Asia Society Museum in New York recently held a solo exhibition of works by Xiaoze Xie, who has made it his mission to trace the history of banned books in China. In “Objects of Evidence”, which closed on 5 January 2020, Xiaoze Xie presented paintings, installation, photography and video that examine the history of banned books in China by also considering the subjectivity of censorship, in relation to the shifting sociopolitical and religious ideologies. At the same time, the Skillman Library at Lafayette Arts (Lafayette College, Pennsylvania) presented “Forbidden Stories: Installation and Photographs by Xiaoze Xie”, with a selection of his photographic work, paintings and books from his collection of banned titles.
Xiaoze Xie was born in 1966 in China’s Guangdong Province, right on the cusp of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Throughout childhood and his formative years, Xie experienced the intrinsic power of books, from the epic tales from classical novels that his grandmother recounted, to the censored books that his school principal father had to collect for destruction and burning during Mao’s revolution. The titles that were forbidden also became for the artist tantalising objects of desire and curiosity, and eventually turned into the primary inspiration for his art.
In a conversation with the exhibition curator Michelle Yun (Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Asia Society Musem), Xie shared a memory of his father’s office:
In my father’s office, I saw piles of old books which people were urged to turn in to designated places to be destroyed. I had a strong feeling that those books were mysterious and dangerous, but did not understand exactly what was going on. One doesn’t know what kind of seeds an experience could plant for the future.
He also revealed how his interest in books has followed his practice for a quarter of a century up to his current project:
I became interested in books as a subject of my painting in 1993, shortly after I moved to the United States. I was fascinated by both the potential meanings and forms of the subject. For me, books are the material form of something abstract, such as thoughts, memory, and history. In the many years that followed, I continued to expand my subject to include Chinese thread-bound books, museum library collections, and eventually newspapers.
Xiaoze Xie received a BFA in Architecture from Tsinghua University in 1988, an MFA from the Central Academy of Arts and Design in Beijing in 1991, and an MFA from the University of North Texas in 1996. The artist currently lives and works in Palo Alto, CA, where he serves as the Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University. However, it was in China that he started to pursue this research project, while on a residency as a faculty fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University in 2014. There, he compiled an index of banned books from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) through the Republic of China (1911–49) into the present day.
Xie used reference books such as A Brief History of Banned Books in China (Chen Zhenghong and Tan Beifang) and A Complete Introduction of Chinese Banned Books (An Pingqiu and Zhang Peiheng), as well as other materials to compile a long list of titles. There are many publications on premodern banned books, but information on the last few decades is more difficult to gather, as the artist reveals to Yun, due to the sensitive nature of the subject.
The artist then expanded his research project to chart the history of banned books through painting, photography and installation. Talking to Yun, he reveals:
The project started with reading and research and eventually involved searching, collecting, and photographing objects; consulting and interviewing various individuals (scholars, authors, editors, and officials in publishing houses); organization and display of materials, etc. The mediums I employed are necessary and direct ways to tell this complex story. The installation of books and life-size photographs provide concrete evidence of censorship, while the documentary film contextualizes the history of censorship and offers different perspectives on related issues.
Xie first set out to locate and purchase the original editions of modern books, published before they were banned, from the internet and used bookstores. He then searched for premodern titles in the databases of public libraries, and identified many entries in the rare book collections of Peking University in Beijing and Fudan University in Shanghai. He then negotiated with the institutions to gain access and photograph the books on site.
Xie even included in his work Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu and Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong Lou Meng) by Cao Xueqin, both censored multiple times during the Ming and Qing periods as “obscene”, and Water Margin (Shui Hu Zhuan) attributed to Shi Nai’an, today all considered great classics of Chinese literature. As Asia Society Museum has written, “Xie’s body of work provides a means to consider changes in cultural standards and their influence on shaping modern Chinese society.” In his conversation with Yun, Xie explains how he became interested in the history of banned books in China and shaped his current project:
As I continued to paint books in the 1990s, I was also interested in what people have done to books. I painted monumental volumes decorated with gold-leafed edges as well as neglected books in silent decay. I also made installations based on specific historic events such as the destruction of books by the Nazis during the Second World War and by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. All these led to the current project on the history of banned books in China. The books in my “Chinese Library” paintings are all closed and stacked; however, in the photographs in the banned books project, their pages open up for the first time. Content is brought to the fore for close examination.
A pivotal part of his project is a searchable online database of banned books in China, created by the artist as an interactive complement to “Objects of Evidence”. The database “Forbidden Memories: Tracing Banned Books in China” includes information about books censored in China from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) to the present including author, book title, and the date and reason for censorship. Visitors could access selected publications under the subjects of politics, literature, religion, academics and morality. The database also includes a brief overview of the history of censorship in Mainland China. Xie developed the database when realising the limitations of the exhibition space available, and the boundaries he had to impose on himself when selecting and developing work for display in limited space. He reveals in his conversation with the curator:
I’ve come to realize that the number of objects and images that can be included is always limited by the scale of the available exhibition space; and it is almost impossible to present the variety and richness of the materials as well as the project’s breadth of time and ambition in a physical space. I also found myself caught in competing desires to protect the objects while creating interactive experiences for the audience. A searchable database is a good solution. It presents a more inclusive, if not comprehensive, view of the project. The database offers examples, facts, clues, and connections that allow viewers to further navigate the history of censored publications and draw their own conclusions.
In “Objects of Evidence”, the database complements a body of work that spans oil painting, photography and film. The photographic installation captures editions of books printed in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties, while the 46-minute video documentary shares details about Xie’s work and the history and impact of literary censorship in Mainland China.
Xie has amassed a significant collection of banned books over time for this project, with more than 750 titles to date, from the Qing to the present day. At Asia Society Museum, three vitrines contained first edition banned books from Mainland China, accompanied by later editions sourced from outside the mainland. The books belong to three modern eras in Chinese history: the Republican Era (1911–49), the Hu Feng Anti-party Clique period in the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Foreign books in translation – including A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë – were among the books banned for their socially corrupting material.
Asked about how he thinks his work presents the history of censorship in China, Xie says:
Given the vast history of banned books in China, I feel what I have done is merely a drop in the ocean. However, I am as passionate about this ongoing project as ever. In working with these materials, I have found recurring themes and genres in different periods as well as changing patterns of control and tolerance.
Xie explains how erotic literature has been banned multiple times over the ages, and yet has remained popular over time. The artist has also found that there is a clear, repetitive pattern of censorship on history writing, which often resonates with current politics, and therefore has proved to be a “highly risky territory”. There is much to learn on the subject, and Xie’s ongoing work will just continue to contribute to shed light on it, making his findings accessible to everyone through art. Talking to Yun during his exhibition at Asia Society Museum, he said that through the objects, images and stories he presents in his projects, he hopes to give
… a sense of the vastness and continuity of a history of thought control, with all its complexity and texture. Banned books encapsulate political, religious, and moral conditions and reflect power relationships in different times. As the pursuit of freedom of expression often comes at a cost, I do hope that one remains hopeful despite the weight of this history.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia