This article is based on a lecture given by the author at the forum held by the China Academy of Art "Century: A Proposal," Strasbourg, France, 2017.12.02

The year 1989 represents nothing less than the end of the Cold War, an ongoing, bilateral state of enmity and emergency that was first made manifest in 1918, with Woodrow Wilson's Allied Intervention policy. Twentieth-century global history cannot be discussed without first addressing this ideological divide.

Many may disagree that the Cold War has really ended, and point to the continued division of Korea, China, and the partition of other national peoples; but the Soviet experiment did close shop in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It decided to quit.

Was the end of the Cold War a triumph of capitalist democracy? Or was it the End of History? Both ideologies lay claim to a “universal liberation” of the world, and each tries to vanquish the other in the name of the other side's “iniquities.” But one thing the end of the Cold War has revealed is the way the two ideologies are in collusion with the conspiracy of History (with a capital H). What both ideologies agree upon is their commitment to the universal project of Modernity, which perceives History as a linear progression towards a teleological End. The two sides disagree only on the timetable, and their particular methodologies. This concept of History as a singular path into the future is grounded in the Greco-Christian worldview, and it is not universal to all human cultures. Nearly a century of Cold War in fact allowed the two ideologies to jointly galvanize the rest of the world in the one common Historical destiny of Modernity.

With 1989 and the collapse of Cold War confrontation, the myth of a monorail History also began to unravel. Even though in the post-1989 period capitalism has grown even more hegemonic in tandem with globalization, the world itself is no longer the same.

What has changed is the beginning of an awareness amongst globalist thinkers of the arduous task ahead of unshackling the modern person, and of liberating our future, from the mysterious force of History. During the decades leading up to 1989, the great de-colonization struggles of previously subjugated nations fought for the sovereignty of nation-states; yet it now has become clear that colonization has remained hidden all along within the sinews of the de-colonized nation-states. Subsequent decades of “post-colonial” struggles against the “violence of the episteme” still did not manage to truly de-colonize the mind.

To liberate human historical time from a hegemonic History one needs to go beyond the efforts of the “de-colonial” or the “post-colonial.” The “liberation” of History confronting the post-1989 era has a much more challenging and universal mission. The struggle must start within the heart of the West; this is where colonization of History began.

This universal task requires a radical re-examination of the modern epistemic structure on which both the myths of Enlightenment and modern science and technology are built. This is a global project that demands a radical re-examination of the roots and machinery of science and modern knowledge, calling for global collaboration of both Western and non-Western resources. The urgency of this task has been voiced in recent years through diverse warnings, including the imminent consequences of the Anthropocene, post-human repercussions of cybernetics and artificial intelligence, and other unexpected contingencies that modern technology threatens to deliver in the near future.

Since 1989, both the “post-colonial” and the “neo-colonial” have also emerged in China, although they are couched in other terms of understanding. For most of the 20th century, China believed that by way of revolutions and active pursuit of Modernity, it had broken free of both imperialism and colonialism, when in fact our revolutions also plunged China into the depth of epistemic colonization that seriously compromised its own historical culture and Indigenous knowledge. In the post-1989 era China finally underwent a transformation that paralleled international Cold War politics.

I want to illustrate this with the example of China's art scene. I was the curator of the exhibition “China's New Art Post-1989”, which opened in January 1993. This was one of the first major presentations of Chinese new art in the West.

The significance of art created between 1989 and 1993 is in its articulation of a new aesthetic sensibility that corresponded with the social-political changes in the nation when China shifted from one side of the Cold War to the other. What is interesting to note is how this transition happened almost seamlessly, betraying common ground underpinning the two competing ideologies.

The manifest ideology of the socialist state means artists are persistently engaged with the utopian project of History. In a socialist state, art does not have its own independent space in society, but rather moves with the destiny of History as articulated by the state.

