Post-socialism in modern China
After the death of Mao Zedong, the fall down of the Cultural Revolution, and the collapse of the Gang of Four, China was starting to modernize herself by Deng Xiaoping’s policy of Reform and Openness, i.e. Gaige Kaifang Policy, in the late 1970s. It was economic-oriented in the first place by injecting capitalist elements into the Chinese economic society in order to facilitate the state’s modernization programs while rethinking socialism in a new, more creative ways for social renewal and transformation. In other words, it can be said as the use of capitalism to re-develop Chinese socialism by the combination of capitalist economy and communist politics that what we call as postsocialism in China of the time, a special form of political culture with Chinese characteristics. A kind of new socioeconomic practices of China experience can be seen for the development, revision, re-thinking of socialist modernity. In Deng’s own words, one must “cross the river by feeling the stones”, i.e. mo zhe shitou guohe. (Lu, 2007, pp.206) It is not difficult to understand that “cross the river” refers to the economic modernization while “feeling the stones” refers to the Chinese socialism. Besides, some China scholars have given their concepts on Chinese postsocialism alternatively. For instance, Paul Pickowicz suggests that the phenomenon of postsocialism appeared only after the death of Mao or that it is simply a cultural by-product of the reform decade. (Lu, 2007, pp.206)
“The idea of a distinctively postsocialist condition is best used to refer to the type of popular cultural diversity, cultural ambiguity, and cultural confusion that became so pronounced in China in the 1980s.” (Pickowicz, 1994, pp.61)
According to Lu, Chinese postsocialism is a periodizing concept as well as a historical condition in a more critical sense. The concept of New Period and post-New period is adopted. 1989 is set as the watershed between these two. The former describes as the post-Mao period since the late 1970s through the 1980s what is known as pre-postsocialist stage while the latter describes as post-modern or postsocialist moment in the 1990s and the twenty-first century with the Chinese characteristics from the modern to post-modern era. (Lu, 2007, pp.207)
“It refers to a period of new culture directed towards consumption, supported by mass communication, guided by the values of pragmatism, and constituted by a plurality of discourses. It has ended the authority of the discourse of enlightenment…It is a concept of periodization as well as a code of cultural interpretation. The appearance of this concept and the debates about it indicate the enormous, obvious cultural differences between the 1990s and the New Period.” (Zhang, 1997, pp.74)
In light of this, it can be said as acquiring a historical understanding of Chinese postmodernism which can be claimed as cultural logic of a postsocialist society within the discourse of modernism-postmodernism shift in the post-Mao Chinese context and beyond. Such can be seen in the contemporary avant-garde Chinese art scene. Typically, political pop and cynical realism paintings in the 1990s have marked the unique notion of Chinese modernism and postmodernism in the art which have influenced the global ultimately. For example, the recreation of the aura of Mao’s era in Wang Gangyi’s political pop paintings originally was inspired by the American pop art artists like Andy Warhol at the time while Warhol also borrowed Mao’s portrait for his cloning art creation at the same time. It can be said that the enlightenment of Chinese socialism has been restored and become a kind of universe under the globalization in this way. In other words, Chinese history has found a new mode of expression and articulation in postmodernism for the realities of Chinese socialism through the co-existence of multiple modes of production and socio-cultural norms, which can be served as a global capital for social experimentation that affecting us – back to the past and forward to the future.
Chinese artists and experience
It is no doubt to say that thanks for the Deng’s open-door policy and economic reform and hence the pursuit and copying of the West in the New Tide movements in the 80’s, China experience was focused in the social sense with the individual relationship and reality comprising endless possibilities that able to preserve the spiritual difference and distinguish us all from the others. Accordingly artistic freedom could be released to a large extent when compared with the Mao era before. Chinese artists’ role and identity had been changed. They were no longer served as a political tool for the Party while the concept of “I” for individual ideal and the existential experience of the individual could be notified monolithically. For example, the ’85 Movement was called off in 1985 that advocated the formation of various unofficial art groups and exhibitions in the following later half of the 1980s. Conceptual art that laid an artistic foundation built on creativity and spiritual awareness was gradually to come alive and played a rather significant role through independent efforts of individual artists and art groups in a view to question the tradition and criticize the authority with the negotiation of the western ideas under the New Tide.
