Public Art in 1990S China

Vivian Y. Li Forging a New Dialogue: Public Art in 1990s China

t the watershed 1979 meeting of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee, popularly known as the Thought Liberation A Conference, Deng Xiaoping declared the reversal of Maoist thought. In so doing he effectively overturned the demand for artists to continue producing by-then formulaic portrayals of the Communist social trinity—the worker, the peasant, and the soldier. On the one hand, established sculptors from the 1980s thus turned to establishing a new category of large-scale public sculptures called urban sculptures, or chengshi diaosu, that focused on enhancing the growing modern urban landscape. On the other hand, a younger generation of artists began questioning the new institutional motivations for public art production in post-Maoist China, albeit through opportunities posed by new commercial commissions and ventures, such as Zhan Wang’s iconic Artiﬁcial Rock series and Wang Jin’s famous Ice, 96 Central China. Zhan Wang’s and Wang Jin’s works engaged the public in the new cultural milieu that emphasized material desires over ideological ideals. Since the early 1990s ideology had ceased to be the core of Chinese society; it was replaced by economic development and the growing market economy and competition. By studying how artists responded to the new market system of art and its commercialization through public sculpture, we can better understand the emergent interaction among artists, the government, and commercial interests in shaping a new public.

At the 1979 Thought Liberation Conference, according to conference participant and sculptor Ye Yushan:

Deng Xiaoping said, “Whatever Mao said that is right, we will do it. If it’s not right, we won’t do it.” The effect on art was tremendous. Before, art was required to have a subject matter. But during this conference they said this was wrong—it’s okay to have subject matter, but it’s also okay to have art without subject matter. That was really great for us, a liberation. . . . Another major theme of this conference picked up on something Mao himself said: “Let a hundred ﬂowers bloom.” That was a good direction for the arts in China. One hundred types of “ﬂowers” would make for rich diversity in all of the arts.1

14 Despite overturning the demand for artists to continue producing representations of only the worker, the peasant, and the soldier, artists were called on to still serve “the people” and its politics in the new party policy of Four Modernizations, which were focused on modernizing the ﬁelds of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology.

Catalogue cover for Selected Works of Chinese Contemporary Sculptural and Mural Arts, China Sculptural and Mural Art Corporation, 1985.

Hence, to keep sculpture relevant in post-Maoist China, in 1982 the China Artists Association established the National Guidance Committee for the Construction of Urban Sculptures to develop public sculpture for the beautification and modernization of urban space.2 This new institutional organization helped establish the category of urban sculpture and created over four thousand sculptures in urban public areas during the 1980s and early 1990s.3 Under Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms the increased decentralization and privatization of institutions in China, including art institutions, also meant that artists had to find alternative means besides the government to fund their artistic production. With the gradual introduction of market competition in the post-Mao China of the 1980s and 1990s, public sculpture firms, such as the China Sculptural and Mural Art Corporation, began forming and advertising to potential domestic as well as international clients.

The inaugural catalogue of the China Sculptural and Mural Art Corporation is indicative of the new artistic and institutional developments in public sculpture in post-Maoist China. The catalogue consists of images

15 of existing sculptures in outdoor public settings in different cities and institutions, mostly across China, that were made within the previous five years by established sculptors. Explicit political content is conspicuously absent from any of the works in the catalogue, in contrast to the politically charged socialist realist sculpture prevalent in China just over a decade prior. Instead of workers, peasants, and soldiers, the figurative works are portraits of actual historical people executed in the academic realist tradition, abstract female figures presented as poetic allegories, or classical female beauties modeled abstractly or in the academic realist tradition.

Fu Tianchou, Memorial Statue of Xu Beihong, 1983, marble, 80 cm, Xu Beihong Memorial Hall, Beijing.

