Why should an artist go from the Netherlands to China?

What can a pair of Dutch artists in China contribute to Chinese art? How many of China’s long and diverse traditions will they have to appropriate in their work before they are even able to make a contribution? More and more Chinese artists work in the (Post) modern canon. They tackle Chinese themes, but in doing so they adopt the position of an autonomous artist and present their paintings and media installations at international art events and in the white cubes of the leading galleries all over the world. They have been very successful recently and their market value is rising to astronomical heights. So it seems only logical that a flood of artists from Europe and the US should move in the opposite direction and find its way to booming China. In that case, however, neither the Chineseness of Chinese art nor the provenance of the artists who visit China matters very much. What they are after is a Tran cultural exchange. They hope to get a lift from the Chinese growth and, via a U-turn, to also make a name for themselves on the global art market. Is there by now such a thing as typical Chinese art with which foreign artists can engage in dialogue?

These kinds of considerations, questions and dilemmas are of great importance for the Dutch artists duo Vroegop/Schoonveld. 2008 was the year of their first flight to China, and the same is true of the Dutch gallery owner Melle Hendrikse, who opened the new gallery C-Space in Beijing in the same year just outside the circle of the 798 Art Centre, which has already been adopted by the government. Vroegop/Schoonveld are presenting their exhibition PAUSE in C-Space, June - September 2009. The exhibition in C-Space is based on the principle of multiples, which deliberately forges a link with Chinese mass production.
The cross-fertilisation between the Netherlands and China has come at a historically critical moment. At the very moment when Chinese artists are participating in (Post) modern art, Modernism itself is in a crisis. The whole of Western art is characterised by a crisis in art. The key concepts of Modernism are the autonomous subject, universal validity, and progress. All three concepts were undermined during the postcolonial phase of the late twentieth century. All the same, the notions of autonomy and progress prove to still exercise a strong force of attraction on cultures that have embarked on a lightning modernisation manoeuvre to catch up, such as China.

In Western art, on the other hand, the Modernist principles are increasingly called into question. Artists are no longer autonomous individuals who can view their means of expression from an independent position. After all, how we profile ourselves depends to some extent on the media available to us. For artists, this means not only that they express a highly individual inspiration, but also that they themselves are always products of material media. Whether they like it or not, their work always bears the traces of that. That is the route that we shall explore in the career of Vroegop/Schoonveld, but which is also of importance for the position of Chinese artists today.

Right from the start, Vroegop/Schoonveld have positioned themselves as artists in the tradition of multiples, art stores and art factories. What they add to that is that they do not just apply them to the Western conditions of production of art, but also confront them with cultural conditions elsewhere, for example India or China. We shall follow their career and projects for a while and then contrast them with the historical background in China, before concluding with an assessment of their current exhibition in C-Space.

Multiples by Vroegop/Schoonveld
Ed Schoonveld (1958) and Matty Vroegop (1960) have formed the artists duo Vroegop/Schoonveld since 1992. They were artists in residence at the International Centre for Cultural Development (ICCD) in Thiruvananthapuram, India, in 1993 and 1995, where they produced a large series of plaster casts of their own heads. Everyday objects were placed on top of each head. The heads were presented not as the inventors of the objects on show, but merely as pedestals for them. The relations of subject to source and object to replica were thereby reversed. The subject is the product of the world of objects. We are produced in multiples by our surroundings.

In the late 1990s they worked with candle factories that endlessly churned out kitsch icons with great commercial success. One of their objects was a wax TV set. The flame slowly died away behind the screen, a slow-motion spectacle of visual consumer culture. The money raised by this lucrative enterprise was turned into a massive gold cast of a used leather purse. This ‘unique’ work of art was then auctioned and sold by Christie’s New York. The concept of money as simulacrum was thematised again in a project in cooperation with the European Ceramic Work Centre (EKWC) in’s-Hertogenbosch, where Vroegop/Schoonveld made gilt ceramic sculptures that found their way to an installation in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and other venues.

