Rokko Juhasz
Our hosts were happy to see us back in Lijiang. We had a festive dinner of bao (we call it knedli, which is exactly how it is made and tastes and tastes the same), black chicken, beans (we call it scones, which are also made the same way, even the same size, but here they are eaten with chili cream or tasty fermented soy beans). After a very tasty dinner, we drank a couple of bottles of beer, which in China is not half a litre, but seven decks. The dinner before our departure was a great meal. Before we left for Hong Kong, I invited the family over for a real Hungarian chicken paprikash, and we managed to get almost everything we needed. Since Naxis don't consume much dairy, getting cream was a bit of a problem, but I ended up finding unflavoured coffee cream at Walmart, of which ten pieces solved the problem. I bought the chicken in the next village, where they have a weekly fair. I was already familiar with the black chicken here, as our host had made it into a very tasty meal several times, so I bought it. Apart from the flavouring and the cream, perhaps the most important difference was that in China they cut the whole chicken into small pieces, bone in, whereas we don't cut the bones, except for the backbone. We hardly had to wash the dishes, we even wiped the pot it was cooked in clean. Encouraged by this, I made it again later for the performance meeting, then for 25 people, with similar success.
The very next day, we set about organizing and preparing the performances. We spent days in Lijiang looking for stonemasons, glaziers, tinkers and printers. In the meantime, we found a fishy stone hot pot restaurant in a secluded little street. Their special that day was Chinese fish. They prepared the fish, vegetables, spices (we were allowed to choose the ingredients) in a stone pot on the table and then added boiling water. They covered it with a hat made of some kind of plant and cooked it in 15 minutes in a strong sizzling steam jet through a tube mounted on the bottom of the stone pot. The fish was extremely tasty, I've never had anything tastier. The surprise was waiting for us at home when we looked up the fish we had eaten. We were served a young specimen of one of the oldest fish species on earth, the Chinese sturgeon (Acipenser sinensis). This fish grows up to eight centimeters long, swimming thousands of kilometers from the sea to the upper Yangtze River to give birth to its offspring. Because of the many dams built on the river, it can no longer swim up to its spawning grounds. Several programs have been launched to save the species. Today it is the most endangered animal in China, along with the panda. Fishing is banned and even artificially bred specimens can only be served in restaurants with special permits. I had a pang of conscience...
Jay, the owner of Lijiang Studios, and his Chinese family, and an American artist, Madeline, arrived and after discussing the planned program, they joined in the organization of the meeting. Jay also said that he would cover the production costs of the exhibition and the meeting. We first started to work on a four-day performance. We thought for a long time about whether we should do something about the almost ubiquitous garbage dumps, the tons of pesticides and fertilizers used, or the peach trees with their fruit individually wrapped in special paper bags. What is more, a company in the area advertised its drinkable fertilizer on billboards and compared it to yoghurt (sic!) - and that is no exaggeration. The drinking water is contaminated almost everywhere. Groundwater is 80 cm deep and wells are not drilled deeper. In the end, however, the idea was inspired by the now banned quarries in the area and the sight of so many wounded mountains. Several local professionals and one of the funny tractors used in the area were also involved in the performance. Er Ge, our host, insisted on driving the tractor. On the first day we set out to find the right stone for the performance. We managed to find it that day, and with a nearby stone cutter we cut it to size and delivered it home. The next day, a local stone carver carved the following text into the stone in Chinese: "Only time casts shadows. Next came the lengthy hand-cutting process. Meanwhile, Er Ge made a deal with a local fisherman who lent him his boat for the performance. Nanxi, a glassmaker, made a glass slab of the same size and shape as the stone. After that, we both took our objects and set off in the tractor to a nearby lake. I placed the stone at the front of the boat and Nanxi sat in the back of the boat with the large glass block. With a single bamboo pole, and lack of practice, we managed to swim into the deeper part of the lake with considerable effort. Here, I pushed the stone into the lake and Nanxi filled her glass belly with water, sealed it and tied it to her back. We headed back to the tractor. My stone wasn't light either, but it was crumbling under the weight of the glass jar full of water. He had a long way to go to the quarry, where he carried the glass slab filled with lake water to the exact same spot where we had found the stone.
We had a few days left before the exhibition and the meeting. The 14-member local Naxi band accepted our invitation, and in addition, one of the best known and most educated dongba (religious leaders, I mentioned above), who also knows hieroglyphic writing, accepted our invitation after a few days of deliberation and arrived a day before the others. As one of the items on the agenda of the meeting was the making of a time capsule, we asked him to perform a ritual related to time.
