The Otherness of the Everyday: Twelve Conversations from Chinese Art World During the Pandemic

At the end of 2019 to the beginning of 2020, when the coronavirus first emerged, Wuhan in China became the first city in the world affected by this deadly disease. It then rapidly spread to the entire country, and further on to Europe, America and the rest of the world.

During these strange times, we witness the emptiness of streets, squares and cities everywhere; we are estranged from and yet ‘connected’ to each other. As a response to the pandemic, Jiang Jiehong convened in-conversation talks with figures from different disciplines in the Chinese-speaking world, including anthropology, architecture, art, curating, fashion film, literature, media, museum, music and photography.

The twelve high-profile participants in these conversations are Xiang Biao, Zhang Peili, Pi Li, Zhang Zikang, Gu Zheng, Li Lin, Zhang Zhen, Shu Kewen, Jiang Jun, Wang Shouzhi, Chen Danqing and Zhu Zheqin.

These conversations foster new understandings of this present-day crisis; the threat of the invisible, notions of distance and spatialization, separation and isolation, communication and mobility, discipline and surveillance, and community and collectiveness, as well as the increase in conflicts and divisive voices between China and the world. At the same time, these reflections give us the opportunity to re-examine our past ‘normality’, and to project our future visions of a post-COVID world.

Readership will include those working and studying in the humanities and specifically in the disciplines of the interviewees, and those who have particular interests in contemporary China. The Otherness of the Everyday is also of interest to a more general audience who has experienced the pandemic and is seeking innovative understandings of this global crisis in human history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Mar 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789384413

Book preview

Introduction: The Otherness of The Everyday

Jiang Jiehong

Around the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020, it is commonly understood that Wuhan in China became the first city in the world to be affected by the coronavirus.¹ It then rapidly spread to the entire country and further on to Europe, America and the rest of the world. Restrictions on travel, instructions to maintain social distance, and finally the lockdown of districts, towns and cities were enforced to help slow down its transmission, but so far, nothing has been able to stop it. We all continue to face this unprecedented challenge.

I was travelling from Shanghai, on 20 January 2020, after a one-week business trip on the way back to my home in Birmingham only three days before the Wuhan lockdown was implemented. Pudong Airport was operating as usual with absolutely no sign of any forthcoming health emergency. I was received warmly by the crew, who smiled as usual, without the slightest concern of what was going to happen in the immediate months to follow. I didn’t realise at that point either that it would be my last trip to China for over a year.²

Since the first cases were confirmed in York in January 2020, the Covid-19 situation in the UK took a sudden turn for the worse in the following weeks. Informed by the WHO, the UK government planned four phases in tackling Covid-19, that is, to start in the ‘containment’ phase, along with ‘research’ being carried out and planning for the ‘delay’ and ‘mitigation’ work. Following the national lockdown in European countries, such as Italy and then Spain, the first national lockdown in the UK began on 20 March 2020 – all pubs and restaurants, as well as nightclubs, theatres, cinemas, gyms, and so on nationwide were closed.³ Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the nation on the coronavirus, urging people ‘at this moment of national emergency to stay at home, protect the NHS (National Health Service) and save lives’.⁴ We witness the emptiness of streets, squares and cities (Fig. 0.1) everywhere across the world. Hundreds of thousands of citizens across the country clapped on Thursday evenings to support NHS workers (Fig. 0.2), while pictures of rainbows created by school children have shone in windows in response to the outbreak as a prayer and a sign of hope (Fig. 0.3). We keep experiencing a spatialised daily life through social distancing measures of being 2 metres apart; we suffer but benefit from the distance and because of it, we are estranged from and yet ‘connect’ with each other.

This photograph shows an empty road over Westminster bridge in London during the Covid-19 lockdown. There are no cars or people visible. Two empty bus stops are located at either side of the road. The time on the Big Ben clock face reads 6.25 am.

Figure 0.1: Empty Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament with the Big Ben in London on an early summer morning during the Covid 19 lockdown.

