Anyone unfamiliar with the current discourse in Chinese art is bound to be amazed by the frequent outbursts of scholarly anguish over the direction of Chinese painting at the threshold of the 21st century.
After all, overwhelming evidence offered by itinerant exhibitions from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan suggests no reason for alarm. But venerable participants in an international conference,[1] held in Hong Kong as part of the programme of the travelling exhibition, Twentieth Century Chinese Painting: Tradition and Innovation,[2] were liberal in their resort to phrases such as 'crisis,'and warned of the many dangers posed to modern Chinese art at this "crucial juncture."[3]
These concerns are well-founded. Chinese art, arguably the most reliable weather vane of mainland society and lately of Chinese communities worldwide, has been more responsive to political and social upheaval than has been apparent through the readings of contemporary history. Nowhere in the whole array of artistic expression is this interaction more evident than in painting. This is because in China's society, unlike many others, the painting tradition to this day brings together three of the highest forms of intellectual, literary and artistic expression : calligraphy, poetry and painting.
It is another matter, of course, that tradition no longer dominates the scene.Chinese artists during this century have explored and experimented with a wide gamut of ideas--abstract expressionism, conceptual art, constructivism, Dada, hard-edge, minimalism, multimedia, op, performance art, photo-realism, pop, surrealism--and employed a startling variety of techniques, media and materials.
Had this artistic interchange been confined, say, to abstract expressionism, which draws heavily on western abstract painting but nods familiarly at Chinese literati tradition, the experts who poured out their anguish in Hong Kong conceivably would not have bothered leaving their homes for a communal wringing of hands.But the dangers posed to Chinese art are perceived as numerous and potentially damaging not only in content and form but also in their future role in the evolution of art in the next century. Nor, as it transpires, are these dangers seen to be projected on China and its culture alone. Rather they are seen in the context of East-West tensions, a mostly western developed world "with its rapidly refined cultural machinery ... launching a new colonial wave on the Third World."[4]
The rhetoric demands attention because it comes not from political quarters, but the beleaguered bastions of Chinese art history.
Exactly how and when the "rot set in" remains moot, but the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the opening of China to outside influences began to change the world of Chinese art, where the literati painters enjoyed high priesthood while those at other strata of artistic expression were relegated to secondary positions and their creative efforts sub-categorised as folk art or crafts.
The post-Qing period was marked by profound cross-influences and sweeping cross-currents, not least amongst these being the interflow generated by the two great wars, which culminated in the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. Although the republic's birth was a strong assertion of China's identity, it paradoxically led to recurrent self-doubt, nourished in no small measure by competing cultural incursions from outside the borders. The most sublime expressions of Chinese art, especially traditional painting, fell from grace. The Cultural Revolution exacted a crushing ideological and physical toll from both protagonists and victims, a temporary reprieve coming only with the demise of Mao Zedong in 1976--which also signalled its welcome end.
Although China has breathed relatively freely in the past two decades, events in the Tiananmen Square in 1989 have reverberated through Chinese art communities both within the country and outside it, and especially amongst the new colonies of artists created in the West as a result of the vicissitudes of the 1980s. The changes being brought about are yet to be fully identified, though they are discussed at some length in Michael Sullivan's monumental new survey.[5]
How has Chinese art, and painting specifically, fared in this period of indeterminate transition, postponed arrival/s and multiple diasporas? A follow-up symposium at the British Museum, which coincided with the London showing of Twentieth Century Chinese Painting: Tradition and Innovation, offered opportunities further to examine developments in China, Hong Kong, Europe and other parts of the world.
Although the question required exhaustive exploration, it nevertheless raised its head during the brief discussion: what of the future? Would China's painting tradition--some 8,000 years of it--be sacrificed on the altar of the Global Village? Could the onslaught of satellite television and communications, freer and cheaper travel and ad hoc capitalism--as well as the neo-colonialism and cultural imperialism of the scenarios painted at the Hong Kong conference--disfigure, distort or obliterate Chinese painting as we know it? Or would the cumulative actions of the Chinese alone do that anyway to their art?
The more pessimistic amongst the traditionalists already have cited the work of practitioners amongst the waves of Chinese immigrants settled into Europe and North America as the precursor to the mainland art of the 21st century. They consider it to be largely undistinguished and increasingly indistinguishable from the rest of current practice in the West. This position is condemned by the artists themselves, who feel justified in equating traditionalist intolerance with western reluctance to recognise their work as part of the mainstream. True, not all Chinese art that blends the traditional with the modern is innovative, much of it remains in transitory, exploratory or experimental stages. But in between there have been significant departures, breathtaking phases of innovation. From the evidence so far, however, it seems that the numerous positive developments have failed to assuage the distress caused to the committed theoreticians and historians.
