In 1997, a war broke in a rural Chinese province near the
Tibetan border. But it wasn’t a war over politics or religion
““ it was a battle between towns over who had the right to
declare itself Shangri-La, the place that inspired the fictional
town in James Hilton’s 1933 novel “Lost Horizon,”
in order to draw more tourists to the area. The battle became known
as the Shangri-La War, and eventually became so heated that the
Chinese government had to step in to declare one town the
winner.
When artist Patty Chang came across this story while surfing the
Internet during her residency in Paris, she was immediately
fascinated by the absurdity of the marketing war and decided that
she wanted to journey to the self-proclaimed magical heaven on
earth herself in order to document the juxtaposition of reality and
fiction that merges in the mountain city.
Chang’s 40-minute video installation titled
“Shangri-La” and its accompanying mirrored mountain
sculpture are on display until Oct. 16 at the UCLA Hammer
Museum.
Chang’s work, along with Fiona Tan’s
“Correction,” which is also on display at the Hammer
Museum, marks the first Hammer presentation of the Three M Project
““ a collaboration between the Hammer Museum, New York’s
New Museum of Contemporary Art and Chicago’s Museum of
Contemporary Art.
“The word “˜Shangri-La’ in our cultural
vocabulary is something that a British writer in the ’30s
made up based on a Tibetan word for “˜heaven on
earth,'” Chang said. “But he altered it for his
fictional means. It’s interesting that the Chinese are
embracing it.”
While Shangri-La may suggest other-worldliness, Chang’s
trip was rooted in reality from the start. Her initial plans to
visit the city were canceled because of the SARS outbreak in China,
forcing her to postpone the date.
When she actually did take flight to China, she was able to
capture her initial impression of Shangri-La from an airplane that
descends from above the clouds into the city.
At first, it appears to be a quiet city closely integrated with
its mountainous natural environment. But people immediately enter
the video, exposing the reality that the self-proclaimed earthly
heaven may not be so ethereal as its name suggests, particularly
when exhibition viewers realize that the mountain that monks are
climbing is actually a replica of one inside a hotel.
“The most difficult part (of the project) was going there
and trying not to have any expectations of what it may be but
immediately feeling disappointed upon arrival,” Chang said.
“I had expectations for a place that didn’t exist and
had to deal with the idea that Shangri-La was a real place. It has
citizens who live and work there. There are toilets. People kill
and eat animals. There’s a marketplace,
construction.”
Indeed, Chang’s video follows many examples of
construction in Shangri-La, from the creation of a Tibetan chamber
that is supposed to cure altitude sickness, to the decoration of a
cake, to most importantly, the assemblage of the mirrored
mountain.
The concept of the mirrored mountain evolved from Chang’s
original plans to place mirrors on the ground in order to have them
literally reflecting the heavens on earth, in the same way that
Shangri-La embodies both a physical reality and has a mythical and
fantasy aura around its name. And the fact that she chose a
mountain is significant in itself.
“It’s a symbol in the book and in Tibetan
Buddhism,” Chang said. “It’s something you
don’t climb; you give reverence to it. In towns there were
recreations of the mountain everywhere.”
But just as the Shangri-La wars were about marketing,
Chang’s project ended up being about advertising in addition
to art.
“The compound where the construction took place was
actually at a karaoke bar run by monks. Once we started planning
it, (the monks) got really interested in it and wanted to keep it
as advertising for the bar. They started negotiating with the group
building and it became a business negotiation,” Chang
said.
Another realistic aspect of Chang’s project is the sheer
duration of the video itself, which doesn’t lend itself
easily to fast-paced gallery walkers.
“It’ll be interesting to see if people watch for
more than five minutes,” Chang said. “People are much
more used to walking through and glancing (at the art in museums),
so if people can sit through it, I’m happy.”
Yet for those people that do sit down to watch her installation,
she hopes that she was able to successfully bring to light the
problems with constructing a place of perfection on earth.
“People have always had the idea of utopia. It’s
part of human nature to want a better place up to the point of
creating it,” Chang said.
“When we go on holidays there’s a structure and
mechanism behind our pleasure that’s not just what we see in
front of us. (I want to) let people question their notions of
perfection and an ideal place or situation and understand what the
realities and the non-realities of that are.”