 ditorial Note: Huang Zhuan has been an important curator and critic in China for over 20 years. Currently, he is the art director at Shenzhen OCT Contemporary Center. He also teaches history of art at the Guangzhou Art Academy. ArtZineChina recently interviewed him about the changes and directors of Chinese art in this new age.
 Artzinechina: I hear you attended a China Art Foundation meeting at Dicheley, England near Oxford University in October. Could you tell us something specific about it?
Huang Zhuan: They set up a China Art Foundation in London and pulled together some western art museums, scholars and some Chinese scholars and held a meeting. The meeting indicates western art museums or academic circles are beginning to show some concern over their approaches to a genuine understanding of China. I have an impression western intellectuals are beginning to find ways to understand China. They consider it important for them. It shows the west’s attention to Chinese contemporary art are upgrading; it’s the only deep impression I have over that meeting. Now the problem remains not only about the way China sees the west but also about the way the west sees China. In the meeting they (the western scholars) always asked questions like this: you always say we’re distorting you (your contemporary art) and politicizing you, then, does your art ever have any independent aesthetics of its own?
ArtZineChina: Did that meeting come up with any answer to that question?
 Huang Zhuan: No. I believe Chinese haven’t solved these problems yet, after all, Chinese contemporary art has developed for only two to three decades and now it’s getting stuck. At the very beginning of contemporary art development, Chinese studied the west and learned from it by following in their footsteps. Later, the west attempted to see and understand China in their own manner. Now it’s such an situation: the west has no idea how to understand China and China doesn’t know how to see the west, but both sides believe the other side is important. Then it’s no longer the problem. The question is how should they understand one another and how they should go beyond the old dichotomous thinking model of either Chinese or western and build a mirror-image model where there is something of each in the other? Now I’ve come to a basic conclusion: the whole western art system is undergoing some sort of decline.
ArtZineChina: What makes you come to such a conclusion?
 Huang Zhuan: Let’s talk about the decline. The Biennales are its symbol. Biennales are the axis of the post-war western art system, which reflects the whole cultural, economic, social, and mainly the intellectual modes of the west, while the most recent several Biennales are beginning to show some poverty or decline of the intellectual ideas.
And this decline is portended by the system’s inclination to trite ideas, power centralization and popular tastes. For a start, the historical idea and knowledge system of the Biennale have failed to adapt to an ever-changing world cultural structure. Though western Biennales have had a history of over a hundred years up to now, modern Biennales began to emerge only after World War II. Fundamental historical ideas for the exhibition system of Biennales like Venice, Kassel and Sao Paulo, etc. are based on two starting points:
First, it’s the west’s view of history of “continuity” and “cycles,” which determines that contemporary art is a continuous and cyclical phenomenon in European history. The recurrent model design of Biennales just originates in such a view of history. It’s something of historical determinism in nature. Moreover, the design of the Biennale system is also a product of the post-war cold-war mentality, and the value basis of such mentality turns out to be Eurocentrism, or accurately, West-Eurocentrism.
 After the War, particularly with the collapse of Eastern Europe bloc, the emergence of a pluralistic view of history and the rise of a global culture, such a history value system of Eurocentrism began to decline. Western philosophers and intellectuals had made earliest self-examination of it, and it’s also universally reflected in western political thinking and economic life. Pitifully, such profound changes in cultural thinking and structure didn’t find their way into the art system of Biennales, which still continues the old idea of Eurocentrism, the cyclical view of history and the cold-war mentality. Since the 1990s, or since the 1993 Venice Biennale, which was themed as “cultural nomadism” – a slogan of some pluralistic color, and which seemed a bit different from the Eurocentrism-conspicuous Documenta simultaneously curated by Jan Hoet, though Venice Biennale has admitted in China for the first time, they actually haven’t changed their approaches to the understanding of the east. They’re still interested in only what they need: an oriental and cold-war China, whose political pop and cynical realism cater right to their interest. Ultimately, China is still treated as a follow-up model of Cold War. It should be said such a mentality hasn’t changed fundamentally even up till today. The Kassel and Venice Biennales last year seemed to have added some weight to China, but they still failed to project any new thinking; further, because selection of artists involved consideration of western collectors, the impartiality of the selection might be even more dubious. In conclusion, in face of a changing complex global culture the western Biennale system has lost its original intellectual energy and spiritual vitality, and has failed to find ways to meet challenges. Their thinking model has limited their abilities to understand things outside Europe, nor has it helped them see themselves clearly; the addition of a new element China hasn’t breathed any new life into their ideology, instead, it has made some of their existing faults look more conspicuous.