In the end, 18 artists came to the two-day meeting. On the first day, there were individual performances and a collective performance (a so-called group situation), as well as a concert (with special Naxi instruments, with musicians aged 40-90) in a good atmosphere. It was good to meet again with new and old friends. Almost everyone we met in the last two months came. The Kunming group dazzled the audience with surprisingly good performances. Our exhibition was also completed. What I'm particularly proud of is our almost half-hour video Time-transport, which we edited together from our four-day performance with Nanxi. Another of our successful multi-day performances was an artistic treatment of a disagreement we had. It was at the beginning of our residency program that, standing in the courtyard of our studio, which was strewn with river gravel but the weeds had already made their way through the gravel, we found ourselves on either side of a dilemma that could be described as philosophical. Nanxi thought that nature should be allowed to have its way in the yard, and I thought that this was an area that needed to be conquered by nature. From this little conflict, our performance piece, Border, was born. We started from two sides of the courtyard facing each other. We laid two wide strips of paper across the yard, marking out a path the width of a sidewalk. Then Nanxi, starting from one side, began to pick up and collect pebbles and anything else she could find (bone fragments, shells, cigarette butts) and put them on the paper lane at the end of the path. I did the same thing on the other side, but I started to remove the weeds from the road and collect them on the paper lane. We finished in two or three days and met in the middle of the road. Er Ge's elderly father sat there with us almost the whole time, and finally just said to Nanxi in Naxi, "don't be sad, it will all grow out tomorrow".
Hungarian chicken paprikash was waiting for us. The time capsule was slowly filling up. For this occasion, we had a box made of stainless steel, measuring about 25 x 25 x 50 cm. In our bid, we told the specialist exactly what kind of box we would like him to make. The invitation to the event included a time capsule and we asked everyone to bring a personal object related to time. Everything from a childbirth permit to hair collected over the years was placed first in the labelled envelopes and then in the box as part of the ceremony. A specially cut ring-shaped stone was brought to the dong. Early the next morning, the stone carver arrived to carve the date and the word time capsule on the stone cube that would seal the time capsule. While he worked, the dongba began the almost three-hour ceremony. Around 3 p.m., the time capsule was placed in the middle of the studio courtyard for 10 years. This was not Jünnan's first performance art meeting. But perhaps the most comprehensive. Thanks to He Libin, news of Jinnan's performance art events have been coming in ever since. A few years later, he himself visited us for the 30th anniversary of Transart Communication.
In the remaining four days, we visited one of the deepest canyons in the world, the 3,800-metre deep Tiger Leaping Gorge, and the sacred place of the Naxis, the spring at Baishuitai, which feeds water and minerals to one of China's largest limestone terraces. It was a fabulous experience. The upper reaches of the Yangtze were swollen abundantly by the rainy season (July-September) that arrived two weeks ago. The raging river was an indescribable sight. Many tourists were taking photos on the terraces built along the river. A few kilometers upstream, close to our accommodation, there was another trip to the bottom of the canyon and back, which took about 6 hours via steep ladders, tunnels, slippery rocks and suspension bridges. At the bottom of the canyon there was a huge boulder in the middle of the river that could hold about 30 people at a time, but now there were only a few braver tourists. The cliff was connected to the river by a suspension bridge. It was a terrifying feeling to stand on the huge rock in the middle of the raging Yangtze between the 5,600-metre Jade Dragon and the 5,400-metre Haba; the rock shook with every rush of the Yangtze.
We spent the night in a guesthouse in the middle of the canyon, and the next day continued on to Baishuitai, where we smoked a cigarette, lit incense and took a selfie with the dongba guarding the spring around the clock. On the way home, we sampled some shepherd's purse stuffed with yak, a local ji speciality.
When we got back to our studio, the police were waiting for us. It had only been a few days since the meeting and they were already there to have a look around. Three of them came. Two in uniform and one in a suit. While they were taking our details, the man in the suit went around, looking at everything, wanting to know everything. Who was there, who lived with us, why we hadn't checked in at the local police station. It was obvious that someone had called them, but once they knew we were leaving the next day, they stopped bothering us.
One chapter from the forthcoming book:
Rokko Juhász: The Life of a Performer
Kalligram ed., Bratislava, Slovakia, 2022, 200 p.
ISBN 978-80-8267-002-1
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Photos
1. Artist never rests, Asiatopia, 2014, Bangkok, Thailand. Photo: Aor Nopawan
2. Awaiting Miracles, 2017. Photo: András Ravasz
3. Balance. 2017. Symposium Hala. Photo: Symposium Hala
4. Balance. Suitcase. 2021. Boca de Tomates, Mexico. Photo: Artist's archive
5. Export. Equinox to Equinox. Mexico City. 2019. Photo: Paola Paz Yee
6. Only Time Casts Shadows. 2021. UDVArt, Filakovo. Slovakia. Photo: Julia Farkas
7. Possible Past. Performance-concert. 2009. Budapest, Hungary. Photo: Artist's archive
8. The Birth of Light. Parabiosis. Chongqing, China. 2016. Photo: Nanxi Liu
9. Urban memories. Guangzhou Live. 2011. Photo: Artist's archive
10. Ex-Port. Performancear o morir. 2019. Norogachi, Mexico.Photo: Chuyia Chia
11. Will be back soon. 2013. Novi Sad. Serbia. Photo: Artist's archive
12. …, Transart Communication 2016, Galanta, Slovakia. Photo: Nanxi Liu
13. Unconditional love. 2014. Gunagzhou Live. China. Photo: Artist's archive
14. Crossing. With Paola Paz Yee. Pohoda 2021. Trenčín, Slovakia. Photo Jakub Janco
15. Time-transport. 2016. With Nanxi Liu. Lijiang, China. Photo: Madeline Finn
16. Urban Mémoire. Transmuted International Performance Art Festival. Mexico City 2011. Photo: Martin Renteria.
17. A Brief History of Time. UTOPIA International Performance Art Meeting. Mexico City 2015. Photo: Martin Renteria.
