Toward A Transnational Modernity: An
Overview of the Exhibition
"Inside Out" an essay
by Gao
Minglu
| New Chinese Art
strives to present a survey of contemporary art from the Chinese
societies of Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the overseas Chinese
artist community that retains or respects its original content and
milieu insofar as possible in the very different cultural and social
context of the western museum space. The paradox of trying to present
the art's originality on its own terms in such a different setting may
best be indicated by the title Inside Out.
The primary goal of this exhibition is to enrich the western audience's understanding of contemporary art from the selected Chinese regions, both visually and conceptually. As a guest curator originally from China, my key concern during the two-year curatorial process has been to integrate the visual presentation of the artworks and a theoretical interpretation of the context within which "contemporary Chinese art" makes sense. Also, since there are significant historical, political, and regional differences between the four societies represented, configuring an integrated but non-hegemonic structure was a challenge. |
front
page |
| The exhibition has been
constructed around the central issues of modernity and identity. At this
moment it is crucial to discuss these issues in global terms, in
relation to a transnational modernity, against the background of which
we see the issue of identity in contemporary art practice in different
Chinese regions in terms of local context and relationships inside and
out. Transnational modernity and transitional identities have produced
the dynamic visuality that this exhibition presents.
Some scholars have argued that Chinese art has been westernized since the seventeenth century, when China's painters came to accept western ideas regarding representation.2 Around the same time a patron system emerged in south China, a sign of the beginning of a modern commercial art market.3 Some might even argue that as early as the sixteenth century Chinese artists began to concern themselves with issues of modernity, as in the West.4 I would argue, however, that in both the broader culture and in art a consciousness of modernity and the pursuit of a new, modernized nation with a concomitant anti-tradition did not emerge in China until the late nineteenth century. At the turn of the twentieth century, under continuous pressure from modern western military, economic, and cultural forces, Chinese intellectuals and artists began an art revolution by taking various western modern art forms as models to revive their weakened tradition, which was perceived as backward. This project of self-salvation, called the New Cultural Enlightenment Movement, reached a peak in 1919 in the May Fourth Movement, the first intellectual movement in modern Chinese history to establish a mainstream intellectual discourse directed against tradition and toward national salvation, democracy, and science--a project of Chinese modernity. Almost all of the influential philosophers, thinkers, and scientists active in the New Cultural Movement were engaged in the early 1920s in the intense Greater Debate between Science and Mysteries Study (Kexuan da lunzhan).5 This framed what I call a self-defined modernity, driven by an aspiration for national strength and confined to specific and local social, cultural, and economic contexts, and which has influenced Chinese intellectuals and artists for most of this century. The practice and theoretical concerns of this modernity were rooted in a desire for internal strengthening in reaction to the impact of western forces. Chinese modernity could be labeled a defensive modernity, and it has been inextricably bound up with the articulation of a national identity and subjectivity. It did not seek a global role or interaction in a larger modern world. The Anti-Japanese War and subsequent civil war halted this elitist modern art project, and it was reoriented on the Mainland by Mao toward a state-masses ideological art with a more radical tone of nationalism based on an iconoclastic philosophy that was both anti-traditional and anti-western. (Different historical circumstances prevailed in Taiwan and Hong Kong, as will be outlined below.) After Mao died and the Cultural Revolution ended in the late 1970s, a new artistic generation in the eighties embraced western modern art again and renewed the project of a self-focused modernity begun some sixty years earlier. The cultural debate climaxed on the Mainland around the mid-eighties, and with such trends as Searching for Cultural Roots (Wenhua xungen), Cultural Reflection (Wenhua fansi), and Culture Fever (Wenhuare), avant-garde art and literature movements with a more radical tone of social and cultural criticism emerged. Although the new art of the '85 Movement, so called, encompassed forms of almost every western modern movement from Dada to Pop, the art practice using various western-originated forms was self-oriented and not involved with the western mainstream for either direct input or evaluation; it was an internal dialogue answering only to its own social and cultural demands. A Chinese modernity systematic in both ideological and economic terms, and possessing a significant connection between the Chinese and western art worlds did not really come about until the late 1980s. It has only been since the basis of society has been altered by the emerging transnational economic system that any real interplay or clash of the East (or China) and the West has become possible. The Chinese consciousness of modernity has only recently begun to be transformed from a self-focused to an interactive one. Chinese contemporary art was brought into the international arena by the end of the Cold War and the ensuing economic globalization. Western institutions and art markets discovered contemporary Chinese art and culture, and now, the Chinese in all three of our regions and abroad can identify themselves in the mirror of the West's definition of a Chinese modernity. For example, concepts like Neo-Confucianism, Confucian capitalism, industrial East Asia, and Post-Confucianism that first emerged in the West spread in East Asia during the seventies and eighties and began to be discussed in Mainland China after its economic boom of the early nineties. I would argue that the Chinese framing of modernization that prevailed until that time, which posited the confrontation between or combination of pure eastern and pure western cultures, is no longer a major issue for Chinese societies. The debate over modern and traditional, East and West, occurred in the art of Taiwan and Hong Kong during the 1950s and '60s, when modernist, experimental painting movements appeared in these two regions.6 Schools of modern ink painting that attempted to establish a modern Chinese art that combines traditional Chinese and modern western art peaked in the sixties and seventies in both Taiwan and Hong Kong. (A similar emergence of abstract modern ink painting took place on the Mainland in the early eighties, after the opening to the West.) The fact that in Taiwan this debate was carried out in purely cultural and utopian terms evidences a continuity with early modern painting movements during the twenties and thirties in Guangzhou, Hangzhou, and Shanghai, movements led by Gao Jianfu (18??-19??), Lin Fengmin (18??-19??), Lui Haisu (b. 1895/96), and others. In the fifties, most of the artists of the Eastern Painting Group (Dongfang), for instance, were the students of Li Chung-sheng (Li Zhongsheng; 1911-94), a Mainland-born painter who was trained in Shanghai and Japan and taught along with Lin Henmin, the academy's director--at the Hangzhou Academy of Fine Art until he went to Taiwan in 1949. Lin has been one of Taiwan's most influential artists and considered the "father of modern art" there.7 In the seventies, Taiwan artists began to shift their attention to rediscovering and reestablishing a native Taiwanese art, in the process abandoning the modernist utopian dream of the fifties. Both the economic miracle that gave the Taiwanese a new confidence and the social changes resulting from the political crisis of losing a seat in the United Nations influenced art, prompting investigations of indigenous culture and redefining a modern subjectivity. In the eighties, due to an institutional configuration known as "museum age" and the return of a number of Taiwanese art students trained overseas, contemporary art showed a mature Taiwanese face, combining various traditional and western sources and, since the early nineties, becoming known in the international art arena. Since the 1960s, Hong Kong has developed as a global economic center rather than the hub of or part of a nation. Hong Kong is instead a city/region with a peculiar international character and sited in a kind of spectacle that is "forever-present." Rather than identifying with a traditional or a native cultural past--as do people in Mainland China and Taiwan--Hong Kong people identify themselves with what might be described as a sort of mutational trans-metropolitanese that has been characterized by an unconsciousness of decentralization. Perhaps it was only when Hong Kong people watched on TV the ceremony of the colony's handover back to China and the institution of "one country, two systems," that they suddenly became aware of having a history and a "national identity" distinct from any other in the world. It was the coming of this transition that awakened contemporary Hong Kong artists to examine their unconscious past and unpredictable future, as presented in Inside Out. In short, it has been forces active in the current global modernization and a concomitant consciousness of location, boundary, and relationships based primarily on economic factors that have brought to an end the heretofore self-focused and self-defined Chinese modernity and pushed Chinese intellectuals and artists toward an transnational modernity.
