AUGUST 2002 SUMMER ISSUE

 Contemporary Chinese Arts in the Cultural Arena From Iconoclasm to Neo-Iconolatry Cultural Production and the Cultural Revolution Variations of Ink: A Dialogue with Zhang Yanyuan Curatorial Notes on the 2002 Gwangju Biennale YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

Volume 1, Number 2, Summer/August 2002

 Katy Hsiu-chih Chien  Ken Lum   Shengtian Zheng   Julie Grundvig Paloma Campbell   Larisa Broyde   Joyce Lin    Kaven Lu

  Judy Andrews, Ohio State University John Clark, University of Sydney Lynne Cooke, Dia Foundation Okwui Enwezor, Documenta X1 Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Fan Di An, Central Academy of Fine Arts Fei Dawei, Independent Curator Gao Minglu, New York State University Hou Hanru, Independent Curator & Critic Katie Hill, Independent Critic & Curator Martina Köppel -Yang, Independent Critic & Historian Sebastian Lopez, Gate Foundation and Leiden University Lu Jie, Independent Curator Ni Tsai Chin, Tunghai University Apinan Poshyananda, Chulalongkorn University Chia Chi Jason Wang, Art Critic & Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago

 Art & Collection Group, Ltd.

   Leap Creative Group

  Raymond Mah   Gavin Chow  Jeremy Lee

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 - Yishu is published quarterly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited in Vancouver, Canada. Subscription and advertising inquiries may be sent to either addresses: Taipei: Art & Collection, Ltd. 2F, No. 6, Alley 6, Lane 13, Section 1, Nanking East Road, Taipei 104, Taiwan. Phone: (886) 2-2560-2219, 2560-2237 Fax: (886) 2-2542-0631 e-mail: [email protected] Vancouver: Yishu 1008-808 Nelson Street Vancouver, B.C. V6Z 2H2 Canada Phone: (1) 604-488-2563 Fax: (1) 604-591-6392 e-mail: [email protected] www.yishujournal.com

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Cover: Detail of Fang Zengxian, Arouse Millions of Workers and Peasants, 1968, oil on canvas, 250 x 340 cm. Courtesy of TZ Hanart, Hong Kong. Photo: Howard Ursuliak 

 Contributors

 Traveling Artists, Traveling Art, Ethnographic Luggage Sasha S. Welland p. 9  System and Style in the Practice of Chinese Contemporary Art: the Disappearing Exterior? John Clark

 From Iconoclasm to Neo-Iconolatry: Taiwan’s Contemporary Art in the Post-Martial Law Era Chia Chi Jason Wang

 From Street Art to Exhibition Art: The Art of p. 15 the Red Guard During the Cultural Revolution Wang Mingxian

 Political Inspiration in Art Production: Three Oil Paintings Depicting Mao Zedong During the Cultural Revolution Yan Shanchen

 Brushes are Weapons: Art Schools and Artists During the Cultural Revolution Shengtian Zheng

 Zaofan Youli/Revolt is Reasonable: Remanifestations p. 37 of the Cultural Revolution in Chinese Contemporary Art of the 1980s and 1990s Martina Köppel-Yang

 For Reference Only: Restricted Publication and Distribution of Foreign Literature During the Cultural Revolution Shuyu Kong

 Variations of Ink: A Dialogue with Zhang Yanyuan p. 47 Wu Hung  Event City and Pandora’s Box: Curatorial Notes on the 2002 Gwangju Biennale Hou Hanru

Review  Identity Politics? Allegorical Existence? On the Way to the Fantastic Elsa Hsiang-chun Chen

 Chinese Name Index p. 62 

JOHN CLARK is Associate Professor at the University of Sydney where he is Chair of the Department of Art History and Theory and Acting Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2001. His current research investigates new definitions of modernity in art through a comparison of Chinese and Thai art of the 1980s and 1990s.

ELSA HSIANG-CHUN CHEN is an art critic and a lecturer at Taipei National University of the Arts.

HOU HANRU is a graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. He served as co-curator of the Shanghai Biennale, 2000. He was curator of the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and co-curator of Cities on the Move, 1997-1999. He lives and works in Paris as an independent critic and curator and is an advisor at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam.

WU HUNG is the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History at the University of Chicago. He received a John Simon Memorial Fellowship in 1999. Although best known as a scholar of ancient Chinese art, he has contributed significantly to the introduction of contemporary Chinese art to the West. His book Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) was nominated by Artforum in 1999 as one of the “best books of the 1990s.”

SHUYU KONG received a M.A. in Comparative Literature from Beijing University, China and her Ph.D. in Modern Chinese Literature from the University of British Columbia, Canada. She is Assistant Professor in East Asian Studies at the University of Alberta. Her teaching and research interests include modern Chinese literature and cinema, women writers, and contemporary cultural practices, especially the relationship between literature and the marketplace.

MARTINA KÖPPEL-YANG is an independent art critic and historian with a Ph.D. in East Asian Art History from the University of Heidelberg. She has written extensively on the subject of contemporary Chinese art. She has curated and co-curated several exhibitions, including Leased Legacy: Hong Kong 1997 (Frankfurt: Museum for Arts and Crafts, 1997). Her forthcoming publication is Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avant-garde, 1979 – 1989 (Hong Kong: Timezone 8).

WANG MINGXIAN graduated from the Chinese Department of Xiamen University in 1982. He is currently Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Architect Journal and Secretary General of the Environmental Art Committee of the China Construction Cultural Association. Recent books include The Art History of the People’s Republic of China: 1966-1976 (Beijing: China Youth Publishing House, 2001) in collaboration with Yan Shanchen.

YAN SHANCHEN graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1982. He is currently a Senior Researcher of Art at the Shanzhen Fine Art Institute. Recent works include The Art History of the People’s Republic of China: 1966-1976 (Beijing: China Youth Publishing House, 2001) in collaboration with Wang Mingxian.

CHIA CHI JASON WANG is an art critic and curator in Taiwan. He teaches at the Department of Art and Art Education at National Taipei Teachers College. His more recent experiences include Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei and Executive Director of Dimension Endowment of Art. He is one of the two curators of the 2002 Taipei Biennial.

SASHA SU-LING WELLAND is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her writing has appeared in From Beijing to Port Moresby: The Politics of National Cultural Policies, Hedgebrook Journal, Flyway: A Literary Review, and Chain. Forthcoming with The University of Iowa Press is From All This Journey: Following the Lives of Ling Shuhua and Amy Ling Chen, a biography of two May Fourth Era women.

SHENGTIAN ZHENG graduated from the China National Academy of Arts in Hangzhou. He was a Professor, Department Chair, and Director of International Programs at his Alma Mater. He was an Honorary Fellow at the University of Minnesota from 1981 to 1983 and Visiting Professor at San Diego State University from 1986 to 1987. Zheng has curated and organized many international exhibitions and served as editor for various art publications. He is the co-curator of the exhibition Art of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976 at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Vancouver, Canada.

 “Contemporary Chinese Arts in the International Arena” conference in the Stevenson Lecture Theatre at the British Museum. Courtesy of the British Museum

From April 18 to 20, 2002, the British Museum hosted a conference entitled “Contemporary Chinese Arts in the Cultural Arena.” Organized by the British Museum, in collaboration with the Chinese Arts Centre, this event brought together over twenty artists, writers, and curators from around the world to present their views on the state of contemporary Chinese art today. The conference focussed on issues around contemporary Chinese art with reference to China’s political history, its status within the international art world, and the implications of ethno-national cultural production in terms of a globalized economy. The conference provided a forum for dialogue, debates, and a critical analysis of the various forms of visual and literary art being produced within the category of “Chinese contemporary art.”A forthcoming publication based on the conference is being produced by the Centre for Art International Research at the Liverpool John Moores University.  ,  ,  

 . 

Figure 1: Yin Xiuzhen, Portable Cities – Beijing, 2000, installation. Courtesy of the artist

Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.1

My impetus to open with a quote from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities — an imagined series of exchanges between the Yuan Dynasty Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and Marco Polo — comes from a conversation with Zhang Yonghe, a Chinese architect who has designed exhibition spaces in China and abroad for contemporary Chinese art. In speaking of Invisible Cities, he suggested that the text invites a Chinese reversal, in which a Chinese traveler might sit in the garden of a Western emperor and narrate to him travels through city after city of his empire. This call to reopen Calvino’s imagined dialogue highlights several elements that have underpinned debates about modern Chinese culture for the last century: a presumed conversation between East and West, the bow of empire before the ascendant idea of nation, and the importance of travel.

Travel has become central to the working lives of many Chinese artists who find themselves or their artworks circulating through various sites of the international art market. Yin Xiuzhen’s Portable Cities — Beijing provides an intimate embodiment of this fact (fig. 1). She fabricates the city inside a suitcase as a ring of clothing-constructed buildings, including the landmark of the China Central TV tower, arranged around the open green space of a stretched short-sleeve shirt. Pulled inward, the sleeve leads the viewer’s eye down to a macro lens that displays in miniature a liberation-edition map of Beijing affixed to the bottom of the suitcase. Yin has also installed a speaker inside the suitcase that plays Beijing Opera as sung by elderly amateurs recorded in Shishahai Park. Although this piece references personal and historical associations with the artist’s home city, it has also traveled to New York.2 Yin has explained that the idea for her suitcase series

 came to her while watching luggage go around an airport baggage carousel. Waiting for her suitcase, she thought of how it represents a home she tries to carry with her when she travels abroad to participate in exhibitions or art related activities.

The display of Beijing in a suitcase in a New York gallery demonstrates how the category of “contemporary Chinese art” has emerged as the cultural product of a multi-sited circuit of people and art objects that flow across borders at differential rates. In the last decade, questions about Chinese international exchange have come to the fore in discussions of globalization, often in hyperbolic terms suggesting the absolute novelty of China’s current “opening” to the world. While events such as the burst of Chinese artists onto the Venice Biennale stage in the 1990s certainly signal a notable shift in this cultural field, the importance of international exchange for China has historical roots that date back long before our present trumpeting of a newly born global. The issue of how to express Chinese modernity through artistic production has been on the table for at least a century, and bound up with the practice of ethnography or auto-ethnography for just as long. The travel of artists and art objects has become essential to the construction of a Chinese self in relation to numerous others, including the West, the rural, and the past.

In order to elucidate possible meanings of the term “ethnographic luggage,”I turn to another traveler’s tale, which prefigures Invisible Cities by exploring the unequal parameters of the history of ethnography. In Shen Congwen’s 1928 novel Alice in China, Lewis Carroll’s beloved protagonist tours China accompanied by the White Rabbit. However, Alice does not arrive as a blank slate upon a distant shore. She carries with her a guidebook to China, full of prejudiced opinions, written by an Englishman. While Calvino’s Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo tells him, he listens attentively. Shen’s Alice finds herself in dialogue not with her cultural Other, but rather with their description by another Westerner, and all of this in Chinese by a Chinese author who ironically asks his audience to reassess themselves through the critical eyes of the West.3 Although Chinese artists, on their many journeys and sometimes permanent residence in other lands, have begun to depict for the Western power brokers of art and culture their travels through cities such as New York, London, and Paris, one-way ethnographic expectations are continually foisted upon them to explain their “otherness” to the West.4 In response, artists work to overturn the “guidebook” stereotypes that threaten to block any dialogue at all. And, as part of this process, they struggle with those ideas of self and other we cart around with us like so much indispensable luggage.

    In 1994, the France-based Chinese artist Huang Yongping staged The Overturned Tomb at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands (fig. 2). His sculptural installation, inspired by a historical photograph, reproduces in concrete the stone façade of a traditional tomb and then topples it outside the window of the museum’s Chinese wing. By creating a tension between the Tang Dynasty ceramics on display inside the gallery and their suggested Chinese origins outside the gallery, Huang critiques both the Orientalizing isolation of Chinese culture in a pre-modern diorama and the cultural raiding that stocked Western museum collections in the first place. In this piece, the travel of colonial acquisition meets that of a contemporary émigré artist coming to terms with his “native” culture as discovered in the museums of the West.

This anthropological roundabout of travel to know the “Other” has roots in the gradual encroach- ment of imperial powers into China that led up to the Opium Wars, the imposition of the “Unequal Treaties,”and treaty port semi-colonialism. In his study of the Nationalist Revolution in

 Figure 2: Huang Yongping, The Overturned Tomb, 1994, installation, 2.7 x 6.4 x 7.8 m. Installed outside the Kröller-Müller Museum in Oterlo, Holland. Courtesy of the artist and Hou Hanru

China, John Fitzgerald persuasively argues that a favorable European idealization of China first began to shift toward an Orientalist John Chinaman figuration of Chinese culture in 1743, when British naval Captain George Anson met resistance to his demands for entry to the harbor of Guangzhou.5 After he threatened to destroy the Chinese fleet stationed in the harbor, city officials relented in hopes of saving Guangzhou from the destruction Anson had wrought at other locales. The captain returned the favor by describing the surrender as indicative of the weak character of the Chinese in general.

The Chinese soon found themselves besieged not just by the British but also by the likes of the French, Germans, Japanese, Russians, and Americans, and as a result of this mixed colonial presence, a solid monolithic “West” never existed in China. However, each of the various foreign powers embarked upon “capturing” their bits and pieces of China not just through political and military might, but through the production of knowledge about the people and territories they had colonized. The racist practice of nascent ethnographic writing on the habits and customs of the colonized, epitomized by books such as H. G. W. Woodhead’s The Truth About the Chinese Republic (1925) and Rodney Gilbert’s What’s Wrong with China? (1926), claimed the authority to characterize the Chinese and established a standard list of their faults.6 These amateur ethno- graphies written by colonial officials and merchants traveled home along with plant specimens, stuffed animals, and the skeletal remains of eighteenth-century bound feet. The collecting, labeling, and exhibition of artifacts of “primitive” others in the ethnographic museum provided a way of knowing colonial subjects out there as a people captured and contained, who could be understood by a trip to one museum wing or another. As Huang Yongping reminds us, art museums often still take this method of organization as their historical inheritance.

Yet, decades before Huang, at the same time that Gilbert and Woodhead were busy cataloguing the Chinese character, the Chinese novelist Lao She had already accidentally wandered into the Oriental corner of the Royal Botanical Gardens in London, a misstep that caused him to declare:

 Imperialism overlooks nothing. It doesn’t confine itself to usurping a people’s land and destroying a people’s country. It really does take away all people possess for investigation — animals, plants, language, customs, geography — all are investigated. This is the terrible part of imperialism. Imperialists are not only specialists in military tyranny. Their knowledge is overwhelming too! Knowledge and military power!7

The civilizing mission of imperialism, in its various national forms, attempted to convince the “natives” of a new order of rational scientific thought that organized the world according to a hierarchy of cultures culminating in the modern, self-governing nation. According to this logic, whichever colonial power displayed the most impressive knowledge of their colonized most deserved the right to govern, and this project of dominance required all manner of report and ledger book to keep it in place against anxieties of systemic weaknesses and criticisms from within and without. Postcolonial nationalists, too, found themselves wrapped up in the complex affair. In the efforts to reclaim their cultures, lands, and peoples under the banner of nation, they relied on the discourse of colonial Orientalism in order to combat it. To prove their own right to govern themselves, they had to wrench ethnographic authority back into their own hands, and they did so by setting out to discover themselves anew.

    In his book My Country and My People (1935), Lin Yutang launches, in English, a rebuttal to the accounts of the armchair anthropologists, whom he accuses of creating a “constant, unintelligent elaboration of the Chinaman as a stage fiction.”8 Auto-ethnography for a domestic audience was encouraged during the early Nationalist period in order to recover an authentic, spontaneous Chinese essence unadulterated by effete, aristocratic tradition or Western influence. Many New Culture activists of the 1920s and 1930s believed that popular tradition Figure 3: Wang Jianwei, Living Elsewhere, 1999, video still. offered an alternative non-Western route to Courtesy of the artist modernity, and so they urged Chinese students and scholars to explore China’s hinterlands. Sun Yatsen stressed this need for domestic travel by drawing red lines across maps of China to mark the railway lines and highways he believed were necessary to unite a nation: “Economists have always spoken of three necessities of life — food, clothing and shelter. My study leads me to add a fourth necessity: means of travel.”9 Ethnographers and folklorists from the cities set off to remote villages to record the customs, stories, and arts of the “common people,”reenacting a kind of colonizing gaze upon a rural other in order to incorporate difference. They believed this form of self-discovery would allow for an awakening of “new people” to the cause of Chinese nationhood and provide vital nourishment to a rebirth in contemporary arts.

Gu Jiegang, as one of the main proponents of the Folkstudies Movement, aimed to uncover a tradition of the folk that would provide a link between a Chinese past and a viable cultural future not made in the image of the West. In the pages of the journal Folklore, he and his compatriots argued how to set things aright in China by simultaneously educating and being educated by the masses. A decade later and with a more immediate political agenda at hand, Mao Zedong in his

 “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art” (1942) thoroughly wedded this mode of ethnographic exploration to the practice of revolutionary art. He declared the political importance of art when he exhorted writers and artists to go to the countryside to learn from “the people,”to depict their lives, and to make art that would raise their revolutionary consciousness.10

This form of travel, of city-based artists to rural locations, eventually became institutionalized in post-1949 art academy curricula and continues today with students still participating in annual one-month shixi fieldwork trips to observe and sketch the lives of peasants and national minori- ties. Until recently, teachers prepared their students for these trips by tutoring them in the political concept of shenru shenghuo, or to “deeply enter life,”originally meaning the life of “the people.” Many of a younger generation of artists questioned their ability to enter the lives of people whom they saw as radically different from themselves and asked why they could not also shenru shenghuo in the city. It might be argued that over the last decade of Chinese art this generation of artists has been engaged in exactly this sort of visual production based on urban participant observation. Yet, as I argue below, the history of auto-ethnography in China and the memory of rural-urban movements still feed the imagination of some contemporary artists.

The “opening and reform” shifts that have fueled international border crossing in contemporary Chinese art clash with this counter-tradition of domestic border crossing when its “to the people” representations enter the commercial passageways of a world market. In Primitive Passions,Rey Chow’s work on Chinese cinema, she alerts us to the dangers of contemporary Chinese art that made auto-ethnography not for a home audience but for the desiring eye of the West.11 Drawing upon the work of anthropologist Michael Taussig, she proposes that the films of the Fifth Generation directors confront their viewers with “a novel anthropology not of the Third and Other worlds, but of the West itself as mirrored in the eyes and handiwork of its Others.”12 Her thesis suggests that the West can learn more about itself than the other through its fascination with Chinese art. The tensions wrapped up in the issues of art and ethnography, and the crossings of travel inward and travel outward, remind us of the legacy of postcolonial nationalism as a “derivative discourse” of colonial Orientalism.13 The colonial emphasis on uncovering the cultural essence of the “Other” as part of various civilizing missions led Chinese intellectuals to explore their internal “Others” in order to incorporate their difference in the anti-colonial project of building a Chinese nation-state. Contemporary inheritors of this history often grapple with personal histories that span vast ranges of experience — rural, urban, and global; and their works present subtle meditations on selves who are also others.

   By means of transition into this final section, I relate an anecdote about my experience as a North American anthropologist conducting fieldwork in Beijing on issues of cultural identity in contemporary Chinese art. I met the artist Wang Jianwei while I was translating for two visiting curators from the United States. This type of middle-position participant observation has charac- terized much of my research in an urban “field.”At the beginning of this translated conversation, I explained my role in it, which sparked Wang Jianwei to tell us about his interest in anthropology, as a challenging mode of thought for artistic creation. He gave credit for this interdisciplinary stimulus to Wang Mingming, a Chinese anthropologist who studied in England and has published translations of Anglo-American anthropology for Chinese readers.14 Drawing upon Wang Mingming’s work, Wang Jianwei claims to enact a strategic shift away from what he perceives as the Western anthropological goal of studying culture in foreign places. He endeavors instead to turn the method of participant observation back on his own culture. The second time I ran into

 Wang, while waiting in a hotel lobby for a banquet to celebrate the opening of an exhibition, he remembered me as “the anthropologist” and reiterated to me this other-self anthropological meditation he hopes to provoke through his work. He also jokingly rebuked me for not being a “real” anthropologist, meaning a researcher who spends time outdoors with rural villagers. When he pointed to my untanned city skin as evidence of a failed researcher, I understood both that I was being tested as a Westerner in China and the persistence of a focus on rural-ness in Chinese anthropology.

Wang Jianwei’s examination of the rural, or more accurately what is now a rural in-between of the “floating population” who move between city and country, is by no means a simple intellectual exercise. Wang spent two years after high school, in the late years of the Cultural Revolution, as a “sent down” youth doing agricultural work in rural Sichuan, a lonely period in which he describes having no power of choice or consciousness of future possibility.15 During his next six years in the army, he spent most of his time drawing military strategy maps, a highly specialized form of symbolic visualization preparing for potential conflicts with the Soviet Union or the United States. After eventually studying Figure 4: Wang Jianwei, Living Elsewhere, 1999, video still. Courtesy of the artist at the China Art Academy in Hangzhou and continuing to work independently, Wang has emerged on the international exhibit circuit. His journey to becoming recognized as an artist represents a particular generation that did not have regular educational opportunities because of Cultural Revolution interruptions.

Many artists who came out of this period have an acute experiential sense of the differences between then and now. In his video works, Wang Jianwei tries to explore the social links that exist between reform-era China and this previous period of extremism and isolation. Suspicious of both celebratory and denunciatory judgements of the Cultural Revolution, he seeks to dislodge the chunks of past experience or phenomenological memory that remain lodged in people’s everyday behavior. The fieldwork he has undertaken for his videos performs a kind anthropology of the self. He attempts to suture the gap between past and present eras in China: by intense, unyielding observation of the floating population’s in-between-ness, he circles back on his own foundational experience in the Cultural Revolution countryside.

In 1993, Wang Jianwei returned to the area where he had farmed as a seventeen-year-old youth and spent almost a year working alongside a peasant. By bringing his identity as artist back to this lifestyle, he hoped to reflect upon the growing sense of radical distance between past and present, rural and urban. He calls this decision his first attempt at fieldwork. While working on a later project concerned with the spatial relationships people have with architecture, he accidentally wandered upon a large compound of villas left half-constructed on the side of the Chengdu airport road. The construction project had been halted during the Asian economic crisis, and the unfinished community of luxury homes walled off to prevent trespassers. Wang entered through a “rabbit hole” in the wall and found that four separate households of rural people, stuck in limbo between a shrinking countryside and an inhospitable city, lived, farmed, and raised pigs in various empty villas. He returned to the site repeatedly over a year and gained the trust of its residents through a shared language of agricultural techniques. They understood him as an old Cultural Revolution youth searching for a disappeared rural past, and he filmed how the habitus they

 Figure 5: Zheng Lianjie, Binding the Lost Souls: Huge Explosion, 1993, 35mm black-and-white photograph of performance. Photo and courtesy of the artist

brought with them from rural life subverted the empty shells of homes planned for the nouveau riche and “finished” them into working spaces. The long shot, long take gaze that Wang favors follows the ruined villa dwellers’ everyday use of their living space and creates for the viewer a sense of oppressive boredom. Rather than suggesting, as “to the people” movements or Mao did, that he could enter someone else’s life; he proposes the distancing effect of the camera lens as one possible way to share an experience of radical difference. The resulting piece, entitled Living Elsewhere, has undergone its own travels, with the fate of being shown mostly elsewhere (fig. 3). When projected on the screen of documentary and video art exhibitions abroad, Wang’s gaze through the camera’s lens begs anew the question of who is being mirrored in whose eyes (fig. 4).

Zheng Lianjie, an artist of the same generation, has also repeatedly returned to a single rural location. At Dongpo Village, a remote Great Wall site three hours outside of Beijing, he collabo- rates with villagers in the creation of performance and installation pieces. Zheng similarly lacked formal educational opportunities and is a largely self-trained artist who opened one of the first grassroots night schools for art in 1980s Beijing. While as a youth he remained in the city during the Cultural Revolution, eventually working in a factory, both his father, who was labeled a Rightist, and an older brother, who was caught listening to a Soviet radio station after the Sino-Soviet split, spent extensive time working in the countryside. Zheng invokes this family background of absent figures when explaining his on-going interest in the rural as a place of alternative knowledge often forgotten or dismissed by city residents.

In 1990, Zheng Lianjie began the first of semi-annual pilgrimages to Simatai, a crumbling section of the Great Wall that traverses steep peaks. Three years later, Zheng together with a group of friends, students, and local villagers gathered more than 10,000 broken stone bricks from the fields at the foot of the Wall and carried them to the top, where they wrapped each one with a strip of red cloth. As homage to the many unnamed laborers who lost their lives building the Wall and a reflection upon the events of 1989, the collective effort of Binding the Lost Souls: Huge Explosion lovingly gleaned fragments of past yearning from the ruins of history (fig. 5). After repeated clashes with authorities over his art, Zheng left China in 1996 for New York. However, he continues to return to Dongpo Village, which he claims figures even more largely in his mind

 since the cultural shifts he has undergone as a Chinese immigrant to the United States. In 1999, he and several Dongpo children and teenagers performed Bricks and Stones, in which each person picked up a broken brick from the Great Wall or a stone from the village and held it for one hour while standing on a hillside facing the setting sun (fig. 6).

In addition to his repeated returns to the village to create collaborative pieces, which he sees as a way of linking art with society and his present in the U.S. with his past in China, last year Zheng also presented a slide show entitled Reappearing Exit to the Dongpo villagers. By showing them artworks that he completed in locations as diverse as Simatai and New York and asking for their opinions, he aimed to broaden the kinds of viewing spaces available for contemporary Chinese art and to suggest that art should travel to as diverse places as artists do. In his projects, rural people are not a resource mined for authentic essence but active interlocutors of contemporary Chinese expression, who have things to say about pieces created on the streets of Manhattan and whose images have appeared on the walls of that village’s Asian American Arts Center.16

When this kind of auto-ethnographic art, which depicts semi-rural Chinese life, travels to Western exhibition spaces, it runs the risk of fulfilling the contract described by Rey Chow, in which it provides reassurance to Western audiences of their own modernity in comparison with an exotic Third World Other. This dilemma represents the same burden of history that contemporary anthropology chips away at through self-reflexivity, debates about fieldwork ethics, and responses to the West by “native” anthropologists. Wang Jianwei and Zheng Lianjie provide examples of how to complicate the layers of difference, between East and West, rural and urban, self and other, past and present, in such a way that no neat hierarchy falls out of the picture. Their images are not ones of China as a timeless, traditional, rural Other, bound in a single place and waiting to be discovered, but of Chinese as a mixed and hybrid space.

Figure 6: Zheng Lianjie, Bricks and Stones, 1999, 35mm black-and-white photograph of performance. Courtesy of and photo credit of the artist

 They perform a rear guard avant-garde, looking back at Maoist aesthetic practice born of the Nationalist Folkstudies Movement born of Western colonial ethnography. The Chinese art terms used for “avant-garde” (qianwei and xianfeng) still bear the imprint of recent politico-military usage. Rather than jettisoning the past, as the forward progress of battle demands, let us remember that when troops reverse, the rear guard suddenly becomes the vanguard picking a way back across the destroyed field. These artists return, full of doubt but also a sense of possibility, to an examina- tion of art as a form of social interaction, bidding multiple audiences to look beyond the simple thesis of a hierarchy of progress. Their local and global border-crossing travels do not privilege any particular form of movement as progressive, but embody a purposeful estrangement in which one may learn just as much about one’s self through the other as one does about the other.

It is easy to dismiss Mao’s slogan of “to serve the people” as a propagandistic statement that was never realized, one of the many failures of a heroic socialism, yet remnants of that experiment refuse to disappear in the works of these artists. The memory of the past they explore is not a heroic memory, but one that puzzles over the ruined fragments left in the violent path of all heroic progress narratives—colonialism, socialism, and that newest of triumphs, global capitalism.

Notes A version of this paper was presented on April 19, 2002, at the British Museum in London for the conference “Contemporary Chinese Art in the International Arena.” It will be published in Contemporary Chinese Art in the International Arena (Liverpool: Centre for Art International Research at the Liverpool John Moores University, forthcoming). 1 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1974), 5. 2 Yin Xiuzhen’s piece Portable Cities — Beijing was included in the Making China exhibition held at the Ethan Cohen Gallery in New York from January to April 2000. Beijing-based curator Huang Du, assisted by Yale graduate student Bingyi Huang, organized the show. While Yin did not travel to attend the opening of the exhibit, she requested that the curator keep the baggage claim tag from her piece for her records. She has plans to make similar city suitcases based on other Chinese and foreign cities that she visits in the future. 3 See the chapter “One China, One Nation: The Unequal Treatise of Ethnography” in John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 103-146. I am much indebted in the first two sections of this paper to the meticulous research and provocative thesis presented by Fitzgerald in this chapter. 4 The same expectations are not demanded of the West. When Chinese curators planning to organize exhibitions of Western contemporary art in China can travel freely to Europe and America, without being able to speak the languages of their host countries, and be eagerly welcomed into artists’ studios to learn more about new work, perhaps some two-way parity will have been reached. 5 Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution, 112-114. 6 In My Country and My People, Lin Yutang describes with picturesque irony the colonial treaty port figures whose accounts of China he wrote against: “The Old China Hand, or O.C.H.—let us stop to picture him, for he is important as your only authority on China….He drinks Lipton’s tea and reads the North-China Daily News, and his spirit revolts against the morning reports of banditry and kidnapping and recurrent civil wars, which spoil his breakfast for him.” Lin Yutang, My Country and My People (Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1998), 8. 7 Lao She, Ma and Son, trans. Jean M. James (San Francisco, [1929] 1980), 204. 8 Lin, My Country and My People, 11. 9 Sun Yatsen, San Min Chu I, The Three Principles of the People, ed. L. T. Chen and trans. Frank W. Price (Chungking: Ministry of Information of the Republic of China, [1924] 1943), 480. 10 While Mao’s invocation of the “folk” in art became increasingly rigid as visual culture was policed for its political correctness during the Cultural Revolution, artists in the post-Mao era have repeatedly returned to the revolutionary story of internal movement from city to country as a twentieth-century representational touchstone. Fifth Generation filmmaker Chen Kaige’s 1984 Yellow Earth depicts, for example, the journey of a young cultural worker from the Eighth Route Army who, in 1939, goes to the Shanbei countryside in order to collect folk songs. 11 Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 12 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 236. 13 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986), 38. 14 His translations include, for example, a Chinese version (1998) of George Marcus and Michael Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 15 The Chinese term he uses to describe his time in the countryside is the verb chadui, which literally means to “insert oneself into the brigades.” 16 The Asian American Arts Center in New York presented an exhibition of Zheng Lianjie’s performance and installation art, including Bind the Lost Souls and Bricks and Stones (March 15 – April 28, 2002).