On the other side, the global art world has an entirely different regime. Here, the free space of art implies a socially maintained site of transgression and critical reflection that is safely circumscribed. In practice this is an “international” space mediated by the world of international art critics and curators. For post-1989 Chinese art, experimentation with the imagination is a new freedom, but this freedom is gained by reducing its essential audience to a narrow band of professionals, and effectively removed from direct social action.

In China today, art practices that represent both sides of the Cold War continue to be maintained. At the China Academy of Art, state commissions of artwork requiring ideological vigilance continue to be officially appointed on a regular basis. At the same time, the China Academy of Art is well known for mentoring artists who produce highly original individualist artwork with global significance.

What is more significant is that the Academy has maintained the institution of traditional “literati art” throughout its entire ninety-year history. “Literati art” has a historical mode of display and connoisseurship, and maintains a separate system of apprenticeship; these features identify it as a coherent art world. In recent years many new ways of thinking have arisen from the interaction between the three parallel, independent artworlds of socialist art, global art and literati art, even though the resulting creation is now presented mainly on the dominant global platform.

What this means is that within this Academy, three different artworlds representing both sides of the Cold War as well as traditional cultural lineage continue to thrive within a single institution, even though Socialist art is much less dominant than it used to be.

The ease China demonstrates in negotiating both sides of the Cold War may be symbolized by the historical fact that, in the 1920s both the National Republican Party and the Chinese Communist Party shared headquarters under the same roof in Moscow. The end of the Cold War for China does not mean the vindication of one side over the other, but only a shift in dominance at this juncture of history.

Like the example illustrated by the China Academy of Art, the presence of three parallel ideological worlds is a reality of contemporary times. If “liberation politics” symbolizes the vision and dream of the 20th century, the new tilt of Historical destiny in 1989 towards the “liberation” of History points to a long task ahead. The world must now start to face the challenge of taking leave of “modernity.” But until new episteme and new aesthetic sensibilities of the truly “post-modern” emerge, the terms of contemporary struggle are to continue by navigating the three parallel worlds available to us.

Friends and Colleagues, I toast to 1989!

This article is based on a lecture given by the author at the forum held by the China Academy of Art "Century: A Proposal," Strasbourg, France, 2017.12.02

The year 1989 represents nothing less than the end of the Cold War, an ongoing, bilateral state of enmity and emergency that was first made manifest in 1918, with Woodrow Wilson's Allied Intervention policy. Twentieth-century global history cannot be discussed without first addressing this ideological divide.

Many may disagree that the Cold War has really ended, and point to the continued division of Korea, China, and the partition of other national peoples; but the Soviet experiment did close shop in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It decided to quit.

Was the end of the Cold War a triumph of capitalist democracy? Or was it the End of History? Both ideologies lay claim to a “universal liberation” of the world, and each tries to vanquish the other in the name of the other side's “iniquities.” But one thing the end of the Cold War has revealed is the way the two ideologies are in collusion with the conspiracy of History (with a capital H). What both ideologies agree upon is their commitment to the universal project of Modernity, which perceives History as a linear progression towards a teleological End. The two sides disagree only on the timetable, and their particular methodologies. This concept of History as a singular path into the future is grounded in the Greco-Christian worldview, and it is not universal to all human cultures. Nearly a century of Cold War in fact allowed the two ideologies to jointly galvanize the rest of the world in the one common Historical destiny of Modernity.

With 1989 and the collapse of Cold War confrontation, the myth of a monorail History also began to unravel. Even though in the post-1989 period capitalism has grown even more hegemonic in tandem with globalization, the world itself is no longer the same.

What has changed is the beginning of an awareness amongst globalist thinkers of the arduous task ahead of unshackling the modern person, and of liberating our future, from the mysterious force of History. During the decades leading up to 1989, the great de-colonization struggles of previously subjugated nations fought for the sovereignty of nation-states; yet it now has become clear that colonization has remained hidden all along within the sinews of the de-colonized nation-states. Subsequent decades of “post-colonial” struggles against the “violence of the episteme” still did not manage to truly de-colonize the mind.

