Pursuit for the Tao through the Silkworm: A Conversation with Liang Shaoji

Pursuit for the Tao through the Silkworm: A Conversation with Liang Shaojii Yang Jingii Abstract: The Chinese artist Liang Shaoji has been working intensively with silkworms for almost 30 years. His abundant art practices under the Nature Series have become a unique phenomenon in Chinese contemporary art. Liang was awarded the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) in 2002 and the Prince Claus Award in 2009. In this conversation, he discusses how he has transformed the life process of the silkworm into an artistic language to explore the relationship between human beings and non-human life. He also articulated the association between the Nature Series and philosophy, history and culture, highlighting the integrity of ecology and culture, an idea which has traditionally been highly valued in Chinese culture and art. Yang Jing: Good morning, Mr. Liang. You once mentioned that you first got the idea of using the silkworm as an artistic medium in 1988 when you were working on your installation series Yi. In that work, you used dried cocoons. From using dried cocoons to using the silkworm’s spinning process, how did the transformation happen? Liang Shaoji: The series installation Yi was created in 1988. I used the silk and dried cocoon to make the hexagram symbols of the I Ching. One day when this work was put in the exhibition hall of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, the rain just stopped and the light was shed on the silk tissue, the shadow in the dark space making a hazy and surreal feeling. The dried cocoon and their shadows looked to be overlapping and slighting moving. It reminded me of what Lao Tzu said in Tao Te Ching: Indistinct and shadowy, yet within it is an image; shadowy and indistinct, yet within it is a substance. I was enlightened by such an illustration of the essence of Eastern aesthetics. From that moment, the idea of using living silkworms came to my mind. Yang Jing: Before the Yi, did you even have experience with silk or other natural materials? Had you ever thought of using a living organism for making artworks? Liang Shaoji: The inspiration I received from the Yi series was a direct reason. But to choose the living silkworm as a medium was never an accidental consequence. It lies in my past experience. When I was studying at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, I was fond of German expressionism and expressionist art was deeply inspired by primitivism. At that time, the Romanian artist Eugen Popa was teaching in this school. The young students showed great interest in his teaching and the works he made. Meanwhile, I liked the works by Shu Chuanxi and Pan Tianshou. The expressionist style in Shu’s work and the constructivist characteristics of Pan’s work interested me deeply. This school founded by Lin Fengmian has always advocated combining Chinese and Western art. So even though I was trained under the Chistyakov system, the influence I received there made me not totally follow the Russian socialist realist art. In 1965, after graduating from the middle school attached to the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, when I was planning to apply to the Department of Sculpture, the Cultural Revolution started and the Academy stopped enrolling new students. I had no other choice but to go to work. I was sent to a flax-spinning and weaving factory in Taizhou. It was the largest linen fabrics factory in China, dealing with flax dyeing, spinning, knitting and weaving. This factory produced all kinds of linen products, such as clothes, hats, shoes, curtains, lampshades and carpets, and many of them were exported to other countries. I worked there as a designer, so I had a lot of opportunities to go to beaches, hills and bamboo forests, looking for wild fiber plants, to touch various materials and to cultivate a sensitivity to natural materials. Since the 1960s, in addition to doing my daily job, I insisted on making sculpture and painting, and I never gave up. I also attended provincial and national fine art exhibitions. In the late 1970s, I transferred to the Light Industry Department’s Overseas Exhibition Office in Beijing and worker there for more than two years. The experience of working at exhibition planning in large spaces prompted the idea of combining sculpture, painting, architecture and craftsmanship to form a multi-dimensional art. I went to France and Germany in 1982, and then to the USA in 1983. When I went abroad, I visited a lot of art museums and galleries. It was a pleasant surprise for me to find that this possibility does exist as hybridization and indeterminacies are the essential features of the postmodernism. Modern art tapestry can be a way to realize the integration of art forms. So after I returned to China, I began my experiment with three-dimensional fabrics, mixing various skills, such as holing, pulling and stretching, collage and knitting. However, the most important harvest of going abroad was the discovery of the difference between Chinese and Western culture. I realized that the attitude towards nature is the most important division between Eastern and Western cultures; each has been creating its own universe. In 1986, I got an opportunity to study at the Institute of Art Tapestry Varbanov (IATV) established by Maryn Varbanov at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. My mentor’s love for China and his dedication to his career so deeply impressed me. He set forth the concept of soft sculpture and emphasized the combination of concept, material and space, which cleared up much confusion in my mind and illuminated me the way to transform