Place of production: Changchun, China

Place of storage and use: Shenyang, China

Type of compartment: YZ22 hard-seat

Year of design: 1958

Period of production: 1960-1983

Number produced: 1002

Number of passengers: 118

Maximum speed: 120 km/h

Weight: 42.5 tons

Size: 24.5 m (L) x 3.2 m (W) x 4.5 m (H)

Color: green and white

Media equipment: 24 projectors, 24 DVD players, 24        sound speakers, 12 CD players

Methods of transport: Ship + truck, in four containers

Duration of transport, Shenyang to Basel: 30+ days

Number of workers involved: 17

Length of time required for on-site build-up: 7 days

 

 

 

 

 

A weathered, green train car—typical of the ubiquitous vehicles that traversed China’s railways throughout the latter half of the twentieth century—sits motionless on the concrete floor. The room is dark, but flickering lights emanate from the windows of the train. The visitor is drawn to the entrance at the rear of the car, and finds the interior immaculately clean, but is nevertheless overwhelmed by the physically uncomfortable exaggeration of a genuine train ride. The window over each of the twenty-four seating compartments has been replaced with a projection screen, and as many unique video loops continuously illuminate the windows. Some of the footage comes from historical archival documentation of the bloodiest and most brutal moments of the past century of East Asian history; some appears to come from World War II- and Cultural Revolution-era propaganda footage; some mimics contemporary footage of the view from a train window; some recalls the artist’s own serial ink painting with hand drawn animations of maps and diagrams. At the same time, twelve audio loops cycle through the public announcement system, entirely out of sync with the synthetic scenery projected onto the windows. Some of the music might be traditional folk songs, while other tracks seem like experimental sound art.

 

Confronted by this excess of sensory experience, the viewer is suddenly struck by the realization that she is, indeed, staring into amnesia. Via video editing techniques, the images with which she is inundated have been stripped of all context. They have been torn from history, removed from their original narratives, and presented as isolated instances of violence and memory. At the same time, they have also been released from their filmic origin, having been rearranged into new sequences and stripped of all sound. The figurative images and abstract soundtrack are forced into conflict, erasing the false logic of progress and certainty. The time and space behind the historical phantasmagoria playing across the windows have vanished, both violently and silently. Origin disappears, along with the ability to make sense of these images by circumscribing their flattened landscapes and inserting their characters into a definable and recognizable semiotic position.

 

Through this project, Qiu Anxiong interrogates the relationship between past, present, and future on a cultural matrix that is at once both spatial and temporal, questioning the roles of memory and imagination in our perceptions of the passage of time. Particular images within the train interact with others unpredictably, further reinforcing the subjective nature of memory and questioning this phenomenology of experience. When the sound tracks are also taken into account, this audiovisual experience seems to simultaneously create and reject an imagined history. All of these images, like the physical environment in which they are installed, have been absorbed into the collective memory of several generations—some who directly experienced these historical events, and some who have only read about them in history textbooks. Authenticity, however, is rejected by the cleansing of amnesia: this tangible archive of affect releases its surplus and empties into a vacuum at the far end of the train. When facing this black hole of imagined memory, the role of the viewer is that of the contemporary subject: to untangle the various strands of life and layers of signification, to trace them back to a nonexistent origin, to separate the modern from the historical, the fantastic from the lived, the vanished from the new.

 

Originally entitled Memory for Forgetting, the piece forces its audience to remember—or to invent a forged memory—just to forget it, to reject it, to deconstruct its ephemeral presence by making it physical and leaving it behind. It might not be too much of a stretch to call the work China’s definitive dialogue with the Euro-American tradition of relational aesthetics, forcing viewers into a vigorous struggle with their own memories, with the mediated images with which they have been inundated, and finally wit h each other. Far from mimicking the projects Bourriaud describes under this theoretical rubric, however, Qiu Anxiong seems to be working in a rather different intellectual strain: that paradox of continental philosophy known affectionately as religion without religion. It seems strangely appropriate, as China has itself been caught in the grips of a series of secular or quasi-secular religions and anti-religions for a sizable portion of its own history; perhaps the lessons of post-Christian Europe are more applicable in confronting Chinese history are more viable than might be readily assumed.

