Wu Jian’an: The Seven Layered Shell

“To see the world in a grain of sand” was William Blake’s name for extraordinary perception. A way of seeing can sometimes do the reverse: reveal a grain of sand in the world. I don’t mean to deny the obvious or to pretend that the grain of sand was anywhere but in the world: but its position in the world, its rubbing against countless other grains of sand, was not visible to us as long as the grains melted into the single continuous substance, “sand.” Making the eye snag that grain takes effort.

Here is enormous effort. Wu Jian’an enlarges our perception by stuffing every particle of his body-shaped figures with detail. What is the object he puts before us? Is it a full-body tattoo from which the body has been removed? A robe covered with the most exquisite and perverse embroidery? The biggest of all circus acrobat performances? Wu Jian’an does not depict, he does not cast a shadow, he does not map an object’s contours. There is no brushed-in continuity here, but rather space divided and expanded a hundredfold. What he scales up becomes something of a different kind. Stand closer. You’ll see. Something simple (the outline of a human body, as plain as your own shadow when seen from a distance) turns out to be immensely complex. The shadow fragments. The one body is now teeming with smaller bodies that are themselves teeming with smaller bodies. The bodies at their various levels peer at us with countless eyes or go about their business, ignoring us. What can have prepared Wu Jian’an to see this for us? What can prepare us to see what he must have seen?

A thought: Some 98% of the DNA in human cells does not code for proteins or enable the transmission of heritable traits. Our guts are full of bacteria without which we could not digest. Approximately 8% of the human genome is thought to derive from viruses that crept into our germ plasm in the remote past. The Self, we discover, is to a great extent made of Others. With this knowledge, how could we carve a human image out of a single block of wood or marble or paint it in continuous streaks of color, as if to perpetuate the beautiful lie of the human essence being one selfsame thing? The code that makes us who we are is in large part separate from us, unreadable as having anything to do with ourselves: that must be why noncoding DNA was at first called, impatiently, “junk DNA.” Stop to read the junk! Know thy(non)self!

The “Seven-Layered Shell” depicts human bodies as sand. No, as sandcastles covered with shells, made from sand that is itself ground from broken shells. The body becomes a crowd, or several crowds of individuals struggling, copulating, and cooperating; it becomes a screen for the fantasmagoria of images, words, dreams and fears; a monster equipped with every kind of snout, tentacle, fang and orifice; or all of these at once, with delicacy and humor.

Since the eye is drawn irresistibly to the proliferating atoms of imagery that make up the giant forms, here it will be well to stand back and name the continents on which they multiply and sport. First, a huge man, named for the Confucian’s entry into maturity, Er li (Standing On One’s Own ), stares before him with his whole complement of symmetrical feet, arms, eyes and so forth. Answering this Golem is a nine-headed serpent, Xiangliu, a parade, carnival, history of civilization and diagnostic table of folly that Bosch or Breughel would have recognized. A Ship of Fools transports the allegory towater, drifting away where the Tower of Babel merely collapses. By exchanging gifts, two figures Hand in Hand forge the basic relation of self and other. The Mutation of a six-fingered hand links creativity with monstrosity. The Six-Eared Macaque once almost succeeded in stealing the credit from Sun Wukong and the Tang Monk for bringing the Buddhist scriptures to China: with his “sensitive ear, discernment of fundamental principles, knowledge of past and future and comprehension of all things” he is a formidable and duplicitous rival. Together, these seven layers of the shell may constitute a cosmology, a jataka-narrative of successive incarnations, an artist’s autobiography, a game of chess, an allegory, a map of the life of the mind, a fugue, a code, or a fingerprint; whatever they compose, they are reiterations of three hundred and sixty stamped images, dancing in and out of visibility. The One of the work flickers out of the buzzing business of its Many.

