A NEW STAR has risen in the cultural firmament. China has exploded on to the art scene — and literally in the case of the artist Cai Guo-Qiang. It was he who, almost two decades ago, first helped to spark a cultural revolution. A series of pieces involving spectacular gunpowder detonations heralded the birth of a dramatic new phenomenon.
“Fireworks are used in China on every significant occasion,” he explains. “They are like the town crier announcing whatever is going on.”
Crowds gathered to gasp. The flag of contemporary Chinese culture was planted in Western consciousness. It has been waving like a red rag to a bull market ever since.
“Gunpowder was invented in China as a by-product of alchemy,” Cai (pronounced “sigh”) says. His country certainly seems to have undergone an almost magical transmutation. An isolated Eastern empire, walled off from the West by Mao Zedung’s reign of terror, has moved over the past 30 years to become the centre of a global economy. A metamorphosis of matter and spirit has taken place. Now a new wave of China-chic is sweeping the world.
Forget silk, ink and watercolour. Forget translucent porcelain and dragons of jade. And forget the stilted propaganda of socialist realism. China’s cultural makeover is aggressively contemporary. Beijing, host to a groundbreaking 1989 China Avant-Garde exhibition, now boasts more than 30 new galleries as well as an annual art fair to encourage collectors. Shanghai is due to open its hundredth museum this year.
Clearly the Chinese Government now sees culture as a platform from which it can assert itself. Meanwhile Sotheby’s has just reported record sales in Hong Kong. Christie’s announces that Chinese mainland buyers account for at least 15 per cent of Chinese art sold at international auction. The Kunstmuseum in Bern is displaying (to coincide with the prestigious Art Basel) the contemporary Chinese art collection of Uli Sigg, the former Swiss Ambassador to China who is sometimes dubbed China’s answer to Charles Saatchi. And in Britain, the V&A and the RA are both planning shows. The Academy’s China: The Three Emperors 1662-1795, which opens in November, is an unprecedented collection.
This week the Venice Biennale plays obligatory tribute. For the first time since this flamboyant arts-beano was launched more than a century ago China is to sponsor a national pavilion. This is a significant move. It indicates not only a new Western appetite for Chinese art but, more importantly, the changed attitude of the Chinese state. It has transmogrified from the enemy to the champion of free-thinking artistic culture. And things can only go on from there as a generation of artists who, having lost faith in progress after Tiananmen Square and emigrated abroad, are now being lured back by a new openness that has spelt economic boom.
Cai, whose work has been shown at the Venice Biennale four times — in 1999 taking the Leon d’Or — is the curator of the new Chinese pavilion. “Right now, Chinese art is at a crux point,” he says. Ostensibly it may not have the power it once had. In the past, when artists were at risk opposing political repression, they had not only a powerful subject but could also turn the situation to their own advantage by ensuring that journalists turned up to their openings to report on the inevitable arrival of the police to close down the show. That created a sense of event. “But now Chinese art is facing different challenges. It must look at aesthetics, at artistic value,” he says. “Artists whose work was part of a group effort, who depended on a collective ambition, often cannot sustain a solo show. There is some distance to go until the Chinese can catch up with international developments.”
But China has vast resources to draw on, not just because of the sheer number of people but because they come from a rich, complex historical background and this has bred into them a dramatic temperament. Look at the Cultural Revolution, for instance, he suggests. It created a virtual world and for years people lived inside its utter unreality. That is a powerful idea to draw on. Or look at the way China can make anything from the most sophisticated technology to the most humble commodity. “People come from an explosively creative background. And that has enormous potential.”
What makes a national pavilion? This is the sort of question that Cai and his co-curators began by asking themselves. They came to the conclusion that the pavilion should represent an open- ended discussion — both literally, in that the works occupy a temporary space rather than a permanent block, and metaphorically, in that a lot of the works have a spiritual quality.
“The entire space seems to be quite empty,” he says, which may be a relief since it comes at the end of the Arsenale, and many visitors will have walked a long way through all sorts of competing wonders to reach it.
Once there you will find a bamboo canopy to relax under. Designed by the architect Yung Ho Chang, it seems far from the typical “state monument” erected by other nations. From beneath it you can watch the huge plasma screens on which the video images of the leading feng shui specialist Wang Qiheng slowly unfurl. Wang has been exploring the energy flow of Venice and its biennale gardens.
Come in from the garden and you will find two installations. A multi-screen projection, Shout by Xiu Zhen, takes you into the turmoil of Shanghai markets. Every now and then someone cries out loudly off camera and for a few seconds all the people stop, startled and alert for a few seconds, before gradually resuming their daily business. “It is like the shout which announces the presence of something,” Cai explains, “or like in Zen when the masters sometimes shout or even hit their pupils to bring them out of mundane life and into enlightenment”.
There is also a light installation by Liu Wei. As visitors walk down corridors created by old oil storage tanks, they feel almost as if they have stepped out on to some red carpet as lights flash suddenly about them. They feel disorientated, as if they have moved to some different space.
But the most provocative curatorial choice is of the duo Peng Yu and Sun Yuan, whose queasy artistic experiments with cadavers and foetuses in the 1990s led to censorship. Now the duo brings a flying saucer — the DIY creation of Chinese farmers — into the garden. This sort of project is almost a phenomenon in China, Cai explains. At grassroots level in semi-literate communities there is an astonishing desire to build things — aeroplanes, submarines, rockets and spacecraft.
These farmers, from the southeastern Anhui province, are in Venice to present the latest version of a UFO that they have been developing for years. “They want to take flight,” says Cai. “But this is not escapism. This is a form of idealism. It rises from a belief that in China anything is possible.”
Tomorrow afternoon, spectators will witness the inaugural launch of their craft. No doubt many gathered will be wondering if this dramatic interest in China is only a flash in the pan (like the damp-squib craze for Russian art in the early days of perestroika) or whether this ancient culture, with its rich 3,000-year history of art-making and invention, is here to stay.
