10:00:00:00 PICTURE START
10:00:36 EVAN HUGHES TO CAMERA:
Hello. I’m Evan Hughes and we’re in China to meet some of the artists at the forefront of the first great movement of the 21st century. Not since American pop art of the 1950s and 60s has a group of artists so decisively captured the global imagination.
Chinese contemporary art is taking the world by storm coinciding with the emergence of china itself after years of isolation.
And with the eyes of the world on China we’re going to take a look at the country through the eyes of its artists – a remarkable group of individuals holding up a mirror to the vast social and economic changes upending their lives plus a billion more.
10:01:17 TITLE: CHINA’S AVANT-GARDE – THE NEW CULTURAL REVOLUTION
10:01:28 Ray Hughes, (Art Dealer):
It is a time of change and that time of change is so massive and it affects the whole of the society and the artist as eloquent spokesman gives it form.
10:01:47 Karen Smith, (Curator/Art Historian):
This period of history has been as exciting as it would have been to have been in Paris in the early 1900s. Out of this kind of incredible period of innovation and inspiration there will be people emerge who will be remembered as Picasso, Matisse, and any other number, you know, Braque, the artists that you can name from that period of the early moderns.
10:02:13 Melissa Chiu, (Asia Society, New York):
This is a movement that really emerged in the late 1970s when Deng Xiaoping declared open door policy in China what we saw were some of the first exhibitions in fits and starts, of experimental contemporary Chinese art and in many ways this was the beginning point.
10:02:42 EVAN HUGHES VO:
BEFORE THE OPEN DOOR POLICY, ARTISTS HAD BEEN CONSTRAINED BY THE DICTATES OF THE
CULTURAL REVOLUTION. BASICALLY THEY PRODUCED BIG INSPIRATIONAL PROPAGANDA POSTERS OF THE MAO ERA. ART TRULY WAS THE SERVANT OF THE STATE.
10:03:00 Claire Roberts, (Curator/Art Historian):
You depicted things that were heroic and you presented positive characters. The most positive of all of course was Chairman Mao who was represented as the Sun.
10:03:10 Karen Smith, (Curator/Art Historian):
And in the early 1980s, a lot of the images of Mao that had hung everywhere started to be taken down, just that intense propaganda that was visually everywhere, was quietly removed. This is where people here start to hear Simon and Garfunkel, start to read modern literature, where there’s an awareness of big films and even theatre productions, so it is an incredibly lively period.
10:03:46 Melissa Chiu, (Asia Society, New York):
And by the end of the decade in the 1980s there was a very important exhibition called China Avant-Garde at the national museum and this was an exhibition where over 100 artists came together to show their work and this is often posited as a really important moment when Chinese contemporary art in a way was officially recognized.
10:04:14 EVAN HUGHES VO:
BUT ALL THAT WOULD COME TO AN ABRUPT END WITH THE CRACKDOWN ON THE PRO-DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT IN TIANANMEN SQUARE. IN THIS REPRESSIVE ENVIRONMENT OF THE EARLY 1990S, ARTISTS WERE DRIVEN OVERSEAS OR UNDERGROUND. AND OUT OF THE UPHEAVAL, CAME IMAGES THAT NOW DEFINE CHINA’S FIRST GREAT WAVE OF CONTEMPORARY ART … MOVEMENTS KNOWN AS POLITICAL POP AND CYNICAL REALISM.
10:04:44 Karen Smith, (Curator/Art Historian):
Fang Lijun started off creating these great lumbering figures which were very quickly interpreted as being sort of like the image of a generation, that disaffected youth, a generation who’ve had had so much goodwill, everything they thought they were heading towards in the late 1980s seemed to have been pulled from under their feet.
10:05:07 Claire Roberts (Curator/Art Historian):
Well, the very early artists who depicted Mao in their paintings were actually very bold because Mao was being represented in a way that he had never been represented.
10:05:22 Geoff Raby, (Aust Ambassador to China):
It was difficult for artists to show art publicly, we often used our diplomatic apartments as temporary exhibition spaces and so we would hang their paintings and then invite people into the apartments and spend the weekend using our apartments as an exhibition.
10:05:41 EVAN HUGHES VO:
WESTERN DIPLOMATS LIKE GEOFF RABY HAVE BEEN THERE FROM THE EARLY DAYS, ENCOURAGING YOUNG EMERGING ARTISTS.
