Letters from Xiao Lu to Li Xianting about the shooting of her work Dialogue at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, in 1989.
Xiao Lu’s First Letter to Li Xianting
Dear Lao Li: greetings!
I spent all this time in Beijing in my hotel. I couldn’t see any green shadows outside the window, but just shut myself inside my room, except for an occasional long walk outside, and I seemed isolated from the world. I’m writing some things, and those words that confuse me are getting tangled up and pulled along by some invisible force. That world of statements that cannot become clear, things that cannot be openly said, is telling me that there are definitely things that I don’t know about that unknown world. I don’t know what speaking the facts means today. I am misunderstood by people, and slandered with various nonsense talk, but it seems that I am completely indifferent to this. I am getting closer and closer to myself. I search my soul. I’m not mistaken. I am like someone possessed, wanting to resolve unknown secrets. People are, in fact, so insignificant in the universal scheme of things, and answers about the form of so many of their actions cannot be achieved by rational analysis. My intuition tells me that it is the necessity of many apparently random events that interests me.
From Wen Pulin (温普林), I obtained the original videotape recording of that year (the first version of The Great Earthquake), and watched it many times. The rumour that there was a plain-clothes policeman on the scene who saw me doing the shooting is plain nonsense. Based on the videotape, at first Ju Yi (居奕, a fellow student of mine from the Subsidiary High School of the Central Academy of Fine Art, who at the time was filming the videotape of the shooting with Wen Pulin) and I exchanged a few words. Then Tang Song (唐宋) said a few words, and the two of them exchanged a few more words, after which I moved towards the installation work and fired the gun. After that I left the scene moving to the left. At this moment, Tang Song happened to be standing on the left-hand side. The plainclothes policeman must have been drawn to the scene by the sound of the gunshots, and an intuitive misunderstanding led to the mistaken arrest of Tang Song. Tang Song later told me that after he was arrested, he didn’t say a word, so he was taken away. And I quickly returned the gun to Li Songsong (李松松) after seeing that Tang Song had been arrested, and went and hid in the box of “East-South-West-North”【translator’s note: Zhang Yongjian’s (张永见) installation Black Box - Guide to Destiny – Skin-mole Fortune-telling (《黑匣子——天命指南——由痣看命》(1989))】. I am now sending you the slightly revised “Explanation”.
Xiao Lu
2 February 2004, Hangzhou
Xiao Lu’s Second Letter to Li Xianting (栗宪庭)
Dear Lao Li: Greetings!
I am now sending you my “Explanation of the shooting work Dialogue in the National Art Museum of China 1989”. The specifics of many conversations about these matters and many of the matters themselves are not very clear in my memory, but I remember the major things.
In recent days I have been constantly looking back at the event that happened that year. Objectively speaking, Tang Song (唐宋) was only someone with inside knowledge of the shooting incident. In that sense, he did have a connection with the incident, but he has no connection with the work itself. On the other hand, there are too many people who have a connection with the incident, although Li Songsong (李松松) was very important among them.
Perhaps it was in Hangzhou that Tang Song first heard about my idea of firing a gun, and he learned that I would be able to borrow one. As for his idea of taking part in this work (I have no way of being sure about this), after he got to Beijing he suggested buying some red cloth, but during the installation of the work my attitude spoiled that hope. I tore it down, and he reverted to the role of bystander. Yet the course of events again allowed him to become involved – he was arrested, and so he again wanted to become part of it. At this time I was trapped in my emotions. I observed his intervention without seeing it for what it was.
At the time, he and I were people who were on two separate tracks. I fell in love with him as a person, and he fell in love with my gun. The work itself, which was based in personal emotion, became, through the form of the gunshots, a means for me of achieving a physical and mental release. All my body and soul were poured into this personal emotion, and the work didn’t seem important to me at the time, so I tacitly agreed to everything that Tang Song was doing. Given further the extraordinary experiences that we shared afterwards, I added a romantic flavour to this emotion. However, personal emotion was after all at no stage the foundation for Tang Song. He hated being seen in the role of the ‘great lover’, and he became angry with me, and considered that my existence had affected his career. A random opportunity was all it took for him to leave me, but he had used all sorts of ways and vile language to hurt me, all with the one purpose of causing me to leave him.
