CONVERSATIONS: Chris Gill on “The Chinese model” in Contemporary Art

Qiu Jie on exhibition at Shanghai Gallery of Art Feb 2010

(This is an excerpt from a lecture given by Chris Gill in Shanghai University, November 2009)

What specifically differentiates Chinese art, apart from the obvious regional specification? A major factor was Chairman Mao’s decision that “Art should serve the people,” made at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in the 1940s, which was fully implemented once the Communist Party had taken over leadership of the country. By means of this directive, Soviet style realism dominated, and those artists who had been more integrated into the world art scene prior to this, had to disregard western art practice, which was considered bourgeois. Many artists were denounced, and this became worse during the cultural revolution. Also after the Communist take over of China artists had very little exposure to anything except Soviet style work, and soviet style art education still dominates in art schools to this day. Once the reform process started by the early 80s Chinese artists gradually became aware of the various art movements and ideas that were prevalent outside the Soviet sphere. Currently artists who want to can keep close contact with the art world outside of China, mostly via the internet, and also there are numerous exchanges and travel opportunities available for Chinese artists today.
As the institutional, academic, critical and political situation is quite different to ‘the west’ a new emerging way of doing things is emerging in China, loosely referred to as “The Chinese Model.” What is the Chinese model? It is a rough, and often unspoken, collection of strategies for dealing with issues- such as lack of funding- more specifically state funding, censorship, under the table financial dealings, problems with institutions and cultural organizations, who have political directives and agendas that the artists may not want to be associated with. Also art criticism in China has many detractors- mostly due to the perceived idea that art critics now only write about artists for payment. Similarly auctions in China have become a very grey area- with a lot of talk of manipulations. What this means in effect that there is a blurring of the lines, as the contemporary art scene rapidly evolves, and the government mechanisms of control also evolve in parallel, so we have a very sophisticated escalation on both sides, which will create a very complex and in some way unscalable monolithic structure, which we call “Chinese Contemporary Art.”

(Excerpt):

由于体制，学术，评论和政治形式完全不同于“西方”，在中国出现了一种新的方式，有一个不成文的叫法：“中国模式”。那么，什么是中国模式呢？它是使用一种粗糙的，并且常常无法明白言说的行事方式来处理诸多问题，比如，资金短缺－具体来说是国家拨款的短缺，政审制度，暗中进行的金融交易，与各类机构和文化组织存在的矛盾，而这些机构和组织一般具有政治动机，令一些艺术家退避三舍。此外，在中国，艺术批评引来众多不满的声音，主要是艺术评论家被看作是为钱而写作。同样，中国的拍卖市场也是一片灰色地带，关于暗箱操作的议论很多。这意味着，界线变得越来越模糊，因为随着当代艺术的快速发展政府的控制机制也同步发展，两者同步加速度行进，纷繁错杂，将会制造一个非常巨大的一体结构，我们称之为“中国当代艺术”。

Text provided courtesy of DSL Collection and the author, Chris Gill