To the extent that the Stars exhibition works embodied the crucial

THREE DECADES / THEMES historical change circa 1979, it is to be expected that Wang Keping’s works
are commonly subsumed under the storyline of the politics of art. Indeed,
some obvious conceptual strains are discernible in Wang’s sculpture: the bold

EUGENE WANG impulse to question the ideological orthodoxy of Maoist years, the burgeoning
aspiration for freedom of expression, the rumination about the masses’ blind
passion and deplorable lack of critical thinking. However, reducing these works
to a few cut-and-dry concepts shortchanges their significance. While Wang’s
works facilitate such expositions, they go beyond them. These works are
remarkable because of their capacity to articulate the historical circumstances
of the time through the very enabling medium of sculpture that both mocked
Contemporary Chinese art has by now accrued a hefty history spanning three and transcended the prison-house of language at the time. Three years into
decades or so. While its range and heterogeneity strain and defy any single the post-Mao era, the aspiration for change was mounting; but the habits of
storyline, the sense of it finally acquiring a history calls for some kind of language died hard. This is where artistic intuition and perceptual acuteness
reckoning and account in the form of a storyline. Shifting contexts could thus made a difference.
be established; the bewildering welter of facts and figures could be streamlined Wang had not received academic training in sculpture. He thus had the
for easy access. Indeed, for many, totalising master narratives are increasingly advantage of being unshackled from both the French and Soviet–Russian
intellectually suspect nowadays. However, bereft of them, one is likely to modes that dominated the art school sculptural training in China at the
flounder in facile ahistorical promiscuity. Insufficient reckoning with shifting time. It is just as remarkable that he was yet to know modernist sculptural
historical groundings often hampers our accounts of contemporary Chinese art. modes defined by Henri Matisse and Constantin Brancusi. Instead, it was
For this reason, in what follows, I offer a storyline of contemporary Chinese art. his experience of working in theatre that had a more telling impact on his
While it obviously leaves out bases uncovered, the aim is to trace out the larger sculptural works in unexpected ways. Modes of theatricality amounted to a
undertows that have driven trends and impulses. conceptual and formal fulcrum for Wang Keping’s eloquent sculpture. Exposure
For what it’s worth, the history in question is here conveniently divided to the Theatre of the Absurd supplied him with the conceptual apparatus.
into three decades. A period-specific preoccupation animated the art of each The sense of ‘absurd’ translated into a visual language of ‘strange’. But these
of the three decades. The 1980s was about language; the 1990s, the medium; conceptual charges functioned more as cues. It was his sensitivity to the
and the 2000s, space. contingency of the material medium of wood—its conical knot, flowing grain,
growth rings—that made his sculptures eloquent.
1980s: All About Language Wang Keping’s Cadre 1979–80 (cat. XX) provides a good example of how
1980s was the decade now remembered for its onslaught of experimental his intuitions work out in the sculptural medium. He started with the impulse
waves and avant-gardist art movements. The impetus behind was the search for to fashion a satirical sculptural depiction of a bureaucrat, inept in administrative
alternative modes of thought to unshackle from Maoist-era orthodoxy. To the competence but given to throwing his weight around. A blockhead with eye
extent that modes of thought are couched in discursive habits, the revamping sockets but without eyeballs became a fitting formal correlate. In the process
of visual languages amounted to ways of breaking out of the old ‘prison-house of carving the wood, however, new shades of suggestiveness presented
of language’.1 So the relentless experimentation in visual languages in the themselves. The truncated piece suggested ‘heedlessness’. This prompted Wang
1980s was ultimately about the renewal of conceptual language, i.e., modes of to seize this condition to articulate the ‘head-without-brain’ idea.3
thought. Ultimately, Wang Keping sought to transcend the impoverished language
It all started on 27 September 1979. On that day, twenty-nine artists of the time. An imaginary dialogue he composed lays out his artistic conviction
exhibited their works in a public park east of the National Art Museum of about the power of visual language:
China in Beijing. The event has since been remembered as the Stars exhibition. A: What is this sculpture about? I can’t see what it resembles?
The phrase is misleading in English. The artists featured in the exhibition were B: It is itself. Its value does not depend on resembling something else.
1 Frederic Jameson, The
not stellar in their social standing – the word star conveys more of the sense A: I can’t understand this painting. I only feel the dance of several colours.
prison-house of language, of a twinkling of distant constellations rather than stellar personae. The artists B: You have got it. 3 Meishu, no. 4, 1982.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton were in fact amateurs. Though the event has been commonly referred to as A: Some of these paintings have no titles. I would like their creators to Cited in Sun Zhenhua,
University Press, 1972. Diaosu kongjian, 2002,
a painting exhibition, its outstanding signature pieces were in fact wooden say something about them. p. 7.
2 Sun Zhenhua, Diaosu sculptures by Wang Keping, a professional actor who had dappled in sculpture B: ‘Untitled’ means that they don’t have a title. Let others grasp the work.
kongjian, Changsha: 4 Wang Keping,
Hunan meishu
for less than a year. Works by Wang that drew attention included: Silence, Respect other’s imagination … Whatever is said has been said; he does ‘Wen da’, Meishu, no. 1,
chubanshe, 2002, p. 6. Breathing, and Long Live.2 not dwell on what need not be said.4 1981, p. 41.

