JUNE 2005 SUMMER ISSUE
INSIDE
Dialogue with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Huo Hanru on the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial On Curating Cruel/Loving Bodies The Yellow Box: Thoughts on Art before the Age of Exhibitions Interviews with Michael Lin and Hu Jieming From Iconic to Symbolic: Ah Xian’s Semiotic Interface Between China and the West Place and Displace: Three Generations of Taiwanese Art US$12.00 NT$350.00 US$10.00 NT$350.00
Editor’s Note Contributors
: Opening remarks Richard Vinograd p. 7 Re-Placing Contemporary Chinese Art Richard Vinograd Remarks Michael Sullivan : Prodigal Sons: Chinese Artists Return to the Homeland Melissa Chiu Between Truth and Fiction: Notes on Fakes, Copies and Authenticity in Contemporary Chinese Art Pauline J. Yao Ink Painting in the Contemporary Chinese Art World Shen Kuiyi Remarks p. 12 Richard Vinograd : Reflections on the First Chinese Art Seminar/Workshop, San Diego 1991 Zheng Shengtian Between the Worlds: Chinese Art at Biennials Since 1993 John Clark Between Scylla and Charybdis: The New Context of Chinese Contemporary Art and Its Creation since 2000 Pi Li Remarks: “Whose Stage Is It, Anyway?” Reflections on the Correlation of “Beauty” and International Exhibition Practices of Chinese Contemporary Art p. 83 Francesca Dal Lago : How Western People Support/Influence Contemporary Chinese Art Zhou Tiehai The Positioning of Chinese Contemporary Artworks in the International Art Market Uli Sigg Chinese Contemporary Art: At the Margin of the American Mainstream Jane Debevoise Remarks Britta Erickson p. 93 Artist Project: Zhou Tiehai WILL
On the Edge Visiting Artists Program Britta Erickson On the Spot: The Stanford Visiting Artists Program Pauline J. Yao
Review of On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West Qing Pan Acknowledgements
Exhibitions Listings p. 101 Chinese Name Index Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Volume 4, Number 2, June 2005 Yishu 13 has taken a somewhat different direction Katy Hsiu-chih Chien from past issues. It is the first time a complete Ken Lum issue has been devoted to a single theme. Keith Wallace While we don't foresee this happening with any Zheng Shengtian Julie Grundvig regularity in the future, the conference Kate Steinmann “Displacements: Transcultural Encounters in Larisa Broyde Contemporary Chinese Art” was both timely and Joyce Lin worthy of such attention. Judy Andrews, Ohio State University John Clark, University of Sydney “Displacements” was organized by Britta Erickson Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation and Richard Vinograd in conjunction with the Okwui Enwezor, Art Institute of Chicago Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator exhibition On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Fan Di'an, Central Academy of Fine Arts Fei Dawei, Guy & Mariam Ullens Foundation Artists Encounter the West held at the Iris and Gao Minglu, New York State University B. Gerald Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. Hou Hanru, Independent Curator & Critic Katie Hill, University of Westminster The conference brought together a provocative Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian Sebastian Lopez, Gate Foundation & Leiden University mix of scholars, artists, curators, and collectors Lu Jie, Independent Curator to discuss the position of contemporary Chinese Charles Merewether, Australian National University Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University artists in the increasingly globalized world of the Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator twenty-first century, and, in particular, their Wu Hung, University of Chicago relationship to the West. Art & Collection Group Ltd. Leap Creative Group During the past fifteen years the discourse Raymond Mah around contemporary Chinese art has taken place Gavin Chow Jeremy Lee outside of China, especially after the migration of relaITconsulting, Vancouver numerous artists to other parts of the world Chong-yuan Image Ltd., Taipei where they were able to both freely make art - without the threat of censorship and to develop Yishu is published quarterly in Taipei, Taiwan and edited in successful careers. Today, with the increasing, Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates of Yishu are March, indeed, seemingly enthusiastic acceptance of June, September and December. contemporary art by the Chinese government, Editorial inquiries and manuscripts may be sent to the Editorial Office: that discourse is now returning home. This is a Yishu 410-650 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC situation unparalleled in any other country at any Canada V6B 4N8 other time. It is an issue that has been simmering Phone: 1.604.649.8187; Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: [email protected] below the surface, but rarely outrightly discussed. [email protected] With “Diplacements” that discussion has been Subscription inquiries may be sent to either Vancouver address put into motion. or Hawaii: Journals Department University of Hawai’i Press 2840 Kolowalu Street, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA The staff of Yishu would like to thank Britta Phone: 1.808.956.8833; Fax: 1.808.988.6052 Erickson for suggesting this idea and for all her E-mail: [email protected] help in preparing material for this issue. Thanks The University of Hawai’i Press accepts payment by Visa or Mastercard, cheque or money order (in U.S. dollars). also to the speakers who agreed to have their Advertising inquiries may be sent to either Vancouver address presentations published. The conference papers or Taiwan: are accompanied by an artist project by Zhou Art & Collection Ltd. 6F. No.85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Teihai, a review of On the Edge visiting artists Phone: (886) 2.2560.2220; Fax: (886) 2.2542.0631 E-mail: [email protected] residencies by Pauline J. Yao, and a review of the exhibition On the Edge by Qing Pan. Additional www.yishujournal.com thanks to Kristen L. Olson (Educational Services No part of this journal may be published without the written permission from the publisher. Coordinator Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Subscription rates: one year: US $48; two years: US $86 Visual Arts) and Damon Palermo for transcriptions. We thank Mr. Milton Wong, Mr. Daoping Bao, Paystone Technologies Corp., Raymond Mah, and the Leap Creative Group for their generous support.
Cover: Michael Lin, Three on the Bund 29.09-15.11.04-2004, skaters on emulsion on Keith Wallace wood. Courtesy of Shanghai Gallery of Art.
MELISSA CHIU is Museum Director and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Asia Society Museum in New York. She has taught at Rhode Island School of Design and was recently awarded a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship. Ms. Chiu has curated exhibitions over the last ten years that included artists from Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, China, Hawaii, and the United States, and has published widely on contemporary art in journals, magazines, and exhibition catalogues. She is also currently Guest Editor for The Grove Dictionary of Art update on Asian contemporary art published by Oxford University Press.
JOHN CLARK,FAHA, CIHA, is Professor in Art History at the University of Sydney. Among his books is Modern Asian Art (Honolulu, University of Hawai'i Press, 1998). His recent work includes two book drafts: Modernities of Chinese Art and Modernities compared: Chinese and Thai Art in the 1980s and 1990s.From 2004-2006 he is working on the new Biennales in Asia under an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant.
JANE DEBEVOISE is a PhD candidate in contemporary Chinese art at the University of Hong Kong. Prior to moving to Hong Kong, Ms. DeBevoise was Deputy Director of the Guggenheim Museum, responsible for museum operations and exhibitions globally. She joined the Museum in 1996 as Project Director of China: 5000 Years that was presented in 1998 at both the Guggenheim Museum New York and Bilbao. Ms. DeBevoise is a Trustee of China Institute in New York and a member of the Board of Directors of Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong.
FRANCESCA DAL LAGO is a scholar in modern and contemporary Chinese art. She holds a B.A. in Chinese studies from the University of Venice and an M.A. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she is about to defend her Ph.D. on visual popularization and early propaganda forms in the PRC during the 1930s and 1940s. For three years she taught Chinese modern and contemporary art history at McGill University, Montreal. Dal Lago has published scholarly and critical articles on various aspect of Chinese art and visual culture in publications such as The Art Journal, Time Magazine, East Asian History, and was the editor for the visual art section of the recently published Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture,Routdlege, 2005. She now resides in Italy where she is affiliated with the Department of East Asian Studies, Venice University.
BRITTA ERICKSON is an independent scholar and curator who focuses on contemporary Chinese art, publishes and lectures internationally. In 2001, she curated the exhibition Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing for the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., and was curator for On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West at Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University where she has also lectured.
KUIYI SHEN is Associate Professor of Art History at University of California, San Diego. He is the author and co-author of numerous books, exhibition catalogues, and articles on modern and contemporary Chinese art, including A Century in Crisis: Tradition and Modernity in the Art of Twentieth Century China (1998); The Thunder and the Rain: Chinese Paintings from the Opium War to the Cultural Revolution (2000); Word and Meaning: Six Contemporary Chinese Artists (2000); Chongqing Chilis (2003); and Zhou Brothers: 30 Years of Collabration (2004). Among the exhibitions he has curated, are A Century in Crisis: Tradition and Modernity in the Art of Twentieth Century China, and the modern section of China: 5000 Years, held at the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao in 1998.
PI LI is an independent curator of visual arts. Exhibitions he has curated include Fantasia (Donga Ilbo Art Museum in Seoul, 2001, Eastern Modern Art Center in Beijing, 2002), Moist: Asia-Pacific Multi-Media (Millennium Museum, Beijing, 2002) and Image is Power (He Xiangning Art Museum, 2002). He was the assistant curator for Chinese Pavilion of São Paulo Biennial (2002), Shanghai Biennale (2002) and Alors, la Chine? (Centre Georges Pompidou, France, 2003). He has
published the books Post-modernism Sculpture (1999) and Time of Curators (2003). Pi Li was the founder of Website arts.tom.com, chief editor of Contemporary Art Magazine, and director of Chinese Contemporary Art Awards 2001. In 2004, he founded Debo Films together with Wang Xiaoshuai which supports independent film and young Chinese directors.
QING PAN is currently finishing her doctoral degree in the Art Education Program at Columbia University in New York. She is the New York Correspondent of Art and Collection Magazine in Taiwan. Last November, she organized a symposium at Columbia University entitled “Conversations Across Cultures: Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Chinese Art and Art Education,”held in conjunction with an exhibition she curated consisting of students’ artworks from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. While at Columbia, she has fostered a collabo- ration between Teachers College at Columbia University and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, which involves the design of a new art education program for teachers of art education at the university level in China.
ULI SIGG,born 1946, grew up in Switzerland. He completed his studies with a Ph.D. of the University of Zurich Law Faculty. From 1977 to 1990 he joined the Schindler Group where, in 1980, he established the first Joint Venture between China and the West and remained its Vice Chairman for ten years. In 1995, the Swiss federal government appointed him for four years ambassador to China, North Korea and Mongolia. Presently he also serves as member of the Advisory Board of China Development Bank and other Chinese entities. As a collector he has formed one of the most substantial collections of contemporary Chinese art. In 1997, he established the Chinese Contemporary Art Award, an art award for Chinese contemporary artists living in China. He is also a member of the International Advisory Council of Tate Gallery, London.
MICHAEL SULLIVAN is Fellow Emeritus at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University. His many books include Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China (California, 1996) and The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art: Revised and Expanded Edition (California, 1997). Michael Sullivan has received honours and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He lives in Oxford, England
RICHARD VINOGRAD is Christensen Professor in Asian Art at Stanford University’s Department of Art & Art History, where he has taught since 1989. He is the author of Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 1600-1900 (1992), co-general editor of New Interpretations of Ming and Qing Painting (1994), and co-author of Chinese Art & Culture (2001), along with many scholarly articles on aspects of Chinese pictorial art and theory from the tenth to the twenty-first century.
PAULINE J. YAO is Assistant Curator of Chinese Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and specialist in modern and contemporary Chinese art. She is an adjunct faculty member in the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice and Fine Arts at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. She holds a B.A. from Pitzer College in Claremont, California and a M.A. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago.
ZHENG SHENGTIAN taught at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou for more than thirty years. He is currently the Managing Editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and a Board member of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. His work as an independent curator includes Jiangnan: Modern and Contemporary Art from South of the Yangzi River (Vancouver), The Art of Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Vancouver, Toronto,Winnipeg), Shanghai Modern (Munich, Kiel), and the 2004 Shanghai Biennale. Zheng has contributed fre- quently to periodicals and catalogues of contemporary Chinese and Asian art.
ZHOU TIEHAI was born in Shanghai and continues to live and work there. He has exhibited widely with solo shows in Shanghai, New York, Milan, Tokyo, Beijing, and Rotterdam. He was also included in the 48th Venice Biennale, Cities on the Move, Fourth Gwangju Biennial, and Alors, la Chine?
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Displacements was an international scholarly conference held at Stanford University on January 28, 2005 in conjunction with the Cantor Arts Center exhibition On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West.The conference brought together distinguished scholars, artists, curators, critics, collectors, and gallery managers to discuss the exhibition and other intellectually significant themes.
The conference papers circulated around several perspectives on the topics of displacement and transcultural encounters. A number of papers discussed the transnational or thoroughly overseas careers of many of the most notable contemporary Chinese artists, including the implications of meeting new critical and institutional expectations in those settings and the challenges faced by those artists upon returning to China. We were also concerned with the cultural politics of contemporary art practice, including outright political critique of both Chinese and Western governments and arts establishments and the misunderstandings and conflicts that can arise from what might be called the anthropology of art encounters, including issues of ethics, ownership, authenticity, and taste. The role of international biennials and exhibition circuits, along with the operation of transnational art markets, dealers, collectors, and curators provided a major focus of commentary and discussion.
Other concerns included the displacement, transposition, or mobilization of traditional Chinese high culture in painting, calligraphy, and other visual and plastic arts for radically new purposes by contemporary art practitioners. We also engaged the ongoing reshaping and reconceptualizing of Chinese art historical practice and understanding by the exigencies of contemporary art studies environments, media, and criticism. On a broader scale, we considered the displacement or co-optation of local cultural identity, social and professional networks, sense of place, and site specificity by globalized corporate culture or by transnational institutions and circuits of exhibition and marketing. -
This conference is about displacements and transcultural encounters in contemporary Chinese art.1 It is organized around notions of location and mobility and our sense that much of what is vital and powerful in contemporary Chinese art is based on displacements of one kind or another, in scales ranging from the local to the global. These might be displacements Artist with Michael and Khoan Sullivan at the Stanford Art Museum, 1967 of neighbourhoods in the interests of (now called the Cantor Center for Visual Arts). Courtesy Richard Vinograd. urban modernization, displacements of historical forms by new video, film, or digital media, or displacements of artistic careers and even monuments from China into transnational arenas and exhibition circuits.
Our conference is dedicated to Professor Emeritus Michael Sullivan, whose distinguished career here at Stanford is surely familiar to most of you. It is one aspect of that prolific and diverse scholarly career that is of spe- cial note today—Professor Sullivan’s pioneering and central role in bringing modern and contemporary Chinese art to the attention of a worldwide public, academic and otherwise. At a time when twentieth-century Chinese art had only a tenuous position in Chinese art historical studies, Michael patiently, persistently, and, I daresay, lovingly chronicled its distinctive, sometimes bewildering, and often painful trajectories within the troubled landscape of modern Chinese politics and culture. Michael Sullivan was Yan Lei, The Curators, 2000, set of three paintings, oil on aluminum sheet on canvas, friend and confidant to many an artist, 135 x 230, 78 x 38, and 73 x 56 cm. Jean-Marc Decrop Collection. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. (I hope you will forgive me Michael; this is a photo of Zhang Daqian with your dear wife Khoan at the Stanford Art Museum in 1967, with you placed rather into the background.) and his writing on the subject is enlivened with personal experience and a deeply sympathetic familiarity with the conditions under (or against) which much modern Chinese art was produced. He was anything but an apologist for this art, however; always an incisive and witty critic, he could be as alive to its contradictions and occasional bad faith as elsewhere he was admiring of its courage and sincerity. From as early as his 1959 Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century to his recent Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China
(1996), an indispensable resource for every student in the field, his work has been one of the key foundations on which the recent abundance of writing about contemporary Chinese art has been based. We are deeply and collectively appreciative of that foundational work and delighted that Professor Sullivan can join us today.
Among our major concerns are transcultural encounters occasioned by the manifold displacements in the contemporary Chinese art scene of the sort that are a major focus of the On the Edge exhibition. Another of Professor Sullivan’s books, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art,took as its central Wang Du, Youth with Slingshot (detail), 2000, resin, fibreglass, acrylic paint. Fashion Concepts, Inc. Collection. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. theme such cultural encounters, reaching back to the sixteenth century but with a substantial focus on the twentieth century as well. We are perhaps more apt these days to emphasize the deep-seated hybridity of cultures (as visualized so wittily in Hong Hao’s Selected Scriptures,re-mappings of political and cultural power) rather than the unity of cultural systems, and to look for frictions, competitions, and disruptions in conditions of cultural encounter rather than for harmonious synthesis or unproblematic influences. Nonetheless, the kinds of relocations, transferences, and re-placements of art, artists, and systems with which we are concerned has been a central theme of Professor Sullivan’s work. It strikes me also that displacements and replacements are at work in art historiography as well. Professor Sullivan participated in the ongoing relocation of modern and contemporary Chinese art studies from the margins toward the center of attention. We are now at a moment, it would seem, when contemporary art events, studies, and criticism are positioned to displace historical art studies, or art historical studies in the conventional sense, from their central status in the field.
Indeed, it seems that replacement, in manifold senses, has become a central strategy of contemporary Chinese art practice, and I would like very briefly to explore some of their varieties and implications, focusing on the art and artists represented in the On the Edge exhibition. Replacement seems to operate in at least three major ways: first, the replacement of one thing or medium with another, or substitution; second, the serial placement and re-placement of similar projects or structures; and third, the re-placement, relocation, or redeployment of a local or site-specific cultural formation to a different context. There are of course many admixtures and permutations of these types.
A simple kind of substitution appears in Zhou Tiehai’s airbrush copies, or simulations, of famous old ink paintings or Hong Hao’s photomontage substitution of a modern city for the Song capital
in his Spring Festival on the River. Media substitutions are also at play here, and a kind of double replacement, of news photographs with fiberglass sculpture, and of a real-world political site to an art space, operates in Wang Du’s Youth with Slingshot.
Serial placement and re-placement take many forms. Zhan Wang’s urban re-sitings (projected or actual) of his stainless steel Ornamental Rockeries and of his Floating Stone from historical to nautical or aerospatial settings exposes the power of context. Miao Xiaochun’s serial perfor- mances of a literati scholar persona placed and re-placed in incongruously modern and yet suggestively familiar settings offer a wry commentary on the aesthetics of loss. Yin Xiuzhen’s Portable City—Beijing is a kind of encapsulated place, and her Suitcases are personal spaces that can be in turn be placed and re-placed around the world.
Strategies of re-placement in the arena of cultural formations have many variations. Within the art world, Yan Lei’s The Curators cut-outs offer a tongue-in-cheek Zhou Tiehai, Rongxi Studio, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 94 cm. Collection of the artist. wish- fulfillment replacement of Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. critical scrutiny. Cai Guoqiang’s Still Life Performance re-situates the decorum and location of original model, painting as activity, copy, and copying all at once in a museum gallery. Zhang Hongtu crosses the codes of oil painting and ink painting to create liminal images such as Shitao/van Gogh that are easy to look at but hard to see because of the interference of our categorical expectations. Xu Bing’s Reading Landscape offers at least a double re-placement: of painting within the three-dimensional real space of the gallery and viewer, and of pictorial motifs with textual, graphic signs. Sui Jianguo replaces sculp- tural skin with simulated Mao suit clothing and thereby realigns our expectations of both classical European and Maoist bodies.
Performances by Ni Haifeng and Zhang Huan involve other kinds of replacements and displace- ments of natural skin and bodies, with implications for both commodified and politico-mythic
identity. International and art-world politics alike are engaged in the successive placements, displacements, and re-placements of Huang Yong Ping’s Bat Projects, and Cai Guoqiang’s re-placement of his version of the Rent Collection Courtyard from Sichuan to Venice perturbed systems of politics, culture, cultural politics, commerce, and law all at once.
Artistic strategies of replacement have had considerable efficacy and staying power in contemporary Chinese art. We see them at work as early as Wang Guangyi’s Great Castigation Series from the early 1990s and, as Lichtenstein’s Paintings in Chinese Style images indicate, they are by no means limited to Chinese practitioners. Their particular prominence in recent Chinese art Xu Bing, Square Wood Calligraphy Classroom, 1994-1996, installation. practice, however, may be based on Collection of the artist. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. some distinctive factors. Foremost among these are the circumstances of repeated displacement that shaped modern and contempo- rary Chinese art, marked by artistic wanderings and diasporas, episodes of displacement to the countryside in the Cultural Revolution years, and the widespread migration and relocation of Chinese artists after 1989. Moreover, the reception of Chinese art in international and now global arenas has perhaps been especially strongly shaped by stereotypes, expectations, and preconcep- tions, of the sort so powerfully exploited by Xu Bing in his Square Word Calligraphy replacements of Chinese graphs by Roman alphabet letter forms, where horizons of preconception lend acts of substitution and re-placement a particular disorienting force.
It’s now time for my own replacement, so please join me in welcoming Michael Sullivan to this conference, and now to the podium for some further remarks.
Notes 1 I want first to acknowledge and to thank the many persons and organizations that have been so instrumental in supporting this conference and bringing it to realization: Britta Erickson, first and foremost, whose On The Edge exhibition is the pretext, occasion, and framing context for this symposium. In addition to the many complex labors involved in organizing and bringing an important international show here to Stanford and writing and editing its catalogue, Britta was instrumental in identifying and contacting the distinguished group of scholars,critics, curators, and collectors who join us here today. We have also to thank the Cantor Center and its Director, Tom Seligman, Curator of Asian Art, John Listopad, and staff, especially Kristin Olson, Educational Services Coordinator, who has been the chief logistical coordinator for the exhibition and for this conference. We are also most grateful to many other co-sponsors and financial supporters of this event: The Stanford Center for East Asian Studies and its Director, Jean Oi, and Assistant Director, Lydia Chen; the Freeman Fund; the Stanford Department of Art and Art History and its chair, Joel Leivick, and administrator, Gary Given, as well as the Christensen Fund for Asian Art within the department; and the Stanford Humanities Center and its Director, John Bender, and administrator, Susan Sebbard.
Thank you very much, Rick, for the extremely gracious remarks about me. I don’t know how many of you got the point of that photograph he showed, which I think reveals very vividly what an absolutely central role my wife Khoan played in my relationship with artists. Thank you.
Britta has asked me to say a few words at the opening of this conference. When I wrote them I had not seen the exhibition and I still haven’t seen it, so my remarks will be of a general nature. You have much to do so I’ll try to be brief. I’d first like to congratulate Britta warmly as Rick did on this remarkable achievement, and to tell how utterly unworthy I feel to be honoured in this way, and also how happy I am to see the artists here who have come such a long way, and to thank Tom Seligman, who isn't here, and the staff at the Cantor Center for their warm and generous hospitality.
When I was at Stanford and I arrived with Khoan almost forty years ago, we mounted two exhibitions of modern Chinese art in the museum. One was of the work of Zhang Daqian, who was then living in Carmel. The other was from our own modest collection. Not much happened with contemporary Chinese art after that and I am delighted that Britta has taken up the torch with her splendid, controversial exhibition. It is burning more fiercely now than it ever did before, and there is now such close collaboration between the museum and the Department of Art.
But what am I doing here? My only claim to be present is that I’m a survivor from an earlier age who has been an observer of the Chinese art scene for sixty years. And I have, in that time, witnessed momentous changes. In her letter inviting me to participate Britta said, “Some of the pieces you will hate.”And that started me thinking, “Why would I hate them?”
It is commonplace that the shock of the new inspires hostility even among artists. The young Seurat thought that the late landscapes of Cézanne were deplorable. Matisse said that Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was ridiculous. If I do hate any of the works that Britta’s included in the exhibition—and I’m not saying that is because they are expressed in a new and unfamiliar language—is there something about them that justifies my dislike? Is there something wrong with them or with me? On the question of quality in art, I should like to say something in a minute. But in the meantime I would like to put in a plea for the usefulness of elderly outsiders like myself: observers, critics, and historians who are not at the cutting edge. I believe that we have a function not to attack the new but to assert permanent values. The architectural critic Robert Campbell called these two kinds of peoples the “Treads and the muds. They need each other,”he wrote. “They are equal and opposite. They live in each other’s eyes. If one were to disappear the other would have to disappear too.”Or, as Ma Desheng put it in about 1979, “I am against tradition because there is a tradition.”In 1851, the prince consort, husband of Queen Victoria, said that the art critic's job was to be encouraging and generous and not just negative. This does not mean that he or she should accept everything just because it’s new. As much second-rate art is created in Factory 798 as was produced in the studios of SOHO a decade ago. We must have or develop a sense of quality in art. To wait for the verdict of a later generation is not enough.
When Britta invited me to talk, I asked her what her criteria were for selection for this exhibition. There were three, she told me: “The work must have a strong theme, it must have meaning, and it must have aesthetic value.”Theme and meaning go together, so I should consider them together.
All conceptual art has meaning and sometimes little else. But meaning and theme in a work of art are not enough. A bad painting of so powerful a theme as the crucifixion is still a bad painting. What is the meaning of a Braque still life? The meaning is in the painting itself. Nor is originality in itself such a merit. There was a time in China when it was. In 1979 one did not question the Britta Erickson (left) and Michael Sullivan (right). Photo: Zheng Shengtian quality of the work of the Stars group. That they produced it was enough. In the same year a group of students did a performance in which they wrapped themselves in cloth and poured ink all over it. I asked one of them what was the significance of their performance. The significance of it he replied was that we did it. Now that’s not such an empty answer, as it seems. In China, at that time, to do something outrageous, even silly, was a fine act of defiance, significant indeed, as it meant taking a position, but today, when once more almost everything is allowed, that’s too easy. I say almost because there are still forbidden areas and until these cease to exist, true cultural freedom in China cannot flourish. The question of the social and political consciousness of the artist is a difficult one, and I expect it is one to be aired quite widely during this conference. There are no simple answers.
If Britta’s criteria had stopped at theme and meaning I would have been profoundly disappointed. But they did not. Her third criterion, you will remember, was aesthetic value. When I asked her what she meant by that she said, “It must look good.”How seldom does one hear those words today. I was astonished and delighted. For it is the gift of making things that look good that distin- guishes the artist from all others. But what do we mean by look good? Is it a matter of integrity, of imagination and feeling, a mastery of form and of the medium?
Of course, we do not like the same things, but we know or should know good when we confront it. I’m not a lover of Wagner but I recognize its greatness when I hear it. A feeling for value in art is partly innate, comes partly from learning and experience, and I would urge young people especially to develop this sense. To sharpen their critical faculty and not simply, as some do, to accept everything that appears at the cutting edge of the avant-garde as though it were of equal value.
I envy the younger generation of artists, critics, and historians involved with contemporary Chinese art, for they live in exciting times. It is a world both richer and more complex than that of the West. This is for three reasons. The first is the extraordinary expansion of Chinese urban culture in the last two decades—it is growing at a faster rate than that of any other country. It is both a support to artists and a temptation to corruption. Market forces and the continual looking over one's shoulder to the West may be stimulants, but they are not healthy ones. And it is fascinating to see how artists deal with this. The second is that modern Chinese art illustrates in a dramatic form the gigantic collision between the cultures of China and the West, which Chinese artists have been wrestling with for a hundred years. And it is not reflected anywhere to the same extent in contemporary Western art. And the third lies in a quality that I think is unique to China itself: her powerful sense of history. For China’s past is now no longer a burden, as it was in the nineteenth century, but a source of inspiration. These interactive dialectical forces give to the culture of today’s China a creative energy that is reflected in Britta’s exhibition, and indeed in this conference, and it is enormously exciting. To be associated with it in any way is a privilege.
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Xu Bing, Square Wood Calligraphy Classroom, 1994-1996, installation. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
In recent years, there has been a marked change in the way that overseas Chinese artists relate to mainland China in their work. This could be characterized as a renewed connection to and identification with China, and it is evident in frequent travel back, exhibitions in various galleries and museums, and even the manufacture of their work. This overseas community is made up of Chinese artists from a similar generation (born predominantly in the forties and fifties) who migrated at a similar time (late 1980s and early 1990s) to a limited number of locations (Sydney, New York, and Paris). I will discuss the circumstances and development of this overseas community of artists and comment upon recent developments—specifically, a return to the homeland, not just physically in the case of some artists who have returned to China intermittently, but also, perhaps more importantly, at the level of a psychological engagement with China.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, a significant number of artists, curators, and critics left China for Australia, the United States, and Europe. This exodus has frequently been portrayed as the migration of dissident artists escaping a Communist regime, particularly after the events of June 4, 1989, at Tian’anmen Square. Yet this is not entirely correct. At the end of the 1980s opportunities for Chinese artists to visit other countries emerged, largely through scholarships to study abroad as well as invitations to attend exhibitions and artist residencies. This period is frequently referred
to as being gripped by “leave the country fever” (chuguore).Some artists who were overseas when the Chinese government used force to quell protests in Beijing in 1989 decided not to return to China, while others drew upon their overseas connections to facilitate migration. Chinese-Australian artist Ah Xian has spoken of such opportunities: “Once they had the chance to go overseas, they tried as hard as they could to stay.”1 Chen Zhen’s migration provides another example. His brother had settled in Paris before him, making it easier for him to migrate there. Some artists who were already abroad, such as Yang Jiechang, has said that his return to China would have been extremely difficult because he was told he did not have a job to return to. It was, perhaps, as much about individual opportunity as national political events in China that prompted these artists to decide to migrate and settle.
The settlement of these artists, critics, and curators outside China has been described as a splintering of the Chinese art world. A prominent Chinese curator living in Paris, Fei Dawei, for instance, explains this as a time when “Numerous top talents took up residence abroad and the world of Chinese contemporary art branched out into two schools: the expatriates and their counterparts in China. Each school set back to work—only in different environments.”2 This separation in the art world between overseas and mainland artists created a rupture in discussions of Chinese art. In this way, one might describe Chinese experimental art during the 1990s as two parallel art worlds: inside and outside China. You might also ask, now roughly fifteen years later, what has happened to these parallel art worlds? It has become increasingly obvious that the distinctions between them have almost completely dissipated. This has largely been due to changed conditions in China, where the display of contemporary art in the public sphere has become much more permissible while at the same time contemporary art has been presented in national exchange exhibitions at an official level. The most recent example of the latter is Alors, la Chine? (2003), at the Centre Georges Pompidou, which was part of a bilateral France-China cultural exchange.
We can set about defining this overseas or diasporic community through a shared set of experiences. In fact, there does exist a self-conscious identification of an overseas Chinese artist community. Artists Chen Zhen and Xu Bing have both referred to the similarities of life experiences for their generation. They account for this in terms of decades and, specifically, the last three decades: one decade experiencing the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath; the second decade of liberalization in China, which resulted in artistic freedoms and exposure to Western styles; and the third decade living in the West and engaging with an international art scene.3 In Xu’s words:
We do identify as a similar generation. I would also like to add that our experiences also include ten years of education in socialism before the Cultural Revolution, so this is in fact a forty or forty-five year experience. This is why my generation has so many complex cultural references. They have been nourished by all of these different influences. This group of artists, although our work might be very different, it does share a certain cultural spirit based on similar historical experiences and cultural backgrounds in China.4
If we look at the work of artists such as Cai Guoqiang, Gu Wenda, Yun Feiji, and Xu Bing, in New York; Chen Zhen, Yang Jiechang, and Yang Peiming, in France; and Guan Wei, Ah Xian, Xiao Xian, and Dong Wang Fan in Australia, we might also ask how this very set of experiences Xu Bing mentions plays out in their work?
If we can make any generalizations about the work of these artists, it is that their idea of being Chinese is distinctly different from those artists who remained in China. This refigured Chineseness is produced by the interaction between the host culture and the original Chinese culture. For
instance, the work of the Paris-based artists Huang Yongping and Chen Zhen resonates with the principles of Chinese medicine and alchemy, while for Gu Wenda and Xu Bing, who currently live in New York, Chinese language remains a central aspect of their installations. Similarly, references to Chinese acupuncture and porcelain designs can be found in the work of Guan Wei and Ah Xian, who live in Sydney. Looking at similarities between artists who migrated to different countries, we see a recurrent use of Cultural Revolution iconography in the work of Guo Jian in Sydney and Zhang Hongtu in New York, as well as a preoccupation with the Chinese tradition of ink painting in Gu Wenda, united nations: united 7561 kilometers, 2003, installation at the University the work of Gu Wenda in New York and of North Texas, Denton. Courtesy David Cateforis. Yang Jiechang in Paris. An interest in healing and the use of Chinese traditional herbal medicine is a feature of the work of Chen Zhen from Paris and Cai Guoqiang from New York.
At times, however, the inclusion of Chinese symbols may appear to conform to clichés of Chinese culture. This has certainly been the criticism directed at overseas artists by some mainland critics. Most notably, Wang Nanming’s criticism of overseas Chinese artists as examples of “Chinatown Cultures.”5 Homi Bhabha’s comments on the process of identification are salient in this instance:
The question of identification is never the affirmation of a pre-given identity, never a self-fulfilling prophecy—it is always the production of an “image” of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image.The demand of identification—that is, to be for an Other—entails the representation of the subject in the differentiating order of Otherness. [my emphasis]6
This observation about identity sheds light on some of the issues relating to the incorporation of Chinese symbols in the work of overseas artists. Bhabha’s statement draws our attention to the fact that when Chinese artists incorporate Chinese references into their work it is frequently a transformation or reinterpretation of Chinese culture from a distance. In other words, Chinese identity outside China is distinctly different from Chinese identity in mainland China. Significantly, Chineseness is altered irrevocably by migration and the adoption of other sources of inspiration.
A number of general observations regarding the relationship between overseas Chinese artists and their homeland China can be made on the basis of this observation. The first is that Chinese artists in different countries, perhaps more so than other migrant artists, share similar difficulties in adjusting to their place of settlement. This has involved adapting their Chinese identity to their environment and getting a sense of who they are in relation to a host country, while also coming to grips with a displacement between their memories and experiences of China and the changes that have occurred in that country during their absence. Secondly, the Chinese reference point, for much if not all of the work of the overseas Chinese artists examined here, is Old China; it is based on traditional rather than contemporary issues, concerns, and daily life in China. This is under-
standable, given that the artists live outside of the country, but it creates another strange disjuncture, given that a great many of these artists have been upheld by Western galleries and museums as exemplars of “contemporary” Chinese art. Thirdly, language and communication remain enduring preoccupations for overseas Chinese artists, whether in the form of works about calligraphy, about the difficulty of communicating across cultures, or about the translation of a formal language from one culture to another. Fourthly, the works comment critically on the way China is perceived within Western countries. This is particularly apparent in the work of the Chinese artists who migrated to France, who were forced to deal with centuries-old perceptions of their country and region embedded in the local culture. In comparison, Chinese artists living in the United States and Australia engaged with much shorter local histories of migration and influence.
In spite of the similarities of experiences and artistic approaches discernible among the generation of artists examined here, it is also useful to draw some distinctions between them, with the idea that settlement in different countries did affect their artistic approaches to being Chinese. For example, there was a greater tendency amongst those who migrated to Australia to continue working in a similar vein to what they had done in China. All of these artists continued to paint, at least for the first few years, and all made figurative work. The size and shape of Guan Wei’s paintings have remained consistent, their dimensions drawn from a series of window frames he found while at art school in China and used as stretchers for his paintings. Artists living in the United States, on the other hand, tend to reinvent Chinese signifiers within an international idiom. Xu Bing and Gu Wenda achieve this by altering the Chinese language to make characters legible to English-speaking audiences or, at times, illegible to Chinese-speaking audiences, while Cai Guoqiang modifies Chinese teachings such as traditional Chinese herbal medicine and philosophies of alchemy or fengshui to suit an American context. By contrast, Chinese artists in France seem to be more interested in examining contemporary and historical interactions between China and the West.
There is a strange cultural logic to these artistic responses, since they also reflect popular perceptions of these societies abroad. Relatively speaking, Australian culture is open to outside influences and cultures, especially by artists coming from a culture as old and established as that of China. With this, it is not surprising that there should be so many connections between their work made in China and that made in Australia, especially in the areas of subject matter and technique. By contrast, the United States, as a global power and dominant cultural force, exerts a great influence on artists working not only in the country but also around the world and has done so for the last thirty years.7 It is also no surprise to find that France, the nation that developed Sinology as a discipline and established Orientalism in art, should elicit art works from its Chinese immigrant artists that point to a more traditional distinction between East and West.
The work of these overseas Chinese artists stands in contrast to that of their peers in mainland China, who all regularly employ contemporary, localized references in their work, making little overt reference to Chinese traditions during the 1990s. When Chinese traditions are featured in these mainland Chinese artists' work, their meanings are often very different. For the mainland artists Song Dong, Liu Xinhua, and Qiu Zhijie, the use of calligraphy always involves a tacit criticism of the tradition, which is everywhere around them, yet when overseas Chinese artists employ Chinese writing or calligraphy, it is usually as part of an identification with Chinese culture and a specific art tradition.
This state of affairs might be interpreted in different ways. The external system of recognition and validation of Chinese art in the international arena that occurred in the nineties could be said to have caused an internalized dislocation, whereby local Chinese traditions were undervalued in favour of international styles such as installation, video, and conceptual art. One of the effects this had on artists was the intensi- fication of a dual system of art practice within China, illustrated by the continuing, if somewhat dubious, distinction between official and unofficial art. During the last decade, this distinction has become more apparent with the increasing sales and exposure of Qiu Zhijie, Tattoo II, 1997, silver print, 180 x 145 cm. Courtesy the artist. so-called unofficial artists outside of the country, some of whom have made a great deal of money from their work. By contrast, overseas Chinese artists have increasingly sought to overcome a sense of dislocation from their homeland by identifying with recognizable symbols of Chineseness. Partly, this is related to their own experience, as mentioned, and partly, it reflects the different demands of foreign audiences, many of whom continue to look for a recognizable sense of Chineseness in the work of Chinese artists.
To make matters more complex, however, differences between the work of artists living in China and those who live outside have begun to break down. Some of the artists who left China for professional opportunities in the 1980s and 1990s have since returned permanently, such as Wang Zhi Yuan, from Sydney, and Ai Weiwei, Wang Gongxin, and Lin Tianmiao, from New York. Recently, others have begun to travel back and forth between China and their adopted homes, with some of them (such as Ah Xian, Gu Wenda, Huang Yongping, and Cai Guoqiang) having Chinese labourers manufacture their works. Some have even bought property in China and return for long periods at a time. This re-engagement with their homeland is a consequence almost entirely of the massive social, political, and economic changes in China over the last decade. Strict prohibitions against the display of contemporary art have now been lifted, or almost, allowing artists once banned from showing art in China to display their work. Some overseas Chinese artists have even been invited to show their work in an official capacity. Cai Guoqiang was commissioned to design a pyrotechnic display for the 2001 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit Meeting in Shanghai. This represents an extraordinary turnaround on the part of a government that for many years maintained a hostile and adversary attitude toward contemporary art. Expatriate Chinese and even foreign curators have been invited to curate major exhibitions in China, such as the 2000, 2002, and 2004 Shanghai Biennales. The Chinese government also sponsored the country’s first official participation at the Venice Biennale in 2003.8
China now also boasts three large-scale biennial exhibitions (Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou), while the loosening of economic controls by the Chinese state has led to the birth of a small but significant Chinese art market.
But it would be foolish to suggest that the conditions of art-making and exhibition display in China are on a par with those available in the West. The Chinese government's growing relaxation of controls over contemporary art reflects a reluctant loosening of political control in response to forced economic changes, as well Ah Xian, China China-Bust No. 60, 2002, porcelain pierced through with four-season-flowers design. Photo: Liu Xiao Xian. Courtesy the artist. as a need to show tolerance and leniency as part of the nation's aim to secure foreign investment in China and to improve its human rights record to gain membership in influential world-governing bodies such as the World Trade Organization. The Chinese government has also sought to improve its international public image as part of its bid for the 2008 Olympic Games, an event which is usually accompanied by extensive cultural activities from the host country. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that conditions will not revert at any time. What is clear, however, is that the once distinctly separate art worlds inside and outside China are much more permeable now than they have been since at least 1989.
Notes 1 Ah Xian, unpublished interview with the author, April, 15, 2001, Sydney. 2 D. Fei, “When we look. . . .,” in C. Driessen and H. van Mierlo, eds., Another Long March: Chinese Conceptual and Installation Art in the Nineties, exh. cat., (Breda, The Netherlands: Fundament Foundation, 1997), 49. 3 Chen Zhen in conversation with the author, December 23, 1999, Paris. 4 Xu Bing, unpublished interview with the author, May 27, 2000, Sydney. 5 N. Wang, “Why We Should Criticize Xu Bing’s ‘New English Calligraphy’ and Acknowledge Liu Chao’s ‘Machine Calligraphy’.” Chinese-art.com, vol. 4, no. 2 (2000), http://www.chinese-art.com/Contemporary/volumefourissue2/nanming2.htm, and N. Wang, “Chinatown Culture: Chinese Contemporary Arts in the International Arena,” unpublished paper presented at the conference Contemporary Chinese Arts in the International Arena (London: British Museum, 2002). 6 Homi Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition,” in P.Williams and L. Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (Hertfordshire, U.K.: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 117. 7 See, for example, the exhibition The American Effect (2003) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which explored global perceptions of the United States. 8 China’s participation was not complete in the end (due to complications with SARS), but it showed a willingness on the part of the Chinese government to embrace contemporary artists and art as national symbols in the international arena.
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Asian Art Museum of San Francisco exterior signage, January 2004. Photo: Pauline J. Yao.
Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true; Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real.
Cao Xueqin1
This couplet, flanking the entrance to The Land of Illusion in chapter 1 of the Chinese literary classic Hongloumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as The Story of the Stone) has long been regarded as a succinct summation of the novel’s ordering principle and thematic focus. Since its publication in the late eighteenth century, issues of truth and fiction have plagued scholarly investigation of the masterpiece. Not only does the novel center on a principal theme of parallel worlds—one real and one illusory—but issues of authenticity surround its very existence and creation. As stated in one translator’s introduction, “it is somewhat surprising that the most popular book in the whole of Chinese literature remained unpublished for nearly thirty years after its author’s death, and exists in several different versions, none of which can be pointed to as definitively ‘correct.’” Moreover, as literary scholars delve into the text itself for clues, they are faced with a multitude of verbal riddles, wordplay, puns, and double entendres, enhancing the novel’s liminal position between illusion and reality. According to one scholar, “the first lesson one learns from the reading of Hongloumeng,a lesson as profound as its expression is commonplace, is that there is more to the linguistic sign than meets the eye and ear.”3
The same might be said for the visual arts, where throughout time artists have made it their work to play with signs and signifiers in ways that reinforce, circumvent, or falsify direct meaning. For centuries, artists around the world have engaged in making forgeries or copies of earlier masterworks—at times motivated by deceitful intentions and at others by a desire to show reverence for or honour the past. A recent exhibition at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco looked at the evolution and progression of this longstanding tradition with respect to traditional Asian art. The exhibition, Fakes, Copies and Question Marks (September 25, 2004–March 27, 2005), attempted to explore the convoluted and compounded nature of authenticity in Asian art by highlighting recent discoveries the Promotional display for Fakes, Copies and Question Marks at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, January 2004. Photo: Pauline J. Yao. museum has made regarding dating and attribution of works in its collection. The exhibition aimed to debunk standard assumptions about an artwork being strictly either real or fake, old or new, authentic or inauthentic, and it illustrated the need to expand and update by including those instances where something inhabits both categories and or exists as an amalgamation of the two.
Curated by the Museum’s Head of Conservation, Donna Strahan, the show takes a decidedly interactive and scientific approach, and thus provides opportunities for in-depth probing into the more tangled questions concerning imitation, connoisseurship, archaism, and how they vary from one cultural area to another. However, the core question of the exhibition, “Why do we care if something is authentic?” is a provocative one, not only because of the context of the museum—where questions of authenticity are paramount—but because it brings up so many other questions: What do we mean by authentic? Where and how do we locate authenticity? How are we thinking of these terms in contemporary art?
I will address how some of these questions and other issues relating to fakes, copies, and authenticity are embedded in the work of three contemporary Chinese artists: Ai Weiwei, Zhan Wang, and Cai Guoqiang. Indeed there are many more artists whose works might also be considered in this vein—from Xu Bing and Gu Wenda’s “fake” characters, to Qiu Zhijie’s tireless One Thousand Copies of the Orchid Pavilion,to more recent works by Zhou Tiehai and Huang Yongping’s Bat Project.But, for purposes of limiting the discussion, I have selected instances where artists have taken as their models previous icons in the Chinese artistic tradition and how these models or “originals” are revealed to have their own dubious claim to authenticity, thus resulting in com- pounded meanings and multiple layers of signification.
A pioneer in addressing issues of fakes and authenticity is artist, curator, and designer Ai Weiwei. Few artists can claim a kinship with the concept of “fakes” as strong as that of Ai Weiwei, whose name card bears the designation “Fake Editorial.”Ai’s artistic projects deal with the thorny overlap
Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995, black-and-white photographs. Courtesy of Robert Miller Gallery, New York. of authenticity and the power of authority. From his early copies of Chinese neolithic pots to his Qing dynasty replicas, he engages in a double-edged process that acknowledges and disrupts inherent value systems. In the work Dropping a Han Urn,Ai took a reportedly genuine Han dynasty urn and dropped it to ground where it broke into hundreds of pieces. This was documented in a series of three black and white photographs. In another work, Breaking of Two Blue and White Dragon Bowls,Ai photographed himself smashing a Kangxi period bowl into multiple fragments. These projects have been widely cited as iconoclastic gestures in which the artist, utilizing icons deemed representative of Chinese traditional art and culture, is seen to be negating or rebelling against China’s past. Such a reading might be possible, yet the motive behind Ai’s gestures also has to do with questioning the authority these objects hold and who assigns them such authority. In his view, one can only interpret these gestures as rebellious acts if one believes that the objects he is breaking are authentic markers of China’s past. Ai’s conviction that such objects would not be deemed valuable if it were not for an authoritarian voice telling us so, turns his iconoclasm towards systems of power and authority. Interested in provoking people to challenge the ways in which value becomes invested in objects, he maintains that his breaking of the urn is insignificant: “It was not powerful; it is only grabbed by the weight and gravity [of the earth]. It’s powerful only because someone thinks it’s powerful and invests value in the object.”4
And yet, one has to wonder, by photographing and documenting these occurrences, isn’t Ai acknowledging another system of power and investing value in his own actions as an artist? If the actions were not powerful, then why photograph them? His actions substantiate the system of power that is the artworld, which holds the artist in a keystone position. In an effort to dismantle the authority invested in certain objects Ai unwittingly confirms the existence of this authority through the documentation of the event itself and through proclaiming it as art.
Clearly, one of Ai’s goals is to get us to question whether or not the meaning of these projects would be the same if the objects were not authentic. Another project, in which he hired craftsmen in Jingdezhen (the site of the former imperial kilns) in Jiangxi province to create replicas of eighteenth-century blue and white porcelains made during the reigns of the Kangxi (1661–1722), Yongzheng (1722–1735), and Qianlong (1735–1736) emperors, toys with ideas of connoisseurship and the relationship between body and mind:
It’s very [ironic]—every decision: the color of the glaze, the curves, the way of painting, even each brushstroke-all of this reflects a high degree of decision making. It’s like a secret code, more secret than that of the American dollar. It takes an expert to recognize it. Yet, all those judgments are not based on scientific principles so much as personal feelings.5
Ai is himself a collector and connoisseur of antiquities, so he is familiar with the subjective nature of authenticity. Such experts may be able to tell the authentic from the inauthentic and yet, due to differences in training and personal opinion, they often disagree, thus revealing that the expert or authoritarian voice can come from anywhere. Ai’s replicas pose the question, where is the authenticity in these pieces? If they adhere to the style and decoration of Qing ceramics and if the material and place of production are “authentic,”then what keeps us from thinking of them as authentic? [The same question can be posed about his furniture pieces, in which, by using salvaged wood from Qing temples in southern China and employing “authentic” wood joinery and craftsmanship, he makes us constantly ponder the relationship between old and new, authentic and fake. When something is viewed as being authentic, it goes through a process of othering, a removal from its time and place to occupy some distant past. Ai is interested in reversing this process—taking something old and recasting it in contemporary terms, thereby fooling with our perceptions. At the same time, Ai’s blue and white replicas invoke Duchamp’s concept of the readymade—a copy with the same value as the original—forcing us to see how something mass produced can become elevated to a work of art through the act of selection. Value in the art world is determined by the “psychological” mechanisms that are at the core of any monopoly system: rarity,authenticity, uniqueness, and the law of supply and demand. Seen today, Ai Weiwei’s oblique reference to industry and manufacturing does not go unnoticed, especially as the global demand for Asian antiquities (and the corresponding market for forgeries) moves forward at a swift pace.
Beijing sculptor Zhan Wang, in his Ornamental Rock series, which began around 1995, plays not only with notions of real vs. fake but also underlying assumptions concerning natural vs. man made, cultural vs. synthetic, original vs. copy. Zhan’s stainless steel “artificial” rocks are designed to force a meeting between the glossy, manufactured sides of contemporary life and the austere, weathered classical forms of literati culture. Created through a process that involves laying sheets of stainless steel over the surface of a three-dimensional garden rock and hammering out each undulating curve and recess, Zhan forms a one-to-one relationship between the “original” rock and the resulting “copy” where the primary difference between the two is material. From his early projects, Zhan’s underlying aim has been to challenge the viewer to discriminate between reality and artifice, original and derivative. The question I would like to pose is: how are we to think of the stone models or “originals”? What, in fact, is original about them? Is it the fact that they existed before their imitations were realized? Or that they guided a process of replication? Or that they are simply natural or found, and not man-made?
The answer to this last question is what lends Zhan Wang’s projects such depth and variegated meaning. Though admired for their natural qualities, the “original” rocks Zhan uses were often “enhanced” by sculptors to improve their appearance. [These “fantastic rocks” (qishi, guaishi,or yishi), as they are known in English, are often seen grouped together in Chinese gardens to suggest a series of mountain peaks, or viewed individually as a microcosm of the natural environment. The term “strange rocks” or “fantastic rocks” bears implicit ties to the world of fantasy and illusion and, in fact, many of these sorts of rocks were “chiseled, ground and polished to complete their beauty.”6 And according to twelfth-century rock connoisseur Du Wan, “those that are slightly inferior in their characteristic hollows and crags are improved by more chiseling and then aged by resubmersion, so that the stone may be scoured by wind and rain and its patterns restored to a living appearance.”7 Clearly identifying where nature ended and human intervention began is not always possible, and, hence, the rocks are at once fake and real, nature and art.
The artificiality Zhan intends to explore therefore extends beyond his use of modern materials to encompass the duplicitous quality of Chinese garden rocks in the first place. Often seen as representing nature or the idea of nature, Chinese garden rocks go one step further to represent the imagined ideals we place upon nature. Rather than being examples of natural phenomena, they are mediated by an artist’s hand, who, inspired by nature, has mastered the art of imitating it. Thus Zhan Wang’s stainless steel rocks rely on our imagination—to make the fake become real and, then, to undo this process by making the real fake again.
The time in which Zhan chose to resurrect these rocks—paragons of an “authentic” past steeped in literati taste—was mid-1990s Beijing, a time of rapid urbanization and large-scale redevelopment. Reacting to the tendency of Chinese modern architecture to imitate traditional or classical forms, Zhan spearheaded the project New Map of Beijing: Today and Tomorrow’s Capital-Rockery Remodeling Plan (1997), which involved placement of “fake mountains” in front of these “fake” buildings. In doing this he makes us consider which is more “fake”—the modern building made to look like something old or something old refashioned as new? Does the countering of a “fake” with a “fake” result in the production of something real? Zhan’s work not only points how garden rocks have come to be used in modern settings as markers of “authentic” past but how traditional idealized views of nature need to be updated to fit today’s modern urban landscape.
In 1999, Cai Guoqiang, an artist whose name had not been previously associated with making fakes or copies, brought controversy and scandal to the contemporary Chinese art world with his restaging of Shouzu Yuan (Rent Collection Courtyard) at the 48th Venice Biennale. In a story that is familiar to many by now, Cai Guoqiang hired a crew of sculptors to recreate the famous Socialist Realist masterpiece Shouzu Yuan in Venice as his entry for the Biennale, renamed as Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard.After the piece received positive press and won a top prize at the Biennale, the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts filed a lawsuit against the Venice Biennale exhibition, its curator Harald Szeemann, and the artist Cai Guoqiang for copyright infringement. The arguments surrounding the case mostly focused on whether Cai had violated the artists’ rights (and copyright law) or appropriated their work in efforts to create a postmodern work of art. The latest development in this saga is that Cai’s Venice Rent Collection Courtyard has been since “rescued” from destruction and moved to Museo Civico della Ceramica (Civic Museum of Ceramics) in Nove, Italy, and made permanent through a firing process. Most interestingly, the artist has stated that the sculptures in Nove are no longer his artwork.9
The life-sized sculptural installation consisting of over a hundred figures and props has its own convoluted history and background with multiple versions created and circulated over time.10 What is of interest to me is not the particular history of the sculpture, but its iconic role as a “model sculpture” in modern Chinese history. Cai’s decision to recreate this masterpiece of Socialist Realism—already a copy to begin with—has been deemed an act of appropriation. Cai himself maintains that the act of reproducing the Rent Collection Courtyard at the Venice Biennale was a conceptual performance piece that used a canonical work of art to discuss aspects of art production and meaning. He believes he was not creating a sculpture but instead performing the “making of a sculpture” by conceptualizing the form and methods of the original piece.11
Unlike Ai Weiwei’s and Zhan Wang’s work, which draws from ancient examples, Cai’s restaging of the Rent Collection Courtyard has elicited controversy because the work Cai has borrowed from is a known entity, an existing artwork with a traceable past. And yet, our encounters with the history
Zhan Wang, (left) Flowers in the Mirror (2005), 6 photographs, 101.6 x 101.6 cm; (right) Artificial Jiashanshi (1998), stainless steel, 48.25 x 58.4 x 150 cm. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. of the Rent Collection Courtyard tell us otherwise. In light of Mao Zedong’s policies towards art, which discouraged individual attributions and encouraged anonymous or joint authorship, the Rent Collection Courtyard has been historically recorded as anonymous. While certain elements of this are now coming to light, the fact still remains that the power behind the Rent Collection Courtyard stems from its revolutionary subject matter and esteemed position in Chinese history rather than from “originality” (i.e. rarity) or authorship. It is exactly this esteemed position in Chinese history and model status that embodied certain values at a specific point in time, which Cai intended to draw upon, not dissimilar to Ai Weiwei and Zhan Wang’s reactivation of earlier high points in Chinese culture. The Rent Collection Courtyard, like Zhan’s rocks, is not a copy of a thing but of an idea, or more accurately, an ideal that once held sway in China but is now increasingly outdated.
Perhaps Cai’s most significant contribution in his restaging of the Rent Collection Courtyard in Venice is the discussion around what new meanings are produced in the transposition of this piece from its original place and time (revolutionary era China) to the center stage of the international contemporary art frenzy known as the Venice Biennale. Britta Erickson poses the compelling question, “what happens to a revolutionary work of art when the audience is no longer revolutionary?”12 We must also ask why Cai chose to mobilize this artwork at this particular point in time—was it to satisfy a trend? To serve a need within the market? Many have read Cai’s borrowing of Socialist Realist language to serve as entertainment for the bourgeois art crowd as a reaction to the craze for Chinese contemporary art in the west. Actually, the dispute around Cai’s appropriation fueled debates on the original Rent Collection Courtyard,with different parties fighting to claim their version as the definitive “original.”Issues of authenticity also entered into discussions of Cai himself, with some wondering whether Cai, as a Chinese expatriate artist, was authentically Chinese enough to be included in the Venice Biennale under the title of Chinese artist or, on the flipside, whether he is authentically Chinese enough to be appropriating a work of Socialist Realism for an international audience. Cai’s appropriation of the Rent Collection Courtyard is an intriguing culmination of Ai’s anti-authoritarian stance and Zhan’s adoption of idealized values in Chinese history.
In conclusion, how are we to interpret these contemporary projects as fakes and determine to what extent they are in line with a long tradition of copying and imitating earlier artworks? The practice
Cai Guoqiang, Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard 1999. Photo: Elio Montanari. Photo courtesy of Cai Studio. of reviving elements of the past to serve the present has been widely noted in studies of contemporary Chinese art, but the act of copying or making fakes brings up altogether different associations. Though the contemporary artists I have discussed here do draw upon artistic examples of the past, their work exists on the surface of a larger phenomenon present among art practitioners today, many of whom are engaged in creating fakes of a different sort that aim to deceive and defraud. Indeed, the issue of fakes extends well beyond art to everyday life in contemporary China, where fake drugs and pirated DVDs, CDs, and computer software abound.13 The choice on the part of these artists to make copies, adopt the terminology of fakes, and further blur the lines between truth and fiction is timely, given external efforts to coerce China into acknowledging international copyright law. As these artists have demonstrated, making fakes can help us see the unstable and arbitrary status of the “original,”underscoring the absurdity of our endless striving towards the authentic and exposing the disputable boundaries between truth and fiction.
Notes The author wishes to thank Britta Erickson and David Spalding for their thoughtful insights and advice on this topic. 1 Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, trans. David Hawkes (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 55. 2 Ibid. For a more detailed discussion on the publishing and authorship of this book, see its introduction, 1–46. 3 Anthony C.Yu, Rereading the Stone: Desire and the Making of Fiction in the Dream of the Red Chamber (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 4. 4 Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei Works: Beijing, 1993–2004 (Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Books, 2003), 31. 5 Ibid, p.29. 6 Quoted in Robert Mowry, Worlds within Worlds: The Richard Rosenblum Collection of Chinese Scholar’s Rocks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums, 1997), Introduction, 21. 7 Ibid. 8 For more on the debate surrounding Cai Guoqiang and the Rent Collection Courtyard, see Britta Erickson, “The Rent Collection Courtyard Copyright Breached Overseas: Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts Sues Venice Biennale,” and Zhu Qi, “We Are All Too Sensitive When It Comes to Awards! Cai Guoqiang and Copyright Infringement Problems Surrounding Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard,” in Chinese Art at the Crossroads: Between Past and Future, Between East and West (Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Books, 2000). 9 I thank Britta Erickson for bringing this most recent development to my attention. 10 Ibid. 11 Quoted in Zhu Qi, “We Are All Too Sensitive When It Comes To Awards! Cai Guoqiang and Copyright infringement Problems Surrounding Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard,” 59. 12 Britta Erickson, “The Rent Collection Courtyard:A Model Socialist Realist Sculpture of the Cultural Revolution ...and the Bourgeois Reactionary Time Bomb within," “Cultural Production and the Cultural Revolution” conference, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia, March 22–23, 2002. 13 A recent article highlights this burgeoning part of China's economy. See Ted C. Fishman, “Manufaketure: Counterfeiting and pirating (that is, making knockoffs of what developed nations have created) are at the heart of the Chinese economic boom: As unethical or illegal as it might be, the Chinese government is not about to stop it,” New York Times Magazine, Jan 9, 2005, 40–44.
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In the 1980s, the terms “ink painting” or “ink art” were overwhelmingly accepted in China, replacing the long-standing labels “Chinese painting” (zhongguo hua) and “national painting” (guohua).The reason for this shift in terminology seems to be that artists and writers in that period thought that a more neutral language would open doors to a wider art world and create more opportunities to expand the potential of a traditional medium that had been used by Chinese artists for thousands of years.
