White Rabbit Gallery Stage 6 Visual Arts Case Study
He Xiangyu 何翔宇: Art and Alchemy
“I wanted to be like a magician…”
He Xiangyu Tank Project, 2011 – 201, Leather, 150 x 890 x 600 cm, image
courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Gallery
A ‘soft, deflated tank not fit for warfare.’
Painstakingly sewn by an army of women trained by the artist, the military machine is a life-size
replica of a Soviet-style tank stitched from over 400 pieces of fine Italian leather.
Artists’ Practice
The Structural Frame
The Cultural Frame
Conceptual Framework: Artist/Artwork/World
Outcomes: P7, P8, P9, H7, H8, H9
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This Case Study is focused on:
Reading and analysing extracts of art critical writing
Understanding ‘visual codes’ and iconography – applying the structural frame to understand how
artists create meanings in their works through their choices of materials and their visual language
Understanding how contemporary artists work in ways informed by globalisation and a
postindustrial marketplace, incorporating theories of visual culture
Developing art critical writing skills in analysis, interpretation and evaluation of selected artworks
Comparative writing – learning how to compare works (by the same or different artists) in order
to make inferences and deductions
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Note to teachers and students
This Case Study focuses on the practices of the artist and the critic. In the first instance, students
encounter the artworks themselves, in the gallery and/or in reproduction or online. A sequence
of learning activities begins with a discussion of selected works and video clips, followed by
examples of art writing and artist interviews, with questions. These provide information about
the artist but are also models of critical practice. Whole class and small group tasks are
suggested, with links to other artists, art movements and/or critical theories. An extended
response question, with marking guidelines, requires students to develop an argument that
demonstrates their understanding of the artist’s practice. The Case Study may be implemented
over 4 -10 hours, depending on teacher and student interests and needs.
Background
Born in 1986, He Xiangyu is a member of a new generation of conceptual artists in China using a
range of materials and techniques to articulate cultural and social concerns.
He Xiangyu began his Cola Project in 2008. For this work the artist boiled down 127 tons (60,000 bottles,
or approximately 135,000 litres) of Coca Cola over the course of a year. The material residue resulted in
a highly corrosive, pungent earth-like substance, and a black ink that Xiangyu used to make Song Dynastystyle landscape paintings. Cola Project recalls ‘earth art’ works from the 1960s by artists such as Robert
Smithson whilst also providing a commentary on the effects of western consumer culture on
contemporary China, by subjecting its products to a profound process of material transformation.
Equally ambitious in scope, He Xiangyu’s Tank Project (2011–13) is a life-size military tank made entirely
of luxury Italian leather. The work took two years to create, and was hand-sewn by an entire factory of
female needle workers, specially trained by the artist. This collapsed and deflated object suggests the
steady advancement of Western materialism in contemporary China, and highlights the interdependencies of political and economic power.
Text adapted from http://whitecube.com/exhibitions/he_xiangyu_inside_the_white_cube_2014/
He Xiangyu Tank Project (detail) 2011 – 2012, Leather, 150 x 890 x 600
cm, image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Gallery
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‘All
the effort that went into making this tank is very, very important because it is an integral part of the
project. When we finished the project I thought we had only made the outer form or appearance of a tank
but in fact, with the effort and work that went into this project, an actual tank could have been built.’
(He Xiangyu)
Teaching / Learning
This Case Study may be approached in a range of different ways, depending on the particular
interests of teachers and students. Strategies may include:
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Class and/or small group discussion of He Xiangyu and a comparison with other artists and their
working methods
Independent research or collaborative investigations
Debates or dialogues exploring He Xiangyu’s ambitious and provocative installations and his use
of surprising materials.
The creation of student blogs or websites
A: Individually, students read each of the three texts and answer the questions
before attempting the extended response.
B: In small groups students may choose to investigate:
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He Xiangyu’s material practices – how are particular works produced, and what materials and
technologies are involved in the selected works?
