Contemporary Chinese art is largely a movement of modernization and post-modernization. The ideology behind the movement is the Western philosophy and art theories of the 20th century and today. In this sense, contemporary Chinese art is also a movement of westernization.
In the West, the term “contemporary” is both conceptual and temporal. It refers to the art that poses an ideological and stylistic challenge to the accepted concepts about art and the establishment of art, including the language of art, and also refers to the art of the last 20 to 25 years. In China, contemporary art has a similar connotation, but the time span is longer. Some scholars in both China and the West use the term to refer to the art after 1949, and some, including myself, consider that the beginning of contemporary Chinese art should be 1979 when the first post-Mao avant-garde exhibition “Stars” was held on a sidewalk in Beijing right beside the National Gallery of China, which was closed down by police soon after.
Nevertheless, China adopted an open policy towards the West in 1979. When the Chinese eventually woke up and opened their eyes to see the rest of the world, they were shocked by the wealth of the West, and saddened by the underdevelopment of their own country. Realizing this reality, the Chinese people, at least the Chinese intellectuals, gave up their faith in communism and turned to embrace Western ideology. In this historical context, the 20th-century Western art theory found no difficulty to enter China. Since the beginning of the 1980s, there has been a current of introducing Western art theories to China through translation.
DaiGuangyu
2
Like almost every child, I fell in love with art when I was in elementary school. In my early teens I copied paintings from books, magazines, and newspapers, and also sketched landscapes from life. Then I followed a private teacher to learn drawing techniques when I was 12 or 13. However, my true love affair with art, in the sense of professional work, started ten years later, when I read a book of modern Western art theory, Art and Psychoanalysis by Peter Fuller.
That was in the early-mid 1980s. At that time I worked on my master’s thesis on the late 19th-century English novelist Thomas Hardy and approached his works from Freudian and post-Freudian perspectives. During those years, reading in the library was part of my routine. One day when I was surfing on the bookshelves in the reading room for graduate students, Peter Fuller’s book attracted my attention.
Ha, I giggled at the finding of psychoanalysis and post-Freudian theory, though it was about art, not literature.
That was the first edition of that book, published in London in 1979 by Writers and Readers. I read the introduction to the author, and giggled again. You know what? In terms of school training, the author was not a professional art critic at the beginning. Instead, he studied literature at Cambridge, and then turned to write on art because of his passion for art.
Amazing, I thought, so am I, having been trained in literature and having a love for art.
How do I make the turn from literature to art?
Peter was a writer. He made his turn by writing art reviews, with critical and even controversial tones. He debated and argued with some big names, such as Clement Greenberg, and was also backed by some big names, such as John Berger. Interestingly, they both made similar turns from literature to art as well.
Hmm, I thought, this was a way to get there.
However, I didn’t want to repeat what Peter did and I wanted to take a different path, -- all roads lead to Rome anyway.
After graduating with a degree in comparative literature and English literature, I got a job teaching world literature at Sichuan University in my hometown Chengdu. While teaching, I also read and wrote on critical theories, mostly the 20th-century Western theories about literature. But, what’s the difference between the critical theories of literature and art? The philosophy behind them is the same and the difference in methodology is not big. Freudian and post-Freudian theories are for both. There should be no such issue switching from literature to art and I should have no problem making the change.
So, I chose to translate Peter Fuller’s Art and Psychoanalysis into Chinese. I spoke to an editor in the Sichuan Fine Art Publishing House, who was my age, and had just graduated with a degree in art history. Very lucky was I to learn that the editor had a project to organize a translation series of Western modern art theories. I told him how valuable Peter’s book was and convinced him that the translation should be similarly valuable.
Then, I spent two months translating the book of more than 200 pages, and spent another month revising it. About 5 students helped me with copy-writing the translation manuscript. Upon the completion of the translation, I noticed that there were quite a few pieces of hair that I scratched off my head in every page of Peter’s book. OMG, I couldn’t believe that my hair had thinned.
