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“The best way of
making money on a flower was to buy one that was about to develop
offsets which could be removed and sold separately. Bulbs that were
likely to grow rapidly were thus more valuable than either immature
flowers or those which were already fully developed and unlikely to
produce more than a few offsets before they died. But even the most
experienced growers found it difficult to predict accurately what
a single bulb of a particular variety would do, and so far as novice
florists were concerned, bulb dealing was an exercise in pure speculation.”
Mike Dash, Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s most
coveted flower and the extraordinary passions it aroused, Phoenix
(UK), 1999
I recently presented a series of documentaries practically unknown
in Europe at the Motor Village in Turin; they were dedicated to
five art events of great significance to the city of Shanghai, all
of which have taken place from 1998 to the present. The catalogues
and videos presented at the motor show provide a fascinating, if
fragmented, view of a group of individuals -- artists, curators,
and gallery owners among them – who joined forces in the late
90s to create (or tried to create, at least) a context for contemporary
art in Shanghai. Presenting this video seemed to me a good way to
show the public how unstructured the arts and culture scene still
was in the late nineties. And even though it is almost impossible
to believe today, the situation at the time was even more challenging
in the field of contemporary art. My colleagues, collaborators,
and I set to work in an artscape that was still “empty,”
you could say; we tried to come up with a modus operandi that would
be the most effective, despite the inadequacy and the relative marginality
of the venues made available to us, all temporary – abandoned
spaces. Only as recently as the year 2000 did these venues start
to become more stable, hosting the particularly exciting start-up
phase of our projects, even if our “negotiations” with
the city’s institutions and political culture were terribly
complex.
This is how the BizArt Art Center came into being: a not-for-profit
facility which, having practically nothing to go on, was able to
develop a strategy of experimental action focused on specific projects
involving Chinese and international artists and having a strong
educational connotation. The undeniable achievement of this relatively
small group of individuals, over the last decade, has been to meet
the city’s “hyper-commercial” evolution head-on,
with a policy that goes decidedly against the general trend. Hence
a “not-for-profit” space that today is still devoted
to creative activities that are not bound by the concept of art
as the production of “art objects” with an immediate
commercialization as their raison d’etre, but rather
the essential creative process: generating ideas.
Our economic difficulties notwithstanding, we have managed to pursue
our vision and see it evolve continuously and at a lightning pace,
in a setting in which time seemed to expand and shrink with no interruption
– a sort of “hypertime” in which months and years
blurred together amidst the frenetic changes happening all around
us. This state of affairs forced us to act very quickly, to the
detriment, on occasion, of a systematic analysis of the decisions
and paths we chose.
An “off” Story
The first video I’d like to discuss is from 1998. The title
of the exhibition was Jinyuan Road 310. A group of artists
lead by Xu Zhen, Alexander Brandt, and Yang Zhenzhong curated this
event/multimedia show in a basement space they rented for the occasion.
Although it seems frankly inconceivable today, back in 1998 multimedia
or new media art was not yet considered art or classified as art
by the Chinese authorities, who viewed it as “unstable”
(bu wending), if not, at times, outright subversive. Consequently,
due to certain contents deemed to be “unstable” –
with no further explanation – the exhibition was closed down
by the police. The following year, in 1999, the same artists staged
a new action, this time by means of a more complex operation designed
to build awareness among both the expat community and the international
companies offering their support. Presented as a historic event
for the city of Shanghai, the exhibition, which was called Art
for Sale, was sustained by a highly effective marketing strategy.
The venue chosen for the show was a shopping center, and the space
was divided into two parts: one given over to an intentionally cynical
commercialization of art objects, after the manner of a sort of
mini market; and the other part reserved for performances and installations.
This exhibition, as well, was closed down immediately, the day after
the inauguration. The reason the authorities gave was the supposedly
pornographic content of the works on display.
