For Robert Hughes’s famous quote (“What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture”), see →
Hal Foster, “The Medium is the Market,” London Review of Books, October 9, 2008 →
Walter Robinson, “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism,” Artspace, April 3, 2014 →
Jiang Feng, “Guanyu Zhongguohua wenti de yifengxin” [A letter about the problem of Chinese painting], Meishu 12 (1979): 10–11.
Hai Yuan, “Jingti yishu shangpinghua de buzheng zhifeng” [Watch out for an incorrect tendency toward commercialization in the arts], Meishu no. 1 (1983): 42. Hai Yuan is probably a pen name and may be short for Qian Haiyuan.
Zhongguo: Bajiuhou-yishu [China: Post-’89 art], ed. Wang Lin (Hong Kong: Yishu chaoliu zazhishe, 1997), 92–93.
Zhu Qi, “Do Westerners Really Understand Chinese Avant Garde Art?,” in Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium: Chinese-art.com 1998–1999, ed. John Clark (Hong Kong: New Art Media Limited, 2000), 55–60.
The Gang of Four is described as “ultraleftist” because that is how the Chinese would have described the extreme conservatism and doctrinaire Maoism of this group. In contrast, many of the leadership figures who advocated for a more liberal—meaning more open—social, political, and cultural space in the 1980s would have been described as “right-leaning.”
Zhongguo meishuguan [NAMOC], Zhongguo meishu nianjian, 1949–1989 &leftbracket;Annual of Chinese art, 1949–1989&rightbracket; (Nanning: Guangxi meishu chubanshe, 1993), 1058–68. The shortest exhibition during this time period lasted only two days. See ibid., 1068.
The Art Market in 2014, 25–32 →. According to this report, ink painting and calligraphy represent 84 percent of the Chinese domestic fine art auction market, with oil painting and contemporary art representing 16 percent.
Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China (Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 80.
Forty-five yuan was equivalent at the time to approx. one month’s salary.
See Rauschenberg Foundation website →
The rental cost, including utilities, was about 50,000 RMB. To close the deficit in his original 150,000 RMB budget, Gao’s financing strategy included selling artwork in the show. But ultimately this plan failed, leaving him with a large unpaid debt. Gao Minglu, interview by author, New York, August 11, 2004; Kong Chang’an, interview by author, Los Angeles, August 20, 2005; Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth Century Chinese Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 152–54; and for a price list of works in the “China/Avant-Garde Exhibition,” see Tokyo Gallery archive at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong.
Francesca Dal Lago, “The Avant-Garde Has Its Moment of Glory,” Time, September 27, 1999, 98.
Cited in Norman Bryson, “Something to Do with Freedom,” in Wu Shanzhuan: Red Humour International, eds. Susan Acret and Lau Kin Wah Jaspar (Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive, 2005), 9.
Wu Shanzhuan, interview by author, Hong Kong, February 13, 2004.
Wu Shanzhuan, “Guanyu ‘dashengyi’” [On “big business”], Zhongguo meishubao 11 (1989): 2. See translation in Acret and Lau, Wu Shanzhuan, Artists’ Writings/14.
Gao Minglu, “Wu Shanzhuan’s Red Humour International Series,” in Acret and Lau, Wu Shanzhuan, 63.
Wu Shanzhuan, “Guanyu ‘dashengyi,’” 2.
See Fei Dawei, “Two-Minute Washing Cycle,” in House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective, eds. Philippe Vergne and Doryun Chong (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2005), 9; and Gao Minglu, “The ‘85 Movement,” ibid., 160, in which he cites an unpublished essay by Huang that states, “Regardless of their market price, to burn artworks is a proper way to keep their substantial value.” This incineration took place on November 23, 1986 outside an art museum in the southern Chinese city of Xiamen.
See Vergne and Chong, House of Oracles, 23.
Geng Jianyi, interview by author, Hangzhou, July 13, 2006, and confirmed by Wu Shanzhuan. See also Vergne and Chong, House of Oracles, 21. The questions on these forms started conventionally enough, asking for names, birthdates, and employment status, but gradually evolved towards an unusual curiosity, to include questions about favorite plants, animals, and people, attitudes towards work, ideological tendencies, and lifestyle.
Bryson, “Something to Do with Freedom,” 9–10.
Geremie R. Barmé, “Arrière-Pensée on an Avant-Garde: The Stars in Retrospect,” in Chang Tzong-zung, Michael Sullivan, Huang Rui, Yan Li, Ma Desheng, Ahcheng Zhong, Wang Keping, Chen Yingde, Geremie Barme, and Li Xianting, The Stars: Ten Years, 79–82 (Hong Kong: Hanart 2, 1989), 82.
Wu Shanzhuan, “Guanyu ‘dashengyi,’” 2. See also Acret and Lau, Wu Shanzhuan, Artists’ Writings/14.
Wu Shanzhuan cited in Gao Minglu, “Wu Shanzhuan’s Red Humour International Series,” 63.
Wu Shanzhuan, interviews by author, Hong Kong, December 15, 2003, and Nanjing, June 12, 2005. In the 1980s, after graduating from the Hangzhou-based Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now named alternatively the China National Academy of Art or the China Academy of Art), Wu returned to his hometown of Zhoushan (located on an island not far from Shanghai) and was assigned to and worked at a small local state-run organization called the Institute for Mass Culture, from which he received a modest salary and other benefits. Since the 1990s Wu has lived between China, Germany, and Iceland.
Wu Shanzhuan, interview by author, Hong Kong, February 13, 2004.
Wu Shanzhuan, “Alphabetical Aphorisms,” unpublished booklet. The “D” entry reads, “Debt: Wu was selling shrimps at the National Gallery [NAMOC] in the name of art. As an artist he is in debt to the shrimp seller at large.”
Wu Shanzhuan, interview by author, Hong Kong, July 5, 2005.
Bryson, “Something to Do with Freedom,” 9. In his discussion of the nature of the Chinese avant-garde, Bryson suggested that the totalitarian state voluntarily created quasi-independent areas, such as Special Economic Zones and “zones of art,” in which, by implication, emerging businessmen and artists were able to work.
Wu Shanzhuan, interview by author, Hong Kong, December 15, 2003.
In the 1980s these so-called avant-gardists were not political dissidents advocating the overthrow of the Communist Party—an interpretation that has been favored by some Western writers. This interpretation appears somewhat self-serving, projecting a Cold War perspective and a certain American triumphalism. If anything, these artists were clamoring for admission to the “center,” hence the great excitement around exhibiting inside the National Gallery, the ultimate Socialist Art Palace.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is the sole party in China and defines the political establishment, has a left wing and right wing, and many factions in between. The right wing, which held sway during the 1980s, was more liberal, and tolerated (if not advocated) debate in a more open sociopolitical space. The left wing is and was more conservative. The left wing won the internal CCP ideological struggle that was waged during the 1980s, and after Tiananmen the relatively open sociopolitical space that had emerged at that time was closed, market reforms were accelerated, and economic growth became the singular goal at the expense of political plurality. The Faustian bargain was struck, and making money became the new ideology. This a basic sense of a story that is, of course, much more complicated.
Nicholas Jose, “Notes from Underground, Beijing Art, 1985–89,” Orientations, July 1992, 8.
Martina Köppel-Yang, “The Surplus Value of Accumulation: Some Thoughts,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, December 2007, 18.
A portion of this text is based on material that originally appeared in Jane DeBevoise, Between State and Market: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Post-Mao Era (Leiden: Brill, 2014).