D O C U M E N T/ I N T R O D U C T I O N

inTroDuCTion To
“a ConVersaTion WiTh hsieh TehChing,

froM The Black cover Book”

Lee ambrozy

In 1993, before they would arrive at their current acclaim, Hsieh
Tehching, Ai Weiwei, and Xu Bing convened in New York City to dis-
cuss art, personal choice, society, and the individual, among other
abstractions. At that time, New York was an adopted home for all three
artists. Hsieh arrived from Taiwan in 1974, and Ai from Beijing in
1981, followed by Xu in 1990. The city was an intellectual seedbed for
the Chinese émigré community, its urban fabric an incubator for cre-
ative projects that would resonate in a still-opening and still-reforming
China. One such project was the now-renowned Chinese art publica-
tion The Black Cover Book, the intended destination and motivation
behind the dialogue translated here. Published in late 1993, this thin
black journal was famously distributed through unoffi cial channels to
reach China’s art circles.

The city of New York had been an irreplaceable backdrop to the
monumental series of live-art performances that Hsieh executed there
over fi ve twelve-month intervals between 1978 and 1986—his One Year
Performances series. In One Year Performance 1978–79 (Cage Piece),
Hsieh spent the year living in a small wooden cage; in One Year
Performance 1980–81 (Time Clock Piece), he punched a time clock on
the hour every hour for one calendar year; in One Year Performance
1981–82 (Outdoor Piece), he lived entirely outside and did not enter any
sheltered spaces; and in One Year Performance 1983–84 (Rope Piece),

doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00114

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Hsieh and performance artist Linda Montano tied themselves together
with an eight-foot-long piece of rope. For One Year Performance 1985–86
(No Art Piece), the last in the series, he did not interact with art in any
way; and on December 31, 1986, he vowed not to show his art again
until his 49th birthday, on December 31, 1999.

Hsieh’s feats of endurance and self-control were well known in

New York at the time and were slowly gaining a reputation within
China. Indeed, Hsieh was the headlining artist featured in The Black
Cover Book. Thus, the two editors of the project, Xu Bing and Ai
Weiwei, were keen to engage him in conversation, and this dialogue
would tease out Hsieh’s thoughts on postmodernism, value judgments,
social systems, and more. It was a rare opportunity for three figures on
the cusp of stardom to discuss their creative motivations and address
questions that would resonate with the Chinese diaspora—issues such
as cultural hybridity, civilizational strife (or its imagined presence), and
the relation of art to society.

The Black cover Book: The CulTural Milieu

The Black Cover Book was originally envisioned as a quarterly journal,
but only three issues would ultimately be published: the original in
1993, The White Cover Book in 1995, and The Grey Cover Book in 1997.
(Xu Bing did not participate as an editor in the latter issues.) All three
books have since achieved something of a cult status in China, with
original editions now being prized collector’s items. This is due to their
significant influence on contemporary art practice and discourse. As
the editors made explicit in their preface to The Black Cover Book, its
content and scope were intended to provide a more vibrant and pluralis-
tic engagement with art than that offered by the plastic arts favored by
China’s “official” art magazines such as Meishu (Fine Arts), China’s
oldest arts magazine, which is still printed today. Indeed, The Black
Cover Book was conceived to be something quite the opposite. As edi-
tors Ai and Xu state in the “Editors’ Remarks” introducing the publica-
tion: “This is an independently edited, self-published, and internally
circulated scholarly document about modern art in China. . . . It
includes primary documents on artworks and archival records and
research . . . [and] focuses on the current international discussions and
debates, and their relation to the evolution of Chinese culture.” The edi-
tors were equally clear about their intended outcomes for the project,
elaborating that “This medium will provide experimental modern

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Chinese artists with the opportunity to show, elaborate on, and interact
with others. This type of interactive participation, exchange, and dis-
cussion will provide a creative environment for Chinese modern art as
well as promote its development.” They were aware of the power of the
printed word to bring together communities and inspire social change.
After all, Mao had proclaimed that the pen was an instrument of revo-
lution, and having grown up during the Cultural Revolution, both Xu
Bing and Ai Weiwei were well versed in Maoist revolutionary theory.
Although the political implications of the publication may not be appar-
ent from the dialogue nearly twenty years after the fact, The Black Cover
Book could also be considered a recent addition to a long and esteemed
tradition of politically inspired self-publication in the arts. This tradi-
tion belongs with Lu Xun and his Selections of Modern Woodcuts (1929)1
and also includes Ai’s father, who wrote revolutionary poems from a
Kuomindang prison cell in 1933 during the Civil War.