 

Jacques Derrida writes often of “the gift of death” and its relationally necessary counterpart “the work of mourning.” These two positions are not separated into a subject-object dichotomy, but rather rest on the same plane of active passivity. In both cases, the task is that of moving on; not of lingering over the body of the dead—here manifested as the image, transformed into light and refracted via the medium of celluloid memory—but of leaving corporeality behind. This is a fundamentally religious perspective; the moment of secular religion appears only when nothing exists beyond this ephemerality. The work of mourning, then, is letting go of a pressing nostalgia for a nonexistent origin, which requires a letting go of language. In Staring into Amnesia, Qiu Anxiong has already completed this first step: he destroys the linear logic of language, of the textual sign, and instead replaces it with the twisted semiotic renderings of filmic code. This translation does not, of course, eliminate language, but it does prepare the viewer to complete her own task—that of recognizing the impossibility of entrusting memory to narrative.

 

If Derrida supplies a framework through which the piece might be read, it is Michel de Certeau who offers a conceptually interesting non-resolution. In his essay “The Weakness of Believing,” the philosopher writes: “…the ‘follow me’ comes from a voice which has been effaced, forever irrecoverable.” Although he intends to refer the the Christian impetus towards blind faith, his words are unintentionally provocative in the context of Chinese collective memory. Moreover, his analysis of the origins of belief is even more prescient. Certeau defined the signifying event of faith not as death or resurrection, but rather as the empty tomb. This “signifying event,” which corresponds to the event-based historical narrative demolished by Qiu Anxiong’s video projections, might better be translated into this theoretical space as a simple turning point, or perhaps even as a moment of slippage. This moment, in which the work of theological deconstruction occurs, is a turn from mourning to emptiness; from belief in the call of language to recognition of the specters of imagination.

 

After confronting the black hole at the far end of the train—the blank wall that signified all that is lost and all that is gained by the rejection of imagined experienced and the cleansing of memory—the viewer steps back into the prosaic space of the exhibition hall. She refuses to look back. That which is left behind remains behind. The empty tomb cannot recover any value as a source of belief without affirming its very origin as emptiness—and an empty origin, of course, is no origin at all. The train is empty. Those who utilized its potential for motion have themselves passed on, from corporeality into the play of light that flickers along the interior walls of the train car. Their voices have been followed along the narrow passageway through the middle of the compartment, but they themselves are absent. Nothing remains to be seen. The tomb is empty.

 

 

一節綠色的、老舊的火車車廂,靜靜地停在展廳的水泥地面上——這樣的火車在上個世紀的最后50年里曾縱橫中國大陸。展廳很暗，從火車車窗中透出斑駁的燈光。步入車廂，觀眾會看到打掃得非常潔凈的車廂內部，但即使這樣，這件裝置所帶來的被放大的火車旅行感還是給觀眾帶來一種不舒服的感覺。間隔火車空間的二十四扇車窗被當作了投影儀的屏幕，每個屏幕上不間斷地循環播放著各自的影像。有些影像來自于上個世紀發生在東亞大陸上那些血腥的、最殘忍的歷史檔案紀錄片，有些影像內容看上去來自第二次世界大戰和文化大革命時期，有些影像模仿了現在火車旅行時人們能從車窗中看到的風景，還有一些影像是由藝術家手繪的地圖與圖表組成的動畫。與這些“人造的風景”影像同步的，是由12套音頻設備循環播放著的音樂。有些也許是古老的民歌，有些則是實驗音樂。

 

《前塵——新大陸架的沉降》是一件被賦予了過剩的感覺經驗的作品，觀眾會猛地被作品呈現的內容所打動。通過技術編輯，圖像被從原有的文本關系中釋放出來。這些圖像從歷史里跳出來，脫離了原本對它們所進行的敘述，被孤立地當作為暴力與記憶所舉的例證。同時，它們也脫離了原本的紀錄片，圖像被重新剪輯，并且去掉了聲音。有形的圖像與抽象化的音樂之間的沖突，抵消掉了錯誤邏輯所帶來的假象，無論激動或是靜默，車窗上上演的這些影像的時間與空間的歷史背景消失了。隨著其起源的消失，通過認識其特征，并將此特征置入到一個可被辨識的符號學位置，從而去感受圖像的能力也消失了。

 