38 GO F!GURE THREE DECADES / THEMES 39

 Wang both embodied the impulses of the time and was ahead of the
game. The repudiation and overhauling of social realism through abstraction
and formalism were under way. Wang’s sculpture presaged that impulse.
Meanwhile, his works also anticipated the artistic investment in the natural
texture of materials, the contingency of form, which were yet to become
established artistic conventions in contemporary China. Even the earthiness
of the wooden mask form inadvertently looked forward to the symbolic
rediscovery of the ‘primitive’ rural topographies in the literary and art
movements of the 1980s.
Wang’s sculptures made the form of human head a contested site. The
conceptual charge of the Theatre of the Absurd repudiates the social-realist
theatricality that highlights heroic grandstanding current in the previous
decade. Not coincidentally, a year later, another head portrait carried the day.
Father 1980 produced by the Sichuan artist Luo Zhongli (b. 1948)
captured the public imagination. The painting’s effect derives from its striking
contrast between the head portrait format and its colossal size. Its photorealist
depiction of the weather-beaten face of an old peasant against the background
of a parched land is suffused with pathos – a marked departure from the
heroicising images of social-realist icons of generic workers and peasants
ubiquitous in the Maoist era. Moreover, it put a non-descript peasant head in
the colossal head portrait format previously reserved for Mao. Luo’s work was
a milestone signaling the emergence of Ruralism in the early 1980s. Inspired
in part by travelling exhibitions of works by Andrew Wyeth and nineteenth-
century French paintings of the countryside, the early 1980s Chinese paintings
of the rural subjects, produced mostly by the Sichuan art school students,
re-trained the public eye on the pathos of rural earthiness. Rustic subjects
– exemplified by Luo’s Father – map out the tension of contradictory traits
and impulses. They embody at once unadorned authenticity, simplicity, and
backward numbness. Authenticity was badly needed after decades of lies and
deception; simplicity was consoling after years of disorienting political strife;
and the backward numbness spoke to the acute awareness of the mindlessness
of the decades long succumbing to political machinations. These qualities
were irreconcilable in discursive formulation; the paintings sutured them into a
whole. The critical discourse at the time struggled to come to terms with these
works. Apparently the artists used their visual language to formulate well the
entangled emotions many felt at the time.5
Ruralism was soon to be outgrown. While its emotionalism answered
the psychological needs for post-trauma healing in the early 1980s, it became
strained for lack of forward-looking directions. Moreover, more critically
minded artists began to question the excess of the self-indulgent emotional 5 Eugene Y Wang,
rhetoric Ruralism had unleashed. Faced with the ideological bankruptcy and ‘Anxiety of portraiture:
Ancestral image-making
cultural wreckage in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, the artists of the in post-Mao China.’ In
1980s endeavored to bring about a cultural revival powered by the new Politics, ideology, and
language of Reason as opposed to emotionalism. To break out of the prison- the literary discourse in
modern China, edited
house of old language and thinking, they eagerly sought inspiration in Western by K Liu & X Tang with
philosophy and theories: Immanuel Kant, GWF Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Foreword by
F Jameson, Durham:
and Sigmund Freud. From Kant and Hegel they extrapolated an aesthetics of Duke University Press,
Reason, as exemplified by Wang Guangyi and the Northern Group’s paintings of 1993, pp. 243–72.

