Chinese Apartment Artist’s and Maximalist’s political and cultural resistance against the International Art World in the 80’s-90’s
Song Dong, Culture Noodles, 1994, installation shots of shredded book pages in the artist’s apartment
The absent discourse of Asian Art within global art history has propelled many art historians and curators to mediate and integrate the heterogeneous art forms of Asian art into the broader art world. Scholars today have rejected the insinuation of a totalising Western-centric narrative of art and the trivialisation of non-western Modernities, as monolithic entities that are derivative of their hegemonic western counterparts.[1] Chinese Modernity was a transformative era towards a new nation and cultural expansion, characterised by the 1976 Cultural Revolution and the death of the communist revolutionary Mao Zedong, who sought to relinquish any elitist and bourgeois culture from the Chinese society. The Chinese Avant-garde movement evolved from the changing social and political environment, propelling many regional collectives to establish their own ‘unofficial art’ of their era. The Chinese Avant-garde in a sense shared a commonality with the Western hegemonic Avant-garde in its attempt to negate and transcend its past, but through radically rebelling against the official political ideology and global expansion. Since the accelerated globalisation in the late-twentieth century, Cynical Realism and Political Pop has been at the forefront of the Chinese Avant-garde discourse in the West. Namely for its ethnographic framing and politically aestheticised form that capitulated to established capitalist values ingrained in the West. However, prominent Chinese art historians and curators Gao Minglu and Hou Hanru have argued that the monolithic depictions of the Chinese Avant-garde overshadowed concurrent narratives and movements such as Apartment Art and Maximalism. Apartment Art and Maximalism will be analysed as alternative trajectories of the Chinese Avant-garde that sought to undermine the official art discourse and the dominant political ideology through their self-reflective and immersive practices. Both movements exemplified the critical moments of accelerated political upheaval and social transformation in China as they navigated between the local and the global.
Undoubtedly, the Chinese Avant-garde discourse in the West is substantially centred around the political and societal instability of the Chinese Communist Party, echoing the Cold War ideological antagonism against Communism.[2] Cynical Realism and Political Pop are often at the forefront of this discourse utilised as political and ideological propaganda to support the values and triumphalist image of the ‘First World’.[3] Consequently, after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protest, ideological cynicism of China’s social and political conditions was disseminated across Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the broader West as it reinforced the capitalist worldview of the Western consciousness, drawing distinctions between the ‘First and Third World’.[4] The international market commodified the recognisable aesthetics of ‘chinese-ness’ and ideological cynicism of Cynical Realism and Political Pop, as an ethnographic representation of the Chinese Avant-garde and Chinese condition.[5] On the contrary, Cynical Realism and Political Pop artists were concerned with undermining the official art discourse and sought to articulate the growing complexity of the Chinese identity through the agency of juxtaposing official Socialist propaganda and consumerist imagery.[6]
Obscured away from the Western-centric market, alternative collectives and underground Avant-garde movements took place in the periphery of the spotlight on Political Pop and Cynical Realism. Apartment Art, a term coined by Gao Minglu, emerged as a result of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign in 1983 which sought to neutralise corrupt and bourgeois ideological influences of the West. Likewise to Cynical Realism and Political Pop, Apartment Artists[7] sought to undermine the official ideology and the totalising Socialist Realism mandated by the state as the official art to “serve the people”.[8] Apartment Artists transformed their abode into their studio, salon, and gallery space, becoming an active Third Space for underground Avant-garde collectives to exist beyond the bounds of Socialist Realism and ‘official’ artistic modes. Homi K. Bhabha’s conception of “Third Space”[9] or “location of culture” can be applied to Apartment Artists and Maximalist’s initiative to undermine the official spaces and the oppositional discourse of the East and West. “The process of temporalisation”[10] and performative hybridity in the ‘mid-ground’[11] allowed Chinese artists to exemplify and embody their cultural identity and differences between dichotomies. These artists sought to illustrate the dynamism and heterogeneous nature of their identity through their performative methodologies to navigate in-between cultural modes, locality, and political ideologies.[12]
Figure 1. Song Dong, Culture Noodles, 1994, installation shots of shredded book pages in the artist’s apartment
