Journal of Visual Art Practice

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Contemporary Chinese art and criticality: From the

general to the particular

Paul Gladston & Katie Hill

To cite this article: Paul Gladston & Katie Hill (2012) Contemporary Chinese art and criticality:
From the general to the particular, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 11:2-3, 99-116, DOI: 10.1386/
jvap.11.2-3.99_2

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1386/jvap.11.2-3.99_2

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 JVAP 11 (2+3) pp. 99–116 Intellect Limited 2012

Journal of Visual Art Practice

Volume 11 Numbers 2 & 3
© 2012 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/jvap.11.2-3.99_2

Editorial
社论

Paul Gladston 诺丁汉大学

University of Nottingham
Katie Hill 苏富比艺术学院
Sotheby’s Institute of Art

Contemporary Chinese art

and criticality: From the
general to the particular
中国当代艺术与批判性：
从普遍到特殊

Abstract Keywords
The following editorial sets out the context for this special edition of the Journal of People’s Republic of
Visual Art Practice by situating contemporary Chinese art and its critical engage- China
ment with society and politics – both within and outside the People’s Republic Taiwan
of China and Taiwan – in relation to a wider history of modernist, postmodern- contemporary Chinese
ist and contemporary visual art theory and practice. It also outlines the particular art

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Paul Gladston | Katie Hill

criticality social, economic, cultural and political conditions in relation to which contemporary
modernism art is produced and received within the PRC and Taiwan as well as differences
postmodernism between localized Chinese and international perspectives on the critical significance
contemporaneity of contemporary Chinese art.

关键词 摘要
中华人名共和国 接下来的这篇社论旨在为本期《视觉艺术与实践》的中国当代艺术特辑提供
台湾 一个阅读的语境。文章从现代主义，后现代主义和当代视觉艺术理论及实践
中国当代艺术 的历史脉络出发，来检视中国当代艺术及其对社会和政治的批判性参与（包
批判性 括中华人民共和国和台湾境外的艺术实践）。同时，文章还概述了影响当代
现代主义 艺术创作和评价的特定社会，经济，文化和政治环境，以及在解读中国当代
后现代主义 艺术的批判性时，中国国内视角与国际视角之间存在的差异。
当代性

Introduction
During the last three decades, contemporary Chinese art (that is to say,
contemporary art produced within the People’s Republic of China and
Taiwan as well as in relation to associated diasporic communities worldwide)
has attracted sustained critical attention within the international art world.
However, in spite of this attention critical discourses on the significance of
contemporary Chinese art are still relatively underdeveloped not only in terms
of their engagement with historical detail but also their theoretical sophis-
tication. The making of contemporary Chinese art has been characterized
consistently and regardless of location by a bringing together of images, atti-
tudes and techniques appropriated from the western avant-gardes and post
avant-gardes with aspects of localized Chinese cultural thought and practice.
Within westernized contexts outside the PRC, including Taiwan, there has
been a tendency to interpret this commingling of cultural outlooks somewhat
abstractly as a variation on the cultural hybridism that supposedly defines other
forms of contemporary international artistic practice and, consequently, as a
site of pervasive deconstructive resistance to authoritative meaning. Generally
overlooked or downplayed within these westernized contexts are localized
interpretations of contemporary Chinese art that uphold its significance as an
expression of an essential modern Chinese cultural and/or civilization-specific
identity (not least within the PRC) and, therefore, as a site of more or less
oppositional resistance to western cultural influences set against the back-
ground of contemporary globalization. The stand-off between these highly
generalizing and theoretically opposed positions (which is arguably marked
by the persistent traces of a Cold War ideological division between liberality
and collectivism) has stymied more focused critical readings of contemporary
Chinese art by overwriting the complexity of its multiple and shifting relation-
ships to differing social, economic, political and cultural settings.
In an attempt to go beyond these existing generalizations, this special
edition of JVAP will present a diverse range of essays examining the signifi-
cance of contemporary Chinese art as a focus for social and political criticism
viewed closely in relation to the specificity of prevailing conditions of time and
place contingent upon its production and reception. In each of these essays,
some of which have been written from autochthonous Chinese art world
perspectives and others from international perspectives sensitive to local-
ized Chinese sociocultural points of view, particular attention is also paid to
the capacity of contemporary Chinese art to intervene critically within wider

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societal settings beyond the often deadening limits of the privatized gallery or 1. Here, the term
‘modernism’ refers
museum space. What emerges is a rather more nuanced framing of the criti- to modern forms
cal significance of contemporary Chinese art than that more usually set out of cultural thinking
within international and Chinese contexts. and practice that
first emerged with
The remainder of this editorial will contextualize the essays that follow by the development of
situating the development of contemporary Chinese art in relation to a wider industrialized and
history of modernist, postmodernist and contemporary visual art theory urbanized societies
in Europe and North
and practice. It will also provide a broad outline of the conditions in rela- America during the
tion to which contemporary Chinese art is produced, displayed and received late nineteenth
and early twentieth
within the PRC and Taiwan as well as differences between localized Chinese century. The term
and international perspectives on the critical significance of contemporary ‘postmodernism’ refers
Chinese art. to a diverse range of
cultural/philosophical
discourses and
practices that first
Modernity and modern art in China during the twentieth came together within
century an international
context during
Within the contemporary international art world there is a continuing assump- the late twentieth
century and that
tion that the production and display of advanced contemporary art has the seek to problematize
potential to and, indeed, should act as a locus for socio-political criticism. This rationalist-progressive
assumption extends not only to those westernized contexts that fomented the attitudes associated
with western(ized)
initial development of critical thinking and practice associated with modern- modernism. Here,
ism and postmodernism, but also to contexts where recent entry into moder- ‘modernity’ refers to
nity has engendered contemporary thinking and practice that diverges from economic and social
relations associated
and/or assimilates established modernist and postmodernist sensibilities. The with the historical
former grouping includes ‘first world’ (European and American) sites in which shift from traditional
agrarian societies
modernity – that is to say, industrial capitalism and urbanism – first emerged to those dominated
during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as sites around by industrialization
the world that became implicated in modernity/postmodernity through the and urbanization.
‘Postmodernity’
spread of western colonialism/imperialism. The latter enfolds sites in the refers to complex and
‘second’ and ‘third’ worlds whose relationship to western(ized) capitalist/ dynamic economic
industrialist (post)modernity has only developed in a materially sustained way and social relations
perceived to have
in recent decades as part of globalization.1 arisen as a long-
Within westernized contexts, the assumption that artistic production and term consequence
of modernity
display has the potential to act as a locus for socio-cultural criticism can be and in relation to
understood to have grown out of a post-Enlightenment belief in the necessity postmodernism.
for a critical departure from established tradition as part of the development
of a more rational and progressive modern society. As such, it encompasses
the notion that artistic production and reception should be part of open criti-
cal debate within the public sphere as well as a potential contributor to civil
(that is to say, non-governmental politically engaged) society. It also encom-
passes/imbricates a range of intersecting approaches to socio-political criticism
across the arts, humanities and social sciences that have coalesced as part of
modernism-postmodernism and that form what might now be thought of as
modern westernized critical discourse: first, the strand of continental philos-
ophy that includes German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, struc-
turalism and post-structuralism, as well as the method of immanent critique
developed by the Frankfurt School with its emphasis on the writings of Marx
and Freud; second, semiotic criticism that provides methodological tools
for the analysis of ‘texts’ in both the narrow literary and the more expan-
sive culturally studies sense; and third, the field of anthropology that exam-
ines everyday cultural practices and sense-making rituals. Together, these
diverse approaches provide a formidable battery of practical and intellectual

