Uncovering the Heritage Silhouette: Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin '15

By
Brittany Nguyen
December 03, 2020

Uncovering the Heritage Silhouette is a bi-weekly series diving into how tradition influences the creation of art. We interview artists heavily influenced by their heritage. 

Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin '15 is an artist based in Guangzhou and New York. In 2015, she earned an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University following a BA in Studio Art and Communication from Denison University in 2012. She has hosted high school debates on contemporary art world issues, designed a phone app to find alternate ways to talk about gender issues, organized meetings between scientists, artists and philosophers to address the possibility that we live in a simulation, and organized fictional panels that took place in the future. She is currently devoting her time to researching “Boy’s Love” (BL) culture and writing a BL novel about doomsday prepping in Shenzhen. 

A pleasure to have you today! How should I address you, do you have a preferred artist name?

Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin: This is something I’m still struggling with as I have been wanting to change my name. Right now I just use my full name. “Xiaoshi” is the name my mother gave me and it translated to “little poet.” And I am not little nor do I write poetry, haha. The pronunciation of the name can also be interpreted as “teacher” also. This caused a bit of misunderstanding when I was in primary school but it was a small thing. I’ve been wanting to change my name to the meaning of “morning” but I’m not completely sure. I’m afraid of changing my name now in my career because of all of the works before this being with my current name. 

My current artist name has a double “Vivian” and a lot of my American friends call me “Vivian” or “V.” I picked this name when I was young after I was introduced to Harry Potter. Vivian was a powerful witch in the King Arthur story but at the time I only knew the Chinese spelling. I brought it back after I went to America and found out “Vivian” was the most popular name for Chinese immigrants a few generations back because of the popular movie Gone With the Wind. The double part was inspired by a contemporary comedian that I just mimicked. 

On your website instead of a headshot you have a photo of the poet Li Bai in the 21st Century. What is the significance or decision behind this?

XVVQ: I just like this poet a lot! And my name means little poet. Also at the time that I uploaded that photo, there was a certain beauty photo app that was really popular. I just photoshopped on top of all these males into very feminine filters.

Where has post-lockdown taken you? 

XVVQ: My hometown! The south end of Guangzhou, in the suburb I grew up in. My suburb used to be its own city but now it’s connected to the larger city. It’s where the pearl river enters the ocean. One thing that’s really nice is that a lot of the islands around here are named after dragons and it is said that people from centuries back used to travel from all over China to come to see the dragons. Personally, I love the image of a dragon flying up into the sky because the long body to me looks like a river entering the sea.

That’s wonderful! The dragons become part of the heritage of the city. 

XVVQ: Yes! And the word “cultural heritage” sounds dead to me, but should be living. A living knowledge that is connected to you by the relationships you build with people. I think it’s an ecology of people, family, and things around you such as the environment. This also includes songs, books, and history all around you. Heritage is carried by those who live on the land. 

You are based both in Guangzhou and New York, but many of your project titles are not translated. Is there a reason? 

XVVQ: I still have an apartment in New York and I can’t get to a lot of my things because of the pandemic. It’s a bit of a problem as my plans to return are very not sure. 

For the titles, a lot of it not being translated was because I’m just a poor translator. I never translated anything, English into Chinese or vice versa. Because of this, I feel like I have two artist identities separated by the barrier of language. The Chinese works stay in China and the English works operate in America, kind of. I think that I should really translate them though so that people can really enter them. 

When I was in my undergraduate in Ohio I made a piece titled Goldfish, which was fish made out of ceramics that floated from the ceiling. I had referenced a specific type of goldfish that was very common in Asia which have distinct large front heads and many of the viewers had misread the installation as me putting crowns on fish’s faces. It was a visual mistranslation. At the time it really bothered me. I wanted the audience to get exactly what I wanted to say. 

Right now it’s a little different for me, as I’m okay with cutting pieces out and listening to all interpretations now. But because of that specific event, I changed to reference a lot of universal symbols that are easier to be read. For my audience in Ohio, that is 88% white and a tiny place. Once I moved back to China, I felt free and started using whatever I liked again. I regret not doing so for the longest time. I was still trying to understand my art, I spent a lot of time asking my audience to do the work rather than myself. 

