Postmodern Shaman Cang Xin’s Daoist Surrealism

Art critic and curator Maya Kóvskaya discusses the art practice of the Chinese artist Cang Xin, who explores the sensual connections to the world and sensory experience.

A lavender cloudbank unfurls on the horizon, as Chinese artist Cang Xin meditates in solitude on a jagged outcropping of rock. He gazes out across an expanse of shadow-dappled land. In another image, his naked body is dwarfed by the rugged Tibetan landscape and mani stones, engraved with the Buddhist mantra: om mani padme hum. In yet another, he floats on his back surrounded by lotus leaves, dotted with pink bursts of flower, or lying on a shelf of ice encircled by a wreath of flames. These images are part of Cang Xin’s ‘Man and the Sky as One,’ series of performance photography works, in which he explores our connection to and place in the natural world.

Cang Xin has been called a Surrealist and a Daoist, as well as a postmodern art Shaman. From his early explorations of identity and its erasure or substitution in ‘Trampling Faces and Identity Exchange,’ to his investigations of our sensual connections to the world and sensory experience of it in his ‘Communication Series,’ and ‘Bathing,’ with animals’ performances, to his playful creations of mythical flora and fauna and neo-primitive rituals in his ‘Northern Romanticism,’ 3-D animated film, his Shamanist pencil sketches and carved wood totems and sculptures of ‘Exotic Flowers and Rare Herbs,’ fusing the botanical and bestial and human into fabulist creatures, Cang Xin has been focused on the relationships between human beings and the natural world. Much of his art employs visual techniques that bear a strong lineage to Surrealism. He employs these techniques in order to engage questions about how we are to know ourselves and our world, as well as explore the power of the imagination to recover or invent interconnections in the world.

In the ‘Surrealist Manifesto’ (1924), André Breton argued that “Surrealism is “based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought,” the difficulty of ever truly knowing the reality of the world and ourselves has been a central tenet of Surrealism as well.

If “knowledge” was suspect, however, the imagination was valorised as a panacea to cure the woes of the human condition. “Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality,” wrote Andre Breton. He argued that realism, rooted in positivism was “made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit.” Excessive rationalism suppressed human creativity and dimmed the imagination, “under the pretense of civilisation and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices.” Calling for imagination to reclaim its rightful place in our lives, he asks whether the “dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life?” He identifies a tension between states of dreaming and waking and puts his faith for “the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but too unmindful of my death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys of its possession.”

The marvelous, in Breton’s vision, is the embodiment of the beautiful par excellence: “The marvelous is not the same in every period of history: it partakes in some obscure way of a sort of general revelation only the fragments of which come down to us: they are the romantic ruins, the modern mannequin, or any other symbol capable of affecting the human sensibility for a period of time.” To access the marvelous, he advocates “going back to the sources of poetic imagination and, what is more, of remaining there.” In these ways, much of Cang Xin’s art fits well with these central tenets of Surrealism.

Along with their exuberant rejections of rationalism and positivist realism, however, many 20^th century surrealists were uninterested in a search for self-knowledge through the natural world, epitomised in Breton’s famous conclusion of the ‘Surrealist Manifesto,’ “The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live which are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.”

For Cang Xin, however, in spite of his appropriation of surrealist visual techniques, the natural world is a wellspring of wonder, and plays a major role in his own creative flights of imagination. In this way, one can say that his Surrealism is constituted and circumscribed within the larger framework of Daoist thought and his own shamanistic practices.

The classic lines from the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching) – “The Way that can be described is not the true Way,” and “The Name that can be named is not the constant Name” – frame the epistemological predicament of knowledge of the world, and self-knowledge in a way that differs from the Surrealism. Daoists hold that each individual is a microcosm of the universe, and our corporeal being is directly connected to the five elements of wood, fire, earth, metal and water, as well as the changing seasons, and diurnal cycles of the sun and moon. Knowledge of the universe, in this view, begins with understanding oneself. And understanding oneself requires placing the self in the larger context of wan wu – all that exists. The epistemology of Daoism is at fundamentally at odds with the sort of Enlightenment mode of scientific rationality and positivism that assumes things in the world have knowable, fixed, given, universal essences. In this way, Daoist ideas are more compatible with Surrealism than with positivist realism, but rather than finding only ennui in nature, nature is the source of imagination and creative renewal itself. Indeed, as a contemplation of the flow of the universe, and inquiry into order of nature, the Dao is said to embody the natural order itself. Cang Xin’s cosmology is firmly rooted in this set of presuppositions.

