By Valentin Diaconov
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Ai Weiwei Forever Bicycle (2012)
‘China China’ at the PinchukArtCentre, Kiev
Contemporary Chinese art and literature has never been met in Russia with the same intense interest as in the West. As it often happens, one has to leave Russia to get acquainted with the current trends. The PinchukArtCentre in Kiev may be off the international radar for the global art set and ‘China China’ will not help matters, if only because of its somewhat simplistic curatorial thinking (the main conflict in Chinese art making, according to PinchukArtCentre’s chief curator Bjorn Geldhof, can be found in the show’s sweeping subtitle: ‘Individuality vs. Collective’). But the PAC holds a special place in every Russian art lover’s heart as, with the chance to see work by established art stars that one often reads about but can rarely experience in the flesh, it is a kunsthalle we all would welcome.
Dasha Zhukova’s Garage in Moscow was supposed to be like this, but it’s grown more and more progressive by the year. Victor Pinchuk’s tastes are much more conservative, a who’s-who kind of collecting that relies on loud names. How are we supposed know if Damien Hirst’s recent paintings are as awful as people say? Head to a retrospective at the PAC or to the 4th floor of the building in the centre of Kiev, where part of Pinchuk’s collection is on permanent display. It’s the same with Chinese art: everybody knows of Ai Weiwei’s plight, but all a Russian audience got when he was included in the main project of the 4th Moscow Biennale was a tedious video. ‘China China’ has three of his works, Rooted Upon (2009), Fairytale (2007), and a huge constellation of bikes titled Forever Bicycle (2012). Ai Weiwei is now more a hero than an artist to many people. That is why encountering his work can be a shock, for it’s mostly banal and boring – all effect and no after-effect.
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Sun Xun The History You Can Not See (2013), film, wall painting, woodcut, paper drawing, paper sculpture and chalk
To an eye trained in Western art history, Chinese art feels liquid like water with no discernible bounds and frames; ready to fill any space you are willing to present it with. Take for example Sun Xun’s History You Can Not See (2013), a work based on Ukraine’s single most devastating peace-time tragedy of the Soviet era, the Holodomor (literally, ‘death by hunger’) when millions died from starvation; a side effect of collectivization in the 1930s. Sun Xun’s installation is part-wall mural, part-animation, part-work on paper. It goes on and on through the PAC’s staircase looking like a Raymond Pettibon on steroids. One gets the feeling that the artist would fill a skyscraper fire exit given half the chance.
This urge towards an abundance of means and the large-scale causes mild to extreme discomfort, at least for me (I discussed Chinese art with colleagues who also professed similar feelings). But every discomfort, as we all know, must be thought out and subjected to the light of reason. That is why it seems important for me to dig out a comforting image of China that is rooted in Russia’s past, because it is against this image that Chinese art is judged by Russian viewers.
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Sun Xun The History You Can Not See (2013), film, wall painting, woodcut, paper drawing, paper sculpture and chalk
China as a tourist destination has found many fans amongst Russia’s middle class lately, with young professionals praising the break-neck rhythms of Beijing and Shanghai, enjoying exotic street foods and generally admiring the unstoppable machine that is today’s China. The tumultuous political relationship between the USSR and China is a thing of the past, but it is important to recall when one is cornered by yet another gigantic installation by a Chinese artist.
