BACK TO SENSE PERCEPTION AFTER POLITICAL POP
A Solo Exhibition by Qi Zhilong
March 4 - 13, 2009
The National Gallery
Medan Merdeka Timur No.14
Jakarta Pusat
INDONESIA
Expanding Contemporary Art
CP Open Biennale that CP Foundation held in 2003 at the National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta, offered a critical vision regarding art.1 The biennale analyzed the general understanding regarding the current international art, and questioned the signs of the contemporary art development as reflected in the celebration for the new media art, as implicitly such celebration looked down on the use of conventional media, especially paintings and other media of expressions in the world of crafts.
Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, and Wang Guangyi were present at the CP Biennale—Zhang Xiaogang and Yang Shaobin had actually been registered as participants, but decided not to participate in the last minutes. During the CP Biennale I in 2003, I told Fang Lijun that he and his colleagues were the “locomotive” in the biennale, because the problems behind their works could be use as the case in point for us to question the signs of the contemporary art development in the international world.
Their works caught the attention of contemporary criticism in the early nineties as the tense Chinese open door policy at the end of the eighties had enchanted the world. Sometime before the Tiananmen Tragedy (February 1989), Fang Lijun along with the artists’ group “The Star” and the curator Li Xianting held an exhibition with the title of “China/Avant-Garde” in Beijing. The exhibition promoted the liberalization and the openness of China, and was therefore regarded as an important sign that supported individuality in China at the time when the socialist Chinese government was apprehensive in continuing their open door policy and recognizing individual freedom. Fang Lijun, Li Xianting, and the artists in “The Star” were celebrated by the international world as heroes of democracy.
As the world was losing its interest in Tiananmen Tragedy, however, and as CNN no longer reported on the political upheavals in China, the attention on Fang Lijun and a number of other painters such as Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, Wang Guangyi, Yu Youhan, Li Shan, Yang Shaobing, and Qi Zhilong also declined and even disappeared at the end of the nineties. Why was that?
In the contemporary art forums, I have heard a variety of opinions saying that their works have academic tinge to them and therefore do not reflect the contemporary art development. Aside from the fact that they are still focusing their explorations within the realm of painting, their works also show consistency in terms of their thematic explorations and idiomatic development, which many interpret as the search for originality, individuality, and even the essence of art enchantment. Such tendencies are seen as having been based on the modernist principles that the contemporary art has left behind.
I did not entirely agree with such opinions and posed the question of why, during the nineties, such seemingly-modernist works can be read using the contemporary criticism? The answer I received was that in the beginning of the nineties, such paintings were seen as social commentary about the political upheavals in China. At the end of the nineties, the paintings did not show any changes, while the social and political conditions in China had changed. The paintings, therefore, lost their underlying context.
Such views rather bother me as I realize that most of the artists in Indonesia still work just as these Chinese painters do. A large number of Indonesian artists still explored the realm of paintings and their works reveal certain consistency. From my encounters with a number of Asian artists, especially from the Southeast Asia, I find that such tendencies are also dominant among them.
A nagging question thus emerged, forcing me to ask whether the contemporary art in Asia is defined by the cutting edge development that show similarities—or are made to look similar—with the development of contemporary art in Europe and United States. Does this not reflect a return to modernist avant-gardism? And will such focus on the cutting edge development—i.e. the celebration of new media—not eventually give rise to a new form of marginalization that might be trapped in the judgment of “art/non-art,” just as what had happened to the modern art in the twentieth century? I ask myself truly, what is wrong with painting? What is wrong with crafty idioms, which contemporary criticism has disregarded?
It was also such questions that had formed the basis for the critical curatorial stance that CP Biennale I 2003 took. It was not difficult to see how such questions could be justified by the inconsistency of contemporary criticism, which judged differently between the works of the Chinese artists in the early and late nineties.
Such thoughts brought me to the opinion that saw how the understanding about the contemporary art needed to be expanded, to prevent it from becoming “temporary art” that is trapped in modernist-style debates. To me, the opposition between modernist criticism and contemporary criticism reflects the philosophical turmoil among the modernists and post-modernists in the Anglo-American art tradition, which has not been thoroughly understood outside its realm. The important part of the contemporary art is the liberation of global art from the domination of modernist criticism that is “white, male, and bourgeois.”2 The contemporary art, therefore, signifies the emergence of the reconciliation process of the world art.
