Name: Liu Shi Yuan (S), Kristian Mondrup (K)

City: Copenhagen

www.shiyuanliu.com

I think as an artist, you need to work within a context, both in terms of where you make the work, and who you try to communicate with through your work. How do you think moving to a new cultural environment has impacted your work?

S: There will be limitations. When you’re influenced by a new culture, you want to send what you want to say back to where you came from. For example, China. Then, there will be gap in between. It’s not that easy. Whether you’re making art or writing articles, when you put it into your work, what other people see is that you’ve changed. But you want to communicate your voice to them and have an understanding from them. This is very difficult. 

For example, in Europe, we talk a lot about migration – whether it’s immigration or refugees. These two words are different. To me, immigration probably feels more relatable, though we also care about the refugee problem. But when I talk about these things with my friends in China, their reaction is totally unexpected. They might say stuff like, “Shiyuan, you have to know you’re already lucky to go out of the country. Those who can move are definitely the stronger ones.”

Completely different angle.

S: Right. I remember when I first arrived in New York, that was the first time I left Beijing. Back then, I would tell my friends in China via the internet, “Oh, the video department at this school is actually not as great as I thought it would be.” Because I found the video department not so great, I talked to the dean of the department and transferred to the photo major, even though I was recruited as a video art major at first. When I told my friends that it’s actually not that great, their reactions were all like, “Shiyuan, you’re already fortunate that you can go study abroad.”

Is it possible that because you already had a certain way of making work before, and a particular topic you were talking about, with a particular audience… When you change to a new environment, those topics are no longer relevant here, so no one cares. And when you moved here, perhaps you weren’t very familiar with local concerns. Did you find yourself lost in between cultures?

S: In fact, in the past few years my work has all been about this. In many interviews, someone will ask me, “What are you doing exactly?” I’ll say that I hope I can be a good person, someone who can communicate cross-country and cross-culturally. I’ve been setting standards for myself and exercising how to intercommunicate between different cultures. Like what we were talking about earlier, how do we avoid misunderstanding and the problem of being unable to communicate? On top of that, you also have to be a good person on an international level, make an impact and do things for the public good. More than that, you also have to be an interesting person.

But how do you achieve that? In fact, this is the current requirement I’ve set for myself these days. I don’t think it’ll be easy. In the process of finding the way, there will be a lot of questions such as: What is globalization? How do you avoid simplistically connecting these concerns to politics and the economy? How can my art discourse be independent from these two elements? Though our world is entirely controlled by politics and the economy, one policy can change a lot of things — maybe the border is closed… then why does art continue to exist? It’s because art can talk about these issues. Art can be linked with politics and the economy, but also be independent from them.

K: What you’re saying is based on the assumption that art can change the world. You can see, it’s a funny argument. “Art can change the world” is like an old Marxist argument, it’s like a means of production. Then, you have to change the society, you have to take control of art and culture. That’s basically what happened during the Cultural Revolution, but it’s a basic Marxist assumption. You can say that, in modern times, Ai Weiwei is using the Marxist approach to art as a means of production to fight a communist government, and he got nothing out of it.

He’s famous.

K: Yeah, he’s famous in the West. But he can’t live in China anymore, and China hasn’t changed an inch. If anything, China has become more totalitarian and more extreme in controlling its citizens under Xi. I mean, he made a hell of a lot of money from it. But the idea that art will change the world? I think there are a lot of things you can do with your life that will change the world much more significantly than staying in the studio. 

But that doesn’t mean art isn’t important. Art is important for people who appreciate it. But I think it’s a misunderstanding in the art world that, just because you think something is important yourself, and your friends think it’s important, then that means it exists as the most important thing in society.

I see the same thing from my friends who are involved in music – we all spent the largest part of our lives discussing records, music, aesthetics in composing and technique, production techniques. For us, this was the most important thing in the world — like, how can the world live without music? It turns out the world is just fine. You know, there is music, but it’s not changing the world in that way. It’s a small factor, maybe 1%.

It’s very privileged.

K: Yeah, it’s very privileged. It’s a very privileged position.

Do you think art can really reach everyone? Can everyone understand and appreciate art? Does everyone need art? Or is it only a certain type of people with a certain kind of socio-economic background will be interested in it? At least people with a middle-class background?

K: I think it used to be like that. If you look at 20, 30 years ago, how the art world functioned at that time… that’s what it was, as I understand it. When I was little, when I went to museums, it was pretty much just retired women with big hats who read the daily newspaper and looked at some old painting exhibitions. And they took an art history class because they had time, and because they were retired. But nowadays, art is becoming a fashion phenomenon and status symbol.

