The Unfolding of Concepts:
Art within Pluralism
Conceptual Art and its Development – Video Art – Conceptual Photography – Issues for Female Art and Female Artists
Conceptual Art and its Development
In the late 1980s, in order to maintain the momentum and direction of their advance, more radical artists, namely Wu Shanzhuan, Gu Wenda, Huang Yongping, Zhang Peili, and Xu Bing, began to explore the possibilities of impelling art in a direction counter to art (anti-art) by beginning to dismantle the bridge between possible directions and indicated directions, or by arbitrarily adding non-expressive materials. After the 1990s, the domination of art by the market became an increasingly undeniable reality, and the most destructive function of the market ideology was that interests could lead to any revision of explanations of meaning. As a result, it was only natural that artists seemed to react rapidly and enthusiastically to the market. At the same time, the old political controls did not change in the slightest. In short, economic freedom and political control formed the context of the new period and led to complexity in artists’ points of departure and in the ways in which they tackled various questions.
It was against such a background that Chinese art underwent the transformation from modernism to contemporary art.
After entering the 1990s, conceptual art in China transformed as it moved in the direction of greater complexity. Even though conceptual art had, in the words of Huang Zhuan, ‘the goal of subverting classicism’s and modernism’s traditional reflection theory with its subject and object’, it was however the concrete reality in which each artist found himself or herself that stimulated the thinking of conceptual artists and provided the possibilities for their work.
Between 29 January and 4 February 1991, the Big Tail Elephant Work Group, a newly established ‘art community’, held its first show – aptly named the Big Tail Elephant Work Group Art Exhibition, in rooms of the Guangzhou No.1 Palace of Culture. Group members included Chen Shaoxiong, Liang Juhui and Lin Yilin. They had participated as early as in September 1986 in the Southern Artists Salon First Experimental Exhibition held in the student activity center of Zhongshan University in Guangzhou. For the show, Chen Shaoxiong over a seven-day period actualized his cut-up of the concept of time by using black paint to indicate serial numbers of sheets of plastic film and the dates on which he completed painting them. The medium used as membranes was common, ready-made material. The artist was attempting to utilize materials with which people were very familiar, and, through the special experience structured by the relationship between the process of the artist’s actions and the materials themselves, he expressed his own views regarding time and states of existence. In this work, titled Silence for Seven Days, Chen Shaoxiong’s painting of the plastic membranes during the fixed period of time was not a study on a formalist aesthetic theme but rather a process or procedure that required completion, so that the actions of applying the black paint became elements in this work on timeliness and emotional feeling which even the artist himself could not evade. Two years later, Chen Shaoxiong presented a performance installation work titled Five Hours at the Red Ant Bar in Guangzhou, in which he constructed a simple quadruped from a colored fluorescent lamp; from the belly of the animal an old-fashioned alarm clock was suspended, and a fixed period of time was indicated on a wooden plank. The ballast for the fluorescent lamp served as a dish which was placed on a small, hard dining table. He sat at the table, with the lamp attached to his mouth and the legs of the creature. The artist’s performance and installation obviously encompassed both implied meanings and symbolism, exhibiting the influence of the material world on man’s surroundings and on the human spirit.
In 1992, in what was called the ‘China, Shanxi, Taiyuan 1992 .12. 3’ performance show, Song Yongping, Wang Yazhong and Li Jianwei deployed bicycles on the streets of Shanxi’s capital Taiyuan in their performance art activities. The artists provided no explanation of the meaning of this performance, because in their view, after entering the 1990s, artists had neither the power nor the possibility to speak about meaning. The scene of the performance was permeated with a feeling of destructiveness. In August 1992, Song Yongping and a number of artists had prepared a performance activity titled Country Project, which was a proposal for a comprehensive series of related art activities in which more than twenty artists participated, including Wang Yazhong, Liu Chun, Wang Chunsheng, Zhou Yi, Shen Guanqun, Han Fei, Chang Qing, Zhang Guotian, Fan Xiaoli, Li Shaoping, Li Chen, Tang Jin, and Li Jianwei. The participants conducted a field investigation along the Yellow River in Shanxi’s Lüliang prefecture, and as a result of their allotted efforts completed a series of paintings and photographic works, shot a TV program and an MTV both titled Country Project 1993, and compiled an anthology of reportage writing of the same title. Country Project 1993 addressed the issue of the general materialism ushered in by the commercialization of the 1990s, and the artists hoped through these activities to restore the primitive impulse to art and to regain the authenticity of the soul.
In comparison, Sun Ping made use of the Guangzhou Biennale to present Issuing Sun Ping Art Co. Ltd. A-Shares (hereafter Issuing Shares), more clearly revealing the conceptually destructive and disruptive function of such performance art. In October 1992, at the same time as several hundred avant-garde artists from across the country were taking part in the Guangzhou Biennale, Sun Ping presented his Issuing Shares at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, as a playful re-enactment of stock market activities. In 1992, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s famous ‘southern inspection tour speech’, the economic situation in southern China began to exert an influence on all parts of the country, and participation in the stock market became a part of the life of the general population. By simulating the fast food phenomenon of this new life style, the artist was humorously satirizing it.
At the end of 1992, a collective group calling itself the Lanzhou Art Division emerged in the Gansu provincial capital, Lanzhou. The initial motivation for setting up this group was to express disgust with the phenomenon of commercialized art that had emerged during that year. As a result of the influence of the commercial operations mechanisms initiated at the Guangzhou Biennale, words like ‘operations’ and ‘market effect’ came to be widely used in the world of avant-garde art, and many of the high priests of the eighties new wave movement began to develop enthusiasm for the notion of market operations. However, as the artists Cheng Li, Ma Yunfei, Ye Yongfeng, Yang Zhichao, and Liu Yiwu saw it, materialism corrupted the soul of the artist and posed an obvious danger detrimental to art, and so they initiated a number of performance works designed to criticize and eliminate the phenomenon. On 12 December 1992, members of the Lanzhou Art Division adopted a systematic set of principles stressing that their organization was based on ‘free association and natural interaction’, and they proposed that they would implement their plan for a performance art activity called Burial. On 8 January 1993, they used a blank death certificate from a hospital and an obituary notice, which they then filled out and sent to artists and critics throughout China, at the same time as they placed in Shanxi Daily the obituary which announced that ‘the deceased was the artist Zhong Xiandai (lit., ‘Death Knell for Modernity’) who had for a long time, in collusion with critics, art dealers and newspaper editors, been involved in the shotgun sale of art works’. On 17 January, the funerary of Zhong Xiandai was held. The funeral altar was made from blocks of ice, surrounded on all four sides by black wreaths, and the casket containing the ashes of the ‘deceased’ was placed at the rear of the altar. Zhong Xiandai’s glass coffin was placed in front of the altar and before the coffin was a 10m long black banner proclaiming in black on white characters ‘Funeral’ and in black characters on red two sets of slogans –Three Attacks (San da) and Three Antis (San fan), being respectively ‘overthrow painting hegemony, overthrow painting publications and overthrow art dealers’ and ‘oppose talent scouts, oppose selling paintings and oppose publishing articles’. The members of the Lanzhou Art Division read out a long eulogy, shouted slogans, set off fireworks and took turns wearing the sets of red, black and white mourning garments; they wore face masks, as the coffin of ‘Zhong Xiandai’ was raised and then carried into the city. Finally, the ‘body’ of Zhong Xiandai was doused in petrol and cremated, and the ‘ashes’ were then interred in a small wooden casket. From today’s perspective, such action art seems more like an angry symbolic protest, but it served as a graphic record of the intellectual crisis experienced by artists at that time.
In October 1993, the artist Wang Jianwei (b.1958) signed a contract with a peasant called Wang Yun living in Production Brigade 1 of Yongquan Village, Wenjiang county on the outskirts of Chengdu to plant one mu (0.067 hectares) of wheat and cultivate it for one season, in order to observe and record the integrated system of actions involved in cultivation as a demonstration of the view that all information in the world (including tangible natural physical existence and intangible non-natural spiritual consciousness) is part of a cycle of inputs and outputs. In October of the same year, the artist Geng Jianyi invited twenty persons to Hangzhou Moganshan Middle School to fill out questionnaires testing their knowledge of China’s Marriage Law, and this performance art activity which resembled an examination aroused a great deal of dispute regarding questions related to law, marriage and family. Another performance art action was initiated on 25 May 1993 when the artist Huang Yan began his ten-year project of making rubbings of a section of one demolished or re-located building from each period. This long-term performance project was titled The Collection Series: Demolished Buildings. Among the art annals of 1993, we also come across the following performance projects: Cai Guoqiang’s Extension of the Great Wall: The Ten-Thousand Meter Plan implemented in the Gobi Desert just west of Jiayuguan, the westernmost end of the Great Wall; Huang Yan’s posting out of Mao Zedong Badges from Shenyang; and, Wang Youshen’s work Newspapers: Advertising which was a wrap-up of the Great Wall in Beijing using silk-screen prints, white cotton cloth and newspapers. However, it was after 1994 that conceptual art really took off.
