1 00:00:07,460 --> 00:00:12,320 You've seen the range of sides work from from this film, 2 00:00:12,320 --> 00:00:22,430 and it's it gives a very strong and positive impression, as indeed, this is his work, very strong and positive. 3 00:00:22,430 --> 00:00:26,060 But it also comes from dark, some dark places as well. 4 00:00:26,060 --> 00:00:35,460 And then talking about the the context, the ambience and the influences, I'd like to talk about some of these darker places. 5 00:00:35,460 --> 00:00:43,810 Now. Was there we go now starting off where you ended it in, not in 1957. 6 00:00:43,810 --> 00:00:55,180 A little later than that, but in Congo and with the famous I guess it's when period a which characterised the city, 7 00:00:55,180 --> 00:01:04,180 a city that was really big in the 13th century. It was part of the Marine II maritime hub for the Silk Road. 8 00:01:04,180 --> 00:01:09,730 And then somehow things politics changed. The harbour silted up. 9 00:01:09,730 --> 00:01:18,860 China itself changed and it became, yeah, the matchbox that scientists described it. 10 00:01:18,860 --> 00:01:30,350 But I believe that site, as important as control was for his childhood, the influence of his mother and his grandmother, 11 00:01:30,350 --> 00:01:41,510 introducing him at a pretty tough time in Chinese history to shamanism, to Taoism, taking him to temples, which it was difficult to get to. 12 00:01:41,510 --> 00:01:48,770 That certainly was all important, and he was an influence of first introduced art. 13 00:01:48,770 --> 00:01:54,260 His grandmother had a late period bed, which had these, I guess, erotic paintings on it. 14 00:01:54,260 --> 00:02:01,010 And this made the strong a strong impression on the young artist young to be artists, 15 00:02:01,010 --> 00:02:09,590 but also his father and his friends who were a kind of literati group is that was a member of the party. 16 00:02:09,590 --> 00:02:19,280 Of course he could not. Not not be. But he ran the main bookshop in the town and for some reason, the from from slightly happier days. 17 00:02:19,280 --> 00:02:28,130 They had a lot of Western literature people like Samuel Beckett and Marilyn Monroe's husband, Arthur Miller. 18 00:02:28,130 --> 00:02:34,430 That's right. And these were hanging around. 19 00:02:34,430 --> 00:02:37,730 At least they were hanging around until around about 1970, 20 00:02:37,730 --> 00:02:45,920 when things got so hot in the Cultural Revolution that his grandfather, his father and his brother, his uncle. 21 00:02:45,920 --> 00:02:53,690 But at night, and that's the memory, not the book burnings we know from Berlin in the 1930s. 22 00:02:53,690 --> 00:03:02,540 But the book burnings in Congo in the early 1970s, very much the same reason. 23 00:03:02,540 --> 00:03:06,740 Anyway, Okonjo, Shanghai. 24 00:03:06,740 --> 00:03:16,400 This is where I think you really got an education, you opened up to a much bigger world before that, it's really been the high culture revolution. 25 00:03:16,400 --> 00:03:24,560 So I got young, had been the Red Guard, had been a member of a theatre group proclaiming the words of Mao, 26 00:03:24,560 --> 00:03:30,410 but also moving away from this acting role towards set design. 27 00:03:30,410 --> 00:03:39,290 And that is something that drove him to go to the Shanghai Theatre Academy and obviously in Shanghai. 28 00:03:39,290 --> 00:03:45,500 And there was no arts academy there. And this was really the hottest school going. 29 00:03:45,500 --> 00:03:48,020 And it offered so many things. 30 00:03:48,020 --> 00:03:58,190 The great professors who so many who had studied in Leningrad, it also travelled in America as soon as it was possible to get out. 31 00:03:58,190 --> 00:04:03,260 The researcher, who built a non-official office right through the Cultural Revolution, 32 00:04:03,260 --> 00:04:09,710 making abstract paintings that no one knew about a great group of students. 33 00:04:09,710 --> 00:04:13,580 Shenzhen was one of them. But Gwenda was hanging around. 34 00:04:13,580 --> 00:04:18,530 I mean, it was a really interesting place. And I think just now is. 35 00:04:18,530 --> 00:04:24,890 The second generation or third generation of scholars, historians are beginning to look at Shanghai. 36 00:04:24,890 --> 00:04:31,820 They begin to realise that the story of the of contemporary art in China didn't all go through Beijing, 37 00:04:31,820 --> 00:04:35,840 and the little bit tango to Shanghai was an absolutely critical place. 