The China Project

30 opposite Wang Qingsong / China b.1966 Night revels of Lao Li (detail) 2000 Type C photograph, ed. 7/9 / 120 x 960cm / The James C Sourris Collection. Purchased 2002 with funds from James C Sourris through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Mu Chen / China b.1970 Shao Yinong / China b.1961 Qixianzhuang (from ‘Assembly hall series no.6’) 2006 Type C photograph, ed. 1/3 / 182 x 244cm / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2006 with funds from Michael Simcha Baevski through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery right Qiu Zhijie / China b.1969 See you again, see you again (stills) 1996–2003 Mini DV, 10:30 minutes, colour, stereo / Purchased 2004. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery The postmodern leanings of contemporary Chinese art are expressed primarily as linguistic devices that aim to distort, appropriate, juxtapose, imitate or mock concepts and images drawn from both Chinese and Western canons, as well as from the ‘Red classics’ of Chinese socialism. We see these common traits in the works of contemporary Chinese art in the Queensland Art Gallery’s Collection. ‘The China Project’ exhibition thus reflects the attitude and position of contemporary Chinese art toward traditional and socialist classics, even as it manifests the hybrid state of tradition and modernity, of Eastern and Western culture, in the context of China’s current social transition. In doing so, the exhibition also exposes the uncertain state of the so-called classics. Because this art intentionally plays on the meaning of cultural symbols and icons, and because it emphasises the richness and detail of individual memory, the cultural memory it contains carries strong traces of both emotion and pastiche. Imagination is a structural element of this form of cultural memory, expressed as fantasies of ‘return’ or a ‘spiritual home’ in that which has already disappeared or which remains only in individual memory. For this reason, such imagination carries with it a hint of the postmodern. This postmodern current in contemporary Chinese art is evident by way of cultural memory and imagination, or rather, in the way it takes cultural memory and imagination as narrative resources to be drawn from and exploited. This cultural memory could be categorised into two major divisions: first, the 5000 years of traditional Chinese culture, up to and including the beginning of modern Chinese history as symbolised by the May Fourth Movement of 1919; second, the establishment of a New China in 1949, and the socialist period that followed, lasting through to the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s. The imaginations of memory are not mere nostalgia; through the historical depths that they imply, we can interrogate the past, and explore what of its inheritance remains possible and impossible in the future. From a sociological perspective, to analyse these images is indeed to analyse Chinese social phenomena. These works are true records of the confusions of traditional and contemporary, East and West, which mark the cultural ecology of this process of social transition. They also respond to the chaos of lived Chinese culture with an imagistic hybridity that reflects the hybridity of a so- called postmodern society. Analysed as visual art, these works show how, amid real and substantial change in China, a cultural memory and imaginary finds its way ever more clearly into the artists’ individual ‘nostalgic’ visions, channelled through their personal experience and lived memory. The ‘artistic methods’ employed in these works are ‘methods’ in the postmodern sense, operating on three levels: first, by distorting narrative structures; second, by creating a sense of displacement; and third, by adding to this displacement elements of parody or satire. In these works, we see the appropriation and fabrication of Chinese and Western classical images, plays on the self and the other, and a conflation of sentiment and reality. They are hypertextual collages of displaced effects. Postmodern art attempts to place all artistic questions on a single plane, and uses the joking tactical approach of ‘however it’s done is fine’ to flatten this plane. This postmodern flatness, in turn, renders final meaning and intellectual value indefinitely suspended. They consciously flatten their surfaces — ‘they’ referring not just to the artists, but to the ‘I’ in the work, and to the symbols and metaphors of social understanding and social critique. These multiple layers overlap and interweave, forming a single entity. And it is precisely by entangling and conjoining these several images that a new