You've seen the range of sides work from from this film,
and it's it gives a very strong and positive impression, as indeed, this is his work, very strong and positive.
But it also comes from dark, some dark places as well.
And then talking about the the context, the ambience and the influences, I'd like to talk about some of these darker places.
Now. Was there we go now starting off where you ended it in, not in 1957.
A little later than that, but in Congo and with the famous I guess it's when period a which characterised the city,
a city that was really big in the 13th century. It was part of the Marine II maritime hub for the Silk Road.
And then somehow things politics changed. The harbour silted up.
China itself changed and it became, yeah, the matchbox that scientists described it.
But I believe that site, as important as control was for his childhood, the influence of his mother and his grandmother,
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.
That certainly was all important, and he was an influence of first introduced art.
His grandmother had a late period bed, which had these, I guess, erotic paintings on it.
And this made the strong a strong impression on the young artist young to be artists,
but also his father and his friends who were a kind of literati group is that was a member of the party.
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.
They had a lot of Western literature people like Samuel Beckett and Marilyn Monroe's husband, Arthur Miller.
That's right. And these were hanging around.
At least they were hanging around until around about 1970,
when things got so hot in the Cultural Revolution that his grandfather, his father and his brother, his uncle.
But at night, and that's the memory, not the book burnings we know from Berlin in the 1930s.
But the book burnings in Congo in the early 1970s, very much the same reason.
Anyway, Okonjo, Shanghai.
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.
So I got young, had been the Red Guard, had been a member of a theatre group proclaiming the words of Mao,
but also moving away from this acting role towards set design.
And that is something that drove him to go to the Shanghai Theatre Academy and obviously in Shanghai.
And there was no arts academy there. And this was really the hottest school going.
And it offered so many things.
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.
The researcher, who built a non-official office right through the Cultural Revolution,
making abstract paintings that no one knew about a great group of students.
Shenzhen was one of them. But Gwenda was hanging around.
I mean, it was a really interesting place. And I think just now is.
The second generation or third generation of scholars, historians are beginning to look at Shanghai.
They begin to realise that the story of the of contemporary art in China didn't all go through Beijing,
and the little bit tango to Shanghai was an absolutely critical place.
And the discourse there was amazing. And you can see art from other places.
Nine. There was this big exhibition of French landscape painting came to Shanghai 1981 from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts,
Great Exhibition of Abstract Abstract Expressionism, and it all sunk in.
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,
the foremost artistic centre in Asia from the 20s, 30s and even to the late 40s.
In spite of the war going on. Amazing story of modernism.
There's the woodblock movement, which you all know about has been looked after by the sea because it chimed in the ideology.
But actually the many, many different modernist schools in Shanghai at this time,
it hasn't been written up, neither in Chinese nor adequately in any other language.
There's still a lot of work to be done on this. Just one example of a beautiful painting.
I've never seen another work by this artist. Many things undoubtedly were destroyed.
But there's wonderful stories to be told and to hang out there.
You can see it in the buildings alone of great French modernist architects, Hungarian architects all over Europe and Asia.
So the other stories that were going on was, of course, the the liberation, the end of the Civil War.
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.
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.
Of course, they didn't know how to paint properly because Mao had this big dilemma.
If you are a communist country, you can't really have this old aristocratic calligraphy or calligraphic style of painting going on.
What what do you have in this western modernism from Shanghai was absolutely bourgeois and terrible.
So the brother, you know, the friendship the brotherhood from from Russia,
that was one way to teach you how to paint properly in the socialist realist style.
This is something I think that is fascinated but also tormented in the way.
So I mean, to the present day, this thing about being Chinese parts of the eastern philosophical and cultural tradition,
yet also western dialectical materialism made its impact really almost from birth.
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,
there was a Russian art history and this was possible to be reproduced.
Rather bad colour reproduction. This is one of the famous paintings of sight, even made a reproduction of it.
Painted a reproduction. What else was going on in China?
A football shirt who, before the liberation was an excellent artist working with brush.
He was sent off to Czechoslovakia. Another problem with the country, and this is vulgar.
So using the old methods for communists, new communist purposes or this kind of thing?
