates on the artwork’s meaning occurred. In contrast, those who participated in Nian assumed the identity of citizens with rights. Their participation constituted a form of criti-cal expression in the public sphere. While Sunflower Seeds represents the individual expression of a single artist, Nian carries the collective voice of a public composed of both the artist and the participants.

These two projects point to a phenomenon increasingly visible in Chinese art practice. In addition to artists, tens of thousands of people take part in the making of Chinese contemporary art each year. Most are employed as workers; some participate as citizens. Behind the small difference in Chinese – gongren for worker and gongmin for citizen – lies two models of artistic produc-tion that are diametrically opposed. While the production of many large-scale sculptural pieces such as Sunflower Seeds depends on the silent labour of workers and often conforms to the practice of global capitalism, the making of socially engaged projects such as Nian contributes to the development of a civil society in China by providing platforms for citizens to speak.

The meaning of gongren has changed significantly over the past three decades. During the state-socialist era (1949–1976), workers were consid-ered revolutionary subjects, constituting the leading class in the great march to communism. However, as China turned towards market capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, the glory associated with gongren started to fade. According to Chinese official data, between 1998 and 2003, state-owned enterprises laid off more than 30 million workers, roughly 40 per cent of the total workforce (Yan 2010: 499). Nowadays gongren evokes not a sense of class consciousness but lower income and social status. The word is primarily used to describe people engaged in manual labour, including factory workers, craftspeo-ple and domestic helpers. The Mao-era image of a strong, proud and vocal male has been replaced by that of a young, obedient and voiceless female. While the term gongren has lost much of its political significance, the term gongmin has acquired an activist connotation. Gongmin is often invoked to emphasize the rights associated with citizenship and to challenge the

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party-state’s authoritarian power. It brackets class and social status and emphasizes equality and active participation. Gongmin is also linked to the notion of the public sphere – its literal meaning is ‘public person’. As political scientist Wang Shaoguang puts it, private individuals become gongmin only when they enter the public sphere (1991: 105).

Gongren

The production, exhibition and discussion of Sunflower Seeds reveal two discon-nects. First, western and Chinese critics interpreted the work from different perspectives – political iconography for western critics, and global capitalism for Chinese commentators – and there was no exchange between the two groups. This suggests that in light of rapid globalization of contemporary art we urgently need transnational public spheres where critical debates, in addi-tion to artworks and exhibitions, can travel across national borders. Second, the production of the physical object and the production of the meaning of the artwork were divided and situated in different social spheres. Workers who participated in the making of the object had no access to the discursive sphere where the meaning of the work was generated through public discussions.

When Sunflower Seeds opened at Tate Modern in October 2010, western critics in general received it as a provocative work, reading it primarily as a metaphor of dissent against China’s undemocratic regime. They focused on the iconography of the sunflower seed. Prompted by the artist’s own state-ment, they frequently cited two references: the sunflower as a sign of the personal cult built around Mao, and the sunflower seed as a symbol of friend-ship among common people. Both interpretations refer to the Mao era, in particular the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. David Barrett, writing for Art Monthly, mentions that ‘during the 1960s and 70s, [workers in Jingdezhen] also produced many porcelain versions of the familiar Mao Badges, the designs of which often featured the common Cultural Revolution motif of sunflowers turning their heads to face Mao’ (2011: 24). Rachel Campbell-Johnston, writ-ing for The Times, informs her readers that the sunflower seed is ‘a ubiquitous Chinese street snack that even in the darkest days of the Cultural Revolution was readily available, something that could still be shared and enjoyed in a time of poverty, repression and fear’ (2010). Some critics went further. They not only associated the work with China’s state-socialist past, but also read it as a prophetic gesture pointing to China’s democratic future. For example, Andrew Graham-Dixon writes in The Sunday Telegraph,

[…] Ai Weiwei’s multitude of seeds face and follow no one. They form a fragmented world, something atomised, smashed to rubble. And maybe that’s what they’re truly meant to portend: the fall of China’s old guard, the dismantling of the totalitarian system, which will take place as surely as every tide will always turn. His sunflower seeds are a softly spoken message to the people Ai Weiwei loves and whose masters he condemns. Sooner or later China will have to change. One day, all those seeds will grow.

(2010)

While the critics associated Sunflower Seeds with China’s past and future, they made little effort to relate the work to China’s current socio-political situation.

