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Double birth: the new Ullens Center for Contemporary Art opened with a survey of the '85 New Wave, China's first nationwide avant-garde movement
Art in America, April, 2008 by Phyllis Tuchman
With the inauguration, this past November, of the nonprofit Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in the 798 arts district of Beijing [see "Front Page," Nov. '07], the global dialogue about new art in China was given a substantial boost. The 70,000-square-foot UCCA will present international exhibitions of both current and older work, and will commission world-class figures to make site-specific pieces for the two large, vaulted naves that the center calls home.
The opening show, "'85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art," was a sterling example of this fledgling institution's strengths. It did much more than offer a refresher course to local viewers and introduce a major chapter in Chinese art history to Western visitors not familiar with the legacy behind today's stars of the auction houses, biennials and art fairs. Among the 130 or so paintings, sculptures, installations, videos and works on paper--executed by three collectives and 27 individual artists born and educated in China--were numerous artworks that had never been exhibited publicly before on the Mainland. Some were fabricated abroad by artists who left China at the end of the '80s. Others, having been lost or destroyed in the intervening years, were reconstructed for the show. At the time the movement developed, no major venue in the People's Republic had anything like the UCCA's high degree of curatorial freedom combined with its world-class operational standards and financial means.
To be sure, an important survey of contemporary art was mounted in 1989 at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. A timeline in the "'85 New Wave" catalogue describes the "China/ Avant-Garde" survey, which featured 293 pieces by 186 artists, as "both the first large-scale art exhibition curated by critics and also the first national avant-garde art exhibition." However, a few sentences later, this same show is called "the farewell ceremony of the '85 movement." Scheduled to run for two weeks, "China/Avant-Garde" was temporarily suspended when artist Xiao Lu, in an opening-day performance, fired a pistol at her own installation; after the show reopened five days later, a bomb threat closed the doors a second time.
Belgian collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens, who reside in Switzerland, developed the UCCA, housed in a former munitions factory, along the organizational lines of a private institution in Europe or the U.S. Their French architect, Jean-Michel Wilmotte, is currently helping to restore Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, and his Chinese co-designer, Qingyun Ma, serves as the dean of the school of architecture at the University of Southern California. The curatorial staff includes Colin Chinnery, former arts programmer for the British Council in Beijing; Jan Debbaut, previously director of collections at the Tate Modern; and U.S.-based teacher and curator Kate Fowle.
Although less than 25 percent of the opening show came from the Ullens's own historically diverse, 1,500-piece collection, you could almost describe the UCCA and the '85 New Wave--the first nationwide outpouring of experimental work in China--as joined at the hip. The organizers believe that their exhibitions, symposia, educational programs and commissions will make a profound difference in the course, not just the appreciation, of Chinese art. According to Fei Dawei, recently departed artistic director of the UCCA, who has been living in Paris since the late 1980s, the inaugural survey celebrated "the birth of Chinese contemporary art" in tandem with "the birth of a new institution." (In February, the UCCA announced that Fei would be replaced by Jerome Sans, former co-director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris [see "Artworld," this issue].)
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With few exceptions, the featured artists were born during the 1950s and early '60s. Consequently, they were in their early 20s or late teens when their parents (or, in some cases the artists themselves) returned in the late 1970s to their former lives in the major cities following periods of "reeducation" in rural villages and communes. In the early 1980s, many of the '85 New Wave painters and sculptors graduated from far-flung art schools located in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenyang, Chongqing, Kunming and Guangzhou. Most of the art on view was executed between 1986 and 1989, a period bracketed by the economic reforms and renewed internationalism undertaken by Deng Xiaoping after the Cultural Revolution, and events surrounding the Tiananmen Square protests during May and June 1989. Yet, even in those dark final weeks, the Goddess of Democracy, a 33-foot-high, Styrofoam-and-papier-mache statue modeled on a metal armature in four days by students at the Central Academy of Fine Art, served as a symbol of hope.
The UCCA exhibition presented the '85 New Wave as an astonishing melange of styles and manners. That's how Fei Dawei remembers the original scene and how he believes the movement has played out over time. The first sentence in the preface of the catalogue proclaims: "Between 1985 and 1990, a group of over one thousand young Chinese artists living in an environment without galleries, museums, or any systematic support for art and with unprecedented enthusiasm and passion, led a fundamentally influential artistic movement." As curator of the show, Fei admirably selected from the great mass of work thus produced. Examples by Huang Yong Ping, Geng Jianyi, Gu Wenda, Xu Bing and Zhang Peili particularly stood out. Four of these artists (all but Xu Bing) graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, a scenic, provincial capital 112 miles southwest of Shanghai.
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