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Available articles about Feng Mengbo
- 1. Art as a game
- 2. Introduction to Phantom Tales
- 3. On the Future of the Present: Art, Technology, and Popular Culture
Art as a game
Sweeping economic, political and ideological changes have taken place in the last couple of decades in the People's Republic of China - changes to which especially young, westernized artists like Feng Mengbo, born in 1966 in Beijing, are reacting. Feng Mengbo has been working since the early 90s with digital media which he renders alien by using a western-eastern mixture of motifs ranging from the MGM-logo via the heroes of the cultural revolution to figures from Hong Kong action-films.
For about two decades the People's Republic of China has been subject to sweeping changes. The introduction of new technology, mainly in towns and cities, the economic shift towards a market economy and the influence of world-wide globalization are changing the land and the people at a dizzying pace. Especially young artists in China are trying to come to terms with these changes in their surroundings. Between the poles of Chinese traditions on the one hand and the increasing influence of western culture on the other, they often work on the artistic fringe, experimenting with paintings and installations, with video and photography.
Feng Mengbo, born in Beijing in 1966, has been working with a mixture of digital media, painting and photography. At the opening of the exhibition 'Configura 2 - Dialogue of Cultures' in Erfurt in 1995, he described his artistic ideal in the following words: 'I would like my works to be a kind of game. There should be a lively image, and there should be tumult. Many faces and tales should look familiar...' To achieve this, he moves between various cultural magnets, combining video-games with scenes from the time of the cultural revolution under Mao, or combining CD-ROMs with images from Hong Kong action films.
In the partly autobiographical and partly fictive video 'My Private Album' he uses the tale of a big family to present Chinese history and culture over several generations. In 'Taking Mt. Doom by Strategy' he combines the vicious video-game 'Doom' with 48 clips from the revolutionary opera 'Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy'. From the official, romantically idealized image of the cultural revolution little remains, when Mao's greeting from the rostrum to the marching masses is cut into a close-up of a taxi, which he seems to be hailing for a get-away. Ironically Mengbo highlights the virtual nature of these newly juxtaposed images, in roaring in place of the tiger in the MGM-logo.
At Documenta 11 in Kassel, this Chinese artist invited visitors to take part in a video-game. His installation 'Q4U' was based on the Shareware-version of the prohibited game 'Quake III Arena'. Whoever walked into the room with the caution 'Entry only for Adults' stood in front of three big projection screens of the same shape and size, which were all part of the computer-game. Mengbo had developed a version for several players, who could slip into the identity of the artist, who had put himself with naked torso and US army-trousers - into the game's matrix. He also embodied the foe, who is fired at not only by players but also by his own numerous doubles.
The interactive nature of the game gave it a new dimension and made it an image of the continual strife between the artist, his alter-egos and viewers. These tried, by clicking the mouse, to hit and kill the artist whizzing by. At the end of the game, the number of hits was totaled up, and most players began then, at the latest, to feel shaken at the fun of the massacre, though perhaps with the consolation of seeing that other players, too, had fallen victim to this sophisticated, thrilling and critical game. 'Q4U' worked on several levels, as a criticism of an entertainment industry rampant with fantasies of violence and as a pointer towards loss of communication, with mutual killing as the residual form of human contact.
Source: www.culturebase.net
Translation: Phil Stanway
Introduction to Phantom Tales
Born in 1966, Beijing-based artist Feng Mengbo came of age during the height of the Cultural Revolution, a time when cultural politics dictated by Chairman Mao promoted an artistic policy based on a social realism infused with heroic romanticism. Spanning a range of media from painting to cd-roms, Mengbo's work addresses subject matter as intensely personal as My Private Album, a cd-rom documenting several generations of his family, as well as work that verges on social/political critiques, exemplified in the cd-rom installation Taking Mount Doom by Strategy, which melded themes of violence, power and heroicism from the popular video game Doom with the revolutionary opera, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. Much of Mengbo's work since the early 90s has been variously influenced by the style, content, or cultural implications of video games, which greatly interested him as an adolescent.
For Phantom Tales, his first work based only on the web, he goes further back in his personal history to stories and modes of entertainment from his childhood. Each of these three animations is based on a book. Stylistically the images in these books are reminiscent of the social realism of German artist Käthe Kollwitz, but whereas her work denounced the atrocities of war and served as a critique of official policy, the illustrations generated during the Cultural Revolution often glorified strife in the name of liberation and were orchestrated very much by those usurping authority.
Mengbo's first two animations are based on picture books published in 1972 and 1969 respectively, widely popular stories full of violent imagery. One Silver Dollar recounts a tragic family tale from the period prior to 1949 of a People's Liberation Army soldier whose family members were killed either by the National Army for refusing to join or by a rapacious landlord for blood money, symbolized by the iconic image of a coin dripping with blood. Using cinematic techniques, such as panning, zooming, and establishing shots, it transforms the static illustrations from a storybook into a dynamic animation.
