Contemporary Chinese Art in New York

Kim Baskin

In March of this year Sotheby’s New York held their first ever auction of Contemporary Asian art. Expectations ran high for the lot labeled “Contemporary Art Asia: China, Japan and Korea,” which ultimately grossed over $13 million. Of the 246 works presented, nearly half of them were by Chinese artists, confirming rumors that have dominated the international art circa for nearly two decades, predicting a China which boasts an inherent creativity to rival its economic prowess and technological expertise.[1] In the wake of prestigious auction houses like Sotheby’s who have publicly taken a stake in Chinese Contemporary art, a growing international awareness has propelled this movement into the spotlight, labeling it as innovative, historically enriched and not to mention valuable. The flux of current exposure and the buying frenzy which has materialized around it, remains steadily fueled by throngs of articles dedicated to tracking the exponential growth of these work’s rising market values and budding popularity. What Art Asia Pacific’s Spring 2006 issue referred to as a “gold rush” of interest in Chinese contemporary art; a phenomenon validated by the tremendous success of Sotheby’s 2006 New York auction, marks yet another turning point in a movement which has constantly redefined and transformed itself on a global stage.[2] Many are skeptical about how the gross monetary success and multi-coastal fame will affect the content and quality of Chinese contemporary art and new generations of artists.[3]

The movement, which has traversed many countries as part of a wider diaspora of Chinese artists who left China during the late 1980s following Deng Xioping’s reforms, has anchored Chinese contemporary art in art communities outside of China, assimilating itself within the cosmopolitan landscape of international art hubs like New York City. It is New York and Chinese cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong that have continually perpetuated the demand for new Chinese art, both within museums and galleries, as well as amongst curators, critics, and buyers. The popularity of Chinese works with zealous New York collectors and with the city’s prestigious art institutions has challenged China’s ability to keep a tab on its high profile artists, the creators of the country’s most valuable cultural commodity. It is this very migration of consecutive generations of Chinese artists and the increased circulation of their artwork that is responsible for gaining new Chinese art the widespread recognition it has today. However, it has simultaneously forged a divide in the movement, which has resulted in the creation of two distinct fronts, one in mainland China and the other in New York City. The recent onslaught of market activity has served to accentuate the distinctions between these two locations and the respective strands of Chinese art they nurture.[4] This study attempts to trace the migration of Chinese contemporary artists to New York City, examining how the resident New York art community and current market climate has shaped the content and visual language of their work in comparison to Chinese contemporary artists who have chosen to remain in China. How distinct are these two strands of the movement and will the changing relationship between China and the U.S. help close the gap between them. How have international market pressures and the local trends of New York and Chinese cities altered the current state of Chinese contemporary art and what is its current course of development?

To better understand the current state of Chinese contemporary art and the unique history legacy from which these generations of contemporary artists emerged, a brief overview of China’s art historical past is needed.

From Ink to Installation

 China’s art historical tradition has followed a uniquely defined path from literati landscape painting and calligraphy, to mass produced New Year’s calendars churned out from woodcut prints, to the epic monumentality of national portraits, painted in the broad strokes of Soviet Realism. While western art has often accompanied or been inspired by historical and social trends, the artistic tradition in China is virtually indistinguishable from its historical movements. With the exception of early landscape masters working under the great dynasties, the “artist” as enlightened individual or later the “artist” as “dissident-hero” never took root in the China as it did in Europe and America.[5] Throughout the course of modern Chinese history, the role of the artist has not, until late, been portrayed as a person of creative genius but assumes an alternate role as art worker. Chinese artists were part of a tightly knit and regulated art bureaucracy, which became nationalized in 1949 by Zhou Enlai, whose policies promoted the massive popularization of “people’s art” under Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party. The creation of national art forms which “addressed the needs of the whole country,” became a critical propaganda tool of the Communist party, leading to the establishment of the All-China Art Workers Association, the Chinese Artists Association and the Central Academy of Fine Arts.[6] Artists became, in this context, government workers, employed to serve the people and to better the image of the Communist cause. Until the 1980s, these national institutions based off of Soviet models, existed as the only outlet through which artists could gain fame and recognition by excelling in their prescribed duties, for which the reward was a promotion within the same government institution or another of its kind. Western art forms promoting non-political ideals of humanism, idealism, liberalism, and individualism, such as impressionism and abstraction were labeled as “high-class art,” and thoroughly suppressed.[7]  The Chinese Communist Party promoted this systematic grooming of “professional” artists within the art academies and institutions which taught Soviet Realism and virtually nothing else, as a method of government control, reminding China’s aspiring creative minds that the process of “…making art is, in fact, a job.”[8]  

Surprisingly, during the Cultural Revolution the grip of the art bureaucracy weakened a bit as government employed art workers were sent to the countryside to labor alongside Chinese peasants. It was only in the rural solitude that these years provided that artists found the ample opportunity to sketch and draw in private. Many first generation contemporary Chinese artists look back on these opportunities fondly as the only happy times during those difficult years.[9] After the dissolution of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xioping’s 1978 reforms along with his re-building of China’s elite institutions re-enthroned many leading art bureaucrats, resulting in the re-establishment of China’s leading art institutions, but with a different goal in view. Deng’s increasing tolerance of foreign influence as evident in his establishment of an open door policy with the west and his ambitions for China’s economic and social reform, spawned a new generation of artists who grabbled freely with the notion of a modernized China.

The 1980s saw the birth of a Chinese experimental movement, which harnessed new forms of expression, mainly performance and installation art, engaging the public in a heated cultural debate exploring the redefined roles of history, tradition and the effects of rapid modernization in post-cold war China. Issues of Chinese identity and modernity which dominated the experimental and avant-garde art of the 80s has continued to hold the interest of western audiences, gaining the movement increased attention in international art circles, as the rising status of Chinese industries and businesses have continued to alter the current world order. The 1989 China Avant-garde exhibition and the Tiananmen Square massacre that followed seemed to threaten the status of China’s verdant creativity, momentarily forcing new artists underground. However, within a couple years the movement bounced back. Tainted by the events of 1989, that left a dark, cynical impression on the artistic community, many of whom were also students, led to the development of the political pop and the cynical realist movements of the 1990s. “By 1992 the Party had given up trying to purge all dissident voices and opted instead for the strategy of urging all arts organizations to strive to earn more money…”[10] This approach, a decade later, has propelled the movement into the international art market. With contemporary Chinese art sales grossing huge profits, promoted by newly established galleries in the mainland and by veteran western auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s who have  aggressively entered domestic Chinese art markets in Shanghai and Beijing, there is no question that China has achieved the shift from the national to the transnational with unimaginable success.

It has only been since the basis of society has been altered by the emerging transnational economic system that any real interplay or clash of the East (or China) and the West has become possible. The Chinese consciousness of modernity has only recently begun to be transformed from a self-focused to an interactive one.11

This excerpt taken from the Asia Society’s 1998 exhibition catalogue, “Inside Out: New Chinese Art,” a show curated by Gao Minglu, the same Chinese curator who organized the famed China Avant-garde National Gallery exhibition in 1989, boasted the emergence of a newly vamped Chinese contemporary movement, capable of transcending the boundaries of nation, history and tradition. Backed by the popularity of earlier Chinese trends like political pop, this new “interactive” art sought to engage the international community in a visual discussion of China’s changing global role, shifting the focus from modernity in China to its relation with a larger, transnational modernity.[11]

This transnational shift in both content and scope is most likely a direct result of the increasing number of Chinese artists working abroad and the growing marketability of Chinese contemporary works on an international scale. It is the first generation of Chinese contemporary artists who emerged from the Cultural Revolution and fled the country during the 1980s that is largely responsible for current transnational patterns in the movement. During an interview I had with Melissa Chiu, the director of the Asia Society Museum, Melissa stressed the importance of this first generation in terms of establishing roots and connections outside the mainland at a time when few had the opportunity or the means to leave.