38 00:04:35,840 --> 00:04:40,760 And the discourse there was amazing. And you can see art from other places. 39 00:04:40,760 --> 00:04:48,290 Nine. There was this big exhibition of French landscape painting came to Shanghai 1981 from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 40 00:04:48,290 --> 00:04:53,390 Great Exhibition of Abstract Abstract Expressionism, and it all sunk in. 41 00:04:53,390 --> 00:05:08,590 Everyone saw it. So, but also in Shanghai, as they say in the museum gods and suave Shanghai happened to be one of the most next to Tokyo, 42 00:05:08,590 --> 00:05:15,610 the foremost artistic centre in Asia from the 20s, 30s and even to the late 40s. 43 00:05:15,610 --> 00:05:19,810 In spite of the war going on. Amazing story of modernism. 44 00:05:19,810 --> 00:05:26,980 There's the woodblock movement, which you all know about has been looked after by the sea because it chimed in the ideology. 45 00:05:26,980 --> 00:05:32,560 But actually the many, many different modernist schools in Shanghai at this time, 46 00:05:32,560 --> 00:05:38,590 it hasn't been written up, neither in Chinese nor adequately in any other language. 47 00:05:38,590 --> 00:05:44,530 There's still a lot of work to be done on this. Just one example of a beautiful painting. 48 00:05:44,530 --> 00:05:48,640 I've never seen another work by this artist. Many things undoubtedly were destroyed. 49 00:05:48,640 --> 00:05:52,900 But there's wonderful stories to be told and to hang out there. 50 00:05:52,900 --> 00:06:04,170 You can see it in the buildings alone of great French modernist architects, Hungarian architects all over Europe and Asia. 51 00:06:04,170 --> 00:06:12,120 So the other stories that were going on was, of course, the the liberation, the end of the Civil War. 52 00:06:12,120 --> 00:06:23,850 And this is a painting from 1951, which actually is of an event in 1942, the Yunnan Forum by On You, who actually had studied in Moscow. 53 00:06:23,850 --> 00:06:33,660 So is one of the very, very early artists to go into Russia. And then this Russian artist who came and really taught the Chinese how to paint. 54 00:06:33,660 --> 00:06:39,030 Of course, they didn't know how to paint properly because Mao had this big dilemma. 55 00:06:39,030 --> 00:06:49,410 If you are a communist country, you can't really have this old aristocratic calligraphy or calligraphic style of painting going on. 56 00:06:49,410 --> 00:06:56,730 What what do you have in this western modernism from Shanghai was absolutely bourgeois and terrible. 57 00:06:56,730 --> 00:07:00,480 So the brother, you know, the friendship the brotherhood from from Russia, 58 00:07:00,480 --> 00:07:04,320 that was one way to teach you how to paint properly in the socialist realist style. 59 00:07:04,320 --> 00:07:08,490 This is something I think that is fascinated but also tormented in the way. 60 00:07:08,490 --> 00:07:19,200 So I mean, to the present day, this thing about being Chinese parts of the eastern philosophical and cultural tradition, 61 00:07:19,200 --> 00:07:26,890 yet also western dialectical materialism made its impact really almost from birth. 62 00:07:26,890 --> 00:07:36,610 The other thing, of course, was Russian painting, because with the brass of the Brotherhood of the two nations up until the beginning of the 60s, 63 00:07:36,610 --> 00:07:40,600 there was a Russian art history and this was possible to be reproduced. 64 00:07:40,600 --> 00:07:46,810 Rather bad colour reproduction. This is one of the famous paintings of sight, even made a reproduction of it. 65 00:07:46,810 --> 00:07:52,400 Painted a reproduction. What else was going on in China? 66 00:07:52,400 --> 00:08:00,610 A football shirt who, before the liberation was an excellent artist working with brush. 67 00:08:00,610 --> 00:08:07,690 He was sent off to Czechoslovakia. Another problem with the country, and this is vulgar. 68 00:08:07,690 --> 00:08:13,240 So using the old methods for communists, new communist purposes or this kind of thing? 69 00:08:13,240 --> 00:08:22,900 This is before the Culture Revolution 19, 1959, but a view of the in the Russian style. 70 00:08:22,900 --> 00:08:31,000 Of something from the Civil War or this will fund an amazing landscape painter. 