Although China in the 1990s was still recovering from a decade of
isolation during the Cultural Revolution and the events in Tiananmen
Square, its cultural genetics and modernist inclinations were more
hybrid and much closer to the West than we generally acknowledge.
Translations of radical cultural-political ideas had a long tradition in
China, and they had profound implications. This is exemplified by
anarcho-feminist thinker He Yin-Zhen’s journal Natural Justice, which
has recently been recognized as the first to publish a Chinese transla-
tion of the Communist Manifesto in 1907, much earlier than the
Chinese Communist Party’s version.2 The visual arts were just as
deeply entangled with the West, beginning with Jesuit painters at court
during the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) and continuing into the 20th
century with Chinese painters who lived and worked in academies and
salons in Paris and across Europe before the war. Chinese artists—
including some of the country’s most influential painters, who would
later be embraced by the Communists, such as Lin Fengmian and Xu
Beihong—have long been familiar with oil and canvas, modernism and
abstraction.3

Elizabeth Emrich, “Modernity through Experimentation: Lu Xun and the Modern
Chinese Woodcut Movement,” in Print, Profit, and Perception: Ideas, Information and
Knowledge in Chinese Societies, 1895–1949, ed. Pei-yin Lin (Boston: Brill, 2014), 64–91.
The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, ed. Lydia Liu,
Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
See Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2012).

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More recently in Chinese history, and relevant to the editors of The

Black Cover Book, the prolific translation of European ideas picked up
again during what is widely known as the “literature fever” (wenxue re)
of the 1980s, when Freud, Sartre, Nietzsche, and other intellectuals
were translated into Chinese. This opening of the floodgates of infor-
mation followed years of monotonous “Red” culture, such as the
model operas of the Cultural Revolution. Not only did translations of
European literature and philosophy reach young audiences for the first
time, they also diversified a concurrent resurgent interest in Taoist and
Buddhist philosophy. The 1980s were thus a rehabilitative and forma-
tive moment for all artists and intellectuals.4

Through its combination of images, interviews, and archival docu-

ments, including artist sketches and project plans, The Black Cover
Book introduced Chinese audiences to a wealth of art practices, both
local and international, that were either undocumented or little known
in China in the early 1990s. In the absence of physical exhibition or
gallery spaces within China, the publication offered the printed page as
a space where a community of like-minded artists could convene. The
book documents the studio practices of artists, many of whom have
become familiar names in contemporary art: Song Dong and Wang
Jianwei in Beijing; Zhang Peili in Hangzhou; Chen Shaoxiong and
Xu Tan in Guangzhou; as well as artists in New York (Wang Gongxin,
Zhang Jianjun) and Boston (Zeng Xiaojun). The editors put forth a new
definition of “art” by showcasing photography as well as conceptual and
experimental works—modes of production that hitherto had little or no
presence in art publishing in China. In addition to artist profiles, arti-
cles on Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons were translated
into Mandarin, while Hsieh’s One Year Performances featured promi-
nently. Hsieh’s strong presence in the book emphasized its New York–
centric bias, which was perhaps unsurprising, given that Ai and Xu
both lived in New York and that the city and its art scene were central
in their editorial decision-making.

The context surrounding The Black Cover Book’s production is cru-
cial for understanding its impact on China’s small circle of conceptual

See Wu Hung and Peggy Wang, eds., Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents,
MoMA Primary Documents Series (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). For
arguably the most comprehensive theoretical treatment of this period, see Gao Minglu,
Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2011).

