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Abstract
The Chinese Character Simplification Programme of 1955–1957 that remains a national standard by force of law in the People’s Republic of China, not only degraded the aesthetic properties of the Chinese written character, but also hindered literacy by means of a haphazard formal reduction of the number of strokes, and by eliminating two-thirds of characters from the lexicon of those allowed for publication. In The Chinese Version painting series by Jia (b.1979), the artist arranges Chinese characters according to formal rather than semantic criteria, in order to generate by means of their juxtaposition, abstract or figurative patterns. Each character may retain its individual meaning, but not its function as a sequential syntagm. This strategy invests the characters with a formal aspect to ‘return’ that which was mutilated by the Simplification Programme. As the Simplification Programme’s formal changes ended characters’ role as image-signs, the artist’s choice to present each work as a painting alludes to their lost image capacity while appearing to imitate the outward aspect of printed characters, thereby implicitly turning against itself the pretext of character simplification for the sake of efficiency.
Notes
1. The artist’s full statement on her Chinese character works, The Chinese Version is available online (Jia, Citation2012). In Chinese epistemology, the idea that to fix a linguistic term for something is a precondition for understanding, and, by extension, the understanding of its appropriate role in society, has a long tradition that dates to Confucius’s own comments on ‘the Rectification of Names’ (正名zheng ming) in Analects 論語Lun yu Book 3, Chapter 3 (Muller, Citation1990/2016). Since the paradigmatic Neo-Confucian philosopher, Zhu Xi (朱熹) (1130–1200), incorporated the Analects into the canon of texts for the Imperial Examinations, this view pervaded Chinese thought through the twentieth century. In the West, this ‘language first’ criterion is a staple of twentieth century analytic philosophy enunciated in Frege and Wittgenstein and substantiated by Dummett e.g. ‘We have seen that it was both natural and correct for Frege, in extending the distinction between sense and reference [Sinn and Bedeutung] from names and expressions of other kinds, to take truth-values to be the referents of sentences’ (Dummett, Citation1973, p. 644). In continental philosophy, Gadamer is perhaps the most authoritative exponent of the view that understanding presupposes mediation through language (Gadamer; Weinsheimer and Marshall, trans., Citation2004, p. 545).
2. Since 1947, Bebelplatz.
3. ‘Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen’ (Heine, reprint Citation2012). There were three literary works by Heine entitled Almansor. This line derives from the tragedy he wrote, which premiered at the Nationaltheater Braunschweig in 1823.
4. In order to mark its 75th anniversary in 2012, Haus der Kunst opened what Okwui Enwezor has called ‘a reflexive exhibition’ precisely to explore this aspect of the history of the institution. Enwezor: ‘I am of the opinion – as my predecessors Christoph Vitali and Chris Dercon were – that we absolutely have to not only show this material, we also have to properly contextualize it, we have to work towards defetishizing it, we have to work towards demystifying it’ (e-flux, Citation2011).
5. I.e. any culture that was alien to the Socialist–Realist orthodoxy that produced works of the sort that so disappointed Engels, the enthusiastic fan of Balzac (Marx & Engels, Citation1888).
6. Since Vladimir Putin’s first election victory in April 2000, besides the persecution of Pussy Riot and its associated art collective, Voina – a campaign that has received international attention – museum directors Yuri Samodurov and Ludmila Vasilovskaia were arrested and charged in 2003 for organising an art exhibition at the Sakharov Museum; they were convicted in 2005. Together with another colleague, Andrei Yerofeev, Samodurov was convicted once again in 2010 for organising an art exhibition. The arrest of Pussy Riot members in 2012 that would result in their imprisonment was the culmination of a long campaign of suppression of their associated group, Voina, against which at least a dozen criminal indictments have been filed (Amnesty International, Citation2013).
7. This was in fact the fourth time that hostile elements had attempted to destroy the sculptures since the thirteenth century.
8. The lesson of Adorno and Horkheimer who coined the term ‘The Culture Industry’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment first published in 1944, reveals that Western liberal democracies that replaced the most appalling tyrants, and which generally refer to themselves as ‘free societies’ are not immune to conditions inimical to culture because, according to the authors, it is inherent in capitalist societies to subsume artistic production and dissemination with a domination that their legislative freedoms belie. Despite these liabilities, such a condition is altogether different from the organised programmes of cultural destruction of totalitarian regimes, and therefore, while lamentable, does not merit comparison with them on equal terms (Horkheimer & Adorno; Jephcott, trans., Citation2002).
9. As good a brief summary as any, of the immense literature on this subject in Chinese and Western languages, is Richard King’s brief characterisation of the period in his introduction to Oxford Bibliographies’ Revolutionary Literature Under Mao: The effect of mercurial and often vindictive policy changes on writers and artists could be devastating: the Anti-Rightist campaign of the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of Mao’s last decade (1966–1976) saw the persecution of many of the nation’s leading cultural figures; virtually no writer or artist had an uninterrupted career. Contemporary art as we currently understand the term, did not exist in China during this time. Art was limited to official socialist realism of a sort that would be familiar to those who follow current artistic production in the DPRK (King, Citation2014).
