"Xiao Lu: Thirty years later” by Mikala Tai
By Mikala Tai
In late May 2011, escaping the behemoth art fair ArtHK. I caught the subway to the end of the Hong Kong Island line. In the port suburb of Chai Wan a few galleries had moved into warehouses spaces, and as I squeezed into a goods lift between boxes of frozen seafood, I was prickly with excitement. There is something particularly special about seeing an artist you have long studied and admired perform live, and the promise of seeing leading Chinese performance artist Xiao Lu was more than enough to lure me away from the decadent parties that encircled the art fair.
The performance was Science Democracy, 2011, in which Xiao Lu pasted to the floor of the gallery ninety-two red, rectangular slogan posters that read 科学民主, or Mr Science Mr Democracy’, an instantly recognisable slogan in China from the May Fourth Movement. On 4 May 1919, thousands of university students in Beijing had taken to the streets, chanting 科学民主, in a renegade intellectual and reformist protest for change. The movement campaigned for a new China, one that did away with imperialism and appealed for the country to embrace both science and democracy in the new era. Ninety-two years later, Xiao Lu, in perhaps a performative precursor to Hong Kong’s contemporary sociopolitical protests, evoked the vigour and defiance of this earlier protest.
In a room full of clinking champagne glasses, I watched Xiao Lu work. The audience quickly tired – after all, watching glue dry is not dissimilar to paint – but her focus remained. She began to engage a few of us to work with her, to paint the glue ourselves and to participate in a small, but significant, gesture that connected us to those who had so many years earlier campaigned for and sought radical change. I didn’t speak to her that day. I didn’t tell Xiao Lu of all the books I had read, the articles I had tracked down, and how I had asked my grandmother to translate newspaper clippings so I could begin to build an understanding of the impetus behind her practice. But a few years later, I did.
Xiao Lu is renowned for Dialogue a work she completed as part of her final-year studies at Hangzhou’s Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1988. The installation features two telephone booths, one seemingly occupied by a woman and the other a man. In the middle of the two booths is a mirror and a white plinth with a red phone hanging limply off the hook. In recent years, Xiao Lu has told me the work was originally a comment on the disengagement and miscommunication between men and women in the age of technology: a warning perhaps of how connections are being tempered by human advancement. In documentation from her graduating exhibition, the work appears in stark contrast to the more traditional sculptures and paintings of her peers. A few months later, in February 1989, Dialogue was included in the milestone China/Avant-Garde Exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Beijing. The exhibition was momentous as it was the first time in the post-Mao era that contemporary artists had occupied the gallery, which was straying far from the nationalistic work that it had come to house. There is grainy footage from the opening taken by filmmaker and critic Wen Pulin of swarms of people exploring the exhibition. Xiao Lu, with her long hair tied into a ponytail, glances back at the camera a few times as she stands in front of her work. After her last glance there is suddenly a flurry of movement and then, out of nowhere, Xiao Lu raises a handgun, fires two shots into the mirror of her work and races out of the frame. The video cuts out amid noise and the crowds running for the door.
The exhibition was immediately closed, and Xiao Lu and her then boyfriend, Tang Song, were detained by the police. News of this brazen act ricocheted around the world, capturing the headlines of The New York Times and Time magazine. Upon release, Xiao Lu and Tang Song distributed a signed statement refuting any suggestion that the act had been politically motivated, and the exhibition reopened. They also held an ad hoc media call where they drank tea and fielded questions. In that moment, Tang Song, more comfortable with the sudden attention, took a spokesperson role and, as a result, began to be written into the authorship of the work. Four months later, as the tanks retreated from Tiananmen Square, Dialogue began to be seen as an artistic premonition of the violence of 4 June 1989. Within days, Xiao Lu’s graduate work centred on technology’s mediation of human communication had been historicised as a pointed political performance by a creative duo.
In the years after 1989, Xiao Lu and Tang Song migrated to Australia and participated in numerous exhibitions, from Mao Goes Pop in 1993 at the Museum of Contemporary Art to shows at Holdsworth Galleries, Irving Galleries, the University of Sydney Club, and the progressive, and still missed, Space YZ at the University of Western Sydney. Then, for a period, Xiao Lu stopped producing work. By 2004, her relationship with Tang Song had disintegrated and she was back living in Beijing, emboldened to not only return to her art practice but also to reposition her place in art history.
