Shu Yong: Mediator of Bodies

What are theories of the media, if not ­propositions meant to explain the how and the means of the interconnection between ­different existences within a same ether?

– Peter Sloterdijk 

The  Bubble as Evolutionary Medium?

Born in Xupu, in the province of Hunan, in 1974, Shu Yong has developed an intensely media-oriented (and mediatized) art practice founded on direct interaction with the public. Himself the owner of an advertising agency, he treats Chinese society as a laboratory, operating either through social events or directly through the mass-media in what he, following Beuys, calls “social sculpture.” While the association with Beuys may verge on the presumptuous—Yong is light years away from Beuys’ “broader concept of art” or his search for a third way between ­communism and ­capitalism¹ 1 - On this topic, see Joseph Beuys and Volker Harlan, What is Art? Conversations with Joseph Beuys (East Sussex: Clairview Books, 1992).—, one can nonetheless say in his defence that he does indeed seem to be particularly responsive to the social processes of “­evolutionary warmth” so dear to the master from Krefeld. For several years now, Yong has been working with a powerful intuition of what Bachelard had called “the intimacy of roundness,” evinced in his most recent work by a fondness for the figure of the bubble. In the series of oil paintings titled China Mythology (2007-08), for instance, Yong ­revisits ancient Chinese mythology in colourful, fairy-tale-like ­surroundings, where mythological characters appear within soap ­bubbles. Soap ­bubbles are also in evidence in his photo-performance project Bubbles in the Office (2000-06), where Yong would show up and blow soap ­bubbles in the offices of rich businessmen in the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong province, provoking surprised, sometimes even angry reactions. From the arcana of ancient Chinese mythology to the hyper-energetic entrepreneurial life of a region justly dubbed the “workshop of the world” (economic production in 2009 may well surpass US$512.1 billion), Yong’s bubbles seem to undo the world, to take it into an evanescent spaciotemporal continuum; they form a kind of ethereal superconductor for a world that is becoming ­unified as it ­dematerializes. One might say that the bubble is to Young what fat is to Beuys, a ­sculptural ­expression of uncondensed social ­existence, a trans-individual ­quasi-body (a media?). Note that in Mandarin, the word “media” is translated as 첵竟 (meiti)—literally, “mediator of bodies.” In a way, Yong’s work strives to interrogate the media phenomenon, at the confluence of the organic and the ethereal.