Dossiers and archives may not sound very artistic but they seem to be finding favor with some of today's Chinese artists.
At an ongoing exhibition titled Microscopic Narration at the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing's 798 Art District, about 300,000 pages of photocopied legal documents, case photographs and six TV monitors playing short interviews comprise a section of artist Li Yifan's multi-media work, Dossier.
These exhibits are from case histories of migrant workers' disability compensation fought by renowned labor lawyer Zhou Litai. For his work, Li shredded some files to make new paper, carrying transcribed chapters of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's, The Social Contract, by three disabled migrant workers.
The exhibition also includes the screening of two of Li's documentary films, Before the Flood, about the relocation of Fengjie, a town in the Three Gorges region, and Village Archive, about the lives, labors and religious activities of the residents of a small village.
"To some extent, I'm doing the work of a sociologist, but in an artist's way," says the 42-year-old Chongqing-based artist/filmmaker. "I'm making these works not because I love art or film, but because I have something to say about society, and I'm using the language of art only because I know it."
Li's method, which he terms "pathological research", is based on a lot of fieldwork. He spent 11 months in Fengjie to investigate and shoot materials for Before the Flood, which include an old man losing the small inn in which he lived, a Christian church's bargaining for compensation, and the conflicts between relocation officials and the old town's residents. For Village Archive, he spent another year at Longwang village in Fengjie to film villagers' lives through four.
Li is not alone in incorporating sociological research into art works. In artist Qiu Zhijie's Project of Suicide Intervention on the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge too, sociological research plays an important role.
"If this work is seen as a knife, then the sociological research involved is the whetstone," says the 39-year-old artist.
Built in 1968, the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge was a symbol of the achievements of New China, and certificates of merit and notebooks used at that time usually carried an image of the bridge.
However, according to official statistics, more than 2,000 people have committed suicide on the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge. At the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, which is supposed to be the world's No 1 suicide spot, 1,500 suicides have been recorded so far.
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