Using movement: how Beijing's post-1989 artists capitalized on a city in flux

ABSTRACT

The 1990s are often described as a time of political retreat by artists and intellectuals in China, immediately following the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and their bloody crackdown. The 1990s were also, however, a time of dramatic spatial and social flux in the country, characterized by radical urbanization, widespread demolition of the built environment and mass rural to urban migration.

This paper considers the political activities of Chinese artists during the 1990s and early 2000s, yet does so with a focus on their spatial engagements, arguing that these constituted a new, necessary and highly productive mode of political work at this time. Describing a number of relatively self-made artists’ colonies that appeared in Beijing in the early 1990s, and tracing these through to their semi-institutionalization (as ‘creative industries precincts’) by the Chinese Communist Party in the mid-2000s, it demonstrates alternative means by which China's artists continued to intervene in the negotiation of a Chinese modernity, once the possibilities for discursive engagement had been largely foreclosed.

Drawing on archival research, personal interviews and literature in art history as well as cultural, urban and policy studies, this analysis thus tells a spatial history of this period often historicized as the development of ‘Contemporary Chinese Art’. Importantly, this paper also seeks to offer new political imaginaries, pressing against expectations that Chinese artists be revolutionary or openly oppositional, and illustrating modes of political intervention that instead work creatively and discreetly with the movements of institutional and physical change.

KEYWORDS:

• Movements
• urbanization
• contemporary Chinese art
• Beijing
• artist colonies
• migration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Christen Cornell is a Researcher in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.

Notes

1. The terms Cynical Realism and Political Pop were taken up by many to describe Chinese art produced across the 1990s and early 2000s. Lurid, knowing and slightly hypnotic, these aesthetics were characterized by works such as Yue Minjun's laughing faces, or Zeng Fanzhi's comical masks; that is, with a new and slick style of oil painting that sold well on China's growing transnational art market.

2. Wu Hung does not italicize the term ‘yundong’ and, while I do in my own text, I conform with Wu's usage when quoting him.

3. For more on the Stars exhibition, see (Li 2010; Sullivan 1999; Whittaker 2013; Wu 2010). For more on the ’85 Art Movement, or 85 Movement, see (Andrews & Gao 1995; Gao 1986, 1991, 2011; Sullivan 1999). For more on the China/Avant-garde exhibition, see: (Andrews & Gao 1995; Gao 1991, 2011; Sullivan 1999; Wu 2010).

4. The following year, The Stars Group was granted an exhibition at the National Art Museum itself, with many of the same artists who had made the earlier protest against China's socialist art establishment now invited to exhibit within one of the country's most authoritative of public art institutions. Many works exhibited within the 1980 Stars exhibition were still considered audacious for their overtly satirical intentions. However, this permeability of institutional boundaries says a lot about new flexibilities within the art bureaucracy in these first few years of economic reform, and the impact of The Stars as a political force.

5. Such demands did change over time: the years between 1957 and 1959, for example, were a period of relative fluidity, particularly for rural people wanting to move to the city (Wang 2005, p. 46), and during the 1960s the hukou, was slightly relaxed and reinforced according to the fluctuating need for industrial labour within the cities (Chan & Zhang 1999, pp. 828–831). For a brief period at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the hukou system was also disrupted by groups of Red Guards and rural peasants who destroyed some of the hukou records and began to travel across the country. Largely, however, this network of spatial bureaucracies operated in relative unison, compartmentalizing the population into ‘units’ of communality, assigning individuals their occupation, and then embedding those social identities within bureaucratically defined understandings of ‘place’.

6. Estimates of these numbers vary: Zhao (1995) begins his film with text saying there were between 400 and 500 artists by the time of the dispersal; Hu’s (1995) film estimates over 200 in the period of Spring 1994.

7. Zhao (1995) documentary, Goodbye, Yuanmingyuan, includes a scene in which artist, Wen Quan, sings a song to a group of fellow Yuanmingyuan residents on the eve of the community's closure by authorities. The lyrics run:

I live in a village by the Yuanmingyuan, making a living any way I can. Some days I’m barely getting by, it's the same for all my friends. We came to Beijing with hopes and dreams, but now I panic at this world I see. Taking life day by day, my life will never be the same. My heart grows number day by day, and my nerves are getting frayed. I can't find no bed to rest my sleepy head. I’m weary, but I can't find no peace of mind.

8. Artist Zhang Huan was also detained for a few days but was released once he presented a valid hukou.

9. The term xifu actually means ‘daughter-in-law’, but is also sometimes used as slang for ‘wife’.

10. Contemporary Chinese Art was dramatically increasing in value in the first years of the 2000s, peaking in 2005, and this economic value of 798’s artists’ productions played an important role in the site’s overall story.

11. In March 2004, resident 798 sculptor and Professor at Qinghua University, Li Xiangqun was elected to the People's Congress, where he submitted a formal case to the ‘preservation’ of the 798 Art District. Using his position from within the bureaucracy, he argued for the area's architectural and historical importance. Li also, however, highlighted the economic expediencies of its art community, referring to its benefit for nearby real estate values and as a tourist destination for the coming 2008 Beijing Olympics (Currier 2012, p. 190).

12. Examples of Beijing artist-originated villages that received ‘creative industries’ classification include Song Zhuang Artists Village in Tongzhou District, Caochangdi International Art District and Huantie Art District, each in Chaoyang District. Examples of government-established ‘art districts’, also classified as ‘cultural and creative industries precincts’, include Jiuchang Art Complex in Beihu District, or Dagao International Art District in Tongzhou.

13. Districts such Redtory Art Park in Guangzhou, OCT Loft in Shenzhen, M50 Art District or Redtown Culture in Shanghai, and The Loft Art District in Kunming are notable for their formal similarities (often occupying ex-industrial spaces and marketed as the respective city's ‘798’), but also for their repetition of the ‘art district’ moniker, apparently as a means of claiming legitimacy.