Cultural Maodernity
chinese artists’ heritage informs, but does not dictate, their art
The most disconcerting thing about stepping into Cai Guo-Qiang’s new show at the Guggenheim is that the background noise in the museum sounds just the same as that in the small exhibit by Lin Yilin at the Shanghai Gallery of Art in China—and not because the exhibits have the same dusty quietude typical of art houses. In fact the atmosphere is far from hushed; both buildings welcome the visitor with gargled discord, a mess of the audio from various TV speakers slightly under-qualified for the decibel range involved.
From there, however, the shows diverge dramatically. The Guggenheim’s rotunda space greets visitors with a sequence of nine white sedans, suspended by uncannily thin wires and rotating in a seeming stop-motion capture of free-fall form. From the inside of each car radiates tube lighting, which flashes in mock explosion up the seven-story installation.
The Shanghai Gallery of Art presents a much darker and claustrophobic entrance. About ten feet from the doorway is a high, white wall, lined with ten 14-inch TV screens. Each plays clips on loop of the artist and various Norwegian students acting out responses to the questions, “What is your problem?” and “What is the problem with the world?”
The reason for even comparing these two artists—both Chinese originally, but recent transplants to New York, both with a tendency towards the experimental—is to see if perhaps contemporary Chinese art is different, or presented differently, in China than it is in the U.S.
The fact that the initial audio in both of the openings gives similar impressions is not enough to prove that Chinese artists work in similar ways across geographical boundaries. Nor is the subsequent visual difference enough to say curators treat Chinese art differently across the Pacific. The discord is only an incidental overlay made after the works themselves, unintended by the artist yet a reality of the open floor plan in most museums and galleries. In the same way that these shows cannot be judged based on their first impressions, the two artists cannot be equated purely by their common denominator of Chineseness.
But by the same measure, each of these shows is in some way specifically shaped around cultural heritage. Cai Guo-Qiang’s show “I Want to Believe” marks the first exhibit of a Chinese artist at the Guggenheim, and is part of a larger effort to increase the museum’s collection of non-Western contemporary art, one of the most popular “genres,” so to speak, in the art world today.
A testament to the true interconnectedness of the global art community, Lin Yilin will be featured in New York’s upcoming Asian Contemporary Art Week, which runs from March 18-24, and will speak at the China Institute on 65th Street on March 18. The title of Lin Yilin’s Shanghai show—“A Spatio-Temporal Tunnel”—is meant to evoke the artist’s recent experience returning to China after an eight-year stint without a visit.
The balance of tipping a hat to tradition while firmly trying to work freely of historical constraints seems to be a common theme of well-respected Chinese contemporary work. Most artists will work with elements emblematic of their country at first, simply because those are the subjects and materials available. Lin Yilin certainly did that with his early work, in which he constructed cement-block walls around trees, foot massagers, and even himself.
The pieces usually commented pretty directly on the influence of a Westernized world (often represented by Hong Kong) bringing unwanted changes into his home province of Guangzhou. In his most famous public installation—if you can call it that—Yilin moved a section of a wall brick-by-brick across the main thoroughfare running between Hong Kong and Guangzhou. No hidden meaning there—by blocking traffic he meant to protest the influx of Westernization across the border.
But walls were entirely absent from Yilin’s Shanghai Gallery show. This was more mature work, more cerebral, and—as suggested by his inclusion of Norwegian students in the piece mentioned earlier—certainly more culturally ambiguous. Shanghai Gallery of Art director David Chan explains that this complexity is exactly what he wanted. “I’m more concerned with the formal idea of what an artist brings forth [from the work],” Chan said. He expressed his frustration with much of the Chinese art remaining at surface level, work he feels is simply cashing in on the recent cache of Chinese art in the West, but lacks any deeper questioning. “Artists can make a living selling art now. That changes it,” he said.
By labeling themselves as “Chinese,” artists can become a part of the new cash cow that is “Chinese contemporary art.” Rising artists, especially in cities like New York, can earn large sums for comparatively one-dimensional work. In an auction at Christie’s one year ago, the day closed with a total of $20.1 million in sales—just in Chinese art. It was the highest recorded intake from a Chinese art sale in New York to that point.
What frustrates Chan most is the mold these artists fill—one into which the art world forces them, but of which they also choose to be a part. “The articulation of Chineseness is very superficial. People always narrate the cultural origin [of an artist], but humanity is defined by an innate response to something extreme.”
Perhaps this grasp at humanity is Cai Guo-Qiang’s main goal—a man working in gunpowder, arrows, and atom-bomb imagery must deeply understand the core elements of a human reaction to violence. (When asked what his opinion of Cai’s work was, Chan paused, smiled slightly and said, “Well, he’s a very good showman.”)
The artist himself explains that his work presents a “psychological contradiction for people, drawn from psychological uneasiness.” He challenges viewers with exploding cars and tigers shot through with arrows, forcing them to come to grips with the violence but also the “tragic beauty” underlying each disaster: “I am bringing chaos to time, to context, and to culture ... I ignore the boundaries between Chinese, Eastern, and Western, or whatever culture there is.”
Violence—and more specifically in a modern context, terrorism—crosses boundaries without discrimination. But Cai explains that his work more particularly aims to draw out a “child’s curiosity, or doubting attitude towards life experiences.” Cai’s coupling of violence and beauty provokes a childlike disbelief and a very adult appreciation. One Guggenheim visitor noted, “It’s so elemental, so unexpected. It takes everything you ever thought about art and breaks right through it.”
Chan points out that this is the goal of a lot of Chinese art today. “In China, art has a relevance to what’s going on.” He emphasized that in a communist society, Chinese artists are increasingly taking the sometimes dangerous and always controversial path of articulating their own individuality. “It is a struggle between the individual and the collective,” Chan said.
Both Cai and Lin take the underlying messages of their work seriously, but in their more mature work neither directs these lessons to a particular audience. Their ideas find global application and appreciation because they reach further to the core of “humanity,” whatever that may be. Still, Chan maintains that the current framing of their art as Chinese before anything else denies each artist his ultimate goal.
“These two artists are positioned as ‘Chinese,’ but they have both left China and return to it with a shifted perspective,” Chan said. “They find themselves somewhere in between the two places, and as a result are able to see everything differently—from that removed perspective—but people still see them as only Chinese artists. Artists are artists. There should be more hybridity.”