This photograph depicts a domestic window display of ten children’s drawings thanking National Health Service staff for their hard work during the pandemic. Many of the images contain rainbows to symbolise solidarity and hope for the future. To the far left-hand side, part of another window with similar children’s drawings is visible.

Figure 0.2: Children’s drawings of the rainbow, 16 May 2020, Birmingham, England. Photo by Julia Jiang.

This photograph was taken on a residential street in the UK. Two households have come outside to clap in appreciation of National Health Service staff. There are 7 people outside in total including three children. A house number plaque reads 34 and is decorated with flowers. Dustbins can be seen outside.

Figure 0.3: Neighbours clap their hands and make a noise for carers and key workers, Watford, UK, 23 April 2020.

This video still captures a light show to celebrate Wuhan’s lifting of lockdown. Light beams emanate from the top of a skyscraper by a river.

Figure 0.4: Wuhan light show honours the heroes in the battle against Covid-19 as the 11-week lockdown ends on 8 April. Screenshot from YouTube.

Many of us voluntarily conducted self-isolation, either out of fear or out of love – it is an entirely new experience of everyday life. Today, new technologies have provided us with all kinds of ways to communicate. Although we have not been able to see our relatives, friends, students or colleagues face-to-face, through a transparent screen glass, we meet – we are so close and yet so far away. At least, those wonderful apps on our smart phones, a blessing or curse, can keep us (or not) in touch through textual, audio or video messages.

China, a country with a population of almost 1.5 billion, had to implement the strictest measures to rapidly and efficiently control the situation in its own way. We have seen light shows in Wuhan as a display of collectivism in overcoming the crisis and as a tribute to the heroes who fought in the battle against Covid-19 (Fig. 0.4); access controls through security checks at airports and traffic stations and surveillance cameras; mask-wearing as a most commonly understood practice; and patients in the coronavirus hospitals dancing in unison. However, domestically, a tension had been built up between the Chinese government’s official account and grassroot narratives, for example, spontaneous practices of diary writing and film-making, as well as the public discussions emanating from social media. Propaganda during the pandemic has elicited overwhelming public support from Chinese citizens, while any dissenting voices have been suppressed. Internationally, the pandemic has generated significant impacts on the important partnerships between China and the world. From US president, Donald Trump’s controversial usage of labels such as ‘the Chinese virus’⁵ to the coronavirus reparations demanded of China by the German tabloid Bild and others,⁶ there has reignited a negative public discourse leading to an exposure of distrust in the Chinese government, particularly in terms of issues such as transparency, surveillance and human rights. For instance, as the Hong Kong-based journalist Verna Yu comments: ‘If China valued free speech, there would be no coronavirus crisis.’⁷ When the virus spread unstoppably in Europe and the US, damaging health and the economy, further antagonism between China and the Western allies was stimulated with even the rise of racist attacks against Chinese diaspora⁸.

We read the news every day – how many people have been infected, and how many of them sadly died – which have been perceived initially as human tragedies but quickly turned into mere statistics. We’d better hide behind our screens, with an optimised portrait against a decent background, with no temperature or odour. I missed the normal, when we could gather in the same room, learning, teaching or even meeting, dressed properly from head to toe, without face masks, when we could see each other and choose to observe an encouraging smile or a subtle yawn. After a long teaching session, we would have a drink at a bar near Margaret street, while the discussion could be further stimulated and continue. I could of course still make myself something alcoholic, following a 2-hour group critique on Microsoft Teams. If the former felt natural and rewarding, the latter seemed to be a punishment. Nevertheless, I am blessed – I have never had the opportunity to spend so much time with the family altogether in the same house, day and night, and for so long. One day, my daughter Julia was writing a poem – at the end, it reads, ‘… but for now, two metres between you, and the world does not feel enough’. I couldn’t stop thinking about the notion of ‘2 metres’, as both a spatial and a temporal measure.