This is before the Culture Revolution 19, 1959, but a view of the in the Russian style.
Of something from the Civil War or this will fund an amazing landscape painter.
That's what he's known best for. He was being marginalised because he was such a good landscape painter.
But he made this celebrate the success of our glorious atomic bomb explosion 1965.
It's an amazing, amazing painting, and it's a shared interest and love that Sy has for mushroom clouds.
And then in the in the mid-60s from the mid 60s, there's the Cultural Revolution from 66 to 76.
Some examples that the lessons were learnt from Constantin Maximoff.
He spent two years in Beijing Arts Academy, also travelling to Sichuan all over the place.
What kind of brought into hyper mode these different ways,
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.
And so the whole idea of peasant painting was was invented sometime in the 60s, around the time of the Russian Revolution.
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.
And then, yeah. Socialist realism continuing.
One of the things that was deeply impressive was the sculptural tableau with 180 characters in it called the Rent Collectors Courtyard.
And I should say that Constantine Constantin Maximus Sy has collected many of his works.
I think about and of them, but also in the Venice Biennale in 1999, say as a homage,
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.
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.
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.
There was no chance of of making a profit out of it.
The gesture, the story, the connexion had been made.
And it's a story of connexion, which is very important.
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,
bookshop manager and amateur painter. His dad's matchboxes.
And then going to the Shanghai Theatre Academy.
Lovely day in the foreground. And not only that, in that spirit of opening up in the early eighties after the Cultural Revolution,
which was like taking the cork out of an out of a vacuum bottle in the influences from everywhere suddenly rushed in,
and a lot of them were Chinese influences because people until then had been insulated from their own history,
their own ideas, their own religions and their own archaeology.
And this is a side doing rock rumblings in Fujian province, I believe of some ancient belches there.
There's one work in the show which relates to this.
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.
Xinjiang province and then up into Tibet. And of course, I was not alone.
Many young artists, artists of his generation were doing that to get in touch with something else with the kind of feeling.
There's a group from the academy. And Self-Portrait.
Very Expressionist. And, of course, Expressionism was known about by then.
Not in 1976, but by 1980. By 1980,
a generation of people would certainly be fully au fait with the different art histories and a lot of the
current things that were happening in the West that they wanted to look at it from their point of view.
And this beautiful painting that from next year, 1984 of Hong Kong, his future wife, a very different style.
Something very fugitive, very, very soft, very lyrical, quite unlike the self-portrait.
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.
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,
the general so-called generation meeting was to work collectively, to think collectively to look at the West.
Oh, all these art movements. So you have to be part of a movement and you have to belong to something some identity.
And Cy and others who you will see in the moment.
So no, we actually have to find an identity of ourselves to take responsibility for our own work and actually find a language,
a language which made sense artistically, aesthetically, but also morally.
Which actually talks about life and how one saw life, truly.
So this key painting made, I think, in one job, one job before leaving for Japan in the same year.
And of the Nagasaki bomb and the number of images from that, there's a self-portrait.
These stencil forms, which once in later in Saigon, Chung's paintings, very recent paintings and the Picasso as much with the dive.
But arriving in Japan, getting out of the the Chinese sea into another one, which was radically different.
I mean, Manohar was all over the region in in Japan at that time.
There's a kind of abstract philosophy of things of bringing out the the the idea of things,
of the spirit of things, which I think you were interested in but didn't take too seriously.
And at that time, what struck you was what would you told me?
And I've read what you've said was that. The whole theory of space and idea of the cosmos was very different.
There was a astrophysical idea of space which wasn't really publicly available in China at that time.
What was available was these gods have floated across space and across time, telescope space and time.
But now we lived in the world of. Big bangs and black holes.
And it was bringing these two ideas together, which was pretty critical for work using gunpowder,
which just started, he was already in China, but making it into events.
And this was the first project for extraterrestrials made in 18.
Nine is about an abode. It's the kind of year it's a year that was exploded.
And so it's looking at the structure, the house.
And then pretty soon afterwards, site involved himself his own body as a kind of breathing figure in the in the landscape.
While the explosion went on around him.
But I think one of the things that I took from him with him, from China and particularly from the Shanghai Theatre Academy,
was not only creativity and the need to find your own way,
but also the ability to plan to think spatially to be able to draw plans and also to be able to think about budgets.
