The twenty years following the opening up of the P.R. China has also resulted in great changes and new developments in the field of fine arts. After several decades of a strictly guided and one-dimensional art production and after being nearly totally cut off from information about the art outside China, the new liberties have been intensively used, both by individuals inside and outside the art institutions, to fill the gaps and try to come in sync with the international art world.

When information about modern and classical art from the West reached China in the late seventies and early eighties, it first arrived in bits and pieces. Catalogues and books brought by visitors circulated among friends and a few exhibitions of modern art, from France and the USA among others, caused a sensation. At the same time Chinese scholars started a series of articles in the art magazines to introduce modern and classical art outside China and soon standard art historical works were translated and published.

The first modern art exhibitions with Chinese works were held in Beijing and Shanghai in 1979 and 1980. The second half of the eighties saw a large number of group exhibitions and manifestations organized nearly all over the country. This uprising culminated in the February 1989 exhibition in the National Gallery in Beijing under the name "China/Avant-Garde". (to see related article in "China Gallery website, click here ) In the same period artists based on the mainland were invited to take part in exhibitions in Europe and the USA. The early nineties saw a still growing number of smaller an bigger group exhibitions of contemporary art from China, first in Europe and Australia and recently also in the USA.

From the beginning many in the Chinese art world expected that China as a nation should develop its own version of modern art, recognizable as "Chinese, and that only based on such an accomplishment individual artists could get international recognition. Many theoretical efforts were made to define and describe the bases and charachteristics of such an art. A great number of exhibitions, especially in the eighties, were announced as historical steps in this aspired direction by pretending that they revealed the latest trend which would dominate and inevitable make history. Similar presumptions and practices were incidentally repeated in the Western art world when in the nineties big exhibitions on the contemporary art of China started to travel abroad and this claim for something exclusively "Chinese" continued.

It is clear that with this exhibited collection we didn't start another search for what finally is Chinese and what's not, or what it should be or has been. The eighteen presented artists also don't use a common style, technique or subject matter and their works are dating from 1986 until this year. Most of them have followed an academic education and all are well informed about both Western and Chinese art history. Instead, the regional diversity, different backgrounds and directions of the artists can give an impression of the variety the Chinese art world has exhibited in such a short time.

It is not surprising that several artists react on, use or document aspects of the vast change of Chinese society, which changed within twenty years from showing the nearly uniform religious soberness of the Mao era to the present abundant consumerism and from a strictly defined social structure and the connected mores to its remaining and scattered fragments of today. In the art world of the nineties the art market became a hot item, auctions were organized, specialized magazines appeared and art academies reshaped in what looks like company groups.

Zeng Hao was teacher at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts when he portrayed his enterprising friends and colleagues in their new outfit and modern furnished apartments. "The Mirror", "Flowers" and "Thursday Afternoon" were painted in sequence in 1994 and 1995. "The Mirror" shows a face looking at us with a quiet smile and self-assured eyes, popping up from a disproportional small torso dressed in a shirt and jacket, which seems to squeeze the head and undermine the intended expression. This effect is deepened by the even smaller objects in the separated foreground, a comb, lighter and as a deadpan blow, a cosy piggy-bank. In "Flowers", two half cut-off figures serve as a background for the theme of the painting. In "Thursday Afternoon", fashionably clothed figures and a number of luxury objects without mutual relations are bluntly present in a brightly colored undefined space.

Until the early eighties the social unit one was attached to, school, army unit or warehouse etc. was one of the basic elements in Chinese society. They covered professional as well as private life and did so life-long. Zhuang Hui who worked several years in a large steel plant in Henan province knew the strong material and psychological dependency on this identity confirming relationship. When about twenty years after the collapse of the unit-structured society he reanimates one of its traditional ceremonies, the group photo-session, no one could resist nor discuss or criticise his presence and position on the photo : on the left side of the group, as the outsider and conductor, standing besides the hierarchy.

