"Memory, the staging of the past, turns the flow of events into tableaux" - Susan Sontag 
   

20^th century China had witnessed a multitude of intense changes that go unparalleled in world history. In the brief 49 years before Communist Liberation, China was already awash in fragmented and riotous political dynamism. Six hundred years of Manchu rule had ceded to a brief Republic and subsequent warlord infighting. Western imperialism overlapped with Japanese occupation and the Nationalists, once allied with the Communist party, eventually turned against them in a bloody civil war that gave birth to the People’s Republic of China. The PRC itself has witnessed continual reinvention since its initial rise to power, and now in the year 2007 there are few obvious traces of its original form.  Yet in the wake of this chaotic history were individual lives that followed the ebb and flow of social and political commotion. Some of these lives were those of artists. 

Artists, Zhang Dali, Wang Lang, Liu Xinhua, Ren Hong, Zhang Nian, and Sheng Qi were all born just before the Cultural Revolution when China once again was redefining its social and political aspirations. China has not stopped since. The history of these individuals and the development of their artistic practice follow the same plot of the PRC’s own tumultuous story. From the early 1960s and the outset of the Cultural Revolution colored by Red Guards, re-education and a manic idealism; to Deng Xiao Ping in the early years of opening up with joint ventures, Rock and Roll, and Nietzsche; to 1989 when political change was stopped dead in its tracks and supplemented instead with Deng’s proclamation “to get rich is glorious”, and the nation heeded. Now China, one of the strongest and fastest growing economies in the world, has centered itself in the international spotlight with its entry into the WTO, the impending Olympics, the World’s Fair and more and more and more money. Today privatization, health care trouble, club kids, internet chat rooms and Starbucks more accurately describe the cultural fabric of contemporary China.   It seems that China’s momentum is unstoppable, that its constant reinvention as a nation has left its people and culture in a state of continually catching up…Continually past forwarding. 

This group of artists is of a generation that has experienced many of China’s changes firsthand.  Many of these individuals have also had the chance to witness China from afar.  From Europe, Sheng Qi and Zhang Dali have seen what the rest of the world was witnessing, a nation hastily moving from socialist bankruptcy towards economic salvation. But these artists, like much of the population in general, haven’t had the opportunity to fully process the onslaught of novelty that they have, and continue to, experience. The physical, social, and cultural transformations, even within the last few years, has caused a sense of collective amnesia where nostalgia for the way things were is continually negated by the continually new; and where traditional values are trampled underfoot as new ones have yet to fill their place.  The psychological toll of these rapid changes has yet to be seen. The accelerated move forward is just too distracting to take note of what has just been. However these artists, using diverse and almost Freudian techniques, are reflecting on the past as a way to inform the future. 

Zhang Dali, initially fleeing Beijing to Bologna after the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, returns six years later to an unrecognizable city caught in a continuous cycle of demolition and construction. Beijing’s hutong courtyards, after providing shelter for hundreds of years, are being swept aside by sledge-hammer wielding laborers. As these ancient homes disintegrate, glossy modern towers rise up from the rubble announcing the coming of a new China. Residents of these courtyard homes, powerless over their destiny, are subsequently relocated to newly built high-rises on the city’s outskirts. Disillusioned with the careless abandon of the ancient city he loves, Zhang Dali begins his Dialogue campaign.  In the covert of night he spray paints the outline of an unadorned, anonymous head on every corner and nook of the city as a way to speak with the city in transition. Zhang Dali’s head serves as a rebuttal to these rapid changes. Often found on buildings demarked for demolition or already in the process of demolition, the heads surface like voices of protest, disenchantment, and of memories released from these edifices.  

Another familiar story of China’s economic development is the re-emergence of a class system where the bottom wrung is composed of a huge, floating migrant population.  Peasants from the farmland, in effort to make post-agricultural ends meet, come to the city to find work in menial jobs. The migrant worker, ultimately responsible for building the modern facade of today’s China, however remains at the periphery of society. Often being refused social welfare, education, housing, and protection by law from abusive employees, the migrant worker adopts a new second-class identity.  Zhang Dali has cast the naked bodies of many of these workers, turned them into fiberglass simulacrum, substituted their names for numbers and by signing them claimed them as his own. These bodies, frozen in the tormented instant of their plaster bath, are distant reminders of a feudalistic past, class struggle and the transparency of these struggles. These haunting figures are also a premonition of a potentially volatile future.  

Equally as critical but with a more humorous bend is the endeavor of Wang Lang and Liu Xinhua. These two artists are involved in the ongoing and ultimately infinite task of cataloging photographic practice in late 20^th century China. Following the tumultuous trajectory of China’s modern history, focusing mainly on propaganda periodicals and newspapers but also, as China has opened up, venturing into popular publications and even advertisement imagery, the duo has decoded the patterns and methodology of China’s image construction tradition.

