Can Transnational Art be Digitally Reproduced, Curated, and Purchased via Online Viewing Room after the Covid-19?

——A Critical Evalution of Two Photo-based Artworks by Mona Leau

*Notes: This article is written by the artist herself indeed by using the third-person narration as a part of her experimental practice, as a praise for Roland Barthe’s famous saying: “I want a history of looking. For the photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity.” 1It should be emphasized that Mona Leau is the artistic alter-ego of Jinmeng Liu. The main reason for doing so, is to objectify her perspective as a critic, a curator even a dealer-to-be of her own works, thereby discovering ‘blind spots’ that might be ignored during the previous stages of creating and displaying art. Besides, all links for references are listed at the end.

 
 
 
 

    Fig.1 Web 2.0 Prototype of  Golden Grave (2020) and The Wall of Times（2020/2021）

 

1. Introduction

  Golden Grave is an one-woman exhibition of the emerging artist-cum-curator Mona Leau from China, in which shows approximately 20 original works executed by various media (Fig.1). It consists a series of old photos from the artist’s family, documentaries presented in both still and moving images, also, an assemblage with curatorial quality.

  Born as a typical member of ‘Gen Z’, the artist has multicultural backgrounds. After studying abroad and being educated with the Western critical thinking, she has started to epistemologically question everything, for example, the complicated traditional rituals that link material reality to spiritual world together: why do we still have them after modern a half-century endeavor of China's ‘modernization’?

   Although the exhibition is simple, it dramatically highlights several paradoxical relationships: personal feminist aspiration and male-dominant Confucian culture, mechanical camerawork and traditionally customary rite, Chinese cemetery and world wide massive mortality, family reunion and self-quarantine, etc. They seem contradictory yet simultaneously poetically inter-dependent.

  Family photo or Quan Jia Fu, which can be literally translated into ‘the fortune of the whole family’, has unique aesthetic, social and financial values in Chinese contemporary art. One of the prime examples belongs to the celebrated Chinese artist Xiaogang Zhao, whose photo-realistic style painting to depict families during the Cultural Revolution. In China, family photos is quite different from what it is in other cultures. Every time when family gather together during the Spring Festival or special events and dine out, normally ask waiters in the restaurant to take a photo for us. Some restaurants even have professional photographers and printing techniques - people can buy prints, or cups with photo printed on it directly from the restaurant. Chinese see it as a formal but not serious thing, thus family photo always records joyful moments, which echos to its Chinese connotation.

2. Structure and Methodologies

  For a more comprehensive understanding of Mona Leau’s two photo-based exhibition Golden Grave and creation the Wall of Times accomplished in 2020, the following analysis from section 3 to section 4 shed light upon its online mode with proper criticism in terms of commerical mechanism and Internet legal issues; furthermore, ‘missing’ panel texts with work descriptions and map are now added. Section 5 assesses the value of ‘collective memory’ conveyed from her philosophy, and the final section not only summarizes the contents, but proposed other potential problems from both curating and collecting.

  A range of multidisciplinary theoires are included in this essay: 1) photographic criticism of David Company and Susan Sontag; 2) the application of sociological research paper published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science looks at the implication of collective memory in the era of digitalization, current data of global art industry is also presented to support analysis; 3) law is another angle to approach her works, the article ‘Transnational Cyber Offenses: Overcoming Jurisdictional Challenges’2offers useful definitions and explanation to conduct specific case study.

 

3. The Need, Use and Risk of Online Viewing Room (OVR)

  The temporary show is curated and installed by the artist herself in 2020 Spring, at the Stevenson Blanche Gallery of California Institute of the Arts. Initially, it should last for a week, form March 7th to the 14th. However, after the coronavirus situation becomes more severe, as a venue for public education, the campus-based gallery has been closed since March 10th. In other words, the exhibition may largely lost its potential beholders.

  This unexpected and calamitous termination causes the urgent need for, especially the artist, to re-organize the exhibition on her personal website: www.monaleau.com. As a prime choice for practicing virtual curation, she applies the mode of Online Viewing Room (OVR), which is also used by two leading brands of art business——Art Basel and Christie’s after the outbreak of the pandemic. Except for graphic digitalization of the physical space, prices of most displays are also provided for reference.

  It is necessary to re-emphasize that, COVID-19 had a huge devastating impact on the art world. According to two studies by UNESCO and the International Council of Museums (ICOM), until now, the pandemic forced nearly 90% of all museum worldwide, and more than 85,000 in number, to close their doors for varying lengths of time. Plenty of exhibition institutions shut down. Self-quarantine also stops them going to exhibitions in person, socially distances individual from the object-based art viewing experience. 3As a result, in order to keep the elan of artistic eco-system, key constituents who participate within the art world, including artists, curators, dealers and organization administrators, should attempt other paths to create, to show and to sell art.

  Online exhibitions may be trendsetting in foreseeable future, more and more exhibitions would be phenomenally relocated in cyberspace, where various risks and opportunities should be equitably evaluated from both the artist’s and viewer’s benefits.

  First, considering from financial standpoints, a positive consequence that OVR strategy would bring to the self-funded artist in particular is cost saving of venue rent, lighting, installation expenses and logistics. Moreover, compared with the representative gallery, the personal website based OVR has potential to create a more transparent, direct and convenient platform of primary market between the artist and collectors to complete transaction.

  In addition to the money issue, another chance that the Internet develops can be revolutionary ways of seeing, even experiencing art: every online exhibition is transnational and it transcends geographical limits. Although the Plato once claims that ‘the body is the prison of the soul’, the OVR mode allows the audience whose body is quarantined to remain in local communities simultaneously visiting an exhibition perhaps thousand miles away. This imprisonment of the body indeed liberates the mind and the soul at a great extent.

  Even though successfully mature exhibition and sale have already been operated online by such as the Saatchi Gallery and Artsy, however, OVR lacks of security in many level. There is always a chance that audience can download the pictures freely from internet, which may harm artists’ intellectual property rights. 

  It is inevitable that the stealing is happened all the time, unfortunately, there is no actual ‘Internet Police' be arresting people, as Alexandra Perloff-Giles pointed out,

  “The Internet as we know it thus reflects a deliberate repudiation of centralized, top-down authority. Its technological infrastructure was built to prioritize survivability and flexibility over security; as it has evolved, that infrastructure has become ever more global and more reliant upon shared resources.”

  What’s more, comparing to the internet, the public would be showing more respect in traditional galleries or museums. It is hard to control aggressive comments and attacks. As Barlow’s declaration enacted in 1996 has clearly stated that, “cyberspace lacks geographic boundaries and does not map neatly onto the traditional system of territorial jurisdiction.” In America, such behavior can be regarded as an embodiment of democracy, but in a communist country like China, the conception of democracy is still in a relatively shallow state. A large amount of netizens attack with verbal agitation but not politely express rational criticism or opinions, therefore, the audience who check Mona’s works as well as other promotional materials on her online viewing room may cause transnational moral dispute as her creation is bilingual, culturally hybrid and executed during the time China and the US has intense diplomatic affair. 

 

4. Supplementary Literature for Curation

  It might be noticed that, as a formal exhibition, the only thing missing is literature. Although subtitles are presented in the short film, there is no artist’s statement or curatorial prelude which normally printed onto the wall panel or/and brochure to explain the whole show.

 
 
    Fig.2 Floor Plan of the Exhibition

    Fig.2 Floor Plan of the Exhibition

 

  As a photographer at that time, the artist believed that the documentary image is an introverted and best visual language to express her intention. The British artist and curator David Company also considers that “the term ‘photographic’ has come about to designate a whole range of important partial practices.” She comprehended Company’s explanation as all forms of art are photographic except for texts.

  However, a basic problem concerning audience’s perception also emerged: most viewers are American-based whose knowledge of Chinese culture is generally scarce. It unavoidably leads to  confusion during exhibition, because the subject-matter is relatively uncommon. 

  As can be seen from the floor plan (Fig.2), the show room is structured into a conch shape, which is divided into dual sections of different works surrounding an identical motif. One part interweaves to another, explaining the quintessence of the artist’s weltanschauung-- ‘the love and filial piety of family’.

  A range of old photos can be encountered immediately while entering through the door (Fig.3). The provenance of this reminiscent materials are the family members of the artist. The purpose to present this pieces of family memory not only is emotionally cultivating audiences’ expectation and curiosity of this exhibition, but offering background information of the Chinese artist, even thought they reveal a rather ‘fragmentary’ state in terms of both display form and heart-broken trauma generated in the artist’s early years, while other pictures are arranged in a rationally chronological order.

  Old photos is an important property shared by the artist's family, thus she is able to decide their reproduction right. They can be regarded as a set of auxiliary curating props to interpret the exhibition. Therefore it should be noticed that this photo collection is the only part in this exhibition will not be written into the catalogue raisonne and participate in future sales.

 
 

              Fig.3 A View from Exhibition Entrance

 

  On the right corner is a single booth which is numbered as section 2 on the map, there comes an expanded cinema in capsule size that each time only one audience can get in and comfortably enjoy the 10-minute long bilingual video ‘This is Not the Work I Made’ (2019). For audiences, confusion of the old photos may emerge at the beginning of the exhibition, yet after watching this biographical tragicomedy with audio narration and English subtitles, it may be possibly solved. On the one hand, it seems that a string of Quan Jia Fu and other types of family photos mirror the artist’s happy childhood; on the other hand, voice-over provides critical opinions towards the unpleasant reality of her actual family life, which highly contrasts to the photographic surface.

  All photos have been displayed online and applied to the expanded cinema project ‘the One-Person-Cinema’. To prevent misappropriation, this part can be charged for a certain fee, as a non-profit project, to cooperate with charity organizations or support Asian culture community in the US.

  Opposite to the theatrical installation, a square area standing out on its own, like a winding corridor. Two original works made by the artist form the final section. This series of documentary photos taken during the Spring Festival is entitled ‘Cemetery, Crematory and Grave’ (2019), recording a contemporary ritual activity of ancestor worship in northern China (Fig.4).

