From 2008 onwards, China became embroiled in the global economic crisis, as the inevitable endpoint in a process initiated by a political decision made at the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Party Central Committee some 30 years previously. At that momentous gathering, the Communist Party of China (CPC) shifted its political line from one in which ‘class struggle’ served as the ‘key link’ to a policy stressing economic construction. This led to the gradual introduction into socialist China of the laws and regulations needed to sustain a capitalist market economy. By the first decade of the 21st century, the status of the Chinese market might not yet have been fully acknowledged by the international community, but China’s accelerating participation in the process of globalization was patently obvious.
The economic crisis made Chinese artists and critics fully realize the nature of globalization’s impact. Indeed, according to the usual view and experience, globalization stemmed from economic strength. Economists such as Alan Rugman define globalization as multinational firms crossing national boundaries, engaging in foreign direct investment, and setting up commercial networks to create activities of value. Other scholars think globalization should be interpreted as a complicated process in many diverse fields including the economy, politics, culture, and technology. But it is the combined strength of politics and culture generated by economic forces that actually impacts on all other human activities in a comprehensive way. Against such a background, Chinese artists faced two difficult choices: On the one hand, they clearly realized that local criteria of value cannot provide the authority and legitimacy for artistic value judgments; on the other hand, the construction of a Chinese national culture is also subject to global pressures but China, unlike Western countries, has not gone through the process of systematically constructing a national culture, and so, in the absence of Western choices and opportunities, Chinese artists can sense a loss of values, and when Westerners make choices it is hard for Chinese artists to avoid the suspicion that these choices are ‘cultural colonialism’. As early as the mid-1990s, the critic Huang Zhuan very clearly expressed the resulting contradictions in culture and the arts: ‘In terms of cultural meaning, when contemporary art of the Third World expresses its own ideas and issues, it always confronts this paradox: It finds itself in the position of constantly resisting the cultural oppression of the doctrine that the West is the center, and whenever it discards its own position of submission, it must also be constantly vigilant to avoid falling into the trap of the ideology of old-fashioned nationalism; in terms of methods, when it establishes its own independent cultural identity, necessarily using the intellectual resources and modes of discourse of the First World, it must also be vigilant in describing how this may have brought alienation to its own identity’. [1]
In the art world, discussions in the 1990s on several artistic questions may have extended into the new century in different forms, and those artists who were important players in modernist and contemporary art in the 1980s and 1990s were now already middle aged. Artistic sensitivity and differences about artistic issues are now the concerns of a younger generation of artists. However, investigating the work of these young Chinese artists is already different from analyzing the art of artists born in the 1950s and 1960s. Most artists born in the 1970s, especially those born after the mid-seventies have no direct experience of history before 1978. They were born when China had begun to restore the national economy and to use Western thought – especially Western liberal thought – to undertake a critical summary and analysis of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ period from 1966 to the end of 1976. The young directly benefited from the opening to Western knowledge and thought and the relatively relaxed freedom of speech of that time, but could read nothing in their textbooks about the thirty years of Chinese history from 1949 to 1978. Thus, although they had acquired some new Western knowledge, they lacked the experience to make any historical comparisons. When officialdom used its various media and opportunities to make propaganda and educate, the content was largely limited to praising the reforms, and as one can imagine, younger people did not gain much knowledge about history simply because of the government policy of opening-up. Indeed, Western thought already permeated intellectual discourse and every corner of society, but in the field of education which officialdom controlled, the political and moral education which students from primary school to university received was mainly confined to Party ideology and government propaganda. No basic knowledge about human civilization or any traditional ethical teaching was wholly or systematically imparted, and as for universal values and concepts – these were fuzzy notions from the West which China had never fully discussed, and officialdom has continued to the present day to remind the population how hostile Western forces will use these as a pretext to subvert socialist