by Linda Jaivin
The authorities don't make a habit of confiscating or destroying the work that's created in such ‘liberated areas’. And while they don't do anything to help the artists, neither do they make it impossible for them to survive or even exhibit. Sure, it's unlikely that these artists will get their work shown in such major state-run venues as the China Art Gallery, but that's not totally out of the question either. And there are perhaps a dozen galleries in Beijing run by foreigners or Chinese or both that specialise in representing ‘unofficial’ artists.
I don't want to give the impression that the authorities leave these artists alone entirely, or that they're not under some surveillance. There is, undeniably, harassment and the threat of censorship. Returning to my previous analogy, China's independent artists could be said to constitute a subculture that inhabits a basement room equipped with blackout curtains and a secret cellar door—just in case.
Under Chairman Mao, and especially during the ultra-radical period called the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, the Communist Party didn't just censor artists of independent bent. It criticised them, ‘struggled’ them, imprisoned them, tortured them, sent them into internal exile or killed them. You didn't have to paint a picture of Mao as a dictator—as if anyone would dare—to have your work labelled ‘counter-revolutionary’. A traditional landscape painting could in itself be ‘reactionary’ simply because it did not have an overtly political character, or, in practical terms, a high-tension power line indicating the great improvements that the Communist Party had brought to the countryside. As Mao himself explained: ‘In today's world, all culture, literature and art have a definite class character and belong to a specific political line. Art for art's sake, art that transcends class, and art that is independent of politics does not in fact exist at all.’ Following this line of reasoning, Mao insisted that ‘Our literature and art must serve the masses, first and foremost the workers, peasants and soldiers.’
But literature and art weren't only expected to know which side they were barracking for, they were expected to get out there and rumble. Here's another quotation from the Chairman:
Literature and art must be made an integral part of the overall machine of revolution, a powerful weapon to unite the People and educate the People and attack the Enemy and annihilate the Enemy, and aid the People in uniting in heart and mind to struggle against the Enemy.
All of these quotations come from Mao's famous ‘Talks on Literature and Art’, which he delivered in Yan'an in 1942. Yan'an is a town in a desolate and barren region of China's mountainous northwest; at the time, it was the centre of one of the Communists' most impenetrable and remote ‘liberated areas’.
The bunker mentality of those years never quite dissipated. The leadership spent a great part of the fifties, after coming to power, ferreting out real and imagined enemies from all corners of society, including the cultural sphere. The coming of the Korean War and then the Cold War reinforced the sense that the whole world was against them. The break with their only major ally, the Soviet Union, towards the end of that decade only pumped up the levels of anxiety and suspicion. By the sixties, Mao felt the threat from within. Intra-party power struggles escalated and intensified, leading to and continuing as a result of the Cultural Revolution itself.
In such a paranoid atmosphere, it did not take much to incite the wrath of the authorities. Artists could be punished for offences as slight as the wink of an eye—literally the wink of an eye, as in the case of the blinking owl by Huang Yongyu.
Huang Yongyu was a painter who had achieved a degree of fame in the fifties and sixties. In the early seventies, he painted an owl with one eye open and one eye closed. This led to him being accused of ridiculing the leadership and the party line. His accusers said the owl had ‘one eye closed to socialism and the Cultural Revolution’. Perhaps it did. Then again, winking is what owls actually sit around doing when they're not tormenting small furry animals.
For this and other art crimes, Red Guards trashed Huang Yongyu's home. They hit him, they screamed at him, they sent him to a rural village for ‘re-education’ by the peasantry. Huang Yongyu became a genuine underground artist. He continued to paint—in a darkened room, with the windows covered, lest anyone passing by look in and discover him. Whenever someone came to the door, he scrambled to hide his work and pretended to have been doing something else. During this period he nonetheless produced giant, defiantly vibrant pictures of flowers. Each one is a minor miracle, as is the fact that they—and he—survived at all.
The Cultrev officially ended in 1976, following Mao's death and the arrest of the ‘Gang of Four’. It had produced a ‘lost generation’ of young people. While still students, they'd been whipped into an ideological frenzy, set free to do the dirty work of persecuting people like Huang Yongyu, and then unceremoniously dumped in the countryside to chill out when their enthusiasm was no longer needed. They experienced extremes of belief and disillusionment almost unimaginable to outsiders. From their ranks came revolutionary China's first independent, even dissident, poets and artists.
On returning to the cities, some formed artistic collectives. The most famous of these called itself the Stars. Death, suffering and madness were staples of the Stars' experiential diet, resulting in a variety of aesthetic eating disorders: their art ranged from the anorexic, I-don't-want-to-grow-up little girl sweetness of Li Shuang's collages to the bulimic outpourings of political passion in Wang Keping's sculptures and Ma Desheng's powerful prints. The Stars were classic modernists, brimming with hubris. As Ma Desheng put it: ‘Every artist is a star … we called ourselves “The Stars” to emphasise our individuality.’ They asserted the right of art to exist for its own sake. Defying bans, directly challenging the authorities to shut down their exhibitions, the Stars staged a daring series of exhibitions from 1979–80. Genuine underground artists, they fought their way up to the light.
