Growing up is about learning the rules of the current civilization. Part of that consists in reducing possible movements. A small child can still climb walls, jump and fall flat on the floor in public. If an adult did the same thing, people would stare at him. The civilization process assures that an adult would not even think of trying to do strange movements in private, where no one can see, with the exception of exercise or sports, which also follow a set of rules. Daily life routines in Beijing are changing rapidly, being transformed not only by new working conditions but also by new floor plans for private apartments.
In my short film No school today, (Video, 12 min, 2005) I wanted to try out what happens if the rules for movement are changed within the confined space of one of Beijing's new, anonymous flats so that it gets used in a way it wasn't intended.
A man and a child are living in one of the
new apartment blocks. The flat is furnished in 'international style' with
no specific taste, so you can't guess the man's profession or hobbies.
The only exception is an oil painting of a rare desert stone hanging on the
wall, which I painted myself. This painting reappears within the exhibition.
Rare stones, or gongshi, are an old-fashioned collectors item in China; little
pedestals are carved to hold them. [1]
The man comes in with some soy milk for breakfast, puts it on the table and tries to wake the child up. The boy doesn't want to go to school. He refuses to undress. The man gets angry. Until then the movements have been normal, but now the child manages to get away from the man with some acrobatic moves. For the next few minutes the man is trying to catch the boy, but now they have new rules for their movements: they can't walk freely any more. The man can move only if he keeps attached to the floor or the walls with his whole body. Crawling forward, he becomes an animal-like menace to the child. The child can move forward by jumping or doing somersaults. The space becomes bigger for the child to hide in, because he can cross the room much faster than the man. While at first the two are angry at each other, later they start having fun and play it as a game. Finally the man gets hold of the child. He carries him piggyback. They leave the apartment, take the elevator down and vanish in the crowd of the street.
No school today was an experiment
based on improvisation. I was working together with Cui Tao from the Beijing
Modern Dance Company, and the 10-year-old Zheng Chenggong from Dongcheng
Sports School, where he is learning martial arts.
[chinese
version]
[1] 'Gongshi' (rare
stone) or 'guaishi' (strange or fantastic stone) are small
stones collected for their form and put on a shallow tray filled with sand,
fine gravel or water; from the Song Dynasty on (960-1279) they were put
on beautifully carved wooden stands that resemble roots. The fashion has
spread through Asia; in Japan they are called 'suiseki', in Korea 'suseok';
in English they have been called "scholar's rocks" or "viewing
stones". Mountains were considered sacred in China, as in many other
countries of the world. Rocks were seen as the bones of the Earth, maybe
the bones of prehistoric dragons; when garden design developed into an art,
each garden had to have a strangely formed garden stone. The stones were
considered the backbones of the garden, whereas the soil was thought to be
the skin. Stones with holes in them were highly appreciated, since they allow
the cosmic energy to circulate. The Scholars then used even smaller stones
for meditation about the cosmos, placed next to landscape paintings of mountain
landscapes or calligraphy. Through these abstractions, the imagination could
concentrate and be purified. In 1131 a.D., the scholar Du Wan wrote the Stone
Catalogue of Cloudy Forest, which lists 116 different kinds of rock
formations that could be distinguished by connoisseurs. To me, the stone
that I painted represents a Western adaptation of a Chinese tradition that
was based on a deep connection to nature. I modernized it by giving it a
very red background; the 'cosmic energy' of the stone becomes something rather
gloomy in this modern environment. Beijing is on first sight the extreme
opposite of the Chinese love of nature; I haven't seen any other city so
far that is as grey, polluted, and made out of concrete. But on closer look,
each of the new apartment blocks is laid out around an extremely manicured
garden; even the young people love huge aquariums with rock landscapes. The
man and the boy in my film use movements that recall animals; and they do
it with ease, because after all we are animals. The Chinese scholar's stone
is an extremely cultivated way to look at nature, a nature that is not seen
as an opponent but as something human beings are a tiny part of. Even though
the stones are very small and tame on their nice pedestals, they are not
small to the thought of the scholar. Human beings are small, as on the landscape
paintings. Today, the comparative size of men and nature will have to be
thought over again in China, as all the latest developments make use of nature
in an extreme way. The painting serves as a little knot of concentration
within the video, as did the paintings Silver on Copper in the group
show Atomkrieg,
and Nach Katarzyna Kobro, Suspended Construction (2)
in Splendor Geometrik
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