Author:
Ursula Panhans-Bühler
Critic, Curator and Professor of Kassel Fine Arts Academy

Cat - fish - melon, a new poetic dimension in Yang Jinsong′s painting

<!--Session data-->

Translated from German by Jacqueline Winter

When I wrote a commentary on Yang Jinsong's painting in autumn 2004, massive cats had suddenly begun to appear in his workshop on Beijing ' s outskirts- meaning, on his pictures; and they proceeded to dictate new kinds of composition, color and brushwork.

At that time, my essay ,” An Interplay of Poetic Scenarios“, concerned itself with Jinsong ' s art from his beginnings at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute.

His art then centered exclusively on a personal world of himself and his wife She Cai. Their portraits were surrounded by a tender confusion of ordinary things, which seemed to be taking over, crowding their tiny apartment on campus. A gaily wandering irregular pattern of bright colors appeared to provide optimistic contrast to their melancholy miens. Even after their move to Beijing , where Jinsong found a big new studio, the couple had managed to retain a mostly miniaturized presence on bigger canvases with isolated iconic motifs.

The appearance of the cat opened up a new dimension in Yang's work at that time, a tension between poles. I was very curious where this tension would lead him, and I said as much at the end of my essay.

If you look back now at the paintings of the last seven years, you can understand that the cat came to announce a dramatic break in Jinsong's work, which went on to be carried by a triad of the cat, the water melon and the fish, supported by a few other meaningful motifs, for example those battered single sofas or armchairs, those dark landscapes of lotus fields in nightly hues, or a close-up of a burning log fire. Finally there were new, bright and gigantic scenes, split into atoms of motifs.

And just as the first large cat leapt into pride of place from nowhere in October 2002, right onto a canvas of Huangjueping, Yang Jinsong's old neighborhood in Chongqing, those new visual metaphors drove out the narrow focus on one′s personal situation and opened up a view of China′s current situation, pressured by globalized economy, politics and culture.

Understanding of metaphors depends on a cultural framework. Individuals may be able to sharpen a personal focus out of their collective communicability, but they usually can't create their own isolated metaphors.

Therefore, Yang Jinsong's innovations should be recognized as all the more bold and surprising, as he takes the risk of establishing metaphors of his own, aiming at the nerve of current conflicts.

And maybe one can see that his effort originates in a fight against cultural desperation or resignation, as he tries to alert others to a critical view of the precarious social situation.

Therefore it seems desirable to intertwine Yang Jinsong's new methods with several strands that determine this situation: first, the tempestuous changes in China's economy, politics, society and culture; second, being dragged into a global capitalist process where nobody can really see where things are going, let alone set a course; third, the new commercial role of art as a “blue chip”, hampering its function as a critical mirror; and fourth, the individual artist confronting this situation, not wanting to be devoured by the mechanics of fashionable decoration. In the light of this tension I will once more attempt to follow the development of Yang Jinsong's art from 1997 to 2011 from a changed and dynamic viewpoint.

Yang Jinsong is now referring to traditions of calligraphy and ink painting, via the medium of his oil paintings. His work has also come into its own in watercolors, which are providing a space of experimentation for his change in the field of oils.

Drawings nowadays are not for preparation and try-out, and they are no intimate side-projects either. They are the medium of a lookout that circumvents a fixed and closed worldview, articulating open questions of our time. A fleeting association, a concept, an impression, hard to grasp and quickly forgotten, can be brought up by a drawing, as well as something brought up under the surface. To sketch is to open up a space that transcends manifest hints, to gain an immediate access to the sphere of feelings. When something fleeting comes up as the smallest common denominator of experience, viewers participate in the generation of a picture in a new way.

*

But let us first go back to an aspect of Yang Jinsong's earlier paintings- we may gain a new understanding of them in the light of his new approach. Jinsong and his wife first appear as a confidently dominant duo in the center of his compositions. They are leaning towards each other, but they are also separate beings. Soon they acquire a monstrous identity of symbiotic twins melting into each other, a stylization of elongated heads, their pale faces only separated by a sharp shadow. Flat as a playing card, they seem to be trying to defend themselves against the growing anarchist heaps of consumer goods, a lively and colorful siege surrounding the couple's castle. They had appeared more at ease when they had occupied little islands on bamboo stalks, in window openings of swinging pumpkins, or in a sea of tea or lotus leaves, in their own little natural refuge.

But the inverted proportions of large and small, of toys and the world of utility also touched their representation, and sometimes the pair seemed to drown in the throng of things, as if they had lost control of the incoming flood of objects. Apparently that which used to promise more comfort and pleasure began to show its dark side- a situation that literally seemed to become “hot” when in one of the new large paintings of 2003 an electrical cooker became the labyrinthine platform for the things and the couple; once connected, it could quickly destroy everything.

These paintings in their dynamic sequence could also be understood as a critical commentary to a changing cultural situation, in which overwhelming consumerization and advertisement, along with the new role of media and consumer propaganda, make you suddenly feel the loss of your own culture as a price to be paid. Yang Jinsong is younger than the generation fixated on a critical view of the past after the economic opening, which came out in a sarcastic Polit-pop, notoriously satirizing the overbearing style of Maoist propaganda, full of clichés that were remarkably successful in the western art context. This view of the past still has the generation of Yang's parents in its grip, because of personal traumas from the Cultural Revolution.

In a western context you could think of Pier Paolo Pasolini remarking that 20 years of Fascism had damaged Italian culture less than the spread of capitalist consumer society in the decades after the Second World War. The spreading of capitalist economy in China has not resulted in very explicit damage to designated cult objects of the cultural past. But old cities with their traditions have been radically razed for the rapid growth of the new Chinese megacities. The differences between urban and rural areas, between rich and poor, are accelerating as the cultural heritage mutates into alienated tourist sites. It would not be very surprising if Mao's portrait on Tiananmen Gate at the Forbidden City would be mistaken, by younger Chinese, for an advertisement poster by Andy Warhol. Maybe there is no other country in the world with such a thorough development in the last 30 years, a radical break with the past that needed at least 70 years in Western countries, not to speak of a longer period of preparation in the 19th century. For Yang Jinsong's generation, cultural memory and current development in their mutual incompatibility are painfully closer together than for any other generation before and after. This insoluble paradox seems to have become the driving force for the break in Jinsong's artistic approach. The cat, which he has called his self-portrait – you could also speak of a figure of identification – was the first in marking this break.

*

The cat, the water melon and the fish, these three big metaphors in Yang Jinsong's recent painting, do not appear together ; they are isolated topics. What they do have in common is that they are more than conventional subjects, as in genre painting or in still lives. Another common feature is that the surface of the painting does not have to be filled with color and motifs in every corner. Jinsong risks something a painter doesn't do very easily- that his paintings could be mistaken for large drawings. And as the double portrait of his wife and himself virtually vanishes, he builds up a new distance to his artistic topic. The tight private circle is broken up towards a further-reaching public investigation.

How did Yang Jinsong come up with these new metaphors, so charged with critical meaning? Let us take the cat first and venture a comparison with two famous appearances of cats in contemporary art. At the 1999 Biennale di Venezia, the South African artist William Kentridge, invited by Harald Szeemann, showed his animated film Stereoscope , with a cat in a leading role. The film represented the disparate state of South African society with a white businessman, caught up in his business deals and losing all contact with other people in his country, including his wife or lover. His torn state of mind is shown through an animated double screen, which is criss-crossed repeatedly by the cat. The cat moves between different sides of a split personality and a disparate society. When the conflicts, demonstrations and uprisings about the conditions of life and work are reaching a climax, the cat rolls itself up and becomes a bomb that explodes and destroys everything. Maybe Mr. Kentridge wanted to stress the untamable independence of this beautiful animal, whose dangerous energy comes to represent an invariable force of nature.

In 2002, the French film auteur Chris Marker begins a documentary about the appearance of a cat in Paris . The cat shows up on many walls, often difficult to reach, grinning toothily. The anonymous street artist who paints it sometimes adds the signature “M.Chat“. There seems to be a connection to the precarious political situation in France , where the right-wing candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen almost won the first round of a presidential election. This threat to democracy in the country was lessened in the second round. But the cat also witnessed the preparations to the American invasion of Iraq , instigated by President G. W. Bush after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. There were many debates and demonstrations in France about this at that time. At these demonstrations, the grinning cat showed up on signs and banners, saying “ faites des chats, pas de guerres“, ” make cats, not wars“. The cat thus becomes a symbol of humorous independence and individuality against inflexible politics. Unfortunately, says Marker, this independent attitude disappeared after a few years, along with its visual feline presence in the city.

Yang Jinsong's cat seems to pick up on this feral independence and its ambivalence, gazing at the viewer in an upright majestic pose, or arching through the whole picture as a dark animal, with fiery eyes and a red, bloody tongue in its open mouth. Sometimes the cat is rolled up and seems to be indifferent to everything, or it might be rearing up and regarding a helicopter like some strange kind of insect. In some pictures the cat rests like a mountain of rugged fur, in others it lounges lazily on its back. If you think of all those tiny dogs in China , overbred and completely dependent on the next available animal clinic, the untamable energy of these cats becomes even more eye-catching. They seem to be saying, “Just you wait.”

*

While Yang Jinsong's cat represents this untamable power, he lets the motif of the fish become a metaphor of the looming self-destruction of civilization. Western languages are used to fish as metaphors, for example when Pieter Bruegel draws a huge fish like a mountain range on the shore, disgorging smaller and smaller fish, while a fisherman climbs on the big one with his harpoon. The picture's title, Big Fish Eat Small Fish, means the exploitation and humiliation of the little people by the powerful. There are no such metaphors in Chinese. Fish are fish, although they may be prized at the family table or at a restaurant dinner with friends. Yang Jinsong's fish paintings are all the more unusual and exciting, showing plundered and destroyed fish in ever growing formats, up to a canvas of four and a half metres in length and 2.5 metres in height, a huge painting in three parts that was completed in April 2008 and has left the artist's studio only one time since then, to be presented in his solo exhibition in the Indonesian National Museum in Jakarta in December 2008.

