The Great Wall in Chinese Contemporary Art

Perhaps the most widely recognized visual symbol of China, the Great Wall has functioned within China as a consistently changing sign rather than as a rigidly conceptualized symbol. In the premodern era, as some Confucian scholars from Sima Qian to the seventeenth-century philosopher Gu Yanwu argued, the wall symbolized the futility and cruelty of the first emperor's political and military ambitions. This notion also appeared in common legend.¹ By the end of the nineteenth century, the negative moral implications of the wall gave way to positive views of national power and a consolidated racial identity.² The wall finally surfaced in Chinese visual art forms in the 1930s. When the Sino-Japanese War began in 1937, the wall had already become the base from which Chinese border defenses sought to rout the Japanese invaders in the early 1930s; the physical body of the wall was reframed in multiple media outlets as a monument for heroic resistance against foreign invasion and rapidly found its place in the popular artworks produced throughout the war. The monumental image of the wall was therefore effectively shaped by both the military reality and the visible public media during the war period of the 1930s, rather than by previous abstract concepts and ideology per se. Sun Yat-sen, the "Father of Modern China," first proclaimed the Great Wall as a symbol of Chinese identity for preserving the national pride against the alien invasion in the early twentieth century; the wall as a symbol of the Chinese nation, however, was not widely recognized by the common Chinese and was not transformed into popular media and art forms until the Japanese forces invaded Manchuria in 1931.³

During the Mao era (1949–76), however, works illustrating or employing the Great Wall were relatively rare. Often depicted in landscapes, commonly rendered in the convention of woodcuts or traditional ink painting and classifiable as "industrial landscapes," the wall usually appeared juxtaposed against modern factories, reservoirs, railways, or bridges to show the binarial contrast between then and now or old and new. Inevitably, the wall signified the past and thus a temporal state qualitatively inferior to what was construed as the "present" or the "new."

Toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, following Mao's death and the Deng Xiaoping reforms of the late 1970s, some Chinese avant-garde artists, including the '85 Movement,⁴ began to use the image of the Great Wall to express social and aesthetic rather than state concerns. These artists laid the foundation for the post-Tiananmen avant-garde art movement that was active during the 1990s. The amorphous signification of the wall throughout modern history coincided with the goals of this new generation of artists. With no interest in representing a linear or even an objective history of the wall, artists in the 1980s and 1990s attempted to remake the accumulated historical significance of the wall into a useful sign for confronting the complex ambiguities that contemporaneity thrust on them.

Mourning the Wall: Wounded People, Ruins, and Rituals

New modes of expression that some artists pursued included earthworks and performances enacted at the wall itself. Though the form and materials involved in these works varied, they all attempted to create a kind of ceremonial or ritual environment for mourning the memory of the wall, where ritual attempted to bridge the gap between grand historical memory (a "meta-memory") and the individuals' ephemeral experiences.

A significant illustration of this trend was the performance of a Beijing-based artists' group called Concept 21. Its members included Zhao Jianhai, Sheng Qi, Xi Jianjun, and Kang Mu. On May 10, 1988, they stayed in a tower on the Great Wall overnight and began their performance at sunrise. Wrapping themselves in black and making themselves up into "ghosts," their performances included Screaming against the Sky (Houtian), Wrapping the Great Wall in Red (Hongse baozha changcheng), Borrowing Fire (Jiehuo), and Saving People from...