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| Production in the World of Object Images |
| By Qiu Anxiong |
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Editorial Note: ArtZineChina is running a series of articles about a dispute which arose between a French artist (who is not named here) and a group of Chinese artists, led by Qiu Anxiong, the Shanghai based video artist. As part of an exhibition that Qiu Anxiong created as a commentary on the dispute, he wrote the following essay, a spirited attack on art and capitalism -- and the decline in values.
 t’s a show about production. It stemmed not from an academic concern but from a conflict we had been trapped in. To wriggle out of the predicament we had to look for solutions, and finally we decided to create a show.
This show has provided us with an opportunity to re-examine our own situations and to explore the relations between the world and us.
 A world was brought from the other shore to us by a dog; the world was wonderfully depicted: on a world-renowned beach in the Mediterranean Sea, there are numerous world-celebrated cool boys, cute girls and Big Wigs, who are eye-catching and trend-leading heavyweights. Such a distant world would relate to us, for a dog, one that we produced, would be present at this world-famous gathering and enjoy intimacy with the group and even end up as items in their homes.
Miraculously, this dog had linked two totally unrelated worlds together. It’s a soul hailing from the opposite shore, acquiring countless material fleshes and returning to where it’s from and ultimately achieving immortality.
These two worlds the dog has linked together are mutually false images. We know countless descriptions about the West and enjoy an abundance of knowledge, ideas, images, and voices from the West, all of which have been the most genuine existence of the West to us, even more genuine than the distant real-life Western world. The West in our mind is probably a world depicted only in a few simple words and pictures; only this dog remains a sole material entity in these two worlds, and it’s also a witness to the actual existence of these two worlds.
Our job is to produce, which is material and technological. What we need to care about are L-iron, welding rod, woodwork board, wire netting, crossbars, gypsum, glass fiber reinforced plastics, red stuff, white stuff, mud pasting, die sinking, die line aligning, paper sanding, water sanding, polishing, burnishing, baking finish, etc. we’re required to be accurate, meticulous, graceful, neat and tidy, non-elaborative and non-creative. And then this dog could secure a flawless fleshy body that matches its soul.
 This should have been a perfect picture, and we would have played an insignificant role in it, being only background viewers we were supposed to be neglected. This role-distinctive picture should have been very harmonious and we’d tried hard to finish this job and serve that great and distant gathering.
Then one day, such a harmonious picture was suddenly shattered, like a beautiful background curtain on the stage was torn apart, exposing the cold and ugly controlling gadgets on the backstage. How had we gotten trapped in this predicament? When had we stepped onto the surface dust of the hanging cover over the pitfall unaware? When had we wandered into the labyrinth while still watching scenes? Is the entire world actually a huge pitfall and everyone has fallen into the abyss without exception? We have no idea even now that the concealed is perhaps no truth; when turning back to look for some traces we could only find a mess of entangled narrative fragments.
When we finished most of the ordered pieces, the sub contractor took a small few of them and sent them to that wonderful beach but said he wouldn’t take the rest of the dogs; of course he also refused us the rest of the pay. However, workers’ wage, workshop rent and borrowed money for making dogs were all on the waiting list; our contract also got lost mysteriously in the last round of negotiations. Should we hand out those left over dogs to workers and tell them those are wages and overtime pay for their months of hard work from 8 in the morning till 11 or 12 deep into night? Could we give out those dogs to the owner of the workshop and to friends who lent us the money and tell them these are the equivalent of rent for the workshop and borrowed money returned to them? What we encountered is quite common in China – day and night hard work couldn’t get paid and employers naturally have adequate excuses for their not paying.
 With labor disputes in China, employers have explicit supremacy over labors because they have advantages of wealth, more relations with authorities, more law consultants and stronger discourse power; foreign investors in China enjoy more preferential policies from all levels of governments and a seemingly inherent sense of superiority. In contrast, workers could only maintain a low level of living on their meager wages; they have no knowledge, no discourse power and no law consultants, for who would be law consultants for the poor? Labor enjoys no social security; laws targeted at labor protection exist in name only, for capital has bought over government officials long ago. When conflicts between labor and capital break out, police and military troops come not to deal with capitalists but serve as their hired thugs instead, whereas migrant workers who only want their delayed payment back, end up as trouble-making law-offenders.
Our workers are not making trouble; they’ve gotten used to have their payments delayed; they’re just waiting, clinging to a faint glimmer of hope that someday they will get their pay. It’s a universal situation – most migrant labors are bearing it patiently and they’re just waiting.
That capital accumulates wealth by exploiting labor’s surplus value has been expounded thoroughly in Marx’s “Das Kapital,” then, purpose of developed countries’ capital investment in China is absolutely clear – there’s abundance of cheaper labor here, and the Chinese government’s hunger for capital has cultivated a fertile soil for capital.
 In a day when capital could easily cross national borders and wield its power rampantly through financial means, or even inflicts heavy losses on several economies, the incident we suffered is insignificant. Like a red blood cell, our birth and death are of little concern to the whole situation (but, this cell could reflect the state of health of the whole organism). We’re only an operator of the production, if a cheaper, more qualified operator arrives, our qualification expires automatically and we’ll soon vanish out of the scene. In this spectacular scene, our existence counts for little, we’re only one of the cost factors of productive force – the labor force, and we’re surplus labor when unemployed. What happens to us is typical in the neo-colonial times, and our case epitomizes a fundamental conflict between transnational capitals and labors in third-world countries, that is, the conflict between capital’s pursuit of maximized profits and labor’s rights. Capital’s sympathy shown to labor remains a lip service; they complain of the squalid working condition that’s hazardous to workers’ health, yet when a neat and tidy workplace demands more money, their compassion for workers suddenly vanished to nowhere.
Developed countries have turned third-world countries into their workshops, exploiting cheap raw materials and labor, and variation of exchange rate to make huge profits; further, relying upon their capital supremacy and monopoly of advanced technology, they’ve seized hold of local markets step by step.
When exclaiming MADE IN CHINA is conquering the whole world, they don’t mention who are the biggest profit reapers; there’s no mention of the fact that 400 million shirts are needed to exchange for an Airbus jet, that an Iphone cost half-a-year’s wage of an ordinary Chinese worker. Instead, they point out, with seeming seriousness on opinion-swaying mass media, that politics in these countries is corrupt and dark, that people there have no human rights. However, if governments in these countries aren’t corrupt and dark, and safeguard human rights, where could they go to make huge money? Part of the profits they make owe its credit to the dark and corrupt politics there. They’re using double standards in ideology and economic policy, which are based on the same logic our compassionate sub-contractor has used. Then, they would never fight for the sake of justice; as is evidenced by a well-known remark: “There’s no permanent friend and there’s no permanent enemy; there’s only permanent interest.” Justice remains only a beautiful costume wrapped about the naked interest.
 Though it’s an old theme that capital has man alienated, it’s happening visibly around us in the past two decades in China; it’s changing our way of life and mode of thinking. Before the open-and-reform policy, Chinese live in an illusion world molded by communist ideology; they’re woken up as if from a dream after that policy but are soon plunged into another phantom world shaped by capital. When John Maynard Keynes declared that “consumption is the sole purpose and the only goal of any economic activity,” consumption-oriented production has become the major style of human activities in modern countries. Mass consumption serves as a virtual puppet for capital operations.
Generally, today’s capital has penetrated into every nook and cranny of human life; no matter with globalization, media information transmission, or with political game, cultural competition, or even with your sanitary napkins or condoms, there’s capital’s invisible hand operating behind.
The value system of a consumption society is composed of various sorts of indicators – GDP, CPI, share indexes, futures indexes, confidence indexes, so much and so forth, which have become a spiritual totem of modern societies. When indexes rise, all feel excited and successful; when indexes fall, all feel depressed and defeated. Such scenes are gradually proliferating from developed countries in America and Europe to every corner of the globe. When some Asian countries are complacently reveling in their procurement of admission tickets to modernization, capital immediately exposes to them its bloodsucking nature, whether it’s financial robbing or military strike, all are the will of capital. The existence in modern societies turns into a prevalent development and competition panic; everyone fears lagging behind and all desire to rise as a winner in the world of object images; whereas the late-comers in this world always play a passive and defeated role, feeling at a loss what to do, because rules are constantly revised and they’re kept in the dark, and worse, they’re deprived of the rights to make rules.
