looking back to move forward:
contemporary chinese art
The impact of culture and social issues on an artist’s practice is an inextricable and intricate facet in the rise of some of the most prolific and prodigious contemporary artists in our world today. These figures today are hence moved to act as social commentators and public figures, sparking activism and awareness, controversy and deep meditation on contemporary culture and its abundance of burning social & political issues. These refreshing roles that cultivate new cultural convictions, epitomise a thirst for discussion, and invigorate not only the art world but larger society with their creation and courage are manifested in the multi-faceted masterpieces of Xu Bing, the reflective responses of Ah Xian, and Ai Weiwei, possibly China’s most dangerous dissident man and an iconoclast of our time.
In the New York Times in 2004, Holland Cotter described him as an “artist whose role has been the stimulating, mould-breaking one of scholar-clown”. Though Ai surpasses the role of an artist alone as a conceptual artist, architect, curator, designer, film maker, writer and activist, his longing for transparency is more than clear. His avant-garde practice incorporates assisted readymade sculpture, defamatory photography and navigating the powerful online realm, in which he empowers with knowledge and expression with new sagacity through social and political commentary, often motivating meditation collectivism vs the individual in the communist society. Believing "everything is art, everything is politics.”, Ai exposes both himself and these issues he interrogates to successfully transcend a world of restrictions and censoring even within the constraints of the authoritarian China he is confined to. Ultimately though, “Ai can’t be here”, his prolific potency and practice still stirs and inspires around the globe.
Highly influenced by both the horrors of Mao’s oppressive Cultural Revolution in his childhood, which saw the damnation of his father’s intellectual creativity & freedom and forced his family into menial life in the impoverished countryside, but also the effects of his study in New York as an impressionable young adult discovering Marcel Duchamp & Andy Warhol for the first time, he declared he wanted to be the Chinese Warhol, and in doing so amalgamated his traditional and historical background with a modern world of iconography and consumerism. This dynamic practice is epitomised in the work Han Dynasty Urn with Coca Cola Logo. Like a Duchampian readymade, Ai incorporated an ancient neolithic vase as his base, and on the surface painted the iconic CocaCola logo atop what seemed to be a graffiti over a precious artefact. Not only was the artist referencing the enduring history of humankind, but emulating the “stamping out” action that prevailed in the Cultural Revolution; the destruction of tradition and culture in the way of progress and development of an idealistic future. In this way, Ai draws on his current materialistic & consumer driven world that again destroys the traditional aspects of culture in the globalised, multinational and transcendent icon of CocaCola, a symbol of Western culture and society that was beginning to make it's mark on his modern China. In disrupting these ideals of art as well as questioning the cultural values and social issues deeply rooted in Chinese history, an arena in which the modern world is so often threatened by the past, Ai defies time, as does the rapid pace of globalisation and corporations.
Over the next two decades, Ai Weiwei’s work as an artist and activist reached new heights and potency, essentially embracing a more vigorous role as a commentator of social justice and defender of freedom that he saw diminishing on personal, local and global stages. He proclaimed “There are no outdoor sports as graceful as throwing stones at a dictatorship.”, and proved that with a commitment to raising consciousness and seeking the truth in such a suffocating society, a small act is worth a million thoughts. Ai Weiwei’s creative vision and thirst for justice in this period culminated in his poignant work Remembering (2009) in which the artist created an enormous installation upon the facade of the Haus der Hunst in Munich, Germany out of 9000 children’s backpacks. Each backpack, assorted in an infant’s rainbow of blues, greens, reds and yellows represents a child’s life lost in the devastating May 12, 2008 Sichuan earthquake and forms in Chinese lettering a sentence with which a mother of one of the victims commemorated her daughter: For seven years she lived happily on this earth. The tragedy in which it is believed over 68,500 people died & 18500 were declared missing was highly censored by the Chinese government in the aftermath. Ai in his documentary Never Sorry recalls: “I write blog every day. Sometimes two articles a day. But for seven days during the earthquake I couldn’t write one blog. I just simply could not write. It is devastating. I’m speechless.”