A major political campaign of the early eighties was directed against a film called Bitter Love. Bitter Love describes the life of an artist who went overseas before 1949, but returned to China out of patriotism and his desire to serve the new revolution. The party repays his loyalty and sincerity with suspicion, harassment and persecution. At one point, the question comes up: ‘You love your country, but does your country love you?’ In the end, and this is one of the parts that absolutely enraged the authorities, the artist collapses in a snowy field. His tracks form a giant question mark in the snow, and his body is the dot. The film, incidentally, was broadly based on the life of Huang Yongyu.
Fast forward to the nineties. Officially, there is no such thing as censorship of the visual arts in China. Then again, the Chinese government also insists it doesn't have any ‘political prisoners’ either—only criminals guilty of ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’. Yet the security forces may arrive to shut down an art exhibition, or demand that specific works be removed from a show, or pressure a publication not to feature the work of an artist. Party and government organs issue secret instructions to the media telling them which subjects or artists must never be written about.
China's independent artists had a major presence at the 1994 Venice Biennale. The BBC, Time and other foreign media interviewed the artists and wrote up their show. But according to the critic Liao Wen, who looked and was outraged by what she did not find, the Chinese press published not a single word about the Biennale. As you might imagine, the state-controlled media also totally ignored the success of Mao Goes Pop, another major exhibition of ‘unofficial’ art which broke attendance records at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art when it showed there in 1994, and garnered high praise everywhere it toured.
In the first half of the 1980s, the idea that the naked body was a legitimate subject for painting was still highly contentious in China. In 1983–84, the Communist Party launched an ‘anti-Spiritual Pollution’ campaign, one of a series of dumb efforts to stop people from doing stuff they enjoy, like reading books that aren't about revolutionary heroism
and listening to pop music that's about love. During the campaign, the police raided the home of an independent Beijing painter, A Xian, who now lives in Sydney. They interrogated him about where he had found the models for his paintings of nudes. He answered, ‘In books.’ Towards the end of what he later described to me as a quite farcical discussion on the nature of art, A Xian finally twigged onto the fact that the policemen were angling for him to give them a painting. So one went off to her fate as pin-up girl in the station, and A Xian was left to paint in peace.
Several years later, when things loosened up a bit, the state-run China Art Gallery staged a major exhibition of paintings featuring the naked body, mostly the female naked body. It was the first time in anyone's memory that the queue to get into the gallery stretched around the block. The majority of people in the queue were male. Many had never been to an art exhibition in their lives. Nudity in art—female nudity anyway—was legitimised at last. Art schools were even permitted to hire live models for their drawing classes—a subject with which the clearly titillated Chinese media had a field day.
In June 1994, the performance artist Ma Liuming stripped naked in front of an audience of nine in his own home and proceeded to cook up a pot of sweet potatoes into which he'd thrown some jewellery. For this outrage against decency, the police came and arrested him. They hauled his viewers into the cop shop as well. Talk about audience participation. They were all eventually released.
There are two very interesting photographs of Ma Liuming that I've seen. In one, he is wearing make-up, earrings and a bracelet but nothing else; in the second, he is dolled up in a floral print dress and chiffon scarf. He looks gorgeous. While this would not be remarkable on Sydney's Oxford Street, it is fairly astounding in Beijing. Nudity is nothing, in transgressive terms, compared with anything touching on homosexuality or serious gender-bending.
The year after Ma Liuming cooked up jewellery soup and got himself into hot water, another artist called Song Dong set up an installation in the gallery of the Central Art Academy in Beijing. He called it ‘It's Another Lesson…Are You Willing to Play with Me?’ Among the materials used in the installation were 10,000 actual examination papers, 500 specially designed examination papers, silkscreen prints of maths and punctuation symbols, seven black-and-white television sets and a number of large, blank, bound books. The walls and floor of both of these spaces were covered with the silkscreen prints and the genuine exam papers. Some gallery-goers were asked to don special robes and sit down at a table in the middle of one of the installation's two interconnecting spaces. Once seated, they were asked to read the blank books. They were given magnifying lenses to aid in the process; they could write or draw in them as well. Everyone was invited to fill out the exam papers. They were told to do this any way they wished. They had to put a name on the paper, but it didn't have to be their own; and they were asked to grade themselves. People were also welcome to write or draw on the blackboard.
The artist declared that he welcomed ‘unanticipated’ actions. The security forces obliged. Half an hour after the exhibition opened, they arrived to shut it down. They gave three reasons: the exhibition was bu yansu —‘not serious’; it was you shandongxing —‘capable of stirring things up or inciting things’, and it was you bu anquanxing, an ambiguous phrase which translates literally as ‘unsafe by nature’ but also has the implication of ‘endangering security’.
