“3 Parallel Artworlds: 100 Art Things from Chinese Modern History” is the culmination of a year-long project, and reflects a decades-long process of inquiry and exploration.

The concept of “three parallel artworlds” is in essence a comparative framework through which we examine three forms of art production of the past century, grounded in China's pre-modern world, in China's Socialist world, and in the contemporary global capitalist world. This framework seeks to delineate the major forms of art practices that inform the Chinese cultural imagination today. It takes the position that China's ideological divide of the past century does not mean separate “Chinas,” just alternative positions on the project of modernity. Having taken a stake on both sides of the Cold War, Greater China today continues to face problems generated by both capitalist democracy and socialist idealism. At the same time, civilizational China has not been totally erased from memory, as China's robust visual art practices happily demonstrate. The “three artworlds” reflects a view of art that does not privilege the dominant modern trends, but ruminates on Chinese art production of the past “long century,” crossing between ideologies and historical styles in the process.

The idea of “three parallel artworlds,” which challenges the paradigm of chronological art historical time in the terrain of Chinese art, evolved out of discussions initiated in the intellectual environs of the China Art Academy in Hangzhou. Its first manifestation was in a lecture I presented to graduate students at the academy, where I am a visiting professor in the Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thought. The lecture examined the status of the “art thing” within three different art systems, and reflected critical art interests that have driven cultural projects I have developed over the years in association with Professor Gao Shiming, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thought at CAA. Professor Johan Hartle of the University of Amsterdam, a visiting professor at CAA who co-authored with me the conceptual essay in this book, made subsequent contributions that were key to working out a schema of institutional critique. This schema was further developed in discussions with Prof. Gao. It was Gao Shiming who first proposed the creation of a selection of 100 artworks, or “art things,” to be constructed around the “three artworlds” concept.

The year 2014 was to be the 30th anniversary of the establishment of Hanart TZ Gallery, and as a marker of this event I made available Hanart's standing collection of modern and contemporary Chinese art, assembled over a period of four decades, as the resource from which the selection of 100 “art things” could be drawn. (In due course, the “Hanart 100,” as this selection is now known, will be given as a gift to the Hong Kong public as a resource for research and education). It was also Gao Shiming who brought into the curatorial process advanced students of the Institute in a team led by the young curator Liu Tian. Thus the year-long “Hanart 100” project was born.

A major exhibition, “Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies,” was launched in Hong Kong in January 2014, and its narrative interpretations of the “Hanart 100” collection represented the public introduction of the “three artworlds” framework. The curation of the exhibition was developed around a set of themes collaboratively identified in discussions by Gao Shiming, myself and advanced graduate students at CAA. These themes were articulated in a verse-form text written by Gao Shiming reflecting personal as well as historical and collective experiences evoked by these works. The exhibition was accompanied by a major symposium which brought together some of the most distinguished and creative minds in the fields of art, art history and cultural studies from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Europe and the United States, for two days of presentations and panel discussions. The present book incorporates, in an extended form, a selection of the papers delivered at the symposium, which constitute explorations, responses and critiques around the “three artworlds” theoretical framework.

As explored in detail in the opening essay, the “three artworlds” framework is critical of the segmentation of history because it creates hierarchies of power. We now know the privileged moment of the modern future does not represent universal achievement, although it certainly channels passions in directions that often reduce local historical knowledge, erase memories and scramble cultural sensibilities. By looking at the principal aesthetic endeavors in Chinese society and asking what recent cultural forms have shaped our lives for good or bad, we may be able to recover the defining artistic forms of the modern era and legitimize significant articulations that have been marginalized. Apart from a comparative study of the institutional structure of these three artworlds, the critical focus here is on what art does within their respective sociopolitical contexts. Principal questions asked of each of the three worlds are: How does an artwork “go to work,” so to speak? What does the “art thing” of the art world do to the “everyday things” of the world? Where is the proper place for the “art thing” to be seen, to be held in custody?

These speculative views are for me directly related to art as personal experience, as art should be for any of us engaged in the field. A personal trajectory, as presented below, may offer a better appreciation of the thinking presented here.