通過《前塵——新大陸架的沉降》這一方案，邱黯雄審視了“過去”、“現在”、“未來”三者在歷史性的文化意味中的關系，以此質詢當我們的感知穿越時間隧道時，“記憶”與“想象”所扮演的角色。火車內部這種獨特的情景與每扇車窗上不可預知的、沒有邏輯的不同的影像相結合，更進一步加強了主觀記憶及對經驗現象的質疑。當還有同步播放的聲音介入這一感知時，這一視聽體驗似乎是要同時創造與否認一部想象的歷史。所有的這些圖像，就像它們現在棲身的環境那樣，已經成為了幾代人的集體記憶——有些人親身經歷過上述的歷史事件，有些人則只是從歷史書中得到這些記憶。的確，無論怎樣這些圖像是不能被忘卻的，這些切實存在的檔案將它所含有的過剩情感釋放到火車盡頭黑暗的真空中。面對想象記憶的黑洞，觀眾所扮演的角色是在當代主題下，解開纏繞于生命的繁復線索及不同層面的含義，回溯到一個不存在的本源，將現代與歷史、幻想與現實、已消失的與新生的區分開來。

 

作品最初被命名為《為了忘卻的記憶》，是因為作品要求觀眾去想起，或者也可以說是去臆想出一段被遺忘的記憶——這樣做的目的只是為了忘記它，通過將之物化并棄之于身后，去解構它短暫的存在。不過分地說，這也許是中國當代最貼近歐美傳統“關系美學”的一件作品。它使觀眾與他們的記憶展開抗爭，與將他們淹沒其中的動畫影像展開抗爭，直至最后彼此之間展開抗爭。歐洲哲學體系中，悖論被當作一種不是宗教的“宗教”去崇尚，邱黯雄非但沒有模仿尼古拉斯·波瑞奧德(Nicolas Bourriaud)在其理論體系下的描述，反而是在用一種完全不同的智力應變的方式進行創作。用這一理論來解釋此作品似乎是奇怪但又適當的，介于中國文化自身即長期存在這樣一種模式——被推崇一些準宗教式的信仰與反宗教這雙重特征所控制。或許歐洲后基督教時代的范例更適合注釋這樣的中國歷史。

雅克·德里達(Jacques Derrida) 的理論中經常出現 “死亡之禮”這一說法及與必要對應的理論“悲慟的力量”。這兩個命題不是將之分成“主語”與“對象”，而是被共同放置在“積極的被動”這一層面。對雙方來說，任務不是因為死亡而使生命停滯不前，而是應該努力向前，積極面對——就像這件作品的圖像所證明的，通過影像記載的模糊記憶，換一個角度審視歷史，而不是超越其具象的存在。這是一種基本的宗教觀，只能當認識到死亡的本質時，并非宗教的哲學觀信仰才會出現。于是，悲慟所扮演的角色，即是去釋放一種沒有緣由的壓抑之情，這需要脫離語言的層面。在《前塵——新大陸架的沉降》中，邱黯雄已經完成了第一步：他摧毀了語言、文本符號的線性邏輯，取而代之的是復雜、交錯的電影語言與符號。這就準備了讓觀眾去完成他們自己的任務——承認轉述記憶的不可能性。

 

德里達給出一個理論框架可以用來解釋這件作品，米歇爾· 德·塞圖（Michel De Certeau）提出的概念化“非解決”理論也能詮釋出此作品的含義。 在塞圖的文章《信仰的弱點》中，這位哲學家寫道：“‘跟著我’來自一種被打破的、無法拯救的聲音。”盡管他個人想要提出的是基督教推動了盲目崇拜，但他的理論也無意中觸動到了中國人的集體記憶。他關于信仰起源這一論題的分析也是十分帶有預見性的。塞圖并不是將信仰這一“有意味”的事定義為死亡或者重生，而是一座“空的墳墓”（耶穌死后3天復活，這里所指的既是他的墳墓）。“有意味” 的事對應的是以事件為基礎的歷史敘述，它被邱黯雄的這部影像新作推翻，也許更好地說法是將這一理論空間轉化為一個簡單的轉折點，或者一個“開始發生變化的瞬間”。這是一種從悲慟到虛空、從對語言召喚的信仰到承認對想象的恐懼的轉化。

 

面對一直通向車廂盡頭的黑洞，觀眾退回到展廳的平地上，空白的四壁消失了，取代它們的是投影在車窗上的想象的歷史與觀眾自身記憶的被清空。不回頭看已經過去并且仍留在那里的過去，除了斷定它起源自虛空，一種虛空的起源外，這座空的墳墓不能重新獲得作為一種信仰源泉的任何價值。曾經乘坐過這輛火車的人也許已經不在了，成為了投影光束中的點點斑駁。他們的聲音沿著狹窄的車廂穿過火車，但他們本身不在這里。這里看不到歷史的痕跡，沒有什么留在這座“空墓”中。