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Unpleasant but healing:

Redemption and reflection in art practice during the 20th Century after D.T.Suzuki’s spread of Zen beyond cultural boundaries, a comparison between Joseph Beuys’ I like America and America likes Me 1974 and Tehching Hsieh’s One year performance 1978

MA FINE ART DIGITAL HUA13405289

JIAQI HUANG

JIAQI HUANG MA FINE ART DIGITAL

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Abstract This paper aims to investigate the relationship between worldwide

dissemination of Zen and growth of contemporary art in the 20th century. A

recent issue is presented at the beginning containing the basic question about

artists’ practice to social revolution, by giving examples of early enlightenment of

Zen in west society to justify the cultural generality in different contexts. And

then through Joseph Beuys and Tehching Hsieh’s specific works to illustrate the

change of method and ideology under the impact of Zen. According to the return

of Zen in China after longtime insulation, to indicate the social value and

direction of contemporary art in the East, it sums up the spirit of Zen plays a

positive role in social revolution.


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Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................. 2

Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 4

The Revolutionaries from The Root ............................................................................ 5

Avant Dadaism: The History .......................................................................................... 5

Zen: Journey to The West ................................................................................................ 6

Contribution of D.T. Suzuki ..................................................................................................... 7

The Chance in Contextual Diversity ..................................................................................... 7

From John Cage to Joseph Beuys .................................................................................. 8

Joseph Beuys’ Healing Room ...................................................................................... 10

We Propose Exchange: Beuys and China .......................................................................... 11

The Living Dead ........................................................................................................................ 12

Tehching Hsieh’s Invisible Cage ................................................................................ 13

After Isolation: Ideology, Self-‐Awareness and Action in China ....................... 16

Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 18

Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 19

Photograph ................................................................................................................................. 21

Figure 1 Aiweiwei and blanket, London, 2015 ........................................................................................................ 4

Figure 2 D.T. Suzuki and John Cage, 1962. ................................................................................................................ 8

Figure 3 Beuys’s felt blanket, walking stick and coyote became sculptural props throughout the

performance, 1974 ................................................................................................................................................. 10

Figure 4 Poster of "Social Sculpture: Beuys in China", 2013 ........................................................................... 11

Figure 5 Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance: Cage piece (1978 –1979) .......................................... 13

Figure 6 Tehching Hsieh on Day 1, left, and Day 365, locked up for art, Cage piece, 1978-‐1979 ... 14

Figure 7 Paper-‐cut propaganda poster from the early days of the Cultural Revolution ..................... 16

Figure 8 The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the

Washing Machine for Two Minutes, Huang Yongping, 1987/1993 .................................................. 17


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Introduction At 10:00 a.m. on 17th September, the artists Ai Weiwei and Anish Kapoor joined

hands and each carried a single blanket to start an eight-‐mile walk from Royal

Academy of Arts to the Olympic park at Stratford, what represents the global

crisis that faces 60 million refugees in our world today. Increasing number of

people and journalists joined the action before the artists reached their

destination.

The group was consisted of more than 150 people from different occupations

and fields, to support the cause. From photographers, documentary (film)

makers and installation creators, artists in modern society are engaging with

some of the most pressing issues of this age. As Aiwewei said after the walk:

“We are artists, we are part of the whole situation. This problem has

such a long history, a human history. We are all refugees somehow,

somewhere and at some moment.”(Brown, 2015)

Figure 1 Aiweiwei and blanket, London, 2015

During the four years of 2014 to 2018, First World War Centenary (1914.org,

2015) takes place to mark the 100th anniversary of the First World War. By the

end of WWI, very few survivors were free from that distressing sequel, from then

on, groups of innovators include artists started to take action on relieving and

recovering the world from a long illness as redemption. What brought a query:

How can artists respond with actual discourse on this mobilization and

integration under different social modes and contexts? Debating on regional

phenomenon in the evolution this paper explores the moments of


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enlightenment1 that based on the development history of contemporary art in

the 20th century, addressing the problem of what art was doing or what art was

not doing for a long time.