 

A Life in Three Parallel Worlds

 

Two divergent paths for the project of modernity, one Socialist and one Capitalist (and both making hegemonic claim to the future of the world) were put into sharp focus by the Cold War. Straddling either side of this war, modern China has played both the bad guy and the good, depending on one's stance. These two worlds were contemporaneous for more than four decades and, arguably, are still running parallel. The story about one is incomplete without the other.

Growing up baffled and unhappy about the world around me was how I came to art. Refugees of the Communist Revolution, my parents feared and resented Communism, a feeling shared by most immigrants arriving in Hong Kong. In youth my impression of politics was an echo chamber of rumors about purges and ideological movements that rumbled and clattered forward like an enormous machine propelled by inscrutable, sinister forces. The only concrete link I had with the reality of these politics was the weekly relief parcels I helped my family pack to ease the plight of Mainland relatives during the great famine, a dire result of Mao's Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s.

Although I am still grateful to the Irish Jesuit Brothers who accounted for the first eight years of my early schooling at Hong Kong's La Salle College, during my teenage years I was in a constant state of eschatological terror. Fear of the perpetual darkness of hell and the hopeless task of sorting out sins venial and mortal left me in despair. The uncompromising monorail of Christian historical eschatology was also made concrete for a schoolboy through the endless tunnel of school exams. It eventually dawned on me that the two terrors I found myself caught between—one political and revolutionary, the other religious and eschatological—were profoundly linked, and that the relentless race of modernity that plunges man into the euphoric anticipation of the future is propelled by a similar ideological engine. For the idealistic youths of my day, the contemporaneous counterculture rebellion in the United States and Mao's Cultural Revolution presented two seemingly irreconcilable choices, both emerging from the heart of the Cold War to challenge the political economic system of the state, both idealistically exhilarating, and each existing on either side of the ideological divide. And yet the celebration of either of these “liberation movements” left a query: What would happen to those who didn't want to be, or—in America's case—could not afford to be, liberated? What about the socio-economic forms and historical knowledge that the program of liberation leaves behind? How does one deal with the remainder of historical progress, as the “bad” past does not ever wholly disappear, even if its physical traces are erased? I began to be curious about China's remaining traditional classicists and philologists, and wondered why, in the span of one generation, the revered learnings of the Confucian order suddenly became irrelevant, and even scorned? During university holidays I attended lectures by master Chen Zhanquan (Chan Cham-chuen) and master Feng Kanghou (Fung Hong-hou), and in later years I followed the teachings of Professor Su Wenzhuo (So Man-jock). It was then when I began to catch glimpses of the shrouded constellations of a magnificent world order.

We now see that neither movement arrived at what it intended: the logic of capital had the better of them both, evidenced by the neo-liberal boom in the United States and China's plunge into state-sponsored capitalism. The American self-help culture and ecological turn of the flower power revolution inadvertently transformed Fordist management in the 1980s and helped pave the way for the neo-liberal boom of the 1990s: while Mao prepared China for the consumer age by stripping peasants of heritage, social bonds and time-worn habits, and transforming them into alienated workers hungry with desire. A brave new world means every naked being needs to re-supply themselves afresh with new goods. As such, there appears to be a quirky subterranean collusion between the two worlds.

The exhilaration and terror of the re-making of China in the past century throws up perplexing issues about art-making. The new generation of Chinese societies in Hong Kong and Taiwan shared the counterculture wave that rippled from the capitalist West, with fine art indicating the way of change by charging forward with a succession of superseding art movements. In Mainland China, on the other hand, successive political “struggles” and “movements” radically transformed the nation in every aspect of society. Comparing the visual cultures of the two worlds shows that the experimental social forms and public displays of ideology in China were no less radical than that of any art movement of the capitalist West. These two historical waves, one in artistic practice and the other in social practice, manifest two paths of modern avant-gardism.

Two alternative projects of modernity propel China towards a glorified, projected future with no indigenous precedent. There is a subtext, however, which is the hierarchical claim to legitimacy, firmly lodged within the early colonial parameters of “progress” that forms the foundation of the power structure of modern imperialism. Through directing the course of “progress,” Western imperialism creates its most secure and lasting legacy by laying claim to its ownership of history and, by implication, to the arbitration of legitimacy. Here, the Communist revolution has ironically succeeded where the colonizing efforts of the Jesuit missionaries and militarized European traders, arriving on China's shores since the Ming dynasty in the sixteenth century, had failed: This is the willing incorporation of China into the historical and ideological narrative of the West, thereby compromising, however unwittingly, China's historical imagination and its own cultural intuition.

