＂ As Seen is the perfect book to keep posted by the historian
of the Chinese contemporary art scene. Thanks to Karen Smith, each
year we have a great summary of what’s going on in China, as a
panorama of the year’s top shows. A memory of the future, don’t
miss Karen’s eyes.＂
Jér?me Sans, curator
＂ Published simultaneously in English and Chinese versions, and
distributed both through the official Chinese system and the
international art world system, this volume goes a long way toward
cr
內容簡介：
As Seen is a series of publications that review the work of
Chinese artists as presented in public museums and galleries in
China. As Seen is not exhaustive, but it is the result of extensive
exhibition-going. With particular focus on the achievements of
young artists, As Seen 2 continues to track the pulse of the times
as it underscores artistic content and
form.
關於作者：
Karen Smith has been writing about China’s contemporary art
scene since the early 1990s. She has lived in China for twenty
years during which time she has contributed to numerous
international and domestic publications and exhibition catalogues,
both for individual artists and group exhibitions.
Her personal books include several monographs on China’s leading
artists, and the historical compendium Nine Lives: The Birth of
Avant-Garde Art in New China, which examines the careers of nine
founding fathers of China’s new art movement which began in
1985.
In her capacity as curator, Smith regularly produces exhibitions
in China and abroad.
目錄：
4 FOREWORD | Philip Tinari, director, UCCA
6 AS SEEN 2 | Introduction
14 Heman Chong | A Stack
18 Pak Sheung Chuen | The Horizon Placed at Home
22 Luo Dan | Simple Song
28 Li Ran | Mont Sainte-Victoire and other points of
reference
36 Chen Zhen | Same Bed, Different Dreams
44 Gu Dexin | Important is not the Meat
52 Huang Ran | Disruptive Desires, Tranquility, and the Loss of
Lucidity
58 Liao Guohe | Popular Painting
62 Zhang Hui | Groundless
68 Xie Fan | The Layers
72 Wang Du | Contemporary Art Museum of China
76 Xu Bing | Book from the Ground
80 Irrelevant Commission | Why We Do Useless Things? and Unrelated
Parades
86 Ma Ke | Life Most Intense
92 Jiang Zhi | If This is a Man 5
98 Yang Fudong | Close to the Sea Revival of the Snake
104 Jiang Xiaochun | 7
108 Li Shurui | The Shelter A Wall
114 Zhang Ding | Buddha Jumps over the Wall
120 Hu Xiangqian | Protagonist
124 Wang Sishun | Liminal Space
128 Hai Bo | Solo
134 Zhou Tao | Collector
140 Pei Li | Generation P
146 Li Dafang | Throw-back: Jin Zhan’s Messy Growth, His Language
and His Relatives
150 Wang Wei | A Wall on the Wall—A Floor on the Floor
154 Geng Jianyi | Wu Zhi
164 Chen Wei | A Forgettable Song Xian City
170 Li Songsong | The One
176 Hu Yun | The Secret Garden Reeves’s Pheasant
182 Zheng Guogu | Spirits Linger With Dust
188 Liu Wei | By Order of the Artist: No Title Necessary
192 Utopia Group | Trudge: Geography of Utopia Group
200 Zhou Yilun | Our House by the Seashore
206 Hu Xiaoyuan | No Fruit at the Root
210 Cao Fei | Secret Tales from the Museum
216 INDEX OF EXHIBITIONS
219 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
內容試閱：
AS SEEN 2
The ancients would take years to mull over the correct answer to
a question. Today we have only minutes to respond.’
The words quoted above, from one of China’s leading artists—the
painter Zhang Xiaogang—were not, as might be imagined, written
recently against the relentless pace of life in China in the second
decade of the twenty-first century. Instead, this diary entry comes
from almost thirty years earlier, in 1985. At that particular
moment, viewed from the surface of society, economic reform was
still more theory than practice. A Chinese art world was, however,
beginning to emerge, signposted in the middle of that decade by the
advent of the ’85 New Wave. But even for the small number of
artists involved—a tiny number relative to the size of China’s
population—the pace of life was far from accelerated; if anything,
it was calmer than it had been in previous decades, notably during
the last years of Mao Zedong’s rule, which were marked by a
frenetic succession of bitter ideological campaigns.
So if, in 1985, it seemed to Zhang Xiaogang that there were but
minutes to respond, today, given the extreme demands of life in
China—one of the few nations currently expanding in all directions
at full throttle—that response time has been reduced to
nanoseconds. There is barely pause for reflection: there is no time
to pause. That seems to be true for all, be that artists, curators,
critics, collectors, or even the gaze of a burgeoning public
audience. No one intends this to be so. Rather, for those engaging
with the art world, it is just a fact of having to accommodate an
extraordinary number of invites, assignments, exhibitions,
lectures, tours and mundane chores. All of that while
simultaneously trying to keep up generally with the pace of change
that is still perceived as unfolding into a bright new future, the
arrival of which no one wishes to impede.
The urgency here is both fuelled by the freedom from convention
that imbued the Chinese art world with a particular dynamism in the
mid-1980s, late 1990s, and early 2010s as it regrouped after being
driven off the rails by the explosion of the art market and
exacerbated by the lack of a cohesive, transparent art-world
system. Add to this the emergence of social media as a primary
source of information, promotion and publicity, as well as its role
as a platform for the exchange of views, and one that demands daily
if not hourly attention, and time simply evaporates.