Following the end of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, 1983-85, and the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests, Song Dong’s transformative apartment installation “Culture Noodles” 1994-95 (see Figure 1) was a response to the suppressed arts ecology and the changing political and social context of his practice. The Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign was initiated by the Chinese Communist Party to quash Western abstract expressionism and ‘unofficial’ artistic modes in China, neutralising corrupted elite and bourgeois influences.[13] By the hands of a noodle-maker, Song Dong shredded books into thin strips of Culture Noodles, reifying the relationship between spiritual and material nourishment. Song Dong’s site-specific installation depicts the transformation of a spiritual substance into a material form of nourishment in his own home. Song Dong transformed his home into a site of deconstruction, production and transformation of culture and knowledge, as a space for performative production of meaning. The temporal and performative action of shredding, highlights the transformative and metamorphic experience of destruction and production, drawing attention to the significance of art-making as social and individual practice. As artists began to stray away from depicting the dominant narratives of working-class heroes and heroines[14], they focused mostly on the tangible and observable in their physical environment. Apartment Artists often utilised mundane everyday items and domestic objects that were symbolic of their physical context in their homes, to signify the changing state and disillusionment towards China’s arts ecology. Apartment Art “partly became a response to the suppressed arts ecology of China, and the artists changing relationship with their local context”[15], shapeshifting the social agency and cultural role of Chinese artists at the time. Song Dong’s practice transcended the stagnation of an ideologically driven society and the suppressed local art scene through active modes of production and performance. The Third Space is an “ambivalent space of enunciation” for performative meaning production that allows artists to articulate cultural identity through created situations and transformative processes.[16] This alternative space emerged as a result of globalisation and cultural mobility, enabling individuals to negotiate between meaning and representation.[17] The Apartment Art movement was catalytic to the development of the Avant-garde in China, as an independent and underground Third Space undermining the authority and state-run gallery spaces which marginalised unofficial movements. The Chinese Avant-garde of the late-1980’s attempted to “break down the constraints of the authorities of official discourse and to reclaim freedom of expression”[18], as apparent in Culture Noodles. Song Dong’s apartment installation was a paradoxical engagement between the personal and political, and a site for underground cultural exchange for spiritual and material nourishment, as he would frequently have other artists render their creativity in his apartment. Culture Noodles draws a comparative analysis to both books and noodles, shedding light on the significance of culture, as a means of spiritual enrichment and enlightenment in the time of uncertainty and turmoil.
Disembodied from the international market and media Apartment Artists were preoccupied with their local contexts, diverging into their own homes and domestic spheres as “self-imposed exile away from mass-consumer culture”.[19] Without a beginning or end, Song Dong’s use of dematerialisation and site-specificity provoked an intangible and unmarketable condition to his work, making it impossible to exhibit beyond the limits of his home. It is only through photographic documentation that Culture Noodles is made accessible to the outside world. Apartment Art in the 1990’s became a direct self-critical response to the Avant-garde movement itself, as artists began to recognise the detriment of the commercial art market upon the Chinese arts ecology.[20] Artists like Song Dong gradually shifted their concerns as the arts landscape began to rupture from the cultural expansion and the global mass culture. The hybridisation of destruction and reconstruction is indicative of Song Dong’s introspective reflection of the hyperbolic transformation of the arts landscape, and its entanglement of the local and global. Song Dong resists the forces of globalisation on his emphasis on the local, reinforcing his concerns of the stagnation of the arts ecology amid China’s confrontation and negotiation with the Western-dominated international art market.[21] Many artists turned to the success of the “speculative mass productions of political kitsch and commercial kitsch”, capitulating to the demands of the western-centric market at the time.[22] Song Dong’s detachment from the broader society disembodied the need for a commercialised space or alternative validation for his practice, establishing a critical eye on the commercialised art world. The use of commonly accessible materials in a private setting demonstrates the close inspection of the entangled relationship between the Avant-garde space and the broader changing social sphere. Song Dong provides an introspective awareness of his own culture and environment through his performative resistance against the homogenising forces of the global mass culture.
