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Contemporary Chinese art has by now accrued a hefty history spanning three decades or so. While its range and heterogeneity strain and defy any single storyline, the sense of it finally acquiring a history calls for some kind of reckoning and account in the form of a storyline. Shifting contexts could thus be established; the bewildering welter of facts and figures could be streamlined for easy access. Indeed, for many, totalising master narratives are increasingly intellectually suspect nowadays. However, bereft of them, one is likely to flounder in facile ahistorical promiscuity. Insufficient reckoning with shifting historical groundings often hampers our accounts of contemporary Chinese art. For this reason, in what follows, I offer a storyline of contemporary Chinese art. While it obviously leaves out bases uncovered, the aim is to trace out the larger undertows that have driven trends and impulses.

For what it’s worth, the history in question is here conveniently divided into three decades. A period-specific preoccupation animated the art of each of the three decades. The 1980s was about language; the 1990s, the medium; and the 2000s, space.

1980s: All About Language1980s was the decade now remembered for its onslaught of experimental waves and avant-gardist art movements. The impetus behind was the search for alternative modes of thought to unshackle from Maoist-era orthodoxy. To the extent that modes of thought are couched in discursive habits, the revamping of visual languages amounted to ways of breaking out of the old ‘prison-house of language’.1 So the relentless experimentation in visual languages in the 1980s was ultimately about the renewal of conceptual language, i.e., modes of thought.

It all started on 27 September 1979. On that day, twenty-nine artists exhibited their works in a public park east of the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. The event has since been remembered as the Stars exhibition. The phrase is misleading in English. The artists featured in the exhibition were not stellar in their social standing – the word star conveys more of the sense of a twinkling of distant constellations rather than stellar personae. The artists were in fact amateurs. Though the event has been commonly referred to as a painting exhibition, its outstanding signature pieces were in fact wooden sculptures by Wang Keping, a professional actor who had dappled in sculpture for less than a year. Works by Wang that drew attention included: Silence, Breathing, and Long Live.2

To the extent that the Stars exhibition works embodied the crucial historical change circa 1979, it is to be expected that Wang Keping’s works are commonly subsumed under the storyline of the politics of art. Indeed, some obvious conceptual strains are discernible in Wang’s sculpture: the bold impulse to question the ideological orthodoxy of Maoist years, the burgeoning aspiration for freedom of expression, the rumination about the masses’ blind passion and deplorable lack of critical thinking. However, reducing these works to a few cut-and-dry concepts shortchanges their significance. While Wang’s works facilitate such expositions, they go beyond them. These works are remarkable because of their capacity to articulate the historical circumstances of the time through the very enabling medium of sculpture that both mocked and transcended the prison-house of language at the time. Three years into the post-Mao era, the aspiration for change was mounting; but the habits of language died hard. This is where artistic intuition and perceptual acuteness made a difference.

Wang had not received academic training in sculpture. He thus had the advantage of being unshackled from both the French and Soviet–Russian modes that dominated the art school sculptural training in China at the time. It is just as remarkable that he was yet to know modernist sculptural modes defined by Henri Matisse and Constantin Brancusi. Instead, it was his experience of working in theatre that had a more telling impact on his sculptural works in unexpected ways. Modes of theatricality amounted to a conceptual and formal fulcrum for Wang Keping’s eloquent sculpture. Exposure to the Theatre of the Absurd supplied him with the conceptual apparatus. The sense of ‘absurd’ translated into a visual language of ‘strange’. But these conceptual charges functioned more as cues. It was his sensitivity to the contingency of the material medium of wood—its conical knot, flowing grain, growth rings—that made his sculptures eloquent.

Wang Keping’s Cadre 1979–80 (cat. XX) provides a good example of how his intuitions work out in the sculptural medium. He started with the impulse to fashion a satirical sculptural depiction of a bureaucrat, inept in administrative competence but given to throwing his weight around. A blockhead with eye sockets but without eyeballs became a fitting formal correlate. In the process of carving the wood, however, new shades of suggestiveness presented themselves. The truncated piece suggested ‘heedlessness’. This prompted Wang to seize this condition to articulate the ‘head-without-brain’ idea.3

Ultimately, Wang Keping sought to transcend the impoverished language of the time. An imaginary dialogue he composed lays out his artistic conviction about the power of visual language:

A: What is this sculpture about? I can’t see what it resembles?B: It is itself. Its value does not depend on resembling something else.A: I can’t understand this painting. I only feel the dance of several colours.B: You have got it.A: Some of these paintings have no titles. I would like their creators to

say something about them.B: ‘Untitled’ means that they don’t have a title. Let others grasp the work.