The dominant art platform today is defined by the capitalist global world, which sets the parameters for reading all other types of art production, including those that retreat to the periphery. Relative to this is the idea of obsolescence in art which has been ingrained in the modern imagination, with an implication of the progressive exigency of the “new.” How this “new” becomes credible has long been contested in Asia, since the power of legitimation is largely determined in the West, with its well-developed structure of institution and discourse, accompanied by long shadows of the capitalist market that shade the entire field of art. The Socialist era, until so recently a shining example of modern idealism, has been excluded from the global modern narrative of art. Then again there is art that does not ascribe to the “new,” or insist on adapting to the times according to its own schedule. I am speaking here of traditional art practice, ink-and-brush painting and calligraphy in particular, which has come back with a vengeance—a fact noticed by the capitalist world only as it takes the art market by storm.

Nothing captures the radical shifts in cultural paradigms and the imagination of the world better than the field of art. The restructuring of aesthetic sensibilities is integral to the creation of the modern person. China's recent explosive proliferation of cultural institutions both private and public reflects the urgency of giving institutional shape to the dramatic changes in aesthetic sensibility and capturing changes in the structure of desire—both being ways of relating to the material world and community. If “aesthetics is ethics,” as Wittgenstein flatly stated, China's current field of art might well represent the latest laboratory for ethics and new social-political life.

The most painful part of the project of modernity has been the destruction of China's past, culturally and materially. This was completed in our lifetime as a systematic political program. For most of the century, “progress” was figuratively depicted as a removal of the hindrance of China's civilizational past. Symbolically, the great encircling wall of Beijing was painstakingly pulled down by 1960: three years for the outer wall, seven years for the inner wall. The conflagration of the Cultural Revolution and the slash-and-burn construction boom of recent decades need no elaboration. Significantly, the erasure of China's material culture has been synchronized with the state's ideological program. One example of the subtle shift of China's new historical imagination makes the point: the People's Republic is the first regime in all of Chinese history to forego its own claim to history and adopt instead a foreign religious-political calendar, so the 65th year of the present regime is now officially the 2014th year of Jesus Christ.

The re-making of the Chinese person, from language to desires to his imagination of history and future, is now complete. This is the legacy of China's century of revolutions, inspired by the civilizational shift towards European Enlightenment. Today, it should be evident that the outcome of China's Enlightenment liberation means to be liberated into a foreign country. Tagore came to China in 1924, in time to remind May Fourth activists of the value of their own culture and to warn against the dangers of the modern nation-state, which he so astutely observed in the rising militarism of Japan. He was promptly snubbed and thus a promising link of Sino-Indian intellectual exchange was broken.

Today the time is ripe for China to be “de-Enlightened.” Revaluation of the heroic path of modern revolution is imminent. At such a juncture, reconnecting with our neighbors, especially the Indian intellectual world, to ponder the wisdom bred out of other paths to modernity—such as India's long struggle against colonialism—would be strategically important.

For more than a century, the now ex-British colony of Hong Kong has been the grand stadium for witnessing China's cataclysmic epic of civilizational change. For the Hong Kong natives, the colonial world was certainly another country, but as a realm caught between two warring political ideologies, a foreign colony also offered respite. In the old world, dissenting literati escaped from political society to “mountain retreats” and “hermit retreats.” In modern China, the “mountain retreat” was found ironically in the British colony of Hong Kong. Hong Kong has served as a repository of the residue of the historical master narrative. It has been a field of negotiation, an in-between place that deals with the remainder of China's neat political agenda of modernity. On the other hand, the success of colonial modernity, with its logic of exploitative commerce and hierarchical institutions in every field, brings home the intense awareness that the center of the world is elsewhere. Being modern and elsewhere at the same time might have sparked the eschatological terror of my youth.