The consciousness of what modernity is, especially for the people of nonwestern regions, has also changed since the beginning of these peoples' modern history. For China, the crux has not been a consciousness of time but of one individual subjectivity within a strong sense of nationalism. Only after traditional servility (nuxing) was challenged could a new, powerful modern Chinese society come into being, and only then could a modern anti-tradition arise. This contradiction between self-salvation and anti-tradition caused an ambivalence central to the nature of Chinese modernity. For the Chinese modern has meant a new nation rather than a new epoch.10 Thus Chinese modernity is a consciousness of both transcendent time and reconstructed space with a clear national cultural and political territorial boundary.11 National identity, however, has meant different things in the different Chinese societies and their art. In Mainland China in the 1980s, artists responding to a monolithic state ideology searched out a free subjectivity and presented an iconoclastic ideological utopia. This changed in the nineties to a project of anti- or non-ideology and dematerialization. This transition may be seen clearly in the contrast between the '85 Movement (sometimes called the '85 New Wave) and the Political Pop, Cynicism, and Apartment Art of the nineties. Whereas the central concerns of Taiwanese art in the fifties and sixties were tradition versus modernity and western versus eastern, nativism subsequently became the primary issue. The Nativist movement of the seventies was the first Taiwanese turn to local culture,12 and since the late eighties many artists have been exploring native religion, local culture, and folk art in conjunction with Chinese traditional and western elements, but in a way that subverts both.13 Nativism may be different from nationalism; its meaning is perhaps more like that of tribalism. And, as the Taiwanese scholar Huang Wan-yao has said, the choice between tribalism or nationalism may be a key determinant of the fate of the Taiwanese independence movement.14 In contemporary Hong Kong, the issue is one of regional culture. Unlike nationalism and nativism, which seek an identity based on the past, regionalism can avoid the definition of a single historical tradition and be concerned with a spatiotemporal consciousness. This is possible in Hong Kong partly because it did not develop as a city within a nation but as an international financial center. Hong Kong people have identified themselves with something that is transnational, and this has been reflected in art there, especially since the mid-nineties. This is obviously a reaction to the end of the colonial period and reunification. Works by Hong Kong artists in this exhibition present this transitional moment in their concern with the issue of identity. Chinese artists overseas may play the most important role in confronting and communicating with an international cultural mainstream. Rather than being part of a "diaspora," the identity and visual world of recent ÈmigrÈs may be shaped by, and may be shaping, a "third space" that truly is between East and West. Thus the visuality of each Chinese region reflects its own context of identity: nationalism in the Mainland, nativism in Taiwan, regionalism in Hong Kong, and the third space for Chinese overseas.
Chinese intellectuals and artists have had to constantly adjust their social position, seeking a free subjectivity in a struggle for spiritual liberty, nationalism, and individuality. The Chinese avant-garde art movement that flourished from 1985 to 1989 was very much a product of its period. It emerged from the intellectual engagements of the mid-eighties after the opening to foreign ideas and suffered as those concerns were suppressed or transformed by subsequent events. The culture then consisted of three different spheres: official culture, elite culture, and public culture. Avant-garde art was a product of the second. The elite were not defined economically but by intellectual influence, and the social and cultural weight of intellectuals grew during the mid-eighties, as the government encouraged them to contribute to society. Cultural activity in all areas--from universities to newspapers to television networks--increased. Many intellectuals felt a strong responsibility to the public and believed that official and public culture could be enlightened through their efforts. They promoted ideas in the mass media that generally were not those of the official political propagandists but were their own, and intellectuals saw themselves as something of modernist and enlightenment philosophers in their own historical context. The influence of elite culture was best exemplified by the production of television scripts like River Elegy, with its revisionist historical ideas, for public television. By this means, elite culture strongly influenced the public sphere, and was generally treated with deference by officialdom. In the eighties, artists seeking modernity undertook three major tasks. First, the avant-garde artists saw themselves as cultural pioneers whose task was to enlighten the masses, fight for social reform, and rebel against the past. Second, they criticized the previous state-dominant ideology, which had long suppressed individuality. Third, avant-garde artists made the creation of art part of a cultural enlightenment program rather than a formalist activity, a social activity rather than the representation of an illusory reality. This total avant-garde of the 1980s adopted a rhetoric similar to that of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Based on its goal of enlightenment, artists of '85 Movement (Bawu meishu yundong) claimed that art has nothing to do with technique or style but should directly express ideas.15 For example, the manifesto of the influential North Art Group said, "Our painting is not art anymore but a part of our complete new thought."16 The movement's major tendency of humanism included two important groups: Rationalist painting and Current of Life painting. The Rationalists emphasized a positive and sublime spirit in creating a futuristic utopia in order to purify society (pl. 20). The Current of Life group explored individual myths in abstract images or depictions of a primitive sort of life (pl. 2). Some directly expressed nationalistic themes and a quest for Chinese power. The conceptual artists of the '85 Movement criticized conventional art ideas and dominant art institutions. Using media such as language and readymades, they questioned art's old ideological subject matter as well as the new utopian subjectivity, devoting themselves to a project of anti-authorship and anti-subjectivity in an attempt to destroy any doctrine of art ideas, objects, or history (pls. 5, 15).17 The '85 Movement was not a new school of artists working in their studios, art schools, or universities; it was a broad movement encompassing social activities such as performances, meetings, lectures, conferences, and village-factory visits as well as many self-organized, unofficial exhibitions. Most of the latter took place in the public sphere, deliberately confronting both the public and the powers that be. The most sensational event was the China/Avant-Garde exhibition of 1989, which was shut down twice by the authorities.18 Since 1989 and the June 4 Tiananmen Incident, however, the government has attacked intellectual culture and the elite has become weak. Moreover, with the increasing emphasis on the immediate economic benefits of any activity, official and public culture now share common economic priorities, relegating the formerly elite intellectuals to a marginal position. With the failure of the democracy movement and the intellectuals' modernization program of the eighties, and under the unexpected impact of commercialism and mass culture, many artists abandoned the humanist utopianism and hopefulness of the eighties. More neutral or even cynical attitudes gave rise to Political Pop and Cynical Realism, for example. In the early nineties, these forms of painting gained popularity in international art scene. Soon after, however, the artworks were co-opted as part of international market production. This transformation of antagonistic criticism and spiritual pursuits to Political Pop's discourse of parody and pastiche may be interpreted as a mourning for both Mao's revolutionary utopia and the avant-garde enlightenment movement. In the nineties, no artist has been able to escape from the commercial waves of the transnational economy. The art world is now dominated by a concern for commercial success to the degree that most other critical criteria have been discarded. Realist painters have, for various reasons, attained the greatest monetary success. Avant-garde artists lost their audience. Indeed, the alternative of accommodating to the new commercialism or working in complete obscurity threatens their very survival as artists. Avant-garde artists, for whom critical recognition, not financial benefit, had been the only reward, now find themselves with no public outlet. A self-defined elite culture and avant-garde shifted their direction toward a new arena--the international system of art institutions and the transnational market. The overproduction of commercial art and mass culture has forced most conceptual artists in one of three directions. The most prolific are now working abroad. Many who have stayed in China isolate themselves from society in self-exile, giving rise to "Apartment Art." Others have gone into the public sphere to directly confront society in order to shock the newly materialistic masses.
