Shiyi Sheng

Transposing notes on the work of Shiyi Sheng by Thomas Zummer

…of the body (impressions)

The recognition of the body’s inscription into artistic practice as both subject and site is a commonplace of our modernity, and the attendant reflexive philosophical elaboration of corporeality is a perennial complement. The complicities and predations between center and periphery, inside and outside, between the places, limits and extent of bodies, is so ubiquitous, and mediated, as to be almost invisible, so much so that it is often only at the margins of this circulatory system that our corporealities are rendered visible and sensible, framed in a manner that catches our gaze, and allows us to see through the reflexes and habits of an increasingly regulated specularity1. It is in this permeable and intercessionary space that we re-cognize and re-engage the body, where the body becomes an inter(sur)face where aesthetics, ethics, and technics intersect and transpose. We are so familiar with ourselves, so secure in our embodiments, in what we presume ourselves to be, that we readily forget how strange, wonderful, and terrifying those territories are which lie just beyond the artifactuality of identity.

It is this space, what we might call the commonplace of photography and cinematography—its tacit visual habitus—that Sheng Shiyi situates her work. Here, she tampers with convention, teasing both form and reception, opening hitherto unsuspected spaces of the image. And with a beguiling simplicity she traces some of the more surprising and unexpected referential trailings in the conventional frameworks of viewing. In a recent short video piece entitled Allergie culturelle Shiyi uses a matchstick to make a ‘drawing’ on the hypersensitive skin of Chinese man. The impression of the matchstick on the surface of his skin raises a welt, marking the trajectory of the matchstick with a raised swelling. The man’s skin turns a bright red, and the tracery of lines fades after approximately three hours. This man had been told that his condition is an allergenic reaction to a foreign environment (having grown up in China, he has lived in France for almost fifteen years). Shiyi uses the subtle interplay of surfaces—of skin, the surface of a body, which is the common visual surface inscribed onto film—as an enabling metaphor to tease out relations between foreignness, memory, performance, technics and the body. In the first performance, Shiyi had drawn a “French plane tree,” which is commonly thought to have originated in France. In fact, it is a type of tree native to China that was exported, mainly to France. Shiyi then asked several other foreign students to execute a drawing, one which would be suitably representative of their home, on the man’s skin. A range of drawings from Finnish, Canadian, Japanese, Swiss, Columbian and Chinese students are accomplished o the malleable surface of the man’s back. Ranging from schematic to intimate to symbolic, all of the drawings slowly fade away. Are they absorbed? Consumed? Rejected? In a sense it is impossible—and unnecessary—to determine, since the metaphors of impression, physical, cultural, conceptual, all play out. And there are further questions, for example: what sort of surface is a body? What sort of medium, or interface can it become? Sheng Shiyi’s Allergie culturelle also references certain early works in American conceptual/ performance art, works by artists such as Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci. For example, in the early 1970s Vito Acconci was invited to the Rhode Island School of Design to ‘perform.’ During the day he met with students, critiqued work, and generally played the role of a visiting artist. As evening came and the time of the performance drew near, the gallery space filled up. Acconci wandered among the crowd, stopping and engaging people intermittently, all the while obsessively pushing the serrated edge of a bottle cap into the flesh of his hands and arms. Nothing else happened, and when people asked what he was doing with the bottle cap—he was making it fairly obvious—he replied: “I’m trying to make a good impression.” That was the ‘performance.’ The sense of it lies not in the one-line denouement, but rather in the proleptic process, the performative suspense, anticipation, and the array of subjective states—annoyance, suspicion, confusion, laughter—that were set into motion.2 In a similar work Acconci again uses the body—his own—as an impressionable surface, biting himself in order to leave a series of discrete (temporary) marks. This performance was also recorded, effectively transferring the surface bearing impressions to another ‘surface,’ the screen. Notions of screen, face, surface, interface, trace a common rhetoric of corporeality between works. Acconci’s Applications (1970, Super-8 film) is the filmed record of a live performance in which Acconci’s body is covered in imprints of bright red lipstick, applied by Kathy Dillon, who ‘smothers’ his upper body in kisses. Acconci then rubs the front of his body against Dennis Oppenheim’s back until all traces of color are transferred from his body to Oppenheim’s. In Dennis Oppenheim’s Identity Transfer [1970] a drawing by Oppenheim is inscribed onto the bare back of his son, who, tracing the tactile sensation, repeats as accurately as possible, the form of the drawing on the blank wall in front of him, a subtle commentary on notions of translation, transfer, traversal—of place, sense, generation, meaning, etc.3 A recent work, Identity Transfer (after Dennis Oppenheim) by Eduardo Villanes, performs a related a 'conceptual' transfer of identity, from the printed image to the TV image, oven the skin of the author, as a way of showing impunity over a case of human rights in Peru.4 There is, between an often unlikely constellation of works, an echo, a trace that crosses, and so makes salient, a common territory of representation, indeed, a problematics of representation. Sheng Shiyi’s works employ this echo-like structuring to circumscribe her own questions of place and displacement, identity and difference, setting them to work within a framework which is simultaneously intimate and public.