The two-day symposium on 24 and 25 September 1996 at the British Museum consisted of four sessions, dealing initially with historical issues and then going into detail about the scene in Europe, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia.
Edouardo Welsh maintained that during at least a part of the post-1949 period in China, art ceased to exist at all, functioning only as propaganda that served a political or utopian goal, the latter most often ascribed to Mao.[6]
Paradoxically, however, the mobilisation of society to reach that goal demanded a lot of art. In a way, this elevation/relegation gave art a role long coveted by the western avant-garde: that of not only portraying the future but also managing to bring it about.
At the height of the Cultural Revolution, Mao's propaganda machine had reached a level of sophistication where reality was fabricated by individuals who, while serving to build Mao's image, remained nameless and faceless. They were part of the multitudes who helped create art at the slightest excuse, for the flimsiest reason. The ultimate paradox of the situation was that while art spread to every nook and cranny of China, it further alienated the artists who were amongst the victims of the Cultural Revolution.
"Art had all but disappeared, cultural creation often becoming a collective effort whose content was solely political." Although this assertion by Edouardo Welsh reflected the mood prevailing at the time, the audience at the symposium was left undecided as to whether the "end of art" signified by the popularisation of art under Mao indeed was that and no more. Perhaps the artists could take comfort in their own refusal to compromise, which reinforced their integrity and the intrinsic value of their experience?
John Gittings argued against art having been nothing more than politics, or political art being a mere exigency of the Cultural Revolution. "There was a very real sense in which art reflected the life of the times, the aspirations and the ideals--Maoist ideals which are now rejected but then were more in favour than is often admitted today."[7]
Maintaining that art was as complicated then as at any other time, Gittings argued against dismissing the art of the Cultural Revolution "or the first attempts to find a new artistic route after Mao died, as either 'mechanical' or 'derivative.' It is still a subject which is well worth more study." The derivative nature of much of the contemporary Chinese art in the 1980s, for example, had more to do with the fact that its creators had been isolated from the outside world for many years before that.
While some of the art produced was clearly derivative, other suffered from an emptiness that reflected a society practically bereft of its ideological centre, a condition that preceded liberalisation of the 1990s.
Hou Hanru, citing an increasingly visible americanisation in China, argued that tradition and its cultural paraphernalia once again were being used as a cultural strategy, even as the means to an end.[8]
Tradition, the counterweight to anti-tradition, has emerged as an "asylum for those in search of 'fullness' or firmer ground amid rapid changes." Equally significant, tradition is seen by those in authority as a theoretical resource for their own legitimisation, a new prop for conservatism. The official support to modern guohua, he argued, could be seen as a strategy for suppressing politically troublesome experimentaton.
This has led to further exploration of tradition and greater innovative experiments. Citing an example, he said the traditional ink-wash painting, with protagonists such as Lin Fengmian, Wu Guazhong and Liu Guosong, was "essentially based on theoretical assumptions of the necessity to combine the traditional Chinese painting language and modern western styles as an effective and reasonable" way of arriving at modern Chinese art.
But, while the older generation of innovative painters continues to focus on a combination of classical and western, the younger artists increasingly have opted--among a range of experiments--for almost total abstraction, giving no quarter to what he called the hundred year obsession with the "correct" proportion between the eastern and western elements. Among examples of that all-out radical approach he cited the avant-garde movement born in the 1980s.
What seems feasible in China did not, of course, so appear when artists began to emigrate and settle abroad. Those arriving in the West, particularly Europe and North America, soon found themselves confronted with new challenges to their identity and their art, an issue explored in theJourneys West conference [9] and discussed thereafter in EAR.[10].
This state of affairs necessitated resort to new strategies, including the use of traditional forms, themes and techniques to resist the pressure of being "otherised" in the West. Faced with eurocentricism, for example, the artists who settled in Europe tended to "incorporate the Chinese cultural resources as an effective means to claim their own identity and their own rights of expression."
But, as Hu Hanru pointed out, this exposed the artists in diaspora to further risks. Their resort to quasi-traditional techniques or forms was not without pitfalls, since the strategy could be seen to work only if it was based "on engagement with the reality of international and global cultural life--even the political struggles" that it entailed. Because, he said, "there is almost no room for The Other in today's international life except as a victim", i e being perceived as exotic. Perhaps the only positive way out would be to aim for a thorough restructuring of the global culture, a rearrangement that took into account and eventually could be founded on a logical interaction between tradition and contemporaneity, between difference and hybridisation.
