From *Oriental Horizon* to Danmei Fan Comics: A 20-Year Cultural Retrospective, and an Argument About Mainstream Values

“When we seem to have nothing to do with mainstream values, are we in fact locked even more firmly inside that system?”

A film crew is shooting in a gloomy old house. The woman's ghost that haunts the place takes her revenge: she lures the hero toward the spot where he is about to be executed with a swarm of American dollar bills.

The scene stayed with Dai Jinhua. The film it comes from, The Lonely Ghost in the Dark Building (《黑楼孤魂》), is in an exhibition she recently co-curated, “Imagining Mainstream Values.”

“In this spatial field, a historical moment appears. It is a moment of encounter, and also a moment of passing each other by.”

The show opened on November 18 at the Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum and runs until March. Her co-curator is Su Wei, the museum's senior curator.

The Lonely Ghost in the Dark Building is a genre picture made by the Shenzhen Film Company in 1989 — China's first horror film after more than a decade in which the genre was banned by no written rule at all.

The ghost is a girl who died unjustly in the Cultural Revolution, and what she tempts with is green American money. On one side, the specter of history; on the other, capital and desire arriving from outside in the new era. The mood of 1989, a hinge year, was captured almost by accident in a rather clumsy film — and turned into an allegory.

This is the first time Dai Jinhua has curated anything, and the subject sits almost exactly on top of her academic field, mass culture.

“Across these 40 years China has been at once full of vitality and beset by crisis, and the change has been so violent that it is hard to say where it begins and where it ends. In the end we chose the 1990s as our starting point,” she said in a lecture on opening day.

Amid change that fast, Dai argues, people find it hard to agree on what mainstream values even are. The idea keeps moving, and how each new “mainstream” gets made is the question the exhibition wants to put.

The Su Wei–Dai Jinhua partnership has produced something that looks unlike what you expect in a museum. On one hand there is plenty of art, including pieces commissioned for the show; on the other, it tries to conduct a serious argument by laying out a history. Alongside the exhibition there are several lectures on “why mainstream values,” running through the end of December.

A clear timeline carries the narrative across three floors in seven chapters: “Prologue: The Lonely Ghost in the Dark Building”; “The Other Shore: Little Theater, New Documentary and Sixth Generation Cinema”; “Beside the Sunken Ship: Urban Cinema”; “Sex · Politics: Literature”; “The Split Surfaces: Debates in Intellectual History”; “The Reflecting Mirror: Legacy and Translation”; “The Focusing Lens: Positions, Camps and the Refining of Questions”; and “Parallel Universes” — all trained on the cultural language and markers of the past three decades.

Thirty artists (or artist groups) and 23 works (or groups of works) sit side by side, but this is not quite an art exhibition in the usual sense: it mixes video, photographs, oil painting, installation and a great deal of documentary material.

The closer it gets to the present, the more varied the forms. The third-floor gallery given over to the game Chinese Parents, for instance, hands a commissioned artist three whole walls on which to reconstruct every topic and argument the game has generated. At a row of school desks piled with copies of Five Years of Gaokao, Three Years of Mock Exams, visitors can play it on a computer.

The show starts on the second floor.

The decade is one thread. Before you reach The Lonely Ghost in the Dark Building, the right-hand side of the first gallery gathers photographs from Living Space, once a segment of CCTV's Oriental Horizon; on the left wall plays Mama (1990), directed by Zhang Yuan, one of the earliest Chinese features shot in a documentary manner.

Jiang Yue's The Other Shore and Wu Wenguang's Bumming in Beijing appear as landmarks of the New Documentary Movement of the early 1990s. They also connect back to Living Space at the entrance: Jiang Yue shot a series of shorts for The Other Shore set on documenting ordinary people, and Lu Wangping, a producer on Living Space, was the cameraman on Bumming in Beijing.

The three were made independently, but they share one thing: as cities filled up with people on the move, they caught the faces and daily lives of ordinary people — something almost nobody was filming then.

Symbols — labels — are the other thread.

In the chapter “The Split Surfaces,” the exhibition uses stacks of documents to show the arguments that ran through the 1990s in academic journals, above all Xueren (《学人》). The quarrel between the “New Left” and the “liberals” in the second half of the decade gets pride of place.

The “Sex/Politics” section picks out representative literary work, including Wang Xiaobo's The Golden Age, Tie Ning's The Rose Gate (《玫瑰门》) and Cui Zi'en's Enter the Clowns (《丑角登场》).

Elsewhere you find artists working on their own, leaving the viewer room to read for themselves.

