Two Swift Decades One Incredible Art Scene

By Zhang Zhaohui

Today's Ball Party

When viewed in the context of history, the twenty-year development of contemporary Chinese art is but a blink of the eye, yet in terms of personal experience, it records the era in which my generation grew up. It captures our pains and gains, achievements and frustrations, happiness and bitterness.

Chinese-Painting-Series-Lan

In Beijing in the late 1970s, I was still in junior high school but was already fascinated by fine art. I studied painting at Haidian Children's Palace in the far northwest corner of Beijing and would often cycle from the Fragrant Hills to the China Art Gallery, to the gallery of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and to the Imperial Ancestral Temple (Tai Miao) within the Forbidden City, to visit art exhibitions. I have vivid memories of the Stars Group painting exhibition and the Democracy Wall that appeared during that time in 1979. The Stars Group exhibition, which was held in late 1979, demonstrated the sensitive and courageous attempts of these young artists to break away from the ruling ideology. From exhibiting on the walls outside the China Art Gallery, to being banned and then finally being admitted into the national gallery, the exhibitions and activities of the Stars Group, and their spiritual allies, the obscure poets Bei Dao and Yang Lian, reflected warfare between two forces. The Stars naturally dissolved as the main participants, Wang Keping, Ai Weiwei, Qu Leilei and Ma Desheng, went abroad and settled down in foreign lands.

Closely following the Stars Group came the styles of Scar and Country Life Painting led by artists living in the southwestern provinces of China. Luo Zhongli, Cheng Conglin, Ai Xuan, He Duoling and Chen Danqing initiated these schools. They painted the life of minority peoples and villagers in the remote areas where they had spent years of their youth ploughing the land, as a record their own experiences during the Cultural Revolution, and a reflection upon life's hardships and bitterness. Luo Zhongli's Father and Chen Danqing's Tibet Series are masterpieces of this school of painting. I clearly remember when Father was hung in the main exhibition hall of the China Art Gallery. The peasant's deep eyes and weather-beaten face drew many people to stand long in contemplation before him.

Standard-Family

In late 1985, the American artist Robert Rauschenberg showed a range of his works at the China Art Gallery. It was the first time in fifty years that a Chinese audience was brought face to face with modern American artworks. The exhibition halls were crowded with people who felt refreshed by a totally new form of art that they did not quite yet understand. It served to excite young Chinese artists' enthusiasm to learn from him, and the show proved a stimulant to the nascent avant-garde movement. Overnight, a number of Chinese artists began producing 'ready-mades' and installations, and hundreds of avant-garde art groups and experimental art exhibitions appeared. I was then studying in Nankai University in Tianjin, and the weekly China Fine Art Newspaper provided me with all the latest trends in the new art. Together with the emerging avant-garde, modern western art works and the range of art theory that was introduced in large quantities - even though much of it was poorly translated - constituted an important part of the heated discussions that began to take place about traditional and modern, eastern and western art across China.

New Human

The avant-garde movement culminated in the China Avant-Garde Exhibition held at the China Art Gallery in February 1989. Organized by ten young art theorists, more than three hundred works by almost one hundred avant-garde artists from all over China filled the exhibition halls. The show was important in offering an unprecedented review of avant-garde art in China to that date. Although I was not directly involved in the exhibition, excited, yearning, yet hypercritical like those artists, I witnessed the drama of the exhibition came in for criticism. Later, the art critics Gao Minglu, Hou Hanru, Zhou Yan and Kong Chang'an, and the artists Xu Bing, Huang Yongping and Wu Shanzhuan went abroad and the curtain fell on the first act of the great avant-garde movement.

Imigrate Workers

In the early 1990s, a new generation of artists began to emerge. They were represented by young teachers at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Bejing, like Liu Xiaodong, Yu Hong, Wang Hao, Shen Ling, Wang Yuping, and Wang Jinsong and Wang Yousheng, who made their debut in New Generation, an exhibition shown at the History Museum in Beijing in 1991. The 'satirical realists' were represented by Fang Lijun, Liu Wei and Yue Minjun, whilst the pop artist Representatives was Wang Guangyi, Zhang Peili, Ren Jian, Yu Youhan, Geng Jianyi, and Wang Ziwei. The 'new generation' artists' approach to realism relied on personal technique as they depicted the routines of daily life. They placed great emphasis on the need to explore artistic language, ignoring spiritual pursuits. The satirical artists expressed a sense of malaise and loss, reflected in their use of distortion. 'Pop' artists used popular and easily recognizable symbols to illustrate changing attitudes towards the socio-economic situation. These three schools of painting became the standard image of Chinese avant-garde art within the international art scene in the early 1990s.

Meanwhile, a new school emerged in Chinese ink painting, the new literati represented by Zhu Xinjian. The artists of the school emphasized tradition and paid much attention to the control of brush and ink. The majority of their paintings concern their personal life and interests and as a result, critics accused the new literati of not caring about social problems. Part of the reason for their lack of social awareness derived from a sense of futility with the world. However, the attitude of these artists was undeniably representative of the thinking in some quarters.

Book from the Sky

In the mid-1990s, the new genre of 'gaudy' art emerged out of the pop art trend, represented by Xu Yihui, Liu Zheng, the Luo Brothers, Wang Qinsong, Yang Wei and Qi Zhilong. Many of their works reveal the obvious influence of controversial American kitsch artist Jeff Koons, as well as reflecting the prospering Chinese economy in a tendency toward a secular and vulgar art. A further aspect of the art of the mid-1990s was the flourishing of performance art and conceptual photography. Performance artists included Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming and Cang Xin. Since 1995, photography had been developed as a conceptual medium, of which Wang Jinsong's Standard Family is an outstanding example. At that time I was in the United States studying contemporary art criticism and curatorial studies, but each move on the domestic or international scene by Chinese artists attracted my attention.

Fish

In the summer of 1998 I returned to Beijing from New York just in time to catch the next new wave in contemporary Chinese art. Some young artists were exploring new media such as video, installation and the Internet, and artists and curators were staging various exhibitions that utilized the increasingly influential media to widen their influence. Zhang Peili was the first artist to explore the potentials of video in China. He completed his first video artwork titled Standard Pronunciation in 1986. Other influential video artists include Song Dong, Qiu Zhijie, Wang Gongxin, Zhao Liang, Wu Ershan, Weng Fen, Yang Zhenzhong, and Xu Zhen. As computers became more readily accessible in China, artists were provided with a convenient material and technique for their artistic explorations. In early 2000, artist Huang Yan organized the first Internet art exhibition in Changchun, in the far north of China, in which more than thirty artists participated. These included Wang Guofeng, Jin Feng, Cang Xin, Zhou Xiaohu, Cao Kai, and Zhang Tiemei.

After much painful struggle, experimental art in China is now adopting a calm, pluralist and localized path to development. Of one thing I am sure: within the competitive international environment, with China's artists up against the world's leading artists, more and more interesting people will emerge and exciting event will be staged in the field of new and experimental art in China.