This generation is in a really different position from other diasporas in the sense that they all left the country at about the same time and their previous life experiences are all quite similar in a way that you could never generalize in another country…Many of these artists actually speak about that artistic community of having shared experiences and a kind of uniformity of experience, obviously with individual responses to it, but in a way that you could never consider with other countries and artists.[12]

The impact of these shared experiences—academic training in Soviet Realism and other party approved styles, working in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, the liberalization of the 1980s and the arrival of new forms of experimental art— were able to translate across oceans as a cohesive, uprooted movement, capable of mirroring the artistic trends of the mainland, through a transnational distortion. The departure of this generation including artists such as Hung Liu, Zhang Hongtu, Gu Wenda, Xu Bing, and later Cai Guo-Qiang marks the event some art historians refer to as “the splintering of the art worlds,” one inside China and one outside.[13] It is in the New York art community that most of these artists have matured, establishing their own domestic branch of Chinese art and enmeshing themselves within the cosmopolitan network of New York’s museums and galleries.

New York’s Ex-pat Painters

In the early morning of 30 May 1989, Beijing’s residents awoke to find a new statue, some seven metres high, in the [Tiananmen] Square. Representing a young woman holding a torch with both hands, it became the focus of worldwide attention for the next five days.[14]

The Goddess of Democracy, a giant plaster statue crafted by students of the Central Academy of Fine Arts with undeniable likeness to the Statue of Liberty, became the student movement’s self proclaimed symbol. The ideals her image represented, namely, freedoms of expression, were currently being sought after by a group of Chinese artists newly relocated in New York City. A city which in the Chinese imagination had come to embody these very liberties, offering promises of creative freedom, guiding inspiration and artworld prestige for these ambitious new artists.

Zhang Hongtu, a well-known member of the newly displaced, first generation of Chinese contemporary artists, can recall vividly the experience of watching the Tiananmen protests on television from his New York tenement and the subsequent effects it had on his artwork.

I couldn’t cut off my relationship between my past experience and my new life in the U.S. I couldn’t isolate myself from the society, so I started making art, mixing my life experience in China with the art concepts I learned after leaving China. Ironically, art has become a tool to make political statements again. But the difference is that art and artists in China were used as a tool by the government. Now I can use art to express my political ideas by choice.[15]

This except, taken from a 1995 interview with Lydia Yee, the curator of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, reflects the shared sentiment of this first generation. Zhang Hongtu who arrived in New York in 1982, settling in the U.S. with his wife who had family in the New York area, was one of the first Chinese artists to leave the country and establish a career in Manhattan. Xu Bing and Gu Wenda, two of his contemporaries in the field of new Chinese art were soon to follow. While artists and art students in China struggled to absorb a century of western art history in a single decade, these artists who entered the New York scene at the end of the 80s found themselves in direct contact with the galleries and museums that helped forge the famed modern movements of minimalism, pop art and neo-expressionism.[16]  The unbridled opportunity to experiment with new content and forms, without the paranoia of government criticism, helped these artists realize a wider breadth of artistic creativity. While reforms in China had drastically improved the working conditions of artists, what Zhang calls the “pressure of the past,” referring to the weight of Chinese history and traditional culture, remained heavy burdens for artists living in China even during the post-Cold War era. “Diaspora artists,” such as Zhang, Gu, and Xu haven’t abandoned popular Chinese iconography, politically charged symbols or historically embedded aesthetics either, however, they consider their work as entirely exempt from the developing course of Chinese art history, including the mainland contemporary movements of experimental modernism, scar art and political pop, which came in direct reaction to the traumas of the cultural revolution and the Tiananmen Square protests.

In discussion of his “Material Mao” works of the mid 90s, which impose a silhouette of Mao on surfaces covered in substances like soy sauce and lipstick, in relation to the work of political pop artists working in China, Zhang remarked, “the only relationship between my work and theirs is that we are using the same image…” Instead he chooses to align his early Mao works with “artists like Xu Bing and others who are dealing with Chinese culture, deconstructing historical and cultural images,” in hopes of establishing a new identity or a “de-identity” through a process of deconstructing “existing collective or national identities.” It is only from a distance, after one has been partially removed from China and its landscape, that such a reflection and reinterpretation of Chinese history and culture can be made.[17] This is the shared perspective Zhang believes “diaspora artists” maintain. 

Artists Xu Bing and Gu Wenda who followed Zhang Hongtu in the early 90s to New York, have become giants on the international art scene for their over the top installations and controversial performance pieces which blatantly defy the schools of painting and sculpture, mediums closely associated with government control of ideology. Instead, their alternative work is undeniably grounded in the present, allowing them to address “the real in real space-time; an especially relevant consideration in China’s current atmosphere of theatrical social changes.”[18] Xu Bing is perhaps best known in New York circles for his installation piece “Book from the Sky” which was shown in Asia Society’s highly publicized 1998 exhibition Inside Out: New Chinese Art. In the piece “boxed sets of books bound in blue paper covers seem at first sight to be authentic classical texts, printed in characters in Song script, but on further inspection none of the characters can be pronounced or understood.”[19] The dramatic installation of these texts or “non-texts,” which were draped from the ceiling and systematically arranged on the gallery floor, at first overwhelms the viewer with the grandeur of dynastic Chinese scrolls. Then on second glance, drains the text’s pseudo-characters of all meanings and associations with Chinese culture, history and tradition. The work serves to undermine the ideological constraints that have dictated cultural production in the past, reclaiming a culture that only becomes visible through the systematic repetition of mundane everyday practices.[20] Gu Wenda participates in this same type of dialogue, harnessing language and text as a way of eliminating the “burden of culture,” that Zhang Hongtu spoke of. Gu’s “Temple of Heaven” installation, featured in the same Asia Society exhibition as Xu Bing’s “Book from the Sky,” featured a tent made of human hair collected from various U.S. and international locations, decorated with a “false script” Gu created from combining Chinese, English, Hindi and Arabic letters. The installation is in medium and content, multi-cultural and multi-racial, in the “nature of America” where it was conceived. [21] It is the multi-cultural landscape of New York that nurtures the trans-cultural forms that these artists are creating and it is their ability to disengage the representation of China with a specific history and tradition that distinguishes this New York branch of Chinese Contemporary art from the brand created in China. 

Chinese-ness becomes an open signifier which acquires its peculiar forms and contents in dialectical junction with the diverse local conditions in which ethnic Chinese people construct new, hybrid identities and communities.[22]

However, the local conditions in New York have changed quite a bit since Zhang Hongtu’s interview with Lydia Yee in 1995 and the opening of Asia Society’s Inside Out: New Chinese Art show in 1998. Nearly a decade later, with market forces and major exhibitions backing them, new generations of Chinese artists have taken center stage promoted by the growing number of international biennales, exhibitions and galleries. This years Asian Contemporary Art Week, focusing in new media and video works, traces the current shift from the installation and site specific performance pieces of the late 1980s and 1990s to current multi-media trends, which some critics proclaim are   “more easily accessible to Western viewers” as evidenced by the increasing number of Asian artists working with international curators.[23]

Whether new generations following in the wake of Zhang Hongtu, Xu Bing and Gu Wenda, will continue to move in a direction of trans-national innovation or whether it will weaken under market pressure is still in debate. Some believe, as Melissa Chiu of the Asia Society does, that the longer artists reside outside of China, the more acute their longing becomes for older cultural and traditional references, which becomes increasingly apparent in their work over time.[24] Other critics and curators see a shift towards larger, all encompassing, universal or “human” themes, as “diaspora artists” strive for content that isn’t specific to any nation but is in essence borderless. And there are those who believe that contemporary artists both in the U.S. and in China are too quick to play the “culture card” as a means of roping in local and foreign buyers who often equate politically charged imagery and traditional iconography as a sign of good, authentic, contemporary Chinese art.[25] With a variety of factors influencing the current course of new Chinese art, of which the strongest these days seems to be the burgeoning local and international markets, a comparative look at the art community in mainland China must first be assessed in order to outline the current trajectories of the movement.   

Mainland Money and Myths      

While rumors of government crackdowns on artists have circulated widely ever since the closing of 1989’s China Avant-garde exhibition, gaining the attention of the international art world, most would say that things have changed drastically in China, for the better. Melissa Chiu who travels to China multiple times each year in preparation for upcoming Asia Society exhibitions, insists that currently “contemporary shows are non-governmental,” with little to no restrictions.[26] However, in an interview with Zhang Hongtu this summer, the artist assured me that government presence is still quite prevalent in China, which upheld restrictions banning installation and performance art at the National Gallery in Beijing up until just two or three years ago. This Zhang claimed was in direct response to the controversy which arose around the China Avant-garde exhibition.[27]

1989’s China Avant-garde exhibition and the Tiananmen protests which took place just after, marked a critical turning point in the development of contemporary art in the mainland. The exhibition was the first exhibition of un-official or experimental art to be shown in a public Chinese venue and was closed down twice by authorities in a span of only two weeks. Ultimately, the closing down of the exhibition and the events that took place during its opening weeks led to the banning of “unauthorized gatherings, including the exhibition and publication of any kind of unofficial art.” [28]

Melissa Chiu describes the China Avant-garde show as “a premonition of what was to happen on June 4^th…the artists were attempting to push the limits of what was acceptable and the response was that the government shut the show down, but I think the circumstances were a lot more complicated than that.”[29] In further discussion of the show, Melissa describes the disillusionment of the west with the events of the exhibition and how that has promoted a tainted vision of China’s current situation and the government’s relationship with contemporary mainland movement.

The first thing was that an artist, Xiao Lu shot her work. Now, under most circumstances the museum would close or at the very least the artist would be reprimanded for such a thing because it places others around her in danger. The second thing was there was a bomb threat which prompted the second closure, and of course if there was a bomb threat in any other museum, the museum would close. Much has been made of this closing down of the show and in some ways it is censorship, but I think it was because of June 4^th and the crackdowns that ensued after that, that the show has been made in this light. Yes, it was virtually impossible after June 4^th in 1990, ’91, ’92, for artists to show their work in a public museum…and what came out of that was an underground movement. I think more than anything else, perhaps, it was the lack of a market that made it difficult for Chinese artists at the time. There was no way for them to make any income, to make money to survive…these also had effects on the production.[30]

Had these same events taken place at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, chances are the consequences would be the same if not more severe. It’s most likely that the same preoccupation of western admirers who favor “politicized images of an alienated, alternative and perhaps even anti-establishment China,” are also those who choose to glorify the China Avant-garde exhibition for more than what it was. The government restrictions that ensued and the forcing of the experimental art movement underground were most likely consequences of June 4^th than anything else.  

While it is easy to assume that if the censorship myths are unfounded and the rumors false, then artists and curators working in China must be content with the current artistic climate, this is not necessarily the case. Due to the explosive success of the Chinese contemporary movement, some curators warn, as Zhang Hongtu does, that things may not be going as smoothly as they appear. The same disillusionment that surrounds the China Avant-garde exhibition seems to exist today, surrounding the rapid development of a domestic art market in China. In this instance, what appears to be the government’s promotion of artistic creativity is, in some cases, a subversive form of government censorship. 

The highly publicized first Beijing Biennale debuting in 2003, now competes with the Shanghai Biennale, the Guangzhou Biennale and the Chengdu Biennale, all of which draw an impressive international following.[31] However, the rapid stimulation of the domestic art market, which puts local artists hard at work, promoting a modern, innovative image for China, may have an alternative government incentive as “part of the State’s larger strategy of governance in the age of globalization.”[32] Liao Wen, the owner of the new East Village Art Center in Beijing remains tentative about the current situation in China. “China wants to be accepted as an equal player…wants to hold the Olympics, wants to adopt certain poses to show the world we are a modern nation. Relaxing its attitude toward contemporary art is part of this strategy.”[33] 

Artists, curators and gallery owners know that there is still a lot of lost ground to be made up before Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou or any other Chinese city is able to compete with older established international hubs like New York. Unfortunately, progress becomes threatened when the government’s grand scheme for China’s capitalization of international markets affects more than just the quality of last years Biennale. As Richard Kraus outlines in his book, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture, China lacks the “commercial infrastructure that manages interactions between artists and consumers in long-established capitalist societies. These include agents to negotiate favorable terms for artist clients…gallery owners to show paintings…and attorneys to protect the legal interests of artists.”[34] In rushing the development of a domestic art market, the mainland contemporary art movement is placing itself in a vulnerable position. While some foreign owned and local galleries remain dedicated to the promotion of artists who choose to move in off-beat and inventive directions regardless of how profitable their shows may be, this is not usually the case. The majority of galleries favor art that is marketable to a wide international and domestic clientele, the majority of whom are Chinese businessmen “seeking cultural capital, investments, and decorations for their fancy new homes.”[35] What ends up being rewarded by the market is “trend-y” art, or art with a visual language that can be identifiably traced back to one of the defining trends of the contemporary movement, the most popular of which is political pop. Zhang Hongtu refers to the situation in the mainland as “imbredding,” and upon my visit to his Queens studio was quick to draw my attention to a stack of Sotheby’s and Christie’s catalogues he had stored in the back. “Now people open their eyes to look at which style is more popular in the market.” He pulls out the most recent 2006 Sotheby catalogue on Contemporary Asian art, pointing out a number of paintings all crafted in a similar style, featuring large, iconographic Mao’s painted in flat color—all of them reminiscent of 1990s political pop, a preferred style of both domestic and international collectors.  

