If you meet Shen Shaomin in Northeast China, you’ll find the answer to some of the questions. In Shen Shaomin’s words, when he returns to the Northeast, everything from the air and scent to the bacteria seems to be just right. This feeling is as if the Monkey King had returned to his Waterfall Cave. For example, Shen Shaomin’s sudden sense of humor, or how he cleverly handles the atmosphere of a drinking session and remains sober after several rounds—these skills and wisdom, along with his unconventional ideas and effective mobilization of various resources, all have deep roots.
In the feature “New Voices of Northeast China,” we interviewed Shen Shaomin, who was born in the Northeast. During the interview, he talked about the humor that sprouted from the black soil of the Northeast. It’s everywhere, not only on the stage of Er Ren Zhuan (a traditional Northeast song-and-dance duet), but also on the Kang bed-stoves of ordinary people. More important than cultural expression are the daily attitude and survival wisdom derived from natural instincts. North-easterners use humor to confront the severe cold, traverse history, and penetrate life. Thus, humor often accompanies heavy emotions.
Shen does not dwell too much on history and theory when talking about the Northeast; he focuses mostly on traces of personal memories. For him, true locality flows in the blood and naturally manifests itself in expression. There is a distinct northeastern humor and tragic grandeur in Shen’s poetry and artistic proposals, but he dislikes being tied to labels or hindered by artistic boundaries. Art should be free.
Through individual narratives and practices, we caught glimpses of the complexity of the times, and saw how those forgotten perceptions of history are re-expressed in art. Just as Shen surpassed the shallow nature of success studies and continued the relay of failed scientific research through art, in his wisdom, the crumbling scenes of the Northeast also contain new life.
Shen Shaomin’s self-narrative is as follows.
Burying a Copper Incense Burner in the Pigpen
I was born in Acheng, and in my memory, Acheng is a county very close to Harbin, a typical small town in the Northeast. In fact, Acheng has a longer history than Harbin; it was once the capital of the Jin Dynasty and the birthplace of the Manchu people. During my childhood years, the Manchus made up a considerable proportion of Harbin’s population. Most of the Han nationality migrated there during the period of the Northeast Project, and there were also Koreans and Hui nationalities. I attended a Hui school when I was in elementary. Harbin was also deeply influenced by Russian culture; the Russians left behind not only many buildings but also the Harbin sausage and the big loaf bread. My first girlfriend was a beautiful Chinese-Russian girl.
My mother is Manchu, and a Yellow Banner one at that. When our household was registered, the earliest version of our household registration book indicated the Manchu nationality, but it was changed to Han during the Cultural Revolution. At that time, no one felt proud of being Manchu; it seemed that only the Han people were considered orthodox Chinese. Some Manchus chose to change their ethnicity to Han during that time, then they changed it back to Manchu later, and after awhile, no one really cared anymore. When I was young, I often rummaged through boxes looking for things to play with, and back then I could still find some Manchu clothes and shoes, but later on these things were all hidden away. At that time, being a minority meant being different, and it made everyone nervous and insecure, so anything that seemed unsafe was hidden or buried. I vividly remember that during the “Destroy the Four Olds” movement, my grandmother was Buddhist, and burning incense and praying were considered part of the “Four Olds” that needed to be destroyed. I personally buried her copper incense burner in the pigpen.
My mother came from a large family, but it declined. She dropped out of school in fourth grade, so she could read a little. At that time, education opportunities were rare for women. My mother had the genes of nomadic people. I was an only child, and my father died early, yet she never thought of making me stay by her side. Ever since I was young, she has filled my head with the idea that a man must go out and explore and not settle in one place. So when I decided to leave the art academy system and leave the Northeast, my mother was the only one who supported me.
My father passed away early, and I had to drop out of school to take over. I was temporarily assigned to a brick factory to do manual labor, which was too hard. It happened to be during the Cultural Revolution, and the slogans of Chairman Mao needed to be written on the walls, but no one knew how to write them. I said I could, but I had actually never written anything of the sort before. I started practicing when I got home. Later, I was transferred to the trade union and was responsible for writing propaganda slogans. In 1995, when I returned from Australia, I specifically went back to that brick factory, and the words I wrote on the front gate were still there.
There wasn’t much entertainment when I was young; the only amusement was group fights, and after the fights everyone became friends again. My nickname was “Strategist,” and I was responsible for planning strategies and setting traps and ambushes, all learned from picture-story books. Coming up with so many plans may have had a subtle influence on my future proposals. We did not have much extracurricular reading in those days, so I read some novels repeatedly and went through “Tracks in the Snowy Forest” more than three times. The influence of tragic revolutionary romanticism in films and literary works such as “Anna Karenina,” “Resurrection,” and “How the Steel Was Tempered” had a profound effect on me.
Speaking of my first work, it was made when I was about sixteen. That year, my father was diagnosed with cancer, and he only lived for about a year longer afterwards. There were five children in our family, and I was the only boy, so I was awfully spoiled, and I had a very close relationship with my father. When I realized that he was going to leave the world soon, I really wanted to do something for him. Funeral culture in the Northeast values coffins; people judge the wealth of a family by the thickness of the coffin wood. We were very poor at the time, but we still used all our money to buy a good coffin. I wanted to paint some patterns on the coffin, but I didn’t understand the traditional 24 filial piety stories, so I painted what I imagined as heaven, hoping that my father would reach a beautiful place after his death. Apart from my emotions, I had nothing to repay my father with at that time. This was the gift I gave to my father, and it was the last one I could ever give.
Looking back now, this seems somewhat surreal. Some of my poems later on were related to this memory as well. “The lightning tore a crack in the sky/I saw a narrow heaven/Along the raindrops, I felt the voice of God/Who can tell me if it was God who created man/Or if man fabricated God?” “I tore the entire sky apart/But failed to see the heaven I dreamed/I drilled a hole through the earth/But failed to see the truth behind/I stared at the mirror until wrinkles showed/But failed to see my own side.” Perhaps in my works, this kind of heavy yet romantic emotion has always been present.
The heaviness and romanticism of North-easterners are often related to this land. In rural areas, winter took up six months of the year, plus there is a two-month agricultural downtime, which means people had up to eight months of idle time. How to kill time became a major problem. North-easterners like to drink, firstly because of the cold, and secondly, drinking has become an effective habit to help pass time. In the villages of the Northeast, you have to walk tens of miles to find a few households, and since it’s rare to meet others, people end up becoming particularly hospitable. Even if they met someone who was only asking for directions, they’d want to invite them inside their house for a drink. The reason why North-easterners are humorous and are fond of telling and making up jokes is the cold. They love sitting and drinking on a heated Kang bed-stove and chatting away. Southerners who plant three crops a year don’t have this kind of luxurious time, so you rarely see this gene of systematic humor in them. Zhao Benshan is not uncommon in the Northeast; I used to take taxis in Shenyang often, and many taxi drivers were laid-off workers. Even some of the female drivers were quite humorous, much funnier than Zhao Benshan.
A Positive Pessimist
I started my art with printmaking. Heilongjiang valued printmaking at that time, and the Beidahuang Printmaking School formed its own style, which also influenced the printmaking of Daqing, Acheng, and so on. Creators back then needed to have a revolutionary spirit and cooperate closely with various movements. But printmaking had little influence on my later work because I didn’t do it for long, and I stopped after I went to Beijing.
I used to go to Beijing a lot because my job at the painting academy didn’t require fixed office hours, so I often went to Beijing to see exhibitions. Beijing was relatively open at the time, and all sorts of people gathered there, poets and contemporary artists alike. Contemporary art was in a semi-underground state back then; so-called contemporary art actually referred to not painting revolutionary themes and being abstract instead. Looking back, it might not even be considered modern art. Poetry, rock music, and contemporary art were all active at the time. I discovered a lot of new things there, and when I looked back and saw that sticking to the rules of the painting academy was clearly not what I wanted, I quit my job and went to Beijing.
Back then, I was fascinated by Beijing. I often rode my bicycle long distances just to see a band perform, and the excitement was indescribable. There was no such atmosphere in the Northeast. In terms of art, the Northeast was deeply influenced by Soviet culture; Maksimov’s Oil Painting Study Class influenced many people, and some northeastern painters of my age are still on that path. Later, when I became a mentor at the painting academy and started to teach some young people, I guided them to create rebellious works and completely got rid of the traditional requirements of printmaking. I brought them information about exhibitions and creations I saw in Beijing, and some of these students also left the Northeast later on. I also organized the first contemporary art exhibition in the Northeast with some passionate young artists who had returned from Beijing. Wang Guangyi went to see that exhibition; at that time he was looking for a place to hold an exhibition for the “Northern Art Group,” but there was no space at all, so they ended up holding the exhibition in a classroom.
Artists are still emerging in the Northeast, where people are not as busy making money as those in the South and therefore have a lot of free time to engage in useless thoughts. Contemporary art in the Northeast is also influenced by external factors, but the films and literature grown here differ from those in the South. For instance, Haibo’s photography is full of romance and sadness; he found a group photo of classmates, and several decades later, he gathered those people together and took another photo in the original location. Some had aged, some were absent, and some had died. This type of work, along with Wang Guangyi’s political pop art and Yue Minjun’s work of grinning faces, is unlike the works of the Jiangnan region (south of the Yangtze River). The humor and weight of the North-easterners lie in their wisecrack.