As a young student, I was first attracted to Xiao Lu’s work for its apparent fearless political nature. Countless articles canonised Dialogue as this critical moment in contemporary Chinese art history, and even as recently as 2011 – in that warehouse in Chai Wan – I remained captivated by her embodiment of political action. But, in the years since we have become friends, I have found that her political nature and her persistence are fundamentally more concerned with personal freedoms. She is primarily interested in deep emotion, in gestures of extreme action and of chance, with her performance works more of a personal endeavour than political protest. In 2004 Xiao Lu once again raised a handgun, but instead of firing at Dialogue, she fired at fifteen framed images of herself, one for each year since 1989. Fifteen gunshots, 2004, marked Xiao Lu’s return to her practice and a reclamation of both her past and her future.
Since returning to her practice, Xiao Lu has consistently placed herself at the precipice between conceptual willpower and bodily limita-tions. She has worked at a startling pace, self-publishing a semi-autobiographical novel that advocates her as the sole artist of Dialogue, designing her architecturally brilliant home and studio in Beijing, and performing consistently in China and internationally. In Sperm. 20061, she unsuccessfully petitioned men to anonymously donate sperm so she could have a child. In One, 2015 (pp. 54-5)2, she inserted herself into the tradition of ink and brush painting, dousing herself in ink and letting it seep into xuan(rice) paper under her feet. More recently, in Polar. 2016 (fig.13),3 she attempted to hack herself out of an ice chamber with a Norwegian fishing knife, slicing her hand and requiring three hours of surgery after being pulled, bleeding, from the ice. In each work Xiao Lu has embraced the unknown of the precarious and submitted herself completely to each performance.
By 2017 Xiao Lu was once again at the forefront of contemporary art. Dialogue was included in the Guggenheim’s pivotal exhibition Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World and then in Performer and Participant at the Tate Modern in London a year later. In both cases Dialogue was credited under Xiao Lu’s name and hers alone, the result of years of agitation for sole recognition. It was amid the re-emergence of Dialogue on the world stage that I, along with curator and art historian Dr Claire Roberts and leading Beijing art critic Xu Hong, began working towards Xiao Lu’s first institutional solo exhibition. Xiao Lu: Impossible Dialogueopened in Sydney at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in January 2019, tracing her thirty-year oeuvre and profiling her practice beyond Dialogue.
Newly commissioned for Impossible Dialogue was the performance work Tides, 2019 (fig. 14),4 conceived by Xiao Lu to mark the time since both Dialogue and Fifteen gunshots. The work emerged from a reflective Xiao Lu, who, ahead of relocating back to Australia, wanted to reconnect with her second home and acknowledge the passing of three decades of work. I received her preliminary concept for the performance as a beautiful ink drawing emailed from Beijing that depicted her on a beach placing thirty bamboo poles at the ocean’s edge. Each pole, one for each year, was to be planted in sand amid the buffeting waves of a rising tide. It was to be a physical and emotional challenge.
Months later, in the pre-dawn darkness of a summer morning, the production crew clandestinely heaved the bamboo down to the water’s edge and waited for first light. We were all nervous, compounded by Xiao Lu’s recent confession that she didn’t know how to swim. The reality of her commitment to risk was heightened. Just before she began the performance, she turned, giving me the same glance – a look of resolve and excitement – she gave the camera in 1989 before she fired the shots into Dialogue. For over an hour Xiao Lu struggled with each pole, determinedly battled the rising water and her sodden ankle-length dress to dig and place each one into the sand. We had expected most of them to fall, for the ocean’s pull to be overwhelming, but only two poles toppled. At first, they were swept out to sea but, within minutes, they returned to shore, beaching themselves. After the performance, Xiao Lu, depleted, sat on a sand dune while we retrieved the bamboo. It was a near impossible task: each pole was impaled in the compacted sand. It took five of us to remove what Xiao Lu, alone, had accomplished. It was my turn to glance back, and as I caught her eye, she gave me a wry smile of knowing.
Performance/installation, 21-23 Nay 2006, Kanga Hotel, Yan’an, China, as part of the Long March Project.
Performance, 5 Sep. 2015, Valand Academy, Gothenburg, Sweden, as part of Live Action 10.
Performance, 23 October, 2016, Danish Cultural Center, Beijing, as part of Beijing Live.
Performance, 18 January. 2019, beach near Sydney.