Winds of change propel China's new art starsMurray Whyte
Visual Arts Critic Published On Sat Dec 12 2009EmailPrintRepublishAdd to Favourites Report an errorShare Share4 ArticlePhotos (3)
Fang Lijun's bland, yawning figures make it clear how he feels about Mao Zedong's edict that all art should glorify the state.

PICHI CHUANG
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BEIJING–Somewhere between the jam-packed news conference and the moment, hours later, when the gallons upon gallons of bulk-quality wine ran dry, China's million-dollar men clustered together for a snapshot: Liu Xiaodong, Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun and the man of this particular hour, Zhang Xiaogang, whose work filled the 22,000 square feet of gallery space surrounding them.

A decade ago, this moment would have seemed the stuff of deluded fantasy: four Chinese artists, each of them routinely selling work for millions of dollars, arms linked in a massive former government munitions factory given over to a storied New York gallery, PaceWildenstein, to promote Zhang's art to the world.

"When I was younger, there was no such thing as an art gallery," said Liu, 43. "We had no concept of a market, or an economy of art. We just wanted to make better work."

How times have changed. Liu, thoughtful and soft-spoken, a quiet presence behind black-framed glasses, sold one of his large-scale paintings last year at auction for $7.95 million (all figures U.S.). His previous best, in 2006, set a record at the time at $3.2 million; Yue claimed the title in 2007, selling paintings for $4.2 million, then $5.9 million, before passing it on to Zhang last year, when he registered $6.1 million. They've all since been surpassed by Zeng Fanzhi, whose "Mask Series, 1996" sold in 2008 for $9.7 million.

Before the economic crisis put a dent in the Chinese art market last year, figures like these had become commonplace. But before you start to think the boom has deflated, think again. Zhang's opening, which inaugurated Pace's Beijing gallery, was in September. Through a translator, Pace chairman Arnie Glimcher told the assembled media – TV crews, a throng of paparazzi-style photographers, newspapers, magazines – that "the most interesting art in the world today is in China."

Pace and a host of other Western galleries have staked a significant chunk of their future on the hope Glimcher's statement is fact, not speculation. The Chinese military used to make missiles in Pace's Beijing gallery, where vaulted concrete ceilings arc as high as three storeys. It's now the biggest commercial gallery in the world, and one of hundreds of galleries in Beijing's sprawling 798 Art District, an old military factory complex that the government remade into artist studios in 2002.

There's no arguing that the dollars spent on Chinese art have been significant. (Glimcher told that me prices didn't matter. "The equation of art and money is vulgar," he said. "If we didn't love the work, we wouldn't be here." Later on in the conversation, Glimcher said, with obvious pride, that Zhang's show had sold out in four hours. Some slump.)

More significant, perhaps, is the content. Fang and Yue helped found Cynical Realism, an art movement in the late '80s that served as an ironic, chiding response to Mao Zedong's edict that all art should glorify the state. Yue's iconic image, a self-portrait locked in a frenzied forced grin, is one of the most ubiquitous icons in Chinese art today; that, along with Fang's much-repeated bland, yawning figure, made it clear how they felt about such decrees.

At his Pace opening, Zhang's new work ventured for the first time into installation and sculpture. Both there and in his painting, it's more personal, but no less marked by authoritarian rule. His project was to paint, from memory, some of the scores of family photos destroyed by the authorities during the Cultural Revolution in the late '60s and early '70s (family pictures were illegal; Zhang's parents were among the many intellectuals taken away for "re-education").

The results – oblique, blank-faced portraits where faces rarely differ – speak of an assault on personal memory and history as much, or more, than the government's goal: To wipe China's slate clean and leave its millennia-old culture behind.

It's not difficult to see why, not so long ago, these artists had a hard time renting studio space, let alone selling work. What's changed? It depends on your point of view.

Some say it's the prevailing ethics of a nation in rapid transformation, where big dollars trump all – even party doctrine. Others will tell you that a marginal realm like art, for all its splashy showings at international auctions, has its purpose: As a harmless sprinkling of good public relations for an economic powerhouse determined to take the next step, from the world's premiere widget-maker to cultural superpower.

The target market is obvious. Xiaoze Xie, who teaches painting at Stanford in San Francisco, left China in 1992. On a recent visit to Toronto, he told me that much of the big-name work found in China these days was pointed directly at Western collectors plied with simplified narratives of suffering during the Cultural Revolution.

"A lot of these works only satisfy a sense of exoticism," Xiaoze said. "They're not relevant – to China's realities, to the Chinese audience."