Luo Zhongli
Father 1980
oil on canvas
227.0 x 154.0cm
National Art Museum
of China, Beijing

40 GO F!GURE THREE DECADES / THEMES 41

 pristine mannequin-like figures modelled upon abstract sculptural forms against
uncluttered background. The overall mood is a cold dispassionate quietude
with metaphysical overtones of spiritual aspiration, divested of emotional
verbiage. These figures recall the ‘frozen calm’ of classical sculptural forms that
Hegel saw as the perfect union of divine content and expressive form.6
The artists’ overweening reliance on philosophic discourse, however,
led to an increasing divorce of art and reality. Artists such as Wang Guangyi
began to worry about the consequences of the high-mindedness of the
‘philosophical zeal’ that had turned increasingly hollow in substance and lost
its grip on the real world. Moreover, there was a growing realisation of the
impact of the rhetorical fervor of the Cultural Revolution that got China
into trouble in the first place. Wang set out to ‘cleanse the humanist zeal’.7
Dispassionate iconographic citation remains his strategy. In his early works, he
referenced canonical traditional Western art as a point of entry for his visual
deconstruction. In 1988, Wang shifted his focus of ‘analysis’ or deconstructive
parsing to the iconic images of Mao over which he applied a red grid, Mao
Zedong, red grid no. 2 (cat. XX). His Mao paintings were intended primarily
as an attempt at cognitive re-orientation rather than political posturing or
attitudinising – in fact, he wanted his stance to be ‘neutral’.8 They were meant
to forestall and frustrate the habitual expectation of discursive meaning and
aesthetic judgment commonly brought to bear on them.9
Wang’s Mao paintings spell out a grammar of motifs that was to define
a distinct Pop streak with a Chinese twist. The ostensible irony derives
from endless serial reversals and displacements. If Mao stands for a past of
revolutionary zeal and ardour and the grid signals present-day revisionist rigour
and reason, the rendition of Mao, the icon of fervour, in cool monochrome gray
and the grid, dispassionate reason writ large, in fact, reverse their moods and 6 Frederic Lilge,
roles. The opposition can be construed as one between the fading memory of ‘Philosophy and
a passionate revolutionary past and the surging reality of a consumerist present: education in Hegel’,
British journal of
each critiques the other; none gains the high ground. In another sense, the educational studies, 22,
redness of the grid associated with the present-day life driven by consumerism no. 2, June 1974,
pp. 147-65.
makes a mockery of the grid, which in principle is expected to dispassionately
anchor critical reason. 7 Wang Guangyi ‘Wo
Even though Wang Guangyi is now commonly presented as the leader canyu le ’85 meishu
yundong de jincheng’ in
of the cool-headed and even-keeled Northern Group, his intellectual roots and Huatan ouxiang, Deng
artistic practice largely came from south and southeast coastal China in the 1980s. Pingxiang ed., et al.,
Zhuhai, Guangdong:
His reaction against the ‘philosophical zeal’, i.e., the blind submission to some Zhuhai chubanshe, 1999,
exaggerated idea, was shared by his schoolmates at the Zhejiang Art Academy, a p. 111.
bastion of boundary-pushing art practices in the 1980s. Like Wang Guangyi, the
8 Lü Peng ‘Tushi
Hangzhou-based artists, who formed the Pond Society, were just as repulsed by xiuzheng yu wenhua
the excessive philosophizing zeal and metaphysical pretensions in art practice. pipan’, in Dangdai yishu
chaoliu zhong de Wang
Geng Jianyi’s works were exemplary in this regard. His Haircut, no. 3: Guangyi Chengdu:
Another bald head of the summer of 1985 1985 makes the prosaic everyday life Sichuan meishu
chubanshe, 1992, p. 36.
scene of haircut its central subject, with the largely cold palette registering an
indifference that precludes any discursive hot air. Second state 1987 (cat. XX), 9 Huang Zhuan, Yishu
consisting of four large canvases (170.0 x 132.0cm), shows mask-like faces in shijie zhong de sixiang yu
xingdong, Beijing: Beijing
varying states of convulsive laughs. The artist intention was modest in scope. University Press, 2009,
He sought to engross the beholder in a total and immediate response to his p. 133.

