Thomas Bayrle: "Chinese Motorways"

By Janina Bach

When passengers leave the airport in search of a bus to take them downtown, they are met with an ear-deafening concert of car horns. Cars and buses are stuck in traffic. Whoever hits the gas pedal faster cuts ahead, leaving it up to the other drivers to avoid a fender-bender. When the visitors finally get downtown, they get the impression that city driving is a chaotic free-for-all. Cars, buses, motorised rickshaws and bicycles jam the streets, whenever a hole opens up, the drivers rush to fill it so that they can move a few metres further. The pedestrians are completely relaxed as they zigzag their way through the moving traffic.
In a nutshell, Thomas Bayrle claims that the difference between German and Chinese driving styles is that "here, everyone is right - in China, everyone is careful." According to the artist, traffic in Germany is amorphous, like water. Everyone channels together without losing respect for the other drivers. He's discovered that the supposedly monolythic and homogeneous mass of Chinese people follows a highly individual pattern, or ornamentation, comprised of extremely diverse people and characters. He sees the collective norm, which has been sustained for decades, slowly crumbling, and notices the Chinese are enjoying their new-found freedom. For the artist, their behaviour in traffic reflects how Chinese society functions, in which he also sees an important advantage the Chinese have over the West. "In the digital age, the age of mass communication, they are much more flexible and are familiar with more roads less travelled." During his stay in China, Thomas Bayrle has begun to view the rigid structures in Germany more critically and sees them as roadblocks to movement and variation, and consequently, efficiency. Despite the gross contradictions inside the country, Bayrle sees a stark contrast between modern-day China with its incredible dynamics and the situation in Germany. "Although the party apparatus still demonstrates static qualities in public life, there's nothing static about the individual aspects of Chinese society - everything is constantly changing from one variation to another."
As a weaver - the profession he learned in his youth - he views political society as a kind of fabric with horizontal levels in which the quality of life is determined by more or less complex forms of weaving. "Like leaves of grass in a meadow", he equates the individual in the verticality of each piece of grass, much like a relief, which, in sum, comprises the "horizontality of the collective". For him, the dense mesh of society is like a fabric in its horizontality. In examining the structure and function of Peking's traffic system, Thomas Bayrle has developed "a system of layers, between which several layers interact." In cardboard collages, he combines three periods of Chinese history. He overlaps and interweaves a Chinese symbol (radical) which "determines the form of a highway structure", a highway grid, the markings of which he has cut out, and historic photos dating from the Cultural Revolution. The "highway cords" which "brutally" weave their way over and under the city create an irregular, relief-like structure on which a heavily screened photograph is printed. All the photos of the Cultural Revolution originate from the artist's private collection which he started in 1964. They depict scenes in which construction crews are building streets and laying water mains. Thomas Bayrle is fascinated more by their vivid imagery than their ideological implications.
The artist is accompanied by his wife Helke Bayrle, who, in addition to pursuing her own projects, is giving him both technical support and an important objective opinion regarding the content of his work.