Zhang Xiaotao. Sakya, 2010-2011; still image; 80 x 144 cm. Courtesy of Pékin Fine Arts Beijing.

For the last few years, in regular visits to Beijing, I have been delighted to encounter work that seems to have escaped the dead hand of suffocating theory. Certainly Beijing has seen its share of the “art as spectacle” phenomenon, with artists tempted by the accessibility of large spaces, cheap labor, and cheaper fabrication costs to make works that are bigger and shinier than they need to be. But that’s the world we are living in now—a world of giant rubber ducks everywhere and butt-plug sculptures in the center of Paris. Art as entertainment. An evaluation of 2014 exhibitions in a Sydney newspaper pointed out that these days “you can’t just put stuff on the wall and expect that lots of people will come see.”[1] People expect something momentous, something extraordinary; they want their perceptions altered. In short, they want art to be magic.

And, sometimes, just sometimes, it is. My most enduring memories of the all-too-rare transcendent art experience include Cai Guo-Qiang in Brisbane, Xu Bing’s magnificent Phoenix in New York, and Huang Yong Ping at Beijing’s Red Brick Art Museum. Which is not to say that I haven’t also seen some wonderful painting, most particularly in Beijing and Shanghai. No “Zombie Formalism” there. To my list of the extraordinary I can now add Zhang Xiaotao’s digital 3D animations at Pékin Fine Arts, in his solo exhibition In the Realm of Microcosmic. Two works, Sakya (2010–2011) and The Adventures of Liang Liang (2012–2013), were exhibited in the 55th Venice Biennale, in the China National Pavilion’s Transfiguration curated by Wang Chunchen.

Zhang Xiaotao. Sakya No. 4, 2010-2011; still image; 80 x 144 cm. Courtesy of Pékin Fine Arts Beijing.

With references ranging from video-gaming software and science fiction to Tibetan thangka painting, sutras, and mandalas, Sakya reveals the struggle to retain spirituality in today’s modernizing, materialist China. It centers upon a significant Buddhist temple in Tibet partially destroyed by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Past and present overlap and the experience is hypnotizing, immersive, and very beautiful. Zhang Xiaotao says his utopia would be a “Buddhist Renaissance” in China, believing that people have lost their way in the chaos of urbanization and the frantic acquisition of material possessions. He incorporates a deep sense of history and reverence for tradition with a dizzying technical accomplishment using innovative approaches to technology.

In The Adventures of Liang Liang (2013), the artist animates his little son’s precociously wonderful and eccentric drawings, creating an engaging allegorical adventure in which cartoon characters, superheroes, deities, and traditional Chinese stories such as Journey to the West merge and overlap. His most recent work, Three Thousand Worlds (2014), creates an ambitious multilevel, multi-spatial representation of the Buddhist notion of the oneness of all things, the Three Realms, the intricate reciprocal relationship between the macrocosmic and microcosmic view of the universe. He is influenced by new theories in quantum physics and the way they challenge accepted notions of time and space as much as by the philosophies of his mentor, Xu Bing. Joseph Beuys’ philosophy of “social sculpture,” in which the artist breaks down barriers between artwork, artist, and audiences, is a significant influence. Zhang Xiaotao believes the artist should be “like an alchemist.” On the evidence of this show, Zhang is a magician.

Zhang Xiaotao. The Adventures of Liang Liang, 2013; video; 11:49. Courtesy of Pékin Fine Arts Beijing.

A major event on the Beijing calendar each year at Pace Beijing has been Beijing Voice, which showcases current discourses and directions in contemporary Chinese art. This iteration, the fifth, was curated by artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu with independent curator Cui Cancan. For their project Unlived By What Is Seen, they had 2,000 square meters of exhibition space to play with in Pace Beijing alone, as well as two other major Beijing galleries—Galleria Continua and Tang Contemporary Art. The curators selected twenty-eight artists and three artist collectives to participate in an exhibition intended to interrogate relationships between the artist, the art object, and the audience.

Beijing Voice: Unlived By What Is Seen; installation view. Courtesy of Pace Beijing.

They present works in support of a theoretical position: that there is a shift in focus from making art to taking action; a move away from the production of images and objects. Instead, the artists are “developing modes of existence that interrogate life itself,” according to the somewhat opaque publicity material. In many instances the result of this is an artist-as-talking-head narrating personal stories or aspects of daily life to a video camera. Unsurprisingly, some of these are much more interesting than others. The documentation of performance works offered little that seems new. Sun Yuan volunteered to allow the artist Zhao Zhao to stab him once in the back with a knife. I think we may have seen this once or twice before.

