'The Real Thing': Contemporary Art from China

In recent years, handbags by European fashion houses come with hologrammed price-tags to assure customers of their authenticity; perhaps in reaction to the vast output of faked designer goods from South-East Asia. It therefore seems ironic that an exhibition on contemporary Chinese art held at Tate Liverpool in 2007 takes as its title The Real Thing. The curators of the exhibition cite a number of inspirations: the move away from the Cynical Realist style that characterises much Chinese painting towards the end of the 1990s, and the reaction against the spectacle of economic and social change in China’s Reform Era. Against the curators’ intentions, however, the title would also makes one wonder about the necessity of such rhetoric, as if we were visitors to a Victorian Museum of Curiosities, uncertain as to whether to spend our hard-earned pennies on a ticket to the show. The ‘real thing’ is also spoken of in almost manifesto-like terms in describing a group reacting to Debordian spectacle; it is stated explicitly in the exhibition catalogue that these artists are attempting to maintain their creative integrity in the face of commercial temptation. One only needs to turn to Ai WeiWei’s Working Progress (Fountain of Light), an undeniably beautiful construction of metal and electrical lighting that is based on Vladimir Tatlin’s paradoxically spectacular Monument to the Third International, to wonder about the care of thought with which such a declaration can be made.

Many of the blanket terms of postmodernist artistic discourse, such as Julia Kristeva’s abject and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome, attempt to define the ‘real thing’ that is supposedly concealed beneath the cultural constructs of language and behaviour. Perhaps then, this exhibition points unwittingly to the paradoxes of this condition – that, despite the hostility in scholarship to geist, and the advocating of cultural mixing, artistic purity is insisted upon in this exhibition of Chinese art. It is difficult not to see the exhibition, in this sense, as an attempted liberal Western apologia for industrial progress and the twentieth-century success of European and American modernist art trajectory, in the face of the Eastern cultural void. The ‘real thing’ might be the nitty-gritty of manual labour, as reflected in the coal-mine paintings of Yang Shaobin, in which, hovering between Photorealism and French Impressionism, large-scale oil canvases demand attention through their scale and compelling manipulation of paint. The ‘real thing’ could also be embodied in the lives of workers at the Osram lightbulb factory in Foshan documented in Cao Fei’s video, their performed aspirations bringing a tangible and personal side to the anonymity of the factory backdrop. Whilst China’s growing economic and political status cannot be ignored, the lack of contextualisation in the show through supplementary information suggests a curatorial uncertainty as to how to convey this change. The very fact that the curators were able to commission a number of works carries with it the uncomfortable possibility of non-Western artists tailoring their work to Orientalist specifications. Gu Dexin’s 2007/03/30 is described as part of an artistic practice that balances Gu’s divergent yin and yang parts, a quaint description which might be read as the artist exploiting his Chinese-ness to appeal to a British art institution. If “they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” has become the implicit message here, then perhaps this exhibition is a further presentation of postmodernist unravelling.

(photograph of Ai WeiWei's Fountain of Light courtesy of Kimberley Williams)