310｜When "Nora" returns to her hometown, she meets "Gauguin" again

Mar 21

Da Guangzi's writing was born out of her detailed feelings of returning to her hometown after traveling thousands of miles away. In her past life, she was the stubborn child who refused to be shot by the camera in the photo studio, while her childhood teacher was also a maverick who did not tolerate being manipulated. This mutual seeing once gave the large photons the power and support to flow outward. Many years later, Daguangzi and his teacher briefly reunited at an exhibition in a mud house in his hometown, and got acquainted with the mountain art tribe he created in his hometown, and participated in a series of conversations and activities.

During the Spring Festival holiday that just passed, did you return to your hometown?
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The long delay of the epidemic has made people more sensitive to their every move and walk. What will we think of when we return to our long-lost hometown and meet our family, teachers and friends we haven’t seen for many years in a strange yet familiar environment? How do we deal with the thoughts and scars left here, and how do we align our past and present selves?
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This article is such an observation diary of returning home. Da Guangzi's writing was born out of her detailed feelings of returning to her hometown after traveling thousands of miles away. In her past life, she was the stubborn child who refused to be shot by the camera in the photo studio, while her childhood teacher was also a maverick who did not tolerate being manipulated. This mutual seeing once gave the large photons the power and support to flow outward. Many years later, Daguangzi and his teacher briefly reunited at an exhibition in a mud house in his hometown, and got acquainted with the mountain art tribe he created in his hometown, and participated in a series of conversations and activities. The distant tender memories and various hidden pains at the bottom were intertwined, making Daguangzi realize that she and the teacher were dealing with similar "runaway" propositions in parallel with their different fate lines, but at the same time, there were also unavoidable questions about Differences in cognition between generations, gender, politics, art and action - and these differences are deeply connected with the history and structure of the local land they share. So she decided to record the fragments of her return home, mixed with her love, hate and hope for her hometown, her old friends and her old self.
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Text / Editor of Daguangzi / Lin Zihao

01. Salvage "Gauguin"

"I have to paint": Exodus

"By the way, let me tell you something new -" An hour and a half into the monthly cross-country long voice call, my mother suddenly became interested.

"I recently went to see your teacher W. He sold his house in the city and moved to the mountains for almost ten years. He rented a mud house and the yard was full of painted stones, which is a bit artistic. There are several houses with similar courtyards next to it, it seems to be an art village. We still have such a place in our small place, I will show you next time I go home."

W is my first teacher who taught me how to play the piano for many years. He was also my mother’s school colleague before she retired, teaching primary school music classes. It was a primary school, with only one L-shaped two-story building, surrounding a small courtyard in the center that was the flag-raising platform. Two pines and cypresses that are much taller than the building and a large mulberry are all the vegetation on the campus. When the mulberry fruit season comes, there are enough fruits to be distributed to the two hundred students in the school, four or five mulberries each. When he was in school, W would suddenly play and sing bel canto in the empty music classroom in the corner of the second floor, and the sound would resound through the entire campus; after get off work, he would go into a small darkroom in the corner of another corridor near the school and play tricks on him to take pictures on outings. Photo below. At that time, I always felt that he was there but not there.

I must have been five years old. One time, my mother talked to W about me, saying that I didn’t like going to the photo studio to take pictures. I didn’t match my facial expressions and was so stubborn that I couldn’t even take a birthday photo. "I just don't like being manipulated, wearing someone else's clothes and makeup, and pretending to be in front of the camera." I was secretly afraid of being laughed at by the teacher and tried to regain my respect. When the amateur photographer W heard my counterattack, he laughed heartily: "She has personality! I like this little girl!" This clip became a golden moment in my relationship with the teacher: in a girl who smelled the same kind of , the intersection of being seen, a little girl establishes a little bit of herself. It turns out that I can refuse to be manipulated. It turns out that I have a choice.

My experience is not surprising: I moved from a factory to a county town during elementary school, to a provincial capital for high school entrance exams, to a coastal province in college, and then continued to study abroad. Like many small-town girls, I kept leaving, moving to places where educational resources were more concentrated. There is almost no need to hesitate in this process, because the place where I was born assigns a proposition to every person born: go out.

Over the years, I gradually lost news of W.

"So, what did he do after the school closed? Why did he suddenly go to the mountains?" I sat down seriously and crossed my legs, as if there was a real interlocutor in front of me, and asked my mother on the other end of the phone.

