The Great Economic Retreat: New Images of Urban China
Zhengshengtian
In 2003, the Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen made a 16mm silent colour-film, Factory, in which female textile workers were invited to return to their former workplace, the Lien Fu Garment Factory, which had been closed and abandoned seven years earlier. In his artist’s statement for the 5thth Shanghai Biennale, in which as a co-curator I had invited him to participate, Chen noted: “In places all over the world, many labourers have had similar experiences—a production relationship between the ‘transplanted’ and the ’untransplanted’. In order to find low priced labour, factories constantly shift locales. But after being abandoned, unemployed workers have no choice but to linger on in the same place. They cannot move.”
In the late 1990s, hundreds of thousands of factories shifted from one side of the Taiwan Strait to the order. In the 1980s, for example, an electronic information industry had rapidly developed in Taiwan, composed mostly of processing and assembling plants. The total gross output value of this industry reached $74.7 billion USD in 2001. But it faced the same beleaguered situation as other Taiwan industries at the end of the last century. In their search for lower operating and production costs, many factories rushed to relocate in mainland China, especially to Dongguan, a small town in the Pearl River Delta. The scope of this shift was tremendous. In a few years, this sleepy town became one of the most important centres in the world for production and assembly factories. It was said: If there is a traffic jam between Dongguan and Shenzhen or Hong Kong, the price of computer in the international market will rise.
While the workers of the Lien Fu factory were desperately waiting for compensation that never arrived, millions of mainland Chinese labourers from all over the country congregated in Dongguan and surrounding towns to take up their new jobs. According to China’s Fifth National Census, from 1990 to 2000 the population of Dongguan increased from less than 2 million to 6.44 million, making it the third largest city in Dongguan province, after Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Almost five million of its residents are temporary, eighty percent of the whole population. These anonymous migrant workers have produced more than three hundred billion RMB to add to China’s GDP every year and put Dongguan on the map of the global economy.
However, the decrease of Dongguan’s processing industry accelerated with almost the same speed as its increase. After 2007, more and more factories in the Pearl River Delta closed their operations owing to an increase in labour, land, and environmental protection costs. The general decline in the world’s economy rubbed salt into business owners’ wounds and forced them to abandon their facilities once again as it had happened a decade earlier in Taiwan. It was reported that more than one thousand shoe factories closed in the area last year. Some shut literally overnight, without notice and without paying their dues. The owners vanished for good, and countless unemployed workers were driven to the brink of desperation.
In 2007, a young man with a large Hasselblad camera and tripod appeared in the industrial ruins of Dongguan. Jin Jiangbo, a Shanghai based conceptual artist, took many photographs of the empty workshops, abandoned warehouses, and deserted dormitories, all looking like a horrifying war zone or ghost town. A selection of these photographs was exhibited at the Nanjing Biennale and the Second ShContemporary Art Fair in 2008 under the title The Great Economic Retreat (Jinji Da Chetui).
Jin Jiangbo was born in Zhejiang Province, China, in 1972. In the same year, Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni visited China and made his controversial three-and-a-half-hour long film Chung Kuo (China). Antonioni said: “I went to China not in order to know it but to have a look and to record what was passing in front of my eyes.” The scenes passing in front of his eyes obviously did not please Chinese leaders. The film was criticized as having “a vicious motive [and] despicable tricks” and was banned in China. Thirty-five years later, Jin Jiangbo decided to record what was passing in front of his eyes with his digital equipment. The artist explained in an interview: I prefer to use photography to record the complexity and bare reality of this world directly because it is more natural and less virtual than interactive modes.”
Jin Jiangbo has gained international recognition for his interactive installations. In terms of subject matter, he has always been interested in China’s role in the global context. His early installations China Tyrannosaurus (2005), The Third Eye (2005) and The Phantom of Time (2006), focused on issues related to globalization, international politics, and cultural dialogue. In 2005, I invited Jin Jiangbo to participate in an exhibition I curated for the Toronto International Art Fair. The title of the show, Art Rising, was adapted from a headline of the national newspaper The Globe and Mail for its special edition “China Rising” (Zhongguo Jueqi). Jin Jiangbo made a new version of his multimedia installation The Third Eye, which connected audiences from both Toronto and Shanghai by using camcorders and the internet in the form of a well. I called it “one of the most unusual and playful projects” and commented: “I think this energy will continue as long as Chinese society continues to experience one of the most invigorating social and economic experiments in modern history.”