For instance, Fu Tianchou’s Memorial Wu Mingwan, Life, 1984, bronze, 180 cm, Sichuan Fine Statue of Xu Beihong is a standard Arts University Gallery. sculptural bust made for the Xu Beihong Memorial Hall in Beijing, while Wu Mingwan’s sculpture Life, made for the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute’s Art Gallery, consists of exaggerated abstract forms suggestive of the female body. Similarly, Sui Jianguo’s apparently smaller-scaled Melody of three abstract ﬂute players executed in white with minimal details and

16 Sui Jianguo, Melody, 1984.

Xie Xiang, Li Xiangsheng, Ye curving lines, implies feminine forms Bin, and Yang Qirui, Peony Fairy, 1983, marble, 570 cm, to evoke the sculpture’s lyrical theme. Luoyang’s Wangcheng Park. The 5.7-metre-tall Peony Fairy, in Luoyang’s Wangcheng Park, further demonstrates the new emphasis in 1980s public sculpture that would carry through into the 1990s on classical concepts of beauty and allegory through female forms and ﬁgures, whether abstract or realist in approach. The only political work that appears in the catalogue relates to the politics of another country, Li Shouren’s 4.5-meter tall Monument to the Martyrs of Djibouti, located at the People’s Palace in the Republic of Djibouti's capital of Djibouti City. Its particular inclusion in the catalogue appears to showcase more the ability of the ﬁrm’s sculptors to create for an international clientele than the sculpture’s political connotations.

17 Li Shouren, Monument to the Martyrs of Djibouti, 1984, 450 cm, People’s Palace of the Capital of Djibouti, Republic of Djibouti, Africa.

The China Sculptural and Mural Art Corporation’s agenda to insert itself into the national and international market for sculpture is explicitly expressed on the last page of the catalogue. On the page is a list of the twelve overseas branch offices of the firm’s parent organization, the China State Construction Engineering Corporation, where the text indicates that orders can be placed. With the exception of Hong Kong and Macau, the offices are all located in formerly non-aligned countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, such as Thailand, Iraq, and Libya. The appearance of new for-profit firms, like the China Sculptural and Mural Art Corporation, to delegate national and international public sculpture commissions to senior sculptors in China, many of whom established themselves earlier by making socialist realist works, indicates not only the adaption of the sculpture production system to the changing national and international political climate, but also to the introduction of art making as a lucrative commodity in contemporary China.

As older sculptors with established careers from the recent socialist past were exploring new working methods and genres as well as adjusting their

18 Artiﬁcial rocks in front of an ofﬁce building in Haidian District, Beijing, 1996.

Zhan Wang, New Picture of Beijing, Today and Tomorrow’s Capital—Rockery Remodeling Plan, 1995, computer generated proposal for West Train Station, Beijing. Courtesy of Zhan Wang Studio and Long March Space, Beijing.

production to a shifting sociopolitical situation and market system, a new generation of artists born in the early 1960s was employing the medium of sculpture to question the changed institutional motivations for public sculpture production in contemporary China. A case in point is Zhan Wang’s Artiﬁcial Rock series. Begun in the mid-1990s, the series was initiated as a critique of large-scale scholar rock groupings that the artist observed were being arbitrarily recast as public sculptures to decorate the outdoor spaces of new high-rise buildings.

The resulting unconvincing combination of Chinese stone aesthetics, which are traditionally found in the natural setting of private gardens, with gleaming modern skyscrapers, prompted Zhan Wang to facetiously propose instead to plate the scholar rocks in stainless steel to better complement the cool polish of the buildings made of industrial glass and steel.4 As in the 1995 computer generated proposal, New Picture of Beijing, Today and Tomorrow’s Capital—Rockery Remodeling Plan, Zhan Wang inserted his stainless steel covered rocks in front of the new West Train Station in Beijing. This proposal was developed in response to the organizers of the

19 Zhan Wang, Artiﬁcial Rock #59, 2006, stainless steel, installation view at British Museum. Courtesy of Zhan Wang Studio and Long March Space, Beijing.

