Anti pro–fanum:
Chen Tianzhuo’s Ishvara

Excerpt from P.h.D. thesis chapter (unpublished)

In the past years, the works of Chinese artist Chen Tianzhuo (陈天灼）have made bold appearances in museums, gallery spaces, and performance venues. In China and internationally, he presents his audiences with artistic practices that challenge (global) contradictory attempts to separate and purify the natural, social and empyrean realms. Forever seeking to create a trance-like state, Chen invites his audiences to contemplate these divisions, as he continues to develop a practice in which dualist understandings are transcended. His performances manage to demise claims that posit a clean and principled split between the human and the nonhuman, as well as constructed, independent accounts of each. By partly neglecting possible violations of religious tradition on the one, and partly emphasising a free-spirited voluntarism and the sheer opportunistic possibility of transgression on the other side, they blend spheres of the sacred, the profane and the commercial into his very mannerism. In short, Chen can be introduced as someone wanting nothing to be outside his artistic temple, nothing to be profane, from the Latin pro (before) fanum (the temple).

Che Tianzhuo’s performance works engage with China’s, dazzeling postsocialist condition. Deploying the paradigm of Postsocialism in this chapter refers to the contemporary period, starting from the 1980s. Postsocialism addresses the overlap of social systems, symbolic orders and modes of production that characterize this era in China, against the backdrop of a global capitalist world market liberal economy and facing the rise of new media technologies. However, Postsocialism does not indicate a teleologic historical determinism that liberates or dissolves the notion of socialist modernism. Its cultural expressions posit a subjectivity and newness, yet are “embedded” in prevailing ideological ideosyncracies. Aiming to capture the contradictory realities of Chinese reality, it serves as theoretical framework to address the intertwining of Chinese modernity and postmodernity, as well as the embedding of Chinese socialism in Postsocialism.

The social space in this period has been referred to as “carnivalesque”, describing the disorientating effects of individual freedom, private ownership and rights, social mobility and consumer mass culture.  It is important to highlight, that under the circumstances of economic developmentalism and globalization, both the ‘postsocialist’ and the ‘postmodern’ in China describe “not the end of modernization” and, more generally, the spirit of modernity as such, but  “rather their permeation and radicalization”, their “intensification and standardization”. Chinese postsocialism and postmodernism are hence treated as entangled categories with largely coherent effects. Breaking with the sociopolitical, conceptual totality of socialist modernity, the liberating ramifications of the reform period had first resulted in what Zhang Xudong describes as “the general disintegration of a real or imagined national political, intellectual and cultural discourse.” (Ibid p. 3.) While the recent years have seen a return of national selfhood and policies focused on defining a grand Chinese identity, Chen Tianzhuo’s works yet speak brilliantly for a generation with fragmented and individualistically differentiated views of the notion of the collective in society. In this chapter, their complex sign language will thus be studied in how it generates a sense of a ‘postsocialist popular’: a sense of belonging and community through the use of simultaneously commercial and spiritual symbolic registers. His aesthetic intensity challenges  the permeability of ideologies and cultural hierarchies

This chapter starts with an introduction to the artist’s methods of production, along some of the central topics we meet with in his works, such as the search for community, the quest for an ‘alternative religion’ and the carnivalesque as aesthetic strategy. This will be followed by a part that focuses closely on the performance Ishvara.

Chen spent his University years in the UK, studying Graphic Design at London’s Central Saint Martins College, followed by a Master’s degree in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design. After returning to Beijing, Chen’s early career has been significantly shaped by his transnational radius, over time attracting a number of fellow artists to collectively engage in ever more ambitious artistic endeavors together. Asked to participate in Wiener Festwochen for the first time with Ishvara, it was rather by chance that Chen started to orient his works towards the format of performance, of the kind that fits more conventional, black-box theatre spaces. While invitations to other festivals such as Steirischer Herbst (AT) and Theater der Welt (DE) soon followed, Chen still remains a newcomer to the institution of theatre, both in China and Europe, a position he regards as rewarding, allowing him to explore the genre without the cognitive constraints imposed by standardised tertiary education. Similarly, the performers he chooses to work with, often do not have a background in the theatrical arts either. Members of his collective play an important part in realizing the works. Regardless of collaborative spirit however, it is Chen himself who serves as ‘metteur-en-scene’. The realm of performance sees a culmination of his experimental practices, unifying  painting, sculpture, installation, video, music, and fashion. His paintings, sculptures and videos are also exhibited as stand-alone elements  in an art world context, or, as in the case of TRANCE and the Beijing version of Ishvara, both shown in Long March Gallery, the set is conceptualised to host the performance as event, but can as well be visited during regular hours as part of the exhibition. In China, Chen has so far presented his performances in independent venues, mostly in visual art spaces such as K11 or Bank Gallery in Shanghai, Long March Space and Faurschou Foundation in Beijing.

