Form without time: He Gong

A Culture Exile for Life

---Art Journey of He Gong

Lu Peng

SEPTEMBER 30, 1659 . - I, poor miserable Robinson Crusoe, being shipwrecked during a dreadful storm in the offing, came on shore on this dismal, unfortunate island, which I called "The Island of Despair"; all the rest of the ship's company being drowned, and myself almost dead.

<Robinson Crusoe>

It is always hard to identify He Gong’s locality as an artist.  The essential reason of this is his versatile person and time.  In his early memories he was greatly encouraged by the freedom and adventure of Robinson Crusoe.  Once got past his first confusion and suffering, he started to yearn to be exiled instead of being accepted by the social order in which he lived.

He Gong was born in a primary school teacher’s family in Chongqing in 1955.  His father was sent to reform in a labor camp for being a rightist liberal when he was two years old, while his mother transferred to teach in a faraway primary school in the outer suburbs of Chongqing.  His childhood was lonely.  It can be easily imagined the boy’s connection with the outside world was broken and interfered.  Looking back he remembered his young age as set on a background comprised of Army College, faculty dormitory, small town, and farm fields.  He Gong’s father was an ardent lover of books.  He was so overwhelmed with reading that he often lost track of what’s going on around him.  He Gong’s first taste of freedom came from sneaking his father’s books.  He admitted he was deeply influenced by the book <Robinson Crusoe> found at home.  The Great Cultural Revolution started in his childhood confined him both physically and spiritually, so when he read <Robinson Crusoe>, his “soul simply followed it away”.

Another unforgettable book is a volume written by Liu Shaohe, a Sichuan poet.  This book reached He Gong not because of its merit; on the contrary, its popularity comes from being used as a negative example of anti-right movement.  The young boy was totally ignorant of politics.  He was purely surprised by its poetic beauty and endless imagination.  He earnestly tried to visualize the outside world through poetry.  When he read a science book for the first time, his imagination even caused physiological reaction:

I can still remember his first sentence, “the universe is infinite”.  I suddenly hear a loud buzz in my head.  “Infinite”, how to grasp the meaning of this word!  On that hot summer day, I got goose bumps all over me!  Total shock!  It instantly pulled me away from the reality.  Completely unprepared, an innocent young boy tried to absorb the meaning of “infinite”.  It ended up making everything meaningless.  (From ‘Dialogues with Guan Yuda’, June 14, 2007, in room 512 Kehuayuan Hotel, Chengdu)

The first sentence is all that’s left of the book <the Mysteries of the Universe>.  It’s not memorized as scientific knowledge for common people; instead the passion stirred by its hidden poetic nature is irresistible.  In vastness and void where to find individuality?  During armed warfare of Red Guards many people escaped to the little town where He Gong lived.  This chaotic outside world was in cruel contrast to his poetic and idealistic thoughts.  Yet ideal and poetry shined even brighter against the dark reality.  Soviet Oil paintings found in a neighbor’s magazine left him with extremely good impression.  That was when He Gong started studying sketch with a teacher from Sichuan Fine Art Institute, which was his first hobby in life.  Meanwhile he found fun in stealing vinyl records from army.  He secretly got himself a phonograph and listened to all those incomprehensible Soviet songs alone in his room.  In this way He Gong somehow had his initial experience with foreign culture, which was completely strange and shocking to the society at that time.  He was touched and reformed by these personal experiences.  They went deep enough to affect later his many choices as an artist.  We can even say this first taste of culture collision silently changed his life.  

After being ‘sent down’ to live in the countryside for six years (from 1972 to 1978), at last He Gong was given a chance to apply to Southwest Normal University.  All these years in poverty and despair he had been yearning for the world beyond the mountains.  He never missed a chance to go out, even just to buy a cow or potato seeds for the production team.  He traveled the Three Gorges of Yangtze River almost on foot.  Though trapped in remote area, some student youth of the time were stunningly familiar with the world map, which was their only source of knowledge of Earth.  Country’s name, its production and population, He Gong recited them all.

He Gong was sensitive in presenting the cultural meaning of the ‘sending down’ of student youth.  He revealed experience of physical liberation hidden in it.  A part of this extremely complicated experience was the initial understanding of sex.  Unprecedented social turmoil had great impact on his thoughts.  In his sense authority, society, economy, and culture all directly pound, press thus build human body.  For this reason he was never willing to forsake his expression’s close connection with human flesh when dealing with grand topics.  His art is always strong in physical experience to deliver the sense of temperature, touch, and quiver to his audience.