Jin Jiangbo has remained true to his mission of being on the front line. As of 2007, he took time to study the small commodity market in China, especially Yiwu, an inland city three hundred kilometers south of Shanghai, in Zhejiang province. According to a report prepared by the United Nations, the World Bank, and Morgan Stanley, Yiwu is the largest small commodity market in the world. Twenty years ago, the town had only three narrow streets in a three-square-kilometer area. Now there are twenty-five thousand factories manufacturing and supplying about four hundred thousand varieties of commodities with the lowest price to the global market. More than one thousand containers leave Yiwu every day for two hundred destinations around the world.
Jin Jiangbo conducted field research on Yiwu’s industrial production: What proportion of the commodities being produced by family businesses meets the product quality criteria? Who are those manufacturers? Is the right of intellectual properties respected? How is industrial waste treated in the light of environmental problems? These questions sound like a survey for a social studies paper, but the output of Jin Jiangbo’s investigation was in fact a body of fascinating photographs. He captured the scenes that reflect the bizarre look of the market: In contrast to the massive area and the loads of merchandise visible in the photographs, there are almost no shoppers around. The market appears dead in daylight, and comes to life in the evening only because the rental costs are lower. Signs such as “Reliable,” “Pollution-free meat,” and “Green pure vegetables” are visible everywhere due to an awareness of poisoned products and counterfeit commodities. This artist has called it a “de-naturalized market.” It is the first time that Jin Jiangbo has used photography as a medium.
Susan Sontag wrote in her commentary on Antonioni’s Chung Kuo: “Photography does not simply reproduce the real, it recycles it—a key procedure of a modern society. In the form of photographic images, things and events are put into new users, assigned new meanings, which go beyond the distinctions between the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, the useful and the useless, good taste and bad.” Jin Jiangbo’s view of photography is definitely not merely subjective. As critic Yang Xiaoyan put it, his “subversive on-site photography” is the artist’s “visualized political practice.”
Jin Jiangbo’s next photographic project provided further evidence of the artist’s active role in intervening in life. Later in 2007, he travelled to Dongguan when he heard that a large number of foreign enterprises’ closed down not long before. “The sustained growth power and the advantages to foreign trade by exporting low-cost workforce and products have passed their prime due to the double blows of the depreciation of the U.S. dollar and the revaluation of the RMB,” as the artist observed. “Moreover, the microeconomic adjustment measures for economic structure may bring great change to the overall industry chain. For instance, the issuing of a new labour law resulted in the wide retreat of a number of foreign-funded enterprises in Dongguan city, with ten thousand foreign-invested enterprises withdrawing from Guangdong province within only one year. Though this is regional on the surface, it has exerted sweeping impact on China’s overall economy, which strongly reflects the internal problems long rooted in the economic structure. In light of this situation, I went to excavate and record it, and managed to release the ‘denaturalized times scenery’ with panoramic views through the window of art in order to find out the strengths of modern art.”
Jin Jiangbo’s use of the panoramic view accurately reflects the width and depth of this great economic disaster. The vastness of the working spaces beside small traces of a hasty departure—a cup, a fire extinguisher, or a slogan on a broken sign—provide the shocking contrasts of the tragic moment. Looking at this almost surreal scene, one is compelled to raise a simple question: what went wrong? Besides wide-angle large scale photographs, Jin Jiangbo plans to make an installation in the future that includes many articles he collected on the sites while he was shooting as well as videos of the artist’s interviews and conversations with Chinese economists and bankers. He also plans to do some surveys on the internet. Jin Jiangbo says:” The concern about China’s reality could be meticulous and specific, and powerful as well. Many elements of Chinese society are beyond the western experience and boast a unique modernity with Chinese characteristics, and that is the real modern landscape.
The real modern landscape that Jin Jiangbo has captured, a new page of the astonishing and sometimes catastrophic transformation of China’s urban life, is brought to our attention. Does the artist “photography for the purpose of establishing evidence,” as Walter Benjamin indicated? Without doubt, Jin Jiangbo’s The Great Economic Retreat is an extraordinary practice in what has become nowadays a money-and market-oriented Chinese contemporary art scene. The political significance of Jin Jiangbo’s images may help us to re-examine the fundamental role of contemporary art today in China and encourage a revitalization of the notion of social practice in art that was, in the twentieth century, among the most important contributions to contemporary art in China.