          :   

 

Figure 1: Details of Hou Yimin, Chairman Mao and the Miners of Anyuan, 1977, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Museum of the Revolution, Beijing

    The early twenty-first century forms a particularly opportune moment to look back in very broad terms at the inter-relation between different art discourses in China.2 These discourses have often been driven by two kinds of distinct but related historicist motivations, both of which are now etiolated, if not yet dead. Firstly, there are those of “national” or “Maoist”“revolutionism” (fig. 1). Secondly, there are those of economic and cultural “developmentalism” (fig. 2). The former has involved the rhetoric of Han ethnic, Communist Party or Leader control in the guise of appropri- ating the many previous discourses of “patriotism.”The latter is based on the notion of reaching appropriate stages of development to a level where certain types of cultural expression would be allowed.3 These stages of development are linked to increasingly available economic surplus. In the People’s Republic of China, the transition between revolutionism and developmentalism was symbolically located between 1976 and 1979 with the death of Mao Zedong and the implementa- tion of Deng Xiaoping’s Four Modernizations. Although we are dealing with macro-phenomena, these discourses can be linked to particular stylistic “interpretants” (code or sub-code) based on Socialist or Revolutionary Realism, in the case of the former, and Academic Formalism,4 in the case of the latter. While it can be argued that national revolutionism is near its end in China, this is not the case with developmentalism. If we look at the stylistic interpretants associated with Academic Formalism, we see a rigid and increas- ingly lifeless formalism or a vapid and even vacant expressionism. Neither of these tendencies have the formal grandeur nor gritty, sinuous matière they pretend to possess. It is a mark of the internationalization of the discourses Figure 2: Wang Yuqi, “Pastorale,” published in Meishu, 1984, around academic oil painting that we can make oil on canvas, 105 x 138 cm

 comparisons with stylistically close precursors or contemporaries outside China. Since the early 1980s, similar exemplars have testified as markers of standard attainment between China and Western Europe — even as many Chinese have explicitly taken such markers as their models when they have trained in European art schools or worked in European studios.5

Underlying these first two historical discourses have been two others: that of the “public” and that of the “private,”which only now have been allowed a greater prominence. In this sense, the developmental discourse is their precursor or precondition. These other tendencies are not so easily conceptualized as discourses. However, my argument is mapped out by an interpretant, which varies between a foregrounding of the comfortable newness of a sensation (fig. 3) and a presentation to the viewer of a kind of rawness (fig. 4). This is a discourse of representation in the domain of the public or one involving a statement and even contestation of what Figure 3: Song Dong, Art Travel Agency, performance at the Shanghai: Chaoshi (Art for sale) exhibition, 1999 work is to be in the “public space.”6

In contrast, if not exactly opposed to this discourse of the public, is one that manifests an experiential knowledge of concealment and feigned ignorance. With this discourse of the “private,”one encounters a world transcending and ignoring aestheticism (fig. 5). It is as if, in the privacy of our minds, we can ignore what we know about the world and simply display the pleasure of forms, a domain Figure 4: Gu Dexin, 1999.5.8, 1999, installation. of secret empathy, and a superiority gained by not show- Polyphenolrene exhibition, May 1999. Photo: John Clark ing too directly or too much what you know (fig. 6). Another side to this discourse of the “private” is the privacy of staying in touch, of knowing that you are in the know, and is characterized by the mask, the cynical smile, and the game of false objects with real associations.

This set of four discourses of “national revolutionism” (socialist realism), “developmentalism” (academy formalism), “the public,”and “the private” as defined by the interpretants mentioned above, is only a tentative step towards re-defining a conceptual space that maps out recent Chinese art. It eschews habitual binaries, such as neo-traditional/modern, Chinese/ Western, and official/unofficial, even if these positions still have some Figure 5: Xu Lele, Remains of the Daydream, 1996, Chinese media, 38 cm wide hermeneutic value. Unfortunately, the way these binaries have been mobilized in much discussion of Chinese modern art has not always been productive and has frequently degenerated into a mirroring of clichés. The set of discourses I have outlined

 Figure 6: Zeng Fanzhi, Mask Series: No.6, 1995, oil on canvas, 180 x 150 cm      

below are intended to present one way out of this mirroring. They can be diagrammatized as shown but the alignment of the axes is hypothetical and very different arrangements and inter-relationships could be argued for.

      Since the mapping of many cultural developments in China has, in the last one hundred and fifty years, been in terms of “China” and the “West,”it is important to try and re-conceptualize what these two elements might mean. Foreign sources are external; they derive from exogenous discourses, which interpose on those that are internal or endogenous. The idea that “China” indicates the “endogenous” and the “West” indicates the “exogenous” has been so naturalized in critical practise.

One argument is that what is interposed from the external to the internal level represents the imposition of the exogenous onto the endogenous; when the endogenous moves to the external level it does so on terms set by the exogenous. This argument suggests that Western modernism is imported into China and that when Chinese modern art leaves China, it does so only to the extent that the West allows. According to this view, there is a lack of hegemony, on the one side, and an absolute kind of dominance, on the other.

The reality of this dominance is less forceful than a strict hegemony would suggest. Many kinds of selections take place when any cultural form is imported. Obviously, in the mid-1950s, selection took place under domestic political constraints that determined how and what should be imported from the discourse mapped by the interpretant of socialist realism and selections and applications were made in relation to a Chinese subject matter. The same sorts of selections and re-applications were seen in a Chinese context during the 1980s and 1990s when, for example, certain notions of abstraction were borrowed from “Western” sources and applied to “Chinese” contexts. However, like many earlier kinds of figuration or realism, the introduction of “Western” modernist stylistics in the 1980s cannot actually be considered an imposition. More applicable is the notion of “Western” styles or whole discourses being situated within “Chinese” ones without totally overcoming them: a “nested” exogenous discourse within an endogenous one. To forcibly claim that what may have been a selective interposition was a blind imposition can be associated with the political status quo and has often been a ploy for cultural conservatives in China as elsewhere. This was most notably the case with the hostility towards “Western” modernism among

 cultural and political targets in the “anti-spiritual pollution” campaigns during the early and mid-1980s8 and in the written attacks on Xu Bing and other modernists during the repressions following the Beijing massacre on June 4, 1989.9

Let us look at a few examples before taking this theoretical discussion of exogeneity/endogeneity further. One of the most interesting features of the cultural opening in China during the 1980s was the fact that it was preceded by many earlier art contacts. While I have listed many of these elsewhere,10 let us take the case of knowledge about the American Homeland realist Figure 7: Zhu Yu, Theologie Portative, 1998-99, installation Andrew Wyeth.11 It would appear that his work was first written about in Chinese in 1981 and may have been in response to the well-known popularity of the Sichuan painter He Duoling, whose debts to Wyeth were as apparent as the Chinese interest in Wyeth’s kind of “direct” realism. This realism was clearly in demand in the Chinese academy during the late 1970s and early 1980s: it was seen as a way out of the dead-end of socialist realism that still retained direct contact with socialist ideology and a vestigial notion of participating in and privileging representations of the masses. It would appear that He Duoling had only documentary knowledge of Wyeth until he visited an American art school in 1985.12 However, this “transfer” could also have been via the knowledge and circulation of Wyeth’s catalogues in Japan during the 1970s. The noted experimental guohua painter Chen Ping also shows evidence of Wyeth in work contemporary with, or slightly earlier than, He Duoling. In an interview, Cheng Ping stated that his knowledge came from a large album of Wyeth’s, which he had seen in 1975.13 Ying Ruocheng, the inner-party official who was known to Chen Ping’s own high cadre family, had brought the album back from the United States.14

This case indicates that selective contact with “Western” discourses was actually quite a widespread phenomenon in China before the 1980s and 1990s.15 It also points to the fact that “Western” modern art is a reference for stylistic innovation even in guohua — when it is required endoge- nously. This case also suggests that, as a model of value or technical attainment, “Western” references and works sit “nesting” in endogenous discourse and are available without occupying any position of dominance. This can be found in such straightforward references to Western modernism in late 1970s works as Yuan Yunsheng’s obvious allusion to Pablo Picasso’s Les demoi- selles d’Avignon in his airport murals. Another case of endogenously “nested” exogeneity is found in the late 1990s.16 This concerns the exposure of young, largely art school trained graduates in China — now referred to collectively as the Cadaver School17 — to the work of New British Art (fig. 7). I am referring specifically to the works of Marc Quinn (fig. 8) and other artists who took part in the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in December 1997.18

After a long and increasingly intense exposure to information about, illustrations of, and exhibi- tions of works in China from “Western” modern art since the early 1980s, there is no question, in the 1990s, of informational isolation of the Chinese art world from contemporary “Western” art. The issue is not so much what information or images are available, but rather what their route of dissemination is and how such Western works are selectively re-deployed as references in Chinese art practice. It would appear that Sensation was first known about in Beijing from the catalogue of the exhibition purchased in Holland by the video artist Qiu Zhijie and taken back to Beijing,

 where it was shown to Zhu Yu. Interested in the manipulation of bodies and tabooed acts in the public space, the artists learned what they could from looking at the Sensation catalogue plates of Quinn’s or Damien Hirst’s confrontational aesthetics.

It is clear that the prosthesis with dead human organs, the grafting of parts of one animal onto human flesh, the forming of fantasy animals in formalin suspension from apparently organic parts, and the act of cannibalism are all works positioned in relation to particular “Chinese” concerns of the artists.19 They are as culturally specific a Chinese exploration of body art material as that which has been found elsewhere in a European context.20 It is up for debate whether the Chinese “cadaver” works add up to an endogenous discourse possible to adumbrate only when developmentalism has, to some extent, run its course. By the late 1990s, the artists’ concerns arose from their Chinese experiences and Sensation was simply a position they could refer to in order to make both their subject matter and modality of expression evident.21 The concerns of the “cadaver” artists include: (1) a visceral compulsion to react against a sterile art educational system;22 (2) the need to use the breaking of taboos in installations or performance acts as a subject matter in order to foreground the private discourse of cruelty in twentieth-century Chinese life; and (3) to call into question the role of the artist as the “author” of his or her work as it has been variously constituted in relation to a Marxist or Chinese humanist perspective. Much of Zhu Yu’s work, for example, resembles either the fetishes used in shamanistic ritual or in performance acts. His work involves a peculiarly intense and mercilessly rational interrogation of the artist as the embodiment of values rather than as the hysterical and trance-like conveyor of the absence of a humanly believable persona.23

What impact on the distinction of exogenous and endogenous discourse has there been from the movement of Chinese artists travelling and living abroad in the late 1980s and 1990s? Their continued involvement in art discourses within China has, in the past, been seen as a diaspora, which functioned in largely two ways.24 Firstly, diaspora created enclaves of artists abroad, who predominantly continue to work in discourses — whether in guohua or “Western” media — which they had followed in China. In effect, they constitute a domain of “Chineseness” overseas and, in many cases, the artists themselves socialize mainly with other Chinese-speakers. A surprising number are less than fully competent (or are functionally incompetent) in the language of the society in which they reside. This is a kind of weak insertion of exogeneity into the endogenous

Figure 8: Marc Quinn, No Visible Means of Escape, 1996, mixed media, 180.3 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy of the Saatchi Collection, London

 Figure 9: Wang Jin, Ice ‘96, Central China, 1996, performance and installation, Zhengzhou, Henan since the artists’ concerns, practices, world views, and, in many cases, their information-base about other art tendencies are still tied up with the society they have come from. Living in New York or Paris, these artists are more likely to read about art via the pages of Yishujia from Taiwan than Art in America or Artpress.

Artists, such as Xu Bing and Cai Guoqiang in New York or Huang Yongping in Paris, have been able to use their local base abroad to become modern Chinese artists on an international scale.25 This type of artist modifies the discourse so that its endogeneity sits or is “nestable” within plural exogenous discourses. It does not really matter whether painting that clearly refers to the Chinese landscape painting discourse is referred to as “modern Chinese” or as abstraction lyrique — as in the case of Zhao Wuji (Zao Wouki) during the 1950s and early 1960s in France. Similarly, it does not matter that a Chinese artist, such as Huang Yongping, represented France at the 1999 Venice Biennale despite the fact that he did not have a French passport. It may matter, however, that this artist, who now has a French passport, had his work censored out of a sculpture exhibition in Shenzhen by the French authorities because of a concern over the likely offence to Chinese sensitivity and a possible American reaction.26

It is important to consider how far this shift represents the genuine plurality of modernist discourses and how far the shift of such Chinese artists into world discourses — whose work often contains highly specific Chinese cultural references — is merely a signal of the irrepressible demand of modernist relativization for another and newer relativization. This may even be the case when an artist, like Huang Yongping, sincerely believes he is opposing globalization in its Americanized guise even as globalization directly facilitates and privileges the circulation of his works. Has modernism been changed by the advent of plural modernisms or has it simply reformulated its own potential and need to accept the exogenous? Exogeneity and endogeneity are peculiar features of the structuring of art discourses that are immensely privileged by a modernism that structurally accepts difference, unlike earlier times of contact between art discourses that were defined as culturally other, and as politically other in the case of China.

    When one asks of contemporary Chinese art: in what lies the basis for the distinction between “official” and “non-official,”the opposition is often produced as a difference of style, technical

 mode, or artistic intent. I would argue that the difference might not be between the outside and inside of an art system or between an establishment and an avant-garde, but rather between different elements that are privileged differently within the same system. This becomes clearer if we consider various “signs of the times” in 2000 and 2001 before returning to look at longer-term institutional factors.27

The state apparatus for art has changed recently in China. The first change was the removal of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and the China National Academy of Art in Hangzhou from the purview of the Ministry of Culture and their placement under the Ministry of Education in 2000. This move has taken a logical further step towards the professionalization of artists, which commenced with the Four Modernizations policy in 1979.28 The result has been the rise of a more- or-less autonomous academic art in the 1980s, culminating with the 1989 exhibition of academic nude painting in Shanghai. In a possibly related move, the Ministry of Culture decided to financially support a major exhibition of modern Chinese art in Berlin in 2001, including some art previously frowned on in official circles. The same Ministry will also support the exhibition of modern Chinese art in France in 2003 and, reciprocally, French art in China in 2004.29 The kernel role of the academies in Beijing and Hangzhou in advising the government about modern art30 and the role of the China Art Gallery in Beijing in the exhibiting of it indicates that the “official” position is less inflexible than in the recent past.31 Officialdom is now re-positioning itself within international styles of prestige display. It is likely that their models have derived from European and North American galleries that the Chinese political leadership have seen on visits overseas as well as from those modern art works reputedly mentioned in conversations between Chinese and foreign leaders. This great official flexibility has increasingly appeared since the end of the political threat posed by the democratic movement events of 1989, the subsequent Beijing massacre, the rise of consumerism,32 and the iron-gloved internal suppression or external exile of those anti-system forces involved.

The second change is to be found among the artists themselves. For a contemporary art world defined, at least for a period in the 1990s, by an opposition between “official” and “non-official,”it is remarkable how many of the artists in the “non-official” category have been both educated and employed within the art system and how few have come from outside of it. The affiliations of the latter group have often been skewed. For instance, Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, and Xu Bing all graduated from the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts graphic art department and not the oil painting or sculpture departments. Others, like Gu Dexin and Ma Liuming, did not study at the major tertiary art academies. However, Ma Liuming33 studied at the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts from 1987 to 1991, where he assisted his teacher, Wei Guangqing, in a performance piece entitled Zisha Jihua (Suicide project).34 This was the first time Ma Liuming was introduced to body art performance. Shortly afterwards, he experimented with the medium himself. No considered analysis could regard this practice as autonomous of the Chinese art system as it was structured by the academy, even if the artists’ own critical reaction was largely negative in their work.

What is the Chinese art system against which Chinese “non-official” artists have functioned, at least in the 1990s?35 Firstly, it is a structure integrated by educational curricula from secondary education. In a phenomenon repeated elsewhere in Asia,36 more than half of the recruits for the major tertiary art institutions are recruited from the attached high school of that institution or its equivalent. Those likely to become recognized artists have had eight to ten years of training within the same art system which was, until recently, integrated by the same curricular norms.37 The highly educated reaction against these norms by conceptual artists, such as Jiao Yingqi or

 those interested in the expression of physical cruelty such as Zhu Yu, can only be linked in their reaction against such training and their determination to articulate a formal reaction against it.

In China, this educational structure was also, until recently, integrated by a highly complex series of overlapping control systems into the overall Chinese art world. As can be seen from the diagram below, we deal not with a unitary official art system in China but an overall structure integrated by the five control hierarchies of the Communist Party: (1) the Artists’ Association; (2) the Ministry of Culture; (3) the professional art institutes, which are usually under local administration but informally report to the Ministry of Culture; and (4) the art academies themselves. To this may be added a separate but by no means unimportant hierarchy: (5) the art activities of the People’s Liberation Army, which has its own museum and art school. The system also comprises other

important levers of control. These include the informal or ad hoc committees formed across this series of structures at the national, city, or provincial level, where local officials and party members from all these institutions meet to coordinate views and, in some cases, action. Certainly, one group was thought to exist nationally to coordinate views on art after 198938 and during the 1990s when performance art and installation art were officially prohibited from exhibition at the China Art Gallery. Other forms of regular interference include the shutting down of exhibitions after they had been hung but just before or after they opened. This indicates a level of coordination among officials.39 Whether these groups included members of the police (Public Security Bureau) or other security bodies is not clear.

The “official” art world also has a domain of control in the art galleries at academic institutions and also (particularly in the China Art Gallery in Beijing) some provincial fine arts museums (such as in Guangzhou) as well as temporary exhibitions in Workers’ Cultural palaces and even in parts of the Palace Museum complex in Beijing. This “official” domain has great importance for publicly accepted codes of appraisal and the “consecration” of works for display. In particular, the China Art Gallery has consistently refused to exhibit installation and performance art since 1989, despite the fact that these genres have been exhibited and practised in some provincial cities — albeit without formal or official approval (fig. 9). The China Art Gallery has systematically removed the possibility of small artist-run group or one-person exhibitions by giving over the whole of its top floor to sales areas for tourists — the very spaces in which these exhibitions had previously taken place.

 Figure 10: Zhu Ming, 1997.8.10, 1997, performance, Dahuangzhang, Beijing

Clearly, these official interventions in China, as in any other culture, involve the setting up of criteria for works that can be exhibited, which include those that may cause public offence.40 The ground rules for the adjudication of such rules in China lies in the hands of bureaucrats and party officials who are not themselves subject to public scrutiny or review. Some works, such as those by the Cadaver School, challenge obscenity laws and laws about using actual human remains in many countries. These works would be prosecuted under the law, not shut away via administrative fiat.41 Indeed, all contests for exhibition rights are likely to involve broader and non-artistic issues of access to decision-making power. They also lead to the questioning of the ideological hegemony of the Party and State in daily practice — one that, under Leninist principles of democratic central- ism, has not yet ceded the freedom to exhibit to any or all “publics,”regardless of how specialized.

It would appear that “non-official” art has largely been constituted by a personal reaction, on the part of the artist, to the structure of the “official” art world shown above. It has also been constituted by the attempt to circumvent intervention with the right to exhibit via small-scale, temporary exhibitions in sites which are only known to “non-official” art insiders.42 Of some importance is the reaction of such artists against the notion of the fine art object and the idea that the disciplines for their production be sanctified in art schools. Most of the artists were strictly trained at universities and have impressive sketching abilities. However, they resolved to give up this kind of academic technique and turned to a purer ideal of spiritual and conceptual expression. From the eyes of these artists, the description of the external world is too classical and commercial. They think that artistic creation is not just imitation. They wish to find a way to directly reach the conceptual or spiritual realms.43

Many in the “non-official” world may have wanted to enter the “official” world but were not able to do so while others have chosen to leave it after being admitted. Indeed, we must recall that there have been two sorts of exclusions related to age and competence. As a result of the Cultural Revolution, many prospective art students were well over normal application age (being in their late twenties and early thirties) during the art school intake that occurred between 1978 and 1980.44 From this age group came a number of artists who would not have been able to enter art school any later, such as the print makers Chen Haiyuan and Wang Gongyi in Hangzhou.

There has been little reform of the art education curriculum, either in schools or in art academies, to allow any of the modernist techniques (which seem to have had a superficial sway in the 1980s)

 to have any impact on selection procedures.45 These general art education curricula have produced and been a product of the poverty of general art education — an education that only goes up to Impressionism (and possibly Picasso) and conceives of beauty in terms of positive images, health, and goodness. Unlike those in specialist tertiary art education or in the broader intellectual class, the knowledge of art generated by this simplistic general art education cannot conceive of art in terms of ugliness or that which is shocking and revolting.

It is hardly surprising that current “non-official” art is not organized around movements that assimilate “Western” tendencies from the 1980s. In the 1990s, “non-official” art was activated in loosely amalgamated circles around certain critics and certain generations of artists. Here, the line between “official” and “non-official,”on the one hand, and between educational employees and paid critics,46 on the other, is highly blurred. Even “official” critics — each with a cohort of artists they support — have been widely active with “non-official” art. One can broadly categorize these critics into three types: the “official,”the “non-official,”and the “artist” critics. In practice the distinction between “critic” and “curator” is blurred since many critics perform more strictly curatorial roles in exhibitions. The “official” critic is defined by having a danwei (work-unit and official body which employs them) and includes those such as Shao Dazhen from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Lang Shaojun from the Art Research Institute in Beijing, Yi Ying from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and Huang Du who was, until 2000, at the Chinese Artists’ Association in Beijing.47 These “official” curators and critics must also include a sub-category of those who have “official” positions but have who been active in curating and/or documenting “non-official” exhibitions. This sub-category would include Leng Lin from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing48 and Feng Boyi from the Chinese Artists’ Association in Beijing, both of whom have been particularly active in writing critical justifications for and curating performance and installation art.

Apart from the “official” critics, there are “non-official” critics without work-units but who have market mediation ability, as in the case of Li Xianting.49 There are also those loosely attached critics originally without a work-unit or a particular career history, such as Dao Zi50 and Chen Xiaoxin. To these, one might add the further category of “artist” curators, who act as art discursive reference points, even theoretical mentors, to loose aggregations of artists. Outstanding among these is Ai Weiwei, co-editor and producer of the “red flag” art books,51 co-organizer of the Chinese Art Archives and Warehouse with the late Hans van Dijck, and co-curator with Feng Boyi of the Bu Hezuo Fangshi (Fuck off!) exhibition in Shanghai.52

These groupings around critics are also associated with generational distinctions among the “non-official” artists, among whom one can see four kinds of reaction to the “official.”They are listed as follows: (1) reactions against “official” notions of the art object disseminated in art curricula at secondary and tertiary levels and reinforced by explicit codes of public taste imple- mented by exhibition controls, however informal; (2) reactions against control by critics which has seen much organization by artists themselves or the implied sanctification by one cohort of a particular artist to act as critical defender; (3) the conflicts among the “non-official” artists about the position of relative success of earlier groupings, often with foreign approval or sales, especially those of the 1950s and 1960s generations who went abroad; and (4) the re-deployment, particularly among young contemporary artists, of a kind of instantaneous prominence achieved through personal connection with, and status certification by, older artists.53

In the late 1990s, the attack on notions of the aesthetically privileged fine art object produced a tendency to privilege the body as a medium in relation to the subject of masochist relations and

 unpleasant subject matter, such as in the work of Zhang Huan. Another tendency is a kind of conceptualism verging on Zen absorption into the object or into the trance of performance (fig. 10). Indeed, this latter practice of an acted-out conceptualism is often a deliberate transfor- mation of the terms of Chinese art discourse from inside Chinese society in ways that may be uncomfortable for authorities and viewers alike. It systematically disrupts the notion of the art work by presenting a unique event often performed with, if not on, the artist’s body. This is an important and complex field of discussion and theorization, which is surprisingly underdeveloped in both Chinese and English.54 One aspect of this field is the relation of “Chinese” to “bodies” in history55 and how a set of concepts and practices, which construct “bodies” in China, have been passed onto a developing consumerist society which has the twin inheritances of “Chinese” neo-traditional painting and derivations of Soviet “realism.”Do these notions and their complex inter-articulation imply a different and culturally specific set of concepts about what it was to practice art and what the resulting art object was to be? It arose at a specific historical conjuncture where earlier ideological suppressions had been removed by a developing consumption-oriented economic surplus that connected corporeal pleasure to the enjoyment of previously scarce manufactured objects.56

Another aspect is the inheritance of the specifically modern and Chinese physical callisthenics and notions of physical health whose negation was explored by Gu Dexin and the photographer, Hong Lei, among others. This might be called the “Maoist body” — a notion deriving from Mao Zedong’s own writings on physical education.57 Why should much installation and performance art in the 1990s foreground a content that is disgusting, unhealthy, or decayed? This work might be simply conceived of as a negation in the flesh of the “Maoist language” so carefully negated in the late 1980s by some painters of the New Currents in Art Movement58 or by writers trying to circumvent the Orwellian heritage of Mao-speak.59 This work, however much produced in the context of a reaction to earlier discourses, might also be the manifestation of an exploration of revulsion and dread of a metaphysical kind — long familiar in Euramerica in the work of the Surrealists.

A third aspect is found in the exposure to many types of “other-than-Chinese” notions of the body mediated via Euramerican art and also by the advertising images of consumer culture, which were increasingly deployed in China during the 1990s. For art, this field is perhaps the most complex of all. It includes both the primary borrowing from Euramerica in the form of deliberate misprision of images, such as those by Wang Xingwei, and a secondary elision of images drawn originally from Euramerican art but taken up by advertising, frequently in semi- pornographic images of women. This problematic links Chen Wenbo or nostalgic photographers, like Zhuang Hui and Hai Bo, in a questioning of the politics of visual citation. However indebted this problematic may be to “other-than-Chinese” theorizing, it seems to be that with Hai Bo, a sympathy with ordinary Chinese and the changing conditions of their everyday lives is enjoined through the reference to iterative portrait images. With Chen Wenbo, Zeng Fazhi, and Zhang Enli, a cynical display of what an image does is presented via the explicitness of the image discourses the work is borrowing from. These discourses could be from advertising or new realist directness educated in early twentieth-century German painting like Neue Sachlichkeit, among other sources. Variously motivated by discourse-aware cynicism or humanist sympathy, it questions the directness of art representation and its appropriateness to life experiences. It also asks the viewer to question why a gaze points the viewer to look in any particular direction at all — a central theme in the video art of Song Dong.

  Style is an elusive but key concept to distinguish in the characterization of any art discourse. It is my purpose here neither to engage in an art theoretical disquisition nor to use analysis of actual art objects to reflexively clarify theoretical concepts. Suffice to say, there are two main positions that I will be discussing in relation to the theories articulated by Meyer Shapiro and George Kubler.

For Shapiro, style is a symptomatic trait, a manifestation of a culture as a whole, and a measure of accomplishment which, when peculiarly adequate in a given period, is collectively created and collectively passed on to later artists.60 In contrast, Kubler sees style as one of many elements in the understanding of culture, which “reduces redundancy…at the cost of expression.”61 The basic issue here is the rendering of style (by conventional art history) as the consideration of static groups of entities. Objects in cultures, including art objects, appear more like a “linked succession of prime works with replications, all being distributed in time as recognizably early and late versions of the same kind of action.”62 Shapiro sees understanding art much more humanistically within the frame of the generation of meaning about life. Kubler, like a natural scientist examining evolution of a previously unknown species, sees art as if it is a life form63 inhabiting “a world of limited possibilities, still largely unexplored, yet still open to adventure and discovery.”64

One of the ways out of the binaries shown in the section on historical discourses in art is to see them in their inter-relation as a highly disparate set of styles. Having done that (the exercise cannot escape a degree of arbitrariness) we can then begin to question what life-experiences are represented (from the “Shapiro” side) and what the range of possibilities are within this universe of which the actual styles represent a limited working-out (from the “Kubler” side).

The view that oppositional discourses are the result of exposure to foreign or culturally alien ideas does not have much use here. There has been continuous contact with Euramerican avant-garde art since the late 1970s in China. This is evident in the plethora of art publication activity (which increased significantly after the Beijing massacre), the demise of the only quasi-national and “anti-mainstream” art journal Zhongguo Meishubao in 1989, and the purging of Shui Tianzhong from directorship of the Central Art Research Centre in the same year. As a result, the art critical isolation of the Chinese art world from international currents in ideas has largely disappeared. The list of translations of Euramerican modern art theory resembles, in a different art historical context, the flood of translations of Soviet art books and theories during the 1950s. These two corpuses form a valuable and extensive basis for analyzing the role of foreign ideas and their acceptance and selection in China.65 These are problems about the use of external ideas or works as references and models for practice. The scale of translation and the availability of these Euramerican references make questions of cultural and endogenous resistance more important than those of exogenous influence in the 1990s. The resistance to foreign ideas and works becomes, paradoxically, more important when these are relatively available then when their availability was constrained in the early 1990s by ideological factors and through systems of restricted access by which state authorities deemed these ideas as a form of “spiritual pollution.”

From the “Shapiro” position, I am going to group styles functionally in terms of the kinds of meanings they serve as markers for or carry. These may be less restricted in practice than the four initially distinguished as: social, idea, group, and fashion or marketing markers.

 Social markers are styles which signal acceptance or non-acceptance of concepts of the art object, of social and general human validity, as well as of collective or individual dreams or the signifying of the role of the individual in a collectivist society. This way of characterizing style seems to be a far more salient way of identifying relations between styles then, say, “western-style” or “national” painting. The great problem of an avant-garde or an innovative modernist project in China begins here since it is almost too easy to break that contract, or simply hint at its rupture to be able to create the semblance of an original “non-official” statement or a frisson in an audience. Moreover, such a frisson can be created because the acceptance of style as a social marker has been so inculcated in the art-educated public as well as in the broader public by the art educational system discussed above.

Idea markers seem to use style to play an intellectual game. They often manipulate ideas as the subject and deploy them as a quasi-philosophical tool under the guise of using an accepted art convention, or at least one, which the viewer may conceive as conventional. Obviously, this type of work in academic oil painting and, to some extent, national painting is close to the use of ideas in Euramerican history painting. Chinese artists were extremely familiar (at third hand) with this painting of ideas via their transmission through Soviet realism, Chinese propaganda painting, and the general support for the use of moral allegory through party policies for literature and art since Yan’an. In painting, conventions, such as those of academic painting, can be used to point to the idea of innocence or self-sacrifice or, in some conceptual installation, with revolting material to their cynical inversion in moral corruption or selfishness. It is appealing to artists to use styles as markers for ideas which codify some hitherto unexpressed subjectivity, particularly if that subjec- tivity is one ostensibly suppressed or later diverted into mindless consumption by a social system.

Group markers use style to indicate a sense of belonging to a generation and, by implication, of not belonging to a teacher-student cohort. Much of the Cynical Pop art of the early 1990s resembled a kind of adolescent strutting before the patriarchal gaze. In the late 1990s, this could be played with by a mature artist like Sui Jianguo, who showed a lack of parentage as much as an in-your-face achievement of hitherto suppressed expression. Group adhesion marked by style was a recurrent feature of art journalism in the “official” art journal Meishu during the 1990s. There was the deliberate suppression of any vestige of other groups. Why should the gemen’r (blokes) not have their own in-group demonstration? Group markers are beloved of foreign art curators because they betoken a “period mood.”So many artists produce them that such outsiders think they can choose between better and poorer examples. This coincidence of endogenous drives and exogenous needs may account for the survival and propagation of Cynical Pop itself.

Fashion and marketing markers are the “Kublerian” endpoint for the “Shapiro”-like stability of a repetition of style. The worked-out solutions are seen whenever art styles cease to be socially accepted markers and simply show that they are where the “current” now is or what the market will now buy. This is, of course, also the case for bogus depictions of a fantasy China, which was as beloved by party bureaucrats and business corporation taste as it was for the slick representation of radicality, mobilized by a more thorough knowledge of art history. If all the stylistic positions are worked out, the art critic or historian becomes exactly as Kubler might have intended: a natural scientist looking at the working through of particular sub-sets of overall evolutionary possibilities. Here, the patronage elites’ codes of visual taste, their notion of decorativeness, and their visual education become the field over which fashion and marketing markers play out since they now control the range of possibilities within which artists can work.

 The China of the 1990s occupied a space between two systems — one where the old patronage elite, with its limited visual education and range of tastes, were still present but had lost their effective hegemony. This elite was sidelined by exogenous taste and external exposure of the art produced by those trained within the art system but not given a place within it to work out their own possibilities. There has been a change in the taste of that domestic patronage elite and, to some extent, its reconstitution with the inclusion of domestic entrepreneurs who sponsor art. I think it is in situations like this that the “nested exogeny” mentioned earlier may arise, so that when a new set of patrons emerge, they can do so with exogenous canons within the system and already partly naturalized as endogenous.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, the sales of Chinese modern art to expatriates, the growth of an international market, and the international prominence of these works when seen abroad can be seen as a kind of colonialization and manipulative “spiritual pollution” feared by party officials in the early 1980s.66 These works could also be seen as the end-point for the internal closure of Chinese art discourses and for the art system as such. From now on, foreign influence could still be excluded, but not on the basis of the flow of ideas about art or representations of it.

