刘雨佳，《远山淡景》（静帧），单通道录像，2018，39分26秒，截图自CEF实验影像中心微信小程序

作为龟兹文化“活化石”的库车王妃俨然是博物馆里的一处奇观。同样值得注意的是，这位维吾尔族女性也主动扮演着异域王妃的角色，并从中获益——奇观化和自我奇观化在此交叠。对于熟悉抖音和快手的中国观众来说，以少数民族风情为亮点的奇观和与之相应的消费模式并不陌生，因此影片中的这一幕似乎不足为怪。不过，影片通过艺术家精心布置的镜头语言邀请观者进入主人公的日常生活场景，并从这个角度来寻找用于解读她的民族身份的复杂线索，这是对奇观化的更深层次的检验。 

回过头来看先前的几个场景，不难发现，主人公的私人生活几乎已经完全让位于公共表演了。即便是在清洗洗手间的时候，她仍穿着与游客合影时一样的民族服饰，就像是随时准备迎接新的一批游客。与此同时，电视机播放着用当地语言录制的政治宣传节目，“民族团结”的意识形态和针对新疆的“去极端化”思想动员化作绵延的声音讯号，在房间里弥漫开来。镜头带领观者在不同空间之间穿梭，与其说这是在私人的生活空间与用于展示的公共空间之间来回切换和比照，不如说影片展示了个体生命是如何被充斥着多层权力关系的空间所裹挟和规训的。生活在博物馆中的主人公犹如久困于牢笼之中的狮子，既被剥夺了王妃身份的实际权力，也无法摆脱继续扮演王妃角色的命运。 

《远山淡景》聚焦于这样一个性别化、民族化、奇观化的身体，并通过影像的形式将这个身体以及它所处的空间呈现给当代艺术的观众。比起寻找一个局内人的视角来呈现真实的边疆，影片似乎更加重视边疆与内地的“相遇”，以及建立在这一关系之上的民族身份想象与构建。“远山淡景”或许就指涉着“观-演“关系中对渺远事物的浪漫想象吧。更进一步讲，表演不是单向的展示，它必须被放入与观看者的关系中进行检验。影片对“观-演”关系的处理带有敏锐的反身性，艺术家通过现实与虚构之间的模糊地带巧妙地抛出问题，引领观者设身处地地思考造成主人公尴尬处境的深层原因，也指向了想象和观看中蕴含的权力关系。 

中国当代艺术创作中处理中国边疆和少数民族议题的作品并不多见。或许，比起通过讲述关于边疆的故事来挑战主流影视剧和整个文化产业对少数民族女性的想象、塑造和边缘化，更迫切的任务在于回到“边疆”这一并非中立的概念本身，发现并检验它在当前社会背景下的矛盾与问题，进而带着尖锐的问题意识去创作。如果说边疆之所以为边疆，是缘于它与权力中心的相互关系，那么在处理边疆议题时就不得不把“中心”也纳入检验对象中来。同理，围绕少数民族展开的创作也无法绕开被少数化的民族与处在中心位置的民族之间不可化解的张力。 

从这个角度看，《远山淡景》的创作和展示本身不就是对“边缘-中心”关系的一次“观-演”式再现吗？一方面，归入“边疆”系列的作品将主人公的日常生活进一步公共化、符号化，无论是在洗手间劳作还是与游客合影，这些日常动作在镜头的中介作用下获得了又一层的表演性，并被预先赋予了“边疆”的涵义。另一方面，影片毫无意外地在“中心”被展出了，这仿佛印证了一个几乎不言自明的假设：唯有“中心”的观众才是当代艺术的“目标观众”，也只有他们才有资格成为当代艺术的“普遍观众”。“边缘-中心”关系的再现留下许多亟待回答的问题：以当代艺术的名义出现在“中心”的“边疆”要如何摆脱被再一次他者化的命运？“边疆”是否有主动发声的可能？“边疆”题材的作品如何能反过来向“中心”的观众发问？这类作品对于少数民族观众和参与者又有怎样的意义？中国当代艺术的本土观众是去民族化的吗？所谓的具有普代表性的“公众-观众”在本土语境下遮蔽了怎样的民族关系？
(发表于：岐路批评)

Liu Yujia, The Pale View of Hills (still), single-channel video, 2018, 39’26”. Courtesy of the Center for Experimental Film (CEF) WeChat Mini Program.

Next, the camera is fixed to the bathroom counter, capturing the protagonist cleaning the bathroom and marking her first appearance in the film. In this long take, the act of cleaning seems slow and deliberate. The time in the film seems synchronous with the viewers’ reality, and because of this immersion in the spatio-temporal realm presented by the film, viewers feel an intimacy with the woman in the video, who is still something of a stranger. Liu introduces the protagonist in this way, perhaps in order to avoid making her ethnicity the overwhelming first impression.

We quickly learn the woman’s special status when we see her sit properly on the living room sofa, wearing the same ethnic clothing she wore when she was cleaning. Fruit and snacks are piled on the coffee table in front of her, while pictures and décor are carefully arranged on the wall behind her. We have no idea how this reception room and the living spaces we just saw are connected inside the palace. Perhaps the door curtain we saw at the beginning of the film leads to the public reception room. “It wasn’t easy to get here, let’s take a picture.” Following the guide’s instructions in Mandarin, several tourists stand next to the Princess Consort, one after another. After the photograph is taken, the guide says, “Please just hand the money to the Princess Consort.” The price is 30 RMB per person. From the corner, the video camera captures the moments before and after the photograph. We cannot feel the presence of the camera or the artist. This observer’s perspective is reminiscent of a documentary, but we might also feel like we are seeing a recording of a performance. With the remaining time, the film returns to scenes from the protagonist’s daily life and shows the process of the photograph with a group of tourists, interspersed with several shots of the outdoors, local dance halls, and billiard rooms.

 Liu Yujia, The Pale View of Hills (still), single-channel video, 2018, 39’26”. Courtesy of the Center for Experimental Film (CEF) WeChat Mini Program.

The Princess Consort, a living fossil of the Kucha culture, is like a spectacle in the museum. It’s also worth noting that this Uyghur woman actively plays the role of the exotic Princess Consort and benefits from that—spectacularization and self-spectacularization are layered here. A Chinese viewer familiar with TikTok and Kuaishou will be no stranger to ethnic minority spectacles and the related consumption model, so this scene in the video does not seem out of place. However, through the artist’s carefully plotted cinematographic style, the video invites viewers into the protagonist’s everyday life and, through this lens, they can uncover the complex threads that can be used to interpret her ethnic identity—this is a deeper examination of spectacularization.

Looking back on the first few scenes, we discover that the protagonist’s private life seems to have entirely given way to public performance. Even when she is cleaning the bathroom, she wears the same ethnic dress that she wears to take pictures with tourists, as if she were always ready to greet a new group of visitors. At the same time, the TV broadcasts political propaganda recorded in the local language, transforming the ideology of ethnic unity and the intellectual mobilization related to Xinjiang’s de-radicalization into a continuous signal that fills the room. The camera brings the viewer through different spaces. Rather than saying that this switching between and comparison of private living space and public space used for display, it might be better to say that the film shows how an individual life can be coerced and regulated by spaces flooded with multiple levels of power relationships. The protagonist living in a museum is a bit like a long-caged lion. Her power as Princess Consort has been stripped away and she cannot escape the fate of continuing to play the role.

The Pale View of Hills focuses on this gendered, ethnicized, and spectacularized body, presenting this body and the space in which it exists to contemporary art audiences in video form. Instead of searching for an insider’s perspective to presenting the real borderlands, the artist seems to stress the encounter between the borderlands and the interior and build a vision or construction of ethnic identity on the foundation of that encounter. The Pale View of Hills may refer to a romantic vision of distant things that lies within the relationship between viewing and performing. Furthermore, performance is not a one-way display; it must be examined in relationship to viewers. The treatment of the relationship between viewing and performing in the film has a nuanced reflexiveness. The artist skillfully poses questions from the vague zone between reality and fiction, helping viewers to put themselves in the protagonist’s shoes and consider the deeper reasons for her awkward circumstances, while also pointing out the power relationships contained within these acts of imagining and viewing.

Few works of Chinese contemporary art engage with China’s borderlands and ethnic minority issues. Perhaps, rather than telling a story about the borderlands to challenge how mainstream television and film and the entire cultural industry has envisioned, portrayed, and marginalized ethnic minority women, the more pressing task lies in returning to the not-at-all neutral concept of the borderlands in order to discover and examine its associated contradictions and issues in the current social context. As a result, the work reflects a keen awareness of the issues. If borderlands are borderlands because of their relationships to power centers, then when engaging with borderland issues, the center must also be examined. For the same reason, work made about ethnic minorities cannot avoid the irreconcilable tension between the ethnicities that have been made minorities and the ethnicities placed at the center.

From this perspective, isn’t the creation and presentation of The Pale View of Hills a viewer-performance manifestation of the center-periphery relationship? On the one hand, this work on the borderlands made the protagonist’s everyday life more public and symbolic. Whether she is cleaning the bathroom or taking pictures with tourists, these everyday acts gain another level of performativity through the intermediary of the camera and are imbued in advance with a borderland sensibility. On the other hand, it is not an accident that the video is being exhibited in the center, which seems to confirm an almost self-evident assumption: Only viewers from the center are the target audiences for contemporary art, and only they are qualified to become ordinary viewers of contemporary art. The representation of the center-periphery relationship leaves many questions that need urgent answers: How should the borderlands that appear in the center in the name of contemporary art escape the fate of being othered once more? Could the borderlands speak for themselves? How can artworks featuring borderlands actually question viewers in the center? What meaning does this kind of work have for ethnic minority audiences and participants? Are local viewers of Chinese contemporary art devoid of ethnicity? What ethnic relationships are concealed within the representative public or audience in the local context?