Respect other’s imagination … Whatever is said has been said; he does not dwell on what need not be said.4

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three decades / themes eugene wang

1 Frederic Jameson, The prison-house of language, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.

2 Sun Zhenhua, Diaosu kongjian, Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 2002, p. 6.

3 Meishu, no. 4, 1982. Cited in Sun Zhenhua, Diaosu kongjian, 2002, p. 7.

4 Wang Keping, ‘Wen da’, Meishu, no. 1, 1981, p. 41.

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Luo Zhongli Father 1980 oil on canvas 227.0 x 154.0cm National Art Museum of China, Beijing

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Wang both embodied the impulses of the time and was ahead of the game. The repudiation and overhauling of social realism through abstraction and formalism were under way. Wang’s sculpture presaged that impulse. Meanwhile, his works also anticipated the artistic investment in the natural texture of materials, the contingency of form, which were yet to become established artistic conventions in contemporary China. Even the earthiness of the wooden mask form inadvertently looked forward to the symbolic rediscovery of the ‘primitive’ rural topographies in the literary and art movements of the 1980s.

Wang’s sculptures made the form of human head a contested site. The conceptual charge of the Theatre of the Absurd repudiates the social-realist theatricality that highlights heroic grandstanding current in the previous decade. Not coincidentally, a year later, another head portrait carried the day.

Father 1980 produced by the Sichuan artist Luo Zhongli (b. 1948) captured the public imagination. The painting’s effect derives from its striking contrast between the head portrait format and its colossal size. Its photorealist depiction of the weather-beaten face of an old peasant against the background of a parched land is suffused with pathos – a marked departure from the heroicising images of social-realist icons of generic workers and peasants ubiquitous in the Maoist era. Moreover, it put a non-descript peasant head in the colossal head portrait format previously reserved for Mao. Luo’s work was a milestone signaling the emergence of Ruralism in the early 1980s. Inspired in part by travelling exhibitions of works by Andrew Wyeth and nineteenth-century French paintings of the countryside, the early 1980s Chinese paintings of the rural subjects, produced mostly by the Sichuan art school students, re-trained the public eye on the pathos of rural earthiness. Rustic subjects – exemplified by Luo’s Father – map out the tension of contradictory traits and impulses. They embody at once unadorned authenticity, simplicity, and backward numbness. Authenticity was badly needed after decades of lies and deception; simplicity was consoling after years of disorienting political strife; and the backward numbness spoke to the acute awareness of the mindlessness of the decades long succumbing to political machinations. These qualities were irreconcilable in discursive formulation; the paintings sutured them into a whole. The critical discourse at the time struggled to come to terms with these works. Apparently the artists used their visual language to formulate well the entangled emotions many felt at the time.5

Ruralism was soon to be outgrown. While its emotionalism answered the psychological needs for post-trauma healing in the early 1980s, it became strained for lack of forward-looking directions. Moreover, more critically minded artists began to question the excess of the self-indulgent emotional rhetoric Ruralism had unleashed. Faced with the ideological bankruptcy and cultural wreckage in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, the artists of the 1980s endeavored to bring about a cultural revival powered by the new language of Reason as opposed to emotionalism. To break out of the prison-house of old language and thinking, they eagerly sought inspiration in Western philosophy and theories: Immanuel Kant, GWF Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. From Kant and Hegel they extrapolated an aesthetics of Reason, as exemplified by Wang Guangyi and the Northern Group’s paintings of

5 Eugene Y Wang, ‘Anxiety of portraiture: Ancestral image-making in post-Mao China.’ In Politics, ideology, and the literary discourse in modern China, edited by K Liu & X Tang with Foreword by F Jameson, durham: duke University Press, 1993, pp. 243–72.

