China's other cultural revolution: history and Chinese art

Art in America, Sept, 1998 by Charles Ruas, Richard Vine

These critical and historical questions certainly seem to indicate that post-Maoist Chinese art needs to have its own show. But even without the concluding section, the Guggenheim show is an indispensable exhibition that begins to lay out some of the complexities of the history, of 20th-century Chinese art. Others will continue to explore the directions set out by the curators of this admirable survey.

Post-Mao Artists in New York

Sometimes it's an advantage not to be official. While the Guggenheim Museum pulled every imaginable diplomatic string to secure historical treasures for "China: 5,000 Years" and ended up with "no room" for the more adventuresome strains of post-1980 work, smaller museums and individual dealers in New York have been providing viewers with a flurry of up-to-date exhibitions featuring mainland Chinese artists and recent expatriates. (One might suspect that the process of hobnobbing with ambassadors, government ministers and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had more appeal to Krens & Co. than trooping around to cramped artists' studios on the outskirts of Beijing. But Charles Ruas suggests that the real, though long denied, story is that Chinese officials waxed uncooperative once the Guggenheim submitted its list of selected contemporary artists. Nevertheless, a show of the previously excluded works apparently will be possible in 1999.)

Even the most enterprising American curators and dealers, however, are essentially following the lead of institutions in other industrial nations, where new Chinese art and artists have been cultivated for several years now. Many of the most important figures, curators and critics as well as artists, have studied or resided in Europe, particularly Paris, while notable surveys have been mounted in Australia, Hong Kong, Spain, Germany, Holland, England, Japan and Brazil.

The Tiananmen Generation

After the death of Mao in 1976, followed by the demise of the Cultural Revolution and the purging of the Gang of Four, a process of liberalization began in China that made possible, though it did not exactly foster, development of modern avant-garde practices. Artists previously deprived of external imagery now gained access to the whole of Western art history, including classic modernism and international contemporary work. Several informal movements arose, among them modernist abstraction, "literati" art emphasizing personal expression, various schools of revivalism employing traditional materials and techniques to affirm cultural identity, and Chinese Pop in both political and purely social versions. Even video work [see article on p. 53] and performance, usually stressing public venues and encounters, began to flourish moderately. Scores of independent artists' associations were operating throughout the country by the mid '80s, their activities known collectively as the '85 Movement. In February 1989, Gao Minglu, then editor of the journal Meishu (Fine Art), was able to organize an exhibition of vanguard art at the National Gallery in Beijing -- a show that was closed twice for political offensiveness during its run.