| China is no doubt the most attractive centre of attention for the world today, not only in terms of its economic development, but also in terms of its cultural and social mutations. Accordingly, China’s contemporary art is becoming a new emerging force in the global art scene at the beginning of the 21st century. The presence of Chinese artists in major international art events is increasing spectacularly while more and more people from the international art world are visiting and acting in the Chinese art scene. It’s no surprise that one can talk about a genuine fever for everything Chinese. |  |
Longing for Paradise, Negotiating with the Real – Hou Hanru
China is no doubt the most attractive centre of attention for the world today, not only in terms of its economic development, but also in terms of its cultural and social mutations. Accordingly, China’s contemporary art is becoming a new emerging force in the global art scene at the beginning of the 21st century. The presence of Chinese artists in major international art events is increasing spectacularly while more and more people from the international art world are visiting and acting in the Chinese art scene. It’s no surprise that one can talk about a genuine fever for everything Chinese.
It is in this context that one should ask the question: what’s the real significance of Chinese contemporary art in Chinese society and in the globalising world of today. One can also raise the question of the significance of contemporary art in general in the world by exploring the “boom” of Chinese art.
Contemporary art activities in China have been developed along with the speedy modernisation process of the country. Fundamentally, it’s a movement of experimentation and of the “avant-garde.” The ultimate motivation is to achieve freedom of imagination and expression even though the cultural, political and economic conditions are constantly changing and evolving. However, the rapid modernisation and integration into the global market economy and geopolitical restructuring imply new and increasing pressure coming from the demand for economic growth and the transformation of the nature of cultural activities into exchangeable objects in the global market and communication systems. This provokes a kind of unprecedented, collective fever for development and consumption. Ironically, this tendency pushes further the uniformisation of the society under the banner of material development and leaves less and less space for individual freedom and independent intellectual positioning.
China is going through a period of explosive booms of material development, consumption and urbanisation. In the meantime, further social democratisation and justice building are evolving in rather slow paces, not to say stagnated. The populations are, increasingly, being swallowed into the spiral of migration, mixture and social reclassification. However, as pointed out above, individual freedom and especially creativity have not been much encouraged. Like most of the intelligentsia, artists are caught in an even more intense contradiction between material improvement and spiritual limitation. Covering an extremely immense territory, and in many different contexts, contemporary art in China is a highly diverse and complex scene. The opportunities for frequent presences in the internal and international art worlds have not only excited the artists, but they have made integrating themselves into the global art market become a new condition of their work. For many, it’s also a crucial moment for critical reflections on reality and the consolidation of personal stances and independences.
These artists, by further profound research and persistence in their own thoughts, imaginations and creativities, reaffirm that the very essential vocation of art is that of existing as open spaces for freedom—freedom of imagination and creation. Instead of superficially manipulating “social and political signs” to satisfy the expectations of institutions and the market, they refuse to be instrumentalised by either national or international establishments. They resort to the most diverse and personal languages and references in order to express their ultimate fantasy. Often, with great senses of humour and distant but pungent comments, they fabricate their own heavens, their own paradises of imagination, fantasy and ideals. They incorporate experiences that navigate between memories and dreams, between personal desires and philosophical reflections, between everyday, “minor” initiatives and the revolutionary, utopian projects that they are constantly developing in their works in the most unpredictable, unfathomable and even uncertain ways.
Using all kinds of imaginable media, they open their works and lives up to the most risky intellectual and cultural adventures. In the middle and late 90s, the most spectacular phenomenon in the Chinese scene was, among others, actions and images that directly involved corporal conditions, often including suffering and violence. It was a kind of mixture of desperation and loss of self-control in the face of a schizophrenic world. However, along with the establishment and “normalisation” of a consumerist and urbanised society, especially along with the prevailing of electronic images in the urban world ranging from TV programs to advertisements, from pop culture to the internet, the introduction of multimedia such as video, digital photography and computer technologies has fundamentally changed the approaches and languages of the artists’ creations, and, more importantly, their visions and imaginations. A great number of video and cinema works have been created to provide entirely new narratives of the individual and collective lives in the Chinese society today, while new fantasies and critical discourses are being generated through the creation of those narratives. On the other hand, urbanisation is also deeply influencing the mutation of the art scene. More and more artists are now exploring the possibilities of bridging urban life and art, and especially the possibility of merging architectural design and the visual arts. All in all, these allow the artists to re-engage themselves with the real.
