Shanghai is an
exploding city. The sounds of construction clang, roar and rage 24 hours a
day, as old Shanghai, with its dirty, chaotic lanes and alleys is razed to
make way for wave upon wave of postmodern protruberances, a high-rise utopia
to house its burgeoning population – around 20 million at present, and set
to soar.
In October, when I visited Shanghai, the shock headline in a local newspaper
was that growth had slowed in China to 9.1 percent. That this unimaginable
figure might actually represent economic deceleration is one of many
statistics about the country at which one is induced to shake one’s head in
disbelief. Yet this furious race for modernity, the impatient clamouring for
progress and change, is the background against which artists work in
Shanghai – the bafflingly swift metamorphosis of the art scene mirroring the
headlong changes in the city.
The scene in Shanghai – which, despite all the breathless talk in the West
of the explosion of Chinese art, is fairly small – clings on to its own
corner of the old city. A clump of handsome, slightly crumbling old
warehouses and factories built in the pre-war days when French, American and
British business interests dominated, has been colonised by a tenacious
group of artists and dealers. They moved here a year ago, after another
warehouse complex, in a 1930s former granary in West Suzhou Road, was
demolished; but neither is the long-term future of their new home, 50
Moganshan Street, assured. The place is a disturbing admixture of the high
art scene and brutal poverty, where workers toil in small, noisy print
factories alongside fashionably austere warehouse spaces on a grand scale
that only the Larry Gagosians of this world could aspire to in Europe or the
US.
Artists such as Davide Quadrio, an Italian long-term resident of the city,
who runs a not-for-profit space called BizArt, here perform a delicate dance
with the city authorities. It is a complex web of negotiations that is
partly to do with what can and cannot pass the censors’ gaze, though this,
according to Quadrio, is a gradually decreasing problem: ‘Pieces that were
censored three or four years ago are no longer,’ he says. ‘You play with the
limits and the government lets you play.’ Much more of a problem than
censorship, he says, is the dearth of economic structures for establishing
forums for art outside the system of state-run museums. BizArt, for
instance, is set up as a wholly owned Chinese company (its money-earning
branch, the biz in the art, sells services such as exhibition and catalogue
design, which helps fund its events, along with support from foreign
agencies including the British Council and Arts Council England). This
set-up ‘made BizArt a commercial enterprise in the eyes of the Chinese
authorities, which eased the inherent tensions in our mission and allowed us
to survive financially,’ Quadrio wrote in his essay in ‘BizArt: A Failed Art
Center’ (published by BizArt, September 2004). ‘We are aware that BizArt is
always under control, and our exhibitions and other activities are checked
directly or indirectly by the authorities, as we want to maintain open
contact with the police and the Cultural Bureau.’ But, he adds: ‘The more or
less silent approval by the local authorities does not amount to genuine
cooperation. The Chinese government does not grant any financial support to
us and virtually only allows us the freedom to operate.’
Independence from government is still crucial, he believes. Though he has
been invited to work directly with the authorities on an official space,
‘The time is not ready to take such a risk’. A decade ago it would have
seemed unimaginable even to be considering such a dilemma. According to
Quadrio, what could reasonably be described as a contemporary art movement
(in the freest possible sense, that of a number of loosely linked
practitioners finding a context in which to operate and, at times,
cooperate) emerged in the wake of the ‘China/Avant-garde’ show in Beijing in
1989. At first this operated almost entirely underground – artists showed to
their colleagues in temporary spaces or studios, gradually gaining
confidence and currency through the decade. Shanghainese artist Xu Zhen has
written: ‘In a period of time from 1997 to the end of 1999 the young artists
in Shanghai were greatly enthusiastic though no galleries and museums would
invite them to display their work. Their future was unclear, but they were
confident that they would rise to fame one day and it was only a matter of
time. They were working hard to improve the artistic environment in
Shanghai, which was more important to them than individual success ... They
were more united than artists in Beijing. Though they had different ways of
working they were friends with each other and shared the same ideal of
promoting art.’