China, and if necessary, statements about universal values are often subjected to critique. [2] It is true that the Party and the media increasingly propagate concepts of democracy, fairness and justice, but the political system of this country remains one-party rule, and ‘socialism’ continues to exist both as an ideological concept and as a social system. Among the many ironies is that even though the intellectual emancipation of the 1980s provided the possibility for individualism of different forms and modes, this did not mean that everybody has acquired a systematic understanding of democratic systems and free thought; some young people interpret individual freedom to mean that one can do whatever one wants, and so they lack any situational or historical consciousness for discussing related concrete issues. Most of them are unaware that whatever freedom or individualism they have today is related to the adoption in July 1977 by the 10th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China at its 3rd plenary session of the ‘Resolution on Comrade Deng Xiaoping resuming his post’; they do not realize that the current situation is also related to the publication on 10 May, 1978 in Theoretical Trends (Lilun dongtai), the internal organ of the CPC’s Party School, of an article authorized by Hu Yaobang (1915-1989) and titled ‘Practice is the sole criterion for testing truth’; they are also unaware of the connection with the 25 November, 1978 decision made at the working conference of the CPC Central Committee’s plenary session reversing the original verdict that those involved in the Tiananmen Incident of April 5, 1976 were ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Few people have concerned with later questions: What was the historical significance of such a major event as the decision of the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Party Central Committee on 18 December, 1978 to make the focus of all Party work from 1979 onwards ‘the switch to the socialist modernization drive’? The young could only enjoy the benefits of these events, and even regarded the freedoms of today and the legitimacy of the individual’s private world as natural things, not knowing the underlying background and political reasons for this ‘natural’ situation. In fact, the young care little about the political issues that concerned people in the 1950s, and there is only a minority, such as the writer Han Han who is idolized for his novels and blogs, who see a large number of institutional factors (such as, the Great Wall erected on the internet to prevent free human exchanges) as serious problems to be tackled.
Since 1949, Chinese art has been inextricably linked with politics. At the beginning of the eighties, critics called on people to pay greater attention to the aesthetic function of art, and to abandon the position that art is the tool of doctrine. Because of history – especially the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, to the present day artists and critics have tended to avoid the vocabulary of ‘politics’. Unlike economists, who regard politics as a mechanism that accompanies the distribution of public goods, artists and critics mainly interpret politics as thought, concepts, and ideology, and in this way, for reasons of inertia and ideology, contemporary artists often either intentionally or unintentionally combine art with political matters, but invariably never elaborate on the relationship between art and politics. Artistic and critical circles are still filled with an atmosphere of strenuously avoiding controversial political issues, even though political issues are constantly at the forefront of questions related to journalism, the internet media, exhibition inspections, and the allocation of resources. At the same time, the complexity of social affairs has also led to complexity in the expression of politics - for example, political sensitivity stemming from ecological problems, from the process of appropriating and demolishing people’s houses and then relocating them as an aspect of urbanization, and even from rescue efforts during natural disasters.
Just as the works of many young artists proclaim, the high-speed development of the market economy and material ‘progress’ - mainly in the urban context - have satisfied people’s basic demands, and at a time when ‘made in China’ is also becoming a fashionable concept globally, many people - including of course those young artists - very naturally seemed to readily regard today’s world as one very different from that perceived by artists born in the 1950s and 1960s. In academia and art circles, the two decades since the beginning of the 1990s brimming with ‘post-modern’ theory, the streets and lanes brimful of goods that circulate in world markets, and the global links established by the Internet even delude people into thinking that national boundaries are illusory. In artistic circles, it had become routine for artists to fly to New York, Paris, Venice, London and numerous other cities in Western countries to participate in exhibitions or attend activities; the net effect of this also blurred the notion of borders - between nations, histories, politics, economies, cultures, ideologies and even habits and customs, and these feelings also blurred people’s judgmental lines of vision.
Changes in the material world generally led people to think that the reform and market economy had basic legitimacy, based on the indirect and latent characteristics of the impact of politics on daily life and on the basis of society’s lack of any new guiding values. As a result, with the development of the economy, background interests, experience and personal knowledge begin to influence people’s judgments. The 2000 Shanghai Biennale gave some people the feeling that ideology had been dispelled and the atmosphere was filled with globalization, because the different concepts of art, taste, and interest, as well as profit demands of the Biennale’s policy makers, operators and participants, as well as their varying degrees of political sensitivity, dispelled any unified ideological criteria. Many critics still doubted that the reality of such ‘globalization’ could enjoy any assurances from the political system in China, but the political rule decided on as early as in the early 1990s that the demarcation lines between ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ could not be debated sustained and perpetuated this non-debatable reality, by not allowing it to surface as ideological conflict. In China, people had for a long time been forced to accept the view that economics and politics were quite separate: capitalist markets and technology served the socialist economy, and a market economy and socialism were not contradictory. However, this kind of explanation provided no corresponding foundation in the political system or any unified system of value judgments for the fields of literature and art. Some contemporary artists and critics (mainly teachers in some institutes) had different degrees of contact with the political system, simply by being for example teachers or professors in institutes, and in different spaces with different degrees of intensity and technology they relied on moving back and forth, inside and outside the system. However, this does not mean that there were no demarcation lines around the political system. Since the beginning of the 1990s, two realities – the system and one outside the system - had gradually taken shape in parallel, and regardless of however fuzzy the artistic criteria of the political system were, the old ideology and the official standards that depended on it for their survival continued to exist; the ‘main tune’ (zhuxuanlü) which officialdom propagated was merely an ambiguous substitute term for what had in the past been called ‘political tasks’. Those artists who needed to rely on galleries and the market are not controlled by such criteria in the slightest. As a result, there were two art worlds in China, even though information about these two art worlds was often presented to the world on the same website, e.g. Artron.
After the year 2000, nobody could convincingly point in which direction art would develop, and at a time when the legal identity of capitalists (who if willing could now also join the ranks of the Communist Party as a proletarian vanguard) occupied the mainstream, the questions of whom art should serve and the direction in which art should develop had further emerged in the mechanism of art. The complicated economic sectors had produced complex social strata, but ultimately which stratum was the main strength in this society, or did the different strata constitute a new historical totality? Within the official art system few people contemplated, or could even articulate, these questions.
Most people could see that the economic reforms seriously challenged the authority of the old system, as well as the right of ‘experts’ and ‘authorities’ to speak out. Wu Guanzhong was an older painter within the system, and he was an interesting special case, because he frankly stated that the Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the ‘artists associations’, and the state academies were necessarily suspect, and this made official ‘authorities’ and ‘experts’ extremely tense and enraged. Basically speaking, they found that Wu’s criticism of them challenged their very legitimacy in this new historical period. In fact, these organizations continued to exist throughout the period in which the market economy rapidly developed, because there had been no change in the political system of China, and the old ideological criteria in the worlds of culture and art still existed. In step with the reforms and seeing things from the positions of tactics and cost accounting, the costs consumed by these organizations was insignificant compared with other areas of the old system; because of the system itself, the propaganda function of art still occupied an important position in the work of ideological administrative departments, and so the continuation of these organizations still had a political raison d’être, since the power of the markets and their institutional improvement had still not impinged on the power of mandatory intervention that these organizations enjoyed. At the same time, because art works had the attribute of being goods that could be immediately exchanged for currency, those people in the system who consumed taxpayers’ money could similarly place their own works in the market through the use of power and skillful language; as a result, they not only had power and capital but also obtained material benefits offered by the market at the same time, and they made use of the twin opportunities presented from within the political system (power) and outside the political system (markets). From this perspective, capital also played a part in maintaining the old system.
During the 30 years of reform, official arts organizations in China never staged an exhibition of modern or contemporary Chinese art, except in 1989 when the China Art Gallery (now the National Art Museum of China) allowed the ’89/China Modern Art Exhibition to be staged. This demonstrates that there was no new art system to support new art and artists, and the system and criteria under which art operated were not at all those that accorded with the historical stage which the reforms in this country had attained. The question of which works of art state galleries should ultimately collect had become seriously pressing, if the actual requirements of an age of the reform and of the historical stage this country had reached were to be met. However, against a background in which the state constitution finally contained guarantees of the protection of private property, and contemporary art products were constantly circulating in society as private property items, it was unavoidable that as private collections grew there was an acute need to be able to convert these important resources of the newly constructed system from private commodities into public holdings.
