My early years were spent in a small village yard in Shanxi, China with my grandparents, who were peasants. They planted several pomegranate trees because I liked pomegranate. They have died, but trees are alive and growing wild*.
When I found myself studying contemporary art in California and Cambridge when I was in my 20s, I felt impossible to communicate the world and the work I was in now with my rusty earliest self and its community. My art since then has always been various attempts to do this impossible communication, but with other people and communities.
*2024 Update: the old yard in the picture above has been completely demolished, including all the trees.
In the age of AI-Generated Content and Content Creator Economy, I don’t want to be a content creator. I want to be a context creator.
I make all my art in collaboration with non-artists. If I ask Chinese people to “make art,” they show lots of doubts about whether they have the “talent” or “skills”. But if I ask them to imitate a performance art piece, say, along with me, they can do it immediately and it always turns out to be naturally different from the original and is often speaking to a new social context acutely.
So, in 2022, with two collaborators I started to organize ShanzhaiMFA (or “fake art school”), an anti-hierarchical co-learning and co-living collective where people do creative things without being a professional “creative”. Shanzhai originally means mountain fortress; in Chinese history, rebellions against imperial rule often started from such fortresses. It implies lack of control. Its “contemporary use usually encompasses counterfeit, imitation, or parody products and events and the subculture surrounding them” (Wikipedia).
With this name, we attract a wide variety of people, most of whom have no art education before but have a sense of humor. School dropouts, young poets, NGO workers, old psychoanalysts, lawyers, PhD candidates, delivery workers, DJs, rural elementary school teachers, small business owners, fortune-tellers — as well as my own mom — sleep, teach, and create socially engaged art together in each term, one to four weeks long.
We publish open invitation for each term on social media — no application, no bureaucracy, everyone is accepted, very low price with hostel-style accommodation included. We have run 7 terms so far, totaling 100+ days, 200+ courses, 100+ student-teachers from across the country.
After I graduated from a liberal arts college and went back to China, I don’t want make art for refined cultural consumption anymore. On the contrary, I want to “uncivilize” ourselves from the social norms of Chinese culture which too often regards itself as highly “civilized”. In Shanzhai, we sometimes call the teachers “jiaoshou”, meaning yelling beast. Chinese students and teachers, including myself, are otherwise too civil.
Every student is a teacher; every audience is a performer -- by design we exchange roles all the time. We learn conceptual writing by shouting rebellious slogans on megaphones on the streets, so that conceptual art is more than just conceptual. We do morning workouts by following not yoga videos but performance art videos. We do non-fiction journalism writing through improv theater. We join local Yingge street dance group. We make theater with actual Buddhist nuns as well as fake Mosul shamans. Theater is not a product of work, of workshop, of studio, of training, of project meetings; art happens during cooking, playing, and sometimes dreaming. Our theater-classrooms are often on the streets, on the trees (we climb trees everywhere), in the rain, in the mud, in temples, in homes, and under cover of the night.
I want to thank the following authors for inspiration: Byung-Chul Han’s Shanzhai, Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster and Proletarian Nights, Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing; and the following practitioners: Anti-University UK, Silent University. - LATEST: 三十一世紀原住民：三月在清邁 - FAKING ART: Dali Art School https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ZQqn_PWzqZgRXmE23PZfXw - COOKING ART: Chaoshan Village Art School https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/gniCKwCf9puBE9sBVW3VfA - UNCIVILIZING ART: Chaoshan Village Game Theater Festival https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/B82JlAB4nKMDPB8pC7x6SA - FAKING NATURE: Xiamen Village Ecology Art School https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/j3AxzdzPyYif5MryqzEg4w - FAKING FAMILIES: Xiamen Village Art School https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/9KV1rWC8qGAdletx258B5Q - FAKING REALITIES: Taizhou Art School in a local mental hospital https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/WkaOHJBvhLplRYMB9T6XAQ - Latest updates are on our WeChat public account: 山寨MFA - Album: https://www.are.na/shanzhai/index
I want to thank the following for inspiration: Participedia, UbuWeb, Beautiful Trouble
Inspired by A Wall, an online archive and course on social art by Zheng Bo
DIY Wiki and Social Programming
@WUHAN Annual Conference of Network Society, China Academy of Art
diy wiki and social programming.pdf
If Society is Programming Us, How Do We Program Society: Avant-Garde Art Actions & AI
@CHIANG MAI WAMO 2023, a Web3 conference
@SHANGHAI Artificial Intelligence Hackathon, China Academy of Art