Many artists sought to detangle themselves from the confinements of cultural expansion and the accelerated globalisation of the arts landscape in China. The Chinese Avant-garde school of thought, ‘Maximalism’, which was first used by Gao Minglu, comprised of artists who sought to deconstruct meaning and culture through the process of repetition and labour. The Maximalist’s aimed to invoke social and cultural critique within the Chinese and global context, standing in the mid-ground between the East and West dichotomy.[23] The modern Chinese society was “fundamentally concerned with how to integrate art and social projects” into society to foster a better understanding of their living space and context.[24] Apartment Art and Maximalism were a response to the alienation and estrangement of an ideologically driven society and growing globalisation, which was divergent to the violent criticisms of the consumer society of its Western Avant-garde counterparts. Similar to Western Minimalism, the Chinese Maximalist’s rejected the representational value of art to depict a utopian or illusionary world, as seen in the early-twentieth century movements like Surrealism.[25] However, unlike its Western counterpart Minimalism, Chinese Maximalist’s were concerned with subjectivity and individual spirituality, influenced by Chinese Chan Buddhism and traditional Chinese philosophical concepts. The Maximalist’s were not concerned with the resulting artwork of their process but were instead engrossed in a spiritual practice through strenuous repetitive labour, which often referred to the fragments of their daily life.[26] The meditative practice of Maximalism was similar to Apartment Artists who sought to self-exile away from the confines of the broader art-world in a Third Space.
Figure 2. Xu Bing, Book from the Sky, 1987-91, hand-printed books, ceiling, and wall scrolls.
The Chinese Maximalist movement sought to deconstruct meaning and cultural constructions of knowledge and ways of understanding the world, to negate the urgency and pressure to resonate with a particular set of ideologies or beliefs. Xu Bing’s “Book from the Sky” 1987-1991 (see Figure 2) emphasises the deconstruction of culture and symbolism through the meditative repetition of invention, carving and printing of ‘meaningless’ Chinese characters. Book From the Sky is an immersive installation of traditional hand-printed books, and scrolls installed from ceiling to wall stamped with carved woodblocks. Xu Bing carved in 4000 ‘pseudo’ Chinese characters, which convincingly resembled authentic characters, repeatedly onto traditional wooden printing blocks (see Figure 3). Akin to Song Dong’s subversive Culture Noodles, Book from the Sky embodies a form of ‘destruction’ of traditional culture, symbolising the generation of artists that experienced the ideological disillusionment of the Mao utopia. Xu Bing’s approach to ‘meaninglessness’ and ‘nothingness’ is indicative of the fundamental philosophical concepts of Chan Buddhism and Eastern Philosophy, which delineates the moment of spiritual freedom and enlightenment from the confinements of any doctrine. Maximalist’s placed emphasis on the labour, temporalisation, and practice of art making, disembodying the value of the resulting artwork. The labour-intensive repetition allowed Xu Bing to cultivate a meditative Third Space for spiritual enlightenment “by endlessly experiencing a fixed point”.[27] The practice of performative repetition is evident in the aesthetic of ‘the infinite’ and limitless numbers, integral to the movement, many other Maximalist artist’s involved repetitive mark-marking and performative methodologies in their practice.[28] The immersive practice allowed artists to unearth a mid-ground that was beyond the confinements of the global and local arts ecology. The experiential process of mark-making and performative meaning production allowed Xu Bing to reify meaning through his subjectivity, and enable viewers to articulate their individual reality in relation to the work.[29] Song Dong and Xu Bing both deconstruct and reconstruct aspects of culture that seek to make sense of the world, signifying their rejection to apply themselves to any particular set of cultural ideologies or totalising perceptions of the world.
Figure 3. Xu Bing, hand-carved printing block from Book from the Sky, 1987-91
The homogenising forces of globalisation and Western mass culture undermined the heterogeneous nature of Chinese identity. Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky overthrew the reductive reception and orientalist interpretation of Chinese art as dissident political narratives and the ‘othering’[30] nature of the Western market. The alternate forms of validation, fame, and financial incentives of the international art market fundamentally transformed the face of the Chinese arts ecology.[31] The subversion of value and meaning is apparent in Xu Bing’s meditative and laborious practice of inventing and carving 4000 characters, for it to become eventually ‘meaningless’. Similarly to Apartment Art, Book from the Sky was a response to the corrupted arts ecology, which was a result of capitalist globalisation and cultural expansion. Xu Bing’s practice negates the pressure to create a definitive meaning into his work, handing the agency to the audience to decipher and conjugate their interpretations. Xu Bing denotes that the moment the work leaves his hands it "no longer belongs” to him, it becomes “the property of all the people who have touched it[…]departing from [him] ”.[32] This quote draws to a relevant argument that Gao Minglu once made that Maximalist artist’s “denied that the ending of a work was generated by the artists themselves”, which was similar to Roland Barthes’ post-structuralist concepts. Barthes’ argued authors and artists cannot generate new meanings and narratives, but only act as “scriptors" regurgitating narratives that already exist in the world.[33] Gao Minglu further argued that Chinese artists most likely were not informed by Barthes’ work or post-structuralism in the 1980’s but were instead informed by their “specific reality of Chinese art” as a way to criticise the overemphasis of meaning.[34] Maximalist focused on the temporality and experiential process of their work, which manifested a metaphysical space that circumvented the futility of meaning and representation beyond the global mass culture. This metaphysical space became a cultural strategy for both Apartment Artists and Maximalist’s to escape the static and exhausting emphasis on value and meaning.
