Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China Published by Edizioni Charta. Milano, Italy, 2007

Jonathan Goodman

ell conceived and well written, Melissa Chiu’s Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China Wconsiders the Chinese artistic diaspora— painters and sculptors, performance artists and conceptual practitioners who left the Mainland in favour of greater aesthetic freedom in America, Europe, and Australia. After the events on June 4, 1989, at Tian’anmen Square, the democracy movement in China was crushed, and many artists sought to escape what had become a prison house for the intelligentsia. At the same time, however, as Chiu points out in a perceptive introduction, there was a general exodus that had to do with cultural restlessness as much as political oppression. She finds that not everybody wanted to leave; she quotes Ah Xian,

Cover of Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China. a ceramic artist who settled in Australia: “Once we had Image: Ah Xian, Human Human—Landscape 1, 2002-2003. Courtesy Edizioni Charta, Milano. the chance to go overseas, we tried as hard as we could to stay” . And most recently, many Chinese artists have returned to China, including such major figures as Zhang Huan, who never gave up his Chinese passport while working in America, and Xu Bing, who has accepted the post of vice president at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in , where he received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees more than two decades ago.

Chiu rightly suggests that the ebb and flow of immigration by Chinese artists is complicated, and much of her book, which is devoted to case studies of individual artists, claims a greater complexity for these figures than what the general perception might assert. Chiu argues for a continuing perception of the “Chineseness” of Chinese art, no matter where it is being practiced and shown. Chinese art is based upon the incorporation of Western avant-garde practices of the 1960s and 70s—in particular, performance and conceptual art—which is then used to express specifically Chinese concerns; it builds upon, but is not beholden to, Western contemporary art. Interested in the interaction between Western and Asian cultures, Chiu has coined the word “transexperience,” which she deems as being “thought of as a theoretical framework to explain Chinese overseas art by questioning its relationship to time, in particular to the past, present, and future”. The homeland thus becomes a site of the past and the country the artist has immigrated to serves as a place in which the present is investigated. Chiu sees three strategies whereby transexperience is redeemed through art—by an emphasis on the recovery of Chinese materials “at a geographical and psychological distance from China”; by juxtaposing “memories of China with its current reality”; and by modifying “Chinese signifiers, such as Chinese characters, to make them accessible to non-Chinese audiences.”

The recovery, juxtaposition, and modification of Chinese cultural artefacts build a new architecture of experience. The past, present, and future respectively concur with the three

91 aspects of cultural recognition that comprise the effects of transexperience. Xu Bing’s famous installation, Tianshu (Book from the Sky) (1987-91), is based on a visual archaeology that attempts to recover lost language even if that language is nonexistent or entirely imaginary. -based conceptual painter Zhang Hongtu does not so much juxtapose as literally replace styles in his , which take recognized masterpieces of Chinese art and rework them in the manner of Van Gogh or Cezanne. Finally, the attempt to reify the future occurs when Chinese artists work out a connection between Chinese as a language and the other languages it coexists with. As Chiu points out, Xu’s New

English Calligraphy (1994-96) has Wenda Gu, Speechless No. 2, 1985, performance view at National Art Academy, unsuspecting participants writing Hangzhou. Photo: Jiao Jian. Courtesy of the artist. English calligraphy while they think they are practicing writing Chinese characters; she also cites Gu Wenda’s piece United Nations, with its variants—especially United Nations—China Monument: Temple of Heaven—transforming traditional calligraphy into something as monumental as it is unreadable. It would seem that the notion of mixing Western and Chinese cultures carries with it a pessimistic reading of the merger; most likely, the works imply, the conflation of signifiers cannot be reduced to the melting pot Americans so often refer to.

Chiu cites the manipulation of Chinese characters as examples of a “new, subversive Chineseness”. It is an accurate term for an entire generation of artists old enough to remember the and the savageries of Tian’anmen Square, but who are not always or necessarily thrilled with their experience in Western culture. Indeed, viewers see, again and again, these artists return to the historic, and historical, signifiers of an older (even ancient) Chinese culture. Surely their artistic decisions constitute a reaction toward the monolithic, usually capitalist societies they chose to relocate in. Identity, as understood by the Chinese, the vast majority of whom belong to one racial group, remains key to their concerns. They build bridges with their homeland by addressing not only inspired moments in Chinese culture but also stereotypes, as happens in Zhang Hongtu’s Acupuncture Chart (1990), with a corpulent Mao as the model for key acupunctural points. Here the artist expresses his long obsession with Mao, as consequential an icon—for better or worse—as the Chinese have seen in modern times. Chiu’s astute reading of the need for members of the diaspora to remain culturally Chinese correctly points out their need is essential to their creativity.