71 00:08:31,000 --> 00:08:36,130 That's what he's known best for. He was being marginalised because he was such a good landscape painter. 72 00:08:36,130 --> 00:08:43,180 But he made this celebrate the success of our glorious atomic bomb explosion 1965. 73 00:08:43,180 --> 00:08:53,980 It's an amazing, amazing painting, and it's a shared interest and love that Sy has for mushroom clouds. 74 00:08:53,980 --> 00:09:02,770 And then in the in the mid-60s from the mid 60s, there's the Cultural Revolution from 66 to 76. 75 00:09:02,770 --> 00:09:07,360 Some examples that the lessons were learnt from Constantin Maximoff. 76 00:09:07,360 --> 00:09:13,720 He spent two years in Beijing Arts Academy, also travelling to Sichuan all over the place. 77 00:09:13,720 --> 00:09:17,380 What kind of brought into hyper mode these different ways, 78 00:09:17,380 --> 00:09:25,600 but socialist realism alone wasn't the only thing you had to find something which was a folk art, which wasn't just going back to the old ways. 79 00:09:25,600 --> 00:09:33,370 And so the whole idea of peasant painting was was invented sometime in the 60s, around the time of the Russian Revolution. 80 00:09:33,370 --> 00:09:43,230 And this is an example of one of many works from exhibition of peasant painting, but toward the world in the late sixties and seventies. 81 00:09:43,230 --> 00:09:50,430 And then, yeah. Socialist realism continuing. 82 00:09:50,430 --> 00:09:59,580 One of the things that was deeply impressive was the sculptural tableau with 180 characters in it called the Rent Collectors Courtyard. 83 00:09:59,580 --> 00:10:06,360 And I should say that Constantine Constantin Maximus Sy has collected many of his works. 84 00:10:06,360 --> 00:10:15,570 I think about and of them, but also in the Venice Biennale in 1999, say as a homage, 85 00:10:15,570 --> 00:10:29,920 as a slightly double edged homage or ambiguous homage made a replica of that using some of the craftsmen who made the original in the mid 1960s. 86 00:10:29,920 --> 00:10:38,080 And when it was all over, it won the Golden Lion prise, of course. I think the jury thought it was kind of wonderful, appropriate postmodernity. 87 00:10:38,080 --> 00:10:46,930 I'm sure that side wasn't thinking in that way. You can ask him what he was thinking later, but and then it was destroyed. 88 00:10:46,930 --> 00:10:50,740 There was no chance of of making a profit out of it. 89 00:10:50,740 --> 00:10:55,480 The gesture, the story, the connexion had been made. 90 00:10:55,480 --> 00:10:58,730 And it's a story of connexion, which is very important. 91 00:10:58,730 --> 00:11:06,960 So let's just talk quickly about size, work and what he was producing in the 70s and early portraits of his of his father, 92 00:11:06,960 --> 00:11:12,760 bookshop manager and amateur painter. His dad's matchboxes. 93 00:11:12,760 --> 00:11:20,620 And then going to the Shanghai Theatre Academy. 94 00:11:20,620 --> 00:11:29,930 Lovely day in the foreground. And not only that, in that spirit of opening up in the early eighties after the Cultural Revolution, 95 00:11:29,930 --> 00:11:38,840 which was like taking the cork out of an out of a vacuum bottle in the influences from everywhere suddenly rushed in, 96 00:11:38,840 --> 00:11:44,900 and a lot of them were Chinese influences because people until then had been insulated from their own history, 97 00:11:44,900 --> 00:11:49,850 their own ideas, their own religions and their own archaeology. 98 00:11:49,850 --> 00:11:56,510 And this is a side doing rock rumblings in Fujian province, I believe of some ancient belches there. 99 00:11:56,510 --> 00:11:59,060 There's one work in the show which relates to this. 100 00:11:59,060 --> 00:12:12,230 It's not exactly about it, but from 1985, a painting and also travelling around the country to Berlin paid to see the Buddhist paintings there. 101 00:12:12,230 --> 00:12:16,820 Xinjiang province and then up into Tibet. And of course, I was not alone. 102 00:12:16,820 --> 00:12:26,950 Many young artists, artists of his generation were doing that to get in touch with something else with the kind of feeling. 103 00:12:26,950 --> 00:12:34,320 There's a group from the academy. And Self-Portrait. 