Visitors seem dazzled by the might of painterly propaganda in the "90th anniversary of the CCP" painting exhibit.

A major function of the National Museum of China is its definition and display of Chinese history under the Party. This section, somewhat romantically entitled “The Road of Rejuvenation” takes up a major part of NMC’s northern section. I walked through it all, from the Opium War to “China in Space.”

Inside the Grand Hall. If it looks like an elegant version of a terminal, it's because the German architects specialize in airports.

First, we enter a sculptural antichamber. This has got to be one of the weirdest immersive sculptural environments I’ve ever seen. An enormous entrance hall has been clotted with what looks like baked clay (I guess it’s depressingly expensive bronze that preserves the original rough slapdash clay “style” of the sculpture). On the left, scenes of feudal China (somewhat more beguiling than depressing, to my eye). On the right, scenes of modern China under the Leadership of the Party (really bleak and ugly, a lot of it is weirdly blank but one can make out a kindergarten model style mini-HK skyline, a high speed train rushing across the Tibetan plateau, and a fast cosmic ball of something, whirring with lumpy clay energy. In the middle, brutally (or, rather, I should say boldly) cleaving past and future in two is a sleek perforated sculpture, designed like a retro jet age style symbolic representation of what must be the progressive force of the Chinese Communist Party (think 1930s deco aggressively angled car hood ornament the size of a small jet). Suitably ideologically seasoned, I entered the Road of Rejuvenation galleries.

There’s something depressingly old-fashioned and small-scale about all of this. I was expecting, I don’t know, something fresh and imaginative, designed at least to display the currently authoritative version of Chinese history in an impressive or at least rhetorically vigorous way. Perhaps I was expecting to see at least a lavish application of unlimited budget to ideological goals where the stakes were enormous. Apparently making something both new and coherent and politically satisfactory was too hard a task, and the curators of this section fell back on the oldest cliches of Chinese ideological museology.

History in pictures, or by the numbers?

Walls are plastered with enlarged photographs, each accompanied by copious explanatory texts (in Chinese and often in English, which is thoughtful); no progressive historical figure of any importance can be left out, so we often get pictures of meetings, and portraits and lists of everyone who might have been present. Come to think of it, this is exactly the strategy of the two giant propaganda film hits of the last two years, The Founding of A Republic and The Beginning of the Great Revival. And it’s exactly what bogs down the second film, turning it essentially into a power-point display of Chinese Communist hagiography, incidentally turning off audiences, who failed to purchase tickets in Party-mandated droves.

There are artifacts as well, although which ones are authentic and which are replicas is hard to discern (and the labels rarely make distinctions for us, unlike the Ancient China galleries, where replicas are meticulously labelled as such). Sun Yat-sen’s hat, for example, seems to be made of suspiciously new-looking wool, though the black brim looks authentically worn. I was taken with the original plaque for the Beijng Imperial University. At least I think it was the original.

The dark grey walls of the oppressively colonial late Qing era historical display rooms progressively lighten until we reach the mockup of Tiananmen. An explosion of red greets the eye. It’s 1949, and the brightest red walls decorate the upbeat, celebratory exhibits. Here there is lots of technology (machines, or models of machines, are everywhere) and lots of weaponry (attracting the entranced attention of the youngest museum-goers the day I was there). After Liberation, the exhibition space walls become pink (socialist pink?), then fade to clean white, matching the contemporary post-capitalist characterless era of the PRC, celebrated with endless dull photographs of Deng Xiaoping, followed by Jiang Zemin, followed by Hu Jintao. Perhaps I should have counted the photos, for now I wonder if the tallies for these three would have been exactly equal.

