Review: Art Intervenes in Society: A New Artistic Relationship
Wang Chunchen
Published by Chinese Contemporary Art Awards in collaboration with Timezone8, 2010

The past year has seen an unprecedented level of self-conscious social activism within the art world in Beijing, both in the sense that recognized major artists have displayed an increasing willingness to make public their positions on key issues of social injustice and in the sense that these activist roles have come to achieve a certain presence in the content of art itself. Artist Ai Weiwei, of course, has been leading this movement with his documentary and petitioning projects related to corruption in the Sichuan earthquake, while other members of this circle of the art world like Yang Licai, Zuoxiao Zuzhou, Wu Yuren, and residents of a number of studio districts have expanded this social pressure within this work, through their work, and around their practices as artists.

It is appropriate, then, that the second recipient of the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) for independent criticism, Wang Chunchen of the Art Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, chose to write his prize-winning essay, Art Intervenes in Society: A New Artistic Relationship, on precisely this set of methodologies. Wang should be commended for his courage in facing this increasingly visible group of practices, especially as the majority of mainland Chinese critics have continued to sideline the potentially embarrassing political aspects of activist work by artists like Ai Weiwei in favor of more broadly cultural readings, while those abroad have chosen to fixate on the easily fetishized dissident qualities of his activity rather than a comprehensively social (and not necessarily oppositional) interpretation. Fortunately, however, Wang Chunchen moves well beyond this single figure, examining case studies as varied as Xu Bing’s “Forest” project, Guan Shi’s Baiyin projects, Lu Shengzhong’s educational practice, the Zendai “Intrude” series, the Long March Project, and work by artists from Xu Zhen and Yan Lei to Jin Feng and Zhang Dali. This list clearly attempts to investigate not just the obviously political but also practices of art that make use of charitable, inclusive, democratic, documentary mechanisms, even if the criteria remain unclear.

Unfortunately, these efforts are hampered by Wang Chunchen’s failure to resolve or even express interest in the confirmation of a distinct vocabulary with which to discuss such problems. The most serious error here is an apparent inability to understand the infrastructure of the art world, from which all of the projects in question emerge, as a an always-already social and socialized entity. That is to say, as the title Art Intervenes in Society makes clear, Wang takes “art” and “society” as two distinct terms with a mutual relationship but with little possibility of overlap, artificially creating a synchronic image of the art world in which artists are autonomous and asocial beings functioning in an entirely self-contained universe, majestically drawing “influence” from social phenomena and deigning to condescend into the public realm to offer assistance and alteration. With references to the total art and socialist ideals of Wagner, Wang has here constructed an independent system in which not a single one of the relevant terms is properly defined with relation to any of the others: “art,” “society,” and “reality” circulate as supposedly self-evident labels, the relationships between which can be realigned based on the voluntarism of artists and critics.

Aside from this overly simplistic synchronic model of social structure that consistently excludes both the content and infrastructure of art to a distinct territory, Wang Chunchen also ignores the diachronic discourse of art as a specific historical context. This particular failing, for all the force with which it emerges in this text, is symptomatic of the wider conversation from which Wang emerges, that is to say, the institutional narratives of Chinese contemporary art. In this analysis, the figuration of “art,” which, as noted above, is not defined in any meaningful way either as a practice or as a system, appears to be treated as a a cluster of actions deployed by the somewhat mythical subjects known as artists. This failure to recognize the already existing discourse of contemporary art, either internationally or in China, serves to categorically obfuscate what, actually, is intended by the “new artistic relationship” raised here in such a misleadingly straightforward way, a shortcoming that becomes painfully obvious with the use of terms like “situationism” and “total art” without any relation to their historical underpinnings. The examination of some 10 years (and a significant focus on only two to three) of regional art activity, particularly that under the self-proclaimed banner of “project-based art,” amounts to very little when isolated from information on the systems from which these artists emerged, historical precedent in China and internationally, and prior critical writing on the historical formations of socially aware contemporary art.