To liberate human historical time from a hegemonic History one needs to go beyond the efforts of the “de-colonial” or the “post-colonial.” The “liberation” of History confronting the post-1989 era has a much more challenging and universal mission. The struggle must start within the heart of the West; this is where colonization of History began.

This universal task requires a radical re-examination of the modern epistemic structure on which both the myths of Enlightenment and modern science and technology are built. This is a global project that demands a radical re-examination of the roots and machinery of science and modern knowledge, calling for global collaboration of both Western and non-Western resources. The urgency of this task has been voiced in recent years through diverse warnings, including the imminent consequences of the Anthropocene, post-human repercussions of cybernetics and artificial intelligence, and other unexpected contingencies that modern technology threatens to deliver in the near future.

Since 1989, both the “post-colonial” and the “neo-colonial” have also emerged in China, although they are couched in other terms of understanding. For most of the 20th century, China believed that by way of revolutions and active pursuit of Modernity, it had broken free of both imperialism and colonialism, when in fact our revolutions also plunged China into the depth of epistemic colonization that seriously compromised its own historical culture and Indigenous knowledge. In the post-1989 era China finally underwent a transformation that paralleled international Cold War politics.

I want to illustrate this with the example of China's art scene. I was the curator of the exhibition “China's New Art Post-1989”, which opened in January 1993. This was one of the first major presentations of Chinese new art in the West.

The significance of art created between 1989 and 1993 is in its articulation of a new aesthetic sensibility that corresponded with the social-political changes in the nation when China shifted from one side of the Cold War to the other. What is interesting to note is how this transition happened almost seamlessly, betraying common ground underpinning the two competing ideologies.

The manifest ideology of the socialist state means artists are persistently engaged with the utopian project of History. In a socialist state, art does not have its own independent space in society, but rather moves with the destiny of History as articulated by the state.

On the other side, the global art world has an entirely different regime. Here, the free space of art implies a socially maintained site of transgression and critical reflection that is safely circumscribed. In practice this is an “international” space mediated by the world of international art critics and curators. For post-1989 Chinese art, experimentation with the imagination is a new freedom, but this freedom is gained by reducing its essential audience to a narrow band of professionals, and effectively removed from direct social action.

In China today, art practices that represent both sides of the Cold War continue to be maintained. At the China Academy of Art, state commissions of artwork requiring ideological vigilance continue to be officially appointed on a regular basis. At the same time, the China Academy of Art is well known for mentoring artists who produce highly original individualist artwork with global significance.

What is more significant is that the Academy has maintained the institution of traditional “literati art” throughout its entire ninety-year history. “Literati art” has a historical mode of display and connoisseurship, and maintains a separate system of apprenticeship; these features identify it as a coherent art world. In recent years many new ways of thinking have arisen from the interaction between the three parallel, independent artworlds of socialist art, global art and literati art, even though the resulting creation is now presented mainly on the dominant global platform.

What this means is that within this Academy, three different artworlds representing both sides of the Cold War as well as traditional cultural lineage continue to thrive within a single institution, even though Socialist art is much less dominant than it used to be.

The ease China demonstrates in negotiating both sides of the Cold War may be symbolized by the historical fact that, in the 1920s both the National Republican Party and the Chinese Communist Party shared headquarters under the same roof in Moscow. The end of the Cold War for China does not mean the vindication of one side over the other, but only a shift in dominance at this juncture of history.

Like the example illustrated by the China Academy of Art, the presence of three parallel ideological worlds is a reality of contemporary times. If “liberation politics” symbolizes the vision and dream of the 20th century, the new tilt of Historical destiny in 1989 towards the “liberation” of History points to a long task ahead. The world must now start to face the challenge of taking leave of “modernity.” But until new episteme and new aesthetic sensibilities of the truly “post-modern” emerge, the terms of contemporary struggle are to continue by navigating the three parallel worlds available to us.

Friends and Colleagues, I toast to 1989!