2000
AD and Rust Another 2000 Years 
From Zheng Guogu's slender body we can sense the agility and changeability
of the South (the fat one liter Coca Cola bottle after rusting for two
thousand years will surely become as lean as Zheng Guogu, a Diet Coke
bottle). We should keep in mind that before the year 2000 Zheng Guogu's
"genesis" ("Many, many years ago, our ancestor, Peking cave man lived
in Zhoukoudian, Dalin township......") relied on performance art. The
traces of explosions in Post
Fire Tail, the pits in Planting
Geese, the limestone and electric welding in Key
Development Project, have now vanished into thin air like
so many historical relics. Only a few photos remain as evidence that
his slender body once made such performances. Zheng Guogu now survives
in the photos. In case you don't know these pre 94 relics, we should
start by looking at is current photographs and those recording his former
performances.
Once, in The Sunflower Treasure Song, First
Cooked Pot we revealed the secret of photography: Photos
are convenient to carry around, to mail, to exhibit and to collect.
It is an easy medium to get into and can be abandoned whenever. Photos
also make it easy for one to grasp and understand life. The creative
result emerges distinctly on the photographs that hold between 400 and
2000 contact prints (Did he make 2000 because it was the year 2000?).
Their capacity of life is frightening (even the dramatic paper cannot
contain it). Chance collects thousands of objects together like a dictionary.
135 clicks, such immediacy is unbeatable.
The
"anti-essentialism" tendency running through Zheng Guogu's works
is expressed through the action of frying model tanks (a
work from 1998). The seductiveness of the fried effect is no less than
that of Kentucky Fried Chicken drumsticks, these are succulent contemporary
cultural objects. Another work with historical significance that needs
time to come to completion is the steel Coca Cola bottle that will only
turn into powder in thousands of years - and then again from powder
to dust! Behind this work emerge the slogans "anti-easy-to-carry-about,
anti-fictitious, anti-pop, anti-gaudy, anti-advertising, anti-popi*",
and in the end there is a risky "anti-essentialism" slogan: do you see
the risk I take? I hope everybody takes risks.
The
"ritual" atmosphere in Zheng Guogu's early works (the stone slabs in
Post Fire Tail, and the ground marks in
Planting Geese) reappears with a new dramatic form in To
Rust for 2000 Years: since the whole
art world is so crazy, then come, let's play to our hearts' content,
exceeding the bounds of life.
Similarly, in the "activities near my home", which I discussed in an
early article, an even more distinctive view gradually emerged: a coastal
island, a youth violence center, or one could say a fringe of land engulfed
by a whirlpool of violence, still having merriment and terror, employment
and resistance, the joyful and trivial decorative thinking of the home.
There is a game here as well as a true smile - the older one grows,
the truer the smile. (1999)
The
following are six episodes of Zheng Guogu's years:
In Zheng Guogu's early work Post Fire Tail,
the "explosion" was simultaneous on five monumental ceramic slabs on
the ground and on the walls, and because the stone stele were also arranged
in sequence, the spectacle gave the audience a "ritual" atmosphere.
In my opinion, Zheng Guogu's explosions and the death of the figures
in the video games are one and the same thing. Planting
Geese, from early 1994 is one of his most interesting works.
In one of the flat construction sites in Yangjiang, Zheng and his friends
(who were later to appear in The Strange Life
of Youth in Yangjiang) dug thirty pits in which they proceeded
to "plant" live geese. They left only their heads uncovered, and these
they dyed with ink. The geese were released at five o'clock in the afternoon,
and the whole event was doubly joyful - such acts are really good for
a sound mind and body.
(Activities Near My Home 1995)
In
May 1994 Zheng Guogu followed a local Yangjiang lunatic, taking photographs
recording his actions as he went along. This 
material
would later become the main part of the work My
Teacher. His daily life was brought into the category of
"art" without our really noticing this boundary. Zheng Guogu's photographs
of himself in front of multiple copies of his "teacher" form an overlapping
image of the two actors, (his face is blurred as his camera allows him
twenty seconds of movement) but in the end there is only one photograph,
one result.
In
October that year, Zheng Guogu made a performance in Guangzhou called
Key Development Project. The result
was not attractive. The whole ground was littered with waste material,
like something of a ruin. We called it a geographical discovery. Despite
the disgusting environment, the snowed over land and miniature mountains
(plaster mixed with tea water), the dried corpses of wild animals, the
destination-less navigation lines (chaotically flying smoke balls),
the rivers of larva from the volcanoes (paint dripping from metal plates)
and so on, still gave people a fairytale illusion, like BASAINA's version
of "Snow White".
Time after time, the body has been damaged but the energy is exuberant.
(Activities Near My Home 1995)
Beginning in 1995 Zheng Guogu used every opportunity to photograph the
people and scenery around him:...most of the images frozen in these
pictures have what is known in literature as an "effect of alienation":
You live all your life in a familiar environment, and suddenly you get
new glimpses of this life, and these are all the more surprising because
they are photographs, then you discover there is a calm narrator pointing
everything out to you.
Honeymoon involved a long process.
In this work Zheng Guogu strengthened this new art definition of "scenes
of life", taking "scenes of life" as the material of his work. A series
of photographs faithfully recorded Zheng Guogu's and Lola's honeymoon
in Guangzhou, while at the same time he laid out an installation in
an exhibition hall in Guangzhou.: an idealized "newly-wed couple" stroll
happily on a floor covered with lucky stars and colored balls, and they
really seem to be the embodiment of the "Zheng Guogu couple". So the
artwork Honeymoon consisted of the
two parts held simultaneously, the installation in the exhibition hall
and the life episode of the "Zheng Guogu couple" honeymoon in Guangzhou.
Zheng Guogu likes to use visible materials of life in an undisciplined,
consuming way, to the extent that one critic pointed out that these
works lack "artwork quality"; even if the work's appearance is abrupt
it will always (whether consciously or not) produce a certain coincidence
with incidents in private life. The most important thing is the works
are not dull but lively and interesting. Perhaps his works are made
for our generation, born in the seventies, that neither indulges in
sensual pleasures and has no strong ideal bride - maybe we are sentimental,
but we hold no high hopes for the wedding night. With a few photographs,
he outlined all the seduction, vacuity and pallor of the "ideal bride".
Already with Duchamp, the innards of the bride were transformed into
a fascinating mechanical relation. Zheng Guogu clothed his "ideal bride"
in a splendid, gaudy new dress - in line with popular aesthetics and
social morality, while he unhesitatingly dressed up in formal black
tails......
(The Ideal Bride of a Young Man
(1995) and Zheng Guogu:
So what's the secret of Zheng Guogu's recent works? Their only connection
with photography is that a camera was used; What else are they if one
forgets the machine he was holding? They are certainly not a primitive
record of life - the figure actions and scenes they contained were fabricated
by Guogu, but there are also some elements which have been directly
captured from daily life, so are they "photo-dramas" or......"photo-narratives"?
All in all they're rather original artwork.
In
Yanjiang, Guangdong, I met those people in the photos, Guogu's friends,
the loose girls, the knife-wielding, gun-toting "louts" and the menaced
adulterers. They quickly became my friends. They don't dress like in
the photographs, you could say there's a difference between what they
are and what they appear to be (in the photographs), but it is not a
complete distortion. Although the photo-images are Guogu fabrications,
the longer I stayed, the more I felt they were entirely likely to live
that kind of life. Such lifestyle and self images are really fun, and
suit (Yanjiang, Guangdong) south coast city youths' desire for a reckless
life. Its worth experiencing.
Guogu is not at all interested in the social essence of youth culture.
What he cares about is the medium-created presentation of life. It's
a problem of art creation. They are not really living, they exist in
the camera (or other media), then in an instance they have disappeared.
Just like a villain who has been killed off may reappear in a sequel
(albeit with a different name and identity), growing to adulthood (artists
included) is a reoccurring problem for each generation. We're not sure
whether we should first discuss life or art. Ultimately the life and
fantasies of the Southern youths remain the biggest secret.
(Secrets
of Youth Life 1998)
Guogu now makes TV programs as well as artworks. My
Teacher from 1994, inaugurated his "documentary" period.
In 1995 Guogu completed his "ideal bride" in a most interesting way,
using a few "photo-studio backgrounds" After "The Honeymoon" a dramatic
change occurred in the subject and themes of Guogu's photography, and
what appears before us is a stage-costumed, more dazzling "reality".
The figurants are all his young Yanjiang friends and relatives, the
scenes are his own "elaborate" fabrications, and they have the narrative
character of short stories. In The Diversification
of Merchandise this beautified stage of social interpersonal
interaction has been replaced by a more terse and exquisite spectacle
of objects. Together, these articles form the familiar "material foundation"
of our social relations, and are always connected to power and good
looks. This was Zheng Guogu's "photo-paper drama" period.
Ten Thousand Customers is a most
notable work and its richest dramatic quality is its "duality": aesthetics
and commerce: it
both wants to break a minority of collectors' monopoly of art while
hoping that buying art works may become
a means of social
interaction.
Zheng Guogu is beginning to seek a way of working that can resolve this
contradiction. From The Medium is the
Model to
A World View - Digital Images, through the process of altering
and rearranging the photo-material on the TV screen to make paper works,
Zheng Guogu unconsciously established his own channel of communication.
In the ensuing Tokyo Sky Story
we saw a "sky theatre" where he let some puppets flutter about the Tokyo
skies...... the difference is he is now increasingly aware of the artificial
character of the photography and produces all his photos in an elaborate
way, just like consumer products.
This
is an era of abundant and transient photography, so in a peripheral
Chinese town, Zheng Guogu is able to make a global broadcasting Zheng
Guogu channel. Like other brilliant images, they are both exciting and
disappointing; the difference is that they are made by Zheng Guogu.
(Zheng Guogu Channel. Made by Zheng Guogu
1998)
Note:
* For an explanation of Popi see Li Xianting "The 'Shaved Head Popi'
Created by Fang Lijun" in Fang Lijun, SMA Cahiers
13, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 1998.
by
Hu Fung
contradictory home province, Guangdong, where the glittering proximity
of Hong Kong constantly beckons.
" Planting Geese"- in which geese
where planted like carrots, their heads dyed with ink and then later
released- "Post Fire
Tails" and "Key
Development Project". "Planting
Geese" celebrated experiencing the given, being part
of the world and experimenting with limitations, portraying them in
a new or different light. Hu Fang, a writer and friend to Guogu, interpreted
the artist's performance as having ritual character. His performances,
set in natural environments, using basic elements such as soil and animal
life, celebrating the creation of possible life structures, compels
the audience to think of ritual ceremony in archaic societies.
commercial products he intends to appeal to a wider audience.