Gallery space leading to the Deng Xiaoping era: a gap in history waiting to be filled

I wanted to pay special attention to the displays from around 1966 to 1976, but couldn’t find any. Chairman Mao largely disappears from the photos in the early 60s (there is a lot of Zhou Enlai beaming, welcoming foreign guests, etc.), and then there’s a jump to 1972, which is exclusively about Nixon in China. Nothing happens up on the walls in between. In fact, this hiatus is echoed by a remarkable caesura in the display architecture: we enter a large empty lobby right after the eight photographs from 1972-76.  Nobody’s there, nothing’s on the walls, just a few benches scattered around to sit and contemplate, as we walk down 5 flights of stairs, and then we’re into the Deng Xiaoping era as the galleries resume. Perhaps the building’s architecture just happened to need a lobby here, with an intervening staircase. Perhaps it’s empty space to be filled with something about the currently undepictable Cultural Revolution, when the time comes for the Museum to face that part of Chinese history. In an interesting coincidence, the historical display in the China National Film Museum in Beijing does exactly the same thing between 1966 and 1976: there’s a gap, and empty lobby and a staircase, and then the displays resume.

In other words, Chinese history is a work in progress. Such can be seen throughout the National Museum of China, whose combination of monumentality and contingency, glorious beauty and stolid ideology, mirrors awkwardly, but also quite appropriately, China today.

To retrieve some of the National Museum’s missing history between 1959 and 1976, watch historical documentary filmmaker Hu Jie’s films Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul and Though I Am Gone.

Relevant Classroom Use

The gallery of Ancient Chinese art in the National Museum of China may be the new highlight of anyone's visit to Beijing.

Beijing’s new National Museum of China opened in March 2011. It’s been steadily expanding inside since, opening more and more galleries to the public. Recently, the galleries of ancient art were finally opened, so I decided it was time to make a thorough visit (I’d been once before in early May just to take a look at the building) and see how the Chinese nation choses to present itself in a grand museum setting.

First of all, the setting. It is very grand. Super gigantic-grand. Reports in Western media describe an amusingly direct series of phone calls by planners of the National Museum of China (NMC) to western museum experts. Sample questions: “What is the floor space of the Louvre?” “What about the British Museum in London?” Clearly, the architects’ brief included making this the Largest Museum In The World (to match Beijing Capital Airport’s Terminal 3, the Largest Building In The World; the Great Wall, and so on). Apparently they succeeded, and out of the shell of two older museums on Tiananmen Square, the Museum of Chinese History and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, the National Museum of China is being born, a giant monument to China’s fabled 5000 year history, and as we shall see, to the faithful guardianship of this immense history by the Chinese Communist Party. “Is being born” because the NMC is still a work in progress. Vast swathes of the building are still uninhabited, forthcoming galleries uninstalled. But I would estimate that at least half of the Museum is now open, more than enough for a full day of provocative and sometimes entrancing museum-going.

Newly minted Chinese haute bourgeoisie find a place to see their own aspirations reflected within the Museum.

One enters either in enormous long lines from the main entrance on Tiananmen Square, or without lining up at all from the building’s north side. At first I was told that the North Entrance was a sort of VIP entrance, and on my first visit I managed to talk my way in by appearing stubborn and obtuse and pretending to know no Chinese. At least I thought that was happening. This time, it seems that the only difference between the two entrances is the price of admission. It’s free to enter by the long lines; one pays (a nominal 10 RMB, about $1.50) to skip the line. And that 10 yuan includes admission to the German Enlightenment temporary exhibition (a disappointing assemblage of second rate paintings around one  great Watteau masterpiece, Party in the Open Air, and some characteristically brilliant and chilling Goya prints from his Caprichos and Los Desastres de la Guerra series). Not included is the Louis Vuitton “exhibition” installation-advertisement, which would cost another 10 RMB. I opted to skip paying to see an elaborate showroom for luxury products, though not without wondering what sort of deal LV managed to negotiate with the Chinese museum authorities that allowed them to co-opt four large galleries in the nation’s foremost museum to mount what is essentially a PR show-cum-product exhibition.

