Two Curators, One for Beijing and One for Guangzhou: What Their Conversation Reveals About How They Read Society

"Site-specificity" is the art world's word of the moment. It is a borrowed one, translated from the English "in-site," which originally meant made on the spot.

The first forum of Gallery Weekend Beijing was a conversation between the curators Hou Hanru and Cui Cancan, under the title "From Guangzhou to Beijing: The Site-Specificity of Art."

The talk began at 10:30. The hall was already full of listeners who had come especially to hear it.

Hou Hanru was born in Guangzhou and now directs the Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome. He has curated a run of exhibitions about civic culture and urbanization in the Pearl River Delta — Cities on the Move and Canton Express among them — and carried these forward-looking shows to international audiences.

Cui Cancan is a young curator who has just won this edition of Gallery Weekend Beijing's "Best Exhibition" prize for Zhang Yue's solo show Song of the Mountain Eagle. Cui arrived in Beijing in 2011 and has independently organized many experimental projects tied to the city, including The Sixth Ring Road Has One More Ring Than the Fifth (part of which is on view now in Drift at the Hyundai Motor Culture Center), Night Walk to Heiqiao and Country Wash-Cut-Blow.

"Site-specificity" is a borrowed term, translated from the English "in-site," which originally meant made on the spot. In art it names a line of research and a tendency: inside a space defined by a cultural symbol or a particular history, the art itself enters a relationship of dependence with that space. Set against the particularity and concreteness of the site-specific is the universality and convergence that stands for "globalization." Site-specificity means bringing everything back to a concrete history, a concrete space, a concrete individual will, a concrete social practice.

In this conversation Hou Hanru spoke for Guangzhou — for the civic culture of the southern Pearl River Delta. Cui Cancan spoke for Beijing — for a body of social practice carried out under the northern political center.

The exhibitions both curators have staged in their respective cities follow the principle of site-specificity, probing the social meaning behind art and the larger subjects it opens onto: globalization, urbanization, marginalized groups, the urban-rural fringe.

Each of them used his own exhibitions to work through that social meaning, and through what social practice had taught him.

The following is an excerpt from the conversation:

Hou Hanru:

The invitation came with a condition attached: I had to talk about the site-specificity of art.

In the 1990s I was living in France, and one or two of the exhibitions I did in Europe touched on subjects connected to Guangdong. In 1997 something big happened — the handover of Hong Kong. By then Hong Kong had moved past being a colony and formed a highly plural, hybrid identity of its own, which let us glimpse a set of important elements about what global development might become. What did this "return" mean? A return to China, a return of sovereignty, or a signpost to some other path of future development? It also raised a string of questions about nation, culture and identity, and one very particular question: the relationship between the city and the nation-state.

That project was an intensely local subject, and at the same time an intensely global one. The so-called local question is really about what we decide to do when a so-called globalized imagination arrives. The two sides cannot be pulled apart. In the same way, if there were no outside influence, it would never occur to us to reach for Chinese or Eastern culture at all. All of this is a defensive instinct in a fairly passive situation, as if we had to rebuild our confidence. Under those conditions, what does site-specificity mean? Can a passive mechanism like that be turned into a creative opening?

Hong Kong's hundred-odd years of history give us a good case. Later I widened the subject to the Pearl River Delta, which after the reform and opening-up of 1978 was where China set out to reconnect with the world. The Delta was a laboratory for a new model of economic development, and later a pioneer model for three decades of Chinese industrialization and urbanization. As the most open gateway China has had for more than 2,000 years, its culture is enormously complex and plural. Historically and in the present, the Pearl River Delta is one of the places where the argument between the global and the local runs hottest — and it is also very far from the political center.

Moderator: The Pearl River Delta sounds closer to the "mid-ground" you wrote about in one of your earlier books. Would that explain it better than "site-specificity"?

Hou Hanru: That's very well put.

When I wrote that book I was living in Paris, and I was lucky to be standing at a turning point in history — the years just after the Cold War ended, the start of an optimistic age. Across the West, and especially in the big cities, a tendency was introduced that now looks very politically correct: cultural pluralism.

That was an important backdrop. It made us see that we live in a new reality of many cultures, and that every individual carries that plurality. Standing in that middle ground, we gained a new freedom. We began to challenge fixed ideas — nationality, ethnicity, borders — and we were all hoping for a somewhat better process of globalization. Then the money came, and the engine of globalization turned into free-market capitalism, neoliberal capitalism. Those forces set off new contradictions, which is why global politics today has become so populist. The process threw up plenty of problems, the gap between rich and poor among them, and that provoked resistance from the lower and middle layers of society (which is also why someone like Trump turned up later).