That "Mulberry Primary School" closed a few years after I left, along with the restructuring of the state-owned power group to which it belonged. It was 2003, the outpost of large-scale closure of small thermal power units across the country. In the power plant behind the elementary school, the generators that roared day and night have stopped making noise, and the impressive chimneys and cooling towers have stopped emitting smoke. Only when all the familiar background sounds and colors were eliminated did people realize that the steam emitting from those behemoths was a strong sense of pride and hope. The most youthful teachers in my eyes, young people under thirty years old who have stable positions in state-owned enterprises and are only worried about which ballroom dance to dance in the staff entertainment room when night comes, are scattered everywhere and collide with reality for the first time. Full of arms. I am especially curious, where will an ungrounded young man like W go?

"Mulberry Elementary School" and the power plant behind it. Generation tool: Bing Image Creator

"He and the art teacher from the same department went to the county town to open an art palace and run art and music interest classes. The scale was quite large. You participated in this period. But doing business did not suit his personality. Later, the group broke up. He went private The small smelter wrote the material for several years, but it may not be satisfactory. When I heard about it again, I went to the mountains."

After the power group was restructured, most teachers from Zidi Primary School were directly assigned to small factories in the surrounding area to work as office clerks, and they have continued to do so. W ventured into the county town to do business, changed his approach, and continued in the field of artistic enlightenment education that he was good at. I don't know the details of the subsequent twists and turns, but he finally ran away regardless, which sounds like a Chinese local version of "The Moon and Sixpence". In the original story, the hero, who is based on Gauguin, suddenly ran away from home in his forties. In order to pursue a chaotic and passionate artistic ideal, he fell from the middle class into poverty, and finally gave up modern life completely and went to the primitive big world. River painting. He left behind the resounding words "I've got to paint", and also left behind an astonishing separation, which seemed to indicate that I would carry out that departure at the right age.

Seven years ago, because of my love for this book, I took my mother to see the drama version. It was her first time watching a drama. Later, when soothing my anxiety about the future, she would sometimes unexpectedly quote The Moon and Sixpence, "You are like him, if you really love it, you will be broken into pieces." For a long time, I thought that I was also "Gauguin" and that after going around and around, I would finally reach the realm of the moonlight.

"Your teacher's life is quite different now. It's quite comfortable. After we drank tea, they were still drinking coffee. But it seems that they have nothing to say to our old colleagues, and they are not interested in the people and things in the city. Their whole demeanor is... It’s changed. I can’t understand it. Are they living in seclusion? What is their source of income? Where are their families?”

Mom's question made me feel relieved and suddenly light.

At this time, I had been studying abroad for many years and was about to graduate. It was the first time that I began to seriously consider choosing a career. I was feeling the pieces of the floating board coming loose under my feet, and the pulling of threads from all directions. The biggest worry for people who have never really taken a step is that if they make a wrong step, they will no longer be able to do what they want to do, and they will no longer be able to reach their ideal self-state. Therefore, the choice before them carries a heavy weight that perhaps should not be there. But at this moment, hearing about the current status of my distant teacher W and the twists and turns of the past twenty years is like looking through a long lens with a long focal length, reflecting the possibilities of my future from a calm object perspective. Fate is never kind, but maybe I am also a stubborn little stone. I will be blown away by the tide and deformed by myself, but I will also be condensed and firm in the tide.

I needed this confirmation so much that I cried as I listened on the phone.

Reconnection: On the land we share

My hometown is a small county in the northern Central Plains. It is a palm-sized city and is surrounded by mountains.

In the autumn of 23 years after the epidemic, I temporarily decided to return to China to visit relatives because my family was seriously ill. Three flights, one high-speed train, one bus, four years of travel, two days and two nights, and we are here.

Maybe he has grown up. This time, my stomach was not hungry, but my eyes and ears were hungry. I looked and listened everywhere. Like a starving exile, I am no longer "picky" at all, I like to listen to everything everyone says, and I am not afraid of anyone saying anything I don't like. Wanting to closely reconnect with the past with and without me, I eagerly captured the traces left behind in the important moments I missed.

"Why is the whole city in darkness at twelve o'clock at night?"

——"The municipal government is out of money, and government agencies cannot pay wages for several months. Let's turn off the street lights to save electricity."

“A lot of parking lots have suddenly grown up, and there are electronic signs showing empty parking spaces. It’s really nice~”

——"The municipal government is still out of money. We need to add road poles to all vacant lots and build parking lots to generate some income."

"There are so many new foods! Haven't everyone tightened their belts after the epidemic? Why are there so many more small shops?"

——"You don't understand this. We only need food, and other shops can't afford it."

