10/10/2018 Trojan Horses in the Chinese Countryside: Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune in Dialogue and Practice | FIELD http://field-journal.com/issue-9/trojan-horses-in-the-chinese-countryside-ou-ning-and-the-bishan-commune-in-dialogue-and-practice 1/19 Search Issue 10 | Spring 2018 Issue 9 | Winter 2018 Issue 8 | Fall 2017 Issue 7 | Spring 2017 Issue 6 | Winter 2017 Issue 5 | Fall 2016 Issue 4 | Spring 2016 Issue 3 | Winter 2016 Issue 2 | Fall 2015 Issue 1 | Spring 2015 About Events Submit Contact « Previous / Next » Trojan Horses in the Chinese Countryside: Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune in Dialogue and Practice Mai Corlin In her 1984 essay “Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power” feminist activist and writer Lucy Lippard famously ponders whether “the Trojan Horse was the first activist art work.”[1] By this Lippard presented us with manifold representations of power and an exploration of how these can (perhaps) work from the inside and out, from the outside and in. My inquiry here is, however, not the Trojan Horse of Ancient Greece nor the Trojan Horses of a North American tradition of activist art, but rather, how Lippard’s Trojan Horse can be read in the context of socially engaged art projects in rural China. This article is, in other words, concerned with the Bishan Commune Project; a long-term socially engaged art project initiated in the southern part of Anhui province—it is concerned with the artists and intellectuals who were involved, the villagers they met and the local authorities they negotiated with. In 2010 artist, editor, curator and filmmaker Ou Ning drafted a notebook titled The Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia.[2] The notebook presents a utopian ideal of another way of life based on the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s idea of mutual aid as well as James Yen’s rural reconstruction practices of the 1930s.[3] The notebook thus presents a plethora of references from China and the rest of the world and as such places itself solidly within a global art world discourse of the local and the global, the place of the collective within surrounding society, as well as history as it is understood and reread in a very contemporary setting. In 2011 the Bishan Commune was established in the village of Bishan in rural Anhui Province and in 2013 Ou Ning left Beijing and moved to Bishan with his family. The main question of this article, fed by curiosity [Fig. 1 – Cars entering the village of Bishan. Photo: Mai Corlin, July 2014]