In Hou Hanru's argument, questions of identity were not confined to the Chinese in diaspora. On the mainland itself, openness and globalisation has led to ambivalence or oversensitivity to being Chinese. In their encounters with the outside world, especially the West, it is not uncommon for Chinese artists and intellectuals to feel isolated or alienated--even manipulated--or to succumb to overt nationalism or a new third worldism born of a tendency to equate modern with western. This awareness owes as much to China's recent openness as to accessibility of outside literature, including Edward Said's Orientalism. Although, at first glance, this seems to bring China more into the international fold, quite the reverse may be happening, as Katie Hill argued in her presentation.[11]As resurgent nationalism sweeps across China, as a prop to identity and power, it is alienating both the Chinese on the mainland who find it anachronistic and the Chinese abroad whose work continues to reflect their strong cultural affinities.
The nationalist upsurge may also be playing havoc with, or rendering thoroughly indefinable, what passes for modernism in China. Citing the oeuvre of Huang Yongping (b 1934), who showed his printed books reduced to pulp, A Comprehensive History of Chinese Art and A Concise History of Modern Painting after Two Minutes in the Washing Machine at Les Magiciens de la Terre [12], Hill argued that Huang's dadaist deconstruction played a formative part in the evolution of contemporary Chinese art, while challenging established notions about art and art history.
This was exactly what the Xiamen Dada group, which Huang announced earlier in 1986, had set out to do through a series of out of the ordinary artistic experiments. These included the use of scrap material and the notorious litter bin episode. Huang threw painted canvases into a public bin in Xiamen, his hometown, and waited to monitor the reaction of passers-by. He took photographs of people who invariably took the paintings apart--either to use the frame or the canvas. He was arrested by police who saw the whole activity as criminal. Huang's conclusion was: the relationship between art, objects, society and authority was nothing if not complex. His ideas, which questioned both words and art, were reinforced when the artists in a dadaist exhibition in 1986 publicly destroyed all their works in a bonfire ceremoniously announcing the end of the Xiamen Dada. The incident was one of several provocative events staged by artists, many of whom ran afoul of the authorities as a result.
Was this modernism or--even better--postmodernism, or yet another transition for Chinese art? To be sure, the social and political realities of China in the late 1980s did not allow Huang to carry on with his experiments, with the result that when he appeared at the Centre Pompidou for Les Magiciens he decided to stay in France. And what Michael Sullivan calls the "avant-garde assault" [13], the Xiamen Dada being only a part of it, did test the limits of official tolerance, for the Tiananmen tragedy soon followed in June 1989. The ensuing clampdown all but extinguished artistic experimentation, until a strange mixture of post-Tienanmen censorship and the hesitant birth of China's market economy began to shift the emphasis from conceptual to commercial success. The first Guangzhou Bienniel in 1992 was a reflection of that trend.
The effect of this dramatic change on mainland art has not been all good, nor has it been as negative as it is often presented. But it has caused dismay amongst many commercial dealers of contemporary art and led to reassessment by artists of what they believe to be their true worth in the international marketplace. Perhaps, more important, it has put new strains on the umbilical cord that links mainland art and the art of the many diasporas across the world.
Are the Chinese artists in the West on way to being hybridised and then homogenised within the host cultures--subsumed and absorbed by their immediate environment in the same way they have partaken of its elements? The example of the Nanyang School of Chinese Painting in Southeast Asia[14] raised that question. The Nanyang (South Seas) School took root in the 1930s, thrived in the 1950s and matured through the better part of 1960s and 1970s as a style distinct from mainland China. The distancing from China (due to political rather than geographical reasons) and the multicultural mix of Southeast Asia contributed to the evolution of a style evocative of China and South Asian subcontinent but native to its place of birth.
This has obvious resonance for Chinese communities in the West as, with the passage of time, they become more and more europeanised or americanised. Already for many Chinese in the West, the essential cultural bond with mainland China has weakened in the absence of linguistic competence, though perhaps not so severely as for other Asians, Africans and West Indians, some of whom jokingly admit to having become "coconuts"--white within and black without.
The situation by no means is irreversible. Profiling Liu Guosong (Liu Kuo-sung, b1932), Sonia Lightfoot related how in his 30-year career outside China, most of it spent in Taiwan, Liu Guosong has gone through phases in his quest to invent unorthodox tools, colours and techniques to arrive at modern painting that would require no "translation" and stay within the tradition--a path chosen by Liu Shou-kwan, Zhao Wuji and his friend Wu Guanzhong. [15]And yet Liu Guosong, too, was not immune to the shock of the new. While experimenting with oil painting during 1960-65 he began adding gypsum to oil in order to give his medium that extra fluency. But a chance encounter in Taiwan with a critical essay on contemporary architecture made him change course midstream.
This was a time when bamboo bridges made of concrete were very much in vogue in Taiwan. The sight of the cement and sand reproductions angered architects and one prominent critic, Wang Dai-hung, said a material used out of context bordered on deception. Liu, who had been using materials very much "out of context," felt the criticism applied to his work as well. Almost on cue, he quit painting oils after seven years and took up brush and ink painting again.
