The 'icing of global modernity': After Utopia

International global modernity - from reality TV to the forces of the moneymarkets; global brands to selfie sticks - and the traditions of ancient cultures make strange bedfellows. Or do they? Perhaps there's a seamless integration - a global cultural soup - in which we all float like Alphabet Spaghetti.

Luo Brothers, Double Happiness (The World's Most Famous Brands Series), 2008 Bronze painted bronze 31.5 x 23.62 x 19.69 in. (80.01 x 59.99 x 50.01 cm.)

Last night I attended a talk at the University of Sydney in which the past director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (and noted China scholar) Edmund Capon, engaged two Chinese artists in conversation about how they navigate the treacherous morass of artistic freedom - and its limitations - in China. Shen Jiawei left China in 1989 with the diaspora who emigrated to Paris, New York, Sydney, Vancouver and other cities. Guo Jian dealt with his own troubles with the authorities just last year, returning to Sydney under difficult circumstances. Shen Jiawei painted propaganda pictures, very famous ones, in an earlier life, but is now better known for massive history paintings and portraits of luminaries ranging from the Pope, to Princess Mary of Denmark, to the collector and philanthropist Judith Neilson. Guo Jian enlisted in the People's Liberation Army at the age of 17, and painted propaganda pictures for the PLA. As a 'Cynical Realist' painter in the 1990s he overtly explored the nature of propaganda in pop-inspired paintings. The conversation was measured, and, it must be said, a little guarded, but interesting in that each artist represents the experience of living and working in two entirely different worlds.

Shen Jiawei, now and then.
Above, 'Standing Guard for our Great Motherland', a famous 1970s propaganda poster.
Below, 'How to Explain Art to a White Rabbit' (portrait of Judith Neilson) 2015

Capon played a role as the urbane western observer, inevitably on the outside looking in despite his long experience of China (first visiting in 1972, touring cadre schools, tractor factories, Potemkin communes and operations carried out under acupuncture) and his scholarly knowledge of ancient China. He appeared bemused at times, confessing he is completely mystified by the art market in China. "Who is buying all this stuff?" he exclaimed, after Guo Jian revealed that in the artist 'village' of Songzhuang there are, by some estimates, 20,000 artists living and working at any one time.

He spoke of the apparent materialism of the younger generation in comparison with the political commitment of the older, and I struggled to contain my disagreement. Artists born in the '80s and '90s may have come to adulthood in a dog-eat-dog aspirational and individualist world, where the phrase 'Serve the People' seems a quaint relic of a discarded past, but in my experience they are no less serious about the comments they make about their world. There are many ways to be political, and subversive images of Mao are no longer at any kind of cutting edge. Women artists, in particular, are seeking ways to explore the particularities of their lives, in hugely diverse ways, something which I explore at length in my forthcoming book, 'Half the Sky: Conversations with Contemporary Women Artists in China.'

Nevertheless, Capon is always good for a snappy quote, and last night was no exception. He showed images by the great ink master, Ba Da Shenren, to explain that rebellion was nothing new in Chinese art, before telling the assembled audience, 'The icing of global modernity on the cake of Chinese tradition is getting thicker and thicker - but there is still plenty of cake left.' This, certainly, seems a self-evident truth, and many artists in the major centres of Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Guangzhou are embedding traditional practices and philosophies in their work, in ways both more and less obvious.

The strength of traditional culture was evident in an excellent exhibition I saw a few weeks ago at the Singapore Art Museum, 'After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art.' My review of the show is published today in 'Daily Serving':

After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) explores the dissonance between our innermost longings and the contemporary world we have created. Gunter Grass said, rather gloomily, that melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin. Imagining perfection, we confront the contradiction between the Arcadia of our imagination and the imperfect realities of our everyday. Featuring eighteen artists and artists’ collectives from across the Asian region, the exhibition was conceived as a four-part narrative. From the potent metaphor of the garden, we move to the city as a “contested site of the utopian ideal.”[1] Discredited utopic ideologies are juxtaposed with the notion that the search for an ideal world is now a psychological, inner journey, an entirely individual pursuit.

Ian Woo. We Have Crossed the Lake, 2009; Acrylic on Linen; 194 x 244 cm. Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Other Edens presents the garden as a site of desire in the colonial imagination. Singaporean painter Ian Woo’s  lyrical, abstract representation of foliage and water represents the solace found in the natural world. A reference to mid-20th century abstraction is evident, but Woo has invented a powerful and idiosyncratic visual language. Underlying the gestural, calligraphic mark-making of We Have Crossed the Lake (2009) is a spare restraint emerging from his deep knowledge of Chinese ink-painting traditions.

