In Gnawing Texts, Reaming Words, a destructive violence lurks within the stillness and sanctitude of the library. In this installation Mali Wu presents pulp fiction -- and pulp non-fiction-- in the rawest sense of the word. Processed in the blender of her studio, the great literary classics of East and West, art books, Encyclopaedia, and books by or about 'Great men" are alike reduced to an indecipherable pap which she then repackages and reshelves. Not all of these works are reincarnated as bound volumes. The Bible is crammed inside a medicine bottle, romantic fiction appears in candy jars and experimental work in the tubes of the laboratory.
"I chose books that have been influential in the past but the authority of which has been much disputed, or works that have become outmoded and no longer influential" explains the artist. The clarity with which Mali Wu typically outlines the ideas behind her conceptual work as well as the simplicity and directness of its presentation masks its complexity and cultural resonances.
The quiet reading room of Gnawing Text, Reaming Words in fact contains echoes of some of the loudest explosions in 20th century Chinese Cultural History. The first was the May Fourth Movement of 1919 sparked by student anger at humiliating concessions forced on China by Japan and other Imperialist powers. Many of China's intelligentsia came to the conclusion that the more profound source of their country's weakness lay in its outmoded Confucian ideology. Their slogans included 'Overthrow the house of Confucius!'. They advocated a complete overhaul of not only the educational system which was based on rote memorisation of classic texts, but of the written language itself. The explosion took place in the mainland during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when, instigated by Mao, students rebelled against all forms of intellectual authority, burning books, torturing teachers.
China's 5,000 year old history has long been both a source of pride and oppressiveness. From the time of the May Fourth Movement, each generation of Chinese artists and intellectuals (and there is no doubt that Mali Wu is both) have needed to remove the obstacle of that authoritative tradition from the path ahead of them in order to move ahead. Neither the May Fourth Movement nor the Cultural Revolution was able to successfully deconstruct the resilient classical tradition. As a citizen of a very contemporary and world-wise place that is Taiwan today, however, and particularly as a woman Mali Wu is also struggling against the dominant ideologies Western civilisation..........
As the writer Ye Yilan notes in "Mali Wu's Conceptual Works" (Ye Yilan, 'Wu Malide guannian zhi zuo', in Shinei zazhi, March 1995, pp174-176) Mali's installations are characterised by their "strong conceptual nature, their social character and their critical attitude". When Mali Wu first returned from abroad, according to Ye she was struck by the "political, economic and social chaos of Taiwan". She wanted to "transcend traditional notions of good and bad, beauty and ugliness, gender and even the common notions of the difference between art and non art as well as accepted standards."
Wu's first major work back in Taipei Time Space(1985) consisted of a room filled with crumpled newspaper and the recorded sounds of the city streets. Visitors to the show shuffled through the balls of paper, trampling on the text, a culturally rebellious act in itself in the context of a society that so venerates the written word (a theme further developed in Gnawing Texts, among other works), and a political one given the fact that all the newspapers in Taiwan at the time were controlled by the state.
Political themes come to the fore in some of Wu's later works such as
Asia, a huge maze with a red centre created in 1989 for an
exhibition in Japan. Regional politics blend with gender politics in the
literally startling installation Swing (1992). Viewers continually
upset delicately balanced bowls and plates on a swing. The frequent sound
of breaking crockery was particularly shocking since Swing was
positioned in the middle of an exhibition that also included genuinely
precious ceramics and antiques. It played on the image of the fragility of
China, its association with women's traditional duties in the kitchen and
the intended double entendre of the English words "china" and "China".
Gender has become an increasingly central concern of Mali Wu's work.
Female, a bra hanging on the back of a chair, implies the passivity of
the traditional woman, how they are sat upon, one way or another, by men.
In the more ambiguous Portrait she wraps a meat cleaver in red
cloth and hangs a string pearls around the handle, In Pink News,
one of a series of faux-autos that she has created, a small loudspeaker
truck resembling the type used by candidates in Taiwan's noisy election
campaigns is painted pink and turned into a military vehicle for the
battle between the sexes..........
Linda Jaivin is a freelancer who lives in Sydney , Australia. This article was orginally translated into German and published in the exhibition catalogue Balance Act (Stuttgart: Ifa Gallery, 1995)
Copyright © : Linda Jaivin, 1995
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.5 , November 1997