A lot of it has to do with the economics that the art world has become formalized as an investment thing. The whole art world is becoming more and more institutionalized and formalized, which means that it becomes associated with wealth. And when it becomes associated with wealth, then having a Jeff Koons work becomes the same as driving a Ferrari. It’s something you can show when you take people home. Then you’re like, “See how wealthy I am? I have these works.” And people will know — if they know.

And I think in this sense, what I mean is that it turns the whole thing upside down. Because at an earlier stage, I don’t think people ascribed so much importance to art in that way. Art is a way of developing an internal understanding of the world. But now we live in a hyper-visual, hyper-commercialized culture. Art has now become both an aesthetic symbol, and a form of social currency; it has also become something highly associated with commercial culture, because visual culture and commercial culture are so interlinked. And I think the art that’s coming out now has more to do with artists advertising themselves as the product than art as appreciation, art as a medium of human expression.

What do you think, Shiyuan?

S: I mean, we talk a lot about this at home. This is of course from his point of view.  Of course, art can’t be separated from politics, the economy, and our bigger system. This has a direct impact on whether the artist can survive, and directly affects if I need to get a part-time job in five years or next year.

But it’s exactly because it can’t be separated that we need to separate them. And this requires artists to look at it from a separated point of view throughout the creating and thinking process. This is a necessity for an artist. You have to be very knowledgeable; you have to understand what’s going on, but at the same time you have to forget about it. No matter how we analyze it and make conclusions, I think art is never that simple. It’s always changing, it’s something you can’t conclude.

What do you think of the fact that on the one hand, you can concentrate purely on the creation of the work and how to communicate through the art-making process, but once your work is done and becomes an object, once it enters the consuming system of exhibition – like Kris said, perhaps in the eyes of the collector, it becomes something to show off their status and cultural taste? You said you don’t want to travel by plane and contribute to global warming, while in reality your work is feeding into that system. How do you view this contrast?

S: This is the audience’s problem. Only the audience feels like they need to know who the artist is when they’re reading into an artwork. “I need to Google her, I need to remember her name.” To me, I don’t think the artwork necessarily has to be linked to the artist. When I make the work, I want to present it to everyone, but I don’t even think I should show up at the opening. What I do isn’t important. Nowadays, audiences are misreading the artwork, they think the artwork is about the creator. This isn’t artists branding themselves, it’s just how things ended up.

I think people should focus more on the artwork, instead of the artist. This has nothing to do with being successful or not. People may think I’m very successful, but I’m not. First, I’m not making a lot of money, I’m still barely surviving here. Second, of course I’m not successful – compared to those scholars, my knowledge is too shallow. So, I don’t understand why people would think of an artist like that. I think they should focus more on the work. But from another point of view, the work can never be separated from the artist. At the end of the day, we’re looking at what kind of contribution an artist can bring to this world throughout her entire life, instead of thinking one piece of work can make an impact.

One work perhaps can’t make much difference, but what’s really important and touching is the change you see in each of an artist’s solo exhibitions. What you see is someone who’s real, how her point of view has changed, how she’s grown, and how she’s making progress. When you see an artist who presents something new through each of her solo shows, you’ll realize she’s just a normal human being. She’s not different from people who work other kinds of jobs. Because everyone needs to change. 

And you’ll also be able to see what makes her feel uneasy in life, because she’s just a normal human being. So, I think when you weigh an artist by what she has been contributing throughout her entire life, it can be a very touching thing. But if you very quickly judge something – the most pathetic thing in our society nowadays is we judge and define things very quickly, stuff like hashtags. Then there will be limitations, because you’re not giving a real, blood-circulating person any chance to change anymore.

K: It’s a big contradiction I think — I mean, look at Olafur Eliasson’s studio in Berlin. The funny thing is, I really like his work, and I really like the idea that he wants to make a collective out of that. He’s doing a school, and even their kitchen is publishing books of recipes and things like that. Everything is like a collective effort, but still, Olafur is the brand and the name of it. So, it’s like an ultimate capitalist company in a way. And then at the same time, it’s like a total collective movement. 

And this, I think, is the ongoing struggle for art in a capitalist society. On the one hand, it’s about branding, about making a name brand for one strong artist who’s behind the work. And then on the other side, everyone knows they should be dealing with art on an emotional level, not engaging from an investment angle. While on the production side, you can say that art is a collective effort, and it’s about the community, about experiencing each other, experiencing and interpreting your surroundings in a more intense way. And that can only be a social thing. You can’t live by yourself all alone, not having anything to do with anyone, and then produce meaningful art. I think it’s quite impossible.