Secondly it’s the problem of the system design itself, which is becoming increasingly totalitarian.
The original western art system design was intended to be a democratic one, but the value basis for that design originated in Eurocentrism and cold-war mentality. Such exclusive, historical deterministic values were intrinsically something of totalitarianism -- particularly in the 1980s after the establishment of a curator system and its step into the so-called “curator era”, western art system had become increasingly bureaucratic and totalitarian.
Today many elements are manipulating the western art mechanism, including foundations, art museums, art markets and the like, but the decisive one comes to be the curator-dominated art power system formed on the basis of Biennales. Curators are endowed with powers to decide on exhibition themes, nature, structure, scale, participants and almost all rules of the game; he becomes not only the judge of the art but also a colluder of western art system and an interested party of art capital. Such a system has paradoxically changed the democratic nature of contemporary art.
 ArtZineChina: So you mean the design of the curator system itself is a problem?
Huang Zhuan: Yes. The increasingly complex organizational structure and the complicated power relationship in this system have accelerated the decline of this system. The ever-expanding curatorial power has made selection of the curator of every exhibition evolve into an interest game, whereas almost all exhibition themes have ended up formalism procedures due to the exhaustion of intellectual powers. Then, an exhibition theme could be large enough to embrace everything, and its emptiness is destined. As a result, either a work is reduced to an interpreting tool of the theme, or the theme ends up a totally unrelated encumbrance to a work.
Sure we won’t deny a good curator can exert some positive influence over an artist or an exhibition, but now it seems the problem is not with the quality of a certain curator, it’s the inability of the whole system itself to meet the requirement of the experimental contemporary art. It couldn’t in the least give any revolutionary impetus to contemporary art. Instead, it ends up a constraint on contemporary art. Curators and themed Biennales have become a systematized and lifeless walking corpse, and art has been directed as a performance in every several years. It’s where the problem of the Biennale system design lies. Many Chinese talented artists have been reduced to “Biennale artists” who have to watch a curator’s face and weigh his words, and it’s the direct consequence of this system.
ArtZineChina: Then what’s the last manifestation of the decline of the whole western art system?
Huang Zhuan: Thirdly, it’s the western Biennale-dominated art system’s increasing tendency to cater to popular tastes. It means a complete compromise with business and mass media. It’s probably no secret already that many galleries and collectors have turned operators in all sorts of Biennales through various channels.
In the “revolutionary times” of Kassel exhibition (I refer to the time from 1950s to 1970s, particularly to Beuys times), all artists were keeping an alert or even critical eye upon mass media. Now, however, all exhibitions have found it impossible to be divorced from their collusion with mass media, and Biennales have formed a broad tacit agreement with mass media in the ways of creating gimmick news and popular idols. The news media has become an effective force to intervene in and transform the art; contemporary art is increasingly reduced to a raw material of the fashion industry and the mass consumption culture.
Artists now are more accustomed to teaming up with journalists – it's more convenient and more immediate a way of producing effect, which has even created a huge number of professional “news-type artists,” and there’s an increasing number of such people in China nowadays.
The above-mentioned three points presage a certain decline of the Biennale-dominated western art system, which has lost the possibility to stimulate ideas and any ability to challenge.
ArtZineChina: Then, when we examine Chinese contemporary art, what’s its biggest problem?
Huang Zhuan: The biggest problem with Chinese contemporary art is its reliance on a Biennale system and its reliance on western powers, because even today the participation in Biennales is still seen as the major token of the success of one’s art. Biennales are beginning to decline in the west, but they’re still a vigorously pursued game in China.
In late 1990s Chinese contemporary art began a course of systematization on the premise of certain recognition from official authorities. Such a course went right along with the course of art’s market force, which resulted in a huge difference between Chinese and western curator systems – Chinese curators’ high integration with business and political systems. In China, curators are mostly “critics” or gallery bosses, or they could even be “consultants” of art museums or auction houses at the same time. This phenomenon doesn’t exist in western countries. Such a situation could only lead to one result: Chinese contemporary art no longer has any independent status and public faith; whereas when the State begins to treat contemporary art as a necessary complement to it’s cultural image, contemporary art’s legitimizing course must conceal an even deeper alienation in it, that is, its re-instrumentalization.
ArtZineChina: What does the academic criticism system of Chinese contemporary art look like? Does it differ hugely from the west?
Huang Zhuan: Fundamentally we haven’t formed an independent criticism system of our own. Chinese contemporary art criticism system was formed in the 1980s’ art enlightenment movement; it had two bases – a political criticism consciousness and a moralized thinking model whose methodological basis was theory of reflection, that is, it determines art functions to reflect the reality – an art work must be a reflection of some realistic thing or idea (either it is to praise or to criticize), and it rejects the idea that art has its own logic and functions that are far more complicated than “reflection.” In China there’s conceptual art but there’s no criticism about it just because the force of theory of reflection is too strong. In the  revolt against the mainstay culture in 1980s the criticism with such a moral orientation did embody a revolutionary nature, but the outmoded style of a simplified politicized and moralized criticism not only leave the west with excuses for their misinterpretation of China but also greatly restricted the openness and the discourse field of contemporary criticism.
ArtZineChina: What is the politicization and moralization of art criticism?
Huang Zhuan: To interpret all art activities in terms of political and moral behaviour, but sometimes art’s logic does have nothing to do with the logic of politics. The interpretations of the works by Wang Guangyi, Zhang Peili, Huang Yongping, Zhang Xiaogang are mostly enshrouded in a theory of reflection methodology and a narrow-minded political logic.
ArtZineChina: With the art market boom in recent two years, art critics have been levelling more and more criticism at art capitalization. How do you think about this phenomenon?
Huang Zhuan: It’s also a result from moralizing inertia of the criticism, which I call “pseudo moralism.” Since last year the criticism of the so-called Chinese art capitalization has become a trend. Attempts to seize a moral vantage point for oneself by criticizing “capital” are perhaps not much of a fault, but they already have nothing to do with true art criticism. If someone tries to defame a group of artists of the 1980s on the excuse of morals and thus to negate the 1980s, his real intention would be in question. In the past history, moralism has always been a strategy in power games, and one’s negation of a history usually conceals some sort of his implicit selfish desires.
Contemporary art’s inclination to systematization, fashion and collusion with news media is a problem more serious than art capitalization. Capital is neutral; it’s neither good nor bad. Hayek said capital is the greatest tool of freedom human has ever invented. Then, to criticize art capitalization on a moral position is, for better, missing the point, or, for worse, ill-intentioned.
ArtZineChina: Let’s return to our first topic. In your opinion, what’s the significance of the London meeting in solving Chinese contemporary art’s present problems?
Huang Zhuan: Almost all curators of important art museums in western countries or directors of their Oriental Departments had come to that meeting, and some advanced scholars who’re interested in China also attended. Looking by the name list, I believe it can be counted as a serious meeting. Optimistically, perhaps it hints the intellectual class in the west are beginning to realize their problems, realize they have problems with their ways of thinking when looking at China. In a sense, it means the end of an era when the image of Chinese contemporary art was controlled by western collectors and curators only.
 Chinese are now still incapable of describing themselves, but you should become aware of this first: Chinese contemporary art should, first of all, be “art,” and it’s a sort of human wisdom. For art the most important thing could only be art, which can’t be simply treated as any form of cultural or political tool. The only reason for contemporary art’s existence is its offer of a visual wisdom to human race that couldn’t be replaced by any other domains of human culture. As for what this wisdom could be used for, it’s another matter.
ArtZineChina: Could you say something about the present financial crisis’ impact upon art?
Huang Zhuan: The current financial crisis should be a good thing to art, particularly to the unabated feverish Chinese contemporary art. It perhaps has nothing to do with art, but it can be an anti-dote to those who have had their heads turned by the market. Art and market shouldn’t have been in a relationship like this, it has been over-exaggerated and distorted. One has taken wrong medicines, now he has no medicine to take, and this may force him to stop to look for other prescriptions.
 Huang Zhuan: Independent Curator, Associate Professor at the Art History Department of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.
Related Links:
·A Conversation about Art in the 80s
·Abstraction: An Expression Concerning Liberty
·Is there any other choice for Chinese Avant Garde art?---- Re-read “Free Communication”
·Reflections on the '80s Avant-Garde
·Who Should Be an Art Critic?
·Xiang Jing vs. Huang Zhuan
·The Ghost of Collectivism in Our Art
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