September 20, 2024 to January 19, 2025

Inside-out Art Museum, Beijing

Improvisation is one of the characteristics of art, as well as a method of creative practice. It highlights an artistic process where the artist finishes their work immediately and swiftly, using everything at hand, when the inspiration, provoked by an external stimulus or an internal impulse, hits unpreparedly and uncontrollably. Of all the age-old principles of creation, improvisation is arguably the one most closely associated with creativity. In certain art traditions, such as Indian music, improvisation is regarded as an art form of the highest artistic value. In the context of traditional Chinese music culture, due to its unique system of notation and inheritance, improvisation was once a ubiquitous technique in musical practice, and was deemed one of the most important features of traditional Chinese music. However, creativity is neither the goal nor the focus of improvisation. Improvisation serves as a form and a technique of creation, as well as an idea of it. Improvisation is a cross-cultural phenomenon that is probably as old as the human race. This is the reason why we encounter improvisation frequently throughout different historical moments and creative activities in the long history of art. From the Dada movement’s rejection of logic and introduction of chaos and irrationality into their creative practice, to the Situationists who, out of an ideal to fight against Capitalism’s alienation of the individual and of social life, advocated the pursuit of genuine desires, the experience of life, and the sense of adventure, we can see that improvisation is the method, the idea, the principle, and the real life itself.

On July 1, 1997, Jacques Derrida and Ornette Coleman engaged in an impromptu conversation in Paris where they interpreted Derrida's essay Play as a commentary on the question of the immediacy and creativity of performance itself. Derrida's essay questioned the possibility of pure freedom and pure spontaneity, and he was acutely aware that the success of improvisation depends on countless uncontrollable or unpredictable factors. Ironically, Derrida was booed off the stage halfway through his performance by an audience that likely had no idea who he was. His improvisation ended in failure, but in an unpublished interview he still asserted, “And so I believe in improvisation, and I fight for improvisation. But always with the belief that it's impossible.”

Indeed, as Derrida noted, improvisation is a challenging cause, a challenge to the intelligence and skill of the creator. Improvisation is not about an absence of rules and structures, nor about the advent of Otherness, but rather can be understood as a self-organizing process that relies on and stages the particular constraints that encourage the emergence of something new and inventive. Improvisation is associated with the autonomy and creativity of the artist. In this regard, improvisation is also creativity in a broad sense. In late eighteenth-century Germany, for example, artists were increasingly expected to imitate the productivity and dynamics of nature, rather than merely mimic or represent its appearance. The notion of aesthetic autonomy was fully articulated for the first time, giving rise to the pursuit of expression and genius. The demand for novelty and originality in art during this era, however, made it impossible for art to fully premeditate, prompting artists to draw on improvisational techniques during their creative process. These developments contributed to Romanticism’s rediscovery and reinvention of improvisation as a practice that “relies on and stages the particular constraints that encourage the emergence of something new and inventive.” In a certain sense, improvisation replaced the aesthetics of autonomy and followed an aesthetics of self-generating, as “the artwork [has to] emerge with and according to a plan it develops for itself.” In other words, improvisation sets its own boundaries; in the meanwhile, it keeps negotiating with the ever-shifting plan where the creativity bursts out. This requires the artist to keep constant and intense attention to the formation of their artworks, just as the way we should maintain a high level of attention to the environment we inhabit.

Usually abrupt and unconventional, improvisation is not isolated from other artistic practices. As a process that is self-generated, self-developed, self-directed, and self-reflective, improvisation implies deliberate interruptions, disturbances and overflows, encompassing unsettling and discordant tensions. The approach to how improvisation becomes art is to a large extent through a setting of specific constraints, and thus arranging the creativity itself – in the same way as art needs improvisation to be original, unique and coherent. This co-existence of constraints and the attempt to transcend constraints is essentially the autonomy of creative practice. The idea of improvisation as the ultimate form of creation, or in other words that creation implies alteration and the process of creating per se, is one of the things that improvisation inspires us.

Artists may either introduce life into their creation, allowing the impermanence, disorders and mutations of life to intervene and to become the driving force of their creation, or place themselves directly in various real-life scenarios, immersing themselves in the ever-changing flow of life. Improvisation contains, at the same time, the conditions that create improvisation as well as the act of creating itself. It takes the initiative to face all the oncoming constraints, uncertainties, and risks, discover hidden gaps, and even “turn enemies into allies.” Improvisation encompasses both the soft and the resilient side of art. It could stray from life, be invisible in life, be isolated from life; meanwhile, it could also constantly create within life, keep company with the ever-changing life, and even re-invent life.

Improvisation underscores self-consciousness and a recognition of flux, contingency and chaos as a constant, while acknowledging yet weakening the constraints of rules on creativity. Improvisation is wary of approaches, institutions, dogmas, and thinkings that are overly systematic and even ossified. It abandons communication with established orders, and constantly looks for the opportunity to disrupt sequences and connections. In the meantime, improvisation, as an integral part of the order, enters into a paradoxical and alienated relationship with it - an exile. We can thereby extend this understanding and perceive the relationship between individual experience in art and the legacy of art history as a form of improvisation. It is through the continuous efforts of individual artists to break away from existing paradigms and constraints, to tamper with them, to clash with them, and eventually to transcend them that the evolution of art becomes possible. Improvisation is a unique expression of the way artists break through stable structures, a manifestation of their power of subjectivity. In this sense, improvisation contributes to an intrinsic impetus of art and art history, leading the life of art towards openness, dynamism and evolvement.

