Fake It Till You Make It: the 1st Anren Biennale
Long before its inaugural biennial opened last October, the Sichuanese town of Anren – on the outskirts of Chengdu, China – was the site of a very different kind of theatre. The town had been home to one of China’s early 20th-century landlords, Liu Wencai, who then became a pantomime villain in Mao-era historiography (validating the expropriation of his properties when the Communists came to power). The luxury spoils from Liu’s Anren estate were being exhibited in the town as early as the 1950s, as demonstrations of the corruption of pre-liberation China. But probably the most recognized demonization of Liu resides in the Rent Collection Courtyard sculptures, which are still on display in his Anren manor today. These 114 figures were made by art students in 1965 from local clay, constructing a diorama of Liu and his clawing cronies abusing tenant peasants: the sculptures became a Cultural Revolution icon, with replicas proliferating across the country.
The original Rent Collection Courtyard installation, in which socialist realism met older religious (hellish) iconography, soon transformed into a piece of savage drama, as the original artists intended. Each night, museum staff had to wipe away the spit of fuming visitors that drooled down Liu’s own statue. Liu’s manor became, as the scholar Haiyan Lee so well describes, ‘the heterotopia that brought the dark past into the present and enabled millions of Chinese to relive the horror of class exploitation and oppression’. From the 1980s, the more sensationalist horror elements of the preserved Liu manors – the nail studded cages and ‘bloody’ wall markings – began to disappear. And the arrival of the private Jianchuan Museum Cluster in the 2000s, which is host to a sizeable collection of Cultural Revolution artefacts – and reportedly a ‘Commune’ restaurant and daily broadcasts of ‘red songs’ – heralded Anren’s new Disneyfied shift. (The municipal government even once encouraged townsfolk to wear period dress.) When I visited, the town blended its older voyeuristic texture with a more recent economy of distraction.