This is not unlike, I imagine, renting on-screen time in contemporary Chinese blockbuster films (Feng Xiaogang’s being the most notorious in this respect) for prominent product placement: even the current propaganda would-be blockbuster The Beginning of the Great Revival, in its own way the NMC of contemporary propaganda films, managed to place a rather prominently branded antique Omega wristwatch into its story.

After entering the Museum, I was searched and frisked by airport-style security people, though none of my beep-eliciting and obviously bulky electronics were inspected (photos of the museum that follow are the results of my semi-surreptitious attempt to document my visit for this piece, apologies for the rough quality). Then on into the main hall.

Visitors as ants in a vast cultural space. It doesn't just look like a classy airport terminal; you could fly a small plane in here.

I felt tiny. Most of NMC’s floor space is taken up by an enormous main entrance hall, fronting Tiananmen Square. It’s designed to make you feel minuscule and insignificant (in the face of those 5000 years of history, perhaps?), and it works. What doesn’t work is the gigantic scale of the building: though galleries and a series of balconies (hello Musée d’Orsay) afford vantage points over the hall’s various cavernous wings, you never know quite where you are (and I’m good with maps, and can get you from the Louvre’s Winged Victory of Samothrace to Chirac’s African sculpture court in three minutes flat). Follow the crowds.

Facing the entrance hall is enormous Central Hall Number One, now devoted to a display of gigantic (I’m running out of words for “really big”) historical paintings chosen to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. The display was a bit dutiful, paintings crammed in together, hung above each other in study gallery style, around a vast empty middle. The famous revolutionary paintings in the collection of the Museum were somehow missing (I’d seen them years ago in the great Guggenheim show on Chinese art). The whole installation looked a bit perfunctory, as if sending a curatorial message that “we have to do this, but our heart’s really not in it”.

What the curators hearts are into, clearly, is ancient Chinese art, especially from the Neolithic times through the Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, and Tang dynasties. These galleries, newly opened, are spectacular. Louvre spectacular. British Museum spectacular. Every tourist who’s come to Beijing looking for masterpieces of Chinese ancient art (and told to go to the Shanghai Museum to find them) now has someplace to satisfy his or her art desires. I was in heaven.

Right off the bat, we can admire a neolithic erotic/devotional sculpture, anatomically detailed (it’s hermaphrodite), prominently placed with helpfully explanatory caption. The prudish Chinese curator is extinct, at least at the NMC. You’ve seen Chinese bronzes before, but nothing this spectacular: profusely detailed four animal-headed cauldrons, vats large enough to bathe an entire court. Masterpieces sit in their own beautifully lit cases in the middle of large galleries, and intelligent thematic groupings (family life, economy, transport) as well as smaller works are gathered in cases around the walls.

Ranks of Han dynasty soldiers

But bronzes are just a warm up show. The Museum’s Qin and Han sculpture collection is glorious. The two terracotta warriors from Xi’an seem a bit lonely off with their horse in their heavily protected corner (word is that NMC used its institutional heft to requisition many masterpieces from regional museums all around the country), but facing them, the vast battalion of metre-high Han dynasty pottery warrior statues, arranged in ranks from spear-carriers to cavalrymen, is a spectacular show of art and might. Then there is a Han dynasty sculpture masterpiece gallery that I will keep going back to. It includes the famous laughing drummer curled up on one leg, an ecstatically gesturing female Han dancer, arms describing hyperspace, and a magnificently snarling stone lion.

An arched stone gate from the Northern Wei Dynasty is one of the few architectural installations in the museum, but it’s beautifully detailed, and unprotected (there’s glass around almost everything other than the large scale stone objects). NMC’s other architectural materials take the form of large elaborately detailed wooden models (a temple hall, a pagoda), which seem to be a specialty of Chinese museology, and do in fact attract the close attention of many Chinese museum goers.

