Meiling Cheng

Dappled China: Untamed Histories Surrounding the China Brand

Grey China Grey: the colour of mourning and repentance; of humility, plainness, and punishment; of aging, despondency, and melancholy; of equivocality.1 From an Oral History Sitting across a table from me in his studio in Beijing, Yang Zhichao recounts his recent experience of enacting his performance piece A Hundred Days from May 12th (Bairi wu yi er) in Sichuan province one hundred days after the 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit on May12, 2008.2 Yang Zhichao and his wife, Zhang Lan, armed with two identication cards as professional reporters from Beijing, rst travelled to Chengdu, where they heard about a disaster site that had received little coverage by the media. Local rumours alleged that ofcials in the little town of Muyu, Sichuan, had grossly underreported its number of earthquake victims: the regional government claimed ninety out of the probable three-hundred dead, with most of them school children. So the artists hired a veteran taxi driver to take them from Chengdu to Muyus only high school and, with the drivers whole-hearted support, took pictures of the earthquake wreckage along the mountainous way.
Devastation of the 2008 earthquake in Muyu, a little town in Sichuan province. Photo: Yang Zhichao.

The calamity the artists witnessed on the campus of Muyu High School brought them to tears. A three-story-high student dormitory was completely attened to the ground, burying all of its residents. Yang Zhichao felt especially

A pencil among the earthquake debris of Muyu High School. Photo: Yang Zhichao.

emotional when he saw broken pencils scattered amid the rubble. The sight inspired his immediate performance response. Trying to be inconspicuous, he set the action in a debris-covered corner between two half-crumpled classroom buildings. Having secured their camera on a tripod and asking their driver to press the shutter button, Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan each sat on a stool to begin their makeshift operation. Zhang Lanwho previously had worked in a hospitalplaced a bit of pencil lead into a prepared silicone capsule, and then surgically inserted the capsule into Yang Zhichaos abdomen. The artists nished the performance in twenty minutes without encountering any interference. Before they left

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the schoolyard, however, several undercover policemen stopped them and, on the excuse that they had no approval letter from the local governments Propaganda Department (Xuanchuan bu), ordered their taxi to follow the police car to the police station. The police interrogated Yang Zhichao, Zhang Lan, and their driver in separate rooms for an hour, accused the artists of illegal reporting, searched all their bags, and conscated the lm in their camera.3 Fortunately, the artists were not body-searched: they each had hidden a roll of lm and a memory card from their digital camera in their underwear during the taxi ride to the police station. Moving Toward the Grey A Hundred Days from May 12th is the fourth installment in Yang Zhichaos performance series titled Book of Revelation (Qishi lu, 2004), which refers to the well-known Biblical source. In Revelation I: Earth (Tu, July 14 2004), Yang Zhichao placed 1.6 grams of ne yellow earth taken from the bank of the Yellow River in his hometown, Lanzhou, Gansu province, into a silicone capsule and had a physician surgically implant the lled capsule into his belly.4 In Revelation II: Ashes (Jin, 2006), another capsule, lled with ashes from a forest re-incinerated site, was surgically inserted into the artists abdomen. In Revelation III: Night (Ye, 2006), a surgeon, wearing a pair of infrared glasses in an unlit windowless room inside the Tang Contemporary Gallery in Beijing, made a two-centimeter incision below Yang Zhichaos navel to let the darkness sink into the slit before he sutured the artists wound. The corporeal conceit of having an object surgically embedded inside his body was not alien to Yang Zhichaos performance oeuvre when he embarked on A Hundred Days from May 12th. This latest addition within his Revelation series was nonetheless distinct because Yang Zhichao framed his process of making the piece, with the assistance of his wife, as integral to the artwork. Like two independent reporters unafliated with any institution, Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan self-funded their inquiry into a disaster site

Yang Zhichao and Yang Lan, Revelation IV: A Hundred Days from May 12th, 2008, performance. Photo: anonymous taxi driver. Courtesy of the artists.

Yang Zhichao, Revelation I: Earth, 2004, performance at Jianwai SOHO, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.

