Not Just Another Brick in the Wall
Erin Scime
From October 21, 2005 through January 29, 2006, The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art was one of the most significant exhibitions of the Albright-Knox’s recent history. Organized by Professor Gao Minglu of SUNY Buffalo, the exhibition included 47 artists divided into three separate spaces: SUNY Buffalo Anderson Gallery, SUNY Buffalo Center for the Arts and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The exhibition was made possible by collaboration with the Millennium Art Museum in Beijing.
Several months ago, I was sent (online) a short podcast of two Asian males, dressed in Houston Rockets jerseys, lip-synching to a Backstreet Boys song. However, it wasn’t until after being sent this video by several friends, hearing about it in unrelated conversations at work and on the subway, and reading about it in Thomas L. Friedman’s NY Times article “Chinese Finding Their Voice” (10/21/05), did I come to understand this simple occurrence as a significant and transitional point in which we must think about the breaking down of barriers between China and the United States. In 1989 the physical wall of Berlin was broken, symbolizing our reconnection with Eastern Europe. However, because there is no set-date for when the wall between communist China and the West fell, the Great Wall serves as this allegory within this exhibition.
In his introductory essay, Albright-Knox Curator Douglas Dreishspoon reminds us of the psychological walls pertaining to the East ranging from the materiality of Emperor Qin’s [221-207 B.C.] stone partition to the Communist government and more recent SARS epidemic. But at the dawn of the digital millennium, these walls are rapidly succumbing to larger (more profitable) business and artistic networks.
In his preface, Gao Minglu states that the exhibition and accompanying catalogue are not merely anecdotal, but a “concise history of contemporary Chinese art.” Indeed, this is true. For the changing landscape and interpretation of the Great Wall takes on a change of significance when the revolutionary thoughts and reflections on China’s momentous past are assembled into a cohesive examination of the changing landscape and dynamism of contemporary China. The nation’s recent opening to the West has allowed for an advancement of technology-media multinational companies has allowed its urban centers to become increasingly more global and interwoven with Western culture and networked commerce. The question is: within this maelstrom of events, how have (and how will) young Chinese artists find their voice?
Initially, the exhibition begins on a celebratory mark: from replication of the wall in its texture, emotional history and physical presence over the corporeality of the human form. Based on his proposal for the United Nations, Wenda Gu’s 10,000 Kilometers is a wall, formed from bricks of hair. Ma Liuming’s performance on a section of the wall poses a conversation about the recent changing views on sexual freedom and gender identity antithetical to the nation’s history embedded within the wall. In Xu Bing’s massive rubbing of a portion of the wall outside Beijing, the wall’s ghostly past and unparalleled grandeur becomes a subjective, purloined panorama extracted from China’s countryside.
Beyond the physicality of the wall, the exhibition highlights several artists working within the changing environment of their nation. As a result, it is quite clear that within contemporary Chinese art, there is a question of style, approach and mode to art-making. In a similar vein to Soviet art, once opened to the West by the efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev, young Chinese artists are forced to assimilate into the very global art world. Minglu also speaks of the dichotomy between the individual and the collective. Stating that it is primarily a Western notion to stress the productivity of the individual “free” artist as “good” over the traditional Chinese social artist’s view is primarily a result of the language of globalization. The changing definition of self can be seen from the early 90s to the present. Take for example, Wang Xingwei’s Mason, a self-portrait in which the artist’s own body replaces the stone in an imitation of Gustave Courbet’s famous Stonebreakers; or another painting, Eight Women Leaping into the River, in which eight husky and Communist-garbed Social Realist-style figures emerge from a battle with a red sky in background and purifying water at their feet.
Another theme beyond the wall deals with the rise of a migrant worker class in China. Song Dong’s performance Together with Farm Workers and Zhang Dali’s Offspring both attack the existing welfare system which has created this poor, often forgotten migrant class. Similar to the intents of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, these works open discussion of poverty as the result of an imperious global economy.
Outside of the exhibition, the catalogue serves as a captivating history of Chinese avant-garde art and culture stretching back to the last 20 years or so. Gao Minglu’s years of research acutely weed through the many “isms” and developments in experimental and conceptual art. [Anyone familiar with Russian art history will find this catalogue as definitive as Camilla Gray’s The Russian Experiment in Art.] The author also presents the issue of translation of culture and language within these works, particularly in the confusion surrounding the term “avant-garde” as it relates to Chinese contemporary art and Euro-American art. As we know it, the term has been situated within the writings of Charles Baudelaire, whom clarified the position of the artist as self-alienated from the emerging bourgeois culture and changing capitalist dynamic of 19th century France. But the “culture industry” as we know it in the West, is somewhat conflicting with the long engrained philosophies and trends of ancient China. As Minglu explains, the term avant-garde is used in China as a “unity of the aesthetic and the social”–a sort of mix of ancient philosophy and communist theories. With this contextual breakdown at hand, it is possible to view the changing landscape of Chinese social, political and economic outlook via this exhibition. Gao Minglu’s research and catalogue proved to be an insightful, educated and inspiring examination of contemporary Chinese art.
