Folk culture China in the China Pavilion, Venice Biennale: repositioning ‘Chineseness’ in contemporary art discourse

ABSTRACT

In this article, I explore how Qiu Zhijie’s curation of the exhibition Continuum – Generation by Generation at the China Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale offers a new understanding of ‘China’ and ‘Chineseness’. It is neither a reproduction of literati arts nor a critical use of symbols of socialist China, but an appropriation of Chinese folk culture to re-envision the central role of China in the global art scene. This new form of Chineseness is what I call ‘folk culture China’. Although the curator attempts to challenge the existing interpretation of contemporary Chinese art widely circulated in the art market, the curatorial strategy deployed in this exhibition inherits a culturalist view of Chinese culture by re-nationalizing folk culture as the essence of Chinese culture that sustains Chinese civilization. Folk culture China also highlights the importance of collaboration between folk and contemporary artists in which the former can remind the latter of the collective spirit embodied in craftsmanship, which is the core of the Chinese mode of art-making. More importantly, folk culture China is an anti-nation-statist discourse that paradoxically repositions China from an object of the Euro-American-centric contemporary art system to the center of the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Chineseness
• Chinese culture and civilization
• contemporary art
• folk art
• folk culture China
• the China Pavilion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In fact, such a critical lens shares the same analytical vein as ‘global art history’, a discipline that adopts a transcultural approach to study culture as a constant process of being constituted and reconstituted rather than studying it in terms of ‘nation’. Monica Juneja states that, ‘in challenging an approach that takes national cultures as units to be juxtaposed, compared, or connected through transfers, the agenda of global art history is to fashion narratives on art movements such as modernism out of a specific national art history in which they have been contained, theoretically as well as institutionally, in the very structures of academic disciplines and university departments’ (2011, 283). For more debates with regards to art history as a global discipline, see James Elkins’ edited book Is Art History Global? (Elkins 2007).

2 The Tang Wu Revolution refers to the Emperor Tang of the Shang and the Emperor of the Zhou overthrowing their previous empires of the Xia and the Shang respectively through revolutions.

3 People’s arts at that time consisted of ‘paintings, printmaking, sculptures, architecture designs, New Year Pictures, comic strips, lantern slides, paper cutouts, pictorials, posters, illustrations, and decorative arts’ (Tang 2015, 32).

4 In the exhibition catalogue, there are both English and Chinese versions of the curatorial statement, in which the English version uses ‘immortality’ to translate the concept of buxiu while the Chinese version uses ‘yongsheng’ (literally translated as immorality).

5 The exhibition was on view at the Times Art Museum (Beijing) from 31 March to 17 June 2018 and the Ming Contemporary Art Museum (Shanghai) from 31 March to 3 June 2018. In these two locations, not only were the artworks exhibited earlier at the Venice Biennale showcased, there were also copies of articles written by art and cultural critics as well as Qiu Zhijie’s essay ‘Who Belongs to the Bottom? Who are the Elites? – Let’s Begin with What Mr. Li Dazhao Has to Say’. According to the exhibition tour guide in Shanghai, Qiu Zhijie’s article serves as his response to those who did not understand his logic of the curation. This essay is included in the edited book The 57th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia – Pavilion of China, published by CITIC Press Group in 2020.

6 Zhongguo is commonly translated as ‘the middle kingdom’ in English literature. However, in Qiu’s text, he uses ‘the central kingdom’ instead.

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Wang Jiabao

Wang Jiabao recently completed her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies in Asia at the National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on the genealogy of the discourse of ‘folk’ or minjian in modern and contemporary China.