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2. Within sinological resources that have enabled sustained and far-reaching criticism not only of
circles, many scholars
regard the Ming
established traditions but also emergent orthodoxies through a direct multi-
Dynasty (1368–1644) as faceted engagement with the complexity of both the past and present. In light
the starting point for of the postmodernist critical turn within the arts and humanities of the last
the ‘modern’ period
in Chinese history as half century, it is also important to recognize that the criticality of contempo-
this encompassed the rary art is no longer seen in modernist terms as a focus for a potentially auton-
rise of print culture omous/transcendent criticality, but instead as one that is subject to constant
and commercialism
within China. recuperation by the mainstream of modernity and therefore as being in some
Because of China’s sense complicit with the positions of authority that it otherwise resists.
5000-year history,
there is a tendency
Within China, a self-conscious desire for ‘modernity’ began to emerge
among sinologists during the mid-to late nineteenth century largely in response to western
to collapse specific colonialist interventions and military defeat at the hands of an expansionist
historical events into a
broader ‘civilizational’ Japanese navy. This desire resulted in growing criticism of and resistance to
discourse. The sense the prevailing feudal order within China that eventually led to the demise of
of extreme longevity the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and the establishing of republican rule in 1912.2
that accompanies
this discourse is During the early twentieth century, modernization of education (including
problematic to the the founding of schools for girls and western-influenced art academies) and
writing of modern/
contemporary
reform of China’s established Confucian social hierarchy resulted, against the
history as it absorbs background of the example set by post-Meiji Japan, in a broadening of criti-
rupture into a more cal attitudes that extended both to reformist and revolutionary outlooks. This
conservative scheme of
historical continuity. broadening of attitudes was influenced strongly by translations of western
writings on social Darwinism as well as aspects of the western philosophical
3. The New Culture
Movement was tradition carried out during the early 1890s that opened up possibilities beyond
initiated shortly after the continuum of China’s bounded philosophical and cultural traditions
the establishment of (Shen 2009). The emergence of critical modernity within China was further
the Chinese republic
in 1912 through calls bolstered by the founding of the reforming New Culture and May Fourth
for social, political and movements; the first shortly after the establishment of the Chinese Republic
cultural change issued
in the journal New
in 1912 and latter following the poor settlement offered to China as part of
Youth (also known the Versailles Treaty in 1919.3 These movements initiated a dramatic shift in
as La Jeunnesse). The cultural sensibilities encompassing active debates on the modeng/modern and
movement gained
national prominence modernization conducted in journals such as La Jeunesse/New Youth.
following a wave of While all of these developments are entangled inextricably with west-
student protests on ern attitudes towards modernity, to describe them simply as manifestations
4 May 1919 initiated
in response to the of ‘westernization’ would, however, be something of an over-simplification.
unfavourable terms The emergence of critical modernity within China was not only a response
forced upon China at
the Versailles Peace
to localized political and cultural concerns different in substance and timing
Conference of the from those of the West, it can also be understood to carry traces of indig-
same year. The May enous cultural attitudes, not least those associated with the Chinese literati
Fourth Movement
was a nationalist tradition. The literati, amateur (in the western eighteenth-century sense of the
movement that also word) intellectuals who acted as government officials throughout the period
grew out of student of dynastic rule within China, took on the responsibility of maintaining social
demonstrations in
Beijing on 4 May order/harmony (following conceptions of filial piety set out in the writings of
1919. These student Confucius) by opposing inappropriate aspects of imperial policy. This opposi-
demonstrations,
which protested
tion, which ran the risk of violent retribution or exile, often took the form of
against the Chinese a deliberate withdrawal from public life. Critical resistance to authority within
government’s poor China since the late nineteenth century is therefore linked to a much longer
response to the Treaty
of Versailles, initiated tradition of opposition; one that predates the emergence of western post-
an upsurge of Chinese enlightenment reflexivity.
nationalism and a As part of the shift in sensibilities initiated by the New Culture and May
move away from
the dominance of Fourth movements, Chinese artists – some of whom had travelled to study
intellectual cultural in Europe and Japan – began to appropriate a range of technical, stylistic
elites towards more
and theoretical influences from western modernist art. This appropriation,