Performance art is undeniably significant in the development of contemporary art in China, and is well documented. A consistent thread within this history focuses on a punishing, ritualized inscription of suffering upon the body. He Yunchang famously had his own rib surgically removed and made into a piece of jewelry with the addition of 400 grams of gold. Art historian Gao Minglu suggests that the overt violence that characterized performance art in the 1980s revealed, intentionally or not, the “sorrows and disturbances hidden in the artists’ souls as they found themselves straddling cultural epochs and influences while trying to forge a new way.”[2]  In the Bohemian East Village artists’ community outside Beijing, artists such as Zhang, He Yunchang, and Ma Liuming were responding to a society increasingly focused on private wealth and ownership of commodities. They felt they could “own” nothing but their own bodies. Performative practices thus focused on the idea that the artist’s own body was his or her primary material. Existential, ritualized, their work explored ideas about shamanism, martyrdom, political violence, and highly contested notions (in a collectivist society) of the individual.

Rather than establishing something radically new, Unlived By What Is Seen appears to look back with a degree of nostalgia to this era before Chinese artists were subjected to the hype and hustle of the art market. The artists and their works are all but invisible behind a wall of theory. Unfortunately, this makes the works—or, rather, the traces left behind following the actions of the artists—seem like historical artifacts. Huang Yan’s My Life recorded everything in his daily life for more than two years, and the exact time at which they occurred. More than a hundred thousand events have been recorded so far. More interesting was the documentation of Homeshop, a defunct artist initiative located in an old Hutong neighborhood in the city center that operated as a locus for the exchange of ideas between artists, designers, and thinkers—relays between the public and the private. But even here, the museological display of objects, documents, and photographs conveys little of what I am sure was genuinely exciting for the participants.

Beijing Voice: Unlived By What Is Seen; installation view. Courtesy of Pace Beijing.

Some works reveal an engaging Dadaist absurdity. Walk the Art Arena – No Survivors uses the local comedy genre of “Crosstalk” to cover thirty years of anecdotes about Chinese contemporary art, artists, exhibitions, business dealings, and events. Kang Jin’s Faster is subtitled I try to run in the flow of traffic on the highway—which, given Chinese highway traffic conditions, must surely come under the heading of self-sacrifice in the name of art. Wei Bingqiang collected hundreds of stones in a fruitless endeavor, asking the question, “Is it possible to find an entirely circular stone in the world?”

Young artists have always questioned the nature and purpose of art—where would the 20th century avant-garde have been without that? While there is no doubting the sincerity of the curators, or the artists, in their belief that they are challenging the hegemony of the art market and what they deem “ossified modes of making art,” by the time I left the last of the three galleries I was beginning to feel that Joseph Beuys has a lot to answer for. For me, at least, the base metals had not turned into gold.

[1] Robert Nelson, “Visual Arts Year in Review,” Sydney Morning Herald, December 31, 2014 http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/visual-arts-year-in-review-commercial-galleries-at-a-crossroads-as-institutions-prosper-20141226-12b2wt.html#ixzz3NiPPsVeK

[2] Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-garde in Twentieth Century Chinese Art (Cambridge MIT Press, 2011), 216–217.

Xie Qi. So Green (Mao on 50 Yuan), 2012; oil on canvas; 200 x 180 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Pékin Fine Arts.

Recent exhibitions in Beijing reveal how Chinese contemporary art combines a mastery of technique (learned in the rigid academic tradition of the powerhouse art academies such as the Central Academy of Fine Arts) with a willingness to innovate. Artists who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s discovered western Modernism and post-Modernism all at once, resulting in an art devoid of the overwhelming layer of theory that infects much contemporary art in the West.

Li Shurui, Beijing, 2014. Photo: Luise Guest.

Li Shurui at White Space Beijing continues to paint in her characteristically psychedelic manner, using an airbrush to create monumental three-dimensional canvases. The blurred, softened edges of her forms make us question our perception of reality. Li was startled when someone told her she was making “Optical” art like Bridget Riley, as she had never heard of this style. Her training at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts provided her with almost no awareness of  Modernist or contemporary art, which paradoxically allowed her the freedom to invent a visual language entirely her own. She is interested in the color spectrum and in creating paintings that provide an experience so physically immersive that it becomes emotive as well as perceptual. The shimmering uncertainties of her large paintings pierce the illusion that we inhabit a rational world. The sculptural pieces in this show blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. They lie on the ground like shards broken from an extraterrestrial machine, their matte-gray knife-blade surfaces punctuated by sky-blue edges.

Li Shurui. Lights No.95, 2009; acrylic on canvas, 210 x 210 cm. Courtesy of Li Shurui.

Painting continues to be a vital force in Chinese contemporary art. It was the Political Pop and Cynical Realist painters, after all, who burst onto the international art scene like flamethrowers in the mid-1990s and continue to be influential today. Younger painters cannot help but reference their work in some way, as well as the various strands of modern painting in China, which include variations on traditional ink painting, Soviet Socialist Realism, and Cézanne-inspired Modernism. An exhibition at Beijing’s iconic Red Gate Gallery, in its unique location in the restored Ming Dynasty watchtower on what remains of the city wall, reveals the strength of this tradition.

Zhang Yajie. Corner of the Studio, 2013; oil on canvas, 160 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Red Gate Gallery.