Yang Zhichao, Revelation II: Ashes, 2006, performance at a forest re-incinerated site on Huairou mountain, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.

Yang Zhichao, Revelation III: Night, 2006, performance at Tang Contemporary Gallery, Beijing. Courtesy of the artist.

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so as to directly collect from local residents hitherto untold stories, yaway rumours, hushed recollections, and often unveriable, if strongly claimed, evidence. The artists then devised a creative way to respond to, document, and transfer these stories to the public realm. Although visiting an earthquake site to stage a private memorial for the victims is not necessarily a political act, the troubles that Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan encountered in Sichuan circumstantially establishes the political relevance of A Hundred Days. The piece exposes the regional government corruption that resulted in the shoddy construction of public school buildings; it contradicts what the central government propagates as its ofcial version of history, which touts the states triumphant mobilization of political resources in remedying natural disasters, while eliding its simultaneous coercion of the victims grieving parents into silence.5 If the traditional Chinese phrase zheng shi describes the version of history penned by the government-sanctioned agentsthat is, the orthodox historythen the version of history privately composed by Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lans action during A Hundred Days serves as a vernacular counterpart to the ofcial history: ye shi, which means, literally, wild historiesthe folk-generated compilations of hearsay, gossip, opinions, anecdotes, leaked secrets, dissenting remarks, covert images, furtive eyewitness accounts, embellished memoirs, and private investigation reports.6 Wild histories are parallel versions of history, consisting of orature and often anonymous or pseudonymic discursive documents that are untested, uncensored, and unsubstantiated. Like rhetorical inltrators, wild histories insinuate themselves into the public memesphere and cultural memory without vetting by the institutional mechanisms that establish the country's ofcially authorized and disseminated history. Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan enacted their self-assigned ethical roles as artists-citizens to compile their wild histories. Their serious intent and the weightiness of their subject matter bestow a heroic import on their contribution. Yet wild histories could just as well be trivial, parodic, spurious, or far-fetched. Orthodox history tends to be highly regulated"tamed"in order to appear in harmony with the State's projection of a national selfimage. Conversely, wild histories are, in their essence and politic, untamed histories, for they amass indiscriminately those accounts of putative happenings and alleged reminiscences that are untamed and largely untamable by the powers that be. Slyly subversive in intent, untamed histories are mixed in tone; they may by turn be accusatory, poignant, speculative, sentimental, hyperbolically facetious, even phantasmagoric. They may function as apocryphal archives, colloquial chronicles, or simply as unauthenticated and non-attributable addenda to orthodox history. Like narrative horses without bridles, these untamed histories gallop on the edge of ofcial surveillance; they track the fence surrounding the center for their own merry-go-rounds, their quixotic chases after shadows, or their amateurish derby without the benet of referees. When given the chance, these untamed histories may also risk jumping over the fence toward the center to perform their rider-less rodeos, generating sub/cultural forces through the sheer horse-power of their vocal energies and physical maneuvers.

