The question of what computer-driven video games, interactive CD-ROMs, and the Internet have to contribute to art as a humanizing force is answered in part by the recent experiments with paintings which incorporate computer-generated images, prints, and most recently, interactive CD-ROMs, by a young Chinese artist, Feng Mengbo, who works in Beijing. Feng's experiments are driven by his fascination with video games. Like the earlier generation of post-modern artists in the West, he melds the means of popular culture into his art. In doing so, he uses technology and other artistic media to make a statement about life in the context of significant cultural and political transformation on a global scale.

During the early nineties, Feng produced a series of computer-based paintings, Taxi! Taxi!—Mao Zedong I-III. In this series, he likened Mao's waving to the army of the Red Guards gathered at Tiananmen Square during the Cultural Revolution to the way people wave to hail a taxi by copying Mao's image and placing an ordinary yellow taxicab in front of it.(3) With this act, Feng Mengbo quietly introduced a human scale to the mythical Mao. In a 1994 work titled Game Over: Long March, he transformed stills from a video game into a series of 42 paintings that examine China's revolutionary past.(4) Images feature a Chinese revolutionary street fighter dressed in a blue soldier's uniform with a red armband. His weapons include the conventional artillery of grenades and bullets as well as crushed Coca-Cola cans. A young Mao and heroes of the revolutionary operas created during the Cultural Revolution are interspersed with characters from the international video world including ninjas and dinosaurs.(5)

Beginning in 1996, Feng Mengbo parlayed his interest in video games into a form of interactive art. His first interactive CD-ROM, My Private Album, was shown in New York at Holly Solomon Gallery in April 1997.(6) Initially conceived as a collection of slides intended to document family history, My Private Album consists of a study of the artist's life in the context of a multigenerational family including grandparents, parents, and his wife. This work juxtaposes history as seen from a personal, familial perspective with official history. The images are drawn from a wide variety of sources including the family photo album, old gramophone records, book pages, sections of movies, drawings, paintings, postcards, his own digital movies, and other memorabilia depicting Chinese culture of the late twentieth century. The pictures mark life transitions over three generations, thus revealing the passage of time through the human cycles of birth, maturation, and death.(7) The images are generated with a Macintosh computer and are projected with a digital projector onto a screen surrounded by curtains to give it the appearance of a miniature theater. Viewers can manipulate the order of events appearing on the screen by using a mouse and keypad.

The main feature of the exhibition at the Haggerty Museum is Taking Mt. Doom by Strategy, Feng Mengbo's second interactive CD-ROM installation, which links the high-tech game aesthetics of the West and the traditional staging of the Beijing opera to explore the history and meaning of the Cultural Revolution in China.(8) It is based on a mixing of the video game Doom with the opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy from the Cultural Revolution era and includes 42 clips from the film of the same title. In the hands of Feng Mengbo, the romanticized propaganda themes of the opera and the film are laced with gentle irony and wit. From the artist's perspective, both the opera and the film are "full of fighting about power, blood, and heroes" and hence are concerned with the same issues.(9) These sources are mixed and adapted by the artist according to his own fantasies and imagination.

Feng Mengbo believes that the video game is a source of art. This claim does not arise from any lack of training or knowledge of the fine arts. He studied design for four years at the Beijing School of Arts and Crafts and spent an additional four years at the Central Academy of the Fine Arts in Beijing. The video game is a very natural medium for him, probably because he spent many hours in his youth playing video games. More than the previous My Private Album, Taking Mt. Doom by Strategy reveals the artist's youthful in-depth involvement with video games. While the aim of the former work, according to the artist, was to make a documentary, the aim of the latter is to make a game that is full of imagination and fun. In contrast to the slow, quiet pace of My Private Album, Taking Mt. Doom by Strategy is noisy and fast paced. And with a very different visual result. The work quite literally embodies the Phenomenal character of the electronic world: "lightness, free mobility, and free play with dimensions and forms."(10) Feng prefers to call the results of this process a game rather than art, but he has already conceded that the game is the source of art, so there need not be a division between the two for him.

A primary reason for choosing the interactive CD-ROM as a medium for artistic expression is grounded in the artist's strong commitment to democratic populism. Video games are a source of empowerment and participation for their youthful practitioners and also for the audience within the virtual world provided by Taking Mt. Doom by Strategy. The versatility of the digital medium gives the audience freedom to participate in the artwork itself, and the technical possibilities for interaction by the artist and the user help to free the process of making art from conventional linear narrative structures. For Feng Mengbo, new technologies offer new ways of exploring human concerns and returning to individuals the opportunity to imaginatively reshape their own cultural participation. Within the simulated realities of video games, the individual can create his or her own virtual world, where the roles of heroes and villains can be altered at will.

