The Age of Rebirth:
The ’85 Ideological Trend and Modernism
The Progressive Chinese Youth Art Exhibition - The Debate about Chinese-Style Painting - The ’85 Ideological Trend and Art Movement - The Important Art Groups and Their Art -
The Progressive Chinese Youth Art Exhibition
In 1981, at a working conference in Hangzhou (18-25 December), the secretariat of the Chinese Artists Association pointed out that ‘artworks and statements revealing tendencies to bourgeois liberalization have appeared’. This reaction in the art world to ‘bourgeois liberalization’ was obviously connected with Deng Xiaoping’s 17 July speech on this theme to officials of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee: ‘In recent days there has been an airing of excessively liberal views, many of which far exceed the intensity of erroneous ideas expressed by most rightists in 1957. Examples are numerous. In brief, these statements express the wish to abandon the socialist road, break with the leadership of the Party, and engage in bourgeois liberalization. … the core of bourgeois liberalization is opposition to the leadership of the Party…’ In August, it became readily apparent why in the world of culture and art harsh condemnation had been instigated against Bai Hua’s film Bitter Love that cynically looked at reality. Through until 1983, phenomena suspected of being ‘bourgeois’ constantly surfaced, until on 12 October, Deng Xiaoping anxiously and unequivocally told the 2nd plenary session of the 12th Congress of the CPC : ‘Success in the battle lines of theory and culture is of prime importance, and there is no doubt that these must be affirmative. Yet, many problems, as well as serious confusion, exist in the areas of literature, art and theory, most notably the phenomenon of spiritual pollution. … The essence of spiritual pollution is the spread of the decadent and moribund thought of the bourgeoisie and other exploitative classes, which results in a lack of trust in socialism, the communist enterprise, and the leadership of the Party’. Several months later, in mid-December, the Chinese Artists Association convened a meeting in Suzhou that focused on a discussion of the elimination of ‘spiritual pollution’ from art circles.
The sixth national art exhibition at the end of 1984 was disappointing, even if the occasional painting like He Duoling’s Youth did happen to be included in the national offerings. The Central Academy of Fine Arts staged a forum on 15 January 1985 on its campus in conjunction with the exhibition, at which Fei Dawei, a student at the academy, made an interesting observation on the organization of the discussions:
The preparatory work for this art exhibition began at the end of 1983. Given the particular historical conditions at that time, the preparatory work both in Beijing and regional centers was to varying degrees influenced by ‘leftist’ thought. … There is an imbalance between thematic and non-thematic paintings among the works in the exhibition. Non-thematic works focusing on the artistic exploration of new ideas are few and far between at the exhibition. ..[1]
However, about six months after the conclusion of the sixth national art exhibition, a fresh atmosphere again prevailed in the art world, stemming directly from the Progressive Chinese Youth Art Exhibition held in Beijing in May 1985. The painter and critic Yuan Yunfu recorded the excitement this event generated:
From these young people’s works, we genuinely feel that Chinese art is moving from a single face towards pluralism and that the pursuit of different artistic styles is beginning to widen the field as individual appearances take shape. Seeing these works, one sincerely feels that a spring-time with a hundred flowers blossoming has come to the arts.[2]
Indeed, the genres on display at the Progressive Chinese Youth Art Exhibition were clearly more diverse than those seen at previous exhibitions, and artists and critics felt that the various possibilities of art were being confirmed for the first time; the previous debates among art critics on form and abstraction, realism and modernism seemed to have played their role in liberating artistic thinking. It was totally understandable that at this time people assessed the liberation of artistic thinking according to the extent to which artists were free to select the forms they liked. Artists and critics were excited by the ideological situation that unfolded in that year – from the announcement by Party leaders at the Fourth Congress of the Chinese Writers Association that ‘creative writing must be free and, in other words, writers must think for themselves and be completely free to choose subject matter, themes, and artistic techniques of expression’. Hua Junwu appealed to artists at the Fourth Congress of the Chinese Artists Association convened shortly afterwards ‘to struggle against all those phenomena which impede creative freedom’.
The Progressive Chinese Youth Art Exhibition had a clear theme – ‘participation, development, and peace’. Although the theme was in itself beyond reproach, it also shows that those works which were able to express greater meaning beyond those themes were not in the running for the first, second, and third prizes. Yet three works that only won encouragement awards deserve our attention – In the New Age: The Inspiration of Adam and Eve, Coming of Spring, and Studio 140. These works reflected the question of form, one related to the question of change in the content of thought and concepts.
Zhang Qun and Meng Luding’s In the New Age: The Inspiration of Adam and Eve adopted surrealist techniques similar to those of Dali, yet the significance of this work was that the changes in artistic conception went far beyond the artistic forms, and the artist’s ideas was firmly grounded in skepticism: ‘All final conclusions are suspect for youth. The pressure of progress compels us to introspect on what happened in the past. The existing order is increasingly less suited for us’.[3] Even though this statement came from the artists, they were simply expressing an important trend in ideas at that time: skepticism about doctrine. The artists did not believe in a ‘pre-existing order’ or the artistic thought of mainstream ideology; they would rather endure the suffering of the human world of experience by savoring dangerous fruit like Adam and Eve than be dominated by god and enjoy the happiness of a paradise without light. As symbolized in the painting, they felt it was necessary to break away from the outmoded restrictions of paradise, and squarely face the future. In this sense, In the New Age: The Inspiration of Adam and Eve was a symbolically significant didactic painting.
Coming of Spring by Yuan Qingyi was a very different work, in that it revealed a completely different state of mind and contrasted with the dominant mood of In the New Age. Its state of mind could even be regarded as the future envisaged by In the New Age. Spring was coming, but what was its relationship to the ‘self’? Did spring signify the hopes of the ‘self’? If ‘the pre-ordained order’ and its internal basis were biased in the eyes of this generation of artists, then the understanding of spring must entail the search for alternate paths and so artists naturally accepted the view that the theories of existentialism could shed light on these questions:
The theory of existentialism raises the ‘consciousness of self’ to greater heights and stresses the initiative of the individual, forcing man to perfect himself in social reality, as well as forcing him to perfect the society, and so promote the development of mankind and society. Although the theories of existentialism and Laozi’s Taoism are different and are even far removed from each other, they have one point in common, which is the role of the individual and how an individual can rely on the strength of others to perfect himself …[4]
Studio 140 by Li Guijun was described by Ma Yuan as a ‘conversational’ (duihua-shi) work but, on the contrary, this painting evades ‘conversation’. The three people in the painting register no emotional bond nor have any literary connection, nor do they have any connection with the viewer. We feel that this is a cold and detached ‘studio’, in which the ‘painting’ and the ‘reading’ seem to occur in two separate spaces. The importance of this work is not its form and technique, but in the cold detached mood that it conveys.
Apart from the three works just mentioned, the Progressive Chinese Youth Art Exhibition included several other notable works: Zhang Jun’s 5.4.1976, Liu Qian’s Alleyway, Zhou Chunya’s Ruoergai in the Spring, and Yu Xiaofu’s Children Comforting Picasso’s Pigeons. At this time, when the notions of ‘significant form’ of Clive Bell and of symbolic aesthetics were used by some critics to analyze paintings of Susanne K. Langer, they intentionally discarded in-depth elements according to the form and style of the works in order to stress the history of styles and avoid the suspicions raised by vulgar sociology. However, as soon as we seriously examine the ‘meaning’, ‘emotion’, or ‘concept’ of Chinese artists’ works, we invariably discover that within those works there was a critical consciousness or conception determining ‘meaning’, ‘emotion’, or ‘concept’.
The Debate about Chinese-Style Painting
After enduring several political campaigns, the continuity of Chinese-style painting (Zhongguo-hua) and its brush-and-ink traditions was broken by the campaigns designed to reform it beginning in the 1950s, but when the art world again began to emulate the West, some critics seemed to jump out and raise the question of Chinese-style painting all over again in the new social context of calls for intellectual emancipation. The 7th issue for 1985 of Jiangsu Art Monthly carried an article by Li Xiaoshan titled ‘My Views on Contemporary Chinese Painting’. His statement that ‘Chinese painting had already reached the end of its days’ succeeded in infuriating the older generation of guohua painters, as well as many who were middle-aged. The logic of this widely discussed article went as follows: ‘Traditional Chinese painting, as an aspect of feudal ideology, has its roots in an absolutely closed autocratic society’. Therefore, ‘the history of Chinese painting is one in which technical treatment (the pursuit of the formalized artistic means required by the ‘artistic conception’) constantly improves, while the conception of painting (aesthetic experience) constantly diminishes’. In addition, ‘because of Chinese painting’s weakness in theoretical principles which to a certain extent has also restricted its practice, the entire meaning of Chinese painting theory is basically not concerned with guiding painting in how to observe and explore the beauty of changing life but with the discussion of experience heavy on methodology and light on principles because it is subject to control by ethnic characteristics that stress practice and dismiss theory, by focusing on a wealth of painting experience’. Moreover, ‘Chinese painting theory, under our historical conditions today, does not require revision or supplementation, but rather a fundamental conceptual change. Therefore, we must discard the old theoretical system and our rigid understanding of art, and focus on emphasizing conceptual questions of modern painting’, because ‘the transformation of painting concepts will mark the beginning of a revolution in painting’. Of course, ‘a new concept of painting does not spring out of nowhere and it will draw on the outstanding legacy of tradition’. ‘China’s outstanding legacy of tradition is that spiritual essence which integrates space, time and the observer’. ‘Now, what aspect of Chinese painting needs to be revolutionized?’ ‘Our primary tasks in improving Chinese painting are to change our worship for the strict rules of form and break out of the framework established by form’. In concrete historical terms, ‘when Chinese traditional painting had evolved to the time of Ren Bonian, Wu Changshuo, and Huang Binhong, it had already entered its final days, and in the fields of figural painting, flower and bird painting and landscape painting, there were artists with some of the greatest achievements. Later, ‘if we say that the paintings of Liu Haisu, Shi Lu, Zhu Qizhan, and Lin Fengmian were moving in the direction of modernity (of course, modern concepts of painting were still only rarely manifested in their works), then, the works of Pan Tianshou and Li Keran included more rational elements and were not transcending the track of traditional Chinese painting …We can say that the achievements of Pan Tianshou and Li Keran influenced later generations, but much of the influence was passive. Fu Baoshi had several points in common with them …. Painters such as Li Kuchan and Huang Zhou were decidedly inferior, Li Kuchan’s works being, in fact, models of pastiche’. However, ‘what this age requires is not the type of artist who can only inherit the cultural tradition, but the artist who can make an epochal contribution’.
It was quite clear that the focus of the discussion was Li Xiaoshan’s mention of Chinese art’s ‘final days’. One article in the subsequent issue of Jiangsu Art Monthly, Ding Tao’s ‘After Reading My Views on Contemporary Chinese Painting’, cited the fact that more than nine hundred traditional Chinese paintings, bearing ‘seals and ink proclaiming the glorious age in which they were painted’ had been exhibited in the recent sixth national art exhibition, and argued that because ‘for more than half a century, through the arduous efforts of intelligent men who had searched through the total expanse’ of history for enlightenment, and ‘the unprecedented liberation of literary and artistic production, especially since the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Party Congress’ [1978], Chinese painting ‘now will never again face its “final days”’. Another article, by Ma Zhenguo, published in the 12th issue of Jiangsu Art Monthly of the same year argued that Li Xiaoshan’s article ‘was from beginning to end steeped in an attitude of nihilism regarding Chinese painting’.