The turning point in Shanghai was a show called ‘Art For Sale’, in 1999,
organised by a group of young artists and shut down after two days by the
authorities for containing ‘pornography’. It gained prominence in the media
(though it is worth pointing out that Xu decries the lack of engagement of
art critics in China with contemporary art: ‘I really have no idea what they
are doing now. I just know what they’re doing has nothing to do with the
young artists in Shanghai,’ while noting that ‘the [state-controlled] media
are interested in modern art because they believe it would make them
fashionable and promote the circulation’). Other shows followed and, despite
the short life of ‘Art For Sale’, contemporary art did start to gain
acceptance by the authorities, as evinced by, in 2000, a Shanghai Biennale
(the third) that dared to flirt with the avant-garde.
The scene began to transform ‘from an era of guerrillas to the era of a
regular army’, as artist Qiu Zhijie has put it. Xu: ‘Many artists in
Shanghai and other cities of China rose to fame overnight. They were offered
a lot of invitations to biennales and other exhibitions ... In 1998, artists
had a revolutionary enthusiasm for their work, but after 2000, they played
by the rules, which was more secure and promising.’ There was also, in 2000,
an almighty scandal that most of the artistic community in Shanghai would
rather not remember. Li Liang, the urbane owner of a Moganshan Street
gallery, Eastlink, put on the uncompromisingly titled show ‘Fuck Off’, as
part of an unofficial Biennale fringe. It famously included Zhu Yu’s
photographic document of a performance work, that performance being the
consumption of a baby. The show was shut down immediately and some believe
the cause of contemporary Shanghainese art was damaged with the authorities.
The work certainly still stings in official quarters. When the organisers of
the Liverpool Biennial, which is forging links with its Shanghai
counterpart, visited the city recently, the head of the Cultural Bureau was
keen to hear their views on ‘eating babies’.
In October 2004, the Shanghai Biennale was once again in full swing. In the
generous but not especially sympathetic spaces of the Shanghai Art Museum
(housed in the 1930s former racing club in Fuxing Park) contemporary work by
east-Asian artists sat alongside work from big-hitters from Latin and North
America – Cindy Sherman, Bill Viola, Jeff Wall et al. The strapline of the
biennale was ‘Techniques of the Visible’ or, in Mandarin, ‘yingxiang
shengcun’ – a more freighted phrase than its English counterpart. Ying
suggests projection, shadow, imitation; xiang appearance, outward form. The
terms are often used together to describe video or digital art, but it has
philosophical overtones that have a distant Western counterpart in Plato’s
cave. In crude terms, it means that the Shanghai Biennale showed a large
proportion of video, DVD, film and photography – media that currently
dominate the attention of artists, naturally perhaps, in a country where
technological advance gallops apace.
These new media and techniques have marked, according to Quadrio, ‘a huge
revolution in terms of creativity’, who believes they are used ‘in a more
effective way than in Europe. There isn’t such a reverence for technology,
or a notion that “I shouldn’t get too close to a machine because I am an
artist,”’ he suggests. Work such as that by Yang Fudong bears this analysis
out. His offering in the Biennale was part of a collaborative project, by
Ladder to Heaven Video Group, with artists Chen Xiaoyun from Hangzhou, Cao
Fei from Guangzhou and Jiang Zhi from Shenzhen; their work was a combination
of mysterious, densely
knit and interrelated film pieces.
A small but important thread in the Biennale was work labouring under the
title of the Yanchuan County Paper-Cut Research Project. Eight months of
field-work in rural communities in the inland county of Yanchuan had
documented art of a markedly low-tech form – the folk-art technique of
cutting complex and often startlingly beautiful shapes from red paper:
animals, nameless creatures, abstract shapes. It was among the most
beguiling art in the Biennale, and hints at, perhaps, future dilemmas and
choices for the artists of Shanghai. As art and artists career forwards into
a future of hyper-modernity, perhaps one day they will take pause to absorb
their surroundings, and indeed the past (into which they are, after all, so
thoroughly imbued via a still highly traditional art-college training) – and
take care not to erase them as thoroughly as the city authorities will
doubtless erase the vestiges of the old Shanghai.
Charlotte Higgins is the arts correspondent of the Guardian