What Would Mao Think?

“China is different from the U.S. in that way,” says Chinese artist Xu Bing, who moved to this country in 1990. “Here, contemporary art is mainstream--in China it’s not, it’s still underground.”

And thus, the added frisson to a show such as “Inside Out: New Chinese Art,” which opened last month at the Asia Society and P. S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. It offers the heady lure of forbidden fruit, as well as the promise of insight into the psyche of that awakening giant: modern China. The exhibition of more than 80 works by 58 artists is more extensive than any previous showing of contemporary Chinese art in North America--and picks up where the Guggenheim’s “China: 5000 Years” show earlier this year abruptly left off.

Whether one can justify reading a whole nation’s being through a selection of its modern art, one cannot help but try with a show like this, which comes to us relatively uncensored, unlike film and literature from the People’s Republic.

That is possible because most avant-garde works never see the light of public display in their homeland, and many of these artists have only sold their art privately and through art galleries abroad. Officially sanctioned genres at art academies, which control the art world in China, remain traditional ink painting on paper (and the typical subjects of landscape, bird-and-flower, etc.) and Realist oil painting, preferably with Socialist tendencies but with at least politically acceptable ones. Those who deviate have been considered subversives and hooligans.

“When I was in China, what I did was considered underground,” recalls Gu Wenda, who was trained at one of China’s foremost art schools, the China Academy of Art (formerly the Zhejiang Academy of Art), and now lives in New York. In the ‘80s, Xu and Gu were pioneers of a style that employs “false words,” and both have works included in the exhibition. Visits to China tell Gu that change has come. “Now the line between mainstream and underground is more vague--now at least you’re not in danger,” he says. “When I was found doing this avant-garde art [at the academy], I was kicked from teaching in the Chinese painting department to the education department--basically a demotion.”

Gu left China in 1987--one of the many artists who left in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The irony is that now that he’s famous, the art academies often invite him to speak.

“Inside Out” covers the period from 1985 until now, the critical time in which mainland artists discovered Western contemporary visual idioms and began to adopt those expressions as their own. In the liberalizing climate of the 1980s, they were finally allowed to see, mostly through reproductions in magazines and books, what the rest of the world had been doing; at the same time, social and material modernization was coming upon them in an avalanche.

Younger artists were naturally drawn to trying different styles as well as different media, and this show reflects an almost dizzying range of experimentation. “It’s as if 100 years of Western art emerged all at once in Chinese art--everything from Surrealism, Dadaism, German Expressionists, and so on,” says Gao Minglu, the principal curator of the show.

Gao played a key role in the history of Chinese contemporary art. In February 1989, he was one of the chief organizers of the landmark “China/Avant-Garde” show at the National Gallery in Beijing, a show shut down twice by authorities during its two-week run. The first time was because artists Xiao Lu and Tang Song fired gunshots into their installation as a form of performance art--a cheeky moment captured by photography in “Inside Out.” The second time was due to an anonymous bomb threat. Then on June 4, the Student Democracy Movement was violently crushed in Tiananmen Square, and all the arts felt the chill hand of authority forcing them into conformity once more.

As a vocal supporter of the now-discredited avant-garde, Gao eventually fell to a purge at his publication, the popular journal Art Monthly. He was forced to leave his editor’s job and go home to study Marxism, which he did for a year. Then in 1991, he accepted an offer to be a visiting fellow at Ohio State University; today, he is completing his doctorate in modern Chinese art at Harvard University.

Gao acknowledges that artists in the 1980s were copying the West, but now, he believes, “Chinese artists are adapting to the strategies of Postmodern Western art, they’re not imitating, like in the 1980s. If you look at the exhibition, you’ll see lots of stories or concepts from ancient Chinese tradition. Right now, the focus is not on style but on thinking and concerning yourself with contemporary issues, trying to transcend Modern or Postmodern Western art.” In short, the latter-day pieces are using Western vehicles--oil painting, assemblage, installation, even performance art--but looking to their own society, be it issues of stultifying tradition or crass materialism.

The exhibition has a stated and evident political agenda. As Vishakha Desai, director of the Asia Society Galleries, has said, “Much of the new work being made in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and by Chinese artists abroad, is created in direct response to major political, social, cultural and political changes since the late 1980s.” This is arguably true for younger artists in China and Taiwan, but a curious generalization to make about art in Hong Kong, which has been, up until the last few years, remarkably nonpolitical.

Thus, a certain social seriousness, even self-importance, permeates the selection. This would also be the result of coming from a culture that sees the arts as critical tools of education in general (the traditional Chinese view) and of social change in specific (the Maoist conviction). “Though considering themselves a transitional generation, they believed they bore responsibility for the nation’s future,” writes Gao in the exhibition catalog about the group called “Rationalist painters.”

One would have to reach back several decades--perhaps to the 1960s--to find a period in American history when any generation last held that belief, let alone any generation of artists.

What we see from the 1980s seems fairly mild in expression--building up to some rather provocative 1990s moments that include nude performances--but it was revolutionary for its time. For example, there are the images of Mao Tse-tung manipulated in unfamiliar ways. In Wang Guangyi’s “Mao Zedong No. 1” (1988), Mao’s familiar paternalistic portrait is painted behind a black grid. While it is almost statement enough to reduce Mao to a nonofficial, non-heroic position--after all, his visage was long holy, and, as the Cultural Revolution ditty went, “Chairman Mao is our sun”--the grid further distances us from the icon.

Gu Wenda’s triptych “Pseudo-Characters Series: Contemplation of the World” (1984) shows a giant character floating over an ink wash landscape. But the word has been modified--in fact the center and left ideograms together mean “god,” the center and right together mean “flowing, harmonious”--the three taken together mean, well, nothing. Indeed, a mind boggle for those who have held the written word sacred.

Colin Mackenzie, curator of galleries at the Asia Society, believes that the earlier works reflect the artists’ faith in their ability to change society. “But that idealist notion fades even before 1989,” he observes, “and there’s a much more cynical, knowing, distanced view of society [afterward].” As an example, he cites the contorted, howling faces in the large paintings of Fang Lijun. The political agenda of the show is reiterated when he says, “There’s very much a sense of cynicism, of disillusionment here.” He also mentions Zhang Xiaogang’s “bloodline” series, in which “families are depicted as aliens, almost featureless.”

It should be pointed out, however, that Zhang’s family portrait--here a man, a woman and a child painted in a meticulous, mostly monochromatic palette with a red thread running through their faces and necks, “connecting” them--is one of the most beautiful works in the exhibition and has an eerie soulfulness that transcends its “featureless” quality.

In interviews with these artists, they tend to deflect questions about politics. In fact, even those engaged in the so-called Political Pop movement, modeled after American Pop and probably the most recognizable and commercially successful of the Chinese trends, often put on a flip, evasive attitude. In the “Great Castigation” series of Wang Guangyi, one of the leading proponents of Political Pop, heroic workers and soldiers are juxtaposed with logos from modern consumer culture. “Coca-Cola,” a painting from 1993, shows three stern-eyed workers, their muscular arms extended and holding a pen together like a factory tool or a weapon. Below the pen’s nib is the cursive company logo. In other works (not in the show), Wang has depicted logos for Kodak, Evian, Hitachi, Disney--all brands that, as the artist once said, “either I or my wife use.” In this way he slyly pairs the old gods of communist ideology with the new gods that have washed over China: consumer products.

The ugly rumor about the “China: 5000 Years” show, created hand in hand with Chinese authorities, was that the contemporary section that was planned was lopped off to please them. The Asia Society, which organized the show in conjunction with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has not had that pressure. “We haven’t had any problems getting the artwork out,” Mackenzie says. “We haven’t advertised that they’re coming out, but we haven’t broken any laws by taking them out. This is not an official exhibition.”

Furthermore, “it’s not just an exhibition about mainland China, it’s an exhibition about the Chinese world.” To that end the exhibition includes not only art made by artists in China, but also mainland artists who now live abroad, as well as recent works by 16 Taiwan and Hong Kong artists that fit the two stated super-themes of the show: modernity and identity. Unfortunately, the inclusion of those territories seems incidental and has the adverse effect of suggesting they are parts of China. (Of course, as of last year Hong Kong is indeed so, but Taiwan remains very independent.)

One of the most intriguing themes threading throughout “Inside Out” is the manipulation of words. Chinese characters are conveyances of language, but they are also ideograms and icons in themselves--thus revered both for meaning and form. About a dozen artists deal directly with words and/or calligraphy.

“The moment you deal with words, you’re dealing with the fundamentals of culture,” says Xu Bing, whose large installation “Book From the Sky” (1987-91) fills one room. Sheets of printed text hang from the rafters and cover the floor and every word of that text is unreadable--either because they are wrong combinations of radicals, have an extra stroke or are missing a stroke. The joke here--and it is a bit of an elaborate joke--is that Chinese people entering the room will believe they can read the text, then realize they cannot. “Book From the Sky” also has an ineffable Chan Buddhist (or Zen) beauty about it--the scrolls of paper floating above, illegible words floating all around.

Qiu Zhijie decided to copy the “Orchid Pavilion Preface,” a model of ideal calligraphy from the past, onto a sheet of oblong paper. Then he wrote the same text again and again, shifting the brush away from the last script slightly, until he had a sheet of black paper with chicken scratching on the edges. The piece is called--what else?--”Writing the Orchid Pavilion Preface One Thousand Times” (1986/1997).

Some have been creative in bringing other media into the spin: Huang Yong Pin’s 1987 installation showed the mushy results of “ ‘A History of Chinese Painting’ and ‘A Concise History of Modern Painting’ Washed in a Washing Machine for Two Minutes.”

Fortunately, certain pieces go beyond the single-line laugh. Gu Wenda has integrated his love for playing with language with cultural metaphors. In the large installation “Temple of Heaven,” panels composed of human hair cover the ceiling and four walls. They spin a text in four languages--English, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic--or at least they look like those languages. In the center of the room are Ming-style tea tables and chairs, and bell sounds fill the air.

“I’m trying to convey two concepts,” he explains. “First, that different cultures exist and misunderstand each other. The other is that when you try to learn another culture, you lose some of your own culture.” While some may find that a demerit, he believes it is progress. “It’s my own experience coming from China,” he says. “In order to gain new things, you lose something of what you had before.”

While some of the avant-garde artists in China are living comfortably off selling works abroad for $20,000 and up, few--if any--of the avant-garde artists living outside the country are getting rich and famous. They are, however, getting recognition. In the last five years, there have been major exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art at the Venice and Sao Paolo biennials, as well as prominent museums in Asia and Europe.

Today, Gu Wenda feels comfortable living and working in multicultural America, but here he deals with other problems. “Racism always exists; the mainstream is always white,” he notes, “but I feel that even if the ground is not equal, you still have a piece of land that you can do something with.” He adds, “You gain the ground, inch by inch.”

Perhaps the same can be said for those who stayed behind.

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“Inside Out: New Chinese Art,” Asia Society and P. S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. Ends Jan. 3, 1999. (212) 288-6400.

The show moves to San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art and the Asian Art Museum, Feb. 26-June 1, 1999, and other venues into the year 2000.