In Chapter Two, “Theories of Being Outside,” Chiu elaborates on the Chinese artist’s need to remain connected to his or her culture of origin—a desire based upon the inevitable identification of the artist with his or her Chinese heritage. All artists in transit bear with them the information

92 and the experience of their home, but in the Chinese case, the connection appears to be particularly intense, occurring on a racial level. Indeed, Chiu quotes the late, Paris-based artist conceptual artist Chen Zhen, who acknowledges his practice as being based upon his “bank of genes.” Chen’s connection to his heritage is not a mere matter of influence; rather, it is a world Huang Yongping, VOC, 1998, scales, cardboard boxes, of history and culture, genetically linked to his plates. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. own circumstances, from which he can draw materials for his own art. China’s great past, its imperial history, enables the Chinese artistic diaspora to borrow and quote at will. The collective achievements of China are quoted, but the diaspora artists prefer to make use only of what they want, infusing background materials with processes that are local and more or less contemporary in respect to their sites of work. In fact, it would be romantic, however, to say that the artists are nostalgic or filled with longing; it is not the idea of China that they draw upon, but, rather, the specifics of its artistic history. Culturally speaking, they seem to look Wang Zhiyuan, Underpants, 2002-2005, wood, acrylic and mixed media, 80 x 77 x 10 cm. Photo: Wang Zhiyuan. backward, but in fact they draw upon the past to Courtesy of the artist. create art that is absolutely contemporary.

The remarkable emigration of the many Chinese artists to America, mostly to New York City, is brought up in Chiu’s informative Chapter Three. The list of New York-based Chinese artists includes Zhang Hongtu, Wenda Gu, Xu Bing, and Cai Guo- Qiang, as well as , Cai Jin, and Yun-Fei Ji. In recent times, there has been a movement back to China—Cai Jin, Ai Weiwei, and Xu Bing, for example, have returned to Beijing. However, it is clear that the chaotic freedom of New York has acted as a catalyst for a large number of the artists mentioned. In this case, transexperience proves an accurate term in describing the passage of these artists into the broad liberties of a post-industrial, Guan Wei, Two Finger Exercises No. 30, 1989, gouache, hyper-capitalist society—a context that generally wax, oil, crayon on card, 34.5 x 25.5 cm. Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Photo: Yang Yong resulted in the artists’ use of the Chinese past. They Qiang. Courtesy of the artist and Sherman Galleries. pursued a global outlook through their intense identification with native traditions and materials, from which the technical skill and human subtleties gave them much to work with. Chiu, who uses a case-study approach for much of the rest of the book, deftly handles the ambitious individuals who moved west in pursuit of both freedom and personal gain. Zhang Hongtu, one of the earliest pioneers, first moved to New York in 1982, at the age of thirty-seven. Of a Muslim background, he exorcized his Chinese experience by fixating on Mao, whose presence was ubiquitous while he was growing up in China.

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Cai Guo-Qiang, Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard, 1999, installation view at 48th Venice Biennale, clay, wood, lamps, tools. Photo: Elio Montanari. Courtesy of Cai Studio, New York. Zhang, who work has shifted since his arrival in the U.S. and now acknowledges both Western and Chinese legacies in a single , is given much space for the illustration of his works, which include his negative Mao series, in which Mao’s stately figure is given its contours in negative space. In the remarkable Last Banquet (1989), a version of the Last Supper, all the figures, including Jesus and Judas, are portrayed as Mao himself. Clearly, Zhang has regularly turned toward his earlier context as an inspiration for the art he has produced in America. Another affecting piece is Zhang’s Soy Calligraphy (1996), which is, in Chiu’s words, “a job advertisement rendered in the refined calligraphic style of fourth-century master Wang Xizhi in ”, the condiment found ubiquitously in the Chinese fast food kitchens in New York. The meeting of an ancient style with ultracurrent materials is a way of characterizing the artist’s transexperience, which covers epochs and geographies to make its social point: namely, that for many Chinese who have come to America illegally, the only jobs available are the ones hidden away in sweatshops and that are themselves outside legal status.

