An Evaluative Biography of Cynical Realism and Political Pop
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OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Sep 06 2014, NEWGEN 6 An Evaluative Biography of Cynical Realism and Political Pop Svetlana Kharchenkova and Olav Velthuis Introduction On April 2nd, 2012 at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong, “1993.4,” a large canvas by the Chinese artist Fang Lijun sold for 3.7 million USD (Sotheby’s 2012a). At the forefront of this canvas is a couple, another five figures are grouped in the lower right corner in the background. All the men are bald and look both mischie- vous and bored, a type of protagonist that Fang Lijun adopted since his gradua- tion project at the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts in 1988–1989 and that became part of his signature style (Figure 6.1). “1993.4” had travelled long distances before its sale at Sotheby’s. It was created by the artist in Yuanmingyuan, an artist village on the outskirts of Beijing in 1993, as part of a series of six canvases designated for that year’s Venice Biennale. The 1993 edition of the Biennale, arguably the world’s most prestigious art event and widely considered as the best launch pad for a con- temporary artist’s international career, was the first in which Chinese artists participated. The year before, Francesca Dal Lago, an Italian art historian who at the time was a cultural attaché of the Italian Embassy in Beijing, had convinced Biennale-director Achille Bonito Oliva to come to China. Subsequently, together with the revered Chinese art critic Li Xianting, Dal Lago had prepared a list of artists for Bonito Oliva to check out. Fang Lijun was one of them. He ended up being selected by the Biennale director. In the spring of 1993, the painting was transported, together with dozens of other works by Chinese artists, to Venice. Due to the lack of space, how- ever, another work—only one of the six paintings—was exhibited. Later on, a European collector purchased “1993.4” directly from the artist, and then passed it on to another European collector (Sotheby’s 2012a). In turn, this 108 Part-I.indd 108 9/6/2014 4:45:06 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Sep 06 2014, NEWGEN Cynical Realism and Political Pop in Chinese Art Figure 6.1. Fang Lijun, 1993.4, 1993. Acrylic on canvas, 180x230 cm. Image courtesy of Springs Center of Art collector, characterized as “important” by Sotheby’s, sold the work about 19 years after its creation for the aforementioned amount in Hong Kong, where it was acquired by a Shanghai private museum (Art Radar Journal 2012). During the travels of the canvas, its worth was assessed and justified by many people, beginning with the artist himself and his companions who fre- quented his studio, by Li Xianting, Achille Bonito Oliva and the organizers of the Venice Biennale, the two European buyers, one of whom purchased the work at the beginning of Fang Lijun’s international career and the other one when it was developing further, by the auction officials of Sotheby’s Hong Kong who accepted the work for their auction and subsequently had to come up with a price estimate for it, as well as its current owner when s/he bought it in 2012. Moreover, potential buyers at Fang Lijun’s studio in Yuanmingyuan, visitors to the European collectors’ premises, and scores of anonymous spec- tators and the prospective bidders at auction previews, assessed its worth as well. The spatio-temporal unfolding of these valuations, sometimes coher- ent, often contradictory, some provoked by previous valuations, others rel- atively independent, some superficial, others in depth, some produced by 109 Part-I.indd 109 9/6/2014 4:45:07 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Sep 06 2014, NEWGEN Moments of Valuation laypersons, others by experts, some valorizing the work (i.e. attaching value to it), others eroding value, is what we call an evaluative biography.1 In this paper we reconstruct the evaluative biography of a style with which Fang Lijun has been associated—Cynical Realism—and its sister-style Political Pop. Artists affiliated with these two styles have been extremely suc- cessful, both artistically and commercially (Lü 2010). Moreover, they were probably the first two contemporary Chinese styles to become recognized among audiences in Europe and the United States. By reconstructing this biography, we seek to understand the reasons for their success, and for their wide, global recognition. Throughout its development in the last 30 years, the Chinese contempo- rary art scene has been complex and has gone way beyond the several iconic styles such as Cynical Realism and Political Pop. While recognizing the intri- cacies of Chinese contemporary art, we focus on these movements because of their eventful biography and manifest presence in different discourses about Chinese contemporary art, both in China and abroad. We study the two styles together because of their similar evaluative biog- raphies; indeed, they have often been evaluated together (e.g., Li 