What has been the result of this change? Did the concept of “ink art” evolve into something substantially different from “national painting” or “Chinese painting”? The state of ink art today, some twenty years later, was well documented by two exhibitions held in China late in 2004.
One was the 2004 New Xieyi Ink Invitational Exhibition at the Chinese National Art Gallery in Beijing, which included seventy-five works by twenty-five artists.1 The second, in the south, was the Fourth Shenzhen International Ink Biennial,which included works by 124 artists.2 The stated purpose of the Beijing exhibition was to represent mainstream ink art in the 1990s and, specifically, to reflect the ways Chinese ink painters, now working in the context of a global economy and the widespread permeation of Western culture, are able to maintain the use of their own artistic language to create art.3 The works in the show covered a wide range of the most commonly practiced styles of ink painting in China but did not include the more non-traditional current uses of ink, such as installation art or conceptual art. Instead, they included examples of such 1980s innovations as “new literati painting” by Zhou Jingxin, Zhu Xinjian, and Zeng Mi, and formalist experiments by landscape painters such as Jia Youfu, Long Rui, Wang Wuxie, and
Zhuo Hejun and figure painters such as Li Jing, Li Xiaoxuan, Chao Hai, and Tian Liming. These artists’ works are quite typical of most of the ink paintings you can see in exhibitions at museums, galleries, auction houses, and even hotel gift shops in all parts of China, and on the basis of their ubiquity alone they warrant the label “mainstream.”
At the conference associated with this exhibition, Chinese critics and artists raised issues that still basically revolved around the concept of xieyi,which refers to a “free and self-expressive manner.” The term may be translated literally as “to express ideas,”or “delineating an idea,”or, in Eugene Wang’s more creative rendering, as “sketch conceptualism,”4 but in most cases it is associated with certain schools of pre-modern Chinese painting.
Despite the use of the pre-modern term xieyi, the speakers worried about how to infuse ink painting with new meanings and a contemporary spirit. But, at the same time that they agonized over how to achieve recognition for their work, they essentially spoke in terms and about issues only relevant to themselves as Chinese artists within the Chinese context.
The second show, in Shenzhen, was more interesting visually and conceptually. It included four parts, plus a section on Korean ink painting, each of which was conceived by a different curator. The four sections were: (1) Contemporary Brush and Ink, (2) Urban Ink, (3) Ink Design, and (4) Ink Space. Although the concepts of these different sections often overlapped, the overall result was not very coherent, and the show as a whole demonstrated very well the anxiety of Chinese artists who work in this media in the face of the international art world.
The Shenzhen International Ink Biennial was initiated in 1998, but two previous international ink painting exhibitions had already taken place in the city in 1988 and 1992. The organizers of the 2004 Biennial wrote that they hoped through this show to thoroughly examine the conditions and reasons for the continued existence of the ancient art form of ink painting. Specifically, by exploring the different expressive forms of contemporary ink painting and the potential for and limitations of their transformation and development, they sought to suggest a new understanding of its essential qualities and to expand the visual field of contemporary ink art through creative design concepts and experimental works.
The Contemporary Brush and Ink section, as the title suggests, deals with the issue of bimo,or brushwork, which remains a hot topic among ink painters of formalist inclination. The paintings in this section of the show are quite similar to those in the New Xieyi Ink Invitational Exhibition in Beijing. It tries to convey a general sense of the various styles of ink painting practiced in today’s China. The ten artists chosen for this section have developed unique personal styles of painting, and, in the sense of an individual artistic language, their work is the most closely related to traditional Chinese art of any in the show. Zhang Guiming, for example, uses shapes that are almost geometric to form his compositions of plum blossoms and birds and flowers. Yu Peng uses calligraphic lines to paint slightly bizarre landscapes. This section seems to serve as a general background, and almost as a foil, against which the other sections should be seen.
The Urban Ink section is divided into three parts: modern urban landscapes, the existential and emotional experiences of contemporary urban people, and women artists. In the second part, Zheng Qiang’s Fashion Show and Zou Jianping’s Intimate Companion express a concern for the complicated relationships between young men and women in urban environments. Zhou Yong’s Love Cat, Love Dog, Love Pets, and Huang Yihan’s Cracked City convey the aimlessness and nihilism of urban youth by means of exaggeration and manipulation of form and colour. Contemporaneity is further suggested by the artists’ explicit use of digital imagery to supplement what they consider to be weaknesses with the traditional medium of ink painting. The third part, Their City, aimed to convey what it identified as the special understanding and forms of expression associated with urban women ink painters.
For the Ink Design section, professional designers were invited to create works of commercial design based on ink. Yuan Yunpu used computers to transform and enlarge images from his ink paintings into textile designs. Other artists also used their ink painting for furniture decorations and two-dimensional graphic design. The reason for adding a section to the exhibition focused on design seems to have been to attempt to demonstrate the possibilities of merging fine art and commercial art, a rather different approach from the rest of the exhibition.
The section Ink Space fits most squarely within the category of contemporary art. According to curator Gao Minglu, this part was called Ink Space because he was trying to create a zone of freedom to let different concepts of ink converge, forming a hodgepodge of different approaches and leaving possibilities open within his space.5 The format and media of the art in this section were varied and included installations, video, and two-dimensional work, but the works were all connected in some way to ink. These included examples of abstract ink painting, which is more commonly called “experimental ink painting” in China, as illustrated with work by Zhang Yu and Li Huasheng, and also installation works, such as those by Wang Nanmin, Zhang Jianjun, and Wang Tiande. Many artists in this section have been included in recent international exhibitions and biennials in China.
Some of this work may be very familiar to Western audiences, such as that of Xu Bing and Gu Wenda. Both artists deal with the materials of ink, brush, and paper, and they both refer to the Chinese written language and its meaning. Xu Bing’s Reading Landscape pushed the pictographic function of Chinese characters to its extreme. From a distance, the three large-scale scrolls look like traditional ink landscapes. But when one moves close to them, one finds that the landscape elements are composed of repeated units of Chinese characters, functioning like the conventional texture strokes applied by ancient painters but wildly different from traditional art in its use of characters. Xu Bing rendered the foreground grasses using the Chinese character for grass, built up mountains from the characters for mountain, stone, and trees, and wrote “white” in faint ink across areas of mist.6
The two exhibitions I am discussing give us a general picture of so-called “ink art” in China today. But the kind of painting in the Beijing show, although practiced by thousands of painters in China, is normally never seen in international exhibitions. This group of artists is concerned with their position in China, with an internal audience and standards, and the way they discuss issues is based entirely on the Chinese context. Their worry about the reform or transformation of Chinese painting in relation to modern society may be seen in the styles and subject matter evident in some of their paintings. They may talk about tradition, but their techniques and imagery are all completely different from classical Chinese painting. They have already gone well beyond Chinese tradition, but they are still willing to limit their practice and discussion to a Chinese context. They are extremely anxious about the future of Chinese painting, in part because the reasons for which it has been attacked over the past century—that it is unsuitable to modern life—have not been satisfactorily resolved. Moreover, in recent years, as China rises as a power in the contemporary economic and political world and its doors are now completely open, Chinese art more often
appears in the international art scene (in exhibitions such as On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West), but the artists who practice in this traditional medium feel that they have become outsiders in a changing environment. They recognize that the current globalization of economy, technology, culture, and politics is breaking down the established borders among various human activities and social structures, and they feel an urgent need to break out of their traditional framework. But they have no access to the outside world and are unable to acquire it. This unresolved anxiety sometimes manifests itself as nationalistic rhetoric. In the words of one such artist, they “oppose standards placed upon Chinese contemporary art that are defined by Western hegemony.”They further criticize those Chinese artists who are successful abroad for their irrelevance to contemporary China. Wang Nangming, for example, critiqued such artists thus: “...The symbols employed by overseas Chinese artists have nothing whatsoever to do with breathing life into today's culture....[They are] merely physical illustrations of Chinese proverbs, simple allusions, little more than superfluous comments otherwise unrelated to either contempo- rary Chinese or Western culture.”7
Adoption by such artists and the critics who support them of a nationalistic rhetoric is rarely helpful in solving their artistic problems. We can see they are anxious to go “beyond.”“The ‘beyond,’” however, is, in Homi Bhabha’s words, “neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past....” We are, rather, “in the moment of transit, where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.”
Marginalization at the international level was described by Wu Hung in 2002 as an artist’s “volun- tary exemption from contemporaneity.”Another factor might be that “national painting,”particu- larly when it pursues nationalistic issues, is essentially meaningless outside the national context.
At this point, I might paraphrase W. J. T. Mitchell’s opinion on landscape by suggesting that we think of ink painting of the past not as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a process by which social and subjective identities were formed.10 Our concern is not just what ink painting is, or means, but what it did, how it worked as a cultural practice. It did not merely signify or symbolize power relations; it was itself an instrument of cultural power. Is its problem today, then, that in the 1950s it successfully severed its ties to its tradition,11 to its earlier signification, to assume a transformed role within the closed cultural world of Maoism? And that the world in which its cultural practice was meaningful has been gradually eradicated over the past twenty-five years? Perhaps it survives only vestigially, rather like a state-owned steel factory in Dongbei (Northeastern China) where hundreds of thousands of well-intentioned workers produce goods for a cultural market that no longer exists. The survival of this edifice today, based on tiny state subsidies from a rapidly shrinking bureaucracy, is made possible only by sympathy payments for the workers with whom social contracts have been so completely broken.
Since the 1980s, however, many other Chinese artists have dealt with the new environment in a more active way. Some brought the ideas of Abstract Expressionism into ink painting. Artists in Guangdong and elsewhere launched Experimental Ink Painting, which has become one of the most important branches of contemporary ink painting outside the mainstream.
By the 1990s, contemporaneity appeared as the major issue among Chinese ink painters. According to Wu Hung, “that contemporaneity must be recognized as a particular artistic/theoretical construct, which self-consciously reflects upon the conditions and limitations of the present.”12
That the theme of urban life has been raised by so many artists shows how strongly they seek a viable response to what is now an increasingly sharp criticism of ink art’s lack of contemporaneity. Artists seek to distance themselves from the stereotypes of traditional literati painters, who were perceived as hiding from society to engage in self-centered personal expression, and they instead try to show, through urban themes, that they are involved in a dialogue with contemporary society. It is clear that the main concern of these artists is a fear of being marginalized as outsiders in the contemporary art world. Simply adding a new label or innovative title, however, will not help much to solve their dilemma.
One solution to the problem of how to participate in the international artistic community seems to be to use a format and approach that is completely new to ink painters. In recent biennials and exhibitions we see artists using installation, sculpture, multi-media, video, and performance art to further explore the potential of these traditional materials. We are far beyond the terminological question with which we began of whether to call a painting “national painting” or “ink painting.” There is now an awkwardness about whether we can still call these works “ink art.”
It is absolutely fundamental, however, to understand this intense and dynamic scenario as beyond the horizon of a national—or Chinese—context, logic, and history. Chinese culture itself is already part of the current process of renegotiation between the local and the global, the very process that is generating a new and constantly mutating international cultural and artistic structures.13 We perhaps should take up completely different approaches to reconsider the art of this era. The boundaries to conceptual exploration based upon materials and medium have created bottlenecks to artistic and critical development. We might have to see it as Richard Vinograd wrote of Chinese painting three years ago: “as plural, multiple, or polyvisual . . . ” and an art form that “need not imply a total atomization of painting or the uselessness of any categorization.”14
Notes 1 The exhibition was organized by the Institute of Fine Arts, the China Academy of Arts, and Chinese National Gallery of Art, and was exhibited from October 24 to 27, 2004, in Beijing. 2 The Fourth Shenzhen International Ink Biennale was organized by the Shenzhen Institute of Painting and was exhibited from December 13 to January 10, 2004, in Shenzhen. 3 See “New Xieyi Ink Painting Invitation Exhibition,” http://arts.tom.com/zhanlan. 4 Eugene Wang, “Sketch Conceptualism as Modernist Contingency,” in Chinese Art: Modern Expressions, eds. Maxwell Hearn and Judith Smith (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 102–161. 5 Gao Minglu, “The Statement of the Curator of Ink Space,” http://arts.tom.com, December 9, 2004. 6 About Xu Bing's Reading Landscape, see Britta Erickson, The Art of Xu Bing—Words without Meaning, Meaning without Words (Washington, D.C.: Sackler Gallery, 2001), 71–75, and Kuiyi Shen, “Landscape as Cultural Consciousness in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 2, no. 4 (December 2003), 33–40. 7 Wang Nanming, “The Shanghai Art Museum Should Not Become a Market Stall in China for Western Hegemony: A Paper Delivered at the 2000 Shanghai Biennale,” Chinese-art.com, vol. 3, no. 6. 8 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 1. 9 Wu Hung, “Contemporaneity in Contemporary Chinese Art,” in the conference volume Taiwan 2002 Conference on the History of Painting in East Asia (Taipei, 2002), 465. 10 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Introduction,” in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1–2. 11 About the ink painting in Mao's era, see Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People's Republic of China, 1949–1979 (Berkeley, 1994), 176–200. 12 See Wu Hung, “Contemporaneity in Contemporary Chinese Art,” 476. 13 Hou Hanru, “Beyond the Chinese,” Chinese-art.com, vol. 2, no. 6 (March 2000). 14 Richard Vinograd, “The End of Chinese Painting,” in the conference volume Taiwan 2002 Conference on the History of Painting in East Asia (Taipei, 2002), 424.
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I first want to express my heartfelt thanks to all the speakers, of course, but in this context especially, to Melissa Chiu and Pauline J. Yao, both of whom bravely and very good spiritedly stepped in at literally almost the last minute to offer papers for this session, keeping up this morning’s theme of replacements to the letter.
I’ve only just heard Melissa’s paper this morning along with the rest of you without having had a chance to preview it, so my remarks will be necessarily off the cuff. I’ve had Pauline’s paper for a good 48 hours, by contrast, and Kuiyi’s for much longer, 72 hours, I think, so of course I have much more carefully reasoned and cogent responses to those papers. Seriously, since two of the papers are replacements, I was more than a little apprehensive that they might not have anything to do with one another, but in fact they have some interesting mutual resonances.
Those intersections have to do mostly I think, with the reemergence of historical horizons, almost a return of the historical repressed, one might say, within the realm of the contemporary. That history can be as recent as late 1980s or 1990s for Melissa Chiu’s returning prodigal artists, or the Cultural Revolution or the Republican period for Kuiyi Shen’s ink painters, or as far back as Ming garden rocks or Han pots for Pauline J. Yao’s pseudo-fakers. At least, I hope this isn’t just the historian in me seeing things, or wanting to see things, that aren’t really there. What I’m pointing to is not by any means a return to the past, much less a manifestation of tradition, but something like an ongoing re-negotiation of historical positions. It’s fascinating to me, for example, that some of the ink painters Kuiyi Shen discusses reinscribe themselves within the rhetoric of a nationalist movement, even after explicitly rejecting the labels of “Chinese painting” or guohua,“national
painting.”At the same time, the tension between ink painters and oil painters—which have semiotic content as fields of activity in themselves, quite apart from specific exemplifications, with ink painting standing for something connected to high Chinese culture (whether as a legacy or a burden) and oil painting much more congenial to international, cosmopolitan, contemporary exhibition venues—seems to recapitulate in some way the status of Republican era painting (which Kuiyi has done so much to illuminate), where somewhat conservative but avant-garde oil painters contested with national style ink or ink-and-colour scroll painters. For Cai Guoqiang, history returns with something of a vengeance, in the form of lawsuits and entanglements with a changed horizon of intellectual property rights. The exquisite irony here is that the exploited are no longer peasants but sculptors or their heirs, and the exploiters are no longer the landlord class but avant-garde artists and curators.
Another common thread has quite a lot to do with our primary themes of displacement and replacement (or re-placement) in a variety of ways—related sometimes to the idea of being an insider or an outsider or the increasingly blurred boundaries between those conditions.
Melissa Chiu’s subjects are artists who were displaced, or self-alienated, from the official Chinese art establishment, but who have regained a place within the Chinese art institutional establishment, with all the tensions and ambivalence that relocation can entail. Artists whose identities as outsider-artists was hard won in the West, who had negotiated a place, however liminal, within international art world circuits or even within the national arts establishments of their new homes, must now reconceive and refashion themselves and renegotiate a space for themselves within a dramatically changed domestic Chinese arts arena—one where they now, ironically, have somewhat the status of outsider, celebrity artists.
Many of the ink painters whom Kuiyi Shen discusses, who occupied the status of being insiders within the high tradition of Chinese artistic culture partly by default, and partly by active claim, ironically find themselves dispossessed or displaced from that position by the shifting cultural landscape of contemporary China. They have become outsiders in the rush to contemporaneity.
Among the case studies presented by Pauline J. Yao, Cai Guoqiang’s Venice Rent Collection Courtyard is most thoroughly entangled in issues of re-placement. It seems to me that the relocation of this tableau to a radically altered international art-circuit environment from its original theatre of ideological indoctrination in a fundamental sense is the work of art-much more than the more or less (often less than more) faithful replication of the original Rent Collection Courtyard sculptures.
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San Diego State University, 1991.
The spring of 1989 was not only an important moment in modern Chinese history and politics, but also a dividing line for Chinese art at the end of the twentieth century. During the 1980s, the development of contemporary Chinese art was mainly a domestic phenomenon. The China /Avant-garde exhibition (Zhongguo Xiandai Yishu Zhan),which was held in January 1989 at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, marked the end of this period. The show was symbolically closed twice by authorities. Upon closing the show, the organizers received a penalty that banned them from holding any art exhibitions at this venue for two years. Considering the political and social upheaval that almost immediately followed the show, no one believed there was a chance to exhibit contemporary art in Beijing in the coming years.
Despair and depression was the prevalent mood in the art community in China, and the open door was closed once more for those who intended to leave the country. Many artists who had already been in the West, either visiting or studying, decided to stay. But they were not yet prepared for relocating. Surviving in a strange land was a big challenge for everyone. While the legal, scientific, academic, and other communities had structures for exchanging ideas and information, Chinese artists living abroad had no formal communication network and, therefore, many artists felt isolated and without support. Perhaps the primary concern of these artists was their need to reconnect with their fellow artists and to be involved with the art community. In order to address this pressing need for further communication among Chinese artists, a proposal for holding a meeting in the United States was discussed among some concerned individuals and institutions.
In a written announcement for this program that I sent out in 1990, the mandate of the event was described as follows:
The purpose of the Workshop is to provide an environment in which Chinese artists can exchange ideas, discuss resources, and create new work. The Workshop would serve as a cornerstone for visual artists to develop their own network, allowing these individuals access to the mainstream artistic community and, at the same time, encouraging them to nurture their cultural identity. The Workshop might even be the first step towards a long-range goal of creating a studio/conservatory for Chinese artists in this country.1
Two organizations played the major role in initiating this event: the International Institute of Art (IIA) and The Center for United States-China Arts Exchange. IIA was the brainchild of Waldemar Nelson, a foundation specialist based in New York. He was an advocate for Chinese art in the 1980s. A non-expert on art, he fell in love with the new emerging Chinese art and found great potential in it during his several visits to Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Beijing. Encouraged by Robert Anderson, the Chairman of The Atlantic Richfield Co. (ARCO), he was able to initiate the first contemporary Chinese art exhibition held in the United States, Beyond the Open Door, held at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California, in 1986. This exhibition introduced artists Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, Wang Jianwei, and Zhang Jianjun to American audiences for the first time. In a systematic listing of contemporary Chinese art shows held in the West, Hans Van Dijk and Andreas Schmid noted in 1994, “Pacific Asia Museum made a start with the exhibition Beyond the Open Door,which comprised works of the early eighties.”2 By 1988, Nelson and some of his friends registered a non-profit organization in New York, aiming to raise funds and support for bringing Chinese art into the international arena. With its ambitious name and attractive mandate, the International Institute of Art started with an impressive list of Honorary Council of Patrons, including Joan Harris, Lord Bullock, and Mme. Georges Pompidou, among others. Since I had worked with Mr. Nelson on the above-mentioned exhibition and some other projects in the mid-1980s, I was invited to assume the position of Vice President in charge of programs. Unfortunately, the political change in China in 1989 stopped the formalization of this organization. It was never developed, and it did not function fully, aside from sponsoring and founding some art projects in China and the United States, including this one.
The Center for United States-China Arts Exchange is a not-for-profit organization affiliated with Columbia University. Established in 1978 by Professor Chou Wen-chung and other friends, the Center “was founded to promote mutual interest and understanding of the arts of the United States and China and to promote creativity in both countries.”3 It was one of the first organizations that acted as a cultural liaison from the U.S.A. after the ending of the Cultural Revolution in China. Mr. Nelson was one of its Advisory Board members, and he urged the Center to be the co-sponsor and provide the majority of the funding for the workshop for artists from China. Then I was able to discuss the project with the Art Department of San Diego State University (SDSU), where I was a visiting professor during 1986–87, and to secure it as the venue for this event.
An open call was announced in a newsletter, Art China News, that I have published in Vancouver since 1990. Twenty-three artists applied. Among them one was from Taiwan, while the others were all from mainland China: thirteen living in the United States, four in Canada, and one in Germany. There were also four artists living in China who applied.
The workshop started on June 3, 1991, and lasted for four weeks. The selected artists were Chen Danqing, Hou Wenyi, Yang Qian, and Zhang Jianjun, from New York; Han Xin, from Columbus,
Ohio; Xu Bing, from Madison, Wisconsin; Wang Dongling, from Minneapolis; Sheng Shanshan, from San Francisco; Huang Yaliand Li Mo, from Vancouver; and Ruan Jie, from Shanghai. Most of them came to North America in the early or mid-1980s. Only Xu Bing and Huang Yali, a female ceramic artist based in Wuhan, arrived in Canada after the massacre at Tian’anmen Square of June 4, 1989, and both had had their work exhibited in the China/Avant-garde exhibition in Beijing. New York-based artists Gu Wenda and Cha Li were invited, but couldn't come because of other engagements. Liu Xiaodong in Beijing and Sun Ren in Hangzhou were not able to secure their visas.
The participating artists were provided with free studios and accommodations in San Diego. During the summer, the university campus was half empty, so we could assign large classrooms to each artist as studio space. Xifangsi, a Buddhist temple in town, provided clean and quiet rooms for their residence. Most artists received travel funds for their air tickets, and financial aid was also available for those who could not pay for their art supplies and meals. A few Chinese artists living in California also came and participated in partial programs at their own cost.
Artists worked individually in their studios, and they were required to finish at least one work during their stay. Actually, many artists were so productive that they were able to produce several works during the first three weeks. Xu Bing made his first project since coming to the United States: English Alphabet, also called ABCDEFG . . . This is a group of ceramic pieces in the shape of printing type. Because he had to leave San Diego early for other commitments, he asked the studio assistant to lock him in the ceramic studio overnight to finish firing the last pieces in the kiln. Chen Danqing finished two huge astonishing canvases reflecting his thoughts and visions of Tian’anmen Square. He said that he had dreamed of making large paintings of this size for many years, but it was not possible in his small apartment in Queens, New York. He enjoyed working in the spacious and bright studio so much that after the workshop he returned to SDSU to continue working on the series. The group of sardonic photo-realist paintings he made was a major breakthrough in his artistic development. As a critic described them, “They resemble theatre scrolls dedicated to the impact of media, to political repression and to the mis-marriages that occur when Eastern tradition runs headlong into Western figurative painting.”4
On June 10, Dr. Chou Wen-chung chaired a roundtable discussion with the participating artists and a few visitors to examine the current social and cultural issues of Chinese art. The outline provided by him included the following topics:
1. The future of Chinese art 2. The factors and causes that have influenced the development of Chinese art since the Qing dynasty 3. Thoughts on art education 4. The political, social, economical impacts on the creation of art in China 5. The issues overseas Chinese artists are facing in dealing with their creative practice5
The last topic, which was the focus of this meeting, was divided into several questions:
A. For overseas Chinese artists, what merit do they have to achieve in terms of technique, style, and national uniqueness before gaining the international recognition? B. How do the social structures and cultural environment of Western society influence Chinese artists? C. How can Chinese artists develop their aesthetic view and artistic style in this environment? D. If most Chinese artists choose to stay abroad, would it affect the continuation and development of Chinese culture towards its goal of modernization? E. How can the overseas Chinese artists contribute to the development of Chinese culture?6
The one-day discussion was recorded and later transcribed (in Chinese) by the Center at the Columbia University. According to Dr. Chou, an edited copy was sent to chosen organizations in
Roundtable discussion, San Diego State University, 1991. the U.S. and China, but all speakers’ names were omitted as a precaution. The discussion was summarized under five sections:
1. The impact and misguidance of Western art 2. Artists and society 3. The self-examination of overseas Chinese artists 4. How can we deal with ourselves? 5. The battle between commercial art and “cultural value”7
This 108-page report contained first -hand material reflecting the views and concerns of the overseas Chinese artists in early 1990s. One artist commented:
Why couldn’t we paint as well as we did before even though we had the opportunity of coming abroad, widening our field of vision, and devoting great enthusiasm and tenacity to our work? We did far worse than those who stayed at home, who didn’t have “opportunities” and “eye-openers.”Some of us return home often. Those who do not return also remain watching the situation at home. We have seen many art works turned out in China with great energy, with true talent. Why? This is the question we have to focus on—how could overseas Chinese artists deal with themselves? I would give a brief conclusion. First, we lost our stage. We lost the stage of China. Second, the best situation we can get is becoming a supporting actor—a role on the side of the stage. In most cases we couldn’t even get supporting roles. If we stay home, in any case we would play a leading part in the academies, on the “chessboard” of the country. Being the leading part or supporting part is quite a different phenomenon.8
Another artist stated:
The further progress of Chinese art has to wait for China’s re-opening in the next period. In fact, the door began to close again during the past two years. I was in China during the last decade. I had many opportunities to go abroad. But I felt it was meaningful to stay home. The country had great hope and made you believe that you had to participate in and work there during this moment. At the time of the China /Avant-garde exhibition,held in Beijing, the momentum for development of Chinese art was never so great. And it did attract a lot of international attention to ...contemporary Chinese art. This momentum could become an opportunity for Chinese art to shift to a larger cultural operation, to participate in the world’s cultural arena. But it was broken suddenly. Then many artists felt hopeless under the circumstances and chose to go abroad for their own sake....I had a feeling that those who left China in recent years seemed in a better condition. One of the reasons is the recent rapid change happening in China. This brought improvement in artistic qualities. I am sure many of those who left China earlier also have superb artistic quality. But at the time they went abroad, China was still a rather closed society. So they didn’t have the chance to think about art issues and had very little understanding of modern art....What ...most Chinese artists lack understanding [of] is the relationship between
Studio visit, San Diego State University, 1991.
engaging creative activity and participating in cultural debate and cultural development. They always tend to take creative activity as a temporary, pragmatic endeavour. I think many Chinese artists don’t understand the progressive function of artistic activities to the culture of mankind.9
The self-examination of these artists was an important step for them in clarifying their thoughts and preparing themselves spiritually for the next phase of their personal and artistic lives. The report is a valuable document, recording Chinese artists at the beginning of their transformation. Participants also participated in an informal discussion during one evening of every week, where they took turns showing slides of their work and getting feedback from their fellow artists. These meetings were very informative and allowed those artists who were somewhat isolated to learn from others’ experiences.
After a month filled with tours, lectures, and hours of studio work, a symposium and exhibition were held at SDSU as the conclusion of the project. These evenst also attempted to connect Chinese artists with the mainstream community in the area. The symposium, entitled “Contemporary Chinese Art: Crisis and Perspectives after the 1980s,”was held on June 27. Speakers included George Kuwayama, Curator of Far Eastern Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Zhang Qiang, Senior Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Arts and former head of the China Art Weekly, an important publication during the 1980s New Wave Movement in China. His topic was “Pre-Modernism: Art in China before the 1990s.”I also gave a talk, entitled “Chinese Art at a Crossroad,”introducing most of the contemporary Chinese artists living abroad. A panel made up of five participating artists who discussed issues facing Chinese artists was moderated by Ida Katherine Rigby, an art history professor at SDSU.
The exhibition, Chinese Art Meets West,opened at the University Art Gallery of SDSU in the evening on the same day. Twelve projects, most of them produced during the workshop, were shown. In addition to his new ceramic installation ABCDEFG . . . ,Xu Bing displayed four volumes of bound books from his famous project Book from Heaven (or Xi Shi Jian: A Mirror to Analyze the World, 1988). Chen Danqing’s powerful painting Expression drew tremendous interest, especially for its image of Tian’anmen Square. Some other works shared a similar memory of the incident:
Han Xin’s painting Crucifixion depicted a hanging bicycle as a metaphor of the victims; Yang Qian’s installation Fragile Monument, an unstable structure built from Styrofoam and mirror, questioned the value of history and collective memory. Zhang Jianjun’s installation Water expressed the artist’s concern for the environment and nature, a very new subject for Chinese artists at that time. Other works were mostly abstract or semi-abstract paintings, including Wang Dongling’s calligraphy-like ink-splash images. Huang Yali made a group of six ceramic sculpture pieces, Untitled, which continued her exploration of the interdependent relationship of the ancient and the new.
