The China Project

89 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection LIU Xiaodong Liu Xiaodong’s work explores a figurative practice as part of the avant-garde ’85 New Wave. Many of the artists associated with this time were also linked to the official academies, either as students or as teachers. The relationship between the establishment and emerging artists was not necessarily clear. Indeed, during this period, many of the teachers in the academies explored notions of Realism and Modernism, Modernism’s development in the West and China’s own figurative traditions, with the intention of forging styles that resonated within contemporary China. By the late 1980s, the euphoria of experimentation began to dissipate, with the Avant-garde gradually becoming associated with bourgeois liberalism. The result was a fragmentation that extended into a sense of disaffection and the hardening of positions at both ends of the political spectrum. This culminated in the closure of the ‘China/Avant-Garde’ exhibition within days of its opening at the National Art Museum of China in February 1989. This was the first exhibition of its kind to be housed in a prestigious state gallery, and the works displayed — which were essentially at odds with the politics of the official institution — created an insurmountable tension. Liu painted Smoker 1988 at the point of his entering into Beijing’s Central Academy (now the Central Academy of Fine Arts) as a teacher (he had studied oil painting there from 1984 to 1988) and the work was included in ‘China/Avant-Garde’. His style, while figurative, is also expressionistic. Liu’s early subjects were often friends and colleagues from the Academy, as well as figures in the arts community. Smoker depicts a young Beijing film director sharing a cigarette with an older worker. 1 Painted in close perspective in Liu’s studio, the young director is tainted with the vanity of the new emerging elite. 2 In stark contrast are the slightly grotesque and simple features of the old worker, who is consigned to the background, carrying with him the burden of age and conformity. The subjects are pushed together and made to share the pictorial space. Smoker portrays a moment in which the aspirations of youth, hungry for individuality and material wealth and perhaps already corrupted by this potential, are juxtaposed with the tired, old worker. Here, over a cigarette, the two figures become a metaphor for the old China and the new. Liu, whose subjects included the disaffected and alienated youth of Beijing, belonged to the larger group of painters known collectively as the cynical realists. Cynical Realism was coined by the critic Li Xianting to describe a vein of artistic practice that was disinterested in being part of the idealism of an earlier period. 3 These artists focused their attention on the mundane and ‘used a roguishly cynical approach to illustrate themselves and their immediate and familiar environment, with its tableaux of boredom, chance and absurdity’. 4 Interested in the minutiae of existence, artists such as Liu Xiaodong questioned any sense of a sustainable utopia. Instead, they concentrated on painting a close, unglamorous view of a China that grappled with the inherent tensions accompanying the nation’s immersion in the stream of the globalised economy. endnotes 1 Nicholas Jose was given this painting by the artist in 1989 after its showing in the ‘China/Avant-Garde’ exhibition. The subjects of the painting are discussed in Nicholas Jose, letter to Doug Hall, Director, Queensland Art Gallery, 8 December 1998. 2 Liu Xiaodong, Queensland Art Gallery provenance form, Queensland Art Gallery Research Library artist’s file. 3 Li Xianting, ‘Major trends in the development of contemporary Chinese art’, in China’s New Art, Post- 1989 [exhibition catalogue], Hanart TZ, Hong Kong, 1993, p.20. 4 Li Xianting, p.20. Smoker 1988 Oil on canvas / 116 x 90cm / Purchased 1999. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant