Even after nearly two decades, Xiao Lu can recall vividly the New Year's Eve of 1989, when she drew worldwide attention.
Although she does not remember whether she was nervous or excited that morning, she is sure that the night before she was sleepless, "thinking hard whether I should do it or not".
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Xiao Lu, pictured with her 2006 installation artwork Sperms, shot to notoriety, literally, in 1989. [China Daily] |
At dawn, the decision was made.
At about 11 am on Feb 5, 1989, Xiao met with her friend Li Songsong in the corridor outside the west wing of the National Gallery of Fine Arts (now called the National Art Museum of China).
"You got the pistol?" Xiao asked eagerly.
"Yeah!" Li replied, taking out the pistol. He eased its bolt and then handed it to Xiao.
"Loaded with three bullets," said the young painter Li, who had sneaked out his revolutionary grandma's war trophy of the 1940s.
"Okay," said Xiao, grabbing the pistol, her palm sweating and her face flushed.
The national gallery was packed with visitors. The first ever China/Avant-Garde Exhibition had just opened.
The works on display by 186 artists included paintings, installations, performance art, photographs and videos, challenging the conventional, Socialist Realism approach to art.
At the exhibition halls, an artist was touting prawns; another was sitting amid chicken eggs; and yet another was giving away condoms.
Some were crawling on their hands and feet on the open ground in front of the national gallery, which was covered with a black cloth with "No U-turn" traffic signs painted on it.
"The atmosphere at the exhibition was weird but electrifying," Xiao recalled.
The pistol hidden in her pocket, Xiao took a deep breath and hurried into the First Exhibition Hall on the ground floor of the national gallery.
She raised her hand and fired the first shot - "Bang!"
"One more!" shouted Tang Song, a young artist who had come up beside her at that very moment, along with two cameramen.
Xiao pulled the trigger again - "Bang!"
Both gunshots ripped into a mirrored installation work entitled Dialogue, made by Xiao a year earlier. In the broken mirror, she saw her own face and eyes, distorted.
The sudden gunshots shocked the artists and visitors around. The exhibition was immediately thrown into chaos.
An act of rebellion?
The local authorities reacted as if attacked. In minutes, police officers swarmed into the museum and it was evacuated. The exhibition halls were sealed off.
The show, the country's first government-sponsored exhibition of experimental art, was shut down for days.
Why Xiao did what she did is not immediately clear, but that did not matter. "She has ignited a symbolic explosion," said critics.
The Western media sniffed a good story. The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France Presse, and United Press International immediately reported the news; The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor and most major European newspapers also reported on Xiao's performance.
Leading Chinese media also reported the story and Xiao's installation and performance provoked the strongest ever public and media reaction. She was an overnight star.
Some critics saw Xiao's Dialogue as reflecting the contradictions and obstacles to dialogue between individuals, and between society and art, as perceived by a sensitive artist confronting rapid modernization and its consequences in the 1980s.
Some said Xiao was challenging the boundary of art freedom and liberty in an opening and fast-changing society.
Some others viewed her work as an answer to the curtain call of the 1985 New Wave Vanguard Art Movement.
Some even said the significance of Dialgue went beyond the initial judgments of most people, including the artist herself.
Whatever the truth, Xiao made the history books.
Personally motivated?
"For me, the shooting simply gave the final touch to my installation, offering me an outlet for my pent-up emotions," says Xiao, a new graduate of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Fine Arts) in 1989.
A decade after the economy's opening-up and reform, "Chinese society, on the whole, was still isolated, underdeveloped and culturally starved."
Like other young artists of that time, Xiao was experimenting with new media and new techniques to express personal feelings and new artistic concepts.
"A decade earlier, many people had suffered in love. Therefore, my parents often warned me not to be vulnerable to such feelings," says Xiao, who however, carried many emotional scars.
She sought an outlet in art for her wounds.