The events were well attended and well received. The exhibition was covered by local media and Chinese publications in the United States and Taiwan. Professor Norman Klein of the California Institute of Arts, a renowned art critic, wrote an essay, “Underneath the Wave: New Art by Chinese Artists,”which was published in both the English and Chinese media. He was one of the earliest Western critics able to foresee the importance of the contribution of Chinese artists to the international art scene. He wrote:
A crucial shift has taken place in Chinese art that is crucial not only for China but very likely for American art as well, as we are spun ever faster into the new global culture of the 1990s. A young generation of mainland Chinese artists, many living in North America, have developed a unique reading of Euro/American modernism, and of post-modernism, in a context really never seen before.10
After analyzing the art works he saw in San Diego, he concluded:
This work was clearly years beyond our simplified western notions of multi-culturalism, or even post-colonialism. This contained an historical diversity far more contemporary than I had expected. It also reminded me once again that there can be no primitivist ideal moment in any culture (except to imperialists), only mutating hybrids going back centuries. Clearly what was displayed here, casually in progress, contained possibilities for art of the next century.11
No doubt this event was one of the first attempts to introduce contemporary Chinese art to the West in the early 1990s, especially to North America. At the same time, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena launched its second contemporary Chinese art exhibition, I Don’t Want to Play Cards with Cezanne and Other Works: Selections from the Chinese New Wave and Avant-garde Art of the Eighties.This larger exhibition was curated by David Kamansky, Director of the Pacific Asia Museum, and Professor Richard Strassberg of the University of California at Los Angeles. Forty-one works were brought from China, including Geng Jianyi’s famous painting The Second Condition, Wang Guangyi’s Big Dolls: Holy Mother and child,Xu Bing’s original version of A Mirror to Analyze the World (Book of Heaven), Yu Hong’s Portrait with Gold Frame, Zhang Peili’s X, and works by some other important artists of the 1980s and 1990s, Zhang Xiaogang, Zhou Changjiang, Wei Guangqing, Mao Xuehui, Lu Shengzhong, and He Duoling. The participants in the San Diego project took a tour to Los Angeles to visit the exhibition and had a pleasant meeting with the curators and sponsors of the show. This exhibition was again supported by ARCO. Most of the works were eventually collected by ARCO and Michael Murtaugh, Manager of Public Relations at AT&T in Los Angeles.
The San Diego meeting was also significant for individual artists. It became a turning point for some artists who had experienced difficult decision-making or adjustment processes during that time. For example, Wang Dongling finally made a decision to return to China after the workshop. Chen Danqing stopped painting Tibetan scenes for commercial art dealers in New York and continued to work on his own impression of “the second nature” media images. He was soon given a chance to have a solo exhibition in San Jose and was invited to give a lecture to the art
Chinese Art Meets West exhibition at the University Art Gallery, San Diego State University, 1991. students at San Jose University. Xu Bing’s English Alphabet took him to a much more ambitious and larger project, the English Classroom.These works won him great popularity and success in the international art scene in the late 1990s. He was given one of the highest awards in the United States, the prestigious “Genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation, in 1998 for his remarkable achievement in contemporary art.
In a lecture I gave in the 1990s, I said: “The post-Tian’anmen political repression and ideological regimentation has been affecting Chinese artists and their work in many ways. One of them is a flood of Chinese artists that left the country. They are seeking artistic freedom but are trapped by the difficulties of living in a strange land. It may provide an opportunity of global outreach for contemporary Chinese art.”
Thirteen years have passed since the seminar/workshop in San Diego. Many changes have happened in the world and in those artists’ lives and careers as well. Most of them still live in North America and have become relatively established in their chosen paths. Among the eleven artists, five returned to China and re-settled there as their main residence. Professor Wang Dongling is now a leading calligrapher and the Head of the Contemporary Calligraphy Research Center at the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou. Chen Danqing finally returned to China in 2001. He was a professor and Ph.D. instructor at the College of Art at Qinghua University, formally the Central Academy of Art and Design, from 2001 to 2005. He may be better known as a writer and a frequent guest of TV or radio shows in China nowadays. In a recent interview, he was asked:
Someone said: “Chen Danqing left China at the wrong time and came back again at the wrong time.” It seems your recent (critical) attitude mainly came from your unique personal experience and should not [be] blamed on the problems of the overall environment. Please let us know your view on this.
Chen Danqing answered:
I rather hope it is not “the problems of the overall environment.”Indeed, the overall environment in China has been improved a great deal. My experience was not different from all other “Lao Zhiqing” (old young intellectuals), but I am very stubborn....“Left at the wrong time”—I have heard people said it to me nicely. The meaning actually was “missing the chance to be promoted in the bureaucratic
system.”This is typical “official thinking,”a view from an official career aspect. “Came back at wrong time”—thanks for the kind consideration. Then what is the right time to come back?
Having returned to China, my stomach has adjusted very well, but my brain was not willing to adjust. I don’t want to make adjustments anywhere. Why should I make adjustments? A mature society would tolerate artists, but not ask artists to adjust themselves.12
Chen Danqing sent his resignation to Qinghua University not too long ago, mainly because of his objections to the current education system. This shocking news has stimulated a discussion about the issues of relocating. The sense of belonging and unbelonging has been common to the artists living in the new global configuration, and it has also become a great challenge to them, whether they are leaving their native country or going back to it. Therefore, it might be worthwhile to organize another meeting of Zheng Shengtian (left) and Chen Danqing (right). those eleven artists after thirteen years. An exhibition of their recent work could provide a very interesting comparison for us to look at Chinese artists’ work in a much wider social and global context, and not only for its artistic value.
Notes 1 Project Description, Chinese Art Seminar/Workshop, International Institute of Arts, 1. 2 Hans van Dijk and Andreas Schmid, “The Fine Arts after the Cultural Revolution: Stylistic Development and Cultural Debate,” in China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture, (Oxford University Press, 1994), 38. 3 “Purpose and Organization,” Statement of The Center for United States-China Arts Exchange. 4 Norman M. Klein, “Building With Ashes: Contemporary Chinese Painters Push Onward,” Fine Arts, November/December 1992 (Ronkonkoma: SunStorm Arts Publishing Co.), 31. 5 Chou Wen-chung, The Topics for Discussion, manuscript, 1–2. 6 Ibid., 2–3. 7 Haiwai Zhongguo Yishu Jiazuo Tanhui Fayan Jilu (The Center for United States-China Arts Exchange); (1991), 2. 8 Ibid, 55–56. 9 Ibid, 72–73, 75–76. 10 Norman M. Klein, “Underneath the Wave: New Art by Chinese Artists,” Fine Arts, January 1992, (Ronkonkoma: SunStorm Arts Publishing Co), 11 Ibid. 12 Interview with Chen Danqing, “Huihua, Tu Xiang Yu Xue Shu Xing Zhenhua,” in Yishu Dangdai (Art China) vol. 3, no. 2. (Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Publishing House, 2004), 17.
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When we investigate the exhibition of Chinese art at biennials since 1993, it is necessary to observe that this is a very complex field with multiple levels of activity that includes geographically disparate sites and many different kinds of actors.1 Furthermore, biennials (which here will include triennials) have themselves become a Xiao Yu, Ruan, 1999, dimensions variable, multi-media, rabbit & bird corpse. Exhibited at the 2001 major phenomenon within the Venice Biennale. international art world, into which the exhibition of contemporary Chinese art has been integrated. There is no space here to attempt to write a pre-history of the biennial exhibition and the structure of the international art world of which it is a part. This field—and Asian participation within it— is under-studied at present.2 There has been significant Asian intervention in the field, including in China, where biennials with a significant international component and direction have been founded in cities such as Beijing, Busan, Guangdong, Gwangju, Shanghai, and Yokohama, as well as other more localized biennials such as that at Chengdu or those that might be called “quasi-biennials,” such as some exhibitions at Shenzhen. There are, in addition, many exhibitions that amount to a “state-of-the-field” survey of modern and contemporary Chinese art, which were more frequently held overseas during the 1990s, and the curatorial line as well as the curators themselves of these exhibitions cannot be separated from the biennial structure.
The kinds of art practices exhibited at the international level changed during this period, however, and the increasing Chinese participation in itself was a factor in that change. Thus, whilst Chinese contemporary art was engaged with international structures, it could not control those mediating Chinese contemporary art, and in certain measure the practices adopted by Chinese artists themselves were agentive with regard to the international field: they were not wholly passive. That this agency was almost entirely motivated by various and often conflicting domestic agendas in addition to the sheer exigencies of survival for the particular artists, does not also mean that those Chinese artists and curators active in the international field were unmindful of the international tendencies in art to which they contributed. This may particularly be said of those art practices largely meeting with official disapproval in China in the 1990s, such as performance art, installation art, and the first wave of video art, or those that included shocking articulations of the human body or dead organic matter and that were accused in some official circles of being vapid, imitative, or “un-Chinese” by following foreign tendencies. The last accusation was a convenient way of ignoring how much these practices arose from the realities of everyday Chinese life and from cultural values which were specifically Chinese in provenance. They were also drawn from many modern discourses of art practice found in Chinese art academies, or were linked to them, even by their formal negation.3
. When one looks at where Chinese contemporary art has been exhibited, and by whom, since the 1980s, it seems sensible to identify a typology of sites, exhibitions, and curators. Different types of exhibitions4 usually involve different kinds of institutional sites, and these in turn employ different sorts of curators. Obviously these categories can be refined, but listing them in some way as follows has the merit of allowing us to understand the multiple levels at which questions of the exhibition of Chinese art in the international environment are articulated. This environment, of course, also includes the international component of domestic exhibitions sited in China, especially the biennials and triennials at Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai.
Note:These categories are not intended to be comprehensive and give only indicative examples. The inclusion of Chinese with non-Chinese institutions and curators is deliberately made to sug- gest their systemic interdependence.
• Museums of art: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, National Gallery of Australia, China Art Gallery • Museums of Asian art: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Pacific Asia Museum • Museums of contemporary art: Centre Georges Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art Oxford, Chengdu • Non-profit but regularly funded museums, galleries, and art centres: (a) Kunsthalle-type galleries or regional art centres: Wiener Secession, CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Shanghe Meishuguan Upriver Gallery, Chengdu, (b) small, not-for-profit institutes of modern and/or contemporary art: Gallery 4A, Centre A • Commercial galleries with some non-commercial functions: HanartTZ, Sherman Galleries, Ethan Cohen, Shanghart, Redgate, Courtyard
• Biennials, triennials, and other recurrent exhibitions of contemporary art: (a) Chinese artists shown in the national pavilion, or as a single-artist representative: Venice Biennale, São Paolo Biennial, (b) Chinese artists exhibited as part of a whole biennial thematic: Lyon Biennale 2002, (c) Chinese artists shown as part of a curated section of a larger Biennale: Zones of Urgency • National Survey exhibitions: “I Don’t Want to Play Cards with Cézanne” and Other Works, China Avant Garde, Inside-Out: New Chinese Art • Conceptually based, zeitgeist or tendency exhibitions: (a) China included but not central: Les Magiciens de la terre¸ Zones of Urgency, (b) China the topic: China/Avant Garde, New Art From China, Alors, La Chine? • One-person exhibitions at various sites beyond commercial galleries: Cai Guoqiang at Iwaki, Xu Bing at Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C., Guan Wei at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Chen Zhen at Serpentine, London, Shen Yuan at Arnolfini, Bristol • Virtual exhibitions in printed or electronic form: Fresh Cream etc. and its successors, the defunct chinese-art.com and the many Chinese domestic art-related Web sites with a significant international reporting function, like tom.com
• Public museum-employed curators: Alain Sayag, Hans Ulrich-Obrist, Claire Roberts, Xu Hong, Zhang Qing • Independent Curators: Fei Dawei (1990–2002), Hou Hanru, Harald Szeeman, Martina Köppel-yang, Zhang Zhaohui
• Private museum curators: Fei Dawei (since 2003) • Academics or other higher educational teachers or researchers: Fan Di’an, Pi Li, Leng Lin, Jonathan Hay • Art journalists: Huang Du (until 2002), Michel Nuridsany • Commercial gallerists: Chang Tsong-zung • Non-profit centre directors: Huangfu Binghui, Alice Ming Wai Jim • Collectors or patrons with an important curatorial perspective: Jean-Michel Ducrop, Uli Sigg, Guy Ullens
Clearly these category lists indicate the plurality of sites, exhibitions, and curators to be considered. But just as importantly, they show that they are not infinite in number, not irregular, and not randomly articulated. The large number of artists shown in these exhibitions is also not unlimited; in fact, careful examination, whatever the system of selection, reveals the numbers to be relatively few and repetitive. That is, the artists form a restricted cohort from which selections are made and some artists or groupings of artists are regularly recruited.
This regularity or restriction indicates the presence of a structure that, to be unified, must in an operational sense have a definition of contemporary Chinese art. A limited definition of the “contemporary”5 in art work in China would be that which emerged in the last fifteen or so years (since 1985) and which usually eschews art practices and definitions of the finished art Liu Jianhua, work exhibited in Beijing as among those selected for Chinese exhibition at work as determined by the academy. It the 2003 Venice Biennale. is the medium itself as well as the content that defines contemporaneity or, more specifically, contemporary art practice: thus the presence of installation, performance, video, certain types of conceptual sculpture, and non-documentary photography. Okwui Enwezor wishes to add the qualification that,”even if the names are repeated in different places, it’s very important to see them [different types of exhibitions including biennials] as completely different events.”6 I can’t agree that the regularity on one level, that of the participating artists, is overcome on another, the variety of different works, to constitute different exhibitions. I think, rather, that this is necessary, if professionally interested, obfuscation. When both the artists and the mediators/curators provide such regularities, the variety seen in the works is merely a currency that links the other two in a privileged exchange. In any case, for the Chinese artists the critical issue or constituting element of their discourse has been non-acceptance by the “official” art world. In most cases, until around 2000, artists were not producing work recognized by the Chinese art academies and other official exhibition institutions. This change in official policy was shown in 2001, when, for the first time, there was official participation in an overseas exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, and in 2002 at the São Paolo Biennial.
The most noticeable examples of Chinese artists showing in international contexts are early exhibitions such as those in the United States showing the development of modern painting in China (beginning in 1987), biennials outside of China such as Venice (beginning in 1993), and exhibitions inside China at Shanghai (beginning in 1996). But there are a limited number of
curators involved with this, above all in prominence Hou Hanru and Chang Tsong-zung. Also present, especially towards the end of the 1990s, are Wu Hung and Zheng Shengtian, and it should be noted neither of them are resident in mainland China. The China-resident curators who have been most active internationally are Fan Di’an, Pi Li, and Huang Du, but their activity has taken place mostly after 2000.
It would appear that China first partici- pated as a nation at the Venice Biennale in 1980 with an embroidery exhibition in the corner of the Yugoslav pavilion. This was followed by unofficial participation in the Aperto section in 1993,8 and then by Geng Jianyi, Beauty Salon, 1985, oil on canvas, 80 x 72 inches. Exhibited in Beyond the Open Door in 1987. the exhibition of large portions of the Uli Sigg collection in 1999. What would have been the first official participation in a national pavilion funded by the Chinese Ministry of Culture in 2003 was cancelled because of the SARS epidemic.
Anticipating this official drift were the curatorial activities of Chang Tsong-zung, the Hong Kong gallerist who in many ways functioned as a cultural mediator and commentator on contemporary Chinese art. He exhibited the first artists from mainland China to be seen at São Paulo in 1994 and another group at Venice in 1995, as well as working as the invited curator at São Paolo for a Chinese mainland artist, Qiu Shihua, and one Hong Kong artist Ho Siu-kee in 1996. Chang Tsong- zung was also involved with significant exhibitions in not-for-profit spaces such as The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, in 1996, and large exhibitions in commercial spaces that amounted to contemporary Chinese art surveys, such as that taken from the Ullens Collection and organized by Galerie Enrico Navarra as Paris-Pékin, in Paris during 2002. In restrospect, his work had an important bridging function that had begun with his catalogue of numerous artists culled mainly from his own HANart TZ gallery collection, in China’s New Art, Post 1989 and their selected exhibition in Sydney in 1993. From time to time, this process involved the semi-ostracized mainland critic Li Xianting as a writer or co-curator and kept up the international exposure for a small group of contemporary Chinese artists, before the seismic shift in overseas exhibition exposure began with the massive display at Venice in 1999.
So the first conclusion about exhibition sites is that they have been strongly associated with the purposes of particular cohorts of China watchers, such as Richard L. Strassberg and a small number of non-Chinese museum curators and critics in the 1980s and early 1990s such as Jean-Hubert Martin and Marianne Brouwer. Secondly, these sites changed with the rise of new and largely non-China based curators in the 1990s, with a noticeable increase in the range of sites at the end of the 1990s. Thirdly, with a new willingness to engage in the field of contemporary Chinese art as an aspect of China's repositioning in the world, a new cohort of Chinese curators based in China not only filled the unoccupied slots in pre-existing site activities such as at the São Paolo and Venice Biennales, they actually positioned China as a national unit which was to join in the
Cai Guoqiang, Bringing to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot. Exhibited in Transculture at the 1995 Venice Biennale. international process of defining contemporary art and, by implication, put China forward as a prescriptor of contemporary art.
I will turn to the category of curators in a separate section below, but I will now look at types of exhibition. Here, biennials must not be regarded as a homogenous type, and in fact include within them invited national pavilions such as at Venice, or of a single artist as at São Paolo, together with curated thematic exhibitions the themes of which are usually announced every other year in January for the following June. Alongside this, aspects of contemporary art practice have been surveyed in exhibitions loosely conceived of as more openly defining contemporary practice, as in Aperto in Venice since 1980. These would become very large sub-curated exhibitions, essentially freely delegated to individual curators who both defined their exhibition concept and often were significantly engaged in fundraising and promotion. Examples at Venice were Transculture,in 1995, and Zones of Urgency and Utopia Station,in 2003. Indeed, Zones of Urgency,whilst curated by one person, Hou Hanru, actually contained a further sub-exhibition within it, Canton Express, that of artists from Guangdong. Incidentally, Hou Hanru is from Guangdong, and had his first major participation in a performance event with Yang Jiecang in 1987, and would appear to have always maintained his links with artists from his home province.
By 1999, Chinese participation had become standard in most sections of the Venice Biennale and at São Paolo. By the time of the Gwangju and Busan Biennales in 2004, Chinese participation had become a standard inclusion at international biennials, in both those cases running at around two to four percent of the artists selected in the international sections.
But the almost implacable advance of contemporary Chinese art at major biennials masks a very different series of stories. It should first be recalled that the biennial is not the first exhibition site for most of the art, and many times the work illustrated in the catalogue is not the work that is actually exhibited. The art shown at biennials rests on many other different types and levels of exhibition. There are introductory surveys of private or corporate collections, sometimes with fairly transparent political or business agendas, such as the Beyond the Open Door exhibition of 1987 at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, with its catalogue introduction by Henry Kissinger.
There are public displays of the private taste of some members of the European business elite, such as the exhibitions of the Sigg, Ullens, or Uyterhage collections at various times in Europe. These are paralleled by much more inclusive but also modest exhibitions such as the Centre Chine of the École des Hautes Études on Sciences Sociales exhibition in Paris in 1987. I include mention of this less well-known exhibition to show the real scale of artistic movement and the range of artists present in one Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Dogs that cannot touch each other, performance, non-Chinese metropolis at a date before the Beijing, 2003. institutional recognition of contemporary Chinese art. It points to the pitiless indifference of curatorial fashion until external events such as the growth of the Chinese economy or internationally significant domestic Chinese events such as June 4, 1989, forced a different perspective on art institutions.
As important are the small-scale involvements of a number of artists in group exhibitions either focused on Chinese artists, such as Art Chinois 1990 Demain pour Hier at Pourrières or exhibitions in which Chinese artists were selected as representatives of place, such as Parisien(ne)s at the Camden Art Centres, London, of 1997 or Paris pour escale at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris of 2000.12 These are above and beyond the very many one-person exhibitions held all over Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia, from commercial galleries to not-for-profit regional art centres to major national museums such as the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, which held an exhibition of Xu Bing’s work in 2002.
The most important exhibition type for the consecration or prescription of artistic importance is the major conceptual or thematic exhibition.13 The latter perforce overlaps with the representative national survey exhibition, with the variation that contemporary Chinese art is implicitly presented as a particular discursive representation of larger social issues, found in many other national and especially Asian contexts from Bombay to Bangkok to Seoul. Thus is the undertow of Cities on the Move in which Chinese artists were simply included among many others in this current, where China was presented as typifying a new or a more complex relationship between artistic expression and urban change. This motif recurs frequently in the curatorial strategies of Hou Hanru, as we shall see below. The use of Chinese prior examples to typify desired outcomes in Europe has some longevity. And in a way their use is a bit like a bit like Voltaire’s eighteenth century deployment of Jesuit letters pleading for recognition of ancestor worship as an argument for a secular religion not in the control of the Catholic church in France.14 Contemporary Chinese art in exhibitions like China/Avant-Garde,in 1993, or Alors, la Chine?,in 2003, often seem to be advanced as an interpretive model for all avant-gardes or all contemporary art and current social conditions in “modern life of an urban kind now.”By nature of the appeal required to attract their own audience, but also in virtue of the curatorial process that usually puts final selection in the hands of non-contemporary Chinese art specialists, conceptual or “tendency” exhibitions use the thematic of “China” or “contemporary Chinese art” as a metonym. They refer to all “contemporary art” and elide specific discursive differences into an assumed international, discursive continuity.
The functions of the final type of exhibition, those in printed or electronic virtual form, are difficult to qualify. The printed virtual exhibitions always seem to be late in reinforcing existing appraisals of artists with already long exhibition records as important.15 The electronic virtual exhibition, in its immediacy and prolificacy, can often be considered early in its supply of excessive information of a relatively trivial kind, but also in certain editorial hands has shown a capability to supply significant commentary and circulate good images on a greater scale than any printed art magazine.16
The Web in particular has amplified the possibilities of information about artworks serving as a substitute for viewing the actual artworks themselves.17 But what the extension of this virtuality, this increase in the volume of information, and the speed with which it can be accessed means for art production on a world scale is by no means clear. Changes in attitudes toward the experiential contents of everyday life, the transposition of ritualized, corporeal, and social time from the single to plural, or the supposedly transcultural contexts of interpretations are among some of the consequences for art practice. This may, in short, add up to a systemically conditioned choice for many art world actors from artists to curators Qiu Zhijie, Tattoo 2, 1994, colour photograph, 50 x 38. between accentuating the local and de-emphasizing it Courtesy of the artist. with an increased focus on global commonalities. Many of these tactical choices by artists do not allow anyone outside these processes, like art historians, to readily access the strategic patterns of interactive timing with curatorial selection. This is particularly so when curators perform as cultural entrepreneurs who position or enable art practice rather than re-distribute or re-position works that were actively produced by artists before and beyond the domain of the global. Here one may note that some Chinese artists, like Wang Xinwei, have actively appropriated global discourses but with a rhythm and placement we might regard as local.18 But, in contrast, the Australian artist Imants Tillers has made appropriation not merely the technique of his practice but also the subject of its investigations and explorations.19
Imants Tillers, Izkliede, 1994, oil stick, gouache, synthetic polymer paint, canvas boards, 304 x 914. Collection of Gene & Brian Sherman. Exhibited at the 2003 Beijing Biennale.
. One might think that the principal function of curators is to select works for exhibition. But of course they bring to this process particular values and conceptions, including whatever might be thought of as “contemporary Chinese.”Since selection involves exclusion as well as inclusion, it is sometimes revealing to see where the line of what is to be left out is drawn. Usually the restriction
is geographical but also involves a zone of influence received or transformed where the creative energy lies in a particular art culture.
In 1995, Dieter Ronte and Walter Smerling saw the goal of their exhibition “Quotation Marks”: Chinese Contemporary Paintings, shown at the Singapore Art Museum, and the rationale for their inclusion or exclusion of particular works as “original Chinese, not joint ventures.”20 The problem of selection from Chinese sources was positioned as discrimination in favour of work that carried authentic values or that represented certain criteria of contemporaneity introduced from outside. Whatever good intentions the The Monk and the Demon, catalogue cover, 2004. European curators had, they could barely escape exoticizing China.21 According to this viewpoint, expressed by Wang Huangshang in 2004, the work selected for exhibition is trapped in a net of values that are not Chinese, and this removes or denudes the possibility of Chinese art having influence on other international discourses, where the art is nothing more than an illustration depicting Chinese social reality, and is devoid of any real discursive power in the international landscape.22 As a critique of Euro-American curatorial practices this position seems straightforward, but it also possesses the problematic notion that there actually is a set of Chinese values that exist independently of non-Chinese curatorial selection, and that, by implication, only certain Chinese individuals are suited to select the art.
Such a separation of Chinese and non-Chinese selection criteria has the twin effect of making selections more subject to the “representative- ness” of the “Chinese” values of Chinese selectors and making the curatorial selection into propaganda supporting the values that the selection implicitly or explicitly represents. Indeed, selection of works as representative of ‘contemporary Chinese’ values turns the curator into a salesperson for the work they have selected. Chen Shaoxiong, Figure anti-terrorism, 2003, installation with photographs. It would make a fascinating study to compare the rhetoric found in the internal written defence of curatorial programmes and contemporary advertising copy for high-end consumer products.
But a more interesting—if for other reasons more fraught—role for the curator is as a major thinker, or at the very least a humble mediator, who, by the presentation of selected artwork, facilitates a higher level of intellectual exchange between cultures thought of as distant or different. Clearly some curators consider artwork in some way to be the transmitters or the embodiment of a contemporary zeitgeist, and their involvement in exhibitions is aimed at facilitating such transmission. Whether curators have enough time or are subject to enough personal and public critical interaction to produce such thought does not appear to be a concern. If I may be allowed to generalize from personal observation, repeated interviews with curators over the last three or more years have not removed the impression that their situating of a work or of an artist in a
particular way for the purposes of their exhibition affects the significance of the work or artist on an intellectual level. To be direct, curators are functionally inclined to confuse intellectual or spiritual value with propagandistic value. Here the temptation to substitute text that is like advertising copy for fully articulated ideas is prevalent.
It is true, to judge from their writings, that Fei Dawei and Wu Hung, both living outside of mainland China, regard themselves as intellectuals or, specifically, art historians, and compatriots of several important critics in China who curate. Yu Hong, Fashionable Sports, oil on canvas, 174 x 179 cm, 1992. Exhibited at the 1993 Venice Biennale. But these critics, for example Yi Ying, Yin Shuangxi, or Wang Lin, are barely known abroad.23 The position they have adopted is that of members of an intellectual class, or, more broadly, of thinkers on art. However, readers of English texts may form an inaccurate impression of this position, which is more widely found in China than overseas. This may be because the most prolific writer in English, Hou Hanru, as we will see below, seems [now] to regard himself more as a creative entrepreneur than a thinker.
, , Among the most important effects of selection is that on a one-time basis, or over several exhibitions, it provides concrete definition of the work of a group of exhibited artists. The curator thus functions as a kind of talent scout, or, if the pool of talent is already clear to the curator, as a kind of the- atrical agent for a stable of actors who Huang Yongping, One of Nine Celestial Animals. Exhibited in the French Pavilion at the 1999 Venice Biennale. may appear in various spectacular events appropriate to their work and abilities. Reciprocally, it is surely the case that exhibitions are also conceived in terms of the quality of artists and work that are available or the quality of pro- duction that is guaranteed. One of the most obvious features in exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art, whether in those supposedly representative of “China,”or contemporary practice in China, or representative of a particular position in a non-Chinese art world for which a Chinese representative may be required, is the restricted number of names that appear repeatedly. It is interesting, for example, that the works of Zhang Peili and Geng Jianyi, despite the change in their medium from painting to installation and video after 1993, have been continually seen since 1987 as representative of contemporary Chinese art practice. It is similarly notable that the very compe- tent and often interesting paintings by Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong, rendered in an expressionist- realist manner well known outside China in Europe and America since the late 1920s, should so regularly re-appear in many different kinds of exhibitions. The institutional consecration of these artists, as well as their market position in the case of the latter two, must be related to a kind of curatorial restriction on other selections.
, Exhibition catalogues and the explanations found within them have almost always involved explications of recent ideas that justify or in other ways support the curatorial strategy implied in selecting works. Sometimes this can take the form of a brief reference to a theorist deemed relevant to the field in question, or sometimes an abbreviated, detached, floating interview that features snippets of thoughts from a famous thinker. Contemporary art catalogues seem to be particularly prone to citation of intellectually fashionable ideas, as if this justifies their exhibition concept or selection. In the field of contemporary Chinese art it is interesting that in Cities on the Move, Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist cite the emergence of new cities, or raise China’s “Special Economic Zones,”as typical of the shifting phenomena that underlie their exhibition without citing a single statistic, economic report, or set of data.25 This style is a kind of high journalism that deals with new “facts” or “phenomena” as if they were already self-demonstrated and required no further discussion. Obrist, in the catalogue for Utopia Station at the Venice Biennale, in 2003, includes “floating” interviews with luminaries such as Immanuel Wallerstein or Edouard Glissant without subjecting their thought to any kind of analysis or introduction, let alone citation as part of an argument.