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Wang Guangyi Death of Marat 1986 oil on canvas 150.0 x 200.0cm Sigg Collection

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pristine mannequin-like figures modelled upon abstract sculptural forms against uncluttered background. The overall mood is a cold dispassionate quietude with metaphysical overtones of spiritual aspiration, divested of emotional verbiage. These figures recall the ‘frozen calm’ of classical sculptural forms that Hegel saw as the perfect union of divine content and expressive form.6

The artists’ overweening reliance on philosophic discourse, however, led to an increasing divorce of art and reality. Artists such as Wang Guangyi began to worry about the consequences of the high-mindedness of the ‘philosophical zeal’ that had turned increasingly hollow in substance and lost its grip on the real world. Moreover, there was a growing realisation of the impact of the rhetorical fervor of the Cultural Revolution that got China into trouble in the first place. Wang set out to ‘cleanse the humanist zeal’.7 dispassionate iconographic citation remains his strategy. In his early works, he referenced canonical traditional Western art as a point of entry for his visual deconstruction. In 1988, Wang shifted his focus of ‘analysis’ or deconstructive parsing to the iconic images of Mao over which he applied a red grid, Mao Zedong, red grid no. 2 (cat. XX). His Mao paintings were intended primarily as an attempt at cognitive re-orientation rather than political posturing or attitudinising – in fact, he wanted his stance to be ‘neutral’.8 They were meant to forestall and frustrate the habitual expectation of discursive meaning and aesthetic judgment commonly brought to bear on them.9

Wang’s Mao paintings spell out a grammar of motifs that was to define a distinct Pop streak with a Chinese twist. The ostensible irony derives from endless serial reversals and displacements. If Mao stands for a past of revolutionary zeal and ardour and the grid signals present-day revisionist rigour and reason, the rendition of Mao, the icon of fervour, in cool monochrome gray and the grid, dispassionate reason writ large, in fact, reverse their moods and roles. The opposition can be construed as one between the fading memory of a passionate revolutionary past and the surging reality of a consumerist present: each critiques the other; none gains the high ground. In another sense, the redness of the grid associated with the present-day life driven by consumerism makes a mockery of the grid, which in principle is expected to dispassionately anchor critical reason.

Even though Wang Guangyi is now commonly presented as the leader of the cool-headed and even-keeled Northern Group, his intellectual roots and artistic practice largely came from south and southeast coastal China in the 1980s. His reaction against the ‘philosophical zeal’, i.e., the blind submission to some exaggerated idea, was shared by his schoolmates at the Zhejiang Art Academy, a bastion of boundary-pushing art practices in the 1980s. Like Wang Guangyi, the Hangzhou-based artists, who formed the Pond Society, were just as repulsed by the excessive philosophizing zeal and metaphysical pretensions in art practice.

Geng Jianyi’s works were exemplary in this regard. His Haircut, no. 3: Another bald head of the summer of 1985 1985 makes the prosaic everyday life scene of haircut its central subject, with the largely cold palette registering an indifference that precludes any discursive hot air. Second state 1987 (cat. XX), consisting of four large canvases (170.0 x 132.0cm), shows mask-like faces in varying states of convulsive laughs. The artist intention was modest in scope. He sought to engross the beholder in a total and immediate response to his

6 Frederic Lilge, ‘Philosophy and education in Hegel’, British journal of educational studies, 22, no. 2, June 1974, pp. 147-65.

7 Wang Guangyi ‘Wo canyu le ’85 meishu yundong de jincheng’ in Huatan ouxiang, deng Pingxiang ed., et al., Zhuhai, Guangdong: Zhuhai chubanshe, 1999, p. 111.

8 Lü Peng ‘Tushi xiuzheng yu wenhua pipan’, in Dangdai yishu chaoliu zhong de Wang Guangyi Chengdu: Sichuan meishu chubanshe, 1992, p. 36.

9 Huang Zhuan, Yishu shijie zhong de sixiang yu xingdong, Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2009, p. 133.

