Ten Artists, Ten Conversations, Ten Stories

My most recent article for The Culture Trip introduces ten of the fascinating artists that I have interviewed for my book, "Half the Sky: Conversations with Contemporary Women Artists in China". Here are the first three.

Ten Contemporary Chinese Women Artists You Should Know

Chinese contemporary art is ‘the flavour of the month’ in the West, but there are fascinating stories as yet insufficiently told: the stories of contemporary women artists. The ten artists introduced here are members of a generation who grew to adulthood in the 1980s and 1990s. Born into a post-Mao China that was entirely and disconcertingly different from the world of their parents, they have been forced to adjust to a tsunami of change.

Bu Hua Beijing Babe Loves Freedom No 6, 2008, Giclee Print, Image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Gallery

Bu Hua

Bu Hua was born in 1973, graduating from the Institute of Fine Art, Tsinghua University, Beijing, (formerly the Central Academy of Fine Art and Design) in 1995. In her strong imagery and flat, decorative backgrounds we can see a trace of the traditional woodblock prints of the revolutionary period, and also her love of Japanese art and design. Often described as a pioneer of digital animation in China, Bu Hua was one of the first to use animation software in an art context, creating surreal narratives about contemporary life. Her animations and still images often feature a feisty, sassy pigtailed child dressed in the uniform of the Young Pioneers, a Communist Party youth group. A clever combination of innocence and knowing, cuteness and cunning, playfulness and cynical parody, she swaggers through Bu Hua’s invented world. ‘I felt that this character is an actual person living in real life but [she] is really also an idealised version of myself. She knows this universe and the rules of this society like the back of her hand,’ says the artist. ‘Savage Growth’ employs her characteristically crisp graphic style to create an allegory of industrialisation, pollution and militarisation. Her heroine, armed only with a slingshot, takes aim at flocks of white birds which prove, on closer examination, to be military aircraft. Twisted trees grow out of pools of oil, and a row of sexy foxes (‘fox spirits’, in Chinese lore, are dangerous seductresses) sway backwards and forwards to a mechanical sound track like the rhythmic metallic noise of a factory assembly line. Bu Hua says, ‘people in China pay a lot of attention to the past and the future, but it’s really kind of forbidden to pay a lot of attention to what is happening now, in real life…I am showing what is happening in China at this exact moment, what is happening now.’

Cui Xiuwen, Existential Emptiness No. 3, 2009 C-Print, (85 x 450 cm) Courtesy Klein Sun Gallery, NY. © Cui Xiuwen

Cui Xiuwen

Cui Xiuwen’s 2002 ‘Lady’s Room’ caused the first lawsuit in Chinese contemporary art, when a professor in Guangzhou took exception to its frank documentation of prostitution in the ‘new’ China. With a hidden video camera in the bathroom of a swanky Beijing nightclub she recorded young hostesses changing their clothes, counting their money and arranging their next liaisons with their clients, exposing the seedy underbelly of China’s economic miracle. Born in 1970 near Harbin, Cui Xiuwen trained as a painter, graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. In the mid-2000s Cui produced a body of work featuring young girls dressed as Young Pioneers and posed in the Forbidden City, dwarfed by claustrophobic walls and gates representing Chinese tradition. ‘Angel no. 3’ features the same girl, nightmarishly replicated as a crowd of adolescent clones, sleepwalking towards us with arms outstretched. The work evokes the deliberate erasure of bitter memories – a collective amnesia. ‘This is about my own life experience,’ Cui says. ‘I would wake up and see the sky filled with this huge grey cloud which made me feel as if there was no hope.’ Cui Xiuwen returned to the countryside near Harbin to shoot ‘Existential Emptiness’. Like misty ink and wash ‘shan shui’ scrolls the series depicts a living girl and a life-sized doll, a shadow version of the living girl, a puppet figure. The figures are tiny in the vast landscape, like solitary scholars in the mists of a literati painting.