Some works reflect the bitter aftermath of totalitarian ideologies. Asian nation states today—even the behemoth of a post-Mao China—are hostage to the forces of the global market, and old certainties have vanished. Shen Shaomin’s hyper-real embalmed bodies of Communist leaders lie in crystal sepulchres, as if awaiting a call to arms that might reanimate them. Mao lies next to Ho Chi Minh and Fidel, Kim Il-sung and Lenin. Summit (2009) is a G8 meeting of cadavers. The meta-narratives of the twentieth century, like these old men, lie in the morgue of history.

Shen Shaomin. Summit (detail – Ho Chi Minh), 2009; silica gel simulation, acrylic and fabric; dimensions variable. Singapore Art Museum collection. Image courtesy Singapore Art Museum

Vietnamese/American collective The Propeller Group collaborated with an advertising agency to re-brand Communism, a tongue-in-cheek attempt to make it newly palatable. The mise-en-scène of Television Commercial for Communism (2011– 2012) is all white—no red flags, no references to the glorious struggle of the proletarian masses, no cult-like imagery: a satirical “whitewashed” revolutionary ideology as empty and uninflected as a mouthwash commercial.

Anurendra Jegadeva. MA-NA-VA-REH – Love, Loss and Pre-Nuptials in The Time of the Big Debate, 2012-2014; multi-media installation; dimensions variable. Singapore Art Museum collection, image courtesy Singapore Art Museum

Anurendra Jegadeva’s MA-NA-VA-REH – Love, Loss and Pre-Nuptials in the Time of the Big Debate (2012–2014) presents the personal as unambiguously political. A seductively gaudy Hindu wedding altar is adorned with images of the artist’s parents, the religious iconography of four major religions, and a panoply of South Asian cultural references. Jegadeva comments on two definitions of marriage: the wedding of the artist’s parents, in 1957, the year of Malaysia’s independence; and the marriage of convenience that created Malaysia as a modern state. Caucasian Krishnas are juxtaposed with the Virgin Mary, and portraits of political leaders jostle in a joyously vibrant eclecticism. In a time of  increasing political and religious tension this exuberant mash-up of culture and tradition seems utopian indeed.

Kawayan De Guia. Bomba, 2011; installation comprising 18 mirror bombs, sputnik sound sculpture; dimensions variable. Singapore Art Museum collection, image courtesy Singapore Art Museum

18 sparkling “bombs” hang in the darkened space of the chapel (the museum was once a Catholic school.)  Terrifying disco balls promising destruction, they cast shards of light onto the Stations of the Cross that still adorn the walls. At once beautiful and menacing, Kawayan De Guia’s Bomba (2011) references the bombing of Manila in World War II, but evokes the horrors of more recent conflicts, and others of the past, contrasting the glittery lure of hedonism with a dance of death.

Chris Chong Chan Fui. Block B, 2012-2014; single-channel video with sound, 20 minutes (loop). Collection of the Artist, image courtesy Singapore Art Museum

Other works explore urban alienation. Chris Chong Chan Fui’s 2012–2014 video Block B was shot in a gritty neighbourhood of Kuala Lumpur where life unfolds chaotically within a grid of brutalist high-rise apartments. Shannon Lee Castleman set up sixteen video cameras in facing apartments on Singapore’s  Jurong West Street 81. Residents simultaneously filmed and were filmed by their neighbours. The work reflects the new realities of surveillance, but also reveals the joys of the everyday within these closely-packed buildings. In unscripted exchanges between neighbours who might otherwise never have spoken, we see the possibilities for human connection in unpromising environments. Through this examination of utopias lost and found, the exhibition reminds us that the universal desire for the perfect world remains a tantalisingly elusive aspiration.

Reality TV (If You Are the One) meets the Great Wall of China (photo Luise Guest 2013)

After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art is on view at the Singapore Art Museum through October 18, 2015.

[1] After Utopia catalogue, Singapore Art Museum, 2015.