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1. Currently, the porcelain seeds made for Ai Weiwei’s project are being sold on Chinese website alibaba.com for 1.6 yuan per piece for any order larger than 100 pieces. Most likely Ai would have paid a lower price given the size of his order. Even at 1.6 yuan per piece, Sunflower Seeds would have contributed 160 million yuan to Jingdezhen’s economy over a period of two years, roughly 0.6 per cent of the total output value of the city’s ceramics industry in 2009 and 2010. The output value of Jingdezhen’s ceramics industry was ten billion yuan in 2009 and sixteen billion yuan in 2010.

The production that made the massive installation possible was not scrutinized, but rather readily welcomed as a benevolent gesture. In the documentary video produced by Tate that shows glimpses of the production process in Jingdezhen, Ai explains that many women painting the seeds were rescued from unemployment. Guardian critic Adrian Searle, possibly cued by Ai’s statement, makes a further claim: ‘the town that once made porcelain for the imperial court has been saved from bankruptcy by making sunflower seeds’ (2010: 11). However, even on high estimate, contribution from the Tate installation would have accounted for less than 1 per cent of Jingdezhen’s ceramics revenue.1 Barrett argues that Sunflower Seeds ‘is not another exam-ple of the exploitation of China’s population of unskilled migrant work-ers’ because the project ‘has helped to support traditional craft production in numerous small-scale, village-led workshops’ (2011: 24). Yet small-scale production is not an antidote to exploitation, and corruption is known to be a serious problem in Chinese village governance. Tate has not disclosed the project’s financial details to the public, making a meaningful debate on the ethics of production difficult.

Produced in enormous quantity, predominantly by female labour, for export, the production of Sunflower Seeds was similar to that of many Chinese commodities. It was also troubled by safety issues often found in Chinese manufacturing. Soon after the exhibition opened, Tate decided to retract its original plan to let viewers walk on the installation because, as stated on its website, ‘the interaction of visitors with the sculpture can cause dust which could be damaging to health following repeated inhalation over a long period of time’ (Tate Modern 2010). Two months later, Tate also disclosed that traces of lead were found in the material of the seeds and in the dust. Insisting that the installation was safe for visitors in London, Tate made no mention of whether the workers in China had been exposed to health hazards during the manufacturing process. In the documentary video, not a single worker in Jingdezhen was seen wearing a mask when moulding, painting or packaging the seeds.

Unlike western reviewers, Chinese critics showed little interest in read-ing Sunflower Seeds iconographically. Focusing on the work’s massive scale, they paid close attention to the project’s relation to global capitalism and geopolitics. Independent curator Fu Xiaodong writes, ‘Outsourced, enor-mous capital input, factories for a single artwork of a great artist, [the produc-tion model of contemporary art] has reached its pinnacle, and at the same time, its end’ (Anon 2010a). Pu Hong, a writer and architect, asks, ‘When Ai Weiwei’s work, an unprecedented spectacle, wins a round of applause in the West, when his fans eagerly dance the “democracy numbers” in order to win a ticket to the western mainstream, how meaningful is this kind of luxurious democracy to China’ (Anon 2010a). Critic Cheng Meixin argues that Sunflower Seeds’ enormous size and waste of resources ‘is no different from the Chinese government’, which has an insatiable appetite for large-scale projects. He writes, ‘luxurious art projects based on massive consumption is fundamen-tally a negation of the ordinary human being’ (Cheng 2010). Many comments posted on the Internet expressed similar criticism: ‘So wasteful of labour and resources, so not environmental’ (Anon 2010b); ‘But he had laowai [foreign-ers] paying for it and liking it’ (Anon 2010c); ‘So damn wasteful. It would be perfect for the [Shanghai] World Expo. If he wants to address this issue, why not just bring the audience to take a look at Foxconn [a contract manufacturer with over 900,000 workers in China]’ (Anon 2010d).

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The comments in the Chinese discussion reveal an almost exclusion-ary interest in the present. Sunflower Seeds was not received as a critique of the Mao era, but as an immense project similar to the doings of the current government, which is fixated on economic growth based on high investment and cheap labour, often at the expense of the environment. Chinese commen-tators were also more sensitive to the fact that Sunflower Seeds was made in China and being exhibited in the West. Although many may have shared with their western colleagues the desire for a democratic future, they felt indigna-tion towards the often overly prescriptive attitude of the West, as exemplified in the statement made by Graham-Dixon quoted above.

