From piggy-banks to "the Testimony of the Hare"
and what had gone before.

Hans van Dijk 1999

Beyond Exile

John Clark 1999

The twenty years following the opening up of the P.R.China has also resulted in great changes and new developments in the field of fine arts. After several decades of a strictly guided and one-dimensional art production and after being nearly totally cut off from information about the art outside China, the new liberties have been intensively used, both by individuals inside and outside the art institutions, to fill the gaps and try to come in sync with the international art world.

When information about modern and classical art from the West reached China in the late seventies and early eighties, it first arrived in bits and pieces. Catalogues and books brought by visitors circulated among friends and a few exhibitions of modern art, from France and the USA among others, caused a sensation. At the same time Chinese scholars started series of articles in the art magazines to introduce modern and classical art outside China and soon standard art historical works were translated and published.

The first modern art exhibitions with Chinese works were held in Beijing and Shanghai in 1979 and 1980. The second half of the eighties saw a large number of group exhibitions and manifestations organized nearly all over the country. This uprising culminated in the February 1989 exhibition in the National Gallery in Beijing under the name "China / Avant-Garde". In the same period artists based on the mainland were invited to take part in exhibitions in Europe and the USA. The early nineties saw a still growing number of smaller and bigger group exhibitions of contemporary art from China, first in Europe and Australia and recently also in the USA.

From the beginning many in the Chinese art world expected that China as a nation should develop its own version of modern art, recognizable as "Chinese", and that only based on such an accomplishment individual artists could get international recognition. Many theoretical efforts were made to define and describe the bases and characteristics of such an art. A great number of exhibitions, especially in the eighties, were announced as historical steps in this aspired direction by pretending that they revealed the latest trend which would dominate and inevitable make history. Similar presumptions and practices were incidentally repeated in the Western art world when in the nineties big exhibitions on the contemporary art of China started to travel abroad and this claim for something exclusively "Chinese" continued.

It is clear that with this exhibited collection we didn't start another search for what finally is Chinese and what's not, or what it should be or has been. The eighteen presented artists also don't use a common style, technique or subject matter and their works are dating from 1986 until this year. Most of them have followed an academic education and all are well informed about both western and Chinese art history. Instead, the regional diversity, different backgrounds and directions of the artists can give an impression of the variety the Chinese art world has exhibited in such a short time.

It is not surprising that several artists react on, use or document aspects of the vast change of Chinese society, which changed within twenty years from showing the nearly uniform religious soberness of the Mao area to the present abundant consumerism and from a strictly defined social structure and the connected mores to its remaining and scattered fragments of today. In the art world of the nineties the art market became a hot item, auctions were organized, specialized magazines appeared and art academies reshaped in what looks like company groups.

Zeng Hao (1963 Beijing) was teacher at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts when he portrayed his enterprising friends and colleagues in their new outfit and modern furnished apartments. "The Mirror", "Flowers" and "Thursday Afternoon" were painted in sequence in 1994 and 1995. "The Mirror" shows a face looking at us with a quiet smile and self-assured eyes, popping up from a disproportional small torso dressed in a shirt and jacket, which seems to squeeze the head and undermine the intended expression. This effect is deepened by the even smaller objects on the separated foreground, a comb, lighter and as a deadpan blow a cosy piggy-bank. In "Flowers", two half cut-off figures serve as a background for the theme of the painting. In "Thursday Afternoon", fashionably clothed figures and a number of luxury objects without mutual relations are bluntly present in a brightly colored undefined space.

Until the early eighties the social unit one was attached to, school, army unit or warehouse etc, was one of the basic elements in Chinese society. They covered professional as well as private life and did so life-long. Zhuang Hui (1963 Beijing) who worked several years in a large steel plant in Henan province knew the strong material and psychological dependency on this identity confirming relationship. When about twenty years after the collapse of the unit-structured society he reanimates one of its traditional ceremonies, the group photo-session, no one could resist nor discuss or criticize his presence and position on the photo: on the left side of the group, as the outsider and conductor, standing besides the hierarchy.

Because off its supposed objectivity, photography has long been an important propaganda form in the P.R. China. But the same effectiveness and pretence can be used in reverse. In the eighties some young photographers started to use it as a medium revealing social reality. In the late eighties, Zhang Hai'er (1957 Canton) started a unique series of photos of girls who served as models at the art academies. Being a model was and still is a suspect position in China. But Zhang Hai'er is not a documentary photographer, nor an observing photographer. He engages himself. He did so when he later visited the Steelworks of Wuhan. His own presence in the portraits is more than obvious. Looking at his works results again in commitment.