Wang Guangyi
Death of Marat 1986
oil on canvas
150.0 x 200.0cm
Sigg Collection

42 GO F!GURE THREE DECADES / THEMES 43

Xiao Lu Fang Lijun
Dialogue, photograph 980810 1998
of an installation 1989 oil on canvas
Courtesy of the artist 250.0 x 360.0cm
The Kenneth and Yasuko
Myer Collection of
Contemporary Asian Art
44 GO F!GURE Queensland Art Gallery THREE DECADES / THEMES 45
 painting, un-mediated by external noises and extra-pictorial overlays. The in- The resurrection of Maoist-era images, as demonstrated by Wang
your-face laughs were therefore meant as a visual device to impact the viewer Qingsong’s Past, present, future 2001 (cat. XX), was a tongue-in-cheek move. In
viscerally and directly without any intervening gaps or discursive barriers.10 a vein of mock-seriousness, it at once re-enacts and deflates the revolutionary
The visual effect of Geng’s paintings, however, inadvertently transcended idealism of the Maoist era. The re-enactment triggers nostalgia for cultural values,
their initial intent. Once transferred from photographs to gray-tone canvas, such as prelapsarian simplicity, purity, and fervor – real or imagined – that the
the painted laughs become muted hysteria and hollowed euphoria. The largely memory of the revolutionary years evokes, which stands in sharp contrast with
monochrome palette, the pitch-black background, the serial repetition, and present-day crass consumerist materialism. Meanwhile, the cheesy iconographic
the cropping that leaves out ears (thereby creating the mask effect) further recapitulation of Maoist-era motifs suggests historically ironic parallels between
enhance the eerily surreal overtone. The faces captured the mid-1980s mood: the revolutionary past and consumerist present. The rural sensibility that remained
the existential anxiety, listlessness and ennui, induced in part by immersion in the hallmark of the Maoist-era aesthetic palate is put on the spot: its rustic
Sartre, Becket, and Freud, even though, ironically, the work was intended to rein simplicity notwithstanding, it reeks of uncouth vulgarity and earthy banality. It
in excessive theorizing. is precisely these qualities that describe well the gaudiness and bad taste of the
Geng Jianyi’s works forebode what was to come. The bald heads in his upstarts and nouveau-riches of the 1990s. So the revival of revolutionary icons
Haircut, no. 3 1985 heralded paintings of shaven heads Fang Lijun produced amounts to a double movement: it both opposes the consumerist present with
around 1990, and continued throughout the decade.11 The two artists’ bald the memory of revolutionary past and equates them. The opposition highlights
heads, however, point to both continuity and discontinuity in their pointed the bankruptcy of the utopian idealism of the revolutionary past in the face of a
suggestiveness. Geng gave form to the existential ennui and meaninglessness, rampant materialist present; the equation mocks both the past fervent utopianism
which Fang continued. Geng’s shaven heads, however, embodied more of and its present-day betrayal – both appear equally dubious.
the mid-1980s anxiety to unload the heroicising grandiloquence by shifting Globalisation precipitated Chinese artists’ turn to indigenous Chinese
attention to the meaninglessness of routine life. Fang’s bald heads were resources. If nation building and nationalisation were primary concerns of
consonant with the time around 1990. 1950s and 1960s, and modernisation and belated enlightenment discourse
Two events in Beijing in 1989 ended the eventful 1980s. An artist dominated the 1980s, globalisation was the new reality of the 1990s in China.
unexpectedly shooting at her own installation in the 1989 China/Avant-Garde The homogenising force of transnational capitalism made its impact felt
exhibition in the National Art Museum of China brought the high-octane show everywhere, including China. The inclusion of contemporary Chinese artworks
to an abrupt closure. The government crackdown on the student movement in international biennales and exhibitions and private and institutional Euro-
in Tiananmen Square crushed the political aspirations of the young generation. American interest in collecting it made Chinese artists more conscious about
The twin events dealt a double blow to the artists of the 1980s, bringing their their own standing vis-à-vis the international audience – real or imagined.
high-minded idealism crushingly to the ground and deflating any illusion that Globalisation prompted them to be more sensitive to their own indigenous
their aspiration was part of a collective dream of modernisation. Fang Lijun’s cultural tradition on which they drew: both to stake out the turf of cultural
paintings speak well to the changed climate and mood. The dumbing-down identity and to have a competitive edge in the international market of ideas and
roguish images register the mounting sense of spiritual emptiness and lack of ‘brands’. It is only to be expected that the recapitulation of pre-1949 Chinese
direction. The oversized rogue image itself suggests the growing irrelevance images and motifs became a strategic way of staking out ‘Chineseness’.
of the notion current in the 1980s, i.e., the artists’ self-appointed avant-gardist But it was Chineseness with a 1990s inflection and flavor. With the
stance in leading the masses out of darkness. The political reality deflated that bankruptcy of the avant-gardist high-mindedness of the 1980s, the generation
grand illusion and heroic self-regard. of artists who debuted in the 1990s vaunted their distinctive sensibility and
preoccupations. No longer occupying the Olympian height, they ceased to
1990s: All About Medium regard themselves as avant-garde with the enlightenment mission to lead the
Chinese society veered in a direction that the ominous year of 1989 did not charge of modernisation. Public events and grand themes – long fraught with
presage. Liberal economics overrode and masked repressive politics. Starting in contrived narratives – were no longer the primary focus of their visual interest.
1992, the mounting political tension of the previous decade now gave way to Instead, they were drawn to the brute texture of individuals’ lived experience,
10 Liu Chun, Yishu, a dramatic economic turn to market economy. The new reality of the surging especially those struggling on the fringes of society. Pictures of social outcasts
rensheng, xinchao:
yu 41 wei Zhongguo
consumerist mass culture and rampant materialism made a mockery of the became mirror images of artists’ own unmoored existence
dangdai yishujia duihua, recent memory of the political high-mindedness of the modernist strivings of This shift to an individual private experiential domain led to a radical
Kuming: Yunnan renmin the 1980s. Feeling betrayed and disillusioned, artists were no longer anxious to reorientation of medium. Many artists found that the mediums in which
chubanshe, 2003, p. 199.
play catch-up along the projected modernisation highway following Western they had been trained were wanting in their capacity to capture heightened
11 Fang Lijun, ‘Guangtou modernist formal models. Instead, they began to turn to China’s own past to individual sensorial experiences in a rapidly changing time. Many painters
Fang Lijun 20 shiji
nianpu’, Shanxi wenxue,
look for alternative resources and directions. Visual motifs from the Maoist abandoned their familiar crafts in easel painting and opted for performance art,
2010, pp. 91–96. years and the pre-1949 past were tapped for different ends. photography, and video, with body as the new focus.