But at that moment I felt the Pearl River Delta was a fully formed regional case we could use to think inside the larger global picture. The fast urbanization going on there did not only bring new living conditions and a new look to the cities. The most fundamental thing it brought was civic culture. This new civic culture gave us a new kind of hope. It made our cultural senses richer and sharper, and it gave every individual a new independence: freedom was no longer only something to long for, it was something to practice. Out of that a new social order would take shape. So how should we look at art made under those conditions? At the time a group of very interesting artists appeared in Guangzhou, even though the livelier places were still Beijing and Shanghai.

Every one of these artists is a model case. None of them appeared by accident; they were the truest, most typical embodiment of civic culture. A related run of activity also came out of second- and third-tier cities such as Yangjiang. Their work was quiet and never showy. They had no need to display lofty ideals or a great tradition, but through an everyday, slow-and-steady method they gradually built a body of work that genuinely stood for the civic spirit.

From then on I invited them into the Hong Kong project Cities on the Move (1997–2000). The Vienna Secession had asked us to curate it for their centenary, and it was very forward-looking. We did not want to discuss Asian cultural identity or the great traditions of the East. We chose to discuss the urbanization of Asia instead. Asian urbanization is a thoroughly hybrid urban culture; with capital and real estate pouring in, it took on a series of uncontrollable, extreme forms. Hong Kong at that point played an enormous part in how China rebuilt its own economic system. Whatever people pictured as a modern city had to look like Hong Kong, and that led us straight to building tower after tower with no one living in them. This imagination of modernization was first translated into a direct goal in the Pearl River Delta.

The word "moving" implied watching how the city of Hong Kong would move to its next stage — spreading out across the whole country — which kept pushing us to go on discussing postcolonial urban culture.

In 2003 and 2004 I worked with Pi Li on the architecture biennale and the sculpture biennale in Shenzhen, and I proposed turning the exhibition into an opening: making Shenzhen, and Overseas Chinese Town in particular, the site of an international event tied to site-specificity, turning the exhibition into a work of public art and public action. Overseas Chinese Town then had five systems — streets, low-rise buildings, high-rise buildings, an amusement park — but no public space, and public space is the single most important thing in real metropolitan culture and civic life. It would form a system more lasting and more alive than the city's existing ones. I called it the fifth system. That was how I put this research on the Pearl River Delta back into a working, on-the-ground setting.

Two years later I was invited to do the Guangzhou Triennial. I named it Beyond and gave it the subtitle "A Laboratory of a Special Modernization," and it centered on the Pearl River Delta — a place for examining one particular kind of modernization. Since it was a triennial, we decided to spend three years on it, and we built a Delta Lab inside the Guangdong Museum of Art. Every other week we invited a new group of people to join the research on the Delta region, then put the results on display in the show. Something interesting grew out of it, which we called manufacturing reality: it produced a museum, the Guangdong Times Museum. That set off a whole discussion about the relationship between art institutions and cities, essentially about how an experimental art base can work as an engine of community culture.

In 2013 the "Autonomous Region" project went on examining the relationships among territories and border zones inside a plural cultural landscape — relationships that are contradictory and highly interactive at once. After it ended, in the Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism that has just closed, we placed much of the discussion inside urban villages.

This question of the plurality of urbanization is what forms the conceptual map of art in the Pearl River Delta.

Cui Cancan:

Of all cities, I think Beijing is the one with the least autonomy. China spans several time zones, but we all count the hours by Beijing time. Beyond its function as a city, Beijing has experiences no other city shares: it is a political center, it reports directly to the central government. In the news coverage of the past few years, we have noticed that Beijing's function as a city is being worn away, while its function as a capital is being pressed harder and harder.

Beijing's migrant population is extremely fluid; the city has roughly 50 million people. What are those people doing, where do they live, how do they survive, what ideals are they holding on to? That is the core of what I keep stressing about site-specificity in Beijing. Site-specificity has two parts. One is the urban experience, the real experience, the cultural experience shared around the world. The other is the particular moments only Beijing faces, and the particular reality it confronts alone, with no help. That is the crux of it: only because we are on the scene, on the front line, on our own ground, can the problem be solved — and this predicament belongs to us alone. Integration never means the integration of predicaments. Predicaments come in thousands of kinds, tens of thousands of kinds.

