"The bird should be allowed to fly, but only in the cage. If there is no cage, the bird will escape.” Chen Yun (God father of China’s "Bird Cage Economics”)
In 1986, Chinese economist Chen Yun explained his economic theory thusly…
‘The enlivening of the economy is permitted under the guidance of (state) planning,
and must not overstep the guidance of planning. This is like the relationship between
a bird and its cage, The bird must not be held tightly in the hand or it will die, It
should fly, but only within the cage; without the cage, it will just fly away,..,
Naturally the size of the cage has to be appropriate...[and] must be adjusted frequently.
(Chen, 1986, p. 287; quoted in Li & Lok, 1995, p. 290).
In the very heart of Kuala Lumpur, Warren Art Gallery presents the recent works of Chinese artist Kexin Zhang. Zhang was born in 1957, in Harbin, China, but has travelled widely, far from the land of his birth. In Zhang’s Kuala Lumpur exhibition, ’My 3 Kingdoms: Contemporary Art by Kexin Zhang’, the audience is presented with an array of Zhang’s more recent works, some on canvas, some ink on rice paper, some ink on silk, as well as a small collection of intriguing wood carvings.
The notion of ‘3 Kingdoms’ hails from the Chinese ‘Three Kingdoms Period (between 220 and 280) when Wei, Shu and Wu states warred against each other for overall supremacy. In his 14th century novel ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’ Luo Guanzgong wrote about those conflicts, legends, magic, and morality which formed both history and story towards the end of the Han dynasty. There is also some referencing to Chen Shou's ‘Records of the Three Kingdoms’, within Zhang’s artworks as presented.
Zhang reinterprets the concept of ‘3 Kingdoms’ through his personal experience of dwelling in three countries, Beijing (China), Jakarta (Indonesia) and Bangkok (Thailand). He is a self-proclaimed ‘nomad’. Despite Zhang’s notional freedom to travel, and his proclaimed nomadic nature, he constantly depicts himself with his head inside a birdcage, as if bounded by its constraints.
In a black and white photograph, in the inside page of the ‘3 Kingdoms’ exhibition catalogue, Zhang is pictured with his head inside a birdcage, replete with live sparrows. Two pages later a similar image occurs on page 3, this time in colour, while bottom left runs the legend ‘The Bird, Yogyakarta’s 1’, it is dated 2015. On page 4 there is yet another image of the artist, in black and white, in a birdcage, titled ‘The Bird, Yogyakarta’s 2, again taken in 2015, and the ‘head in a birdcage’ becomes a central motif for the exhibition. That motif is no mere whimsy, no empty gesture but featuring constantly within the exhibition. Zhang’s notion of being in a birdcage had already become a performance installation (‘You Can Touch Me’, 2016), part of the main theme for the launch of that year’s exhibition.
In that Warren Art Gallery exhibition, one large (96cm by 90cm) multi-narrative ink on rice paper painting,‘View Spot’, draws our attention to a figure dressed in a white gown, flailing his arms. That figure has a Chinese-style birdcage upon his head, a similar figure is seen (bottom centre) in the ink on silk painting, ‘Faith, The Bird’ (152cm by 113cm) looking furtively around. The figure is, of course, Kexin Zhang; the birdcage may be seen to represent a notion of Chen Yun’s limitations of the individual, within a Chinese Communist society. It is a society where people are free but only within certain, malleable, limits. But I want to nomadically explore another interpretation.
Other paintings in Warren Art Gallery, incorporate the artist within his works, indicated in ‘Farewell the Lonely Island’, ’From Bangkok to Beijing’ and ‘Looking for the Spiritual Home’. Zhang becomes the chief character, as well as author, of his narratives. Zhang is very much the ‘My’ or me/I in his ‘My 3 Kingdoms’.
The Catalan painter Salvador Dalí had, narcissistically, placed his own image into his paintings, mixing the dream of Dalí with reality of Dalí in his Surrealist fashion. Zhang, alternatively, poignantly reminds his audience whom the paintings are about, giving his audience indications to the predicaments he finds himself, and his societies, in.
