Lu Mingjun Branching Paths to Self-Liberation Huang Yong Ping, Reptiles, n May 1989, three artists from mainland China—Gu Dexin, Huang 1989, installation view, Magiciens de la terre, Centre Yongping, and Yang Jiecang—took part in the highly controversial Pompidou, Paris. Courtesy of the artist. Iexhibition Magiciens de la Terre, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. This was the first time contemporary Chinese art was featured in an international exhibition. The Tian’anmen Square incident broke out not long after the exhibition opened. The gunshot set off by Xiao Lu at the February 5 opening of the China/Avant-Garde exhibition in Beijing was seen by many as a harbinger of the Tian’anmen incident. This sudden event affected the itineraries of all three artists to varying extents. Huang Yong Ping and Yang Jiecang (as well as Fei Dawei, the curator who accompanied them) chose to stay in Paris, and they began their careers as overseas Chinese artists. Gu Dexin resolved to return to China. Several months later, the Berlin Wall fell, and East and West Germany were unified. In the summer 1989 edition of The National Interest, Francis Fukuyama published his essay “The End of History?,” in which he declared Communism bankrupt and posited that liberal democracy was possibly the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government.” Two years later, the Soviet Union declared 65 its dissolution, bringing the Cold War to an end. The “post-Cold War” era replaced it as the new system of the world. A year after that, Deng Xiaoping toured southern China to promote reforms to the economic system, and marketization came to occupy the mainstream of mainland Chinese ideology. Soon after, in 1993, Chinese artists made their first group appearance at the Venice Biennale and began down a new path of internationalization. Feng Mengbo, My Private Album, 1997, installation view, documenta X, Kassel. Courtesy of the artist. If Magiciens de la Terre was an omen of globalization and the “end of history” was the mainstream ideology of the “post-Cold War” or “Post-89” era, then Samuel P. Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order stood as a sweeping diagnosis and criticism of this period’s “universal optimism,” and Magiciens de la Terre could be seen as a model of the “postcolonial.”1 As Rasheed Araeen, founder of the journal Third Text, pointed out, Martin’s self-declared “good deed” not only failed to cast doubt on Western dominance, it also denied “other cultures their ability to question their domination and to liberate themselves from it.”2 In 1997, a year after Samuel P. Huntington published Clash of Civilizations, artists Wang Jianwei and Feng Mengbo took part in documenta X in Kassel, becoming the first Chinese artists to be featured in this exhibition. The reason this installment of documenta, curated by Catherine David, was of groundbreaking significance in the history of the exhibition is that she pulled it from its Western- centric modernist leanings into a framework of global politics, society, and culture in order to confront the differences, shifts, and complexities within. Coincidentally, it was also in this year that “A world economic crisis forced people to consider the destructive force of international financial capital flows on society and economy.”3 At the same time, the journal Frontiers published Wang Hui’s essay “The State of Ideas in Contemporary China and the Question of Modernity,”4 which touched off a battle between left and right that continues to this day, and provoked reflection on global capitalism, neoliberalism, and the hegemonic inequality of the entire modernization process. Nevertheless, the rise of such schools of thought as the “New Left” and democratism were accompanied by the total, unstoppable invasion of globalism. Even anti-globalization itself was a global wave. 66 On July 13, 2001, International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch announced in Moscow that Beijing had been selected to host the 2008 Olympic Games. On November 10 of that same year, China officially joined the World Trade Organization after years of difficult negotiations. For a time, the whole nation celebrated. These events also brought legitimacy to contemporary art. Before this (the earliest such legitimizing event being the Shanghai government holding the Shanghai Biennale), contemporary art had been illegitimate, or in a “half underground” state, but now it had become a part of the government’s cultural strategy. The West was unstable in 2001, especially the United States, when the 9/11 terror attack led directly to a resurgence of the right wing. Empire, the book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri released by Harvard University Press the year before, attracted much attention as a result. The two authors viewed the multinational system of global capital as a new form of “empire” distinct