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"Orientally Yours"
Karen Tam, "Orientally Yours," installation, 2007. Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge.
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"Nothing!"
Kan Xuan, "Nothing!," installation view, 2012. Photo by Hua Jin, Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Courtesy of the artist.
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"Yellow Signal-Position"
Wang Jianwei, "Yellow Signal-Position," installation view, 2012. Photo by Hua Jin, Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
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"Yellow Signal-Position"
Wang Jianwei, "Yellow Signal-Position," installation view, Centre A, Vancouver, 2012.
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"Enjoy Depend on Yourself"
Gu Xiong, "Enjoy Depend on Yourself," c-print, edition of 5, 2005, 60” X 30”.
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"Undergo"
Gu Xiong, "Undergo," c-print, 2005, 60" X 40". Courtesy Diane Farris Gallery, Vancouver.
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Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gall
"Panda"
Ken Lum, "Panda," lacquer, acrylic sheet, aluminum, 2007. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, gift of the artist.
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"Orientally Yours"
Karen Tam, "Orientally Yours," installation, 2007. Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge.
ACROSS THE CULTURAL DIVIDE
Chinese contemporary art and the Canadian effect
By Portia Priegert
There’s been a boom in Chinese contemporary art over the last decade, with new galleries, record auction sales and blockbuster exhibitions in the West. The effect has been so large and fast-paced that you would expect the trend to have an influence on the work and the market for Canadian artists of Chinese heritage. “It’s an interesting question,” says Keith Wallace, editor of Yishu, an English-language journal on contemporary Chinese art. “It would seem obvious, that there would be some interaction. But there isn’t a huge influence, that I know of.”
The different art systems in China and Canada are part of the reason, says Wallace, former director of the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. The Chinese system is more market-driven, and public galleries with permanent collections — a vital part of the Canadian system — don’t exist in China. And much of the Chinese writing about contemporary art is promotional rather than analytical. There’s also a limit there on freedom of expression. China is more open than it used to be, but culture remains subject to state control, and the imprisonment of Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist who ran afoul of authorities for criticizing China’s human rights record, is well known to the Canadian art community.
Artists on either side of the ocean typically respond differently to issues in their immediate environment. Certainly, the Chinese avant-garde was influenced by Western art developments after the death of Mao in 1976. Artists engaged in what was called “reading fever” — devouring Western books and magazines that pointed to new approaches as they shifted from socialist realism to explore photography, installation and digital media. But the themes they explore typically remain tied to their experiences — ideas such as the rise of consumerism and the loss of tradition amid escalating change since the end of the Cultural Revolution. Wallace says some artists also create work about individuality within a collective society. “It’s hard to explain,” he says. “It’s quite complex. A lot of it is almost existential, in a sense, in terms of the individual, and a kind of loneliness in being an individual.”
Canadian artists of Chinese heritage interpret culture in widely ranging styles. Vancouver artist Ken Lum, who has exhibited in Canada since the late 1970s, engages conceptually with the structures and systems of everyday life. Karen Tam, a younger Montreal-based artist, has attracted attention across Western Canada for the Chinese restaurants she recreates within galleries to explore histories of cultural exchange in communities.
Henry Tsang, a professor at Emily Carr University whose work considers community and identity under globalization, cautions against coming to quick conclusions. “It’s hard to generalize, as there are significant differences between Chinese-Canadians who were born here, who immigrated here (and at what age and generation), from where, what kind of practice they have, and what relationship they have with China, whether it’s a romanticized one, for example fixed-in-time Chinatowns, or as exotic or foreign,” says Tsang. “But clearly they wouldn’t be seen as part of the new China art movements, and wouldn’t be able to promote themselves as such unless they came out of Mainland China relatively recently.”
Still, some artists do bridge the cultural divide. One is Gu Xiong, a University of British Columbia professor who emigrated from China in 1989. His 2010 installation at the UBC Museum of Anthropology, Becoming Rivers, uses the Fraser and Yangtze rivers as metaphors for migration, and the formation of personal identity. He’ll exhibit the work, which includes photographs, an imaginary map and a flotilla of paper boats, in China this summer. Although a broader range of art is being shown in China, he notes that restrictions remain. “If Chinese society opens more to show different works, then that would be great,” he says. “But now, so far, there are some limits, some issues you cannot touch.”
Vancouver-based artist Ho Tam was born in Hong Kong and educated in Canada, and he’s been working on publishing projects in China, including a recent book about Canadian photo-based artists. He’s also spent time researching his family’s history, but says he doesn’t know of other artists in China doing work about their roots, perhaps because the art world’s interest in identity issues has waned. “The idea of working with homeland, to a lot of people it’s already been done 10 or 20 years ago,” he says. “So I think the interest is not as great these days.”
Institutions in Vancouver have responded to the new prominence of Asian contemporary art. The Vancouver Art Gallery has organized shows by leading artists from China, including Huang Yong Ping, whose 2007 retrospective, House of Oracles, featured a monumental sculpture of a snarling tiger atop an elephant. Another important development was the 1999 establishment of Centre A, which focuses on contemporary Asian art. It’s organized exhibitions by Chinese artists, including this spring’s Yellow Signal, which features new media work by Wang Jianwei and Kan Xuan. And Vancouver-based Yishu, which bills itself as the first English-language journal about contemporary Chinese art, is marking its 10th anniversary this year by launching a Chinese-language edition for distribution in China.
Western collectors are increasingly interested in contemporary Chinese art, in part because it was a previously hidden society and the art world is always enchanted with the new. And the contemporary market’s prices have been driven higher by China’s wealthy new elite. The Economist, warning that buying Chinese art is not for the faint of heart, reported in 2011 that the Asian auction market had doubled over the two previous years, largely because of art sales. It noted that two of the world’s 10 most costly contemporary artists — Zhang Xiaogang and Zeng Fanzhi — are Chinese.
Initially, much of the discourse about contemporary Chinese art came from outside the country’s borders. “Many well-known artists and curators left China after 1989 and moved to the West,” says Wallace. “Some have now moved back to China.” Beijing, considered the country’s intellectual capital, has a large and vibrant art community — particularly in the arts district known as 798. Meanwhile, in Shanghai, a biennale that began in 1996 continues to attract major international artists as well as leading collectors.
Wallace points to a recent move in China to reclaim the country’s art discourse. “There’s often a comparison between China and the West,” he says. “A lot of intellectuals in China are trying to remove themselves from that discourse to try and to find out what their internal identity is.”
Certainly, historical complexities and the tremendous pace of recent changes make understanding the Chinese art scene challenging for outsiders. A leading Chinese curator, Gao Minglu, has cautioned against simplistic analogies with Western conceptions of modern, post-modern and contemporary art. “It might still take a while before China’s contemporary art develops into an autonomous system — the present effort of narrating, reflecting on, and comparing contemporary Chinese art against the backdrop of art around the world being the premise for its future development,” he writes. “In fact, during past decades, or even the past century, art in China has assumed its own internal logic and pattern, leading to a structure of art that is now visible.”