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which took place against the background of earlier borrowings from the west- populist forms of
politics within China.
ern academic tradition initiated by European missionaries during the seven-
teenth century (Clunas [1997] 2009: 129–30), resulted in an effective division 4. Shan shui (literally,
‘mountains and water’)
of Chinese art into three categories for the purposes of public exhibition: is a traditional style
‘modernist’, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern-literati’ (modern-traditional) (Danzker of Chinese landscape
et al. 2004). Examples of artworks associated with the former category include painting that uses
ink and brush on
paintings produced by members of the Shanghai-based Storm Society, who, rice paper or silk to
in 1931, published a manifesto aligning the group with western modernist depict natural scenes
movements such as a Fauvism, Expressionism and Dada (Pan 2008: 47–87), involving mountains,
rivers, streams,
while examples associated with the latter include photographs by Long Chin waterfalls and lakes.
San that combine modern techniques with imagery more usually associated
with traditional Chinese ‘shan-shui’/‘mountains and water’4 ink and brush
landscape painting.
From a western perspective, much of the work produced by Chinese
modernist artists of the early twentieth century would appear to have no critical
content other than a formalist desire to move beyond traditional Chinese
modes of artistic production. However, seen through the lens of a localized
Chinese modernity, early twentieth century Chinese works of art that refer-
ence European modernism can be understood to carry specific connotations of
ideological radicalism that exceed the merely formalistic. The appropriation of
western modernist and realist styles by Chinese painters was part of a debate
that raged during the 1920s and 1930s about the direction of modernization
within China. Modernism and realism in the arts became strongly aligned with
differing ideological positions: the former with liberal bourgeois-democratic
reform and the latter with socialist revolutionary change. Furthermore, along-
side Chinese modernist art of the early twentieth century there was also the
development of a realist approach to painting by artists such as Jiang Zhaohe
that, following the example set by the western trained painter Xu Beihong,
made use of the conventions of western academic realism to reflect on issues
of pressing social concern with China (Pan 2008: 47–87). Confirmation of the
criticality of these differing approaches to artistic production is evidenced by
the curtailing of both in the face of continuing opposition to artistic radicalism
in China throughout the 1920s and 1930s. By the mid-1930s it became more
or less impossible to pursue a modernist approach towards artistic production
in the face of hardening attitudes on the political right (China’s ruling nation-
alist party under the leadership of Chang Kai-shek had by then adopted a
distinctly fascistic form of populist republicanism) and the left. At the same
time, socialist leaning art became increasingly ideologically entrenched result-
ing in a shift towards populist/instrumentalist forms of artistic production
such as those developed by the Chinese modern woodcut print movement to
highlight instances of social injustice and deprivation in line with socialist and
communist principles (Tang 2007).
By the late 1930s, the development of modernist art within China had also
become subject to the pervasively destabilizing effects of two simultaneous
military conflicts; one between government forces headed by China’s repub-
lican president Chang Kai-shek and an insurgent People’s Liberation Army
under the leadership of Mao Zedong, and another pitting Chinese republicans
and communists against invading Japanese imperial forces. Consequently,
from the end of the 1930s through to the establishing of the communist
People’s Republic of China in 1949, the development of modernist art in
China was heavily disrupted both materially and ideologically. Nevertheless,
the influence of western modernism can be seen to have persisted in relation

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5. In May 1942, Mao to the making of expressionist style paintings produced by the artist Huang
Zedong convened a
forum on literature
Xinbo, which present a distinctly bleak left leaning view of contemporaneous
and the arts at the events within China.
Chinese Communist During the period from the founding of New China in 1949 until 1978,
Party’s headquarters in
Yan’an in the northern artistic practice within the PRC was, broadly speaking, dominated by a CCP
Chinese province of directive that all forms of art should reflect the point of view of the masses and
Shaanxi. During this serve the revolutionary aims of the CCP (as set out in Mao Zedong’s ‘Yan’an
forum, Mao gave his
now famous ‘Yan’an Talks on Art and Literature’ (1942)) (Mackerras 2008: 150).5 Throughout the
Talks on Literature 1950s and the early 1960s, traditional modes of Chinese art-making were
and the Arts’ in which
he argued vigorously
encompassed by this directive, thereby instituting a relatively pluralistic land-
that there is no art scape of artistic production and public artistic display that saw the making
‘detached from or of socialist realist artworks influenced strongly by the cultural policies of the
independent of politics’
and that art should be Soviet Union alongside the use of traditional Chinese gong-bi and shui-mo6
used to support the ink and brush techniques as a vehicle for the representation of revolution-
revolutionary aims of ary subjects. During the late 1950s, the plurality of official Chinese art was
the CCP by objectively
representing and further amplified by a call from Mao Zedong for the use of Chinese folk art
promoting the view motifs and techniques as an expression of a specifically Chinese revolutionary
of the masses. This
vision of art as part of
identity. This call, which went on to contribute to a nationalist/anti-imperialist
a larger ‘revolutionary rejection of western political, economic and cultural influences initiated in the
machine’, subsequently wake of the disastrous events of the Great Leap forward of 1959–1960, saw
became the basis of an
official directive issued an extension of official Chinese art into areas that significantly compromised
by the CCP shortly any exclusive relationship between revolutionary ideology and the decidedly
after it came to power high-art methods of western academic realism and Chinese literati ink and
in 1949 requiring that
all artists working in brush painting.
the newly founded The coexistence of western influenced and traditional Chinese art as
People’s Republic of
China should not only
part of the CCP’s revolutionary project was, however, decidedly short-lived.
take the view of the During the decade-long Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) traditional Chinese
masses, but also be culture was violently suppressed in an attempt to force China into a deci-
totally subservient to
the aims of the Party. sive revolutionary breaking with its past. This suppression resulted not only
in the widespread destruction of traditional artefacts by Red Guards loyal to
6. There are two
main techniques in Mao, but also by private owners fearful of political persecution. At the same
traditional Chinese time, there was a violent suppression of ‘bourgeois’ modernist art that led to
painting: gong-bi, or the destruction of many works of art produced as part of the early flowering
meticulous technique,
often referred to as of modernism within China before 1949 (Pan 2008: 47–87). At the same time
‘court style’ painting, there was also a renewed purging of counter-revolutionary content within
and shui-mo (literally
‘water and ink’),
the arts that forced artists working for the CCP to carefully self-censor or
freehand technique. encode anything that might be perceived to run counter to the viewpoint of
7. Throughout the 1960s
the masses and the ideological aims of the party (Clarke 2008: 272–96).
and into the 1970s Public revolutionary art within China during the Cultural Revolution
artists associated was not, however, limited solely to conventional works of representational
with the No-Name
Group developed an socialist realism. Alongside paintings and sculptures in a soviet-influenced
aesthetic–formalist academic style and posters representing revolutionary subjects in a highly
style of painting similar graphic manner (which had become established as mainstays of Chinese
to that of European
modernism during the revolutionary art during the 1950s), there were also dazibao/big character
early to mid twentieth posters carrying revolutionary slogans and street performance events serving
century.
as a focus for the dissemination of public information as well as denunciations
of counter-revolutionary activity. Furthermore, it would be wrong to assume
that the production of art influenced by early western modernism had come
to an abrupt halt during the Cultural Revolution. Not only was art of this
sort produced in a clandestine manner during the early years of the Cultural
Revolution (most notably by individuals who would later go on during the
1970s to form the unofficial No Name Group of artists)7 (Gao 2007) by the