"To consume is the Ideal - To consume vents one's bottled up spleen better" and "Ten Thousand Customers" are photo works of the youngest artist featured in the exhibition, Zheng Guogu (1970 Yangjiang), who runs his publicity company in the southern coastal city of Yangjiang. His refined and delightful photographical reports about life in prosperous Yangjiang are an undisguised glorification of whatever form of consuming. It is a consequent position in a society that lacks all basic elements of a free modern art world. Culture itself, recent political forms since 1949 or that extensive heritage that's called the Chinese tradition, form subject matter for artists. Most of those are not surprisingly active and located in Beijing, the capital. Zhou Yunxia (1958 Nanjing) lived in the artists' village of Yuan Min Yuan in North-Western Beijing when he painted his variation of "Animal Farm". In " June 3, 1994" Geng Jianyi (1962 Hangzhou) depicts in detail how politicians show thanks after being applauded. Liu Anping (1964 Berlin) entitled his devastating action in room 571 of the Holiday Inn hotel in Beijing "The Behavior of Young Red is Righteous", and with shocking clarity Gu Dexin (1962 Beijing) demonstrates the harsh simplicity of propaganda.

Ai Weiwei (1957 Beijing) focussed in the late seventies and early eighties on the recent national history. A history which had a direct and great influence on his life and that of his parents. In more recent works he broadens his themes as well to the present, as in "Seven Frames", a photo series of a young guard serving at Tian'anmen Square, registered in ruthless detail in seven shots from the head, of what appeared to be a lad from the countryside almost past his teens, to his unknotted heavy leather shoes. In 1996 and 1997 he engaged porcelain workers in Jingdezhen to produce the so-called "Blue and White" ceramic in 18th century Qianlong and Kangxi style. It shows an underlying destructive aspect towards the long tradition and is also a consequence of a discussion about authenticity since in the beginning of this century so-called "ready made's" were introduced in the modern art world by Marcel Duchamp.

Wei Dong, Hong Lei and Hong Hao belong to the few who work close to a traditional style. Wei Dong (1968 Beijing) masters traditional landscape painting of different periods and styles. To this he adds women figures scarcely clothed in parts of official costume fashions derived from the recent history painted in "gongbi" technique, a kind of fine brushwork style dating back two thousand years. Hong Lei (1960 Changzhou) transfers traditional compositions and themes in photographical works, reworked with brush and other tools. Hong Hao (1965 Beijing) started 5 years ago his extensive "Selected Scriptures" series; silkscreen prints showing moulded pages of a book containing medical documents, like "Selected Scriptures, page 1762, Acupuncture Therapy, the Hemp Cloth Phrenology" a review of his career as an artist "Selected Scriptures, page 3155, The Road to Success" and a wide variety of world maps, like "Selected Scriptures, page 1862, The Division of Nuclear Arms", "Selected Scriptures, page 95, The Latest Practical World Map" and "Selected Scriptures, page 3065, The New World Order".

Between 1991 and 1993 Wang Xingwei (1969 Haicheng) painted a large triptych showing a group of fighting young people. The North-Eastern part of China, where he grew up and lives is known for those frequent outbursts. The formation of the figures in the painting is classical; static in symmetry with an inside action. It is painted in a realistic fashion, slightly tending to cartoon-like character style. Like other paintings from that period he used realism to reflect and document his social surroundings. Violence remained the theme in the paintings "To Hurt" (1994) and "All Happy Families are Similar" no 1 and 2 (1994), but in "To Hurt" he used a more monumental style, less realistic, as an effort to define the essence of violence. The painting could also be entitled "Cooperation", he explained later. "All Happy Families..." depicts a mistreated woman lying on the floor of a living room surrounded by objects from the modern art history, "all just toys" according to the artist; the hat of Beuys, the "Fountain" of Duchamp, a small Jasper Johnes and the wooden stick with tar Wang Xingwei had used to paint "To Hurt". After his works first received recognition, he preferred to live in a rather small city enjoying family life and better working conditions, unlike many artists who moved to Beijing.

