Time to return – Leading artists assemble to define contemporary art

By He Jianwei 

The China Avant-Garde Exhibition, held at the National Art Museum of China 21 years ago, was the first time many in the West saw contemporary Chinese art.

Critics of the day called it the final curtain for the ’85 New Wave Art Movement, a vague period of time in the mid-’80s when Chinese Avant-Garde emerged.

In the years since, these artists have won attention with their exhibitions abroad and have broken auction records around the world.

Last year, 21 representative artists from various periods and schools of the last 30 years were assembled for the first time at the newly founded Contemporary Art Academy of China.

These leaders returned to the museum last Wednesday to show their latest paintings, sculptures and installations in an exhibit which is itself the history of China’s contemporary art.

A giant stainless steel sculpture of a laughing man welcomes visitors at the front gate of the National Art Museum of China. The face – its mouth open and eyes closed – has become a dominant icon in the paintings and sculptures of creator Yue Minjun.

That sculpture is part of The Constructed Dimension: 2010 Chinese Contemporary Art Invitational Exhibition, a collection of the last 30 years of development in Chinese contemporary.

More than 70 works by 20 artists are on display. Their oil paintings, sculptures, installations and photographs each represent a different area of contemporary art.

Timezone8 book listing

Timezone8 is a Hong Kong-based publisher, distributor and retailer of books on contemporary art, architecture, photography and design. This week, it recommends three new titles for Beijing Today readers.

Wang Guangyi
By Karen Smith, Yan Shanchen and Charles Merewether, 204pp, Timezone8, $40.00
The 17-year career of a contemporary art giant forms a rich tapestry of imagery, ideas and ideology. Since the mid-80s, Wang Guangyi has stood as a role model for his fellow artists. His parodies of masterpieces of Western art, including Leonardo da Vinci’sVirgin and Child with St. Anne and Jacques-Louis David’sThe Death of Marat, continue to inspire.

Zhuang Hui: Ten Years
By Meg Maggio and Zhang Li, 130pp, Timeone8/Courtyard, $35.00
During the past 10 years, Zhuang Hui has made a name for himself with his black-and-white, 180-degree-pivoting-camera shots of workers, peasants and soldiers. These and 140 other images are collected as a photographic journal from one of China’s top photographers.

Cang Xin: Existence in Translation
By Huang Du, Zhu Qi, Chang Tsong-zung, Meg Maggio and Feng Boyi, 200pp, $19.00
Cang Xin is a Beijing-based performance and conceptual artist active since the mid-90s. As a participant in To Add One Meter to an Unknown Mountain, now a defining image of contemporary art, Cang began to find his own artistic identity in the 1994 work Trampling Faces. Like much of his later work, it explored issues of “self” and “other” in a way that was both ceremonial and spontaneous, always depending he participation of others for completion.

(By He Jianwei)

Four Chinese artists rebuild ‘Berlin Wall’

 

Xu Bing (right) explains Lu You's poem to the ambassador (middle).

 

By He Jianwei

“The Berlin Wall was a symbol of the Cold War and represented a splitting of Germany,” Michael Schaefer, German ambassador to China said last Thursday at a showing  four Chinese artists’ work to rebuilt the Berlin Wall.

The four artists created four giant bricks, over two meters high, which will be shown in front of Brandenburg Gate on November 9 at the festival celebrating the 20th anniversary of the collapse of Berlin Wall.

To celebrate the anniversary, Goethe Institute asked artists from  Mexico, Yemen, Israel, Palestine, North Korea, Cyprus and China  to recreate sections of the Berlin Wall, including.

The wall represents not only the disruption of a nation, but a  division between rich and poor, developed and developing, and even the different colors among people, the ambassador said.

China is famous for the Great Wall, but “the concept of  ‘wall’ is different in Germany. The Berlin Wall divided Germans, but the Great Wall played a role of unifying the nation (China),” he said.

The founder and president of the Goethe Institute China, Michael Kahn Ackermann, selected four prestigious Chinese contemporary artists: Huang Rui, Xu Bing, Zhang Xiaogang and Wang Guangyi.

Huang picked 20 pictures of 20 incidents in German and Chinese history to illustrate the relationship between art and political events. Two pairs of words are written on two sides of the brick – one side is Berlin and Beijing and the other is Art and Now.

He treated the historical incidents as part of art. “I can say ‘art all’ to conclude my work,” he said.

In Zhang’s work, one side depicts capitalism and the other socialism. His brick looks like a mirror. He painted a chair on ach side and wrote the lyrics of Pink Floyd’sThe Wall on the capitalism side and the artist’s diary on the other.

The real Berlin Wall separated two social systems: East Berlin was socialist and West Berlin was capitalist.

“Everyone who saw my work can also see himself or herself in the mirror. The viewers also become one of part of my work,” Zhang said.

As one of the representatives of political pop art, Wang Guangyi painted a worker raising a hammer to smash a wall.

“The cultural event is meaningful for us to rethink the period of the Cold War. The tangible wall was toppled down, but does not the intangible wall still exist? Wang said.

Next to Wang’s work is Xu’ which looks like a gravestone engraved with calligraphy. The characters are from Xu’s well-known work Book from Heaven, in which all characters are illegible and created by the artist.

Xu said the calligraphy on the stone is from a poem by Lu You (1125-1210), a poet in the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279). The poem is about Lu’s sad marriage. His mother forced him to divorce his first wfe. Lu loved his mother and reluctantly divorced his wife.

Eight years after their divorce, Lu met his ex-wife in a garden and wrote the poem to express his sorrow and regrets.

“The feudalethical code in ancient China was like a wall making Lu and his wife divorce. Maybe there were many sad love stories among people in East and West Berlin because of the Berlin Wall,” he said.