When looking at the variety of theories about the beginning of Chinese Contemporary Art, it’s not difficult to notice that the differences among these theories are deeply rooted in the art historians’ different understandings of Modern Chinese Art. Judging from the framework of western art history, Modern Chinese Art might have existed for five centuries.
In his essay Double Modernity, Para-Modernity, Jonathan Hay pointed out that modernity that does not ultimately derive from Euro-America might have come into being in as early as the 17th century in China.
However, most Chinese art historians would push this date forward by at least 300 years. For thousands of years, Chinese Art has developed in its own logic, which isn’t easily interchangeable with the western model. It was not until the late 20th century that people started to use the western framework to define and institutionalize Chinese Art.
At the turn of the 20th century, under the continuous military, economic, and cultural pressures from the West, Chinese intellectuals and artists began to seek help from the modern world to revive their weakening tradition. This New Cultural Enlightenment Movement not only legitimised western Modern Art in China but also established a mainstream intellectual discourse that later became the foundation of Chinese modernity.
Other scholars believe that the Maoist ideology, which prevailed around the 1960s to the 1970s, dramatically broke the traditional boundary, and directly influenced the first generation of Chinese contemporary artists who were born in the 1950s.
Deng Xiaoping’s modernizing policies of the late 1970s offered artists more opportunities to learn about art from around the world, as well as the ability to work independently of the state commission and the sanctioned Socialist Realist style. A profusion of different styles and experimental tendencies subsequently emerged. The Stars Group, which included Ai Weiwei, produced works spanning several different Western avant-garde styles, while the Xiamen Dada group created enigmatic works that subverted the logic of modernisation.
The ‘85 New Wave culminated in the 1989 “China Avant-Garde” exhibition, which was shut down by the state after two days when Xiao Lu shot a bullet into her own sculpture. The early 1990s saw the ascendancy of two styles that engaged in sharp cultural critiques: Political Pop and Cynical Realism, as well as the performance-oriented East Village movement in Beijing.
More recent movements include the Post-70s Ego Generation, which consists of young artists raised under China’s One-Child policy who tend to take the self as a subject rather than the collective. Many contemporary Chinese artists, however, such as Cai Guo-Qiang and Ai Weiwei most famously, continue to take broader social issues and traditions as the basis for their work.
In the 1980s, after Mao died and the Cultural Revolution ended, a new artistic generation embraced western Modern Art again. And this time, the avant-garde movement emerged with a more radical tone of social and cultural criticism.
The avant-garde artists saw themselves as cultural pioneers whose task was to enlighten the masses, fight for social reform and rebel against the past. They criticised the state-
dominant ideology, which had long suppressed individuality.
This utopian ideology underwent a huge transition in the early 1990s, as a result of the Tiananmen incident and the shutting down of the Chinese Avant-Garde Exhibition in 1989. With the failure of the democracy movement in the 1980s, and under the unexpected rise of mass culture, many artists abandoned their humanist passion. More neutral or even cynical attitudes gave rise to Political Pop and Cynical Realism in the 1990s. Realist painters have, for various reasons, attained monetary success. In contrast, avant-garde artists have lost their audience.
Some believe that this downturn of the utopian avant-garde in the 1980s can be traced back to some often neglected art projects that took place around 1986 and 1987. These projects signified deep dissatisfaction with the on-going Modern Art movement. They tried to break out of the historical framework of western art, and embraced local history, instead of being fixed on philosophical thinking. Furthermore, they rejected collectivism and focused more on individual pursuits.
Interestingly, artists involved in these early projects, such as Wu Shanzhuan, Gu Wenda, and Xu Bing, all became the leading figures in the Contemporary Chinese Art movement of the 1990s. The rise of these artists coincided with the weakening of the 1985 movement. Some believe that the exhibition of Modern Chinese Art in 1989 was, in fact, the last effort to sustain the waning momentum of the Modern Art movement, rather than a visionary project to bring the future to the present.
These artists in the 1986 group had all travelled to the west during the late 1980s and early 1990s. If any sort of “rupture” really existed, it must have been in some way related to the artists’ lives overseas.“Now that we have a completely different but equally powerful benchmark (the western art),” wrote Xu Bing in his letter about Modern Chinese Art in 2007, “our understanding of the value of our own culture has become deeper and more objective. The more we understand the West, the more we cherish our own culture. Our traditional culture, socialist culture and even Cultural Revolution and Maoism are valuable. Only if we are able to combine these traditions with the western culture, can we create art of the future… Chinese avant-garde should be shown to Chinese people, instead of just catering to the taste of western curators.”
This quote explains why the art projects around 1986 tried so hard to break out of the framework of Western Art and embrace traditional Chinese Art.
“My new work “Book from the Ground” may seem to be transnational and contemporary, and it incorporates new technology. However, the key to my inspiration for this work comes from our traditional hieroglyphic. Chinese people are the most sensitive to pictorial writings, this is why I’m so interested in this iconography,” Xu explained in his letter.
Although Xu Bing and other artists from the 1986 group gained international recognition almost at the same time as the Political Pop and Cynical Realism artists, the art critics and art historians discuss these two groups separately. Many critics question the future market of Political Pop and Cynical Realism but do not question the future market of the 1986 group. The fundamental difference between the two is that the former relies almost entirely on the West, and the latter sought out to represent their own culture and tradition. But even Xu Bing himself has implied in his writing that Chinese Art hasn’t become Contemporary yet. Real Contemporary, as some art historians have pointed out, is art that is de-“ideologicalised.”
Ever since 1980, the Chinese Contemporary Art movement has been centred on one issue, the conflict between the official ideology (“the state institution in its own interests, produces a purposely misinterpreted conception of reality and endows it with the status of the ‘truth’, making it the official discourse”) and the unofficial ideology (the motivation shared by avant-garde artists of the 1980s to break down the constraints of the authority of official discourse and reclaim freedom of expression). The continuous existence of ideologic-centrism lies in the prevailing antagonist way of thinking; the real “task” for the Contemporary artists is to carry out an “un-unofficial” art, which breaks out from the ideologic-centrism, and which encourages real freedom of creation.
In as early as 1988, a Beijing-based artist group named “New Measurement” Group had already noticed such necessities and had started to experiment with this freedom of creation. These works were regarded by some art historians as the heart of the Chinese avant-garde movement of the 1980s and 1990s.
The three group members, Wang Luyan, Gu Dexin, and Chen Shaoping, spent eight years operating mechanically using rules, formulas, diagrams, signs, and manuscripts, which recorded their processes. This gave birth to a new ‘non-art’ language situated between letters, mathematics, and linguistic research; ideological problems were transcended by purely numerical and rational research.
Today, the market in China has grown faster than any other markets in the world over the past ten years, with its fair deals of side effects – positives and negatives. What we are witnessing now is as impressive as its growth: its capacity to change and adapt to new realities, in a fraction of time compared to the Western art market’s long history.
The Chinese market is becoming far more international. Buyers of Chinese contemporary art are from all over the world, and this will increasingly be the case. With the number of international venues increasing quickly for Chinese artists, no doubt that this trend will continue. Similarly, as Francois Curiel, CEO of Christie’s Asia said: “Chinese buyers are also beginning to buy European and American contemporary art.” A recent example of this was when Wang Jianlin, China’s richest man, bought a $28 million Picasso at auction.
There’s a fantastic new generation of artists in China whose creativity and originality only demands to be seen. Some experts, such as Arne Glimcher, founder of Pace Gallery, go as far as saying that the “Western narrative has, to a large extent ended, and the Chinese one just began.”