Interview with Zhang Ga

Zhang Ga is a Chinese-born, U.S.-based academic, artist and curator. He curated Synthetic Times at the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), Beijing, from 10 June 10 - 3 July, 2008. The exhibition was a major overview of contemporary global media art practice, most which had never been seen before on the Chinese mainland.

This previously unpublished interview was conducted via skype on 17 July, 2008. Quotes from this conversation appeared in Dan Edwards' RealTime review of Synthetic Times.

Can you tell me a little bit about your background? I believe you studied in China and Germany and now work in the US. Are you originally from China?

I actually studied in Germany and the US. I went to the Central Academy of Fine Arts – not the academy, but the high school affiliated with the Academy. A long time ago – in the late 70s. But my formal education was actually all in the West. First in Germany, at Berlin University of Arts, then at Parson’s in New York, where I got my MFA. I’ve been living outside China for over 20 years now. I’m an artist and also a curator. And I’m teaching in New York as well. So many hats…

I believe you have been involved in a series of new media exhibitions in Beijing over the past four years or so?

Right, we initiated this Beijing International New Media Art Exhibition Symposium that was first staged in 2004. And subsequently in 05 and 06. So I worked with Tsinghua University to introduce media art in China. I was involved – actually I initiated that.

How did your involvement first come about?

That was interesting, because I left China for a long time, and then I went back in 2003 for the first time in over a decade. Then Tsinghua University asked me if I wanted to help them do something. And that’s how it all came about. We started to plan this... but one of the things was when I was in Chian in 2003 I looked around in the Chinese universities and also among artists– I visited a lot of artists – and I realised their understanding of new media still really remained at DVD, digital photography, a little bit of 2D interaction and Flash – stuff like that. And I thought that was not quite adequate given the very active scene globally in media art. I thought it was important to introduce some of the most cutting edge, almost current, media art production to China. That was the initial idea…

So in terms of the Synthetic Times exhibition, did the National Art Museum of China approach you to curate the exhibition, or did you approach the museum with a proposal?

They came to me. Mr Fan Di’an, the director, asked me to help him with this. That was quite a while ago – 2006. The show was conceived in 2006, and I’ve been working on it for the past two years…

And was that part of a desire on the part of the museum to introduce not only the work, but the concept of new media, to a broader audience in China?

I think so – I don’t know if you know much about Fan Di’an? He is a a well-respected curator in China, and also internationally, mainly for Chinese art. He is a very forward-looking man, and really wanted to do something to move the museum forward. I think he inherited a museum which is quite traditional – I mean you know the National Art Museum. I doesn’t really have international cache. So I think he wanted to do some drastic change. I assume, from my understanding. He is ambitious and wanted to really bring the museum to an international level comparable to other big museums in the world. And I think he wanted to do something that is cutting edge, that is more appropriate for contemporary dialogue.

In your essay on the Synthetic Times website, you state that the exhibition “is conceived with a sense of urgency to grapple with the new materiality and a new reality that is unfolding relentlessly before us.” It struck me when reading your piece that China is a place in which the incorporation of digital, networked technologies into everyday life is far less advanced than in richer, highly developed countries such as the U.S. Do you think new media art plays a different role in China to the role it plays in richer, more developed nations?

I think that digital technology’s development in China in the last few years was almost parallel to anywhere in the world. So in terms of infrastructure, in terms of the technology itself, it’s just as advanced. So accordingly there should be an art that responds to this social, cultural and technological phenomenon. In that sense I don’t think China has been on the cutting edge yet. The practice is still quite primitive. So that’s one thing which is very important to have them have a direct dialogue with the outside world. First to be aware of what is happening. Then probably based on that, that kind of knowledge, there will be an advancement in terms of artistic production.

Do you think the new media exhibitions you have been involved in in China have had a discernable influence on contemporary art practice in Beijing and elsewhere in China?

I think it definitely has had some impact on the Chinese art scene in general – especially this current one, Synthetic Times. Artforum, the Chinese version, wrote that this was the most comprehensive international show since 1985, when China first staged a Rauschenberg retrospective. That had a major influence on a whole generation of Chinese artists and actually directly led to the 1985 new wave movement. That was a catalyst for the later development of Chinese contemporary art. And they were saying this might be a comparable event for the Chinese art scene. Of course it’s a speculation, but the fact is the whole Beijing art world came out to see the show, which is very unusual. Established artists, young people, young artists – they all came to see the show, and were impressed or intrigued. So I think in that sense, given the current Chinese art market hype, I think it might serve as a more serious mode of art production – to help the Chinese younger generation to learn…let me put it this way; I think Chinese contemporary art is very problematic, because of the auction market – it all seems it’s very easy to make art. Everybody’s making so such money, without really reflecting on what they actually contribute to the language of visual art or art in general. And I think this probably acts as a wake up call – to let people realize that there are works that are very sincere, very serious, and require a lot of dedication and research and experimentation, and not come across as such an easy approach. And the way art has been developed in the West.

To be honest, this sort of show even in the West is very edgy. Not necessarily just in a Chinese context. No major museums so far have mounted a show of this scale and this breadth of artists. Other museums internationally probably didn’t have the audacity to mount such as show. But in China everything’s possible. They can bypass all the rules and conventions, and do something really unexpected. And I think this is one of the examples probably manifested in the art world. So I think the importance of this show not only lies in its Chinese context, but also it really is a regrouping of new media practice at an international level. It’s all kind of scattered in the last couple of years. There was a hype in the West during the early 2000s, or late 1990s, but since then, as far as I know, there has not been a single show of really great significance and importance, and the museums’ support of this sort of work is really dwindling. In that sense for the National Art Museum to mount a show of this scale is very encouraging for the global media arts scene. That’s why a lot of artists participating in the show were very excited and very encouraged that a new playground is happening here.

