The Arts: Modern painting is in modest bloom in China. The goal: to define a modern esthetic.

　　ON FEB.5, 1989, WITH great fanfare, the National Gallery in Beijing launched an exhibition called China/Avant-Garde. It was to be a coming-out party for a small group of young artists nurtured during a decade of unprecedented freedom. The warming of the 1980s had given the painters exposure to modern art from the West and with it, an intoxicating spirit of license. Here was a chance to show off the results. But at the opening, someone fired a gunshot in-side the gallery, clearing it. Authorities ultimately closed the show twice during its two-week run. Four months later, tanks were rolling against students and dissidents in Tiananmen Square. A movement was flattened before it could bloom.

　　Fang Lijun, 34, was one of the artists featured in China/Avant-Garde, and one of the students on the square June 4. In his tranquil court-yard studio north of Beijing, Fang says that Tiananmen taught him the darker truths about power in China. When Fang was a child, he says, his middle-class family was branded as a tar-get by the Cultural Revolution; his parents originally gave him art supplies to keep him in the house, safe. “I always asked myself why people acted this way or that,” he says. “Finally the solution came in 1989.” In his Puma T shirt and jeans, Fang is an emblem of the new China, both the June 4 backlash and the liberal periods surrounding it. “I’ve

　　talked about [Tiananmen] a lot,” he says, “so if I do so now there won’t be any consequences.” He looks at the two massive canvases that stand unfinished in his studio: one of a featureless bald head contorted into what could be a scream or a yawn, another either swimming or drowning in a brilliant azure sea. “My generation of artists is the first to have the opportunity to be personal and creative,” Fang says.

　　Nine years after the false start of 1989, modern painting is in modest bloom in China. “The changes are so great in the last 20 years,” says Shanghai painter Pu Jie, 38. “I’m pretty optimistic about the future.” Brian Wallace, who launched Red Gate, the first modern-art gallery in Beijing, in the summer of 1991, says government officials have not interfered with him. “You can spot them a mile away,” he says. He hastens to add, though, that he would not mount overtly political material for fear of trouble.

　　After a burst of political pop art in the ‘80s and early ‘90s--Mao iconography run amok-- the new artists are developing more measured, less reactive takes on contemporary Chinese life. In

　　pop’s place has emerged work like the coolly unsettling “Mask Series” of Zeng Fanzhi — figures obscured by faceless white masks — or Su Xinping’s muted “Sea of Desire” paintings, in which anxious laborers leap blindly from the security of their work groups. This is unmistakably Chinese art, but the market for it remains overseas — largely in Hong Kong and Europe. If the artists falter, they know, the foreign public will move on. If that happens, the artists will have to rely on local support — in a market for whom the question “What is Chinese?” demands a new answer every day.