Example of "Form and Content"

I was reminded of Bakhtin's concept on "“form and content in discourse are one” in "Discourse in the Novel" while discussing a new installation at the art museum with some peers (261). The installation is "Urban Landscape: A Selection of Papercuts by Qiao Xiaoguang." It features several pieces depicting differing themes on the urbanization of Beijing. 

I was curious about some of the repeated images across the pieces and asked my roommate from Beijing if she had any interpretations. She explained that one of the Chinese characters featured in the piece was a typical sign the Beijing government would use to mark a building for deconstruction. Birds, also,  often repeating in the pieces, she told me, could stand for a certain species of bird that the Beijing government was killing off due to their devastation of farm crops. 

Considering her interpretation, I was able to see how the form and content of the piece work together. In traditional Chinese paper cutting, an artist takes one sheet of paper and cuts shapes into it to create depictions. This art form reflects how the Beijing government "cut away" at natural Beijing in order to urbanize. By removing  parts from pre-existing "places", both the government and art form create new places. 

The authorial intention of the piece appears to me to be a desire to reclaim Chinese traditions in an urbanized China which are being lost in its "cutting away" of the natural state. This intent becomes apparent by considering both the content of the pictures and the art form through which the pictures are presented. Without considering them together, the form and content still have their own meanings. The form stands for tradition, and the pictures stand for city life, but when they are stratified by the author, these meanings become juxtaposed and their differences apparent. Through the space created by this difference, the author's intent, a new meaning combing the two separate meanings, manifests. 

Bakhtin describes this kind of stratification as “…a hybrid construction...an utterance that belongs, by its grammatical [syntactic] and compositional markers to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances…two languages, two semantic and axiological belief systems” (304). 

The artist is the "single speaker" in this instance. The form and content of the piece come together as the "hybrid construction."