With this idea in mind, CP Foundation held Yue Minjun’s solo exhibition at the CP Artspace, Jakarta, after CP Biennale I, 2003, and, together with the National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta, held Fang Lijun’s and Yang Shaobin’s solo exhibitions at the National Gallery after CP Biennale II in 2005. It is still in this context that CP Foundation together with the National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta, present Qi Zhilong’s solo exhibition.
In early 1990, Qi Zhilong’s paintings, alongside paintings by Wang Guangyi, Yu Youhan, and Li Shan, are noted as having brought about the tendency that the curator Li Xianting dubbed “political pop.” This tendency revealed the tension in the political development in China, along with the emergence of consumer images in its economic development. These two matters were related. The economic growth in China influenced the democratization process and the awareness about freedom.
The intellectualization of political pop appeared shoulder to shoulder with the intellectualization of cynical realism (as reflected in the paintings by Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, and Zhang Xiaogang) in the exhibition of “China’s New Art, Post-1989” (in which fifty-one Chinese artists participated) in Hong Kong in 1993. The exhibition, curated by Li Xianting, was the biggest post-Tiananmen exhibition outside China and therefore caught the world’s attention. Still in 1993, this exhibition travelled to Australia, Europe, and finally made an appearance at the Venice Biennale.3
Contemporary criticism could easily recognize political pop as it could be readily compared with pop art, which had marked the emergence of contemporary art in the beginning of the seventies in the United States. Both tendencies were read as efforts to promote popular culture in order to reveal general signs (i.e. signs that the public could easily recognize). With its focus on context, contemporary criticism viewed them as art expressions that tried to communicate with the public. This was contrary to the focus on individuality in modernist criticism, which tended to ignore the public and did not care if art expressions became something esoteric.
I thus wondered whether the two pop symptoms were actually comparable. I think the tendency of political pop could not be entirely seen as an effort to promote general signs, as the popular culture in China had a distinct story.
As global industrial products began to enter China at the end of the eighties and in early nineties, the Chinese themselves could not buy the imported products that were on sale in restricted stores, due to their poverty and also because of the government regulation. At the time, only foreigners could enter the stores and buy the products. The Chinese could only look from outside how the foreigners shopped.
As the pop culture emerged, there were social changes that created a shock to the culture. There were tragic problems of humanity, discriminations, and visual shocks. Art expressions emerging from such situations, I think, were therefore more closely related to (emotional) sentiments, obsessions, and intuitions. I could not see how such art expressions could come into being out of the awareness about the conflict between the modernists’ and the post-modernists’ views.
Qi Zhilong’s paintings reflect such obsessive sentiments. His paintings are portraits of beautiful Chinese women in Mao-style uniform. Besides appearing in the form of the alluring faces, the beauty in Qi Zhilong’s paintings is also revealed in the plaited long hair, which is actually the hairstyle that the Cultural Revolution had banned. During the era of the Cultural Revolution, women’s long hair must be done up, twisted and hidden behind Mao-style hats. Men and women therefore had similar appearances. In Qi Zhilong’s paintings, however, women are present in all their femininity and charm, albeit still in Mao-style uniforms.
Qi Zhilong grew up during the sixties when China was still a closed, socialistic country. At the time, the issues of women and beauty had been sidelined from life because they were considered as unrevolutionary. The shift in the political condition in China in the beginning of the nineties changed this situation. Female beauty was present in industrial, fashion, and lifestyle products, as well as in advertisements. It was welcomed due to its link with economic growth.
This situation created the opportunity for Qi Zhilong to present issues of women and beauty. It is such background that made Qi Zhilong’s expressions about women and beauty closely related with consumer images.
Qi Zhilong himself, however, admitted that he had been interested in the subject of women and beauty ever since he started painting in his teens, before he was enrolled in the art academy. I think this is a significant admission. I see that his obsession to present the subject of women and beauty made Qi Zhilong’s paintings do not reveal big leaps of change. The development of his paintings shows subtle shifts. Until 2005, Qi Zhilong still painted beautiful women in Mao-style uniform, and it was only in a joint exhibition in 2008 in Beijing that he began to present beautiful women without Mao-style uniform.
But it is precisely such development that contemporary criticism questions. His paintings are considered an oddity because they no longer reflect the changing social reality in China. Beautiful women in Mao-style uniforms are no longer in keeping with the social context of China at the end of the nineties, much less in 2005. Qi Zhilong’s paintings in their current development—the beautiful women without the Mao uniforms—therefore loses all the signs needed for contemporary criticism. Aside from its weaker relevance with the current context, the paintings prove difficult to be read using the general signs (usually interpreted using consumer images) because the female costumes in these paintings do not reveal, say, the urban lifestyle.