Sugar and Spice Sichuan Style: 'China's Decade' at Ray Hughes Gallery

Wan Yang, Game No 2: Fortuitous Encounters in the Forest, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 150 cm, image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

Ray Hughes, that somewhat Rabelaisian, larger than life fixture of the Sydney artworld, first travelled to China in 1998. Since then he has been a regular visitor to the studios and galleries of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and, most recently, Chongqing, that vast city of 38 million people on the Yangtze River in Sichuan Province. It is now well known that it was at an exhibition at Ray Hughes Gallery that Judith Nielson, the founder with her husband Kerr of the White Rabbit Gallery http://www.whiterabbitcollection.org and its significant collection, first encountered contemporary Chinese art. While she has since developed her own networks of artists and advisors, it is due to her chance encounter with artist Wang Zhiyuan and the energy and excitement of Chinese art at Hughes’ Surry Hills Gallery that a new and vital force was unleashed onto the Sydney cultural scene.

Something of a maverick, Hughes’ determination to run his own race in the sometimes pretentiously self-conscious Sydney artworld is what makes him such an interesting character.  He is interested in “the next generation, the next ‘new thing’ “, he tells me when I visit the gallery to see the group show ‘China’s Decade’ together with a show of new work by the painter Li Jun. A curious title for the show, given that many works date from the late 90s, but there is no denying the accuracy of the statement in today’s global context. Hughes was expansive and animated, describing his visits to Sichuan (and the hot pots eaten in the mountains with the artists, teachers and art students, of course!) and the way that the artists he admires there are focused on moving art beyond the limited scope of the ‘Political Pop’ movement of the late ‘90s, re-examining their own pre-revolutionary Chinese history. They are developing a new visual syntax which incorporates Western influences with a confidently global, international outlook.  Their references to Chinese art and craft traditions are sometimes subtle and veiled, sometimes overt.

Luo Brothers, 'Welcome Welcome!', fibreglass and paint.
Image reproduced courtesy of Ray Hughes Gallery

This is not to say, however, that the brash wit of Political Pop is altogether absent. The work of the Luo Brothers, who have been shown in Sydney by Ray Hughes since his first forays into Chinese art, is typical of the style. As well as the highly recognisable icons of consumer desire – such as the gaudy fat ‘good fortune’ fibreglass babies reclining smugly on cans of Pepsi that we see in this show – there is also a series of pencil and charcoal drawings. The three works in ‘The 100 Family Names Primer’ series represent a baby, a young female in Red Army uniform, and an old worker, all with their jackets covered in Mao buttons and backed by revolutionary flags. The title is presumably a reference to the ‘Old Hundred Names’, the ordinary working people of China who propped up the revolution and are now propping up the country’s growing wealth and industrial might in the factories of the Pearl River Delta. Other works by Feng Zheng-jie and Qi Zhilong which date from the late 90s and early 2000s work the familiar seam of Red Army ballet dancers and Maoist imagery with engaging verve and confidence. There are those in China, such as the Canadian Martin Kemble of the respected Shanghai ‘Art Labor’ Gallery http://www.artlaborgallery.com/ who see the continuing popularity of this style in the west as a kind of ‘Chinoiserie’ or orientalism, which Chinese artists are pragmatic enough to happily profit from. There is no doubt some truth in this. However, despite the fact that younger artists (and many of the older generation as well) have moved away from this somewhat obsessive gnawing at the bone of the Cultural Revolution, these works still exert a fascination in their relentless exposure of the contradictions of this ‘new’ China as it moves towards global dominance.

Hang Bo’s series of photographs, ‘No. 6 They’, ‘Middle School’ and ‘No.  5 They’ exemplify a very different approach to the business of ‘being Chinese’ and making sense of history. His method is to take ‘found’ images, poignant group photos of young Pioneers, soldiers or work unit comrades from the time of the Cultural Revolution, and then re-photograph the same (living) subjects in the same arrangements. Quietly arresting and very moving, ‘No. 5 They’ contains a number of empty chairs, and one inevitably begins to speculate as to the reasons for the absences.

Of most interest to me were other more idiosyncratic works such as Wang Yuping’s oddly tentative ‘Untitled’, a mixed media work on paper.  A faceless figure, sketchily and loosely rendered, tenderly holds a small black bird on its hand. Reminiscent of ink drawings by Joy Hester such as ‘Girl with Hen’ or the ‘Lovers’ series, in which faces are partially or totally obliterated, the work can be read on many levels and suggests the vulnerability of both the natural world and of human connections. Ji Dachun’s large canvases, in which mundane objects such as electric light bulbs and shoes appear to float against a light coloured ground, are also strangely compelling, making subtle references to Western modernist conventions of abstraction, colour field painting and expressionism. There is a Zen sensibility though, of weightlessness and quiet meditation, which makes these works repay a second look, and then a third.