Some critics pointed out that the conceptual art of the 1990s was an attempt to salvage the defeated new wave art of the 1980s. However, the conceptual art of the 1990s did not have a philosophical background, there were no idealist goals, there was no intellectual logic, and no new context which provided legitimizing support had made its appearance. Confronting a background of vested interests, political purposes and contested power, artists seemed unable to continue using the ideological weapons of the 1980s and had to look for new directions and new modes on their own. The critic Huang Zhuan defined this change in Chinese conceptual art as follows:
If, we say that what was in the early 1990s called the post-89 art movement was at most only a compromise form in the transition in China from modernist to contemporary art, then conceptual art in the strictest sense of the term only appeared around the mid-1990s, and compared to other similar avant-garde art movements, its progress seemed to lack clear goals and norms. In fact, it was like a movement without coordinates, with dispersed strength and with its greater possibilities concealed. In media terms, it had already begun to make extensive use of such visual elements as written characters, installations, the body, video images, the internet, and graphics, and to whatever extent possible to excavate the latent energy and meanings of these media in culture, history, psychology, sociology and politics, thus effectively expanding the sociological and anthropological implication of Chinese avant-garde art. The emergence of conceptual art in China, unlike in the West, perhaps lacked the requisite art-historical logic, and there were extremely uneven developmental levels and questions of concern between different regions, but this movement had from its outset discarded the characteristic ‘grand narrative’ of the 1980s and established intimate relations with specific social and private subjects. At the same time, this movement was from its beginning very internationalized, although this certainly did not mean that it was more imitative of Western conceptual art but that it had begun to familiarize itself with understanding and appreciating Chinese issues from an international perspective and had also begun to engage in work that revealed a familiarity with internationally accepted modes and rules.[1]
The conceptual art of the late-1990s and that of the early-1990s reveal obvious differences. Even though conceptual artists were constantly prepared psychologically for the possibility that they could be closed down in the environment in which they had to exhibit and work, they were sometimes even hopeful of that eventuality given that the privacy of conceptual art was no longer conscious resistance to public openness and universality and was a return to the natural state of the individual. In fact, in the later stages of the 1990s, because of the further loosening of the social environment, the right of conceptual artists to exhibit was no longer a serious problem. As long as they had economic support, conceptual art could always be implemented in part or in its entirety in venues ranging from basements to regular art exhibition spaces or open public places. The most outstanding example illustrating this was the show In the Name of Art curated by the critic Zhu Qi and staged in June 1996 in the Liu Haisu Art Museum in Shanghai. As the first national exhibition of installation art in the 1990s, the curator had to establish the theme of the show, fight for a legitimate museum space, look for funding, invite artists, and confirm the artistic background and nature of the entire exhibition, while maintaining totally independent rights for all the works in the show. The most important thing was ensuring that, as the first exhibition of installation art in a government art museum, the show was legally run, encompassing as it did not only installation works but also video art and conceptual photography.
Those familiar with these closed art circles and whose words and actions were incomprehensible to society at large could address no universal issues or ideology. The artists were very clear that their art could make pitifully little impact on society. Their earnest search for some link to ‘the ultimate concerns’ of society and the proletarian masses was now out of date; similarly, the notion of challenging society was merely what remained of the artistic theory of reflection. The power system had adopted modes of both laissez-faire control (if art demonstrated no direct aggressiveness) and strict control (if art demonstrated the possibility of causing concern), so that artists became further mired in deeper concern for their own private space. The spiritual states brought about by this loss of ‘ultimate concerns’ were manifested in a lack of logicality and generality, as well as in imaginings, dreaming, sexual desires, perverse thoughts, money issues, physical pain, intellectual games…. In a word, an individual’s daily experiences or fantasies could all become the subject of art. In a situation of complete freedom with no support from values, conceptual art occasionally resulted in abnormal incidents, such as the work Encyclopedia Britannica in which the artist Liu Xinhua made ink seal impressions using his penis to daub the ink on one page daily of the Chinese edition of that work. Another example was the screening of the video work SW: Good Morning Beijing at Beijing’s Dahua Cinema by Wang Jinsong and Liu Anping, in the course of which Zhao Shaoruo and Liu Anping would splash prepared Chinese ink on the audiences suddenly and unannounced; among their victims was the ‘godfather’ of avant-garde Li Xianting and some other artists. These satirical incidents had a special symbolic meaning, demonstrating that when conceptual artists were unable to challenge society positively, they could only turn to themselves and the art world made up of artists and critics. They became the audiences of their own works, as well as bearing the brunt and providing the target of their own satire.
Qiu Zhijie, as a student, advocated ‘anti-individual painting’, and among his earliest influential conceptual art works was a large sheet of paper on which in 1992 he wrote out the text of the calligraphic masterpiece The Preface of Orchid Pavilion 1000 times, until the paper was completely covered with black ink. The artist’s performance was clearly intended to demonstrate how historical and cultural symbols completely disappear during the process of constant re-writing. The artist explained that in performing this ‘meditation on calligraphy’, he was deeply influenced by the Fluxus movement and extremely interested in the processual. Qiu Zhijie was a rare scholar among artists, constantly searching for a point of departure in his readings of Western and Eastern philosophy and thought. Thus, in discussing ‘The Preface of Orchid Pavilion’, he invoked such concepts as ‘the principles of Chinese calligraphy’, ‘the archaeology of knowledge’, ‘the visual purity of abstraction’, and ‘meditation on calligraphy’. Later, Qiu Zhijie looked for other modes of performance. In Hangzhou he used cages, calligraphy and people to enact his work Positions. The artist stood outside the cage on which there was a sign: ‘Every cage shuts out the world beyond it’. Through this work he attempted to provide popular expression for a metaphysical dilemma, in order to exhibit the intellectual activity of the artist. However, these early and constant readings laid the foundation for his later crazy, unceasing experiments.
Another artist at this time producing works that entailed writing was Song Dong. From January 1995, the artist began writing Diary Written with Water recording the content of his private life as a ‘diary’ on a stone slab. Not surprisingly, his ‘private life’ while written on stone gradually disappeared as the water evaporated. Despite constantly repeated writing, the logically open content could never be known. Song Dong’s works were the result of contemplating life’s ‘paradoxes’. The artist became so fascinated by this activity that even on the last day of 1999, he still publicly wrote his invisible diary under the gaze of a watchful audience.
In 1994 at Beijing’s Hanmo Art Centre, Xu Bing implemented his writing-related work titled Cultural Animals, and this can be regarded as a variant of his late-1980s work Book from the Sky. In the latter work, Xu Bing brought a readily appreciable absurd commentary on the myth of Sisyphus to his play on characters. The artist now pushed this absurdity to its extreme, by applying printed Latin and Chinese script to the bodies of a boar and sow, respectively, who in mating enacted a cruel metaphor of ‘East-West cultural interchange’. If Xu Bing had earlier reflected a suspicion of traditional Chinese culture through his creation of bogus Chinese ideographs, he had now abandoned that serious or analytical suspicion in exchange for a more cynical and obvious absolute denial of cultural values, in this malicious mockery of daily life. Xu Bing’s denial of cultural meaning was obviously tactical, and it was this tactical negation that guaranteed that the artist could continue his subversion and questioning of culture and art, while invoking ‘culture’ or ‘art’.
In Guangzhou, the works of Lin Yilin and Xu Tan related in the main to urban culture. In 1995, Lin Yilin staged the work titled One Thousand and One Thousand in Guangzhou. At a major road near Guangzhou railway station, Lin Yilin meticulously kept moving bricks from one end of a purposely built wall to its other end, so that the wall gradually advanced towards the other side of the highway. By constantly moving the wall’s bricks over a 90 minute period, the artist succeeded in moving the entire wall across the road. This was almost a physical game which tested the artist’s ability during the process and the possibility of change in the environment. What was interesting was that throughout the period of the performance, the road traffic was not interrupted by the artist’s work. Xu Tan’s work titled Fable of Love was seen as touching on issues of post-industrial society. It made use of the ubiquitous store dummy to express the animal affections between a man and a woman, and the installation with toy rifles serving as props was dramatically placed by the artist outside a bar in Guangzhou. This graphic symbol of ‘love and violence’ was completely obvious, but it was unclear whether the work was directed against ‘post-modern’ society or expressed the artist’s own latent desires. However, through this performance piece the artist sought to prove how individual feelings were transplanted to ordinary public spaces and hoped to put this question to audiences familiar or not familiar with the environment of the bar.
In 1994 the Beijing artist Wang Youshen implemented the work Nutritious Soil in his own home and in doing so he also tackled the issue of elevating personal experience into public experience. Wang Youshen covered the floors of the self-contained flat with the nutritious soil which his father had been using to grow pot plants, and had his family conduct their normal lives in this environment in which he had covered the floor with this ‘nutritious soil’. The artist reported that his purpose was to test the nutrients in the soil. He later further expanded his basic concept by pondering the relationships set up by moving ‘soil’ between different regional ecologies, and reflecting on whether ‘such high quality soil genuinely provided any nutrition for natural or human environments’. The artist bought such ‘nutritious soil’ as part of a planned experiment and shipped it to different countries while also purchasing the nutritious soils of other countries to test in China. Through this transplantation of ‘soils’ he sought to dissect contemporary cultural contexts.
Beginning in 1993, the artist Huang Yan made rubbings of buildings that were being demolished or relocated in more than 20 Chinese cities. He not only made rubbings of sections of doors and windows, interior walls, exterior walls, stairs, numbers and corridors of the buildings, but also of daily use items taken from them. In Huang Yan’s hands, the function of the techniques for making rubbings, previously only applied to inscriptions on monumental masonry, was opened up to record images of buildings, in what could be regarded as ‘urban archaeology’ documenting the enormous changes taking place in Chinese cities. The implementation of these works by Huang Yan required enormous patience. For example, on 1 October 1, 1994 between 8 am and 8 pm, the artist sifted through every variety of rubbish collected along Stalin Road in Changchun. Photographs of the performance process and of some of the rubbish were used to produce Huang Yan News: The Rubbish News, which was then sent to various parts of the country by means of the postal service. Concern for cities and urban ruins was also reflected in the works of the artist Zhang Dali, who through his ‘18K’ project painted or hollowed out his signature human-head outlines on the walls of demolished houses throughout Beijing. Unlike Huang Yan, Zhang Dali shot photographs of his signature profile against different backgrounds, which became his trade mark and an enduring symbol of his artistic work. The members of the self-styled Three Man Joint Studio - Sui Jianguo, Zhan Wang, and Yu Fan, together with Jiang Jie, Lin Qing and some others, staged an on-site performance titled New Wangfu Square in the rubble of the old Central Academy of Fine Arts in Wangfujing Street in the wake of the demolition of the academy’s old buildings. Sui Jianguo used decrepit classroom desks and chairs and discarded student sculptural exercises to create his work Ruins, Zhan Wang made large concrete bricks and used old slogans from the classrooms to make his Classroom Work, while Yu Fan’s Beautiful Vistas turned the spacious classrooms into a scenic resort with a swimming pool, umbrellas and the like. Like works by Huang Yan and Zhang Dali, these installations also created formal and conceptual links with the transformation in urban topography which was taking place. As teachers at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Sui Jianguo and Zhan Wang incorporated modes which transcended traditional concepts of ‘sculpture’ in their experimental art works. In their early works, they had tackled the obvious vestiges of the political and ideological contexts. Sui Jianguo’s Zhongshan Jackets and his Gestures familiar to anyone with an understanding of history very succinctly expressed historical concepts, and the artist objectified the grand narrative through his symbolic linguistic tactics. Perhaps because of his temperament, Zhan Wang focused his attention on his man-made rocks of the type used in rockeries and called Artificial Mountain Rocks in the mid-1990s. These were the product of memory (his experience in working jade), directions indicated by Western artists (his close attention to Henry Moore’s sculptures with cavities), and the influence of ‘ready-made objects’ and of the traditional culture in which he was steeped. When the artist began to produce his installations in stainless steel which could be accommodated in any space, he attained his conceptual freedom.
Yin Xiuzhen (b.1963) was not the type of artist who simply confined herself to feminist theory. As an artist, she paid close attention to real life topics of common concern to ordinary people. In a work related to the topic of visas, she covered the desks and chairs of the old visa office in the former embassy of the GDR with bags of Chinese cement. The process of producing this work and the visual impact of the final installation expressed the artist’s ‘questioning of the cultural power of the visa’. Later, the artist used plastic bags, disposable chopsticks and Lhasa river water to produce her installation Living Water in Lhasa, and she also used butter and local shoes to produce Butter Shoes. These two works assiduously avoided the sensitive subject of feminism and paid close attention to the wider natural ecology and cultural subjects.
Dai Guangyu’s installation work titled Water Gauges Laid Aside for a Long Time also expressed an artist’s concern for the natural ecology. The work entailed placing a wooden propaganda billboard measuring 250cm x 200cm on the pavement of a street in the south-western metropolis of Chengdu, attaching a 30 sq m piece of rice paper on the ground before the billboard, and soaking twelve black and white photos of human heads in square medical trays filled with dirty water and placed on a desk to one side. To the left of the trays he arranged samples of water (polluted river water), tea and cups of tea brewed up using the polluted water. With the passage of time, people could see how the originally clear photographs were eaten away until they finally disappeared. The artist expressed natural and human relationships in the simplest way, and because understanding the work required only general knowledge, it was easily understood by audiences. Later, the artist took part in another art activity called The Guardians of the Water with several Chinese and foreign artists in Lhasa.
In 1995, the artists Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, Ma Zhongren, Wang Shihua, Zhu Ming, Cang Xin, Zhang Binbin, Duan Yingmei, Gao Yang, Zu Zhou and other artists of Beijing’s East Village performed a collective work called Increasing the Height of an Unnamed Mountain by One Meter on a mountain in the vicinity of Beijing. The work was very simple, the naked artists forming a human stack or what can be described as a shapeless hill. This symbolic increase in height was interesting because the feelings aroused by a stack of male and female bodies were comprehensive, at the same time as they were also simple.
Typical examples of the pure utilization of the body in performance art could be found in the work of Zhu Fadong, Cang Xin, Ma Liuming, and Zhang Huan.
Works by Zhu Fadong (b.1960) titled Missing Person Notice, Person For Sale/Price Negotiable, and ID Card were symbolic records of how an individual’s existence can become ‘lost’ in society. In January 1993, Zhu Fadong printed large quantities of his Missing Person Notice and pasted them up in the streets and lanes of Kunming, the ‘missing person’ in question being the artist himself. The disappearance of the individual artist was the symbolic metaphor for this work. By May 1994, the desire to get on in society eventually drove Zhu Fadong to settle in Beijing. He embarked on the year-long performance art work titled Person For Sale/Price Negotiable in which he wore a sign with these words on the back of his Zhongshan jacket and walked the streets and alleys of Beijing, sometimes engaging people in conversation. Given the fact that he was living in circumstances where he could not be traced, he was essentially also offering himself up to society, in order to transact a symbolic value exchange - between the artist and society. In March 1997, Zhu Fadong began to work on the performance art work called Life Styles which continued over a period of one hundred days during which Zhu Fadong worked for a large number of organizations, families and individuals, and became embroiled in constant discussion about hours and wages. The theme that the artist wanted to display still related to exchange: despite the discovery of the existence of the artist’s individuality, his social being cannot be brought to completion without the relationships established through monetary exchange. Zhu Fadong’s works involved the social attributes of the entity of the artist, yet the works of other conceptual artists, though directed against the individual, paid close attention to physicality or the attributes of the human body.
Cang Xin (b.1967), with Licking, went one step further in expressing the meaninglessness of an artist’s concern with the human body. In his constantly evolving body of work, Cang Xin successively licked thirty different types of object, ranging from books to living things. Cang Xin recognized that in that era overflowing with material desires, everybody had developed pathological characteristics, and the ‘licking’ designed to stimulate the senses of his audiences was a unique experiential mode; the tongue and the particular object with which it was in contact created a special sensory feeling, through which a consciousness of this question was induced in audiences. Cang Xin certainly did not believe that he could sit on the sidelines because the artist was himself the ‘sufferer’. In such works, the physical existence of the artist and his implementation of the specific masochistic behavior confronted this other physical existence, providing the principal ingredients of the work’s meaning.
Such performance art, by dispelling the customary logic through the body, was further expressed and amplified through the work of Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan. At the beginning of the 1990s, Ma Liuming (b.1969) was first noted by critical circles as a performance artist when he began removing all his clothing, and embarked on a series of fictive gender change performance works. In 1993, the Gilbert and George Visiting China Exhibition staged at the National Art Museum of China facilitated Gilbert and George being invited by Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan to the East Village where they lived to watch his extempore performance, and this marked the beginning of Ma Liuming’s career as a performance artist. At the end of that year, the artist had photographs taken of him wearing women’s clothing, and he shortly afterwards adopted the name ‘Fen-Ma Liuming’, ‘Fen’ being a woman’s name meaning ‘Fragrance’. Fen-Ma Liuming soon directed his sights at both the natural environment and society. During the process of his performances, the artist appeared with a woman’s face and a naked male body. In the context of China, ‘Fragrance’ is not a name approved of for males, and in the countryside the name is a pejorative related to weakness or femininity. Later, people followed the direction of the artist’s suggestions about the meaning of the name ‘Fen’, pointing out that it was a homophone of the word meaning to ‘separate’ or ‘divide’. The artist was obviously alerting people to the fact that between the subjective state of the artist and the characters he created between the female face and the male body, between the superficial makings and the inherent desire, and between experiential intuition and rational judgments, there was always a distance, yet this separation was uncanny because if others were lax in their rationality it would be difficult for them to distinguish the separation and the distance. In this, it is of utmost importance that audiences are led towards interpretation in the direction of ‘the third sex’. On 19 April 1994, Ma Liuming performed Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch No.2. The work entailed Ma Liuming removing his clothes, walking towards a fish bowl from which he selected a living fish which he immersed in a pot of boiling water, to which he then added the soya sauce and other ingredients. On the 12th of June, when a performance of Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch No. 2 was drawing to a close, police visited and, failing to get anyone to produce a valid temporary residence permit, took Ma Liuming, Zhu Ming and several others to the local police station. After his release from prison, Ma Liuming did not stop art performances. He wrote in his notes: ‘Many years of experience made me realize that art falls far short of being regarded as being something with intrinsic value as an image of people. The meaning of life itself goes far beyond. So I decided to use this living art to express my views on art’.[2]
Masochistic performance was taken to its extreme through the experimental work of the artist Zhang Huan (b.1965). His works titled 12 Square Meters and 65 Kilos performed in Beijing’s East Village could be regarded as tests of the psychological endurance of his audiences. In 12 Square Meters, performed by Zhang in May 1994 in Beijing’s East Village, the artist covered his body with honey and sat quietly in a rural public latrine for two hours, allowing flies to stick to his body. Zhang Huan, in ‘Author’s Description of 12 Square Meters’ described his motivation for the performance work: ‘In May this year, on a blisteringly hot day, I went to the usual public lavatory I go to in Beijing’s East Village and I found I couldn’t even put my feet down. So I headed off to another lavatory but found it the same. I then cycled to the East Village work team’s toilet, but I could not endure that for very long, and suddenly I had my inspiration for 12 Square Meters’. There was basically little difference in the background of this work by Zhang Huan and those of Zhu Fadong and Ma Liuming; all were descriptive of the psychological state that comes from having a lowly social position, living a harsh life and having to ‘endure’ it. The honey on his body, the stench of fish guts, the unbearable summer heat, filthy public latrines, countless flies, the stink and the itch – all those things which produce unbearable sensations were graphically and shockingly depicted by these artists ‘through experiments in dissecting a reality of personal value and existential experience’. In June of that year, Zhang Huan performed his work 65 Kilos, which was the body weight of the artist without clothing, in his workshop in Beijing’s East Village. In this performance the naked artist suspended himself horizontally with a steel cable from the ceiling, and managed to drip 250 ml of his blood into a tray on the ground via a blood transfusion tube over a 60 minute period. Under the tray was an electric stove, which continuously fried the blood as it dripped into the pan. Zhang Huan said of the performance that he ‘experienced the power to carry on and endure the reality of this existence’.[3] In April 1995, Zhang Huan again tested himself in a dangerous situation, this time at a construction site. A steel tube measuring 25mm in diameter was inserted into the body of the artist while it was still emitting sparks as it was being cut. The artist had once said that his ‘works were designed to endure oppression on behalf of everyone’. The intensity of the artist’s endurance of physical torment became coordinates for testing, or creating, such oppression.