Apartment Art and Maximalism were disembodied and ‘othered’ by the triumphalist cultural viewpoint of the West, shapeshifting the representation of Chinese Avant-garde in the international art market. The ethnographic framing of Cynical Realism and Political Pop became an ideal commodity for the Western spectacle society drawing hierarchical distinctions between the ‘Free World’ to the ‘Communist World’.[35] Apartment Art and Maximalism provided a more inward-looking and self-reflexive response to the broader society and arts ecology of China, exemplified through performative production of meaning in the Third Space. They reflected upon the cultural expansion and globalisation of China, through their self-meditative and private practices as a way to criticise the ‘ideological kitsch’ and ‘commercial kitsch’ of the time.[36] Song Dong and Xu Bing engaged in their immersive methodologies, cultural contexts, and locality to transcend the confinements of the global and local arts ecology. As Asian art historian David Clarke denotes, Contemporary Asian art continues to be consumed and recuperated within a Western-centred vision and framework, reinforcing established asymmetrical power structures and relations in the art world.[37] Artists and historians today are continuing to dethrone the Western-centric discourses of the Chinese condition to establish a separate criterion to evaluate the heterogeneous art form that is Contemporary Chinese art.
[1] Harney, Elizabeth, and Ruth B. Phillips. "Introducing the Multiple Modernisms Project." Artlink 37, no. 2 , 2017. p.37.
[2] Hou, Hanru. "Towards an 'un-unofficial Art': De-ideologicalisation of China's Contemporary Art in the 1990s." Third Text 10, no. 34,1996. p. 40.
[3] Gao, Minglu, “Extensionality and intentionality in a transnational cultural system”, Art Journal; Winter 1998. p.36.
[4] Chiu, Melissa. “Breakout : Chinese Art outside China”. Milano: Charta, 2006. p.29.
[5] Hou, “Towards an 'un-unofficial Art': De-ideologicalisation of China's Contemporary Art in the 1990s”,
p.40.
[6] Hou, Hanru.“Entropy; Chinese Artists, Western Art Institutions: A New Internationalism”, Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. J Fisher, London: Kala Press.1994. pp.81-82.
[7] The term ‘Apartment Artists' refers to artists that were a part of the Apartment Art movement. Could also be referred to as Apartment Art artists.
[8] Political slogan of the Chinese Communist Party which first appeared in the Maoist era.
[9] Bhabha, Homi K. “The Location of Culture”. London, Taylor & Francis Group, 2004. p.55 Accessed June 8, 2020. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203820551
[10] Hopfener, Birgit.“Destroy the Mirror of Representation. Negotiating Installation Art in the 'Third Space”, Negotiating Difference : Contemporary Chinese Art in the Global Context. Weimar: VDG, Verlag Und Datenbank Für Geisteswissenschaften, 2012. p.65-66 , Accessed May 22, 2020, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/lib/monash/reader.action?docID=2069200&ppg=61
[11] Mid-ground is a term rephrased by Hou Hanru in his book “On the Mid-Ground” 2002, directly derived from Homi K Bhabha’s conception of “Third Space” as an alternate and independent space that transcend the East-West dichotomy.
[12] Hou, Hanru. “On the Mid-Ground: Chinese Artists, Diaspora and Global Art”, On the Mid-Ground, ed Yu Hsiao-hwei, Hong Kong: Timezone8, 2002. p.74.