Since the eighties, the art world in Taiwan has become more pluralistic, with many different approaches to art incorporating numerous forms and ideas. There have been no dominant trends or movements. Various types of modern and postmodern art from abroad have been introduced, producing reproductions or variations of pieces of western origin. We might divide the different approaches current into two major aspects. |
Only after traditional servility (nuxing) was challenged could a new, powerful modern Chinese society come into being, and only then could a modern anti-tradition arise. This contradiction between self-salvation and anti-tradition caused an ambivalence central to the nature of Chinese modernity.
Chinese intellectuals and artists have had to constantly adjust their social position, seeking a free subjectivity in a struggle for spiritual liberty, nationalism, and individuality. The Chinese avant-garde art movement that flourished from 1985 to 1989 was very much a product of its period.
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| Rock 'n Roll
Postmodernism: Made in Taiwan
One tendency encompasses artists whose themes reflect Taiwanese reality; they combine modern urban and local folk cultures, industrial landscapes and agricultural ones, traditional high art and native low art, and the global and the local, all expressed in a Taiwanese postmodern manner. Such artists do not care about the original form, language, or text. Instead they superimpose, without conscious regarding for the "origin," ideas and forms onto native culture and local context in a fluent, comprehensible language. Such strategies as simulation, appropriation, and masquerade were quickly adopted by these Taiwanese artists to transform the typical western contemporary fashions into local colors. Moreover, traditional Chinese art, such as literati-style painting, has been transformed into a new local-style ink painting that combines high and low sources. This broad tendency can be called "Made in Taiwan," a phrase which brings to mind images of famous western brands produced in factories there.19 Postmodern strategies have been married to the native folk culture (termed xisang wenhua, the traditional form for wedding ceremonies and funerals) and produced an urban leisure culture with an exaggerated face. Behind the mirage of happiness there nevertheless has resided melancholy, anxiety, and disappointment deep in the hearts of the Taiwanese people. These artists see the issues of native culture, folk art, urban leisure culture, politics, and sexuality as being linked together in a social and cultural monolith, and present them in high-key colors, violent images, and with powerful emotions. Their works are just like rock 'n' roll music, as Kao Chianhui, a Taiwanese critic points out.20 American Pop Art's obvious influence can be seen in paintings by Huang Chin-ho (fig. 00), Wu Tian-chang, and installations by artists such as Wu Mali, who uses mixed media to mirror the kitsch of mass culture and political strategy. But instead of its American forerunner's positive enjoyment of consumer culture, Taiwanese Pop reveals the madness of urban life behind a happy mask. Wu Mali has presented giant images of toys, which could symbolize a society in which politics, business, and consumption are viewed in playful enjoyment, but may also allude to Taiwan's being like a toy in a larger world. The postmodernist aesthetic intentionally expresses a postmodern sociopolitical attitude. The painter Huang Chin-ho has said: "I seek to make an overall assessment of Taiwan's cultural tradition in order to open up new frontiers for the country's new aesthetics, which are distinct form those of China and the western world. . . . My canvases strongly condemn the degeneration of the country's living environment and the corruption of the people's spirits by the colonial rule that has afflicted Taiwan for centuries."21 "Chaotic" compositions are characteristic of Made in Taiwan artworks by Huang Chin-ho, Wu Tien-chang, Hou Chun-ming, Guo Zhenchang, and Yang Mao-lin, among others. Elements of fragmentation and deliberate chaos could be interpreted as a resistance to a totalizing authority. In Taiwan's political circumstances, searching for cultural modernity and identity can take this oppositional orientation emphasizing the local in an anti-modern, anti-industrial/rationalized visuality. Modernity as such may be a symbol of power, authority, order, and totality, which the artists oppose. Using only the materials and techniques of traditional Chinese ink painting, Huang Chih-yang executed a series of paintings entitled Zoon. The brushwork takes on an industrial hard-edge stroke, and rapidly painted arms, legs, bodies, and heads form monster-humans lacking gender or any identification with civilized people. The combination of the mechanical and the primitive goes far beyond the elegant aestheticism of traditional Chinese literati painting. Huang likes to identify the images of monsters in his paintings as himself. He says, "Man is such animal. I am such an animal."22 Huang's paradoxical, bizarre images are particularly concerned with the confrontation between multiple elements: natural environment, traditional culture, urban material life, and human nature. Sexuality is an important theme for certain Taiwanese artists. Many Chinese artists have seen the representation of sexuality not only as men enjoying women's bodies but also as symbolizing the birth or flourishing of national power. This has been true in the art of the Mainland since the eighties and of Hong Kong around the middle nineties, when it was promoting a local cultural identity. In the nineties, artworks with sexual themes have become a powerful vehicle to present the Taiwanese search for a native (or national) cultural and political identity. Most sexual works are filled with the atmosphere of violence, masculinity, and the desire for the female body. Masculinity is equivalent to nationalism. This tendency can be truly found in Ho Chun-ming's "pornographic print" paintings (pl. 56).
Their works may seem extremely close to western contemporary art, especially Minimalism. Tsong Pu (pl. 66) has said, "My greatest ideal is to use the simplest of colors and to display everything entirely with the materials I use," and Lin Minhong wrote that "the meaning of my work is the process of being what you are seeing." The difference, however, is that beyond the form, these artists strive to express impressions gained through observation of nature and life. Displayed material does not tell the audience about the philosophy and principles of art, it examines the relationship between nature and the individual artist's feeling, and transcendent ideas that are colored by modern urban life. Chu Chiahua was trained in Italy in the eighties, and upon returning to Taiwan in 1991, he began a new phase of artistic exploration, closely observing the visual effects of material objects and transforming visual reflexes into an artistic language. His materialist aesthetic stresses the possibility of an object's rebirth after artificial processing (pl. 67). Chen Hui-chiao has created installation works possessing the characteristics of "female sensibility" (pls. 63, 64). One series using needles and thread brings traditionally female crafts--needlepoint and embroidery--into the realm of modern Taiwanese art. In one piece, more than ten thousand glittering silver needles trailing silk threads, all in chaotic disarray, pierce fabrics layered on top of one other.23 Chen has also arranged her needles and threads on a panel as a Minimalist painter arranges color fields on a canvas. She has written, "Everything is relative, such as the mutual correspondence of action and stillness and the succession of strong and soft." This is unity, which I desire to express in my works, making a direct connection between appearance and the mind the ultimate truth of my knowledge. By casting away the prisons created by historical outlooks and purifying my inner self, I come into contact with the truth."24 This universalist tendency is quite different from the Made in Taiwan painters. As part of Taiwan's cultural elite, the universalist artists seek to find purification in their lives, and may transcend life as well. This is not, I believe, cultural escapism but rather a quest for transcendence as a reaction to increasing globalized materialism and to political and social crises.