Conspicuously, the voice of the workers who manufactured the 100 million seeds was missing in the discursive arena where the meaning of the artwork was debated. The workers did not participate in the discussion on their own, nor were they asked to by the artist or any critic, Chinese or western. In the Tate documentary video, the workers’ relationship to the art project was framed purely as one based on labour. Most of the shots show them working silently. We see Ai Weiwei talking to several workers on a few occasions, but none of the conversations go beyond production-related issues. In one scene, entering a room where about 100 women sit around large tables painting the seeds, Ai looks around, photographs one worker at close range with his mobile phone while she is painting, and talks with another briefly about the quality of the cast. Ai is the client who has come to the factory to check on the progress of his order; the women are well-behaved labourers who keep to their work, responding only when asked. In another scene, Ai thanks a girl for ‘painting many seeds’. Giggling, she replies, ‘No need to thank me. After all I did earn some money from it’. Ai then enquires as to how many pieces she has painted. She thinks for a moment, unable to recall the number, and answers, ‘Anyway, I painted for about 2000 to 3000 yuan’.

Throughout the video, we see Ai and the workers in Jingdezhen limiting their interaction to that between a client and labourers, never engaging in discussions about socio-political issues that would dominate the interpreta-tion of Sunflower Seeds when it was exhibited in London. The only conversa-tion that approaches politics is between Ai and a senior woman while she is painting the seeds in a home workshop together with several younger women. After learning that she has been painting porcelain for more than 30 years, Ai asks whether she has painted the image of Mao in the past. She says no, she has not. Ai follows, ‘so not everyone could paint him’. She does not respond and keeps working. The soundtrack then cuts to a voice-over by Ai, explaining that,

In the political area, you can see all the paintings always have sunflower seeds. Whenever Chairman Mao comes out, there are sunflowers around him. That means Chairman Mao is the sun, and all the ordinary people loyal to the party are sunflowers. So sunflowers supported the whole revolution, spiritually and in material ways.

While the conversation between Ai and the woman was carried out in Chinese, Ai delivered this statement in English. It is clear that ‘you’ no longer refers to the woman in Jingdezhen, but the documentary’s assumed viewer at Tate Modern in London, including western critics, many of whom relayed the sunflower’s political reference in their reviews.

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The documentary contains two kinds of scenes. Episodes filmed in Jingdezhen focus on the production of the object, which is situated in the economic sphere driven primarily by private ownerships, employment contracts and monetary incentives. Sensitive aspects of this process, such as financial transactions between factory owners and the artist or his agent, remain hidden from public view. The other set of scenes, featuring the artist talking about his project, are situated in the public sphere and concern the production of the meaning of the artwork. The subject matter discussed is limited to aesthetics and politics, excluding economic issues critical to object production. The viewer is assumed to be English-speaking, interested in and capable of conversing about art and politics. When Sunflower Seeds was exhib-ited at Tate Modern, interactive video kiosks were installed to allow visitors to record questions and comments for Ai, who would then respond to some of them online. While Tate visitors were invited to join the discursive arena, the workers in Jingdezhen had been relegated to the private sphere of object production, never being able to assume the identity of discoursing citizens to participate in the public sphere of meaning production. The artist serves as the only link between object production and meaning production.

The partition between object production and meaning production – and consequently the exclusion of workers from the public sphere – is not unique to transnational art projects such as Sunflower Seeds. Much of the so-called public art today is still plagued by this schizophrenic situation. But transna-tional practice does exacerbate the problem. Had the 100 million porcelain seeds been produced by workers in the United Kingdom, the British public would likely have paid much more attention to the project’s production and financing, and found the absence of the workers’ voice problematic.

To overcome the disconnect between the western artistic public sphere and the Chinese artistic public sphere will require building transnational platforms. (This special issue is such an effort.) To overcome the disconnect

Figure 2: Diagram; two disconnects in Sunflower Seeds.

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2. Almost all schools in China are run by the government. Private schools, a recent phenomenon, only exist in large cities where affluent parents can afford to pay higher tuition fees.

3. Ai Xiaoming (b. 1953) is a professor in the Chinese Literature Department at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou. Over the past decade she has become one of the leading figures in Chinese activism. The four documentaries are Our Children (Wo men de wa wa), Investigation by Citizens (Gong min diao cha), Why Are the Flowers So Red (Hua er wei shen me zhe yang hong) and Sichuan Forgotten (Wang chuan). They can be watched online at: http://vimeo.com/14657507.

4. Liu Jiakun (b. 1956) is a Chengdu-based architect. He met Hu Huishan’s parents when he went to Juyuan after the earthquake. According to Liu’s blog, he was deeply moved by the parents’ love of their daughter, so he decided to build a small memorial for her. Hu Huishan Memorial was erected in the compound of Jianchuan Museum Cluster, a private museum established by real estate developer Fan Jianchuan in Anren, Sichuan. For more information about the project, see http://blog. sina.com.cn/s/blog_ 49e53b730100ebvm.html

between object production and meaning production will require building strong public spheres accessible to all citizens. This is a daunting task in China today because we face an authoritarian party-state and a capitalist economy, and the two interests are increasingly aligned. Wang Hui recently wrote that ‘the new workers’ silence in the political sphere is one of the most impor-tant characteristics of contemporary Chinese politics’ (2012). Workers do not develop social relations in the workplace; each is linked to capital ‘individu-ally’ (Wang 2012). How can art contribute to the building of a public sphere in China? How can we bring publicness into the creative process and enable participants to act not as workers – or not only as workers – but as citizens? Let us now turn to Ai Weiwei’s other project, Nian, to seek some answers.

Gongmin

The sound file is played. Silence, for about two seconds. ‘Cao Zi Yan’ – a female voice emerges, reading a name, pronouncing each character fully. The recording is so clear that we feel as if she were standing in front of us, reading the name to us. After a short break of silence, a male voice reads, ‘Du Xin’. His tone is just as formal as that of the first reader, but we notice the difference in sound quality. ‘Du Xi Peng’, a female voice continues, slow and medita-tive. We can hear a tail sound lingering on after each syllable. Perhaps she was recording in an empty room, in an effort to turn the simple reading into a solemn ritual. ‘Yu Jing …’, a soft voice murmurs and we have trouble making out the last character. It seems that the reader has pressed the recorder’s stop button too hastily, so the last syllable is truncated. ‘He Chuan’, an accented female voice follows. The way she pronounces ‘Chuan’ is typical of southern Chinese, who cannot easily distinguish ‘-n’ and ‘-ng’. By this point, the fact that we are listening to a sound file assembled from a large number of discrete recordings becomes apparent. Even though each reading event lasts for only two or three seconds, the difference in tone, pitch, volume, speed, rhythm and accent is easily detectable. Or perhaps it is because we are listening atten-tively, for we know that the names belong to the students who were killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

On 12 May 2008, a deadly earthquake struck the northern part of Sichuan province, killing nearly 70,000 people. A few days after the earthquake, some careful readers, by piecing together various news reports, pointed out that a large number of collapsed structures were school buildings. In the town of Xiang-e, residents told one reporter that over 300 students were killed at Xiang-e Middle School, ‘more than triple the number killed throughout the rest of the town’ (Areddy 2008). Some parents started to question whether the school buildings were poorly constructed and government corruption was the root cause.2 A critical concern quickly emerged on the Internet and in printed media. The government first promised to conduct a thorough investi-gation. Then, a year later, the provincial government announced that ‘no case of building collapse in the earthquake has been found to be caused by prob-lems of construction quality’ (Anon 2009). Since then, no more reports have been issued by the government and the contentious issue has disappeared from public media.

A few activists – Ai Weiwei among them – refused to let the issue vanish. Ai Xiaoming, a professor at Sun Yat-Sen University, produced four documentaries on the issue.3 Architect Liu Jiakun built a small memorial for Hu Huishan, a student killed at Juyuan Middle School.4 In February 2009,

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5. Ai Weiwei and Tan Zuoren were doing similar work, but they did not know each other in person. When Tan was arrested, Ai and five volunteers went to Chengdu, hoping to testify on behalf of Tan. In Chengdu, Ai was beaten by local police and prevented from going to court. Ai captured the clash on tape and included it in his documentary Lao Ma Ti Hua.

Chengdu-based activist Tan Zuoren posted an open letter on the Internet, calling for the establishment of an independent archive for the students killed in the earthquake. In March, Tan, assisted by Xie Yihui, published an online report based on his own investigative work. He was arrested a few days later on charges of incitement to subvert state power. In spring 2010 Tan was sentenced to five years in prison. In spring 2009 Ai Weiwei was also work-ing on compiling information about the students killed in the earthquake.5 He titled the project Citizens’ Investigation. The word ‘investigation’ – diaocha in Chinese – was appropriated from Mao-era political vocabulary. Mao wrote many ‘investigative reports’ early in his career, including the famous ‘Report on an investigation of the peasant movement in Hunan’ (1927), and established ‘investigation’ as a standard practice of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). By connecting ‘citizen’ to the official word ‘investigation’, Ai and other activists high-lighted citizens’ right to hold the state responsible rather than the usual oppo-site. They sent hundreds of requests to various levels of the government, asking for information related to student deaths. However, their requests were repeat-edly turned down. At the same time, more than 30 volunteers went to Sichuan in person, visited towns where schools had collapsed and gathered informa-tion directly from local residents. After half a year’s difficult work – they were frequently detained by local police – they produced a list of 5205 names, together with each student’s gender, date of birth, age, school and class.