The translation was published a year later, at the turn of 1987 to 1988, and was the first one of the “Translation Series of Modern Western Art Theory.” Right after the book, I wrote an analytical review on it and had it published in a leading art magazine in Beijing. The book and the book review symbolized my turn, if there was one, from literature to art.
I mailed a copy of my translation to Peter, and I could imagine how happy he was when he received it. Peter replied right away, with a package of books and magazines. When Art and Psychoanalysis was reprinted in London by the Horgarth Press in 1988, he mentioned my translation in the “Preface to the Second Edition”. That was the second year that Peter started the art magazine Modern Painters. He asked me to write an article about contemporary Chinese art for his magazine. I did, and wrote about a renowned contemporary artist Duolin He from my hometown. Peter exchanged letters with me, asking me technical details and questions regarding the editing of my writing. Unfortunately, that article was not printed due to the tragic death of Peter in 1990.
HeDuoling
3
Because of common ideology, Chinese art was greatly influenced by the Soviet socialist realism, which for more than 3 decades since the mid 20th century promoted revolutionary subjects and master narration, as well as realistic representation. During these decades, the narrative subject of Chinese art advocated the state ideology. To a large extent, the socialist realist art in China was a political propaganda.
Born in 1948, Duolin He is a post-Cultural Revolution artist, and is one of the most important artists of the 1980s. As a victim of the Cultural Revolution, He and the artists of his generation posed a critical reconsideration of the past. His art is an expression of personal feelings of his generation in a sentimental mood, and not a presentation of the state ideology. He abandoned the Soviet socialist realism and turned to learn the new language of art from the West. He was fascinated by the American genre artist Andrew Wythe and was overwhelmed by Wythe’s mood and technique.
When Duolin’s painting “Spring Breeze” was exhibited and reproduced by the press, it became an instant icon of the new art in China, which demonstrated the Western influence rather than Soviet influence on Chinese art.
Because of Duolin’s importance in Chinese art, when Peter assigned me to write on contemporary Chinese art for his magazine, I decided to interview him and write on his art, through which I hoped to draw a panoramic picture of Chinese art of the 1980s.
In the interview Duolin talked about his art and his story of doing art. In his painting, the subject was not the socialist realist glorification of state politics, but a very personal feeling towards what had happened when he was young. Though it was personal, his feeling was shared by the other artists and the people of his time.
In the 1980s, formalism was no longer a fashion in the West, but it was a big hit in China since the Chinese artists just put off the realist art of socialist politics and were fascinated by the formalist art from the West. Duolin was keen to use lines for a structural and compositional purpose, and keen to explore personal feelings conveyed with a sentimental visual order. His art showed the main stream of Chinese art of the first half of the 1980s.
4
From then on, I started to write about contemporary Chinese art, while I also continued translating Western art theories into Chinese, including Peter’s articles on Henry Moor and post-industrial culture.
After Duolin He’s generation, a new wave of Western-influenced Chinese avant-garde movement started in the mid 1980s, which was simply named the “New Wave of 1985” by art historians. Towards the end of the 1980s, the Western-oriented avant-garde dominated the art scene in China. That was before the internet age, and the information on Western art was in great demand by young avant-garde artists in China. In Chengdu, I became involved with an avant-garde group “Red-Yellow-Blue Society,” and whenever I got together with other members I brought a number of copies of Modern Painters and other books to show them the new art in the West.
In that group, Guangyu Dai is most prominent, with a nation-wide reputation for his provocative performance and installation art. Guangyu and I talked about the idea of inviting Peter to China to give talks to the young artists. We also approached a local TV station and, with their promise of personnel, technical and financial support we decided to make an educational documentary on Peter’s visit. In order to make it happen, I requested Sichuan University to send an official invitation to Peter and requested Sichuan Institute of Fine Art to invite Peter over to give talks.
Peter scheduled his China trip with great enthusiasm and planned to bring his wife and two kids to China in May 1989. He even made an arrangement to write travel journals for a newspaper in Bath. But he could not eventually make it. In the spring of 1989 there was political trouble in China, and Peter’s mother also fell ill.
In the early spring of 1989, the most important and history-making art exhibition in the second half of the 20th century, “Avant-garde China” was opened in the National Gallery in Beijing. Guangyu sent works to the exhibition. In the next year, he organized another exhibition for the avant-garde artists in Chengdu.
The difference between the generation of Guangyu and the generation of Duolin is that the avant-garde went beyond painting and brought new genres of installation and performance art to China. Furthermore, the younger artists are more critical towards both the state politics and the establishment of art, and paid more attention to current and immediate social issues, and less to the past. In terms of the language of art, the avant-garde is more international, and less Chinese.
In the 1990s and recent years, Guangyu devoted almost all of his time to the performing art. He traveled around China and Europe, creating art works concerning the issues of environment, women’s role in today’s society, war and peace, etc. In the two-volume art history book published by Taschen titled Art of Today, Guangyu’s works were included with an analytic discussion. I was amazed when I read the book and found that one of his works used an envelope with my address in Canada on it. Probably Guangyu was trying to say that his art had a direct connection with the West. Indeed, in 1993, I curated an exhibition in Montreal for him which received a positive response from local media.
HeDuoling
5
Peter and his family could not make it to China. I thought I should go to the West to further my study of Western modern art theory. I sent an application to the graduate school at Goldsmith College, University of London, in 1989, and I was accepted. I told Peter about the acceptance, and asked him if he could offer me a financial sponsorship. Well, we lived in two completely different worlds, and I had no idea about what the sponsorship could mean to Peter. Luckily, Peter discussed his sponsorship with the Dean of Goldsmith and made the offer to me. He also told me that he would offer me a job to work for his magazine. That was great news. An American professor teaching at Sichuan University told me that she just could not believe that someone would be willing to offer the sponsorship, and that it was a very big thing in the West that people usually did not do.
Peter passed away in 1990. I gave up the planned travel to London and turned to Montreal on the last day of the same year to study art theory at Concordia University, where I am presently teaching. The new experience in Canada made it possible for me to compare contemporary Chinese art with contemporary Western art.
Living in the West, I have written for some leading art magazines in China since I arrived in Canada 18 years ago, introducing contemporary Western art and art theories to China and criticizing what was going on in the art world there. Some years later, I selected some of my writings to make a book, not a collection of essays, but a full-length book on art, titled Rethinking Art at the Turn of the Century: a Comparative Study of Postmodernism in the West and Contemporary Art in China, which was published in Shanghai in 1998. In this book, I devoted a chapter to the discussion of Art and Psychoanalysis and dedicated this book to Peter.
My writings on art brought me recognition and reputation in the art and critical circles in China. I continued writing art reviews and critical articles for leading art magazines in China and over seas, and had another book on art published in 2004, A Cross-Cultural Art Criticism. The two books, along with my translation of Peter’s Art and Psychoanalysis, have been on the required and selective reading lists of some art schools and universities in China, for students majoring in art, humanities and social science.
This year I have another book on art coming out in Beijing, Form and Conceptuality: a Cross-Cultural Approach to Visual Art in the Context of Contemporary Critical Theory. In addition to these scholarly books, I have also published two collections of personal essays about art and literature. One is Overseas Landscape, published in Chengdu in 2003, and the other is Exploring Inscape: an Art Critic’s Travel Journal, published in Shanghai this month. Currently, I am writing a column on visual culture and contemporary art for Contemporary Artists bimonthly in China, and writing critical reviews, personal essays, and travel journals for other art and literary magazines, as well as newspapers in China and North America.
Needless to say, contemporary Chinese art is not only the focus of my writing but also a part of my life. If I trace the source of my life, it would be the love of art. That love was a vague dream 25 years ago, and it was then crystallized by Peter and his writings.
Believe it or not, I never met Peter Fuller, who I considered my mentor in art.
HeDuoling
September 2008, Montreal