During the sixties, as Matthew Turner has indicated, Hong Kong identity "emerged from a clash of discourses--citizen and compatriot, Chinese and Western, morality and utilitarianism." Identity came to be based on life-style, on a shared recognition of similar self-images and existential choices, now that Hong Kong people could no longer be guided either by the Chinese tradition or the Chinese modernity that had developed in Shanghai before the war. "Hong Kong was to become less a Chinese city with a remarkable history and more a remarkably a-historical 'Chinatown, and Hong Kong in the late sixties became a culture of translation rather than tradition.'"26 Ackbar Abbas has pointed out that the colonial itself is an unstable paradigm, and that unlike Chinese culture on the Mainland and in Taiwan, Hong Kong's urban culture is not linked to a long tradition nor does it express the hopes and aspirations of a people or nation.27 The fashion, hybridicity, and translation of Hong Kong culture were established in the decentralized space of a timeless spectacle. In the sixties, some elite Hong Kong artists had hoped to bridge East and West, creating a modern Chinese ink painting and a modern Chinese art renascence. The leading figure was Lu Shou-kun (18??-19??), who built on the modern Chinese Lingnan School founded by Gao Jianfu in Guangdong in the 1920s. They shared with some Taiwan artists the goal of creating a new internationalist form, but the Taiwanese were reacting against a conservative traditional painting supported by the government, and the Hong Kong artists were fighting against the local dominance of low or popular culture. In 1971 the Hong Kong-born population outnumbered first-generation immigrants for the first time. The combination of a majority with their roots in Hong Kong and the phasing out of the colonial system mandated in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration combined to prompt questions about cultural conflict and identity.28 In the eighties a new generation tried to articulate the absence of a nationalist narrative of identity. The identity expressed in the multimedia work of this new generation is, however, unstable, floating, and skeptical.29 A consensus was building that "colonialism has taken away Hong Kong people's sense of being Chinese. They need to build up their identity as Chinese."30 Dancers, painters, dramatists, and designers increasingly rediscovered their Chinese heritage. Fashion designer Ragence Lam said, "I am beginning to feel a sense of belonging. I don't really have any roots, but now that we see more of the mainland Chinese I feel a need to identify."31 But that confidence was shaken by the Tiananmen Incident of June 4, 1989--for only the second time in history there were large demonstrations. Hong Kong's democracy and liberty began to be viewed as part of local cultural identity for the future, and an ambivalence about national identity became a dominant psychological factor. With the approach of Hong Kong being handed over to China on July 1, 1997, a new art quickly developed. In 1995, a new generation of Hong Kong artists suddenly appeared. That year dazzlingly fresh material was shown in the exhibitions Red Movements, Who is in Charge of Tomorrow, Basic Dimensions, and Location. It started with Pre'97: Proposal and Projections in April and ended with December's Pre-97: Special Arts Zone. In these projects, artists endeavored to portray social reality from such angles as "Identity Confirmation," "Red Humor," "Historical Sentiment," and "Political Shock."32 Avant-garde art works with political and social messages were a new phenomenon. Previously, Hong Kong art showed tendencies toward escapism. Now questions were being raised about social authority and the lack of a common culture. Kum Chi-Keung, an artist born in Hong Kong in 1965, created Transitional Space, in which two birdcages may stand for Hong Kong and the Mainland. Kum says: "I have set free some dozens of birds in this hall. Able to fly as they wish, some of the birds may choose the new room, while some others may still stick with their old places, as if they could not forget their original cozy nests."33 On January 31, 1996, sixteen artists, most of whom were born in Hong Kong in the sixties, made a public performance intended to wake up Hong Kong's seemingly insensitive masses. They masqueraded as a group of mourners at a funeral and walked around the streets of the very shopping crowded district Jianshazui (Tsim Sha Tsui) carrying signs with slogans like "mourning human culture" (pl. 72). In their statement, they wrote: "Mourning--the weakened human spirit
Other artists sought to raise consciousness of and a concern for a national identity, whether positive or negative, optimistic or pessimistic. Danny Ning Tsun Yung's Deep Structure Chinese Culture, 1991-97, is a series of installations involving many artists and intellectuals that refers to the paradox of a national identity and a local identity through such means as placing the viewer in a circle of standing tablets with mirrors facing the center and the backs painted solid red. Art in Hong Kong has on occasion paralleled some of the avant-garde projects on the Mainland and in Taiwan in emphasizing masculine power as a symbol of nationalism in the face of the West's impact. For instance, a 1995 exhibition entitled Penis Exhibition organized by the Hong Kong Young Artists Association made references to a Hong Kong cultural renascence as symbolized by phallic images. It seems, however, that this somewhat militant and vital avant-garde practice suddenly became quiet after Hong Kong reverted to China on July 1, 1997. One wonders if artistic practice will become a part of a universally indifferent cosmopolitan culture, or if artists will continue to take an adversarial position as an avant-garde with a specific target. If so, then, what will that target be?
Chinese artists were among the first to articulate the impact of huge transnational corporations (TNCs) in the transformation of Chinese society. About 1990, an art group in Wuhan known as the New History Group, led by Ren Jian, proclaimed that contemporary art had been transformed into product art: "No art, just product" and "Art as fast food, ready to serve people." Consumer fashion became the primary aesthetic.36 In order to expose this shift, the group planned an extravagant artwork titled Mass Consumption that was to include rock music, portraits of famous businessmen, a fashion show, and the sale of 10,000 pairs of jeans designed by Ren Jian with the pattern of flags of every nation in the world (pl. 42). This event was scheduled to take place on April 28, 1993, at the new McDonald's restaurant in Beijing, said to be the biggest in the world. This was part of a phenomenon that might be tagged, as Jianying Zha did, the "Whopperfication of Chinese Art," or to be more site-specific, the "McDonaldization of Art."37 It might also be called " Coca-Cola-ization." In 1997, a nationwide consumer survey showed that Coca-Cola is the most famous and admired company in China. The previous year Wang Jin had proposed a project called The Great Wall: To Be or Not to Be. It would take place during the winter at a site in Gansu Province adjacent to a ruined section of the Great Wall and would involve forming a section of wall and a tower out of innumerable Coca-Cola cans and bottles. The "Great Wall" of frozen Coca-Cola would be of a "boundaryless" universal commodity, while the ruins of the actual Wall remain a monument of an "eternal" boundary of a nation. The Great Wall of China becomes an abstract symbol of nationalism in transition as a new, open consumer society is wrought by the global economic system and the contradiction between acceptance and resistance is highlighted.
