After Exoticism - review of art festival, Shanghai, China

Art in America, July, 2001 by Richard Vine

An Open-Door Policy?

"Beijing looks to Shanghai; Shanghai looks to the world" runs a hoary adage in China, and it is apparently no less true today than in the bad old days of colonial trade. A few nay-saying artists, critics and public officials (vestiges of China's ancient Great Wall protectionism and later Maoist distrust of all things Western) associate the current onslaught of foreign goods, lifestyle concepts and art with the Opium Wars of 1839-60 in which European powers foisted the devastating narcotic on the Chinese populace at stupendous Western profit. In fact, one of the most memorable presentations at the Biennale's international conference was Wang Nanming's "The Shanghai Art Museum Should Not Become a Market Stall in China for Western Hegemonism"--delivered by the irate Chinese artist while dressed, with unintentional irony, in American blue jeans and a stylish, possibly Italian, linen jacket. Since Deng Xiaoping's "Reform and Opening" policy initiative--promising "socialism with Chinese characteristics"--permitted the beginning of a partial market economy in 1978, gone are the Maoist uniforms and Red Guard fanaticism. Private business today accounts for about 33 percent of the overall Chinese economy. In lower middle-class neighborhoods near the Shanghai Art Museum, crowds now jam corner stock parlors to buy and sell commodities amid the glow of wall-sized LED quote boards and video price-trend graphics--a scene that resembles an Andreas Gursky photo come to life. A bit further upscale, the French embassy, clearly determined to be au courant in the new China, held a reception for its sponsored artists in a hotel disco called the Hot Stock Fun Pub.

Accordingly, Socialist Realism, which was still acknowledged in the modern portion of the Guggenheim Museum's "China, 5,000 Years" exhibition in 1998, has vanished without a trace--replaced by a wild mix of Euro-American styles and themes. China, as was noted at the Biennale seminar, essentially skipped the stage of modernist formalism, moving in two Great Leaps, so to speak, from traditional ink painting to Socialist Realism to postmodern eclecticism.

If the "advanced" work now produced has a distinct character, it is that of heady, youthful liberation. Images from abroad--whether from videotapes, newly available Western magazines, or the Internet--are voraciously consumed and almost manically reprocessed into high-energy art. The urge for practitioners to "catch up" with the West and to stand out from the overwhelming competition leads many to a strategy of shock. If one "Fuck Off" artist uses a dead baby (Sun Yuan in Honey, 1999, or Zhu Yu in Eating People, 2000), the next, it seems, must use two (Peng Yu in Link of the Body, 2000).

After decades of censorship, China's young talents now seem obsessed with testing the limits of tolerance: How much provocation will the government permit? When will viewers begin to react with physical disgust or moral outrage? At what point will the artist's own performing body revolt or give out? In short, these "progressives" are remarkably like avantgarde artists everywhere--in manner, in dress, in conversation, in critical and formal concerns. Nothing is more uniform, it seems, than art-world nonconformity. Thus 137 years after the first Salon des Refuses, the paradigmatic revolt against the Academy is again being played out, in eerily familiar form, amid the pre-and postmodern tumult of the world's most populous nation.