The Revolutionaries from The Root Since the beginning of 20th century, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and Paul

Gauguin have been regarded as vanguard figure in the history of modern art that

started the early practice against traditions, and these prominent people exactly

inaugurated a new era for the process of growing Fauvism, Cubism and

Expressionism in ten years afterwards. However the War broke off the progress

and caused collective psychological trauma, paving the way for major political

changes, including revolutions in many of the nations involved.

Avant Dadaism: The History During 1916 to 1923, Dada arrived that was associated with artists came from

France, Germany and Switzerland like Jean Hans Arp, Otto Dix and Marcel

Duchamp (Huelsenbeck and Green, 1998) to engage in sabotage, denial, destroy,

subversion and other ‘anti-‐art’ movement. Dada is not only raised for

reconsideration the essence of art and itself forward, it also opens up new

possibilities of how do art intervene politics.

Talking about Dada, Duchamp should be the representative because their spirits

were very similar. In both Duchamp and other Dadaists’ art they all appealed a

kind of freedom to ‘overturn everything’. (Eliot and Rainey, 2006) In fact,

Dadaism cannot go beyond the spirit of Duchamp at any time. Dada was a

campaign that launched by a group of youngsters who had lost confidence in

civilization and escaped from the battle, they did not acknowledge the entire

world, hoping to overthrow everything, deny everything. From here, it is easy to

see, the ideas and intents of Duchamp were familiar with Dadaism, as all of them

1 Enlightenment in Buddhism, the English term enlightenment is the western translation of the term Bodhi, "awakening", which has entered the Western world via the 19th century translations of Max Müller. It has the western connotation of a sudden insight into a transcendental truth. (Gregory, 1987)


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intended to deny everything with established pattern. But Duchamp's ideology

was based on respect for the original life model, in order to achieve ‘spiritual

freedom’. (Paz, 1978) Duchamp said: “I like living, breathing better than

working...my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is

inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant

euphoria.” (Frank, 2014) Coincidentally, from the point of Chinese Zen (Chan

Buddhism)’s view that all objects or movements over the world are the reflection

of people’s heart, Duchamp had not approached any Eastern Zen and he had

never been to Eastern countries, nevertheless he turned his life into art, his

awareness of life and art was inborn.

Indeed the cruel war challenged the original traditions and morals, impacting

people's inherent thinking, which heralded a coming experimental age that

anything can happen. In 1919, The Mona Lisa was added long mustache.

Zen: Journey to The West On might think what is the meaning of overturning the fixed status or authorities?

However, in Duchamp’s term, the change is a change of perspective, he asked in

reply “Why can’t we change the perspective to view "master" works?” Duchamp

questioned the boundary and nature of art, just like Zen explores capacity and

potential of human, what lead Zen integrated into Western culture.

Transferring by Bodhidharma from India to China, Zen was founded in China in

the 6th century C.E., and it was exported to Japan and Korea after 600 years.

"Meditation2" is a school of Buddhism that has had significant impact in Japan

and Europe and America.

Zen disseminates that we are all already enlightened beings, but our true

potential has been clouded by ignorance. In east countries especially in Japanese

culture Zen influenced warrior samurai for its focus on discipline and self-‐

control. Zen also has effect on the practice of various arts, such as calligraphy,

painting, garden design, and archery. Beginning in the 20th century a

2 Meditation is a practice in which an individual trains the mind or induces a mode of consciousness, either to realize some benefit or for the mind to simply acknowledge its content without becoming identified with that content, or as an end in itself. (Alan, 2009)


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popularized version of Zen has become spread throughout the world and

influenced many in both the United States and Europe. (Patheos.com, 2015).

Contribution of D.T. Suzuki D.T. Suzuki was born in a Buddhism family in Japan, who became a Japanese

Buddhist scholar and thinker later and has been widely celebrated as ‘the first

transmitter of Japanese Zen to the west, especially the US and Great Britain’

(Dharmachāri, 2010). In 1893 he went to World Parliament of Religions held in

Chicago, then in 1897 Suzuki started to work with Paul Carus in translating and

preparing Eastern spiritual literature for publication in the West. Afterwards,

Suzuki engaged in teaching, writing and lecturing in Japan and the US, which

promoted the understanding of Buddhism in Western countries, he made Zen

popular and easy to understand by sharing his way of living based on Zen and

transforming the mysterious oriental outcome into an acceptable attitude

towards life for Westerners.

