Gaudy Art also grew out of the formalistic elements and creative impulses of Chinese Political Pop and Cynical Realism.  What I mean by formalistic elements in this respect, is a tendency toward the use of gaudy or garish colors and materials.  As early as 1990, the former "Popi" (suggestive of the English word ennui) artist Zhang Peili painted his "Aerobics" series which were unmistakably incorporating such elements in his work. Their use can also be detected in the Political Pop artists, Fang Lijun and Song Yonghong's works as early as 1992. 

Both Cynical Realism and Political Pop, as forms of "unofficial art", even if they could not be exhibited publicly and thereby gain public acceptance, reflected a "Zeitgeist" its English counterpart being a Spirit of the Age, depiction in the bored ennui, roguish humor, and political irreverence that much of the work displayed.. All of the things which appeared broadly in the literature, music, movies and television serials of the time.

There are elements of Political Pop and Cynical Realism which in many ways are interchangeable and overlap.  Whether it be Cynical Realism's depiction of "popi",  or  Political Pop' s use of consumer images and of its toying with political images.  The underlying trend was to express a political position,  even when the work had no direct relationship with politics. 

The fact that these works symbolized China in the late 80s and early 90s, encouraged a kind of widespread public sentiment at the time.  Cynicism and "popi" have many precedents in Chinese intellectual history, manifesting themselves especially in periods in which there is a high degree of political control.  For example, the scholar gentry class in the fourth century, between the Wei and Jin Dynastic reigns, was often portrayed as a self-derisive, crazed rogues who found a way to deal with tight political controls.  A well-known literary work of the time, Shi Shuo Xin Yu (literally translated, World Stories New Language), is full of documented examples. 

Cynical Realism's characteristics on the other hand were a more pedestrian attitude to everyday-life.   Plays and essays produced during the thirteenth century Yuan dynasty are filled with examples of "popi" and self-derision.  Sun Daya in his seminal work "Tian Lai Ji Xu" used "Cynical Farce" in reference to Bai Pu, a writer of ballads at the time.  The sense of ennui and inner-emptiness expressed in this kind of dissolute and " popi" style seems to be a common way for China' s scholar gentry class to find escape in dark political times. Another interesting comparison, is that of one of China's most popular Buddhist images, "Mi Le Buddha," which portrays this important religious icon holding his belly, reeling in good-hearted laughter, which for me is similar in terms of its expressive form and spirit to Fang Lijun's characters.  They are often portrayed laughing in a similarly irreverent and almost impious way. 

However, it was artist Qi Zhilong who, from the beginning infused his late Political Pop works with popular Gaudy "social flower" motifs, movie stars and poster girl images. Although never overtly political,  his works were in many ways the precursors of Gaudy Art.  It may even be suggested that he stands as one of the original Gaudy Art artists.  From the beginning, he preferred his works to be referred to as "consumer images".  This is what I refer to when I say that Gaudy Art's "creative impulses" can be traced to Political Pop art which expressed the deep psychological feelings evoked by " the impact of Western consumer culture on socialist political ideology. 

This becomes more apparent when we look at the images of flashy actresses, beautiful women and social flowers in the works of Qi Zhilong and compare them for example, with Wang Guangyi's  "Great Castigation" or " Yu Youhan's " Mao and Whitney" both of which are highly representative of Political Pop art. 

In Qi's works, the political image has been considerably muted while the consumer image is made more prominent.  It becomes  an important distinction between the "gaudy" tendencies of Political Pop and Cynical Realism and Gaudy Art works themselves.  The critical approach of Gaudy Art is not a departure from the past.  Rather, Gaudy Art is an attitude that consumer culture and everyday life have taken leave of politics.  It is a genuine feeling about the gaudiness and its many appearances that have come with a consumer culture running rampant in China. 

Another way to put it might be to say that artists associated with Gaudy Art are intuitively responding  to the "get-rich-quick" attitude of the dreams and realities of peasants. Brought about or emerging out of the consequences of Western consumer culture in China.