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 Contemporary Chinese art and criticality

mid-1970s it was being made and its associated techniques taught more or 8. Deng Xiaoping’s
so-called ‘policy of
less openly outside official artistic circles (Gladston 2011a: 29–30). opening and reform’
Here cultural life within the PRC diverges markedly from that of the West is, in fact, a series
during the same period. As a result of several decades of the CCP striving of related policies
and directives,
to consolidate its hold on power, any artistic development that might bridge including the Four
the divide between Communism and western post-war liberalism, such as Modernizations,
that which emerged as part of the development of apartment art in the Soviet the shaungbai/Two
Hundreds directive
Union during the 1970s and 1980s, was powerfully foreclosed. Nevertheless, and jiefang sixiang
particular forms of Chinese modernism thrived within the PRC through the shishi qiu shi/the
Liberate Your Thinking
development and crystallization of Communist imagery throughout the 1950s, and Search for the
1960s and 1970s as well as outside mainland China not only in Taiwan and Truth in the Facts
Hong Kong/Macau but also in diasporic Chinese communities. Consider here, directive. The Four
Modernizations calls
for example the Fifth Moon group who, during the 1960s in Taiwan, devel- for the modernization
oped a form of abstraction using techniques adapted from traditional Chinese of technology,
landscape painting. Consider also, transnational Chinese artists such as education, agriculture
and the military.
Li Yuan-Chia, who became part of the minimalist–conceptualist movement in The Two Hundreds
London during the 1960s before setting up his own museum in Cumbria, and directive, which takes
its name from the use
Zhao Wuji who left China for Paris in the 1940s where he produced highly of the slogan ‘Let one
abstract paintings drawing on the Chinese landscape tradition. hundred flowers bloom
Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the subsequent accept- and one hundred
schools contend’, calls
ance of Deng Xiaoping’s programme of social and economic reforms in 1978 for greater diversity
(the starting point for China’s precipitous modernization of the last three of thought and public
decades),8 there has been a radical rethinking of modernity within the PRC debate as part of the
process of reform,
involving the reopening of China to outside economic and cultural influences effectively reviving
as well as the reconstruction of space within the country for relatively autono- the One Hundred
Flowers Bloom
mous forms of economic and cultural enterprise. As a result of this rethinking, campaign initiated by
Chinese artists have been able to develop forms of artistic practice that diverge Mao Zedong in 1956.
markedly from official strictures imposed during the time of the Cultural The Liberate Your
Thinking and Search
Revolution not by drawing openly on modern non-Chinese and traditional for the Truth in the
Chinese cultural resources but also by aligning themselves with a new offi- Facts directive seeks to
cially sanctioned spirit of individualism and entrepreneurship. promote experimental
research and the
This divergence has arguably led to a return to the tripartite division of discussion of subject-
artistic production that prevailed within China during the early twentieth specific questions
rather than purely
century in response to the ingress of modernizing western cultural influ- ideological ones.
ences. While officially supported forms of socialist-realism persist, this once
almost wholly dominant mode of artistic production has now been supple-
mented by three others: a return to traditional forms of Chinese art-making
often referred to as guo hua/national art; an officially supported modern art
that tends towards a rather anodyne formalist mixing of traditional Chinese
and modern western(ized) techniques; and a largely privatized, though, in
recent years, increasingly officially recognized, modern art known as Zhongguo
dangdai yishu/Chinese contemporary art that draws strongly on the influence
of western(ized) modernism and international postmodernism.
It is also important to recognize the development of contemporary art
within Taiwan during more or less the same period. Between the retreat of
Chang Kai-shek’s republican forces to Taiwan after their defeat at the hands
of the PLA in 1949 and the lifting of martial law (known as the ‘White Terror’)
in Taiwan in 1987, the Taiwanese government supported a distinctly nation-
alistic view of traditional Chinese culture in opposition to official socialist
realism within the PRC. As previously indicated, modernist forms of artistic
practice existed in Taiwan alongside traditional forms as early as the 1960s,
but these were heavily marginalized. During the 1980s and 1990s official

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Paul Gladston | Katie Hill

government support within Taiwan then shifted towards the making and
showing of contemporary forms of art, although major public art institutions
tended to exclude artworks that might be interpreted as critical of govern-
mental authority. Since the 1990s contemporary Taiwanese art has not only
become increasingly pluralistic, drawing on a variety of indigenous Taiwanese,
Chinese and non-Chinese cultural influences, it has also become enmeshed
ever more closely with international artistic and curatorial trends. This has
resulted in the development of a contemporary art in Taiwan that is both
discernibly critical and socially engaged (Shi et al. 2009).

