GOOD NEWS FROM THE LOWER WORLD!
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| New boko: Good News from The Lower World! 176 sidor Chinese, English,Swedish Karneval Publishing |
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"I happened to be there..."
(Text from the book) |
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GLEAMING;NEWLY WASHED SUVs jostle for space with trucks hauling long
trailers on the muddy road that leads up to village. They move at a
leisurely pace to avoid colliding with the little three-wheelers that,
quite without warning, are liable at any time to spill their cargoes of
bricks or melons all over the road. Taxis make their way to the depot.
Electric bikes swish noiselessly past the pedalling cyclists. But it is
still the pedestrians who are most numerous, on their way to or from
the bus stop on Lai Guang Ying Dong Road. At night the road is shrouded
in total darkness and the traffic is not quite as dense. Black shadows
pass by on all sides. The smells are more intense and more varied. The
fragrance of burning wood from the barbecues mingles with the stench of
the latrines. Suo Jia Cun is a typical village on the outskirts of
Beijing. Hustle and bustle everywhere. |
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IT'S
A YEAR now since the Olympics. There are no longer any guards manning
the road-block. Migrants – blue-collar workers and budding
entrepreneurs alike – live cheek by jowl in tiny, wretched hovels. And,
on all sides, the construction sites inch gradually closer. Great
changes are taking place; for many people things are getting better,
others are having to move to another of the city’s suburbs, and in the
middle of it all is BIAC, the Beijing International Art Camp. It is
here, for the third consecutive year, that I have hired a studio. |
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‘Make what is old serve the new and make what is foreign serve China.’ I think that’s how Chairman Mao expressed it, if my memory serves me correctly. China has been ever present at the back of my mind since I was a little boy who collected stamps and dreamed of going to sea. Somewhere out there, beyond Vinga Lighthouse that marks the entrance to the port of Gothenburg, lay Zanzibar, San Marino, Shanghai … |
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PARENT'S HOME was full of bowls and dishes decorated with the most
exquisite of motifs – dragons, pagodas, demons, beautiful bridges with
daintily tripping ladies, cherry blossom twigs frozen in their icy blue
glaze... My dad was a policeman who repaired Chinese porcelain as a
hobby. It was fascinating for me to see him sitting at the kitchen
table, drilling through the porcelain with an antiquated diamond-tipped
bit to mend the broken pieces. (‘Riveting’ them, as the experts say.)
The scents of Prussian blue, ultramarine and turpentine mingled with
names like Qing, Kangxi, Song … He taught me how to recognise Ming
porcelain and told me how people used to replicate porcelain from an
earlier age so exactly that it was impossible to tell the difference
between original and copy. Later, at Valand School of Fine Arts in
Gothenburg, Sweden, in the early 1970s we had study groups to discuss
Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art. These and
the Chinese woodcuts that were spread via the pages of Chinese
Literature and Art, a magazine distributed free by the Chinese Embassy,
influenced my early graphic prints in a big way. |
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FOR
A COUPLE of weeks in August 2006 I worked alongside Chinese artists as
part of a wood symposium arranged in Orsa, Sweden. It was there that I
created a cockroach girl, a ‘Mayan’ horseman and the loudspeaker tower,
‘Information’. They all had their origins in some simple sketches I had
made in Mexico. A single line of text each day over the course of a week or so gradually developed into a short poem that DongDong and Wei Haitung translated. I then copied the Chinese characters from their translation, painting them on the carapace of the cockroach. The lettering was originally conceived to serve a purely decorative function, but it wasn’t long before the idea occurred to me to write the full story of the Cockroach Girl’s quest for love. |
| The Moon shines cold Girl seeks Love Finds love in the sculpture I wish I were a Dragon When dragons fall in love the Moon shines warm. |
