In the summer of 1990, I travelled from Chengdu to Kunming, to visit Mao Xuhui in his city home. At that time, everybody had recovered from the depressed mood of the previous year, and we were discussing art again, as well as the future of art. It is already very difficult for me to remember the psychological mood of the last half of 1989, and I am only reminded of it when I see statements from that period in magazines and other publications, talking about those obscured and hazy days that lacked direction. In fact, the artistic phenomena of that time, such as Cynical Realism and Political Pop, were already quite unlike the modern art of the 1980s that had expressed metaphysical ideas and set out to record the agonies of the soul. Later, it dawned on everyone that the Bohemian emotions and mood of that earlier period had been well and truly roped in, opening up a yawning chasm that would prove fatal to enter. Perhaps there was also some instinctive reason why, in the summer and autumn of 1990, I took the trouble to carefully understand and observe Mao Xuhui’s art, and I completed an article running to more than 20,000 characters, its title at that time being ‘Mao Xuhui: The Figurative and the Narrative of Life’. In December 2005, Mao Xuhui had his first solo retrospective exhibition at the Xin Dong Cheng Space for Contemporary Art, and this article appeared as the catalogue essay accompanying that exhibition. Reading it today and disregarding the style of writing, the content transports me back to that time, and I feel that these words still suffice for reconstructing the psychological mood that then prevailed. During that time I also finished writing ‘Wang Chuan: Moving to the Start of the Beginning’ and ‘Wang Guangyi: Pictorial Revision and Cultural Critique’, and these articles too take me back to the feelings and the emotions I once experienced. Later, I did not write up more detailed research on individual artists. In the 1990s it was hard to earn a living, and from 1993 to 1998, my writing was fairly scattered and at times did not really come to anything. In October 1998, I was drinking with a number of friends in Zhang Xiaogang’s small bar in Chengdu, and something Wang Guangyi said alerted me to write my History of Contemporary Chinese Art: 1990- 1999. In 2001, I became a doctoral candidate working under Fan Jingzhong and during my study time I completed my dissertation on landscape painting of the Song dynasty titled Pure Views Remote from Streams and Mountains: Chinese Landscape Painting in 10th-13th Century. These two large writing projects had again aroused my interest in historical writing. So when I was in Sanya completing my A History of Art in Twentieth-century China, I also began writing the case study, ‘Song Yonghong: The Objective Expression of Spiritual Consolation’, which I completed in the Rive du Moulin Coffee Shop in Sanya in March 2005.
Later, I wrote case studies of many other artists, and these were also intended to inform my art history students about my own feelings and experience, so that they too could participate in the study of contemporary art history. It seems that it has always been very difficult for me to ever put aside my interest in art history, whether it is the stories of today or the events of the past. Most people question the writing of contemporary art history, especially the application of the term ‘history’ to contemporary artists, and there are many reasons for this. Especially in an era in which value judgments have been lost, people can affirm or deny an art event or an artist’s work from any perspective. A long time ago, critics and scholars reminded us that ‘all history is contemporary history’ in order to demonstrate that persons can and do have the authority to write about everything that has ever happened, and after Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Sigmund Freud, Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood made that point. After Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Juergen Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu, people felt quite free to do so.
There are many issues related to historical writing, and we can only explain our own perspective and position. In other words, mankind can never be troubled by changes in ‘language’ or ‘lexicon’. One cannot be swayed by things that are rhetorically flowery and dazzling. Indeed, history requires that the person writing history possesses wide-ranging knowledge, because anything may become the object of history studies. However, for the writer of contemporary art history the important thing is not phenomena, but the relationship between those phenomena. E. M. Gombrich (1909-2001) constantly revised, supplemented and altered his history of human art, and while we might even disagree with his basic view on art, this scholar who significantly influenced the historiography of Chinese art stressed that it was most important to retain ‘historical sense’ and never be swayed by things I describe as rhetorically flowery and dazzling.