The untidy business of subjugating native intransigence to colonial modernity is the lesson to be taken from the Hong Kong experience. In retrospect, one recognizes that the leftover of the master narrative, the “outside” of ideology, is what defines Hong Kong's identity and supplies colonialist capitalism's expansionary appetite. For this reason, the more radically China tries to wrestle its claim on modernity by plunging forward, the more radically it compromises its ability to affirm itself. This is because, in so doing, it would have eradicated the most viable “outside” that, potentially, could supply an alternative to the colonial project of capitalist modernity: its own historical past.

Although compromised by the submission to modernity's flawed universalism, the significance of China's herculean efforts in self-affirmation through a long century of revolution rises above any ideological failures. History will take its own time to fully digest the meaning and complications implied by the entanglement of the struggle for national sovereignty, traditional civilizational ideals and desire for modern progress. From the angle of artistic production, the ongoing research project of “3 Parallel Artworlds” takes the sketch of three parallel worlds to inspect this complicated era. There are other unidentified factors in force. There will always be residuals and “outsides,” and the secret anarchist buried within each of us should be glad that the “world at large”—the Chinese call it jianghu, “rivers and lakes,” referring to uncharted self-regulating social orders beyond the limit of official governance—can never be fully absorbed by any monolithic interpretative order.

The crumbling of a major civilization's edifice that accompanied the enterprise of re-inventing China over this century is the big story for art. How this has come to pass, what is the significance of the loss and how to make sense of the radical transformation will be a lesson not just for China but for the modern world at large. If China has attempted, at incalculable costs, the most extreme interpretations of the two major propositions of modernity, we should recognize this as a price paid towards a greater understanding of the trajectories of history, both past and future—not just for one nation but for all humanity.

 

Back to the Book: Parameters of Discussion

 

The twelve core essays in this book are divided into two sections, called 3 Parallel Artworlds (Part I) and 3 Parallel Artworlds (Part II), respectively. In addition to the introductory text by Johan Hartle and myself, Part I contains essays that examine the three artworlds framework and make comparisons with other art historical experiences: Boris Groys transposes it to an Eastern European context, showing with humor the absurdity inherent in bringing together the ideologies of capitalism and socialism; Eugene Wang selects a historical signifier—the iconic ox form—and traces its trajectories through various time frames; Liu Tian examines and explicates the interpretative approach of the curatorial team to the three parallel artworlds to show how they materialize in the planning and execution of the exhibition “Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies,” and also explains the conceptual thinking behind the exhibition structure and the many permutations across intellectual and cultural boundaries.

Part II comprises essays that respond to, critique and personalize the cultural and political implications of the framework: John Rajchman and Lu Xinghua both perceptively question the present framework and propose alternative takes that would allow an understanding of art that transgresses contextual boundaries; Hammad Nasar ruminates on issues facing divided peoples in South and West Asia who unwittingly had modernity inflicted upon them; Qiu Zhijie illustrates how the three worlds interject and intersect in the life of an artist; Huang Sun Quan and May Bo Ching highlight the question of political and personal identities in the existential context of belonging; Wang Xiaoming examines the recent history of Chinese “revolution” and the “avant-garde” to illustrate the complexities of the “Chinese modern;” and finally, a short text by Bei Dao presents a chronicle of his thoughts in response to discussions during the “Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies” symposium, opening up further questions and trajectories. Concluding the discourses is Gao Shiming's Afterword, an engaging reflection in which he reiterates positions explored in the book, and envisions from the impasse of the contemporary the coming of a new, socially productive art.

A third section of the book, called “Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies,” chronicles the selection of the eponymous exhibition, presenting the 100 art things in a narrative framework echoing Gao Shiming's thematic verses. The entries for the individual artworks were written by myself and incorporate personal, historical and aesthetic considerations and points of view. These texts are another articulation of the idiosyncratic nature of selection and interpretation.

A fourth and final section, “8 Hanart Projects” serves as a kind of case study of selected projects (encompassing events, experiments, actions, exhibitions and discourses) spanning the period from 1989 to the present time, which I initiated in various collaborations with scholars, artists and thinkers from Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, India, Europe and the United States, and which may help to demonstrate the dynamics and dialectics of the “three parallel artworlds” theory within a contemporary context of practice and application.

