Tim Yip Thinks the Three-Dimensional World Is Going Flat, and He Wants Art to Preserve the Memories of the Past

“The rifts we have created — I hope they can be reconnected.”

For the past three years, Tim Yip has traveled the world with Lili.

Lili is an installation doll, born in 2008. She first met the public in 2013, at Yip's Beijing exhibition Dream, Crossing, In-Between (《梦·渡·间》). She has long hair, wears sunglasses, and has a fine figure — she looks like a girl of seventeen or eighteen. In Yip's eyes, that is the best time of a person's life.

On September 22, 2016, a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Lili came to Shanghai with Yip for his solo exhibition “Tim Yip: Liuxing.” Liuxing is an abstract term from the I Ching; it means to give something form. For Yip, what takes form is memory — the illusion of history and reality.

The show included the work the public knows, such as the costumes from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the film that won him the Academy Award for Best Art Direction. It also included sculpture, video and installation work in a style of Yip's that most people have never seen.

That less familiar Yip is the one who wrote Tim Yip's Creative Aesthetics: Liuxing (《叶锦添的创意美学：流形》), a book about his own experience and the reflections that came out of it. On November 28 he and Chan Koonchung talked with readers at the One Way Space bookstore in Aegean Shopping Park.

Yip admits the book is hard to read, because “I see a lot of things I can't say out loud, so I have this strange way of writing them down.” Those things usually have no order to them — once you organize them, once you impose order, they lose themselves. So Tim Yip's Creative Aesthetics: Liuxing reads like sleep-talk, “jumping around the whole time.”

In an interview, Yip told QDaily that the past and the present are not the same: the past was a three-dimensional era, today is a flat one. In the three-dimensional era, people's lives grew out of memory and experience, and that memory and experience came from things that had actually happened — “if you say you've been to Rome, then you must really have been to Rome for the memory to exist.” Today, globalization and the digital age have flattened the whole world; people can acquire memories, and knowledge of things, without any real experience. As Walter Benjamin put it, in the age of mechanical reproduction the artwork loses its “here and now,” loses its aura — though this also sets the artwork free, and lets the making of art reach the masses.

Between the three-dimensional and the flat, Yip wavers. He says he is trying to express a three-dimensional memory but wants to convey it by flat means — to project the three-dimensional onto a plane, so it can reach more people and last longer. That attempt is why Tim Yip's Creative Aesthetics: Liuxing, like his art, is full of intricate detail and unreasonable logic. Together they make up the raw, unsorted stream of information in the book.

At the talk, Chan Koonchung compared Yip's aesthetic to the maximalism now in fashion, saying the two share a kind of “family resemblance.”

Chan listed nine traits of the maximalist novel to get at Yip's aesthetic. Seven describe the work itself: prolific, encyclopedic, genre-mixing, symbolically interactive, stylistically varied, trans-modern, omnisciently narrated. The other two describe its effect — such books leave the reader emotionally overexcited and cognitively disoriented.

Yip, for his part, sums up his own aesthetic as Neo-Orientalism. He is from Hong Kong, and the city's old nickname, “the Victoria of the East,” says exactly what it is: a meeting point of East and West. His Neo-Orientalism sets out to pick up traditional culture again, join it to Western art, and reconnect the ancient past with the future. As he put it: “Without the ancient past there's no way to have a future. You can't build the future out of realism at all.”

“Orientalism” comes from Edward Said's Orientalism, where the Orient has nothing to do with China — it means the Middle East. Orientalism describes how the Western world, carrying the attitude of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European imperialism, understood the East, with its biases about Eastern culture and Eastern people. Yip's “Neo-Orientalism” deliberately steers clear of the political weather of the moment. His aesthetic, he says, faces the future, and he won't adjust it to any particular political situation.

Throughout the conversation Yip kept returning to his unease about globalization. He thinks it has turned the world into a plane, made commercial standards the measure of everything, squeezed and dissolved individual experience, and stripped much of art of its own roots.

He wants to find that root, though he doesn't think of himself as reviving the past. As he has said before: “There's really no such thing as ‘innovating within revivalism’ anymore. Global culture now circulates over the internet, so aesthetics no longer has a nationality. Eastern aesthetics needs time to settle. Young people should work to find the thousand-year source of Eastern aesthetics — which has nothing to do with technique or material, or vocabulary, or remaking symbols. Only by chasing those sources can you find a new Eastern aesthetic culture. In my work, Chinese elements and Western modernity don't conflict; using Western culture to express Eastern culture is entirely workable. Isolating Eastern culture is simply not smart.”

What is a poet to do in chaotic times? Yip has no intention of answering that. He intends only to be himself: to face tradition, to face the future, and to step away from the present era. For him aesthetics is a harbor, and anyone who can find such a harbor today is lucky enough.

Below is a partial transcript of the event:

Q = Questioner Y = Tim Yip C = Chan Koonchung

Q: Your Neo-Orientalism tries to build a kind of future, and you've also said American contemporary art has no roots. Within Neo-Orientalism, what relationship do you think the public and art should have?

Y: We often say art has to suit the public's taste. Artists often find that painful. I don't think the pain is inevitable, or necessary. What causes it is probably that our society splits art's value into two parts. High art is supposedly unrelated to the public; and then there's the other kind, the complicated thing in so-called modern art called dialectics, where everything has to be handled through concepts — the problem of modernity, for instance. That slowly makes modern art irrelevant to ordinary people. My own ideal is that contemporary art should connect everyone. And connection isn't only between people; it also means connection across time. For example, we used to always say tradition has a rift in it, a break. But look at me and you'll find there is no break in tradition. I want to turn this experience into something everyone can learn from and share — that is, to talk about how tradition is handed on into the future. The rifts we have created — I hope they can be reconnected.

This isn't happening only in China. It's happening in many other places — India, and other countries with deep cultural foundations, are all affected. I want to grab back the time they have lost.

Q: You've been deeply influenced by traditional culture, and you've put forward “Neo-Orientalism.” But I have a worry: nationalist thinking is fairly widespread on the mainland right now. Are you afraid your aesthetic style and ideas could be used by nationalism, or even populism?

Y: I think I just do my own thing. I feel some things … you can't capture them with other things. Because right now, in this era — and not only in China; my work is all over the world, and I've begun to have dialogue and exchange with the whole world — I think this may be a current of thought particular to this era.

Q: You've said your aesthetic takes people, space and time as its coordinates. What connects those coordinates to the present era?

Y: I try to keep away from this subject, because the contemporary always has its limits. If you pay too much attention to the present, the most original and most complete part of yourself gets shaken. I think that even if I go inward, it can still radiate outward. I don't follow the ready-made ideas that are out there. So this thing of mine was never meant from the start to be promoted, or to be made into some particular shape — that's not it. It's still my inner experience. But I've met people who, because of this inner experience I've made, came to see a different attitude toward this era, a different angle on it. I don't want to be dragged into the things everyone is pushing back and forth right now. That force is too strong.

Q: In your costume design for film and television, is period costume the area you handle most easily?

Y: I think I do all right at it. Because what you see there goes beyond the thing itself. You can look at the details. A lot of foreign artists later came to look at my details; they don't look at the big concept, because they can tell right away that what I do doesn't fit the big concept. It's the details they find interesting.

That kind of detail makes it easier for me to control the rhythm — to control the rhythm beyond the subject matter. It connects to something more real. It's not that we have some idea, or that some event happened that has to be reflected in the work — no, it's something more concrete than that. If we call what is happening now “manifest” — the thing has appeared, you can see it — then “latent” is what says why it appeared. You can see that underlying force more clearly, and it's right there in the details.

When I was shooting with Ang Lee we paid very close attention to small props. I'd have to ask him: does this one get a shot? If it's going to be on camera, then the detail of the prop becomes an important part of the film, because it feeds straight into the actor's reactions, into the actor's consciousness. Through the details the audience is drawn, without noticing, into the drama. So it's not only the actors performing; we're performing too. It goes beyond the script, beyond our own lived experience.

Q: In your talk you mentioned Generation Change. Could you explain what kind of change this change is?

Y: We're in an electronic world now — we've fallen out of a three-dimensional world into a flat one. In the three-dimensional world, everything a person talks about comes from memory. He has a lot to explain, and those things really happened. Say I tell you I've been to Rome and you haven't; I have to bring out photographs to show you, and back then you couldn't fake it with a digital camera, so I really had to have gone to Rome. What happened before really happened. Take the hippie movement. Why do those hippies still wear those clothes at seventy? Because they lived it, in their own bodies.

By the time you reach the two-dimensional world — people born in the 1990s aren't quite there yet, and it gets more obvious the further along you go — you end up with essentially no memory at all: everything comes from the internet, it's flat, with no bodily experience. I'm about to work on a subject set in the future, and I've found that things from the future will seep into the finest details of people's lives. In the future a lot of memories won't be clear. Say I like a certain girl but have never dated her; I've only seen her photos, I keep grabbing her photos, and so my relationship with her slowly becomes very intimate, yet has nothing to do with you at all. That's two-dimensional.

Where you live gives you a memory-body. Growing up in Paris, growing up in Tibet — different spaces, different memory-bodies. But if you grew up in Vietnam you can go to San Francisco and wear Uniqlo just the same. Because the whole world is the same now: a brand has to attach itself to the commercial system and become a fixed standard, and that standard has to work everywhere. That's how it slowly turned out this way. It's no longer the brand itself that has the power to sell; more and more people are looking to brands for a shared value — Uniqlo, say, or Muji — and the brands become an idea, a concept. That's a kind of two-dimensionalizing.

But what does an idea have to do with you or me? And yet it shapes everyone's life. It slowly exports its flat values to you and asks you to build your own life on them. People stop being different from one another.

I used to go to India often. When India came up, a lot of people thought: the culture is so different, what a thrill. Go to India now and they speak English too, they carry an Apple too, their computer is the same as yours, everything they meet every day is the same as what you meet — and they're starting to forget their own Indian languages. Some Chinese people living abroad can't speak Chinese at all anymore. The whole world is slowly turning into a single plane.

I miss that three-dimensional world, so you'll see that in my work I try to turn three-dimensional things into a flat world. That way they can survive into the flat world. I can't stop the world from going flat — it has its own fate, and you can't change it.

We don't worry about the outcome, but we can transform things: use art to carry what belongs to the last era across into the next world. So that the people of the next world can also see the information we have now.

Q: You've said you look at a collaborator in terms of “inner form” and “outer form.” Could you use that method on the director Ang Lee?

Y: Some part of me is quite like him, and that part isn't like most people, so I find him relatively easy to read.

Here's an example. Once we were shooting a scene in a princely mansion — a man jumping from the pavilion down into the courtyard. The action director designed a move where he'd leap in through the wall hanging, one shot, done. I said no. In the old northern mansions there was a lot of wind and sand, so they had two layers of wall, and only the upper one opened, and it opened outward. There's no way you could jump in like that. Ang Lee, the cinematographer and the action director nearly came to blows. A whole group of people wouldn't budge; they said if we couldn't shoot it that way, they'd all walk off. It was a fairly serious problem. That's just how Ang Lee is. Afterward he stormed off, furious, and a crowd of people went with him. The two of us sat down. I didn't say anything either. He asked me one question: is it really true? I said I'd looked up some material, and yes, that's how it was. We sat a moment longer, then he got up and left — we'd sat there about two minutes. Then Ang Lee had the whole set built over from top to bottom. I watched that shot get pushed back three hours before they filmed it. The way they shot it: the man jumps onto the beam, leans outward, opens the door, then jumps across to the south side. They finished it in three takes. The editor saw it and thought it was great. Nobody else understood the relationship between the two of us; they thought it was maddening, as if our values had nothing in common with theirs.

As for how I see him: we've known each other so long, and for so long nobody paid any attention to us, so we'd often talk after a scene wrapped, talk for a long time, about our lives. Two very dull, quiet people, but when we talk together it isn't dull at all. Sometimes someone would say, don't you have a five o'clock meeting tomorrow? We didn't care. We'd talk until four and only then leave. We really hit it off. Other people get nervous sometimes; we don't.

Something else happened once. One day we were shooting at the mansion, outside the mansion. Ang Lee's way of shooting is strange. Old buildings are hard to find now, and there are all sorts of complications with the modern buildings next to the old ones. One day we'd scouted the location, the set was built, everything was fine. But when it came time to shoot, Ang Lee suddenly needed a set put up on short notice — less than two days. I went and did it myself, and it wasn't easy. I had no time to stand over them on site, and once they'd finished building I got very anxious. I came back and saw the wall was brand new: it hadn't been aged. Everyone thought it was ready, everyone was set to roll. I saw the wall was new and had to make trouble. I said we can't shoot this. They said, out of the way, out of the way! He stood there and wouldn't move, while everyone else wanted to shoot. So I picked up my things, went up there and started painting it myself. I don't care whether you shoot or not; it has to be aged first. Ang Lee agreed. Afterward we waited for it to dry, went back and touched it up bit by bit, and then shot. I do this often on my films.

So there are still parts of him that line up with me, which is why we communicate so easily. Talk with him and he's not complicated at all; he's a very simple person. He's very complicated and very simple at once. What he comes up with is always strange, and his daily life is extremely plain — he puts everything he thinks into his films. That's why we're pretty good friends.

Q: I study stage design at the Beijing Dance Academy — costume and set design. About the sense of beauty you've described: while we're in college, what should we do, what should we look at, to raise our taste a little? This is an era stuffed with internet celebrities, restless in every direction, and that sort of thing isn't beautiful. Your work is a visual feast to me, every piece of it, whether it's film art direction, stage or costume. How can we train ourselves up to that level?

Y: It's hard. You are you; becoming me isn't really possible. You can be yourself, and you might end up better than me. Here's my advice. First, take time and space as your coordinates and keep searching. Write down on paper the things from your own period. I like film, say, I like Fellini — just write it down, write ten of them. Once you have ten, start asking why you like this one, why you like that one. What's the reason? What is it about clothing that you like? Go find a target that belongs to you, find a formless self, use this method to look for yourself. Getting started takes a long time: spend half a year on it, say, finding ten things a day that strike you as amazing. I really like this person's shirt — why do you like the shirt? Trace every single thing all the way down. Then forget it; don't stay stuck inside it. Slowly you'll form your own coordinates. You also have to find out whose shirts are the best. Once a symbol appears, keep looking for its roots. You can look into what kind of machine makes it and what that machine is like — a machine that's stable can produce a related stability. Think through ten questions a day and you'll be unbeatable.