|| méconaissance… (expressions)

Many of the contemporary artistic practices that situate themselves in proximity to the body address issues of identity, cognition, or the body’s normative or exceptional articulation in social and technical spheres, there are also certain artists whose explorations of alterity and corporeality introduce a disturbance— throw into question— those determinations which are taken as material or medium by others. Sheng Shiyi is one of the most interesting of a generation of younger artists who take nothing as given, even— especially—the intimacies and intricacies between self and other. In a series of video pieces related to Allergie Culturelle, Shiyi has individuals perform actions or works from a cultural tradition different—sometimes radically—from their own. In one part of this work-in-progress she has a professional Asian singer perform arias from a western opera. With consummate professionalism and style, all of the inflections are wrong—a bit off, out of registration, mis-regarded. It is a beautiful, and uncanny moment, where both an echo of the music evoked, and the presence of a miscast variant cohabit5. It is a form of punning, what in rhetoric is named paronomasia. 6 The echo returns, nonidentical to itself, and in its foreignness, recalls that which is absent. It is a poignant comment on assimilation and simulation, communication, longing and solitude. It is the quality of “being out of place” of being displaced or culturally transposed, that Sheng Shiyi is exploring with this unfinished series of ‘portraits.’ In another work, Contemporary Cooperation, perhaps the most engaging and successful piece, a culturally diverse group of people are asked to meet for dinner. When they arrive—the cuisine is asian—they are all given chop-sticks; in this case, however, the chopsticks are almost a meter long, and quite impossible to employ in a conventional manner. Shiyi’s camera simply records what takes place, as people fumble, drop, or unexpectedly launch pieces of food into the air. It is engaging and funny, watching people’s frustrations and laughter. Finally one group of people figure out something that works very well with these new chop-sticks: they begin to feed each other. It is a sweet and generous lesson in the sociology of community.

||| dispositions…(photography)

There is a curious confluence between certain words in English and in French which, depending on the context, may be used to denote either objective conditions or subjective states. The word disposition, for example, may refer to a mood, temperament, or natural inclination. An inclination may refer as easily to the physical condition of a body resting at an angle as to a propensity, a habit, or an attitude. An attitude, in addition to connoting behavior, has a precise meaning regarding the position of an objective body relative to specified directions. Attitude may also mean a posture, a settled mode of thinking or a disposition. In French, disposition means a tendency, inclination, or aptitude, and the word dispositif, which translates the English apparatus, as device or set-up, also has the connotations of a configuration, system, or plan of operation. When one speaks then, of a disposition of the body, one may refer to its material conditions or tendencies, as much as to its unconscious, subjective, or performative states. Moreover it is inordinately difficult to draw a line, to determine boundaries—or even, for that matter to trace the contours of a mediating interface—between the different aspects of embodied being.7 Here, with a remarkable prescience towards the signs and senses of embodiment—as lived being, as a contiguity or metonymic presence, as a deictic (spatio-temporal) marker, as a trace, or as an interval—Sheng Shiyi takes up issues of corporeality and photography. In her works the shadow of the body is traced and reflected, doubled and deferred, inscribed as self and other, in a relentless exploration of its apprehensions, arrestments, deferrals and excesses. In some cases the trace is quite literal, as in those works which circulate around the presence of remnants, a blur of movement on the surface, a chair recently evacuated, a hat, abandoned.