Zhan Wang, Artiﬁcial Rock #5, 1997, 162 x 45 x 40 cm, stainless steel, collection of Uli Sigg. Courtesy of Zhan Wang Studio and Long March Space, Beijing.

train station’s open call for public sculpture proposals in the plaza. At the time the train station was almost completed and was already being critiqued as a crude pastiche of traditional and modern architectural motifs and styles. The ambiguity in Zhan Wang’s proposal of the stones’ form and depth caused by the rocks’ distinctive reﬂective surface is augmented by the

20 Zhan Wang, Artiﬁcial Rock contrast of the grainy image of the #100, 2006, 53 x 47 x 28 cm, stainless steel. Courtesy of train station in the background. Zhan Wang Studio and Long March Space, Beijing. The fantastically large, organic forms that are obviously digitally collaged onto the architectural setting frustrate any real attempts to harmonize the two. Through his Rockery Remodeling Plan Zhan Wang satirizes the arbitrary use of traditional rockery to decorate the public space of modern structures by taking this practice to its extreme realization.

Soon after his rejected proposal for the Beijing train station, however, commercial businesses ironically began supporting his actual realization of Artificial Rocks to decorate their sleek new buildings. Zhan Wang’s Artificial Rock was realized the following year in Beijing. Using his previous experience as a jade carver patiently shaping hard materials, he laboriously transformed regular rocks as well as curiously shaped found rocks for his Artificial Rock series by pounding the stainless steel sheets onto the rock and then polishing the rock’s acquired metallic surface.5 The intricate edges, crags, and curves that create the admired dynamic play between negative and positive spaces and complex layers of depth in Chinese stone aesthetics are smoothed over and camouflaged by the uniform, undulating skin of stainless steel. The stainless steel’s reflective surface which constantly projects the shadows, lights, and forms of its surroundings, further undermines the viewer’s depth perception of the actual rock. The bulky stainless steel structure is not meant to be seen as a scholar’s rock per se, but, rather, a modern parody of one to critique the superficial employment of traditional arts and aesthetics for the sole purpose of complementing the nation’s modernization efforts. Since he began making the series in 1996, Zhan Wang has made over one hundred pieces, the majority of which have been collected overseas by European and American collectors and institutions interested in contemporary art from China.

Choosing to work with more contemporary forms, Wang Jin’s Ice, 96 Central China is a thirty-metre-long, one-metre-deep, and two-and-a-half- metre tall ice wall constructed of six hundred blocks of ice. Frozen within the blocks of ice are over three hundred various highly desirable consumer items such as bottles of perfume, cell phones, leather goods, watches, and gold rings, that viewers could see through the surface of the ice. Installed in the outdoor plaza of a major mall in Zhengzhou, the capital of the central province of Henan in the heartland of China, Wang Jin hoped the wall would give passersby a moment of pause to recognize their material desires, and through the experience dissolve the boundary between the space of art and their daily life. The concept of an ice wall developed after the cultural

21 bureau (wenhua ting) of Zhengzhou and business investors of the new Zhan Wang, Artiﬁcial Rock, 1996, stainless steel. Courtesy shopping mall commissioned the artist to create a large-scale work in the of Zhan Wang Studio and Long March Space, Beijing. plaza of the mall as an attraction on the occasion of the opening ceremony. Such partnerships among government entities, commercial businesses, and artists were quite common starting in the 1990s, although, as Wang Jin relates, the partnerships were often informal and ambiguous, which would lead to constant insecurity. Even on the night before the opening day when the organizers realized that the ice was not completely transparent, like the effect of the famous ice lanterns in Harbin that they had imagined, they tried to renege on their payment to the artist.6

The shopping mall, called the New Zhengzhou Tianran Building, was named after the old Tianran trade building which had burned in a large conﬂagration at the same site a year before. Only the four dots in the mall’s sign connoting water at the bottom of the ran character (然) in tianran (天然, literally “natural”) survived the ﬁre. Wang Jin thus decided through

