The academy strikes back: last fall, as official taste reigned at major international surveys in Beijing and Pingyao, avant-garde artists responded with spunky alternative shows

Art in America, June-July, 2004 by Richard Vine

These last two works, like so many others in the freelance shows now proliferating in China, expose the blunt irony in official efforts to preserve dynastic traditions and the "Chineseness" of mainland culture. During the Cultural Revolution, after all, political ideologues did their best to eliminate both these legacies and thereby created, for the country's younger generations, something of a clean intellectual and emotional slate--upon which a great many ideas from the democratic, consumerist West have now been indelibly inscribed, to the commissars' rue.

Pingyao Populism

The Pingyao photo festival offers another illustration of the two-steps-forward, one-step-back syndrome that currently afflicts the nation's contemporary-art agenda. In 2001, veteran photographer Si Sushi, working closely with authorities responsible for the 2,800-year-old walled city in Shanxi Province, established an annual survey of fine-art, news, travel and fashion photography calculated to bring new awareness--and more free-spending outsiders--to the UNESCO-listed world heritage site. The plan worked, producing greater media attention (Pingyao had long suffered a woeful lack of publicity even within China) and an increase in tourism from 600,000 to 2 million (mostly domestic) visitors annually. In 2002 a bold new element was added. To complement the international selections overseen by French codirector Alain Jullien, Chinese photographer and architectural designer Gao Bo was commissioned to mount a survey of cutting-edge work by the country's best young camera artists. With the help of designer Shu Yang and independent curator Gu Zhenqing, he presented a wide-ranging, high-quality overview of what is known in China as "new" or "conceptual" photography [see A.i.A, Apr. '03].

Such was the success, or at least notoriety, of Gao Bo's project, however, that resentment immediately ensued. A formal debate was held at the 2002 festival between champions of the avant-garde work and spokesmen for the more established documentary and "beautiful scene" schools of photographic practice. In 2003, at the behest of regional politicians and members of several photographers' unions, Si Sushi, himself editor of the government-run People's Photography, reasserted primary artistic control, retaining Jullien's less threatening international section but completely eliminating the maverick New Photography division. Thus in 22 scattered venues, intellectually prosaic (though sometimes artsy) reportorial images increased exponentially--constituting the bulk of some 6,000 pictures grouped in 100 exhibitions. As a result, truly interesting pictures--which could, with diligence, be discovered in considerable quantity--had to be sought for amid a cascade of visual cliches.

The strongest concentration of adventurous Chinese work was found, as in the previous year, at the Cotton Textile Mill. At the rear of the complex, on the upper floor of the last building, the Centre Photographique d'Ile-de-France presented examples collected through the French ministry of culture's contemporary-art fund. (As in 2002, major financial support for the festival was supplied by the French firms L'Oreal and Alcatel.) Despite authoring a brochure essay drenched in old-style Sino-exoticism ("China--forever so diverse, so contradictory, so secret and fascinating ..."), curator Agnes de Gouvion Saint-Cyr assembled prime works by 13 New Photography stalwarts. Participants included Zhao Bandi (with images featuring his Baby Panda doll), Wang Ningde (carny dancers), Yang Fudong (his icodic beat-up yuppie in The First Intellectual), Shao Yinong & Mu Chen (their genealogy scroll), Shi Guorui (pinhole shots of the Great Wall) and Wang Dongfeng (disused provincial opera houses). Downstairs was a riveting exception to the festival's more anodyne documentary works--Jia Yu Chuan's black-and-white series "Female Drug Taker," chronicling the unusual trajectory of a heroin-addicted prostitute from lurid shooting up sessions through agonized withdrawal to group treatment and eventual smiling, well-fed recovery.