i just finished looking over this interview. i thought parts might be relevant. (please don’t share with other just yet.)
especially, we seemed to have talked about these 3 paragraphs. the whole piece in below.
the picture is of making cheese… separating the curds and the whey (solids and liquid).
But also DICA isn’t a sort of “anti-gallery” thing. It has this opposition to galleries and the commercial world but it’s not denouncing them, it’s just another way of doing things.
ES: Is this necessary, or needed at this point, this kind of alternative. Do you feel there’s too much emphasis on galleries and the commercial side of things? Do you feel DICA is relevant, for this place, for this time, for this situation?
MY: On one side, any artist, art project, curator, etc. can get carried away and say this project is so necessary. But I’d have to say there are many more atrocities to be in the world dealt with before the atrocities of the Beijing art world, you know? So, on one side I would very much say, it’s an art project – not a necessity. That’s one of the beautiful things about art – that it’s not a necessity.
But on the other side, what I was definitely faced with, and DICA was generally faced with, was the question of “why make art in Beijing?” And that question really originated from the time when I first landed in Beijing before the Olympics (in April/May 2008). The activity here was really hyper and a Biennial worth of projects would open every couple of weeks. It’s quietened down now but there’s still a legacy of that, there’s still a lot of projects going on. To add to that activity, you have to be really sure you want to do something. There’s so much background noise, it’s so loud that not much gets heard over the top of it. So, you’ve got to be really sure about the reasons why you want to do it, but also the reasons why it might have some benefit, for the wider audience and yourself. We’re outside of the standard structure here and therefore it gives us a chance to think about DICA, to think about the structure itself and where the structure could break down. I’m talking about the gallery, the art mechanisms here, where it breaks down, or where it succeeds and where it doesn’t succeed, and what can be made better out of it, or what needs to be kept the same? As always it’s an intervention. Here partly into art’s mechanics.
The Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art
Interview with artist Michael Yuen
The Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art (DICA) is the creation of artists Michael Yuen (Australia) and Yam Lau (Canada). DICA uses a donkey as a site for contemporary art. A donkey is a normal means of dissemination in China, so DICA co-opts this animal to take art out from the art areas and into the normal life of the city.
Its first appearance was in a small street market in Beijing close to the 798 Art District.
I met up with Michael just after the second showing in a café in 798 where we discussed the format, aims and results of DICA.
Edward Sanderson: OK, let’s start with the history of DICA and it’s format?
Michael Yuen: DICA started last year with my friend Yam Lau, we were both talking about our practices, and what we’ve done outside, and specifically outside of the gallery and the gallery system. I’d seen a donkey across the road from 798 and we were talking about that and thought “this could be interesting – we could make some kind of art space out of this, right? Out of the donkey?” I guess at the time we were talking about how we were in the city, in Beijing where the point where the rural stops and the city begins is so vague and overlapping. Symptoms of this are that the donkeys and their farmers are coming going around town, migrant workers are continuously arriving and leaving, that taxi drivers that are living on the city’s edge and driving in the city, sleeping in one and working in another, and moving through both. And the donkey for us was a very visible part of that. I like to say that DICA is an off space on the back of a donkey that travels the streets of Beijing.
ES: A symptom?
MY: Yes, a symptom. Then it was at least a year, or six months after that, when we finally met up again in Beijing, this Summer [2009], before we started thinking this is actually do-able and we wanted to do it, after not thinking about it for six or nine months.
ES: Had you worked with Yam before?
MY: We first met when we did a show together, at YuanFen Gallery (gallery in 798, focusing on New Media art).
ES: And, the exhibition, technical setup?
The setup for the first video project included two LCD screens, and we commissioned a saddle-maker in Beijing who makes a really beautiful saddles really delicate, hand-made things, with multiple layers of leather. He made a pair of plain saddles to carry the screens. For the audio we have Laoban speaker system made by another artist, which are placed on the cart. The screens just run on very simple chips, and we can put a USB card in or a SD card that can run very high quality video. Super simple!
ES: Improvements?