from folk art into contemporary art. Meanwhile, his concern about nature also deeply encouraged me to shift my view form working indoors to outside. He once planned to cover the West Lake with a net. He was a good friend of Christo Jaracheff, and he even suggested Christo could come to wrap the Great Wall, but unfortunately this plan was never realized. In 1987, Gu Wenda, Shi Hui, Zhu Wei and I had three works selected in The 13th International Biennale of Tapestry in Lausanne, Switzerland. That was the first time that Chinese works appeared in the Biennale after the 85’ Art Movement. My work was titled The Meaning of Sun Tzu’s Book. I mixed bamboo and flax and combined traditional weaving techniques, singeing and writing. Inspired by the chess manual, I put the bamboo slips in many dislocated empty flax-woven boxes. The Art of War was written on the singed bamboo slips. My idea was “to array troops is like weaving”. The comparison of hard and soft materials and of real and vague spaces forms a mixture of truth and falsehood which is the essence of the art of war. In 1989, I was invited by the Artists' Union of the USSR to attend the 3rd International Fiber Art Symposium in Riga, Latvia. During my three-month stay there, I communicated with other artists and had made several works. By the end of the symposium I won first place in the creation contest. But the experience of winning this award triggered my thinking: among over 50 tapestry artists, although some artists had partaken in international exhibitions and made excellent works, many were still restricted in decoration and handicrafts. That made me doubt. For example, if we look at the works of Polish fiber artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, we can feel her deep concern about human destiny. Her works are not merely handicrafts. I thought if we merely focus on decoration, the future development of fiber art would be limited. I started to explore the possibility of the dialogue between fiber art and contemporary art with a firmer determination to strike off the shackles of decoration. In the symposium in Latvia, I made a very interesting work, Fit. This work was formed by three Chinese characters — heaven (天), earth (地) and man (人). Each character was divided into two parts. I made one part in Hangzhou and then the other part in Riga. I included the tickets and vouchers during my residence and other daily items. I wanted to move it back to China and make the two together to express the idea of the dislocation of time and space. But on my train back to China in December in 1989, the political situation in Latvia had an abrupt change. After I returned to China, I made several calls to the Artists' Union of the USSR, but they didn’t know how to deal with the situation. Finally, I had to leave it unsettled. I felt a little depressed. But later, I realized that the harmonic fit of heaven, earth and man is a utopian ideal. The humans are always expecting that. This is an endless movement. I felt that this is the essence of art, in an eternal movement without an end point. Later, when people asked me why I chose to use a living animal to make art, I started to recall my experience in Riga in 1989. It made me believe that the value of art lies in the process, not in the result, not in the object finally presented. The possibility of change is more important. Isn’t my experiment on silkworm cultivation in which I took the endless life cycle of silkworms a medium for expressing the eternal movement? Yang Jing: When did you start to raise silk worms? Liang Shaoji: In January 1989, Yi: Magic Cube, one piece of the Yi series went to the China Avant-Garde Art Exhibition. Then, I started to rear silkworms in the spring of 1989. The question of life is the starting point of art as well as the ultimate interrogation in art. The scientific miracles created by biology and genetic engineering in the 1980s also greatly motivated me to use art to answer these questions: Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are we doing? For me, silk is a reflection of the trace of time and life on the long journey; it draws an infinite as well as an infinitesimal “one”. It is like an unbroken line of life and destiny, and the cocoon is a living body, a universe. Yang Jing: Did you exchange your idea with domestic and foreign counterparts? What kind of feedback did you receive then? Liang Shaoji: I first tried to study how to cultivate silkworms at the Zhejiang Agriculture University. The professors warmly showed me around the laboratory and told me that they had never seen anybody making silkworms to spin cocoons on metallic surface. Silkworms would reject metallic materials. When I put the silkworm on the metal frame, it immediately crept away. Then I thought that was very interesting, all possibilities and impossibilities are answers in art. Even the failure would not matter. Realizing this would be a meaningful attempt when China was changing from an agrarian society to an industrial society, my mind was easy. I copied the lecture notes from the university, borrowed sericultural text books and also subscribed to sericultural journals. I left the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts and established my studio in Taizhou that is one of the important sericulture bases in Zhejiang. Time flies by and now I have been working in this field for 28 years. My interest in silkworm cultivation was different from that of biologists and silkworm growers. They more focus on how to improve the quality and quantity of silk production. I focused on the life process of the silkworm, associating it with morphology and ecology, and transforming it into a new art form. I consider the