Wang Yuping, Untitled, 1998, mixed media on paper, 102 x 69 cm,
 image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

The highly respected senior painter Liu Xiaodong, who will be remembered by Sydney audiences for his monumental  paintings of migrant workers building the Three Gorges Dam shown at a Sydney Biennale some years ago, is represented here with a work from 2002, ‘Unknown Pleasures’. A solitary figure, seen from the rear, smokes a cigarette, quietly observing a street scene. Large, ornate, brightly coloured floral wreaths are arranged along a bicycle lane in front of the kind of new commercial buildings which look ramshackle and decrepit in China before construction has even finished. There is a melancholy air about this figure observing the ‘new’ China.  Liu was apparently inspired to develop his particular expressive style after he was given a postcard of a work by Lucien Freud. When you look at the way he paints flesh, especially in those earlier paintings of migrant workers at the dam site eating lunch in their underpants, or young girls lying on seedy bare mattresses, this makes perfect sense. There is a sense of melancholy and a hint of menace lurking behind the seductive and luscious painterly surface.

I was intrigued by Zhou Siwei’s mixture of ‘spice and sugar’ in works such as ‘Infection Bambi ‘ paintings, part of a larger series of ‘cartoon nostalgia’ which includes ‘Infection Mickey’ and ‘Infection Astro Boy’. Drops and splatters of paint create stylised images which are intended, the artist says, to return viewers to the state of their wide-eyed and optimistic youthful selves. Rather unnervingly though, Bambi appears to be decomposing, so the work rather suggests the impossibility of returning to that charmed childhood state, and instead suggests that popular culture is toxic to those who consume it. The artist has said that his work is there to be ‘infected’ with all the various interpretations and ideas that the viewer may bring to contemplating it. Zhou studied at the influential Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing. This city is, Hughes believes, at the centre of innovative art in China. Zhou represents a generation who have little interest in, or direct experience of, the Cultural Revolution that provided so much of the imagery employed by the first wave of contemporary Chinese artists and avidly ‘consumed’ by Western audiences. In this he reminds me of Lu Yang, a young artist I met in Shanghai last year, who told me she has no interest whatsoever in being identified or defined as a Chinese artist. The limitations of national identity become  meaningless in the age of social media. These young artists are forging a new path, challenging the orthodoxies that have grown up in the last 20 years about what Chinese art ‘should’ look like. Sometimes they may seem to an (older) outside observer to be in denial, however there is no doubting their sincerity, or their determination.

As I chatted with Hughes in the gallery, though, my eye was continually drawn away from him (despite his characteristically brightly coloured shirt and tie) to the works by Chang Xugong hanging above him. Dating from the Late 90s, they represent the ‘Gaudy Art’ movement. Born in 1957 in Hebei Province, Chang uses the tradition of silk embroidery to make comment on the nouveau riche in China and their relentless acquisition of consumer goods and branded products. Like the dramatic imagery of heroic workers from Cultural Revolution Propaganda posters, these new aspirational heroes of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ appear happy to the point of lunacy, which allows just a little doubt to creep into the mind of the viewer. They  are charming rather than malicious, however -  there is affection in the mockery, rather as one might tiredly acknowledge the foibles of a relative one is really quite fond of. Many of his toothy grinning characters carry the latest accessory of urban China – a fluffy white Maltese terrier or Paris Hilton style pooch. Cars, mobile phones and television sets swirl around like the haloes surrounding Renaissance depictions of saints. These saints, though, are more likely to be performing Karaoke than miracles.

Chang Xugong, Untitled, 2000, machine embroidered satin, 100 x 80cm,
image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

The delicate and beautiful works of Li Jin, http://www.li-jin.com/  an artist from Tianjing, are reminiscent of nothing so much as the drawings of George Grosz or Max Beckmann, albeit with a lighter and more humorous touch. Loose, lyrical ink on paper works depicting rather unprepossessing looking men in front of messy  tables scattered with bottles of baijiu and cut sausage, or engaged in strangely unerotic encounters with plump naked girls, they celebrate the everyday lives of ordinary and unbeautiful people – that is, most of us. Affectionate and gentle, his works present a slightly flabby and imperfect cast of characters, drawn lovingly without attempts to idealise, to beautify, or to apply Vaseline to the lens recording daily existence. In a time when the only images of ordinary flawed human beings we see are the grotesque photographs of ‘Celebs without Make-up’, or the sad and desperate on ‘The Biggest Loser’, this is very refreshing.

The exhibition celebrates Chinese art in all its rich diversity. Yes, there is Mao imagery, and the memory of the Cultural Revolution lives on in the work of many artists – how could it not? Yet there are also artists working in new techniques and with imagery that represents the bizarre and the humdrum, the beautiful and the disturbing, the humorous and also the magical aspects of life in China (and everywhere) today.