Even in this digital world we still readily accept photography’s claim to verisimilitude, that in an indexical relation to the real, the light which impinges upon bodies fixed in a momentary interval before the camera, is the very same light that records this impression upon the photo-sensitive/chemical surface in a camera. When Roland Barthes says, looking at a photograph of the youngest brother of Napoleon, “I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor,” he begins a subtle interrogation of precisely this ontology.8 The photograph is an indexical sign in that it ‘points to’ that which it depicts, its representamen, and it is for this reason that Barthes claims that it is impossible to see a photograph (or, one might add, subsequent media) since one only sees what a photograph refers to;. Photography is, in this sense, invisible. At the same time it also has a substantive presence, a “likeness . . . sent out from the surfaces of things,” bearing “the look and shape of the body from which it came.” 9 Photography thus takes up residence within the framework of technical reproducibility, from Plato’s shadows to Pliny’s tracings, as an evidentiary marker, an index of bodies, things, events. It is, like those relics of a more direct nature—hair and teeth, bones and raiments—similarly stabilized, even fetishized, as a privileged mark of presence, plural, teetering on the edge between recognition and méconaissance. Sheng Shiyi’s photographs—more precisely I should call hers a photographic process, since she often does not produce fixed stabile artifacts, but hundreds of intermediary contact sheets—take place within the everydayness of images, in relation to photography’s favored conceit of a “perfect moment.” Sheng Shiyi not so much rejects, as ignores, the notion of a “perfect moment” and seeks those moments that are just about to escape the gaze, those images which, just as they are caught, defy belief, which belie themselves in their strangeness or their inconsumability. These are the most interesting images. Sometimes they too, are overlooked. It is the great merit of Sheng Shiyi that she has a certain sensitivity to their loss, a certain engagement with their foreignness, that these invisible images are preserved.

Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument; and when we wish to move about we do not move the body as we move an object. We transport it without instruments as if by magic, since it is ours and because through it we have access to space. For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret affective movements, those most deeply tied to the humoral infrastructure, help to shape our perception of things.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty10



notes


1. I have addressed related aspects of photography, and subsequent media, in various texts. See especially: “Projection and Dis/embodiment: Toward a Genealogy of the Virtual,” in Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, ed. Chrissie Iles, [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Abrams] (2001); “Variables: Notations on Stability, Permeability, and Plurality in Media Artifacts,” pp. 201–253, in Saving the Image: Art After Film, ed. Tanya Leighton, Pavel Buchler, [Glasgow and Manchester: Center for Photography/Glasgow and Manchester Metropolitan University] (2003); “Arrestments: Corporeality and Mediation,” Thomas Zummer, in Suturas y fragmentos: Cuerpos y territories en la ciencoa-ficción/Stitch and Split: Bodies and Territories in Science Fiction, Nuria Homs, Laurence Risser, eds., Fundacion Antoni Tapies/Constant vzw, Barcelona/Brussels, 2004-05; “Seeing Double: Eleanor Antin’s Roman Allegories,” Thomas Zummer, PAJ 83 A Journal of Performance and Art, May 2006 Volume XXVII, No. 2 [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] 2006; “Inter/sur/faces: Notes on the Recent Works of Heleen Deceuninck,” Thomas Zummer, in Temporalities, exh. cat., [Bruge: Free Space] 2006

2. This story was related to the author in conversation by Alan Sondheim, who was present in the audience at the time, and a friend of Acconci’s.