However at the same time, with the Chinese artists’ blood origin, it is not difficult to see that they would retain and respect the past socialist spectacles as their original content and context in art creation. It can be said as a desire for internal strengthening in reaction to the modernization and various western influences in turn to become a defensive modernity bound up with the articulation of a self or national identity and subjectivity among the Chinese artists in the contemporary world. For example, political pop and cynical realism following the 4-June incident which appeared predominantly in various international exhibitions in the 1990s marked the new progress in contemporary Chinese art at the time.
Our era is characterized by the highly globalized world, connected by different networks and transmitted by intense media, where imagination runs free and virtual reality becomes undistinguishable from the actual life while echoing our past. History is intricately intertwined with tradition, a situation that will always stand true, duplicating itself and passing it on to the following generation. By investigating the contemporary Chinese artists’ works, on one hand it is attempted to traces what cultural identities have left behind while on the other hand to looks gallantly into the future. (Liu, Ferguson and Thometz, 2008, pp.17)
To go further, three kinds of contemporary Chinese artists can be classified in my generalization in order to see their searching for new cultural identity in contemporary Chinese art formation and transformation in the era of modernization and globalization.
The first group of Chinese artists is rather nostalgic in temperament through the invention of traditional spectacles that can be easily found in the contemporary Chinese art world. According to Hobsbawm and Ranger, invented tradition means a set of practices, a ritual or symbolic nature which seeks to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviors by repetition which automatically implies continuity with a suitable historical past. (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983, pp.1) Chinese artists exhume and dig up traditional culture as a resource and foundation to transform, evolve, develop or expand it, or even to convey into an extreme or racial way for the pursuit of artistic conception and notion to arise the visual psychology and existential state of the Chinese people’s modern life today in terms of economical, social or political. For example, well-known famous contemporary Chinese artists Cai Guo-quiang and Xu Bing based in the West while with their cultural and national identities as Chinese artists, they deploy to set up the Chinese traditional orientation in a contemporary context through the discourse of artistic negotiation both locally and internationally. (Wang, 2000) They use traditional Chinese materials or subjects as the dimensions of an unique language to bridge over in which different cultural identities may appear and meet in such negotiation consequently, instead of adopting the entire China-oriented or colossal red socialist principle in their artistic creations. At the exhibition MOCA Envisage II: Butterfly Dream, video artist Chen Shaohua’s Original(Fig.1) demonstrates the fun making of the black Chinese ink movement in the water so as to explore China’s history and past identities. It can be understood that Chinese ink is taken as a symbol of the Chinese people’s origin to represent their sole extensive history and glory. By seeing the ink movement of different patterns from the beginning to its end of continuously in the video, it can be read as a representation of the rise and downfall of one empire or dynasty to another during the ancient China from time to time. Besides, Chen Ke’s a series of C-print called “With you, I will never feel lonely”(Fig.2), another example to use Chinese materials into the artwork, showcases different kind of Chinese antique objects such as toy piano and spittoon in the 1970s in order to reconstruct a kind of collective memories back to the past time related to the artist.
Fig.1 CHEN Shaohua, Original, Ink Video, 5min, 2006
Fig.2 CHEN Ke, With you, I will never feel lonely – Toy piano and With you, I will never feel lonely – Spittoon, C-print, 30x30cm each, 2008
Fig.3 Wallace CHAN, Zhuang Zhou’s Butterfly Dream, Sliver/ Copper/ Obsidian/ Stainless Steel/ Root of Longan Tree, 31.5 x 31.5 x Diameter 5(inch), 2000 The third group of Chinese artists is rather inquisitive in mind. They are situated themselves in the cultural sphere of exchange and interactivity with the West together with an unique Chinese sensitivity of themselves aiming to respond in their works with the existential predicament and quandary of a contemporary man. It can be seen easily that the state’s cultivation of a market economy in China has played the largest part and could be counted the most for the sphere of influence on arts and cultural development in modern China. A kind of aggressive neoliberalism since the post-Mao socialist era had provided rooms for artists’ consciousness of individual disposition for their artistic self and interaction with the outside world for further artistic transformation and development under the globalization and intense influx of western ideas which particularly feature the postsocialist stage in China in the 1990s onwards. According to Anthony Giddens’, a distinctive feature of modernity is the increasing interconnection between the two extremes of extensionality and intentionality – globalizing influences on one hand and personal dispositions on the other. (Gao, 1998) Typically the development of political pop and cynical realism in the 1990s which have been claimed as two of the most identifiable and exclusive avant-garde movements from China by taking the western pop art styling and employing the political elements and various socialist spectacles such as those proletarian images in the past during the Mao period. In the exhibition of MOCA Envisage II: Butterfly Dream, Chinese artist Rick Lee, who currently resides and travels in the US, his work 4 Season Tables(Fig.4) produces modern looking furniture with traditional Chinese symbols and a theme of the four seasons. At the same time his works are exhibited together with his wife Collen Guen’s gown called The Butterfly Dream(Fig.5), hand-sewn with many butterflies that appear to be dancing in the air. Their fantasy on the East-West cultural interaction between them can be seen in their artworks by putting them together.
