The Move to the Contemporary:
New Art and Artists
Neo-Academic Art and the “New Generation” – The “New Generation” and “New Generation” Artists – Liu Xiaodong – “Cynical Realism” and Its Artists- Fang Lijun – Political Pop and Its Artists – Wang Guangyi – Gaudy Art – Zhang Xiaogang – Ideology and the Market – “Guangzhou Bienniale” – “Post-89 Chinese New Art”
Neo-Academic Art and the “New Generation”
The slogans of neo-academism were proposed before the China Modern Art Exhibition of February 1989. In 1990, when artists at the Central Academy of Fine Arts again unfurled the banner of ‘academism’, the ‘academists’ faced a very different political, social and cultural reality to that of the ‘new academism’ of 1988. The critic Yi Ying (b. 1953) touched on this historical truth in his article in the 1990:4 issue of Fine Arts Research titled ‘The New Academism: The Point of Intersection between Tradition and the New Wave’:
If we look back and conscientiously summarize this exhibition, we can clearly see that it marks a watershed in new wave art, and as some critics have pointed out, it brought Chinese avant-garde art to a halt. This does not mean that China’s new wave art ended in confusion and chaos, but its blind, imitative and shallow activities came to an end and new wave art needed to head in a new direction. However, one criticism of new wave art is at least correct, namely that the term ‘new wave art’ could no longer logically be applied to an artistic phenomenon, and the new stage of modern art was indicated by reflection on the continuation and simultaneity of traditional and contemporary culture, by the substitution of emotional impact with rational judgment and analysis, and by the beginnings of a new permeation of art works with technical training and cultural education. This is what I call the renaissance of academism or the emergence of the cultural phenomenon of neo-academism. In fact this trend was already apparent in the works of Xu Bing and Lü Shengzhong shown in the China Modern Art Exhibition, but it was in the first half of 1990 that a theoretical experimental basis was provided for the formation of neo-academism in the new art creations offered by the group of young teachers from the Central Academy of Fine Arts.[1]
The ‘new works’ Yi Ying mentioned in this article included those shown in the Exhibition of Teachers’ Works Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Establishment of the Central Academy of Fine Arts held at the beginning of 1990, Liu Xiaodong’s Exhibition of Paintings held at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Gallery in May, and the World of Female Painters, also held in May in the exhibition hall of the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
Several hundred works were exhibited at the beginning of the year in the Exhibition of Teachers’ Works Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Establishment of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, but the works which really attracted attention were those by members of the generation who had attended the middle school attached to the academy, including Yu Hong and Wang Hao. Wang Hao had adopted photographic language to record Beijing street scenes with no clear objective, while there was no particular direction in the behavior of the young women in Yu Hong’s paintings they had some of the qualities of ‘indistinctness, concealment and remoteness’ seen in the works shown in the Seventh National Fine Arts Exhibition. In the works of these young painters, there was a lack of purpose that revealed a failure to pursue poetry, symbol, or implication, and there was nothing mysterious, terrifying, sanguinary, transcendental, or clear-cut in the works; moreover, the technique of expression seemed light and random.
Eight artists took part in the World of Female Painters, sponsored by the Young Teachers Art Research Society of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Guangxi Publishing House. They were Jiang Xueying, Liu Liping, Li Chen, Chen Shuxia, Yu Hong, Wei Rong, Yu Chen, and Ning Fangqian. Although their works showed differences in style, they all revealed a dissipation of ‘meaning’.
Among these painters, the Portrait series by Yu Hong (b. 1966), the youngest artist, depicted a world of images which was rather unique. In her works she emphasized the authenticity of the existence of her subjects, and her handling of accurate modeling and distinctive color exemplified the skill and allure of traditional realism. Interestingly, however, at the same time as the painter accurately reproduced her figures, she portrayed them without any emotional expression and so they convey a sense of emptiness even though they are shown inhabiting real environments.
In fact, even though the works in these exhibitions were termed ‘academist’, they were not the same as the predominantly realistic (xieshi) paintings once denoted by the term. The modern ideological trend in art of the 1980s had undeniably already made an impact, and the teaching system and the formularized and technical basic art training in the academies of fine arts in the 1990s had already been shaken. The influence of the traditional techniques which the artists acquired at the academy was limited to technical aspects, because the inherent basis of this traditional skill and technique had already been exhausted. The real influences on the spirit and concepts of the artists were Western artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe (for Li Chen), Francis Bacon (for Chen Shuxia) and photo-realism (for Wei Rong). In any case, young teachers at the institute had few other choices in this period.
Staged in the China History Museum in July 1991, the New Generation Art Exhibition was jointly planned by the artist Wang Youshen, and the critics Yin Jinan, Zhou Yan, Fan Di’an and Kong Chang’an. The nominal organizer and sponsor of the exhibition was Beijing Youth Daily, where Wang Youshen worked as an editor and served in fact as the head of planning. Painters participating in the exhibition were Wang Hao, Wang Huaxiang, Wang Yuping, Wang Youshen, Wang Hu, Liu Qinghe, Zhou Jirong, Wang Jinsong, Song Yonghong, Zhu Jia, Pang Lei, Yu Hong, Wei Rong, Shen Ling, Chen Shuxia, and Zhan Wang.
In the exhibition catalogue, the critic Zhou Yan noted that works with ‘a relaxed satirical humor’ and ‘original language’ were included. The painters of the New Generation initiated an expressive vocabulary of humorous satire. Even though the language was not overstated, the vocabulary provided the psychological background and material preparation for ‘Cynical Realism’.
Most critics take the view that the New Generation began with the one-man show of Liu Xiaodong and the exhibition, World of Female Painters. After those two shows, a number of atmospherically similar exhibitions were staged in Beijing, especially by teachers of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, which included solo exhibitions of paintings by Wang Huaxiang, Yu Hong, Su Xinping, and Shen Ling, as well as a joint exhibition of the paintings of Zhao Bandi and Li Tianyuan. Prior to the staging of the New Generation Art Exhibition increasingly younger artists were showing new work.
The artists of the New Generation were concentrated in Beijing. They had not issued a formal manifesto nor had they formed any art group. They had little interest in the frenzy for theory that characterized artists of the 1980s, and they did not seek any systematic theoretical foundation for their work. They did not even have any interest in writing and they only paid close attention to the detail of the moment, recording common people or ordinary incidents, paying attention to the process of creating a work of art and adhering to the stated philosophy that ‘painting is painting and it should be professional’, which represents the spiritual condition of the New Generation artists.
Compared to the modernist artists of the 1980s, the young people of the New Generation had not experienced the reality of the Cultural Revolution nor the psychological pressures caused by the various political movements of the period of extreme politics, and so their background knowledge was not burdened by history and sad memories. These painters born in the sixties had little opportunity to experience the spirit of ‘collectivism’; earlier artists were concerned about questions of ‘mankind’ and ‘ultimate goals’, and the concepts of ‘the grand soul’ and ‘salvation’ preoccupied many avant-garde artists of the 1980s. However, the painters of the New Generation did not have the slightest interest in such ideas. Concepts and mental states had changed in the face of reality, shifting from mankind to the individual, from metaphysical paradise to obvious daily life, from the abstract to the concrete, from enthusiasm to cold detachment, from concern with saving mankind to floating freely, from analytical reason to reflective perception, from indirect imagination to direct expression, from risk taking to placid quietude, from poetry to prose, from collectivism to individualism, from the centre to the periphery, from anxiety to unconcern, from serious to flip, from responsibility to rejection, from remote to ‘close-up’. It was because of such changes that the realist works of the artists of the New Generation were so distinctly different from the ‘classical wind’ paintings of the time or the realist Scar paintings of a decade earlier.
Prior to 1989, the ‘responsibility’ associated with modernism had been linked with ‘meaning’ and ‘ideals’. The goal of legitimizing the quest of avant-garde art was a collective social goal and in the process of pursuing this collective goal many artists and critics felt they experienced the meaning of life. The New Generation can be regarded as a reaction to the essentialism of the ’85 ideological trend in art, regardless of whether or not the artists themselves believed this to be the case, and should be judged in terms of the basic historical context.
The New Generation’s state of mind became a trend that rapidly spread. At the Guangzhou Biennale held in the following year, the flames of nihilism seemed to have been fanned with gathering force and velocity. Wang Jinsong, Zhang Yajie, Zeng Hao, Mao Yan, Song Yonghong, Shen Xiaotong, and Xin Haizhou all demonstrated different aspects of the style of the New Generation in their works.
Liu Xiaodong
Liu Xiaodong (b.1963) graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1988 and was assigned to teach at the middle school attached to the academy. He completed The Smoker in that year, as well as Siesta and Drunk, and these fairly expressive works revealed psychological factors latent in Liu Xiaodong’s subconscious world, and his violently strong interest in what was close to him. The Smoker and Siesta were entered in the China Modern Art Exhibition at the China Art Gallery in the following year. In 1990, Fan Di’an noted how Liu Xiaodong ‘mostly paints interiors, in which the characters and models with whom he is familiar are confined and enclosed. His indoor spaces convey a clear sense of ordinary life, expressing his desire to depict reality faithfully and not embellish it with his imagination. The objects seem congested in the paintings, pushing them even closer towards us and making us more attentive to his reality and the existence of his characters. It seems that only these cramped compositions and his pure and unadorned characters can relieve the tension he feels. I was particularly impressed by how, in several of his oil paintings, the compositions are cramped and subjects seem to be quite incompletely shaped, so that parts of their bodies are cut off by the edge of the work, and the everyday objects like cartons, extractor fans and desk lamps have been lowered within the space, yet this all serves to enhance the visual relationship with reality’.[2]
In Liu Xiaodong’s works of 1988-1989 the compositions conform to those in the random snapshots of daily life that he was taking constantly; the painter obviously understood and empathized with the psychological states of his close friends, but did not think that their treatment as subjects required anything more than the modernism with which he had long been familiar and perhaps he was also only painting just what he wanted to paint. In fact, although we find the sturdy foundation of realism in his brush work and modeling, works like Fathers and Sons or Herdsman Pastoral make it clear that the painter is unusually practiced in his consummate modeling. People were, however, willing to regard these works as far removed from the Central Academy of Fine Arts’ institutional system, the concepts behind which were mostly Soviet.