history of sericulture in China as a great performance art; our ancestors tamed the wild silkworm and generated a great impact on Chinese culture and aesthetics, as the appreciation of softness, emptiness and quietness. In 1989, when I went to Riga for the 3rd International Fiber Art Symposium, I showed a picture of silkworms spinning on the barbed iron wire to foreign artists. They were very interested to this, but they thought that it would be difficult to define this as fiber art, tapestry or sculpture. I sent the picture of Nature Series No.1 to Hou Hanru. He highly praised my idea. He thought that was unique among Chinese artists. His affirmation gave me great encouragement. Yang Jing: Yes. You were focused on the aesthetic aspects in the life process of silkworms. You expanded the morphological study to aesthetic thinking; this is something we call art. Of course, silkworm cultivation requires specific technology. What do you think is the most important connection between the two sides? Liang Shaoji: The connection is experiment. Through the experiment, or we can say trial and error with a playing attitude, I had a new understanding of the biological nature and life process of the silkworm and that made me feel relaxed. The relaxed mental status led to the sensitivity, so I could understand the silkworms’ pattern of motion, their biological habit and their life miracle. For me, their crawling and spinning, and the influence of the shed, of the smell, light, their biological clock, temperature and humidity on the silkworm all became artistic factors, becoming the starting point of my experiment, and it even became a completed living artwork. Thus my experiment has three meanings: first, it is a way to loosen the bonds of decorative tradition; second, it draws a line between my work and that of silkworm growers; and third, it is a reply to the coming biological century. Yang Jing: Your works are very experimental. Many critics think it is difficult to categorize them. What do you think of this? Liang Shaoji: Somebody said that my works belong to installation; I think it is not very accurate. Installation more utilizes readymade objects, mostly daily life objects and existing materials and reorganizes them according to an idea. My material is not at all readymade; it is created from the life process of silkworms. If it is readymade, it is a living readymade work. Take Broken Landscape as an example, I described the lifecycle of silkworms as the ‘an infinitely fine line’. Hidden in the silk net are their traces of life: eggs, cocoons, pupae, moths, and the excretions of silkworms. In Chinese, the pronunciations of silkworm (蚕), broken (残) and Zen (禅) are very similar. In a sense, a landscape of silkworm is a Zen painting that depicts the contemporary broken landscape. In Listening to the Silkworms, I moved the tools used to cultivate silkworms to the exhibition hall and I invited the visitors to sit in a darkened room and listen to the sound of silkworms living in the adjacent room eating mulberry leaves and spinning cocoons. The remarkable sound is like the bubbling of a running stream or the chirping of autumn insects. When the visitors attend to the sounds of the silkworm’s life, they can feel the greatness and mystery of nature and reach a peaceful state of mind. Again listening to the silkworms became listening to Zen. I spent a great deal of time to study silkworm’s spinning on various materials. Xia Yongqing, a well-known professor in sericulture from the Southwest University, once said: “You have researched the silkworm’s spinning on metal, broken glass pieces, mirror, stone and the human body so deeply; it is a thesis on silkworm behavior. The ratio of the internal size of the cocoon to the size of the chrysalis is very consistent with our research findings on the ratio of the weight of cocoon to the weight of chrysalis.” In order to track the life process of the silkworm, I started to use a video camera and that developed into video art. Meanwhile, performance and dance were also integrated into the Nature Series. In summary, my art is complex; the soul of it is experience and meditation. In 2009, I was awarded the Prince Claus Award, the award statement describing me as “a Chinese conceptual artist who is awarded for his evocative artworks that offer a meditative approach in which art becomes nature and nature becomes art, and for his insightful investigation of the ethics of the human condition and relationship with nature.” Many conceptual works don’t have a fixed from, but I still focus on the form of an artwork. My works have a fixed form and can be preserved for a long time. When I was cultivating silkworms, I thought about ants. The ant kingdom is a very hierarchic and disciplined society, just like human society. I didn’t find this kind of hierarchy in the world of silkworms. However, the silkworm’s survival on different materials reflects various phenomena in human society. All creatures in the world are seeking for space for living in absurd and unsolvable contradiction. The difficulties of life come not only from the natural world but also the actions of human beings. The broken mirror and the bricks and stone from the debris of the Wenchuan earthquake reflected the survival dilemmas of humans in society. I once wrote: my work is at the point of intersection of art and science, of biology and biosociology. Critic and curator Doris von Drathen once mentioned: “his purpose is not to come up with an aesthetic form that might earn him a new label in the official world of art. Rather, he is concerned with creating something akin to a visual philosophy.” I also pay attention to transgenics, study the pathology of silkworms