1992/2010; Hou 1994). However, the biography that we reconstruct is not completely unique to Cynical Realism and Political Pop. It also partly pertains to success- ful artists of roughly the same generation born around 1960, such as Zhang Xiaogang and Liu Ye. On the other hand, for reasons that go beyond this paper’s scope, some artists who were initially identified as Cynical Realist or Political Pop artists, never became household names and thus do not fully share the evaluative biography that we present. Regimes of Justification We draw on the work of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot in order to make sense of this evaluative biography (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). Their framework provides the tools to study the particularly rich, complex, contra- dictory evaluative biographies of art movements (see Eyck and Busch 2012 for a previous application to art criticism). Indeed, Boltanski and Thévenot’s understanding of worth as “a site of tensions, risk, and uncertainty, which requires continuing reconstruction and reenactment of agreements” (Lamont 2012: 208) seems particularly apt for the intricate taste-making 1 Our project bears resemblances to what Appadurai (1986) calls the “social life of things” and reminds us of what Kopytoff (1986) calls a thing’s biography. But whereas biographies in Kopytoff’s sense are encompassing, describing the social and cultural contexts in which an object circulates, and the way a thing gets commodified and de-commodified, our biography focuses on valuations and their justifications. 110 Part-I.indd 110 9/6/2014 4:45:07 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Sep 06 2014, NEWGEN Cynical Realism and Political Pop in Chinese Art machinery of the art world. Moreover, the arguments which various actors, Chinese, foreign and those with mixed identities, have used in order to jus- tify their decisions to give attention to artists working in the styles of Cynical Realism and Political Pop, to buy their works, to select them for a public exhi- bition, or to do the very opposite (to ignore, reject or to criticize them) can be located in at least five of the worlds which Boltanski and Thévenot have identified: (1) the inspired world, where a work’s worth is justified because of the artist’s uncompromising creativity; (2) the civic world, where the value of art is seen in political terms, as an attempt to come to terms with China’s repressive political regime; (3) the world of the market, where works are auc- tioned and worth is predominantly talked about in dollar prices and justi- fied by referring to its scarcity or its expected financial return; (4) the world of renown, where artists are concerned about their reputations and buyers boast about their acquisitions of art for the status it may confer upon them; and (5) the industrial world, where artists’ studios are compared to efficient art factories. Before we can apply Boltanski and Thévenot to the biography of Cynical Realism and Political Pop, however, some specifications, reservations and additions need to be made. First of all, while the justifications that figure in Boltanski and Thévenot’s work are typically studied synchronically, when looking at the evaluative biography of Cynical Realism and Political Pop it makes sense to consider how justifications emerge diachronically. Related to this, we find that one actor’s valuation of Cynical Realism and Political Pop strongly depends not only on the particular context in which a valuation is made, but also on preceding valuations by others. For instance, the negative valuations of Cynical Realism and Political Pop, which have been widespread in recent years, cannot be understood without taking into account the ear- lier positive valuations of curators and buyers, the changing position of the Chinese government, and the steep rise of the Chinese art market in the first decade of the 2000s. The pattern we find resembles mediation processes that exist in Western modern and contemporary art, where the worth of a style is recognized in ever widening circles, starting with peers, followed by critics and curators, then by market actors and finally the general public (see e.g., Bowness 1990). As Nathalie Heinich has argued, the work of these intermediaries (critics, curators, dealers, auctioneers etc.) is key to the field of contemporary art: “no installation, performance or contemporary painting could move successfully from the artist’s studio (or mind) to a public place, let alone to any private home” (Heinich 2012: 701). In the case of Cynical Realism and Political Pop, the intermediation was not only necessary to move a work from one institutional world to another, but more importantly to move it spatially, from one art world to another. It 111 Part-I.indd 111 9/6/2014 4:45:07 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Sep 06 2014, NEWGEN Moments of Valuation enabled works of art created in the Chinese art scene, which had for decades been sealed off from most of the rest of the world, to circulate in Europe and the United States.