The art critic Richard Vine, a senior editor at Art and America and for many years one of the few incorruptible observers of China’s cultural scene, recounts this history in his new critical survey called New China New Art, published by Prestel.[1] Today’s Chinese avant-gardists do not “share either the political intent or the reckless bravery of the Tiananmen organizers,” he notes. “The cruel lesson of June 4, 1989 is that repression sometimes works.”

[...] Look up Chinese art history and you won’t find chapters on illusionistic painting or abstraction or high modernism. Traditional Chinese art is limited to calligraphic ink on paper. So today’s hot Chinese artists, who skillfully replicate the contemporary practices of Western art, never passed through the history that created it. “Mao Zedong, having set out to establish a Communist utopia,” notes Vine, “inadvertently paved the way—at the cost of forty to seventy million peacetime lives—for a postmodern society par excellence.”

And from Art Journal:

Vine divides New China, New Art into sections according to medium: painting, sculpture & installation, performance, photography and video, while at the same time remaining artist-centric in approach. Some 125 Chinese artists are featured overall, including details on each of their backgrounds and careers.

However, it would be impossible to produce a book of this kind without addressing the social history of China and the repression under which artists have traditionally produced their art. While covering the major events such as the effects of Tiananmen Square, New China, New Art intertwines fascinating and lesser known events such as the Shanghai Biennale of 2004, in which a group show of abstract works was open for only four hours before being closed by authorities.

Chinese artists, says Vine, are unique in that they have undergone virtually overnight, a complete shift from a period of enforced people’s art to that of eclectic postmodernism. This was so, writes Vine, without ever passing through a period of high-minded modernism, as in the Western world. Thus, the effects of the ‘capitalism yes; democracy no’ stance taken by the country’s governments, can also be seen in the contemporary art market – the importance of the flow of capital in this domain should not be underestimated.

Read also:
- Reviews on Art Critical and Red Box Studio.
- Art in America’s website
- A 2007 article in the New York Times about artist Zhang Huan
- CDT’s coverage of contemporary art

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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When the exhibition “Inside Out: New Chinese Art” opened at Asia Society and P.S. 1 in 1998, it caused a stir because it both did and did not meet expectations of contemporary art from China.

The show had plenty of Mao portraits, but they came with jokes: Mao behind bars, Mao in Pop colors, with beauty marks and a flower in his teeth. There was also calligraphy, but it was messed-up calligraphy: illegible, computerized, used to write nonsense characters, fake language….[Full Text]

[Image of Zhang Huan via NYT]

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I don’t know what is more interesting: this description of Zhang Huan‘s performance art; or the fact that the Boston Globe story ran in the China Daily. Here we have an officially sanctioned Chinese newspaper running commentary on postmodern performance art and, simultaneously, telling us that traditional Confucianism is making a comeback (soon to be an Internet movie near you!). What a wacky world Chinese culture has become!

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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Zhang Huan is the type of artist whom many outside the rarefied world of performance art label a crackpot. He has covered his naked body in honey and fish oil and sat in a public toilet, attracting flies. For his piece “Zhang Huan: Seeds of Hamburg,” documented in a series of photographs on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, he coated himself with honey and birdseed and closed himself in a cage with 28 doves. Under rainy skies Monday evening in “Zhang Huan: My Boston,” a live performance, he had himself buried under a pile of books.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: performance art, zhang huan
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