If you want to define a metaphorical space for this iconographic motif in Yang Jinsong's work, you could hardly go back to traditional Chinese motives of living fish swimming happily in their natural environment. So we have to remember it is not only a destroyed, dismembered, maltreated fish, but also a stranded fish, a fish out of water, caught or strung up on barbed wire, and sparsely strewn with tiny emblems of political, economic or media violence like tanks, bulldozers, transport hooks, clearing vehicles, demolished houses or factories with smoking chimneys, TV-screens, helicopters, or broken passenger planes.

In Western metaphors, the shipwreck has become the metaphor of a failed civilization – from Turner to G é ricault's Raft of the Medusa, to Caspar David Friedrich, to Mallarm é 's poem “Un coup de D é s ...“ (‘Casting a dice will never abolish chance') and to a series of paintings and drawings by Martin Kippenberger in a late part of his career. Civilization losing out against the uprising of nature. But although Yang Jinsong's fish sees this kind of catastrophe as a failed harmony with nature, it would be too much of a shortcut to reduce the fish to the problem of a failure in protecting the environment. The shock of this fish metaphor goes deeper and is ingrained with a sensitive, intuitive perception of self-destruction in a globalized world, torn from economic and political competition.

The series of oils, starting in 2005, is accompanied by many water color paintings, from which you can plainly see the influence of traditional Chinese ink painting on Yang Jinsong's new picture concepts. While his cat playfully morphs into a mountain range only occasionally, the transformation of the fish motif into a general representation of nature requires the fish to apparently change into a landscape. There are different approaches. Either the brush strokes furnish the landscape dimension, or the fish is surrounded by the articulation of a genuine landscape. But in the latter case the fish becomes again merely a motif, and so the larger oils tend to tie in the brush strokes of the fish with an empty varnished background. Therefore I prefer these pictures, which concentrate the drama in the drawing of the fish, with very expressive, partly chaotic strokes. The melodramatic charge is not in a surrounding landscape, and the act of destruction shows up very directly. Tortured nature is represented in the gaping fish jaws; a state of exhaustion becomes a continuing process.

For four years, Yang Jinsong has been experimenting with new fish paintings, with new positions of the fish, a change in the surface from solid color to graphical drawing, torn up and charged with emotion. Yang Jinsong was also testing color hues. There are fish in black and white on a grey canvas, and other pictures with soft pink and grey hues on a brownish background. If you look into this process more closely, you can see two dangers – the hues of the painting should not become too beautiful, and the painting should not be taken over completely by outbursts of raw drawing. The grey-in-grey fish helped the painter towards a concentrated relation between form and color. He was able to anchor the stranded fish on the picture in the form of a mountain range, suggesting foothills in the lower margins and an endless stretch of 'landscape' at the top of the picture, while the fish at the core keeps the whole manifestation together dynamically.

Comparing the water color pictures with the oils shows us that that water color painting helped Yang Jinsong to integrate expressive moments of drawing into his oil paintings. They acquired a different density and a more acute emotional weight. This journey into traditional ink painting was not simply an attempt to resurrect old conventions. It was a means of furnishing his oil painting with a thematically relevant force, expressing the spirit of his time. If you see this development in contrast to his earlier period, you could say that a closed-up, self-contained form was broken. And so an enormously powerful drama was set free, which is present in the current social situation. Yang Jinsong's reflected artistic sensibility helps him to attain an emotionally accessible identity, behind the masks of a world plastered with advertisement designs and consumerism.

*

The fish paintings could also be, ironically, titled, “Grand Banquet”. Yang Jinsong has used this name for his series of water melons. In 2003 they were the last refuge of his domestic idyll, before they morphed into broken ridges. Now these side walls make the viewer - and in a recent painting from 2010, Jinsong and his wife themselves, seen from the back – seem to be standing in front of a new Great Wall. In 2004, in the sea of a greasy Chongqing hot pot, the production junk, consumer junk and control junk of a brave new world was swimming together in a wild mix of large and small. These allusions seem to have been swept up to the wet surface at the edge of a water melon slice, accompanied by other objects on the side slopes of the melon ridges.

We can also find two new motifs among these allusive items. Half-naked miniature prostitutes are crawling around on the sweet fruit, not very different in color, so maybe you don't see them at first glance. But above all there is almost always a dismembered doll; sometimes the head is torn off, or an arm and a leg. This doll also belonged to the junk on the easy chair, alluding to pompous furniture from the Mao era, since 2006. In contrast to earlier pictures with easy chairs, you get the impression of a recent destruction having caused this chaos on those threadbare sofas of a bygone time. But the dismembered doll on the melon mountains seems to contain yet another allusion, especially in combination with the prostitutes. At this banquet, the female in general is thrown on the side of wear and tear, of careless consumption – a discreet and minute hint, expressively shocking nevertheless.