Hailing from a Manchu family, Cang Xin was born in Baotou, Inner Mongolia in 1967 and grew up in Handan, Hebei Province after the age of five. He moved to the industrial port city of Tianjin, in 1986. A man with a wide-range of interests, he first studied musical composition and played in a rock band called Armadillo for two years before shifting his focus to the study of philosophy when Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, caught his fancy. After a year of that, he grew restless for new creative stimulation and began to audit classes at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. It was here that his love of photography was discovered. Next door to the academy was a photography lab where he studied and then found employment working in the dark room. It was there that he began to experiment.

From mid-1989 through mid-1993, Cang Xin worked at a photography studio in Handan, but a visit to Beijing changed everything. A friend took him meet Li Xianting, the godfather of Chinese contemporary art, and performance artist Ma Liuming was there, showing his new work. Ma Liuming had just completed his path breaking performance, ‘Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch,’ and the art world was abuzz with talk of the possibilities in performance art, galvanising Cang Xin to move to the experimental artist colony called the Beijing East Village, where Ma Liuming, Zhang Huan, Zhu Ming, Zuoxiao Zuzhou, RongRong and other artists who soon became part of the new generation of art stars in China all lived.

Cang Xin found a job at a darkroom near the Academy of Fine Arts and shared his rundown courtyard with artist Gao Yang and a group of garbage pickers. It was a time when the artists were all quite poor and struggling, but the intellectual and creative ferment of the place was at a peak.

During that winter in the Beijing East Village, Cang Xin did his first proto-performance art piece. He drew 300 ml of his own blood and squirted it on the floor and wearing a white doctor’s coat, he lay on the ground in the blood, covered with X-rays. The performance drew on the three traumatic years he spent in the hospital as a small child, battling hepatitis and tuberculosis.

In early 1994, he executed his first major inquiry into the politics of identity with the performance of Trampling Faces. After making 1500 plaster molds of his face and laying them out on the ground in his courtyard, Cang Xin invited people to come step on them. In his room was a hospital bed covered with the fragments of broken faces.

As the performance art experimentations picked up momentum, so did the official interference. In June of 1994, the Beijing East Village was disbanded following arrests of Ma Liuming and Zhu Ming after several controversial performances. Cang Xin recalls that he was lucky to be at work at the time and able to lay low for a while afterwards.

Cang Xin’s epistemological journey in art practice began in earnest in 1996 with his ‘Communication Series I’, sometimes simply known as “Lick.” After going through a difficult period, psychologically, in which he suffered from depression, agoraphobia and a kind of self-described “autism,” Cang Xin felt alienated and lost. He was not part of the official art system, and felt that society and family were all against him. In this state, he felt incapable of communicating with the outside world, and yet communication was what he needed most. As a form of self-healing, he began to try to make contact with the world in a new way—he began to lick things: water, shoes, mirror, clock, brick – all sorts of everyday objects. The first time just did this alone, but later he asked a friend to document this process. Reasoning that of all the five senses, touch and taste were the least socially mediated and most direct and immediate, he began to use his tongue to experience the world around him n a new way. He discovered things about the world that he had never noticed before, like the fishy smell and coldness of a snake’s body, or how a cat’s fur was hypersensitive and would move gently in response to the tongue, and it made him feel reconnected again. As he continued in this therapeutic artistic exploration, he discovered that the ground tasted differently in various places as well. In ‘Communication Series II,’ he focused on traditional Chinese objects like tea, the five elements and so on, while ‘Communication Series III,’ involved touching everything inside a supermarket with his tongue, and ‘Communication Series IV,’ focused on licking the ground in different places all over the world.

