Wang Di and Mao-era architecture

text / Yin Jinan

Architecture always employs its historical presence to construct our landscapes, and the “objectivity” of architecture is not always reflected in its mere functionality. As a historical relic itself, it already is the target of every observer’s objectivity; even if the person is imaginative, architecture remains a realistic departure point for the machinations of just such a person.

I often think: what would it be like were a historian or a sociologist to take up a camera and photograph architecture as a historical entity? Undoubtedly, the camera is a more “objective” tool then other recording methods, and this is precisely what historians and sociologists strive for––though none of them are capable.

Wang Di has photographed some of Beijing’s structures. These buildings have their own history; they were all built in Mao’s era, and the spirit and culture of Mao Zedong’s era are embodied within them. From them we garner a visual sense of people in the Mao-era, their class concepts and their historical relation to these buildings. Wang Di’s motivation to photograph these buildings is derived from his personal experiences growing up as well as a special fondness for them. Through his photographic process he has gradually merged into the world of sociological methodology and perspective with these historic buildings that bear the weight of Mao-era cultural ideology with their physical form, and they are dying off––becoming submerged in the phenomenal progress of a developmental wave. In truth, not only the Beijing of emperors is disappearing, but the Beijing Mao created is departing as well. This fact is undoubtedly determined from a macro perspective of cultural relics and history.

The Maoist era Beijing that Wang Di was raised in was not of his choosing, it was an inevitable condition, predetermined, and even less can we erase it in the future. For this reason, the collectivist-socialist and historical nature of such a background are extremely obvious. This Soviet-influenced Chinese architecture was once closely related to early Socialist practice. It embodies the most archetypal modes of Chinese ideology of the 1950s and ‘60s.

In the 1980s many from the young generation struggled to extricate themselves from the desires that belonged to this cultural background. Chinese society suddenly found itself in a so-called social revolution. Firstly, the power to deny stemmed from discrepancies found in the cultural domain, at the time it was easiest to find the spirit of freedom in foreign culture. What followed was the transcendence of the collectivism that was a result of political inertia. In that era Wang Di, just as Cui Jian, fell in love with rock and roll music. The rock and roll of China in the ‘80s wasn’t really music, but a movement of freedom and rebellion. It was also a collective movement, but its goal was to move towards individualism. The result of freedom and rebellion is a kind of elitist culture (which in actuality is highly political), not pop culture, and even less was it commercial.

Commercialism in China during the ‘90s was endowed with continuously maturing elements of freedom, and the architecture of this new culture continues to rewrite the history of Mao’s Beijing, as well as of the even earlier historical era of the ancient emperors. Beijing no longer possesses her eternal surroundings, but is instead subject to endlessly changing scenery. In the process of change, not only is old culture disappearing along with the artifacts, portions of our more recent history are disappearing as well (including some intangible cultural remnants of the ‘90s). In the ‘90s Wang Di became a professional musician, his music also imported the cultural trends that would rewrite modern China.

Chinese artists born in the ‘60s found their individualistic foundation through a process of narrating tales of their maturation. This foundation is built upon the backdrop provided by the Mao era––rebelling against these surroundings is their story of their youth. They have definite traces of a biographical quality. The artists of this era complied with the tide of modernity, they were radical once upon a time.

From an onlooker’s perspective, the process of modernization is a new tale of collectivity––the setting of this story is China. The story itself is a broad account, but the bulk of its weight can be diluted with many personal stories (and within such a framework, we also cannot overlook personal stories). This is not at all a simple process, the collectivism of the modern era is rewriting that of Mao’s. Those stories of rebellion and those objects belonging to the radicals have become the most individualistic of cultural objects. The architecture of Mao’s era is disappearing, the very structures that defined such radicals; the objects of collective and personal memory are similarly disappearing. A world without a sea implies a world without boats.

As a critic, I am more interested in whether or not the Beijing that is leaving is the Beijing that belonged to the common people––the Beijing that Wang Di knew. This Beijing has forever been his life’s backdrop and his spiritual abode. I hope that his camera is able to capture the “subjectivity” that the historian and the sociologist think so little of.

Wang Di’s subjectivity and his individuality are rooted in the fact that he has awakened to the fear that accompanies this vanishing architecture and its history, it was his foreboding premonition of such extinction that led him to pick up his camera. This architecture is a material object, and yet not simply a material object at all. As scholars are mourning the decline of the emperor’s Beijing, Wang Di is focused on the even faster disappearance of Mao’s Beijing. He wants to tell the world that inside these Mao-era architectural wonders that are currently being demolished resides not only the spirit of Mao Zedong and his people, but more importantly, therein lies the “ego” of the common people––and Wang Di’s personal world.

Wednesday, February 18, 2008
Paris, besides the Seine River

Image and essay are both included in Ego / Structure * Red Dwellings published by Timezone 8 and Xin Beijing Gallery, March 2008