The most spectacular and exciting condition in today’s China is speedy and explosive urban expansion. This urban explosion has been, for the last decade, the main driving force for China’s modernisation and mutation towards a global power. Far away from established models of modern city development, the current Chinese urbanisation is generating a unique model out of its constant negotiations with all kinds of unbalanced and unexpected situations. It’s always the result of responses to immediate economic and social demands. Uncertainty and instability are the main qualities and the very centre of its energetic mobilisation while the cities are seeing their territories being expanded in both horizontal and vertical directions. In the meantime, the traditional local differences between cities are rapidly erased and replaced by what Rem Koolhaas calls Generic Cities. To a great extent, Chinese cities are becoming a kind of banal but fascinating non-places. This no doubt is a wonderful new context for Chinese artists to act in. In fact, many artists in the 1990s have been developing their work directly from the streets. The best example is the Guangzhou based “Big Tail Elephant Group”. Their works are often site-specific installations and actions demonstrated directly in public spaces. Often resorting to materials found on the spot, they intervene in the sites with highly energetic, imaginative and critical gestures to reveal the hidden aspects of urban booming. The increasing standardisation of inhabitant conditions, commercialisation and privatisation of public spaces and other issues related to economic globalisation and geopolitical conflicts are being brought out as targets of their critical revelation of the city reality. In the meantime, their actions and shows, like urban guerrillas, are momentary occupation of the urban space itself, generating a kind of temporary autonomous zone, a punctuated haven, in the heart of a crowded and busy city. This strategy has permitted them the maximum freedom of imagination and expression. It also inspires a lot of younger generation artists to negotiate for their survival and development in the difficult reality. Zheng Guogu and his “Yangjiang Group”– are certainly the most intimate alliance. Based in the provincial city Yangjiang, a few hours drive away from Guangzhou, where “Chinese style urbanisation” unfolds in a radical and excessive manner blending new constructions resulted from tabula rasa urbanism and remains of unfinished buildings due to bad plans and bankruptcy, they not only create art works to reflect to the mutation of urban life in such a context. What is more interesting is that they design and construct excessively extravagant “deconstructivist” buildings in the midst of banal new buildings as a provocative gesture to insert alternatives to disturb the “normality” of urban structure. On the other hand, these buildings, in turn, often offer them spaces for further artistic experiments. Photography and film shootings as well as various forms of performances take place here while the interior spaces become permanent laboratories for design and other related activities. This allows them to get on board of an endless and totally free adventure of continuous inventions of artistic languages while the field of “art practice” is being infinitively enlarged and expanded, like the complexity of the city itself… One of most exciting results is the project “Canton Express” in “Z.O.U – Zone of Urgency” in the last Venice Biennale. The project, with a street-city designed by Zheng Guogu and his friends, gathered more than 20 artists, architects and other cultural activists from the Cantonese region (Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Yangjiang, etc.) to create a temporarily event city – a fabricated paradise – to display their individual creations.
In the meantime, everything in the city seems to be changing so easily that its appearance and disappearance are happening seamlessly. One of the most remarkable events happening here, in a similar style of mutation, is its contemporary art scene. Claiming for distinct individualities, many artists are all fascinated by the spectacle of their city’s mutation. However proud they may be of such an immense “progress”, they also preserve distant and critical positions towards the urban dramas. Artists like Lu Chunsheng, Zhou Tiehai and Liang Yue, among many others, have been the most active ones. Their works, reflecting to the wonder of the urban transformation, are also massively expressing their intrigued but puzzled reactions to such a reality
Living in the capital Beijing, artists like Zhu Jia, Wang Gongxin, Wang Jianwei, Song Dong, Yin Xiuzhen, Liu Wei, Lin Tianmiao, Zhang Dali, Sheng Qi, Jiang Jie, Zhan Wang, Sui Jianguo, Miao Xiaochun, Hong Hao and Zeng Li etc. are no less sensitive to the urban mutation movement in the country. Actually, with the coming of the 2008 Olympic Games, Beijing is going through an even more radical and aggressive urban mutation. Most of the traditional court-house based urban texture has been erased while new boulevards and open sites are lending themselves to national and international architecture celebrities to experiment with their latest fantasies. Beijing, with the introduction of names like Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & De Meuron, MVRDV, Zaha Hadid and Paul Andreu, is quickly being turned into a test ground of globalisation of urban expansion and architecture. This certainly has a major impact on the art scene. The city hence becomes a central concern for the art scene. The architect Yung Ho Chang has been closely collaborating with the visual art world in his inventive exhibition designs and actual installation works. He recently leads a research project “Beijing Morphing” with his students and colleagues to demonstrate the evolution of Beijing’s urban space and social situation. It provides a significant reference tool for the cultural world to understand the city. Ai Wei Wei, an artist who was involved with the first Chinese avant-garde group “Star Star (Xing Xing)” in the late 1970s returned to Beijing after over a decade of living in New York. The spectacular urban development in Beijing has a huge impact on him, who has been entangled in the question of Chinese cultural root and global conditions of contemporary life. Soon, he has turned himself into a self-made architect who experiments with a hybrid style incorporating traditional Chinese craft materials, technology and western, minimalist architectural language. This makes him a unique figure perfectly relevant to the situation.