At the start of the new millennium Vroegop/Schoonveld became involved in group projects with students. This led to Train 2005, a project in which students made multiples. Some of them were presented to a large company that manufactures business gifts and design objects for (museum) shops. A design by one of the students was taken into production and distributed wholesale.

We started to work together between 2005 and 2007, when I was a professor at the art academy where they worked – ArtEZ/AKI Enschede – and in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Twente. In the light of those functions, I wanted to work with Vroegop/Schoonveld to explore the changing social role of the artist in specific projects. The first joint project targeted the cardboard industry. This was a follow-up to a previous project of Vroegop/Schoonveld called ECSTASY, in which they had made a complete car showroom, including cars (Rolls Royce Corniche + Porsche 911), reception desk and furniture out of cardboard on a scale of 1:1. The new project, implemented once again with students from the art academy, was called FastFurniture. The students worked on making cardboard furniture using bee board supplied by Besin International and aroused great interest on the part of the Knowledge Centre for Paper and Cardboard in Arnhem. In the course of the design process we investigated the unclear boundaries between autonomous art and design, the role of the production process in the way artists profile themselves and the end of the autonomous author vis-à-vis mass production. In the following year we offered the workshop Interiors: FastFurniture, Multiples & Other productions, which focused on the construction of self (as artist/author/designer) by means of techniques of mediation. Both projects were exhibited and published in postcard collections with accompanying text and the book Multiple.

As an outcome of the cooperation we jointly set up a project agency: AIR (Artistic Industrial Research) & Co. We offered our services to industry to draw up in-company diagnoses regarding the cultural conditions of the process of production. By developing prototypes on the spot, the intention was to promote the hybrid or cross-cultural deployment of the machinery. At that time Vroegop/Schoonveld took part in a design competition organised by the silver industry. They developed a gigantic silver chandelier cut out of silver plate by means of a computer-driven water jet. The application of this technique to precious metal sheets had never been shown on this scale before. The flat lamina was turned into a volume of 52 x 52 x 86 weighing 3,125 kg. After this exercise they went in search of a confrontation with the culture of mass production par excellence: China. With the help of a grant from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (BKVB), I was able to accompany them for some of the trip and activities. They started in the Chinese European Art Centre (CEAC) in Xiamen. It was not the intention of Vroegop/Schoonveld as artists in residence to merely make use of China’s cheap labour power. They wanted to investigate the relations of production in China as the basis for an artistic intervention in which East and West meet.

Chinese mass production
Chinese artists of course come from a totally different historical background from that of Europe and the US, but the present situation of the world art market is favourable in view of the embarrassment of the Chinese by their own past. The crisis in the art of the West that has so often been diagnosed offers an ideal platform for Chinese art that is now emerging from its own crisis-ridden past. The people of China have been through several revolutions in the course of a century, during which the Cultural Revolution in particular wiped out much of China’s cultural heritage and its material memory. Carol Lu, a Chinese art critic and internationally operating curator, finds the amnesia typical of the cultural situation in China. ‘There is no question of continuing cultural traditions, development, and critical and intellectual capacity. We live with fragmented memories from our own past and have almost no sense of history. This has seriously affected our ability to place our own position and what is happening around us in a context’ (in: New World Order, NAI Publishers 2008, p. 20).

Artists in China are in a difficult spot. The Communist tradition of China calls for art that is at the service of the people, but that tradition has to be reinvented if it is to manifest itself on the international stage. On the world market, biennials are increasingly characterised by a multicultural component. Artists from all over the world are caught on the horns of a dilemma between an artistic recuperation of their cultural (sometimes ethnic) roots and forced modernisation. People are increasingly talking about alternative modernity (Andrew Feenberg, Alternative Modernity, 1995; the exhibition Altermodern, Tate Britain, London 2009). China too is taking its own course. The artists are jumping onto the modernisation bandwagon of the West, now that it has already passed the Postmodern station and is in danger of getting stuck in the creative industry. The Chinese draw on every influence to create their own lucrative mix.