Lao Li, fifteen years ago, I made that work for reasons of personal emotion. For the sake of personal emotion, I said nothing about this work for fifteen years, and today, it is still because of personal emotion that I have spoken out about the whole process of the shooting incident. Perhaps this is a woman’s true psychological journey. Sometimes I am not all that clear about opinions about art, but I know where the truth of my own conscience is. From formal conception to the shooting, this work should be considered intrinsically connected to my psychological journey. On the other hand, its further development and extension has an inseparable connection with the politics of our Chinese society. Maybe this is the foundation of the rebirth of this work. In fact, come to think of it now, the extension of this work is the closest to me personally, and it has continued its extension even to today. When I recreate it, it is a time of facing it again. The emotional life that used it as a medium fifteen years ago has become an ending, again in Dialogue. If one were to speak of fatalism, there seems to be a weird circle to this. A fortnight after Tang Song had formally raised parting ways with me, I received a phone call from Beijing asking me to re-create that work. As soon as Tang Song heard of this, and again sought to control the work, I firmly replied: “No!”
This was the origin of that new work of mine. When I faced myself and fired fifteen shots, this was when I could truly face up to those fifteen years of mine, in the same way as I explained that work Fifteen Gunshots….from 1989 to 2003:
Love
Heaven knows
Hate
Earth knows
Having neither love
Nor hate,
Ghosts know.
Fifteen years ago, after I had fired those two gunshots at the National Art Museum of China, there was me and there was him. When we walked out of the Beijing Dongcheng Detention Centre, an invisible force attracted me, and from 1989 until 2003, we spent a full fifteen years together.
Today I raise a gun again, and facing myself, I fire a full fifteen shots, one shot for each year….
We’re done now.
I am not good at theoretical explanations, let alone at discussing art. All I know is how to live truly. As for the form in which a work of art manifests itself as such, its existence is only a matter of inner need. It may be a painting, or a poem, or perhaps what it needs to use is a gun… All in all it is decided by your psychological direction in a specific state. It cannot be explained by using the word “art”. Rather it is a life-preserving instinct. It is where your life is.
23 December 2003 in my studio at Dashanzi, Beijing.
In fact, when I think back about the events of that time, many links between randomicity and necessity seem indispensable. Had a single one of those apparently random events that followed closely one after the other been absent, there was no way the result would have been the shooting incident. And yet one main thread runs through the whole sequence, consisting of my inner needs, for regardless of whether they were someone else’s suggestion or by some prompting, unless you have these inner needs, none of all this will happen. Because you have the right of choosing to do something or not. Because, at the final moment, the need was for you to go and fire the gun.
Lao Li, I don’t know whether forming a work is based in a person or in a meaning. I think that if this work itself had never been established, there would have been no way all that meaning could have been formed.
I don’t know whether this is a problem with me or with you, with Tang Song, or with society, but Dialogue is indeed a work created by a woman but talked about by a man. This is either embarrassing or ridiculous. As for my personal experience, it is more like both embarrassing and ridiculous.
Lao Li, there are times, when one one faces up to the truth, that one become so helpless and lost, but perhaps this is just the nature of things. It forces you to face up to various matters, and to yourself. You have no choice. Nobody else can save you. You can only rely on yourself to rise up and face up to everything. That’s the reality of it.
Lao Li, for so many years, we haven’t had a good talk about this. The reason I can write these things to you today, is because I still feel some respect for you. I misunderstood you once, but after we talked over the phone, I tended to trust that you would understand me. I don’t know where the present road leads, but as for all this that I have written to you now, I still hope that you will examine it in detail, for history needs a fairly objective truth to exist.
Xiao Lu,
3 February 2004, Hangzhou.
Xiao Lu’s Third Letter to Li Xianting
Dear Lao Li: Greetings!
Over the last few years, I have not collected too many materials on this aspect. What I have is only what other people gave me at the time, and I don’t know whether sending it to you is useful or not.
