CORRECTION APPENDED

In Building 15 on No. 50 Moganshan Road on a weekend afternoon or then and thereabouts, then—but only then—did it become real to me.

Moganshan Road calls itself the center of modern art in Shanghai. I arrived prepared to bear witness to the fruit of the Chinese art boom, the boom that The Asia Times calls an “artistic renaissance,” not unlike the “emergence of Western Modernism more than 100 years ago.” A tough act to follow indeed, especially if your country was closed off from the rest of the world for much of that time.

I had only heard of the big artists. Zhou Tiehai with his computer-generated superimpositions of Joe Camel’s face onto famous Western paintings, or Wang Guangyi and his retooling of propaganda posters to incorporate an excessive amount of corporate logos. Yue Minjun’s trademark is fashioning representations of his face while smiling (in every medium imaginable), and then, of course, there is the work of Zhang Xiaogang whose black-and-white paintings of 1950s era Chinese families have sold for upwards of US$2 million at auction. While these men are undoubtably the blue chip artists of today, they have not risen to the top without critical dissent.

There exists a contingent of scholars and collectors that share the belief that a great deal of artists in China—being freed from the requirements of traditional art schools and the dictates of the state—have chosen to use their national identity, more than anything, as a selling point. To them, Yue Minjun’s smiling faces appear more Chinese-looking than is accurate; similarly, Wang Guangyi’s political pop paintings are seen as insincere and overly topical. Many Western critics, along with other Chinese artists, are bothered by the success of those who make intentional and overtly Chinese art. Some have gone so far as to characterize much of this work as a sort of soft minstrel art.

A brief note before continuing though: while there is great danger in grouping all art from China into a single artistic category (just as it would be to group all contemporary American art into something similar) it is useful to think of Chinese art in terms of a series of coexisting and often overlapping subgroups (state-supporting art, commercial art, or overtly subversive art, to give a few examples) that are united by a universal challenge facing all artists of the Middle Kingdom: how do Chinese artists today reconcile their personal artistic convictions to the prospective financial boon of both appealing to Western art tastes and asserting (or exaggerating) one’s Chineseness?

And, regardless of whether or not an artist chooses personal artistic motivations over commercial pandering, how does he or she culturally translate their “Chinese art” for the international market? What’s more, there is the subtler question of how Chinese artists will be able to relate to non-Chinese viewers without having to DECLARE with every work “I am Chinese, and this is Chinese Art!”

As I walked around the complex of galleries and studios on Moganshan Road, I saw works by all of those big names—Yue’s smiling faces, Zhang’s monochromatic canvases. None of these paintings however were made by the hands, or with the permission, of the artists. The Western art world has historically been one of trends (remember when feces paintings were in?) but never has such conceptual larceny, such outright theft of not only theme but style, been seen this side of the Yangtze. Perhaps I didn’t fully realize the situation at that instant, but the experience certainly helped to stoke my fears that the financial incentive to tailor one’s art to mirror prevailing tastes might impede progress and override creativity. Fresh-out-of-art-school artists can make a decent living doing so, selling as much to new Chinese money as they can to naïve Manhattanites most likely inspired by an article in Sunday Styles to go on a thrill trip and get their hands on the next big thing.

I am put at ease, however, by the precedent set by perhaps the most famous work to date of artist Xu Bing called “Book From the Sky” or “Book From Heaven.” In one of the first examples of installation art in China, Xu created volumes of scrolls containing approximately 4,000 invented Chinese characters, which were then hand-cut onto wooden print blocks. Each character appears to the viewer as if a real word, with Chinese visitors to the installation noting that their first impression of the project was that many of the characters were simply written incorrectly.

“Chinese readers could interpret the concept of an unreadable language as the mythos of a lost history,” Gu noted in an interview with Art Journal, “while non-Chinese readers could interpret it as a misunderstanding of an ‘exotic’ culture.”

In dealing so directly with issues of language in his work, what Xu quite ironically does is address the issue of cultural translation as well. He gives power to the belief that issues of relatability to Western audiences are not insurmountable, and in fact have cultural precedent within China. Standard Chinese is a Chinese that is at once familiar and foreign to many—there are likely hundreds of millions of Chinese who speak Chinese dialects at home or even exclusively and deal with issues of cross-cultural translation everyday.

This is bilingual art. This is progressive art. If this is not truly modern art, I’m not sure what is. Xu’s is art that accepts flawless cross-cultural translation for what it is—an impossibility—and therefore embraces the inevitability that both textual and non-textual images will have vastly dissimilar impressions on viewers of different tongues and backgrounds. The unfortunate and unfair byproduct of not being born in an English-speaking country is that one cannot naturally create visual art using the ‘cultura franca’ of the day. China may have been blocked off during the Beatles, not have been there for New Realism, and then prevented from being part of Pop Art, but that doesn’t mean that they cannot relate to us without essentializing themselves, or conversely, that we cannot understand them outside of those essentializations.

In Beijing and Shanghai today, the famous rhetorical question posed by a British textile tycoon before the Opium War—what if every Chinese added just one inch of fabric to their clothing?—has found new meaning as a generation of Chinese artists now ask What if every European collector bought just one of my paintings? As Zhu Qi, author of the essay Art Capitalism in China writes, showings of Chinese art have become an “assessment index of artist’s position in art scenes and of his market price,” as opposed to a referendum on their talent. This is a Bull Market in which 70 percent of all collectors of contemporary Chinese art have suddenly appeared over the past three years. It is as if somewhere in between the end of the Cultural Revolution and now, the Chinese artistic community drove up to Lookout Point with that nebulous concept called “art commerce” and gave it up on the first date.

Xu Bing included, there is a wealth of wonderful art emerging from China—especially Beijing. Unfortunately for some of the artists who decide to shrug off the demands of the international market in favor of more directional work, their art often meets the criticism from the government, often resulting in professional dismissal and bans on public displays of art. Nonetheless, Chinese artists today, due in great part to the art boom in their nation, are presented with incredible prospects. While the prices of art made by Chinese may fall, foreign interest in the Chinese art scene is unlikely to wane. If the work of Xu Bing makes one thing apparent, it is that the creation of Chinese art that sells, but lacks declarations of its Chineseness, is not only a possibility, but for some, already reality.

—Columnist Ruben L. Davis can be reached at rldavis@fas.harvard.edu.

CORRECTION

The Oct. 2 Arts story, "Self-Aware Chinese Art Begins to Break Down Walls," misspelled the name of a road in China. It is spelled "Moganshan." This article has been updated to correct the original error.