New China, New Art Young Chinese Artists: the Next Generation

Jonathan Goodman New China, New Art Authored by Richard Vine Prestel Publishing, New York, 2008 Young Chinese Artists: The Next Generation Edited by Christoph Noe, Xenia Piech, and Cordelia Steiner Prestel Publishing, New York, 2008 ow that the art market bubble has burst, our understanding of contemporary Chinese art can take on a greater sense of reality than Nit did during its salad days. As the market grew larger and larger, with prices matching the extravagant nature of the images being bought, the Chinese art world became bloated with its own success. Artists under twenty-five years of age were buying Mercedes Benzes. It was hard not to be swept up by the enthusiasm, if not always by the art. Critics, curators, and dealers went for the money. Indeed, the market became its own watchman, indifferent to the worries of art’s intelligentsia, such as critics who hoped that things would not happen too fast. As a result, a certain level of greed set in, likely modeled after the manic enthusiasms of the American art world, where there seems to be no ceiling for how much an image might cost. To be sure, there were and are individuals of integrity who had the sense not to trust so volatile a market. And surely the generation of Xu Bing, Huang Yong-Ping, Cai Guo-Qiang, Fang Lijun, and Yue Minjun, which in recent years had reached maturity, should be allowed to reap the benefits of their earlier careers. Yet the power of cash, as well as the power of culture, proved irresistible to many people, and many businessmen invested not out of aesthetic interest but for profit alone. While there is nothing inherently wrong in making money, the aura of excess resulted in circumstances in which the art business began to believe its dream of an affluence that would dwarf that of earlier times. China had been impoverished for so long that it seemed indifferent, even slightly cruel, to moralize; what seemed to count was that everyone should have fun in a picture that seemed—and indeed was—too good to be true. The dynamics of the bubble were so extreme that writers lost their way when writing about its effects, succumbing to the hype that had quickly taken over the description of Chinese art. It was hard to know what exactly to do—should a critic turn his or her back on the mercenary, or should he or she quietly acquiesce to the spectacular power of the market, which simply ignored the jeremiads of people concerned with its excess? With art being what it is—a commodity of fashion—it seemed better to go with the flow, which created its own reality. So much money was being made that many found it impossible to resist the seduction of its blandishments. Inevitably, a sense of reality would set in, but only if the judgment of writers was supported by a healthy dose of reason. In the climate that has now taken over, it may be exactly the right time to extol the achievements of a country whose increasing political and economic importance surely has played a role in the West’s perception of its art. Indeed, books have started to appear that describe a large and diverse art scene, fraught with a chaos of styles and a history dating back but a generation, to the mid- to late 1980s, when curator Gao Minglu presented his brilliant but doomed China/Avant-Garde in 1989, a huge descriptive show, in Beijing. Nearly two hundred artists had work in the 100 show, which was shut down twice in just over a week. There may now be enough time between Xiao Lu’s provocative gunfire, in which she shot at her own installation as an act of personal dismay that was mistaken as a blow for democratic freedom, and the present, for writers to describe and judge the amazingly fast onslaught of art that was no longer tied to tradition. New China, New Art, Richard Vine’s extensive look at the players, large and small, who contributed to the phenomenon of China’s vast new wave, follows the changes that occurred across the board in various media; after an introduction, the book is divided into categories by medium: painting, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and video. Interested in describing a scene that burst from its beginnings in Beijing’s dilapidated but vibrant East Village—named after New York’s creative neighbourhood of note in the early 1980s—Vine thoroughly explores the groundswell of energy that pushed into prominence artists like Xu Bing, Zhang Huan, and Xiao Lu. It must have been a very heady moment to be an artist. We must remember that, like all art movements, the compelling works made by the Chinese avant-garde had their own history of influence—for example, Xu Bing wrote his master’s thesis on serial repetition in the art of Andy Warhol, relying on Western art magazines for his information. One of the notions that comes through in New China, New Art is