Inside Out: New Chinese Art
From September 1998 to January 1999 the Asia Society in New York presented Inside Out, an international exhibition of contemporary art from China. The exhibition, organized in co-operation with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, will also be held in San Francisco from February 26 to June 1. The two cities have two of the largest Chinese communities outside Asia.By Marjan van Gerwen
The exhibition shows more than 80 works by 58 Chinese artists currently living in the People's Republic of China, but also in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas. The exhibition includes installations, videos, and performance art as well as the more traditional media, spanning some fifteen years (1984-1998). 'Inside Out' tries to explore the hybrid existence of younger Chinese artists. How are they responding to the modernization of their countries and how do they reinterpret their artistic and cultural traditions?'Inside out' arrives at a time when the interest in Chinese culture has been sparked off by several recent shows ('Splendors of Imperial China' in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's in 1996 and 'China: 5000 Years' at the Guggenheim in New York). Gao Ming Lu is guest curator for this exhibition. From 1985 until 1989 he was the editor of 'Meishu' (Fine Art) magazine and shortly before the Tiananmen Square protest, he organized the exhibition 'China / Avant Garde' at the National Gallery in Beijing in 1989. He came to the United States in 1991.
The central issues are modernity and identity and the exhibition tries to show the divergent philosophies that have arisen in response to the political upheavals in mainland China in the past two decades from the last days of the Cultural Revolution to the Coca-Cola materialism of the 1990s. As such, it gives a context to the art, making it more complex and more comprehensible than before.
Political Pop
The rapid turnover of styles among PRC artists is a reflection of their sudden exposure to Western art. From 1949 until 1979, artists were restricted to a very limited ranges of choices: oil paintings in the socialist- realist mode, folk and popular art forms, or traditional brush painting.
Since 1979 foreign art has gradually begun to be published in magazines such as 'Meishu' (Fine Art), alongside more ideologically correct styles. Many young artists consider the post-1949 period as tradition and their attitudes to that period are surprisingly mixed. In the eighties the Political Pop movement appeared. This movement, which was perhaps surprisingly not an anti-Communist movement, was nevertheless considered as such by the international museum world and came in for its fair share of attention after 1989. The triple portrait of Mao by Wang Guan Yi, which caused a sensation in Beijing in 1989, is an example of this movement. The works of Cao Yong and Liu Wei, for instance, show a critical point of view cast at society in China.
Private emotions
The different road taken by Taiwanese artists stems from the particular circumstances of their island. After the eclipse of foreign colonialism, over the past twenty years the island has experienced rapid economic growth, massive industrialization, and increased political liberalization. Artists travelled abroad, bringing in and adapting Western styles.
The history of Western oil painting was thus always familiar to Taiwanese artists. It is not surprising that no exact parallel to the 'humanist' and 'political pop' trends of the PRC appeared in Taiwan. Two young Taiwanese artists, Hou Chun-ming and Huang Chih-yang are concerned with more private emotions, taboos, fears, and fantasies than with materialist desire. They employ traditional Chinese brush painting and woodblock techniques, but effectively subvert and criticize conventional practices and beliefs in their work.
In the series 'Zoon', Huang Chih-Yang dissects the human body and reduces it to its most primal and organic state. He tries to explore the relationship between our changing external environment and our internal nature. 'New Paradise', fourteen panels of woodblock prints by Hou Chun-Ming represent the changing relationship between men and women through their sexual organs. Now women no longer depend on men, men feel rejected.
The concern of Hong Kong artists is with identity and belonging, issues which have been thrown into stark relief in the context of Hong Kong's return to China and the end of colonialism. Reflecting the urgent sense of transition, contemporary art in Hong Kong has shown new force and inventiveness, particularly within the last two to three years, a fact reflected in the choices of artists in the exhibition. The installation with video by Ho Siu-kee 'Walking on Two Balls' provides metaphors for the difficulty of the idea of passage as both a spiritual and a physical condition.
Splashed ink
The artists demonstrate that the globalization of contemporary Chinese art is increasing in diversity and richness. Some of the artists who now work outside China consider themselves primarily as contemporary, rather than Chinese, artists. Others, such as Cai Guo-qiang, still draw on Chinese themes but explore them through the distanced perspective of an expatriate catering to an audience that is more often than not non-Chinese. His installation, 'Borrowing Your Enemy's Arrows' takes its name from an ancient Chinese myth. Ren Jian has turned to a commercial kind of pop-art. He has made a massive cosmogony painting called 'Primeval Chaos' on a hundred-foot scroll made of nylon rather than the traditional silk. Several of these artists returned to China to seek materials and inspiration, among them Wang Tianze who created 'Ink Banquet', in which he has splashed a table, chairs, and place settings with ink.
One of the pervasive themes is the interest in exploring the forms and meaning of script. It is no coincidence that script, rather than religious image, constitutes the most enduring aspect of tradition and one in which artists continue to find inspiration. The obsession with pseudo-characters is common to artists from the PRC, Taiwan, and overseas. The work of Wenda Gu and Xu Bing can be read at another level: the predilection for distorting and dissolving images so that they lie on the border of a meaningless pattern is a hallowed tradition in Chinese art, stretching back through the spatial and semiotic ambiguities of scholar painting to roots in the tantalising patterns of archaic bronzes. Xu Bing's 'Book from the Sky' seems a reverent homage to the ancient art of woodblock printing. It features dozens of what appear to be Chinese characters, the building blocks of the common script that is the only real unifying principle for the Chinese empire. Every character is in fact a meaningless scribble concocted by the artist. Xu sees it as a statement of the ancient Taoist belief that true knowledge does not come through words but through experience.
Through their diversity, the works incorporate the themes of a culture in transition. Whereas in Hong Kong the question of identity seems to be directed at the future more than the past, in Taiwan and, to a certain extent, in the PRC it evokes a nostalgia for the past. While in Taiwan memories of the family loom large, in the PRC surprisingly the Cultural Revolution is sometimes evoked nostalgically.
The catalogue accompanying the exhibition contains nine essays that investigate the critical position of Chinese art in the global arena and the ongoing influence of its heritage.
Marjan van Gerwen is Project Co-ordinator of international projects at the GATE Foundation.