Contemporary Chinese art
At a seminar at the Australian National University in 1985, Geremie Barmé discussed the poetry of Yang Lian, one of the younger members of the Today magazine group, in the context not only of modernisation and modernism, but also primitivism, root-seeking, myth-making, and even shamanism, the capacity to communicate with the world beyond the living, which recurs in Chinese folk religion. Today magazine, and Yang Lian, had emerged in association with the Democracy Wall movement of 1979–80 in Peking, when, following the death of Mao Zedong and the smashing of the Gang of Four in 1976, and the ascent of Deng Xiaoping, educated youth returned to the cities demanding change. The Democracy Wall movement was accompanied by unprecedented expressions of dissent in art and literature, but ended in suppression and the draconian sentencing of democracy activist Wei Jingsheng and others.
By the mid-1980s, such dissident artistic activities were resurfacing. They were also partially condoned. Barmé argued that the dissident culture was a continuation of older forms of Chinese discontent with orthodoxy. He drew attention to an alternative Chinese culture that had roots in the mysteries of the I Ching (Book of Changes) and the earthy energies of popular Taoism. In its cosmopolitan Peking form this culture found its Western affinities in Freud and Dada, T.S. Eliot and the Beats, rather than Marx and science. I believed that what was emerging, in pockets and spurts, of a new, or newly configured, Chinese culture offered important insights into what was going on in the society as a whole.
The kind of Taoism that Barmé had introduced me to as an intellectual concept showed in the passionate, committed, frenzied, hard-living, protean creative spirits of the Peking scene; qualities that came to the fore when the quest for creative expression was once more connected with direct political dissent, ten years on from the Democracy Wall, in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Today was founded by poets Bei Dao and Mang Ke. They and their friends – writers, poets, artists, performers, theorists and social activists – formed a dissenting group that had its origins in the Cultural Revolution, when the children of urban intelligentsia were sent to the countryside. Some, including Bei Dao, had since left China. Others were repositioning themselves in the 1980s, like Mang Ke, also known as Monkey, who became a kind of godfather to other writers and artists. ‘After You’re Dead, You Can Still Grow Old’ is the title of a poem he wrote around this time.
In retrospect the period of the late 1980s is most noteworthy for the formation of a contemporary Chinese art. Visual art, working beneath or around the written language that can be so oppressive in Chinese culture, offered sensitive seismic readings of what was going on underground. I was privileged to watch, and learn, as exciting new kinds of Chinese art were fired into being by the energies of rebellion.
This phase of contemporary Chinese art began in 1985 with critic Li Xiaoshan’s remark that traditional painting was dead. I saw Lin Chunyan’s bold paintings from the existential States series at the Old Observatory in 1986, in an exhibition that was allowed to happen, although without approval, in the precarious leniency of that year. To be an artist at that time was to show oneself in a new way, rejecting tawdriness and dehumanisation by devotion to creative pursuits, however useless, in the manner of old-style literati. Works may have ended up gathering dust in a corner – that didn’t matter. As an unexpected offshoot of utilitarian ideology, art subverted the society that bred it.
Ah Xian first showed me his work in private at his home and I could see at once its powerful, metaphorical political eloquence – a judgement shared by many people who have seen it since in exhibitions around the world. The way Ah Xian visualises, and even conceives of, human beings is mediated by crude, mass-produced models. Re-working Cultural Revolution models in his Heavy Wounds series, for example, the artist shows the sources of human creativity – brain, the sense organs, genitalia – bound and gagged. The dumb emptiness of people’s faces is a travesty of the spiritual emptiness suggested by the stylised Taoist waves in the background. In other works pain and puzzlement are expressed in cross-overs of medium and form, in multiple layers and broken ill-fitting elements. Working without institutional support, Ah Xian, like most of the artists, lived and worked in modest, cramped conditions. Sometimes huge canvases were propped in the narrow hallway, with not always enough space or light to see the work properly. How moving – and reassuring – it was to see real work, with flair, originality and conviction, emerging from under the nearly fifty years of rigid Communist Party cultural regulation and the 3000 years’ tradition as numbingly constructed in China’s museums.
In 1986 at the China Art Gallery I singled out an oil painting by Wang Youshen, Yugong and his Sons, from a show of work by graduating art school students. I tracked down the artist and we became friends. He has gone on to produce work that in more conceptually sophisticated ways returns to the theme of that early work, the multiplying conformity of individuality in China. He works as art editor at the influential Peking Youth News and produced an installation work for the 1992 Venice Biennale: curtains of newsprint blocking the view from the window to a different, more open reality. In 1988 I also met Guan Wei, another student of the I Ching, whose then predominantly grey canvases of figures marked with acupoints instantly appealed to me for their cool, sharp playfulness – a rare quality in the academy art of the time, whether in traditional Chinese manner or the solemn adaptation of social realism or other newer imports. Guan Wei had stacks of paintings in his studio that had been seen by only a few friends. Standing to one side of the system, Guan Wei showed a startling inventiveness, a capacity for radical play, which gave a rare quality of humour to his work.