Another concern lies again with this problematically defined notion of “art.” At various points throughout the text, this single term stands in for three wildly differing levels of meaning: in some places it refers to the content of art (for example, art about social protest), while on others it signifies modes of art (art produced in a protest setting or as an act of protest), and in yet other places it comes to stand for the circumstances of the production of art (art created “in society,” or with consciousness of protest). This semiotic slippage comes dangerously close to collapsing everything remotely related to the act of participation, accumulating within its bounds everything from relational aesthetics to the Cultural Revolution. Although it may be unnecessary or even unreasonable to call for rigorous arguments of terminology within the space of such a brief essay, opacity of this magnitude begins to obstruct any potential for mutually intelligible discussion, especially when the fraught terms of art and politics are involved.

These three failures of definition and circumscription, moreover, contribute to a third problem: the refusal to apply an existing criteria of conceptual and aesthetic judgement, and, more damningly, the failure to put forward the standards of a potential new paradigm that could accompany the shifts in artistic consciousness Wang Chunchen notes. Fittingly, this might be termed the Sigg paradox: patron of the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards and private collector Uli Sigg has amassed what many consider to be one of the most comprehensive collections of contemporary Chinese art, though he himself is the first to admit (albeit in hindsight) that it is an “archival” collection, attempting to span the breadth of new art as it has emerged over the past 20 years, rather than a “quality” collection constructed on the foundation of particular sensibility, taste, or concept. Combined with a system in which criticism rarely speaks negatively or even directly about bloated artists and movements–a deficiency that the CCAA grant for independent criticism was intended to correct–, audiences for this art are presented with a broad field of often mediocre work (at least according to the laws of probability) in which interested players speak their minds only implicitly. Here, too, Wang never lays out criteria for the projects included in his survey, but neither does he claim that all of this work is interesting as art in and of itself. Real criticism should have the courage not just to broach new topics of conversation, but also to evaluate the practices at stake.

Wang Chunchen has indubitably taken the first step in reconsidering the political and social value of recent Chinese art beyond the fetishistic tokenism of proto-revolutionary aesthetics, but his account nevertheless leaves much to be desired. It would seem that the most important lesson here is that, in building up a culture of criticism and evaluation in China, writers and historians must begin from a far more basic position, challenging the received definitions (or, more often, lack thereof) of art, politics, society, and other key concept; the kind of work we are offered at present, constructing relationships between objects never fully grasped within the text, does little to further this conversation. Criticism must step back, embrace a fuller understanding of historical and geographic context, and approach with fresh eyes the safe and institutionalized narratives that have come to characterize contemporary art as it is presented to its audiences Without such internal rigor, wild speculation about a presumed public understanding of art remains a fantasy serving only a few, largely silent actors in the field.

International visibility for contemporary Chinese art arrived more or less in a flash over the last half-decade, fueled both by a global fascination with the re-emergence of the Chinese underground in the leadup to the Beijing Olympics and by the unprecedented popular appeal of art within Western culture in general. While the recent credit crisis and ensuing recession have curbed the influence of these elements, they have also encouraged Chinese collectors and art investors to assert their presence in these markets, bringing further definition to the function of art as investment and confirming the already established hierarchy of investment-friendly artists. This list, however unfortunately, continues to be almost inexplicably dominated by kitschy painters of little or no interest to the narratives of international contemporary art, though a set of up-and-coming major artists is looking to change all that. Recent major sales at auction in Hong Kong, largely now the center of the secondary market trade in Chinese art, have seen an emergence of noteworthy names alongside the stable standbys of Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, and Zeng Fanzhi, many of whom offer serious potential for interested collectors.

Liu Wei (b. 1972) may be the best representative of this new wave, regularly drawing bids between USD$60,000 and USD$80,000 in 2009 and 2010. Most commonly seen on the auction block are his bold paintings, particularly the extensive series entitled “Purple Air” (2005-), which depicts somewhat abstracted landscapes of urban Chinese as if these cities were the sites of some neon cyberpunk fantasy. In Beijing, he is equally respected for his work as an installation artist, presenting large-scale architectural configurations like “Outcast” (2007), a building constructed from old glass-and-wood windows and doors with high-powered fans blowing sand, furniture, and other detritus inside. His latest work has been shown in venues from the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art to the Saatchi Gallery, a mainstay in many such rigorous collections

Zheng Guogu (b. 1970) has been similarly prolific over the past several years, largely offering an examination of the conditions of rural China complementary to Liu Wei’s investigation of the urban. Typically selling for a similar but slightly wider range between USD$35,000 and USD$80,000, his paintings in the “Computer Controlled by Pig’s Brain” (2003-) series the inanity of local gossip and popular culture media as filtered through the small town in which the artist resides. Though it generally only appears in institutional exhibition settings, Zheng Guogu’s major project is “Age of Empire” (2001-), a massive undertaking in multiple media that takes the form of a building site in southern China as well as paintings, videos, and installations; this body of work attempts a variety of feats, from materializing the video game after which it is titled in real space to illegally purchasing and developing land as a way to confront the rule of law.

