The Times (London), September 10, 2005
Is China beginning to show new cracks?
Morgan Falconer

As China hastily embraces capitalism, an exhibition at the V&A documents the change that is sweeping the country. Morgan Falconer reports

Tiny photographs sit in the palm of Sheng Qi's left hand in his series Memories.

In one image is his mother, smiling in an old-fashioned Chinese jacket; in the other is Sheng Qi himself, grinning cheerfully in his Mao cap. But the hand holding the photograph is conspicuously missing a finger: 20 years ago Qi decided to enact an old ritual signifying the desire to put the past behind and took a meat clever and hacked the digit off.

"This is the collection of my memories," he says. "All of the images of my life."

And sitting over a drink with him in Beijing, I did find him strangely sanguine about the experience.

Born on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, he was involved in the Students' Movement in 1989 that ended so dis-astrously in Tiananmen Square. Today he lives in a city that is embracing capitalism with a haste that is dizzying. How should one react to changes like that?

This week a new exhibition of contemporary photography and video art from China opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and aptly it is called Between Past and Future. It features 80 works by 40 artists and presents a vivid picture of the country and the contemporary art scene. There is much that we might recognise: theatrically staged pho-tographs, records of extreme performances, cerebral conceptual art, body art and documentaries.

But there is also much that blends the old with the new: Hai Bo does this literally in a series of works in which he traced the sitters in old group photographs and got them to pose once more. Xing Danwen shows a series called Born in the Cultural Revolution, featuring photographs of a naked, pregnant friend amid Mao memorabilia. Ma Liuming strips naked to walk barefoot across the Great Wall.

Sze Tsung Leong shows a series of beautifully pale documentary photographs of Chinese cities being torn down and rebuilt by new developments; piles of rubble giving way to towers and tennis courts. And, as if to confirm that Beijing's urbanites are blase about the emerging city, Zhao Liang staged Social Survey, in which he wandered the city pulling out a fake pistol to test people's reactions to violence. The photographs show people just staring blankly.

The overwhelming theme is that of change. There were only two independent bars in Beijing in the early 1990s, now there are countless, and this encouraged Cui Xiuwen to make night life the focus of her comic-tragic video Ladies Room, which she shot with a hidden camera in the women's toilet of a high-class hostess bar.

The women strip and change, shove money down their tops, hoist their cleavage into more arresting positions, and talk money on mobile phones. Women used to pay relatively little attention to themselves, Cui told me, because there simply wasn't the money to spend on yourself. Change isn't all for the better.

Even those who don't point to the pain of change are still ambivalent about its effects. In recent years Zhang Dali has been carving his cartoon profile heads into the walls of old buildings soon to be demolished. Like almost all the artists I met, he applauds the changes of recent years, but wishes they had come more slowly. "We need time to think about this process," he says. "Right now it's incoherent, there are gleaming buildings going up beside piles of rubbish."

China's art scene used to be devoted to social realist painting and traditional calligraphy. There was little institutional support for avant-garde artists, nowhere to exhibit, and artists lagged far behind their peers in the West. But since the authorities made Western art books and magazines more available, Chinese artists have been racing ahead. Indeed, this year China was represented for the first time at the Venice Biennale.

Today the old and the new are on a more equal footing. You find some young artists employing older traditions in peculiar ways: Huang Yan describes himself as an "avant-garde ink" painter, and his torso is depicted in one photograph tattooed with a pale and beautiful scene of mountains and rivers. And you also find remarkably youthful art-world players one would recognise from the West: Guan Yi, a young collector in his thirties, has just erected a vast warehouse gallery on the outskirts of the city. It reminded me of Charles Saatchi's old Boundary Road gallery. And when he told me of his admiration for the graduates from the China National Academy of Art in the city of Hangzhou, I thought of Goldsmiths College in London. When students emerge from art college in China they face similar, though no doubt tougher, chal-lenges to young British artists, and many get together to live, work and exhibit. Perhaps the exhibition's most vivid record of this is in the photographs of the so-called East Village scene that existed in the early 1990s. The young crowd settled among a group of warehouses behind what is now the Sheraton Hotel, but what was a haven for migrant workers.

They were a diverse group, but it is the performance artists and the photographers who captured them that are re-membered. Zhang Huan staged a performance in the Village in 1994 entitled 12 Square Metres, in which he covered his body in fish oil and honey and sat for an hour in a squalid toilet; it was dedicated to the poet Ai Qing, who was forced to clean public lavatories after a Party purge of intellectuals. In Ma Liuming's performance Lunch II, he adopted a female alter ego and cooked up a strange dish of potatoes and jewellery, placed it in condoms and buried them. The police were not amused: they arrested everyone there, including Ma, who then spent the next two months in a detention centre.