Grass Stage, the workers' theater troupe Zhao Chuan built with workers at Foxconn in Shenzhen, made and performed work together between 2016 and 2018. Besides videos and photographs of the performances, one wall carries the email exchanges from the troupe's workshops, which lay out how the workers live.

There is also Father and Sons, a documentary by Wang Bing, the director of West of the Tracks (《铁西区》), and a single photographic frame Hao Jingban held in the dark on the night of the evictions. Both watch the people society calls weak from very close up, and with care.

For the cultural shifts before 2000 the exhibition can name fairly clear turning points. Once the internet arrives, the flood of information it brings blurs everything into a mass that is much harder to read.

Four of the projects were commissioned for the show. Two of them, fan works and web drama, belong to what people call subculture.

Hu Wei's fan comic adapted from Les Misérables — a wall of original drawings plus the artist's own written account — explains the basic furniture of fan and danmei culture: character pairing (CP), the parallel universe (AU).

Hugo's French Revolution is moved sideways into the France of May 1968. In her statement the artist writes that she “tried to project the revolutionary theme of Les Misérables onto political life today.”

Chinese Parents, released in 2018, is a role-playing game in which the player raises a child from birth to the college entrance exam. The exhibition presents a survey of it: a wall covered in bullet-comment-style argument, from Tieba to Weibo, from meme stickers to long essays, tangled up with references to real life — such as the online group “Parents Are a Scourge,” which existed for a while and was then shut down. What it shows reaches far beyond the design of the game.

Even danmei fan work, which fences off its own small patch and amuses itself there, is given a wider social meaning under the exhibition's theme, and shown from several sides at once. You do not often see this in a museum's white box, but it brings the conversation closer to life and cuts down on the received wisdom.

The last work in the show is a woodblock print from 1978, in a corner almost nobody notices. A white egret glances about against a dark ground. It is called Not Knowing the Way Home (《不知归路》).

One more thing worth noting: the curators built the show around a term Dai Jinhua coined in her work on mass culture — “shared space.”

Wherever power manages to operate, Dai argues, society and its members must have arrived at some tacit understanding, some resonance, inside that space. Look back at the past two decades and more in China: mass culture has been under heavy state influence and control the whole time, yet many new judgments of value did not come down from state power in the old sense. They grew out of marginal spaces, and they carried society's real will.

The exhibits look as if they point in every direction, but each was chosen on this premise, and each has something of the “shared space” about it.

An exhibition, though, can only do so much. This one is like a cultural-studies paper heavy with pictures from which most of the text has been cut. Standing in the galleries with no context, a visitor will struggle to see the thinking underneath, or why any particular object is there.

We talked to Dai Jinhua and Su Wei to get a clearer guide.

What follows is drawn from a group interview with QDaily and other outlets, and from the opening-day conversation:

Dai = Dai Jinhua

Su = Su Wei

Q: From the 1990s to now, what has happened to this “shared space”? Has it grown?

Dai: When we say “shared space” we really mean gray zones. They tend to show up in the middle of an argument — between the old and the new, say; or between the obvious official clichés and the popular talk people trade in the street. They are the cracks that open while things are changing.

At a moment of loss and disorder you can watch a new mainstream grow inside that shared space — or watch the space seal shut. So the point we picked this time looks like a decade, but the decade itself is not what interests us; a moment of fierce argument in Chinese society is. Mainstream values are only a parameter, a coordinate, to help us measure how a culture forms and how it works.

Su: Professor Dai and I more or less agreed on a phrase: the deferral space, or buffer space, of mainstream values — the place where things get fermented again. What is plain is that mass culture in China is a product of a power structure.

In the cases we just mentioned you find exactly that space of digestion and deferral. In today's culture, are the new things growing in these new spaces also doing a kind of imagining? While we were installing the show I read the survey of Chinese Parents closely — all the fine-grained argument inside it. You cannot sort that by camp, you cannot sort it by morality, and you cannot judge it against too many settled rules of reality. It has to be looked at as history in the making.

Q: This condition of the past few decades, where we are not quite sure where mainstream values sit — does it exist everywhere, in every culture, or do you think China is peculiar?

Dai: I think it is 100 percent Chinese characteristics. There is simply no precedent: no region, no country, has gone through development this large and this fast, and social change this large, in so short a time.

Through all of it the state has played the ghost — sometimes a ghost, sometimes flesh and blood. In art, the state's demand for modernization and art's demand for modernization still lined up in the 1980s. Then came the 1990s, an era of splitting and surfacing, when individuality began to wake.

The individual and the individuality of the 1980s were collective nouns. Individualism, for instance, was a collective image, something that happened under the awakening will of the nation. In the 1990s making art became an individual act, and that matters enormously. It no longer worked around a given work, a given philosophical question or a given social current; the individual became the absolute ground of creation.

