China's latest export: avant garde art
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Sheng Qi's art remembers his experience in the Tiannamen Square massacre. Submitted photos |
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By Anne Galloway Times Argus Staff - Published: September 19, 2008
If only China's Chairman Mao Zedong could see them now: His people en masse making consumer goods for the West; his people tapping into unimagined wealth; his people making some of the most outrageous avant garde art in the world.
I'd say that Mao must be rolling in his grave, except that his body is housed in his own personal mausoleum.
Thankfully for the Chinese people, Mao's cult of personality didn't outlive him. After he died in 1976, his successor, Deng Xiaoping instituted economic reforms that ever so slightly lifted the lid on Chinese culture.
As a result, in a single generation China has gone from an isolationist country that exported few manufactured products to becoming the world's industrial powerhouse. What's made in China these days, doesn't stay there. Americans buy more goods from China than anywhere else in the world.
Those products now include handmade crafts and even fine art. Some of the hottest artwork on the market in New York is by avant garde Chinese artists, many of whom were born during Mao's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a period in which intellectuals were sent to forced labor camps or prison to be "rehabilitated." (Merely thinking back then was a bad idea, never mind bothering to express an opinion.)
It will take a long time for Chinese culture to rebound from Mao's repressive regime and the Tiannamen Square massacre in 1989 after which thousands of Chinese artists and intellectuals fled the country.
Ironically, the Cultural Revolution made it possible for artists to reinvent themselves. There was no immediate past to return to – only the ancient artistic tradition of scroll and landscape painting. Nor were Chinese artists influenced by the West, as the doors to the country were effectively closed for about 50 years.
Consequently, there is nothing derivative about contemporary Chinese art; it is a direct expression of the culture. If you go to see the "Made in China" show at the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe, you'll see what I mean.
In this first-ever exhibit of modern Chinese art in Vermont, curators Jacquie Leven Mauer and Lillian Mauer have brought some of the most iconic works of this avant garde movement from private collections and galleries in New York and Montreal, including Sheng Qi's performance art pieces on film; Zhang Huan's clever photographic and film inversions of Chinese proverbs; and Huang Yan's traditional landscapes on an unusual canvas – the human body.
In all, there are 32 works and 15 young Chinese artists represented in the show (only one was born before 1966). Two of the photos are by Edward Burtynsky, a renowned Canadian environmental photographer who has documented the razing of villages for the Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtze River. A handful of the works on view are antiquities from the Ming, Tang and other periods are on loan from the Schneible Gallery in Shelburne.
Much of the work is representational and conceptual in nature; there are very few abstractions in the show. Photography is used liberally to capture original, ephemeral artworks or performance pieces.
Thematically, the work revolves around cultural keystones: Traditional proverbs, landscapes, archetypes and Chinese characters that define simple words or ideas. There are also a few potent political statements in the show and pieces make fun of China's slavish devotion to American consumerism. The artists have, however, embraced a fundamental Americanism: They have learned how to make the personal political.
Sheng Qi fled China after Tiannamen Square, but he left a part of himself buried there: his left pinky finger. At the time it was a gesture of defiance; later, he incorporated his self-mutilation into his art. In "Memories/Me," his hand (which has been blown up to fill a poster size photo), featuring the missing digit, holds a tiny school photo of himself. The blood red background enhances the gruesomeness of the image.
Huang Yan creates his "Tattoo Landscape" on the chest of a model. The white powder base creates a mottled background on the undulating surface of the skin. The traditional landscape painted in brown and green, follows the contours of the body and seems to come alive in this context. The photograph of the painting captures the effect in detail, from the pores of the man's skin to the continuous brush strokes that create the sinuousness of the greenery.
Enigmatic Chinese proverbs are the subject of Zhang Huan's work. In his photograph, "To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain," (the title is derived from an axiom) he asked 10 artists to help him literally do just that. And so they climbed to the top of a mountain, took all their clothes off and piled on top of one another into an uneven stack. An engineer measured the height of their human mound, which when they adjusted themselves came to exactly one meter (though where they measured from – head or derriere who knows). Misty mountains rise behind them, creating a kind of mystical setting for this ironic image.
In "Beggar," Wang Qingsong creates a digitally manipulated tableau. A white woman wearing a traditional silk Chinese dress walks away from a beggar dressed in rags. The setting is a sterile studio space or warehouse represented here in a kind of generic gray light. The woman carries a clear plastic purse filled with dollars, and a small pampered dog follows at her heels. The beggar is half lying on the ground with a cup in front of him with Chinese currency sprinkled around it. Even the pooch has a better life than this impoverished wretch. Qingsong, who often inserts himself in his images, is the beggar.
This last image is a not-so-subtle reference to the latest form of repression to hit China is consumerism. Other pieces in the show also bemoan the loss of culture in the name of progress, but it's on a larger scale – in the form of urban renewal and Three Gorges Dam.
Still this exhibit gives me hope that not everything made in China has become a part of our throwaway culture. Chinese artists anyway have retained a connection to ancient threads of their own culture that they perhaps once thought were lost.