In many of the articles refuting Li Xiaoshan, the authors criticized the idea that Chinese art was in its ‘final days’ by tackling an analysis of the question of tradition. Dong Lou’s ‘Talking about My Views on Contemporary Chinese Painting’, published in the 1986:5 issue of Jiangsu Art Monthly, was representative. After presenting a harrowing account of the general failure of Chinese art and artistic theory education over previous decades, Dong Lou wrote: ‘It is impossible to expect Chinese art to quickly pull off an about-face and produce, as though by sleight of hand, Western abstract art the one minute and photo-realism the next; we need to look squarely at the overall aesthetics and the ethnic spirit of our Chinese nation. Any total repudiation of Chinese painting, and even resentful complaints about the nihilism of seventeen or even eighteen generations of our forefathers, is a shallow and ignorant exercise revealing how intellectually vulnerable we are to any winds of change from the West or how little conscience we have’. He went on to point out that ‘foreign ideological trends are chaotic, and have no close and necessary connection with the prospects for the development of Chinese painting’. This writer not only insisted on the view that ‘the more distinctive the national character, the more international the significance’, but also made the following frank statement in conclusion: ‘Rather than innovate by peddling foreign trends it is preferable to market reliable Chinese-made goods’.
Wan Qingli, in ‘A Further Discussion of Chinese-style Painting’ which appeared in the 1986:2 issue of Fine Arts Research, made the philosophical concepts of ‘antagonistic contradictions’ and ‘non-antagonistic contradictions’ the basis of his attacks on Li Xiaoshan’s view that innovation on the basis of China’s painting traditions was ‘a slogan pandering to the times’ and represented ‘a truth that could never be put into practice’, points that Li Xiaoshan had made in another essay ‘Premises about the Existence of Chinese-style Painting’. Wan Qingli argued that only when there was inheritance could there be development, and ‘without inheritance, there can be no development; the denial of everything means the loss of everything, and after everything is destroyed, there is only a wasteland’.
Apart from the many contributions to the debate in the pages of Jiangsu Art Monthly, the journal also organized two forums on the question of the Chinese painting tradition – in July 1985 and March 1986; at these forums many critics directly and indirectly addressed, in various ways, the issues raised by Li Xiaoshan’s contention that Chinese traditional painting was in its ‘final days’. After Li Xiaoshan’s article was published, many articles on issues concerning Chinese painting and traditions were directly or indirectly provoked and influenced by the language of Li’s piece; the academic discussion Li precipitated was unprecedented and it was even described as ‘the third great debate on Chinese painting’. Li’s article provided a focus for critics and artists tackling the problem of defining Chinese painting. In order to emphasize the vitality of Chinese painting, Lu Fusheng and Jiang Hong wrote articles proposing that ‘creating “modern Chinese-style painting” is our glorious mission conferred on us by history’.
The essence of this dispute was in fact not limited to whether or not Chinese painting was in its ‘final days’, but the articles of refutation, discussion and conciliation lacked intellectual value because the authors of these articles wanted to discuss the issues raised by Li Xiaoshan only within very narrow intellectual confines. The aesthetician Gao Ertai, in his ‘Defence of Li Xiaoshan’, published in the 1987:1 issue of Jiangsu Art Monthly hit on the crux of the issue, by arguing that this dispute about the question of Chinese painting and relevant traditional problems, ‘is in fact a deepening of the intellectual emancipation movement since 1978 and 1979’. In the ’85 period, a large number of modern art forms were simply reproductions of Western modern art, but the real reason for this replication was that a new generation of artists in a new historical period hoped to adopt what for them were new concepts and new ideas. In 1987, when Jiangsu Art Monthly launched another discussion on traditional and modern culture, the issues extended from those revolving around a type of painting to engulf the entirety of the cultural background, and after one year, simple discussions about culture were rare.
The ’85 Ideological Trend and Art Movement
In 1985, China’s social-scientific, literary, and artistic circles acknowledged their urgent task to be ‘conceptual renewal’, summarized as follows in an article titled ‘85: The New Crisis’ and attributed to the eponymous Qingnian that appeared in the 1986:2 issue of the journal Art Trends:
Chinese society today is going through a profound change which is altering people’s life styles and moral sentiments, especially the systems of values they reference, forcing them constantly to open up and introspect, subjecting what we thought of as being correct for so many years to fresh scrutiny and appraisal, and making serious judgments and choices about the world opening up before them. Such a ubiquitous social consciousness throughout contemporary China had to be reflected in its most positive and active representation, its reflection in art.[5]
Indeed, China’s artists faced a complex reality. The defeat of the nation’s former idol and the appointed ordering of his universe, the transformation and change in ethics and values, the inrush of a dazzling external world and the enticements of personal liberation and of the trends of individualization all presented themselves to artists within the short span of a few years. The bankruptcy of the old order necessitated a fresh search for spiritual support and a spiritual locus, as well as for a firm footing for one’s self and one’s art. Yet in a reality in which there could be no resting place and in which everything was in flux, the possibilities for finding a support and basis were few and far between.
However, there was another course of action open to artists – looking abroad, to the vast quantity of books being translated at that time from English, German, and French, and turning towards that philosophical literature related to ‘concepts’ and ‘conceptual renewal’. Perhaps there has never been another period of history or another place when or where a nation’s artists were more passionately fond of foreign works of philosophy, foreign intellectual arguments and foreign literature than China in 1985-1986. This was a truly remarkable phenomenon.[6] Incomplete statistics yielded by one survey of the reading preferences of the members of the country’s main art organizations revealed that the most popular categories of readings were biology, philosophy, Eastern traditional thought, Western modern aesthetic theory and art theory, but of the surveyed group 40% preferred philosophy and the social sciences. On the reading lists of artists, we find Nietzsche, Bergson and thinkers who stressed intuition and vitality, as well as Freud’s writings on dreams and the subconscious, and the more difficult and challenging philosophers such as Russell and Wittgenstein. In addition, existentialism, Zen, Taoism, and Buddhism were also favored reading and subject for commentary by artists. Regardless of whether or not artists really understood Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-philosophicus or Heidegger’s arguments concerning ‘existence’ or ‘Dasein’ and whether or not their choice of favorite philosophers was blind, artists in 1985-86 genuinely made great efforts in their quest for a basis and for values applicable to their own selves and their art. In fact, artists even gave clear expression to their own ideas and feelings for philosophical ideas in their artistic works, and this phenomenon has been described as ‘artists who would be quasi-philosophers’.
In the 1985-86 ideological wave the philosophy that made the biggest impact was Sigmund Freud’s pathology of human personality. The tension in Western thought between consciousness and the subconscious and the resulting moments of pain this occasioned elicited a sympathetic intellectual response among countless Chinese. The resulting description of people’s instincts and desires gradually became more emboldened. A large proportion of young Chinese artists also became infatuated with Bergson’s theory of the duration and contrasts of the inner world and Nietzsche’s praise of the Dionysian spirit of tragedy. Thus, many of the manifestos and monographs of the day feature prose replete with statements about the instinct for life and the élan vital.
Interrelated with this conscious exaggeration of personal instincts, there was a conscious emphasis on the sense of loneliness and the sense of cold detachment. Loneliness as a philosophical category received maximum development in 20th century Western philosophy. Sartre’s famous saying that ‘hell is other people’ (l’enfer, c’est les autres) was the most vivid and succinct demonstration of this development. At the same time, the various arguments about the individual and the world and about individuality and society presented by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and others also brought a new line of thinking to Chinese art circles with their strong collective consciousness. There was a ferment for some time created by a category of transcendental philosophical terms such as ‘omnipotent will’ (quanneng yizhi), ‘noumenon’ (benti), ‘absolute spirit’ (juedui jingshen), and ‘Ding an sich’ (zizai zhi wu). The transcendental nature of these concepts themselves seemed to indicate to artists an image of a world of the personal spirit far beyond this world of dust and the entanglement of the emotions. Solitude, fantasy, tragedy, religious atmosphere, and a sacrificial spirit became themes that one group of artists strove to show in their work. It is worth pointing out that at the same time that artists were highlighting the loneliness and lack of emotion of the individual, many artists were providing an alternate annotation on solitude based on a number of ideas drawn from traditional Chinese philosophy.
When Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, he was expressing a bold spirit of rebellion and blasphemy. In the ’85 period when Chinese modern artists were accepting the influence of Nietzsche’s thought, they were also drawing on the consciousness of rebellion of this fin-de-siècle philosopher. After 1985, hot issues debated in Chinese intellectual and academic circles revolved around the comparison of Chinese and Western culture, the discussion of the appropriation and selection of the achievements of human civilization, and even discussion of ‘total westernization’ vis-à-vis ‘making foreign things serve China’. Anger and resentment regarding the contemporary backward state of China had led to the censure of Chinese culture and of the Chinese character formed by that culture, and to the censure of native culture. At the same time, the strength of external cultures and the psychological repression these occasioned among Chinese people led another group of people to seek solace and strength in their glorious history and their highly admired hoary tradition. The ‘search for roots’ and the ‘new Confucianism’ stood diametrically opposed to ‘total westernization’.
In a word, after 1985, artists found themselves in a free market of ideas and concepts where the pricing was chaotic and the weighing scales were all over the place. Various philosophies were successively hawked and peddled, and one set of aphorisms would be given prominence as another set fell from view. In this situation characterized as a hundred flowers blossoming, skepticism and the rejection of old traditions and history also became possible. The enticement of new ideas and new worlds was so great that some artists believed that anything old was sinister or ugly, the logic behind this being that anything old, whether it was a political system, an art style, or a lifestyle, was traditional, when in fact the true meaning of ‘anti-traditional’ was opposition to all restraints placed on people’s freedom. Western Dada emerged during the First World War and gave rise to an age of massive cultural destruction and deconstruction. Although Chinese Dadaist thought was a direct transplantation of the Western legacy, the time and background in which it arose were different in many aspects. Chinese Dada was born in the profound cultural crisis that came in the wake of the protracted nation-wide cultural destruction and holocaust of the Cultural Revolution - a crisis the complexity of which entailed an instinctual conflict with the old political system and the suspect ideology that accompanied the Cultural Revolution, together with the content of all former traditions. The reality which confronted China’s young Dadaists was possibly not as filled with despair as the reality faced by Tristan Tzara, but the inner terror and disillusion they faced was no less than that of the older generation of Western Dadaists.
‘A Survey of Intellectual Trends in Art’ (Yigu meishu sichao zhi gaiguan) by Ma Nanchi (Yang Chengyin), published in the 1986:6 issue of Fine Arts, devoted a small section to defining the contemporary ideological art movement which it characterized as a ‘chaotic frisson’ and ‘a minor trend in artistic thought’:
Some people have dragged in the doctrine of absolute freedom as the prop supporting their ideas. ‘If you want to paint something paint it; if you love painting in a particular way, do so and talk about it later’. … Freedom is a philosophical category; it is the understanding and mastery of necessity. If you do not understand and grasp the laws of objectivity, then there can be no freedom to speak of; if artists fail to understand and grasp the laws of beauty and art, then there can be no freedom in creating to speak of! As a political category, freedom is the right of people to act as they will and to be unrestricted within the confines of fixed laws and rules of discipline. Freedom here is placed in opposition to laws and discipline. Throughout the world from ancient times to the present there has been no freedom not subject to any restraints. Creative freedom is regulated as a right that artists already enjoy in our socialist motherland. This creative freedom is probably not absolute freedom. The guiding policy in literature and art of ‘serving the people and serving socialism’ might not be law, but it is a tenet that an artist with a sense of social responsibility must consider and self-consciously implement. The Party and the state have conferred the right of creative freedom on our artists and our artists should consider their obligation and responsibility to practice art for the Party and the state.[7]
Implicit in this argument was the assertion that the state provided artists with the conditions to create, and artists should repay this debt of gratitude. Obviously, the standards by which art was judged were firmly held in the hands of the state. However, ‘the state’ had already clearly announced that the freedom to create art was guaranteed by law and that it would not interfere in artists’ creative activities. So who represented the ‘state’ in assessing gratitude for stipends and ungrateful behavior? Was it the art critics?