W ater melons are very large fruits, predestined to be used as metaphors for the Grand Banquet of modern consumer society. But let us first think of their colors, green and red. It is a combination that may evoke, despite the juicier hues, at least in China , a memory of Chinese landscapes. Sichuan province, where Yang Jinsong comes from, is known for its red earth contrasting with green plants. You could also think of monuments of tradition, receiving tourist attention nowadays, like temples, monasteries and palaces with earthy colors, where this kind of color contrast is used for walls and roofs. Finally, you could think of a trivial transfer of these colors onto current mineral water bottles in China , for example in the brand “Nongfu Spring“.

*

The red sea of the melon slices as a landscape element is enhanced by pastel-colored, landscape-like surroundings of the melon ridge. The sparsely distributed things with associative meaning, lost all over the fish landscapes and melon ridges, as well as the examination of calligraphic tradition in the fish paintings, have prepared an altogether new kind of format, which can be seen in three big paintings from 2010. They don't have one large motif dominating the whole canvas; it is an exploding pattern of things that carries a contemporary world being lost in boundless infinity.

The first picture, finished in May 2010, still has the large fish as a structural landscape element, but the fleeting brush strokes of the parts in burgundy and silver-grey colors seem to be melting into the white background. All those watercolor sketches have contributed to this new lightness. Grey lines, which seem to denote either cables or parts of barbed wire, or both, paradoxically, are also structural elements and nuances of scenery, supplemented by smaller and larger distributed objects. The white background makes this fissured or dismembered landscape into a vague phenomenon, hard to define. The relations between its elements seem to be accidental, as if the painter wanted to show that in this modern world everything is situated or happening next to something else in a chaotic way, without any apparent logic. The viewer has to make up his own relationship between the artist on the left, who is looking at a tank across a smoldering fire. Maybe the tank is on its way towards him, and he won't be able to stop it. A terrorist on a monitor, toting a Kalashnikov, is connected by cable to a raw, torn-out heart in the front, a looming explosion. This could be a comment on the absurd interchange of reality and the world of the media. At the sides of the picture, the motifs are overlapping, be they a cigarette butt, an erupting volcano or a building from Tiananmen Square . And so the heterogonous associations could be going on forever into a space that cannot be concentrated in a single view any longer.

With this picture, drawing has acquired a new weight in Yang Jinsong's painting. The drawing elements enable him to show the chaotic disintegration of our world, and at the same time visualize the feeling of being torn apart and lost in this world. One picture title is a paraphrase of this new creative approach: “Travellers among Mountains and Streams” from October 2010, where the smoldering fire is a dark ridge delineating a larger scenic formation, while a raw, dismembered lamb has been distributed over the picture. We know the colors grey and pink from the first painting, and here they are supplemented by the changeable green of large lotus leaves. An astronaut in his white suit with his helmet closed is standing lost in the middle. We are not sure if he is just another motif in this torn world, or if he is a visitor from another world, looking – just like the viewer – quite accidentally at this strangely apocalyptic scene.

At this point it is time to speak of the particular beauty of these catastrophic worlds, which are manifestations of the artist's passionate wish to do something for this world. Ever since those fish, Yang Jinsong seems to be occupied with the paradoxical coexistence of beauty and terror. It is not easy to hold these two in balance. If one of them gets stronger than the other, the result would be either Kitsch or negative prophecy. This is why the best of those fish demand a certain hardness and discipline of color, and there is a balance between the verve of the drawing process and the blooming colors. The emotions of the painter in his experience of our reality cannot be separated from each other; they are joined to each other like the infinite ends of a parabola.

*

The development of Yang Jinsong's art also follows an inner personal logic, in addition to the artistic logic. We can see this from a few smaller new pictures. It is as if the painter would return to his old passions: to cover every last bit of the canvas and show the familiar motif of a couple in close embrace. But I think Yang Jinsong also puts a new kind of reflection up for discussion. He and his wife are seen from the back, in a boundless landscape, either in a sea of lotus or above the clouds, looking at an insular idyll far away: a small plot of land with a house, a window with their faces, as shadows or lit up dimly by a lamp. You see a wish imagined, and you also see that its fulfillment is very far away. And in between there is his field of occupation with contemporary experience of a warped globalized world.

The poetic logic in Yang Jinsong's painting has changed the direction of its view, but kept to its substance. The occupation with traditional ink painting has not led to an invocation of impotent forms of the past, a flight from the modern world. It has enabled suspense and tension between the past and the future. The small portrait of a black cat from 2008, reduced in a close-up to eyes and mouth, the black fur of the face cut by the edge of the painting, could be read as an apotropaic mask, set up with its glowing eyes and mouth in front of a present marked by deep conflicts, and by an absent-minded refusal to acknowledge them.