For instance, virtually all of the international Chinese exhibitions in Hong Kong, Australia, and Europe since the early 1990s have presented Political Pop and Cynicism as the major non-official, avant-garde movements and interpreted them ideologically in light of the Tiananmen Incident of 1989. Further investigation and thought show, however, that Political Pop and Cynicism are nothing more than a combination of ideological and commercial practices. Most Political Pop artists are ambivalent about the Cultural Revolution and Mao's ideology. They glorify the persuasive power and unique aesthetic of Mao's propagandist art. Yu Youhan called Maoist art "pleasant to hear and to look at" (xiwenlejian); Wang Ziwei thinks that Mao himself was concerned about and communicated compassionately with the masses; and Wang Guangyi worships the power of print because we are living in an age of mechanical reproduction.38 Although Political Pop allegorizes the Mao Myth and Mao's Utopia, the artists by no means criticize the discourse of power in Mao's Communist ideology and propagandist art, as many western critics have pointed out. Rather the artists still worship and desire to gain this power. From an ideological perspective, Political Pop is a continuation of pre-Tiananmen Incident avant-garde "red humor,"39 but neutralizes its direct criticism of reality by taking its strategy of imitating both propagandist and consumer discourse while exhibiting an ambivalence toward the nationalism that is increasing among Chinese intellectuals in the nineties. The ideological nature of Political Pop is similar to that of Sots Art, a Soviet avant-garde art movement in Moscow in the 1970s ("Sots" being short for "Socialist"). It was based on Soviet mass-cultural imagery and a Soviet variation of American Pop Art that delighted in the spectacle of antagonistic semiotic and artistic systems confronting each other. For example, Kosolapov's poster Symbols of the Century that montages Lenin's profile and the Coca-Cola logo is similar to Wang Guangyi's Great Castigation: Coca-Cola (pl. 35). Coke's reassuring slogan "It's the Real Thing" and Lenin thus become interchangeable as mass-cultural products.40 Sots Art and Political Pop share a similar ideological content--nationalist power. As Boris Groys analyzed, "In the Soviet politician aspiring to transform the world or at least the country on the basis of a unitary artistic plan, the artist inevitably recognize his alter ego, inevitably discovers his complicity with that which oppresses and negates him, and finds that his own inspiration and the callousness of power share some common roots. Sots artists and writers, therefore, by no means refuse to recognize the identity of artistic intent and the will to power at the source of their art. On the contrary, they make this identity the central object of artistic reflection, demonstrating hidden kinship where one world like to see only morally comforting contrast."41 Political Pop attracted much more international institutional and marketing attention than Sots Art, however, as it emerged while the Communist world was declining and the Cold War was ending, and also because China has since become a major transnational market. Whereas the Sots artists emigrated to the US in the late 1970s and found commercial success there, none of the successful Political Pop artists has left China. On the contrary, they have become a part of an upper-middle class in the changing Chinese economy. The artists no longer strive to produce a confrontation with authority and the public as their predecessors did; they have changed from elite/amateur avant-gardists to professional, careerist artists. Sots Art is not a commercial, impersonal art that responds to and simultaneously strives to manipulate spontaneous consumer demand. But the nationalism and materialism of Political Pop, based on a transnational political and economic circumstances, share common roots with government policy and the art is in a position of complicity.42 The aesthetic allegory of both propagandist art and consumer mass culture that function in Political Pop led me to label it "double kitsch"; the Political Pop artists are producers, and their trademark works are real commodities. In another words, they themselves thus become the "double kitsch." Consequently, the "presence" of the avant-garde in the international exhibitions and markets overseas might reflect an "absence" of the avant-garde inside China. An example of this dislocation was found on a New York Time Magazine cover in December 1993. On it was a reproduction of a painting by one of the Cynics and the title of an article on the Chinese avant-garde: "Not just a yawn but the howl that could free China."43 Ironically, if you had visited the artist, you would have found him living in a big house in Beijing with a beautiful garden and a big gate between him and the ordinary people. Such new professional artists have been passionately involved in creating a Chinese leisure culture, which is an essential part of any capitalist society, rather than engaging in avant-garde culture.44 Thus, what the Chinese avant-garde is, is questionable from a global perspective.
The Chinese may now be experiencing circumstances similar to those faced by the western avant-garde a century ago, in which there is a division between two modernities, a materialist one and an aesthetic one. The western aesthetic modernists expressed their disgust with materialism through means ranging from rebellion, anarchy, and apocalyptic visions to an aristocratic self-exile in an ivory tower for the creation of a purely aesthetic utopia expressed in various modern abstract forms. The Chinese avant-garde, however, has directly faced and challenged materialism as part of their social project rather than just an aesthetic utopian program. One response by the post-Tiananmen avant-garde on the Mainland has been a self-imposed exile from mass-consumer culture but with an antagonistic and strongly critical tone, giving rise to Apartment Art. In private spaces, artists of this group have created unsellable and unexhibitable works, such as Song Dong's Water Writing Diary. In performances in Beijing's East Village, Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming have confronted the system of art marketing and institutions and engaged in pseudo-religious meditations on highly personalized objects (including their own bodies and experiences) in private spaces to seek a now-disappeared spiritual "aura" and a "purification" in the midst of a materialist society. A different response is to take to the streets, plazas, shopping malls, and other public spaces to create a sort of happening and mass art, using consumer goods as media and implicating the audience of consumers in the process of a happening or action. Wang Jin's Ice: Central China, 1996 and Lin Yilin's wall projects are examples. Audience and artist are joined in a shared experience reacting to society's materialism. Similar reactions to the encroachment of transnational mass consumption in Taiwan's flourishing urban mass culture are found in contemporary art there after the late 1980s. The "Made in Taiwan" artists deal with this explicitly in their work; they accept conflicts between materialism and spiritual purification and represent the material world as overflowing with images of urban leisure culture, nude women, and luxury goods. Their approach is similar to the Mainland painters of the "New Floating World," led by Song Yongping, Cao Yong and Su Xinping. The motivations of the Made in Taiwan artists comes from the discovery of "folk kitsch" as characteristic of Taiwan's native culture, while that of the New Floating World painters comes from the artists' experience of "double kitsch" in which socialist kitsch and capitalist kitsch mirror each other. Another trend in Taiwan is to react to the social space of the newly manifest materialist world by combining an ideal of "purification" with a profound reflection on the existence of the self and an investigation into the individual's position in society. This purification gives direction to a material aesthetic in visual art practice that differs from western avant-garde methods of dealing with the issue of fetishism. For instance, in 1994 an exhibition called Urban Nature: A Dialogue Between Humanism and Materialism investigated modern cosmopolitan life as an industrial experiment in which human beings are the animal subjects. Despite the superficially convenient communication and material accumulation of burgeoning metropolises that combine increasing population density with endless material production and consumption, the spiritual quality of individual life has not been sustained and enriched. In fact, individuals are becoming more absorbed in sheer utility and materialism, isolated from one another. Taiwan is an example of such an industrial society.46 In the exhibition, the artist Chu Chiahua put his apple-green 1970s Toyota, covered on one side by feathers in the gallery. This piece highlights the fading away of nature from everyday life in a big city. Chu's oeuvre emphasizes the comparison and contrast of different types of materials and a type of materialism that is both familiar and alien; it is expressly derived from Taiwan's urban environment (pl. 67). The idea of "aesthetic materialism" has become central to Chu Chiahua's artistic style. He challenges the Taiwanese public, who recognize only simple use-value and give in to unchecked materialism, to appreciate the possibility of a materialist aesthetic rooted in their daily experience. Chu looks to the possibility of an object's rebirth after artificial processing. Displaying material as itself in this way may seem similar to Minimalism's development of the Duchampian designative readymade tradition and Frank Stella's positing that "what you see is what you see," but an essential difference is that Chu's readymade materials do not pose a contradiction between the preindustrial craft of traditional art and the industrial production of modern commodities. Nor do they express a dialectic between modernism (high art) and mass culture (low art), as did the work of some Euro-American conceptual artists in the sixties.47 Chu sorts out the variousness of personal experience and selects from otherwise neutral industrial materials those suiting his own taste and then endows them with a quality of "uniqueness" derived from an aesthetic orientation rather than a conceptual one. As Taiwanese critic Shih Rui-ren suggests, in a world overflowing with products and famous brands, Chu seeks to find his favored brand, through which he can articulate a difference in indifferent urban life.48 Chu's materialism does not deal with ambivalent "readymades" that allegorize industrial material fetishism and raise ideas of "art." Rather, material to Chu is simply a part of nature mediated by human beings. Such a relationship between nature and humanity has traditionally been central to the meaning of life for the Chinese. This different concept of a readymade is inherent in his individually chosen material, rather than a personal fetish material chosen out of mass-produced objects. Other Taiwanese artists, especially the IT Park group, have also been involved similar projects of purification.