When it comes to his public appearance, Chen’s style mimics the eccentric spirit of his works and vice-versa. Shaggy and woke, both on- and off-stage, he definitely is aware of several common associations that link his identity as a globally-working artist to his Chinese descent. Owning a willful ‘oddball appearance’, he knows how to make an entrance that counters identity-fetishism, ready-to-wear categorization and oversimplified pigeon-holing Chinese artists are often met with. The originality of his self-staging, as freak, guru, rock star and wild child, can therefore be regarded as part of his carnival grammar.

When shown in Beijing and Shanghai, Chen’s work has repeatedly been criticised for moving away from the immediate social and political local context. Seen from a generational angle, the emphasis of the spiritual as a semantic foundation for the communal is indeed not without a sense of surprise. Following decades of socialist realist orthodoxy, the aesthetic concepts of Chen prove exemplary for a wide generational gap. Both religion and rave, the two discourses that stand central to his work, have been foreign cultural phenomena to his parents’ generation. In Chen’s telling, individuality makes the "defining trait" of his post-1980s (bashihou) generation, thus rendering them "more free to deal with different topics, and more brave to be individual.” The rapid rise of the Internet has certainly had a significant impact on this generation: As the development of the digital economy has reframed patterns of communication, it created a world that appeared borderless, offering itself as an extensive resource for artistic production. This imaginary of the internet being a decentralised, universal, and pluralistic medium allowed for practices that unlinked symbolic imagery from its original contexts and moored it in the newly developed online communities. Today’s China is the second largest economy in the world with an internet of global, yet also distinctly Chinese characteristics. Despite its Sinicizations, the most prominent of which being the so-called Great Firewall, the internet in China must still be considered fertile ground for people, who seek to ground their sense of mutuality in a mode of continuous mutability and opportunistic exchange. Under such premises, Chen’s work makes a plangent claim for the multi-directionality of (online) imagery flow, presenting and fusing fragments of global fan cultures such as Southpark’s character Eric Theodore Cartman or Sailor Moon, subcultural music and DJ scenes, religious as well as fetish culture. His staged compositions thereby draw critical attention to the expanding cultural brokerage between the arts, so-called internet cultures and their digital economies.

At this current and still fairly early stage of his career, this scripted anarchy of his is practiced with great affinity for the very act of transforming. Digital technology, longue durée events, music and bodily strategies such as Masks and Maskings are among the tools deployed to alter the experience  of both performers and audiences. Masks and Maskings, which this chapter focuses on, create states of ambivalence, as they both mark entrances into the realms of make-belief and syncretism, yet can also function as paradigms that critique the artifices of real-life propaganda and power-identity. Secondly, the registers of Maskings demonstrate the spirit of the popular being altered and positioned next to ‘great’ religious spirits, in a constant shifting between the ideal and material, the sacral and profane.