Nian was produced in spring 2010, on the occasion of the second anniversary of the earthquake. On 12 April, Ai sent out a Twitter message, asking people to read one or a few names from the list of killed students and e-mail the sound file to his studio. Within a week, around 2000 e-mails were

Figure 3: Ai Xiaoming, An Investigation by Citizens (2010); documentary video (stills).

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6. This process is described in the e-mail sent out to all participants when the project was completed.

7. ‘Tofu-dreg project’ is a common phrase used to describe construction projects of poor quality.

8. It could be played online, downloaded from file storage websites, or obtained via peer-to-peer application eMule. I was able to access the file in China in summer 2011. However, in spring 2012, I could no longer access the file without using a VPN service to get around the firewall maintained by the state.

received and all of the names were read. Ai’s assistants then concatenated individual recordings into a single mp3 file and posted it online.6 The follow-ing short text was included in the online announcement:

Nian is a work from twitter friends to the students killed in the Sichuan earthquake, expressing [our] mourning for the passing of innocent lives and anger for [the government’s] covering up of the facts of tofu-dreg [projects].7 Respect life, refuse to forget.

(Ai Weiwei Studio 2010)

The sound file was circulated online using different technologies.8 I have recounted the activist activities surrounding the issue of student

deaths because I want to make it clear that Nian was not all Ai Weiwei did, and Ai was not the only person working on this issue. Though framed mainly as an art project, Nian was not separate from other activist activities.

Tan Zuoren, Ai Xiaoming, Ai Weiwei and other activists did not consider their actions to be anything extraordinary. In their eyes, what they did was simply what responsible citizens should do. Tan wrote in his open letter, ‘Everyone of us Chinese still possessing some conscience should feel guilty to these children and shoulder some responsibility’ (2010). Ai Weiwei stated in an interview, ‘I always believe, the responsiveness and transparency of the government in handling public matters depends on supervision. […] If citizens do not ask for accountability, it will leave space for corruption and the abuse of power’ (Zhang 2009). Why did the government react so strongly to the activists, to the extreme of putting some of them in jail? Activism is grounded in the legitimacy of citizens’ rights, and more specifically, the right of citizens to obtain public information, to express views on public matters and to subject government operation to the scrutiny of public opinion. On the one hand, citizens’ rights, including the right to access public information and the right of freedom of speech, are clearly written in Chinese law. On the other hand, the state routinely installs roadblocks to prevent the realization of these rights, and when it deems necessary, suppresses them outright. The root cause of this contradiction lies in the incompatibility of rights with China’s authoritar-ian system. Rights of citizens are not natural rights, but rights granted by the state. The state, itself limitless, can set limits to rights.

Any activity propagating the idea that something lies outside the state poses a fundamental challenge. The activists were treated seriously by all levels of the government not simply because they might have discovered indisput-able evidence that would pinpoint certain corrupt officials. More importantly, their activities sent out a dangerous message: citizens have the right to engage in activities independent of the state and critical of the state. They suggested that the state’s identification with the people is not automatic, the power of the state not absolute. As political theorist Claude Lefort observes, ‘the logic of the system prevents it from accepting any opinion which may be seen as a sign that social life is external to power, that there is an otherness in the social sphere’ (1986: 251). While the activists and the parents pursued the same goal – both groups demanded thorough investigation of the issue – the parents posed less threat to the system. They sought help within the existing state apparatus to relieve their private grievances. They petitioned to higher levels of the government to investigate the issue and punish lower-level officials. They persisted in their struggle because of private reasons: they have lost their children. The activists had no personal connections to the

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victims, and they acted outside the state, treating the state as an equal, chal-lenging its absolute authority.