Kan Xuan’s video works such as “Kan Xuan, Kan Xuan”, “Objects” (2003) and so on, are, in turn, similar but silent claims from a young woman’s depth of heart, lonely and helplessly facing such a precarious world. Apparently fragile and delicate, they are in fact obsessive and powerful resistance vis-à-vis the real … This kind of uncertainty vis-à-vis reality can be also seen in Zhuang Hui’s recent work. Originally a photographer who utilised panoramic format black and white group portraits to document the dominance of collectiveness in Chinese society, he increasingly resorts to different media such as large scale installations to demonstrate the merge of fiction and reality. His latest video and photo works, furtive but loose, purportedly show an out-of-control process that reflects to a kind of ultimate suspicion with regard to any events.
What is revealed here is an intense schizophrenia, a dilemma between searching space for independent existence and expression in the public, urban atmosphere – to construct a paradise for the individual and the desire and ethic duty to engage with social reality, is so pervasive and “typical” that many artists exert their creativities with a focus on such a tension.
Video as the most open and flexible technology and language has provided the favourite media for most of them. One can witness a boom of video art in the process of the city boom. In the meantime, it’s extremely interesting to note that cinematic narratives are increasingly becoming a focus for the artists. No doubt, the capacity of expansion in both time and space implied in the cinematic linguistic system can allow the largest liberty for them to explore and express in depth their intellectual engagements, in their direct confrontation with the explosive urban world affected by modernisation and globalisation as well as in their determinate pursuit of paradise – a utopia still imaginable in the age of dystopia.
Confronting with an unfathomable and incomprehensible urban mutation, Lu Chunsheng also seeks to construct an alternative haven. However, equally organising his thoughts and sentiments into cinematic textures, his narratives are full of suspension, interruption, irrationalness and even chaos behind its tranquillity, sublimity and introspectiveness. Recounting his “incapacity to understand the changing world”, his films, carrying the most unconceivable titles like “The Curve Is Able To Cough”(2001), “That’s All Wright Brothers’ Fault” (2001), “Trotsky Was Murdered In Summer, The Gentlemen In The Financial Field Become More Depressible” (2001), “Before The First Steam Locomotive Was Born” (2003) and “A History of Chemistry I” (2004), they are a kind of labyrinth-like, alchemical blending of urban rumours, science history, accidents, violence, detective adventure, complots and aimless actions… Radically humorous, ironical, pungent and playful, they constitute a parallel universe of imagination and enjoyment. However, it’s by no means disengaged from real. Instead, they represent the ultimate dystopian vision of the real, which is ontologically impossible to understand for the contemporary man.
Cinematic narratives not only provide the ideal language for artists to conceive and realise their paradisiacal alternative realms of imagination, dreams and ontological inquiry. It’s also a highly efficient tool for artists who commit themselves to directly witness changes in the urban society. Urban expansion does not only change completely the physical forms of the city. It also alters totally the social structure and ways of living of the inhabitants. Thanks to economic development, migration of labour forces and integration into the globalisation process, Chinese urban societies have seen some fundamental transformations. Differences between different social classes are being drastically amplified while the whole social-political system is going through some major evolutions. Artists are doubtlessly among the first to react to such restructuring. Concerning with reality has always been in the centre of Chinese art although space for public criticism has remained limited. It is in the limited space that some artists come up with the most powerful witness to the contradictory and conflictive reality.
Cao Fei and Ou Ning’s “San Yuan Li”(2003), however, is certainly the most powerful work. Exploring the particular urban transition process of San Yuan Li, a village in the city of Guangzhou, it demonstrates some fundamental contradictions in the urban mutation while exposing some highly inventive and alternative solutions to face the violent homogenisation of architectural forms. In the meantime, it is a wonderful visual construct of an exciting urban zone, a veritable urban poesy.
