It's BS! Not a Single Chinese in World's Top 200 Artists

On June 8, 2009, Times Online published a list of "Top 200 Artists of the 20th Century to Now." Not a single Chinese artist is on that list! I was absolutely flabbergasted. But I should not have been surprised. I should not even have paid attention to such a list. After all, this list was the result of a poll of mainly Western readers: 1.4 million of them. And, like all the rankings, this list was intended to stir up controversy in order to draw readers. To use an analogy, this list is as relevant and irrelevant as the US News and World Report's college rankings. Still, the exclusion of Chinese artists speaks volume of how little the general public in the West knows about China.

Many names on the list are not questionable. Picasso of course deserves the no. 1 spot, and names such as Monet, Klimt, Matisse, Pollock, Warhol, de Kooning are thundering! No one can argue against inclusion of these great artists. They are great because they have challenged or even changed our views of art and of life, because they were consistent and productive, and because their works became icons of the 20th century.

Still, I believe several Chinese or China-born artists should have a position among the top 200. They might not be compared to the Picassos at this point of their career, but people will talk about their legacies twenty years from now. If Damien Hirst can be named the world's no. 53 artist, I do not see artists such as Cai Guoqiang, Ai Weiwei, Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, or Yue Minjun fall too far behind. In terms of total auction records, Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, and Yue Minjun are all up there, with Damien Hirst, in the list of top-five "most expensive living artists."

I must acknowledge that the auction price is one of the least accurate criteria for judging an artist's greatness. Too many factors impact the auction price: price manipulations, financial fluctuations, geoeconomic shifts, the ignorance and stupidity of the nouveau riche (they were synonymous with "American," then with "Japanese," and now with "Chinese"), and so on. When it comes to the auction prices of Chinese artists' works, they increased together with the attention to China's rise.

Still, when someone's work smashes auction records, the price is usually a reflection of this artist's achievement. Zhang Xiaogang is one of the world's most expensive artists because his "Big Family" series are increasingly treated as the representational icons of the traumatic Cultural Revolution. Fang Lijun smashed one auction record after another because his "cynical realism" best captures "the capitalism with Chinese characteristics": the insatiable, unregulated, unrestrained pursuit of materialist desires disguised as what's unique of the socialist and totalitarian China.

Maybe, twenty years from now, these names will become household names anywhere in the world. By then, China will be either the most dominant country in the world or another busted super-power-wanna-be. Either way, Chinese artists will have born witness to the most massive 21st-dream fulfilled or smashed.

Fang Lijun Studio, 5/18/09, Beijing

Zhang Xiaogang Studio, 5/16/09, Beijing

Zhang Xiaogang "Amnesia and Memory"

Zhang Xiaogang

Amnesia and Memory

Water Color

2008

38x29 cm

Acquired from the artist in 2009

To understand this painting, we must first pay attention to several key visual motifs: the truncated man's body, the traditional-bulb emitted white-light cutting a swath through the flesh-color, the notes on which the body sleeps, the wall painted half-way in green. These motifs all point to the 1980s. In China, the 1980s is a decade of cultural liberation when large quantity of books in Western philosophy, literature, politics, and economics were introduced into China and enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese college students and graduates despite the uneven quality in translation. It was also an important decade for Zhang Xiaogang personally: a struggling artist at that time, he drifted in Southwest China, fell in love as often as he got drunk, devoured Sartre, Kafka, and Kierkegaard, and almost died of a severe illness. These were his formative years: finally, after all these struggles, excitements, and existential angst, he grasped the fleeting serenity behind the surface of emotional disturbance. When he reversed the order, making the surface serene and flat and the disturbance deeply hidden, he created his "Big Family" masterpieces. While the "Big Family" series was the result, not the reflection, of his struggles during the 1980s, his "Amnesia and Memory" was the direct reflection on the 1980s.

I should note at this point that Zhang Xiaogang is never an artist of concepts: he does not simply co-relate certain concepts or issues with his artistic creations. He always begins with concepts, such as "family portrait" or "amnesia and memory," but he quickly goes beyond simple concepts. He conceptualizes and aestheticizes concepts. This notion becomes clear after we examine two seemingly excessive visual motifs in this painting.

The first excessive motif is the heart sitting on the chair at the top of the painting. The heart is connected to the truncated body, presumably keeping the body alive. This heart image does not correspond well with the previously mentioned motifs because it takes the painting out of the mimetic mode. The light bulb, the green wall, the notebook, even the truncated body, are still confined in the mode of mimesis: they do not venture beyond "common sense" or everyday things. But the heart, in its bizarre isolation from the body and its sci-fi arrangement, is no longer mimetic. To use a term from narratology, the heart is "diegetic": it "tells" instead of "shows"; it tears open a struggling individual whose only comfort is in the book he buries his face in; it tells a story of agony, of existentialist inquiry.

The second excessive motif is the camcorder sitting on a tripod. The camcorder is connected to an outlet on the light bulb. Well, the immediate reaction, upon seeing this image, should be "anachronistic." There was no mini-camcorder in the 1980s, at least not in China. Because of the anachronism, this camcorder instantly takes the time-setting out of the 1980s and into the present. Simply put, this camcorder is the tool by which the present-day artist observes himself in the 1980s. Time overlaps. Memories become layered. Amnesia becomes a palimpsest of remembering: erasing one layer to expose yet another layer.

The dialogs and tensions between the obvious (or straightforward or memetic) motifs and the diegetic motifs give this painting a profound meaning as well as a level of colorful and aesthetic harmony based paradoxically on the visual tensions.