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Cynical realism is Political Pop • The performance in the discovery of the individual and sexual identity • The paths of the memory • The Gaudy Art • How China changes • Artistic role among rebellion, tradition and innovation • The art after the 2000 beneath painting and new media
(Source of the article is the presentation to the exposition held in Milan in September, 2005) |
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| Play the Life! creation - 2005 mail: info@playthelife.com | ||||||
The
Chinese contemporary art in moving Westwards.
Nevertheless, it exists some social and psychological realities, some philosophical attitudes and
some symbolic analogies that make to
interpret subjects, techniques and images in
different ways from ours. 
The
repression of Tiananmen Square, after the hopes of greater freedom of
expression, determines a deep depression among artists. Many
of them decide
to leave. Others stay and tell with steadiness their desperation.
To do so, they invent a psychological style, unpublished in the
global panorama, but rich of a long resistance tradition to the
dictatorships
in China.
The Cynical Realism is inspired to a very Chinese attitude
defined popi. It enjoys of great prestige among the intellectuals.
It can be translated as punk or schizoid underground. In base of
the popi strategy, the artist, in order to get some taste of liberty,
pretends to be
crazy and accepts to live in the borders of the society. At the
beginning of the '90 the popi manifests itself as a grotesque attitude, soaked with a bitter
desperation but aimed to carry on
in testifying despite the disenchantment. Among its most notable
representatives there is Fang Lijun, with his clones with the
trimmed head that wander without destination between sky and
earth. Liu Wei creates some violent drawn back expressionists that, in
the strained and corrupt subjects, tell the psychic and mental backstages of the characters. Yue Minjun respects this attitude of
false separation through a self-portrait that exhibits a smile with
twenty-four teeth.
Yang Shaobin is
the most violently modern. For a
curious case of the destines, these artists, from drop-out
gathered in Yuangmingyuan, a bohèmien Beijing community, got a
great success in the West, also because they have been the first ones to
show that art could be the spokesman of the desire of liberty, and
of emancipation from the system. 
The art of the performance is very felt in China and it has quite a lot
interesting protagonists. A notable chapter has been written in the '94 in a
place next to Beijing, called East Village. Here some young
artists, looking for an alternative style of life, began to
express through actions today popular, that we know above all
through the photos of Rong Rong. Here
Zhan Huang begins with a performance from the title 'Twelve Meters
Square', in which he shows his extraordinary persuades of control and resistance of his
body submitted to a terrible physical torture. To him the discovery of the
selfness passes through the persuasion of
feeling and to control the body. When, through a performance, this situation
is rendered explicit, and transformed in a sign and in a language, he
comes to communicate its way of be and to feel itself and to share with others the feelings and the thoughts that spring
from this. The use of the body belongs also to some actions of Ma Liuming. In the East Village he creates a character,
Fen-Ma Liuming, who associates to of the virile characteristics of beautiful face of
woman. Fen in Chinese means perfume and it has a female connotation.
The young Ma Liuming, even owning masculine tastes, had
very female hands and face. To him is a surprise to discover
that many judged him in base of the aspect, and in his first performances
he decided to show in a critical way this ambivalence, exhibiting his
naked masculine body surmounted by a beautiful face with a make up for woman, in actions that concerned
activity as to cook and
to walk. In his actions, that were realized both to the closed one
and to the open spaces - also in famous places like the Great Wall (1998)
-
he reveals our habit to judge things and people in base of the visual
data. From here he hopes to bait a greater awareness and a process
of revision of our prejudices. For both Zhan Huang and But Liuming
nudity and sex don't serve as erotic calls, but they are born
from the need to perceive and to share completely, in
an instinctual way, and without the implicit social connotations in every
type of suit. In the East Village there
has also been made collective performances: Zhan Huang, who has conceived
it, Ma Liuming and Zhou
Ming together with others, create a performance of the title "How
add a meter to an anonymous mountain". It deals with a symbolic
message, valid for the experiment of the East Village and also for all
of us: the tenacity, the resistance, the lucidity, the collaboration
and the wish, together with our body, are a capital, small but
effective and real, that allows us to make the difference, and to
realize any any
project, even the strangest and the difficult one, as to add a
meter to a mountain…exactly. 
New China is not exempted by the painful evocation of
its past. The most proper tool to remember is obviously the photography.
Photography finds a very fertile ground in China that, through the
vocation for the pictorial realism, it has been learning for long time
to appreciate and to manage the new media. The appetite for the
technological innovation in '80 is stopped by the economic difficulties and the scarce diffusion of the new
media. With the
'90 photography is averagely welcomed with abundance of innovative results
and unpublished visual effects, aimed to document and to comment the
great social changes of the
moment. The photography also assembles on recalling the past,
both as way of expressing its suffered own and as tool of
investigation, for the construction of the new individual and social
identities. 
With
the advent of the market economy, the desire to become
wealthy and to possess grow up. The Gaudy Art, that derives its
name from the union of two words that respectively mean "from
the garish colors" and "vulgar", works as a mirror of this situation.
Among its protagonists there are the Luos Brothers, that
adopt a material of ancient Chinese tradition, the lacquer, to realize
the full icons of symbols that originate both from the old popular
iconographies of die farmer - we find again Mao, girls tidied up with
braids, red cheeks, alone dawning, children, red guards, and so on -
and from the new dreams of modern
opulence of the new riches. Someone has defined the images of the Gaudy
Art "the new ugliness" and in effects it is an aesthetics of the
ugliness to make, for many, irresistible these images that describe
more and more diffused dreams. As Jeff Koons already had understood,
people have lost the desire to administer the beauty: what the masses
adore is the kitsch, that is ugly, but happy.
In this the Gaudy Art grafts on the aesthetical populist Maoist the
carnival of the new Gods of the market, creating a hybrid with the colors red and gold, that
save also the old world of archaic China through the preferences of the decorative arts in
comparison to the beautiful arts.
The women without head of Liu Jianhua are just what they seem, that
means "beautiful pullets" that court the great erotic inspirations of a vast masculine public. The projects of Xu
Yihui are the critical materialization of the dreams of the moment:
handbags that contains gold bars. The photos of Liu Zheng and Wang Qingsong testify, for transposition,
the great school of origin of their theatrical professionalism, the one of the
Beijing Opera. There photographic groups are met; characters
characterized by the direction of the gestures, of the customs, of the
makeup's, of the
expressions and of the colors. They are treated by Wang Quingsong in
a great way to express the sense of deceptive happiness
of which today China pleases itself. 
It's
in the representation of the depths social upsetting of the years '90
that the new Chinese photo manifests its spectacularity and its style
able to boss a great variety of techniques and of visual effects. Hong Hao uses new digital techniques to make
us participating in some colored world of myriad of objects that suddenly entered
to belong to the once bare panorama of the middle Chinese. He doesn't
photographically take back the objects anymore, but map their
ownerships, thanks to the new technologies. Other comment the trials
and the effects of the urbanization, the diffusion of the market economy and the destruction of the ancient urban and city installations
through a party of languages that include old and new media: painting,
sculpture, photo, cinema, video, performance and installations. It is
made by Xue Song with the collage and by Sui Jianguos with his Dinosaurs Made in
China. A versatile artist as
Zhang Dali uses various techniques: he creates some sculptures that
are the tread of some faces of the disinherited capitalist China, that
means those of poor ex-farmers that come in crowds from the countries
as to search of food and job. They are
probably among those people that participate in the destruction of the old
Beijing: Zhang Dali immortalizes the ruins of the new demolitions
with the images of his series of graffiti. Weng Fen shows us the
aspect of the new Chinese metropolises, full of skyscrapers, without
giving up, through his
young witness, to question himself about the future. His ones are spectacular
images, great, according to a style that the Chinese have known
how to impose with effectiveness to make the spectator to feeling
himself
inside the represented vision. 
The
new rules of the capitalistic economy and the enormous changes that
are their consequences, transform figures and roles of the artist. The
experimental creator, that uses every type of old and new average,
seems to have replaced the literate fruit of the classical culture. He
finds a careful public, that feels itself involved both from the themes
and from the immediateness of the languages. These new communicators
talk about AIDS and SARS, they talk about the vices as the drug, the diffused
corruption and the increase of the violence. Zhao Bandi
uses the techniques of the marketing: a testimonial
is created - a tender panda, that is at the same time a symbol of China
and an endangered specie - and, together with him,
creates instructive and ironic sketches,
equipped
with comic strips. Qiu Zihije
reports strongly various problems
among which there's the drug, but
when it comes with expressing his rebellion, he returns to use an
ideogram: it is red and it means No, Not (不).
The tradition ends to
survive in various ways, the writing and the calligraphy are among
the most consistent vehicles. Gu Wenda adjusts him to the themes of the
modernity, inventing clever inks for the images of his rolls. Also
Ding Yi and Shen Fan make the writing
Chinese a source of suggestions. Their abstract works receive many
stimuli from the writing that, from centuries, stirs among abstract
and concrete, sign and image.