Perturbed and frustrated with the lack of information released, the artist was prompted to conduct a search of his own. Aided by his online prominence, he recruited thousands of passionate volunteers inspired by his activism to venture discretely into the disaster zones to survey parents with the aim to collect details of the names, birthdays and schools of lost children to publish on his blog. What they uncovered was more than 5000 identities of children who perished, many of them within their shoddy collapsed schools. The remnants of these bags and learning materials amongst the devastating destruction was met with both dismay and drive, moving the artist to not rally the government for transparency and reform, but to create an artwork that honoured the individual life and innocence that was lost at the hands of negligence and silenced by censorship. His words "The art always wins. Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay.” is certainly relevant in this case, in which he underwent emergency brain surgery for internal bleeding as a result of a fierce assault from Chinese police when attempting to testify for a fellow investigator of the corrupted construction and the student casualties. Thus, Ai Weiwei’s role as both an artist and activist allows him to address crucial cultural and social issues that promote ideals of freedom, justice and cultural consciousness whilst meandering artistic and provocative political realms that are just as dangerous as he is.
Similarly, an artist that shares this thirst for examining and responding to the world around him is Xu Bing. Raised in the Cultural Revolution’s period of peril, terror and uncertainty, Xu was trained as a propagandist whose following enlightenment and education as a student would see the banning of one of his first ingenuous works The Book from the Sky in the lead up to the Tiananmen Square massacre. In a practice addressing & engaging with themes of social justice, cultural progress, freedom & historical events of his time have brought the conception of poignant and contemplative works such as his post September 11 Where Does the Dust Itself Collect? as well as more traditional homages as in Background Story which utilises found discarded vegetation behind a light glass panel to render a sweeping shadow landscape reminiscent of 14th century Chinese hanging scrolls.
More recently, the artist’s creative commentary of cultural & social issues is encapsulated in the commanding and colossal Phoenix; a pair of 100 ft birds soaring magnificently as a metaphoric and physical symbol of China’s growing prosperity and industrialisation. They are momentous; equally celestial as raw, as fierce as they are compelling. Composed of twinkling lights nestled amongst the crevices of culled detritus and accumulated remnants salvaged from the raw squalor of the Beijing skyscrape landscape exist harmoniously textured in a symphony ranging talons to tail, chins to wings. Here, the artist along with his team of engineers and migrant labourers to whom the work is dedicated created these traditionally auspicious symbols of fortune in the east and rebirth in the west to epitomise the contradictions amidst contemporary Chinese society; the city’s growing grandeur and prosperous capitalist wealth that blinds the realities of harsh living conditions, menial pay, and the sacrifice of their labourers. Embodied through the materials found in these worker dwellings in the remnants of the constructions they have worked so diligently on, objects from simple scrap metal to their striped vinyl migrant bags share inextricable links with these worker’s identity and stories, an abrasive assemblage so beautifully manipulated into these mesmerising birds that ultimately highlights the skill and value of this forgotten growing underclass, and the integral role they play in China’s fate as a capitalist nature. The rise of China's rapid economic flourish is in many ways credited to these poor workers, who are honoured and appreciated in this representation of the Phoenixes, who further epitomise their dreams and prosperity, and in turn, those of the Chinese nation. In examining these issues of globalisation on a glittering but garish scale, Xu bares binary tensions between eastern tradition and western influences, offers a meditation of modern migration and the search for a national identity on a local & global scale.
‘The phoenix of today’s China bears countless scars,’ says Xu Bing. ‘It has lived through great hardship. But it has adorned itself with great respect.’ Hence, the artist’s ability to render cultural contemplation, historical awareness and allegory through a varied material and conceptual harmony that at once engenders both criticism & praise of the world around him is at the heart of Xu Bing’s practice.
Furthermore, Ah Xian is another significant contemporary artist whose practice is ingrained with cultural and social concerns. The Beijing-born artist now living in Australia maintains a commitment to traditional Chinese art in his use of porcelain and pattern to express his experience of the Chinese diaspora and explores the reconciliation of his past and present cultural identity. Raised in post Cultural Revolution China, the young Ah who had retreated to Australia to pursue artistic and intellectual liberty as a student later returned to Jingdezhen, the historical center of China’s fine porcelain production where he not only reconnected with his heritage, but realised a need to express his dislocation & meditation that would culminate in his material practice.
“Our ancestors have created and handed down to us a very wealthy culture and art heritage. I believe that the best place to apply (not just attach) all of such quintessential treasury heritage we possess is nowhere else but on human beings ourselves. This would be one of the dearest returns to both nature and art evolution that I could aim to achieve.”
Creating body castes of various women and men of differing ages in quiet, gentle poses, fired in kilns at Jingdezhen and hand-painted by local workers, Ah bathes his busts in exquisite traditional designs and ubiquitous natural patterns to explore the indelible nature of heritage. The artist further explores the effects of western and eastern cultures on the other by amalgamating porcelain, one of the most significant Chinese exports to Europe in the late sixteenth century, with the the ancient Roman portrait bust. In this way, Ah Xian reflects upon globalisation’s efficacy to impart new influence across history and culture, from the early eras of trade, to his education in Australia, to the post Cultural Revolution period that saw a thirst for a new foreign flavour and growing global consciousness, as similarly experienced by Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing. As the artist discussed: “Twenty years after the Cultural Revolution and after China has opened its door to the world, we as artists with a Chinese background, should have learned and been sufficiently influenced by Western philosophy, art and culture as a whole to attain a level of confidence and capability to tell story about ourselves using our own language.”
This conceptual and material dialogue is manifested in Ah Xian’s China China Series. In China China Bust 15, the female figure smiles gently in a reflective reverie, calmed by the closed eyes and lips melting under the flow of the intricate blue cascades, mountainous peaks and blossoming trees. The bust’s detail fosters a sense of awe and meditation of the sublime nature in accordance to traditional Chinese landscape depictions, whilst contrastingly the simple cast white porcelain body below reinforces the simplicity of the human form that harbours the greater complexities of our being; our identity, our philosophies, our thoughts, our dreams. Ah’s dialogue between the intrinsic and extrinsic, old and new, and the collaboration between traditional artisans and contemporary conceptual artists hence provide an insight into the significance of cultural and societal matters in both informing and inspiring artistic response.
In all, artists Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing & Ah Xian embody the creative and conscious responses to evolving social and cultural issues through their individual innovative practices and conscientious commentaries that in turn inspire reflection, awareness and criticism of the contemporary human experience.
In the New York Times in 2004, Holland Cotter described him as an “artist whose role has been the stimulating, mould-breaking one of scholar-clown”. Though Ai surpasses the role of an artist alone as a conceptual artist, architect, curator, designer, film maker, writer and activist, his longing for transparency is more than clear. His avant-garde practice incorporates assisted readymade sculpture, defamatory photography and navigating the powerful online realm, in which he empowers with knowledge and expression with new sagacity through social and political commentary, often motivating meditation collectivism vs the individual in the communist society. Believing "everything is art, everything is politics.”, Ai exposes both himself and these issues he interrogates to successfully transcend a world of restrictions and censoring even within the constraints of the authoritarian China he is confined to. Ultimately though, “Ai can’t be here”, his prolific potency and practice still stirs and inspires around the globe.
Highly influenced by both the horrors of Mao’s oppressive Cultural Revolution in his childhood, which saw the damnation of his father’s intellectual creativity & freedom and forced his family into menial life in the impoverished countryside, but also the effects of his study in New York as an impressionable young adult discovering Marcel Duchamp & Andy Warhol for the first time, he declared he wanted to be the Chinese Warhol, and in doing so amalgamated his traditional and historical background with a modern world of iconography and consumerism. This dynamic practice is epitomised in the work Han Dynasty Urn with Coca Cola Logo. Like a Duchampian readymade, Ai incorporated an ancient neolithic vase as his base, and on the surface painted the iconic CocaCola logo atop what seemed to be a graffiti over a precious artefact. Not only was the artist referencing the enduring history of humankind, but emulating the “stamping out” action that prevailed in the Cultural Revolution; the destruction of tradition and culture in the way of progress and development of an idealistic future. In this way, Ai draws on his current materialistic & consumer driven world that again destroys the traditional aspects of culture in the globalised, multinational and transcendent icon of CocaCola, a symbol of Western culture and society that was beginning to make it's mark on his modern China. In disrupting these ideals of art as well as questioning the cultural values and social issues deeply rooted in Chinese history, an arena in which the modern world is so often threatened by the past, Ai defies time, as does the rapid pace of globalisation and corporations.