Dong Yuan, Grandma’s House and Bosch’s Garden, installation view, oil on separate canvases, image courtesy the artist

Dong Yuan

Dong Yuan paints objects which represent cultural and personal memory with meticulous realism, creating installations of multiple separate canvases. Born near Dalian in 1984, Dong studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. As a student, inspired by Western still life painting and Giorgio Morandi, she painted literally everything she owned. Small canvases depict her shoes, rolled up quilts, books, a rice cooker, a bath towel hanging on the back of a door, a teapot, even a box of tissues. ‘Home of Paintings’ and ‘Sketch of Family Belongings’ record, on 59 and 186 canvases respectively, the tiny apartments in which she lived as a student. ‘Grandma’s House and Bosch’s Garden’ consists of 855 canvases, a surreal juxtaposition of the fantasy world imagined by Hieronymus Bosch and the rural Chinese world of her grandmother. The gods of happiness, prosperity and longevity are juxtaposed with images of Mao and the stars of TV game shows. Furniture, teacups, textiles, traditional New Year hanging scrolls and everyday possessions intermingle. The humble courtyard house where Dong Yuan had been happy as a child would, inevitably, be demolished. Dong Yuan believes it is her duty and obligation to paint these memories, slowly and intensively completing one room at a time. The project took the artist more than two years. She describes the process as ‘fixing it in memory,’ - an elegy to a lost world. ‘It’s hard to know how many things have to disappear before people find their hearts settled down,’ says the artist.

To find out about the other 7 - click HERE

上海日记 Shanghai Diary: two artists, a curator, and a revolutionary martyr

West Lake, Hangzhou, photograph Luise Guest

On the website of the Shanghai Biennale: "Free of charge for active army men, retired cadres, and dependents of martyrs, visitors with disabilities, and seniors over 70"

I have arrived in this exciting city of Jetsons-style futuristic overhead freeways, and flyovers, a veritable  concrete spaghetti, after the increasingly usual unexplained flight delays out of Beijing. Colonial and art deco buildings poke their heads above the freeway walls, and apartments with gold domes and cupolas gleam in the sun. At Hongqiao airport an exhibition of traditional ink painting sits side by side with a Chrysler show-room full of gleaming vehicles. This too is "socialism with Chinese characteristics." I have to get used to taxi drivers saying "Qu nali? " (where are you going?) Instead of the Beijing "Qu narrrrrr?" Immediate observation: Shanghai street style is very cool indeed compared with the more pragmatic and prosaic Beijing. The streets of the French Concession district are full of young guys in big overcoats with designer glasses and geometrically sharp haircuts. The notable exception to the high style aesthetic is that truly eccentric Shanghainese habit of wearing pyjamas - often bright pink flanellette, printed with Hello Kitty or Snoopy characters - in the street. They are sometimes paired with high heeled shoes and ankle socks. The addition of a puffy down jacket in a virulent shade of electric blue is often a notable feature as well. 

In Beijing it is rare in most places outside the diplomatic area or 798 to see another Westerner - Shanghai is much more ethnically diverse. On my very first visit to this city in 2011, after spending a month in Beijing, I was surprised to see mixed race couples. This is generally a Western man with a Chinese woman, almost never the other way around. My young postgrad student translators, however, (mostly girls) talk to me about the pressure from their parents to find a good Chinese husband. In Beijing last week "Shirley" told me that every time she returns home to Shanghai her mother sets up  a series of blind dates with eligible bachelors, worrying that she is leaving it too late. She is 22. She thinks her mother chooses a "better quality" man than the rock musicians with whom she has had disappointing romantic experiences, and says she would never, never marry a man that her parents disapproved of. "Family is the most important thing of all," she says, and as an only child she must not disappoint the parents who have lavished her with love and educational opportunities.