   “”       Another process is positioning the outside in Chinese art now that foreign flows cannot be shut out. State-controlled impediments between endogenous and exogenous discourses67 have ceased or become technically less effective because of the impact of economic growth and commercial exchange and as a result of the spread of information technology. More fundamentally, however, modernist discourses themselves relativize art objects and art discourses inherited from the past as much as they privilege the differences between the endogenous and exogenous. The reason for this privileging is that “nested exogeny” allows the outside to be kept inside endogenous discourse as more of a reference or set of criteria for assessing the relation of any other kind of practice to the past and, by extension, as a reference for assessing the relation with “others,”whether temporal or culturally conceived. Thus, a knowledge of Picasso, Duchamp, or Beuys, in however limited a form, can always be deployed as a reference in examining the relationship between a practice and its intended meaning but does not have to dominate that practice itself. Could, for example, the action work of Song Dong be possible without reference to the Duchampian notion of absurd repetition, of the futility of the finished fine art object, and of the strange relationship of naming to art objects?

To recapitulate, if the knowledge of relativizing modernist discourses can now be endogenously located without it being an exogenous model imposed for imitation, what does it mean for a difference between endogenous and exogenous to still exist? Up until the 1990s, Chinese artists were still going abroad in order to move into the exogenous world. However, a double change seems to have taken place. Those who were in China found that they could move outside in their practice by no longer accepting the constraints of the academic fine art object and the training procedures required in its production. Many of those who moved abroad simply transferred their practice to another domain, including Yuan Yunsheng and Chen Danqing, without leaving behind their endogeneity. In other words, they simply used their overseas life as an extended field in which to deploy their Chinese discourses and frequently used subjects. Other artists who moved abroad kept their use of Chinese subject matter but saw themselves outside both the Chinese academic art they had tried to overcome or circumvent in China and the reception culture abroad, which insisted on their being “Chinese” (fig. 11). There are many cases of this hybrid and culturally interstitial position, of which Huang Yongping is among the most notable. His work

 Figure 11: Huang Yongping, Parisiennes, 1997, installation, 14 x 6.7 x 3.7 m. Courtesy of the artist never solely deploys a Chinese motif as “Chinese,”but rather subverts the “Chineseness” imposed on it. His reaction to this received positioning becomes an immense and fertile conceptual space for another and further kind of relativization: that of the notion of endogeneity itself.

  In early 1999, I interviewed a number of artists and critics in Beijing and was struck by how politically aware they were more than twenty years after the end of the Cultural Revolution and how disturbed they were by the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.68 This subject and a genuine outrage came easily to the surface in artists who might have been more distanced from yet another exercise in human folly or hegemonic malevolence, depending on your point of view. Indeed, they might have been indifferent to this event because of their more unworldly aesthetic concerns. Their reaction was hysterical, in a clinical sense, rather like a child’s frustrated narcissist reaction to a parent who will not listen or listen on the child’s terms. Since artists in China decided to become modernist, there has been a clamour to not only claim the attention of the “West,”but to eventually rival and even outsmart it. One sees evidence of this in the 1960s in the writings of Liu Guosong.69 This intense and sometimes psychologically aggressive desire is also found among some artists of Chinese origin abroad, naming of whom should be relinquished here.

One may accept the caveat that there is nothing particularly “Chinese” about this attitude, since it is reasonably held by many other intellectuals and artists from the “Third” world who live in the Euramerican metropolises and who feel ignored or marginalized. Conversely, certain “First” world intellectuals are unable to accept the “authentic” modernity of art in societies they consider peripheral to the development of modern art. This position is premised on a prejudiced (self-privileging) definition of cultural otherness and a notion of “our” modern and “their” underdevelopment.

There is a difference in historical background as well as in intensity. For some Chinese artists, the hysteria would appear to be fed by a kind of helplessness before the Chinese historical drives, which claim external and “Western” recognition. The helplessness is a result of the indifference of

 a “West,”which mechanically and often implacably imposes its own ignorance of the “Other.” Privileged by difference, yet ignored because of it, Chinese artists have awaited the creation of a new field of cultural hybridity in order to handle this hermeneutic contradiction in Euroamerica. What accounts for the hysteria is the end of a world where the desire for recognition is required or can be mapped onto Euramerica. Rather than simply the collapse of the “West” or “China” or the movement from identity as an artist of the masses to one with an individual expression, what may have broken down is the ability to structure artistic creativity around these external and internal divides. It is this evacuation of meaning, above and beyond failed recognition, which may account for the intensity of the loss.

APPENDIX 1: CHINESE CONTACTS WITH FOREIGN ART, 1972-1982

See John Clark, “Modernity in Chinese Art, 1850s-1990s: Some Chronological Material,” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 29 (1997): 74-169. I have inserted these excerpts in order to show how early and extensive the contacts with art outside China and with modern art were, even during the last years of the Cultural Revolution. 1972 Zhao Wuji returned to China to see his mother. He asked after Lin Fengmian three times, not knowing he was in prison. They did not meet but, unknown to Zhao at the time, Lin Fengmian was released three months later (Interview, 1987). 1973 April: Works of Hokusai were exhibited in Beijing. This was one of the earliest exhibitions of foreign art, apart from Albania, after the breakdown of relations with the USSR, and was arranged during the visit of Prime Minister Tanaka the previous September. There were extensive exhibitions of East European and Soviet art from the mid-1950s to early 1960s, which can be found in the chronology in MY 2-1959. The Mexican president showed Mexican works on the theme of the Mexican Revolution including those by Siqueiros and Mendez on the occasion of the visit. A work by Siqueiros had been illustrated in MS 1 and published February 6, 1961, with a declaration from the Chinese Artists’ Association of April 1, 1961, when Siqueiros was arrested by the Mexican Government. October: Yugoslav works were shown in various media on the theme of the Yugoslavian War of Liberation. It is believed that Zhao Wuji’s inquiries on his visit to China may have helped secure the release of his old teacher, Wu Dayu, in Shanghai. 1974 Zhao Wuji returned to China to see his mother. At the time, he pressed the French Embassy to organize an exhibition of Huxian peasant paintings abroad (Interview, 1987). 1975 Zhao Wuji returned to see his dying mother (Interview, 1987). 1977 July: An exhibition of nineteenth and twentieth century Romanian Painting. 1978 February: An exhibition of the Japanese nihonga painter Higashiyama Kai, whose work was later published in China in a coloured album form, serving as a role model for new directions in guohua.i Higashiyama seems to have been promoted by Li Keran, whose painter son would be living in Osaka by 1981. Meishu Congkan in Shanghai promoted the work of Zhao Wuji and Zhang Daqian. March 10: An exhibition of French Barbizon School painting opened. May-July: Li Chu-tsing, a Chinese art historian from Kansas, visited CAFA. 1979 March: An exhibition of Swedish sculpture and painting was held. June: The Beijing Branch of the Artists Association and CAFA held an exhibition of illustrations of Impressionist painting. July: An exhibition of Japanese modern painting was held. August: An exhibition of Romanian modern painting was held. September 11: An exhibition was held of work by the Japanese nihonga painter Hirayama Ikuo (later the head of the Tokyo University of the Arts). 1980 January: Jianzhu Xuebao, no. 1, published the first article to introduce post-modernist architecture (Gao et al., 1991). March: An exhibition took place of American greeting cards and illustrations. October: An exhibition of West German advertising art was held. November: MS published an article by Shao Dazhen on “The spirit of modernism and modern art.”

 Xinmeishu, no. 2, published articles re-appraising Impressionism. December: Wu Jiafeng’s reappraisal of Impressionism, Yinxiangpai de Zairenshi was published in 6,000 copies. Wenyi Yanjiu (Literature and art research), no. 6, published an article by Shao Dazhen on Surrealism. Shijiemeishu, no. 4, comprehensively introduced Gustav Klimt. 1981 January: MS illustrated German Expressionists. February: MS published an article on Henri Matisse’s papercuts. March: Xinmeishu, no. 1, published articles on colour theories. Shijiemeishu, no. 1, published articles on Millet, Moreau, Picasso and Wyeth (Picasso’s Guernica had been briefly mentioned in MS 5-1961, published October 6, 1961). April: Wenyi Yanjiu, no. 2, published an article by Liu Gangji, Professor of Aesthetics at Wuhan University, on modern western painting. June: Wenyi Yanjiu, no. 3, published an article on Picasso by Shao Dazhen. Shijiemeishu, no. 2 published articles on Munch, Blake, and Hokusai. September: An exhibition of works from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts was held and included American Abstract Expressionists. October: Meishu published articles on Mexican muralists and New York murals. October 15: The American historian of Chinese painting, James Cahill, and his wife visited the CAFA. Other visitors before the end of 1981 included Zhao Wuji and the modern abstract guohua painter Liu Guosong. Liu, from Hong Kong, was a major figure in Taiwan modern art in the 1960s and was known to be in contact with the Beijing art world. In the spring of 1981, the modern painter Xiao Qin (Hsiao Ch’in), who had gone to Milan from Taiwan in the mid-1950s, visited his aunt, Xiao Shufang, in Beijing. She was married to Wu Zuoren and was herself a painter.

APPENDIX 2: TYPES OF ART PRACTICE AND STYLE IN CHINA

A number of artists are listed in each category. Of course, no comprehensiveness is possible or intended in what can only be an indicative, hermeneutic classification. However it will be seen that such a list can be drawn up with far fewer categories for the style/subject/expression/content nexus than might otherwise be expected. Indeed, “style” does not readily separate from “subject,”as indicated by Schapiro. I am grateful to the suggestions of Thomas Shapiro Berghuis, Shao Yiyang, and others in checking and broadening my identification of these stylistic categories and in suggesting exemplars.

Guohua2 “Classicist” exploration of existing discourses: Lü Yanshao Decorative populism: Huang Yongyu Realism as “red” decoration: Liu Wenxi

Xin guohua Folk abstraction: Chen Ping Conceptual ink abstraction: Wang Gongyi, Zhu Qingsheng New literati: Xu Lele Eccentric expressionism: Li Xiaoxuan

Calligraphy Conventional four modes: Qi Gong, Xie Zhiliu, Shen Peng, Wang Yong New expressionism: Wang Fangyu, Zeng Youhe (USA), Xiong Bingming (France) New abstractionism: Qiu Zhenhong, Wang Dongling, Zhang Qiang, Wang Nanming

Academic oil painting New classicist Soviet realism: Hou Yimin New classicist European: Jin Shangyi Impressionist: Dai Shihe Surrealist: Ding Fang, Xia Xiaowan Figurative Expressionism humanist: Fei Zheng and other “half cut-off” artists Figurative Expressionism nihilist: Liu Wei Figurative photo-realism humanist: Shen Jiawei Figurative photo-realism nihilist: Leng Jun, Shi Chong

 Abstract expressionism: Ma Lu Abstract expressionism: Ding Yi

Prints Soviet/proletarian: Zhao Zongzao Lyrical narration: Wang Gongyi Nostalgic gross: Zhou Jirong Conceptual extension: Xu Bing Individualized lyricism: Chen Haiyan

Sculpture Academic humanist realism: Pan He National expressionism: Fu Tianchou, Liu Xunfa Modernist extrusion: Ye Ruzhang Absurdist realism: Zhan Wang Populist decorativism, “kitsch”: Ye Yushan

Installation Conceptualism: Sui Jianguo Re-constituted objects or sites: Lü Hao

Performance Ritualization of the body/binding: Zheng Lianjie, Sheng Qi “Disconcerting” events in public: Xiao Lu/Tang Song, Wu Shanzhuan Body as performative image: Ma Liuming, Zhu Ming Environment/public policy interaction: Luo Zidan, Wang Jin Human individuation and the public/private space: Song Dong, Wang Jianwei, and Wang Gongxin The body as allophagic/autophagic: Zhu Yu

Photography Socialist heimat: Zhuang Hui Socialist heroes: Qiu Zhijie Propaganda eulogy: Zhao Bandi Chinese “folk” recording: Liu Zheng, Han Lei, Hong Hao, Hong Lei, Wang Qingsong Contemporary social photo documentation: Rong Rong, Song Yongping, Zhuang Hui, Wang Jingsong Conceptual experimentation: Ai Weiwei, Wu Xiaojun, Zhen Guogu, Zhao Bandi

Video New narratives: Song Dong Video as object/installation: Zhang Peili

Computer Cartoon: Feng Mengbo Virtuality: Geng Jianyi Conceptual: Jiao Yingqi

Notes from the Appendixes 1 I am grateful to Thomas Berghuis and Shao Yiyang, Ph.D. candidates at the University of Sydney, for their comments. 1 The nihonga painters Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, whose Hiroshima panels had been exhibited in Beijing in 1957, came to China in 2 Semiotically speaking, a discourse is the mapping of a text onto a 1981. After seeing their 1957 exhibition, the guohua artist, Zhou context via the intermediary interpretant of a code. Different codes Sicong, met with them on a visit to Japan in 1980. provide for the hermeneutic generation of different text/context relations, as much as they indicate which texts form the context of 2 By the 1980s, guohua had at least three invented “traditions” to other texts. Thus, alongside a hierarchy of codes there is also a mobilize: (1) any kind of pre-modern ink painting from late Ming hierarchy of texts. In this sense, art works are in a discursive realism to literati exercises; (2) popular, highly coloured decoration relation with other art works through the mediation of a code or from a range of Chinese, Japanese, and some European sources; stylistic convention. However, codes are also in a discursive (3) ink and usually light colour syntheses between the two relation to other codes through the application of another type of tendencies above and “socialist” subject matter, whether of the code we call, according to varying methodological premises, masses or of the feats of socialist construction, in rural landscape epistemologies, belief structures, ideologies, and so forth. Thus, or urban panorama setting. discourses of works and discourses of interpretation separately exist in parallel and also simultaneously in correlation with each Notes other via the work. This crossover has led many art historians to confusedly identify stylistics in the work with ideologies in A version of this paper was presented as the Keynote Speech for the interpretation. See John Clark, “Introduction: A disciplinary field,” conference “Contemporary Chinese Art in the International Arena” on chapter 1 in Modern Asian Art (Sydney: Craftsman House; April 18, 2002, at the British Museum in London. It will be published in Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998). Contemporary Chinese Art in the International Arena (Liverpool: Centre 3 for Art International Research at the Liverpool John Moores University, On the level of intellectual subjectivity, the Cultural Revolution is forthcoming). like a caesura between the constructivism of the 1950s and

 the developmentalism of the 1980s, which “demolished the 22 Jiao Yingqi, interviewed by the author, Beijing, March 27, 1999. constructive cultural space” and precipitated “a process of See also his article in the special issue on Art Education in Meishu ‘self-alienation’ in cultural and aesthetic domains.” See Liu Kang, Guancha (September 2001), 16-18. By the 1990s, however, many Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their academic teachers, including Sui Jianguo and Zhan Wang indirectly Western Contemporaries (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University supported experimentalism. The latter supported many young artists’ Press, 2000), 163. experiments with body art, such as Zhu Yu. Indeed, Zhan Wang is reputed to have taken some of the photographs of Zhu Yu’s work. 4 Which no longer has to be simplistically figurative. 23 I think that in order to make some kinds of art, it is necessary to 5 It must not be forgotten how academic realism in the 1980s became vigorously criticize and even embody the negation of the “human” a more open “modernism” in the official art academies such as in — especially in societies and contexts where the “human” is the “gritty realism” of Luo Zhongli, Chen Danqing, and others. systematically abused or mendaciously used to conceal its negation. 6 Experimental artists tend to think of their exhibitions as not taking I am thinking of Auschwitz, the Beijing Massacre, Srebreniza, and place before a broader public gaze and assimilate their audience the economic sanctions by Britain and the United States, which to a restricted and private gaze. The latter is often conceived of systematically murder the “Iraqi enemy’s” children. However, an art as a domain of necessary isolation and independence from the that does so without pointing to where the positively “human” might former of which it is by implication critical. be may very well collude with the evil it exposes. 7 The location of the axes in this diagram is arbitrary. The diagram 24 See John Clark, “Dilemmas of [dis-]attachment in the Chinese indicates that the two discourses of “revolutionism” and diaspora,” Visual Arts and Culture 1, no. 1 (1998). Some of the artists “developmentalism” can be seen as one discourse. With a shift of abroad found their expression in literature, such as the novella interpretants between “socialist realism” and “academic formalism,” by Zhu Wen entitled Yinwei Gudu (1994), which deals with the they represent one code with double aspects. loneliness of the fictional artist Ding Dalong in New York. In 8 Such as “abstract humanism.” See Richard Baum, “The Road to considering external diaspora, one should also take into account Tiananmen, Chinese Politics in the 1980s,” in The Politics of China, the internal diaspora towards the centre – where regional artists 1945-1989, ed. R. Macfarquar (Cambridge: Cambridge University came to live and work in Beijing, particularly from the 1990s, and Press, 1993). were helped to do so by various Beijing artist communities. 25 9 John Clark, “Official Reactions to Modern Art in China Since the There is also a counter tendency in which some artists, like Beijing Massacre,” Pacific Affairs (September 1992): 334-352. Ni Haifeng in Amsterdam and Wu Shanzhuan in Hamburg, seem to have been more “contained” in Europe since their work has not 10 John Clark, “Modernity in Chinese Art, 1850s-1990s: Some opened up to world-wide circulation. Chronological Materials,” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 26 29 (1997): 74-169. This includes a list of foreign art contacts with See Pierre Haski, “Huang Yong Ping tournait l’Amérique en dérision. China from the 1970s to the 1980s. I attach a short extract of these Son oeuvre est retirée, Censure Franco-Chinoise au Musée de materials for 1972-82 as Appendix 1 to show how early and Shenzhen,” Libération (December 12, 2001). Thanks to Martina extensive these contacts were. Köppel-Yang for a copy of this text. According to Shao Yiyang, there was extensive Chinese Internet debate at about this 11 See Joan Lebold Cohen, The New Chinese Painting, 1949-1986 incident being an over-reaction by the French to the possibility of (New York: Abrams, 1981), 107. Cohen dates He Duoling’s “Wyeth” American hostility after the September 11, 2002, terrorist incident. mode to 1981. 27 See also Thomas Berghuis, “Signs of the artistic times in China,” 12 He Duoling was invited to the Massachusetts College of Art in IIAS Newsletter 28 (2002). 1985. See the catalogue He Duoling (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Art 28 Museum, 1988). An index of professionalization is the number of graduates from the art academies, including crafts and performing arts, under 13 Chen Ping, interviewed by author, Beijing, May 18, 1999. the Ministry of Culture. These increased from 798 in 1979 to 3576 14 Cheng Ping borrowed the album from Ying Ruocheng’s son. in 1990. See Shao Yiyang, 2001. 29 15 This is the case even in the 1950s. See Shao Dazhen, “Chinese Art According to my informal conversations with French officials in in the 1950s: an avant-garde undercurrent beneath the mainstream Paris during August 2001. of realism,” in John Clark, Modernity in Asian Art (Sydney: Wild 30 Non-attributable interviews with me in 1999 indicated that Peony, 1993), 75-84. Fan Di’an, Vice-Head of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing 16 I am indebted to Thomas Berghuis for information from his and Xu Jiang, then Vice-Head of the China Art Academy in interviews in 2001. Hangzhou (Jiang Zemin’s nephew), had both advised Jiang Zemin on modern art. Fan Di’an also served as an arts advisor on 17 See Fei Dawei, “Transgresser le principe céleste: Dialogue avec paintings to decorate Central Committee buildings in the le group cadavre (Zhu Yu, Sun Yuan, Peng Yu), ‘Représenter Zhongnanhai headquarters complex. l’Horreur, Hors Series,’” Artpress (May 2001). 31 The China Art Gallery in Beijing is now being refurbished. Shao 18 The paperback edition of the catalogue was later published in Yiyang has confirmed that this new art gallery will be enlarged to 1998. See Norman Rosenthal and Charles Saatchi, Sensation: twice its original size and will keep the name Zhongguo meishuguan. Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection (London: Thames It will house and exhibit twentieth century Chinese modern art. and Hudson, 1998.) I have no evidence showing that Chinese Traditional art from before the twentieth-century will be kept in a artists had received or understood the critical reception of this new art museum. In addition, there will also be a City Art Gallery exhibition in Britain, such as for example found in Julian built in Beijing. Stallabrass, High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s (London: Verso, 32 1999). It is quite conceivable that such critiques may have been The rise in cultural consumerism has been anecdotally noticed by mentioned in personal correspondence to China from a number of foreign interviewers of some entrepreneurs, who now frequently Chinese artists resident in London. possess a complete set of Chinese encyclopaedias in their offices. There has also been a notable increase in the scale of classical 19 See inter alia, Wu Meichun, Qiu Zhijie et al., Houganxiang: Yixing yu music performances in Beijing, with up to five venues now regularly Wangxiang (Post-sense sensibility: alien bodies and delusion) offering such concerts, according to my conversation with the art (Beijing: privately published, 1999); Ai Wiwei and Feng Boyi, Bu critic Yin Shuangxi in March 1999. For the relations between hezuo fangshi (Fuck off!) (Shanghai: Eastlink Gallery, 2000); and economic activity and the scale of cultural consumption, see Catalogue of the 49th Biennale di Venezia, English ed. (Venezia: La Josephine Fox and John Clark, “Economic reform and modernity Biennale di Venezia, 2001): 198-99. The last text discusses Xiao Yu. in Chinese art,” chapter 3a from John Clark, Modernity in Chinese 20 For a defining survey essay see Lea Vergine, Body Art and and Thai Art of the 1980s and 1990s: Artists, Works, Institutions, Performance: The Body as Language, trans. Henry Martin (Milan: 2001, forthcoming. This project is from 1999 to 2001 and was Skira, 2000). funded by a Large Grant from the Australian Research Council.

33 21 Among other references found among such works were those to the Ma Liuming still sells paintings. Joseph Beuys, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and Jeff Wall. See Li 34 Zisha Jihua involved Wei Guangqing who was wrapped in cloth and Xianting, “Dangdai yishuzhong de shiying baijiere,” Jinri Xianfeng, placed on a white blanket on top of a red cross made from cloth. no. 10 (January 2001). 35 Shao Yiyang with John Clark “The Structure of the Chinese Art World in the 1980s and 1990s from Official and Other Sources,”

 chapter 3b from John Clark, Modernity in Chinese and Thai Art of recent texts are: Wen Pulin, Zhongguo Xingdong: bashi niandai dao the 1980s and 1990s: Artists, Works, Institutions, 2001, forthcoming. jiushi niandai de xingwei yishu (Beijing: Beijing Windhorse Mass Media, 1999); Wen Pulin, Jiang Hu Feng: Zhongguo qianwei yishujia 36 Pattama Harn-Asa with John Clark, “Some Thai Art Educational wai zhuan (shang) (Changsha: Hunan Meishu Chubanshe, 2000). Institutions,” chapter 4b from John Clark, Modernity in Chinese and There is also an important book by a Japanese researcher of Thai Art of the 1980s and 1990s: Artists, Works, Institutions, 2001, contemporary Chinese poetry, which has many observations about forthcoming. early Chinese performance works, including those done in Japan: 37 The operation of normative systems for marking in Chinese art Maki Yôichi, Avan Chaina: Chûgoku no gendai aato (Tokyo: schools while derived from the Soviet version of the late nineteenth- Kodamasha, 1998). century Chernyshevsky system, was always much more specific (at 55 Not all the implications of pre-modern conceptualizations for the least in the early 1960s) particularly in relation to class background body and its repositioning in “modernist” discourses have been as a variable in assessing technical performance. See John Clark, worked out. See Anglea Zito and Tani E. Barlow, Body, Subject & “Realism and revolutionary Chinese painting,” Journal of the Oriental Power in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). The Society of Australia 22/23 (1990-1991): 13, footnote 29. essays in this text, particularly that by John Hay, “The Body Invisible 38 From the exclusion of Wu Shanzhuan’s work at the February 1989 in Chinese Art?,” 42-77, constitute a useful starting point. Zhongguo Xiandai Yishu-zhan. 56 For a theorization of consumption and culture in China see 39 See Wu Hung, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China (Chicago: The Dai Jianhua, “Redemption and Consumption: Depicting Culture in David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, 2000). Among exhibitions the 1990s,” Positions 4, no. 1 (1996). There is more writing in closed at the last minute before opening were Leng Lin’s Shi Wo Chinese on this from the late 1990s. See Fei Qing and Fu Gang, (It’s me) (Beijing: Xiandai Yishu Zhongxin, 1998) and Zhang Zhaohui, “Xuhuan yu xianshi: xiaofei, xinxi shidai de jianzhu,” Jinri Xianfeng, Cong Zhongguo chufa yishuxzhan (Departure from China: a new no. 5 (May 1997); Yi Ying, “Dazhong wenhua yu zhongguo qianwei Chinese art exhibition (Beijing, Shiji Bowuguan, 1999). Informal yishu,” Meishu Chaoliu, no. 1 (1997); Yi Ying, “Shehui biange yu interviews indicate that, at least in the 1990s, the Ministry of zhongguo xiandai meishu,” Tianya, 5 (1998). Culture had surveillance teams observing some of the experimental 57 See Mao Zedong, “A Study of Physical Education” in The Political art exhibitions. Thought of Mao Tse-tung, ed. Stuart Schram (London: Pall Mall 40 There is continuous self-censorship by curators of art exhibitions, Press, 1963). Original text published in 1917. particularly in exhibitions the curators think will cause controversy, 58 This negation may develop into a quasi-essentialist landscape such as Buhezuo fangshi (Fuck off) in 2000. There is also the dreaming which blends superhuman “Chinese” ethnic figures into discretion shown by not naming the photographer of sensitive the depiction of landscape in the work of Din Fang, or in the newly works, such as Zhu Yu’s “cannibalism,” which may involve the acceptable academic treatment of academic angst after the horrors photography being done by artists who are publicly well-known in of our age in the Goya-esque leanings of Xia Xiaowan (now head of other media and even employed in major art schools. Oil Painting at Beijing Teacher’s University). For his earlier work, 41 They were announced in Wenyibao on January 18, 2001, and see V.C. Doran, ed. China’s New Art Post-1989 (Hong Kong: Hanart republished under the by-line of Yang Zhong in Meishu Guancha TZ, 1993). (April 2001) with illustrations of works by Zhu Yu among others. 59 See Geremie R. Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese 42 My understanding of “non-official” art has benefited from a Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). conversation with Feng Boyi in Beijing, February 23, 1999. 60 Meyer Shapiro, “Style” in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, 43 Jia Fangzhou, Lin Lin et al., Fanshi-Zishen yu Huanjing zhan and Society (New York: George Braziller, 1953): 59. (Beijing: Beijingshi Jianshe Daxue, November 1998). 61 George Kubler, The Shape of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 44 Based on my interviews with Chen Haiyuan in Hangzhou, Beijing, 1962 and 1979): 121. April 27, 1999, and Wang Gongyi, Beijing, May 21, 1999. 62 Ibid., 130. 45 Typically, students may join the “experimental” studio in fourth-year 63 A position found in the work of Kubler’s later Yale colleague, Henri in some departments such as painting. Focillon. See La Vie des Formes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de 46 According to several informants, most critics in Beijing, by the France, 1934). Kubler was the co-translator in 1942 and for its late 1990s, employed or otherwise, were being paid around revision in 1948. 2,000 yuan or about US $150 per article or catalogue essay. The 64 Kubler, The Shape of Time, 126. gallery or the artist and not the publication paid the fee where the critique appeared. 65 In the growth of Chinese modernity — like any other culturally bound modernity which attempts to relativize complex strata of 47 Huang Du has withdrawn from the Chinese Artists’ Association in pre-modern pasts—the questions that always arise are: how far order to write a Ph.D. at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. previous habits of cultural acceptance are being applied to the 48 As of 2001, Leng Lin is studying in Germany. new material or how far they are being used to generate new 49 Li Xianting’s courage and intellectual insight over a long period from material. Are there strategies of choice and lacunae of selection an originally neo-traditional perspective on modernity may be seen which are culturally specific and generalizable across time and in his collection of critical writings. See Li Xianting, Zhongyaode such ideologically different material? This substitution on the plane bushi yishu (Nanjing: Jiangsu Meishu Chubanshe, 2000). of ideas about art of Chinese variations of Soviet art ideology by recent Euramerican modernist theory may, on the plane of mass 50 He later became a teacher in the Art History Department of the imagery, resemble the substitution between politically motivated Sichuan Art Academy. propaganda imagery and consumer desire-oriented mass 51 Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, and Zeng Xiaojun, eds. Hongqi (Heisepi) (Beijing: commercial advertizing. Private publisher, 1994). Hongqi (Red flag) indicates the name 66 I am referring to the prominence of Chinese modern art in Venice of the Communist Party’s theoretical journal and was only inserted in 1993 and Barcelona in 1994. in this book by a hand-printed red stamp. See Ai Weiwei and 67 Xiaojun, eds. Baisepi (Beijing: private publisher, 1995); Ai Weiwei, As discussed earlier in this paper with the move of artists abroad. ed. Feisepi (Beijing: private publisher, 1997). 68 This attachment was clear in interviews and conversations with 52 This was one of the alternative exhibitions run at the time of the artists and critics as varied in background as Yuan Yunsheng, 2nd Shanghai Biennale in 2000. Another such alternative exhibition Liu Bingjiang, Pi Li, and Yi Ying. held in Shanghai during the time of the Biennale was Gu Zhenqing, 69 For a discussion in English, see John Clark, “Liu Guosong’s: Yichang yu richang (Unusual and usual) (Shanghai: Yuangong The Road of Chinese Painting,” Journal of the Oriental Society of Xiandai Yishu Zhanlanguan, 2000). Australia 27/28 (1995-96): 33-56. 53 Under the fourth type of reaction, Thomas Berghuis points out that a concrete example of such certification was seen in Ai Weiwei stamping of the personal identification number on Yang Zhichao’s back for a body art piece. 54 Thomas Berghuis is writing a survey of performance art in China during the 1990s. On the topic of the body in art, the most useful

    -:      -  

   

Figure 1: Yang Hsia, The God of Integrity, 1990, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist

 Taiwan emerged from martial law rule in the 1990s, marking the beginning of a period of social deconstruction. With the old establishment collapsed, no consensus for a new system has yet taken hold and has left Taiwan in a state of political, social, religious, and cultural uncertainty. Since the end of martial law, there has been a breakup of many traditional values and a forceful skepticism of the exercise of authority.

An anti-aesthetics sensibility has become the normative character of Taiwanese contemporary art. Received notions of “beauty” as well as artistic form are not sufficient in terms of conveying the social situation. There is now a general state of confusion about values in Taiwan. In this new era, contemporary artists are struggling to create art that is relevant to the changes that have occurred in Taiwan. To be a relevant artist means to be acutely aware of the facts of Taiwan’s transformation from a society of entrenched values to one in which such values have become untethered.

 The tension between a not yet articulated new value system and the lingering but decaying traditional value system is palpable. In such a context, it is difficult for a new value system to emerge. Contemporary artists must rely on personal perspectives to animate their art. Gradually, this highly self-conscious individualism also turns into a kind of tension. Although such tension can add great creative dynamics to contemporary art, it can also lead to many individual works of art with no common ground among them. In Taiwan, artists work in a milieu characterized by a fin-de-siécle crisis.

