In recent years, a swath of creative talent has burst out across all areas of the visual arts including painting, sculpture, photography, installations and more. The infamous Ai Wei Wei is arguably the most well-known, but there are many others as well.
And not only are the creations impressive, but they are also becoming extremely valuable, fetching premium prices at international auctions and catching the attention of many a savvy investor. Closer Look features just a few of the most renowned contemporary Chinese artist on the scene today, no doubt just the tip of a very large and inspiring iceberg
YUE MINJUN – A world-class smile
It’s impossible not to recall a certain eccentric pink smile when you think about Chinese contemporary art. Yue Minjun is the artist behind his own face repeated over and over again in his paintings. He was born in 1962 in the northern Heilongjiang Province and moved to Beijing with his family when he was still a child. He studied at the Hebei Normal University and graduated in the very symbolic year of 1989. After the Tiananmen crackdown he was easily associated with the artistic movement known as Cynical Realism. His paintings carried no clear social or political message, they were ambiguous and humorous depictions of a country changing in a fast, though ironic way. At the time he had his first solo exhibition in an American gallery in 2007, Yue Minjun said in an interview with The New York Times that he was very clear about his participation in the so-called movement: “I’m actually trying to make sense of the world. There’s nothing cynical or absurd in what I do.” Of course Yue was influenced by Chinese politics and all the social changes he saw. His pink self-portrait is not just a man smiling. That smile is exaggerated to a point that you almost feel uncomfortable when you look at it. With a strong satirical touch, he did things like recreating Manet’s “Execution of Maximilian”, or putting his face on a pope’s body. A smile doesn’t always mean joy or happiness, and China has a long tradition of ambiguous faces smiling, starting from the soviet-style posters during the Cultural Revolution. Yue Minjun appropriated this idea and mixed it with his contemporary life. The result is a world-class smile, somewhere between historical references and pop culture.
CAI GUO-QIANG – Artist on fire
Though he was born in Qunzhou, Fujian Province, it was during the years he lived in Japan that Cai Guo-Qiang explored the potential of gunpowder in his creative work. It was the 1980’s and 90’s and Cai was beginning to walk the path towards the artist he was to eventually become: famous for his explosion events, many times performed in public. Nowadays based in New York, Cai Guo-Qiang is currently working on a big project with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition is a work in progress, mixing drawings, installations and a series of onsite gunpowder events, and will be on display until July 30. On a more conceptual level, Cai bases his artwork on Eastern philosophies and on daily life events. He is very well known in the US, where he has held a number of individual exhibitions. A multi-award winning artist, Cai won the Japan Cultural Design Prize in 1995 and the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999. From Taiwan to Spain and Qatar, he is admired all over the world. He is also well connected to the spheres of power in Beijing, being chosen to curate the first China Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale, in 2005, and to direct the visual and special effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. But if he is famous for his gunpowder events, it is his installations, using all sorts of large scale elements, such as cars (“Inopportune: Stage One”) and boats (“Reflection – A Gift From Iwaki”), that are among his most original and remarkable works.
ZHANG XIAOGANG – Portraying the Cultural Revolution
This Beijing-based artist is a good example of someone who looked backwards in order to move forward. Using typical family photos from the Cultural Revolution period as a starting point, Zhang Xiaogang created his own aesthetics with mainly black and white paintings, portraying unexpressive faces. The level of success he has achieved can be measured by Sotheby’s Contemporary Asian Art sale in Hong Kong last April: Zhang Xiaogang’s “Bloodline – Big Family: Big Family No.2” (1993) was acquired for US$6.69 million. Born in Yunnan province, Zhang studied at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. There’s an inherent sadness in Zhang’s works. Even when he uses colour – and he does it only seldom to highlight some elements – the images are nostalgic and reflect the concept of the annhilation of individuality in order to belong to something greater. The way Zhang Xiaogang deals with this subject is also presented in the physical similarities we can find among the different characters in his paintings. His works have a strong photographic sense. At the same time all the characters, especially the eyes of the characters, look dehumanized. Works such as “Bloodline” and “My Dream: Little General” – where you can find the gray scale of his works and the exaggerated size he gives to people’s heads – are good examples of this. In a subtle way he is making us think about social repression and conformity, something that manages to erase individual specificities – that’s why none of his figures has a name or belongs to a place. Zhang Xiaogang also uses calligraphy in his paintings, mixing different languages to communicate. And he is a sculptor who takes advantage of many materials to work on the same subjects: memory and identity.
WANG GUANGYI – Political Pop
Politics and ART often walk side by side. Sometimes they even walk together too closely, like when Mao’s regime completely controlled artistic production in China. Wang Guangyi, as many other contemporary artists have done, decided to work with these symbols, giving them a very special touch. Art critics describe Wang’s canvases as ‘political pop’. It’s easy to understand why when in the same painting you have Mao’s Little Red Book and the word ‘Porsche’. He manages to appropriate the visual icons from the Cultural Revolution and reinvent them using a colourful style that can make us think of Andy Warhol, and is certainly inspired by the 1950’s British and American pop-art movement. The method used by this artist, born in Harbin in 1975, is simple and efficient: to combine the images of communist propaganda with advertising language and techniques, and sometimes with the graphic style of comic books. Nowadays based in Beijing, Wang has explored the power of some of the most famous Western brands and products, such as Coca Cola, Chanel, Swatch, Louis Vuitton and Starbucks. His focus on these brands is also related to the way the Western capitalist model has taken over so many Chinese cities over the years. The mainland’s heavy political past and lighter consumeristic present are juxtaposed to invite the audience to reflect on globalization and also to see how China is changing by absorbing products, words and ways of thinking from different parts of the globe.