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and performance artists during the early 1990s. Although the publica-
tion was not explicitly political, it traversed unknown territory, and the
new and untested, independent and foreign nature of its content made
it potentially dangerous. Even today, censors raise eyebrows when artis-
tic content is suspiciously abstract or is deemed to have the potential to
fan the flames of “cultural degeneracy,” such as pursuing commercial
interests.5

As Ai has discussed in a recent interview, the Shenzhen printing

house commissioned to print the volume refused to do so at the elev-
enth hour. The decision was most likely an instance of self-censorship
based on suspicions about unfamiliar material. But for the editors,
such a hurdle meant that the proofs needed to be smuggled across the
border to Hong Kong for printing.6 Following its surreptitious re-entry
across the border into China, the book was distributed mainly among
closed groups of friends. The audience for avant-garde art within China
has always been relatively small compared to the more mainstream
plastic arts, film, or literature (in fact, it is a community composed
mostly of the artists themselves). Within weeks, The Black Cover Book
found its way into the hands of its select, specialized audience, thus
fulfilling its role as an underground, virtual meeting space for concep-
tually based art. The speed with which the book circulated and devel-
oped its wide renown are testimony to the dearth of Chinese-language
publications discussing foreign or unsanctioned art in the period fol-
lowing the Tiananmen Square events of 1989.

The book was also hawked by artists outside Beijing’s National Art

Museum of China, the most important exhibiting institution in the
capital at that time. The action was historically pointed, for it recalled
the guerilla-style Stars Art exhibition (xingxing huahui zhan) of 1979,
which had been installed on the fence surrounding the same museum.
The Stars Group has often been cited as the first contemporary art
movement in China. Their manifesto demanded self-expression in the
arts following the Cultural Revolution, and among its members were
cultural luminaries such as Huang Rui and Wang Keping. With no

Recently, on October 15, 2014, at the “Beijing Forum on Literature and Arts,” Xi Jinping
invited cultural figures from film, literature, and the performing arts to speak. His mes-
sage was that “Art works should not be the ‘slaves’ of the market and should not bear ‘the
stench of money,’” but should instead serve the people and reflect socialist values. The
message echoes Mao Zedong’s 1942 “Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art.” See “China’s
Xi points way for arts,” October 16, 2014, Xinhua News.
Author interview with Ai Weiwei, April 4, 2013.

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nongovernmental space to exhibit their works, and the museum being
unwilling to officially host such an exhibition, the Stars Group daringly
hung their works in public, introducing self-expression back into the
visual arts.7

In fact, the state’s persistently limited tolerance for avant-garde art-

ists and its silencing of creative expression meant that, by the early
1990s, there were still no official or sanctioned venues for live-art or
conceptual practices. As experienced by artists living in Beijing’s “East
Village,” a small artists’ community on the capital’s outskirts, extreme
performance works clashed with a conservative cultural infrastructure.
In his work 65 kg (1993), for instance, artist Zhang Huan suspended
himself from the ceiling, opened a vein, and dripped his own blood
onto a hot plate below him, where it sizzled and filled the neighborhood
with the smell of burning human flesh. On occasion, if the neighbors
were scandalized, police were called in and artists were incarcerated.
In Guangzhou, located on the border with “free” Hong Kong, an
artist collective experimenting with nontraditional media and perfor-
mative techniques, the Big Tail Elephant group (or BTE, a group that
included Liang Juhui, Chen Shaoxiong, Lin Yilin, and later Xu Tan),
worked inside the official system. They held their first exhibition in a
“Workers Cultural Palace,” a vestigial Socialist-era community space
intended for the cultural education of the masses. In the absence of
exhibition venues, BTE also opted to intervene in public spaces: Lin
Yilin’s Safely Maneuvering across Linhe Road (1993) is one example.8 Lin
constructed a small wall of cinder blocks to obstruct one of the busiest
roads in Guangzhou; during his ninety-minute performance, he then
migrated the wall—brick by brick—across the road.

