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| By Achille Bonita Oliva |
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Editorial Note: "A Gift to Marco Polo", a special exhibition of the 53th Venice Biennale, hosted by Venice International University, Institutions of Chinart and Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, will open on 3 June, 2009, in Venice, Italy. The opening reception was held on 9 May in Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai. Gong Mingguang, curator Lv Peng, artist Wu Shanzhuan and Ye Fang attended the reception. The following article is written by another curator Achille Bonita Oliva. With a description of Chinese contemporary art scene in Beijing and Shanghai, Achille Bonita Oliva expressed his idea on this cross-cultural exhibition.
 ou reach Beijing under a geodesic dome, not a Buckminster Fuller structure but layers of smog that turns the sun into a yellow veil. Under the Beijing sky, an intense and broad vitality pulsates through the horror vacui of Tiananmen Square and the large new thoroughfares that lead to the outskirts. Seventeen years have gone by since my first trip to China, when I was searching for avant-garde artists to bring to the West for the first time, to the 1993 Venice Biennale, beyond the Great Wall. I find the City of Heavenly Tranquillity in great expansion under an incessant daily and nightly strife. Everything is in expansion in China, multiplied by an unimaginable and disproportionate quantity, that produces surprising quality. Here, man is a modular entity and cross-eyed at the same time, bringing about tirelessness and discipline, consumerism and tradition, wild capitalism in the south and cooperative statism in the north. But  everything now converges on the big cities. There is a deep cleft with the countryside where you still witness a rural way of life that eludes any programme for renewal. Renewal requires the introduction of western technology, that needs first to be assimilated, chewed, digested and regurgitated following a Confucian pragmatism that guarantees autonomy and refutes the cultural submission of the Chinese people. In the meantime we witness something unique in the world after 5.000 years: the geography of the Heavenly Empire corresponds to the present Chinese territory. There is no distinction between the centre and the outskirts in the Imperial City. Labour and residential neighbourhoods are efficiently built, plant and old factories are converted. This is where you find Dashanzi, Art District 798, a post industrial complex brimming with Chinese and foreign galleries, all with a taste for the avant-garde, from the Italian Arte Continua and Marella to Xin Dong Cheng, the German Urs Meile and the Koreans Arario and Ium. 798 has now become the model for a new district, Liquor Factory, another suburban conglomerate bearing a number, where the artistic life (galleries, restaurants, pubs and shops) of the new generations is developing. The Academy of Fine Arts has a university degree and the ambition to build a contemporary museum that should become its exhibition centre. Artists have their studios here and work under the soft but watchful eye of the state and the authorities. Guangci and his wife Xiang Jin also have their sculpture studio. She creates tranches de vie, everyday Chinese life, the latest generation on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He creates round figures reminiscent of Botero, an ironic play on the hagiographic iconography of socialist realism, the celebration of the Maoist regime now turned on its head in  intentional kitsch. The post Tiananmen generation seems hit by disenchantment, the all-too-easy acceptance of a role imposed on it by the authorities: art for art’s sake, and politics on the other hand runs life and business. A ghost hovers in every field over China: real socialism, the mimetic ability to go beyond every copyright, from clothing to art forms, the urge to quote every thing all the way to its most faithful reproduction. Artists are now popi and pop, somewhere between trans-avant-garde and American art. The Chinese critic Li Xian Ting accurately describes popi, a colloquial term from everyday life that has become a cultural concept, implying themes like shabbiness, cynicism, sarcasm and indifference. It includes artists such as Ding Yi, Liu Wei, Xu Bing, born in the sixties, who graduated in the eighties, the second generation after the cultural revolution. Having undergone continuous socio-political shocks in a country that is constantly changing, they witness the exhibition “China-avant-garde” in February 1989 in the Beijing National Gallery. This is where the attempted renewal of a generation was measured, a generation that searched for a connection with western culture, with all its implications of individual freedom. The tragic events of Tiananmen Square have blown away all hope, and hence the resulting disillusionment, as well as disappointment, indifference and a loss of ideals. All this leads to an upheaval, popi becomes political pop. The lessons of Andy Warhol and American pop art are used, but turned from iconographic celebration of consumerism into satire of the  most consecrated political image. Grotesque realism, partly inspired by the masks of Chinese theatre, turns into a more painted and conceptual representation. This includes the grotesque heads painted by Fang Lijun and the deformed parents’ faces by Liu Wei, the social visions ranging from Wang Guangyi, Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, Yu Youhan, to Lu Chunsheng, Cao Fei, Wong Xingwei, Chen Shaoxiong, Chen Xiaoyun and the tiger perforated by a thousand arrows by Cai Guo-Qiong. These images are testimonies of the attempt of a generation to come out of isolation, confront a reality