China's avant-garde artists dare to be different

Carla Bianpoen, Contributor, Jakarta

Of the 167 works at September's CP Open Biennale, those of four Chinese world-renowned avant-garde artists were heavyweight contributions in supporting the Biennale's visions. The artists belong to the Chinese avant-garde that found its momentum after Tiananmen in 1989.

Avant garde in the Chinese context should be understood as a movement that started as a protest of society's values. Artists then tended to use Western art language; while the language may be imitative, and the forms similar, it had a distinct meaning of its own. Under the slogan No U-Turn, the China Avant Garde opened their exhibition in 1989 with a collection of 293 paintings, sculptures, videos and installations by 186 artists, including Wang Guangyi, Xu Bing, Wu Shan Zhuan, Huang Yong Ping and Gu Wenda.

But the government closed the exhibition soon after its opening when two artists fired gunshots as part of a performance work. Although it was reopened, it was shut down completely two weeks later after reports that the gallery, the municipal government and the Beijing Public Security Bureau had received bomb threats.

The crackdown caused a temporary disruption in the momentum and for the artists to go into themselves, allowing a new energy to emerge. They became famous as "Political Pop and Cynical Realism". There were also artists who left the country and developed their art toward universal significance, but their roots are forever shining through. Gu Wenda

Among the latter is Gu Wenda, born in 1955, one of the most accomplished and diverse talents in the art form. Gu, now a performance artist, painter and installation artist, began to question traditional painting methods and calligraphy and in 1984 started to incorporate surrealist techniques with traditional ink and brush painting techniques, together with the use of invented Chinese language.

He left for America in 1987, and has taken an important role in confronting and communicating with an international cultural mainstream. Residing in New York and retaining his studios in Shanghai and Xian, Gu is obsessed with the unification of the world through a mix of DNA in human hair. He is active in an ongoing project including 22 site-specific country installations with human hair.

His installation titled The Thin Line: the history of the Chinese in the Diaspora, was accorded a special space at the CP Open Biennale. Wang Guanyi

One of the dominant trends to emerge in China after 1989, Political Pop was a combination of socialist realism and American Pop Art styles that lampooned the government's introduction of capitalist market relations and its promotion of Western consumer goods and advertising icons. Among the most important painters of this trend is Wang Guangyi, born in 1956, who lives and works in Beijing.

Reworking the visual tropes of the propaganda of the Cultural Revolution in the flat, colorful style of American Pop, he presents both the capitalist and communist symbols. Conflicting and competing, both insist on hegemony, drawing a parallel of capitalist and communist systems.

His painting at the CP Open Biennale was titled Great Criticism: Rolex, showing an image that could have been one of the political propaganda posters, now transformed with the addition of the words "No" and "Rolex". This was probably one of the artist's responses to the influx of advertising images promoting newly available, high-priced commodities in China.

Beginning with Coca Cola and first shown abroad at the 1993 Venice Biennale, the Great Criticism series has successfully used the names of various great world brands placed against images of idealized young soldiers and farmers wearing Mao caps. While some disapprove of this easy way of making art, it has not prevented him reaping huge success.

Wang 's art education began at middle school. In 1972 he entered art classes run by Harbin's Children Cultural Palace. Two years later at age 17, he was sent along with thousands of high school students to the countryside to learn from the peasants. In 1977 he enrolled in the oil painting department of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts where he graduated in 1984.

Different from Gu Wenda and Wang Guanyi are the younger Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun born, in 1963 and 1962 respectively, for whom the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was a childhood memory leaving a bitter legacy.

Fang Lijun

Fang Lijun, who sent two paintings to the CP Open Biennale and came to Jakarta to talk on his art on Sept. 22, said he began to learn painting when he had to stay home to avoid being attacked in the street during the Cultural Revolution.

Indeed the 10 years of turmoil during the Cultural Revolution were hard on the family. Fang was born to a blue-collar family in the small city of Handan in Southern Hebei. Fang's father was a cadre in the machinery division of the Ministry of Railways, but during the Cultural Revolution he was classified as a rich peasant and demoted to the post of train engineer.

In 1968 his grandfather was denounced as a landlord, with abusive messages pasted on their home. To Li Xianting, the Beijing scholar and art critic who is fondly called "Lao Li" (older brother), Fang once said, "I think of my whole life before China opened up to the outside world as hatred. Because I was born in the wrong class, I had to learn at a very young age to shut up, and fake it".

After the Cultural Revolution, Fang began studying ceramics at the Hebei Light Industry College in 1980, and informally he also learned woodcuts. After graduating in 1984, Fang worked in art advertising and participated in regional art exhibitions. He was accepted for formal study in the print department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1985.

Fang Lijun's images portray people with shaved heads or swimming through iridescent water, depicting contemporary people and their times in a style which has been termed Cynical Realism. Generally described as "rogue and ennui", Li Xianting, foremost Beijing based critic and mover of the Chinese avant-garde, explains that rogue encompasses a Chinese cultural concept of cynicism, including the notions of joking, boisterous untrammeled behavior, an indifferent lack of restraint, and the ability to see through everything. The rogue is the last and staunchest enemy of authoritarianism, he contends.

In this sense, the bald-headed youth who first appeared in the artist's paintings in the early 1990s and has since become Fang Lijun's characteristic figure, has been widely interpreted as the symbol of disillusion, mockery and rebellion in present Chinese society, though Fang himself says he used bald heads simply to attract attention.

But more striking is Fang's open-mouthed figures floating like baldheaded clones in an endless space. They seem to speak of uncertainty, a sense of premonition amid happiness. Images of facial expressions and grins akin to old people who have descended into dementia looking up to the sky, surrounded by flowers that seem artificial, evoke an eerie feeling of witnessing a stirring drama of people trapped in the emptiness of life.

The flowers may have a double significance as he was taught to paint flowers because of their beauty. But at one time when he was in a flower painting class, there was a dead body close by? Could the sweet scent and look of flowers actually be a cover for the stench of the real world?

A sense of double significance or ambivalence is also evoked by his water series. Water, according to Fang Lijun, can be relaxing and dangerous at the same time. It refers to life as well as death. Perhaps this is why he states that the translucent blue water embracing a man swimming on his back in one painting denotes the history of humankind.

The other painting in the same exhibition shows a fat baby hand blown up before a wide peaceful landscape with flowers floating in the air, perhaps a sign of hope or rebirth. Yue Minjun

Whoever has seen the "silly smiles" of Yue Minjun's images at the Singapore Esplanade may have loved them for their seemingly hilarious and infectious laughter. Others may have been left with a feeling of boredom, but perhaps very few have recognized the cynical aspect in these realistic images. The wide smiles showing teeth too perfect to be real in the cloned faces have a meaning of their own. Laughing like a silly man denotes detachment, an attitude of avoiding confrontation and retaining inner peace.

According to Li Xianting, it is a self-ironic response to the spiritual vacuum and folly of modern-day China. It is as if the mass of contradictions faced every day were so absurdly dense that they led to a sort of pathological disassociation from self, expressed through these grotesque portraits.

Yue Minjun, too, belongs to Cynical Realism. His works are instantly recognizable by the cloned faces that are bursting into laughter. Similar to exaggerated advertising images of perfect "shiny happy people", Yue Min's faces are also cynical and mocking.

Most of the time appearing superficial, humorous, mindless, and ridiculous, they, nevertheless seem to contain either a message of some sharp critique, as shown in the slideshow he held during his talk at the Biennale. Laughing faces in a boat, for instance, tell about the problem of existence and those who must find another place to live, while the haunting sense of being followed all the time is revealed in his self portrait titled Heaven, showing a hearty laughing figure amid the hovering shadow of chairman Mao.

In the 500 x 182 cm long canvas Fighting, Yue Minjun paints a row of his clones, each with different detailed cracks around the eyes, seemingly bursting in laughter as they point their fingers to an invisible object, with aircraft flying overhead and dark clouds rising up from the bottom. The contrast of laughing faces, the pointing fingers, with the tanks and the dark smoke rising from the bottom comes across as a sinister joke.

One might wonder why these two painters would express critique through their own faces. I was told that it is the safest way to give social comment at a time when critiquing the government is a taboo. And using oneself as a model also saves time and money.

Whatever may be true, the paintings reveal an extraordinary depth of thought.