Notes: Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Voices from the End of the Twentieth Century

Notes: Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Voices from the End of the Twentieth Century (hereinafter referred to as Notes) is a new chapter in the study of the history of Chinese contemporary art in the second half of the 20th century, succeeding our previous exhibition Waves and Echoes. By presenting words, notes, images, documents, archives, and works of artists, curators, and scholars, Notes surveys the trends of thinking and practices of China’s intellectual and artistic communities at the turn of the century. Upon entering the 1990s, the concepts and imagery of the end of the century and the 21st century made constant appearances in the discourses and creative works of scholars and artists of that time. On one hand, they attempted to break away from the semantic and interpretive system of the 1980s and establish a system of social reality and value that directly addressed and belonged to the 1990s. On the other hand, they perceived the arrival of the turn of the century as a significant point in time that brought them expectations as well as a sense of complexity and sorrow, caused by the shock of the market-oriented economy. 

In the exhibition, we have selected essays penned by 18 scholars, curators and artists between 1997 and 2002 and made them into 18 pamphlets for reading. The texts, most of which were published at the time of writing, have appeared in anthologies of collected works, symposium papers, newspapers, journals or personal archives. We have deliberately juxtaposed texts from the contemporary art world with those from the intellectual community, and have also presented some excerpts from these texts on the walls, forming a field of intellectual voices within the exhibition space.

At the turn of the century, the production of contemporary artworks was inextricably related to the social realities back then, revealing the social space and boundaries of that time. We have sampled works of 43 artists from the late 1990s to the beginning of the 21st century, reproducing these examples in images and textual descriptions. Thus a valuable art historical archive has come into being. In the exhibition, visitors are encouraged to pick them out of cabinets as if they were note cards and to place them on shelves surrounding the walls, where they can be freely juxtaposed and viewed. From today’s perspective, contemporary artists’ practice then was utterly lively and adventurous. Keeping up with their times, they drew keenly on various intellectual sources. Extending the ideological emancipation in the 1980s, the practice of artists was jointly driven by artistic issues and realities of the time. The conceptual practices, which had emerged from the late 1980s, had by this time developed multiple new fields, issues, and means of visual expression, and they were poised to flourish. However, the erosion of humanism by the market-oriented economy and pragmatism, a phenomenon deeply concerned the academic community, would also cast a profound impact on the transformation of the contemporary art scene in China. Such a reality impeded the space for reflection opened up by conceptual art from being further explored in depth and breadth, and leading it gradually to the crisis of self-imposed shackles and rigidity.

With these evidences of thoughts as well as notes, drafts, and artistic materials from the end of the century, we attempt to return to that specific time and space in history, where desire and hope, distress and confidence were germinating. We aim to detect the thinking processes of the protagonists of history at that time, and to critically understand the way they defined themselves and history in the past. Through these traces of reflection, we witness scholars and artists of the time retrieving, examining, and reassessing the experiences, experiments, emotions, trends, and debates of the 20th century. In this case, this exhibition also becomes a historical “notebook” that documents the existential and creative state of thinkers and practitioners at the turn of the century.