A consumption-oriented production style has divorced the logical relationship of production meeting demand; instead, it creates demand to prod production. Demand creation means to issue fashion trends through mass media, and it comes in endless fresh styles. As a result, today media industry has become so highly developed, and capital’s demand and control for media have become unprecedentedly intense. Control of media means control of market, and control of market means control of wealth. Then, capital has built up a world of object images, which are now guiding our life; our whole life is to work and consume, and to work is to involve in the production of object images, to consume is to live through leisure time in a style molded by these images. Shopping, cosmetic surgery, fitness building, house refurbishing, traveling, holidays at the beach, provocative TV programs, rumors of celebrities, there’s always a media telling you all these and informing you what are the most interesting and fashionable. However, all these are soon to be forgotten, for every day there’s something new.
Today’s smartest dress styles will soon be outdated; today’s most admired stars are quickly targeted by gossip groups, and all their flaws and defects are immediately exposed to public eyes tomorrow; and a stylish mobile phone bought yesterday has turned an outmoded rubbish. All can be bought and sold only if value can be squeezed out of them, even the deformity of a newborn baby can be. The capital’s object image world needs no history and no reflection but an indulgence in object images, in quick consumptions and rapid oblivions.
The entire world is two-dimensional. In a world of object images, man’s free existence remains a fortress never unattainable. The object image world has put all sorts of wonderful mirages into our horizon, which are guiding our mass consumption behaviors. While consuming, we wouldn’t care about the state of the producers’ existence; meanwhile, our own existence as producers is also overlooked by other consumers. To consume is to have our life filled  with beautiful images, which are always transient soap bubbles; after their burst, we have to hunt relentlessly for new bubbles to fill in our empty mind, and we also end up witnesses and conspirators of these images. In the “production – consumption” cycle, we have been abstracted into a passive role; our ego has been subject to standard patterns in the object image world; our freedom has ended up nothing but the ABCD in standard multiple choice questions.
The world of globalization, by no means a brighter future of the world as its advocates depicted, is actually a mosaic of production-consumption scenes pieced together by capital; some sections of the scenes are flawless and perfect, wealthy and prosperous, but at a cost of poverty, filth, conflicts and riots in other parts of the world, and the rift between them can never be repaired this way. However, what are shown to the public are always the brighter and happier sections. The people reveling on the beach of Ghana have no idea of what is happening behind the dog; what they see remains only a pleasing glossy baking finish surface of the dog.
Chinese contemporary art is cheerfully embracing capital in an open market, but this exciting scene is nothing but a speculative market manipulated by capital behind the scenes. Marx pointed out that the fundamental distinction between commodity circulation and capital operation lies in the fact that, commodity circulation operates in a commodity – currency – commodity cycle, while capital operations run in a currency – commodity – currency cycle. In commodity circulation, currency is exchanged for needed commodities, whereas in capital operation, currency is exchanged for more currency. If this formula is applied to art, the common art collection behavior, we can see, involves art appreciation and house decoration where collectors show interest only in art itself, whereas capital operations in an art market aim only at extravagant profits by buying and selling art products, where art dealers are not in the least interested in art. To art investors, what matters most is how to buy a work at lower prices and sell it at higher prices; art is nothing but fictitious capital like bonds and securities, and its price depends entirely upon investors’ confidence; then, a demonstration effect the highly lauded works at auction houses produced has brought art world numerous shoddy imitation works. Art works whose prices are pushed far beyond their values end up victims of capital’s thirst for exorbitant profits, while all this has come as nothing but another proof of our being manipulated by an object image world fabricated by capital. If artists change into diligent workers in this world, then their rebellion, subversion and all intellectual introspection and tribulation represented in works end up only spiritual consumer goods, which brings a euphoria over consumption of false agonies.
 As some artists say, before the numbers at auction houses, all academic learning turns pale and feeble. I believe he says it sincerely; if he feels weak before the games of capital, art’s independent value outside market is invalid to him. If art loses its conscientiousness for existence and criticism of surrounding world, it has been utterly reduced to a mouthpiece for the object image world, and the supposed creation has ended up nothing but an eye-entertaining trick.
In the 1980s, Chinese contemporary art was born out of a passionate idealism of the pre-capital times, and Western cultural theories had undoubtedly served as a catalyst to this passion. However, the over-enthusiastic and radical fire was soon extinguished by the cold water of reality. After the end of cold war in the 1990s, the West spontaneously diverted its attention to China – a strong fortress of the opposite ideology; against such a background, Chinese contemporary art has found its way into international horizons. Then, following the crumbling of orthodox values, a cynical attitude exhibited by Chinese artists was exploited by the West as a propaganda weapon against Chinese official ideology. What the West truly cared about were never problems happening in China but their views on China being evidenced by Chinese art. So it’s an outcome of mutual win – Chinese art achieved an international success and the West found a Chinese cultural specimen they needed. Generally, in the early 1990s these happenings indeed counted, at least they’re genuine reactions to realities and helped create artists’ formal languages. But when artists gradually approached success, their art became increasingly stereotyped and stayed in a standard poise of success, daring not to go further beyond. Evidently, artists had got some idea of the success rules in art scenes and the operations of markets. From a former artist of pure expression he had transformed into an artist of successful business operation. It’s brought about by the change of circumstance and is excusable. However, art now doesn’t explore deep into the suspended issues, and artists become increasingly obsessed with the rating of the exhibitions they take part in, and with their access to heavyweight art museums and galleries. Now they see no progress in their works and even have no failed explorations – here lies the nub of the problem. It characterizes the utilitarianism of Chinese contemporary art. We can see many successful artists but few of them explore. Many so-called explorations turn out to be more of imitation and revision of popular styles. Chinese contemporary art has thus been reduced to an art specimen of cultural colonization.
 Then, Chinese contemporary art after the year 2000 has been hotly pursued by capital, and so arise the scenes described above. In a power-shifting art scene, art critics and theoreticians either struggle in areas of exhibition planning, or end up propagandists writing flattering articles for galleries; then, quality academic criticisms have been reduced to almost nothing. Up until now, Chinese contemporary art as a whole has not taken the cultural responsibility for history and reality; only a very small number of artists are reflecting upon questions. Most of them are struggling to swim upstream in the production-consumption picture. Now, when capital grows increasingly powerful, it’s not an optimistic situation. The booming art scene goes on like a blooming plastic garden, which, though beautiful and splendid, remains only a fake representation of life.
This exhibition happens out of a labor, a deal, a temporary employment relationship, an economic dispute. What it presents has not much to do with art either, but is to show some relationships – relationship between human beings, between man and object, between objects, which are by no means objective matters beyond aesthetic range and none of our business but something deeply involving us, upsetting us and tightly binding us. It recalls our various memories where all tastes, smells and feels have deeply trapped us in it and enfeebled us. But it’s the very world we’re in.
What viewers see in this exhibition would be more of “proof” than of art work. It exhibits an onsite scene – the front and back stages of the object image world. Here, the back stage veiled by the object image world becomes the foreground, and all elements, from production processes to workers’ living situations, are implicit contents of those products. In the picture of consumption, we see pleasing presentation images only; however, what’s exhibited here is a complete chain of an art product from its production to its consumption, that is, the whole relationship in the object image world is demonstrated in this miniature scene. Note here it’s reality itself instead of a finished product after meaning transformations. “Presentation” is the essence of this exhibition; only presentation of reality itself could become “proof”. It testifies to the true situation of the object image world we produced, testifies to the predicament we’re trapped in; we’re participants in all this and witnesses of all this.
 As mentioned earlier, it’s an exhibition born out of our plight. This plight has double meanings: one is plight in reality, which is temporary and concrete; another is spiritual plight, which is more complicated, difficult and wide-ranged. For us, it’s vital to have this exhibition touch these problems. As bottom producers in an art production chain, what does creation mean to us? Are we really able to communicate with each other? What could art contribute to our soul today? Is the production-consumption mechanism of art a pitfall or an incubator for creativity? How should artists cope with such a mechanism? What are the criteria for our judgment of art? What should be its foundations? How should we realize freedom in our present existence?
This exhibition is named, “We Are The World,” after the title of a song, in which the words say, “We are the world, we are the children, we are the ones who make a brighter day, So let's start giving.” Indeed we are the world. We constitute this world, which, however, remains far from innocent and harmonious. This world is divided. There is still fighting and hatred, conflict and dispute, cheating and in-fighting. We’re deceived by object images we ourselves produce. We’re prisoners of ourselves. If we could reflect upon ourselves in action, examine our real situation, discern all sorts of false images surrounding us, perhaps we could live up to our life creatively, and free ourselves from seduction and besiegement by object image world, and come closer to truth in our existence. It’s a gleam of optimism out of pessimism. 
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