CHINA MAKES ITS MARK
By Jack Fischer
Mercury News
China's emergence on the world stage usually is discussed in economic terms -- it is underwriting America's deficit, after all -- but as the sleeping giant awakes, its contemporary artists want a place at the international table, too.
``On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West,'' now at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, finds a dozen of China's most highly regarded contemporary artists making their cases with a frankness not typical in an international setting.
The exhibit, which continues through May 1, features a dozen native Chinese artists living both in China and abroad and working in a variety of mediums, from painting to performance art. Its diversity of invention should be a revelation to anyone who still thinks of Chinese art mostly in terms of antiquities, traditional brush painting and tentative imitations of the West.
Double disadvantage
Unlike their Western counterparts, these artists have labored under the double disadvantage of being marginalized by their government and then marginalized again in the international world of contemporary art which, despite growing pluralism, remains mostly in the hands of influential European and U.S. curators.
Their impatience for recognition is understandable when you realize that the many artists in ``On the Edge'' who were born in the 1950s lost a decade of their careers to the repression of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Tse-tung's purge of bourgeois ``elites'' that closed the art schools, among other disruptions.
But the show begs several complicated questions. Key among them: Is there anything intrinsically Chinese about contemporary Chinese art, or is it mostly the product of a global sensibility and artists who simply happen to have come from China?
As noted in essays in the catalog that accompanies the exhibit, some of these artists have objected to Western curators picking their work for its ``Chinese-ness,'' which they interpret as Westerners exoticizing them, as they've done for a century with non-Western art. The artists even have a term for compatriots who manipulate this predilection: They call it ``playing the China card,'' a deft appropriation from the world of Cold War politics.
If there is little to differentiate contemporary Chinese art from contemporary art elsewhere -- and virtually all of the art-making techniques here are the same as in the West -- then what is the basis for pleading inclusion in the international art circuit based on nationality?
The differences are small and growing smaller with every chat over the Internet and exchange of movies and television. But -- for the moment, anyway -- place still makes a difference. For all but the youngest artists in the Cantor show, that difference grows from the radically different experiences these artists have had during the past 20 years, as China swung from extreme isolation and radical egalitarianism to its embrace of the free market.
While much of the rest of the world was introduced to Pop Art, minimalism, the post-modern ironies of Jeff Koons and so on, many of these artists are of an age when heroic social realism was virtually the only acceptable art, making politics still inextricable from what they do. The loosening of government repression of artists that occurred in the 1990s has offered a chance to reflect on what they had to endure.
The Cantor show, guest-curated by Britta Erickson, a recently minted Stanford Ph.D. in art history and a leading scholar of contemporary Chinese art, tries to capture much of the foregoing by dividing the show into three parts: ``The West Through a Political Lens,'' ``Cultural Mélange'' and ``Joining the Game.''
In ``The West Through a Political Lens,'' Wang Du, who lives in Paris, combines the political with an insight into mass media in his sculpture ``Youth With Slingshot'' (2000). Wang appropriates images from the media, here a photograph of a boy shooting a slingshot at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing after the accidental NATO bombing in 1999 of the Chinese Embassy in the former Yugoslavia. But Wang, whose sculpture re-creates the distortion in the photograph by greatly enlarging the boy's fist and slingshot, is less interested in the incident than in how the media subtly but crucially distort events.
The meat man
Zhang Huan offers one of the exhibit's most visually compelling works with his video and photographs ``My New York'' (2002). Zhang, whose work focuses on pain and sensitivity in social groups, moved from Beijing to New York City in the 1990s.
Struck by the self-assuredness and strength that New Yorkers project, he crafted a suit made of slabs of beef that made him look like an excoriated superhero. Zhang walked through the city wearing the suit, releasing doves as he went. His point extends beyond New Yorkers to all Americans, suggesting, among other things, that they must be sensitive to their strength in the world and urging them to seek peace.
Hong Hao crafts maps distorted to reflect cultural and political realities, while other work in this section explores espionage between West and East and the use of China as a dumping ground for discarded computer components.
The ``Cultural Mélange'' section addresses the accelerated collision of cultures between the West and the Middle Kingdom. It's a point made most rudely, and hilariously, in Xu Bing's video ``A Case Study in Transference'' (1994).
Xu covered the skins of two pigs with text, one in nonsensical Chinese characters, the other in nonsensical Western text. Xu says he intended to explore the disjuncture between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. But when these pigs' thoughts turned to physical love, viewers saw a parable on the nature of relations between East and West.
Qiu Zhijie's interactive CD-ROM ``The West'' (2000), projected on a gallery wall and navigable by computer mouse, is as much a sociological exploration of Chinese myths and attitudes toward the West as it is an aesthetic experience.
The open-ended, non-linear presentation lets viewers see images and read interviews with contemporary Chinese men (and women) -- to explore attitudes and misconceptions. Not surprising for someone who has lived through China's many propaganda campaigns, Qiu also is interested in exploring the ways people's views are manipulated without their knowledge.
More poetic is Qiu's ``Grinding the Stele'' (2001). In this video, Qiu rubs the tombstone of a U.S. child who died in 1915 against another marking the death of someone who lived during the Qing Dynasty, which ruled for roughly 250 years ending in 1911, until the inscriptions on both are obliterated. A bit of so-called process art, it captures the metaphor of friction and the obliteration of cultural differences in the continuing encounters of China and the West.
In an exercise in reverse cultural appropriation, Zhang Hongtu, part of what is known as the Political Pop movement, has repainted the work of Chinese artists in the styles of Western artists, as in ``Shitao -- Van Gogh #7'' (2004). Closer to a classic Pop sensibility is his ``Long Life Chairman Mao'' (1987-1995), which gives the Great Helmsman new immortality as the face on a Quaker Oats carton.
Finally, the ``Joining the Game'' section of the exhibit finds Chinese artists exploring their resentment of the unfair power relationship between them and Western curators, whose approval they need to gain recognition outside of China and, hence, legitimacy in the international art community.
Contemporary Chinese artists have a term for visits with Western curators to review their portfolios: ``going to see the doctor.'' For Yan Lei, the scene was reminiscent of a group photograph he came across of the Western inventors of the spy camera. In ``May I See Your Work?,'' Yan appropriates the photo of the dour bunch, adding the crucial question.
But I suspect it will be less than a decade before China's growing wealth allows the emergence of a large class of its own contemporary art collectors. If Western artists decide that they, like Microsoft and General Motors before them, want better access to China's market, the time may come when the artists in the Cantor show are judging Western artists.
There may be no clearer sign than commerce dictating art to indicate that they've arrived on the international stage.
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