The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

24 Michael Ming Hong Lin Taiwan b.1964 /CA Taipei 5.27- 8.26.2001 2001 Pentalite paint Courtesy: The artist CONTEMPORANEITY AS INTERNALISATION - AN INTERPRETATIVE STRATEGY It is a truism that the course of contemporary art is inevitably affected by external factors, among which social change looms large. The recent development of Chinese art offers perhaps the most dramatic evidence for such causality: not long ago this art was restricted to Communist propaganda posters and Mao's portraits, but now young experimental Chinese artists travel to every major exhibition in the world from Venice to Havana with government-issued passports. From a sociological point of view, this startling transformation is itself part of a broad transformation of Chinese society brought about by Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms and open-door pol icy: one can trace the 'social changes' in Chinese art step by step from the late 1970s, when these reforms were first put into practice. To summarise some basic facts: unofficial art societies and exhibitions appeared in 1979, followed by a nationwide 'avant– garde' movement in the middle to late 1980s. The 1990s saw the emergence of commercial galleries and private museums of experimental art - a radical branch of contemporary art that self-consciously challenges official, academic and popular art with its cutting-edge mediums and controversial subjects. Independent curators and art critics played increasing roles in advocating this art; and the experimental artists themselves were rapidly internationalised. Some artists emigrated abroad and gained fame there; others remained local while cultivating global ties. Numerous books and magazines on contemporary art have been published over the past twenty years, and many experimental exhibitions have been staged in all sorts of public and non-public spaces. Clashes between the avant-garde and political authorities have never ceased. But to many observers, two government-sponsored contemporary art exhibitions during the past two years - the 2000 Shanghai Biennale and the 2001 'Living in Time' exhibition in Berlin - reflect a new level of normalisation of international-style contemporary art in China. APT2002 The close relationship between contemporary Chinese art and the country's sweeping transformation has encouraged the compi lation of a macro history of this art, which interprets the contemporaneity of artists and art works against large social and political movements.Taking a textual form and largely reflecting an academic interest, this historical narrative contributes to our knowledge of contemporary art by documenting specific conditions and stimuli for art creation in a Communist country, which is nevertheless attracting numerous overseas investors as well as a growing number of international curators. On the other hand, this macro narrative has little impact on the curators, as they rarely select artists and works based on a historical textbook, but are guided, often spontaneously and intuitively, by what they find new and compelling in visual forms. Artists not only respond to such interest and judgment, but are also stimulated - again spontaneously and intuitively - by their ever-changing environment. From this approach, if the contemporaneity of contemporary Asian art has anything to do with social change, such change cannot remain simply an external frame, but must be internalised as intrinsic features and qualities of specific works and art projects. This leads me back to a proposal made at the beginning of this essay: that contemporaneity must be recognised as a particular artistic/theoretical construct, which self-consciously reflects upon the conditions and limitations of the present. Now I can further propose that contemporaneity, as such, results from the artist's internalisation of complex contextual factors; to locate contemporaneity in art is to discover the logic of such internalisation. This interpretative strategy discards the overall framework of a macro history of contemporary art, but forges micro narratives that emphasise artists' individual responses to common social problems. My earlier discussion of various counter-monuments, anti-monuments, and ruin images provides individual examples of such narratives as sites of contemporaneity. These examples also indicate the possibility of a more general mapping of contemporaneity.