Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2015

In 1988, artists Chen Shaoping, Gu Dexin and Wang Luyan began collaborating with a distinctive approach to art-making in Beijing, China, forming the New Measurement Group (NMG). Active until 1995, they based their practice on a series of complex collective instructions, which they would execute to create artworks. Their resulting drawings would then appear in different forms such as tables, diagrams and numbers, which were then bound together into books for presentation in an exhibition context. This article considers the NMG's art practice as situated within a Communist approach to art-making, one structured upon collective ownership of production and moral codes, and reflecting China's artistic, economic and socio-political context at the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s. Additionally, this article considers their collective instruction-based practice within an international history of instruction-based art; that is, art based on artists' instructions for themselves or audiences to enact, a genre having a longer history within a western context, specifically through the genres of conceptual art and Fluxus. To understand the NMG's contribution to art-by-instruction, this article discusses their practice alongside some aspects of the exhibition series 'Do it' – the role of the audience, the value of subjectivity and chance, and consideration of the art-making process. Since its inception in 1993 by curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist and artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier, 'Do it' has featured certain kinds of instructional artworks; that is, artworks based on artists' instructions and enacted by audiences. Though very different, this curatorial project offers the possibility of discussing and considering the NMG's distinctive process-based approach to art-making in greater detail.

The distinctions of works by women artists in Taiwan in recent years are usually linked with influences of feminism and the lifting of martial law in 1987. In truth, women artists in Taiwan have been active since the beginning of the twentieth century and many more became influential after World War II during the period when Madame Chiang Kai-shek and her husband�s Guomindang government directed cultural policies. The efforts of these early artists have been neglected in art historical studies because their works were mostly traditional and not innovative. This article will re-evaluate the meaning of these artists in Taiwan art history from alternate perspectives of modernity, namely, the importance of traditionalism in modern art and the role of patriarchal nationalism in defining a national art form.

This is an investigation into the significance of the ancient 'secret' women's phonetic syllabary, Nüshu, in the performance and painting work of contemporary artist Ma Yanling, based on two extensive interviews with the artist in October and November 2013 and a close analysis of specific works. This article examines, first, the ways in which the gendered communication of life-stories and the exploration of female grievance found in Nüshu texts (the supposedly 'secret' women's phonetic syllabary used by peasant women in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province until the late 1980s) continues to have relevance in the work of a contemporary artist. It is argued that Nüshu texts (intended to be chanted aloud) are in themselves performative and cathartic in a similar manner to contemporary performance art practices. Second, the article argues that the ways in which Ma Yanling's work subverts the iconography of Mao-era propaganda portraiture and its Pop-inspired satire in contemporary Chinese art (Zhongguo Dangdai Yishu) represent complex and contradictory aspects of female experience and feminine subjectivity in today's China.

Since the 1990s, China, as a new global power, has played an increasing role in international affairs. Chinese journalists have travelled to war and conflict zones overseas to report and file news coverage back home. This article surveys the historical development of Chinese war photography. It also critically examines the ideology and practices of four young Chinese photojournalists who work at a Chinese state news agency through semi-structured interviews and analysis of the photographs they took in conflict zones. The author argues that contemporary Chinese war photojournalists take realism as their main aesthetic and ideological doctrine in a sense to provide visual evidences and to stress the naturalism and symbolic power of war images. The visual representations of civilians� sufferings and hope for peace correspond with China's peaceful diplomatic policy and non-intervention principles. The war images elicit sympathetic public emotions and collective memory in China. Chinese photojournalists� depictions of wars and conflicts are influenced by internal political, organizational and individual constraints as well as the changing nature of contemporary wars.

Yu Haibo is one of the first photographers in the People�s Republic of China to be directly influenced by Surrealist thinking and practice after the ending of the Cultural Revolution. In this conversation with his daughter Yu Tianqi Kiki, Yu reflects on his development as a photographer and the relationship of his work to the western philosophical tradition and the shifting socio-economic and political context in the PRC since the early 1980s.

During the early 2000s, Hong Kong-based curator and critic Chang Tsong-Zung (Johnson Chang) developed the concept of the 'Yellow Box' – initially in collaboration with Gao Shiming and Qiu Zhijie – as a critical alternative to the now internationally dominant modes of museum and gallery display known as the White Cube and Black Box. The intention of the Yellow Box is to provide viewing conditions conducive to the showing of contemporary works of art produced using modes of visual expression prevalent traditionally within Chinese cultural contexts, such as those associated with shan shui ink and brush landscape painting. In this conversation Chang reflects critically on implications of the Yellow Box, including its relationship to public space and cultural politics.

This curatorial text, originally published in the catalogue for the group exhibition Fresh Visions 2013: From University to Universe (held in the galleries of OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in Shenzhen (OCAT Shenzhen) from 7 September to 7 November 2013), presents co-curator (with Pu Hong and Li Rongwei) Edward Sanderson�s experiences during the preparation for the show and his conclusions drawn from those experiences. Fresh Visions is an annual exhibition established by the state-run He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen in 2004, and the 2013 edition marked the first time that OCAT Shenzhen (administered by the He Xiangning Art Museum) hosted the show. The exhibition features selected artworks from the Oil Painting Department degree shows of the top nine art academies of China: Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), Academy of Art & Design, Tsinghua University (Beijing), China Academy of Art (Hangzhou), Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts (Chongqing), Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (Guangzhou), Luxun Academy of Fine Arts (Shenyang), Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts (Tianjin), Hubei Academy of Fine Arts (Wuhan) and Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts (Xi'an). The author's experience of visiting the degree shows while researching for the exhibition has led him to propose that higher education in art in China (as exemplified by these academies) remains dominated by conservative and uncritical attitudes towards art creation. The level of skill on display was of a consistently high standard, but the author found the level of creativity to be lacking. The author attributes this to a lack of criticality in the practices of the artists, apparently in part due to the educational environment itself. Making an analogy to a complaint regarding restrictive systems of assessment in US MFA programmes, the author highlights the risks of a similar inflexibility in the academic systems of China, and warns of the consequences of such a situation for the art world that these graduates are entering.

'Mao's Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution', China Institute, New York, 18 September 2014-26 April 2015

Zheng Chongbin. Impulse, Matter, Form, Br itta Er ickson (ed.) (2014), Beijing: Ink Studio, 123 pp., ISBN: 978-0-615-86453-2 (US$45)