A Licence to Paint Money

Part of A Better Guide to Běijīng

The Chinese art industry is little different from any other in the country, able to exploit cheap manufacturing space and low labour costs to the point that some established artists have large teams of assistants to do the grunt work at kiln or easel, simply reproducing earlier ideas or filling in the artist’s sketch. But while there’s an obvious if not physically present ‘Made in China’ sticker, there’s no ‘School of’ label to undermine the price.

The industry is also as riddled with corruption as any other, and when it comes to the abuse of intellectual property, perhaps even more so.

‘Limited editions’ may be limited only by the physical capacity of the studio-factory where they are produced, record-keeping is almost non-existent, and successful ‘signature’ works may be repainted multiple times or reproduced with only slight variations.

Exposure in art magazines and positive reviews are routinely purchased, display space in prestigious museums is rented rather then earned, and curators themselves are for hire as the authors of monographs and magazine articles. Art auctions are manipulated with the use of bidding rings and behind-the-scenes discounts for preferred clients.

Much art is skilfully produced to appeal to the West’s desires and preconceptions about China, treating the classical canon and the clichéd square-jawed worker-heroes of Soviet-influenced 20th-century propaganda alike as an image bank to be plundered at will. The aim is to produce what will sell.

Western art from Mantegna to Modigliani is also referenced, and it is perhaps the combination of this intention to communicate with the viewer’s wallet and the use of a familiar visual vocabulary that means there’s very little about modern Chinese art that truly has the inscrutability Westerners are often predisposed to look for in China, and which is in fact rather more commonplace in Western avant-garde. The struggle to gain critical and commercial acceptance overseas has made Chinese art accessible to anyone.

Avant-garde seems in fact an entirely inappropriate term for an art that’s mostly concerned with looking back rather than forward, that rarely seems to find any subject of discussion other than the Chinese condition, and whose comment even on that is often timid and almost never political.

Chinese artists are involved in the same Faustian bargain as the rest of society, accepting economic freedoms in return for relinquishing political ones. Emerging from the Cultural Revolution, art beyond the delicately representative or overtly propagandist remained without much of a public forum until foreign recognition came along.

It was the late ’90s before there were galleries to display and sell avant-garde art, and the current explosion came about over a decade or so, after the government recognised that avant-garde Chinese art could both enhance the country’s image abroad and rake in big hard-currency profits. There’s relatively little interference now, but then most take care not to give the authorities any cause. Foreigners who buy because they think they detect a hint of political rebellion are in fact merely helping to tie the gag a little tighter while simultaneously assisting the authorities in promoting an entirely unwarranted image of tolerance.

There’s perhaps more sign of real radicalism in performance art, photography, and video, all media with much shorter histories, although Chinese work still travels in the slipstream of the West. Even here, if there’s any challenge or confusion for the viewer it’s in assuming that works with a similarity to Western ones come with similar cultural freight. But art in China has not gone through the same stages of development as art in the West, and can absorb foreign ideas entirely out of sequence.

Abstraction, for instance, was a bold step in the West, but in China it was imported ready-made, just like some computer technology developed with research and investment overseas and now available in a plug-and-play form to Chinese artists.

Much performance art, photography, and video work seems to have no other aim than to shock, particularly in its use of nudity, but like the Chinese potboiler novels that have appeared over the same period of time, such as Wèi Huì’s Shanghai Baby, they come 30 years too late to shock the West.

Exceptions would be the use of self-torture, the mutilation of live animals, and the employment of dead children as props, which go far beyond beyond legal limits in the West but which have now attracted new regulations from a government that, as in all other spheres, is reactive rather than pro-active.

The investment bubble has proved poppable. In 2009, galleries closed by the dozens across Běijīng, and few of that year’s crop of 208,000 art students at university level found themselves living the high life hoped for, and few since.

But it’s long past time serious Chinese artists got over the fact that Yuè Mǐnjūn’s (岳敏君, www.yueminjun.com.cn) multiple images of himself grinning at soldiers with raised rifles, with its hint of Tian’an Men Square massacre for those who choose to see it, sold for US$5000 in 1994 and then nearly US$7 million in 2008, while another canvas sold for US$4.9 million in 2005 and then for US$54 million three years later. His prices have now collapsed. And it’s equally long past time to ban the juxtaposition of typically Chinese images with the logos of Western consumerism, or the adaptation of Western masters to new ends. These have become almost as tired as the expression ‘New China’ itself.

It’s already more than 30 years since the late Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren made a notorious pastiche of the European early-modern masterpiece Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, controversially featuring a naked 15-year-old pop starlet, to be used on her record’s sleeve. But most Chinese artists might just as well adopt McLaren’s answering machine message of the time: ‘We’re only in it for the Manet.’

Next in Běijīng Suburbs and Beyond: Dà Shānzi 798 Art District
Previously: Běijīng’s Artist Colonies
Main Index of A Better Guide to Beijing.

For discussion of China travel, see The Oriental-List.