Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia. Ou Ning (欧宁). 2010.
Artist Ou Ning founded the Bishan Commune as a utopian experiment in Bishan Village in 2010. Although originally centered around the Bishan Harvestival, an annual arts festival, it shifted to a more local model after the festival was shut down by authorities in 2012. Since then, the Commune has focused on artistic collaboration with local villagers and has expanded to emphasise the village’s economic development. The notebook shown in the photo details Ou Ning’s vision and ideas for the commune, as well as his inspirations derived from alternative communities around the world.
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After an unplanned break, Design China is back. Contributor Sherry Yong Chen catches up with Ou Ning to find out about his latest.
What have you been up to recently?
Earlier this year, I resigned from my positions at Chutzpah! and V-ECO magazines; most recently, I have been reading and writing. My book South of Southern: Space, Geography, History and the Biennale was finally published this past January. This took me five years to complete, and is a summary of the 2009 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Architecture Biennale exhibition.
Additionally, last March I attended an international literature conference at Haus de Kulturen der Welt, and in May I presented my project Bishan Commune in the exhibition "Cloud of Unknowing: A City of Seven Streets" at Taipei Fine Art Museum. Last June, I visited some rural communities in the US, as well as the headquarters of Modern Farmer magazine and Paul Glover, who initiated Ithaca Hours, and Yin Yu Tang. This was followed by a trip to Denmark, where I presented Bishan Commune and visited some special communities like Christiania Fristaden. Right now, I am writing an article about practicing utopia for a Taipei Fine Art Museum publication, and an article about Christiania Fristaden for Paper News.
How has the Bishan Commune project matured since our last interview?
In April, we transformed an old shrine in Bishan into a bookstore, which has become a very successful public space in the countryside. In addition to selling books and coffee, we organise a series of small-scale activities, including the first reading club in July, for which we invited Wang Jiyu, a Masters student of Experimental Art from Central Academy of Fine Arts, to deliver a lecture, and the Danish music-art group YOYOOYOY to perform “Movable Accurate” in Bishan. We have also held a series of discussions, for instance, engaging in debate about alternative education methods, as well as Huizhou cultural research. For the latter, we published a report of nearly 500 pages, which summarises fieldwork into local, traditional handicrafts and our research progress from the past three years. The entire project was conducted by volunteers from Anhui University.
Overall, Bishan hasn't gained much progress because we have faced many difficulties, including those from the local government and lack of funding. Last July, Zhou Yun, a PhD candidate at Harvard, visited Bishan during a Chinese research session organised by the Social Sciences faculty at Nanjing University, after which she questioned the Bishan project on the internet. I responded to her questioning online, which immediately led to nation-wide controversy and discussion. Zhou Yun mainly criticised Bishan for showing a tendency of elitism, but I don't think she fully understands the difficulties that the project has faced and how much effort we have put into it. This controversy has, however, increased social awareness for a rural construction movement in China, so actually it has had quite a positive impact in some regards.
How else has your project impacted the local community?
The impact of the Bishan project on the local community is manifested in the following ways: first of all, as we purchased old houses in the village and settled down, the villagers have eventually realised the value of their old houses. Their awareness of self-protection has increased, and their ability of price negotiation has improved. The old houses, which received little attention in the past, now enjoy a very active market. Until now, about twenty newcomers have purchased old houses in Bishan.
Secondly, the numerous activities that we have organised, including Bishan Harvestival in 2011, Yixian International Photo Festival in 2012, and many small activities afterwards, have all opened up the villagers' horizon from a cultural perspective. Public life in Bishan is much more active as a result. There is widespread participation in all kinds of activities that we organise, and the villagers often come to the Bishan Bookstore to read and rest. Under the influence of Bishan, some Bishan young fellows who worked in other places have now returned to their hometown and started their own enterprises, with strong dedication to the modernisation of their hometown.
Additionally, the village committee is now starting to identify Bishan as a village whose characteristics lie in cultural construction, and they have become aware of protecting the historical sites of the village to attract more intellectuals to settle down here. In terms of land development, they have also focused on cultural innovation and organic agriculture. Some large-scale investments are flooding into Bishan, but only time will tell if it is actually a good thing.
You recently travelled to Denmark and presented your work there. What was the context of the visit, and how was your work received?
My visit to Denmark was arranged by Mai Corlin, a PhD candidate at Aarhus University. Since 2012, Bishan Commune has been the topic of her doctoral dissertation and Mai has visited us a couple of times. While I was in Denmark, I presented Bishan project in an exhibition named "FORESPØRGSLER I JORD OG KUNST", held in a farm near Aarhus. I also exchanged views with other artists who participated in the exhibition. The Danish people generally do not know much about the current situation in Chinese rural areas, and curiosity has driven them to come to my exhibitions in Denmark.
We have also organised three seminars in Aarhus University and Copenhagen University. In the art space YNKB in Copenhagen, I delivered a report entitled "The Crisis and Experiment of the Commons: The New Rural Reconstruction Movement in China", in which I analysed the current social background of the new rural reconstruction movement in contemporary China. Then, I was invited by the Christiania Researcher in Residence project to stay there and conduct research for an extra week.
What is the long-term plan for Bishan Commune? Where do you see it going in the future?
My family and I have settled down in Bishan, and we have thoroughly enjoyed our life here. I usually just do some reading, complete some writing tasks, and live a simple life with my family. It is the kind of life that I have always longed for. However, the Bishan project does not have any long-term plan at the moment because we are faced with too many difficulties to continue working on this project. This year, we planned to organise another Bishan Harvestival as an investor had expressed interest and was willing to fund this event. The local government also approved our proposal of re-organising this mega-event. However, this investment covers more than 200 mu (a unit of area equivalent to approximately 0.0667 hectares) of farmland. We were very concerned that over-exploitation of land will affect the ecological environment of Bishan, which may lead to unfavourable situations, so we became very cautious. The event has been put on hold for now.
This year the village committee persuaded me to purchase an old grain distribution station in the village. The station had been left unattended and in disrepair for many years, so I need to gather some money for reconstruction. If I could, I would transform it into a village museum, which would exhibit the materials that I have collected about Bishan's history, alongside documentation about the Bishan project. We might also organise some art exhibitions and film screenings related to the village. But these are just ideas, and they cannot be realised until all the conditions are met.
Few places in China preserved the rural essence as well as the small towns in Huizhou region, in the southern part of Anhui province. The rich merchants of the area developed their villages for centuries and built up vast mansions to live, all of them richly decorated with handcrafted wood panels in their majestic ancestral halls. Even though, due to the tumultuous history of China during last century and the economic development of coastal region, Huizhou's cultural heritage started to vanish and many of the grand mansions remain abandoned.
Now, several intellectuals and artists are trying to revitalize the area through the Bishan Commune, a project that wants to bring back the old charm to Huizhou and fight for the preservation of its local culture. Ou Ning and Zuo Jing, the two creative minds behind the initiative, have already started the Bishan Harvestival, a cultural festival in Bishan Village. One of the first results can already be seen in the place: Qian Xiaohua, the owner of several independent bookshops, decided to reconvert one of the ancestral halls into one of his stores.
Sad news. Critically acclaimed literary magazine Chutzpah! has stopped publication after nearly four years. Chief Editor Ou Ning announced the news on 19 February 2014 on his Weibo and Facebook accounts. Over its print run of 16 issues, the publication has earned "rave reviews by lovers of literature for its presentation and edgy selection of literary content. Subjects ranged from dialect to minority literature, poetry, diaspora, and the last on the 'Diamond Generation' of post-89 youth. Each issue also included an abridged English-language supplement consisting mainly of translations from the Chinese". Read more via randian.
Ou Ning discusses Beijing's Climate Politics and why he relocated to Anhui Province earlier this year:
"In April 2013, I packed all my stuff into nearly a hundred boxes and transported them by an eight-meter container truck from Beijing to Bishan, a village in Yi County, Anhui Province. Actually, I didn't move here specifically to avoid the haze in Beijing, and my fear of air pollution was not so strong that I needed to buy canned fresh air from Chen Guangbiao...I moved to Bishan because I decided to reconstruct this rural area and conduct ecological experiments here. Instead of being overly dependent on the city, we should retrieve the value of the countryside through agricultural development and eco-environmental protection. Only in this way can we balance the population between urban and rural areas, reduce city pollution and control energy use, solving environmental problems in the whole of society fundamentally. This point of view may still be more of a brainstorm or an 'artwork', like the bike designed by my friend Matt Hope, and it may still face many practical difficulties in reality, but at least we have made our first step". Read more.
"A little over month ago, I found myself traveling to rural Anhui province. Coal+Ice, the documentary photography exhibition I had produced for Asia Society, had been invited to exhibit at the Yixian International Photography Festival. Logistically, this exhibit proved a daunting feat. Fifteen massive crates of photographs were driven all day from Beijing to Pingshan Village, where the power of ten men would carry each crate 500 meters down a rocky hill to the exhibition space, an ancestral hall that dates to the late Ming dynasty. I calculated our exhibition's wattage needs and we borrowed electricity from the farm next door...On the day before the opening, we still had about two more hours of installation ahead of us when we discovered the festival had been 'postponed' by the county government". Continue reading.