104 00:12:34,320 --> 00:12:40,440 Very Expressionist. And, of course, Expressionism was known about by then. 105 00:12:40,440 --> 00:12:45,240 Not in 1976, but by 1980. By 1980, 106 00:12:45,240 --> 00:12:51,870 a generation of people would certainly be fully au fait with the different art histories and a lot of the 107 00:12:51,870 --> 00:12:57,240 current things that were happening in the West that they wanted to look at it from their point of view. 108 00:12:57,240 --> 00:13:07,140 And this beautiful painting that from next year, 1984 of Hong Kong, his future wife, a very different style. 109 00:13:07,140 --> 00:13:16,870 Something very fugitive, very, very soft, very lyrical, quite unlike the self-portrait. 110 00:13:16,870 --> 00:13:31,000 But then really trying to get a take on how to go forward, and I think say it's like a number of artists working in Shanghai. 111 00:13:31,000 --> 00:13:39,460 They weren't really a collective bunch. The default button for a lot of artists in China and from the 70s and into the early 80s, 112 00:13:39,460 --> 00:13:44,500 the general so-called generation meeting was to work collectively, to think collectively to look at the West. 113 00:13:44,500 --> 00:13:50,980 Oh, all these art movements. So you have to be part of a movement and you have to belong to something some identity. 114 00:13:50,980 --> 00:13:55,270 And Cy and others who you will see in the moment. 115 00:13:55,270 --> 00:14:05,380 So no, we actually have to find an identity of ourselves to take responsibility for our own work and actually find a language, 116 00:14:05,380 --> 00:14:10,810 a language which made sense artistically, aesthetically, but also morally. 117 00:14:10,810 --> 00:14:19,150 Which actually talks about life and how one saw life, truly. 118 00:14:19,150 --> 00:14:32,520 So this key painting made, I think, in one job, one job before leaving for Japan in the same year. 119 00:14:32,520 --> 00:14:42,400 And of the Nagasaki bomb and the number of images from that, there's a self-portrait. 120 00:14:42,400 --> 00:14:54,450 These stencil forms, which once in later in Saigon, Chung's paintings, very recent paintings and the Picasso as much with the dive. 121 00:14:54,450 --> 00:15:04,500 But arriving in Japan, getting out of the the Chinese sea into another one, which was radically different. 122 00:15:04,500 --> 00:15:10,380 I mean, Manohar was all over the region in in Japan at that time. 123 00:15:10,380 --> 00:15:16,800 There's a kind of abstract philosophy of things of bringing out the the the idea of things, 124 00:15:16,800 --> 00:15:23,430 of the spirit of things, which I think you were interested in but didn't take too seriously. 125 00:15:23,430 --> 00:15:28,890 And at that time, what struck you was what would you told me? 126 00:15:28,890 --> 00:15:37,590 And I've read what you've said was that. The whole theory of space and idea of the cosmos was very different. 127 00:15:37,590 --> 00:15:45,450 There was a astrophysical idea of space which wasn't really publicly available in China at that time. 128 00:15:45,450 --> 00:15:52,740 What was available was these gods have floated across space and across time, telescope space and time. 129 00:15:52,740 --> 00:15:59,370 But now we lived in the world of. Big bangs and black holes. 130 00:15:59,370 --> 00:16:05,910 And it was bringing these two ideas together, which was pretty critical for work using gunpowder, 131 00:16:05,910 --> 00:16:10,230 which just started, he was already in China, but making it into events. 132 00:16:10,230 --> 00:16:14,550 And this was the first project for extraterrestrials made in 18. 133 00:16:14,550 --> 00:16:24,390 Nine is about an abode. It's the kind of year it's a year that was exploded. 134 00:16:24,390 --> 00:16:28,290 And so it's looking at the structure, the house. 135 00:16:28,290 --> 00:16:37,890 And then pretty soon afterwards, site involved himself his own body as a kind of breathing figure in the in the landscape. 136 00:16:37,890 --> 00:16:43,250 While the explosion went on around him. 137 00:16:43,250 --> 00:16:52,700 But I think one of the things that I took from him with him, from China and particularly from the Shanghai Theatre Academy, 138 00:16:52,700 --> 00:16:57,080 was not only creativity and the need to find your own way, 139 00:16:57,080 --> 00:17:06,680 but also the ability to plan to think spatially to be able to draw plans and also to be able to think about budgets. 140 00:17:06,680 --> 00:17:11,180 These practical things you get in theatre academies, you don't get them in art academies, you know, 141 00:17:11,180 --> 00:17:18,450 you just kind of constantly tussling with the very often with the taste of your professors. 