Ursula Panhans-Bühler

Beijing, June 2011

Translator:Jacqueline WINTER

<!--Session data-->

Some translations of Yan Jun’s poetry into English, French, Dutch and German

For current info on Yan Jun and his various sound projects, see http://mu.subjam.org/yanjun/.

Artspace China has a long interview from August 2011:　http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/artspacechina/2011/08/post_3.html　

Yan Jun’s poems have been translated into English, French and other languages for about a decade. Maghiel van Crevel’s report from a poetry event in Beijing, along with extensive translations, appeared online at the MCLC Reseource Center in 2003: http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/yanjun.htm, see also http://h1753510.stratoserver.net/w/The_Poetry_of_Yan_Jun

Yan Jun’s poems have appeared in various magazines, for example Cerise Press in Spring 2010 (http://www.cerisepress.com/01/03/shi-ke-and-yan-jun-innovative-poets-from-china)

There is a longer text by Yan Jun called Noise and the Apocalypse on the site “pangbianr” (http://pangbianr.com/noise-and-the-apocalypse/), with acoustic   accompaniment and references to the Chinese original in a Taiwanese magazine.

Yan Jun’s poetry was featured in the project Poesie in die Stadt: Chinain Germany in 2009. See http://www.bosch-stiftung.de/content/language1/html/24938.asp

The following poems were written between 2008 and 2010, and translated in 2010. See also my paper on Chinese literature from 2000 and 2010 (http://langmates.com/dujuan99/blog/3650/), which contains translations of the three poems Charter 09, April 25 and This Moment. My page Translation on erguotou.wordpress.com (http://erguotou.wordpress.com/translation/) has English and German versions of This Moment.

This Moment was recited by the author and presented with my English translation at the Rotterdam Poetry International Festival in June 2011. They also have many other poems by Yan Jun in Chinese, English and Dutch at 

http://international.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=19777&skin=pif

Four poems from 2008-2011 have appeared in the latest number of the German magazine Dianmo (July 2011, http://dianmo.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/dianmo_jul12_web.pdf, p.32/33

Two poems also appear at Lionel Marchetti’s site Lampe-Tempete: 
http://www.lampe-tempete.fr/sommaire8.html

Lionel has a few French translations at http://www.lampe-tempete.fr/yanyunLT8.html

The poems below are followed by the text Northern Roundworms by Che Qianzi. Northern Roundworms is actually a liner note for a new CD by Yan Jun.

14. Februar, Mit Vater im Krankenhaus

Feb. 14, Taking Father to Hospital

2月14日，和父亲去医院

We had breakfast. Took our medicine.

Battled with polluted air.

我们吃了早餐  吃了药

和污染的空气做斗争

Wir haben gefrühstückt.. Nahmen Medikamente.

Wir kämpfen mit verschmutzter Luft.

We got up early. To wait at the hospital

And recognize the ear doctor’s steps.

我们早起  在医院等待

辨认着耳科大夫的脚步声

Wir stehen früh auf. Um im Krankenhaus zu warten.

Wir erkennen die Schritte des Ohrenarztes.

We were silent. Sat in a row.

Stored our silence in the air.

我们沉默着  并排坐着

把沉默存进空气里

Schweigend sitzen wir nebeneinander

Und speichern die Stille ein in die Luft.

One day. Two days. With our hands behind our backs

Standing in the slow-moving elevator

一天  两天  我们背着手

在缓慢的电梯里站着

Einen Tag. Zwei Tage. Mit den Händen hinter dem Rücken

Stehen wir im langsamen Lift.

The scarf is new. The ice and the garbage are new.

We are listening to each other. Until we hear nothing.

围巾是新的  冰和垃圾也是新的

我们互相听  一直到听不见

Der Schal ist neu. Eis und Abfall sind neu.

Wir hören einander zu. Bis wir nichts mehr hören.

2008.02.14  Yan Jun, 2008-02-14  MW Tr. Febr. 2011MW Übers. im Febr. 2011

Febr. 18, Strindberg from Labrang

He heard of Beijing.      It made his ears ring.

Northern bicycles.        Slipped through the sky.

He heard of Labrang.     The monastic name rang.

Northern pancakes.       Covered with snowflakes.

He went to the cellar to watch underground movies.

And now he is old.         Doesn’t go anywhere.

Snow’s on the street.     Bicycle is downstairs.

Strindberg from Labrang.     Doesn’t hear anything.

Yan Jun                   Feb. 18^th, 2008 in LanzhouMW          Tr. Feb. 2011

2月18日，夏河的斯特林堡

他听到了北京  他是它的耳鸣

北方的自行车  在天空中滑过

他听到了夏河  法号响起了

北方的大饼  被雪花盖起来

他在地下室看地下电影

他老了  哪里都不去

雪在街上  自行车在楼下

夏河人斯特林堡  什么都听不到

2008.02.18，兰州

18. Februar, Strindberg aus Labrang

Er hörte von Peking      Das Sausen der Ohren

Das nördliche Fahrrad           Rutscht durch den Himmel

Er hörte von Labrang             Der Mönchsname klang

Der nördliche Fladen            Mit Schneeflocken drauf

Im Tiefgeschoß sieht er die Untergrundfilme

Er ist alt geworden                Geht nirgendwo hin

Der Schnee auf der Straße            Das Fahrrad im Hof

Strindberg aus Labrang         Hört gar keinen Klang

Yan Jun, 18. Februar 2008, Lanzhou

MW                Übers. im Febr. 2011

June 2^nd, A Peaceful Life

A peaceful life has never appeared

A thunderstorm never really came down

Except for the ceaseless      doubled dizziness

In the afternoon     tying       the girl who keeps screaming

Erotic as water

Water as water       in boiling water the moment of stillness

Another afternoon         the next afternoon

Passed without motion         has not gone away

Yan Jun, June 2nd, 2008

MW                Tr. Febr. 2011

6月2日，平静的生活

平静的生活从未出现

就像雷雨从未真的降临

除了无休止的  加倍的晕眩

在下午  捆绑  操着尖叫的姑娘

水一样的色情

水一样的水  开水的片刻宁静

又一个下午  下一个下午

静止般地经过  又从未消失

2008.6.2

2. Juni,  Ein friedliches Leben

Ein friedliches Leben ist noch nie erschienen

Als wär das Gewitter noch nie ausgebrochen

Außer der endlose doppelte Schwindel

Am Nachmittag              fesselt    das kreischende Mädchen

Wie Wasser erotisch

Wie Wasser, das Wasser              Das kochende Wasser, die Stille davor

Wieder ein Nachmittag         der nächste Nachmittag

Ohne Regung vergangen                       und doch nie verschwunden

Yan Jun, 2. Juni 2008

MW                Übers. im Febr. 2011

August 10

Apples fell from the sky

And backed up traffic

People fell from the sky

Inventing ice cream

Now is that time

Now the walnuts are ripe

The library’s finished

The key burning the red door is blue

And so we have met

Flying birds invent flying

Sneezing mysteriously          We raise our heads

Yan Jun August 10th, 2009

8月10日

苹果从天上下来

把交通堵起来

人类从天上下来

发明了雪糕

现在就是那个时刻

现在核桃成熟

图书馆竣工

蓝色的钥匙烧着红色的门

所以我们相遇

飞鸟发明了飞

我们抬头  神秘地打喷嚏

2009.8.10

10. August

Ein Apfel kommt vom Himmel herunter

Und hält den Verkehr auf

Die Menschheit kam vom Himmel herunter

Und erfand das Speiseeis

Jetzt ist diese Zeit gekommen

Die Nüsse sind reif

Die Bibliothek ist errichtet

Blaue Schlüssel brennen rote Türen

Also sind wir uns begegnet

Fliegende Vögel erfanden das Fliegen

Wir heben den KopfNiesen geheimnisvoll

Yan Jun    2009-08-10

MW         Übers. Febr. 2011

Northern Roundworms – Che Jianzi

北回虫

车前子

Translated by Martin Winter

1) Northern Roundworms

一．北回虫

Yan Jun has sent me e-mails with the following titles: “North”, “Recycling”, “Wormhole Chance Composition“. The contents of the attachments lacked any formal classification. I combined some parts of the titles and came up with “Northern Roundworms.” I just printed out these names. That was all. Now Yan Jun wants me to write a little explanation. The explanation follows: I pick up my “Modern Chinese Dictionary (Commercial Press expanded edition 2002)” and flip through it randomly, for example now I hit upon “low employment” – that’s a mistake, so I employ a lower page, like page 9. Page 9 has various syllables in different tones that sound like “an”, where “an” can mean “container”, “eat food from one’s hand”, “I, we, our (in dialect)”, “dibble holes for planting seeds”, “the first sound of a Buddhist mantra”, “so”, “another way to write ‘an’, meaning I, our, we in dialect”, “ammonium”, “to powder a wound”, “’an’ as in ‘bi’an’, a legendary animal drawn on the door of a prison”, “shore”, “lofty”, “press or push down with your hand”, “according to”, “note”. With these 15 words, I go into “Northern Roundworms”; at the ninth line it says “record”, so I record fifteen words: “meanwhile, passing cars lifting up a strong wind”. Including the punctuation, this sentence has almost exactly 15 syllables. “Chinese people always look outfor good connections”, and so I combine those 15 kinds of “an” with the sentence before, connecting them one by one: (container) mean- (eat from hand) while (I, me, mine), (dibble holes) passing (mantra) cars (so) lifting (ammonium) up (wound powder) a (prison sign) strong (shore) wind (press) and so on. “Recording means to kill the truth. Then you make it into a specimen, or meat cooked with soy sauce. And then you eat it, digest it, and absorb the truth.” If I don’t go according to the absorbed truth I had in mind – what isn’t true is below –