Events such as this would seem to suggest that China's artists are forced to battle for freedom of expression against the authorities. But it's not as simple as that. When I met Rong Rong, the photographer who captured these and other performances in the East Village, he explained that Ma Liuming's mistake had been to antagonise his neighbours on a quiet Sunday afternoon by taking his clothes off. Fair enough. Tales that the authorities closed down the notorious China/Avant Garde exhibition in 1989 also become more explicable when you hear that during the show an artist shot a pistol into an artwork in a crowded room.

Indeed, when I brought up the subject of politics with many artists, they seemed uninterested. "The idea of the 'Chinese artist', the 'political artist' has gone," one told me. "In the past five years there has been much more interest in individuality. This isn't the Cultural Revolution!"

The West, they complain, is fixated with politics in Chinese art: long after the Chinese were bored with Political Pop, the collision of Pop Art and Social Realism that enjoyed a brief vogue in the 1990s, Western buyers were still enraptured. Of course, the authorities keep an eye on the art scene, but they prefer to use funding as a carrot and stick to keep their artists in line, paying to promote their liberalism abroad but keeping their artists hungry at home.

And much worse happens elsewhere. When Guan Yi showed me around his gallery, he pointed to a spot that was awaiting a sculpture by Huang Yongping, depicting a section of the American spy plane that was shot down in China in 2001. Guan said that Huang had tried to exhibit the sculpture three times, but each time the American authorities had refused to allow it. Sometimes, it seems, China is in the vanguard.

Between Past and Future, Victoria and Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 (www.vam.ac.uk 020-7942 2000), Sep 15-Jan 15, 2006

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Time Out, September 07, 2005
Art Great leap forward;
Martin Coomer

The camera and the camcorder are opening up a new and provocative world of Chinese art as the country adjusts to globalisation. On the eve of the V&A's newexhibition, Martin Coomer travels to Beijing to meet four artists documenting their rapidly changing surroundings

Sitting in his garden on the outskirts of Beijing, videoartist Wang Gongxin enjoys telling an evidently wellrehearsed story about needing to buy a map in order to find his way around his hometown. With less relish he mentions the 'ugly' new architecture thrown up without much thought or style, and the inflation that makes life here less affordable each year. Beijing is being transformed almost, it seems, on a daily basis. Successive waves of change have rendered it almost un-recognisable as the centrepiece of Mao's regime. And the unstoppable momentum reveals a sobering truth: Beijing is becoming just likeany other world metropolis. Even Starbucks has infiltrated the Forbidden City.

What disappears, culturally and individually, in this process, and the ways in which Chinese identity is diluted by rampant globalisation, are key concerns forthe artists I meet. Almost all of their work addresses this conflict between progress and loss with wit, bitter irony, even nostalgia.

The artists are also united by their choice of photography and video over traditional media. Relatively cheap and fast, these disciplines provide suitabletools for navigating the ever-shifting terrain. It's hard to believe that it's been just a quarter of a century since photography in China began to break free of propagandist restrictions; only a decade since it started to be considered anart form. The V&A's 'Between Past and Future' exhibition is a fantastic introduction to these developments, but the pace of change in Beijing is such that work produced even a couple of years ago assumes the patina of a relic. HowChinese artists keep up or burn out looks set to become one of the key visual art stories over the next few years. It's tempting to say 'watch this space', but you'd need compound eyes.

Wang Qingsong, like many of the artists I spoke to, switched from painting to photography almost a decade ago in order to capture the accelerated changes around him. He describes his role as that of a journalist.

However, when confronted with large-scale Jeff Wall-esque tableaux in which workers are engulfed by walls of peeling, hand-painted adverts for Western and Chinese brands, you wonder if camp theatricality isn't more of a driving force for him than the search for photographic truth. 'That's because life can seem fake, or performed, ' Wang explains. 'Slogans get thrown up into culture but it's up to people to decide what's real.' On display at the V&A is his 'Night Revels of Lao Li', a scrolllike photograph based on a Tang dynasty painting which depicts the life of Han Xizai, an intellectual who, powerless to reconstruct the country as he wished, retreated into a life of indulgence. Wang's picture gaudily updates the (in)action to suggest that while, on the surface, things have altered beyond recognition, the ability of individuals to affect change remains depressingly similar. In 'Past, Present, Future', he recreates the sculptures that stand in front of Mao's memorial in Tiananmen Square, replacing the bronze figures with real bodies painted gold and silver and daubed with mud. From active participant in the first photo, Wang becomes a mute observer in the second.

Driven by his own experience he worked in the mines while trying to get into art school and now supports his ex-tended family through sales of his work Wangclings to the idea that art has the ability to communicate socially charged messages. However, he admits that his beliefs can sometimes get lost behind the glitz of the finished product.