Just like some of my poems, “I carve a poem on my teeth/Only when I smile can you read/But since then, I’ve never smiled again, and swallowed all my teeth in the end.” “Polish lies until they’re fine, a mouth of false teeth will make them shine.” “I close my left eye/And finally see the tears of my right eye/I plug my right ear/And finally hear the cries of my left ear/I tightly shut my lips/Giving myself an eternal kiss.” These words may have a humorous undertone, but the imagery always accompanies a sense of pessimism, yet I often say that I am a positive pessimist.
To Step Out of Art History Is to Step Into Art History
The temperament in the bones of North-easterners, as I have mentioned many times, was influenced by a bank robbery that occurred in the Northeast when I was in my teens. Of course, this was a criminal act, but it showed the wisdom of North-easterners. Southerners might think North-easterners are a bit foolish, but I think they are quite clever. Robbing a bank and then brewing tea there on the spot may seem careless, but it actually involves meticulous planning, with humor infused in the intelligence. The literature and films of northeastern intellectuals, such as “The Piano in a Factory,” also give off a kind of tragic romanticism and humor.
Er Ren Zhuan represents another form of extremely vulgar grassroot humor. I once spent three years in Daqing, and many people from the art circle also went there. I took them to see Er Ren Zhuan, and they were all amazed at how directly critical and humorous it was about society, to a point so surreal that it surpasses even the language of contemporary art. This kind of humor is a transformation of the philosophy of everyday life, and its criticism even exceeds the earlier casual satire of Chinese crosstalk. In Northeast China, everyday humor can mock anything. Whenever we wanted entertainment during the harsh winters, we would pool our money and invite crosstalk actors to our homes to perform. The stage was just a 4-square-meter spot in the middle of the heated Kang bed, and you couldn’t even turn around if it was packed with too many people. Crosstalk relies on unique vocal styles that are mostly based on speaking jokes, which are often rude and spicy. They make fun of life, themselves, and their partners, entertaining each other with crude insults.
This environment had a great impact on my worldview. When I left Northeast China in my twenties, those experiences and influences could never be erased. Northeast China occupies a considerable part of my life. Whenever I return to Northeast China, the entire environmental atmosphere and even the bacteria here seem to stimulate me instantly. Even though I’ve been to Beijing, abroad, and then to the South, and have constantly been using new languages to express myself, I still retain traces of a North-easterner. This influence naturally reveals itself in my work. To me, Northeast China is like a majestic background, existing in my memory but not necessarily directly reflected in my works.
Take Shenzhen for example: if I hadn’t come to the city, I would never have made “Monument of the Sea” with 33 tons of sea salt. In Australia, I would think of the vanishing fish, and turn the courtroom into an exhibition hall, with the judges and the audience as my materials. I’m not in favor of emphasizing “locality” too much, because that emphasis is equivalent to the pursuit of a particular symbol. I’m not constrained by that limitation, nor do I enjoy it. In fact, I think that a good artist’s work should not have a strong sense of time or regional characteristics; the ability to transcend time and become a classic is what makes a piece great.
In the documentary “I’m Chinese,” even though it seems to discuss the history of Northeast China, I’m actually talking about borders, immigration, and identity. I have no experience in making documentaries, but I have a thing for movies. If I have the will, naturally there will be a way. My method is intuition. I never studied poetry or attended art schools, but without the constraints of a reference system, I am even more open and free. I always emphasize to young people around me that my creative principle is myself, not the art historical system. You must first step out of art history to go into art history.
Artists shouldn’t define themselves too much. When faced with issues worthy of attention, they should simply choose effective methods to express them. Many documents in Northeast China that are worth recording are going extinct, but one’s ability is limited, so sometimes I encourage people around me to do it. Not long ago, a student from the Central Academy of Fine Arts who studied technological art shared his work with me. He came from Jixi, a coal-producing area where the entire city is on the verge of collapse and young people are fleeing the place rapidly, leaving only a few coal mines still in operation. It was such good material, but the student insisted on fitting it into the framework of technological art, which shows that our education system indeed has its problems. Art is art and should have no boundaries.
