by Sally Clarke

Abstract

The histories of Asian art are full of controversies and China is no exception. Under Mao Zedong, the communist party effectively imposed its view of culture on the populous and employed thousands of artists to communicate the political legitimacy of the party through their works, therein creating an extensive iconography. The stifling of the arts by Mao was particularly visible in the realm of photography where artistic practices centred on documenting political rallies and supporting government communications. Post Mao, the market reforms started in 1979 under Deng Xiaoping and the policies of his government leading up to Tiananmen and for years afterwards had a tremendous impact on avant-garde artists. In particular, artists took to expressing their reaction to urbanisation through locally organised events and experimenting with the medium of digital photography.

Introduction

Rapid urbanisation has a powerful impact on artists’ practices in China, and in particular on those artists working in the medium of digital photography. The changing aesthetics of the Beijing urban environment that came into play in the 1990s and accelerated until the 2008 Olympic Games form an important part of the metanarrative of contemporary art in China, which is being formulated against a backdrop of cultural globalisation. By adopting a social semiotic approach, this paper will discuss new media artworks via an analysis of the context in which artists approached the theme of urbanisation, and identified the dynamics and aesthetics informing their works. While it is a given that government changes in policy and leadership impact the lives of a country’s citizens, what is remarkable in China is the pace of change. The drive to embrace industrialisation within China has had a considerable effect on all strata of its society. It is clear that artists working in the urban environment of Beijing during the period discussed, like their fellow city dwellers, began to consider what these changes meant to them.

Background

The 1990s onwards has been selected as it was not until then that artist photographers began to take the city as a subject in its, “own right without recourse to rural values or national allegories.”¹ This changed occurred as the Chinese government began the path of opening up China to the West and industrialisation: In effect reversing Chairman Mao’s policy of developing the rural economy at the expense of the urban. The Chinese economy was slow to change course, and like a mega-tanker ship in the open ocean, cumbersome to control and set on the desired path. Indeed, this policy was extremely controversial owing to political resistance and the lack of an economic, social and bureaucratic structure to support a volte-face in policy. Under Deng Xiaoping, however, there took place an “unprecedented transformation of China’s cities.”²

Through the opening up of the Special Economic Zones in the southern China, Deng began trade relations with the West, and freed hundreds of millions from poverty. However, there were societal casualties in this drive to modernise China and pressures would continue on the freedom of expression: Deng Xiaoping’s order to open fire on the student led popular demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989 proved that government controls on many aspects of society were not going to diminish overnight and, “evoked a massive outcry in the West, far greater than previous tragedies in Asia of a comparable scale elicited… most likely because events unfolded in real-time in peoples living rooms via the television set.”³

The rise of the urban consciousness

Deng’s polices led to the creation of a new urban aesthetic, which I shall define as the way in which the city is envisioned, experienced and assessed. This definition was used first by Robin Visser and is derived from Guy Debord’s interpretation of aesthetics as “new ways of seeing and perceiving the world”.⁴

Gregory Bracken asserts that, “urbanisation is playing a vital role in China’s recent and remarkable resurgence. It is estimated that more than 200 million people have moved from rural areas into China’s cities in recent years. These people are taking part in what is the largest human migration in human history, sparked by Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Open Door’ economic reforms that begun in 1976.”⁵ In support of this statement we can look to Kam Wing Chan who accurately predicted that:

If annual urban population growth of 4 per cent to 5 per cent similar to that of the 1980s is maintained in the coming decades, China’s urban population will be hitting the 50 per cent mark around 2010. In less than one generation’s time, China will be transformed into a primarily urbanised society, both in demographic and occupational terms. Not only will these changes have a profound effect on the way of life of most Chinese people and the way Chinese society is organised but the outcome of such a mammoth transformation will also create a drastically different dimension in the future global political economy.⁶

Ai Weiwei on the eve of the 20-year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident , wrote with melancholic causticness:

Let us forget June Fourth, forget that day with no special significance… People with no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press and no right to vote aren’t human, and they don’t need a memory… Forget those soldiers firing on civilians… the city and the square that didn’t shed tears. Forget the endless lies, the leaders in power who insist that everyone must forget, forget their weakness, wickedness, and ineptitude… For our own survival, let us forget.⁷

Deng and the policies of his government leading up to Tiananmen Square and for years afterwards “had a strong effect on avant-garde art circles, for the removal of the venues for publication closed off their most important access to the audiences for their art.”⁸ Given that the museums are state controlled in China, as indeed is the media, the artists took to expressing their reaction to urbanisation, alongside other themes driving their practices, through locally organised events using experimental art, installations, photography and video art throughout the 1990s.