Nonetheless, its not consumer culture that is at issue here.  Given that modern day consumer culture takes root and grows from the social values and standards of a modernized society, it is a fact that China does not have either the social values and standards or a modernized society that seems central to Gaudy Art.

With regard to my position that Gaudy Art is driven by "a peasant-like, get-rich-quick taste,  it seems to me that all cultures are founded upon the existence of a set system of social standards and values.  Yet, over the past  hundred years, as China has broken with its traditional culture and accepted the impact of Western culture, it has still never really approved the value system underlying Western culture. 

From such early social philosophy  as "China as the basic essence, theWest as a means to an end,"  to "China's basic essence is the socialist ideology",  the foundation upon which contemporary culture stands essentially comprises of short-term political pragmatism and expedience. As a result, China has been unable to establish lasting cultural systems and forms.  So-called "traditional culture" and even "Western culture" in today's reality are nothing more than attitudes borrowed in the name of such political pragmatism and expedience. 

Western and traditional cultural forms are mostly employed to serve a political agenda.  I don't know if this constitutes culture and so I refer to it as "the culture of habit".  In China's present social structure this attitude allows people in positions of authority to pick and choose from traditional,  and Western culture according to their own personal preference, memories or requirements. Culture for these people is forever in an unsystematic state of disparate pieces. 

For the peasant elements in power, modern consumer culture naturally takes the form of things like "Happiness and Prosperity",   "8888" (the number eight sounds like the character "fa" , which means to "get rich") and Red Lanterns.  Of course, I'm over-simplifying. Hopefully, in future others will be able to take a closer look at this phenomena. 

It is against this backdrop, that China's Gaudy Art being influenced by the art of Jeff Koons can be verified.  For me this seems only natural.  Each and every artist must work from a certain linguistic tradition or school.  The important thing is the artist's feelings and whether they are informed by today's realities, not to mention the manner in which the artist chooses to express his feelings toward this reality.  Or, in the case of those artist's whose work has been affected by Koons's work, the thing that concerns me most is, how the artist in question turns this into their own mode of discourse?

As already mentioned, Qi Zhilong is an important artist emerging out from Political Pop towards Gaudy Art..  Another important artist is Xu Yihui who was initially involved in the 1985 New Tide Movement, but then subsequently found himself less active for a number of years. 

Between the years 1991 and 1992, when planning the "Post '89: New Chinese Art "and "Mao Goes Pop" exhibitions, Xu Yihui  provided me with additional support.  When re-writing "Artistic Renditions of Mao" and "The Layers of New Thought on China's Modern Art".  Xu helped me copy and organize countless slides.  He began to compare Shanghai Calendar Posters, and Yanan peasant-based art, to later Cultural Revolution's "Red, Bright and Shiny" posters  which he felt had led to a form of "debasement" of Chinese culture.  At that time, Xu spoke to me on a number of occasions about the relationship between consumer culture and this steady  debasement or "vulgarization" of culture over the past hundred years.

 At the time, he had not yet moved to the artist colony at Yuan Ming Yuan outside Beijing.  He had, however, already completed his painting, "The Little Red Book", a precursor his porcelain works such as, "Fast Food Lunch Box".  It was in the fall of 1992 that I  decided to include these works in a Political Pop exhibition I was curating in Taiwan at the time. In fact, I felt these works to be the earliest works of Gaudy Art.   Or to put it another way, these works were the precursor forms of Gaudy Art because works like "Little Red Book" had been very much influenced by Political Pop art. 

After moving to Yuan Ming Yuan in the Spring of 1993, Yu  began work on "Sunflower", "Warm Water Bottle" and other works.  He employed such objects as strings of "twinkle" lights popular outside the entrances of stores and restaurants at the time.  Some of Xu's early works, unlike "Warm Water Bottle" "Sunflower," still had political overtones .