The Chance in Contextual Diversity Suzuki argued that a Zen satori (awakening) was the goal of the tradition's

training, while after centuries of development in China the traditions produced

different results from exactly the same origin.

‘In India, there prevailed the tradition of the mendicant, however in

China social circumstances led to the development of a temple and

training-‐center system in which the abbot and the monks all

performed mundane tasks, including food gardening or farming,

carpentry, architecture, housekeeping, administration (or community

direction), and the practice of folk medicine. Consequently, the

enlightenment sought in Zen had to stand up well to the demands and

potential frustrations of everyday life.’(Ch'en, Suzuki and Humphreys,

1955)

Back to Suzuki’s dissemination in the west, he ever said: “For you Westerners, it

is Swedenborg who is your Buddha, it is he who should be read and followed!”


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Which can be an enormously enlightening point for westerners to understand

basic meaning of Zen. Even so, under different context and background,

Westerners’ traditional way of thinking is rational dichotomy, which becomes

the biggest obstacle to use Zen thinking for creation. The essential difference

between the West and the East in the national character is, Easterners pay more

attention to an intuitive, holistic worldview, while Westerners will focus on the

analysis and conceptualization, with independent worldview. This fundamental

difference makes the western artists cannot completely understand the true

meaning of Zen, the thing what they learned from Zen is the attitude towards life,

"Turn life into art". They feel that this phenomenon can give their art an

unprecedented opportunity for change, which stimulates their pioneering spirit

in new artistic movement.

From John Cage to Joseph Beuys Since the World War II started in 1939, the entire art criticism and its measure of

social value were challenged again. After Suzuki introduced Zen to the West, in

1940s, John Cage, who was one of the leading figures of the post-‐war avant-‐garde.

‘attending Suzuki’s classes and Zen showed Cage his true nature: peaceful, loving,

joyful. His response was immediate: He would put all these soaring insights into

his music.’(Larson, 2012) ‘As he said: “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly

noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it

fascinating.”’(Cage and Gann, 2011)

Figure 2 D.T. Suzuki and John Cage, 1962.

Later on in 1951 Cage began to use chance operations in the course of his

composition, which took him to another direction. ‘His adoption of chance


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techniques is almost always seen as a rejection: a jettisoning of everything

traditionally musical.’(Pritchett, 1993) The promotion caused by Zen Buddhism

which influenced Cage to finally remove any trace of his personality from the

composed work. In Cage’s 4’33’’, which is commonly perceived as "four minutes

thirty-‐three seconds of silence", he clamed that any sounds might constitute

music as a reflection of Zen. 4’33’’ became a representative piece in post-‐war

culture, ‘in the words of one writer, “the authority of the composer (had been)

extinguished.”’(Pritchett, 1993)

Referring to Cage’s another piece 0′00″, without ordering any musical rules what

this piece showed the audiences is only behaviors, completely discarded the

classics and rebelled against orthodoxy, awakening the appearance of

Performance art.

Affected by Cage, Fluxus in 1960s carried ‘overthrow’ to extremes. The

traditional authorities were deconstructed and another discourse was set up, all

the contemptuous of authorities turned to be Fluxusist’s purpose more than

method. Joseph Beuys, as one of the Fluxusist at its early stage, however, he

could not completely agree with Fluxus’ assertion, and then he went at his own

pace. Beuys attempted to overthrow the system in vertical way, away from John

Cage’s aesthetic feeling and gradually decaying value of the sense of form in art.

‘As one acknowledged realization that it is incorrect to describe Beuys as an

artist who also partook of politics. To Beuys, being a member of parliament,

educator, a feminist, an environmentalist, or a person interested in discussion

and reforming university entrance exams, etc. were all equivalent to being a

sculptor, performing challenging actions, and drawing.’(Mizusawa, 1993)

Beuys’ idea of art extends to incorporate all types of activities. In other words, all

liberal and creative activities in pursuit of the ideal human society are art and, in

Beuys’ terms, “social sculpture3”, what interposed art to life and returned art to

3 In 1973 Beuys wrote: “Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-‐revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-‐hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.” (Caroline, 1973)


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the public. In the thinking model of Zen that all the external forms would make

people ignore the essence as well as Beuys’ interpretation of art.

