A Panoramic
Exhibition Traces Chinese Contemporary Art
In 221BC, the self-styled
first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang (259-201BCE) declared his reign the
beginning of history, and enforcing the decree by pre-empting dissent: burning
the books and burying the scholars possessed of other ideas about antecedents.
Jorge Luis Borges, in “The Emperor and the Books,” an essay about this
alternate-facts regime, concludes that Qin’s radical rewriting of history was
doomed to fail (as it did, with Emperor Two), by the conservative character of
“the most traditional of peoples.”
Given the strongly
Confucian, hierarchical bent of Chinese culture, that characterization has some
truth. However, it ignores the social, political and economic revolutions of
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (as well as various failed
revolutions: the Boxer and Taiping Rebellion, etc.). Cultures do not attain the
ripe old age of five thousand by being inflexible and dogmatic—by building
mental walls, and forsaking rationality and reality. The historian Will Durant noted
that China’s foreign conquerors and rulers—the Mongols of the Yuan Dynasty and
the Manchus of the Qing Dynasty—ended up mastered and colonized, themselves. “Notice
that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow
survives by bending with the wind,” observed the sage, Bruce Lee.
The lessons of
history, including cultural syncretism are much in evidence in the wide-ranging
survey now at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World (through February
24), assembled by the Guggenheim Museum. Comprising over a hundred objects—in
painting, drawing, photography, video, sculpture, installation, and conceptual
art—from sixty-odd individual artists and collectives, the show is an ambitious
retelling of the development of contemporary art, especially conceptual art,
from the quashing of democratic dissent at Tiananmen Square in 1989 to China’s ascent
to the world stage as an economic equal with its hosting of the 2008 Beijing Olympics,
a spectacle that enlisted the talents of famous artists Ai Wei Wei, who
designed the Bird’s Nest stadium, and Cai Guo-Qiang, who designed the fireworks
extravaganza.
The title of the show
is revealing: Art and China. The
development of contemporary art is on display, but there’s little or none of
the Cynical Realism that first registered with western audiences, a kind of
ironic commentary on Chinese culture that seemed made for export: Pop Art (not
socialism) with Chinese characteristics, to misquote Deng Xiaoping. With
multiple curators, the show is expansive, with much of the work seemingly
chosen as much for historical (or art-historical) reasons as for pure aesthetic
appeal (which contemporary art mavens sometimes disparage as
counterrevolutionary bourgeois hedonism). Can we dub Chinese conceptual art,
then Sino Realism?
The show is organized
in six topics, each one occupying a gallery or two on the museum’s seventh
floor.
1. No U-Turn: 1989 revisits
the China/Avant-Garde Art show that
opened in the National Art Gallery in Beijing, in February, 1989, containing
work made during the previous decade after the liberal reform policies of the
late 1970s. Unfortunately, the forward-looking, no-retreat thrust of that show
was blunted by the events of June 4, which prompted both an exodus of talent
and dampened the \ spirits of those who remained. The most prominent work in
this gallery is the large pair of sculpture installations by Huang Yong Ping, “Theater
of the World” and “The Bridge,” which update traditional Chinese animal
symbolism with live snakes, lizards and insects, confined to zoomorphic (snake-
and turtle-shaped) cages. Installed at the Guggenheim, the piece aroused the
ire of animal rights activists; SFMOMA has chosen to exhibit the work emptied
of prisoners, and thus without creaturely carnage. More traditionally palatable
is Gu Dexin’s “Plastic Pieces—287,” a swarm of multicolored plastic tangles,
melted into organic forms suggesting android viscera, and more interesting to
peruse in its bizarre details than to behold in toto as a large wall installation. My favorite piece in the
entire show is Qiu Zhije’s panoramic six-panel map of China, “Map of Art and
China After 1989: Theater of the World,” a fanciful yet sobering depiction of mountains,
river and plains bedecked by historical and cultural inscriptions in English
and Chinese: e.g., Valley of Reform Era, No U Turn, Socialism with Chinese
Characteristics, Struggle Against Bourgeois Liberalization, etc. It’s a world
contained in an artifact, like the Bronze-Age Greece contained in Achilles’
shield in The Iliad, or Bruegel’s
living-folklore painting of Dutch villagers enacting 16th-century
Dproverbs. Alas, this encyclopedic masterpiece
linking traditional Chinese landscape painting with history, politics and
aesthetics, belongs to the Guggenheim, which commissioned it; at least it will
be available in New York.