Constant anxiety, melancholy, and inner consumption mark the ambience of contemporary Taiwan. Living in a changing society, contemporary artists take the responsibility of welding new ethics and order together instead of passively reflecting or representing the present chaos and turmoil. Not only do artists create works in the name of anti-aesthetics, they also take on the representation of iconoclasm in order to target Taiwan’s society and its value system in general. Indeed, iconoclasm and anti-aesthetics are two sides of the same coin. In terms of comparing the current society of Taiwan with that before the lifting of martial law in 1987, the phenomenon of iconoclasm can be read indexically in terms of the post-martial law era, representing the degree of freedom and openness that Taiwan has enjoyed. For artists, iconoclasm is not only a critique of past traditions, but also a pretext to undermine the established order so as to propagate the difference of the “here and now” identity.

Iconoclasm serves the purpose of destruction and is a gesture of breaking off from anything obsolete. To an obvious degree, the launch of iconoclasm is for the creation of a varied system. Sometimes, the purpose of iconoclasm is to allow the invention of a new iconicity. An emerging phenomenon seen in Taiwan during the 1990s was the formation and escalation of new cults. New cults, as in the creation of false gods, may have evolved from traditional religious beliefs but also signified a rising enthusiasm for the pseudo-worship of a human form or a material-thing. A new cult requires a new icon. Without one, it is nearly impossible to form a new myth.

What is worth noting is that a lot of new material values in modern Taiwan have been imported, transferred, and propagated by First World nations, such as the United States and Japan, through the process of globalization. As has been stated clearly by many renowned scholars, the force behind this tidal wave of globalization is late capitalism, multinational capitalism, and media capitalism. Globalization as a new cult has brought to Taiwan an excitement for the new economy- of which Internet technology and new media constitute major parts. The consumer logic of post-industrial capitalism is pervasive the world over. Even the countries that are still embedded in the pre-modern state or those that originally belong to the Third World, such as Taiwan and Mainland China, are intoxicated by the mystique of a consumer society.

As an OEM kingdom of manufacturing for decades, Taiwan has long succumbed to the economic chain of multinational capitalism led by the U.S. and Japan. As the era of globalization approach- es, Taiwan is no exception in welcoming and embracing this new order. Taiwan has enormous capacity as a manufacturer of commodities. The combination of this capacity is interwoven with a historical susceptibility to being influenced, permeated, and even overshadowed by Western and Japanese cultures. This combination has opened up the possibility of Taiwan falling into an enthusiastic cult worship of materialism. Being a bountiful country that enjoys an excess of commodities and material goods, Taiwan is inclined to immerse itself in highly materialistic values. Taking comfort in materials through material worship has become the new value standard for the younger generations in Taiwan.

 Figure 2: J.C. Kuo, St. Taiwan: Mother and Child, 1997, mixed media. Figure 4: Dean-E Mei, Faceless, 2001, computer-generated image. Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist

Figure 3: J.C. Kuo, St.Taiwan-Bubble Gum, 1997, mixed media. Figure 5: Dean-E Mei, Taiwan Loves Japan / Japan Loves Taiwan, Courtesy of the artist 2001, computer-generated image. Courtesy of the artist Figure 6: Ju Lin, Maria the Earth Mother, 1999, ink and colour on paper. Figure 11: Tung-lu Hung, Evangelion: Ayanami Rei, 1999, computer- Courtesy of the artist generated image. Courtesy of the artist

Figure 7: Ju Lin, Discarding the Body, 1999, ink and colour on paper. Figure 12: Tung-lu Hung, Pretty Soldier: Sailor Moon. 1999, comput- Courtesy of the artist er-generated image. Courtesy of the artist Figure 8: Chieh-jen Chen, Image of Identical Twins, 1998, laser image print. Courtesy of the artist

In line with the development of computer technology and Internet systems, imaging technology has undergone radical development. When virtual technologies are combined with aesthetics, the result is a new kind of media: the art of virtual reality. This new media has become the furnace for the emergence of new cults and icons and has provided many people with psychological comfort and spiritual consolation. It is a new religion.

By looking at the shift from iconoclasm to neo-iconolatry in the art of Taiwan, we are able to see many interesting clues of the New Taiwan in its process of stumbling into a new epoch. In order to demonstrate what I have delineated above, I will be looking at seven artists, including Hsia Yan, Kuo Jen-chang, Mei Dean-E, Lin Ju, Chen Chieh-jen, Hung Tung-lu, and Yao Jui-chung. To compare their backgrounds and the respective generations to which they belong, these seven artists cover a spectrum of generations ranging from the pre-Second World War era to Taiwan’s post-economic-miracle era-that is, the 1980s and 1990s.

It is worth emphasizing that during the decade of the 1990s, these artists have remained, for the most part, in Taiwan and their art is a dialogue about the place of Taiwan. They have witnessed all sorts of chaos, violence, tension, opposition, and irrational fever in Taiwan during this decade. All of them have chosen to deal with the issues of Taiwan’s politics, society, religion, history, and culture in the practice of their art-through which they represent, reflect upon, deconstruct, parody, and even ruthlessly critique phenomena that seem important and significant to them.

These seven artists have investigated the aspects they are concerned about-not only pointing out that “iconoclasm” is a key to understanding Taiwan of the 1990s-but also simultaneously declaring that while the old icons are being smashed and destroyed, the shadow of neo-iconolatry has crept into the shrine of the old icons, replaced those icons, and become the new norm and new establishment.

 Yang Hsia (b. 1932) has lived in China, Taiwan, Europe, and the United States over the past fifty years. It was not until the early 1990s that Hsia decided to move from the United States back to Taiwan to settle permanently. During the 1960s, Hsia developed a highly individualized painting style that became known for the incomplete and frightening Figure 9: Chieh-jen Chen, Self-Destruction,1996, laser image print. humanoid figures that populate his works. This dis- Courtesy of the artist tinctive style was derived in part from the popular tradition of religious Daoism in which priests drew magical characters in order to invoke the spirits and bring good or ill fortune. The Divine Marshal and God of Integrity (1990 fig. 1) belong to a series of visual studies by Hsia using popular deities from religious Daoism as his subjects. In both these works, however, Hsia leaves out their eyes and deprives these images of facial expressions, thereby cutting off the very source of power of these gods. The fact that these icons are sightless and faceless signifies that the visual gaze of these idols can no longer dominate the worshipping masses. The power of these icons has been diminished and dissipated. Perhaps we can understand these iconoclastic works in this way: with the loss of traditional values, these idols are as good as dead; only their outer forms remain as empty shells.

J.C. Kuo (b. 1949) is part of the first generation of post-war Taiwanese artists. His upbringing included a mixture of local Taiwanese and Chinese traditions, as well as Japanese and modern Western cultural influences. St. Taiwan: Mother and Child belongs to a series of mixed media paintings completed in 1997 under the collective title Saint Taiwan (fig. 2-3). In these works, Kuo blends the traditional iconographies of Daoism and Catholicism, both in terms of the images portrayed as well as the frames in which they are presented. Yet, the central figures depicted in these paintings are nameless common people. As a result, each painting overflows with mixed messages: the voice of the counter current and the sounds of social satire. Through this personal list of the canonized, Kuo presents his own appraisal of various developments in Taiwan society. Rather than gods from the traditional pantheon, the icons in his paintings are for the most part personifications of popular phenomenon. The Saint Taiwan series represents Kuo’s views on the unspeakable and unspoken realities of politics, religion, and culture in contemporary Taiwanese society. The images depicted run counter to popular aesthetics, resist media manipulation, reject new cults, and confound the psychological expectations of viewers and believers. Therein lies their iconoclasm.

Dean-E Mei (b. 1954) was part of the first generation of Mainlanders born and raised in Taiwan. In the early 1990s, Mei returned from the United States to settle in Taiwan. One can identify two main modes of expression in Mei’s paintings. First, he takes icons of heroic political figures and calls them into question (2001, fig 4-5). In Taiwan Loves Japan / Japan Loves Taiwan, a modified portrait of President Lee Teng-hui is used to deconstruct the myth of Lee Teng-hui. Upon careful examination, Lee’s smiling face reveals a striking similarity to Chiang Kai-shek’s visage. As in his blended image of Mao Zedong and Sun Yat-sen in the 1991 work Three Principles of the People Unify China, Mei’s creative aesthetic of deliberate ambiguity confounds and challenges the viewer. The grafting of their images suggests strong connections and significant similarities between these two formidable political figures. In his second mode of expression, Mei takes sites of historical and political significance and makes these the targets of deconstruction. In his Outside-Field Battle Series (2001), Mei aims his political satire at newly elected President Chen Shui-bian’s recently proclaimed national defence strategy of keeping any decisive military battle beyond Taiwan’s

 borders. The deconstruction of iconic sites takes the form of computer- generated military destruction. In desecrating these sites, Mei’s sense of humour is comparable to that of Marcel Duchamp painting a moustache on a photograph of the Mona Lisa.

Ju Lin’s (b. 1959) formative years in the Figure 10: Jui-chung Yao, Barbarians Celestine #1, 2001, computer-generated image and gold leaf. Courtesy of the artist 1980s coincided with the watershed peri- od during which Taiwan made the trans- formation from a society under martial law to one freed from such restrictions. Perhaps a reflec- tion of such uncertain and transitional times, the fragmentary images produced by Lin can be said to be neither completely iconoclastic nor examples of neo-iconolatry, but rather something which hesitates and wavers in between the old and the new. Maria the Earth Mother (fig. 6) and Discarding the Body (fig. 7) were completed in 1999 (both ink and colour on paper). On the one hand, these paintings shock the viewer with terrifying images of figures with missing heads, of creeping appendages, and of disembowelment — all portrayed in a gloomy, netherworld atmosphere. On the other hand, there is a tenderness and solicitude to these depictions, which evokes a sense of reverie in the viewer. Moreover, Lin’s painting techniques are reminiscent of traditional iconography so his works cannot help but possess a nostalgic element. The underlying sources of support for Lin’s “compromise” iconography lie in popular Daoism and a primeval pan-spiritualism that is thick with mysticism and borders on blind faith. In an age of realism, Lin is a storyteller and a traveller in a dream world. Lin’s iconography seems to indicate an alternative path towards curing life and healing the soul; the images may seem shocking on the surface, but they are full of mystical hints at the secret of the origin of life itself. Yet, because Lin’s icons are so overly individualized, fetishized and grotesque, they always give people the impression of being “false gods.”

From the 1980s to the mid-1990s, Chieh-jen Chen (b. 1960) performed and exhibited his works in all kinds of marginal spaces — from abandoned buildings, basements, and city streets, to mountain valleys and seaside settings. Chen used provocative live performances to protest the martial law system’s restrictions on people’s bodies. This kind of bodily consciousness led him to reflect deeply upon, and recognize, the relationship of domination between the body and history, politics, and power. In 1996, Chen began using computer-generated composition and drawing techniques. That year, he completed a series of large-scaled works in which he reproduced images of himself in the midst of historical photographs. Because they dealt with shocking subjects, such as death by dismemberment and insane self-mutilation, the photomontage images attracted widespread attention from the international art world. In Self-Destruction (1996 fig. 9), Chen places himself at the centre of a historical photograph. Ironically, the attention grabbing “heroic” central figure is a grotesque, self-mutilating, and tragic character — a Siamese twin version of Chen: one half blade-wielding executioner and the other half condemned man. The artist also places himself in the ranks of the onlookers staring at the decapitation spectacle. Chen takes this technique even further in Image of Identical Twins (1998, fig. 8). Here, he fabricates an entire landscape littered with replicas of his own decapitated head piled up at the bottom of the picture as well as other heads taken from actual historical photographs. Standing upright in the middle of the portrait is Chen, as a double-headed, single-torso figure holding a withered grass root in

 his left hand and the shrunken image of a nuclear weapon in his right. The patch of ground that he stands upon, marked off by the decapitated heads, eerily resembles an image of Taiwan reduced to ruins.

Jui-chung Yao (b. 1969) belongs to what I term “the post-martial law generation artists.”Even so, he spent his childhood and adolescence in late martial law era. Although he took his art training mainly in the early 1990s, he often chooses to play with historical as well political themes or icons in a playful, insincere, sarcastic, and ironic way. Heaven II (2001) and Barbarians Celestine #1 (2001, fig. 10) are both recently produced works by Yao. The artist uses the tactic of creating gods in order to weave an illusion of heaven that is little more than a fairytale. The statue of the mermaid in the middle of Heaven II is reproduced from a photograph taken by the artist at the “Paradise of the Eight Immortals,”an amusement theme park that was very popular for a time, but (due to changing consumer tastes) has since been relegated to ruin. The background of Barbarians Celestine #1 is taken from a remote corner near a waterfall. Neglected roadside statues of the Buddha represent more ruins of icons. Everywhere in Yao’s Barbarians Celestine series, one can see these kinds of icons of gods discarded along the roadside. These are the by-products of the fanaticism of new cults and the movement to create new gods. In this particular piece, Yao has chosen to canonize the monkey saint in the scene. In an instant, the ruins of roadside religious statues are transformed into the mythological sacred temple of the monkey god of the new millennium. The artist creates these false icons to suggest that the new cults of 1990s Taiwan consist of little more than money-worship and materialism.

Tung-lu Hung (b. 1968) is a young artist of the post-martial law period, Tung-lu Hung has chosen to set his creative sights on observing and reflecting the perspectives of the new generation of young Taiwanese who live in a consumer society that worships material things as gods. These young people are constantly pursuing the most popular fad, keeping up with the newest media campaign, and experimenting with the latest drugs. They engage in these activities to stimulate their senses and obtain some kind of short-term relief or temporary satisfaction for their beleaguered souls and embattled spirits. Street Fighter: Chun-Li, Evangelion: Ayanami Rei (fig. 11), Lynn Minmay, and Pretty Soldier: Sailor Moon (fig. 12) are four works produced by Hung in 1999 that combine both traditional photography and computer design techniques. In each of these pieces, the main subject is a “pretty girl” heroine taken directly from Japanese popular culture, specifically, manga, animé and video games. Each character plays the role of saintly warrior in a future universe and new age. Moreover they carry a messianic responsibility in terms of the possible salvation of humanity. In Evangelion: Ayanami Rei, the heroine, stands with dignified bearing on a central stage decorated with flowers. The backdrop behind her consists of a canvas entitled The Holy Mother’s Coronation in Paradise painted by a minor Italian artist in the fifteenth century. In Hung’s painstaking arrangement, Ayanami Rei stands in a position that coincides with and covers up the central icon of the Holy Mother and the coronation ceremony in the painting behind her. Thus, a new holy mother from popular culture has replaced the Holy Mother of Catholicism. In this way, Evangelion: Ayanami Rei can be said to be a work of iconoclasm, false idolatry, and neo-iconolatry.

Notes 1 “From Iconoclasm to Neo-Iconolatry” was initially written for Renjian fukan, the literary supplement of China Times and was published on April 30, 1999. The essay was later expanded into this substantial edition and developed into an exhibition which had taken place in 2001 at Eslite Gallery in Taipei, the Taipei Gallery of the Chinese Information and Culture Center in New York City, and Manhattanville College in New York State. This English version was rendered and abridged from the Chinese original. The rendering of “Introduction” is done by this writer and the descriptions of the artists and their works were translated by Carsey Yee, to whom I express my appreciation.

 China’s recent entry into the World Trade Organization marks another step in China’s integration with the world’s leading economic system, an integration that is at times fitful and contradictory. It is now nearly thirty years since the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution, a tumultuous period that ironically paved the way for what is happening in China today. Since the emergence of a vibrant and contemporary art scene within China, the lessons of the Cultural Revolution have deeply informed Chinese artistic production, from Cai Guoqiang to Huang Yongping. The Cultural Revolution is the spectre that haunts the memory of today’s “ahistorical” China. Between March 22 and 23, 2002, a conference entitled “Cultural Production and the Cultural Revolution” was held at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery organized the conference in collaboration with the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, as well as with the Department of History and the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Victoria. The conference was in conjunction with the exhibition Art of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1966 - 1976 at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (March 22 – August 22, 2002), the first comprehensive survey of art from the Cultural Revolution ever exhibited outside of China.

Installation view of the Art of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976 exhibition, The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, March 22 to August 25, 2002. Courtesy of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. Photo: Howard Ursuliak      :          

 

The launch of the “Cultural Revolution” in China in 1966 can seem a deeply irrational event of the 1960s. However, the art production from this period now represents an important influence on contemporary Chinese art production. Red Guard inspired art also played an integral role during the Cultural Revolution. Members of the Red Guard took to the streets, painted the gates and walls red, and covered them with Mao Zedong slogans and quotations. With the decline of the Red Guard movement, their art campaign gradually disappeared. Due to a lack of documentation as well as a narrowness of perspective, the works produced by the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution are not mentioned in the writings on twentieth century Chinese art. What will be discussed here is how this art movement got started and how it created a new art based on a relationship to the street. “Red modernist art” has unique values worth studying and should not be simply brushed aside because of their ideological agency.

    It is extremely difficult to find any published material about the Red Guard art movement during the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese Art Almanac: 1949-1989, compiled by the China Art Gallery, discusses the art development in China from 1949 to 1989. Significantly, the year 1967 is not mentioned. The implication of this omission is that no art events occurred during that year. In reality, however, 1967 does not represent a void in art production but rather the climax of the Red Guard art movement.

The Red Guard was a mass organization mainly composed of college and middle school students. At its peak, there were about ten million Red Guards. These youths played a leading role in the Cultural Revolution. Their vehement attacks on established social values and traditions were strongly endorsed by Mao Zedong. On August 8, the Central Academy of Fine Arts mounted a “black” (meaning reactionary) art exhibition, which took up a whole teaching building. A special room was designated for the exhibition of paintings and photographs of counter revolutionary artists referred to as “evils and snakes.”On August 18, 1966, Mao received Red Guards on the Tian’anmen rostrum while Lin Biao (the second most powerful man in China) gave a speech. After this, Red Guards across the country took to the streets and launched attacks against the “old ways of thinking, old culture, and old customs and habits.”Art college students joined them.

Red Guard students from the middle school attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts of Beijing put up big posters in the windows of Rongbaozhai (the most renowned art studio in China) on Wangfujin Street. One of the posters was entitled Smashing Rongbaozhai and is perhaps the earliest art document produced by the Red Guards. The poster proclaimed:

Rongbaozhai is a wicked store! For decades, this studio has been exploiting the laborers, serving the lord and their spoiled children of the bourgeois and feudal classes, and even acting as a henchman to the blood-sucking evils of the foreign capitalists. In a word, it served anyone but the workers, peasants, soldiers, and socialism. What we want to do is to smash up Rongbaozhai!1

On August 24, the Red Guards from Beijing Normal University came to the Central Academy to help their counterparts “revolt.”Plaster figure models were smashed and teaching materials and

 painting albums were dumped in the middle of the playground and set on fire. At the same time, the Red Guards ordered the “evils and snakes” being pulled out of the “ox sheds” (a sort of prison for intellectuals considered anti-socialist) to kneel down around the burning conflagration. Red Guards not only put up big posters and slogans but distributed pamphlets and appeals, searched people’s houses, confiscated their properties, burned up calligraphy, paintings, theatrical costumes, and destroyed relics and temples. Red Guards from Beijing Normal University destroyed Confucius’ altar in Qufu while their counter- parts in Shandong province dug up the skeleton of Wuxun and burned it in the street.

China was submitted to a red terror wherein Figure 1: Fine Art Fighting Report, newspaper (inaugural issue) everything deemed “feudalistic,”“bourgeois,” published by the Fine Art Fighting Report Editorial Office, 1967. and “revisionist” would come under attack. Courtesy of Wang Mingxian. Photo: Howard Ursuliak Books and photographs declared “pornographic” were destroyed. Bizarre hairstyles, jeans, and all kinds of Hong Kong clothing styles were banned. A garment store put up a sign stating, “it is never quick enough to manufacture revolutionary clothing and destroy bizarre attires.” The Red Flag Combat Team from the Beijing Aviation Institute started a campaign to paint all the walls and gates in the nation red. These walls and gates were covered with Mao’s quotations in order to create a “red ocean.”The number of Mao’s badges was so numerous that it went beyond one’s imagination.

Russian artists once proudly declared that “the street is our painting brush and plaza our drawing board.”Futurist artists vowed to “destroy museums and libraries.”What these artists were asserting in words was taken up and applied by the Red Guards.

      By 1967, Red Guard organizations were established in every art college and university art department, including Prairie Fire in the Central Academy of Fine Art and Dongfanghong Commune in the Central Academy of Industrial Design. Propaganda caricatures and paintings produced by Red Guards from the middle schools and colleges as well as those produced by workers were Figure 2: Fine Art Fighting Report, newspaper, published by the Fine Art Fighting Report Editorial Office of the People’s commonplace in the streets. Fine Art Publishing House, 1967. Courtesy of Wang Mingxian. Photo: Howard Ursuliak

The year 1967 also saw the emergence of an astonishing number of art publications and spontaneous art exhibitions edited and staged by Red Guards and their supporters (figs. 1 and 2). The publications included Art Combat, Red Art, Red Artist, Art Storm, just to name a few. These publications and exhibitions marked the climax of the Red Guard art movement.

 The revolutionary exhibition entitled Long Live the Victory of Mao Zedong Thought was held at the China Art Gallery on May 23, 1967. It was organized by eighty-four Red Guard organizations in Beijing and featured several hundred prints, caricatures, picture posters, and new quotations. On May 25, Long Live the Cultural Revolution Touring Art Exhibition was held in Tian’anmen Square. A number of responses to the exhibition were recorded. One worker noted, “It is very good. We never had any time before to go to an art show, but now we can see it in ten minutes or so on the way home from work.”2 Another worker remarked, “Art was not meant for us workers, peasants, and soldiers, but now it is so wonderful because they put up the show at our doorstep.”3 An old worker stated, “It is the first time that a show of this kind was ever held in the seventeen years after liberation, and also the first time since the beginning of history. You had to go to a big city to see an art show in the past, but how can we have so much time?”4 Still another worker said, “Art shows in the past were run by experts, so they were not held in factories and the countryside. Now you did it. So it is a victory of the Cultural Revolution.”5 An old worker exclaimed, “This is my first time to see such a fine art show in seventeen years. It made us proud and smashed the enemies’ arrogance. You should paint more.”6 A serviceman said, “These paintings are really good: as powerful as bayonets and grenades. We like them very much. The art shows in the past were confined in exhibition halls which were old and alien to us, not something to entertain workers, peasants, and soldiers.”7 After Tian’anmen Square the exhibition subsequently traveled to various communes and army barracks around the country.

In June 1967, an exhibition entitled Capital Red Guard Revolutionary Rebellion Exhibition was held in the Beijing Exhibition Hall (fig. 3). Sponsored by the Red Guard Congresses of colleges and middle schools, the exhibition showcased many watercolor paintings and sculptures (figs. 4 and 5). However, Red Guard art exhibitions were not limited to Beijing. For the eighteenth anniversary of the founding of China, the China Art Gallery hosted the Long Live the Victory of Mao Zedong’s Revolutionary Line Art Exhibition. This large-scale event featured 1,600 works contributed from all over the country, including traditional Chinese paintings, oil paintings, prints, posters, clay

Figure 3: A Brief Guide of the Capital’s Red Guard Revolutionary Rebel Exhibition, catalogue, published 1967. Courtesy of Wang Mingxian. Photo: Howard Ursuliak

 sculptures, and handicrafts. A touring team then took part of the exhibition as well as slides to show people living in the rural regions of the nation.

These revolutionary exhibitions were heralded as “the great achievements of the Cultural Revolution and a review of the earthshaking revolution in the art circle.”8 They received favorable comments from laboring people. After seeing one of the shows, Wei Fengying, a famous model worker commented excitedly:

The broad masses of workers, peasants and solders have taken up brushes to sing praise of our beloved leader Chairman Mao. Each piece is imbued with shining Mao Zedong thought and a testimony of our great leader’s trust in and sympathy with the masses.9

Art works and Red Guard publications produced during this time were not signed with the names of the artists or editors. Only the names of the Red Guard factions were mentioned. The editorial board of the renowned Art Combat was comprised of nine Red Guard organizations.10 The author- itative Art Storm was also run by nine Red Guard organizations, including the preparatory group of the revolutionary committee of the Central Academy of Fine Art. The tendency to focus on the collective runs counter to much of the art produced in the West. The idea was to highlight prole- tarian collectivism rather than promote a “bourgeois” position of seeking personal fame and gain.

    Members of the Red Guard believed that the Chinese art world was controlled by “capitalist- roaders.”Liu Shaoqi, the vice-president of China, was considered the top capitalist-roader within the Communist Party.11 Traditional subject matter in painting was not only seen as exerting a negative influence on the revolutionary people but also subverting the economic foundation of socialism and paving the way for the restoration of capitalism.12 This subject matter included the portrayal of royal figures, scholars, and beauties from the past. The Red Guard wanted to destroy the monopoly of the art world by capitalist authorities with the help of workers, peasants, and soldiers. Their targets were capitalist-roaders (ranging from Liu Shaoqi to the leaders of the China Art Association), old academic institutions like the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Painting Academy, and reactionary artists.

In order to offset the “backward” influence of Liu, they listed a number of charges against him: (1) he grossly opposed the revolutionary theory set forth in the literature of Mao Zedong; (2) he needed to undergo ideological retraining; (3) he opposed the revolutionary struggle waged by workers, peasants, and soldiers; (4) he advocated the wholesale acceptance of feudalistic traditions in art and culture; (5) he impeded artists from associating with the proletariat; (6) he denied the Party leadership over the creation of a truly Chinese painting; (7) he favored the creation of works that “used the past to satirize the present;” and (8) he engaged in anti-Party activities by utilizing ancient artists.13

In the campaign against “reactionary artists,”the most renowned artist in China, Qi Baishi, was targeted. Liaison stations were set up and Red Guards would ask whether Qi was a revolutionary, like Lu Xun, or a running dog of the National Party in Taiwan.14 “Evidence” was gathered to prove that Qi had been a counterrevolutionary all along. Red Guards argued against Qi’s concept of “art revolution,”claiming that it was deceptive. They asserted that if Qi’s paintings became popular, then people would be ideologically disarmed. They would forget class struggle, be attacked by the enemy, and dilute socialism of its true colour.”In order to disarm the myth of Qi, they even concocted a tale:

 On January 23, 1956, three foreigners visited Qi. After they were introduced, Qi (the stooge) bent his right leg as if to kneel down. It was only due to fact that the arms of the others present supported him that he did not do that. Some people tried to pass it off by saying he was too old to be able to stand stable. But how can such a scum of nation, who readily trembles in front of foreigners, maintain his integrity?”15

Other artists who were persecuted included Chen Banding, Pan Tianshou, Ye Qianyu, Huan Zhou, and Shi Lu. In addition, the education system of the Central Academy of Fine Arts was also attacked and accused of imparting feudalistic, bourgeois, and revisionist ideologies.

As vicious rebels, Red Guards tried to subvert the established art world in China. This attempt was manifest in their attack on the traditional Chinese art, established artists, and those in charge of art institutions. Curiously, they rarely attacked western style paintings. Perhaps part of the reason for this can be found in Mao Zedong’s letter to a government minister written on August 4, 1967. Mao wrote: “Painting is a science which should be pursued in terms of the human body — as in Xu Beihong’s sketches rather than Qi Baishi’s.”16 Members of the Red Guards agreed with Mao’s idea and consequently concentrated their attacks on feudalistic traditions in art and culture. Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, was fond of western-style painting and promoted the practice of sketching the human form in the manner of Xu Beihong.

Figure 4 & 5: Photographer unknown, Ode to Red Guards, 1967, silver gelatin print, 38.5 x 33.5 cm. Courtesy of Wang Mingxian. Photo: Howard Ursuliak

    The Red Guards’ vehemence towards “reactionary authorities” and traditional art seemed to be linked to their disdain of official individuals and institutions that were in power prior to the Cultural Revolution. Under the slogan “break with tradition and create a new one,”they tried to create an epoch-making and gloriously new form of art. Red Guard art production was predominantly comprised of picture posters and caricatures. The former was usually created out of woodcut or quasi-woodcut prints using inks and gouache. In the larger exhibitions, however, oil and ink and wash paintings were exhibited along with sculpture.

The modernist writer Lu Xun once noted, “woodcut is most popular during the course of revolution.”This proved to be the case during the Cultural Revolution. The medium became a ubiquitous feature on almost all billboards. The figures represented in these posted prints were almost always workers, peasants, and soldiers with robust and well-developed muscles. They

  would often be portrayed wielding a pen or brush in a weapon-like manner and standing in front of surrealist scenes.

The prints featuring Mao Zedong were also ubiquitous during the Cultural Revolution 057 058 period and consisted of a unique graphic language. The most popular portraits of Mao were created by Shen Yaoyi, a member of the Red Guard from the Print Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (fig. 5). His works, such as Long Live Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought!, reveal his knowledge of Western sketching techniques. However, unlike Western-style sketches, Shen avoided adding too many shadows on Mao’s face. He created faces that 059 060 were very clear-cut in a manner associated with ancient Chinese painting. They were neither too delicate not too detailed. Hence, these portraits of Mao not only revealed ideological implications but also aesthetic ideals.

The genre of caricature also constituted a crucial part of Red Guard art practice. Caricatures could be found everywhere —

061 062 in large cities like Beijing and Shanghai, Figure 5: Shen Yaoyi, Portraits of Mao Zedong, 1968, woodblock print. in smaller cities, and even in rural areas. Reproduced from Wang Mingxian and Yan Shenchen, Xin Zhongguo Meishu tu shi (The art history of the People’s Republic of China) (Beijing: Zhongguo Picture posters also featured caricatures. Qingniqn chuban she, 2000), figs. 057-060 Beginning with its first issue in 1967, Art Combat featured full-page caricatures. The collected works from the Long Live the Victory of Mao Zedong Thought Revolutionary Exhibition included a large number of caricatures of Liu Shaoqi. Weng Rulan, a student of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, published her caricature, The Bad Sorts on February 22, 1967, in East Is Red. Since her father was a famous scholar, she was able to produce caricatures of government and senior art officials who were friends of her father.

Even though the medium of oil painting was considered a refined art, Red Guards incorporated it into their art production. For instance, oil paintings such as The East is Red, Great Strategic Panning, and The Unity of China and Albania were produced and exhibited. The East is Red represents Mao with Lin Bao, Zhou Enlai, Jiang Qing, and other Party leaders as Mao reviews the Red Guard on the Tian’anmen rostrum. The painting was garishly rich in colours.

At the Mao Zedong Thought Illuminated the Miners at Anyuan Coal Mine Exhibition, an oil painting entitled Chairman Mao goes to Anyuan was shown. Its caption read: “A collective work of students from Colleges and Universities in Beijing. Painted by Liu Chuhua.”Liu was a student of the Central Academy of Art and Design. The revolutionary aesthetic principles of brightness,

 lightness, comprehensiveness, and massiveness are clearly visible in this painting. Mao is represented in a conspicuous place. His head is turned up slightly and his left hand in clasped. He wears a semi-old blue gown and holds an umbrella in his right hand. The combination of Mao’s figure with the clouds, trees, grass, and mountains are filled with meaning. Since Liu never received training in oil painting, he was not restricted by any conventions. He created a new painting style that incorporated Chinese heavy color technique.

This painting was well received by the public when it was displayed in October 1967. At the forty-seventh anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1968, the Central Party Committee decided to publicize a number of outstanding paintings in order to illustrate the achievements of the Cultural Revolution. Disappointed with many of the paintings, Jiang Qing chose Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan. On July 1, a reproduction of the painting was featured in the official newspaper People’s Daily and was popularized nationwide. It was also printed on stamps and various badges. It was rumored that even Mao himself was elated by the painting and requested that it be installed in Zhongnanhai, the Party headquarters. Zhou Enlai is reported to have hung a tinplate reproduction of this painting in his bedroom.17

The development of Chinese painting can be seen as going from the new style of woodcut advocated by Lu Xun, to Mao’s call for an art in service of the working classes, to the “red modernism” created by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Of course, the realism of the former Soviet Union also exerted some influence on this development. Within Red Guard art production, woodcut, caricature, and oil painting were combined to constitute a unique and distinct graphic language.

