China’s younger artists are introspective, sophisticated, and hyper-aware of their identity
China has changed more over the past 20 years than most countries did in the entire 20th century. The generation of artists that emerged in the mid-1990s grew up in a mostly rural nation, under Mao, and experiencing the decade-long Cultural Revolution that started in 1966. Their art, often filled with propaganda or portraits based on photographs of the period, reflected not only conditions at the time but also a Chinese identity formed when the country was isolated from the rest of the world.
The latest generation, artists born after 1976 and the death of Mao, emerged under a market economy and an open-door policy, accompanied by Western influences. McDonald’s, KFC, cell phones, and DVDs are all taken for granted by these artists, now in their 20s and 30s. Many of them, the products of China’s one-child policy, have attended the country’s competitive art schools and traveled to Europe and the United States as part of their education. They could look to the generation before them and see that success in the international art market was clearly within reach, and many are already making a name for themselves in China and beyond.
“We can see in the work of the younger generation of Chinese artists a uniqueness and creative potential that could be much, much more interesting than the work of the already world-famous artists, in terms of the art market and the work itself,” comments Xu Bing, the MacArthur Award-winning artist who recently returned from the United States to China to become vice chairman of Beijing’s prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts. “We can see real seeds of contemporary art—a real sense of future,” he adds, “because China is so experimental, the most experimental place in the world.”
From the perspective of James Elaine, a curator who left his position at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to move to Beijing two years ago, “the artists born in the 1980s and ’90s are becoming much more introspective and sophisticated.” Elaine curated the exhibition “In a Perfect World,” at the Meulensteen Gallery in New York last February, featuring works by 12 Chinese artists under 35. Few of the pieces in the show were obviously related to China—no images of Mao or the Forbidden City—but close inspection revealed many undercurrents of Chinese culture and social concerns.
Among the works here were Yan Xing’s video monologue Daddy Project (2011), a work about growing up a single child in a single-parent family, and a painting by Song Kun, Woman in Pinetree (2010), which combines an anime character with traditional scroll-painting techniques. “A lot of these artists are shedding their Chinese skin very rapidly,” Elaine says. “They really want to be international so badly, but they are still Chinese. They are still producing work that can only be made in China.”
“In a Perfect World” is not the only recent show focusing on these younger artists. “Catch the Moon in the Water: Emerging Chinese Artists” opened this summer at James Cohan Gallery in New York. Organized by independent curator Leo Xu, formerly associate director at James Cohan Gallery Shanghai, the exhibition examined how Chinese artists, most of whom have never been to the United States, see the nation based on what they have culled from movies, television, the Internet, and art-history books. Last spring, there was a large group exhibition, titled “+Follow,” staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai, that revealed the sheer diversity of styles among the artists.
Testifying to this breadth is Chen Ke, who, at 33, is already established compared with many of her peers. After graduating with an M.F.A. from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2005, she moved to Beijing, where she has been showing regularly at Star Gallery. She speaks sensitively about her melancholic paintings—fantasies often featuring a sad little girl that are expressions of the loneliness of growing up an only child. Her painting The Snail’s Home (2006) sold for more than $200,000 at Christie’s Hong Kong in November 2010.
“Sometimes I have these mixed-up feelings or I’m frustrated and I don’t want to take it out on my friends or parents or neighbors, so I found I can create these figures and ventilate my anger,” says Chen Ke. It is a surprisingly personal confession yet typical of a generation that is not as concerned with social issues as with individual psychology. Chen Ke has a large studio close to her apartment and there is a waiting list for her work. Still, she remarks, “I never assumed I would be successful, and success has brought me trouble. Success came early for me.” She adds, “but now many people expect me to be better and better, so there is pressure. It’s not just pressure from the outside, but from my own inner self as well.”