Community as working method: The Asian Dope Boys collective

Chen’s works feed on a synthesis of different elements that are merged in a spirit of ontological nihilism and militant ludism. They develop relationships between the self and the foreign, the high and the low that are distinctly non-taxonomic. The artistic strategy starts out from fragmentation and disorder, emphasizing an organic quality that defines the working process as always unfinished, uncompleted. The stage characters and set designs seem to constantly await reworking, as they remain inconsequential in their narratives and dystopian in their hyperbolic expressionism, fleshing out a conception of the performance space as a living and breathing locus. Chen devotes himself to a ‘practice of no origin’, distancing from providing detailed information on his working methods, and also from the cultural markers which shape the characters that appear in his works.  Evidently, both the cultural and ethnic parameters Chen includes in his performances culminate in a heterogeneity full of cultural tension. However, when denouncing Chen for having a multifocal, yet egocentric approach, the commentators’ overall negligence of the collaborative stagings put forward by the artist is noteworthy. Abreactions that arise from confusion in the maze of Chen’s globalist sign language fail to understand the indeed communal process that the works engage into. Although remaining allusive when it comes to political controversy, Chen’s working methods need to be called out to in not only preaching, but actually practicing openness, hybridisation and dehierarchisation, whilst being a constant witness to centripetal forces that call for univocalisation and closure, striving to achieve unification and standardisation.
I argue that for Chen’s artistic practice, collaboration is method. Of the performers that appear in the performances, the majority has been working with Chen on a series of projects. With Yu Han, for example, the artist first collaborated for his 2014 video work 19:53 and later again for the performances at Palais the Tokyo in Paris, and Berghain in Berlin. Having established a peer-group model not only for making art, but also hosting parties and incorporating DJ sets, his tight-knit circle of working collaborators is also a circle of friends. It was after seeing Chen’s performance at the Palais de Tokyo, in June 2015, that musicians Aïsha Devi and Nodey both got in touch about a possible collaboration. "Being familiar with each other’s temperaments" ultimately led Chen to grow his entourage of regular collaborators into the label Asian Dope Boys (ADB). As ADB, they dedicated themselves to organising ‘boundary busting’ events in China’s nightlife and abroad, cultivating crossovers between the realms of galleries, performing arts spaces and clubs. Ylva Falk’s Paris-based collective, House of Drama, Beio and Yu Han joined their ranks, too. The project furthermore spawned a series of mixtapes, the promotion of emerging DJ talents in China and also included the production of Asian Dope Boy fan-culture merchandise, including T-shirts, hoodies, scarves and logo earrings. During the time of his university studies in the UK, Chen absorbed rave-party culture, which he then tried to incorporate into clothing and accessory design. He briefly set foot in the field of fashion, using also his growing popularity as an artist, when collaborating with the Chinese Brand SANKUANZ, the Italian Brand KAPPA on a rave-inspired clothing collection and with the brand Nike. As brands try to fabricate vibrant images to market their products, they look at artists as brand ambassadors to help ‘spreading their message’. For the artist, there is considerable strategic value in a practice of cultural self-positioning that does not restrict itself to the ivory tower of the art world, but also makes deliberate use of ties to the international clubbing scene and certain sectors of the commercial market. Moreover, not all those that associate with the collective have a conventional artistic CV or scholarly backgrounds in the performing arts. While Beio is a computer scientist in his day-job, Yu Han works as a sun glasses designer for his own brand ‘Soft People Area’.

Asian Dope Boys hence creates quite a particular crew that is characterised by wearing an ‘ADB’-branded earring as one way of mutual identification. Sharing not only a common visual language, but incorporating selected signifiers as part of their artistic production, they form a collective that differs from now-canonical notions of earlier avant-garde groups. In pursuing new forms and the creation of immersive experiences, they may not cater to the bell-jarred ideal of autonomy that had been kept up and idealised until the very end of the last century, but attain to maximise self-determination in an entrepreneurial effort and achieve to master diverse channels of creative output. Their expanding of choreographic practice, crossing the art world’s tight boundaries into night-life entertainment and commercial culture, points to what has been discussed as ‘eventisation’ of art in the society of spectacle. In ADB’s case, artistic camaraderie and kinship serve as subversive mechanisms to the ‘spectacular’, and are thus needed to be understood as deliberate, camp-inflected and manifestly queer reaction to the popularisation of subculture and the deterritorialisation of experimental practices from no-longer existent margins. As, in a commercialised cultural market, individual ‘curative’ or affirmative activities result in increasingly selective consumerism, ADB’s artistic engagement tackles the issue how collections of topical merchandise fulfil functions of identification and signification in the social sphere. Similarly to an involvement in religious practices, such practices of consumer capitalism foster a sense of belonging and community, using symbolic resources to perform and construct a shared social identity. The individual’s perhaps excessive and irrational ‘investment’, as believer and fan is experienced as life-shaping and energising. Like religion, it provides a structure that helps people meet ‘needs’ such as wanting to find a system of values, beliefs or symbols that affirms their identity within a social network.

When asked to categorise his performance work, Chen has repeatedly articulated feelings of "boredom" over having to reproduce his cosmos of ideas in a predetermined format. In today’s China, however, there is an inflection point at which younger artists of Chen’s generation encounter more senior and established theatre directors and performance artists, who have become embroiled in debates of whether their sense of ‘the experimental’ has irreversibly been coopted by the logics of commerce and entertainment. The claim fails to reflect the huge cultural changes which occurred in postsocialist China largely within an institutional framework, and both in spite of and as a consequence of the transition to a market-driven economy, including changes in what should be considered a radical and therefore an ‘avant garde’ practice. One can therefor argue that the artistic task of personalised marketing has developed into much less of a tactic, but rather a necessity, allowing artists a factor of recognition when working across different genres and media. Consequently, Chen and ADB engage in staging themselves as the target in the neoliberal arena, as ‘artists as entrepreneurial creatives’.

Inventing Religion : The Calling for ADAHA

Chen’s and ADB’s fashionably developed sense of movement and cultivation of ADB ‘membership status’ claims to progress towards ‘a new religion’. As Chen states, "Essentially what I want to do is extend my work to another dimension or another plane. I don’t want to just put myself into a contemporary art scene, I want to work with different kinds of music and dance to create something really different. New rituals, a new religion. I’m really fascinated with the idea of sacrifice, and that power of wanting to sacrifice yourself for something.”

In Chinese tradition the translation of the English term ‘religion’ (zongjiao) marks a relatively new phenomenon, which first appeared only at the beginning of the 20th century. Zongjiao was coined for the task of translation, as scholars interpreting Western-language texts to Chinese and Japanese language found themselves in need of an adequate equivalent. Unlike the habitual Chinese way of understanding religion in the sense of an ancestral tradition that builds a relationship with the  divine in social, political as well as spiritual intent, the modern ‘Western’ framework rather understands religion, as system of doctrine, organised within the institution of the church that is separated from the state. In late-imperial China, the realms of the ‘religious’ were thought of as a part of an ‘integrated cosmos’, encompassing heaven and earth, gods, deities and humans, the living and the dead. The cosmos was understood to contain or subsume all traditions, including Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, which made it differ greatly from any monotheistic religious concepts. Moreover, the inclusiveness of this cosmic model did not divide the sacred and profane, the natural and supernatural. Instead, everything was to be understood relationally, in the context of its place in the cosmos. This concept evidently conveys an imagined integrity which supported political ambitions of unifying China. Community cults and local ritual traditions have constituted the heart of Chinese religious life, up until the 20th century when they became subject to political attacks, as ‚superstitious‘ practices. While the time of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) saw state-wide claims on Marxist atheism and the destruction of physical evidence of previously existent religious life, post-Mao China experienced a revival of popular religions. Therefore, the issue at present is of how a contemporary sense of Chinese national identity may or may not be relatable to religious practices of an ‘integrated cosmos’, as a concept of state ideology.
While Chen calls himself a Buddhist, his works also receive inspiration from various popular Chinese religious practices, integrating elements of shamanism and exorcism, among others. As a practice that also claims inspiration from sources beyond the traditional Chinese cosmos in the above sense, however, there is very little Sinocentrism to be acknowledged in Chen’s particular approach to the religious and the spiritual. His claim for a ‘new religion’, I argue, is better understood as a claim for artistic freedom wrapped in a terminology of the archaic, mystical and magical. His work acknowledges that, even in a globalised and ‘connected’ world, religious systems keep generating enormous divisions and disunity, and speaking of civilisational or cultural clashes is actually a euphemism for clashes rooted in different religious outlooks. Chen’s notion of growing a religion then serves as metaphor, to articulate the aims of transcultural and collective artistic production, including the involvement of global audiences as ‘worshippers’, or, more contemporary, as ‘fans’. Such art making that is entangled with spiritual promises, I argue, hopes to offer an alternative to the hostile divisiveness and patronising attitudes associated with doctrine and dogma.

