Abstract
On the cover of Ari Larissa Heinrich’s Chinese Surplus there appears a haunting image of a dozen full-size plaster casts of human bodies hanging upside down from the ceiling of a large warehouse. Part of a 2003 installation by Chinese artist Zhang Dali titled Human Offspring, the casts were of Chinese migrant labourers in Beijing (with each cast having been taken from a different individual), and Heinrich – quoting a Chinese critic – notes that the exhibit was intended to draw attention to these migrant labourers’ ‘extremely low position in society and the plight of their inverted reality’ (p. 130). Human Offspring was one of a series of installations featuring these plaster casts that Zhang organized in the early 2000s, but in 2008 he organized another installation, titled Us, for which he instead commissioned five plastinated bodies – that is, bodies in which most of the organic tissue has been replaced with liquid polymers – produced by the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, thereby allowing Zhang, as Heinrich observes, ‘to make the plight of the migrant laborers more explicitly universal’ (p. 132).
It is precisely this shift from the specificity of the bodies of Chinese migrant labourers to the (putative) universality of the plastinated bodies that animates Chinese Surplus. Taking inspiration from von Hagens’s popular Body Worlds exhibits, in which plastinated bodies of partially dissected human corpses are displayed in uncannily lifelike poses, Heinrich examines the ways in which considerations of race inform representations of corporeality ‘in the age of biotech’ (p. 14). Noting that the Body Worlds exhibits have often been haunted by speculation that some of the bodies may have been obtained from executed Chinese prisoners, the author takes the resulting controversies as an incentive to consider how one might ‘incorporate race into biopolitical critiques of aesthetics in medicine, science, and history’ (p. 7). By drawing attention to this racial blind spot within contemporary biopolitical perspectives, Heinrich argues that in many of his examples what are nominally representations of a ‘universal’ human are, instead, ‘a Chinese (or “Chinese”) human, a source of profit whose humanity is qualified or conditioned by its availability as a kind of global corporeal surplus’ (p. 5).
The main body of Chinese Surplus offers detailed and nuanced analyses of a wide range of discourses and cultural formations. Chapter 1 includes a fascinating analysis of the intertwined genealogies of the late-19th- and early-20th-century metaphor of China as a ‘sleeping lion’, on the one hand, and the trope of awakening Frankenstein’s monster (which first appears in Chinese texts at the end of the 19th century), on the other. Chapter 2 considers representations of bodies in contemporary Chinese literature and art, including detailed analyses of works ranging from literature by Yu Hua to performance works by contemporary artists such as Zhu Yu, Sun Yuan, and Peng Yu (all of whom are notorious for using preserved human corpses in their art). Chapter 3 turns to films featuring themes of organ transplants, including works by Clint Eastwood and Stephen Frears, as well as by Hong Kong director Fruit Chan and the Thailand-based twin directors Oxide Pang and Danny Pang. The fourth chapter then returns to the global circulation of von Hagens’s Body Worlds exhibits, and specifically their complicated imbrication with concerns about (Chinese) race, and it is in this chapter that Heinrich notes the fortuitous intersection of von Hagens’s work with that of Zhang Dali.
Zhang Dali’s 2003 Human Offspring installation was part of an exhibit titled ‘Left Hand, Right Hand: A Sino-German Exhibition of Contemporary Art’, which was one of the many unofficial ‘satellite exhibits’ scheduled to coincide with the inaugural Beijing Biennale held in the fall of 2003. This particular satellite exhibit consisted of a large room filled with works by contemporary Chinese artists on the one side, and contemporary German artists on the other – thereby underscoring the dialogic relationship of aesthetic and epistemological traditions in Europe and China. On a similar note, Heinrich concludes Chinese Surplus with an epilogue that opens with a discussion of a pair of exhibits of plastinated human cadavers both of which were displayed concurrently in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, in 2004 – including one by von Hagens and a second by a Taiwanese group. Von Hagens proceeded to sue the Taiwanese group for copyright infringement, yielding a case that ultimately revolved around the relationship between materiality and aesthetics. From this specific legal intervention, Heinrich proceeds to reflect more generally on questions of intellectual property rights and the implications of being able to copyright (parts of) the human body, together with what it might mean ‘to recognize the body as an archive’, and specifically ‘a multidimensional biohistorical archive with the potential to yield untold amounts of data about humanity’ (p. 157). The greatest contribution of Chinese Surplus is that it offers a way of thinking about what it might mean to unlock this virtual archive, and the Pandora’s box that it represents.