Subversive Strategies in Chinese Avant-Garde Art

>The following review of an underground exhibition held alongside the Shanghai Biennale 2000 appeared in the July 2001 issue of Art in America. Socialist realism, which was still acknowledged in the modern portion of the Guggenheim Museum's “China, 5,000 Years” exhibition in 1998, has vanished without a trace …[China] essentially skipped the stage of modernist formalism, moving in two Great Leaps, so to speak, from traditional ink painting to Socialist Realism to postmodern eclecticism … The urge for practitioners to “catch up” with the West and to stand out from the overwhelming competition leads many to a strategy of shock. If one “Fuck Off” artist uses a dead baby (Sun Yuan in Honey, 1999, or Zhu Yu in Eating People, 2000), the next, it seems, must use two (Peng Yu [and Sun Yuan] in Link of the Body). After decades of censorship, China's young talents now seem obsessed with testing the limits of tolerance: How much provocation will the government permit? When will viewers begin to react with physical disgust or moral outrage?… These “progressives” are remarkably like avant‐garde artists everywhere … Nothing is more uniform, it seems, than art‐world nonconformity.1 It is true that nonconformity is a mark of the avant‐garde, but it can be argued, pace this review, that to read the work of Chinese nonconforming artists at the turn of the twenty‐first century as doing nothing but testing the limits of tolerance is to do the art an injustice and to deprive oneself of a lesson on the possible functions of and, hence, the nature of art. The evidence for this can be found by looking at the art of the Chinese avant‐garde as a series of subversions of the claims of certain beliefs to be true. The first subversion is of the presumption that a communist government with a capitalist economy can carve out a social space in which people can be themselves; the second, that the discourses in place in China are interpretable; and the third, that Western conceptions of art, supposing as they do a chasm between art and nature raw, can be adequate to China at the turn of the new century. This way of looking raises the question of whether there are concepts specific to a non‐Western aesthetics that have been omitted or marginalized in the West and would, were they to enter its critical discourse, enrich specific concepts in Western aesthetics and philosophies of art. More precisely, the question is whether there are traits or concepts present in the one art and absent from the other that are so deeply entrenched as not to be able to leave their context in order to enter the critical discourse of the West. An answer to this requires the separation out of the distinctly non‐Western and the transposition of what is separated out to Western criticism. In the fast‐moving history of post‐Cultural Revolution art in China there was a further forward leap from traditional ink painting to postmodern eclecticism not mentioned in the review in Art in America: from Socialist Realism to Political Pop, whose style, though not its content, was indebted to the art of the 1960s in the West. Political Pop performed the first of the three subversions through which the course of recent Chinese art can be charted. One reason to see the art as subversion is to discover what in it is global and what local. “Global” is here taken to apply to those activities or genres that can shake free of their native soil and be transported to almost anywhere, practices such as the manufacture of clothes for American companies and the analysis of radiological scans from American hospitals that have moved to China and to India, respectively, and genres such as the installations and performance art that have journeyed from New York to Beijing. A difference between the economic and aesthetic cases leads to a distinction between the global and the local: something is global when it is unmarked by its travels and local when it bears the imprint of the place to which it has traveled. For example, the “Made in China” tag is the only evidence that many articles of clothing designed and sold by American companies are not of American manufacture. The clothing could have been made anywhere, and aside from the tag there is no sign of its having come from China. The installations and performance art made by artists of the Chinese avant‐garde, however, are marked by the Chinese present and past, and their origin in the West pales in the face of their Chinese‐ness. The imported genres themselves can become so familiar as to lose their “outsider‐ness” and come to be thought of as local or homegrown. China did skip the modernist formalism that reigned in the West throughout the period bracketed by the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. An art conceived as significant form, an art whose content was excoriated for distracting the viewer from the plastic values whose creation is art's purpose, is a luxury Chinese artists cannot afford. The formalist creates forms free of content, message, or meaning of any sort, forms the mere perception of which pleases. Chinese avant‐garde artists, on the other hand, perform ritualistic erasures of systems of intelligibility like language and art. In this activity lies the second subversion. It is performed for at least two different sorts of reasons. One is skepticism or cynicism or despair about, finally, the intelligibility of extant languages and arts. The other is the performance of an intellectual exercise: to find out how much content or meaning one can take away and still have anything that does more than merely please. The exercise includes an experiment in imagination: should the erasures succeed and the world be reduced to nothing but empty forms, would the artist's presence, his or her body and its gestures, be enough to remake the world? The answer from China today is yes. Part of what is distinctive about the work of the Chinese avant‐garde is its subject matter and, most important, the attitude the artist takes toward it. The subject matter of the most recent art is precisely the means through which the avant‐garde performs its third subversion. The distinctiveness, the “otherness,” led the U.K.'s International Trade Commission to find a television program to contain material that constituted an offense against good taste and decency, an offense to public feeling.2 Forty‐two viewers had objected to two pieces of performance art shown on a Channel 4 broadcast of Beijing Swings on January 2, 2003 at 11:05 p.m. One was Zhu Yu's Eating People, which contained a photograph of the artist eating the body of a dead baby, and the other was Peng Yu and Sun Yuan's Link of the Body, in which “the dead bodies of a pair of Siamese twins were smeared with the artists' blood.”3 The fact that Link of the Body was found to offend good taste and decency in Britain and yet won for its artists the 2002 young artist prize in the Contemporary Chinese Art Awards highlights one difference between the global and the local, the regional, the native, what cannot be exported or “shaken off.”4Link of the Body is weakly global in its genre because performance art originated in the West, but the attitudes, ideas, and impulses it expresses are local. Although a British commission found the broadcast of pictures of the work to offend public decency, the Chinese government apparently did not: it did not interfere with the underground exhibition alternate to the Shanghai Biennale 2000 that included Link of the Body. This leads to the thought that the avant‐garde in the twenty‐first century is speaking to something distinctively Chinese and that global this art for its its but only so as the toward the subject matter do not offend their local of what is the in of be The Chinese are through the their of the of the that the second of the century. the Chinese of the series of that the of the and its to about a the of when they in the in in The government and the of the communist government and its capitalist economy still the The people have to come to not only with the between the of the of the and the of the but with the from of any with the to his to This takes place against the of the China” that made to it an art that is in a world that has in its decades the of in the and the and the and an art whose is in and whose to the and of the West was between the of in China in 1949 and the to the West in the is the art of China. it to be in the of what is no its in the the of the of a people and the of the of art One specific Chinese is the its art in the of what can in China be thought and and This is the of an The aesthetic avant‐garde has been the of the West, but its have moved The to the question of whether and how much this avant‐garde is by by its and its recent The question is whether and how what out as distinctly Chinese can in the of the global of Western and performance art in the work of Chinese artists, but they are from the West. for this is the of two with no in the West, by in New Chinese One is the of the to the social by the of and by as having been by social as their and their of the of social space in the People's Republic of China through the was its which the Cultural Revolution to further by to the between and its the space is no The other specific to the new art is the to the languages that and and their languages have are more though not to the of “the languages of and the of are from a and not from a nature in and The includes dead and of however, something in the art that at a that of and what the one the of good taste or decency and for first at one to be found in New Chinese to the social by Chinese of It is the material for the first subversion that the of the Cultural Revolution and appeared as a local of Pop in for example, made a series of installations in made one in which the and of a were with communist from the of in a the of the of a Chinese in the of the were with were and the was with the were out one can no not or the of The is a for a and the of the is that no can be made of the of a of communist and capitalist When the is as a for the the is that its languages and the they cannot meaning because there are no through which they can be read the in the artist not to be the in the of art and is an of Nothing can from it seems, can a a that can be for in its January that was only two that an work by a Chinese artist the and on The New York that in China's from than in 2000 to about in The of the Chinese art requires its artists to become they are to as a This is what they have the history of the of the of the that will is the through which the of the are is not what but what more of the two In the of the of New Chinese overwhelming of the with as or and as and apparently the between and Political from the Cultural Revolution Pop Art in a series of by one of Great the of three by with the the and of the second and third can be The first a and three one whose lies the second in the and whose to be the of a If the first is the second, the one by the is and and The and the on and on the are with of The of the two the and the of China's most to the of and Western to is to its the beliefs and Great on of the New Great is nothing more than an of and can cannot people but not like to an that artists not to be in the of art, and it is with this to not to be in the of that is to their do not issue in does language have the it is at issue is the of and Great that the discourses of can a of in a that that and its not is what The subversion of leads to a of language and to the second subversion performed by art. The second found to be specific to Chinese art, the of the to from the the of the to the social that the in the that the two languages one cannot be and Great that this is because the of the only possible of the and the are can Chinese enter the It and its art are reduced to nothing when made to space with the modern art of and America. This is the of of Chinese and of in a for by The work is the of from having the two in a for two the two had been from their Chinese and Western and made to the meaning of was In the that the material of as as its is are that in out the of through their art precisely the of the by the of their social The of the language or his or her to and the language cannot find or in it. The of artists has been to perform and that not only the of meaning by content, but what is and the performance of to is to do physical to is to use and because there can be no to with requires able to use to and to to and to of performance art in can be read to that in China no to at the of the it lies in a can they can and at their and on their One work is the One by in which the artist does what any of must do and and a The difference of exercise is that the one of which an do is to do no more than to the in the hand, and In the of the did the of that is by language with use of a in a the in the of his and as use of a further it in the the One of the artist's activity a for one and one of The is its language is language in and for in a its use is more or as the at a certain in the The artist's and performance of language with the that had been The of the artist's activity is to language to be because one cannot read through it and because one cannot read between its It finally, that language the world and that is in and one cannot read the world through the of the that it. The it would is The second work is on a performance by in the the of the artist in a and, his a with the for and it the is no of and no matter what it can with or imprint on The in One cannot be read and the for in on cannot be The artist is the by it. what is it to The of or are In is at its The of the of the other of of that language is about, does however, that the is the world is absent precisely because is through with the language by which the is so it the of the New in Chinese art, which the of art, his from the in the in Beijing. did it its viewers with the are of the on for to from the are and of in the of and on the are in the traditional Chinese from which the were in the of the and of the was and the the the and the but of the were The viewer is in that cannot be in of from the and from at the of of the The in One and on are not in from the is not Chinese in his and by is the for by his to it. the work of lies in the doing of the almost three of in It is a a It was like a the was more than the of New Chinese The the the is like a a body what to and so in exercise and the performance of a does the from in this from the bears to and to be and This does not come from to which art or from the artist's to it the from the The of at its leads to the thought of art at its to the third and to to of social and their and and in a nature and is what is avant‐garde Chinese artists when the world to be It is the that is has the social and that have to their of and their claims by the art of the A from the The in a for the exhibition and In the is a with and pictures on the a the of the and its whose is that that their they come in the is the of the The of their and The Chinese have for more than and is an of China. China is present in the and so is the modern West, in the of art. is this exhibition of the of a in a of moving from an exhibition of to that of with an in which from and when by an These they do not the that are their In two of are and in they is and but in the they with other and their This is the space by in which the do what they of that of the of in the In New York made for the like China and now in New The New York that has been by the for the transported of to a New York art it is no of transported of to an art but nature by and, it. to as the the soil and it with The was in one in the exhibition in which a was on the and in an were by to the which the were The difference between the two installations of on the one hand, and the of and on the is that the were and the in the by and were The were they were in an art of they to their one made the other and was in China and is as much an of China as is has it in his from of made of and on to the to the Great of China by in which of were to a on the at the of the Great the was to a series of the the artist that “the of will a of that will the Great which has been for of it did so by the Great is one of and is the of of the two that New on the of the a of from the and with it made an in a in the and of the the of out two of a When the the were and the appeared in the there is nothing from the does the The work won the first an prize in for work in the exhibition in the of and any could have been without the of the of which they were a but the of the of the to out the could have been different without the so are in the world to which they not by or but by it The on the stage of the social and the has been question by two of the subversions performed in the the of the Cultural the stage with is the the the The so as of the third subversion have or on the one hand, and that and from on the matter in the one and matter and in the The subject of the two to be is the The body is not matter it is matter made made of of of its and, for the Chinese and many an artist of the avant‐garde, matter made of its with the are essentially different from the of creation because they are by the of to than to with This difference from the West is in two Link of the Body is a performance in which the dead bodies of twins are to two artists by through which the of the the body of one is with in Link of the Body. The most is the between the the of in their there is the between the artists by of their to the twins by a of a as are with their by The artists the twins are a and a as they would have to be were they the The most moving in the performance is the one between and dead It to an of not the of a is than in of an answer Peng Yu in an in whether her as her his come from a Peng it from her of the of a the of a is like an shock. had a … a of … When her not what of but it was like could from a body in an that the second a is or when a this is so for that of in it to something or to something and to use do this of in this can the of was is about something that what in the a is or The of body to at the between the bodies of and is and the a the body matter no but matter that will as to be a body as it it it is a The of Link of the Body lies in the artists' of the dead bodies with their it as though to the bodies or to to face the of to face the difference between and to face what cannot and so can only If this of Link of the Body has government physical disgust moral is an at a of a work whose is and the the body is and the It is a series of by made from to In photograph is the of the specific to it with a that the artist's The of the different as are the of the are those of and in traditional but of the the face of a they the artist's from and for the is a in its on the An on a stand about of the of the and three and the are the of the of the artist and her to the of the most of her The the and highlights on the stand are a the are the is The is and for the by of the Chinese Art The of with is when pictures a between and The of and highlights the of to the of nature and, hence, to as out in an with her one of the Contemporary Chinese Art Awards in traditional Chinese there is the of in with the work still takes its by this that people see this work in a public it the work the of such The of come from the traditional … and … are through the of and can new In her in the clothes of and like the in The artist is the of her as a subject as of art as and in their and their the their subject in the way traditional Chinese thought the and Peng are young one in the other in have made art that from a with and on the limits of and and the is matter made of the of and of and, for two artists, made of in does this come The that they are that no different in from the of One of this is that is not as something that has and is not as or the are as an of the of and is that the artists with the they use for the third as one that have and not of the of her is an of the of of its and its of the subject of that found by the subject and could not it out of it was and enough for to what to … this subject for not and are what Peng The to in her work the that could from a body in an is and to and and dead and here is a one to the by the of and and to the of and by the When are of that is for language to do is to through the to speak, to to to read the that with at the of activities are language at its is at when the of the and are performed for their as the of a and speaking is at when one a in a language whose one can read but not The of meaning from the of an world or her with the material of the which includes the body and its that in China no to at the of the it lies at a can they can and at their and on their is out as the body of the avant‐garde artist is what is the of a people and the of art The material in the artists' third strategy a on the between and material The toward the taken by artists of the avant‐garde viewers to themselves to a discourse in their the artists work at a that of discourse, at the of matter that the body with its and such material as to a with its viewers about they are as Chinese and and what their