The China Project

49 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection Between heaven and earth: Xu Bing, the Academy and contemporary Chinese art Claire Roberts above Tao Sha / China Sketch of Xing Fei, Claire Roberts and Liu Shan in the dormitory at Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, 1981 / Charcoal on paper / Image courtesy: Claire Roberts opposite Xu Bing / China/United States b.1955 A book from the sky 1987–91 Woodblock print, wood, leather, ivory / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 1994 with funds from the International Exhibitions Program, The Myer Foundation and Michael Simcha Baevski through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / Installed at ‘New Art from China: Post-Mao Product’, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1992 / Photograph: Ray Woodbury / Image courtesy: Art Gallery of New South Wales Thirty years ago few people in the West were interested in contemporary Chinese art. China was (and still is) a communist country, remote from the experience of most Westerners. Folk and propaganda arts were appreciated for their earthy and overly enthusiastic sentiments but not taken seriously as fine art, and brush-and-ink painting was regarded as traditional and difficult to understand. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the political environment began to relax and new directions for social and cultural life seemed possible. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping announced the Open Door policy welcoming overseas business into China and acknowledging the need to attract foreign investment in order to improve the country’s economic future. The Chinese government also made it easier for foreigners to study in China — they, too, provided a source of revenue — and the numbers of students from Australia, America, Britain and France came to rival those from North Korea, Albania and Gabon. In late 1978 I travelled to China, passing through the opening door — continuing the study of Chinese language begun at school in Melbourne — and the following year I enrolled at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). CAFA was an elite art school located in the street behind Wangfujing, Beijing’s most cosmopolitan shopping strip. I was one of three foreign students admitted to the Chinese painting department as part of the first formal intake of foreign students since the Cultural Revolution. We were fortunate to be able to study with fellow Chinese students and live in a shared dormitory at a time when the normal practice was to segregate Chinese and foreign students wherever possible. My dormitory was shared with Maria Fang, a Chinese–American who had entered the school through family connections the year before. Chinese students shared four to a room. We lived in close proximity and quickly became familiar with one another and with undergraduate and graduate students from the departments of printmaking, oil painting and art history. Those years mark a time of transition and change, and people began to express themselves more openly. During the ‘Beijing Spring’ of 1979, workers and intellectuals petitioned for social and political reform by pasting ‘big-character posters’ on what became known as the ‘Democracy Wall’ and unofficial artists challenged the all-powerful Chinese Artists’ Association by forming groups such as the Stars Group and No Name, and organised exhibitions of new art in temporary locations around the city. Within the Academy, students were affected by these winds of change. There was a growing fascination with contemporary artistic styles and modes of expression, and outside class students experimented with a variety of different media and visited exhibitions of experimental art whenever possible. Few could have predicted that, 30 years on, works by Academy-trained artists would sell at auction for $1 million or more, or that friends and colleagues would move to New York, London and Sydney (many in the wake of the trauma of 4 June 1989) and go on to achieve international success. Scenarios such as these were unimaginable. Xu Bing was in the first group of Chinese students admitted to CAFA in 1977 following the end of the Cultural Revolution. We met at the Academy through a shared interest in printmaking and exchanged prints to learn from one another and cement a friendship. 1 Twenty-two years later, having worked as a teacher at CAFA and then lived in America for close to a decade, he was granted a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, nicknamed a ‘Genius Award’, in recognition of his ‘originality, creativity, self-direction, and capacity to contribute importantly to society, particularly in printmaking