(container) mean (shore), a strong wind,

And if it’s not absorbed, it’s not meat in soy sauce, just meat cooked dark. But doesn’t this sound too much like Zen? Let’s digest it a little:

(container) mean strong wind,

And absorb it a little:

(container) mean wind,

And digest a little more:

(container) wind,

This is still too much Zen. I am against Zen in art. I promote antagonism. “I am doing what anyone could be doing.” “This is probably my basic principle.” “In regard to the truth, I don’t have to be a special person.” In regard to myself, I don’t have to be a particular “container wind”, so I flip through to page 825, for example – there are three syllables that sound like “lu” in fourth tone, meaning “to move the eyeballs” or “road” and a “lu” that means “to insult, humiliate”, but the character can also stand for another “lu”, which means “to kill, or to fight together”. With these three characters, I go back into Northern Roundworms, to Page 825, and stop at an empty space, because Northern Roundworms doesn’t have a page 825, there are only all these lines (1-9-9) on this paper I printed out. So I look for the 825^th character, which is “ji”, third tone, meaning “self”, or “sixth”, because it’s the sixth of the Heavenly Stems, used for counting years, hours and so on.

“Chinese will always like to be well connected”, so I let “self” come together with “eyeball-moving”, “road” and “insult”. One character getting together with three characters, this is a little excessive. “Of course this is altogether a different cup of tea with chicken feathers and garlic peel”, as we say. “Are these chicken feathers and garlic peels over here any different from those chicken feathers and garlic peels over there?” “Is there any difference between chicken feathers with garlic peels and chicken feathers with garlic peels? There is no difference. There is only a difference between chicken feathers and garlic peels.

颜峻(Yan Jun)他发来电子邮件：《北方（North）》；《回收（Recycling）》；《虫洞机遇作曲（Wormhole Chance Composition）》。附件作为形式没有等级内容。我把它们合作一起，并命名为《北回虫》，也就是说，我把《北方（North）》《回收（Recycling）》《虫洞机遇作曲（Wormhole Chance Composition）》打印在一张纸上。颜峻(Yan Jun)他要我写段说明。说明如下：我拿来《现代汉语词典（商务印书馆2002年增补本）》，随意翻阅，比如我现在翻到“低就业”——这是一个错误——应该是“第九页”——“第九页”上有“盦”“咹”“俺”“埯”“唵”“唵”“唵”“唵”“铵”“揞”“犴”“岸”“岸”“按”“按”——这十五个字，我就走进《北回虫》，走到“第九行”，停下，在“第九行”这一行“录音”，录下十五个字：

中间，过往的汽车掀起很大的风，   加上标点，正好十五个字。“没办法，中国人就喜欢搞关系……”，我让“中间，过往的汽车掀起很大的风，”和“盦”“咹”“俺”“埯”“唵”“唵”“唵”“唵”“铵”“揞”“犴”“岸”“岸”“按”“按”搞在一起。一个一个搞，关系：

盦中咹间俺，埯过埯往埯的埯汽铵车揞掀犴起岸很岸大按的按风，  “录音就是杀死真实。然后要么做成标本，要么做成红烧肉，吃掉，消化并吸收掉真实。”没有按照我意志吸收掉的真实——不真实在下面——  盦中岸，很大风，

没有吸收掉的肯定不是“红烧肉”，是“肉烧红”。这样，是不是也太有禅意？再消化一些：   

盦中大风，  再吸收一些：  盦中风，  再消化一些：   盦风，

还是太有禅意了。我反对艺术品中的禅意！我鼓吹艺术品中的敌意！“我做的事情都是人人可以做的。”“这大概是我的基本原则。”“对真实而言，我并不需要是一个特别的人。”对我而言，我并不需要是一阵特别的“盦风”，比如我现在翻到“第八二五页”——上有“睩”“路”“僇”——这三个字，我就走进《北回虫》，走到“第八二五行”，停下，在一片空地之上，《北回虫》根本就没有“第八二五行”，它（在我打印的一张纸上）只有“一九九”行。我开始找“第八二五”个字，这一个字是“己”，录下这个字：

己  “没办法，中国人就喜欢搞关系……”，我让“己”和“睩”“路”“僇”搞在一起。一个搞三个，有点奢侈。“当然这是另一些鸡毛蒜皮，”“这些鸡毛蒜皮，和那些鸡毛蒜皮有区别吗？”“鸡毛蒜皮和鸡毛蒜皮之间，没有区别吗？”鸡毛蒜皮和鸡毛蒜皮之间没有区别。鸡毛和蒜皮之间，有区别。

2) Chicken Feathers

二．鸡毛

One chicken feather: Always changing shape 一根鸡毛：它始终在变形，

One chicken feather with one chicken feather: Always changing shape, you can also say no sound is wasted,一根鸡毛和一根鸡毛：它始终在变形，也可以说没有声音是多余的，

One chicken feather with one chicken feather with one chicken feather: Always changing shape, you can also say no sound is wasted, together with anything you like called up inside your body, 一根鸡毛和一根鸡毛和一根鸡毛：它始终在变形，也可以说没有声音是多余的，以及随便什么你身体里被召唤起来的东西，

