Black Ocean, Single-channel video, color, sound, 38’35”, 2016

For Liu Yujia, this was a minor transition. If her previous Third Person (2014), The Course of the End (2013), and Light (2013) established her artistic vocabulary by interweaving appropriation, fabrication, and visualization, then the borderlands, which are the subject of Black Ocean, have a narrative function or play an important role. However, this ambiguous zone full of tension, strangeness, and dialectics is also part of the narrative structure of the video. More than a year later, Liu Yujia is presenting a new project, The Beach, A Fantasy (2017), which is, strictly speaking, an extension of Black Ocean.

The beach is situated between dry land and the ocean; it belongs to neither but has traits of both. It is where we spend our holidays; in this time and place, we are not at home, we are not at work, and we separate ourselves from the normal state of the world. For Claude Lévi-Strauss, the beach “overlaps the physical structure of Land/Sea with the social structure of Nature/Culture… The land, then, becomes culture, the city, civilization; the sea becomes nature, untamed, uncivilized, raw. The beach mediates this terrifying boundary.” [1] Geographically, the “black ocean” of the Gobi Desert in Karamay and beaches around the world are boundaries or territories. According to Owen Lattimore, this is a zone of transition that is both permeated with trade and conflict and contains a blend of different cultures, beliefs, and politics; this is a complex social zone and political-cultural organism. [2]More importantly, relative to Black Ocean, The Beach, A Fantasy is an extension of this territory. They can both be seen as part of the same physical-geographical system, which is also to say that the beach is a borderland, but it is also the borderland of Black Ocean’s borderland.

The entire exhibition (project) is comprised of five works, focused on the clear theme or motif of the ocean from different narrative dimensions. Life wasn’t meant to be easy, This is making things hard is a four-channel GIF work that draws on images from the “Reading the Beach” chapter of Reading the Popular by American scholar John Fiske. This book describes and analyzes the key places and texts—beaches, Madonna, rock music, and TV news—that people confront when they produce their own culture. The four images cited here come from postcards purchased at Australia’s Cottesloe Beach in the 1990s, depicting three beach behaviors that had been banned by the local government, including 1. Topless sunbathing and performance for the male gaze (Figure a. “produces a meaning of the beach as a site for male sexuality”);[3]2. Performances of promiscuity with “connotations of a Roman orgy and/or a sultan’s harem”[4] (Figure c. “Wonder what the poor people are doing” and Figure b. “Life wasn’t meant to be easy. This is making things hard”); 3. Beach bums (Figure d.) We cannot know for sure if the original postcards were official announcements or the result of a well-meaning satirist poking fun at these prohibitions. Interestingly, these images nominally represent prohibitions, but they actually show a seemingly unencumbered state of leisure for the bored bourgeoisie. In the book, Fiske cites lyrics from Iggy Pop’s “The Endless Sea” (1979): “Oh, baby, what a place to be, in the service of the bourgeoisie!”[5]

Life wasn’t meant to be easy, This is making things hard, Looped four-channel GIF animation installation, color, silent, 2017

In the past, the ideas of leisure and ease were interpreted differently. In Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, leisure is earned through hard work, and in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, the bourgeoisie obtained leisure time by exploiting workers. Taking this to an extreme, Malcolm Fraser declared that there cannot be leisure for the proletariat. [6] The traces of gender, class, race, and other ideologies permeate these images, and it is difficult to say that this is an expression of nature. Fiske reminds us that “the beach is a place for looking (SUN, SURF, SAND, and SEE), for possession of the female by the male look. The girls here are not sunbaking merely to produce a tan to take nature back to the suburbs, nor are they swimming out of culture into nature, but they are constituting themselves as bearers of meaning for men.” [7] It is easy to see that these kinds of images are similar to the ones that people often post to Instagram, Facebook, WeChat, and other social media to show off their quality of life and class status. These social media images also adhere to the logic of power that hinges on observing and being observed. Today, ancient (sea)ports have completely disappeared, replaced with concrete container terminals. “That sort of piracy belongs to the past, and the beach is where just about everyone wants to be.” [8]

Life wasn’t meant to be easy, This is making things hard, Looped four-channel GIF animation installation, color, silent, 2017

The original images in Fiske’s book were grainy black-and-white pictures, so Liu has used the style of American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein to translate them into a series of high-definition GIFs that look like advertisements for a beach vacation. She has chosen Lichtenstein’s style because Pop is a part of popular culture, and Thomas Crow once said that Pop’s superficiality actually conceals a deep compassion for its times. She has chosen GIFs because they are products of Instagram, Facebook, and other modern social media, where they are often used to express emotion. Of course, these images of prohibited acts are linked to now-ubiquitous internet censorship and information removal.

