The China Project

19 the china project opposite Wang Qingsong creating the initial drawings for China Red 2008–09, a site-specific work installed in the Long Gallery, GoMA, for ‘Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection’ / Images courtesy: The artist of a curious international art world; within China the creative and intellectual community identified such art as the way forward in contemporary practice. Historian Geremie Barmé argues that: In the years since those events, unofficial art has continued in its ambivalent role. With one eye trained on the marketplace and the other on official orthodoxy, [unofficial art] has achieved a status of a cultural barometer that with its ebb and flow has recorded the covert artistic vitality of the nation. It is in the oscillation of Caesar and Mammon that much contemporary mainland art has been able to flourish. 6 Since the openly experimental and often anti-establishment energy of the 1980s, the resounding success of artists in the market in the late 1990s and into the 2000s occurred in the context of an expanding market economy. Deng Xiaoping’s reformist agenda (‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’), instigated from the mid 1980s, ensured that China was a participant in the global economy and as much a major consumer as a producer. 7 This is the environment addressed by Wang Qingsong’s installation China Red 2008–09. The Long Gallery wall in GoMA is plastered with hundreds of cheap, hand-copied advertising and marketing slogans — a tacky yet ominous reference to a distinctive Chinese brand of sloganeering and jingoism, and encapsulating that very ambivalence Barmé has identified. Here is a work that is consciously attuned to the peculiar tensions of making art in China today, where the role of the commercial is inevitable and intrinsic and must be addressed and critically analysed. Like China Red , Xu Bing’s A book from the sky 1987–91 also uses text and word play. However, Xu Bing’s installation was made during a very different time, the late 1980s, when the nature of art making had a markedly different energy. This work cites the importance of Chinese literati history, using technical brilliance in the production of each character to bring forth a work that is, in the end, unreadable. Meaning is contained as contradiction and paradox, for ‘sense’ can only be made after one understands that there is ‘no sense’ to be made in the characters contained in these books and scrolls. The work was recognised at the time to be a touchstone for the Avant-garde while also offending the authorities, who interpreted it as a gesture of impertinence and disrespect. Xu Bing’s monumental work encapsulates the ambition that heralded the Avant-garde in China, the first manifestations of which are now discussed broadly under the aegis of the ’85 New Wave. As art historian Fei Dawei has stated: . . . the ’85 New Wave Movement represents a watershed in contemporary Chinese art history. As the liveliest part of the entire intellectual liberation movement of the 1980s it marked the end of a monolithic artistic model, achieving unprecedented freedom and opening a path for Chinese art to march toward internationalisation and contemporaneity. After 1985, contemporary art became a driving force behind Chinese art. 8 Literally thousands of artists across China undertook this task with fervour. 9 The breadth of practice and the explosion of experimentation were momentous, and occurred during this time of relative openness. Leading up to this period was the tumultuous, repressive, culturally interventionist and largely destructive Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Although ‘Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection’ does not delve into this time in depth, a portfolio of nine photographs by Li Zhensheng captures some of the wildly anarchic, disturbing and conflicting events. Li documented this period through an extraordinary body of photographs (numbering many thousands of rolls of film), taken over 18 years from 1964 while he worked as a photojournalist for the Heilongjiang Daily newspaper in the northern city of Harbin. As Li acknowledges, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution there was a general sense of excitement heralded by a decree issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on 16 May 1966. 10 However, the promised change was enacted as a campaign of violence and persecution for artists and intellectuals, ending only with Mao Zedong’s death in September 1976, and the fall of the ‘Gang of Four’ a month later. 11 The Cultural Revolution was identified as ‘the most catastrophic and complicated mass movement and political upheaval ever to afflict China’ 12 by Sinologist Jonathan Spence who, in his 2003 essay on the significance of Li’s work, described his creation of the photographic archive: As an official photographer for a state-controlled newspaper he was, of course, to some extent doing no more than obeying orders in framing his photos; but as a young man with an acute eye, he was also achieving something far more complex: he was tracking human tragedies and personal foibles with a precision that was to create an enduring legacy not only for his contemporaries but for the generations of his countryman then unborn. And as Westerners confront the multiplicity of his images, they too, can above Ah Xian / China/Australia b.1960 Metaphysica: Cicada on bamboo (detail) 2007 Bronze and brass / 53.5 x 43.5 x 23.5 cm / Collection: The artist