An installation for Nanjing

Last October, I was approached to participate in an exhibition at the AMNUA museum in Nanjing, a metropolis near Shanghai. Nanjing, relatively unknown to us, is forever linked in China to the murder of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants by the Japanese during World War II. Politics and history intertwine here. This was also the case in the exhibition Insource/outsource, with which the curators wanted to hold the political/social changes in China up to the light.

China as a communist nation. China as a capitalist nation that makes products for the whole world. With this contrast, this interesting fact, the curators Douglas Lewis (Canada) and Yamin Wang (China) were playing. For their project, they had in mind a specific work of mine that they had found on my website: Cry out for joy you lower parts of the earth. I had built this monumental installation at the Centraal Museum Utrecht ten years ago. The work consisted of more than a hundred wells, garden nets and clouds. The latter were composed of maps that had been manually perforated by HKU students, a true monk's work. For me the installation, with its wells and cables, represented the flows and connections under the city. I had no political associations.

Rather, I was and am inspired by a writer like Calvino, particularly his book Invisible Cities. But there was more than a problem of content: nothing was left of the installation.

The only possibility was to develop a new work, a Chinese version of the installation in the Centraal Museum. It became an internet search for things and materials on mostly Chinese-language sites. Fortunately, I had two assistants available from the museum who did the preliminary work for me and went looking for materials in factories and suppliers in Northeast China. It soon became apparent that the wells I had used in Utrecht could not be found in China. When I work on site myself, I go foraging in stores, construction pits, or come across materials along the road. I prefer to find my building materials physically, I have to be able to see and touch them. That now had to be done from a distance and in 'blind' trust to pictures with which a factory promotes its products on its website. I decided to embrace the whole adventure with open arms and not to stick to an idea that was too firmly defined. I have worked in China before. I have also noticed that things always work out, left or right, even if they are not as straightforward as we are used to.

Through the internet, skype, with the help of my assistants in China, I found wonderful products related to the drainage systems under the city. Large pipes, cuffs and cables. Finally I found ribbed pipes in different sizes that are blue inside. These I chose.

The development of the clouds was more complicated. I wanted to use city maps of Nanjing. After a search I found one on which all the streets, water features, city edges and greenery were indicated. I wanted to avoid the time-consuming tearing by hand, as was done at the time in the Centraal Museum, by having the maps punched out in a printing office. Because that turned out to be too expensive, the museum decided to do it by hand anyway and put many assistants to work!

Two weeks before the opening, I arrived in Nanjing. Everything was ready. Large black ribbed tubes in lengths of five meters in varying diameters. These turned out to be so hard that I could stand them upright in the air. In another room they were working with the maps. To my surprise, they had come up with a plan to drill the holes in the paper with a speed drill. Then they had to remove the advertising from all the maps, one by one.

I had four assistants every day, students from all kinds of faculties on the university campus where the museum is also located. Students from the departments of music, visual arts, dance and theater. They can register with the museum to be called upon if work is available. So it came about that every day I had different students with diverse backgrounds. With several students I went on 'studio visits' or visited the workshops where they worked themselves.

We built the clouds in a week in the museum's garage. The perforated cards were laid out over a construction of chicken wire and connected. This mass of clouds had become a work in itself, causing me to doubt whether the tubes should have a place in it. Usually I decide this intuitively, but in this case, where the curators were so specifically looking to reprise the installation Cry out...., it was not possible for my mind.

It was an adventure to work together because not everyone spoke English well, understood what I was saying, or was too shy to say so. There was a lot of chatter among them which I, in turn, could not understand. Yet there was always someone who stood up as a mediator/interpreter. Some didn't understand a thing about what was on my mind, others really wanted to know everything and there was always the conversation about decisions that had to be made. A number of students want to do everything they can to be able to come to Europe.

A period of ten days was planned for the construction of the exhibition, but totally unexpectedly, without any of the curators knowing about it, a short presentation lasting five days was inserted. In the end there were only three days left in which the work of all the participating artists had to be set up. I had been given an aerial platform, but now everyone had to use it at the same time. All the way to China. Fortunately, in the end I hardly needed the access platform. During the cutting and sawing of the tubes I decided to leave them standing instead of hanging them up. The very monumentality and fragility of standing was a new opportunity for me. The clouds did move into the sky. The garden net was, until a long time ago, "an unfindable product. At the last moment the assistants found nets made of cotton, which still had to be painted black. Still wet with paint, they were delivered two days before the opening and the installation could be completed just in time.

As I said, I have nothing political in mind with my work, and a social statement is also far from the norm. I rather try to tap into a poetic stratification in products with a purely utilitarian meaning. I am fascinated by connections, junctions, by the city which I experience as a large organism. In China, the associations were clearly different. For the visitors to the exhibition, the new version of Cry out for joy, you lower parts of the earth was an unmistakable, critical reference to a factory on the edge of their city, source of smog, outgrowth of capitalist China. This interpretation corresponded wonderfully well with other work shown at the exhibition. For example, the Chinese artist Jin Feng showed the complete inventory of a store that had recently gone bankrupt as a direct result of economic developments. Another participant, Mathew Carver (Canada) discovered that his own paintings, made in an edition by a Chinese copy painter, were being offered for sale on the Internet. Carver went to see this man. His portraits of the Chinese painter, busy copying his work, were on display at the exhibition.

Exhibition concept: Douglas Lewis

www.nuamuseum.org
www.karinvandam.com

Karin van Dam is a lecturer at ArtEZ, University for the Arts Arnhem.