3. See: Castelli-Sonnabend Videotapes and Films, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1974 [New York: Castelli-Sonabend]; Castelli-Sonnabend Videotapes and Films, 1975 Supplement [New York: Castelli-Sonabend]; See also: Conceptual Art, Ursula Meyer, [New York: E.P. Dutton] 1972; Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, Lucy Lippard, [New York: Praeger] 1973. Among other artists who deal, in a wide variety of ways, with corporealities, include Marina Abramovics, Vanessa Beecroft, Phil Collins, Alan Sondheim, Leslie Thornton, Foof’wa d’Immobilite, Nan Goldin, Araki, etc.

4. Identity Transfer (after Dennis Oppenheim) by Eduardo Villanes, was exhibited at the Espacio Fundacion Telefonica in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the Centro Cultural de España in Mexico City, the Tremaine Gallery, Connecticut, and various other venues. See also works by Mike Kelly and Paul McCarthy (Fresh Acconci) and Marina Abramovics (a remaking of Vito Acconci’s “Seedbed” at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia), which range from incursion and cooptation to homage.

5. The structure of the uncanny: an eruption of the unfamiliar within the familiar as the familiar. The first five entries on “uncanny” in the Oxford English Dictionary all have to do with mischief, malice, carelessness, unreliability, lack of caution or trust, difficulty or severity—and uncomfortability, especially as regards the supernatural, the strange or unfamiliar. In the psychoanalytic register the term is far more determinate, and heavily theorized, such that it is put into play with discourses on simulation, mimesis, alterity, the sublime, the abject, the alien and the aesthetic. In modern robotics an uncanny threshold is reached at the point that a simulation is believably human enough such that any subsequent disparity in that illusion produces anxiety.

6. Paronomasia is a form of punning in which words which sound very similar, but not identical, are brought into close proximity, so that by being so close in sound each invokes the other to an indeterminate degree, causing a duplicity—a fibrillation—in the space of the trope. In other words, though each term sounds very like its counterpart, it is only almost a pun, since it also underscores the difference between them. Another term for Paronomasia is Aversio, or Turne-Tale. See: Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd Edition, [Berkeley: University of California Press] 1991; See also: Michael Hawcroft, Rhetoric: Readings in French Literature, [Oxford: Oxford University Press] 1999; and Marc Fumaroli, et al, Histoire de la rhétorique dans l’Europe moderne, 1450–1950, [Paris: Presses universitaires de France] 1999.

7. All definitions are from the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Sheng Shiyi’s studies have taken place in Paris, France, and in New York City, USA.

8. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida; Reflections on Photography, Richard Howard, trans., (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981/ Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980).

9. The reference here is to Lucretius, quoted in extenso:

… I show that there
Exist what we call images of things,
Which as it were peeled off from the surfaces
Of objects, fly this way and that through the air;
These same, encountering us in wakeful hours,
Terrify our minds, and also in sleep, as when
We see strange shapes and phantoms of the dead
Which often as in slumber sunk we lay
Have roused us in horror; lest perchance we think
That spirits escape from Acheron, or ghosts
Flit among the living, or that after death
Something of us remains when once the body
And mind alike together have been destroyed,
And each to its primal atoms has dissolved. . . .

I say therefore that likenesses or thin shapes
Are sent out from the surfaces of things
Which we must call as it were their films or bark
Because the image bears the look and shape
Of the body from which it came, as it floats in the air

—T. Lucretius Carus, De rerum natura

For Lucretius the body casts off impressions, excressences, like the skin of a snake, or the exquisite exoskeletal husk of a cicada, negative traces of an absent body, both substance and phantasm. It is as apt a description of our apprehensions of photography as any modern account. This translation is from: Sir Ronald Melville, ed. Lucretius On The Nature of the Universe, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)

10. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis, trans., (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1968





















Biographical Information on the Author

Thomas Zummer is an independent scholar and writer, artist and curator. His drawings, media, and sculptural works have shown world