Art historian Wu Hung came to a startling conclusion while organizing the exhibit “Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the 20th Century,” which opens this weekend at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art–he sees no historical precedent for the current crop of artists emerging in China. “They refuse to be labeled ‘Chinese artists,’” he says. “Of course, they’re still Chinese in nationality. But they’re so influenced by the West–by MTV and global pop culture–that they’ve developed a new sensibility of displacement not rooted in any older tradition.”
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Wu says he had few preconceived notions when he first pitched the project to the museum three years ago. “Given the gallery’s small size, I knew I didn’t want a comprehensive survey or a retrospective,” he says. “Besides, those shows date quickly.” By the time it arrived at the Cultural Center in 1997 “New Art in China, Post-1989,” curated by a Hong Kong art dealer, was already “old hat,” he says. Wu had also served as a consultant for last summer’s “Inside Out: New Chinese Art” at New York’s Asia Society, an exhibit that took years to organize. “The bureaucratic politics were horrendous,” he says with a chuckle. “Taiwan insisted on the same number of works as China, and Hong Kong didn’t want to be counted as part of China. It was quite a lot of hassle. My show, I said to myself, would be less ambitious in scope, faster to put together–a snapshot of what’s important right this moment.”
Allowed to continue his education in art history, Wu enrolled in the doctoral program at Harvard, his father’s alma mater, in 1980 and wrote a dissertation on second-century Chinese monuments. He stayed on as a professor until 1996, when the U. of C. hired both Wu and his wife, Judith Zeitlin, an American-born professor of Chinese literature.
