The China Project

40 above and opposite Xu Bing / China/United States b.1955 A book from the sky (details) 1987–91 Woodblock print, wood, leather, ivory / 4 banners: 103 x 6 x 8.5cm (each, folded); 19 boxes: 49.2 x 33.5 x 9.8cm (each, containing 4 books) / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 1994 with funds from the International Exhibitions Program and with the assistance of The Myer Foundation and Michael Simcha Baevski through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Language, landscape and performance After 1985, performance art in China became closely linked to renewed calls for the development of ‘conceptual art’ — known as guannian yishu and sixiang yishu (literally, ‘idea art’). Chinese conceptual art occupied an important factor in the onset of the ’85 New Wave movement. 13 During the 1980s, different types of performances directed the production of art into the public sphere. Performance art reinterpreted the role of the artist as practitioner, and provided artists with ways of connecting the embodiment of art to social circumstances in a rapidly changing cultural environment. Increasingly, the body became the main object and subject of experimental art in China. Performance art is crucial for understanding the overall discourse on modern and contemporary art in China over the past 30 years, as artists began to assimilate, transform and transpose a range of artistic forms, styles and techniques. This can be seen in the way artists became increasingly aware of the spatial and temporal relationship in their works, and started to seek out new relations with audience perceptions in the overall development of their art. It would lead to the production of many groundbreaking installations and new types of performances. Some of their inspiration came from exhibitions of leading overseas conceptual artists, such as during the major overview exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg at the China Art Gallery in Beijing in 1985, which brought them into direct contact with of one of the leading conceptual artists of the twentieth century. At the same time, it is important to look at the way Chinese artists gained experience of three-dimensional installations from domestic, historical sites including the Great Wall of China and the large, spatially constructed wall paintings in the Buddhist caves near Dunhuang. 14 An artist who provides an important link between the development of installation art and performance art in China is Xu Bing. In 1988, while teaching at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Xu completed the first version of an installation that marked a watershed in post-Mao China’s experimental art. Originally titled A mirror to analyze the world , Xu’s A book from the sky 1987–91 (also known as Tian shu in Chinese) consists of 300 square metres of rice-paper sheets, printed with around 4000 altered and ‘meaningless’ woodblock characters that the artist had carved over several months. The installation was first shown at the China Art Gallery in Beijing in October 1988, alongside an exhibition of work by Lü Shenzhong, an important contemporary of Xu. A mirror to analyze the world was also one of the main installations at the ‘China/Avant-Garde’ exhibition, which opened at the China Art Gallery in early February 1989. This time, a small set of four books that were printed with the same ‘meaningless’ characters accompanied the installation. The books were displayed on tables that occupied the central section of the floor, with large banners covered in ‘meaningless’ characters covering the ceiling and walls of the exhibition hall. The final version of the installation was completed in 1991, and contains 100 books printed with Xu Bing’s characters. Between 18 May and 10 June 1990, shortly before moving to New York, Xu completed his second large installation, titled Ghosts pounding the Wall . It took Xu, seven art students and eight local farmers more than three weeks to make a monoprint of a 150-metre section of the Great Wall near Gubeikou, just north of Beijing — near the site where the Concept 21st Century Group had staged their 1987 and 1988 performances. Ghosts pounding the Wall required 1300 sheets of rice paper to construct a 1500-square-metre installation. For Xu, the process of creating the work was important. His emphasis on process is marked by the transition from a cultural–historic three- dimensional structure (and a national symbol), into a monoprint, for which he combined classic Chinese techniques with a contemporary approach. The final stage of the artistic process led to the formation of a three-dimensional conceptual art installation. The installation connected the process of art to the general transformation of modern culture. Its power is derived from the manipulation of national symbols and ideological contexts. 15 Initial drafts for the installation had been made as early as 1987, when Xu took some sample rubbings of the Great Wall, and were exhibited in 1988 under the title The Great Wall alignment . These early works by Xu clearly show how, during the second half of the 1980s, artists were developing a new wave of experimental art that was capable of transforming the symbolic functions of traditional culture and historical sites into a new, contemporary, artistic language. The Great Wall is an important signifier in the reconstruction of modern culture, as well as in the growth of a new, conceptual discourse of Chinese art. The performances by the Concept 21st Century Group in 1987 and 1988 or installations such as Xu’s Ghosts pounding the Wall involved the creation of a ‘ceremonial or ritual environment, which was not necessarily celebratory of the Wall’s “greatness”, but rather mourned the memory of the Wall, and in doing so hinted at cultural realities’. 16 These comments also made it clear that the Great Wall provided a different reference in the work of Chinese artists, compared to some of their overseas counterparts.