From the annals of China’s vast publication output Wang Lang and Liu Xinhua have culled 1000’s of pictures of identically posed people reading. They then divided this collection into further detailed subsets of: singular men reading, singular women reading, double women reading, groups of three women reading, many people reading, etc. The monotony is numbing. The formula so persistent it becomes hollow. Not until we see the full collection of these images as a dense vertical montage, instead of a sequence of images spread over time, do we realize that the compositions and postures is just a standard off-the-shelf image implement, worn thin by its constant use.

Wang Lang and Liu Xinhua have not stopped their project in the echoing redundancy of the revolutionary image but go on to investigate the tenets of photographic publication in general. Through the methods of re-photography and archiving Wang Lang and Liu Xinhua’s task ultimately looks backwards as a way to look forward. Their work highlights the deceptive nature of photography, then and now, and our continued willingness, as an audience, to be deceived by it.  

Red Memories, a new painting series by Ren Hong, draws upon a similar bank of images as those of Wang Lang and Liu Xinhua yet presents them in an altogether different way. These popular images were imprinted into the consciousness of the artist during her childhood years living in an art-workers commune. Growing up in an environment where day-to-day life was saturated in the iconic and often-celebratory worship of the state has left a great impression on the artist. In Ren Hong’s paintings the images are not the subject of critical analysis but instead they express a romance with the artists own childhood memories from that period. Ren Hong meticulously renders images of Chairman Mao, diligent proletariat or the legendary Lei Feng in lively, bright colors. It is the same images that we have seen over and over yet they are different, shattered, novel. The images are veiled in scrupulously repeated, hand painted patterns. The patterns are constructed from symbols of the same era which are repeated continuously across the canvas: flying birds, arrows, butterflies, flags, images that connote a rising up, an elation; urns, roosters, hammer and sickles, images that have traditional or political charge. The juxtaposition of these soft vibrant images overlayed with graphic kaleidoscopic patterns is hypnotic. The works simultaneously express nostalgia for an era of idealism and innocence as well as the chaotic effect of that era.  

Zhang Nian, an artist famous for his early performance pieces involving chicken eggs, also deals with paint and memories. In his egg pieces the egg represents the unknown, closed future, the promise of a life or nourishment to come. In his series Moving Memories the future is already here, the egg already hatched, and instead we look back not so much at the value of history’s formative events but at the process itself.  Zhang Nian recreates archetypal images from the 20^th century via his signature, hallucinatory painting style. From Lu Xun, the father of modern China and images of the anti-Japanese War, to the People’s Liberation Army taking over the Nationalist’s Headquarters in 1949, throughout the early years of the People’s Republic to the Cultural Revolution and Nixon’s visit; from Deng Xiaoping pronouncing the four modernizations and Jiang Qing’s trial to the Hong Kong handover and beyond, history speeds past us in symphonic explosive oils. Using a tunnel vision aesthetic, Zhang Nian’s large-scale canvases streak outwards like rays of historical light. The central focal point of the painting rapidly recedes, leaving the rest of the canvas blurred by the turbulence. While these images refer to a great past locked in the annals of time they also describe the tendency to forget. A nation is not only the sum total of its significant events but the ability of its people to hold them in their hearts and minds. Today as China deals with the onslaught of western style modernity and global capital, Zhang Nian holds up the torch to see the light of the past racing towards and away from us at the same time. 

Sheng Qi, like Zhang Nian also emerging from a performance art background, bases his paintings and photographic work around a singular theme, Tiananmen Square and the big military parades that are held there every National Day. At the center of this theme is a performance that commemorates both the turmoil of 1989 and his own personal anguish. Sheng Qi like the rest of the artists in this exhibition was raised and nurtured on an unrelenting love and trust of his country, and that country’s guardian, the People’s Liberation Army. At the same time he was led to believe that love was one of the most sacred things in life. After the incident on the square and a subsequent falling out with a romantic interest, the artist’s sense of betrayal overwhelmed him. Additionally at the end of 1989, China as a nation was mourning not only the lives lost in the square but also the sudden, oppressive end of creative and personal freedoms. It was in this atmosphere that Shen Qi chopped off his left finger, planted it in a flowerpot and left for Europe. It was almost ten years later when he returned. The reason for his return was that, as China was recovering from its charred past, he thought that his voice of resistance could now be heard. The four-finger project shows the artist’s pinky-less hand against a red background. With each picture in this series a small black and white photograph in the palm of his hand changes. They depict a diverse mix of historical and present day references: the big Military parades, portraits of soldiers, dead people, bikini-clad women, families, etc. It is the turbulent story of modern China played out in the wounded grip of this artist. The incidents that gave rise to this series still lingers. The issues haven’t yet been addressed on a formal level. Besides the artists personal commemoration it remains a vacuous, unspoken history. His paintings “Big Military Parade” also euphemistically nod to this incident. These large, gritty, paint-splashed canvas’ showing bold tanks against the Gate of Heavenly Peace omit that same anguish that precipitated the removal of his finger. Sheng Qi’s oeuvre is one that is married to the past but like Zhang Dali’s it is also a warning for the future. It is an endeavor that keeps the past forward.