46 GO F!GURE THREE DECADES / THEMES 47

 Song Dong’s works exemplify the trend. Trained as an oil painter, he
switched to performance and video art in the 1990s in an attempt to bridge the
yawning gap that intervened between the easel painting medium and his private
experiential world. Diary written in water 1995 records the process in which
he earnestly wrote his private journal with a water-drenched brush. Water as
a new medium of his bodily engagement had the transformative fluidity that
encompasses the liquid, gaseous and solid states. His direct engagement with
water was a most private endeavor. He was able to write out in and with water
the flashbacks of liquid memories: his childhood observance of water flow
on the table, the sense of wonder about the malleability of shapes the water
assumes contingent on the physical dimensions of containers, the fright caused
by his physical education teacher who pushed him into a swimming pool when
he had yet to know how to swim, and the childhood memory of practising
calligraphy with water to avoid the cost of ink. The unmediated and direct
interaction between his body and the water-as-medium ensured that no one
else was ever able to read his ephemeral diary. Water and his own body were
also the medium for his Breathing part 1 and part 2 1996 (cat. XX). Prostrating
himself on Tiananmen Square in one cold night, he kept blowing his breath to
the same spot on the ground for forty minutes so that the vapor eventually
congealed into a solid icy pool. The bodily act brought together two separate
spaces: the public and his private realm. Or rather, the primacy of his private
act of breathing relegates Tiananmen, a looming symbol of the political public
arena, to be no more than a hollow backdrop or a senseless hulking presence
beyond the ken of personal self-absorption and privacy.
The growing interest in the texture of personal experiences gave
women artists an edge. The 1990s saw the emergence of a number of young
female artists who made an indelible imprint on the contemporary Chinese
art scene. Their works are noted for the primacy of cryptic personal privacy,
the intuitive and sensorial grasp of the phenomenal world, the predilection
for natural, biological, and existential processes instead of political, historical
and philosophical preoccupations, an indifference to the world of men, a
preference for traditional handicrafts, and the affinity for unassuming mediums
akin to everyday and household experience.12 In many ways, Lin Tianmiao’s (b.
1961) Braiding 1999 exemplifies these characteristics. A twelve-foot-tall stretch
of cloth bearing the imprint of the artist’s photographic self portrait with
shaven head hangs monumentally from a metal contraption in space. Numerous
holes across the cloth allow for the woven pieces of thread issuing from the
back of the cloth. They merge and converge into thick braids, winding across
the floor, leading to a video monitor that displays the artist in the process of
weaving thread through the cloth. It is the same piece of cloth that hangs in
the air with her photographic self portrait.
Both Song Dong and Lin Tianmiao’s works render obsolete the notion
of art premised on a specific medium. In Song’s case, the artist’s own body and
the transformative states of water were the mediums for his art practice. In
Lin’s case, photography, video, cloth, and braided thread constitute the material
12 Jia Fangzhou, Shiji support. The breakdown of the medium specificity did not come from the
nüxing yishuzhan, Beijing:
Huaren yishu chubanshe,
internal evolution of the art world enacting a self-fulfilling prophecy; rather,
1998, p. 121. it was propelled by the artists’ pressing psychological need to find fitting

