The mature work of the contemporary Chinese artist Geng Jianyi is characterised by persistent demurrals from any direct form of (re)presentation. Since the mid-1980s, when he first came to prominence as a leading member of the Hangzhou based art group Chi She (the Pool Association), Geng has deployed a highly diverse range of techniques, including the use of photographic transfers, assisted ready-mades, and chemical transformations, whose insistently tangential qualities consistently serve to evoke rather than to define. Indeed, in formal terms many of Geng’s works are little more than supports for the accumulated traces of remotely directed or ‘chance’ acts. Take, for example, the ‘paper installation’ Reading Manner, which consists of a concertinaed book of blank paper pages despoiled at the margins by the red-inked fingerprints of numerous invited ‘readers’.
It is, of course, possible to interpret these various demurrals from the point of view of contemporary Western theory as an extended deconstructive commentary on the inherent ‘emptiness’ of linguistic signification, and to bolster such a reading by drawing abstract parallels between the theory and practice of deconstruction and the comparably non-rationalist teachings of Chinese Taoism and Chan Buddhism (something to which Geng himself has alluded). However, this on its own would be to sell the potential significances of Geng’s work substantially short. For those familiar with the immediate circumstances surrounding Geng’s development as an artist in post-revolutionary China it is also possible to see much of his work as an elaborate tracery of public and private meanings clearly ‘grounded’ in the phenomenology of everyday experience. Consider here Geng’s repeated references to the official documentation of identity, which in the context of contemporary mainland China can be understood both