In this age when there was no one who could represent the truth, China’s young artists of China in 1985 and 1986 adopted a very natural form of resistance by forming their own organizations, and one of the most prominent characteristics of the 85-86 modern art movement was the rise and proliferation of various independent art groups. Between 1982 and 1986, according to Tong Dian, 79 organizations of young artists were established throughout the provinces and cities of China, and they staged a total of 97 events.
From 1985 onwards many new or revamped periodicals, such as Art Trends in Hubei, China Art News in Beijing and Painters in Hunan, as well as journals devoted to actively introducing art and organizing discussions, such as Meishu in Beijing and Jiangsu Art Monthly in Nanjing, played a positive role in adding fuel to the flames. It can be said that in the ’85 ideological movement, critical and theoretical circles to some extent shook off their paralysis and inertia and began to respond fairly keenly to the creative work and activities of artists, even though attitudes and appraisals of the new trends differed. Nevertheless, this response and the subsequent debates created a positive and lively atmosphere for the development of art. Young critics began to defend modern art.
Confronting these new artistic phenomena, the critic Gao Minglu in an article titled ‘The New Wave Art Movement and the Value of the New Culture’ analyzed the reasons for the phenomenon of this rise of groups in terms of their ‘defensive function’, ‘constructive function’, ‘effective value’, and ‘spiritual functional efficacy’. His analysis was exhaustive and credible from the perspective of cultural psychology and sociology. However, he did not explain one outstanding contradictory phenomenon: In the ’85 ideological wave, personal liberation and the establishment of individuality were the basic principles to which people generally subscribed. Artists too proclaimed that their art was entirely the product of their own unique inner world or expressed their own thought. However, it was these very people advocating individuality who were rushing to form groups in which they were ‘focusing’ their individuality under banners of unity.
In fact, we find, when we examine many of the art societies and groups, that there was no obvious conformity in style or expression among the artists who were members. Of course, artists do not necessarily get together simply to seek out commonality; on the contrary, they want to express their individuality. However, in the’85 period, it was only possible to express individuality through the surface commonality of the group. At that time, advancing modern artistic creation was somewhat equivalent to expressing individuality in a socio-cultural environment, and to achieve this people formed groups to pursue individuality, jointly creating the conditions for realizing individuality. As it transpired, most of these varied groups would soon collapse and break up, because once the experimental works of modern artists could win the approval of the various examination boards and be exhibited and young artists had the ability and conditions to even stage their own one-man exhibitions, the necessity of banding together to hold exhibitions had more or less faded away. We can see how some groups simply disintegrated of their own accord after staging a single exhibition, when the members were no longer tolerant of the individuality of their former partners and went off to pursue their own solo careers.
Although modern art exhibitions or groups characterized and based on new concepts and ideas began making an appearance with the Stars, such phenomena soon began emerging in every major city. Worth noting is the Experimental Painting Exhibition: The Stage ’83 which created a sensation at Shanghai’s Fudan University in September 1983, with its showing of works by ten artists including Li Shan, Zhang Jianjun, Yu Xiaofu, and Dai Hengyang. In January 1986, the Exhibition of Works by the Miyang Painting Studio included such artists as Wang Huanqing, Qiao Xiaoguang, and Duan Xiucang, while in the same month artist Wang Chuan staged the Zero Modern Art Exhibition on a busy street near the Shenzhen Municipal Theater in that city. In May 1986, the Sunday Painting Society, whose members included Wu Pingren, Qu Yan, Yuan Xianmin, and Weng Jianqing, organized the Xuzhou Modern Art Exhibition. In June 1986, thanks to the organization of Li Jixiang, Zhu Kaijia, and Xu Dacheng, the Sichuan Youth Red Yellow Blue Modern Painting Exhibition was held in Chengdu. In November 1986 the brothers Song Yongping and Song Yonghong organized a performance art event at their modern art exhibition in the Worker’s Cultural Palace in Taiyuan, Shanxi, and in the same month the China Art Gallery in Beijing staged an exhibition of young artists from Hunan province, while Hubei province staged a large-scale festival of young artists in November that year. In addition, Peking University in November 1986 was one of a number of venues for performance art by the Concept 21group, comprising Sheng Qi, Zheng Yuke, Kang Mu, Zhao Jianhai, Xi Jianjun, Zhu Qingsheng, Kong Chang’an, Hou Hanru, Fan Di’an, Han Ning, and Ding Bin.
On 10 June 1986, Deng Xiaoping announced: ‘Now it seems that if we do not reform the political system we cannot adapt to the situation. Reform should include the reform of the political system and political structural reform should be regarded as a sign of the reform’. However, in December of that year, the fact that some university students in Beijing, Shanghai, Hefei and other places paraded in the streets and shouted more radical slogans should have been regarded as echoing a more open situation, but People’s Daily, the organ representing state ideology carried an editorial titled ‘Treasure and Develop a Political Situation of Stability and Unity’ and a commentary article, ‘Political Structural Reform Can Only Be Carried Out under the Leadership of the Party’. Subsequently, on 28 January 1987, the Central Committee of the CPC issued ‘Notice on Several Questions Related to Opposing Current Bourgeois Liberalization’. Then, in December 1987, Fine Arts Trends announced in its 6th issue that it would suspend publication in 1988.
The Important Art Groups and Their Art
The Northern Art Group was established in July 1984. Apart from graduates of art colleges, the group included students of literature and others from polytechnic colleges. The earliest members comprised fifteen young people from the northeast including Wang Guangyi, Shu Qun, Ren Jian, Liu Yan, Ni Qi, and Lin Wei. The group’s first exhibition in the strict meaning of the term was the February 1987 ‘Biennial’ staged in the Jilin Art Institute in Changchun. An article published in the 1985: 18 issue of Fine Arts of China, titled ‘The Spirit of the Northern Art Group’, can be regarded as the ‘manifesto’ of the group, while ‘The Explication of the Northern Art Group’ (hereafter ‘Explication’), published in the 1987:1 issue of Meishu Sichao, can be regarded as the explanation by these artists of their artistic thought and philosophy. The artists believed: ‘The Eastern and Western cultures have already basically disintegrated, but they can be replaced by the strength of a new kind of culture – the birth of the northern civilization’. In ‘Explication’, Shu Qun further explained what was meant by ‘northern culture’: ‘Northern culture or the culture in the hinterland of the Frigid Zone is in fact our term for the visualization of rational culture’. Therefore, the essence of ‘northern culture’ was the rational spirit, and Shu Qun in his notes explained this rationality as something different from ‘the usual rationality’, ‘being an invariable spiritual principle’.
The critic Gao Minglu, in his article ‘Regarding Rational Painting’, analyzed the reasons why this concept of ‘rational painting’ emerged and pointed out the course of its spiritual development:
The present search for the power to judge rational painting has advanced in step with the constant calls over recent years to arouse subjective consciousness and dynamic thought. The praise of self-consciousness is the pursuit of human freedom, given the rational existence of free will and talent. But freedom of this subjective consciousness relies on ‘the individual using mankind to explain it, not mankind using the individual to explain it’. On the verge of pushing off from this shore into the world of dazzling appearances and having set out into the empty night for the world on the other shore that transcends the senses, they simply found that they had entered the present spiritual world in broad daylight. This was the rational core of rational painting.[8]
The Northern Art Group had neither a unified language mode nor style, yet the main characteristic of this group was the degree to which it was cold, detached, solemn, and stifled.
Wang Guangyi (b.1956) was admitted to the oil painting department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts at the age of 23 and, in his time at college, perhaps because of his individual character, Western classical art, as well as classicist philosophy and aesthetics, were more attractive to him.[9] Between the time of his graduation and 1986, Wang Guangyi completed the series titled the Frozen Northern Polar Regions. The visual symbols in this batch of works suggested cold detachment, obviously related to the environment of the northern region and the compositions depicted scenes from the wintry north. The overall cold and gray mood and the shapes of the objects in the paintings have ‘frozen’ feel, and in his defense the artist pointed out that this ‘frozen’ quality expressed an ‘inner drive’:
Today the time has come to proclaim the inner drive which is the vital force behind culture. We yearn to ‘look upon all forms of life vigorously and joyfully’, in order to establish a new and more human spiritual mode that will foster more orderly progress in life. For this reason, we oppose that morbid and terminal rococo-style art and all that is unhealthy and not conducive to the evolution of life, because such ‘art’ can only foster the growth of human weakness, distancing man from health and life from its essence; the clamor raised by this morbidly terminal art will obstruct those healthy people to heed the heavy and solemn knell from within the inner drive of their lives.[10]
Around 1987, Wang Guangyi entered his ‘post-classical period’, of which the most important works were Post-Classical: The Return to Compassionate Love, Post-Classical: The Gospel of St. Matthew, The Death of Marat, and The Trinity. Wang Guangyi subsequently adopted a straightforward technique of creating grids, and the conceptual symbolic background was provided by a space filled, to a greater or lesser extent, with a religious atmosphere. We might be unclear concerning the concrete symbolic significance of the five rectangles labeled ‘A, O, X, M, A’ in the lower section of the painting titled Black Rationality: Divinity Ratios, but the bibliography of spiritual pointers which Wang Guangyi provided for his audiences was an analytical passage regarding ‘partial resemblances and a grid pattern of interconnected resemblances’ from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
In Shu Qun’s (b.1958) series of works titled Principles of the Absolute (Juedui yuanze), the images of rationality he provided were conceptualized ‘architecture’. The buildings in these works were in fact churches or the artist’s revised imaginings of these Western cultural symbols, but this is unimportant. According to his explanation, ‘the black cosmic universe in the work gives us a sense of limitlessness and eternity. The cross which approaches from the distance expresses temporality, while the image of the celestial spheres below it creates a greater psychological distance and the architectural network structure expresses the characteristics of loftiness, solemnity and rationality. The choice of these shapes was only made in order to further reflect the spirit related to the other shore, and this spirit of rationality that I was promoting was really only the spirit of paying close attention to existence or what might be called the Hebraic spirit’. From 1987 to 1988, Shu Qun completed a series titled Travelling to the Other Shore, which he explained as follows: ‘This set of works mostly takes churches or buildings with a lofty and spiritual significance as its linguistic material (structural material), which is then subjected to purification and simplification, so that all extraneous details are completely removed, retaining only the structure and tone of the characteristics of the ‘shared image’, in order to enhance the conceptual ‘flavor’ of its ‘rationality’ (mechanism and structure)’. Later in the 1989 at the China/Avant-Garde: China Modern Art Exhibition, Shu Qun exhibited his series titled The Final Rationale: Eliminating the Principles of the Absolute, through which the artist sought to explain how ‘rational painting’ had already fulfilled its mission of transmitting the Zeitgeist, and that henceforth painting should enter into itself; in other words, painting should be a branch of the natural sciences.
From 1982 to 1987, Ren Jian (b.1955) created three series of works comprising several dozen works – The Legend of the Wolf Star, People Pass through Heaven, Earth, and Hell and Assume the Form of Kings, and Polarization. In Polarization, Ren Jian seems to be insisting on his adherence to the specificity of the Eastern spirit. In his view, the disintegration and regrouping of forms in modern Western art revealed obvious differences from Eastern artistic concepts; the question was not one of abstraction or figurativeness but rather the search for the language form which could express the spiritual atmosphere of the culture in which the artist found himself.