Su: That point is crucial, because once we discuss this exhibition, once we discuss mainstream values, we cannot avoid the state. Between the 1990s and today the individual and the ghost of the state have entered a dialogue, rather than an agency relationship. It has even become possible for me, as a subject, to choose not to see the spirit of the age or the direction the state calls for. I keep a critical distance from you — that too began in the 1990s.

Q: Take the Living Space team you mentioned. They were not mainstream themselves, but they gradually entered the mainstream's field of view. Is that kind of crossing still possible?

Dai: Hard to answer. Concretely, we are in two conditions at once. One is that the space of possibility is shrinking; that much is clear. The other is that new mechanisms have appeared.

Over the past year or two I have spent time and effort on certain subcultural communities — the fujoshi, danmei web fiction, audio dramas, fan culture, comic conventions, doujinshi. I put in the time to watch and understand, but the generation gap is there, and I will never claim to be the one who understands them best.

I did not expect this myself, and it confirmed once again what I observed in the 1980s: it is in the most marginal, most alternative, most offensive or entirely ignored cultural fields that you can watch a powerful mainstream being built.

Danmei is such a subcultural, small-circle thing — how did it swell into so large a body of original writing and merchandise, and then start spilling over through web series and audio drama? I am not exaggerating when I say I think danmei stories will do better than straight romance, because they have become case studies in repairing intimacy. Look at how difficult and how accidental the relationships in them are, and how necessary and how beautiful. Their popularity, in a sense, manufactures a fantasy against a real social shortage. If it were stronger still, it could become a repair, something that reconnects social relations. My point with this example is that something extremely marginal, extremely niche, may grow into something popular and social.

And subcultures express themselves with more abandon — or more productively — than so-called mainstream or official culture: they question value statements by instinct. That is what makes them interesting. It is not at all the official-versus-unofficial standoff we used to imagine. Not at all.

Q: Online, much of what looks like mainstream information has in fact been filtered. If what we see does not necessarily stand for real mainstream values, how do we tell?

Dai: That is part of what this exhibition wants to unsettle. I think our discussion of mainstream values has focused too much on power. Out of habit we assume mainstream values must be official values, or that official values must be mainstream.

Recognizing mainstream values is not a matter of sifting cultural material for patterns. It is a matter of turning back on yourself again and again, and questioning again and again. And the process does not mean submitting to mainstream values. Quite the opposite: it means finding where I stand in relation to them.

Q: In your lecture you said a person cannot live entirely outside mainstream values. Could you say more?

Dai: Yes. What we have now really is freedom on a scale never seen before — anyone above the urban middle class has unprecedented freedom, because we can genuinely live alone without being lonely. What nobody notices is that when we finally have this self-enclosed, self-sufficient private space, we are in fact deepening our socialization.

Start from the basics: the internet, then online shopping, then the global logistics system, then a stable social order. A courier knocks and it is not an assassin walking in, right? All of it rests on the whole social system running fully and smoothly. But nobody feels it; we take the system for natural. So I say this is unprecedented: our government has public credibility, our public is full of confidence in the system.

Ask people directly and they might not put it that way. But in practice they trust it completely. We accepted online and mobile payment without a moment's thought, never asking how big a thing this is. I read a passage in a German magazine saying that while the whole EU is still arguing and fretting over whether to begin going cashless, China has already gone cashless across the board — and nobody here would ever connect paying by phone with demonetization.

Q: So we as individuals are highly compliant with the overall social order?

Dai: You can call it compliance, or you can call it delight. We don't feel anything pressing on us; we are thrilled to have new technology at our service. People take it purely as service, as convenience, and don't feel the systemic change behind it.

How do we hold ourselves in relation to mainstream values? When we seem to have nothing to do with them, are we locked even more firmly inside that system by them? We can probably picture the shut-in life as the tree in Asimov's future world, with us as the hives hanging on it.

In that sense, our relation to the tree, and the relation between our own cell and the next one, is something the new global mainstream values would like us to overlook and that cannot be overlooked. There was probably no way to put that into an exhibition, but it is one of the questions we started from.

Young people in China used to stand high and see a good deal. Now the scholar knows everything under heaven without leaving his door, yet people's attention and field of view are cast far off, pushed a long way from themselves. They don't actively sense the overall state of society, or how its mainstream values are shifting. Their sense of belonging comes while being swept along.

Cover image: the documentary The Other Shore / A Discussion of the Chinese Grammar of “The Other Shore,” Jiang Yue, 1995. Image: Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum. Images not otherwise credited are from QDaily.