Mailbox 5

A Conversation between Ye Yongqing and Liao Yibai

Ye Yongqing: What is the name of the place where you grew up?

Liao Yibai: That would be Mailbox 5.

I grew up in a typical Third Line military factory, and was born in the factory worker hospital. When I was old enough to understand things, I discovered that the place wasn’t marked on the map, and our address was just a post office box. Since it was a chemical factory, it was represented by the number 5; 7 stood for machinery, 6 for tanks… The destructiveness and danger of 5 was much higher than 7. In a machinery factory, the worst that could happen was that you crushed your fingers or crashed a car or something, but we were chemical engineering, manufacturing the propulsion elements for cruise missiles. In the nineteen sixties, a lot of technicians responded to the call and took assignments in the Third Line. Mao Zedong said that the Third Line: must be scattered, must be remote, that we had to dig deep caves; we dug a lot of caves at the factory. Since it was chemical engineering, there were a lot of problems, a lot of accidents. Later, when I changed my name to One Hundred (Yibai), my father was very satisfied, saying that this represents the one hundred percent precision of accidents.

Since accidents were common, and people would die when something happened, how many people died, who died, who disappeared when? We didn’t know, it was a secret; new faces often appeared at the factory, and some people left. We didn’t know where these people went. Did they get assigned to other factories, or what? Anyhow, they were just gone. In such an environment, as I child I had no concept of money. Everything was distributed by the factory. Going out wasn’t easy either. The factory would assign a car, and on the weekends everyone would go to the county seat or the city to buy stationary, new glasses, clothes, whatever.

Ye: It was military-style management.

Liao: That was the Cold War era. There was American imperialism and Soviet revisionism. We enjoyed military discipline, and our living conditions were pretty good. A trumpet sounded to start the shift, and the bullhorn signaled the end of the shift. In our education we were told that American imperialism and Soviet revisionism could strike at any moment, and that we were at war. Their missiles could hit our home, so we had to shoot ten at them, and they had to be absolutely of the highest quality, so we could hit their home. When my father was with his friends at the time, this is what they talked about. We weren’t afraid of anyone; we were determined to resist to the very end. I didn’t understand such a big situation, but I knew what my parents were so busy with every day, and that it was very dangerous. To this day, my mother’s foot bears sulfuric acid burn scar. We would be studying in school, and there would be a loud boom, the factory experimenting with cannons and explosives. We were used to it; it was normal. But this was the sound of an experiment. If it was different, then it was an accident. Some of the children, their fathers would be gone all of a sudden, disappeared, and so would the children. We didn’t know where they went. After an accident, the people involved would visit the wreckage and everyone would be scared shitless. Family members weren’t allowed inside, but looking in from the outside, we knew what happened. Yesterday it was a factory building, and today it’s gone. Looking at the wreckage was jarring. They would encourage our studies at the time, saying that if we learned well we could test into the Military Industry University, and come back to the factory to replace our fathers. I was thinking, I wouldn’t come back here to replace my father, even at gunpoint. I was determined to leave this system.

Ye: In that environment, how did you come into contact with art?

Liao: My father could paint, and to cover for that, he studied explosives. My father was sent from Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, to Sichuan in 1966 to build the factory. After I was born, my father wanted me to learn a different trade, so I wouldn’t have to work at the factory, so he taught me painting, that I would be able to test into a different school. Painting itself wasn’t important, it was important to know that trade. I didn’t want to be blown up on that production line.

Ye: When did you leave there?

Liao: February 20, 1986.

Ye: You’re quite clear on that.

Liao: I came to Chonqing to enter the supplementary class at the Institute of Fine Art. Our factory’s material conditions were beyond comparison. It was a micro-society; the girls at the factory only married the guys at the factory, so that the three hundred families there were all related, but there was a great deal of will there. But I knew of the danger lurking in the shadows. When I saw the wreckage flying from the explosions, I couldn’t take it. The explosions would send bolts, clamps, tongs and machine chassis flying, and what goes up must come down, and when they did, they found random places to crush. When I was little I saw a dog struck dead on the spot by a bunch of screwdrivers. This memory lives on in my sculpture language.

I wanted to learn a different trade, and that was my motivation to learn painting. Art wasn’t important at all; what mattered was escape. When I arrived in Chonqing, I painted sloppily. I didn’t know the ways of the school. But us military factory kids could take hardship and had discipline. We worked with precision and cold logic. That’s how I began my studies.

Ye: When you arrived at the Sichuan Institute in ’86, Scar and Country were old hat, and it was in the midst of the New Wave art. The Sichuan Institute didn’t have a lot of back and forth with the outside world, but it was always lively inside. Did this influence you, or did you have some other system of reference?