But the art world demands one name on the billboard, and that’s the commercial aspect of it. I think as long as we have this kind of system that’s been developing over the past 10-20 years, where it becomes so commercial, it will never have an impact. Because every time someone makes something that’s arguing something or trying to change something in society, a collector buys it and puts it in a white cube, in a little glass box. It’s like you take the dangerous thing… you take the bomb and put it in a bomb shelter, making sure it will never explode. So, it’s like artists keep on making bombs, and collectors keep buying them and putting them in safe storage, so they’ll never explode.

That’s how I kind of see this tension between society and art: art does in a way have the power to influence society, because it’s made by people who are genuinely thinking about how things are working in life and in society, in aesthetics, and how the human mind is structured, why you’ll find things interesting and other things not interesting. And that’s a really interesting topic, but if it always gets pinned down into texts and books, and white cube exhibitions, then I think we also purposefully prevent it from actually doing the work and having the impact it could.

I think there are two perspectives. If you’re thinking about how art can change things in society, then maybe there are other things that are more effective; maybe it’s not art. But when artists are talking within their own context of the art world, they’re focused on concerns of art history, or their artist peers, rather than the full chain of production. How does one balance these perspectives? Or, if you care about the ethical aspect, do you then withdraw from making art all together? Otherwise, you just keep on feeding into it. 

K: But it’s a really interesting question. Like, how can you be a successful contemporary artist in today’s society and still be a moral person? I mean, if you know that climate change is happening, and it’s going crazy, how can you live with yourself shipping crates on airplanes and going around the world 150 days a year by plane for exhibitions and openings?

It’s like, the whole art world is living in the plane constantly and talking about the importance of changing the world while they’re totally destroying it. At the same time, they know it and it just keeps going on. What I mean is, we live in a really difficult time, because now it’s so obvious that we have to all think about how we deal with our lives, and I think art can contribute to that. But we can’t just talk about it, and then go on doing art fairs and travelling around the world. We have to do something, actually do something.

Shiyuan, let me ask you. So what Kris was just saying — I think as a Chinese person who’s lived in Western society, knowing their context, we can understand that this makes sense, that things should be done this way. But as you were saying earlier, this kind of thinking doesn’t really exist in the Chinese art world, right? 

S: Oh, really? Which thinking doesn’t exist?

The ethics of making artwork — concerns about the carbon footprint of shipping, or what kind of artmaking is good for society and the world. This kind of thinking is completely nonexistent in the Chinese art world. But you make exhibitions both in China and in the West. Can you talk about the differences between doing a show in China versus abroad? 

S: In China, people might feel like they already know about the topic that I want to discuss in my work. That’s also how a lot of people responded to the Documenta this year, complaining that it’s still about the European migration crisis. But what’s wrong with continuing to talk about the migration crisis? The problem is still there, it still exists. I think there’s a very quick reaction of “Oh, I already know that, move on to the next subject.” This kind of ignorance is very terrifying.

Don’t you think that with the domestic environment in China, people don’t really care about these kinds of things?

S: I know, that’s why I want them to care. I think I’m in a very lucky position, since I have the opportunity to tell them these kinds of things. I hope that when I’m communicating through my work, at least they can give me some sort of response and trust. I feel very fortunate that I have the opportunity to do these kinds of things. They should care about it. This has to do with the government as well, to increase people’s awareness.

I remember there was one time I was flying from Copenhagen to Beijing for work. Every time I go back to China, I’ll bump into a tourist group that came to visit Copenhagen. So, there was this one little girl who bought neck pillows for the flight. She only needed one, but she bought three. People next to her were asking, “Why did you buy two more?” And she said, “Because it was really cheap, so I thought why not just buy a few more? I don’t even want the other two.” And I thought: fine, if you don’t want them anymore, you can donate to the Red Cross box, or sell them second-hand, or give them to someone who needs them. But she just threw them right into the trashcan. How shall I say this… the non-communication and lack of trust between people is very non-environmentally-friendly. I thought to myself at the time, that it would be a really horrible thing if everyone in the country is living this kind of lifestyle.

I think the only way to change our future life is to change our lifestyle. This has no direct link to things like moral consciousness, but to our awareness. I think we need to make progress; we can’t only think about our own life; we need to read more. Like I said earlier, as a professional artist and a good artist, you need to read a lot. You need to be informed, you need to constantly be thinking. It’s not enough even when you do this 24 hours a day. I feel like this is something we’re missing. It’s not easy, maybe even impossible when you ask someone to change his lifestyle directly. But I really think it’s our lifestyle that’s destroying our future living environment.

Do you think this has to do with the broader social structure and different stage of development in a society? For example, China is still a developing country, right? In the past few decades, so much has changed so drastically. Here in Copenhagen, you have a foundation, there’s a sense of security and stability. You know there probably aren’t going to be big problems here. With this foundation, you can start to care about how to better society, self-refection, etc. But in China, you’ll feel like: I don’t even know what tomorrow will bring. If I don’t grab something now, someone else is going to take it away. You have that sense of insecurity.

S: I know what you’re talking about. This is related to the whole bigger social system. I can very much understand people in China. You need to tightly hold a lot of things in your hand. Otherwise, no one else is going to give it to you. No matter how you ask for it, no one else will give it to you.

Recently, I was working on an application proposal for a project that’s related to this topic – about how to discuss one’s rights. It was initially because I saw a lot of videos on YouTube showing the missing children in China who are living in really horrible situations. So I kept on watching these things, because they just hit right in my weak spot. And I realized after constantly watching these, YouTube just started to recommend more related videos like that. So, my whole world was controlled by the YouTube search algorithm. Every time I opened the website, my page was full of content about missing children, because the search engine nowadays will pick the topics they think you’re interested in. So all I was thinking and dreaming every day was about this. I had to reset my Youtube settings, clean up my search history.

But this is also something I feel really ashamed of, because I’m doing something that’s quite evasive. But I also have to make sure I have a clear mind in order to think and observe. So I chose to ignore a problem, for example, by reseting my YouTube history. What’s happening in China, I just deleted them all like that. I feel really ashamed, but I had to do it.

At the end of the day, it’s the country’s governing policy problem. I think it doesn’t matter if you’re capitalist or socialist, but as a human being, you can’t be hopeless. When you’re alone and hopeless and no one else is going to help you… this is what the current situation is like in China.

I think there are two extremes here. One being, when you live in a society where there’s no hope, why would you still want to make art? Why would you still want to be an artist? The other extreme is, say, if you’re living in a welfare society like Copenhagen, where everything is perfect, everything is given to you, a society where you can still live without doing anything….

S: Not me, I’m just barely surviving.

Then, are there any artists you know who are from here? What’s their motivation for making art? What do they want to communicate through their work?

S: Kris, maybe you can talk about this. To be honest, I’m not quite sure myself. In Denmark, how do artists make art? I think they make a different kind of art. It’s like, my art practice here is quite unique. But other Danish artists, why do they make art? I find that their artwork is usually deliberately underwhelming on the surface, but complex on the conceptual level. Why do they make work like this?

K: I think if I want to make a broad comparison between the Chinese art world and European art world, I would say, I think Germany, Sweden, and Denmark; also parts of France, Belgium and Holland; it’s all kind of one tradition in a way. A European tradition, you can say. 

In Europe, you see more artists dealing with issues they want to work with, and they present them in ways that they feel make sense for what they’re working with. Whereas a lot of art in China has to do with formal aesthetics, and a lot to do with social issues, but it all ends up in sculpture or painting, or video, something physical. It very rarely ends up in super-deconstructed stuff that’s hard to sell. And that of course has to do with public funding in Europe, the way institutions work, and the whole infrastructure of the art world that’s different.

For everything in China, you rely on galleries. They give a deposit for the exhibition, pay the material cost for your first exhibition, and bring you to art fairs to sell as much as they can. So, people are really relying on this. But I think it’s a lot more concrete. I think what you see in China, it’s a lot more in a box, a lot more white-cube friendly. It’s just trends happening.

Like when you go through 798, most of the shows there look like they can be taken down, put in a box and shipped to Basel Hong Kong afterwards, and it fits. I think that’s the difference. I think a lot of artists in Denmark are working on obscure stuff they want to do, and they won’t be able to sell. They don’t have any gallery connections. I think America is also like this. Maybe a lot of artists don’t want to have gallery representation.

It’s just really hard, I guess. 

K: Yeah. One thing is it’s hard to get representation. Another thing is they have to change their practice a lot, so they rely on something else. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with dealing with formal aesthetics in a way, it’s also an important development. Because we have such a visual culture now, so we also need someone to do the groundwork and develop the next steps for our visual society.

S: Chinese artists particularly will avoid talking about politics. There are a lot of things people don’t want to talk about.

Do you think this also has to do with our education system? Those who received an art education abroad understand that one should engage, critique, and discuss social issues. But in China, contemporary art education only has a very short history. Growing up, you’re not encouraged to discuss anything in our education. So, when you really want to discuss something, you realize you don’t know what to say, or don’t have anything to say. Meanwhile, your access to information resources are very limited.