'What you see happening with commercial culture is happening with art there's always competition for the spotlight. A lot of the younger generation completelymiss what's going on in my work because they don't know what it felt like 15 years ago. They take the work at face value, see it as onedimensional.' While Wang represents a steely-eyed, determined face of contemporary Chinese art in a similar mould to Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons, Rong Rong seems to have achieved fame almost by accident. In 1993, attracted by low rents, he along with a dozen or so artists and musicians moved into a decaying village on the easternfringes of Beijing. Because of its location and a shared aspiration to New York-style bo-hemianism, they dubbed the place 'East Village'. Now legendary, this tight-knit community is considered to have spawned, over its 18-month existence, the new wave of Chinese performance art. And Rong was around to capture its evolution on camera including Zhang Huan's 'Twelve Square Meters',an endurance performance in a filthy, flyinfested toilet.

Like Nan Goldin, Rong has a great eye for the 'moment' and is at his best when unconsciously recording the acts of artists unconcerned by his presence. It's easy to overlook the importance of his work in raising awareness and encouraging acceptance of photography as an art form in recent Chinese history. Rong was simply helping friends record their per-formances; he never predicted the appeal and impact his photographs would have when they were published.

The legacy of this creative burst is not entirely benign. To whom do these images really belong? Rong, or Zhang and the other performance artists who relied on him to capture their works? Rong doesn't like to discuss the rumoured acri-mony between him and some of his East Village contemporaries: 'It was great at the time to have that spirit of camaraderie, but when it ended, I actually felt some sense of relief. There was a greater freedom to start doing something more ex-perimental in terms of what I wanted to do.' However, his more recent photos of Beijing's demolition sites and self-portraits with his Japanese wife, Inri, frolicking naked on a mountaintop, are proof that creativity doesn't always flourish in the transition from life on the edge to success at the centre.

Xing Danwen was also part of the East Village scene. A sense of uneasy anticipation is encapsulated in her series of portraits entitled 'Born with the Cultural Revolution', in which a naked and heavily pregnant friend lounges aboutunder portraits of Mao. 'I had a lot of questions about sexuality, identity, background, my professional role. I think that all the photographs about the women are really about myself.' Xing left China to become a journalist in Europebefore studying photography and film at the School of Visual Art in New York. Returning to Beijing three years ago, she now lives in one of the city's many high-rise apartment complexes a gated community called 'Class'. Striding abouther pad, she switches effortlessly between the lingos of estate agent and artist, discussing apartment specifications with relish then offering a criticalcommentary on her situation.

This weird duality filters into her most recent work, a series of large-scale, computer-manipulated photographs in which she digitally inserts herself into scale-model mock-ups of places like the strangely foreboding 'Class', assuming roles as varied as leisured housewife, white-collar worker and murderous teenager.

'When I started to travel abroad I really noticed the living conditions bathrooms, bedrooms that make you very comfortable, phone lines, facilities thatwe didn't have. It was something unreachable. The idea for the work is based on the conflict between the dream and the reality, ' she says. 'Before, everybody lived together, but now we've all moved into individual spaces in these huge buildings. Physically it's very close, but emotionally it's very isolating. You don't know your neighbour. You have to be alone, have to be independent. It's difficult.' Curiously, Xing doesn't feel the need to reconnect with reality by photographing the results of modernisation that surround her. 'So many people are photo-graphing real cities to show what the picture becomes after modernisation, ' she says. 'The interest for me is how my country and city have become so similar to every other place.'

I meet Qiu Zhijie at the 798 artists' complex in the Dashanzi district, a formermunitions base transformed into a thriving community of studios, galleries and restaurants. Qiu doesn't work here, though; he totes around a black holdall containing a laptop and books his studio and office combined. He expresses hisconcerns about what constitutes successful Chinese art today, and how it is presented to the world. 'The modern system of exhibitions is based on the salon tradition, ' he says. 'All the works are trying to be highlights, trying to be "got" in five seconds. For some types of art it's good, but for others it's unfair. The problem for me is that you always have to be in such big group showsto take part in the con-versation; but in a group show, it's not my conversation.' 'Curators are always choosing the most "strong" work, but we needto discuss what is strong, ' he says, making veiled reference to his 'Tattoo' series that will appear in the exhibition.

These are undoubtedly some of the punchiest images you'll see at the V&A. In onephoto, Qiu's body becomes flat-tened by text written across his torso and on the wall against which he stands. Image and background are confused, the symbol thatconsumes him signifying 'no' in Mandarin a comment about a sense of individuality being diluted by the onslaught of change.

Understandably, Qiu's commentary on this series which is now ten years old is somewhat distracted. A writer, cu-rator and teacher as well as an artist, he prefers to go through masses of projects and ideas on his laptop. 'I'm mobile. I'm always looking in more than one direction, ' he says, and these qualities best equip him to cope with Beijing's pace of life. In his new photographs, he uses torchlight to write aphorisms in the evening air, using a long exposure to capture the image before the text fizzles out.

He's reluctant to leave too much of a trace in an already commodity-saturated culture. 'It's a bit like a Chinese poet going to a place to write a poem, only I use light and time as my materials, ' he explains. 'Like graffiti, but I don'twant to make the city dirty.' 'Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China', V&A, from Sept 15.

 

 

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Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
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