2. New Measurement: Analyzing the Situation follows the development
of conceptual art in Hangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai, using “mechanistic
processes, documentary sensibilities, and minimalist means that slyly mimic the
very systems the artists sought to subvert”—I quote the show’s wall label—by
eliminating individuality and embracing absurdity. Wang Guangyi’s oil painting Mao Zedong: Red Grid No.2, is a grisaille
rendering of the Great Helmsman, almost official-looking in its neoclassical
perfection, but crisscrossed by red stripes suggestive of cages. Geng Gianyi’s Misprinted Books are bound volumes of
gibberish Chinese characters, a Borgesian idea, converted to Hanzi. Qiu Zhije’s
“Assignment No.1: Copying the Orchid Pavilion Preface 1000 Times” both embraces
and mocks China’s reverence for tradition and rote learning: the artist copied
a famous fourth-century poem until it became an illegible, inscrutable block of
ink fashioned and canceled by innumerable repetitions.
3. Five Hours: Capitalism, Urbanism, Realism examines the return
to social realism in Beijing and Guangzhou. Hung Liu painted “Avant-Garde,” a
shaped-canvas self-portrait as a rifle-bearing soldier in the People’s Army, in
1993-4, after emigrating to California; it’s monumental and dignified, a
testimonial to the value of traditional art training, once disparaged by the
avant-garde West as Soviet Realism—and a reminder that ‘avant-garde’ was
originally a military term. Zeng Fanzhi’s oil painting,”Meat,” shows stoic
slaughterhouse workers changing into their work clothes, while surrounded by hanging
carcasses that are nearly indistinguishable from the men’s bodies. Liu Zheng’s documentary photos of coal miners
and actors and Wang Jianwei’s “Living Elsewhere” video of hardscrabble country
life—at the edge of a superhighway, no less—remind us that ‘crazy rich Asians’
are the stuff of global fantasy—mostly. (The film flopped in China,
incidentally.)
4. Uncertain Pleasures: Acts of Sensation examines both the acsecnsion
of Chinese contemporary painting to the international market, and the reaction
to that financial success among the artists of Beijing and Hangzhou. Ai
Weiwei:”Always distrust authority, be suspicious of centralist theories, doubt
your alleged cultural influences.” Yu Youhan’s collage, “Just What Is It That
Makes To day’s Homes, So Modern, So Appealing?” pays homage to Pop Art with its
title, taken from Richard Hamilton’s iconic collage; but instead of a
California bodybuilder with a giant lollipop as protagonist, we have a
middle-aged Mao enjoying the midcentury-modern lifestyle. Lin Tianmiao’s
sculpture, “Sewing,” looks at the Chinese fashion industry through the lens of
surrealism, with its sewing machine wrapped—mummified—in cotton thread, and a
ghostly pair of hands busy at work via digital video projection. Chen Zhen’s suspended
sculpture, “Lumière Innocente,” a child’s bed bedecked with otherworldly lights,
is a magical object even without a social subtext. Song Dong, by finding and
throwing stones, and painting on them a record of his interactions, creates
faux-archaic artifacts endowed with narratives in “Throwing a
Stone—documentation.” Ai Weiwei’s famous photos of the artist dropping a Han
Dynasty urn are here, as is a Han vase decorated with a Coca-Cola logo, and an
unpretentious photo of an insouciant young woman (the future Mrs. Ai, I
believe) lifting her skirt and flashing her panties for the camera at The
Forbidden City.
5. Otherwhere: Travels Through the In-Between focuses on the
increased contact with the international art market as well as the
transformations in consciousness wrought by digital media. Song Don’s “Stamping
the Water” is a series of color photographs documenting an hour spent stamping
the water of the Khasa River with a large carved woodblock bearing the ideogram
for water, an exercise in poetic transcendence—or bureaucratic absurdity. Zhan
Wang’s video, “Empty Soul / ”The Mao Suit,” documents the
mass-grave burial of a number of coffins, each bearing an empty Mao suit, in a
parody of the massive Qian burial site of the First Emperor, with his armies of
ceramic warriors. Liu Xiaodong’s four full-length oil portraits of
soldiers, “Battlefield Realism: The
Eighteen Arhats,” are painted in a simplified realistic style recalling both
commercial illustration and Egon Schiele, a style appropriately ambivalent for
warrior-saints.
6. Whose Utopia: Activism and Alternatives Circa 2008 examines the art
produced as the Beijing Olympics (motto: One World, One Dream) drew near,
promising renewed international acceptance and enhanced national prestige.
