Dates: 2024.9.20-2025.1.19
Address: Beijing Inside-Out Museum, No.50 Xingshikou Road, Haidian District, Beijing
Curator: Carol Yinghua Lu
Assistant Curators: Na Rongkun, Sining Zhu
Exhibition Coordinator: Rory Guan
Curatorial Assistants: Cao Liyao, Li Huiyi, Sun Yuhan
Improvisation is part of the nature of art, and a method as well. It highlights an artistic process where the artist creates spontaneously and swiftly, using everything at hand, when the inspiration, provoked by an external stimulus or an internal impulse, hits unpreparedly and uncontrollably. Of all the age-old principles of artistic creation, improvisation is arguably the one most closely associated with creativity. In certain art forms, such as Indian music, improvisation is regarded as an art form of the highest artistic value. When it comes to traditional Chinese music culture, due to its unique system of notation and inheritance, improvisation was once a ubiquitous technique in musical practice, and was deemed one of the most important features of traditional Chinese music. However, creativity is neither the goal nor the core of improvisation. Improvisation serves as a form and a technique of creation, as well as an idea of it. Improvisation is a cross-cultural phenomenon that is probably as old as the human race. This is the reason why we encounter improvisation frequently throughout different historical moments and creative activities in the long history of art. From the Dada's rejection of logic and introduction of chaos and irrationality into their creative practice, to the Situationists who, out of an ideal to fight against Capitalism’s alienation of the individual and of social life, advocated the pursuit of genuine desires, the experience of life, and the sense of adventure, we can see that improvisation is the method, the idea, the principle, and the real life itself.
Chen Liang, Shi Bi Zheng Shou (part of Final Poem Museum), 2024, single-channel video (color, sound, 14’17’’)
On July 1, 1997, Jacques Derrida and Ornette Coleman engaged in an impromptu conversation in Paris where they interpreted Derrida's essay Play as a commentary on the issue of improvisation and creativity of performance itself. Derrida's essay questioned the possibility of pure freedom and pure spontaneity. He was acutely aware that the outcome of improvisation depends on countless uncontrollable or unpredictable factors. Ironically, Derrida was booed off the stage halfway through his performance by an audience that likely had no idea who he was. His improvisation ended in failure, but in an unpublished interview he still asserted, "And so I believe in improvisation…I fight for improvisation, but always with the belief that it's impossible."
Indeed, as Derrida noted, improvisation is a challenging cause, a daunting task for the intelligence and skill of the creator. Improvisation doesn't mean that there are no rules or structures, not does it mean to pull strange tricks that come out of nowhere. Rather, it can be understood as a self-organizing process, associated with the autonomy and creativity of the artist. In this regard, improvisation is creativity in a broad sense. In late eighteenth-century Germany, for example, artists were increasingly expected to imitate the productivity and dynamics of nature, rather than merely mimic or represent its appearance. The notion of aesthetic autonomy was fully articulated for the first time, giving rise to the pursuit of expression and genius. The demand for novelty and originality in art during this era, however, made it impossible for art to fully premeditate, prompting artists to draw on improvisational techniques during their creative process. These developments contributed to Romanticism's rediscovery and reinvention of improvisation as a practice that "relies on and stages the particular constraints that encourage the emergence of something new and inventive." In a certain sense, improvisation took the place of the aesthetics of autonomy and followed an aesthetics of self-generating, as "the artwork [has to] emerge with and according to a plan it develops for itself." In other words, improvisation sets its own boundaries; in the meanwhile, it keeps negotiating with the ever-shifting plan where creativity bursts out. This requires the artist to keep constant and intense attention to the formation of their artworks, just as the way we should maintain a high level of attention to the surroundings we inhabit.
Hu Yiyao, Sports Paintings, 2023, Performance, single-channel video (color, silent)
Usually abrupt and unconventional, improvisation is not isolated from other artistic practices. As a process that is self-generated, self-developed, self-directed, and self-reflective, improvisation involves deliberate interruptions, disturbances and overflows, encompassing unsettling and discordant tensions. The approach to how improvisation becomes art is to a large extent through setting up specific constraints, and arranging creativity itself, in the same way as art needs improvisation to be original, unique and coherent. This co-existence of constraints and attempts to transcend constraints is essentially the autonomy of creative practice. The idea of improvisation as the ultimate form of creation, which is to say that change itself and the process of creating is artistic creation, is a revelation brought to us by improvisation.