and optimize their hybridization, and I explore transgenic chromatic silk and the fluorescent silk. But at the same time, I am cautious with the use of technology, always keeping the advice of Heidegger and Hawking in mind. In recent years, there has been a lot of talking about biological art. Biological artworks are mostly made in laboratories. My work is different. I tried to maximally use the factors which exist in the natural process. Based on observation and analysis on the life of the living creature, I find and cultivate its own potential and naturally achieve the transformation. I use biotech in a moderate way to activate genes while avoid violent intervention. In addition, the gene technology is not only a practical approach, but also an aesthetic consideration, as physics without making any metaphysical assumption is meaningless. In addition, my working process is often accompanied by accidental effects. The biological process of silkworms has often inspired me. My emotion interacts with their biological process; when the situation changes, I follow the change and adjust the concept and method to get to a simple and plain effect. When observing the silkworms spinning, I find that in cold weather the silkworm changes its movement and the shape of silk becomes looser. One day I happened to see silkworms spinning and soon the silk wrapped and covered the metal base of work, and that inspired me to create Snow Cover. So my creation is the use of the natural process and it contains many accidental effects, not only of the accidentals on my side, but also on the side of the silkworms. Without accidentality, there could not be contemporary art. The accidental effects make me meditate, and that can generate new work. Yang Jing: In my opinion, it’s perhaps more appropriate to consider your work as an integrated art. Your work is cross-disciplinary, not only crossing different mediums, but more importantly it connects different disciplines such as art, biology, ecology and sociology. According to your opinion, what is the core concern of the Nature Series? Liang Shaoji: My work could last for 28 years because I never thought about into which system I should set my works. I tried all kinds of possibilities. This series is more and more focused on a core value, about nature. I think the division of the Eastern and Western philosophy is the attitude towards nature, which also reflects the different views on anthropocentrism. Through the silkworm, I endeavored to explore nature, to question the time and life; in a simple word, to pursue the Tao through the silkworm. I spent thirty years understanding the Tao through silkworms. The Tao follows nature; in other words, the Tao is a synonym of the nature. To grasp the Tao, we need not only logical thinking, but also an aesthetic attitude with continuous practice, summarization and reflection. The Tao of Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu Tao is a kind of chaotic whole thing that is neither the subject nor the object, yet both the subject and the object. To seek the Tao through the silkworm is to observe everything about the life process of silkworms, immerse myself in this process, and then achieve such a status of “I am a silkworm”, as if I’m living and metamorphosing with the silkworms. Heidegger mentioned that “devoutness of thinking lies in questioning”, silk (丝) became thinking (思) and history (史), and then surpassed individual thinking and history, becoming a poem (诗). Silkworm (蚕) becomes Zen (禅). I once wrote: “silk for me, is the reflection of the trace of time and life on the long journey, it delineates a ‘One’ which is infinite and infinitesimal.” Meanwhile, silk reminds me of salvation. The silvery shining silk emits natural warmth. Silk contains the most important element, amino acids, that make up life. Silk provides positive energy to secure, heal, and revive. Nietzsche once mentioned to look at science from the perspective of the artist, but at art from that of life. Haven’t I always been doing this? Yang Jing: your work interacts with the animal’s life course. Your work is process-based, the process of time and life. Can you give any further explanation of the meaning of process? Liang Shaoji: My work is process-based, so the idea of process means a dynamic body which lies on three levels. First, the silkworm is a living thing, not any industrial material. Second, the making of my work often needs a rather long time; the creation process is the endless life process of silkworms. Third, I put my work under the changing historical and social environments and make them enter a dialogue with different social circumstances. My work enters the flow of time and space and becomes an interactive form. In addition, in my creative process, I always emphasized experiencing. Western philosophy emphasizes analysis, the Eastern more experience. The dynamic “experiencing” process results in enlightenment, either a sudden or a gradual one. The Beds and Chain: The Unbearable Light of Life are the result of life experience and enlightenment. My inspiration for making Beds came from my experience of observing the silkworm spinning. I used to observe the silkworms at night and sometimes I continuously sat up for several nights. One time, after continuously observing them spinning for several days and nights, I was then too tired and fell asleep while I was sitting on the floor. When I woke up after one hour, I found that a silkworm had fallen down on to my shoulder and had already made a thin cocoon on it. I suddenly started to think: am I a silkworm? So I thought of using the burnt enameled wire from the discarded motor to make a number of tiny beds. Then I cultivated silkworms