China’s integration with the global system is never one directional. More and more international artists and professionals are now being “imported” to the country to become a considerable influence in the evolution of the local art scene. Naturally, some overseas Chinese artists, being increasingly successful in the global arena, are now coming back to the country to realize and exhibit their works. Among them are some important names such as Huang Yong Ping, Cai Guoqiang, Chen Zhen, Shen Yuan, Wang Du, Yan Peiming, Yang Jiechang, Gu Wenda, Xu Bing, and Ni Haifeng, etc… With their direct experiences of travelling and working around the world, they have shown particular insightful visions and opinions on global issues. In the meantime, they are also able to observe and comment on the local situation from a wider and deeper perspective with a global dimension.
The question of tension between reality and utopia, between dominant ideology and independent worldviews, between public space and individual freedom are now being brought to the front. Chinese artists, probably more often than others due to their uncomfortable existence in a fundamentally schizophrenic social context, have to face such a question and look for alternative solutions to express themselves. Imagining and constructing personal havens to express their fantasies and desire has always been an important option. This is not only a simple relieving refuge.
It’s also a veritable space of resistance and freedom. Gu Dexin’s works, navigating in the ocean of imaginary creatures and negotiating between vital pleasure and fatal erosion of life, have formed a fascinating universe of such a desire for freedom. His recent computer works, animating hybrid creatures that incarnate eroticism, political critique and humanist values, are extraordinary manifestos of individual idealism. If Gu Dexin represents the existential idealism of a generation grown up in the 1980s avant-garde movement, a younger generation, inheriting the aspiration for individual freedom, tends to develop such idealism from an even more intimate and thus more “down-to-earth” ground. Facing an increasingly materialistic society of consumption and the overwhelming dominance of new technology and popular culture, they resort to a rather different system of value and mental state. Instead of investing their energy to face-to-face political struggle, they opt to fabricate their own, personal enclosures to realise their values of independence and dreams. “Alternative” forms of living and thinking, such as video games, Kara-OK parties and even drug consumption, are being invented and built into a new infrastructures of this generations’ communication and expression systems. Speaking specifically coded languages and sharing similar fantasies, artists of the new generation, like many of their contemporaries, are now developing their work along a totally new line. Utopia is no longer a valid form of paradise. The currently valid form is a more heteopia-like, multiple, complex and impure form of imaginary zone, a paradise fabricated with quotidian negotiations with survival obligations and fantasies, obsessions and hallucinations. However, they have by no means given up the edge of critique. Artists like Yan Lei, Fu Jie, Chen Wenbo, Liu Wei, Feng Mengbo, Cao Fei, Unmask, etc. in spite of the diversity of their media and languages, are closely related to such a “Zeitgeist” under the nickname of “New New Human Beings”.
Although belonging to an older group of artists, Yan Lei has been a significantly independent but influential figure in the 1990s with his interventionist critiques of the institution and the globalising art world in his conceptual projects and painting. Continuing with such a sense of critique, his new works are leading to a more hallucinating realm of mechanical production of images. What counts is not only the implication of the images, which are often referring to the issue of institutional power. What is even more pertinent is the combination of the ambiguity of the status of the images and the disappearance of the author. The result is an open and indefinable space of dreaming and spiritual ecstasy. Cao Fei, a much younger woman artist from Guangzhou, on the other hand, even more relevantly such a Zeitgeist. She has grown up in the world of electronic entertainments and advertisements. Now at the mid-20s, she has already produced a great number of DV films and photography. They cover a wide range of subject matters, both closely related to the everyday life of the New New Human Beings and concerning with social transformations. Inspired by both advertisement and experimental films, Cao Fei has developed a highly personal language demonstrating the jouissance vis-à-vis the mutating reality. They are often fresh, colourful, full of movement and energy, humorous and ironic. They are at once celebrations of the pleasure of living in a new age of new technology and expressions of the fear of plunging into the brutal nightmare of a society founded upon the mixture of totalitarian politics and materialist values. However, capturing vivid moments of real life and fantasy, Cao Fei’s works are always smooth and timely relevant in spite of their diversity, without hiding away the particular sensibility and sensuality of a girl at her early 20s. This endows her work with a quasi-unfathomable depth of psychological tension, oscillating between love and anger, sexuality and pain, hope and despair, movement and suspense… Narrating the most dreamlike but uncanny experiences and imaginations, Cao Fei’s work brings us to get on a wonderful journey towards the realm of the self-made myth of this new generation. Like the estrange figures of “Cosplayers” in her latest film (2005), the mythic images of her work haunt our life and penetrate in our unconsciousness in the most unlikely way.
It is the very way that one has to get on in order to deal with today’s art scene in China, swinging between paradise and reality.
