China displays new tolerance for abrasive, urban art

In the West, "Chinese art" has meant Ming vases and bamboo-laden landscape paintings. In recent years, however, a growing avant-garde movement has come into its own in this country. These artists' work crackles with sharp-edged social and personal commentary, and that is considered as original and mature as anything produced in the West.

Still, modern art has no official sanction here. China's capital has no modern art museum. Artists live in conclaves on big-city outskirts, and most Chinese don't know their work, let alone buy it. Exhibits that go abroad - most famously, the 1995 show "Mao Goes Pop" - are organized in the West.

Last week, however, in a sign of a thaw in official circles, an exhibit by 29 young "new media" Chinese artists opened in Berlin - the first-ever major approved show of avant-garde art to travel outside China.

The exhibit features video and computer art, huge installations, and canvases that allude to what one critic calls the "spiritual confusion" of modern, urban China: unsparing photos of the migrant worker gangs that swirl through Asian cities today, video presentations of swimmers gasping for air, a performance piece in which the artist writes an "invisible" diary day after day in water on a stone, to name a few.

The show is considered significant not only for its official nod, but because it introduces a new and sophisticated younger generation of artists, many of whom participated in recent protest exhibits containing controversial "shock art" that brought a crackdown by the Ministry of Culture this summer.

"This is the first time the Chinese government has approved anything like this," says Fan Di'An, co-curator of the show and a dean of the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. "It is the first time the government has allowed a realistic appraisal of the urban world of youth. Many people, including officials, realize art is a reflection of social self-realization. They know that social criticism is a part of the art scene."

Titled "Living in Time," the show opened Sept. 18 at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof museum, where it will remain through Nov. 18.

Chinese authorities have been leery of the often disturbing and abstract, symbolic nature of modern art since it first appeared 20 years ago in protest exhibits set outside Beijing's National Museum. Under Mao Zedong, art's "purpose" was to glorify images of happy peasants and noble workers. Yet, reforms in the 1980s brought a terrific ferment, a "New Wave" movement. Chinese "discovered" artists such as Picasso and Braque as part of an influx of Western culture and thinking at the time. Critics mostly regard that early work as Western imitation, however, not as original.

A watershed came with the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. The Central Academy of Art was closed. So was "Fine Art in China," the main avant-garde umbrella group. Many artists shut down

their studios, and often their personal lives, for two years or more.

Yet the post-1989 period proved cathartic. By the late '90s, a more diverse and mature expression developed. In January, after visiting the Shanghai Biennale - the first-ever semi-official exhibit of the avant-garde - Art in America magazine editor Robert Vining enthused that was he saw was unexpectedly "dynamic."

Liu Qinghe, one of few painters to appear in Berlin, depicts modern Chinese faces against traditional Chinese backgrounds. "In the '80s, I was caught up, trying to paint like Cézanne and reading Hegel," he says, "But, after the Tiananmen period, I started looking inside myself."

For years, emphasis was placed on what was and wasn't "officially approved" here. Yet today, the lines are again blurring, with the government staking out a position that cracks down on new forms of extreme art, but officially tolerating a wider range of work that previously might be labeled as subversive.

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