Song Dong
Stamping the water 1996
Type C photograph on
paper 36 photographs:
120 x 80cm (each, irreg.,
approx.) Purchased 2002
Queensland Art Gallery
48 GO F!GURE Foundation Queensland THREE DECADES / THEMES 49
Art Gallery
 correspondence between the vagaries of their individual bodily and sensorial
experience and the variety of material forms.
The abandon with which erstwhile painters luxuriated in inter-medium
practices occurred at the expense of the easel painting medium. Many
abandoned the comfort zone of practicing the material mediums they had been
trained in and opted for installations, photography, video, and performance
art. Artists such as Zhang Peili, Song Dong, Lin Tianmiao, Wang Gongxin, and
Wang Jianwei were initially all trained as oil painters. Once they discovered
the camera as their medium, they have not looked back. This trend in turn
impacted the painting medium. Those who stayed with the medium felt the
pressure to reinvent the wheel and revamp the medium. A favored strategy was
appropriation of formal properties from other media, such as photography.
Wang Xingwei My beautiful life 1993–95 (cat. XX) epitomises this practice.
Picturing the back of himself and his girlfriend leaning against a bridge railing
over a river, the painting emulates the photographic effect of grainy texture
and the glare of single-source flash-lighting, thereby turning the oil painting
canvas into a pictorial mimicry of a photograph. Meanwhile, the work lifts
a familiar composition from Edvard Munch’s paintings, such as Rain 1902.
At once a mimicry and a citation – visual strategies customarily deployed in
conceptual art – Wang’s work both riffs photo-documented performance and
spoofs a canonical painting. It paradoxically enacts the wrecking of medium
specificity by the very act of persisting in it. If the goal of post-medium
conceptual art is to bring down the unexamined pretensions of high art tied
to a specific medium,13 in particular, the oil painting, Wang’s work stands that
premise, i.e., the celebrated post-medium photographic dumbing-down of ‘high
art’, on its head. The mild humor of the work derives from the very send up
of the photographic medium effect on oil painting canvas: the mock-serious
enshrinement of banal snapshot as high art makes such modernist strategy
equally pretentious and suspect.
The impact of photography on 1990s practice, however, was not
limited to the emergence of neo-documentary photography as a means of
documenting performance art; moreover, it served as a model or medium for
conceptual art. Its formal properties – the deadpan camera eye, the mechanical
reproduction, and layered citations – amount to a formal paradigm that other
mediums such as easel painting could appropriate and mimic. The appropriation
and internalisation of the photographic medium was most palpable in easel
painting.

2000s: All About Space

Space has always been an issue in Chinese art. The dramatic changes in the
physical environment and cultural landscape in China have made artists even
more acutely aware of individuals’ vexed relationship vis-à-vis the surrounding
world and the kaleidoscopic backdrop of shifting societal panorama. Such
relationships are clearly registered in artworks of the 2000s as a figure-and-
background relationship. Previously, this relationship had been far less fraught 13 Rosalind E Krauss,
with tension: figures were placed in settings or against backdrops that served ‘Reinventing the
Medium,’ in Critical
largely as the subjects’ social, conceptual, or psychological extensions: the Inquiry, 25, no. 2, winter,
fitting milieu, habitat or states of mind. Chinese artists of the 1980s set their 1999, p. 295

Lin Tianmiao
Braiding 1999
digital photograph,
cotton thread, video
dimensions variable
Sigg Collection

50 GO F!GURE THREE DECADES / THEMES 51

Liu Xiaodong
Three Gorges: Newly
displaced population 2004
oil on canvas
300.0 x 1000.0cm
collection XXX