This is not to disregard the fact that there ARE artists based in China who are working to counter these market pressures by creating innovative strands of “anti-trend” art, which are not easily translated into neat art historical categories or labels, like political pop, scar art or cynical realism. Artists like Zhang Dali who spray paints abstracted profiles on to the walls of abandoned or partially demolished buildings in Shanghai’s urban center. His trademark image becomes part of China’s changing metropolitan environment, tracing the process of urban expansion and the “loss of history and culture in this rapid social regeneration.”[36] Or Cao Fei, who transforms abandoned city lots into personalized dreamscapes, featuring strange futuristic characters who command over these surreal landscapes. Her works “celebrate the pleasure of living in the age of new technologies and express a fear of plunging into a nightmare” in which society lays victim to “totalitarian politics and materialistic values.”[37] This new mainland art rejects the overtly political content that popularized the art of the past, choosing instead to “question the quotidian,” engaging in themes that command and displace the everyday and the mundane. It finds its home in the re-defined landscape of China’s growing cities, reflecting the “tenuous and ambivalent character of the times.”[38]

Transnational Trajectories

Culture has become a “constituent element of the economy” in China, “foreign galleries have entered, Chinese-owned galleries abound, and the conditions for promoting art have changed at a speed that challenges the imagination.”[39] While government intervention appears to have dissipated, the more logical conclusion seems to be that it hasn’t dissipated, its just changed its form. The interests of the Chinese government and the various government organizations that enforce them, most notoriously in relation to arts in China, the Ministry of Culture, have not entirely shifted off the radar, but in some cases have merely shifted their interests from ideological and stylistic standardization to marketability.[40] Many mainland artists have recently been accused of creating a certain style of marketable art “which they reproduce ad nauseum simply to make money.”[41] Chinese “diaspora artists” who have settled in New York City feel the impact of local market trends increasingly these days. Local markets, which developed domestically after increased international interest and praise of Chinese contemporary work, created a multi-coastal market and an international audience which has acquired a taste for the iconography and ideas behind this culturally charged work. It has also in many ways, successfully made this new Chinese art “mainstream.”[42]

For Chinese artists now residing in the New York and other international hubs, the struggle comes in disengaging themselves from the current mainland trends that make up the Chinese art historical movement, which western audiences too often place them in. As Zhang Hongtu articulated earlier, he chooses not to align himself with mainland movements of Political Pop or Cynical Realism, but instead chooses to associate himself with other first generation “diaspora artists” with whom he shares similarities of experience. Unlike artists who have chosen to stay in China, Zhang and his contemporaries have been uprooted and displaced, so that their notions of China derive from vestiges of experience as opposed to the corporeal experience of witnessing China’s rapid modernization. Most of these artists, including those discussed earlier such as Xu Bing and Gu Wenda, represent an older generation of artists who came of age during the cultural revolution who have no “real” China to go back to.[43] Of course this statement is to be taken figuratively. Established artists such as Xu Bing and Gu Wenda who are often regarded as the pioneers of Chinese contemporary art, especially amongst international circles, have earned a healthy income over the years and travel back to China frequently. Zhang himself visits China every year to see his family and friends. However, New York remains their home, and the China they reveal in their artwork is largely imagined, something they continue to interact and identify with, but not something they experience on a day to day basis. Zhang described his situation as “living in two different worlds,” between which a gap exists that his art attempts to bridge.[44]  

