This talk has two themes. First, I want to reflect upon a fundamental problem or dilemma in presenting contemporary Chinese art in the West. Second, I want to explain the purpose and content of this exhibition, which to a large extent responds to this problem.

In a lecture I gave at the MoMA earlier this year, I reviewed the 45th Venice Biennale in 1992, which, for the first time, showed a large group of works of contemporary Chinese art in a major international exhibition. Prompted by a fanfare of news reports in popular Western art magazines, that moment announced the official entrance of contemporary Chinese art into the global space, and also introduced a paradox that has been associated with this type of Chinese art to this day. This paradox, if I can summarize it in a single sentence, is that although in general perception contemporary Chinese art must be in some essential ways connected to China (so it can be recognized as “Chinese”), it must also acquire independent agency in order to enter the Global Salon. The impact of this paradox is complex and goes beyond simple value judgment. Here I want to reflect upon some aspects of this paradox for two purposes: first, it may help clarify the murky entanglement between so-called “international” contemporary art and various brands of “regional” contemporary art – not only contemporary Chinese art but also contemporary Indian art, contemporary Iranian art, contemporary Korean art, and so on. Second and more practically, this reflection responds to a repeated challenge in curating exhibitions of non-western contemporary art, namely, how to retain the authenticity of this art, instead of “flattening” it to suit a preexisting art historical narrative and exhibition mode.

Here “flattening” means simultaneous conflation and growth: the depth is turned into horizontality; events and representations are reconfigured into lateral networks and synchronic relationships. More specifically, regardless where a multi-national exhibition is held, in Venice or in Shanghai, it easily “flattens” the historical dimensions of a regional contemporary art through a simultaneous process of decontextualization and recontextualization— a process that resembles the act of collecting. The contemporaneity of a regional art is redefined as a suspended moment outside any historical narrative. In the case of contemporary Chinese art in such settings, while it is reframed within a global context, it nevertheless cannot be “inserted” into the existing history of modern and contemporary art because of its specific timing, inspirations, criteria, and context. This dilemma has further led to a particular perception of individual artists: because most non-western artists are automatically associated with their countries or regions, they too have become suspended. This is why those truly original artists actually suffer most from this perception: even though their works appear in numerous international exhibitions, they disappear in standard histories of contemporary art or are grouped into a separate, minor chapter.

Multi-national exhibitions also easily “flatten” the political dimensions of regional contemporary art. Although in the West the avant-garde as a historical movement belonged to the past, in the domestic sphere of many Third World countries, the concept of “contemporary art” still often signifies social experiments that aspire to challenge established art institutions and systems. In 90’s China, for example, new art forms such as installation, performance, and site-specific projects conveyed a strong social message to subvert established norms. This significance largely disappears when experimental Chinese works are displayed in international exhibitions that feature endless installations and multi-media works. The new exhibition venues thus should be thought of as a means of translation – something that reconstructs old definitions and regenerates new meanings — and should also be identified as new sites of art production and circulation. As such sites, biennales and triennials not only commission works for an international audience, but also channels “regional artists” into a global socioeconomic network. It was precisely in the early 1990s, around the 45th Venice Biennale, that contemporary Chinese artists first became a global commodity, promoted by transnational commercial galleries and auction houses, and collected by foreign collectors and museums. Today, when contemporary Chinese artists travel to almost every important international exhibition, the commercialization of their works has also reached a critical point.

These reflections lead to a practical, curatorial issue: How to “de-flatten” regional contemporary art through exhibitions? My above reflections raise questions about the implications of many international exhibitions in displacing, decontextualizaing, and appropriating non-western artists and their works. These questions cannot be answered by returning to old regional traditions – the interaction of contemporary art in a global space is an irreversible trend and must remain as a major factor in today’s art creation. To respond to these questions productively, I suggest, a curator should reintroduce the notion of “depth” into an exhibition of non-Western contemporary art. This was the intention of the First Chapter of the 2006 Gwangju Biennale in Korea, for which I served as the chief curator. It also underlies the current exhibition at the China Institute Gallery.

Briefly, both exhibitions emphasize what I call a diachronic dimension of contemporary art, defined as artists’ dialogues with histories and memories, and as their responses to previous aesthetic and visual languages. Since such dialogues and responses constitute important aspects of contemporary art in general and transcend regional boundaries, what unite or separate artists will be their artistic aspirations and visual languages, not their birthplaces, residency, or ethnicity. Intersecting with a “synchronic” dimension of contemporary art that focuses on international style, global networking, and information technology, this diachronic dimension will add three-dimensionality to a presentation of today’s art.

From here I can turn to the current exhibition in the China Institute Gallery. Many people have asked me why I have chosen the book as the central concept for a major exhibition of Chinese art, a focus which seems rather unusual in today’s discourse on contemporary art. My answer is that this focus is determined by contemporary Chinese art itself, not by a pre-existing theoretical model produced in an external artistic or intellectual context. Simply put, many contemporary Chinese artists, including some of the most famous ones, have created works that are related in one way or another to the book; many of these works are of high artistic quality. The frequency of such projects during the past two decades is unparalleled in the world. Since these experiments betray little or no direct influence from Western art, they provide important evidence for understanding distinct characteristics of contemporary Chinese art and strongly refute a criticism repeated by official Chinese critics and some Western critics that experimental Chinese art as a whole is “derivative” and lacks indigenous roots.

In my essay in the exhibition catalogue, I connect this phenomenon to the strong intellectual dimension in traditional Chinese art and the extraordinary importance of the book to both traditional and modern Chinese artists, but also noted a major difference which separates “experimental” artists since the 1980s from their predecessors. Although the book maintains its importance to these artists, the role of the book in artistic creation has changed greatly. Most important, because these artist position themselves at the margin of mainstream Chinese culture, they have developed a very complex relationship with the book. On the one hand, they recognize the strong bond connecting themselves with the book; on the other, they also attack the book for its manipulative power in politics and its banality in commercial culture. Moreover, contemporary art mediums, such as installation, video, and digital photography, have enabled these artists to “reinvent” books through a large number of artistic experiments.

The more than thirty works in the show are selected from a large pool of examples and reflect a wide range of artistic experiments. The first part of the exhibition had the subtitle “Reimagining Tradition.” It included works that reflect the artists’ desire to engage the past in a contemporary dialogue. A number of these works derive essential elements from traditional Chinese books and painting/calligraphy albums, including format, reading or viewing conventions, and painting and printing styles and materials. The artists, however, do not follow established traditions passively. Instead, they have self-consciously developed different strategies to problematize their relationship with China’s cultural heritage. A common strategy is to deconstruct traditional forms in order to express new concepts and ideas. Works in this section thus demonstrate a constant interaction between past and present, and between preservation and renovation.

The second section is called “Negotiating History and Memory,” and is more closely related to the historical experiences of contemporary Chinese artists. Some works in this section are imbued with vivid personal memories of the Cultural Revolution; other works demonstrate a strong iconoclastic impulse, questioning the roles that books have played in standardized education and political propaganda. Several works in this section deal with urgent issues in today’s world, including globalization, war and peace, and the relationship between East and West. The exhibition also includes a site-specific project by the artist Qiu Zhijie. Surrounding a communal area outside the gallery spaces, it reminds the audience of the omnipresence of books in people’s daily lives.

I will use the time left to outline two main themes of the second section currently on display.
One group of works in this part of the show is closely related to the notion of “intimacy.” For this exhibition we interviewed many invited artists. Although we anticipated they would connect their works with personal experiences, we have nevertheless been surprised by the richness of their reminiscences about the roles that books have played at different stages in their lives (please read the artists’ statements in the catalogue). It seems that the topic of the “book” opened a hidden door, allowing them to speak about their art in a personal, intimate voice. For example, the oil painter Zhang Xiaogang talked about his love-and-hate relationship with the book when he grew up. Not coincidentally, books became central images in his paintings from the 1980s to early 1990s, and have recently returned to his repertoire. A series of paintings shown in this exhibition, titled Private Notes and executed in watercolor and oil on paper, is an important example from the earlier period.

The seven compositions in the 1991 series constitute a metaphorical diary over a week — a numbered calendar on the back wall indicates the sequence of the seven days. Books and dismembered body parts are two central motifs in the compositions, interacting with each other in various ways to suggest a continuing narrative. These images — a yellowish hand holding a pen to write on a piece of paper, a red hand pointing at a sentence in a book, a broken arm laying on pages covered with tiny characters – seem to convey traumatic experiences and signify yearning and desperation; their dark mood conflates memories of the Cultural Revolution and the June Fourth Movement. What one finds in these paintings are “memory images” resurrected from history and from the depth of the artist’s psyche. Influenced by Surrealism and Expressionism, Zhang Xiaogang devised a private iconography centered on the book to represent his experience.

One of the most striking works in the exhibition is Liu Dan’s enormous painting called Dictionary. By enlarging an ordinary dictionary hundreds of times its original size, he bestows a tiny book with the status of a monument. On the other hand, by depicting the dictionary with a painstaking, photorealistic style, he stresses its vulnerability to time and to human touch: the book’s yellowish paper and worn pages arouse nostalgia, testifying probably to a life-long intimate relationship between the book and a human subject.

But not all the artists in this exhibition approach books as intimate objects invested with personal memory. In fact, a considerable number of works emphasize a meaning of the book that is entirely opposite to intimacy. Instead of attaching sentimental values to books, their creators display various negative attitudes – suspicion, cynicism, iconoclasm — toward books. An implicit argument shared by these artists is that because books are made by men, they cannot avoid being used by political and religious authorities to advance their ambitions. A grave lesson these artists learned from the Cultural Revolution is exactly the alarming capability of a single set of books to control millions of people. To these artists, books are full of lies, and are also battlegrounds of different politics, religions, and ideologies. This dark side of the book is the central theme of Wei Guangqing’s Black Covered Book: Desert Storm. Fifteen years after this book’s creation, we can now better appreciate a Chinese artist’s prophetic vision: as the war in Iraq was revived and drags on, this “black book” made in 1991 continues to comment on current international politics.

Following a different direction, Yue Minjun ridicules books in his Garbage Dump. The six squatting figures are all based on the artist’s own physiognomy, and can thus be considered his self-portraits. Instead of contemplating the books, they exude a kind of frenzied excitement that is at odds with the context. Yue Minjun says that he deliberately juxtaposes the books with this image of himself, which “is the exact opposite of those images that one always sees of scholars and their attitudes towards books.” As he states in the interview, a majority of books in today’s world, especially best-sellers, are empty in content and poor in taste. Still many other books cannot even realize their commercial value, as they travel directly from production lines to waste stations, leaving no impact on society. It is clear that in making such judgments, the artist is actually commenting on the general conditions of contemporary culture; but the book offers him a sharp focus to deliver such criticism.

To sum up, this exhibition shows three main aspects of the relationship between books and contemporary Chinese artists. First, many book-related works in this art are rooted in the artists’ personal experiences. More than any other object, books awakened their curiosity about the surrounding world.

Second, to many contemporary Chinese artists, books can also be the most dangerous things in the world because they provide the most effective tools for political and religious brainwashing. Although these artists are not necessarily opposed to all books, their rebellion against orthodoxy has prompted them to cast the book as a general symbol of the repressive power of political authority and commercialization.

Third, because of its significance as a major transmitter of traditional knowledge, the book has become a primary site for contemporary Chinese artists to rediscover their cultural heritage and to enrich their experimental projects with their finds.

Rather than isolated tendencies, these three aspects are often intertwined in a single work, intensifying its complexity and historical significance. Through uncovering such complexity and significance, I hope that this exhibition can contribute to the study of contemporary Chinese art by increasing the “depth” of interpretation. As I proposed at the beginning of this talk, this is an urgent task because now that contemporary Chinese art is becoming rapidly globalized, it is also losing its definition and individual voice. The basic goal of this exhibition is therefore to explore an indigenous narrative of contemporary art in a global context, thus offering an explanation why contemporary Chinese art is both “contemporary” and “Chinese.”

Wu Hung
Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor
Director, Center for the Art of East Asia
Consulting Curator, Smart Museum of Art
The University of Chicago