Even though Liu Xiaodong did not participate in the New Generation Exhibition of July 1991, his art was rapidly brought into the analytical fold of New Generation art. Now, all artists demonstrating similar mental states were being subsumed by critics within large general categories. Against the oppressive social backdrop of the time, Liu Xiaodong continued to complete works that adhered to his inner directive, such as Cheers!, Young Love Runs Deep, which depicted mismatched love, Afternoon with its bed scene, and Joke which portrayed a gathering of friends in a room. Even showering under the blazing sun on a hot day was the subject of one work.
In 1995, Liu Xiaodong began to teach in the Third Painting Studio of Central Academy of Fine Arts. As he later told the critic Li Xianting, at a time when conceptual art was being noisily propagated, he thought the reason for the existence of painting was that it provided ‘hints’ or ‘veiled suggestion’. He described how difficult it was to solidify visually an instant of reality observed, like an image of two people climbing power lines as glimpsed from a passing car. He was not discussing the question of whether or not he could capture an instant of time like a camera, but whether the mode of painting could ‘condense’ the veiled suggestions presented by a psychological instant. Such ‘veiled suggestion’ was of crucial importance because it drew the demarcation line between his realist paintings and the camera, on the one hand, and between the realist painting of the academy and all other personal painting styles, on the other.
The tradition of the Central Academy of Fine Arts was one of realist plotted painting, except that in different historical periods the plots of the paintings were somewhat different. Liu Xiaodong certainly did not intentionally take the question of plot in the academy’s tradition into account, but his knowledge and interest tended to make him extremely curious about ‘narrative’, and while he realized that narrative in painting when filtered through modernist concepts was quite ridiculous, he did not believe that particular plot elements garnered from reality were necessarily detrimental. For him what was important was the most difficult element to grasp successfully, namely ‘suggestion’.
His paintings with their rejection of idealistic attitudes and their rich sensitivity to reality captured the spiritual state of society at that time and provide an artistic record imbued with aesthetic value for posterity.
Cynical Realism and Painters
In April 1992 Francesca Dal Lago and others organized the earliest exhibition of Cynical Realist paintings by the ‘school’s’ representative painters Fang Lijun and Liu Wei in a gallery that was a refurbished temple in the suburbs of Beijing. This was the first public exhibition for these two painters, and the exhibition was a success. The fine response of the audience augured well for the future prospects of modern art. In his simple and unadorned statement introducing the exhibition, Li Xianting wrote:
I call the neo-realist trend which appeared in 1988-1989 and was mainly focused in Beijing ‘Cynical Realism’ (wanshi xianshizhuyi). The Chinese term ‘wanshi’ is synonymous with the English word ‘cynical’, but it lacks the taunting cold ridicule of the English concept’s cool detachment from reality and life. However, Cynical Realism represented a new cultural tendency in the modernist ideological trend of the 1980s. The 1989 China Modern Art Exhibition marked the end of the phase of China’s new wave art of the eighties, and at the same time it represented a heavy blow to the idealistic attempt to introduce Western modern culture to save and rebuild new Chinese culture. Cynical Realism was the inevitable spiritual product in the face of a shattered psychological state.
The term ‘Cynical Realism’ first appeared in Li Xianting’s essay of August 1991 titled ‘The Sense of Ennui and the Third Generation of Artists since the Cultural Revolution’. At the beginning of that year, Li Xianting began to note and study this new trend in realism. At the beginning of 1993, the inaugural issue of Genesis ran a column by Dao Zi titled ‘Café Guerbois’ that published an article completed by Li Xianting at the beginning of 1992 titled ‘Post-Modern Tendencies in Chinese Art Circles since 1989’, in which the critic presented a full explanation of the changes in his thinking over the previous year. To this article, Li Xianting appended a footnote explaining the historical and cultural connections of the concepts of ‘scoundrel humor’ (popi youmo) and ‘hooligan culture’ (liumang wenhua) that related to the ‘Cynical Realism’. While analyzing the phenomenon of Cynical Realism, Li Xianting did not change the fixed ideological position that ran through all his criticism and he sketched in the contours of the logic behind the emergence of the Cynical Realism artists:
The Cynical Realists were born in the 1960s, and in the late 1980s they constituted the third generation of artists who had graduated from college. Therefore the background of society and art against which they grew up was greatly different from that of the two generations of artists who preceded them. The end of the Cultural Revolution was the background in which the generation who had been ‘educated youth’ sent down to the countryside matured, and the subsequent entry of Western modernist thought also nurtured the artists of the ‘85 new wave, having already provided the idealism for two previous generations of artists who had wanted to rescue Chinese culture. However this third generation of artists began their primary school education in the mid-1970s and, flung into a society with constantly changing concepts, they embarked on student art careers amidst the sloganeering of the previous two generations calling for the salvation of Chinese culture. They were entering society in 1989 when they saw that, after the China Modern Art Exhibition had exhausted almost all the options of Western modernist art, the dream of saving Chinese culture had also vanished. Society and art had left only fragments hastily gathered by chance for this new generation of artists, who had no faith in constructing a new value system and harbored no illusions about expending efforts to save society or culture. They felt they could only save themselves from their own helpless situations. They felt that ennui was not only the most authentic emotion they could muster but also the best path of personal salvation they could follow.
In art this sense of ennui impelled them to abandon the idealism and heroism that typified earlier art and to transform the elitist concerns of the two previous generations of artists in order to look instead straight ahead and focus on the mediocre reality surrounding them. Being bored equates with a sense of meaninglessness, so they did not need to adopt a respectful attitude. The sense of weariness impelled them to portray themselves with mockery, and they roguishly, cynically and disdainfully depicted the familiar, inconsequential, accidental and even ridiculous snippets of life surrounding them and of which they were a part. The result was the creation of an artistic style imbued with ‘the humor of the scoundrel’ (popi youmo).[3]
As Li Xianting noted, Cynical Realism discarded metaphysical questioning and the search for meaning, and so had no background support from metaphysical concepts. Indeed, artists born in the 1960s feared philosophy, distrusting the expression of any philosophy from the past, because they had heard too many lies, seen too much ugliness, and encountered too much that was unbearable. They felt remote from what they could glean about respect for life and had begun to suspect that a noble and healthy life must be a false or even duplicitous construct. This standard of values was described by Fang Lijun: ‘The bastard can be duped a hundred times but he still falls for the same old trick. We’d rather be called losers, bores, basket cases, scoundrels or airheads, than ever be cheated again’.
Cynical Realist art was exhibited comprehensively for the first time at Post-89 China New Art and it influenced the painting style of many young artists. By 1995 or thereabouts, Cynical Realism, together with ‘Gaudy Art’ (yansu yishu), which was even closer to in style to consumer society, had a spiritual continuity.
As one of Cynical Realism’s representative painters, Liu Wei (b.1965) depicted his almost grotesque images with disjointed and irregular brush strokes, and playfully rendered the soldier, his father, with a gross appearance, indicating the painter’s impulse to transgress norms. The perceived decline of values in the real world led Liu Wei to discard accepted standards, and so the rot in reality he perceived was depicted as rot. Ugliness became the first step in the liberation of his artistic images. A series of paintings titled The Swimmer, which Liu completed in 1994, demonstrated the painter’s lack of restraint in handling sexual themes. He made no attempt to embellish or conceal sexual images perceived to be offensive and he positioned historical personages in spaces together with unabashed sexual images. He seemed to be making a statement that nothing was sacred and that the difference between the ‘great’ and the ‘vulgar’ was only a lie told in the past. His series of works completed in 1995 and titled Do You Like Meat? was shown at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1996; the painter used color to present to audiences a trashy world festering with corruption, and his images of decay were a negation of civilization and its values.
In 1991, Yang Shaobin (b.1963) moved from Hebei to the Yuanmingyuan artists’ village in the hope of getting a chance to develop. In his earliest works Yang Shaobin used unattractive images of policemen to express his satirical contempt for reality. In these works, the police exude none of the sense of justice that their positions call for; they are ugly, comical, and nauseating. As symbols of power and the state apparatus, his images of police are mercilessly mocking. Yang Shaobin’s focus on policemen as his subject matter perhaps related to his own experience and his personal reaction to violence. In his works after 1996, violence and violent behavior seemed to grow in strength and, by drawing on specific incidents and contexts, the unidentified figures in his works seemed to approach the animal intensity of gnashing at each other. In a painting titled Group Fight (1996-7), a dramatic depiction of a violent fight among himself and his artist friends, the violence is omnipresent and palpable. In several other works of this period, the violent behavior of his characters is unbearable and almost unwatchable. The purple wounds, the bruised and bloodied flesh and the swollen faces in his paintings were intended as reminders of the ubiquity of violence around us.
Yue Minjun (b.1962) was at first an artist living in Yuanmingyuan, and in 1991, he painted The Comedy in the Unnamed City Gate and Crazy Laughter. The former work revealed the unconscious elements of the artist’s future direction: attention to historical and political background, exaggerated modeling of the heads and a bored and desolate mood. Yue Minjun could not retain and replicate the authenticity of the retinal image like Liu Xiaodong, but he did also want to depict the daily lives of his close friends. He could not simply extract his own self-image in the way Fang Lijun, but he succeeded in linking himself to elements of history, society, and politics. Like Wang Guangyi he was sensitive to historical and political reality, but he could not limit himself to making only a cultural appraisal of such questions.
The prominent stylistic sign of Yue Minjun’s works is the head with the gawping and beaming smile which is repeated constantly. The image of uncontrollable laughter in the paintings related to the personality and image of the painter, as Yue has described: ‘Smiling is a refusal to think deeply when you feel there are things about which you have no way of thinking deeply or which are too difficult to think about, and you need to get rid of the thoughts’.[4] The images in the works of Yue Minjun were in the first instance drawn from his friends and those around him, and he made the enormous head a leitmotif in his paintings. After using images of his friends, the artist later decided to limit them to ‘himself’. The perception that life lacked values led him to see everything as a void, to adopt a satirical take on politics and to transform otherwise serious subject matter into the object of derision. His Great Unity (1993), Execution (1995), and La Liberté guidant le people (1995) mocked politics in this manner. To a certain extent, the art of Yue Minjun documented the sense of awkwardness and acute discomfort in this period. His subjects had neither status, authority, nor hope and his only psychological comfort seemed to be derived from an endlessly repeated visage with its gawping smile.