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Fang Lijun 980810 1998 oil on canvas 250.0 x 360.0cm The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art Queensland Art Gallery

Xiao Lu Dialogue, photograph of an installation 1989 Courtesy of the artist

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painting, un-mediated by external noises and extra-pictorial overlays. The in-your-face laughs were therefore meant as a visual device to impact the viewer viscerally and directly without any intervening gaps or discursive barriers.10 The visual effect of Geng’s paintings, however, inadvertently transcended their initial intent. Once transferred from photographs to gray-tone canvas, the painted laughs become muted hysteria and hollowed euphoria. The largely monochrome palette, the pitch-black background, the serial repetition, and the cropping that leaves out ears (thereby creating the mask effect) further enhance the eerily surreal overtone. The faces captured the mid-1980s mood: the existential anxiety, listlessness and ennui, induced in part by immersion in Sartre, Becket, and Freud, even though, ironically, the work was intended to rein in excessive theorizing.

Geng Jianyi’s works forebode what was to come. The bald heads in his Haircut, no. 3 1985 heralded paintings of shaven heads Fang Lijun produced around 1990, and continued throughout the decade.11 The two artists’ bald heads, however, point to both continuity and discontinuity in their pointed suggestiveness. Geng gave form to the existential ennui and meaninglessness, which Fang continued. Geng’s shaven heads, however, embodied more of the mid-1980s anxiety to unload the heroicising grandiloquence by shifting attention to the meaninglessness of routine life. Fang’s bald heads were consonant with the time around 1990.

Two events in Beijing in 1989 ended the eventful 1980s. An artist unexpectedly shooting at her own installation in the 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition in the National Art Museum of China brought the high-octane show to an abrupt closure. The government crackdown on the student movement in Tiananmen Square crushed the political aspirations of the young generation. The twin events dealt a double blow to the artists of the 1980s, bringing their high-minded idealism crushingly to the ground and deflating any illusion that their aspiration was part of a collective dream of modernisation. Fang Lijun’s paintings speak well to the changed climate and mood. The dumbing-down roguish images register the mounting sense of spiritual emptiness and lack of direction. The oversized rogue image itself suggests the growing irrelevance of the notion current in the 1980s, i.e., the artists’ self-appointed avant-gardist stance in leading the masses out of darkness. The political reality deflated that grand illusion and heroic self-regard.

1990s: All About MediumChinese society veered in a direction that the ominous year of 1989 did not presage. Liberal economics overrode and masked repressive politics. Starting in 1992, the mounting political tension of the previous decade now gave way to a dramatic economic turn to market economy. The new reality of the surging consumerist mass culture and rampant materialism made a mockery of the recent memory of the political high-mindedness of the modernist strivings of the 1980s. Feeling betrayed and disillusioned, artists were no longer anxious to play catch-up along the projected modernisation highway following Western modernist formal models. Instead, they began to turn to China’s own past to look for alternative resources and directions. Visual motifs from the Maoist years and the pre-1949 past were tapped for different ends.

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The resurrection of Maoist-era images, as demonstrated by Wang Qingsong’s Past, present, future 2001 (cat. XX), was a tongue-in-cheek move. In a vein of mock-seriousness, it at once re-enacts and deflates the revolutionary idealism of the Maoist era. The re-enactment triggers nostalgia for cultural values, such as prelapsarian simplicity, purity, and fervor – real or imagined – that the memory of the revolutionary years evokes, which stands in sharp contrast with present-day crass consumerist materialism. Meanwhile, the cheesy iconographic recapitulation of Maoist-era motifs suggests historically ironic parallels between the revolutionary past and consumerist present. The rural sensibility that remained the hallmark of the Maoist-era aesthetic palate is put on the spot: its rustic simplicity notwithstanding, it reeks of uncouth vulgarity and earthy banality. It is precisely these qualities that describe well the gaudiness and bad taste of the upstarts and nouveau-riches of the 1990s. So the revival of revolutionary icons amounts to a double movement: it both opposes the consumerist present with the memory of revolutionary past and equates them. The opposition highlights the bankruptcy of the utopian idealism of the revolutionary past in the face of a rampant materialist present; the equation mocks both the past fervent utopianism and its present-day betrayal – both appear equally dubious.

Globalisation precipitated Chinese artists’ turn to indigenous Chinese resources. If nation building and nationalisation were primary concerns of 1950s and 1960s, and modernisation and belated enlightenment discourse dominated the 1980s, globalisation was the new reality of the 1990s in China. The homogenising force of transnational capitalism made its impact felt everywhere, including China. The inclusion of contemporary Chinese artworks in international biennales and exhibitions and private and institutional Euro-American interest in collecting it made Chinese artists more conscious about their own standing vis-à-vis the international audience – real or imagined. Globalisation prompted them to be more sensitive to their own indigenous cultural tradition on which they drew: both to stake out the turf of cultural identity and to have a competitive edge in the international market of ideas and ‘brands’. It is only to be expected that the recapitulation of pre-1949 Chinese images and motifs became a strategic way of staking out ‘Chineseness’.