Joseph Beuys’ Healing Room When Beuys survived in air crash in World War II and saved by Tatars, they

wrapped Beuys in animal fat and felt to keep him warm. Therefore, he continued

to use these materials in his sculptures and performance art, such as his popular

piece ‘Fat Chair (1964-‐1985)’, or ‘PLIGH (1958/1985)’, or ‘Jockey Cap (1985)’.

Figure 3 Beuys’s felt blanket, walking stick and coyote became sculptural props throughout the

performance, 1974

In May 1974, Beuys arrived in New York JFK from Germany in preparation for

his " I like America and America likes Me". He wrapped himself in a felt, and an

ambulance took him to a small room in Rene Block gallery, where he started his

performance. In that room there was a wild coyote, a pile of straw, as well as 50

copies "The Wall Street Journal". Over the next three days, Beuys spent eight

hours per day to stay with the coyote. Initially Beuys was covered by felt with

crutches in hand, standing in the room as a guest, allowed the coyote’s

aggressive behavior, even biting. Afterwards the coyote turned wary, then

gradually became friendly. To got along with in the three days, which was a

symbol of communication between the American spirit (the coyote) and Beuys,

who was transported back to the airport via ambulance. ‘He never set foot on

outside American soil nor saw anything of America other than the coyote and the

inside of the gallery.’ (Tauschinger-‐Dempsey, 2013)


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The coyote had been regarded as god in native Indians’ culture, while the white

settlers treated them as ferocious beasts. Beuys’ art was fulfilled with shaman

spirit, including control and transform nature. Beuys completed this

performance as a penance for the whites’ wrongdoing before. The performance

reflected his original intention that as a healer to visit America.

We Propose Exchange: Beuys and China At the same time, on the other side of earth everything was changing during the

Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution in China. Under compulsory command and

enormous pressure from the Central Cultural Revolution Group, to a certain

degree, the “red, bright, and shining” art had fomented revolution. However, the

priority of art during that period was serving political and propaganda purposes.

‘The Cultural Revolution pitted young people against older generations so that

many revered artists and artistic traditions suffered humiliation and

destruction.’(Avril, n.d.) Political woodblock prints and the Soviet socialist realist

style with Chinese characteristics formed a false dawn to the masses.

Figure 4 Poster of "Social Sculpture: Beuys in China", 2013

As a result, this evolution postponed decades for Chinese to meet Beuys, and his

mysterious room, even Beuys has influenced contemporary Chinese art since the

cultural opening due to economic reform that began in 1978. In 2013, Central

Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) brought Joseph Beuys’ exhibition to China for the

first time, which was entitled “Social Sculpture: Beuys in China”, over 400 works


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were presented in the exhibition, including manuscripts, drawings, photographs,

and videos documenting the influential artist’s performances. The most

impressive work for Chinese visitors was the piece of ‘Chinese Hare Sugar’, the

picture turned out to be the most familiar pattern of White Rabbit toffee candy

wrapper, which was the product as everyone knows in China. In fact Beuys had

showed his special preference to hare in previous works he used the candy

wrapper found in Shanghai to make this screen prints in 1979. Before this he

already produced another two ‘Hare Sugar’ multiples, the first in 1972,

‘American Hare Sugar’ in 1974. During Beuys’ lifetime he had never been to

China, however in this ‘happening’ Beuys bridged himself with the orient.

The Living Dead Hare, honey, fat, felt and confined space had already been the significant

imageries of Beuys’ works, which also reflected in his ‘How to Explain Pictures to

a Dead Hare’, taking place in another Beuys’ “room” in Düsseldorf.

In this performance what Beuys explained was no longer art, neither to instill the

hare to some ideas forcibly, but expressed a relationship, according to his

understanding the relationship between hare and the world was the same as

man and the world is the same, which emphasized the balance between nature.

