New Delhi, Nov 17 (IANS) The last three decades in Chinese art have seen immense change. Cut off from global movements in contemporary art till the 1970s, China is emerging as one of the largest buyers of art in the Asian market and also producing an amazing body of modern works, says Canadian art writer and critic Keith Wallace.
‘The volume of contemporary art by established native Chinese artists is huge – it’s bigger than India,’ said Wallace, an authority on contemporary Chinese art.
‘The art market and aesthetic scenario in China – mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau – have gone through an incredible change in the last 30 years,’ he said.
Wallace, the editor in chief of ‘Yishu: Contemporary Journal of Chinese art’, was here to address a gathering of art writers as part of a lecture series hosted by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FICA) – an initiative of the Vadehra Gallery.
‘Places like Hong Kong and Taiwan experienced modernism between 1950s-1980s. Shanghai was in the shadow of Soviet socialism and had little access to contemporary art. Most of the art that flourished was realism propaganda art like posters and paintings till the late 1970s following which China began to open its door,’ Wallace told art writers.
In the 1980s, information about contemporary art began to trickle to China through books and exhibitions, Wallace said.
‘An exhibition by American artist Robert Rauschenberg in 1985 at the Beijing National Gallery was the first officially sponsored American art show in China in 50 years. It was a watershed,’ Wallace said.
Many of Rauschenberg’s installations and readymade objects were cited by Chinese practitioners of the 1985 new wave art, political pop and cynical realism movements as the inspiration, the art critic said.
‘Soon after the exhibition, people were devouring books because the information was not coming in a linear pattern. The works that were produced in China in the 1980s assimilated three major styles – surrealism, abstraction and expressionism,’ he said.
According to Wallace, the 1990s opened art from the largely insulated mainland China to the world.
‘Prior to the 1990s, very little work from mainland China was being shown outside – but in the 1990s, art from mainland China began to be exhibited outside. Moreover, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 triggered an exodus of Chinese artists from the country,’ Wallace.
The era also marked the beginning of art as an investment option in China.
‘The decade of 2000 saw the rise of collectors and collecting became all about investment,’ Wallace.
The Chinese are still collecting art as a investment despite the recession of 2009. ‘As a result, the price of contemporary Chinese is going up again,’ Wallace said.
Chinese art is dominated by painting and sculpture and far less new media such as ‘video and digital photography’, Wallace said.
‘Most contemporary artists are trying to develop styles that sell. While the younger generation of Chinese artists, who have not emerged through the cultural revolution, are experimenting, works of the older artists are still grounded in socialist realism. But contemporary art is moving very fast socially and economically,’ Wallace said.