All my international trips – for example, to Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in March and to Ca’ Foscari University in Venice in May for teaching and to Hong Kong in June for Research Grants Council panel meetings – were either cancelled or postponed until further notice. I examined a Ph.D. student at Goldsmiths in London on 2 March and that was probably my furthest adventure in 2020 beyond the city of Birmingham. Even locally, the deteriorating Covid-19 situation left us no choice but to withdraw all the annually planned research seminars at the Centre of Chinese Visual Arts (CCVA)⁹ after our last physical session in the Lecture Theatre at Birmingham School of Art on 5 February. While we are unable to meet face to face and are quarantined at home and on the internet, paradoxically, we can meet with anyone anywhere in the world online. To resume our CCVA research seminars, we must make something special with the internet, which is no longer an alternative way of our communication. When we cannot talk to the students and colleagues who are in the same city, we talk, instead, to those on the other side of the world.

In light of the coronavirus situation and the unprecedented scale of disruption it has caused, CCVA started to convene a Covid-19 special weekly seminar series, since April, in the form of in-conversation talks, entitled The World, Two Metres Away (Liangmiwai de shijie). This online seminar series was organised to explore and record the immediate reflections from the Chinese art world through critical discussions on present-day experiences, to assist future community building and cross-cultural understanding between China and the rest of the world, and to provide first-hand materials for future research including the development of this book project. The participants were selected through a set of rigorous processes and criteria. First of all, they represent a diverse range of subject areas across the arts and humanities in order to share, exchange and innovate ideas from different scholarly and professional backgrounds, for example, around the notions of distance and spatialisation, separation and isolation, communication and mobility, discipline and surveillance, and community and collectiveness. Second, the invited individuals are not just native speakers who would be able to fully engage with the seminar discussions in Chinese for the audience in China, but more importantly, they have an in-depth understanding of Chinese arts and culture in the globalised world, to be extended to cover the Covid-19 context. And third, the fine-tuned selection of participants also covers varied or conflicting political standpoints, either from official or minjian (non-official) perspectives, that are particularly important in revealing a true picture of this pandemic – far outweighing just a health crisis.

As a curator, I could easily have a few names in mind, such as those artists and art museum directors that I have worked with before. On the one hand, I thought that since Covid-19 impacts our daily life so widely, we could extend our invitation a little further beyond the field of contemporary art. On the other hand, it would certainly be challenging to engage in a dialogue outside the scope of my area or to make any meaningful contributions. I wrote my first unsolicited e-mail to an anthropologist.

We were privileged to have received the consent, to participate in the seminars and for contributing to this publication, from twelve distinguished guest speakers from a broad range of disciplines – anthropology, art, curating, design, fashion, film, literature, media, museum, music, photography and urban studies. By accepting the invitations, each participant would choose one of the Saturdays for their session in the following three months dependent on their availability. Therefore, the allocation and sequence of the seminars¹⁰ went on from 6 June to 12 September 2020 was not arranged, but destined, so that the discussions were developed according to, not only the area of expertise of the participants, but also the latest situation of the pandemic at the time.

These exchanges as qualitative methods had been planned in three phases, that is, the pre-seminar, seminar and post-seminar phases. First, one or more preliminary meetings (dependent on the needs) were arranged with the individual participants prior to the seminar event to agree on the range and the procedure of the dialogical discussion. Second, the in-conversation talks (in Chinese) between myself and the individual participants were first developed and improvised via Zoom and then streamed live on the Chinese online video platform Bilibili for the audience in China. Each seminar lasted approximately for one hour on a weekend morning (UK) or afternoon (China). The immediacy of the improvisation between the two participants was essential to capture any instant and instinctive responses and reflections in such rapidly changing circumstances, while questions from the audience provided another layer of evaluation. Third, the post-seminar communications with participants were critical to further extend the discussions, to inform the work on the editing and translation of the transcription for this publication. Rather than reorganise them in a different order, I keep that natural flow of the series, as the following chapters in the book are simply in chronological order according to the dates of conversations.

