First published on ArtSlant China.
Text by Robin Peckham.
Thirty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art
Minsheng Art Museum
570 West Huaihai Rd., Bldg. F, Red Town International Art Community, 200050 Shanghai, China, China
April 19, 2010 – July 18, 2010
Last week saw the grand opening of the Minsheng Art Museum, an institution owned by a private bank that has been producing exhibitions for almost two years. The proper opening was given over to an exhibition entitled Thirty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art, 1979-2009, a multi-generational survey of the development of oil painting apparently devised without the help of a curator, as none was credited anywhere within the space or in the catalog. The narrative largely stuck by the now-canonical mainstream mythology of artists and their collectives, leaning heavily towards a Beijing-centric view especially in the chronologically later galleries. Despite of or perhaps even because of this strategy, a number of the individual works exhibited truly belong to the category of contemporary masterpieces–the majority of which were borrowed from private collections rather than the more typical Chinese practice of borrowing directly from artists and galleries. Nonetheless, for the casual observer the true pleasure of the exhibition lies in an art historical rendition of the guessing game “Where are they now?” Indeed, how did the Zhao Bandi transform from a realist painter to a panda performer? And how did Leng Jun move from anti-humanist technical collage to textbook oil painting?
Beyond the overall narrative offered by the exhibition, however, it may also be possible to track the trace of several other sets of ideas through the work on offer. Most interesting of these alternative readings may be the development of “experimental” or “alternative” art, which begins here with the cold white glove paintings of Zhang Peili and Qiu Zhijie’s landmark conceptual work “Writing the ‘Orchid Pavilion Preface’ One Thousand Times” (1992), a framed sheet of paper on which he carried out the titular action in his messy calligraphic style. The culmination of this arc is unfortunately absent from the exhibition, which ends with an awkward periodization choice that points to a problematic split between conceptual and sentimental contemporary art: Zhang Enli and Zheng Guogu are here opposed to Wei Jia and Song Kun. While the former grouping, which also includes Liu Wei and Xu Zhen, might be said to represent the heirs to the alternative Hangzhou school so well represented in the late 1980s and early 1990s, here they appear to yield to the cartoon fantasies of another world entirely.