A Post-90s Artist Staged a Show About Plungers and Clouds. What Was He Trying to Say? | 100 People With Ideas

"My dad would say, 'Hey, aren't you studying art in London? What's this about making plungers?' He wanted me to head toward the clouds, toward the sublime. He wanted the architecture I made to be 'grand.'"

On March 1, Shanghai's Fiu Gallery put on a strange "exhibition."

Walk into the hall and the first thing you see is visitors in twos and threes, wine glasses in hand. You wonder whether you have wandered into a salon by mistake, but you soon notice that the crowd has ringed off a rectangular space ahead and to the left, inside which white "clouds" float, washed in pale red light. Between the clouds and the floor stand white PVC pipes about the height of a person, each held down by a red suction cup at its base.

You recognize at once that the clouds and the floor are in fact joined by something like a toilet plunger. The music keeps shifting between suspense and calm, mixed with the sound of wind, and at times a slow, distinct dripping of water. The lights go out, and two dancers enter the installation one after the other, moving with the music — now studying the clouds, now listening to the floor, now following each other, now drifting apart.

The performance is called Cloud/Plunger, and the concept and space are the work of post-90s artist Lin Tuo. Few people know the name — his other identity is master's student at the UK's Architectural Association (AAIS), graduating this year. The two dancers, Malgorzata Dzierzon and Renaud Wiser, have both worked with the dance companies Rambert and Gothenburg Ballet, and are also Lin Tuo's teachers at AAIS. The team covered space design, choreography, performance, costume, programming, music, production and filming; many of its members are people Lin Tuo met as an undergraduate in the architecture department at Zhejiang University, and later while studying in London.

In January this year, at London's light festival, the team worked with Rambert on a performance. Lin Tuo hopes to use it as his graduation project in London. He applied for funding from the young-artist program at the nonprofit China Exchange, and got free venue support from the newly founded Fiu Gallery in Shanghai. On March 22, the team will perform it again in London's Chinatown.

Lin Tuo's master's program is called Spatial Performance. It is an art form you will not find on Wikipedia. By AAIS's own account, work of this kind sets out to "challenge the distinction between art and architecture in the making of special projects such as dance, theater, musical performance, exhibitions and arts festivals, revealing the shared 'worknet' behind different art forms."

"Short and effective," said one gallery owner who was there.

The dance ran under 30 minutes. The promotional copy called it "a cross-disciplinary art performance that tries to reflect the absurdity and the reality of society today, expressing the ruptures in everyday life and the inner connections those ruptures contain."

But on the night, no one on the team explained in public what the installation or the dance meant. There was no curator. No critic. Set aside the team's international background, and the whole thing felt more like a spontaneous game with no rules. After the dance, some of the audience gathered around the creators, asking all sorts of questions about the performance and the design. Many still had a wine glass in hand.

The great majority of the audience was very young, many of them still at university. Some came from architecture departments — including Lin Tuo's own teachers at Zhejiang University. The gallery is said to have admitted one in three of the people who registered online; the venue holds about 150.

We sat down with Lin Tuo in a café to talk about clouds and plungers.

Q — QDaily L — Lin Tuo

Q: Why move from architecture, which you studied as an undergraduate, to spatial performance?

L: What I did as an undergraduate leaned toward narrative — architecture was only a means of expression for me. Making architecture is often bound up with social and economic factors; if you treat architecture purely as a technique, you can actually express yourself better. Building a lobby, for instance, takes a lot of resources — you can't just do as you please. With an installation you have more control over it, and there are fewer economic constraints to answer to. I find designing under economic constraints rather stifling.

The pleasure I find in architecture is in narrative, in conflict, in the connection with people at a small scale. Take this sofa — a little lower or a little higher makes a difference, it changes how intimately you engage with it. The installation is the same. Whether the clouds are higher or lower, the audience responds differently. Set them lower and the audience has to give more — they have to crouch down to look.

Q: Why does the relationship between people and objects at a small scale interest you?