Fig.4 Rick Lee & Collen Guen, 4 Season Tables – Spring 28x28x22(inch), Summer 19.5x19.5x32(inch), Fall 21.5x21.5x21(inch), Winter 39x39(inch), 2008
Fig.5 Rick Lee & Collen Guen, The Butterfly Dream, 7x4(feet), 2008
From the above classification, it can be observed that self identity and group identity among the contemporary Chinese artists have been persisted by sharing the same ideologies among themselves. The Open Door Policy by Deng’s in the late 1970s foremost brought a seismic impact on the people’s everyday life and conceptions of self, and the notion of individual freedom among the artists. Economically, various exhibitions and biennales since 1990s have reserved the path towards commercialism and been seeking a global role or interaction in a larger modern world that giving a new look to visual art in China. Appearing even more appealing to the West, commendation is won from the western world within the discourse of focusing on broader Chinese contemporary social issues and cultural concerns to a very great extent. Artists can be identified as economic men as they have become rather financially independent by enjoying all sorts of luxury in China's new market economy to sell their artworks in the art market by themselves. It is no doubt to see that famous Chinese artists nowadays like Yue Minjun, Wang Guangyi and Xu Bing have become the new rich in Chinese society by the large scale economic increases among them from time to time. With the accompaniment of socialist transformation with the modern era, consequently the visual characteristics of contemporary Chinese art could reflect increasingly distinct individual experiences and the sensitivity to individual expression in order to give artistic underpinning of cultural identity for those artists. A complex, dynamic, spiritual, existential and powerful cultural and social predicament can be seen as well.
Conclusion
Under the period of reform and open-door policy in China in the late 1970s, the premise of cultural westernization was paved the way to the crushing of art and politics in China and hence the blooming of Chinese contemporary art from the 1980s onwards. Chinese artists have been confronted with an international range of styles, schools, media, and thematic orientations, together with traditional Chinese modes of socialist to postsocialist characteristics, there are of situations where political as well as aesthetic implications have been carried out. The basic objectives of the political nature are to propose and research China's socialism and cultural problems from artists’ point of view in an attempt to positively promote and develop the stratum of basic unit within the modern society, as well as the understanding of each individual towards the postsocialist era. By doing so, ability to question Chinese contemporary society and culture can be truly attained, thus preserving a certain scope of individual characteristics and the quality of dialogue between China and the West. (Pi, 2000) In this way, postsocialism in China has constructed an ideology and image in Chinese contemporary art with tradition-bound socio-political nature. Application of postsocialism to art is deft and nuanced, and proffers arresting insights into the works themselves as well as the socio-political situation they exist in. (Hoey, 2008) For the artists, there is a personal emptiness and communal connection that is missing in China and desires to be fulfilled, seek to fill a void – discover a meaning to life that satisfies the craving for more than one’s basic needs. (Freundl, 2008, pp.15) In light of the new China’s experiences, the discovery of self in a competitive environment of the society filled with pressures is emphasized. Under the globalization, new Chinese cultural and national identities are constructed within the context of international politics, cultures and influences as well. The problem of identity reached out from the personal into the political arena, as the visual arts became an important vehicle for group identification and competition. (Thorp, pp.369, 2001)
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