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The wild, wild East: the first-ever Guangzhou Triennial and the fourth Shanghai Biennale, in their concurrent runs, caught the energy of the entrepreneurial New China and its art - Report From China

Art in America, Sept, 2003 by Richard Vine

China today, with its bustling commercial districts and its antic, independent young artists, must be a tough place for the October crowd to visit. For nowhere is there a clearer demonstration of the deep kinship between progressive art and emergent capitalism, long considered mortal adversaries by Western avant-garde ideologues. Despite reactionary setbacks like the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, China's increasingly business-friendly policies, initiated in the late '70s by Deng Xiaoping, have been galvanizing. Currently only 25 percent of the nation's GDP is produced by state-owned firms. The populace of 1.3 billion has recently experienced considerable political liberalization, a new receptivity to the West, and an economic growth of 8-10 percent each year for two decades. Government leaders now aim to increase the current $1-trillion economy four-fold over the next 20 years. Under the country's one-party system, many political frustrations remain. But the social effect of this new consumerism, quickly reflected in art and architecture, has been to render the land of Confucius and Mao unrecognizable to anyone who knew it even 10 years ago.

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Last winter, two major art roundups manifested these startling changes in complementary ways. The First Guangzhou Triennial, organized by Chinese-born University of Chicago scholar Wu Hung, surveyed experimental art produced in China during the years 1990-2000. Meanwhile, the 2002 Shanghai Biennale--under a curatorial team headed by Fan Di'an, vice director of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and Alanna Heiss, director of the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York--presented a Chinese-heavy overview of the global scene (31 participants out of 67 were from the People's Republic), with special emphasis on new architecture and urban planning. The two shows--one superbly selected to confirm a neat historical thesis, the other a hodge-podge of conflicting curatorial agendas reflecting the complexity of 21st-century social and artistic transformation--gave viewers, especially foreign visitors, a widely inclusive glimpse of the ferment that makes Chinese art so vital right now, for everyone.

Gonzo in Guangzhou

The developmental scenario informing "Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art, 1990-2000," and made explicit in Wu's catalogue essays, followed a classic avant-garde trajectory. Progressive art, which emerged in the late 1970s (i.e., with the demise of Man and the end of the Cultural Revolution), was at first a collective affair, generated by groups of impoverished artists living together on the margins of major cities. Over the course of the 1980s, independent artists and curators--most of them traditionally trained in the nation's rigorous art academies--conducted a campaign of self-conscious modernization. This effort was roughly equivalent, in the eyes of supporters and detractors alike, to an embrace of contemporary Western forms, mediums and theories. A much-repeated process that Wu calls yun dong (mass movement), since it entails a Cultural Revolution-style combination of agenda, propaganda and organization (but also bears an eerie resemblance to a Western marketing blitz), produced a flurry of short-lived movements: Cynical Realism, New Wave Art '85 (with some 80 groups), Gaudy Art, Chinese Pop, etc. By the end of the decade, semi-formal "artists' villages" were being established, most famously in and around Beijing. The culmination of this first period of official tolerance (if not approval) was a 1989 exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Beijing--"China/Avant-Garde," organized by editor Gao Minglu (who subsequently curated the epochal 1998 show "Inside Out: New Chinese Art" in the U.S. (see A.i.A., Mar. '99]). In a classic instance of official response to radical provocation, the show was closed early, after live ammunition was fired during a performance piece.

Following the Tiananmen Square crackdown, experimental Chinese art became increasingly individual and increasingly international, as many important figures (Huang Yong Ping, Chen Zhen, Cat Guo-Qiang, Wenda Gu, Xu Bing) went into self-imposed exile abroad and began to show worldwide. Meanwhlie, within China, a few commercial galleries started selling avant-garde work--but almost exclusively to foreigners resident in the country or to dealers and collectors overseas. (Such material remains alien and mysterious to the general public in China, while newly rich collectors tend to seek status-enhancing traditional works or famous-name high modernist art from the West.) Wu detects a shift toward greater self-examination and social critique in the mid-'90s. Certainly by the time of the third Shanghai Biennale in 2000, Western observers could see that unofficial shows and personal outrageousness for example, working with corpses and body parts, or claiming to have cannibalized a human fetus--had become an established gambit for attaining artistic celebrity [see A.i.A., July '01]. The fact that, in fall 2002, all private shows mounted in Shanghai at the time of the Biennale had to be vetted in advance by government authorities indicates the kind of political monitoring that today's Chinese artists still must finesse. Indeed, two days before the opening of the Guangzhou Triennial, Bat Project 2, a major outdoor installation by Huang Yong Ping, was removed by order of the national ministry of foreign affairs, purportedly out of concern that the work a full-scale duplication of the left wing and front fuselage of an American spy plane that collided with a Chinese fighter in 2001--would offend foreign sensibilities [see "Artworld," Jan. '03]. Unpredictability, in both policy and enforcement, is viewed by some art-world regulars as a deliberate governmental ploy--one meant to induce creative hesitancy, and thus a chilling effect. In a way, then, the work shown at the Triennial was a sample of what Chinese artists have dared to make--and been able to get away with for shorter or longer periods--over the past decade.

The wild, wild East: the first-ever Guangzhou Triennial and the fourth Shanghai Biennale, in their concurrent runs, caught the energy of the entrepreneurial New China and its art - Report From China

Art in America, Sept, 2003 by Richard Vine

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