One phenomenon which perplexed critics in the first ten years of the new century entailed the startlingly sky-high prices that Cynical Realist and Political Pop art works produced since 1993 were realizing on international markets. Until 2008, critics launched direct attacks on the artists and works who obtained such high prices in auction salesrooms. Meanwhile, also participating in this criticism of high price artists were some critics of the older generation, such as Gao Minglu who had lived for the previous 20 years in the U.S.A., but who clamored to add his voice to those of these critics. On the other hand, Chinese contemporary art since the beginning of the 1990s had never received approval from the official ‘artists associations’, and even in December 2008, the Chinese Artists Association’s ‘Work Report’ still singled out contemporary art for censure. As a consequence the two artistic phenomena - Cynical Realism and Political Pop – found themselves consistently the brunt of two groups of critics – those critics of high price artists mentioned previously who had never made their values and position clear, and the official line spelled out by the ‘artists associations’.
The transitions in the political system and the reforms that had taken place in the economic system over the previous 30 years were incompatible, and the reality was simply described as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. However, the main embodiment of these ‘Chinese characteristics’ was the material wealth generated by the development of this market economy and the reality of this incomplete market transition, which resulted in a uniquely ‘fractured society’. In any case, the nature of ‘socialism’ – the Communist Party holding power and the incomplete market economy – received its guarantees from the official media, ideological propaganda, the structure of education, and the political system. This was also the reason why the National Artists Association administered by the government under the leadership of the Party could use large amounts of taxpayers’ money to hold an art exhibition extolling the Communist Party, while art which reflected or embodied real problems and new concepts had to continue to survive in an uncertain market environment as it totally lacked any state funding.
Politics still functions as a brake on contemporary art by controlling the mechanisms of public property. One only has to investigate the history of the fine arts since 1979 to realize that whenever there is any discussion on the platform for artistic exchange, or on the environments in which art works are exchanged and artists receive the costs and resources from this trade and exchange with the artist in trade of the work of art, one can see the influence politics exerts on contemporary art: it is the official fine arts organizations that really hold the legal power, the opportunities, and the resources to conduct exchanges, and these official organizations control the right to represent the country and the right to distribute the relevant resources. Those contemporary Chinese artists who already play a significant role in the international community have never become the representatives of China’s contemporary national culture, and it is the enforcers (or messengers) of the national ideology, the National Artists Association, who have no understanding at all of the position in the world of these artists, but suspect instead that there is some ulterior motive behind the forces that have pushed these Chinese artists to prominent status.
In brief, today’s art circles have no conceptual mansion that can symbolize the times, demonstrating that Chinese art has over the first decade of the 21st century entered a more complicated new stage. When we consider how the new system related to art was produced by the economic development of the market, the diversification of artistic phenomena, the multiplicity of positions in critical circles, the chaotic confusion in values, and the multi-layering of stances, viewpoints, and tactics, we can regard this first decade of the new century as the decade of the possibly inevitable (and appropriate) shattering and dissolution of the revolution in modernist and contemporary art that began after 1979.
Saturday, 5 February, 2011
NOTES:
[1]Huang Zhuan: ‘Issues and forms in Third World contemporary art’ (Disan-shijie dangdai yishu de wenti yu fangshi).
[2] In February 2007, as one of the Party’s leaders Wen Jiabao made the following statement in an article entitled ‘On the historical tasks in the primary stage of socialism and several problems I have encountered in foreign policy’ (Guanyu shehui-zhuyi chuji jieduan de lishi renw he wo guo duiwai zhengce de jige wenti): ‘Science, democracy, a legal system, freedom, and human rights are not the exclusive preserve of capitalism, but are values which mankind has pursued in common in the course of a long historical process and they are the fruits of civilization created together’. However, this statement has had no bearing on the critique of ‘universal values’. In 2008, Chen Kuiyuan, Head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, made the following criticism: ‘In the past Christianity advocated its religious doctrines as universal values, and today the West authoritatively pronounces its ‘democratic views’, ‘views on human rights’ and its free market economic theory to be universal values; China is like a shadow following a person when we too talk volubly about wanting to integrate with “universal values’’’. (See: Panorama [Guangjiaojing], September-October issue 2010, no. 456)