Date: July 16 - September 12, 1999  
Venue: University of Oregon Museum of Art, Eugene, Oregon  

Date: October 2 - December 19, 1999 
Venue: The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 

The initial appeal of the Communist Party to a majority of Chinese owed much to this revolutionary approach. But after taking over the country in 1949, the party itself became the major source of dogmas and superstitions. Its political ideals demanded believing and submission and its leaders increasingly detached themselves from reality and turned themselves into political idols. This mystification process reached its zenith during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong was made into a god and his words into religious doctrines, worshipped and memorized by millions of Chinese unified by faith and loyalty.  

This background explains why demystification became such an urgent task to a new generation of reformers and revolutionaries after the Cultural Revolution. In China�s art world, demystification has been a continuous process in experimental art since the late 1970s, where it has developed into a major strategy of isolating, emptying, and recycling canonical signs and images, often even sacred political symbols. These include, among others, images of Mao (sacred icons in the PRC), Tiananmen and Tiananmen Square (the most sacred place in the PRC), the Great Wall (the national symbol of China), and, on a deeper level, the Chinese written language, which has facilitated both classical writings and Communist propaganda. Two installations in this part of the exhibition, Xu Bing�s Ghosts Pounding the Wall (1990) and Wenda Gu�s Pseudo� Seal Script (1984), are among the most powerful iconoclastic works created from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.  

It should be noted, however, that this strong interest in political symbols had its direct origin in the Cultural Revolution itself, which over a decade produced innumerable copies of a few sets of images and texts� mainly Mao�s portraits, his writings, and his sayings�in every written and visual form. The chief technologies of cultural and artistic production during that period were repetition and duplication�two essentialmethods used to fill up time and space with a limited range of images and words, thereby creating a coercive, homogeneous verbal and visual language in a most static form. Consequently, this homogeneous language both provided the basis for and became the chief target of the iconoclasm mobilized by experimental Chinese artists in the era following the Cultural Revolution.  

From the late 1970s to mid-1990s, young artists systematically fragmented the visual language of the Cultural Revolution by extracting individual symbols from their original context, distorting them for formalist or ideological reasons, and mixing them with signs derived from heterogeneous sources (such as commercial advertisements or images from Chinese folk art). Such practices became so common in Chinese art in the early and mid-nineties that they transcend the differences between individual artistic trends taking place at the time, such as political pop, cynical realism, or critical symbolism. At the same time, as such works were increasingly created for foreign and overseas Chinese collectors, they were detached from the local Chinese reality, becoming increasingly �image plays� staged for a non-Chinese audience.  
But genuine effort to demystify the official visual language and symbolism (which is still all-powerful in China) also has continued since the mid-nineties and is represented by works in this section. While political pop and cynical realism mainly satirize a bygone political culture, these works often address contemporary issues in Chinese society from an individual�s point of view. One such issue concerns the relationship between the past and the present. Several works, including Song Dong�s Breathing (1996) and Mo Yi�s Made by the Police Department (1997) derive their subject from the memory of the June Fourth Movement of 1989, whose tragic ending still haunts contemporary Chinese artists. Other works, such as Xing Danwen�s Born with the Cultural Revolution (1995�96) and Yu Fan�s My Mother (1995) explore a more complex relationship between individual and collective identities in Chinese society. The styles of these works are more diverse; the artists� deconstruction of conventional symbols becomes subtler and is carried out on an ideological as well as aesthetic level, as in Sui Jianguo�s Earthly Force (1990�92) and Zhang Hongtu�s Studs (1992). In general, these works reflect a current tendency toward diversity and individualization. Most notably, their direct engagement with personal experience often is absent in �political� works by the previous generation of Chinese experimental artists. 

In the mid-nineteenth century, European photographers made the first serious effort to document architectural ruins in China. Beginning early in the twentieth century, some young Chinese artists studied in Europe, where they absorbed the prevailing �ruin� aesthetic and pictorial formulas for representing ruins. Upon returning to China they found similar inspiration in old temples and pagodas. Such picturesque and sentimental images never gained real life, however. A different kind of ruin image became influential and finally became part of a modern visual culture in China. Instead of inspiring melancholy and poetic lamentation, these images, including images of wars, the Cultural Revolution, and large-scale demolitions of traditional cities, evoke pain and terror. They shook their audience because they register, record, restage, or simulate destruction�destruction as violence and atrocity that left a person, a city, or a nation with a wounded body and psyche.  

Ruin images in modern Chinese art have thus been intrinsically connected to important political and social events. From the beginning of this century, representations of war ruins played an important role in promoting nationalism and China�s transformation into a modern nation-state. Such representations provided the most concrete and direct proof of foreign invasions and could most effectively accelerate nationalist sentiment. Because of its assumed documentary value, the photograph could play this role better than any traditional art form such as painting or sculpture, especially when news photos became a regular feature of the newspaper. Perceived as reality itself, a �ruin� photograph constructed an �observed� world in print for paintings to represent. Depicting devastated fields during the civil war or destroyed cities after a Japanese bombing, these paintings often re-create the scenes based on historical photos.  

