Art, Culture, And Cultural Criticism in Post-New China

Art, Culture, and Cultural Criticism in Post-New ChinaAuthor(s): Sheldon Hsiao-peng LuSource: New Literary History, Vol. 28, No. 1, Cultural Studies: China and the West (Winter,1997), pp. 111-133Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057404Accessed: 12/04/2010 09:08

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Art, Culture, and Cultural Criticism

in Post-New China

Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu

For Katheryn M. Linduff

A visitor in Beijing these days can easily pick up a popular weekly titled Guide to Shopping High-Quality Goods (Jingpin gouwu zhinan) from a street vendor. The newspaper offers all kinds of useful

information to Beijing consumers: car sales, new skin lotion products, latest fashion, interior design for apartments, tour packages to summer

resorts, new affordable models of washing machines, effective diet,

office rentals, "romantic connections," and so forth. Interestingly enough, a regular column of the newspaper is appropriately tided "Cultural

Consumption" (wenhua xiaofei). It features news about cultural activities

such as performances of Swan Lake by the Chinese Central Ballet Troupe and the Moscow Ballet Theatre, upcoming films in town, good books to

read, and so on. In a June 1996 issue, within "Cultural Consumption: Film and TV" (wenhua xiaofei: ying shi), there is also a subheading "Cultural Fast Food" (wenhua kuaican)} This section introduces two new

TV serials that viewers should look out for: a thirty-part program Beauty Zhao Feiyan (Meiren Zhao Feiyan, the story of a famous imperial consort in

the Han Dynasty), and a twenty-part program Bright Moon in Another

Country ( Taxiang mingyue, a tale of two mainland Chinese girls working in San Francisco's Chinatown).

At the information centers of newly built, gigantic shopping malls such as Landao, Yansha, Guiyou, and Saite?symbols of Beijing's mod ernization and

Westernization?Beijing residents can book and pur

chase tickets for a series of art performances during 1996-1997. The

China National Culture and Art Corporation (Zhongguo wenhua yishu zong gongsi) and Beijing professional performance marketing and

promotion agency offer a variety of domestic and international venues, such as Nutcracker and The White-Haired Girl by the Shanghai Ballet, Don

Quixote by the Grand Moscow Classical Ballet Theatre, Sleeping Beauty and Endangered Species by the Australian Ballet, Puccini's Turandot by the Central Opera Theatre of China, Anne-Sophie Mutter's China Tour, Yanni's China Tour, and performances by the Martha Graham Dance

New Literary History, 1997, 28: 111-133

112 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Group from America, the Toronto Dance Theatre from Canada, and Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Zubin Mehta.

As the Chinese nation is furiously modernizing itself to overtake the

postmodernity of advanced First-World societies, culture and art have now inevitably become a matter of consumption and marketing in China as well, handled by corporations and businesses. Beijing residents,

newspaper columnists, and art agencies all seem to have a rather savvy,

cavalier, and matter-of-fact attitude toward the fate and function of high culture as well as popular culture in a consumer society. This is a time

when even Mao is on sale. In the domestic market, sacred revolutionary

icons and images from the past are now up for sale just like precious

objects of traditional Chinese art, literati painting, calligraphy, and

antique furniture. The oil painting "Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan" (Mao zhuxi qu Anyuan, 1968) by Liu Chunhua, the most famous painting

of the Cultural Revolution period, was auctioned off for about a million

Chinese yuan, setting a record, in an art fair. What is at stake, then, for

the artist when art itself is a proper commodity, a "high- quality good," a

"fast food"?

In the present study, my wish is to come to terms with the "cultural

logic" of contemporary China and at the same time outline a new

tendency in Chinese cultural theory and criticism in the period after the

Tiananmen incident in 1989. Evidently, 1989 is here taken as a turning

point in China's cultural and intellectual history. In a more euphemistic

expression, Chinese historians and critics have drawn a dividing line

between what they call the "New Era" and the "post-New Era." The New

Era is the post-Mao period that begins with the Reform in the late 70s. It came to a sudden end in 1989 as a result of the Tiananmen incident.

The post-New Era witnesses the rise of consumerism, the commercial

ization of cultural production, and the expansion of the mass media and

popular culture. The populace is bombarded with the sound, images, simulacra, and messages emitted from the electronic media. The

ponderous, self-reflexive cultural critique of the "deep structure" of the

Chinese nation in the style of the 1980s is largely over. On the surface, there is a general depoliticization in both public culture and critical

discourse.

In the past several years, indigenous Chinese critics such as Wang

Ning have seized on postmodernism as an effective theory to describe

the contemporary cultural scene in China. They first noticed a Chinese

literary postmodernism, and later saw postmodernism

as a cultural force

that has permeated all spheres of life in China.2 Central to their

postmodernism debate is the tension between popular culture and elite

culture, or the relation between consumer culture and the intellectual

elite (humanists, academics). Elsewhere I too have attempted to grasp

ART, CULTURE, AND CULTURAL CRITICISM 113

the postmodern turn in contemporary Chinese social, cultural, and

intellectual life through an analysis of popular culture (pop music,

popular literature, cinema, TV serials), the public sphere, the mass

media, and the academy.3 Here, I want to revisit the postmodern theme

by looking at post-1989 avant-garde art.

Cultural theory and criticism in the post-New Era have developed in

directions radically different from previous mainstream intellectual movements. These new developments are first of all a response to the

social, political, and economic changes in China after the Tiananmen

incident; second, and perhaps even more important, they are closely related to events in the global arena, or what has been called

"transnational capitalism" or "global capitalism."4 The emergence of

contemporary Chinese cultural studies is a result of formations and

transformations at both the national and the transnational levels.