After 1969, Red Guards retreated from the political arena and their art movement was at a low tide. It was not until 1972, when the Cultural Team of the State Council held the national art exhibition, that Red Guard art production reached its second point of apogee. The works displayed in this state-run art exhibition reflected mostly socialist realist tendencies rather than the rebellious spirit of the Red Guard.

Therefore, we may say that the Red Guard art movement has left us with a unique history that took place in the stormy streets during the Cultural Revolution. Contemporary art historian Gao Minglu has written:

Various badges, picture posters, etc., during the Cultural Revolution are comparable with the advertisements of Coca Cola in effect. The cult of revolutionary media and leaders during the Cultural Revolution was far greater than the cult of commercial advertisement and movie or singing stars in the West today.18

This remark points to characteristics of Red Guard art. By creating an artistic language smacking of “red modernism,”Red Guard art was unmatched in its ability to convince the masses to partici- pate in street art and other art activities. It is important to study the art production advocated and produced by members of the Red Guard in order to fill a vacuum in the art history of China. As this research has just started, it is hoped that more scholars will join in to probe this distinct form of art that was created during an era of ideological frenzy and social chaos.

 Notes A version of this paper was presented on March 22, 2002, at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design for the “Cultural Production and the Cultural Revolution” conference. The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery organized the conference in collaboration with the Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia; the Department of History, University of Victoria, and the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Victoria. The conference was in conjunction with the exhibition Art of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976 at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (March 22 – August 25, 2002). This paper will be included in a forthcoming publication of the conference by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver. 1 Yu Hui, Secret Accounts of Red Guards (Beijing: United Press, 1993), 190. 2 Editorial Office of the Touring Exhibition, “Touring Exhibition is Great,” in Pictorial Bulletin of Touring Exhibition (June 1967). 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Fine Art Critical Group of Cultural and Art Set-ups of the Central Government, “The Ode to Chairman Mao’s Revolutionary Line: Review of Art Exhibition Long Live the Victory of Chairman Mao’s Revolutionary Line,” New Fine Art, no. 1 (1967). Art Circle’s Liaison Station for Criticizing Qi Baishi and the Fine Art Critical Group of Cultural and Art Set-ups of the Central Government. 9 Wei Fengying, “Observations on the Art Exhibition Long Live of the Victory of Chairman Mao’s Revolutionary Line,” Proletarian Pictorial and Fine Art Fighting Report, no. 5 (July 1967). 10 Art Combat was started on April 20, 1967. 11 This term “capitalist-roader” refers to persons in power taking the capitalist road. It was a political label often pinned onto cadres of the government by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. 12 Fine Art Critical Group of Cultural and Art Set-ups of the Central Government, “The Ode to Chairman Mao’s Revolutionary Line: Review of the Art Exhibition Long Live the Victory of Chairman Mao’s Revolutionary Line,” New Fine Art, no. 1 (1967). 13 See Temporary United Committee and the Anti-Revisionism Force of the Red Guard Congress at the Affiliated High School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Red Rebellion Team of the China Art Museum, eds., “Cut off Liu Shaoqi’s Talons Towards the Chinese Ink Painter’s Community,” Art Storm, no. 2 (1967). 14 See Art Circle’s Liaison Station for Criticizing Qi Baishi and the Fine Art Critical Group of Cultural and Art Set-ups of the Central Government, eds., “Thoroughly Expose and Punish Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Yang’s Towering Crimes of Promoting Qi Baishi and Restoring Capitalism,” Art Storm, no. 5 (1967). 15 “Qi Baishi’s Ludicrous Performance of Sycophancy and Obsequiousness,” Art Storm, no. 5 (1967). 16 Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong on Literature and Art, rev. ed. (Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House, 1992). 17 See Yuan Dongming, “Liu Chuhua: Artist of ‘Mao goes to Anyuan,’” in Interview with Celebrities of the Cultural Revolution (Beijing: Central Minorities Academy Press, 1993). 18 See Gao Minglu, “Mao Zedong’s Popular Art Formula,” in The Great Cultural Revolution: Historical Records and Research (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press).

     :          

 

Figure 1. Tang Xiaohe, Go Ahead in the Wind and Waves with Chairman Mao, 1971, poster. Reproduced from Wang Mingxian and Yan Shenchen, Xin Zhongguo Meishu tu shi (The art history of the People’s Republic of China) (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chuban she, 2000), fig. 214

 When the Fourth Front Red Army arrived in Yan’an after the Long March at the end of 1936, Mao Zedong’s leading role in the Chinese Communist Party and its army was firmly established. From that point on, Mao became a trope of Chinese art production. The earliest and most popu- lar image of Mao is a coloured woodblock print entitled Portrait of Mao by Wang Shikuo.1 Mao’s image could later be seen on various posters and New Year pictures. Due to wartime conditions, many of these pictures were produced on coarse materials.

The production of Mao pictures entered into a new phase of production during the decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Propaganda Department and with the active involvement of many artists, the image of Mao often appeared in oil and ink paintings, prints, sculptures, and New Year pictures. Before 1966, professional artists produced Mao’s portrait. In works such as Luo Gongliu’s Chairman Mao Gives a Report on Modifying Thought at the Cadre Meeting in Yan’an,2 Cai Liang’s The Son of the Poor Peasant,3 and Li Qi’s The Chairman Walks Throughout China,4 Mao is portrayed in association with guerilla warfare and as a leader of the peasants.

The Cultural Revolution brought the creation of Mao’s portrait to its most developed point. Frequently used as an image in nationwide campaigns, Mao was depicted with increased presence. To analyze the art production of Mao during the Cultural Revolution, it is useful to divide the Cultural Revolution years into three periods. The first period (1966-1967) involved the production

 of iconic portraits. The second period (1968-1971) consisted of the production of spontaneous and thematic representations of Mao. The third period (1972-1976) involved the organization of art exhibitions.

During the first period, Mao was predominantly represented in two media: one was the woodblock print and the other was large-scale oil paintings and poster reproductions of these paintings. Mao’s image in the woodblock print style was featured in newspapers, magazines, and on propaganda boards. This style (mainly in black and red) became very popular since it was relatively easy to produce and duplicate images. The most famous works were Go Ahead in the Wind and the Waves with Chairman Mao (fig. 1)and Long Live Marxism, Leninism, and Mao Zedong’s Thought! by Shen Yaoyi.5

The large-scale oil paintings were reproduced in poster form that were then printed by numerous publishing houses and displayed in public spaces and in homes. Some of the most important works were Wang Hui’s Sailing the Seas Depends Upon the Helmsman, Revolution Needs Mao Zedong’s Thought, (1967, fig.2) and Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan (1967, fig. 3) by Liu Chunhua.6 During this period, Mao’s image took on a mythical status. He was often represented as a solitary figure with a most lofty and authoritative manner.

On June 12, 1969, the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department issued a document entitled, “Some Problems with Painting Chairman Mao that Must be Noticed.”In this paper, local governments were advised “not to pursue the form, but rather the actual effect.”Newspapers were told “not to use the portrait of Mao as a masthead painting.”The document also Figure 2: Sailing the Seas Depends Upon the Helmsman, 1969, poster, 122 x 244 cm. Courtesy of Yan Shenchen. Photo: Howard Ursuliak ordered that “no Chairman Mao badges be produced without the permission of the Central Committee of CCP.”This notice quenched the mass “Icon Producing Movement” to some degree.

After the end of the most tumultuous period of the Red Guard movement, Chinese artists who were deeply influenced by the Soviet system of literature and art sought to depict their revolution- ary leader with higher aesthetic and technical standards. They paid more attention to the content and form and how to visualize the relationships between Mao and the people. Fang Zengxian’s Arouse Millions of Workers and Peasants (1968, fig. 4), Tang Xiaohe’s Go Ahead in the Wind and the Waves (1971), and Chen Yanning’s Chairman Mao Inspects the Countryside in Guangdong (1970 and 1972, fig. 5) are representative of the types of portraits that were produced between 1968 and 1971.

In July 1971, the Cultural Group of the State Department was founded. The founding of this department reveals the desire to organize and systematize the production and reception of literature and art in China. In terms of art production, the Culture Group held a series of important national exhibitions, including Commemorate the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art (1972), The National Fine Arts Works Exhibition (1972), National Exhibition of Lianhuanhua, Ink Painting (1973), and the National

 New Year Picture and the Youth and Children’s Arts Exhibition (1975). The works exhibited in these exhibitions followed the politically prescribed formula of being “tall, big, omnipotent, red, bright, and shining.” However, the works also revealed little difference from those produced before and after the Cultural Revolution. It could be argued that these artists tended to strive for technical excellence at the expense of political inspiration.

  :         Fang Zengxian graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1950s and was best known for his ink paintings such as Red Storyteller and Every Grain is Hard Work.7 His ink painting was considered a successful experiment because it represented a reform of traditional Chinese figure painting with a realistic approach bor- rowed from the Soviet realist model. Fang appropriated Figure 3: Liu Chunhua, Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan, 1969, the brushwork of traditional Chinese flower-and-bird poster, 116.5 x 87.5 cm. Courtesy of Yan Shenchen. Photo: painting in order to create lines full of expressive force. Howard Ursuliak

During the Cultural Revolution, he produced a popular oil painting entitled Arouse Millions of Workers and Peasants. According to Fang, Zhang Yongsheng, the leader of the student rebel faction in Zhejiang province at that time and a student of the Print Department of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, was not satisfied with the oil painting Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan because of its so-called artistic “immaturity.”In order to gain political power and respect, Zhang launched a large-scale campaign aimed at showcasing the great achievements of Chairman Mao throughout different historical periods. Students and teachers of every department of the academy participat- ed. The students did most of the work and the teachers offered technical guidance and advice.

Fang Zengxian and two other students of the Chinese Painting Department were given the task of depicting Chairman Mao in Anyuan in 1922. As research, they traveled to the small city in order to see what life was like there. It took them a long time to finish the preliminary sketch but only a month to finish the actual painting. Upon finishing a small-scale preliminary work, Fang suggested to Zhang that it was not suitable to produce an ink painting of eight square meters. He stated that it was difficult to anticipate what the final product would look like because they were unable to find a 1922 photograph of Mao to use as a reference. Fang argued that the expressive force of ink painting was not as strong as that of oil painting, especially during the “red” times. Zhang agreed and the painting was completed with oils.

Fang had studied with the French-trained painter Zhuang Ziman and learned the techniques of oil painting. Fang recalls that it took him almost half a month to model Mao’s image using a profile photograph of a middle-aged Mao. Strong light and the expressive method of Chinese painting were used to render Mao’s dress and accoutrements. The final effect was an image of strength and vitality. Fang’s colleagues praised the painting and political leaders were very pleased with it, especially Zhang Yongsheng. He wanted to make the painting a model of the slogans “make the old serve today” and “make foreign things serve China.”It is said that Zhang himself brought the work to Beijing in special vehicle so it could be approved by Jiang Qing and the other

 Figure 4: Fang Zengxian, Arouse Millions of Workers and Peasants, 1968, oil on canvas, 250 x 340 cm. Courtesy of TZ Hanart, Hong Kong. Photo: Howard Ursuliak central leaders. Despite the popularity of Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan, painters in Zhejiang were skeptical of this painting and believed that it basically a Western style oil painting that did not strictly adhere to the official slogans of “make the old serve today,”“making foreign things serve China,”and “let a hundred flowers blossom at the same time, put forth new ideas.”

Fang’s Arouse Millions of Workers and Peasants was modeled in a realistic manner. The facial expressions of the figures are very serious and their actions are full of vitality and determination. The pictorial composition and the gestures of the figures are similar to the portraits of Soviet leaders during the 1930s and 1940s. Although Fang used oil paints, he took up a number of expressive techniques coming out of traditional Chinese painting in terms of the articulation of lines, shading, and color. Half of the painting’s surface was left empty and some incidental details were omitted so as to emphasize the figures within the picture plane. Fang used lines to give prominence to the figures in a way that recalls the classical technique used in the Zhejiang School beginning in the Ming Dynasty.8

Compared to other paintings produced at the time, Arouse Millions of Workers and Peasants stood out in terms of its compactness and formal precision. Nevertheless, Jiang Qing disliked this work on the grounds that the oil paints were applied in manner that evoked the style of traditional Chinese painting. She felt it was inappropriate to promote this work as a model on the same level as Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan. I would argue that if Jiang Qing’s knowledge about Western and Chinese painting was as extensive as her knowledge about Western and Chinese theatre and dance, she may have been more supportive of this painting. She may have been more willing to raise it to the level of a model work to be studied and emulated. This unfavorable verdict was com- pletely unexpected by the leaders and artists in Zhejiang. The painting had already been published in some main publications in Zhejiang province and many color posters had been produced. Following this verdict from Beijing, this painting was soon to be forgotten and Fang never again tried to use traditional Chinese painting techniques for the purposes of creating Mao’s image.

        :          Tang Xiaohe’s oil painting Go Ahead in the Wind and Waves (1971) was very popular during the Cultural Revolution.9 It was published in numerous publications, including the People’s Daily and the Liberation Army Pictorial. It was applauded by both officials and the masses in terms of its subject matter and style. Its circulation was probably closest to that of Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan. Tang majored in oil painting at the Hubei College of Arts and graduated in 1965. His father, Tang Yihe, was a well-known oil painter whose ability to draw was as famous as that of the painter Xu Beihong. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Tang Xaohe suffered a great deal as a result of his family’s intellectual background. Nonetheless, Tang worshiped Chairman Mao, just like other youths did at that time.

On July 16, 1966, a seventy-three-year-old Chairman Mao swam nearly thirty kilometers of the Yangtse River in Hubei province. It was said to have taken him an hour and five minutes to do so. The event was much publicized by the media.10 While Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan represented a specific moment of early revolutionary history in China, Go Ahead in the Wind and the Waves would portray a more recent historical event, one that immediately foreshad- owed the Cultural Revolution and the call to socially reconstruct China. The phrase “strong wind and waves” can be read as a warning of danger and the need for courage in the revolution.

Go Ahead in the Wind and the Waves was realized very quickly. The modeling of the figures was entirely conceived by Tang. It took him two days to draw the sketch and only nine days to paint it on canvas. The painting was created for the National Fine Arts Exhibition to Commemorate the Thirtieth Anniversary of Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art. The subject of the painting was not assigned and came instead from Tang’s own “revolutionary enthusiasm.”Understanding the historical meaning of his subject, Tang conceived of Go Ahead in the Wind and the Waves in “monumental” terms. The painting was horizontal in composition, with the riverside slipway formed like a monument. The Yangtse River bridge and people swimming can be seen in the background. The low perspective positions the viewer in such a way that he or she would have to look up at the depicted scenery. Tang composed the figures to suggest monumental statuary. The image of Mao was based on a popular photograph that circulated at the time.

There were debates about this painting when it arrived in Beijing. For some, the image of Mao as a swimmer was acceptable in photography, but not in painting. To represent Mao swimming in a painting was seen as a diminishment of his “god-like stature.”It is true that for Chinese at that time, Mao’s private life was kept at abeyance from their imaginations. It was hard to accept an image of their leader in a swimsuit. One of the top art officials, Wang Mantian, argued that representing Mao in bare feet would lessen his “god-like” status. She hoped that the painter would solve this dilemma.

Tang was inspired by a historical story about the wisdom of a painter. The story recounts how an ancient painter was asked to paint a portrait for an emperor with an impaired left eye. The painter portrayed the emperor as he was hunting, with a bow in hand and his left eye shut. The emperor and his ministers were greatly pleased by the painting. To modify his painting, Tang decided to add a Red Guard with a buoy in hand in front of Chairman Mao. He found a pupil in Beijing’s Wangfujin district to sketch this figure. By adding this figure, Chairman Mao’s dignity was retained and the arrangement of the figures within the painting was improved. The political leaders praised Tang’s strategy. In the exhibition, the painting was

  prominently placed on the right side in the central hall near Chen Yanning’s Chairman Mao Inspects the Countryside in Guangdong.

By the time of this exhibition, the aesthetic concepts of “red, bright, and shining” were well known. Many spectators regarded Tang’s painting as a model of this concept. Tang’s use of color resulted in a dramatic effect whereby every block of color was blended with no more than four colors. Compared to the other paintings in the show, the colors in Go Ahead in the Wind and the Waves were very bright. The lightened parts of the figures’ faces, hands, and feet were colored vermilion, earth red, yellow ochre, and brown, while the unlit parts were colored ultramarine. Clothing and the surrounding areas were rendered in very bright colors as well. The whole painting was so bright that one could feel the “glare” of the colors. Tang is reported to have said that he wanted to achieve “a harmonious and lofty tone” and that such colors could give the spectators a feeling that was very similar to the summer sun in Wuhan. Go Ahead in the Wind and Waves can be regarded as an emblematic representation from the early part of the Cultural Revolution in terms of technical ability.

One year later, Tang and his wife, Cheng Li, recreated the same event in another painting entitled Grow up in the Wind and the Waves (fig. 6). To avoid making a propaganda picture like Go Ahead in the Wind and Waves, Tang and Cheng Li chose to emphasize aspects of daily life. A seated Mao is represented surrounded by a group of young people. Although Mao is seated, he is still positioned in the centre of the picture, with all eyes on him. Unlike the earlier painting, this canvas was more sophisticated in terms of its coloration. Although published in many newspapers and periodicals, its “sense of the times” was not considered to be as strong as was the case of Go Ahead in the Wind and Waves.

Figure 5: Chen Yanning, Chairman Mao Inspects the Countryside in Guangdong, 1972, poster, 61 x 84.5 cm. Courtesy of Yan Shenchen. Photo: Howard Ursuliak

        :          Based on publication records, Chairman Mao Inspects the Countryside in Guangdong was painted twice by Chen Yanning: once in 1970 and then again in 1972.11 The first painting was published as a poster in folio size by Figure 6: Tang Xiaohe & Chen Li, Grow up in the Wind and the Guangdong People’s Press. The painting was also Waves, 1976, poster, 1976, 87.5 x 116.5 cm, Courtesy of Yan Shenchen. Photo: Howard Ursuliak published in 1971 in Liberation Army Pictorial and Worker, Peasant, Soldier Pictorial. While the acknowledgment was given to the Former Site Museum of the Guangzhou Peasant Movement Institute where the painting displayed, the artist remained anonymous. The painting is still a part of the Former Site Museum’s collection.

The second version of Chairman Mao Inspects the Countryside in Guangdong was published so many times that an accurate number cannot be given. It was published in nearly every newspaper and magazine related to art in China. It is likely that it was first published in folio by the People’s Press in 1972 after the National Fine Arts Exhibition to Commemorate the Thirtieth Anniversary of Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art. The last time it was featured in a Cultural Revolution publication was probably in 1977 in Hold High Chairman Mao’s Great Flag and Forge Ahead Victoriously: Selection of Art Works, which was printed by the People’s Fine Arts Press.

The painting was described in the article “Stride Forward on Golden Light Road: On the Oil Painting Chairman Mao Inspects the Countryside in Guangdong.”This article was featured in the first volume of Introduction on Fine Arts Works which was published by Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Press in 1973. The author of the article, Fang Shouyu, suggested that:

The painting [Chairman Mao Inspects the Countryside in Guangdong] was inspired by Mao’s 1958 inspection of Tangxia Production Team in the suburb of Guangzhou. A new social organization, the People’s Commune, was established in the Chinese countryside that year. Farmers, workers, soldiers, students, and merchants were joined together and the governmental and productive organizations became united as one. The painting depicts Mao leading a crowd of poor peasants who are striding forward in a wide road. It pays tribute to Mao’s great revolutionary stance and to the courage of those peasants who followed “Chairman Mao’s Revolutionary Line.”

In relation to the earlier version of this painting, Chen Yanning left the basic arrangement of the pictorial composition the same but made a few changes. In the 1970 version, Mao is painted in an even light. In the 1972 painting, however, a sharp light source from the side illuminates the figure of Mao. Moreover, the second version presents a more dramatic contrast between the light and dark areas within the composition.

While Chairman Mao Inspects the Countryside in Guangdong is based on the historical incident of Mao’s inspection of the Tangxia suburb of Guangzhou, the representation of the figures and their dress resemble fishermen in the Haifeng and Lufeng counties, a seaside region in Guangdong Province. It is possible that the heavyset figures of the fishermen better reflected the idea of the revolutionary labouring class. Another reason might be that the fishermen were more attractive in their pleated and loosely fitting clothing blowing in the wind.

 Fang claimed that this painting succeeded in expressing the relationship between the revolution- ary leader and the ordinary people. He noted that:

Mao is placed slightly in front of the crowd and at the center of the picture plane. It was important to portray Mao standing tall and looking into the distance while leading the peasants forward on the wide road of the People’s Commune. The painting used flaming colors. Chairman Mao’s white clothes clearly contrasted with the dark background. The few white clouds flying in the sky looked natural, which was useful to express the Great Leader Chairman Mao’s boldness and breadth of vision.

In terms of the painting’s formal construction, Chen Yanning was praised for the way he rendered the figures’ hands, feet, and the pleats in their clothing. Mao and the peasants appeared robust and strong. A case could be made that Chen Yanning was strongly influenced by the brushwork of the Russian painter Mikhail Vroubel.12 For instance, the way the trouser legs were painted is reminis- cent of Vroubel’s The Seated Demon. The pleats of the clothing worn by the old farmwife on the left conveyed a visual rhythm and reflected well Chen Yanning’s modeling skills. There is an emphasis on brushwork that can be seen in the forehead and jawbone of the old peasant on the left of Mao. The hands of the peasant in this painting from the Cultural Revolution were rendered very large and did not strictly follow anatomical drawings.

As a painting produced near the end of the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Inspects the Countryside in Guangdong represented a move away from the principles of “tall, big, omnipotent, red, bright, shining,”and dramatic in gesture. It also represented a move away from Soviet-style historical paintings, which often utilized gray tones. Chen Yanning’s painting is innovative in terms of its use of a strong color palette, the rendering of concise forms and shapes, the use of elaborate brushwork, and the omission of minor details deemed unimportant to the overall mes- sage of the painting.

Notes 1 Wang Shikuo (1911-1973) studied art at the Peking Art College, the National Hangzhou Art College, and the Shanghai Art College during the 1930s. In 1936, he entered the National Tokyo Art College. In 1938, he went to Yan’an and taught at the Luxun Academy of Art and Literature. In 1950, Wang was appointed as a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. It is possible that an earlier image of Mao appeared in a black-and-white woodblock print entitled Red Star Shining in China by Wo Zha. See Clear Sky: Collection of Woodcuts in the Liberated Regions from 1937-1949 (Beijing: Hunan Art Publishing House, 1998), 28. 2 Luo Gongliu (b. 1916) studied art at the National Hangzhou Art College. In 1938, he went to Yan’an and worked in the Northern China Front. After 1949, he was a professor in the Oil Painting Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He taught Advanced Study at the Repin Academy of Art in Russia from 1955 to 1958. After his return to China, he devoted himself to producing historical paintings. Chairman Mao Gives a Report on Modifying Thought at the Cadre Meeting in Yan’an is in the collection of the Chinese Military Museum in Beijing. 3 Cai Liang (1932-1995) graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1955 and worked in the Xi’an Branch of the Chinese Artists Association. He taught at the Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts beginning in 1978 and at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts from 1981. The Son of the Poor Peasant is in the collection of the China Art Museum in Beijing. 4 Li Qi (b. 1928) entered the Training Program for Art Cadre in the Army at the Luxun Academy of Art and Literature in Yan’an in 1941. Beginning in 1950, he taught at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The Chairman Walks Throughout China is in the collection of the China Art Museum in Beijing. 5 Shen Yaoyi (b. 1943) graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is now a professor in the Stage Design Department of the China Academy of Traditional Operas in Beijing. 6 Liu Chunhua (b. 1944) entered the Affiliated High School of the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in 1959. In 1963, he became a student at the Central College of Art and Design in Beijing. Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan was sold to the China Construction Bank for 6.5 million RMB at the China’s Guardian Autumn Auction in October, 1995. See Major News of the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1989 (Beijing: Shandong People’s Publishing House, 1989). 7 Fang Zengxian (b. 1931) graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1953. After completing the Graduate Program, he started teaching at his Alma Mater in 1955. He is now the director of the Shanghai Art Museum. Arouse Millions of Workers and Peasants was painted by Fang, Yang Huijun (his student), and two PLA soldiers. It is now in the collection of the Hanart Gallery in Hong Kong. 8 This style of ink painting was practiced by the following teachers of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts during the 1950s and 1960s: Fang Zhengxian, Li Zhenjian, and Zhou Changgu. 9 Tang Xiaohe (b. 1941) graduated from the Hubei College of Arts in 1965. He worked at the Hubei Art Institute and became a professor and the president of the Hubei College of Fine Art in 1994. Go Ahead in the Wind and Waves is in the collection of the Hanart Gallery in Hong Kong. 10 On the same day between 1966 to 1976, more than ten thousand people participated in the “Cross the Yangtse River Festival” in order to memorialize Mao’s feat. Several people drowned each time during the event. 11 Chen Yanning (b. 1945) graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1965 and became a professional artist in the Guangdong Painting Institute. He moved to the United States in the 1980s. Chairman Mao Inspects the Countryside in Guangdong was produced in 1972 and is in the collection of the China Art Museum. 12 Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910) was a Russian artist with a painting style influenced by Byzantine mosaic and Renaissance paintings.

   :        

 

Figure 1: Man’s Whole World is Mutable, Seas Become Mulberry Fields: Chairman Mao Inspects the Situation of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Northern, South Central and Eastern China, 1967, poster, 61 x 84.5 cm. Courtesy of Wang Mingxian. Photo: Howard Ursuliak

In May 1996, Newsweek published a Chinese painting on its cover to mark the thirtieth anniver- sary of the Cultural Revolution in China (fig. 1). In this painting, Mao wears an army uniform and a red collar badge. With his hat in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Mao stands defiant and proud under a rosy sky in front of a birds-eye view of China. Behind, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Jinggang Mountain, and Lushan Mountain can be seen covered with crowds waving countless red flags. The painting’s original title is Man’s Whole World is Mutable, Seas Become Mulberry Fields: Chairman Mao Inspects the Situation of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Northern, South Central, and Eastern China. The first line is from a poem written by Mao in April 1949, entitled The PLA Captures Nanjing.1

Most art works, including paintings, posters, sculptures and political cartoons, were created anonymously and collectively during the first part of the Cultural Revolution. Personal contribu- tion and credit were not recognized. Instead of the artist’s name, the work was usually attributed to an organization or group. Often referred to as Chairman Mao Inspects Areas South and North of Yangtze River, this painting acknowledges the source on the lower right side: “provided by the Zhejiang Art University of Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers.”

When I first saw the cover of Newsweek, I was suddenly reminded of many memories from my inerasable past. When the Cultural Revolution ended after Mao’s death in 1976 and the downfall of the Gang of Four, most art works produced during the early years of the revolution were considered meaningless political propaganda and destroyed or thrown away. My colleagues and I did the same thing in order to release ourselves from the nightmare. Nobody knew where the original canvas of this oil painting was and nobody cared.

 Thirty years ago, I was a young teacher working at my Alma Mater, the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. It was founded in 1928 by Cai Yuanpei, a liberal educationist, and Lin Fengmian, an artist trained in Europe. Directly under the jurisdiction of the State Ministry of Culture, it is one of two prestigious art institutions of higher education in China and where many of the best artists in the country have been trained in recent decades.2 Because of its liberal approach, the school has a history of cultivating revolutionaries and rebellions. In 1929, Chen Zhuokun and some schoolmates organized a group called Yi ba yi she (Society of the Eighteen).3 Inspired by the famous writer Lu Xun, these young students actively promoted woodcut as a revo- lutionary art form and took part in the 1930s left-wing movement in art and literature.4 Some of the members of this group were arrested and a young girl named Yao Fu (Xia Peng) lost her life in jail at the age of twenty-four.

Despite its progressive and revolutionary stance during the first two decades of the Communist regime, the Zhejiang Academy was often referred to as “the base camp of bourgeois liberalization.” During the early 1950s, Lin Fengmian was compelled to leave his teaching position. In 1957, Vice-President Mo Pu, Dean Jin Lang, and thirty-two teachers and students were labelled “bourgeois rightists” and nearly all of the leaders at the Academy were removed for their “anti- communist party activities.”This event was referred to as “a very rare case in the whole nation.”5

On May 16, 1966, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party passed the famous “Circular of May Sixteen,”a document partially written and edited by Mao that announced the theory, guideline, and policies for launching the Cultural Revolution. This date is commonly considered to mark the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China. Beginning in early July, students in almost all of the universities and schools in China were encouraged by the newly appointed Small Committee of Cultural Revolution of the CCP to walk out of their classes and join in the “revolutionary mass criticism and repudiation” activities. Rebel students at the Zhejiang Academy, along with a few young teachers and workers, formed a radical group called Hong wei bing zhan dou dui (Red Guard Fighting Force). This group was lead by Zhang Yongsheng, a fifth-year student in the Printmaking Department who was from Hanshan, a small town in the neighbouring province of Anhui. He was in my watercolour class for a year and was never considered a particularly talented student or potential leader. To the surprise of many teachers, Zhang played a key role during the turbulent period of the Cultural Revolution, not only at the school but also in the entire region.

As the head of the campus Red Guards, Zhang successfully networked with other radical student organizations from other high schools and universities in the city. Beginning in the summer of 1966, classes were cancelled in schools throughout China despite the fact that teachers and staff still received their minimum wages and students remained in the dormitories. On November 15, 1966, Zhang formed Hong san si (The Headquarter of Revolutionary and Rebel Red Guards of Hangzhou). On December 30, he established Sheng lian zong (General Headquarter of United Zhejiang Rebel Factions) and proceeded to expand his power to other areas in the province.

In early 1967, under Zhang’s leadership, Red Guards kidnapped Jiang Hua, the party secretary of the Zhejiang province, and a powerful member of the Central Politburo of the CCP. Following the example of Shanghai’s “January Storm,”many violent rallies were organized to attack the legiti- mate provincial government.6 Zhang was officially appointed vice-chairman of the “Revolutionary Committee of Zhejiang” in 1968. He also held a concurrent post as the Chairman of the

 “Revolutionary Committee” of the Academy and became one of the most powerful persons in this important coastal province — a province with a population of thirty two million.

During the years of the Cultural Revolution, people were generally divided into three categories. The first was the zao fan pai or the rebels and radicals who led or joined the rebellion activities and struggled for and won the power of their danwei (units). The second category was the bao shou pai or politically active “conservatives” who, while espousing Mao’s cause, often defended the existing authorities and opposed the seizure of power by the rebels. The third was the xiao yao pai or non-partisan crowd who stayed away from the political factions and tried to maintain a private life separate from politics. These categories were applied to each person and his or her fate was affected accordingly.

I was labelled a stubborn conservative even though I was quite excited when the Cultural Revolution began. Mao’s idea of taking a critical approach to the literature and arts of the past and creating a new culture for working people sounded very appealing to me. As a young artist, I was dissatisfied with the way the art establishment was controlled by a few bureaucrats and old-fash- ioned senior artists. I believed that the Cultural Revolution would open a new phase for China as well as the world. Many of my colleagues shared the same excitement and enthusiasm in the first few months of 1966. We burned our own paintings and writings and got rid of many of our books on classical Chinese and Western literature from our bookshelves. Unfortunately, the Red Guards did not appreciate our self-criticism and revolutionary spirit. They saw us as incurable sinners who were beyond redemption since we had been educated under the “capitalist revisionist educa- tional system” for too long. We were not allowed to join the Red Guards or any rebellion activities.