Artists such as Ai Weiwei (born 1957), who post-Tiananmen had departed China for New York only to return in 1993, became increasing critical of the widespread disregard for the nation’s material culture. In works such as Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, (1995), a series of three black and white photographs, “Ai documented himself letting an antique pot drop on the ground and smash.”⁹ This was act was analogous to the government’s respect for history, which he perceived was devastatingly absent from its drive for modernism. This work was extensively covered by the international press and raised global awareness of the Chinese government’s urbanisation programme, and its impact on historical monuments.

Beyond work that focused on urbanisation, political pop also came to the fore with many artists beginning to paint with a cynical attitude. Cynical pop art is an art form, which arguably emerged post the political suppression of civic demonstrations during 1989. Wang Guangyi (born 1957) is often credited with being the leader of cynical pop art. Post 1989, he selected images from political history and combined them with images that denoted mass consumption such as Coca-Cola bottles or McDonalds.¹⁰

In contrast to Wang Guangyi whose works, at the time of their creation, were a commentary on mass consumer culture and its embrace by the Chinese government, Wang Jinsong’s photographic series One Hundred Signs of Demolition, 1999, “epitomises the theme of urban destruction in a more laconic fashion. It consists of pictures of the Chinese character for “Tear Down” (Chai) that is seen everywhere in China, signalling the destruction of old walls, spatial enclosure, communities and neighbourhoods.”¹¹ The image is composed of one hundred photographs of constructions carrying the sign they had been marked with, which signalled their eminent destruction. Wang numbered the images from 1900 to 1999 in a commentary on the continuing razing of historical buildings in Beijing throughout the twentieth century.

Robin Visser writes that literary critic Li Jeifei speaks for many when he discusses the unanticipated raising of his urban consciousness in the 1990s:

From my personal history I had no knowledge of anything outside the city, but that doesn’t mean I knew the city. This confused me and I began to question this. The city failed to inspire me even during the 1980s – I never gave it a second thought. For years I simply had not incentive to reflect on the city. After consideration, I realised that my only impression of the “city” had been formed by watching set films in New York, Rome, London, Tokyo or Hong Kong. But in 1993 and 1994, I suddenly became fascinated with the urban space. I began to pay attention to the city landscape and urban events. Better put, the city started to change in such a way that I had to notice it. In the second half of the 1990s the trends in literature started to support my observations. Of all the new literature written since 1995, probably 80-90 per cent is on the topic of the city. This is not to say that rural literature is dying out, but the real vitality is clearly to be found in urban literature.¹²

Gu Zheng supports Visser and Li’s pinpointing of the time period in which an urban consciousness arose. In Contemporary Chinese Photography, Gu explores the rise of urban photography and notes that while photographersbegan to look at individual subjective experience of the city in the late 1980s,Chinese urban life had yet to be transformed as radically as that of the countryside, and had failed to sufficiently attract their attention…. into the 1990s, as the process of globalisation began to accelerate, the urbanisation of Chinese society began to unfold at an extraordinary speed […] the rapid pace of urbanisation began to affect people’s mind-sets and ways of life, and photography began to use its unique methods to observe witness and present Chinese urbanisation on these levels.¹³

Stairway to Heaven – From Chinese Streets to Monuments and Skyscrapers

During the period under review (1990 to 2008), numerous exhibitions have dealt with the theme of urbanisation; arguably the most significant were Cities on the Move (1997-1999) and Stairway to Heaven – From Chinese Streets to Monuments and Skyscrapers (2009). Cities on the Move, was a travelling exhibition on Asian urbanism curated by Hanru Hou and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The vision for the exhibition was grand indeed and described its theme as a dynamic of global capitalism”

Urban transformation causes contradictions, contestation, chaos and even violence laying bare the fundamental paradox behind the pragmatic conviction in the co-operation of Asian lifestyles and social orders and a globalising liberal consumer economy. The impulsive and almost fanatical pursuit of economic and monetary power becomes the ultimate goal of development. In resistance to this new hypercapitalism, new freedoms and social, cultural, and political claims are being made by society itself. The City is a locus of conflict.¹⁴

