We must survive: Yokohama Triennale entwines stories of darkness and resistance

The eighth Yokohama Triennale offers no cheap optimism for our troubled times. Wild Grass: Our Lives (until 9 June) taps into the darkness of China’s past to celebrate the quiet resistance of survival—everyday political acts without trite inspirational slogans.

The title chosen by the Beijing-based artistic directors, Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding, references the Chinese author Lu Xun’s ground-breaking 1927 collection of prose poems Wild Grass, which probed the meaning of our vulnerable humanity. Their exhibition, like Lu Xun’s stories, pulls from some of the hardest times of Chinese history, intertwined with Asian and international resistance movements of the 1960s, 1990s and 2010s, to show how the human spirit endures like the titular weeds. Grappling with the seductiveness of nihilism and the near impossibility of persistence, it posits that there is no shame in despair, only in indifference.

It is a timely message for China today, where hope can feel in short supply, and any kind of political resistance can only be expressed abroad. Lu Xun’s example is a reminder of the earlier upheavals of the 20th century, when local warlords and Japan carved China up after the end of the Qing dynasty, the ruling Nationalists slaughtered leftists, and the people faced the Japanese occupation, the civil war, the famine caused by Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.

The triennale is concerned with “the resilience of individuals” and the potential to “build your own world even with very limited possibilities and resources”, Lu tells The Art Newspaper. “Even though we are confronted with situations of hopelessness, resilience is our kind of hope.”

“For us, that is a very important message,” Lu continues, “because we live in a situation where protest is impossible. Direct confrontation is impossible. But still we need to think independently and critically, so we can go on with life.”

That vision unfolds in the Yokohama Museum of Art, whose atrium has been transformed into an improvised camp. Sandra Mujinga’s suspended fabric giants, And My Body Carried All of You (2024), loom over the huge hall. The air is pierced by the odd staccato noises and whistles of Open Group’s 2022 video Repeat After Me, in which Ukrainian interviewees verbally mimic the sounds of war. Images of the attack on the US Capitol Building in January 2021 are shown on shattered screens in Emmanuel Van der Auwera’s Video Sculpture XXVII (January 6th) (2023), observing how disinformation can incite violence.

The implications of camps as sites of displacement and resistance have taken on extra weight since the US college protests for Palestine started in April. The entrance gallery resembles a kind of “temporary residence” for refugees in exile, but also social protest sites, or “a collapsed temple,” Lu says.

Acts of resistance punctuate the works on view. The Taiwanese collective Your Bros. Filmmaking Group collaborated in 2018 with migrant Vietnamese electronics factory workers in Taiwan, who were striking against the poor living conditions of their dormitory. Ký Túc Xá/Dorm (2023-24) is stuffed with crude cardboard replicas of the products they made alongside video documentation. Huang Po-chi’s work, documenting his mother’s struggles as a textile worker, presents a parallel to earlier labour movements in Taiwan.

Around the dormitory structure, videos show the Sisyphean performances of the Vienna-based Japanese artist Niwa Yoshinori, who engages in futile actions like moving a puddle with his mouth, or changing currencies back and forth until nothing remains. South Ho’s photographs of Hong Kong streetscapes during the quiet moments around the 2019 protests call out to another sort of futility.

The exhibition’s main off-site section at the historic Daiichi Bank Yokohama Branch echoes the theme with recent histories of East Asian grassroots organising including Matsumoto Hajime, a leader of Japan’s Amateur Riot (Shiroto no Ran) recycle shop and activist network. Artists Liao Xuan-Zhen and Huang I-Chieh commemorate the 2014 Sunflower Movement, when Taiwanese student protests blocked a trade deal with Beijing. The mainland Chinese zine collective Prickly Paper addresses precarious topics like women’s and LGBTQIA rights, often using the woodcut printmaking techniques that Lu Xun advocated as a vehicle for social change in 1930s China.

Woodcuts are largely sidelined in Chinese contemporary art for their association with state propaganda. But the past decade has seen a revival of the medium among young artists and collectives “looking very directly at social issues” in self-published zines, Lu says. “It has become present, especially in platforms like art book fairs—which is a platform that is quietly disappearing in China.”

Lu, the director of the Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum, observes a wider shift in mainland Chinese art production over the past ten years. “The force of commercialisation is so [strong] that it is hard to find artists who are continuously paying attention to and think very consciously about social conditions,” she says. Only a handful of contemporary mainland Chinese artists are included in Wild Grass: Our Lives.

By contrast, artists in Taiwan and Hong Kong “are compelled to dialogue with social realities in their work, and we see powerful works coming from these difficult contexts”, she says. “Difficulty also gives us a certain agency, creativity and resilience. That is something we wanted to highlight in this exhibition.”

Represented by some 20 of the 93 artists in the exhibition, the woodcut movement is also a way to look back at the history of cross-cultural exchange between China and Japan. The show spotlights the late Chinese artist Li Pingfan, who was influenced by the Shanghai woodcut workshop supported by Lu Xun. During the Japanese invasion Li moved to Japan and took Chinese artists’ anti-invasion woodcuts there with him. These later inspired Japanese artists “to confront with their social realities”, Lu says. “That kind of artistic, intellectual agency has always been a strong bond between Chinese and Japanese artists and intellectuals.”

The appointment of two Chinese artistic directors at the Yokohama Triennale was itself a strategy to foster exchange, following the 2020 edition led by India’s Raqs Media Collective. “There is a very strange custom in the Japanese art world, that curators are always Japanese, middle-aged and male,” says Kuraya Mika, the director of the Yokohama Museum of Art and of the triennale’s organising committee, which selected Lu and Liu. “We wanted to focus on internationalising, which is characteristic of Yokohama.” Japan’s earliest open port received a strong influx of Chinese immigrants, including Lu Xun in his student days.

At Lu Xun’s polarised time, before and during Japan’s brutal invasion and occupation of China, there was an undercurrent of resistance in personal ties, particularly between Japanese and Chinese left-wing intellectuals and artists. The personal creates a crack in the obdurate surfaces of the geopolitical, as small and fragile, yet tenacious, as the wild grasses that grow amongst concrete.

“Connecting China and Japan, we were a bit scared, because nation to nation the relationship is not smooth,” Kuraya says. “But underneath, as individuals, we speak the same language in art. For Hong Kong and Taiwanese artists, the political relationship is very severe, but they can cooperate. This is another third place where individual artists can be friends, which is very important.”

• 8th Yokohama Triennale: Wild Grass: Our Lives, various venues, Yokohama, Japan, until 9 June