Do you consider yourself to be a global artist now? How do you identify yourself and how does that affect where you share your work? 

XVVQ: That’s an interesting question because recently I have been trying to learn lyrics of songs from foreign places that I want to go to but cannot due to the pandemic. I have been singing in German, Portuguese, Spanish, and more! I don’t really know much about the languages, but the songs are easy to enter in and I can easily learn a couple of works.  From there I started thinking about how the internet separates us. Depending on what language you know, you would not enter other countries’ websites. For example, I would not enter a Russian or Japanese media page. Because of that, I started wondering what would happen if I just put my work out there on those foreign sites. I want to drop my work in the middle of an Indian website and see what people think about it! Since people are not going to shows, I want to utilize the internet. 

For my identity, I don’t really consider how the artwork will see me. It’s more about what I want to do now, where I want people to see the translation. I used to do a lot of start-ups about cursing people when they do racist stuff. I made a phone app about it. I think it’s important for my identity to be there as a Chinese person but it’s changing all the time. I always feel like I belong to someone who doesn’t belong anywhere.

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How fun! Can I hear more about the phone app? 

XVVQ: This was something I made to help build community. It’s not about making a functional app. I presented this at the Columbia graduation show and I had a fake start-up booth in the start-up fair. I just sat there all day with my friends at the booth and many strangers would come by to interact with the app. They would share their stories and how they cope with tough situations and this built a tiny little community. That is exactly what I want to do, build relationships and give a space for that. Now that I’m looking back on it I realize that I want this to not be confined to just an art show.

This makes me think of your piece Ruthless Lantern, which is a Cantonese magazine that centers on Miss Ruthless (a fantasy figure whose mission is to take an active socio-political stance in reuniting and speaking on behalf of the diasporic communities across Hong Kong and China at large). The magazine focuses on Chinese youth and beauty culture through gossip. Can you talk about that?

XVVQ: Yes it’s the same thing, gossip is in the community and it plays a big role. I get a lot of criticism in China because I stick to the notion of gossip and it’s known to be such a bad thing. But this is a way for information to float around when you don’t have other means. It’s never shown on major outlets or more official windows. I think gossip is great and what happened is that I was actually doing a residency at the time. I was a part of a show at Para Site called In Search of Miss Ruthless curated by Hera Chan and David Xu Borgonjon. David I believe is currently doing his PhD at Columbia, but both amazing people to talk to. But anyway, I was doing research there. I also went to a place called Asian Art Archive, they are a research initiation located on a street that sells a lot of antiques and there I found an old gossip magazine. I saw it and knew I wanted to do this! I picked up some 80s and 90s Hong Kong gossip magazines there. It was interesting to see all my childhood stars on the front covers in an overly glamorous manner that’s very outdated. What I loved is how all the stories about them inside the magazine were so very mean. An example would be like “Oh, look at this young woman, she is eating so much chocolate! Her skin is not as fair as before.” Everything that they wrote was meant to create anxiety. Anxiety became a product, they would sell marriage affairs and punish women. So what I wanted to do was reverse all of this and that is what Ruthless Lantern is. 

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You once wrote that the magazine “aims at taking down the patriarchy.” What does this say about women’s role in China’s society now? What is it like to live as a woman in China according to this magazine?

XVVQ: This magazine is intended for a global audience and represents a type of shared anxiety. Living in China now I think there is a kind of regression for women in the workforce. For a long time it was like 80% of women in the workforce were leaders. I remember it being significantly higher compared to many other countries. Now though this number has significantly decreased in more recent years, dropping down to around 60%. There is a new kind of anxiety where women over the age of 35 have difficulty finding jobs. The leadings factors are of course the economic changes but also a gendered bias. 

I was shocked the other day in particular because of something the woman who helps clean our house said to me. So for a long time, this specific cleaning industry was dominated by older women but she told me that the company that assigns her work stopped hiring women over 35. I was so shocked that even the cleaning industry was so strict, like what is going on here! it’s crazy. I think it’s important to think about how to create more jobs for women. 