We were new to Zoom then, or online live stream. With room for 100 people, our Zoom capacity was considered more than sufficient to accommodate our 20-student cohort of both postgraduate and Ph.D. at CCVA and to invite an external audience. The Zoom room had been quickly filled up with its maximum number much earlier than the scheduled time, while two persons are still missing – our guest speaker Xiang Biao and myself, the host – who were not swift enough to get in! It was good that we had a live streaming plan as well to a wider community in China. Despite a 20-minute delay at the start of our very first seminar due to the late arrival of the speakers, its audience number of the first session on Bilibili reached 15,000.

Philosophical discussions in the West have been either updated or newly generated by the pandemic. The current situation, for example, recalls Michel Foucault’s examination on a strict spatial partitioning through inspections. Through his concept of ‘Panopticism’, he interrogated measures that were taken in a town to combat the plague, including ‘strict spatial partitioning’ and ‘a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death’. Due to a public health crisis, the rate of surveillance exponentially increased as ‘the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects’.¹¹ Parallels can readily be drawn to the present-day situation provoked by Covid-19, whereby, under the pretext of a contagion, mass regimes of electronic tracking have been initiated. On Covid-19, Jean-Luc Nancy appropriates the term ‘communovirus’, suggesting, essentially that it is, ‘a virus that communises us […] That this has to involve the isolation of each of us is simply a paradoxical way of experiencing our community’.¹² Within a few months since the outbreak of Covid-19, one of the most prolific philosophers and cultural theorists in the world Slavoj Žižek published his new book on the pandemic.¹³ It suggests that the world needs a new form of ‘communism’, the translation of this epidemiological reality into a durable politics, to control and regulate the economy, to limit the sovereignty of nation states and to avoid a global catastrophe.

However, what of the voices from China? How do we perceive the spatialised setting of our daily life beyond the ‘normality’ in a Chinese cultural context? What do we learn from this present extraordinary circumstance and how do we reimagine the ordinary in the past? And what are the reflections upon global flows of people and goods, its interruption and the current emergency of political conflicts leading towards an uncertain future? Within the arts and related fields, more specifically, when public access to and interactions with museums, galleries, concert halls and cinemas are restricted, the usual programmes of exhibitions, films and dramas are interrupted or replaced with online alternatives and digital forms, we encounter the pandemic, or indeed, as the title of this book suggests, The Otherness of the Everyday (in Chinese, Richang youbie).

Although, as mentioned previously, I had a chance to communicate with the individual participants prior to the seminars taking place, the live conversations were primarily impromptu, not structured and therefore, discursive, on the one hand. On the other hand, the form and process of conversation led the speakers to unpack the complexity of their theses, assisting the accessibility of their analysis. The titles of the following chapters of the twelve conversations are only indicative rather than definitive.

Translation is a ‘mission impossible’, notwithstanding that the translators of the project are more than capable and my edited Chinese transcripts were translated thoughtfully and faithfully. The problem that I found in the English version was in fact nothing to do with the re-interpretation of any linguistic or cultural meanings, but instead, fundamentally, the fact that we perhaps would not even have such a conversation if it was conducted in English. For instance, at some point, a participant would probably not choose to use a Chinese idiom, anecdote or sarcasm, but an English one, which could well illuminate a very different context of discussion. They are not just two languages but also two different modes of communication. Through the inevitable process of translation from Chinese to English for this publication, it was challenging to maintain the accuracy of the content, the tone and ambience of the conversations including their colloquial quality, and at the same time, to decode those culturally rooted expressions, metaphors, sense of humour, and indeed, their ‘otherness’.