Such a grand vision was bound to create divisions in its execution. The scope for the exhibition was perhaps so wide that it could not convincingly achieve its curatorial goal of combining architecture with art works ranging from video installations to performance art. Some critics observed that in many cases the strongest works in Cities on the Move were installations and sculptural projects by a number of artists whose work did not always address the central thesis of the exhibition. Furthermore, “While Liew Kung Yu’s photo-collaged architectural conglomerations brought out precisely the tensions between modernization and tradition that were at the centre of this exhibition, strong contributions such as Jeong-A Koo’s crushed aspirin, Lee Bul’s gigantic inflatable character, and Sarah Sze’s “cityscape” constructed from materials such as crates, gum packages, and toothpicks, did not necessarily always address the topic so directly.”¹⁵

Xu Tan’s Welcome to Southern Airlines (1997), did, however, speak to the contradictions of the modern metropolis:

“Using time lapse photography, Xu captures the recurrent take offs from Guangzhou’s Baiyun airport from the perspective of a cyclist pedalling past shacks of migrant workers. Xu’s work foregrounds the new spatial and temporal layers into which Chinese cities are being reorganised, which can be measured by different speeds of displacement: by plane, by car, by bicycle or by foot. These disparate spatial and temporal zones in the city generate different notions of time, constituting different cultural experiences within the same city.¹⁶

The Stairway to Heaven exhibition discusses how Beijing was being envisioned, experienced and assessed through urban aesthetics post-Tiananmen until 2008, a period of intense urbanisation, which drove the augmentation of a new consciousness amongst artists. The latter exhibition looked at street photography, which started to emerge in the late 1980s. Zheng asserts that :the force behind street photography was the street itself… With a new freedom for self-expression through fashion and consumption, the people in the street were the art. It became a unique moment where artist, camera, and people on the street all revelled in construction of new identities after years of subjugation. Photographers were experimenting with flashing light, super fish-eye and noncompositional techniques. At the same time, the skyscraper began to epitomise the transformation of Chinese urban culture and its shift from a horizontal to vertical culture.¹⁷

Stairway to Heaven presents layers of diversity through the multiple voices, strategies and techniques of seventeen artists: Ai Weiwei, Chen Shaoxing, Gu Wenda, Gu Zheng, Hong Lei, Laing Weiping, Liu Bolin, Lu Yuanmin, Luo Yongjin, Ma Liuming, Wang Jing, Wang Fen, Xing Danwen, Yang Yong Liang, Yening, Zhang Dali and Zhu Feng. These contemporary artists produced work for the exhibition against a backdrop of extreme optimism in the country with the eminent arrival of the Olympic teams alongside great sadness owing to the devastating earthquake which took place in the Sichuan Province on 12th May, that killed up to 50,000 people, displaced millions and saw the Chinese government accept international support for the first time.

Stairway to Heaven showcases the oeuvre of artists who work in photography and follows their search for an experience that may define the expectations and dreams of the Chinese people:

“In the context of the Olympics, it recognises that as athletes strive for gold, they are searching for “heaven” and that each Chinese citizen is also trying to find her piece of “heaven” in the new China and asks: What does it mean for Chinese culture to become more urban than rural and more conceptual than representational? How will this influence Chinese history?¹⁸

Although the curators of Stairway to Heaven proposed to focus on works by lesser known artists, it would have benefitted from the inclusion of strong critical works by contemporary photographic artists such as Ni Haifeng (b 1964) who lives and works in Amsterdam and Beijing. Haifeng produced a series of 30 photographs, Between Twilight and Dawn during the winter of 2005, which are a “metaphor for reality, focusing on the scarred terrain caused by the intense plastic surgery that Beijing underwent in preparation for the Olympic Games”¹⁹. The images contrast the old with the new, rich abodes versus those of people living in abject poverty, the resplendent new office blocks brightly lit in contrast to the crumpled buildings that have been demolished to make way for the games to come.

Haifeng’s contrasts remind us that in China the distance between the rich and poor has widened considerably during the beginning of the twenty-first century. In 2006 at least one in seven Chinese lived below the poverty line, a figure ten times more than the official estimate of 20 million people earning less than $1 a day.²⁰ Although China claims that income inequality peaked in 2008 and has narrowed since then, many economists believe the problem is understated. China has 2.7 million millionaires and 251 billionaires (in United States dollars). In 2008 it was reported by the World Bank that 13 percent, or 173 million people, still lived below $1.25 a day.²¹ Meanwhile, average annual disposable income in the cities is about $3,500.²² It is worthwhile bearing this widening disparity of incomes as much as it helps to construct a framework for an analysis of the artists’ opinion of whether the utopia promised by modernism had been realised.