In a broader sense, this calling for spiritual emancipation as the purpose of life and a pre-requisite for social improvement can be said to connect Chen’s practice to Western/Euro-American movements of the 19th century, such as the Theosophists, Transcendentalists, Spiritualists and to post-war New Age and ‘Aquarian Age’ enthusiasts. With these predecessors of a wordly-oriented and even theatrical interest in spirituality, Chen and his artistic collaborators share a the craving for the occult, the magic and ‘exotic’, and especially a sense of ‘sexed flavor’ in their works. Yet, his and Asian Dope Boys’ vision is neither anti-establishmentarian nor incompatible with institutional frameworks. As the following detailed analysis of Ishvara shows, Chen and his fellows succeed in blurring the relationship between the human and the spiritual in ways that exceed categorial value judgements, while also managing to contravene propositions that circle around the notion of postmodernity, as well as postsocialist society and its ways of deliberately borrowing from various religious practices for the sake of pseudo-moral self-improvement. Unlike a millennial understanding of holistic body-concepts as self-realisation, mind-expansion and, as welcomed ‘secondary effect’, bodily attunement to a capitalistic cosmos driven by Foucauldian biopower, Chen’s performances present concepts of embodiment that are far from functioning in self-contained and controlling ways.

As Julie Chun observes in regards to Chen’s artistic practice, a shared emphasis on fulfilling a  longing for acceptance constitutes the fundamental appeal of drug culture, cult culture and institutional religion alike; "the innate desire to be absolved and absorbed into a community." Classifying Chen’s works as ‘religious’, consequently, presents them as ready-made answers to post (socialist) modern anxieties and the dwindling sense of orientation they provide for the individual. China’s recent past gives ample examples for a conflicted history of collectiveness, departing from the ideal of collectivity that had been sustained by political will only. Conceptualising possibilities of what I call a postsocialist popular in practice as well as production, Chen navigates the increasingly globalist, yet politically constrained artistic milieu of contemporary China. With life and art linked in both a poetic and professional mission, this creative trajectory opposes anxieties of ‘contamination’ that would damper on utopian dimensions of popular imaginations of collective consciousness and globalist mobility. His use of stereotypical and commodified types of Asian physiques runs parallel to acknowledging the discourse of a racially derogatory view of East Asians, that characterises historical narratives and continues to be relevant to this day. His signature aesthetic thus fuses elements of religious spheres and contemporary pop, exploring the potential of such cross-over to serve a new communal spirit.

Driven by the intention of building a crowd of like-minded followers and fans, Chen devotes  a great deal of his time reaching out to others. Constantly connecting and promoting his work, he is active on multiple social media channels. For his profile on the Chinese micro-blogging site Weibo, for example, he created a series of tattoo patterns, which he seeks to distribute widely amongst his followers. The patterns, the elements of the drawings and paintings, are all adapted from religious symbols. The distribution of visuals/images/emblems/symbols, akin to a guerrilla tactic, aims to create symbolic ties, similar to visual markers among gang members. The body becomes their carrying vehicle; those wearing the tattoos become followers of what Chen calls "his religion", articulated as "virtual modern religious experience".  One is reminded of Robert Bellah’s now classic description of what he called “Modern Religion,” in which the ability to make meaning and to find a workable synthesis resides in the individual. According to Chen, this possibility of individual choice symbolises the quest to arrive at neo-universalisms, which, in his case, while integrating existing symbolic registers, foster alternative modes of collective experience.

The Eye of ADAHA

In his works, a figure representing an all-encompassing witness appears as the ‘all seeing eye’, a universal symbol with diverse meanings ranging from the embodiment of power of governance to the eye of divine benevolence, watching over human civilisation. The eye of ‘ADAHA’ that recurs in Chen’s works, is the god, idol, superstar and centre of a newfound belief system of the same name founded by the artist – which Chen, as ’invented tradition’, calls the religion of ADAHA. The Sailor-Moon-haired goddess in transcendent pose, that Chen first created for his video Picnic, is also named ADAHA. She serves as patron to the concept. In 2021, Chen adapted her hallucinatory being into a Non-Fungible Token (NFT). As his first NFT, she went on sale at the inaugural ‘NFT Marketplace Premium Event for Contemporary   Art Auction’ on the cryptocurrency exchange platform Binance.