One chicken feather with one chicken feather with one chicken feather with one chicken feather: Always changing shape, you can also say no sound is wasted, together with anything you like called up inside your body, every kind of bastard is encouraging you, 一根鸡毛和一根鸡毛和一根鸡毛和一根鸡毛：它始终在变形，也可以说没有声音是多余的，以及随便什么你身体里被召唤起来的东西，每一个王八蛋都在激励你，

One chicken feather with one chicken feather with one chicken feather with one chicken feather with one chicken feather: Always changing shape, you can also say no sound is wasted, together with anything you like called up inside your body, every kind of bastard is encouraging you, and if you think about it, how can you not be moved to tears? 一根鸡毛和一根鸡毛和一根鸡毛和一根鸡毛和一根鸡毛：它始终在变形，也可以说没有声音是多余的，以及随便什么你身体里被召唤起来的东西，每一个王八蛋都在激励你，想到这你难道不热泪盈眶？

3) Garlic Peels

三．蒜皮

[Do you know why these Western avant-garde musicians love to throw dice? Because they are lazy, evading their duty, they don’t want to choose.][For improvisation, they always say you need to empty your self, – but what if I can’t make myself empty – then I just have to observe myself, and see how non-empty I am.][You set up the machine, throw the switch, and the self starts to interfere, no-one can pretend not to be around anymore.][Nobody is more special than other people.] 【你知道，为什么那些西方先锋派音乐家喜欢丢骰子吗？因为他们偷懒，逃避责任，不想选择。】【即兴演奏那件事，都说是需要把自我放空的，我放不空怎么办啊——那我就观察着我，看我是怎样的不空。】【架好了机器，摁下开关，自我就开始介入，谁也别假装不在场。】【没有谁比别人更独特。】

[…] Flipping through the dictionary ≠ throwing dice. […] Making excerpts ≠ emptying your self. But making excerpts = improvisation. […] So is improvisation always making excerpts?【】翻词典≠丢骰子。【】摘抄≠自我放空。但摘抄＝即兴演奏。【】那么，即兴演奏＝摘抄吗？

4) Chicken Eat Worms

四．鸡吃虫

“This“ ”This” “This” “This”“各个”“各个”“各个”“各个”

“Active”“积极”

“Oh” “cackling” “bricks” “all the way until” “squeaking”“哦”“咯咯”“瓦”“直至”“直吱”

“Squeak”“吱”

“Squeak”“吱”

“Squeak” “Creak”“吱”“唔唔”

“Cock-a-doodle-doo” – Chicken eat worms, and produce eggs.“喔喔喔”——鸡吃下的是虫，生出是蛋。

Aside from that, parts of the dictionary belong to vision and noise; any noise is also auditory writing. […]I have done a limited edition called “Che Qianzi: Recent Works”, which consisted of 20 pages ripped from “A Modern Chinese Dictionary (Commercial Press expanded edition 2002)”and bound into a separate volume. 另外，一部词典也就是视觉噪音；一件噪音也就是听觉文字。【】我做过一本限量版《车前子近作》，从《现代汉语词典（商务印书馆2002年增补本）》中撕下二十页，装订成册。

5) Writings

五．文字

Listen! Criticizing ears. Right now we are criticizing ears. 听！批判耳朵。正好批判到耳朵。

It’s not politics; it’s not economy; it’s not culture; it’s not art. Yes, sound: noisy. It is art; it is culture; it is economy; it is political. 不是政治的；不是经济的；不是文化的；不是艺术的。是，声音：噪音的。是艺术的；是文化的；是经济的；是政治的。

The animals can only be small animals. 动物只能是小动物。

Nothing heard by chance; just recorded by chance. 没有偶然听到的；只有偶然录下的。

Tools: Opportunities are the tools. 工具：机遇即工具。

Soul: The materials are the soul. 灵魂：材料即灵魂。

Avantgarde just means not timid enough, we need more of that. 先锋意味着还不够胆怯，需要做得更多。

Who can be more brave than the conservative, more blunt, more unscrupulous? In art. 谁能比保守更勇敢、更粗鲁、更肆无忌惮呢？在艺术上。

The decibel level of silence exceeding the noise, in China?沉默的分贝超过噪音，在中国中？

When you are about to wash your hands, the water screams – “left” “right”; washing your ears, you see the bottom of the great river: their face has booked a soft pillow on the riverbed. 洗手之际水发出尖叫——“左”“右”；洗耳的时候大河见底：它们的脸在河床预订了松软的枕头。

This is nothing unique, so we are very inspired.  一点也不独特，所以我们兴致勃勃。

Listen! Fortunately there is some inspired noise. 听！幸亏还有噪音是兴致勃勃的。

Written in Beijing in the morning of Jan 19, 2011, in the Mumu (Eye- wood) – Building.

2011-1-19，上午，北京，目木楼

<!--Session data-->