2019 年，美国艺术家亚瑟·贾法（Arthur Jafa）的作品 APEX 在 MoMA 展出。这是一部长 8 分 12 秒的视频短片，在 DJ Robert Hood 如脉冲一样的电子乐节奏中，841 张与黑人文化相关的图片逐帧快速闪过屏幕，仿佛是一股“黑色”意识流。在贾法的图像库中，也有林青霞、周星驰等中国人。今天它提供给我们的毋宁是一种重新连接世界的方式。作品中暗含着一条从爵士、蓝调、R&B 到摇滚、嘻哈的当代音乐史，追根溯源的话，都可以归结到“黑人文化”。然而，事实上它们早已超越了种族和国界，成为全球文化、艺术和政治的一部分。

多年前，一群埃塞俄比亚的黑人少年，不远万里来到河北吴桥县，学习中国的杂技。何翔宇这位长驻柏林的中国艺术家发现并将镜头对准了这群非洲少年在中国县城的日常，通过朴素的观看，打开了一个隐藏在其中的身体、语言、阶级和跨国资本等纠缠在一起的政治机体。值得玩味的是，此时杂技却荒诞地成了连接世界的一种新方式。

大概 20 年前，时在美国生活、工作的中国艺术家赵刚和几位黑人和亚裔同道，每月定期在纽约哈勒姆一起阅读学习英文版《毛泽东选集》，一起讨论社会主义现实主义。作为社会主义现实主义曾经的反叛者，他到了美国以后，才渐渐意识到社会主义现实主义本身所具有的革命的普遍性。20 年后，已经回国多年的他来到东北，重访“中东铁路”和“横道河子”，并就此完成了一系列有关东北的绘画作品。这些作品混合了人、物、风景和美术史知识等各种题材，但都指向 20 世纪以来的中国革命及其复杂的国际背景和曲折的历史过程。托洛茨基、列宁这些人物多次出现在他的画面中，对他而言，“十月革命”不仅属于俄国，迄今依然在召唤着世界各地的社会主义革命。与之相应，另一位年轻的艺术家胡伟提供了一个不同的观察和思考。在一次去德黑兰的考察中，胡伟和同伴重访了在 1979 年伊朗伊斯兰革命中被焚烧的电影院“一条街”，他们把革命前的伊朗电影和电影院场所作为分析地缘政治和石油政治的透镜。文字、档案、移动影像、电影素材和声音被穿插在真实与虚构的叙述脉络中，展现了“无声”的历史操纵以及后革命时期伊朗社会状态。胡伟关心的是，当战争、欲望与物质之间的纠缠指向一种人造的末世“失乐园”时，前卫运动还能在哪些层面向当下扩散。

2020 年，工作、生活在柏林的另一位中国艺术家潘岱静，在格罗皮乌斯博物馆举办了一场题为“Dead Time Blue”的表演。在充满了无形而又鲜活的歌剧声音的幻景中，观众被表演者的动作所鼓动，舒适地对空间进行探索，并创造了一个摆动在摩擦和触痛之间的肢体交流。这样一种交流虽然无关激进，也无关革命，可是在疫情时代，它可能是最具革命性的。

不可阻挡的逆全球化浪潮和越来越加复杂的全球地缘政治局势，让国与国、种族与种族、阶级与阶级乃至人与人之间的连接、沟通变得异常艰难。互联网技术虽然提供了种种跨越这些边界的沟通和交流渠道，但同时，它也在加剧着各种阻隔、分化、孤立和冲突。如何重新国际化，重新建立与世界的关系，成了当下和未来最紧迫的命题之一。“惊蛰”的寓意自不待言，不仅是向旧时代的告别，更是对一种新生的渴望和憧憬。此时，至少在这个 200 多平米的空间，音乐、杂技、革命……这些熟悉而又久违的画面和声音，相互震荡，将世界毫无违和地连作一片——尽管这只是一种“真实的虚构”。