As early as 1982, the future members of the New Figurative group - Mao Xuhui, Zhang Xiaogang, and Pan Dehai - would often get together in Chengdu, imagine they were artists in Paris on the banks of the Seine, and, as Mao Xuhui has described, ‘sing songs, smoke plenty of cigarettes, drink large quantities of wine, crazily discuss the mysteries of life and the universe, and when talking about Adam and Eve call her the “Chengdu chick”. Later we’d drink some more and trip the light fantastic along the river. There we’d often get blind drunk, throw up, and heave. That’s how Zhang [Xiaogang] developed a stomach problem’. It was under these conditions that Zhang Xiaogang executed many ‘terrifying drawings’ and oil paintings with fiendish images, and Pan Dehai ‘fled to the clay forest where he discovered his holy land in that beautifully bare and desolate landscape, where there was nothing but he felt everything was to be found’. He painted ‘batches of paintings depicting forests of red clay, gray clay and white clay, until the clay forests themselves finally disappeared. It was a restless and crazy time. Mao [Xuhui] became a fixture in a shop writing advertising, as he read Kafka all day long. … He depicted a life steeped in restlessness and desire, inflated lives, and decadent emotions’.
In 1985, Mao Xuhui’s friend Zhang Long returned to Kunming from his fine arts studies at Shanghai’s East China Normal University to spend the vacation. When he saw the paintings by Mao Xuhui, Zhang Xiaogang, and Pan Dehai he was ‘very excited, and decided that the paintings he had seen in Shanghai were too insipid and sweet, lacking life’. After the artists failed to get enough money together to stage their show, they traveled to Shanghai and successfully staged their New Figurative exhibition. Mao Xuhui has recorded this in an interesting account titled ‘Account of the New Figurative Exhibition and Artists, and the South-west Art Study Group’.
In July, they staged another show in July in the Nanjing Education and Health Museum. The New Figurative Paintings Exhibition drew the attention of the critic Gao Minglu who played an important role in the ’85 period, and he began to correspond with Mao Xuhui and introduced him in his articles on the ’85 movement. In August 1986 Mao Xuhui took part in the ’85 New Wave Large-scale Slide Show Exhibition and Conference in Zhuhai (often simply referred to as ‘the Zhuhai Conference’) organized by Gao Minglu, Wang Guangyi, and Shu Qun, which was a large gathering of new wave artists that through lantern slides brought together modernist art works from all over China. Perhaps inspired by this experience, Mao Xunhui returned to Kunming in October 1986 and set up the South-western Art Group with Zhang Xiaogang, Ye Yongqing, Pan Dehai, Zhang Long, and others, in order to promote modern art in that city. Mao Xuhui recalls how ‘in December 1986, Zhang Xiaogang organized the Fourth New Figurative Exhibition, based on slides and illustrations of the South-western artists as well as some new works. The question of funding all these exhibitions was resolved by the artists. When the fourth exhibition concluded, it was like the last supper. As a result of the government’s campaign against bourgeois liberalization, the South-western artists undertook no activities in 1987, and everyone just painted on their own’.[11]
As a participant in the New Figurative exhibitions, Pan Dehai (b.1956) grew up in the north and attended Northeastern Normal University. At the time when he was to be assigned a workplace on graduation, he actively requested to be sent to the south, a part of China that he had grown to love. Pan Dehai began his series of works titled Maize in 1987 and exhibited the earliest works in this series at the 1988 South-western Modern Art Exhibition. At the China/Avant-Garde: China Modern Art Exhibition in 1989 his work titled Husked Maize: Rear Mountain attracted critical attention. In this work, this image of natural maize has been completely transformed into a personal symbol with abstract significance; the grains are replicated in a more complex way as though they have been endlessly reproduced. In the Maize series, Pan Dehai applied layer after layer of pigment to the canvas at the same time as he used a technique of cutting away paint from each layer so that the layering of the remaining paint created unexpected colors.
In 1983, Ye Yongqing (b.1958) traveled to Guishan in Yunnan, a place familiar to many artists from Kunming. Its unique landforms and natural environment left a great impression on the artist. Ye Yongqing’s early works were filled with bucolic lyricism and the rural content in the works is an idealized world induced by the artist’s inner contradictions, as in Man Beneath Tree, which he completed in 1984 and which depicts a conflicted mood. A genuine sense of insecurity has forced the artist to search for a refuge. In his painting of 1985 titled Girl Lying in Wait for the Floating Clouds, the artist painted a deformed but otherwise healthy looking girl holding what resembles a branch symbolizing eternal life in her hand while she awaits the arrival of something mysterious. In The City Is a Machine for Handling Human Waste, two categories of living beings in Ye’s illusory world – birds and humans, formed an inalienable part of the factories or machinery. The artist was telling audiences: ‘The chimneys and buildings of the Chongqing Power Plant beside the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts often appear in paintings as totemic symbols of the time that runs counter to human nature’. Obviously, Ye Yongqing’s fragile illusory world would shatter on the moment of impact. In many of his works of the 1980s, Ye further described the antagonism that existed between the space of the individual and the space of civilization. Ye’s art at this time was imbued with elements of Expressionism and Symbolist poetry, imbued with the delicate hallucinations that delineate a pathological reality.
Mao Xuhui was born in 1956 in Chongqing. When he entered to the Fine Arts Department of Kunming Teachers College in 1977, and possibly in 1976 when was still a member of a work team engaged in the rural political campaign ‘to learn from Dazhai’ not far from Kunming, he became acquainted with Zhang Xiaogang and Ye Yongqing who were also youths sent down to the countryside. Mao later recalled: ‘My major influence before entering university was the light of the great outdoors’. In his third year of college he borrowed the autobiography of Ilya Ehrenburg which opened his eyes to the work of Modigliani, Picasso, Fernand Léger, Chaim Soutine, Diego Rivera, and Kazimir Malevich. Not long after graduating, Mao Xuhui went to Guishan, which he would visit often during the following years. This place with its bright blue skies, red earth, white sheep and simple and honest ethnic Sani villagers not only aroused the memory of Mao Xuhui’s childhood but also made him realize more deeply the consolation and lyricism of nature.
During 1982 and 1983, Mao Xuhui extensively read modern Western novelists and philosophers, including Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow and August Strindberg, as well as Kafka, Camus, T. S. Eliot, Schopenhauer, Hermann Hesse, Nietzsche, and Sartre; at the same time he began to listen to modern music, Shostakovich and Stravinsky making a deep impression on this young artist. He also loved the expressionist art of Kokoschka and Kirchner. In 1984, Mao Xuhui completed his first batch of expressionist works – Red Bulk, Bulk in Movement, Swelling Bulk and Red Human Figure. Of his later works he wrote: ‘My major paintings after 1986 began to express my family crisis and my distress at having to face this situation. These paintings reflected how my marriage was on the verge of falling apart. ...’ This condition and state of mind were also depicted in oil paintings like Human Bodies in a Cement Room: Noon, Human Bodies in a Cement Room: Several States, the Private Space series and the series Portraits of Woman and Man. In 1988, Mao entered the 1988 South-western Art Exhibition with his oil paintings titled Private Space: Self-Imprisonment and Paternalism. This show presaged the creation of the ongoing Paternalism series in the coming years. Paternalism at the show laid down the basics for the future Paternalism series. Later, pointed forms became the signifiers of Mao’s Paternalism series: these withered and twitchy states appeared in different contexts as ghosts. In fact, this evolution of states and styles preserved ‘stable images’ such as the ‘paternal’ images from the ’85 period and the images of the Scissors series completed after the mid-1990s.
In October 1985, five months after the Progressive Chinese Youth Art Exhibition, the Jiangsu Art Museum in Nanjing was the venue for Jiangsu Youth Art Week: Large-scale Modern Art Exhibition, in which 138 artists showed more than three hundred works. In scale, this was one of the largest art shows of the ’85 period. We could see characteristic works of young artists like Ding Fang, Shen Qin, Yang Zhilin, Chai Xiaogang, Yang Yingsheng, Xu Yihui, and Guan Ce. Audiences found many works in the exhibition depressing and tending towards decadence – Yang Yingsheng’s The White Pigeon Obscured by the Shade and the Rubik’s Cube Just Floating Away, Xu Yihui’s Southern Moravia, Wu Xiaoyun’s Cut Open Apple, Ren Rong’s Call of Nirvana, Cao Xiaodong’s Room No. 8, and Shen Qin’s Dialogue between Master and Disciple. The expression of fuzzy ideas in the name of the ‘uncertainty of theme’ was the product of heavy skepticism.
An article titled ‘Random Notes’, which appeared in the second issue of 1986 of Jiangsu Art Monthly stated that through this exhibition people could see that ‘there is a group of young painters who are devoted to the reflective exploration of the national culture, at the same time as they are inclined towards a return to the simplicity, condensation, and mystery of the ancient spirit of the East’. Certainly, this ‘reflective exploration’ was not a rational retrospective, but rather an attempt to seek reassurance through intuition. For these artists, the purpose was not to reproduce history and ancient culture, but rather to continue to search for some ineffable sense of security. As Yang Yingsheng commented: ‘The past is for everyone both absolute security and an absence of intimidation…’ Yet in fact this was the psychology of escapism. Among Ren Rong’s works, the enormous statue of Buddha stood as if beckoning all those living beings in a vast and ill-defined desert. His statue of Buddha was no longer simply symbolic of either religious mystery or sustenance. The artist seemed to be invoking this remote historical monument to provide himself with coordinates that could fix him in reality. The appearance of many works in a surrealist style expressed the artists’ spirit of enquiry. Of course, in contrast with the realist style, the linguistic significance of surrealism was more obscure, but this only serves to explain the complexity of the reality artists faced and the complexity of people’s understanding and thinking about reality. Two works illustrate and explain this complexity – Yang Zhilin’s Evolution of Man from Fish: Man’s Fondness for Eating Fish and Shen Qin’s Dialogue between Master and Disciple.
In June 1986, the year after the exhibition, Ding Fang, Yang Zhilin, Shen Qin, Cao Xiaodong, Chai Xiaogang, Xu Lei, Xu Yihui, Guan Ce, and Yang Yingsheng, ‘because of their shared style of painting, banded together as a surrealist group’, under the name The Color Red: Travel, and Ding Fang wrote for the group ‘Admonitions of the Color Red: Travel’.[12] In this document Ding Fang maintained that in this world people had lost the ability to conduct a dialogue because they are shrouded in loneliness. Ding Fang stressed the Western sacrificial spirit of Sisyphus. He told artists, ‘our inner conscience continues to choose to engage in the action of pushing the rock uphill’; this action originates in the hope we can glean from the depths of despair’.
The earliest monumental works of Ding Fang (b.1956) were the series of oil paintings titled Fighting Drought and Harvest. Ding Fang’s understanding of heavy color and brush strokes was drawn from his own experience of life and the influence of Georges Rouault. If the oil paintings in the Fighting Drought series reflected how the artist’s dialogue remained at the stage of pure love, then his Walls series that he began at the end of 1984 was a clear expression of a more metaphysical introspection on culture. Because the artist’s spiritual understanding inclined towards a more transcendental nature, the details of nature in his works tended to diminish progressively and the atmosphere he created through his composition and color also moved in the direction of surrealism. What merited attention was that the artist’s geometrically accurate treatment of the angles of the line of the moat and of the regularity of the battlements provided the initial clue for the modeling of the sword in the painting.
After he completed Leaving the Fortress, the illusory sense that history and nature induced in the artist’s soul still continued to influence his work, and led him to paint a series of magic-realist works. The series titled The Call and Birth was the full embodiment of this style, its most important characteristic being that the turning of the earth bore the image of an enormous mask, and the shape of the mountain fortress was more solid and simple. Through these images the artist was attempting to explain that even though the surface of the land suggested that the earth was utterly exhausted it concealed a powerful latent vitality that will speak when we look at it with the eyes of history. The artist has anthropomorphized the earth and created it as a historical ‘mask’ which can breathe, sigh or even emit a deafening roar.
In 1987, the artist completed his series titled The Strength of Tragedy. In the second work in this series, subtitled Sacrifice, we see a typical image of the sacrifice of Christ, through which the artist attempts to show a consummate portrayal of solemn and stirring sacrifice. In the artist’s eyes, the ‘life of personal sacrifice in flames’ is ‘a symbol of the resurrection of the soul’. The third work in this series is symbolic of the ascension of the soul of the artist. At this stage in the series The Strength of Tragedy, Ding Fang transformed his love of nature into the spirit of Christ’s sacrifice and accompanying this religiosity he began to reiterate an ascetic spirit.