At the end of 1993, I had the chance to go to the Chongqing region where I saw works by a recent graduate of the Sichuan Art Academy, Feng Zhengjie, His work such as his  "Idols and Zealotry", also focused on consumer culture.  The canvases were bright and gaudy in color.  They recalled  the works of Xu Yihui and Qi Zhilong. It was then for the first time, that I began to gain a feeling for works concerned with consumerism and the debasement of culture.

At the time, Xu Yihui had embarked wholeheartedly on the production of Gaudy Art works. Along with Yang Wei, Liu Zheng and Qi Zhilong, Xu and others who met frequently.   I should say that in the period from 1993 to 1994, a group of artists with common interests emerged around Xu Yihui and his works. 

In 1994, Xu Yihui told me about his idea for a series of porcelain works.  That summer, I accompanied him to the Ci Zhou Porcelain Kiln in my home town where I introduced him to some porcelain artisans who were friends of mine. After seeing his sketches and understanding his requirements, they suggested that he might be better served by the Porcelain kilns in Jingdezhen. 

During September, on my introduction, he went to Jingdezhen for the first time.  By early 1995, he had completed his first porcelain works and returned to Nanjing.  About the same time, Hu Xiangdong moved into the artist colony at Yuan Ming Yuan.  By the Spring of that same year, Xu Yihui, Yang Wei, Hu Xiangdong, Liu Zheng and Wang Qingsong began interacting  again. The long talks they had on the subject helped to crystallize their feelings regarding their work. 

Among the many members of the group, Yang Wei was the writer.  He was thoughtful and read lot of books.  He took it upon himself to record some of the things happening at the time through his essays and notes. Toward the end of 1995, he finished  writing "Vulgar Arts in a Collapsing Culture". This essay came out of the many talks he had with other artists.  Of course, many of these concepts were shared by the other artists, especially Xu Yihui with such works as the "Stylization of Local Theater"  In fact, Xu Yihui was hard at work at the time on an article he later published entitled "The Quality of Modernism Versus the Linguistic Realms of Popular Culture" In this article, Xu made the point that he didn't think Gaudy Art was an important artistic movement in the traditional sense.  There was no underlying theoretical basis for it. The important thing for him was the resonance of the work itself. 

Still, with the exception of Xu Yihui's works, other artists had not really taken on a "face".  Even Yang Wei's works at the time were similar to the pink lotus works of Political Pop artist Li Shan.  Gaudy Art  really did not take a definable shape until the Fall of 1996.  At the invitation of Xu Yihui, I visited the artists' colony again and saw for the first time the brash gaudy motifs of "turnip and cabbage"  of the artists Hu Xiangdong and Wang Qingsong. 

Liu Zheng had just completed his "Blue Sky Days" work and Yang Wei was working on a series of Renminbi currency works entitled "The Chinese People's Bank".   While these works were outwardly gaudy resulting in titles such as  "Cabbage and Turnips are Today's Vulgarity"  and the "Chinese People's' Bank" along with other such crude jokes, much of the work was still only a reflection of the group's common understanding and conceptualization of mass culture, rather than dealing with personal feelings.  Still, I wanted to try to organize an exhibition on the theme.  This was despite the feeling that these works were still dangerously similar in both look and feel.  After talking to them further and expressing my reservations, I decided to shelve the idea for awhile.

In April of 1996, Wang Xingsong, Qi Zhilong and Xu Yihui sought out both Liao Wen and myself  to help them organize an exhibition.  A few days later, Yang approached us separately to plan an exhibition for him. At the time I considered putting them all together in one exhibition, but at the time I felt the idea would not  work.

I had previously written a catalogue essay for Feng Zhengjie entitled "Brightly Colored Plum and Peach Blossoms Among the Ruins".  As I thought more about an exhibition for Xu Yihui, Wang Qingsong and Qi Zhilong, I began to refer to their works as "gaudy" in as much as they were garishly colored and using vulgarization as themes in their work. 
I eventually settled on an exhibition which I titled "Model for the Masses". 

When planning Yang Wei' s exhibition, I was asked if I could come up with a title that had something to do with dressing up or cosmetics and, for that I chose to use "Rouge Life". 