o Specific artworks that use global brands as image or material: Andy Warhol’s soup cans, CocaCola bottles and Brillo boxes; Wang Guangyi’s ‘Great Criticisms’ series of Political Pop paintings,
Ai Weiwei’s continuing trope of the altered Han Dynasty urn, Julian Meagher’s still life paintings,
contemporary recontextualisations of Flemish ‘Vanitas’ still life
o The relationships between works by He Xiangyu and other contemporary artists who employ
unexpected materials in their works. Students could consider:
Gao Rong, ‘The Static Eternity’ (an entire traditional Chinese house in which every aspect
is made of stitched fabric)
Shi Jindian ‘Beijing Jeep’s Shadow’, a military jeep made of wire
Lin Zhi, ‘Afraid of Water’ (a Chinese bathroom and squat toilet entirely made of mud)
Japanese artist Yuken Teruya’s shopping bags containing tiny intricate forests
Australian duos Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, and Ken and Julia Yonetani
Japanese Motoi Yamamoto and his use of salt in monumental installations
Chinese artist Cai Guo-qiang has ‘drawn’ with gunpowder and firecrackers
Zhang Huan’s ‘Buddha’ series made of ash from burned temple prayers
C: Optional extension activity. Research notions of ‘materiality’ in contemporary
art practice.
In a digital age, does the material practice of an artist still produce meaning?
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Useful References and Resources
http://artradarjournal.com/2015/11/25/chinese-conceptual-artist-he-xiangyu-interview/
http://leapleapleap.com/2012/05/he-xiangyu-the-primacy-of-process/
http://dailyserving.com/2012/03/alchemy-in-reverse-he-xiangyus-cola-project/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0AAZLbhfa4
http://www.artnet.com/galleries/white-cube/he-xiangyu-inside-the-white-cube/
http://www.whiterabbitcollection.org/
www.teachingchineseart.com
Materiality
Structural Frame
Cultural Frame
Visual
codes
Contemporary art
as an international
commodity
Practice
The artistic ‘means
of production’
Artist/Artwork
Chinese
military
history
Artist/World
globalisation
Essential Vocabulary for this Case Study
Installation
Conceptual Art
Postmodernism / Postmodernity
Post-Mao
Globalisation
Fabrication
Satire/Satirical
Materiality
High-concept
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He Xiangyu Tank Project (detail) 2011 – 2012, Leather, 150 x 890 x 600
cm, image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Gallery
With a life-size military tank made entirely of luxury Italian leather, hand crafted
by an army of artisan female needle workers, He Xiangyu challenges our
preconceptions of materials and our assumptions about art objects.
Readings and Questions
Reading #1. Introducing He Xiangyu
Artist He Xiangyu was only three years old when People’s Liberation Army tanks rolled into
Beijing on June 4 1989 to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations that had occupied the vast
spaces of Tiananmen Square, in the centre of the city, since early that year. Manned by young
and fearful recruits from far provinces, they were ‘S59’ tanks, based on the armoured vehicles
donated by the Soviet Union earlier in the 20th century. He Xiangyu spent two years making a
replica of a Chinese tank using Italian leather in place of steel, stitched with waxed thread in
place of rivets.
Today, many people of He Xiangyu’s generation do not recognize the famous photograph of a
thin white-shirted man carrying a shopping bag and standing in the path of an armoured tank, in
Tiananmen Square in 1989. Nobody knows who he was or what happened to him. Was he
executed? Imprisoned? Or has the Chinese citizen known as the ‘Tank Man’ lived an anonymous
life somewhere in China ever since? His fate remains a mystery, and the events of that time have
been shrouded in secrecy. The image of the tank has become highly sensitive in China, along with
any other reminders of the events that took place in Beijing on that June day. The artist himself
simply says that his tank is based on “the same tank that was used during sensitive incidents in
China’s recent history.” The tank, of course, is a more generalised symbol of military power and
authority, and may be interpreted in multiple ways. He Xiangyu is adept at creating a visual
language of unexpected materials and forms, in large-scale installations that reflect on the
contemporary realities of Chinese society.
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In 2008 he began a project on an industrial scale. For Cola Project he boiled 60,000 bottles, almost
135,000 litres of Coca-Cola (the amount consumed by the inhabitants of his home town each
year) down into a black coal-like sludge, smelling like a chemical by-product. He used ink mixed
with this residue to paint misty landscapes in the style of the Song Dynasty masters, thus literally,
physically overwriting the visual language of the imperial past with the globalized, corporate
present-day. Another element of this installation, two jade skeletons, were carved by artisans
skilled in this traditional craft to the exact dimensions of the artist’s own skeleton, determined
via an MRI scan. The pelvis and thigh bone of the gleaming white jade were boiled in Coca-Cola,
resulting in an alarming discoloration and corrosion. Cola Project transformed the American
product of consumer desire into something disgusting and disturbing: a reminder that the fast
pace of urbanisation and technological change may come at the cost of our consumption and
destruction of nature. The artist, who says he himself drinks cola every day, has grown up
knowing nothing other than the globalised, materialist, fast paced ‘new China’. He represents
the consumption culture which now pervades almost every corner of the globe in both a physical
and a metaphysical manner.