You can't finish just by grabbing hold of one idea. You should grab the idea you actually feel, and that felt idea will change. Because if it stays fixed on the project you picked, it's trailing along behind the project. Once you've picked many projects, you'll find something formless that belongs to you — something you have a real feel for, something that, when you read into it, all your memories can be poured into. You need to find that point. It's like going into a room to find your keys without knowing where they are: you have to look for the key, and only when you find it can you unlock and develop yourself. Once you find your own point you become an irreplaceable story, and so an irreplaceable artist. Don't follow someone else. Grab the point you feel most deeply, and know that finding it costs a great deal. Twenty-seven is a major threshold; you have to get through it bit by bit. Thirty-five is another one. You keep moving forward, bit by bit.

Q: Two things have been hotly debated in film circles lately: the 120-frames-per-second technology in Ang Lee's film, and the round frame in Feng Xiaogang's I Am Not Madame Bovary. You've worked with both directors. What do you make of these two things?

Y: Every era has its own way of making progress. In terms of the body, when you make progress — when you train — your muscles ache. It's that simple. Sometimes our reaction is especially strong; we should look back at it later and not trust how it feels at the time, which is all any given moment reflects. So did it have value at the time, does that sort of common sense have value? Only time can tell. Sitting at an earlier point in time, a thing can even produce a different feeling. Whether it comes early or late, you can't let the media hand down the verdict; everyone should think it through. If it's good, put forward another batch of things — plenty of people have ideas about this, and there are Chinese examples to learn from. If it isn't good, there's no need to fuss over it; if it is good, it's fine to keep an eye on it for a while. This should be a healthy process. No need to be so tense about it.

Q: Mr. Yip, your graphics and imagery turn up in television, in theater and in books, but there's an important factor in your work that rarely gets mentioned: music. Could you talk about the part music plays in your creative process? And could Mr. Chan talk about the musicality or the rhythm he senses in Mr. Yip's work? Thank you.

Y: For me, everything is music. Music is giving sound a form and putting our attention on it. Take color. You'll notice my handling of color is very complex, extremely complex color — and I still get there through musical technique, orchestral music and so on. So how the film's color shifts, how the through-line runs, what rhythm it produces, all of that comes from music. Then space, then the rhythm of speech. Right now I'm doing editing, and rhythm itself is, to me, the oldest thing there is. It comes before image. This rhythm is older than image.

C: I can only guess; I don't know how important music is when Mr. Yip is creating. But looking at his work myself, what comes through first is always a sense of space, and that sense of space has a process to it. I imagine he has paired it with very good music — like a kitchen, where the kitchen needs a slightly larger axis, and that is put together afterward. But when you're creating there's the possibility of leaving room for music and for the camera to come in; you're not just working flat, two dimensions merged into one — otherwise there'd be no need to make it so three-dimensional. In a lot of Hong Kong films a table is built on only three sides, and the last side leans against the wall, on the excuse that it's covered back there so no rotten wood will show. Mr. Yip is always more all-around than that, and being all-around already gives you a sense of space. I believe that also leaves room for music to walk in — I think he's thinking about this while he's creating.

Y: Here's a simple example: the films I did with Tsai Ming-liang. You know how he shoots a whole scene in one shot? Everything he does for rhythm is an event plus a space, and his angle never changes. So everything becomes a matter of reading that space; sometimes it breaks away from the narrative drive of an ordinary film. Sometimes time drifts, because things move so slowly — five minutes to show someone sitting down, standing up. A lot of things just watch my world go by, and his films have that kind of space.

In an ordinary film, everything that happens adds to the sense of rhythm, pushes the story forward in order, lets you know what the space is. So a big set really suits Tsai Ming-liang's films; a big set always has a lot of space in it. Take a room: you put in some furniture, and the scale you place it at is small. Say the wall is here and the window is here; the sofa in front should be 1.5 meters from the wall for the proportions to look right. On his sets I might push it to 2.5 meters. You can't see the difference on screen — once the camera is set up, the visual sense of space still reads as 1.5 meters, but I've given him a much bigger space to move in. When you shoot films, be careful about where the camera goes. We ask what rig is being used, how much room to leave on each set, and we leave space for the dolly track and the camera crew to move. That's what makes a shot come out well; otherwise it ends up looking smaller than it should. That's just how it works, and it makes for a very different rhythm.

Cover image: a still from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon