In 2010, Ou Ning exhibited the notebook Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia .1 The notebook presents basic ideas and structures for the Bishan Commune, a utopian ideal of an alternative way of life far away from Chinese society and authorities. The notebook displayed Ou Ningās research into alternative communities, anarchism and the Chinese historical Rural Reconstruction Movement (RRM ) of the 1930s. In 2011 Ou Ning and his colleague Zuo Jing began the work to establish the Bishan Commune in a village in rural China. The main questions of this book thus revolve around how an anarchist, utopian community unfolds to the backdrop of the political, social and historical landscape of rural China. Or more directly: How do you start your own utopia in the Chinese countryside?
This book presents research into the lifecycle of the Bishan Commune as it was imagined and as it unfolded in Bishan Village; from the beginning of the project, with the creation of the notebook in 2010, to the establishment of the commune in Bishan Village in 2011, on to Ou Ningās move to Bishan together with his family in 2013, to the closure of the Bishan Commune project by the Chinese authorities in early 2016 and again on to Bishan Village after the departure of Ou Ning, with Zuo Jing maintaining his commercial activities in the village.2 These periods of Bishan Commune reveal five different, but not strictly demarcated, phases of the project and offer ways in which to understand how urban artists engage in opposition to and negotiate and cooperate with the Chinese authorities as well as with the local villagers.
The Bishan Project, the name by which it has primarily been known,3 had its headquarters in Ou Ningās house, a large Hui-style compound he named Buffalo Institute (ēé¢). The Institute has served as a hub for arriving visitors, including artists, intellectuals and activists from near and far who came and stayed for varying periods of time. For the first couple of years, the primary activities unfolded around the Bishan Harvestival,4 a yearly large-scale art festival that invited artists and activists from all over the world and attracted large numbers of visitors of all kinds. Later, in 2013, when Ou Ning moved to the village together with his family, another kind of work beganāwork that focused on dialogue and collaboration with the villagers through activities such as reading groups, smaller exhibitions, researcher-in-residence programs, concerts, publication of magazines, preservation of local handicrafts traditions, a community supported agriculture (CSA ) project and much more. Many of these activities took place at the Bishan Bookstore (ē¢§å±±ä¹¦å±), opened by Ou Ningās long-time friend Qian Xiaohua the spring of 2014,5 or later at the School of Tillers (ēåé¦), a gallery, library and education space opened by Ou Ning the spring of 2015 in the house adjacent to the Buffalo Institute.6
Early texts and interviews with Ou Ning reveal that the Bishan Commune was conceived by the initiator as an extra-governmental, extra-system activity, simply providing an alternative to the existing order (0086 Magazine 2015 [2010], 15), whereas later texts lay out a re-evaluation and restructuring of these views and focus more on the Bishan Project as interconnected with surrounding society and the need for the Bishan Project to respond to the necessity of economic development for the local residents and authorities (Ou 2012a, 104ā105). It is, of course, not surprising that the project changes when utopian ideals meet the ever-so demanding reality, so what I am interested in is not that it changes, but how and why it changes, thus exploring the Bishan Commune as a practical example of what happens when urban artists and activists engage in practice in the face of power and people in rural China. This study provides an analysis of the six years that the Bishan Project existed (2010ā2016) and its endeavors to transform Chinese society starting from a rural village; an unstable trajectory of cooperation, negotiation, misunderstandings, opposition, control, co-existence and (im)possibilities. Furthermore, this book examines how artists and intellectuals alike bring utopian imaginaries of the future developed in urban centers to the countryside. It traces the transformation of urban-based artists and intellectuals into socially engaged artists in rural China and unfolds what occurs when processes of art and social engagement are introduced into a specific village and how this affects local officials, villagers and artists in dissimilar ways.
Closing Down
In February 2016, as I was preparing to leave for Bishan for a research trip, I received an e-mail from Ou Ning, telling me that the Bishan Project had been shut down, that he and his wife and children had had to leave the village with a few daysā notice, furthermore urging me not to visit Bishan in the near future until things had settled down a bit. The closure came as unexpectedly to me as to other observers,7 though Ou Ning mentioned in the e-mail that the relationship with the local authorities had been particularly strained the last couple of months. The project has in its relationship to the local authorities gone through phases of a better or worse relationship, but Ou Ning had managed to pull through despite this. While it is perhaps not surprising that the local authorities were not in favor of housing an anarchist community of artists, this book shows the willingness on behalf of Ou Ning and others engaged in the project to compromise their goals in order for the project to proceed altogether. Whether compromise is a viable route to take in the larger picture is of course another discussion. Despite the compromises, the authorities were not satisfied.
The closure in itself inevitably casts a different light on the entire project as well as the findings of this book. What I thought was the story of compromise, dialogue and negotiations, instead became yet another addition to the long story of the oppressive censorship regime of an authoritarian government, whether or not the decision to close the project was spurred by ideological or economic concerns, or decided by the local or the central government. The closure added a layer of that indeterminable fabric called censorship and once again made the all-encompassing power of the CCP very visible. The Bishan Commune is history (for) now and remains as yet another contribution to the bulking literature on anarcho-communist rural utopias that flourished, died out and wandered into the imaginary of other worlds and ways to be.8
Despite the closure of the Bishan Project, its trajectory can reveal important insights into the workings of a socially engaged art project trying to manifest itself in rural China. This book spans a variety of methods and approaches in the venture to answer the questions to which this research has given rise. The basic questions have been: what is the Bishan Commune and how did it (manage to) unfold in the Chinese countryside? Of course, these questions spur a string of other questions such as: what constitutes the thinking of Ou Ning and his position in the project? What are the larger Chinese and international contexts of Ou Ningās thinking? What does community mean within the boundaries of the utopian Bishan Commune, or how does its utopian propositions unfold in the reality of a Chinese village with the political landscape that entails? And once we enter the village, how do the villagers and local authorities perceive the project? How does this triangular (and dialectical) relationship affect the project? In short, how has the project evolved, changed and accommodated to claims and wishes from a variety of agents? And then, how can this be understood in the broader light of socially engaged art practices in rural China? Are socially engaged art projects, understood in the United States and Europe as political and critical projects aimed at social change, possible in in a place like rural China, which is constrained by party control? And if so, on what terms are they possible? In other words: how do artists practice in the face of power in rural China? And do they themselves become powerful? The description of the structure of the book towards the end of the introduction will add nuance and depth to these questions as each chapter deals with specific phases and aspects of the Bishan Project. For now, I will provide a bit more information to guide the reader along into the world of Bishan.
Extradisciplinary Investigations
I will explain the concept of socially engaged art in detail in Chap. 2, but for the reader unfamiliar with the terminology of v...