“The New Spirit in Painting: Moving Beyond - Painting In China, 2013”.

　　POETRY:

　　For many years Yang Lian as a poet of international repute had discussed issues of art and culture with fellow writers and intellectuals in China and in expatriate situations around the world; they wished to define a new climate which rejected Political Pop and Cynical Realism10 and looked to the great traditions of Chinese history and culture for inspiration. Yang experienced the hardship of the Cultural Revolution, being sent to the country where he worked as a gravedigger. He and his fellow aspiring intellectuals found the reality of life politicised and dehumanising. Further, Modern Standardised Chinese (Putonghua, or ‘common tongue’) was to those in pursuit of personal expression anything but that. Many new words were in fact introduced during the late nineteenth century via Japan and simplified characters were introduced after 1949: “more than forty per cent of the Chinese we use today is actually an interpolated “foreign language” - western vocabulary was first translated into Chinese characters by the Japanese, then borrowed into written Chinese. There are numerous examples, such as “democracy”, “science”, “materialism”, “idealism”, “ human rights”, “law”, “politics”, “sports”, “socialism”, “capitalism” and even “self”, “psychology”, “time”, “space”, without which the modern mentality would lose its roots”.11 It is important to note, however, that the introduction of vernacular Chinese was to improve literacy, and that debates regarding vernacular Chinese had been raging since the early twentieth century.

　　Yang was part of the group of Misty Poets who chose to eliminate “the boring and meaningless politically-conscious high-register vocabulary from the language of poetry.”12 He and his poet friends addressed reality, such as the destruction of the inner self, by going back to images such as the sun, the moon, water, earth, darkness and the sea. “Misty Poetry” was a simple return to favouring a pure and Classical Chinese. Their poetry consequently sounded odd in the politically defined China of the 1980s and 1990s. The challenge Yang Lian and his poet and artist contemporaries set themselves was to find a contemporary voice or visual language using Classical Chinese, a language purer and more able to resonate with subtle and manifold meaning. The impact of Chinese educated society of the influx of Western ideas during the 1980s is difficult to imagine; works in translation varied enormously in quality and so the effect at times must have been both alluring and bewildering. The Misty poets and their artist counterparts sought to create a language without plagiarising the West, or playing into the cultural East-West divide, they sought to integrate intellectual resources and to express themselves in a personally defined language. Yang Lian and his artist contemporaries such as Xu Bing and Xu Longsen reacted to the reality of the Cultural Revolution and the influx of European and American literature and art, through their own experiences of it. It is clearly not possible to generalise in broad terms but to choose a small number of exceptional artists as examples (Xu Bing, Xu Longsen, Shang Yang, Su Xinping) whose work each captures important aspects of the discernible artistic climate, that are less known in the West. The artists chosen for Moving Beyond, which this publication accompanies, likewise do not claim to be representative of art in China at the present time but they do, however represent the independent, meditative artistic pursuits are asserting a force for change. Following 1989 these artists also reacted against the Western-inspired styles of Political Pop and Cynical Realism that other artists chose to employ, by establishing a dialogue with self and Chinese traditional culture.

　　This is a situation that cannot be seen in isolation or as the first time for Chinese intellectuals in the past to have asserted views on culture that ran counter to the prevailing political regime. Indeed China’s history is marked by foreign imperialism and incursions. As Simon Leys observes, “It seems that there is a paradox at the heart of this remarkable cultural longevity: cultivation of the moral and spiritual values of the ancients appears to have most often combined with a curious neglect of, or indifference (even at times downright iconoclasm) towards, the material heritage of the past”.13 In the 1930s Fou Lei (1908-1966) wrote an essay whilst living in Paris where it was first published. In 1932, “The Crisis in Modern Chinese Art, 1932” was published in Shanghai expressing despair at the state of Chinese society. The problems of the arts he describes share an uncanny resemblance to the views of Yang Lian and Xu Longsen albeit in a wider global context. Fou Lei tragically took his own life in 1966 at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

　　“In today’s China, where people have lived for many thousands of years following wisdom, harmony and the Golden Mean, in the face of Western mechanisation, industrialisation, science and the temptations of material society, it is increasingly difficult, to hold onto a dreamlike world of knowing quietude. China with its profound, ancient and glorious artistic past, is today obstinately seeking the very ‘materialism’ that the West has tired of and wishes to cast aside: this state of affairs is lamentable but at the same time dictated by the ineluctable force of fate”.14

　　The relationship between the written word (calligraphy) and the pictorial world of painting has attracted the attention of scholars for centuries: “The cultural richness and resonance of the union of writing and painting mark Chinese art as genuinely different from the Western tradition of art-making”.15 The relationship between painting, poetry and philosophy has traditionally underpinned all cultural manifestations in China. Leys explains that the Western traveller to China would have been disconcerted by the lack of monumental buildings, “a material absence of the past”, by contrast to Europe where in spite of wars, a large number of monumental landmarks remain - from Classical Greece and Rome, medieval cathedrals, churches and palaces of the Renaissance, “an unbroken chain of architectural witnesses that perpetuate the memory of the past, right into the heart of our modern cities.”16 Chinese civilisation, he says, “did not lodge its history in buildings, the real past is a past of the mind, its imperishable elements are moments of human experience. The only truly enduring embodiments of the eternal human moments are the literary ones”.17 Visitors in recent years will by contrast find a spectacular range of international architectural schemes as a consequence of the economic boom, a unique cultural situation, and the art market too reflects the commercial power of China as a nation.