The history of the happenings, activities, and exhibitions in Shanghai
at that time remains to be written. Moreover, the extreme commercialization
of contemporary Chinese art, with its inevitable oversimplification,
often stands in the way of a more contextualized vision of the evolution
of art in China over the last two decades. And the recent internationalization
of Chinese art has had consequences that are highly problematic,
among them the difficulty in understanding, critiquing, and documenting
the many-sided evolution of the Chinese artists’ careers,
and especially of those working in Shanghai. Only lately has an
analysis of the recent past and the key moments in the genesis and
development of contemporary art in China been undertaken, two examples
being the publication of monographic issues of the Beijing journal
U-TURN, edited by Philip Tinari, and the Ullens Foundation’s
commitment to arranging retrospectives of Chinese art, an activity
that was inaugurated in 2007 with “85 New Wave: The Birth
of Chinese Contemporary Art.” The fact remains that, for the
most part, such an attempt at contextualization still stops at Beijing,
while a history of the art scene in other places like Shanghai,
Chengdu, Kunming, and the area of the Pearl River Delta still cries
out for codification.
Another video I presented in Turin – not strictly connected
to the BizArt activities, but certainly part of a planning strategy
characterized by provocative gestures and other actions in the field
– documents the exhibition entitled Fuck Off in the
English version, and, far less aggressively, Buhezuodefangshi
(or “non-collaborative attitude”) in Chinese, which
was held in 2000. Within a matter of days this exhibition, too,
was shut down, and its organizer Li Liang, of the Eastlink Gallery
(which was a cross between a commercial gallery and a not-for-profit
organization), who had curated the exhibition together with Ai Weiwei,
encountered considerable problems in managing his own activity for
over a year. At first glance, the exhibition was not particularly
controversial, and the contents of the artworks were critical without
being subversive. Stronger tones and even violent ones, at times,
marked the catalogue itself. A number of the artists featured had
exhibited works that utilized or displayed human corpses or parts
deriving from corpses such as, for example, the body fat displayed
in Peng Yu’s installation. Indeed, the work that drew the
most fire, the one that caused a genuine scandal, horrifying visitors
before going on to tour the world, was the performance “Eating
People” by Zhu Yu. Documented on video, it presented an act
of cannibalism involving a boiled human fetus. The authorities promptly
redrew the general laws on pornography and xingwei yishu,
or nudity and the use of the boy as a vehicle for performance art.
In reality, the phrasing of these laws is extremely ambiguous;
the guidelines and general principles can be interpreted as having
meanings that are diametrically opposed. The vagueness of the rules
and the potentially antithetical interpretations constitute factors
that still create situations of great confusion and uncertainty
at the present time: anything goes, in theory; the human body can
be represented for artistic purposes, as long as the work is neither
pornographic nor offensive. The terms of the debate are all rather
vague, too; indeed, even the meaning of the word “art”
is not at all clear. The question inevitably arises: what are the
boundaries?
The other events I presented on the occasion of the Turin fair
are the three latest exhibitions without government backing organized
by the group of artists led by Xu Zhen, Yang Zhenzhong, and Alexander
Brandt, all three of whom still collaborate closely with BizArt.
The first was entitled Fan Mingzhen and Fan Mingzhu (2002),
after a pair of Chinese twins who greeted visitors at the two entrances
to the exhibition. This was divided into two parts: two matching
exhibitions covering an area of roughly 2,000 square meters; in
both spaces the artists exhibited the same works with very minor
variations such as, for example, an alternative ending for a video,
different proportions for an object, or the slight modification
of a performance. Every visitor could thus choose which part of
the exhibition to start with.
And to make the situation even more absurd, destabilizing, and paradoxical,
Xu Zhen created a performance entitled “March 6th”:
he invited a hundred farmers, factory workers, and jobless individuals,
and then a hundred university students, all wearing striped pajamas,
to stand by the exhibition’s two entrances. For every visitor
who crossed into the exhibition space, one of the figures in pajamas
– on one side a farmer/factory worker and on the other a student
– would leave his or her group and follow the visitor throughout
the show, a full two meters behind, and neither speak nor interact,
with the visitor, who could only shake the “shadow”
off when it was time to go into the rooms holding the video installations.
In this case the “shadow” would wait at the entrance
to the room. It isn’t hard to imagine exactly how surreal
and, at the same time, how very amusing this experience was.
2004 was the year of 62761232, an exhibition introduced
by a long subtitle: “62761232 is the telephone number for
a courier in Shanghai. From September 10th to September 20th, from
10 am to 10 pm, no matter where you are in the city, you will be
able to have an exhibition brought in front of you.” A “portable”
show, in a word, which saw the participation of forty artists, among
them Xu Zhen, Yang Zhenzhong, and Kan Xuan (I myself took part,
under my Chinese name Le Dadou), as well as many others, like the
thirteen messengers who worked for a local messenger service, equipped
with bicycles and scooters. And preparing these young messengers
was the most interesting part of this exhibition/performance piece:
for months they were taught how to do a performance, explain a conceptual
work, and exhibit and comment on contemporary artworks for the benefit
of their future audiences. The messenger who delivered his or her
exhibition package thus took on the role of guide to the event.
The artworks were delivered in a random order: a sack containing
the numbers corresponding to the forty works on display was given
to the “customer-visitor, “whose exploration of the
exhibition thus unfolded randomly as well, and somewhat ritualistically.
The 2006 Solo Exhibition was very likely the most ambitious one
that this group of artists has arranged in the last few years (even
if the circumstances turned it into more of a happening). The event
was made possible with the technical and logistic support of BizArt,
the Dolan Museum, and the Zendai MoMA. It was actually a combination
of 38 solo shows by as many artists, each one curated utterly independently
of the others, which, of course, made for a total of 38 catalogues,
38 invitations, 38 press kits, and 38 different and separate spaces
clustered in a former industrial facility that had just been remodeled.
The exhibition covered an area of roughly three thousand square
meters. Approximately eighty people contributed to the making of
the event, including the artists; BizArt, Zendai MoMA, and the Dolan
Museum collaborators; and students. Each artist was in charge of
his or her “solo exhibition,” from the form and content
to the design of the invitation and the catalogue. And perhaps as
a result of the long “silence” imposed by the censorship
that prevailed from 2000 to 2006, the critical content of several
of the works on display was quite direct, and at times their visual
impact was rather disturbing. The young Zhang Ding, for example,
presented a photographic study of pornography in China; He An designed
an installation about rape. The works were labeled as “unstable”
by the authorities, and in the presence of over a thousand visitors,
the exhibition was closed down by cutting off the electricity just
ten minutes after it opened. News of this was not made public. On
the one hand, the local press was silenced; on the other, we ourselves
chose not to enlist the international press, considering that by
working in China, and intending to work in China in the future as
well, we had to play by the rules and accept all the consequences
of breaking them. We undertook multiple negotiations with the authorities
to try to rebuild our relationship with them. As soon as the exhibition
was shut down, the three organizations behind the event were indicted,
and a number of the artists had to make themselves scarce for weeks.
Some of them went away, others faced the local authorities, and
still more were forced into hiding.
After working in China for ten years, this experience was acutely
frustrating and depressing. It was hard to accept a reality so bleak
– and so completely different from the image of the modern,
international Shanghai that the West like to believe in, and the
local authorities do everything to promote, in order to sell the
idea of a city that can offer its residents a better life –
the slogan “Better City, Better Life,” created for the
World’s Fair to be held in 2010, epitomizes this policy. Needless
to say, the reality is quite different and far more complex for
those who live in Shanghai and work in the contemporary art field.
One point that I feel needs to be clarified is that open clashes
with the establishment have not always been the rule in the experience
of BizArt or other non-institutional organizations, groups of artists,
and independent curators in China when arranging their various activities,
projects, and exhibitions. Since working with the local governments
entails dealing with individuals who, for the most part, know very
little about art, negotiating with them is thus a matter of pure
dialectics, whereby the form and content of a work are broken down
and analyzed in the most elementary fashion, to the point of even
distorting the artist’s original intention on occasion, in
order to create a simple, direct message that will distract the
“censor’s” attention. Admittedly, this has not
always proved to be a winning strategy. Indeed, over the years I’ve
become convinced that the problem with censorship is (almost) never
the art in itself, rather – as one of the “censors”
explained to me one day – the fact that those in positions
in power fear that the so-called “unstable” exhibitions
could engender situations that could put their positions and their
privileges at risk.
