Fission and Isolation: Two Forces that Shaped the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art since 2019

Since 2018, the escalation in trade tension between China and the United States has created instability and uncertainty in mainland China’s economy. The issue of trade also turned the public’s attention towards populist ideals and away from their countries’ domestic conflicts. With the continuous and seemingly inevitable opposition between China and the United States, other countries have had to take political sides, with each camp continually breeding negative sentiments of the other. By 2020, the spread of COVID-19 across the globe further severed any international cultural exchange.

This sudden shift in global dynamics has impacted China’s art industry in many ways. The pandemic and quarantine policies disrupted international travel, while tariffs from artwork transactions overseas remained high. These factors made those in the Chinese art scene temporarily shift their focus from the world stage back to the realm of local history. Retrospectives of pioneering artists were held one after another, from Zhang Guangyu (Guardian Art Centre, 2020) and Yuan Yunsheng (Long Museum, 2022) to Liu Huanzhang (Star Gallery Beijing, 2021) and Ding Liren (Power Station of Art, 2022).

Not only do their artistic styles diverge from socialist realism, brought in from France and the Soviet Union and embraced by the state, they also differ from the avant-garde art represented by the Stars Group and the ’85 New Wave movement. Despite being from different generations, they remain dedicated to reinvigorating China’s traditional artistic lineage, a cause repeatedly hindered throughout history but which has never entirely ceased.

The younger generation of artists have their own interpretations of history and the present. Liang Shuo, adept at using recyclable materials to transform spaces, understands traditional Chinese culture in a rather radical way. His solo exhibition Scenery (Beijing Commune, 2019) and the work In the Peak, commissioned by M+ for the Sigg Prize 2019, present how pristine nature as envisioned in Taoism is destroyed in contemporary settings. With processes that cut to the heart of the matter, Liang shows that although the forms and traditions of ink art have not been abandoned, its spiritual core has been changed.

With his interest in black humour, Liu Yefu often offers piercing commentary on the inequities and absurdity of society. In Liu's video Fool’s Paradise shown at his exhibtion with the same title (Magician Space, 2022), scenes of conventional scholar’s life repeatedly alternate with images of figures such as Elon Musk, highlighting and strangely subduing the tension between global and local, future and past, progressive and conservative ideals. As history reincarnates endlessly, the work exudes a heavy sense of pessimism.

In addition, fear and confusion triggered by global economic downturn and political unrest have intensified the large-scale production, display, and commercialisation of paintings. This had the effect of encouraging deep and significant reflection on the art form, allowing experienced painters such as Liu Ye, Duan Jianyu, Zhang Enli, and Xie Nanxing to present grounded and insightful solo exhibitions.

Take Xie Nanxing as an example. Trained as an adept painter, Xie deliberately avoids clearly defined styles and reduced symbolic and narrative elements in his paintings to a minimum, focusing exclusively on creating visual experience. Recently, making use of a light source in sketching, he makes abstract compositions and adopts experimental approaches to express the human psyche.

On the other hand, China’s isolation on the external front echoes its domestic restrictions. In the 1990s, the internet rose to prominence and was widely regarded for its higher purpose: to connect the world and offer free ubiquitous access to high-quality information. If, as foretold in the 2014 Art Post-Internet exhibition at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, the internet is a new creative platform that allows anyone to become an artist, then the Chinese government’s increased output of online content after 2018 to protect national security dissipated any optimism for the web.

Instead, the World Wide Web seems to have become an insular storage room for data. As big data technology tracks human cognitive behaviour, users are targeted and fed with content that amplifies their existing views, creating an echo chamber. The capitalism-driven logic behind this operation is also part of government policy.^[1]

As China self-isolates in the information era, Chinese artists resist and respond tactfully with themes such as everyday nuances and materiality. Artists like Yu Ji, Nabuqi, Zhang Ruyi, Yu Honglei, and Zhong Yunshu use sculptural mediums to respond to Western art history, particularly modernist questions about form, which remain unresolved in China. At the same time, these artists emphasise how a focus on materiality does not stop the work from commenting on everyday life.

In her exhibition, The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog (Beijing Tabula Rasa Gallery, 2020), Zhong Yunshu built a strange environment using many everyday materials. The exhibition reveals and forces the audience to confront the real yet fragile convergence between the power of art, the functionality of the objects, and the semantics of everyday life.

There are also artists who challenge the internet’s seemingly lofty ethereal quality. In 2021, Chu Yun created the work Butterflies with butterfly specimens. Shown in a small private exhibition in Beijing, he juxtaposed butterflies captured near Chaobai River in Beijing with keywords and category labels from Pornhub in the same gallery. No matter from which angle, audiences were not able to see both parts at the same time. Desire and death echo each other to form a karmic loop that appears and disappears perpetually. Sex and flight are both symbols of freedom that are, in this moment, restricted and exhausted.

The trade war and informational isolation are the two forces shaping the development of contemporary Chinese art in recent years. As a cultural body, China, having never been fully colonised, is now having a deeper reflection on its connections with and contradictions against Western civilisation in a period of limited exchange.

Today, contemporary Chinese art does not simply establish the differences and conflicts between Eastern and Western cultures, nor does it express an absolute necessity to learn from the West. Instead, Chinese art is rediscovering the complexity of its historical lineage and searching for non-ideological modes of expression from the materiality of experiences. Maybe this path will lead to a space not yet compressed by political power.