Feng Mengbo believes that art is for the widest possible public audiences. It is not made just for critics and other specialists of the art world. In this respect, he is closer to Keith Haring (who began his career in the subways of New York and who expressed a similar populist perspective on art with respect to his desire to communicate with mass audiences) than to the Pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, whose manipulation of images from everyday life often failed to appeal to the public outside the art world. As an artist, Feng Mengbo eschews any political role, asserting that his artworks are based on his private understanding of culture. Although he does not admit to any political aims, his work nevertheless invites examination of the cultural forces of the Cultural Revolution by dissecting and subjecting to critical scrutiny some of its more powerful themes. His work can also be said to be political in its inquiry into how critical perception and art may lead to a more active role in the affairs of the world.(11) His art undoubtedly benefits from the current world-wide attention to politics and commerce in China and its cultural links to the rest of the world. Recognition of artists in China, as well as in other Asian, African, and Latin American countries, can be seen as part of the geopolitical changes accompanying globalization. Like many artists caught up in the process of globalization, Feng Mengbo's artistic concerns are linked with a global culture which extends beyond a particular national culture.

Increasingly, Western art institutions recognize the creativity and originality of contemporary artists from the non-Western world, and non-Western artists eagerly embrace Western artistic trends.(12)

The Internet has been the primary link between events in China and the technological and artistic developments in the West. It has had an especially important role in the development of artists such as Feng Mengbo. It provides instant contact with the most current developments in art and culture across the world. It also offers a means for artists away from the main Western art centers such as New York and Berlin to show their work in areas where travel is either prohibited or prohibitively expensive. Communication through the Internet thus allows artists in China to instantly share their creative works and receive feedback. In these respects, digital technologies have indeed served to extend the humanizing effects of art on a global basis.

Culturally, Feng Mengbo combines experiences as a child of the Cultural Revolution in China with contemporary Western technological culture made possible by the Internet and by cultural exchange which brought young Chinese artists to exhibit their work in the United States and Europe. His approach to art will appeal to the visual literacy of minds shaped by video games and the cultural resources provided by the Internet. The globally minded blend of East and West represented in his work may well signal a trend for the future development of art.

Curtis L. Carter

Notes

1. Jim McClellan, "Its About Art, Not Gizmos," The Guardian Online, 27 August 1998. A discussion of Revolting which was the theme of the 1998 International Symposium of Electronic Art held in Liverpool and Manchester, England from September to November. Charles Esche, lead curator for the event, emphasized the notion that technology be used by the artists to express ideas rather than to be a subject itself.

2. Charles Esche, quoted in McClellan, 2.

3. Geremie R. Barme, "'MB@Game!'—A Beijing Screensaver," manuscript for publication in Art & Asia Pacific (June 1997), 1.

4. Anthony Healy, "Chinese Political Pop Art: Game Over?," Window, 14 October 1994, 42-43. Healy notes the difference between Chinese Political Pop Art and the work of Feng Mengbo, and, following critic Linda Jaivin, suggests a link with the international Cyberartist movement which includes among others the artists Christine Tamblyn in the United States and Yoshinori Tsuda from Japan.

5. I am indebted to Geremie Barme for his description of these works. See Barme, 1.

6. Previously Feng Mengbo had produced two additional works using the same title, one a set of engravings, and the other an installation called Air Dry produced in 1991-92 using handmade paper and netting. Prior to its New York showing, the CD-ROM of My Private Album was shown in Austria, Germany, Finland, Mexico, and Holland.

7. Barbara Einzig, "Feng Mengbo: On the Heroic in the Everyday," Artbyte 1 (June-July 1998), 10-12.

8. A modified version of Taking Mt. Doom By Strategy using two computers and projectors was presented at the 1998 International Symposium of Electronic Art at the Tea Factory in Liverpool, England during September 1998. The Haggerty Museum installation is the first version to present the full piece which requires three computer-projector stations.

9. Letter from Feng Mengbo to Curtis Carter, 28 September 1998.

10. Wolfgang Welsch, "Artificial Paradises?," in Undoing Aesthetics, trans. Andrew Inkpin (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 174.

11. Einzig, 12.

12. Franklin Sirmans, "Hou Hanru, Hong Kong, Etc.," Flash Art (October 1997), 78.

Acknowledgments

The Haggerty Museum is pleased to present the first United States museum exhibition of the work of Chinese artist Feng Mengbo. The artist has been of great assistance in planning and installing the exhibition. I am grateful also to Holly Solomon and the staff of Holly Solomon Gallery for their assistance in bringing Mr. Feng's work to Milwaukee. Holly Solomon and artist Don Ritter participated, along with Feng Mengbo, in the panel "Electronic Arts: A Visual Revolution." The Instructional Media Center and College of Communication at Marquette University provided financial and technical support for the exhibition. Special thanks are due to Jon Pray, Kurt Neumann, and Jay Wilm of IMC and Dean William Elliott of the College of Communication for their assistance.The exhibition is sponsored in part by the Joan Pick Art Endowment. Members of the Haggerty Museum staff were closely involved in all aspects of the exhibition. Steven Anderson, assisted by Tim Dykes, designed and installed the exhibition; James Kieselburg handled shipping and insurance of the works and managed the technical details of the installation. Lee Coppernoll organized tours and the panel discussion; Paula Schulze designed the gallery guide and coordinated exhibition production; Stephanie Bjork promoted the exhibition; and Joyce Ashley and Nicole Hauser, with the help of student assistants Lisa Neumaier and Juan Ramos, provided administrative support.

C. L. C.