The brave new world of Chinese art

Asia File

Contemporary art has reached a stage where it's daring to break barriers and go into bizarre experiments. What's even more significant is that this new-found freedom has earned official tolerance

In January 1989, at an avant-garde exhibition in Beijing, one young artist took her defiance of establishment art to an unprecedented level. As people watched in disbelief, she coolly fired a shot into her installation piece and proclaimed that Art was dead.

But Art was not dead. While her act cut the exhibition short, it brought the contemporary art movement in China into the focus of public attention. The exhibition represented a direct assault on the traditional and official art of the country and took the new art movement far beyond present consciousness and styles. It has stayed there since.

Contemporary art in China has now reached a stage where it's beginning to look truly futuristic, if futuristic means the daring to break barriers and go into bizarre experiments.

At the Shanghai Biennale 2000, the third in the series, one young artist, doing a performance, suspended himself tens of metres up in the air. Photographs showed men wearing Mao suits together with naked women. Some installations even had raw meat thrown in for effect.

It's a whole new world and one wonders if it's Chinese. But the lack of Chineseness doesn't bother today's Chinese artists and art critics. They are out to eradicate functionality, deconstruct it and free art. As Hou Hanrou, who curated the Biennale 2000, said at the time, "Nationalism is my enemy. I do not belong to any nation. We live in the world and should not believe that we somehow belong to anything."

What's even more significant is that this new-found freedom has earned official tolerance. Biennale 2000 was the first time that avant-garde art was ever allowed to enter the halls of a national art gallery, in this case, the Shanghai Art Museum. Also, for the first time was installation art accepted as an art form.

Now, falling in with the trend set by Shanghai, Beijing has launched its own biennale in a further show of support to non-traditional art. A total of 270 artists from China and 40 other countries are participating in the exhibition that began on September 10 and will end on October 20.

In many ways, the transformation of the Chinese art landscape has been as dramatic as the physical transformation of the country itself. In fact, the two seem to influence each other. What we are witnessing in China today is an unprecedented cultural revolution where, for the first time, a hundred different thoughts are being actually allowed to contend.

Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou are the three pillars of contemporary Chinese art. It was at Guangzhou that the movement first sprung its roots in 1996, when a group of artists aged 28 to 40 got together to form what they call The Cartoon Generation, seeking to "read society through art." They have little regard for the techniques and values of the "art from the past" and believe that the line between painting and non-painting has no reason to exist.

Guangzhou is also the base of another avant-garde group called The Big Tail Elephant, known for aggressive social criticism. The group often creates its spectacles on busy streets and other public places, like a band of urban guerrillas out to challenge the oppressions of power.

One of its shows had an installation made up with lobsters and crabs from restaurants, copies of Renaissance paintings, tacky neon lights, and street junk to portray disharmony in society.

Performance, installations and videos, the so-called non-painting, or new-media art, now form the essence of Chinese art today. At China's first exhibition of video art, "Image and Phenomenon", in 1996, artists used more than 10 video installations and other video pieces to depict the schizophrenic transformation of Chinese society.

Zhang Peili, probably the most important Chinese video artist whose works are in the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art, uses multiple screens to create three-dimensional collages with stunning effects.

To record the defilement of the earth by industry and commerce, one artist, Shu Jie, set waste materials in plaster as if they were historical relics unearthed by archaeologists. At Shanghai 2000, half the exhibits consisted of non-painting media.

A very direct impact on the contemporary art movement comes from the growing urbanisation of the Chinese landscape and all that it contains by way of social conflicts and a new delineation of space. Not surprisingly, the Shanghai Biennale 2002, which ended in January this year, was focused almost entirely on the urban theme.

Some of the artists combined visual arts and architecture to portray the urban drama. Others chose to be hyper-realists to capture the denudation of the human soul. But whatever it was that they created, "art" or "not art", one thing was clear. They were using an idiom that was no longer peculiar to any particular country. It had become truly international.