井底之蛙

Opium burning, 1917-1919. Beijing

Duke university has put the entire Sidney Gamble archive on-line. Some of these have been published already (Gamble is pretty well known) but this is the entire archive and it is searchable. Well worth looking at.

Jed Perl has a piece up attacking Chinese art at TNR. As any number of people have pointed out Contemporary Chinese Art^TM is booming. For Perl, however, it’s all totalitarian crap. I would actually agree with Perl that a lot of the stuff being produced by Chinese artists and purchased by China’s new ultra-rich (and their foreign buddies) is kinda questionable, and I certainly think that a lot of Chinese young people seem to be buying into a pretty sanitized view of Mao and the Communist period. The nostalgia for communist-period idealism you sometimes hear I always find hard to figure out.

For Perl, however, the only possible reason to think about China is to denounce Mao and the Cultural Revolution (which are of course the same thing.) Thus it becomes impossible for Chinese to be anything other than toadies unless they are in jail. The theme of “Revolution” comes up a lot in the art Perl is talking about, in part I think because he is talking about western collectors, who probably don’t know much about China but do know there was a revolution and in part because lots of Chinese artists do use Communist iconography and themes from the past. Some of them are probably toeing the official line, some are subverting the official line, some are doing both, some think they are doing both but actually are not.¹ For Perl though it is pretty easy. If you see anything that looks “China-y” it’s crap.

I have studied the catalogue of this collection, The Revolution Continues: New Art from China, and I am pretty confident that it is the most hateful art book published in my lifetime. For the revolution that is continuing is none other than the Cultural Revolution.

Really? The modern smiley-face authoritarianism of China is the same as the Cultural Revolution? One begins to suspect he does not know much about the CR, which is pretty rapidly confirmed as he scoffs as a curator for suggesting that

“reprising the Red Guards’ antiauthoritarian stance to art, sought to bring down the institution of art itself through Dadaist strategies”?

Perl asks

In what sense, pray tell, was the Red Guard anti-authoritarian?

“Pray tell” suggests that he has no clue what the Red Guards were. The first thing a youth was supposed to do after strapping on the red armband was to “bombard the headquarters” and attack the authorities that actually controlled their lives, teachers, party bosses, etc. Everyone in China over a certain age knows this, which is why it is always so hard to figure out what Chinese artists might be doing with Mao images or CR images or whatever. Not everybody in the world needs to know (or can know) all the things Maoist references can mean in China, but if you are going to write about Chinese art it helps to have some idea what you are talking about. One can imagine touring the Louvre with Perl and having him be stumped by why there were all those pictures of a lady holding a baby. The only tool Perl has for understanding Chinese art is “Radical Chic” which may be useful for understanding why Westerners are buying this stuff but does not help much for understanding the art. After all, the main market for Chinese art is China. Why are wealthy Chinese (many of whom did not have much fun in the Maoist period) buying this stuff?

At the top of this post is a painting by Zhang Xiaogang. Perl..

His paintings are said to reflect the tensions of the Cultural Revolution, when children were known to turn their parents in to the authorities. In the Louisiana catalogue, this schlock is described as showing people “isolated in their own emotional universes” or shaped by, “mysterious, unknowable forces.” The only mysterious force from which Zhang is isolated is the art of painting.

I actually find it an interesting piece, in part because the isolation from family and others is a theme that always comes up in Cultural Revolution memoirs. Maybe Zhang is a hack, but I’m pretty sure I am not going to take Jed Perl’s word on that without something to back it up. Perl again

By aestheticizing historic catastrophe, the art world’s unholy synthesis of Maoism and kitsch enables people to blur their own memories.

That’s pretty bold for an American. What should Chinese people do? Commit mass suicide to prove they are free of the Maoist taint? Abandon art for a few centuries? There are lots of ways for Chinese artists and people to deal with the past, including ignoring it, but lumping every Chinese artist from Wang Guangyi to Cai Guoqiang in with the Red Detachment of Women is just sloppy.

I suppose what is particularly depressing is that with a minimal amount of effort Perl could have found lots of Chinese artists denouncing the people he talks about as talentless hacks and sell-outs. Had he been writing about British art or French art or maybe ever Japanese art he probably would have done so, or his editor would have sent him back to do it. He then could have written something interesting and informative.²

1. I think things like this have happened in other authoritarian societies. Maybe someone who knows art can give Perl some references [↩]
2. Perl is also dismissive of the originality of Chinese art, claiming that pretty much all of this has been done before. Some of this I buy (lots of hacks out there) and some I don’t. The dividing line between being influenced by someone and copying them is always a tricky thing, but apparently for Perl any vague link to a western work of art renders anything a Chinese does completely derivative. I remember being struck by the “defiance in the sunset” scene in Red Sorghum and realizing that at least in 1987 the visual world of Zhang Yimou was different than mine. He could use a scene like that and not be referring to Gone With The Wind in any meta-critical way. He was, as I took it, just pinching a visual from a foreign film only artsy types would have seen. [↩]

After my posting last year of “Pigs. Shit, and Chinese History,” Sigrid Schmalzer was kind enough to share this map which she drew based on the works of the Ming dynasty scholar Li Shizhen (李時珍; 1518-1593) mostly widely known for his Bencao Gangmu (本草綱目).

It looks to me as if Li was as much concerned with how the meat would taste as with other qualities!

