By Christopher Beam
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In
a gallery in Hong Kong’s Chai Wan district last week, during the city’s
third annual installment of the international Art Basel fair, the
Beijing-based artist Huang Rui
introduced a new live work called “Red Black White Grey.” At the start
of the performance, four affectless women walked onstage wearing trench
coats, then disrobed one by one as Huang, who is sixty-three, slathered
their bodies with black and then white paint. He directed them to lie
down on a canvas that looked like four Hong Kong flags, in
configurations that by the end spelled out “1997,” the year in which
sovereignty over the territory transferred from the U.K. to China, and
“2047,” the year that Hong Kong is slated to merge completely with the
mainland. As the soundtrack’s drums and electric violin built to a
furious climax, the women put their coats back on and the artist painted
single digits on the front of each jacket, to form “2015.” The music
stopped, and the audience applauded.
Huang’s
performance stood out in the week of nonstop art, if not for its
subtlety then certainly for its political intent. I’d come to Art Basel
expecting to see political messages, especially given that it had been
only a couple of months since the pro-democracy Occupy Central protests
gripped Hong Kong. But, with the notable exception of Huang and the
Beijing artist Xu Qu, whose installation of tattered yellow umbrellas,
called “Occupy Art Central,”
was shown at the nearby Art Central fair, few Chinese artists whose
work I saw seemed to grapple overtly with the city’s recent trauma, or
with the Communist political system that spawned it. Whereas many
artists of Huang’s generation, from the sculptor Wang Keping to the painter Ma Desheng, made their names by challenging the government, the younger Chinese creators seemed less interested in activism.
Westerners
are often criticized for looking at Chinese art through a narrow
political lens. Ask an American to name a Chinese artist, and the
response is most likely Ai Weiwei, whose brand of political provocation
ranges from mocking the government on his blog to collecting the names
of more than five thousand children who died in the 2008 Sichuan
earthquake as a result of shoddy building construction. He has become
all but synonymous with Chinese art. (Evan Osnos profiled Ai Weiwei in 2010.)
This
focus on the political has persisted in the West for decades, fostered
in part by the journalists who reported on China in the
nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, when relatively few
international art critics had visited the country. Back then, the
Chinese artists who drew global attention were those who criticized the
Communist Party, including Huang, who organized one of the seminal
independent art displays of the era, the unauthorized “Stars”
exhibition, in Beijing in 1979. This journalistic bias persisted into
the nineties, when several avant-garde Chinese artists, including Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, and Wang Guangyi,
gained international fame after their art was labelled “cynical
realism” or “political pop,” and described by Western media as an
expression of disillusionment with Chinese society following the 1989
massacre in Tiananmen Square. By the mid-aughts, their paintings were
selling for millions. More recently, the mantle has passed to Ai, whose
success owes to many factors: his quotability, his gift for social-media
engagement, his family background, his physical appearance, his humor,
his excellent English, and his well-regarded body of work. But it’s his
defiance of the government that has made him an icon—outside China, at
least.
Inside China, people have more complex
views of Ai and of the relationship between politics and art. After
Huang’s performance was finished, I encountered Wang Keping, a gifted
wood sculptor who first made his name at Huang’s “Stars” exhibition in
Beijing. Wang was even more radical than Huang at that event, agitating
for a march and, according to an account he wrote later, shouting out “I
am a rebel artist!” in the presence of state media. Among the
sculptures that Wang hung on the gate of the National Art Museum that
day was “Silence,”
a bloated face with a cork in its mouth. Since then, however, he has
drifted away from politics, building abstract depictions of male and
female bodies; two of these sculptures occupied prominent spots at the
fair. “When you look at the art scene, the work that really carries
weight and power in politics and society is very rare,” he said.
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