Yan Lei (b. 1965) is another member of this group known as a prankster within the art world, notorious for an early series of satirical actions that caused much consternation amongst his peers, who found themselves invited to imaginary international exhibitions and shamed by their lack of knowledge about the wider art world. Regardless of the reception at the time, these projects now propel his wickedly clever paintings to sums between USD$10,000 to USD$40,000, including a range of image-based compositions that detail liminal spaces, from airports to forgotten portraits. Most significant are his recent series “Color Wheel” (2006-) and “Sparkling” (2007-), both of which play with pictorial conventions and the roll of light and color in the framing of the subject; the former accomplishes this through abstract concentric rings of colors, while the latter places sometimes obscene and always profane objects and models at the center of radiating beams of celebrity in a contemporary take on the color by number game.

These three artists may be the core names to watch over the coming years, both critically well-received within the art world and important to private collectors and other buyers alike. Within the ring of already fully established artists visible at auction, many are already extremely overvalued and priced far out of proportion to their historical and aesthetic value, though there are exceptions to this rule. Liu Xiaodong (b. 1963), one of the few significant realist painters to emerge alongside the more graphically oriented artists of his generation, may be the most important of these: his set of paintings “Eighteen Arhats” (2004) sold at the peak of the market for almost USD$8 million, and demand for such work has demonstrated no sign of receding. With his cinematic yet painterly gaze firmly trained on the social ills of development, Liu is, in terms of quality, worlds away from the other competitors for the title of most expensive living Chinese artist at auction. Another key artist of this generation is Zhang Peili (b. 1957), often referred to as the “father of Chinese video art” but severely undervalued on the auction market. From his earliest documentation of broken mirrors and wandering hands “30×30″ (1988) to his latest large scale self-reflexive video installations like “Mute” (2008), this work is making it into the most important institutional collections.

The center of the commercial Chinese art world has long been Beijing, home to the country’s foremost art academy and museums, but Shanghai too hosts a robust system of artists, private museums, and galleries. ShanghART, founded by Swiss dealer Lorenz Helbling some 15 years ago, has long been the leading space, representing a long list of artists from established painters like Zhou Tiehai and Zeng Fanzhi to emerging young new media and conceptual artists like Zhang Ding. Recently, Shanghai has also seen an influx of competitive new multinational galleries, like the local outposts of New York dealer James Cohan and Hong Kong gallery chain Osage, all of which are known for introducing important international work to the local art scene.

Ultimately, it is the growth of this infrastructure, and particularly the intellectual and critical regard for contemporary cultural production that insulates it, that will continue to propel Chinese art on a forward trajectory despite the variations of the market. The world is waiting for an understanding of recent cultural history in China that transcends the easy stories of success and investment that have so far commanded the majority of media attention, an understanding that will only come from greater familiarity with artists and the broader political and economic systems that produce them. Fortunately, curiosity towards the contemporary remains unabated, and growing interest in art from both the emergent intelligentsia and individuals of leisure in China and international observers indicates that this will remain a category to watch as it evolves into ever newer and more intriguing territory.

