Chinese art has undergone radical transformations in the past two decades, and a new exhibition at IMMA shows how artists have reassessed their traditions and identity, writes Aidan Dunne
It's likely that if you go and see Dreaming of the Dragon's Nation at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the experience will confound your expectations of Chinese art. Unless, that is, you have been following the remarkable progress of contemporary Chinese art over the last 20 years or so at various international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale. Because in that time it has undergone a series of radical transformations, the effects of which are fully evident in the exceptionally broad selection of work on view at IMMA.
The show's curator is Li Xu, head of the academic research department of Shanghai Art Museum. A youthful, energetic man with perfect English, great enthusiasm for his subject and a wry sense of humour, Li joined the museum in 1988, which means he has been witness to and, to an extent, part of the upheavals in the Chinese art world. Having grown up in Manchuria, he studied in Beijing before going to Shanghai.
"There have been great changes in that time. In fact it began in 1985 with a movement called the New Wave. It seemed that every young artist in China wanted to rebel against the traditional forms. They turned to western art. The more western it was, the better. "Part of the impetus for this was that from 1984, Chinese artists were invited to exhibit abroad, in biennials and so on. But what happened was that, as more and more of them went abroad, they began to change. Rather than simply embracing what was going on in the west, they began to rethink their own identity."
From about 1992, Li reckons, Chinese artists at home and abroad addressed their own traditions and identity in increasingly creative ways. "So that I think the situation has been getting better since the mid-1990s. Something else has started to happen, which is that artists have reconsidered forms they had rejected. And the first Shanghai Biennale was held in 1996. Now it is one of the most important exhibitions in Asia, perhaps the most important bienniale." But he is by no means complacent, and suggests that the questions facing a genuinely contemporary, genuinely Chinese art have yet to be fully resolved.
A lively engagement with traditional forms is evident in Dreaming . . ., imaginatively and audaciously so in the form of Liu Jianhua's composite ceramic map of Dublin, encompassing both sides of the bay and cleverly demarcated areas of the city. It's a reworking of an idea Liu has employed elsewhere, notably in Venice last year. He uses a traditional porcelain glaze in sculptures of myriad familiar object and products, from toys and tools to crash-helmets and kitchen utensils. But the choice and placement of the objects refer to the nature of the terrain they represent.
More critically, Hong Lei offers an ironic photographic take on a celebrated traditional work, a Yuan Dynasty ink painting of a beautiful landscape. In the same vein, Yang Zhilin's Rolls of Tang Dynasty Poetry are actually toilet rolls. Run out across the gallery floor, the paper is embellished with beautiful calligraphy and ink drawings: the height of a tradition. "I like this piece," Li observes. "Because it says a lot. With globalisation it is increasingly difficult for countries to maintain their identity, their self-confidence. Every culture must treat its traditions in terms of contemporary styles and forms if it is to preserve its identity, but there are pressures towards uniformity, towards lessening the value of what is indigenous. Zang's point is that the celebrated poetry of the Tang dynasty is the equivalent of toilet tissue for contemporary materialistic culture. I think he expresses this very well."
Actually, as one might expect of a culture attentive to its own traditions, there is a great deal of highly skilled ink painting on view. There are, Li explains, two substantially different modes of ink painting, one characterised by the detailed use of precise brush strokes, the other broader, more gestural and free. Regardless of the mode, an accomplished ink painter would have mastered four skills: "poetry, calligraphy, painting and seal-making. All of them very demanding." The skill of Xu Lei, Liu Qinghe and Zhang Jian is obvious and their work, despite its adherence to traditional means, is entirely fresh and of its time.
It's perhaps more surprising that there are very good Chinese abstract painters. While, Li acknowledges, abstraction as such never featured traditionally in Chinese art, abstraction is, so to speak, built into many art forms, including the Beijing opera. There is, he suggests, an inherent receptivity to abstract principles in the way Chinese art was perceived, so that the abstract painters haven't simply borrowed western models, they have integrated western ideas with Chinese sensibilities.
He points to Yu Youhan as an exemplar. "The work here is actually his last abstract painting. He no longer does abstraction. But I prefer it to the work he went on to do. As a teacher, he influenced many younger artists." Among them was Ding Yi, whose intricate grid-based composition is vibrant and brilliant. Li points out that some commentators have compared his work to Australian Aboriginal art. The same might apply to Cheng Qiang's frenetic patterning. Qiu Deshu's Fission, an all-over colour composition, is an absolutely beautiful piece of work, and the painter has used not just pigment but torn tissue.
Apart from the gentle realism of He Duoling, typical of many Chinese painters who adapted western methods of representational oil painting, a broad, satirical, sometimes strident and cruel humour is also fairly typical. It is there in the work of Yiu Minjun, Liu Dahong, Guo Wei and in Xiang Jing's striking, unsettling sculpture. Sculptors Chen Xiaodan and Shi Hui, on the other hand, display understated wit and a sophisticated feeling for images and form in their work.
One contemporary Chinese artist whose work has been seen in depth in Ireland, thanks to the Ormeau Baths and Douglas Hyde galleries, is Yang Fudong, who makes films - and is passionately committed to film. They can be of feature length and draw on both Oriental and European art house traditions. Their superb visual quality, air of introspection and subdued lyricism amount to a distinctive personal style. His most recent film, showing at IMMA is, Li says: "A very open story. It's set in a beautiful landscape, a mountain where lovers visit. Each pair of lovers buys a lock, locks it to a wall of locks, and throws away the key to symbolise their union.
Of course it's also a sad place, because people go there and commit suicide as well." Several participating artists work in photography. Xiang Liqing's composite images of apartment blocks are as relevant in an increasingly densely populated Dublin as they are in China. Hong Hao's amazing visual inventories of the things surrounding an individual, various functional objects and, separately, an array of books, a small library, are portraits of an absent person. That is, they offer clues to their possessor. There is broad humour in Zhao Bandi's series of staged photographs utilising a Chinese icon, the panda, and in Yang Zhenzhong's clever double-screen video, in a way a fantasy of omnipotence.
Dreaming... offers us a hugely engaging, exceptionally energetic display of artistic diversity, ingenuity and skill.
Having worked his way around the whole exhibition, Li remarks that his favourite shows are those featuring work by a single artist or, perhaps, just two to four artists whose work enjoys some significant relationship. His point is that such diverse group shows of individual examples cannot present an accurate or comprehensive view of what is going on. They are more a snapshot. But this show, all the same, is very good of its kind and is long overdue in Ireland. See it and enjoy it.
Dreaming of the Dragon's Nation: Contemporary Art from China is at IMMA until Feb 6, 2005 (01-6129900) www.modernart.ie