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What Does the Grey Say? Unlike their mentor Ai Weiwei, who got into trouble with the State for his art activism on behalf of Sichuan earthquake victims, Yang Zhichao and Zhang Lan had no desire to overtly challenge the political centre of power. Thus, does their memorial performance of A Hundred Days from May 12th merely add a paragraph to the ongoing chronicle of surreptitiously engaged untamed histories in the as yet authoritarian China? Does the dystopic performance piece serve only to supply a contrary footnote to the nations aggressive promotion of what Wang Jing calls the country brand of China following the Saatchi & Saatchi vision of turning the nation into a brand?7 By designating A Hundred Days as part of his Revelation series, Yang Zhichao seems to subsume the performance pieces regional specicity under its potential global resonance. In this context, his body, with the sealed capsule, becomes an eneshed archive, analogous to the prophetic or apocalyptic Book of Revelation, which is replete with cryptic messages and redemptive symbolism, waiting to be discovered by future initiates.8 Nevertheless, I suggest, there is no contradiction between the regional and global references in A Hundred Days; rather, their joining amplies the multivalence that underscores Yang Zhichao performance, turning the artists body into simultaneously a mourners mnemonic sanctuary that symbolically recollects the dead Chinese schoolchildren and a mystics corporeal temple of riddles for current and future humans. The same juxtaposition of glocal semiotic allusions characterizes the three earlier installments in the Revelation series, rendering the entire series a demonstration of Yang Zhichaos commitment to his live arts civic efcacy as untamed historical narratives. Yang Zhichaos Revelation series reects the transforming subject position for contemporary Chinese experimental artists, who are remodeling their aspirations as creative contributors to their own country and to the globalized international community. We may understand this ongoing transformation of what being an artist means in post-Deng China as a process initiated by two indigenous circumstances: one, the professionalization of Chinese artists, and, two, the two-decade-plus lineage of Chinese experimental art.9 As Richard Kraus observes, the gradual professionalization of Chinese artists started during the Mao regime, which employed a vast number of artists as bureaucratic cultural workers to produce utopian communist propaganda and monolithic artworks in the style of socialist realism. In the reformist China, "the greatest force for change has been the introduction of a market for culture, operating alongside the older state system for reproducing and distributing art."10 The prospect of a potentially sustainable professional practice has encouraged many artists since the late 1980s to pursue independentunofcialcareers; their exodus from permanent state employment has in turn allowed them to develop a more multifaceted relationship with the government.

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Professionalism, however, often compels a professional without the institutional subsidy to heed the dictates of the market. Therefore, following ideological and stylistic uniformity, commercialismexpressed through an exclusive interest in prot-makinghas emerged as the most pervasive source of constraint on artists continuous quest for creative experiments, even though it has also offered the self-employed art professional the possibility of nancial success and social recognition. This scenario of commercialism's potential threat to spontaneous art making is familiar to most independent artists in late-capitalist countries such as the United States. What makes it different for Chinese artists is their relatively shorter, but also more intense, exposure to the force of commercialism, which, since the drastically depoliticized post-Tiananmen 1990s, has risen as the safest, most practical, and ofcially least problematic route for "private" professional pursuits. With the arrival of the China brand, which announced itself most grandiosely in the globally telecast opening ceremony for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, producing contemporary artworks has proved (by several international record-setting auctions in the past decade) to be a rewarding means of cultural production and career advancement for Chinese artists. Yet the same cultural and economic circumstances made available by the China brandwith its mixture of rampant commercialism, the elevated international stature of China, and Chinas access to the international art world via globalizationalso functions as an impetus for some artists to choose an alternative path, such as practicing non-commercially oriented experimental art. According to Wu Hung's analysis, "self-positioning" oneself as an "experimental artist" in today's China is to aver a sense of mission to expand creative territories for Chinese art from a decidedly marginal stance against "various kinds of cultural hegemony."11 I propose, however, that an experimental artist's self-positioned marginality does not have to always stand in opposition to the political status quo, nor does it overdetermine an artist's professional practice. Experimental artists like Yang Zhichao, for instance, avoid direct confrontation with the government whenever possible. His professional portfolio, too, includes multiple components, combining commercial output in various media and genres, occasional overseas commissions, and exhibition opportunities with less commodiable experimental projects such as the self-produced A Hundred Days from May 12th. A Hundred Days bears witness to the human cost of ofcial corruption exposed by a natural disaster. As such, its occurrence disturbs the master historical narratives, those woven in support of the China brand. By subsuming A Hundred Days within his ongoing body art series, Yang Zhichao effectively superimposes a biblical/metaphysical hermeneutic frame on this performance artwork about a specic local calamity. Who exactly is the target audience for Yang Zhichaos untamed histories? Before attempting to answer the question, I would like to consider a few more examples from the same genre.

