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The World Is Not Flat
By Aruna D’Souza
When you break the boundaries between disciplines—between art and technology, say, or design and activism—other boundaries start to crumble, too, including the boundaries that separate nations and cultures. The earth isn’t flat, by any means—the movement impelled by globalization is fraught with friction. But the kind of work that is done at Bennington College—a liberal arts college in Vermont—has long been transgressing boundaries, both conceptual and global, and using the friction that results as a catalyst for innovation.
At Bennington, we don’t break boundaries or forge new relationships just for the sake of doing so. Underlying all of our work in the world is the driving question: What can collaboration across oceans, countries, cultures, disciplines, and languages look like? In this ongoing search for new ways of thinking, making, and doing, some of our most fruitful recent endeavors have been a web of interconnected projects in China.
New Forms of Artistic Collaboration
“China Dialogues,” a project that was realized at the Usdan Gallery at Bennington College in the fall of 2015, might offer one answer to this question. There, Zhang Yangen, a sculptor and professor at the Guangxi Arts Institute in China, and Dai Jian, a teaching fellow in the Master of Fine Arts in Dance program at Bennington, worked with students, faculty, and staff here at the College and with students in China to imagine collaboration as a form of art.
The project came about from conversations between visual arts faculty member Jon Isherwood and Michael Suh, curator and executive director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Beijing, about having Suh curate an exhibition at the Usdan Gallery. Eventually, the two wondered what might happen if, instead of shipping Chinese art to Bennington, they invited a Chinese artist to come and work on campus. Thus, Yangen arrived at Bennington for a two-week residency in October 2015.
Yangen and Dai Jian decided to turn the question of how one can conceive and connect ideas at such a distance (Bennington to Beijing) into art, and put the process of working on display.
Since their earliest contact was via text messaging and other electronic communications, the Internet and digital culture became the focal point of the project. When he arrived on campus, Yangen set about fabricating a massive, deconstructed “@” sign out of lath and wire in the middle of the gallery space, and covered it with hundreds of items of clothing that had been donated by students both in China and here at Bennington—a nod to the fact that the character “衣” is both the word for clothing and the beginning of the word for email.
The Chinese students who sent clothing to Bennington heard about the project on social media—for Yangen, the fact that these conversations start electronically and end up becoming concrete is one of the interesting parts of the project. The red and yellow thread that was used to hand-sew the fabric onto the lath framework symbolizes the “common thread” that connects countries and individuals, according to Yangen.
The sculptural element was fabricated with the help of the faculty members and students who drop into the gallery to lend a hand. Students from languages faculty member Ginger Lin’s “Visual Art in China” and Chinese language classes acted as translators; other students took photos and videos to document the process, took part in fabrication, and contributed in other crucial ways.
Meanwhile, dance students, working with Dai Jian, developed movement pieces that became an integral part of the of the piece. With the help of music faculty member Nick Brooke, the hanging object was fitted with microphones that amplify the vibrations produced when a body brushes against or moves it, adding a sonic dimension.
Unusually, there was no final form of the project—no capstone performance, for example, to mark the “completion” of the collaboration or the artwork. Instead, at a series of open rehearsals, visitors were invited to see the work as it evolved. This was collaboration conceived as an open-ended form of art, as a site for engagement, and as a single node in a larger web of encounters.
Many Tentacles
“China Dialogues” was neither the beginning nor the end of Bennington’s work with Michael Suh, Zhang Yangen, or the institutions that they work with in China. It developed out of conversations happening together and separately, all over our campus, as well as in China. It also prompted new conversations, and thus new projects. This spirit of open-endedness, of initiating lines of inquiry and tracing them to their logical conclusions—for every question must have multiple answers, after all—is very much what Bennington is about.
If there was anything like an “origin” to this web of dialogue, it was in a meeting of minds between Jon Isherwood and Michael Suh. Isherwood had traveled to China in 2007 and met curators and artists working there; his work was shown in two exhibitions in Beijing—one at the Today Art Museum in 2008, in a show that highlighted the fusion of traditional carving techniques with cutting edge technology, and another at the Songhzhuang Art Museum in 2012. Among those he met were Michael Suh, and they began talking about connections that could be mapped out between China and the U.S., between an artist and teacher and a curator, between a museum and a college, and between one of the world’s largest metropolises and a small town in rural Vermont. China Dialogues was one of these connections. There have turned out to be many others.
