M84 Wang Guangyi

We – Participants of the ‘’85 Art Movement’ (1986)

In 1978 the Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping initiated the Open Door policy in order to open up China to foreign trade and investment. As Western culture and liberal ideas became more widely known in the country, through magazines and exhibitions, they inspired an unprecedented outpouring of nonconformity and radical activism, particularly among the student population, which agitated for a more open society.

Since the establishment of communist rule some thirty years earlier, many art schools had closed and the visual arts had been constrained into the service of the state as a vast propaganda machine. Now, art schools were opening up again, and many young art graduates were inspired by the idea of creating China’s very own brand of modern art. Between 1984 and 1986 some eighty-five artist groups emerged across the country, forming an energetic, nationwide, avant-garde movement. To express their idealistic vision and radical intent, they issued manifestos and artistic statements, staged conferences and held unofficial exhibitions – giving rise to the catch-all term referring to this short-lived period of buoyant artistic creativity: the ‘’85 Art Movement’ (also sometimes referred to as the ‘’85 Art New Wave’).

This optimistic era in China came to an abrupt end in 1989 with the brutal suppression of the country’s growing democracy movement following the killing of hundreds of students who were peacefully demonstrating in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Although most of the groups of the ’85 Art Movement swiftly disbanded – such as Xiamen Dada, the Northern Art Group, the Pond Association (M83) and the Red Brigade (M87) – many of their members went on to become internationally recognized, most notably the painter and installation artist Wang Guangyi (b. 1957) and the sculptor Huang Yong Ping (b. 1954).

Wang Guangyi was a member of the Northern Art Group (Beifang yishu qunti), which sought, through Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies of romanticism, to establish a Northern aesthetic rooted in the sublime. He published the manifesto ‘We – Participants of the “’85 Art Movement” ’ (‘Women – “85 Meishu yundong” de canyuzhe’) in the radical new journal Fine Arts in China (Zhongguo meishu bao) on 8 September 1986. In it he articulated the need for a strong, healthy civilization, espousing humanist beliefs, which would give birth to a new and exciting visual culture: a modern Chinese Renaissance.

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Life’s inner drive – the underlying power of culture today has arrived at its supreme moment! We thirst for and ‘happily embrace all forms of life’ by giving rise to a new, more humanistic spiritual model, to bring order to the evolutionary process of life. To this end, we only oppose those morbid, rococo styles of art as well as all things unhealthy and detrimental to the evolution of life. Since these arts abet man’s weaknesses, they cause people to be far from health and far from life. As we see it today, the ideas of art have already exceeded its [traditional] conceptual definitions. Although Conceptual art is regarded as art’s alienation from itself, before a new culture of art arrives, we can only accept this kind of alienation. In this way, we can use the alienation of art to express the concept of anti-alienation.

It is exactly in this sense that the participants of the ’85 Art Movement are not engaged in creating art for art’s sake, but rather in advancing a process of articulation and behavior that is not merely the philosophy of a philosophical concept. This is similar to the peculiar qualities of uncertainty found in art at the beginning of the European Renaissance. The reason that Renaissance art has historical value is not because it perfected artistic models, but rather because it conveyed the revelatory expression of non-philosophical philosophy and gave rise to humanist thought. This, in turn, prompted Europe to depart from the difficult conditions of the Middle Ages, to discover humanity and the value of human nature.

It is precisely this significance that the ’85 Art Movement shares with the earlier Renaissance. However, the difference is that the importance of Renaissance art lies in its discovery and awakening of human nature, while the ’85 Art Movement is grounded in the context of modern civilization and is intent on elevating humankind’s sublimity and health.

We oppose speculation over so-called pure artistic forms because excessive discussion of these kinds of questions will lead to the unchecked spread of a morbid state of formalism. This will then cause humanity to forget its own difficult conditions. Therefore, we once again propose the ancient proposition, ‘content determines form’. What our images articulate is not art! They prophesy a new culture, the Culture of the North. The reason that we choose painting as the medium for transmitting our predictions is because the act of painting itself possesses an unknowability in its deeply layered semantics that approaches the ultimate essence of existence.