Failure Is a Common Occurrence
During my seven years in Australia, I didn’t create many works. Some ideas were practically impossible to implement in Australia. For example, the works I did in Daqing required the use of animal bones or even human bones as materials. In Australia, not only would they involve high labor and material costs, but they would also face many legal obstacles. The reason I chose to work in Northeast China is that first, the long winters there made it convenient to handle and store large quantities of bones that could be kept outdoors. My friends in Daqing were also a key factor. If North-easterners consider you a true friend, they will support you unconditionally. They stand by your side without hesitation, and they are absolutely loyal. Northeast China is relatively backward in terms of business and economy, partly due to a lack of contract spirit. This is a problem in the Northeast, but it also has its advantages. Lacking the spirit of good faith and fair dealing means that many things are based on verbal agreements. When alcohol is involved, it’s easy to get carried away and say, “Leave it all to me,” even though you might forget about it the next day. Nevertheless, the forthright manner among friends can actually accomplish many things.
When I decided to come back from Australia, the first place I thought of was Daqing, because I knew such a group of people there. I called them and told them that I needed bones to create artwork, and they asked me what kind of bones I needed. After listing the bones of various animals, I mentioned human bones. Their response was, “Just come back; I’ll go kill one for you if necessary.” It was humorous but reassuring. When I arrived in Daqing, they not only prepared materials for me but also provided a studio, a car, and assistants.
The construction of my work usually requires a large production site and team cooperation. Although I used to have a studio in Beijing, most of my works were actually made in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, or Dongguan. Based on my experience, the processing ability in the South is stronger, and Southerners pay more attention to the spirit of the contract. Their work is more reliable and refined. On the other hand, I know the people from Beijing too well. They seem to be capable of doing anything. If you tell them you want to build an aircraft carrier, they’ll agree without hesitation, but in the end, they may only hand you a small boat and claim that it too can sail.
The works I truly produced in Northeast China were the Bones series. As a former heavy industrial base, the Northeast has no technical problems producing and modifying mechanical kinetic installations. The kowtow pump was directly modified from ready-made products purchased from factories, and the suicidal fighter jet was made in Shenyang because Shenyang has factories that produce fighter jets. The “Reconstruction of Tiananmen” (i.e., “Project No. 1”) was also produced in Shenyang because Shenyang has the Forbidden City and old craftsmen who understand the production and maintenance of ancient architecture. I have never stuck to a specific place to produce work because all my works are different, and I choose the site according to my needs. Southerners are reliable, but it’s quite impossible for them to make models of ancient architecture or produce the kowtow pump. However, when it comes to the refinement of the work, the Southerners will naturally outdo the Northerners, based on my experience.
I decided to come to Shenzhen later on, not only to make technology art, because that isn’t just about technical considerations. In 2012, I conceived a project called “The Relay of Science.” I visited many scientists and learned that their work is essentially a continuous process of experimentation and failure. Research funding doesn’t always directly correspond to results, and many studies may ultimately be abandoned due to an inability to proceed. In reality, their initial ideas are often quite emotional, with many idealists among them, which I find similar to artists. In the realm of art, there is more potential in abandoned ideas; it doesn’t necessarily mean failure but instead leads to a wider range of outcomes. I wondered if scientists could pass on their failed experiments to me, and I could shape them into a sentimental outcome, perhaps a poem, a film, or an installation. Later in Shenzhen, I came across artificial intelligence, allowing me to further realize my ideas.
Whether in scientific or social experiments, failure is all too common. The dilapidated scenes in Northeast China today are a typical epitome and model of the failure of the planned economy. Many factories in the Northeast, such as the “Three Big Factories” in Harbin, employed tens of thousands of people each. The massive layoffs in the past caused great social turmoil because several generations of family members, relatives, and friends all worked in the same factory. When they became unemployed, they couldn’t even find someone to borrow money from. The influence of collectivism and the planned economy in the Northeast is deep and lasting.
In this age of synchronized information, the Northeast is no longer as secluded as it once was, but for economic reasons, many young people still choose to leave and seek opportunities in the South. The history of the Northeast is an endless tale, and if you dig deep into it, many issues go directly into contemporary art. Southerners study English in foreign language classes, but in my parents’ generation, they learned Japanese, and when I was in high school, it was Russian. Due to the Zhenbao Island conflict and the downturn in Sino-Soviet relations, the first phrase we learned was “Lay down your arms and we’ll spare you,” in preparation for fighting the Soviet Union. Similarly, Daqing and Jixi are both epitomes of the Northeast’s destiny. At various stages, the Northeast has been continuously outputting without much input. With such rich resources and once possessing cutting-edge railway technology and heavy industrial bases, its economy was one of the best in Asia and even the world. How it developed to its current state is a question worth pondering. As for artists, this place is full of materials and resources. Though we don’t emphasize a northeastern identity, the people, history, immigrants, and ever-changing cultural identities rooted in this land are now like a pot of Northeast stew—rich, thick, and intertwined.