On 2 December 1985, an exhibition titled ’85 New Space created a sensation when it opened in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province. The exhibition displayed a total of more than fifty works by a dozen artists, the most arresting being Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, Song Ling, Wang Qiang, and Bao Jianfei.
The organizers and participants in the New Space exhibition were mostly students of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, and the direct planning and organization of the exhibition was carried out by a group called the Youth Creation Society (Qingnian Chuangzao She). The society was established in 1984 and the founding members included Bao Jianfei, who in 1981 graduated from the printmaking department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Zhang Peili, Zha Li, and Geng Jianyi, who were graduates of the oil painting department, and Song Ling, who graduated from the Chinese painting department.
After they had drafted the proposal to stage an exhibition to be called the ’85 New Space, the Zhejiang branch of the Chinese Artists Association and the Youth Creation Society contacted each other to bring the proposal to fruition. In accordance with the principles governing the exhibition agreed on by the organizers, the exhibition sought to ‘present works in which modernity … prevailed, and to strengthen pictorial language as well as suppress expression’. This plan to ‘suppress expression’ eventually led to a debate among visitors and critics about whether the entire exhibition was ‘hot’ or ‘cold’:
One body of opinion maintained that the fundamental tenor of the paintings in the exhibition was cold and detached, leaving viewers with a chilly feeling. This tendency to coldness was not merely one of external form but more importantly reflected the artists’ attitudes to life and artistic theories. Someone used three words to summarize this exhibition of paintings: asocial, detached, and mystifying. A spokesman at one meeting pointedly asked: Are the chilly feelings conveyed by the paintings in this exhibition and the serious, blank, and expressionless looks on the figures produced by a chilling reality or by the artists’ icy approach to reality? [13]
A number of people noted that the artists included in the New Space Exhibition revealed some obvious differences from Chinese artists from other areas. From today’s perspective it is more correct to say that what distinguished some of the art in the New Space Exhibition was its determination to tackle the themes of urbanization and cold detachment. At that time, regardless of whether a young artist came from Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangsu, or some other place, he was either concerned with themes of the native soil and the vast wilderness, or he confronted surrealism and his own ‘internal video’. Moreover, most of these artists’ works demonstrated a rare passion and revelation, the overwhelming majority of works in the ’85 New Space being utterly dissimilar. The latter not only examined the city and industrialization, but also revealed restraint, connotation and detachment.
In May 1986, debates and discussions initiated by Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, and Song Ling led to the proposal to set up a new group, which subsequently came to be called the Pond Society. The manifesto of the Pond Society expressed a determination to saturate their work in meaning:
The use of the name ‘pond’ is designed to stress the notion of ‘saturation’ as applied to two aspects of the perception of ‘truth’, namely the themes of an artist’s work and the effect of art on audiences. We also want the word ‘pond’ to express how the linguistic meaning of art itself is unknowable. The Pond Society no longer attempts to grasp technique, because we all take the view that the ‘sacred’ easel is not the only way of relaying the ideas we want to convey. We are making every effort to break the confines of language and to advocate a fuzzy form which is a psychologically charged ‘artistic activity’. In this, painting, performance, video, and the environment (such forms all being conceptual) provide the characteristics of visual language and establish an organic and connected whole.[14]
After the establishment of the Pond Society, the artists engaged in four different events: (1) Work No. 1: Yang’s Taiji series; (2) Work No. 2: Travelers in Green Space; (3) various performance artworks featuring bondage and wrapping, one of the best known being Wrapping: King and Queen, whereby two artists wrapped themselves with newspapers and formed various tableaux. Wrapping had some stifled absurdist meaning, and it shared psychological characteristics with much of the other performance art of this period. After 1987, the Pond Society broke up.
Two People in Lamp Light was the graduation work of Geng Jianyi (b.1962). After this oil painting and another group of his works titled Paintings from the West were exhibited at the academy’s graduation show, he attracted the attention of a number of people at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. One teacher described how Geng’s works ‘offer us only figures with icy cold faces and rigidity’. Many people were critical of his work for not reflecting emotions and the style of this turbulent exciting period. Hairdressing No. 3: Another Shaved Head in the Summer of 1985 is a humorous title that had no logical connection with the work itself, as another shaved head in the summer of 1985 relates to nothing in particular. The painting uses a large quantity of blue to create an atmosphere of cold detachment. The barber and the shaved head are presented like simplified manikins, and their movements are stiff and wooden. The sneering cynical humor of Geng’s Hairdressing series gives way to the hearty humor evident in the series of paintings of 1987 titled Second State. In these works Geng Jianyi combined the fiercest expression of humanity and the most constraining repression of this expression to construct a composition filled with strong contradictions. Conceptually, Geng Jianyi’s works and artistic conceptions are some of the earliest experiments in China in the elimination of narrative and the direction of thought, something later regarded as ‘post-modern’.
Zhang Peili
Zhang Peili (b.1957) was admitted to the oil painting department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, where Wang Guangyi and Geng Jianyi were his classmates. Two series of works by Zhang Peili were included in exhibitions of the ’85 New Space: one was his series of figures with musical instruments; the other was his series of swimmers. In A Rest (1986), a man in ordinary summer clothes sits upright in the center of the painting holding a saxophone on his leg, a composition expressing the nihilism in which the player sits. In contrast with this work, Swimmers in Midsummer is somewhat more complex. Four male youths in blue bathing trunks stand in different postures against an exaggeratedly blue setting and they face or are half-turned towards the water in the swimming pool that is so blue it makes them shiver.
The elimination or freezing of the sense of life was a theme Zhang’s works constantly expressed, as was clear from his works included in the ’85 New Space exhibition. We can trace a clear line of development from his incisive detachment to themes threatening extinction through the progression of his works from the cold detachment of the jazz musician to the cold metal of the saxophone in There Is No Jazz Tonight then to the rubber gloves in his series titled X?, but of course this progression also only revealed the changes in the artist’s inner attitudes to other people. If Zhang Peili’s object in his Jazz series still placed people among his life forms (even though the life sense of this form of life was extremely limited), then in the X? series the paintings only retained traces of past or potential relationships with people.
In the idea behind the X? series and its expression we can indistinctly discern the way in which Zhang Peili’s conceptualization was developing, and this trend was more obviously revealed in his mimeographed Art Plan No. 2 of 15 December 1987. This document ran to nineteen pages, and although it was explicit in its demands describing what was to be implemented, the implementation was totally unnecessary and the artist was only presenting a proposal for people to read. From a document, the reader could see that the work was intended to have the following characteristics: passivity, restraint, compulsion, symbolism, and concentration.
His work titled Report on the Situation of Hepatitis A in 1988 was sarcastically described in an article in the 1989:9 issue of New Observer as follows: ‘More than twenty pairs of used rubber gloves changed beyond recognition by medical liquids were placed in a pile. The artist told the audience that this art work was titled Report on the Situation of Hepatitis A in 1988, to which one audience member retorted: “But it looks like a pile of filthy waste to me”’.
In fact, all the artist’s works were a quest to reject metaphysics. This is apparent in a video work titled 30x30 which Zhang Peili completed in 1988. Zhang Peili said in introducing this work: ‘In Plan No. 2 everything was transmitted through written language and it could only rely on the medium of written language. In 30x30 the situation is the opposite, because this work addresses the visual and the required medium is the TV. Here, I believe that through the link used by TV and the audience’s psychological expectations of it I try to explain my view of language within a larger context’. 30 x 30 was a video work completed with the stipulation that no attention be paid to technical skill. After selecting a room and setting up the camcorder, the work commenced. ‘I carried out very simple actions, repeatedly dropping onto the ground 25-30 cm below a 3 mm thick glass mirror measuring 30 cm by 30 cm and then reassembling the fragments of it and gluing it back together until 180 minutes of video had been filled’. There is no experience or work more boring or more wearying than this repetitive activity. In the course of recording and producing this piece, the artist rejected the need for any particular technology; for example, the camera was fixed throughout the recording and was never turned on or off, there was no editing of the recording and there were no titles at the beginning and end of the piece. What is interesting is that the person in charge of the camera would leave at any time there was something else to attend to. All these elements were aimed at enabling this work which was close to practical experience to replicate practical experience as much as possible and to avoid creating meaning which went beyond that produced by the experience. This work of Zhang Peili was China’s first conceptual video art, and his later work continued his experiments in this genre.
Huang Yongping
The name of the exhibition, Xiamen Dada, staged in Xiamen from 28 September to 5 October 1986, unabashedly revealed that it was an imitation of Western Dadaist doctrine. The major participants in the show were Huang Yongping, Cai Lixiong, Liu Yiling, Lin Chun, and Jiao Yaoming. The works were displayed in various ways – hung, installed, fixed to vertical surfaces, or laid out on the ground, and the forms of media were various - paintings, material objects, installations etc.
China’s new wave artists in 1986 were already familiar with the work of Duchamp and Rauschenberg. For those involved in the Xiamen Dada event, the urinal and the recycled old tires that were the ‘life objects’ were not difficult to find. Huang Yongping also had this to say about Xiamen Dada: ‘Discussing the aspect of spiritual meaning we can say: Zen Buddhism is Dada, Dada is Zen Buddhism, and the post-modern is the modern resurrection of Zen Buddhism. In the frankest and most profound way they announce that we are concerned with aesthetic meaning and that we must realize that the truth is not the truth and so must maintain our serious reservations and suspicions’.[15]
Xiamen New Dada closed in November 1986 with the wholesale burning of all the works, which was a dramatic demonstration of Dada’s destructive spirit. All the artists’ works that had been exhibited were put to the torch on a large pyre. As the fire burned everything enclosed within a large whitewash circle, a large sign outside it proclaimed: ‘The Dada Exhibition is now over’. Not long after the fire in December of the same year, Huang Yongping and several other artists organized an art ‘event’ in the Fujian Provincial Art Gallery in Fuzhou. At this exhibition, the artists dragged construction material and rubbish lying around the gallery directly into the exhibition hall and placed it together with some previously shot photographs and signs with statements like: ‘It took me five years to study art, but ten years to learn to reject it’. This event can be described as a continuation of Xiamen New Dada, as well as a negation of it. The artistic criteria which artists and others usually acknowledged were mocked by the rubbish and assorted objects. This Duchampian provocation was again played out before an unprepared Chinese audience; the officials predictably responded by shutting down the show after two hours. After the artists burned their own works at Xiamen Dada, the participants began to engage in different ‘artistic’ activities after 1986.
The activities of Xiamen Dada had much to do with Huang Yongping. Born in 1954 in Xiamen, Fujian province, Huang Yongping was admitted to the oil painting department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1977. From a Hong Kong publication titled Interviews with Duchamp, Huang Yongping learned about the type of Western art that transcended modernism. From the beginning, Huang Yongping imbued the Dada idea that ‘liberation’ embodied ‘destruction’ and, in fact, he was also beginning to free his mind from what he suspected to be the trap of modernism.
