Present Encounters : Papers from the conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1996

SESS ION 4 : ARTISTS AND THE SOCIAL D IMENSION Wang Youshen The Present Situation of Contemporary Chinese Art (Ecology and Psychology) The title of my speech is 'State of being and state of mind: The present state of Contemporary Chi nese Art'. To understand customs of contemporary Chinese art one always has to know two things: one is the social reality of the country and the second is the analysis of the artists of contemporary China. My speech is based on these two aspects. Contemporary Ch i nese art is a reality that has been recorded into the Chinese history of art. As social space and individual space, state of being and state of mind have a lways accompan ied art and artists. One aspect of the social and individual space exists obj ectively i n the international community of super powers, questions of cultural focus of our own ethnic local ised commun ities, questions of cultu ral specificity and the existence of human life , and the life of the natural world etc. . Another aspect is the principal existence of state of mind and the state of being, the psychology and living experience of human and natural life. How should we confront the current situation of social and individual psychology and state of being? How should we adapt to the variations and interrelationships of the social and ind ividual psychology and state of being? This requires the enthusiastic involvement of artists and the functioning of their work. Therefore, an examination of the present state of contemporary Ch i nese art is valuable to the development of Asian-Pacific contemporary art. I n a general sense, the value of contemporary China in recent years is d rawn from and h i nges on the economy, and has deeply penetrated all layers of social psychology, influencing each person individually, incl uding the artists who are engaged in the work of spiritual guidance. The government implementation of a market economy has altered the familiar pattern of people's life consciousness, the consequent values have changed and impacted on the individual psychology of the contemporary Chinese people. At the same time, this social evolution, which does not depend on the shifts o f i ndividual determi nations, brings about various new types of social ecology such as: the doubting and perishing of spiritual and moral values; the overabundance and prevalence of money worsh i p and hedonism; the trade in money and power; social corrosion and an i nability to defend against crime; unemployment; the gap between rich and poor; envi ronmental pollution etc. These social phenomena produce d imensional variations of collective social psychology. Today a general spi rit of scepticism seems to have become the 'trend of civilisation' wh ich people acknowledge . . . Therefore, all of us in this popularised 'psychological story' naturally become the motivators of this 'trend of civil isation'. This statement by Wang Guang Yi seems to reflect the attitude of the majority of people. Because the internal questions of art are now less relevant, contemporary artists push towards exploring the external issues relating to art. (Wang Guang Yi , Beiji ng) Based on his own artistic judgement, Wang's series 'Great Criticism ', produced in the 1 990s, and his new works Visa (1 995) and Paradise (1 995) produced in the last two years, a re stronger i n their ideologically-orientated social psychology and depict for his audience a 'popular psycholog ical story' of a pantheistic social psychology. In the mid 1 980s the artist Wu Shanzhuan had already started his 'red humour'. The work Showing China from the best aspect - buy your own five comer star from the national flag (1 995) - by Wu Shanzhuan and the famous Icelandic female artist l .S. Thorsdottir, who a re both resident in Germany - is two-directiona l and commercially 'advertises' Modern Ch i na 64