Text by Robin Peckham
Modernity and modernism are fraught concepts in written Chinese. Most mainland writers, trained as they are in “harmonious scientific development” or what have you, tend to use the term xiandai, which carries a mixture of California ideology optimism and pseudo-scientific pretense. The great debates about modernization and Westernization are carried out in the vocabulary of xiandaihua, the many faces and disciplinary understanding of modernism are all translated as xiandai zhuyi, and modern art is generally discussed as xiandai yishu (or the period spanning modern and contemporary, xiandangdai). Probably derived from the perspective of dialectic-based historical materialism, the unity of the term belies its nebulous meaning. Scholars in different disciplines rarely agree on the historical meaning of “modern China,” much less when this is construed to include the strange and at times horrifying creature we have come to call “modern art” in China.
The discourse of modernity was at its most active during a period of several decades spanning the end of the Qing dynasty and the Republican era, when the concept was translated phonetically as modeng. Modeng carries a range of meanings historically distinct from the ideological engineering of xiandai, but remains a marked term nonetheless. It entails less objective science and more cultural borrowing, particularly from the English language. Its use today generally refers to an historical moment writ large, rather than a particular theory of cultural development. Modeng might call to mind intellectual freedom, vigorous debate, Shanghai cinema, mid-century Hong Kong, cigarettes, and jazz, all epitomized in vintage design, fashion, and style that blends Chinese aesthetics with Western convenience. So it was that Tang San, a collaborative art studio and music venue in a walk-up tenement building owned by a pawn shop on Shanghai Street in Mongkok, was awarded the title of “a very modeng club” by a mainland culture magazine.
Tang San recently hosted the debut Hong Kong performance of Zhao Yiran, better known to followers of the Chinese music scene as Zhao Laoda. Laoda (this latter name is a respectful form of “eldest brother”) has lived as a wandering musician for much of his life, now approaching its fifth decade. Finding himself unable or unwilling to make a living through conventional means, Laoda joined the zouxue movement and subsisted by playing folk-inflected covers of popular songs. His style, influenced by the lyrical trauma of American folk and blues and the musical traditions of his native Ningxia in equal parts, appropriates the narrative and emotion of lowest common denominator pop ballads while inhabiting their shells with the genuine power and heartbreak of poverty and life on the road. Every song Zhao Laoda performs sounds like it belongs solely with his voice, but the fact remains–he is doing it to survive.
Zhao Laoda’s major album, “Living in 1988,” implies nostalgia for an age of innocence. Though certainly not a political artist, his words and actions stand always on the side of freedom. The reminiscent tone present in so much of his best work sits quite comfortably with Tang San, a space that similarly manipulates a bygone historical moment to confront a politically, financially, and culturally pessimistic future. The incongruity of the particular modernisms visible both within this apartment, reticent to leave behind a colonial era in which prospects appeared brighter than they have turned out, and these songs, always recalling the potential of a process of reform and opening that remains incomplete, should be self-evident. Zhao Laoda’s zouxue lifestyle was only possible due to this nascent political process, but its tightening and expansion have relegated his cultural work to the status of an underground curiosity. The pawnshop on Shanghai Street may soon be demolished and “Living in 1988″ may never be formally released, but the name laoda will always remain.