In March 1985, Huang Yongping began an experiment in painting ‘according to a self-regulated procedure but one which had nothing to do with myself (non-expression)’. This mode of painting took its inspiration from the roulette wheel, and also, according to Huang, from the musical attitude of John Cage. Following this procedure he produced the artwork titled Painting of Non-Expression which obviously had some regularity, because a roulette wheel must include some element of probability. Yet Huang Yongping made this probability meaningless, because he announced that ‘whatever number the indicator finally points to falls within my expectations’. He hoped that there was ‘the possibility of getting rid of the conscious or unconscious domination of the laws of pure form and of getting rid of the individual’s preference for color and overall arrangement … so that all arrangements would be good arrangements in that the arrangement itself would no longer matter and both colors and arrangements would lose all meaning’.[16]
In 1986, after he burned his works included in Xiamen Dada, Huang Yongping seemed to face the choice of completely repudiating ‘art’ or continuing to work as an artist. His installation titled ‘The History of Chinese Painting and The Concise History of Modern Painting’ was a Dadaist work that was the product of this paradox. The installation placed two art histories familiar to Chinese artists and readers alike in a washing machine for two minutes, and then piled up the paper pulp that remained and which had already fused into a congealed lump on a sheet of broken glass. He placed the sheet of glass on a timber crate which had obviously been used to consign items to the artist himself. The History of Chinese Painting provided an explication of Chinese traditional and classical paintings, while The Concise History of Modern Painting was an introduction to the Western modernist painting tradition, but reducing these representations and symbols of tradition to soggy pulp had the simple aim of expressing contempt and mockery for the classics, orthodoxy or the traditional. In 1989, this work was exhibited by the artist in the China Art Gallery, acknowledged to be the supreme hall of Chinese art.
In 1989, an invitation to an exhibition in Paris, the Magicians of the Earth exhibition at the House of Oracles, provided Huang Yongping with the opportunity to join Western contemporary art circles. There he exhibited his Flying Object. For Chinese artists this was a year of ‘flight’, and Huang Yongping, who had made the first tentative steps into the territory of ‘post-modernism’, now had the opportunity to get away from China with its sentimental, formalist and aesthetic art concerns, and even to make a break with the language of Zen and directly experience Zen. Later, in a Western cultural context Huang Yongping very intelligently used both the West to attack the East or the East to attack the West, for which he earned a reputation.
Gu Wenda
During the confrontational opposition to tradition in 1985-1986, it is easy to imagine how some artists questioned and even rebuked the use of Chinese characters as a symbolic system for Chinese culture. We can see that some artists from the perspective of questioning culture toyed with the satirical destruction of Chinese characters. Artists such as Gu Wenda and Wu Shanzhuan played with the arrangement of the elements within Chinese characters and reconfigured them, challenging the fixed and sacred traditions governing their structure over millennia. The artists’ critique of Chinese characters was in fact also a critique of traditional patterns. In this sense the work of these artists was also specifically targeted. After 1986, we see distortions of Chinese characters or Chinese characters themselves as themes in many artists’ work.
Like so many Chinese artists of that period, Gu Wenda (b.1955) demonstrated a great interest in the Western modern art and philosophy then pouring into the country. Before art circles in China experienced the concerns about the future of Chinese painting later presented by Li Xiaoshan, Gu Wenda had already begun to quietly explore the new possibilities extended by the traditional Chinese painting style. In several works he created in 1983, we can clearly see his attempts at this type of artistic innovation. Without exception these works combined a spirit of ancient Chinese civilization and some of its typical symbols with the artistic linguistic mode of Western oil painting and even some surrealist techniques. The composite blending of ink and wash coloring and weird forms created an ideal conception of fantastic turbulence. His massive work titled Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate is representative of these efforts. Measuring 7 meters in length and 1.4 meters in height, this work presented surrealist imagery that formed a hallucinatory Daliesque vision. Although his work titled The Terror of War did not reference Dali’s The Terror of Civil War in its images and composition, his absurdist brush imagery aroused a sense of terror and unease and there were other similarities with the Spanish painter’s evocation of that nation’s Civil War. Gu’s History of Civilization (Wenming shi) was another work using the fantastic Daliesque imagination to bring together cultural symbols including a Western cross and Chinese characters, to allow the artist to explain his own understanding of the ‘history of civilization’, an understanding which probably had much to do with the many books he was reading at this time.
The symbolic depiction of the enlightenment and inspiration received from such books was a general hallmark of the new wave artists of the ’85 period. Gu Wenda proceeded from a traditional Chinese perspective and his challenge to the traditions of the modernists and Chinese artistic culture made him a subject of discussion in Chinese art circles. That discussion probably began with his one-man show held in conjunction with the Seminar on Questions Concerning the Chinese Painting Tradition at Yangling, Shaanxi province, in June 1986.
Gu Wenda divided this solo show into two sections. The first, known as ‘the public show’, contained his xieyi paintings and calligraphy, most probably exhibited so that the painter could gain greater leverage with the second part of his exhibition because the former were works in a traditional mode which could be accepted by Chinese traditional painting circles. However, it was the works in the second part of the show, titled ‘the internal viewing’, which attracted attention. On the subject of these particular exhibits, Fine Arts in China carried a short piece on the second page of its 33rd issue in 1986 which contained the following descriptive passage:
Entering the exhibition hall and seeing the chaotic black ink and wash, the inverted characters, the running script taking off at a gallop and the misplaced and reversed bold-type characters, all so far removed from the ‘spirit’ of calligraphy, displaced in ‘time and space’ and imbued with a twisted ‘religiosity’, the audience is plunged into a murky atmosphere, which some have compared to ‘the funeral of a psychopath’! At least it is a far remove from the experience of visiting an art exhibition![17]
This solo exhibition of Gu Wenda was displayed in a long rectangular hall and most of the important exhibits on vertical and horizontal scrolls of Xuan paper were ink and wash paintings, works of calligraphy, symbols, and scrolls bearing seals. In addition, in the center of the hall paper covered a timber frame of human height which formed a ‘pyramid’ installation lined with photographs of the artist, while the ‘pyramid’ itself was daubed with symbols. The characters, ink, wash and symbols created a chaotic visual effect. People found the works with red and black circles and intersecting marks even more startling. During this period, Gu Wenda produced a large number of works, including The Age of Totems and Taboos, Silent Door Gods, Crazy Door Gods, The Characters for Orthodoxy and Revolt, Why Have Us Read the Character for ‘Quietude’ Written by Three Men and Three Women?, and Displaced Characters. Why Have Us Read the Character for ‘Quietude’ Written by Three Men and Three Women? was the work which attracted the greatest attention. The Age of Totems and Taboos, completed in 1985, communicated bluntly through popular graphics, red forks and circles, and Chinese characters concealed within the shading of the ink and wash. The title of this work naturally evoked Freud who was at that time so influential in China.
After 1986, Gu Wenda’s works began to make the transition to installation art. In a representative work titled Quietude Is Soul and Life, we can see that some elements of Gu Wenda’s original artistic style have been preserved: large black ink characters and the characters in the red circles with forks, as well as the wash background, conveyed the flavor of a traditional Chinese landscape painting. However, these elements were not the main elements or theme of the work. The central section of the work comprised a layered red fibrous fabric and the space above it bore shapes like traditional square seals.
Wu Shanzhuan
In 1986, Wu Shanzhuan (b.1960) and six classmates from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts - Luo Xianyue, Zhang Haizhou, Song Chenghua, Ni Haifeng, Huang Jian and Wu Haizhou, organized an art event called the 75% Red- 20% Black-5% White Exhibition. About seventy works by seven artists were exhibited, and all were scrolls of Chinese characters in red, black and white. After the scrolls were completed, the proportions of colors used in the works conformed to the proportions in the title of the show. The scrolls were covered with words from everyday signage describing the prices of cabbages or the presence of waste disposal facilities together with lofty concepts such as ‘nirvana’; these juxtapositions covered the surfaces in the exhibition space.
Wu Shanzhuan explained these works as follows:
In essential meaning, Chinese characters are ideographs, yet in terms of visual meaning, they are constructed in accordance with absolutely rigid principles. Within a square the required strokes were magically combined to create the 49,000 characters in the Kangxi Dictionary, yet we can also simply say that the Chinese people created 49,000 forms of beauty.[18]
In 1987, Wu Shanzhuan devoted himself to the series titled Red Humor, in which the major work was ‘Several Natural Passages from the Second Chapter of the Novel Titled In the Red’. This was a large installation comprising sections of scrolls bearing various types of writing, and many everyday Chinese phrases with irregular graffiti on red, white and black paper creating a visually dazzling space. In this chaotic and unordered area, the color red overwhelmed all other colors, creating the impression that it dominated everything in sight. The all-pervading red and the chaotic characters combined to suggest the big character posters and the massive slogans that were plastered over everything like a red tide during the Cultural Revolution period. In allowing people to recall this historical moment, Wu Shanzhuan’s Red Humor series played a vital role, even though the artist denied that his work had any social significance.
The ‘historical’ meaning of the ‘Novel titled In the Red’ was its ability to conjure up memories of the red sea of big-character posters which had not really yet been buried totally by history, even though the characters on paper did not make a single reference to the Cultural Revolution. On the contrary, advertisements for sales, color TVs, video parlor signs, and notices announcing newly arrived stock were a familiar part of commercial signage on Chinese streets in 1986. By bringing together memories of an absurd past and current reality, the past was evoked in the present in a latent way but one that could not be readily dismissed.
In the 1989 China/Avant-Garde: China Modern Art Exhibition, Wu Shanzhuan exhibited his Dadaist mixed media works Big Bank Note and Chinese Cabbage. In the work titled Big Business Wu Shanzhuan gave full play to his challenging satirical ideas through his performance of selling prawns. The humorous barbs of Wu Shanzhuan’s were directed at the China Art Gallery itself, by ‘selling prawns in the China Art Gallery which functions as a law court in assessing artistic products – a proposal resisted by the gallery’. Wu’s action embodied his suppressed anger regarding the entire socio-economic and cultural system controlling the art establishment in China, even though Wu never acknowledged that there was any need for artists to actually enter the fray in the fields of politics and ideology. When this exhibition at the China Art Gallery was shut down or opposed because of various incidents, notably Xiao Lu’s ‘gunshot incident’, Wu Shanzhuan, in order to conceal his engagement, adopted the excuse that ‘my business is closed today for stocktaking’, and the later eruption of political reality would leave him feeling somewhat terrified. Wu Shanzhuan takes his place as one of the first artists of the ’85 movement to appreciate the crisis of essentialism in this period.
Xu Bing
Like most other members of his generation, Xu Bing (b.1955) spent two years of ‘re-education’ in the countryside after graduating from middle school. In 1981 Xu Bing graduated from the print-making department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he remained as a teacher. Xu Bing pondered the question of how by combining the nature of repetitions of print and the traces of print he could create a non-repetitive art form demonstrating repetitive work. His work titled Second Series of Woodcuts was an interesting experiment in such a combination, and they were the realization of a rationale he conceived as early as 1985, namely ‘seeing the process of painting even more like a process of creative thinking’. The artist was confident that in the course of making art, the artist’s soul could acquire the sense of perfection and satisfaction similar to that acquired through the process of ‘spiritual cultivation’. This was the spirit that guided Xu Bing in his later work on Book from the Sky.
In October 1988, the showing together at the China Art Gallery of Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky and of Hesitant Travel by Lü Shengzhong (b.1952), a teacher at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, attracted critical attention. The spirit of ‘restraint’ in China’s cultural tradition and the spiritual cultivation of Buddhism both permeate Book from the Sky, while the concept of ‘pluralism’ proposed by Xu Bing closely related to the spiritual approach which dominated his thinking. Xu Bing told a number of people stories regarding Sakyamuni’s lack of fear of hardships in his quest for truth and revealed his own pleasure in accepting this spiritual approach. [19]
Book from the Sky represented a turning point in the ’85 ideological trend – from an attitude of critique and subversion to a retreat from meaning. We have already seen how Gu Wenda and Wu Shanzhuan during the ’85 ideological trend had handled Chinese characters and text in a manner rich with Dadaist significance. On the basis of their particular sensitivities, Gu Wenda and Wu Shanzhuan had broken the cultural barriers inherent in the Chinese written character through their work. The importance of their activities did not lie in dispelling the meaning of Chinese characters, but in causing Chinese characters to lose their dignity within the realm of artistic language and to exist for artists simply as material to express some internal need. Xu Bing’s created characters were part of a new trend to eliminate the meaning of characters after the ’85 movement. In fact, after Gu Wenda and Wu Shanzhuan, people were mentally prepared for this development. Chinese characters were no longer respected as sacred and inviolable, and artists could treat them at will.