The original images in John Fiske’s Reading the Popular, 41.

This work is an index for the entire exhibition, and the other works all have some relationship to this piece. The last of the beach rules relates to “beach bums.” In the original image, there is a bum in the distance on the right, but Liu Yujia removed him (and the words “BEACH BUMS” on the left side). In her translation, all that remains is a pair of nude women in the foreground seen from behind. Fiske believes that the makers of the card position the viewer as middle-class. The idle “bum” and the bourgeois viewers outside the image have the same somewhat voyeuristic mentality, even as they project class, gender, and other ideological discourses.[9] Coincidentally, Liu’s work The Koh Larn Island centers on the experiences of a local bum called Yoad (a word meaning “classy” or “respected” in Thai) on an island near Pattaya in Thailand. Liu Yujia’s small act of removing the bum from the original picture reflects Yoad’s experiences and mental state. For Yoad, power-driven voyeurism and class-gender visions no longer exist. 

Liu originally wanted to shoot a work about Thai beaches, but she never found a subject she considered exceptional. During the trip, she met a bum called Yoad. Curiosity compelled her to interact with him and listen to the story of how he became a homeless vagabond. When he was five, his father, a criminal, was killed. When he was old enough, Yoad inherited his father’s property, but due to poor management, he nearly lost the family fortune. The only remaining house was confiscated by the government. Yoad telling the story of his life is one of the key threads in this video. The other thread is a local person wearing sunglasses and a mask riding a motorcycle that pulls a plastic swan used for ocean rescues. This person aimlessly wanders the island in an amazing spectacle. The artist explained that, while she was filming, she encountered interference from the local police, as well as resistance and questions from the motorcyclist (her protagonist). However, in her view, “these questions reveal their terror and unease when faced with the unknown or the extraneous, as well as their desire to control this fear.” [10]The actions in the film seem disordered, meaningless, and absurd, and here, the plastic swan is transformed into a viewer, providing us with a special perspective. Through its “eyes,” we gain a panoramic view of everyday scenes that are destroyed and rebuilt. We are no strangers to absurdity and surrealism because these elements also appear in Black Ocean.

These two works, which were originally unconnected, now represent a clever relationship between words and images and between texts. Yoad’s description of his own life feels as if it was told through another’s eyes. He often says, “Everything is gone,” which is paired with the plastic swan leaving the ocean and the beach. The motorcycle pulls it around the streets and alleys; when it is removed from its original functional system, it becomes an outcast. Yoad was abandoned and cast aside by his friends, family, and country—his own story resembles Robinson Crusoe’s lonely fate and strange life experience in Daniel Defoe’s desert island book. Robinson Crusoe also appears in another of Liu’s videos: Let’s Go! Robinson Crusoe, who has endured many hardships, transforms his deserted island into a colony, but he still manages to return to England to be married and have children. In Yoad’s case, he has no connection to islands and beaches, which is also true of Liu Yujia’s photographic series MacGuffin (2014), named after something that does not exist or is immaterial, something unreal, a pure surface.[11]

Liu Yujia has reviewed large quantities of text and online materials, and from those sources, she has collected many video clips and pictures that support performances and related narratives. The material for the multi-channel video installation The Beach, A Fantasy came entirely from (purchased) archival footage, edited from real archival sources. The clips include familiar scenes of the beach at Normandy, where Allied forces landed during World War II (Atlantic Ocean), waves on Bondi Beach in Sydney (Pacific Ocean), scenes from Miami Beach (Atlantic Ocean), as well as relatively unfamiliar scenes from the port of Alexandria (Mediterranean Sea), the city beach in Rio de Janeiro (Atlantic Ocean), and the island of Martinique (Caribbean Sea). The work was originally inspired by Michael Taussig’s essay “The Beach (A Fantasy).” Liu referenced his choice of beaches near the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea, but Taussig’s narrative is an intentional reversal of American poet Charles Olson’s statement that the history of the world could be summed up by three oceans: the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific (Homer, Dante, and now Melville). Yet how unthinkable Olson’s proposition has become, and he has since consciously resisted or removed ideology, [12] but for Liu Yujia, this historical order does not exist, and ideology is one of her important metrics.

Initially, she envisioned multiple corresponding sets, but she eventually had to abandon this careful design; instead, she chose to mix them all together. The clips still blend multiple correspondences: beaches are sites of extreme actions such as battles and surfing, they are places of leisure, they are garbage dumps, they are sites of capitalism, they are colonized third world countries, they are bodies, and they are spectacles. Although Liu only selects certain fragments, the content and orientation of every fragment is entirely different, and the video clips she appropriates are products rooted in the perspective of an Other. When the multiple screens are juxtaposed in the same space, she builds a special realm that knits together the different cultural, lived, political, and psychological states of gender and class, race and region, trade and conflict, desire and compromise, freedom and fear. As I have noted previously, this is all a metaphor for the beach. Even so, this is a beach about a beach, and in this moment, others’ visions are incarnated as participants or consumers—the subjects of the beach. 

Beaches from different regions are imbued with different ideological sensibilities, and they may even represent sharp divides (echoed in “Wonder what the poor people are doing,” the third image in Life wasn’t meant to be easy, This is making things hard), but the beach often blends different ideologies, and this blend itself may even be free of ideology. Bizarrely, it is a boundary, but it is also boundless. In this sense, we could say that the beach is a microcosm of or metaphor for the geo-politics of a nation-state in an era of globalization. However, we may see this differently when we move away from the multi-channel video installation and face Let’s Go!— a single-channel video comprised of many different sources edited together. 

Let’s Go! is like a footnote or an entrée to A Beach, A Fantasy, or an introduction to the concept of the beach. However, this does not imply that the work is not self-contained, and in a sense, it sums up Liu’s perceptions of and thoughts about the beach. Unlike A Beach, A Fantasy, Let’s Go! is a text or archive of the beach, which engages the viewer in reading. Liu used similar textual and archival methods in her slide installation from two years ago: 3-10-6 (2015). Fiske wrote, “Like all texts, beaches have readers. People use beaches to seek out certain kinds of meanings for themselves, meanings that help them come to terms with their off-beach, normal lifestyle.” [13] The layered or multi-screen nature of the images is rooted in a self-referential design, but it also relates to the online era, which offers ways of reading or viewing multiple pages. Speaking of archives, Hal Foster once pointed out that archival art does not simply imply a shift in artistic practice toward the anthropological; it primarily implies a search for subjectively constructed meaning in history. Here, the role of the archive is to present humanity’s different perceptual reactions to historical events, exploring how these perceptual reactions can become critical power, adjusting the spatial-temporal relationship between the past and the present. [14] Apart from the fact that these materials or archives from different places are all related to beaches, there are few intersections, the result of the combination and assemblage of their differences. The work’s goal is not to pursue a coherent narrative, and from the beginning, the piece was markedly anti-narrative and anti-circumstance. According to Aby Warburg, this is the liberating intellectual practice of an “iconology of the interval.” An “interval” is “a kind of no-man’s-land at the center of the human.” [15] We can see it as an enclave of subjective growth and free movement, and the hesitation and interpellation caused by these sustained disconnections and intervals evolve into a subjective consciousness. Moreover, isn’t the beach a “non-no-man’s-land” interval between the ocean and the land?

There are no direct experiential connections between the beaches in lifestyle advertising, the beaches in Daniel Defoe’s books, the beaches in Friedrich’s paintings, the beaches of Syrian resorts, the beaches on which refugees arrived, and the beaches that serve as daily markets in India. Apart from the visible elements of the beach, these images string together the different methods and degrees of violence that hide behind them, encompassing politics, war, capital, consumption, and everyday life. For example, the surf that appears in the video originally implied nature and risk, an escape from cultural control. According to Roland Barthes, this is a shift from the politics of ideology to the politics of pleasure. [16] “Pleasure, which affords the escape from this power, the escape from the norm, becomes an agent of subversion because it creates a privatized domain beyond the scope of a power whose essence lies in its omnipotence, its omnipresence.”[17]  Even the surfboard has become a commodity, and surfing has become part of popular culture. In other words, what is truly governed or enforced is not the radical act of surfing; it is surfing as a consumer good and mass culture. [18] This may not have been something Liu considered, and presumably this was not a standard she used when she chose this material. Coincidentally, in addition to being broken, cracked, and conflicting, they share a secret sense of violence. These cracks and conflicts weaken or offset one another, thereby strengthening this sense of violence. We believe that everyone experiences and imagines the beach as something natural and pleasant—a picture-perfect landscape—but here, the layered fragments and the successive wave (sounds) in the background press on the viewer’s senses like a series of strikes. Like Robinson Crusoe discovering footprints on the beach, this gives rise to fear, while activating space for wisdom and imagination. [19] We could imagine this as the way in which Hobbes’ state of nature leads to a rational society. However, Liu Yujia’s logic is akin to that of Foucault; she wants to show how the rationality of nature, freedom, and collision conceals violence, and then, how people can smash this invisible web of power.