In terms of iconography, ADAHA can be compared with the Eye of Horus, reminiscent of the Egyptian symbol of the door to the soul. In the Osiris myth, the offering of the Eye of Horus to Osiris became the prototype of all funerary offerings and other offering rites. In  his usual universalist manner, Chen names his re-composition of the symbol after the Islamic Feast of Sacrifice, called Eid al-Adha. Further sources include the Sanskrit language, where ‘adha’ is a meditative chant or a sentence connector such as the words ‘therefore’ and ‘moreover’. In Hinduism, Shiva is referred to as the “destroyer of evil and the transformer”, depicted as having three eyes. It is said, that when the third is opened, it destroys anything it sees. The ‘third eye’, unlike the sensory eyes that are deeply contaminated by karma, is untarnished by memory. In karmic concepts, it serves as the destruction of evil and ignorance, thus transforming it into knowledge and higher consciousness. The following analysis traces this Shivaist context in Chen’s Ishvara performance.

Chen's joyous ambivalence: Carnival as a collaborative method, Trance as Goal

Chen’s works evolve around dichotomies of substance and appearance in respect to power structures. Engaging with diverse institutional practices and their spatial representations, his theatrical aesthetic comes alive in a ceremonial manner that invalidates the rules and norms of their settings. There is no question that Bakhtin’s carnivalesque spirit and the sorgenfrei-dimensions of the grotesque are vital concepts when it comes to an understanding of much of the world’s transgressive art, including in the case of Chen and ADB. Their mode of the ‘ceremonial’ equals what Bakhtin has termed the carnivalesque, in that it breaks into the ordered structures of reality, inserting "into these structures an indeterminacy, a certain semantic open-endedness, a living contract with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality." As the following analysis shows, Chen’s visual strategies are best described as consequent overdosing, evoking the absurdity of a  ‘trippyness’ that challenges any cultivated logic of the narratives that his settings are modelled after. If we, therefore, stay with the mediations of a Bakhtinian vocabulary, we can describe the morphology of Chens sites as revealing a place in which the ‘drama of the body’ can be played out – the ’drama’ of birth, coitus, death, growing, eating, drinking and evacuation. The act of such corporeality is what connects the private, individual body to a larger collective body and, according to Chen’s conviction, to the realms of ADAHA. The concepts of materialism and of ambivalence, as they are constitutive of Bakhtin's argumentation, redraw the contours of the resulting togetherness, ‘in laughter’. Temporally, in an orgiastic manner, they suspend the confrontation of the official and unofficial, the lofty and the low, the self and the other.

Inspired by contemporary urban club cultures and temple cultures alike, Chen’s performances aim to create spaces of withdrawal from the present order. Giving in to joyous anarchy, they meet both the heroic and the monumental with a symbolic resonance that subversively attacks its perversion, by forcing its system of values, first into exposure and then inversion. Authority is dismissed inside a visionary logic of bland experience where any structuring and organising concepts are teasingly withheld. Such approach should therefore be understood as social resistance, as it willingly and joyfully leaves things misunderstood. Therein, the playfulness of laughter functions as a powerful weapon, with effects commonly feared by the powerful. Taking on the principle of laughter that organises the carnival as transtemporal and universal, the following analysis shows how Chen’s works tackle myths of human collectiveness and togetherness through inverting representations of political and religious culture in both sign and body language, celebrate the impure as a liberating force and praise the artistic ‘ordo ab chaos’ as their motto.

Ultimately, Chen’s approach aims for the creation of collective trance, a state of altered consciousness that he associates with Shamanist practice. Shamans usually work in trance, assisted by spirits. They serve as mediums to the spirits; possessed by them often to a degree so "that it is understood that the spirit temporarily displaces the person and it is the spirit itself that moves and talks via the human body." Both Shamanism and Mediumism make for imprecise concepts that are not only prominent in Chinese Folk religion, but known and interpreted cross-culturally. The following case study of Ishvara demonstrates how, firstly, in their artistic negotiations of a transcendent or altered state, Chen’s works employ visual, auditory and kinesthetic means; and, secondly, how Masks and Maskings aid the experience of this ‘neo-shamanist’ vision of moving ADAHA’s spirit.