When I expressed my disagreement with the excessive violence of the Red Guards, I was arrested by the Red Guard Fighting Force at the beginning of January 1967 and placed in the niu peng (cowshed) on campus that served as the detention building where the “monsters and demons” were kept. I was held prisoner there for about three months and shared a room with Pan Tien Shou, a renowned artist and the president of the Zhejiang Academy, as well as a dozen other senior professors and school leaders. We would wake up in the morning, sweep the campus, and then line up to recite Mao’s quotations and slogans. Most of time, however, we sat in the room and studied Mao’s Little Red Book and Cultural Revolution documents. As detainees, we had to criticize and humiliate each other in order to show our willingness to subordinate ourselves to the Red Guards.

Considered too young to be kept in the niu peng, I was released in April 1967 and appointed to work in the school cafeteria for another three months. I learned how to get up at two o’clock in the morning and cook a huge barrel of rice porridge for hundreds of students. I eventually won back my freedom through hard work and obedience. I was allowed to go back to my department building and join other “revolutionary masses” for “re-education.”Besides reading newspapers and official documents, we did not do much except sit and talk for the most of the time. Painting and other activities considered non-political were not permitted. We felt that there was no reason to get involved in such dangerous activity anyway.

In the summer of 1967, the situation in many provinces throughout China was marked by massive confrontation and fighting between different rebel and mass factions. Large-scale battles were fought in Shanghai, Nanjing, Changzhou, Zhengzhou, Shenyang, Chongqing, Changsha, and other major cities. Numerous lives were lost and the legitimate governmental system totally collapsed.

 After the “July Twentieth Incident” in Wuhan, there was the imminent threat of civil war.7 Mao felt that it was the time to regain control in order to prevent the coun- try from falling into chaos. He took a special trip to cities in the north, east, and central south of China in order to inspect the pre- carious situation. On October 7, 1967, immediately following this unannounced inspection, the Central Committee of the Figure 2: Great Yak, n.d., jade, 21 x 14 x 7 cm. Courtesy of and photo: Shengtian Zheng CCP announced and circulated Mao’s new instruction. It called for a ceasefire among opposing mass organizations and stated that “There is no conflict of interests inside the working class and there is no reason to split into two organizations of large irreconcilable groups.”8

I had been very puzzled since the Red Guard Movement began. I thought the Cultural Revolution was supposed to create a new culture and encourage new ideologies. I thought its purpose was to eliminate the differences between intellectuals and the working class by uniting the interests and abilities of all sectors of society. The violence applied by the Red Guards shocked me. When I was arrested by students on a chilly night in a small town Jiaxin near Hangzhou, I argued with them and said, “Beating me only can touch my skin and flesh, but not my soul.”Their response was, “Revolution is not inviting somebody to dine, is not painting, nor embroidering.”We all quoted from Mao’s Little Red Book.

During the months spent in detention, I was very distressed and did not understand why I was treated as an enemy. I did not understand how the Cultural Revolution could stir up such hatred among people. Later, the violence increased and bloodshed occurred all over the country. Like many other loyal believers, I still trusted Mao and thought that these developments went against Mao’s intention. When Mao’s new instruction was released and the wrongdoing of using excessive violence was criticized and a call for unification was made, I felt a sense of release and was filled with hope once again. His instruction stated:

Some became Conservatives and made mistakes. It’s just a question of understanding. If one stands on the wrong side, then step to our side, that is all… The majority of cadres are good, only a very small minority are bad… We allow cadre to make mistakes, and allow them to correct their mistakes. Do not attack and bring them down once they make a mistake… We have to tell the heads of revolutionary rebels and young Red Guards: now is the time they may make some mistakes too.9

Everything Mao said sounded so right to me. Around the time that Mao’s instruction was released, students and teachers were preparing a new exhibition to salute the Cultural Revolution. For almost a year, nobody had touched their brushes and painting boxes. We never thought that we would go back to the studio. When the smoke of gunpowder gradually dispersed on the campuses, Red Guards threw themselves into another feverish action. In October 1967, an exhibition called Long Life of the Victory of the Revolutionary Line of Mao Zedong was held at the China Art Gallery in Beijing to commemorate the eighteenth anniversary of the People’s Republic. This was the first national exhibition since 1966 and some sixteen hundred paintings, posters, sculptures, and crafts by both amateur and professional artists were shown.10 The exhibition was an example of this new enthusiasm in art production and many exhibitions soon followed in other provinces and cities.

 After a long period in quarantine, I was allowed to join in the Fan xiu zu (Anti-Revisionism Group) activities of the Oil Painting Department in the fall of 1967. Members were busy preparing art works for the upcoming exhibitions. Of course, all the works had to eulogize Mao. One of our collective products was a series of portraits representing Mao at different ages and in front of different historical sites, such as Nanhu Lake of Jiaxing (where the first CCP Congress was held in a boat in 1921) and Jinggang Mountain (where Mao established the first revolutionary military base in 1927). Of these sixteen portraits, I was assigned one: Mao’s face glowing from the torch lights during the 1945 parade in Yan’an celebrating China’s victory over Japan at the end of the Second World War.

Teachers felt useful again in the Cultural Revolution. Their professional skills were needed and valued in order to produce good paintings. Quan Shanshi, a professor who trained at the Repin Academy of Fine Arts in Leningrad during the 1950s, suddenly found himself the centre of attention since many student needed his help to achieve the likeness of Mao’s face and the colour balance for the composition. The portraits were published and distributed all over the country.

With a little more self-esteem and confidence, I started to work out the composition of a new painting of Mao. I wanted to depict him as a leader who stands high above and overlooks the country in order to symbolize his recent inspection trip and instruction. In terms of style, I was still fascinated by Mao’s idea of “combining Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism.”11 During my years at the Zhejiang Academy, I had never been satisfied with the strict realistic style that attempted to present a straight copy of reality. Even for a political poster, I thought a more creative imagination was required. Using a horizontal format, I sketched Mao standing on top of the world. Clouds flowed around his gigantic body. I borrowed the Blue and Green Style of traditional landscape painting to highlight areas along the south side of the Yangtze River.12 The whole land was covered with red flags and banners in accord with the slogan: “The globe is entirely red!” Everyone liked the idea and my sketch was easily approved.

Before I started to draw on the canvas, I was told that this work should be produced collabora- tively. Two artists were assigned to the team: Zhou Ruiwen, a student and member of the Anti- Revisionism Group, and Xu Junxuan, a teacher who was originally in the “conservative” group but turned against it later. Because painting was considered a revolutionary task, it was thought that the people who had a “higher revolutionary consciousness” should play the more important role-in a painting, it meant to paint the most significant part of the canvas. As a young student, Zhou was given the honour of painting Mao’s face. As an “awakened intellectual,”Mr. Xu was allowed to paint Mao’s body. The largest part of the painting — the sky, clouds, and background — were left for me, a “bourgeois intellectual” who was still under a kind of surveillance. Despite the large proportion of the total area, the areas I had been assigned to paint were not considered politically important in the painting. I was occasionally invited to retouch some colours on Mao’s face and body to assist in achieving the realistic likeness of Mao.

The finished painting was well received. It was not only shown in the provincial art exhibition in 1968 but was also published in many different formats and distributed widely. The painting was reproduced on the huge billboard in front of the Shanghai railway station and in public areas of many other cities in China. During a research trip to China for the current exhibition at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery entitled Art of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976, we found posters, calendars, and even reproductions printed on tinplates as desktop ornaments in the street flea markets of Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.13

 As the leader of the school, Zhang Yongsheng must have felt proud of the popularity of this art- work around the country. On a very important trip to Beijing in 1968, Zhang took this painting and other works produced from the Zhejiang Academy with him. On May 19, Jiang Qing, referred to as “the standard-bearer of the Great Cultural Revolution,”received Zhang and his colleague Du Yinxin. Two other leaders, Yao Wenyuan and Chen Boda, as well as her daughter, Xiao Li, who was head of the PLA newspaper, accompanied her. According to the report relayed to the students and teachers afterwards, Jiang Qing’s response was not favourable. She claimed that the painting did not portray Mao’s image correctly. She stated: “People said it’s a good painting, a good painting; but if you look at it carefully there are problems. The background is too complicated. [Mao’s] chin doesn’t look comfortable. The right arm is not well painted.”14 She told Zhang and Du that, “There is a painting called Mao Goes to Anyuan which is extremely good. It brings out Mao’s vital spirit.”15

Only after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when Jiang was arrested and many inside documents were released, did I finally realize why she disliked this painting and praised another. Mao Goes to Anyuan obviously expressed her political preference. Mao’s inspection trip and instruction in 1967 was aimed at the extreme left-wing leaders in China. Of course, she was not happy with criticism of Mao and did not want to see a painting related to this criticism. She preferred Mao Goes to Anyuan because it reproduced a piece of history she fabricated. Denying the leading role of Liu Shaoqi in the early workers’ revolutionary movement, Jiang said: “It was Chairman Mao who walked to the Anyuan coal mine, step by step.”16 While the oil painting Mao Goes to Anyuan became “the model of ‘making foreign things serve China’ and opened a new page of art history,”our painting quickly disappeared from public view.17 I even learned that an anonymous letter was sent to the Revolutionary Committee of Zhejiang, accusing the producers of this painting of being counter-revolutionary enemies. My enthusiasm faded away and I was not encouraged to participate in other artistic activities for the next few years.

By the next year the radical phase of the Cultural Revolution was over. On October 7, 1968, the Workers Propaganda Team was sent to the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art to replace the Red Guards leadership. In December of 1969, all the students, staff, and teachers were moved from the campus to Chen County, a hilly area east of Hangzhou. The following year, the Academy was ordered to relocate to Tonglu County along the Fuchun River. This is the same river that, six hundred years ago, had inspired the artist Huang Gongwang to create the masterpiece Fu Chun Mountain Dwelling. However, the Academy suffered a great deal from having to move back and forth during these years. I was physically sick and hospitalized for a long period of time. Zhang Yongsheng gradually lost his power and influence. On July 27, 1975, he was separated from his followers and sent to a small village in Hebei Province.

The year 1976 marked the end of the Cultural Revolution. In October, one month after Mao’s death, Jiang Qing and other members of the Gang of Four were put in jail. Zhang Yongsheng was accused of being “a trusted follower of Jiang Qing.”Nevertheless, it took more than two years to investigate his crimes of factionalism and his 1968 meeting with Jiang Qing. On April 3, 1979, Zhang, at the age of thirty-nine, was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court and his political rights were deprived for life. He was accused of being “the chief culprit responsible for unrests in whole Zhejiang Province” and was sent to a labour camp in the remote province of Qinghai next to the desolate Gobi.18 His wife divorced him and left China. For many years nothing was heard from him.

 In 1994, I had a chance to receive a high-ranking delegate in Vancouver who was visiting from Qinghai Province. During his visit, Mr. Liu Lixun, Director of the Foreign Economic Relations and Trade Commission, gave me a small stone sculpture as a gift and asked me if I could help find a market for this kind of production (fig. 2). Made from legendary Kunlun yu (jade from Kunlun Mountain), this sculpture representing a yak demonstrated the skills of a professionally trained artist. When I asked Mr. Liu where this sculpture was from, he did not answer directly. He said, “It was produced by prisoners in the labour camp. In the camp there was a very good instructor, Zhang Yongsheng, who graduated from the prestigious Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts.”

What a coincidence that this yak was brought into my hands in Canada from thousands of miles away. “Hold Brushes as Knife and Gun, Concentrate Fire on the Reactionary Gang” was a very popular slogan in Chinese art circles thirty years ago. Holding brushes was not only a privilege for trusted artists but also an obligation to serve a revolutionary purpose. Today, Zhang, a political prisoner from the disgraced Cultural Revolution, is using a sculpting knife to carve art pieces whose only function is to serve as a commodity for the consumer market. Nothing could be more ironic than this dramatic and preposterous change in Zhang Yongsheng’s role in history. If Mao Goes to Anyuan can be bought at art auctions for millions of dollars, if Rent Collection Courtyard can become a subject of a high stakes copyright lawsuit, then Zhang’s return to the artist’s role and artistic tools once again becoming simply art tools is probably just as reasonable an epilogue for the extreme absurdity that was cultural production during the Cultural Revolution.

Notes 1 Newsweek, May 1996 2 Mao Zedong. The PLA Captures Nanjing. April 1949. 3 Another is the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. 4 1929 marked the eighteenth year in the establishment of the Republic of China. 5 Lu Xun (1881-1936), the great Chinese writer and leader of the May 4th Movement, joined the Chinese Left-wing Writers’ Federation after moving to Shanghai. Besides his aggressive writing, Lu Xun believed that woodcuts would serve a wider audience and create a new art direction. He published and introduced art books by European and Soviet artists and encouraged young Chinese artists to combine them with traditional methods. Lu Xun even invited and translated for a Japanese printer, Uchiyama, to teach a workshop in yi ba yi she in Shanghai. 5 The Cradle of Arts. (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts Publishing House, 1988), 32. 6 Chen Chao and Wei Hao Ben. The Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution in Zhejiang, May 1966 – October 1976. (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Gazetteer Editorial Office, 1989). 8 On July 20, 1967 two of the left-wing leading figures of the Cultural Revolution, Wang Li and Qi Ben Yu, were arrested by anti-rebel PLA troupes in Wuhan. 9 Zheng Qian and Han Gang. The Later Years – Mao After 1956. (Beijing: Chinese Youth Publishing House, 1993), 459. 10 Ibid. p. 459-460. 11 Wang Mingxian and Yanshanchun. The Art History of the Peoples’ Republic of China, 1966-1976. (Beijing: Chinese Youth Publishing House, 2000), 12-16. 12 This slogan first appeared in 1958. It requires writers and artists to apply the principle of combining the revolutionary ideal and the objective reality to their artwork. 13 A style of Chinese traditional landscape painting that uses mainly mineral colours, such as azurite and green made from malachite. 14 In 1999 and 2001, Scott Watson, the Director of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, and I travelled to China twice in order to view the public and private collections of art works from the Cultural Revolution in preparation for the exhibition. 15 On Perilous Peaks Dwells Beauty in Her Infinite Variety – Speeches on the Cultural and Artistic Revolution by Jiang Qing, 1969, 109. Published as Internal publications. Publisher’s name not given. 16 Ibid. p.109. See The Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution in Zhejiang, May 1966 – October 1976. Edited by Chen Chao and Wei Hao Ben. (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Gazetteer Editorial Office, 1989), 94. 17 Wang Mingxian and Yua Shanchen. The Art History of the Peoples’ Republic of China, 1966-1976. (Beijing: Chinese Youth Publishing House, 2000) 63-67. 18 “Another Great Fragrant Flower,” Editorial, Wen Hui Daily, July 6 1968, 19 Yang Mu. Pathbreakers of the Cultural Revolution. (Beijing: United Publishing House, 1993).

   ⁄   :              

 -

Chinese art critics often call the art of the 1980s and 1990s hou wenge yishu (post-Cultural Revolution art). This term locates the artistic production of this period after 1976 and fixes it in both a thematic and conceptual framework. As with postmodernism — which is only “post” in relation to modernism — “post-cultural revolutionalism” is defined in relation to the Cultural Revolution. One can generally observe a negative fixation on ideology in the Chinese art produc- tion of the 1980s. Hou Hanru has referred to the art of the 1980s in China as an ideology-centric art.1 However, the Cultural Revolution and its guidelines of artistic creation, aesthetic principles and iconography as well as the concept of iconoclasm and a militant critique of the old, is not merely a source of negative fixation for the Chinese artists of the 1980s and 1990s. It is more than a status quo the artists want to overcome. If one considers the utopian aspects of the Cultural Revolution, with its total aestheticization of politics, society, and everyday life, then one can think of the decade as an overall artistic performance (Gesamtkunstwerk) or a social sculpture (in the sense of Joseph Beuys). The images and narratives produced during the Cultural Revolution in China not only had a formative influence on the artists born in the late 1940s and in the 1950s — who constituted the main force of the New Wave Art Figure 1: Xingxing meizhan (First exhibition of the stars) was held on September 27, 1979, in Beijing. Reproduced from Chang Tsong- Movement of the 1980s — but also on a younger zung and Hui Ching-shuen, Xin Xin Shi Nian (The stars, ten years) (Hong Kong: Hanart 2, 1989), 25 generation of artists.

In order to show how Chinese artists have employed and implemented the cultural legacy of the Cultural Revolution during the last two decades, I will be discussing and distinguishing three basic strategies: assimilation, deconstructive strategies, and appropriation. By “assimilation” I am referring to the approach of artists during the late 1970s and early 1980s who automatically employed aesthetic principles and practices of the Cultural Revolution despite their desire to overcome them. “Deconstructive strategies” refers to the position of cultural critique that has been taken up by artists since the mid-1980s including Gu Wenda, Huang Yongping, Wu Shanzhuan, Wang Guangyi, and Xu Bing. Their artistic strategies have been oriented towards a deconstruction of cultural icons and signifiers, including the image of Mao Zedong and the Chinese script (symbol of the political power and main vehicle of political agitation especially during the Cultural Revolution) and show the artists’ distrust in culture as a meaning system. However, their thorough and fearless attacks against imposed cultural structures and patterns reveal their training in Cultural Revolution practices and their conviction that zaofan youli (revolt is reasonable). They combat like with like to free Chinese visual culture from redundancy and propose instead semantic emptiness. Lastly, I use the term “appropriation” to refer to the artistic strategies being practiced in China during the 1990s. Once cultural icons and signifiers were emptied of meaning through the strategy of deconstruction, the artists were free to propose and employ new meanings and readings. The appropriation of the cultural legacy of the Cultural Revolution is one step in the

 Figure 2: Itinerary exhibition during the Cultural Revolution, 1967. Reproduced from Wang Mingxian and Yan Shenchen, Xin Zhongguo Meishu tu shi (The art history of the People’s Republic of China) (Beijing: Zhongguo Qingniqn chuban she, 2000), fig. 010 formation of a new cultural self-consciousness of contemporary Chinese artists who, in the 1990s, had to face the challenges of the international art scene and market.

  The influence of the Cultural Revolution is evident not only in the works of art themselves but also in the ways in which they were promoted and received. One of the first unofficial exhibitions after the end of the Cultural Revolution was held in Beijing on September 27, 1979, and entitled Xingxing meizhan (First exhibition of the stars). The artworks were hung along the railing of a park located adjacent to the National Gallery in Beijing (fig. 1). While this kind of open-air exhibition may seem unorthodox, the exhibition of prints, posters, and New Year pictures on the streets was very familiar to the artists and their public who were used to exhibitions taking place in work units, schools, and on the streets. (fig. 2) It is important to point out that the works in First Exhibition of the Stars were not presented this way simply because the artists were unable to find another venue. Exhibiting on the street served as an open provocation to the authorities and was the most effective way to reach and move the public.

The dialogue between the public, specialists, and cadres into the process of creation — the so-called san jiehe (three-unity approach) — was a working method recommended during the Cultural Revolution that was still in practice during the 1980s.2 Well-known examples of this approach are the paintings by Luo Zhongli and Wang Guangyi. Luo’s Fuqin (Father, 1979) is a photo-realist portrait of an old farmer from the Dabashan region in Sichuan. The painting was only allowed to be exhibited after the artist added a pen behind the left ear of the farmer at the request of Li Shaoyan, the Vice-Chairman of the Chinese Artists’ Association and Vice-Minister of the Propaganda Committee of Sichuan. The farmers of Sichuan Province enthusiastically discussed the painting and their statements were published in the official art magazine Meishu (Art).3 Wang’s Mao Zedong — Black Grid (1988) was intended to be the sensation of the China/Avant-Garde exhibition that took place in February 1989 in Beijing. Indeed, it is a sensation that this series of three standard portraits of Mao-whose face is visible behind a black grid-was actually exhibited. However, Wang had to retouch parts of the work in order to obtain the permission to exhibit. He had to change the letters A and O written in white in the corners of the canvas since their meaning was deemed unclear. Officials claimed that one could think of a current joke with the title “I am not AQ, I am AO.”Thus, Wang added some black paint and turned the O into a C. Moreover, he was obliged to write a short text in Chinese and English that stated his respect for Mao Zedong. This statement was hung next to the painting. The public’s discussions of the meaning of the black grid were published in the official art magazines in China.

Two more aspects of the artistic practices of the Cultural Revolution adopted by the artists during the 1980s should be mentioned: mass movement and iconoclasm. The Xinchao meishu yundong (New Wave Art Movement) or Bawu meishu yundong (‘85 Movement) of the 1980s constituted a mass movement that was sustained by many regional artist groups. Art magazines like Meishu

 (Art), Zhongguo meishu bao (Fine arts in China), and Jiangsu huakan (Jiangsu pictorial) built up a nationwide network that promoted and supplied information about this alternative art through their reports and the organization of nation-wide conferences. The desire to act as a more or less consistent movement is best Figure 3: Red Guards burning an inscription of the Confucius Temple in Qufu, 1966. Reproduced from Wang Mingxian and Yan Shenchen, Xin Zhongguo exemplified by the emblem on the banner of Meishu tu shi (The art history of the People’s Republic of China) (Beijing: Zhongguo Qingnian chuban she, 2000), fig. 002 the China/Avant-Garde exhibition as well as by the presentation of the exhibition. The exhibi- tion was partly organized by the newspaper Fine Arts in China and was the long-term planned summit of the New Wave. On the opening day, the organizers decorated the exterior of the National Gallery in Beijing with black banners on which the emblem “No U-turn” was printed. The artist performances that took place on the opening day exemplify an iconoclastic attitude. Wang Deren threw condoms inside the National Gallery and Xiao Lu fired two pistol shots at her installation Dialogue. Huang Yongping and the Xiamen Dada group showed their project of tear- ing away the National Gallery with a rope. Emblematic of this kind of fearless and radical attitude taken up by the artists of the 1980s is Huang Yongping’s and the Xiamen Dada’s performance entitled Burning Event which took place in November 1986 and involved the artists’ burning their works in the exhibition in front of the New Art Gallery in Xiamen (figs. 3 and 4).

   In the following, I will be discussing how aesthetic principles promoted during the Cultural Revolution were assimilated in the paintings produced as part of the so-called Shanghen yishu (Scar art) and xin xieshi zhuyi (New realism) during the late 1970s and early 1980s in China. Cheng Conglin’s oil painting 1968 nian X yue X ri xue (The snow on a certain day in a certain month in 1968, 1979) shows the final scene of a fight between two Red Guard factions in Sichuan Province (fig. 5). Cheng’s painting was inspired by Zheng Yi’s short story “Maple” that was published in China in February 1979.4 The gray tones and the loose painting technique reveal Cheng’s attempt to overcome the style of the Cultural Revolution by going back to an earlier painting style-a style practiced in China during the late 1950s and early 1960s and referred to as “simple revolutionary realism” and “revolutionary romanticism.”Examples of these styles are Qing Zheng’s Jia (Home, 1957) and Wang Shikuo’ drawing Xueyi (Bloody clothes, 1959). For both artists, the Russian models of critical realism were important ones. Similarly, Cheng also turned to these Russian models. Vassili Ivanovich Surikow’s Boyarina Morozova (1884-1887) is a key source of inspiration for Cheng in terms of composition and the creation of dramatic tension is obtained through the contrasting of syntactic (formal) elements, such as contrasting movements and an accentuated contrast of dark and bright areas.5 Moreover, tension is also created through the stylization of the protagonists and the exaggeration of their facial expressions and gestures. Cheng’s stylization, however, goes further than his Russian model in that his characters closely resemble the fierce heroes of the Cultural Revolution. This is evident if we compare the female protagonist in his painting to a still image of the heroine, Wu Qinghua, from the revolutionary ballet Hongse niangzi jun (Red detachment of women, 1970, fig. 6).

Similar to paintings produced during the Cultural Revolution is Cheng’s contrasting of specific syntactic elements to generate meaning. For instance, the contrast between light and dark zones symbolizes the dialectical tension between positive and negative — here between the two Red Guard factions. The contrast between red and green can be read as the tension between activity

 Figure 4: Xiamen Dada, Burning Event. In November 1986, the Xiamen Dada group burned works from their exhibition in front of the New Art Gallery in Xiamen Figure 5: Cheng Conglin, 1968 nian X yue X ri xue (Snow on a certain day in a certain month in 1968), 1979, oil on canvas, 196 x 296 cm. Collection of the National Gallery Beijing. Courtesy of the artist and passivity. Furthermore, the contrast between orange and blue can be associated with a contrast of warmth and coolness. These visual contrasts and their associations work to symboli- cally position each of the figures in the painting. The losers are represented wearing blue clothing that is torn to pieces. Thus, they occupy the passive position in the painting. The winners, on the other hand, are wearing green uniforms, warm coats and red, orange, and brown garments. The frightening and sinister atmosphere of the scene is highlighted by the abnormal climatic phenomenon of snowfall in the hot province of Sichuan.

Similarly, in Fuqin (Father), Luo Zhongli employs the use of light to generate meaning. He illuminates the old and emaciated face of a farmer in a white and gleaming light. This light makes the old man sweat yet it is the same light that makes the plants grow; it stands for the farmer’s difficult life as well as for his endurance. Here, as with paintings produced during the Cultural Revolution, light is used to emphasize the message of the representation and to characterize the inner attitude of the protagonist. Luo’s representation of light can be compared to a painting produced during the Cultural Revolution by Shang Ding. In Lianxu zuozhan (Fighting without respite, ca. 1974),

Figure 6: Still from the revolutionary a young PLA soldier is represented writing a critique of Lin Biao ballet Hongse niangzi jun (The red detachment of women). and Confucius. A package of dynamite rests on his lap and serves as Reproduced from Le détachement féminin rouge (Beijing: Waiwen chuban- his desk. The bright sunlight enhances the soldier’s fierce and she, 1973), 78 enthusiastic attitude.

In another painting by Luo Zhongli, the symbolic use of light is even more evident. In Chuncan (Spring silkworms, 1980) an old woman is represented feeding silkworms (fig. 7). Only her white silk-like hair and her hands are visible. Her hair seems to be the only source of light in the paint- ing. This light is white and is the colour of death. Again, light enhances the message of the paint- ing that alludes to a verse often used by Chinese propaganda: Chuncan dao si si fang jin (Just when it dies the spring silkworm has used all the silk). Similarly, in Gao Quan’s Luhuo zheng hong (The furnace flames are red right now, 1964) the red light seems to emanate from the copy of Mao’s writings that an army cook is holding in his hands (fig. 8). The light stands for the right ideologi- cal attitude; it is the hot source of his revolutionary enthusiasm.6

   The slogan guannian gengxin (conceptual innovation), which was formulated by Chinese art critics after the Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign in 1983, refers to the search for innovation in artistic language. In addition, it was considered a means to reconstruct a new culture based on the freedom of expression. The end of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign — which had targeted early humanist Marxism — was widely understood as an opening up of the possibility to revive and deepen the former questions of alienation and humanism. The Party’s modernization program and the new liberal atmosphere in China created a climate of unmitigated optimism where intellectuals and artists could participate by formulating utopian visions of a Chinese modernity. This attitude was called renwen reqing (humanist enthusiasm). Most Figure 7: Luo Zhongli, Chuncan (Spring of the artists neither doubted the official definition of modernity silkworms), 1981, oil on canvas, 241 x 141cm. Courtesy of the artist nor questioned humanist enthusiasm. However, some artists — especially those belonging to the first and second generation of graduates of the Chinese Fine Arts Academy in Hangzhou — looked for ways to overcome modernist tendencies and humanist enthusiasm. Their critique was aimed at cultural icons. Artists like Xiamen Dada, Huang Yongping, and Wang Guangyi focussed on culture as a product of the process of creation. Others, such as Wu Shanzhuan, Gu Wenda, and Xu Bing, concentrated on the Chinese script. Common to these different approaches was the fact that the artists sought to subvert or overcome latent cultural patterns and tushi (schemata) that they saw operating in China.7 To them, these patterns and schemata were the main reason behind the restriction of thought and expression.

The critique of the Chinese script was a particularly effective means to deconstruct prevailing cultural patterns and schemata. The revision, simplification, and distortion of language are a common practice in political campaigns — the Cultural Revolution being the most recent and most violent one. The dazibao (big character posters) produced during the Cultural Revolution are one example of the ways in which the Chinese script was utilized to propagate certain political views and

Figure 8: Gao Quan, Luhuo zheng hong (The slogans. Hence, the dazibao was an important reference point furnace flames are red right now), ca. 1964, oil on canvas. Reproduced from E.J. Laing, The for the disrespectful artists working in the 1980s and 1990s. Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Republic of China (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University The Chinese script is deconstructed in various ways in dazibao: of California Press, 1988), fig. 9. characters are misspelled or simplified, words are scribbled out and turned upside down to express disapproval, important or dramatic passages are underlined, signs are crossed out (often in red) which signified the political disgrace of a person.8

In his installation Hongse youmo – chi zi (Red humor – red characters, 1987), Wu Shanzhuan recreates a scene depicting the omnipresence of written political slogans and big character posters by choosing the distribution of colour in three-coloured prints, posters and slogans from the Cultural Revolution (fig. 9). Wu’s slogans, however, are a nonsense medley of captions from classical poetry, political slogans, and price notices, which the artists chose at random. Thus, his installation is an acid mockery of the overwhelming presence of text in Chinese society. The juxtaposition of incoherent sentences and texts works to further generate the semantic emptiness of the text. Of particular interest are Wu’s allusions not only to the Cultural Revolution but also to

 Pop Art and Dadaism. If we reconsider the culture of the Cultural Revolution as an overall aestheticization of political and social life, and Pop Art and Dada as the quest to lead art back into life, then we not only have to consider Wu Shanzhuan’s artistic approach an original Chinese answer to modern Western art. We also have to acknowledge that the legacy of the Cultural Revolution is one of the main factors in the fast and successful development of Figure 9: Wu Shanzhuan, Red Humour – Red Characters, 1986, mixed contemporary Chinese art. media installation. Courtesy of the artist

Gu Wenda is another artist inspired by the disrespectful and radical use of the Chinese characters during the Cultural Revolution. In Jing ze shenling (Wisdom comes from tranquility, 1985-1986), Gu relates this use of Chinese characters to traditional calligraphy and painting (fig. 10). However, by omitting or inverting the order of the strokes, writing the characters like a mirror image, and inserting elements of Chinese landscape painting, Gu creates non-existent, fake characters. His characters are authentic only in their aesthetic appearance; they actually constitute semantically empty patterns. Thus, Gu questions the meaning and relevance of these patterns, particularly in the case of Chinese calligraphy and painting.

Xu Bing’s Tianshu (Book from the sky, 1988-1991) is probably the most radical example of the deconstruc- tion of the Chinese script (fig. 11). In this project, Xu invented imaginary characters employing existing character components. Using his imaginary characters, Wu printed Book from the Sky using the traditional technique of woodblock printing in order to create a canon of semantically empty writings. His creation of semantically empty words is a witty subversion of the most powerful instrument of state Figure 10: Gu Wenda, Wisdom Comes from Tranquility, 1985-86, installation: ink painting, calligraphy, tapestry. Collection of the ideology in China: the written word. China Academy of Arts. Courtesy of the artist

   In opposition to the 1980s, the cultural climate of the 1990s in China could be described as a kind of ideological vacuum. The explosive growth of the Chinese market economy in the 1980s resulted in extensive developments in urbanization and the commercialization of all aspects of life. The artists and intellectuals — after the Tian’anmen massacre — left behind humanist enthusiasm and utopian aims. They now faced a rapidly changing social and economic environment where common structures and values had degenerated. To some artists, the answer to this vacuum was cynicism — as evident in the trends of the so-called hooligan culture and the development of Political Pop and Cynical Realism. For others, what emerged out of the void was the question of how to relocate the self in the face of the degradation of old, the ambivalence of new values, and the arbitrariness of pluralism. Furthermore, the influence of the international art market and the taste of an international art public became an increasingly important factor within the Mainland Chinese art scene. The task for the artists was thus double: on the one hand, they had to relocate their position as artists in a market-oriented art scene and, on the other hand, they had to redefine their identity as Chinese artists within a global framework. The appropriation of typical Chinese imagery seemed to be one appropriate strategy.