Since then he finished around twenty works, showing situations by using art works and images from the history of western art, Chinese social realism, propaganda art and recent history to confront and test their meanings and values by applying them to his own surroundings and daily life. In several of them he plays the principal character, like in "Mein Kampf - Wang Xingwei in 1936" where he stands as a complacent adolescent besides Hitler, who just has been convinced by Wang Xingwei of the theories of Gandhi. Mein Kampf is burning at their feet. In "The Testimony of The Hare" painted in the style of Caravaggio he interrogates the animal to find out what really happened when Beuys did his performance with the dead hare in his arms. In "Still No A-mark" (1988) he rebukes his son for his shortcoming. The title, like the posture of the boy, is derived from a work around 1940 of the Russian painter Kelnikov, a painting used for copying at many art academies in China. Wang Xingwei is sitting on pop-art furniture from the English artist Allen Jones in a posture derived from a sculpture by Michelangelo against a canvas painted in American hard-edge style as a background, to make it more stage-like, he explained.

At the art academies experiments are not encouraged and because of the lack of a clear government policy towards modern art, education remains concentrated on the teaching of technical skills. As a result the art world is enriched every year with some hundred high skilled painters, printers etc. In 1990 Ding Yi (1962 Shanghai) was one of them, but he belonged also to the few who felt not limited to the traditional ink-wash painting technique, he had been trained in.

In the early eighties he had started to study the work of the French painter Utrillio. When we look at the paintings he did after this confrontation it is clear that he was not attracted by the exoticism of the Parisian street views, the architecture of many buildings in Shanghai is rather similar to the ones Utrillio depicted. The following years he gradually reduced the elements and composition of his paintings to what he considered as the essential for the painter: the horizontal and vertical, represented by a cross. From there, ten years ago, it appeared to be a fascinating way back to the sensitive use of color of Utrillio and the richness of texture of traditional Chinese landscape painting.

Zhao Bandi 's (1963 Beijing) "Young Zhang" (1992), painted with a free brush- stroke, was one of the last oil paintings he did. Like the ones he painted at the academy it shows an interior with an intimate scene, a smoking boy sitting in bed in front of a television comfortably stretching himself. The painting is hanging at an angle of 30 degrees, the television set in front and the figure stretching himself in the direction of the onlooker contribute to the strong spatial effect. After travelling in Europe and the USA in 1993 and '94, Zhao Bandi widened his medium to the use of objects. "The Big Rumor Spreading Until Today" (1994) made of perpex suggests a jumping figure in great excitement. In 1995 and '98 he designed and produced calendars in a style influenced by educative printwork of the 50ties and Pre Rafelite painting. Calendars are a very popular item at streetmarkets in Beijing at the end of the year. Zhao Bandi pretends to be an outsider of the limited art world and the public acceptance of these works fulfilled his long cherished wish to find an audience outside the art world.

Like Zhao Bandi's, the art of Zhang Yajie, Liu Wei and Guo Wei is based on introspection not aimed at statements about culture or bothered with comments about the outside world, but instead delivers direct reactions to it. Zhang Yajie (1963 Beijing) painted scenes of persons in streets and interiors, in 1996 he started a series of paintings in grey-tones and zoomed in on some friends to show us characters we are familiar with. Liu Wei (1965 Beijing) calls himself a blasphemer. Texts, sketches and partly finished depictions of sexual fantasies, the pleasure of smoking Camel, the beauty of nature, much pork and his beloved dogs fill his canvases. He shows us the bright side of modern life, but without the skin. There is a small virtuous painting by Guo Wei (1960 Chengdu), a self-portrait from 1995 which he didn't intend to be an artwork. He painted it at the end of a working day, to relax. The horizontal format stresses the intense observing expression, it shows fascination by the indistinct separation between perception and imagination, or by, to use the title of one of his other works, "The Rumors of a Myth".

This essay will make some general comments on the art situation in China before observations about works in the exhibition.

If the 1970s had ended with a new potential freedom for artistic expression so long as 'Chinese socialism' was left unchallenged, the end of the 1980s provided the bloody caesura of the Beijing massacre to the experimentation of the mid- and late-1980s when the status quo declared there would be no going back. Fortunately the powers that be forgot modernity is a future-oriented discourse, and left it to occupy whatever space there would be no going back to: the market economy, consumer culture, or even the nefarious life of surface 'pop' and subterranean counter-culture movements .