In Mao's day, there was right and wrong, or rather, right and left. There were goodies and baddies, and a clear—if perpetually shifting—party line. There were no such creatures as ‘independent’ or ‘unofficial’ artists. In fact, there were no ‘artists’ at all—the politically correct term of the day was ‘workers in literature and art’. They didn't create ‘art’ as such, they created propaganda—and propaganda was a word without negative connotations. In return, the state rewarded them with salaries, houses and studios. Huang Yongyu had been a comfortably state-supported artist before the owl incident toppled him from his perch.
In Mao's day, you either made your art serve the party or you were dead meat. Today all the Communist Party can really ask for is that you don't actively oppose it. It is still not comfortable, however, with equivocal forms of cultural expression.
I'm quite certain that the authorities were able to see an inflammatory element in Song Dong's installation because, with his blank books and blackboard, he offered viewers an unsupervised opportunity to express themselves in public. What if someone wrote, ‘We want democracy!’ or ‘Down with the Communist Party!’?
Well, so what if they did? Would that cause the multitudes to pour back out onto Tiananmen or force the party out of power? Of course not. Quite the opposite, in fact—if that happened, and it was tolerated, people would probably conclude that democracy was on its way and there was no need for radical action after all.
Nine times out of ten, the party will leave artists alone these days if leaving them alone doesn't involve a loss of face. The best example of what it does when it feels that face is at stake comes from the film world.
Since the late eighties, a small number of directors have been making films independently of the studio system. Many of these films concentrate on aspects of contemporary Chinese life that the party would rather ignore. They include documentaries on Tibetan religion and former Red Guards and even fringe artists. They also include the docudrama Beijing Bastards, by Zhang Yuan, which portrays the apparently fragmented and meaningless lives of drunken, brawling, rock-n-rolling urban youth. These directors simply hire or borrow their equipment and thus circumvent entirely the process of official permissions and approvals.
Beijing Bastards took the Jury Prize at the Locarno film festival in Switzerland and was screened to much critical excitement at Tokyo and Rotterdam. Meanwhile, the established director Tian Zhuangzhuang did something even more outlandish with his film The Blue Kite. He made it using the resources of the Beijing Film Studio, but the script the studio heads vetted was not the one he worked from. When someone dobbed him in, the studio ordered him to halt shooting immediately. He ignored them. When it reached the editing stage, some officials from the Party Propaganda Department and Film Bureau got a hold of it and flipped. (Among other things, the film portrayed how army leaders regularly took advantage of pretty young girls they fancied, punishing those who would resist.) The officials demanded the print be confiscated. Somehow, Tian smuggled it out to Japan where it was put into post-production. Blue Kite screened at the Cannes Directors' Fortnight and won top prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival.
When both films, and a handful of other ‘independents’, were showcased in a special program at Rotterdam, it was the final straw. Big loss of face, big retaliation. The government officially banned seven directors, including Zhang Yuan and Tian Zhuangzhuang, from making any films at all. An article published in the Beijing Youth News, and headlined ‘Make Films According to the Law: You Have No Other Choice—the Ministry of Broadcasting, Film and Television Shows Rule-Breakers the Red Light’ said that anyone who loaned, sold or rented equipment or film stock to these directors or offered them processing would be punished. If anyone invited them to collaborate on a film they were making, it would be banned as well.
Tian, Zhang and the others just kept their heads down for a while. Not too long in some cases—Zhang, audacious as ever, has even made a documentary on Tiananmen Square itself, taking 35 mm cameras onto the square in the confident assumption (proved correct, as it turned out) that the police would think that anyone doing so must have official permission. Tian is also active again as are most, if not all, of the others on the list.
Things that have nothing to do with art can have huge repercussions on, for instance, whether Chinese artists will be able to show their work and what kind of work they can show. Following the Beijing massacre of 1989, all subcultures had to close the blackout curtains and slip down into the cellar for a while. It was months before any independent artists even tried to hold an exhibition.
Since then, every year in May and June, which are the protest movement and massacre's anniversary dates, the authorities become hypersensitive to trouble. An elderly couple, the playwright Wu Zuguang and his wife, the actress and painter Xin Fengxia, planned to hold an exhibition of her paintings and his calligraphy, all on completely innocuous themes, in a department store gallery in central Beijing at the end of May a few years after the massacre. Somehow, the security forces learned that the former student leader Wang Dan, who had recently been released from prison, intended to attend the opening. So they forced the department store to cancel the exhibition. If it hadn't been for the timing, the policemen informed the store manager, then Wang Dan's presence would have been no big deal.
It's difficult to make sense of how censorship works in the People's Republic, because sometimes it doesn't, and when it does, it doesn't always make any sense.
A new, post-Stars generation of artists has grown up in China, less political than any before it, more cynical, more savvy. Never having given themselves over to the collective, they don't struggle for individuality so much as take it for granted. Having witnessed the futility of many a grand political gesture, they are less likely to want to change the world than to try and carve out a little private space from which to observe or ignore it. They are less the conscience of society than—in the case of some—its sense of humour.
