Michael Hatch on Lawrence Weiner in Translation

2008.01.16

“The misunderstanding is that my work has to do with language, it has nothing to do with language.”

So began Lawrence Weiner’s lecture to a full auditorium at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts on January 11. He continued to defy the contexts into which the Beijing art world wanted to place him on the following evening when asked to speak as part of a panel discussion titled “Art and Language,” organized by the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA). After hearing his work described as “text-based” the artist stated, “I’ll be damned if I know what text-based art is since all art is about communication.” Confrontational, but not impolite.

But perhaps the most controversial public comment of Weiner’s long-awaited, albeit brief stay in Beijing was his directive to “Walk away from The Word,” an axiom presented in response to the point that his work, when translated into written Chinese, contains visual forms and therefore contains metaphor, an element that Weiner claims to avoid with his work.

Lawrence Weiner at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.

Such a plea to move away from past associations with The Word is antagonistic towards the very nature of the Chinese language. It also chafes against a sense of cultural pride that most citizens—many controversial artists included—prefer to maintain. I don’t doubt for a minute that Weiner prefers to chafe, to change comfortable perspectives. But I do doubt the potential for his work to surpass metaphor (and therefore function as he fully intends) when translated into Chinese, because the visual presence of the written Mandarin word is simply too strong.

Why aren’t there more Chinese artists working in the style of Lawrence Weiner? Chinese contemporary art in its current state is often narrated from the assumption that it is a step behind the “real” contemporary world, simply imitating it with a Chinese voice. So, why isn’t anyone imitating Weiner?

One only has to look at the works of Xu Bing, Qiu Zhijie or Gu Wenda to see that such a strategy doesn’t make sense in written Chinese, where visuality—and therefore metaphor—is built into the language. When the Chinese language is manipulated in contemporary art, it is most often done through plays on the roots or past contexts and metaphors of characters themselves. The work of Xu Bing comes closest to “walking away” from the associations attached to Chinese characters, but, as in his iconic Book from the Sky, it does so by a slight dismantling of the visual structures of Chinese character radicals, enough to simultaneously engage and frustrate the faculties of comprehension. Xu Bing’s new Book from the Earth, on the other hand, (a series of rebus-like stories strung together from universally legible icons) pursue an Esperanto of universally applicable metaphors. Both operate within existing linguistic logics.

Artists Jiao Yingqi, Wang Luyan, and Lawrence Weiner with Ullens Center curator David Spalding Weiner's work Moved About to Allow the Light, 2007.

Another example is the artist Jiao Yingqi, one of the three panelists at the UCCA discussion with Weiner. Jiao develops new characters that describe the changing conditions of contemporary Chinese culture. Weiner proposed that “[Jiao Yingqi] is not changing language; he’s changing the logic pattern.” What he did not note is that Jiao works well within the logical patterns of pre-existing traditional Chinese radicals, which in turn have visual roots and therefore metaphorical implications. For instance, his set of characters for homosexuality included a character pronounced la, short for lala, the colloquial word for lesbian. His new character included two conjoined female radicals over a heart radical. The only way to read Jiao’s new character is through an understanding of the visual roots of already existing characters.

The crux of the issue is that the written and spoken systems of Chinese do not have a direct association. One cannot read Chinese characters without first memorizing their phonetic and tonal assignments. There will never be a Hooked on Phonics for Chinese as one cannot sound out a character. Nor can one even read a sentence unless one knows each character by memory. One can however make a guess as to the meaning of an unknown word based on the visual association of its radicals. In that sense the visual metaphors that lie at the root of even contemporary Mandarin are still very functional. An artist manipulating Chinese characters as medium cannot separate metaphor from language, and therefore most chose instead to work within that system of visual metaphor as language.

Lawrence Weiner and translator Weng Wei at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

Weiner might well argue that this misses the point of his work, of which he says: “Since (the work) is always related to material itself, it’s never mistranslated,” and it “adapts itself to the new environment (of translation).” By allowing the work to take on whatever characteristics the language of translation may bring, he allows the work’s impact to change outside of his control, but does it have impact at all if it is bound within a system of visual metaphors as language? He urges that viewers “Make your own metaphor.” But if, for example, Weiner were to use Jiao Yingqi’s new word for a “T” (a masculine-role lesbian in colloquial Chinese) then there is no way for the viewer to escape the bound visual metaphor of one female form containing a smaller female form, an image-as-word that not only fails to “leave out all self-reflexivity,” but also promotes the assumed patriarchal power dynamic that Mr. Jiao imposes on his subject.

— 文/ Michael Hatch