Fresh Eyes 2010
He Xiangning Art Museum
Shennan Road, Overseas Chinese Town
Nanshan District, Shenzhen, China
July 18, 2010 – September 12, 2010

Painting in China has been in crisis since shortly before the boom at auction that rocketed artists with little sense for the terms of the medium like Zhang Xiaogang and Fang Lijun to something between fame and infamy, igniting a full-fledged reaffirmation of early-1990s modes of painting as a graphic style: political pop and cynical realism, above all else. There have been bright spots, no doubt, as with the generation trained by Liu Xiaodong at the Central Academy of Fine Arts that emerged with and around the first N12 exhibition in 2003, including Wang Guangle and Qiu Xiaofei, or more recent forays into abstraction from Li Shurui and Zhan Rui, or even earlier with Yan Lei and Chen Wenbo. But there has not, unfortunately, been much sustained interest in the notion of painting as a specific medium with a definite history; for so many artists and observers of Chinese art, painting represents a fundamentally reactionary medium that lends itself to crass commercialism, especially in the face of the pseudo-conceptual actions and installations that have come to signify emerging artists who prefer to work under the labels of “experimental” and “underground.” Nevertheless, painting remains the dominant medium for the new crop of art school graduates who flood the pages of art magazines and the ranks of summer group shows every year, even if most such works resemble poor reworkings of already canonical Chinese pieces–themselves secondhand imitations of the styles of Richter and Schnabel.

All in the Game collects supposedly exemplary works from university graduates across China to Shenzhen, which boasts some of the best museums in the country but no serious art school to call its own. With no curatorial mandate to speak of, such surveys provide an excellent opportunity to place wagers and note prospects for trends in emerging art for the year ahead–usually an almost laughable proposition. While this iteration of the annual exhibition contains a number of pedestrian pastoral works after Chen Danqing, a few copies of the vacuous feminist realism of Yu Hong, at least two takes on Richter-style squeegee paintings, and a handful inspired by Zeng Fanzhi, art star of the moment for fashionable Chinese collectors over the past two years, it also surprisingly offers a few new directions to look forward to. There is Zheng Jiang, whose “Body” (2010) ambiguously depicts a nude male figure disrupted by the painterly patterns and reflections of a decorative glass frame that would be equally at home in the Shanghai streamline moderne or in mid-century American suburban bathrooms. Wang Weijin’s “You are not a fish 4″ (2010), titled after an anecdote in which the Daoist thinker Zhuangzi answered such an allegation with the retort “You are not me; you would not know,” depicts a flow of dark blue smoke or thin liquid against a white background, a rare step towards the pure materiality of the abstract for young Chinese artists. Ma Aizhou paints landscapes of the intermediary zones between the rural and the urban not unlike those of Liu Weijian, but the gentle brushwork on canvases like “One Day in August 2006″ (2010) appears more strongly influenced by the light-based planarity of Alex Katz. Zhang Lu’s “Untitled” (2010) series constructs empty architectural spaces of sheer color and geometry, similar to the sensitivity towards interior space demonstrated by Hong Kong painters Kitty Ko Sin Tung and Sarah Lai. Zhang Yufei, on the other hand, generates absurd juxtapositions of the political and the naturally beautiful, as with the pairing of a surveillance camera in color and tree leaves in black and white in “Spring will always belong to a state of the pursuit of completion” (2010), which indicates a growing willingness to approach through painting social issues previously left to the sexier media of video and installation. This group alone proves that all is not lost for the discourses of painting in China: technique is alive and well, and style may be beginning to reemerge after a long period of hibernation under the mantle of graphic recognizability.

Rob and Nick Carter: Revolve
15 June – 31 July
The Cat Street Gallery
222 Hollywood Rd., Sheung Wan, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Hong Kong is an interesting city in which to play with light, essentially constructed our of varying glass and steel rectangles perched between verdant hills and the reflective harbor. Many an installation has productively toyed with the glimmers that manage to break through the rows of skyscrapers and into the gallery cubes below, most recently perhaps Masato Kobayashi and Au Hoi Lam. Most significant of all, however, is the Chinese painter Yan Lei, who spend several years in Hong Kong in the 1990s. During that period, he developed his “Color Wheel” series, which satirically deconstructed the notion of painting in parallel with paint-by-number images. Influenced by the pervasive neon signs that dominate the streetscapes of Mongkok and Wanchai, these wheels have always felt somehow more alive than his later detached irony.

Rob and Nick Carter have struck upon a similar method of composition in their latest works, currently exhibited at the Cat Street Gallery. Most impressive is the series “Spectrum Circles” (2010), which exist gracefully in the ever-diminishing territory between photography and the painterly. Produced through a unique process in which light is directly applied to photosensitive paper, the final images are irreproducible and absolutely mesmerizing, consisting of a series of glowing concentric rings that could just as easily be computer-generated paintings or photographs of neon lights. This is the ultimate distillation of photography, incorporating a technique that captures the evanescent while maintaining its uniqueness to a single specific point in space and time.