142 00:17:18,450 --> 00:17:23,700 But this work was made in 1993, I believe. 143 00:17:23,700 --> 00:17:30,630 And yes, it was just just three months before they came to to Oxford to make his work, 144 00:17:30,630 --> 00:17:38,370 and it was extending the Great Wall of China looking at the Great Wall of China as the Dragon Meridian. 145 00:17:38,370 --> 00:17:42,330 The line of GDR or energy, which stretches across the world, 146 00:17:42,330 --> 00:17:55,710 the whole world and just taking the the archaeological ruin and extending it by a few metres or a few kilometres and then actually doing it, 147 00:17:55,710 --> 00:18:04,230 having witnesses to it. Witnesses were given something to perk them up when they when they arrived and then they 148 00:18:04,230 --> 00:18:09,330 were given something to calm them down when they'd seen it all and were going to go home. 149 00:18:09,330 --> 00:18:20,940 So it was it was very much a show. And this is the John Piper gallery in the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 150 00:18:20,940 --> 00:18:35,010 in which site participated and in the tiny video council in the corner that was running the the extending the Great Wall of China work. 151 00:18:35,010 --> 00:18:42,180 And then otherwise there was a kind of barbecue here, which we've been using for toasting different herbal remedies, 152 00:18:42,180 --> 00:18:51,780 different Chinese herbs to create a feeling of bringing things together, bringing the body together, healing the body. 153 00:18:51,780 --> 00:18:58,790 There were also sketches which you can't see, which were acupuncture drawings the body. 154 00:18:58,790 --> 00:19:08,120 The explosion event painting. Well, it's a yes, it's an explosion of that work based on Halley's Comet, 155 00:19:08,120 --> 00:19:15,800 which happened in Angel Meadow just by modelling college and was dedicated to Halley, 156 00:19:15,800 --> 00:19:27,320 who discovered this comet, which happens every 70 odd years and and also the the slightly dark side to this was that. 157 00:19:27,320 --> 00:19:32,800 That. Traditionally, comments were often regarded as harbingers of doom. 158 00:19:32,800 --> 00:19:38,590 But the other side to that was the scientists often think that it will come within comments. 159 00:19:38,590 --> 00:19:48,220 Perhaps they brought with them when they were when they landed material from other worlds, which actually helped create life. 160 00:19:48,220 --> 00:19:51,970 So those two ideas were very much present in that work. 161 00:19:51,970 --> 00:19:58,990 And then the the threatening letter way just looks like a balance in the corner, but it's some. 162 00:19:58,990 --> 00:20:03,370 It's called silent volcano, and it's actually gunpowder bits. 163 00:20:03,370 --> 00:20:09,460 Gunpowder split up into its constituent parts, so there's a kilo of of sulphur, 164 00:20:09,460 --> 00:20:13,960 seven half kilos of potassium nitrate and one point five kilos of charcoal. 165 00:20:13,960 --> 00:20:19,410 Now they're all separate. You mix them up. Boom. 166 00:20:19,410 --> 00:20:36,060 Public space. Yeah. Anyway, no one was smoking now directly opposite to this work by Johnson, who was a good friend and sadly passed away. 167 00:20:36,060 --> 00:20:48,750 And then also went, who was in Shanghai. It's a series of two works the hanging scrolls from from the 80s made in Shanghai. 168 00:20:48,750 --> 00:20:57,570 And then another homage, I mean, not actually from Banjo, from from Shanghai, but from Shaman. 169 00:20:57,570 --> 00:20:59,550 Not far in between the two. 170 00:20:59,550 --> 00:21:09,500 One young ping sadly passed away, I think, at the beginning of this week and for whom Sy has written a very beautiful note. 171 00:21:09,500 --> 00:21:17,420 This is a work called Yellow Peril, and it has a thousand locusts and two scorpions above your head as you work through it. 172 00:21:17,420 --> 00:21:23,440 He, too, has a string of fifth critical intelligence. 173 00:21:23,440 --> 00:21:31,230 Really looking at the development of the explosion events, the Earth has a black hole to realised in Hiroshima, 174 00:21:31,230 --> 00:21:40,950 so a kind of development the painting of Nagasaki made still in in Japan and then this development in which the the 175 00:21:40,950 --> 00:21:54,140 black hole from space is channelled down by a fuse into this dark hole near the detonation zone in Hiroshima itself. 