[13] Wang, Chunchen. “The art of anxiety: China’s social transformation and the uncertain reception of Chinese contemporary art”, Journal of Visual Art Practice 11, 2012. p. 223, accessed May 25, 2020, doi: 10.1386/jvap.11.2-3.221_1
[14] Wang, p.224.
[15] Gao, Minglu.’Changing motivations of Chinese contemporary art since the mid-1990s’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 11, 2012. p.212, Accessed May 20, 2020, doi: 10.1386/jvap.11.2-3.209_1
[16] Hopfner, “Questioning Representations of Chineseness by Inhabiting Events of Cultural Difference”, p.64-66.
[17] Bhabha, Homi K. In Rutherford, Jonathan, “The Third Space - Interview with Homi Bhabha”, Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, p.209.
[18] Hou,“Towards an 'un-unofficial Art': De-ideologicalisation of China's Contemporary Art in the 1990s”, p.37.
[19] Gao, Minglu. “Extensionality and intentionality in a transnational cultural system”, Art Journal; Winter 1998, p.36
[20] Gao, Minglu. “Total Modernity and the Avant-garde in Twentieth-century Chinese Art”. Cambridge, Mass, London: MIT Press, 2011. p. 276.
[21] Hou, “On the Mid-Ground: Chinese Artists, Diaspora and Global Art”, p.75.
[22] Gao, “Total Modernity and the Avant-garde in Twentieth-century Chinese Art”, pp.275-276.
[23] Gao, p.311.
[24] Gao, Minglu. “Particular Time, Specific Space, My Truth”: Total Modernity in Chinese Contemporary Art. In Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, postmodernity, contemporaneity, ed. T Smith, et al. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. p.136.
[25] Gao, “Total Modernity and the Avant-garde in Twentieth-century Chinese Art”, p.314.
[26] Gao, p.314.
[27] Wu, Hung. "A "Ghost Rebellion": Notes on Xu Bing's "Nonsense Writing" and Other Works." Public Culture 6, no. 2, 1994. p. 418.
[28] Gao, “Total Modernity and the Avant-garde in Twentieth-century Chinese Art”, p.340.
[29] Hopfener, “Destroy the Mirror of Representation. Negotiating Installation Art in the 'Third Space”, p.64+71.
[30] ‘Othering’ is a systemic process and condition of hegemonic power structures that marginalises communities and groups based on inherent differences that are not limited to racial, gender, religious, socioeconomic and ethnic differences.
Powell, John A.,and Stephen Menendian, “The Problem of othering: Towards Inclusiveness and Belonging”, Othering & Belonging Journal, Issue 1, 2016 , Accessed June 21 2020 http://www.otheringandbelonging.org/the-problem-of-othering/
[31] Chiu, “Breakout : Chinese Art outside China”, p.29.
[32] Wu, “A "Ghost Rebellion": Notes on Xu Bing's "Nonsense Writing”, p.418.
[33] Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author,” 1968, Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. pp.142-8.
[34] Gao, “Total Modernity and the Avant-garde in Twentieth-century Chinese Art”, p.316.
[35] Hou,“Towards an 'un-unofficial Art': De-ideologicalisation of China's Contemporary Art in the 1990s”, p.40.
[36] Gao, “Total Modernity and the Avant-garde in Twentieth-century Chinese Art”, p.7 .
[37] Clarke, David. “Contemporary Asian Art and Its Western Reception”, Third Text, vol.16, Issue 3, 2002, p.238, Accessed May 20 2020, doi:10.1080/09528820110160673
Images
Song Dong, Culture Noodles, 1994, installation shots of shredded book pages in artist’s apartment. Image reproduced from: Parlene, Anna, “Chinese Avant-garde art in the 1980s”, Lecture Slide, Post-war Practices 1945-1990 AHT2102, Monash University, 19 May 2020. p.38. Accessed 18 June 2020.
Xu Bing, Book from the Sky, 1987-91, hand-printed books, ceiling and wall scrolls. Accessed 18 June 2020 http://www.xubing.com/en/work/details/206?year=1991&type=year#206
Xu Bing, hand-carved printing block from Book from the Sky, 1987-91. Image reproduced from: Parlene, Anna, “Chinese Avant-garde art in the 1980s”, Lecture Slide, Post-war Practices 1945-1990 AHT2102, Monash University, 19 May 2020. p.31. Accessed 18 June 2020.
