Zheng Shentian—I Was Supposed to Go to Mexico

“I Was Supposed to Go to Mexico”, a remark by Zheng Shengtian (b. 1938) when musing on his first overseas training post in the 1980s strikes as profound now. In the 1950s and 1960s, a large number of foreign art exhibitions were showcased in China. Visits and lectures by artists belonging to the international socialist or leftist camp, such as David Siqueiros, José Venturelli, and Eugen Popa, inspired the Chinese art world to draw from a greater variety of sources. These artists experimented in an art system different from the then mainstream Soviet socialist realism, a phenomenon that prompts us to look anew at the fact that from the 1950s, Zheng Shengtian and his generation who were students at the time, began to inherit an international socialist outlook. Initially intending to go to Mexico, Zheng ended up in the United States and became a seminal figure in mediating exchanges between Chinese contemporary art and the West. However, the aspiration to “go to Mexico” has never ceased.

The imagery of the “Zócalo” (the main public square of Mexico City) is used as the driving conceptual motif for Zheng Shentian—I Was Supposed to Go to Mexico. The Zócalo of the exhibition space is composed of archival materials from Zheng’s ongoing research on the artistic dialogue between China and Mexico in the twentieth century. When considering the narrative of twentieth-century Chinese art history as divided into a binary of Western modernism and revolutionary realism, this valuable collection of documents exposes the undercurrents and tributaries between these two poles, in their historical complexity. Surrounding the Zócalo are more than 60 paintings by Zheng Shengtian dating from the 1950s when he was a student at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) in Hangzhou and later at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, followed by works from the period of the Cultural Revolution, and later works created in his time in the United States and Mexico during a government-funded overseas training program after Reform and Opening Up. The 12-meter mobile mural, Winds from Fusang, co-created by Zheng with Sun Jingbo hangs at the end of the Zócalo. Completed in 2017, seventy years after his first encounter with images of Mexican muralism as a student, this epic masterpiece depicts key individuals and events that have propelled a century of Sino-Mexican exchange on artistic ideas and expression.

Three seemingly independent narratives threads—Zheng Shengtian’s personal history, his artistic practice, and his historical research on the subject of Sino-Mexican art exchange—are juxtaposed in the same space. The viewing experience strings together the chance relationships between the personal, artistic, and epochal, bringing forth “two internationalisms”. A “socialist modernism” potential was embedded within the various literary and artistic trends that emerged during the New Democratic period of the 1950s, representing one approach to internationalism in the past century. After Reform and Opening Up, Zheng side-stepped into another approach to internationalism, the internationalization of contemporary art. “One century, two internationalisms.” Zheng’s life informs the historical narrative of three generations that have been divided and disconnected: the so-called “New China”, the “New Period” (post-Cultural Revolution), and the “New Century”. He sheds light in corners of Chinese art history that have been muddled and obscured by ideologicalized narratives, and recalibrates them within the historical fabric of lived experiences, allowing us to form opinions with a new perspective.

Zheng Shengtian—I Was Supposed to Go to Mexico is curated/produced by Long March Project, with the scholarly support from the Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thought, China Academy of Art. This text draws from the research and writings collectively undertaken by the two organizations.