and let them spin on the beds. Year after year, the process went on. This work was made from 1992 to 1999. In 1999, this work went to the Venice Biennale. At that time of the transition of the millennium, people had different interpretations of this work. Some critics interpreted this work as a memory of childhood. A critic from Taiwan considered it as a political metaphor, the confrontation between silk and metal. In this work, the contrast between the feelings of being electrified conveyed by enameled wire and the softness of silvery silk is similar to our living environment at that time, which is filled with a deep anxiety like being electrified. At the beginning, the bed was made too big, because later I found out that the large size destroyed my sympathy to silkworms. Only the tiny size that fits the silkworm can present Chuang Tzu’s idea of the equality of things. These swaying tiny beds that staggered and extended in the exhibition hall were weighted by the pressure of the surrounding space while projected a tremendous power, like those matchstick-like figures in Alberto Giacometti’s works. In general, I have been emphasizing the artistic process, contingency and experience. Some critics have thought that I chose to use the silkworm as a symbol of Chinese culture. In fact, this is a misunderstanding. I just employed it as a subject of biological art to re-examine and reveal the essence of human survival from the perspective of contemporary art. The essence is the Tao. I am importing new genes into Chinese silkworm culture. Of course, China's long silk culture and aesthetics provided me with enlightenment and enriched my language. According to my opinion, some installation artists often make a mistake: they think this is what material A symbolizes and this what B symbolizes and then they put them together and then add their symbolic meanings together. It is wrong to put materials together to get a compound meaning. The encounter of different materials is not 1＋1 ＝2, it is a rather fantastic biochemical reaction. The artist’s mission is to discover and activate this miracle, or to create a field where the miracle will occur. The artist uses his wisdom to inspire others to have a new understanding of the world. Because installation artists use ready-made items as material, they must be aware of the issue of over-materialization. Yang Jing: Yes, materials have symbolic or metaphoric meanings, but art is not science, so the meanings of materials are not fixed and accurate. Liang Shaoji: For example, Beuys’ use of felt and fat is full of wisdom and sensitivity. His works reflects the spirit of shamanism. The meaning of felt and fat came from his experience of being rescued by Tartar tribe after the airplane crash. His sensitivity to materials was from his life experience. Wassily Kandinski mentioned the spiritual meaning of point, line and shape. I think material is also spiritual. We need to sublimate the material and object into Tao. Yang Jing: Yes. Your Nature Series found the proper material and a good way to elicit the spirit of the material. You realized a transformation, and in this transformation process you combined natural life and a historical and cultural phenomenon and changed it into art. This process is of course complicated as it refers not only to conceptual transformation, but also to many concrete issues relating to form and technology. This series which started in 1989 is still ongoing. How many works have you made under this series so far? Liang Shaoji: There is no exact number, but at least more than 250 works. According to my agent, it is difficult to get an accurate number of my works. I often recorded my work and then I did further modification, so the original one in fact didn’t exist anymore. Sometimes, I change the building of the same piece according to the different exhibition spaces. Last, I like to put uncompleted or completed work in a new environment to create a dialogue between my work and that environment and then I take photos. For instance, I have been working on this four-cornered pyramid shaped item for many years and it is still going on. If you look from one side, it is like a pyramid; if you turn it upside down, it is a sandglass. I continue to cover it with silk, and take it to meaningful spaces, such as the Museum of Louvre in Paris, the Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona, the Florence Cathedral and the Forum of Heaven in Beijing. Despite having been photographed, this silk pyramid has never been exhibited, but it will be presented together with photos at the As If solo exhibition in 2018. Yang Jing: In your 28 years creative process, you experienced certain changes and advances. If you look back the long process, do you think that certain stages can be identified by changes in concept, in the issue focused on, or in the form of the work? Liang Shaoji: I have not seriously considered this issue. The evolution of the “natural series” can be roughly divided into three stages: the initial stage, the developmental stage and the illusory stage. The first stage was from 1989 to 1999, in which I mainly focused on the conception of the silkworm as a medium, the research into the silkworm’s biological habits and the possibility to make a new language with the silkworm. I conducted a lot of experiments in this period. Most works in this period are full of tension and confrontation, showing the cultural conflicts between East and West, the anxiety and the sense of crisis in social transition and the tenacity of the will to survive. The main works from this period include Beds, Self-roped, Nature Series No. 24,Nature Series No.25.Nature Series No. 24 and Nature Series No.25 depicted