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

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Xu approached his art from a different angle. A Book from the Sky, comprising several very long scrolls floating horizontally side-by-side below the ceiling of the UCCA over open books on platforms resting close to the ground, was originally executed during a four-year period (1987-91). The installation was extremely labor intensive. Xu did nothing less than invent his own characters, literally thousands of them. With the scrolls positioned above the heads of viewers, he transformed his indecipherable prose into a mesmerizing, room-size work. Moreover, in the "'85 New Wave" catalogue, poignant extracts from an interview he gave in 2000 offer a vivid reminder that unraveling Chinese contemporary art can be as complicated as studying the iconography of a Renaissance altarpiece. For example, if you don't keep in mind how many of the '85 New Wave artists and their families and friends suffered during the Cultural Revolution, you're going to miss a critical aspect of interpretation. Xu relates, "My feeling towards books has something to do with ... knowing that few among my generation had a chance to read. ... During my school years, China was still in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and no books were available and I only started reading after coming back from the countryside."

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Zhang Peili's large oil painting Swimmers in Mid-Summer (1983) is another work that Westerners should approach carefully. It's easy to make hasty assumptions regarding its meaning. Zhang's canvas doesn't depict your typical Thomas Eakins swimming hole, though the somewhat austere picture of young men in bathing trunks about to dive from starting blocks into a pool does vaguely resemble an Alex Katz composition. The subject matter, however, has a different resonance for Chinese viewers than it does for Americans. Zhang's swimmers call to mind athletes preparing for a summer Olympics, the Asian Games or some such championship meet. China is rife with state-sponsored training programs aimed at creating competitors who can win gold medals.

It's important to realize that many 85 New Wave artists were as rooted in their own locales as certain U.S. painters and sculptors associated with New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. In the UCCA tome, Fei Dawei cites differences among the Northern Art Group, the Pond Society (from Hangzhou) and the Southwestern Art Study Group, and also singles out the artists who participated in "Magiciens de la Terre" (Gu Dexin and Wang Jiechang in addition to Huang Yong Ping). Considering the geography of China as well as its history and politics, a fuller picture needs to be sketched out for Westerners interested in the rise of contemporary art halfway around the world. Why, for example, did the art academy in provincial Hangzhou survive the Cultural Revolution so well and produce so many outstanding artists? Many such questions still need to be posed and answered. And there is a lot more that needs to be done to explain how members of the '85 New Wave, such as Huang Yong Ping, Wang Guangyi and Zhang Peili, have become international art stars. The UCCA, which will mount a show drawn exclusively from the Ullens collection during the Olympics this summer, has its work cut out for it, especially since it wants to influence the future.