The China Project

33 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection opposite Ah Xian / China/Australia b.1960 Metaphysica: Rabbit 2007 Bronze and brass / 61.5 x 43.5 x 24.5cm / Collection: The artist above Wang Youshen / China b.1964 Portrait series – Frame (detail) 1990 Collage on paper, mounted in a commercially produced silk brocade-covered concertina- folding Chinese-style album (ceye) / 30 pages: 34 x 26.5cm (each) / Gift of Nicholas Jose and Claire Roberts through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2008 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery visual tension is produced. This tension derives from their rebellion against the cognitive styles and narrative principles of classical art: it is a subversion and a deconstruction of earlier modes of creative consciousness and narrative method growing out of the connections between ‘intertwined images’ and, as such, seeks to provide a varied concept by which to understand history and the classics, and to understand social realities anew. It handles the classics from inside, using elements buried deep within them to break down their control, thus channelling their power toward new, changed purposes. By revealing the limitations of existing visual modalities, and by challenging the authority of monolithic narrative, such works reveal the pleasures of absurdity and provide food for thought amid their unfeigned, bemused humour. The postmodern stance and method may be our salvation from the simple ideological critiques and dogmas of an elitist Modernism, allowing us the reserve and calmness with which to confront China’s existing cultural realities, and giving us another interpretive strategy by which to encounter these works of art. For me, rendering judgment on the meaning or value of an artist’s work often has to do with the directness of the connection the work bears to the artist’s living environment, personal history, and individual or collective memory. At the same time, I am interested in how this connection plays out in relation to the current cultural configuration or ecology, and how it reflects the artist’s attitude or position toward reality. As analysis deepens, I look at the artist’s choice of subject, their use of cultural resources, facility with media and discursive modalities, and other specific details. Thinking about and critiquing the contemporary cultural situation leads to methodological advancements over old art, and the artist needs to use a methodology drawn from the so-called ‘artistic’ register to make manifest their concepts. For this reason, we might say that the work of Chinese artists is determined by the particular cultural situation of China, and that it picks up on certain properties of the current Chinese cultural ecology. In this scenario, artists are an alternative presence in the city: their sensitivity and sharpness; their accumulation of unique and divergent experiences; their reflective, critical spirit; their humour — all are worth paying some attention. The meaning of their artistic expression lies not just in having conveyed the cultural memory of these several generations with new concepts and visual expressions, but in having recorded a spiritual and emotional history. Although a voluminous historical compilation can record past experiences and memories, a painting or a photograph can often better capture the internal world of a particular historical era; while written language can be limited, visual language allows hidden realities, temporal changes and even ideologies to emerge. The experiences or feelings of a generation have mostly to do with memory, and the distinctions among generations are largely distinctions of memory. So to build a common experience or feeling for a generation, the most important task is to build a generational memory. (I choose the word ‘build’ because if memory is to be brought into art, it must undergo a process of conversion into artistic imagination and language, and this process does not occur automatically: it demands constant effort and diligence — the process of gradually building a cultural memory.) The works of contemporary Chinese art in the Queensland Art Gallery’s Collection interest me precisely because I have experienced scenes and dispositions similar to those expressed in these works, and have even shared in the joy some of these works seem to convey at breaking one or another taboo. The ‘I’ posited in these works is not far from me as a viewer, which lends the works an easy feeling of familiarity. And yet this resonance also calls for further reflection, because that which resonates grows not naturally out of individual experience, nor is it actively sought and attained by us as individuals. Rather, it was forced upon us by a given society during a given period, and hardly anyone could avoid or refuse this legacy. We can only grow up in line with the times and the regulations of a society, leaving in the end a bizarre historical reality: what we think of as our own — personal experience and memory — is in fact a collective experience and memory. Faced with the overwhelming power of an era and a society, the individual seems not only a powerless actor, but a vain fabrication — which is only to say that, in fact, there is very little individual uniqueness, at least not in the sense of true difference. What we often take for individual experience or memory is, more often than not, the offhanded creation of a singular era and society. The era and the society are the most powerful authors of all, writing memories limited not to a specific individual, but spanning a generation, several generations, or even a whole nationality. Translated from the Chinese by Philip Tinari.