Zhang Yajie featured in Red Gate’s very first exhibition, in 1991, a time when artists barely dared to think about the possibility of selling their work. A key member of the “New Generation” group, his candid, dynamic painterly technique represented scenes of daily life in Beijing at a moment of chaotic social change. Black-and-white portraits revealed the aspirations and desires of ordinary people in a transforming city. Recent paintings depict mundane objects and settings that evoke a powerful sense of nostalgia. Sinks, taps, barred windows, heating pipes, and austere doorways remind viewers of the simple Soviet-era apartments in which so many Beijingers grew up. Is there a veiled critique of the over-the-top consumerism of today’s China in these expressive and rich painterly surfaces? Corner of the Studio (2013) reveals his typically high viewpoint and broken brush marks. Rich juxtapositions of subtle grays, reds, and pinks create mottled, weathered surfaces, suggestive  of times lost. Fish (2009) depicts a vividly colored dead fish lying in a metallic sink, its blood clogging the drain.  This  powerful image  may be read in many ways. Traditionally in China, a fish symbolizes wealth, abundance, and good fortune. In this painting, at first sight a banal image, the sense of waste and pathos is overwhelming.

Zhang Yajie. Fish, 2009; oil on canvas; 100 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Red Gate Gallery.

At Pékin Fine Arts, the first solo exhibition by Xie Qi introduces a painter with impressive technique and a visual vocabulary that makes a sardonic comment on contemporary China. Her primary subject of the Chinese Renminbi bank note, with its iconic image of Mao Zedong, might lead one to expect a Warholian, Pop-inspired hard-edge satire. On the contrary: Xie’s canvases are lushly layered with translucent veils of paint through which ghostly imagery appears and disappears. The image of Mao, or the architecture of the revolutionary past, emerges as if seen through thick fog. Mysterious, ethereal, the sheer physicality and seductive beauty of the works overwhelm the viewer. There is a sly wit at play here, though. Her painting of a Swiss franc reveals the almost hidden image of artist Giacometti. In So Green (Mao on 50 Yuan), the chairman is only partially visible behind transparent curtains of color, as if he is vanishing into an irrelevant past. There is an inherent sense of loss, and an acknowledgement of the layering of history; past and present coexist. Xie Qi told me that this underlying sadness was very much part of her intention.

Xie Qi. Faded Portrait, 2013; oil on canvas; 200 x 180. Courtesy of the Artist and Pékin Fine Arts.

At Chambers Fine Art, the exhibition Transformation: Recent Work by Wu Jian’an presents a body of work by an idiosyncratic artist best known for his innovative papercuts, often influenced by Chinese mythology and classical Buddhist art. For me, the most interesting element here was the 6000 Painted Faces and 1000 Fairies painted by Qingdao Art Students, a room entirely filled with concertina books of ink-drawn faces, some wonky and some accomplished but weirdly compelling, and a wall of tiny faces, each profoundly human in its individuality. Wu looks for hidden relationships between diverse forms, fascinated by what he describes as “old China”—not scholarly literati painting but shadow puppets, papercuts, folk art, and the fierce carvings and paintings of the Dunhuang caves. Transformation is inspired by the Chinese classic text “Journey to the West,” an allegorical pilgrimage tale combining comedy with spiritual enlightenment, in which a Buddhist monk travels to India in search of sacred texts. Overshadowing everything in this exhibition is Monkey Face Composed of 72 Tigers, a reference to the Monkey King’s ability to transform himself into seventy-two different life forms.

Wu Jian’an. Installation view of Transformations, 2014. Courtesy of the Artist and Chambers Fine Art.

At Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, a major retrospective of Xu Zhen (now known by his invented corporate identity  “MadeIn Company”) reveals the ambition of his practice: part Warhol-style factory and part purely Chinese industrial-scale art production. From an artist who defies categorization, or even interpretation, the show is visually stunning as sheer spectacle. From the ShanghArt Art Supermarket filled with commercial packaging from which all the contents have been emptied, complete with bored cashiers; to enormous versions of classical antiquity with heads replaced by upside-down Buddhist statuary; to versions of Gothic architecture made from black leather and bondage ropes, this is an artist unafraid to examine uncomfortable aspects of the contemporary world.

Xu Zhen (MadeIn Company). Installation View. Courtesy of Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Eric G. Powell.

Also at UCCA is Ji Dachun: Without a Home. Ji is best known for Surrealist-influenced satirical critiques of contemporary China. and for paintings in which figuration alternates with abstraction, and western influences are underpinned by references to Chinese conventions of ink painting. The artist’s first institutional exhibition in Beijing is a comprehensive examination of his practice. Biological forms hint at nightmarish hybrid breeding programs or the mad frontiers of scientific experimentation and the cloning of scary new life forms. Ji’s paintings are both beautiful and alienating; seductive and disturbing, not unlike Beijing itself.

Ji Dachun. Installation View. Courtesy of Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art. Photo: Eric G. Powell.