For body image and representation there have been more body-positive images reaching China recently. I have seen a lot more plus-sized models when shopping and I even modeled once for my friend. I think the aesthetic has improved, you no longer need to be that “young and beautiful” image with pale skin. A lot of companies have changed their branding and large brands that focus on the “perfect” body are no longer popular. Even on television, I have been seeing girls a little larger, a little darker in skin color, and more outspoken. I would not call this “mainstream” yet, but it’s out there and that’s a change for sure. 

I read you also participate and organize debates, you do performance lectures, and are a creator in many technological forms. You are pushing for discussion. 

XVVQ: During the time of the debates, I was obsessed with predicting the future because I believed that the future could change with the predictions. This actually came from a personal writing project where every day I wrote down the next day as if it had already happened. One time I wrote about going to Coney Island and getting a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone. I went there the next day and realized I couldn’t really tell about where the future begins. If I’m getting the ice cream or not I did it all to match the relationship of what I wrote before and that all my actions were all in response to my writings. I was interested in these loops. 

I was also influenced by Ray Kurzweil who had predicted the internet’s path. He had this ability to move a lot of people during his lectures. This in ways built the future for him. So I ended up doing a lot of debate of whether artificial intelligence becomes an artist and whether we can have temporary art in the future. The answer was no at the lecture. 

I’ve stopped doing a lot of these works though because of the past few years. The future is so unpredictable, haha! I totally just gave up. It’s hilarious also because a lot of my recent works are about doomsday prepping, and I don’t think I prepped! I’m not prepared! 

I did see that you started a project surrounding doomsday prepping in Shenzhen. It surrounds a fictional character also. Can I hear more about the beginning mechanics behind it?

XVVQ: This project in particular is never finished. I recently changed it up from the novel into song making. It’s music readings now. It’s another doomsday prepping work. The new Chinese character is a physical representation of the third-person pronoun. There is no such pronoun in the Chinese language, and only in recent times, about a hundred years ago did we get the female “her” pronoun. This was through the New Cultural Movement. 

I started this project due to the translation difficulties I find myself in today. I don’t want to make people gender-specific at times. So I just took the Latin letters “T” and “A” to create my Chinese character of “TA.” How you write the Chinese character is by combining the female persons’ characters to create the idea of “them.” 

Now I’m writing songs about this character and I switch in this new character for their name. My hope is to leave this character in the world and see if people want to use it. I want them to think about if there should even be this character, should the character change, and overall start conversation. 

Are you making a music video?

XVVQ: Absolutely! Featuring “TA.” I want to make it with all my friends and have fun with it! First, though I recently photoshopped “TA” into landscapes and had it pop up on companies and stuff. It was really fun! The slogan is “Why Not Try For TA” (pictured above). I also want to combine it with the BL (Boys Love) work I had already been doing.

What about the Doomsday aspect? It’s quite a timely topic. 

XVVQ: That’s all I’ve been working on lately. I started this work in 2017 and it was meant to be a medium of the way for coping with anxiety in general. It’s a personal way and it’s always a failure to be prepared. The work changed a lot over time, it used to be very tech-savvy and start-up booth-like.  Now the whole look is about nature and is analog. It looks very shabby. I even made it about how technology can be magic. But overall it’s all about my failed doomsday prepping. 

Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin (China, 1989) makes installations, sculpture, sounds and performance in Guangzhou, China. Selected solo and group exhibitions include Next Act, Asia Society, Hong Kong (2020), How do We Begin?, X Museum, Beijing (2020); The Deficit Faction, Long March Project, Beijing (2019); The Racing Will Continue, The Dancing Will Stay, Times Museum, Guangdong, China (2019); Café do Brasil and In Search of Miss Ruthless, Para Site Art Center, Hong Kong (2019 and 2017); Ecologies of Darkness, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2019); Preparation Park, Artista x Artists, Havana, Cuba (2019); ThingstoCome, Weekend, Seoul(2017); LvHua Dai, Saltprojects, Beijing(2017), Regular Expressions, 221A, Vancouver (2016), InResponse:Other Primary Structures, The Jewish Museum, New York (2014). She has recently taken part in the ‘New Sites’ program for emerging artists at UCCA, Beijing (2019). She is the editor-in-chief of Ruthless Lantern.

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