Zhao Bandi (b.1966) held an exhibition in Beijing with the painter Li Tianyuan as early as 1991, and on the invitation card which was the size of a large newspaper the two painters expressed their concern regarding the future of painting, even posing the question: ‘Is painting dead?’ The large work of 1991 called Butterfly contained figures who looked alarmed, but obviously from their expressions the girl and young man had no basis in narrative, nor did they have any relationship. Zhao Bandi soon left the world of painting behind him. In Chinese Story of the Year 2000, Zhao Bandi made his own image the central subject in this essentially vulgar work. In the image Zhao Bandi was breast-feeding the panda, like a young woman, as he sat in a boat surrounded by lotus blossoms, while the woman played the role of the boatman. This reversal of roles was in keeping with the artist’s social satire. Zhao Bandi’s use of the panda image significantly strengthened the popular appeal of his work. He later wrote and performed in a series of public service advertisements, in which he acted the role of interlocutor with a panda. The artist, through the panda, addressed social issues to rouse his audiences and, like so many performance artists, Zhao Bandi continued his performances which required no explanation and were permeated with commercial significance.
On 21 April 1995, Gao Ling, Dao Zi, Leng Lin, Wang Mingxian, Zhang Xiaojun, Qian Zhijian and Zhang Xu met in the offices of the old Fine Arts editorial offices in Beijing at 52 Dongsi Batiao Street to discuss the question of performance art. This discussion is regarded as the first academic research by critical circles in China about the performance art of the 1990s. For reasons already discussed above, the social impact in China of performance art was invariably restricted. Leng Lin complained that ‘in a situation where there is no effective media to disseminate performance art, performance art assumes the forms of photography and video, and people can only understand performance art activities through visual materials, which precludes people from sensing the performance in situ and results in the production of visual materials with often suspect authenticity’.[4] Dao Zi commented: ‘Since the idea of performance art is a revolution against easel painting and expands the media and language for visual perception, the act of scrupulously producing visual materials for publicity has itself become problematic…’.[5] The opposing viewpoint was expressed by Zhang Xu who stated that ‘image and text materials and performance itself are two aspects of a single entity’.[6] Regardless of whether these critics stressed the directness of performance art or the importance of the venue of the event, they nearly all noted one important characteristic of Chinese performance art: the existence of both performance art and conceptual art on Chinese soil seemed to not permit the artist to be directly involved at the scene. Spontaneous rebelliousness and provocation on the part of art, as well as its sociality and public nature, in other words its direct impact in its setting, were completely problematic. It was the view of some artists that the important thing was not the effect in the location where the art event took place, but what means were adopted to later relay the record of that art work and thereby win social approval. If an artist failed to win the approval of Chinese society, he felt he should at least win the approval of Western society, as Leng Lin observed: ‘Some performance artists now engage in art (and here we are mostly discussing individual performance art), which is private and concealed, lending it possible post-colonial color, and this will generally make absolutely no impact on Chinese reality. So, I doubt that art which expresses individuality can have any real significance, and what these artists create is for Western eyes and provides no revelation about the real environment’.[7]
Lu Hao’s series of Bird, Flower, Fish and Insect paintings completed in 1999 possibly had symbolic meaning. The artist recreated a number of familiar historical buildings in fiberglass and, most importantly, these buildings were charged with strong ideologically symbolic meaning. In The Bird, Flower, Fish and Insect Fishbowl aquatic animals ‘freely’ swam about in this confined space and the intention was that, by observing their existence, audiences would reflect on human social experience and discover the pitiable nature of their existence. Any person with knowledge of Chinese history and politics could see that these ‘neutral’ or even ‘interesting’ things all bore the heavy weight of cruel history and reality: this transparent world informed people that their freedom is limited.
Video Art
Although the concept of video art[8] is generally regarded as having made its appearance in China in 1990,[9] Zhang Peili’s work of 1988 titled 30 x 30 can be regarded as an earlier example of Chinese video art. In 1991, Zhang Peili presented his work Hygiene, No.3 at the Garage Exhibition, which depicted the artist continuously washing a rooster in a face basin with soap and water. In 1992, Zhang Peili created Water: Standard Edition of Ci Hai, the visual content of which evoked the artist’s planar work Standard Pronunciation, except that rather than depicting an announcer only reading the politicized news, the presenter is now reading out the entry for the character for ‘water’ (shui) from the authoritative Ci Hai dictionary. Through these works, the artist drew attention to the major gap that exists between the incident the lens confronts and the reality about the incident which the screen presents, revealing how technological conditions change and revise an artist’s original conceptual and visual intention through the course of artistic creation.
Performance artists in China nearly all staged their performances in isolated places and spaces, and they did not actualize the social function of performance art as in Europe in the 1960s, the majority of Chinese artists hoping simply to rely on the photographs of their performances to spread their message after the event. The situation with video art in China was similar. In the West, video art could be a form of art that constituted an anti-art market and anti-system action, and it already formed an organic link in the capitalist cultural system. Yet video art in China had not been through the politically radical, functional stage of early Western video art and, from the outset of their contact with and application of this distinctive artistic medium, Chinese artists did not direct their lenses at China’s streets and alleys. Chinese video artists usually worked in a very individualized way and often sidestepped technical questions because of limited knowledge and ability. Artists hoped to effect a new rebellion through video – one directed against the system as well as the logic of art, but the real state of the economy and the system always restricted the public risk taken by the video artist. Although video art opened up a new language system, how video art in China was to escape from the ivory tower and become a socialized form of art which could provide truly satirical comment on the mass media and especially TV remained a predicament for Chinese artists throughout the 1990s.
From the beginning of the 1990s onwards, many Chinese avant-garde artists successively adopted this new mode of expression. From 1993 to 1994, Yan Lei completed his works titled Dissolving, Clean-Up, 1500cm and Beijing Haws. Yan Lei declared that he was ‘infatuated’ with the long lens and, in his works, the objectivity or indifference of the medium was taken to extremes by Yan Lei. In 1996, Li Juchuan made a 100-minute long video of himself holding a brick with his hands titled Living with Kika, made using a long shot. The off-screen Spanish sound track was taken from Almodovar’s film Kika. In 1994, Tong Biao screened his video Sleeping while Being Watched at the Fourth Documentary Exhibition in Shanghai. The repetitive and dry subject matter was rendered even more unpalatable by the camera and technical problems that heightened the boredom, heaviness and repetition of the original material. In 1994, after working for three years on his Exercise Number One: Copying out the Preface of Orchid Pavilion One Thousand Times, Qiu Zhijie moved to Beijing, where he completed Toilet and Aisha’s Hands. At the end of 1994, Zhu Jia completed Forever, and in 1995 Li Yongbin made his first video work, Face, I which he showed in 1996 at an exhibition in Hangzhou. Among the other early wave of Chinese new media video was Chen Shaoxiong’s work of 1994 with the inscrutable title Seesaw Target, as Observed (Shot) with the Support of Pulmonary Activity.
Among these video works, Chen Shaoxiong’s Eyesight Correction Device attracted attention. In the description of this work when shown at the annual exhibition of the Big Tail Elephant Work Group, the artist explained: ‘Eyesight Correction Device is a TV video installation in which two videos, Urban Books with Additives and Private Portraits of Individuals, are shown on TVs, one at the end of each separated viewing chamber. To adjust for body height, two series of sheets of glass like spectacle glass are suspended at positions based on the distance of the viewer’s line of sight. From the viewing point the sheets of glass are graduated in increasing size until they are finally the size of the television screens at the ends of the two chambers, and on the glass are written sentences with words and images that circle and intersect each other. Watching the two televisions, the line of sight is split, placing the viewer in a physiological predicament created by the dilemma in the line of sight. Yet, the characters (language) become a replicated target object. In the real world, these complex relationships between the world of visual imagery and the world of language are perceptual problems acknowledged by philosophy, and my interest in them concerned the mode of observation and the position of observation’.
The video installation of Wang Gongxin (b.1960) titled Brooklyn Skies (1995) was quite interesting. In a room in his house, the artist dug a dry well measuring one meter across, at the bottom of which he placed a television with its screen facing upwards and on it he screened a video, as the title suggests, of the sky over Brooklyn in New York. The work was intended to allow audiences to look down into the well and see the sky at the other end of the earth, as though looking straight through the earth. This was a humorous speculation on the notion of digging a well in a Beijing courtyard house and popping through to see the sky in New York. Accompanying this performance which allowed audiences to glimpse the other side of the earth was an off-screen sound track, repeating ‘Don’t look, there’s nothing worth looking at’. For Wang Gongxin and Lin Tianmiao who had returned together to China in the early-1990s, the starting point of this work might have been a joke made by them by American friends when they were living in the States: ‘If you want to go to China, just dig a hole go and so straight through’.
In April 1996, Qiu Zhijie and Wu Meichun, with the financial support of friends, organized the show Image and Phenomenon: Video Images in Hangzhou. As the curator of this exhibition, Wu Meichun in an article titled ‘Video images as images of phenomena’ described her own line of thought: ‘By using Image and Phenomenon as the title of this exhibition we want to articulate a major area of attention and concern: What possibilities does video bring to the contemporary scene? Does video art exist as images of phenomena, or as a phenomenon created through images?’ Wu Meichun believed that video art was an independent mode of art and that video images were only a type of new content ushered in by technology; the mode of both their introduction to society and their outcome was not at all a common reflection of the camera. The contingency of the psychological factors of the artist operating the camera resulted in video images that in themselves were highly uncontrollable.
Artists remained anxious about technical questions of video art, and, in fact, the equipment supporting the new technology still remained a luxury item for Chinese artists. However, in Wu Meichun’s view: ‘We should adopt a more positive position in confronting reality, and so not wait for the widespread increase in the number and quality of local video works before exhibiting and presenting a new reality, but use these exhibition activities to advance and initiate new explorations in video art. Not only the art works but the exhibition activities are more than a reflection, but also a response to, reality’. In fact, in order to get support and equipment from video manufacturers, the organizers of the exhibition visited countless companies during the heat of summer until, just several days after they had delayed the opening of the exhibition for a week, they succeeded in getting an agreement from a television supplier. The video cameras were borrowed from friends of the teachers at the China Academy of Fine Arts and artists in Hangzhou and after the exhibition concluded they had several weeks to return this equipment. At the same time, they had been unable to find an exhibition space with all the circuitry suitable for showing video works. The power needed to run all the art works far exceeded the load which the exhibition room could handle, so power had to be brought in from other sources. With the help of students from the China Academy of Fine Arts, they got new lines into place connecting all the art works with only thirty hours left before the exhibition opened. At 8 AM on 14 September, as the audience and reporters poured into the exhibition room in the gallery of the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts, some individual works were still being tested and calibrated.
