Chinese art :: politics and Western bias

Screenshot The New Yorker

Oh my, was I delighted when I came across this. In case you are not a regular reader of The New Yorker, you may have missed it.

Last Friday, an outstanding article by Christopher Beam in the esteemed highbrow magazine really made my day. At last, somebody who realizes that there are actually artists from China whose name isn't Ai Weiwei! That's a start, I guess.

Reporting from the international Art Basel fair in Hong Kong, the author interviewed several Chinese artists and art dealers who were present at the illustrious annual event (held alternately in Basel, Miami and Hong Kong).

He also took the opportunity to reflect upon the complex relationship between Chinese art and politics and Western media bias. Beam's piece deserves an extensive quote: 

'Westerners are often criticized for looking at Chinese art through a narrow political lens. Ask an American to name a Chinese artist, and the response is most likely Ai Weiwei, whose brand of political provocation ranges from mocking the government on his blog to collecting the names of more than five thousand children who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake as a result of shoddy building construction. 

He has become all but synonymous with Chinese art. (Evan Osnos profiled Ai Weiwei in 2010.) 

This focus on the political has persisted in the West for decades, fostered in part by the journalists who reported on China in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, when relatively few international art critics had visited the country. 

Back then, the Chinese artists who drew global attention were those who criticized the Communist Party, including Huang, who organized one of the seminal independent art displays of the era, the unauthorized "Stars" exhibition, in Beijing in 1979. 

This journalistic bias persisted into the nineties, when several avant-garde Chinese artists, including Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, and Wang Guangyi, gained international fame after their art was labelled "cynical realism" or "political pop", and described by Western media as an expression of disillusionment with Chinese society following the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square. 

By the mid-aughts, their paintings were selling for millions. 

More recently, the mantle has passed to Ai, whose success owes to many factors: his quotability, his gift for social-media engagement, his family background, his physical appearance, his humor, his excellent English, and his well-regarded body of work. 

But it's his defiance of the government that has made him an icon - outside China, at least.'

I couldn't agree more. Honestly, I am more than a bit unnerved by the omnipresence of self-styled Western poster boy Ai Weiwei. It may sound a little harsh, but I really can't stand the old chatterbox any more. The West (yes, I know, this is a highly controversial one-for-all label) is so incredibly obsessed with the protagonists who exhibit an impassioned anti-government attitude that different Chinese perspectives and divergent domestic discourses play no role at all.

The same pattern emerges over and over again; the coverage of other art forms, be it the literature business or the film industry, is not an exception.

I still vividly recall the shrill collective outcry in Western media outlets when the holy Nobel Price in Literature was awarded to Mo Yan in 2012. His whole body of work as well as his personal biography was meticulously dissected for the slightest trace of regime affirmation or appeasement.

The same holds true for the Chinese film industry. You have shot a flick with a shaky hand-held camera, depicting gritty locations and severely depressed characters? Well, chances are you will be invited to big international film festivals and hailed as the next icon of contemporary Chinese cinema.

Personally, I find it very disturbing and not only a bit arrogant & ignorant that fervent regime critique seems to be the sine qua non for the evaluation of Chinese art works and artists.

Sadly, the predominance of political defensive reactions is an ongoing and widespread trend that is also discernible in a large part of general China coverage.