10:05:47 Geoff Raby, (Aust Ambassador to China):
In the 1980s it was inconceivable that foreigners and Chinese could mix freely together, that they could own apartments in the same apartment block, that they could go to bars and clubs together, that the cultural life could be so open. Things like that have just changed as I said, beyond all expectation.
10:06:19 EVAN HUGHES VO:
IT WAS NEW YEAR’S DAY 2000 – THE FIRST DAY OF THE NEW MILLENIUM, THAT MY FATHER AND I WERE FIRST INTRODUCED TO THIS NEW ART. IT WAS AT THE HOME OF THE FORMER SWISS AMBASSADOR TO CHINA, ULI SIGG AND IT WAS AN ASTOUNDING EXPERIENCE OF DISCOVERY.
10:06:36 Ray Hughes, (Art Dealer):
And there in his castle in Switzerland over six floors was a really diverse reading of the new art out of China.
10:07:01 EVAN HUGHES VO:
THAT FIRST GREAT COLLECTION OF MORE THAN 1200 ARTWORKS HAS SINCE TOURED THE WORLD UNDER THE BANNER OF MAHJONG. IT WAS THIS MEETING WITH ULI SIGG WHICH OPENED THE DOORS INTO CONTEMPORARY ART FOR US IN CHINA. ONE OF THE FIRST STUDIOS I SAW, WAS THAT OF QI ZHILONG’S.
10:07:32 Ray Hughes, (Art Dealer):
Qi Zhilong is of the first of the first new wave. He’s been in the artists’ villages at the beginning. Qi Zhilong is a painter of a wonderful long series of revolutionary women. They are about beautiful girls, they’re about a time of idealism.
10:07:59 Melissa Chiu, (Asia Society, New York):
They are incredibly seductive images that harken back to this time with a kind of hint of nostalgia that many artists of this generation think of the cultural rev, believe it or not, as a period, with very fond memories, when they were growing up and coming of age as artists.
10:08:25 Claire Roberts, (Curator/Art Historian):
As part of the aftermath of Tiananmen, many artists decided that they wanted to leave China and they went all over the world, some went to America, some went to Canada, and some of course came to Australia .
10:08:40 EVAN HUGHES VO:
AH XIAN IS ONE OF THOSE ARTISTS WHO
FOUND A NEW FREEDOM AWAY FROM THE POLITICS OF CHINA AND AUSTRALIA ALLOWED HIM TO REFLECT MORE DEEPLY ON HIS CHINESE PAST.
10:08:50 Ah Xian, (Artist):
The cultural background can be deposited into your brain and it’s always influential later on, no matter where you move to live.
10:09:15 EVAN HUGHES VO:
IN AUSTRALIA AH XIAN’S ARTISTIC EXPRESSION EVOLVED. HE BEGAN CREATING EXQUISITELY PAINTED PORCELAIN BUSTS.
10:09:25 Claire Roberts, (Curator/Art Historian):
In many ways they are an eloquent expression of his own displacement and his own cultural conversation with himself as someone who is Chinese who has found himself in a different cultural environment.
10:09:44 EVAN HUGHES VO:
NOW BEIJING BECKONS. LIKE SO MANY OTHER EXPATRIATES, AH XIAN DIVIDES HIS TIME BETWEEN HIS ADOPTED COUNTRY AND CHINA.
10:09:53 Claire Roberts, (Curator/Art Historian):
They are reconnecting with the city that they grew up in, with their place which has moved on so dramatically that still I think, some of them feel like foreigners there.
10:10:06 Geoff Raby, (Aust Ambassador to China):
The openness now of the economy, the capacity for Chinese to travel and for foreigners to visit China is underpinning this great cultural flowering we see present in the Chinese contemporary art scene.
10:10:45 EVAN HUGHES TO CAMERA:
THIS IS THE 798 ART DISTRICT. WHEN I FIRST CAME HERE 8 YEARS AGO THE PLACE WAS PRACTICALLY DESERTED.
IT TOOK A GROUP OF ARTISTS AND INT ELLECTUALS TO SAVE IT ALONG WITH THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT TRYING TO SAVE THE BEAUTIFUL BAUHAUS BUILDINGS. THOSE BUILDINGS OF COURSE HAVE BEEN TRANSFORMED NOW BRINGING A LITTLE BIT OF EUROPE OR AMERICA TO BEIJING.
