Art, Culture, And Cultural Criticism in Post-New China
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Transcript of 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
114 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
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
ART, CULTURE, AND CULTURAL CRITICISM 115
"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,
116 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
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
ART, CULTURE, AND CULTURAL CRITICISM 117
!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
118 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
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
120 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
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.
ART, CULTURE, AND CULTURAL CRITICISM 121
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
122 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
Pl?liAli? ^?r?**:'s?s^^
c.
ART, CULTURE, AND CULTURAL CRITICISM 123
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.
124 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
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.
ART, CULTURE, AND CULTURAL CRITICISM 125
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.
126 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
Fig. 8. Xu Bing, "A Mirror to Analyze the World." Installation: Mixed media.
Courtesy of Hanart T Z Gallery, Hong Kong.
ART, CULTURE, AND CULTURAL CRITICISM 127
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
128 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
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.
ART, CULTURE, AND CULTURAL CRITICISM 129
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,
130 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
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
ART, CULTURE, AND CULTURAL CRITICISM 131
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).
ART, CULTURE, AND CULTURAL CRITICISM 133
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.