If you add to these two exhibitions the solo exhibition of the works of Feng Zhengjie,  including an exhibition that was eventually closed down of the Luo Brothers, the Spring of 1996 saw four exhibitions of Gaudy Art: "Rouge Life" on April 13; "Model for the Masses" on April 20; "Brightly Colored Peach and Plum Blossoms Among the Ruins" on April 27; and, "The Damage From the Flooding of China": (a play on the word "fuhua" which means "enriching of China") on May 18. 

Since seeing Qi Zhilong and Xu Yihui work I have been trying to get my head around this style of art of art from China.

As the US moved from Pop Art in the sixties to Jeff Koons and kitsch in the eighties, how had the visual and verbal language of art changed between the time these two different styles emerged? Were there parallels in the transition from Political Pop to Gaudy Art in Chinese contemporary art?  What made Gaudy Art different from the art of Jeff Koons?  These were just some of the questions I attempted to address in my previous two articles on the subject.*
 
I'd like to sum up with a few words on the origin of the term "Gaudy Art" and its meaning. The term "kitsch" and its appropriation into American art can be traced back to 1939  (maybe even further, I'm not sure) when Clement Greenberg wrote his influential essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch". Greenberg maintained, what later became a modernist tenet, that art had to have an essential "quality" to be considered art.  Anything lacking this "quality" was kitsch.  In the nineties, a good number of critics take exception to Greenberg's concept of "quality". 

This is perhaps most evident in later discussions of the works of Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Mike Kelly, Jenny Holzer, David Hammons, Elizabeth Murray.  Critics like Robert Storr point out that artists like Koons effectively debunked the "cult of quality" and " the mystique of the eye"(Art in the Postmodern Era, Irving Sandler, Harper Collins(1996), P. 7).  In distancing themselves from modernism's blind faith in formalism, such artists were essentially saying that there ought to be something more important than the aesthetic form of art itself.  Thus, we see in works by Koons and similar artists the emergence of social criticisms, some positive, some negative, but all engaged with their surroundings

The term "kitsch" appeared in China for the first time, if my impression is correct, in the 1990's with the translations of works by Czech writer Milan Kundera.  Here the word was translated "meisu" ("mei" meaning "seductively beautiful" and "su" meaning "common, base or vulgar"). 

In the English - Chinese dictionaries, kitsch is defined "clumsy or crude handicrafts; cheaply made." The term originated from Germany, where I understand it implied  something common or cheap, or even something pretty that was popular with the people.

I had a chance to sit down and discuss the subject of kitsch with a Harvard scholar in 1994. We agreed that a more accurate translation might  be "yansu" ("yan" meaning "garrishly or brightly colored" and "su" meaning "common, base or vulgar").  However, my thinking at the time was that the art I was experiencing was really a parody of kitsch. It was not kitsch itself.

This term �yansu� I had come up with was translated into the word "kitsch", for a speech I gave at "Visual Art and Culture" in Australia in 1996. Entitled  "Popu Zhihou: Yansu Yuyan yu Fanfeng Mofang" - it was translated as  "After Political Pop: Kitsch Discourse and Satirical Parody".   Looking back, I don't think this translation of "yansu" was accurate. 

During that same year I also had an opportunity to talk with New York MOMA curator, Barbara London, on the subject. I asked her if she could think of a term that might be more accurate in meaning. After seeing the works first hand, we agreed that her term  "Gaudy Art" might be more appropriate. 

As American critics today disagree with Greenberg position that art produced like that of Koons should be considered kitsch, similarly I don't think the "yansu" art produced by those artists whose work have been discussing should be considered kitsch. It seemed only natural to search for a new term to describe this kind of art emerging in China.

 Li Xianting
1998.3.25

* The title of Li�s previous two articles on the subject of Gaudy Art are �After Political Pop: Kitsch Discourse and Satirical Parody� and �Parodying Imitations of a Get-Rich-Quick Peasant Taste.