ZHANG HUAN – Body of art
Zhang Huan is arguably one of the most interesting and confronting contemporary Chinese artists. Born in Henan province in 1965, Zhang is a multitalented artist who works with installations, sculpture, photography, painting and most of all, performance. He is the man who once covered himself with honey and fish oil and went to a communal outhouse where many artists lived. He stood still while insects completely covered his body and created “12 Square Meters”, one of his most famous art works. Several hours later, he walked to a river and jumped in. He is also the man who photographed himself covered in Chinese characters wearing the meat-flecked rib cage of a recently killed animal as scud (“Meat & Text”). And the one who collected incense ash from different temples in Shanghai (the city he adopted as his home together with New York), to create a series of sculptures (“Ash Head”) and paintings. Life, death, spiritualism and religion often cross the path of this conceptual artist, but Zhang has a tendency to show his naked body, and inflict pain on it, as a way of expressing himself. One of the most famous images he gave us was when he lay his naked body on a block of ice, at MoMA PS1, in New York. Zhang is a very wealthy man thanks to his artwork. He is admired in the US and in Shanghai, and has a factory studio with more than 100 employees. Though he studied classical painting, it was only when he understood he could use his body as a medium that he found his own language. But that doesn’t mean Zhang’s only intention is to shock the audience. In fact, he avoids violence and he never lectures in public. He simply makes us curious about what he’s trying to say and about himself. Ultimately, everyone is free to draw their own conclusions.
ZHANG DALI – Life upside-down
It was one simple idea that rocketed Zhang Dali to the heights of the art scene. He was interested in the massive Chinese migration inside the country, and wanted to give a voice to the millions of anonymous poor people who travel from the countryside to the big cities looking for a better life. So in 2003 he decided to start portraying migrant workers in life-size resin sculptures presenting various postures. Over three years Zhang, born in Harbin in 1963, created 100 sculptures. He used some of them to create his most well known work: “Chinese Offspring”. The resin bodies are usually hung upside down and all have a different number, the author’s signature and the work’s title carved on them. But why upside-down? Because Zhang wants to express uncertainty, vulnerability and a certain level of entrapment – they had no choice but leave their hometowns and try to improve their lives somewhere else. For Zhang, also a Beijing-based artist, this faceless crowd is the movement that is really changing China today. And paradoxically the one about which no one wants to talk. After he graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts & Design, the artist started working with graffiti. He would look for buildings about to disappear in Beijing, scheduled for demolition, and start carving and spraying their walls. This kind of urban art soon evolved to greater levels. Zhang Dali also has an almost-historian role. His never-ending project “A Second History” consists of locating images in Chinese archives and researching their history. He also aims to uncover the role of photography in state propaganda during Mao Tse-tung’s regime. His work has already been shown at the New York MoMA.
FANG LIJUN – Lost youth
Art critics used to say Fang Lijun’s paintings portrayed the gloomy perception that Chinese youth had of the future, after 1989 and the Tiananmen incidents. As previously mentioned, the Cynical Realism movement emerged at this time and Fang was the so-called leader. Some artists choose an idea, others choose an expression, a color, a theme. Fang, born in Hebei in 1965, chose a head. The figure of a bald-headed man is recurrent in his works; only the situation where we find this anonymous character changes, as does his expression. But there’s something that is always there: a kind of apathy, a mixture of confusion, rebellion and despair that is hard to describe. Fang Lijun’s work encapsulates the disillusionment of China’s new generations. Using his bald-headed protagonist and a vast number of colors, the artist who is nowadays based in Beijing, goes from realistic painting to more alternative and contemporary forms such as comic style. He prints his works on a large scale, recovering part of the ancient Asian practice of woodblock printing – a process of carving a ‘negative’ image onto a panel, coating the surface in ink, and impressing the image onto paper – but also evoking styles reminiscent of European church ceiling paintings, like in the piece “30th of May”.
By replicating all his characters as if they were only one, Fang Lijun is saying something important about the way individuality is viewed in China. And many people are listening to him.
ZENG FANZHI – A matter of expression
Zeng Fanzhi’s paintings were previously considered different from those of his peers in that they are not political, but psychological. This is still true, but one should not forget that any art can have many interpretations and that Zeng himself was clearly political when he created “Tiananmen”, a work in which he used one of the most symbolic places in China together with the iconic portrait of chairman Mao Zedong. Born in Wuhan in 1964, Zeng Fanzhi is one of the most famous and prominent contemporary Chinese artists. He graduated from Hubei Academy of Fine Arts and during his student years he had already started to develop his style, very much influenced by German Expressionism. One can easily recognize some similarities between Zeng’s ‘Hospital’ series, dated from this early period, and Max Beckmann’s paintings (even if Beckmann used to refuse the expressionist label). Early in Zeng’s career, Beckmann was definitely one of his favourite artists. In the ‘Hospital’ series, Zeng explores the relationship between patients and doctors, and today it is still one of his most famous artistic works. But it was in the 1990’s, when he began his ‘Mask’ series that Zeng found his real path to fame. Contrasting with the anger and violence we feel when we look at the bloody tones of ‘Hospital’, Zeng’s ‘Mask’ paintings strike us with the same intensity and psychological tension, but through apathy. The series of people with unrealistically big hands, wearing white masks and facing the audience make his work instantly recognizable. In more recent years Zeng has painted landscapes and his brush strokes have become softer in his use of colour, searching for a more realistic approach. And collectors still love him as much as they always have.