经济大撤退：城市中国的新气象
郑胜天
2003年，台湾艺术家陈界仁创作了一幅16毫米无声彩色胶片作品--工厂，在那里，一些妇女手工纺织工人被邀请到他们之前工作的地方，Lien Fu Garment Factory工厂7年前已经被关闭和荒废了。在第5届上海双年展上，作为合作策展人，我也邀请了Chen参加这次展览。她曾说：在全世界各国各地，很多劳动者都面临同样的经历----一种转移或非转移的生产关系。为了寻找更为廉价的劳动力，工厂会频繁转换场所。工厂被放弃后，那些失业的工人毫无选择，只能停留在原地方，他们不能走。
20世纪90年代晚期，成千上万的工厂台湾海峡的一角转移到了另一个地方。20世纪80年代，电子信息业在台湾得到了迅猛的发展，形成了很多加工装配的工厂。在2001年，这一行业的总长值达到了747亿美元。但在20世纪末期，还是出现了和台湾其他企业同样的被困情况。在他们寻求更为低价的管理和生产成本时，很多工厂蜂拥而至，搬迁到中国大陆，特别是东莞，珠江三角洲上的一个小镇。此次迁移的范围很大。几年内，这个沉睡小镇的加工装配工厂变成了世界重要基地之一。据说，如果东莞与深圳，或是香港出现交通堵塞情况，那么国际市场的电脑价格将会上涨。
当Lien Fu工厂的这些工人在绝望地等待着迟迟没有到来的赔偿，来自中国大陆的成千上万的工人又聚集到东莞，并在这个城市周围开始寻找他们的新工作。通过中国第五次全国人口普查，1990到2000，东莞的人口从200亿上升到644万，使它一跃成为广东第三大城市，仅次于广州和深圳。然而，几乎有500万人口是暂住性质的，占东莞总人口的80%，这些匿名外地迁入的劳动者每年给中国的国内生产总值带来了3000万的人民币的收入，同时，也大大提升了东莞在全球经济中的地位。
然而，东莞的加工业的萧条的速度也和它当时发展的速度一样。然而，2007年后，珠江三角洲上越来越多的工厂由于劳动力、土地和环保成本的增加而倒闭了。世界经济形势的普遍下降给商人带来了很大的灾难，他们像十多年前台湾出现的情况，被迫他们再次荒弃了那么设备设施。据报道，去年在东莞有将近1000家鞋厂倒闭了。有些是一夜间就倒闭了，没有任何迹象，也没有支付工人的任何费用。工厂主一个个都消失了，而无数失业工人被迫到了绝望的边缘。
2007年，有一个人独自扛着Hasselblad相机和三脚架出现在东莞工业废墟现场，他就是金江波，主要活动于上海的一位概念艺术家。他拍摄了很多被废弃的工厂、仓库和宿舍作品，这些地方看上去就像是恐怖的战争地带和被废弃的城镇。这一系列的部分作品，曾参加了南京双年展，2008第二届上海当代艺术节，作品名为：经济大撤退。
金江波，1972年出生于中国浙江。同年，意大利电影制片人Michelangelo Antonioni 访问中国，并且制作了一部长达3个半小时的有争议的电影：Chung Kuo（中国）。Antonioni说：我来中国，并不是为了了解它，，而是为了记录出现在我眼前的一切。然而这些出现在他眼前的并没有取悦到中国的领导者们。这部电影被批评为带有“险恶动机”、“卑劣手法”，因此在中国遭到了禁播。35年之后，金江波决定用他的数码设备来记录他眼前所出现的一切。艺术家在采访中说：我更喜欢通过摄影来直接记录这个世界的复杂性和当代性，因为它比起互动的方式，感觉更为自然，也少了些虚拟。
金江波的互动装置作品已经赢得了国际认可。单从题材拉看，他一直以来就对全球环境下的中国角色比较感兴趣。他的早期装置作品“中国暴龙”（2005）、“第三只眼”（2005）以及“时间幻影”（2006），这些作品主体都是关于全球化、国际政治和文化交流对话的。2005年，金江波应我的邀请，参加了我作为策展人的多伦多国际艺术节。这个作品名为“艺术崛起”，曾被国内报纸“全球与通信”所接受，因为它是中国崛起的一个特殊表现形式。金江波创作了他新颖的多媒体装置作品“第三只眼”，这个作品主要是通过摄像机和互联网，以一口井的形式来把多伦多和上海两地的观众联系起来。我称它为“最不平常及最有趣的一些工程”并且评论到：我认为这种力量将会延续下去，只要中国社会能继续去尝试现代史下最具活力的社会和经济的各种试验。