Contemporary Chinese art – differing perspectives

The term ‘contemporary Chinese art’ is used widely within an anglophone
context to denote various forms of visual art produced as part of the liberaliza-
tion of culture that has taken place within the PRC following the death of Mao
Zedong and the ending of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 and the subsequent
confirmation of Deng Xiaoping’s programme of economic and social reforms
at the XI Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1978.
The comparable term in use within the PRC since the early 1990s is Zhongguo
Dangdai Yishu/Chinese contemporary art. Before that the term most widely
used was Zhongguo xiandai yishu/Chinese modern art.
Between 1978 and the early 1980s there was an attempt by the CCP to
reform established forms of socialist realism by outlawing the representation
of idealized revolutionary types in favour of the representation of individuals.
This shift, which reflected a growing tide of humanism in China after the
death of Mao, supported the making and public display of two generic vari-
ations on established socialist realism: history paintings addressing events
during the Cultural Revolution often referred to as ‘Scar Art’, and more
pastoral representations of Chinese life under communism known as ‘Rural
Realism’. Both of these genres make use of allegory, symbolism and, it might
be argued, evocations of the sublime to present humanist commentaries on
China’s recent political history. As such, they remained subject to intense state
scrutiny as well as governmental attempts to control their public reception.
Consider here, for example Luo Zhongli’s painting Father (1980), a ‘super-
realist’ portrait of a Chinese peasant that can be interpreted as a critique of
continuing social disparity within the PRC but which was presented publicly
in the early 1980s as a heroic representation of the Chinese masses.
Since its inception within the PRC during the late 1970s, contemporary
Chinese art has been characterized by an often conspicuous combining of
images, attitudes and techniques appropriated from western(ized) modernist
and international postmodernist art with aspects of autochthonous Chinese
cultural thought and practice. In light of its combining of differing Chinese and
non-Chinese cultural influences, contemporary Chinese art within the PRC
has been interpreted within an international art world context as a localized
variant of postmodernism whose hybridizing of differing cultural outlooks/
modes of production has the potential to act as a focus for the critical decon-
struction of supposedly authoritative meanings.
This vision of contemporary Chinese art was established during the late
1980s and early 1990s through a series of exhibitions, including ‘China’s New
Art Post-‘89’ at the Hanart Gallery in Hong Kong and ‘China Avant-Garde’
exhibition in Berlin (both of which were staged in 1993), that first brought
international attention to the genres of painting known as Political Pop and

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 Contemporary Chinese art and criticality

Cynical Realism (Figure 1). These genres – the former combining popular
international capitalist and Chinese communist party imagery, and the latter
depicting cartoon-like figures convulsed either by grimacing or disingenuous
laughter – were presented as (understandably) coded attacks on the authori-
tarianism of the Chinese Communist Party set against the background of the
Tian’anmen killings of 4 June 1989 and the ensuing conservative crackdown
within the PRC. Within westernized contexts still in thrall to oppositional Cold
War ideology, this early framing of the critical significance of Political Pop and
Cynical Realism entered rapidly into the public consciousness, informing a
popular understanding of contemporary Chinese art that persists up to the
present day.
In recent years, this view of contemporary Chinese art as a focus for political
dissidence has been reinforced by the international reception of the artist
Ai Weiwei. During the last two decades, Ai has gained a significant interna-
tional profile not only through his involvement in art-making, architecture and
art-related publications, but also his public criticism of the CCP both through
direct activist intervention and the use of new media. While Ai’s open resistance
to political authoritarianism, which led to his detention by the Chinese authori-
ties in 2011, has attracted justifiable support outside the PRC, it has arisen
within international contexts where there is still relatively little knowledge or
understanding of localized social, economic, cultural and political circumstances
within the PRC and where the political outlook of China’s ruling Communist
Party is often perceived starkly as a direct (and even Barbaric) threat to liberal
western(ized) democratic values. This view of China is strongly reinforced by
Ai’s use of the Internet, which is widely considered to act as a platform for a
nascent counter-authoritarian public sphere within the PRC (Ai 2011).
Also symptomatic of the international art world’s view of contemporary
Chinese art as a focus for deconstructive counter-authoritarianism is the

Figure 1: Yu Youhan, The World is Yours, 1994-95, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of

ShanghArt Gallery.

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Paul Gladston | Katie Hill

9. The first international persistent inclusion since the late 1980s of works of contemporary Chinese art
survey exhibition
of contemporary
in international survey exhibitions such as the ‘Venice Biennale’, ‘Documenta’
art, ‘Magiciens de la and the ‘Sydney Biennale’9 whose curators have sought to uphold cultural
Terre’, was held at the hybridity in the visual arts – chiefly in light of influential critical writings by
Centre Pompidou and
the Grande Halle de Edward Said ([1978] 1991) and Homi Bhabha (1994) – as a deconstructive post-
la Villette in Paris in colonialist resistance to western modernism’s orientalizing belief in the histor-
1989. The exhibition, ical ascendancy of the West over the East as part of the unfolding of modernity
which was curated by
Jean-Hubert Martin, (see e.g. Merewether 2006). Included among those who have sought to frame
included the work of contemporary Chinese art in this way is a group of Chinese artists and cura-
three artists from the
PRC: Gu Dexin, Yang
tors living and working in Paris. One of the most high-profile members of
Jiechang and Huang this group is the artist Huang Yongping, who, since his relocation from the
Yongping. PRC to France in 1989, has produced numerous sculptures, assemblages and
10. Traditional Chinese installations that are, as curator Alex Farquharson makes clear in promotional
thought and practice materials accompanying a recent exhibition of Huang’s work at Nottingham
is informed by a ‘non-
rationalist’ dialectical Contemporary gallery (UK), very much open to interpretation ‘as allego-
way of thinking ries for conflicts and convergences in traditions and beliefs under the influ-
associated with the ences of colonization and globalization’ (Farquharson 2011). One of Huang’s
Daoist concept of
yin-yang. The term most ambitious works in this regard is The Bat Project (2004), a large-scale
yin-yang refers to the assemblage comprising an aircraft fuselage whose cockpit has been hung
notion that seemingly
opposing forces/terms
with the stuffed bodies of dead bats. This assemblage can be interpreted as
(e.g. light and dark, a double-edged commentary on a collision between a US surveillance plane,
and male and female) carrying a bat logo on its tail fin, and a Chinese fighter jet that took place in
are in actuality both
interconnected and disputed airspace near to the Chinese island of Hainan in 2001; the bat being
interdependent. It variously a symbol of dread within the United States and of good luck within
is important to note the PRC (Vergne and Chong 2005: 72–75).
that the similarly
non-rationalist view Another key member of the Paris-based group is curator Hou Hanru, who
of dialectic thinking has published a number of texts that seek to align postcolonialist discourse
associated with
the Derridean term
with aspects of traditional Chinese cultural thought and practice. Included
différance looks among these is the essay ‘Entropy, Chinese artists, western art institutions: A
towards a persistently new internationalism’, which looks towards works by Huang Yongping such
disjunctive deferral
of absolute meaning, as Non-Expressive Painting (1985) and Small Portable Roulette (1988) as a bring-
while yin-yang is ing together of college-montage techniques appropriated from western Dada
conventionally with traditional Chinese divinatory practices associated with the Yi Ching
understood within
a Chinese cultural (Book of Changes). For Hou, this bringing together,
context to support
the possibility of
reciprocation between
[…] not only suggests a process of constant change in the universe, the
opposites (see Gladston duality and interconnectedness of necessity and chance, of the rational
2008: 63–69). and irrational, culture and anti-culture, but also a strategy to launch
‘attacks’ on the legitimacy of the West-centric monopoly in intellectual
and everyday life
(Hou 2002: 62).