Representations of ruins again became an important phenomenon in Chinese art in the 1970s and 1980s. A type of painting known as �scar art� (shanghen yishu) depicted tragedies of the Cultural Revolution. While such paintings were often created by academic artists in a realistic style, young experimental artists used installations and performances to �restage� their experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Instead of representing a past era realistically, they often evoked a chaotic environment typical of the Cultural Revolution�ruined big-character posters, tattered papers and broken objects, dilapidated layers of writing and painting. As its name suggests, the Cultural Revolution started in the cultural, ideological, and political spheres. The targets were not cities and villages, but �old� ideas and cultures. New ideas were communicated not through grand monuments but with a visual environment comprised of revolutionary images, colors, and slogans. Consequently, works by experimental artists in the postrevolution era represent the destruction or self-destruction of this environment.  

Images related to destruction, fragmentation, and ruins continue to be an important component of Chinese experimental art in the 1990s. These images do not constitute a single trend or development, however. As reflected by works grouped in this part of the present exhibition, some artists continue the deconstruction of the socialist visual language, but the fragmented images they create are much subtler and are imbued with personal experience. For example, Cai Jin�s Beauty Banana Plant No. 48  (1994) transforms the revolutionary color red into a personal symbol, and Shi Chong�s symbolic painting The Stage (1996) employs a supra-realistic style to evoke a sense of violence and vulnerability. Other artists represent �wasted� environments and people in contemporary China. Their works, such as Yuan Dongping�s Sisters (1989�90) and Zhang Huan�s 12 Square Meters (1994) continue a realistic/humanistic tradition advanced by critical Chinese writers and artists throughout the twentieth century. With their strong political and social implications, these works link �Demystification,� the previous part of this exhibition, with the current theme, �Ruins.�  

The last three works in this part are related, in one way or another, to the transformation of the city during China�s drastic modernization and commercialization. A striking aspect of Chinese cities over the past five years has been a never-ending destruction and construction: a forest of cranes and scaffolding, the roaring sound of bulldozers, the dust and mud. Old houses are coming down everyday to make room for new commercial buildings, often glittering high-rises in the so-called �Chinese postmodern� style. Thousands of people have been relocated from the inner city to the outskirts by official decree. These conditions imply changing conceptions of temporality and spatiality and supply both the context and the content of the three works in this group. Zhan Wang�s Temptation (1994) is linked to his other projects on demolition; Rong Rong�s Untitled (1996�97) studies abandoned images in demolished buildings; Yin Xiuzhen�s Suitcase (1995) defines the artist�s position in a �ruined city.� Taken together, these artists have shifted their focus from past to present. Their works transport a startling sense of absence and loss in a contemporary Chinese urban environment. 

From �Demystification� to �Ruins� to �Transience,� the focus of this exhibition has gradually shifted from the introspective look at the Maoist era taken by experimental artists to their critique of the post-Mao modernization project to their reflection on artistic language and representation. This reflection is prompted by the profound changes in China from the 1980s to the 1990s. 

The rapid development of a market economy has not only altered the shape of the city but has brought about fundamental changes in social structure, ideology, and morality; even more striking are the shifts in people�s identities and relationships. One of the major effects of these changes has been to destabilize the existing structures and systems. While generating uncertainty and anxiety (as expressed by the �ruin� installations and photographs in the previous section), this destabilizing process can be enormously energizing, because instability is often a necessary condition for a self-examination devoid of the confidence and optimism attached to a self-imposed collective ideology. This self-examination has begun to produce important changes in recent Chinese experimental art. A number of features common to these works signify some noticeable tendencies. 

One of these tendencies is a conscious shift from �depth� to �surface.� For many years Chinese artists have been schooled to inject deep meaning into their works. They have been told that they should investigate the essence of the phenomenal world and should only employ their brushes to paint images that convey social commentaries. This teaching has in?uenced generations of artists, including some experimental artists, but it is ?rmly rejected in all the works in this part of the exhibition. The artists of these works all identify themselves with the surface, though the meaning of �surface� varies in each case. Yu Hong�s �surface� is that of a glamorous but superficial social life; Zeng Hao�s �surface� is that of the flat picture plane; and Zhan Wang�s �surface� is that of a reflecting mirror. What these artists have in common is their rejection of anything beneath these surfaces. And according to all of them, their attachment to the surface is not born of their indifference to meaning, but of the meaninglessness in anything they depict. 
Related to this distrust of the world they belong to is a fascination with the phenomena of transparency and translucency, which both negate the materiality of art media and imply the possibility of making the subject or reality invisible. Wang Jin�s translucent Peking Opera costumes are unreal and noncommittal: they both attract the gaze and detour it somewhere else. Qiu Zhijie has made the most serious effort among Chinese experimental artists to dismiss the boundary between the subject and the environment. Unlike the �ruin� installations and photographs in the previous section, which always omit the subject, Qiu�s work represents the subject but makes it invisible. 

These works also attest to a new sense of time and space. The artists uniformly reject large temporal and spatial frameworks and associate their works only with the momentary present. Liu Zheng�s retro-style photographs deconstruct the sentiment of nostalgia: by making these photos �collages� of nostalgic images and contemporary kitsch, he cancels the historical credibility of the images. Zhu Fadong, on the other hand, identifies his art with his �state of being.� His performances thus always represent his self in a constant state of flux, wandering, seeking a place for himself, and vanishing in an exterior void. This uncertainty in spatial definitions also characterizes Zeng Hao�s painting of interior space. His depiction of a contemporary lifestyle redefines this space as a random gathering of things at disconnected moments in time. But it is Yu Hong�s painting Flying (1997) that offers the best metaphor for the sense of instability and transience: jumping on a trampoline, three grown-ups imagine that they have been freed from the earth.