Xu Bing: Phoenix
Two huge, breath-taking birds, who flew last spring from China to North Adams, will soon migrate south from Massachusetts’ Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MOCA) to St. John the Divine, New York City’s vast Gothic cathedral.
Xu Bing, who created the Phoenix Project – the two beautiful creatures measure 95 and 100 feet long and weigh 12 tons – is one of China’s most important contemporary artists. The birds, adorned with tiny LED lights, have hung from MOCA’s indestructible ceiling for five months, becoming, by night, a magical, Milky Way-like constellation illuminating the community.
The Phoenix, an ancient bird, is fabled in many cultures to rise from its own ashes, symbolizing new life. In a way, the same could be said about Mass MOCA – which transformed old North Adams factories into a spectacular museum where space and light themselves seem to promise infinite possibility. Once home to a complex of nineteenth-century mills and factories, e powered by the Hoosic River, the buildings included brickyards, saw mills, marble and iron works, machine shops, a textile printing business, and cabinet, hat and shoe manufacturers. There, in 1926 Robert Sprague founded Sprague Electric, a company that, for five decades, made capacitors – electrical energy storage components – and was North Adams’ most important employer. This all changed when Beijing’s Factory 718 began making capacitors more cheaply.
History repeats itself. A century earlier, North Adams had another labor relationship with China. In the late 1860’s, when shoe making became increasingly industrialized, Calvin Sampson – owner of one of the factories now on the MOCA campus – slashed wages and increased hours of his mostly Irish and Canadian immigrant workers. Supported by The Order of the Knights of St. Crispin (patron saint of shoemakers) – a large but poorly organized northeastern American labor union – the workers struck. Sampson brought in “cheap Chinese laborers” to replace them.
Xu Bing: Phoenix
“During the second half of the 19th century, North Adams was the largest Chinese immigrant city east of the Mississippi,” says Joseph C. Thompson, Mass MOCA’s director. “Today we acknowledge the long, complex relationship between this factory and China by honoring important Chinese artists like Xu Bing,”
Thompson’s words don’t begin to unpack the particulars of this past – a relationship that has much to do with the interdependent and conflicted dynamic between art, labor, capital and market values. It’s all re-enacted in the Phoenix story.
When the 21st century global economy was roaring, Ravenel – a major Taiwanese auction house that provides art collection and investment services to wealthy collectors – invited Xu Bing to create a large sculpture at the heart of Beijing’s bustling central business district. The piece was to be located in the midst of new, grand, groundbreaking buildings. Before beginning, on his way to see the site, the sculptor walked through the construction area where workers live.
“When I entered the construction site,” Xu Bing says, “I had a deep reaction. Migrant workers are extraordinary, with tremendous skills and abilities. Their working conditions are very harsh…My idea was to use the leftover materials collected from the site to make a work of art…These buildings [where the work was to be displayed] represent China’s new wealth, prosperity, and capitalist resources. The income disparity, division of resources, the issue of migrants becoming a new underclass could all be dealt with profoundly through art…Every piece of refuse has been touched by these migrant workers – each one has a certain spirit.”
Collecting quantities of waste discarded at building sites – shovels, hard hats, fire extinguishers, canisters, tools, bamboo scaffolding, steel beams, fans, pipes, and hoses – Xu Bing thought about the past. He remembered what simple materials traditional Chinese folk artists had used – brush, ink, and paper – to create hope for the future. And he recalled ancient stories that, in every culture, come to mean so much, generation after generation.
Like the fabulous phoenix, this sculpture has had ‘near death’ experiences. At a critical moment in its creation, the Chinese government put a hold on all construction in the city because of the Olympics. Then the global economy crashed, and the original funders lost their nerve, Xu Bing explains.
“Wealthy backers had greater tolerance, sense of humor, even a bit of self-criticism when the economy was booming. When the resources were lost, they were less willing to tolerate it. Though it was deliberately made… they said it looked unfinished – like only the structure of a piece of sculpture, and wanted to cover it with a layer of crystal. I realized they didn’t understand. In the end they rejected the piece. Funds stopped, winter came, the birds lay as if they were sick on the floor or the shop. Then a Taiwanese collector came forward….”
Having the Phoenix here in the US has had particular significance for Xu Bing.
“Chinese urbanization and globalization emerged from your western value system and development model… And China is an incredibly experimental place. Its…momentum, vitality… no one in the world understands, not even the Chinese. China is experimenting with values and methods that have never been tried to confront China’s problems and the problems of the world…. It’s as if China is in the process of focusing. It has not yet become sharp.”
Maybe one function of the artist is to confront formative forces in our worlds, which helps the rest of us experience connections between our pasts, presents, and futures. Explicitly, the Phoenix Project illustrates the eternal relationship between art and capital. But it’s also about at its core labor, the rapid accumulation of wealth, and our place in time. Every one and everything – including buildings like Mass MOCA – has a history. How we choose to acknowledge the past – in our present actions, commitments, creations, or celebrations – reminds us who we have been, are, and perhaps will be, one day. And, for now, the present is what we have.
*Quotes are transcribed from the video (vimeo.com/6418206) and from The Story of the Phoenix – Xu Bing’s Phoenix Project, by Zhai Yongming, translated by Jesse Robert Coffino (Beijing, 2012, available at Mass MOCA.)