The exhibition presented 16 works of 15 artists, including Zhu Jia’s Forever, Li Yongbin’s Face, Tong Biao’s The Afternoon of August 30, Yan Lei’s new work Absolutely Safe, and two works by Zhang Peili - Inappropriate Sensations and Focal Length. Other video installation works included Total Life Testing by Chen Shaoping, Qian Weikang’s Breathing/Breathing, Wang Gongxin’s Milk, Chen Shaoxiong’s Eyesight Correction Device, Qiu Zhijie’s Present Continuous Tense, and Geng Jianyi’s Intact World, as well as Visible and Invisible Life by Gao Shiming, Gao Shiqiang and Lu Lei, and I Am Not a Fish by Yang Zhenzhong.
The exhibition Image and Phenomenon was a collective show which brought to an end the scattered and submerged state in which Chinese video art had existed. The exhibition, with its complete academic framework and many works, was the first major event in the history of the development of video art in China. The exhibition stimulated further interest in video art and its recognition among artists, attracting more people to enter the field. Of special importance was that the exhibition created the theoretical conditions for the further development of video art, as well as providing the modes and experience for resolving questions concerning the equipment and facilities used in new media exhibition activities.
The problems of the political system revealed in the course of the exhibition also provided artists, and especially the organizers of the exhibition, with hands-on knowledge of the workings of the system. Firstly, national TV stations which had the most advanced photographic and recording equipment were not permitted to have any contact with experimental artists. In most cases, artists with insufficient economic support all worked underground and usually had to rely on friends working at TV stations to go on working privately. It was still quite unknown how experimental art could ever be able to access mass media, or how most of the works expressing personal ideas could ever become a valuable link in contemporary culture. Overseas organizations had already collected works by Zhang Peili and Qiu Zhijie, but did this augur well for Chinese artists? Avant-garde painting had acquired an enormous market in the 1990s, but the future of video art remained unknown.
Regardless, as a measure of the scientific and technological progress of contemporary society, video art became a new choice in artistic language. But in China in the 1990s, this new visual language was doubly restricted: the technological aspects were primitive and crude, and the ideological power system was restrictive and repressive. Despite this, video art still managed to became an important component of China’s contemporary artistic development, and the problems it faced and posed would constantly find solutions and responses in the new century.
Conceptual Photography
Photography emerged as an important component in conceptual art in the second half of the 1990s. Although some early works by artists producing conceptual photography were related to the new documentary photographic style, the trend to conceptualization in video images began to be specially highlighted in the later 1990s. The conceptual liberation of photography shared a similar background in reality and culture as the video art appearing in China. Because of the introduction of new concepts, artists, not needing to rely on the ordinary function of the camera, had the possibility of controlling and altering the images taken by the camera. In this respect, the photograph in itself, like video art, was not merely a documentation of a recorded image, but could become an independent reality – a brand-new reality of seemingly familiar images.
Investigating the sources of this profound change is a detailed and major undertaking, but it reveals that the earliest records of something labeled ‘reportage’ photography was work completed in 1976 by Li Xiaobin and Wang Zhiping who later became founding members of the April Photography Society, which they set up in 1979. The stance of photography as ‘new reportage’ or ‘new documentation’ attracted academic attention in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. The executive editor of Modern Photography, Li Mei (b. 1952) and the critic Yang Xiaoyan in an article titled ‘Trends and Advances in the Development of the Art of Photography on the Chinese Mainland since 1976’ provided a comparatively detailed account of these developments. Until the 1980s, ‘reportage’ advanced together with aesthetically formalist photography, but in contrast with the latter, the photographic images in this style abandoned the presuppositions of aesthetics, directly presenting viewers with images which were technical products of the lens that seemed to lack aesthetic controls. Although they lacked ‘aesthetic’ integrity, these works presented viewers with the harshness and bitterness of life. Such photographic artists targeted daily reality and social issues, contradictions and conflicts in their work, and their cameras almost always expressed social concerns. Lü Nan (b.1962), renowned for a body of photographic work taken in psychiatric hospitals and simply titled Insane Asylums, attracted wide attention because he succeeded, through his works, in pushing a buried social topic into the media glare. Xiao Quan, Zhang Hai’er, and Han Lei were other photographers also first introduced in the pages of Modern Photography.
The images in the works of Han Lei (b.1967) created a strange feeling of distance, and real objects frequently took on the appearance of being from a remote past, prompting the critic Yang Xiaoyan to describe Han Lei as ‘doing the past’. Over a few years in the late-1980s and early-1990s Han Lei shot a number of works under the ‘urban’ rubric that maintained a narrative style that bore out Yang’s comment: ruined lanes, ordinary pedestrians, retrograde chimney stacks. In the photographer’s eye, these ‘pure images’ could serve as a metaphor for itself. In the details of the series titled The People of Muddy Street, we see mud, not yet melted snow, artificial flowers in trees, expressive close-ups of children, a man urinating against a wall in the distance, lovers embracing, industrial chimneys, hovels – structuring an unfamiliar world, which though realistic is remote and terrifying, and the feelings it arouses are hard to express in words. In his photograph of folk actors, it is difficult to say whether the expression on Sun Wukong (Monkey) that we see is that of the ‘auteur’, and given the absence of any other dramatic treatment on the part of the artist, Han Lei is in fact only giving us a glimpse of a heart-breaking moment.
The important phenomena in photography in the 1990s came from those artists working from the outset in experimental photography. When photography no longer took functionalism to be its goal, photography was presented with a more complex mission. In 1996, the experimental photographers Liu Zheng and Rongrong (Lu Zhirong) began to edit New Photography, a Beijing-based publication which had not been examined by the relevant news control office and was hence illegal. In the first issue the editors announced the birth of ‘new photography’ and, after presenting a critical analysis of earlier ‘documentary’ and ‘reportage’ photography, they stressed the characteristics and principles that differentiated their ‘new photography’ from that of the past:
The photographer’s individual social experience and values system play a direct role in the photographic creative process, so that photography becomes personalized and a form of expression of the life of the photographer.
Highly individualized photographic language expresses feelings about life. The creativity of the photographer is mainly embodied in two aspects - unique personal feelings and the unique form of expression.
We must reject all interference from non-personal and utilitarian factors.
New photography will exist as an ongoing non-mainstream art form, emphasizing the spirit of the self as it constantly advances through improvement and creation.[10]
What the editors outlined in their statement did not stray from the range of modernism, but the photographic works published in the four issues of New Photography which did appear genuinely succeeded in revealing a fundamental revolutionary change in the field of photography. Even though the meaning of the term ‘conceptual art’ remained hazy, in the later stage of the 1990s artists favored the ‘conceptual’ and in the third issue (1997) the editors emphasized the meaning of ‘conceptual’: ‘The conceptual entered Chinese photography like a window being suddenly opened in a house that had been shut up for a long time, so that people could breathe much more easily, and at that moment we also realized what was meant by new in the new photography’. Obviously, openness was the true warm clothing accommodating the ‘conceptual’.
Most works by Lu Zhirong (b.1968), as an editor of New Photography, were portraits. If we say that Xiao Quan retained a traditional restraint as an auteur, the work and lifestyle of the artist in Lu Zhirong’s work had already utterly discarded the customary ‘aesthetic’ judgments. Lu Zhirong lived for a time in Beijing’s East Village artists’ community. Lu Zhirong’s photographic works of artists Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming were not merely documentary materials, but within the opened up field of conceptual art the object, performance and documentary visual record formed an inseparable historical documentation, and the record itself also became a body of work describing an elusive reality. After 1997, Lu Zhirong began to make ‘tinted’ photographs with serial numbers. In these works, an evil romantic temperament seemed to be manifested in their aesthetic, and his combination of figures and dilapidated or ruined environments created a sense of unease. In Lu Zhirong’s works, we can see the desolation wrought by time – to people, actions, scenery and crumbling walls.
The works of Liu Zheng (b.1969) had a distinctive documentary quality from the outset, but he quickly began to discover elements of the absurd in the relics of history and gradually began to choreograph elements as he rewrote history and myths. In Three Attacks on the White Bone Demon (1997), he selected scenes from Beijing opera performances. Most of the actors were women engaged in performances on stages cluttered with props and which left audiences breathless. The dancing poses of the women acted were highly suggestive and they were scantily dressed, many with exposed breasts. In these photographs the artist had made every effort to direct the on-stage action and link the expression of the theme with traditional opera. Rigorous traditional opera modes and shameless sexuality were positioned by the artist in a single interconnected space, creating something which was both fantastic and provocative.
Although Zhuang Hui (b.1963) also manipulated the subjects he shot, his manipulative actions did not include any blatant symbolism. He made use of a 180° wide-angle panoramic lens. He travelled with his swiveling cine-camera to shoot large group photographs in factories, to prepare class photographs for schools, to capture line-ups of workers at shipyards or photograph large groups of assembled soldiers. The final effect he created through his works was that of photographic ‘scrolls’ which embodied the style of China’s tradition of group photographs. These works served as both collective and individual portraits, being at one and the same time records of individuals and of communities. The communities he shot were invariably Chinese ‘units’, to which was added an extraneous element in the artist himself. The ‘unit’ in China was a special concept within China’s special politico-social system, and over a long time the individual workers in these units formed a ‘family’, being the organization they depended upon for their existence. With the extremely rapid development of the market economy, the ‘unit’ gradually became an organization that presented countless problems. Even though ‘the unit’ continued to appear very strong, unified and united, upholding common goals and providing shared psychological enjoyment, in the real social context everything depicted in these photographs was taking on a spurious air of unreality.
