[First published in Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab, Skira Rizzoli, Milan, March 2012.]
Wormholes, Shipwrecks and Hybrids
As the audience gathered in the desert in preparation for Black Ceremony last December, I stood at the back of the crowd to watch the work and gauge reactions. Mobile phones were held aloft and the suspense mounted during the triple countdown to each effect in rapid, overlapping Chinese, English and Arabic. The audience’s responses to each explosion were palpable, from their wonder at the somber power of the black pyramid to their shock at the visceral heat of the fireball. At the sight of the rainbow they let out a collective gasp of joy. I looked around at the dusty expanse of Doha filled with onlookers from all over the world, awed and unsettled by what they had seen in those fleeting moments, and I reflected on the process of making Saraab. It struck me that Cai Guo-Qiang evokes wonder so well in others because of his own endless capacity for it – his ability to find delight in the unfamiliar and to take vast leaps of the imagination.
Cai’s impressions of the Doha skyline, a crop of glass towers glinting in the sunlight, inspired the name of this exhibition: the city seemed to him like a mirage rising between the desert and the sea. A common trope when describing the Gulf, the image of the mirage captures a sense of both wonder and of the surreal. A natural mirage occurs when light refracts due to differences in air temperature, creating a hazy reflection of an existing location. In Saraab, traces of locations are refracted through the lens of Cai’s imagination.
Cai often describes his work in terms of a “time-space tunnel,” and in this exhibition, the points of origin come from fragments of Cai’s personal experience, including romantic tales of Silk Road shipwrecks, childhood adventures among tombstones, and his recent discovery of Qatar’s petroglyphs. He conflates temporal and geographical elements in his new artworks for Saraab, creating a channel between his hometown of Quanzhou and Doha, highlighting processes of memory and dislocation, and inviting viewers to consider new perspectives on cultural connections between China and Qatar. While the optical illusion of a mirage calls an onlooker to question the reality of what is seen, Saraab encourages the viewer to explore how meaning is created.
The hyperreal visual imagery connecting these disparate elements has a dream-like, unsettling quality – historic relics are reanimated and iconic, traditional Chinese materials are juxtaposed with visual symbols from the Gulf that contain a similar semiotic power. The relationship Cai evokes appears to be pre-existing, as there is evidence in the artwork of a dynamic of exchange between China and the Arab world that began a thousand years ago; at the same time these cross-cultural connections are being conjured in the moment. Cai challenges us to examine the connections he makes in the process of creating the artworks, opening up a host of questions about the nature of the relationship over time, and about the value of initiating cross-cultural dialogue.
The artist’s relationship to the past as a non-linear, “constructed imaginary”[i] is very similar to the ways in which China and Qatar are currently re-imagining themselves and reconstructing their legacies at an incredible pace. Both countries are in the middle of an extended construction boom, their urban landscapes characterized by cranes, scaffolding and rubble, as well as people from countless places. It is not difficult to imagine that these cities, like the Saraab exhibition, contain several wormholes – systems of instantaneous connectivity between different worldviews, multiple locations and multiple points in time.[ii] Both artist and nations are participating in processes that unsettle and implode boundaries between the real and the imaginary, the familiar and the strange, here and there, and – of course – the past, present and future.
One of Mathaf’s goals is to shine a light on under-explored historical and geographical relationships, and Saraab encourages reflection on how a new museum in Qatar anchors the art that we exhibit in relation to the passage of time. Our location in Doha challenges us to consider the complex, ongoing process of modernization in relation to how artists experience and understand modernity and, by extension, modernism and its offshoots. Our interest in developments in art over time also involves paying attention to how cultural immersion might affect art historians’ perceptions. Thus, what we at Mathaf might consider a vital distinction between “Arab” and “Muslim” is not necessarily apparent elsewhere in the world. In the Arab world (especially the Gulf), as in China and many other parts of the globe, historical processes have not unfolded as neatly as in the West. Neither are recent processes of cultural production as easily accommodated by existing histories, since, outside of a Euro-American framework, it is often the case that elements of “the premodern, the modern and the postmodern coexist in the same space at the same moment.”[iii] Across Asia, as a result of unique historical, social and economic forces, each country, each city, contains its own palimpsest of unexpected cultural hybrids, relics and elements of pastiche.
Saraab is an opportunity for Mathaf not just to reflect on the instant connectivity Cai creates between the ancient past and the present moment, but also to consider the overall nature of the cross-cultural dialogue that the exhibition proposes. As I discussed this exhibition with both the artist and the curator, I found myself drawn to the gaps in the story that the exhibition tells, as well as to the connections that it asserts, and was compelled to consider the origins of those connections and the conceptual interstices between the locations and moments represented in the show.