然而站在这个水平线上，金江波已经证实了他的使命是正确的。正如在2007年，他花了很多时间来研究中国的小商品市场，特别是在浙江的义乌，这个距离上海南部仅有300多千米的一个内陆城市。通过来自美国的媒体、世界银行、摩根史坦利的记载和报道，义乌是世界上最大的小商品市场。20年前，这个小镇在一个3平米的区域只有3条狭窄的街道。现在，这里有近25000座工厂，制造并以最低的价格向全球各国供应着400000余种商品。而且，每天都有近1000只集装箱离开义乌到达世界200多个国家目的地。
金江波对义乌的工业生产领域展开了调研：家庭式生产车间的生产的产品有多是符合产品质量原则的？谁是这些产品的制造商？知识财产是否应该受到尊重？鉴于环境保护的政策，他们又是如何处理那些工业废弃物？这些问题听起来像是一篇社会研究论文的一项调查，但事实上，金江波展开研究的结果则是这些繁华热闹场面的主要部分。他捕捉到了繁华市场背后异乎寻常的现场：与摄影作品中大规模的经营场所和商品的装卸场面相比，周围似乎少了些店主。市场在白天通常是冷清的，只有到了晚上才会是一片繁忙的景象，仅是因为那时租金成本低。类似“可靠的”、“无公害猪肉”、“绿色蔬菜”这类标记随处可见，因为大家对有害产品和冒牌货都有很强的意识。这位艺术家称它为“非自然化市场”。这也是金江波第一次把摄影作为一种媒体。
Susan Sontag 对Antonioni的作品“中国”曾评论到：摄影并不是简单的现实再现，而是让人回想现实----现代社会的一个关键。在摄影图片这一形式上，事物和事实被放在一个全新的环境里讨论，而且也赋予了新的涵义，它已经超越了美与丑、正确与错误、有用与无用、好与坏的区别。金江波摄影的角度并不仅是主观的。正如评论家杨小燕所说的，他的颠覆现场摄影是艺术家可视化的政治实践。
金江波接下来的摄影项目进一步证实了介入生活中艺术家的积极作用。2007年末，当他听到不久前在东莞有很多外资企业倒闭，他一人前往了东莞现场。正如艺术家所观察到的，由于人民币的贬值和美元的升值双重压力，持续增长的动力和通过输出廉价劳动力和产品的外贸优势已经超出了它的黄金时期。而且，经济结构的微观调整方案可能会对整个工业链带来很大的变化。例如，东莞的大量外资企业倒闭所带来的新劳动法问题，从而导致了仅在一年内，广东就有10000家外资企业撤离。虽然从表面上看，只是区域性的，但这对中国的整体经济产生了重大影响，同时，也强烈地反映出了根植于经济结构的内部问题。鉴于此，我尝试去发现并记录下来，用全景式的方式，通过艺术的平台来公布这个所谓的非自然化的时代风景，希望能找出现代艺术的力量。
金江波的全景式方法确切地反映出了这次经济危机的广度和深度。巨大的工厂车间，除了一些仓促离开的痕迹外，还有就是一些空杯子，灭火器，以及一些破碎的横幅标记，给人一种震惊的凄凉的场面。看看这幅超现实的场景，人们不禁要问：这是怎么了？除了大画幅的摄影照片，金江波计划在将来做个装置，里面会有他在现场拍摄收集的很多文章和报道，以及艺术家和中国经济学家、银行家的采访和对话的视频内容。他也打算在互联网上开展一些调查。金江波说：“对中国现实的观察将会是详细和具体的，同样也会是富有影响力的。中国社会的很多元素都超越了西方的经验，并且夸大了独特的具有中国特色的现代性，那或许就是真正的现代场景。
金江波所捕捉到的真正的现代场景，令人惊奇的又是富有灾难性的中国城市生活新篇章，它现在已经引起了我们的注意。艺术家的“摄影是为了寻找证据的目的”，是否正如沃尔特·本杰明所说的。毫无疑问，金江波的作品“经济大撤退”是一次不平凡的实践经历，在某方面上已经成为以金钱为市场导向的中国当代艺术现场。金江波作品的政治重要性在于可以帮助我们重新审阅当今中国当代艺术的基本的角色，并且鼓励我们进行艺术社会实践，那也就是在20世纪，对中国当代艺术最重要的贡献。
评论文章