Gilane Tawadros: 'The Leftovers of Translation: the Works of Shen Yuan'
In: Shen Yuan. Edited by Sarah Campbell and Gilane Tawadros. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2001, pp. 32-49.
A frozen, wine-coloured tongue carved from ice hangs down over a metal spittoon. The tongue is suspended, like a sheet of glass, frost-bound and hard. As warm currents of air circle around it, the frigid organ softens and yields. Drop by drop, the melting ice drips into the waiting spittoon until the glint of metal, reflecting through the water, hits your eye. In time, the frosty tongue thaws to reveal the blade of a kitchen knife, sharp and pointed. Perdre sa salive or Wasting One's Spittle (1994), an installation piece composed of frozen tongues, kitchen knives and metal spittoons is concerned, like many of Shen Yuan's works, with the transformation of images and objects from one state to another. Like the Chinese expression of 'finding reincarnation in another's corpse', Shen Yuan takes everyday objects and materials and invests them with new lives and meanings, translating the mundane into the extraordinary.
In Wasting One's Spittle, objects and materials are transformed into something other than themselves but, like the spittoons that gather the melted ice, the residue of the original material remains. Here the role of the artist is not that of a magician conjuring new forms from old, nor that of an alchemist transforming base metal into gold. Rather, the artist acts as translator, reinterpreting elements of the physical world into new visual metaphors that often refer back both to the previous condition of these materials and to spoken language, in particular to colloquial proverbs and sayings. 'To lose one's spittle' in Chinese is to be excessively modest or submissive, but here the unassuming image of drooling tongues dissolves itself into the spectacle of sharpened knives. In a subtle inversion of the original meaning, Shen Yuan's icy tongues 'lose their spittle' only to acquire the trappings of imminent violence.
But Wasting One's Spittle is also concerned with the limits of language: the cul-de-sac of clichéd proverbial sayings; the inability of words to approximate to the visual image; and the inadequacy of translations from one language or culture to another. At one moment, these tongues are as solid as ice; at another moment, they have melted and metamorphosed into another state. Perhaps they might be seen as the 'leftovers of translation', all the things that are left unsaid or all the nuances of language that inevitably remain untranslated. Invoking the untranslatable should not be seen as a melancholy exercise but, on the contrary, it offers the possibility of a dynamic exchange between artwork and viewer that leaves the work open to continuous interpretation and re-interpretation. Shen Yuan's works articulate what Sarat Maharaj calls the 'leftover inexpressibles of translation', demonstrating 'an attentiveness that opens on to an erotics and ethics of the other beyond its untranslatability'.
How [...] to recode translation taking on board ideas about its limits and dead-ends, its impossibility, the notion of the untranslatable, what we might call 'the untranslatability of the term other'? [...] the idea is to ask if the hybrid might not also be seen as the product of translation's failure, as something that falls short of the dream-ideal of translation as a 'transparent' passage from one idiom to another, from self to other ... To recode it in more circumspect key involves defining it as a concept that unceasingly plumbs the depths of the untranslatable and that is continually being shaped by that process. It is to reinscribe it with a double-movement that cuts across 'optimism and pessimism, the opaque and the crystal-clear' - to activate it as a play-off between the poles. It amounts to reindexing hybridity as an unfinished, self-unthreading force, even as a concept against itself. At any rate, as an open-ended one that is shot through with memories and intimations of the untranslatable. [1]
The French title of the work, Perdre sa salive, introduces another colloquial meaning to the work - wasting one's breath - that becomes knitted into the increasingly complex fabric of the piece and its multiple meanings, translations and interpretations. The artist herself talks about the work in terms of the excess of language, of when words spill over to such an extent that they become meaningless and language loses its ability to communicate. In this respect, Wasting One's Spittle and other works by Shen Yuan reflect on the relationship between the visual and the linguistic, elegantly and succinctly problematised by René Magritte's painting of a painted pipe, accompanied by the words 'Ceci n'est pas un pipe' (This is not a pipe). Created in what Walter Benjamin christened as 'the age of mechanical reproduction' and in the face of the challenge presented to painting by the photographic image, Magritte's painting underlines the gap between the 'real' world and its representation by the artist. Shen Yuan's work, made in an age of increasingly rapid communication technologies and the mass migration of peoples across the globe, points to the limits of language to describe and translate lived experience in a new global economy. Shen Yuan's preoccupation with spoken language and its limited ability to articulate contemporary experience is undoubtedly informed by her own migration from China to Paris and the consequently painful negotiation of an alien culture and language, familiar to many migrants. Uprooted from a familiar environment to an utterly different cultural space, language which once acted as an anchor rooting you in a particular place and culture, is abruptly weighed, leaving you adrift and lost. Linguistic and communication skills honed over decades become defunct overnight, crudely underlining the fallibility of language.
The migrant experience of daily alienation and discomfort is explored once again in a new installation piece made specifically for the Arnolfini, Bristol. Feel Just Like a Fish in Water (2001) is an elaborate piece that stages an old rowing boat, washed up on a bed of coarse sea salt. Echoing the skeletal frame of the boat are a number of fish skeletons, delicately cast out of Bristol blue glass and beached on the sea of salt. Live fish swim backwards and forwards in the bottom of the boat. In this, as in other of Shen Yuan's works, there is a persistent tension between the elements of the work that are solid, structural and suggest fixity or permanence and other elements that are fluid, moving but also vulnerable and impermanent. In smaller works like Untitled (1995), a slipper, lying on the lid of an open shoe box, is filled with the artist's cut fingernails. The slipper becomes a container for the body's natural waste product and the residue of the human body. Grown and cut over an extended period of time, the mound of cut fingernails is like the sand trickling through an egg-timer, a few grains at a time.
In this way, Shen Yuan builds the element of time as well as space into her work. Time, becomes the fourth material or constituent part of the work (after the artist, the materials, the viewer) which is invoked and resides latently in the work and whose gradual effect will inevitably unfold in the course of an hour, a day, a week or a month. A great deal has been written in recent years about space and place in relation to contemporary art practice, but very little attention has been paid to the concept of time. And yet, social and physical geography is rendered meaningless without the dynamic of time - like an out-of-date map or guide to a city in which the street names have changed, the configuration of buildings and landmarks have evolved beyond recognition and where people look altogether different. Shen Yuan's eloquent description of how a sixteen-hour flight changed everything echoes the temporal transformation that her installations frequently undergo, becoming, over time, altogether different. 'Becoming' rather than 'being' is the condition to which Shen Yuan's works approximate - constantly changing and transforming from one state to another.
In 1999, Shen Yuan made another work involving tongues. Diverged Tongue (a project made originally for the CCA Kitakyushu, Japan) consists of a huge, inflatable, forked tongue, reminiscent of a children's toy whistle, which is suspended from the wall and blows itself up at three to four minute intervals along the length of the gallery floor. Once again, the work takes as its reference point a Chinese saying, in this case, one that defines an extended and forked tongue as the mark of a person with a distinctive (regional) accent, a person from another place who attempts (and fails) to speak two languages with one tongue. Diverged Tongue reflects on the failure of language to straddle, at one time, two distinct linguistic systems and, by extension, two different, cultural spaces. Extravagant claims are made for this twenty-first century globalised world in which we can bridge vast geographical distances in a matter of hours, communicate in a matter of seconds, and yet, Shen Yuan implies, we trip up at the first hurdle of linguistic difference.
