No Power to Push Up the Sky takes its name from a literal translation of the slogan 23-year-old student leader Chai Ling wrote on her clothes during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. In an interview conducted in Beijing on May 28, 1989, one week before the massacre, Chai Ling recalls this expression of the students' sense of helplessness. For the video, fifteen people spontaneously translate into English excerpts of her original Chinese interview. The video also features running headlines from Western newspapers and journals that chronicle the Tiananmen Square events. Both forms of translation demonstrate the complex process of locating meaning across language, culture, and politics. By positioning translation as an interpretive act, the video points to the subjective motivations underlying any understanding and narrativization of history.
Sharon Hayes
Unstable Realities: The Work of Lam Kin-Hung and Lana Lin
Lin's video installation lakes its name from a translation of the slogan 23-year-old Student leader Chai Ling wrote on her clothes during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest. In No Power, the artist asks 15 people to read and spontaneously translate the Chinese transcript of an interview that Ling gave in Beijing on May 28, 1989, five days before the Tiananmen Square massacre. These translations are edited into a three-image projection in which headshots of the translators are interspersed with headlinesâtaken from English-language Western newspapersâdating from May 28-June 9, 1989. On a 13-inch monitor mounted on an adjacent wall, there is a two-minute excerpt of an interview with Chai Ling on the television program "The Charlie Rose Show" conducted seven years after the massacre.
As unprepared translations, the new texts that No Power's translators create, with the attendant effort, qualification and struggle, resist a notion of translation as a simple transmission of information. Lin edits the translations such that they repeat each other: the same line is translated four, live and six times by different translators. In one such sequence, a headline from the Seattle Times: "History May Just be Repeating Itself in Tiananmen Square' is followed by several slightly varying translations:
""At that moment, 1 couldn't endure anymore." ""Again I don't think I could have...ah...I think, bear it or had patience.' ""At that time, I couldn't take it anymore." ""At that time, I could not, I could not control myself, suppress my feelings anymore."
This barrage of interpretation overwhelms the fixed meaning of the text and offers instead a text that has been forced through a multiplicity of reconstructions. Immersed in this chain of varied interpretations, the headlines become yet another subjectivity, imbued with their own distinct ideology.
What is significantly insistent in these reconstructions is the presence of the speaker: the performative gesture of respeaking Chai Ling's historic text. In "The Task of the Translator,' Walter Benjamin states: "The basic error of the translator is that he pre-serves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue." Following Benjamin's admonition, it could be said that the translation constitutes, as it were, a third language, one resulting from the moment of collision, the moment in which the translation happens. Lin's privileging of the moment of translation in No Power as well as her use of translators with a range of language proficiency raises the question: which is the foreign elementâEnglish, Chinese or the act of translation itself? It is toward this question that No Power pushes its viewer, not only on the level of language, but in terms of a larger cultural and political translation of the events of 1989. Though Lin's speakers are dislocated from the time of the original speech, their live translation of the text serves also to collapse temporality. The translators and even the headlines, with a reference to âPresident Bush", speak to us both in and of the past as well as in and of a distinctly present moment. By calling up this text, with its mix of declaration and ambivalence, clarity and confusion, the translators' performative reiteration reenacts the complexity inherent in any attempt to understand and articulate a political event such as Tiananmen through the lens of time, culture and geographic distance. Lin's translations, in their performative state, neither tell nor describe nor communicate something, they do something: displacing the originary status of the text and the author and leaving the viewer to negotiate a multiplicity of meanings.
In Chai Ling's 1989 interview she was quoted, as saying she was (...) or, as it was translated into English, "hoping" for bloodshed. In the two-minute loop from "The Charlie Rose Show," Ling, from a distance of seven years, disputes this particular translation of the phrase saying that the word can also mean "anticipating' or "expect-ing." Far from an authorizing clarification, this excerpt points to the absence of an original meaning. "There are no originals, but only a heterogeneous continuum of translations, a continual process of rewriting in which meaningâas well as claims of originality and purityâare made."
Both Lana Lin's No Power to Push Up the Sky and Lam Kin-Hung's The Circle's Corner are characterized as much by what they cannot communicate as by what they can. Operating in the gaps between historical moments, geographic locations, and fixed meanings, it is precisely Lam and Lin's inability to image, write or speak a stable reality that demonstrates their radicality. Speaking with Charlie Rose, Chai Ling tries to contextualize her 1989 interview within the turbulence and mutablity of the student movement during the five days between the interview and the massacre of students. "There were so many things happening at the same time," she says, 'Five days is a long time." It is in this place of vital instability that I locate Lam and Lin 's work.