Editorial Note: This essay is written for the exhibition, Art in Two Cities, which is being exhibited at re-C art space from Jan. 10-Feb. 20, 2009. Artists from Chengdu and Qingdao are paticipating in the exhibition. Beijing--based gallery director Liang Kegang is the curator.
 he urbanization since the end of the 1990s has been a watershed in this twenty years’ development of Chinese contemporary art. Essentially, contemporary art belongs to the city culture, or only the city culture has all necessary conditions for contemporary art to arise, develop and result. Therefore, the interdependence does exist between Chinese contemporary art and the city culture which have interacted as both cause and effect, and benefited from each other, as same as the relationship among literati painting, pastoral poetry, classical garden, agricultural civilization and agrestic society.
From the book "Earthbound China" written by Mr. Fei Xiaotong, the traditional Chinese society was agrestic in itself. The so-called “agrestic” meant the character of the wide rural regions where the agriculture was produced in small scale by the most Chinese resident population who were earthbound and supported by their own farmland and textile process. They started and finished their work of the day at sunrise and sunset respectively. They naturally planned their production according to the sun and the earth. In an agrestic society, everything couldn’t live without the land, the god to the farmer, and no exception would be allowed wherever they went or moved. Chinese classical art, especially the literati painting, mainly represented the mountain, water, grass, tree, flower, bird, fish and insect in common with the life style, obviously.
Cities have been in the center of the storm of modern civilization to question all sides of the “modernity”. For the sake of the contemporary art, the city culture contributes to the ecological environment. A modern city must have the characters of variation, instability, rapid and multiple expansibility, and  diverse structures of space-time. City culture consists of various parts, but they are distinguished from each other, while exchanging and infiltrating. Being the flesh and blood of the modern city culture, lively and actively, architecture, commerce, media, citizen, fashion, institution and system help the contemporary art in every way to be derived and developed. A centralized city can be powerful on words to guide the mainstream culture at the post industrial era. Vocabularies like fashion, trend, avant-guard, confusion, introspection, struggle, and disobedience, accompanied by the contemporary art, are also produced by the modern society upon its anfractuosities, high frequency and fast pace. The contemporary art, including some peripheral art forms, is not only originated from the city culture but also the vial part, to point at the centralization of geography and words on the ideology. On the other hand, the city culture has provided the contemporary art with the symbol of “currency” for spread. Art should has its own system for spread, where the symbol, signified and signifiant, can be created to be a common “currency” on the ideology through the deconstruction of the city culture, which has been infiltrated into every details of social routines to lead the fashion in an ambitious manner.
Now, China is experiencing the most intensive and extensive historic transformation which is not only from the traditional agricultural society to the modern industrial but also from the agrestic culture to the city culture. All those coexistence and metabolism of the new and old life styles, disintegration and reconstruction of the social institutions, hit and fusion of foreign culture and ours, and relapses and pains of the change on thoughts have provided  the experiments of the contemporary art with much more various and colorful living pictures and ideas than ever before. When artists found themselves in a city life which seemed noisy, disordered, unclearly and fantastic, they have got more deeper feelings about all urban diseases, as well as a new inspiration. Putting an end to the interests on agrestic culture with rurality and leisure, they moved their attention and concern over the city. Being the media of the real society to represent the characters of the day, Chinese contemporary art has to get beyond its five thousand years’ history of agriculture and improve the rapidly developing city culture in course of its own perfection. Chinese cities shaped their own culture, and from all details of our life the infiltration could be easily found, while the new idea and expression have been advised in this way at the same time. It could be concluded that the Chinese contemporary art, since the 1990s, and the specific city culture have become one and the same, existing and flourishing together as both cause and result.
Chengdu and Qingdao are two highly characteristic cities of China. One is the thriving center of the southwest China full of leisure and enjoyable night life, and the other has all reputation for an always beautiful, romantic and wealthy city by the sea in the north. Being totally unrelated, they were brought together for nothing but this exhibition named “A Tale of Two Cities”, which gathered the newly outstanding forces on contemporary art of the two cities, and attempted to favor an interaction in spite of great difference.
 The title “A Tale of Two Cities” should be for the convenient sake by the curator to borrow from the famous book of the English writer Dickens, in which “Two Cities” were London of England and Paris of France. American Scholar Li Oufan also used it to name his research on the city culture of Shanghai and Hong Kong as the Chinese “A Tale of Two Cities”. From his view, Hong Kong should be a “mirror” to Shanghai of its all legend, when there accepted a lot of immigrants from Shanghai in the 1950s and their following nostalgia for the past. There are various connections among Chinese cities. For example, “Hong Kong and Shanghai” are a group, “Jing-school, Hai-school” are a group too. Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taiwan are all international and modern while maintaining the classical Chinese culture in the blood. However, when Chengdu and Qingdao have so big difference, where shall we start? Relative to the magnificent and panoramic review, could we be an idle “roaming walkers at city” like the poet Baudelaire written by Walter Benjamin? Or like an artist who affects the city by every means of cultural behaviors. Or feel their special cultures and characters from the creation of the artists and episodes of their daily life.
Just like a human, a city has its own characters that will be represented by its resident routines, and art works as well. It is the soul. When the modernization became more and more radical, Chinese cities turned to be much more boring at the first sight and hard to tell one from another. They have the same square residential houses like bird cages, the same supermarkets or chain stores, the same lofty government buildings, the same streets full of tastelessly advertising like and stuff. Hong Kong copied New York, then Beijing and Shanghai copied Hong Kong, then other cities copied Beijing and  Shanghai, without any spirit, personality, soul or character at all. The advertisements of the real estates are often absolutely ridiculous that only the advertisement writers could invent those poetic and deceiving names when locked in the office, though the flaring signifiant only proved the lack of the signified and the breakdown of the meaning.
Compared to Chengdu of its long history and humanity, Qingdao has been more romantic and “Referism”. On the history of Qingdao, Germany and Japan once involved the management directly, swayed by Russia from the side, which concluded the very multiple dominion of imperialism. Hence, Qingdao, as a colony, was the important spot of the outdated of Qing Dynasty, and movements like “respecting Confucianism” and the “Restoration”, at the beginning of the Republic of China. Besides, it was also a window for our cultural information to spread to Europe. The dominion of imperialism for almost a century left a special political society in this modern city more open-minded, compatible and creative, which contributed to the bud of the contemporary art there. Last November, “Dream of Contemporary Art and Qingdao” directed by Liang Kegang in Beijing was just a review to the forgotten history, which clued the whole course of how the city had its art, from the modern to the contemporary, being developed. Especially on key persons and matters, it showed us a sample of a city’s art and how it handed down from generation to generation among artists when isolated from the western art world.
As for Chengdu, it has been still in the traditional enjoyment of low pressure, leisure and physical pleasure, which could be found so often in daily life as to be an absolutely great comfort of transcendent prosperity, numerous beauties and all kinds of night life. Living there, even the ordinary food, clothing,  shelter and transportation will tend to have more enclosed style of fancy delicacy, and moreover, it has been like this since a long time before. Just as once the saying said: “Don’t worry. Don’t hurry. Who could manage all not be sorry? Busy like Han Xin, and busy like Chu’s king. One died along Wu River side, not another yet even spent…” Chengdu people like to be leisurely, while being busy is ridiculed. It is their living attitude, as well as the city character, showing thoroughly through that “unoccupied”. There are so many tea houses around the streets to be the public spaces, where people meet friends, do business, promote goods, perform a show for money, chat, and “look around” when unoccupied, no less than the social and political centers. They dip the time in the tea cups, to carve out the remembrance of the “things past”. As for art, depression, gone love and decadence have been the feelings, sensations and ways of seeing that the artists there could not escape. Compared to the artists from Qingdao, they are more grassroots and “agrestic”, when playing in the style of the literati. Even though the Wenchuan violent earthquake occurred, their respects to daily life and earthly joys remained the same as before.
When those two distinct cities meets through the dialogue between their artists, will it be a great impact on both spirits? Or a home dinner party for a group of indifferent strangers? I suppose, after the appreciation of their art, it will help to find the answer.
At night, August 18, 2008,
Siji Inn, Dali
 Guan Yuda: Independent curator and art critic. Also a Professor of art department of Yunnan Univeristy.
Re-C Art Space is located in Chengdu, in between Chengdu DuFu Museum, the Provincial Museum and Institution of Poetry, Painting and Calligraphy. Re-C Art Center is composed of Re-C Non-profit Art Foundation and Re-C Art Space and aims at supporting contemporary art through different ways. For more information, please check here .
Below are part of the works by participating artists.
Cheng Jiagang, Com Field, Laser Print, 110 X 140cm, 2007
Chen Liangjie, Whisper, Oil on Canvas, 65 X 81cm, 2002
Chen Zenghui, Blue Memory, Oil on Canvas, 150 X 200cm, 2008
Shan Hong, Heaven - The Crying Mandolin, Oil on Canvas, 190 X 300, 2008
Dao Zi, Supernatural language (detail), Ink on Paper, 103 X 369cm, 2008
Diao Yi, Give Him a Shot, Acrylic on Canvas, 150 X 150cm, 2008
Du Guozhen, Warm, Screenshot of Music Cartoon, 2008
He Gong, August Water, Oil on Canvas, 180 X 150cm, 2008
He Peng, Consciousness Attitude - Lenin and Marx, Oil on Hand - made Paper, 100 X 70cm X 2, 2007
Huang Mingjin, Be [1]. Be Out 08 - 03, Oil on Canvas, 195 X 155cm, 2008
Huang Yang, Cat, Oil on Canvas, 200 X 160cm, 2008
Jiang Yongjie, Untitled, Oil on Canvas, 200 X 160cm, 2007
Jiang Guorong, 0830, Oil on Canvas, 100 X 160cm, 2008
Li Yuying, Harmonious, Oil on Canvas, 140 X 110cm, 2008
Lian Xueming, The Dish of Desire No.18, Oil on Canvas, 160 X 210cm, 2006
Liang Kegang, The Heart of Art, Electronic Video Installation, 30 secs play continuously, 2007
Liu Chuanbao, City Series - Erosion, Oil on Canvas, Installation, 180 X 150cm X 4, 2007
Liu Dahong, The Fairy Tale of Winter, Print, 74.5 X 104.5cm, 2007
Luo Fahui, Fairyland - 2008 No.1, Oil on Canvas, 240 X 300cm, 2008
Meng Hongyan, Boundless Earth, Oil on Canvas, 68 X 78cm, 2008
At the exhibition
At the exhibition
Artist: He Duolin
From left to right: Lynn Zhang and He Duolin
|
