Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art - Volume 2, Issue 2-3, 2016

This editorial reflects on President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping’s visit to the United Kingdom in 2015 and two attendant cultural myths: first, of traditional Chinese culture as essentially harmonious; and second, of Ai Weiwei as an exemplary political dissident.

The early 1980s mark the beginning of a still ongoing period during which Beijing has undergone radical structural transformations. These transformations are reflected by the work of numerous artists resident in the city. In this article I analyse four stages in the production of a series of graffiti-style interventions into the urban fabric of Beijing by one such artist, Zhang Dali – Dialogue (1995) and Demolition (1998). The use of public space, place and site form the connecting thread of this analysis. The tracing of this thread is intended to bring us closer to a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which such uses are made in artistic contexts. In a narrower sense I scrutinize to what extent Zhang’s site-specific interventions can be understood to make claims on space. I maintain that Zhang makes claims on space both by mimicking the processes of transformation that Beijing has undergone since the early 1980s, and by projecting to a wider audience the effects that these processes have had on him and others as subjects.

Drawing upon the film and video installations of Singaporean artists Ho Tzu Nyen and Ming Wong, this article aims to make a critical enquiry into methodological and theoretical intersections between film and fine art. Drawing from the cultural particularities of Singapore, there are dimensions in these artists’ works that are relevant for the discussion of an imaginative identification with local histories. Contested issues relating to representation, identity, roots, performativity and history are engaged and negotiated in their works. Ho and Wong foreground the significance of the Malay heritage in the Singaporean identity, notwithstanding being Chinese. The artists are careful to underline the notion that identities are constructed and fluid, and their works reveal a resistance against a singular, constructed definition or an essentialist interpretation of the Singapore national identity, in favour of one that is able to reflect pluralities of diverse societies and the multiplicity of culture. The endeavours to devise alternative modes of exhibition in the art gallery are directed in part at transforming the exhibition environment and how viewers relate to the artwork. In their moving image installations, Ho Tzu Nyen and Ming Wong have developed various visual strategies that explore the dynamic relation between filmic space and time. Proposing a more fluid approach in the understanding of spectatorial positions, both artists have produced a visual and experiential language that enable the audience to develop a new consciousness about their environment and themselves. By engaging the aural-visual, conceptual and physical aspects of the artists’ works, the analysis of the moving image as a series of assertions made within the fields of contemporary art and film seeks to explore new possibilities about what is meant by the ‘cinematic’ in Singapore.

Wang Bing explores the contradictions and complexities of China’s post-socialist society today and their consequences for the individual. In Father and Sons 王兵 – 父 与子 (2014) he focuses on a father with his two sons in their migrant condition. The promises of socialist utopia with Mao Zedong as the father of the nation, somehow replacing all fathers in China, no longer exist. In today’s reality traditional family structures have disintegrated, the position of the father is hollowed out, and there is no future for the family in post-socialist China. This article explores Wang Bing’s aesthetic language and choices, his tactics and techniques. His masterly manipulation of time and space, of light and dark, his composition of images with frame-into-frame technique, his use of sound and music, his references to pre-Communist and Maoist times, and his apparent non-interference as a film-maker prove extremely effective in pulling the viewer into the lives of the protagonists, turning viewing the film into an almost live experience.

This article examines the uses of organic matter in the art of Xu Bing and Gu Wenda. It attempts to outline the common concerns that both link these uses to culturally specific identities (Chinese or otherwise) and go beyond them to construct an image of the nonhuman world as a phenomenon that participates in and is effected by the context of globalization. The analysis presented draws upon recent posthumanist theoretical work in animal studies and object-oriented ontology, specifically Cary Wolfe’s writings on animals and biopolitical frameworks and Timothy Morton’s theories of ecology and hyperobjects. Considering works like Xu Bing’s A Case Study of Transference and Gu Wenda’s united nations series from the viewpoint of posthumanist philosophies offers a more nuanced critical picture of how both artists have attempted to engage the boundaries of culture and human biological identity in the era of economic and environmental globality.

Both the noun and the verb ‘map’ appear often in artist statements, catalogue entries and other forms of text that accompany contemporary art. However, articles and survey exhibitions that trace the rise of this theme have not yet in any great detail investigated it within the context of Chinese contemporary art. ‘The map’ forms an urgent lens with which to investigate Chinese works because within this theme can be found some of the most resonant discourses in East Asian modern and contemporary art – in particular, identity, environmentalism, translocalism, Debord’s psychogeography and Pratt’s ‘contact zone’. This article will focus on examining the theme in relation to the key words landscape, environmentalism and identity; identifying the period in which landscape and map-work aligned in Chinese art history; and demonstrating how contemporary Chinese artists have utilized the map and mapping to articulate the layers of their experience as Chinese nationals or artists of the Chinese diaspora.

Liu Ding is an artist living and working in Beijing. Liu’s solo exhibition, titled ‘New Man’, was staged at MOT International gallery in London, United Kingdom from the 10 April to 27 June 2015. The following conversation took place near Liu’s home in Beijing on 12 May 2015. In this conversation Liu describes works included in ‘New Man’, and their significances as a related group of works within the context of the exhibition’s installation. He links aspects of these works to his continuing research (in collaboration with Carol Yinghua Lu) into the introduction and development of Soviet-inflected Socialist Realism in China, the accommodations that artists made with the ideologically driven aesthetic norms related to this, and the aesthetic and ideological legacy of this style for artists in China. At the same time, Liu places the experience and knowledge gained from his research in parallel with his practice as an artist and curator, all of which informs the exhibition ‘New Man’.

Rudi Stanzel is an artist who lives and works in Vienna. He produces concrete, largely monochrome non-figurative paintings and objects often structured around loosely defined geometric patterns, including grids and stripes, and modular arrangements. Stanzel regards his work as resistant to precise conceptual interpretation. He also eschews conventional painterly concerns with part-by-part composition and spatial illusion, placing emphasis instead on the materiality of surface. Stanzel has taken up positions as an artist in residence in the People’s Republic of China on two occasions: first at the Ningbo Museum of Art from September to December 2006, and subsequently at the Organhouse in Chongqing from September to December 2013.1 In this conversation he discusses the development of his practice as an artist and the impact on that development of local materials appropriated during his residences in China.

The following conversations with the artists Chen Shaoxiong and Qian Weikang were conducted by Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu and Su Wei as part of their research as curators of the 7th Shenzhen Biennale, ‘Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, not a World’, which was staged in 2012. The interviews were originally published in Mandarin Chinese in Individual Experience: Conversations and Narratives of Contemporary Art Practice in China from 1989 to 2000, a collection of conversations Liu, Lu and Su conducted with artists and curators active in China from 1989 to 2000. Chen Shaoxiong is a founding member of the art groups the Southern Artists Salon and the Big Tail Elephant Group, both of which were formed in Guangzhou – the former in 1986 and the latter in 1990. Qian Weikang was active as a conceptual artist in China during the early to mid-1990s. Both interviews explore the concerns of artists in China during the 1990s as well as the socio-economic, cultural and political circumstances surrounding their practice at the time.

Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, 21 April–11 July 2015

Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History, Paul Gladston (2014) London: Reaktion Books, 256 pp., ISBN: 978-1780232690, paperback, £25.00

This photographic article presents installations shots of works by Chinese artists included in the Venice Biennale 2015.