Starting from 1980s He Gong realized his fate as a culture exile.  It seems there is no such thing as a clear and logical ending for He Gong and his generation.  Individuals are thrown into different social environment wantonly.  While waiting for the catastrophic end of the Great Cultural Revolution, unexpectedly he was granted admission to university, a chance offered by political reforms.  Though ordinary today it appeared to be a miracle for him.  Like many other artists in his generation He Gong eventually got a chance (also a well-thought-out personal choice) to get out of China, henceforth inflicted with unimaginable culture shock.

After the downfall of the Gang of Four, Chinese society was swept with an idea change called Emancipating the Mind.  He Gong named this radical and risky social experiment ‘body violence’ or ‘body revolution’.  Body going ahead of the rest sprouted from the strong need to reform Mao’s social structure with absolutely no valid new belief.  In this unthinkable vacuum body was the only reliable proper tool to feel and grasp all new uncertainty.

Of his various experiences the real eye-opener undoubtedly was the culture shock he received after 1985.  He Gong was studying for his master’s degree of art education in Friends University of Kansas in 1986.  Although he failed due to inadequate language ability and relevant knowledge background (education, psychology, etc.), it was nevertheless the first cross-cultural exchange he had.  In this period he became interested in post-modern art’s phenomenon analysis of Charles Jencks.  He also came across Walter Benjamin.  Benjamin’s discussions of movie together with the strong atmosphere of experimental art all around are hints of new art possibility for him.

In Whitney Biennial of 1987, Jeff Koons and other artists’ works struck him with such force that he was left in shock.  Anxiety, confusion and depression swallowed him.  However, digestion of post-modern art and the idealism of rebuilding his art world gradually led him out of dependence on the old culture.  The initiative of post-modern culture gave He Gong a brand-new starting point: in postmodernism a Chinese artist enjoyed completely equal platform as his fellow artists from developed country or of modern art background.  This was exactly the ground on which he developed his proposal of ‘multi-culture studio’ in Canada in 1990s.  Quickly recovered from the unfavorable reaction of culture shock, He Gong gradually found his way to be a multi-culture artist.  He learned to observe, explain and approach from multiple cultures’ viewpoints.  

The political event of 1989 once again made He Gong a culture exile.  Enthusiasm turned into sudden disappointment, He Gong was filled with bewilderment and despair.  He created an installation for this in the very year: Trap Designed for Future Archaeology.  It gave Gao Minglu a deep impression.  He wrote later:

I was deeply impressed by He Gong’s installation Trap Designed for Future Archaeology, when I first saw it around the turning of 1990 to 1991.  To my knowledge this was probably one of the few artworks daring to confront the tragedy of 1989. (Gao Minglu: Exiled Utopia-Thoughts of He Gong’s Recent Oil Paintings)

Trap Designed for Future Archaeology still smelled of He Gong’s earlier political idea and the concept of avant-garde art in those days.  The empty chairs set in front of red background had grief beyond words.  Yet the way he handled this kind of subjects still had the limitation of his 1989 person.  We can find the same grimness and quietness in his same-year installation The Problem of Intellectuals.  He did not try to activate anything, nor persist on finding any answer for the real world.

Influenced and invited by Bruce Parsons, he finally left China for Canada in 1991.  There He Gong changed his artistic observation focus in no time.  Being rid of the conflict of Chinese political system and ideology, he found himself in a different context: an observer of the relationship between an oriental eye and the world.  In this period he created an important installation, This Is Not the Mayflower.  Black ships all directing to an image full of sadness of history, this artwork discussed the social anxiety of international refugee.  Wandering and confusing theme dominated the cross-culture communication.  Immigrants discovered to their shocking and cruel dismay, they can never have back their old illusion of the New World.

Though having been traveling around the western world, He Gong still felt the hurt from his uncured cultural wound when he worked on this installation.  He once told his friend he suffered from depression and some sort of violent emotion in this foreign land, which he believed would ruin his artwork.  Unexpectedly this installation gained him much publicity and approval, following himself being tagged as a Chinese artist out of June Fourth Incident by western art world.  This new cultural identity has some suspicious connection with his work’s popularity.  Guessing it was his special status that woke up western world’s attention, He Gong felt somehow restrained.