From the Times via CDT an article about a group of Chinese intellectuals who are asking for some new people to be put on Chinese currency. This is actually a big issue, since who nations put on their money is a political statement of some importance.¹ The list of suggested people is pretty interesting. They are suggesting Qu Yuan, Li Bai, Yue Fei, and Wen Tianxiang. The Times calls Qu Yuan a poet, which he was, but of course he was much better known as a protester against political corruption. Li Bai is the “pure” poet in the group, and Yue Fei and Wen Tianxiang are both straight nationalist figures who died resisting foreign interference in China’s internal affairs. It is a well-thought out list (Not all Mao, but nationalistic enough to pass muster) and I wish them luck, but I suspect not much will change. Chinese money has always been very focused on politicians.

Sun Yat-sen got most of the face time under the Republic, appearing on all sorts of notes.

Mao has taken pride of place since.

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1. I’ve always thought that American money had remained stuck in the 19th century because of a lack of national confidence. If someone did suggest changing our money some Democrat would probably suggest putting MLK on there and Republicans would go nuts about political correctness. Easier to stick with Jackson. Plus, if we went with more modern designs and colors like most of the world has done in might turn us gay. [↩]

Some time ago Stefan Landsberger¹ sent me some images of propaganda posters from the War with Japan. I have not blogged about them as yet due to laziness, but a couple are very appropriate as classes wind down.

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1. This is one of the advantages of having a blog. Cool people with all sorts of interesting stuff send it to you. If you have not been to Stefan’s Chinese Propaganda Poster site you really should [↩]

Yang Liu , a Beijing artist trained in Germany, comments in a series of banners on the differences between Chinese and German culture. Ms. Yang’s Website is here: http://www.yangliudesign.com/

The German is in blue, on the left, the Chinese in red, on the right, continued beyond the “more” marker!

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Via Easternity and Danwei, Cao Fei’s Second Life RMB City. If you want a nice view of what China is today, this is it. You would of course get a better view if you went on Second Life¹ and looked yourself, but apparently it is not done yet.

1. Even the guys from Danwei, who think Second Life is for wankers, think this is cool [↩]

Several generations later, in Zhao Mengfu’s “Twin Pines, Level Distance,” something new appears. No more realism; no more romanticism; in a sense, no more painting. Now the landscape image is an extension of writing, a form of embodied thought, an essence of landscapeness, a text to be read. In the contemporary West we have a term for this: conceptual art.

With Asia Week in New York the NYT has a review of a show called “Anatomy of a Masterpiece: How to Read Chinese Paintings” There is a slide-show too! It looks like a nice show and a good book. Given some of the interest in connecting Chinese art to western traditions in the last post and the comments I thought I would post this.

Via HNN 

Following up a quote on Thomas Hahn’s site I got a hold of Francois Julien’s The Impossible Nude - Chinese Art and Western Aesthetics.¹ Jullien is interested in the question of why the Chinese artistic tradition did not have nudes and, by extension, why the Western tradition was so obsessed with them.

The existence of the nude is made possible primarily by what, which the Greeks, we came to understand by “form”: a form that functions as a model, whose background is often mathematized and geometrized, and takes on the value of an ideal as it fixes an identity of essence (the eidos) -this is what was consecrated by the nude. p.33

The nude is thus a form in the Platonic sense, “whose contour detaches it from the world and resettles it in itself” (p.75) and always posed (p.78) Chinese artists were always more interested in things in relationship to their surroundings, and thus were always uninterested in painting “mirrored reflections” (which Da Vinci, for one very much wanted to do), avoided poses and instead wanted to capture the “natural” which is seen through interaction.

Here is an illustration from the painter’s manual The Mustard Seed Garden, showing a man

“in the autumn, in the mountains, walking with hands clasped behind his back.” This indicates that the natural context-the setting and the season-which is defined beforehand, but not actually depicted, is considered inseparable from the representation of the figure itself. Otherwise, the critic goes on to say, “the mountain is merely a mountain, and the man is merely a man.”…then the intimacy of their relationship falls apart and the co-originality that the painter was trying to trace….is lost. p.55 Jullien compares the nude to something Chinese artists really liked to paint: rocks. He quotes Su Dongpo “Men, animals, palaces and even tools all have a constant form; on the other hand, mountains, rocks, bamboos, trees, waves or mist have no constant form but nevertheless possess an internal coherence that is constant” Rocks are called ‘cloud-roots’ because they contain just the same active qi as a cloud or a human, and that is what the artist should depict.(p.71)

Here is Ni Zan’s “elegant rock” which “remains blurred, vaguely defined, indistinct.. The mass of concentrated energy is not circumscribed within the form of the rock…and its “form” without being completely individualized is not inconsistent either, contains all forms, or rather it excludes none. (p.77)”It’s a good book, and if you ever wondered why Chinese painting and Western painting did not come together very well in the 20th century you should read it.

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1. U of Chicago Press, 2007. It’s a good book, if a little sinological for me. [↩]

Hunting leopards in Zhejiang, 1935

 I’ve been doing a bit of photo and video stuff lately, and one site that has been very helpful is Thomas Hahn’s Zenfolio which hosts a lot of pictures of modern Chinese art and also lots of historical photographs. He also has a great bibliography site on Chinese/Asian  photography.