Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century
The Cultural Revolution upended the social order to the point that drivers were instructed to stop at green lights and go at red ones. Students attacked and tortured their teachers. According to Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn in China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, the Guangxi province saw “one of the largest episodes of cannibalism anywhere in the world in the last century or more”; the writers add that “the cannibalism took place in public, often organized by Communist Party officials, and people indulged communally to prove their revolutionary ardor.”
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Because 15 of the 21 artists represented in “Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century” were born in the 1960s, they didn’t so much live through the Cultural Revolution as they came of age during the long recovery from it. Although the show’s catalog maintains that “to this generation of artists, the 1960s and 1970s has become the remote past,” there’s a level of seriousness, even grimness, in all the work displayed that suggests to me that the horrors of the Cultural Revolution are still influencing the culture.
Not all the art in “Transience” refers directly to social or political issues, but the most powerful works protest China’s legacy of dehumanizing policies in the name of revolution as well as attempts to overcome that legacy. Xu Bing has never been allowed to exhibit his “counter-monument” Ghosts Pounding the Wall, which dominates the lobby of the museum, in his homeland. For this piece he enlisted a crew of students and peasants to take impressions from the Great Wall on sheets of paper, which he’s then mounted–redeploying one of the icons of both Chinese nationalism and Chinese communism, this time in ink on paper instead of bricks.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): “12 Square Meters” by Zhang Huan.