The mockery expressed in the works of An Hong (b.1963) was more direct, and they can be divided into two categories, one type displaying deities, with Tibetan Buddhist sculpture juxtaposed with stuffed toy animals, and the other exhibiting an obvious sexual addiction in which the blatant sex was highlighted by pornographic moods. In these works the artist personally assumed the stage, playing a cameo role, or compellingly imitated Buddhist iconography. In the religious works, he dressed as Buddhist deities and adopted the stage name J.G., a reference to Jin-gang, the Chinese name of a martial Buddhist guardian. Certainly, An Hong did not adopt Buddhist attire in these works because he had found a spiritual home among the Buddhist gods; on the contrary, his attitude towards religion was highly skeptical, and he did not treat religious images with reverence. In his pornographic works, the artist’s face was covered with white pancake makeup suggestive of the facial make-up used in Beijing opera, while the strings of artificial pearls, silks and fluffy toys all hinted at sexual lasciviousness and the glowing red breasts like Chinese lanterns suggested some sexy variety show. The artist’s use of images of Buddhist ‘deliverance’, of photographic ‘veracity’ and of absurdist performance all structured the questioning of real issues raised by his works.
In 1995, Geng Jianyi produced Proof of Survival, a work drawing together many official documents, photographs of people and photocopies. As his raw material the artist took passport and ID photographs to verify his own existence and then rearranged them so that the final work raised doubts about many of the social rules in contemporary Chinese society. As one of the members of the New Gradation Group (Xin Kedu), an early conceptual art group that broke up at the end of 1995, Gu Dexin began in 1989 to use chemicals to make nauseating art works. Later, he combined his works with photography, using animal flesh to demonstrate various stages in the process of decay. His color photographs were completely lacking in any trace of ‘aesthetics’, and he used his bloodied hand to handle flesh – the original and ordinary method of production, to emphasize the absurdity created through the special gaze he focused on this natural material.
Hai Bo (b.1962) was especially sensitive to the way people change over time. He referenced old photographs of his family and friends, asking them to return to the poses they had originally assumed and be shot once again, an exercise which resulted in startling contrasts. Everybody has his or her own unique view of time, but by positioning his subjects in different times, Hai Bo also forced us to experience the feelings that he stipulated. The artist quite clearly had a sentimental and melancholy view of history, and although he believed that such work could create a calm mood, the time that he presented was in fact emotionally limitless. The physical world might change, but time is eternity; this is what Hai Bo had set out to tell us.
Yang Zhenzhong (b.1968) subjected his photographs to computer imaging, and used humor in his treatment of the social theme of the one-child family, a concept expressed through processed photographs of hens. In four color photographs shot in 1997, he showed different stages in the growth of a family - a pair of chicken ‘newly-weds’, the one-child family, and the extended family, with the hens in every case placed in the monochrome background.
The techniques used by the artist Jiang Zhi (b.1971) in his 1998 series of conceptual photographs titled Mumu in which props formed the subjects received complex confirmation. The artist endowed an image of an ordinary toy with a ghost-like life, so that Mumu could act as an externalized substitute for man’s inner life at the same time as serving as a predetermined symbolic object. This subject invested with life by the artist was even shown to enjoy its own environment. However, at the same time as the ‘authenticity’ of photography relayed the miraculous life of Mumu to viewers, it also exposed the fabrication of the work itself, serving as further confirmation of the paradox set up between the authentic and the fictive.
In the world of conceptual photographic art, Hong Lei (b.1960) was an artist who utilized traditional visual resources. He graduated in arts and crafts painting in the Faculty of Technical Fine Arts at the Nanjing Academy of Arts. Even though he had a brief career as a painter, through his installations he discovered that photographic techniques were connected with his artistic interests. In 1996, Hong Lei returned from Beijing, where he had spent time drifting and cogitating, to his hometown of Changzhou, where his will to create art works remained alive. In his spare time he emulated the techniques of the American artist Joseph Cornell in making installation works. ‘Because these were temporary improvised installations, thanks to the assistant of my student Dong Wensheng, I recorded them with a camera’.[11] These photographic records of his installation art impressed his friends. In 1998, Hong Lei participated in the New Image – Concept Photographic Exhibition curated by Dao Zi. Hong Lei’s earliest conceptual photographs were the series titled Autumn in the Forbidden City he shot in 1997 in the western corridors of the Hall of Supreme Harmony in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Hong Lei placed images of dead birds bedecked with strings of pearls in his conceptual photographs of this historic site familiar to Chinese, and in post-production on the photographs he added believable blood and traces of damage to the photographs. The artist was thus fabricating historical stories, in the belief that for audiences with basic knowledge about the Forbidden City, Qing Dynasty history and even earlier Song Dynasty history, these fabricated historical stories could readily become a psychological literature of photography, expressing grandeur, dilapidation, sorrow and death. Later, Hong Lei shot a series in the traditional gardens of Suzhou. In the corners of typical gardens, there was the fresh blood of dead birds flowing from attic windows and along the runnels in artificial rockeries into the ponds of the garden and tinting the surface of water red. At the same time, the viewer could discern red clouds gathering on the horizons of these photographs. Although these works could be explained from a surrealist point of view, these unreal scenes were the artist’s personal understanding of historical reality. His concepts of inner melancholy led Hong Lei to use historical visual resources to express his unique conceptual thought.
Like video art, the conceptual photography of Chinese avant-garde art totally opened up the possibilities of contemporary art. More and more artists began to experiment with the language of photography, and exhibitions of new conceptual photography proliferated in China.
Issues of Women’s Art and Women Artists
In the 1990s, perhaps the first article discussing art from a feminist perspective was by Xu Hong, who in the 7th issue of Jiangsu Art Monthly in 1994 published ‘Emerging from the Abyss: A Letter to Women Artists and Critics’, yet the specific time when the history of women’s art began in China remains difficult to establish.
In the catalogue for the 1998 show titled Exhibition of a Century of Women’s Art (Shiji nüxing yishu zhan), the female critic Tao Yongbai presented a retrospective on the history of Chinese 20th century women artists, resuscitating for late-20th century audiences the names of female artists of different periods.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Chinese women began their struggle for independence and rights. However, it would be immature to regard women artists and their works from different periods as expressing the feminist movement or its strength. In fact, most women artists engaged in art activities were motivated by their innate love of art and natural predisposition. The position of women artists in art history inevitably mirrored the reality of their position in social life – invariably secondary or, when compared with males, usually weak and dependent. When women artists began to be engaged more directly and forcefully in art activities, they naturally questioned principles long neglected or readily presumed (simply regarded as self-evident) in the process of history: were the criteria governing the nature of art itself only capable of positioning women in a secondary, weak or dependent historical role? Did women artists’ physiological, economic or other weaknesses result in their being unable to enjoy the full social rights that all human beings should be accorded?
The artist Xu Hong wrote:
In the ebb and flow of modern art in China, no sooner had the exhibition of critic nominated works in Beijing concluded than the Guangzhou Biennale formed a second round. Although these exhibitions were different from official national art exhibitions in their organizational structure and modes of evaluating works for selection, they basically perpetuated the traditional art activities of outmoded male chauvinism, whereby a group of powerful men sat down together and discussed which works by women artists qualified for inclusion and which did not, then finally selected those women artists whose works perfectly matched their standards while making irrelevant comments about them.[12]
Here the female artist Xu Hong was not discussing issues such as birth control, abortion, the division of labor, income distribution or equal opportunity of work, but the position and rights of women artists in art activities, and their status and value in art history. After expressing doubts regarding the male domination of exhibitions and evaluation criteria, she clearly articulated the topic of ‘feminism’ and called on women artists to emerge from the ‘abyss’ of powerlessness created for them by men in the art world.
Xu Hong argued that women could not find their own position in the world of art, that ‘ridiculous’ discrimination against women continued to exist in China in full force, and that women’s art was not accorded fair and equal treatment which meant that it was often neglected, and so when women were placed in such a predicament, they lost the motivation and conditions needed for them to speak out:
Almost all existing systemic norms, including the establishment of philosophy, language and visual imagery, were set up in accordance with gender differentiation. Even women’s own habits of language and thought were not self-determined and accorded with this set of systemic criteria and, because everything had long been colored by the elements of gender differentiation and discrimination, whenever we attempt to affirm ourselves we unconsciously formulate arguments in terms of reference devised by others. Now that we are soberly attempting to use our own language to confront our habitual irrationality, we have lost ourselves and effectively become speechless.[13]
Those cultivated persons who collected women artists’ works, yet who passionately discussed the physical lives of women as prostitutes, obviously represented the violent posture of male chauvinism in the art world. Unlike most critics of male chauvinism, Xu Hong’s language was violent and uncompromising. She took the view that ‘humankind under the control of male chauvinism has done all manner of vicious and stupid things which deviated from fundamental human interests’. She even believed that ‘the trends and exhibitions of avant-garde art from its beginnings in the 1980s until the 1990s had been the preserve of males’, which she described as ‘a one gender club’. She was concerned that, ‘if this long outmoded approach continues into the next century, this outer layer of modernist and essentialist patriarchal doctrine will tear our heads from our bodies, resulting eventually in the actual extinction of art’.
As we mentioned when examining the New Generation, it was in the early 1990s that eight artists from the Central Academy of Fine Arts – the teacher Jiang Xueying, Liu Liping, Li Chen, Chen Shuxia, Yu Hong, Wei Rong, Yu Chen and Ning Fangqian - staged the show titled The Female Painters’ World (Nü Huajia de Shijie) in the exhibition hall of the academy. Long before this exhibition, women artists had in various ways been involved in activities in the art world, whether avant-garde or traditional. However, by 1995, there began to be many exhibitions, big and small, of women artists specifically exhibiting as women artists, and to tie in with this particular condition, Jiangsu Art Monthly published a special issue on women artists, highlighting the fact that this first major showing of Chinese female painters took place in 1995.