I, however, do not agree with that opinion. Considering Qi Zhilong’s obsession—which served as the connecting thread along the development of his works—consumer images are not the only symptom that one could see in Qi Zhilong’s paintings. I do not think one can use merely the (social) context as the critical frame to read his works, and neither can these works be immediately considered as records of the political conditions or as social commentary.
Qi Zhilong’s expressions reside within the realm of thoughts about beauty. This is the cause of the dilemma that emerges as one tries to read his works, because thoughts about beauty have long been abandoned by both modernist and contemporary criticism. There is thus no room within the contemporary criticism in which one can analyze his obsession in the subjects of women and beauty.
Thoughts about beauty on which Qi Zhilong’s paintings have been based are known as the ‘philosophy of aesthetics’ (also known as aesthetics). Philosophy of aesthetics questions the experience of beauty that does not differentiate the aesthetic objects, whether they are of nature, reality, or works of art. In Western thoughts, this branch of philosophy was developed in the eighteenth century and subsequently sidelined—and then abandoned—with the emergence of the Anglo-American art tradition in the nineteenth century.
The Anglo-American tradition gave rise to philosophy of art, which reduced the philosophy of aesthetics. In philosophy of art, the aesthetic objects in question were merely works of art—reality and natural objects as the sources of beauty were ignored. Armed with the concept of fine art, the discussed works of art were specifically the ones with visual characteristics. This view saw ‘art’ as the intrinsic value of works of art that were visual in character—concrete, visible, and real. 4
In philosophy of aesthetics, meanwhile, ‘art’ constituted the sense perception, which was seen as distinct from the perception that arose from rational thoughts. ‘Art’ in this sense existed within the human being itself, in the form of mental capacity, instead of residing within the work of art. The expressions, therefore, varied—they could be in the forms of visual works of art—paintings, sculptures, objects, crafts—or they could also be works of art in other forms, such as poetry, music, novels, and theatrical plays. This view saw the essence of art expression as residing within the capacity of the individual artist.
In the modernist philosophy of art, which had been heavily influenced by fine art thoughts, the search for the intrinsic values of works of art (in visual forms) was focused on painting analyses. It is this belief that contemporary criticism defies. As is apparent in the development of contemporary art so far, contemporary criticism denies the primacy of painting and promotes other media of expressions—this is thus the basis for contemporary criticism’s celebration of the new media.
The two criticisms have actually similar perception about art. In both modernist criticism and contemporary criticism, the focus is in the analyses of visual works of art. In its opposition against modernist criticism, contemporary criticism has not once turned to the understanding of art as sense perception. This shows how contemporary criticism is inextricable from the Anglo-American art tradition.
In my observation, expressions in the paintings by Qi Zhilong as well as by most Asian artists have been based on the belief of art as the sense perception itself. Such understanding on art, I think, is rooted in the local cultural views, which are the subversive views in the development of art that has been heavily influenced by the perception of the Anglo-American art tradition. So far this influence has never been thoroughly analyzed and is therefore not understood.
Contemporary criticism—like the modernist criticism—fails to read such art expressions because they are not in keeping with the paradigms of art development within the Anglo-American art tradition. Contemporary criticism cannot understand why Qi Zhilong and many Asian artists feel that the different media of expressions, which have been debated in the contemporary criticism, are nothing significant. Neither can this criticism understand that Qi Zhilong’s tendency to hold on to painting is in no way because he believes in modernist principles. As I have mentioned in the beginning of this essay, expressions of art which the contemporary criticism fails to read might very well be the dominant art expressions, and thus cannot be ignored.
The development of contemporary criticism today, however, is not without resistance. Within the development of art theories after the reign of the modernists, there was a tendency to abandon philosophy of art and return to philosophy of aesthetics. The thoughts that have arisen from such shift turned out to have critical views on contemporary criticism.5
This development might bring with it signs of world art reconciliation. This reconciliation has a firm basis. If one cares to analyze the situation deeper, it will transpire that the similarity between the understanding of art in Western thoughts of the eighteenth century and the understanding on art in many non-Western cultures shows that if one day this reconciliation is materialized into an awareness, a world art tradition will come to be, serving as the continuation of the art traditions that exist in all cultures along the history of the civilization. Does this not constitute art as a cultural practice in the contemporary culture? It is on such platform that one can read Qi Zhilong’s sense perception about women and beauty in China.
Jim Supangkat | Curator for CP Biennale I, 2003 and CP Biennale II, 2005
ph. +62.21.3448126, 3853206 | fax. +62.21.3853203, 3853208
info@cp-foundation.org