Despite these criticisms, at least Hou and Obrist are serious and, in a virtually oblique and dyslexic manner, at least put the texts they refer to into a space where they may be further mobilized to generate further meanings. Unfortunately, another kind of journalist-cum-curator exists in the field of contemporary Chinese art, such as the renowned writer for Le Figaro Michel Nuridsany. His argument usually starts by finding a straw man to attack, such as a non-art specialist French Sinophone who says, “Nowadays there’s nothing interesting going on in France. It’s all happening in China”.26 This kind of attack is supported by the guise of corroborating realia, usually a citation from an artist’s interview that is intended to inveigle the reader into the idea that the text they are reading is more informed than it really is. We learn, for example, that Huang Yongping called his group Xiamen Dada in 1985–86 because in an interview Huang said, “Chinese contemporary art was fifty years behind the times compared to Western art. We believed a reference to Western art was essential if Chinese contemporary art was to exist.”27 This statement of relatively well-known facts is cited as corroboration for what is to follow.The reader is then primed to accept statements like Huang Binhong’s that “the thought behind Fauvism is close to the power of the line in antique Chinese painting”; it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry at such absurd displays of nationalist arrogance.”28
Unfortunately, Nuridsany does not know that the reason why Shao Dazhen, an emiment and liberal conservative historian of modern Chinese art accepts Huang Binhong’s views is likely to
Huang Yongping, drawing for French pavilion installation, Venice Biennale, 1999.
be that Shao happens to know Huang’s late work. Moreover, as Nuridsany could have established via conversation with even a moderately well-versed French “Sinophone,”Huang Binhong was a close friend in the 1940s of Fu Ren, the Francophone Shanghai translator of texts on twentieth- century French modernist art that Huang undoubtedly discussed with Fu Lei, and via whom we can assume was obtained the profound cross-cultural literary and pictorial understanding—not “nationalist arrogance”—on which Huang Binhong’s statement was based.29
Perhaps it is only an outsider to regular curatorial practice who will naively testify, as I know of very few actual curators doing, to functioning as a market maker for contemporary art. That is, a curator will not acknowl- edge in print or public utterance what is common trade parlance among professionals, that curators by their selection consecrate an artist as purchasable and also, although this may even more rarely be discussed, Catalogue of Chinese exhibition at 26th Sao Paolo Biennial, 2004. determine the price for an artist's work by the sum they are willing to offer or recommend to others for the purchase of an art work. So far as I know only Strassberg has acknowledged such a role for himself, in 1991 by stating: “In a country still without an independent art market which was now facing international isolation, artists were more than ever anxious for their works to become known abroad, both for psycholog- ical as well as pragmatic reasons.”30 He also acknowledged the interventionary role of an overseas curator by noticing that a handful of independent artists were living independently of the state in small groups within a defined geographical area, and that ”some maintained strong bonds of friendship growing out of their school days in the art academies…..[that curatorial visit could take place was] ‘a sign of hope in what is obviously a depressing situation.”31
, , The curator can also conceive of his or her function as a catalyst for social change in the small domain of art, if not in the wider society. Sometimes this is because the contemporary Chinese artist forces a reappraisal of domestic institutional rules, if not also of the institutions themselves, by his or her mere inclusion in an overseas exhibition. This was certainly the case with the participation of Huang Yongping and his curation by Hou Hanru in the French pavilion at Venice in 1999. The ideal usually advanced by the siting of other-cultural artists in the global centre of the art world is one of equality and enrichment of voice.32 In carrying out this transformation of institutions the curator puts him- or herself forward as cultural radical, as Hou Hanru did when he said, “it’s necessary to carry out radical strategies to bring the “foreigner” into the territory of the dominant institutions.”33 But when a curator acts as an agent of social or cultural change, art may be only a means to this activity’s ends. Hou Hanru, for example, has said, “Maybe visual art is irrelevant to me.”34 This radicality is ambivalent identifying with the culture from which the curator originates and privileging the ‘other’ culture which they seek to influence.35 Curators usually admit to necessarily being co-opted by the institutions against which they react. Hou Hanru, for example, has said, “the only thing you can do is to use the existent institution and change it from the inside.”36
One sometimes gets the feeling that curators, when asked about their deeper purposes, cast around for any idea that will do, as an educator, or a moralist, even though the two positions often converge. Hou Hanru again serves as a typical example: ”My idea is to transform it [the biennial] into a school, to make the whole process of preparing for the biennial a training school.”37
, Art exhibitions often transparently perform a diplomatic function. They show one society to another. This official or commercial curiosity was a prominent feature of some exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art abroad in the 1980s and early 1990s. The position was advanced early on by none other than Henry Kissinger: ”There is no clearer prism through which to perceive these developments than in the art now being created by the new generation of Chinese artists.”38 And the notion of cultural openness serving as an antidote to possible narrow diplomatic closure in the past is also evident with Kissinger in 1987: ”channels for international cultural exchange must be kept open.”39
The most ubiquitous value of multiple exhibitions is that the selection of artists is representative of a current situation: that the selection represents what is contemporary and has left behind some previously set values. Ronte and Smerling wrote, for example, “we wanted to present ...a representative overview of the actual modern art scene.”40 Perhaps the universal preoccupation of overseas exhibitions in the 1990s was that Chinese art had gone beyond old-fashioned Maoist politics. ”The exhibition wants to show that China is a country in upheaval, that has a great future ahead of it, ” and in China the new art doesn’t serve politics anymore.”41 This was a projection of non-Chinese prejudice, because what academics fought out in the 1980s was precisely a new way of connecting with reality, unblemished by party intervention. The underlying value of Chinese curators abroad, typified by Fei Dawei, who has been in France since 1986, was to open up a new kind of dialogue that accepted difference, but also a dialogue between contemporaries, not one focused on old views of a China in the past.42
The problem was that, around 1990, Fei Dawei perceived a radical difference in cultural position- ing of contemporary art between China, on the one hand, and Europe and America, on the other: “Even if formal resemblances apparently exist, the state of mind between China and the West remains radically different.”43 This amounted to an opposition of cultural essences of a kind which, it might have been supposed, exchanges of contemporary art should have overcome. But the trope of self-expression or individual identity has been strongly linked to contemporaneity in Chinese art during the 1990s, even if it is stressed that this quest for individuality comes from different and specifically Chinese sources.44
Just at the time when some non-Chinese curators were clinging to the notion of art practice in China being somehow more vital and more representative than that of Chinese artists abroad, some overseas Chinese curators, like Hou Hanru, were beginning to reconfigure the image of the Chinese artist resident abroad from an exile or an immigrant to a traveller, never quite resident in any overseas metropolis.45 The selection of Huang Yongping to be one of the two artists in the French pavilion at Venice in 1999 also was intended to emphasize “the importance of co-existence and dialogue between different cultures, individuals, as well as the diversity of concerns that are played out in the common spaces of creation.”46 The conception of international art exchange for China seems to have become one of receiving greater recognition for the complexity of Chinese society and the individuality of the artists.47 Indeed, a stress on individual achievement is found
throughout official statements from around 2000.48 Fei Dawei, in writing of a Belgian collection survey of recent Chinese art, stated that ”the most important thing for the artist to transcend is himself or herself, not the outside world.”49
Running against this revisited notion of the artistic individual is the notion that China can absorb, indeed needs to absorb, other cultural elements in order to resist the globalizing centre. That this “survival strategy,”by incorporative tolerance, may at some point comprise a kind of Chinese hegemonizing does not yet surface in Chinese curatorial texts, but it seems to be circulating just below the fashionably resistant surface. For example, in 2004, Huang Du mentioned that “contemporary Chinese art must not only actively absorb the useful elements of other cultures with an open mind, but also emphasize its own uniqueness and independence.”50 Speaking of a Mongolian yurt exhibited by a “Chinese” artist at São Paolo, he further writes, “the work pays tribute to the national heritage of traditional Chinese culture by rediscovering and using the traditional artistic elements that were previously ignored.”Here the laudable aim to rediscover minority cultural artifacts ignored by both Han chauvinism and globalizing pressures in the art world is incorporated into a Sinocentric notion of artistic fusion and tolerance.
We have seen above how Fei Dawei in 1990 was so sure about the differences between Chinese and Western cultures. But his position is by no means rare and is found widely in both China and Europe and America. For example, in 1993, David Elliott and Lydie Mepham positioned contem- porary Chinese art, including specially commissioned in situ work,by means of different views of natural forces: “While the Chinese artists recognize the same entities they do not see them as opposites. Such categories are, rather, different states of energy within a greater unity.”51 Such a bifurcation of the world is also found on the Chinese side. There is an implicit divide where Western events are somehow outside of Chinese discourse, like the almost complete lack of discussion of the artists themselves in some texts about the first major exposure at the Venice Biennale by Fang Lijun and Wang Guangyi and others in 1993.52 Such an artistic position also carries the understanding that the cultural difference between China and the West overlies a deeper ideological conflict. As Wang Guangyi writes, “In my view the central point I want to express in “The Great Criticism” series is the ideological antagonism that exists between western culture and socialist ideology.”53 It is significant that such a motivated set of works as “The Great Criticism” series, which would seem to feature the clash of Western commercial values symbolized by their local product avatars with the socialist ideals of the earlier Cultural Revolution period, should be posed as a clash between “western culture and socialist ideology.”The artist has not noticed or accepted that socialist ideology itself is a very Western product. The circularity of this position indicates that the cultural antagonism referred to is part of an internal and projective “Chinese” set of oppositions. Wang Guangyi, like many others in China and outside it who accept such oppositions, have very little idea about what the “West” actually is, or what “China” is, from the opposite position.
. It will have been noted that I have not made a particular point of separating Chinese and other- than-Chinese curators in the above analyses. This was deliberate. It might suit essentialist, nationalist, or various levels and types of “in-the-know” constructions of contemporary Chinese art to separate out these two categories of actors, so that one or other choice can be deemed “Chinese” or “Western.”I would be the last person to deny cultural specificity to either selection. But what emerges from an assessment of the list of curators, critics, and other actors is that
Chinese and other-than-Chinese actors are in such frequent interaction with each other and the same artists in China or abroad, that, whilst their selections and motivations may differ due to cultural or interest backgrounds and positions, what is significant is that they may be considered as one set of actors. To some extent this is due to the increased speed of exchange via exhibitions in the late 1990s, the increasing involvement of official bodies in contempo- Wang Guangyi, The Great Criticism-Benneton, 1992, acrylic on canvas, rary art exhibitions, and the increased speed 200 x 340 cms. Exhibited at the 1993 Venice Biennale. and volume of informational and personnel flows. Although the full details of analysis have to be worked out, it is also clear that the limited selection of artists in the exhibitions must indicate some kind of structural convergence among the bodies that site those exhibitions, as much as in the choices of the curators.
It will probably not be possible to fully describe and satisfactorily analyze all the interactions that take place between these actors and the various exhibition sites. Yet some issues may be pointed to. I was surprised at the lack of seriousness with which the prior Stars-generation artists were regarded by a number of post-Magiciens de la Terre artists and curators in France when I met them on several occasions over 1999-2003. This points to unresolved issues between older and younger artists and their curatorial cohorts being promoted overseas, but also to difficulties in finding their counterparts in generational and regional links among artists and curators in China, some of which go back to the late 1980s.
There is also a large differentiation, not easily mapped precisely but evidently present among artists and curators, between those who handle contemporary art in terms of “China” and the “West,”whether on the level of a historical-cultural or social-situational discrimination, and those who see China as part of a world increasingly defined by multi-ethnicity and hybridity. One should underline here that in Europe and America, this is a multi-ethnicity and hybridity that is not determined, as it might be in China, by the perceived ability of Sinified culture to absorb cultural and ethnic difference, but by the position of immigrants under conditions of a globalized economy that still preserves local cultures fostered by states.
As repeatedly demonstrated by Alain Quemin,54 the artists’ country of origin still strongly determines their prominence both in esteem and market sales between national and international levels. The “prescribing countries” of the international art world are overwhelmingly the USA and Germany, followed at a lower level by France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Japan and Korea are barely present among these prescriptions and China has only just begun to enter. In the Chinese case, the state as a funder of overseas exhibitions of contemporary art, as a provider of exhibition spaces, and as a facilitator of a contemporary art world has barely begun. This is the case, even given that these activities have previously been in the domain of a much older cohort of artists and curators centred on restrictively funded exhibition, educational, and studio institutions. Private patrons have begun to exist in China, but have nothing like the scale, function, and aesthetic range of similar patrons in, say, Japan or Korea.55 Thus we would have to conclude
that Chinese patrons have not yet had an impact on the pattern of practice or the kinds of artwork that are created.
Many other issues remain to be examined concerning the reception of contemporary Chinese art in China itself during the 1990s and how this was conditioned by the rise of mass consumerism in the cities, particularly since changes in urban life or in its relation to artistic expression and general aesthetic perception have been referred to by artists or accepted as the basic driving forces behind contemporary art by many curators. Consideration of these must be left aside for another occasion.
I am particularly grateful to the following colleagues for materials, interviews, or other help that has contributed to this essay: Thomas Berghuis, Chang Tsong-zung, Jean-Michel Ducrop, Fan Di'an, Fei Dawei, Gao Minglu, Hou Hanru, Huang Du, Huang Yongping, Gu Dexin, Li Xianting, Martina Köppel-Yang, Francesca dal Lago, Shao Dazhen, Shao Yiyang, Terry Smith, Wu Hung.
Notes 1 A list of those active in introducing contemporary Chinese art overseas is given in Appendix One to an extended version of this paper but not included here. 2 Studies that generally bear on the understanding of biennials and the international art circuits in which they are located are given in the second part of Appendix Two to an extended version of this paper but not included here. 3 For the imbrication of the "official" and the "non-official" art worlds, see John Clark, “System and Style in the Practice of Chinese Contemporary Art: The Disappearing Exterior?" Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 1, no. 2 (summer 2002), 13–38. Part of this was translated (by Jean-Dominique Langlais) in “Style et Système au pratique de l'art contemporain en Chine,” in A. Lemonnier, ed., Alors, la Chine? (Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 2003). 4 A list of exhibitions and texts is given in Appendix Two, which is unpublished here. 5 For the definition of contemporary art, see Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? Contemporary Art, Contemporaneity and Art to Come (Sydney: Artspace Visual Art Centre, 2001), n. pag. See also Alain Quemin, L'art contemporain international: Entre les institutions et le marché (le rapport disparu) (Nîmes: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon/Artprice, 2002), 16–17. 6 See "Curators' trip to China,” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, vol. 1 no. 1 (spring 2002), 31. This is a singular document on translating the discourses of the periphery into those now current at the centre and transmitting them back to the periphery. 7 As mentioned in The Japan Foundation, ed., Venezia Biennale/Nihonsanka 40nen/The Venice Biennale/40 years of Japanese Participation (Tokyo: The Japan Foundation and Mainichi Newspapers, 1995). 8 The Chinese artists exhibiting at various exhibitions, including biennials at São Paolo, Venice, and other sites from 1987 to 2004, are listed in Appendix Three to an extended version of this paper but not included here. 9 Quemin 2002, 136–46. 10 John Clark, "Japanese Contemporary Art and Globalization-Largely Seen from Participation in the Venice Biennale," presented at the conference "Globalization, Localization, and Japanese Culture in the Asia Pacific Region," organized by the International Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, and the Department of Japanese Studies of the National University of Singapore, October 28–30, 2004. 11 Political changes may also have enabling effects. In 1999 Cai Guoqiang was able to import an original team member from Sichuan to assist in re-creating the 1965 Rent Collection Courtyard sculptures in Venice. See Nico Stinga, Terrecotte Cinesi dalla 48A Biennale di Venezia (Nove: Antiga Edizioni, 2003), 9.
12 On the activities of Chinese artists and curators in France, see John Clark, "Chinese Artists in France," in Jean Fisher and Gerardo Mosquera, eds., Over Here (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2004), 310–333, and John Clark, "Chinese Artists in Paris," Far Eastern Economic Review, vol. 16, no. 12 (1986). For a Chinese translation, see Meishu Shichao no.4 (Nanjing, 1987), 24–30. 13 Indeed, we may link the intention to prescribe to such exhibitions that are not ostensibly about a national position as actually an implicit claim to the right to make prescriptions by the site and its curatorial mediators, as well as by the nation where that site is located. 14 See Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV (1751), trans. Martyn P. Pollack (London: Heron Books, 1961), ch. XXXIX. 15 For example, the Chinese artists in Gilda Williams, ed., Fresh Cream (London: Phaidon, 2000). 16 See John Clark, editor and contributor, Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium (Hong Kong: New Art Media, 2000), and its successor compilation, Wu Hung, editor and contributor, Chinese Art at the Crossroads: Between Past and Future, Between East and West (Hong Kong: New Art Media, 2001). 17 See Denis Diderot, Essais sur la peinture, Salons de 1759, 1761, 1763 (Paris: Hermann, 1984), 33–38. 18 Szeeman discusses his selection of Wang Xingwei in Wu Hung, Chinese Art at the Crossroads, 154. 19 Tillers Imants, "Locality Fails," in Rex Butler, ed., What is Appropriation: An Anthology of Critical Writings on Australian art in '80s and '90s (Sydney: Power Publications and Brisbane, Institute of Modern Art), 1996, 139-144. 20 Dieter Ronte, Walter Smerling, et al., “Quotation Marks”: Chinese Contemporary Paintings (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 1995), 27. 21 See Hou Hanru, Parisien(ne)s (London: InIVA and Camden Arts Centre, 1997), 5. 22 Wang Huangsheng in Fei Dawei et al., The Monk and the Demon: Contemporary Chinese Art, exh cat. (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2004), 14. 23 See Yi Ying, Xueyuan de Huanghun (Changsha: Hunan Meishu Chubanshe, 2004); Yin Shuangxi, Diaosu 50mran, 20Shiji Zhongguo Diaosu Xueshu Lunwenji publisher and date unknown, Wang Lin and Yin Shuangxi, Yin Shuangxi, Zhubian meishu Piping Jianian Duti mingzhan, Youhua (Chengdu: Sichuan Meishu Chubanshe, 1994), and Wang Lin, Dangdai Mieshu Zhuangtai (Nanjing: Jiangsu Meishu Chubanshe, 1995). 24 Hou Hanru, On the Mid-Ground, ed. Yu Hsiao-Hwei (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2002). 25 See Hou Hanru and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Secession: Cities on the Move (Ostfildern-Ruit: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1997), n. pag. (section 1). 26 Michel Nuridsany, China Art Now, trans. Susan Pickford (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), 8. 27 Nuridsany, China Art Now,8. 28 Nuridsany, China Art Now,9. 29 Huang Binhong’s work is the subject of a Ph.D. thesis, now nearing completion, by Claire Roberts of Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, and I am grateful to her for sharing her research and several illustrations. 30 Richard L Strassberg, “I don’t want to play cards with Cézanne”: Selections from the Chinese “New Wave” and “Avant-Garde” Art of the Eighties (Pasadena: Pacific Asia Museum, 1991), xi. 31 Ibid. 32 Hou Hanru, One Man, Nine Animals: Huang Yong-ping's Project for the French Pavilion in Venice Biennale (Paris: Association Française d'Action Artistique, 1999), 26. 33 Ibid. 34 Hou Hanru, in Caroline Thea, Foci: Interviews with Ten International Curators (New York: Apexart Curatorial Program, 2001), 30. 35 See Yu Hsiao-Hwei in Hou Hanru, On the Mid-Ground, 12. 36 Hou Hanru, On the Mid-Ground, 15. 37 Hou Hanru, On the Mid-Ground, 16. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 22. 40 Ronte and Smerling, “Quotation Marks”,9. 41 Ibid., 10. 42 Fei Dawei et al., Art Chinois 1990 Demain pour Hier (Pourrières and Aix en Provence: Les Domaines de l’Art and Éditions Carte Segrete, 1990), n. pag. 43 Ibid., 16. 44 See Claire Roberts, New Art From China (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1992), n. pag. 45 In Hou Hanru, Secession,7,and Hou Hanru, On the Mid-Ground, 14. 46 See Hou Hanru, One Man, Nine Animals, 21. 47 Hou Hanru, Fan Di’an, and Gabriele Knapstein, Living in Time 29 zeitgenössische Künstler aus China, exh. cat. (Berlin: Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture of PRC and China International Exhibition Agency, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin-Preuischer Kulturbesitz, 2001), 27. 48 See The 25th São Paulo Biennial, Here and Now: Chinese Art in the Process of Urbanization (curated by Fan Di’an, assistant Pi Li), exh. cat. (Beijing: China International Exhibition Agency, 2002), 29. 49 See Fei Dawei et al., The Monk and the Demon, 12. 50 The 26th São Paolo Biennial: Chinese Pavilion (curated by Huang Du, artist Qu Yan), exh. cat. (Beijing: China International Exhibition Agency, 2004), 2004., n. pag. 51 See David Elliott and Lydie Mephan, Silent Energy (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1993), 3. 52 A kind of “cuturalized” indifference to the event was privately reinforced by comments to me from observers of their reaction to the Italian environment when they visited the Biennale. 53 See Wang Guangyi's comments in Huang Zhuan and Pi Li, Tuxiang Jiushi Liliang/Image is Power (Changsha: Hunan Meishu Chubanshe, 2001), 257. 54 See Quemin, L’art contemporain international. 55 Attempts in the early 1990s to have a foundation law established that would allow for art donations and the running of private museums met with failure, coming up against the policy for organization of non-party bodies under Leninist theory, according to my conversation with a leading Chinese art critic in 1999.
:
Huang Yongping, Bat Project I, II, III Memorandum, 2001-2003, installation. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
Today, my paper will focus on the impact of the international art system on Chinese contemporary art. My point of view is not as optimistic as that of my Chinese colleagues because I believe Chinese contemporary art has become totally confused within this new context, and many innate disadvantages have been exposed. Chinese contemporary art was first accepted within the interna- tional realm at the semi-closure of the Cold War. Within this perspective, Chinese contemporary art was recognized in the West as a symbol of the existence of free individual spirit within the structure of collectivism. This, along with the overall advance towards a market economy in China since 1992 and the changes in the world political situation led to contemporary Chinese art becoming represented by Cynical Realism and Political Pop, which was frequently exhibited in the West. Those artists who committed themselves to “expose the suppression of human nature in China’s society” won commendation from the West. Though they illustrated suppression in Chinese society, the abundant incomes they achieved enabled them to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle. They became society’s nouveau riche. To Western tourists, such styles of art, which clearly alluded to a non-Western ideology, were taken as the characteristic standard for contemporary Chinese art. The art was then used, in turn, as the reference point for identifying Chinese culture. The crux of the matter is that due to political and economic inequality, the West’s understanding of Chinese art was distorted from the beginning. The success of Cynical Realism and Political Pop inspired
artists to elaborate their “internationally best-selling” style and to add more political ingredients to it. Equally, it encouraged younger Chinese artists to join the rank of “dissidents.”This was exemplified in the style of Gaudy Art that subsequently emerged in the mid-1990s. If the art of the 1980s was too weak to support its own faith, and Cynical Realism and Political Pop gave up their commitment to their ideal, then under the guidance of the West, the new art forsook commitment to any faith. It danced hand in hand with cultural nihilism and in the end was reduced to “roguish” Cynical Realism.
People may be confused as to why Chinese contemporary art has been able to change so easily. Chinese contemporary art did not grow out of a modernist movement as in the West; rather, it grew up under Socialist Realism. Prior to 1980, art in China was dominated by the school of (academic) realism. This related directly to the prevailing ideology of the times. From Mao’s “Talks at Yan’an” in 1942, we can see that it was realism alone that was able to meet the demands of “Serving the People.”Thus, realism became the principal tool of the nation’s propaganda. Another important concept that also related to Socialism was that of Collective Spirit. Under this spirit, the individual was subject to the collective in all aspects of his/her life. All Chinese were thereby brought together in working towards a much grander common aim. Chinese contempo- rary art grew up against this background without many modernist resources. Here, modernism is not equivalent to Western modernism but means the strong interest in individuality and experi- mentation with language. Practicality was thus already in the blood of Chinese contemporary art, manifested not as a style but more as an unconscious methodology. These reasons can explain why Chinese artists chose such radical ways of making art, even to the point of using the human body as a medium.
Information about Western contemporary art was neither learned in schools, nor introduced objectively in the mass media, nor acquired by students studying abroad. It was spread by word of mouth and was seen in catalogues brought back to China by artists travelling abroad. Upon seeing a new issue of a foreign art magazine, young artists could only glean information from pictures a few square centimetres in size; most could not read the text. Prior to creating any work that might be construed as contemporary art, Chinese artists had scarcely any opportunity to view an original work.In such a situation, young artists who don’t understand the original work unwittingly promote mass-media ideologies.
Such practicality not only appears in the art but also characterizes the attitude of the Chinese government towards the arts. Since 2000, more and more Chinese contemporary art began to be shown through the official exchange program. This would seem to indicate that contemporary art had been already widely accepted by the government. But, to be honest, this is not true. As evidence we can consider the fact that from 2001 to 2003, a work by the Chinese-French artist Huang Yongping (his copy of an EP-3 spy plane) was three times taken off the checklists of important exhibitions for diplomatic reasons. On the other hand, we will find that Chinese contemporary art is shown more often overseas than in China. Contemporary art has already been used as a diplomatic tool, with two goals: it is intended to demonstrate how open the government is now, with the hope that this might bring economic benefits, or it is used as a means in which to take the place of Taiwan—for example in the São Paulo and Venice Biennales. But in China, nothing changed at all. The government does not focus on supporting the art in China. It uses the art as a tool.
Within this context, we will see that in official explanations of contemporary art exhibitions, the meaning of the work is changed—the original background information has been removed. With
more and more exhibitions, it seems that we already have a kind of official, harmless contemporary art. The officially promoted art could logically include the more high-tech media, such as new media, because this kind of exhibition could use the technology to hide the radical perspective of the art. Officially promoted kinds of art could also logically make use of traditional, vernacular codes in their styles, because these evoked China. For the museums and curators, this would make them feel safe.
Judging by the external environment, the rendering “harmless” of contemporary art raised an even more challenging problem. The problem arose in a re-examination of contemporary Chinese art in a colonial context. Borrowing Jurgen Habermas’s notion of “commonness,”art theorists had been looking for a way to bring art from international biennials back to the local society. As the most widely exhibited contemporary art, the manner of style of such artworks raised doubts: When an artist co-operates with the ruling will of the society, what is the artist’s minimum morality? The essential nature of contemporary art is anti-establishment. Yet, without support from an establishment, contemporary art is rootless and vulnerable to manipulation by others. We frequently see contemporary art appear in public spaces, yet we know that it can gain legitimacy only if it shuns sensitive topics. If artists shun sensitive areas, can contemporary art exist? And if artists do not shun sensitive issues, what will happen to contemporary art?
On the other hand, we found that the international world had taken a new attitude towards Chinese art. Outside China, during the entire decade of the 1990s, exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art were usually organized according to two modes. One was the "impact vs. response" mode, which held that the leading factor in the development of modern Chinese culture was Western aggression, and that development and changes within Chinese culture could be interpreted in terms of Western impact-Chinese response. Typical shows of this type have been China’s New Art, Post ‘89 (Hong Kong, 1994) and Inside Out: New Chinese Art (New York and San Francisco, 1998 and 1999). Such exhibitions largely focused on a politicized perspective on Chinese experimental art. The second mode was “tradition vs. modernity,” according to which modern and contemporary Western society provided the model for all countries in the world and China was expected to make the transition from a “traditional” to “modern” society according to the Western model. Following this logic, Chinese experimental art became basically folk art, which was demonstrated in the exhibition China! Contemporary Painters,held in Germany in 1996. It seemed to some people that Chinese society could follow the well-beaten Western track towards a “modern” society only if the West gave China a stern warning. Both modes represent Western- centric views, both believing that the industrialization of the West had been a blessing and that the Chinese could never achieve conditions favourable to creating) such modernization. Therefore, no significant historical change in twentieth-century China could have been anything other than the changes experienced by the West. It goes without saying that this guideline greatly oversimplified Chinese experimental art and hindered its progress. It may be true that both artists and art in China had been distorted by the impact of their own cultural framework, but if we focus only on a narrow and distorted picture, this will become a new form of suppression that further harms Chinese art by limiting it to a false and narrow political theme that allows it only an unreal, distorted existence.
Furthermore, the Chinese government devotes a great deal of money to promoting Chinese art in order to build up a good political image rather than developing a system to support art creation, and this has led to a situation where the foreign collector and commercial gallery have become the
controlling power behind Chinese contemporary art and profit from it. There are two examples that have made people quite upset in China. The first is that, as early as ten months before an exhibition of Chinese video and photography opened at the International Center of Photography in New York (Between Past and Present, 2004), hundreds of galleries, collectors, and dealers came to Beijing and Shanghai with the list of artists in the exhibition and went crazy shopping. Compared with the Inside Out exhibition of the 1990s, this new exhibition brought more collectors. The second example is that more and more museums are using private money and collections to help put together their Chinese contemporary art shows. It seems that Chinese art has already become the new hot field for collecting as well as the new field for reaping profits. Under these circum- stances, exoticism and identity codes have become the most prominent characteristics of Chinese art. On this level the Chinese government and foreign collections have the same interest.
I can say this is the new situation for China and its art. Since Chinese art has not gone through the experience of modernism, its creation seems more and more to follow a policy of fitting into the exhibitions, but without being rooted in the artist’s individuality and China’s society. This leads to secondary effects, which is that in the international art world, the main function of Chinese art is just to offer a Chinese image to prove the abstract concept of pluralism. Under the image of pluralism, the value will not be important any more. This can also explain the why foreign curators, when they come to China, always lower their original standards and use another kind of standard to select artists.
Inside China, artists are now losing their position. Their position had been the underground. It was not a good position, but it was a position. Now that they are widely shown, they are not underground anymore. They can even sell their work very successfully. In the past years, most of my colleagues and I have tried to build up an open position for Chinese art in China, but now we have suddenly found that such work did not bring a good situation for China; on the contrary, it made the art lose its energy. But, to be honest, we still feel okay about this situation. Even where the relaxations are unstable or sporadic, they are effectively transforming the social context of experimental art in China.
Analyzed from within, the art system of the 1990s led to a logic based on the manipulation of ideological differences and antagonisms between China and the West. Those differences and antagonisms obviously cannot serve as the basis for the existence and success of experimental art in China, otherwise China’s experimental art would only interpret Western values and standards, and it is also a certain kind of practicality. If we take a lesson from the experimental art of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, we will learn that empty ideology cannot be a permanent reason for art. With China’s expanding entry into the international world, Chinese society will undergo great changes. As the process of globalization continues, ideological differences will be altered too, and the narrow-minded Cold War ideology will disappear, giving way to conflicts between different values caused by different ways of perceiving things. Grasping the gist of the new world situation has become an increasingly urgent issue. Therefore, Chinese experimental artists must prepare for an era in which pressure from different ideologies gradually disappears. When ideological differences no longer exist, Chinese experimental artists will have a future only if they turn their attention to the deeper layers within Chinese society.