Artists like those in the BTE, who were based far from the capi –
tal’s politicized atmosphere, and artists who had experience overseas
acted as crucial counterpoints to Beijing’s creative community. Wang
Gongxin, one of the artists profiled in The Black Cover Book, illus-
trated this biculturalism in his early, site-specific installation Sky of
Brooklyn—Digging a Hole in Beijing (1995). Attempting to create an
inverse version of the American myth of “digging a hole to China,”
Wang dug a hole in the floor of his Beijing house located in the tradi-

See Li Xianting, “About the Stars Exhibition,” in Wu and Wang, eds., Contemporary
Chinese Art, 11–13.
See the exhibition catalog Da wei xiang (Großschwanzelefant) (Bern, Switzerland:
Kunsthalle Bern, 1998).

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tional alleyway dwellings of the capital called hutongs. At the bottom of
the hole, he placed a video monitor showing a video of the sky and pass-
ing clouds that he had filmed above his Brooklyn studio.

The Black Cover Book incorporated all of these geographically dis-

parate practices to become a physical manifestation of the emergent
biculturalism and of hitherto undernurtured experimental art prac-
tices across China. It opened a virtual space where conceptually driven
practices converged, regardless of the artists’ physical locations. As
such, this radical act of self-publishing can be seen as a kind of concep-
tual artwork in itself.

The Dialogue: TransCripTs froM a fuTure pasT

In the discussion with Ai and Xu, Hsieh observes: “We’re all preparing
to do something. Weiwei will go back to China. Xu Bing is in New
York, and I will go to Taiwan. It’s only a small change, but we’re all
preparing for something.” These three artists were each on the verge
of a significant life change, and the palpable sense of urgency in tran-
sition permeates their dialogue. What they do not explicitly acknowl-
edge, even though it frames their relationship, is their shared
immigrant experience and cultural-linguistic background. Yet this
shared background is pivotal to their discussion. For example, by
1993, Hsieh Tehching was a seminal figure in the New York live-art
scene. His Taiwanese origins made his celebrity status all the more
poignant within China. Not only was he admired for the strength of
his performances, but many artists saw Hsieh’s acceptance into the
“Western system” on merit alone as a formidable task. The feeling of
marginali zation that these three émigré artists shared can likewise be
intuited through their dialogue. Hsieh says, “[Duchamp] was a mar-
ginal figure, but we are even more marginal than he. We shouldn’t
play at the West’s game, but we have to understand it, that’s the only
way to undermine it.”

Ai Weiwei’s family history was also complex. His father, Ai Qing,
was a nationally famous revolutionary poet who was sent into political
exile during the Anti-Rightist Movement of the late 1950s. The entire
family in fact was exiled to Shihezi, in the remote Western Xinjiang
Province—where Ai Weiwei spent his childhood—until Ai Qing was
rehabilitated in the late 1970s and they returned to their courtyard
home in Beijing. In 1981, Ai Weiwei left Beijing for New York, where he
became fast friends with Hsieh. Considering his unique family history

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and his having spent his formative twenties in New York, Ai’s intellec-
tual makeup was formulated as a complex blend of influences informed
as much by New York’s East Village galleries as by Chinese visual and
decorative arts. We know him today as a political activist, but Ai’s
important early editorial work is often overlooked. The Black Cover
Book, and the later White and Grey Cover Books, clearly demonstrate
a commitment to shaping a Chinese-language discourse in contem-
porary art.

By contrast, Xu Bing came from a more orthodox background and
had academic training in the plastic arts. In the dialogue Xu expresses
anxiety about redefining the artist’s responsibility, a concern that
reflects his training in the Chinese art academy. After Mao delivered
the “Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art” in 1942, artists’ social respon-
sibility was made inseparable from the formal qualities of the artwork
itself and was given highest priority within the Socialist Realist agenda.
While the Cultural Revolution took formalism to an extreme, artists in
the late 1970s were beginning to disentangle art’s formal qualities
from the artists’ alleged social responsibility. Xu’s work was central to
that discussion in academic forums. He came to the United States in
1990, just three years after completing his breakout work Book from the
Sky (Tianshu). Ai and Hsieh quickly sought out the creator of this
intriguing work.9 Book from the Sky was a labor-intensive woodblock
print installation of thousands of contrived and illegible “Chinese char-
acters” printed on paper and hung to cover an entire room. The over-
whelming amount of human toil necessary to produce such an
immersive installation of woodblock-printed text––all of which was
completely nonsensical––had absurdist connotations that evoked a poi-
gnant sense of hopelessness. After Xu’s immersion in a foreign culture,
these themes of repetition and human futility that had informed his
early work began to give way to issues of cultural and linguistic
exchange.

Despite their commonalities, the three artists each brought a dif-
ferent worldview to the dialogue. Compare their reactions to Duchamp,
for instance, who in their discussion becomes the archetypal Western
artist. As they debate his adaptability to changing times, Ai views him

See Mao Weidong, Stephanie Tung, and Christophe Mao, eds., Ai Weiwei: New York
Photographs 1983–1993 (New York: Asia Society Museum, June 29–August 14, 2011),
exhibition catalog, 247, for a photograph of Hsieh, Ai, and Xu during Xu’s residency in
Madison, Wisconsin.

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as an oracle: “Duchamp predicted future developments.” Xu conversely
sees him as fulfilling an inevitable role within the changing tides:
“Duchamp was just a guy with a gun. He was the first to use a gun.
Before him, there were only bows and arrows.” And Hsieh demon-
strates a self-effacing macrocosmic worldview: “He was a marginal
figure, but we are even more marginal than he.”

The “system” emerges as a leitmotif in the dialogue, and readers

will sense their alienation from what is posited as a “Western system.”
Hsieh’s attitudes can be summarized in his opinion of the “system”
and of the three artists’ own position relative to it: “As for the problem
of whether or not we should intervene in the Western system: My point
of view is that we shouldn’t even bother.” If the use of the term system
feels unfamiliar in this context in English, it can perhaps be best
understood as a parallel to Arthur Danto’s definition of the artworld:
a cultural context or shared web of history, values, and theory.10 Xu, Ai,
and Hsieh’s discussion of the “Western system” is based on a position
of biculturalism and on a cultural opposition between East and West.
This opposition of zhongxi guanxi (China-Western relations) is still fre-
quently cited in the Chinese-language art discourse today, as is free-
dom of choice in the production of art, social responsibility, morality,
and (perhaps the elephant in the room for contemporary art in China)
the art market. Xu Bing presciently alludes to this current reality:
“nobody is willing anymore to pay attention to a group of people who
play without ‘making any dough’.”

The fourth (silent) participant in the discussion is the city of New

York. More than mere backdrop, New York became an indispensable
catalyst for the artists’ work, their friendship, and the production of
The Black Cover Book itself. The city’s spaces provided the canvas for
Hsieh’s tremendous yearlong performances; heaving with AIDS activ-
ism, labor strikes, and even solidarity protests with the demonstrations
in Tiananmen Square in the 1980s, New York also nurtured the bud-
ding activism of the young Ai Weiwei, who joined civil rights protests
there; and it immersed Xu Bing in a new culture within which he could
recognize the distinctive character of his cultural heritage. This period
was transformative for Xu in particular. His Square Word Calligraphy
(1994) may have resembled the earlier Book from the Sky, with its simi-
larly illegible characters, yet each “character” is in fact an English word

10 Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy LXI (1964): 571–84.

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created by nestling letters of the Latin alphabet within the appearance
and semiotic trappings of a Chinese glyph. New York as interlocutor
weaves its way into their dialogue via mention of artists such as Andy
Warhol and allusions to a “Western system” that could also be under-
stood as a fully mature network of galleries, museums, artist collec-
tives, and criticism—something yet unavailable in Taiwan or China.

unexpeCTeD ouTCoMes

Since The Black Cover Book was originally planned as a quarterly, the
editors had circulated a call for submissions earlier that year entitled
“Red Flag—Art Documents for Exchange.”11 The Beijing address for
submissions listed the curator Feng Boyi as addressee and included a
beeper number; Xu Bing’s sender address was listed as 52 East 7th
Street, New York City. The call for submissions describes The Black
Cover Book as being for “art world insiders” and “not for open circula-
tion.” Meanwhile its selling price was considerable for its day; it sold for
the rough equivalent of 25 USD today.12

As with all things cultural in China—and despite the publication’s
ostensibly nonpolitical content, as I noted earlier—politics have colored
both the dialogue and the book’s release. The project was born in a
tense political climate, and the internal editorial strife behind its pro-
duction has likewise made history. The drama began with a disagree-
ment over the book’s title. If popular oral histories are to be believed,
the title of the book caused conflict among the editors. The more politi-
cally audacious Ai was in favor of the title Hongqi (Red Flag), a refer-
ence to the national flag and to China’s first manufactured automobile
of the same name.13 Xu Bing allegedly felt that such a provocative title
would cause unwarranted trouble for the magazine and its editors. The
title Heipi shu, which translates literally to “Black-Skinned Book,” is
thus a compromise between Ai’s politics and Xu’s concerns.

Still, the English title is misleadingly innocuous, as politics remain

embedded in the Chinese original. The Black Cover Book is only the
most literal translation; it could also, perhaps more cannily, be trans-

“Hong qi—Yishu jiaoliu ziliao” (Red Flag—Art Documents for Exchange), Asia Art
Archive, www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/CollectionOnline/SpecialCollectionItem/7689.

12 Author interview with Wang Gongxin and Lin Tianmiao, April 2014.
13 As soon as the first Hongqi vehicle was produced in 1958, it became a central motif in the
political spectacles staged on Tiananmen Square. A symbol of a strong, independent
China, the Soviet-style car was the model Mao and all leaders since have ridden while
surveying troops lined up for inspection.

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lated as “Black Papers.” This translation would reflect the editors’
intended wordplay on “white papers” (baipi shu),14 official clarifications
of the party’s stance on certain contentious political issues, such as
Tibetan or Taiwanese independence.15

Ultimately, The Black Cover Book epitomizes underground pub-
lishing in contemporary China, and the short dialogue succeeds in
crystallizing a set of still-relevant issues within Chinese-language art
discourse today. While many observers of the Chinese art world are
eager to disparage the authenticity or criticality of such a discourse, it
is important to remember that publishing can be a critical act in itself,
which The Black Cover Book manifestly demonstrates. Many factors
contribute to the shortage of good art criticism within China, which
can be best summarized as a lack of incentives and an excess of hur-
dles. Censorship is a substantial problem, and a strong contemporary
art market supports an excess of soft advertising on what seems to be
an ever-increasing number of new art media, websites, and print maga-
zines that plagiarize indifferently and without deterrent. Considering
this, the enterprise and idealism fueling this dialogue make it seem all
the more urgent.

Just as importantly, The Black Cover Book, born of a unique histori-
cal moment and of a uniquely bicultural context, helped Chinese artists
formulate their own self-conception as connected to a greater geo-
graphic and intellectual territory. No longer were they working in isola-
tion, nor were the concerns of artists in China confined to a bamboo
cage of their own construction. In a pre-Internet age, The Black Cover
Book succeeded in bracketing together artists such as Hsieh, Duchamp,
and Koons within a single space. As such, Beijing’s “East Village” was
in closer proximity than ever before to the East Village of New York,
even if it was only between the two covers of an ambitiously conceptu-
alized publishing project.

14 On the question of the associations of this title with governmental white papers, see Ai
Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006–2009 (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2011), 263 note 68. Although not cited in this footnote, the artist confirmed to me
in a 2010 interview that the title was inspired by the white papers.
The Central Committee of the Communist Party’s (CCCP’s) white papers include
“Human Rights in China” (1991), “Tibet––Its Ownership and Human Rights Situation”
(1992), “The Taiwan Question and Reunification of China” (1992), and “Family Planning
in China” (1995). A complete list of the CCCP’s white papers can be found online at
www.china.org.cn/e-white/

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