Tank (2011 – 2013) is a replica of the Soviet-designed armoured vehicles that became prototypes
of all subsequent armoured vehicles used by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The artist
says he found the tank used as the basis of his sculpture near an army base at the frontier
between China and North Korea. It was a ‘T34’, a Soviet tank used in World War II and given to
the Chinese, who began to copy them. He Xiangyu says his team had to sneak into the army base
in the middle of the night to measure the different parts of the tank by hand, in order to replicate
it. It took 4 months to determine all the measurements needed to produce the detailed plans
needed to create an exact simulacrum, using expensive Italian vegetable-dyed leather. It took
250 full-scale leather hides to create the outer ‘skin’ of the tank, sewn together with 50,000
meters of wax string. The finished work weighs over 2 tons.
Deflated, flattened, a parody of a fierce war machine, the tank evokes the abject failure of
military might and reminds us of the inevitability of global power struggles. It seems to have
collapsed under its own weight.
Luise Guest, 2015
Note: The T34 is actually a Soviet tank used in WW2, notably against the Germans in Operation
Barbarossa. It was well-armoured, fast, lethal, and tough. After the war, the Soviets gave China 1800
T-34-85 tanks. The Chinese started copying these and called them Type 58s.
Focus Questions
1.
2.
3.
4.
What materials, processes and procedures are used by He Xiangyu?
What can you infer about his material AND conceptual practice?
What is surprising or unusual about his practice?
Other artists (most notably Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Ai Weiwei) have used
the image of Coca-Cola’s recognisable global brand in their work. What is different about
He Xiangyu’s ‘Cola Project’?
5. Why do you think He Xiangyu chose to make ‘Tank’ from leather, and stitch it together?
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He Xiangyu Tank Project (detail) 2011 – 2012, Leather, 150 x 890 x 600 cm
Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Gallery
Reading #2. He Xiangyu: The Primacy of Process
Glossary
Maximalist. Maximalism, a reaction against minimalism, is an aesthetic of excess and
redundancy.
Parlance. A particular manner of speaking, an idiom.
Free Market Ideology. A market based on supply and demand, with little government control.
Supra-individual. Over, above or greater than the individual.
The artist He Xiangyu (born 1986) has made a quick name for himself in the contemporary art
world. His reputation, for the most part, owes itself to the scale and grandeur his work has taken
on, both uncommon for an artist his age. The huge, post-apocalyptic landscape mountains of
black crystalline residue seen in his Cola Project (2009), created by boiling and reducing 127 tons
of Coca-Cola over the course of more than one year, is a prime example of the bravado that backs
his practice, as is Wu He You Zhi Xiang (2009), a 26-ton pile of dead wood reigned in the corner
of Today Art Museum by a massive chain and anchor that threatened to cave in the gallery floor.
However, with most of He Xiangyu’s work, the end result is secondary to the processes, both
physical and psychological, that lead to its spectacular fruition.
Cola Project has been embraced by some as a critique of the invasion of Western culture into
China, of the arching domination of free-market ideologies over his young generation; indeed,
the seething, large-scale destruction by a Chinese artist of capitalism’s tastiest flag-bearer makes
such a reading difficult to resist. The critic Gao Minglu, however, offers a more insightful analysis
into He Xiangyu’s practice, marking He’s work as essentially Maximalist, or primarily dependent
on the personal relationship between the artist and the material object. He’s interaction with
Coca-Cola began with small-scale experimentation indoors in his Beijing studio, but eventually
ballooned to transcend the individual and incorporate the public. Through an extended network
of personal connections in his hometown of Dandong, Liaoning, the artist secured an entire
lumber mill and employed a team of migrant workers to carry out his vision, meanwhile
somehow persuading both local police and environmental authorities to turn a blind eye to his
otherwise suspect activities and their daily billows of pungent, toxic smoke. In the popular
parlance of Chinese contemporary art, He’s long arms transformed Cola Project into a work of
social intervention, an execution of power on supra-individual scale.
Einar Engstrom, 2012 http://leapleapleap.com/2012/05/he-xiangyu-the-primacy-of-process/
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Focus Questions
1. The writer suggests that in He Xiangyu’s work, the end result is secondary to the processes
involved in its making. What processes were used in ‘Tank’ and how do they contribute to
the meaning/s of the work?