"What about the fence surrounding the city at the foot of the mountain? When was it built? It looks expensive."

——"During the epidemic, it was said that a traveler went up the mountain and was bitten to death by poisonous ants and bees on the side of the trail. In order to seal the wild road, a hundred-mile-long fence was built. You can't tell. It may be to revive tourism. Please charge more for the entrance fee to the mountain."

…………

At the dinner table, in the ward, in the taxi, in the rock climbing gym, on the barber bench, and on the hiking trails, everyone couldn't wait to describe to me the outstanding feelings at the moment. Among these echoing narratives, "strict control" and "too difficult" are the most frequent words, with "no money" and "volume" ranking second. I first completed this series of necessary alignments, and the warmth of returning home for the first time was lifted by the reality of the post-epidemic.

It turns out that "juan" is no longer a term reserved for big cities and big factories, but has also spread to small counties in the 18th tier. Coupled with the increasing pressure from local governments and local financial difficulties, "returning to hometowns" no longer seems to be the most important word. Comfortable living choices. "It's too difficult" quickly became my new mantra - after listening to stories of human suffering struggling for survival, I seemed to be able to only use this most effective word to give back some emotional resonance. It's like I'm secretly feeling guilty. Is my life in a distant place really still too easy?

However, in this stuffy air, is there any other world? After a month of listening to sad stories, I thought of visiting Teacher W.

Enclave and locality: placement

W’s mountain residence is located in a small village at the foot of the mountain ten kilometers away from the city. Unlike several other landscape villages, there are far more villagers here than outsiders. The so-called art tribe is just a row of five or six families embedded in the original village.

The residences of the original villagers are square bungalows with small courtyards made of concrete and red bricks, a typical northern new rural style, which is a fragment of my nostalgia for the post-90s generation. The foreign artists rented earth houses that had been in disrepair. Loess, stone and blue bricks formed the main walls, and wooden rafters and tiles built the roof where cats like to walk. Repair the walls, run water, electricity, connect to the Internet, build a skylight, build a glass house, replace the broken glass on the wall with cactus, and plant a green wall... On the outside, it seems that the earth house has been minimally modified, but in fact it is light It took a whole year to repair it, just like carefully repairing the homesickness of those born in the 1970s.

Green hills, villages and earthen houses. Generation tool: Bing Image Creator

However, this is not where all artists’ nostalgia lies.

I thought this was a gathering place for country gentlemen, and I could speak my hometown dialect without any obstruction, but the posters for the first exhibition on the walls of the courtyard actually revealed an international atmosphere, which surprised me. You know, this is a small county town where the first McDonald's has just opened. Starbucks has not yet entered, and foreign faces only appear around the scenic spot. W was very happy that I noticed this poster, and started to introduce a series of names after the name: a famous French photographer, an Italian curator, a Chinese student from an overseas art school, a professor from a major art academy, a native of Shanghai, Hangzhou, Jinan people and so on. Although the beard makes his face look a bit old-fashioned, I have seen his spirit when introducing his colleagues, and his hearty laughter on the small campus.

"I came across Z's painting exhibition in a certain museum. Is he here too?" I asked.

"Ah, you know him! He is a very successful painter of the generation born in the 1970s, and his paintings can sell for millions. His studio is in another ravine, and we also have contacts." Realizing my attention to the exhibition , the teacher became more excited.

This enclave is a bit fly, I thought to myself. They are not just hermits who entertain themselves. Their eyes are always facing the distance, looking forward to recognition from their colleagues and acceptance from the market.

"Y is a retired professor from the Academy of Fine Arts. The courtyard is across the street. He traveled all over China and finally chose this mountain to stay, which means this is the best place for us."

"Why do you say that? Is it any different from other places?"

After a moment or two, W said, "After looking around and deciding on this place, it means this is the best place." W hesitated a bit.

Either he didn't think much about it, or he didn't want to think about it. In the single-arrow escape story, the most important thing is looking back and doubting. W is one of the few locals in the tribe. Professor Y's stay and the visits from other colleagues from far away seemed to have stamped his fate and life choices. Seeing W so self-consistently affirming his current destination, I can only be happy for him as the future is unclear; but at the same time, I know that after seeing the outside world and having feelings for and doubts about every place I stay, I can no longer I can't be as sure as him.