Nian also forms a sharp contrast to the propaganda of the state. Ai Weiwei’s team posted the sound work on the Internet on 12 May 2010, the second anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake. The intention of the project was made clear in the last sentence of the accompanying text: ‘Respect life, refuse to forget’. On the same day, what occupied the official media was not remembrance of those killed in the earthquake, but exaltation of the state itself. The state-run Xinhua News Agency issued a long article, titled ‘Great strength to create earthly miracle – revelations from Wenchuan earthquake reconstruction’, which was picked up by most major newspapers and televi-sion networks. Calling the speedy reconstruction in the earthquake area an ‘earthly miracle’, the authors declared that,

This earthly miracle was created by the strategic manoeuvres, decisive actions, and scientific actions of the Party’s Central Committee and the State Council, which galvanized the strength of the entire nation, relied on the enormous advantages of socialism with Chinese characteristics, relied on the selfless devotion of all constructers, especially the Party officials, and relied on the independent, indomitable national spirit.

(Anon 2010e)

Inserting itself next to the state’s glorification campaign, Nian occupied a critical position. Its criticism of the state is not direct, but implied. It does not name the state as the target of its refusal. In an authoritarian society, criticism of the state does not need to be explicit. Any statement different from the official version, any focus of attention beyond the official domain, is under-stood as an expression of criticism of the state, by both the state and anyone familiar with the operation of authoritarianism.

Nian’s oppositional stance to the state goes beyond its subject matter and central message. The kind of relationality in this work is fundamentally differ-ent from that contained in the ‘Revelations’ article. In the ‘Revelations’ article, individuals are always referred to not only by their names but also by their official positions: Hu Jintao, General Secretary of the CCP; Jia Zhengfeng, Baoshan Village Party Secretary; Xu Zhenxi, Commander of the Shandong Unit of the Reconstruction ‘Army’. Even an ordinary villager like Wang Quan has a title-like descriptor: member of Unit 4 of Chaping Village of Daguan Township. This makes it possible for the reader to quickly locate each indi-vidual in the social totality, organized in the form of a giant pyramid. Orders are transmitted downward; in a few rare occasions petitions are submitted upward. The categories in this pyramid were constructed in the state-socialist era and continue to operate today. Relationality in this pyramid is static. Since nothing can exist outside the state, there is no need for any kind of relational-ity other than that permanently imprinted in this pyramid.

In Nian, three groups of people are present: the students killed in the earthquake whose names are read, those online participants who perform the reading, and the listeners to the sound work. The only information contained in this sound work is the students’ names. We could look up the students in the list published by Citizens’ Investigation and obtain some further informa-tion. For example, we would learn that Cao Zi Yan, whose name was read first, was 11 years old when the earthquake happened, a student of Grade 5, Class 2 at Xinjian Primary School. About the second group, the readers, we

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know nothing except the qualities of their voice. They remain anonymous, devoid of identities. We can only describe them as readers, derived from their form of activity in this particular art project. Unlike ‘Party Secretary’, ‘reader’ is not a permanent title; it is associated with only transient partici-pation. Doubtless these readers also live in the Chinese pyramid, like those individuals meticulously positioned in the ‘Reflections’ article, but their status in the state bears no significance to their relation to the students. The readers and the students were linked only by the readers’ act of reading. Most likely the readers did not know the students personally. How should we describe this relationality? It is not kinship, friendship, comradeship or partnership. Literary scholar Michael Warner has given it a peculiar name: stranger- relationality (2002: 74–76).

With modernity, strangerhood has become a normal feature of social life. ‘In modern society, a stranger is not as marvellously exotic as the wander-ing outsider would have been to an ancient, medieval, or early-modern town’ (Warner 2002: 75). With newspapers, television and now the Internet, even if I do not know you personally, we still share a wide range of common under-standings, from food prices to fashion trends, from recent events to social imaginaries. On the other hand, to recognize someone as a stranger is to admit that there is still something unknown in that person. Often strangers make us nervous because we lack any existing framework to structure our relationship to them. To be willing to encounter a stranger is to be willing to discover potential agreements as well as differences. Stranger-relationality is never given and always carries risk.

In contemporary China, several forces are working against the idea of stranger-relationality. As discussed earlier, the party-state does not recognize strangers. A person’s position in the state pyramid casts him or her into a predefined character with stringent requirements of performance. Individuality is dissolved. How two persons should interact, regardless of whether they have known each other for decades or have just met, is determined by their relative positions in the system. During the Mao era, the notion of a stranger, someone who could have different preferences and alternative thinking, was eliminated. Those few who dared to be ‘strange’ were declared enemies of the people. A person’s relation to the state, the so-called organizational relation (in Chinese, zuzhi guanxi), trumped all other types of relations: friendship, reli-gious membership, kinship and sometimes even marriage (Vogel 1965: 46–60). After the market reform was initiated in the late 1970s, the state started to allow some freedom and flexibility, mostly in economic affairs. Gradually people gained mobility in their employment and residence. Economic devel-opment enabled different lifestyles in the material sense. A large portion of the population – urban residents and migrant labourers – untangled themselves from the fixity of the state pyramid. However, while the state has allowed the market to develop and gain a certain degree of autonomy, it has rejected calls for political reform. Freedom of expression and freedom of association are still largely prohibited. Grass-roots efforts to build civil society organizations are met with constant suppression. A serious consequence of this one-sided reform is that, while distance is now firmly established in urban conscious-ness, interaction between persons is predominantly motivated by interest: would I gain something financially from my interaction with you? A market mentality encourages transaction but not relationality.

