Dai Chenlian, Big Nothing, 2018, performance, single-channel video, color, sound, 50 min. Courtesy of the artist.
In 2018, I wrote the program note for Big Nothing in the key of Taoism—an endless cycle of reversals, the illogical and nonsensical gain new senses. A certain mystique surrounds the work, lending the humble-looking artist, who toils behind and in front of paper puppetry, an aura of undiscovered genius. The work leaves the audience lingering in the thought: What was the question? The Tokyo Festival World Competition Award for Outstanding Show award went to this dark-horse piece, as a sign of appreciation for this inexplicable big nothing. It seems to have indeed struck a chord with the East Asian audience. But back then I had not resolved the Lu Xun connection.
To read Lu Xun is to understand the psychic landscape of Chinese society (along with his more than cursory comments on Japan); his novellas are based on hyperrealist depictions of Chinese society in transformation in the early twentieth century. Society in Lu Xun’s eyes was imbued with traditional moral codes and rituals that devoured individuality, creativity, and vitality. Worse still, the masses tended to accept injustice, show submissiveness in the face of power, and even take pride in humiliation. Lu Xun viewed Chinese literature as carrying exhortations to “enter the world,” but in a form of “zombie optimism”—ritualistic, lifeless, formulaic. By contrast, even Western literature of despair contained the pathos of the living. Lu Xun didn’t ask whether or why the Chinese spiritual world (of which Youyang Zazu is an emblem) and the Western spiritual yearnings have different outlooks on life, but this might unlock a key question for us today. Lu Xun’s own literary endeavor had been an attempt to reconstitute life.[1] This life is not just individual but collective vitality and courage against both tradition’s inertia and modern oppression. The revolutionary zeal in Lu Xun conveniently leans on mainstream Communist discourse, even though he was a leftist but never a doctrinaire Marxist. Indeed, his independence of thinking outshines the party literature. Mao Zedong acknowledged that Lu Xun would probably have been silenced if he had lived into the Maoist period because of his independence of thought.
Lu Xun figures prominently in the intricate web of East Asian intellectual history. Japanese Sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi, a preeminent scholar on Lu Xun, viewed Lu Xun as the exemplar of Asian modernity, neither an imitation of the West nor a return to “tradition,” but founded on constant self-negation. Indeed, Lu Xun negates his own reference points such as Nietzsche and early reformers like Liang Qichao in a process of creativity.[2] The eminent Chinese thinker Wang Hui similarly frames the profound skepticism and critical stance toward all “truths” as an “in-between” consciousness, between traditional and modern, Chinese/East Asian and Western, and he crucially directs the criticism toward the self.[3] In other words, “forgive no one,” not even oneself.
In a 1960 lecture titled “Asia as Method,”[4] Takeuchi Yoshimi proposed using “Inter-Asia methodology” as a means to break free from colonial and Western hegemonic frameworks in academia and the intellectual sphere.[5] This was later picked up by Chen Kuan-Hsing,[6] who was instrumental in establishing the network of inter-Asia scholars who collectively aim to rediscover and recontextualize regional histories in order to reshape subjectivities. But if this anti-imperialist framework is accepted without a grain of salt, we are capitulating to a specific way of reading history, according Asian scholars a specific place in the intellectual landscape and granting license for nonengagement today. Not uncommonly have I heard “I can’t read this thinker because he’s a Western male” from non-Western scholars in the West. It’s easier to see through this moral blackmailing—where one side claims moral rights and the other side is left to acknowledge power structures through endless self-criticism—than to exercise the in-between consciousness and self-criticism. More importantly, inter-Asia thinkers and practitioners need to engage with each other in relation to the West: Which part of Western history do we need to work through in order to position ourselves critically? Which parts of our tradition do we want to revisit, rework, and bring forward?
Dai Chenlian, Big Nothing, 2018, performance, single-channel video, color, sound, 50 min. Courtesy of the artist.
It is noteworthy that both Takeuchi and Wang appeal to feeling or irrationality to develop a vision of Lu Xun as resisting modernity.[7] Maybe Lu Xun’s high regard for Youyang Zazu speaks to his own hauntology—that some of its residues are remain suspended in the present, in a certain leap of faith into the ghostly, miraculous, and hearsay. In Lu Xun, we could potentially identify how he has reconciled a rational—by some definitions individualist—and overall liberal framework of thinking and politics with the afterglow of its opposite, the lineage-based, still somewhat enchanted social reality, where the characterization of ghostly takes the form of repetition, reincarnation, and timelessness.