‘Historical sense’ cannot attain numerically or rationally verifiable material, and so it is easily scorned or ignored. However, there is historical writing conscientiously produced by individuals with genuine historical experience: Historical writing requires a special ability to ‘convey feelings’ and this ability is often described as human empathy and compassion. Historical writing is to a great extent understanding the eternal questions of civilization. Simply put: The historian’s instinct is responsibility; the historian’s main task is to observe the passage of time; and the historian’s dilemmas stem from anxieties and misgivings about historical problems. These instincts, tasks and dilemmas cannot change because of the emergence of new art-historical concepts, because even newer concepts of art history are constantly emerging. There are in fact connections between ‘historical sense’ and restorative historiography, but the restoration of emotional situations using ‘historical sense’ is not in vain. ‘Restoration’ entails questions of time, materials, images and perspectives, but if the historian’s hope to succeed in ‘restoration’ proceeds from personal responsibility and historical sense it will probably produce good results.
When an artist’s work becomes the object of our research, it is not because his (or her) art is magnificent or amazing, but because the work enables us to understand questions that their specific society and intelligence constantly raise for our investigation. I had already finished completed writing an art history in three parts, when I felt that we should at the same time freshly examine what has already formed part of the edifice of history through the medium of case studies. Comprehensive histories, including those arranged dynastically, embody a world outlook, but the perspective can encompass what is a priori and coincidental. Those of us born in the 1950s have a conscious experience of the Cultural Revolution, and we have the abundant resources for understanding and knowing this extended historical period that began with the liberation of thinking in the 1980s and the development of the market economy in the 1990s and resulted in China’s unprecedented international influence stemming from economic development, and so the question emerges of why we do not go out and research and write about those things with which we are so related? There is an ever-growing documentation about the ‘the flourishing age of the Tang and Song’, but when we come to the suffering and problematic 20th century, even though the available materials remain scattered and incomplete, what events and phenomena can actually stimulate our historical sense? The answer would seem self-evident. The generation born in the 1950s received no training in traditional knowledge, and their desire to liberate themselves was, comparatively speaking, expressed in the 1980s through their acquisition of Western knowledge that far outstripped their understanding of their own tradition. As someone born in the 1950s, I admire those scholars who can again tackle those ancient volumes and enhance and deepen our knowledge. However, I prefer to expend my energy in recording and researching contemporary art, and bringing to the subject my experience of different periods of Chinese history. Having seen the national economy move from the brink of collapse to its rise as an influential world player, the fascist autocracy be replaced by an awakening democratic consciousness, and empty idealism give way to individual consciousness, we discover that there are so many questions that we contemporaries need to resolve and summarize, so why are we not engaged in writing about the contemporary age? This psychology is surely historical sense. Unlike critical writing, including my own, the different case histories in this collection investigate, analyze and study the unique experiences of individuals within particular social, political and economic contexts. I have not expended ink on the excessive analysis of art forms, nor have I exhaustively explicated conceptual questions possibly encompassed within artistic phenomena. My experience tells me that formal analysis allows us to see targets clearly, but context helps to understand the reasons why those targets exist. This work is indispensable for historical writing, unless we are to deny that the discipline of history is a civilized genre. The more we penetrate the connections between details, the more we are able to find the source of the question; the more we indulge in metaphysical speculation, the further we are from the past of history. This is so of histories of philosophy, let alone histories of events. The work of writing art history is reliant on art criticism, although ultimately historical writing is not criticism. In my recent writing, I feel that it is extremely important to observe this distinction.
Nobody compelled me to begin this research project with a particular artist. One day in 1992, I bought a train ticket to go to Wuhan, and it was on a later train from Wuhan to Changsha that I began to write about Wang Guangyi. The history of the new art constantly reminds historical investigators that a single drop of water can possibly reflect the world. Urged on by personal interest, artists, publishers and exhibition work, I have been constantly writing case histories of artists, although not according to any plan; those that I have completed to date still fall far short of doing justice to the abundance of contemporary art, but in each one we can see how contemporary art has transformed. As these case studies increase in number, we will be better able to see the pattern and detail of art history more clearly. In fact, the interaction of research from both macroscopic and microscopic perspectives will enable us to see the overall picture of history.
In writing The History of Modern Chinese Art: 1979-1989, I quoted from the first chapter of Herbert Read’s A Concise History of Modern Painting, a influential work among modern Chinese artists and critics, where he cites Collingwood: ‘Contemporary history embarrasses a writer, not only because he knows too much, but also because what he knows is too undigested, too unconnected, too atomic. It is only after close and prolonged reflection that we begin to see what was essential and what was important, to see why things happened as they did, and to write history instead of newspapers’. From today’s perspective, it seems that Collingwood was basically an essentialist, but we should be clear that the spiritual kernel in his essentialism was responsibility.
History is often written by contemporaries, in the same way as Giorgio Vasari (1511- 1574) was a contemporary of the Renaissance about which he wrote. The contemporaneousness of writing is not in question, the key being that the attitude and stance of the writer determine the responsibility that imbues the writer’s judgment and comprehension. As I mentioned, these are the things that constitute ‘historical sense’.
The historian does not make excessively assertive or conclusive statements, and simply unravels the skein of ‘historical facts’ from his materials to weave his understanding of history; he cannot rush to conclusions on the basis of the facts he uncovers, and only by placing those facts within the structure of context can he allow these facts to automatically endorse his conclusions. In the process of constant writing, I was not confined by any particular methodology for researching art history. We should realize that in historical writing, the pure wine can make people very intoxicated so cocktails may be more effective.
In order to furnish readers unfamiliar with art history with a comprehensible narrative, I have not arranged the catalogue chronologically according to when the case studies were written, but have given priority to arranging the articles according to the priority of the historical problems they uncover, so that ‘Huang Rui: The Context of the Stars’ is at the beginning. The advantage of this arrangement is that readers can follow the outlines of history through the case studies.
As a ‘hundred flowers bloom’ in the contemporary art world, the Hunan Publishing Group and the Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House reached a decision to collect and manage contemporary art, and decided to mount exhibitions of artists based on the research and writings of Zhu Zhu and myself, simultaneously creating the conditions for the publication of my study Artists in Art History and collecting and exhibiting the works of the artists included in the volume. This is something that my friends had hoped to see achieved for many years, and only now has it come to fruition. My many translations and writings have been published by Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, and I believe that without that past cooperation it would have been difficult to arrive at the stage we are at today. I wish to thank my colleagues at the Hunan Publishing Group and the Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House as one of the curators of the exhibition Case Histories: The Artists of Art History and Art Criticism, and in particular also thank Zou Jianping, Li Luming, Xiao Peicang, Sun Ping, Yao Yangguang, Li Xiaoshan and Wang Hua for their many years of support and encouragement. I still remember how in the 1980s whenever Zou Jianping sent me a photograph of his latest work I had that warm feeling one has of revolutionary comrades coming together under the banner of modernism.
At the same time, I also wish to extend my thanks to Chen Meiling of Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House’s SZ Art Center and her colleagues for the diligent work and care that they have shown in preparing this exhibition. I also want to express my compliments and gratitude to Dr. Bruce Gordon Doar, who during a short time translated, checked and correlated all the drafts with intelligence and diligence, bringing his own fine skills to the task, and enabling the book to serve as a future reference volume for English readers.
Finally, I wish to thank all the many artists who directly and indirectly lent this project their support. Without the excellent material they provided for the case histories, the publication of this collection would have been inconceivable. Most importantly, regardless of discrepancies, it is the art that takes centre-stage in the history of contemporary art and the work of these contemporary artists has consoled and encouraged so many people.
Saturday 16 February 2008