10:11:17 Melissa Chiu, (Asia Society, New York):
We see private museums being built by artists and private collectors… and you see auction houses emerge/ 42.44 By this account, you know, Beijing is certainly on its way to becoming a major arts centre.
10:11:E32 Geoff Raby, (Aust Ambassador to China):
No question that things are much more open and much freer and I think a measure of how free things are is really how few things are closed down.
10:11:43 Ray Hughes, (Art Dealer):
The way China has opened itself to the world, the world has poured its products in with great glee and there are those keen observers such as the Luo Brothers, and it’s three brothers who work together, they brainstorm, they’re like very clever 3 Stooges
10:12:22 Luo Weibing, (Artist):
As long as we as artists can reflect our own life, that is good. We are gaining lots of things but also, we are losing a lot.
10:12:34 EVAN HUGHES VO:
THE LUO BROTHERS EMBODY WHAT BECAME KNOWN AS GAUDY ART, A MOVEMENT THAT DEVELOPED IN THE LATE 1990S. AND WHILE THEY DELIGHT IN SENDING UP CONSUMER CULTURE, THEY HAVE BECOM ITS BENEFICIARIES … MAJOR WORKS BY THESE ARTISTS WILL SELL FOR UP TO HALF A MILLION DOLLARS.
10:12 EVAN HUGHES VO:
LIKE THE LUO BROTHERS, CHANG XUGONG IS ALSO CONFRONTED BY THE HUGE CHANGES CHINA HAS UNDERGONE, AND THE IMPACT OF NEW–FOUND WEALTH ON ITS PEOPLE. HE USES A SEWING MACHINE TO MAKE HIS PORTRAITS OF CHINA’S NEW MEGARICH. IT’S KITSCH, BUT LOADED WITH ATTITUDE AND ACUTE OBSERVATION.
10:13:30 Chang Xugong, (Artist):
We have a tradition that we tend to forget. Chinese people pursue the latest trend. We don’t hold on to our memories.
10:13:59 EVAN HUGHES VO:
LI JIN TREASURES HIS CONNECTIONS WITH THE PAST. EVEN HIS STUDIO TELLS YOU THAT THIS IS A TRUE AESTHETE WHO COULD NEVER LOSE HIMSELF IN ARTISTIC FADS OR FASHIONS. HIS WORK IS MARKED BY AFFFECTION AND HUMOUR. IT’S A GREAT CELEBRATION OF HUMANS AT PLAY.
10:14:26 Li Jin, (Artist):
I appear in most of my works. I must paint something I understand, myself. Maybe I have a narcissism complex which means I have a positive image of myself. I am always happy to paint myself.
10:14:58 EVAN HUGHES TO CAMERA:
What I find most enjoyable about Li Jin’s works are here we have a group of assembled characters, clowns themselves. Imperfect beings, imperfect women, all enjoying themselves, having fun and here is an artist who quite subtlety but essentially displays the clown.
10:15:20 Melissa Chiu, (Asia Society, New York):
One of the big differences with Chinese contemporary artists today is that many of them have taken their own careers in hand. They really want to self-manage their career and so many of them have large-scale studios to equal any Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst studio actually.
10:15:43 EVAN HUGHES VO:
YANG JINSONG IS ONE OF THE LEADERS OF THE NEXT GENERATION, THE SO-CALLED SECOND WAVE. HE’S NOT FOLLOWING THE NOTION THAT “IT HAS LOOK CHINESE, IT HAS TO FOLLOW MAO”. HIS ART TELLS A MORE PERSONAL STORY..
10:16:00 Yang Jinsong, (Artist):
This is part of my life, the artist, and I love art because I can’t do anything without painting. I tell stories of our society, of our surroundings, of our environments, all the problems we have. (What are some of those stories?), This story you may see from the fish series, they are about violence, cruelty. I’m not looking for beauty I think. Maybe you can look for something beautiful in my older series but not this recent one.
1016:35 EVAN HUGHES TO CAMERA:
Behind me is one of Yang Jinsong’s earlier works. This is a work filled with some of the paraphernalia of life in modern China in the late nineties. Things start to seep in such as DVD players, televisions, electric rice cookers and of course at the centre of it is the serenity of Yang Jinsong the artist and his wife and, sadly, a serenity which as we’ll see, will disappear in later works.
