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Jane Tippet on Tu Hongtao What is the essence of contemporary Chinese art? Is there such a thing |
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Jane Tippet on Tu Hongtao
What is the essence of contemporary Chinese art? Is there such a thing as a fundamental core in this ever-changing and evolving genre? In 2005, the iconic artist Yue Minjun asserted, “Modern Chinese art devotes most of its attention to reality. And as almost every artist reaches out his antennae for what is most familiar to him and his most important experiences, one can easily identify a strong existential awareness in present-day Chinese art. This art is not inflated, not fantastic, but decidedly real. That is why it is particularly capable of stirring the soul of the viewer. Because artists are excessively concerned with the circumstances of their own existence, their work is unconsciously Chinese. That mode is not something deliberately introduced into works but just part of our lives.” As China comes to terms with its role in a global marketplace and as the West attempts to grasp Chinese culture, the visual arts have become a space of common ground—of shared interest—in which the two highly variant cultures can examine and thereby begin to understand one another.
The last two decades have seen a rise in prominence of a variety of individuals whose work has navigated the boundaries and limitations of what one might consider Chinese. Born in Chengdu in 1976, Tu Hongtao has emerged as a representative of a generation of artists whose oeuvre has focused on this very journey of national self-discovery. Though he is a contemporary of such artists as Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, and Fang Zhangjie, Hongtau has created work that is a world of virtual pleasures, images, technology, and dreams. Rooted in the aesthetics of Animamix (Animation and Comics), a term describing the marriage of the world of the visual fine art with the fundamentals of the aesthetics of animation and cartoons, Hongtao’s paintings bear witness to the rapidity of change at work in both our physical spaces and in an individual’s emotional state. They focus on creating cityscapes juxtaposing modern technological advances with figures that are doll-like in proportion and construction, stress the lack of coordination between the human condition and contemporary urban lifestyle, and in doing so emphasize the vulnerability of the individual human being. Eschewing a practice that has become common in contemporary Chinese painting—focusing on the importance of brand names, advertisements, and modern labels—his paintings instead feature surrealistic techniques (both in terms of composition and subject), highlighting the modernization of a traditionalist culture in an entirely new way.
“Landscape,” Hongtao writes, is “a kind of language with Western perspectives, buildings and crowds. In a sense it is narrative, virtuous, and illogical. From a visual point of view the pictures are abstract forms, while landscape is more like a spiritual quality.” Yet in adopting the attributes of traditional landscape painting, Hongtao raises challenges to the nature of urban development. Applying the same principles of a softer and gentler genre of art that is also traditional in the East and the West, Hongtao forces a modern audience to face the consequences of the physical change wrought by the social and physical development of our cities and countrysides. Although his pictures confer a greater brutality than may actually be present in reality, they draw attention to the extent of destruction and confusion that may exist if society—both Eastern and Western—continues on its present course.