In his artistic style Zeng Fanzhi (b.1964) was initially close to expressionism. The expressionist characteristics of narrative content and language imbued his work with the power to shock. In works like Union Hospital Triptych (1991) and Meat (1992), the painter attempted to express his personal concerns and agonies. The painter was asserting that people in reality were already pathological and required treatment. However, the real issue was that his patients were not physically ill and merely removing the disease from their bodies would not resolve the problem. More seriously, there was no distinction evident in the paintings between the mental states of the doctors and of the patients. Patient and doctor alike had succumbed to the same pathology. In the expressionist style, symbolic images are clearly discernible: the eyes of the figures in his paintings were always open wide and they revealed unchanging expressions of alarm. These images eventually led the artist to abandon more realistic objects. In 1994 Zeng concealed the painful expressions on the faces of his characters, by replacing them with ‘masks’. This change was a new recognition of reality on the part of the artist, and this was another mode of expressing doubt about truth and the essential reality. Certainly this new style continued to demonstrate an absolutist position and Zeng perhaps still believed in the existence of an essential inner being, in the face of which he felt he was rendered powerless. In confronting the questions of whether it was meaningful to declare the authenticity of life or whether reality actually existed, Zeng Fanzhi clearly felt spiritual agony and distress, choosing to substitute a mask (or ‘false face’) for a face which could only speak with difficulty, suggesting that for him the state of reality was something which everybody preferred to conceal behind a ‘mask’.
Works by the Guangzhou painter Deng Jianjin, the Chengdu artist Guo Wei, the Chongqing artist Guo Jin, and Zhong Biao’s works of the 1990s were all part of the phenomenon of Cynical Realism, and the spirit and emotions of the art of artists in different cities similarly expressed this popular approach in that era.
Fang Lijun
Fang Lijun (b.1963) entered the Central Academy of Fine Arts to begin his studies in the print making department in 1985. By 1998, Fang Lijun was creating his first sketch-like works with the shaved head theme. In the summer of 1990 Fang Lijun moved into a secure studio space in Yuanmingyuan, where he completed his black-and-white oil paintings titled The First Group.
In March 1991, the critic Li Xianting began categorizing the works of Liu Xiaodong, Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, Wang Jinsong, and Song Yonghong together, and coined the term Cynical Realism to describe them. In 1992 Francesca Dal Lago held a preliminary showing of a joint exhibition of Liu Wei and Fang Lijun, and Hans Van Dijk included Fang Lijun’s work in the Chinese Avant-Garde Art Exhibition he was curating, for which the critic Li Xianting wrote the catalogue essay explaining the new artistic phenomenon.
The works simply titled Series which he painted in 1990-1991 followed the path of Cynical Realism, and in them appeared the bored person yawning and staring out indifferently, that was to become the iconic psychological image of that period. As someone who experienced and recorded a unique historical situation, Fang Lijun, through recording his own emotional state and mode of expression, depicted the emotional state at this time of Chinese society, especially of the residents of Beijing, and anyone familiar with the changes in the literature of this period will recognize that the emotions which Fang Lijun’s paintings evoked were similar to those elicited by the novel Don’t Treat Me as a Person by Wang Shuo.
In 1993 Fang Lijun was included in the China Post-1989 Exhibition staged by Li Xianting and Johnson Tsong-zung Chang in Hong Kong; in the same year Achille Bonito Oliva visited Fang Lijun’s studio and invited him to the Venice Biennale. Time magazine in the US published a large photograph of Fang Lijun at work, while New York Times Magazine published his Series 2, No.2. He began to visit European galleries that Chinese artists were eager to see in Spain, Italy, Germany and France, and to be baptized into Western art for the first time.
In 1992, what came to referred to simply as Deng Xiaoping’s ‘speech following his southern inspection tour’ guaranteed the continuing development of the market economy, and the core of the reported speech was that ideological disputes were nonsensical, and if the national economy were not rapidly stabilized and developed, China and her people were doomed. Stifled debate had benefited no-one, but for people who regarded discussion as being beside the point, Deng’s speech was seen as being tantamount to emancipation. Fang Lijun and some other artists were asking whether, in one’s own space, freely moving our hands and feet, freely breathing the air, freely laughing, freely staring or freely slapping ourselves and yawning was now permissible behavior? Could such behavior be attacked? The image of the guy with the shaved head and the bored expression could be interpreted as a satire of the system, and were we to attempt to identify who among the artist’s friends or which other artists served as models for the figures in the works, our analysis of that cramped historical context would reveal that self-mockery was the real meaning of Fang Lijun’s works in that period.
In 1993, Fang Lijun began to make water one of the most important elements in his paintings. However, as traditional texts explain, the symbolic properties of water are more difficult to understand. In fact, Fang Lijun’s water contained complex elements, including freedom, crisis, taking things philosophically, a sense of suspension, and even sexual love.
People born in the 1950s and 1960s were familiar with the images of flowers associated with the ‘motherland’ and this shaped their historical memory. In 1993, some chance event may have led Fang Lijun to begin to use images of flowers, whether fresh, large, blooming or floating, to enhance the libertine and crude image of the shaved head. However, if we look at the way in which he continued to use flowers and combine them with the image of the red scarf, it is clear that the ‘flower’ had complex associations for Fang Lijun.
Fang Lijun’s oil paintings of flowers were shown at the Venice Biennale of 1993, and he and other Chinese artists began to become internationally known. For contemporary Chinese artists, the 1993 Venice Biennale was a symbolic turning point and it was clear that the admission of Chinese artists to the international community held great promise for the future, although this was questioned by some critics who called artists’ attention to ‘post-colonial culture’ and warned them about allowing their art to become a tactical tool of Western ideology. After the Biennale, Fang Lijun’s works went on to become irreplaceable icons of the spiritual climate in China in the 1990s.
Political Pop and Artists
At the beginning of 1992, a group of artists from Hubei became the main force in the early period of Pop art in 1990s China, and prominent in the group were Wang Guangyi, Wei Guangqing, Li Bangyao, Yang Guoxin, Ren Jian, Shu Qun, Fang Shaohua, Chen Lushou and Yuan Xiaofang. At the first national unofficial exhibition in China in the 1990s, the ‘Guangzhou Biennale’, Pop art was promoted on a large scale and, among the Pop works, two were singled out for a documental award and a scholarship prize, two won awards for excellence and four won other prizes, the upshot being that Pop art became very influential.
In the early 1990s, artists became highly skeptical about myths regarding ‘the artistic noumenon’ or ‘purified language’. In fact, since 1990, when the end of the idealism of the new enlightenment movement which had taken shape in the 1980s was proclaimed and idealistic social marketing was underway with the support and encouragement of the government, it began to merge with globalized capitalism. At this time, Derrida’s deconstructionism was spreading through China’s academic circles and in the avant-garde art circles of Hubei it was also a topic of discussion.
At the beginning of 1991, the 1st issue of the journal Art and Market carried an interview with Wang Guangyi and on 22 March Beijing Youth Daily carried a full page spread illustrating Wang Guangyi’s works and carrying articles about them. At a time when the media rarely introduced avant-garde art, the legend of the Wang Guangyi ‘effect’ greatly inspired many avant-garde artists. They were concerned with the following questions: Was there any possibility for the logic of modern art to develop, given that since 1989 ‘avant-garde art’ had been more or less placed in an illegitimate position, there were no opportunities for exhibitions or large-scale academic activities, and it lacked the support of the powers that be? Could new hope come from other sources? For example, could the power of the market provide legitimacy? By that time, the ’85 complex of idealism began to be abandoned, as artists began to believe increasingly in the need for ‘operations’ (caozuo).
The birth of Pop art was related to the reality of the mass popularization of commodities and the consumer society. The oppressive social atmosphere from 1989 to 1992 forced those avant-garde artists still with permanent jobs (most of the Hubei avant-garde artists were teachers) to seek new opportunities for making breakthroughs. One opportunity was provided by Deng Xiaoping’s investigative journey to the coastal cities of Shenzhen and Zhuhai at the beginning of 1992, after a speech was released encouraging Chinese to strive in the direction of the market. Undoubtedly this voice from the center of politics and power unprecedentedly highlighted the market which was something China was only beginning to acknowledge. The editor of Jiangsu Art Monthly, Gu Chengfeng (b.1958) wrote when analyzing the background against which Chinese Pop art was produced: ‘Various media have increased the pace of change at an unprecedented rate, and the visual images produced by TV, electronic games, copy machines, faxes, advertising, karaoke and beauty contests have already transcended the scope of entertainment and consumption to impact deeply on a generation’s life style and mode of thinking; culture is a fashion which is instantaneous, consumer-based and superficial. Such a fashion not only constantly challenges orthodox culture but demands to be expressed in the art of the day. This is the unique environment that produced Chinese Pop art’.[5] This specific environment translated the concepts of rapidity, immediacy, fame, popularity, and effect into the domain of art. In his sense Chinese Pop art conformed to how Hamilton casually described Pop art in the 1950s: ‘popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business’.
Chinese Pop eventually morphed into ‘Political Pop’ as it was transformed into a contemporary art trend opposing the dominant ideology, and it was a typical ‘operational tactic’ (caozuo) of the 1990s. The political conflict and ideological challenge reflected in Political Pop works was strengthened by each side in conflict perpetuated the strategic East-West confrontations in politics, culture and economics, and so extended its meaning. The presence of this logic and the political and ideological coloring of the artworks were relied upon by many Chinese avant-garde artists and critics as the point of departure and goal in marketing avant-garde art, and this saw the flourishing of Political Pop within a very short span of time.
Almost all critics noted that the common characteristic of the ‘Political Pop’ on display at the Post-89 China New Art exhibition, with its juxtaposition of political images and commercial logos, was its denial and transference of the trustworthiness of the value of these images and icons, as well as its disdain for them. As a stratagem of opposition to the political system in the nineties, Political Pop was almost one of the few remaining absolute stances of political opposition and as a part of the entire ideology, the system of authority in the Chinese art world could only make boring statements,[6] and was unable to initiate any sustained political movement as it has done in the past. This fact explains why there was a discernible change at this time in discourses and systems of authority in ideological and ‘political’ conferences. As a result of the introduction of a number of forces and of the increasing complexity of power structures (with domestic and international, political and economic, cultural and ideological, individual and collective factors), both intrinsically absolutist attitudes made impossible compromises against the background of the legitimization of the market.[7]
As a trend, ‘Political Pop’ first appeared in force at the Post-89 China New Art exhibition. As one of the curators of the exhibition, Li Xianting proposed that the use of the term ‘Political Pop’ be clear and he hoped that people would see more complicated political issues in the new reality. Indeed, whether seen from the angle of images or symbols, the linking of ‘Pop’ and ‘politics’ created a unique artistic phenomenon.