This is possible, if not necessary, because, as postcolonialist culture critic Homi Bhabha suggests, cultural identity is not an irreducible given nor are "dominant" and "dominated" separate or independently defined entities. Moreover, identity is also determined by a specific historical moment and space (in-between, hybrid). Thus, the "oriental" identity of these artists is always in negotiation, involving the continual exchange of cultural performances that in turn produce a mutual and mutable recognition of cultural difference. The real situation and cultural space of these Chinese artists overseas is what Bhabha has called "the third space."50 The Chinese artists overseas have had to rethink their origin and how it can function in such exchanges on the one hand, and to participate the "mainstream culture" in a way of representing the origin very perfomatively on the other. We may call this strategy of creating art by Chinese artist overseas "post-orientalism." Two examples illustrate this transition. Cai Guo-qiang was a important member of an avant-garde group of the '85 Movement who moved to Japan in 1987 and then to the U.S. in 1995. In China and Japan, he created a series of works in which gunpowder explosions left traces on the canvas. Caiís intention was to extend the ancient oriental concept of "primary substance" to other kinds of cultural entities. He believed that non-Asian cultural features too were derived from such a concept, and that the concept of primary substance in Asian philosophy can be used as a foundation in any culture in the contemporary world. Since 1993, Cai has developed his Projects for Extraterrestrials, which have taken place in Johannesburg, South Africa; Otterlo, Holland; Hiroshima, Japan; and Bath, United Kingdom. This project transcends his early oriental ideal by asking the audience to realize a dimension of art that is transcultural and transpolitical, perhaps even universal. Cai's recent work uses old and new materials to bridge cultures, as in Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan, 1996. It consists of a number of sheepskin coracles forming the head and body of a dragon, and several Toyota engines as its tail. Genghis Khan's coracles symbolize military power and remind the audience of the Mongolian incursion into Europe in the thirteenth century, and the Toyota engines symbolize the rise of Asian economic power in contemporary society. The title Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf suggests the development of a world power, or, from a negative perspective, a "threat from Asia." The work, thus, transforms a Chinese traditional material into a contemporary object and a sign of exchange. Cai's new installation for Inside Out utilizes a boat made of rice straw from his hometown of Quanzhou, an ancient seaport in South China. The boat hangs in the air, pierced by myriad arrows. Borrowing Your Enemyís Arrows, 1998, is based on a story from the third century BCE in which a famous general realized that he lacked enough arrows for an upcoming battle. Rather than attacking, he made three hundred boats of rice straw with straw figures on them and sailed them toward his enemy on a misty morning. The foe peppered the boats with arrows, which the general recovered, and he went on to defeat his adversary. Once again, Cai uses a traditional story with an impressive visual form to comment on contemporary transcultural issues. In the early 1980s, Wenda Gu was the first Mainland artist to incorporate western Surrealism into Chinese ink painting. The result was a new movement of modern ink painting called Universal Current (yuzhouliu). However, Gu's period of Rationalist painting soon came to an end, and he turned to creating provocative installations inspired by a strong Asian mysticism. He then became involved with "deconstructive calligraphy," a trend in Chinese conceptual art. In an interview from 1987 he ambitiously claimed that he wanted "to transcend the East and West" and find a new way in which he could define the general issues faced by all humanity.51 He experienced culture shock after emigrating to the US and sought to challenge the international mainstream. Gu took up this challenge with body art. His first controversial work, exhibited in Los Angeles, was made from dozens of used sanitary napkins and tampons collected from women around the world. This was followed by a work made from placenta powder. Recently, he has been working on a massive, global project called United Nations. He constructs different monumental forms, such as an American flag, a Chinese landscape painting, or an Islamic temple with its calligraphy, by using human hair or bricks made from human hair from people in different places. The works wed public, monumental forms with the most private of personal substances--hair. Unlike many Euro-American contemporaries whose art deals with bodily substances and crises of the human body, Gu's work does'ít address specific social, political, religious, or sexual issues. Rather, he explores the eternal human verities and the general human condition. However, Gu does project his own interpretation and understanding of the history and culture of the Other into his monuments made of othersí hair. Gu describes himself as "a foreign intruder to any country, using local materials and local labor." For him, "the various 'misunderstandings' from different people, times, locations, are part of the value of the creation in itself. 'Misunderstanding' is the essence of our knowledge concerning the material world. The sum of various misunderstanding is the confrontational truth of my work."52 These two overseas Chinese artists, as well as Huang Yong Ping and Chen Zhen in Paris, Wu Shan Zhuan in Hamburg, and Xu Bing and Zhang Jianjun in New York all face different challenges abroad and have learned to use an international language, or a postmodern language, in their post-oriental works. This language is a kind of strategy that includes appropriation, allegory, masquerade, and cynicism; it differs from their original "grand" language in China when they were obsessed with seeking "truth." Now, most of them have abandoned the pursuit of "authenticity," "uniqueness," and "center" and replaced these ideas with relative concepts such as "moment," "nomadism," and "transformation."53 The global modernization shaping the contemporary culture of Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong has had its largest artistic impact on the pursuit of subjectivity in these fast-changing societies. Modernization has also transformed Chinese artists' consciousness from a focus on an internally directed, nationalist modernity to an interconnected, transnational one--the artistic gaze now looks outward as well as inward. As Anthony Giddens has pointed out, one of modernityís distinctive features is an increasing interconnection between the two ìextremesî of extensionality and intentionality, between globalizing influences and personal dispositions. 