These practical things you get in theatre academies, you don't get them in art academies, you know,
you just kind of constantly tussling with the very often with the taste of your professors.
But this work was made in 1993, I believe.
And yes, it was just just three months before they came to to Oxford to make his work,
and it was extending the Great Wall of China looking at the Great Wall of China as the Dragon Meridian.
The line of GDR or energy, which stretches across the world,
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,
having witnesses to it. Witnesses were given something to perk them up when they when they arrived and then they
were given something to calm them down when they'd seen it all and were going to go home.
So it was it was very much a show. And this is the John Piper gallery in the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford,
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.
And then otherwise there was a kind of barbecue here, which we've been using for toasting different herbal remedies,
different Chinese herbs to create a feeling of bringing things together, bringing the body together, healing the body.
There were also sketches which you can't see, which were acupuncture drawings the body.
The explosion event painting. Well, it's a yes, it's an explosion of that work based on Halley's Comet,
which happened in Angel Meadow just by modelling college and was dedicated to Halley,
who discovered this comet, which happens every 70 odd years and and also the the slightly dark side to this was that.
That. Traditionally, comments were often regarded as harbingers of doom.
But the other side to that was the scientists often think that it will come within comments.
Perhaps they brought with them when they were when they landed material from other worlds, which actually helped create life.
So those two ideas were very much present in that work.
And then the the threatening letter way just looks like a balance in the corner, but it's some.
It's called silent volcano, and it's actually gunpowder bits.
Gunpowder split up into its constituent parts, so there's a kilo of of sulphur,
seven half kilos of potassium nitrate and one point five kilos of charcoal.
Now they're all separate. You mix them up. Boom.
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.
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.
And then another homage, I mean, not actually from Banjo, from from Shanghai, but from Shaman.
Not far in between the two.
One young ping sadly passed away, I think, at the beginning of this week and for whom Sy has written a very beautiful note.
This is a work called Yellow Peril, and it has a thousand locusts and two scorpions above your head as you work through it.
He, too, has a string of fifth critical intelligence.
Really looking at the development of the explosion events, the Earth has a black hole to realised in Hiroshima,
so a kind of development the painting of Nagasaki made still in in Japan and then this development in which the the
black hole from space is channelled down by a fuse into this dark hole near the detonation zone in Hiroshima itself.
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.
A taking of a breath and also something like what are doing to the body of the Earth,
what a what an osteopath or a crier a chiropractor might do to a human body.
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.
And I think it again won the prise.
I think it won the Vanessa Prise in the Venice Biennale and this a jump from Banjo brought over sort of brought here,
floated through the canals, bringing medicinal herbs.
And these were made up and bottled, and they were sold in various slot machines around in in Venice.
So it fitted perfectly into the slightly trashy atmosphere of the of the Biennale.
The thinking about.
Chinese A. And the Chinese traditions, not only to the gods and the Tao pantheon, who have travelled and fought across the heavens.
There is also there is of of warfare and particularly some sons, suit military strategist who was writing in 5th century before our era.
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.
And I think that Sun Tzu really comes to his mind at this time because it's a
matter of adapting to a different artistic environment and a kind of competition.
You moved from Japan, which is extremely sophisticated in every way, but it's it's hermetic.
In New York, you were at the centre of arguably the centre of the western art world.
And some, particularly the text about some about some Zimmet say quote was that.
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.
But but more than illustrating it.
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.
Zubin Zubair, the arms just a bit later and just thinking about resourcefulness and strategy in battle.
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.
A battle to express oneself in a way that would be intelligible, going out of Asian culture into something very, very different.
A much more capitalist, money orientated business. And.
Keeping the explosion events going, but in the kind of smaller way,
I can't imagine anyone being allowed to do a big gunpowder event in the middle of New York.
But if you take it in the small cardboard tube with you, you know, poof.
And that's what I did. Very carefully selected sites that the Manhattan, you see the twin towers still going there.
But I was thinking about the mushroom cloud. There's a kind of beautiful thing, not necessarily something that's so negative that power.
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,
and also to some sites of American landlords to Michael Heights as double negative in the
Mojave Desert and then to double spiral by Robert Smithson and in in the Great Salt Lake.
So exploded this so it's kind of like marking out your territory in a way as a novice travelling across the country,
the big gap not just sitting there in New York, but actually.
Saying I've arrived, it's a calling card. Now, one of the things that I think.
Imposed on everyone, not just those living in New York, was the was the 9-11 attacks,
terrorist attacks and this work opportune stage one is made in response to that stage one and stage two.
And it's a it's a car turning over in space and seeming to explode with time.
So this kind of troubles stereoscopic effect as you see this car from one viewpoint.
You can see that there was one car is moving across the space and in this about horror and terror.
And trying to understand the attitudes of people who did terrorist acts.
You famously said I make explosions, so I'm interested in explosions and you approach explosions.
As a scientist, almost you're looking into the rationale of why people could do that, what could lead them to do it?
They're humans, too. Why? And then perhaps in a very different tradition of Chinese iconography, the figure of the of the Tigers,
these are not real tigers, but they look very real and pierced by arrows like the both.
And then deflect from Iraqi.
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.
And it also was. This was made before, but it was destroyed quite badly in the tsunami of 2011.
This work is made before then. But in the American context, science, so working with gunpowder and fireworks,
but also making these installations gold head on and using various techniques,
using very good technicians to create these rather ambiguous at times sardonic statements,
which also very they draw you and you walk right close underneath them.
Now, things again began to change around about twenty nine and.
CI was went with his daughter to Toledo.
He'd been fascinated by El Greco work since he was a young artist and he went to sketch there.
Not a lot happened until. 2016, 2017, and this is connected with him moving into colour using gunpowder,
not just making explosion events and works, which in some ways record them,
but actually making gunpowder paintings using colour as part of that and actually
taking off feeling becoming part of a conversation with the tradition of Western art.
The great artists of the old Western art.
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.
The kind of montage effects over the surface thinking about Western space,
western pictorial space, as opposed to the Chinese space, traditionally always much flatter.
And this work, which is the title of the of the exhibition in the Prado, the spirit of painting takes us even further.
You can see it's it's undulating 180 centimetres 80 metres wide.
And a direct homage to El Protocol, the Apostles and like.
And I think at this time, what you're writing,
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.
I mean, some of it direct imagery would be banal. And it's trying to make painting possible again,
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.
And then in the Fitzy, you saw the on the film, the big event there,
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.
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.
But this incredible installation amongst these.
He's wonderful.
Some of the best examples of classical sculpture and creating a tunnel in space and time literally of bringing these two things together.
And really, just to try to tie things up, I'd like to finish in Moscow in 2017,
where I have an exhibition at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts State Museum of Fine Arts,
and it's the was the 100th anniversary of the October revolution.
And. The Pusskins entrance, the main entrance outside where people usually queue for hours and hours and hours.
That was completely cluttered up with shopping,
supermarket shopping trolleys and then little babies cribs and then birch trees were growing out of them.
The installation was actually almost made it difficult to get in there, but when you got in?
This is what you saw, and the word bland is the word made out of reads the symbols, triumphant symbols.
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.
Idealism, but also analogy for bravery. For all the people's bravery who tried to make things better, but didn't.
There's no comfort for murderers and size work, but there is for people who try to make things better.
And just a few little details of what you've just been looking at, Snowden guardian of Felber father.
Happy New Year found Father Frost on the top of their knees with childlike images.
And then as you looking in the face, going back and make a montage, they're heroic sculpture.
Other elements from from the Russian past, from the Soviet past,
but also something that was shared with China to two of the biggest countries in the world are both experienced.
This and as far as I know, no other artist has even tried to, let alone think about it, literally do anything about it.
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,
the body of the Earth human body also extends to his own.
He was a martial arts practitioner as a as a young man,
and he's starring in a film called Spring and the fall of a small town made Quanzhou and playing Olive had,
I guess, is the colour head of the Bowman's own Secret Service.
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,
he tells me, is actually making an exhibition about the history of kung fu in Hong Kong.
So I can't think of any better curator, but don't keep being an artist, please.
You put this out of a job. OK, thank you very much.