He Gong confronted Bruce Parsons once for his work being interpreted in Parsons’ way which represented the dominating western idea.  He believed that was not his original intention. This problem was not only found in his conflict with certain western critics, it also plagued more in-depth theoretic discussion.  When Fan DiAn came to Canada, He Gong promoted theory discussion of Chinese avant-garde art in North America with him.  A seminar named Chinese Vanguard-Art on the Background of Cosmopolitanism was held.  It gathered almost all the people related to Asian art history research and practice in US and Canada, in which Chinese were few and mostly with language barrier.  In this meeting He Gong gave a speech in fluent English, which brought him much and more attention and questions.  But the seemingly smooth communication concerned him.  He Gong detected danger in using concepts, words, and expressions easily understood and accepted by westerners.  On the one hand Chinese artists created with their own emotion and intuition, but on the other they had to justify it in front the international world.  In order to be noticed and accepted they had to translate the liveliness into a formatted language.  Some of the most important things were lost in the process.

After This Is Not the Mayflower, more of his important installations were created during the 1990s, including the impressive Program of the Post-Yangtze Dolphin.  If He Gong’s installation works before 1989 could be called concept-prone, he had swerved to a different road in early 90s.  This was related to the inspiration of Jeff Koons.  The key point is that he seized observer’s fascination with material features with keen perception, and used it to arouse people’s confusion, excitement, uncertainty, and even some happy dizziness, instead of cold and abstract cognition.  In some sense we can say He Gong distasted symbolic reading of artwork by art world.  He viewed Chinese avant-garde art history as an accidental result.  He was more interested in what was behind the work.  He obviously believed there was a complex art world behind the official portrait of contemporary art, which very few tried to differentiate and examine.  Art was always under deep influence of power and authority, and there was no help for it.  It was actually very hard to reconcile artist’s work and other’s expectation of him.  Though constantly distorted and misread, He Gong was still not interested in the argument of grand topics.  His focus was always on the exposure of hidden physical energy.  His intention in art was body experience buried inside the great revolution story.

After his European trip in 1995, He Gong started planning his Train Station series.  This series was represented by The Subway to Brooklyn and The European Train Station.  He Gong digested the symbolic existence of European train stations in a witty way.  From the end of 1994 to 1997 he repeatedly used the theme of train station, railroad, and subway.  His cross-culture vision prompted him to this historical image of European culture.  In this symbol he found his own imagination, Claude Monet’s paintings, pictures in WWII documentaries, and lots of condensed cultural connotation.  He Gong admitted it was far away from common taste then, but close to his own heart.  Because his personal contact with Europe revealed to him a Europe different from the one usually imagined, he determined to dismantle the symbol to find the truth.

He Gong evoked audience’s sense of being in a theater with his train station images.  This artistic style continued into his later series with more clarity and strength.  In his The Grand Dinner Hall series we discovered the evolved artistic language from The European Train Station.  Those strange space surrounded audience’s sight with similar theatric feeling, profound and haunting.   This approach hinted the emptiness and violence of ideological symbol, moreover he till meant to evoke observer’s anxiety by convincing them they were on the scene.  We felt like being placed in the room provided by He Gong.  He not only offered us the seat, but also the secret of observer-lost and trembling involuntarily in front of the scene of power.

The dome of the Great Hall of People as a meaningful political symbol popped up again and again in He Gong’s color experiment.  He even unexpectedly used it in his black-and-white oil paintings.  Here we can see an obvious tendency toward decolorization, and his decolorized work had more political implication.  He Gong presented to us the grand , tragic, and trembling inner experience of observer with black and white, with brilliant texture and imposing form.  His unique past freed him from reliance on symbol and image, and this way he finally achieved his self-exile from western art world.  All these years his work proved it’s a dead end trying to find idea and explanation though tracing back the image history of Chinese Vanguard-Art.  In the end like in Utopia the voice of Plato’s exile poet was heard.