Because of its supposed objectivity, photography has long been an important propaganda form in the P.R. China. But the same effectiveness and pretence can be used in reverse. In the eighties, some young photographers started to use it as a medium revealing social reality. In the late eighties, Zhang Hai'er started a unique series of photos of girls who served as models at the art academies. Being a model was and still is a suspect position in China. But Zhang Hai'er is not a documentary photographer, nor an observing photographer. He engages himself. He did so when he later visited the Steelworks of Wuhan. His own presence in the portraits is more than obvious. Looking at his works results again in commitment.

"To cunsume is the Ideal-To consume vents one's bottled up spleen better" and "Ten Thousand Customers" are photo works of the youngest artist featured in the exhibition, Zheng Guogu (1970, Yangjiang), who runs his publicity company in the southern coastal city of Yangjiang. His refined and delightful photographical reports about life in prosperous Yangjiang are an undisguised glorification of whatever form of consuming. It is a consequent position in a society that lacks all basic elements of a free modern art world. Culture itself, recent political forms since 1949 or that extensive heritage that's called the Chinese tradition, form subject matter for artists. Most of those are not surprisingly active and located in Beijing, the capital. Zhou Yunxia (1958, Nanjing) lived in the artists' village of Yuan Ming Yuan in North-Western Beijing when he painted his variation of "Animal Farm". In "June 3, 1994" Geng Jianyi (1962, Hangzhou) depicts in detail how politicians show thanks after being applauded. Liu Anping (1964, Berlin) entitled his devastating action in room 571 of the Holiday Inn Hotel in Beijing "The Behaviour of Young Red is Righteous", and with shocking clarity Gu Dexin (1962, Beijing) demonstrates the harsh simplicity of propaganda.

Ai Weiwei (1957, Beijing) focussed in the late seventies and early eighties on the recent national history. A history which had a direct and great influence on his life and that of his parents. In more recent works he broadens his themes as well to the present, as in "Seven Frames" a photo series of a young guard serving at Tian'anmen Square, registered in ruthless detail in seven shots from the head, of what appeared to be a lad from the countryside almost past his teens, to his unknotted heavy leather shoes. In 1996 and 1997 he engaged porcelain workers in Jingdezhen to produce the so-called "Blue and White" ceramic in 18th century Qianlong and Kangxi style. It shows an underlying destructive aspect towards the long tradition and is also a consequence of a discussion about authenticity since in the beginning of this century so-called "ready-mades" were introduced in the modern art world by Marcel Duchamp.

Wei Dong, Hong Lei and Hong Hao belong to the few who work close to a traditional style. Wei Dong (1968, Beijing) masters traditional landscape painting of different periods and styles. To this he adds women figures scarcely clothed in parts of official costume fashions derived from the recent history painted in "gongbi" technique, a kind of fine brushwork style dating back two thousand years. Hong Lei (1960, Changzhou) transfers traditional compositions and themes in photographical works, reworked with brush and other tools. Hong Hao (1965, Beijing) started 5 years ago his extensive "Selected Scriptures" series : silkscreen prints showing moulded pages of a book containing medical documents, like "Selected Scriptures, page 1762, Acupuncture Therapy, the Hemp Cloth Phrenology", a review of his career as an artist "Selected Scriptures, page 1862, The Division of Nuclear Arms", "Selected Scriptures, page 95, The Latest Practical World Map" and "Selected Scriptures, page 3065, The New World Order".

Between 1991 and 1993 Wang Xingwei (1969, Haicheng) painted a large triptych showing a group of fighting young people. The North-Eastern part of China, where he grew up and lives is known for those frequent outbursts. The formation of the figures in the painting is classical : static in symmetry with an inside action. It is painted in a realistic fashion, slightly tending to cartoon-like character style. Like other paintings from that period he used realism to reflect and document his social surroundings. Violence remained the theme in the paintings "To Hurt" (1994) and "All Happy Families are Similar" no 1 and 2 (1994) but in "To Hurt" he used a more monumental style, less realistic, as an effort to define the essence of violence. The paintying could also be entitled "Co-operation", he explained later. "All Happy Families…" depicts a mistreated woman lying on the floor of a living room, surrounded by objects from the modern art history, "all just toys" according to the artist; the hat of Beuys, the "Fountain" of Duchamp, a small Jasper Johns and the wooden stick with tar Wang Xingwei had used to paint "To Hurt". After his works first received recognition, he preferred to live in a rather small city enjoying family life and better working conditions, unlike many artists who moved to Beijing. Since then he finished around twenty works, showing situations by using art works and images from the history of western art, Chinese social realism, propaganda art and recent history to confront and test their meanings and values by applying them to his own surroundings and daily life. In several of them, he plays the principal character, like in "Mein kampf-Wang Xingwei in 1936" where he stands as a complacent adolescent beside Hitler, who just has been convinced by Wang Xingwei of the theories of Gandhi. Mein Kampf is burning at their feet. In "The Testimony of The Hare" painted in the style of Caravaggio he interrogates the animal to find out what really happened when Beuys did his performance with the dead hare in his arms. In "Still No A-mark" (1988) he rebukes his son for his shortcoming. The title, like the posture of the boy, is derived from a work around 1940 of the Russian painter Kelnikov, a painting used for copying at many art academies in China. Wang Xingwei is sitting on pop-art furniture from the English artist Allen Jones in a posture derived from a sculpture by Michelangelo against a canvas painted in American hard-edge style as a background, to make it more stage-like, he explained.

At the art academies experiments are not encouraged and because of the lack of a clear government policy towards modern art, education remains concentrated on the teaching of technical skills. As a result the art world is enriched every year with some hundred high skilled painters, printers etc. In 1990 Ding Yi (1962, Shanghai) was one of them, but he also belonged to the few who felt not limited to the traditional ink-wash painting technique, he had been trained in. In the early eighties, he had started to study the work of the French painter Utrillo. When we look at the paintings he did after this confrontation it is clear that he was not attracted by the exoticism of the Parisian street views, the architecture of many buildings in Shanghai is rather similar to the ones Utrillo depicted. The following years he gradually reduced the elements and composition of his paintings to what he considered as the essential for the painter : the horizontal and vertical, represented by a cross. From there, ten years ago, it appeared to be a fascinating way back to the sensitive use of color of Utrillo and the richness of texture of traditional Chinese landscape painting.

Zhao bandi's (1963, Beijing) "Young Zhang" (1992) painted with a free brush-stroke, was one of the last oil paintings he did. Like the ones he painted at the academy, it shows an interior with an intimate scene, a smoking boy sitting in bed in front of a television comfortably stretching himself. The painting is hanging at an angle of 30 degrees, the television set in front and the figure stretching himself in the direction of the onlooker contribute to the strong spatial effect. After travelling in Europe and the USA in 1993 an '94, Zhao Bandi widened his medium to the use of objects. "The big Rumor Spreading Until Today" (1994) made pf perpex suggests a jumping figure in great excitement. In 1995 and '98, he designed and produced calendars in a style influenced by educative printwork of the 50ties and Pre-Raphaelite painting. Calendars are a very popular item at streetmarkets in Beijing at the end of the year. Zhao Bandi pretends to be an outsider of the limited art world and the public acceptance of these works fulfilled his long cherished wish to find an audience outside the art world.

Like Zhao Bandi's the art of Zhang Yajie, Liu Wei and Guo Wei is based on introspection not aimed at statements about culture or bothered with comments about the outside world, but instead delivers direct reactions to it. Zhang Yajie (1963, Beijing) painted scenes of persons in streets and interiors, in 1966 he started a series of paintings in grey-tones and zoomed in on some friends to show us characters we are familiar with. Liu Wei (1965, Beijing) calls himself a blasphemer. Texts, sketches and partly finished depictions of sexual fantasies, the pleasure of smoking Camel, the beauty of nature, much pork and his beloved dogs fill his canvases. He shows us the bright side of modern life, but without the skin. There is a small virtuous painting by Guo Wei (1960, Chengdu), a self-portrait from 1995 which he didn't intend to be an artwork. He painted it at the end of a working day, to relax. The horizontal format stresses the intense observing espression, it shows fascination by the indistinct separation between perception and imagination, or by, to use the title of one of his other works, "The Rumors of a Myth".