China displays new tolerance for abrasive, urban art
CC Tang
yesterday, last year, 5 years ago, or decades ago.
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By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BEIJING - In the West, "Chinese art" has meant Ming vases and
bamboo-laden landscape paintings. In recent years, however, a growing
avant-garde movement has come into its own in this country. These
artists' work crackles with sharp-edged social and personal
commentary, and that is considered as original and mature as anything
produced in the West.
Still, modern art has no official sanction here. China's capital has
no modern art museum. Artists live in conclaves on big-city outskirts,
and most Chinese don't know their work, let alone buy it. Exhibits
that go abroad - most famously, the 1995 show "Mao Goes Pop" - are
organized in the West.
Last week, however, in a sign of a thaw in official circles, an
exhibit by 29 young "new media" Chinese artists opened in Berlin - the
first-ever major approved show of avant-garde art to travel outside
China.
The exhibit features video and computer art, huge installations, and
canvases that allude to what one critic calls the "spiritual
confusion" of modern, urban China: unsparing photos of the migrant
worker gangs that swirl through Asian cities today, video
presentations of swimmers gasping for air, a performance piece in
which the artist writes an "invisible" diary day after day in water on
a stone, to name a few.
The show is considered significant not only for its official nod, but
because it introduces a new and sophisticated younger generation of
artists, many of whom participated in recent protest exhibits
containing controversial "shock art" that brought a crackdown by the
Ministry of Culture this summer.
"This is the first time the Chinese government has approved anything
like this," says Fan Di'An, co-curator of the show and a dean of the
Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. "It is the first time the
government has allowed a realistic appraisal of the urban world of
youth. Many people, including officials, realize art is a reflection
of social self-realization. They know that social criticism is a part
of the art scene."
Titled "Living in Time," the show opened Sept. 18 at Berlin's
Hamburger Bahnhof museum, where it will remain through Nov. 18.
Chinese authorities have been leery of the often disturbing and
abstract, symbolic nature of modern art since it first appeared 20
years ago in protest exhibits set outside Beijing's National Museum.
Under Mao Zedong, art's "purpose" was to glorify images of happy
peasants and noble workers. Yet, reforms in the 1980s brought a
terrific ferment, a "New Wave" movement. Chinese "discovered" artists
such as Picasso and Braque as part of an influx of Western culture and
thinking at the time. Critics mostly regard that early work as Western
imitation, however, not as original.
A watershed came with the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. The
Central Academy of Art was closed. So was "Fine Art in China," the
main avant-garde umbrella group. Many artists shut down their studios,
and often their personal lives, for two years or more.
Yet the post-1989 period proved cathartic. By the late '90s, a more
diverse and mature expression developed. In January, after visiting
the Shanghai Biennale - the first-ever semi-official exhibit of the
avant-garde - Art in America magazine editor Robert Vining enthused
that was he saw was unexpectedly "dynamic."
Liu Qinghe, one of few painters to appear in Berlin, depicts modern
Chinese faces against traditional Chinese backgrounds. "In the '80s, I
was caught up, trying to paint like Cézanne and reading Hegel," he
says, "But, after the Tiananmen period, I started looking inside
myself."
'Subversive' no more
For years, emphasis was placed on what was and wasn't "officially
approved" here. Yet today, the lines are again blurring, with the
government staking out a position that cracks down on new forms of
extreme art, but officially tolerating a wider range of work that
previously might be labeled as subversive.
Painter Lu Fen, tall with a quick spreading smile, says that in the
mid-'90s he could not show work with military uniforms and depictions
of Mao. "But these days, I paint whatever I want," Mr. Lu says.
"There's been an explosion of form, everyone going in every direction,
and that is the best development that could be expected."
Yet, until last week, officials never approved avant-garde art to
travel abroad - feeling it might show "a bad face of China," says one
source, or cross lines of taste or politics that would bring down
wrath in Communist Party circles.
Eight of the 29 artists going to Berlin, in fact, took part in an
exhibit that protested the Shanghai modern art show in January. Called
"We Aren't Cooperating," the show was designed partly to exhibit a
more radical and extreme side to the current scene here, and also to
challenge the official idea that "reform" in modern China is
unstintingly positive. Some works used blood, images of surgery, and
body parts.
This summer, shortly after Beijing won its bid to host the 2008
Olympic Games, the Ministry of Culture cracked down on this extreme
end of the avant garde - known as "shock art." They applied statutes
forbid the showing of "violent, bloody, or obscene" works. Violators
could face a three-year prison sentence.
"In the three months after the statutes were publicized, you get a
huge increase in works that are bloody, violent, and probably
obscene," says Robert Bernell, director of Chinese-art.com, a
fine-arts website.
"Some of the artists going to Berlin were part of a controversial show
that contributed to a recent crackdown," says Brian Wallace, director
of the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing. "But now they are in a major
exhibition that is part of a Chinese government cultural-exchange
program. I've not seen such selections before. This is good strong
work, and a sign things are happening."
Clay clones and migrants on pilings
The Berlin show examines the social climate of a country undergoing
change - the pursuit of money, uncertain relationships, alienation,
pollution, and a fear of individuality.
The signature piece, by artist Yang Yong, shows migrant urban workers
resting on top of pilings for a skyscraper. Migrants are a hot subject
here - dusty laborers who come from the country, build the new
metropolis' of China, and then are required to leave.
In an Internet art project by Shi Yong titled "You can't clone it, but
you can buy it," visitors to Mr. Shi's website "voted" on what an
urban Chinese man should look like. The "winner" is a smiling figure
with long blond hair wearing sunglasses, a black Mao suit, and
carrying a briefcase - a figure part capitalist, part communist. Shi's
installation features dozens of identical clay statues of the figure.
Another piece, "2,000 years from now," by Zheng Guo Gu, forges plastic
bottles into cast-iron replicas.
Shi Hui took the theme of "scholar's rocks" or miniature mountains
that appear in traditional Chinese gardens, but that under Ms. Shi's
hand are made of paper - a comment on distance from nature.
Yang Fu Dong, considered a breakout photographer, depicts a man and a
woman dancing in the dark. Mr. Yang asks ordinary people to pose as if
they are famous actors, and he explores the problem of private space
in China.
"These works are sophisticated, intelligent, and highly nuanced," says
Dr. Bernell. "The artists are globalized and cosmopolitan, and in tune
with any big city in the world. One often hears about China as if it
is homogenized. These artists show something else."
"New media" art has jelled in China only in recent years. "In 1996,
you had less than 10 video artists in Beijing," says Mr. Fan, the
exhibit co-curator, someone known to have advised President Jiang
Zemin on art. "Now you have more than 100."
Another first in Berlin will be the installation in a public square of
a huge video screen that will repeatedly play a six-hour tape of
Chinese video art. According to Fan, cultural ministry officials sat
through the entire film, and only requested one change: a toy with a
US flag stuck on one side was thought possibly to offend American
viewers.