What the art practice of the ‘Communication Series,’ taught him was that we are both separate from and connected to the world around us. We learn new things about ourselves through the process of engaging with the world. With this experience, his interest in Daoism, Shamanism, and various mystical traditions grew. Cang Xin came to think of art as a kind of Shamanistic practice, in which the artist plays the role of spiritual intermediary between human beings and the world.

His thinking about Shamanism expanded in the course of his ‘Identity Exchange,’ series (2000 - ), in which he posed with people from all walks of life – garbage pickers, professors, white collar office workers, punk rockers, waitresses, Peking Opera singers, coal miners, beauticians, and so on – wearing the clothes that marked their social identities and professions, which they stood in the underwear beside him. By taking on their roles, Cang Xin plays the meta-role of a postmodern Shaman, revealing the superficial scaffolding of social identity using photography. By taking on the roles of each person he posed with, he conceptually interrogates questions about identity, social roles, the differences between our exterior trappings that are markers of those roles, and the similarities between us when we strip those things away. Moreover, by stripping the participants of their roles, Cang Xin highlights that symbolic moment of openness when we leave behind the roles we typically occupy, as well as meditates on the rapidity at which the massive socioeconomic changes in China are creating both social dislocation and new opportunities for flexible, fluid self-making.

In 2002, Cang Xin went to China’s Northeast and was struck with a new idea for a piece that would extend and expand his Shamanistic art practice. There in Daqing he found almost nothing was growing except a lush carpet of green and the ground was so flat and level with the horizon that it made a sharp, straight line that was visually striking. Cang Xin immediately felt the need to lie down and align himself with the skyline. He felt that by integrating himself into nature and seeking oneness with it, he could engage in the most profound Shamanistic practice of all – a practice that would extend his preoccupation with the search for knowledge of the self through knowledge of the world. Thus the ‘Man and Sky as One,’ series was born, based on the traditional Chinese concept of tian ren he yi, which refers to unity between heaven and humanity, or nature and humanity, as the concept of tian (nature, heaven, the sky, a greater power, or something like “god”) is more encompassing than either of those concepts in English.

From this point in his work, Cang Xin’s cosmology began to come into increasingly sharper focus. Other animals, he believes, have senses that are usually much more sophisticated and sensitive than ours. “Human beings’ life styles,” he argues, “have regressed us as a species to a huge degree, and human civilisation and culture have led to major changes in our inner state of being that influence and sometimes impair our judgment about ourselves and the world.”

In this way, Cang Xin offers art as a palliative to our deteriorating senses. He employs techniques from the visual lexicon of Surrealism, allowing dreams and the imagination to create new worlds where humans, plants, animals, and even inert matter intermingle in the hopes of regrounding us in basic existence. He rejects the idea that humans are superior to animals, or that nature is our dominion. Instead he holds that we are all part of the same being and that our existences are intertwined to such an extent as to be inextricable.

Thus, he uses Surreal dreamscapes and imaginary creatures to create a sort of postmodern Daoist mythology of this ‘basic nature’ that he believe we share with wan wu – all that there is. In doing so, he hopes to show that the things we see and believe may not be real, people need to journey inward, in order to achieve a better relationship with the outside world by integrating the power of ‘man’ with the ‘power of nature’ by realising our fundamental unity.

Many Eastern belief systems are not ‘religions’ so much as spiritual systems of ethics. Daoism, especially, rejects the sort of systematic claims to knowledge/power that undergird scientific rationality, and in this way, is partially compatible with the elements of Surrealism that reject rationalism and seek to free the imagination. While he draws on both these disparate traditions, however, Cang Xin differs markedly from the Surrealists in that he does not believe that “existence is elsewhere” – instead, his postmodern Shamanistic art practice is a resounding affirmation that “existence is everywhere.”

(Maya Kóvskaya is a Delhi and Beijing-based writer, art critic, curator, translator, scholar and consultant with over a decade of experience in China. She has curated numerous exhibitions, in China, the USA, India, and Europe, and her art criticism appears regularly in art catalogues, international art magazines and academic journals. She was recently Critic in Residence for the Public Art Ecology program at Khoj International Artists Association. Her book, ‘China Under Construction: Contemporary Art from the People’s Republic’ (2007), is available in bookstores worldwide. Email: mayakovskaya@gmail.com)