Contemporary Chinese art has a strongly iconographic character. There is a lot of art that recycles the propagandist visual idiom of posters, flags and party badges from the Mao era in a new Pop Art packaging. It is a way of coming to terms with their own past. An artist like Yue Minjun has become tremendously popular with his series of paintings of Chinese with a broad grin. You can even find them in endless quantities of pirate versions on the Chinese markets.

This procedure is what guarantees success in Chinese art. An artist has to invent a personal idiom and then start an art factory where less fortunate painters expand that oeuvre by means of variations on the same theme. Many installations by Chinese artists are also making their appearance on the international art markets. These installations are concerned with Chinese identity, they are sometimes even politically critical in their intention, but they lack bite because they are usually presented in the form of camp or Pop Art. Today’s Chinese art is generally still trapped in a Postmodern visual discourse focused on the international branding of artists and frivolous Pop Art versions of Chinese identity. There are only a handful of artists, such as the veteran Ai Wei Wei, who oppose this tendency and give the importance of regaining the cultural memory a central place in their work.
Contemporary Chinese art may go down well on the international scene, but it barely filters down to the level of the ordinary Chinese. This is because there is no Chinese middle class. There is an increasing number of rich Chinese but they float like oil on water. They achieved their wealth by making use of cheap Chinese labour power and of the market for mass products. At the bottom of the social ladder work often still goes on as it has for centuries. The Chinese porcelain industry has never changed. The same applies to bronze casting, wood carving, lacquer work, and so on. The Chinese art academy is in fact still a place to learn a profession where masters who inherited their methods from centuries before initiate their pupils into the craft.
In the meantime China has a culture of mass production without parallel that goes back centuries. The first Chinese emperor unified China by setting up a system of weights and measures and a uniform script for civil servants. In the succeeding dynasties the extensive civil service apparatus was used to standardise crafts and building processes throughout the empire. Production was modular. All of the operations that went into every production process were carried out and optimised separately before being assembled. That called for supervision from above, endless classification, categorisation and taxonomic integration. Manuals for this were developed in the course of the centuries, not for the benefit of the craftsmen who did the work, but for the officials and tax collectors who supervised it. That modular method of production led to a unified culture (see: Lotha Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art, Princeton 2002).
The whole of China is founded on multiples. The modular methods of production, utilities and building typologies are the same all over the country. China can still draw on that legacy, because it is still very much alive. The monuments that were produced in this way have been largely destroyed, but the operations are still recorded in the physical memory of the gestures and their coordination. Because of their own heritage of a century of Marxist ideology, Chinese artists ought to be eminently suited to conduct artistic research on the material conditions of their own contemporary visual production, but they have become detached through the forced constriction of all social relations in an economic straitjacket.
This is the situation that Vroegop/Schoonveld are now entering. Given their background in the artistic tradition of multiples, the next logical step is to conduct artistic research on the relations of production on which visual culture is based. What better place could there be to start than in China, that has recognised the importance of modular relations of production for millennia? But what is there in the artistic career of Vroegop/Schoonveld that is of importance for the cross-fertilisation that they envisage? Three important themes can be distilled from their work: craftsmanship, engagement, and an inquiring position as artists.