In the French Concession, Shanghai, Photos Luise Guest

Since I arrived in Shanghai I have had a fascinating conversation with independent curator Shasha Liu about the Chinese art market in the odd surroundings of the Marks and Spencer coffee shop - more of that in a later post. Two artist studio visits took up my first two days - the first an interview with young sculptor Yu Ji, whose work is currently showing in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. She is pushing sculpture into the realms of performance art, and she won my heart when she confided her early love for the work of Wolfgang Laib. I later discovered she has worked with Grass Stage Theater Director and art historian Zhao Chuan whom I interviewed with his wife, the performance artist Wu Meng, back in 2012. There is a distinctly more theoretical approach - and perhaps a more polemical one too - to art practice in Shanghai as compared with Beijing. Yu Ji is interested in the body in quite an abstract way - her work is not about sentiment or feelings, but explores the body taking up space, moving in space, and the experience of physical sensation. 

An early work in her student days started with the used bars of soap with which a range of different people had washed their bodies. Yu Ji made plaster casts of these worn and humble objects. Arte Povera interests her - the use of simple inexpensive materials such as concrete and plaster. This has been partly out of necessity, as a student and then as a young impoverished artist just beginning to make her way, but it is also a distinct aesthetic and conceptual choice. It is something seen in the work of other Shanghai based artists, too, such as Shi Qing, and again represents a distinct contrast with the grand ambitions and enormous scale of many Beijing-based artists. Yu Ji loves the amputated limbs and battered torsos of Classical sculpture from the ancient world, and was also inspired by the Buddhist statuary of the Mogao caves along the silk route. She is interested too in the connection between art and daily life, and one of the works currently showing in Paris is based on the very particularly Chinese experience (outside the big "first-tier" cities) of the communal public toilet. For more about this interesting sculptor you can read my forthcoming article about ten interesting emerging Chinese artists in The Culture Trip!

Yu Ji December 2014 Photograph Luise Guest

Yu Ji, image courtesy the artist

My second interview was with painter Wang Zhibo, whose work was seen in Sydney this year in "Wondermountain" at Sydney's Penrith Regional Gallery, an exhibition curated by Joanna Bayndrian. She selected contemporary artists both Chinese and Australian who draw in some way upon the traditions of scholar painting and "shan shui" ink and brush landscape painting. You can read my review of that exhibition if you click HERE. Zhibo lives and works in Hangzhou, so I had a grand Chinese travel adventure, leaving my hotel at 7.00am in order to get to Hangzhou's West Lake with at least a little time for a walk around its famed circumference before going to the studio she shares with her husband,  painter Yuan Yuan. The visit was worth it in every way - these highly landscaped vistas punctuated with red maple leaves and willows drooping into the water are so reminiscent of Chinese painting. I loved it despite the battered vans tearing around the lake with tourist touts screaming out the windows into hand-held loudspeakers, and hordes of people taking photographs of their wives and daughters leaning winsomely against trees or looking flirtatiously through pavilion windows.

Local officials on a West Lake junket? Photograph Luise Guest

West Lake Vista, Photograph Luise Guest

My conversation with Wang Zhibo took place amidst the constant noise of drills and jackhammers, as the old factory area is being "upgraded" to become fancy expensive design studios, shops and galleries - "like a little 798" said Zhibo. Her work is cool and metaphysical, dealing in imagined and remembered landscapes which blend east and west, past and present. She is currently working on a series of paintings of security guard houses (like those in the gated estates of the newly wealthy Chinese, always given grandiose names such as "Florida Heaven" or "European Mansions") sited in imaginary gardens inspired by Renaissance painters such as Botticelli. I like this idea, which combines whimsy with savage satire. Zhibo loves Masaccio and Piero della Francesca for how they make the difficult appear easy and inevitable, and there is a similar cool architectural eye on the world in her own work.

Wang Zhibo in her Hangzhou studio, December 2014, Photograph Luise Guest

Images courtesy the artist

After two hours talking with Zhibo and her young assistant, Bing Er (studying English languageat university but desperately wanting to be a photographer and work with Yang Fudong) came an exhausting trip back to Shanghai. Firstly a cab from studio to station with, as is usual, no suspension. The cheerful driver made up songs for me based on our stilted conversation. Sample words, translated from the Chinese: "Hangzhou traffic is terrible every day, every day, every dayl Traffic jams every day, traffic is shit!" Then he would turn to me and say, "Hao bu hao?" (Good or not good?) "Very good!" I assured him, hoping we would eventually arrive unscathed at our destination, which seemed more likely if he faced the road than swivelled around grinning at me. Then almost an hour in the grim, very cold waiting room of the railway station. Then an hour on the fast train, on which many people were standing, as they had sold more tickets than seats, with a man snoring more loudly than I would have believed possible next to me. Then one hour and ten minutes in a taxi line at Hongqiao Station, into which a Russian woman in a fur coat pushed ahead of hundreds of people and leaped into a cab with her child.Nobody protested. I wanted to punch her. Then 50 minutes in the taxi crawling through the stalled traffic, interspersed with burst of maniacal speed and heart-stopping near misses. Like so many of my China days, it was exhausting and wonderful at the same time. If only the mythical revolutionary martyr Lei Feng, who is like a socialist saint in China, much satirised by cynical youth,  HAD been there to help me get a taxi, as this sign in the railway station appeared to promise....

More on Shanghai art, and more of my random #OnlyinChina observations in a later post. Off to the Shanghai Biennale now, followed by more art, as much as I can cram into the day. I will give a few museums a miss, though, including the mysterious but terribly dull-sounding "Exhibition of Deeds of Good Eighth Company of PLA on the Nanjing Road."

Learn from Uncle Lei Feng, strive to become a red-flowered youth, 1983, chineseposters.net

Study Comrade Lei Feng, 1990

From Chinese Posters site: The following example from early 2001 may serve as an illustration of the continuous redefinition of Lei's exemplary status. Falun Gong members undergoing "re-education through labor" were taken to the Lei Feng Memorial Hall in Liaoning Province, in order to learn from Lei's self-sacrifices. According to the report in the Liberation Army Daily [Jiefangjun ribao], the visitors "spontaneously repeated and copied down inscriptions" from his diary.

山水 Shan Shui - musings on mountains, water and all things Chinese

Hua Tunan. Fluorescent Impression Shanshui, 2013; spray paint; 300 x 500 cm. Image courtesy of the Artist.

There is a small mountain of stacked books beside my bed and another on my desk. Unsurprisingly, almost all of them have some relationship to China or to Chinese art. As is my usual habit I have been immersing myself in all things Chinese, from books to art to political news  - in fact pretty much everything except doing my Chinese language homework. I have managed to avoid this every night this week. It consists of re-writing, in characters I barely understand and won't remember by tomorrow night's class, a riveting text about the history of the bicycle in China, and the construction of sentences using words such as 'bicycle lane', 'air pollution' and 'health and fitness'. Currently I just cannot force myself to do this. Maybe after some junk TV, and a stern talking to - of myself, by myself....Add to this the fact that my new teacher has (to my ear) a somewhat impenetrable Shanghai accent and continually corrects my Beijing pronunciation, and it's all a recipe for a demoralising Wednesday evening. Eating bitterness, one might say. However he does like to interrupt the lesson to provide us with new "4 character idioms" and Chinese stories, including one about the Emperor being astride sky, mountain and river at the one time - and some very bad Chinese jokes about how much women like to shop. "Tongyi bu tongyi?" (Agree or disagree?) he says. I didn't endear myself by saying loudly "Bu tongyi!" (A lie, really, as I am quite partial to a bit of retail therapy - especially in China!)