Other artists covered in chapter three include Gu Wenda, who is represented by his remarkable United Nations pieces, in which hair is gathered from all over the world and used to create a huge screen of seal-script calligraphy. In his monumental internationalism, Gu rejects the notion of cross-cultural influence; he is quoted as saying, “I think that it is artificial and superficial to create an intellectual and emotional distinction between artists from different countries and cultures.” Interestingly, he is one of the more Westernized immigrant artists, having married an American woman and remaining in New York City. Yet his art is distinctly linked to Chinese calligraphic traditions, and it proves hard to believe that transnationalism is not the unspoken centre of his practice. Xu Bing, living in New York until very recently, has moved back to Beijing after coming to America in 1990 where he spent a year in Madison, Wisconsin, on a postgraduate fellowship. Xu’s obsession with language culminated early in his career with a masterwork, Tianshu, which consisted of books, scrolls, and wall texts printed with meaningless characters. Tianshu was made in Beijing, but Chiu also takes us deftly through the high points of Xu’s American career and his ongoing focus on the book and language itself; Xu’s quotation from Mao, “Art for the people,” was printed up on a red banner using his Square Word Calligraphy, and hung in front of the entrance of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, surely a signal of Xu’s continuing allegiance to his experience in China. Cai Guo-Qiang, Yun-Fei Ji, and Zhang Huan make up the rest of the case studies in Chiu’s third chapter.

In Chapter Four, “Discourses of East and West: Chinese Artists in France,” consists of studies of four artists who worked in Paris in the 1990s: Huang Yongping, who came to France in 1989; Yang Jiechang, who also arrived in 1989; Chen Zhen, who came in 1986; and Shen Yuan, in 1990. Huang Yongping has received great success in France, even representing France in the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1999. His mixture of Daoist mysticism and hard-core modernism has won him an international audience. Chiu refers to his installation in Yellow Peril (1993), which concerned the strained relations between Britain and China, and who are represented by scorpions and crickets, respectively. While the scorpions were considerably fewer in number, they ate the crickets at will. The symbolic function of the scenario was meant to be taken as at least partially humorous, but the grim facts remain; Huang caters to a complex view, in which Western imperialism is assaulted despite his residence and very public career in Paris.

The transexperience of artists in Australia, where Chiu was born and educated, serves as the focus of chapter five, entitled “The Asianization Debate in Australia.” The artists’ prospects in Australia have been a bit different, in large part because Australia has promoted itself as being a part of

96 Asia. The Chinese artists who have in fact made the move to Australia have done well—as Chiu points out, Guan Wei had “a major retrospective of his work” in Sydney in 1999; Ah Xian was the winner of the first National Sculpture prize, given by the National Art Gallery in 2001; Fan Dong Wang won the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award in 2000; and Guo Jian’s solo show, entitled Mama’s Tripping (2000), travelled throughout the country. More recently, Chiu curated a successful show of Ah Xian at the Asia Society in New York, where she is director of galleries. Ah Xian’s beautiful porcelain busts and figures combine Western naturalism with Chinese decorative arts; in an interview, he asserts the ongoing presence of Chinese traditional culture for the educated artist: “Those who have grown up steeped in Chinese ways can hardly escape the influence of thousands of years of Chinese history and cultural traditions, including language, education, religion, and so on.” At the same time, however, Ah Xian claims that he uses “Chinese culture as the source of inspiration for new cultural forms.” The point, as I take it, is that he is committed to new expressions in art even as he makes use of traditional ones.

It seems that the success of the Chinese artistic diaspora circles around the goal of making new work while referencing homeland traditions the artists cannot escape. Identification with China’s extraordinary culture becomes the foundation of work that manifests an acquaintance with history that is much more than casual; however, it may be said that the emphasis on creative interpretation of that history is at least as important as the history itself. In her last chapter, Chiu makes the important point that many Chinese artists have returned to the Mainland, where they are participating in the incredible upturn of the art market. Even the government welcomes their homecoming, recognizing that the artists are a new source of funds. In consequence, as Chiu points out, the work of insiders and outsiders has begun to merge, philosophically as well as stylistically: “As the art world in mainland China has expanded and a new generation has emerged, creating a much more complex environment, the distinct differences between the work of artists living in China and those who live outside have begun to break down.” In truth, the merging of artistic identities between émigrés and their colleagues at home may well have developed because of China’s transition to capitalism and its support of economic practices that function in similar ways to Western systems.

One hesitates to put too much emphasis on the market, but it currently holds true that it has become a remarkable bubble, with businessmen investing not for the pleasure of art acquisition, but rather for the fast turnover of money. It is sad to see, most recently, a new generation of artists who have not discovered transexperience so much as they have exploited it. The market may or may not burst, just as the younger artists may or may not mature. But the generation of artists who left China because their culture was not supporting them, either on a political or aesthetic level, and with their courage and intellectual flair built upon the suffering of the Cultural Revolution and the demise of the democracy movement, has made them a group to reckon with. Chiu vividly presents and analyzes this group and their work, giving a literary voice to a cohort whose first allegiance was to art, and whose integrity was intrinsic to their practice. We are lucky to have had such a generation of artists, and we are also fortunate to have so insightful a history of their production.

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