In that context I put on several exhibitions, and a fairly typical one was Night Walk to Heiqiao. I found a toilet of just over 10 square meters in Heiqiao and handed it to the 1,500 artists living there to run as a curatorial project. It was open 24 hours a day, do whatever you want; we supplied a light bulb and a socket. Over two months more than 200 artists came — 40 I invited, 160 who turned up on their own. In the last two or three days before it closed, there was one day when more than 30 artists queued up to make work. We set no limits, did no curating, did no managing. Night Walk to Heiqiao ended up with more than 200 works, all sorts of things: some people handed out money, some handed out flatbread. It was a completely free, anarchic, utopian idea — a crowd gathered on an urban-rural fringe, breathing in the bad smells, sitting in a circle drinking and eating. Those 200-odd works exposed something too: the artists' work was badly homogeneous. By the last month it had turned into a fighting ring. Nobody restricted you and nobody protected your work either. There were fights among ourselves, again and again. Once things are completely out of control and power is completely let loose, you find that an artist is a different kind of person. After that I became obsessed with the urban-rural fringe. I am a young man from a county town, and I meet urban experience through county-town experience, in the middle of that utterly mutated, hybrid, chaotic reality of the fringe.

Then I started staging an evening event called Country Wash-Cut-Blow. There were suona horns that night, there was pole dancing; any form would do as long as it expressed something. When we express, what we care about is not the channel of expression but its content. What I really wanted to be was someone who lets people exchange.

More than a thousand people turned up that night, and we even closed with the song Unforgettable Tonight. "Country wash-cut-blow" was a very fashionable idea at the time. We were after aesthetics, joy and an equality of power; we were after that sneer the middle class and capitalist forms direct at a certain marginal aesthetic, and we were thoroughly sick of it. Look at Shamate culture, look at Kuaishou, and you see the most vivid, most living kind of existence — one that to some degree refuses textualization and professionalism, while carrying hysteria and the absurdity of the era along with it.

Then I began The Sixth Ring Road Has One More Ring Than the Fifth, which Second Floor Publishing initiated and I curated. Between the Fifth and Sixth Ring Roads we found 40 villages and sent 40 artists to do research in them. The interesting part is that every investigation came out strange. One artist, for instance, went to look into the gang problems among a village's stray dogs. Every village in Beijing, every district and street, has a character more independent than you would think, and at that point site-specificity moves from the idea of Beijing as a whole down to each particular village. Put more simply, site-specificity covers not only cities and villages but every individual, and how each individual understands his own site-specific experience. That is site-specificity at a finer grain.

When that project was done we wanted to hold a competition: the "Far East Showdown, Ground-Hugging Flying Mopeds" electric-scooter race. We found 60 artists who ride electric mopeds, ran several races flash-mob style and gathered everyone at Songzhuang — all six races over three days worked that way.

After that we held an awards ceremony called the "Winter E-Bike Guerrilla Race Under a Tent." Why under a tent? Because an exhibition's display space is not only a rebuilt space. It is a space of experience, a space of energy, a space packed with information, experience and perception, like a cave still full of the smell of primitive life.

Facing a reality this chaotic and complex, how do we, as artists with a sense of aesthetics, close the gap between reality and aesthetics? We look up at the stars, we watch the changes and the realities we are living through today, and perhaps we can give them a deeper meaning, a larger one.

I once said to Zhang Yue that we had been poisoned by Soviet literature: "When you look back on your life, do not regret having achieved nothing and do not be ashamed of having wasted your years; give your whole life to humanity, and work for the liberation of mankind." At the time I felt that much of what we face today under site-specificity rests on our own understanding of our ideals, and on my understanding, as a curator, of reality. While our own refrigerators are packed full, perhaps two kilometers away 20 people are crammed into a 10-square-meter room that costs 500 yuan a month, and not one of them can find a family or a place to settle.

What I care about more is how many people on the margins there are in this country, how many marginal groups, how many people the mainstream culture ignores. Through these site-specific projects we try to join those islands into a continent. Why join them into a continent? Only that way can we see the truths this era's mainstream screens out; only that way can we see what world we are actually living in today. Beyond examining how art develops and serving a function for globalization, site-specificity is also part of the chain of evidence for a historical region: it keeps adding to and strengthening the completeness and objectivity of that region's history. That completeness and objectivity means, on one side, more shareable, universal site-specific experience, and on the other, the particular moments of site-specificity, the predicaments you alone can face. In every city and every region, I think, we will all face these things.

Image credits: Dayue Community, Art China, Hi Art