This exhibition presents a new vision of one of the most important theme in the Chinese avant-garde contemporary art: The Social Art. Mao once said: "Art is a political tool". 42 Chinese contemporary artists commandeer this message and illustrate through a variety of media (painting, sculpture, video, photography, installation) that Chinese society is on the move.

Participated artists:
Cang Xin • Fang Lijun • Feng Mengbo • Feng Zhengjie • Fu Zhongwang • Gao Brothers • Li Ji • Li Luming •  Li Shan • Liu Dahong • Liu Jianhua • Lu Hao • Luo Brothers • Ma Han • Ma Liuming • Mao Xuhui • Qi Zhilong • Qiu Zhijie • Shao Yinong & Mu Chen • Shi Xinning • Shu Qun • Sui Jianguo •  Tang Zhigang • Wang Guangyi • Wang Jinsong • Wang Yigang • Wang Ziwei • Wei Guangqing • Weng Fen • Wu Mingzhong • Xu Yihui • Xue Song • Yang Shaobin • Yin Zhaoyang • Yu Youhan • Yue Minjun • Zeng Fanzhi • Zhang Peili • Zhang Xiaogang • Zhang Xiaotao • Zhao Bandi • Zhong Biao • Zhu Wei

 

Born in the fifties in the United States, the influence of Pop-art gradually spread to encompass Europe in the sixties. Later it led to Sots-art in the soviet union of the seventies. In both cases, it involved the observation of popular culture and the extraction of artistic concepts. In the world of capitalism, Pop-art was confronted by consumerism and chose to display its eternal icons – like Andy Warhol's belle, Marilyn. As for Sots-art, their field of vision ranged over the last breaths of a totalitarian world where mental coercion remained firm. Sots-art therefore became a form of political mockery. At the end of the eighties, "Sots-art" spilled over the USSR's borders to develop anew in Eastern Europe and China; countries that had shared a common communist ideology for at least a half-century.

 

Chinese artists, trained in the school of social realism, were raised within the personality cult of Mao, founding leader of communist China until his death in 1976. In the eighties, Chinese artists discovered western contemporary art and set about appropriating it wholesale and reproducing, though fifty years in arrears, the great artistic movements that had taken place at a distance, from Dadaism to new realism through to symbolism. At the beginning of the nineties, after the torturous repression of the Tiananmen movement, economic reform opened the doors to modernism as well as the deep mutation of Chinese society. Along with a new generations of people completely disconnected from their own country's history, particularly recent history, a resurgence of old traditional beliefs grafted themselves onto fresh soil, that of modernisation. Vast disparity between the social classes reappeared, the market economy was discovered… never before had a country so large and so populous undergone such vast change in so short a time. It is this unprecedented and passionate experience, the transformations of this society of the past century, marked by communism, which has gradually become the subject matter from which artists find their inspiration.

 

In the nineties, contemporary Chinese art developed into several branches. In recent years, "Soc-art", a parody of socialist art and an allusion to Pop-art, has drawn-off the greatest number of artists. Basically, as with that of the former USSR, it is a kind of political mockery, beneficial to free spirits that continue to live within an authoritarian regime. The philosophical basis is identical: the relativist nihilism developed by the communists in an effort to suppress the influence of religion and the former system of order to the point of extinction. Contemporary artists looked back with a critical eye on that ideology, the game of propaganda, personality cults as well as consumer society and the new cult surrounding wealth.

 

Wang Guangyi was one of the first to launch into direct political parody. His work first appeared on the international scene during the 45^th Venice Biennale in 1993. This artist, born in a very poor region of northern China in the fifties, just before the "Great Leap Forward" and the terrible famine that claimed millions of Chinese lives, decided to revisit the propaganda posters that pervaded his childhood. However, he corrupted them through a caustic sense of irony. One would think one is viewing an original piece. They colours are as striking as those of the day, featuring that ever-present red. The figures: young workers or peasants, bursting with good health or else the luminous smiles of the faithful, convinced that the new communist society will carry them to an ideal world. But rather than brandishing a "little red book", the once ubiquitous collection of Mao's thoughts, they are rather holding aloft mobile phones or a brush in the guise of a bayonet. Within the canvas, the product labels that set Chinese people to dreaming are present: Chanel, Vuitton as well as Guerlain, creating a sudden connection with present day poster campaigns, highlighting the similarity of their effect on the spirit...