And the ghostly does come back transmogrified. The phenomenal rise of Protestantism in recent decades in China is puzzling, especially when contrasted with the Catholic Church, Buddhism, and new religious movements whose number of adherents are far eclipsed by Protestantism. Sociologist Sun Yanfei’s insightful study on religions in post-Mao-era China (1976–) unearths how Protestantism’s institutional features uniquely position it to prosper.[8] Western Protestant missionaries such as the American Baptist Missionary Union had already established a foothold in Chinese cities and counties starting in the late nineteenth century. After World War I, the Local Church, a homegrown Chinese Protestant movement led by Watchman Nee (also known as Ni Tuosheng, 1903–1972) gained momentum in China. The Maoist era saw the total displacement of traditional lineal power through Communist land collectivization and the reordering of work and life, which the market-oriented economic reform in the post-Mao era unwound, thereby giving rise to an interstitial social space. This then created room for religious exploitation in the form of active congregational and proselytizing activities. Alongside this feature of social organization, Protestantism speaks to the spiritual needs of the people, where the promise of transcendental salvation in a monotheist setting proves more attractive to polytheist indigenous religions that are not oriented toward salvation. The inherently fissiparous nature of Protestantism encourages the proliferation of heterogeneous congregations and sects, and local churches are prone to schisms. Many of the Protestant churches in contemporary China may confuse their Western peers in their outlook and feverishness. Some intellectually inclined Chinese Protestants have expressed their distaste for this religious fervor to me; at the same time, they uphold the view that the Chinese never would have been able to develop a sense of individuality without going through a version of the revolution of Christianity.
I do wonder how this plays out in South Korea. The recent political shakeup revealed the deep schism between the conservative and liberal camps, with the Protestants speaking out politically leaning predominantly toward the conservative camp. This has profound implications for democracy: Though the two parties may still share common policies—especially on the social and economic fronts, which should be the “base” in contrast to the superstructure such as ideology—their electorates are mobilized in ways that increasingly bend toward a zero-sum game. The archetype of zero-sum game originates from none other than the theological world.
Dai Chenlian, Big Nothing, 2018, performance, single-channel video, color, sound, 50 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Looking for the inexplicable and profound experience elsewhere, Camille Ralphs’s poetry turns out to match the intensity of the prelude—especially her series of poems called “Common Prayers,”[9] all riffing on devotional texts with witty word play and migration of forms. The metaphysical weight remains, but the context changes to one that is contemporary and inquisitive. Few contemporary artists in the West are public about their religious beliefs. Indeed, following the deconstructive zeal of postmodernity, it feels contemporary to take secularity as a given and fill the vacuum of other-dimensional experiences with contemporary forms of rituals in art. These rituals tend to be mystic, energy based and healing oriented, communal, and pre-Christian (or non-Western, which in many cases overlaps with pre-Christian), notwithstanding various mystic traditions in Christianity and not differentiating between the variations of secularity—institution, practice, and conditions of belief in the classical Taylorian sense. I am not concerned with a theological-political treatise of contemporary art here, though the debate on the theological-political presence in art is far from settled—whether it is a permanent feature in the contemporary world, it is going through multiple deconstructions, or it is coming back into play in the “state of emergency.”[10] Anyone who adamantly opposes the view that the contemporary art world is immune to religiosity should look no further than Germany after many art institutions were accused of anti-Semitism in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. This “self-confession” isn’t an active religious practice but rather a certain temperament—an individualized form of guilt—based on religious tradition, much like Weber’s “iron cage,” which allows the Protestant ethics to continue to shape life in a capitalist world through habits and Weltbild.[11] But expressions of “self-confession” can take public forms: Art institutions disinvited artists that allegedly support BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, a movement to isolate Israel), created ethical committees, and established codes of conduct.
What we should inquire into are working ideas that buttress some of contemporary art’s key claims in the West, such as the polemics around atomized individualism and the enshrining of the community. In my critique of documenta fifteen elsewhere,[12] I have problematized the tendency of Global North curators and thinkers to abide by the idea that the separation of art and everyday culture is irrelevant to artistic discourses in the Global South. Art of the Global South is defined either as an integrated social practice within a given society or as a transcendental medium possessing spiritual power, incommensurable within the logic of autonomous art associated with the Global North. But perhaps this dichotomy of a supportably autonomous art versus an art as blended into everyday life is itself a mischaracterization. Here I don’t mean to polemicize “autonomy” via the discussion on the political economic strata of art—hence its heteronomy— a Marxian line of discussion that I still hold dear. Rather, it is in the sense that the autonomy is a heritage of the understanding of aesthetic judgment— in other words, a transcendental structure of subjectivity that renders possible the universal communicability of feeling.
We might assume the dichotomy of autonomous Western art versus nonautonomous non-Western art in the first layer, but there’s something else at work. One is that autonomy hails from the lineage of transcendentality (read: religion). The implication then is that when one is looking for art in the everyday in the non-West, one is in fact looking for the transcendental. Allow me to expound upon these thoughts.