 

Winter, the 65th Year of the People's Republic Hong Kong

“3 Parallel Artworlds: 100 Art Things from Chinese Modern History” is the culmination of a year-long project, and reflects a decades-long process of inquiry and exploration.

The concept of “three parallel artworlds” is in essence a comparative framework through which we examine three forms of art production of the past century, grounded in China's pre-modern world, in China's Socialist world, and in the contemporary global capitalist world. This framework seeks to delineate the major forms of art practices that inform the Chinese cultural imagination today. It takes the position that China's ideological divide of the past century does not mean separate “Chinas,” just alternative positions on the project of modernity. Having taken a stake on both sides of the Cold War, Greater China today continues to face problems generated by both capitalist democracy and socialist idealism. At the same time, civilizational China has not been totally erased from memory, as China's robust visual art practices happily demonstrate. The “three artworlds” reflects a view of art that does not privilege the dominant modern trends, but ruminates on Chinese art production of the past “long century,” crossing between ideologies and historical styles in the process.

The idea of “three parallel artworlds,” which challenges the paradigm of chronological art historical time in the terrain of Chinese art, evolved out of discussions initiated in the intellectual environs of the China Art Academy in Hangzhou. Its first manifestation was in a lecture I presented to graduate students at the academy, where I am a visiting professor in the Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thought. The lecture examined the status of the “art thing” within three different art systems, and reflected critical art interests that have driven cultural projects I have developed over the years in association with Professor Gao Shiming, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thought at CAA. Professor Johan Hartle of the University of Amsterdam, a visiting professor at CAA who co-authored with me the conceptual essay in this book, made subsequent contributions that were key to working out a schema of institutional critique. This schema was further developed in discussions with Prof. Gao. It was Gao Shiming who first proposed the creation of a selection of 100 artworks, or “art things,” to be constructed around the “three artworlds” concept.

The year 2014 was to be the 30th anniversary of the establishment of Hanart TZ Gallery, and as a marker of this event I made available Hanart's standing collection of modern and contemporary Chinese art, assembled over a period of four decades, as the resource from which the selection of 100 “art things” could be drawn. (In due course, the “Hanart 100,” as this selection is now known, will be given as a gift to the Hong Kong public as a resource for research and education). It was also Gao Shiming who brought into the curatorial process advanced students of the Institute in a team led by the young curator Liu Tian. Thus the year-long “Hanart 100” project was born.

A major exhibition, “Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies,” was launched in Hong Kong in January 2014, and its narrative interpretations of the “Hanart 100” collection represented the public introduction of the “three artworlds” framework. The curation of the exhibition was developed around a set of themes collaboratively identified in discussions by Gao Shiming, myself and advanced graduate students at CAA. These themes were articulated in a verse-form text written by Gao Shiming reflecting personal as well as historical and collective experiences evoked by these works. The exhibition was accompanied by a major symposium which brought together some of the most distinguished and creative minds in the fields of art, art history and cultural studies from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Europe and the United States, for two days of presentations and panel discussions. The present book incorporates, in an extended form, a selection of the papers delivered at the symposium, which constitute explorations, responses and critiques around the “three artworlds” theoretical framework.

As explored in detail in the opening essay, the “three artworlds” framework is critical of the segmentation of history because it creates hierarchies of power. We now know the privileged moment of the modern future does not represent universal achievement, although it certainly channels passions in directions that often reduce local historical knowledge, erase memories and scramble cultural sensibilities. By looking at the principal aesthetic endeavors in Chinese society and asking what recent cultural forms have shaped our lives for good or bad, we may be able to recover the defining artistic forms of the modern era and legitimize significant articulations that have been marginalized. Apart from a comparative study of the institutional structure of these three artworlds, the critical focus here is on what art does within their respective sociopolitical contexts. Principal questions asked of each of the three worlds are: How does an artwork “go to work,” so to speak? What does the “art thing” of the art world do to the “everyday things” of the world? Where is the proper place for the “art thing” to be seen, to be held in custody?

These speculative views are for me directly related to art as personal experience, as art should be for any of us engaged in the field. A personal trajectory, as presented below, may offer a better appreciation of the thinking presented here.