So the situation between Scylla and Charybdis is not a good situation, but it is necessary to Chinese contemporary art. Only under these conditions can we examine the basic aspects of our art and more carefully develop both individuality and art itself.
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Having listened to the keynote remarks and the discussion during the previous panel, I would like to ask a question that may relate to all the papers presented thus far. This deals with the importance inherent in the exhibition and display practices within the definition of the concept (or concepts) of Chinese contemporary art. In his introduction, professor Michael Sullivan mentioned the importance of the standards that underlie the exhibition On the Edge that is the occasion for this conference and highlighted the importance of the aesthetic value of the work o fart.The existence of a concept of “beauty” is something which most of us may agree upon, yet I do think there is hardly one single view that defines the idea of “beauty.”Melissa Chiu later mentioned the various features or styles associated with groups of Chinese artists residing in different geographical zones of the world and how these formal differences have shaped their artistic identity on an international level. I would then like to ask whether a specific kind of “beauty” may or may not affect the success of certain artworks vis-à-vis the site of their display and how their formal character (to use a more theoretically savvy term) may interact with the public and market response to that site.
We should remember that there have been many more Chinese artists than those who are now internationally acclaimed and who migrated to France, Europe, or to the United States in the last two decades and did not “make it.”Some eventually stopped making art or continued in a purely commercial vein; others have recently returned to China to find there the kinds of possibilities that were once sought overseas. What does this tell us about the standards at play and the categories in which artists “from elsewhere” might be forced to fit in in order to succeed within social and cultural environments different from their original ones? Could any rationale be derived from the comparison of the work of artists who have been successful overseas and that of artists who eventually abandoned their creative activities or significantly altered their styles to adapt to a foreign context? I do believe that the receptivity—by this I mean the aesthetic, cultural, and institutional frameworks—of the space of viewing may significantly affect the productive processes of art making, particularly when a geographical and cultural gap exists between the space of creating and display of the artwork.
This brings me back to the subject of our panel, Exhibiting Contemporary Chinese Art, and the position held by the framework(s) of display and dissemination in the formation of a specific Chinese art identity. John Clark provides an accurate and fact-based description of the phenomenon of the increasing participation of Chinese artists in international biennials. I agree with him on the homogeneity of the standards that define such participation, yet the questions remain: how do such structures impact upon the way art is produced by artists who are aware that their artistic identity needs to be somehow connected to the image(s) generally associated with their geographical space of origin? How does the very complex and organized system of the biennials,
Francesca Dal Lago (left) and Michael Sullivan (right). Photo: Qing Pan. particularly in the light of their World’s Fair legacy (i.e., the desire to “represent” the world, to categorize it and display it as a spectacle) influence the way in which these artists will be shaping their artistic persona and, accordingly, their work? Given the until recently limited offer of exhibition venues in China, artists have obviously tended to pursue all possible occasions overseas, necessarily considering beforehand what kind of artwork may “fit” in the context of an international art exhibition or a biennial. The critical connection established between the homogenizing process activated by international art institutions and the production of art in the so-called peripheral areas of the world needs to be the subject of further inquiry.
In reference to Professor Zheng Shengtian’s introduction of a very courageous and little-known event organized during the earliest days of China-U.S. artistic interaction, I would like to suggest the possibility of repeating such an experiment by inviting some of the original participating artists, as well as artists who only recently migrated to West, to answer some of the original questions and compare the answers with the outcome of the seminar fourteen years ago. One of the questions, “if most artists chose to stay abroad, would it affect the continuation and development of Chinese culture towards its goal of modernization?” could be rephrased as “how has the presence of Chinese artists overseas affected the formation of elements defining Chinese art on an international scale, and how did these elements inform the way Chinese art has been produced, exhibited, and marketed internationally?”
Finally, it would be interesting if critic and curator Pi Li, who has been personally involved in the recent official Chinese sponsorship of international exhibitions of contemporary art, could forecast or elaborate on the ways in which the participation of the Chinese state may impact on the above- mentioned trends and redirect the ways in which an artistic Chinese identity is to be shaped on both national and international levels. How may this crucial new patron regain the “stage”— mentioned by one of the artists quoted in Zheng’s paper—which had been “lost” by Chinese artists once they moved to the West? What kind of stage should be selected, and how may the intervention of mainland Chinese institutions affect the direction and production of its performance?
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Zhou Tiehai speaking at “Displacements.” Photo: Zheng Shengtian.
It is a great honour to be here at Stanford University to talk with you about “Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West.”My original subject was “How Western People Support/Influence Contemporary Chinese Art,”but I prefer to talk about the subject rather broadly. Recently, I have been thinking about a few interrelated issues—what is the “essence” of contemporary art, what is the current system of the contemporary Chinese art market, and what is my own situation now as a contemporary Chinese artist?
Mankind has evolved rapidly from the agricultural, to the industrial, to today’s IT-dominated civilization. I truly believe that art will stand at the forefront of the future development of human history. Contemporary art expresses wisdom, a very encompassing wisdom. Such wisdom exists in the East as well as in the West. But why did contemporary art in China only start to happen in the 1980s?
Only since the 1980s have contemporary artists in China been exposed to their counterparts in the West—to gallery people, curators, journalists, and collectors. From that time forward, under the influence of the western system, contemporary art in China mushroomed.
In 1996, I made a movie about when Chinese artists got in touch for the first time with their counterparts in the West. The movie is nine minutes long. It is called Will,or, in Chinese, bixu, which means literally “we must.”
WE MUST build our own airports, WE MUST visit the foreign doctors, WE MUST become art tour guides, WE MUST establish contact with the godfathers of art. I think the video Will reflects very well the situation of contemporary artists in China at that time. Looking at Chinese contemporary art over a period of 20 years—that is, since I started to do my first works in 1986—I can only describe the situation today as grave, or dongdan bude,which means “can’t move.”
It cannot simply be said that the result of the influence of the Western art system on Chinese contemporary art is good or bad. It is obvious that China at the moment lacks a system to sustain and develop contemporary art and is also not able to create a good model for itself. But I also want to emphasize that I don’t think the current system or model is a failure or can be categorized as East or West. I am not interested in these kinds of questions.
I am interested in the question of whether, through further development of our civilization, we will be able to quench the human thirst for freedom and liberalization of the self. Can we really cure the widespread depression common to both poor and wealthy societies in today's world? Depression is such a common phenomenon.
In my own artistic development, I encountered this feeling of “can’t move” in 2000. Realizing that the Western art world, however developed it is, cannot bring solutions to important problems, I started to look at the Chinese art world.
In my art, I call works related to Western “civilization” (that is, works with Western images) “placebo” and works with Eastern images “tonic.”Both of them, ”placebo” as well as ”tonic,” have curative purposes. We cannot say that one is better than the other, or that one is higher, the other lower.
In today’s contemporary Chinese art world, we seem to be hopelessly entangled between these two civilizations, moving back and forth between Eastern and Western things. How to jump out of this confinement and solve the essential needs of mankind?
As an artist, I cannot stop challenging myself to try to answer the question: How can one find a way to satisfy the human pursuit for freedom, beyond the normal wisdom of human civilization? How can one focus back to the original meaning of contemporary art and its pursuit of freedom?
So far, I do not think we have a solution for such questions.
The international art market consists of a top segment I call “global mainstream art” and several base segments that feed into this global mainstream art and possess specific characteristics, such as video art, multimedia art, or national art movements like Chinese art and Young British Art. In order for Chinese players to succeed—be they artists (even those with a strategy to subvert this system), gallerists, auction houses, collecting institutions or individuals, or authorities intending to facilitate this endeavour—it is crucial that they understand the mechanics of the international art market system.
The top segment of global mainstream art is made up of work by a group of about 150 artists. They are represented in major exhibitions, art media, collections, and, with some restrictions, auctions. The group composition has become increasingly fluid and constantly reconstitutes itself with new artists entering from the base segments. Until twenty years ago, entry was restricted to painting and sculpture, but photography, video, and installation have now reached a similar status. The top segment commands, with a few exceptions, the highest prices in the markets, usually with a breathtaking rate of increase during periods of economic upturn, such as the late 1980s and the present. The market taste is driven not exclusively by quality but by a whole number of factors. At this stage, no artist living in China has entered this market segment yet. A small group of Chinese artists living abroad, however, are positioned at its periphery.
Who are the artists topping the list? I refer to the 2004 ranking of Kunstkompass, published in October by the German magazine Capital,which has been publishing these lists annually since 1970. The top 100 is led by two German artists, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, and dominated in number by artists from the United States. Ninety out of the top 100 artists are from the Euro- Anglosaxon cultural space, or what I like to call “NATO ART,”and three only are Asian (Japanese and Korean). The main criteria for achieving inclusion on this list are the number of solo exhibitions an artist has had in 180 recognized museums, participation in 120 group exhibitions, and the number of mentions in publications, again, data mainly originating from that same Euro-Anglosaxon cultural space. This system feeds very much on itself and is difficult to penetrate from the periphery, from places such as China. However questionable this list may be, it does reflect a market reality. This ranking, as well as others similar to it, does have impact within the collector's community. The vast majority of individual collectors are not daring. Buying art at prices exceeding 20,000 USD is often not a spontaneous act anymore, but rather requires support and confirmation from outside analysts and the seemingly expert advice a list such as this represents, no matter how limited in its nature. Institutional collectors, for other reasons, are also not too daring and prefer in the majority to follow the mainstream, be it for lack of money to collect beyond the “musts,”or, in particular, to avoid criticism by their peers, with the upsetting result that, on whatever continent, all contemporary collections start to look more and more mainstream and disturbingly alike.
If an artist has the privilege to make it into this mainstream art segment, prices soar within months and exhibition opportunities quickly multiply. But the pressure to produce in order to meet instant global demand can also break a promising artistic career.
What, then, are the success factors guiding accession to this market segment of global mainstream art? It is a mix consisting of the quality of the work, of the marketing strategy chosen by the gallerist or artist, of the fashion or flavour of the moment, of curator and media attention, and, in particular, of becoming part of one of the networks driving this international art system. Such networks connect their players across borders in the mature art markets. They consist of a commodity—namely specific artists producing the works—then of a closely knit circle of gallerists, curators, and art critics who provide a multitude of exhibition and publicity stages for the artists to pass through, and, finally, of a material resource, that is, powerful and prominent collectors and, in a mature stage of an artist's market cycle, the auction houses. They all join together to create and signal a visible demand for these works. These protagonists will work together in an informal way, with or without immediate material compensation, but ultimately they mutually benefit from each other in their respective disciplines.
Some Chinese artists living abroad are only one step away from making it into this segment. But most of them have chosen to be their own dealers, although generally working with galleries case by case. Many of them are financially quite successful—so successful that they choose to ignore one fact: to achieve the ultimate success in terms of being represented in the majority of truly important contemporary collections still remains very difficult if one chooses to somehow stay outside of this powerful system.
Yet the international art system also has a relentless hunger for fresh material. Looking at the segment of Chinese art, meaning art works made by artists living in China, international demand is now taking on a different dimension. In the past China was a territory reserved mainly for a few specialized collectors and some spontaneous buyers from outside Asia. Today we see new entrants such as Chinese collectors, other Asian collectors, and, in particular, sophisticated collectors of global mainstream art who are taking a closer look. They have now determined that the exposure of Chinese art in an international art context, not in “Chinese art” exhibitions only, to a broad public such as in the 1999 Venice Biennale and in subsequent comparable venues is not a temporary phenomenon but rather a sign that art from China is here to stay. Some collectors are now, after careful examination, entering this new field and starting to collect artists that satisfy their criteria, which means, in their view, having the potential to enter the global mainstream art segment. A few of them are attracted by distinctly Chinese features in a work, but a majority simply by good art that happens to be produced in China. This group will be very important in moving this segment of the art market one step further, by marking these works as collectible for a much larger group of followers. They will eventually pave the way for a secondary art market, which is a precondition for many American collectors to enter the field. The November auctions in Hong Kong, after a failed attempt in the 1990s in London, were a testing ground that produced encouraging results for the international auction houses. Interestingly, Chinese buyers have also been awaiting such auction results: they see them as instrumental to establishing a pricing mechanism that they consider more transparent and more trustworthy than gallery pricing.
The relatively high prices that have recently been seen on certain works of Chinese art—in comparison to the prices of peer works by Western artists of a similar ranking—are becoming a serious issue for international collectors. Lately, prices have been driven up by Asian collectors who, as new entrants in this field, are not sophisticated about international market pricing. This development implies a real danger that collectors of global mainstream art will turn away from collecting art from China before they even start.
Nevertheless, the conditions for success in the international art market for contemporary art from China have never been better. Although quality remains an issue, China, by international standards, currently has a very lively art scene. Yet succeeding will definitely require more strategic thinking from all players in the contemporary Chinese art scene. As declared by the Minister of Culture in a forum last year, China has more than 200,000 cultural enterprises of some sort that eventually need to be commercialized. The Ministry of Culture recently organized an “Art Industry Forum” to discuss various options. How can the Ministry and other relevant Chinese authorities contribute to its international success? It may sound paradoxical: by allowing a domestic market for contemporary Chinese art to develop further. A number of limitations has led to a unique situation: for the last twenty-five years, the main body of contemporary art, or, certainly, most of the experimental art of China—which might well be considered the biggest cultural space in the world—has been collected by people outside China. Yet the strongest stimulus for success—inland and abroad, artistically and economically—is a flourishing domestic market with domestic buyers. This attracts artistic talent in numbers necessary to break into the highly competitive international art scene, talent that otherwise would be lost to other careers promising a better future. And it would provide this talent with more means to keep up with what is happening outside China, which in turn would reinforce the Chinese position in this rapidly growing global market of contemporary art. Yet all this hinges on one big proviso: that the artists will master this ongoing and most challenging process of moving from the semi-underground to the mainstage, with less and less systemic resistance to rub against and more and more temptation to cater to a commercially driven market.
How, then, to develop the domestic market? There are legal issues to be resolved. A legal entity, such as a foundation or association, to be set up without the insurmountable barriers I encountered when establishing the Chinese Contemporary Art Award, should be available for supporting activities in the field of art and culture. Tax deductions ought to be introduced for donations in this area. Then specific tax and customs regulations should to be improved to prevent art dealing and auctioning to be lost to Hong Kong, a trend that could still be reversed.
But most importantly, to buy contemporary art, you have to appreciate it, and to learn to appreciate it, you have to be exposed to it. To be exposed to it, you have to allow for an exhibition, publishing, and gallery infrastructure, and the necessary freedom to show—even to show work that might not be pleasing to all strata of society. Room for social critique is an essential component and a major attractor anywhere in creating a local audience and a local discourse. Understanding and supporting the setting in motion of this upward spiral will lead to a much stronger and sustainable market for contemporary art at home and abroad, contributing to economic as well as spiritual growth in China.
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Social gathering for Michael Sullivan. Photo: Zheng Shengtian.
In the 25 years since my first encounter with contemporary art from mainland China, at the 1980 Stars show at the National Gallery in Beijing, a lot has changed. On one level, scholars and critics now specialize in the subject and international exhibitions are dedicated to its display. But on another level, contemporary art from China, at least within the context of mainstream America, is still relatively unknown and unexplored. As a student of Chinese art with a long-standing interest in its promotion and appreciation, I have been alternatively perplexed and perturbed by this situation.
In an attempt to understand the position and positioning of contemporary Chinese art in the United States, I have taken this opportunity to consider in some detail two representative platforms of mainstream exposure and acceptance—the art media and the modern art museum. In this context, I will first review the presentation of Chinese contemporary art in Art in America, Artforum, and ARTnews,followed by a look at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) and the Guggenheim Museum. In conclusion, I will explore the connections between presentation and position and focus on the obstacles and opportunities that this relationship presents.1
To understand the beginnings of what I would consider a distinct bias in the treatment of Chinese art in the American mainstream, I have attempted to review every issue of Art in America, Artforum, and ARTnews published between 1978 and the present.2 Dividing this period into two, I observed that in the first fifteen years, between 1978 and 1992, Art in America,for example, published only six articles dedicated to contemporary art from the People’s Republic of China. Over the next twelve years, between 1993 and 2004, the trend was definitely up, with the magazine publishing about fifty articles on Chinese contemporary art, of which about a third appeared in last year’s summer issue. Still, the overall coverage is limited, accounting for a little less than 1% of the total non-advertising pages published in that period.3
Continuing to measure the margin, I found a similar trend when I looked at Artforum.(You will have to excuse my desire to quantify this exposure; I was a banker in another life and even at the museum where I worked subsequently, arithmetic was a large part of my job.) Between 1978 and 1992, for example, there were only two articles on contemporary art made in China or by recent émigrés. This number increases in the more recent period to eighteen, of which most are very short reviews of commercial gallery shows.
ARTnews,on the other hand, shows a more consistent focus, with thirteen articles between 1978 and 1992, which increases to thirty-two between 1993 and 2004. However, the overall coverage is also microscopic, accounting for about of 1% of all the non-advertising pages published in the last twelve years.
Statistics have a certain succinct simplicity, a comforting clarity for quantitative people like me, as they provide indisputable evidence of the phenomenon that one is exploring. Chinese contemporary art is indeed on the margin of the American mainstream art media, at least quantitatively; but more interesting, certainly, is a qualitative investigation into the nature of these articles. What do they say? Does their character change over time? If their appearance ebbs and flows, are there external reasons?
Instigated undoubtedly by the resumption of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China, the first article worth considering is a pioneering attempt in the spring 1979 Art in America by a group of self styled “art workers” who traveled from the United States to China to investigate the art scene and returned with the most unusual observations. Larry Rosing, for example, generalized, “The word ‘art’ itself means something quite different to the Chinese than it does to us. All the Chinese we met willingly worked within narrow stylistic limits. They felt none of the pressure we feel to be inventive, to create something new.”4
Lucy Lippard, a feminist critic who, in a different article in 1980 for Artforum,admits to “political sympathy for Chinese socialism,”went to China looking “forward to meeting artists whose politics were upfront in their art”.5 Apologetic but somewhat under-whelmed by what she saw, she began her article by saying, “the things that most interested me had little to do with art.”6 Particularly intriguing to Lippard and her traveling companions was the mixture of high and low culture in the visual landscape that she assiduously avoids calling kitsch.7
This preference for what might be termed “living kitsch” over the Chinese contemporary art scene—or, at least, the contemporary art scene that officialdom allowed these writers to see—is echoed by Jamey Gambrell and Hal Foster, who make another foray to China for Art in America in 1985. After a visit to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Gambrell, like his predecessor Rosing, was confounded by the work he found there, preferring the popular culture that he encountered on the street signs and billboards, which he called “the true modern art of China.”8 Hal Foster also sidestepped the art scene in favor of interesting observations about the prevalence of kitsch in the Chinese urban landscape, which he described as “capitalist bits ...grafted on to the communist body.”9
In next seven years, Art in America published only three more articles focusing on China. This despite a broadening interest by Western curators and critics in art outside the Euro-American mainstream, evidenced by numerous articles in the magazine chronicling current developments in Japan and Russia, for example, as well as a whole issue dedicated to subject of “Globalism” in July 1989.10
By contrast to the meager coverage in Art in America and Artforum, ARTnews regularly reported on Chinese contemporary art in the 1980s and early 1990s, due in large part to the contributions of Joan Lebold Cohen, who came with a background in contemporary China, where she had been based for a number of years. Avoiding the condescension or confusion one detects in the writings of more mainstream critics, Cohen takes a descriptive approach to chronicling China’s herky-jerky progress toward a more liberal social space and emphasizes the political context in which the art works were made. As the titles of her articles indicated—“A New Freedom within Limits” (1980), “Drawing a Harder Line” (1981), “Braving the Currents of Bourgeois Internationalism” (1984), “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back” (1988), “No U Turn” (1992)—artworks for Cohen were benchmarks of political change.11
The year 1993, however, marked a shift in the position and presentation of contemporary Chinese art in the American mainstream art press. First of all, the economic ascendance of a non-Japanese Asia focused the attention of Western observers. Art fairs in major Asian cities proliferated, and full page advertising spreads announced these events in ARTnews and Art in America.As writers were either invited or sent to these aspiring commercial capitals, regular reporting began in earnest. ARTnews,for example, at about this time published the first of a series of articles focusing on the burgeoning Asian art market, and in 1993 Art in America published a major profile on the region.12 Strangely, China was not included in the latter issue, but the deficit was remedied in 1994 by a long and interesting report from Beijing, on the occasion of the exhibition of British artists Gilbert and George at the National Art Gallery.13 After 1993, sporadic articles dedicated to individual Chinese artists appeared, including a review of Zhang Peili’s work in 1993 and Cai Guoqiang and Xu Bing in 1994.14
Just as it had in the 1980s, politics continued to inform the coverage of contemporary Chinese art at this time, but by the mid-1990s the situation had become, I believe, more complicated. June 4, 1989 was, of course, a flash point, framing much of the discussion about current events in China. For example, Chang Tsong-zung and Li Xianting’s New Art from China, Post ‘89 show was present- ed in Art in America in 1995 as “Banned Art from China Tours the U.S.”15 But contrary to the char- acterization of Chinese art as banned or politically dissident that was perpetuated in the main- stream news media and elsewhere—here I am thinking, for example, of a messianic but highly influential cover story by Andrew Solomon in the New York Times Magazine in December 1993—I would argue that after the mid-90s most American art magazines were preoccupied with another kind of politics, springing from a different kind of concern, and that was multiculturalism.16
Stimulated by postcolonial critique and initiated by the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, which Benjamin H. D. Buchloh in Art in America called “a long overdue and courageous attempt to depart from the hegemonic and mono-centric cultural perspectives of Western European and American institutions,”multiculturalism in the 1990s became the new curatorial imperative.17
But this preoccupation with ethnic diversity and cultural inclusiveness was a double-edged sword. On one hand, it empowered Western curators and critics to look beyond the normal list of Euro- American suspects to include representatives from other cultures around the world, including
China. From this time on, biennials and international art shows began to multiply around the world, with the concurrent inclusion of Asian artists dutifully and increasingly reported in the mainstream art press.18
However, despite the growing number of published articles referencing contemporary Chinese art, I do not believe the depth or quality of the reporting improved substantially, except in a very few cases. Perhaps writers were constrained by the nature of their assignments or by editorial policies that emphasized brevity and scope over substance and depth. Perhaps writers (and/or their editors) had become impatient with the complex issues raised by the postmodern theorists.19 But whatever the reason, it is my observation that, just as the new art journalism began to adopt a refreshing Catholicism, it also became increasingly event-driven and shallow, reading more like a laundry list, or a tourist guide book, than art criticism—testaments to cultural diversity at the expense of engagement.
Individual artists or themes were rarely singled out, and only a few critics like Eleanor Heartney had the confidence (or temerity) to go beyond the role of introductory tour guide. For example, in the twelve years between 1993 and 2004, excluding reviews of commercial gallery shows, Art in America, ARTnews,and Artforum published only a handful of stand-alone profiles, and these focused on a strikingly concentrated list of individual artists, including seven on Cai Guoqiang, six on Chen Zhen, four on Xu Bing, three on Yun-fei Ji, and two each on Huang Yongping and Yang Fudong.20
Perhaps the reason for the inclusion of the majority of these artists is obvious. For the most part they had lived and worked in close proximity to a Western cultural capital, primarily New York and Paris, and, by extension, close to the reporter. Therefore they were accessible. But it must be equally apparent that most of the artists singled out for special attention retained recognizable signs of Chineseness in their work.
One of the most sensitive writers on Chinese contemporary art in a mainstream media context, Eleanor Heartney, in her July 1989 review of Magiciens de la Terre,offered a possible explanation:
Buffeted by glasnost, the Third World debt crisis and an influx of refugees from all corners of the globe, the West’s long-standing faith in its own powers of self-determination has of late come under heavy fire. In academic and artistic circles, one consequence is a newly fashionable fascination with the Other, which threatens to join the Heroic Sublime and the Primal Self in our pantheon of governing myths of 20th century art.21
It was in this same article that Heartney singled out for the first time works by Chinese contempo- rary artists, in this case Huang Yongping and Gu Dexin.22 Heartney’s appreciation of the complexity of post-colonial debate, a characteristic that informs her analysis to this day, was apparent when she concluded her review of this controversial but prescient show on a cautionary note. “For all its celebration of the exotic and different, [the exhibition] remains oddly familiar, reminding us that to seek in the Other a reflection of our idealized self is never to leave home at all.”23
Ten years later, Heartney reiterated this concern in her 1998 review of the Inside Out exhibition, curated by Gao Minglu, and applauded “the presence on the [curatorial] team of well-informed insiders,”which ensured that “the selections avoid the trap of exoticism which leads many surveys of Asian art to focus on obvious trappings of ethnic identity. In fact”,she goes on to say, “visible markers of “Chinese-ness” are absent from many works in the exhibition. The sense of identity, instead, emerges from the confluence of esthetic, social, personal and political influences.”24
Nonetheless, it should be noted that despite these exhortations against exoticism, in their choice of artists for individual attention and review, Eleanor Heartney and many of her colleagues in the field tended overwhelmingly to focus on those Chinese artists who indeed exhibited “visible markers of Chineseness” in their work and whose meditations on cross-cultural communication and identity seemed dependent on their inclusion.25
While acknowledging the sensitivity of many of these reviews, it is still important to ask whether, by singling out artists who retained Chinese signs, these critics advanced or detracted from the cause of multiculturalism? Or, in their insistence on ethnic origins and national background, did they, rather than eluding the “politics of polarity,”actually reinvigorate the much-contested binary of East and West?26 Should we applaud their broad-mindedness, or have they just created new stereotypes, closing the door while seeming to open it?
To consider these questions further, I would like to discuss briefly the position of Chinese contem- porary art in mainstream American art museums. Does the characterization of contemporary Chinese art in the mainstream art press reflect, inform, or refute its presentation or position in the mainstream art museum? Is there any connection, and, if so, what is it?27
Considering for a moment the MoMA and the Guggenheim, two museums that I have chosen to represent the America mainstream, I think we can see certain parallels. First of all, just as in the mainstream media, where coverage was minimal, the investment by these two museums in con- temporary Chinese art was small.
MoMA made an effort. Through its affiliate P.S.1, it can be said to have supported the Inside Out exhibition, and individual curators, such as Barbara London, have shown a sustained interest in Chinese contemporary art, curating two off-site presentations of video and film, in 1998 and 2004, and an on-site installation of Zhang Peili’s video work, Eating,in 1998.28 But a preliminary review of the museum’s permanent collection reveals that, as of 2002, the MoMA had only a few Chinese works of art, twelve in total, including a painting by Zhang Daqian and a number of woodcuts that entered the collection prior to the 1980s. More recent acquisitions include Cai’s Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows (1998), Zhang Peili’s Eating, and a twelve-meter long handscroll by Huang Yongping.29 Given the huge size of the MoMA’s reserves, however, this investment in China must be described as minimal.30
The situation at the Guggenheim is similar. Although there was an extensive presentation of painting from the modern period in 1998, as part of the China: 5000 Years exhibition, the Guggenheim has yet to organize an exhibition that engages with contemporary Chinese art, and only six works by Chinese artists are represented in their permanent collection, including Cai Guoqiang’s large and well-published installation, Cry Dragon, Cry Wolf (1997), a photograph by the late, Hong Kong-born, New York-based Tseng Kwong-chi, and a work by the Paris-based abstract painter Zao Wu-ki.31
In sum, I think it is safe to say that neither the MoMA nor the Guggenheim has a persuasive collection strategy for, or a significant programming commitment to, the art of contemporary China. Why haven’t American art museums such as these made a larger investment in contempo- rary Chinese art? The answer is obviously complex and not unrelated to the issues that we have explored earlier. It also bears witness to the complicated ecology of cultural management in
America, the system on which museums depend, and this is where we have come full circle.
First, as we discussed, the visibility of Chinese art in the American mainstream media is limited. Coverage is sporadic and often superficial, although, unsurprisingly, the rare artists who are singled out in the media for in-depth analysis are often among the few who are collected. Second, there is the dealer issue. To the extent that Chinese artists have not, in general, established long- term committed relationships with commercial galleries, they miss out on significant opportunities for visibility and promotional support as well as on conduits of inquiry and information. Third, until very recently, experimental art from China has not appeared at auction, eliminating another important avenue of exposure and legitimacy.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the fact that there are still very few major private collectors of Chinese contemporary art in the United States. But there are some indicators that this may be changing. We may be in a transitional time. Eloisa and Chris Haudenschild, for example, have recently developed an important collection of video, photographs, and film, which was presented in the traveling exhibition Zooming Into Focus.33 But to this day, all museums in the United States, not just the Guggenheim or the MoMA, depend in large part on the donations of artwork from individual collectors. Unlike in other countries, where government agendas often inform the programming and, by extension, the collection policy of many state-sponsored institu- tions, museum collections in America are generally sustained by the politics of private wealth. Therefore, until private benefactors in the United States—who tend to read the same magazines and rely on the same dealer-auction nexus as curators do—begin collecting contemporary Chinese art, a new canon will wait to be written and a new visual history will wait to be made.
So where does this leave us? First of all, as a longtime student of Chinese culture, I applaud Britta Erickson and Rick Vinograd and initiatives such as the exhibition On The Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West and the accompanying symposium, Displacements: Transcultural Encounters in Contemporary Chinese Art, as well as university art museums and other specialized platforms, including the Asia Society and the China Institute, for providing sustained forums of visibility and debate.