Rouge by Li Shan (b.1942) was an important symbol of 1990s Political Pop. In fact, the content of Rouge was ‘sex’, but the work’s success derived from the intimate connection between its allusion to sex and politics, because of its ideological conflict and its linguistic context of opposition between Eastern and Western ideology. Li Shan was known for his performance art work in the 1989 China Modern Art Exhibition titled Washing Feet, and he had curated and participated in the 1986 Shanghai First In-Out Exhibition as well as the Shanghai Second In-Out Exhibition: The Last Supper at the end of 1988. By the 1990s, Li Shan had begun to create works in the Pop style, and his Rouge made a visual impact at Post-89 China New Art, the 1993 Venice Biennale and the 1994 São Paulo Biennial. Li Shan stated that he was striving to distance his art from the confrontational posture of ideology and politics, and he cloaked the purpose of art in metaphorical rhetoric. However, in China of the 1990s, in the historical context of Political Pop, it is a moot point whether Li Shan’s statement could be taken completely at face value. The artist’s use of elements of irony, ridicule, metaphor, mockery, allusion or simile on the level of rhetoric, as well as the enunciation of ‘attitude’ were in fact political discourse and represented the selection of an ideological position. In this sense, Li Shan’s art was an important part of ‘Political Pop’. In a transitional historical period, Li Shan was using his art as a final warning to those who were about to forget history. Even though this warning was highly individualized, it was replete with surreptitious appeal.
The style of the art of Yu Youhan (b.1943) in the 1980s was abstract, and from the beginning the innumerable dots in his works were not intended to convey any ideas to his audiences. From 1990 onwards, Yu Youhan began to paint portraits of Mao Zedong using a particular style, and these portraits were all selected from the photographs of Mao Zedong most familiar to Chinese people and the artist’s paintings were made to resemble silkscreen prints. The symbols in the paintings were random and not meticulously executed, like shoddy examples of Chinese folk art. In reality the artist was playing with the traditional ‘dragon and phoenix pattern’ motifs, but the value judgment of the work was obscure because the artist was unable to shake off the personal historical complex. The artist described this in an essay of July 1997:
I paint Mao Zedong, generally speaking, to depict China, her history and my own experience of life. However, as an artist, this expression proceeds in accordance with what I like and what I am able to do. The period of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening has provided Chinese artists with greater room for their activities and this has enabled me to depict Mao Zedong, the most famous person in modern China, in my style.[8]
Even though Yu Youhan only expressed the historical consciousness of an individual and mentioned no interest in the concept of ‘Political Pop’, his works were still unable to avoid the fate of being ‘politicized’; within a particular historical period, his images of Mao Zedong became an integral part of the ideological game.
The painter Liu Dahong (b.1962) who lived in Shanghai was influenced by narrative painting traditions, and in his choice and treatment of subject matter we can see that he was highly sensitive to contemporary society and politics. He attempted to draw on wide-ranging traditions from Chinese classical and folk arts to Persian miniatures and medieval Dutch fabulist art, and from his combination of classical styles and modern art he sought a unique mode of expression for his views on history and reality. By the end of the 1980s, he began to combine in his paintings hallucinatory narratives with satire and ridicule. A rich array of players and scenes provided the elements in his canvases – Yangge dancers of the Yan’an period, model theatrical works from the Cultural Revolution, ancient images and modern women, Chinese dragon dances and Western orchestras, ancient Chinese pottery figurines and vignettes reproduced from classical Western paintings. This dazzling array of components was brought together in his fascinating contemporary genre paintings. His subsequent works titled Twelfth Month (1988) and Mid-autumn (1989) utilized the content of folk tales, historical anecdotes, and scenes of contemporary daily life, to create a floating world of dazzling and inexhaustible chaos. When organizing these stories, Liu Dahong’s focus remained on using these elements to express his own view of the present. Because of the complexity of the visual elements, the stories Liu Dahong recounted required careful reading. Within an entire composition, there were invariably vignettes of different eras and tales with different content which interconnect and interacted. It was the interactions that constructed a vast and integral hallucinatory entity, a reality reconfigured. At the beginning of the 1990s, the art of Liu Dahong, because of its political nature and ironic take on social issues, had the label ‘Political Pop’ attached to it.
The Shanghai painter Xue Song created art works comprising Chinese characters and images formed from previously burnt printed matter and these were distinctive among the Pop art produced in the 1990s.
Wang Guangyi
One of Political Pop’s most important works, Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism was initially not well received by critics, who felt that these small oil paintings which combined Cultural Revolution newspaper masthead motifs and commercial logos totally diminished the work’s ‘painterly quality’. However, Wang Guangyi was not interested in the history that gave rise to Pop Art; he wanted to find a way to escape from ‘meaning’, and a possibility of rejecting ‘artistic nature’. At the end of 1990 after Great Criticism had appeared, Wang Guangyi stated:
My Great Criticism might easily fall into a trap of misrepresentation by taking historical material and individual language and mixing them together. Actually, as an artist, this form of individual language is achieved precisely through the process of continually establishing traps. That is to say, setting traps is the prerequisite for ‘individual pre-recognition’, or doing things in advance of thinking about them. As Derrida once said, ‘you write before you think’.[9]
Wang Guangyi regarded his Great Criticism series as ‘a batch of post-Pop works resolving the problems of the commodity economy’. [10] He wanted to borrow the popular images of the Cultural Revolution to mock and ridicule the commodity economy. However, the images in Great Criticism constructed by ‘workers, peasants and soldiers’ alerted people that this was not a light topic, and the method of blocking the vertical extensions did not obstruct the pictorial historical symbols, so that the works could still readily suggest the history of the political movements and the ideological autocracy of more than a decade previously.
The critic Li Xianting published an article titled ‘Post-Modern Trends in China’s Art Circles Post-1989’ in the inaugural issue of Genesis in January 1993, in which he wrote:
After 1989, the ’85 new wave artists abandoned the more serious, metaphysical posturing and held high the banner of deconstructionism and moved towards Political Pop satire. Using satire and humor, these artists created popular new works using Mao Zedong and other political subjects, which I call ‘Political Pop’.[11]
As early as 1989, the Shanghai artist Wang Ziwei (b. 1963) had adopted a technically bereft mode of flatly applying images of Mao Zedong to his own works, although Wang Guangyi had been applying grids to portraits of Mao Zedong from 1987 to 1988 and these revealed a mocking and deconstructed approach to politics. Later, Wang juxtaposed Cultural Revolution newspaper and propaganda art in which the masses engage in ‘great criticism’ with Western popular brand logos such as Marlboro and Coca-cola which were familiar to the Chinese, thereby providing audiences with an image of China compatible with trends of commercialization. Such a choice by Wang Guangyi can be described as an impulse of political sensitivity and ideology, because of his Duchampian questioning of art after 1989.
Wang Guangyi’s influence in the 1990s was enormous, and his Great Criticism was regarded as the most typical work of Political Pop. Among the avant-garde artists in China, Wang Guangyi is one of the few who clearly understood the political nature and strategy of art. He also clearly understood that works like Great Criticism were not merely semantic signifiers representing the problems of that period but that these signifiers truly symbolized this specific time, and that people, even though many were Westerners, were able to discuss these signifiers and, even given the premise that they were not discussing the advance of any artistic language, these signifiers inevitably became spokesmen or supra-signifiers for Chinese avant-garde art. This point alone makes Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism one of the most important historical documents of China’s avant-garde art in the 1990s.
Gaudy Art
Gaudy Art is regarded as an artistic phenomenon which evolved in 1996 from several exhibitions such as Templates of the Masses and Make-up Life. During the next few years Gaudy Art gained popular momentum. In June 1999, a Gaudy Art exhibition titled Centennial Rainbow: Gaudy Art was held at the TEDA Art Museum in Tianjin. It would be four years before the name Gaudy Art was accepted and entered the history books. Gaudy Artists include Yang Wei, Xu Yihui, Hu Xiangdong, Feng Zhengjie, Chang Xugong, Qi Zhilong, Li Luming, Sun Ping, Liu Liguo, the three Luo Brothers - Luo Weidong, Luo Weiguo and Luo Weibing, Wang Qingsong, and Liu Zheng. In addition, the Cartoon Generation artists led by the Guangzhou artist Huang Yihan are also considered to be members of the Gaudy Art group.
Spiritually, the most recent tradition for Gaudy Art was Cynical Realism. Around 1994 the cynical lifestyle concepts of ‘roguishness’ and ‘mocking humor’ were flourishing, and after the mid-1990s this gradually turned into feigned charm or stylized irony. The absurdity summoned up by the Cynical Realists with regard to the social realities structured by politics and commerce, as well as by power and money, was expressed through the implied shapes of reality, with residual ‘ideas’, ‘innuendos,’ and ‘symbols’ that were opposed to reality. Gaudy Art absorbed the anti-idealist lifeblood of Cynical Realism but filtered out Cynical Realism’s history or its individualized psychological story. As for reality, ‘satire’ might still be an appropriate word, but the ‘satire’ of Gaudy Art has obvious affinities with reality and even ‘consorts’ with it.
Gaudy Art also had a connection with the Pop art which was popular from 1992 onwards. In fact, throughout the 1990s, Pop art continued in many different styles. In language, Gaudy Art was a variant of Pop art. The linguistic parameters provided by Pop art supplied a logical background for the emergence of Gaudy Art. However, the path of development of Gaudy Art was possibly more similar to that of US Pop art or the classical Pop of Britain, in that Gaudy Artists were extremely familiar with ready-made signifiers drawn from reality. The Pop art represented by Wang Guangyi, Yu Youhan, and Li Shan borrowed from the forms and methods of popular culture and pressed them into the service of the artist’s historical or politicized complex, whereas Gaudy Art cast its gaze on all that was personal, ethnic and nostalgic, completely eschewing the political symbols that attracted attention in East-West cold war games, more directly looking for image resources in folk and pop culture and thus weakening its coloring as confrontational ideology. Therefore, some critics regard Gaudy Art as ‘Post-Pop’ or even as a sign of Chinese Pop’s decline. So, we might describe Gaudy Art as the ‘illegitimate offspring’ of Cynical Realism and Pop art conceived in the hotbed of the rapidly changing commercialized society. It was the most thorough expression of the situation that prevailed after the ‘New Generation’ artists embarked on the descent from the metaphysical spirit to the material world.
In the eyes of official art, artists who stressed ‘vulgar’ or ‘gaudy’ images belonged to the ‘avant-garde’. Those artists who intentionally opposed conventional morality and artistic concepts were not favoured by the authorities because of the happiness or joy their paintings might express. Unlike Cynical Realism or Political Pop, Gaudy Art more derived its motive force from enticements of the commercial and consumer worlds. If we say that what earlier artists confronted was still the ideological predicament, for Gaudy Art, the political standpoint had already been dissolved by the commercial game.
Gaudy Artists did not want to describe life realistically or symbolically, nor did they attempt to provide any rational analysis of social significance concealed within life; they were only interested in the vulgarity or mediocrity within actual life that had been exaggerated, emphasized and enhanced. Under the spreading panoply of absolutist power, popular culture, with its conspicuous revelry, showy entertainment and pseudo-classical style, viewed itself with all the vanity of the fashionable aristocrat and projected the demeanor of the educated and powerful newly emerged from the omnipresent world of commerce. Such a situation made society a void in which there was no basis for making value or ethical judgments. Gaudy Art did not maintain an attitude of critique towards reality; on the contrary, it gave it a twisted welcome. Like the artists of the Rococo period, they embellished it with dainty and dexterous floral motifs to deck it out with à la mode taste, and within this ornamentation they used humor and irony to remedy their sense of helplessness and psychological loss.
Gaudy Art also impinged on politics and history, although this was not simply because the works of artists such as Qi Zhilong (b.1962) presented images or figures of an historical political complexion. If Gaudy Art touched on political themes, it also rendered any potential political topic of conversation mediocre or pointless. Gaudy Artists had no interest in discussing political topics. However, just like farmers who sell pigs and remain blithely unconcerned about discussing state ideology but are more than capable of making any number of witty remarks about the mood of the public, the Gaudy Artists, in their similar irresponsibility, also felt unconstrained in making witty observations about contemporary social life. What distinguished Qi Zhilong, to some extent, was his intrinsic empathy for history, his retention of memories and his avid interest in the fashion aesthetic of the Cultural Revolution period. He dressed his female subjects in drab military garb, and revised history with an aesthetic interest that could be readily accepted by audiences, and of course the ‘revolutionary idealism’ that accompanied it.
Gaudy Artists were familiar with the art history of the 20th century. They had been imbued with modernism and post-modernism, they had no firm (or predetermined) rational position, and they were familiar with word play. In their thinking, the terms ‘seductive’ or ‘beautiful’ did not explain anything, nor did the concepts of ‘entertainment’ (amusement) or ‘joy’ (sublimation), ‘vulgarity’ or ‘shame’, differ in value; the images in their works and their comic effects had no grip on happy or sad sensations. There was neither aesthetical nor ethical appraisal, nothing ‘utilitarian’ nor ‘aesthetic’; there was no ‘loftiness’, ‘terror’ or ‘transcendence’, and naturally there could no ‘ethical arbitration’. The artist Xu Yihui, for example, proclaimed himself to have become an insignificant ‘bit player’, and one with ‘the masses’ as a vulgar commoner; ‘for me, loud colors, images of mediocre daily life and classical cultural designs are not so important, and it is only in terms of traditional criticism that cultural experience is seen to be wallowing in the mire of daily aesthetic experience’.The series of works by Feng Zhengjie (b.1968) titled Bridal Gown Photography emulated the work produced by the popular photography studios which specialized in wedding shots and he attempted to mock their prevailing fashions. The artist produced playful and exaggerated renderings of posed matrimonial moments in which bride and groom dress as wealthy couples from different historical periods and of the coquettish shots in which ordinary people pose as stars of film and television. He highlighted the ‘boundless joy’ on the faces of the young couples with purple hues and the works are drenched with silvery green; the couples’ expressions and postures were gauchely intimate and risibly formal.
Other active participants in Gaudy Art included Yang Wei, Wang Qingsong, the Luo Brothers (Luo Weidong, Luo Weiguo, Luo Weibing), Liu Zheng, and Li Luming. Guangzhou’s Cartoon Generation (Huang Yihan) is also regarded as another type of expression of Gaudy Art.
Zhang Xiaogang
Zhang Xiaogang (b.1958) was an artist who remained independent of the various related artistic phenomena of the early 1990s, but the aesthetic mode he opened up makes it difficult to understand the range of his art by simply examining it within the context of a particular trend, even though his art absorbed elements from various trends.
After a lyrical expressionist period, Zhang Xiaogang has called the years from 1982 to 1985 his ‘period of demons’. His reading of Western books and his obsession with music aggravated the artist’s sense of depression, anxiety, loneliness and sadness. After his hospitalization in 1984, Zhang’s sketches and oil paintings began to include images of the world of dark spirits, and the bucolic motifs of his earlier works disappeared. In his Phantom series, Zhang expressed what he felt on the hospital bed and inside the ward, using surrealist modes in order to portray his fear and anxiety about death.
The motifs of the next phase of Zhang’s artistic career, ‘the period on the opposite shore’, are not essentially different in nature from those of his earlier phase, the ‘period of demons’, although Zhang was beginning a rational review of issues related to life and death. The artist experimented with paper, by spraying colors on sheets and then cutting away the outlines of the images with a knife. Usually, he rubbed pigment on a section, but other sections he would handle meticulously. Belonging to this category is Lost Dreams Anthology, a collection of about forty paintings done between 1986 and 1988, which was an experimental series imbued with lyricism. The painter simultaneously used oil paints and pieces of cloth in the paintings. Sometimes he also used simple oil painting to complete his dream world, an example being the 1988 work Eternal Love. Zhang continuously pursued his disorderly reading of Western philosophy and literature, and he listened to what he regarded as tragic and lofty music. At the same time he was obsessed with Pink Floyd’s The Wall. In his Vast Sea of 1989 we can see omnipresent skulls. In fact, in many works until 1991, including Hand-written Notes, his motifs never strayed from the theme of life and death.
In 1992, Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour of China once again changed the political atmosphere that had been created in June 1989. In the coastal regions of China at least, people discovered that in the market economy mechanisms they could rediscover their own path of development. At the beginning of that year, Zhang Xiaogang went to Germany and saw for himself art works by the great masters he so worshipped. When he was discussing his disappointment at ‘the absence of great artists, such as Beuys and Kiefer, and their works as in the past’ at Documenta Kassel, he also described the luxurious and aristocratic atmosphere that now pervaded contemporary Western art, noting the visits to exhibitions of international VIPs and royalty (such as the Belgian king and the Dutch queen). This was somewhat different from the perception Chinese artists had held of the state of Western art. At the same time, the work K18 by the group of Chinese avant-garde artists represented at the exhibition, Lü Shengzhong, Wang Luyan, Ni Haifeng, and Li Shan, had an underground character that seemed like a decorative curlicue at a capitalist event’.[12]
By the latter half of 1992, he started using the term ‘contemporary art’, having seemed to have found the exploration of essentialism to be a bottomless abyss, despite the fact that he retained his obsession with sentimentalism and moroseness. He then wrote: ‘The approach to entering a contemporary artistic state is characterized by distinct individualistic art styles (the right approach to the language of art); at the same time, one must also transcend the formalist complex (new images, new style, and other ‘visual composition’). I believe that these are the extremely difficult problems facing the contemporary art community.’ In fact, as a sensitive realist, Zhang Xiaogang was well aware of the importance of changing the artistic language. By 1993, he had begun to style himself a ‘spiritual drifter’, and in March of that year, his painting series Hand-written Notes was categorized as belonging to ‘the spirit of the traumatized romantic’ in the Post-89 China New Art Exhibition. However, Political Pop (as represented by Wang Guangyi, Yu Youhan, Li Shan and others) and the ‘sense of ennui and of the ruffian style’ (as represented by Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, Wang Jinsong and Liu Xiaodong) exhibited at the same time became focal points for the public.
In 1993, he painted several works that marked a decisive turning point in his career: Yellow Portrait, Red Portrait, Bloodline: Mother and Son, and Red Baby Boy. Yellow Portrait and Red Portrait featured his artist friends Ye Yongqing and Mao Xuhui. These two paintings may be regarded as an experimental attempt to get rid of excessive expressionist language. Bloodline: Mother and Son and Red Baby Boy, as well as these two works, belong in content to the same group treating the themes of bloodlines, life, growing pains and suggested death. Zhang retained the original core and motifs of his art and even his earlier surrealistic psychological characteristics, the accidental light and the combination of objects devoid of natural logic. By the end of 1993, Zhang was moving rapidly along what was regarded as a typical iconological path and with the appearance of the piece Bloodline: Big Family in 1994 the ‘framing’ of expressionism had been completely removed. The artist explained the change in his mode of expression in this way:
The elements that constitute my recent art works are derived from some old photos from a private collection, and from charcoal drawings that were once seen everywhere in the streets, in addition to what history and reality have instilled in our complicated minds. I cannot say clearly which string in the depths of my soul was pulled by these carefully embellished old photos. They made me think and I loved them. Maybe because at that time these old pictures not only provided me with the joy of reminiscence but they also presented a simple and direct, if somewhat illusory, visual language which validated my intention to discard attempts at enigmatic mannerism and bloated romanticism. At the same time, iconological languages like old pictures and charcoal sketches embody things that I am familiar with but indifferent to, among which are the aesthetic requirements that ordinary Chinese have long been accustomed to, such as the emphasis on collectivism at the expense of individualism, modesty, neutrality and a lyrical aesthetic.[13]
Zhang’s family had been ‘revolutionary cadres’, a class of people familiar to people born in the 1950s. Such families had tried to keep their earlier photographs taken during the revolutionary period and the years of national reconstruction. They were very different from the even earlier photos in which people were photographed in long gowns and mandarin jackets. On the contrary, old pictures taken between the 1940s and early 1970s were directly linked, emotionally and historically, to living Chinese people, both parents and children, and they even link several important historical periods together.
In 1994, at the 22nd São Paulo Biennial, Zhang exhibited his spiritual Bloodline series and Family series to acclaim, and he received popular acknowledgment in many subsequent exhibitions. Gradually, others consolidated the aesthetic mode of this spiritual history. At the same time as he steadfastly maintained his earlier spiritual quest, Zhang Xiaogang rationally used surrealist techniques and Pop Art simplification to consolidate his own unique aesthetic modes and construct a classic documentation of contemporary Chinese art history.