But it was Chineseness with a 1990s inflection and flavor. With the bankruptcy of the avant-gardist high-mindedness of the 1980s, the generation of artists who debuted in the 1990s vaunted their distinctive sensibility and preoccupations. No longer occupying the Olympian height, they ceased to regard themselves as avant-garde with the enlightenment mission to lead the charge of modernisation. Public events and grand themes – long fraught with contrived narratives – were no longer the primary focus of their visual interest. Instead, they were drawn to the brute texture of individuals’ lived experience, especially those struggling on the fringes of society. Pictures of social outcasts became mirror images of artists’ own unmoored existence

This shift to an individual private experiential domain led to a radical reorientation of medium. Many artists found that the mediums in which they had been trained were wanting in their capacity to capture heightened individual sensorial experiences in a rapidly changing time. Many painters abandoned their familiar crafts in easel painting and opted for performance art, photography, and video, with body as the new focus.

10 Liu Chun, Yishu, rensheng, xinchao: yu 41 wei Zhongguo dangdai yishujia duihua, Kuming: Yunnan renmin chubanshe, 2003, p. 199.

11 Fang Lijun, ‘Guangtou Fang Lijun 20 shiji nianpu’, Shanxi wenxue, 2010, pp. 91–96.

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Song Dong Stamping the water 1996 Type C photograph on paper 36 photographs: 120 x 80cm (each, irreg., approx.) Purchased 2002 Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Queensland Art Gallery

Song dong’s works exemplify the trend. Trained as an oil painter, he switched to performance and video art in the 1990s in an attempt to bridge the yawning gap that intervened between the easel painting medium and his private experiential world. Diary written in water 1995 records the process in which he earnestly wrote his private journal with a water-drenched brush. Water as a new medium of his bodily engagement had the transformative fluidity that encompasses the liquid, gaseous and solid states. His direct engagement with water was a most private endeavor. He was able to write out in and with water the flashbacks of liquid memories: his childhood observance of water flow on the table, the sense of wonder about the malleability of shapes the water assumes contingent on the physical dimensions of containers, the fright caused by his physical education teacher who pushed him into a swimming pool when he had yet to know how to swim, and the childhood memory of practising calligraphy with water to avoid the cost of ink. The unmediated and direct interaction between his body and the water-as-medium ensured that no one else was ever able to read his ephemeral diary. Water and his own body were also the medium for his Breathing part 1 and part 2 1996 (cat. XX). Prostrating himself on Tiananmen Square in one cold night, he kept blowing his breath to the same spot on the ground for forty minutes so that the vapor eventually congealed into a solid icy pool. The bodily act brought together two separate spaces: the public and his private realm. Or rather, the primacy of his private act of breathing relegates Tiananmen, a looming symbol of the political public arena, to be no more than a hollow backdrop or a senseless hulking presence beyond the ken of personal self-absorption and privacy.

The growing interest in the texture of personal experiences gave women artists an edge. The 1990s saw the emergence of a number of young female artists who made an indelible imprint on the contemporary Chinese art scene. Their works are noted for the primacy of cryptic personal privacy, the intuitive and sensorial grasp of the phenomenal world, the predilection for natural, biological, and existential processes instead of political, historical and philosophical preoccupations, an indifference to the world of men, a preference for traditional handicrafts, and the affinity for unassuming mediums akin to everyday and household experience.12 In many ways, Lin Tianmiao’s (b. 1961) Braiding 1999 exemplifies these characteristics. A twelve-foot-tall stretch of cloth bearing the imprint of the artist’s photographic self portrait with shaven head hangs monumentally from a metal contraption in space. Numerous holes across the cloth allow for the woven pieces of thread issuing from the back of the cloth. They merge and converge into thick braids, winding across the floor, leading to a video monitor that displays the artist in the process of weaving thread through the cloth. It is the same piece of cloth that hangs in the air with her photographic self portrait.

