The Tiger Cages

Lily PHD of Chicago University

Four stacks of heavy, dark mahogany cages form a wall almost two meters high. Twelve bright noses peek through the bars: Shandong stuffed tigers (normally about the size of a mouse or a rabbit) blown up to the size of big dogs are trapped inside the cages. Their patchwork faces and plump bodies are instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent time in China, as one of the distinctive regional folk arts now sold as tourist kitch. The visual contrast between the seemingly shrunken dark hardwood cages (recycled from old buildings) and the oversized, technicolor stuffed animals inside is striking. Stacked in this fashion the cages suggest a petshop; arranged in a row they suggest a circus, or a prison. The tigers' soft ears and erect tails stick out from between the bars, which leave them no room to turn.

In this work, Zheng Xuewu addresses questions of self-repression and confinement, of tradition and conservatism. First, as Zheng explains, this piece describes the stagnation of the folk arts. The Shandong toy tigers have been made in the same mold for generation upon generation, and now they are dying out. As young people throughout China leave the countryside for the city, fewer and fewer people learn old handcrafts, or have time to practice them. Toy tigers, formerly a common gift for children, are replaced by a shifting parade of new toys. Many people mourn the passing of the folk arts, or try to preserve them; but Zheng contends that perhaps the handcrafts are passing because they have not been able to adapt to the needs and aesthetics of the time. From one perspective, the work suggests the question: should the folk arts be preserved by being put in the mahogony cages of “tradition” and cultural patrimony? If the animals inside are the sculpture, in this case the pedestal has become a cage, a form of confinement. From another, the antique form of the cages suggests that folk arts have stagnated precisely because of their inherently conservative character, because they have been made the same way for too long. In this context, Zheng's project operates both as a form of support for the folk artists who made the tigers, and as a kind of intervention, insofar as he asked them to make a new kind of tiger.

More interestingly, these works address broader questions of confinement, the confines of habit that artists and other people find themselves falling into over and over again. But they are seemingly unaware of their confinement: like the blissful sleepers in Lu Xun's iron room, the tigers stare happily out through the bars of their cages.