The 'forked tongue' also denotes a different register, accent or idiom. Variously termed as broken English, lingua franca, patois, creole, this new 'tongue' unfurls, creating something new, something other than its constituent parts from the residues of half-remembered speech and almost-forgotten expressions. Deflated and curled up in the corner of the gallery space, Shen Yuan's Diverged Tongue is an absent presence, barely registered by the visitor entering the space. As it inflates and expands across the gallery floor, however, Diverged Tongue takes on an altogether different persona as a deafening and overwhelming presence in the space that is impossible to overlook. In the context of a European continent which has been transformed and continues to be transformed by the influx of migrants from all parts of the world, Diverged Tongue could be seen as a metaphor for the ambivalent status of Europe's migrant communities. Deracinated and transposed to the continent's urban spaces, they are perceived as a latent threat - at one moment barely visible or acknowledged and, at another moment, caricatured as hordes on the brink of 'swamping' Europe's indigenous cultures. A fluctuating tide of xenophobia and racial violence ebbs and flows across Europe and intermittently surges like a tidal wave over the neo-liberal defences of the continent's democracies. At times such as this, it is the polite and liberal patina of civilised societies that threatens to melt like the ice concealing Shen Yuan's steely knives, transforming a domestic implement into a deadly weapon.
Shen Yuan cites the literary and linguistic as significant references in her work over and above the sociological or philosophical - hence her repeated use of colloquial proverbs and sayings as a starting point for the making of works. Her visual and linguistic punning owes much to Marcel Duchamp's readymades, not least in her fascination with the transformation of images, the possibility of plural meanings and the migration of the readymade object into the gallery space. But unlike Duchamp's readymades that, by their movement from the world outside into the space of the gallery, are bestowed with the status of art objects, Shen Yuan's objects and materials are continually in the process of transformation, continually becoming something else that cannot easily be fixed or held. They are, to all intents and purposes, migrating objects moving from one space to another and being transformed in the process. In this respect, Shen Yuan's 'readymades' are deeply personal and intimate reflections on the experience of identity as a continuously shifting and allusive entity. In Fingerprint (1999), a slice of raw ham, laid out on a plate like a slice of human skin, is delicately embroidered with minute gold thread to create the configuration of the artist's fingerprint, the body's unique identification system, in such a way as to reinforce its fragility and impermanence rather than to fix identity once and for all.
The human body as a measure and departure point for readjusting physical scale is a recurring motif in Shen Yuan's work. In a series of works using hemp to create gigantic plaits of hair, the artist reconstructs the human head on an enlarged scale. Three Armchairs (1995) consists of three traditional armchairs whose backs have been opened up, drawing out the hemp that is then plaited into braids. Shaped to accommodate the seated human figure, the chairs are remoulded to assume the image of a human head or rather three human heads that are then bound together and intertwined. In Threes and Fours (1997), Shen Yuan used the architecture of the gallery space in Camden Arts Centre, London, as the framework for imaginary heads that looked out of the gallery with their hemp braids trailing and interwoven across the floor of the space. The installation presents an ambivalent image since it is impossible to tell whether these metonymic human beings are coming together of their own free will or whether they have been forcibly shackled together by the braids of their hair. The human body and its senses are, for Shen Yuan, both the gauge and the barometer by which the individual calibrates their relationship to the external world, but she remains equivocal about the nature of that relationship. Absorbed into the physical architecture of the building, her gigantic heads (implicitly female and Chinese) gaze out of the gallery windows like a permeable human skin mediating between the inside and the outside of the gallery which is either a jail or a haven, depending on your interpretation. [2]
In a later installation piece - Un Matin du monde (2000) - the explicit references to the human body have disappeared, remaining now only as an implicit physical presence in the work. Recreating the rooftop of a traditional Chinese house, the installation gives you the illusion of standing on a rooftop in China, which has been peppered with the sounds of everyday life and the smell of spices and prepared duck that has been put out to dry. The viewer's physical presence 'activates' the work by introducing a human scale to the installation and by bringing the viewer's imaginary and sensory responses into play. Smell and sound are added here to the trilogy of senses (taste, sight, touch) invoked in Shen Yuan's earlier installations. This piece, perhaps more than any other, accentuates the sensuality of her works that stretch out to engage you physically with all your senses and emotions. It is difficult to be a remote spectator when your nose begins to pick up the scent of spices and your ears tune in to the hum of street noises as Shen Yuan's installation implicates you physically and emotionally, drawing you into the work not just visually but through smell, sound, taste and touch. Un Matin du monde mines the latent characteristics of her materials and at the same time stimulates our latent senses and emotions, transforming us in the process from spectators into participants. 'Art for me,' writes Shen Yuan, 'is a way of finding "reincarnation in another's corpse." To reveal the latent language of the material, to breathe life into inanimate things, make useless things useful and make useful things useless, that is what I wish to do.' [3]
It is this poetic and often disturbing transformation of objects from their literal meaning and function in the world into something different that lies at the heart of Shen Yuan's practice as an artist. In this respect, her work challenges the literal nature of some contemporary artworks where 'real' things are preserved or moulded and re-exhibited in the gallery space as figurative metaphors for the human condition. Perched on Shen Yuan's reconstructed rooftop, your view is restricted to what lies on the roof and above it. In visual terms, you have a bird's eye view restricted to the skyline without the benefit of seeing what lies beneath or around you. You are in a 'real space' but at the same time removed from reality. Un Matin du monde transposes you to a space of limitless imagination but also to the realm of flawed and incomplete memories.
The Dinosaur's Egg (2001) provides a different kind of bird's eye view. A map of China and its neighbouring countries covers the gallery floor. A large fibreglass egg has hatched and given birth to an army of fibreglass figures, caricatures of 'traditional' Chinese characters that are reminiscent of children's toys. Half a metre in height, over fifty of these fibreglass characters are dotted across the map to resemble a gigantic children's chess game. Like Diverged Tongue, this work is inspired by children's toys. The inflation of toys - as with Claes Oldenburg's giant sculptures of everyday objects (hamburgers, typewriters, ice cream cones and so on) - assigns them with a monumentalism and scale that seems inappropriate to their significance in the culture as a whole. But the resonance of children's toys for Shen Yuan lies in their function as a kind of creative unconscious of a culture. Toys and games are the fabrications of adults, the products of their unbridled imagination and hence a cipher of a society's imaginary. Shen Yuan cites the example of computer games as evidence of the creative space that toys and games provide for adults to indulge their imagination. Whether it is the struggle to overcome extra-planetary aliens in War of the Worlds or the attempt to master the imminent chaos of the urban environment in Sim City, computer games now occupy the same position as films (particularly films noirs and science fiction movies) of the 1950s and 1960s, providing, through the vehicle of entertainment, a mirror to society's fears and fantasies.
The Dinosaur's Egg figures are also translations or mistranslations of Chinese culture. They represent the failed attempt to translate another culture, giving birth to these bizarre, over-sized caricatures whose somewhat sinister presence populates the entire gallery space. The work speaks to the contradictions of globalisation where the movement of people, criss-crossing the world, has not been mirrored by a parallel movement of ideas. The speed and exchange of worldwide communication has not resulted in an equally fast exchange of cultural understanding. Shen Yuan's most witty and playful installation is also the most pessimistic appraisal of the failure of cross-cultural translation and more specifically, of one culture's failure to engage in any depth with cultures and ideas that are different from it. Over the past decade, we have seen the increasing 'globalisation' of the art world in parallel to many other sectors of the economy. And yet the more visible presence of artists from Africa, Asia, South America and the Caribbean on the international art world stage has not shifted the enduring hierarchies. Nor has it challenged the prevalence of cultural and racial stereotypes that insist on mediating 'difference' according to their own terms of cultural engagement. The new economy of 'multicultural managerialism', as Sarat Maharaj has characterised it, demands a fresh response that, like Shen Yuan's installations, is seductive and playful, but at the same time, armed with a razor-sharp critique of the dead-end that 'multicultural managerialism' encourages.
Shen Yuan's work always stops short of proffering any solutions or answers to these issues. The role of the artist, in her view, is to provoke questions, never to provide fixed answers. But, at the same time, her work poses one of the most troubling political questions of our time: how can the individual and the individual's viewpoint and experience inform the direction of society and social change when there are so many competing individual agendas and ideologies?