In Nian, stranger-relationality was established through the act of mourn-ing. Traditionally, mourning occurs only among family members and friends.

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It depends on a pre-existing kinship or friendship and marks the end of such a relationship. Collective mourning is orchestrated only by the state, for political leaders and state-recognized heroes such as soldiers killed in combat. After the earthquake in 2008, the government for the first time set a date for national mourning for civilians killed in the disaster. Nian initiated a different kind of mourning: it was not based on private attachment, not organized by the state and not for an aggregative body. Connections were established between individual readers and individual students. By recognizing the loss, mourning marked the beginning of a relationship rather than the end of it. Though the resulting work can be understood as a commemoration of the entire group of killed students, the specificity of each act of mourning is sustained through the identification of the student’s name and the unique texture of the read-er’s voice. Nian constitutes public mourning also in the sense that the readers engaged in making their expressions public. It was different from a parent reading his or her child’s name at home. The readers understood that their recordings would be posted on the Internet, to be listened to by strangers. The act of addressing an unknown public of listeners carried a higher level of risk than private mourning.

In Nian, stranger-relationality characterizes two other groups of relations in addition to those between the readers and the students. First, the relation-ship between the readers and Ai Weiwei’s team, which served as the project’s initiator, coordinator and editor, was also based on the readers’ participation alone, without any external structural support. This relationship began when a reader paid attention to the Twitter message sent out by Ai (and forwarded by others). It was extended when the reader made his or her recording and sent it to Ai’s team. It ended when he or she received an e-mail from Ai’s team, informing him or her of the completion of the sound work and thank-ing him or her for his or her participation. He or she did not join an organiza-tion or receive a reward. The relationship was transient and situated within the project only. Second, when someone listens to the sound work, he or she also enters into a relationship with strangers: the students, the readers and Ai’s team. He or she comes into contact with them without knowing them. This relationship too lacks permanence or institutional basis. The listener can choose to end the relationship at any time by clicking the stop button. No matter how many times he or she listens to the mp3 file, he or she does not become a friend, a relative or a colleague. He or she remains a stranger to those in the work, as they do to him or her, though a connection has been established by his or her mere act of listening.

In the Chinese context, stranger-relationality might be better called citizen-relationality. As discussed earlier, in the modern world strangers are not completely strange to one another because they share a wide range of common understandings. The notion of citizens endowed with rights is one of the funda-mental principles underlying this shared horizon. Citizen-relationality makes it clear that this is something between persons with equal rights, not determined by their status, class, gender or other differential criteria. It can be formed outside the state, constituting a challenge to the latter’s totalizing power.

Nian created a counterpublic, which, in Nancy Fraser’s words, is a discursive arena where ‘members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppo-sitional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs’ (1990: 67). Warner argues that the oppositional character of a counterpublic is not ‘a function of its content alone’ (2002: 119). Counterpublics not only produce

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9. CCTV stands for China Central Television, the network directly controlled by the central government.