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Red China Red: the colour of traditional and revolutionary China; the colour of festivity, auspiciousness, loyalty, and devotion; the colour of blood, passion, sacrice, and martyrdom; of re, rage, and impatience; of aborted vitality latent in prosperity. From A Cut Finger On June 4, 2002, Wang Chuyu enacted a solo performance piece entitled Reading the Constitution (Xianfa yuedu, 2002) in his own apartment in Tongzhou, Beijing, without an invited audience. The artist slit his right index nger with a razor and began reading a popular edition of Peoples Republic of China Constitution (Zhongguo renmin gongheguo xianfa). His blood oozed out profusely, staining the booklet.12 On the thirteenth anniversary of the June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre, Wang Chuyu commemorated the untimely deaths by miming the clash between esh and steel. His blood, a sacricial libation, paid homage to those unexpectedly martyred in the crossre between youthful naivete and wrangling political wills. The front cover of the PRC Constitution booklet displays a logo, a red round stamp comprising the outline of the Imperial Palace Museum, located to the north of Tiananmen Square, and the ve-star symbol from the Chinese National Flag. As a visual prop, the booklets cover soaked in Wang Chuyus blood restages the trauma of a national tragedy. In Chapter II of the PRC Constitution, Article 35 reads, Citizens of the Peoples Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.13 Cited as a legal text, the booklet, with its blood-lined pages, spells out its own contradiction: Does this document record a nations legitimizing principles, which deserve patriotic bloodshed to protect its integrity? Or does it inventory mere bureaucratic verbiage, mocking its readers earnest folly? Wang Chuyu rst linked his cut nger with the PRC Constitution in a public performance that took place in Hong Kong in April 2002, in a little theatre inside the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. The artist slashed his nger with a razor and then distributed twenty-ve copies of the PRC Constitution among his audience, which comprised mostly Hong Kong residents somewhat
Wang Chuyu, Reading the Constitution, 2002, performance, June 4, 2002, Beijing. Wang Chuyu, Reading the Constitution, 2002, performance, June 4, 2002, Beijing. Wang Chuyu, Reading the Constitution, 2002, performance, June 4, 2002, Beijing.

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Wang Chuyu, Constitution Excerpt, 2002, an audience member participating in the artists performance at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. Courtesy of the artist.

familiar with performance art. Inviting the twenty-one audience members who had accepted his bloodstained booklets to come on stage one by one, the artist urged each participant to improvise a response to the Constitution booklet. Most read a section or two in Cantonese through an open microphone on stage. A few diverged from this common pattern: One mumbled through all the lines; one alternated the recitation between Cantonese and Mandarin; one burst out crying; one read the Constitution booklet upside down. Wang Chuyu entitled this interactive performance Constitution Excerpts (Xianfa zhaiyao, 2002), which inaugurated Reading (Yuedu, 2002), an ongoing performance series revolving around the artists conceptual modication of the PRC Constitution. To date, the most combustible event in Wang Chuyus Reading series occurred across the Taiwan Strait during his participation in the Taiwan International Performance Art Festival in August 2007. Wang Chuyu had specially prepared a fake document for the occasion: a pamphlet entitled The Peoples Republic of China, the Republic of China, Constitution (Unication Edition) (Zhongguo renmin gongheguo, Zhonghua minguo, Xianfa [tongyi ban], 2007), in which he compiled the entire constitutions from both governments, reproducing one chapter from the mainland, followed by another from the island, alternating from one to the other chapter by chapter until the end. Considering the political tension between China (PRC) and the portion of Taiwanese citizens who lean toward Taiwanese Independence (ROC), Wang Chuyus choice of the word unication on his pamphlets cover is nothing short of incendiary, even though his intention remains ambiguous. By recognizing the ROC and aligning its constitution with that of the PRC, Wang Chuyu seemed to satirize Chinas ofcial policy in eventually unifying Taiwan under the mainlands sovereignty. Yet his pamphlet also appears to have symbolically unied the mainland and the island in one volume. Given the political context, however, the artists conceptual subtlety and political ambivalence failed to amuse his Taiwanese audience. Wang Chuyu staged his public art event Constitution, Unication Edition (Tongyi ban xianfa, 2007) on a busy street in Taipei, near National Taiwan Normal University. Distributing his pamphlets among some performance