 In the early 1990s, the painting styles of Political Pop and Cynical Realism tended to appropriate imagery stemming mainly from the Cultural Revolution. The image of Mao Figure 11: Detail of Xu Bing, Book from the Sky, 1988-91, was popular and the “Mao Craze” of the early 1990s woodblock print. Courtesy of the artist further enhanced this approach. Well-received by the international art public, these aesthetic tendencies influenced the inner Chinese art scene and played an important role in the commercialization of Chinese art. Typical for paintings in the style of the Political Pop is the collage-like combination of syntactic elements of Pop Art (bright flat colours), New Year paintings (black or grey outlines and the repetition of decorative elements), and imagery from the Cultural Revolution. This scheme is visible in paintings like Mao Zedong at Tian’anmen (1990) by Yu Youhan,Wang Guangyi’s Da pipan (The great criticism, 1993), and the Luo Brothers’ Welcome to the World’s Famous Brand Series (1997, fig. 12). The artists here also insert images of the new consumer society like, for example, tins of Coca Cola. The juxtaposition with Liu Wenxi’s Xinfu qu (The canal of happiness, 1968) and a photo of the first train that crossed the Nanjing Bridge in 1968 serves to illustrate the sources of inspiration for these paintings: the art and everyday life of the Cultural Revolution (fig. 13).

The appropriation of heroic images from the Cultural Revolution has also occurred at a conceptual level throughout the last two decades. In 1999, Yang Jiechang “re-created” a hero of the People’s Republic of China, Dong Cunrui, who was very popular during the Cultural Revolution and also a prolific figure in Chinese schoolbooks and comic books during the mid-1990s (fig. 14). Yang presents this hero in an installation where the constant repetition of the hero’s image recalls its function within the organization of a collective consciousness. The artist uses different media to re-create the image of the hero, including a Figure 12: Luo Brothers, Welcome World’s sculpture, a slow-motion film, photographs, and a picture book. Famous Brands, 1996, lacquer on wood The sculptural element consists of a replica of Rodchenko’s Workers’ Club (1925) in which the reader is inevitably subjected to “ideological reading.”9 In the picture book, the same photograph of Dong is displayed on each page. He is represented holding a satchel charge but his features are blurred. By copying and recopying copies of the reprinted storybook, Yang wipes out Dong’s distinct features and presents him in his most essential form: as an archetype created by socialist propaganda.

The repetitive use of Cultural Revolution imagery — especially the image of Mao Zedong — can also be seen a strategy to re-appropriate history. Yan Peiming, for example, repeatedly paints blurred and bold portraits of Mao (fig. 15). The constant repetition of the political leader’s features not only represents an appropriation of the artist’s personal history but also hints at the crucial role of Mao’s image in the collective memory of the Chinese people.

   Figure 13: The first train that The legacy of the Chinese Cultural Revolution is not only a Chinese legacy. crossed the Nanjing Bridge in 1968. Reproduced from Wang Mingxian The utopia of a Cultural Revolution also haunted the Western intellectuals and Yan Shanchen, Xin Zhongguo Meishu tu shi (The Art History of the in the 1960s. A dream of Swiss curator Harald Szeemann was to exhibit People’s Republic of China) (Beijing: Zhongguo Qingnian chuban she, the famous early Cultural Revolution ensemble of sculptures known as 2000), fig. 291

 Shou zhu yuan (Rent collection courtyard) in a Western museum. However, Szeemann’s dream was not realized until he invited Cai Guoqiang to participate in the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999. Cai “imported” his Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard for Szeemann. He organized a crew of Chinese sculptors — including one who had worked on the original

Rent Collection Courtyard — to recreate the piece for the Figure 14: Detail of Yang Jiechang, Recreate Dong Cunrui, 1999, multimedia installation and video still. Biennale (fig. 16) Cai’s strategy of appropriation is as Courtesy of Cherng Piin Gallery, Taiwan deconstructive as the distorted characters of Gu Wenda or Xu Bing. His decision to recreate this masterpiece of Socialist Realist sculpture — of which replicas were exhibited all over China in the 1960s and that probably had (except for the Mona Lisa) the largest public in the world — can be seen as a reaction to the craze for Chinese contemporary art in the West. The 48th Venice Biennale showed nearly thirty contemporary Chinese artists. The standard for their selection was, of course, set by the criteria of a Western institution and a Western audience. One of the criteria is often authenticity, which means that only a Chinese artist living in China is an authentic Chinese artist. Another criterion is the presumed success on the art market. To show Rent Collection Courtyard — the epitome of the Chinese socialist utopia-at such a highly profiled venue for contemporary art can be seen as an open provocation to the international art public.

Cai further questions the relevance of the meaning of a work of art, once it is transferred into another cultural, social, and political context. The fragility of meaning and relevance is mirrored in the delicate material of dry clay; the sculptures will disintegrate even before the re-creation of the entire ensemble is finished.10 Cultural images and epitomes thus appear as mere clichés, their appropriation as a witty strategy. This aspect is highlighted by the responses to Cai’s Rent Collection Courtyard: he won one of the Figure 15: Yan Peiming, Col Rouge, 1987, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist three international prizes of the Venice Biennale. The Fine Arts Academy of Sichuan accused Cai Guoqiang of spiritual plagiarism and of violation of spiritual property. For the international art world, to award this prize to Cai and his Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard was another move in the process of globalization. For the Fine Arts Academy of Sichuan and the growing nationalist tendencies in China, the fact that this prize-one of the most prestigious in the Western art world-was given to a non-authorized copy of a masterwork of Chinese socialist art was simply an act of Western colonialism. Rent Collection Courtyard not only proves Cai’s sense of witty strategy but also the disrespectful and subversive attitude of a Red Guard, who is convinced that a critique of, and the revolt against, institutionalized thought and practice are reasonable.

As Zhang Xudong and Arif Dirlik have suggested, Chinese post-modernity should “be grasped not only in relation to modernity in general but also in relation to a revolutionary modernity,” since Chinese society also experienced modernity as the history of revolution.11 The legacy of the Cultural Revolution and China’s revolutionary past is, at least for contemporary artists, neither obsolete nor irrelevant. It is deeply embedded in the Chinese social and cultural consciousness. The aesthetic guidelines and practices promoted and the images that were produced during the Cultural Revolution can, in part, provide contemporary culture in China with potential for

 Figure 16: Cai Guoqiang, Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard, at the 48th Venice Biennale, 1999. Photo: Shengtian Zheng critique. The assimilation of creative methods of the Cultural Revolution in the artistic production of the early 1980s was one way of coming to terms with and digesting an all-too-recent past. The deconstructive strategies of the mid-1980s were a means not only to overcome Chinese artistic patterns but also Western modernism. Finally, the appropriation of imagery from the Cultural Revolution during the 1990s can be read as the quest to relocate Chinese post-modern art and culture.

Notes 1 See Hou Hanru, “Towards an ‘Un-Unofficial’ Art: De-ideologicalisation of China’s Contemporary Art in the 1990s,” Third Text 34 (spring 1996): 37-52. 2 The “three-unity approach” was used particularly at the beginning of the 1980s. 3 Lu Peng and Yi Dan, Zhongguo xiandai yishu shi 1979-1989 (Hunan: Meishu chubanshe, 1992), 48. 4 I will not be discussing the narrative components of “Maple.” 5 Gao Minglu, Zhongguo dangdai meishu shi 1985-1986 (A history of contemporary Chinese art, 1985-1986) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1991), 25. 6 See Martina Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare. The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979-1989 (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, forthcoming). 7 The concept of cultural schemata is influenced by the reception of Herbert Gombrich. 8 See Francesca Dal Lago, “Images, Words, and Violence: Cultural Revolutionary Influences on Chinese Avant-Garde Art,” Chinese-art.com 3, no. 4 (2000). On-line magazine available at . 9 See Yang Jiechang, Recreate Dong Cunrui (Taipei, Taiwan: Cherng Ping Gallery, 1999). 10 See also Britta Erickson, “Cai Guoqiang Takes The Rent Collection Courtyard from the Cultural Revolution Model Sculpture To Winner of the 48th Venice Biennial International Award,” Chinese-art.com 2, no. 4 (1999). 11 Arif Dirlik and Zhang Xudong, eds., “Introduction: Postmodernism in China,” Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture: Special Issue Postmodernism and China 24, no. 3 (fall 1997): 8.

   :           

 

Figure 1: New edition of Years, People, Life. Courtesy of the author

For many years, both Chinese and Westerners have viewed the period of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) as a bleak winter for cultural production, a time when artists of all kinds were silenced, and apart from pieces of blatant propaganda, few real artistic works were produced. Although this view is justified to a certain extent, it is based on a rather narrow definition of culture, namely official published state culture, and it over-simplifies the complicated and stratified nature of cultural production and circulation in society. More recent studies of literary production during the Cultural Revolution, especially those dealing with underground literature, have revealed the existence of an unofficial and unorthodox reading and writing, and this in turn provides a convincing explanation for the apparently sudden burst of intellectual and literary creativity that occurred in the late 1970s. Underground literature, such as that produced by the Baiyangdian poetry group in the early 1970s (the main antecedent to Misty poetry) and hand-copied novels circulated during the same period, indicate that there were intellectual doubts, rebellion against revolutionary orthodoxy, and germination of the seeds of change even in the so-called barren years of the Cultural Revolution.1

Internal publication, the subject of this paper, is another source for us to study the complexity and stratification of culture in Socialist China, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s. According to the Quanguo neibu faxing tushu zongmu (1949-1979) (Catalogue for national internal distribution [1949-1979]), in the three decades from 1949 to 1979, over 18,301 internal publications appeared, including nearly 9,700 titles in the humanities and social sciences. Among the latter were a large number of modern literary works from outside China, and I will focus on these foreign works in this paper, since they give a particularly clear indication of the functions and unintended conse- quences of the internal publication system.2

 Internal publication of significant amounts of contemporary foreign literature began in the early 1960s and continued right up to the mid-1980s. Initiated in the early 1960s, and picking up again in 1972 after a break from 1966 to 1971, internal publication was actually one of the most important and systematic venues for introducing and disseminating foreign literature during the decades of 1960s and 1970s. Though commissioned by the government, the selection principles and titles of these works differed dramatically from those for openly published and unrestricted foreign literary works. They included some of the most challenging and “decadent” works of the European and American modernists and “Revisionist” writing from the Soviet Union — in other words, books reflecting world-views that the Chinese government officially considered to be anathema.

Though internal publication of such works completely ceased during the most turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1971), their circulation was, paradoxically, broadened in this period. As I will show, despite the fact that they were originally designated for internal circulation only among “high level” readers above specified official ranks, these books spread much further during the chaotic years of the late 1960s and reached many readers who would never have encountered them in more peaceful times. As a result, such foreign literary works became the main avenue for intellectuals, officials and especially educated youth to find out about the contemporary world beyond the borders of China, and to become familiar with its challenging intellectual currents. In many cases, particularly among the “urban youth “ generation, these works profoundly influenced and altered their intellectual development and helped to form an intellectual and literary undercurrent that dramatically reshaped the ideological and aesthetic topography of China over the next three decades.

In this paper I will take a preliminary look at the cultural phenomenon of internal publication of foreign literature in China during the period from the early 1960s to mid-1970s, focussing especially on three aspects: the origins of the internal publication system, the criteria for selection of titles, and the unexpectedly powerful influence of internal publications during and immediately after the Cultural Revolution. Before dealing with these aspects, however, I will first briefly describe the kinds of foreign literature that were openly available in Socialist China, in order to demonstrate the contrast with titles chosen for internal publication.

            Translating and publishing foreign literature has been an important cultural enterprise in China since the late nineteenth century. The first large-scale translation of foreign literature began in the late Qing and early Republican period and right from the start there were high expectations among many Chinese thinkers for the results of this enterprise. Most reformers and socially engaged intellectuals saw foreign literature as a vehicle for social reform. They took what they considered to be mainstream Western culture as their model in promoting a thoroughgoing transformation of Chinese culture and society, and the translation of foreign literary, philosophi- cal, and other academic works became an integral part of their new cultural movement. Due to this focus, the works that they chose to translate, whether it was the late Qing craze for political fiction, or writings by “oppressed groups” in Eastern Europe and Russia translated by the May Fourth Generation and the leftists of the 1930s, all displayed more or less overt political and social concerns.

Yet at the same time, a newly emerging urban culture and print media technology created the economic conditions for professional translators, writers, publishers and bookstores to introduce

 more popular foreign literature for mass consumption in newspapers and magazines. In contrast to the works selected by reformers and serious intellectuals, such popular fiction was mainly for entertainment and light reading, a way to become acquainted with Western life and to satisfy readers’ curiosity. And thirdly, there were also some elite intellectuals and literary professors, often trained abroad, who claimed to believe in “art for art’s sake,”and tried to promote writings and theories about the autonomy of literature. Their translations included works of Western and Japanese literary classics as well as modernist writings.

This relatively diverse approach to foreign literature became considerably narrower in the early 1950s when China’s relationship with the rest of the world changed following the Communist takeover. The translation of foreign literature in Maoist China (1949-1976) was strongly influenced by the following factors:3 First, after the government took over the publishing industry and nationalized the culture business in the early 1950s, literary production became an integral part of the state plan: subsidized, but at the same time, regulated. Foreign literature was watched especially closely due to the sensitive nature of Sino-foreign relations. Only a handful of “reliable” state-run publishing houses had the privilege to translate and publish foreign literature, such as People’s Literature Publishing House (Renmin wenxue), World Knowledge Publishing House (Shijie zhishi), and Shanghai People’s Publishing House (Shanghai renmin). This virtual monopoly effectively controlled the publication process, from planning, title selection, and hiring of translators to printing and distribution, and prevented other publishing houses from introducing controversial foreign works.

Second, in terms of title selection, political considerations were paramount. For this reason, contemporary titles were clearly slanted towards works from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and many small Asian, African and Latin American countries, which were either friends or allies of Socialist China.4 Often these foreign works were used, together with revolutionary historical novels by Chinese writers, to “engineer” the socialist revolution and play a central role in the “socialist education” of the 1950s — especially in schools and colleges. For example, those works on the Soviet Socialist revolution and construction, and the Soviet resistance against Hitler in the Second World War were especially prominent. Some of these translated titles, such as Gangtie shi zenyang lian cheng de (The tempering of steel) by Nicolay Ostrovsky (1952), Qingnian jinweijun (The young guard) by Alexander Fadeyav (1954), and works by M. Gorky and V. Mayakovsky were among the most popular books, with millions of copies sold.

By contrast, there were few translations of contemporary works from North America and Western Europe. Instead, most works from the West were “classics” written before the twentieth century, especially the so-called “critical realist” novels of the eighteenth or nineteenth century that dis- played the corruption and social problems of Western society (by Dickens, Balzac, Hugo, Stendhal and Tolstoy, etc.). It was not until the 1980s that a more representative selection of twentieth century foreign literature appeared on regular bookstore shelves. The three collaborative projects initiated by People’s Literature Publishing House with the Institute of Foreign Literature of Chinese Academy of Social Science and Shanghai Translation Publishing House (Shanghai yiwen), starting in 1959, illuminate this highly selective tendency. They included the Waiguo wenxue mingzhu xilie (Foreign masterpieces series), Waiguo wenxue lilun xilie (Foreign literary theory series), and Makesi zhuyi jingdian zhuzuo (Marxist literary and art theory series).

With regard to openly published works, therefore, it is clear that prior to the 1980s, cultural elitism and political engagement were the dominant factors controlling the selection and translation of

 foreign literature in Maoist China. Like other cultural institutions, the policies and practices of the publication business were centrally planned and regulated, often blatantly servicing the political demands of the leadership and undergoing frequent revisions to keep in line with changing political winds. Moreover, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), even these highly selected works were denounced as poisonous.

 :     The internal publication of foreign literature, like many other cultural developments in socialist China, resulted from political considerations, especially the disputes and subsequent fierce debates between China and the Soviet Union from the end of the 1950s onwards. During these debates, the Chinese government accused the Soviets of “revisionism” and treated the reforms of Khruschev as evidence of Soviet capitulation to Western Imperialists. This anti-revisionist, anti-imperialist foreign policy took center stage in China for the next fifteen years. But at the same time, many leaders in the Chinese Communist Party felt that they themselves should gain a deeper understanding of ideological trends in international Communist movements, especially in the Soviet Union, as well as an understanding of some of the latest Western ideas, in order to equip themselves better to oppose the revisionists. As a result, at the end of 1960, officials of the Department of Propaganda and Ministry of Culture called a meeting in Beijing’s Xinqiao Hotel with editors involved in foreign literature publishing. In this meeting, Lu Dingyi (or Zhou Yang?), the official in charge of propaganda and cultural affairs, admitted, “We are in complete darkness about the West and have only scanty knowledge of the Soviet Union.”They thus proposed to translate some of the most important contemporary works from abroad, with the proviso that these publications should be circulated only “internally.”5

According to Qin Shunxin, who was editor and translator of Russian and Soviet literature in People’s Literature Publishing House and involved in internal publication since 1960, a few such books, identified on their back covers as neibu faxing (internal publications), were published in the two years following this meeting, but they were not much different in appearance from openly published books. It was from 1963 that, at the suggestion of Lin Mohan (or Wei Junyi?), the head of People’s Publishing House at that time, the internal publication of foreign works assumed the character of a vast and organized activity and a much more systematic and uniform packaging of internal books began.

There were two main categories of translated works: the first category included books dealing with politics, philosophy, and international affairs, such as the works of Leon Trotsky, and books by or about Khrushchev. These were covered in plain gray paper, hence they were later referred to as hui pi shu (gray covered books). The second category mainly focused on literature, including works of literary theory and criticism. Most of these were so-called humanist (rendao zhuyi) works or the thaw literature from the 1950s and 1960s’ Soviet Union, and contemporary modernist works from the West. They were all packaged in plain yellow covers, and later became known as huang pi shu (yellow covered books).

The print numbers cannot be exactly confirmed, except to say that they were very small. According to Qin Shunxin, gray covered books were more “restricted,”with a print run of around three to four hundred, and yellow covered books were relatively “loose,”with around nine hundred copies. The small numbers confirm that the original function of these translations was as reference books for high officials-according to Qin Shunxin, the general guide for the ranks was division comman- ders and directors of bureau and prefects (shi, ju, diwei shuji or zhuanyuan etc.).6 The supply of

 internal publications of literary works in Beijing went to cultural officials, libraries and reference rooms in the Propaganda Department and Ministry of Culture, and some also went to famous writers and university professors. In the provinces, only the directors of the local Propaganda Departments and Bureau of Culture would be allowed access to them.

The selection, translation and publication of foreign literature titles was mainly Figure 2: Sunken Cathedral: a research on underground poetry during the carried out in Beijing by Writers Cultural Revolution. Courtesy of the author Publishing House (Zuojia) and Chinese Drama Publishing House (Zhongguo xiju), both of which were at that time affiliated with People’s Literature Publishing House. These institutions already employed the most talented translators and editors, many of whom had received their training before 1949. After 1964, some of the trans- lation work was split with the Shanghai Office of Writer’s Publishing House (Zuojia chubanshe Shanghai bianji suo), but the Shanghai Office focused mainly on translation rather than selection of titles. According to Qin Shunxin, this process was not controlled as tightly as one might imagine. Apart from the fact that these books were produced in very small numbers for internal circulation, there weren’t many regulations or restrictions designed to keep the process secret: their publication was treated as part of the normal work of the publishing house.

Most of the works were chosen and translated by editors like Qin Shunxin, who were also experts in the source language. Of course, as experienced state-employed intellectuals, they would have been very aware of the current Chinese political agenda and the need for a certain amount of self- censorship.7 They would first collect information and materials by reading newspapers, journals and books from abroad. Qin Shunxin himself had the task of locating books by Russian/Soviet humanists and the third or fourth generation of Soviet writers influenced by contemporary Western modernist writers and ideas, since these were being hotly debated in the Soviet Union at the time. The editors would then obtain copies of the selected works for the publishing house, and if approved, would find a translator, or in many cases, carry out the translation work themselves. Every quarter or half year, the president and chief-editor of the publishing house would report to officials in the Propaganda Department and Ministry of Culture, but it seems that the top leader- ship seldom intervened with the selection and editing process.

This internal publication of contemporary foreign literature was cut short when the Cultural Revolution broke out in earnest in mid-1966 and most cultural institutions collapsed, with virtually all intellectuals sent to be reformed in cadres’ schools. When Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping brought the various state bureau and institutes back into operation after 1972, many exiled officials and intellectuals returned, and the work of internal publication resumed once more. This time Shanghai started first, and took a much more active role.8 Shanghai translators published while still at cadres’ school, for example, the Translation Team of the Cadres’ School of Shanghai News and Press System (Shanghai xinwen chuban xitong wuqi ganxiao fanyi zu) had work published by Shanghai People’s Publishing House as early as the end of 1971. In 1973, a Shanghai journal entitled Zhaiyi (Translation digest) appeared, which mainly introduced contemporary literature and literary trends from the Soviet Union, Japan and the United States

 for internal circulation. In Beijing, the People’s Publishing House also brought out more titles, but many were not printed until 1977 or 1978.

The internal publication of translated foreign literature continued at least to the mid-1980s, but from the late 1970s the titles selected and the assumed audience greatly changed. More literary books with fewer political undertones were introduced, along with some popular entertainment works, such as detective and love stories, and bestsellers like the novels of Margaret Mitchell and Arthur Hailey.9 Once again, however, the stated aim of these translations was to allow responsible officials to learn about the social problems of foreign countries. The kinds of books chosen were obviously aimed at a much broader audience than the political and cultural elite of the earlier period. During this period, there were also more publishing houses (especially provincial ones) that became involved, such as the Masses Publishing House (Qunzhong chubanshe) run by the Ministry of Public Security, Jiangsu People’s Publishing House (Jiangsu renmin), and the Shanghai Translation Publishing House (Shanghai yiwen), and the restrictions on internal publication were gradually loosened. Finally, many of the translated works were openly released in new editions, creating the first wave in the commercial publication of foreign literature in the mid and late 1980s.

   In terms of their titles and authors, the internal publications that appeared in the early 1960s and 1970s differed dramatically from those of openly published foreign literary works. As noted above, they were contemporary-oriented, focusing on writers and works that exerted a major influence on ideological and cultural trends, no matter whether they were produced in socialist or capitalist societies. A large proportion of these works were modernist in style or content, and directly challenged publicly advocated policies in China at that time. Based on the titles listed in the Catalogue for National Internal Distribution (1949-1979), most of the foreign literary works were still from the Soviet Union (over one hundred titles), American works were second most popular, with nearly thirty titles, then Japan (twenty-four titles), France (fifteen), and Britain (fourteen).10 The large proportion of contemporary Western works contrasts greatly with the tiny numbers of that category that were openly published in China during 1950s and early 1960s. And even though works from the Soviet Union predominated in both internal and open publication lists, the kinds of works selected were completely different. The open publications emphasized “progressive models of socialist revolution, construction and patriotic spirit,”whereas the internal publications included many controversial works by dissident humanist writers and modernist writers of a younger generation, such as Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967), Konstantin Simonov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Vasily Aksyonov. For example, Ehrenburg’s famous novel The Thaw was available as early as 1963, and four volumes of his six-volume memoir Ren suiyue shenghuo (Years, people, life) appeared between 1962 and 1964.11 Qin Shunxin, the editor and one of the transla- tors of Years, recalls that the latter work was one of the few titles whose translation was directly ordered by the top leadership, due to the great influence of Ehrenburg’s writings and the frequent appearance of the writer and his works in Western reports.

Along with this translation of unorthodox and “revisionist” literature from the Soviet Union, many major contemporary Western modernist works were also translated. These included the existentialist Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea and Other Stories (Yanwu ji qita, 1965) and Albert Camus’ The Outsider (Ju wairen, 1961), Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot (Dengdai geduo, 1965), The Trial and Other Stories (Shenpan ji qita, 1966) by Kafka, Collection of Essays by T.S. Eliot (Tuo Shi Ailuete lunwen xuan, 1962), On the Road (Zai lushang, 1962) by Jack Kerouac and Catcher in the Rye (Maitian li de shouwangzhe, 1963) by J.D. Salinger.

 The format of these publications is also noteworthy. The books had a uniform appearance with their plain yellow covers and “internal publication” labels. For those internal publications that came out before 1966, most of the books were prefaced with brief publication notes (chuban shuoming), which were basically the publication information of the original work. Occasionally there were more detailed introductions to the work or the writer, mostly objective and balanced. For instance, there is an extended afterword to Catcher in the Rye by the translator Shi Xianrong, who was then also an editor at People’s Literature Publishing House. It is clear that the translator had read extensively among journals and newspaper reviews of this book, both those from America and the Soviet Union. He gives an introduction to the writer and the reception of the work, but avoids making his own reading or interpretation of the novel. As a result, the tone of his remarks is scholarly, based on careful collection of a broad sample of materials, rather than stridently political. By contrast, in the late years of the Cultural Revolution, the internal publications that were produced in Shanghai were all prefaced with “criticisms” written in fierce politicized language, and giving distorted interpretations of the work from a “revolutionary” point of view.

Besides works of literature, there were also a substantial number of collections of literary theory and criticism among the internal publications, especially introducing the various debates among Soviet writers. The topics included: Sulian yixie pipingjia zuojia lun yishu gexin yu ziwo biaoxian wenti (Soviet critics and writers on artistic renovation and self-expression), Sulian wenxue yu rendao zhuyi (Soviet literature and humanism), and Rendao zhuyi yu xiandai wenxue (Humanism and modern literature). These topics reflected and provoked many of the literary debates that raged among Chinese writers of the period. They were mainly collected and edited by the editorial board of the Translation of Modern Literary Theory Series of Writers’ Publishing House.

   The original aim was to circulate these internal publications among a small group of high-ranking officials in the propaganda departments and culture bureau and elite intellectuals, to help them understand international affairs and ideological trends, and better equip them to resist the threat of enemies outside. However, it was not long before many of these works gained a much wider readership than the government intended. This occurred to a certain extent when the children of high cultural officials and intellectuals, especially those of high school and college age, gained access to their parents’ books and passed them among their friends within what has been called the young elitist “underground salon,”giving them a kind of unexpected intellectual enlighten- ment.12 Yet a much wider dissemination of these internal publications occurred during the most turbulent period of the Cultural Revolution, when all order and boundaries broke down. From 1966 on, Red Guards made frequent raids on libraries and reference rooms in cultural institutions and on the homes of high officials, famous writers, and scholars. After confiscating many of these restricted works as evidence of wicked bourgeois influence, some Guards were then tempted to read them and pass them around. The most popular of these translated works were also circulated in hand-written copies.

After 1968, most of these urban youth were sent down to the countryside, and carried some of these books away with them, allowing them to spread further among Chinese youth. Some of the most popular books were the existentialist or beat generation works that seemed to give some kind of meaning, or at least an identification with the spiritual crisis that these young people were experiencing. Among them were Kerouac’s On the Road, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Camus’ The Outsider. According to many of the urban youth of the early 1970s, especially those from

 Beijing who were used by Mao in the Red Guard movement but then exiled to the remote countryside, their prevailing disillusionment and doubt found echoes in the spiritual world of alienation and loss depicted in these works. In fact some of these urban youth even imitated the protagonists in those works and set out on their own wild wandering journeys around the country, for instance, the poets Mang Ke and Peng Gang in 1971 and 1972.13

The most direct and obvious influence of these accidentally circulated internal publications on contemporary Chinese intellectual thought and literature is revealed in numerous memoirs from the urban educated youth generation. As Xiaoxiao points out in a paper on underground reading movements during the Cultural Revolution, during the first seventeen years after 1949, the openly available books for young people, including approved translations of foreign literature, were monotonously similar in style and tone: mainly Marxist, Leninist and Maoist works, and revolu- tionary literature from China and the Soviet Union, along with some carefully selected and edited classic literature from China and the West. These works, often accompanied by simplistic and distorted interpretation, are filled with intonation, single-mindedness and purity. However, as many who grew up in that period have acknowledged, they did little to help young people resolve the confusion that they suddenly experienced during the wild ups and downs of the Cultural Revolution. Instead, it was the unorthodox titles among the internal publications that seemed to speak directly to their shattered lives, and provided the spiritual fuel for the subsequent “nuclear fission” in their intellectual thought.14 According to Xiaoxiao’s survey, which is based on recollections of the sent-down youth generation, forty titles from among the internal publications were particularly influential.

Yet the most frequently mentioned case is the influence of such publications on the Baiyangdian poetry group15 — the precursor to the popular Misty Poetry and Today poetry groups of the late 1970s. The Baiyangdian poetry group was made up of young poets mainly from Beijing, such as Duoduo, Yue Zhong, Mang Ke, Peng Gang, and Ma Jia, who produced a substantial amount of poetry around early 1970s which circulated widely as underground literature and gave a voice to a whole generation of sent-down youth. (Fig. 2) Ma Jia underscores the importance of these books on the intellectual development of young people:

That was a closed society, but there were still a few people who had privileged access to these books… Only those several yellow covered books could provide some real information. [These young people] thus shared the sources of this information. Despite considerable differences in their cultural backgrounds, they all shared a similar response [to those works].

Ma claims that the spiritual source of a whole younger generation of Chinese writers, such as Duoduo and even later writers like Wang Shuo, was those internal publications, and concludes, “the influence of these books on contemporary Chinese poetry and literature is immeasurable.”16 Duoduo himself describes the winter of 1970 as an “early spring of the spirit for Beijing youth,” and declares that reading the two most popular books, Catcher in the Rye and Dai xingxing de huochepiao (The ticket to the stars), a Soviet version of Catcher in the Rye by Vasily Aksyonov, allowed a fresh breeze to blow over them.17 Poet Lin Mang also relates how many of these books were circulated as hot items, often in hand-written copies, concluding, “Those books had a great influence on the Baiyangdian poetry group, and changed many peoples’ way of thinking.”Lin describes the shock of pleasure he felt when reading his first internal book, The Ticket to the Stars: “I realized that the rebellious consciousness and awakening of a whole young generation in that novel was indeed very similar to our own experience, and I felt that the pace of the novel was fast, and the contents very refreshing, not like Balzac’s old-fashioned dreary style.”18 There is no doubt

 that these internal publications, especially modernist writings from the West and Soviet Union, allowed a whole generation of literary youth to break away from the narrow intellectual perspective that the first seventeen years of socialist education instilled in them and learn to think for themselves.

Another equally important influence of these internal publications was to unconsciously prepare the groundwork for the time when China did eventually begin to reopen to the world outside. Though the open translation and dissemination of Western modernist works was the result of the open-door policy of Deng’s era, especially after the Fourth Congress of the Writers and Artists in October and November 1979 when Deng urged people to learn from Western writers in their modernization, many talented translators and gifted scholars had already paved the way by producing these internal publications during the Maoist period; and even though their circulation was initially restricted, the fact that they were already complete helps to explain the sudden appearance of so many openly published translations of foreign philosophy, literature and culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so soon after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Most of the foreign modernist works that emerged on bookshelves at that time were actually just reprints of translations completed long before, in the 1960s. And the fertile discussions and experimentation with modernist writing techniques that occupied many Chinese writers of the 1980s, among them Wang Meng, Gao Xingjian, Bei Dao, Liu Suola, Xu Xing etc., benefited greatly from the fact that the major modernist literary works were readily available in Chinese translations.

