A Story of Ruins is a great contribution to the understanding of visual articulations of remembrance and nostalgia in Chinese visual art, a subfield that gained momentum with the recurrent presence of demolition and debris in Chinese contemporary art. As Wu Hung's pioneering efforts (as curator, scholar and critic) evidence, the subject offers some conceptual difficulties, the major being how should ruination be situated in relation to an aesthetic tradition that allegedly had not indulged in ruins, either for the material (preference for ephemeral timber structures) or the symbolic (perceived continuity of history/culture) conditions of Chinese art.
The present book engages with these and many other issues by bringing together previously scattered writings by the author and further original research. Scholars of Chinese studies and art will find numerous, and often uncharted, illuminating examples and conceptual frameworks, and will enjoy Wu's capacity to draw connections and single out specific responses to remembrance. Whereas the brief contextualization and multiple images punctuating the text aid the navigation and enjoyment of a general readership, scholars from other disciplines and areas will surely take part in the global dialogue proposed by Wu, and the potential lines of research opened by the book (for example, are there similarities between the qiu that covers/signals a tomb and Middle Eastern tells?)
Expanding from the title, Wu Hung works towards a double aim. A first conceptual engagement is with the term “ruins,” for which Wu provides an alternative conceptualization “beyond a conventional pictorial or illustrative mode” (p. 19). Chapter one uncovers visual articulations in ancient painting of huaigu (“reflections on the past”) sentiment around visual tropes like qiu 丘, xu 墟, or ji 迹, and underscores parallelisms between practices like stele rubbing, pilgrimages and antiquarianism, and the European ruin tradition. By setting apart representations of monuments like steles (undamaged indexes of abstract, ontological history) from withered and half-torn trees (ku shu) that display “a sense of natural decay, death and rebirth” (p. 40), Wu productively and with great insight unpacks multiple vectors of meaning around ruins and their paradoxical nature – to preserve the unpreserved. Connecting with Buddhism and scholarly citations, the book achieves to open a space for ruins away from Christian eschatology and European mimetic tradition.
As for the second purpose of the book, occupying chapters two and three, Wu traces the story of the introduction of European ruin imagery in China, starting at the moment when Chinese art “ceased to be a self-contained cultural system and was brought into a global circulation of images, mediums and visual technology” (p. 95). According to the author, photography and realist painting turned ancient modes of huaigu into “physical and representational” ones (p. 112). The itinerary spans from the picturesque drawings of William Alexander during the Macartney embassy to anti-Japanese ruins of artists like Gao Jianfu in chapter two, and journeys along the 20th century to examine, in the last chapter, the most recent representations of demolition in contemporary artists. “The Birth of Ruins” in China, as chapter two is unambiguously titled, is described as a process of internalization that achieved great artistic productivity in the 1980s, when ruins were claimed as a powerful symbol by artists of the Stars group and poets around the magazine Jintian, and also at the turn of the century, when avant-garde artists produced fascinating responses to the alienation ensuing from widespread urban renovation.
The main weakness of the book has to do with its methodological structure: if Chinese artists, from ancient times up to Shitao, commanded an array of conceptual and visual resources to evoke times passed, these should have featured in the tale of how Chinese artists received, negotiated and appropriated Western ruin images. Instead, Wu fails to address the possible continuities of ancient, local concepts and practices in modern artworks, and offers an exclusively foreign genealogy for modern ruins, even though the book is filled with works that seemingly echo, across centuries, visual tropes like the “living ruins” of withered trees, or the human embodiment of ruination. His story, while it gestures towards the transnational negotiation of meaning via Lydia Liu's “super-signs,” understands modernity as the tabula rasa of Western imperialism, with the result that it replicates impact-response paradigms, qualified by contemporary historiography, which belittle China's role as a passive reaction and foreclose other possible previous influences (such as Jesuit missionaries).
This long-expected contribution expands Wu's ground-breaking research and will surely become a reference; and yet, an understanding of modern Chinese ruins beyond narratives of national allegory remains open to explore. For all the untrodden paths opened by this outstanding book, and the growing presence of avant-garde Chinese art in international art circuits and markets, Chinese contemporary aesthetics of demolition, with its emphasis on subjective perspectives and stories, asks to be grounded in vernacular practices, experiences and perceptions. This is not the challenge for Chinese ruins alone: as cultural geographer Bradley L. Garret noted about a recently published edited volume on ruins and modernity, research on ruins needs to move beyond visuality and recognize “ruins as places of play, promise, activism, unregulated participation, unexpected memory, and encounters with the uncanny and the sensual” (Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2011, volume 2). A Story of Ruins provides invaluable materials and a crucial historical awareness to solidly furnish future research of ruins, in China and elsewhere.