The implication of Hou’s reading of Huang’s work here being that non-
rationalist aspects of traditional Chinese thought and practice associated with
the Yi Ching can be understood to have presaged the conceptually uncer-
tain outlook of western(ized) deconstructivist postmodernism,10 thereby
suspending any sense of the latter’s ascendancy over the former as part of
the unfolding of modernity. Huang’s intellectual project of the late 1980s can
thus be understood to carry distinctly nationalist undertones by dint of this
anti-imperialist motivation.
The prevailing view of contemporary Chinese art within an international
westernized context is thus a critically double-edged one, framing that art as

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 Contemporary Chinese art and criticality

a focus for resistance both to political authoritarianism within the PRC and 11. Since 1979 there have
been intermittent
colonialist/imperialist relations of dominance outwith the PRC. Moreover, periods of political
while the former carries the traces of a distinctly oppositional Cold-War conservatism within
political world-view and the latter draws on a deconstructive postmodernist the PRC. The first
of these was a
view of the critical potential of cultural hybridity, at a superficial level, at least, government crackdown
both can be seen as compatible insofar as they involve an abstract resistance on the Chinese
to authority cognate with the westernized modernist/postmodernist tradition Democracy Movement
that began in March
of cultural reflexivity. This internationalist reading of contemporary Chinese 1979. This crackdown
art also extends, as previously indicated, to similar forms of contemporary art was followed by the
Campaign against
produced in Taiwan that are very much open to interpretation as sites of criti- Zichan jieji ziyou hua/
cal resistance to localized and international relations of dominance. Bourgeois Liberalism
The difficulty with this double-edged view of contemporary Chinese art, of 1981. Subsequent
waves of conservatism
however, is that in spite of its apparent consistency with established modernist/ within the PRC include
postmodernist conceptions of art as a potential focus for social and political the Anti-Spiritual
criticism, it does not take fully into account prevailing conditions of artistic Pollution Campaign
(Fan jingshen wuran
production and reception within the PRC and Taiwan. Throughout the devel- yundong) of October
opment of contemporary Chinese art within the PRC, the CCP has continued 1983 to February 1984,
another Campaign
to suppress any public resistance to its authority as well as any action that against Bourgeois
might be understood to undermine the integrity of the Chinese nation state. Liberalism in 1987
Since the ending of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign in 1984,11 this has and the conservative
crackdown following
tended strongly towards the handing down of vague directives on individual the Tian’anmen
and collective behaviour. Such imprecise boundaries of social acceptabil- protests of 1989.
ity, while making space for greater social freedoms also instill a pervasively 12. Zhang Peili, one time
controlling (panoptical) sense of self-surveillance/self-discipline throughout head of the New Media
Chinese society. As a consequence, there has been a localized (and highly Department at the
China Academy of Fine
understandable) tendency to demur from the public framing of contemporary Arts in Hangzhou and
Chinese art as a focus for political dissidence. leading member of the
1980s art association
All of that notwithstanding, within the PRC since the mid 1980s Chi She (the Pond
the term Zhongguo dangdai yishu has often been used to signify qianwei Association), is widely
or (broadly speaking) ‘avant-garde’ forms of art (Wu 2008: 16), that, as considered to have
been the PRC’s first
Martina Köppel-Yang points out, can be understood both to ‘merge with’ video artist.
and to ‘semiotically oppose’ established social, political and cultural norms
(Köppel-Yang 2003: 35–37). Within the context of the PRC, the appropriation
of techniques historically associated with western modernist and postmod-
ernist art by contemporary Chinese artists since the late 1970s is therefore
open to interpretation as a focus for necessarily coded forms of (more or less)
oppositional (rather than self-consciously deconstructive) socio-political
critique. Consider here, for example, Wang Guangyi’s painting Mao Zedong –
Red Grid (1988) (Figure 2), a triptych involving the superimposition of a
geometric grid over three identical portraits of Mao Zedong, which can be
understood to signify Mao’s isolation from the Chinese people while draw-
ing short of any explicit or focused criticism of Mao’s actions (Köppel-Yang
2003: 157–58). Consider also Zhang Peili’s12 more recent video installation A
Gust of Wind (2008) (Figure 3), a multi-screen video installation representing
the destruction of a well-furnished interior by a typhoon, which is open to
interpretation, in light of events such as the Great Leap Forward of 1958–1961
and the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, as a visual metaphor for the precarity
of China’s increasingly precipitous programme of modernization of the last
three decades (Gladston 2009: 50–58). The use of the term Zhongguo dangdai
yishu therefore implies a degree of separation from the now internationally
dominant postmodernist view of contemporary art insofar as international
postmodernism has tended to frame the characteristically negative tactics of

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Paul Gladston | Katie Hill

Figure 2: Wang Guangyi, Mao Zedong—Red Grid, 1988; oil on canvas.

Courtesy of the artist.

the western historical avant-gardes as something of a spent force, while those

same tactics are still perceived to have a certain currency within the prevailing
socio-political and economic contexts of the PRC (not least, perhaps, because
of the official and unofficial persistence within the PRC of dialectical revolu-
tionary Marxist thought).
At the same time, it is also important to acknowledge that the emer-
gence of qianwei art within the PRC since the late 1970s has involved the

Figure 3: Zhang Peili, A Gust of Wind, 2008; multi-media installation. Courtesy

of the artist.

