Art of the Ecstatic Multitude
Beatrice Leanza
The dilemma of identity, revolutionized more than one century ago by the Western avant-garde as an extroverted self-experience and later reproduced by consumer capitalism into the collective spectacle of our media society, has progressively penetrated the values of everyday life and at the same time left the project of modernity still spiritually incomplete. While subjectivity has become the very precondition of art, engagement in human dialogue and intellectual commitment into shared social commons and political issues have impinged on artistic practice an even larger mandate and indeed expanded the geographical borders of its psychological understanding.
That process of ideological consciousness, which less than 30 years ago led to the birth of a Chinese national avant-garde movement, is now upholding unprecedented significance and sociological repercussions. During the course of its development, throughout the three decades reaching to the present, the status of independent art in China has in fact been strongly committed to the invasion of a psychological cultural territory within and without the soil of public acceptance. At the same time, its sprit and discipline had abruptly moved into international networking and presence onto the Western market, both under the expectations and hope that the shaping of a strong cultural identity would have matured together with correspondent economic volume.
The rapidity of such a process described by the gigantic scale of the country’s exposure onto the international scenario is augmented by the overriding poetics of a global era when crescent transnational interdependence is on a side contributing to global problem solving and on another equalizing local political agendas and economics of thoughts. Under these premises the aesthetic production of Chinese art has repeatedly been searched and had searched itself too for the signs of an exclusive character, a sort of ethical and mystical nucleus directing towards a "landscape into which no one seemed to have yet ventured" (Jurgen Habermas). If it’s true that these expectations are coming together with the sociological implication that the meaning of collective identity is embracing that of a worldwide multitude, the current schizophrenia interesting the Chinese contemporary art market can be read as misguided, derived from its still transitory movement towards a more conscious universal integration and capacity to espouse all of the discourses that the art system itself is articulating from within. If, as Habermas defines it, the avant-garde’s draws metaphor to a distinctive cultural attitude which understands itself as beholder of a yet unoccupied future, that future still remains to Chinese artists one to be envisioned and whether necessary, reacted against.
The epochal metamorphosis, that interested the above mentioned three periods, have in fact rooted in generations’ intellectual criteria by determining diverse processes of memory and sense of history and belonging, the relationship to the past and the political authority, while gradually transiting to a modern concept of consumer and individualistic society. The bursting attention that the phenomenon of Chinese art is publicly gaining by culminating in a commercial boom in both Europe and US, has also changed the dynamics of the national artistic discourse. The fast growth of the global quest for art and new paradigms has in fact determined an intended accomplishment of structural and infrastructural ameliorations and a serious attempt to consolidate figures of professionalism in all the spheres of the artistic system a local establishment. Curators, critics and art consultants are numerous, even if not always withstanding theoretical accountability. Cities like Beijing and Shanghai are witnessing a steeping development of artistic quarters, studios and galleries areas, auction houses and local art fairs are attracting an always larger audience of native buyers, while informing a wide and multi channelled scope of new cultural industry.
As well the progressive establishment of concept of biennials and triennials is a clear sign of China’s intention to meet structural integration. On the occasion of last November’s Guangzhou Triennial art director Hou Hanru stated "the biennale or triennial embodies a desire by the authorities to promote a coherent identity in an increasingly competitive world of cultural production. In many ways this is a collective longing to become a part of the overall process of economic globalization itself."
The bliss of economic prosperity and abrupt social improvement that is interesting the dense demographic of today’s China is likewise typifying the appearance of a new sociology within the artistic population too. The elevation model that starts to appear, despite the still meagre artic environment, is induced both by the emergence of better financed commercial structures, especially international private galleries of a different range and artists’ generational responses to issues of self perception and consequent ego disclosure.
