26. – 29. May 2009
Beijing Rosedale Hotel

Initiated by the China Contemporary Art Foundation and the Chicago Research House for Asian Art, and organized by the art historian James P. Elkins and artist Qigu Jiang from The School of the Art Institut of Chicago, Peking University Research Center for Aesthetics & Aesthetic Education, Gao Minglu from the University of Pittsburgh, People’s University of China School of Liberal Arts and the Wall Art Museum.

The following is not an official report or a summary of the results of the Beijing conference, but only presents personal notes and observations, which are very selective and also serve our own recollection. The conference was attended by 15 overseas scholars, among them four Chinese living in the West, and 19 critics, art historians and philosophers from China. It also included visits to artists’ studios such as the one of Xu Bing and Zhang Wang. The conference was meant to inaugurate a new discussion between the two groups of participants. It also was to find out whether Chinese art history offers hermeneutic possibilities of its own for interpreting recent art, thus offering alternatives to the globalized art criticism today.

In the first session, Gao Minglu presented the Yi Pai concept with a long Chinese history behind, a synthetic theory against the usual kind of representation. He called it an alternative theory meaning that art should go beyond language and not merely imitate the visual world.

Thus he argued for a return to originality in a sense different from Western theory. As exhibitions such as Inside Out: New Chinese Art (1998) or a recent one in Oxford (2008), the latter with 15 Western and Chinese artists, demonstrated, there was still superficial knowledge of Chinese art and mentality in the West. The debate about the shortcomings in Western reception of Chinese art, he maintained, was overdue. It should therefore be mentioned that the same Gao Minglu had curated an exhibition with the concept of Yi Pai which opened at the time of the conference at the Today Art Museum in Beijing. It presented a large selection of contemporary Chinese artists in the light of the Yi Pai principle.

In China, the so-called Star group in 1979 searched for a space of contemporary art but also for an appropriation of modernity, both physically and theoretically. In China, Gao Minglu argued, there was no break between modernity and contemporaneity. Landscape painters were driven by the vision of an utopian society. The 1989 logo, created by Yang Zhilin, symbolized a “No Return” to tradition. In general terms, Gao Minglu held any linear art history for not applicable to China. Thus, China reached modernism via post-modernism, i.e. the other way around. In China the notion of art does not offer any theory of truth and realism but instead celebrates beauty as the leading principle. It thus invites to see the “other” of the West in terms of the latter’s preference for reason in controlling and representing reality or picturing the visual world. If Gao Minglu argues that art and life are inseparable in China, it should be objected that this also applies to the postmodern West but in a different way and in a different society. Minglu concluded his paper with a reference to a threefold Chinese theory of aesthetics: Li (religious symbol), Shi (concept, but also calligraphy), Xing (likeness, or painting). Chinese art criticism thus linked three different principles, which remain separated in the West. It therefore makes sense that Minglu also criticized the “October” group and its linguistic concerns, since their arguments do not apply to China where post-structuralism was absolutely unknown.

Si Han, curator for Chinese art at the Museum for Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, received his Ph.D. in Göteborg, Sweden. In his paper he approached the general topic of the conference from a slightly different side which was of equal importance, namely with the question what Chinese contemporary art could or should look like in a Western museum where Chinese art was formerly part of an ethnographic collection. He also pointed to the paradox that the budget of the Stockholm museum foundation only allowed for ancient Chinese art, though the latter could not be legally exported before 1949 and therefore did not allow the building up of collections from China directly. The real problem, he implied, however, is the question of the context where recent Chinese art is to be exhibited in a Western museum and whether the needed context is the traditional Chinese one or the global contemporary.

But Si Han also discussed another problem, this time directed to Chinese art criticism. He vividly complained the still missing reception and availability of recent Western art theories and visual theories as against the dominating discourse, which continues to be “big or general art history” (da mei shu) in the old sense. His argument was not that art criticism in China should introduce the discourse of visual studies and pictorial theory as a readymade. On the contrary, he proposed to develop a Chinese counterpart, based on Chinese terminology and concepts. There is, he continued, enough to rely upon. Thus, “image” in Chinese is tu, while painting is hua. Images fall into three distinct categories: first, tu li, meaning image as idea or principle, second tu shi, meaning image knowledge or written language, and third tu xing, meaning image as form or painting. In our view, this argument needs special attention, since it applies not only to the Chinese case, but also to other cultures. Many cultures possess their own concepts, as they survive in their languages, but they were put aside during modernism. Such concepts, therefore, after modernism wait to be integrated in or counterbalanced against the dominating global debate.