In 2019, APEX by American artist Arthur Jafa was once again exhibited at MoMA – it was last shown in 2013. It is a short video of 8 minutes and 22 seconds, in which more than 1,000 pictures related to black culture flash rapidly across the screen frame by frame, as if in a stream of ‘black’ consciousness, over the pulsing electronic beats of DJ Robert Hood. As far as I know, in Jaffa’s image library, there are also Chinese celebrities such as Lin Qingxia and Zhou Xingchi. This is certainly an extremely politically correct work, but in my opinion, what it offers us today is rather a way to reconnect with the world. Implicit in the work is a history of contemporary music from jazz, blues, R&B to rock and hip-hop, all of which can be traced back to “black culture”. However, in fact they have long transcended race and national boundaries and become part of global culture, art and politics.

What Jafa didn’t know was that years ago, a group of black Ethiopian teenagers traveled thousands of miles to Wuqiao County in Hebei to learn Chinese acrobatics. He Xiangyu, a Chinese artist based in Berlin, discovered and focused his lens on the daily life of this group of African teenagers in the Chinese county. Through simple observation, he presented a hidden political organism of entangled bodies, languages, classes and transnational capital. What’s interesting is that at this point acrobatics absurdly became a new way of connecting the world.

About 20 years ago, Zhao Gang, a Chinese artist living and working in the United States, and several fellow black and Asian artists met regularly to read and study Selected Works of Mao Zedong in Harlem, New York, and to discuss socialist realism. As a former rebel of socialist realism, he came to realize the revolutionary universality of socialist realism itself after arriving in the U.S. Twenty years later, after having returned to China for many years, he came to the Northeast to revisit the ‘Middle East Railway’ and ‘Hengdaohezi’, and completed a series of paintings about the Northeast. These works mix various subjects such as people, objects, landscapes, and knowledge of art history, but they all point to the Chinese revolution since the 20th century and its complicated international background and tortuous historical process. Characters such as Trotsky and Lenin have appeared in his paintings many times. For him, the “October Revolution” not only belongs to Russia, but still calls for socialist revolutions all over the world. In contrast, another young artist, Hu Wei, provides a different observation and reflection. During a trip to Tehran, Hu Wei and his companions revisited the street of cinemas that was burned in the Iranian Revolution in 1979. They use the pre-revolutionary Iranian films and cinemas as a lens to analyze geopolitics and petroleum politics. Texts, archives, moving images, film footage and sound are interspersed in the context of real and fictional narratives, revealing the ‘silent’ manipulation of history and the state of Iranian society in the post-revolutionary period. What Hu Wei is concerned about is that when the entanglement between war, desire and materialism points to an artificial post-apocalyptic ‘Paradise Lost’, at what level the radical revolution can spread into the present.

In 2020, Pan Daijing, another Chinese artist who works and lives in Berlin, presented a performance entitled ‘Dead Time Blue’ at the Gropius Bau. In the illusion filled with disembodied yet vibrant sounds of opera, the audience was inspired by the performers’ movements to explore the space comfortably and created a physical exchange that swung between friction and tenderness. Such an exchange, though not radical or revolutionary, may be the most revolutionary in the age of the epidemic.

The unstoppable wave of reverse globalization and the increasingly complex global geopolitical situation have made it extremely difficult to connect and communicate between countries, races, classes and even people. While Internet technology provides various channels of communication and exchange across these borders, at the same time, it is also exacerbating all kinds of barriers, divisions, isolations and conflicts. How to re-internationalize and re-establish the relationship with the world has become one of the most urgent propositions for the present and the future. The meaning of ‘Jingzhe’ goes without saying. It is not only a farewell to the old times, but also a yearning and yearning for a new life. At this moment, at least in this 200-square-meter space, the familiar and long-lost images and sounds of music, acrobatics and revolution oscillate with each other, connecting the world without any discord – even though this is only some kind of ‘real fiction’.