In addition, I realized that for many artists who came and went, this place was actually a foreign land. On the one hand, they are creating enclaves and building tight small utopian communities among the homeless people; on the other hand, they also intend to experiment with a "long-term local plan" and, as mentioned in early interviews, "truly become 'villagers' ”, “relevant to the local area”. "Artistic villagers" is how they position themselves. Tribal members envision helping villagers develop folk arts such as tie-dying to promote village construction, and helping farmers' children with public welfare classes on calligraphy and painting art to achieve inclusiveness. " Not only for my own artistic dream, but also to realize my dream of building a beautiful countryside." However, the huge difference between the vision and lifestyle of the original villagers made the initial attempts not smooth. Coupled with the real impact of physical isolation during the past few years due to the epidemic, "how to be local" has become a long-suspended question.

While visiting, I passed by a small courtyard and W was quite critical of its Internet celebrity decoration. “These broadcasters just set up a scene here. They come to live broadcast every day and clock in to go to work. They are 'performing' rural life, not really living. ". What exactly is a sincere “local” life? This question remains to be answered. After all, W and his companions are also exploring a new rural life that is different from the original villagers. However, before the "artistic villagers" have fully taken root, they are already questioning the "outsiders" who came later than them according to their own tastes. This may be a premature judgment on an open question.

Guardian Tsuchiya: Resistance

Afterwards, W took me inside to drink tea and join two painters and a couple from out of town to chat. They came here specially to deliver paintings for an exhibition that will be held here soon. Speaking of this exhibition, W's mood suddenly changed, excitement mixed with calm anger, "It was because of that incident."

It turns out that this place is facing a demolition, and "that incident" refers to the first step in resisting the demolition - the viral popularity of a short video released by Art Tribe to prevent demolition personnel from measuring the house and land.

After the epidemic, cultural and tourism bureaus in various places have vigorously revitalized the tourism industry. The hometown, which is basically positioned as a tourist city, finally couldn't help but make some big moves after tourist attractions in surrounding cities became popular on online platforms. Integrating the small villages at the foot of the mountain and planning and building them into B&B villages is the first step for the government to learn from and imitate similar operations in other regions.

The bundle of developmentalism with scale and homogenization is more like an unproven myth than a proven effective model. Contemporary art and original cultural resources do not allow this tribe to receive differential treatment. The possibility of preserving this heterogeneous landscape has never been in the imagination of the local government - probably only the temples and halls dedicated to Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism are understood as the "culture" to be protected in this city. In fact, this village is not the birthplace of this artistic tribe, which is facing relocation for the second time in ten years.

After a year of stalemate, they came up with the short video, which unexpectedly circulated on the Internet. Even established nail dealers in other regions came to offer remote support. This volume of voices made government staff think for the first time that they might have to use a gentler attitude to talk about cooperation with the art tribes; the artists also realized that they should take advantage of the east wind to quickly curate exhibitions to show the value hidden in the mountains. Go for more power.

In this small town, all dissatisfaction with the managers and the current living situation seemed to be nothing more than appetizers on the dinner table, but finally a group of people, a group of people who seemed to have been hiding for a long time, jumped out and said, "I don't agree." In In the increasingly bleak autumn of the northern county, a skylight seemed to be opened above my head. Outside the window was not the cold moon, but a basin of hot and bright flames.

In mid-October, after the rain, the mountain peaks behind the village were hazy.

I thought the opening ceremony was a small local gathering, but the 100-meter-long parking queue outside the village foreshadowed the liveliness of the scene, and a series of non-local license plates once again confirmed the regional diversity of the tribe's members. W said that friends from all over the country were extremely helpful. After hearing about the cause, they sent a large number of exhibits in a short period of time, which made this temporary exhibition possible.

On that day, exhibits with the theme of the mountains where the village is located were scattered in the real living spaces of each house: courtyards, halls, side beds, laneways, and exhibition halls everywhere. The rain had just stopped and the roads in the village were still very wet, and some courtyards had to be climbed up a short dirt road to reach. I purposely wore leather shoes to see the exhibition, but I didn’t expect that I would have to step on wet mud and jump through puddles to move from one bungalow roof to another. Without the filter of an art museum, the viewers in this live exhibition are less solemn than they normally would be when viewing an exhibition.