 

During the nineties, Soc-art was enriched by the rediscovery of Mao's image. The movement initially became popular and commercial through antique markets and second-hand trade, the familiar little red book and innumerable pins, posters, paintings or plaster effigies of the official portrait of Mao that had flooded through China in the fifties and sixties and were stored away during eighties. These items of propaganda, sold as souvenirs today, reappeared throughout the country's larger cities, to the point of being distributed in supermarkets with numerous recent re-editions presently circulating! Many artists found their inspiration in this situation. The eldest, like Li Shan (born in 1944) or Sui Jianguo, who's childhood and adolescence featured the national Mao craze, tend toward rendering these objects of propaganda with derision and questioning the credulity of a public faced with the government’s grand machinations. Those born at the beginning of the sixties, who were still children during the Cultural Revolution, create a more imaginary universe, like Shi Xinning, who introduces Mao to all the stars in Hollywood through an improbable trip to America. The youngest artists, born after the end of the sixties, having only a vague recollection of Maoism's final years, grew up though China's reformation and address Mao's commercialised alter ego. All of these pieces, with their omnipresent Mao, beg a dual reflection on the enormous impact that was created by such an effigy, during two distinct eras, for two distinctly different reasons, one a matter of communist propaganda and the other a consumer phenomenon linked to the capitalist system...

 

Other artists work on the representation of power. Mao Xuhui, in his deeply symbolic manner, painted a man dissolving, seated on a hard chair, head between his hands, a few weeks after the Tiananmen incident. It then gradually transformed into a pair of scissors, a symbol of power, flying, aggressing or seducing, within a once sinister frame that has gradually become more luminous. His junior, Ma Han, prefers the image of Tiananmen Square or the official buildings that surround it: the entrance to the Forbidden City or the National Assembly Building...

 

Within the bosom of soc-art, artists developed the disparate sensibilities and themes that have become their creative conduits and marks of distinction. Zhang Xiaogang, and a number of other artists born at the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties, like Qi Zhilong, make use of nostalgia in their investigation into the necessary work of memory. Others, like Yang Shaobin, evoke violence, past and present: the fierce competition in which Chinese people become embroiled as a result of their plunge into the market economy, police repression (Yang Shaobin began his career as a police officer...). Still others prefer humour, like Li Ji who introduced animals, Tang Zhigang with his children, Zhu Wei and his characters seemingly drawn from a fairy tale.

 

Younger artists, born after the end of the sixties, tend rather to deal with subjects that involve the new generation, like the cult of wealth that has in some sense replaced the earlier ideology (the Gao Brothers) as well as the fascination and excesses that are generated by consumer society (the Luo Brothers). Zhao Bandi, on the other hand, questions the impact of the Olympic Games on Chinese society...

 

Soc-art artists now utilise every form of support, an effect of globalisation, and freely invent new ones; finding inspiration in the grand Chinese tradition and blending it with modern techniques. In this way, oil on canvas inhabits the same space as the increasing number of sculptures in which Sui Jianguo excels. Photography (Weng Feng), and video art, remain present. So too with installation and hybrid techniques heavily inspired by classical methods, like the little red ceramic books by Xu Yihui, the lacquer work of the Luo Brothers and Zhu Wei's rice paper work enhanced by coloured ink...

 

Through the eyes of these artists, the spectator is able to discover an alternate view of China. One far removed from conventional clichés, including the complexity of thoughts that permeate Chinese society today: nostalgia and pain over the past, pride over regaining a measure of greatness, worry over the present competitive environment, questions about the future, the integration of China into a modern and global world... from their beginnings in the school of social realism, these Chinese artists have retained a perfect mastery over the technique of oil on canvas, precision of line and a disturbing depth in portraiture. Moreover, from the grand Chinese pictorial tradition, they have inherited the ability to translate simple emotions in a handful of lines.