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| The year after Orsa, in 2007, I rented a studio in Beijing for the first time. The following year I again spent the whole of the summer at BIAC and held an exhibition at the Huang Hua Studio. For the Chinese catalogue I wrote a text, reproduced below in an abridged, slightly edited form: LISTENING TO THE NEWS on my way to Kallax Airport, in the far north of Sweden, I hear that scientists have discovered a community of bacteria deep below the surface of the Earth. The bacteria have clearly existed there for eons – totally unknown to us. I don’t know how the scientists have reasoned, but I presume the bacteria once burrowed their way down deep into the Earth, firmly convinced that they would find something. But could they have any idea of what they would find? I too have sought out places, firmly convinced that I would find something. Chance plays a part in all our lives. I once saw a small piece of wood in a tiny little stand where a man was selling chisels in Izmailovsky Park in Moscow. To tell the truth, the stand was little more than a piece of coarse cloth spread out on a table, but the tools lying there were fantastic – and the man had made them all himself. Beside them on the table was this remarkable piece of wood. Walnut from Kazakhstan. A piece of a root, maybe. Or a knotty growth from one of the branches. I bought it, but it was lying around for more than a year before I began to work with it. By then I had returned from China and my original idea was simply to fashion a kind of Chinese hair-do on a little female figure I’d carved from the wood – something I’d seen on a shadow puppet in Liu Li Chang. Or perhaps it was in the subway? Or on another sculpture? Paradoxically, I owe the extraordinary yet quite wonderful shading in the face of the girl to my relative lack of interest in wood. I regard it simply as a medium to work in and, if there are subtle colour shifts in the grain, they end up where they end up. For me, she was new, mysterious – and slightly scary. A ‘Mouse-Girl-Devil’ |
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in the car on the way to Kallax, the newsreader rounded off the item
about the subterranean bacteria with the words, ‘So, that’s today’s
good news from the World Below!’ ‘Yes,’ I thought. ‘That’s it! Good News from the World Below.’ Of course! The ‘Mouse-Girl-Devil’ was a Messenger from the Lower World. |
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| ON
WALLS, LAMP-POSTS and frontages – everywhere you look in Beijing –
you’ll see phone numbers to ring. Often they’ve been painted over. The
more I have thought about these painted-over numbers, the more they
have attracted me. Various combinations of numbers have crept into my
paintings. This year I got round to asking my friends what the phone
numbers were. ‘Ban zheng,’ they said. They’re part of the illegal
licence business. Marriage certificates, drivers’ licences, Ph.D.
degrees… You can buy whatever kind of papers you need. Everything’s for
sale. Just make a call to the Lower World. |
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MY
FIRST MEETING with the photographer Zhang Xuejiao was a comedy of
errors. I was attending an opening day event for a photographic
exhibition in district 798, the huge art zone in Beijing. Zhang Xuejiao
was standing there with a glass of wine in her hand and, as I made to
introduce myself, she thought I was toasting her health. It was an
auspicious start. Two weeks later Zhang Xuejiao was in my studio to
shoot some portraits of me for this book. When she showed me the result
of her work, I saw, in a series of rapid-fire images, how I was
gradually becoming enveloped in the linen cloth that I was embroidering
and painting – and so the idea was born to make a stage with moving
puppets, like a real stage, a sculpture. |
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LIPS, NOSES, EYEBROWS… I come across all sorts of things in museums.
After centuries of wear and tear, an underpainting finally peeps
through to become the dominant surface colour. Buddha’s hair-cut, this
knobbliness that I succeeded in emulating by using a chisel sharpened
on the ‘wrong’ side. A bronze Buddha, with the most beautiful
amber-like patina I’ve ever seen – found in a museum in Bangkok. The
magnificent Shiva, also in bronze, from the Museum of Far Eastern
Antiquities in Stockholm. I recalled them all from memory when I
created ‘Tricket –The Trick!’ |
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I MUST ALSO tell you about the roots! |
| EARLY
ONE MORNING Zhang Xuejiao returned with two more photographers, Liu
Aiguo and Li Jun, and we all drove to Sanchazi, where the Great Wall of
China is known as ‘The Dragon’s Back’. There, high above us, wreathed
in mist on the hilltops snaked the back of the dragon. It was quite a
struggle to make our way to the summit, but when we got there we called
out with sheer exhilaration across the dizzying heights. As the echoes
of our voices faded among the clouds I noticed a root beside my feet –
a Dragon Root… |
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| It’s bounty like this that these journeys produce. Scratching the
surface, burrowing, digging deep, I inevitably find something. I just
happened to be there – in the night among the lanterns and shadows on
Lai Guang Ying Dong Road, in a museum, in a subway carriage. Then and
now, there and here fuse together to form a picture, maybe a little
sketch that I later return to and reinterpret in the light of new
contexts. I see myself. I see my times. Stockholm, 14 November 2009 Torsten Jurell |