Even by the end of the twentieth century, the lingering influence of some of these translations was still significant: on the popular side, for instance, Catcher in the Rye translated by Shi Xianrong has remained on most popular book lists for almost two decades; and at the elite level, a new six volume edition of Years, People, Life was recently brought out by Hainan Publishing Company (Hainan chuban gongsi, 1999), accompanied by a nostalgic cultural discussion on the plight of intellectuals in the Soviet Union, viewed as mirror images of Chinese intellectuals (fig. 1).

In conclusion, although from the 1960s to the late 1970s little foreign literature was openly published, the existence of these internal publications demonstrates that the stereotypical view of China in the 1960s and 1970s as a self-enclosed, monolithic society is misleading. On the one hand, internal publication shows the contradiction between the extreme cultural elitism and claimed “elimination of class” in Socialist China. In fact, access to knowledge was heavily guarded in the name of revolution. On the other hand, internal publication did serve as an avenue for works of modern literature and Western ideas to enter China, and once introduced, these works also became an exclusive source for Chinese intelligentsia and urban youth, exerting a profound influence on contemporary Chinese intellectual thought and literary development, aided in part by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Thus, in order to give a complete picture of the complicated process of cultural exchange and development in society, we should not ignore the fact there was still a certain degree of literary exchange and communication with the world outside even in such a totalitarian socialist society as Maoist China, and even during the Cultural Revolution. If we wish to fully understand the sources of the profound and apparently sudden changes that have taken place in China since the late 1970s, we also should take into account the immense intellectual influence of these internal publications, accidental though it may have been. Just as in the natural world, so in human society when we see “flowers blooming in spring,”it is only because the seeds of change have been planted much earlier, and spread their roots in the cold winter ground.

 Notes A version of this paper was presented on March 22, 2002, at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design for the “Cultural Production and the Cultural Revolution” conference. The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery organized the conference in collaboration with the Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, the Department of History, University of Victoria, and the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Victoria. The conference was in conjunction with the exhibition Art of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976 at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (March 22 - August 25, 2002). 1 In his recent study of contemporary Chinese literature, Zhongguo dangdai wenxueshi jiaocheng (A course in contemporary Chinese literary history), Chinese scholar Chen Sihe rewrites contemporary Chinese literary history by introducing the once neglected underground literature, and reevaluates some of the Socialist classics from 1950s and 1960s. He coins concepts of qianzai xiezuo (invisible writing) and minjian yishi (unofficial consciousness) to indicate the stratification of literature in Socialist China. Professor Hong Zicheng of Peking University also points out the existence of divided literary worlds during the Cultural Revolution. See chapter 15 in Hong’s Zhongguo dangdai wenxue shi (History of contemporary Chinese literature) (Peking: Peking University Press, 1999). 2 Neibu faxing tushu (internal publication) refers to a large number of publications that are designed for “internal” circulation only. Only people who are above certain ranks are allowed to buy or borrow these books. Such publications made up a very large proportion of the total published titles, and their production lasted over an extended period in Maoist China. Perry Link discusses internal publications during the second half of 1970s, that is, in the early Deng Xiaoping years, in his The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). He also recognizes the big proportion of internal and unofficial publications and analyses the rationale and functions of this kind of publication in the Socialist literary system. However, there are some differences between the internal publications discussed in his book and those dealt with in this paper, as will become clear below. 3 Although I here refer to the general situation over a three-decade period, my description is more valid for the situation before 1966 and after the mid-1970s, because from 1966 to 1976, there was virtually no official publication of foreign literature. 4 This observation is partly based on statistics collected from Waiguo wenxue tushu mulu (1951-1990) (Catalogue of foreign literature, [1951-1990]) from People’s Literature Publishing House, which has been the most important and representative publisher in foreign literature over the last five decades. 5 Interview with Qin Shunxin, former Associate Editor-in-Chief in charge of Foreign Literature in People’s Literature Publishing House, June 2001. There are a couple of vague points (for which I put a question mark) that Qin could not guarantee from his memory. 6 Qin, interview with the author, June 2001. 7 Qin Shunxin, for example, was educated in Catholic school in Xi’an and Shanghai. He later studied Russian and in 1954, he was assigned to People’s Literature Publishing House as editor of Russian/Soviet literature. Since 1960, he was involved in editing works for internal publication, in charge of the Russian and Soviet section. From 1965 to 1973, he was sent to Cadres’ School, and returned to his position as editor of foreign literature in 1973. In 1983, he became Director of the Foreign Literature section, and in 1986, became Associate Editor-in-Chief, and had been in that position until 1993, when he retired. Other editors, such as Huang Yushi and Shi Xianrong, who were in charge of English and American Literature, were also well-trained translators and scholars. 8 According to Qin, this is related to the influence of two prominent cultural officials, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan, whose base was in Shanghai, and their active involvement in literature and art. 9 Link, Uses of Literature, 183-186. 10 My comparison of the Catalogue of Internal Publication with titles of internal publication listed in People’s Literature Publishing House’s Catalogue of Foreign Literature shows that the former is an incomplete one, which missed a few titles. However, the information is enough to give the general idea of this shift in title selection. 11 The translation of the fifth and sixth volumes was finished before the summer of 1966 but was not printed until 1979 due to the chaos caused by the Cultural Revolution. 12 Before 1966, there existed small circles of children from the elite class, often literary youth who wrote poems and loved the arts, and often met in private houses. The most famous underground salons in early 1960s were the taiyang zongdui (Sun column) hosted by Zhang Langlang, son of famous artist and art critic Zhang Ding, and then a college student at Central Academy of Arts, and the X shishe (X poetry society), hosted by Guo Shiying, son of Guo Moruo, who was then a student of philosophy in Peking University. Zhang Langlang recalls that many internal books were secretly circulated among the literary youth in Beijing at that time, they were so popular that some young people even handcopied them. See his “The Legend of Sun Column and Others,” in Chenlun de shengdian: Zhongguo ershi shiji qishi niandai dixia shige yizhao (Sunken cathedral: commerative pictures of underground poetry from 1970s China), ed. Liao Yiwu (Xinjiang Youth Publishing House, 1999), 30-52. These underground salons revived in the early 1970s among the young elite in Beijing. For example, the one hosted by Xu Haoyuan, located in the residence of State Council and Ministry of Transportation, and had a close relation with the Baiyangdian poetry group. See Duoduo, “Bei maizang de zhongguo shiren 1972-1978” (The Chinese poets buried: 1972-1978), in Liao, Sunken Cathedral, 195-202. Another is the famous “Peiduofei Club” hosted by He Jingjie, the daughter of famous poet He Qifang. See Ge Xiaoli “Soviet Songs and Us,” Beijing Literature 8 (1999): 96-100. 13 See “Interview with Peng Gang and Mang Ke,” in Liao, Sunken Cathedral, 183-94. 14 Xiaoxiao, “Shu de guidao, yi bu jingshen yuedu shi” (Trajectory of books: a history of spiritual reading), in Liao, Sunken Cathedral, 4-16. 15 The name comes from the place where most of these young poets stayed during their “sent down” years. It is a rural area in Hebei province and famous for its Baiyangdian lake. 16 See “Interview With Ma Jia,” in Liao, Sunken Cathedral, 221, 219. 17 Duoduo, “Bei maizang de zhongguo shiren 1972-1978,” 195-202. 18 See “Interview With Lin Mang,” in Liao, Sunken Cathedral, 287, 292.

   :     

 

Figure 1: Chen Xinmao, History Text: Blurred Printing Series, 2002, rice paper, ink, mixed media, 48 x 48 cm

The exhibition Variations of Ink: Abstract Ink Painting by Five Contemporary Chinese Artists takes its title from a principle in traditional Chinese painting criticism and connoisseurship, namely that mo fen wu se (ink encompasses all the five colors).1 The inventor of this principle was the great Tang dynasty art critic and historian Zhang Yanyuan, whose Lidai minghua ji (Record of the famous painters of all the dynasties), compiled in 847, constitutes, in Michael Sullivan’s words, “the earliest known history of painting in the world.”2 The significance of this treatise, however, goes far beyond its early date of composition. Zhang’s ideas continue to inspire contemporary artists and art critics in their creation and appreciation of visual forms. Not only the title of this exhibition, but the whole idea of assembling a group of works to reflect on the role of ink in contemporary Chinese art, comes from Zhang’s writings and, more specifically, from the section in his treatise entitled “On Painting Materials, Tracing and Copying.”

This section, the eighth one in the treatise, has received less attention from scholars; partly because the heading gives the impression that here Zhang deals exclusively with technical matters of painting. This is certainly not true. For one thing, in this section one finds the most sophisticated — and at times the most philosophical — discourse on the art medium of ink ever attempted by a Chinese writer. Because of its profundity, as well as abstractness, this discourse has transcended its particular historical time to become a “primary text” in Chinese art criticism. I read this text once again last year and was surprised by its relevance to recent works by some contemporary Chinese artists who are experimenting with the value of ink in abstract visual expression. Since I have also been absorbed by the idea of organizing what I call “experimental exhibitions” to test the role of public art display, I have a two-fold purpose in organizing this small show.

First and more practical, Variations of Ink is an exhibition that presents to the public a group of ink paintings and installations that exemplify an important branch of contemporary Chinese

 experimental art. These works, which largely affiliate themselves with abstract and conceptual art, demonstrate a shared tendency to separate “ink” from “brush.”Hence, they also divorce themselves from traditional Chinese painting, which consistently emphasizes the joint importance of bi (brushwork) and mo (ink).3 In other words, one finds in these works the deliberate dominance of ink over other visual elements. By pushing the role of this traditional medium to such an extreme, the artists both substantiate an ancient art tradition and subvert it.

Gone with the brushwork are identifiable shapes and other mimetic qualities of a painting. Variations of Ink offers abstract “ink” images that reject direct literary translation and social interpretation. Western viewers who have been following recent exhibitions of Chinese “avant-garde” art outside China may find these “formalist” works refreshing. The previous exhibitions, including some I have Figure 2: Wang Tiande, Chinese Garment (large), 2001, ink and gold leaf on paper, curated, have often interpreted contemporary Chinese art in a 170 x 90 cm sociopolitical framework; such a framework has often guided the curator’s selection of artists and works, either consciously or unconsciously. One purpose of this exhibition is, therefore, to balance this familiar picture with images that reveal other kinds of experimentation in contemporary Chinese art. These experiments, which typically focus on formal qualities of a painting in terms of materiality, abstract shape, and tonal variation, have frequently been overlooked in large “sociological” exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art.

Second and more fundamental, although in most exhibitions texts elucidate images, I see this exhibition as serving the reverse role and providing a synchronized “post-modern” visual commentary on Zhang’s writings on ink. The idea is that by looking at these contemporary images, the public may reach a better understanding of the ancient text. Zhang’s discussion of ink forms an independent entry, separated from his discussion on “brushwork” in the same treatise; it is almost as if he foresaw the divorce of ink from brush as they are manifested in these images created more than a thousand years after his time.

Variations of Ink hopes to provide a site for dialogue between contemporary Chinese art and its remote origins. This is a “dialogue” because each work on view testifies to a deliberate negotiation between an artist and his artistic origin. While these artists acknowledge their roots in pre-modern Chinese art, they are also trying to renew this art by making it contemporary and global. These two seemingly opposite paths have led them to rediscover the “essence” of ink-a concept at the heart of Zhang’s discourse. Zhang Yanyuan begins his discourse on ink with the creation of the universe:

Now the fashioning forces Yin and Yang have intermingled; the myriad images emerge in complex patterns. No human words are needed for the mysterious transformation of things-the divine work of Nature operates alone to generate this process.4

For Zhang, yan (words) refer to all verbal and visual signs. Invented by human beings long after the creation of the universe, these signs serve to identify and describe natural phenomena but remain ultimately external to them. One category of such signs is color, which can be used to mimic the concrete appearances of things and living creatures, but can never reveal their essence. Hence in his words:

 Grasses and trees spread forth their glory without depending on cinnabar and jasper; floating clouds and swirling snow are naturally white without waiting for ceruse to make them so; the turquoise mountains do not need mineral “sky blue” powder; and the phoenix is iridescent without the application of multiple colors.5

This series of analogues leads Zhang to define the unique role of ink. To him, this black substance alone allows artists to achieve what cannot be achieved by using radiant “mimetic” colors. The “colorlessness” of ink turns out to be its most precious strength. When used well it can produce endless layers of subtle shades that imply a multitude of colors without representing them. What the artist can capture in an ink painting, therefore, is not the outward appearance of things, but the yi (mind) and his own comprehension of the phenomenal world. Zhang summarizes this view: “If by using ink a painter can allude to the five colors, we say that he has grasped the mind. But if an artist’s mind is Figure 3: Zhang Jianjun, Water and fixed on true colors, the essence of things will escape him.”6 Fire 1992, ink and water on burnt paper, 242.5 x 110.5 cm Once this principle is established, Zhang proceeds to give painters specific advice by developing the concept of the liao (completeness) of a painting. He writes:

Now in painting things, what an artist should especially avoid include meticulous delineation and coloration of forms, excessive carefulness to details, and explicit display of skills and finish. From here it follows that one should not deplore lack of completeness but rather that completeness is deplorable. For once one knows that an image has reached its completeness, where is the need of completing it further? It is not that there is really any incompleteness here: it is not recognizing when an image has reached its completeness that is the real incompleteness.7

Here, Zhang is speaking about two different kinds of “completeness:” one understood as a thorough rendering of external appearances and the other referring to the complete grasp of the mind. He seems to be speaking not only to painters but also to viewers of ink paintings. What one should look for in such a painting, he advises, is whether the painter has deliberately rejected a naturalistic representation and reached this second kind of completeness. A good painter is someone who can translate the mind into the “five colors” of ink; a good viewer is someone who can see such a mind in the lack of colorful, mimetic images.

The contemporary Chinese curator and art critic Pi Daojian writes in the opening of his introduc- tion to an exhibition called China: 20 Years of Ink Experiment: “At a time when globalization is becoming so pervasive and prevalent, it is almost impossible to find an artistic issue as ‘Chinese’ as ‘ink.’”8 Contrary to what one would expect, however, Pi finds the reason for the “Chineseness” of this so-called shuimo wenti (ink problem) not in ink’s origin as a traditional medium, but in a debate among modern Chinese artists and art critics that has continued for over a century. The focus of this debate is whether shuimo hua (ink painting), though of traditional origin, can also be modern and contemporary.

It is impossible to even briefly review this debate in this short essay. As Pi has observed, the vari- ous participants in the debate remained nationalistic and solipsistic until the 1980s, since they had rarely thought of the problem in international terms and since their solutions to “revolutionize” ink painting had heavily relied on renewing the subject matter of representation. An important change in ink painting took place in the 1980s that fundamentally altered the orientation of this

 debate. Instead of approaching ink simply as a medium for painting, an increasing number of younger artists began to treat ink itself as the subject of artistic experimentation. While some of these artists had received formal training in traditional

Chinese painting and calligraphy, many had not. Figure 4: Yang Jiecheng, 100 Layers of Ink (circle), 1992-1995, ink, Although they developed intense interest in ink and acrylic on Korean paper mounted on canvas, 184.5 x 173 cm 100 Layers of Ink (square), 1992-1995, ink, acrylic on Korean paper were fascinated with the potential of this material in mounted on canvas, 184.5 x 173 cm contemporary art, they stayed firmly outside the camp of guohua (national painting).9 Indeed, a movement promoting a new “ink art” gradually emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. The most important contribution of this movement was to rede- fine this art as a branch of shiyan yishu (experimental art), which allies itself with international, multi-medium contemporary art — not with the orthodox school of “national painting.”

The works in this exhibition are the fruit of this movement. The five participating artists include Chen Xinmao, Chen Guanwu, Wang Tiande, Zhang Jianjun, and Yang Jiechang. They are all in their thirties and forties and belong to the post-Cultural Revolution generation of experimental artists. Most of them have engaged in avant-garde experimentation since the 1980s and all of them have been experimenting with ink-related images for fifteen to twenty years. What this exhibition can offer is only a narrow glimpse of their wide-ranging experiments.

Although some images in this exhibition, such as those by Chen Xinmao and Chen Guanwu, employ calligraphy and printing, the general strategy is to subvert and “deconstruct” calligraphy and printing as accepted art traditions and technologies. Chen Xinmao’s multi-medium paintings frequently feature distorted historical texts — incomplete and partially smeared wood-block prints as a result of misprinting. The blurred characters appear dilapidated, as “ruins” or “traces” of some canonical books that have gained a new identity as images of purely visual significance. The ambiguity between textual and visual expression is heightened by the varied use of the ink, which assumes contradictory roles from reproducing texts to making texts illegible, sometimes burying characters under richly-textured, spreading blots (fig. 1).

Chen Guanwu’s attitude towards calligraphy — an art form that he has been practicing since the age of sixteen — is similarly iconoclastic. His works in the exhibition interpret calligraphy as a laborious writing practice, which dismisses any literary implication of writing through sheer repetition. With diluted ink, Chen writes characters over and over on the same spot; the result is a layered presence of gray tones. To stress the subtlety of this ink “color” he frames it with harsh, black dots derived from the heterogeneous tradition of geometric abstraction.

In both Chen Xinmao’s and Chen Guanwu’s works, traditional Chinese ink and contemporary visual techniques, such as collage, installation, and performance, form “a stirring coalition.”10 This particular form of multi-medium art also typifies works by the other three artists in this exhibition. Among them, Wang Tiande has arguably made the most serious effort to integrate two-dimensional ink painting with three-dimensional installations. His well-known piece, Ink Manu (1996), consists of a round dining table surrounded by six Ming-style chairs. These pieces of furniture, as well as bowls, dishes, and wine bottles on the table are covered with rice paper and, in turn, painted with broad ink strokes. Instead of chopsticks, a pair of Chinese writing brushes is left in front of each empty chair, alluding to six “ghost painters” who have just completed their creations.

 Wang Tiande’s individual ink paintings often have round frames, a shape in his view that embodies a more organic, wholesome understanding of the cosmos typically found in Eastern philosophy. (fig. 2) This view may also underlie Zhang Jianjun’s Figure 5: Yang Jiechang, Cardiogramme, 2000, ink, acrylic on rice paper, 229.5 x 698.5 cm installation, Fog Inside, which he created in 1992 in Warsaw. The work is minimalist in spirit and consists of a large, flat, round cylinder filled with ink-infused water. Although the cylindrical shape recalls a steel sculpture, the water inside of it generates a sense of impermanence, a feeling reinforced by the steam that slowly rises from the liquid surface and disappears in the air. For the current exhibition, Zhang Jianjun has replaced the round cylinder with a square cube as the centerpiece of a larger installation/ performance project. Surrounding this square cube are paintings that show large, burnt circles. The juxtaposition of the two primordial shapes (square and circle) as well as their respective connections with fire and water implies the opposition between Yang and Yin. (fig. 3) It is the audience who brings these two cosmological forces into play, as they move between the painting and the installation while sprinkling pieces of a dry ink case into the square “inkwell”.

Our last artist, Yang Jiechang, began to create abstract ink paintings in the late 1980s. To him, such artistic experiments are intimately connected to his study of Zen Buddhism and Daoism.11 In the series 100 Layers of Ink, he obsessively applied layers on layers of ink, creating abstract “black holes” with shining surfaces (fig. 4). A new style he has developed since the late 1990s is characterized by bold, explosive ink drawings. The titles of these works, such as Crosses, Knots, and @, supply a certain sense of lived experience to otherwise abstract forms (fig. 5). These works belong to the series Double View, a title that, in Martina Köppel-Yang’s view, hints at “the technique of multiple layers of ink” and the “ambivalence of the outer appearance of the things.”12 Even deeper in Yang Jiechang’s experiment is his ambivalent relationship with traditional Chinese art and culture. On the one hand, to quote Köppel-Yang again, his art “shows an anti-traditional, anti-cultural attitude.” On the other hand, “the elimination of skill, imagery and personality is nothing less than the sublimation of the self, the ultimate aim of the cultivation of personality the Chinese literati practiced through painting and calligraphy.”13

We may apply these words to the other four artists as well.

Notes 1 Variations of Ink: Abstract Ink Painting by Five Contemporary Chinese Artists (New York: Chambers Fine Art, May 16 - June 16, 2002). This exhibition was curated by the author. All images are installation views from the exhibition, Courtesy of the Chambers Fine Arts Gallery, New York 2 Michael Sullivan, The Arts of China, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 124. 3 Even the most adventurous painters of the mo xi (ink play) type in traditional Chinese art, such as Xu Wei and Zhu Da, still relied on brushwork to make shapes. 4 Two different English translations of this text can be found in William R. B. Acker, Some T’ang and Pre T’ang Texts on Chinese Painting (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1954), 185-86 and in Osvald Siren, The Chinese on the Art of Painting (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), 231-32. My translation in this and the following paragraphs consults and utilizes elements in these previous translations. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Pi Daojian, Zhongguo shuimo shiyan 20 nian (China: 20 years of ink experiment) (Guangzhou: Guangdong Art Museum, 2001), 10. 9 The term guohua is often taken as synonymous to shuimo hua (ink painting). 10 See Martina Köppel-yang, “Painting Beyond the Visual,” in Enlightened Blackness (Hong Kong: University Museum and Art Gallery of the University of Hong Kong and Alison Fine Arts, May 2001). Köppel-Yang describes Yang Jiechang’s work as “a stirring coalition” between Chinese tradition and contemporary art. 11 Yang Jiechang actually studied Daoism with a Daoist master at Mount Luofu in Guangdong from 1984 to 1986. 12 Köppel-yang, “Painting Beyond the Visual.” 13 Ibid.

     :       

 

Installation view of Pause at the Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea, March 29 to June 29, 2002. Courtesy of Hou Hanru

As a co-curator with Charles Esche and Song Wan-Kyung for “Project 1” entitled Pause at the 2002 Gwangju Biennale, the following is a “summary” that I would like to share with the public. It can serve as a starting point for a critical reflection on the project.

From the beginning, the biennale has understood Pause as a departure from established models of biennale events, which have tended to contain art to a “correct” presentational product. In Pause, creativity and process were emphasized instead of products. Spaces must be opened up for works that demand “slow” viewing. Such works resist the highly utilitarian evaluation system dictated by the cultural logic of global capitalism. In opposition to the society of the spectacle, projects dealing with slowness, emptiness, and openness are conceived of as exercises of critique.

The role of the artist and the function of the work of art are challenged. The subjectivity of the artist is exposed to a dialogue of the other while an interactive relationship between the artist and the public is established through a realization process of the works which are flexible and changing in time. Together, they create moments in which both the artist and the public can critically contemplate and reflect on the issues of art and society, globalization and locality, etc. Therefore, the biennale is directly and insistently connected to the interests of the local public. This relationship is unique and the most important consideration.

 Further exploring the questions around the “global” biennale and locality, one should question the established forms of institutional structures and discourses. Striving against the white cube — the commonly taken for granted space for contemporary art presentation or the “typical” form of biennale structure — we have encouraged projects and actions that go beyond such framing devices. We have understood that the truly innovative aspect of the relationship between artistic innovation and institutional framework occur in terms of self-organization of the artist. It is the artist who must endeavour to create differences in the language of art. It is up to the curators to open independent spaces to the artist so that they can draw from new freedoms for their creations. This is particularly significant in the Asia Pacific region, where Western-style infrastruc- tures have yet to be fully entrenched. To make their radically experimental work possible, many artists have organized their own alternative spaces out of everyday life contexts. They live and work in highly diverse cultural realities. The forms of their organizations are accordingly different and therefore enriching. In the meantime, they have also started dialogues across the region resulting in the development of an important trans-regional network of self-organizations and alternative spaces. This has proven to be one of the most innovative developments in the Asia Pacific region’s contribution to the newly globalized art scene. These spaces provide the most important conditions for artistic creation. They are examples of the necessity of the decentraliza- tion of power and the resistance to the homogenization caused by the acceleration of globalized communication and cultural “exchange.”Instead of simply denying the necessity of globalization or global circulation and hybridization of different cultures, they have creatively proposed constructive solutions to make sure our future can remain rich, diverse, and open to the other. Certainly, this kind of initiative has not been limited to the Asia Pacific region. In Europe, Latin America, and other parts of the world, similar self-organizational structures are becoming increasingly important. In this biennale project, we have attempted to bring these organizations to Asia so there can be an environment of dialogue and exchange both within and outside of Asia. The biennale is not a “once-and-for-all” event. Rather, it is like a Pandora’s box that once opened, the changes of which emanate can never be contained again. On the contrary, the changes will be continued, developed, multiplied, and extended over time and space. It demands that art must always be engaged in a political reality.

The biennale—which includes many site-specific installations, especially the adapted versions of the “reproductions” of the alternative spaces—is by no means a simple presentation of objects. It is a permanent workshop and a lively urban space within which real life events are developing all the time. It is a dynamic, complex, and mutating system of creation and exchange. It is an events place. To press this point, we invited Chang Yung Ho and Kim Young-Joon to act as exhi- bition architects. Their roles extended far beyond merely designing formal structures to house the works. Their task was to think of the biennale as an urban planning project as a means to energize the biennale concept. Their intelligent organization of the spaces that were conceived between installations, pavilions, and alternative spaces played off several metaphoric binaries; that between density/emptiness, congestion / fluidity, and interior /exterior. They brought new life to the complex system of the project itself.

In the end, I hope the event city can continue to generate new events and that Pandora’s box, with all its risks for change, will never be closed again!

  

anything the audience gave him. While Cang Xin licked, the   audience took pictures. The entire process was very much a  tourist spectacle.    The world view represented by Communication Series also resembles the one perpetuated by the tourist industry. Cang     Xin’s performance sites are all well-known tourist attractions and include the Great Wall of China, the Parliament Buildings  -  in London, and the Coliseum in Rome. In his explanations of his work, Cang Xin talks about his concerns around issues of tourism, consumption, and the exoticism of cultural myths. He has suggested that his performances relate to his identity as a Manchurian and a Chinese. He also claims that ancient Manchurian shamanism inspires his works. He regards his performances as a way to connect with aspects of nature and the so-called “primitive” and “sacred.” Cang Xin goes on to assert that the act of licking and “tasting the world” reflects a Chinese reality and points to the fact that China has many different cuisines and that there are Chinese restaurants all over the world.2

Figure 1: Cang Xin, performance at the opening of the Sydney Biennale, During his performances in Norway and Casula, Cang Xin’s 2002. Courtesy of the artist body was buried in a ninety-centimeter hole rather than hid- den in a large paper box. He claims that he was trying What can be a point of entry to the exhibition (The World to symbolize the way that the Japanese tortured the May Be) Fantastic? for contemporary Chinese artists? Cang Xin from Beijing and Shirley Tse from Hong Kong and Chinese during the Second World War. Indeed, Cang Xin’s Los Angeles respectively, show us two different directions performances carry many references to notions of in response to this question. “Chineseness,” Manchurian cultural mysticism, and Chinese historical allegories.3 Cang Xin’s performance involving licking was especially highlighted in the media. In a press conference, Richard Grayson, the artistic director of the latest edition of the Sydney Biennale, invited Cang Xin to lick a copy of an Australian art magazine. During the performance, reporters from all over the world were encouraged to photograph this spectacle. (fig. 1)

Why were people so interested in Cang Xin’s live perfor- mance at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and at the Power House Museum in Casula, New South Wales? (fig. 2) I was impressed by the potential of this licking to be read as a gesture of mapping out the world. It seems to me that the photographs of Cang Xin’s Communication Series at the Great Wall, Parliament of the UK, and other Tourist Figure 2: Cang Xin, performance at Casula, New South Wales, Australia, Attractions (1996-2001) function quite cathartically. As 2001. Courtesy of the artist children, we are told to be attentive to what we put into our mouths — not only for sanitary but culturally determined Shirley Tse’s Polymathicstyrene (1999-2000) consists of reasons. As children become adults, the gesture of licking a fifty-meter sculpture wrapped around the gallery walls. as a way to explore the world is repressed and forgotten in (fig. 3) The work evokes the idea of computer circuitry, the process of human socialization. Cang Xin’s act of licking mathematical sequences, and satellite aerial mapping is particularly pure and fantastic perhaps because it so devices. The supporting structure of the sculpture references willfully allows for the return of the repressed. His art not architecture and is covered with a variety of decorations. only encourages us to recall the forgotten but also offers On the surface, we can see both a diverse urban landscape an alternative worldview to the dominant one centered on represented from different viewpoints as well as an ocularcentricity. Cang Xin has built a “brave new world” investigation of figurative and abstract patterns evoked by with his tongue composed of diverse tastes resulting from computer chips. geographical, topological, and cultural differences. Cang Xin has said, “Sydney tastes moist and fishy because it is a Unlike Cang Xin’s work, Polymathicstyrene does not trigger harbor city.”1 any immediate reference to the allegories and histories of “Chineseness” nor to any uncritical cultural myths about the Executed specifically for the Fantastic exhibition, Cang Xin artist’s national identity. Perhaps the audience can, from afar, performed within the confines of a large paper box placed identify with the simplicity and multiple gazes of the land- just inside the gates of the Museum of Contemporary Art in scape suggested in Polymathicstyrene and tie them to the Sydney. With only his head exposed, he licked almost historical trajectories of Chinese landscape painting.

 Figures 3: Shirley Tse, Polymathicstyrene, installation view from the Sydney Biennale, 2002. Courtesy of the artist

However, perhaps it would be more productive to consider different “potentials” in contemporary art practice.5 Her art Polymathicstyrene through Tse’s repertoire of aesthetic and does not make explicit reference to her status as a Chinese material choices. Polymer, vinyl, Styrofoam, bubble wrap, born in Hong Kong. The traces of the artist’s identification and polystyrene are different plastic materials used by Tse. with her native culture remain are not made overt. The These synthetic materials (often used for packaging) relate indirectness of cultural references opens up possibilities in to the artist’s memories of Hong Kong, a city where the terms of allowing for multiple interpretations and readings of “continual transit of stacked metal containers on Kwai her work. It also proposes a re-examination of the self/other Chung Container Terminal” was part of her daily landscape.4 identity politics which contemporary Chinese art practices For the artist, plastic is the material that most strongly are commonly framed within the global arena. signifies her idea of home. Endnotes: The manner in which Tse utilizes plastic material differs 1 Cang Xin, conversation with the author, May 17, 2002. from that of a packaging company. She does not use 2 See Cang Xin, Existence in Translation plastics functionally but rather as the unpainted surfaces (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2002). 3 and spaces reminiscent of Chinese literati painting. In this I was inspired by Shu-mei Shih’s conference paper delivered at the International Symposium entitled “Journey of Healing: Women’s painting tradition, the unpainted space is just as important Spirituality and Artistic Representation” at Fu-jen Catholic as the painted space. Tse’s art practice challenges and University in Taipei on November 12, 2000. See Shu-mei Shih, changes the way people look at and use plastic. Her “Gender, Ethnicity, and Trans/national Visions” in the symposium proceedings. aesthetic endeavors are deeply embedded in her unique 4 Draza Fratto O’Brien, “The Flow of Plastic,” in Shirley Tse: interpretations of plastic. For her, plastic is like the technol- Sculpture and Photography, 1996-2000. This exhibition catalogue ogy that invented it: functional. In Tse’s view, plastic is was published in conjunction with the exhibition Plastic Works and closely bound to contemporary Asian life. Plastic and Prostheses Construction: Works by Shirley Tse and Phoebe Man (Hong Kong: Para/Site Art Space, November 2000). plasticity — like her notion of technology — signify the 5 Shirley Tse, “Technology, Plastic and Art,” in Visit “possibilities” that exist in contemporary life and the (New Zealand: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, summer 2000), 6.

   



  

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