Social anthropologist Xiang Biao (Chapter 1) questions the Covid-19 situations from his perspective: Will the world be reshaped by the pandemic, become more united or more divided? When humanity in its entirety is facing a common enemy – the coronavirus – rifts are widening between countries and among social groups within countries. The conversation reveals a particular state of suspension, the aesthetics of waiting, and our new everyday that has been compelled by Covid’s disruption of life with more elastic visions of temporality. Literature critic Shu Kewen (Chapter 8) also takes the notion of richang (daily life), ‘good’ or ‘bad’, as her point of departure, conveying how the previous ‘experience’ of everyday life (such as SARS in the context of the pandemic) can been digested and accumulated into ‘knowledge’ by the affected countries in Asia and how a ‘reserved space’ can be critical in mitigating any exceptional situations. Although the knowledge gained from experience can produce an effective response in the midst of a crisis, the pandemic reminds us again of the provisional nature of knowledge, the extent of our human capacity and the unknown. However, urban studies researcher Jiang Jun (Chapter 9) is more than confident. In this conversation, he demonstrates how the system of governance in China has curbed the spread of the virus via the methodology of baoheshi jiuyuan (saturated rescue). Triggering a first-level response in Wuhan, medical staff from the entire nation were mobilised to combat the Covid-19 disease, leading Jiang Jun to claim that a one-party system can win the hearts and minds of the people in a time of crisis and that China’s so-called neixunhuan (internal circulation) will open a new chapter of globalisation.

We have been used to the online meeting and teaching via Teams with colleagues and students. There are wonderful functions in those digital platform to manipulate your background, either to blur it or, to make it completely a new world, if one wishes to get out of the gloomy English weather and appear in a sunny conservatory instead, or even on a flawless white sandy beach. It seemed to be a tacit agreement that none of our participants faked their environment and they were generous enough to invite us to their offices (e.g., Xiang Biao and Wang Shouzhi), studies (Pi Li, Zhang Zhen and Jiang Jun) and lounges (Li Lin and Zhu Zheqin) at home and, for those who were travelling, to their hotel rooms (Zhang Peili and Chen Danqing), in various cities and time zones, from Birmingham and Oxford in England, to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Beijing in China, and to New York and Vancouver in North America (Fig. 0.5).

In the art world, public venues such as art museums and theatres have all suffered from the restrictions of the pandemic. Curator Pi Li (Chapter 3) explains how the pandemic has affected his role as a curator at M+ in Hong Kong, dealing with substantial economic losses due to a dwindling flow of visitors. It led to a rather pessimistic view of the uncertain future of art museums, while the overdraft of the value of contemporary art will have to be liquidated by the coronavirus situation. The online exhibitions and digital platforms during the pandemic seem to be as an imperfect but vital way of continuing public engagement while nothing can replace a direct encounter with art. Museum director Zhang Zikang (Chapter 4), holds a relatively more optimistic standpoint, when he enthusiastically introduces the museum’s timely establishment of a digital learning centre two years before the outbreak of Covid-19. In his view, this virtual framework of interaction between the museum and the general public, rather than exacerbating distance, allows for an enhanced encounter with artworks, including display pixel resolutions that go beyond the capacity of the human eye. And yet, as the discussion revolves further around the concept of authenticity, all the digital technologies are only able to show the image of art rather than art itself.

This is a montage of screenshots in black and white from zoom recordings of 12 guests who spoke with Jiang Jiehong. They are all pictured in their home or offices. Chinese language subtitles are visible at the bottom of the screenshots.

Figure 0.5: Twelve guest speakers in conversations at the CCVA Covid-19 special seminar series, The World, Two Metres Away, 6 June to 12 September 2020. Screenshots from the edited Zoom recordings, from left to right, top down, Xiang Biao, Zhang Peili, Pi Li, Zhang Zikang, Gu Zheng, Li Lin, Zhang Zhen, Shu Kewen, Jiang Jun, Wang Shouzhi, Chen Danqing and Zhu Zheqin.

Jonathan Watkins moved to Birmingham one year later than I did, after he curated the 1998 Biennale of Sydney to take the directorship of the Ikon Gallery. When I first met him at the School of Art, he peered over the rim of his glasses while organising his slide tray before his lecture, as if he was projecting his first slide. Usually, we would see each other regularly, as colleagues and as friends, particularly, since we co-curated the Guangzhou Triennial in 2012 and since the Ikon café started to serve Pu’er tea. On a chilly evening of the early autumn, we finally arranged to meet after months at a pub near his house. When I arrived, Jonathan had already chosen a seat, sitting not inside the pub but in its backyard – an open space – in a big coat. He was better prepared, more sensible. We shared our recent