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festival viewers as well as random passersby, Wang invited these participants to respond to the document. Within minutes, a young man set re to his copy of the pamphlet; all other participants soon followed suit by throwing their copies into the re. When the re subsided, the artist bent over the debris and covered his face with the ashes from the burned pamphlets. This interactive street performance ended with the artists improvised response to his audience-participants impromptu act of arson, provoked precisely by a politically loaded artifact, one made for and consumed by a collective action in Taipei. Is Wangs gesture of smearing his face with ashes a lamentation over futile yet irreconcilable human differences? Has the artist foreseen potential bloodshed from the cause of unicationhence, his ad hoc requiem for the future dead? Black China Black: the colour of ink and historicity; of power and formality; of darkness, mystery, and depth; of erasure and forgetfulness; of loss. From a Calligraphers Archaeology Bilingually published in both Chinese and English, the hardbound catalogue for Qiu Zhijies solo exhibition Archaeology of Memory (Jiyi kaogu, 2007) evokes a classical Chinese book, with folio-style pages and an exposed spine, sewn on the right by black threads. The catalogues thick grey covers resemble concrete surfaces; its Chinese title, printed as hollowed characters within a vertical black rectangle, looks like a piece of ink rubbing

Top: Wang Chuyu, The Peoples Republic of China, the Republic of China, Constitution (Unication Edition), 2007, performance as part of the Taiwan International Performance Festival. Courtesy of the artist. Left: Wang Shuyu, The Peoples Republic of China, the Republic of China, Constitution (Unication Edition), 2007, performance as part of the Taiwan International Performance Festival. Courtesy of the artist.

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A scene from Qiu Zhijies Beijing Studio with the construction of Cenotaphs in progress, 200607. Courtesy of the artist.

from an ancient stele.14 The design for this square-set (28 x 28 x 2.5 cm) catalogue echoes that of the individual component for Qiu Zhijies large-scale installation featured in the exhibition, which took place at the Long March Space inside Beijings 798 art district, a chic international tourist attraction.

Qiu Zhijie, Cenotaphs, 200607, concrete-and-cement cube, 16 framed calligraphic citations. Courtesy of the artist and Long March Space, Beijing.

Entitled Cenotaphs (Jinianbei, 200607), Qius installation consisted of eight solid concrete-and-cement cubes (80 x 80 x 80 cm), which took the artist and his team of masonry artisans a year of incessant labour to make. The similar appearance of the eight concrete cubes reects the routine process of making them. Each cube is composed of seventeen concrete slabs layered together; these layers remain visible from the side view, but they reveal nothing about whats enclosed in them. Except for the top layer (the seventeenth slab), each of the rest of the sixteen slabs bore imprints of Qiu Zhijies calligraphic practice, including his archaeology of Chinas long calligraphic, ideological, and social histories and of his own personal life. He searched for phrases, sentences, and codes that resonated with his current memory; he then wrote down a given selection in a calligraphic style that either imitated its original source or t its thematic message. Afterward, his assistants hand-carved the artists inscription into the concrete slab for Qiu Zhijie to make limited editions of ink rubbings from his calligraphic exercise before they covered up the carved and rubbed slab with another concrete slab. Qiu Zhijie and his team repeated the same process layer by layer until they sealed the concrete cube with a blank top slab.

Qiu Zhijie creating a rubbing of calligraphic script from his Cenotaphs series in his Beijing studio, 200607. Courtesy of the artist.

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Thus, the look-alike concrete cubes from Cenotaphs series are actually eight different giant tomes with all their pages sealed. Each tome includes sixteen different texts assembled, recalled, or composed by Qiu Zhijie. The rst tome collects revolutionary slogans of successive Chinese dynasties; the second, pithy statements from Chinese intelligentsia on international politics; the third, newspaper headlines from Chinas republic and communist national histories; the fourth, a list of songs from the karaoke inventory; the fth, individual statements that had become part of public memories; the sixth, fragments of personal letters and casual notes Qiu Zhijie received from friends; the seventh, his diaries written onto the computer and turned into illegible codes by computer viruses; the eighth, e-mail messages received in scrambled codes. They progress from

Qiu Zhijies Beijing Studio showing the calligraphic rubbings, 200607. Courtesy of the artist.

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Top: Qiu Zhijie, Cenotaphs, 200607, concrete and paper rubbing. Courtesy of the artist. Middle: Qiu Zhijie, Cenotaphs, 200607, concrete and paper rubbing. Courtesy of the artist. Bottom: Qiu Zhijie, Cenotaphs, 200607, concrete and paper rubbing. Courtesy of the artist.

collective cultural inheritance to arbitrary individual keepsakes to random codication by intelligent machines. If the rst three tomes represent what the artist gathered from Chinas orthodox history, then the remaining majority are his own compilations of untamed histories. Nevertheless, his attitude to both ofcial and vernacular histories appears the same: no matter how black his ink was and how white the calligraphic scripts contoured by his ink rubbings were, they eventually all turned grey, like dust settling on concrete cubes.

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In this light, the catalogue for the Archaeology of Memory becomes a selfreexive comment on the elusiveness of memory, for the document both provides an indispensable supplement to Cenotaphs and joins the ranks of the eight unreadable tomes to which it refers as yet another transient human gesture toward the semblance of permanence. The main catalogue essay, a Chinese manuscript written in a brush pen by Qiu Zhijie himself, is reproduced in a slightly reduced scale, with its calligraphic text laid out in the traditional Chinese way, going vertically from the right to the left. The essays translated English version follows, its text printed in the usual horizontal typeset, from the left to right and the top to bottom, yet its page order follows the Chinese style in going from recto to verso on each spread. The essay both begins and ends with an unrhymed couplet, which reads, according to the catalogues English version, The Emperor Decomposed Long Ago, Only the Scent of the Nanmu Tree Remains (Diwang zaoyi fulan, zhiyou nanmu xiang ru gu, 2007).15 The couplet sums up Qiu Zhijies Daoism and Buddhism-inspired syncretic philosophy regarding human history: Despite the great power that an emperor may attain, his political ambition, like his mortal body, cannot last forever. In contrast, natures effortless vitality ever sustains itself through perpetual renewal, like the fragrance from the Nanmu tree. The fragrant Nanmu tree, known as Phoebe zhennan in its Latin name, is a plant species endemic to China.16 Ironically, the plant is becoming endangered in China because of the loss of its habitat. Therefore, even Qiu Zhijies chosen symbol for natures self-sustainable, long-lasting scent might one day disappear. The Scent of Untamed Histories As my brief narrative recounting of the performative artworks by Yang Zhichao, Wang Chuyu, and Qiu Zhijie shows, Chinese experimental artists both operate in complicity with and maintain a critical distance from the China brand. In general, these artists appreciate the opportunities for enhanced international exposure of their work facilitated by the current global fascination with China because, despite their nationalistic pride, the international exhibition, circulation, and evaluation system for art remains their most desirable source of professional recognition and rewards.17 The fact that Yang Zhichao would overlay a biblical reference onto his performance series, that Wang Chuyu would adjust his interactive public artworks for various geopolitical contexts, and that Qiu Zhijie would incorporate English translations in a catalogue profoundly rooted in Chinese histories and philosophies all indicate these artists interest and sense of obligation in addressing a larger-than-domestic constituency. The same awareness of accessibility to the international art historical and cultural production systems, however, may also encourage these Chinese artists to shape a creative praxis more complex than the task of securing individual professional advancement. They may try simultaneously to generate more opportunities for work, to exercise creative agency, to express cultural subjectivity, to fulll socio-ethical responsibility, and, within the

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limits of self-preservation, to register a political voice. Indeed, why should these artists choose only one positioneither for or against the China brand, for or against rampant commercialism, for or against the orthodox historywhen they can play with multiple positions at various moments? Monochromatic routines are the negatives of untamed histories. When exposed to light, these narrative horses shock, dazzle, amuse, critique, contradict, survey, and augment the ever-expanding global chronicles by being colourful, malleable, agile, and tactically peripheral. Dappled as dappled goes, in China and beyond.

