The Floating Labyrinth | Exhibition review of “Hu Yun: Mount Analogue”
Written by Qiao Hongkai
They can only be confronted over and over again, with the same pain... the same regrets. — Hirsch
This exhibition challenges the conventional modes of temporal and spatial perception right from the start, (with the entrance set at the "back door" of the Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai in 1933). The linear logic and flattened exhibition space narratives—both long accepted and internalized as a form of "commonsense content"—are replaced by a counter-intuitive emotional experience, intertwined fragments of history and memory, and a vertical spatial dimension spanning three floors. The complexity of Hu Yun's work is intensified within the exhibition's complexity, transformed into a poetic knowledge montage, akin to an explosion of fireworks or a vertically "floating" labyrinth brimming with possibilities. The vertical spatial dimension not only provides a spiritual depth to the works themselves but also evokes a Foucauldian "archaeological" approach essential for understanding Hu Yun's creations: visitors navigate between different floors as if traveling through various strata of history, memory, and culture.
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The exhibition is held at the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), which originally served as the site of China's first natural history museum, (the Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai, established in 1933). Therefore, this exhibition also constitutes an interventionist historical act, with a displaced time and space that are inherent to the narrative of the exhibition from the beginning. As a "knowledge form" (l'épistémè), the museum also implies an ideology and is closely connected to imperialism and colonialism since the 19th century: the backstory of certain collections often hides a bloody history. In the works of Hu Yun, we can see how the artist documents, hollows out, and ambiguizes this colonial history. For example, in Untitled (from the narrative of a five years expedition), (which draws from a memoir documenting the ambivalent feelings of colonialists in South Sudan), certain elements of the original illustrations have been mysteriously hollowed out. These blank and absurd signs exude a sense of eeriness that is inconsistent with their apparent tranquility, like a specific and deliberately rewritten history, with the blanks in the images acting as places of selective memory loss. In the installation The Secret Garden: Reeves’s Pheasant, Hu Yun conducts a poetic study on Riverside's 19th-century explorations in China, during which he discovered a type of wild pheasant—this encapsulates an "exoticized" specter of imagination. Meanwhile, the captivity of Jin opera clips inside a wooden container, serving as a type of cultural cognition carrier, heralds the onset of a lengthy maritime drift voyage.
To a great extent, the modern museums constitute a simultaneous display of predatory collections of original native artifacts, also suggesting a knowledge categorization model tinted with notions of hegemony and chauvinism (archival science, ethnology, genealogy studies). Colonial museums have established an “authoritative monopoly” over the interpretation of knowledge and art; Hu Yun's works challenge this intangible authority. In the installation specially made for this exhibition, The Hollow-Men, a "canopy structure" made of black elastic mesh emerges from the position of the display cabinets of the 1930s natural history museum gallery. The "tree" becomes the "black specter" or the "posthumous life" (Nachleben) of the showcase. The flowing, vibrant "natural growth" presents a poetic resistance to the museum's rigid knowledge classification system. As Claire Bishop suggests in Radical Museology, there is a need for "multitemporal remapping of history and artworks... bringing the past into the present, invigorating it, and maintaining the fluidity of history, enabling its subjects to once again become agents of history."[1] This statement aptly encapsulates the essence of Hu Yun's work.
The metaphor of trees and life is also present in Hu Yun's Palm series of paintings and the work Escape Ladder. Palms are significant symbols of colonial history and exotic allure, serving as "Bilderfahrzeuge" or image vehicles that possess a historic recording function. Additionally, palm leaves have been crucial substrates for engraving Buddhist scriptures in early Buddhism. At the exhibition site, an Escape Ladder made of palm leaves connects the vertical spaces of the exhibition, seemingly inviting visitors to "escape" through various historical layers. Yet, despite our immersion in history, our fates appear to have "no escape." Fragile as the leaves are the fragile lives, manifesting their existence solely through growth.
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As Jan Assmann points out in Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (Cultural Memory), museums are a special kind of place of memory. Unlike other institutions that carry the belief in "progress" promised by modernity, museums are among the rare places that focus on relics and death, where such artifacts can gain public legitimacy (artifacts can only gain their public legitimacy within museums). The connection between museums and cemeteries is "the most terrifying, yet the most apparent connection." Any collected item upon entering a museum thus acquires its "life after death." A museum is the materialization of a "pan-temporal form" (living fossils or forms of remains). It becomes a labyrinth of memory, confronting us with those painful zones of memory, those suppressed yet ever-haunting, whispering pasts.
In this sense, as Hu Yun shatters the temporal and spatial veil with the work The Hollow-Men, he naturally extends the tendrils of art into realms of memory — both public and personal — that carry a greater emotional energy; this is also a form of “labyrinthine archaeology.” At the center of the exhibition’s labyrinth, strikingly displayed, are Hu Yun’s Journey without a Destination and Untitled, where a stereoscopic viewer on a tripod seems to provide a perspective to navigate this maze. Both pieces derive from the ambitious explorations undertaken by Clark in Northwestern China at the beginning of the last century. This expedition was abruptly halted due to the mysterious death of an Indian surveyor named Hazrat Ali from the team. His death became a seminal event that integrated emotions with the historical memory. Therefore, when we see Hu Yun in his works imitating Ali’s attire and pose, using the then-popular stereoscopic photography of exploration era to recreate moments from a century ago, the cultural memories buried under the northwestern sands are simultaneously awakened. Hu Yun collects remnants of space debris from the late 20th century in Northwestern regions, outlining an often-overlooked aspect of the modern Shaanxi-Gansu archaeological records: as centers for satellite observation and cosmic debris recovery. These remains constitute genuine "fragments of memory," which, under the exhibition hall lights, project several static, animation-like image units that oscillate between recognizability and obscurity, recycling and refining the former "cosmic ambitions" into a montage of monumental remnants.
From terrestrial explorations to celestial (space) voyages, the disturbances within the artworks enable us to abruptly "intrude" upon a specific historical moment, thereby resetting the geographical (spatiotemporal) coordinates. This can also be interpreted as a metaphor intrinsic to the title of the exhibition: a mirage-like, illusory “Mount Analogue" that connects the earth with the sky, reality with the transcendent, the knowable with the unknowable, resembling a distant, revisited vision that entices every viewer navigating through the labyrinth of memory.
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In his works, Hu Yun deliberates on the entanglement of place memory with personal emotions. The stance of the "revisitor" imbues his art with a more profound intrinsic reference. In his installation Lift with Care and the slide projection Escape (Revisit Memory 1941-2013), Hu Yun transforms the Shaanxi-Gansu region, previously a field of exploration, into a sanctuary of spiritual significance for his ancestral generation (a sacred site of revolutionary expeditions, also an 'exploration' in its own right). Artifacts like his grandfather’s suitcase, dried peony flowers, and maps, laden with the artist's personal sentiments, coalesce to form an external, physical archive that refines multiple geographical memory narratives into the soulful narrative of a living subject. As Hu Yun retraces his grandfather's past landscapes through personal travel, he assumes the role of a cartographer of memory, fabricating a complex interplay of time and place, reality and unreality, presence and absence. The blurred figures on the slides, much like genuine "ghosts" of memory, hover around moments that are on the verge of (but not yet) being forgotten by us.
"Floating" represents a spectral state of existence; these entities are not empirically real, yet they linger in our consciousness more vividly than reality itself, refusing to dissipate — as encapsulated in the title of Hu Yun's work The Unknown Clouds. In this piece, Hu Yun micro-engraves the names from a list of Chinese laborers onto grains of rice (rice being one of the few essential items that Chinese laborers would carry with them), and places 376 grains into a half porcelain cup found at an old mine site, thus creating a collective portrait of these nameless individuals. They float within history, left only with hollow names that flesh and blood can no longer fill. They have been somehow "archived" (or rendered into archives), but at the same time, they have been forgotten. The act of archiving itself paradoxically constitutes a form of forgetting. In the sound installation Wind Calls, Hu Yun invites local elders to read these names in their dialect. When visitors enter a brightly lit gallery space in the exhibit, they immediately find themselves engulfed by these fluctuating voices, as if disturbed by the wind; pricked by these ghost-like voices seemingly emanating from the void.
In the artwork Everything Is Possible in the Darkness, Hu Yun revisits various personal photographs from different periods of his grandfather's life, selecting those that correlate with significant moments. He re-photographs these images using a film camera and interrupts the development process in the darkroom, causing the images to remain perpetually enveloped in a silent, fog-like brown hue. This evokes Roland Barthes' statement that "the photograph is always invisible." These mysterious brown hues (the photosensitive coating on the surface of the photographic paper) will deepen over time, metaphorically representing the individual's destiny as it gradually retreats into obscurity, while also hinting at the ultimate fate of memory: that all memories are destined to fail, and the endpoint of all memories is oblivion. As Barthes noted, photographs are not aids to memory, but rather anti-memory, because as we continuously "revisit" these photographs, we replace our memories with these very images.
So, what exactly are we remembering? Hu Yun's work may partially respond to this question. Memory is both historical and public, as well as personal and emotional (or desirous). As we continually attempt to revisit the painful zones of memory, we are effectively salvaging fragments of life from history—essentially, attempting to climb what might be regarded as an alluring yet rejecting "Mount Analogue." Hu Yun's art installations present various labyrinths of memory (with the exhibition space itself seemingly designed to mimic a labyrinth), encompassing incidents from recent colonial history, explorations buried in the dust of the Northwest, nameless entities like floating clouds, as well as palm leaves, photographs, maps, and suitcases. Like multiple ghosts floating around the exhibition, these elements repeatedly become lost in history, yet continually convey a doomed desire: the desire to remember and be remembered.
Those people or events floating in our memories are never truly distant (even if they may eventually vanish into an empty future), they merely temporarily fade into the depths of a silent labyrinth, waiting for us to revisit them. Each revisit signifies a form of farewell. "They cannot be redeemed through irony, insight, or understanding. They can only be confronted over and over again, with the same pain, the same incomprehension, the same distortion in observation, the same regret."
[1] Bishop. Radical Museology[M]. Koenig Books, 2013: 56.
[2] Sloterdijk. The Aesthetic Imperative: Writings on Art[M]. Karen Margolis trans. Polity Press, 2017: 227.
[3] Hirsch. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust[M]. Columbia University Press, 2012: 120.