There is a projection screen in the dim mud house, which plays black and white leaves and mountains shot by the artist. Next to the mud wall are two small blank square photo frames. Generation tool: Bing Image Creator

Barista F is sensitive to smells. From the unique cool fragrance of the earthen walls, he smells the smell of his grandmother’s house when he was a child. The smell is the first element that will be extracted from the clean art museum;

My mother and my third aunt have special memories of textiles. In the old fabrics of contrasting colors collected by fabric artists from all over the country, what they see is not national characteristics or bohemianism, but how working people used patch-sized fabrics in an era of scarcity. The cloth ends are spliced into a whole piece of cloth that can be used for tailoring;

When looking at a group of works of father and daughter placed opposite each other, I saw the intergenerational nature of this dialogue: the landscape paintings born in the same mountain, the father on the north wall opposite the hall door, imagined Sorayama Shin. Rain, simple modern ink still embodies the ancient Zen spirit; while the daughter on the west wall on the side can see the rich ink and heavy colors from the stone mountain, and the oil painting with thick coating seems to be saying to her father who is in the right position: No , there is color and energy in this mountain, but you have ignored it.

I imagined that if all the works were transplanted to galleries in first- and second-tier cities, I probably wouldn’t be able to identify their hometowns. Perhaps, some curtains do not belong in a closed cinema, and some exhibits should not be sacrificed and ended up in art galleries. This is probably the "locality" effort of the art tribe: exhibiting on the edge thousands of miles away from the art center, in the native environment where the works were born, highlighting the entanglement of comprehensive space and multiple times, seemingly weakening the subjectivity of the works themselves , perhaps it strengthens the subjectivity of the work. They placed their works, and like these works themselves, they were placed in green mountains, villages, and earthen huts.

02. Continue to escape from "Gauguin"

The best way to end the story is here: a young artist who has been away for half his life and is still a young artist goes to the mountains to build his own utopia while fighting against his fate. By chance, the wild man in the mountains, who had gone inward, used a gentle and open exhibition to complete a forced but sharp external response.

But if I'm honest with myself, I won't stop here.

During the long period of time when I traveled far and wide, Gauguin was my guide and reference system. I take his place, and recognize and cherish the people around me who also have the courage to run away and fight. However, when I met another "Gauguin" again, the mirror not only reflected precious resonances, but also revealed the inevitable differences. I began to realize that my situation and choices were not the same as those of "Gauguin". Exactly the same.

That afternoon, while I was immersed in the suspended moment of this enclave, I was constantly escaping from the moment of rumination. This strange and strong sense of dislocation foretells that a new image will emerge from the chaotic self-consciousness. When reviewing a series of scenes again, some absent voices gradually became louder, distracting from the high-pitched speeches on stage.

Micropolitics in the Tsuchiya: Resistance Again

K is a researcher and curator of Chinese art history from Europe. He came to China during his Ph.D. and has been visiting China every year since then, living there for nearly thirty years. She is a frequent visitor to the village and was awarded the title of "Honorary Ditch Resident" by the Art Tribe. At the scene, K stood out not only because of her Western appearance, but also because she was the only woman in the guest room.

At the opening ceremony, more than a dozen guests stood side by side in the open-air courtyard facing the media and audience. Teacher W introduced and spoke one by one: retired professor, chairman of the Painters Association, dean of the Academy of Painting, leader of the Photographers Association... I haven’t seen them for a long time. I have heard so many titles, but I can’t remember them all, but what surprises me even more is that in a community far away from the “center”, the name within the system is still a reliable pass, and it is also the selection criterion for whether you can stand in the guest seat. one.

As expected, everyone gave a long speech that matched their status. When she arrived at K, she had no title to speak of. She jumped out first and started by saying, "There are no women here. This is so wrong, so I took the initiative to ask that I wait until I am free to hold the opening ceremony. This way I Just stand up and represent the women who have been here.”

Only then did I notice that the most qualified woman in the tribe was standing in the audience. X is an artist who lives in one of the small courtyards and does handicrafts and fabric art. She comes from another city and is the only female artist left. She has experienced a complete resistance movement against demolition, and she has also managed all the details of the exhibition installation day and night, including how many meters to walk, how long to buy the fabric, and when the works will arrive. When I asked X later why she didn’t stand up at the beginning, she euphemistically said, “You should ask your teacher.” As the main promoter of the curatorial process, how does the teacher understand the female colleagues around him? Why did the women disappear in his arrangement? These questions began to ferment in my mind and made me feel painful.

During another revisit, the teacher took a group of guests to visit the studio in the next village, while X stayed at the base camp to cook for everyone. When she poked her head out of the kitchen house and asked, "How many people are paying for the meal?", this familiar hometown dialect, this all-too-familiar role allocation of the male outside and the female inside, once again triggered my embarrassing memories of my hometown. That sentence seemed to come from the mouths of my mother, my grandmother, and the women who had been born on this land for generations, from one kitchen to another. What is even more sad is that when a woman has skills and talents that are appreciated by her peers, she still has to fall into the same scene again, within a public community that is not private.

I couldn't help but think: If that little girl who didn't cooperate with the photo studio grew up and ran away to be here, would she also stand in the audience? Will it also fall into the kitchen? If she starts fighting back, will she still receive encouragement? This thought scares me.

The opening ceremony in the courtyard. Generation tool: Bing Image Creator

The scene continues. After hearing K's public reminder, a professor in the tribe immediately jumped out and tried to resolve the embarrassment with a joke: "There are good wives in the family who want to avoid suspicion, so there can't be female artists here!" Maybe he thought it was a smart joke: On the grounds of protecting his wife and female colleagues, he avoided accusations that there was a lack of women in the community and successfully distanced himself from it. But the suspicion he wants to avoid here, whether it is the rift between family members and colleagues he is referring to, is clearly his own prejudice that still regards female colleagues as male subordinates - and this is fundamentally a dislike of women.

When I saw the guest on stage again in the rest room, I went up to exchange views with K about her speech and expressed my great appreciation. Several guests behind the scenes were complimenting each other and discussing the origin of the title "Chairman". After hearing our discussion, the professor intervened and repeated the joke of "avoiding suspicion" - so he literally means it, he didn't Playing-laughing. “Female artists don’t need to be related to you, they can be independent workers,” I blurted out, and K echoed me. Once the pushback starts, one can’t help but continue, “And, since the original intention is to build a community of equality and freedom, why do we still call him Chairman?”

No one answered, maybe they were genuinely embarrassed. The young adult women's on-the-spot rebuttal was probably new territory they were unfamiliar with and uncomfortable with. In fact, they quickly ignored me and went back to their own conversations. K turned to me and made a pyramid gesture, implying that this was still a hierarchical community. When I almost thought that this place was a floating place, isolated from the gender order, seniority hierarchy, and official-oriented thinking rooted in my hometown, an outsider K who was far away from this set of rules and structures pointed out: There are still strong local people here. imprint.

They are not here and yet here; I am in them and yet not in them.

As a fellow runaway, I once imagined that I could also be a "Gauguin", but I was reminded again here that the "Gauguins" never really welcomed me into their alliance. This is still a matter of gender. It was only when I looked back that I realized that my running away was not just an unconscious flow of potential energy differences in educational resources. The marginalized situation of being a woman and my strong self-awareness since childhood also generated an additional kinetic energy to help me resist the above disciplines. , and instructed me to keep escaping.

All this made it difficult for me to ignore the photos on one of the exhibition walls, which showed women who had stayed here, but they were not seen at the opening ceremony. These fragmentary threads must contain the complexity of individual destiny and many unspeakable secrets, but similar things are happening in various organizations. Its universality makes people feel that it is still necessary to ask: Why are women always the ones who cannot be left behind? ? Is it because they can't find the moon in the spiritual distance constructed by "Gauguin"? Are they forced to continue running away to build their own alliance?

During the joint conversation, members of the art tribe talked about human rights and freedom many times, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights lying on the stone table in the yard also explained their valuable resistance in protecting the earthen huts in the face of forced eviction. They completed their resistance in the face of their own dilemmas and problems in their own destiny line. When I was growing up, I was deeply influenced by such seniors. Their deep public concern and cynical rebelliousness were the starting point for my physical and mental departure. But today, these former nourishments have become something I often have to be wary of and reflect on: What if only dancing with the elephant in the room was considered fighting for human rights, while everyday inappropriate jokes were considered harmless? , then how deeply do we care about “people”? If grand goals and visions—whether they are pure artistic ideals or utopian communities—blur individual faces and cover up differentiated needs, we can ask, is this vision really the common vision of everyone?

In the earthen house, who entertains guests and who stays behind, who is on stage and who is off stage, how to choose names, how to maintain relationships, the lack of these subtle but important communication labors in community construction and negotiation agendas, in turn, exactly Opened me up: continue to run away from "Gauguin", maybe we can go further. Be wary of the moral impulse of "sacrifice the small for the sake of the big", identify politics on a small scale, and connect knowledge and knowledge, knowledge and action in the smallest unit of individual interaction and within the public community, through a kind of both- Concrete life, both individual and public - this is an exercise that I still continue to do.

But there are people in "here": why put them there?

As a foreigner in her/other land, I am eager to understand how artists from all over the country place themselves in "here"; on the other hand, as a native of my hometown who is in "here", I am also interested in the exhibition. The term “local planning” mentioned in the introduction adds to the concern. But upon closer inspection, this question arises: Does moving an exhibition from the contextual vacuum of an art museum or gallery to the contextual vacuum of an artist's studio really be "on site"?

