Ai Weiwei, a contemporary Chinese artist, was widely reported to “literally” destroy China’s tradition in art in his 1995 act of dropping a Han Dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE) urn and breaking it. An article calls this performance “an iconoclastic act”. Ai was quoted as saying that this gesture is “powerful only because someone thinks it’s powerful and invests value in the object.” (Check Visualarts, Cornell for the image and the article and also Artzinechina for a fuller article about the artist in question).
The article continues: “The urn is valuable only because the arbiters of taste and the art market have determined that this is so. In recording the act of its destruction, the meaning and value of the urn is transformed and co–opted into a contemporary, editioned art work that subverts and disrupts the prevailing value system to which it previously belonged.”
I am only highly suspicious of this kind of act towards their ends – whatever they are – because it rings so alarmingly similar to the rationale to destroy ancient architecture in 1950s’ Beijing (back to my topic of course). “When they decided to dismantle and demolish the city’s menlous (gate/ entrance towers) and pailous (ceremonial archways) in the 1950s, the government would gather the public in front of these structures to ‘denounce them for their evils’” (Fang, Ke. Contemporary Redevelopment in the Inner City of Beijing, 2000).
The predecessors of Chinese architecture scholars in China, who usually are also defenders of this millennia-long form of art, have had to combat ignorance about what we call “Chinese architecture”. Now the task is harder and the burden heavier. Prof. Ruan Yisan of Tongji University who works on historic preservation in China, continually talks about the need to “educate the policy-makers”, about the meaning and significance of respecting and preserving traditional architecture. But it seems that the existence of Chinese architecture at present is a complicated issue involving a power struggle between a), greedy and powerful real estate developers, contractors and expropriators, corrupt government officials, the so-called master architects and architectural firms who care more about garnering money and fame than anything else, b), responsible individuals who appreciate the historic, cultural, scientific and aesthetic values of these ancient structures. Guess who loses in this struggle?! It might be an achievable goal to “educate the policy-makers”, to make laws and regulations and to even execute them in China. But how do we defend the Chinese architectural heritage against the darkest human nature of vanity, greed and vulgarity?
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