However, I think we must consider whether in grouping Chinese artworks together to provide context and focus, we are enhancing understanding or just reinforcing old stereotypes. Does circumscription in the name of contextualization actually produce the opposite effect? By separating it out, are we not setting it aside and out of view?
Clearly, exhibitions and symposia such as the ones mentioned above are a good thing. But I do think we need to find ways for the voices of Chinese contemporary art to be heard, not just on the margin but within the mainstream, by pursuing opportunities of access and by encouraging the generalist and the outsider in addition to the expert.
In saying all this, I am not advocating a return to essentialist ideas that gloss over difference and reject the constraints of location and history. By imagining opportunities for Chinese art to be presented and preserved in the context of the American mainstream museum, I am not looking so much for acceptance, or to make Chinese art fit some Western construct; rather, conversely, I am interested in the destabilizing effect that Chinese art might have on the received wisdom of our time. I hope that this expanded exposure, by forcing a reassessment of the meaning of margin,
will address the possibility that the Western mainstream will soon be recognized as just one of many, and that art now situated on the edge will permeate the center of new local and global narratives that explore and affirm the richness of cultural difference and multiple realities.
Notes 1 It is important to note that my paper is limited to observations about certain mainstream art platforms in the United States only. A study of European publications and museums may produce different results. This paper is also not meant to represent an exhaustive study. There are surely other important magazines and modern art museums in the United States, most notably the San Francisco Museum of Modern of Modern Art, which may have a somewhat different curatorial orientation. But due to certain resource constraints, I limited my study to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Guggenheim Museum. In the future I look forward to learning more about the position and positioning of Chinese contemporary art at other magazines and modern art museums in the United States and abroad. 2 In tallying the number of articles, I focused on those dedicated to artists living in the Peoples' Republic of China or to recent émigré artists. I excluded artists from Hong Kong and Taiwan, although articles about contemporary art from these territories seem to be infrequent. In my definition of contemporary art, I include contemporary ink painters, such as Li Huasheng and Li Huayi, and realist oil painters such as Chen Yifei, in addition to so-called “avant-garde” artists who came to prominence in the West in the 1990s. In my tally of articles, I have included small blurbs, sidebars, and one-to-two column reviews, in addition to multi-page articles. Although I would have liked my list to be comprehensive, I certainly acknowledge that there may be oversights and mistakes. 3 In order to calculate the relative coverage of Chinese contemporary art as a percentage of total articles in these selected art magazines, I first excluded the pages dedicated to advertising, which in both Art in America and ARTnews accounted for approximately 45% to 55% of the total published pages, depending on the issue. I then counted the number of pages of all articles dedicated to Chinese contemporary art and divided them by the total non-advertising pages published by these magazines. 4 Larry Rosing, “China: Art and Artists,” Art in America (March/April 1979), 11. 5 Lucy R. Lippard, “The Ten Frustrations, or, Waving and Smiling Across the Great Cultural Abyss,” Artforum (summer 1980), 63, 70. 6 Ibid., 62. 7 Ibid., 67–71. 8 Jamey Gambrell, “A Visit to the Central Art Institute in Beijing,” Art in America (March 1985),136. 9 Hal Foster, “China is Near,” Art in America (March 1985), 128. 10 The July 1989 Art in America issue includes a review by Julia F.Andrews of Ellen Laing’s book The Winking Owl, which I have included in my tally of articles on contemporary art, as well as a small blurb citing events just prior to June 4, 1989, titled, “Chinese Goddess of Democracy Toppled by Troops,” by Jamey Gambrell. The other article on Chinese contemporary art published between 1985 and 1992 is a review in June 1990 of Hung Liu's work at Nahan Contemporary Gallery by John Zinsser. 11 For a full bibliography of articles by Joan Lebold Cohen, including related articles published in the 1980s in the Asian Wall Street Journal, see her Web site, www.joanleboldcohen.com. 12 Examples of ARTnews articles focusing on the art market in Asia include: Kay Itoi, “Auctions: Triumph in Taiwan” (May 1992, 30), Steven Modof, “Pacific Rim: An Art World Blooms” (summer 1992, 83–96), Joan Lebold Cohen, “The Rules of the Game” (summer 1992, 89–90), Barbara Pollack, “West Goes East” (March 1997, 86–87), Joan Lebold Cohen, “China's Flowering Galleries” (October 1997, 146–47), Scarlet Cheng, “The Proof is in the Bidding” (March 1998, 148), and Andy McCord, “Asian Allure” (September 2000, 80–84). See also the full-page advertisements for the Hong Kong and Taipei-based art fairs that began appearing in ARTnews and Art in America in 1992 and 1993. 13 Lynn Macritchie, “Report from Beijing: Precarious Paths on the Mainland,” Art in America (March 1994), 51–57. 14 Guy Brett, “Zhang Peili at Crousel-Robelin Bama,” Art in America (November 1993), 139, 151; Dana Friis-Hansen, “Guo Qiang Cai at the Iwaki City Art Museum,” Art in America (November 1994, 144); and Jonathan Goodman, “Bing Xu: 4000 Characters in Search of a Meaning,” ARTnews (September 1994), 99–101. 1993 was a watershed year for Chinese contemporary art for other reasons, including the major traveling show co-curated by Chang Tsong-zung and Li Xianting, China's New Art, Post-1989, which opened in Hong Kong in January; the first appearance of Chinese artists at the Venice Biennale; the China/Avant-Garde show, which opened in Berlin; Silent Energy, which opened in Oxford, England; Fragmented Memory, in Columbus, Ohio; and the First Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane. In addition, the launch in 1993 of English-language publications such as Art AsiaPacific, which contained regular coverage on contemporary art from mainland China, and Andrew Solomon’s highly influential cover story in the New York Times Magazine, “Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China” (December 19, 1993), went far to increasing the visibility in the West of contemporary art from mainland China. 15 Art in America (October 1995), 33. The listing for this show in the 1996 Art in America Annual Guide begins, “Taking the Tiananmen massacre as a starting point . . .” (28). 16 Andrew Solomon, “Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China,” New York Times Magazine (December 19, 1993), 41-51, 66, 70-72. 17 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Whole Earth Show,” Art in America (May 1989),151. 18 Selected articles in Art in America that mention Chinese artists exhibiting in international biennales include: Edward Leffingwell, “Report from Sao Paolo: The Bienal Branches Out” (March 1995, 35–41), Eleanor Heartney, “Quotidian in Quebec-Montreal Biennale” (February 1999, 48),
Marcia E. Vetrocq, “The Venice Biennale: Reformed, Renewed, Redeemed” (September 1999, 83–92), Ann Wilson Lloyd, “Reorienting: Japan Discovers Asia, Asia Art Triennial in Fukuoka (October 1999, 105–107, 109, 111), Charles Mitchell, “Report from Santa Fe: Places of the Art” (December 1999, 47–50), Felicity Fenner, “Pluralism East-Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane (September 2000, 67, 69, 70, 73), Eleanor Heartney, “An Adieu to Cultural Purity: Lyon Beinale” (October 2000, 146–57), Frank Hoffman, “Report from Kwangju: Monoculture and Its Discontents” (November 2000, 71–75, 77, 79), Roni Feinstein, “Report from Sydney: The Biennale of Reconciliation” (December 2000, 39–45), Richard Vine, “Report from Shanghai: After Exoticism” (July 2001, 36–37), Christopher Philips, “Crosscurrents in Yokohama” (January 2002), Felicity Fenner, “Report from Brisbane: Diversity Down Under” (July 2003, 39–41, 43), Richard Vine, “Report from China: The Wild, Wild East” (September 2003, 41–47, 49, Lilly Wei, “South by Southeast: The 14th Sydney Biennale” (December 2004). 19 The postcolonial debate that occupied much of contemporary art literature dwelled on problems of cultural authenticity and hybridity, neo-colonialism and sociopolitical context, identity politics, and debates about definitions of periphery and center. 20 Articles on Cai Guoqiang include: Dana Friis-Hansen, “Guo Qiang Cai at the Iwaki City Art Museum,” Art in America (November 1994), 144; Barry Schwabsky, “Tao and Physics-Cai Guoqiang,” Artforum (summer 1997), 119–21, 155; Lutfy, Carol, “Flame & Fortune,” ARTnews (December 1997), 144–45; Eleanor Heartney, “Cai Guo-Qiang at the Queens Museum of Art,” Art in America (January 1998), 93; Marek Bartelik, “Cai Guo-Qiang-Shanghai Art Museum,” Artforum (summer 2002),189; Eleanor Heartney, “Cai Guo-Qiang: Illuminating the New China,” Art in America (May 2002), 92–97; and Carly Berwick, “Playing with Fire: Cai Guoqiang,” ARTnews (November 2004),122. Articles on Chen Zhen include: Janet Koplos, “Huang Yong Ping and Chen Zhen at the New Museum-New York, New York-Review of Exhibitions,” Art in America (January 1995); Judith E. Stein, “London-Chen Zhen at the Serpentine,” Art in America (November 2001),157–58; Eleanor Heartney, “Chen Zhen’s Legacy,” Art in America (February 2002), 85–87,127; Francino Koslow Miller, “Chen Zhen: Institute of Contemporary Art/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center-Boston/New York,” Artforum (May 2003); Lilly Wei, “Chen Zhen: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center,” ARTnews (May 2003),152; and Jean-Max Colard, “Chen Zhen-Paris-Works of Chinese Artist Who Passed Away in 2003,” Artforum (September 2003). Articles on Xu Bing include: Jonathan Goodman, “Bing Xu: 4,000 Characters in Search of a Meaning,” ARTnews (September 1994), 99–101; Jonathan Goodman, “Xu Bing at Jack Tilton and the New Museum,” Art in America (January 1999); Mathieu Borysevicz, “Xu Bing at the Sackler-Washington, D.C.—Brief Article,” Art in America (September 2002); and Sarah Douglas, “Thereby Hangs a Tail: Xu Bing,” ARTnews (November 2004), 40. In additional to the one cited above, articles on Huang Yongping include: Janet Koplos, “Huang Yong Ping and Chen Zhen at the New Museum- New York, New York-Review of Exhibitions,” Art in America (January 1995); and Stephanie Cash and David Ebony, “Huang Yong Ping Work Banished in China-Artworld–Bat Project 2 Removed from Guangzhou Triennial,” Art in America (January 2003), Articles on Yun-Fei Ji and Yang Fudong include: Michael Wilson, “Yun-Fei Ji-Pratt Manhattan Gallery,” Artforum (May 2003), 171; Robert Knafo, “Yun-Fei Ji: Moral Vistas,” Art in America (June 2003), 104–107; Hans-Ulrich Obrist, “A Thousand Words-Yang Fudong Talks About the Seven Intellectuals,” Artforum (September 2003), 182–83; Carly Berwick, “Before the Deluge-Yun-Fei Ji,” ARTnews (September 2003),116; and Suzanne Hudson, “Yang Fudong at the Renaissance Society,” Artforum (September 2004), 87. 21 Eleanor Heartney, “The Whole Earth Show Part 2,” Art in America (July 1989), 91. 22 Ibid., 95. 23 Ibid., 97. 24 Eleanor Heartney, “The Children of Mao and Coca-Cola,” Art in America (March 1999), 47. 25 See articles listed above for Cai Guoqiang, Chen Zhen, Xu Bing, Yun Fei-ji, and Huang Yongping. See also an article about Ah Xian by Roni Feinstein, “A Journey to China,” Art in America (December 2002), 122—23, and another on Gu Wenda by Carol Lufty, “Brush with the Past,” ARTnews (September 2000), 140—43. 26 Here my thoughts are informed by the work of Edward Said, especially his book Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); and Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 27 Again, I must emphasize that I do not believe that a study of two museums, the MoMA and the Guggenheim, represents an exhaustive study of American modern art museum practice. Although these two museums are important, if not bell-wethers, I look forward to continuing my research to include a broader sampling. 28 Two video and film shows were presented in 1998 and 2004 and reviewed in Art in America by Ernest Larsen in the September 1998 issue in an article titled “Video Vertex in Beijing” (53–57) and by Barbara Pollock in the June/July 2004 issue in an article titled “Mainland Dreams on Tape” (130–33, 193). The three-channel video and sound installation by Zhang Peili, titled Eating and dated 1997, was presented by the MoMA between October 28, 1998, and February 2, 1999. 29 This information was prepared for a conference in Hong Kong in the fall of 2002 and confirmed in August 2004 in correspondence with Jay Levenson, Director of International Programs. 30 For more information on the MoMA's collection, see its Web site: www.moma.org/collection. 31 Information provided in correspondence in August 2004 by Lisa Dennison, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Guggenheim Museum. 32 For more information the Guggenheim collections, see its Web site: www.guggenheimcollection.org. 33 Zooming into Focus was launched as a two-part exhibition of film, video, and photography from The Haudenschild Collection, premiering in October 2003 in San Diego at the University Art Museum, then continuing in San Diego at the Museum of Art and Museum of Photographic Arts. This exhibition traveled in the spring of 2004 to the Shanghai Art Museum and then in the summer of 2004 to the Centro Cultural Tijuana in Mexico.
:
One of the last issues that Jane raised is something that concerns me a great deal. This would be the crucial issue of: is it productive to continue organizing group exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art? Of course I think about this question quite a lot. But then I stop and ask myself, “Would anybody question the validity of organizing a group exhibition of American artists, or of European artists?” Perhaps yes, if the exhibition purported to present all of that region's art, but certainly not if Britta Erickson speaking at “Displacements.” Photo: Zheng Shengtian. there was a well-considered focus to the exhibition. So the very fact that we stop to question the validity of producing an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art says something about the state of the field. It is by no means firmly established, and it is uncertain of its footing on the world stage to the extent that a great deal of conscious attempts at positioning goes on. I find that Contemporary Chinese art presents a certain practical situation that you have to deal with on a case-by-case basis. In each case you must decide what the most reasonable way of reacting is going to be. That feeds into my general comments about this final panel and the day in general.
As the day has progressed, the complexity of the contemporary Chinese art world has become increasingly evident. Actually, I believe that the art world's messiness is part of what makes it so compelling. At the base we have the art object itself, about which there may often be a certain mys- tique, and the same goes for the artists. But added to that are the complicating layers of money, power, cultural status, and even the vagaries of individual personalities. For this reason it has been very useful to hear from people such as Jane Debevoise and Uli Sigg, who have experience in ana- lyzing complex situations that are not art related. Today they have applied their talents to analyz- ing aspects of the position of contemporary Chinese art in the international sphere, resulting for example in Jane's conclusions based on statistical analysis, Uli's comments relating to the “Kuntskompass” rating, and so on. Zhou Tiehai has very wisely urged us to consider broader ques- tions of the role contemporary art might play in answering basic philosophical or emotional needs of humankind, and yet he too is entangled in the questions of positioning Chinese art.
W I L
A SILENT MOVIE BY ZHOU TIEHAI L 第一幕 軍事會議 Act One The Military Meeting
（全景） 一名領導在上海前衛工商聯合會地圖前介紹戰況。 Panorama shot: A military officer in explaining the war situation in front of a map. (It’s a map belonging to the Shanghai Avant-garde Business Association.)
（近景） 他指著S將軍的位置。 Close-up: He points at General S’s seat.
（字幕） 這個民用機場。 Subtitle: This is a civilian airport exclusively.
（中景） 他嚴肅地說。 Mid shot: He says seriously.
（字幕） 壟斷著迎送各國博物館館長,評論家,畫廊老闆的任務. Subtitle: It has the monopoly to welcome museum directors, critics, and gallery owners.
(近景) 他指著D將軍的位置. Close shot: He points at General D’s seat.
(字幕) 這個軍用機場,秘密迎送各國博物館館長,評論家,畫廊老闆. Subtitle: This is a military airport to secretly welcome museums presidents, critics, and gallery owners.
(中景) 他把手一揮. Mid shot: He waves his hand.
(字幕) 為了封碎他們對我們的長期封鎖,我們必須立即行動起來, 建造一個屬於我們自己的機場. Subtitle: In order to smash their blockade against us forever, we must take action immediately to build our own airport.
(中景) 參謀長說. Mid shot: Chief of Staff says:
(字幕) 同志們,沒有自己的機場,便沒有自己的一切. Subtitle: Comrades, we must remember we will have nothing without our own airport.
Will—The Military Meeting 1, 2002, acrylic on paper, 300 x 450 cm. Will—The Military Meeting 2, 2002, acrylic on paper, 256 x 320 cm. 第二幕 咖啡館 Act Two The Cafeteria
（中景） 咖啡館內七八個人圍坐在一起，氣氛熱烈。 Mid shot: Inside the cafeteria a few people are having a discussion.
（近景） 一個人很激動在說話。 Close shot: One of them explains:
（字幕） 要不斷辦展覽，讓大家都注意我們。 Subtitle: We must continue having exhibitions to draw attention to ourselves.
（近景） 另一個人也很激動在說話。 Close shot: Another one exclaims:
（字幕） 什麼展覽都要參加，只要有機會就上。 Subtitle: No matter what kind of exhibition, I’ll take part if I have a chance.
（近景） 一位女藝術家說。 Close shot: A woman artist says:
（字幕） 要和批評家，記者搞好關係。 Subtitle: We must establish close relationships with critics and journalists.
Will—The Cafeteria, 2002, airbrushed acrylic on synthetic canvas, 200 x 300 cm.
Will—In the Hospital, 2002, acrylic on paper, 280 x 420 cm. 第三幕 看病 Act Three In the Hospital
（特寫） 一塊牌子上面寫：“外國專家門診”。 Close shot: A sign reads: The foreign doctor’s outpatients.
（全景） 醫院裏，有許多人在等待外國專家的診斷，有一個護士在叫號， 一個病人走進去。 Panorama: Three are many patients waiting for their medical check-up by the foreign doctor. A nurse calls a number. A patient goes in.
(字幕） 15分鐘之後。 Subtitle: 15 minutes later.
（全景） 第一個病人出來，第二個病人進去。 Panorama: The first patient comes out, a second patient goes in.
(字幕） 15分鐘之後。 Subtitle: 15 minutes later.
(全景） 第二個病人出來，第三個病人進去。 Panorama: The second patient comes out, the third patient goes in.
（字幕） 15分鐘之後。 Subtitle: 15 minutes later.
（全景） 第三個病人出來，第四個病人進去。 Panorama: The third patient comes out, the fourth patient goes in.
（近景） 診室內，外國專家先看看X光片，並向病人詢問病歷，用聽筒聽病 人的 心臟，又量了一下血壓。 Close shot: Inside the room a foreign doctor examines the X-ray and asks for the patient’s notes. She listens to his heart through a stethoscope and measures his blood pressure.
（中景） 護士叫號。 Mid shot: The nurse calls a number.
（字幕） 下一個。 Subtitle: Next patient.
（全景） 診室外病人焦急地等待著。 Panorama: Outside the hospital room the patients are waiting anxiously.
Will—In the Hospital 1, 2002, acrylic on paper, 150 x 220 cm. Will—In the Hospital 2, 2002, acrylic on paper, 150 x 225 cm. 第四幕 藝術導遊 Act Four Art Tour Guide
（全景） 一名導遊對三，四個外國人宣佈日程安排。 Panorama: A guide announces the schedule for a few foreigners.
（字幕） 上午先看A的作品，再看B的作品，下午看C的作品，再看D的作品, 晚上去E家。 Subtitle: This morning we’ll go to A’s home to see his works. Then we’ll see B’s work. In the afternoon we’ll go to see C’s works and then D’s works. We’ll see E’s works in this evening.
（中景） 一外國人翻看手中旅遊指南。 Mid shot: A foreigner leafs through his guidebook.
（字幕） 我還想看X的作品。 Subtitle: I want to see X’s work.
（中景） 導遊解釋說。 Mid shot: The guide explains:
（字幕） X的畫沒意思。 Subtitle: X’s work isn’t very interesting.
（中景） 另一外國人說。 Mid shot: A foreigner says:
（字幕） 我想看Y。 Subtitle: I want to see Y’s work.
（中景） 導遊說。 Mid shot: The guide says:
（字幕） Y？Y是誰？我沒聽說過。 Subtitle: Y? Who is Y? I’ve never heard of him.
（中景） 一名外國人說。 Mid shot: Another foreigner says:
（字幕） 聽說Z是才華橫溢的藝術家，是否可帶我們去看看呢？ Subtitle: I’ve heard that Z is an outstanding artist, shall we go and see his work as well?
（中景） 導遊說。 Mid shot: The guide says:
（字幕） Z？他住得很遠，來不及了。 Subtitle: Z lives far from here, we don’t have enough time.
Will—Art Tour Guide, 1997, film still. 第五幕 電話訴衷腸 Act Five Heartfelt Calls
（近景） 一位元藝術家跑到公用電話亭，打了五個電話。 Close shot: An artist goes to a pay-phone and makes five calls.
（字幕） 你策劃的任何展覽我都願參加。 Subtitle: I’ll take part in any exhibition you have.
Will—Heartfelt Calls, 1997, film still.
第六幕 你背叛我 Act Six You Betrayed Me
（近景） 一位批評家給一藝術家打電話。 Close shot: A critic is calling on a artist.
（字幕） 近日那位外地評論家在本市活動情況如何？ Subtitle: How about the critic from the other province? What’s he doing in my city?
（近景） 藝術家對話筒說。 Close shot: An artist says on the phone.
（字幕） 我按你的意思，沒有接待他，只是有一個人偷偷會見了他。 Subtitle: You told me not to see him and I haven’t, but there is someone who went to see him on the sly.
（近景） 批評家氣憤地放下電話。 Close shot: The critic slams the phone down.
（中景） 批評家跑入一幢房子，看見一扇門半 開著，推開一看。 Mid shot: The critic runs into a house. He sees a half-open door and pushes it.
（近景） 藝術家正和外地評論家談話。 Close shot: The artist is talking to a rival critic.
（近景） 批評家指著藝術家大吼。 Close shot: The critic exclaims to the artist.
（字幕） 你背叛我！ Subtitle: You have betrayed me!
Will—You Betrayed Me, 2002, acrylic on paper, 150 x 215 cm. 第七幕 你們只有中醫和巫術 Act Seven You Only Have Traditional Chinese Medicine and Witchcraft
（全景） 一桌中外人士在吃飯，一個外國人對中國人說。 Panorama: A group of Chinese people and a foreigner are having dinner. The foreigner says to the Chinese:
（字幕） 你們只有中醫和巫術，沒有藝術。 Subtitle: You only have traditional Chinese medicine and witchcraft, but no art.
（全景） 門被推開，一個人走進來嚴肅說。 Panorama: The door is pushed open. A person walks in, saying sternly:
（字幕） 胡說，我們有藝術。 Subtitle: Nonsense! We do have art!
（近景） 外國人顯得很驚訝。 Close shot: The foreigner is surprised.
（近景） 這個人氣氛地說。 Close shot: The person exclaims:
（字幕） 難道我們的藝術一定要配你們的胃口嗎？ Subtitle: Must our art live up to your standards?
Will—You Have Only Traditional Chinese Medicine and Witchcraft, 2002, acrylic on paper, 200 x 400 cm. 第八幕 教父 Act Eight The Godfather
（全景） 在一個大客廳裏，許多人在跳舞。 Panorama: Many people are dancing in a large sitting room.
（中景） 在另一個房間，教父和一個人在說話。 Mid shot: In another room the Godfather says to someone:
（字幕） 現在新的利害的藝術家太少，我擔心後繼無人。 Subtitle: There are so few outstanding new artists. I’m worried about the next generation.
（中景） 那人默默無語。 Mid shot: The person remains silent.
（全景） 大客廳裏人繼續在跳舞。 Panorama: The sitting room is packed with dancing guests.
（中景） 房間裏教父拉著兩個人的手說。 Mid shot: The Godfather holds the hands of two people.
（字幕） 你們還在爭吵，真讓我放心不下。 Subtitle: You’re still quarreling. That makes me uneasy.
（特寫） 教父老淚縱橫。 Close shot: The Godfather starts to weep.
Will—The Godfather, 2002, airbrushed acrylic on synthetic canvas, 135 x 184 cm. 第九幕 梅杜薩之筏 Act Nine The Raft of the Medusa
（全景） 十幾個人在木筏上，漂泊在海上。 Panorama: Ten or so people are huddled on a raft floating in the sea.
（近景） 有的人已死去。 Close shot: Someone has died.
（近景） 有的人在掙扎。 Close shot: Someone is struggling.
（近景） 有的人在思考。 Close shot: Someone is thinking.
（字幕） 進亦無能退亦難。 Subtitle: We can’t go forward. We can’t go back either.
（全景） 幾個人絕望在木筏上，向遠出拼命呼喚。 Panorama: They are all desperate and shout into the distance:
（字幕） 再見吧！藝術。 Subtitle: FAREWELL ART!
Will—The Raft of the Medusa, 2002, acrylic on paper, 150 x 215 cm. Will—The Raft of the Medusa, 2002, airbrushed acrylic on synthetic canvas, 180 x 270 cm.
Will—The Raft of the Medusa, 2002, airbrushed acrylic on synthetic canvas, 270 x 360 cm.
The film was shot in 1996 for Promenade in Asia-Sur-everyday Life-ism, at the Shiseido Gallery. The paper works were painted by Zhou Tiehai's assistants, Chen Yiyong and Wang haiyan. All works Collection of Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation.
The works presented here were produced as part of the visiting artists program organized by Britta Erickson in conjunction with the exhibition, On the Edge:
Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West.The five artists participating in the program each resided at Stanford for one to three weeks, creating a new work in keeping with the exhibition’s theme. Four of the artists taught in an Art Department course sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and conducted by Richard
Vinograd. Students and members of the public were encouraged to interact with the artists, including acting as artists' assistants. Huang Yong Ping's and Zhan Wang’s new works were installed in the Cantor Arts Center; Yan Lei and Yang Jiechang had a two-person show in the Stanford Art Gallery, Layered Landscapes: Works by Yan Lei and Yang Jiechang; and Yin Xiuzhen’s work was exhibited as a solo show, Fashion
Terrorism, also in the Stanford Art Gallery.
Huang Yongping in front of the Hoover Tower, Stanford University, 2005.
Huang Yongping’s preferred modus operandi is to create an installation or intervention relevant to the location where he is working. On a recent visit to Stanford University, he became interested in the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace and the Hoovers’ connections with China.
In his proposal for a 1/4 Hoover Tower,Huang cites a statement by Ray Lyman Wilbur, the Stanford University president who admired Herbert Hoover’s ability to collect historical materials: “Hoover is the greatest packrat of all times because, whenever he leaves a ton of food, he picks up a pound of history.”As Huang notes,
Of course, he is talking about the 1920s. As everyone knows, today in Afghanistan and Iraq, after bombs, they air drop food. There is never innocent food, and there is never a “pure” or innocent collection of historical documents. My interest in the American think tank has to do with thinking about the relationship between so-called pure disinterested academic organization and contemporary political reality.
1/4 Hoover Tower is modeled after one of the four small towers atop Hoover Tower. The red, white, and blue striped plastic is widely used in China to surround buildings under construction. Huang Yong Ping, 1/4 Hoover Tower, 2005, mixed media installation, 228 x 228 x approx. 563 cm. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
Yan Lei, paintings from West of the West, Stanford Project, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 150 cm each. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
Yan Lei has created four images of Stanford University, painted with him by members of the Stanford and surrounding community, including students, professors, children, and museum docents. Having never before visited the United States, Yan Lei selected scenes that combined his imagined ideas of the United States, Stanford, and his memories of student life. They include a girls’ dormitory, a Christmas party, a drawing of Victor Hugo, and the Cantor Center. He brought canvases prepared in a “paint by numbers” style, with outlined areas for his “assistants” to fill in with a limited palette of twenty of his custom colors, all of them shades of grey. Yan Lei’s paintings frequently comment on power relationships in the art world, or on his journey through that world. Here, the series title West of the West indicates Yan Lei’s position in relation to the site of the visiting artists program: Beijing (where he lives) is west of Stanford; thus, he acts from west of the West. Yan Lei, paintings from West of the West, Stanford Project, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 150 cm each. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
Yang Jiechang, Collection of the artist. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
Yang Jiechang presents an installation/performance. The installation is composed of three ink paintings of human bones plus a large silk embroidery titled Scroll of Secret Merit.The artist describes the embroidery thus:
The embroidery was fabricated in Hunan province, centre of traditional Chinese double-sided embroidery. It represents human bones and sculls floating and being drawn into a vacuum cleaner. The work’s title (Yingong zhou) is borrowed from a Hong Kong “knights errant” soap opera. Its subject is inspired both by current international developments, as well as by the eternal topic of memento mori, including European seventeenth-century representations of the vanitas.In Scroll of Secret Merit,however, I do not use a juxtaposition of representations of life’s pleasures and symbols of death but I contrast most obvious signs for men's transitoriness with the colour of everlasting gold to point to spiritual values.
Those attending the exhibition reception were invited to chant in front of the installation, under the direction of the artist.
The evening before the exhibition opened, Scroll of Secret Merit was installed with musical accompaniment in Dinkelspiel Auditorium as an adjunct to the New Music from Asia concert. Yang Jiechang, (top), 2004, installation/performance, double embroidery, 5 panels, 400 x 250 cm each; (middle left); (middle right) Allah's Jesus' Buddha's Bones, 2003, ink on paper, 103 x 103 cm; (bottom left) Underground Flower (2003), ink on paper, 103 x 103 cm; (bottom right) detail of Scroll of Secret Merit. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
Yin Xiuzhen, working on Fashion Terrorism (2004-2005), mixed media installation with clothing, suitcases, photograph, video, and sound. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
Yin Xiuzhen began working on Fashion Terrorism for a solo show in Germany last August. She has dramatically expanded the project here, working with old clothes and suitcases collected locally. Displayed atop or within twelve suitcases are things forbidden on airplanes—guns, knives, saws, spanners, scissors, spray cans, hand grenades, box cutters, scalpels, hammers, etc.—inge- niously crafted from used clothing. An accompanying video shows airline safety cards, the kind you find “in the seat pocket in front of you”,with a detail from a safety card blown up to provide a photographic backdrop to the array of suitcases. The audio portion of the exhibition consists of a sobering report on the viability of airplane escape plans.
