Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Political Pop is popular with Westerners. Its leading figure, Wang Guangyi, loves money and his own fame, and his work has reached prices in excess of $20,000. He recently rented a $200 hotel room just “to feel what it was like to live like an art superstar.” Wang wears dark glasses even when he is inside, has a long ponytail, and is always mentioned by other artists as an exemplar of Western values in China. He is at work on a series called “The Great Criticism,” in which he plays on the comical parallels between the publicity Mao once negotiated for his revolutionary policies and the advertising campaigns of prosperous Western interests. The names Band-Aid or Marlboro or Benetton are placed against idealized young soldiers and farmers wearing Mao caps. “Post-’89, with people so vulnerable,” he said, “I worry that commerce will harm their ideas and their ability to have ideas, much as AIDS can destroy people’s love relationships or their ability to have love relationships. Of course, I enjoy my own money and fame. I criticize Coke, but drink it every day. These contradictions are not troublesome to Chinese people.”

Yu Youhan, in Shanghai, paints Mao over and over, usually overlaid with garish patterns of flowers taken from the “peasant art” the Chairman loved. Mao mixes with common people or sits at ease on a folding chair; sometimes his face is clear, but sometimes a flower blocks one of his eyes or his nose. One of Yu’s recent paintings is a very pop double portrait: on the left is Chairman Mao, applauding one of his own principles; on the right, Whitney Houston applauds her own music. Both are copied from existing photographs, and the similarity is uncanny.

Individualism by the Numbers

Traditional Chinese painters trained by copying their teachers; originality was reserved for old age, when you might make changes so slight that they were almost imperceptible. The history of traditional Chinese art is rich but slow. The avant-garde goes at breakneck pace.

The artists who engage fully with the question of individuality are perhaps the most interesting in China right now. Paradoxically, the New Analysts Group in Beijing, which includes Wang Luyan, Gu Dexin, and Chen Shaoping, has decided, as an experiment, to suppress the individual in art. After the ’89 avant-garde show, they adopted a resolution stating that members of the group could not sign their work. Shortly thereafter, they established rules of operation. The artists in the group conceive these rules together, pass them by majority vote, and agree to be bound by them. “Facing the rules, we are all equal,” Wang Luyan explained to me. “Since we regard the rules as more important than the artists, we express ourselves in a language of regulations. Symbols and numbers best convey our ideas.”

So the New Analysts Group has made up complex formulae to express its interrelationship; its members use these to produce graphs and charts. One recent piece begins, “A1, A2, and A3 are individuals before reaching the set quantity, and also stand for the order of action after reaching the set quantity. A1, A2, and A3 set arbitrarily their respective graph for measuring, i.e., graphs A1, A2, and A3. A1, A2, and A3 share a set quantity, i.e., table A.” This kind of deliberately arcane absolutism becomes a playful critique of the Chinese principle of conformity, delivered always in the most serious possible manner. The work, regulated though it may be, is some of the most original I saw in China. “Originality is the by-product of our cooperating according to rules on which we have agreed,” Wang Luyan said.

They are an odd triumvirate. Chen Shaoping was sent to the mines during the Cultural Revolution and spent twelve years excavating coal; he is now an art editor for the China Coal newspaper. Wang Luyan spent the Cultural Revolution being reeducated as a farmer and is now a designer for the China Transportation newspaper. Gu Dexin is younger than the other two; he was a worker in a chemical factory until he decided to become a full-time artist.

Mention Song Shuangsong and his haircut performance and these artists shake their heads. “Imagine growing long hair,” Gu Dexin says, laughing, “such that people in the market or at the bus station could tell you were an artist!” Their individuality is infinitely more powerful because it is camouflaged. When a recent Western exhibition that included the work of Gu Dexin ended, the packers confused Gu’s work with their own packing material and his piece was accidentally discarded. “I like for my work to be thrown away,” he said. “There is so much art in the world to preserve and study, and I don’t want to clutter further the history of art.” To this, both others nod: nonindividuality here is an almost unconscious impulse, opposite to what Chinese artists see as the appalling self-importance and egotism of Western artists.