Rene Magritte, in 1937, painted ‘The Therapist’, where a man’s whole upper torso and head are a birdcage. In 1938, Raoul Ubac (Belgic painter, sculptor, photographer and engraver), had created ‘Mannequin dressed by Andre Masson, Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme’. A naked mannikin, breasts exposed, has her head caged in a wickerwork cage, her mouth bound with towelling and a flower over her lips. She is exposed and must remain silent, unable to object to her objectification.
In 1965, Salvador Dalí had persuaded Danish actress, Lotte Tarp, to be photographed by Werner Bokelberg, at Dalí’s home in Port Lligat, Spain, with a four tier birdcage on her head. Just seven years later, in 1972, at Marie-Hélène Rothschild’s infamous Surrealist Ball, just outside of Paris, the actress Audrey Hepburn arrived with her head in a wickerwork birdcage filled with token ‘birds’.
In many aspects the head in a birdcage has become a trope. Surreal images of people with their heads in birdcages is not new. Similar images hail back before Surrealist imagery, back to monstrous devices such as the medieval ‘Scold’s Bridle’, essentially a cage with a mouthpiece which prevented talkative women from talking. The most gruesome is the public death exhibiting ‘Gibbet’ - a full body, metal, cage where criminals were left, dead or dying, until their flesh fell from their bones.
The Birdcage analogy is particularly poignant to Chinese society where, for centuries, Chinese people have prized their birds in cages. Hua Mei, song thrushes, found mostly south of the Yangtze River, in China, are particularly popular. Some owners keep their cages covered, with the cover being removed at sunrise, for the bird to sing. Owning a good bird cage had become a symbol of social status of Chinese rich men, or high officials, in pre-Communist China.
Chinese Bird cages, some gilded, some decorated with decorative, intricate, wooden patterns, are nevertheless still prisons. This idea came to fruition in Chinese feminist dialogue, in the 1930s, with the film ‘New Women’ (1935) and those splendid performances by the actress Ryan Lingyu, playing the housewife We Ming. In Cai Chusheng’s film ‘New Women’, marriage is equated to the entrapment of a birdcage, demonstrated in the frames of Wei Ming (the tortured housewife), who is unable to go out with her husband, clasping her hands and woefully looking at two birds in their birdcage as the realisation dawns that they and she share a similar fate.
In her 2012 work, ‘The Birdcage’ (photograph on plexiglass substrate), the artist Mei Xian Qiu, formerly of Java, Indonesia, now living in Los Angeles, North America, ‘talks’ about the psychological repression of women in society. In much the same way as Cai Chusheng’s film, she equates freedom being exterior of the birdcage, the place which entraps her mind. The central figure’s head (her mind) is encased in a birdcage, her seductively dressed body, replete with alluringly red lipstick painted lips, is free. A yellow (happy, wise) canary, the previous occupant of the cage, now remains uncontrolled and able to sit atop of the cage. The fetching woman becomes the new captive. This photograph reminds the viewer of Zhang’s male figure, dressed in white, with his mind trapped with desire for the trappings of modernity and of the body, which are his birdcage.
In his artwork ‘The Packing Box, from Beijing to Magelang’ (2016) Zhang reveals a large wooden box. The box is full of the ideas, memes and metaphors he has brought with him, from China to Indonesia. The man with the white robe and birdcage on his head escapes. Like a child playing aeroplanes, the figure runs from the box, exhilarated to be free. But he is not free. His head remains caged. His thoughts bounded by the bars of the physical cage, just as Chen Yun’s limitations brought a false sense of economic freedom to China with the trappings of materialism and consumerism, but without a comprehensive access to the knowledge of the full internet, which forbids sites such as Google and YouTube.
Throughout Zhang’s exhibition, images of physical and psychological desire, for houses, cars (‘I Live in Gray and Blue’) demonstrate how firmly we become imprisoned by our desire, the source for our suffering. Despite imprisonment, we attempt to break free, drift in imaginary boats to encounter spiritual awakening. Nature in all its natural gentleness awaits, but our ancestral culture, and possessions weight us down (‘Looking for the Spiritual Home’). Through ‘Meditation’ we are released, though to become so we need to divorce ourselves from the weighty desires which surround us. We must seclude ourselves in nature (‘Lonely Island’), away from intellectualism, away from the erotic thoughts which trouble us and, ultimately, cause our suffering (wood carving ‘The Thinker’).
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