While the exhibition title is inspired by an ephemeral phenomenon, Cai’s starting points for several of the new artworks are solid historical objects often imbued with memories and emotions, each like a vessel containing many fragments of narrative. The material history that Cai references – for example, trade dynamics between China and the Arab world – is quite real, as evidenced by the recovered shipwrecks sunk not only off the coast of Quanzhou as Cai notes in his statement, but throughout the maritime route. Until very recently there was little evidence of the scale and sophistication of the trade. Today historians know that the boats heading west even during the Tang Dynasty in the ninth century CE contained a variety of porcelain products intended for export to different cities. This is evidence not simply of a romantic ideal of exchange, but of complex cross-cultural market systems developed over many years. For example, the process used to create the classic Chinese blue and white designs required the use of cobalt from Persia.
I learned this from Jackie Armijo, an American professor of International Affairs at Qatar University, who specializes in the history of Islamic China and in the contemporary relationship between China and the Gulf.[iv] Armijo volunteered during the Gunpowder Drawing Project and, in a stroke of pure serendipity, helped to create Imitation of a Nautical Chart, an artwork inspired by the navigational maps used by Chinese sailors that she studied for her dissertation. According to Armijo, trade between China and the Gulf began before Islam during the Roman period, when sailors learned the trick of using the monsoon winds to get first from the Gulf to India, then to Southeast Asia and on to China.[v]
The routes flourished for several centuries, but by the mid-fourteenth century CE, after the Black Death decimated populations across the known world, the Ming dynasty moved their attention northward to focus on major construction projects including the extension of the Great Wall of China, and Chinese sea trade with the Gulf declined, creating opportunities for the Dutch, French and British to move into the economic vacuum (although most likely Indians would have been most active on the Gulf trade route). The two distant regions of Asia separately negotiated their own relationships to the global changes in world systems with the rise of Europe, and had little contact for a few hundred years. Modern relations between China and the Arab world resumed in earnest only after the Bandung Conference of 1955, as China’s foreign policy took shape around a sense of nationalism and Chinese opposition to Cold War superpower hegemony.
It is not surprising that in relation to cross-cultural connections, the past seems foreign and opaque. Many of the ‘real’ historical foundations of Saraab are unstable, and few aspects of the relationships on which Cai draws for these works have been extensively historicized. The origin and dates of the petroglyphs north of Doha at Al-Jassasiya, which inspired Cai to create Homecoming, remain a mystery to archeologists in Qatar. Despite their importance in terms of understanding Islamic China, the tombs in Quanzhou cannot be verified as definitively those of the Third and Fourth Sages, and in the Muslim cemetery that also inspired Homecoming, many of the other tombstone inscriptions remain indecipherable. A vital touchstone of this exhibition, Islamic China in general is a vastly under-researched field, despite the fact that the current Chinese population includes twenty million Muslims, with a presence in every city. The maritime Silk Road, despite its equal significance, is far less studied than the overland route, whose images of laden camels journeying over Central Asian mountains are part of the global imagination. As a whole, the historical (and therefore also art-historical) relationships between the Arab world and China, especially in the last half of the previous millennium, are far from widely understood.
As I sat with Cai in his New York studio, talking about how the Chinese and the Arabs see each other, and reflecting on how few academics are engaging with these questions, I became aware of a general problem of asymmetric knowledge: both regions are far more conscious of their more recent respective, often problematic, historical relationships with Europe than of relations with each other. Despite some scholarly interest in the Arab world in China, surprisingly few Arab scholars work on either the historical or contemporary dynamics between the two regions. The dearth of information is instructive in itself, and reveals a constant, silent referent. Impressions and identities on both sides of Asia have been refracted as a result of a Eurocentric vision of history and centuries of Orientalist discourse, and today each location considers itself in relation to blocs or spheres of influence (“East Asia” or “the Middle East”) created by the geopolitics of the Cold War.[vi]
As an ethnically Chinese, transnational artist based in the United States whose career took off during his time in Japan, Cai has consciously engaged with and disrupted traditional East-West dynamics and cultural politics and had plenty of opportunities to consider his position as an outsider in a variety of contexts. It is perhaps his experiences in this vein that sparked his imaginative connection to the Muslim community in his hometown of Quanzhou. Diaspora often involves becoming a stranger to one’s own land, and, on a collective level, often to the past as well. Engaging with a minority history within his country of origin as well as with the symbols of an region of the world unfamiliar to him, Cai creates a complex field of positions and identities, allowing his artwork to accrue new layers of meaning.
Armijo found it extraordinary that Cai had chosen to document and reflect upon the Arabic inscriptions on the tombstones he saw as a child, because of what she described as a general dismissive attitude throughout the history of China towards foreigners, particularly Muslims,. She cited a common distinction made between shu or ‘cooked’ barbarians (more Chinese) and ‘raw’, or sheng (less Chinese—more backward).[vii] “The minorities who spoke Chinese, wore Chinese clothes and adopted Chinese customs were considered ‘cooked’, and they were accorded a certain degree of respect,” she said. “The minority peoples who refused to have any contact with the dominant culture were generally seen as ‘raw’ barbarians.”
Early Muslim traders who chose to settle in Chinese cities such as Xi’an were treated as foreigners and were expected to stay in their separate quarters. During the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368 CE) the numbers of Muslims increased, as the Mongol rulers recruited hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Muslims from the Middle East and Central Asia, in part to help them build and govern China. Craftsmen but also astronomers, doctors, and mathematicians were brought in to help build the empire, and Muslim architects were largely responsible for the design of Beijing. Many officials were then sent to different regions of China, and today their distant descendants preserve Islam in their families and communities. By the end of the Mongol period in the late fourteenth century CE, there were Muslim communities scattered all over China, and they existed in isolation from the Arab world for several hundred years, developing their own history, with traditions such as Arabic calligraphy evolving in slightly different ways.[viii]
By engaging with the idea of Muslims as both present and yet invisible, hybrid and yet still alien, and by making so many new imaginative connections in Saraab, Cai brings to light overlooked aspects of social history across Asia; but also, by dredging up these metaphorical shipwrecks, Cai’s work points to several fragmented systems of knowledge, and therefore also huge gaps in global art history. On both counts, the ruptures often seem to lead to a double process of ‘othering’, but this is not easily apparent unless all relevant discursive contexts are fully understood.
Introductory textbooks of art history in the West often describe a linear progression of art through time, with chapters on Islamic or Chinese Art presented chronologically before the Renaissance as a pre-modern phenomenon, and with no widespread geographical representation after this point. The question of whether art from China or the Arab world could actually be contemporary has been largely answered affirmatively in the last two decades thanks to global politics and the resulting transnational movements of artists, increased market interest and a great deal of international curatorial endeavor, but there is still little consensus about or widespread knowledge of the relationship of these parts of the world to modernity and modernism.
Political and social turbulence of the twentieth century (for example the Cultural Revolution in China, and wars and upheavals across the Arab world) have resulted in fragmented perspectives on artistic development. Despite their lack of overlap with one another for the most part, and their different patterns of historical, social and political ruptures, the art historical trajectories in both Asian regions are somewhat similar in terms of their relationship to the Western art historical ‘center’. Today, there are practically no curators or scholars who are well-versed in the modern history art of both West and East Asia, and while this is bound to change quite soon, they are largely still considered separate blocs. While both regions are understandably proud of their current participation in the international language, practice and display of contemporary art, much work still needs to be done on what came before.
Perhaps with the contemporary revitalization of trade relationships between China and Gulf, there is greater potential for investment in remembering the cross-cultural history and piecing together different kinds of narratives. Cai’s powerful re-imagining of possible and latent connections between geographies and cultures with Saraab is beautiful and compelling, and yet also unnerving. This exhibition reminds us not only of the mirage-like effects of exploring connections between identity and history, but also of the challenges of living with many temporalities layered upon each other, and of how to address different kinds of ruptures.
Certainly, societies undergoing rapid economic development develop a particular kind of conscious relationship to history, as structural elements of globalization are reconfigured into local contexts and elements of the past are erased, reworked and resituated. Despite strengthening economic relations between China and the Arab world (in particular the Gulf) in the past few years, there is as yet little contemporary cultural crossover, nor yet much critical reflection on the historical gaps in the dynamic between the two parts of Asia or on the role played by the refractive lens of the West. Perhaps one of Saraab’s most significant consequences is that it unsettles our assumptions at the same time that it provokes wonder. Cai creates the opportunity to raise countless questions about cross-cultural dialogue: what remains unknown about the past, what there is to learn in the present, and how we might (re)imagine the future.
“As a historian, you’re trying to capture the essence, and that’s exactly what Cai does," Armijo told me, as she surveyed the fresh gunpowder drawing that she had helped to create. “I have always thought that history is malleable, and that’s not a controversial thing. It is never about what really happened, but about what people imagined happened, and isn’t that more interesting anyway?”
[i] Alexandra Munroe, “Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe,” in Cai Guo-Giang: I Want to Believe, ed. Thomas Krens and Alexandra Munroe (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2008), 34.
[ii] The Qatari-American artist and writer Sophia Al-Maria was the first person to point out to me to the notion of Doha as a wormhole.
[iii] Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, “Global Postmodernization: The Intellectual, the Artist, and China’s Condition,” Boundary 2 24:3 (1997), 66.
[iv] Jacqueline Armijo in discussion with the author during the Gunpowder Drawing Project for Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab at Al Riwaq, Doha, Qatar, October 2011.
[v] Armijo in discussion with author, October 2011.
[vi] Ranjit Hoskote, “Retrieving the Far West: Towards a Curatorial Representation of the House of Islam” in Re-imagining Asia: A Thousand Years of Separation, ed. Shaheen Merali (London: Saqi Books, 2008), 114.
[vii] Magnus Fiskesjö, “On the 'Raw' and the 'Cooked' Barbarians of Imperial China,” Inner Asia 1:2 (1999), 139-168.
[viii] See also Jacqueline Armijo, “Islam in China” in Asian Islam in the 21st Century, ed. John Voll and John Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 197-205.