Both Song dong and Lin Tianmiao’s works render obsolete the notion of art premised on a specific medium. In Song’s case, the artist’s own body and the transformative states of water were the mediums for his art practice. In Lin’s case, photography, video, cloth, and braided thread constitute the material support. The breakdown of the medium specificity did not come from the internal evolution of the art world enacting a self-fulfilling prophecy; rather, it was propelled by the artists’ pressing psychological need to find fitting

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12 Jia Fangzhou, Shiji nüxing yishuzhan, Beijing: Huaren yishu chubanshe, 1998, p. 121.

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correspondence between the vagaries of their individual bodily and sensorial experience and the variety of material forms.

The abandon with which erstwhile painters luxuriated in inter-medium practices occurred at the expense of the easel painting medium. Many abandoned the comfort zone of practicing the material mediums they had been trained in and opted for installations, photography, video, and performance art. Artists such as Zhang Peili, Song dong, Lin Tianmiao, Wang Gongxin, and Wang Jianwei were initially all trained as oil painters. Once they discovered the camera as their medium, they have not looked back. This trend in turn impacted the painting medium. Those who stayed with the medium felt the pressure to reinvent the wheel and revamp the medium. A favored strategy was appropriation of formal properties from other media, such as photography.

Wang Xingwei My beautiful life 1993–95 (cat. XX) epitomises this practice. Picturing the back of himself and his girlfriend leaning against a bridge railing over a river, the painting emulates the photographic effect of grainy texture and the glare of single-source flash-lighting, thereby turning the oil painting canvas into a pictorial mimicry of a photograph. Meanwhile, the work lifts a familiar composition from Edvard Munch’s paintings, such as Rain 1902. At once a mimicry and a citation – visual strategies customarily deployed in conceptual art – Wang’s work both riffs photo-documented performance and spoofs a canonical painting. It paradoxically enacts the wrecking of medium specificity by the very act of persisting in it. If the goal of post-medium conceptual art is to bring down the unexamined pretensions of high art tied to a specific medium,13 in particular, the oil painting, Wang’s work stands that premise, i.e., the celebrated post-medium photographic dumbing-down of ‘high art’, on its head. The mild humor of the work derives from the very send up of the photographic medium effect on oil painting canvas: the mock-serious enshrinement of banal snapshot as high art makes such modernist strategy equally pretentious and suspect.

The impact of photography on 1990s practice, however, was not limited to the emergence of neo-documentary photography as a means of documenting performance art; moreover, it served as a model or medium for conceptual art. Its formal properties – the deadpan camera eye, the mechanical reproduction, and layered citations – amount to a formal paradigm that other mediums such as easel painting could appropriate and mimic. The appropriation and internalisation of the photographic medium was most palpable in easel painting.

2000s: All About SpaceSpace has always been an issue in Chinese art. The dramatic changes in the physical environment and cultural landscape in China have made artists even more acutely aware of individuals’ vexed relationship vis-à-vis the surrounding world and the kaleidoscopic backdrop of shifting societal panorama. Such relationships are clearly registered in artworks of the 2000s as a figure-and-background relationship. Previously, this relationship had been far less fraught with tension: figures were placed in settings or against backdrops that served largely as the subjects’ social, conceptual, or psychological extensions: the fitting milieu, habitat or states of mind. Chinese artists of the 1980s set their

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Lin Tianmiao Braiding 1999 digital photograph, cotton thread, video dimensions variable Sigg Collection

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13 Rosalind E Krauss, ‘Reinventing the Medium,’ in Critical Inquiry, 25, no. 2, winter, 1999, p. 295

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Liu Xiaodong Three Gorges: Newly displaced population 2004 oil on canvas 300.0 x 1000.0cm collection XXX

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figures against a variety of monumental backdrops: vast rural or industrial topographies, macro-historical horizons, metaphysical cosmos, abstract abyss. The relationship between the figures and their background topographies was one of correspondence. The artists in the 1990s retreated behind the rampart of their experiential privacies to attend to the house of cards made of different mediums surrounding their body as the ultimate centre. The background tended to be close-range views of corners of an empirical world in observable slices—cocoons of their imaginary solipsism. In either case, some sort of figures-and-background unity is assumed. In this regard, the difference between the 1980s and 1990s is only one of changed preoccupations.

