Linke - Artinfo

84
Installation
view of Chains:
The Unbearable
Lightness of
Being/Nature
Series No. 79,
2003. Silk,
iron chains.
It is not often
that a visit to an
artist’s studio
requires you to go
on a pilgrimage,
but on a spring day I set out for Tiantai
Mountain, a place sacred to both
Buddhists and Taoists, in pursuit of the
artist Liang Shaoji.
Liang went to live near Tiantai Mountain
at the turn of the millennium, but it was 11
years earlier, in 1989, that he began the
journey that would lead him there. That year
he was included in the pathbreaking “China/
Avant-Garde” exhibition at the National
Museum of Art in Beijing. His installation for
the show provided him the twin ideas that
have animated his work ever since: The theme
of his art would be life, and his medium would
be a humble living creature, the silkworm.
At 44, Liang was already much older than
most of the artists who were then beginning
to put Chinese contemporary art on the map.
He had graduated from the middle school
attached to the Zhejiang Fine Art School in
Hangzhou in 1965, on the cusp of the
catastrophic Cultural Revolution (1966–
76). In those years intellectuals were reviled
and the universities were closed, and Liang
found himself working in a textile factory
where he was involved in the manufacture of
carpets, fabrics, lampshades, handicrafts,
and tapestry, while in his spare time he
painted and made prints and sculptures.
Later he became the director of the Institute
of Arts and Crafts in Taizhou.
In the early 1980s he found himself
on a Chinese trade delegation visit to Europe
and the United States, during which he
explored the contemporary artworks in
museums such as the Centre Pompidou, in
Paris. Finally, at age 40, he decided to go
back to school. The Bulgarian artist Maryn
Varbanov had recently set up an atelier at the
Zhejiang Fine Art School, and in 1986 Liang
was accepted as a student. Varbanov, who
had arrived in the country as a student
in the 1950s and became a pioneer of the use
of textiles in installation art and sculpture,
was a profoundly influential figure on the
Chinese art scene. He made his name as one
of the first artists to take weaving off the wall
and present it in open space. Liang was
inspired by Varbanov’s radical approach to
materials and the way in which he merged
Western and Eastern techniques and
philosophies in his art.
In 1988, for the “China/Avant-Garde”
show, Liang created an installation called Yi
Series–Magic Cube, incorporating silk
fabric, dry silkworm cocoons, metal, and rice
paper—just the sort of experiment with space
and materials that Varbanov would have
relished. Later, when Liang was installing the
piece for a show in Hangzhou, a chance
breeze set the dead cocoons swaying in the
light. Looking at them, Liang found himself
wondering for the first time: What would it be
like to work with living silkworms?
The first thing I notice when I walk into
Liang’s studio is the stones. Dozens of them
cover the floor, and they seem to be dusted
with snow. But when I touch one, I find that it
isn’t cold but soft. Silken, sparkling-white
thread covers each stone. In a corner are
stacked dozens of large white disks. These
also turn out to be covered in silk. Liang
explains that when a silkworm isn’t in a
confined space, it won’t form a normal
cocoon but instead will just spin thread and
cover whatever surface it finds itself on.
He likes to quote a line from a poem by the
Tang Dynasty poet Li Shangyin: “Only at
death does the silkworm’s thread reach an
end.” To Liang, this line embodies the
silkworm’s devotion to creation, its
generosity, and its tenacity in life. He says
that in working with them he aims to capture
something of this spirit and to allow a
meditation on the passing of life and time.
The first major work in his “Nature
Series,” which he commenced in 1989 and
still continues today, was called Bed/Nature
Series No. 10, 1993. Liang raised silkworms
to live within tiny bedsteads that he had
fashioned from copper wire salvaged from
old generators. From these fragments of the
waste and ugliness of the man-made world,
Liang had created comfortable refuges that
the silkworms made their own, forming
cocoons, metamorphosing into moths,
laying eggs, and continuing their life cycle
over and over again. The work, which took
seven years to complete, was exhibited at the
Venice Biennale in 1999. Later Liang created
a piece in which silkworms covered
suspended heavy metal chains with silken
threads. He called it Chains: The
Unbearable Lightness of Being/ Nature
Series No. 79, 2003.
In an essay on the “Nature Series” that he
wrote last year, Liang says: “Every life is in
search for its own space for existence amid
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
tiger cai and Shanghart gallery, Shanghai; previouS S pread, ling bingliang
Liang Shaoji and Shanghart ga LLery, S hanghai
absurd and implacable contradictions. The
strong silk threads, symbol of life, as if to
break but resistant, show a strong will to life,
an unremitting life pursuit, a force to beat
the strong with softness, and life
associations with endless extension.”
By the time Bed/Nature Series No. 10 was
complete, Liang had decided to move near
Tiantai Mountain. It is home to the Tiantai
sect of Buddhism, which Liang describes as
the “most indigenous and most pristine” of
all the Buddhist sects in China, and a place
where over the centuries many “crazy
monks” have gone to seek enlightenment.
On Tiantai Mountain there is a platform
where the founder of the sect, Zhiyi, is
believed to have meditated. In 2007 Liang
went there to make the film Cloud Mirror/
Nature Series No. 101. Since moving to
Tiantai he has become committed to the
concept of the interconnectedness of living
beings. Liang thinks this is embodied in the
connection between silkworms and
humankind, and between both of them and
the rest of the natural world. In Cloud
Mirror he illustrated this connection by
holding up a mirror to the sky.
On the mirrors Liang laid out on Tiantai
Mountain, silkworms had already spun
their silk in patterns that evoked the shapes
of clouds. As real clouds passed overhead,
they and the sky itself were reflected in
Liang’s mirrors. In the video of the event,
spun silk and clouds merge in the reflected
sky until it is impossible to see where one
ends and the other begins. The video is a
poetic evocation of the passage of time, life,
and the natural world.
Liang likes to point out that in Chinese the
words for poetry and for silk are homonyms,
perhaps suggesting some deep cultural
connection. He tells me that sericulture has
existed in his country as long as the Chinese
have claimed to have had a civilization,
around 5,000 years. Taking the word
associations further, he points out that the
word for silkworm and the word for Zen also
sound alike; in a 2006 work called Listening
to the Silkworms, which he restaged at
London’s Hayward Gallery last fall, he aims
to induce a Zen-like state by inviting his
audience to do exactly what the title suggests.
The sound of silkworms eating mulberry
leaves is remarkably like the bubbling of a
running stream. In Listening to the
Silkworms Liang asks visitors to sit in
a darkened room and attend to the sounds of
the silkworms’ life. What you hear is not a
recording but silkworms living in an
adjacent room in real time. And as you listen,
you do begin to feel something of what Liang
himself feels deeply, the profound
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | march/april 2013
connections that exist between everything
in the natural world.
In a catalogue essay for his exhibition “An
Infinitely Fine Line” at Shanghai’s Zendai
Museum of Modern Art, Liang wrote that
“the entire ‘Nature Series’ is a sculpture of
time, life, and nature, a recording of the
fourth dimension.” Looking at the works,
especially amid the ancient surroundings of
Tiantai Mountain, you see what he is getting
at. By working with silkworms he has
consciously slowed his artistic practice to the
pace of his tiny co-creators and connected
his art to natural forces beyond his control.
Liang calculates that he has raised around
90,000 silkworms in the 23 years he has
worked on the “Nature Series,” and estimates
that the silk thread they have produced
would wind around the world 10 times. One
imagines he might try that someday.
Detail of Bed/
Nature Series
No. 10, 1993–99.
Charred copper
wire, silk.