Against this background, the issue of the meaning of the concept of ‘women’s art’, the question of what constituted ‘female language’ and the position of women’s art in the history of contemporary Chinese art all began to attract wide attention.
Obviously, the proposal of questions about women’s art most directly touched on the overall appraisal of the modern art movement from the beginning of the 1980s onwards. The feminist view insisted that if women’s art was not correctly positioned and appraised then past art histories would certainly need to be revised or even rewritten. Another related question seemed even more important and more difficult to resolve: If women’s art existed then, from a broad perspective, how do we draw the distinction between ‘female art’ and ‘male art’?
Another female artist Yan Ping (b. 1956), in addressing the questions posed by Xu Hong, repeatedly pointed out that the key to determining women’s self-understanding was determining whether or not women were placed in a passive position in society, because there were no obvious differences in the ratio of rationality or perception allocated to either men or women.[14] Here the core of the question was whether ‘female art’ concealed real distinctions between female language and ordinary male language. Addressing this thorny problem, Xu Hong, Liao Wen and Tao Yongbai in their defense of women’s art took a retrospective look at the early history of women’s art. They were unanimously repelled by women’s art of the 1950s and disappointed by the uniform images of ‘workers, peasants and soldiers’ who were all stalwart, simple and optimistic, not only because art at that time was oppressed by general political principles, but because these images implied ‘conformity to the male dominated system’ subject to the inertia of patriarchal ideology.
Jia Fangzhou (b.1940), in ‘Scanning Chinese Women’s Art in the 1990s’, adopted a similar historical retrospective when he wrote: ‘Until the 1980s, women artists never collectively formed their own context and they continued to look for opportunities to succeed using the yardstick of the male in a male world’.[15]
In fact, until the mid-1990s, the number of women’s artists constantly increased and exhibition activities grew increasingly frequent, but these could still not demonstrate that women’s art had ‘moved from the periphery to the center’, to quote Jia Fangzhou’s phrase. Historically, one of the reasons women suffered oppression in society was the dominance of the system of power underwritten by male hegemony. This male hegemony structured the education, transformation, control and regulation of women, compulsorily alienated women as the other in the world of male power, and saw that women’s rights in society were strangled or were banished to ‘the cold palace’. After China entered the 1990s, male hegemony seemed to have been abandoned in tandem with the opening up of society and women’s rights also seemed to be beginning to become prominent both consciously and unconsciously. However, in an age in which a woman could choose to reject males or choose to make love with any man at will, pursue power or express sexuality, in an era in which a woman could choose to describe her spiritual world and not be belittled by males for it, in an age when a woman could choose and direct a man for a particular task just like men who had once chosen and directed women, and in an age in which a woman could boldly declare ‘I am a loose woman’, as in the title of the photograph of 1994 by Lu Qing, the discussion about feminine ‘authenticity’, among female artists and critics (as well as some male artists and critics) expressed to some degree the characteristics of metaphysics or essentialism.
The prominent characteristic of women’s art in the 1990s was, according to Jia Fangzhou, its ‘split from male discourses and its pursuit of personal values’. Speaking in a general sense, the attention of critical circles to women artists stemmed from the increase in the number of exhibitions and activities of women artists and also from the fact that women artists not only adopted the usual modes and techniques in painting. The use of installation art, performance art and mixed media and the emergence of female art in different styles forced the art world to look at the possibilities of women’s art in a new light. Indeed, it was no easy matter to analyze the distinctive gender differentiation of women artists from the aspects of either the form or spirit of the works. When critics used phrases like ‘the unique feminine perspective’, ‘lofty personal experience’, ‘multi-emotional experience’ and ‘unique intuition and the instinct for life’, their affirmation of the female qualities of the work was not necessarily successful.
In fact, the phenomenon of simply jumping to conclusions about the gender characteristics of a work often bogged much of the feminist art criticism of the 1990s down in immature description. We could ask whether the Boxes series of Chen Yanyin in which the smooth surfaces of everyday items such as tables, electric irons and the like are contrasted with sharp objects, or the Porcupine series of Zhang Wenzhi in which we see serrated shapes that evoke feelings of ‘alienation, anxiety, fear, insecurity and incongruity’ are genuinely feminine? Do the males in paintings by Wang Yanping all exhibit the ‘lascivious gaze and evil intent’ of the ‘peeping tom’, as described by the critic, when they gaze at women? Did all these women artists, as critics described them, maintain a distrust of men, a fear that made them want to run away from men or harbor a constant loathing of men? Feminist critics of the mid-1990s were unable to answer these questions satisfactorily.
Even if they maintained an attitude of distrust regarding the historical role dominated by male artists and critics, female artists had to acknowledge that the modernist movement of the 1980s was a subversion of old propositions and a striving for freedom, and that it provided the basic prerequisites for the development of women’s art in the 1990s. Once the possibility of fullness and freedom in art (regardless of whether it was male or female) was permissible, it also became possible for women artists to embark on self-discovery independently. Once the basic stumbling blocks of monopolistic ideology and cultural tyranny were removed, and once it was possible for artists to embark on the path of artistic self-discovery, women’s art, as one component of the art of humankind, also acquired the right to self-expression, and this was a fundamental fact. It was because of this historical underlay that no one dared or was willing to disparage exhibitions and works of women artists in the 90s, nobody denied the significance of the inner realms of truth investigated by female artists and nobody could prevent people from being interested in the artistic work of women.
Just when critics were engaged in a long running dispute about the essential nature of women’s art, female artists sent out a strong voice through their works. For example, in the language of feminist critics words and phrases, ‘dazzling self-proclamation’, being more revolutionary, was preferred to ‘self-explanation’ or ‘self-assessment’, because ‘for a long time women had consciously resisted the position in which the male visual culture was praised’. Guided by a stance of resistance and given the fact that flowers symbolized feminine qualities in the general culture, flowers became visual weapons in women artist’s works, and through the ‘dazzling self-proclamation’ of flowers, female artists expressed the anger they had long felt towards the culture that conferred rights on males only. Wang Jihua, Li Chen and Zhu Bing painted very large and ‘sexy’ paintings of flowers, abandoning the softness of flowers, while Liao Haiying and Sun Guojuan transformed flowers into strange organs, thereby more thoroughly deconstructing the overall meaning of the cultural attributes of flowers and creating a strong visual impact.
From the 1980s onwards, one female artist whose works were appreciated and understood was the Sichuanese artist Liu Hong (b.1966). Almost all her oil paintings depict naked women and, significantly, for a long time this painter’s works were all titled Personal Soliloquy. The loneliness, silence and melancholy in these works possibly related to the artist’s own experience or situation in life, or possibly also related to the artist’s understanding of the situation in which women found themselves. In 1995 Liu Hong participated in the Exhibition of Modes of the Feminine in Chinese Contemporary Art in Beijing, and from her works in that show we see that this painter did not present a strong challenge like the usual feminist. The female painter Sun Guojuan (b.1959), born in the 1950s, graduated in 1985 as a librarian from Yunnan University. Sun’s outlook on art was one of honesty and sincerity, and she was fond of using things of nature, such as flowers, to conceal her emotions: love, melancholy and loneliness. Sun Guojuan was not particularly attracted by the inducements of the material world nor had she been particularly encouraged by feminism; the modeling and composition of her Red Body was simple, with strong contrasting colors. The startling scarlet torso against the painting’s dark green background expressed an emotional state filled with passionate desires, like fierce flames, but the glistening yellow grass in the distant dark blue background hints at a heart-felt tenderness, like a plaintive song. The sculptures of Li Xiuqin (b.1953) were the result of a different way of thinking. In her works known as the Wood, Iron, Braille series, she strove to maintain a state of ‘nature’ in the cultural context, but this state of ‘nature’ had none of the warmth or tenderness we would expect, and the juxtaposition of the rough wood and the hard, smooth and ice-cold iron bars arouses feelings of anxiety or even pain. The artist’s individualized language demonstrated another side of the feminine - roughness and strength, which formed such a distinct contrast to the quiet tastefulness and gentleness which people usually associated with femininity.
Artists born in the 1960s were possibly different in some respects. Shen Ling, Yu Hong, Chen Xi, Xu Xiaoyan, Cai Jin, and Yuan Yaomin all differed in their visual expression. The earliest images painted by Feng Jiali (b.1963) related to dramatic performances, and allthough the subject matter of her works completed after 1997 was more lifelike, the characteristics of the ‘vamp’ still appeared on the faces of her more demure ‘boudoir’ females. Strongly influenced by the vibrant color effects created for the Chinese drama stage, Feng Jiali presented overstated images of women in daily life that effectively set them at a distant remove from the quotidian. In her dramatic paintings, her women stared out with enormous eyes, as though they were burning up with the desire inside them:
In my painting technique I have drawn on Chinese opera traditions, subjectively rendering an expressionistic alteration of the characteristics of the modeling and color of the typical make-up (lianpu) of the huadan (young female) role and combining it with formal elements of the pin-up calendar posters of the past, to form an image that synthesizes showy beauty, as well as the vernacular and modernity, and which approximates the aesthetic psychology of mass, concealing a spirit of critique transplanted to the connection and location between reality and history. My intention in doing this has been to point out that a woman at the close of this century must be in touch with her ‘personal needs’.[16]
In mentioning a woman’s ‘personal needs’, she was calling for women to honestly acknowledge their sexual needs, and in affirming personal desires, there was also a symbolic emergence of same-sex sexual desires. Feng Jiali’s frank and healthy style excavated areas which had once been socially taboo and embodied a strong rebellious consciousness. Later, when she completed Pregnancy Is Art (1999), she wrote on her swelling abdomen, ‘supplementary vitamins, calcium, iron, folic acid, zinc and vitamins prevent miscarriage’. She was attempting to express a woman’s complex mental state during this special time.