176 00:21:54,140 --> 00:22:06,080 So this idea of art being something that. Real lines that can even heal, and the explosion is something where time and space stopped for a moment. 177 00:22:06,080 --> 00:22:12,200 A taking of a breath and also something like what are doing to the body of the Earth, 178 00:22:12,200 --> 00:22:18,020 what a what an osteopath or a crier a chiropractor might do to a human body. 179 00:22:18,020 --> 00:22:33,040 A realignment. And somewhat more and ironical mode here in nineteen ninety five, bringing to Venice what Marco Polo forgot, it was really big event. 180 00:22:33,040 --> 00:22:34,610 And I think it again won the prise. 181 00:22:34,610 --> 00:22:45,400 I think it won the Vanessa Prise in the Venice Biennale and this a jump from Banjo brought over sort of brought here, 182 00:22:45,400 --> 00:22:49,690 floated through the canals, bringing medicinal herbs. 183 00:22:49,690 --> 00:22:58,180 And these were made up and bottled, and they were sold in various slot machines around in in Venice. 184 00:22:58,180 --> 00:23:09,370 So it fitted perfectly into the slightly trashy atmosphere of the of the Biennale. 185 00:23:09,370 --> 00:23:12,810 The thinking about. 186 00:23:12,810 --> 00:23:22,980 Chinese A. And the Chinese traditions, not only to the gods and the Tao pantheon, who have travelled and fought across the heavens. 187 00:23:22,980 --> 00:23:36,270 There is also there is of of warfare and particularly some sons, suit military strategist who was writing in 5th century before our era. 188 00:23:36,270 --> 00:23:48,520 And this is a work. And it shows a bit of a change because by now, Sy has left Japan and he's living in in America. 189 00:23:48,520 --> 00:23:53,350 And I think that Sun Tzu really comes to his mind at this time because it's a 190 00:23:53,350 --> 00:24:01,370 matter of adapting to a different artistic environment and a kind of competition. 191 00:24:01,370 --> 00:24:08,870 You moved from Japan, which is extremely sophisticated in every way, but it's it's hermetic. 192 00:24:08,870 --> 00:24:16,060 In New York, you were at the centre of arguably the centre of the western art world. 193 00:24:16,060 --> 00:24:25,720 And some, particularly the text about some about some Zimmet say quote was that. 194 00:24:25,720 --> 00:24:36,940 If your opponent is Orthodox, you must always be unorthodox, and there's one way I think of digesting a sort of idea of avant garde. 195 00:24:36,940 --> 00:24:40,630 But but more than illustrating it. 196 00:24:40,630 --> 00:24:53,830 And I think this is a it's a boat that is also coming from Punjab, and it's borrowing your enemies, Arabs and the general here is not the them. 197 00:24:53,830 --> 00:25:03,830 Zubin Zubair, the arms just a bit later and just thinking about resourcefulness and strategy in battle. 198 00:25:03,830 --> 00:25:13,130 And I think that maybe there was a feeling that there was a battle, a battle not between other artists, but a battle with self. 199 00:25:13,130 --> 00:25:21,830 A battle to express oneself in a way that would be intelligible, going out of Asian culture into something very, very different. 200 00:25:21,830 --> 00:25:30,320 A much more capitalist, money orientated business. And. 201 00:25:30,320 --> 00:25:34,940 Keeping the explosion events going, but in the kind of smaller way, 202 00:25:34,940 --> 00:25:40,040 I can't imagine anyone being allowed to do a big gunpowder event in the middle of New York. 203 00:25:40,040 --> 00:25:46,220 But if you take it in the small cardboard tube with you, you know, poof. 204 00:25:46,220 --> 00:25:56,180 And that's what I did. Very carefully selected sites that the Manhattan, you see the twin towers still going there. 205 00:25:56,180 --> 00:26:05,250 But I was thinking about the mushroom cloud. There's a kind of beautiful thing, not necessarily something that's so negative that power. 206 00:26:05,250 --> 00:26:14,280 And the black hole go together, they're opposites of each other. But he also took it to the Alamo, the test site and in the Mojave Desert, 207 00:26:14,280 --> 00:26:20,130 and also to some sites of American landlords to Michael Heights as double negative in the 208 00:26:20,130 --> 00:26:29,550 Mojave Desert and then to double spiral by Robert Smithson and in in the Great Salt Lake. 209 00:26:29,550 --> 00:26:36,540 So exploded this so it's kind of like marking out your territory in a way as a novice travelling across the country, 210 00:26:36,540 --> 00:26:42,280 the big gap not just sitting there in New York, but actually. 