This would not surprise artists of the younger generation in China and abroad, most of whom have experimented with materials either through practical necessity (because desired items were not available at the time) or in their quest for innovation.
The Chinese artists who made Europe their home after 1976 have been prominent among groups who readily have taken the path from tradition to what most of them hope will be innovative milestones in their sometimes double existence as Chinese and European artists. In the event many of them remain in transition, still digesting and absorbing ideas from their immediate surroundings and seeking new ways of synthesis.
Andreas Schmid, introducing Europe-based artists from the New Wave group, also known as Arts Movement 1985, spoke of the groundwork laid by members of the Stars, notably Ai Wewei (b1957), Yan Li (b 1954) and Ma Desheng (b 1952) before the movement expanded and branched out into more adventurous explorations by artists like Huang Yongping, Zhang Peili, Ni Haifeng, Wang Guangyi and Gu Wenda [16].
Schmid suggested that liberalisation might in fact be slowing down the exodus from China. As example he cited artists born in the 1960s who "have become used to exhibiting in the West but none of them sees the need to leave China as long as there is no threat of repression. Life overseas is much more expensive and careers can be made via Hong Kong in much more substantial ways than it was possible during the 1980s."
Among those who settled in Europe, some have made radical departures. Berlin-based Qin Yufen (b 1954) stopped painting at the end of the 1980s and started to give performances and to create objects. "Since 1990 she has preferably worked on installations directly related to the surrounding space. Recently she added sound to her (space related) installations. In these Qin often combines western objects of daily life like clothes-lines or ironing-boards or industrial goods like mosquito nets or porcelain vases with typical Chinese materials such as xuan (rice paper) or bamboo. Clothes-line and ironing-board are not feminist references or ready-made but are used as pure calligraphic signs. The everyday objects are arranged repetitively and serially in big numbers."
Her self-taught husband, Zhu Jinshi (b 1954) also turned away from painting for several years and delved into the work of Joseph Beuys [17], becoming more involved with conceptual rather than material realisation of his art. Among his projects is an Imaginary Museum of Contemporary Chinese Art in the West. Yang Jiechang (b 1956) has been given to painting large black monochromatic paintings and shocking his audience--literally. Schmid related how in an installation at a private home in Paris Yang made visitors walk through a corridor with copper sticks which were connected to a low voltage electricity source. Foam material was put on the floor to create a shaky ground. "When the visitors tried to keep balance by grabbing the copper sticks they got a slight electrical shock. Yang did not want just to hurt people but had and still has the idea that the experience of pain may lead to enlightenment." While the experiments cited in Schmid's survey may have references to China or its philosophical background Guang Yao Wu (b 1959) certainly is a clear exception. A resident of Karlsruhe since 1989, Guang Yao Wu does drawings, paintings, objects and installations--none of which refer at all to Chinese tradition or to China. Instead, he has based his work on Constructivism and Minimal Art. The materials used in the installations range from metal, microphone glove foam to felt.
Schmid took note of the fact while most artists who came to Europe were trained as traditionalists each "developed a unique personal language during their stay by transforming the experiences of both cultures into his or her artistic language." Nearly all of them have gravitated towards installation art, common to Europe but still frowned upon in China.
Quite in contrast to the paths chosen by artists who migrated to Europe, many of whom have succumbed to the influences of the Chinese or European avant-garde, Taiwan's master painter and architect Chen Qikuan, born 1921 in Beijing, has performed miracles while still practising as a full-time architect and part-time artist in Taipei. The art of Chen Qikuan was at the centre of an exhibition at Ostasiatische Kunst Museum in Berlin and the focus of the presentation by Uta Rahman-Steinert [18]. She cited his work as exceptional, drawing on his past associations with Walter Gropius at Harvard and I M Pei at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but maintaining "a very individual style" reminiscent of the literati painters.
The example of Chen Qikuan thus begs the question: crisis? what crisis? If he can sit in Taiwan, remaining unfazed by the Taiwanese avant-garde and produce one masterful work after another, what is there to worry about? Is Chinese painting going from bad to worse, or is it just the artists doing the wrong sort of thing, at least in the eyes of its custodians?
The last word surely should belong to Chu-tsing Li, who writes, "in the world of the 21st century, whether Chinese painting in the traditional sense will continue to develop without losing its identity remains to be seen. No doubt Chinese painting will continue to develop, but in what direction: succumbing to western influences, or maintaining a strong tradition while absorbing new ideas from various sources? This is a crucial juncture, and in some ways it is one of the elements that cause modern Chinese painting to be so compelling.[19] True, some of the painters in transition to 'something new" have gone so far as to shun the symbolism and ritual of the seal of vermilion, embraced techniques that are alien to Chinese in more ways than one. But in the process they have created art that startles, enthralls and inspires the viewer. More important: they have not stopped painting. If and when they do, there indeed will be a crisis.