Why do you think that interest in media arts internationally has dwindled in the last few years? Is it just the difficulty and expense of exhibiting this work, or is it fashion driven?

I think there are several issues. One is it’s very complicate to mount a show like this. It’s very costly, that’s one thing. But that’s not the main issue, because I think in the West you can always get enough money to do a show of any scale. But one of the things is there is a misunderstanding about shows of this type. Because the traditional museum curators do not have a grasp of this kind of work. They would consider this more technology, but not so much art. Which is really a misunderstanding. Because they don’t have too much expertise in that. That’s one thing.

The other thing is that it doesn’t have a market. That’s very much a practical obstacle. It doesn’t sell. Not many people are collecting this sort of work. So there are two faults.

The works are mainly sponsored by art foundations. And especially in the United States, it seems to have lost its momentum. While in Europe there is a state cultural policy supporting this kind of work, in the States mainly it’s a privately run funding infrastructure. Rockefeller Foundation was very into that in early 2000s, late 90s, but now they’ve totally changed their priority, so a lack of funding is also one of the big issues for artists to produce ambitious work in the West. But Australia, Canada, Europe, are different to the U.S. I think they still have quite a bit of support from the government.

I read a recent comment in an online interview with Chinese art collector Guan Yi, in which he said: “The general audience in China doesn’t really understand contemporary art. Their understanding of art largely refers to Chinese tradition and classicism. As many people still do not embrace modernism, contemporary artistic forms and media remain alien to popular aesthetic canons.” Based on your experiences exhibiting new media work in China, would you concur with Guan Yi’s comment?

I agree with what he said. I think one of the reasons the Chinese audience was very enthusiastic about Synthetic Times was actually their lack of knowledge. It’s very refreshing, it was very novel. It was more for the sense of novelty than a real keen interest or understanding. You know when something is new everyone’s going for it. So that’s probably why in a way it was very well received. But I think this is also true with every contemporary art show in China. But given my experience in the West, to really understand contemporary art in the West – it’s not a popular thing either. How many people really understand contemporary art? – that’s very questionable anywhere in the world. Because it’s such a specialised discipline and you have to have all sorts of knowledge to understand the context and the cultural discourse, and most people don’t have that knowledge.

But I think in the West, people are more adept to shows of this type everywhere, because they have seen so many of these things. In China, contemporary art exhibitions are becoming very popular. I think, for example if you go to 798 [an art zone in northeast Beijing] or any of the gallery complexes, whatever you see is mostly contemporary stuff. There’s not much traditional art – galleries don’t deal with traditional art, even in China today. But it all happened really fast. It’s flourished in the last couple of years, so it still takes some time for the general population to have a real understanding of what the galleries are doing. The difference is, this is in the National Art Museum. The audience going to the National Art Museum is very different to the audience going to 798. Because 798 mostly caters to the artists’ community. But the National Art Museum caters to all kinds of audience groups – not necessarily art people, but general audience.

In the time you have been organising these symposiums and exhibitions in China, have you noticed any particular differences in the reaction of Chinese audience to new media works, compared to the reaction of audiences in places like Europe and the US?

I think the majority of the audience attending the exhibitions in the first couple of years were art students and universities, and mostly in educational branches. But this one is quite different – this one has attracted a lot of general audience or interested people. I noticed that this time the so-called white-collar class in China, the more affluent social groups, were the main audience of this exhibition.

In the West, apart from ARS Electronica, ZKM, these traditional media art strongholds, there haven’t many media art shows organised by major museums in the West, or at least in the States. Whitney did a big show in 2002 – that was about it. Since then there haven’t been any major shows of any size.

Network culture is increasingly important in China as elsewhere, and to some extent it’s undermining existing power structures and state ideologies, while also being used, monitored and censored by the state in an effort to maintain an official, singular, homogenous historical and political discourse. Do you think new media art has a role to play in China in subverting or changing present modes of thinking?

Oh, that’s a tough question. I think art doesn’t play an obvious regime change role – definitely not. I don’t think art has any power in that capacity. But I think it is a slow process. For me, I’m not so interested in politics in that way, but I think what matters to me is that art is something that changes you over time, the way you look at the world, the way you look at the world differently, and eventually the way you actually perceive reality. And that probably would pose questions about what’s accepted and what’s not accepted, and then eventually open up new possibilities and new perspectives. I think that’s the most important thing for art in any ideological setting. And that itself is probably an ideology…

What are your plans for future new media exhibitions or projects in China?

I think it should be a continuous thing. We are thinking about doing another large event in 2011. That is still quite preliminary, but there is definitely the intention to continue these sorts of exhibitions or activities. I hope in the next couple of years more intriguing Chinese works begin to surface.

Meanwhile we are also planning on doing a larger scale media art exhibition outside China. So it goes both ways. One side is to have the most interesting works exhibited in China. On the other hand to also try to discover or identify interesting Chinese media art works and introduce them to the outside world, to the global art scene.

Will your efforts remained focused on Beijing, as opposed to other parts of China?

I don’t know. For me, my interest is to do a thorough show, theoretically strong, and actually raise some questions. But there are lots of activities in China, for example the Shanghai Art Festival, which is a huge event. If there are interesting curatorial opportunities that fulfil my understanding of what new media art should be, then I’d definitely be willing to take part in it.

Zhang Ga at the opening of Synthetic Times at the

National Art Museum of China in Beijing.