S: I think this has to do with culture. The ancient Chinese philosophies are very different from the culture here. I realize I’m constantly thinking about these questions while living in the West, because I find it very urgent — why people in China don’t pay attention to those problems. But every time I meet my parents – I only see them twice a year for a very short periods of time, but sometimes they’ll nag me – when I talk about these problems with them, they’ll say they think I’m being too serious. I think maybe not being too serious is a good thing, but it’s different from being ignorant. You can be not-too-serious, but you can’t be ignorant. It’s hard to balance these two sides.

K: I don’t think philosophy is important. Philosophy has never been important. It’s only important for the people interested in it. I mean, the whole point of it is that philosophy asks questions, interesting questions that you can sit and think about. It’s not really a practical approach. I mean if you want to be an artist, you don’t go and read Heidegger and try to make art afterwards, because that’s not how they do it.

So, philosophy comes after art. Aesthetic philosophy comes after art. It’s a way of trying to explain the meaning of it. How does this make sense? Why should we look at this? Can it tell us about anything? Philosophy offers a wide array of strategies to break the work down into something understandable that you can think about for a long time. I would say it’s a tool for making an artwork last longer. It gives art more flavor.

What I mean is, when you look at art, and you have no background or understanding with the history of reading aesthetic philosophy, then you’re basically just looking at a picture. When you start reading art history, aesthetic theory, visual and formal analysis, and conceptual analysis of works, then the work gets deeper in your mind, but it’s still the same work. So, it’s only for your own pleasure, it’s not important. It’s only important if you like pleasing yourself in that way, if you like playing games with your own mind.

It sounds a lot like the Chinese Zen philosophy saying, “Seeing the mountain as the mountain, seeing the mountain not as the mountain, and at last, seeing the mountain again as the mountain.” Anyway, let’s pull back a little bit. I think nowadays, if you want to be an artist, or a so-called intellectual… especially as an artist, you may be good at using visual language to express yourself. But knowledge-wise, you might not be the most well-read, the smartest, or the most specialized on a certain topic. Meanwhile, if you want to make meaningful work, you really need to be knowledgeable.   

I feel like nowadays a lot of artists are making very superficial things. At the same time, like you said earlier, the internet, hashtags, the relations between countries… we used to talk about globalization, but now everyone wants to close their borders. With the backdrop of this unsettled time, artists as individuals are acting like agents — they travel in between different cultural environments, like a bird carrying seeds. But at the end of the day, an artist as an individual and the work they produce are the product of a certain social environment. So when these social conditions are changing, and countries are putting more emphasis on borders… For example, China is now putting a lot of emphasis on its own culture.

K: All countries are like this right now.

S: I don’t think there’s a problem with that.

What kind of impact do you think it will have on artists’ creation? Do you think later on, the work artists create will also have this kind of national culture emphasis? Maybe they don’t need to communicate with each other anymore. There will be Chinese collectors collecting Chinese art; they won’t care about Western opinions anymore. Do you think this phenomenon could persist?

K: I think the problem is that globalization is not a cultural phenomenon, but an economic one. It’s a policy and microeconomic relationship. After 30 years — now 50 years — we are more and more global, but we don’t have cultural exchange, there’s only economic exchange. Only money is communicated.

The politicians and major companies of the world sold globalization like the “Belt and Road Initiative”, you know, it’s like “one world, one dream.” We all make deals with each other, and then we don’t go to war. That’s why we made the European Union, United Nations, and all that stuff. 

After World War II, we said: Okay, if we’re going to prevent Europe from going to war again, we have to make more trade with each other, so we depend on each other, and war will ruin our own economies. So, it was an economic union. And then, we kind of failed both in Europe, but also in the world.

You realize that, you know, free trade also means that 80%-90% of Danish companies moved their factories to East Asia during the past 20 years. And all those people who were working in the factories in Denmark lost their jobs. So how do you think they feel about East Asians right now? They’re the ones who took their jobs. I mean, it’s not as bad in Denmark as in, for example, England and the United States. You can see the reason why Trump can start a trade war with China is because he’s right. I mean, he’s lying about many things. But he is right that when we opened up economic free trade, all the big American companies moved their production to East Asia. Because it was cheaper, and because they have more engineers that are willing to work on an hourly basis without health insurance and all that stuff.

I think the funny part is that, in Chinese art and the Chinese art world, people talk about how globalized they are, and they want to be part of this globalized community, this global culture, but it doesn’t exist. And it seems like it’s the last place, maybe even in the world that people are still talking about this global culture. If you look at the United States, no one talks about global culture anymore. If you look at Europe, people don’t talk about global culture. 

What do they talk about then?

K: They talk about the value of their own culture. And you know, the discourse has kind of changed. I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the past few weeks. I think it’s really interesting to see that it comes from an older problem in Chinese art. When Chinese contemporary art started emerging within the global art world, it was difficult to say that it was Chinese contemporary art, because if it was Chinese art, then why should it be part of the global art world? And if it was contemporary art, then why was it special compared to any other art? So, it was this question, up through the 90s to early 00s, of how to define contemporary art coming out of China as being both exceptional and totally compatible.

But it’s not only art from China. Art from Africa, South America, and many other places also faces similar questions. Back to your question, do you agree then that countries should close their borders and just develop their own culture within? 

K: No, no, no. Not at all. Quite the opposite. But what I’m saying now is that through the past 10-15 years, we’ve seen Chinese artists moving towards this discourse of a globalized culture. They want to make globalized art that delivers, how can you say… delivers the cultural essence of globalized culture. Which is really interesting, because all of a sudden, when a lot of other countries are sort of closing down and no longer buying this argument about globalized culture, you actually have Chinese artists in Shanghai and Beijing defining what global culture is now, in a sense.

I don’t know if they’re doing it yet. But it could be an end game, that either they won’t succeed, or they succeed and come out on top, actually become the front-runner in defining global culture. Not a globalized economy, but a globalized culture. And this is really interesting, because in a sense, it started off as saying we want to be part of a global scene, and then it turns out there was no one playing the global scene other than in financial terms. Then they start defining the actual culture with the production of art. I don’t know if that makes sense.

With the current rise of nationalism and patriotism in China, they’ll say: why is it always you guys from the West determining what gets to be said and what is right? Before, when you talked about globalization, biennials, art fairs, etc, being international was always the ultimate goal for a Chinese artist. Before, it felt like a big party organized by the West, and sometimes they invited some Chinese artists to come join.

K: Yeah, but it was a big party. Because you can say the contemporary art world or modern art world, and the way the whole system is structured was built up in Europe, and then built up in America. And now it’s becoming an accepted system that’s pretty much been copy-and-pasted in China and East Asia. Like, they make galleries, non-profit institutions, museums, video archives, the Asia Art Archive, art fairs. They make all these institutions so it mirrors the Western art world, and now it’s compatible. They could have developed a completely different model.

Right, but I think underneath, what’s happening right now is very different from what it looks like from the surface. 

K: Exactly, it’s totally different underneath the surface. 

But before, it was like: Oh, we have a party, come play, add some diversity. And now, of course it’s also related to the economy and everything. Here, the economy is going down, while China’s is going up. And then, they think: We don’t want to play your game anymore. We don’t care, we’re having our own party. And actually, a lot of Western artists are going to the parties in China. A lot of museums and galleries say, “Oh, you. Come, make a show and we’ll charge high-priced tickets.” I’ve heard that here, governments are withdrawing funding for art, but over there, the Chinese government has realized the importance of culture and art, and how to insert their ideology into it. So actually, they’re putting a lot of money into art and culture. 

K: Not only are they putting money into it, but they’re subsidizing land for real estate companies to build museums that wouldn’t otherwise be built.

That too. Not only the private sector, like real estate incentives. Schools, artist associations, and government-related art departments are also getting a lot of money to paint or make works that respond to the government agenda.

But Shiyuan, I want to get your thoughts on what we were just talking about. Kris was saying perhaps the concept of “globalization” no longer exists. What do you think of “globalization” or “being international”? Because to many people, you’re this kind of artist – you have the experience of living in different parts of the world, and you want your work to communicate with a lot of people. But at the end of the day, you are always a Chinese artist… Do you think domestic development and trends in the Chinese art market are an opportunity for you? Or how do you see your identity and experience fit into the future development of the Chinese art world in the context of a patriotic social environment? 

S: I think compared to the big environments, us getting more local isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Just like we talked about earlier, I think the only way to change our surrounding environment is to change our lifestyle. And those things side, we should just do whatever we have to do to save our environment.

But for you, what does “local” mean? Where is your local?

S: Oh, that doesn’t matter much. I feel like what I do isn’t important, and I don’t have to always be an artist. Or maybe I’ll always be an artist, but that has nothing to do with whether you’re successful or not. I think people shouldn’t think about whether an artist is successful. An artist’s practice has nothing to do with success.

For me, I’m prepared to go and do something else anytime. But as a Chinese person, and especially since my friends are over there, I really hope one day I’ll have the capacity to do something that’s helpful to my people.

Actually, last year, when I had an assistant, we were focusing on a project and wanted to help do something for China’s missing children. I told my assistant that whenever my studio has an extra 100,000 RMB, we’ll initiate this project. Right now, we don’t have that opportunity yet, but I hope it will happen sometime soon. I think I may start to move my art practice toward a more charitable direction. Personally, it really doesn’t matter being international or not. The big historical tendency is like a pendulum; we’ve already passed the momentum of being international, so of course it’s going to move backwards. And it’s OK to be like that.

Your artist friends in China, what is their creative and everyday life like?

S: I don’t know, it seems like they don’t have any problems with their life, and they also seem to have some savings. I don’t know how they can make so much money. Because now everyone has to pay tax, right? I know for sure they didn’t pay tax before. But I’ve always been paying the heavy Danish tax here. I feel like they all seem to have a pretty OK life.

Do you guys talk about art-making when you meet? What kind of focus does their work have?

S: We don’t talk about that much. Every time I go back to China, I notice that people just don’t really talk about this aspect of their lives.

How often do you go back each year?

S: Twice. Once in spring, once in autumn. Every time for about two to three weeks.

How long have you been living in Copenhagen?

S: Almost five years. Yeah, so there isn’t much communication with friends about art when I go back, and I’ve basically stopped travelling for business. For example, if there’s an opening for a group exhibition, unless they need me to go and give a talk, I probably won’t go. I don’t fly much in my life. 

K: And in the past few years, we had a baby, so it was a little complicated. But now he’s almost three years old, so we can now travel a bit again.

S: What I mean is that nowadays if I’m taking a long-distance flight, then I hope it’s meaningful for me. Either it’s meaningful in a sense that I can go visit my family, or that I can be meaningful to others, like giving an artist talk. But if it’s solely because a group show has the money to invite all the artists to the opening, then that kind of travel I won’t do anymore.

In terms of collaboration with galleries in China or in the West, how does it work? Will the gallery ask you to give them a certain amount of work every year?

S: No. Right now, I have three galleries. Basically, every year I’ll work more closely with one of them. For example, next year I’ll have a solo show at White Space Beijing in March or April. So, this year and next year I’ll work more closely with them. But before this year, we didn’t communicate much.

Every time the collaboration resumes, do you initiate it, or that’s just the rhythm of how they work with artists?

S: Both.

Do they give you a production fee first, and then distribute the profit after the work is sold, or…? 

S: Right. My gallery in Beijing will give me more support. It’s not easy for the galleries in Beijing, because they’re also doing the work of an art foundation. Being an artist in Beijing, it’s impossible to apply for any art grant, so galleries will provide a production fee and support the artists to realize their work. But in New York, it’s more professional – the gallery and the artist have to split the production fee evenly. When I had my solo show in New York, I actually paid half of the production fee. This is how they work. Then in Denmark, basically no artist will request a production fee from the gallery. If they don’t have the money to make the work, they’ll have to apply for an art grant. I’ve received a Denmark National Art Grant for two years now.

You can apply as an immigrant? 

S: I think this is what makes me very surprised and also very grateful. Many people have told me that this art grant is basically only for Danish people; it’s very hard to get it as an immigrant. But I got it last year, and I was really happy. I may not be the first one to get it, but definitely one of the very few foreign artists to access the Danish National Art Fund. So, then everyone was telling me, “You’re so lucky, that’s great! They must really love your work.” At the beginning of this year, my assistant was helping me apply again. I said, “Everyone’s said it’s a very egalitarian fund, and they want to give everyone an opportunity. It’s unlikely that they’ll give it to the same artist two years in a row.” But my assistant said, “Nevertheless, let’s try.” And then they gave me the grant again this year.

Do they award grants to a lot of artists?

S: Yeah, there are a lot of nominations. Basically, every year they’ll award 50 young artists. They won’t even ask you how you’re going to spend the money or ask for a proposal when you apply. All you have to do is organize your portfolio and send it to them. They want to see your progress over a year, then they decide if they’re going to support you. With this money, you can spend it on your living expense, or on making work. But I think they definitely won’t give it to me again next year. They can’t award it to me three years in a row. 

Do you have a studio here?

S: Yes, it’s nearby. I’m going to walk there later.

How do you find becoming a mother has affected your artistic process?

S: Definitely there’s a change. I work at the studio every day from 9 am to 3:30 pm, because I have to go pick up my kid from kindergarten at 3:30pm. In China, you pick up the kids from kindergarten at 5pm, but here it’s 3:30pm. So, from 3:30 to 8pm I have to be with my kid, and then I’ll work a bit more after 8pm. Now it’s getting better, but in the first two years of having the baby, with breastfeeding, there was basically no time to be squeezed in a day to do any work. But because it was so hard to find any time, I was very focused whenever I did have a little time. It turned out my working efficiency was much higher. 

