Modern Painters | February 2008
"’85 New Wave"
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
There is no official start date to China’s ’85 New Wave, but the art movement’s apex must surely have been February 5, 1989, during the opening of the seminal “China/ Avant-Garde” exhibition at Beijing’s National Gallery, when Xiao Lu shot two bullets into her installation Duihua (Dialogue, 1989). Within minutes the authorities arrested her collaborator Tang Song—Xiao escaped but later turned herself in—and shut down the exhibition for three days. Not long after, the government described these shots as the first to be fired in the protests culminating in Tiananmen Square. The installation, a tall mirrored wall overlaid with the images of two figures talking on the phone, bullet holes shattering its surface, features in “’85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art,” at Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. It is only appropriate that a survey celebrating the origins of China’s burgeoning art scene should inaugurate a new museum devoted to the development of this milieu.
It is clear from the story of Xiao’s spontaneous performance that the art in China in the mid-’80s was intricately linked to the tectonic shifts taking place in the country at the time, when China was in the midst of fierce intellectual discussion and political awakening. Mao had died in 1976, the Cultural Revolution was over, and China was tentatively opening its doors to outside influences. Newly exposed to such Western art practices as Dada and Conceptualism, Chinese artists began moving away from the long-dominant socialist realism. Out of this fertile ground sprang what is now known as the ’85 New Wave. Opening with this important historical show of revolutionary avant-gardism, then, is a serious statement of intent by the nascent museum. Yet despite the promising anarchic flavor of the period, “’85 New Wave” is curiously enervated.
Or perhaps not so curiously. After all, the dialectical approach to art history is not exactly exciting or encouraging of the viewer’s autonomy, particularly in a gallery setting. There is a story to be told here, but it’s difficult to suss out precisely what that story is, or, more accurately, what made it so revolutionary. There were two important camps within the many movements of ’85: humanist (consisting of painters) and conceptualist. The show begins on a strong note with the latter, in the form of a striking installation by Xu Bing, in which several 500-foot scrolls covered with handpainted letters swoop from the ceiling. To make A Book from the Sky (1987–91), Xu made up thousands of new character symbols, negating his relationship to Chinese culture by denouncing its language. A crucial aspect of ’85 is the synthesis of Western thought—such as Derrida’s deconstructionist theories—with Chinese traditions and religions, such as Chan Buddhism and one of its primary precepts, emptiness: Xu’s work is a primary example of how to meld those ideas successfully.
Unfortunately, the exhibition that follows it appears on first glance disappointingly flat. Primarily paintings, the works on view are evidence of young artists sampling, playing around, and finding their signature styles. Divesting themselves of socialist realism, the humanists borrowed eagerly from the West. Wang Guangyi, best known today for his “political pop” paintings, made a series of surrealist grisaille canvases that, riffing on such iconic works as The Death of Marat, are a combination of Dalí and de Chirico, and also, oddly, Mark Kostabi. Indeed, that last reference point is where the disappointment lies in terms of the painting included in the show. The ’80s paintings on view here look dated and unoriginal—they look like ’80s paintings.
So it’s somewhat perplexing to find the aforementioned Xiao’s provocative work in a rear corner, not far from a video by Zhang Peili, touted as the first example of Chinese video art. Why not foreground these two pioneering works? In the 1988 video, titled 30 x 30, the artist breaks a mirror into many pieces and then carefully glues them back together. It doesn’t seem like too far a stretch to interpret the use of the mirror in Xiao’s work and Zhang’s as a metaphor for identity and the rapidly shifting terms of its delineation as China grappled with modernity. This struggle seems best evoked by the installations and the conceptual works. Geng Jianyi’s simple and powerful Questionnaire (1988) highlights the problem of individuality by collecting statistical info on the artists and critics of the day. In a commentary on alienation, Lu Shengzhong’s Summoning the Souls (1989) conjures an obsessive nut job slaving away in a small apartment. Set off in a small room built of freestanding walls, the work consists of hundreds of red paper cutout figures covering every available surface. It’s a refreshing jolt of life, the beating heart of what is largely an inert exhibition.
Yet for all its deficiencies, “’85 New Wave” is clearly an important show and has a lot to offer both local audiences and ignorant Western art critics. “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of history of art: an artworld.” So wrote Arthur C. Danto in 1964, adding that the artworld should change with the times, which will inevitably offer up new languages and cultures to be digested by art historians. As the artworld continues to expand, it’s obvious that the West has some catching up to do; and institutions that encourage cross-cultural exchange, such as the Ullens Center, are key to enriching the dialogue.
—Claire Barliant