There were two conflicting ends in He Gong’s art.  One was Jeff Koons, the other Jackson Pollock.  He constantly absorbed sense of action and texture from Splash Art to use in his artwork.  That made his theme only faintly recognizable.  The de-image-rization unfolded completely his confrontation with ideological symbols.  Yet at the same time, shadowed by ideology art creation still had to compromise, which became a long-existing shackle worn by individual.  Artists were easily satisfied with a Wang Guangyi or Fang Lijun in symbolic sense, but a symbol out of sudden brainwave meant nothing, an empty signifier pointing to emptiness.  The success of Chinese contemporary art lay in the process of activation and validation, which was led by unmanageable body, not reason.  He Gong thought himself as a ‘dirty artist’, just like ‘dirty farmer’.  He enjoyed his simple life around the world as an exile artist.  From time to time he shared a studio with someone, but most of the time he just stayed mobile, working with his hands in some temporarily rent workshop.  In a sense his faith in laborious work took root in his art.  His work had the same laborious, heavy, and piling energy.  Observers might mistake this detail meaningless and stopped at a clear reception of symbol, but it was really not the artist’s intention.

For fetish Koons art must have fetish on material.  For this he chose to push vulgar image to the extreme of magnificence.  In the uncontrollable fascination and intoxication Koons mirrored human lust.  Though influenced by Koons He Gong nevertheless had completely different quality.  His work had nothing to do with magnificence or exquisiteness.  His final fascination did not come from comfortable enjoyment, but damage, grief, and tremble.  He calmly planted debris, fragment, and stain into our lust.  In his installation Solute to Louis Vitton (cow dung, mixed media), cow dung was put around fireplace, the icon of luxury and decay.  In his oil paintings wild and broken brush movements reminded us the presence of character, scene, and ideological symbol.   He Gong challenged our desire and culture order with these opposing experiences.  To him idea had to be digested by lively body experience, or it would end to be an art system’s tool to impose role and dangerously limit our heart and art itself.

Recently He Gong had many new works, in which we could catch a glimpse of his free road of art.  Oil painting The Last Supper of 2008 absorbed spatiality from European architecture and added abstractness and variation to its outlines, making it hard for us to recognize its outline, volume and light but left with pure emotion and visual search.  This process was accompanied by a vague hunt for imagined objects.  Observers easily took the shadow in the center as the specific Last Supper, then realized it was just presumption, even mistake.  In this sense He Gong added in a metaphor to play a serious joke on critics and audience.  He Gong brought observer’s spatial feeling to extreme.  This intention was obvious in his Occasion created in the same year.  Black elements like jagged lava rock covered the whole canvas.  This repeatedly used technique drew audience’s eyes in The Last Supper, also impressed us as a basic art language in The Grand Dinner Hall series.  He Gong left some touch on the edge of canvas to push us back to the center and upper side, because those black holes quickly narrowed down and accumulated to the top, forming an illusion of depth.  Light was placed at the imagined vanishing point as if something was breaking out between two mountains.  Finally audience discovered the symbol hidden in the sky, the hinted dome of the Great Hall of People on the top of the canvas.  The dome was plainly placed there, yet cunningly obscured by hazy light, then illuminated suddenly.  This was He Gong’s radical way of revealing the dark corner of ideological life.

He Gong developed his new art language after 2010, among them The Dance of Zeus was the most typical one.  In this period He Gong liberated colors.  Stable color combination inherited clear and strong style of Pop Art.  At the same time he turned Pollock’s abstract texture into transitional form between figural and abstract, existing and dreaming.  The outline was recognizable, but only barely.  The shaky edge implied its uncertainty, movement, and unpredictability.  The Dance of Zeus was an explosion of light and color, dots and lines.  Subjectivity metaphored as Zeus appeared in this carnival, drunk with Dionysus’s indulgence, signifying a complete victory of subjectivity against emptiness.  This victory was comprised of fine dusts, which meant it was mundane and had a bottom-up anti-metaphysics feature.  Walk at Night, The Lost Man, and The Stowaway carried out this new art language thoroughly, by which we observed He Gong’s artwork was developing a strengthened faith in subjectivity and insignificance.  It was his full praise for worldly pleasure and transcendence of classic pathos and political constraint.

Art was He Gong the artist’s only religion.  His excavation of dirty objects and fascination with labor eventually upgraded the humble primitive form to a strong faith.  His vigilance against erosion of popular culture took him away from Koons and Pollock, away from persistence of and attachment to formality.  He started off on his journey of releasing the original feeling.  From this we could say He Gong was never a disciple of rationalism and historism.  It should be Henri Bergson’s Current of Life that was closest to his worldview.  A world that depreciated and oppressed natural life was worthless to He Gong.  The infinity of universe meant not the magnificent and cold material, but the stained and broken, yet energetic body.

 November 10, 2012