Traditions and Contemporary Abstract Art in China
Gao Minglu
The idea that abstract art is a universal language shared across cultures makes a
certain kind of sense because in abstract art, at one level, there is no historical or
thematic reference. From Kandinsky to the American critic Meyer Schapiro, that
has been a common view. People need to understand the history of the form, but
only to see the beauty of its composition. At least, that is the perception. And that
is what I think it is: a perception that needs to be tested against the variety of
histories that there are of abstract art.
For example, if we test it against Asian or even just contemporary Chinese
abstract art, we can clearly see its limitations. Chinese contemporary abstract art
was reborn just after the end of the Cultural Revolution as a tendency which
pitted itself in opposition to the political subject matter which was popular during
Mao’s period. However, at the same time, the emergence of abstraction was also
part of the renaissance of traditional ink painting. The artists regarded traditional
Literati painting as modern, close to Western impressionism, as certain artists of
the early 20th century pointed out. It called for a non-political aesthetic,
analogous to that called for by Western modern abstract painters who reacted
against the classic realism of the turn of the 20th century. However, we also have
to know that after the Cultural Revolution, abstract art was itself a political stance
in China. In particular, it is regarded as a product of Bourgeois liberalisation by
officials.
To put it mildly, the history of contemporary abstract art in China cannot be
understood in purely formal terms. It is also important to understand the
marginalised place that abstract art has had in China, at least until recently. It
was marginalised because it was seen as, in certain ways, connected to tradition,
when to be avant-garde was equally marginalised because the international
market gave priority to Chinese political and social subject matter. This
orthodoxy found no place for or overlooked abstract art, so-called non-political
art, which in fact is also political, as a mere glance at the history of the No Name
Group would make clear.
The West’s history of abstract art is different—the problem is the assumption
that it is possible to interpret Chinese abstract art in Western art language. It is
not. Between the ’50s and ’70s in the West, there was much talk of painting for
painting itself or, to use the term of Frank Stella, what you see is what you see.
But in China, it is hard to find such language partly because of the history into
which contemporary art emerged, but also because contemporary Chinese
abstract art is a mixture of an abstract language, traditional Chinese art
language, and even Chan or Buddhist practice or idea. The act of painting is a
search through the surroundings, searching for something infinite, which is not
presented solely by form itself, but also by your personality, by the act of making
art. During the postwar period in the West, there was much talk of materialisation
(or dematerialisation), which is absent in China where there is no opposition
between subject and object, painting and life.
This is an example of why the issue of what is transmitted from one culture to
another is so complex, even if such exchange is something that has often gone
on. For instance, when Western abstract artists accommodate elements of Asian
culture, such as Japanese prints, or nothingness from Zen, the Asian element
serves as reference and inspiration, not as a foundation of new art philosophy.
In Asia, there remains a lot of interest in the transformation of tradition into the
contemporary. At the same time, tradition can also be a target: some want to
rebel against tradition. Either way, it can be seen as a positive force, an impulse
for creation of new art. Tradition benefits contemporary abstract art in many
ways, such as through repetition, series format, involvement of script or written
language, and empty background, which signals nothingness, or
spontaneousness. We cannot find the same phenomenon in Western art, a
related respect for tradition, which took to heart the injunction of the American
modernist poet Ezra Pound to ‘Make it New’.
No one can persuasively argue now that there is one centre of the art world—
whether it be New York or London. And what I have been arguing says that there
is no one story of modern or contemporary art but rather many stories. The world
is now multi-centred: London, New York, Shanghai, Beijing, somewhere in the
Middle East, or even in Africa in the future.
Gao Minglu
Gao Minglu is a distinguished scholar of Chinese contemporary art and, notably, the
curator of China/Avant-Garde (1989) at the National Art Museum of China (Beijing),
the first contemporary Chinese art exhibition to be mounted in China. He brought
the first landmark exhibition of Chinese contemporary art to the USA with Inside
Out: New Chinese Art (1999), which was first shown at the Asia Society Galleries
and MoMA PS 1 in New York. Gao served as editor of China’s leading art magazine
Meishu in the 1980s, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Currently, he is
a research professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the
University of Pittsburgh.
His major publications include History of Contemporary Chinese Art 1985–1986 ,
(Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Press, 1990); Inside Out: New Chinese Art , (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998); A Century’s Utopia: Chinese Avant-Garde Art
(Taiwan: Artists Publishing House, 2000); Chinese Maximalism (Chongqing:
Chongqing People’s Press, 2003), The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art
(New York and Beijing: The Albright Knox Art Gallery and China Millennium Museum,
2005), The No Name: A History of a Self-Exiled Avant-Garde (Beijing: Guangxi
Normal University Press, 2007), Yi Pai: A Synthetic Theory Against Representation
(Beijing: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2009), and Total Modernity and the
Avant-Garde in Twentieth Century Chinese Art (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2011). He
has organised several major exhibitions, including China/Avant-Garde (1989), Inside
Out: New Chinese Art (1998), Harvest: Contemporary Art Exhibition (2002), Chinese
Maximalism (2003), The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art (2005),
Retrospective Exhibition of the No Name Group (2006), Yi Pai: Thirty Years of
Chinese Abstraction (2007–2008), Yi Pai—Century Thinking (2009), Mind Space:
Maximalism in Contrasts (2010), and Window in the Wall: India and China—
Imaginary Conversations (2011).