[09:25:53] Claudia Zeiske: Good Morning He Hai

[09:25:53] He Hai: Good Morning Claudia

[09:25:54] Claudia Zeiske: You and Deng Dafei came to Scotland to do a project about the Sinologist James Legge. What attracted you as a visual artist to this topic?

[09:32:09] He Hai: Because it is about Christianity, the history of the relationship between China and Britain in the 19th century and the translation of the Chinese classics. But of course local conditions and customs of people in Scotland interested us too.

[09:33:14] Claudia Zeiske: What were the main discoveries in your research, and how did you approach the project?

[09:39:23] He Hai: The contribution of James Legge and his ‘embarrassment in the eternal misunderstanding’ is what made us curious.

[09:44:34] Claudia Zeiske: Can you elaborate on this?

[09:47:28] He Hai: With embarrassment I mean the potential of misunderstanding as part of translation. Legge as a missionary and a translator of course never liked mistakes, he just wanted to clear them. But for us artists, it’s different, the misunderstanding is where the aesthetic value lies. In the 20th century, we get to know more and more that communication without any misunderstanding is a illusion!

[09:55:04] Claudia Zeiske: Are you talking about misunderstanding of translation, or cultural misunderstanding?

[09:57:26] He Hai: I mean the cultural misunderstanding. In fact, the communication in general is the same, even in the same country and in the same culture.

[10:01:44] Claudia Zeiske: Yes, this is interesting. Sometimes you can have exactly the right word, the right translation, but the meaning is very different. Sometimes just the different use of intonation can make the meaning of a word very different. So you need to know this as well as just the translation from the dictionary. It is interesting that Legge was very aware of this; unlike other translators he made those many, many annotations of how the meaning of his writing could be translated differently. What do you think are the main values or lessons we inherited from Legge? I mean is this thinking about translation in a globalised world still important?

[10:05:23] He Hai: It’s a big subject; certainly you can say lots about the legacy of Legge. For example, he is smart, diligent, rigorous. As you said, the annotations are his features, he stuck to his principles for all his life. But most important is his attitude towards Chinese culture, he tries to treat it with equality, for an occident missionary in China in the 19th century that could not have been easy. The main value lies in his attitude and not the translation technique.

[10:22:13] Claudia Zeiske: How did that inspire you to make your work? I mean how did that translate into your projects here in Huntly, maybe you could tell a bit more about them.

[10:30:33] He Hai: As James Legge did, we tried to integrate completely into the life of Huntly, we were trying to change into Huntly people. We researched not only the life and the work of Legge but also the life of Huntly people today. Because we agree with Legge’s attitude: you can understand a text correctly unless you understand all its context. So we try to do the project using Legge’s own method. To explain, we cited some translations of Legge, but we combined them with some historic images with a different manner to emphasize the misunderstanding. Also in the parade, we used lots of elements that refer to the issue of misunderstanding.

[10:39:08] Claudia Zeiske: The parade served as a metaphorical funeral, an opportunity to celebrate Legge in Huntly. Was that your intention?

[10:49:03] He Hai: Deng Dafei and I used the idea of a funeral to express the homage to a famous figure which is the tradition in the occident, but we mixed oriental elements into the funeral, like carnival elements, there are both the tragic element and the comedy elements, it seems absurd, but you know, in China we regard marriage ceremonies and funeral ceremonies as “two happy things”. Especially older people, consider a funeral a lucky thing for the dead, as it obeys the rules of nature.

[10:59:04] Claudia Zeiske: This is fascinating. Here in Europe it is almost impossible to understand how death can be celebrated frivolously. And this – I guess – is where Legge comes in; he realised these different cultural understandings. Both death and funeral here are instantly understood as very sad things, even if correctly translated. Funeral in the East is a relief, it seems, a happy occasion, like coming out of a big trauma. For us this is almost unconceivable. Legge worked very hard not only to iron out those misunderstandings in his own translations, but to bring us aware about those possibilities. He asks us to develop a sensibility towards other culture’s understanding of things.

[10:59:51] Claudia Zeiske: One of the other projects you focused on was Legge’s relationship to newsprint. Tell us a bit about that, how did that interest you and how did you ‘translate’ that into your art work?

[11:14:14] He Hai: Yes, the newspaper is very important, even if for the Legge scholars it is not as important the translations. It was important for the modernization of the society and the democratization of China. The appearance of the newspaper gave China a public opinion. The newspaper brought knowledge and therefore power ‘from below’ to China, before that it only came from above through the imperialists and the clerics.
We created a large charcoal drawing that related to the newspaper that James Legge established in China (approx. 4m x 1.5m), and cut the drawing into 24 pieces, before we brought them to Huntly. When we arrived in Huntly, 24 public places were chosen to ‘hide’ each of the pieces, like pubs, cafes, and the supermarket, the churches and the school, but also private spaces. We marked those places on a treasure map and published it in the local newspaper along with the general description of our project. In addition we used the newspaper also in the parade.

[11:17:45] Claudia Zeiske: Tell us how you did that?

[11:27:36] He Hai: First we made the boat out of Papier-mâché, one could see the newspaper all over the surface of the boat.
Then in the parade, we spread lots of pieces of newspaper that symbolised the money of the underworld. Chinese people spread the money of the underworld during the parade for the dead.

[11:32:05] Claudia Zeiske: The newspaper becomes a metaphor for money; for power?

[11:34:30] He Hai: By “underworld” I mean the world of the dead.

[11:37:50] He Hai: Both the newspaper and the money for the underworld has a virtual value.

[11:45:58] Claudia Zeiske: I wanted to ask you also, how your residency time in Scotland was different from working in China. Could you / would you have done a similar thing there?

[11:55:07] He Hai: Our last residency work in China was in 2008 in Shanghai. This was different to the work in Huntly. We did it for almost one year, but for a series of nine actions, each time took 7 to 10 days. So the big difference in our Huntly residency work was that we had enough time to make it more complete than our previous work in China. Of course it’s more difficult because of the problem of the language.

[11:56:21] Claudia Zeiske: And what about the content? Was there a different way of working? I am not only talking about residencies here.

[12:00:19] He Hai: Dafei and I live in different cities, we usually discuss the project via the internet. Then, when we are ready for the project, we meet in the place of the project and do it. Of course also the context is different.
We decide the content and the method depending to the context of the project. In the Shanghai project we thought more about the social problems, less about the cultural problem, because the social problem is so intense there.

[12:17:42] Claudia Zeiske: He Hai, there are so many more things we could discuss here in relation to your project with James Legge: the exhibition, Christianity and the East, your collaboration with Dafei, the funeral wake/tea ceremony we organised, but time and space are running out. We need to leave these subjects for other opportunities. I thank you very much for this conversation.

[12:21:46] He Hai: Thank you too.

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