Since the coming to power of Mao Zedong, Communist officials in China have often referred to Russia as ‘the Older Brother’ (nothing Orwellian in this denomination, just a recognition of USSR’s head start in building socialism). In that time, China and the Soviets existed in a somewhat asynchronous accord: Russia had already passed the stages of Civil War, military communism and Stalin’s purges when Mao established his hold on China by the very same bloody means.. Dispatches from China during Mao’s reign read like accounts of recent history for Soviet people: the language of ideological struggle and the subtext of every political decision were all too recognizable. The USSR was in ‘thaw’, but in China, North Korea and Vietnam the battle still raged. If Fidel Castro’s Cuba has been seen as a picture of romantic resistance to the manipulative West – with guerilla warfare a variation of a beloved image of undercover revolutionaries operating against Tsarist or Fascist forces – there was nothing remotely endearing about the Eastern descent into totalitarian rule. The official Soviet stance on China’s communism changed in 1966. China’s Cultural Revolution, a faithful recreation of Stalin’s Big Terror on a similar or larger scale, proved to be indigestible for Soviet elites with memories of the orchestrated open trials in 1937–38 where everyone could be implicated in fake crimes and shot without appeal. Relations began to blossom again when Deng Xiaoping came in power in 1976 following Mao’s death. With the fall of the Soviet regime, new Russia has searched for a diplomatic footing with China for several years, with the former ‘Younger Brother’ denouncing its closest relative as a traitor against the Communist cause. Now all is well, on the surface, but tensions proliferate away from the media eye: there’s more and more Chinese capital in the East of Russia and in Siberia. In a couple of years, this will be an urgent issue, or so the experts say.
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Ai Weiwei Rooted Upon (2009), 32 tree trunks, and Fairytale (2007), 535 black and white prints
Culturally, the China that exists in the Russian mind is a country of wonderful mystique that existed in the past, beyond Mao’s shadow. Chinese fairytales, illustrated by prominent artists have been bestsellers in the USSR, as have been books of short stories by Pu Songling, a Qing Dynasty writer who retold folklore as vaguely erotic and deeply profound metaphor for human relationships. The most recent writer from China popular among Soviet audiences was Lao She, a victim of the Cultural Revolution. His amazing science fiction novel Cat Country (1932) deserves to be known more widely as a classic Eastern anti-utopia, on par with anything produced in the West. And the most recent painter to capture the Soviet imagination was Qi Baishi (who died in 1957), a traditional ink virtuoso with thousands of still lifes to his name. So, the China we know and love is a China of at least 70 years ago, quite unlike USSR’s evil twin that emerged during the late 1960s. Thus, contemporary Chinese art is simultaneously very transparent for a Russian observer because of our shared history, but at the same time it is considered unremarkable, something that is far away from our belief of what art should strive for.
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Sun Yuan and Peng Yu Seeing Is Not An Option (2013), installation and performance
One of the questions that many people in Russia ask themselves is: ‘what would have happened if we had not got rid of the USSR and proceeded to become progressively more free market in the same ideological frame as the Chinese?’ Would Russia be a richer country? Would Russia have become more totalitarian? To stay closer to the point, would Russian art look as overwhelming as contemporary Chinese art and command, if not love, then at least more respect? There are multiple similarities in the way ideology has been deconstructed in Chinese and Russian art of the recent decades. One thinks of Komar and Melamid’s Sots Art while looking at Zhang Huan’s paintings. Sun Huan and Peng Yu’s Seeing Is Not An Option (2013) hits home with its aggressive enforcing of military ritual in exhibition space. A group of men confined in a cell disassemble and then cobble back various firearms. Their eyes are covered with black cloth. It is a common exercise in the army to disassemble your weapon with your eyes closed at the shortest time possible. From a country with compulsory military training, this performance looks very troubling indeed. What’s even more troubling is that there’s no discernible pacifism or any other progressive message in this work: it just is. Part-highbrow contemporary art installation, part-display of power – the ability of Chinese art to command unbelievable resources at will and combine it with an unrelenting work ethic that dwarfs all competition. It may not seem very meaningful or delicate, but then European notions of intellectual fecundity may be useless here: all that largesse is nothing compared to China’s industrial growth, a mere drop in the ocean of empty cities for millions and the like, a Duchamp urinal multiplied million-fold in the age of overproduction. Scary, huh? I get the feeling that it’s supposed to be. And if you’re Russian, you cannot help but feel a sense of dread towards your close neighbour.
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