CRITICAL WRITING
The Highest Directive: Drinking Water of One’s Own Accord, Urinating Involuntarily
Bao Qiangqiang
What a hectic week. From working overtime last Sunday until today, I have been frantically busy, almost out of my mind. Working on spreadsheets made my eyes ache so much that I had to buy eye drops. Yesterday, in the boss’s office, I saw a small bottle on her desk too. She must be feeling exactly the same: shared experience, from the top down! The heat carries on as ever, apparently determined to wilt us all. A large group of us hides in the air-conditioned office, forgetting everything outside. There is nothing but work. Now my GTALK, MSN and QQ statuses all say “busy.” Even I find it irritating.
Luckily, last Saturday I resisted the urge to stay at home again and resolutely headed for 798. The sun was more than obliging: at two o’clock, vast shafts of light poured down, roasting the ground and steaming me. Most of the exhibitions I walked around were paintings. I had gone for sculpture, but ended up seeing mainly painting and video. Quite a few solo painting exhibitions have opened through June and July. Some are fresh and untroubled, some subdued and melancholy, some vividly colored, some simple and direct. I have never studied art; I just enjoy it and come to look around. That makes it easier to set aside who the artist is, what their style is, or what they have made before, and simply feel and experience the work: liking this, disliking that.
The red-themed works remain as enduring as ever. After all, the converted lofts at 798 still retain slogans from that earlier era: enormous red characters, weathered beneath the arched roofs, reminding people not to forget those years of fervent blood. Quite a few studios have replaced their displays with the artists’ latest work. I like Qiming Liu’s A Single Thread series: vivid red points of emphasis against a gray ground. Our lives often hang by a thread without our knowing it. Perhaps it is precisely this unawareness that lets us appear to move through life with such ease. The tension is just right, just sufficient to suspend the red underwear hanging and fluttering in the wind. Whose it is no longer matters. At the sight of it, you tuck away your inner secrets and the wry smile at the corner of your mouth. Is it a symbol of the unbearable weight of being, or an intimation of its unbearable lightness? Those red, weightless things drift and emerge from dark clouds and mist, everywhere at once. Illusory yet clear in your field of vision, they pluck the most sensitive inner thread: a pessimistic sadness, tension, alarm. Yet the artist has hidden himself on the other side of the mist, watching it all with the same eyes.
So many other memories, in different styles, remain with me: snow on steps, Pop, donkeys and pigs, oppressive video that made my chest ache, the intersections of every optimism and pessimism, broad expanses of color and flowers, graffiti on walls, a naked angel suspended beneath the eaves, the abandoned factories and locomotive left behind at 798… All these things are independent yet interwoven. I bought a T-shirt and an easel I had been looking for for ages. On the back of the T-shirt is a little sailor with a steamed-bun face. His expression—well, a child’s version of solemnity.
After wandering all afternoon, I could no longer stand the outdoor heat and slipped into a large exhibition hall for tea. Browsing the books on the shelves, I found a lovely magazine. Someone upstairs was smoking a cigar. Its drifting scent mingled with the words and pictures in the book and the green tea moistening my throat.
Indeed, 798 is a factory for making dreams.