The Tang galleries continue to maintain this high level of presentation and display, forgoing the usual multicoloured flamboyant statuary for substantial but less familiar pieces. But there is a surprising and somewhat disconcerting drop off in quality from the Song dynasty on, although there is much to look at and enjoy. I’m not sure why. Is the Ancient Art Department at NMC divided into two sections, pre and post-Song? Perhaps artifacts of the highest level just weren’t available at installation time.

All of these galleries are in the museum’s sub-basement, but lofty ceilings, sumptuous materials, and sophisticated lighting make you forget you’re underground. In a giant upstairs gallery, Central Hall 2, is the NMC’s other pièce-de-résistance, a Buddhist sculpture gallery full of beautifully installed Northern Wei masterpieces, a supremely suave Tang dynasty Bodhisattva, and important Song and Ming sculptures, in wood and stone.

The same can’t be said, unfortunately, for the new Porcelain gallery. I hope this atrociously tacky glass and plastic installation is only temporary. It feels like a jewelry show in a HK emporium designed for mainland tourists’ quick-hit look-and-buy visits. It’s crowded, the works are jumbled in what seems to be (but this can’t be) an order based on colour (beautiful simple monochrome porcelain on the left, blue-and-white in the middle, multicolour on the right). This is just weird, but does concentrate some wonderfully elegant, luminously pale Ming monochromes together, away from their more famous blue and white cousins, who always steal the show. Fortunately, hidden in the appalling display are a decent number of my favourite Qing dynasty Yongzheng period porcelains, of perfect proportion and astonishing refinement (the Yongzheng emperor himself may have been sadistically repressive, but his artists were something else).

Relevant Classroom Use

Lu Xinyu (photo courtesy of UCLA International Institute)

Lu Xinyu is Professor and Director of the Radio and TV Department, School of Journalism, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.  Professor Lu is widely regarded as the leading scholar on independent Chinese documentaries.  Her influential book Documenting China: The New Documentary Movement (Beijing, SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2003) was the first book to systematically theorize the New Documentary Movement in China from the beginning of 1990s.  She spent the past academic year as a visiting scholar in the department of cinema studies at New York University.

Selected Publications by Lu Xinyu:

Books:

• Writing and What It Obscures (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2008)
• Documenting China: The Contemporary Documentary Movement in China (SDX Joint Publishing Company, Beijing, 2003)
• Mythology. Tragedy. Aristotle’s Art of Poetry: New Concept to Ancient Greek’s Poetics Tradition (Fudan University Press, Shanghai, 1995)

Papers and Articles:

• “The Power and Pain of Chinese New Documentary Movement”, Dushu No. 5, 2006.
• “Ruins of the Future Class and History in Wang Bing’s Tiexi District”, New Left Review, 31 Jan/Fab 2005. London.
• “Tiexi District: History and Class Consciousness”, Dushu No. 1, 2004.
• “The History of Documentary and the Document of the History”, Journalism Quarterly, Winter, 2003.
• “A Memorandum about Contemporary Chinese Documentary Development”, South China Television Journal No. 6, 2002 and No. 1, 2003.
• “Began from the Other Side: New Documentary Movement in China”, Frontiers No. 3, 2002.

In this interview conducted by dGenerate’s Yuqian Yan, Lu Xinyu told us about her current work during her visit in New York and how she was attracted to independent Chinese documentary from an aesthetic and humanist background.  Starting from Aristotle’s poetic concept of “tragedy”, she led us to understand the New Documentary Movement as a unique art form that depicts the tragic life of ordinary people in the rapidly changing Chinese society.  The interview was conducted in Chinese.  Full English transcript after the break.

Play the Podcast (in Mandarin Chinese) (Time: 16:43)

Download audio file (dGenerate_Lu_Xinyu.mp3)

Download it here (right-click to download). (File Size:7.7 MB)

dGF:  What projects are you currently working on?