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 Contemporary Chinese art and criticality

reconstruction of a relatively autonomous sphere of artistic self-expression 13. A key marker of China’s
increasing nationalism
as a move away from the party dominated and distinctly non-autonomous is a speech given by
socialist realism and street propaganda of the Maoist period. Consequently, the country’s president
while the term qianwei signifies a somewhat oppositional approach towards Hu Jintao at the Sixth
Plenary Session of the
socio-political critique broadly consonant with that of the western histori- Seventeenth Central
cal avant-gardes, the general trajectory of ‘avant-garde’ art within the PRC Committee of the
after 1979 can be seen to run, as the philosopher Zhenming Zhai has argued, Communist Party of
China on 18 October
more or less contrary to the western historical avant-gardes’ desire to negate 2011, entitled ‘To Walk
artistic autonomy as part of a critical sublation of art within everyday praxis Persistently a Socialist
Cultural Development
(Gladston 2011b). It is therefore necessary to make a distinction between qian- Road with Chinese
wei forms of art within the PRC since 1979 and the western historical avant- Characteristics and
gardes on the basis that the former can be understood to go against the grain Make Best Efforts
to Build A Socialist
of the latter’s intentions by reinstating aspects of autonomous cultural practice Cultural Power’.
as part of their opposition to established social, political and cultural norms.
Furthermore, while contemporary art within the PRC can be understood
to act as a platform for coded socio-political critique, its part in the open-
ing up of a relatively autonomous cultural-artistic sphere after the ending of
the Cultural Revolution can be seen to be broadly in keeping with Deng’s
programme of economic and social reform and the associated clearing of
‘depoliticized’ space for entrepreneurial activity. However, while contempo-
rary Chinese art within the PRC can be understood to have made itself party
to the political/ideological aims of the CCP, it is also important to recognize
that it was a largely self-organized movement that had to struggle for accept-
ance in the face of the deleterious effects of recurring political campaigns.
Since the 1990s there has been an increasingly strident sense of nationalism
within the PRC that reflects a continuing desire to uphold a localized sense of
Chinese cultural identity as part of the unfolding of modernity (Hu 2011)13 –
a desire that, as David Clarke indicates, has persisted since China’s earliest
engagement with modernity at the end of the nineteenth century (Louie
in Clarke 2008: 274). One of the consequences of this nationalist turn has
been a localized resistance within the PRC to the international postmodernist
view of cultural identity as a necessarily hybrid phenonmenon, since such a
view undermines any national essentialist understanding of the positioning
of contemporary Chinese culture. Within the context of the PRC there is
therefore a prevailing public view of contemporary Chinese art as a focus
both for the assertion of a modern Chinese cultural identity and, by extension,
an oppositional resistance to westernized cultural dominance as part of
contemporary Globalization.
This sense of resistance is reflected in localized Chinese understandings
of the term Zhongguo dangdai yishu. While the use of the adjective dangdai
as part of the term Zhongguo dangdai yishu signifies something that is ‘of the
present time’ in the general sense of the English word ‘contemporary’, it also
connotes supplementary meanings specific to a vernacular Chinese cultural
context. As well as signifying a specific period of time running from the end
of the 1970s through to the present day, within the localized context of the
PRC, dangdai also points towards a more complex, culturally specific notion of
‘present time’ as signified by the use of the term dangdaixing/contemporaneity.
As Gao Minglu indicates, dangdaixing is frequently used within the Mandarin
speaking context of the PRC as a substitute for the word xiandaixing/modernity
(Smith et al. in Gao 2008: 133). The significance of the word xiandaixing should
not, however, be conflated here with that of the English word ‘modernity’ as
the marker of a sequential shift from the pre-modern to the modern – nor, as

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Paul Gladston | Katie Hill

Gao would (mistakenly) have it, the subsequent sequential emergence of the
postmodern. Instead, xiandaixing signifies what Gao refers to as ‘the particular
social and cultural environment of a specific period, or what modern Chinese
call shidai jingshen, or “spirit of an epoch”’ (Smith et al. in Gao 2008: 133).
The use of dangdai in relation to the term Zhongguo dangdai yishu conse-
quently suggests a departure not only from the sequential logic of a western
modernist conception of history in favour of a rolling, non-sequential sense
of the condition of present modernity that remains in some sense continuous
with the past and future. Understood as such, it therefore points to a decid-
edly non-synchronous view of present modernity as something experienced
differently according to the specificity of prevailing localized (that is to say,
spatially bounded) socio-cultural conditions.
These conditions, within the particular context of the PRC, are strongly
informed, as Gao makes clear, by an abiding consciousness that since the
ending of dynastic imperial rule and the establishing of the Chinese repub-
lic during 1911–1912 ‘Chinese modernity has been determined by the idea
of a new nation rather than a new epoch’ (Smith et al. in Gao 2008: 133).
Moreover, this idea involves ‘both transcendent time and reconstructed space
with a clear national-cultural and political territorial boundary’ (Smith et al.
in Gao 2008: 134). In light of this, Chinese artists, curators, art historians and
critics involved in the production and displaying of contemporary Chinese
art within the PRC have, more often than not, fought shy of international
postmodernism’s pervasively deconstructivist transnational vision of cultural
hybridity, choosing instead to maintain a starkly exceptionalist view of Chinese
cultural identity in spite of the undeniable mixing of Chinese and non-Chinese
cultural influences involved in the making of contemporary Chinese art.
This resistant nationalist–separatist stance, which is broadly contiguous
with the oppositional Cold War anti-imperialism that prevailed within the PRC
during the time of the Cultural Revolution, manifests itself in part through a
continuing tendency among Chinese artists working within the PRC to incor-
porate readily recognizable signifiers of ‘Chineseness’ as part of their work.
Examples of this continuing tendency include installation works produced by
Gu Wenda and Xu Bing since the 1980s that draw directly on China’s calli-
graphic traditions as well as new media installations produced by Lin Tianmiao
and Yang Fudong since the turn of the millennium that, in a number of cases,
present images strongly redolent of traditional forms of Chinese shan-shui
landscape painting. It should be noted here, however, that the use of readily
recognizable signifiers of Chineseness by contemporary Chinese artists in this
way is not simply a sign of separatist cultural resistance. It has also proved
to be a significant selling point for contemporary Chinese art on the interna-
tional art market; one that can be understood to pander to the orientalizing
abstractions of non-Chinese buyers who often know little of Chinese culture
and history. It is therefore possible to view the use of readily recognizable
signifiers of Chineseness by contemporary Chinese artists as simultaneously a
form of cultural resistance and of commercial self-orientalization.
Here, once again, it is possible to interpret the positioning of
contemporary Chinese art within the PRC as an uncertain or ambiguous
one. While contemporary Chinese art acts most decidedly as a platform for
socio-political criticism both within the PRC and internationally, its critical
resistance to western(ized) cultural influence within the context of the PRC
is, for the most part, oppositional rather than deconstructivist in outlook.
As a consequence, the PRC’s autochthonous contemporary art world can