In the debate concerning ‘the grand soul’ (da linghun) and the ‘purification’ (chunhua) of artistic language and in the opposition between the Neo-Academist advocacy of formal refinement and the insistence by some critics that art must maintain its critique of reality, Xu Bing’s works seemed to attain a ‘transcendental and refined’ realm, and from the clamor of these two conflicting ideological trends, Xu Bing seemed to leap clear of the dispute about essentialism and assume a position of ‘discernment and enlightenment’ (dache-dawu).
The ‘Grand Soul’ and the China/Avant-Garde: China Modern Art Exhibition
In 1988 people in China sensed a general crisis: the contradiction between rapid economic growth and slow political reform had become increasingly pronounced, and the development of market economy mechanisms for the previous several years had progressively upset the operations of the long established order in the social system. Various unsettling phenomena had begun to emerge in the wake of the reform: tens of millions of people in the countryside had abandoned agricultural production and eagerly flooded into the big cities; some factories had gone bankrupt, and there were widespread fears that an army of millions of unemployed would soon join those who were now underemployed or without work; inadequate management of the rail system was resulting in constant serious accidents; the campuses were filled with a psychological atmosphere of fantasy, cynicism, detachment, superficiality, decadence and anxiety; added to which, there was inflation, widespread ‘bureaucratic profiteering’ (guandao) and official corruption. These phenomena combined to subject people to unbearable mental burdens and psychological pressures.
It was in this very atmosphere that the critic Li Xianting (b.1949), writing under the penname Hucun, published his article titled ‘Our Times Await the Fervor of the Grand Soul’ in the 37th issue for 1988 of Fine Arts in China, which received a great deal of attention and aroused heated debate among artists and critics. In his article, Li proposed the concept of a ‘grand soul’ (da linghun):
The soul of our times has taken shape as a result of the dramatic cultural collision between east and west and the enormous contrasts between those who are advanced and those who are retrograde. In the deep recesses of this grand soul, endless uncertainty rolls about violently: hope and despair interweave, ideals and reality are in contradiction, the tradition and the future are in conflict, while pain, anxiety, hesitation and all manner of suffering accompany reflections on culture as ideas are tossed back and forth.
In the latter part of the essay, Li Xianting cited T. S. Eliot in his explanation of the grand soul, pointing out that the artist ‘must at a timely juncture appreciate the soul that is more important than his own personal soul’. Li discussed the value of the great masters of the past, but was not concerned about their modes of artistic language or their formal technique, but with their souls, pointing out that the spiritual ‘backdrop’ of the great painters was more important than their works. Li Xianting’s logic was that the practice of art should be separated from language and psychology, and that a perfect ‘purification’ of language was probably impossible; ‘if language and psychology are interwoven throughout the creative process then language cannot be purified in isolation from that psychology’. The central idea in Li’s article was very clear and simple, namely art must continue to carry out its mission of critique.
As early as the first half of 1986, Li Xianting had originally published his essay titled ‘It’s Not the Art That’s Important’ in the 28th issue of that year of Fine Arts in China. The article focused on making people aware that the new wave artists and their works had genuine value and deserved our sympathy:
In many works we can see that their anxiety and their confusion derive from their reexamination of all concepts in which human values are central, and for this reason they preferred western modern philosophy, liked writing polemical articles and took pleasure in involved abstract expression. This signaled that the movement of emancipation in thought had begun to enter the philosophical stage. However this was not the modern art movement itself and at most merely a preparatory stage in ideas, because the poverty of science and philosophy forced them to pretend to be philosophers. The weakness of their ideas meant that their art works could not sustain the heavy thought demanded of them, yet they had to shoulder this heavy thought, and this was the pride, as well as the tragedy, of contemporary Chinese art.
When the heavy question of the ‘grand soul’ was again being raised, people generally felt challenged. The question of the noumenon of art itself was also again being raised. In ‘Getting Back to the Noumenon of Art’, published in the 49th issue of 1988 of Fine Arts in China, Jia Fangzhou (b.1940) addressed the issue of Li Xianting’s ‘grand soul’: ‘The history of art proves that the value of the art of any era can only be truly revealed through the evolution and changes of art itself’. Jia Fangzhou even commented that he ‘could not see any cause and effect connections between Courbet’s position as a great artist and his involvement in the political activities of the Paris Commune’. This proposed viewpoint encompassed the critic’s memory of history. The doctrine of ‘cultural instrumentalism’, which maintained that culture was a mere tool, had devastated Chinese culture to the point where Chinese people remained fearful and wary in the wake of the spiritual trampling they had endured in recent history.
In the midst of this clamorous controversy, as a result of efforts by the critics Gao Minglu and Li Xianting a preparatory committee for the China Modern Art Exhibition preparatory committee was formally established in Beijing in October 1988, and its first circular was issued. In the last ten days of November 1988, the 1988 China Modern Art Creativity Seminar, convened by the Art Research Institute of the China Academy of Fine Arts and the Hefei Painting Academy was held. The aim of this meeting was to provide theoretical preparation for the exhibition, which finally opened on 5 February 1989.
During the course of the exhibition that Wang Guangyi made a statement that was at odds with the prevailing sentiment and aroused controversy: ‘From this year on, my main work will be clearing up the predicament created by the illogical humanistic enthusiasm which pervades art circles’. Put simply this was referred to as ‘cleaning up humanistic enthusiasm’. In the exhibition, Wang Guangyi showed his portrait of Mao Zedong behind a grid and his move from prototypes of classical art to realist portraiture demonstrated the artist’s skepticism regarding concepts that transcend reality. Indeed, this image of Mao Zedong had a history and reality that could not be evaded by Chinese people, and the use of this image to structure a denial of the enthusiasm for meaning became a post-modern concept for the artist.
In fact, it was the pure performance art and installations that were the most influential aspect of the exhibition. Zhang Nian’s Incubating Eggs, Li Shan’s Washing Feet, and Wu Shanzhuan’s Big Business all touched on questions related to art theory, politics, and the commercial social environment.
Around 11 am on 5 February, shortly after the opening of China Modern Art Exhibition, Xiao Lu, a graduate from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, walked up to her installation piece of 1988 titled Dialogue and fired two bullets at it. Shortly afterwards Tang Song, who had incited Xiao Lu to fire the gun, was arrested and taken away by uniformed public security and plainclothes personnel. At 3 pm Gao Minglu, as one of those in charge of the exhibition, announced that the exhibition had been halted in compliance with a circular issued by the relevant authorities. At around 5 pm, Xiao Lu voluntarily gave herself up to the police. Xiao Lu and Tang Song were sentenced to five days detention for disrupting public security, but for reasons that are unclear they were released. However, society regarded the ‘gunshot incident’ as clearly political.
The critic Gao Minglu, who was director of the preparatory committee of the exhibition, expressed dissatisfaction and pessimism in his final summation of the show:
There were fewer of the more serious works that had appeared around 1985 and some of the performance art was fairly absurd; works with a Dadaist flavor seemed to predominate, and the sensationalist pieces can be included among them. … A sense of coarseness and crudity seemed to be part of a psychological trend. … apart from the sense of tragedy surrounding this exhibition, in confronting society and art circles, it demonstrated an increase in ‘hooligan consciousness’ and a decline in heroism and a tragic sense of life. Like the Chinese Bacchus depicted in the film Red Sorghum, there was a lot of bravado, because the life experiences of individuals were not grounded in a rigorous rationality and a natural healthy state but were related to primitivism and the worship of sex.[20]
1989, as a pivotal year, was dominated by the international reality following the conclusion of the cold war, and the changes in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union subverted the thinking of people occupying quite different positions on political realities and systems. The victories in the revolutions in Eastern Europe in that year were so rapid that they were unexpected by all parties, including those in the west who had long hoped for the collapse of the socialist camp. At the end of 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev met George H. W. Bush in Malta, he told the US president that ‘we no longer regard you as the enemy’; this not only symbolized the end of the cold war, but also signified the beginning of a brand-new world order. However, in May 1989, when Gorbachev paid a historic visit to China,[21] the focus of the entire world was on the events unfolding in Tiananmen Square, and at that time Chinese students regarded Gorbachev’s new thinking as a strength on which they could rely.[22] Seen from the perspective of Tiananmen, the radicalism expressed at the China Modern Art Exhibition was no different from the chaos on the streets at that time.
Vagabond Artists and Yuanmingyuan Artists Village
After the Spring Festival of 1989 a phenomenon surfaced which confused and unsettled urbanites: the appearance of large numbers of ill-kempt and poorly dressed rural immigrants in the cities, whom people described as ‘vagabonds’ (mangliu).[23] This horde had to be distinguished from the ‘vagabond artists’ who began to appear in Beijing at the same time; the former were uneducated, failed from the countryside and were driven by circumstances, while the latter were educated and urban and acted as free agents. However both groups lacked stable employment and regular incomes, and both were products of crisis and disintegration in the traditional economic structure.
For some vagabond artists concentrated in Beijing in 1988-1989, Beijing was frequently visited by foreign travelers and art aficionados, who often bought artists’ works, which supported individual artists and even their families. Foreign embassies, organizations and students also played an important role in this. Of course, for foreign art patrons, the Chinese vagabond artist’s lifestyle, a harsh life that elicited sympathy, was often more important or attractive than the art work. At first, the lives of these artists pursuing independence was what most interested their foreign supporters. According to one ‘vagabond artist’ interviewed by Bridge magazine, most of the foreigners who bought paintings ‘did not understand our art’. That artist complained that one wool trader from Australia bought a painting depicting ‘a flock of sheep in front of Tiananmen’ to hang on his office wall - to remind people that his product was also selling in China. Even so, the economic support provided by foreign art patrons also provided the requisite conditions for the survival of these independent artists.
Undoubtedly, the traditional notion of the artist as a professional whose living and work were pursued in peace and contentment and the fixed idea of the Chinese artist living and working in a unit like all other members of society were vigorously challenged concepts in the 1980s. Given the rapid success of the commodity economy and individual businesses, people realized that by breaking away from the fixed unit system and by making a great effort the individual could better realize his or her personal worth. For the individual vagabond artists, the pursuit of an untrammeled and unfettered inner life went without saying. However, achieving such a goal seemed to be related to basic living conditions. In this regard, those foreigners who purchased paintings played an important role, even though some vagabond artists were contemptuous of this. The artist Zhang Nian wrote unsympathetically:
In order to live, modern artists look pitifully [sic] at foreigners’ wallets, and now that their hobby has become the source of sustenance for these young modern artists, they have become more nauseating than prostitutes plying their trade.[24]
The vagabond artist Wen Pulin wrote the following in a long piece on vagabond artists originally scheduled for publication in the journal Painters:
I think this tradition of the vagabond has come down to us from history and it is encompassed within the Chinese concept of ‘suibian’ (informal, random or casual informality), the philosophical basis of which is the concept of ‘the self’ – being comfortable with one’s own feelings and not suppressing the self. In fact, this was also an old tradition of humanism. From the time of the European Renaissance there were renowned vagabond artists, such as Da Vinci, Caravaggio, and then later there was the dashing Spaniard, Francisco de Goya, extending directly down to the modernists Gauguin and Jackson Pollock. In every generation there were vagabonds who were at one and the same time casual yet serious in their grasp of life. …
Without a doubt, the ‘informal’ and ‘artistic’ lifestyle of the vagabond artist opened up new possibilities for the Chinese artist in general, suggesting a possible future in which regardless of whether he or she completely gave up his or her fixed employment, steady income and welfare benefits, a new artistic career path might open up.