We’ve just thrown our bonus money into the Pacific is a neon text work, taken from a Hawaiian Airlines advertising slogan, exhibited in the same space as Let’s Go! Appropriation is tentatively an act of self-liberation, which may connect to people finding nature-freedom on the beach through imagination. Of course, behind nature-freedom lies an invisible, pervasive infiltration of capitalist-power. Both pieces share a consistent logic. Liu chose the form of text because it naturally corresponds to the textuality of Let’s Go! and establishes a reading relationship with the viewer. The mirroring between the text and the screen brings them together. However, the sentence “We’ve just thrown our bonus money into the Pacific” might be more significant. Looking closely, we discover that this line does not actually establish a reading relationship. Because it is an airline slogan, it suggests an aerial perspective, which is what draws us into another dual-channel video, entitled Wave, a work that makes extensive use of this perspective.

The video records the movement of the ocean hitting the shore, and because of the almost nonexistent traces of people and the high aerial perspective, the video looks like an unusual physical GIF. One might say that the work completely shifts our perceptions and visions of the beach to its natural and physical side. Invasion and retreat coexist between the ocean and the land on the mixed, transitional property of the beach. In the chapter entitled “Will and Wave” in The Gay Science, Nietzsche noted that a wave is an aimless, meaningless occurrence, a Dionysian moment. It transcends time and custom, so it seems like a moment that can cross boundaries and be separated from a sense of place. Taussig believed that “the Dionysian play of will and wave acquires premeditated political force. For the whole point of Nietzsche’s work was to try for the ‘reverse experiment,’ undoing the repression that turned man against himself… No accident then, that the reverse experiment has to be down there at the water’s edge, edge of history, edge of repression, ‘turning man against himself,’ the most fateful mimetic act of all.” [20] Here, Nietzsche’s formulation and intention obviously transcends our experience of the beach and its ideological framework, evolving into a universal philosophy of cognition and existence. In my view, “marginal antagonism” and “winning retreat” are political practices.

In W. J. T. Mitchell’s view on landscape, the beach is an allegory and a complex socio-political organism. It is a zone of self-exile, and at the same time, because of taboos, it can become a regulated area; because of war, it can become the site of a massacre; because of capital, it is often a space of consuming and being consumed. The beach is a product of modernity, while also containing intense anti-modernity. Liu Yujia utilizes many texts and archives, which certainly give her work the traits of both film and writing. She has inadvertently written a cultural history or geographical treatise on beaches, but what she truly cares about is how it is shaped into a new geographical discourse and perceptual method when we attempt to weave it into a new narrative. In a globalized era of collision, blending, conflict, fragmentation, and cracking, the beach is a metaphor for frontiers, borders, and geographic politics; it also transcends existing definitions and grows into a new aesthetic medium and imaginative mechanism.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science.” In Potentialities, edited by Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery, 89-103. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Fiske, John. Reading the Popular. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Lattimore, Owen. Inner Asian Frontiers of China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940.

Li, Meng. Ziran shehui: Ziranfa yu xiandai daode shijie de xingcheng (Natural Society: The Formation of Natural Law and the Modern Ethical World). Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2015.

Liu, Yujia. “About MacGuffin.” Provided by the artist, 2016.

Liu, Yujia. “About The Beach, A Fantasy.” Provided by the artist, 2017.

Taussig, Michael. “The Beach (A Fantasy).” In Landscape and Power, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 317-343. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Zhou, Yanhua. “Dangdai piping de ‘qingdong zhuanxiang’” (The affective turn in contemporary criticism), Yishu Dangdai (ArtChina), no. 2, 2017.

1.John Fiske, Reading the Popular (New York: Routledge, 1991), 44-45.

2.Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), 233.

3. Fiske, Reading the Popular, 41.

4.Fiske, Reading the Popular, 42.

5.Fiske, Reading the Popular, 43.

6.Fiske, Reading the Popular, 52.

7.Fiske, Reading the Popular, 41.

8.Michael Taussig, “The Beach (A Fantasy),” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 318, 320.

9.Fiske, Reading the Popular, 42.

10. Liu Yujia, “About The Beach, A Fantasy,” Provided by the artist, 2017.

11. Liu Yujia, “About McGuffin,” Provided by the artist, 2016

12. Taussig, “The Beach (A Fantasy),” 317.

13.Fiske, Reading the Popular, 43.

14.Yanhua Zhou, “Dangdai piping de ‘qingdong zhuanxiang’” (The affective change in contemporary criticism), Yishu Dangdai (ArtChina), no. 2, 2017.

15. Giorgio Agamben, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science,” in Potentialities, ed. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 94.

16.Fiske, Reading the Popular, 50.

17. Fiske, Reading the Popular, 52. 

18.Fiske, Reading the Popular, 56.

19.Li Meng, Ziran shehui: Ziranfa yu xiandai daode shijie de xingcheng (Natural Society: The Formation of Natural Law and the Modern Ethical World), (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2015), 4.

20.Taussig, “The Beach (A Fantasy),” 343.