Other Bennington faculty members were brought into the conversation. Concurrent with “China Dialogues,” a number of intersecting activities and courses took place at the College. Students in faculty member Robert Ransick’s Social Practices of Art course worked with students at the Guanxi Arts Institute and other art schools on a project in which Bennington students went out into the local community to ask questions posed by the Chinese students, while the Chinese students likewise ventured into their city to ask questions posed by Bennington students. Students in faculty member Sue Rees’s classes planned animations with Chinese students in the form of an exquisite corpse: students would take turns adding to the animation without knowing what comes before; the final product would be a surprise to everyone who has contributed when it was finally revealed. Michael Suh and Zhang Yangen did crit sessions with students as they were developing their ideas.
New Forms of Teaching and Learning
What might have started as an encounter in the spaces of art—in the museums and galleries of China, and then in our own Usdan Gallery at Bennington—expanded into the very fabric of Bennington College and of a number of institutions in China, as we, together, began to think about our work as educators differently in light of our global conversation. Developing out of conversations between Michael Suh and Bennington’s vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid, Hung Bui, a symposium hosted by some of the top universities in the United States—Bennington College, Bard College, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley—and attended by over 150 educational leaders from China—college guidance directors, teachers, principals, and government leaders—took place in Beijing in September 2016. It was supported by the Peninsula Hotel and the Museum of Contemporary Art, two vital players in our story.
The theme was the future of higher education. Bennington has long been a leader when it comes to innovative approaches to learning, and the president of the College, Mariko Silver, opened the symposium with a keynote address on the purpose of higher education—not merely its value in an economic sense, but our goals for higher education as students, as parents of students, as educators, and as citizens who depend on the next generation of young people to define and shape our world.
As we change our ideas about what it takes to lead, and as the complexity of the world demands different forms of leadership, innovation, and creativity, how we educate the next generation needs to transform, to meet, and to shape today’s reality. And that requires both drawing from our long-standing cultures and values as well as adapting to new definitions of what it means to be educated.
—Mariko Silver, President of Bennington College
Diversity and Form
As these exhibitions, courses, conferences, and conversations were happening, the Peninsula Hotel, itself a cultural leader in the Chinese landscape, set a challenge for the Bennington College community: design vessels for salt and pepper for the Peninsula’s in-house restaurant. The brief was both tightly focused—tiny, often overlooked, quotidian objects for one of the world’s premier hotels—and expansive: how to imagine the Peninsula’s position, brand, and aspirations in a perfect, graspable form. Students, faculty, and staff proposed a variety of solutions, fusing traditional design practices, sculptural thinking, and advanced manufacturing technologies. Twenty-six of these proposals are featured in the exhibition titled “Secret Garden,” to be shown simultaneously in the gallery at the Peninsula Hotel and at the Beijing Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Michael Suh and Chen Jie; of these, the Peninsula has committed to choosing one to manufacture and be put into use.
The curatorial statement for “Secret Garden” touches on themes that are very close to Bennington’s heart—first, how to ensure the context in which we are developing and testing our ideas, in which we are learning and making, reflects the true diversity of the world, and second, how to ensure we have the tools we need to communicate within and across such diversity. For Suh and Chen Jie the problem is not just a matter of people and situations, but an almost spiritual imperative that should affect every choice we make, including those that go into the making of objects. For the curators, all of these formal decisions—from color to material to texture to shape—become another form of communication, another language at our disposal that allows us to connect across cultural divides and value systems. Suh’s and Chen Jie’s articulation of their curatorial mission is very much an echo of Bennington’s educational mission, and another point of understanding in our many-tentacled relationship.
On Location
While so many of these collaborations have taken place across vast distances, thanks to technology (email, Skype, SMS, WhatsApp)—an idea thematized in Yangen Zhang’s “@” sign at the heart of his installation in Usdan Gallery last year—there are, still, ideas that can only emerge in the contingency of actual human contact, of the proximity of bodies and thoughts in space. Making is physical as much as conceptual, after all.
The Peninsula Hotel, understanding the fruitfulness of such opportunities, has proposed a solution for this: a 45-day residency program in which they will host a member of the Bennington College community—faculty, student, staff, or alumni—providing them accommodations and other support, including access to a studio. While this idea is in its infancy—its first beneficiary will be the yet-to-be-announced winner of the design contest—already Chinese institutions and individuals have stepped forward to imagine ways to take advantage of the opportunity: thanks to Zhang Yangen, there is the possibility of a lectureship at the Guangxi Arts Institute, for example. There are also discussions of a student exchange program with the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute.
There will be, no doubt—thanks to the generosity and forward-thinking attitude of so many of our colleagues in China—other ventures. What links them all is a desire to bridge distances, find common ground, and even find the points of friction that are necessary in any global encounter—moments that require us to come up with new ways of communicating our ideas and enriching us in the process.
China Dialogues
Usdan Gallery, Bennington College