10:16:58 Yang Jinsong, (Artist):
(Why did you disappear from the paintings?), Maybe I should change because my environment change, so fast, I couldn’t follow our time, I only can feel something important in our time, so lots of reasons why I’m changing.
10:17:31 EVAN HUGHES VO:
THESE DAYS, WHEN YOU WALK AROUND THE STREETS OF THE SICHUAN CITY OF CHONGQING, YOU ARE LEFT WONDERING WHERE DOES ARCHITECTURE END AND ART BEGIN?
10:17:40 Evan Hughes in gallery:
This one’s terrific, this one’s fantastic with the birds and the suit, the Armani suit. It’s fantastic.
10:17:48 EVAN HUGHES VO:
HERE WE MEET CHEN WEIMIN, WHOSE PAINTINGS OF CHONGQING CAPTURE THE COLOURS OF HIS SURROUNDINGS IN AN EXPRESSIVE MANNER REMINISCENT OF THE 19TH CENTURY FAUVES.
10:17:59 Ray Hughes, (Art Dealer):
The essence of great art is to capture ,when and where the artist is living and we walked from the street into a romantic version of this street and, thank you. .
10:18:28 EVAN HUGHES TO CAMERA:
WE ARE GOING TO MEET ONE OF THE ARTISTS WHO’S MOVED FROM THE NORTHERN PROVENCES AND NOW LIVES AND WORKS IN CHONGQING, LI ZHANGYANG. HE’S AN ARTIST I FIRST SAW IN BASEL AND REPRESENTS ONE OF THE ARTISTS WHOSE CAREERS HAVE REALLY TAKEN OFF.
10:18:43 Evan Hughes in gallery:
“Hello how are you? Good to see you?”
10:18:45 EVAN HUGHES VO:
LI ZHANYANG HAS LONG PUSHED THE BOUNDARIES IN HIS ART WITH BITING, IRREVERENT OBSERVATIONS OF CHINESE SOCIETY. IN HIS WORLD, DEBAUCHERY AND CORRUPTION LOOM LARGE. AND SEX IS NEVER FAR AWAY!
10:19:14 Evan Hughes to artist Li Zhanyang:
(You don’t see images of sex that much in Chinese contemporary art. Can you display this work in China, can you show this in Beijing?), I think this is very difficult because the Chinese government has forbidden, you know, sexy, political.
10:19:34 Melissa Chiu, (Asia Society, New York):
There are some subjects that are out of bounds. I have certainly seen that in operation today in exhibitions and art fairs and things like that that go on in China today. Some subjects such as sex, violence and religion are still to some degree taboo in state-run museums..
10:19:59 EVAN HUGHES VO:
BACK IN BEIJING, IN ONE OF THOSE HUGE PURPOSE-BUILT STUDIOS, ONE OF THE MORE UNUSUAL COMMISSIONS IS NEARING COMPLETION. THE CLIENT IS THE NEILSON FAMILY WHOSE PRIVATELY-FUNDED MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART IS SOON TO OPEN IN SYDNEY. THE WHITE RABBIT MUSEUM WILL BE DEDICATED TO CHINESE ART MADE SINCE THE YEAR 2000, AND JUDGING BY WANG ZHIYUAN’S WORK, IT WILL BE AN ARRESTING EXPERIENCE FOR THE PUBLIC.
10:20:39 Melissa Chiu, (Asia Society, New York):
Wang Zhiyuan is often known as the underpants guy in Beijing. He does wonderful sculptures which are large-scale reproductions, usually of candy pink women’s underpants.
10:20:55 Paris Neilson, (White Rabbit Museum):
His latest pair of panties are about 4 metres square, so, they’re huge. It’s neon lights and twinkling lights and it’s all just really in your face, and I remember once, his comment about this work was that, all over the world red light districts are marked by these flashing lights and garish colours, whereas you go to Beijing and that’s Beijing everywhere.
10:21:27 EVAN HUGHES VO:
BUT THERE IS NOTHING FLIPPANT ABOUT THE WORK OF LIU XIAODONG.
THE CYNICAL REALIST PAINTER WAS AMONGST THE FIRST ON THE SCENE IN THE 1980s AND IS REVERED BOTH LOCALLY AND INTERNATIONALLY AS ONE OF THE FINEST ARTISTS IN CHINA TODAY.
10:21:47 Melissa Chiu, (Asia Society, New York):
He paints in a something of a socialist realist technique and often figures that are non-heroic and in that way, I think he is reacting against the kind of art that he would have seen during the Cultural Revolution when he was a youth.
10:22:11 EVAN HUGHES VO:
AND LIKE THE FRENCH ARTISTS HE SO ADMIRES, IN PARTICULAR CEZANNE, LIU XIAODONG’S PREFERRED STUDIO IS OUTDOORS.
10:22:22 Ray Hughes, (Art Dealer):
This is real people affected by real things in real time.
10:22:30 Liu Xiaodong, (Artist):
I like to paint meat, body. I think it is very very exciting for me. Something like, when I am hungry I want to eat. I am painting just like that. I want to eat colour. I find drama from life, daily life. I don’t read many books but I read life.
10:23:06 EVAN HUGHES VO:
EARLIER THIS YEAR, ONE OF HIS PAINTINGS FROM THE THREE GORGES SERIES SET A WORLD RECORD FOR A CHINESE CONTEMPORARY ARTIST WHEN IT SOLD FOR NINE POINT THREE MILLION DOLLARS.
10:23:19 Melissa Chiu, (Asia Society, New York):
And it marks the flooding of the Three Gorges for the Yangtze Dam and it was a time that is still continuing when many millions of people were relocated and this kind of social dislocation that occurred has really not been addressed within China.
10:23:42 Evan Hughes to artist Liu Xiaodong,:
(You are a teacher at the Central Academy, what are some of the most important thing you teach to your young students?), I teach my students to open your eyes, open your mind because the art is very difficult. I told my student take time, you know, take time. You need time.
10:24:17 EVAN HUGHES VO:
IN JUST THIRTY YEARS, CHINESE ART HAS BEEN UTTERLY TRANSFORMED, FROM A MERE PROPAGANDA ARM OF THE POLITBURO TO A GENUINE CULTURAL REVOLUTION THAT SEEMS TO KNOW NO BOUNDARIES. WHO WOULD HAVE EVER THOUGHT THAT CHINA WOULD BECOME HOME TO THE ARTIST AS SUPERSTAR?
10:24:37 Melissa Chiu, (Asia Society, New York):
We have artists like Liu Xiaodong responding to that. He mounted an exhib in Beijing at a gallery and of course, knowing that if he were to have produced paintings on canvas, they would have been snapped up well before the opening reception so instead he chose to paint directly onto the wall. People wanted to cut out the gyprock on the wall and to be able to say that was their Liu Xiaodong painting but he refused.
10:25:12 Claire Roberts, (Curator/Art Histori an):
It is a remarkable phenomenon when you think that within our lifetime, a single artist, you know, their life has changed so dramatically in every way.
10:25:29 EVAN HUGHES VO:
FOR SOME OF THE ARTISTS OF CHINA THIS PHENOMENON WILL BE THE MEANS OF GREAT WEALTH AND TEMPORARY FAME ON THE BACK OF INTERNATIONAL HYPE
FOR OTHERS CELEBRITY IS BUT A BYPRODUCT OF SERIOUS ARTISTIC PRACTICE. IT IS THEIR WORK THAT WILL ENSURE THAT THE CONTEMPORARY CHINESE MOVEMENT WILL NOT BE A CHAPTER IN ART HISTORY THAT IS EASILY FORGOTTEN.
10:25:58 CREDITS:
PRESENTER: EVAN HUGHES
PRODUCER/DIRECTOR: CATHERINE HUNTER
SCRIPT: CATHERINE HUNTER
JOHN MULDREW
EDITOR: MIKE FEATHERSTONE
CAMERA: BRUCE INGLIS
DAVID McGUIRE
ROB HILL
ONLINE EDITOR: PETER SHEPHARD
ADD. POST PRODUCTION: STEPHEN HOPES
MARTIN TAYLOR
WITH THANKS TO: JUDITH AND KERR NEILSON
SAM AND SUE CHISHOLM
ULI SIGG COLLECTION
CATHERINE CROLL
CHARLOTTE GLENNIE
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: PETER HISCOCK
ABC COMMISSIONING EDITOR: MEGAN HARDING
PRODUCED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE AUSTRALIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION.
FINANCED WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF SCREEN AUSTRALIA