In 1992, as China's market economy took off, the “cultural economy” and the cultural industry that took shape gradually during this period began influencing and regulating the orientation of art and cultural practices. Unprecedented anxiety, depression, and even emptiness occupied the mind of the literary and artistic community. At this time, the performance art in the Beijing East Village, which paralleled the rock ‘n’ roll scene in Beijing, was a demonstration of a collective restlessness after a long period of inhibition, and of the awakening of artists' individual consciousness. It featured immediacy, directness, intense body language, and an observation and expression of the living environment from a grassroots perspective. It was vital for the artists to express their perceptions of states of being through an emphasis on their own specific bodies, and through the genuine relationship between their bodies and the daily environment around them. These performances were not only direct encounters of their context of existence, but also often improvisational creations embedded within these contexts. Situations the artists were facing were so uncertain that a high degree of wit and acuteness were required to make decisions and responses artistically and tactically. They endeavored to break away from strict norms, to create out of their experience rather than knowledge, to experience history and psychological echoes of reality. In short, they met their life of the moment at eye level. They believed that they were part of life, and that they were one of the states that life could be. They also sought to integrate art into daily life, seeing their personal feelings and experiences in society as a starting point for creating a culture that is indigenous.  They tried to reflect their contemporary life, and thus to make themselves part of the society.

From the 1990s to the present, industrialization and capitalization have become a dominant order in the art world. Art education turned into a market-oriented business and a discipline, which imposed endless constraints and disciplines on the freedom and autonomy of creation. Hollow creations that are commercialized, entertaining and stereotyped have taken place of vibrant art, becoming the façade and substance of contemporary art. While facing constantly changing external challenges, art also has to deal with the problem of ossification periodically in its course of development. And we believe our contemporary creative practice, either its form or idea, is stuck in such a predicament. Various elements, including forms, concepts, ideas, institutions, issues, etc., have all once played their roles in granting art freedom and energy. But these methods, once emerged at different times to solve the problem of ossification, have gradually been reduced to be ossified themselves, lacking the flexibility and agility to address specific issues, and the initiative to make spontaneous adjustments accordingly. Let us take research-based exhibitions and thematic exhibitions as examples. Both of them emerged in the 1990s along with the application of cultural studies in the field of contemporary art and the development of art as a discipline (for example, the establishment of the doctoral degree in art). Over the subsequent decades, contemporary artists and curators have been using archives in their own practices, revealing neglected histories, marginalized groups, and hidden social issues through research-based art. On the other hand, thematic exhibitions have attempted to introduce current social issues to form a narrative of exhibition, and thus to engage in public discourse. However, both approaches have gradually fallen to routines and inertia over the course of decades of development, with a lack of in-depth narratives and dimensions of history. Their didactic nature and favor of form over content led to incompetence in triggering valid thinking and discussion. The decline of contemporary art's vitality and influence today is a fact more than obvious.

Failed in leading the zeitgeist, contemporary art is also losing its inner energy and connotation in making countless compromises and in pandering to various stakeholders, though its outreach has been expanding. An unprecedented sense of constraints and deprivation becomes generally appreciable to the creators. This makes us realize that the urgency of talking about creation per se today is no less than that of the post-Cultural Revolution era’s discussions on formal exploration in art. The aim lies in awakening the vitality of art itself to fight against its atrophy. For this mission, we hope to revisit improvisation. Individuals can draw energy from their own life experiences, so can art be inspired by art itself.

Improvisation is not only an embodiment of artistic creativity and vitality, but a state of being of art. In the academic music education system, the fading of improvisation has deprived the possibility of development and innovation for traditional music, which leads to a loss in its vitality. In our opinion, the independence and initiative of improvisation in terms of its creative and spiritual character is still of great relevance today. In Edgar Landgraf’s Improvisation as Art, he traced how modernity's emphasis on creativity had changed the connotation of improvisation, and how the ideals and rules of improvisation that led to its abandonment in the “high art” in the eighteenth century had reintegrated improvisation back into modernism in a creative fashion. The book tells a story of an eighteenth-century actor who was forbidden by his theater director from improvised performance. He later found himself ended up on stage with a horse that had defecated everywhere. The actor stepped out of his role and, in flagrant defiance of the director's orders, said to the horse, “Weren't you prohibited from improvising?” This witty story underscores that imagination and autonomous improvisation, much like human nature, are inherently uncontainable.

We call for improvisation as a creative consciousness. It is one of the characteristics of life, and a way for people to engage with life. Improvisation that is inherent in creation offers us a perspective to understand the world, exploring the infinite vitality raised from sporadic, unexpected, nomadic, chaotic, and unpredictable forms of organization. Improvisation is not merely one of the values of art, but can also be regarded as a value of life. One might even say that improvisation is a way of creating the world. As a way of thinking, it allows us to remain acutely aware of changes, rather than being fearful or flinching. Anything unexpected, whether it be natural catastrophe, war, or pandemic, can throw us into unprecedented chaos, which, however, may be necessary for the development of life. And at this point, improvisation can probably be a more proactive response compared to passive coping. Improvisation is both an acquirable ability and a way of being of the world. It keeps the universe from falling into an inert equilibrium, and the society from ending up dull and boring. In this sense, improvisation represents the awakening of individual consciousness. And the will towards improvisation is something we must not carelessly discard.