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

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.

Huang [see A.i.A., Mar. '06] led the Xiamen Dada group, whose members publicly burned 60 of their own artworks following an exhibition in Fujian Province in 1986. Initially executed for "Magiciens de la Terre," the seminal global survey organized in May 1989 by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, his installation Reptile (shown at the UCCA in reconstructed form) set a high standard for Fei's formally diverse offerings. After putting newsprint in a washing machine, Huang modeled the wet pulp into massive sculptural mounds that evoke the earth, if not the magicians, of the French exhibition's title. Besides assuming a reptilian form, these units resemble ancient burial mounds. After traveling from China to execute Reptile, Huang remained in Paris; a retrospective of his art is the Ullens Center's second show [through June 1].

Geng Jianyi's four grisaille oil paintings depicting laughing faces that fill the canvases were, surprisingly, among the few figurative works in "'85 New Wave." They contributed a powerful emotional tone verging on hysteria to the overall character of the show, which was more subdued than expected, given the high-impact type of work currently associated with progressive art in China. Geng's quartet of pictures established thematic connections between this first wave of artists and members of the following generation, especially Yue Minjun (not in the show) with his eternally laughing heads.

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Word art, we often forget, isn't a modern invention. As a genre encompassing calligraphy, it's been around for centuries in China. Two '85 New Wavers--Gu Wenda [see A.i.A., May '06] and Xu Bing [see A.i.A., Feb. '05]--tellingly illuminate how open-ended art based on writing systems can be. Gu's work calls to mind political broadsides, the sort posted on walls and notice boards during the Cultural Revolution. Xu's installation, on the other hand, evokes elegant typefaces. Both make you wish you could read Chinese characters. And there's the rub. Because of the language barrier, most Westerners don't recognize the quality of Jabberwocky in the signs and symbols these two artists employ.

"Between 1981 and 1984, I mainly practiced Western painting on rice paper," Gu explained to Fei Dawei in a 1986 interview reprinted in the "'85 New Wave" catalogue. "Although I felt that studying Western modernism has its value in China, it--when judged against the rest of the world--just repeats the old Western road." He clearly avoided that trap in the 1984-86 works on view at the Ullens Center--tall sheets of rice paper, marked up with gouache and ink, featuring red and black O's and X's along with ideograms and simple drawings. Gu also avowed his interest in "deconstruction and the synthesis of characters." He consciously created errors and omitted words. In terms of form language, his work is compelling. Knowing he was twisting elements of the language, rather than playing it straight, adds even more interest.

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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.

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"'85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art" appeared at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing [Nov. 5, 2007-Feb. 17, 2008]. "House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective" is currently on view [Mar. 21-June 1]. Selections from the Ullens Collection will be shown during the Olympic Games in August.

Phyllis Tuchman is a New York-based critic.

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