Vulgar Constructivism and the Dream that No Longer Was

Deng Tianyuan

In 1920, Vladimir Tatlin, the Soviet avant-garde constructivist charged with implementing Lenin’s plan for “Monumental Propaganda” to replace tsarist monuments with new ones of the incoming regime, constructed the model for the renowned Monument to the Third International. Commissioned to commemorate the Bolshevik Revolution, the building would house the headquarters for the Third International—or Comintern, the world organization of the Communist party. Built out of steel and glass, the building would also be very tall, standing a third taller than the Eiffel Tower at 400 meters. Despite being envisioned as the center of global revolution that would bring a utopia into being, it was never realized. But it has survived in the form of photographs of its studio model, and has lived to be a textbook case of twentieth-century avant-gardism. In a sense, it is one of the most cherished dreams of our past century that, thanks to its never being built, people can repeatedly return to for a utopia that once was.

More than seven decades later, a different but not disconnected form of constructivism went rampant in a nation that was a Comintern member and successfully followed Lenin’s revolutionary footstep: China. The agents behind these waves of building massive buildings hardly knew anything about Tatlin or art, for that matter. But they were also arguably drawing out the latent fallacies of monumental propaganda—the many ways in which Tatlin’s dream could go wrong in reality. Shi Yangkun’s project, Retrotopia (2018-2021), which focused on three villages that either practice collectivism in present-day post-reform China or hold on to a lost “utopian” past, recorded the palimpsestic existence of monumental propaganda and post-revolution present. It presents us the spectre of revolutionary collectivism and people’s lives in it, full of quotidian details and inexplicable absurdities in equal measure.

A few of the most capturing photographs came from the renowned exemplar of a collectivist life, Huaxi Village. Huaxi Village, located to the North of Wuxi city in Jiangsu province, was for a time the poster child of the collectivist dream. The legendary head of the village, Wu Renbao, borrowed money to buy in steel in anticipation of its soon-to-rocket price after sensing the change in national policy in Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour speeches in 1992. This daring move helped the village formed its primitive accumulation of wealth. Against the tide of economic liberalization, the Huaxi Village launched a socialist program in the 90s, collectivizing the villagers’ homesteads, building free medical care and schools, and constructing factories on farmlands, as one blueprint envisioned. By the end of 90s, the villagers were known for living in big houses and driving nice cars.

The flashiness of  Huaxi wealth was captured in several photos, sometimes to a haunting effect. In 2011, the Longxi International Hotel was built, a local landmark that combined multiple functions from dining to sightseeing together—“to demand land from air,” as the ambitious secretary proclaimed. The tower was built to be the same height as the China World Trade Center in Beijing, as a gesture to keep in alignment with the central government. The hotel proudly presents a bull made of pure gold, weighing a ton and allegedly costing 0.3 billion yuan. Besides such in-your-face flaunting, another form of bravado expresses itself in big-ness. To project strength and power, things are built very, very big. One of the photos shows us a view of the banquet hall on the first floor of the hotel that becomes more eerie as one looks longer at it. The hall appears deserted, like other venues such as the performance hall, its giant stage rim in golden color and dusty chandelier dwarfing the numerous banquet tables underneath it. Upon closer look, a staff in uniform busies about in the lower left corner, which makes us further realize how blown up in scale the banquet hall is. The wildly unnecessary bigness of the hall almost strikes one as preposterous, as if one is the diminished Alice first entering her Wonderland. Strange scale is an effective literary and artistic conceit to convey un-reality—think of classic tales such as Gulliver’s Travels or the photographs of tiny furniture by the New York artist Laurie Simmons—but the reality documented herein is itself a form of dreamscape. Shi wields the distancing power of documentary photography throughout this series to a sobering effect. Huaxi is typical of the countless counties and villages in China, which are filled with eerily big architectures that one can get accustomed to them. But when embalmed in such a deadpan image, one again gets in touch with the strangeness of how big the buildings are, and may wonder: what is this alienating scent of absurdity that these photographs reek?

Like propaganda, the message conveyed in these constructions is simple and straightforward. But unlike the revolutionary idealism projected by Tatlin’s monumental propaganda, the monumental constructions at Huaxi do not dream big despite their sizes. Indeed, it fantasizes itself as the village that sits at the top of the world. Declaring itself to be “the First Village of the World,” the village is peppered with copies of worldwide attractions, from Arc de Triomphe in Paris to Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. This is, again, reflective of a larger trend, as there are reportedly more than two hundred knockoffs of Capitol Hill in China.[1] But the capacity of utopian imagining was robbed as the age of revolution passed. Tatlin’s monuments were buried in history’s memory, a cherished dream for the still yearning; monuments from a past major Comintern nation that outlasted the Soviet Union sprang up like spring bamboos shoots after a good rain. They no longer spoke of the dream of making the world a better place—a big dream. But they spoke of a dream that, despite their reputation for clinging to Mao-era collectivism, was highly in accordance with the new-era priority of development: wealth and power—a small dream.

This dream, while small compared with its historical alternatives, still allows the offspring of the village secretary to travel within the orbit of China’s ultra-rich: the secretary’s grandson plays esport and hangs with the son of China’s once-richest man. But it looks very different from the perspectives of a regular villager. In Shi’s 2018 first reporting trip to the village, a man in the performance troupe, all draped in Party flags and singing upbeat songs, caught his eye. The next day, Shi contacted him for an individual portrait shot and let the photograph convey the ineffable. The man came from outside the Huaxi Village and earned a living by being a troupe member. The melancholia in his wintry eye, as if he has already seen the heavy side of life, hid the fact that he was merely 20. The ambiguous dilemma the man inhabited, however, pertained to many youth in the village, who upon interviews have revealed their indecision between a life outside of Huaxi and one inside. The former promises a trajectory of life that can potentially go upward, and the latter promises a lifestyle that has a safety net beneath, though it is fixated and materially meager compared to the temptations outside. The former, as many Huaxi youth that returned to the village frustratingly discovered, was hardly viable, as taking root in expensive big cities was forbiddingly difficult. The latter left little room for agency, which can deaden them. In or outside of the village, breathing room is little, which robs dreams of their oxygen. This dilemma strikes resonances with wider Chinese youth today, even in the most glamorous urban cities.

The title of Shi’s project Retrotopia (2018—2022), derives from a sense of lost utopia, the attempt to retrieve it, and the melancholy that accompanies the impossibility of that retrieval. Caught in such a limbo state, villages such as Dazhai Village, a landmark of agricultural collectivization exalted by Chairman Mao in the 60s, latched on to its past glory. Zhao Mingxing, a young man who lost his grandfather to the collectivization process, built a museum that showcased Mao memorabilia. The village, left behind by China’s economic reform, also tries to revive the memory as red tourism, being one of the few means of generating revenues. But a truthful recollection is not only limited by circumstantial reasons but also by their own reluctance to face the darker sides of their youth. The present picks the utopian element of history but winnows out its fallacies. And in this self-propagandizing turn, the memory of utopia—the retrotopia—they claim is triumphant but also marked by a poverty of narrative, which makes the commemoration effort difficult to resonate with today’s youth, who are clueless about that era.

When Shi worked as a photojournalist, he constantly has to straddle the role of a reporter and a photographer in his own right. The privilege that both roles afford him, however, is an engagement with the real. The real—what transpires everyday in China—is a more interesting site than any art institution or discourse is able to offer. The architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas once proclaims with anxiety that the apotheosis of architectural boom in China was happening without anyone trying to comprehend it. The same thinking is applicable to countless phenomena in this country which shed its memories like insects shedding skins. Photographers are usually cast as artists, institutionally by museum collections and gallery facilitations, and historically by belonging to a certain stylistic movement or an avant-garde group. But one shall remember that the original avant-garde theory, whose foundation is laid by the German theorist Peter Burger and later the American theorist Hal Foster, derives its momentum from art’s relationship with the real. If Tatlin’s monuments come down to us in the form of a photograph that offers evidence of a dream that once was, Shi’s endeavor captures a series of fleeting portraits of a historical dream that went awry but struggles to continue to the present day either in corrupted or nostalgic form. The real-ness that these photographs offer is nothing short of and nothing more than a forced direct look at these marginalized memories and the current conditions of the people that carry these memories, which are shared among a much larger demographic than these villagers.