The Great Transition: Artists’ Photography and Video in China
By Christopher Phillips, Exhibition Curator
My interest in recent Chinese art was first kindled in 1998, when the exhibition Inside Out, at that time the most comprehensive survey of contemporary works from China to appear in the U.S., was presented at P.S. 1 and the Asia Society in New York. Inside Out traced the main directions in Chinese art from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s; it charted the rise and fall of such movements as Political Pop and Cynical Realism, and, more significantly, brought to wide attention the achievements of such figures as Cai Guo-Qiang, Gu Wenda, and Xu Bing. I was struck by the freshness and inventiveness of the paintings, prints, and above all the installations on display, and during the show’s run I had the good fortune to meet a number of the participating artists. They seemed to me a remarkable group, distinguished by their hyperalertness to the world around them, their unusual imaginative scope, and their confidence in their own creative powers and cultural idiom.
The following year I began what became a series of regular visits to China. As I made the rounds of artists’ studios in Beijing, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai, and other urban centers, I noticed that a shift toward media-based work was underway among younger practitioners, even those who had trained as painters and sculptors. My path soon crossed that of Wu Hung, who has for the past decade has been one of the most insightful commentators on contemporary Chinese art. At our first meeting, we discovered a shared fascination with the sudden emergence of photography and video as central preoccupations of Chinese artists. The work that captured our attention stood out by reason of its brash energy, to be sure, but also because of its sweeping range of historical and cultural reference. The monumental scale, too, preferred by many of the artists seemed to mirror the breathtaking ambition of the changes taking place throughout the country. Finally, this Chinese work did not really translate easily into the familiar categories of global contemporary art, but stubbornly insisted on its own concerns.
It was in response to this remarkable turn in Chinese art that Wu Hung and I began to plan this exhibition and catalogue. We have chosen not to attempt an all-embracing survey of recent Chinese media-based art, but rather to adopt a more limited and selective approach. Our hope is to introduce to American audiences a remarkable group of younger artists who are at this point still little-known in the United States, and to concentrate on works that convey the complexity of these artists’ responses to the changes in Chinese life that confront them every day.
For those who have not spent regular stretches of time in China in the past decade, and who have not witnessed the constant daily upheavals that constitute the Chinese boom, these artworks can at first seem a mixture of bewildering elements. Artist Zhang Peili, a frequent participant in international exhibitions, speaks frankly of the "quite basic ignorance of China and Chinese culture on the part of the Western art world," which he feels prevents a full understanding of works that spring directly from the current realities in China.
Certainly it is not always apparent to foreign visitors that for the majority of its people China is still an agricultural society, tied to the slow, seasonal rhythms of rural life. At the same time, a classic modernization process is unfolding, complete with breakneck industrialization; the massive transfer of population from the countryside to urban zones; the construction of towering skyscraper cities; and the advent of previously undreamed-of individual mobility thanks to the proliferation of private automobiles. Simultaneously, a postindustrial information society is also taking shape, the signs of which are already visible in the growing presence of personal computers with Internet connections as well as the inescapability of mobile telephones. All of these tendencies, existing side by side and usually in tension, yield the surrealistic juxtapositions that occur at every turn in early twenty-first-century China.
The same dizzying sense of scrambled temporalities greets the foreign viewer’s first encounter with China’s contemporary artistic life. Present-day artists such as Wang Qingsong have expressed the feeling that China’s ancient cultural traditions have been shattered in the past century, reduced to a heap of disconnected fragments for artists to pick through and attempt to turn to their own purposes. At the same time, Chinese artists, effectively isolated from the Western art world from 1949 to 1979, have felt compelled to assimilate as rapidly as possible the key lessons of international modern and contemporary art. As a result, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys and Cindy Sherman, have all been avidly gulped down at once. The references to the works of these predecessors that now surface in contemporary Chinese art can at first seem alarmingly out of kilter to outside observers –at least until we grasp the unpredictable ways in which these works have been incorporated and assigned new values.
Not surprisingly, the recent emergence of photography and video as leading art media in China follows a similar pattern. Before considering how this situation bears on specific contemporary artists and their work, however, it may be useful to briefly sketch out some of the ways in which the Chinese historical experience of these media has significantly differed from that of Europe, Japan, and the United States.
Photography in China: A Divergent Path
(rest of the article is coming soon)