Besides the obvious precedent in the artists associated with the light and space movement, from Robert Irwin and James Turrell to Larry Bell and DeWain Valentine, these images recall nothing so much as the work of the late painter Kenneth Noland. In a moment of appropriate symmetry, Noland’s formalist oeuvre is marked by two similar bodies of work related to what some see as his trademark bullseye pattern, one positioned in his last decade and one during the decade that launched his career. The Carters demonstrate a high degree of sympathy for this legacy, reflecting this same sensitivity to the play of natural light while channeling it through a primal interpretation of the lens- and screen-based realities that mark art production today.

Exhibition runs through 5 December 2009
Tang Contemporary (Gate No. 2, 798 Art District, Beijing)

As usual with such group shows in Beijing, it is unclear what exactly Tang Contemporary and curator Wei Xing attempt to do with their new exhibition “The New Attitude of Image” The incoherent but indubitably grandiose title seems to suggest a meditation on visual culture and affect in art, a survey of image-making in China, or something of that ilk. Indeed, the gallery has even organized an “academic discussion” between the participants in order to legitimize the selection of work and accumulate critical capital for the program. In reality, the exhibition is a survey of new work by several leading painters, including Chen Wenbo, Liu Wei, Qiu Xiaofei, Wang Xingwei, Wang Yin, Xu Zhen under the alias MadeIn, Yan Lei, Yang Yong, Zheng Guogu, and Zhou Tiehai. The work included is wildly uneven and spans multiple genres of contemporary painting, hardly warranting evaluation as a single project.

Wang Xingwei, Wang Yin, and Zhou Tiehai are included under the rubric of conceptual painting. All three artists emerged under this banner with bitingly satirical and occasionally surreal painting in the 1990s, and have continued to pursue highly specific and rigorous forms of practice since then. In this exhibition, Zhou Tiehai’s “Uli Sigg” (2009), depicting the collector carrying a fish, seems to have allowed the thinness of humor to get the better of him, while Wang Yin’s faceless “Self Portrait” (2009) has veered towards a worrying pretension all too common in artists with limited domestic audiences relatively ignored by the international critical and market complexes. Wang Xingwei emerges on top of this bunch with his “Sell Eggs” (2008), a remarkably funny composition that incorporates geometric forms and text. The work nevertheless feels dated despite its recent vintage, belonging to an older discourse of painting that fits better with the critical modes of the 1980s than this exhibition.

Qiu Xiaofei’s sole painting in the exhibition, “Stiffness of the Limbs 1,” may be the most visually interesting work. Depicting an inverted architectural scene, a geometric model, a reclining figure, and the titular text in intriguingly disparate registers on a painterly black background, it belongs to a project that interrogates the connections between political utopia, history, memory, and insanity. The influence of Kippenberger is obvious, but the work nevertheless fits seamlessly alongside the artist’s earlier explorations into the work of memory in the processing of reality.

The other standout works come from Liu Wei, whose series “Yes, That’s All!” is based on a failed video signal–a body of work that has earned him the moniker “Caochangdi Nam June Paik.” The two canvases appearing here are largely abstract renditions of the theme marked by white, yellow, and black bands across the face of the work. Improbably, the artist has managed to sidestep the high-stakes debate between supporters of automated conceptual painting and painterly work that plagues the contributions of Xu Zhen, Yan Lei, Zheng Guogu, Yang Yong, and Chen Wenbo to this exhibition.

It would be fantasy to call for the abandonment of assistant-dominated painting studios in contemporary China, but the current economic and creative climate has led to decreasing interest in painting that reproduces image-as-image without interpretation. Liu Wei avoids this predicament by moving into abstraction, while Qiu Xiaofei insists on a painterly filtration of memory. The older generation of conceptual painters–who have carried on a more or less uninterrupted vision of the painter’s studio for several decades–envision themselves as creators rather than producers or even reproducers. The remaining artists leave themselves open to a form of criticism that would have been unimaginable two years ago, but such painting simply feels excessive within this recent discourse of image-based art.