Are there too many people and are there too many inhabitants?
Or are there too many visitors?
Are there too many good-for-nothings and are there too many escaped criminals?
Or are there too many policemen?
Are there too many buildings and are the buildings of the poor too high?
Or are the buildings of the rich too widespreading?
Are there too many lowered prices and are there too many commodities?
Or are there too many merchants?
Are there too many intellectuals and are there too many students?
Or are there too many politicians?
Is there too much garbage and is there too much dog shit?
Or are there too many eggs?
So there is enough of everything?
No, there is too little money and too few good people. [4]
The text above was written to accompany Alley-Battle (1997) which is probably Shen Yuan's most explicitly political work. Commissioned from the artist as part of Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist's travelling exhibition Cities on the Move, the installation comprised archive film footage of street riots, filmed in different locations and various historical moments, which were projected on to a wall in the gallery space. In front of the projection, bicycles armed with projectile missiles and basketfuls of raw eggs invite the visitor to shift their position in the contemporary art museum from that of spectator to that of activist, even rioter.
The work comments on the volatility of the urban space which, in marked contrast to the quiet and stable environment of the museum, threatens to erupt at any moment 'like a volcano' as Shen Yuan puts it. The image of a volcano which lies dormant with nothing but the occasional rumble for many years, only to explode suddenly without warning, refers in Alley-Battle to the imminence of popular unrest, but also reflects a recurring theme in Shen Yuan's work. A state of impermanence or volatility is present in almost every work as if, inherent in the latent language of the materials she deploys, is the continual possibility of violent metamorphosis. Thus ice tongues transform themselves into sharpened kitchen knives; a giant toy whistle explodes into an all-consuming presence; a fibreglass egg hatches into an army of sinister toy characters; a precarious bridge is stretched across two sides of a riverbank. In the context of growing disenchantment with the democratic process across Europe, the rise of right-wing groups and interests and the deployment of 'active resistance' on the streets of Seattle and London against the unchecked growth of global capital, Alley-Battle is a poignant reminder of the latent unrest that resides beneath the surface of what the economist J. K. Galbraith has called the 'culture of contentment'.
Demolishing the Bridge after Crossing the River (1997) was a site-specific project in Leerdam, The Netherlands, where the artist constructed a floating emerald green bridge out of hundreds of empty beer bottles between the banks of a river in Asperen. The piers of the bridge were made out of three recycling containers for glass, connected together with returnable bottles that were chained together. The work is concerned with the movement of people between two points but also with the movement (and hence the transformation) of materials: the cycling and recycling of materials from sand to glass to bottle - from material to product, from product to waste to product once again. Operating between the twin poles of 'optimism and pessimism', this piece at once celebrates the continuous cycle of making and remaking (a reference perhaps to the artistic process and the transformation of materials into artworks and back to their raw material state once again), but also carries inherently the threat of imminent collapse, of the chain breaking and the bottles collapsing into the river below.
Shen Yuan's artistic practice is perhaps best characterised as one that uses the gallery (and its exterior) as a performative space to which she brings materials and props in order to stage works that address the conditions of modernity in the twenty-first century. Invariably, the viewer is implicated in some way in this elaborate staging for which the individual and their negotiation of the world is key. Inherent to the materials she employs and the artworks she fabricates out of those materials are the transformation of images and objects; the limits of language and the translatability of cultures; the sense of possibility of connection with the rest of the world and, at the same time, the imminence of disconnection; and, above all, the continuous and cyclical movement and migration of things.
Notes
[1] Sarat Maharaj, 'Perfidious Fidelity: The Untranslatability of the Other' in Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism, edited by Jean Fisher, Kala Press/inIVA, London, 1994, pp. 28-30.
[2] Shen Yuan, unpublished writings about her work.
[3] Shen Yuan, unpublished writings about her work.
[4] Shen Yuan, unpublished writings about her work.