from “imperialism.”5 One could say that the 9/11 attack dealt a fatal blow to this “empire.” That same year, Zhao Tingyang published the essay “System Under Heaven: Empire and the System of the World,” replacing “empire” with the traditional Chinese concept of “under heaven” and discussing it as a possible new world order.6 In late 2003, the 21st Century Business Herald published an interview with Gan Yang titled From “Nation-State to Civilization-State.” In the interview, Gan Yang held that the central issue facing China in the twenty- first century was to transcend the logic of “nation-state” and consciously move to rebuild China as a “civilization-state.” This would, to a great extent, depend on whether China could consciously root the “modern nation” of China in its longstanding “historical civilization.” He then used this as a lens to re-examine Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” and to attack the Western neoliberal and academic left’s fantasies of “universal Westernized civilization” from a conservative perspective.7 This interview marked the rise of “neo-conservatism” in China. That year, the group exhibition Prayer Beads and Brushstrokes, curated by Li Xianting, opened at Beijing Tokyo Art Projects and Dashanzi West Art District. Six years later, in 2009, Gao Minglu curated the large-scale exhibition Yi Pai at the Today Art Museum, Beijing. This had profound implications, as these two figures, who were once at the heart and soul of the ’85 New Wave Movement and the leading promoters of avant-garde art in China, were now both attempting to retrace China’s historical traditions to find a new understanding and establish a discursive methodology for contemporary Chinese art. In this process, as the art system (including galleries, museums, and art fairs) became more established, contemporary Chinese art could not avoid being drawn into the global capital system, and the market came to dominate the system, exemplified by the rise of art districts such as 798 in Beijing and M50 in Shanghai. During this time, virtually all acts of criticism and rebellion against the market and capitalism were in essence dependent on very this system and even strove to become the more correct components of this system. Today, we are still mired in the financial tsunami that struck the globe in 2008, and the global crisis has only been intensified by the growing strength of ISIS and increasing ethnic conflicts. Meanwhile, the crisis rapidly wiped 67 out the frenzied spectacle of the Chinese art market as it existed from 2005 to 2007. Luckily, the crisis did not reach the roots of China’s economic growth. That fact, alongside China’s successful hosting of the Beijing Olympics, allowed nationalism to once again rear its head, leading to a debate on the Chinese model discussing the differences between theories of the foreign policy slogans “peaceful rise” and the “Chinese threat.” One aspect that cannot be ignored is that the nation’s economic rise, aside from bolstering national confidence, also led to severe social imbalances, social stratification, and widespread anxiety. These intertwining conflicts and contradictions touched off a fierce ideological debate among intellectuals. Though the debate ended inconclusively, it demonstrated that whether in the West or in China, the decoupling of political form from social form implied that the ideological framework of old could no longer explain the world of today. Liberalism or socialism, radical or conservative—none could adapt to this state of affairs.8 Opening of the Third Guangzhou Triennale, Farewell to Post-Colonialism, September 6, 2008. Courtesy of the Guangzhou Triennale. Also in 2008, Gao Shiming, Sarat Maharaj, and Johnson Chang curated the Third Guangzhou Triennial, titled Farewell to Post-Colonialism. The exhibition intended to effect a thorough departure from the politicizing, ideological artistic framework and perceptual system of “postcolonialism” and the “ideological readymades” and “undigested realities” that emerged from it.9 What appeared to be an attempt to return to the essence of art and politics themselves, however—a return to the politics of art—when rooted in the context of the time also seemed to conceal a “nationalist” narrative. Gayatri C. Spivak once said that the whole world is postcolonial.10 In a sense, globalization and postcolonialism are two sides of the same coin. Thus, to “bid farewell to post-colonialism” is the same as to “bid farewell to globalization.” Or perhaps this is little more than discursive posturing. The complexity of the issue, however, is that even as we stand in this “China” today, it is very difficult to give it an essential definition. It actively takes part in the game of globalization under its own volition, but it is not limited by it. It completely follows the so-called universal logic of the game, rather than playing the narrow role of resistor.