L: I once heard a story about the steps of the Forbidden City. I later found out it wasn't true, but I'd rather believe it. The steps up to the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the story goes, were made deliberately steep, so that officials climbing them to see the emperor had to lower their heads and watch their footing, which made them look humble. A small change of scale like that changes how people behave. Or take classical gardens: plant a banana tree under the eaves, and the water dripping off it makes sound for the whole space. One project I want to do now is to multiply the size of every piece of furniture by 1.5. What would that do? It would be like going back to childhood. A little boy going to the toilet, say — if the urinal is too high he has to stand on something. Multiply a normal urinal by 1.5 and you more or less recover that childhood experience.

Q: How does your work carry this idea?

L: I come from the countryside, and I went to England. Sometimes it feels like a real contradiction: classmates from my childhood might be working in an auto-parts factory while I'm making art in London. I think of the plunger as standing for rural life — concrete, tedious, full of the texture of living — while the cloud is like city life, packed with concepts and labels. In this installation the clouds are all held up by plungers. What I want to say is that people's ideas, the metaphysical things, all rest on the details of daily life. They aren't separate — that goes for rural and urban, individual and collective, all of it. I really like this idea of the "unity of opposites."

As an undergraduate I made a similar piece — three small houses. One was called "The Divorced Couple." I knew people who had divorced but went on living together, because of the children or some other reason. How do you design a living space for that? Similar cases: a blind man and a lame man — the blind man needs eyes, the lame man needs legs — what kind of space do they need in order to live together? Or a celebrity and a paparazzo: they look like opponents, yet they depend on each other. That kind of tension excites me.

Q: Do your old classmates understand what you do now?

L: Some of them actually came to the show. Their reaction was, "Oh — an artist." Watching them watch the performance, sometimes the hairs on my arms stood up. Art shouldn't belong to the city alone; it should be close to all kinds of people.

Q: Can you define this form?

L: It really is hard to define. Spatial performance, spatial installation, space... maybe there's no need to define it first. You can do it, then define it.

Q: What's new about the form?

L: Mainly that it crosses fields: costume design, architecture, installation, staging, music, lighting... you have to bring people from all of them together. We didn't actually work on it for long, only about four months, but the energy it released was huge. I think it did what I wanted it to do: it lets the audience arrive at freer ideas. The countryside isn't only the countryside, the city isn't only the city, the countryside isn't only a plunger, the city isn't only a cloud. I gave you an upper bound and a lower bound; the audience sees the bounds, but is free to choose within them. That idea fits the cross-field form itself.

Q: How did you choose where to perform?

L: We were invited to perform during London's light festival, but the piece wasn't finished yet, so we labeled it "in the making." Shanghai's Fiu Gallery came through a friend's introduction. At first I wanted to show the piece in the countryside, since that would be closer to its subject. Then it would have been shown both in London and out in the Chinese fields, and the two performances would have set up a contrast. In the end we decided to make Shanghai a bridge between China and the world.

The piece has also been adjusted for each venue — it's still developing, in fact. In London there were fewer clouds and less variation in height. This time we increased both the number of clouds and the variation in height, tried projectors and LED lights, and improved the music too.

Q: Did you use tape to hold the plungers in place?

L: No, it's pure suction. But I tried out a lot of different plungers, to see which stuck best and which color worked best. You'll notice this plunger is a particularly bright red, very hard to miss. In London we used a wooden pole; in Shanghai, white PVC pipe. All these materials can be bought on the streets of Shanghai — they're all everyday tools.

Q: For much of the audience, the dance is probably the hardest part to understand. How do you read it yourself?

L: This is a cross-field performance. I began by designing a storyline, based on my earlier analysis of Italo Calvino's novel The Cloven Viscount, and I turned the storyline into a diagram so the dancers could rehearse from it. Their movements contain opposing parts, and the audience has to try to catch movements that contradict each other yet are connected. The same motion, say — one dancer moving forward, the other backward; one moving the upper body, the other the lower. You catch these details, then piece them together along the novel's timeline. The music works the same way: some of it was recorded in a bathroom, some in nature, and the audience sometimes can't tell which sound came from which.

Q: The feel of this event isn't quite what audiences in China are used to — it's more like a social space. How did you plan what the venue would do?

