 rt and China's Revolution” is no doubt the most anticipated Chinese art exhibition of the year, the size of which matching up to a museum overview of Chinese art in the past three decades. Controversies emerged already at the beginning of this year, involving the Chinese government's unwillingness to lend works to the show when the Beijing Olympics was just around the corner. The subtle agony seemed aggravated when the famous “Mao Suit” sculpture by artist Sui Jianguo was put up monumentally on Park Avenue, a work that's famous for its expression of “Communistic limitation and restrain” using its most popular icon of all time. With all the progressiveness presumed, “Art and China's Revolution” turned out surprisingly to be a mild enough encyclopedic effort showcasing more history than art history, more “artifacts” than artwork. It's hard not to compare “Art and China's Revolution” with another exhibition in 1999 named “Inside Out,” curated by avant-garde theorist Gao Minglu and was hosted partially also in Asia Society. If “Inside Out” was a manifesto of the Chinese “New Wave”, "Art and China's Revolution” is more like an illustrated, abridged history textbook of China for the past three decades.
The exhibition chooses its starting point from a big collection of “official art” produced during the Cultural Revolution period. Titled “The Cult of Mao” and organized chronologically, this part of the exhibition is permeated with idealistic, “revolutionary” redness, although how the word “revolution” is defined now and then are so different that it implies absurdity more than anything. From large-scale oil painting of Chairman Mao walking with the people in the  countryside, to banal everyday household objects in Cultural Revolution period -- “Double Lucky” cookie tin, matchboxes, food tickets, pencil boxes etc., the collection wants to portrait the period of time as a “cult”, a blind, jubilant, collective social enthusiasm that seems possible to be read either as a success or a failure of Communism. While most Chinese contemporary artists who grew up in this period of time now tend to build their aesthetics upon turning iconoclastic Mao into pop ironies, “The Cult of Mao”, together with another section focusing on the infamous Red Guards turns the discourse backwards, presenting a big number of “official art” at least on the surface level completely sincere and stunning looking, with arguably better craftsmanship than most contemporary artists. It remains a curious question if we should appreciate them as pieces of crafty artworks or well-intended propaganda materials. An even more complicated case goes to the “Rent Collection Courtyard” sculpture, a large scale work made by artists in Sichuan Art Academy as a designated assignment to depict poor peasants tortured by bourgeois landlords, yearning for the emergency of a proletarian revolution. A highly skilled sculptural piece for certain, “Rent Collection Courtyard” is more a specific narrative than a piece of art, which brings the complicated question of what art even was during the 70s and 80s in China.
Interestingly, the exhibition turns awkwardly bleak when it goes on to display the other side of the history – the blacklisted and the suppressed artists. Here we see the No Name Painting Society, the first secret group of artists who did not follow the party line and chose to secretly paint landscape. However, No Name Painting Society's subversiveness never appears on their tranquil and almost disaffected imageries. Following them there are a series of early paintings by the now international critics' favorite Xu Bing, some early sketch drawings by Chen Danqing and a few early landscape and portrait paintings by the late commercial hit painter Chen Yifei. All of the works are finished when the three, as well as almost the whole generation of urban youth were sent “up the mountain, down the village” to reform. Same with the No Name Painting Society, those early works seem to show subtle historical implications instead of aesthetic appeal, and seem to be chosen for the exact reason of their lacks of artistic compassion.
The exhibition ends with the much buzzed about Long March Project as a gestural jump cut to the contemporaneity that's provenly connected with and influenced by the history shown before. Curator Melissa Chiu believes that this exhibition most importantly provides a historical context to read current contemporary Chinese art. The Long March Project might just be a piece of an iceberg of the entire picture of Chinese contemporary art, yet of dozens of documentation photographs and videos shown here, an ardent symbolical approach of mixing and matching China's controversial history of Red with contemporary artistic methods have been made obvious.
As a cultural center instead of an art museum, Asia Society is evidently more interested in presenting the history than providing the viewers an attitude towards it. This exhibition, intentionally or not, stands right on the fine line of critiquing Communism ideologies and displaying the legacy of it. The New York audience can certainly take it either way, especially in this age that revolution itself is a word has almost become an archival word for good.
The exhibition will close on January 11, 2009. Please also see The New York Times review and slide show: www.nytimes.com Below are the pictures from the exhibition:
|