I have been reading two books written by travellers to China in the late1980s, and marvelling over the dramatic changes in the last thirty five years. Paul Theroux (grumpy old thing) riding the Iron Rooster is invariably cynically disappointed in pretty much everything, and the British writer Colin Thubron is even more disapproving. And I frankly don't believe that all the detailed conversations that both writers report were carried out in fluent Mandarin without any minders or interpreters, especially as Thubron says in Chapter 1 that he spent the year (ONE year!!! Ha ha!) learning Chinese before his journey. That puts me in my place - three years on and my spoken Mandarin is still essentially "taxi Chinese." I have decided that they are clearly both fantasists of the first order. However, both books are fascinating in their own way as the writers observe at  first-hand the impact of Deng's "reform and opening" and the flourishing of markets and small businesses, as well as the human cost of the ending of the "iron rice bowl" and its cradle to grave guarantee of income (albeit small) and health care.

I have also re-read John Garnaut's account of the machinations of Bo Xilai in Chongqing, "The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo." It was rushed hastily into print before what were essentially two show trials - of Bo himself and of his wife Gu Kailai (or, was she? So many conspiracty theories about the identity of the woman who actually faced the court.) However, his obvious knowledge of the way that the system of reciprocal obligation and corruption has played out in recent years in a way surely little different to imperial times makes for a riveting read. And essentially it is a dynastic story - his account of the Cultural Revolution tribulations of Bo Xilai's father, Bo Yibo, who, with Xi Jinping's father, was one of the "eight immortals" of the Communist Revolution, is especially fascinating.

Meanwhile, I have been writing about the revival and reinvention of ink painting, and seeing it in various guises and places including, perhaps surprisingly, the Penrith Regional Gallery and Lewers Bequest, in an exhibition of Chinese and Australian artists entitled 'Wondermountain.' The exhibition was curated by Joanna Bayndrian, who is also responsible for an interesting new website (for which, in the interests of full disclosure, I should say I am a contributor of articles about Chinese contemporary art) Creative Asia. Apart from new work by Shoufay Derz, my favourite works in Wondermountain were by Yang Yongliang, Wang Zhibo and the surreal fog-filled landscapes of Svetlana Bailey. My review of the show (for Daily Serving) was published today. Here is the start of the article.

Subverting the Sublime: 'Wondermountain at the Penrith Regional Gallery'

Liu Yuan, In the Likeness of a Mountain, Digital Print, image courtesy the artist

It seemed entirely appropriate that my journey to see Wondermountain at the Penrith Regional Gallery and Lewers Bequest was through rain, a concrete landscape of freeways and overpasses obscured by my windscreen wipers. I arrived beside the swollen Nepean River, the Blue Mountains shrouded in mist, reflecting on the continuing importance of shanshui (mountain/water) painting. A poetic approach to representing landscape evolving from the Tang Dynasty, the genre has continuing currency in the work of contemporary artists responding to dramatic changes in the natural environment, in China and elsewhere. Subtitled Landscapes of Artifice and the Imagination, the exhibition brings together works by thirteen Chinese and Australian artists, exploring curator Joanna Bayndrian’s interest in the endurance of some of shanshui’s core principles and  “the transient spaces of supermodernity.” Bayndrian wanted to explore the relationship between humans and the natural environment, the artistic appropriation of signs and symbols that have come before, and the visualization of imagined landscapes. These things, so central to traditions of Chinese art, are all relevant to young artists working today.

A number of works depict dystopian landscapes, rather than the sublime vistas imagined by the literati painters in their gardens, or wandering scholars traveling in misty mountains. Yang Yongliang’s animated Phantom Landscape, at first sight a Song Dynasty scroll painting, is a melancholy vision of the fate of Chinese mega-cities. The mountains are actually stacked skyscrapers surmounted by cranes and pylons, while a torrential waterfall becomes a river of cars. Philjames appropriates a picturesque landscape into an image of the Three Gorges Dam in a comment on development and “progress.” Hua Tunan uses the language of street art and spray-can graffiti to reimagine shanshui in vivid fluorescent color far from the restraint and serenity associated with the conventions.

Cindy Yuen Zhe Chen. Soundscape Karaniya Metta Sutta (detail), 2012; ink on wen zhou paper; 72 x 230.5 cm.

