Forms of Concepts
Apart from hosting regular gallery shows, the Fine Arts Literature Art Centre in Wuhan (the capital of Hubei Province and the largest city in central China) organizes a larger-scale exhibition every three years, of which ‘Forms of Concepts’ is the second. The Centre is a commercial art space that also owns and operates an art journal, Wuhan Fine Arts Literature. Although misleadingly labelled as a ‘documentary exhibition’, ‘Forms of Concepts’ was essentially an extensive group show. The term ‘documentary’ is used in the same way as the word ‘literature’ appears in the name of the gallery: as an attempt to augment its academic credentials. Rather like a triennial in format, except that it is completely privately funded, ‘Forms of Concepts’ was housed in various venues across the city, including the Provincial Art Museum and the Fine Arts Academy. Guest-curated by Pi Li, a Wuhan native, the exhibition proposed a new look at the conceptual transformation in Chinese contemporary art practice from 1987 to 2007.
Existing narratives of Chinese contemporary art history are largely based on current success stories, many of which are about artists being recognized and validated by the art market, a dominant marker for the Chinese art scene. At the same time, conceptually driven works from earlier periods to the present are often undeservingly neglected or little acknowledged. The curatorial statement of ‘Forms of Concepts’ expressed a desire to draw attention to the conceptual strength of Chinese art practice and give new weight to it in the different stages of its development. It also constructively pointed out that the reason certain art movements and styles, such as Cynical Realism and Political Pop, were singled out in the early 1990s and are today major market winners was that there was an increase in interest among Western cultural tourists in the politically and economically emerging Chinese society, rather than because of any genuine professional judgement.
This well-meaning curatorial ambition fell flat, however, in the realization of the exhibition. Visually, the show was chaotic and unprofessionally installed: works were presented without due consideration being given to the logic of the layout, and little information or context was provided to help the audience access the exhibition. Ultimately, very few of the curator’s original intentions were translated into the final show, except for the deliberate omission of works from the canon of Cynical Realism.
The exhibition was arranged thematically in sections that included ‘The Expansion of Media and Daily Experience’, ‘Urbanism and New Linguistic Experiment’, ‘Modern Life and New Narrative’, ‘System and Reflection on the System’ and ‘The New Generation and Bad Art’, which is a term the curator coined to summarize the practice of the younger generation of artists. ‘Bad Art’ is based on strategies that confront and defy an existing system within a capitalist society. Such an approach was actually adopted by only a small group of artists in China, particularly those active in the late 1990s, often motivated by a problematically functionalist understanding of art serving political or social ends. Now, after decades of art being hijacked for various political and ideological purposes, more and more artists are becoming eager to free their practice from external forces and focus on exploring the formal and conceptual issues of art-making. Curiously, however, this did not seem to be recognized in a show whose intention was precisely to highlight such an aspect, albeit in regard to earlier work.
Works from different generations of artists were grouped under these various sections in the exhibition. It was impressive to see a number of important pieces from the 1980s and ’90s exhibited in, or recreated for, the show. In Xu Tan’s installation Untitled, (Dreaming Pigs) (1997), for instance, three white fibreglass sculptural pigs stand amidst a field of white fast-food boxes. A red-painted wall in the background is emblazoned with the words: ‘Knowledge is power. Is power power? In my dreams, I become a pig with human brains and organs and I possess enormous power.’ Also on display were Huang Yong Ping’s self-explanatorily titled work The Copied Painting Done in 1980 Being Washed in the Washing Machine for 5 Minutes on December 1, 1987 (1980–7) and Zhang Peili’s Uncertain Pleasure (1996), a video installation of ten screens simultaneously showing images of a man scratching himself.
Despite these highlights, the selection felt too loose and too hastily assembled to open up a more in-depth and intelligent debate. Given its laudable ambition to offer an informed historical survey, with the attendant responsibilities that implies, ‘Forms of Concepts’ would certainly have benefited from more thorough research and a more earnest approach to history. Sadly, it remained an empty shell of a concept.