At times Mengbo seems to present the story quite literally the way he sees it, with the same jumps and focuses made by his eyes. While narrative may be difficult to follow for someone unfamiliar with this classic story, the images, complemented by the animation, convey emotion even if the narrative is somewhat abstracted. A plaintive 1959 recording entitled "Listening to My Mother's Talking About the Past" underscores the emotive effects.
The Bloody History of The Three Stones documents the terrible condition of workers' lives in Tianjin City in the 1940s. Presented in a style analogous to the manual slide shows of Mengbo's youth, it alternates images of drawings, photos, and exhibits resembling courtroom evidence relentlessly from right to left, left to right. "The International," the anthem of the Communist movement, is conjured from what sounds like a scratchy LP overlaid with the squeaks of a slide tray being pulled back and forth.
The third animation, The Technology of Slide Shows draws from a book of that title published in 1982 which documented methods developed by the People's Liberation Army for creating animation effects with slide projections, which, in the absence of television and films, provided a major source of entertainment during Mengbo's youth. The Technology of Slide Shows offers a strange and compelling combination of animation techniques fusing imagery of flowers, the military, landscapes, illustrations of drawing methods, abstract color shapes, and projection instructions, amongst others, with a soundtrack entitled "Fish and Water."
According to Mengbo, this refrain serves as a commonplace analogy of the relationship between Chinese people and the army since the 1940's. Somewhat ironically, in this animation devoid of a narrative, the content overpowers the techniques being illustrated, whereas, by contrast, in his previous two animations the presentation mode overrides the narrative, rendering it secondary: interpretative modes trump didactic goals.
In one email exchanged early during the formulation of his plans for this project, Mengbo proposed to look at the images from these stories in detail, to think about why, as children, his generation was repeatedly exposed to terrible stories, and to question what the violence meant to them then. Mengbo asserts that he is not interested in political critique, but, because popular culture in China prior to the 80s was always about political life, in examining cultural history political content occurs inevitably by default not design.
By transforming the stories into something new and distributing them via a novel medium, with nearly ubiquitous outreach, he provokes a larger audience into pondering such questions, both in relation to China's Cultural Revolution and to our local mythologies of liberation and war. In 1997 Mengbo wrote a statement that seems especially appropriate for Phantom Tales, as this work enters the ever-expanding cultural domain of the world wide web: "Perhaps in the future all of our memories will speak to each other, gradually forming an opaque mass, at once both chaotic and inclusive."
Source: Sara Tucker
awp.diaart.org
On the Future of the Present: Art, Technology, and Popular Culture
On the face of things it might appear that the reduction of the means of art to the latest in computer technology (and its counterpart in the video games of popular culture) would bode ill for the future of art as a humanizing force.
A contrary view is advanced in a new wave of expression which views technology as an artistic tool rather than a subject in itself. The question raised is whether artists using the latest technology can produce art that is "genuinely psychologically or spiritually transformative and not simply about using silicon in a particular way."
The question of what computer-driven video games, interactive CD-ROMs, and the Internet have to contribute to art as a humanizing force is answered in part by the recent experiments with paintings which incorporate computer-generated images, prints, and most recently, interactive CD-ROMs, by a young Chinese artist, Feng Mengbo, who works in Beijing. Feng's experiments are driven by his fascination with video games.
Like the earlier generation of post-modern artists in the West, he melds the means of popular culture into his art. In doing so, he uses technology and other artistic media to make a statement about life in the context of significant cultural and political transformation on a global scale.
During the early nineties, Feng produced a series of computer-based paintings, Taxi! Taxi!-Mao Zedong I-III. In this series, he likened Mao's waving to the army of the Red Guards gathered at Tiananmen Square during the Cultural Revolution to the way people wave to hail a taxi by copying Mao's image and placing an ordinary yellow taxicab in front of it. With this act, Feng Mengbo quietly introduced a human scale to the mythical Mao.
In a 1994 work titled Game Over: Long March, he transformed stills from a video game into a series of 42 paintings that examine China's revolutionary past.
Images feature a Chinese revolutionary street fighter dressed in a blue soldier's uniform with a red armband. His weapons include the conventional artillery of grenades and bullets as well as crushed Coca-Cola cans. A young Mao and heroes of the revolutionary operas created during the Cultural Revolution are interspersed with characters from the international video world including ninjas and dinosaurs.
Beginning in 1996, Feng Mengbo parlayed his interest in video games into a form of interactive art. His first interactive CD-ROM, My Private Album, was shown in New York at Holly Solomon Gallery in April 1997. Initially conceived as a collection of slides intended to document family history, My Private Album consists of a study of the artist's life in the context of a multigenerational family including grandparents, parents, and his wife.
This work juxtaposes history as seen from a personal, familial perspective with official history. The images are drawn from a wide variety of sources including the family photo album, old gramophone records, book pages, sections of movies, drawings, paintings, postcards, his own digital movies, and other memorabilia depicting Chinese culture of the late twentieth century.