Themes for cultural exchange
Vroegop/Schoonveld are rooted in the tradition of the artistic production of multiples which originated in the Pop Art of the 1960s (such as Claes Oldenburg’s Store and Andy Warhol’s Factory), and which reached a new climax in the Postmodern kitsch of Jeff Koons. The multiple has had a strong conceptual component right from the start, and it light-heartedly refers to mass culture and deliberate bad taste. Whether or not it is ‘genuine’ art depends to a large extent on its visual quality. How well made is the multiple? How convincingly does it play its role? Does it just refer to historical style periods, or does it also convincingly embody them? These questions have to be put to every work and different choices have to be made each time, on a sliding scale from camp mass product to exclusive work in a limited and numbered edition.
The success of a multiple depends on its material saturation, in other words, the bridging of the tension between concept and craftsmanlike execution. Souvenirs for tourists are also multiples, but their low saturation in execution is a part of their charm, leaving them inevitably sketchy (see: Victor Margolin, Culture is Everywhere, the museum of Corn-temporary Art 2002). Vroegop/Schoonveld have made camp multiples whose visual idiom is close to that of the souvenirs, such as the candles from the candle factory and the soap wallets. In such cases each object is just an exemplar of its sort. What you buy – for a low price – is the artistic concept. In terms of classic artistry, that is a deliberate provocation. Vroegop/Schoonveld have also created work, however, that is desirable in itself, such as the silver chandelier, even though it also embodies a strong concept. Craftsmanship – over the whole spectrum from concept to engaging with the material – is thus a theme that Vroegop/Schoonveld have explored to its limits.
An equally important theme is that of engagement. The Alarm Brooch (2008) is an exceptional work in this respect. It is a simulacrum of the alarm button that is used to prevent shoplifting in clothing stores. By turning it into a piece of jewellery, Vroegop/Schoonveld challenge the wearer to behave in a provocative way that undermines authority. The Alarm Brooch attracts the attention of today’s surveillance society and the fact that as consumers we are constantly exposed to disciplining by devices. The brooch becomes more effective if more buyers have the courage to risk false detection. The Alarm Brooch is thus a successful example of subversive design. The design of the presentation was mainly developed in China. The project was first presented at the exhibition 1 ding [1 thing] in the Groningen Art Centre.
A third theme that is attracting increasing international attention is that of artistic research, a form of art that has taken off in the last few years. Artists no longer start out from their own subjective experiences, are no longer primarily aiming for self-expression, but use their work to explore the cultural conditions of the senses and of the visual idiom in the media society. Artistic research focuses on the conditions of visual production and thereby also on the diversity of relations of production.
Vroegop/Schoonveld conduct explicit artistic research on the cultural relations of production and the order of commodities. They chose China as a research field for understandable reasons. One of the first productions that they undertook in Xiamen was a photobook, Return to Launch-Site. During their career they have made all kinds of postcard collections of projects and photobooks in which they demonstrate their vision. They like to photograph deliberate and random collections, shop windows, interiors, and also interventions in the public domain that intentionally or unintentionally disrupt or thwart such arrangements.

This forms a welcome recording of the frameworks through which you look if you focus, not on the things themselves, but on the contexts in which they are brought to your attention. The photobook that they made in China in 2008, for instance, invites you to look over their shoulders at the world orders that they have found. Research of this kind also immediately affects the position of the artist, or at least calls it into question. Only an artistry that is constantly questioning itself can form the basis of artistic research.
Vroegop/Schoonveld are not the only ones to face the challenge of introducing the themes outlined above in cultural exchange. Contemporary Chinese artists are running up against the same problems today. So the confrontation between the worlds of East and West in C-Space can open doors for both parties.