Censorship, therefore, is not set in motion at the creation of
an artwork, but only when it is exhibited to the public: when the
public becomes aware of its existence, and when it is documented
in catalogues and the press. Of course, everything is relative:
when you live and work in a place where a democratic system is absent,
a place where the media has to answer to government “watchdogs,”
you still need to find a way to conduct business in spite of these
conditions. That said, in defense of China and its government, I
must say that the attitude of the authorities has always been supportive
of our activities, albeit tacitly. For example, in talks with representatives
of the local authorities, I learned that BizArt’s activity
was followed with great interest, and the international role of
this organization, however misunderstood, was appreciated by the
government precisely because it contributed to the image of a modern
and cosmopolitan Shanghai that the establishment was eager to spread,
recalling as it did the glory days of the city in the twenties and
thirties.
The fragile equilibrium between government control and cultural
development on an international scale has effectively allowed BizArt
and other independent or semi-independent organizations –
such as the Shanghai Gallery, Eastlink Gallery, and more recently
the Shanghai Gallery of Art, Aura Gallery, DDM Warehouse, Suzhou
Creek Warehouse, Dolan Museum, Zendai MoMA, and MoCa-Shanghai; and
other independent curators like Li Xu, Zhao Chuan, Zhang Xian, Gu
Zhenqing, and Karen Hung (to name just a few) – to promote
an exceptional artistic dynamism for roughly a decade.
The current political situation in Shanghai:
what does the future hold?
“At least somebody cares.”
from a conversation between Lothar Spree and Zhu Xiaowen
As the years go by, the political future of China seems more and
more of an enigma to me. What I feel I can try to analyze is what
I see around me in Shanghai. Over the last year the administration
has been reshuffled several times: there have been three mayors
in just a few months, and the leader of the local Communist Party,
Chen Liangyu, was arrested for corruption and misappropriation of
public funds (specifically pension funds). This state of affairs,
rooted in the past regime of Jiang Zemin and thus the old power
system prior to Hu Jintao, formed the backdrop to the most recent
summit of the Central Communist Party. One significant effect of
similar political situations, which are indeed “unstable,”
by my definition, is the direct impact they have on controversial
cultural activities, to the point of clamping down on them altogether.
What was the real reason for shutting down the Solo Exhibition
show? In my analysis, the collaboration between BizArt, the Dolan
Museum, and Zendai MoMA constituted an unusual precedent, hence
a destabilizing one. The exhibition was co-produced, in fact, by
BizArt, an independent organization; the Dolan Museum, a state institution;
and Zendai MoMA, a private museum owned by an influential real estate
agent in Shanghai. It follows that an exhibition of this kind presented
all kinds of structural difficulties as to who exactly was to make
decisions concerning the line to adopt. In a Confucian system that
is highly hierarchical, like the Chinese one, if the lowest government
level (in this case, the government office in charge of cultural
affairs for the district) was unable to take precautions, the problem
would necessarily climb a few rungs to higher levels, where it would
become exponentially more critical and more dangerous. This is precisely
what happened in a climate of extreme tension in the summer of 2006,
when the rapid turnover of short-lived majors and the numerous dismissals
of corrupt politicians were in full swing, creating an alienating
immobility, both political and cultural.
One of the most recent initiatives to be presented in Shanghai,
in the autumn of last year, was called eART, a new media
art event held in public places, galleries, and museums. Conceived
and organized by Victoria Lu, an independent curator affiliated
with MoCA Shanghai, and sponsored by the government, the success
of the event with the critics and public was circumscribed: on the
one hand there were organizational problems, on the other there
was a general apprehension that effectively dampened the event’s
impact in the wake of restrictions applied to artworks by local
and international artists.