For young artists pursuing their own path there was virtually no access to the kind of interpretative context that exhibitions, reviews, art criticism or an art market can provide. Feedback was mostly a matter of comment from like-minded members of the artist’s group. A foreigner like myself introduced another kind of response, however subjective or uninformed it might be. I saw hundreds of exhibitions in those years, and held some informal shows at my home. The scene was vigorous, and occasionally something striking would emerge. Artists came in contact with many foreign visitors, and the meetings sometimes resulted in sale of work or, in the cases of Ah Xian and his brother, photographer Xiao Xian, Guan Wei and Lin Chunyan, invitations to visit and show overseas. These salon-style showings in the apartments of foreign diplomats, journalists and teachers blurred the line between exhibition opening and cocktail party as a way of getting round red tape. Hence the phenomenon of ‘dip’ art. Artists whose work demonstrated the characteristics by which foreigners wished to remember China were preferred, especially if they were personally engaging too. Pre-1989 this free-and-easy art scene seemed to reflect the informality of the wider Chinese society. The tide was flowing almost too fast, however; by being part of a larger movement of change, the salons took on a degree of intellectual significance, presenting audiences with images of a China in which desire and imagination were surfacing in ways that would prove dangerous. Official venues were soon pushed to catch up.
The artists’ work and the unauthorised channels they used to show it challenged the Chinese authorities and the more intransigent parts of the art establishment. A China-wide network of communication and support had developed among unofficial or unorthodox artists and other dissenting intellectuals. Such people, constituting a threat to Communist Party rule, could be harassed by the security system or otherwise obstructed in their personal and professional lives. Questions of desiring to speak or act, or simply exist in a certain way, but of being able to do so only in repressed or codified forms, haunt much contemporary Chinese art. Facelessness, and the emergence from facelessness to individuality, are predominant themes. Many artists have opted for exile outside China.
Each political movement in China brings a tightening of tension. During the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign in 1983–84, for instance, Ah Xian was drawn directly into the surveillance net on the pretext of his having painted nudes, politically unacceptable at the time. During the student demonstrations and subsequent ideological suppression in 1986–87 artists were again targeted. In late-1989, during the purges following the Tiananmen Square massacre, the ‘Survivors’ group, which included many artists and writers who had survived from the Democracy Wall days, was condemned as ‘counter-revolutionary’ and an instigating cause of the ‘turmoil’ that followed. Art critic Li Xianting, who curated the exhibition Mao Goes Pop for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 1993, was singled out for attack, not least for his part in the astonishing China/Avant-Garde exhibition which took over the China Art Gallery in February 1989, just weeks before the demonstrations of that year began. Because of the sensitive nexus of cultural activity and politics, independent artists have played their role in pushing political liberalisation in China, even unwittingly, and while some can be protected by high-level connections or international fame, few are completely immune from restriction and potential harassments.
The capacity to struggle, organise and tactically engage with officialdom is perhaps born out of circumstances. As I travelled around China in those years, I was able, through the network, to meet many people – printmakers in the far north-east, supportive instructors in Wuhan, outspoken critics in Peking and Shanghai, young editors from the south-west. They were individuals whose creative energies had survived, often to remould their original training, artists whose work was able to renew the arguments between tradition and modernity, inside and outside, fecundity and control, meaning and absurdity in intriguing ways, as you can see in the woodblock prints of Xu Bing and Chen Haiyan, or in Fang Lijun’s drawings or Wei Guangqing’s Yellow-covered Book pieces.
I was wary of what was happening in the art schools, despite the esteem in which they were universally held in China, because they seemed parasitic on, and finally wasteful of, their student bodies in ways that had analogies in the Chinese system as a whole. I learned not to equate avant-gardist postures uncritically with artistic achievement. Some of the most suavely, painfully sceptical art I saw came from the heart of academic realism. Tolerance (1988), from Shen Jiawei’s series Gallery of Modern Chinese Historical Figures, is a collective portrait of scholars well-known during the May Fourth Movement, symbolic of the artist’s democratic-humanist aspirations. It was entered in the National Art Exhibition for 1989, yet with subtle irony subverts both Chinese history and its falsification through art.
All that I have said shows that I find it hard to separate the qualities of the art from the historical moment and the circumstances of the artists as individuals and members of their particular groups. The question then asks itself: what happens to these artists when their circumstances change, especially when, in the case of those who have left China, their relationship with the struggles of their culture and society is radically altered? The striking work produced by artists after 1989 – accentuated in the exhibitions New Art from China (curated by Claire Roberts in Australia in 1992) and Mao Goes Pop – indicated tendencies towards cynicism, satire, Pop and the entry into taboo zones of privacy, fantasy and the erotic, as if even artists who continue to work in China are seeking to de-commit themselves from socio-political engagement. But how?