Ideology and the Market Question
In January 1991, after the magazine Painters suspended publication after less than one year of operations, its publisher, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, launched the periodical Art and Market. [14] The prefatory remarks in this journal revealed how the editors were attempting to judge works of art in terms of their price and assert a work’s efficacy rather than its ‘artistic value’:
In an age when contemporary culture can only be defined accurately as a culture transformed by the economy, Chinese contemporary art is entering a major cycle in which its various immature forms and channels are ntering the world ‘art industry’ (yishu gongye), even though this fact has not yet been realized by more perceptive people. However, it is for this reason that we are making materials for correctly understanding this phenomenon and which will benefit the development of art available to museums, state art galleries, galleries, collectors, art dealers, art brokers, art publishers, intermediaries and artists. We know that art in contemporary society faces a situation unlike that in any other period in history. Art’s value must go through the process of pricing in order for its full expression to be realized, even though art’s value is not equivalent to price in an economic sense. From this standpoint, the buying and selling of works of art has become a fundamental premise or promise to make the work of artists, as well as art dealers, galleries and national art galleries, and especially the art brokers, meaningful. In today’s society, if a culture lacks economic verification, it is inconceivable that it can be effective.
Although the editors of Art and Market had poetic illusions about what the journal could achieve, there was important information in the manifesto-like prefatory remarks, namely, that Chinese art circles had begun to realize that the birth of the authority of the market extended the possibility for the legitimization of contemporary art, and this created the possibilities for artistic internationalization. In this magazine, Wang Guangyi was promoted as the leading representative of the new wave movement of the 1980s and in replying to questions from the editors, Wang remarked:
I believe money and art are both good. Mankind worked for thousands of years to discover the joy and contentment art and money could bring. Artists and ordinary people are very much alike; they both love money, but the difference is that ordinary people use money to live a luxurious life, and artists use it to preserve a mythological image: The more charming the myth, the more valuable his or her works become. The law whereby metaphysical myth turns into secular myth is at work in this process, and these two processes have reciprocal relationships that advance the process of art. We could say that this is the thesis and antithesis phenomenon or the Matthew effect that determines the birth and extinction of myth for artists, critics and the art market. [15]
The structuring created by the market question began to be appreciated by critics who curated exhibitions in the 1990s. In the 6th issue of Art and Market, the critic Huang Zhuan published a long article titled ‘Who Comes Out in Support of History’, in which he proposed a brand-new way of writing art history:
Up until now, our modern art history has basically remained a history responsive to the news, one almost ungoverned by the rules of artistic contest, and one without art’s arbitrators, a history that even lacks a stage on which artistic activities are legitimate, and a history awash with the Courbet complex. In such a scene, art has adopted a distorted mode that is incompatible at every turn with society, and the reliance on the political climate has revealed the immaturity and fragility of modern art. Obviously, for us the most pressing task is this: Should we change the way in which we write history, discarding the state of movements with excitement, and reconstruct our history in a more realistic way. [16]
Huang Zhuan’s radical attitude to history temporarily set aside the history of artistic style, and placed judgments about art in the hands of ‘regulators’ and ‘arbitrators’, touching on the question of the ‘legitimacy’ of art history.
For Chinese artists, rules were probably in place at an early date, but the people who formulate what are more usually called the ‘standards’ or ‘criteria’ are through the criteria themselves related to questions of ideology and power. In the 1980s, one of the reasons Chinese modern artists so very naturally formed groups was that their own ‘standards’ received no recognition, and art beyond realism and political criteria was excluded from formal exhibition venues; the general secretary, president and the committee members decided on by the official artists associations made up the artists associations’ ‘arbitration’ cliques. Because of the closed nature of this system, it lacked the mechanism for providing the incentive for artistic development and innovation, and made those ‘experts’ controlling the power the final arbiters of the ossified rules governing art. They determined whose artistic work could be characterized as ‘developing the tradition’ or who ‘dared to innovate’; they also determined whose art was infected with ‘national nihilism’ or tended to be ‘divorced from life, reality and the masses’. However, the operational results of the market economy, perhaps with the help of money, legitimized a new artistic style that disregarded the restrictions imposed by political authority, and enabled new works to be affirmed by society. Obviously, the ‘rules’ and ‘arbitrators’ discussed by Huang Zhuan related to the rules of the market game. Targeting those who felt disgust for commercialization, Huang Zhuan wrote:
For a long time, our art historians have fabricated many myths about how artists manifested their unique genius through their predilections of personality, but seldom have they told us that every artist has achieved fame in extremely complicated realistic ways, backed and surrounded by various political and religious forces, interest groups, art brokers, art dealers, agents, collectors and critics, all of whom played subtle functions which are difficult to assess in the historical process of artistic production.[17]
In Art and Market and other art magazines, the position and function of criticism and of critics in the market became a general topic of discussion, not only because most people writing about the art world were critics, but more importantly because a strong idealism imbued critics from the outset and one of the goals of their work was encouraging social acceptance of a contemporary artist’s work. They were well aware that exhibitions of the official artists’ associations were already inappropriate for young artists’ work because ideological issues impinged on artistic criteria, and given the systemic and economic crises, they hoped this new art would win favor in the market place. Yin Shuangxi in the 4th issue of Art and Market published his article ‘Criticism and the Market’, in which he argued that criticism played the role of ‘intermediary’ between the artist and the market, and proposed the professionalization of the critic. He argued that the relationship between criticism and the market ‘is of the same order as commodity testing and inspection, which ensures that products can be sold’. In the introduction of his article ‘Further Discussion of Criticism and the Market’, Lu Hong pointed out that the chaos in Chinese art standards and market prices is one of ‘the serious problems’ confronting the Chinese art market.[18] In ‘The Involvement of the Critic’, Lang Shaojun proposed clearly: ‘To establish the Chinese art market, there are many things to be done, but one thing is of vital importance, which is getting the involvement of the art critic’.[19]
However, the role of art itself was extremely limited. Because of the involvement of the power of the market and other powerful factors, no absolute truth in judgments about art can in fact exist. An article by Lü Peng, titled ‘Move Towards the Market’ and published at about the same time in both Art and Market and Jiangsu Art Monthly, articulated the concept of market absolutism and directly called for ‘the production of art for sale’ (yishu wei xiaoshou er shengchan), but it attracted widespread criticism after it appeared:
The history of art’s development which is limited to metaphysical concerns will soon conclude. In other words, Chinese art of the 1990s is moving towards the market in an all-round way. Without doubt, the real essence of this move of art towards the market is that art is seeking the support of money.
The central significance of the movement towards the market is that art must be produced for sale.
In a commercial society, fixing monetary pricing is a most effective means. When there is no god to arbitrate in the endless academic disputes, the most effective arbiter is money.[20]
Prior to the publication of Art and Market, the discussion of the relationship between art and the market had been more or less limited to general questions about technical matters, and no discussions had touched on deeper level questions such as the changes in ideology and the new structures of the dialog of power brought about by the art market. At the same time as articles in Art and Market touched on technical aspects and also alerted people as much as possible to the transformation of the art system and ideological concepts brought about by the emergence of the market, they in fact also signaled the beginnings of the decline in the question of the ‘noumenon’ of art.
A total of nine issues of Art and Market were published; every artist promoted and featured in an issue was involved with ‘the modern’ and, apart from introducing the Western art market and related questions, the editorial purpose was obvious: promoting modern or avant-garde artists and their works.[21] Art and Market had its own interesting destiny, because after the Guangzhou Biennale it was forced to suspend publication, not because of political pressure, but because of a lack of economic support.
The Guangzhou Biennale
The Guangzhou Biennale was held at the International Conference and Exhibition Center of the Central Hotel in Guangzhou on 23-31 October 1992, and more than 350 artists and 600 works were included in the show. Apart from Chinese artists, there were several participants from Britain and Italy.
The Biennale set up an ‘artistic manager’, an artistic evaluation committee, an accreditation committee, a legal consultancy, a notary, and a secretariat. The following critics were members of the two committees: Lü Peng, Shao Hong, Yang Xiaoyan, Yan Shanchun, Yi Dan, Zhu Bin, Huang Zhuan, Peng De, Yin Shuangxi, Pi Daojian, Yi Ying, Chen Xiaoxin, Gu Chengfeng, and Yang Li.
The Guangzhou Biennale invested the manager with appropriate powers. He presided over all evaluation work, was the final arbitrator in deciding the award-winning nominations, coordinated the judging panel and was the pivotal figure mediating between the evaluation and accreditation committees. The academic standing of the Guangzhou Biennale was determined in the main by the academic position and the capacity for judgment of the ‘manager’, and this is why the work and authority of the ‘manager’ made his role similar to that of a ‘curator’ at an international biennale. In setting up both an evaluation and an accreditation committee, the Guangzhou Biennale had as its object restricting the power of the manager through the mechanism of ‘two committees’ and preventing the abuse of power, to ensure that the work of evaluation at the Guangzhou Biennale evaluation was carried out objectively, equitably and seriously, and to guarantee the dependability and efficacy of the academic direction and significance. The ‘two committees’ provided the basic academic background in the form of an essay and, academically, the lists of nominations for awards were presented in writing by the committees and voted on by them, in order to provide a comparatively reliable academic foundation for the final arbitration and decisions of the manager and to sufficiently restrict the power of the manager.
It is inappropriate to assess mechanically the position, identity and function of Chinese critics in the 1990s with reference to the attributes of the Western critic, because of the unique situation critics faced in China. Nevertheless, one of the important characteristics of the Guangzhou Biennale was the power entrusted to critics to control the academic and operational aspects of the exhibition. The thirteen critics who participated in the Guangzhou Biennale adopted the new evaluation mechanism for exhibition operations, indicating the future direction of Chinese exhibitions. The history of the curatorial exhibition in China had begun.