Over the next two decades, Ai Weiwei’s work as an artist and activist reached new heights and potency, essentially embracing a more vigorous role as a commentator of social justice and defender of freedom that he saw diminishing on personal, local and global stages. He proclaimed “There are no outdoor sports as graceful as throwing stones at a dictatorship.”, and proved that with a commitment to raising consciousness and seeking the truth in such a suffocating society, a small act is worth a million thoughts. Ai Weiwei’s creative vision and thirst for justice in this period culminated in his poignant work Remembering (2009) in which the artist created an enormous installation upon the facade of the Haus der Hunst in Munich, Germany out of 9000 children’s backpacks. Each backpack, assorted in an infant’s rainbow of blues, greens, reds and yellows represents a child’s life lost in the devastating May 12, 2008 Sichuan earthquake and forms in Chinese lettering a sentence with which a mother of one of the victims commemorated her daughter: For seven years she lived happily on this earth. The tragedy in which it is believed over 68,500 people died & 18500 were declared missing was highly censored by the Chinese government in the aftermath. Ai in his documentary Never Sorry recalls: “I write blog every day. Sometimes two articles a day. But for seven days during the earthquake I couldn’t write one blog. I just simply could not write. It is devastating. I’m speechless.”
Perturbed and frustrated with the lack of information released, the artist was prompted to conduct a search of his own. Aided by his online prominence, he recruited thousands of passionate volunteers inspired by his activism to venture discretely into the disaster zones to survey parents with the aim to collect details of the names, birthdays and schools of lost children to publish on his blog. What they uncovered was more than 5000 identities of children who perished, many of them within their shoddy collapsed schools. The remnants of these bags and learning materials amongst the devastating destruction was met with both dismay and drive, moving the artist to not rally the government for transparency and reform, but to create an artwork that honoured the individual life and innocence that was lost at the hands of negligence and silenced by censorship. His words "The art always wins. Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay.” is certainly relevant in this case, in which he underwent emergency brain surgery for internal bleeding as a result of a fierce assault from Chinese police when attempting to testify for a fellow investigator of the corrupted construction and the student casualties. Thus, Ai Weiwei’s role as both an artist and activist allows him to address crucial cultural and social issues that promote ideals of freedom, justice and cultural consciousness whilst meandering artistic and provocative political realms that are just as dangerous as he is.
Similarly, an artist that shares this thirst for examining and responding to the world around him is Xu Bing. Raised in the Cultural Revolution’s period of peril, terror and uncertainty, Xu was trained as a propagandist whose following enlightenment and education as a student would see the banning of one of his first ingenuous works The Book from the Sky in the lead up to the Tiananmen Square massacre. In a practice addressing & engaging with themes of social justice, cultural progress, freedom & historical events of his time have brought the conception of poignant and contemplative works such as his post September 11 Where Does the Dust Itself Collect? as well as more traditional homages as in Background Story which utilises found discarded vegetation behind a light glass panel to render a sweeping shadow landscape reminiscent of 14th century Chinese hanging scrolls.