Wang Lin discussed the post-avantgarde or post 89 art, as a phenomenon which still waits for finding a proper critical discourse. Post-avantgarde, he maintains, is still avant-garde in the sense that it remains a critical movement. But art at that stage, avoided social issues and painful historical memories, thus remaining oriented towards the market. The real question, he maintained was, for whom history is unfolding and which role history does and should play. Today there is consumerism and materialism worldwide, but history escapes extinction when intellectuals take its part. The pressure of market economy threatens cultural identity more than even the collective regime had done.

Britta Erickson, the one time curator of the famous Estella Collection of contemporary Chinese art, discussed past art as possible inspiration for recent Chinese production. In her opinion, there is enough to find in old Chinese criticism such as the 17th century satire of the 10.000 ugly ink dots, which are protected against repetition or replication. As today everything is present and available to the same degree, there is the danger that artist’s quotations become leveled. But she pointed to positive results such as the activities of Cai Guo-Qiang 1999 in Venice. So-called new work by Lin Hui and Wang Jian uses wrong or perverted quotations from calligraphy in order to counteract the standard reference to old Chinese art. Other artists not only recast Chinese imagery of the past but also ironically recast Western works of art. Examples such as Zhang Hongtu’s picture Shitao – van Gogh 7 (2004) offer superficial similarities and analogies in order to present traps for the viewer. She concluded her paper with three works by Yue Minjun, one being Void Landscape, the other Vermeer’s Girl (2004) and the third Tiananmen Tribune (1991), where the People’s Republic was proclaimed. Such examples, in her opinion, did not allow for quick conclusions from similarities and analogies.

Tiananmen square also was an example in the paper by Huang Zhuan, editor of the volume State Legacy from 2009, a project carried out jointly with Manchester University and “analyzing research in the visualization of political history” in recent art. The Tiananmen tribune is often a clue for the hidden topography of the great square. The speaker used as an example the project Replicated Memory in Beijing by Lu Hao concentrating on nine city gates which were demolished and yet survive in the city’s topography. He also mentioned Zeng Li and his project The Shuicheng Iron & Steel Works. Heavy industry in China initially was situated in the north, in vicinity of the frontier to Soviet Russia. In the 1960s, when the political situation had changed, the plants were moved across China to the south. His last example was Sui Jianguo’s project Raising Speed on the Railway, “a sculpture made of time and space.” Originally, the test track had been kept as secret and was only documented by aerial photos. But all three artists, in fact, analyzed the general Chinese project of modernization, each time with a different iconography and from a different point of view. The State Legacy project resulted in an exhibition, which opened in April 2009 in the Holden Gallery in Manchester and was curated by John Hyatt. The publication of the conference connected with the project had a summary with the title “Politics or Art History?” The speaker discussed the problems surrounding visual political myth with the two terms ‘empire’ and ‘state’. Questions remain. What is politics? Who decides in this case and how do ideology and art relate in post communist times?

Peng Feng, from Peking University, explained another theory of the Chinese art tradition, namely “paths to the middle.” He maintained that artists today understand and use old Chinese art concepts. He strengthened a view which was common at the conference, namely the almost exclusive right of Chinese art critics to offer the hermeneutic principles for interpreting new Chinese market art.

John Clark, Professor at University of Sydney, in his paper “The Elephant and the Ant. Chinese and Thai Art in the 80s/90s” attacked the binary comparison of China and the West. He criticized the belief that the “other” for China is always the West, whereas the others in Asia, with their discourses and art production, remain marginalized. The following debate about Clark’s argument also made the point that there is nothing like “the West,” but that the West is in itself multiform and multinational. Clark based his paper on a discussion of Thai art that deserves a place in the discussion of Chinese art today. The boundaries of modernism, as Clark elaborated, did not break down but are being reinforced. A detached cosmopolitanism ignores the fact that new nationalisms interfere with the global.

Terry Smith, Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, proposed to discuss contemporaneity and modernism not in the usual sequence within the context of a linear history where one current followed the other in time. Also as editor of the volume “Modernity, Post-Modernity, Contemporaneity,” he warned to simplify the very complex situation of globalized art and insisted on “globalization’s thirst for hegemony in the face of increasing cultural differentiation, … the accelerating inequity” within the world and “the co-existence of closed-knowledge communities.” His last point is particularly relevant for an event such as the conference in Beijing. It is a most fascinating question in today’s globalization whether art can be understood as easily, as it can be looked at or sold. The conference, in retrospect, leaves the doubt and the hope that academic methods are translatable from one culture to the other.

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