On the day of the opening ceremony, after several hours of immersed conversation in Mandarin with art creators, I found that a familiar language was missing around me. It was in the village fifty meters away and in the county ten kilometers away, everyone was talking. The native dialect used. Following it, I noticed that the audience were mostly art colleagues and their relatives and friends, which made me curious about the imagination and positioning of the audience when curating the exhibition. When asked whether the curators and exhibitors had done any publicity around the exhibition, or tried to invite villagers to see the exhibition, the answer was a unanimous and flat "no". An art project that takes place in such a small village is embedded in the background of demolition that the entire village has experienced, but there are no villagers in the audience. This first made me doubt the reality of the word "on-site".

Looking back at the works on display, there are few recognitions, descriptions, applications and responses to the environment. In one frame after another, most of the mountains are distant views, with few details of the mountains, making the mountains look like thin raw materials that have been easily grabbed and never fully understood. Furthermore, there are almost only mountains and no people in the picture. Rare characters are presented, or non-daily images such as immortals and Taoist priests, actors wearing makeup, Guan Gong in masks, or self-expressions such as memories and photos of art tribes, but the reality of living here can be seen. The "locals" do not seem to be among the objects of observation. Surrounded by these strange pictures suspended in an island style, I gradually lost my perception of the unique temperature of the earthen wall behind the picture frame and the thickness of my hometown outside the earthen wall.

In early interviews, members of the Art Tribe said that when they first moved to the mountains from the city, they were strongly surrounded by various natural elements. Compared with people, they "felt that the power of nature was greater." I can understand that constantly describing the mountains in a sense of shock is the most real and direct emotional response for newcomers. But ten years have passed, and if we are still immersed in the eternity of the mountain and cannot see the changes of people, how can art be shaped into a specific shape and organically integrated into the current point in time and space? Of course, creation is highly personalized, and each artist's personal care can be established. However, the mountain in the house shows a relatively unified group will. It is still a "picking chrysanthemums under the east fence" style of inward exploration and self-realization. . It seems that there is still a certain distance between the current spiritual core of traditional literati and officials and the symbiotic vision of "becoming a villager."

A picture of an empty mountain that "sees only mountains but no people". Generation tool: Bing Image Creator

Perhaps the wishful thinking of reconnecting with my hometown has amplified my expectations for the "hometownness" of this project. Or, before discussing the formal issue of "how to be in place", we can first negotiate a fundamental attitude, that is, to put the creation Where to place it. Are they cultural scavengers who collect folk customs from the countryside and turn them into their own use? Is it the elite culture representative imagination implicit in the slogan "Light up the village, revitalize the mountain village"? Is it the perspective of a local villager that he assumes when commenting on the Internet celebrity anchor's "performance of rural life"? Or should you hand yourself over and become a node or channel connecting the local network, observing or even participating in the lives of others?

"Don't touch the exhibits on the wall with your hands!" A scene in which an artist scolds the audience and educates them about the exhibition highlights the disparity in experience and background between alien tribes and locals, and the former also has feelings for the latter. Subtle attitude. Talking about the real friction with the indigenous villagers over the competition for the site, the tribal members said, "The villagers don't know how to feel. They only care about who gives more money. If they give more demolition money, they will agree to the demolition. If we give more rent, they will support us." ". These real frictions at the existential level certainly pose additional challenges to the "local" practice of empathy and integration, but the complaint of "what feelings do villagers know?" is not a suitable starting point, but only closes the door to more changes. A vast capacity for empathy and a desire to end connections with people.

Looking from afar and looking back: Another kind of escape

The absence of female artists, the absence of local people, and the absence of people in the works made me realize that I could not and no longer wanted to be "Gauguin". After losing the frame of reference, I thought of another image of a runaway, "Nora".

In Ibsen's writing, Nora's story ends abruptly when she leaves home, but for me, the story begins after Nora leaves. "Nora" is an unfinished proposition, a brand-new situation that is open because it has not been written much - she may be X who continues to stay in the art tribe after running away, or she may be K who returns here from time to time. , maybe it’s the female colleagues who left because they were out of tune with the male artists, maybe it’s me who unexpectedly updated my self-image after returning from a long distance away - all the women who left in different senses are using their own life experiences to interpret and explore "Nana". The different possibilities after La' left reconstruct the coordinate system.

I revisited "The Moon and Sixpence" on the bookshelf at home with new eyes. This time, I finally saw the people who were not present in it. The care for these people may point to a different way of escape from "Gauguin", another kind of resistance and accommodation.