We view the work or we read it; we step back to recognize its outlines or we step in to decipher its subtexts. How to telescope from one perspective to the other? In Standing On One’s Own the Others who make up the colossal standing figure include Mao, Darwin, Freud and Einstein, occupying stations in conspicuous organs as heroes might stand on a balcony to salute the crowd. All four of these heroes have been displayed on banknotes before (Mao in China, Darwin in England, Freud in Austria, Einstein in Israel). [FIGURES 1-3] Like the engraving on banknotes, Wu Jian’an’s draftsmanship brings the portrait to almost (but not quite) dissolve into overall geometric pattern. These omnipresent images are in our hands and pockets, we recognize them for the fraction of a second it takes to pick out a bill of the right denomination, but almost never take the time to look them in the face. So, too, our daily lives are woven of transactions in which money changes hands, but is usually not examined for itself. How fitting it is that theirs should be the faces that guarantee the validity of the means of exchange: four disrupters. Lives woven of Maoist, Darwinian, Freudian and Einsteinian threads must constantly depart from the standard of common sense and traditional behavior.

In Europe, people learned to see bodies above and below the scale of the human body at about the same time, in the seventeenth century. Your body, my body, the bodies of other people can form a crowd, as when we are waiting in line at the bakery, or a body can become swollen through disease or lose parts through war or misfortune. Such changes are banal. But the invention of the microscope disclosed worlds within a drop of water or blood. [FIGURE 4] All of creation seemed to be pulsating with hitherto unknown plants and animals, as ignorant of us and our level of existence as we had been of theirs. The old difference between spirit and matter no longer made so much sense: perhaps all matter was full of spirit, full of animated individuals. Perhaps we had misunderstood our place in the world. Leibniz combined the microscope studies of van Leeuwenhoek with some of Spinoza’s ideas to suggest that everything, alive or not, was engaged in a permanent “conatus,” striving. At the other end of the scale, political theorists attempted to improve on the ancients by postulating a level of organization on which the different, conflicting, arguing bodies of individual men fused into a single body, the Sovereign. [FIGURE 5] Behavior that would be inadmissible in individual men and women was permissible for the Sovereign, who had his match only in other Sovereigns. Individuals were mortal, but Sovereigns were immortal. Civilized people lived under laws, but between Sovereigns there was no law but power. It was best to keep these Sovereigns from knocking into each other.

The simultaneous discovery of the microscopic world and of a non-moral social science put human behavior in a new context. We are still interpreting it: the bodies within our bodies and the body built up out of our bodies continue to defy common sense, which is human-scaled. To think about either other kind of body is to be led into a Blakean alternate world, a mythical world. It is doubly strange that a mere adjustment of scale can get us there. The smoothness of the transition tempts us to believe that the transition is only a gradient, and so to treat nations and bacteria as selves like ourselves that can be manipulated by similar devices. But the translation among levels frequently shatters our expectations, and when it does we are returned to the thought patterns of myth, where incurable diseases are malign demons inhabiting the body and nations acquire outsize personalities. Human beings have motivations that can be communicated to other human beings, but to explain the bodies at orders of magnitude remote from ours we call on the categories of gods, demons, heroes, ghosts, monsters—creatures beyond reason.

Intertwined with the prophets of modernity in Wu Jian’an’s art are monster figures from the Shan hai jing (Book of Guideways to the Mountains and Seas), an enigmatic work of geography from early China. Its first five books detail the mountains and rivers of China with special attention to the animals, metals and medicinal plants they harbor and the deities that lurk among them: the traveler is advised on the proper sacrifices to make to each and on the benefit or harm to be drawn from every plant and animal. A fish called yi with the face of a dog and a cry like a baby’s is found in the streams of Mount Beiyue; eating it cures insanity. A single-headed, double-tailed serpent is to be found on Mount Hunxi; its appearance presages drought in the land. Chinese readers of premodern times would have found nothing objectionable in the inclusion of such details in a work of geography. Prodigious creatures are born now and again and traces of the titanic combats of the gods in the beginning of time still surface, for heaven and earth are vast and nothing is to be excluded. With its sixth book the work ventures beyond the Chinese realm and goes “beyond the seas”: now the animals and human inhabitants veer toward the monstrous, and there is no more talk of paying respects through sacrifices.

South of Offspringline is a watery chasm 2,400 feet deep. The Openbright animal has an animal’s body that is as huge as a tiger’s, and it has nine heads which all have human faces that are all turned towards the east…. To the west of the Openbright there are the Divine Wind bird and the Wonderbird which wear snakes on their heads and tread snakes underfoot, and on their breasts these birds wear a scarlet snake.

In these murky foreign regions the headless Xingtian, the Xiangliu serpent with its nine human faces, the one-eyed people, the people with no intestines, the giants with enormous feet, the people with huge ears, the people with a hole in their chests, and soforth, live. Pushed to the edges of the inhabited world, these bizarre foreigners attest by counterexample the order and regularity brought to the world by the founders of the civilized realm of China. Many of these monsters are, in fact, the losers in the cosmic battles incident to China’s founding:

Gong Gong [when he challenged the Yellow Emperor for the rule of the universe] had a vizier named Xiangliu. Xiangliu used his nine heads to eat from nine mountains. Wherever he dragged his heads became sloughs or ravines. The hero-king Yu killed Xiangliu, but his blood left such a stench behind that the five grains would not grow…. To this day people do not dare to shoot arrows toward the north, for fear of Gong Gong.

These creatures’ deformations are easy to explain: they look that way because of the hits they took in the great battles of mythological times. Being immortal, they continue to exist, but being defeated, they are excluded from the sacred realm of civilization. The purpose of the Shan hai jing in recording their dwelling-places is obscure. Is their only function here to provide a negative portrait of the world order that exiles them? Or do they remind us of the chaos that might loom if any of us were to fail in our duties to civilization?

Wu Jian’an brings the outside inside, forms the body of his human composites from these excommunicated figures. By doing this, he brings a further outside inside. For the monsters and prodigies of the Shan hai jing are among the rare pieces of cultural information that seem to have circulated effortlessly from country to country in times when little else could be trafficked. The Greek physician Ktesias, early in the fourth century BC, wrote a book about India that described such exotics as the skiapods, whose single foot is so broad it can be used as a parasol, the dog-headed people who have never learned to speak, the headless people with faces in the middle of their chests, and the people who grow younger, not older, with time. A hundred years later the Greek ambassador Megasthenes brought back from India tales of people whose feet are set backwards, who have dog ears and a single eye in the middle of their forehead, and so forth. All these images are found in the Shan hai jing. Replicated through the centuries across Central Asia and Europe, on parchment and in stone, and repeated as sober fact in dozens of traveler’s reports, these “marvels of the East” correspond tightly to the “marvels beyond the seas” of Chinese imagining. [FIGURES 6, 7, 8] Thus Wu Jian’an’s decision to bring the non-metropolitan, the eccentric, the exiled, the monstrous into the constitution of his colossal figures opens their bodies’ interior onto the widest cultural outside and makes it impossible to say that his art represents “a throwback to Chinese tradition”; it’s at the very least much more than that. Not to mention that the component figures of his colossi include caricatures, visualizations of slang phrases, elements from Christian, Buddhist and Indic mythologies, graffiti, martial-arts novels, T-shirts, advertisements, cartoons, stencils—a wide variety of “junk DNA” to keep the noise/signal ratio high. [FIGURES 9, 10, 11]

These emblems of Otherness are made by processes of replication, repetition, identity. Not for nothing is China the origin of printing; nor is it just accidentally the home of the rubber stamp. An astonishing amount of traditional hand labor goes into making these multiples, in a seeming parody of China’s present status as “workshop of the world” (a procedural burlesque Wu Jian’an shares with Xu Bing, Ai Weiwei and many other contemporary artists). Wu Jian’an’s colossi come to life on the basis of paper-cutting, resist-dyeing with wax, and hand-printing: the arts of the woodblock New Year’s calendar, the papercut pasted in the window, the shadow puppet cut from translucent donkey leather. Through combination of flat modular elements, vast and complex constructions grow, with at their root only two operations: first the removal of material through cutting and then the making of negative images through light, ink and pressure, both operations repeated hundreds of times for a single composite image. The analogy to the body is once again easy: to reproduce themselves in the organism, genes use a technology of transfer printing, working a maximum of variations on a few standard components.

The information-directed synthesis of proteins and RNA… has two requirements. First, the final products must be constructed from a few standard components. In living cells, the components are amino acids or nucleotides, and the final products are proteins or nucleic acids. Second, a blueprint must be created that describes the order of these components in the final product.

This intense handicraft, this marshalling of mass-production resources for a single occasion or perhaps two, resulting in unique works of art, imitates the combinatory process whereby sequences of four amino acids, locked together in closely predetermined chains, nonetheless produce billions of dissimilar individual humans. Embracing the arts of reproducibility seems the long way around to arrive at uniqueness. Literati art, the art of suggestion, insists on the singularity of the event of brush touching paper: the brush in its dramatic rending of the blank paper accomplishes cosmic work, something never to be done twice. Shitao’s essay on painting proclaims that the method of the art rests on the single initial brushstroke, the beginning of whatever exists, the root of all forms. But such language cannot apply to the printed shape, for it has no beginning, is not drawn like a line from here to there; it lands on the paper and leaves a track, like a bare foot.

Eschewing the turnings of the wrist, the breathing, the infinite training and the ethos of individuality that underlie literati painting, Wu Jian’an’s wax template printing takes for its basis a repertoire of techniques available to peasant households hundreds of years ago. It takes from cottage industry the strategies of the module and the multiple. Like the Chinese theater, it is an art of suggestion, an arte povera. Thus flatness is indispensable to it. Flatness makes possible the standardization on which its complexity builds. Any portrait immobilizes its subject, but a Cubist portrait shows the subject struggling. As the human figure takes on volume through its installation in a room, its flatness becomes cubic. The room might risk becoming the culture hero’s tomb, his underground court, or the laboratory designed for his reanimation—much as ancient Chinese tombs with sylvan scenes printed in relief on their walls looked forward to the pleasures of an afterlife with the Seven Worthies in a bamboo grove. Flatness and volume here square off as do death and life, necessarily caught in their mutual wrestle if the context is tomb decoration, or our modern near-equivalent, those chambers of magnetic resonance imaging where every corner of the body is explored and “thrown in patterns on a screen.” These sensing technologies make the body a field of differentiated heat zones like those which ascribe to the schematic shaman and shamaness lying on their beds of purple a vivid cartographic plumage in blue, cyan, green, orange, red and yellow “Rainbow”. The rounded body takes on flatness as a means of traveling into the hereafter (or, in the case of the medical patient, into the future conditional of health). It accepts transformation into a representational code. Reconstitution can come later. So, too, the translation of round into flat in these hominid banners replays the urge of the Zhou bronze casters to represent every part of the sacrificial or totemic animal on the roughly cylindrical surfaces of their vessels. The same dynamic inspires Northwest Pacific animal art, where the bird, fish or beast was imaginatively skinned and made visible from every angle simultaneously. [FIGURE 12] In both cases the demand for flatness joined to the demand for completeness imparts a tension to the work that renders its surface nonhomogeneous. The skinned animal is about to spring back into three dimensions, it seems. Do Zhou bronze and Kwakiutl wood carving, in their use of doubling, double each other? Whether leading back to a lost common origin or merely an observed similarity, the relationship between the two traditions seems to project itself as an immense bisected animal skin across the two sides of the Pacific, and comes together here as well. [FIGURE 13]

The processes of making minimal units for a giant body, and of snapping that body to a grid of technological representability, involve Wu Jian’an and his assistants in a recapitulation of the development of single-celled, multi-cellular, and ever more complex organisms, through those animals’ invention of houses, cultures, media, and other technological shells for themselves to inhabit. To lift the shell is to embark on a discrete and extraneous discovery of the self. The Shan hai jing has found its contemporary analogue.

I skim and flip through the story of Mu Tianzi of Zhou,

Pausing to gaze on the images of mountains and seas.

In an instant I have reached the edges of the universe,

If this is not delight I don’t know what it is.

-- Tao Yuanming, “Reading the Book of Mountains and Seas”

Haun Saussy

2012.11