cultural translation

What is Chinese about Chinese Literature?

/ astridmo / 4 Comments

What delimits Chinese literature?

I’m currently working on a critical analysis of the term ‘Chinese literature’ including my own role in the reproduction of it through for instance the title of this blog.

It involves asking a lot of questions, first of all: What is Chinese about Chinese literature? Who and what defines it?

Is it geography? If so, how to deal with overseas or exile writers? Is it Tu Wei-ming‘s notion of a ‘cultural China’? Or are might there be hybrids not answering to one cultural ‘root’ called China but to several roots? Is it about language? Current discussions in global Sinophone literature seems to be some of the most nuanced, but still fail to take into account ethnic Chinese who writes in other languages and foreigners writing in Chinese. And the Chinese language itself, even in its written form, is far from being a homogenous or easily limited subject.

Is this category of Chinese literature at all useful? For me at least, it sprung from a very practical wish to be able to access a lot of great novels and poems written in another language – Chinese. So it started with language, but from there it just grew. The best course for me now seems to be not to stop using the term ‘Chinese literature’ but to use it in a more nuanced and reflected way.

As Ien Ang puts it in her brilliant article “Can One Say No to Chineseness?”: “[A]ny intellectual investment in an object of study -say Chineseness- is not the innocent reflection of a natural reality that is passively awaiting to be discovered; rather the active quest for knowledge actively brings it into being, in the knower’s experience and understanding of the world, slices of reality he or she then calls and classifies as Chinese.”

Ai Wei Wei’s ‘Trees’ and the dead beetles – not about China

/ astridmo / Leave a comment

A few weeks ago I visited Louisiana to check out Ai Wei Wei‘s exhibition there. Like many others I wasn’t that impressed.

One thing that caught my eye and interest, though, was the amount of dead beetles locked in the tree-roots of the ‘Rocks and Trees’-installation (2009-2010) (whether or not it was intended, I care not).

For how long had the beetles survived in the installation, their artificial art-home through airports, gallery basements, packing and unpacking. Are they Chinese beetles or picked up in some storage room along the way, and does that make a difference? (they’re dead all the same) And how on earth did they get through airport security?

The little black bodies, lying belly up at the foot of the dead tree trunks nailed together to form a tree-figure, lend the interpretation of the work an extra dimension. The trees are obviously constructed, made up of different parts forcefully put together to form an ideal structure. The artificiality of the structure however, renders the single parts or branches unable to survive. Even the inhabitants of such an artificial construction will not last long.

To read ‘Trees’ as an allegory for the Chinese society, forcefully holding together very different geographical and ethnological communities to form an ideal united nation, is tempting. But it might be more fruitful, and even relevant, to look at the dead trees as a more general critique of ideology.

Few of us can get completely away from a desire for order and consistency, in which trees look like trees, cultures are recognisable as cultures, and Chinese art is about China.

What I got out of seeing Ai Wei Wei’s dead trees (and not least the additional dead beetles) was a feeling that this kind of thought hygiene might be very unfit to accommodate, or even take into consideration, real life.