As early as the winter of 1986, Sheng Qi, Zhao Jianhai, Xi Jianjun and others were involved in the performance art work titled Concept 21 Performance Activities on the campus of Peking University and they attracted adverse criticism not only at Peking University but even in the wider cultural and artistic world. By May 1988, Sheng Qi and Zhao Jianhai, together with Zheng Yuke and Kang Mu, had completed their performance called Concept 21: Performance Display on the ancient Great Wall. Because the psychological states they created through their performance art were so in step with the feelings of Wen Pulin, in October 1988 Wen Pulin invited Sheng Qi and the others to film on the Great Wall. As a result it was on the Great Wall that Sheng Qi performed his bondage work titled Taiji which well expressed his psychological struggle with feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.
If performance art by Sheng Qi and Zheng Yuke was by and large a re-enactment of the bondage performance art being staged throughout China, the events staged by the vagabond artist Wang Deren had some unique features, and his notorious condom scattering performance at the China Modern Art Exhibition in February 1989 had been a media sensation. The artist acknowledged that as early as 1984, he had conceived a spatio-temporal conceptual work titled The Last Orient (Zuihou de dongfang), which was a performance that would entail the actual ascent of Mount Sangdankasang, located in the Tanggula Mountains on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, although mountain climbing was something which Wang Deren had never previously attempted. The climb was scheduled for July 1986, and his companion was an American self-funded student at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. Whether Wang Deren and his friend actually climbed the 6570m-high peak and encountered the dangerous situations they described is doubted by some critics and artists, but in any case, the acknowledgment of such a difficult experience and activity gave them an unusual aura.
In fact, the earliest vagabonds to move in to Yuanmingyuan were a group of young poets, and between 1985 and 1988 they included the well-known poets and rock musicians Hei Dachun (Pang Chunqing), Xue Di (Li Bing), and Xing Tian (Tang Bozhi). Within a short time, the poets had set up the Yuanmingyuan Poetry Society, held recitations, and published mimeographed collections of poetry. Later, increasing numbers of young artists moved in. In 1988, a man called Yin Nan wrote the first account of the ‘decadent and crazy’ artists who lived in the village by Yuanmingyuan, who sometimes even consciously indulged in heavy drinking bouts, fist fights and uncontrolled hilarity. In the late 1980s, Wang Deren, Zhang Dali, Kang Mu, and other artists joined the community.
After June 1989, many of the artists hanging out in Beijing began to suffer more in their vagabond lives. They did not choose Yuanmingyuan because of its historical significance or its artistic or culture value, but because it was not far from the center of the city and rents were low. As the editor Zhang Xiaojun noted:
In fact, there was no connection between the historical ruins of Yuanmingyuan and the artists’ cultural orientation, and if there were any such connection, it was subconscious. We can only say that in the historical flow of modern Chinese art these artists had subconsciously inherited a solemn and stirring duty, namely the sacred mission to reconstruct the artistic prosperity of China. However, in point of fact, the artists of Yuanmingyuan artists village had no sense of shouldering a heavy historical task and their only choices were lifestyle and modes of survival.[25]
By the beginning of 1992, a large group of painters had moved in, including Ding Fang, Fang Lijun, Wang Yin, Yi Ling, Tian Bin, Wei Ye, Wei Lin, Yang Shaobin, Xu Yihui, Mo Gen, Lu Lin, Yue Minjun, Qi Zhilong, and Xu Ruotao. The numbers of artists living in Yuanmingyuan village were rapidly increasing. The easygoing life, the uncertain future and the freedom drew artists to this place, where it seemed they could realize a romantic dreamland and a poetic ideal. Among their ideals, the artistic spirit seemed to be in direct conflict with financial or material considerations. However, the appearance of the market economy had already transformed the political and social terrain of China, as exemplified by the ‘silicon valley’, Zhongguancun, booming just south of Yuanmingyuan. This was a place accruing wealth that was symbolic in China as the centre of the information industry and as a casebook of successful economic development. The artists living in Yuanmingyuan confronted this stronghold of the market economy on a daily basis, and most were disgusted by this environment.
By 1993, several dozen of the painters still living in the village were mostly graduates of fine arts colleges from all over China. It is worth noting that Fang Lijun, the important artist of the 1990s, was still living in Yuanmingyuan in 1993. At this time, Cynical Realism had already become the important art phenomenon following the ‘New Generation’ and Fang Lijun took part that year in ‘Post-89 China New Art’, the Berlin China Avant-Garde Art Exhibition, and in June in the Venice Biennale.
Even though cynicism was a notable characteristic of the artists living in the village, a number of them had in fact participated in China’s official oil painting biennale, notably Wang Yin, Yang Maoran, Wei Ye, Wei Lin, Liu Yan, Zhang Feng, Qiu Bing, and Shao Zhenpeng (Shao Yinong).
As we saw earlier, the artists living in Yuanmingyuan village had the inclination to generally wanted to break away from the fixed system governing art. In his report Zhang Xiaojun wrote that the Yuanmingyuan artists ‘worked like peasants in their studios and took their works to market like self-employed laborers. They relied on their works for a living, in conformity to China’s pattern of artistic production under the commodity economy, and if they were limited by the market they also obtained their motive force for re-production from the market’. This description is somewhat poetic, but as professionals most artists did not get a payback from living there. However, for quite a long time, the artists maintained their hope of achieving artistic success and renown. Manifesto of the Free Artists of Yuanmingyuan Artists Village stated: ‘The pre-dawn light is already diffusing across the horizon, lighting our spiritual road. A new type of existence has already been established on the old and dilapidated ruins of this Chinese garden palace!’ The members of Yuanmingyuan artists’ village were clearly filled with the illusion that they were entering the pages of art history.
Regardless, the Bohemian life style of the village artists succeeded in creating a mythology of opposition to the system. Throughout the 1990s, the Yuanmingyuan artists had no jobs and homes, nor did they have regulated lives or planned gatherings; their regular bouts of copious drinking and sex exemplified the alluring life style of artists for ordinary people. The Yuanmingyuan artists emphasized the importance of irrational life, the supreme importance of emotions for art and the inseparable connection between art and life. In their pursuit of these, critic discovered the artists’ psychological resistance to the established system. Li Xianting wrote: ‘Seen from the perspective of society and culture, they are positive and their resistance to officialdom’s structuring of social life and, regardless of their goals, they have significance, even if it is destructive. This society requires more destructive things, destruction with greater consciousness’.[26]
They were quite different from the Stars artists of the 1980s, in that they had no political goals or any rudimentary sense of justice. At the same time, the reality of China at this stage no longer had any need of the constant replay of romantic posturing in the pursuit of democracy and freedom. The Yuanmingyuan artists were not enthusiastic romantics, because they had no rational standards of value and no clear artistic faith, nor did they demonstrate any attention to logic and the scientific spirit; they were only interested in the unconscious state that lay on the margins of the rational. The Yuanmingyuan artist Wang Qiuren, in his Manifesto of the Free Artists of Yuanmingyuan Artists Village of December 1992, described the spiritual direction of the Yuanmingyuan artists: ‘We want to return to the original condition of life and restore to life and man their original appearance!’ In fact, most Yuanmingyuan artists gave little serious thought to ‘the original condition of life’; this was a mystically colored intangible ‘other’ in which none of them genuinely believed. As soon as life began to undergo real change, especially in terms of material living conditions, they paid little attention to their hungry ‘original condition’ due to a lack of cash.
In 1993, the artists, one after another, were beginning to give serious thought to changing their working and living conditions. For artists in the 1990s Songzhuang village in Tongxian county rapidly replaced Yuanmingyuan artists village as a gathering place and, as the market economy provided new abundance, the community of artists underwent obvious changes in scale, function and nature. Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, Zhang Huiping, Wang Qiang, Gao Huijun and Yue Minjun moved to Songzhuang at the beginning of 1994 as some of the earliest artists to move there. Later, other artists including Yang Shaobin, Shao Zhenpeng and Wang Qiuren made the move from Yuanmingyuan to Songzhuang at different times. This rural area not far from Beijing became the new gathering place for artists and reflected the qualitative changes that would take place in the new century.
NOTES:
[1] Art Trends (Meishu sichao), 1985:1, p.11.
[2] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1985:7, pp.20-21.
[3] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1985:7, p.47.
[4] Fine Arts in China (Zhongguo meishu bao), 1985:15.
[5] Art Trends (Meishu sichao), 1986:2, pp.8-9.
[6] In the decade 1978-1987, more than 5000 works in the humanities were translated into Chinese, 10 times more than the number translated in the previous 30 years. This figure does not include works of literature. Most were western works and western philosophy, history, politics and even ideological works became the staple diet of Chinese intellectuals, having an enormous impact on their spiritual lives.
[7] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1986:6, p.22.
[8] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1985:8, pp.41-42.
[9] The artistic philosophy of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) was not regarded as excessively classical by many students at art colleges during that period of intellectual liberation when any western philosophical or artistic writings could be discussed by young Chinese as relevant and timely.
[10] Art Trends (Meishu sichao), 1987:1, p.20.
[11] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1986:11, p.45.
[12] A footnote in ‘Sayings’ (Zhenyan) explained ‘The color red: Travel’ (Hongse: Lü) as ‘the journey of life’, and as the artists’ ‘experience of the advance of history, culture and life’.
[13] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1986:2, p.47.
[14] Art Trends (Meishu sichao), 1987:1, p.18.
[15] Fine Arts in China (Zhongguo meishu bao), 1986:46.
[16] From Wu Meichun ed., Contemporary Art and Local Culture: Huang Yongping, Fuzhou: Fujian Fine Arts Publishing House, 2003, p.51.
[17] Fine Arts in China (Zhongguo meishu bao), 1986:33.
[18] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1986:8, p.61.
[19] ‘A painter friend discussed an ‘unusual’ person living in his village, who would spend time every day looking for old newspapers, which he would take to the river to wash and then spread out each sheet to dry. After they dried, he would pile them up beside his kang bed. He did this day in, day out. My painter friend described him as someone who was quite unconventional, but I thought about him for a long time and later realized that this was a type of qigong or meditational practice. The purity and non-utilitarian nature of his behavior would have cleansed his mind and have enabled him to remain quite detached even when living alone in the city. The devotion he needed to attain that realm of discernment and understanding would have enabled him to transcend the vulgar scramble for profit and to have attained ultimate enlightenment in this existence’. Ref: Fine Arts, No. 4, 1989, p.8.
[20] Reading (Dushu), No.5 1989, p.127.
[21] On 16 May 1989, Deng Xiaoping met with visiting Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Gorbachev, and they announced the normalization of Sino-Soviet state relations.
[22] On 14 May, the editorial in Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper, titled ‘Relying on foreign forces will result in blow-back’ (Jieyong waili bi cao fangan), contained the following statement: ‘According to reports, Beijing students plan to organize further large scale demonstrations during the visit to China of Gorbachev with slogans in Russian and large numbers of students will even stage a hunger strike, in order to prompt Chinese authorities to make concrete responses to their demands’.
[23] The 4 March 1989 issue of People’s Daily reported the following statistics: The floating population now accounts for nearly 50 million people. In the 23 large cities with a population in excess of one million, the average daily flow of the floating population has reached nearly 10 million per day. On 5 March, the General Office of the State Council sent out an urgent notice requiring all local authorities to control the flow of people migrating to urban areas in order to avoid serious social chaos in the cities.
[24] All unattributed passages in this section are taken from the special issue of Huajia devoted to ‘vagabond artists’, which was subsequently not published.
[25] Ref: Fine Arts Newsletter (Meishu tongxun), September 1992 issue.
[26] Ref: Wang Jifang (b.1961), The Last Romantics of the 20th Century: True record of the Lives of Free Artists in Beijing (20 shiji zuihou de langman: Beijing ziyou yishujia shenghuo shilu), Beijing: Northern Literature and Art Publishing House, 1999, p.64.