In an interview with Luo Youngjin, Xing Danwen and Zhang Dali, by Rachell Smith²³ published as part of the Stairway to Heaven exhibition catalogue, the artists discussed their views on: technology information and instantaneous global communication; the realities of urbanisation in today’s China; the international art world and its myriad locations and of practice and culture; art, culture and politics – Chinese style; and the role of art history and what we can learn from it. It is clear from the interview that, in their work, the artists sought to explore the past while aspiring to obtain a better understanding of the future. Furthermore, they felt compelled, through their artworks, to react to and interpret the forces of urbanisation, mass consumerism and how they have experienced these forces at work. Each artist has embraced new technology, digital photography and the Internet to connect with global consumers of their artworks. Zhang Dali discusses in depth how new technologies have influenced his art over time.

Now when I create a new work, I do not only take into consideration the environment where I live, but also I imagine my work in a different situation and place. From a basic and essential point of view, I know I am influenced by them [technology tools], but they don’t have a part in the decision making process of creating an artwork. The convenience of these tools cannot change my understanding of art, but it can open me up to greater possibilities and different ways of doing things.²⁴

Zhang Dali (b 1963) created a series of works which he calls Dialogues that depict Beijing’s changing urban landscape in an effort to speak to the citizens of Beijing. The Dialogues juxtaposition the disappearing roads, construction sites and traditional monuments in the area against the resplendent roof tops of the corner pavilions of the Forbidden City, Beijing. Sprayed on the wall is a graffiti work that is an outline of his head and tag AK-47, which speaks to destruction. Zhang created over 2,000 of these images that document aspects of a city sometimes changing overnight – with on occasions an entire street disappearing. He asks:

Who has the grounds to do this? Who is the real master of the city? And what is the aim of all this change?… We have lost much”, he states, “but the administrators of the city will never take into consideration the opinion of the people living in the neighbourhoods they are going to demolish.²⁵

The Dialogues reflect Dali’s sense of impotence at stopping the change in Beijing and seek to communicate the reality of Beijing’s changing urban landscape to the international community. They also touch upon the sense of anger that he feels for the people who are migrating to the Beijing in search of a better life, but ultimately receive unequal treatment and find themselves disenfranchised. This sense of rootlessness is something that Zhang himself shares with the migrant workers as he is powerless to protect the old architecture and the history that is part of his heritage, his roots.

Hong Lei (born 1960) had two works featured in the exhibition, Autumn in Forbidden City, East Veranda, 1997 and Chinese Garden Landscape 1998. Hong Lei began his career in fine art, and his works which obviously draw upon his classical training are both dramatic and shocking. The crushed and bloody bird in the image, covered in fine gemstones and pearls speaks of the collapse of the utopian dream – the bird is an allegory for the demise and obliteration of tradition, honourable and putrefied, graceful and precious. According to Gu Zheng, Hong Lei’s art has always maintained a close dialogue with tradition and to this day it is still an establishment of his cultural identity. His photographic techniques are varied and include digital collage and hand dyeing. Taking inspiration from the painting style of the Song Dynasty, Hong updates these familiar historical works by contrasting traditional elements with the creative tricks of the advertising trade.

Conclusion

It would be erroneous to accuse post-Tiananmen photographic artists of simply documenting the changes wrought by urbanisation. They are─through their choice of medium─providing a unique commentary on the impact of national policies and globalisation, and have created a new urban aesthetic in their works. Differences can be observed in how each artist is approaching their artistic vision from Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn to Zhang Dali’s Dialogue Series, and it is noticeable that the thread that unites all these works is Chinese art history─be it the ceramics that are held in high esteem or Song Dynasty painting styles.

Sally J Clarke graduated from the M.A. Asian Art Histories programme in 2014 She also holds an M.A. degree in International Business and Finance from the University of Barcelona, Spain where she was awarded a scholarship for research under the European Union ERASMUS programme, and completed a bachelor’s degree, majoring in economics and politics. Sally is founder of the popular art blog Asian Art Happenings.

This essay was originally published on Modern Art Asia Issue 16, November 2013. The images can be viewed on the website of the journal http://modernartasia.com/exploring-urbanisation-china-new-media-art-sally-j-clarke/