It was a puzzling idea to digest. The narrow Western perspective has reduced China's story to something riveting in its simplicity: A country of billions on cultural lockdown, brutally enforced, coming out of a decades-long slumber.

Xiaoze said it wasn't like that at all. Rather, "the '80s were very progressive. Artists were experimenting with all sorts of subjects and styles."

In February 1989, a huge exhibition of Chinese avant-garde art opened at China's National Gallery. Among the artists showing there were Fang, Zhang and Liu.

Then, on June 4 of that year, the tanks rolled into the throngs of student protesters in Tiananmen Square. A still-undetermined number were killed.

"There was a U-turn – a crackdown," Xiaoze said. "There had been such optimism and then, all of a sudden – no hope."

Xiaoze was among the many who left shortly after as the clamps on expression tightened. China projects today an image today of a booming nation surging forward into a bright future of its own creation, but some things haven't changed.

Parodies of Mao are common – easily readable and even easier to sell. I was put off by a painter I otherwise loved, Li Dachun, when I saw him at an opening take the bait for a cheap laugh: A naked breast, outfitted with Mao's distinctive bowl cut.

Some artists use Mao's iconic status and take it somewhere new. Feng Mengbo, with his "Made to Order" project, renders Mao's familiar portrait in 3-D, using a computer. The eventual plan, he says, is to launch a website where anyone can order portraits of the Great Leader, custom-made to their liking.

"I've already gotten a few orders –`Can you make a golden Mao for me?' `Can you put a tree here?'" says Feng, leafing through a catalogue of his various versions: Mao bronzed, Mao chromed, Mao in a mountainscape, triple-Mao.

"It's just like Apple, or Dell – just order it online, exactly how you want it, and I'll make it. That's what China does."

It's a tightly wrapped package of China's cultural history and contemporary reality, but work as clever as Feng's in this realm remains the rare exception. Artists like Wang Guangyi still ply their familiar forms, so long since subsumed by the mainstream that it's hard to imagine they were ever radical.

Wang's fusion of Communist-style constructivist drawings overlaid with popular brands like Coke and Porsche may have been edgy critiques of China's nascent economic openness in the '80s, but now, it's tired tourist tchotchke – and is sold that way in the endless gift shops that fill 798's tight alleyways. In fact, if you were to count, shops like that outnumber galleries here – a curious fate for a state-mandated cultural zone that opened in 2002.

The district is in a state of constant renovation, the profit-motive ethic of New China transposed to culture. You can buy anything here, from stuffed animals in Red Army military fatigues to a surprisingly broad range of merchandise associated with China's big-name art stars – Yue's iconic hysterical grin is festooned on everything from coffee mugs to picture frames – to an indescribably broad array of Mao merchandise: watches and statuettes, notebooks, pencils and, in one notable surprise, condoms.

"It's not like the Western system, which developed logically," says Leng Lin, whose gallery, the Beijing Commune, is one of the few real art anchors in 798. "In China, everything happens at once. It's like the cities themselves – skyscrapers next to rubble. You can see everything at the same time."

I met Leng one day at his gallery, a huge brick barnlike structure. Leng, who is 43 but has the eager enthusiasm of someone much younger, plays the role of art dealer with wide-eyed wonder. He studied with Zhang and Liu at Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts, but as an historian. With art museums under strict government control and no private art system to speak of, he went to Berlin in 2001. When he came back in 2004, "everything had changed," he says.

What hadn't, though, was a nation still struggling to find its voice. Leng chafes at the simplified Western view of a China hobbled by the weight of its internal cataclysms.

"Everything is viewed from this tragic point of view," he says. "That's how we are defined by the outside, but we have to define ourselves. We want to rethink our history – the positive, the negative, and how we make use of these things and how we fit in the world. We don't want to be as before – we want to be different."

Self-definition is no easy task for 1.3 billion, and the art world is no exception. In my time there, my experiences ranged from the extraordinary to the maddeningly indulgent or painfully ordinary.

At a private museum called Today Art in the heart of one of Beijing's many freshly built "creative zones" – which, true to contemporary Chinese priorities, includes a massive condominium complex – I found Sui Jianguo's "Motion/Tension."

Out front, a cluster of stainless-steel statue versions of Yue's self-portrait stood guard. Inside, Sui, best known for his huge toy dinosaur figurines – a transparent reference to China's manufacturing supremacy and a not-so-obvious nod to its social lag – had taken over the museum's huge central chamber. In it, two massive, rough, rusted spheres teetered slowly past each other, occasionally colliding with a dull clank.

