Propelled by the bleakness of lockdown in Beijing, polymodal performance artist Tianzhuo Chen headed out into the Tibetan Plateau to contemplate human fragility and create his latest video work, The Dust (2021), an opera of ceremonial objects.
Interview by Guy Mackinnon-Little
Beijing-born artist Tianzhuo Chen works at the extreme edges of human experience. His operatic performances, installations and videos draw on the ecstatic rituals of rave culture and gnostic religion, as well as his own practice as a Tibetan Buddhist, to shatter our ordinary sense of being in the world. Chen crafts ceremonies that collapse the boundaries between body and spirit, life and death, and the human and non-human worlds. Past performances have seen him turn Beijing’s Star Gallery into an “acid club” (Tianzhuo’s Acid Club, 2015), stage 12-hour performances inspired by the apocalyptic visions of Antonin Artaud and the shamanic trance dances of Southeast Asia (TRANCE, 2019), and catalyse China’s club circuit with his Asian Dope Boys party collective. All these events are replete with an absurdist iconography that draws as much on late-capitalist detritus such as weed symbols and South Park references as the monstrous thangka deities of Tibetan Buddhism. Chen’s anarchic oeuvre presents both a hyperbolic mirror to contemporary society and a ceremonial shedding of its constrained consumerist psyche. While much of Chen’s work has a carnal physicality in which the body is deployed as a tool to transcendence, his latest video The Dust is entirely empty of human figures. It documents Chen’s post-lockdown pilgrimage to the Tibetan plateau and the skull-lined temples and sky burial sites he visited along the way. Both a continuation and solemn contrast to the cataclysmic excess of his earlier work, The Dust is a contemplation on human finitude and fragility, a story of the spiritual world told only through the sacred sites and ceremonial instruments with which it is contacted. TANK spoke with the artist about creating this opera of objects, reincarnation and the ties between ancient rituals and contemporary club culture.
Guy Mackinnon-Little To start off, could you tell me a bit about the genesis of The Dust? What were some of the initial ideas flowing around your head?
Tianzhuo Chen Last year when the pandemic began, China was the first country to have a lockdown. The news coming from Wuhan was everywhere and everyone was in this deep depression. I was supposed to spend the year touring my latest performance TRANCE in Europe, but we were forced to suddenly cancel. I was stuck in my apartment for a couple of months during the first round of lockdown, after which I decided to travel to Tibet by myself. I’m a Tibetan Buddhist and wanted to revisit; my last trip was almost ten years ago, when I first became a Buddhist. I wanted to walk away from the city and all the depression and that trip saved me. The landscape was completely empty after the lockdown. There were no tourists, just the local people. Many of the temples were still closed, and so I was able to witness the emptiness of the landscape. I decided on that trip that I wanted to shoot a video there, so I returned in the winter later that year. I think of The Dust as a performance video without human bodies; there’s only ceremonial objects, instruments and statues from the Tibetan temples in the video. A lot of my previous work has been about performance, the human and the boundaries of the body, but I wasn’t able to work with any of my usual performers during the pandemic as they’re based in Europe, Japan and Indonesia. I wanted to keep that relation between body and mind in my work but explore it by looking at human relics and artefacts rather than humans themselves. With many Buddhist statues, you know that they were created by humans, but they come to have their own separate narrative. They become their own characters, transcending their human origins. I travelled around 4,000 miles across the Tibetan plateau from the border of Sichuan, through Qinghai, and across the whole of Tibet, encountering human ruins and relics along the way. I then composed all these different places into an opera-like performative video in which these non-human objects and spaces became the main characters.
GML Were particular sites or temples especially important in shaping the final video?
TC I visited two temples with my master. One of them was under construction at the time, so you could see all these Buddha statues covered by plastic sheets, which I thought was an interesting image. I also visited a sky burial site. In Tibetan tradition, when you die your body is chopped up into small pieces and fed to the vultures in the mountain. The idea is that all your body needs to be eaten up, even the bones, which are crushed up. There’s the story in the Buddhist tradition of Buddha giving his own meat to a tiger and an eagle, offering his flesh to other beings. After you die your soul is reincarnated and the empty body left behind is nothing but flesh, so offering that flesh to other beings is the most generous use of your corpse. Normally they allow the vultures to eat everything, but I visited one temple where they keep the skulls of excarnated corpses propped against a wall. They do this to remind us that after we die there’s nothing meaningful left, just dust and bones. I was inspired by this as so much of my previous work – especially TRANCE – has been about the human being and its body, and exploring the relationship between body and mind or spirit through the medium of ceremony. This work is also kind of a ceremony, but it’s a ceremony without the human.
GML One thing I found interesting watching the film is that it doesn’t feel like it’s being presented from a human perspective. You hover above the scene and then suddenly move in very close in these abrupt cuts. Were you trying to assume that non-human perspective yourself when filming? What did being in that ancient landscape do to your own sense of self?
TC When I’m shooting a video, I always want it to look more like an opera than a documentary. I wanted to avoid my own presence as a director and rather portray these objects so that you experience the scene from their perspective. I recorded a ceremony in my master’s temple that is performed once a year. The ceremony itself is quite crazy – monks dance wearing giant animal and skull masks to enact a narrative – but I didn’t use the footage of the ceremony, only the audio. So I’m connecting the sound of the ceremony with images of the surrounding landscape, the temple and the relics it contains. I tried to create the feeling that the chanting was emanating from the landscape and relics. There’s a scene in the middle with a wall of skulls combined with the sound of the monks, and I wanted to give the impression that these skulls were the ones doing the chanting. As a viewer, you’re placed among the skulls that line the wall of the temple.
GML Could you say a bit more about your own relationship to Tibetan Buddhism? You mentioned that prior to these recent trips, you visited Tibet ten years ago to become a Buddhist. What was the lead up to that?
TC I became a Buddhist around the age of 24. None of my family was Buddhist, but I had been really interested in Buddhist ideas for a long time, and at that age I started to realise that all my friends and family would eventually leave me. I experienced friends passing away and that really gave me the feeling that everything we experience in life is full of painful and unpredictable uncertainty. I wouldn’t describe what I was feeling as a fear of death, but rather fear of being alive, the total uncertainty of it all. So I decided to visit Tibet in 2012, where I met my master at his temple and became a Buddhist. Since then, a lot of my work has had to do with Buddhist ideas, but in a very non-traditional interpretation. I like having other kinds of influence in my work which I then combine with Buddhist ideas. Last year was a time to really reflect on the world around me and the fragility of the human as a subject. The Dust is about the vanishing of humanity and coming to terms with that is also part of why I became a Buddhist. At one point making the video, I asked a monk, “If I one day I die? Can I put my bones and my skull on the wall?” He said yes, because death is equal to everyone, and the sky burial is equal to everyone.
GML Capitalism is rooted in this fantasy of infinite growth and accumulation, which we can now see being tied to ecological devastation and the kind of conditions that create a pandemic like the one we’ve been living through. Is this work trying to create a space for us to contemplate our own finitude?
TC Exactly. The human is not the centre of the world. We have to think about coexistence with other beings. Thinking about Buddhist ideas of reincarnation, when we die and enter another life, we all became a part of the whole organism of the world. You can become an animal in your next life, you can turn into another kind of being, moving along this chain of connection. Humans, animals, viruses are all part of the ecosystems of our planet. In this film, I’m reflecting on how things like viruses and humans coexist within this planet and how we think about our own post-human situation.
GML The rituals portrayed in your earlier work draw on the ecstatic excess of contemporary rave culture, while the ancient rituals referred to in The Dust have a more contemplative sense of connection to the world beyond the human. Even though those two things feel at odds on a superficial level, it seems as if you’re trying to forge a connection here. How do the different forms of ritual referenced in your work fit together?
TC My past performances have often combined a ritual-like feeling with the intense, overwhelming and exhausting emotion of club culture, which together produce a kind of trance state. It’s less explicit, but with this video I still wanted to keep this connection. The images aren’t drawn from rave culture, but they are pieced together to capture some of the feeling or tempo of a rave. I’m thinking about the rapidly edited shots of skeletons and one scene where I blow this little bubble into the air, which felt kind of party-like to me; it symbolises how your life is nothing but a bubble blown away in the wind before it disappears, but you also see all the different colours of light refracted in the bubble, as if it’s having a party with all the objects in the film. That’s the connection with my earlier work; I wanted to keep the rave feeling in a context where you don’t necessarily expect that feeling to make sense.
GML It doesn’t feel like a contradiction at all though. You can imagine that video playing as a visual during a DJ set at ALL Club in Shanghai, or you can imagine it existing within the landscape in which is filmed; it makes perfect sense in both contexts.
TC When I was shooting the video I would always ask the permission of the monks and they were very open and curious about what we were doing, blowing bubbles in this temple with the skulls of the dead. They enjoyed watching us; they don’t have this idea that we have to be very serious in the presence of the dead, because while the skulls are significant, at the same time they mean nothing. They’re just bones.
GML It kind of links back to the title, right? When you refer to the dust as this common fate that connects us all. One thing isn’t more sacred or cosmic or special than any other thing because it will just become that dust in the end.
TC Exactly. We’re all constructed from the dust – this very basic element – and we all vanish into the dust when we die. Our lives are just this tiny bubble in the middle. ◉
Photography by Ren Xingxing.CGI overlays by Cattin Tsai and Tianzhuo Chen
