Chang Xugong, Dollar Eurocurrency Series ($50), 2000, silk embroidery on cotton

Several years ago, I happened to overhear two academic economists at a café. They were having the kind of conversation about China as an investment destination that rarely gets voiced quite so directly. The age of escalating corporate profits would never come to an end, they marveled, because there would always be more peasants from central China available to exploit. In the last few years, a similarly excited quiver could be heard in the voices of Western art dealers with regard to the seemingly inexhaustible well of undiscovered Chinese artists.

To understand the connection, one has to first understand China’s real material situation. The country’s spectacular economic growth spurt continues to be a bit like someone training on steroids: increased economic bulk has come at an unhealthy price to the social body. The overheated, export-oriented development of its coastal enclaves, the very thing that has created so much new wealth, has at the same time – through inflation and massive internal migration – led to a spectacular widening of the income gap, creating perhaps the most economically unbalanced society on Earth. Anger is rampant in the neglected countryside, as is labor unrest in the cities, due to the increasingly epic nature of class inequality. Add to this the environmental costs, which have brought both horrific health problems and escalating waves of violent protest. All of this is not a side note, but an integral part of development cut to the needs of global corporations who are addicted to unregulated labor markets. The contradiction leads the ruling Communist Party to wild policy vacillations in its attempt to maintain control.

This bears directly in the position of artists. It escapes no one’s attention that the highpoint of the last generation of Chinese artists – the ill-fated China/Avant-Garde show held at the National Art Gallery in 1989 (closed by the authorities because of art pieces incorporating, among other things, live gunfire and bomb threats), was followed closely by the bloody demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, led by students and intellectuals. Both the almost desperate-seeming artistic adventurousness of the ’85 Movement of artists and the massive popular movement against the Communist Party were consequences of a volatile era of government-mandated deregulation. Both were casualties of the ensuing crackdown.

The paradox of the ‘90s was that at the same time that the state imposed its authority at home, it quickened the pace at which it opened itself to outside forces in terms of investment. The result was art that took advantage of the newly porous cultural space to experiment, but with a hesitation about making any kind of grand claim that art might affect society. The tellingly named “Cynical Realist” painters, including Fang Lijun, Geng Jianyi and Zhang Xiaogang, created images of society marked by a free-floating malaise and obsessive personal motifs. They became among the first international Chinese art stars, even as their spirit reflected intellectuals reconciling themselves with being cut out of the mainstream of their own culture.

Zhou Xiaohu, Parade, 2003, installation with clay figures and video

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Civilization Pillar, 2001-2005, human fat, steel

Liu Jianhua, Obsessive Memories, 2003, porcelain

Today, the state maintains close watch on popular culture, and pushes its own priorities in the art schools and media as it sees fit. In their native land, the audience for Chinese experimental art is tiny, consisting of Westerners or a self-contained, exclusive group of peers and professionals, reflecting a much smaller hold on popular taste than the already largely ivory tower world of Western contemporary art. Hence today’s absurdity of a global art boom in Chinese artworks trumpeted as “socially critical” at the same time that the Chinese government (along with Google) has worked very hard to make sure that routine internet searches are censored. In a sense, this art is just another export-oriented commodity, but as with the export economy in general, the conflict between local realities and global interests ratchets up the tensions.

This is the conundrum lived by many Chinese contemporary artists. On a series of silk-embroidered dollar bills, Chang Xugong stitches in grinning, red-faced portraits of the new middle class, in all their vulgarity, grafted onto American capital. Yet when examining the apparent satirical edge of these works, one must remember that Chang’s practice echoes the status of these petit bourgeois figures – a small businessman himself, he employs a team of artisans to stitch his works from silk. The puffed-up, buffoonish faces presented in his works are a mirror for the avant-garde entrepreneur.

From Liu Jianhua’s headless, porcelain female bodies, strewn on the ground in suggestive poses, to Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s column standing as a tribute to the glittering new coastal skylines, made of fat gathered from Beijing beauty clinics, a theme in recent Chinese art is an identity constructed at an inhuman price. The latter work also marks a trend towards viscerally extreme performances and the incorporation of real animal and even human body parts into works. It’s as if artists were reacting to the increasing irreality of their position – caught between worlds that are increasingly knit together, but also increasingly in conflict – by engaging in ever more anti-social acts, pushing a wedge between themselves and the culture that they are supposed to represent on the global stage.

Such strategies attest to something volatile, like the economic contradictions churning below the surface of twenty-first century China. Look at Zhou Xiaohu’s Parade – hundreds of toy-like clay figures of aliens, dinosaurs and spaceships, meticulously recreating propaganda images of a Chinese military parade. Considered in the context of China as “the workshop of the world,” is this an image of toys taking on a real-world significance as military power? Or of Chinese power rendered as a harmless fiction in mingling with global culture? The piece trembles between these meanings, incarnating not just a “Chinese” cultural situation, but a situation of global forces in perilous equilibrium, heading for a major clash – something that’s likely to take both smug economists and art dealers equally by surprise.

_Ben Davis is an art critic and activist living in New York.

COMMENTS:

IT'S TOO BAD THE CIVILIZATION PILLAR WASN'T MADE IN ITALY. IT COULD HAVE BEEN CALLED THE LEANING TOWER OF PIZZA!
AARON

Sigh. I love Adbusters. The next ten years are going to be interesting. I don't know so much about gallery art per se, but I'm going back to China to join the street art movement and make sure that it doesn't get swallowed by the corporate machine.
Hann

I think we would all do well to realize what is happening in our world. China seems to be a critical dynamo in reshaping how we view our times, if only more of the world was tuned into what artists are intuiting. In a recent Wall Street Journal article Dan Seligman writes on the work of Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian-German-American economist. The heart of the matter is that capitalism changes the way people think. By reducing life's decisions to costs and benefits, it 'creates a critical frame of mind, which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own.'
Synapse

In regards to Zhou Xiahu's parade, I can't help but be reminded of the new rise of the Toy as an art form; Toys made by artists are increasingly entering the realm of sculpture as art, low or high. Publications like Juxtapoz blend advertisement and art catalogues in order to raise the mass produced to an art object status. Recently, Frank Kozik released 50 Mickey Mao busts. Going for 200$ each these busts are pop art icons. It seems that these constructions, like Warhol's depictions of Mao, serve to popularize an image, to make it available for consumption. In that sense, I believe that this wave of Toy art is more of a tool for disinformation and irreverence towards politics, a sort of declaration. Parade feels more like an anti-parade, which may just be a clue that the chinese avant garde is about to experience its very own dada rebirth after dehumanization.
d

"Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men." — Mortimer Adler
neuroaster

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