Li Hong (b.1965) seemed to be simulating the ancient Greek myth of the sirens, finding in the tale of terrifying image of sea nymphs evidence of how patriarchal society insulted women: ‘In the process of human development, men seized power from women, by malevolently belittling them and subjecting them to normative taboos’.[17] However, in this painter’s works, men were replaced by industrial products such as machines and cars, suggesting the hardness, crudity, rationality and mercilessness of male existence. Her women were shrouded or surrounded by industrial products, in environments which they seemed to be trapped. The painter was attempting to inform her audience that the important thing was not to look at the male appearance to discern the face of ‘patriarchy’, but to look at all possible signifiers that expressed the calamity that patriarchal society created for women.
Among the artists of the Siren Studio, the works in an expressionist style by Cui Xiuwen (b.1970) most directly treated the theme of sex, and in many of these, the artist subjected the phallus to an indifferent female visual perspective. Cui Xiuwen emphasized that the true embodiment of feminism was abandoning the position of feminism which was proposed by male society. In her view, the statements of feminism, like so many discourses about women, were also social symbols which patriarchal society attempted to impose on women. She tried to turn this logic back on itself through the depiction of the male sex organ in her works; if women could be gazed upon by men or be positioned by demands for sex then women could also gaze at men and make sexual demands of men. Such a power was absolutely appropriate and essential. There was no particular emphasis on women’s characteristics to be seen in Cui Xiuwen’s works, but through her ‘contemplation’ of the male she gained a particular feminine self-affirmation, identical to that males gain from ‘viewing’ the female nude.
The sculptures of babies titled Fragile Products by Jiang Jie (b.1965) readily perplexed and alarmed people and, exhibited as installation artworks, they were filled with mystery. Shaping dozens of babies in dozens of different postures from wax and then suspending or piling them up under transparent molded plastic was intended to symbolize ‘babies who have just entered the world from the warmth of their mother’s bodies, as though they have been flung into an ice-cold world, in which their fragile lives have little capacity for protecting themselves and so they must trust in fate’. The characteristics of the materials she used and the repeated use of the same image created a sense of uneasiness. The fragile wax suggested that it would break if it was touched and these symbols of life which she created seemed to hint that their destinies would face constant breakage. When the artist participated in the Second Configuration Exhibition in Erfurt in Germany, her ‘babies’ were changed beyond recognition during an accident when they were being shipped. She nevertheless exhibited them in the condition in which they were delivered and they made an even more dramatic impact, demonstrating the work’s theme of life.
Women’s ‘naturalness’ possibly also influenced the ‘sociality’ of female artists. Their reliance on perception, intuition and even sensitivity, their interest in physical objects that are a precipitate of history, such as the use by Shi Hui (b.1955), Lin Tianmiao, Yin Xiuzhen, and other artists of needle, thread, cotton, silk, velvet and various threads and soft furnishing materials, and their fascination with fundamental issues to do with the origins of life, in fact, all structured the rich scene of contemporary art. In making installations and mixed media works, most women artists did not shirk a work’s aesthetic possibilities, and installations that involved repetitive weaving and knotting were often so ‘aesthetically beautiful’ in their detail that the totality of the installation could be overlooked. In some works of this type, people seemed to find it difficult to experience the aggressive nature of ‘feminism’ and, on the contrary, the work became an expression of the artist’s personal character.
Obviously, like plants that constantly grow in nature or other more unusual phenomena that are difficult to summarize, time induced sensitive and bold women artists into more private and mysterious worlds, and Cui Xiuwen turned from her counter-attack on male nature to an exploration of the secrets of female sociality, as in her video work of 1999 titled The Lady’s Room, in which she used candid snapshots of ‘girls’ at ‘work’, enabling men to see an aspect of prostitution they were ordinarily unable to see. Later, people would be able to see images of female reproductive organs during menstruation with blood in the works titled Twelve Months of Flowers (2001) by Chen Lingyang (b.1975). Chen used a Chinese traditional mirror to frame scenes that could never have been previously presented in the frame of history and tradition. However, there was no question of sympathy or consolation for the social encounters of the female herself and by showing the world of the female body and a type of ‘aesthetic decoration’, people naturally opened up to possibilities for feeling and understanding. Such works transcended earlier symbolic female expression.
The pursuit and operation of feminist art in the 1990s culminated in the 1998 exhibition A Century of Women’s Art. In this exhibition, the organizers and curators attempted, from a feminist perspective, to provide a sweeping review of Chinese women’s art during the previous century, and to provide a definitive conclusion for this fashionable topic, but of course a single exhibition was obviously not sufficient to make any definitive conclusions about such a vast historical proposition. Although the visual perspective of feminism offered new opportunities for the investigation of the development of China’s modern art, for critical circles at that time feminist art could be a new basis of support for academic games. In other words, ‘feminism’ was a highly elastic vocabulary waiting for a theoretical vacancy to fill. Ultimately there was no final conclusion acceptable to everyone in the controversy about feminism and feminist art, simply because the critics (mostly male) had not been convinced by and had approved feminism and feminist art within the recesses of their hearts, and their attention to feminist art foundered all the more because of their embarrassment about finding nothing to say in the antiquated language system of the critical world. When dramatic social change results in the emergence of new issues and when social life presents art with new challenges, the critics quite naturally avert their gaze. The topic of ‘feminism’ thus became dispensable.
NOTES:
[1] Huang Zhuan, ‘Meiyou zuobiao de yundong’, Zhongguo dangdai Meishu tujian (Guannian yishu fence), Hubei Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 2001.
[2] Quoted from the artist’s unpublished ‘Notes’ (Suibi), 25 December 1994) .
[3] Quoted from Zhang Huan’s unpublished ‘Personal account of 65 kilos’ (Guanyu 65 gongjin de zishu).
[4] Hualang (Gallery), 1995:3, p.24.
[5] Idem.
[6] Ibid., p.25.
[7] Idem.
[8] The term ‘video art’ appears in English in the original because of the failure of Chinese artists to agree initially upon a consistent translation of the term into Chinese, as at the 1996 show Image and Phenomenon: Video Images (Xianxiang Yingxiang). The definition of video art was first presented in Chinese in a footnote in an article by Lin Zhonglu titled ‘The rise of video art: 90-96’ (Luxiang yishu de xingqi: 90-96): ‘At the study conference held in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Image and Phenomenon, the Chinese translation for the word ‘video art’ was widely debated. Qian Zhijian argued that the word used for ‘video art’ should be different from the word used for commercial video (yingshi-luxiang), and so we translated it ‘shixiang yishu’, while Zhou Chuange suggested that on the basis of the video camcorder which distinguishes between segments of video it should be directly translated ‘shipin yishu’ (literally, ‘the art of visual pieces’)’. This writer is of the opinion that for the layman the usual term for video, ‘luxiang’, should be included in whatever term is used for ‘video art’, simply for proximity to the vernacular and clarity. However because the Chinese term for ‘video art’ was not then standardized, in the Chinese text of this book the original English term ‘video art’ was used.
[9] Lin Zhonglu in his article ‘The rise of video art: 90-96’ (Luxiang yishu de xingqi: 90-96) states: In order to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the city of Cologne in 1990, a German television station organized a large-scale video art exhibition which broadcast video art from all over the world for one hour daily (12 PM – 1 AM) for one week, reaching a viewing audience of nearly two million people, an impressive figure in West Germany at that time. In the same year, as part of an exchange between the Hamburg Institute of Fine Arts and the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Professor Mijka from the former institute brought these eight hours of broadcast video to China, where they were shown to all teachers and students at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts over two sessions and the video remained in the academy’s archive as teaching material for the school’s audio-visual education program. Professor Mijka’s lectures were translated by Professor Shu Chuanxi, who had been in Germany from the 1950s and 1980s, and by the artist Xu Jiang, and this was the first tangible experience of ‘video art’ in China.
[10] ‘On new photography’ (Xin sheying), New Photography (Xin sheying, the English title appearing on the cover as ‘New Photo’), no.1.
[11] Hong Lei’s Personal Chronicle (Hong Lei zibian nianpu).
[12] Jiangsu Art Monthly, 1994:7, p.17.
[13] Idem.
[14] Xu Hong defined the focus of this problem by proposing the following emotionally challenging and leading question for those assessing an artist’s works: ‘Women are only concerned with personal emotions and care about trifling matters surrounding them, and are not at all concerned about the big picture of culture and the society. Such a statement reflects the social assumption of the majority of people, including women. Throughout their lives women are groomed to serve as loving companions and mothers, and they can devote everything to these goals, compared to which other matters seem trivial. Women thus appear more emotionally perceptive, as we see in the ‘mother and son’ theme treated by Mary Cassatt and other female artists, but also to be largely lacking in rationality as artists, so that they can never rival Raphael. Males focus on society and public concerns, exploring a wider range of questions related to mankind, and so males are relatively rational. Perception forms the foundation for the rational and so it is a higher level of cognition. Reason is thus superior to perception and so men are superior to women. However one regards this kind of understanding, we hope that this is something which is discussed in detail’.
The female artist Yan Ping replied: ‘Among men and women there are many individuals who care about trifling emotional matters, and this concern is not limited to women. Historically, there have been female artists such as Kollwitz and Muzhina who have been devoted to social issues, and there are male artists such as Modigliani, Edouard Vuillard and Renoir who have been concerned with small subjects and trifling matters. To say that women throughout their lives are groomed to serve as loving companions and mothers is a hollow claim because men similarly spend most of their energy and devote most of their lives to creating this atmosphere. In this I think men and women are pretty similar. As for the rationality of the sexes, I believe that rationality is not something innate arising from gender differences, but something that comes later with education and training’. Ref: Fine Arts Documentation (Meishu wenxian), Hubei Fine Arts Publishing House, 1995:2, p.18.
[15] Fine Arts Research (Meishu yanjiu), February 1996, p.46.
[16] Century: Exhibition of Women’s Art (Shiji: Nüxing yishu zhan), Shijie Huaren Yishu Chubanshe, 1998, p.111.
[17] Yishu Jie (Art circles), 1998, combined May-June issue, p.94.