Fashion Terrorism brings together Yin Xiuzhen’s signature materials of used clothing and suitcases with her interest in international air travel. Reflecting her peripatetic lifestyle, since 2000 Yin Xiuzhen has been creating works built into suitcases. The first were cityscape components and portable cities, one of which, Portable City—Shenzhen, is featured in the On the Edge exhibition. In 2001 (before 9/11) she made Clothes Airplane, the first of three very large airplanes she has made from donated used clothing. Yin Xiuzhen, Fashion Terrorism (2004-2005), mixed media installation with clothing, suitcases, photograph, video, and sound. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
Flowers in the Mirror is the title of a Chinese novel by Li Ruzhen (1763–1830). In the novel, a Daoist fairy temporarily banished from the dominion of the immortals travels through surreal realms.
Zhan Wang has created the Flowers in the Mirror series by photographing landscapes as reflected in his Artificial Jiashanshi (i.e., his stainless steel rocks). The distorted images suggest a surreal fantasy world. Zhan Wang has said,“Although I began this series in China, I believe it will have enhanced significance as I continue it in America. For a long time, America was a fabled land to Chinese people, imagined in unreal terms.”Zhan Wang photographed scenes around the San Francisco Bay Area—including Chinatown, the Golden Gate Bridge, Union Square, the Palace of Fine Arts, the San Francisco skyline, and the Stanford University Quad—as reflected on the surface of the Artificial Jiashanshi exhibited with the photographs.
Chinese gardens frequently include jiashanshi, literally fake mountain rocks. (In the West they are commonly termed “scholars’ rocks”.) One purpose of such rocks is to afford city dwellers the spiritual experience of traversing the mountains as they mentally wander through the substitute mountainscape of a jiashanshi. Noting that jiashanshi seemed out of place in the modern glass and steel cityscape, in 1995 Zhan Wang created the first Artificial Jiashanshi (fake “fake mountain rocks”!). These labor-intensive works are made by pounding numerous small sheets of stainless steel onto the surface of a genuine jiashanshi.They then are removed, reassembled, and welded together in the shape of the original, and Zhan Wang working in San Francisco, 2005. finally polished to a high sheen in which all seams vanish. Zhan Wang believes the modern city dweller is more receptive to his rocks' reflection of the moment than to the opportunity presented by the natural rocks to contemplate timeless forces.
Zhan Wang, Flowers in the Mirror (2005), 6 photographs, 101.6 x 101.6 cm. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
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Traditionally, art exhibitions consisted of gathering artworks together from disparate locations and installing them in a space open for view by the general public. New trends in contemporary art practice, not to mention museum marketing, however, have rendered this simplistic model something of the past. Nowadays exhibitions function somewhat akin to an event, with a global cast of characters participating in a host of peripheral activities: symposia, artists’ panels, lectures, residencies, performances, and so on. The positive effects of all of this are increased opportunities for discussion and exchange between viewers, scholars, and artists and the opening of avenues for enlivening the art through direct human interaction. The careful planning of such programs—and here is where marketing enters the picture—ensure that the given exhibitions reach an ever-wider audience. On the Edge: Chinese Artists Encounter the West, as this volume attests, is no exception.
The Visiting Artists Program organized in conjunction with the exhibition On the Edge featured five artists—Huang Yongping, Yan Lei, Yang Jiechang, Zhan Wang, and Yin Xiuzhen (in order of their arrival). Each artist visited Stanford for a one to two-week period to create a new work for the exhibition and to give artist talks to students and members of the general public. In conjunc- tion with the program, Associate Professor of Art History Richard Vinograd organized “Seminar: Issues in Contemporary Chinese Art,”in which the first four artists, Huang Yongping, Yan Lei, Yang Jiechang, and Zhan Wang all gave presentations about their work. In addition, all but Huang Yongping also gave public lectures and “brown bag” lunches at the Stanford Center for East Asian Studies. The program, conceived by curator Britta Erickson, was designed to serve two purposes: first, through the creation of a new artwork, the exhibition would be rendered current and up to date; second, the visits timed every two weeks served to “afford the community a rare and extended opportunity to see world-class artists in action.” Erickson’s proposal draws upon deep-seated desires present in the contemporary art world: the constant yearning for the new and the desire to witness or experience the artistic process firsthand. These characteristics are in fact at the core of most residency programs, often cited together with common buzzwords like “exchange,” “interaction,”and “exposure.”Interestingly, Erickson's Visiting Artists Program does not explicitly follow the exchange model; rather, it focuses more on the production and exhibiting of new artwork, with mixed results.
The first artist to arrive was Huang Yongping, who was commissioned to make a new work for the opening of the exhibition. During earlier site visits, Huang was inspired by the Hoover Institution at Stanford and chose to make his installation based upon the Hoover Tower, a prominent landmark on Stanford’s campus. The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, founded in 1919, is a public policy research center that houses documents on the politics, economy, and international affairs of the twentieth century. Huang's project, entitled 1/4 Hoover Tower and looming over 15 feet tall and 6 feet wide, is a recreation of an architectural detail on the actual Hoover Tower. Constructed of wooden planks covered with blue, white, and red striped plastic sheeting of the variety often found at construction sites in China, the tower contrasts sharply with the classically designed marble entranceway to the Cantor center where it was installed. Huang brought the plastic sheeting from China, but all other elements were constructed on site prior to the opening of the exhibition. Viewers peering into the structure through openings can see a quote from
Herbert Hoover himself lining the walls: “A ton of food for a pound of history? Or a pound of explosives in exchange for a ton of history?” The quote refers to the wartime practice of dropping food and bombs and the ramifications of such actions in terms of historical documentation. Huang’s appropriation of the words implies distinct parallels to contemporary political reality.
Beijing painter Yan Lei arrived in late January, bringing with him four prepared canvases in his characteristic “paint-by-numbers” style. The scenes he chose to illustrate were taken from Stanford’s Web site and consisted of various scenes: a student dormitory, the exterior of the Cantor Center, a scene from a Christmas party, and a portrait of Victor Hugo. The impersonal quality is somewhat intentional, since this visit was Yan's first to the United States. The images are based upon his imagined ideas about the United States and Stanford and his own recollections of student life. Over a period of about ten days, the canvases were painted in with the help of students, professors, and other members of the Stanford community. Yan’s paintings were exhibited together with Yang Jiechang’s work in Layered Landscapes at the Stanford Art Gallery from February 10 to 20.
Paris-based artist Yang Jiechang’s project for the Visiting Artists Program consisted of an installa- tion/performance. His work, the Scroll of Secret Merit (2004), actually a multi-panel embroidered silk hanging, was featured as part of Stanford's Chinese Music Festival. Yang’s embroidery was lowered from the ceiling while specially selected accompanying music played. In addition, at the opening of Layered Landscapes,Yang invited reception members to chant together in front of the installation. This chanting later formed a sound element for Yang’s installation. Intricately embroi- dered on both sides with designs of human skulls and bones being sucked into a vacuum, the Scroll of Secret Merit, like much of Yang’s work, draws upon Daoist concepts and is meant to comment upon man’s position in the natural world. As part of the installation, Yang also hung a series of framed ink paintings carrying the same theme on the wall. However, it is unfortunate that the limitations of the gallery space prevented Yang’s piece from being hung from the ceiling as planned.
The project to engage most directly with the physical locale of Stanford and the Bay Area was that of Beijing sculptor Zhan Wang. To carry out his photographic project, Zhan brought with him one of his jiashanshi (“artificial mountain rocks”) from Beijing. Inspired by Jinhuayuan (Flowers in the Mirror), an eighteenth-century novel by Li Ruzhen (1763–1830), Zhan employed the reflective surfaces of his rock to take a series of photographs in various scenic locations in the Bay Area. The resulting images—distorted concoctions of past and present—are part tourist postcard (one can detect obvious landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, and the Palace of Fine Arts) and part surrealist fantasy. While the other visiting artists spent most of their time in Stanford proper, some 40 miles from downtown San Francisco, Zhan, due to the nature of his project, had the fortunate opportunity to see and interact with different parts of the city. His photographs were installed adjacent to the On the Edge exhibition at the Cantor Center from March 22 to the close of the exhibition on May 1.
The surreal world of air travel is expertly addressed by Yin Xiuzhen in her installation project entitled Fashion Terrorism.Yin’s soft sculptures of items confiscated from airport security—guns, aerosol cans, box cutters, and tools fashioned from used clothing—stem from a project she began last year in Germany. The completed installation consisted of ten suitcases of various shapes and sizes containing contraband items which, ironically, the artist carried in her suitcase from Beijing. Rounding out the airplane-themed installation were silkscreen wall hangings featuring a detail from an airplane safety diagram and a pseudo airplane safety video. Walking through the exhibit and seeing brand-name logos like Esprit and Limited Express emblazoned on hammers, knives,
and guns, Yin’s viewers experience another type of journey, where emotions like humour and satire are registered disturbingly close to tragedy and utter terror.
Unlike exhibitions, which, for better or worse, rely upon attendance figures, catalogue sales, and reviews for indications of success, residency programs and visiting artists programs are decidedly more ambiguous. How does one measure the outcome of such exchanges? Do we base our judgments on the artists’ experience or on the experiences of those in the place where the residency took place? To seek some answers, I made an effort to contact each participating artist by email, and nearly all shared positive feedback. Yan Lei shared how his experience of working with the students and local people was energizing, making him feel “young and full of passion.” Yang Jiechang expressed that his lectures were a welcome opportunity to reconsider the last twenty years of his artistic creation side by side with the changes that occurred during those twenty years in the field of contemporary Chinese art. He now feels the impetus to recollect this material into one or several essays. Perhaps due to his close interaction with the city, Zhan Wang offered a variety of insights, speaking on his position as a global yet Chinese artist, his explorations in making Western scenery into Chinese landscape, and the “frozen period” of San Francisco's Chinatown.
However, one unfortunate aspect of the Visiting Artist Program was the relatively short dura- tion—two weeks maximum—of each artist’s stay. This had the undesired effect of diminishing opportunities for exchange and interaction and imposed limitations on creating new work. The abbreviated timeframe did not allow for an artist to conceive, finalize, and produce a new work from the outset, and therefore it relegated artists to re-presenting or adapting previously existing work (Yang Jiechang and Yin Xiuzhen), or, in the case of Yan Lei, relying upon his imagined rather than experienced notions of California, Stanford, and the Bay Area for his paintings. One can’t help but wonder whether, if given more time, these artists might have departed from their usual practice and explored new directions, or whether their experiences and interactions with the Stanford community might have found a way to seep into the work. Had there been resources for a longer term residency, interactions between the artists and students might have been even more productive and could have extended beyond those primarily interested in China or Chinese art to include more fine art students in the studio art department. Additionally, the artists might have had more opportunities to get out of Stanford and interact more with the larger Bay Area arts scene. The benefits of something long term would also afford the opportunity for contemporary Chinese artists to be seen within the framework of their nationality/ethnicity as well as outside it, giving equal measure to the multiple subject positions many contemporary Chinese artists inhabit today. Without a doubt, the Visiting Artists Program boosted awareness and visibility for Asian contemporary art within the Stanford community. Measuring the success or outcome of this program or others like it may not be easy or straightforward, but that is, in part, the point. By and large the appeal comes from that which is immeasurable, that is, the ephemera of passing encounters and transactions that become imperceptibly embedded in one’s mind, only to (we hope) resurface later in a renewed and unforeseen context.
Notes 1 Visiting Artists Program proposal, excerpted in an e-mail message from Britta Erickson, March 23, 2005. 2 With the exception of Yin Xiuzhen, who could not be reached for comment. 3 E-mail discussion with the artist, April 5, 2005. Except where otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 4 E-mail message from the artist, March 30, 2005. 5 E-mail message from the artist, April 8, 2005. By “frozen period” Zhan is referring to the ways in which aspects of Chinese culture is retained or preserved in overseas Chinatown communities, giving the feeling of being frozen in time.
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Installation view of On the Edge. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
As its title suggests, the exhibition that opened on January 26, 2005 at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University brought new insights to the discourse concerning the encounter between Chinese artists and the West. The phenomenon of encounter between Eastern and Western artistic cultures is certainly not new; the Chinese art scene was preoccupied throughout the twentieth century with influences from the West and with the reformation of a national artistic identity. Heated debate developed already in the early twentieth century concern- ing the direction of Chinese art and whether and how to adapt Western styles, techniques, and concepts. This interesting meeting of cultures caught the attention of the eminent British scholar Michael Sullivan, who documented and discussed it in his book The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, published by the University of California in 1972 (with a second edition in 1989). From his perspective as an impartial observer, Sullivan traced the history of this East-West “confrontation” and produced profound insight into the patterns and principles that governed the process by which the two revealed mutual influence.
It has been thirty-three years since the first publication of The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art.In that time, the Chinese art scene has experienced dramatic trans- formations. It has rapidly experimented with all the major styles of Western modern art invented during the past century, and, in some respects, it appears finally to have caught up with the Western art scene. Such dramatic growth calls for a new examination of the issues surrounding this cultural and artistic encounter, and who better to bring us up to date than Michael Sullivan’s own student at Stanford University, Britta Erickson? Erickson’s exhibition was accompanied by a symposium in honour of Michael Sullivan and his enormous contribution to understanding between the West and Wang Du, Youth with Slingshot, 2000, resin, fibreglass, acrylic paint. Collection of Fashion Concepts Inc. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. Chinese artists. The continuing interest in this terrain across generations of Western scholars does much to further our understanding of the continuing development of this cultural encounter.
In China, as elsewhere, influence from another culture is determined by the broader social environment and historical context. Therefore, when Michael Sullivan rightly suggested that the early influence of Western art on Chinese artists was minimal, it was because China then felt that it could afford to disregard European culture: “The influence of Western art, if it did not peter out altogether, trickled like sand to the lower levels of the professional and the craftsman painters, where it stayed till modern times.”1 Later, however, during the nineteenth century, China suffered many humiliations at the hands of European powers such as Britain and France, and, no longer able to discount the existence of the West and its civilization, began to look to the West for new ideas. The turbulent political events of the twentieth century further accelerated cultural change and prompted reconsideration of fundamental artistic practices, values, and beliefs. Even so, Western science, technology, and other domains continued to be seen as far-away models, and the purpose of learning them was to “serve” China. The adaptation of Western art or technology was intended to be put to the service of China, developed within a Chinese consciousness. Chinese artists looked to the West while remaining firmly rooted on Chinese soil. Their artworks were evaluated in the Chinese context, by Chinese themselves, and seen in relation to the past and present of China. This situated Western influence within a Chinese context, but at a distance.
Today it is very different. Almost all artists, art institutions, and art events around the world are part of an integrated and established world order of economy and culture, and many contemporary Chinese artists today actually live in America or Europe. This phenomenon of globalization has had an impact not only upon expatriate Chinese artists seeking to establish their positions in the international art world, but also upon those artists living and working in China, whose ambitions are similar. Chinese artists who remain in China face not only the realities of alternative artistic expressions from the West, but also the global political, social, and aesthetic contexts, as Western and Eastern influences have come into closer interplay than ever before. (This has led many to
Zhang Huan, My New York: #4, 2002. Chromogenic print, 150 x 100 cm. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. question the binary division of East-West that this exhibition provisionally maintains.) Among the twelve contemporary Chinese artists featured in the exhibition, five live overseas while seven have remained in China. The intriguing fact is that regardless of where the artists reside physically, they are more or less equally engaged with the current discourses of the global art scene, and the exhibition wisely made no attempt to separate the two groups according to the artists’ country of residence.
At the same time, the West is clearly no longer in a position to disregard China. As Western societies aim to be more multicultural and plural—at least in ideology—they feel the need to pay attention to traditionally peripheral artworks, and markets for contemporary Chinese art, though small in scale, have emerged in Europe and America. Never more so than at present, Chinese artists are facing a different audience, and they are no longer judged solely by Chinese, but also by Western critics and collectors. This shifting of the terrain requires the Chinese artists of today to speak an
Zhou Tiehai, Civilization, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 510 cm. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. international language, even when they are challenging the oppressive influences of Western consumerism and proposing alternatives to Western-centrism—a difficult task when success requires they do so in a language the West can understand. Rather than adopting Western ideas and artistic styles to the Chinese art context, today’s Chinese artists want to position themselves within the global art scene. This exhibition illuminates this change in the environment, the context in which transformative encounters took place, and the reactions to this change felt by the artists themselves.
On the Edge was divided into three thematic areas (also reflected in the Xing Danwen, disCONNEXION series: b2, 2002-2003, chromogenic print, 148 x 120 cm. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. organization of the catalogue accompanying the exhibition). Part One is called “The West through a Political Lens,”Part Two “Cultural Mélange,” and Part Three “Joining the Game: The Chinese Artist Meets the World.”
The first part of the exhibition, “The West through a Political Lens,”suggests that fascination about the other has been aroused on both sides of the encounter but that views have been divided and distorted by political and media lenses. Wang Du’s installation works address most directly this distortion: lifting images from print media and enlarging and re-presenting them in sculptural form, Wang maintains the distorting effects of photography—isolation, cropping and perspectival exaggeration—providing a physical embodiment of the media’s distorting effects on our perception of world events.
Zhou Tiehai’s Civilization (2004) presents the smoothly airbrushed image of an airplane flying above a quiet sea, alluding to the spring 2001 incident of the forced landing of a U.S. Navy EP-3 Aries spy plane in southern China. It invites viewers to contemplate the dissonance between such a seemingly calm image and the plane’s significance as a military threat that could potentially destroy the peace between nations. Commenting on the same incident by producing a modified
replica of the plane, Huang Yongping’s monumental Bat Project I and Bat Project II (2001 and 2003) unexpectedly created diplomatic incidents during the process of their making and became an ironic double take on diplomatic censorship. Initially, the proposal for the artwork was approved by both French and Chinese authorities, but once constructed for installation, it met with resistance from Chinese and American diplomatic circles, who pressured French diplomats to intervene against the piece (the same incident subsequently recurred at the Guangzhou Triennial). The piece never was shown in its designated exhibition space. The furor over the artwork therefore brought attention to the incident that both parties would have preferred to sweep under the rug of international diplomacy. Yin Xiuzhen, Portable City-Shenzhen, 2003, mixed media installation. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
Xing Danwen’s work comments on America’s current outsourcing of labour to China. This has become a primary topic in the media, as the U.S. government pitches a nationalist agenda to its citizens (one that gives new meaning to “protectionist” agendas of the twentieth century). In reality, what has been outsourced are those things Americans don’t want to do or deal with—in Xing’s case, the dirty work of cleaning up the vast quantity of its own industrial and electronic waste.
A memorable photograph drawn from Zhang Huan’s performance piece My New York is also included in this section of the exhibition. Impressive in its visual impact, it is also the only artwork that supposedly delivers a positive message. The artist donned a body-builder costume constructed from strips of raw beef and was at first carried by others before striking out on his own heroic walk through the streets of New York. According to the artist, the piece was an acknowledgment of the spirit of New Yorkers in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 as “having a strong sense of strength; having a sense of being [themselves], of being New Yorkers....a declaration ofstrength unique to the people of New York.”2 The unrealistic, indeed revolting superpower image, however, might also be read as symbolizing a pumped-up America that was not as strong as it seemed. And the artist himself acknowledges the side effects and limits of building up power.
In Part Two, “Cultural Mélange,” the exhibition explores the interactive qualities of encounters between China and the West. The artworks within this group address very directly the thematic focus by physically mixing Chinese and Western materials. Zhang Hongtu repaints Chinese landscape paintings using identifiable Western styles developed by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Here Wang Shen’s Serried Hills Over a Misty River (a silk handscroll painting of c. 1100) is transformed into Wang Shen—Monet (1998, artist’s inscription and seals added 2002), which copies the French master’s style. Zhang’s works play with the viewer’s understanding of art history and offers alternative ways of representing the familiar. In Grinding the Stele,Qiu Zhijie ground the faces of two gravestones from China and America for a period of three weeks, making periodic ink rubbings to document the disappearing inscriptions. Xu Bing’s Square Word
Calligraphy Classroom offers a physical space for the viewers to actively merge English and Chinese together with a script devised by the artist that gives Roman letters the appearance of Chinese characters when assembled as words. The very physical aspects of these works provided viewers with possibilities and spaces to mix cultures and artistic traditions and products.
The most interesting section of the exhibition should be the third, “Joining the Game: The Chinese Artists Meets the World,”as it appears to cap off a semi-historical, though not chronologi- cal, narrative implied by the exhibition’s themati- zation (from looking beyond, through mélange, to existing in the world beyond). “Joining the Game” features Sui Jianguo, Yan Lei, Yin Xiuzhen, Hong Hao, and Zhou Tiehai (the latter two included in the first section also). Sui Jianguo’s Made in China has become an icon representing Chinese contemporary sculpture’s break into the Western art establishment, mirroring the success of Chinese manufactory business, the very issue to which the sculpture—a group of identical red dinosaurs—makes reference. Yan Lei’s The Curators and May I See Your Work?
makes obvious the undeniable role that Western Zhang Hongtu, Wang Shen-Monet, 1998, artist's inscription and seals added 2002, oil on canvas, 183 x 81.3 cm. Collection of the artist. critics and curators continue to play in the lives Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. and work of Chinese contemporary artists and their engagement with (and access to) the world stage. Similarly, Zhou Tiehai's film Will, not included in the exhibition but presented visually and textually in the catalogue and in this issue of Yishu,deploys silent film to brilliant effect in illustrating the interactions between Chinese artists and Western critics as the artists attempt to enter the international art scene. Like an inside joke, told at the expense of those very art world insiders, it is sure to bring laughs. Zhou is represented in this section by a work from the Tonic series, Rongxi Studio (2001), which is a copy of a traditional Chinese painting produced by an artisan the artist hired to make this unfaithful reproduction.
Other works in the third section were Yin Xiuzhen’s Portable City—Shenzhen,a folksy city-in-a- suitcase that might symbolize the peripatetic globetrotting of many international artists today, and Hong Hao and Yan Lei’s Invitation,which is an elaborate hoax involving invitations to participate in Documenta X, the famous art world event held every five years in Kassel, Germany. Dozens of Chinese artists received these invitations and were fooled, leading to an unfavourable view of the duo and their prank for some time. By now the story has passed into legend. One wishes there were more works in this section, as it would further the theme of the exhibition and enable us to see how Chinese artists are actively grappling with the rapidly changing art world system. But perhaps it was deliberately left open-ended to allow for a future sequel that will update the results of the game.
Sui Jianguo, Made in China, 2002, five pieces, resin, 60 x 35.5 x 80 cm each, Jean-Marc Decrop Collection. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University.
Part of the value of the exhibition lies in its setting. Placed at an important university such as Stanford, which is renowned for its focus on traditional Chinese art, the exhibition reflects the growing interest in Chinese contemporary art in mainstream American society (if Stanford can be called mainstream). Director of the center, Thomas K. Seligman, spoke to this point: “In organizing On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West, the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford joins the growing number of art institutions in the West that recognize the vitality of contemporary Chinese art, and the significant contributions Chinese artists are making toward a new globalized art milieu. The exhibition marks the first step toward a larger presence for contemporary art at the Cantor Center and reflects Stanford University's continuing emphasis on the importance of the Pacific Rim and China.”3
As Michael Sullivan pointed out, the interaction between cultures in the past was a process in which the great civilizations, while preserving their own character, stimulated and enriched each other. But today the nature of that interaction is changing, as ideas, forms and techniques in the arts move with lightning speed around the world. At such times, artists might no longer be identified solely by their nationalities and native cultures, but rather by their individual contribu- tions to a global discourse. As Sullivan suggests, “At this point, the art historian steps aside, and the artist who has achieved a reconciliation of East and West in his own creative imagination speaks to us directly, needing no interpreter.”4
Notes 1 Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 79. 2 Britta Erickson, On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West, exh. cat. (Stanford: Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, 2005), 69. 3 Ibid, 3. 4 Sullivan 1989, 283.
The Visiting Artists Program was sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies, the Department of Art & Art History, Karen Christensen, the J. Sanford and Constance Miller Fund, Linda and Tony Meier, Rex Vaughan, the School of Humanities and Sciences, Jean-Marc Decrop, Eloisa and Chris Haudenschild, and an anonymous donor.
The conference was sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies, the Department of Art and Art History, The Christensen Fund, the Office of the Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, and the Stanford Humanities Center.
The conference was held in conjunction with the exhibition, On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West, which was organized by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. The exhibition and catalogue are made possible in large part through the generosity of Karen Christensen and an anonymous donor.
The exhibition On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West was organized by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. The exhibition and catalogue are made possible in large part through the generosity of Karen Christensen and an anonymous donor.
EXHIBITIONS LISTINGS
ZHENG XUEWU: SOLO EXHIBITION OUTSIDER: WORKS BY LIU WEI & XU ZHEN June 9 to June 18th, 2005 Curated by Pi Li Art Scene China April 30 to May 22, 2005 Lane 37 Fuxing West Road, House No. 8 Long March Foundation Shanghai 25000 Cultural Transmission Center www.artscenechina.com Beijing www.longmarchfoundation.org
INTUITION & RATIONAL: XUHONG SHANG SOLO EXHIBITION SU XINPING SOLO EXHIBITION June 12 to June 19, 2005 May 21 to June 12, 2005 Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art 1-3F & 6F Red Gate Gallery 27 Duolun Road Dongbianmen Watchtower Shanghai Chongwenmen, Beijing www.duolunart.com www.redgategallery.com
THE SECOND GUANGZHOU TRIENNIAL “FOLLOW ME!” CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART AT November 2004 to January 2006 THE THRESHOLD OF THE MILLENNIUM Guangdong Museum of Art July 2 to September 4, 2005 Ersha Island Mori Art Museum Guangzhou Roppongi Hills, Mori Tower 53F www.gztriennial.org Galleries 5 & 6, Hall 3, Tokyo http://www.mori.art.museum
YE XIN & CATHERINE DENIS: A CHINESE ARTIST IN FRANCE & A FRENCH ARTIST IN CHINA PRESIDENT'S YOUNG TALENTS 2005 Ongoing April 23 to June 19, 2005 Art Scene Warehouse Singapore Art Museum 50 Moganshan Road, Building 4, 2F 71 Bras Basah Road, Singapore Shanghai www.nhb.gov.sg/SAM/exhibition www.artscenewarehouse.com
SPACES AND PLACES THE WAY TO CHINA IS THE WAY TO AMERICA: July 3 to November 28, 2005 JI DACHUN/ZHANG HONGTU Hong Kong Heritage Museum May 6 to June 4, 2005 1 Man Lam Road, Plum Blossoms Gallery Sha Tin, Hong Kong 555 West 25th Street, Ground Floor www.heritagemuseum.gov.hk New York, New York www.plumblossoms.com
BOXES: RECENT WORKS BY YUNG HO CHANG June 4 to July 16, 2005 Chambers Fine Art 210 Eleventh Avenue, 2F New York, New York www.chambersfineart.com
INOPPORTUNE: WORKS BY CAI GUOQIANG December 11, 2004 to November 2005 MASS MoCA 1040 MASS MoCA Way North Adams, Mass. http://www.massmoca.org http://www.caiquoqiang.com SHANGHAI COOL LONG MARCH SPACE INAUGURAL EXHIBITION Curated by Gu Zhenqing 30 January to 20 March, 2005 2 March to 3 April 2005 Long March Foundation Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art 1-3F & 6F 25000 Cultural Transmission Center 27 Duolun Road Beijing Shanghai www.longmarchfoundation.org www.duolunart.com
SHI ZHONGYING’S SOLO EXHIBITION THE SECOND GUANGZHOU TRIENNIAL 26 March to 17 April 2005 November 2004 to January 2006 Red Gate Gallery Guangdong Museum of Art Dongbianmen Watchtower Ersha Island Chongwenmen, Beijing Guangzhou www.redgategallery.com www.gztriennial.org
IMPERIAL ELEGANCE: CHINESE CERAMICS FROM XUE JIYE SOLO EXHIBITION THE ASIA SOCIETY'S ROCKEFELLER COLLECTION 3 March to 23 March 2005 Curated by Adriana Proser Art Scene Warehouse 25 January to 1 May 2005 50 Moganshan Road, Building 4, 2F Asia Society and Museum Shanghai 725 Park Ave www.artscenewarehouse.com New York, New York www.asiasociety.org
TIANYUAN SPACE STATION: RECENT PAINTINGS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY LI TIANYUAN TRAFFIC: NEW WORKS BY CHEN WENBO, LIU WEI, 25 February to 26 March 2005 YANG YONG AND ZHU JIA Plum Blossoms Gallery 14 January to 6 March 2005 555 West 25th Street, Ground Floor CourtYard Gallery New York, New York 95 Donghuamen Dajie www.plumblossoms.com Beijing, China www.courtyard-gallery.com
FLOOD: PAINTINGS BY RICHARD TSAO 24 February to 9 April, 2005 Chambers Fine Art 210 Eleventh Avenue, 2F New York, New York www.chambersfineart.com
TAKE A ST/ROLL: DONUT FANTASIES Curated by Linda Lai 4 March to 10 April 2005 Parasite Art Space Number 2 Po Yan Street, Ground Floor Sheung Wan, Hong Kong www.para-site.org.hk
INOPPORTUNE: WORKS BY CAI GUOQIANG 11 December 2004 to November 2005 MASS MoCA 1040 MASS MoCA Way North Adams, Mass. http://www.massmoca.org http://www.caiquoqiang.com