Republic of Jing Bang
Sun Xun
孙逊
Production date
2013
Object Detail
Media
mixed media
Measurements
50 x parts, dimensions variable
Notes
Undertaking a residency in 2013 at Singapore’s Tyler Print Institute, experiencing the city-state’s cultural diversity and comparing it with China’s apparently greater homogeneity, Sun decided to create a new ‘metaphysical’ country, the fictional — and ephemeral — nation that he called ‘the Experimental Republic of Jing Bang’. At the time, Sun was considering the benefits and tensions inherent in the construction of a multi-ethnic nation state such as Singapore. Ironically, his exhibition in Singapore was cancelled when migrant workers rioted in Little India, a rare outbreak of public disorder in a tightly controlled society. Sun’s Manifesto for Jing Bang, ‘Vision of a Divine Land’, begins with these words: ‘I have drawn up a plan to set up a Magician Party. Rather than seeing the filthy and despicable infiltrate the land, I would rather build just a single party…’ and continues, ‘It is created serendipitously, in an unencumbered fashion. The transient republic of Jing Bang does not advocate any political beliefs, which it considers bullshit.’ A series of expressionist works in ink on paper recall the propaganda posters of the revolutionary era in China, and the New Woodcut Movement of the 1930s and 1940s, influenced by western artists such as Käthe Kollwitz. Sun Xun creates a parallel universe that hints at darkness and corruption lying just beneath the surface of everyday normality. A black and white, fringed flag shows a man against a background of stylised, curling waves. He presents us with a large dish weighed down by two enormous crayfish; above his head the red text, in Chinese and English, reads ‘Jing Bang is a Heaven’. Another flag says, ‘We Are Glorious’, and yet another, with deliberate irony, ‘Jing Bang Freedom of Speech’. This ambitious project, created at a time of rising nationalism in China, invented a new, Utopian entity that, unlike many in the real world, did not arise from violent struggle or dispossession. In this land, described by the artist as ‘built on the back of a whale’, people of many races and languages co-exist in harmony. Jing Bang — translated as ‘Whale Nation’ — is a one-party state controlled by the Magician Party.
Accession number
2016.024