Shoufay Derz explores the sublime and ephemeral in works that focus on liminal states. Ash Upon the Moon documents the act of throwing ash into the mountainscape of Taiwan’s Caoshan. The artist describes her process as akin to traditional Chinese stories of the wandering scholar “looking, but not finding.” Her photographs record a kind of drawing in which she references the calligraphic mark of the ink painter. She says, “The ash is to the landscape what ink is to paper.” Jason Wing’s Xucun Village, an installation of recycled bricks with gold leaf, leads us to contemplate the continuing cycle of destruction in China. Not new, of course—each successive dynasty destroyed the temples, tombs, and palaces of the previous rulers—but unparalleled in its scope and impact. To read on, click HERE

Shoufay Derz. Ash Upon the Moon, 2014; pigment print on cotton rag paper; 67 x 82 cm. Image courtesy of the Artist and Penrith Regional Gallery.

Dystopian Vistas: the art of Wang Zhibo

Wang Zhibo, 'Springs II', oil on canvas, image courtesy of Edouard Malingue Gallery Hong Kong

Q: When are landscape paintings featuring those traditional Chinese elements of rocks and water part of a rather bleak and dystopian vision? 
A: When they appear in the work of Wang Zhibo, an emerging artist about to burst onto the international art scene with a solo exhibition at the Armory Show in New York next month following a show at Edouard Malingue Gallery in Hong Kong.

Her work has previously been shown at the Chongqing Art Museum, the Today Art Museum in Beijing, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei. She is certainly a painter worth watching, and her vision is original and compelling.

Graduating in 2008 from the China Academy of Art Oil Painting Department in Hangzhou, Wang Zhibo works in a highly academic style to represent a slightly disturbing vision of the landscape of modern China. Parks, fountains, trees and garden vistas - all are such distinctly traditional elements of Chinese literati painting. In these works, however, the trees and rocks possess an appearance of unreality, as if they are part of a landscape designed by a computer program for a property developer. Beautifully painted, with great control of her palette and her medium, she makes us see the world around us in different ways. Skies are murky, and the light so ambiguous that one cannot tell if it is day or night. Adding to the surreal ambience, these landscapes include palm trees, fences and balustrades, emphasising the sense of artificiality. This is a constructed world.

Wang Zhibo, Green Fault, oil on canvas, 157 x 180, image courtesy Edouard Malingue Gallery

Wang Zhibo, 'We Just Love the Beauty', oil on canvas, 96 x  80, image courtesy Edouard Malingue Gallery Hong Kong

Her unpeopled vistas evoke the grandiose hotel lobbies and shopping mall interiors being built in Chinese cities - reminding me of the advertising hoarding for the 'Soluxe Winterless Hotel' that I saw from a Beijing taxi, on a bitterly cold grey-sky day in December. I had visions of that unseen hotel interior as a kind of Las Vegas wonderland. Wang's paintings perhaps even suggest the bizarre copies of European architecture which abound in China, simulacra of French chateaux, English thatched cottages or Tyrolean villages. Constructed with alarming speed by speculative developers they are often utterly deserted - ghost cities. In a similar way Wang Zhibo's  interior spaces, cool, detached and lacking affect, strike me as sinister places where awful things might be just about to happen.

Her exhibition is entitled 'Standing Wave' in reference to the still moment when two waves of equal but opposite forces meet. The awkward artificiality of the parks and interior spaces that she represents reveals a similar paradox. They are places designed for people to gather and meet, but they are empty, deserted, like de Chirico's Turin or Jeffrey Smart's Italian suburbs. The stillness has a dreadful quality of foreboding. Even the water in the fountains seems to have slowed to a stop.

There is no comfortable Chinoiserie here. Wang's paintings represent the landscape within which most of the world's city dwellers are forced to live - an international language of the built environment which replaces the idiosyncratic, messy and authentic with the fake, manicured and simulated. Her paintings make us face an uncomfortable truth.

Wang Zhibo, 'Red Bug', 2012, oil on canvas,130 x 92

Image courtesy of Edouard Malingue Gallery