Today, despite the tensions generated by the economic boom, in
many areas the atmosphere remains essentially optimistic and open
to exploring all the options; above all, the current political system
is neither fragile nor its reasoning unsound. Personally, I harbour
an extravagant, perverse admiration for the Chinese government’s
ability to manage not only its domestic policies but also its international
relations. It may well seem that the central authority supports
and reinforces the postmodern idea of a globalizing economic dictatorship,
the so-called “socialist path” to capitalism which –
granted the obvious distinctions, yet a troubling analogy nevertheless
– reflects what is occurring in the contemporary artworld
system in China as well. The stellar prices for Chinese art, or
more precisely, for a limited number of works and artists that the
top auction houses like Sotheby’s or Christie’s (to
mention just the most famous ones) are promoting, operate on the
same principle: commercialize the art to the point of creating a
system for art production that is closer to the culture industry
and luxury entertainment field, which turns art into a financial
investment rather than a fundamental ingredient for the artistic
and cultural evolution of China itself.
China and the art market
“To make it as a commercial artist, you have to be a
good businessperson as well, and not all artists are up to the challenge.”
from a conversation with Zhang Beili, Amsterdam, December 2007
Over the course of the last four years, the international art market
has swept into China, only to find a structural framework at the
local level that is still largely inadequate. As recently as four
or five years ago, many in the art business wrote the Chinese artists’
works off as provincial or déjà vu, of no real interest.
As soon as it dawned on one and all that Chinese artworks could
represent an easy investment, guaranteeing quick and substantial
profits, suddenly the sky was the limit: and soon works carrying
a Chinese signature, like those of Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, Zhang
Xiaogang, and Wang Guangyi (to name just of few of those who have
acquired name recognition in the West), went from fetching prices
in the tens of thousands of dollars to millions. The runaway success
of the “first generation” artists (sustained at the
time by respected critics such as Li Xianting and Gao Minglu) was
sudden, swift, and of vast proportions; indeed, this group inevitably
became a model for the generations that followed.
In fact, as Zhang Beili suggested during a recent conference, “contemporary”
art in China was essentially an invention of the nineteen-eighties,
when artists were seeking new expressive forms in opposition to,
or in any case as a response to, the Maoist conception of art, and
behind that the millenary tradition of “classic” Chinese
art. This was the reason artists started to utilize “imagined”
styles, more or less borrowed wholesale from the history of Western
art; the result was the rise of the “pop cynicism” that
spread to the West, the distinctiveness of its symbols linked to
images that the international public could immediately recognize
as “Chinese.” Its criticisms were directed at Maoist
themes and images. With the use of artistic styles initially developed
outside the ambit of Chinese aesthetics, the artists’ original
intentions got lost: the critical spirit inherent in the artistic
endeavor was transformed into a merely symbolic attribute that the
international art-going public could label as “typically Chinese.”
The canonization of these models occurred gradually over the course
of the nineties, with the Berlin exhibition entitled “Chinese
Contemporary Art,” the Venice Biennale from 1993 on; and the
most recent show, “Majiong,” organized by Berne’s
Kunstmuseum in 2006.
The consequences of this approach are there for all to see. Abroad,
above all, the artists belonging to the “canon” have
become the gold standard for young artists and students. The message
is loud and clear: learn to paint and create artworks to sell. This
is the career path that the academies and the various courses in
design, architecture, and fashion advise. The same is obviously
true of the visual arts: with the exception of a few enlightened
teachers, the programs with the educational institutions’
seal of approval are the ones designed to maximize earnings. There
is no formal invitation to seek to understand, learn, and investigate,
in order to create works that have a certain intellectual depth;
the main incentive seems to be making a quick buck, with not the
faintest idea of investing in cultural practices long-term.
Let me stress that there is nothing wrong with earning money from
one’s art, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the
creative process and the coherent development of the artistic practice.
That said, fortunately enough there are organizations that operate
quite differently, such as the Art Academy of Hangzhou, whose New
Media Department has made a very far-sighted commitment to developing
channels that are not solely commercial, allowing students to invest
in complex artistic activities that even involve, on occasion, a
form of political engagement.
It is true that it is essentially private enterprises, scattered
across China, that make up this alternative trend: organizations
and individuals who have worked in China for years, investing time
and energy in understanding the way things work, and at the same
time seeking to improve the quality of the artistic output, whether
in the visual, performance, or musical arts. These players represent
the alternative to the mainstream: the curator, collector, gallery
owner or cultural institution that comes to China (and not only
China?) to go on virtual shopping sprees, scooping up ideas, works,
and artists themselves for export, and creating, as in the past,
a fictional China, magic and diabolical, when not merely a projection
of a China that is grossly oversimplified and lamentably inaccurate.
40+4 Art is not enough, not enough!
This long introduction brings me to the heart of the project being
presented at the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina. Where
to find answers that redefine and reposition art and its meaning?
What, indeed, is the role of art in the context of an alienating
globalization? How to restore a sense of intellectual integrity
to the approach to art, even in its commercial connotations and
its relationship with power? What is the artist’s place in
all of this? In the commercialization of art taken to the extremes,
in which art is first and foremost an investment, and an ideal as
an afterthought, is there still room for “revolutionary”
expression? What is the meaning of an artist’s activity? Is
it possible to envision art associated with a long-term planning
and committed to producing ideas, and not just objects?
Again, is art just the umpteenth product of a specific era or society,
to be exhibited in the museums of the future as representing a particular
moment in political or social history? Am I alone in asking these
questions and weighing their implications, or do others feel this
dissatisfaction and alienation as well: artists, curators, and gallery
owners? Finally, are these problems specific to China, or more generally,
do they characterize the global artworld system today?
In my ideal view of things, my uneasiness over these many questions
could only be dispelled by a real dialogue with the most important
actors in the artworld system: the artists themselves.
This was the reason why Lothar Spree, Zhu Xiaowen, Xu Jie and I
decided in early 2007 to adopt an almost sociological approach and
undertake research to discover whether this unease was deep-rooted
in or shared by Shanghai artists. We often hear about the art “system,”
but the basic building block of this scheme is its core, that is
to say, what the artist creates: in a word, art. And so, together
with Lothar Spree, Zhu Xiaowen, and Xu Jie – the last of whom
in the role of professional interviewer – we tried to probe
the relationship between the artists, their work, and the evolution
of contemporary art in Shanghai over the last two decades, by interviewing
a carefully selected group of artists. The numbers we chose were
forty and four: forty artists and the four people involved in the
research project, for a total of forty-four, the number which, in
Chinese, sounds like the translation of “double death, “
which recalls a quite common tongue twister in the language . Indeed,
all the connotations of the number forty-four seemed to us to be
ironically appropriate for defining the heart and soul of our project.
The forty artists we selected all have very different backgrounds,
ranging from traditional art and painting and new media art. A number
of them are museum directors, others are teachers. Yet although
our selection was subjective, we believe we have succeeded in presenting
a cross section of the art scene in Shanghai.
All artists were asked the same questions, each of which was printed
on a flashcard, and there were twenty-seven cards in all, divided
into four colors, along with a set bearing famous quotations about
art made by historical figures. The interview got underway with
four general and autobiographical questions about the artist (grey
cards), and moved on to questions that were philosophical or psychological
(blue cards), followed by questions that were of a political or
sociological nature (green cards), and winding up with questions
about art as a product (red cards). The conversation ended with
the artist choosing one last card from the pack containing dozens
of quotations (light green cards) by various personalities, concerning
the meaning of art. The artist was asked to comment on the card
he or she had drawn out loud, and propose a personalized version
of the quote if he or she so desired. The interview/conversation
lasted an average of 30 to 45 minutes, and occasionally a whole
hour.
Thanks to a painstaking editing process, a composition has been
created for four synchronized screens, across which the image flicker
at a hypnotic pace that perfectly reflects the view of the contemporary
art and culture scene in Shanghai: its fragmentation and continuous
becoming. By way of this “forced” conversation, the
artists’ narratives attempt an analysis of the history of
contemporary art from the nineteen-eighties to the present, as they
reflect on the condition of the urban artist, the ties existing
between contemporary Chinese art and its past, as well as in relations
to the world history of art; and the art market and the state of
art criticism in China. By means of a presentation designed to unfold
on four screens, the film’s narrative presents not only the
individual artists, but also the collective point of view of the
forty subjects interviewed: a vision of artistic Shanghai that isn’t
“me, myself, and I.”
The wealth of recorded material produced two versions, one in Chinese
and one in English, the transcripts of which will soon be available
on the Internet. The texts have been submitted to a number of local
as well as international art critics, who were asked to write a
commentary and critical appraisal for a publication scheduled for
2008, to serve as the critical apparatus for the installation itself.
One preliminary general statement we can make, evinced by the material
we gathered, is that the “case of Shanghai” is far from
unique; on the contrary, it represents what is occurring in the
rest of the world as well: the fracture between the artist, his
or her art, and the artworld system. This is the very situation
Stephen Wright so aptly illustrates in his introduction to the project:
“Like its skyline, Shanghai’s artscape is changing
at a mind-boggling pace. It is no longer adequate to speak of the
city’s ‘artworld’; rather one must recognize its
plural and overlapping systems, communities, times and places of
art making. How is the status of the artist changing in this landscape?
As the ‘creative industries’ encroach on the former
territory of art production, how have artists coped with the shift
in their activity? How has it impacted on their self-understanding
and on their relationships with other artworld actors including
dealers, critics and curators? […]
At the core of this research project is a series of videotaped interviews
by Davide Quadrio and Lothar Spree, in co-operation with Zhu Xiaowen
and Xu Jie, with some forty Shanghai-based artists, dealing not
with artwork per se, but rather with how artists themselves perceive
their activity, their role and position in a changing, post-conventional
society. This project seeks to ‘map out’ some of the
contours of the city’s artistic imagination, providing a cartography
of the force fields of its subjectivities. And above and beyond
an unsparingly critical, and at times partisan analysis of artists
imaginaries, it provides a heuristic focus on the urban subjectivities
of one of the contemporary world’s most intense urban experiences
– Shanghai.
The interviewees come from a wide variety of backgrounds, practices
and traditions; their outlooks reflect a commensurately broad range
of values, both implicit and explicit, and expectations with regard
to art, art-making, critical commentary and spectatorship. Their
answers, as revealing in what they take for granted as in what they
assert, depict a landscape of overlapping artworlds, each with its
own set of assumptions and economies of recognition.
[…]One of the lines of friction in these overlapping artworlds
opposes the vernacular (practices profoundly grounded in their context)
and the global (world art, everywhere at home, and nowhere more
so than in the white cube). How can this now sterile opposition
be overcome? Is there something ultimately impenetrably specific
to a culture – and the art practices that comprise it –
such that it can be grasped only by those born into it? […]
While avoiding the pitfalls of universalism, is there any point
overstating cultural specificity’ Very probably, the paradigm
shift underway in the symbolic economy of the artworld mirrors a
comparable though vastly amplified ongoing transition in the general
economy. Not surprisingly, many artists appear disinclined to embrace
a new paradigm, preferring to ‘patch up’ a still viable
though more conventional model. Others seem more inclined to renounce
an object-based practice in favor of a more discourse-based or community-based
orientations […]
On the surface, the Shanghai art scene appears vibrant: the economy
is hot, and demand continues to outstrip supply. But beneath the
seamless surface of bonheur and excitement, is there not
a latent discontent – that is, an often only obliquely articulated
frustration and disorientation with current norms and values?”
What this lengthy excerpt seems to suggest is that this “latent
discontent” is not necessarily the exclusive prerogative of
the Chinese art scene.
I have often been invited to take part in conferences and seminars
on the subject of China, in Europe and Asia as well; these experiences
have been enlightening, especially for the sense of “displacement”
they provoke. Over the course of my career, and perhaps as a result
of a feeling of inadequacy partially derived from the Eurocentric
view of the world, my impression of the artworld system in the West
is that it is bursting with professionalism, freedom of action,
money, and power. Examining the European art and government institutions
directly, I soon became aware of the existence of certain mechanisms
that I didn’t understand, or that took me by surprise –
ones that, variations on a theme, are actually quite similar to
those I have described in these images from the evolving art scene
in Shanghai over the last ten years. In conversations with Italian
artists and journalists it has come out that, sadly enough, a sort
of self-imposed censorship exists and is endured in Italy, as well;
in talking with friends and students, the impression that I get
is their broadly-shared sense of powerlessness, a lack of “daring”
caused by cultural immobility and a system of state support for
the arts that suffers from gangrene. That defense mechanism by which
an artist thinks “even if I try, it’s not going to happen,
and if it does happen, it won’t be the way I want,”
is widely shared, to an alarming degree, and as Stephen Wright has
so skillfully shown, it is absolutely alienating.
Independence and the use of the system
I would like to conclude by highlighting certain aspects of the
current situation in China as they relate to the new globalization
of the artworld system. In the last five years interest has grown
exponentially, and opportunities for making contemporary art in
China have proliferated, attracting a series of international players
of Asian or Chinese origin (from Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea,
or continental China). These figures – critics, curators,
artists, and collectors – have shaken the Chinese system to
its foundations, working a middle ground between the international
networks and the local institutions, and clouding the perception
of Chinese cultural mechanisms. They intervene directly in the system,
and the local institutions view them as part of the international
Chinese community. Curators, academics, gallery owners, artist,
and consultants who populate the museums, art festivals and biennials,
they give the impression that a certain degree of government openness
to the arts is a given.
The series of Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibitions
(those organized by Tsinghua University and held in 2004, 2005,
and 2006) or the eART Festival in Shanghai that debuted
in 2007, to name just two events, are part of this system. They
are events which seem to satisfy all the criteria for openness,
at a superficial glance, but in reality, if you analyze how these
festivals were actually put together, you soon discover formidable
control mechanisms at work. The Chinese government’s policy
of supporting the new media and the creative industry has generated
a conception of the relationship between art and technology as entertainment;
in which the two join forces to create the spectacle. These festivals
showcase works that are about design as much as art, practically
manga with a content that in most cases is deemed to be
“safe,” requiring a minimum of analysis, and critical,
if at all, to a very minor degree. The curators, many of whom are
Chinese or “seem” to be Chinese (meaning ethnically
Chinese, but brought up abroad), bring to bear not only their own
experience on the event but an entire international artworld system,
and convey the message of an “up-and-coming” China where
anything can happen in an exciting, brand-new, futuristic landscape.
Indeed, they are the perfect go-betweens for a government working
on a grand scale, and if the content is international, attractive
to the eye, simple to understand, and can bring a bit of glamour
to China, so much the better. Obviously, the international art institutions
are every bit as eager to come to China and open all imaginable
channels to this new world so rich in cultural opportunities. Cultural
and – above all – economic, that is.
“The dichotomy between China and the rest of the world by
miming the rest of the world and adding a so-called ‘Chinese’
value to that. This fluctuating relationship was and still is part
of the displaying-of-art game: content, aesthetics and standards
on display are justified based on the ‘Chineseness’
of it. What is condescending indulgence towards exhibitions in China
(and not only), a sort of justification that responds – from
the Chinese side—maybe to a sort of uneasiness, inadequacy
and nationalism and from the “western” side to a mixture
of paternalism (touching sometimes the level of cultural imperialism)
and anxiety (defending the value and quality of the western implications
– cultural, economic, political—with China).”
The introduction to KIC, one of the venues for the Shanghai eArt
Festival (Urbanized Landscape) in 2008, is thus in keeping
with the theme: “KIC was inspired by a combination of technological
innovation and entrepreneurial spirit found in the Silicon Valley
in the United States, and the cultural vibrancy of the left bank
of Paris”.
Seen from abroad, the Chinese art scene seems to operate according
to international standards and conventions; the reality, however,
is far more complex. China plays by its own rules, those of a system
that was isolated for decades; a system that now opens and shuts
for inscrutable reasons, which are extremely difficult to oppose
or else turn to the advantage of genuine artistic creations. Nonetheless,
if and when the rules are bent to benefit important projects, I
am hopeful that they will produce an unprecedented results that
will have an astonishingly liberating effect on the system. China
as a workshop for new solutions and future rewards? The question
is, is China still in time, though, to evolve in this direction? |