Investment in the Guangzhou Biennale was by Chinese enterprises, and so there were no controls placed on it by the official artists’ associations, nor more markedly did it submit to any Western ideological aims, but it was to some extent influenced by the economic purposes of the investing enterprises. And this is exactly what made critics of the Guangzhou Biennale feel awkward, and so in assessments of the nature of the event there were great divergences.[22]
In any case, the market nature of the Guangzhou Biennale was very obvious, because of the scale of the investment in the Guangzhou Biennale and the marketization of its operations, which raised a series of questions that had seldom emerged in past exhibitions, such as legal questions, how to establish and improve the transportation of the art works, questions related to the insurance system, and tax revenue issues, all of which were closely and directly related to the development of art and the artists’ work. In the period when the market economy was just beginning and appropriate systems and arrangements were not in place, the operations of the Guangzhou Biennale were excessively idealistic. The Utopian ideals held out for market mechanisms were very clearly stated in the ‘Preface’ of the Guangzhou Biennale, ‘Launching the 1990s’, which in mentioning the event’s systematic establishment and related issues offered the following explanation of the ideology of the market:
This Biennale is different from any exhibition that has been held on the Chinese mainland. In the economic background to its operations, ‘investment’ replaced the ‘support’ of the past; in the subject of its operations, the business corporation replaced the cultural organization of the past; in operational procedures, the legally binding contract replaced the administrative ‘notice’ of the past; in the academic background of the operations, the evaluation committee composed of critics replaced the ‘evaluative group’ of the past that relied mainly on artists; in operational aims, the overall ‘effectiveness’ of the economic, social and academic spheres replaced the unitary, narrow and endless struggle for artistic ‘success’. These characteristics of the Biennale made it clear that Chinese art history in the 1990s had already been launched in an all-round way.
……
The Biennale participants - entrepreneurs, critics, artists, editors, lawyers and reporters, through their very participation, began to put to the test and resolve the questions associated with establishing a contemporary art market. More persons already realized that in the 1990s the market question was a cultural problem.[23]
The development of modern or contemporary art remained very difficult in China in the 1990s, because of the limitations of traditional concepts of art and of the old ideology and its corresponding system. Modern or contemporary art faced the double predicament of being disregarded, reviled and criticized by official art and cultural organizations and of having to face the chronic lack of economic resources.[24] However, at the same time as the economic reform efforts in China gathered strength, social commercialization became more serious and economic power began to impinge on and even control social and cultural life, while modern art was also correspondingly weakened by the influence of the old ideology and its political authority. These factors created the conditions for adopting economic measures to support modern art. The successful staging of the Guangzhou Biennale demonstrated for the first time that new art could win official recognition, academic acknowledgment, legal protection, economic support, and media recognition, and as a result new art acquitted legitimacy.
Post-89 Chinese New Art
For a long time, Chinese artists basically submitted to the system of official power exerted through such organizations as the artists’ associations. However, when the free art concepts and works of young artists could barely win the approval of this system, they began to seek out new possibilities. It was this very structural conversion that brought to a conclusion the history of the religious artist and the revolutionary artist, and the history of the gallery artist had begun. A series of tasks related to the exhibition of artists’ works began: contacting critics, producing academic literature and exhibition catalogues, renting spaces for exhibitions, acting as agents, seeking buyers, getting in touch with art museums, organizing traveling shows, and participating in auctions; all these activities began to concern artists. Around 1991, Chinese artists became familiar with the names of Leo Castelli and Mary Boone. It was just against such a background that the curator Chang Tsong-zung (Johnson Tsong-zung Chang) of Hanart TZ Gallery from Hong Kong together with Li Xianting the critic and curator from mainland China organized the Post-89 China New Art, which was actively supported by Chinese avant-garde artists.
In the preface to the catalogue of Post-89 Chinese New Art, Johnson Chang noted the relativity of the environment of artistic legitimization when discussing the political and historical background of his show, as well as how contemporary art could possibly be made legitimate through tactics centered on the market. In fact, after 1989, the Guangzhou Biennale used the discourse of the market as center to showcase strategically the ‘new art’ and win its legitimization. Yet in Hong Kong, Taiwan and some Euro-American Western countries, ‘the new art’ could only enter the scene directly within the international discourse of the post-Cold War era. Against this background, China’s ‘new art’ made its appearance within the very obvious political or ideological discourse that enclosed and influenced international art. We can say that as a result of Johnson Chang’s own position and protective background, he adopted the strategy of sending Chinese ‘new art’ directly to the international space in which the gallery system was fully matured, and ultimately succeeded in wresting the protection of international political power, the support of market forces, an ideologically sympathetic response, and the effective ‘formatting’ of the art system.
Chang Tsong-zung had a rich knowledge of the Western art system, and made use of the comprehensive Western art system to promote Chinese contemporary art in the international community. In terms of its operational strategy, his Hanart TZ Gallery truly grasped the ‘selling points’ of Chinese new art on the Western market, and the concern of the international community for the political and social reality of China. Obviously, the role Johnson Chang played for Chinese contemporary art was very similar to the function played out for American contemporary artists by Castelli, and through the Western gallery system he created a history for Chinese art in the 1990s and at the same time added content that could not be ignored by contemporary world art history.
The Post-89 Chinese New Art exhibition was held in the massive Hong Kong Arts Centre and Exhibition Hall in January-February 1993. More than 200 paintings, sculptures and installations by fifty or so artists were exhibited, and the show classified works into six categories---Political Pop Art, Cynical Realism: Irreverence and Malaise, The Wounded Romantic Spirit, Emotional Bondage: Images of Fetishism and Sado-Masochism, Ritual and Purgation: Endgame Art, and Introspection and the Retreat into Formalism: New Abstract Art. Among the major artists included in the show were Wang Guangyi, Yu Youhan, Li Shan, Qiu Zhijie, Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, Zhang Xiaogang, Zhou Chunya, Mao Xuhui, Zhang Peili, Zeng Fanzhi, Gu Wenda, Xu Bing, Shang Yang, Ding Yi, and Sui Jianguo. In March of the same year, a travelling exhibition making use of the ideological emphasis of Johnson Chang’s exhibition and focusing on ‘Political Pop’ art went to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia where it was titled Mao Goes Pop and to the Taipei Hanart Gallery in Taipei where it was titled Chinese Mainland Political Pop.
The Post-89 Chinese New Art exhibition attracted great attention in the West, where from this ‘new art’ people saw a Chinese reality revealed through novel images. In 1994, Johnson Chang took works by Wang Guangyi, Li Shan, Yu Youhan, Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, and Liu Wei to Brazil to enter in the São Paulo Bienal. Through such exhibitions Chinese contemporary art progressively began to enter Western museums, art museums, and galleries.
Post-89 Chinese New Art exerted an unprecedented influence in Hong Kong, Taiwan and other places, and apart from the works in the exhibition themselves, another factor was the wider background of the upsurge in Asian regional investment in art. Because the more capitalist countries and regions of Asia had a long history of markets and mature market mechanisms, Western politics, ideology and cultural and artistic traditions could exert a more effective influence on them. If we connect this background to the background of the art market on the Chinese mainland, we discover that China’s new art in fact confronted a double market pattern---a double operational sequence and double standards of judgment, parallel realities formed both within the system and outside the system. As a result, the fact that the new art lacked the opportunity to be exhibited and sold on the Chinese mainland did not influence its normal circulation within the international artistic system. Its weakness on the domestic market and its success on the international market formed a dramatic contrast.
In inviting critics to engage with his Post-89 Chinese New Art, Johnson Chang had obviously not invited anyone from the theoretical committee of the Chinese Artists Association and the researchers of ‘new art’ were only those people interested in it. However, through the operations of the Western art system, although Chinese avant-garde art could avoid the ‘risk’ that state political reality might bring, it faced new problems. When Johnson Chang and his Chinese contemporary artists walked the streets of Sydney, Venice, São Paulo or some other Western city or shuttled back and forth between exhibition spaces in Western countries, they found that they also left behind a trail of criticism back at home. Critics focused on the question of the cultural and international identity of Chinese contemporary art. As one of the curatorial directors of Post-89 Chinese New Art, Li Xianting pointed out that in promoting ‘Political Pop’ and ‘Cynical Realism’ his original intention had been to ‘facilitate a path for Chinese modern art that both embodied native cultural characteristics and contemporary nature’. However, other critics argued that modern Chinese art works were lacking and could not be the equal of international art.[25]
When Li Xianting was defending the trends of ‘Political Pop’ and ‘Cynical Realism’ which he had promoted, he admitted that in contemporary art a distinction between ‘the center and periphery’ did exist, but emphasized that such a conversation was absolutely essential:
Contemporary art was art with international contemporaneity on the foundation of modern art and only contemporary art can clear up the question of the center and periphery. It is on these two points that Chinese contemporary art can engage in a conversation with the Western, or what we might call the center of international art world. …Contemporaneity is the starting point reached by the distinction between the international and the ethnic, and there is no question of who is catering to whom. In fact, it is only through dialog that one can find one’s own position and become more individualized.[26]
At variance with Li Xianting’s view, the critic and editor Huang Zhuan, in opening the debate on ‘how Chinese contemporary art can acquire international identity’ in the pages of the journal Gallery, wrote in the preface to the discussion of the question:
The concern about the East in art circles East and West in recent years is a reflection of the intellectual trends of ‘post-colonialism’ and ‘non-Eurocentrism’ in the current international political domain, but could it have the aroma of that ‘compassionate’ cultural hunt for oriental novelty of Western middle class and cultural circles in the post-cold war period? Should we cater to this taste or use this opportunity to reaffirm the international position of Chinese contemporary art? To know what posture to adopt to enter the world or to know how to understand international rules in depth in order to be able to position Chinese contemporary art internationally and to recognize its true international value from the perspective of cultural significance is a precondition for transforming ‘a Chinese topic of conversation’ into an ‘international topic of conversation’. Otherwise, an international opportunity can become an international trap.[27]
The success of Political Pop and Cynical Realism in the Western art world led many Chinese critics to begin to pay close attention to questions of ‘post-colonialism’ and Eurocentrism. Westerners’ political interest fueled Western art market demands. The Post-89 Chinese New Art works, especially Political Pop and Cynical Realism works were the exact new products that the Western art market required. Thus, Huang Zhuan reminded people of this in reviewing the discussion of this question in the 1990s: ‘This question had already transcended the range of critical art theory and become a strategic cultural problem with strong practicality …’[28]
In an article titled ‘Oliva Is Not the Savior of Chinese Art’, Wang Lin demonstrated a similar attitude of suspicion towards this ‘dialog’:
In Western eyes, China is the last bastion in East-West confrontation (even though the parties are not well matched) and a fossil of the cold war period (even though things are changing). Therefore, the Chinese artist (logically) is the product of the era of Mao Zedong and the bearer and the force resisting that ideology. Conversely, Chinese Political Pop feigns to use orthodox images of the Cultural Revolution in order to slander orthodox political mythology, while Cynical Realism mocks hollow idealism with frivolous scenes of life. Chinese avant-garde art is therefore destined to be the contemporary resolution of the complex of the Mao era, and is the regional transformation of the avant-garde art of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.[29]
This dispute continued into the new century with no conclusion being reached. In any case, in the promotion of Chinese contemporary art, ‘joining the international track’ and ‘engaging in a dialogue with the world’ had already happened, and throughout the 1990s Chinese avant-garde art was provided with ample motivation for development. Chinese artists’ works could be seen at increasingly more international exhibitions and they appeared together with Western artists in albums and books produced by art history scholars. This situation indicated Chinese modern art’s contemporary change of direction and, regardless of where the motive forces came from and for what reasons, Chinese artists had begun to enter contemporary art fields in the age of globalization.