During late March and the beginning of April, Beijng gave tribute to three renowned personalities from the 80s avant-garde, who commonly left the country for more than a decade until the beginning of the 90s; Ai Weiwei, Huang Rui, both ex-Stars Group members, and Zhu Wei. In the same period, solo shows by established and internationally featured Wang Jianwei were held at Arario Beijing, while in Shanghai Zhou Tiehai was celebrated by the Shanghai Museum of Art. These artists have established reputation on the basis of languages and critique which while being characterized by strong historical influences both aesthetically and ideologically, highly conceptual and addressing politically sensitive content, can also be observed as less eloquent to today’s textual and visual communication.
Those, as many others, that could be mentioned from the crowded formation of Cynical Realism and Political Pop artists from the 90s are the best recognizable stylistically and those that are profiting the most from the present market driven craze skyrocketing prices to three times the estimations at auction houses. Leng Lin director of Beijing Commune and first figure to set up a contemporary art auction in Beijing in 1996, explains that speculation is the very engine moving the local market "this high tide of commercialization and uneven capitalistic development happens together with a wide range of opportunities, larger financial possibilities and inexistent intermediary structures. This is neither good nor bad, it is just transitory. At present in China there are no collectors but investors, they rely on numbers which are currently proving contemporary art to be very profitable."
In fact what is happening in this new scenario is that with a growing league of local nouveau riche that are more and more establishing their taste and choice in the market and at large lacking critical knowledge and understanding about contemporary art practices. Young cultural entrepreneurs from China together with smaller international galleries have started fuelling the business. Galleries like Bang directed by ex music manager Huang Liaoyuan, Soka Art Centre in Beijing or Aura Gallery in Shanghai are really investing in forging a personal style and targeting an audience of local buyers. Meanwhile though artistic production from a generation of artists in their thirties and even younger ones, is emerging. In an unmediated and uneducated market, such as this scenario, the quality of works becomes often unlevelled and pushed to lighter and more self referential forms of art. "The China Effect" which abroad is mainly performed by means of an increasing media attention devoted to the country’s advancement into the global discourse, in different cases is locally resulting in easier forms of expression lacking reflection about more intricate dialectics and in deregulated commercialization of identity-less art.
The Chinese dream that is feeding urbanism with futuristic and uncontrollable construction and widely providing opportunities for self-realization and accomplishments in diverse fields of production is also facilitating exposure to a younger and less experienced generation of artists, considerably lowering selection procedures otherwise encountered anywhere in a more competitive reality. As curator Zhu Tong (Second Nanjing Triennial and curator of "Fancy Dream") remarks, these younger artists, those born in the late 70s and early 80s, are falling into the fantasy and dream of the long awaited utopian life of prosperity and success. "Self interrogation and sensitivity towards the new social and political factors are not present in these works. Artists rather fabricate allegories about the new fancy world they’ve been living in, one of massive information coming from TV and the internet." Secured by the easy development that China is encountering, the untroubled ecstatic reality that these new generations are facing is, as young experimental artist Liu Ding says, "one without enemies. This period is one of open experimentation in any field. We have the opportunity to start from zero and forge our own vision of the future. What I reckon though is that my generation is lacking spiritual identity and sense of risk. Everything is out there, within their reach, while accomplishment consumed in easy materiality and immediate gain."
On the side, institutions are attentive to catch the latest trends of Chinese contemporary art and museums delegations multiply as 2008 approaches. Exceptions and experiences obviously vary on different levels, but to someone that closely survey this reality cultural overstatements and curatorial misinterpretations might be numerous already.
Chinese art which has deceived itself for a long time believing that exposing a strong cultural dictum of Chinese-ness would have helped prompting its own success, to later struggle for braking free from that stereotype, has by all means proved to be a variegated and responsive system, modelling individual and authentic views on its own experience. But as the current establishment imposed by the market is forcing this expectations delivered by almost two decades of cultural overexposure, the potential of Chinese art cannot be traced or predicted but in the negotiation of the world society and man-made reality and awaited in its generational development and further participation in a wider variety of issues at stake everywhere in the politicized world. It is to this extent that culture would never stop being the most important device for the collective construction of the future.
