The Rise of Experimental Chinese Art During a Period of Political and Cultural Reform

Installation view of Art and China at Guggenheim Bilbao | Courtesy Guggenheim Bilbao

1989 was a watershed year that caused a transformative shift in politics and culture on an international scale. In China it would mark a turning point for contemporary art sparking a new era of experimentation which is explored in the Guggenheim Bilbao’s epic exhibition, Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World. Culture Trip takes a closer look at the conceptual practices which emerged during China’s period of economic reform. 

Your first encounter in Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World is Huang Yong Ping’s Theater of the World (1993), a miniature coliseum of sorts which is populated not with gladiators but beetles, centipedes, crickets, lizards, scorpions and cockroaches. You can guess what plays out. Whether or not you’re a fan of bugs, the spectacle leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. This is further soured by the inclusion of Huang’s The Bridge (1995), which features tortoises and snakes crawling over Chinese sculptures. 

The two-part installation might attempt to condense the order and chaos of life into a digestible size, but it feels like an unnecessarily sensationalistic way to open an exhibition. Especially as Huang’s conceptually minded ‘The History of Chinese Painting’ and ‘A Concise History of Modern Painting’ Washed in a Washing Machine for Two Minutes (1987/93) is a much more potent introduction to a period of art history not largely known outside of China. 

Before it opened at the Guggenheim in New York in 2017, the exhibition had already caused quite a bit of controversy regarding animal cruelty over three particular works, including Huang’s installations. One of the show’s three curators, Alexandra Munroe, was quick to set the record straight at the exhibition’s preview at Guggenheim Bilbao, stating the works in question were never intended to be exhibited in the American presentation – even though a statement was issued at the time to the contrary. 

However, although Munroe stated it’s not a curator’s role to censor artists, two of the works in question have been included in the Spanish exhibition, which – censorship aside – exerts a curatorial choice. Whether or not a European audience has a stronger constitution than an American one, the show opens – quite literally, as originally intended – with one of the controversial works that gives the exhibition its subtitle. 

Framed by two major events in China’s history – the Tiananmen Square student protests in 1989 and the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing – the exhibition looks at how two generations of artists have been both critical and complicit as China emerged as a global economic presence. 

1989 became a catalyst for dramatic cultural and political change around the world, causing a ripple effect of revolution and technological innovation. It was the year dissolution of dictatorial powers started in the Eastern Bloc, which led to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union by 1991. On 9 November 1989, East and West Germany began to dismantle the Berlin Wall, which had divided the city since 1961. Apartheid began to fall in South Africa. Brazil held its first presidential elections in nearly three decades. The protesters who stood up to government corruption and campaigned for freedom of speech were killed when troops entered Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989. 

So what does it mean to view works today which were made in response and since the epic global events of 1989? Have the works, with their hefty socio-political commentary, stood the test of time? Or will they now be viewed through a contemporary consumer lens? Can we connect to Chinese principles that don’t follow a Western rationale? And how did the practice of art develop under certain regimes to facilitate a cultural revolution? 

The biggest takeaway from this exhaustive show that features over 120 artworks is the emergence of conceptual art as a means of expression. Here the experimentation of non-traditional art forms, including performance and video art, truly stand out. The artists, many of whom left China after the events of Tiananmen Square, use art to question hegemonic order and the impact of globalisation which turned China into “the world’s factory”. 

The body is prominent throughout. In simplistic terms it was a cheap and easily accessible material. In 1990, the Big Tail Elephant Working Group was formed by Chen Shaoxiong, Liang Juhui and Lin Yilin in the rapidly expanding city of Guangzhou. They staged a number of interventions throughout the city in public spaces and used found industrial material to create humorous critiques on rapid urbanisation and imposed social structures. In Yilin’s Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road (1995), the performance artist moves concrete blocks across a four- lane road. Located at the base of what was then the tallest building in Asia, Yilin’s action intended to disrupt traffic to the Zhongtian Square construction site to draw attention to the impact of urbanisation and national ambition on society. 

Dashanzhuang, a rundown district of Bejing, became the base for a group of artists who rejected the traditions of painting to experiment in performance art in the early ’90s. One resident artist, Zhang Huan, who studied oil painting, began to use his body as a means of individual expression of resistance to oppressive ideologies that denied individual autonomy. 

Along with fellow artists from the East Village community – so renamed in 1994 after Ai Weiwei returned from New York – Zhang created To Add One Meter To An Anonymous Mountain (1995), a performance on Miaofeng Mountain that used an old proverb “Beyond the mountain, there are more mountains” as its starting point to consider the possibility of manipulating the natural order. Presented as a six- minute video, each artist takes their clothes off and lies on top of each other, ultimately adding an extra one metre to the mountain. 

Zhang Peili’s Uncertain Pleasure II (1996) is composed of a group of monitors that relay close-framed body parts being furiously scratched. It’s a compelling inclusion, as is Sewing (1997) by Lin Tianmiao – one of the only female artists in the show – which is concerned with the commodity of labour as opposed to the question of craft pastimes associated with women. 

It wouldn’t be a show about Chinese art without the inclusion of the world’s favourite dissident Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei. From the publications made with Zeng Xiaojun and Xu Bing which could be used to disseminate ideas in the absence of gallery spaces to his famous Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), in which the artist symbolically destroys the history of Chinese civilisation, Ai’s early works confront divisive cultural value systems. 

The exhibition concludes with one of the most captivating works, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Freedom (2009). A water hose violently thrashes around within an encased area when water is intermittently released via a timer. The video references the social violence of 1989 and the price paid in the quest for freedom. This work brilliantly encapsulates the show’s weighty concept of increased globalisation and state capitalism. 

Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World was at Guggenheim Bilbao until 23 September 2018. 

This article first appeared on Culture Trip