Beuys explained:

“(The hare) has a strong affinity to women, to birth and to

menstruation, and generally to chemical transformation of blood.

That's what the hare demonstrates to us all when he hollows out his

form: the movement of incarnation. The hare incarnates himself into

the earth, which is what we human beings can only radically achieve

with our thinking: he rubs, pushes, and digs himself into Materia

(earth); finally penetrates (hare) its laws, and through this work his

thinking is sharpened then transformed, and becomes revolutionary.”

(Phaidon, n.d.)

‘To Beuys, “Even a dead animal, preserves more powers of intuition than some

human beings with their stubborn rationality.”’(Phaidon, n.d.) This performance


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is considered Beuys’ highest interpretation for "What is art", all Beuys did was

using animals to express human’s limitations.

During this special period, the wounds of war were hidden beneath the return of

a stable life, hovering beside loss and hope, and the audiences peered with

curiosity through the obstacles outside Beuys’ room(s), nourishing a variety of

new ways to reflect the social and political culture.

In addition, the political party The Greens/Alliance ’90 was founded in 1980 in

Karlsruhe, as an important figure in the first years who named the party, Beuys

laid the ideological foundations along with other members, proclaiming the

famous ‘Four Pillars of the Green Party: Social justice, Ecological wisdom,

Grassroots democracy and Nonviolence.’(Wall, 2014) Which carried out Beuys’

spirit through to the end.

Tehching Hsieh’s Invisible Cage Tehching Hsieh, born in Taiwan, jumped ship to a pier on the Delaware River,

slipping into the US where he began his new life as an illegal immigrant for

fourteen years.

At first Hsieh supported himself by working in Chinese restaurant and

construction jobs, he felt cooped up in the life of an illegal immigrant, and uneasy

in the unfamiliar surroundings until he locked him up in a cage, without a coyote

or a hare, Hsieh isolated himself from the others, which lasted from 29

September 1978 through 30 September 1979. What was the first piece of Hsieh’s

five One Year Performance.

Figure 5 Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance: Cage piece (1978 –1979)


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Located in a loft in Brooklyn, in that cage of less than six square meters, and

under the supervision of notary, Hsieh were closed off behind walls that built of

his ideology and broke off all communication with the outside world. He neither

talking to anyone, reading, listening to the radio, nor watching TV, during the one

year his friend Cheng Wei Kuong brought him necessities, disposed his waste

and photographed Hsieh to document the project. Occasionally the performance

was open to the public to visit.

Figure 6 Tehching Hsieh on Day 1, left, and Day 365, locked up for art, Cage piece, 1978-‐1979

Unlike Breatharians4, the main issue for Hsieh to consider was not survival, he

consumed food and the project was meticulously arranged, “The room was

divided into different areas, Hsieh named them "home", "park" and so on; Every

two or three days, he would carefully scrub the floor; Adequate sleep of 12 hours

a day; Collecting his pubic hair regularly and carefully counted; Also, he

masturbated every day, in order to fall asleep more easily.” The same as Hsieh’s

all other One Year Performance, his ‘Cage piece’ struggled against exhaustion and

aloneness, taking every minute into practice, rain or shine. Which was associated

to artists who claimed their lives were their art, such as Nam June Paik´s Altered

Piano, John Cage’s 0’00 or Duchamp’s 'Fountain'. Hsieh set up himself unordinary

living conditions and made life a simple form, in terms of Hsieh, art was

inseparably linked with life, however art was a conversion process, rather than a

direct reproduction of life, his work was not directly on the subject of illegal

immigration, and his thought was not limited by that argument. In his first four

years in New York, he always paced in the studio after work, thinking about how

4 Associated to breatharianism, is the belief that it is possible for a person to live without consuming food. Breatharians claim that food, and in some cases water, are not necessary for survival, and that humans can be sustained solely by prana, the vital life force in Hinduism.


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should he do with art, however nothing could be figured out until he suddenly

realized that his thinking and way of spending time itself was an artwork. His

work was exactly talking about this, everyone spent their time in their own way.

Hsieh said: “You are your own world's dominator, how to choose what way to

spend time? Kings and beggars, they do a lot, or do nothing, for me, there is no

difference, both of them are spending time, spending life. “ As Cynthia Carr wrote

in her book (after Hsieh’s last artwork, Thirteen Year Plan 1986-‐1999):

“When Tehching then came forward to answer questions, he said

first that he had always done his art ‘from instinct,’ that it was very

personal, and that from now on he would not do art at all. Life had

become his art.”(Carr, 1993)

Familiar with Franz Kafka’s themes of death, art, isolation, asceticism, spiritual

poverty, futility, personal failure and the corruption of human relationships, but

differ from the ‘hunger artist5’, Hsieh finally stepped out of his cage while the

protagonist in Kafka’s short story was buried with a pile of decaying straw.

Through Hsieh’s works, including Time Clock Piece, Outdoor Piece, Rope Piece,

No Art Piece and Thirteen Year Plan, the artist attempted to examine the most

essential of human beings, the issue of "the existence of life” and "the passing of

time”, ‘as the three goals of Zen: development of concentration, awakening,

realization of Zen in daily life.’(Kapleau, 1989) For public what Hsieh presented

was his self-‐discipline, self-‐isolation, and even self-‐destruction, comparing with

Duchamp’s Zen of porcelain urinal and Beuys’ healing of banded knife, which

were happened with great social vicissitudes background, Hsieh’s personal

experience were more associated with society nowadays, furthermore, from an

illegal immigrant to a “master” Tehching Hsieh realized his self-‐salvation.

5 A Hunger Artist is a short story by Franz Kafka first published in Die neue Rundschau in 1922. The protagonist, a hunger artist who experiences the decline in appreciation of his craft, is an archetypical creation of Kafka: an individual marginalized and victimized by society at large. (Kafka, Crick and Robertson, 2012),


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After Isolation: Ideology, Self-‐Awareness and Action in

China Based on several decades of development that Zen had inspired a number of

Western and some Asian avant-‐garde artists to take action in art movements,

meanwhile, ‘the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution in China sought to build a

new socialist nation without reliance on the values of foreign societies or

previous corrupt domestic ones.’(Cushing and Tompkins, 2007) Because of the

authorities accepted narrow range of forms and the artistic creativity was

strictly in controlling by Party politics, ‘in that circumstance, numerous of

examples of artwork were destroyed, academic departments were dismantled,

personal careers were ruined, and even brought imprisonment and

death.’(Cushing and Tompkins, 2007)

Thus, either contemporary art or Zen spirit remained stagnant at that time until

the "Gang of Four6" was crushed.

Figure 7 Paper-‐cut propaganda poster from the early days of the Cultural Revolution

Soon afterwards China began to reshape its own culture, turned back to re-‐

examine the artistic value and its direction from the pursuit of economic

development. The exhibition ’85 New Wave represented a resounding reply to

the Cultural Revolution, since China had been cut off from the outside for years,

suppression of such a powerful culture could only be met with an equal and

opposite force, the result of this explosive reaction was the ’85 New Wave

Movement. In the next few years, the artists brought the avant-‐garde

experimental spirit and philosophy of contemporary art to this grandiose and 6 The Gang of Four, was a political faction composed of four Chinese Communist Party officials. They came to prominence during the Cultural Revolution and were later charged with a series of treasonous crimes. (Buckley, 2012)


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rigid socialist country. Everything was reinvented from scratch, but seemed

vibrant.

Many Chinese artists of the ’85 New Wave, such as the Xiamen Dada group in

Fujian and the rational painting movement in Northern China, were inspired by

innovations in art happening in Europe and America. In 1986 Xiamen Dada was

built up by artists Huang Yongping, Lin Jiahua, Jiao Yaoming, Yu Chengang,

Linchun, Cai Lixiong. This Chinese art group protested the influence of socialist

realism art from the Soviet Union, through absurdist artworks and performances.

‘Inspired by the relationship between European dada and Zen Buddhism, and

embraced absurdity. They were particularly interested in the concept of chance,

using it to determine the making of the artworks.’(Tate.org.uk, n.d.)

