Next Station: ‘Cartoon’?
Fang Fang
I have always wanted to curate an exhibition that captures the artistic climate of my contemporaries. Since 2002, I have seen a number of new young writers of the so-called ‘post-1980’ generation, such as Han Han, Guo Jingming, Chun Shu and Zhang Yueran, burst onto the Chinese literature scene. This has again inspired me to seek out the interests and enthusiasms of ‘post-1970’ art. After much time spent wandering the streets, exploring studio to studio, I finally found the twelve ‘post-1970’ artists included in this show/book. They all have strong academic backgrounds, but have chosen to paint using ‘cartoon’ forms that are not approved of by older generations. In this way, they have freed themselves from the bonds of their academic training, and, perhaps, freed themselves in general.
To understand why these ‘post-1970’ artists have chosen to work with cartoon forms we must investigate their childhood experiences. Born in the 70s and 80s, this generation was obsessed with "Astro Boy," " Uproar In Heaven" and "Transformers" to the same extent that the generation born in the 60s hankered for green army satchels, red stars and Beijing’s famous Moscow Restaurant, Lao Mo.
These young visual artists may have been cartoon fans as children, but as adults, borrowing from cartoons in their art is by no means a show of nostalgic imitation. Behind the cartoons are highly individualized psychological worlds, concrete feelings of love, hate, passion and anxiety, and life experiences that may be true or invented.
In Chinese, animated cartoons are referred to by the transliterated term katong or the more familiar name dongman. For several years, it has been hard to find anything worth watching among the dongman products being broadcast and circulated–the last time I was a cartoon consumer was actually two or three years ago, when I stayed up all night watching pirated copies of Spirited Away and Southpark. The Chinese cartoon industry, a focus of attention for numerous citizens, has made a thousand entreaties for a masterpiece over the years, but we have yet to see even the scaly claw of a masterpiece. State-run cartoon enterprises, the biggest players in the industry, have brought their products into the field of youth education and planned their development accordingly. Civilian enterprises are very proud of the achievements they are making in the area of profit, but still, their products always make me think of the domestically produced sports car, Geely’s ‘Beauty Leopard.’
What kind of cartoon stars can the paltry fees offered to writers by the Chinese cartoon industry hope to cultivate? The few hundred RMB paid for the copyright and use of a single work will simply cause any potential cartoon stars to starve. In comparison, ‘cartoon’ painters who earn their living by selling paintings are in a very different situation. Their income from the sale of a painting ranges from a few thousand RMB to tens of thousands, many times higher than the fees paid to artists and writers by cartoon magazines. So who is it that pays the bills of China’s ‘cartoon’ painting? They are a handful of people from the same generation as the artists, entrepreneurs who made money early in life and dream of becoming the next Ding Lei or Chen Tianqiao. The investment they are making in the art of their contemporaries is likely to shake-up the ranks of Chinese contemporary art, building a new stronghold that lies outside both the state-supported, orthodox artist community and the independent, unorthodox artist community.