Crucially important in all of this is the position of the Chinese intellec tual or "cultural critic" amidst profound changes. What kind of new role

the intellectual may play remains to be seen.

Postmodernism and Post-1989

Chinese Avant-Garde Art

I begin by citing a well-known passage from Fredric Jameson's famous

essay "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." Commenting on a poem entitled "China" by Bob Perelman, Jameson writes:

Many things could be said about this interesting exercise in discontinuities; not

the least paradoxical is the reemergence here across these disjoined sentences of

some more unified global meaning. Indeed, insofar as this is in some curious

and secret way a political poem, it does seem to capture something of the

excitement of the immense, unfinished social experiment of the New China?

unparalleled in world history?the unexpected emergence, between the two

superpowers, of "number three," the freshness of a whole new object world

produced by human beings in some new control over their collective destiny; the

signal event, above all, of a collectivity which has become a new

"subject of

history" and which, after the long subjection of feudalism and imperialism,

again speaks in its own voice, for itself, as though for the first time.5

Here Jameson enthusiastically speaks of the appearance of "the New China" in the Cold War era that was dominated by the two superpowers.

What seems to be remarkable about China is its "social experiment," the formation of a new "collectivity," and the emergence of a new "subject of

history" upon the world scene. Yet Jameson soon informs us that the

poem which his comment refers to is very much an evacuated text. The


sentences of the poem are the poet's captions of the pictures in a book

of photographs of China. The real China in the poem is but a

representation of a representation of an absent object. The unified

global meaning of China is made of "discontinuities" and disjunctions.

Jameson was then describing the features of American postmodernist culture by analyzing the poem as one additional example of it. The "New

China" under discussion was the remotest thing from postmodernism

and late capitalism. However, the situation has changed drastically in the

post-New China in the age of global capitalism after the Cold War. What

the critic faces today is no longer merely the deconstruction of the

textual meaning of a poem about China, but the very undoing of the

Chinese historical subject. What formerly appeared to be a singular Chinese collectivity is now an ensemble of heterogeneous, discontinu

ous, and disjunctive elements, an entity that lacks a unified global

meaning. One may say that the dominant cultural logic in contemporary China is postmodernism.

One clear indication of the general cultural aura of post-New China

may be seen in its avant-garde art. In February 1989, just a few months

before the Tiananmen incident, the "China/Avant-Garde" art exhibi

tion was held in the National Art Gallery in Beijing. The show was

interrupted and temporarily closed after two artists, Tang Song and Xiao

Lu, well-connected children of army generals, fired gunshots at their

own installation so as to complete

the artwork through performance.

However, this does not mean that the avant-garde art movement

(qianwei

yishu) stopped altogether in 1989; it has developed even more vigorously ever since.6 As with New Chinese Cinema, these artworks have not been

allowed to be openly exhibited in the mainland, but they have traveled

outside China and been shown all over the word: Hong Kong, Venice,

Berlin, Sydney, Melbourne, Oxford, Barcelona, and many other cities.

The new wave of avant-garde art became first known to the outside

world in the exhibition "China's New Art: Post-1989" organized by Hanart T Z Gallery in Hong Kong, in January/February 1993. It was an

exhibition of some two hundred works by fifty-one Chinese artists. The

thematic groupings already indicated certain distinctive features and

new directions: "Political Pop," "Cynical Realism: Irreverence and Mal

aise," "The Wounded Romantic Spirit," "Emotional Bondage: Fetishism

and Sado-Masochism," "Ritual and Purgation: Endgame Art," and "In

trospection and Retreat into Formalism: New Abstract Art." These works

are characterized by playfulness, irreverence, irony, wit, cynicism, parody,

pastiche, flatness, and comic effect.

Among many other international exposures, Chinese avant-garde art

was part of the Venice Biennial Art Exhibition in 1993 and 1995. In June to September, 1995, the Spanish government sponsored the exhibition


"Chinese Avant-garde Art" (avantguardes artistiques xineses) in Barcelona,

Spain. The event features the works of some thirty Chinese artists. In

1996-97, an American exhibition tour "New Art in China: Post-1989" has been jointly organized by Hanart T Z Gallery and the American

Federation of Arts. Beginning at the University of Oregon, the artworks

will travel to the art galleries of several American cities. Finally, contem

porary Chinese art arrives in the U.S. which has been slow in responding to the Chinese avant-garde

art scene.

Li Xianting, curator, critic, and "godfather" of contemporary Chinese

avant-garde art, describes the two most prominent categories of post-89

art as "cynical realism" (wanshi xianshi zhuyi) and "political pop"

(zhengzhi bopu). Cynical realism is a roguish, irreverent travesty of the

official doctrine of "revolutionary realism" in the Mao era. It includes

the works of such artists as Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, and Wang Jingsong. Political pop gives a pop touch to revolutionary icons, and usually combines images of Mao and contemporary consumerism. The artists

under this group are Wang Guangyi, Yu Youhan, Li Shan, Feng Mengbo,

Geng Jianyi, and others. Very often, the two types mix and become

difficult to distinguish clearly. It appears to me that Chinese avant-garde art, through a skillful appropriation of the language of American pop art, is able to engage the social and political reality of post-89 China in an original, forceful, and ingenious fashion. And precisely because the

paintings have been shown outside rather than inside China, the Chinese

avant-garde adds a new face to international postmodernism. To say that the

"avant-garde" is "postmodern" may sound like an

oxymoron, for postmodernism as we know it in the West implies the

"silence of the avant-garde."7

The avant-garde has become a matter of

the historical past in the West. Its uncompromising, rebellious character has given way to the eclecticism and pastiche of postmodernism. Yet in the cross-cultural analysis

of art, it is necessary for us to change and

revise our preconceived notions of artistic and cultural categories based on the Western experience in view of the sociological formations of

Third-World, non-Western nation-states toward the end of the century. In the Chinese case, it seems to me that the avant-garde is a distinct feature of Chinese postmodernism. Due to specific social and cultural

conditions, twentieth-century Chinese art does not exactly follow the

pattern of the succession of periods and styles in Western art such as

modernism, avant-garde, and postmodernism. As Li Xianting cautions

us,

Contemporary Chinese society cannot be considered as either a completely

industrial or a post-industrial society, and so

obviously cannot have inherent in

its sociology Modernist or Post-Modernist trends in the Western sense. However,


in the decade since China once again opened up to the West, a peculiar cultural

condition has arisen in which elements and messages of a peasant society, industrial society, and post-industrial society co-exist. This does not make for a

society that can develop according to the logic of Western Modernist or Post

Modernist theories.8

Li notices that the hybridity and unevenness of Chinese modernity pose

unique problems for Chinese artists and art historians. Contemporary Chinese art does not repeat the historical sequence of premodernist, modernist, and postmodernist art in the West; but rather, it is an overlap of the premodern, the modern, the avant-garde, and the postmodern at

the same time.

Categories of post-89 Chinese art, for example, political pop and

cynical realism, may be considered "avant-garde" insofar as their experi mentation is still not tolerated by the state and official artistic doctrine.

Both its political content and artistic form are deemed subversive and

irreverent to the establishment. No public exhibition of such art is

allowed in China. It has remained a marginal oppositional discourse in

political and cultural terms.

On another sociological level, the Chinese "avant-garde" soon trans

forms itself into a "postmodern" commodity in the global cultural

economy. Painters such as Fang Lijun and Wang Guangyi have become millionaires and the nouveau riches in China. Their artworks sell well in

the international art market, and art has indeed become a profitable

good. Selling a painting at a price as high as $20,000 (which may be low

by Western standards), these painters, nicknamed "pop masters" (bopu dashi) in Chinese, are the owners of new houses, expensive cars, and

expansive studios.9

In as early (or as late) as 1985, the American Pop artist Robert

Rauschenberg held a large-scale exhibition in Beijing. Andy Warhol also

visited China and became a friend of a number of Chinese artists and art

historians such as Lin Xiaoping. Chinese artists were drawn to Pop art

and played with its style then. Yet "no one?including artists and

critics?really understood the meaning of Pop art."10 Chinese Pop art

was regarded at the time as nothing more than a pale and shallow

imitation of the original. The decisive change came in the 1990s with the

advent of global capitalism in China and the rest of the world. It is the

rapid expansion of a global consumer culture that provides the basis for

post-89 Chinese Pop art.

The salient features of China's post-New art will be evident as we look

at specific examples. Wang Jingsong's painting "Taking a Picture in

Front of Tiananmen" (1992) deserves special comment (see figure 1). One immediately notices a depthlessness in perspective, a comic and


!M>-ftfr?nfr? ?> .- - - -.^.- .^ ̂. ^..;..^....,..r.^ ,,.* .... :." ,,.; W.??

Fig. 1. Wangjingsong, "Taking a Picture in Front of Tiananmen Square." 1992. Oil on

Canvas. 125 x 185 cm. Courtesy of Hanart T Z Gallery, Hong Kong.

parodie effect in the portrayal of human figures in the foreground. It

shows a group of Chinese tourists, with one from Shanghai, as indicated

by the handbag, taking a picture in front of Tiananmen Square. A full

view of the Mao portrait hung over the Tiananmen Gatetower is eclipsed by the presence of the tourists. As one recalls, Tiananmen Square was

the place where Mao declared the founding of the People's Republic in

1949. It has also been the place where mass parades have been

organized year after year by the state. The Square has been the symbol of China's political center. Tens of millions of Chinese citizens have

dreamed of taking a picture at this hallowed place. During the Cultural

Revolution, it was customary to hold a copy of Mao's little red book as

one posed for a picture at the Square to express the sincerest devotion to the Chinese revolution. There were songs about people who traveled a long distance from other parts of China to this holy site to pay tribute to China's political center. In the photo albums of countless Chinese

families, there are well-kept pictures taken in front of the Square. Such a devotional, pious atmosphere is in fact what is depicted in Sun Zixi's

famous, monumental painting "In Front of Tiananmen" (Quanjia zhao, or "A Picture of the Whole Family"), completed in 1964. What is

required from the spectator is "a proper attitude toward the central


icon: Mao's frontal head portrait?the so-called Helmsman's Portrait?

hung on Tiananmen Gatetower in the heart of the country's symbolic center."11

In a more immediate historical context, the viewer also remembers a

tragic event from the recent past, namely what happened on the Square in spring 1989. Wang's flat, comic painting amounts to a parody of

Maoist iconography, a satire of a time-honored revolutionary tradition, a

deflation of idealism, and a sad reminder of the tragedy of 1989. It offers a critique and travesty of the oblivion of history and the commercialism

of life in post-New China. Indeed, the painting of the Tiananmen

Gatetower and the Square has become a popular genre among these

artists, and such pictures have been produced in various styles and great

quantity. Fan Lijun's series of bald, yawning, grinning, idle men against an

empty background or in a void point to the purposelessness, meaning lessness, and disorientation of everyday life in post-Tiananmen China

(see figure 2). Fang is fond of portraying a class of people commonly referred to as pizi ("hooligans"), and often described in stories of the

popular writer Wang Shuo. It is a group consisting of idle young men

and small-time business people in Chinese cities. The pictures strike the

viewer both with a sense of humor and with a profound sadness. The

"yawn" or the "howl," as aptly described by Andrew Solomon, not Edvard

Munch's existential, anguished "Scream," best reveals the post-89,

postmodern sensibility.12

ART, CULTURE, AND CULTURAL CRITICISM

Fig. 3. Wang Guangyi, "Great Criticism: Nikon." Oil on canvas.

128 x 119 cm. Courtesy of Hanart T Z Gallery, Hong Kong.

In Wang Guangyi's "Great Criticism" series, one notices a pastiche of

various symbols and icons: revolutionary workers, peasants, and soldiers

engaged in the criticism of the past as can be commonly seen in posters from the Cultural Revolution; and commercials for Nikon, Kodak, Coca

Cola, Benetton, Philips, and other commodities in the age of global

capitalism (see figure 3). The symbolic and real juxtaposition of a

residual revolutionary enthusiasm with an emergent transnational

commodification is in fact what makes up contemporary China. The

bringing together of disjoined, contradictory elements of social life is a

mark of the unfolding of a postmodern culture.

Chinese political pop in the fashion of Wang is reminiscent of Soviet

Sots Art in the 1970s, which renders a unique combination of "socialist

realism" and American pop.13 The movement consists of former Soviet

artists such as Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, most of whom


reside in New York City now. Alexander Kosolapov's pieces such as

"Lenin and Coca-Cola" and "The Project of Advertisement for Times

Square" are particularly relevant here. These pictures bring together a

portrait of Lenin and the sign Coca-Cola, and prefigure the style of some

Chinese artists. Wang Guangyi's paintings offer a Chinese variation to an

already international theme.

Yu Youhan, the Shanghai-based artist, loves to paint Mao over and

over again. In his paintings and series such as "The Waving Mao" (1990), "With Love, Whitney" (a juxtaposition of Mao and Whitney Houston,

1993), and "Mao and the People" (1995), what would be a sacred icon in

the revolutionary era is now turned into a flat image (see figure 4). In

these pictures, Mao is covered with and surrounded by colorfiil, decora

tive flower patterns which are often seen in Chinese folk art, and is

emptied of spatial and emotional depth. The same thing can be said of

Li Shan's Mao series. Sometimes Li paints a Mao portrait with a flower

growing out of his mouth (see figure 5). The poster quality in these

renderings of the "Great Leader" pokes fun at revolutionary iconogra

Fig. 4. Yu Youhan, "The Waving Mao." Acrylic on canvas.

145 x 130 cm. Courtesy of Hanart T Z Gallery, Hong Kong.


Fig. 5. Li Shan, The Rouge Series, No. 22. Acrylic on canvas. 140 x 258 cm.

Courtesy of Hanart T Z Gallery, Hong Kong.

phy and makes Mao into an object of public consumption. Indeed, "Great Consumption 1993" was the theme of the work of a group of

Chinese artists.14 The duplication of a series of images, for example,

posters of healthy babies, reminds one of such Andy Warhol series of

compositions as his Mao, Marilyn Monroe, and Campbell soup series.

Postmodern commodification has itself become the subject of represen tation in contemporary Chinese art.

Feng Mengbo's series of paintings make video games out of renminbi

(Chinese currency) and revolutionary operas and ballets of the Cultural

Revolution (see figure 6). They also engage the past in order to describe

the present His grotesque, disproportionate, "electronic" treatment of

revolutionary heroes of the "model operas" and "model ballets" in the

Cultural Revolution at once reveals a psychic distance as well as a

congenital connection between his generation and the ideals of the

communist revolution. The incongruent coexistence of an (emergent) materialism and a (fading) revolutionary ethos in Feng's art is indeed

the reality of "postsocialism" in China?the combination of capitalist economy and communist politics.

Zhang Xiaogang's family series is based on black and white pictures of

Chinese families taken in the 1960s and 1970s (see figure 7). Yet this

"photo-realism" is soon transformed into a surrealist, disturbing portrai ture of the (un) happy union of Chinese families in the Mao decade.

Expressionless faces, empty stares, uniform clothes, stiff postures, and

the absence of feelings of joy, sorrow, and anger, reveal a total lack of

individuality in the figures. Zhang's nostalgia for the bygone era and his

childhood (born 1958), is at the same time a criticism of a stifling lifestyle. Liu Wei's deliberately grotesque, distorted portraits of "Dad


Pl?liAli? ^?r?**:'s?s^^

c.


Fig. 6. Feng Mengbo, The Video Endgame Series: "Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy"

(set of four). Oil on canvas. 88 x 100 cm. Courtesy of Hanart T Z Gallery, Hong Kong.


and Mum" are an even more direct attack on the awkward and

unhealthy state of the Chinese family. The post-New aura can be also demarcated by looking at how it differs

from the artistic expressions of the New Era that preceded it. One can

think of Luo Zhongli's immensely famous oil painting "Father," pro duced in the beginning of the '80s. The frontal close-up of the rough, wrinkled, weather-beaten face of a peasant holding a bowl constitutes

the search for a new ancestral icon to replace the dominance of the Mao

portrait (AP 243-72). The painting is marked by a new realism, an

uttermost sincerity, and a high seriousness. Although in a different vein, Xu Bing's monumental work "A Mirror to Analyze the World" (Xi shi

jian, or "A Book from the Sky") may be taken as another landmark piece of the New Era (see figure 8). Xu spent many years carving thousands of

characters to print a series of books and scrolls.15 These characters are

composed in the same way as regular Chinese characters, and they look

like real Chinese characters for those unfamiliar with the language. Yet,

upon a closer examination, these are nonexistent, meaningless words.

The book format resembles that of a classical text where the proper text

is followed by exegesis and commentary printed in a smaller size. Xu's

manner of engaging Chinese tradition is iconoclastic and "totalistic." He

attempts to dismantle thousands of years of Chinese tradition in one

Fig. 7. Zhang Xiaogang, "Bloodline: Two Comrades with Red Baby." Oil

on canvas. 150 x 180 cm. Courtesy of Hanart T Z Gallery, Hong Kong.


stroke. His cultural critique is the very deconstruction of meaning in

Chinese. Such a manner of questioning the foundation of Chinese

culture is characteristic of the critical style of the 1980s. To take cinema

as another example, Chen Kaige's early films Yellow Earth, King of Children, and Life on a String are similarly critiques of the past. These

films endeavor to interrogate Chinese culture from the ground up. The

same thing can be also said of many literary works from the period. In

brief, as we have just seen, Chinese avant-garde art after 1989 has come

up with new styles and tactics of expressing the psychological, social, and

cultural currents of contemporary China. If art in the New Era is mainly the relentless, fearless, and direct critique of China's past and present for the construction of a new historical subject?a Chinese modernity, art in post-New China is compromise, indirect intervention, parody, and

pastiche. As the official slogan of the state in the 1990s is the building of

a "socialist market economy" and "socialism with Chinese character

istics," one may say that the cultural dominant in the post-New Era is

then a postmodernity with "Chinese characteristics," a

"post-socialist

postmodernity."

Cultural Theory and Criticism

In what follows, I demonstrate a similar orientation in the realm of

cultural theory and criticism in contemporary China, a turn away from

previous critical traditions toward a more conciliatory, accommodating

position in regard to China's cultural and intellectual legacy. A quick review of modern Chinese intellectual history is in order.

The May Fourth Movement of 1919, usually regarded as the founda

tional event in modern Chinese intellectual history, has established the

mainstream intellectual discourse in modern China. Founded upon such agendas

as enlightenment, national salvation, democracy,

and

science, the May Fourth Movement posits a fundamental opposition between the old and the new, tradition and modernity.16 The task of

enlightenment is to clear away the vestiges of feudalism, superstition, and the old tradition on the path toward a modern culture. For many decades after the historic May Fourth Movement, the discourses of

democracy and enlightenment were eclipsed by the urgency of "national

salvation" and anti-imperialism. After 1949, the original agenda of the

May Fourth Movement was further suppressed by the state. The Move

ment itself was usually appropriated by official discourse as a great

"patriotic movement" that had inspired nationalistic, patriotic, and anti

imperialist sentiments among the Chinese people. The ultimate pur

pose in all this was to consolidate the legitimacy of the regime.


Fig. 8. Xu Bing, "A Mirror to Analyze the World." Installation: Mixed media.

Courtesy of Hanart T Z Gallery, Hong Kong.


In the Cultural Revolution, Mao skillfully manipulated the rhetoric of

the May Fourth Movement for his political ends: a revolution in the

realm of ideology and "culture" necessitated a radical rupture with the

past. Mao also launched a total attack upon the Chinese tradition for the

sake of establishing a new proletarian culture. Chinese youth were

enthused and mobilized by Mao's antitraditional rhetoric in the early

days of the Cultural Revolution.

In the 1980s, a second wave of enlightenment swept across China.

Self-styled as "cultural reflection" and "historical reflection," the intellec

tual current then was to engage in a self-reflexive critique of the

entrenched patterns of Chinese culture and history. The establishment

of a new subjectivity and the completion of the incomplete project of

modernity/modernization were the main goals. Once again, a relentless

critique of the past was deemed essential for the formation of a new

culture. On the seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, the

students of Beijing marched to Tiananmen Square to emulate and

repeat a primal historic event. The students and intellectuals could not

fulfill their dream this time. With the failure of the student movement, Chinese history turned a new page, and a style of "cultural reflection"

characteristic of the 1980s was also brought to an end.

In the above short narrative of the major moments of modern

intellectual history, the May Fourth Movement and the cultural reflec

tion of the 1980s are taken as the mainstream discourses in cultural

criticism. Such discourses are predicated on a fundamentally iconoclas

tic, critical stance toward the past. (Obviously, the Cultural Revolution is

very much an antitraditional discourse, and in this sense is heir to the

May Fourth Movement.) Furthermore, mainstream cultural criticism as

such is also determined to establish a new, free subjectivity. Chinese

intellectuals have a huge stake in this agenda. In fact, they have been

hailed as the agents of enlightenment, the moral leadership of the

people, and the conscience of the nation.

Post-New thought is a departure from this mainstream critical tradi

tion. It seems that a more conciliatory

stance toward tradition, an

ambivalent attitude toward the position of the intellectual, and perhaps conservative academic politics, characterize the main discussions and

debates. The major critical issues include the question of "East Asian

modernity," the postmodernism debate, Third-World criticism, post colonial criticism, and "national studies" (guoxue). In examining these

discussions, one can detect certain shared assumptions and trends.

A prominent topic in recent years is the role of Confucianism in

modern Chinese and East Asian society. The discourse on East Asian

modernity did not originate from mainland China. A series of interre

lated terms such as East Asian modernity, industrial East Asia, Confucian


capitalism, neo-Confucianism, and post-Confucianism

were invented

and circulated in the West, the inter-China area (Taiwan, Hong Kong, the mainland) and overseas Chinese communities.17 Yet in the cultural

climate of the mainland itself in the 1980s, few critics pursued this line

of thought.18 In the 1990s, Confucian capitalism and other related terms have

become common words that frequently appear in journals in the inter

China area and the West. Confucian capitalism is sometimes used to

refer to the economies of the countries in the entire East Asian and

Southeast Asian regions.19 Again and again in academic and quasi academic journals,

and in journals for general readerships, neo-Confu

cianism is said to be a direct cause of capitalist economic development in Asia.20

The rethinking of the legacy of Confucianism in relation to the

question of East Asian modernity is now no longer confined to Chinese

communities outside the mainland, but is carried out in the mainland

itself. For instance, the new journal Dongfang (Orient), founded in 1993, is purposely devoted to the study of Chinese tradition and culture. The

journal is reminiscent of the earlier Dongfangzazhi (Orient Journal), the

stronghold of cultural conservatism in the May Fourth period. In a

radical reversal of the May Fourth assessment, Confucianism is now

regarded as the driving force of modernity behind East Asian societies, an enduring legacy that ceaselessly mediates, adapts, and renews itself.

China is advised to follow the lead of Japan and the four Newly Industrialized Economies (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South

Korea). The Confucian revival as such in the mainland and the Inter

China area is a return to a "cultural conservatism" and a repudiation of

"cultural radicalism" in twentieth-century Chinese thought. It is a major

attempt at resolving the tension between tradition and modernity.21 The Confucian revival may be seen as Arif Dirlik argues, as a function

of global capitalism.22 It also addresses the issue of intellectual identity in

twentieth-century China. The reversal of Weber's verdict on Confucian

ism is not a rejection of capitalism. The discourse on East Asian

modernity in fact articulates an alternative vision of modernity and thus

further extends the global domain of capitalism. At the same time, the

Chinese intellectuals, as Third-World intellectuals, are able to stage a

counterhegemonic discourse to Euro-American hegemony, and realign themselves with a native, non-Western cultural tradition. Aihwa Ong's

distinction between two notions of Chinese modernity is also helpful in

illuminating this issue. There is a state-sponsored modernity based on

the assumptions of territoriality, fixity, and the nation-state; and there is

a deterritorialized, fluid, hybrid, transnational modernity in the Greater

China area.23 Both notions provide an alternative modernity that chal

lenges the domination of Euro-American capitalism.


The assertiveness of the indigenous critic vis-?-vis the West is also

evident in other varieties of contemporary Chinese cultural criticism

such as "national studies" (guoxue) and Third-World criticism (disan

shijie piping). In the camp of criticism self-styled as "national studies," the

task of the scholar is to focus on the research at hand rather than getting

directly involved in politics. The scholar's place remains within the

academy and out of political intervention. The intellectual is no longer a spokesperson for humanity at large, but speaks and writes as an

ordinary scholar. To remain in the "ivory tower" is in itself an act of

defiance to commercialism and political corruption.24 In the booming region of "Third-World criticism" (Disan shijie piping),

critics take up such themes as "postcolonialism" and "Orientalism."

Third-World criticism Chinese style implies a resistance to Western

cultural and discursive hegemony. Third-World criticism is a strategy of

empowering the nativist, indigenous critic vis-?-vis the domination of

Western theory and culture. The writing and rewriting of people's

history, and the releasing of their "repressed memory," are the tasks of

Chinese Third-World criticism, for which postcolonialism represents the

latest phase of Western colonialism. While colonialism is the West's

invasion and subjugation of the Third World, and neocolonialism is the

West's economic exploitation of the Third World, postcolonialism is the

West's cultural hegemony in the contemporary period. Then the work of

postcolonial criticism is to return to indigenous sources and effect a

counterdiscourse to the domination of the West.

It is important to observe the difference between Third-World criti cism as

practiced in a Third-World state such as China and that practiced

in a First-World power such as the United States. Third-World criticism,

postcolonial criticism, and the critique of Orientalism may well be

progressive, oppositional discourses in the historical, political, and

academic contexts of contemporary America. However, when these

critical projects are taken up by indigenous scholars within the geopoliti cal space that is China, the effect can be quite different. As has been

suggested, there may well be an implicit alliance between such indig enous critical pursuits and state nationalism. In advocating an academic

discourse of resistance to the cultural and discursive hegemony of the

West rather than to the internal power of the state, "postcolonial" critics in China may have mislocated the sources of oppression. Sensitive

domestic issues are elided in such a critical maneuver. Third-World

criticism Chinese style may play into the hands of conservative politics and cater to the sentiments of Chinese nationalism.25

As should be expected, there is a nostalgia among intellectuals for the

preeminent status they enjoyed only too briefly before the advent of

global capitalism in China. Yet they have also begun to take new

positions. In distinguishing between the New Era and the post-New Era,


postmodern critics have characterized the former as the "grand narra

tive of enlightenment and salvation." This grand narrative is a continu

ation of the discourse of the May Fourth Movement. The postmodern turn is then defined by the dissolution and decentering of "hegemonic

discourse": be it enlightenment, humanism, or subjectivity. There seems

to be an implicit celebration of the disintegration of subjectivity. Given the disintegration of subjectivity, the axiology of postmodernist dis course is not

entirely clear.

All these discussions seem to retreat from the previous model of the

intellectual as the agent of enlightenment.26 The intellectual is advised

against direct social and political intervention. The prescribed new role is to stay in the academy. This moment of historic change in the function

of the Chinese intellectual is comparable to what Michel Foucault

describes as the transition from the "universal intellectual" to the

"specific intellectual" that happened in the West after World War II.

Chinese intellectuals are in the process of renegotiating their identity under the combined pressure from the market, the state, and trans

national corporations (TNCs). At the same time, they are redefining the

relation between tradition and modernity, between China and the West.

As we have seen, the role of the intellectual has become a key issue in all

of this. Indeed, perhaps for the first time in Chinese history, the

legitimacy of the intellectual is seriously questioned. There is a strongly felt need for, in Jameson's words, a

"cognitive mapping," a critical,

spatial reorientation amidst the confusions of the global postmodern culture (P54).

Given the omnipresent forces of the state and transnational capital ism, contemporary Chinese cultural critics have admirably begun search

ing for new identities and suitable manners of engagement. A consider

ation of the ominous economic and political constraints makes the

theoretical positions taken by indigenous Chinese critics understand

able. It is sometimes painfully difficult for them to make certain choices, and their decisions are ultimately brave ones. That much said, however, it is timely to emphasize the critical function of the academy under the

reality of contemporary China. As Masao Miyoshi writes, "In order to

regain moral and intellectual legitimacy, scholars in TNC societies need

to resuscitate the idea of opposition and resistance."27 This statement is

not only true of intellectuals in the capitalist West, but also relevant to

Chinese academics as China itself is joining the ranks of TNC societies.

With the changing socioeconomic circumstances in China, academics

can no longer position themselves as "universal intellectuals." Yet there

are still important functions for them to perform. The university becomes a crucial site of resistance in the global economy. There may still be ways for academics to "speak for the people," as it were. "We


cannot represent them, nor can we be surrogates. But we can report

what we know and seek to counter the information emanating from

three other dubious sources: the media, corporations, and the state"

(83). "To intervene or not to intervene" is a choice that all humanists face

in post-New China. They have to decide whether they will stay in the

academy to perform "pure criticism" or actively participate in social and

political events that directly affect the community. It appears to me that

to take up either position is bound to be a one-sided choice. The

framing of the issue as an "either-or" question is indeed inappropriate. After all, the academy is supposed to be a space of thinking and action

that is unique and distinct from other professions. As Edward Said poses the question, "Is there any possibility for bridging the gap between the

ivory tower of

contemplative rationality .. . and our own

urgent need for

self-realization and self-assertion with its background in a history of

repression and denial?"28 Said suggests, "it is precisely the role of the

contemporary academy to bridge this gap since society itself is too

directly inflected by politics to serve so general and so finally intellectual

and moral a role" (16). In a historical period when transnational capital, the media, the market, and the state are

poised to

penetrate and occupy

the entirety of public space, the role of the Chinese intellectual is

singularly significant. To formulate practices of resistance to the tide of

commodification and consumerism, and to find ways of mediating the

local and the global, the critical and the public, and the political and the

contemplative, are of paramount importance in envisioning the position of the intellectual in contemporary China.

University of Pittsburgh

NOTES

I thank Wang Ning for inviting me to the Dalian conference, and participants of the

conference for offering constructive comments on the paper. I am also grateful to Anne T.

Ciecko for illuminating discussions of contemporary art.

1 See Jingpin gouwu zhinan (Guide to shopping high-quality goods), Thursday, 27 June 1996, A8.

2 For instance, see Wang Ning, "Confronting Western Influence: Rethinking Chinese

Literature of the New Period," New Literary History, 24 (1993), 905-26.

3 See my "Postmodernity, Popular Culture, and the Intellectual: A Report on Post

Tiananmen China," boundary 2, 23, no. 2 (1996), 139-69.

4 See Masao Miyoshi, "A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and

the Decline of the Nation-State," Critical Inquiry, 19 (1993), 725-51; Arif Dirlik, "The

Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism," Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994), 328-56.

132 NEW LITERARY history

5 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.,

1993), p. 29; hereafter cited in text as P.

6 For source materials, informative accounts, and criticism of post-1989 Chinese avant

garde art, see Chinas New Art, Post-1989 (Hong Kong, 1993); China Avant-Garde, ed. Jochen

Noth, Wolfger P?hlmann, Kai Reschke (Berlin, 1993) (Chinese ed., Zhongguo qianweiyishu

[Hong Kong, 1994] ); Avantguardes artistiques xineses (Chinese Avant-Garde Art), exhibition

catalogue (Barcelona, 1995); Huang Du, "Xin jiaobu" (New Steps), Jiangsu Huakan

(Jiangsu Art Monthly) (April 1995), 3-14; Nicholas Jose, "Next Wave Art: The First Major Exhibition of Post-Tiananmen Vanguard Chinese Art Seen Outside the Mainland," New

Asia Review, charter issue (Summer 1994), 18-24; Li Xianting et al., "Shenhua?xifang yu

dongfang: di 45 jie Weinisi shuangnian zhan canzhan yishujia guilai tan ganxiang"

(Myths?the West and China: Thoughts of the Participating Artists Upon Returning from

the 45th Biennial Venice Art Exhibition), Jinri xianfeng (The Avant-Garde Today)

(November 1994), pp. 6-28; Andrew Solomon, "Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save

China," The New York Times Magazine (December 19, 1993, sec. 6), pp. 42-51, 66, 70-72;

Xiongshi meishu (Lion Art), 197 (November 1995), special issue on China's avant-garde art,

ed. Gao Minglu, pp. 10-89.

7 See Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch,

Postmodernism (Durham, N.C., 1987), esp. pp. 275-79.

8 Li Xianting, "Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art," in

Chinas New Art, Post-1989, p. xxii.

9 We can only speak of noncommercial, experimental, "real" Chinese avant-garde art, if

it does exist, in the case of contemporary installation. Installation art is not officially

recognized by the establishment in the post-New era. There has been only one important exhibition site for installation art in Beijing, namely, the exhibition hall of Capital Normal

University (Shoudu shifan daxue). The artists cannot sell their products, which disappear or

have to be dismantled soon after completion, since no museum is interested in or capable of collecting their artworks. Their experimentation with the concept, medium, status, and

function of art in contemporary China brings no profit to themselves. I will give a separate treatment of Chinese installation art elsewhere.

10 Yi Ying, "Choice and Opportunity: The Fate of Western Contemporary Art in China,"

in Chinas New Art, Post-1989, p. xliv.

11 Yuejin Wang, "Anxiety of Portraiture: Quest for/Questioning Ancestral Icons in Post

Mao China," Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions

and Cultural Critique, ed. Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tang (Durham, N.C., 1993), p. 243;

hereafter cited in text as AP.

12 See Andrew Solomon's report in New York Times Magazine and the front cover, which

features a painting of a large figurehead by Fang who "yawns/howls" at the reader.

13 See Olga Kholmogorova, Sots-Art (Moscow, 1994); Igor Golomshtok, Totalitarian Art:

In the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People's Republic of China (London,

1990); Gao Minlu, "Meisu, quanli, gongfan: 'zhengzhi bopu' xianxiang" (Vulgarity, Power,

Complicity: The "Political Pop" Phenomenon), Xiongshi meishu (Lion Art), 297 (November

1995), 36-57.

14 See Gao Minglu, "Zou xiang houxiandai zhuyi de sikao?zhi Renjian xin" (Reflections

on Approaching Postmodernism?A Letter to Ren Jian), Ershi yi shiji (Twenty-first

century) (August 1993), 60-68.

15 For discussions of Xu's work, see Benjamin Lee, "Going Public," Public Culture, 5

(1993), 165-78; Janelle S. Taylor, "Non-Sense in Context: Xu Bing's Art and Its Publics,"

Public Culture, 5 (1993), 317-27; Wang Keping, "Xu Bing yu wenhua dongwu" (Xu Bing and Cultural Animals), Jiushi niandai (Nineties) (March 1995), 6-9.

16 Lin Y?-sheng calls it "totalistic antitraditionalism.'' See Lin Y?-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era (Madison, Wis., 1979).


17 The term Post-Confucianism is introduced by Roderick MacFarquhar. "Like 'post

industrial,' the term 'post-Confucian' is used to connote societies which bear the obvious

hallmarks of industrialism/Confucianism, but which have been significantly altered by the

accretion of new elements" (Roderick MacFarquhar, "The Post-Confucian Challenge," The

Economist [February 9, 1980], p. 68).

18 Chen Lai was one of the few mainland critics who saw Confucian "industrial East Asia"

(gongye dongya) as a model for China's future development. See Chen Lai, "Huajie

'chuantong' yu 'xiandai' de jinzhang?'Wusi' wenhua sichao de fansi" (Resolving the

Tension Between "Tradition" and "Modernity"?Reflections on the Cultural Currents of

the May 4th Movement), in Lin Y?-sheng et al., Wusi: Duoyuan de fansi (The May 4th:

Pluralistic Reflections) (Hong Kong, 1989), pp. 151-85.

19 For instance, the 1995 New Year issue of Far Eastern Economic Review features a 'Year in

Review" article which discusses the economic situation of various East Asian and Southeast

countries all under the rubric of "Confucian capitalism." See "94 Free Trade: Key Asian

Value: 'Confucian Capitalism' Succeeds, but Beware the Labor Shortage," Far Eastern

Economic Review (December 29, 1994 and January 5, 1995), pp. 26-32. For another

interesting discussion of Confucianism as a "trend-setter" in East Asian economy and

politics in a journal for the general reader, see "Confucianism: New Fashion for Old

Wisdom," The Economist (January 21, 1995), pp. 38-39.

20 See the special section in memoriam of the neo-Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan

(1909-1995), Ming Bao yuekan (Ming Bao monthly) (May 1995), 99-104.

21 See Liu Dong, "Zhongguo nengfou zoutong 'dongya daolu'" (Can China Go through the "East Asian Road"?) Dongfang (Orient) (inaugural issue, 1993), 7-16; Chen Lai, "Ershi

shiji wenhua yundong zhong de jijin zhuyi" (Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Cultural

Movements), Dongfang (inaugural issue, 1993), 38-44; "Rujia sixiang yu xiandai dongya

shijie" (Confucian Thought and the Modern East Asian World) Dongfang, 3 (1994), 10-13;

Gu Xin, Zhongguo fan chuantong zhuyi depinkun: Liu Xiaoboyu ouxiang pohuai de wutuobang

(The Poverty of Chinese Anti-Traditionalism: Liu Xiaobo and the Utopia of Iconoclasm)

(Taipei, 1993).

22 Arif Dirlik, "Confucius in the Borderlands: Global Capitalism and the Reinvention of

Confucianism," boundary 2, 22, no. 3 (1995), 229-73.

23 See Aihwa Ong, "A Momentary Glow of Fraternity: Narratives of Nation and

Capitalism in East Asia," paper presented at the symposium "The Rise of 'Asian'

Capitalism: Class, Nation States, and New Narratives," New York Academy of Sciences,

February 25, 1995.

24 For an expression of this position, see Chen Pingyuan, "Xuezhe de renjian qinghuai"

(The Scholar's Concern with the Human World), Dushu (Reading) (May 1993), 75-80.

25 For a review of this school of criticism, see Xu Ben, "Disan shijie piping zai dangjin

Zhongguo de chujing" (The Situation of Third World Criticism in Contemporary China), Ershi yi shiji (Twenty-first Century) (February 1995), 16-27.

26 This general trend is regarded as "neoconservatism" {xin baoshou zhuyi) by Zhao

Yiheng. See Zhao Yiheng (Henry Zhao), "'Houxue' yu zhongguo xin baoshou zhuyi"

("Post-ism" and Neo-Conservatism), Ershi yi shiji (Twenty-first Century) (February 1995), 4-15.

27 Masao Miyoshi, "Sites of Resistance in the Global Economy," boundary 2, 22, no. 1

(1995), 83; hereafter cited in text.

28 Edward W. Said, "Identity, Authority, and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveler,"

boundary 2, 21, no. 3 (1994), 16; hereafter cited in text.

Art, Culture, And Cultural Criticism in Post-New China

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