 

A Life in Three Parallel Worlds

 

Two divergent paths for the project of modernity, one Socialist and one Capitalist (and both making hegemonic claim to the future of the world) were put into sharp focus by the Cold War. Straddling either side of this war, modern China has played both the bad guy and the good, depending on one's stance. These two worlds were contemporaneous for more than four decades and, arguably, are still running parallel. The story about one is incomplete without the other.

Growing up baffled and unhappy about the world around me was how I came to art. Refugees of the Communist Revolution, my parents feared and resented Communism, a feeling shared by most immigrants arriving in Hong Kong. In youth my impression of politics was an echo chamber of rumors about purges and ideological movements that rumbled and clattered forward like an enormous machine propelled by inscrutable, sinister forces. The only concrete link I had with the reality of these politics was the weekly relief parcels I helped my family pack to ease the plight of Mainland relatives during the great famine, a dire result of Mao's Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s.

Although I am still grateful to the Irish Jesuit Brothers who accounted for the first eight years of my early schooling at Hong Kong's La Salle College, during my teenage years I was in a constant state of eschatological terror. Fear of the perpetual darkness of hell and the hopeless task of sorting out sins venial and mortal left me in despair. The uncompromising monorail of Christian historical eschatology was also made concrete for a schoolboy through the endless tunnel of school exams. It eventually dawned on me that the two terrors I found myself caught between—one political and revolutionary, the other religious and eschatological—were profoundly linked, and that the relentless race of modernity that plunges man into the euphoric anticipation of the future is propelled by a similar ideological engine. For the idealistic youths of my day, the contemporaneous counterculture rebellion in the United States and Mao's Cultural Revolution presented two seemingly irreconcilable choices, both emerging from the heart of the Cold War to challenge the political economic system of the state, both idealistically exhilarating, and each existing on either side of the ideological divide. And yet the celebration of either of these “liberation movements” left a query: What would happen to those who didn't want to be, or—in America's case—could not afford to be, liberated? What about the socio-economic forms and historical knowledge that the program of liberation leaves behind? How does one deal with the remainder of historical progress, as the “bad” past does not ever wholly disappear, even if its physical traces are erased? I began to be curious about China's remaining traditional classicists and philologists, and wondered why, in the span of one generation, the revered learnings of the Confucian order suddenly became irrelevant, and even scorned? During university holidays I attended lectures by master Chen Zhanquan (Chan Cham-chuen) and master Feng Kanghou (Fung Hong-hou), and in later years I followed the teachings of Professor Su Wenzhuo (So Man-jock). It was then when I began to catch glimpses of the shrouded constellations of a magnificent world order.

We now see that neither movement arrived at what it intended: the logic of capital had the better of them both, evidenced by the neo-liberal boom in the United States and China's plunge into state-sponsored capitalism. The American self-help culture and ecological turn of the flower power revolution inadvertently transformed Fordist management in the 1980s and helped pave the way for the neo-liberal boom of the 1990s: while Mao prepared China for the consumer age by stripping peasants of heritage, social bonds and time-worn habits, and transforming them into alienated workers hungry with desire. A brave new world means every naked being needs to re-supply themselves afresh with new goods. As such, there appears to be a quirky subterranean collusion between the two worlds.

The exhilaration and terror of the re-making of China in the past century throws up perplexing issues about art-making. The new generation of Chinese societies in Hong Kong and Taiwan shared the counterculture wave that rippled from the capitalist West, with fine art indicating the way of change by charging forward with a succession of superseding art movements. In Mainland China, on the other hand, successive political “struggles” and “movements” radically transformed the nation in every aspect of society. Comparing the visual cultures of the two worlds shows that the experimental social forms and public displays of ideology in China were no less radical than that of any art movement of the capitalist West. These two historical waves, one in artistic practice and the other in social practice, manifest two paths of modern avant-gardism.

Two alternative projects of modernity propel China towards a glorified, projected future with no indigenous precedent. There is a subtext, however, which is the hierarchical claim to legitimacy, firmly lodged within the early colonial parameters of “progress” that forms the foundation of the power structure of modern imperialism. Through directing the course of “progress,” Western imperialism creates its most secure and lasting legacy by laying claim to its ownership of history and, by implication, to the arbitration of legitimacy. Here, the Communist revolution has ironically succeeded where the colonizing efforts of the Jesuit missionaries and militarized European traders, arriving on China's shores since the Ming dynasty in the sixteenth century, had failed: This is the willing incorporation of China into the historical and ideological narrative of the West, thereby compromising, however unwittingly, China's historical imagination and its own cultural intuition.

