Sun Liang, 'Saint Rain'
The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges once said that what happens in the present changes what happened in the past - or at least our understanding of it. As a test, take the case of Chinese contemporary art. Until recently, anyone asked to name the seminal exhibition of the late '80s would probably have reached for Damien Hirst's 1988 exhibition 'Freeze'; more adventurous souls might have identified the 1989 Pompidou exhibition, 'magiciens de la terre' where 50 artists from Africa and Asia were exhibited alongside 50 from Europe and the US - an exhibition that formally announced the end of the time when Europe and the US were assumed to be the primary home of contemporary art. (As it happens, three Chinese artists were in that show.)
But with the current fevered fascination of the world with all things Chinese, it's now perfectly reasonable to argue that the most important exhibition of the late '80s - that watershed in recent global history - was China/Avant-Garde Exhibition, held at the National Art Gallery, Beijing. That exhibition might be seen as the gathering together of what is called in China the 'Generation of 85' - the generation who came to maturity as China opened up in the 80s, an opening up that was to be brought to an abrupt and tragic end on 4 June 1989. Around 186 artists were in the exhibition, including artists from Tibet and Inner Mongolia, and key figures in the subsequent history of Chinese art such as Xu Bing and Zhang Peili were participants. It was an exhibition where Sun Liang was to have been part, as a performance artist, until most of the performance artists were uninvited. There are grounds for thinking that China/Avant-Garde is one of the key exhibitions of the twentieth century.
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Yet until recently, there would have been little interest outside China, other than in specialised circles, in such an exhibition and in the '85 Generation. China-fever has changed all that. If there have been comical aspects to the fever, at least it has provoked curiosity about what the Chinese art of the recent past looks like. The evidence is not yet extensive but it is symptomatic. Western museums such as Tate are now making the collection of Chinese art of the last 25 years a priority and New York's MOMA and the Centre Pompidou are already integrating modern and contemporary Chinese art into their collections. At a more modest level, this one person exhibition of Sun Liang is another straw in the wind - important in two ways. First, thankfully, it allows a whiff of history into the artist's life (it doesn't amputate present from past) and shows the range of Sun Liang's work from the mid '80s to the present; and second, it does not lump Sun Liang into a generic 'Chinese' art show, as too many exhibitions still do.
These signs of serious interest are important gains and suggest that the present can truly alter our perception of the past.. As a measure of how the atmosphere has changed over the last ten years, let me just mention parenthetically and personally that when in 1999, as Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, I hosted an exhibition of Beijing-based artists, as part of a month long series of events, Beijing-London: Revolutionary Capitals, I could then find very little interest in London in the Chinese art of the present, never mind the recent past.
Sun Liang, 'Worm with One Hundred Feet'
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But perhaps more important than the western interest in recent Chinese art is the renewed or more correctly named, fresh interest within China itself. Over the last eighteen months, there have been to my knowledge at least five exhibitions devoted to 1989, as if, now that Chinese art is commercially successful, China is turning back to 1989 and that seminal exhibition to remember why art matters, beyond the market. In this context, the most important show in China in the last eighteen months has been the exhibition '85 New Wave: the Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art, a 2007 exhibition at the independent Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing, which brought together 30 artists only - including Sun Liang - from the thousands who worked during the heady days of the mid 1980s. It is a testimony to the quality of Sun Liang's work that the works included in the '85 show struck me among the strongest. The exhibition itself was an act of restoration of a period whose importance can hardly be overestimated but is not easily described.
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To put it crudely, very crudely, China, which had been quite hermetically sealed from the west during the '60s and early '70s, began to open up after Mao's death in 1976, started to become more porous. Between 1978 and 1987, it is estimated that over 5000 works in the fields of western philosophy and thought were translated into Chinese, ten times more than in the previous 30 years. In the artworld of China, although that is a misnomer since there were effectively no galleries or gallery art infrastructure, "87 avant garde collectives appeared around the country, including in inner Mongolia and Tibet...these collectives mounted more than 150 avant garde happenings around the country, participated in by some 2250 artists" (Quoted from Gao Minglu catalogue for The Wall by Fei Dawei, p1).
