Regardless of country, everyone has daydreamed, at some point, of a life less ordinary – ‘what might have
been’ always makes for tempting speculation. This rift seems especially poignant, however, in Chinese artist
Cao Fei’s video Whose Utopia? (2006), which juxtaposes the banality of Chinese lightbulb factory workers’
lives with the vibrancy of their inner dreams and desires. The young artist transports the viewer from
documentary shots of the assembly line, with hundreds of anonymous workers, to poetic invocations of
individual worker’s fantasy lives as, for example, a rock star, a prima ballerina or even a politician. It’s a beautifully
shot and touching piece, but also a shrewd and uncomfortable reminder of the individuals slaving behind the
cheap, mass-produced objects stamped ‘Made in China’. And it’s a sign of the times – rock stars, or even art
stars, as ubiquitous now in China as they are in the West, were not part of Chairman Mao’s blueprint.
Fei’s work would have been impossible to make, both politically and artistically, in China even 25 years ago. At
twenty-nine years old, Fei is among a new generation of contemporary Chinese artists for whom Cultural
Revolution ideals loom in recent history, but whose own experiences are dominated by the perpetual, rapid
change of modern China – the industrialisation, expanding economy, opening of access to information and
growing sense of being part of the international community. China’s art scene today equally bears little
relationship to that of the early 1990s, in which artists – predominantly from the cynical realist and political pop
movements – fought against government suppression and gained huge international attention. Both the
country and the art coming from it have changed extraordinarily, but on the latter count international
perception is slow to catch up, partly owing, one suspects, to the spectacular prices – edging into the millions
– now achieved for recognisably ‘Chinese’ paintings on the blue-chip market.
“The paintings from the mid-90s have become dangerously clichéd,” says Simon Groom, curator of The Real
Thing: Contemporary Art from China, at Tate Liverpool through June, which focuses on works made since 2000.
“This continues to be what people think of as Chinese art. But actually it seems to me there is a radical shift
about every five years. Perhaps most significantly, art has gone from having a completely outwardly directed
viewpoint – fighting against something external with a lot of anger and angst – to works that are more reflective
and personal, and emotionally open in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in the China of 20 years ago.”
Anger, angst and the need to fight – these characterisations accurately sum up the mood of the cynical realist
and political pop artists, whose disillusioned and politically critical viewpoints were often executed with a dark
sense of humour. Despite the promises made in the 1980s, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s ‘opening and Yang Fudong, East of Que Village, 2007, film installation. © the artist
reform’ policy would have little impact on art until the late 1990s. Any early optimism was wiped out with the
events of Tiananmen Square in 1989, immediately after which artistic expression was increasingly regulated by
the government. In response, cynical realist artists portrayed a world of bland conformity, such as in Yue
Minjun’s paintings of men whose eyes are closed to everything around them, but whose mouths grin widely,
tacitly acknowledging their inaction.
The political pop artists combined the visual iconography of Cultural Revolution propaganda with the flat
bright kitsch of American Pop painting – a movement that, like others, was unheard of within China until the
mid-1980s, when dog-eared, faded art history texts from the West started to appear. “The first Gauguin
painting I saw was yellow where it should have been green”, says performance and multimedia artist Zhang
Huan, “but it was amazing.”
Most of the political pop practitioners were born in the 1950s or 60s, and brought up in a time when individual
thought was discouraged and material luxury was scarce. Any artistic training was strictly modelled on the grim
socialist realism brought to China from the Soviet Union – a throwback to Mao’s two trips there (his only two
trips abroad). The image of Chairman Mao was plastered anywhere and everywhere. For artists such as Wang
Guangyi and Li Shan, Mao, Red Army soldiers, comrades and committed citizens become subjects for brightly
coloured, intensely ironic paintings. “These paintings represented thinly veiled protests about not being able
to say what they wanted and not being allowed to show,” says Nicolette Kwok, owner of the London-based
Red Mansion Foundation, who first started visiting China regularly to look at art in the early 1990s. “They were
a very genuine reaction to their situation,” she adds.
Lucie Charkin, an art advisor who lived in China throughout much of that period, describes the atmosphere:
“Until the late 90s exhibitions were still being closed down. You would only hear about a show on the day it
opened, then you’d have to travel there in convoys, often at dusk, through the dusty streets of Beijing to
deserted spaces outside the third ring road.” Such exhibitions were also the platform for radical performance
artists such as Zhang Huan and the Gao Brothers – the latter were placed on a government blacklist and
unable to leave China until 2003. Xu Zhen, 8848 Minus 1.86, 2005, video and mixed media installation. © the artist
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