On
the 2000 threshold, Yang Fudong puts in scene his version of the
destines of intellectual, that turns into manager from bohèmien,
distorted and bloody, dealing with the changes of the metropolis, armed
only of bricks. Ai Weiwei is an extraordinary
artist who shows us to live in a way according to which it conceives the
meeting between classical culture and experimental art, ancient and new
China. He makes it through ancient, original and very precious
finds. He adopts the vase of the Dynasty Han and the woods from which
it draws his map of China, as part of the historical roots of the
country. He contests and considers them. Also when he destroys, from
the past he creates again something, and he
prefigures a tomorrow that as for now is fragmented, but at the end
reveals an imposing continent like China. 
The
painting remains one of the most diffused and shared languages in China.
It is taught in schools and academies, it primarily has realist and figurative intonation,
and it is cultivated with great professionalism. Among the interpreters
most gifted, that combine style and poetry with
a great critical ability, not unaware of the political system
and of its reflexes on the daily life and on the society, there is
Zhang Xiaogang. Hers portraits succeed in maintaining a deep lyricism,
even when they tell as the individual, under the pressure of the power, ends up conforming
totally its expressions to the approved
stereotypes. Only some physical anomaly ends up by chance betraying
it. Also the portraits of Zeng Fanzhi comment the relationship among
that first sign of individuality that is the face
and the masks through which it is ended up to cheat it. Zhou Chunya,
Guo Jin and others develop the poetic liberty of the school of Sichuan
in a very personal direction. Zhou Chunya connects him to the
expressionism and, through his preferred testimonial - his dog Heigen - talks
about the instincts and the relationships between aggressiveness and
sensuality, love and violence. A poetic variation of
the denunciations on the capitalism is that of Zeng Hao, that
exhibits richer and richer panorama of the objects, equipped of
its new supertrendy and fashion-addicted habitants as only a magician could make
up: he makes appear the figures of sudden small
capitalistic mushrooms that sprout from monochrome background as an
apparition of the hat of the magician. 
There
is whom uses painting more as a game that as a language. Zhou Tiehai
creates some pictorial collage in which associates fragments of
famous western pictures the recurrent leit-motiv of the head
of a camel - borrowed by the brand of cigarettes: it should represent
the capitalist universe. Someone defines him the Chinese
Andy Warhol; somebody else thinks that his creations, more than reports are
jokes! The choices of Warig Xingwei are more contemplate. Moreover, his
d'àprés talk among the others about decadence, corruption,
prostitution and life in the violent city. Here he uses a painting made
a long
time ago by an American artist, Eric Fischi, and he
appropriates of it, suiting it with great ability to his world. We
are getting to the 'post', a generalized post, that alludes to a
'later' a great problematic and fleeing deal.
The
arrival of the new millennium sees China among the nations in pole
position. It is not an isolated continent anymore, and its destiny
interests everybody, Chinese and not. The art in these twenty years has
given us a look from the inside, judgments full of brave wisdom and of
anticipations on the country of memorable works. And now? While new
constructive attitudes are looked for, the relationship with the
languages gets sharper. The novel with the new media continues, both in
the form of predilection for the video-art, and through the taste of
practicing and combining many media, included the painting, of which
someone decrees, as always, the death. It prefers to integrate himself to the future instead, opening
himself to many forms of dialogue and contamination
with photo, press and video. It often does it talking about the
history and the actuality. He Sen talks about the customs of the new
mediatic generations - sex, disco, fashion - giving him a photographic
patina. Shi Xinning creates the pseudo-realistic collage, that
visually approaches Mao and his entourage figures of divas, stars,
and symbols of the ways of life of the West, in order to comment the surreality
of the history. Li Dafang mixes realism, writing comment,
journalistic graphics, as to expose us his reflections on the society.
Li Song Song, with post-modern attitude, tries to take the distances
from the history, turning it into painting, while Xie Nanxing absorbs,
in his electric trips from screen TV, the swarming humus of
the night time life of the metropolises. Someone sets out on more
personal paths, as in the case of the versatile Lin Tianmiao, that communicates us ideas and emotions of the
female world
in fascinating installations in which photo, video, and created objects
converge using wares, cloths and manual techniques. Ma Liuming - the
performer that cross his body has already shown us the different potentials
between masculine and female, infancy and maturity, inside that each of
us goes - it now faces his own maturity through a child that look at
him from the maternal womb. In a moment as this, to be
assembled and creative in individual topics, felt important,
personal but sharable, it's a winning strategy, fit to build dominos as to assemble for ours nebulous tomorrow. The wish for this new
challenge is to know how to conquer an innovative and creative
normality.