Liao: It had a big influence on me. When I was at the Institute middle school, I’d often go to watch Pang Maokun do his sketches, and Yang Shu with his abstract oil paintings. I thought it was odd, people actually come to see this stuff? It was actually quite lively at the time. Most of the people who tested in tended to be older. It was a great academic atmosphere. A lot of people had new stuff that affected me, like Guo Wei, Guo Jin, Zhao Nengzhi, He Sen, Xin Haizhou, Shen Xiaotong, all these people influenced me.

Ye: At that time the hottest ones were the two classes of Xin Haizhou, Shen Xiaotong, Chen Wenbo and He Sen. There was also Guo Wei, the first to transform. The earliest transformation of the artistic field was with that class. They were starting to paint the environment around them, from that eighties style, with the big and empty cultural narratives and cultural sentiments, then switching to a very personalized decoding, looking closely at the living environment of themselves and their classmates, that all started with people like Shen Xiaotong. This was different from the old model at the Sichuan Institute. Pang Maokun and the others were like a different generation of people, more with the ways of the institute, closer to the previous generation of artists. A lot of them used ethnic minorities to formulate their understanding of art. This method was pretty universal during the Country Painting days. But this method was already waning, so it was people like Shen Xiaotong, Guo Wei and Chen Wenbo who were coming out with interesting stuff. They were more influenced by the New Wave stuff happening.

Liao: I was at the middle school then, and I didn’t understand that deeper stuff, I couldn’t digest it. But I was pretty rebellious at the school. I always doubted my teachers, and I started, childishly, to directly absorb western stuff. I saw Hamilton’s catalogue, and I cut and pasted from it. I took a lot of pictorials and cut them out for my graduation test. I almost got kicked out.

Ye: The Sichuan Institute was conservative back then, very conservative, because the school hoped that all of the youth in that generation would follow in the path of the already successful Sichuan School. The school really looked up to the early ones, like the classes that came in ’77 and ’78, for their creative abilities, and these students had a bit of freedom. By the second phase, in fact pretty much ever since, it has been a form of imitation and continuation of what had happened in the early eighties. Ever since then, the Sichuan Institute has viewed the Country Style as a kind of classic, a tradition, and they’ve pushed it on all of the youth who came afterwards, and held it as a standard to request from the next generation. Ironically, all of the later ones who made it out did it by rebelling and turning their backs on this orthodox pattern, trying to find a different feeling and a different thing.

Liao: At the Institute Middle School, what they taught was Soviet School painting. I never liked Soviet stuff, because back at the factory it was the Soviet machines that caused the most accidents. They weren’t reliable. I always talked back to my teacher, asking why we had to learn Soviet School. Can I study something else, like Holbein and Dürer? The real transformation of consciousness was when I was three years into undergraduate at the Sichuan Institute, which was in 1993. I caught the contemporary bug starting when I was helping you translate those books, in 1993.

Ye: That was right about when we started seeing more of each other.

Liao: Right.

Ye: I remember that the people connected to contemporary art at the Sichuan Institute were just a small group, and that group didn’t have a lot of connection to the orthodox academic system. China really went through a period of underground art, with an atmosphere where everyone would be talking about it as they ate together, a group of people interacting. I started getting to know you guys, including Zhang Xiaotao and Yang Mian, and you started painting on the fifth floor. You guys wanted to hold an exhibition you called Personal Experience, and you painted a lot of small works. It left an impression that your paintings were a bit different, different from basically all of the artists at the Sichuan Institute. I remember saying that your paintings were light, like a feeling of floating, because you were always mixing light colors. Dark colors were the popular style at the Sichuan Institute, grey and black, dark, even dirty. It was popular then to chase after heavy and deep themes, like your teachers who were always painting thick and melancholy, so the impression you brought out was different. It’s interesting if you look at it now. The new generation, like the ones who came to the exhibition yesterday, like Hui Xin, whose exhibition I saw yesterday, Gao Yu and Zhao Bo, the new generation at the Sichuan Institute, pretty much every one of them is pretty bright and fresh, really strong colors. After 11 years, today’s generation has totally changed. You started working with this feel pretty early, too early even, but this temperament has found a continuation to today. I didn’t understand much about your background before, but the experiences you’re talking about today, like the setting of the oddly comical destruction, we can talk about this influence. I think this batch you’ve made is rather suppositional, visually and perceptually arranged in a way that suggests segmentation. This is stuff from the depths of your memory. You’ve atomized these things, and images and film, you’ve expressed this injured feeling from your youth. I think that though you change around and the changes are big, I think that your stuff has a spiritual character, and even on the technical side, you lean towards similar areas, such as in using segmentation to present the imagination and transform a certain setting. What was it that led you to stop painting and start doing things like film?