that Western progressive art provided a basis for much of what was produced in China. Inevitably, the Chinese artists who comprised the new movement would reinterpret according to their own contexts the kinds of insights American art had come upon in earlier investigations. Chinese art was different. In addition to a different mindset, in which Chinese artists looked to the particulars of Chinese culture even as they embraced certain points of Western art manufacture, there was the presence of Chinese physiognomy, which became a telling feature in the art of Yue Minjun and Zhang Xiaogang. More important, of course, is China’s recent social history, in which capitalism has been enthusiastically embraced, changing the country’s tightly bound left- wing ideology into a capitalist fanfare. Much of Chinese art of the 1980s can be likened to American works made earlier, in the 1960s and 70s, because the social conditions in China took on a cast similar to that of America in those decades, when artists were questioning America’s moral fabric. But this does not mean that the Chinese were copying. It simply indicates that some of the pressures Chinese artists felt, as well as the exuberance of a nation coming into its own after a long period of both cultural and economic poverty, was the result of rigid ideology. Vine’s book does not closely study social conditions; instead, he uses the art to suggest some of the perplexities and conflicts occurring in China at the time. By organizing his material according to genre, Vine presents a broad spectrum of activities. In the chapter “Painting,” for instance, we see the Chinese preference for figurative painting over abstract art—the former can, of course, treat social changes more realistically. Li Shan’s erotic treatment of Mao, painted in 1995, at once indicates an apotheosis and a lessening of the political god: Mao, painted very realistically, holds a lavender-coloured flower between red lips—a portrayal that effectively effeminizes him. Yue Minjun, the artist who has been painting himself for so long now we recognize his face as if it were a trademark, shows a double version of himself in Butterfly (2007). Wearing no clothing but sporting satanic horns at the top of his foreheads, 101 Li Shan, Mao, 1995, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 57 x 34 cm. Courtesy of ShanghArt Gallery, Shanghai. he laughs and flaunts his typical wide grin, and five butterflies accentuate the demonized tone of his self-portrait. Vine rightly points out that Yue Minjun’s “joke was liberating,” but one wonders whether his obsessive need to paint his own features hasn’t become a caricature of a caricature, distancing his viewers much as he himself is distanced from his own design. Vine has done a meticulous job of Yue Minjun, Butterfly, 2007, oil on canvas, 100.3 x 80.8 cm. including people of note in the Chinese Courtesy of Max Protetch Gallery, New York. art world, often humanizing them with a pertinent detail. Despite his tendency to treat the art as art, he is insightful in his contextualizing of the work he describes. As I have noted, much, if not all, of the work belongs to figuration, whose human element is regularly linked to comments on current social conditions. In the chapter on “Sculpture,” for example, there is the massive installation Rent Collection Courtyard, originally made in 1965 by a collective team of sculptors and folk artists, and reproduced in fiberglass in 1974 by a group of sculptors from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. In this group of 119 figures, the peasants’ suffering is emphasized as a comment on the cruelty of the landlord who demands payment in the form of grain. This piece is entirely human 102 Hong Lei, Autumn in the in its portrayal and sets a precedent that serves as a backdrop for more Forbidden City (East Veranda), 1997, chromogenic print, 77 contemporary efforts. Here, as elsewhere, the point is that social reality is x 99 cm. Courtesy of Chambers Fine Art, New York City. commented upon, no matter whether it is a painted fiberglass Mao jacket, entitled Legacy Mantel (1997), by Sui Jianguo, or the brilliantly symbolic Book from the Sky (1987–91), by Xu Bing, whose banners, wall texts, and bound volumes display meaningless characters in a pointed allegory directed towards the emptiness of communication in then-current China. New China, New Art comprehensively captures the broad array of contemporary art in all its forms. Hong Lei’s damaged classicism is shown in the colour photograph Autumn in the Forbidden City (1997), in which a dead bird with a necklace wound around it lies in the foreground, while columns and, in the distance, a view of a major building in the Forbidden City propose a traditional context for the bird, an item of disturbing decay.

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