The pictures mark life transitions over three generations, thus revealing the passage of time through the human cycles of birth, maturation, and death. The images are generated with a Macintosh computer and are projected with a digital projector onto a screen surrounded by curtains to give it the appearance of a miniature theater. Viewers can manipulate the order of events appearing on the screen by using a mouse and keypad.
The main feature of the exhibition at the Haggerty Museum is Taking Mt. Doom by Strategy, Feng Mengbo's second interactive CD-ROM installation, which links the high-tech game aesthetics of the West and the traditional staging of the Beijing opera to explore the history and meaning of the Cultural Revolution in China.
It is based on a mixing of the video game Doom with the opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy from the Cultural Revolution era and includes 42 clips from the film of the same title. In the hands of Feng Mengbo, the romanticized propaganda themes of the opera and the film are laced with gentle irony and wit. From the artist's perspective, both the opera and the film are "full of fighting about power, blood, and heroes" and hence are concerned with the same issues.(9) These sources are mixed and adapted by the artist according to his own fantasies and imagination.
Feng Mengbo believes that the video game is a source of art. This claim does not arise from any lack of training or knowledge of the fine arts. He studied design for four years at the Beijing School of Arts and Crafts and spent an additional four years at the Central Academy of the Fine Arts in Beijing.
The video game is a very natural medium for him, probably because he spent many hours in his youth playing video games. More than the previous My Private Album, Taking Mt. Doom by Strategy reveals the artist's youthful in-depth involvement with video games. While the aim of the former work, according to the artist, was to make a documentary, the aim of the latter is to make a game that is full of imagination and fun. In contrast to the slow, quiet pace of My Private Album, Taking Mt. Doom by Strategy is noisy and fast paced. And with a very different visual result.
The work quite literally embodies the Phenomenal character of the electronic world: "lightness, free mobility, and free play with dimensions and forms." Feng prefers to call the results of this process a game rather than art, but he has already conceded that the game is the source of art, so there need not be a division between the two for him.
A primary reason for choosing the interactive CD-ROM as a medium for artistic expression is grounded in the artist's strong commitment to democratic populism. Video games are a source of empowerment and participation for their youthful practitioners and also for the audience within the virtual world provided by Taking Mt. Doom by Strategy.
The versatility of the digital medium gives the audience freedom to participate in the artwork itself, and the technical possibilities for interaction by the artist and the user help to free the process of making art from conventional linear narrative structures. For Feng Mengbo, new technologies offer new ways of exploring human concerns and returning to individuals the opportunity to imaginatively reshape their own cultural participation. Within the simulated realities of video games, the individual can create his or her own virtual world, where the roles of heroes and villains can be altered at will.
Feng Mengbo believes that art is for the widest possible public audiences. It is not made just for critics and other specialists of the art world. In this respect, he is closer to Keith Haring (who began his career in the subways of New York and who expressed a similar populist perspective on art with respect to his desire to communicate with mass audiences) than to the Pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, whose manipulation of images from everyday life often failed to appeal to the public outside the art world.
As an artist, Feng Mengbo eschews any political role, asserting that his artworks are based on his private understanding of culture. Although he does not admit to any political aims, his work nevertheless invites examination of the cultural forces of the Cultural Revolution by dissecting and subjecting to critical scrutiny some of its more powerful themes. His work can also be said to be political in its inquiry into how critical perception and art may lead to a more active role in the affairs of the world.
His art undoubtedly benefits from the current world-wide attention to politics and commerce in China and its cultural links to the rest of the world. Recognition of artists in China, as well as in other Asian, African, and Latin American countries, can be seen as part of the geopolitical changes accompanying globalization. Like many artists caught up in the process of globalization, Feng Mengbo's artistic concerns are linked with a global culture which extends beyond a particular national culture.
Increasingly, Western art institutions recognize the creativity and originality of contemporary artists from the non-Western world, and non-Western artists eagerly embrace Western artistic trends.
The Internet has been the primary link between events in China and the technological and artistic developments in the West. It has had an especially important role in the development of artists such as Feng Mengbo. It provides instant contact with the most current developments in art and culture across the world. It also offers a means for artists away from the main Western art centers such as New York and Berlin to show their work in areas where travel is either prohibited or prohibitively expensive.
Communication through the Internet thus allows artists in China to instantly share their creative works and receive feedback. In these respects, digital technologies have indeed served to extend the humanizing effects of art on a global basis.
Culturally, Feng Mengbo combines experiences as a child of the Cultural Revolution in China with contemporary Western technological culture made possible by the Internet and by cultural exchange which brought young Chinese artists to exhibit their work in the United States and Europe.
His approach to art will appeal to the visual literacy of minds shaped by video games and the cultural resources provided by the Internet. The globally minded blend of East and West represented in his work may well signal a trend for the future development of art.
Source: Author: Curtis L. Carter
http://www.marquette.edu