Artists may introduce life into their creation, allowing the impermanence, disorders and mutations of life to intervene and to become the driving force of their creation, or place themselves directly in various real-life scenarios, immersing themselves in the ever-changing flow of life. Improvisation contains, at the same time, the conditions that create improvisation as well as the act of creating itself. It actively faces up to all the oncoming constraints, uncertainties, and risks, discovers hidden gaps, and even "turns enemies into allies." Improvisation encompasses both the soft, flexible and the resilient side of art. It could stray from life, hide itself in life, be isolated from life; meanwhile, it could also keep on creating within life, keep company with the ever-changing life, and even re-invent life.
Cement Park, I'm Still on the Balcony · Dusting the Quilt (part of That’s World), 2022, Performance video (color, sound)
Improvisation underscores self-consciousness and a recognition of flux, contingency and chaos as a constant, while acknowledging yet weakening the constraints of rules on creativity. Improvisation is wary of approaches, institutions, dogmas, and thoughts that are overly systematic and ossified. It abandons communication with established orders, and constantly looks for opportunities to disrupt sequences and connections. In the meantime, improvisation, as an integral part of the order, enters into a paradoxical and alienated relationship with it, a way of being in exile. We can thereby extend this understanding to perceive the relationship between individual experience in art and the legacy of art history as a form of improvisation. It is through the continuous efforts of individual artists to break away from existing paradigms and constraints, to tamper with them, to clash with them, and to transcend them that the evolution of art becomes possible. Improvisation is a unique expression of the way artists break through stable structures, a manifestation of their power of subjectivity. In this sense, improvisation contributes to an intrinsic impetus of art and art history, leading the life of art towards openness, dynamism and evolvement.
In 1992, as China's market economy took off, the "cultural economy" and the cultural industry that took shape gradually during this period began influencing and regulating the orientation of art and cultural practices. Unprecedented anxiety, depression, and even emptiness occupied the minds of the literary and artistic community. At this time, performance art in Beijing's East Village, which paralleled the emergence of rock 'n'roll scene in Beijing, was a demonstration of a collective restlessness after a long period of inhibition, and of the awakening of artists' individual consciousness. It featured immediacy, directness, intense body language, and an observation and expression of the living environment from a grassroots perspective. It was vital for the artists to express their perceptions of the states of being through an emphasis on their own specific bodies, and through the genuine relationship between their bodies and the daily environment around them. These performances were not only direct encounters of their context of existence, but also often improvisational creations embedded within these contexts. Situations the artists were facing were so uncertain that a high degree of wit and acuteness were required to make decisions and responses artistically and tactically. They endeavored to break away from strict norms, to create out of their experience rather than knowledge, to experience history and psychological echoes of reality. In short, they met their life of the moment at eye level. They believed that they were part of life, and that they were one of the states that life could be. They also sought to integrate art into daily lives, seeing their personal feelings and experiences in society as a starting point for creating a culture that is indigenous. They tried to have their works mirror their contemporary life, and thus to make themselves part of the society.
East Village Beijing, Primordial Sounds, No.1, 1995, Photography, Dimension Variable
Courtesy of RongRong and Three Shadows +3 Gallery
From the 1990s to the present, industrialization and capitalization of artistic practice have become a dominant order in the art world. Art education turned into a market-oriented business and a discipline, which imposed endless constraints and disciplines on the freedom and autonomy of creation. Shallow creations that are commercial, entertaining and stereotypical have taken the place of vibrant art, becoming the façade and substance of contemporary art. While facing constantly changing external challenges, art also has to deal with the problem of ossification periodically in its course of development. And we fear that contemporary art practice today, both its form and thought, is stuck in such a predicament again. Various elements, including forms, concepts, ideas, institutions, issues, etc., have all once played their roles in granting art freedom and energy. But these methods, once emerged at respective times to solve the problem of ossification in art, have gradually been reduced to ossification themselves, lacking the flexibility and agility to address specific issues, and the agency to make spontaneous adjustments accordingly. Let us take research-based exhibitions and thematic exhibitions as examples. Both of them emerged in the 1990s along with the application of cultural studies in the field of contemporary art and the development of art as a discipline (for example, the establishment of the doctoral degree in art). Over the subsequent decades, contemporary artists and curators have been using archives in their own practices, revealing neglected histories, marginalized groups, and hidden social issues through research-based art. On the other hand, thematic exhibitions have attempted to introduce current social issues to form a narrative of exhibition, and thus to engage in public discourse. However, both approaches have gradually fallen to routines and inertia over the course of decades of development, with a lack of in-depth narratives and dimensions of history. Their didactic nature and favor of form over content led to incompetence in triggering valid thinking and discussion. The decline of contemporary art's vitality and influence today is a fact more than obvious.
Pak Sheung Chuen, Waiting for a Friend (without Appointment), 2006 – 2007, Performance, photograph
Not only is contemporary art unable to pick up the baton of pioneering our times, it is also losing its inner energy and connotation in making countless compromises and in pandering to various stakeholders, though its outreach has been expanding. Artists generally experience an unprecedented sense of constraints and deprivation. This makes us realize that the urgency of talking about creation of art itself today, just as in the post-Cultural Revolution era, discussions on formal exploration in art was aimed to awaken the vitality of art itself and to fight against its dwindling and shriveling. For this mission, we hope to re-discover improvisation. Just as individuals can draw energy from their own life experiences, so can art be inspired by art itself.
Improvisation is not only an embodiment of artistic creativity and vitality, but a state of being of art. In the academic music education system, the disappearance of improvisation has deprived traditional music of the possibility of development and innovation, which leads to a loss in its vigor. In our opinion, the independence and agency of improvisation in terms of its creative and spiritual character is still of great relevance today. In Edgar Landgraf’s Improvisation as Art, he traced how modernity's emphasis on creativity had changed the connotation of improvisation, and how the ideals and rules of improvisation that led to its abandonment in the “high art” in the eighteenth century had reintegrated improvisation back into modernism in a creative fashion. The book tells a story of an eighteenth-century actor who was forbidden by his theater director from improvised performance. He later found himself ended up on stage with a horse that had defecated everywhere. The actor stepped out of his role and, in flagrant defiance of the director's orders, said to the horse, “Weren't you prohibited from improvising?” This witty story demonstrates that imagination and improvisation are both autonomous acts, and thus inherently uncontainable, much like human nature.
Ergao (He Qiwo), Huangbian, 2020, Community art, single-channel video (color, sound), 47'
Acknowledgement: Zhang Lu, director of the documentary
We call for improvisation as a creative consciousness. It is one of the characteristics of life, and a way for people to engage with life. Improvisation that is inherent in creation offers us a perspective to understand the world, exploring the infinite vitality imbedded in sporadic, unexpected, nomadic, chaotic, and unpredictable forms of organization. Improvisation is not merely one of the values of art, but can also be regarded as a value of life. One might even say that improvisation is a way of creating the world. As a way of thinking, it allows us to remain acutely aware of changes, rather than being fearful or flinching. Anything unexpected, whether it be natural catastrophe, war, or pandemic, can throw us into unprecedented chaos, which, however, may be necessary for the development of life. And at this point, improvisation can probably be a more proactive response compared to passive coping. Improvisation is both an acquirable ability and a way of being of the world. It keeps the universe from falling into an inert equilibrium, and the society from ending up dull and boring. In this sense, improvisation means the awakening of individual consciousness. And the will towards improvisation is something we must not carelessly discard.
Carol Yinghua Lu
September, 2024
Pak Sheung Chuen, Chen Liang, Chen Zhou, Ergao (He Qiwo), He Liping, Hu Yiyao, Liu Zhan, M Art Group (Fu Yuehui, Gong Jianqing, Hu Yuelong, Li Zuming, Qin Yifeng, Shen Fan, Song Haidong, Tang Guangming, Wang Guqing, Weng Liping, Yang Dongbai, Yang Hui, Yang Xu, Zhao Chuan, Zhou Tiehai), Ma Liuming, Peng Xueying, RongRong, Cement Park (A Zhong, Chun Yi, En Dian, Fan Xiaoxue, Heiyue·Jishengli, B.A.T, LDS, Shi Xing, Shu, Wenjie Junjie, Xie Songqing, Yi Fan, Zhan Yi, Link), Vunkwan Tam, Tong Tianqing, Wang Sishun, Yorkson, Artists of Original Sound (Cang Xin, Florence Gomez, He Ruijun, Luo Lin, Ma Liuming, RongRong, Song Dong, Song Xiaohong, Wang Shihua, Zhang Huan, Zhu Fadong, Zuoxiao Zuzhou), Zhang Wei, Zhang Zhihui, Zhong Yunshu, Zhou Bin, Zuoxiao Zuzhou.
*Listed in alphabetical order (Chinese surname).
We would like to thank these artists, scholars, curators and institutions for their generous support:
Chen Yifei, Chen Yuetong, Duan Jun, Huang Pojan, Ke Nini, Edward Sanderson, Li Jianhong, Lin Wenjun, Luo Xiaoming, Mi Nuo, Benson Pan, VAVABOND, Zhao Ziyi, Zhou Dengyan.
A4 ART MUSEUM, Empty Gallery, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre & Three Shadows +3 Gallery, BY ART MATTERS, Star Gallery.
*Listed in alphabetical order (Chinese surname).
Poster Design：Meng Yaohan
Design & Layout：Cao Liyao, Duan Ruilin, Li Zhiyan, Li Huiyi