Chinese art at the end of the century stands at something of a turning point. After the hysteria with which so much interesting experimental art was received at the Venice Biennale in 1999 it would appear the Euramerican art world is still reluctant to accept it no longer has - if it ever had - any exclusive rights over modernity. But if this external reception still retains an unshakably atavistic core, what can be said of the situation in China itself?

So modern art in China was given its space to negotiate by this closure to the past if not by the self-enclosed, official art world. The academies still consented to train artists by about ten years' application of conservative art pedagogy derived from the Soviet Union , but not to allow any rigorous formal experimentation a part of the curriculum within their doors. Public galleries consented to show the nude and the abstract, but not generally to exhibit installation or performance art. Officialdom allowed art exhibitions to be prepared, but to see a train of even the most unexceptional shut down even hours before their opening. Last minute representations about possible offence to public order were made to the Public Security Bureau with dreary regularity from unnamed 'persons in the art world' .

Meanwhile a string of successful accommodations with China-based and overseas commercial galleries allowed many artists to earn a living from modern art which was often scatalogical if not hostile in intent to the status quo, but managed to express this without ostensible attack on 'Chinese socialism'. When this 'export production' made survival in China actually become a feasible option for modern artists - rather than the imaginary rationale of a number of overseas dealers who profited from it - the end came into sight of the concept of a diaspora necessarily forced by the thwarting of professional development . Exile abroad was still required for those more actively hostile to the political status quo, but cultural exile now became more a matter of personal inclination related to the content of a given artistic practice.

However, the reality of political intervention in art via the sanctioning of particular artists and styles for official exhibition did not change. Nor did the use of privileged art forms for civilizational projects sanctioned by the party disappear . Art was not to be a domain of cultural practice autonomous of politics even if the gap between what was sanctioned and what was not sanctioned was looser and less rigorously policed . Into this third space could appear comment on the vacuity of modern consumer culture , or even satirical comment on the iconography of great leader . But in this most mediatized of societies there remained many un-faced horrors of recent history at home , and almost no art was in the public domain which deconstructed or satirized official propaganda .

Official art concerned itself with the aesthetics of the well-made, a performative, academic and ultimately vacuous definition of artistic achievement devoid of the contemporary contestation or at least engagement with the frictions of the modernizing lived world of Chinese which would give it meaning . In addition and in parallel, the 'narrow road to the deep national' was pursued by an unholy alliance of convenience between conservative, and meretricious oil painters who hid their lack of creativity under a mask of stylistic déformation in deference to modernity, with 'chinese-style' artists who had only to lift a brush and use ink on paper to claim the cultural authenticity of their practice. Indeed the miasmic confusion between a spurious cultural or technical authenticity and artistic creativity served to reinforce the confirmation of such artists' legitimacy through restricted access to exhibition locations controlled by the Artists' Association or its cohorts.

The relativity of art to the values at the site of display must have been clear to many in the Chinese official art world when its senior members were completely ignored by a stream of foreign art curators visiting China, as they headed to the studios of artists who in some cases could only exhibit their works abroad . By the end of the 1990s the very international succés d'estime of these artists indicated that both the system of training artists and the 'consecration' of their works through access to public exhibition sites were in dire need of reform if not radical re-evaluation, even from a 'socialist Chinese' position. Conservative if decent academic artists could be heard to publicly complain that 'the views of art at the centre are still very revolutionary', by that meaning, presumably, that those in the party leadership, and particularly those in the party Propaganda Department, were still unsympathetic to modern art .

The works in this exhibition show what can be done by a group of committed Chinese artists and overseas curators and collectors willing to commercially exhibit or collect modern art in China to which they have applied fairly rigorous standards of conceptual clarity and artistic execution. It should be remembered that they are performing a function which might normally be expected by a museum or curatorial culture but in China, with the exception of two or three new Museums, they are doing so on a level scarcely imagined by the official world .

This rigour is immediately shown in the work of Ai Weiwei, son of the early modernist poet Ai Qing who was exiled to Xinjiang and where Ai Weiwei had the opportunity to observe the humiliations meted out during various 'thought reform' campaigns. The cold, implacable irony of Ai Weiwei's surrealist objets seems based on the most intense experience of absurdity. This critical stance led to among the first attempts to displace and empty of significance the mask of Mao Zidong. Such conceptual displacement with the odd combinations of visualized metaphors, mostly physical in Ai Weiwei's play with odd combinations of shoes or weirdly constructed furniture, is also found in the prints of Hong Hao, where incongruous mappings are overlaid with equally estranged captions.

One should not for a moment think that this is all some self-obsessed modernist diversion, despite the occasional flirting with pure style games where Duchamp is always the potent attractor. A very serious concern for art and its critical relation to social life underlies such works. As Ai Weiwei wrote in1997:

'In today's culture and art, we still lack basic attention - lack the artist's professionalism and awareness, lack the independence of criticism. The various kinds of investigation of discourse, the application of proliferant techniques and media, the indiscriminant borrowing of methods and content, all have no way of covering up defects in the artist's own awareness, social criticism and independent creation. This exposes the philistine stylistics of the mechanical and the utilitarian. It reflects the poverty of spiritual values and the lowering of taste. When attention to 'trends' changes to an attention to individual methods and problems, and when the investigation of forms changes to an environment for survival, to the investigation of spiritual values, only then will art have its proper awareness, one which is a long road to travel'

The conceptual emptiness of reprographic life reappears in the clapping hands of Geng Jianyi laid out as if in a taijiquan manual, performing when told and properly instructed without asking what they are clapping about. Similarily for Zhou Yunxia, the pigs look down on the cornfields ever better, ever fatter, where the commemorative pole outside Tian'anmen stands in the centre of the picture like a silent sentinel to an unspoken and now possibly meaningless history.

Some artists ostensibly eschew social comment and essay the pure pictoriality of line and colour as in Ding Yi . Some display crudely inchoate viscera, like Gu Dexin, as if the world were a surface of effluvia not noticed by those who exude them, touch them, eat them. Flesh here is bleeding, and apparently lascerated in the surfaces of Guo Wei, or dripping with disgusting fluids in the transmogrified bodies of Liu Wei. I think much of this art is misanthropic or misogynist, but its repulsiveness, and its physical smell in Gu Dexin's installations - one of which was of raw steak, a condom, a plastic dildo, and battery - are not casually or disingenuously so. They are about a negation of power, be it that of the Chinese state and its manic, puritanical blanking out of difference. Be it that of Chinese lifestyles which in Beijing at least can perversely translocate a body from a polymorphously foetid latrine to an exclusivist gastronomic parlour in a few strides. As summarized by Feng Boyi:

'When the ideology of social life becomes an obvious element of installation art, then it becomes difficult to separate art from politics. Gu Dexin's installation piece, comprised of a white curtain, a large table with red table-cloth upon which was place 100kg of pig's brains, and a second red cloth hanging on the wall like a flag. When visitors entered the space, some instantly recoiled from the smell. This piece touched off human reactions of which all people have experience. It was like a bad joke, an assault on the senses and a blasphemy against the language of power all rolled into one' .

It may also be a strategy to paint well and yet depict a mechanical puppet-like viciousness in the subject like the extremely carefully made paintings of Wang Xingwei, combining David's Assasination of Marat with a Chuck Close or a Duane Hanson. Here is much cunning avoidance of direct political critique at the same time as devious insertion of an artistic one through the way celebrated art images are appropriated. Denial of the terms of public political engagement can be countered, as it were, by manipulation of artistic symbols in the domestic space; the father sitting on the sexual mannequin chairs of American pop teasing his implacably moral son in his 'socialist' red tie.

But what empty lives are here displayed. Zeng Hao shows us the absent fields of social life, the posturing moderns with the consumer gadgets of their lives, like playthings in a child's secret garden, but with nothing to connect them. Zhang Hai'er takes us more directly into the pleasure beds of urban dweller, where the frame subtly includes hints of the viewer's own gaze, a scopophiliac hiding from consequences of his own lust.

There is underneath this almost a formalist play with ennui in a false nostalgia for the vanished present that had never been, as if authentic but traduced life was only to be found in the ideological entrapments of the past, or in the fantasy materialist paradise of the future. Only thus can be seen the need to grace so many images with cultural reference to a present in the imagined past as in Wei Dong, or to the fashion consumption of oh-so-modern people in Zhao Bandi.

Finally, humanist nostalgia and conceptual minimalism link in Zhuang Hui's blank, almost nameless portraits of people who are so clearly nameable only to themselves. The records of those whose time has passed, whose system has now denied them the value they once had rather than accept that with the expiry of its term it should now itself 'melt into air'.