The dominant art platform today is defined by the capitalist global world, which sets the parameters for reading all other types of art production, including those that retreat to the periphery. Relative to this is the idea of obsolescence in art which has been ingrained in the modern imagination, with an implication of the progressive exigency of the “new.” How this “new” becomes credible has long been contested in Asia, since the power of legitimation is largely determined in the West, with its well-developed structure of institution and discourse, accompanied by long shadows of the capitalist market that shade the entire field of art. The Socialist era, until so recently a shining example of modern idealism, has been excluded from the global modern narrative of art. Then again there is art that does not ascribe to the “new,” or insist on adapting to the times according to its own schedule. I am speaking here of traditional art practice, ink-and-brush painting and calligraphy in particular, which has come back with a vengeance—a fact noticed by the capitalist world only as it takes the art market by storm.

Nothing captures the radical shifts in cultural paradigms and the imagination of the world better than the field of art. The restructuring of aesthetic sensibilities is integral to the creation of the modern person. China's recent explosive proliferation of cultural institutions both private and public reflects the urgency of giving institutional shape to the dramatic changes in aesthetic sensibility and capturing changes in the structure of desire—both being ways of relating to the material world and community. If “aesthetics is ethics,” as Wittgenstein flatly stated, China's current field of art might well represent the latest laboratory for ethics and new social-political life.

The most painful part of the project of modernity has been the destruction of China's past, culturally and materially. This was completed in our lifetime as a systematic political program. For most of the century, “progress” was figuratively depicted as a removal of the hindrance of China's civilizational past. Symbolically, the great encircling wall of Beijing was painstakingly pulled down by 1960: three years for the outer wall, seven years for the inner wall. The conflagration of the Cultural Revolution and the slash-and-burn construction boom of recent decades need no elaboration. Significantly, the erasure of China's material culture has been synchronized with the state's ideological program. One example of the subtle shift of China's new historical imagination makes the point: the People's Republic is the first regime in all of Chinese history to forego its own claim to history and adopt instead a foreign religious-political calendar, so the 65th year of the present regime is now officially the 2014th year of Jesus Christ.

The re-making of the Chinese person, from language to desires to his imagination of history and future, is now complete. This is the legacy of China's century of revolutions, inspired by the civilizational shift towards European Enlightenment. Today, it should be evident that the outcome of China's Enlightenment liberation means to be liberated into a foreign country. Tagore came to China in 1924, in time to remind May Fourth activists of the value of their own culture and to warn against the dangers of the modern nation-state, which he so astutely observed in the rising militarism of Japan. He was promptly snubbed and thus a promising link of Sino-Indian intellectual exchange was broken.

Today the time is ripe for China to be “de-Enlightened.” Revaluation of the heroic path of modern revolution is imminent. At such a juncture, reconnecting with our neighbors, especially the Indian intellectual world, to ponder the wisdom bred out of other paths to modernity—such as India's long struggle against colonialism—would be strategically important.

For more than a century, the now ex-British colony of Hong Kong has been the grand stadium for witnessing China's cataclysmic epic of civilizational change. For the Hong Kong natives, the colonial world was certainly another country, but as a realm caught between two warring political ideologies, a foreign colony also offered respite. In the old world, dissenting literati escaped from political society to “mountain retreats” and “hermit retreats.” In modern China, the “mountain retreat” was found ironically in the British colony of Hong Kong. Hong Kong has served as a repository of the residue of the historical master narrative. It has been a field of negotiation, an in-between place that deals with the remainder of China's neat political agenda of modernity. On the other hand, the success of colonial modernity, with its logic of exploitative commerce and hierarchical institutions in every field, brings home the intense awareness that the center of the world is elsewhere. Being modern and elsewhere at the same time might have sparked the eschatological terror of my youth.

