Post 89 Artists
"Threading Our Way Through the Images "
article by Pi Li
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| "Threading
Our Way Through the Images"
For anyone who experienced the fervour of the "New Wave Movement" in art during the eighties, contemporary art in the nineties seems to have hit a road block. This road block is not only apparent in the lack of interest in contemporary art amongst the public, but is also evident in art's seeming isolation from other forms of contemporary culture. Historically visual art, unlike sport or performing arts has never attracted such large audiences, yet the situation appears even more acute today. We might be tempted to pin the blame for this current predicament on official control over cultural exchange and transmission. However its more likely that the growing disinterest between the public and contemporary art stems in part from the difficulty that exists between present practices fulfilling the values that traditionally people have associated with what they see as "art" It might be that this road block has affected some artists who have experienced rapid technological advances rather than more traidtional methods of writing and reading. Others have made important uses of the new technology in order to challenge tradtional art forms. For those artists since the 1970' raised on pop music, Hong Kong/Macau movies, pirated CDs, MTV and sensational news reports and other forms of consumer culture in the information age, their visual perception absorbs images far faster and more unconsciously than in the past. Movies, television, pulp fiction, popular magazine, pirated laser disks and other forms of media, including the internet, bring things to be observed and accepted without the critical awareness that has informed previous generations. Images and visual perception have become the new method of transmission and sensory perception. They have led to a form of high speed receptivity. These floods of images do necessarily lead to better clarity and understanding, but may contibute to more superficiality. It is precisely because our current image culture is absorbed less critically by the general public in their desire to be "modernized" that it has created a kind of cultural "withering" that is evident all around us. Chinese art critics at one time viewed popular culture as a weapon to fight the official ideology. Yet, they underestimated this point. Pop culture is a double-edged sword. While pop culture goes a long way to undermining official ideology, it also neutralizes culture, even the individual itself. Particularly, the emphasis that pop culture puts on visual perception in the end leaves people afloat in a sea of images with little time to make value judgements. And, in the web of images, the self also no longer seems to possess what I term its "original dignity". For young artists awash in these images, many have resisted the pressures and chosen to work to restore a sense of the personal over the popular. They re-work ready-made images from a discounted visual resource base in an attempt to recover the self. Wang Yanru shows a strong concern with the potential relationship between public and individual experience by re-contextualizing food advertisements, which represent both an idealized sense of sight and taste. The re-contextualized images, even though they retain their original color, nonetheless cause the viewer to forget, even if only temporarily, the once perfect sights associated with these savory things and to recall the cruel cutting, dicing, squeezing and pulling that they had to go through before the aesthetically pleasing end product. Yang Min attempts to map the tracks of changing value standards in a transitioning China through fashion advertisements. In virtually unaltered depictions of various advertisements, he undertakes to fade, vandalize, and occasionally transpose motifs in order to promote a sense of skepticism and doubt toward the "values" thrust upon people daily in a barrage of value-laden images that remain unquestioned. Cao Zhongwei and Yan Bo represent the laid-back element of their generation. Yan Bo works with common everyday cardboard boxes, on which he paints the imprint traces of consumer goods with acrylic and other substances and renders them in a spontaneous way into clocks, door gods and other images that come to mind. Cao Zhongwei's paintings of televisions all display a strong sense of humor. As fragments of today's youths' collective memory, these works present a cohesive construct of common early experience shared by many youths. After a brief moment of pleasure, these artists allow us to also see the impoverished and restricted side of modern society. Viewing the happiness in these pictures might be likened to seeing the happiness of homeless children playing in garbage landfills, a kind of unbearable happiness that we are helpless to do anything about. As these artists thread their way through the world of images toward the recovery of self dignity, they display a freshness in their attempt to preserve and portray the feelings of the individual. This is their way of subverting mainstream popular media and culture. Their significance is not only in the fact that they have extricated themselves from the political consciousness of Cynical Pop and Kitsch art to rise above the narrow emotions of political victimization. But, perhaps even more importantly, these artists have the potential to break through today's cultural road block with their artistic intepretations of popular images in that their interpretations are not too far removed from society and in many ways subject to a wider reading and understanding of contemporary society. |
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Pi Li is a recent graduate of the Art History department, Central Academy of Fine Arts. Mr. Pi Li now works for the Courtyard Gallery in Beijing and freelances as a writer on contemporary art.
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