More recently, the artist’s creative commentary of cultural & social issues is encapsulated in the commanding and colossal Phoenix; a pair of 100 ft birds soaring magnificently as a metaphoric and physical symbol of China’s growing prosperity and industrialisation. They are momentous; equally celestial as raw, as fierce as they are compelling. Composed of twinkling lights nestled amongst the crevices of culled detritus and accumulated remnants salvaged from the raw squalor of the Beijing skyscrape landscape exist harmoniously textured in a symphony ranging talons to tail, chins to wings. Here, the artist along with his team of engineers and migrant labourers to whom the work is dedicated created these traditionally auspicious symbols of fortune in the east and rebirth in the west to epitomise the contradictions amidst contemporary Chinese society; the city’s growing grandeur and prosperous capitalist wealth that blinds the realities of harsh living conditions, menial pay, and the sacrifice of their labourers. Embodied through the materials found in these worker dwellings in the remnants of the constructions they have worked so diligently on, objects from simple scrap metal to their striped vinyl migrant bags share inextricable links with these worker’s identity and stories, an abrasive assemblage so beautifully manipulated into these mesmerising birds that ultimately highlights the skill and value of this forgotten growing underclass, and the integral role they play in China’s fate as a capitalist nature. The rise of China's rapid economic flourish is in many ways credited to these poor workers, who are honoured and appreciated in this representation of the Phoenixes, who further epitomise their dreams and prosperity, and in turn, those of the Chinese nation. In examining these issues of globalisation on a glittering but garish scale, Xu bares binary tensions between eastern tradition and western influences, offers a meditation of modern migration and the search for a national identity on a local & global scale.
‘The phoenix of today’s China bears countless scars,’ says Xu Bing. ‘It has lived through great hardship. But it has adorned itself with great respect.’ Hence, the artist’s ability to render cultural contemplation, historical awareness and allegory through a varied material and conceptual harmony that at once engenders both criticism & praise of the world around him is at the heart of Xu Bing’s practice.
Furthermore, Ah Xian is another significant contemporary artist whose practice is ingrained with cultural and social concerns. The Beijing-born artist now living in Australia maintains a commitment to traditional Chinese art in his use of porcelain and pattern to express his experience of the Chinese diaspora and explores the reconciliation of his past and present cultural identity. Raised in post Cultural Revolution China, the young Ah who had retreated to Australia to pursue artistic and intellectual liberty as a student later returned to Jingdezhen, the historical center of China’s fine porcelain production where he not only reconnected with his heritage, but realised a need to express his dislocation & meditation that would culminate in his material practice.
“Our ancestors have created and handed down to us a very wealthy culture and art heritage. I believe that the best place to apply (not just attach) all of such quintessential treasury heritage we possess is nowhere else but on human beings ourselves. This would be one of the dearest returns to both nature and art evolution that I could aim to achieve.”
Creating body castes of various women and men of differing ages in quiet, gentle poses, fired in kilns at Jingdezhen and hand-painted by local workers, Ah bathes his busts in exquisite traditional designs and ubiquitous natural patterns to explore the indelible nature of heritage. The artist further explores the effects of western and eastern cultures on the other by amalgamating porcelain, one of the most significant Chinese exports to Europe in the late sixteenth century, with the the ancient Roman portrait bust. In this way, Ah Xian reflects upon globalisation’s efficacy to impart new influence across history and culture, from the early eras of trade, to his education in Australia, to the post Cultural Revolution period that saw a thirst for a new foreign flavour and growing global consciousness, as similarly experienced by Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing. As the artist discussed: “Twenty years after the Cultural Revolution and after China has opened its door to the world, we as artists with a Chinese background, should have learned and been sufficiently influenced by Western philosophy, art and culture as a whole to attain a level of confidence and capability to tell story about ourselves using our own language.”
This conceptual and material dialogue is manifested in Ah Xian’s China China Series. In China China Bust 15, the female figure smiles gently in a reflective reverie, calmed by the closed eyes and lips melting under the flow of the intricate blue cascades, mountainous peaks and blossoming trees. The bust’s detail fosters a sense of awe and meditation of the sublime nature in accordance to traditional Chinese landscape depictions, whilst contrastingly the simple cast white porcelain body below reinforces the simplicity of the human form that harbours the greater complexities of our being; our identity, our philosophies, our thoughts, our dreams. Ah’s dialogue between the intrinsic and extrinsic, old and new, and the collaboration between traditional artisans and contemporary conceptual artists hence provide an insight into the significance of cultural and societal matters in both informing and inspiring artistic response.
In all, artists Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing & Ah Xian embody the creative and conscious responses to evolving social and cultural issues through their individual innovative practices and conscientious commentaries that in turn inspire reflection, awareness and criticism of the contemporary human experience.