A network of oxidized pipe, held by ramshackle scaffolding, lined the room, eventually burrowing through the outside wall. As the spheres lurched close enough to touch, a deafening clatter filled the space: A fist-sized ball bearing in perpetual motion was working its way through the pipe, first inside, then out.

As I heard it roll outside and my brain stopped rattling, all I could do was nervously await its return. Curator Wu Hung calls the piece "a metaphor of contemporary China in the process of rapid development and transformation," which makes sense. But it doesn't have to. Sui gives you the rarest of sensations in art, and the most valuable – the chance to feel, not think, and the indulgence to leave it at that.

And painfully ordinary? Try the hopeless literalism of Chen Wenling. In JoyArt, yet another cavernous 798 gallery, Chen had cast a huge sculpture of a cartoonish bull, propelled, by a blast of gas out its ass, into the gallery's far wall. There, it pinned a bloated figure with devil's horns – Bernard Madoff, apparently done in by his Ponzi-scheme villainy.

What a waste. But capitalizing on a market moment is bound to happen, as are the hackneyed efforts it embodies; trying to see past that moment to something resembling unity – Leng's self-definition problem – is harder. But worthwhile.

"We're expecting this kind of revolution in art itself and it really has to do with the younger generation," Guo Xiaoyan tells me. Guo is the chief curator of the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing, yet another spectacularly repurposed industrial building in 798. It's funded by the Ullens family, wealthy Belgian industrialists with a passion for Chinese contemporary art. The UCCA is a non-profit museum: Not government funded, and not subject to art market whims.

It's a "third way," she says. "We can still unite a lot of artists, who want to be more independent, and really have a pure approach to their work."

Guo used to work for a government art museum in Guangdong. "I always had to consider what the government wanted," she says. "There were a lot of barriers there – a real lack of freedom."

That's not the case here. In the gallery's biggest space, hundreds of flags, cast in ominous charcoal grey, flap in an artificial gale. On each, Yan Pei-Ming has silkscreened a portrait of a small child. Orphaned, abandoned, up for adoption – it's impossible to say. But it's an arresting moment, a helpless sense of the vulnerable caught in an overwhelming torrent of change.

And for all the focus on high-profile art about China's past, the future is really the theme of the moment: Work grappling with the breakneck rush to modernization that seems to swallow everything in its path – rapid urbanization, razed neighbourhoods, history reduced to rubble – is pervasive; so much so that, after a time, it starts to feel a little one-note.

Not that the work itself does. Yang Yongliang's tightly wound photo-composites take images of rampant development and fuse them into chaotic nightmarescapes – black-and-white renderings of a hyperdeveloped dystopia.

And there's no shortage of critical work, either. Qiu Zhijie's "Long Nanjing River Bridge" takes the span, built in 1968 at the height of the Cultural Revolution, and casts it in a different light. Held up as a triumph of the regime, in the churn of Chinese modernity it has become a popular site to commit suicide.

Wen Fang's "Golden Brick" series transposes portraits of migrant workers onto concrete bricks. Installed, he arranges them in sand like the ancient Terracotta Warriors.

The parallel is simple, poignant and stirring: The Terracotta Warriors were a form of consecration, everlasting life for faithful service. Migrant workers, meanwhile, are the fodder of China's urban boom – "the modern city's toiling soldiers," Wen writes, abandoning home and family for the dangerous work of building China's skyscraping ambitions. Many don't survive. Wen's work is both tribute, and grave marker.

You could call it political, or social critique. Either way, it filters through censors, as everything must. But there are always limits. In Shanghai, Martin Kemble runs a gallery called Art Labor. "I've been in China long enough to know the pointlessness of trying to get away with things," he says with a shrug. "You don't go anywhere if you go against the flow here. It's a losing battle."

Kemble, who came to China from Vancouver in the '90s, focuses on younger Chinese artists whose work is less engaged with broader political reality than their day-to-day life. Ying Yefu, a twentysomething artist whose precise ink paintings have caused a stir recently, offers oblique social content: Young women entangled in their long braids or, in one stirring image, a figure grappling with an infant still in the womb.

For Ying, a trenchant reality among his peers is the startling rise in illegal abortions – a street-level truth that goes typically unaddressed by authorities. Ying, whose work has the echo of ancient Chinese painting techniques and forms, drags a traditional esthetic convention headlong into China's uncertain future. That flux, tension and collision have always been fertile creative terrain. In China, the groundswell has barely begun.