10. Jia, Citation2012.
11. There are a variety of reasons why the language reforms instituted by Atatürk (1881–1938) in Turkey are not properly analogous to those of Mao in China. Atatürk began by replacing one alphabet with another. The Perso-Arabic alphabet that had long been in use in the Ottoman Empire was neither an indigenous development, nor well suited to rendering the sounds of Turkic languages. The Ottoman Empire had a long tradition of non-Muslim subjects who wrote Ottoman Turkish in their own scripts, whether Armenian, Hebrew, Greek or Latin. Atatürk’s reforms did not reduce the lexicon of publishable words; in many respects, it expanded it (Zürcher, Citation2004).
12. Bernhard Karlgren (1889–1978), the great Swedish scholar of Chinese historical linguistics, called these word families, a rough translation of the Chinese term同源詞 (tong yuan ci) (also translated as cognates) (Karlgren, Citation1933).
13. Many lists of data show a Hong Kong average of 93.5–96.9% for males – which places Hong Kong two points below the current mainland average, but the sources of these figures are drawn from census data of 2002 versus more current data from the People’s Republic, and therefore are not comparable. Even taking into account this incongruity, the Hong Kong data is skewed downwards because of a comparatively larger percentage of foreign residents who are not literate in Chinese. In Taiwan, where traditional characters are the norm, combined literacy rates are 99.99% (Ministry of Education, Citation2012).
14. The poverty of the officially permitted vocabulary of this period is a condition from which even the comparatively ‘liberal’ current status quo has yet adequately to recover. Endymion Wilkinson, whose Chinese History: A Manual had become a standard even before its substantial enlargement for the 2012 edition, traces the history of Chinese dictionaries of potential use to scholars. He notes that the Kangxi Dictionary kangxi zidian康熙字典 of 1716 contained 47,035 characters of which approximately 20,000 were variants. (The zhonghua da cidian中華大字典of 1915 had even more characters.) Subtracting graphic variants from the total, yields approximately 27,000 characters. Notably, the revision of this work that was released in the early 50s, prior to the Simplification Programme, (The New Chinese Character Dictionary (xinhua zidian 新華字典)) was so severely restricted that its 1965 revision actually was printed but not allowed to be released. In 1970, Zhou Enlai saved it from oblivion as successive revisions censored politically sensitive terms. But even so, the practical availability of a comprehensive dictionary was, for the general student population, close to non-existent as many living scholars well recall (Wilkinson, Citation2000). Even if it were available, it would have been of little use, since official publishing guidelines restricted character use to a vocabulary of less than one third of Chinese characters, a linguistic restriction that was unprecedented in modern times in its ambition not only to suppress the content of published discourse, but the very language in which content might be expressed. This was implemented by the List of Chinese Character Forms for General Printing of 1964 (with 6196 characters), and the List of Generally Used Characters in Modern Chinese (7000 characters) published as late as 1988 and still in force (Yin, Citation2006).
15. Clearly, other traditions practice calligraphy, but, as the patient reader is bound to see, the distinctive properties of Chinese characters as pictographic and ideographic elements allow for aesthetic potentials that simply are not possible in languages written with alphabets or syllabaries.
16. Consistent with its propagandistic aim, character simplification and vocabulary limitation advance (1), severely compromise (2) and effectively does away with (3). The Chinese Version series, on the other hand, does away with (1), uses (2) in order to generate an aesthetic tension and transforms (3).
17. This title for the series has a double meaning that is meant to refer both to The Chinese Version [of cultural destruction specific to government mandated formal character simplification and limitation of vocabulary] and The Chinese Version [of counteracting such acts through artistic means].
18. Given the intrinsically pictographic and ideographic properties of Chinese characters, their peculiar recent history, and the exclusion of semantic relations in order to affect the images in the artist’s arrangements of them, the theoretical aspect of The Chinese Version has little in common with Futurist typography or Western concrete poetry. What is more, in The Chinese Version the typographical arrangement of words is not eccentric, but most often respects the vertical and horizontal arrangement of standard text.
19. The most authoritative treatment of the Conceptual Art of this period remains that of Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions’ October, Vol. 55 (Winter, 1990), pp. 105–143. At the outset of his essay, Buchloh characterises Conceptual Art of the period (i.e. that of artists Seth Siegelaub, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth) as ‘the most rigorous elimination of visuality and traditional definitions of representation’ (Buchloh, Citation1990, p. 107).
20. Hung (Citation2006, pp. 1–23).
21. Learned in conversation with the artist, winter, 2013.