L: For this installation, the audience's participation matters more than the dancers' performance. You can only really feel it once you've gone in and are inside the space. It isn't a traditional stage closed off like a box: you can watch it from different angles, you can even step inside the installation. A traditional theater can't give you that sense of being part of it. At the London show, children crawled right into the installation, as if they were dancers themselves. In the usual Q&A the audience sits below while the creators answer from on high; we wanted to offer drinks, let people relax a bit, and let everyone — audience and creators alike — trade views as equals. You could call it a bit social, but it really does help people talk to each other.

Q: Why didn't you hold a Q&A?

L: A Q&A really is a more efficient way to communicate, but I'd rather talk with the audience as an equal. I don't much like being the cloud.

Q: The cloud?

L: You have to pick one, plunger or cloud. Everyone gets a sticker on the way in, and you can choose to wear a plunger or a cloud — just like the title of the performance, cloud or plunger. Personally I lean toward being the plunger.

Q: Can you still be one, though? You're already making art in London.

L: Why not? I can be a special kind of plunger. In London (on March 22) we're thinking of doing a Q&A and making a chair out of plungers for the guest to sit on. Quite ironic — the guest is a cloud, sitting on a plunger.

Q: Where will you build your career from here — China or London?

L: I'd like to open a studio back home in the countryside, right above my grandmother's place, and make small installations tied to rural life, closer to the villagers. At the same time I don't want to lose what my education in London gave me. There will be some installation connected to both London and the village.

I was born in the countryside of Yueqing, Wenzhou, in Zhejiang. That village is in fact enormously rich — richer even than the city. It has factories, migrant workers, small workshops, farmland, cattle, people fishing, old people, a pool table, a corner shop — wow, so rich! It isn't just the phrase "the Chinese countryside." It's about to be turned into a nature park, with everyone relocated. Some of the old houses have been half demolished, exposing their wooden frames, and I find all of this enormously rich. I know the place — I know what's interesting about it and what's bad about it.

Q: You mentioned demolished houses exposing their wooden frames. What does that have to do with your work?

L: Demolition, as I see it, is really a question of taste: "new" has been made to equal "good." You could put it this way — by traditional standards of taste a plunger isn't acceptable, but art can take a more open attitude. My dad, for instance, would say, "Hey, aren't you studying art in London? What's this about making plungers?" He wanted me to head toward the clouds, toward the sublime. He wanted the architecture I made to be "grand."

Q: My experience of living in Shanghai is that conditions in a lot of the old lilong alleys are bad — rubbish sits out in the open, like a plunger thrown down and left on display. More and more places are being rebuilt into tidy apartment blocks and commercial districts now, and people go out of their way to hide the "plunger" side of life.

L: That's right. Everything becomes one thing, the richness shrinks, it all turns into the sublime life, the great life, which to me is pretty dull. Life shouldn't be great; it should be full of small, tedious things. You shouldn't "live elsewhere," you should live in the present — though that sounds like a slogan too (laughs).

Q: A lot of people can't get hold of the present. You can choose to be the plunger, but plenty of people don't even know what choices they have.

L: I don't see it that way. Some people probably magnify how hard life is. With a place to live and something to eat, getting by isn't much of a problem for most people. Money really is an issue, though — a very concrete one. Sometimes I think, you only get one life; living a bit poor seems cooler, and then sometimes I want to be really successful and rich, and sometimes I just want to be an ordinary person, neither proud nor ashamed.

Q: What is the environment for making art like for young people today? What excites you, and what gets in the way?

L: Honestly, I don't know the current environment that well. As for what excites me: I might watch an old man in a train aisle pull a packet of scented tissues out of his breast pocket, open it with great care, take a sniff, then carefully press the sticker back down, and put it away again. Or I might read that Qu Qiubai wrote, before his death, that "Chinese tofu is also very good to eat, the best in the world." Things like that give me a sense of concrete life you can touch, and make me eager to turn them into work I can share. The parts that aren't making things are exhausting, especially having no money.

Photos in this article are courtesy of the performance team.