Technically I think we’re there. The lesson that we’ve learned, especially from the last DICA inside 798, is to keep it as simple as possible. But the screens are very flexible in what we use them for, there’s quite a lot we can do with them. They are just screens one can buy from the market here, but they turned out to be perfect. We might consider an upgrade to a larger screen at some stage! And Laoban have said that they’re interested in doing their really gigantic speakers for us – that might be a little scary for the donkey but we’ll look into it! Technically, for the video project it’s sort of down pat. Though future projects will not all be video so we’ll have to reconsider the whole technical side anew.
ES: In terms of your work, why did this appeal to you? How did it fit in with what you had been doing already?
MY: I’m interested in the city in general and I’ve never really been interested in showing work in galleries. So it follows that I should be attracted to an outside, mobile space, outside of the gallery, outside of those walls. I don’t think it has so much of a big connection with my work beyond that, and that’s one of the things I like about it: it’s a project that I’m fully involved with without having to link it with my practice so deeply. I can use it as a platform to play with other artists that I like.
ES: So you’re not adopting it as a piece of your own work, you’re curating a situation?
MY: Yam very much feels like it’s a piece of work. And we’re artists, so whatever we do is part of our practice, it always will be. But for me, I take a little bit a step backward. Previous curating I’d done had very much been out of my own artwork, but now I can step back and say “I can divorce these two things, my practice and works that I like to show, and allow the artists that are showing room to breathe without taking their work on too much myself. Of course, this is the sort of discussion that Yam and I have all the time.
ES: Who are the artists that you are working with on DICA? Are they are all people that you know in Beijing, and what are they showing?
MY: The first show is a video show and we present video from six artists and one architect. We have Neville Mars, Shen Yi, Ma Yongfeng, Yam Lau, Jean-François Côté, Li Zenghui, and Chen Xinpeng. Basically these are all friends. The first show was a friends’ project and they are all people that I wanted to work with in Beijing.
I wasn’t too keen on really curating “hard” the first show. But, in future shows we really want to work with certain artists that we have in mind and part of the curatorial structure always about because of timeliness, about the way that we come together, and I guess for the first show we wanted to keep it as loose as possible. So at one stage we proposed a bunch of names, of artists that we wanted to work with, and then allowed it to be fairly open. And we actually said at one point, these artists “…and others,” so we could be really free to move and include who we wanted at any point. But I was pretty keen on it not just being artists—and definitely not just video artists. So we invite people from other fields and will continue to do so. But for the first show but the final works were on video.
ES: This allowed you to bring in other artists who weren’t necessarily known as video artists?
MY: Like Shen Yi: her contribution to DICA is an amazing video which is a sort of collage in time of different stills, of her own still photos. And then on the other side we got to work with Neville Mars, who’s an architect in Beijing. He uses video, among other things, as research. He had bits of video that he was interested in showing, so we could include that. His work was actually from a camera suspended from a balloon, floating up into the sky, looking back onto the place from which it had come from.
ES: So why is it important for you to get out of the gallery then? And how did the donkey fulfil that?
MY: For one thing my work has always been outside of the gallery. My training was as a composer, so the idea of being in a gallery has never been natural to me. Maybe the musical equivalent of the gallery is the ensemble, the concert hall with an orchestra, and again I was never specifically interested in that when I was training to be a composer. I was interested in installation, and outside the space, and public space. So it’s sort of unnatural for me to be in a gallery show. In the same way it is unnatural for me to be in a painting studio or a sculpture studio or a jewellery studio; it feels a bit odd. Interesting, but odd. So it’s not what comes naturally to me and what does come naturally is to be outside.
And on another side, but related, it means that you’re much more connected to life that way. You have people interacting with the work, which don’t particularly come with preconceptions or their;preconceptions are much more varied than the ones of those going to see works in museums or gallery spaces. And that leads to a different way of—well it leads to the creation of different works.
But also DICA isn’t a sort of “anti-gallery” thing. It has this opposition to galleries and the commercial world but it’s not denouncing them, it’s just another way of doing things.
ES: Is this necessary, or needed at this point, this kind of alternative. Do you feel there’s too much emphasis on galleries and the commercial side of things? Do you feel DICA is relevant, for this place, for this time, for this situation?
