Contemporary Art for Every Sense Comes to Wuzhen, Trying to Answer to "Time"

Across three sites in Wuzhen — the Xizha scenic area, the Beizha Silk Mill and the Grain Depot — sound art, scent art, interactive art, installation art and video art, gathered from around the world.

On March 31, "Time Begins — the 2019 Wuzhen Contemporary Art Invitational Exhibition" opened to the public.

Walk through the Xizha scenic area and you see a giant loudspeaker poking out of an old theater, a "palace ruin," a figure running without end across a double-sided LED screen. Step into a former theater down a narrow lane and you run into a work of sound art or video art. Inside the Beizha Silk Mill and the Grain Depot — converted from Wuzhen's old silk mill and its grain bureau — sound, scent, installation and interactive works by artists from many countries are gathered together.

The show takes its name, Time Begins (《时间开始了》), from a long modern poem written in 1949 by the literary theorist and poet Hu Feng. Curator Feng Boyi wanted the exhibition, at a moment when society and the era are both in transition, to show how artists respond in many media to the state of the world. As he sees it, "the world is in an extremely complicated, even uneasy and anxious configuration, and that anxiety and unease comes mostly from how uncertain the future is." Answers may not be on offer here, but the artists keep their edge and their doubt.

The exhibition opens with a round clock at the Beizha Silk Mill. Its many hands shift in no particular order, forming one shape after another, and only in the last moment before each minute ends do they show the current time in Arabic numerals. The artists have taken the clock face — a symbol of time recognized everywhere — and freed it from pure function. In this work, Time Never Stops 61c (《时间永不停歇 61c》), by the collective Humans since 1982, time as a concept, as an abstract sign, is broken open.

The idea of time runs through many works in the Wuzhen show, and yet time here is never as clear as a clock face. It stays blurred, and only the expression itself is fully present.

In Yang Fudong's video work The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains (《愚公移山》), seven modern men in suits lose their way on a journey, stray into the mountains, then change out of their modern clothes and join the old man's work of moving the mountain. This black-and-white piece, drawn from the ancient fable and from Xu Beihong's painting of the same name, overlaps in one frame with Xu Beihong's picture.

"The idea for The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains goes back to my school days," Yang Fudong said. "It was the story teachers kept invoking in class as the spirit of never giving up." Yang chose a mother as the character who carries the story from one part to the next, a modern retelling of the fable. On how time blurs in the work, Yang told The Paper: "For a lot of things, time is the snap of a finger — it could be several thousand years ago, it could be now. But very often what people think about doesn't change all that much. The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains is about a spirit that doesn't change."

The work loops in the Shen family theater in Xizha, a big space holding only two tables and three chairs. That was Yang Fudong's design: he wanted a lonely narrative in an empty room. "It feels a bit like making a film inside a theater. The film is like a character in a play, performing inside it."

Taiwanese artist Su Hui-Yu's three-channel video installation Future Shock (《未来的冲击》) sketches "life in the future" in nine chapters. The film opens with a bald, bloodless human asking: "In the coming decades, humanity will go through an enormous shock. Are you ready?" In images and voiceover, the work tells of a future where people's sense of identity disappears and feeling comes apart. As urbanization keeps demolishing and relocating, the world starts to look like yesterday's hypermarket; by the time the "future" arrives, nothing is left but empty shelves and worn-out signs. In that future society there are streamlined families and paid professional parents, and political minorities — Black people, hippies — change the existing system through strikes and the like.

These "future scenes" look a little familiar, an alternative rendering of the world in front of us. The work in fact comes out of the futurist Alvin Toffler's 1970 book, also called Future Shock. In the book, "the society of the future will be full of the 'unfreedom' of too much choice, a throwaway atmosphere, information anxiety, technologized ethics…" Su Hui-Yu's piece makes the "future" of 50 years ago visible, looking back as if in a dream at the moment when the ideas of "modern" and "future" first arrived. The film closes with a question: "What kind of world do you want the future to be?"

Time is not the only idea the artists here break apart. Space, and the world as given, are also taken apart and put back together.

The Australian artist Liam Young builds a virtual world in Tomorrow's Storeys (《明日楼宇》), a digital projection with a dual soundtrack in which the entire population of Athens has moved into one apartment building, each person allotted the smallest possible slice of floor space — a story about the future life of city dwellers.

The camera pans slowly across the facade of a high-rise that looks like a giant Facebook page, while the voiceover is a conversation among a future public think tank talking through the rules of this "new city" and what happens in it. There is death here and there is birth, there are police and doctors, and there is a way of life in which "a food-delivery drone is at your window five minutes later." Once a whole city's population fits inside this single giant "apartment," every problem shrinks to a dispute between neighbors.

Young made Tomorrow's Storeys for documenta 14 in 2017. In his view, technology has already replaced the traditional forces that defined and shaped cities, and the role of the architect and the urban planner is shrinking fast. On imagining the "future," Young said in an interview: "In an age defined by rapid change, the present is shorter and more immediate than ever, and speculative and reflective projects are especially valuable, because they can offer clues to the various facets of a seemingly dystopian and unknown future."

Young also made a second work for Wuzhen, a six-minute 3D video called The Last Homeland (《最后的家园》), which tries to show what it would mean to hold all of humanity. In an uncanny setting, the film shows a Chinese New Year where city residents from many cultures come together. The space holds not only people but odd creatures with human bodies and the heads of oxen and horses, all celebrating a mongrel global culture. The artist's premise is that every citizen of Earth has gathered in one place, and the full tangle of the world's geopolitical relationships has converged on a single city.

The Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo chose to answer the state of the world with her body. On the afternoon of March 30, on the open ground in front of the Wuzhen Grain Depot, a crew of mechanics took a Chevrolet sedan apart while Galindo sat motionless in the driver's seat, until every removable part had come off and been laid out on the ground. The performance was her response to the 2008 financial crisis. She performed it once before, in Boston in 2014, to say that "the roots of a crisis for some people… are the roots of a crisis for everyone." Video of the performance will later play in the exhibition hall.

Besides the car, Galindo also took apart an iPhone. On the second floor of the Grain Depot, a video plays of that earlier dismantling, part by part, alongside every piece she removed from the phone. The idea has a slightly absurd origin: the artist was quoting the blind Bulgarian mystic Baba Vanga, who said, "In 2018, China will become a world power." Wang Xiaosong, one of the show's curators, said: "2018 has come and gone and we still aren't a 'world power.' It's actually pretty absurd."

Galindo's performances are known for their politics. Among the famous ones is Who Can Erase the Traces? (《谁能抹去痕迹？》) from 2003, also an answer to the political condition of her own country. In Guatemala, politics generally goes undiscussed, and the Guatemalan civil war in particular goes undiscussed. In Who Can Erase the Traces?, Galindo carried a white basin filled with human blood, soaked her feet in it, and walked the whole way from the Guatemalan Congress building to the National Palace, in protest against José Efraín Ríos Montt, then a presidential candidate and a former dictator.

As chief curator Feng Boyi put it: "We thought one settled era had ended, that all that is solid had melted into air, but the new era doesn't seem to have begun." In that gap in time, the artists raise their doubts.

On the ground of the open-air cinema in Xizha, some of the gray paving bricks have been replaced with rows of tiny figures — a "hidden" work by the artist Wang Luyan called Open Confinement (《开放的禁锢》). In a place that once screened many films, the artist has set, inside indoor spaces the size of the bricks, people "confined by film and television culture, by entertainment, information and ideology." The pieces are scattered across the whole cinema plaza. At the site, Wang Luyan said: "What I want to express is a paradox — that inside an open, free space there is a certain invisible confinement. I think confinement isn't a visible thing, but it is a thing that keeps intruding on open, free space at every moment, and it can be sensed."

Passersby easily miss the work, because the plaza holds something that catches the eye far more: Double Vertigo (《双眩》) by Anish Kapoor, two concave stainless-steel mirrors more than two meters high that throw back the passing crowds and the whole square. Visitors take selfies and group photos in front of them, having a fine time.

The pairing is a clever one. Beneath the showy reflecting piece sits its opposite, a tiny, dispersed "worldview." And in space, the eye-level view of Double Vertigo faces the bird's-eye view of Open Confinement.

Wang Luyan made full use of what the open-air cinema plaza is, and of the conversation with the work sharing it. "The visual tension and sensory impact of Kapoor's work is his most classic method," he said. "He exists in eye-level space, I exist in vertical space. One is concept, the other is vision, and that is what gives the two pieces a reason to be together — an artistic exchange, and a standoff between two artistic methods."

Open Confinement was designed for Wuzhen specifically. A third of the works in this exhibition were made for the Wuzhen show, with the artists trying, in various ways, to hold on to the town's sensory memory.

The Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima placed her installation Another Water Surface (《另一水面》) at Wangjinli in Wuzhen. Sixty mirrored stainless-steel stools are fixed into the town's gray brick paving. Look closely and the stools form four rings inside a circle, dazzling in the reflected sunlight. It feels like ripples catching the sun, which is exactly the idea Sejima wanted to convey: ripples on water.

Each stool is designed with its rim slightly higher than its center, in the shape of a ripple. It is also a "useful" installation — a tired traveler can sit down and rest. When the exhibition closes, the work will move permanently to a small hillside at Qingdun in Wucun, and the number of stools will grow to 100. On the uneven slope, Another Water Surface will merge with the hills and water nearby and become part of the landscape.

In the Xiushuilang theater in Xizha, recordings the Norwegian artist Jana Winderen made of the underwater world beneath Wuzhen play on a loop. Seven benches stand in a circle at the center of the theater, and a wooden oar leans against one wall. The sound of paddling, of water, of creatures underwater comes from every side, cut together with fish sounds Winderen recorded in tropical seas and in the Arctic Ocean, as if you were under the water yourself.

The sound piece is called Sound Through Bone: Listening with the Carp (《隔骨传音：与鲤鱼一起聆听》). Winderen has said she likes how sound work has no form. Over the past 14 years she has used hydrophones to record underwater sound around the world, hoping to use these "frequencies that can't be perceived, and the sounds of hard-to-reach places and creatures" to document underwater soundscapes.

Another artist born in Norway, Sissel Tolaas, tries to recover and reproduce something even harder to keep than sound: smell. Her work in the show, Beyond — Wuzhen 2019/2050 (《超越——乌镇 2019/2050》), preserves 52 smells from the memories of Wuzhen residents, among them the tung oil a boat repairman remembers, the mutton noodles of a noodle-shop cook, the earth residents recall, the sunscreen a tour guide knows well.

Using a machine supplied by International Flavors & Fragrances to extract scent molecules and attaching them to 3D-printed objects, Tolaas tries to simulate these real sources of smell. Visitors release the scents from the abstract objects by touching them, then look up a matching passage of text on the wall to learn one resident's scent memory and story of the place.

Tolaas has studied smell since the 1990s and has completed scentscape research on 52 cities, Paris, Shanghai and Istanbul among them. She wants to use smell, the sense bound most tightly to memory, to "reveal an unexplored layer of existence, allowing us to tell different stories."

Besides sound and scent art, the Wuzhen show invited an "influencer artist," Amalia Ulman. The Argentine-born artist, a Spanish national, is only 30 this year, and was the first to become famous through work made on social media. In 2014, on Instagram, she played a girl at three different stages: a "Cute Girl" from the countryside, a "Sugar Baby" sinking into the material life of a big city, and finally a "Life Goddess" who returns to nature.

Ulman always blurs the line between the invented and the real. Her performances on social media challenge traditional forms of narrative. Some see "influencer art" as attention-seeking, a play for followers; others see it as expression precisely fitted to this era. Whatever the audience thinks, the artist is using the media language she knows best to say what she makes of the world.

Ulman made a 15-minute video, There and Then (《彼时彼处》), for the Wuzhen show. Shot as though livestreamed on a selfie stick, it cuts together what a foreign woman experiences in Yiwu, the small-commodities trading hub, along with a scene of her in a hotel room in underwear and a T-shirt, on the phone with friends abroad. As the video loops, viewers gradually piece together this woman's story and her thoughts. Like a livestream, always on and able to end at any moment, it lets you slowly come to know a performed, "invented" person.

The exhibition also set up a young artists section, whose jury picked 12 artists out of 56 born in mainland China after 1984 and showed their work at the Beizha Silk Mill.

In the end the young artist Wang Tuo won the Young Contemporary Art Wuzhen Award for his three-screen video Vortex (《漩涡》). Vortex tells a story about desire, with an architect hooked on two-dimensional (ACG) culture at its center, and mixes video with 2D animation to convey a feeling closing in on desire. The three screens may also point to three contexts at once: the real world, the world on the screen, and the two-dimensional world. In its citation the jury said it "looks forward to his future work continuing to explore the boundary between the real world and the virtual one."

The 2019 Wuzhen Contemporary Art Exhibition holds 90 works and sets of works by artists from 23 countries and regions, and runs through June 30.

The cover image shows the performance of World Power (2019), from the Wuzhen art exhibition; photographs in the article were taken on site by QDaily unless otherwise credited.