The China Project

44 He Yunchang / China b.1967 Dialogue with water (stills) 1999 Beta video, DVD, 15 minutes, colour, stereo, ed. 1/9 / Purchased 2008 with funds from The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Body, art and attitude The ‘China/Avant-Garde’ exhibition opened its doors on 5 February 1989 at the China Art Gallery in Beijing. It presented the work of artists who, in the previous decade, had given experimental art a new approach. The exhibition would also form the basis for the widespread introduction of Chinese art internationally after 1992. The motto of the exhibition was ‘No more U-turns’, and became visualised in the logo of a red stop sign over a black U-turn arrow. From now on, Chinese art would only move forward. At the same time, the location for this exhibition at the prestigious China Art Gallery enticed artists to submit proposals that deliberately sought to confront the gallery’s cultural significance. Several performance works, many of which were not officially approved by the organisers, involved direct interventions by the artists. For many artists, performance art and site-specific installations provided the most important part of the whole event. It gave them the opportunity to confront each other and the public head-on, and emphasised the direct role of the artist in some of the most groundbreaking new forms of modern art in China during the previous decade. All of the performances that were staged at ‘China/Avant-Garde’ caused some level of controversy, which led to several fierce discussions between the organisers and the artists. Several of the artists who were conducting performances were forced to leave the gallery. Yet no one expected the final performance of the day, by Xiao Lu, who was accompanied by her artist boyfriend Tang Song. Less than three hours after the official opening, Xiao took a pistol from her pocket and fired two shots at her installation, titled Dialogue 1989. This unannounced performance caused a major outcry, and soon after the incident, security officials arrested the two artists, and they were handed over to the police. The exhibition was immediately closed. That night, the organisers gathered to discuss the incident and organised a plan to convince officials at the museum to re-open the exhibition — by paying a fine and signing a statement in which they took full responsibility and furthermore vowed to safeguard the event from any other confrontations. The exhibition was reopened on 10 February, only to be closed again on 14 February after an alleged bomb threat. Two months after ‘China/Avant-Garde’ was cancelled, on 15 April 1989, a large group of students gathered at Tiananmen Square in Beijing to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, a strong advocate of reform in China. What followed were a growing number of protests at Tiananmen Square and elsewhere across China, culminating in the 4 June military crackdown. This event marked the end of the first decade of rapid social and political reform in China. Following the crackdown at Tiananmen, all hopes and dreams of creating a ‘high culture’ evaporated. The cultural fever was soon replaced with a new ‘pop’ culture in which cultural taste became defined by increased consumerism. Many artists sought solace in the figure of the pizi — the roaming ‘hoodlums’ that are well described in the early novels of the famous Chinese writer Wang Shuo. 20 From the late 1980s, artists worked increasingly closely in artists’ communities, particularly in Beijing. The most prominent of these communities was established in a small suburb near Yuanmingyuan, which is the Old Summer Palace in the north-east of the city. In this village, an artist’s critical attitude was highly important to his or her status, thereby providing further reference to the character of the roaming ‘hoodlums’ described by Wang Shuo, as well as to the increased radicalisation of art practice. These artists started to disconnect themselves completely from the institutional framework, which had previously provided job allocations for artists but had been gradually abolished between 1987 and 1989. Artists in Yuanmingyuan often had to adapt to the harsh environment in areas that offered cheap accommodation, areas considered dangerous for attracting petty criminals from the entire region. It is this environment that some of the most well known icons of Chinese experimental art established themselves, including artists such as Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, Zhang Xiaogang and Wang Guangyi, who have been propagated locally and internationally as cynical realists and political pop artists. The most important development of performance art in the 1990s came with the establishment of another artists’ community from 1993, known as the Beijing East Village. Initiated by Ma Liuming, Zhang Huan and Zhu Ming, the East Village showed the experimental artists’ growing interest in swapping ‘art-making’ for new types of stern, corporeal performance practices. Understanding these practices in the context in which they were conducted is critical, since they formed against the backdrop of a delayed modern society, which was in a state of shock. For Ma, Zhu and Zhang, the naked body served as a device that could reflect the innermost feelings of the corporeal self, and express and expand direct, physical sensations to an audience. Always working with concepts related to their immediate physical environment, these artists attempted to change and expand ideas about the self in relation to embodied notions of their daily existence. As Zhang explains, ‘the conflict between the body and the external environment is the way to prove the existence of the self’. 21