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

　　The Chinese artists since the 1980s who have travelled and lived and studied abroad have enjoyed greater artistic freedom than if they had stayed at home, and their experience of Western art and inevitably travel itself led to the wider application of their creative practice. Most have in fact returned to China (Guan Wei, Xu Bing, He Gong, Liang Quan), whilst certain key artists such as Shang Yang have not travelled outside of China for an extended period of time. The meeting in Beijing in April 2012 between Yang Lian and Shang Yang was their first. Shang was anxious to explain to me the importance to himself and other artists and intellectuals in China (following the tragedy of Tiananmen Square) of reading Yang’s prose poem: Norilang. Norilang was criticized by the Chinese government in 1983 and formally banned in 1989. ‘Obscure Poetry’, a derogatory term to refer to the poetry of Yang and others in the 1980s was ostensibly a literary debate but was in fact more about politics. Norilang (the name of a waterfall in the Tibetan part of Sichuan Province) was attacked for possessing foreign ideas: the power of Nature was used to symbolise human power, the pomegranate, human suffering. Written at the height of the debate over modernist ideas and Chinese artists relationship with the West, the work with its powerful imagery became a symbol of hope for fellow artists and intellectuals. Much of Yang’s poetry has been written outside of China, but is quintessentially Chinese, with an enduring international appeal. The status of exile18 is a particularly important one in Chinese history and resonates in global culture in the twenty-first century, where an increasing number of individuals and indeed whole communities are forced to migrate due to war, environmental threat, catastrophe or political insurgency.19 Those Chinese artists and intellectuals whose work is most impressive tend to have traversed an independent path through volatile events of great magnitude: from a context of isolation from the world before 1979; the dramatic political and social events of the late 1980s, each involving the processing of an exceptional amount of information; to the opportunity for great material success due to the international art community’s insatiable appetite for the Eastern political exotic. The artists and intellectuals who have contributed to the concept of this exhibition: Moving Beyond refers to the tendency of many artists, fuelled by market forces to make works that are but “hollow forms”; using imported imagery. Common to all the artists in Moving Beyond, 2013 and those who are involved in the on going exhibition programme, is the desire to evolve a suitable and authentic voice to describe the present situation: within Chinese culture this will inevitably traverse the past and the present, the individual and the universal.

　　Perhaps this is one of many reasons the work of the leading Chinese artists and poets at present speaks so directly to the human condition. Encountering the work of Shang Yang in Beijing in April 2011 was an almost over-bearing confrontation with mortality in visual terms such was his conceptual skill with language and his passion for humanity itself. Using the juxtaposition of images from traditional Chinese landscape painting, screened onto the vast canvas by a machine, with an aggressive graffiti-like mark making, it is an image both elegant and aggressive. Perhaps the artist’s fluency in calligraphy on a great scale enabled rhythm within the aggressive marks. The message conveyed by Dong Qichang Project (2008) was inexplicable in its unmitigated might. Shang Yang is one of the most revered artists in China, ‘the Godfather of modern art’ and an important teacher. Shang’s proficiency in the Socialist Realism of his education and early work, which evolved with an adroit ability to absorb Western conceptual art, especially that of Joseph Beuys20, has enabled him to assert and consolidate a personal synthesis of Western and Eastern thought and form.

　　XU BING:

　　Xu Bing is also one of the most important Chinese artists to have challenged both Classical Chinese culture and the contemporary milieu. Based in America (1990-2008) Xu Bing’s ground- breaking work, Book From the Sky (1987-1991) was first displayed in Beijing's China Art Gallery in 1988, and then in China/Avant-garde, 1989 at the same venue. Subsequently it reached a global audience and is now considered one of the greatest masterpieces of twentieth century Chinese art. It was, according to the artist, his response to the Cultural Revolution and the destruction of classical texts, architecture and artefacts. It was "most deeply rooted [in Mao’s] transformation of language . . . . To strike at the written word is to strike at the very essence of the culture. Any doctoring of the written word becomes in itself a transformation of the most inherent portion of a person’s thinking. My experience with the written word has allowed me to understand this."21 Xu Bing has sought to understand “the origin of the Chinese character-writing culture, cutting through many longstanding complex problems and explaining many issues. For in fact, the nature, the thinking, the way of looking at things, the aesthetic appreciation, artistic core and even the physiological rhythm – indeed almost every aspect of the Chinese people – is connected with the ‘pattern of Chinese characters’.”22