But if such figures give a general picture, it is only personal stories that can give a sense of the way the opening up entered people's imaginations. The novelist Ma Jian, author of the acclaimed novel about the '80s, Beijing Coma, told me recently that in the early '80s he sat up all night talking with friends about the wrapper on a bar of western soap, showing the exposed shoulders of a blond woman, so wondrous did they find it; and when I was in Sun Liang's studio in Shanghai last year I asked him why he had called one of the paintings that he showed me Salome and whether he had heard of Oscar Wilde. He replied that the works of Oscar Wilde were among the books that became available in the '80s - as did images of the German artists Anselm Kiefer and George Baselitz. Chinese artists devoured whatever they could find - as do artists everywhere - and the best of them made art out of the most unlikely and, sometimes, unpropitious materials.
Sun Liang, 'The Last Attraction'
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Of course, the danger with this new interest in the '85 Generation of Chinese art, whether in China or in the west, is that there will be a tendency to reduce it to 'political art', given that what brought the phase to an abrupt halt was what happened in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989. The work is clearly marked by the politics, but the best of it, Sun Liang's included, can't be reduced to that historical moment. That would be to do a grave injustice to the work of the Generation of '85 and to its extraordinary variety, which ranged from abstraction to conceptualism to the expressionism that marks Sun Liang's work of that time. The art of that generation was restless and experimental - avant garde in the sense that the word first arose, scouting out new positions, new possibilities, in the vanguard of change, without an agreed destination of where change was to go.
The work on show at the James Hyman Gallery incarnates that inventive restlessness. The meeting - though collision might be a better term - of western and eastern mythologies is sometimes plain in Sun Liang's work of the '80s, especially in a painting such as Icarus and the Nine Suns, where the Greek myth of Icarus, who pays the price for daring to fly too near the sun is married to the Chinese myth of the Ten Suns where Houyi, the god of archery, shoots the sun birds down because they flew too high from the earth. Both myths speak of the punishment of those who do not do what the gods demand.
But whatever the source of the iconography, and it varies from painting to painting, all of Sun Liang's paintings of the late '80s and early '90s are marked by a deliberate and sophisticated bluntness. As I look at them a sentence of that great US painter Philip Guston comes to mind, a painter once accused of betraying his own lyricism by a studied crudity: he once said that when he reflected on the world he could no longer square its brutality with the fact that when he went into his studio it was to adjust a red and a blue. In certain circumstances, it is necessary, with great care, to appear to be rough and blunt.
And like Guston, Sun Liang is perfectly capable of making delicate, lyrical paintings as some of the later ones in the James Hyman show attest. But what characterises these more recent works, in comparison with the earlier, is a much stronger sense of the Chinese tradition of paintings, of the grammar of such painting - with a different colour palette, a different notion of the surface and edges of a painting. The history of Chinese scroll paintings is never far from his mind, he told me.
After all, from 1989 when China closed down on itself for a short period, Sun Liang was thrown back upon the resources of Chinese art and it may be that they sustained him and he understood that they could do so into the future. It's worth remembering that he represented China at the Venice Biennale in 1993.
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History with all its cunning passages makes painters as much as painters make history and in this exhibition it is fascinating to see how one important artist has responded directly and indirectly to the complex and tumultuous changes of his times. The issue now is whether the audience for art which includes both public and private collectors will do the necessary work to rescue the art of the Generation of '85 from the enormous condescension of posterity that has until recently engulfed it. The signs that this will happen are becoming stronger by the day.
Philip Dodd
Sun Liang: A Painter's Journey
8 October - 15 November 2008
5 Savile Row
London W1S 3PD
T +44 (0)20 7494 3857
www.jameshymangallery.com
Philip Dodd has a global reputation in the field of art, culture and creative industries. From 1997 to 2004 he was Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and he has curated many exhibitions, from a major special project with Yoko Ono at the Moscow Biennale 2007 to exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery London and Sotheby's New York. He is Director of Content for the British Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo and senior international advisor to the largest digital arts festival in the world, Shanghai eArts and advisor to the new Hong Kong Art Fair. He presents a weekly arts and ideas programme for the BBC.
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