Liao: Perhaps I’ve approached the study of art like the study of science and engineering. The atmosphere at our factory was really oriented towards engineering. People didn’t really talk about feelings and sensations, so I’ve always had a bit of that in my bones. If I hadn’t tested for the art institute, I could have tested for a science institute without a problem. It might seem curious, a self analysis: in studying oil painting I learned about the control of two-dimensional space. I didn’t understand three-dimensional stuff like sculpture, but it was convenient to learn because I studied sculpting from my wife. Later on I had already worked out the sculpting language, having done it for almost as long as I’ve done painting, and it became my sculpting language. I’m so entranced with technique that I learn fast, but learning too fast can be a trap, or it can be a good thing. Then I became entranced by 3D animation, and studied for three years. Once I applied the colors, I’d start wanting to make it move, but once it started to move I realized that I didn’t understand cinematic language. So then I spent a lot of time learning cinematic language, and filmed a lot. I also read a lot of cinematic theory on the internet, right up to when I filmed this documentary, which was selected for the 2003 Yunfest – Anthropological Film Festival.

Ye: I remember that you’d made a film. I was a juror for that festival, and your film was a documentation of someone who performed professionally for weddings and funerals and the like. I had a strong impression that you were good at both painting and film, and that sculpting was just a process, but your film was linked together with your later expression. You strove for a form of narrative, but you still had that quirk where you liked light stuff, whether you were expressing these huge scenes, or painting the sky and the land later on, those spatial relationships, they were all light and a bit surreal, even the tragedies you filmed. With these themes and these feelings, you were looking for a brisk and smooth expressive language. Your works all have a very strong narrative quality, kind of related to literature and poetry, but even more like a film script, a very scene-oriented arrangement that contained a narrative quality, even when you were filming very realistic stuff. When was it that you started with this kind of painting again?

Liao: Sculpting was just one of my processes. When I did film I didn’t want to make it with a heavy method, which led to such a comedy effect, even when we were filming such a tragedy. Anything can be light. I like using a really light attitude to express something very heavy, like a cruise missile – it has to be light, fast and go far. It is an unacceptable lightness.

Why didn’t I continue with film? Because I don’t have the ability to control it. When I implement my intentions down to my nerve endings, it is nothing like what I wanted. But I want to find a way to climb to the peak. I want to bring all of those foreign languages, sculpting language, painting language, computer language and audiovisual language, together to do something.

Ye: There are very few artists like you.

Liao: Maybe so.

Ye: There really aren’t a lot of artists like you in your generation. You are an alternative, because you are different from other artists in your generation. In the eighties the norm was for endless searching, an endless quest for this type of path, which was rooted in the meager conditions at the time, but for your generation, it was because there were too many choices and possibilities, you had to discard or delete many of these and just take one path. Your situation was that you tried every possibility, and after trying everything you chose one. When you do something you make a lot of preparations, then gather all of your efforts into one spot. In fact, what you have is no longer the experimental aspect we’ve talked about. You have an integrative element to you. For instance, if we take these current paintings of yours as a form of biography, the influence of your youth and adolescence led you to do so many technical explorations of possibilities, and when you go on to actually write a story or make a play, or a short film, the scenes you prepare are all for something like this. This is integration. For instance, as your paintings aren’t simply paintings, you’ve made a sculpture beforehand, these things are all refracted into the sculpture, and before this, each photo is not a sketch but a picture, and you use this picture to develop something painted. And such a complex synthesis sometimes makes me think of another German artist, one from the early eighties, named Anselm Kiefer, who is also like this. Maybe it is a poetic keenness and sentimentality towards personal history that can allow an artist to use such enthusiasm to use such a huge scene and imaginative details to make such an integrated and enormous elegy as this.

Liao: I have tried all of the possibilities, and only after trying everything have I made a choice, and only after much preparation have I concentrated all of my energy into a single point. I had a scientific education, and a basic tenet of that is that you have to try all of the possibilities, testing 1000 materials to determine that the other 999 cannot be used. I really like trying out this kind of process, and I’ve concentrated it into my painting and sculpting.

Ye: The little angel can be understood as a virtualized image, which could be a microcosm. What about the ball?

Liao:When I begin making an angel it is clean, perfect and bright, and because of my memory, I start to add welding marks. When I was little I would always see my next-door neighbor or my father get up in the middle of the night to sneak a cigarette, and I didn’t know until later that maybe there had been an accident at the factory. When this kind of spirit is shocked or hurt it cannot speak. So I think that this ultra-clean method I use to make my angels is different linguistically. After it’s been hit it gets burned, and I did some upgrades in the sculpting language, basically beating it up after it’s done. You could see the flying ball as this small angel’s head or something else. It is an object that’s been smashed into the air. There are lots of spare parts, steel balls and whatever, and they fly. The stuff that comes out of the painting is flying just the same. Whenever there’s an explosion everything flies, a forced, dangerous flight, something that’s been broken and flies in the air. It’s been warped too. It’s like with the social reality where you cannot be yourself, and by the time you land, you’ve been knocked around too. My sculpting is a very complicated process with burning and smashing, and after the burning and smashing, this is the kind of object that comes out. Then I use the camera to get a reflection of this object, and this reflection is the scene we see now. Maybe it’s abstract, maybe it’s the city now, and maybe it’s a beautiful woman or something else. Everything has an abstract relationship.

Ye: So basically what we see now, you’ve already been through so many activities, so many internal vicissitudes, and in that stage you’ve set, in that moment of explosion, these are the different sights of what’s been sent aloft and already smashed into all kinds of gateways, little plots and scene details.

Liao: Right. This one here, Angel Fallen on the Ground, expresses this kind of sentiment. The angel sees that it is lying on this patch of ground, and that it has died on this brightly sunlight spot. It has seen its own death.

Ye:I think what you’re expressing is something sublimated. This is a ball at the moment it is flying up, and through a passage it reaches a different time. Reality, the past, memory and imagination all appear here, just in this moment. It is like a phoenix, still looking for a feel of movement and flight. In this sense it has a bit of a dialogue with your earliest paintings. All of those experiences have given you a richer, more complex background in destruction.

Liao: I don’t really concern myself with what kind of art the people around me are doing, or what the trends are. It’s just like when I was living with that small group in the Third Line, and didn’t care about life on the outside. All we need to worry about is making our own system well.

I just drew this sketch entitled “pass away in meditation”, where this very removed and enlightened person passed away in meditation on the fire. There’s a feeling of going aloft, and this feeling is both light and grievous. I can’t accept it. I don’t want to use a grievous method to express a form of grief.

I hope, rather, to use a light and floating feeling. The people of the Third Line have no value. They were broken up right away. When the nation said they needed them, they used them, and when they said to break up, they were broken up right away. They weren’t important at all. Even the best of engineers, fluent in four languages, a returning expat from the 50’s or 60’s, lived in the mountain for a lifetime, and died drunk in a ditch.

Ye:These plots were all prepared for you and these props you made. It was all there to predetermine this story. The most important plot element of this story is all of this stuff flying into the sky after an explosion, including a ball. When this stuff goes up into the sky, there are a lot of details. You did a lot of preparation for this plot element, including photo preparations, sculpting preparations, making a model and a lot of this stuff, including the preexisting scenery. At this point there is lighting, there are props, there is smoke and a lot of other little plot lines are happening. And in the end it returns to this disaster you’ve made. Why didn’t you go out and shoot this? Why didn’t you use film, choosing instead to paint it?

Liao:I think it would be tough to film something like this. There would be some technical difficulty, because there’s too much imagination in there. I don’t have all the Hollywood skills. I have to add my imagination.

Ye:In this imaginative process, is there the possibility for endless development?

Liao: In painting I can paint a scene from my own imagination. I put a lot of emphasis on the expression of imagination. Visually, explosions are really beautiful, but beneath that beauty there is a lot of pain and danger. There are all kinds of possibilities. What the audience sees is just a photo of an explosion. It’s definitely beautiful.

Ye:All phoenixes are beautiful. There is a different kind of beauty to devastation and destruction.

Liao: I just want to use this kind of painting to capture this beauty, but there a harsh reality lies underneath.

Ye:Let’s return now to the exhibition. What are your plans for the exhibition? Aside from paintings you also have sculptures.

Liao: Yes, sculptures.

Ye: Do you have photographic works?

Liao: I don’t like to use too many things in my exhibitions, to show off that I can do everything. Each medium is like a different language. When I am sculpting, the iron ball shriveled by an explosion, the flying hammer, the screwdriver that hit the dog, those are my memories and imaginations. If I shoot them, they become a documentary. I don’t want to do a documentary, or use a realistic approach to the narrative.

Ye:Then, in your imagination, this exhibition is one of memory and space-time. In the progression of the plots of history, in this exhibition, what ties it all together? You’ve combined so many things. With Kiefer, each of his exhibitions has a direction, maybe one on painting, and he’ll make all of his paintings out like sacrificial offerings, and in form and material, he still retains his cleanliness and power.

