Art superstars and Postmodern Literati: It's Spring in Beijing

Here is my second of four articles resulting from my April in Beijing, published today on www.theculturetrip.com

It’s spring in Beijing. Despite the smog (apocalyptic) and the traffic (makes Manhattan look bucolic) and the general grittiness of a place which is in a continual process of flux and reinvention, this city is inherently beguiling and seductive. In addition to willow and flowering cherry trees, the weight of imperial and revolutionary history, and the ever-surprising inventiveness and enterprise of its inhabitants, there is, of course, the art. This is a city of art superstars and art mavericks, of postmodern literati and of traditionalists, of hyper-inflated prices (and egos) and of sheer hard work in thousands and thousands of studios. From Songzhuang to Feijiacun, from Beigao to Qiaozi Town, in studios ranging from the large and palatial to the humble, artists are working. Artists from all over China and, indeed all over the world, flock to Beijing. Why? Perhaps this question is best answered by an account of some exhibitions I have seen in the last two weeks of April.

Xu Zhen, Installation View, Photo by Eric Powell | Image Courtesy UCCA

Chinese contemporary art (‘Zhongguo Dangdai Yishu’) is like nothing else on the planet. For sheer bravura spectacle, artistic bravery, and innovation it is hard to beat. The unique historical accident which resulted in artists encountering every phase of Western Modernism and Postmodernism all at once, during the 1980s reform era, provided them with the freedom to invent, reinvent and transform historical conventions unburdened by reference points which western artists take for granted. They are often iconoclasts, as well as inheritors of a valued and treasured tradition. This apparent paradox plays out in surprising ways.

Installation view of Xu Zhen, Photo by Eric Powell | Image courtesy of UCCA

At Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, the mid-career retrospective of Xu Zhen (though perhaps we should call him ‘the artist formerly known as Xu Zhen’ as he now operates as a corporation, ‘MadeIn Company’) is sheer spectacle. An extraordinary diversity of installations, performances and objects across multiple platforms and media makes for a very powerful experience, sadly not always the case in the contemporary art museum. The exhibition as a whole, and individual works within it, pack quite a punch. Surprise, delight, awe at the artist’s sheer inventiveness is the initial audience response, followed by a growing awareness of Xu’s thoughtful representation of some of the big issues of our times. The Duchampian wit and irreverent Pop sensibility is underpinned by the artist’s critical gaze on both Chinese society and the international art world.

Described by curator Philip Tinari as the key figure of the Shanghai art scene, Xu is a significant influence for Chinese artists born since 1980. The UCCA show includes more than 50 installation pieces, 10 videos, 40 painting and collage works and several performances (including slipper clad grandmothers who followed audiences around the gallery) and spans his oeuvre from the late 1990s.

Xu Zhen, Installation View, Photo by Eric Powell | Image Courtesy of UCCA

One enters the museum to encounter a monumental sculpture in which the heads of Ancient Greek gods and goddesses have been replaced by inverted Buddhist statuary. In Xu’s hands this literal overlapping of East and West, the continuing concern of so many Chinese artists, becomes parodic. A multi-coloured Goddess Guanyin presides over the ‘ShanghArt Supermarket’, a replica of a convenience store, staffed by cashiers at the cash registers, in which the contents of every package have been removed – and are for sale. This is the literal embodiment of consumerist emptiness. In an interview with Ocula the artist said ‘We consider that exhibitions nowadays are a product, and that art is being sold…’ You wander through rooms containing museum vitrines showing the cross-cultural connections of bodily gestures, or witty replica oil paintings complete with carefully rendered camera flash. Courbet’s notorious La Source with camera flash obscuring – of course – the very source of the painting’s controversy cleverly skewers the phenomenon of art tourism whereby people experience artworks only through the lens of their camera. Images like these may be found in many vernacular Chinese photographs of the 1990s as citizens took up the opportunity for travel outside China.

Smaller versions of Play, the architectural construction of black leather, ropes and bondage items now in the collection of Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery, reveals another aspect of the work of Xu and his art corporation. These works, and the upside down be-feathered tribal people hanging, bound, in contorted poses from the ceiling above us, are deeply sinister and to some extent defy interpretation. Their sheer physical presence is enormously powerful. They suggest the ways in which religion and tribal identities are merely another brand in today’s world.

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Six Exhibitions in Beijing

The first of my articles based on my most recent trip to China has been published today on Daily Serving. I found, amidst some awful and pedestrian shows in the 798 art district -which is really suffering from a push to make the entire space over to the sale of products and "design" (mostly tacky in the extreme) - some wonderful exhibitions. Indeed on my first visit an exhibition by an artist I have met several times, Ma Yanling, was an unexpected delight. Later, Xu Zhen at Ullens and Xiao Yu at Pace were thrilling in the way that one always hopes for, but is so rare an experience. At Redgate and at several of the Caochangdi galleries, interesting shows abounded. Here are some of my impressions:

Beijing is exhausting, exhilarating, infuriating, appalling, and wonderful, all at the same time. The energy of the city, undefeated by its weight of imperial and revolutionary history, or by the dead hand of contemporary politics and power struggles, is encapsulated in the lively diversity of its art scene. In the late 1990s and the early years of this century, Chinese artists were rock stars, earning big money fast. Chinese and international galleries opened large and palatial premises. Every property developer wanted a museum, and artists posed for fashion shoots in Chinese Vogue. Today things are not quite so upbeat, but there is still a palpable sense of optimism about China itself, and about the role of art and artists in this fast-mutating society.

Xie Qi. So Green (Mao on 50 Yuan), 2012; oil on canvas; 200 x 180 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Pekin Fine Arts.

Recent exhibitions in Beijing reveal how Chinese contemporary art combines a mastery of technique (learned in the rigid academic tradition of the powerhouse art academies such as the Central Academy of Fine Arts) with a willingness to innovate. Artists who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s discovered western Modernism and post-Modernism all at once, resulting in an art devoid of the overwhelming layer of theory that infects much contemporary art in the West.

Li Shurui, Beijing, 2014. Photo: Luise Guest.

Li Shurui at White Space Beijing continues to paint in her characteristically psychedelic manner, using an airbrush to create monumental three-dimensional canvases. The blurred, softened edges of her forms make us question our perception of reality. Li was startled when someone told her she was making “Optical” art like Bridget Riley, as she had never heard of this style. Her training at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts provided her with almost no awareness of  Modernist or contemporary art, which paradoxically allowed her the freedom to invent a visual language entirely her own. She is interested in the color spectrum and in creating paintings that provide an experience so physically immersive that it becomes emotive as well as perceptual. The shimmering uncertainties of her large paintings pierce the illusion that we inhabit a rational world. The sculptural pieces in this show blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. They lie on the ground like shards broken from an extraterrestrial machine, their matte-gray knife-blade surfaces punctuated by sky-blue edges.

Li Shurui. Lights No.95, 2009; acrylic on canvas, 210 x 210 cm. Courtesy of Li Shurui.

Painting continues to be a vital force in Chinese contemporary art. It was the Political Pop and Cynical Realist painters, after all, who burst onto the international art scene like flamethrowers in the mid-1990s and continue to be influential today.

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