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Abstract
As a worldwide cultural phenomenon, contemporary art in China has not only been used as a diplomatic language but also a reflection of contemporary Chinese culture. Contemporary Chinese art, as an emerging field to display China’s global role, provides an important perspective to study China’s self-position in global relations, China’s diplomacy in exercising its soft power, contemporary Chinese culture, and the reinvention of China’s cultural/national identity in post-Mao China. Using the 2000 Shanghai Biennale and the Chinese pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale as case studies, this article investigates how the fluid construct of Chineseness is successfully promoted and demonstrated through the government’s support of contemporary Chinese art.
Notes
1. More details can be found in Wang’s article ‘Confrontation and complicity: rethinking official art in contemporary China’ (Citation2007).
2. The series of Deng’s political and economic reforms is also called ‘the Open Door policy’.
3. The influx of contemporary Western ideas in the 1980s, especially the post-Marx works that were not available to ordinary Chinese readers before Deng’s reforms, contributes to the accelerated disintegration of the Marxist historical ideology (He, Citation2002, p. 155).
4. Towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, the perception that China failed to become a modernised country undermined the intellectuals’ belief in the validity of the established cultural theory which promised to enable China to catch up with the West through a ‘scientific’ explanation of China’s history and a series of social projects based on the theory. The crisis in the belief in the social system motivated Chinese intellectuals to search for a new cultural ideology (He, Citation2002, pp. 154, 155).
5. There are two ways of understanding the word ‘tradition’ in contemporary Chinese intellectual discourses. According to the Chinese scholar Qin Hui (Citation2003), there are intellectuals who want to revive ‘collective traditions’ to resist the spread of Western-style individualism. They look to what they consider China’s socialist legacy as the antidote to the disease of liberalism. Their intellectual strongholds are mostly in the humanities. However, the ‘traditions’ which Jiang emphasised in the official statement above referred to China’s historical heritage related to its past as a great civilisation).
6. Such as the increasing social inequality between the urban and the rural, the rich and the poor.
7. By the late 1980s, conservative scholars turned back to traditional dynastic studies with official support. Interests in peasant history had rapidly declined. The ‘cultural fever’ of the time made all kinds of generic comparisons between ‘East and West’, in which culture became a vector of national character rather than a historical or social phenomenon. Dwelling on differences between ‘China and the West’ became a way of minimising differences between past and present, elite and masses, power holders and commoners within China (Qin, Citation2003).
8. This exhibition included the largest ever loan of figures from the Terracotta Army, with which the First Emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, was buried (Lillywhite, Citation2008).
9. Another two renowned exhibitions are ‘China’s New Art, Post-1989’ (Hong Kong) and ‘China Avant-Garde’ (Berlin). ‘“China’s New Art, Post-1989”, curated by Chang Tsong-zung and Li Xianting and co-presented by the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the Hong Kong City Hall and the Hong Kong Arts Festival Society in February 1993’, was regarded as the first major exhibition of
Chinese avant-garde art to take place outside of mainland China. It was originally conceived four years earlier when Chang met Li at the Beijing China Avant-Garde exhibition, but historical circumstances postponed its opening to 1993. Organized by Hanart T Z Gallery, the exhibition sought to sum up the cultural sensibilities emblematic of the avant-garde in the 1990s, contrasting the more exhilarating but less focused explorations of the 1980s with works done in the intervening years between 1989 and 1991 in the post-Tiananmen era.
Hans van Djik, Jochen Noth and Andreas Schmid for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (January 1993), [that] brought the existence of Chinese avant-garde art to the attention of European audiences … this exhibition attempted to relate Chinese experimental art since the late 1970s to other avant-garde movements in contemporary Chinese culture. It subsequently toured Rotterdam and Odense, and was reshaped to focus more on installation art for the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. (EdwART, Citation2011)
10. More discussions in relation to the different using of terms between ‘cultural industry’ and ‘creative industry’ can be found in Justin O’Connor and Gu Xin’s article ‘A new modernity: the arrival of “creative industries” in China’ (Citation2006).
11. International dealers, curators, and critics who travel around China seeking new trends and sensibilities in Chinese art have tended to sympathize automatically with artists participating in underground exhibitions and have tried, with greater enthusiasm, to introduce them to the global art world.
12. Contemporary Chinese art has started to have a presence in international cultural projects supported by the Chinese Government. ‘In 2001, the Chinese Ministry of Culture assembled an exhibition of Chinese contemporary art titled “Living in Time” in Berlin as part of the China Festival during the city’s Asia-Pacific week’. The 2000 Shanghai Biennale is regarded as the first internationally oriented show in the series and the ‘de facto’ legalisation of contemporary Chinese art.
13. The tension between Cai and the Chinese art world is because of his award winning work ‘Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard’ at the Venice Biennale in 1999. Domestic Chinese artists regarded Cai’s work as merely a copy of the artwork ‘Rent Collection Courtyard’ which was an important work of art for the CCP’s cultural propaganda during the Cultural Revolution. Cai’s artwork was regarded as a successful reconstruction and deconstruction of the original work at Venice.
14. Xi Jinping has been the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and President of China since 2013.
15. Qin Hui states that there are two basic camps among Chinese intellectuals: The Chinese New Left and Liberals (Qin, Citation2003). New Left intellectuals advocate a ‘Chinese alternative’ to the neoliberal market economy, one that will
guarantee the welfare of the country’s 800 million peasants left behind by recent reforms. And unlike much of China’s dissident class, which grew out of the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and consists largely of human rights and pro-democracy activists, the New Left view the Communist leadership as a likely force for change. (Mishra, Citation2006)
16. The 48th Venice Biennale was from 12 June to 7 November 1999.
17. The off-biennale exhibition ‘Buhezuo Fangshi’ – literally meaning ‘ways of non-cooperation’, but rendered in English by the exhibition’s organisers as ‘Fuck Off’. Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi, curators of the show, described the event as aiming to show an ‘alternative’ identity. The ‘alternative’ position entailed challenging and criticising the power discourse and popular conventions; in an uncooperative and uncompromising way, it self-consciously resisted the threat of assimilation and vulgarisation. (Köppel-Yang, Citation2003, p. 48)
18. The full name of the State Council is the State Council of the PRC, which is synonymous with the Central People’s Government.
19. Hou Hanru was originally a PRC citizen who left China in 1990.
20. The first one was referred to as the China/Avant-Garde exhibition in 1989.
21. In a footnote, Köppel-Yang noted that this quote is from Synthi-Scapes, exhibition catalogue for the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, Chinese pavilion (China International Exhibition Agency/Guangdong Museum of Art 2003, p. 5). Fan’s Chinese text (on p. 4) reads slightly differently from the English version. Fan Di’an is from Fujian Province, like Xu Jiang (Director of the China Academy of Fine Arts and nephew of president Jiang Zemin). Fan and Xu are very close friends. Xu introduced Fan to his uncle Jiang Zemin as an art history teacher and Fan taught Jiang some lessons. Fan is the most important curator for official exhibitions at the moment. He also curated the Shanghai Biennale of 2002 as chief Curator.
22. Description of the artwork as given on the exhibition label.
23. ‘With the National Art Museum of China – or Namoc – planning to open in a new building in 2017, and Hong Kong projected to open its M + museum in a new cultural district about the same time, the cities could emerge as twin titans of contemporary Chinese culture. Namoc attracted some of the world’s leading architects … to its design contest for the new museum in Olympic park in Beijing. Xie Xiaofan, a deputy director at Namoc, informally announced at the E.U. – China High Level Cultural Forum in November that Mr. Nouvel’s design had been selected, although the decision is subject to the approval of China’s new leadership. The director of Namoc, Fan Di’an, said that the new building would house an ever-expanding collection of contemporary Chinese art. It will have 50,000 square metres, or almost 5,40,000 square feet, of exhibition space – six times the current space – with 20,000 square metres for the permanent collection and 30,000 square metres to showcase contemporary art, Republican-era art, and Western art’ (Platt, Citation2013).