Young Beijing: China's capital, once stifled by officialdom, now hosts a myriad of emerging artists, dealers and curators who are attempting to turn the mega-city into a truly global art center—at startling speed

Art in America, June-July, 2004 by Jonathan Napack

Beijing is on the more. Venues for contemporary art are multiplying exponentially. Official attitudes have relaxed dramatically, with the government often lending support to exhibitions in the form of its imprimatur and, increasingly, its cash. With the new freedoms have come successes overseas. In the last few years, Chinese artists have begun to exhibit regularly in international shows, leaving behind the "Chinese art" ghetto that many of them resented.

It's important to place this activity in perspective. Just seven years ago, there were no significant contemporary art spaces in Beijing. Foreigners could not legally operate galleries or, technically speaking, trade in art. Unofficial exhibitions were organized furtively, without advance publicity, and usually lasted just hours, until the police arrived. A few artists got rich on the overseas market for Chinese "Political Pop"--a genre that clumsily lifted from both Warhol and 1980s Soviet art while shamelessly pandering to Western stereotypes. But most artists lived in desperate conditions, marginalized both economically and socially, like the conceptualists who inhabited Beijing's "East Village" in the early 1990s. In those days, the extreme dedication of artists like Zhang Huan, Wang Jinsong and Ma Liuming deeply impressed foreign visitors.

In 2004, by contrast, roughly a dozen galleries operate in the capital, most of them owned by foreigners--from other Asian countries, the U.S. and Europe. Chinese museums are showing experimental art with surprisingly little censorship. And the material circumstances of the artists have changed drastically. Those who can sell, profit from global market prices but pay low Chinese living costs. Those who can't, moonlight in the booming design and media industries. Either way, artists in China can become remarkably affluent, relative to their country's average income--a fact that has repercussions both for their personal self-confidence and the content of their work. Unlike most developing countries, China has produced a younger generation of artists who show little interest in poverty and the ravages of early capitalism, preferring to address personal-social rather than political-economic issues.

What happened? A lot. First, the country has undergone an information revolution. The government still controls the media but has radically narrowed what it considers censorship-worthy. Lifestyle magazines discuss once-taboo topics like homosexuality; newspapers report aggressively on corruption; books freely critique many government policies. Internet use has expanded dramatically, while regulations that previously limited travel overseas have been noticeably relaxed. Periodic crackdowns still occur--like the national propaganda department warning against "overly negative" reporting that was issued in early April to Guangzhou's Nanfang Zhoumou (Southern Weekend), by far the country's most respected weekly newspaper. (The rebuke was followed shortly by the arrest of the editor-in-chief on "corruption" charges.) But overall, people are much better informed. This applies not just to artists and intellectuals but also to business-people and government officials.

Second, the economy has crossed a certain Rubicon. Though prosperity is not yet widespread (only 8 percent of the populace currently qualifies as middle-class), a moneyed elite has quickly emerged. For them, China is a place of abundance. With more stability in their lives, they have begun to undertake private, wealth-based pursuits--like real estate investment or, in rare instances, collecting art. (The downside of this scenario, of course, is a crime boom and the genesis of an underclass.)

Third, a new generation has come of age. People in their late 20s or younger didn't experience Mao's China. They never denounced their parents or spent years of "reeducation" shoveling pig shit with farmers. As children, many had McDonald's, not gruel and pickles; Celine Dion rather than The East Is Red. They are more globalized and more assertive than their elders, who idealized a West they didn't really know, when China was a much bleaker place. A minor but crucial change affects communication--foreign languages were almost absent from the curriculum until Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978. Now the younger generation, in impressive numbers, can talk confidently to strangers. (Last year, China had more students taking SAT exams in English than did the U.S.)

Finally, a decisive shift has occurred in the role of culture, spurred by the Jiang/Zhu government's recent alteration of Communist Party policy. With the announcement of Jiang Zemin's "Theory of the Three Represents," the Party's theoretical constituency was explicitly recast from workers and peasants to the "advanced forces" of society, including entrepreneurs and artists. This startling change--viewed by many here as an abandonment of old-style Communism for something closer to a Taiwanese of South Korean economic model--was justified with the roundabout formulation that China is still in the "primary stages of socialism and so must pass through a period of controlled capitalism before realizing its ultimate egalitarian ideal.