With curator Martin Germann, I have been pursuing an intuitive line of inquiry: the legacy of Protestantism in conceptual art. It is less about following the long history of deep Protestant suspicion of images and a preference for abstract or minimalist forms over representational religious art to explain away what happened in contemporary art. Rather, it is the contemporary casting of a fundamentally religious or religious-philosophical idea: belief in contemporary art in one’s heart and therefore ridding oneself of the shackles of what art should supposedly look like. Once this belief has taken root, it becomes canonical to younger generations. Admittedly, other traditions have certain affinities to this inward-looking tendency— and it’s no coincidence that koan in Zen Buddhism provides an interesting counterpoint to conceptual art. Yet a significant difference lies in that these other traditions are less fixated on the ultimate truth—which in any case can never be found with certainty. The Christian, and specifically Protestant, focus on the individual or an amplified personal relationship with God—read: truth and, for our purpose, the concept of art—is posited in stark contrast to the dissolution of the very concept. Having one fixed abstract entity to direct all energy toward—whether God, truth, or art, even in its seeming negation (conceptual art)—therefore means having something to defend. The alternative to this monopoly of defense, which leads to endless quarrels and succession of movements (again, religious and artistic), is the lack of needing to defend anything.
At the peak (or peak in the making) of the globalization of contemporary art, Jan Verwoert commented on the missionary spirit in artists going places through the international biennale circuit.[13] In the absence of follow- up research on this phenomenon—which is understandably difficult to frame and quantify—perhaps we could look at adjacent sectors, such as humanitarian aid. Didier Fassen’s work elucidates the diptych—life as highest good and suffering as redemptive ordeal—at work in aid programs today. Not just for the aid workers in question but for the general public, too, through media and social media, there is a collective concern to expose suffering, which is believed to lead to the mobilization of moral sentiments that offer access to the transcendental truth of the victims.[14] Whereas in other cultural traditions suffering and compassion may be elevated (suffering as a test and purification in Judaism and Islam, as well as in non-Abrahamic traditions such as in Buddhism), they are decidedly not redemptive in the sense that victimhood does not harbor a transcendental dimension. This alludes to what could be an updated version of the missionary zeal that Verwoert discussed: Why is the contemporary art world so set on displaying pain and suffering, especially in underprivileged countries? (Again, my utmost respect goes to the Marxian school of critics who argue we need to investigate the structural conditions that lock entire populations in positions of poverty and neediness, hence my full support for teaching political economy as a common core subject in contemporary art education. But it does seem there is a cultural dimension that we cannot overlook here.)
Guided by Bruno Latour’s claim that we have never been modern[15]— in the sense that the rational and purified is a myth—we should nevertheless trace the root social processes that would later inform modernization and defamiliarize them. For example, on the construction of family: Already in the fourteenth century, the Church’s authority in regulating marriage no longer relied on the age-old paternal right to impose a father’s will upon his children. Instead, it was grounded in a principle far more radical: the freedom of individuals to choose. Consequently, the grip of the clan began to loosen. Kinship ties steadily lost their force, and households contracted in size. In the Latin West, it was the husband, wife, and their children who increasingly came to define what counted as a family.[16] Centuries later, the liberal subject of the individual would follow.
Now compare this to the lineage societies that were the norm in many parts of the non-Western world well into the mid-twentieth century. In Marx’s view, individuals are subordinated to outdated “small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized […] idyllic village-communities,” which the bourgeoisie and Industrial Revolution should destroy for the better, even at the cost of blood and violence, so that the peasant can overcome these relations.[17] But in agrarian societies where lineage societies did not hold sway over localities, such as in northern-central China, the peasants lacked a sense of attachment to the community or clan, but this did not lead to them developing into penny capitalists with a rationalist individualist mind. The dissolution of the small “unprogressive” community, lineage based or otherwise, does not necessarily give rise to a social form based on the primacy of civil rights. Instead, it could tip over into an identification with a larger and even more repressive community.[18] I believe it is in this sense that the Chinese Protestant intellectuals say we need to go through similar social processes in order to fully gain a sense of individuality. The critique of preindividual feudal communities can lead to both their totalitarian, modernized versions and to the postindividualistic emancipatory critique of any repressive community. In fact, we observe rightwing, anarchic, and nonauthoritarian leftist swings (both Marxist and anarchist) in many parts of the West that enshrine the small community. These are complexities and impediments to be taken seriously on the way to establishing a political community, itself a product of modernity, with its inherent understandings of individual rights, civil society, and the rule of law.
The mandate of constructing an individualism in Lu Xun’s works is precisely based on a nuanced understanding of the social form and culture of the collective, the community, and the masses. In his writings, Lu Xun posits that the individual can never be fully extricated from the web of the community, with all its promise of warmth—recall the deep affection infused in the daily scenes in Dai Chenlian’s Big Nothing—as well as its potentially accompanying backwardness and irrationality. Note how this endeavor recognizes the conditions of China and the import but also limits of Western thinking; it calls for discursive and critical individualism emphasizing freedom of thought, which is a never-ending process. From this critical individualism we can build collective projects that become the interstitial space—indeed society itself—between the individual and the state. This has become crucial as politics in the East and in the West evokes the individual as a martyr,[19] seeks to erase any mediation between the state and the individual—for example, through algorithm—or deploys a messy use of the “community.”
Dai Chenlian, Big Nothing, 2018, performance, single-channel video, color, sound, 50 min. Courtesy of the artist.
In this experimental piece, I make one methodological proposition: We should always write in two or more registers at once—the couplet. The connection is intense and rigorous, or it rhymes intellectually. The couplet is really a two-way mirror for those willing to look into it. To those traveling all the way to non-Western countries: Why not look for the transcendental hidden in plain sight right where you are? To those busy recriminating others for the problems encountered on the road of modernity: Humility and self-critique can help work out the good aspects of tradition. To everyone as we move forward: Earnestly work through your own problems, as people elsewhere do on theirs. Train the senses; hold space for complexity and ambiguity. See in others what one doesn’t see in oneself—deep patterns of unconsciousness that are hard to square, labels that are difficult to exploit for arbitrage in the cultural market. These are practices that require effort, humility, and rigor—not the imitations that are often broadcast in the public sphere, including in the art attention economy.
Don’t blame others; forgive no one. You do have to be good.
Mi You is a curator and professor of Art and Economies at the University of Kassel / documenta Institut, where she leads research on the social, economic, and political conditions of art. She is the author of the book Art in a Multipolar World (Hatje Cantz, 2024). As a curator, she works between ancient and futuristic imaginaries of societies and technologies, and the history, political theory, and philosophy of Eurasia. Her recent exhibitions include Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis (Framer Framed, 2024), Clouds, Power and Ornament (CHAT, 2023), Lonely Vectors (Singapore Art Museum, 2022), and the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020–21). She serves as chair of the committee on Media Arts and Technology for the transnational NGO Common Action Forum and is a Berggruen Institute Europe fellow.
[1] Xudong Zhang, The Becoming Conscious of Zawen: The Second Birth of Lu Xun Literature, 1924–1927 [in Chinese] (Beijing: Joint Publishing Co., 2023).
[2] Takeuchi Yoshimi, Rojin [Lu Xun] [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1981). See also Zhang Xudong, ibid.
[3] Wang Hui, Resistance and Despair: Lu Xun and His Literary World [in Chinese] (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2008).
[4] Although outside of the scope of the present article here, it is nevertheless worth pointing out the reassessment of the deep entanglement of Takeuchi Yoshimi’s book with the writings of Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), the Kyoto School of philosophy, and the wartime project of overcoming modernity. See Christian Uhl, “Displacing Japan: Takeuchi Yoshimi’s Lu Xun in Light of Nishida’s Philosophy, and Vice Versa,” positions: east asia cultures critique 17, no. 1 (2009): 207–37, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/267328/.
[5] Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Asia as Method,” trans., ed. Richard F. Calichman, What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 149–166.
[6] Chen Kuan-Hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
[7] Viren Murthy, “Resistance to Modernity and the Logic of Self-Negation as Politics: Takeuchi Yoshimi and Wang Hui on Lu Xun,” positions: asia critique 24, no. 2 (2016): 513–554.
[8] Sun Yanfei, Religious Change in Post-Mao China: Toward a New Sociology of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2026).
[9] Camille Ralphs, After You Were, I Am (London: Faber & Faber,2024).
[10] See, for example, Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political,” Democracy and Theory, trans. Dave Macey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 228–266; Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Toscano (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997 [1985]); Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini (Redwood City, California: Stanford University Press, 2011). On Jean-Luc Nancy, see Colby Dickinson, “Ending Christian Hegemony: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Ends of Eurocentric Thought,” Open Theology 8, no. 1 (2022): 14–27, not to mention Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 [1922]).
[11] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (London: Penguin Books, 2002 [1905]).
[12] Mi You, “What Politics? What Aesthetics? Reflections on documenta fifteen,” e-flux Journal, no. 131 (November 2022).
[13] Jan Verwoert, “The Curious Case of Biennial Art,” The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, eds. Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (Bergen: Bergen Kunsthall and Hatje Cantz, 2010), 184–197.
[14] Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Oakland: University of California Press, 2011).
[15] Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993).
[16] Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (New York: Basic Books, 2019).
[17] Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India,” Marx-Engels Collected Works 12 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 131–132.
[18] Qin Hui, Chuantong Shilu [in Chinese] (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2004).
[19] For example, the killing of Charlie Kirk, a far-right podcaster in the United States, in September 2025 was largely painted as a case of martyrdom by some media sources and Republican politicians.
Fellow Sooyoung Leam