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be understood to be in an effective position of alignment with the CCP’s

own authoritarian assertion of the fundamental integrity of the Chinese
nation state. Crucially, the complex shuttling between critical demurral and
complicity that this effective state of alignment sets up is given support by
the decidedly non-liberal democratic political system that prevails currently
within the PRC. While there is, as stated previously, an assumption within
westernized contexts that contemporary artistic practice should be part of
open critical debate within the public sphere as well as a potential contributor
to civil society, within the PRC a full public role of this sort continues to be
strongly compromised by the persistent authoritarianism of the CCP. This is
not to say that contemporary art fails to act as an effective focus for social
and political criticism within the PRC. Nor is it to say that contemporary art
within the PRC is entirely distinct in its critical function from that ascribed to
westernized contemporary art. Rather, it is to acknowledge that contemporary
Chinese art within the PRC occupies a particularly intensified and locally
inflected position of resistance to and complicity with authority common to all
forms of art within modern or modernizing societies.
Within Taiwan the position of contemporary art is more akin to that
occupied by contemporary art in other westernized societies. However
it should be acknowledged that the contribution of contemporary art to
public discussion and civil society within Taiwan is part of a continuing local
struggle with political authoritarianism that was not ended entirely with the
establishing of democracy there in 1987. Moreover, it is important to recog-
nize that the development of a more liberal-democratic and pluralistic society
within Taiwan since the 1980s is part of a continuing resistance to the prevail-
ing politics of the PRC.
Also important to note here is the increasing marginalization of avant-
garde attitudes within the PRC since the turn of the millennium. At the end
of the twentieth century, qianwei/avant-garde art within the PRC reached
what is arguably its high water mark with a series of exhibitions, including the
now notorious Bu hezuo fangshi/‘Fuck off – uncooperative stance’ staged at the
Eastlink Gallery in Shanghai in 2000 (Ai and Feng 2000), that, among other
things, showcased extreme acts of violence to human and animal bodies. Since
then, and partly in response to a government directive outlawing extreme
forms of body art (Anon [2001] 2010: 276–77), dangdai yishu within the PRC
has presented a rather less challenging public face. This waning of obvious
criticality in many ways parallels that to be found within the international
art world where distinctly positivist (counter deconstructivist) approaches
to artistic production associated with the notions of identity and relational
aesthetics have in recent years become institutionally dominant. Nevertheless
there is within the PRC a notable backtracking on the early criticality of
contemporary Chinese art that has taken place specifically in relation to a
localized conjunction of authoritarian constraint, increasing nationalism and
burgeoning market-driven entrepreneurship.

The essays
The essays contained in this special edition of JVAP fall into two groupings.
The first of these encompasses academic perspectives on the issue of contem-
porary Chinese art and criticality. This grouping addresses specific instances
of artistic practice from points of view informed both by an understanding of
contemporary critical theory and sensitivity to the particular circumstances of

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visual art practice within Chinese cultural contexts. The second grouping
encompasses curatorial perspectives on the issue of contemporary Chinese
art and criticality. This second grouping addresses the subject of contempo-
rary Chinese art and criticality from points of view sensitive to the particu-
lar concerns of curators and visual art practitioners working within Chinese
cultural contexts.

Acknowledgement
The editors would like to thank Chris Smith for his support, advice and
unending good humour.

References
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2006–2009 (trans. Lee Ambrozy), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Eastlink Gallery.
Anon ([2001] 2010), ‘Ministry of Culture Notice (2001)’, in Hung Wu and
Peggy Wang (eds), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents, New
York: Museum of Modern Art, pp. 276–77.
Bhabha, Homi (1994), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.
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Peili’, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 8: 2, pp. 50–58.
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Suggested citation
Gladston, P. and Hill, K. (2012), ‘Contemporary Chinese art and criticality:
From the general to the particular’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 11: 2+3,
pp. 99–116, doi: 10.1386/jvap.11.2-3.99_2

Contributor details
Paul Gladston is Associate Professor of Culture, Film and Media and Director
of the Centre for Contemporary East-Asian Cultural Studies (CEACS) at the
University of Nottingham (UK). Between 2005 and 2010 he was the inaugural
director of the department of International Communications and director of
the Institute for Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham
Ningbo, China. He has written extensively on contemporary Chinese art with
particular reference to the concerns of critical theory. His book length publi-
cations include Art History after Deconstruction (2005), China and Other Spaces
(2009) and Contemporary Art in Shanghai: Conversations with Seven Chinese
Artists (2011). He is currently preparing monographs on Chinese ‘avant-
garde’ art groups and associations of the late 1970s and 1980s as well as the
theory and practice of contemporary Chinese art.
Contact: The University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7
2RD, UK.
E-mail: paul.gladston@nottingham.ac.uk

Katie Hill is consultant lecturer on the M.A. in East-Asian Art and online
course leader in Contemporary Chinese Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art,
London and New York. She is also founding director of the art consultancy,

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Paul Gladston | Katie Hill

Office of Contemporary Chinese Art, Oxford (OCCA). She has lectured,

researched and curated extensively in the field of contemporary Chinese art
for more than fifteen years, with research interests in the gendered body in
Chinese art, a hundred years of visual modernity in China, mapping urban
and rural Chinese cultural production in the twenty-first century and the
emergent contemporary Chinese art world. She has curated and produced
several exhibitions, working closely with the interventionist artist duo Mad
For Real (Cai Yuan and JJ Xi) for more than ten years. In 2010 she was invited
to conduct the ‘In Conversation with Ai Weiwei’ on the occasion of the open-
ing of the artist’s Unilever Sunflower Seeds commission at Tate Modern.
Contact: Office of Contemporary Chinese Art, 22 Bridewell Close, North
Leigh, Witney, Oxford OX29 6TR, UK.
E-mail: hill.cai@gmail.com
Paul Gladston and Katie Hill have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in
the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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