MY: On one side, any artist, art project, curator, etc. can get carried away and say this project is so necessary. But I’d have to say there are many more atrocities to be in the world dealt with before the atrocities of the Beijing art world, you know? So, on one side I would very much say, it’s an art project – not a necessity. That’s one of the beautiful things about art – that it’s not a necessity.
But on the other side, what I was definitely faced with, and DICA was generally faced with, was the question of “why make art in Beijing?” And that question really originated from the time when I first landed in Beijing before the Olympics (in April/May 2008). The activity here was really hyper and a Biennial worth of projects would open every couple of weeks. It’s quietened down now but there’s still a legacy of that, there’s still a lot of projects going on. To add to that activity, you have to be really sure you want to do something. There’s so much background noise, it’s so loud that not much gets heard over the top of it. So, you’ve got to be really sure about the reasons why you want to do it, but also the reasons why it might have some benefit, for the wider audience and yourself. We’re outside of the standard structure here and therefore it gives us a chance to think about DICA, to think about the structure itself and where the structure could break down. I’m talking about the gallery, the art mechanisms here, where it breaks down, or where it succeeds and where it doesn’t succeed, and what can be made better out of it, or what needs to be kept the same? As always it’s an intervention. Here partly into art’s mechanics.
ES: Given that the first instance of DICA took place just across the road from the 798 Art District [Editor’s note: generally considered the hub of the commercial gallery world in Beijing], it seems to be making a very precise statement by putting it just outside of 798: although it is still very much in a local (non-art) area, it is also very close to 798, and there’s obviously some opposition going on there. We’re this close to 798 but we don’t want to be in 798.
Also the relationship with the way it worked within the 798 Biennial (which took place within 798). The organisers invited you to bring DICA to the Biennial, but in the end you got thrown out by the security for the area (for reasons which weren’t made clear). So it’s not just your original idea of distancing yourself from 798, there’s obviously an antagonism going on there where you try to bring the two together, and they don’t fit well at all. Maybe that’s the point of DICA? It’s not for the gallery system, not for the gallery space. It antagonised, in it’s way, by what it is without doing anything apart from being there. Like two magnets, there’s a repulsion going on.
MY: In the end that spot for the first appearance of DICA was a practical decision – practical and slightly sentimental!
We had originally wanted to take the donkey and DICA to different parts of Beijing, including Baiziwanlu [Editor’s note: Baiziwanlu is very close to Beijing’s Central Business District (CBD) and the location of a small art community, including the Today Art Museum], the CBD/Guomao area itself and then off inside the second ring road, which is in many respects the heart of Beijing. In there, there are some hutongs (the old-style courtyard residencies in tiny back-streets) in which it would have been nice to move around in. Down near Guomao against the backdrop of these fancy, beautiful new buildings—like Koolhaas’ underpants and the burnt OMA building—, I can just picture the donkey, with its cart and videos!
We also wanted to take it to Sanlitun, the chic place for foreigners [Editor’s note: the most popular area for ex-pats in Beijing]. Sanlitun is interesting because it’s almost a Shanghai or a Hong Kong transplant into Beijing. It’s become a hub for some kind of new activity which never really existed before in Beijing. There is this new development, Sanlitun Village, where there is a big screen—this type, ginormous urban screens where they show urban video art and that would have been a great contrast to the little LCD screens on our donkey.
In the end our first donkey got arrested when we were scouting locations and therefore we had to tread a little bit more lightly. So near 798 was outside the area where donkeys were prohibited and it was close to where our second donkey worked, so in the end it was quite a practical decision, as I said. And sentimental, because in that location the year before was the first time in Beijing I’d seen a donkey and it was in this place.
ES: I remember the year before when you first mentioned this, or some kind of project with a donkey, you were talking about a market place. So this was it?
MY: I’d also seen them down a little alleyway, really close to my house inside the second ring road. I mean really inside Beijing where they’re actually not allowed. I recently found a photo that I took on the fourth ring road, which says “No donkeys allowed,” so I was able to find that line of demarcation!
Another reason I liked that space, was that it is very close to 798 and the galleries, but also so removed. It’s metres away, but another world. On the day of the first event we had a nice trickle of the Beijing art world coming popping across the road, but overwhelmingly the viewers were locals coming home from work, and they really stayed and watched.
ES: Amongst the locals, there was this combination of them not being quite sure what was going on in the videos but also the art people were an attraction in themselves. So there was this combination of them being interested in the videos, the fact that the videos were on a donkey, and also this strange group of people who weren’t normally there.
MY: And then when we showed DICA as part of the 798 Biennial it was just the opposite reaction. In the end 798 is not our primary reason for existence or primary objective, we want to be out on the street. We appreciated being invited by the Biennial and that’s why we did it, but the next project will be back out on the streets. People inside 798 for the Biennial would just come and get their pictures taken with the donkey.
ES: In a way you chose the donkey because outside of 798 it’s a normal feature of everyday life (although you don’t normally get videos on a donkey). But when you take it into 798 it becomes a big tourist attraction.
MY: It becomes a thing you can write off as just another “artists’ fanciful thing” because its so far removed from the what passes for ordinary. I mean DICA isn’t that much of a change from a normal donkey – making a small change that might have larger repercussions is a thread that runs through all my work.
ES: I’m looking at the texts that you wrote for DICA, and I know that you and Yam collaborated on these. I wanted to ask about some of the statements in here: the bit about it “fulfilling the avant garde,” I mean tell me if this is Yam’s end of things? How much is that hyperbole, or—
MY: Oh plenty of hyperbole and plenty of jest!
ES: OK, so are you not taking it too seriously, and pushing the surreal side of it as a way of pricking the art world bubble, or the expectations of the art world through the use of this language? I’m not doubting the meaning behind it, but its like this is pointing up the “art speak” involved – because this is a donkey after all!
MY: Absolutely! Like with everything on the project, Yam and I worked together on it and we both had very different spins on what this could do. From the point of view of the text, we worked it out as a conversation all the time, and because we have a shared idea base, it works quite well. Yam really liked the idea of a manifesto, so taking a slightly aggressive voice. He wanted something that was very “art speak.” It was an attitude, positioning itself on the “outside,” in the way DICA stands apart from everything else, actively distances itself, and that comes through in the final text we made.
I came at it as a little bit of a spoof. I had a lot of fun researching not-for-profit spaces and their art speak and their spins. Some galleries in Beijing call themselves not-for-profit spaces but act as commercial galleries, and it was quite fun trolling through their paraphernalia and propaganda to find out how they present that.
So we came together and meshed these two together and came up with the final product. For me DICA and its documentation was just as important as the actual act. We can’t go out and have a donkey somewhere every weekend, so the text and press release was aimed at capturing that act of resistance. Plus it suggests a description of an art institute which is quite obviously not some government resource or programme!
ES: Did you call yourself a not-for-profit?
MY: In the end we left out “not-for-profit” or “non-for-profit.” I guess we didn’t want to set up too much of an opposition between the official and the unofficial, such that it would appear that we were trying to pretend we were standing outside as the unofficial, accusing the official of being too rigid, or something. In Beijing especially, the question of what is “official” is always up for grabs. To call yourself “unofficial,” or outside of the official, has such little meaning. And then this idea of the “avant garde,” a concept that is bandied around far too often. I mean most artists believe that they’re part of their own avant garde, so it’s a word that doesn’t hold substantial meaning. Nor is it interesting to be an in between space: between nothing A and nothing B. There is no sense in that.
ES: For the first DICA the donkey was pretty much static, but eventually you want it to be mobile. What would that do for DICA? Would it renew the audience all the time, and prevent the audience itself being too static?
MY: Well perhaps the audience isn’t the key here, because in the places where DICA has been located or has situated itself it works best where there’s traffic flow, foot traffic. So the audience actually renews itself, it just keeps moving through. I don’t think renewing the audience by moving the donkey is really the issue, I think it’s more about the chance to move around and explore the city.