2. Art critic Gao Minglu says that He Xiangyu’s work is “dependent on the relationship between
the artist and the material object.” After looking closely at ‘Tank’ how can you describe the
relationship between artist and artwork?
3. The writer describes ‘Cola Project’ as an act of social intervention. Do you agree? Assess the
social impact of a work such as ‘Tank’ or ‘Cola Project’ both as process and as an art product.
Reading #3. He Xiangyu’s New Directions
Adapted from ‘New Directions: He Xiangyu’ at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing,
describing a body of work in which the artist draws the feeling of his tongue inside his mouth
each day, like a diary, or a map.
Best known for sculptural works combining comedy and high concept, He Xiangyu here begins to examine
his own internal landscape, revealing an inner topography depicted in a highly sensitive painterly
language. During a brief stint in the U.S. where language barriers proved difficult to navigate, He Xiangyu
began to translate the feeling of his tongue inside his mouth into visual imagery. The act of translation,
always aimed at demystifying the subject, here only seems to further complicate it. The difficulties of
speaking a foreign language and reproducing unfamiliar sounds, the curl of the tongue that produces
“rat” as opposed to “that”, become a function of He Xiangyu’s body mapping, supplanting the oral, and
aural, by reaffirming the centrality of visual representation. Executed over the course of four years, this
presentation of Palate Project is composed of six groups of drawings using watercolor, ink, and mixed
media on paper. Identifiable anatomical structures dissolve and re-emerge, eventually evolving into
colour fields of yellow with only the slightest hints of form.
http://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/new-directions/
Focus Questions
1. How does He Xiangyu’s practice as described for ‘Palate Project’ differ from his earlier
largescale dramatic installations?
2. Each of the three readings – and each of the artist’s projects described – suggests that the
process of making the work is as important as the end result. Do you agree? Argue a case
for or against this proposition.
3. As a contemporary artist, He Xiangyu works in ways that challenge past conventions of
artmaking. He is often described as a conceptual artist. Research what this term means and
explain why He Xiangyu’s practice can be defined in this way.
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Comparative Art Criticism: An Essay
Apply your understanding of He Xiangyu’s practice to an extended argument about the nature of
contemporary practice, comparing his body of work with the practice of another selected
contemporary artist in order to arrive at your own conclusions. Your discussion must be
supported with evidence drawn from the works themselves and the ideas of other art writers.
Answer the question with reference to ‘Tank’ and ‘Cola Project’ compared with a work or works
by ONE of the following artists:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Shi Jindian
Shen Shaomin
Gao Rong
Bharti Kher
Do Ho Suh
Ken and Julia Yonetani
Plan and write an extended response to this question:
Assess how contemporary artists embed complex meanings in
their works through strategic choices of materials, techniques
and processes.
Shi Jindian
Shen Shaomin
Gao Rong
Barti Kher
Do Ho Suh
Ken and Julia Yonetani
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Marking Guidelines
Descriptor
Mark Range
o A comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the
practice of the selected artists is evident and sustained
throughout
o A sophisticated analysis and interpretation of the visual
codes, materials and techniques used by the selected
artists, demonstrating extensive knowledge and thorough
understanding of the works within their contemporary
context, informed by contemporary theories of art
o Appropriate art terminology is employed fluently and
persuasively
A
9 - 10
o A sound knowledge and understanding of the practice of
the selected artists is evident and well sustained
o A good analysis and interpretation of the visual codes,
materials and techniques used by the selected artists,
demonstrating sound knowledge and understanding of the
works within their contemporary context
o Appropriate art terminology is employed competently
B
7-8
o Some knowledge and understanding of the practice of the
selected artists is evident
o A satisfactory analysis and interpretation of some visual
codes, materials and techniques used by the selected
artists, demonstrating some knowledge and understanding
of the works in a more descriptive manner
o Some appropriate art terminology is employed more naively
C
5-6
o A limited knowledge and understanding of the practice of
the selected artists may be expressed in less coherent
ways
o A simple analysis and interpretation of some visual
codes, materials and techniques used by the selected
artists, demonstrating a developing knowledge and
understanding of the works, is applied in a descriptive or
more limited manner
o Art terminology is used in very simple ways
o A foundational understanding of artmaking practice
o Limited, poorly researched or prepared, revealing an
elementary understanding of the visual codes, materials
and techniques used the selected artists
o Little or no attempt to apply appropriate art terminology
D
3-4
E
1-2
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