Art Sonje Center presents Zou Zhao’s performance Chinese is Not a Language! John Hansen intervenes to accompany Discordant Harmony.

Chinese is Not a Language! John Hansen intervenes

Zou Zhao walks up to the stage from the crowd. Suddenly, she appears lost in time. She delivers a fragment of Li Bai’s Poem, “Jiang Jing Jiu Bring in the Wine!” in three ways: first in the singing style of a Yue Qi-a traditional opera; then in contemporary Mandarin; and finally in fragments of English. She appears to be remembering something she has not quite been able to recall. After the performance, she seems to regain herself, to share a few words of thanks for the museum, and for the audience that made it to this “discordant harmony” opening evening. At this point, she offers her slot of performance to a fictional character, John Hansen, a student of contemporary Chinese philosophy studying the renowned philosopher Chad Hansen. John addresses the urgency of a contemporary problem, which is the continual delay of Chinese people’s collective emancipation from communist rule through language. In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square student-led protest, Zou Zhao asks John Hansen to say a few words regarding the Chinese language.

Zou Zhao urges the crowd to welcome John Hansen. Zou Zhao walks to a nearby chair, where a suit hangs, and then puts it on. She walks around the stage for two minutes, then turns to face the audience. She introduces herself as John Hansen, and begins to give a short presentation on the subject “Chinese is Not a Language!” she begins the talk with a fictional paragraph from Ai Wei Wei’s biography, which claims that there is no freedom in Chinese realities. After this, she urges the world to acknowledge Chinese not as a language through the last presidential election where presidential candidate Xi Jin Ping was elected “democratically” 2950 to 1. To understand the commonplace of fraud, John Hansen proposes to understand the Chinese language through its absence of the concept of truth (as proposed by Chad Hansen). He then goes on to explain briefly the concept of how Tao lacks truth.

In the end, he urges the audience to participate in an occupation of autocracy through language itself by joining him in a chant of “Chinese is Not a Language!” repeatedly.

John ends his keynote address, thanks the audience, and removes his suit. Zou Zhao reappears before the audience. She now says that she will be happy to take three questions from the audience with her prepared answers. After the last answer, she thanks the audience once again and walks off the stage.

Artist
Zou Zhao was born in 1989 in Fujian, China. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, with a BA in Fine Art, and completed her Masters degree in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2014. Her work has been shown in London at various venues, including the Camden Art Centre(2013), the UCL Art Museum (2013), no.w.here art space(2014), the Chinese Visual Festival (2014) and at Double Vision: Overseases Chinese Women Invitation Exhibition 2014, He Xiang Ning Art Museum, China. She has also co-curated The strange impression of seeing things for the first time at the Art Pavilion in 2013 in London, and was the recipient of the Berenice Goodwin Award for Performance from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London in 2013.