211 00:26:42,280 --> 00:26:51,690 Saying I've arrived, it's a calling card. Now, one of the things that I think. 212 00:26:51,690 --> 00:26:58,320 Imposed on everyone, not just those living in New York, was the was the 9-11 attacks, 213 00:26:58,320 --> 00:27:06,270 terrorist attacks and this work opportune stage one is made in response to that stage one and stage two. 214 00:27:06,270 --> 00:27:12,750 And it's a it's a car turning over in space and seeming to explode with time. 215 00:27:12,750 --> 00:27:18,030 So this kind of troubles stereoscopic effect as you see this car from one viewpoint. 216 00:27:18,030 --> 00:27:25,910 You can see that there was one car is moving across the space and in this about horror and terror. 217 00:27:25,910 --> 00:27:32,290 And trying to understand the attitudes of people who did terrorist acts. 218 00:27:32,290 --> 00:27:41,080 You famously said I make explosions, so I'm interested in explosions and you approach explosions. 219 00:27:41,080 --> 00:27:48,560 As a scientist, almost you're looking into the rationale of why people could do that, what could lead them to do it? 220 00:27:48,560 --> 00:28:00,400 They're humans, too. Why? And then perhaps in a very different tradition of Chinese iconography, the figure of the of the Tigers, 221 00:28:00,400 --> 00:28:11,090 these are not real tigers, but they look very real and pierced by arrows like the both. 222 00:28:11,090 --> 00:28:14,000 And then deflect from Iraqi. 223 00:28:14,000 --> 00:28:24,530 And say just as he has this close affinity with the with his hometown Iraqi, also, he has a close affinity, but it's by the sea side. 224 00:28:24,530 --> 00:28:33,530 And it also was. This was made before, but it was destroyed quite badly in the tsunami of 2011. 225 00:28:33,530 --> 00:28:44,650 This work is made before then. But in the American context, science, so working with gunpowder and fireworks, 226 00:28:44,650 --> 00:28:52,990 but also making these installations gold head on and using various techniques, 227 00:28:52,990 --> 00:29:02,650 using very good technicians to create these rather ambiguous at times sardonic statements, 228 00:29:02,650 --> 00:29:12,550 which also very they draw you and you walk right close underneath them. 229 00:29:12,550 --> 00:29:20,300 Now, things again began to change around about twenty nine and. 230 00:29:20,300 --> 00:29:24,350 CI was went with his daughter to Toledo. 231 00:29:24,350 --> 00:29:31,610 He'd been fascinated by El Greco work since he was a young artist and he went to sketch there. 232 00:29:31,610 --> 00:29:42,030 Not a lot happened until. 2016, 2017, and this is connected with him moving into colour using gunpowder, 233 00:29:42,030 --> 00:29:46,410 not just making explosion events and works, which in some ways record them, 234 00:29:46,410 --> 00:29:51,210 but actually making gunpowder paintings using colour as part of that and actually 235 00:29:51,210 --> 00:29:56,700 taking off feeling becoming part of a conversation with the tradition of Western art. 236 00:29:56,700 --> 00:30:00,600 The great artists of the old Western art. 237 00:30:00,600 --> 00:30:11,170 So this is his view of the light of day and night using this technique of of stencilling and other things to create other images. 238 00:30:11,170 --> 00:30:18,810 The kind of montage effects over the surface thinking about Western space, 239 00:30:18,810 --> 00:30:28,690 western pictorial space, as opposed to the Chinese space, traditionally always much flatter. 240 00:30:28,690 --> 00:30:37,210 And this work, which is the title of the of the exhibition in the Prado, the spirit of painting takes us even further. 241 00:30:37,210 --> 00:30:51,190 You can see it's it's undulating 180 centimetres 80 metres wide. 242 00:30:51,190 --> 00:30:57,580 And a direct homage to El Protocol, the Apostles and like. 243 00:30:57,580 --> 00:30:59,910 And I think at this time, what you're writing, 244 00:30:59,910 --> 00:31:09,920 there's there's a degree of anguish about taking on the great Western tradition and admiration, that's really what you take from it. 245 00:31:09,920 --> 00:31:20,930 I mean, some of it direct imagery would be banal. And it's trying to make painting possible again, 246 00:31:20,930 --> 00:31:32,080 but not using paint to get something with it from the energy of the art and to transpose that in the way that is is intelligible. 