22 Wang Jin, Ice, 96 Central China, 1996, 2.5 x 30 m, Zhengzhou, Henan province. Courtesy of the artist.

Wang Jin, Ice, 96 Central China his artwork to use the traditional (detail),1996, Zhengzhou, Henan province, Courtesy of Chinese concept of nature’s five the artist. elements (wu xing) to use water, in the form of ice, to symbolize the rebirth of the shopping building as well as a metaphor for the purification and abatement of the burning desire of mass consumer culture in the rapidly modernizing cities in 1990s China. Therefore, besides the luxury merchandise, in the artwork’s ice there were also documentary photos of the great conflagration that engulfed the former shopping complex. Artifacts that refer to the fire, such as fire extinguishers and other fire fighting tools, were also included to embody the memory of the former building.7

On opening day about 100,000 people attended the New Tianran Building’s opening ceremony. Wang Jin built the wall in front of the entrance to the new building so that visitors would have to walk around the thirty-metre-

23 Wang Jin in ice factory with a block of ice for Ice, 96 Central China, 1996, Zhengzhou, Henan province. Courtesy of the artist.

long wall to enter the building. To Wang Jin’s surprise, though, after the opening ceremony was over and people were invited into the building, they did not go around the ice wall, but instead, upon seeing the precious contents within, started in an uncontrollable frenzy to strike at the ice wall with random objects to possess the desired luxury items inside. The police were unsuccessful in restraining the crowd. By the end of the ﬁrst day, on January 28, 1996, through the unforeseeable will and power of consumer desire, half of the wall and its contents were gone. By the second day it was all gone as people during the course of the two days came to cart away parts of it on their bikes or in their cars.8

Although Wang Jin’s work Ice, 96 Central China is today lauded in history books and narratives on contemporary art in China as an iconic work of performance art for how it prompted the audience’s participation, Wang Jin did not intend for his ice wall to be a performance piece. Rather, it was meant to be a temporary installation as public sculpture. Wang Jin estimated that the ice wall, in the cold winter temperatures of Zhengzhou,

24 Top: Wang Jin, Ice, 96 Central could stay outside for ten days as a frozen monument to consumer desire. China, 1996, Zhengzhou, Henan province. Courtesy of He then planned to let it melt away until the luxury goods and artifacts of the artist. Bottom: Wang Jin, Ice, the old building’s ﬁre would eventually re-emerge, symbolically washed and 96 Central China, 1996, Zhengzhou, Henan province. puriﬁed by the water of the melted ice. The unexpected nature of the viewers’ Courtesy of the artist. reception and passionate vandalism of his work is apparent also in Wang Jin’s absence from the opening ceremony. He was so tired after overseeing the transport and building of the ice wall in the plaza the night before that he chose to skip the new building’s opening ceremony and instead sleep.9

Wang Jin’s poetic intentions for his ice wall piece, which were undermined by the viewers' overwhelming engagement, not only reveal the intense

25 material culture that characterized early 1990s Chinese society, but also the Wang Jin, Ice, 96 Central China, 1996, Zhengzhou, unpredictability of the masses. According to Wang Jin, in retrospect, more Henan province. Courtesy of the artist. than twenty years later, creating Ice. 96 Central China in Zhengzhou was what he called the “right” place to stage the work because the Zhengzhou masses in China’s heartland “typified” the China of that time.10 Yet his statement also implies the still widely held conception in China of the public as a concerted, malleable group rather than individuals with their own different personal motivations and desires. As much as government officials, businessmen, and even artists may want to mold or adjust the behaviour of the people in public space according to new interests and contexts, Wang Jin’s Ice 96 Central China shows the difficulty of controlling such influence and power in any dialogue with the public.

Notes

1. John T. Young, Contemporary Public Art in China: A Photographic Tour (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 27. 2. For an overview of the Chinese art world’s critical response at the time toward urban sculpture and the government’s patronage in developing this new ﬁeld, see Jane DeBevoise’s Between State and Market: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Post-Mao Era (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 140–44. 3. John T. Young, Contemporary Public Art in China: A Photographic Tour, 27. 4. Britta Erikson, “Material Illusion: Adrift with the Conceptual Sculptor Zhan Wang,” Art Journal 60, (Summer 2001), 77. 5. Ibid., 78. 6. Interview with the author, September 26, 2016. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid.