Considering Huanjing : Positioning Experimental Art in China

The question of modern aesthetics is not "What is beautiful?" but "What is art to be (and what is literature to be)?"

—Thierry de Duvé

In November 2000, a series of small, experimental, and provocative satellite exhibitions were launched to coincide with the opening of the Third Shanghai Biennale. The most well known of these was "FUCK OFF," curated by the conceptual artist and former member of the "Stars Group" (1979–80) Ai Weiwei, together with the critic and Chinese Artists' Association member Feng Boyi. The exhibition, known in Chinese as "Bu Hezuo Fangshi" ("An Uncooperative Approach"), featured a series of works, including performances and site-specific installations, which were considered highly controversial, and at times shocking. Works such as an inflated cadaver of a horse placed inside the main exhibition hall by the Beijing-based artist Yang Maoyuan were exhibited, along with Sun Yuan's Solitary Animal, which featured a hermetically sealed glass case containing a skeleton of a large dog and, according to the artist, a type of nerve gas that would instantly kill everyone in the exhibition space if the glass was broken. The live performances included Yang Zhichao's Planting Grass, which involved the artist having three stalks of young grass planted on his back by two young nurses, a performance that took place without local anaesthetic. Following complaints by some visitors to the exhibition, and after reports came in about the live performance by Yang Zhichao, the Shanghai police moved in a few days after the opening and canceled the entire exhibition.

To some critics these works were the product of a "cruel society," presenting visual images that could be described as "barbaric, insane, and the work of savages and madmen."¹ Yet to what extent will, and perhaps are, these works being used as an instrument for the "regeneration of public morality" further geared toward "expanding the order of capital"?

The positioning of visual art by various agents has been an increasingly important issue from the late 1990s onward and most lucidly reflected in the ways in which experimental art in China is created, produced, and received by various agents, including, but not limited to, foreign and Chinese curators, the Chinese government, and certainly the artists.² Such positioning is most explicitly evident in public displays of highly controversial performances and installations such as those seen in "FUCK OFF" where artists use all kinds of visceral references performed under the pretext/in the context of art. Is there some type of historically significant structure evident in the production of these works and their reception over the past few years since 1999? What are the implications for the various discourses concerning the avant-garde in China, and the commonly used binary separating the "official" and the "nonofficial" domains? Does experimental art trace the pattern of an urban society in distress, bringing forth an increase in production of supposedly "cruel" and "barbaric" images, a concept that began in the late 1990s and was followed by more extreme visual images in the very recent present?³ Or is it perhaps, as Jean Baudrillard observed by citing Marx's account of the reign of Napoleon III, that "sometimes the same events occur twice in history: the first time they have a real historical impact, whereas the second time they are no more than its farcical evocation and its grotesque avatar—nourished by a legendary reference"?⁴

A "legendary reference" can be uncovered through a close scrutiny of the endogenous discourses that follow a notion of the "disappearing exterior" as described recently by art historian John Clark, who examines how often "‘Western' references and works sit ‘nesting' in endogenous discourses and are available without occupying a position of dominance."⁵ The emphasis is on an awareness of the agency of the artist—that is, as Clark mentions, there is an acute need to acknowledge "the artist as an actor...