247 00:31:32,080 --> 00:31:37,600 And then in the Fitzy, you saw the on the film, the big event there, 248 00:31:37,600 --> 00:31:49,350 but this was in some of the rooms as you go around these works, the smaller works made again in response to the to the exhibition. 249 00:31:49,350 --> 00:31:58,020 And then most recently last year in Pompei, the events in the in the in the story in which you saw in the amphitheatre that you saw. 250 00:31:58,020 --> 00:32:04,180 But this incredible installation amongst these. 251 00:32:04,180 --> 00:32:05,170 He's wonderful. 252 00:32:05,170 --> 00:32:18,950 Some of the best examples of classical sculpture and creating a tunnel in space and time literally of bringing these two things together. 253 00:32:18,950 --> 00:32:27,680 And really, just to try to tie things up, I'd like to finish in Moscow in 2017, 254 00:32:27,680 --> 00:32:32,360 where I have an exhibition at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts State Museum of Fine Arts, 255 00:32:32,360 --> 00:32:39,590 and it's the was the 100th anniversary of the October revolution. 256 00:32:39,590 --> 00:32:48,880 And. The Pusskins entrance, the main entrance outside where people usually queue for hours and hours and hours. 257 00:32:48,880 --> 00:32:51,880 That was completely cluttered up with shopping, 258 00:32:51,880 --> 00:32:58,510 supermarket shopping trolleys and then little babies cribs and then birch trees were growing out of them. 259 00:32:58,510 --> 00:33:05,270 The installation was actually almost made it difficult to get in there, but when you got in? 260 00:33:05,270 --> 00:33:18,800 This is what you saw, and the word bland is the word made out of reads the symbols, triumphant symbols. 261 00:33:18,800 --> 00:33:33,700 And then these paintings on the side garden. And there's a kind of elegy here analogy for for what went wrong, what so obviously went wrong. 262 00:33:33,700 --> 00:33:43,380 Idealism, but also analogy for bravery. For all the people's bravery who tried to make things better, but didn't. 263 00:33:43,380 --> 00:33:52,240 There's no comfort for murderers and size work, but there is for people who try to make things better. 264 00:33:52,240 --> 00:33:58,840 And just a few little details of what you've just been looking at, Snowden guardian of Felber father. 265 00:33:58,840 --> 00:34:06,520 Happy New Year found Father Frost on the top of their knees with childlike images. 266 00:34:06,520 --> 00:34:13,810 And then as you looking in the face, going back and make a montage, they're heroic sculpture. 267 00:34:13,810 --> 00:34:18,640 Other elements from from the Russian past, from the Soviet past, 268 00:34:18,640 --> 00:34:26,980 but also something that was shared with China to two of the biggest countries in the world are both experienced. 269 00:34:26,980 --> 00:34:38,050 This and as far as I know, no other artist has even tried to, let alone think about it, literally do anything about it. 270 00:34:38,050 --> 00:34:49,840 So that's kind of a very quick canter up today, except it's to revert to an earlier work made in the home town sized interest in the body, 271 00:34:49,840 --> 00:34:54,430 the body of the Earth human body also extends to his own. 272 00:34:54,430 --> 00:35:00,940 He was a martial arts practitioner as a as a young man, 273 00:35:00,940 --> 00:35:12,310 and he's starring in a film called Spring and the fall of a small town made Quanzhou and playing Olive had, 274 00:35:12,310 --> 00:35:17,380 I guess, is the colour head of the Bowman's own Secret Service. 275 00:35:17,380 --> 00:35:29,380 So a real baddie that using the May two years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, but using the the kung fu and his next big project, 276 00:35:29,380 --> 00:35:36,940 he tells me, is actually making an exhibition about the history of kung fu in Hong Kong. 277 00:35:36,940 --> 00:35:41,050 So I can't think of any better curator, but don't keep being an artist, please. 278 00:35:41,050 --> 00:35:53,280 You put this out of a job. OK, thank you very much.