Walking is something that I love to do, especially walking in cities. But walking also plays on the donkey as a mode of transport and supports my, our, feeling that there are numerous ways of presenting art, the gallery with walls and windows is one of those ways but not the only one. The static form is also one of those ways, but again not the only one, and movement adds some kind of energy. There’s also something really beautiful about movement in this case, as I got the chance to ride on the back of the cart, the donkey trailer, through Beijing with the donkey pulling us along, and that was really magical.
ES: Did you have the videos playing at that point?
MY: We didn’t. On our first outing we were desperately worried that the batteries would run out so we were conserving energy. But that journey was totally magical, through the traffic with a donkey that is going at an animal’s pace. It has it’s own, slow rhythm, and in a way it’s more of a human pace – slightly quicker than walking, slower than riding a bike. People and vehicles are passing you, and the donkey stops to eat the greenery on the side of the road at the traffic lights!
ES: Did anyone try to talk to you about DICA? Were people asking question a lot? What sort of feedback did you get?
MY: I think audience feedback can be quite misleading, 100 people come and see a project and 5 people come over and give feedback – it’s kind of non-representative.
ES: Well, just in terms of your observations, how were people reacting? In the market place I know you had a crowd of people gathering around looking at the videos on the side of the donkey. One young, English-speaking couple came up to me and asked what it was all about, they seemed to understand that it might be “art.” The workers who were there, they were quite bemused, but also very interested in having a look and see what it was.
MY: I think for me that was the key. When I looked at everyone I could see people really watching, intently watching the videos, which surprised me – and then they would be discussing it amongst themselves. There might have been 40 or 50 people gathered around the video and then they would turn to each other and say “Oh, what was that about?” “Was that Beijing?” or “Was that a fish in there?” So generally that was a really beautiful audience reaction for me to watch, it made me extremely happy.
ES: If you get a few people watching something it naturally attracts more people who are not necessarily interested in the donkey or the artwork per se, but interested in why other people are looking at something. But people did seem to be generally quite chatty with the other people who were there, because I guess they didn’t really know what was going on, they were openly inquisitive.
MY: Maybe it’s similar to when people gather to play Chinese chess on the street, it starts with two people who are intent on their game, but it also becomes a communal action, there can be 20 people surrounding them, discussing tactics – they’re really into it! And this can happen at 1 o’clock in the morning in China! It just happens all the time.
In terms of the people that I did talk to, many thought it must be a commercial or an advertising campaign for washing machines, because there was one piece with a fish in a washing machine with goldfish being tumbled around in it [Editor’s note: by Chinese artist Ma Yongfeng]. They thought this was a really localised, community-based advertising project (these things happen here)! So that was a nice reaction.
And people were desperate for information: the pamphlets that we produced went in a second. They really wanted to know “what is this?” I think there’s something quite nice in that, and then being able to give people something about the works instead of deferring to some kind of “make up your own meaning,” to give them a little bit of a handle as to what this might be.
ES: So, what about the future for DICA? Will you produce this version of DICA again for future events? Are you going to do other shows? What’s your plan?
MY: We hope to take the donkey to some different cities in China. It would be lovely to take it to other parts of the world as well. We probably won’t show this version of the show again in Beijing.
Well, it may show again in Beijing but we’re looking at some concepts to use these large, enclosed corporate parks, of a big company, for their employees to use in their lunch break. When you have a large corporate headquarters they sometimes set aside an area for employees where cultural events can take place. I just like the idea of going in there and occupying it for a day and allowing people to come and watch DICA. It’s an odd place for it to go, and it’s also about wanting to address this very public space within a controlled corporate environment – that’s kind of interesting for us.
The first show we curated, the video show, will move on and go to different parts of the world or different parts of China. We’re now working on another show that isn’t necessarily screen-based, we want to make sure DICA isn’t just a platform for video (although we have a strong tendency towards video). But the cart can be used for other things or we may lose the donkey cart, we can probably manage to get it down and light enough that we can get the cart taken away, and one artist that we’re working with is producing something without the cart.
ES: But always including the donkey?
MY: Always including the donkey!
Michael Yuen interviewed by Edward Sanderson
At Café, 798 Art District, 27 August 2009.
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