Zhan Guan
Daughter of Time
Summary
Engaging with the conflict between her family’s shamanistic belief and practices, and her school’s emphasis on an atheistic education, the author returns to a much-read Young Adult fiction, Michelle Paver’s Wolf Brother of 2004, which she has come to understand as formative to her development through adulthood. Re-reading this favorite book is one of the methods by which the author reconstructs childhood memories, experience and emotion in order to explore her fear of shamanism and of death. Other methods include recorded conversations with family and friends, and reflections on her own archive of teenage-ephemera including diaries. In the process, she finds that she is trapped in the psychological predicament of what she terms ‘Eternal Youth’. In this thesis, the author utilizes reading on psychology as well as linguistics to consider the conundrum of ‘Eternal Youth’, especially in relation to her experience of shamanism. How to escape the conflicting mental predicaments it has led to? How to truly live in life? In this practice-based research project, the author combines performance art, re-reading of a highly specific text, and writing to express the dilemma of living across knowledge systems, cultures and ages. Ultimately, the project argues for giving up on the pursuit of ‘significance ’ and of absolute rationality as the key to her living of her life.
Additional info
My work are mainly performance art and installation art.
I am an anthropological artist and writer based in Beijing and Fushun. I was born on the vast plains of northeastern China, and my work is deeply influenced by the region’s expansive natural geography, the post-industrial economic decline, and the conflict between my family’s shamanistic beliefs and the atheistic social environment. my artworks focus on my relationships with those around me and the impact of the environment on me.
In my work, I explored my reflections on female identity, intimate relationships, and the interplay between personal and social identity, shaped by the societal upheavals experienced by my generation born during China’s economic reform period.
My recent research focuses on the history of the women in my family over the past century. The women in my family come from diverse backgrounds, including old aristocratic families, middle-class households, and impoverished farming communities. I am researching the unique challenges they faced and how they shaped their lives amidst the turmoil and transformation of Chinese society over the last hundred years.
Between Two Worlds
My interest in researching this topic springs from my confusion about my own identity during childhood and adolescence, as well as the dissatisfaction and retrospection I am experiencing in relation to my current difficulties, and my exploration of them. My research initially began with an inquiry into the fear of shamanism: Animal gods follow and protect me at all times under the orders of my uncle, a shaman. With the influence of animal gods, I have developed several non-human sensations and hallucinations. This allows me to glimpse the world of gods and death, and a great fear towards this world was aroused in me. The fear follows me like a shadow, and is rooted in my life, prompting me to recollect and explore my childhood.
The other inspiration for my research comes from Young Adult fiction, in particular the book Wolf Brother, the first book in the series Chronicles of Ancient Darkness by Michelle Paver, which meant a lot to me when I was seven. The protagonist in Wolf Brother, Torak, has to deal with magecraft and is predestined to fight the soul eaters. The author portrays Torak’s struggle between ordinary life and his destiny, and I feel enormous empathy for Torak. For my research I read the English edition of this book and realised that I live in the intersection of two worlds. At the same time, inspired by Marina Abramovich’s work Nude with Skeleton, I embarked on my first practice, Between Two Worlds, which combines performance art with literary imagery, depicting my struggle to exist in a position between two worlds – being located in both of them and moving back and forth from one to the other.
It shows me constantly shuttling back and forth on a swing. I covered half of the screen with black, symbolizing that every time I try to move forward, it leads me into the unknown world with equal force. Just like a tree whose lush branches and leaves reach into the sky while its roots go deeper underground. I am forced to explore my life deeper into both worlds, facing the unsolvable separation, opposition, and the possibility of being trapped by the fear of the unknown world of the dead.
I selected sentences from Wolf Brother that gave me the feeling of ‘this happened same on me’ and woved them into my story as narration for the video. I attempt to combine performance and text.
Between Two Worlds made me realize that I cannot stop shuttling. However, I have been living a life of never stop shuttling for twenty years. My practice is a retrospective understanding and expression. It is my 6-year-old self who found a way to live without fear through the conclusion that I cannot stop shuttling. My practice allows my 26-year- old self to have a conversation with my 6-year-old self, changing my feelings about my childhood after the practice. Therefore, I reached my first conclusion that there is no present; the so-called present is only an interval between the past and the future.
Daughter of Time
In the process of performing Between Two Worlds, the fear of my childhood gradually dissipated through the constant to and fro. This moment has had an impact on my past. The wonderful connection between these times points prompts me to explore the connection between time, the past, and emotion. I discovered the shaping of language by time and the world in George Steiner’s After Babel and Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. In my second practice, Daughter of Time, I wrote words on coloured paper, and changed their order around. In this way, I demonstrate how memories are distorted and reconstructed by time.
Predicament
Daughter of Time has made me realised that the shaping of memory is uneven and uncertain. In my current work, I am researching my previous practice and interviewing my parents and friends about their opinions of me at different times. As a result I find that I have been repeatedly pursuing a form of ‘correctness’ over the years, trying to find a correct path from former experiences. In Jung's analytical psychology, this is a psychological problem he termed ‘Puer Aeternus’ or ‘Eternal Youth’, that is often closely related to child archetype (Carl Gustav Jung, 2011). My pursuit of this ‘correctness’ comes mainly from the influence of the perspectives of male authors in the books I read, as well as my empathy for Torak in Wolf Brother – I have always looked at the world through the eyes of a male teenager, hoping to be identified by the world as such, and ultimately qualify as an adult male.
This discovery has led to my third practice, Predicament, which is a performance of climbing a tree with the help of fabric while blindfolded. Predicament highlights my confusion, growth, and difficulties. Watching the unexpected cry for help at the end of the video, I feel as if I have returned to the scene at that time, shuttling back and forth between being either the subject as performer and the object as audience. This makes me acknowledge my ‘detached presence’. If I want to escape the predicament of ‘Eternal Youth’, I should accept my female identity and use it as a gap through which I can enter life. At the same time, I am inspired by the pain experienced by Harry Haller, the protagonist of Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, from his pursuit of ideals and elegance, as well as the work of the artist Francis Alÿs, that is based on personal action and impotence: to accept my sensitivity and emotionality, and to escape the pursuit of rationality and ‘significance’.