Notes
1

I presented an earlier, abridged version of this paper in Shenzhen + China, Utopias + Dystopias, an interdisciplinary conference at MITs, History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art Program on March 12, 2011. Id like to thank the organizer, Winnie Wong, for inviting me to the conference. In noting the colour symbolism in this essay, I combine various popular, literary, and associative sources. My choice is inspired by Marshall McLuhans famous dictum: The medium is the message. See Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967). The model of my medium here is untamed histories. The Web sites I consulted for colour symbolisms include Color Symbolism and Culture, incredibleart. org, http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/middle/color2.htm, and The Color Gray, in Elizabethan Era, http://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/color-gray.htm. Authors interview with Yang Zhichao, March 25, 2009, Songzhuang, Beijing. I paraphrased and translated the subsequent citations based on this interview. I also consulted the unpublished text Yang wrote on this event: Yang Zhichao, Qishilu SiBairi wu yier (Revelation 4A Hundred Days from May 12), September 8, 2008. Yang emailed this as-yet unpublished text to me on October 25, 2010. In this text, Yang mentions that the ofcial report gave out 200 as the number of the dead. The police also asked Yang about the missing memory card from his digital camera. Yang lied and said that he only used the digital camera to test the light, because for us professionals, a digital cameras lm quality is not good enough. My retelling of the Revelation series is based on my interview with Yang on March 25, 2009, in Beijing See also Eastlink Gallery, Yang Zhichao zuopin 1999-2008/Yang Zhichao Works, bilingual exhibition catalogue (Shanghai: Eastlink Gallery, 2008), 068081. See, for instance, Sichuan Earthquake, New York Times, (May 6, 2009), http://topics.nytimes.com/ topics/news/science/topics/earthquakes/sichuan_province_china/index.html . For a distinction between zheng shi and ye shi, see Xie Qian, Zheng shi yu ye shi, in Sichuan xinwenwang-Chengdu ribao, (September 13, 2010), http://cd.qq.com/a/20100913/000084.hym. I offer an extended theory of untamed histories here. Wang Jing, Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008), 32, 293. See L. Michael White, Understanding the Book of Revelation, Frontline, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/revelation/white.html. I adopt this designation from Wu Hung, A Decade of Chinese Experimental Art, 19002000, in Making History: Wu Hung on Contemporary Art (Hong Kong, China: Timezone 8, 2008), 31. Richard Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China (New York: Rowman and Littleeld, 2004), 12. Wu, A Decade, in Making History, 3132. My descriptions of Wangs performances in his series Reading are based on my interviews with Wang Chuyu on July 7, 2006, July 15, 2008, and March 25, 2009, in Beijing; a phone interview with Wang Chuyu on March 1, 2011, Los Angeles to Beijing; and on my study of the photographic documents. Constitution of the Peoples Republic of China (Aaopted on December 4, 1982), Peoples Daily Online, http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html. My description of Cenotaphs is based on my interviews with Qiu Zhijie on July 8, 2006, and July 12, 2008, in Beijing; on the information posted on his Web site, Qiuzhijie.com, and on his exhibition catalogue Qiu Zhijie, Jiyi kaogu/Archaeology of Memory, curated Lu Jie, ed. David Tung, trans. Lauren Allhusen (Beijing: Long March Space, 2007). I saw Cenotaphs in progress during my 2006 visit to Qiu Zhijies studio. Qiu Zhijie, Diwang zaoyi fulan, zhiyou nanmu xiang ru gu, and The Emperor Decomposed Long Ago, Only the Scent of the Nanmu Tree Remains, in Qiu Zhijie, Archaeology of Memory, 621 and 2225. S. Lee and F. N. Wei, Phoebe zhennan, in South China Botanical Garden Checklist, http://www. eoras.org/orataxon.aspx?ora_id=610&taxon_id=200009083. This observation is based on my extensive interviews with Chinese artists in Beijing conducted between 2004 and 2009.

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