counterdiscourses, but also mobilize different speech genres, modes of address and mediums of communication. In the bourgeois public sphere, ration-al-critical debate is considered the most appropriate form of discourse because it enables the conception that expressions are ‘propositionally summarizable’. It allows opinions to be transposed ‘from local acts of reading or scenes of speech to a general horizon of public opinion’, acquiring a ‘volitional agency’ to ‘deliberate and then decide’. In this process, ‘the poetic or textual qualities of any utterance are disregarded in favor of sense’ (Warner 2002: 105–06). Counterpublics often cannot afford this kind of abstraction. Imagine, in the case of Nian, if we were to strip away all of the poetic-expressive qualities of personal recordings, the sound work would be reduced to nothing but a cold, accentless narration of the students’ names. It would lose its opposi-tional flavour, becoming identical to a standard broadcast of the state, just like how the aforementioned ‘Reflections’ article was delivered by CCTV’s robot-like anchors.9 The sound work cannot be summarized, restated or transferred to another medium such as printed text. As Mladen Dolar notes, we tend to treat the voice only as ‘the material support of bringing about meaning’, and ‘the voice itself is like the Wittgensteinian ladder to be discarded when we have successfully climbed to the top – that is, when we have made our ascent to the peak of meaning’ (2006: 15). Yet it is clear that the significance of Nian lies in the materiality of the voice. As each name is read, we can perceive distinct qualities of the reader’s voice: accent, pace, timbre, pitch, resonance, cadence and so on. ‘The voice is like a fingerprint, instantly recognizable and identifiable’ (Dolar 2006: 22). Thus, we understand each reading as something personal. In Aristotle’s words, voice is ‘a kind of sound characteristic of what has soul in it’ (Aristotle). The linkage between voice and soul also points to a traditional ritual in China: jiaohun, calling out the name of a deceased person or a sick child so that his or her lost soul can return to the body, has long been practiced in many parts of China (Jiang 1989).

While the form of the work alludes to Chinese traditional culture, its production relied on recent technologies. The Internet as a platform was stra-tegic for the creation of Nian because, among existing media, it offers the great-est possibility to evade state censorship, to engage strangers and to mobilize a critical discourse. Furthermore, unlike traditional media, the Internet allows different formats – text, image, sound, video – to be carried on the same plat-form. In particular, it has greatly reduced the cost of transmitting and circulat-ing non-textual materials, thus benefiting counterpublic forms of expression. The network’s distributed architecture is essentially antithetical to the hierar-chical organization of the state. In most situations information is spread later-ally, from a user to his or her social network, rather than vertically, from a higher-level official to his or her subordinates. Ai’s team could receive over 2000 recordings within a week because people reposted his original message on different websites, greatly extending its reach. Once the final work was posted online, it was quickly duplicated via peer-to-peer download. The repli-cation of the file ensured its accessibility against impending state censorship.

In Nian, the role of the artist was fundamentally different from that of the artist in a more conventional work such as Sunflower Seeds. In Sunflower Seeds, the primary task of the artist was to craft a powerful object to convey his own critical expression. In Nian, the artist concerned himself with creat-ing not an object to represent his individual opinion, but a discursive space for other people – strangers, citizens – to make their expressions public. Some participants may already have formed their judgement on the issue of student

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deaths before their involvement; what the project enabled them to accom-plish was the transformation from private opinion to public expression. Risk is always involved in making things public. The artist had to calibrate the level of risk to achieve criticality on one hand, and to ensure safety for the partici-pants on the other. He did not devote himself to documenting his personal encounter with strangers, but rather to building a platform for other citizens to forge relationships with strangers, and furthermore, to make such stranger-relationality visible. Nian constituted a challenge to the state not only because it refused to forget about the students killed in the Sichuan earthquake, but because it mounted this refusal by creating a public of strangers to mourn for the students. It was not a single artist’s defiant gesture, but a concatenation of discrete oral performances that foregrounded stranger-relationality. The public nature of its production is central to its contestation against state power.

In spring 2011 Ai Weiwei, along with four of his associates, was detained for over two months. Though the government claimed that he was being inves-tigated for tax evasion, it is widely believed that he was yet another victim in the state’s crackdown on activism. The exhibition of Sunflower Seeds in London provided western media with an opportunity to criticize China’s political system, and it was certainly an annoyance to the Chinese government. But it is works such as Nian that pose a more serious challenge to the party-state, as they engage people living in China not as workers silently producing objects for export, but as citizens with rights to speak, to mourn, to ask and to criticize.

ACKnoWledgements

The author would like to thank Katie Hill, Douglas Crimp, Rachel Haidu, John Osburg, Christopher Balme, Sohl Lee and Shing Yuk Chow for their valuable comments.

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suggested CItAtIon

Bo, Z. (2012), ‘From Gongren to Gongmin: A comparative analysis of Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds and Nian’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 11: 2+3, pp. 117–133, doi: 10.1386/jvap.11.2-3.117_1

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ContrIButor detAIls

Zheng Bo is a Beijing-based artist and writer. As a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Rochester, he is completing his dissertation on the relation-ship between Chinese contemporary art and the public sphere. He teaches at China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. His art project Karibu Islands has been featured in the 2008 Guangzhou Triennial and the 2010 Auckland Triennial.

Contact: Visual & Cultural Studies, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA.E-mail: mr.bo.zheng@gmail.comWeb address: http://tigerchicken.com

Zheng Bo has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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