Lao Li, in our phone call you said that you would take all the responsibility, which moved me very much. I know that I cannot avoid my own responsibility in this matter, and the facts today make me realize something logical: that if you establish a personal emotion on this kind of unreal base, you will only reap what you have sown. Lao Li, I know that having come to this step today will make difficulties for you, for this is indeed not a small matter. It involves people and things in many aspects. It is not something I could foresee. Speaking frankly, Lao Li, if I were a very rational person, someone who could so thoroughly have thought through all the consequences of those gunshots, I perhaps wouldn’t have fired them in the first place, because it was indeed against the law. Had it been in a country with a sound legal system, Li Songsong and I would have been sent to prison, Li Songsong for stealing the gun, and I for firing it. Tang Song on the other hand would have been at most someone with foreknowledge of the crime. And it was because we were in China during those years, that I had no conception of the law in my head. It was also the vagueness factor of the law in China that led this work to become social, political, reflective of the elasticity of the law and so on and so forth. All this was the natural consequence produced by this gunfire, but it wasn’t something I had thought about and which had led to my firing the gun. Perhaps Tang Song had thought about the consequences, and that’s exactly why he did not in fact fire the gun, but regardless of how we discuss things after the event, there is no risk involved in that.
To this day I am still not quite clear what the reasons were that led to our being released. At first, the outside world all said it was because of our families. However, as a matter of fact, you know that neither my family nor Tang Song’s are anything special in Beijing, and this couldn’t possibly have been sufficient reason to release us. On the whole there is one point that could have helped us, which is that we had turned the matter into something that was too big, in that all the major international media had reported on it. Naturally Songsong’s grandfather was saddled with a lot of the responsibility, and I have always felt ashamed towards him about this, but as you know, in China no matter as big as this can be determined by any single factor. From this way of determining the problem, perhaps it was due to the specific atmosphere of 1989, and no one can dispute that 1989 was a crazy year in China’s history, and one that was politically quite open. I’ve heard that at the time of the Lunar New Year, Hu Qili (胡启立) happened to be in charge of the Politburo, and that he made the decision. For whatever reason, I think that the arrests and releases of that year really added a lot of political colour to this work. Anyway, the consequences of the gunshots of that Lunar Ner Year’s Eve really caused this work to achieve legendary status.
Lao Li, there is a Chinese expression about “following the course of nature”. Today I seem to have a new understanding of this expression. At the time, the consequences created by my following my conscience in firing that gun, were in fact the results created naturally by the circumstances at the specific time of 1989 in China, and nobody could have predicted all of them beforehand. However, the coincidences of history often are so surprising to people. Maybe some of them are the will of heaven. That includes today’s matters. So many people have urged me not to speak about them, but I cannot suppress the urge to speak out about them. Is this not a consequence of my inner needs? What does “natural” mean, if it is not following the truth of one’s conscience?
Lao Li, on that day you asked me again and again why I had wanted to fire the gun. Perhaps this is a psychological question that cannot be clearly answered in one sentence. And yet I know why I wanted to fire the gun. If you. Lao Li, really feel that it cannot be resolved with the word “emotion”, I may be able to tell you one day. All the social and political factors activated by the gunshots were truly something I could not have controlled at the time. Think about it, Lao Li, if I had really been so sensitive and aware about politics and society, I should never have fallen into the trap of love after I was released. Sometimes I really don’t know where my problems come from. Lao Li, I truly hope that you as an elder can tell me this.
I am not good with words. I always get nervous when I speak with theorists. I’ve said so much that you possibly are thinking that I am getting more confused as I speak. Many words that I had no intention of saying, I have somehow spoken anyway. If I have said anything disrespectful, I ask for your forgiveness.
Yours sincerely and respectfully,
Xiao Lu
20 February 2004
Translation Wen Zai/Archibald McKenzie 2024
Note: Xiao Lu wrote four letters to Gao Minglu and Li Xianting respectively in 2003. Gao Minglu published all of them, while Li Xianting only published three.