For artists outside China the challenge is the give-and-take with a many-faceted international art world. At a time when Asia is being enthusiastically welcomed as a new player in contemporary art, it remains difficult for Asian artists to be understood on their own terms, especially if they wish to repudiate the role of national stereotype.
There is first a need for understanding of what is culturally specific in order to allow the cultural specifics to become legible, and even transparent, as part of a more comprehensive appreciation of the artist’s work. Too often the gleeful identification of something culturally specific – ‘other’ – brings on an awkwardness that, in the name of cultural sensitivity, declines to comment further. Usually brash critics and reviewers, wary of seeming gauche, fall politely silent, leaving commentary to the ‘experts’. Artists can feel this as but another form of obstruction and finally rejection.
Ah Xian, Xiao Xian, Guan Wei, Hou Leong, Huangpu Binghui, Kathy Huang, Jia Yong, Li Liang, Lin Chunyan, Ren Hua, Shen Jiawei, Shen Shaomin, Song Ling, Tang Song, Wang Zhiyuan, Wu Di and Xiao Lu are among the artists from China now working in Australia. They remark positively on the warm reception they have had, but often go on to note the lack of any real engagement with their work from the public. People seem reluctant to explore or interpret, as if afraid of making a mistake. This timidity – if it is not indifference – forms a barrier the artists strive to overcome by reworking those aspects of their culture that travel most successfully. They risk becoming complicit in re-inscribing a cultural stereotype, or orientalising themselves for foreign consumption. Yet to expect them to forget their own artistic and social traditions in order to be absorbed into a foreign art market is also cruel, even if it were possible, because to do so would mean cutting out too large a part of themselves. Their own travel is, after all, a cultural crossing of some moment.
Guan Wei is one artist who can take on transcultural ironies and misprisions in a cool and relaxed fashion. In his painting sequences the Sausage series (seen in Localities of Desire at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1994) and The Great War of the Eggplant, (seen in Perspecta 1995 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales), he shows himself heir to the painting traditions of his native Chinese culture, where freedom is achieved within restraint. The tight discipline he imposes on himself, in terms of form, media, colour and compositional elements, creates a zone of play where postures and impostures can be acted out, and questions asked. He performs a balancing act between an idiosyncratic private vision and the mythology he has fabricated from layers of cultural dislocation. His ordered enigmas simulate narratives that are open-ended in the ways they can be read, providing trick meanings only. They are coded, but the cultural keys are elusive, and their whimsical immediacy, with blithely populist references to cartoons, cookbooks, movies and advertising, proves deceptive alongside darker references to more destructive processes of history and politics.
The Great War of the Eggplant tells a humorous and original story of how the Chinese brought the poisonous eggplant to pre-invasion Australia. Only later, when a European went looking for Chinese knowledge in turn, was a way found to remove the poison to make the vegetable fit for human consumption. It is a bizarre allegory that turns postcolonialist pieties to absurdist play. The eggplant appeals to the artist as a form in its own right, with an amazing life of its own – erotic, procreational and cross-cultural – as the artist discovered when he researched eggplant recipes through history. Yet the vegetable, like the sausage, is not without its pathos too, as a symbol or proxy for human beings who must negotiate war and reconciliation, existence and transformation, survival and consumption. It is a fantastic story – with parallels to the artist’s own story of moving from China to Australia – of moments achieved, only to have them lost in the necessary move on to something else, a process of imbalances resolved at stages along the way in stunning acts of resonant equilibrium.
At the point of maximum desire for communication from one being to another, or from one culture and history to another, however, Guan Wei remains quizzical – and this quality gives his work its captivating mixture of urgency and detachment. In an anecdote the artist tells, ‘Wonderful!’ was the third word of English he learned when he arrived in this country, after ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. Levels of mutual incomprehension were such that he soon found it better to reply ‘Wonderful!’ in response to anything he didn’t understand – until he nearly ruined a friendship by responding to someone else’s personal tragedy with an exclamation of ‘Wonderful!’ In this complex sense, Guan Wei’s ‘Wonderful!’ is a hybrid, and makes the perfect comment on his art.
Artists seek new ways of codifying. In language one speaker must learn the language of the other. In art perhaps something different is possible – the invention of a crossover language that works for particular encounters, while needing no grammar outside itself. For me, anyway, the best new Chinese art offers the viewer the adventure of interpreting a hybrid visual language for which there is no textbook beyond the complex encounter of history and contemporaneity that has brought it into existence. In communicating between two worlds, that is shamanistic enough for me.
1994