52 GO F!GURE THREE DECADES / THEMES 53

 figures against a variety of monumental backdrops: vast rural or industrial from the surrounding world. In contrast, the uniformity of the rows of vacant
topographies, macro-historical horizons, metaphysical cosmos, abstract abyss. seats suggests a mindless crowd, located in the present, but visibly absent. An
The relationship between the figures and their background topographies was additional irony stems from the compositional scheme: the allover fullness of
one of correspondence. The artists in the 1990s retreated behind the rampart the frame proffers a massive emptiness.
of their experiential privacies to attend to the house of cards made of different Both Weng and Miao expose the figure-background disjuncture and
mediums surrounding their body as the ultimate centre. The background incongruity as tropes of fault lines in present-day China. They operate within
tended to be close-range views of corners of an empirical world in observable the uniform space of the photographic medium. In contrast, Yu Hong’s She –
slices—cocoons of their imaginary solipsism. In either case, some sort of Unemployed girl 2003 (cat. XX), a triptych with two photos flanking a painting,
figures-and-background unity is assumed. In this regard, the difference between frames similar preoccupations in a more complex way. Incongruity is the theme
the 1980s and 1990s is only one of changed preoccupations. that runs through each of the three panels. The pair of photographs shows the
The artists of the 2000s stepped out again into vast openness to face the same woman in gaudy pink bridal gown against the humdrum environments of
radically reconfigured spaces of the contemporary Chinese landscape. While everyday life. The central panel depicts a young mother, fashionably attired, in
this figuration against vast backdrop recalls the figure-background relationship symmetry with what appears to be either her mother or mother-in-law, both
of the 1980s, the difference is palpable. Often the figure-backdrop relationship seated in sofas. The incongruity of the situation is palpable. The sets of sofas
is one of unease, disconnect, displacement, incongruity, and dislocation. do not match, yet the two sets are improbably arranged together as a set.
Moreover, a decade-long revamping of the medium had left indelible imprint The two walls are just as disjoined: one festooned with hangings of artificial
on the figures themselves: these are nothing but traces of re-mediation – a plants; the other covered with a landscape painting. The furnishings and their
palimpsest of effects of different medium properties. symmetrical setup recall the level of formality and gravitas often on display
The unease of the figure-and-surrounding relationship speaks to the in photographs of national leaders receiving distinguished foreign visitors in
overwhelming sense of dislocation and displacement many feel in present- the Great Hall of People. The disjuncture among different furnishings and
day China. The rapidly changing physical environment was caused by the decorations mildly mocks the ludicrousness of the untenable formality – not
mushrooming of skyscrapers fed by a frenzy of real estate development, the to mention the unease with which the familial relationship is impossibly
wrecking of old residential communities, internal migration and relocation, and displaced into this grandiose milieu. The mop leaning against the wall ultimately
so on. Moreover, the dislocation occurs not just at the physical and social level, deflates whatever pomposity propped up here. The triptych maps out well the
but often at the psychological level. Artists exploring these shifting fault lines confusion and comedy arising out of the rapidly reconfigured life and space of
of social and psychological landscape throw into high relief a bewildering sense contemporary China.
of new space, the precariousness of cognitive mapping and navigation of these The theme of incongruity not only runs through the triptych as a problem
everchanging spaces. of space; it also stages the question of mediums. Photography is pitched against
Weng Fen’s On the wall – Guangzhou (II) 2002 (cat. XX) illustrates this oil painting. The pink colour scheme engulfs the bride in the photographs to
new sense of space. The photograph centres on a young girl bestriding a wall, such an extent that the photographs aspire toward the condition of a ‘painting’.
looking wistfully at the array of newly risen skyscrapers in the horizon. The Likewise, the intrusion of humdrum household objects captured in the manner
disjuncture of the foreground occupied by the girl and the background is of deadpan camera – the washbowl, the mop, and the trash can – deflates
apparent. The wall she sits on, scrawled with dirt and stains, epitomises the the composition’s aspiration to be pictorial in the picturesque way. Thus both
subject’s real physical world still mired in the weathered everyday humdrum the photographs and the painting speak to their own medium condition
world. In contrast, the pristine skyscrapers looming in the distance against and demand expanded notions of these traditional mediums. The incredible
white cloud and blue sky appear to be a mirage. Distance here acquires the happens so often in present-day China that one should get used to the
dubious character of both spatial recession and temporal marking. Space is unexpected. An everyday object can be catapulted into an improbably fantastic
turned into time, horizon into futurity, and the real into surreal. Meanwhile, height right before one’s eyes, such that it requires no more than the deadpan
the scrawled wall, presenting itself as a flat surface bearing the traces of hand, snapshot to simply show the magic without pictorial embellishment. Such is
inadvertently turns into a photographic mimicry of a canvas or a writing pad; in the case with the girl next door in gaudy bridal gown. Conversely, a deepening
contrast, the distant skyline takes on dimensions of virtuality devoid of human sense of the rootedness in the bedrock of base reality deflates any illusion of
presence and touches. the bubble of the painted fantasy: dreams can be painted, but the painter can
Miao Xiaochun’s Parliamentarian (Congressman) 2002 (cat. XX), made in just as well expose what lies outside the dream, a la mode of a deadpan camera.
the same year, explores a similar disconnect. Here the photographic subject, Such is the case of the house interior filled at once with grand furnishings and
14 Gu Zheng, a mannequin of the artist himself, dressed in a pre-modern Chinese robe, mundane objects.
Contemporary Chinese sits in the empty auditorium of the Great Hall.14 The work revels in the irony The triptych exemplifies the tempered arsenal with which artists
photography, Beijing:
China Youth Press,
of reversal: the artist’s real quixotic presence embodies an absent erstwhile come to terms with new reality in contemporary China. The new inter-
2011, pp. 22–23. subjectivity: a cool, dispassionate and thoughtful observer composed as distinct medium sensibility refined in the previous decade allows Yu Hong and her