LX:  My current research project still focuses on the New Chinese Documentary Movement.  I hope to contextualize this movement in the development of Chinese cinema, as well as world cinema today in order to better understand and reflect on the unique contribution of Chinese documentary.  I think it is important to examine why Chinese documentary has become a movement and its significance to world cinema in general.  This is why I have been attracted to this subject.  My experience in New York this year as a visiting scholar enables me to approach this issue from a broader perspective.  Both Chinese social development and the trajectory of Chinese cinema are interconnected with the process of globalization.  All of these aspects should be discussed in relation to each other.

dGF:  We know that your PhD degree was in aesthetics.  What led you to study independent Chinese film and documentary?

LX:  My PhD dissertation was about dramatic theory.  I was concerned about the reason for the decline of the modern Chinese drama.  In order to understand this, I turned to classical Western dramas and poetics tradition.  I felt that using the Western concept of “comedy” and “tragedy” to analyze and categorize Chinese theater was very problematic.  During my study of Aristotle’s Art of Poetry and its relation to ancient Greek drama, I found a vital change in the concept of “tragedy”.  In ancient times, tragedy, according to Aristotle, was closely linked to the hero and his eminent family.  Heroes were all from royal or noble families.  Why? The explanation given by Aristotle was “happen to.”  But my research found out that heroes became heroes because they were responsible to the whole city-state and society.  But in modern individualistic society, ordinary people become the ones who bear the weight of society.  People from the lowest social class are most likely to be the victims of social transformation.  Therefore the meaning of tragedy has fundamentally changed from the dramatic action of the noble family to the depiction of the tragic life and psychological world of ordinary people.  In this sense, it is the life of ordinary people that embodies the meaning of social tragedy.

I started to teach at Fudan University after my graduation in 1993.  I had some communication with TV stations for my Special Feature Documentary class.  At that time there was a heated discussion about the definition of documentary.  1993 was the year when New Documentary Movement started to be legitimized and accepted within the system.  From then on, I found that TV documentary rather than literature was paying attention to ordinary people.  Literature, on the contrary, entered a self-reclusive, narcissistic stage.  It was documentary that facilitated the dialogue between art and society.  That was very appealing to me since documentary functioned as a continuation of my interest in the transformation of tragedy.  I started to use aesthetic theories to understand Chinese documentary.

dGF:  When you say TV documentary, do you mean “special feature documentary?” (zhuan ti ji lu pian)

LX:  In fact, the TV documentary at that time was a rebellion against special feature documentary.  When we came to the “TV time,” we abandoned the word “documentary” because it belonged to the “Film time”, and conveyed a sense of propaganda.  People who worked for TV stations replaced “documentary” with “special features” (zhuan ti pian).  Therefore at the end of 1980s, when we started to turn against the fake, grandiose and empty formula of the special feature, we redefined and rediscovered the concept of documentary.

Why TV stations?  TV workers were very sensitive to social changes.  The New Documentary Movement started from television because, compared to the film system, these people had closer contact with society and more opportunities to use film equipment.  Accessibility to equipment is also an important reason.  Many first generation independent filmmakers built up their relationship with TV stations through a variety of ways, either private or public.  That was the only way for them to get a hold of equipment.  The 1990s were also the time for the reformation of Chinese television system, which created a flexible space for independent filmmakers.  Many filmmakers took advantage of that space to work on their own projects, including some of the most famous directors like Wu Wenguang.

dGF:  If you look back at that time, how does it compare with the documentary scene in China today?

LX:  The first generation independent Chinese documentary makers had very strong political intention.  They held a clear attitude to criticize and rebel against the mainstream coercive ideology.  Political intention and social responsibility were prominent features among the first generation.  These directors preferred to understand society through observation, to approach Chinese society from the bottom up.  Therefore they were more willing to use the observational mode of direct cinema, combining Frederick Wiseman and Ogawa Shinsuke.