in continuous transformation in order to set up a critical, playful and ironical relationship with it. It is not a coincidence that an artist such as Feng Mengbo substitutes the figures of the heroes of the Long March and the Revolution with characters from videogames, a contamination that describes the mutation and the absolute chaos, illustrated in Mao’s saying: “There is great disorder under the sky”. Beijing has all the stigmata of the Heavenly City, which retains a sense of physical distance, which is felt both inside the Forbidden city and out. Shanghai, on the other hand, represents the cosmopolitan pulsating city, where the incessant construction modifies the landscape day and night. Elegant in its Bund, with a river bank like in new York, it is all colours by night like an oriental Disneyland, at once commercial, erotic and vital. You burst into it at 350 km an hour on the high-speed metro, 7 minutes from the airport to the city. This huge metropolis (18 million inhabitants) is the birthplace of Chen Zhen, the greatest of them all and now deceased, and Yan Pei Ming, both later in the diaspora in Paris. The video artists Yang Fudong and Zhang Huan (also a performer),the sculptor Wang Du and the installation artists Hang Yong Ping and Cai Guo Qiang, literally explosive for his  use of fireworks, all passed through Shanghai, a city in constant movement that during the night at most reaches a state of drowsiness. In this city, many museums deal with the contemporary, in particular the MOCA, a private museum chaired by Samuel Kung and directed by Victoria Lu, a crystal building set in the central park. This is where the exhibition “Italy made in Art: Now” was held, an interdisciplinary cross-section of Italian creativity in various forms of artistic research. Along with the Swiss gallery Shang’ art, another original experience is that of BizArt, the only no-profit organization in China, registered as a commercial company for legal reasons that are typically Chinese, independent in practice but officially part of a government body, as everything must be in China. Funded in ’98, after the end of the exhibition entitled “Art for sale”, curated by Alexander Brandt, Xu Zhen and Yang Zhenzhong, in April ’99, BizArt was born with Davide Quadrio and Xu Zhen. Exhibitions, talks, video art, film, theatre, contemporary music, design, installations, three or four appointments every month, similarly dynamic toe vitality of a city that is growing under the sign of architectural modernity and a mocking reference to tradition. Latest news: for the 2008 Olympic Games hundreds of museums are being built all over the country. Now, in answer to the Beijing Biennale in September that of Shanghai. And now memorize these names of these young artists, they will become famous: Ai Wewei, Shi Yong, Xu Zhen, Yang Zhenzhong, Liu Wei, Liu Ding, Li Shurui, Kan Xuan, Jiang Zhi, Hu Yang, Chen Qiulin. Multimedia, but always under the protective wing of Kong Fuzi, the master, i.e. Confucius.
 This is my Chinese diary, from my trips to Beijing and Shanghai, and whose latest cultural entry is the exhibition “A Gift To Marco Polo” on the island of San Servolo in Venice. Here the circle is completed at Venice International University, whose President Umberto Vattani was the promoter of the Italian exhibition in Shanghai, with a show of Chinese artists who develop different personal aspects of contemporary Chinese art.
Zhang Xiaogang, Zhou Chunya, He Duoling, Wang Guangyi, Fang Lijun,Yue Minjun, Zhang Peili, Wu Shanzhuan, Ye Fang, artists from the latest generations who have reached an expressive autonomy, a freedom of language and a synthesis of form through the political, social and cultural events that have occurred since the nineties. It is not a coincidence that the exhibition mentions Marco Polo and the works on show are a homage to the great Italian traveller who understood and respected the Orient and its culture. The Chinese artists do the same in their dialogue with western, European and Italian art.
The iconography uses an approach that is rightly filtered by a careful analysis of media, including photography. Figurism and abstraction, decoration and ideograms are continually mixed in an approach that recalls pop art and the grotesque yet conceptual realism of their culture.
These artists also take on the cultural history of their country, making use of figurative motifs as a critical quotation and revision. Behind the paintings of the Chinese artists now lies an expressive urgency free from all ideology, thus confirming the acquisition of the value of  autonomous art. This is the starting point for the dialogue with western culture. The gift to Marco Polo is this confirmation of the mutual understanding and vision of art, although anthropologically different depending on the context, capable of asserting a creative impulse, aware even of social aspects, but free to use any linguistic form.
At the end of the first decade in the 21st century, the Chinese wall, thanks in part to these artists, is a great architectural work that stands as a testimony of the history of the Heavenly Empire, and not as a wall that hinders the circulation of ideas. Indeed, art can overcome any hindrance, ideological prejudice or official diktat and spreads its own values and overcomes any obstacle just confirming a single central one: the coexistence of differences.
Achille Bonito Oliva : a highly recognized and respected Italian contemporary art critic and curator. author of essays on mannerism, and a teacher of History of Contemporary Art at La Sapienza University in Rome. He directed the 45th Venice Biennale, and was awarded several prizes and recognitions, such as the Valentino d’Oro, an international prize for art critics. 
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