54 GO F!GURE THREE DECADES / THEMES 55

 contemporaries, who came of artistic age in the 1990s, to explore the problem
of space by way of medium effects.
Jing Kewen’s No clouds at the Great Wall 2010 (cat. XX) also works along
this line. It explores not only the spatial and temporal disjuncture between
the figures and background, but also the shifting effects produced through
inter-medium mimicries and spoofs. Its seeming pedestrian and uniform
disposition belies its embedded historicity. The oil painting is based on one
of the old photographs taken in Maoist years, which Jing acquired from
antique markets. Chinese officials in plain dark-blue Mao suits show around
distinguished African visitors in Western suits in a scenic spot at the Great Wall.
These socialist-era officials look positively drab by today’s sartorial standard
in China. On the other hand, they exude a spirited healthy radiance, which
earns the artist’s admiration. However, Jing’s work is not to be flatly reduced
to fuzzy nostalgia for Maoist years. Having witnessed traumatic scenes during
the Cultural Revolution as a child, he is unlikely to whitewash the 1970s. His
oil painting presents, instead, moments from the past as processed through
the overlay of childhood memory. The refreshing effect of the work derives
from its departure from the 1990s vogue for deliberate over-vulgarising
spoofs of Maoist-era images. Jing’s work oscillates between deadpan pictorial
citation of found photographs and his interventionist painterly reworking
of the photograph. He emphatically brightens up the colour scheme of the
background landscape to lift the mood of the composition from the 1970s
humdrum environment and infuse it with tinges of ‘contemporaneity’, but not
to the extent of over-dramatic send up that characterises the 1990s contrived
burlesque. Sure, socialist years were spoofed; but the eschewal of retrospective
excessive burlesque unsettles any facile positions and propositions. Divested
of any hindsight, a slice of historical memory is revived through the prism of a
borrowed lens – someone else’s viewpoint. The brightening of colour palette
exudes childlike innocence. The work stages intuitive grasps of historical
experiences, unfiltered by discursive habits of the day.
Jing’s painting thus comes full circle in view of the history of
contemporary Chinese art. Artists in the 1980s adopted modernist visual
languages in an attempt break out of the prison-house of language hardened
in the 1970s. Troubled by the danger of radicalism itself ossifying into
philosophical excess, they sought to ‘cleanse’ all that rhetorical verbiage and
zeal in favor of abstract forms of ‘Reason’ with overtones of dispassionate
calm. That resulted in purification of forms with which they project their
missing footnotes? universalising ideals and enlightenment aspirations. The artists of the 1990s
retreated into their own personal worlds to focus on their immediate individual
Yin Shuangxi, ‘Zai lishi
yu xianshi zhijian’, experiences vis-à-vis the real world out there. This led to reinvention and
Xianchang: Yin Shuangxi repurposing of the mediums with the private body and sensorium as the new
yishu piping wenji,
Shijiazhuang: Hebei
focus. The artists in the 2000s came out of their cocoons to embrace public
meishu chubanshe, space again – only that this new re-integration into public life internalised
2006, pp. 206–209. the renewed sense of mediums and individualised sensorial experiences. So,
Zou Yuejin, Xin the three decades of contemporary Chinese art may be framed in a three-act
Zhongguo meishu shi, process: thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis. The master narrative proffered here
1949-2000, Changsha:
Hunan meishu
has indeed left out bases uncovered; but it at least provides one roadmap with
chubanshe, 2002. pp. XX which we can navigate this rapidly expanding horizon.

56 GO F!GURE 57