 
 

            Fig.4 Documentary Photos and the Assemblage

 

  Although method of photographic display is rather conventional, a smaller-scale replica of the grave pictured in photos is placed at the center of this area. ‘The Grave of Humanity’ (2020) is a total installation in terms of aesthetic genre. Sandy earth, connective ropes that represent family bound and papers golden coins collectively reminiscence both the ceremony and the exhibition title.

  About this single assemblage with monumental implication, the artist didn’t plan on making one, until the time when she went to home depot getting materials for the single-person-only-cinema that she built for the film. She saw a chain, and a rope, then the idea flashed through her brain - she imagined to make a symbolic and metaphorical grave.

  Referring to the terminology definition provided by the leading art organization Tate Modern, installation art become an “increasingly visible aspect” for those exhibition curated by the artist him/herself. 8All photographic images included in this show are still displayed in conventional way; however, the cinematic reproduction and replica of grave are the ‘evolutionary’ attempts to materialize photographs into site-specific installations that environmentally associate the context thereby improving audiences’ immersive experience, which the online version will not offer.

 

5. Appraising Collective Memory

“Memory is the great criterion of art……art is the mnemotechny of the beautiful.”9 

——Baudelaire, 1846

 
 

                Fig.5 Wall of Times， 2020/2021

 

  ‘Collective Memory’ is placed at the very heart of aesthetic philosophy which evidences of this specific focus can be seen through out all of Mona’s creation, even though the artist has always practiced independently. The term, according to the late sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, the memory of every individual is only unified and projected in a larger context of a group, such as a family, a lineage, a clan or a nation, over time and space.

  In Golden Grave, there are certain elements reminding or giving ideas to audiences of the life in old days: how to pose for pictures, what kind of old telephones her family used to use, how people dressed two centuries ago, what Chinese traditional ritual was like. Similar creative formulas also appear in her most recent experimental series ‘The Wall of Times’ (2020/2021), which explores the analogy among media, photography and our constructed reality today (Fig.5).

 
 

        Fig.6 Wall of Times， 2020/2021

 

  Conceived and executed during the COVID-19 lockdown, the time-based process is seen as a futile attempt to be in control of my perception on a year long self-quarantine. It  contemplates and contexualizes the dichotomy between traditional and contemporary views on photography and its reproduction methods.

  Made with New York Times newspaper from March to December in 2020, The Wall of Times emphasizes the craftsmanship of intellectually selecting, cutting, formatting and pinning up collections of ready-made photographs alongside with their headlines (Fig.6).

  By deconstructing the linear and hierarchically (re)printed newspapers into an installation with non-chronological, collage-like and multidimensional form, the curated contents map a media heterotopias, corresponding to bombarding social media feeds filled with fragmented information, especially those digital images captured with a few clicks or minimal effort on screens.

  The Wall of Times not only aims to challenge the idea of technological progress as democratic liberation but also to communicate with the constrained, fragile and overwhelmed state of mind as an isolated individual imprisoned in a Foucauldian panopticon.

  Instead of a relatively smaller Chinese community sharing common cultural background, it is undoubtedly that ‘The Wall of Times’ targeting to a wider audience. Those frustration happened since 2020 are collectively mirrored, recorded and materialized through this labor-intensive work. 

   As a result, if following the logic proposed by Susan Sontag, “to collect photographs is to collect the world”11, a much more significant meaning or value of collecting Mona’s artworks is not only to purchase photography, but a series of material carriers of collective memory that we huamn beings are experiencing together.

 

6. Final Remarks

   To concisely sum up, there is no doubt that the Internet is a cost-cum-labor-saving way to exhibit artworks. Even though Gold Grave is more suffocating and realistic in the physical exhibition, due to the pandemic, the artist had to find another space in the virtual world. In the next one to two years at least, there will be more curatorial practice basing on the Internet come out. And digital techniques and platforms for exhibition mounting will be designed in particular to meet the incremental demand of artists.

  Considering the demand-side mechanism in the global economy, the ‘Black Swan’ incident of 2020 not only leaves the crowd out of work or forces them work at home, but also attacks the ‘wealthy’ class badly, which means the high-end art market may not return back to its normality in the short term. Yet think positively, this may open to a new era when art will be affordable to all. History is always strikingly similar, owing to cyber-culture, multi-dimensional public art and the consciousness of avant-garde are (re)vitalizing. In association with media, art will be enjoyed by a broader range of audiences, rather than hanging on an interior wall or locked up in a museum warehouse.

  Based on the reading of Mona Leau’s suspended exhibition Gold Grave, two issues have to be paid attention if the tendency of online exhibition becomes inevitably prevailing from this year on. The first is concerning the Benjaminian reproduction, intellectual property and copyright of photography. Although infringing methods could be invented to reproduce, fabricate and eventually harm the originality, blockchain curation make artworks coded to secure the right and value of the artist’s creative products. Second, what are the sociopolitical meaning and financial potential for the American to collect works by an independent artist from contemporary under the circumstance of diplomatic sensitivity between two countries? This should be another question to seriously take account of.                                     

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