BRIC POP: The Blog

While I do like Jia Zhangke, especially The World, this article by Grady Hendrix from Slate gets the Chinese film industry dead right.

American distributors like to import movies that toe a certain political line, depicting modern-day China as an environmentally degraded hellhole where human life has little to no value, where most people live in poverty and women have no rights. (See Lost in Beijing, Blind Shaft, Still Life, Summer Palace, Raise the Red Lantern, The Story of Qiu Ju, etc.) The best marketing tool for selling a Chinese film in America is to plaster “Banned in China!” across the poster. American audiences love the idea of the little guy with the shopping bags blocking the tank at Tiananmen Square; we’re schooled to think any officially approved movie out of China is going to be propaganda and the only way to “really see” China is through the eyes of filmmakers out of favor with SARFT, China’s official film censorship body.

This is an overall BRIC trend in filmmaking — the tension between the arthouse and the box office.  Only Russia seems to have some balance between their Tarkovskys and their Balabanovs.  In India and Brazil, both are dull.  This is welcome news and good for global mass-market cinema.

I have Big Shot’s Funeral in my Netflix queue and think I’ll go watch it now.

It was fun while it lasted, but like housing, Web 1.0, and tulips, it looks like the global market hysteria for Chinese contemporary is bursting.  When the NY Times reported on it a few weeks back, I was a little busy working and didn’t have time to look into it more until now.

Like the other bubbles, the money and media overshadowed the real value and potential in the commodity being traded (which is hardly a commodity).  When Vanity Fair devoted multiple pages to the subject in December of 2007, there was maybe a paragraph or two on the art itself, and everything about the market, auction houses, Charles Saatchi, and so on.  I could see why — by the time I got to Dashanzi outside Beijing in April of that year, it looked more like Soho in 1999 than Soho in 1979, right down to the attitude of the staff.  But I was still excited about the work, having drafted a chapter for BRIC Pop, “Tate With Destiny” where I tried to suggest that is wasn’t the art market that made Chinese contemporary so exciting.  It was the art.

Way back in 1999 at the Venice Biennale, buried in the catch-all “rest-of-world” exhibit in the Arsenale warehouses,  I had seen a photograph of a performance piece by Zhang Huan.  He’s the guy who’s lately doing Lucian-Freud-come-to-life self-portraits in meat and foam and calligraphy — you know, the usual.  (see: Matthew Barney)  But back in the last century, it was shocking and exhilirating to see Chinese contemporary art among the usual postmodern bullshit in the country pavilions.  The photo was pretty straightforward — just some people chest-deep in water — but the title had a distinctly  Chinese humor that I’ve grown to love, “To Raise The Water Level in a Fishpond.”

Zhang Huan To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond, 1997 Performance at Nanmofang fishpond, Beijing, Photograph by Robin Beck. (courtesy of Asia Society)

I loved this image because it has such a quietness and resolve to it at the same time.  They’re coming, they’re creative, and you had better get used to it.  You see, the Chinese have been raising the water level of a global ocean of contemporary art for a good 15 years now.  We didn’t really notice until the level was pushed up with money, but I think the story ought to be about the art itself.  I can’t talk with the intricacy and sometimes pretentiousness of a contemporary art critic.  I’m just a fan.  But I’m a very big fan of what the Chinese are doing because I think their work is really simple, very powerful, and doesn’t try so hard to make sure we ‘get it’.  Just as the horror of World War I gave us the whimsy of Dada, the near-erasure of China’s creative history in the Cultural Revolution gave up this very happy accident.

The great early 20th century Chinese painter Xu Beihong sums up all art, not just Chinese, with the cryptic statement, “Everything is always about something else.”  For a lot of what I saw, I didn’t know much about the something else, so my initial admiration came from the craft.  I think it’s best to divide up the story of the astounding success of contemporary art in China in three parts: the craft itself, the subtext, which may be considered Xu’s “something else,” and the global effect it has had, another “something else.”

Once you start digging into the art, it’s really inspiring how they remix things that have a traditional use or purpose that we may not know about, like Zhang Xiaogang’s reinterpretations of the Socialist family portrait.  The message isn’t always ham-fistedly screaming in your face, “Look at me! I’m trying to say something about society!”   It sometimes just sits on the craft itself.  If you want to know more about it, you can eventually pick it up.  Kind of the opposite of a Michael Bay movie.

We tend to talk about about China being on the verge of a breakout in the culture industries.   Yet here they are at the top of their creative game, and while the bubble may be bursting, I’ll bet the next generation is split between the buck-makers and the chance-takers, who are a little buried under the hype right now.  It’s already happening with Sixth Generation film, graphic design, and typography.  I remember sitting in a meeting in Singapore in 1995 being told that Chinese characters could only be rendered in either a traditional brushstroke or a bland sans-serif face in advertising type.  And then I saw what they were doing in Shenzhen in the China Now exhibit at the V&A in London last summer, and immediately wanted to go back to Asia to do some really nice print for a change.

Alan Chan, Design and Lifestyle, poster for a lecture by Alan Chan at Shenzhen University, 1998, from V&A website

So let this bubble burst, and let’s start looking for new creative contributions from the Seventh Generation.  I’m sure there’s more where that came from.