54 This feature of modern history has now affected the "Third World" even more than it did the West. In contemporary Chinese societies, the transmutations introduced by modernization interlace in a direct way with individual life and the self. Thus unpredictable visual characteristics growing out of increasingly distinct individual experiences are proliferating in the contemporary art of all Chinese regions. Especially on the Mainland is art being reconfigured as the society is altered. Avant-garde artists are subject to pressures from a changed power structure and a new interplay between the state, the market, and international institutions. The cultural devaluation of Chinese intellectuals and avant-garde artists has, ironically, prompted them to redefine the relationship between Chinese tradition and the West in more rational and pragmatic ways: the traditional is seen as more malleable and the western as more serviceable than envisioned by previous generations. In a global, materialistic society, the previous (modern) Superman has become a small man, and the universal elitism that was the core of Chinese enlightenment movements in the 1920s and 1980s has been transformed into true individualism. Never before have Chinese artists been so emotionally concerned with their private lives and individual interests. The Apartment Art of Mainland artists and the universalism of Taiwan's IT Park artists obviously represent this new orientation. Chinese artists overseas, who are operating in a cultural space where the interconnection between extensionality and intentionality--in terms of both economic globalization and cultural identity--might be more easily articulated than in the People's Republic or on Taiwan, have also turned their attention from the presentation of cultural differences between "monolithic" cultural entities to the representation of interconnections and transmutations among different cultures. Most importantly (in terms of contemporary subjectivity), their artistic creativity derives from their own personal perception and interpretation. It seems that in today's global "trans" age, it will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to define contemporary Chinese art phenomena by using only a few generalized and predictable categories based on a single perspective. For more information on Inside Out: New Chinese Art we suggest visiting the Asia Society.
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A shift in the art world on the Mainland from the ideological concerns of the 1980s to the monetary concerns of the 1990s is evidence of the process of globalized modernization. pl. 72 Pan Xing Lei, To Weun, Tim Yu, and Ma Jian Cultural Mourning performance in Hong Kong January 1996 Photograph by He Yanqian Collection of Pan Xing Lei pl. 35 Wang Guangyi Great Castigation Series: Coca-Cola 1993 Oil on canvas 79 x 79 in. (200 x 200 cm) Collection of the artist
Chinese artists have been forced to abandon their avant-garde mythmaking and innocence--perhaps even naivetÈ--and pragmatically address changing relationships between the local and global, the spiritual and material, art production and producer. Ma Liuming Fen Ma Liuming Performance in Dashan Village, Beijing November 13, 1993 Three photographs by Xu Zhiwei Collection of the artist Song Dong Printing on Water performance in the Lhasa River, Tibet 1996 Thirty-six photographs Collection of the artist Fang Lijun Series 3: No. 15 1993 Oil on canvas 170 x 260 cm (66 7/8 in. x 8 ft. 6 in.) Courtesy of Hanart T Z Gallery Never before have Chinese artists been so emotionally concerned with their private lives and individual interests. The Apartment Art of Mainland artists and the universalism of Taiwan's IT Park artists obviously represent this new orientation.
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| Notes: 1. The debate about cultural identity--encompassing such issues as eastern vs. western--has been a sensitive issue for the Chinese since the mid-nineteenth century, and in some quarters it led to the endorsement of the modernization of Chinese society. Recently, some western writers have raised the specter of cultural confrontations between East and West. Samuel P. Huntington wrote an article and then a book about the topic; in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) he posited that in the post-Cold War world the critical distinctions between people are not primarily ideological or economic but cultural and that nonwestern civilizations, such as the Muslim and Confucian, will challenge western dominance and its "universal" ideas. The Muslim population surge has led to many small wars across Eurasia, and the rise of China could lead to a global war of civilizations. For reasons I develop herein, however, it may be that a clash such as Huntington described would only become possible after ideological and economic reconfigurations have gone further. 2. James Cahill raised this point. See his first chapter, "Chang Hung and the Limits of Representation," in The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 3. See James Cahill, "The Shanghai School in Late Chinese Painting," in Twentieth Century Chinese Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 4. Jonathan Hay, "Modern Chinese Art," unpublished lecture. 5. Zhang Junmai et al., Kexue yu renshengguan (Science and the view of human life) (Shanghai: Yadong Press, 1925). 6. On Taiwan, see Hsiao Ch'iung-jui, Wuyue yu dongfang--Zhongguo meishu xiandaihua yundong ziazhanhou Taiwan zhi fazhan, 1945-1970 (The Fifth Moon and Eastern painting groups: Chinese modern art movements in postwar Taiwan, 1945-1970) (Taipei: Dongda Press, 1991). On Hong Kong, see David Clarke, "Between East and West: Negotiations with Tradition and Modernity in Hong Kong Art," Third Text no. 28/29 (Autumn/Winter 1994), pp. 71-86. 7. Li Chung-sheng: Xiandai xuihua xianqu (Li Chung-sheng: A pioneer of modern painting) (Taipei: Shibao Cultural Press, 1984). 8. See Peter B¸rger, "Literary Institution and Modernization", chapter one of his The Decline of Modernism (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). 9. Some major publications of the theory of avant-garde are: Peter B¸rger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987); Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass.:, Harvard University Press, 1968); and Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity--An Incomplete Project," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. by Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983). 10. In the West, according to Jurgen Habermas, the term modern in its Latin form modernus was first used in the late fifth century to distinguish the present, which had become officially Christian, from the past, which was Roman and pagan. Through various historical circumstances, the term modern has described again and again the consciousness of an epoch that distinguishes itself from the past and views itself as transition from the old to the new (Habermas, "Modernity--An Incomplete Project," pp. 3-4). 11. See my essay "A Total Modernity and Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century China" in the forthcoming catalogue of an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 12. The publication in serial form in 1975 of Hsieh Li-fa's Riju shidai Taiwan meishu yundong shi (The Taiwanese art movement during the Japanese occupation), published three years later in book form (third edition, 1992), marked the beginning of research into Taiwan's art history, which climaxed in the early nineties. 13. The late Alice Yang began to analyze this in "High and Low: The Cultural Space of Contemporary Taiwanese Art," in Tracing Taiwan: Contemporary Works on Paper (New York: Drawing Center, 1997), pp. 7-13. 14. See Huang Wan-yao, "Aimei de Taiwan ren: Erben zhimin tongzhi yu jindai minzu goujia zhi rentong (Ambiguous Taiwanese: Japanese colonial occupation and modern nationalist and national identity)," Hewei Taiwan: Jindai taiwan meishu yu wenhua rentong (Searching for Taiwanese cultural identity) (Taipei: Lion Art Press, 1997), pp. 250-63. 