Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The period from 1919 to 1942 brought general disillusionment with traditional Chinese literati, or scholar-artist, ink painting; when Mao Zedong took power, a heroic style based on the Soviet model became the official language of revolution. Not until 1979 did the Stars group initiate the avant-garde movement. It was part of the Democracy Wall movement, which brought together social, cultural, and political impetus for change. “Every artist is a star,” Ma Desheng, one of the Stars group’s founders, has said. “We called our group Stars to emphasize our individuality. This was directed at the drab uniformity of the Cultural Revolution.” The members of the Stars group, who had never trained at official academies, could not show their work, so in 1979 they hung their paintings on the fence outside the National Art Gallery. When police closed down their open-air exhibition, they demonstrated for individual rights.

In 1977, the art academies, which had been shuttered during the Cultural Revolution, reopened, and young artists began to go through the unspeakably grueling application process, taking their exams over and over for the few places in the Zhejiang Academy in Hangzhou and the Central Academy in Beijing. Between 1979 and 1989, as the Chinese government was liberalizing, exhibitions of Western art appeared at the National Art Gallery, and students would spend days there. In China, even those who railed against society wanted the academic formal training that they felt entitled them to speak and think. The Stars had brought in radicalism of content; now, the ’85 New Wave introduced radicalism of form. In 1985, five critics, including Lao Li, privately set up Fine Arts in China, a magazine that became a voice for new art movements until it was closed down in 1989. These other critics, who were as important as Lao Li, have since either emigrated or lapsed into relative silence.

Many artists during this time signaled their disdain for social norms by ceasing to cut their hair (a radicalism to which Song’s haircut performance alluded). Ignoring the prurient repressiveness of Chinese society, they spoke freely of women, did not conceal the details of their personal lives, told dirty jokes. They sat up at night discussing Western philosophers, artists, poets. Much previously unavailable literature was suddenly published, and they read voraciously. Despite their general looseness, however, most had jobs and were painstaking in the execution of their duties. Art they made for themselves, showed with great difficulty, and sold only occasionally to “international friends” (the phrase, beloved of artists, was Mao’s euphemism for foreign sympathizers).

As artists took up arms against their society’s values throughout the 1980s, they tended to use Western visual language. Some Western critics, looking at this art, have dismissed it as derivative. But that Western language was powerful in China simply because it had been forbidden; the use of it was calculated and meaningful. The artists of the Chinese avant-garde have no more copied Western styles than Roy Lichtenstein has copied comic books or than Michelangelo copied classical sculpture. The form looks similar; the language is imitative; the meaning is foreign.

The last gasp of the exuberant Chinese art movement came just months before the June 4 massacre in Tiananmen Square. In February 1989, the China/Avant-Garde show opened at the National Art Gallery in an atmosphere of naïve ecstasy, its symbol the Chinese road sign for “No U-turn.” Ten years earlier, the Stars had fought to hang their work outside the gallery, but now the critics of Fine Arts in China joined with others to put on a monumental exhibition of the most radical work of all the new artists of the Chinese avant-garde. Many artists thought this show would give their work the official imprimatur it needed to reach the larger population. At the opening, two artists fired gunshots into their installation. Shocked officials closed the exhibition immediately, leaving the dreams of the avant-garde in ruins. Today, some artists have seen “confidential” memos in government files that say no measures will be counted too extreme to prevent another event like the ’89 show.