The artists of the 2000s stepped out again into vast openness to face the radically reconfigured spaces of the contemporary Chinese landscape. While this figuration against vast backdrop recalls the figure-background relationship of the 1980s, the difference is palpable. Often the figure-backdrop relationship is one of unease, disconnect, displacement, incongruity, and dislocation. Moreover, a decade-long revamping of the medium had left indelible imprint on the figures themselves: these are nothing but traces of re-mediation – a palimpsest of effects of different medium properties.

The unease of the figure-and-surrounding relationship speaks to the overwhelming sense of dislocation and displacement many feel in present-day China. The rapidly changing physical environment was caused by the mushrooming of skyscrapers fed by a frenzy of real estate development, the wrecking of old residential communities, internal migration and relocation, and so on. Moreover, the dislocation occurs not just at the physical and social level, but often at the psychological level. Artists exploring these shifting fault lines of social and psychological landscape throw into high relief a bewildering sense of new space, the precariousness of cognitive mapping and navigation of these everchanging spaces.

Weng Fen’s On the wall – Guangzhou (II) 2002 (cat. XX) illustrates this new sense of space. The photograph centres on a young girl bestriding a wall, looking wistfully at the array of newly risen skyscrapers in the horizon. The disjuncture of the foreground occupied by the girl and the background is apparent. The wall she sits on, scrawled with dirt and stains, epitomises the subject’s real physical world still mired in the weathered everyday humdrum world. In contrast, the pristine skyscrapers looming in the distance against white cloud and blue sky appear to be a mirage. distance here acquires the dubious character of both spatial recession and temporal marking. Space is turned into time, horizon into futurity, and the real into surreal. Meanwhile, the scrawled wall, presenting itself as a flat surface bearing the traces of hand, inadvertently turns into a photographic mimicry of a canvas or a writing pad; in contrast, the distant skyline takes on dimensions of virtuality devoid of human presence and touches.

Miao Xiaochun’s Parliamentarian (Congressman) 2002 (cat. XX), made in the same year, explores a similar disconnect. Here the photographic subject, a mannequin of the artist himself, dressed in a pre-modern Chinese robe, sits in the empty auditorium of the Great Hall.14 The work revels in the irony of reversal: the artist’s real quixotic presence embodies an absent erstwhile subjectivity: a cool, dispassionate and thoughtful observer composed as distinct

from the surrounding world. In contrast, the uniformity of the rows of vacant seats suggests a mindless crowd, located in the present, but visibly absent. An additional irony stems from the compositional scheme: the allover fullness of the frame proffers a massive emptiness.

Both Weng and Miao expose the figure-background disjuncture and incongruity as tropes of fault lines in present-day China. They operate within the uniform space of the photographic medium. In contrast, Yu Hong’s She – Unemployed girl 2003 (cat. XX), a triptych with two photos flanking a painting, frames similar preoccupations in a more complex way. Incongruity is the theme that runs through each of the three panels. The pair of photographs shows the same woman in gaudy pink bridal gown against the humdrum environments of everyday life. The central panel depicts a young mother, fashionably attired, in symmetry with what appears to be either her mother or mother-in-law, both seated in sofas. The incongruity of the situation is palpable. The sets of sofas do not match, yet the two sets are improbably arranged together as a set. The two walls are just as disjoined: one festooned with hangings of artificial plants; the other covered with a landscape painting. The furnishings and their symmetrical setup recall the level of formality and gravitas often on display in photographs of national leaders receiving distinguished foreign visitors in the Great Hall of People. The disjuncture among different furnishings and decorations mildly mocks the ludicrousness of the untenable formality – not to mention the unease with which the familial relationship is impossibly displaced into this grandiose milieu. The mop leaning against the wall ultimately deflates whatever pomposity propped up here. The triptych maps out well the confusion and comedy arising out of the rapidly reconfigured life and space of contemporary China.

The theme of incongruity not only runs through the triptych as a problem of space; it also stages the question of mediums. Photography is pitched against oil painting. The pink colour scheme engulfs the bride in the photographs to such an extent that the photographs aspire toward the condition of a ‘painting’. Likewise, the intrusion of humdrum household objects captured in the manner of deadpan camera – the washbowl, the mop, and the trash can – deflates the composition’s aspiration to be pictorial in the picturesque way. Thus both the photographs and the painting speak to their own medium condition and demand expanded notions of these traditional mediums. The incredible happens so often in present-day China that one should get used to the unexpected. An everyday object can be catapulted into an improbably fantastic height right before one’s eyes, such that it requires no more than the deadpan snapshot to simply show the magic without pictorial embellishment. Such is the case with the girl next door in gaudy bridal gown. Conversely, a deepening sense of the rootedness in the bedrock of base reality deflates any illusion of the bubble of the painted fantasy: dreams can be painted, but the painter can just as well expose what lies outside the dream, a la mode of a deadpan camera. Such is the case of the house interior filled at once with grand furnishings and mundane objects.

The triptych exemplifies the tempered arsenal with which artists come to terms with new reality in contemporary China. The new inter-medium sensibility refined in the previous decade allows Yu Hong and her

14 Gu Zheng, Contemporary Chinese photography, Beijing: China Youth Press, 2011, pp. 22–23.

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contemporaries, who came of artistic age in the 1990s, to explore the problem of space by way of medium effects.

Jing Kewen’s No clouds at the Great Wall 2010 (cat. XX) also works along this line. It explores not only the spatial and temporal disjuncture between the figures and background, but also the shifting effects produced through inter-medium mimicries and spoofs. Its seeming pedestrian and uniform disposition belies its embedded historicity. The oil painting is based on one of the old photographs taken in Maoist years, which Jing acquired from antique markets. Chinese officials in plain dark-blue Mao suits show around distinguished African visitors in Western suits in a scenic spot at the Great Wall. These socialist-era officials look positively drab by today’s sartorial standard in China. On the other hand, they exude a spirited healthy radiance, which earns the artist’s admiration. However, Jing’s work is not to be flatly reduced to fuzzy nostalgia for Maoist years. Having witnessed traumatic scenes during the Cultural Revolution as a child, he is unlikely to whitewash the 1970s. His oil painting presents, instead, moments from the past as processed through the overlay of childhood memory. The refreshing effect of the work derives from its departure from the 1990s vogue for deliberate over-vulgarising spoofs of Maoist-era images. Jing’s work oscillates between deadpan pictorial citation of found photographs and his interventionist painterly reworking of the photograph. He emphatically brightens up the colour scheme of the background landscape to lift the mood of the composition from the 1970s humdrum environment and infuse it with tinges of ‘contemporaneity’, but not to the extent of over-dramatic send up that characterises the 1990s contrived burlesque. Sure, socialist years were spoofed; but the eschewal of retrospective excessive burlesque unsettles any facile positions and propositions. divested of any hindsight, a slice of historical memory is revived through the prism of a borrowed lens – someone else’s viewpoint. The brightening of colour palette exudes childlike innocence. The work stages intuitive grasps of historical experiences, unfiltered by discursive habits of the day.

Jing’s painting thus comes full circle in view of the history of contemporary Chinese art. Artists in the 1980s adopted modernist visual languages in an attempt break out of the prison-house of language hardened in the 1970s. Troubled by the danger of radicalism itself ossifying into philosophical excess, they sought to ‘cleanse’ all that rhetorical verbiage and zeal in favor of abstract forms of ‘Reason’ with overtones of dispassionate calm. That resulted in purification of forms with which they project their universalising ideals and enlightenment aspirations. The artists of the 1990s retreated into their own personal worlds to focus on their immediate individual experiences vis-à-vis the real world out there. This led to reinvention and repurposing of the mediums with the private body and sensorium as the new focus. The artists in the 2000s came out of their cocoons to embrace public space again – only that this new re-integration into public life internalised the renewed sense of mediums and individualised sensorial experiences. So, the three decades of contemporary Chinese art may be framed in a three-act process: thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis. The master narrative proffered here has indeed left out bases uncovered; but it at least provides one roadmap with which we can navigate this rapidly expanding horizon.

missing footnotes?

Yin Shuangxi, ‘Zai lishi yu xianshi zhijian’, Xianchang: Yin Shuangxi yishu piping wenji, Shijiazhuang: Hebei meishu chubanshe, 2006, pp. 206–209.

Zou Yuejin, Xin Zhongguo meishu shi, 1949-2000, Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 2002. pp. XX