Figure 8 The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the

Washing Machine for Two Minutes, Huang Yongping, 1987/1993

The same year in Zhejiang, Zhang Peili combined some other artists conferred

and decided to build a smaller group following the work of the Zhejiang Youth

Creation Group, which could support them in making and exhibiting art pieces

outside the China’s official party system, and named it The Pond Association (Chi

She).

In early 1990s, affected by Pop, Cynical Realism and Political Pop arose as forms

of "unofficial art" in China, and Gaudy Art also developed of the creative impulses

of those art movements. During the late twentieth century, while accepting the

influence of Western culture, China persistently sought its own path. Which parts

of Western culture should China accept, and which parts of Chinese culture

should she reject? In the process of accepting contemporary Western culture,

how does one “separate the wheat from the chaff”? For more than a century now,

this has been an incessant debate among Chinese intellectuals and theorists. In


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some ways, Dada brought the series of questions into China, making people to

face the fact that the whole social system began to be challenged under the

influence of the art movements.

Conclusion In sum, Zen had undergone a century to be spread from the East to West, and

eventually affected the East from West, to a large extent it influenced the

development of contemporary art, creating a thinking model for the masses with

collective trauma after World War II to regain freedom and hope, especially for

Western contemporary art to obtain a new perspective on artistic creation.

Take the United States for example, in the early 20th century Abstract art in the

US began to integrate Eastern artistic conception into its expression, just like

Abstract Expressionism directly drew on the brush stroke and technique of East,

but only similar in form. However, during the 1950s when the avant-‐garde

artists in the United States started to extensively contact with Eastern

philosophy and religious thought, they began a profound evolution, which led the

artistic creativity and vitality after the 1960s, making the United States become

the world leader of contemporary art.

In the process of my research, I found it could be such a valuable point, which

was the reason that I chose Beuys and Hsieh’s performance art in New York as

two significant examples in this paper. However, it is noteworthy that, Zen did

not sway Western art from then on, since ancient ages East and West were

different in the national character and cultural context, therefore it was

impossible to be convergence in each development. Nevertheless, since the

history has produced the intersection of the opposite, at least it indicated that

the division between human cultures could still grow freedom beyond

boundaries.

This research paper is a study and argument that established on the timeline,

explaining how the West and the East interrelate, and what the feedback is

afterwards. In general, it helps to collect my specific concerns of art. Personally,

through better understanding of past records, as well as reflection on nowadays

practice, the outcome will contribute to keep my sense of perspective, which is

the extension of my approach.


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Photograph Figure 1: Jiaqi Huang, (2015), Ai Weiwei and blanket, London Figure 2: John Cage and D.T. Suzuki. (1962). [image] Available at: http://www.yishushijie.com/sesquiton/article/?type=detail&id=84 [Accessed 4 Oct. 2015]. Figure 3: Fifty new copies of the Wall Street Journal were added to the closed space, which the coyote acknowledged by urinating on them. (1974). [image] Available at: http://www.kidsofdada.com/blogs/magazine/35963521-‐joseph-‐beuys-‐i-‐like-‐america-‐and-‐america-‐likes-‐me [Accessed 8 Oct. 2015]. Figure 4: Social Sculpture: Beuys in China. (2013). [image] Available at: http://news.artron.net/20140422/n594643.html [Accessed 1 Oct. 2015]. Figure 5: Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, (1979). Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1978 – 1979 Life image. [image] Available at: http://theculturetrip.com/north-‐america/usa/new-‐york/articles/tehching-‐hsieh-‐when-‐life-‐becomes-‐a-‐performance/ [Accessed 2 Oct. 2015]. Figure 6: The New York Times, (2009). Tehching Hsieh on Day 1, left, and Day 365, locked up for art. [image] Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/arts/design/19perf.html [Accessed 4 Oct. 2015]. Figure 7: paper-‐cut propaganda posters. (n.d.). [image] Available at: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/13443 [Accessed 10 Oct. 2015]. Figure 8: Huang, Y. (1987). Putting Herbert Reed s Concise History of Painting, and Li Yu s Concise History of Chinese Painting into Washing Machine for Two Minutes. [image] Available at: https://quizlet.com/5199153/361-‐flash-‐cards/ [Accessed 7 Oct. 2015].

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