Growing Pains in Guangdong
Kim Dhillon
There’s a statistic floating around that by 2015 there will be several hundred new museums in China. Some are already complete, sitting empty, some are under construction, some won’t materialize. No one knows who will run them, as there’s a dire lack of trained professionals in the field and cultural promotion is a limited project where museums answer not to the Ministry of Culture but to the Central Propaganda Department. The political system is building cultural structures in the same way a new generation is consuming luxury goods and commodities at a frenzied pace: there seems to be no foundation, no plan, and just a handful of individuals struggling to form a vision in an art culture that seems indifferent to individualism.
But the money is being thrown out there for the structures to be built, and the Western art world is still in the midst of a fever dream over the creative and commercial possibilities of contemporary Chinese art. The systems in place reveal a drastically different scenario from this exotic misconception. Although some artists are rendering in fascinating ways the shifting personal and cultural identities in the wake of rampant urbanization and materialism, art institutions in China are struggling to keep pace. And just building hundreds more won’t necessarily solve the problem.
The Pearl River Delta in the southern province of Guangdong epitomizes the binaries of China as it powers ahead on its way to reclaiming its ancient status as superpower. Consumption in China is increasing so dramatically that economists, dieticians, and statisticians in Europe and the U.S. are all alarmed: they speculate that the world’s production cannot meet the demand from 1.3 billion Chinese consumers. But China’s consumption-driven new generation lives side by side with hundreds of millions of peasants still below the poverty line. In Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province, this stratification is stark: tiny villages are dwarfed in between new tower blocks. The growth of institutions is just as haphazard as the patchy urbanization.
In Guangzhou, a city of five million, there is one independent art space. And Guangzhou is trying to change its image for the sake of the international art market. The big guns are being brought in for the city’s second triennial this year. Hosted by the Guangdong Museum of Art, it’s being curated by Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist, with Rem Koolhaas chairing a D-Lab seminar series focusing on the urbanization and architecture in the PRD. Called "Beyond: Experimentation and Modernization," the project seems more forward-looking than the first triennial, which focused on a retrospective of the past ten years of Chinese art.
Two out of 30
One major project in the massive urbanization of the Pearl River Delta is the new university city south east of Guangzhou. A thirty-minute drive from the city centre, the universities have been put up in a domineering fashion typical of Communism. Five years ago the area was villages and rice paddies. Now there are six universities separated by four-lane motorways. The buildings are huge, too big to be fully occupied. On the Fine Arts Academy campus, which used to be in the city centre, only two students in a group of thirty intend to become artists. The rest, most of which are enrolled in design rather than the traditional alternatives of oil painting or sculpture, intend to go on to work in advertising or fashion design. Few, if any, could name international artists they find interesting.
In the oil painting department in the Guangzhou Academy is a single module for fourth year students in Experimental Contemporary Art. Led by Haung Xioapeng, who has returned to China after fourteen years in London, where he did an MA at the Slade, his is the only module where the students are encouraged to develop conceptual work not restricted to traditional media. Ironically, the work that really embodies the sexy notion of contemporary Chinese art that Western markets are so hungry for, is being produced under methods that are bringing concepts from the UK back to China.
The Local Scene
To say the local art scene was active might be over-generous, but it is progressive in tiny pockets. In the 1990s, Big Tail Elephant Group, a collective of Lin Yilin, Chen Shaoxiong, Liang Juhui, and Xu Tan made interventions on the street to reveal and engage with the unique boom of southern China. Elsewhere (the majority of the art college for example) innovation is non-existent, but some local artists are making their presence felt internationally by building work from the complexities of daily life at home. Cao Fei, 27, lives and works in Guangzhou. In the past year she’s been selected to show in the Moscow Biennale (also co-curated by Obrist), the Shanghai Biennale, and Tokyo’s Mori Museum for solo shows in New York, and in China. Fei grew up in the 1980s and 90s, a world of electronic media and advertisements, and Hanru says her photos and videos convey "the pleasure of an age of new technologies and express a fear of plunging into a brutal nightmare where society is founded on a mixture of totalitarian politics and materialist values."
This is not a culture that waits for permission or for urban planning: a lack of permanence and a violent rejection of tradition have been lived throughout history, most recently with the knocking down of temples in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Cities get built quickly and without a plan. Two examples sit near the border, in a no man’s land between mainland China and Hong Kong known as the Special Economic Zones. Shenzhen was a testing ground for Western-style capitalism as a way for China to try out economic modernization in the mainland before reacquiring Hong Kong in 1997. Built up in the last two decades, Shenzhen has exploded from a small border town to a sanitized mass of tower blocks that feel like a mix of Palm Springs landscape design and Hong Kong commerce. In the same region, Nansha is a new town, which, like the new museums being built for China, sits vacant. Designed and developed by a local real estate magnet, it has hotels, conference centres, concert halls, apartment buildings; all luxurious, brand new, and empty. Everything here develops so quickly that present inhabitants aren’t a concern; they’ll come sooner or later. Yang Yong, who now lives in Shenzhen, documents with his photos the alienation of urbanization for a new population without roots.
The art production in China that has backbone and relevance are the projects that engage with this confusing environment, and not a boring combination of traditional oil painting and Occidental assumptions. With the structures and institutions beginning to be put in place, the world is waiting to see how China’s tradition of rapid development will translate into contemporary art. The result could be a progressive new model emerging from totalitarian politics, or it could be a sorry mimic of art in the capitalist world.