I don’t know why, but I feel like from the moment I realized I was pregnant, my baby has brought me a lot of good luck. My career didn’t go down – quite the opposite, it’s gone up. I wasn’t giving up anything. In fact, before I was pregnant, some of my art friends in Beijing were telling me, “Shiyuan, you’re now at this age, do you have any plans to have kids? You know, if you want to be a career artist, you have to be very professional. You won’t be able to be close to your family, because you won’t be able to take care of both family and your career.” But at that time, I was already pregnant. So, I was like, “Yeah I’m planning on it. He’s already inside, I just had the examination.” 

Then they were like, “Oh, in that case, you’re probably not going to make any work in the next two years. We won’t hear anything from you for a while.” But it was quite the opposite. In those two years, I found my career was reaching a climax. I don’t know why. But I never believed that female artists have to give up their career for the baby.

Do you think it’s because your husband also works in the art field, and he can understand and support you being an artist? 

S: Definitely there’s that. I think that the things a Danish dad can do would be impossible tasks for a Chinese dad. It’s also because they don’t have this distinction between what men or women are supposed to do. You’ll see a woman fixing a car or moving a big cabinet; you’ll also see a man feeding a baby with milk from a bottle or being a stay-at-home dad taking care of the kids every day. It’s probably because I live in Denmark that I have the opportunity to not give up my career. But meanwhile, it’s also really hard, really really hard. Because in China, you’ll get help from your parents. Usually it’s a nanny and a grandma helping take care of the kid. But here, we don’t get any of that, it’s only the two of us. So, it’s really hard, but since we’ve decided to do this, we tried our best. In the end, everything worked out.

The first time I had a group show in France at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, my baby was only 28 days old, and I brought him to the show. Since we were really busy during the day – I had to give interviews, etc. – I wanted to let him sleep. And after sleeping a lot during the day, he really wanted to play at night. So basically, I didn’t get any sleep during those three days in France. In the daytime, I was feeding in the men’s toilet – we found a toilet in the LV Foundation far away in a corner where nobody would walk in, so my husband could come in and help. While I was in there breast-feeding, suddenly someone called me and said, “Shiyuan, it’s your turn to do the interview.” My baby was still eating at the time, and I had to pull him away and say, “Mom has to go for a second.” Anyway, it’s really, really hard.

But I think that’s also a very good example to show other people that you can still have an art career after having a baby.

S: Right, exactly. The friends in China who said those things to me back then, they definitely feel very surprised that I managed to do both. But of course, it’s not easy.

Perhaps a lot of people think you’ve got everything, but they don’t realize how hard you’ve worked to fight for it.

S: Right, I think it’s really wrong that people think you have to give up a lot of other things in order to be a good artist. Art comes from life; how can you make art when you don’t have a life? How is it possible to give up life for art? I can give up art for life. With art, if you lose it, you can still pick it up later. But if you lose life, it’s going to be very hard to pick that up.

You’re saying that perhaps you can give up art for life. But what is it that motivates you, makes you feel like you must continue making art? I know some artists, their motivation is that there are so many schedules lying ahead of them. They work for the project deadlines.

S: Yeah, I’m like that.

Right? But there are also artists who haven’t yet reached that level of success, they don’t have many projects coming in. 

S: I’m really jealous of them. Because they have the time and opportunity to do something else.

Maybe some people will think that if you don’t mind doing something other than art, then maybe art-making isn’t necessary. In other words, why would you make art? Do you think you need a little bit of ambition or desire for fame in order to get motivated to do things? 

S: Yeah, I understand. I think I’m really lucky. Everyone is talking about the midlife crisis, but so far, I haven’t felt it. I’m really lucky that there are still people expecting to see my new work, looking forward to seeing the changes in my next solo show four years later. I think this is my motivation to continue making art. 

But for sure, if one day we are in war, or our environment is in a crisis that requires me to do something else, something more effective, then I’m ready for it any time. It’s a very urgent problem that our living environment is having a crisis. Due to global warming, the temperature has been rising all around the world. Scientists anticipate that in 50 years, the temperature in Beijing will be as high as 48 °C, which is no longer suitable for humans to live. In just 20 years, most of us will become immigrants. That’s also a big problem in Africa now.

When most people become immigrants, and our borders are closing, it’s not unlikely that a war will happen. Would art still be important then? I don’t know. So, I think it’s a good thing if I can call for people to do something to make change for our future while I still have the capability to do so.

2018.9.20 Copenhagen