Li Jin, Accompanying Object, 2007, ink on paper, 46 x 70 cm, 

image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

Chang Xugong, Untitled, 2000, machine embroidered satin, 100 x 80cm,
image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

China and the Zeitgeist

I have been immersing myself in Chinese art to an even greater extent than usual: books and articles about Chinese art, web sites dealing with Chinese cultural issues, and exhibitions of Chinese art, to the point where I am dreaming about Chinese art....strange that suddenly there seems to be so much to look at and write about here in Australia. China is THE hot flavour of the month right now it seems, and all things Chinese, from food to fashion, art to literature, music and film, are suddenly highly desirable.

Song Yi, 'Girl', oil on canvas, image courtesy of Red Gate Gallery, Beijing

During the Sydney Chinese New Year celebrations, which culminated in the rather daggily charming parade that I described in a previous post, the Sydney Town Hall was the unusual site for 'Two Generations: 20 Years of Red Gate Gallery', an exhibition of work by artists from the Red Gate Gallery stable. Brian Wallace, the Australian director of this highly respected Beijing commercial gallery, asked a number of his senior artists to each nominate a young emerging artist for inclusion in the show, and the results were fascinatingly diverse and very impressive. There were  many wonderful works, including the luscious red calligraphic surface of 'Work 1112', a painting by Jiang Weitao revealing the continuing interest in painterly abstraction in Shanghai in particular.

Jiang Weitao, ‘Work 1112’, 2011, oil on canvas, 112 x 82 cm, image courtesy of Red Gate Gallery

From this substantial show in the centre of Sydney to the National Museum in Canberra (which has since the end of 2011 been showing a large exhibition of works from the collection of the National Art Museum of China, 'New Horizon) felt like a longer journey than just the tedious drive down the Hume Highway. This exhibition was uneven in its quality, with fabulous works by significant artists juxtaposed with more pedestrian works by (presumably) artists with impeccable political connections. The catalogue was particularly appalling - as if written by someone from a government office with little knowledge of art or the art world. While it was good to see the patterns of change in China as represented in artworks over the years since 1949, the exhibition as a whole was really quite bizarre, despite the inclusion of Xu Bing and Shen Jiawei.

I have written more extensively about both these shows in an article posted on The Art Life:
Drifting Clouds: Two Views of Chinese Art

Spring Breeze and Willow, Zhou Shuqiao, 1974, image reproduced courtesy of the National Art Museum of China

Last weekend I spent some time in the current exhibition showing at Ray Hughes Gallery in Surry Hills, 'China's Decade', which provided an illuminating contrast with both the previous shows. Hughes is one of the first people in the Sydney art world to understand the significance of the art being made in China in the early 90s, and the first to begin to show Chinese art in Sydney. He told me that he is now particularly interested in what is happening in Chongqing, that huge city of 38 million people in Sichuan Province, as he believes it has become a central locus of innovation and interesting practice. The works range from explorations of popular culture ('Infection Bambi'by Zhou Siwei, for example) to Li Jin's lyrical ink paintings of a kind of 'floating world' of everyday life - eating noodles, lying about watching television, making love. I loved the  fabulous examples of the 'Gaudy Art' of the 90s, such as the machine embroidered silk works of Chang Xugong which feature maniacally grinning karaoke singers and self satisfied toothy 'entrepreneurs' in brightly coloured suits clutching mobile phones and other accoutrements of  'success'.  The exhibition demonstrates the diverse richness of contemporary art in China, charting the startlingly rapid change in society and all the tension, dislocation and fragmentation that results from that, as well as the unalloyed joy and satisfaction of sudden wealth and access to all the desirable products of global capitalism. This last is featured in a cynical and witty form in the fibreglass fat babies of the Luo Brothers, lolling about on Pepsi cans or wrapping themselves around Big Macs.

Chang Xugong, Untitled, 2000, machine embroidered satin, 100 x 80cm, 

image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

Best of all, however, was the painting by Liu Xiaodong, Unknown Pleasures, a work dating from 2002. A wonderful painter, his work is never facile despite his mastery of the painterly surface and gestural mark. In this work, the solitary figure smoking a cigarette in a street lined with shoddily constructed commercial buildings seems to embody a weird mixture of existential despair and hopefulness - the zeitgeist, perhaps.

Liu Xiaodong, Unknown Pleasures, 2002, oil on canvas, size unspecified,

 image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery