Girls, Zhang Ying

The early August heat in Shanghai was just as sweltering as our weather in the reputed urban furnace of Nanjing 200+ kilometers away. I was in Shanghai for a two-day stay, to put on an exhibition at East Asia Contemporary Arts (“Inter-textuality of Light”—Photographs by Qiu Zhijie and Tokihiro Sato). It is a modest-sized gallery, located on the Bund; from the doorway you can look down the street and see the Huangpoa River and the high-rises of Pudong beyond. This small exhibition took place only one week after my previous exhibition (“Case Studies—Artists through the Eyes of a Critic,” Beijing Shengzhi Art Space). From the way this sounds, one might think I’ve been churning out a show every week. Of course, things have not gotten quite that drastic. I had been mulling over this show since March, and my original plan was to add works by a German photographer. This son of this photographer, who happens to be a Sinologist, had been hoping to show his father’s works in China. When I brought up this matter on the phone, he was glad for a moment, but when I said the exhibition was a few short months away, I could visualize an incredulous look on his face, as if he were encountering a story from The Arabian Nights.

Apparently there is something scary to Westerners in the phrase “Chinese velocity”; however, it is hard to say what kind of definition this phrase will merit once it enters English or German dictionaries. During that opening at East Asia Gallery, I was already going over timetables in my head, because another exhibition awaited me in Nanjing the following month, this time with no definite theme—simply an event to give young artists from south of the Yangzi, predominantly those born in the 70s, a chance to show their works. The Qinghe Art Center and White Canvas Gallery in Nanjing both committed themselves to hosting the exhibition, unconditionally and without remuneration. The event in Shanghai took place on August 2nd, and the next afternoon I went to Hangzhou to seek out and evaluate artists. The following two days I was on the road: Hangzhou>Suzhou>Changzhou>Nanjing.

The title “Buoys in a Deep Mere” may be a shade too literary, but our Jiangnan region, after all, has a literary feel to it. Hank Bull, the Canadian curator who mounted “Jiangnan Project” and “Jiangnan—Contemporary and Modern Chinese Artists” in Vancouver (1998) had a sense of this: “Jiangnan not only stands for power and wealth, it represents one of the most developed, historically rich regions in the world. From the Southern Song (1127-1279) and even earlier, the area south of the Yangtze was the center of China’s artistic activity.” To be sure, though our civilization did not originate in this area, this is where it found its deepest, most intricate embodiment, its fullest form of refinement and decadence. As for the temperament of this place—the aesthetic tone of life it once attained to—one can get a idea from an anecdote recorded in an old miscellany: When Zhao Kuangyin overthrew the southern Tang, one of his generals received a palace consort as a reward. At nightfall he had lamps lit, but the consort scowled and said, “Too smoky.” He called for candles, but again was rebuked for making the room “smoky.” The general asked what they used for light in the palace. The consort answered, “We had glass spheres that glowed at night and lit up the whole room.”

Among impure vapors we moderns are exposed to, smoke is probably the most innocuous, but to this consort its smell was unbearably plebian. If we think of this consort as an embodiment of Southland culture, we can imagine her delicate, cultured airs, her pride and superciliousness, her self-conscious, affected manner…But then again, over many historical cycles this region has been accustomed to incursion, to destructive forces imposed from outside, and still somehow it has bounced back miraculously to shape a cultural identity for itself. Each time a historical storm has swept over this area, it has been able to re-manifest its quiet reflective surface. The expansion of each unbounded ripple pattern has ended up proving the existence of a center point.

Yet to speak in this way conceals a likelihood of regional cultural chauvinism. When we shift our gaze to the younger generation, it is time to put our a priori framing device aside. Young people have a tendency toward rebellion and self-marginalization. They easily get fed up with any historical space that seems outmoded and stagnant; they prefer to embrace new things that turn up amidst headlong change. Seeing their passion and creative spirit, we may be led to feel that something is truly making its advent. Yet as the face of life undergoes great change, we can still find artists among them who consciously draw on our regional, traditional heritage to express personal or collective experience. They do this with a level of maturity that no longer brooks neglect. If we say that the Southland is a deep mere, then these young artists are like buoys, pointing to a shipping route between tradition and modernity. The meaning of a buoy is twofold: it indicates a place of departure, but is also a marker of return. To put it more precisely, a buoy marks a path of back-and-forth movement.

In early photographic works by Dong Wensheng or Chen Wei, we can appreciate the sensibility of a classic Southland youth, a daydream that proliferates like spring grass in the rainy mist among deep alleyways. In the distant background this daydreams expands toward bluffs and wetlands in the environs, or into the heart of an untended garden. Vestiges of the dream are marked by spots of blood and semen, bespeaking desire and repression—a coming-of-age tale woven from despair and self-inflicted wounds. After this initial stage, Dong Wensheng began, in his encapsulated treatment of gardens, to open a window on a more embracing, more illusory historical setting. Chen Wei opted to present his subjects with the firm outlines of sculpture or memorial plaques, all the while extending his feelers into a space between childhood memories and present-day ruins.

The same daydreaming mood pervaded the works of Li Xiaosong and Zhang Qing for a time. Now their installations, performances and videos show more of the detached intelligence needed in a surgical operation, more of an outward impetus in treatment. Gradually, deftly, they have converted psychic wounds and morbid grotesqueries into rapid, fragmentary reflections of reality—the present reality of Chinese society in transformation. Gao Shiqian, in his work “Red,” exercises an intellectual’s prerogative by choosing a background antithetical to our Southland tradition, namely the Northern Frontier. From the perspective of an old retired soldier he redacts an epic mini-drama of China’s red years. Wu Yuren went so far as to collect semen from migrant laborers which he mixed into benches made of plaster, thus confronting us with social reality from a standpoint of “basal narrative.” In two recent works titled “Mirror Reflections,” a title that reminiscent of the “Mirror Gallery of Lovelies” in the Dream of Red Mansions, Wu shows ability to combine a treatment of current subjects with Oriental insight into the void. As for Wu Junyong, sex becomes grounds for gossip: this human physical instinct is rendered immobile in his grasp, ready for him to draw back the canopy of hypocritical convention and show the true farce within.

As for easel-mounted work, the tone here is refined and moody, stressing the intrinsic effects of form or an emotionally fraught surrealism. Bao Zhong uses biological parables to deal with the tension of reality and illusion. Wang Zhibo uses a classic Southland sensibility to confide experience of the waking dreams he has experienced. In Su Cheng’s silkscreen palette, history and present reality are conflated in a double vision of spacetime. Zeng Yi uses expressionist elements to evoke the downfall of heroism and an atmosphere of defeat. Yu Jie borrows cartoon language to convey a private side of desire. In works by Luo Fan and the even younger painter Zhang Ying, one finds a tone—an emotional complex—belonging to classical painting: through well-tempered technique they convey an everyday quietude, a dreamlike quality.

More importantly, perhaps, this new generation’s doubts about painterly language have led to remarkable new ways of presenting experience. Xiao Bo’s reworking of documentary and movie scenes presses us to contemplate once again, ritualistically and in a mood of nostalgia and hollowness, certain collective memories that are already fading into indistinctness. The raw stills he uses is not reality itself; rather, it is a story, a redaction of history, an illusory image. Gu Xiaomin finds inspiration in diagrams from a color blindness test: here too the images from reality are shifted onto the illusory ground of painting. In comparison, Li Qing’s formal propositions lend themselves to remarkable treatment and development. He continues with his two series: “Let’s Spot the Difference” and “Images of Mutual Undoing and Convergence,” but he has taken them beyond their unripe beginnings. In the current field of Chinese painting, his work has expressive possibilities that place it in the top rank. In addition, he has recently ventured into photography, and here too the combination of intellect and emotion is striking.

We have noted that in dealing with political and social themes, the tradition here has been to use metaphor and parable. This doubtlessly enhances the sensory enjoyment offered by art, rather than presenting a naked record or critique of current reality. Yet beneath the sensory coloring or coating, gleams of intellect are implicitly present. Just as a “cultured air” carries a judgment of “smokiness,” one could say that having an idea of Jiangnan [Southland] is like having a distant vista of civilization, a way of gaining perspective on present reality, from which one may perhaps may develop a more resonant symbolism.

This situation is seen with special clarity in works by the young artist Chen Hui. For many years his paintings have negotiated the difficult middle ground between irony and literati-style lyricism. His urge toward irony may surpass his urge toward lyricism, but in terms of personal temperament, it would appear that he is not “mean-hearted” enough. In contrast, when he gives pride of place to lyricism, recollection and meditation, his works become movingly persuasive: they manage to grasp and convey reality in its intimate grain. Such persuasiveness can be found in his photography. “Fifteen-Second Gaze” shows a wax sculpture of Madame Sun Yatsen, in a partial view that magnifies cobwebs, blotches and discolored spots. This work, along with his long scroll “33224,” lay bare the emptiness of time and the absurdity of history. His recent “View of Snowy Woods” appears to follow ancient artistic models in its composition of a woodland scene, but the presence of a surveillance camera revises the quasi-literati atmosphere of the picture. Thus the third component of the picture’s imagery—snow—takes on an overarching sense of consciousness being blanketed. Running counter to this we have Sun Jianchun’s photographic work titled “Khaki Uniform and Water Lilies.” In a serenely decadent, typically traditional atmosphere, a modern image has been embedded in a pointed and violent manner. As for his “Confucian Temple,” his striated, richly layered forms give a sense of compression, thus earning a place in our era’s pictorial inventory.

Artists chosen for the “Jiangnan” exhibitions in Vancouver ten years ago were mostly born in the Fifties and Sixties. What is more, they represented an idea of “pan-jiangnanism,” that is, everything south of the Yangtze, and many of them hailed from Shanghai and Fujian. Of course, place of origin is not the important thing: in the current exhibition a few of our artists are also “outlanders.” Zeng Yi of Suzhou was born in Chengdu and Wu Junyong of Hangzhou was born in Fujian. From another aspect, many young artists born in Jiangnan have gone off to faraway places, most of them converging on Beijing and Shanghai. One intriguing fact is that almost all the young artists who leave the region also give up the traditional mode of easel-mounted art in favor of new media such as processed images, video, installation and performance. One example quite familiar to me is Liu Ding, whose house was only one street away from mine when he lived and created art in Nanjing. At that time he still went in for easel-mounted art, and he tried minor inventions such as painting with fingernail polish. This doubtlessly showed his thirst for innovation. A few years later he moved to Beijing, where he quickly shifted to installation art and transformed himself by tirelessly taking part in domestic and international exhibitions. It could hardly hurt to imagine what path he might have taken had he stayed in Nanjing: though he might have taken up installation art, he clearly would have lacked a setting where he could find partners in dialogue. This is because easel-mounted art holds a dominant place in Nanjing even today, and one seldom sees people doing creative work in other genres.

For young artists who wish to explore new directions in art, it would seem that going somewhere else is an imperative. Among the young artists who remain and do creative work in the Jiangnan area, many have experienced sojourns in cities like Beijing, where they have absorbed nutriments for avant garde art and expanded their horizons. Since China was first infected by modernism, major metropolises have been the path of ingress most favorable to “traitorous liaisons.” Though rapid growth of the internet and other media has ended the information monopoly of large cities, it is undeniable that each new wave of artistic exploration has found fertile ground to take hold and develop in those major cities. Nearly all the important exhibitions are concentrated there, so that is where one finds chances to exhibit one’s own work. It also means, given recent growth of the art market, that one has a chance of pursuing art professionally in those places.

In contrast, the atmosphere of modern art seems a bit thin in the present-day Jiangnan region. To a large extent, young artists of this region have already been adopted, or they are waiting for adoption. At any rate, based on my observation, they are more hesitant and cautious than their peers in other areas. One can only hope that this reflects more gravitas on their part. If last October’s “Rotation” exhibition gave me insight into the combination of lofty detachment and wifely grievance that characterizes older Jiangnan artists, then the current show has shown me something about younger artists: both the lofty attachment and the wifely grievance are diminishing. In our ceaselessly changing era, satirized as a time of depleted spiritual resources by Jiang Chongwu in his installation “All Paths Effaced of Human Traces,” these young artists no longer assume the form of a forlorn figure walking beside a deep pool. The figure they will ultimately present is still a riddle just barely showing itself in the current of time.