This Museum Wanted to Show Performance Art, So It Brought In a Weird Band | 100 People With Ideas

But the curator soon realized: "The performance is only a way to lead the audience into their art world."

Curator Fu Liaoliao wanted to stage a concert inside an art museum. She decided that last June, after watching the band Maywa Denki play.

The musicians came onstage at the Shenzhen Maker Faire in the sky-blue overalls Japanese factory workers once wore, and introduced themselves as the "president" and the "employees" of Maywa Denki. "President" Novmichi Tosa looked more like a lecturer than a performer: the homemade instruments Maywa Denki plays are so odd that he has to spend several minutes between songs explaining them. When an instrument failed, Tosa showed no sign of panic. He would shout "Broken!" in a clownish voice, and when he shouted "Switch On!" again, it meant the music was about to start.

"None of that would be allowed at an ordinary concert," Fu Liaoliao said. Even at a maker faire full of novelties, she decided quickly that Maywa Denki was "unlike anything I had seen before."

The museum where Fu Liaoliao works, the Ming Contemporary Art Museum (McaM) in Shanghai, was looking for exactly that kind of "unlike anything before." Its director, Qiu Zhijie, a professor at the School of Intermedia Art at the China Academy of Art, helped organize one of China's earliest exhibitions on video art back in 1996. He wants to make performance art the core of the whole museum.

Multimedia has been changing the art world, and more and more artists now make video installations and interactive installations. "These works are performative by nature," Qiu Zhijie told a reporter from The Beijing News last year. But in China, no museum has presented that mix professionally; they have all missed an "obvious trend" of the past two decades. Because McaM followed the trend, Qiu said, cultural institutions of every kind were already crowding in before the museum officially opened.

Audiences looked eager too. They wanted to see something new.

On January 23, the day Maywa Denki opened on the main stage in McaM's exhibition hall, more than 300 people poured into the museum. The seats built out of the old factory's wide staircase were packed, and the open floor near the stage filled up with people standing.

McaM may be the venue in Shanghai best suited to Maywa Denki. Converted from the old Shanghai Papermaking Machinery Factory, it still smells of industry. From a distance, the patchy red brick walls and the repainted iron workshop doors sit easily beside a name as factory-like as "Maywa Denki." What startles you is the light box for the sign, with the museum's English and Chinese names on it.

Even the interior, rebuilt to hold exhibitions, keeps giving the factory away: bare roof beams play against the whitewashed walls around them, and the rusty rebar poking out of the second-floor railings is wrapped in white foam, a plain warning to keep your distance.

As the name suggests, Maywa Denki was once a real factory. It was founded in Japan in the 1960s and went under a dozen years later in the oil crisis. In 1994, the brothers Masamichi Tosa and Novmichi Tosa turned Maywa Denki into a strange band with the manner of a machine shop. Besides playing in work uniforms, they design, build and sell all sorts of mechanical "products."

Fu Liaoliao had meant to move the maker-faire concert into the museum as it was. But last September, "president" Novmichi Tosa brought work far richer than a stage show, including an illustrated catalogue of every instrument "product" the company has made.

These "products" have no practical use. Most run on a 100-volt current that drives a mechanism to strike a sound. That is all. Apart from being carried onstage as instruments, they are mostly collected and played with. One of them, the Electric Tadpole, sells for about 400 yuan and has sold 120,000 units over the past 20 years. Tosa calls them "Nonsense Machines," and explaining the name, he said it is "precisely because they are so meaningless" that they "may keep giving people ideas" — which is more or less how you would talk about a work of contemporary art.

The two sides finally agreed that the band would play live only on the first two days of the show. For the rest of the run, a "puppet" band strapped into the instruments would stand on the stage in place of the real musicians. Every so often the stage lights would come up, the instruments would switch on and play by themselves, and the museum was confident a crowd would gather anyway.

"The performance is only Maywa Denki's way of leading the audience into their art world," Fu Liaoliao said. Tosa won her over quickly. In a sense this is a band whose instruments matter more than its shows. What began as a plain live concert became the largest exhibition in Maywa Denki's history, with more than 100 works — nearly every "product" this "old factory" has turned out in 20 years:

the Tsukuba Series of early mechanical instruments that often appear onstage (named by former president Masamichi Tosa in tribute to his alma mater, the University of Tsukuba); the Fish Instrument Series, which asks "who am I" from a fish's point of view; the Sound Series, full of "face" motifs and odd noises; and the somewhat heavy, hard-to-read Edelweiss.

Let us try to explain how these works are more "performative."

In the two small rooms of the Tsukuba Series, projectors run Maywa Denki's own introduction to each instrument, one by one. Take the Finger-Snap Wooden Fish. The video shows it clearly: flip the power switch on its "chest" and a huge pair of "wings" opens behind it; snap your fingers and the mechanical wooden fish at the wingtips knock against each other.

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Edelweiss was new work from Maywa Denki in 2001. They built more than a dozen installations across five separate rooms, among them the Crying Sheep, which drips water from its horns into a pool below. The whole piece uses space and machinery to tell what Tosa calls a "film script."

The audience's idea of "performance" is probably more direct and more excitable, and this art stuck between performance and installation was not what they had in mind.

Qi Shengjie, a student of arts management, found the exhibition contradictory. "A lot of the works need someone to operate them, or to be worn on the body and performed with. But as visitors, we can't interact with the works, for practical reasons. So even the interesting machines are only on static display, and all we can do is watch the videos to find out what they look like when they run."

Walking into an art museum, an audience has to rethink what "performance" means; it is often delivered through video and interactive installations. On December 5 last year, McaM held Designed for Performance: European Contemporary Stage Design (《为表演而设计——欧洲当代舞台美术设计展》), where "performance" all but meant stage design.

More often, performance is "a way to lead the audience into the art world."

Behind the main stage of their retrospective, Nonsense Machines, Maywa Denki set aside a changing room. Visitors could put on the band's trademark blue overalls, walk the galleries, copy the poses of the Maywa Denki musicians and take pictures with the strange instruments. Fu Liaoliao thinks this works very well: "They — Maywa Denki — are maybe just cosplaying a factory, and the audience is cosplaying them."

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But the audience may just as well expect to watch a performance in the museum itself, which would be more interesting still.

Last year McaM invited productions including Ghosts 2.0 and The Accident (《意外》) to perform there. Fu Liaoliao said: "These works already existed. They weren't commissioned for the museum, so they didn't look very different from a performance in a traditional theater."

The curators could not add much cross-disciplinary invention to those shows, but the change of venue still made for a distinctive experience.

Take Ghosts 2.0, a new production adapted from Ibsen's play Ghosts, in which the actors film themselves onstage with handheld cameras and the footage is projected live. Inside McaM's "old factory," the projection lands straight on the museum's bare wall. "The image is huge and hits you visually, very different from playing in a small theater before. The texture feels a bit more 'contemporary art' now," Ghosts 2.0 producer Wang Qingyang told QDaily. Ghosts 2.0 is shot in cool tones, and McaM's walls are bare, the plain color of concrete; in that room the lighting looked colder, which helped build a more sinister atmosphere.

"Basically our sound and light installations are designed for each exhibition or performance," Fu Liaoliao said. To meet the setup Maywa Denki asked for, McaM built a pool into the second-floor floor for the Edelweiss Series, and to show the Fish Instrument Series, they put live fish in a real tank.

Either way, the place does not feel much like "a venue inside the modern museum system." "It's a very tolerant container," Fu Liaoliao said. The good news is that there are more and more museums like it.

Cover image from: VICE, PCM