Art in China: A show with no actor?
For ten years spanning the sixties and seventies, Chinese artist Liu Bao-Shen kept alive what images the Red Guard had tried to obliterate. The peonies, golden roosters and fabled white phoenixes that typified his subjects had, in their traditionalism, earned him a sentence in a provincial labour camp. There, in the dirt and dust, he traced them by night with a stick.
Subsequently a senior professor at the Xian College of Fine Arts, for those ten years Liu erased his artworks before each dawn until the end of his sentence, when art museums in China would begin to collect and display his paintings.
As Liu etched in the dust, Xi Jinping, appointed chairman of China’s Communist Party last November, himself was sent to labour in the countryside. He was kept between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two. This was Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and it most certainly was not televised. As artists, writers and intellectuals were beaten to death, tortured or driven to madness and suicide, fear taught Chinese intellectuals the value of a silence that, despite the subsequent ascents of such veterans as Liu and Xi, lingers in the art and politics of today.
In the shallowest terms, the success of Liu tells of a post-Revolution deliverance for contemporary Chinese artists, made all the more promising by hopes of reform and liberalism projected onto the new chairman.
Under Hu Jintao, China has not only quadrupled its economy but has also seen an incredible proliferation in cultural infrastructure and government support for the arts. Inside the new and colossal art museums, however, progress ends, and an oddity encroaches. Some are filled with safe, approved work, while others are closed to all but national leaders on inspection tours.
The rest are empty vessels. Particularly since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, censorship of critical voices in China has been fierce, and the relationship of the country’s authorities to its artists remains, at best, ambiguous.
It is this parasitic ambiguity that dominates what Chinese art is permitted, placing more scathing or subversive artists under perpetual threat. Of course, ambiguity is a hallmark of contemporary artistic language. It connects our freedom of interpretation with the limitlessness of our unconscious. In China it assumes an altogether more urgent and prescriptive role, and that is of protective shield, not ‘adopted’, as such, but required in the grinding process of self-censorship. Those who refuse to make use of it are punished accordingly.
Lamenting the neutralization of critical or subversive perspectives in his 1987 work ‘Ways of Seeing’, John Berger complained of the dishonest portrayal of politically powerful artworks under such sublimating terms as ‘beauty, truth, genius, civilization, form, status, taste etc.’. In applying such labels to works with real political undertones, the messages are obscured by the giant umbrella of Greatness.
In China the problem goes beyond one of art criticism, seeping by necessity not just into the mind of the artist himself but into all spheres of public expression. While under house arrest, Ai Wei Wei, an artist as seditious as he is now illustrious, drew parallels in his blog between himself, disgraced politician Bo Xilai, and civil rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng.
Enter Xi Jinping. At the 18th Party Congress in November, during which the Chinese leadership handover began, the sanctioning of a particular exhibition fuelled hopes for increased liberalism. It included photographs of such former political campaigners as Zhao Zinyang, arrested following the Tiananmen massacre and placed under house arrest until his death. Nor has it been forgotten that Xi, speaking to the then US ambassador to China in 2007, openly lauded the work of expository independent film maker Jia Xhangke.
Xi cannot have been ignorant of the weight behind this statement, set as he was to run a country in which such an artist’s documentary aesthetic and treatment of sensitive themes have precluded the official state release of any of his films. His speech at the Party Congress showed the populist expressions not to have waned.
Unlike his predecessors, Xi now addresses a nation of citizens experienced with technology, exposed to information and teeming with cynicism. Microblogging is rife, allowing both fact and sentiment to travel faster than any Great Firewall of censors can contain it. “It is the people,” he has said, “who have created history, and it is the people who are true heroes. The people are the source of our strength.”
‘The people’, however, may not be of such concern to those others in the Communist Party’s standing committee. To find in Xi’s words a reformist promise for the future of China is to misunderstand the system at large. While he may be ‘first among equals’ in the committee, such equals include some of the party’s most ardent conservatives.
Here, the most enthusiastic expectations for change must be tempered. As Liu Bao-Shen continued to draw for years with his stick under cover of darkness, critical artists in China must still veil their art in something, or suffer the consequences.
One an economist trained in North Korea, another a seasoned propagandist, Xi finds himself ruling together with conservative others in a party that operates by consensus, in which no one man’s proclivity for edgy films can be enough.