Various groups of artists abstained from the official rites and ceremonies,
creating utopias of their own outside the object-trading commercial system, and
in stark contrast with the dazzling pyrotechnics that highlighted the Olympics
opening ceremonies, shown in a video. Gu Dexin’s “2009-05-02,” a series of
painted ideograms in official fonts and colors, reproduces disturbing text from
Lu Xun’s dystopic novel of 1918, Diary of
a Madman. Ai Weiwei’s “4851” covers the walls of a small gallery with lists
of the names of children killed in (I believe) the Sichuan earthquake, a topic
he covered several years ago in a dragon sculpture composed of small backpacks.
The dragon, associated with water and benevolence, is also the subject of Chen
Zhen’s “Precipitous Parturition,” an 85-foot long dragon with a sinuous body
made of bicycle inner tubes, and a head fashioned from bicycle wheel rims, hanging
in SFMOMA’s old main entrance, on Third Street. The hasty birth of a mobile,
industrialized nation—with its benefits and costs—is the subject here, and one which
resonates through the rest of this mammoth exhibition on which I have barely
touched here. It’s a must-see aesthetic spectacle—with sociopolitical
characteristics.
It should not be
forgotten that a certain amount of Big Brotherism still prevails in China, now
aided by digital technology, so artists who stayed in China after 1989, unlike
their emigrant peers, still have to toe the line. The governments actions
against Ai Wei Wei, which culminated recently in the sudden (but probably
expected) bulldozing of his studio,
cannot have escaped anyone’s attention. Youthful protests against
cultural conservatism—the invasion of museums, and documentation of actions
performed in public space, familiar to westerners familiar with Dada and performance—took
place, but overt political dissent is understandably nowhere to be seen. During
the Soviet bloc years, eastern European artists used Surrealism to mask and
process their discontent. Conceptual art, with its intellectual puzzles and
in-joke humor, may serve the same covert expressive function in today’s
capitalist China. Can we dub it Sino-Realism?
—
the twenty years
between the bloody suppression of protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and
the ostensible accession of China to respectable nationhood (these days, with
the rule of law seemingly on the decline everywhere, not looking so
respectable) with its hosting of the Olympics in 2008. Art fans will remember that Chinese were
enlisted in the spectacle: Ai Wei Wei designed the Bird’s Nest stadium; and the
pyrotechnics expert _____ was entrusted with the fireworks, which are, after
all, a Chinese invention.
Originated at the
Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York City, to acclaim and alarm. The acclaim
was for the show’s ambitious scope, tracing the history of China’s avant-garde
art movements in a vast country without much of a collector base, and its
ascension to the global art world (several of the artists are rep[resented by
Pace and Gagosian, major player galleries with worldwide reach and impact. The
alarm was for a pair of controversial installation sculptures,
Chen Zhen’s
“Precipitous Parturition,” and 85-foot long dragon with a sinuous body made of
bicycle inner tubes and a head fashioned from bicycle wheel rims and other
parts. hanging in lobby of SFMOMA old main entrance
Parturition is giving birth,
so the hasty birthing of a mobile, industrialized nation—a formidable dragon,
traditional symbol of _______________
ZHang Peili “Water:
Standard Version from the Cihai Dictionary”
(1991) video of famous woman newscaster who has been tricked into
reading a dictionary entry on water, symbol of change and adaptation
Huan Zhang “12 Square
Meters:”(1994)
Ai Wei Wei “Dropping Han
Dynasty Urn “ (1995
“Han Dynasty Urn with
Coa-ColaLogo”
(1995)
Xu Tan “”Made in China”
installation (1997-8)
six theme
third space”
critical stance and
open-ended forms of COnceptual Art
Gu Dexin’s wall
sculptures of melted plastic pieces in various colors —organic, variety meats
intestinal viscera zoomorphic invertebrate life forms from some alternate
reality
QIu Zhijie “Map of art
and China After 1989: Theater of the World “ 2017)
six-panel painting in
ink ion paper mounted tovsilk
commissioned by te
Guggenheim
specifically created
for this theme
mountains, plains,
rivers, vast expanse
features labeled Chinese history and art history that has the
intellectual and emotional depth and the visual grandeur of a Breugel lansdcape
populated by enactments of sixteenth-century Dutch proverbs
Huan Yong PIng
“Theater of the World
(1993) millipedes, beetles,crickets, cockroaches, grasshoppers geckos and wall
lizards
The Bridge 1995 bronze figurines, corn snakes and sulcata
tortoises
Wang Xingwei’s
2001painting, “New Beijing,” replicating a news photo of wounded students
whelled to the hospital but replacing the students with wounded oenguis
Xu Bing’sinstallation
“Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?”
Chan Buddhist poet
originally distfrom9/11
site
Huang Yong PIng ”The
History of Chinese Painting and A Concise History of Modern Painting Washed in
a Washing Machine for two Minutes (1987/93)