Liao: In the end, my exhibition is talking about caring. After two generations of people paid the price in a senseless Cold War, I learned to care about others. Since every moment of my memory remained as if framed, after this we should learn to care for others instead of slaughter them.

Ye: Every object, every scene, everything is framed in time, framed within a specific event and time, and through each plot sequence, it is repeatedly replayed. This moment, in every detail and level, returns to ponder this history.

Liao: In my life, it was art that allowed me to escape from danger and carry on living.

Ye:In fact every person is influenced by two things, the first being memory, a person’s experience in life and history, and the other thing is imagination towards possibilities and the future. These two things are the wings of what we call creativity. These wings can carry you to fly to that peak, or to land over there. The most interesting landing spot is this exhibition of yours. It is this moment, this place in time, this interface from an explosion. Some of the interfaces are on balls, some land on the head of an angel, and some pathways are may be on the nails and hammers flying through the sky; some of the details might be on an animal. At such a time you are actually restoring your memory and continuing your imagination.

Liao: The scene after the explosion is like an installation, with bolts, screwdrivers and all kinds of tools stuck in the paddy field and reflected there. The scene is shocking. I can’t escape the memories and imagination from that time. I use the unique language of art to express my sentiments. I’m just like the others who came out of our factory. They use their words to describe their experiences and pain, and I use the language of my paintings to talk about mine. There are often the sounds of explosions in my ears. All of the cats around the factory went crazy, as did the dogs. They all had an odd demeanor, so I made something like a crazy cat. I think I have some absurd reasoning inside me. The Cold War, preparation for war and disaster, resistance against the west, it’s all an absurd political game.

Ye:On another topic, this scene, your preparations for war and your background are all linked to the new China. The Third Line was a national policy from the past, and part of the Cold War. All of the people brought together in the construction of the Third Line were the most creative people of the earlier era, using their talents and lives to create this tragic scene. I held an exhibition once entitled Deflowering, which was about this kind of experience, these discarded times that had once been so hot and bright, about the tragedies of the times that had been wrought by the fickle nature of man. This is instinctive to man. In different eras, because of some absurd transformations, a lot of lives and things that were once seen as highly valuable suddenly became lost. It is that situation where the sacrifice we once saw, so much tragedy, so much creation, so much happiness and sorrow were forgotten in an instant. But maybe some people like you could not forget and will not forget this history. But this experience isn’t entirely a memory, but something that is slowly and continually influencing you. Since you are always using your imagination to continue this and develop it, it has become a drama that plays out countless times in your mind, these plots. Now you are trying with this exhibition, through different interfaces, to return to this instant, this explosive instant, restoring this instant through different levels. I think this may be what makes your exhibition stand out, and what makes it interesting.

Liao:All of my spaces are abstract, undefined. I am the same as everyone else who came out of our factory. None of us has forgotten, and we are still using the conceptual method that remains in our memories to do it, to continue our own values and views towards life, just like before. A lot of people say that we Third Liners are all stiffs, very tight-strung, battling like soldiers every minute, that we have a strange quality. Later I saw a lot of my classmates, and they had all left the Third Line. The Third Line has no real connection to the people. Aside from having memories, we just brought our memories from that time to our lives now, and we live in this society. But I was surprised to discover that twenty years later my classmates’ values, methods of doing and saying things, senses of humor and analytical methods were all the same as back then. They’re still just as witty, funny and preposterous. When I’m making my works, I like to use stainless steel and pigment to make jokes. It’s just fun. There’s no need to be so bitter, no bitterness. Something you thought was awesome back then, you don’t think much of it later. My mental retrospective just flies by so lightly. I paint light colors that contain bitter, tragic things. I’m just keeping my head down just as we studied our hypothetical enemies back on the Third Line, researching a topic. As to the results, we’ll leave that to the audience to figure out.

Ye:It’s like you said, be it change or trends, it’s just an outside world, and artists are stuck in the middle of all these conflicts between the self and the outside world. You put yourself back in your old factory, back in that certain time and place. In fact, every one of us is on the margins of crisis. Every day, we all have conflict with these centers, but in the process of this conflict, each person molds their self-world. Liao Yibai’s world might be a warped metal ball in the midst of flying, reflecting the scene of that instant. That instant is full of all kinds of details and all kinds of purgatories of conflict. After so many years of preparation, making films, making sculptures, painting oil paintings, after all these years of bringing all these things together, it is all to express a self-world for that instant.