China’s Underground Culture, Hiding Your Face and T-shirts that will never appear in China

Awaiting a Democratic Hong Kong

Chinese China publications can be so very cool. I own a book on interviews of all the conptemporary photographers today around the world published by the Shanghai Government Press. Some of them take photos of junkies and men painted in drag stuck on with sequences looking like dwarfs. They also have a publication that talks to all the top editors in today’s magazines as a way to introduce western mags to China. They include Colors, ID, and even independent magazines like Spoon. The same publishing house has a collection of T-shirt art, some of which are very political. Like anti-Bush ones.

When I look at them I forget China is China and it seems all good. Except that they will never in a million years put something like the HardCore Democracy Set in there, probably not include a photographer who photographs HK demonstrations, and include any images of the Taiwan 326 protests. Coz in that very hip existence they continue to write out history and tell their story like they want it to be told.

That drives me crazy. We can have a million Che stencils but never a Zhao Zi Yang one. They can have a million images that subvert the Statue of Liberty but never the Goddess of Democracy, and if we don’t look too hard we might forget China is not a Civil Society, and internet activists who I know would refuse to have their face photographed for a publication we’re both interviewed for on the grounds, it’s “Dangerous,” and my friend will not let me video him at a protest least it get the colleagues in his NGO up in China in “Trouble.”

It just looks hip but it misses the point. We can have clubs and parties, punk shows, and street art but it is all veiled in a controlled and prefabricated story of what cannot be said. What cannot be told. Maybe ID will never get too political. But Warhol (who was one of the founders) never worried if screen-printing Mao, or Jack Kennedy for that matter would arrest him. Was it revolutionary then? Yes. Was it subverting a power dynamics and making a statement? Yes. But was it dangerous to him? No, the person who shot him was a crazed radical feminist with mental problems, not the FBI.

So China has the pretences of radical underground culture. Beijing and Shanghai has a booming underground culture. In fact I just met a piercer who has been puncturing holes in people’s bodies up in Guang Zhou for the last six years. Not bad for a Totalitarian Regime. I might even find more people “like me,” in that respect up in China that I do in the ever conservative and financial based Hong Kong. They would probably be cool, but I probably can’t then get all disillusioned and go protest the WTO on the weekends with my dreadlocked and pierced friends coz we don’t have anything better to do. So it’s forever a fight against the something but not overt. The large white elephant remains. And I will never be able to pop into China and make my T-shirts for half the price I can in Hong Kong.

Be free to be who you can be as long as you don’t feel certain ways. Fight against dominant culture without the politics. Wear what you want as long as you don’t say what they don’t want. Read what they allow you to as long as it’s non-threatening. Give all the veneer and patina of freedom without the reality.

That’s my country. That’s the underground culture. Just like what’s wrong with it in the free world. A lot of bells and whistles without bite.