Made in China
Vroegop/Schoonveld were artists in residence at the Chinese European Art Centre (CEAC) in Xiamen from February to June 2008. It was their explicit wish to conduct artistic research there on the Chinese methods of production and on the culturally specific way in which mass products are distributed and sold. The outcome of their research was an exhibition in the CEAC: On Display. This exhibition consisted of an installation that presented the Chinese Store.
Mass produced commodities find their way to everyday life. The main flow of items branches into many narrow channels that fork in turn and ends up in the capillaries of the small family shops that open onto the overpopulated city streets of China. Here are the familiar little shops, no larger than a bike shed, where the wares are displayed on the street side while the family openly lives behind and between them. At the back they sit huddled round the TV set eating noodles. In the meantime the children sleep on the packaging piled up against the back wall. Vroegop/Schoonveld did not just use this shop model for the design of their installation in the CEAC; this model was itself the object of their investigations. The exhibition shows the dynamic tension between the arrangement that has been introduced and chaos of everyday objects, devices, tools and so on that are for sale.
The presentation of the store is one of the basic principles of Pop Art. Vroegop/Schoonveld add a critical intercultural component. Their installation shows the tension between the Chinese way of displaying wares and the typical Western design of an exhibition in the white cube of the art gallery. The latter usually defines a ritual space in which unique works of art are isolated. By installing the model of a Chinese shop in the CEAC gallery, models of arrangement from two different cultures are played out against one another. The Chinese model is itself shown in accordance with the Western canon, but at the same time it challenges the Western form of display. The gallery presents the model of a Chinese shop, while when seen from the shop the CEAC only represents the cash register section. The Chinese shop, however, is subordinate to the economic system of the international art market.
The installation On Display certainly is an encouraging research result. At the same time the artistic duo used their time in the CEAC to widen the research from trade to the underlying Chinese relations of production. They zoomed in on the porcelain industry. Fujian, the province where Xiamen is situated, is also the location of the porcelain city Dehua. The classic modular method of production of China also led to the concentration of specific handicrafts in centres exclusively devoted to them that grew to become entire cities.

That process is still going on in the industrialised China of today, directed even at the highest level by the government, as a political strategy of regional development. Thus there are cities centred on the car industry, the shoe industry, and so on. In view of their earlier experiences with ceramic production in India and later also in the European Ceramics Work Centre in ’s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, cooperation with Chinese ceramic mass production was a logical step for Vroegop/Schoonveld. Besides, their introduction to Chinese culture had already led a concept to take shape that was eminently suited to being elaborated in porcelain.

Vroegop/Schoonveld and I travelled to Dehua to meet Master Su, the descendant of a family that has been producing white China for centuries. Su showed us his workshops, his clay extraction, his gigantic wood-fired oven, the Dragon Kiln, which nestles against the ridge of a hill like an elephant’s trunk some dozens of metres long. That kiln usually produces a never ending flow of white teapots. Master Su managed to convince Vroegop/Schoonveld completely of the craftsmanlike quality of his work and of the porcelain clay that he used. There and then the order was placed to produce a large number of porcelain disks that would eventually be shown for the most part as an installation. In the end 2,400 exemplars were produced and will be used for the exhibition in C-Space in Beijing. Vroegop/Schoonveld would document the production process as part of their research. This preliminary research was conducted in 2008, but its actual implementation required a new stay in China from February to July 2009. The exhibition PAUSE is the crowning achievement of that residence.

PAUSE in C-Space
The notion of void has always played an important part in the work of Vroegop/Schoonveld. They had already used it as a theme on several occasions in the medium of photography and turned it into an art poster. For instance, the duo photographed the flattened and yellowed grass on the spot where a tent has temporarily stood and an empty section of pavement in a snow-covered street where a parked car has disappeared. In both cases absence is rendered visible. At the same time, they reveal that beneath the surface there are always layers that immediately form a new surface skin of reality when exposed to the air. The turning point from full to empty and back again to the appearance of everyday fascinates Vroegop/Schoonveld.
Chinese culture is equally fascinated by the transition from emptiness to plenty. Already in the prehistoric era an abstract symbolism was developed for this concept that also found material expressed in two objects carved in jade: the bi disc and the tsung. The bi disc is a round jade disc with a hole in the middle; the tsung is a square column with a circular hole running down its centre from top to bottom. The bi disc is regarded as a symbol of the heaven, the tsung of the earth. Both items are found in large numbers in tombs as gifts for the dead from the Neolithic era on. Their production and use continued throughout the dynasties of China almost down to the present. Although there is a consensus on the ascription of bi to the heaven and of tsung to the earth, we can only speculate on their ritual use. Some claim that the bi disc was knotted to the clothing of imperial messengers as a mark of distinction. It is also sometimes seen as a means of ritual communication with the world of the heaven, but that is not certain.
Philosophically speaking, the bi disc is the symbol of the void. The heaven extends from the outermost void at the edge to the innermost void at the central hole. The disc is the world in between that exists thanks to the tension between nothing and nothing. The bi indicates the primordial relation itself. If this primal tension becomes associated with matter, thus if the circle is expressed in the square of the tsung, the bi manifests itself as the creative principle.

The meeting of heaven and earth creates the ‘ten thousand things’, the Chinese collective term for all that materially exists. The tsung therefore usually has several layers. The materialisation of the primal tension triggers a chain reaction that produces one layer of manifestation after another. Fairly flat tsungs have been found, but sometimes they have so many layers that they can be as tall as half a metre. The transition from bi to tsung is the turning point from void to fullness. It is bi that causes the world to emerge from nothing. The bi is the symbol of the generative void.

Vroegop/Schoonveld decided to use the model of the bi disc for a monumental installation of multiples: 2,400 round discs made of milk-white porcelain from Dehua. Bi discs were traditionally made of jade. Jade is a sacred stone. Although it is very hard, it was sculpted by hand in the prehistoric period. Ancient bi discs fetch large sums of money on the international antiques market, but nowadays they are also counterfeited in infinite numbers and offered as genuine on every flea market in China. There is a mechanised mass production of jade bi discs, but this model has never been made in porcelain. Porcelain-Master Su Zhu Zhuang assumed responsibility for the production.

For the production of their multiple, Vroegop/Schoonveld decided to use four disc diameters that are connected with the devices on which information is stored in the West: the LP (diameter 30 cm – central opening diameter 0.5 cm); the EP (diameter 25 cm – central opening diameter 0.5 cm); the SINGLE (diameter 17 cm – central opening 3.5 cm), and the DVD/CD-ROM (diameter 12 cm – central opening diameter 0.5 cm). 600 exemplars were produced of each of these four types. Customised disc holders (plate stands) will be made in China for these discs in which the 2,400 discs will be inserted in the final installation. The large number is partly based on the desire to be able to construct the work on a monumental scale.

The installation in C-Space consists of the confrontation of the innumerable circular representations of the void with the white cube of the gallery. The circles from China challenge the three-dimensional rectangle of Western art presentation. It is a repetition on a higher plane of the confrontation that was staged in On Display, in which the Chinese arrangement was played off against the Western one. There is an extra layer of meaning: the bi discs have been given the format of information storage devices. In the worldview of the West today, information is the generative principle. All phenomenal forms are traced back to information. Even all organisms are derived from DNA information. However, the Western worldview is indifferent towards the material differentiation of information.

Chinese philosophy, on the other hand, shifts the centre of gravity to the ‘ten thousand things’. The bi principle lies behind them, it is effused into the earth, and only then becomes differentiated. The Chinese bi disc production is thus expressed in extremely resilient jade. The Western bi, however, is a blank information storage device made of easily reproducible material. Through the use of craftsmanship of the workshop of Master Su Zhu Zhuang, the installation has not remained conceptually at the level of a sketch. As a result, it has achieved a high material degree of saturation. While Western thought tends to abstraction, the linking of concept with matter is typically Chinese.

As a monumental three-dimensional object, the display of white discs is not only in the space; it relates to that space, challenges it, with all of the associations of cultural confrontation and cross-fertilisation. Craftsmanship, engagement – in the sense of respecting the cultural memory again – and research are assigned a crucial role in this exhibition. The dialogue with China has been brought about by it, but of course not yet ended. Vroegop/Schoonveld keep on presenting work in progress. C-Space offers a unique opportunity for that. The objective of the C-Space gallery is to promote the exchange between Chinese and Western art. The exhibition PAUSE makes an important contribution to the dialogue between East and West. There really is something at stake in that dialogue. Vroegop/Schoonveld have put the points that matter in the discussion in C-Space on the agenda.

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These objects are connecting Chinese tradition, philosophy, industry, matter and knowledge with Western modules of knowledge and communication, carriers of information.
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