Within a relatively concentrated timeframe the discourses of the ‘market’ (Guangzhou Biennale) and ‘politics’ (Post-89 Chinese New Art) interconnected and became interdependent. This was the actual situation and unforgettable reality for the Chinese art world in the first years of the 1990s. The Guangzhou Biennale and Post-89 Chinese New Art came with distinctive formulations in their preambles: the former, ‘launching the 1990s’; the latter, ‘striding forward into the 1990s’. The similarities of these slogans might have been a coincidence, but they can also be seen as inevitable because the two exhibitions ultimately relied on the changed, and dramatically changing, realities of China in the 1990s. Seen historically, the former exhibition proposed the basic question of the development of Chinese mainland art – establishing a market system. For Chinese artists, that was a new artistic ideal that they had to fulfill with wisdom and knowledge and one that might entail pain, suffering and callousness if it were to be an ideal that provided limitless possibilities. The latter exhibition also utilized the irreversible Chinese background of reform in the system of the market economy and it promoted Chinese mainland avant-garde art in the mature international artistic environment through the Western art and gallery systems which protected ‘the new art’ which might otherwise have perished in the reasonably immature market mechanisms in China. In other words, it provided the Chinese ‘new art’ of the 1990s with the possibility of developing effectively. As a result, the importance of Post-89 Chinese New Art was far-reaching.
NOTES:
[1] Fine Arts Research (Meishu yanjiu), 1990:4, p.18.
[2] Fan Di’an, ‘Liu Xiaodong or the revelation of truth’ (Liu Xiaodong huo zhenshi de chenshi), Fine Arts Research (Meishu yanjiu), 1990:2.
[3] Genesis (Chuangshiji), 1993 inaugural issue, p.44. This magazine was established in Xi’an, but suspended publication after a short time.
[4] Liu Chun (b.1957), ‘Works should represent an artist’s attitude and position: Conversation with Yue Minjun’ (Zuopin yinggai daibiao yishujia de taidu he lichang: Yue Minjun fangtan lu), 2004.
[5] Gu Chengfeng, ‘Chinese Pop trends’ (Zhongguo bopu qingxiang), Chinese Fine Art in the Nineties: 1990-1992 [90 niandai Zhongguo meishu 1990-1992], Urumqi: Xinjiang Meishu Sheying Chubanshe, 1996, p.92.
[6] In February 1997 the organ of the Chinese Artists Association, Fine Arts Newsletter (Meishu tongxun) published a speech by Li Qi, the veteran painter renowned for having painted Mao Zedong and subsequent Chinese leaders, at the forum convened by the Chinese Artists Association to study spirit of the CPC’s sixth plenary session. This old ‘authority’ who had lost his influence in art circles attacked Political Pop in a speech titled ‘Rubbing our eyes so they see clearly’ (Caliang yanjing), and elevated the issues raised by this art phenomenon to the level of a threat to the nation’s ‘spiritual civilization’. In his speech, Li Qi haplessly noted that ‘the organization supporting the Third Chinese Annual Oil Painting Exhibition ‘at which there were so many Political Pop works’ was the Art Office of the PRC Ministry of Culture and even ‘the three curators of the exhibition’ were officials from the Art Office responsible for fine arts work!’ See: Fine Arts Newsletter (Meishu tongxun), February 1997, pp.3-5. Fine Arts Newsletter (Meishu tongxun) was an official art publication even though it was issued unofficially only within fine arts circles, but it had almost no influence, and it was very difficult for Li Qi’s speech to get any wider and more effective coverage. In contrast with earlier history, such ‘authoritative personages’ were at this time reduced to mere chatter.
[7] The 1995:7 issue of the official magazine Fine Arts (Meishu) reprinted Zhou Yi’s article ‘Political Pop makes waves in Brazil’ (Zhengzhi bopu zai Baxi yinqi fengbo) from the 13 January 1995 issue of the newspaper Southern Weekend (Nanfang zhoumo). The article reported Johnson Chang (Zhang Songren) sending works by Yu Youhan, Li Shan and other mainland artists to Brazil for the São Paulo Biennial, and it touched on the issues of ideological conflict and the changing game rules of the market. The report especially emphasized the question of the ‘smuggling’ (zousi) of art works and how the prompt and efficient operations of the Chinese market had demonstrated that free exchange rendered this problem worthless and beside the point. Even though there were few domestic opportunities to exhibit Political Pop works, these works had entered the international art market through legitimate sales and against a background in which there were no national benefits in the trade, Johnson Chang’s HanArt had relied on the capitalist laws supporting private property and the support of the international art system to send works he himself had bought to this international exhibition, bringing the exhibition and circulation of art to fruition. The article reported that ‘in light of the daily intensifying smuggling of fine art works, the Market Office of the Ministry of Culture and the relevant departments of the State Bureau of Customs have entered into negotiations with a view to rapidly formulating Regulations on the Management of the Fine Arts Trade’. However, it was clear that they not achieve this goal because the contemporary trade in art works had complete support and guarantee from free market principles, and this outmoded ideology could not gain support from effective authorities. This small incident also demonstrates how the market dissipated political violence and initiated a new political chess game.
[8] Not released.
[9] Private letter from Wang Guangyi to Lü Peng, 17 February 1991.
[10] Private letter from Wang Guangyi to Lü Peng, 1 November 1990.
[11] Genesis (Chuangshiji), 1993 inaugural issue, p.45.
[12] Private letter from Ye Yongqing to Wang Lin, 24 August 1992.
[13] From Personal Account, 1995.
[14] In fact, Painter and Art and Market were both registered for publication as ‘books’. In China, obtaining a license number for the publication of an ongoing periodical is unusually difficult, but publishing houses may if they like apply for a publishing license by declaring each issue of a periodical to be a book in a projected series each bearing the same title and retaining the same format, effectively producing a publication that is to all intents and purposes a magazine. A similar procedure was later adopted by Beijing Sanlian Bookstore in publishing Avant-Garde Today (Jinri xianfeng).
[15] Art and Market, no.1, 1991, p.4.
[16] Art and Market, no.6, p.29.
[17] Idem.
[18] Art and Market, no.7 (1992), p.40.
[19] Art and Market, no.8, p.7.
[20] Art and Market, no.8, p.3.
[21] Each issue of Art and Market promoted one or several key artists: Issue no.1, Wang Guangyi; no.2, He Duoling; no.3, Zhang Peili; no.4, Ding Fang; no.5, Zhou Chunya; no.6, Shang Yang; no.7, Shen Xiaotong; no.8, Wang Guangyi and Li Luming; no.9, Shi Chong (b.1963), Zeng Fanzhi and Zhang Yajie. Issue no.1 also ran Gao Minglu’s ‘An overview of Chinese contemporary art’ (Zhongguo dangdai yishu gaikuang), which attempted at the outset to draw readers closer to modern art. Every subsequent issue to varying degrees introduced Chinese and overseas modern artists and their works, and the editors attempted wherever possible to avoid general commercial works with no academic value.
[22] Summary Report of the Biennale Authentication and Evaluation Work (Shuangnianzhan jianding pingshen gongzuo zongjie baogao) recorded different views: (1) The Biennale was a strongly academic exhibition, demonstrating marked properties of the avant-garde, the reason being that exploratory works took the majority of awards, as well as being strongly represented among the selections. (2) The Biennale had the nature of an art expo, bringing together works of every type (academic, commercial, different styles and types). (3) The Biennale showed a high degree of bias and was not nationally representative for a number of reasons: (a) There were not enough realist oil paintings (especially academic oil paintings), and it could not compare with the exhibitions of oil paintings that had been held in Shanghai and Beijing. Of the superior oil paintings in the show, only one succeeded in winning an award, that being a third class award, which was also unfair. (b) Regional bias. Works from Hunan and especially Hubei took an excessively high proportion of the top awards. Other areas, such as the Northeast, Beijing, Shanghai and Zhejiang (all distinguished by their excellent oil paintings), virtually took no awards. The Biennale thus lost credibility as a national event. (4) It had not shaken off its commercial associations, and so it remained a commercial exhibition. The reason was that a high proportion of the works selected for inclusion were commercially commissioned. (Source: Ideals and Operations (Lixiang yu caozuo), Chengdu: Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, 1992, p.78)
[23] Art and Market, no.8, p.2.
[24] The Biennale nevertheless still won the approval of the Guangdong Artists Association and the Guangzhou Municipal Cultural Bureau, and some of the older generation of Guangdong painters such as Tang Xiaoming, Lin Yong and Pan Jiajun also expressed clear support for the Guangzhou Biennale. In order to avoid the conflict between different art concepts, the Guangzhou Biennale critics wanted to break out with the concept of ‘art moving towards the market’, because that concept was synonymous with the guiding political ideology of the time and avoided any talk of contradiction that might emerge with Pop Art and other modern art forms.
[25] Zou Jianping (b.1955), ‘Modernism: The lost golden apple’ (Xiandai-zhuyi: Shiluo de jin pingguo), Gallery (Hualang), 1996:1.
[26] ‘From Venice to São Paulo: Some critics and artists in Beijing discuss the international value of Chinese contemporary art’ (Cong Wenisi dao Shang Baoluo: Bufen zai Jing pipingjia, yishujia tan Zhongguo dangdai yishu de guoji jiazhi), Gallery (Hualang), 1994:4.
[27] Huang Zhuan, ‘How Chinese contemporary art wins international identity’ (Zhongguo dangdai yishu ruhe huoqu guoji shenfen), Gallery (Hualang), 1994:4.
[28] Huang Zhuan, ‘Three big problems of Chinese art criticism in the 1990s’ (90 niandai Zhongguo meishu piping zhong de san da wenti), Contemporary Art and the Humanities (Dangdai yishu yu renwenkexue), Changsha: Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 1999.
[29] Wang Lin, ‘Oliva is not the savior of Chinese art’ (Aoliwa bushi Zhongguo yishu de jiuxing), Dushu, 1993:10.