Yue Minjun at the 798 art district of Beijing, the trademark of Chinese contemporary art.
It was a pleasure for me to see the New Art from China Exhibition at the Saatchi gallery. It reminded me the 798 art district I visited a year ago in Beijing. Chinese contemporary art is easily accessible. I think because it summarizes so well Western contemporary art in its attempts to adapt it to the Chinese culture. A benefit of cross cultural dialogue is that only relatively accessible, understandable language is replicated. You lose in the process some refinements of the original artistic vocabulary of course but you also gain a common basis for new evolutions. I’m not sure the Chinese contemporary art discovered its own aesthetical identity though, maybe it doesn’t need any more in a globalized art world…
Some argue Chinese art is poor because of expression censure. I wonder then how it can be so valued in the art industry. Maybe it is because contemporary art is meaningless anyway and thus compatible with censured creativity, or maybe it is because art is so encoded, inexplicit that subversive creations can be tolerated. Not all artistic expression is political of course and you might also think there is enough space left for creation. Those questions are not Chinese specific but should be applied to the entire contemporary art production.
Whatever the answer, the exhibition of the Saatchi Gallery is a concentrate of creativity, craftwork mastery and diverse artistic means applied from a constrained Chinese perspective.
My favorites:
- Zeng Fanzhi, This Land Is So Rich In Beauty 2 , because of the expressiveness and dynamism of his brush marks.
- Li Songsong, This Is How We Talk Politics. I like his way to paint the mass media distortions, the result is aesthetically very pleasing
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