Wiseman’s observation was objective and dispassionate.  He maintained certain distance from his subjects; his observation was cold in some sense.  Ogawa used observational mode in a more interventional way.  He treated his subjects as his own self.  The first generation borrowed from both Wiseman and Ogawa to depict Chinese underclass as an objective “other.”  But this “other” was positioned equally to the directors themselves.  This is the major difference from the second generation who emerged at the end of 1990s.  With the emergence of digital video, filmmakers are no longer dependent on TV stations.  Many young directors use the camera to express themselves.

The new generation emphasizes individualism and self-expression, while the previous generation focused on realism.  The first generation placed emphasis on the “other”; and the second generation expresses the existence of the self.  In a broader sense, it is the existence of both “other” and “self” that constitute Chinese society today.  So there’s some interesting dynamic between the two generations.  The first generation directors claimed that “We are not artists. We are just artisans.”  This claim emphasizes the position of the director in relation to reality.  They do not want to impose their subjectivity on reality, but to allow the conflicts of reality to be revealed from the text without authorial manipulation.  The second generation directors see themselves as artists.  So their aesthetic style incorporates more performativity and self-reflexivity.  Interestingly, they may have never heard about these theories, but they instinctively created these styles to break the boundary between what’s in front of the camera and what’s behind it, and the boundary between subjectivity and the other.  They boldly show themselves in the film, therefore the boundaries between the director and film subjects, public and private disappear as well.  In this sense, they are very avant-garde.  They break established rules and create new aesthetic styles.

This is the current situation of independent Chinese film and documentary.  Meanwhile, those documentaries of social concerns still exist in an influential and powerful way.  So independent Chinese documentary or independent Chinese cinema today is very diversified.

dGF:  You’ve already mentioned many, but I still want to ask what are the major issues that you are most interested in, or you think are important to us as independent cinema lovers.

LX:  I’m most interested in how Independent Chinese cinema and New Documentary Movement build up their connection with society.  How do they redefine the concept of documentary and art?  What is art?  We used to imagine art as a self-contained pure aesthetic form.  This concept was quite influential after 1980s.  But now we are facing the dramatic transformation of Chinese society, both temporally and spatially.  Everyone’s life is inevitably involved in and affected by this process.  How should art react to these changes?  As a film director who bears this social pressure, how to express and represent his understanding of this society, his expectations for the society and for life itself?  All of these construct a new artistic platform for us to understand Chinese society today.

If we only learn Chinese from economic and social perspectives, we’ll never understand the psychological changes Chinese people are going through during this transformation.  By watching independent documentaries, we not only experienced the psychological world of the directors, but also got to experience the existence of people at different social levels through the lens of camera, especially the existence of the underclass and how they struggled through these changes, their pains and their needs.  This is extremely important to me.

dGF:  What would you say have been the most impressive or most significant works of Chinese documentary in the last few years?

LX:  There are a lot.  I’ve written extensively in my essays.  For example, West of the Tracks.  It focuses on how the traditional mainstream community becomes a marginalized group in Chinese society.  Working class used to be the dominant class in China, but they become marginalized under today’s market economy and social transformation.  How does the changing life of this huge group of people affect Chinese society and the industrialization process of the world?  What is its significance to globalization?  West of the Tracks pushes us to think about these questions.  The director has a very interesting view of art.  He says, “If you think my film is about laid-off workers, it means you haven’t fully understood my film.  My real focus is on human life.”  As long as it concerns human life, it has something to do with art.  Art is always about human life.  Politics and economics are the power that is behind human life.  We see the complexity of power relationship through the fate of individual and therefore to reflect on the problems we come across.

Another example would be Before the Flood, which is about the Three Gorges Project.  It is a powerful combination of broad social background and individual lives, a vivid depiction at both macro and micro level.  Bing Ai also takes Three Gorges Project as its subject matter, but explores it from a feminist perspective.  Woman’s affinity for land, for river makes the film extremely powerful and penetrating.  It allows us to experience the development of Chinese society and the tragedy of Chinese people from within.

Relevant Classroom Use

Relevant Classroom Use