In late 1988, Zheng Shengtian, one of Xiao's teachers, advised her to do an installation work, breaking away from the traditional genre of oil painting.
After graduating from the Oil Painting Department, Xiao put together her first installation work entitled Dialogue.
It featured a young man and young woman - both in student uniforms - making calls at two telephone kiosks.
In the middle, a red telephone sat against a mirror on a table, with its mouthpiece dangling in the air, probably suggesting "a dialogue interrupted".
Finding the installation "too clean, too beautiful, and too conventional", Song Jianmin, another teacher, advised Xiao to "add a destructive factor to it".
They even discussed using a catapult or air rifle to achieve the desired visual effect.
After failing to find a gun, Xiao temporarily dropped her plans, leaving her work unfinished.
Then, she was invited to participate in the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition.
"The shooting at the National Gallery was meant to release my feelings of depression. Everything changed after those gunshots," she says.
Love amid the chaos
"I was shocked and realized I had put myself and my friends in big trouble.
"I wasn't thinking about breaking the law. I just acted instinctively."
Soon after the second gunshot, police came up and took away Tang Song.
Xiao fled the scene but turned herself in four hours later.
In the corridor of the Dongcheng District Detention Center, Xiao met Tang Song who was walking out of another interrogation room.
Tang nodded and smiled at Xiao, before leaving with the police.
"His smile struck me. At that moment, I felt drawn to him," Xiao says.
Xiao and Tang were released three days later.
On Feb 10 - five days after the shooting - the exhibition re-opened, attracting even more people. The media sought out Xiao and Tang, but for the most part, Xiao kept quiet.
"I did not know how to explain my work to the public. I was afraid of exposing my personal feelings," she says.
"But Tang acted as a spokesperson for my work using words such as modernity, politics, law, strategy, and plan, which I did not see as relevant to my work."
However, blinded by love, she did not have the heart to speak out.
That night, Xiao and Tang became lovers and the following day, the pair fled Beijing.
In December 1989, they moved to Australia where they lived for 15 years, vanishing from the Chinese art scene.
In 2003, Xiao broke her silence and announced, to the disappointment of many, that the original motivation behind the installation and performance art "was simply the virginal harm" she had suffered in the mid-1980s.
A 'random work'
Xiao says the shooting incident was misinterpreted.
"My work, combining installation and performance, was not planned beforehand to attract social attention. Rather, it was a random work."
It was a stroke of luck that she got a pistol that let her give the final touch to her work, she claims.
And it was by sheer accident that the gunshots occurred at the National Art Museum of China.
At that time, Chinese artists did not know about publicity and media exposure, she says. "Our work was driven by passion."
Nonetheless, that passion had unintended results.
For one thing, experimental art had been out of mainstream art exhibitions for quite a long time.
It was not until the late 1990s that such art resurfaced, particularly with the emergence of such hotspots as the 798 Factory, Caochangdi, Songzhuang, Suojiacun and Dongying art zones in Beijing.
"Seeing its historical value, people have been attaching increasing attention to the (shooting) incident. It has been reinterpreted again and again," Xiao says.
"The others (artists) all had a strong sense of history, politics and mission, but I was perplexed by my own petty emotions. I felt this was my world," says Xiao.
In 2004, Xiao created a photo series entitled 15 Gunshots: From 1989-2003, "to say goodbye to my youthful years" and probably also to her boyfriend of 15 years, Tang.
In 2006, Xiao re-worked her 2004 piece, adding the 16th shot to it.
"When in love, a woman can easily lose her mind. Now I live alone and I really enjoy this," Xiao says.
But she refuses to call herself a feminist.
"I am not career-oriented. I am a very traditional woman, although I've found no security in love," Xiao says.
"I have always wanted to have a baby. So far, I have failed to fulfill my wish, the biggest wish in my life."
In 2007, she opened an art studio in Dongying Art Zone in Northeast Beijing.
"Life has to turn a new page," she says.
(China Daily October 14, 2008)
