Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2018

Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky (1987–91) is widely regarded as one of the most important artworks in the global contemporary art canon; a spectacular installation comprised of an invented lexicon of 4000 pseudo-Chinese characters laboriously hand-carved and printed onto rice paper scrolls that is utterly illegible. Some two decades later, Xu published Book from the Ground: From Point to Point (2014), a 112-page ‘graphic novel’ written entirely in the international visual vernacular of emoji, icons and symbols culled from the Internet, which according to the artist, ‘virtually anyone can read’. This article explores how the artist’s long-standing preoccupation with visual over verbal forms of communication both plays to the idealization of the Chinese logograph as a model for a ‘new media literacy’ in the global imaginary, whilst also reflecting the culturally-coded anxieties centred on the murky politics of language, and the language of politics, in modern and contemporary China. Reading between the lines of what is touted to be an ‘open book’, it considers the degree to which the banal panoply of utterly conventional signs that constitute the Book from the Ground might be encrypted with a subversive subtext – one that is in dialogue with grassroots forms of online resistance that similarly play on the visual-verbal properties of the Chinese logograph to subvert the limitations placed on the seeable and sayable in contemporary China.

Despite being considered the first video artist to work in China, the majority of Zhang Peili’s earliest video works were originally exhibited abroad. In many of these exhibitions, his videos were displayed in different installation formats and configurations. One of the most evident of these changes occurred at the travelling exhibition China Avant-Garde. In Berlin, the opening venue of the exhibition, two videos were displayed in ways that differed from their original presentations; Document on Hygiene No. 3 (1991) and Assignment No. 1 (1992) were presented as singlechannel videos on single monitors instead of the multiple monitor installations previously used to show the works in Shanghai and Paris, respectively. Water: Standard Version from the Cihai Dictionary (1991) premiered in Berlin as a single-channel, single-monitor work. However, when it was installed in the exhibition’s Rotterdam venue, the work was shown on a nine-monitor grid. This article explores what caused the flexibility in the display of Zhang Peili’s early videos. I argue that these transformations demonstrate Zhang Peili’s conceptualization of video as a medium for art and his navigation of the rapidly globalizing art world. While the initial examples of this flexibility in installation were often caused by miscommunications with international curators, later exhibitions provided a regular venue for Zhang Peili to develop his approach to the ‘scene’ (chang) and ‘content’ (neirong) of video installation. Furthermore, as one of the most active Chinese artists working and exhibiting abroad in the 1990s, Zhang Peili was placed within the middle of domestic and international debates about the globalization of contemporary Chinese art. He responded to these debates by expelling signifiers of national identity in his videos and by forcefully deriding these discussions as a form of nationalism. Considering his video work from the perspective of its international presentation provides an important example of how artists working in China situated themselves in relationship to global art production in the 1980s and 1990s.

Cao Fei (b. 1978) was born and raised in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou by the Pearl River Delta (PRD), ‘the factory of the world’, as the artist defined it. Working with multimedia, primarily video, photography and machinima, her practice engages with popular culture, regional trends and globalized fashions. With an early official participation at the China Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2007, Cao Fei is one of the most renowned Chinese artists of the post-Cultural Revolution ‘new new human beings’ (xinxin renlei), and one of the few women artists from the People’s Republic of China who has been recognized and collected internationally by art establishments such as the Tate Collection in Britain, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and MoMA in New York. This article proposes to use Cao Fei’s work to explore the limitations of the global/local discourse and offer a more nuanced and complex understanding of this dichotomy in Chinese contemporary art.

Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-Jen’s video works directly address Taiwan’s post-martial law condition. His video installations demonstrate what I propose to identify as ‘the aesthetics of the multitude’. Through the process of filmmaking, Chen imagines the possibility of a collective political alliance. Theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the multitude rejects reductive identity politics and acts against capitalism. The multitude depicted in Chen’s work suggests a democratic potential that has the capacity to resist the sustained exploitation and homogenization that exists under neo-liberal globalization. His first video installation, Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph (2002), not only sets the tone for his later works but also signals a paradigm shift in Taiwanese contemporary art from the national to the global after 2000. I argue that Chen’s aesthetics of the multitude move beyond the contentious issue of national identity that characterizes Taiwan’s postcolonial art in the 1990s and anticipates the formation of a postnational subjectivity.

This article will examine the evolving function of critique in the work of artist, activist and dissident Ai Weiwei since the mid-1990s. It will do so by first considering Ai’s manipulated and transformed furniture in relation to the inundation of Ming and Qing Dynasty antiques on the market during the 1980s and 1990s to demonstrate how his art uses ambiguity to critique western market expectations. Throughout his artistic career from 1996 to the present, Ai has repurposed antique furniture, doors and temple beams as sculptures and installations. If this under-researched yet important group of works by him is considered through a socio-economic framework and a Duchampian sense of irony, as this article intends to do, these pieces will be able to be understood as sardonic assisted readymades, with a specific set of different meanings for people in China and the West. Differing from prevailing views of Ai’s repurposed antiques that have regarded them as objects moving away from their Chinese sources, i.e. their ‘Chinese-ness’, this article will look at his sculptures and installations, which incorporate while dramatically altering these historical objects, as satirizing western consumption of Chinese culture and history. It will also situate the works as critical of a consequence of China’s rapid transition to global stage: consumers’ and government’s tendency to erode cultural heritage, sites, and artefacts in exchange for economic growth and the new. Ultimately, this article will suggest that these works source their political thrust from a type of ‘radical ambiguity’ that Ai has now expunged from his practice in favour of more determinate means of critique.

The move from Age of Empires to ‘Liao Garden’ constitutes an important conceptual shift in Zheng Guogu’s artistic practice. If Age of Empires can be considered an expansion of thought, ‘Liao Garden’ creates a temporal magnetic field. Both works reveal Zheng’s penetrating insight and depth of understanding in relation to calligraphy, tea ceremonies, architecture, medicine and other everyday experience and forms of knowledge in China. This article examines how, in response to the changing conditions of globalization, Zheng’s continuous fantasy, and his experiments and actions, convey an extraordinary force and kinetic energy. In the context of a reality that does not lie in any specific geographical location, the artist seeks to explore a free world that eliminates the categories of the imperial, the colonial and the globalized.