15. I coined the term '85 Movement, or Bawu meishu yundong, in a paper given at a conference and published as "Bawu meishu yundong" in Meishujia Tongxun (Artists' Journal) 1986.3 (June 1986), pp. 15-23. After high-ranking officials objected to this designation, the term '85 Art New Wave, or Bawu meishu xinchao, was briefly adopted as a less objectionable alternative (the word movement being fraught with political implications). In the 1986 essay I discussed the connection between the '85 Movement and the May Fourth Movement in terms of Enlightenment discourse. 16. Shu Qun, "Beifan Yishu Qunti de jingshen" (The Orientation of the North Art Group), Zhongguo Meishubao (Fine arts in China) no. 18 (November 23, 1985), p. 1. 17. For details, see my essay on Mainland China in Inside Out: New Chinese Art ed. Gao Minglu, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 18. See Julia F. Andrews and Gao Minglu, "The Avant-Garde's Challenge to Official Art," in Urban Spaces in Contemporary China, ed. Deborah Davis et al. (Washington, D.C., and New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 221-78. 19. In 1989 Yang Mao-lin created a series of paintings on economic modernization called Made in Taiwan (Taiwan zhizao). The phrase also appears on Yang's painting entitled Zeelandia Memorandum L9301, 1993, in which images of a Dutch colonial figure and a traditional Chinese official refer to Taiwan's history. 20. Kao Chianhui, "Xinyang chaoqianwei, jingshen xinpopu, yaogunhouxiandai" (Beyond avant-garde, new spiritual pop, rococo postmodernism), in Tangdai wenhua yishu sexiang (Fine art/unrefined, visual culture in the 90s) (Taipei: Artists Press, 1996), pp. 67-75. 21. Artist's statement, in ArtTaiwan: La Biennale di Venezia 1995 (Taipei: Fine Arts Museum, 1995), p. 53. 22. Artist's statement, ibid., p. 39. 23. Artists' statements, ibid. 24. Unpublished statement by the artist. 25. Xian Yuyi, "Liushi niandai--lishi gailian" (The 1960s--An overview of history), in Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Identity/ Xiangang liushi niandai (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1995), pp. 80-83. 26. Matthew Turner, "60s/90s: Dissolving the People," in Hong Kong Sixties, pp. 13-34. 27. Akbar Abbas, "Hong Kong: Other History, Other Politics," Public Culture 9, no. 3 (Spring 1997), p. 303. 28. Xian, "Liushi niandai--lishi gailian," p. 80. 29. See David Clarke, "Negotiation between East and West." 30. Li You, "Art the Luohu Bridge," People's Literature 1986 no. 6. 31. In Turner, "60s/90s: Dissolving the People," p. 26. 32. Pun Ling Lui, "The SAR of Art" in Qianfeng '95 (Forward '95) (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Development Council, 1996), p. 26. Some of the exhibitions and venues were: Pre '97: Proposals and Projections, Stream Heritage: Transformation Installation, and Penis Exhibition at the Fringe Club; Pre '97 Special Art Zone at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; and New Dimension Art in the Hong Kong Cultural Centre foyer. 33. Kum Chi-Keung, Qian '97 Yishu Tequ (Pre '97: Special Art Zone), p. 20. 34. Unpublished statement on Cultural Mourning. 35. Fredric Jameson, "Modernism and Imperialism," in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 43-66. 36. Unpublished statement, "Xinlinshi 1993 daxiaofei"(New History 1993--Mass Consumption), 1993. 37. At midnight on April 27, the Beijing Public Security Bureau summoned the artists for questioning and informed them that the activity could not take place. 38. These statements and those of other artists are published in the Political Pop section of the catalogue China's New Art: Post-1989 (Hong Kong: Hanart T Z Gallery, 1993). 39. Chinese Political Pop and Cynicism may be traced back to the mid-1980s, when Wu Shan Zhuan and other Hangzhou artists created the series of installation works called Red Humor (1986-87; e.g., pl. 5) and a group paintings of "gray humor," represented here by Geng Jianyi's Second Situation, Nos. 1-4 of 1987 (pl. 22). The best-known representative of Cynicism, Fang Lijun, began drawing his cynical figures not after the Tiananmen Square crackdown but in 1988. 40. Margarita Tupitsyn, "Sots Art: The Russian Deconstructive Force," in Sots Art (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986). 41. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rogle (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), p.12. 42. I analyze this phenomenon in "Meishu, quanli, gongfan: Zhengzhi popu xianxing" (Kitsch, power, and complicity: The Political Pop phenomenon), Xiongshi Meishu (Lion Art) 297 (November 1995) :36-57. 43. The article was by Andrew Solomon, The New York Times Magazine, December 19, 1993. 44. For more details about these new middle class artists or "post-Tiananmen elite," see Jianying Zha, China Pop (New York: New Press, 1995). 45. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, pp. 41-42. The concept of the two modernities is basic to the theory of modernity in the West and is discussed by Max Weber, Jurgen Habermas, Peter B¸rger, and others. 46. Shih Rui-ren, "'Duhui ziran zhan'--dangdai yishu dui duhui zhihan de duomian jianzhao" (The exhibition "Urban Nature"--a reflection of the substance of the metropolis in contemporary art), in Dushi zhongde siran: Renwen yu wuzhi de duehua (Urban Nature: A Dialogue between Humanism and Materialism), (Taipei: The Empire Art Educational Foundation, 1994), pp. 2-5. 47. This feature of the ambivalence of readymades and the articulation of contradictions between different category pairs is discussed by Hal Foster in "The Future Of An Illusion, Or, The Contemporary Artist As Cargo Cultist," in his End Game: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture (Boston and Cambridge, Mass: Institute of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1986), pp. 91-105. 48. Shih, "'Duhui ziran Zhan,'" p. 5. 49. The East-West cultural debate that had begun in China around the turn of the century articulated three major issues: the differences and similarities between China and the West (zhongxiyitong); comparisons of the respective merits and flaws of Chinese and western cultures (zhongxiyoulue); and the future of Chinese and western cultures (zhongxiqushi). For almost all Chinese cultural pioneers, cultural conflicts such as traditional vs. modern or East vs. West were based on the notion that these were monolithic entities. 50. Homi Bhabha, "The Third Space," in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990). 51. Fei Dawei, "Fang Gu Wenda" (To transcend the East and West: An interview with Gu Wenda), Meishu (Art Monthly) July 1987, pp. 12-16. 52. In Kim Levin, "Splitting Hairs: Wenda Gu's Primal Projects and Material Misunderstandings," in Wenda Gu: Dio e i Suoi Figli/God and Children: Italian Division of United Nations, 1993-2000 (Milan: Enrico Gariboldi/Arte Contemporanea, 1994). 53. Portions of this section on Chinese artists overseas are derived from my "From the Local Context to the International Context: An Essay on the Critique of Art And Culture," in The First Academic Exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Art 96-97 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Art Centre, 1996), pp. 23-29 (in Chinese, with translation by Billy Wu). 54. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) |