Festival Embraces the Real and Imagined : Chinese Artists Savor Opportunity for More Exposure

The images depicted by Chinese emigrant artists Gao Xiao-hua and Chen Qiang are worlds away from Laguna Beach, where their works are being featured in the Festival of Arts that opened Friday.

Gao’s colorfully detailed oil paintings portray the Yi people of China’s Sichuan mountain region, and Chen’s stylishly stark collagraphs and etchings capture the moods of ancient Tibetan villages.

Yet their aim is the same as any of the U.S. exhibitors in this year’s Festival of Arts, the oldest and best known of the summer art-and-craft festivals in Orange County’s famed coastal art colony.

Like all of the festival’s 165 participants, both Chen and Gao, former teachers in Beijing’s Central Institute of Fine Arts, want to make it big on the U.S. art-consumer market.

“We seek images and subjects that have universal appeal,” said Gao, 31, whose portraits of weathered Yi clansmen have been likened by festival organizers to the popular American illustrations of Southwest Indians.

Visions of commercial success and critical recognition, however, aren’t the only attractions in America for Chen and Gao, among the People’s Republic artists who have emerged since the reopening of art academies after the Cultural Revolution.

Raised in the isolation of a Chinese Communist society that had denounced Western art as decadent--and that had shut out virtually all cultural contacts with the West--Gao and Chen now seek firsthand exposure to U.S. art communities.

Chen’s Laguna Beach showing this summer is his first in California, but Gao has already exhibited at several Southland facilities, including last year’s Festival of Arts and his current one-man show at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena.

And Gao and Chen hope to soon attempt the ultimate American showcase: New York.

Chen, 28, expects to show his prints this fall at a new private Manhattan gallery started by his American sponsor, Oklahoma oil magnate Robert Hefner III, who met Chen during a Tibetan visit.

Gao, who will move to New York after the close of the Laguna Beach festival Aug. 30, is planning a private gallery showing there sometime next season.

In the early 1970s, such contacts with the West would have been unthinkable in China.

Then, students like Gao and Chen were being trained wholly in art forms that Westerners regarded as artistically stifling--propagandistic paens to socialist achievements in People’s Republic factories and farms.

But this official attitude seemed to ease somewhat by the late 1970s, a few years after the death of Mao Tse-tung, when artists were allowed to create works that openly criticized the catastrophic devastation of the Cultural Revolution, Gao said.

Gao himself won official praise in 1978 for his somberly ironic painting, “Why?” depicting dispirited youths sitting on one of their Red Guard banners spread over a grimy street. “It was an astonishingly new kind of theme for us--it showed the dark underside of that time. It wasn’t all happy, smiling people,” he said.

By the early 1980s, when the Chinese were being allowed expanded exposure to Western films, music, theater and literature, the Communist government also permitted artists to dabble in long-vilified Western styles, even abstract art and depictions of nudity.

During this time, Gao and Chen, however, continued to work in the more conventional styles and to focus on quasi-anthropological projects about “ordinary people,” such as the people in the remote settlements of China’s western regions.

Despite their official good standing, which included the showing of their works at important exhibits in China (and for Chen in traveling shows in Tokyo and Paris), there were obstacles to their artistic development.

The availability of art books and other reproductions of Western contemporary and modern art had increased markedly at the Central Institute, but like the other artists, Chen and Gao were still hampered by the shortage of working materials and the scarcity in China of exhibits of Western art.

Also, there were obvious limits to even this aura of official permissiveness.

Gao said his portraits of Yi patriarchs were turned down for a national exhibition in 1984 because some jurors found the works lacking in “constructive themes.”

“They felt the Yi men looked dirty, too poor. It was too much about a backward society,” Gao said.

While China permits showings in America of controversial Chinese works--such as those employing abstract forms or commenting on societal alienation--these same works would not be seen in national exhibitions in China, Gao said.

An example, he added, is “Beyond the Open Door,” a 40-artist show now at the Pacific Asia Museum that includes such disputed styles.

At the same time, thanks to China’s easing of restrictions on working abroad on extended or permanent visas, artists like Chen and Gao became part of a growing Chinese exodus to the United States.

“We don’t know the exact numbers (of artist emigrants), but they have gone mostly to Los Angeles and especially New York,” said Gao’s wife, Janet Baker, who studied Buddhist art history at Beijing’s Central Institute and is now gallery director at the China Institute in America, a New York-based cultural organization.

“But we do know there are 20 to 30 Chinese in this country just from the Central Institute,” added Baker, who served as interpreter for Gao and Chen during an interview this week in their Laguna Beach duplex.

Yet there are a few more obstacles still facing Gao, Chen and other Chinese artists here. Western artists who have seen China’s traveling exhibitions argue that while the techniques of People’s Republic artists remain masterly, their works are still slavishly imitative of 19th and 20th Century Western figures, from Van Gogh and Matisse to Wyeth and Pollock.

This vast artistic disparity is not lost on Chen or Gao.

“Their whole generation had been left stranded, absolutely isolated. To them, their journey (to the United States) is one of great discovery,” said Baker, who first went to China in 1981 as a University of Kansas exchange student studying at Nanjing University.

Gao, who is particularly intrigued by America’s fast-growing video and computer art, put it this way: “Here, there are so many new forms, new media. Here, there is such (artistic) diversity. This is both a marvelous stimulus and challenge.”

Even so, Gao and Chen said they are not about to abandon the solidly crafted styles they developed in China. Nor, they added, do they expect to engage in highly abstract works or other such forms.

Indeed, they expressed dismay about what they regard as the more vacuous forms of contemporary Western trends, such as “conceptual art” methods.

“Maybe people can take a bicycle wheel, give it a title and place it on a platform, and still call it art,” Gao said. “To me, this is empty and formless--of little or no consequence.”

Their main mission is to help create a modern artistic identity for China.

“Of course, it is vital that we do what we can to contribute to mutual understanding here,” said Chen, who plans to return to Beijing and his Central Institute of Fine Arts faculty post.

“But we are also part of the move to find China’s new (artistic) identity. It is a difficult journey and a long one. Whatever the results, it cannot be Western. It must be distinctly Chinese.”