Those who have moved to the west do not simply intend to look back to their ‘Chinese’ cultural roots (which have often been ‘exoticised’ by Westerners) in order to manifest their identity as ‘other’, isolated from the reality of the society itself as were earlier generations of Chinese immigrants. Instead they attempt to establish positive dialogues with the Western art world through their individual creations by demonstrating the values of their work…they consider their work as reactions, provocations and, in a certain sense, as critiques of the reality in which they now live…The international context provides them with unprecedented possibility through which to manifest their creativity and, finally, to exert their influence on the formation of a new multicultural world.[45]

This excerpt taken from a 1994 issue of Art and Asia Pacific entitled “Art of the Chinese Diaspora,” signifies the first attempts of these Chinese “diaspora artists” to identify themselves with a context separate from the avant-garde mainland movement that was getting so much attention during the late 1980s and early 90s. Not only did they attempt to distinguish themselves from mainland artists, but they attempted to free themselves from the connotations usually associated with Chinese art. They challenged the “function of art,” as we commonly perceive it and the western hegemonic constructions that label Chinese culture as the “other.” During the 90s when Art and Asia Pacific published this edition dedicated to artists of Chinese decent living abroad, multiculturalism was a widely debated topic in art circles, especially those based in New York. Just as the democracy movement and governmental reform prepped the stage for mainland contemporary artists in the 1980s, 1990s interest in multiculturalism and the emerging Asian American movement, promoted in New York art circles by groups such as Godzilla, provided a strategic premise for the emergence of these new artists from abroad. Now, twelve years later, these “diaspora artists” are finally breaking free from the multicultural framework that deemed artists such as Zhang Hongtu as Chinese-American or Asian-American. What is beginning to emerge is a form of transnational or diasporic art that successfully challenges preconceived assumptions about the type of work ethnically Chinese artists are creating and the message they’re trying to convey. The differences in perspective and relation to China that distinguishes the domestic branch of contemporary Chinese art from the kind we find being creating in New York and other U.S. cities are affected by these shifts in perception, due to a changing global order. China, no longer the “exoticized other” is now viewed as an important asset to the United States, a partner in governing a new world order. The redefinition of China within the international community and especially within the American imagination, brings with it a redefinition of its art, which like Chinese businesses and markets, has established itself among a host of international communities. The current trends of Chinese contemporary art in the mainland seemed to differ significantly from the trends evident in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s—cynical realism and pop art contrasted greatly with the secular content used by Xu Bing and Gu Wenda in their universally themed installations—but now both seem to be on a similar trajectory. Market success has come as a mixed blessing for both groups and many serious artists both in New York and the mainland have pursued similar artistic paths in opposition to growing market pressures.

Thus, both branches of the Chinese contemporary art seem to have arrived, by very different means, at the same intersection. Respectively, their situations are historically and contextually unique, however, both the domestic brand of Chinese contemporary art and the transnational, have fallen victim to the same neat labels and categories the market and commanding art circles have created for them. “Diaspora artists” who are simultaneously Chinese and not Chinese, depending on who you ask and what country they’re from, are constantly a point of contention for an art world that likes to organize artists according to racial characteristics and thematic patterns. On the other hand, Chinese contemporary artists working in the mainland who are indisputably Chinese, find themselves confined by the restraints of this title. As Chinese artists they are expected to create works that feature overtly political and culturally embedded images. Both sides are in agreement that artists who depict such content are too often handsomely rewarded by unseasoned market buyers.

There are a few positive attributes to the sprawling marketplace, the most significant of which is that “it allows Chinese artists to make a living and to have a career.” [46] Chinese artists in New York are reaching new pinnacles of success—Cai Guo Qiang, a first generation Chinese “diaspora artist,” was granted the prestigious Metropolitan Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor roof garden this summer to stage his famed gunpowder experiments—and those working in China are finally able, after 2000, to exhibit experimental works internationally. Many of these contemporary mainland artists premiered their work in front of packed American audiences during the highly publicized New York Asian Contemporary Art week earlier this spring. A number of well-established New York art galleries including the Kustera Tilton Gallery, the Thomas Erben gallery and the Bose Pacia gallery, who had never before aligned themselves with Chinese contemporary works, signed on to partake in the festivities, showing new media and video works by emerging Chinese artists.[47]  

International market pressures have proved to be a domineering factor in the current course of Chinese contemporary art, affecting everything from content and style, to the actual ways in which we perceive, react and classify this new Chinese art.

In short, it has been forces active in the current global modernization and concomitant consciousness of location, boundary, and relationships based primarily on economic factors that have brought to an end the heretofore self-focused and self-defined Chinese modernity and pushed Chinese intellectuals and artists toward a transnational modernity.[48]      

In China, the general sentiment of the art community seems to be in agreement that despite the “successful formulas of the past, ours is a time of fragmentation and diversity, more so now than ever before.”[49] While there will always be decipherable distinctions between the two strands of Chinese contemporary art, their paths of development now run on parallel tracks, both in hopes of achieving a form of new Chinese art that is neither trendy nor exotic, political or purely marketable. Simply an art that is reactionary and investigative, rooted not in sweeping cultural movements or persuasive ideologies, but in the transformative powers of the everyday and the simpler realizations of life that are not confined to any specific nation, culture or people.   

Bibliography

Andrews, Julia F. Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979, Berkeley: University of California Press,
    1994.
Ang, Ien. “Migrations of Chineseness: Ethnicity in the Postmodern World.” Cultural Studies: Pluralism and Theory, Parkville,
    Victoria: University of Melbourne, 1993.
Bryson, Norman. “The Post-Ideological Avant-Garde.” Inside Out: New Chinese Art, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of
    California Press, 1998.  
Cohn, Don J. “Cultural Imports: Sotheby’s Brings Chinese Contemporary Art to New York.” Art Asia Pacific, no. 48 (Spring
    2006).
Gao Minglu. “Toward a Transnational Modernity: An Overview of Inside Out: New Chinese Art.” Inside Out: New Chinese Art,
    Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.  
Hou Hanru. “Departure Lounge Art: Chinese Artists Abroad.” Art Asia Pacific, vol.1, no.2 (1994).
———. “Beyond the Cynical: China Avant-garde in the 1990s.” Art Asia Pacific, vol. 3, no. 1 (1996).
———. “China Today: Negotiating with the Real, Longing for Paradise.” Flash Art, (March/April 2005).
Jordan, Francesca. “Aperto Beijing.” Flash Art, (July/September 2003), pp. 71-73.
Kovskaya, Maya. “Talking to the Movers and Shakers of the Art World.” Art It, (Spring/Summer 2006), pp. 62-71.
———. “Curator Interview 9: Huang Du.” Art It, (Spring/Summer 2006), pp. 62-71.
Kraus, Richard C. The Party and the Arty in Chin: The New Politics of Culture, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield
    Publishers, Inc., 2004.
Lu, Carol. “A Flawed Biennale: Carol Lu is Unimpressed by the Shanghai Biennale 2004.” Flash Art, (January/February 2005),
    pp.58.
Maerkle, Andrew. “Focal Point: Asian Video and Media Artists Take New York.” Art Asia Pacific, no. 48 (Spring 2006).
Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument.”
    http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId=%7B35B54034-D40F-4FD8-86EA-0B1A0A9D0F81%7D
Mills, Dan, Li Xianting and Xie Xiaoze. Regeneration: Contemporary Chinese Art from China and the U.S. Lewisberg, PA:
    Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, 1998. 
Sothebys. “Contemporary Asian Art [N08242].” http://search.sothebys.com/jsps/live/event/EventSearchResults.jsp
Wu Hung. Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
    2005.
Wu, Olivia. “For Collectors with Deep Pockets, China is Fast Becoming the Place to Buy New Art.” San Francisco Chronicle,
    (July 21, 2006).
Zhang Hongtu: Material Mao, Bronx Museum of the Arts, October 13, 1995 – January 14, 1996.

Interviews conducted by author

 
Chen, Abbie. 2006. (Curator and founder of CAN, Chinese Artists Network) Notes July 15. Manhattan, New York.

 
Chiu, Melissa. 2006. (Director of Asia Society Museum) Tape recording & notes July 27. Asia Society, New York.

 
Chiu, Melissa. 2006. Tape recording & notes August 9. Asia Society, New York.
Tezuka, Miwako. 2006. (Contemporary curator Asia Society Museum) Tape recording & notes August 1. Asia Society, New York.
Zhang Hongtu. 2006. Tape recording August 13. Queens, New York, artist’s studio.