If Weibo keeps the art world busy, it also increases the pressing
nature of an already urgent obsession with “the next big thing”.
Thus, as artists attempt to keep their careers on track, both the
content and execution of works suggest that, in the absence of time
to respond, they merely react. Encounters with the resultant works
tend to encourage a similarly summary response in critics, curators
and even audiences. In terms of the “contemporary”, the air of awe
and meditative contemplation once associated with the experience of
art is ever more diluted; the notion of a tortured artist engaged
in a passionate search for meaning in life and a sense of the
eternal is, it seems, officially dead. Well, almost.
This question of response versus reaction arose while preparing
for this volume, and from surveying the volume of art recently
produced in China, but this phenomenon did not spring up overnight.
The problem is partly rooted in what generally constitutes
post-postmodern art; that which is termed “contemporary” art. There
is an air of duplicity in the nature of much art that aligns itself
with this label, and not just in China. But in China, against the
ongoing rush to internationalise and compete, and more, that
duplicity can seem pronounced in a seam of art that, superficially,
has all the right qualities and ticks all the right boxes; that
speaks to the moment, to the perceived socio-political mood. But,
when prodded, these elements are sometimes revealed to be red
herrings: like a stage set with its painted backdrops and clever
illusions. Not all art falls into this mire, of course. The key is
weeding out the followers to give the leaders their full due.
In identifying strong works, one trend did suggest itself: a
small number of significant artists appears to be opting out of the
fast lane, taking a step back behind the front line to carve out
time for a closer engagement with a personal value system as the
core of their work. Gu Dexin’s decision to retire entirely is an
extreme example. Ditto, Geng Jianyi who has always been true to his
particular stance, even if that meant disappearing from public
view. More recently, Zhang Xiaogang and younger artists like Liu
Wei, Cao Fei and even Hu Xiaoyuan have each demonstrated a desire
to take back control of the creative process.
The front line in China today is dominated by highly active young
artists, a good portion of them, as I hope this volume
demonstrates, producing exciting, innovative art. The best are
defined by the energy and assertiveness they deploy through
intuitive and unhesitating gestures and actions. Their works
capture brilliant instances of vision. Their liberating and
fearless path of “anything goes” leads to real innovation. If
that’s hard to spot at times it’s because there is a far larger
volume of artists producing art—this, the duplicitous portion—that
is simply “anything you can get away with.” The problem is that the
resulting artworks can appear disparagingly similar to the
innovative pieces, which is great for clever individuals with a
talent for imitation, but not so great for innovators deserving of
attention.
“Anything you can get away with” as an observation of some art is
not a recent thing, but words published by the venerable Marshall
McLuhan, often described as a twentieth-century seer, in his
seminal 1964 publication Understanding Media. McLuhan also wrote:
“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march
backwards into the future.” Events and attitudes in China show that
to be a largely Western perspective. Contemporary art in China has
little relation to history in the Western sense of continuum.
Today, in terms of the cultural sphere, there are, for example, no
museums where an overview of modern and contemporary art can be
seen. And there are too few books on the evolution of China’s
contemporary art forms; not a single tome viewed by consensus as
objective or factually reliable.
The mindset of artists at work today feels unconsciously closer
to that of the Italian Futurists, active a hundred years earlier,
than any other state in evidence today. Yet the Futurists sought to
destroy an “old world”—with museums they described as
graveyards—that was deemed irrelevant to their future. In China,
the art world increasingly sees the museum as an ultimate resting
place: hence, perhaps, the astonishing volume that has, in recent
years, sprung up across the country. We need rear-view mirrors.
They show succeeding generations where they came from, warn of the
pitfalls of unregulated human acts, and mark what has been overcome
to endure the passage of time. Sentimentality aside, they offer
confidence more than comfort per se. In China, the lack of an
effective rear-view mirror is signalled by the ongoing state of
nostalgia—a yearning for a different time that effectively
obliterates history—revealed in the work of artists such as Zhang
Xiaogang, but also Chen Wei, Utopia Group, Hai Bo, and even Wang
Wei. So although nostalgia may have little to do with an actual
past, if the Chinese art world kept a better eye on the rear-view
mirror it might see that Western art history is an exclusive and
somewhat limiting club, at odds with the diversity that is to be
found within China’ s own cultural framework today; a diversity
that, due to the power of art world forces driving the
“contemporary”, is in danger of being undermined. But while the
absence of a “rear-view mirror” may or may not hinder the wholesome
growth of artistic careers and practice in general, it is impeding
the development of local critical parameters, of a factual history
of art, and of a broader public audience. By extension, the
question of what art is, or can be, gains an urgency all its
own.
As Cao Fei demonstrates in her Secret Tales from the Museum, that
question is increasingly relevant to the growing number of ordinary
people who have already demonstrated a fascination for contemporary
expression—the strangeness of its manifestations as much as its
value as currency. For the best of today’s art to find a place in
art history it must contain enduring values—human, aesthetic,
philosophical or political—as representative of this era, which
itself will only be seen clearly with hindsight, in a rear-view
mirror. That too will be the test of the responses and reactions in
the selection of works included in this series; a test of the
process of documenting art within a specific time frame, attempting
to record the mood of a moment, the values and fascinations that
drive the work. These responses took a considered amount of time;
but only time will tell whether that matters or not.
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