The untidy business of subjugating native intransigence to colonial modernity is the lesson to be taken from the Hong Kong experience. In retrospect, one recognizes that the leftover of the master narrative, the “outside” of ideology, is what defines Hong Kong's identity and supplies colonialist capitalism's expansionary appetite. For this reason, the more radically China tries to wrestle its claim on modernity by plunging forward, the more radically it compromises its ability to affirm itself. This is because, in so doing, it would have eradicated the most viable “outside” that, potentially, could supply an alternative to the colonial project of capitalist modernity: its own historical past.

Although compromised by the submission to modernity's flawed universalism, the significance of China's herculean efforts in self-affirmation through a long century of revolution rises above any ideological failures. History will take its own time to fully digest the meaning and complications implied by the entanglement of the struggle for national sovereignty, traditional civilizational ideals and desire for modern progress. From the angle of artistic production, the ongoing research project of “3 Parallel Artworlds” takes the sketch of three parallel worlds to inspect this complicated era. There are other unidentified factors in force. There will always be residuals and “outsides,” and the secret anarchist buried within each of us should be glad that the “world at large”—the Chinese call it jianghu, “rivers and lakes,” referring to uncharted self-regulating social orders beyond the limit of official governance—can never be fully absorbed by any monolithic interpretative order.

The crumbling of a major civilization's edifice that accompanied the enterprise of re-inventing China over this century is the big story for art. How this has come to pass, what is the significance of the loss and how to make sense of the radical transformation will be a lesson not just for China but for the modern world at large. If China has attempted, at incalculable costs, the most extreme interpretations of the two major propositions of modernity, we should recognize this as a price paid towards a greater understanding of the trajectories of history, both past and future—not just for one nation but for all humanity.

 

Back to the Book: Parameters of Discussion

 

The twelve core essays in this book are divided into two sections, called 3 Parallel Artworlds (Part I) and 3 Parallel Artworlds (Part II), respectively. In addition to the introductory text by Johan Hartle and myself, Part I contains essays that examine the three artworlds framework and make comparisons with other art historical experiences: Boris Groys transposes it to an Eastern European context, showing with humor the absurdity inherent in bringing together the ideologies of capitalism and socialism; Eugene Wang selects a historical signifier—the iconic ox form—and traces its trajectories through various time frames; Liu Tian examines and explicates the interpretative approach of the curatorial team to the three parallel artworlds to show how they materialize in the planning and execution of the exhibition “Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies,” and also explains the conceptual thinking behind the exhibition structure and the many permutations across intellectual and cultural boundaries.

Part II comprises essays that respond to, critique and personalize the cultural and political implications of the framework: John Rajchman and Lu Xinghua both perceptively question the present framework and propose alternative takes that would allow an understanding of art that transgresses contextual boundaries; Hammad Nasar ruminates on issues facing divided peoples in South and West Asia who unwittingly had modernity inflicted upon them; Qiu Zhijie illustrates how the three worlds interject and intersect in the life of an artist; Huang Sun Quan and May Bo Ching highlight the question of political and personal identities in the existential context of belonging; Wang Xiaoming examines the recent history of Chinese “revolution” and the “avant-garde” to illustrate the complexities of the “Chinese modern;” and finally, a short text by Bei Dao presents a chronicle of his thoughts in response to discussions during the “Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies” symposium, opening up further questions and trajectories. Concluding the discourses is Gao Shiming's Afterword, an engaging reflection in which he reiterates positions explored in the book, and envisions from the impasse of the contemporary the coming of a new, socially productive art.

A third section of the book, called “Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies,” chronicles the selection of the eponymous exhibition, presenting the 100 art things in a narrative framework echoing Gao Shiming's thematic verses. The entries for the individual artworks were written by myself and incorporate personal, historical and aesthetic considerations and points of view. These texts are another articulation of the idiosyncratic nature of selection and interpretation.

A fourth and final section, “8 Hanart Projects” serves as a kind of case study of selected projects (encompassing events, experiments, actions, exhibitions and discourses) spanning the period from 1989 to the present time, which I initiated in various collaborations with scholars, artists and thinkers from Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, India, Europe and the United States, and which may help to demonstrate the dynamics and dialectics of the “three parallel artworlds” theory within a contemporary context of practice and application.

 

Winter, the 65th Year of the People's Republic Hong Kong