In the book, in order to enthusiastically praise the hero's irresistible artistic enthusiasm and vitality, Maugham did not hesitate to describe his wife and children as vulgar philistines: In the past, they were keen to hang out in literati salons, but they were greatly puzzled when their husband left. , and deceived himself and concealed his intolerant revenge; but after his husband became famous, he used the deceased's reputation to pursue profit, and retorted as a genius to defend his original choice to leave home.

How light it is to be "Gauguin", so light that it is full of temptation. He only needs to look into the distance, only needs to face himself, only needs to have a long conversation with a grand and pure pursuit, and only needs to repent and surrender to a primitive and surging desire. As for the pull behind him, Maugham wrote, "I didn't understand at that time that women have a problem that they can't get rid of, that is, they only want to talk about their private affairs with people who are willing to listen to her." Reading such a sentence again, I can't help but I wonder how much respect and communication is missing between the "Moon" and "Sixpence", so that a detective writer needs to keep going back and forth between the two, acting as a bridge between the gaps.

This story once aroused a frenzy in China in the 1990s. Painter villages and musician settlements that sprouted up across the country were filled with similar legends. The hard-to-reproduce ambition and passion of the "Gauguins" still shine. However, before the big change of "exodus", the voices and positions of the abandoned people are erased, and the communication of the left people in the relationship is not questioned. Failure to do one's duty, treating family as a mere prison and obstacle, and treating separation as a one-way track that constantly gives up and creates fractures. This simple narrative of progress can no longer be used.

What's more, this kind of defense of a way of leaving without self-reflection and irresponsibility for the remains not only adds an exceptional and sacred aura to art, but also provides a special defense for the artist alliance of a certain gender.

Female creator Fu Seoul talked about why she wanted to return to a life alone and pursue her dream of directing in the TV show "Goodbye Lover 3". However, when she and her partner painfully looked back, picked up, and supported each other with extreme honesty and courage, and jointly completed the arduous labor of explanation, Fu Seoul was still regarded as "ungrateful" and "abandoned" by the entire network. The sound of crusade continues to this day.

This is the new problem of contemporary "Nora".

At the end of the 19th century when "A Doll's House" was born, "Nora's" mission was only to escape from the patriarchal marriage and family; but after a hundred years, feminism has already injected richer connotations, including housework, emotional labor, care The exploration and polishing of values such as work and relationship maintenance seem to complicate the life issues of runaway women. "Nora's" new situation is to be entangled and superimposed between self-realization and caring for others, between looking at the future and looking back at the past, between rupture and suturing, between abandonment and picking up. , becoming a continuum.

Indeed, this is a slightly heavy expectation, which seems to make it more difficult for "Nora" to be lighthearted in the face of choices, but in turn, it may also be an antidote for "Nora". The fateful tearing feeling of those who run away is accompanied by the pain of those left behind along the way. To heal each other's pain, what we need is to use care, looking back, sewing, picking up, and clearing the gaps. out of the old accumulation, establish new connections, and then better embed them in the time and place.

Return to yourself. After this unexpected return to my hometown, I was able to align myself with the old people one by one. Fortunately, after getting to know each other again, explaining "who am I now", and listening to "who are you now", those feelings of tearing - the uneasiness of meeting the hometown and not knowing it, and the expectation of the old friend , criticism and non-acceptance of the old self, and uncertainty about the changes in the new self - are weakening day by day. Although this relay of gentle support for each other consumes energy, it makes both parties involved become more fluent and complete people in the sense of connection, and this is probably the feedback that "Nora" style escape may get.

When I wrote this, the demolition negotiations were still in progress, and I was about to "go back" to a distant place. The brief reunion with teacher W stirred up distant tender memories, as well as the deep pain and new collisions. Mixed with my love, hate and hope for my homeland, my old friends and my old self, I carefully recorded this encounter, just to do some trivial translation work between "Nora" who was born in the 90s and "Gauguin" who was born in the 70s.

· about the author ·

Big photons, “microscopic eyesight and kaleidoscopic brain.”

· Author Acknowledgments ·

This paper benefited from the help of many people from the beginning to the publication. Although it is impossible to list their names one by one, I would like to thank the allies for their in-depth discussions during the conception stage and their generous feedback during the rounds of revisions. The difficult moments in writing, because of the encouragement and input from these hometown people, editors and friends, unexpectedly turned into moments of connection where allies were found - "I've got to write", which not only stems from writing life The inner impulse of experience, also because of you and these moments. Thank you for making writing an action.

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