This essay will make some general comments on the art situation in China before observations about works in the exhibition.

If the 1970s had ended with a new potential freedom for artistic expression so long as 'Chinese socialism' was left unchallenged, the end of the 1980s provided the bloody caesura of the Beijing massacre to the experimentation of the mid- and late-1980s when the status quo declared there would be no going back. Fortunately the powers that be forgot modernity is a future-oriented discourse, and left it to occupy whatever space there would be no going back to: the market economy, consumer culture, or even the nefarious life of surface 'pop' and subterranean counter-culture movements .

Chinese art at the end of the century stands at something of a turning point. After the hysteria with which so much interesting experimental art was received at the Venice Biennale in 1999 it would appear the Euramerican art world is still reluctant to accept it no longer has - if it ever had - any exclusive rights over modernity. But if this external reception still retains an unshakably atavistic core, what can be said of the situation in China itself?

So modern art in China was given its space to negotiate by this closure to the past if not by the self-enclosed, official art world. The academies still consented to train artists by about ten years' application of conservative art pedagogy derived from the Soviet Union , but not to allow any rigorous formal experimentation a part of the curriculum within their doors. Public galleries consented to show the nude and the abstract, but not generally to exhibit installation or performance art. Officialdom allowed art exhibitions to be prepared, but to see a train of even the most unexceptional shut down even hours before their opening. Last minute representations about possible offence to public order were made to the Public Security Bureau with dreary regularity from unnamed 'persons in the art world' .

Meanwhile a string of successful accommodations with China-based and overseas commercial galleries allowed many artists to earn a living from modern art which was often scatalogical if not hostile in intent to the status quo, but managed to express this without ostensible attack on 'Chinese socialism'. When this 'export production' made survival in China actually become a feasible option for modern artists - rather than the imaginary rationale of a number of overseas dealers who profited from it - the end came into sight of the concept of a diaspora necessarily forced by the thwarting of professional development . Exile abroad was still required for those more actively hostile to the political status quo, but cultural exile now became more a matter of personal inclination related to the content of a given artistic practice.

However, the reality of political intervention in art via the sanctioning of particular artists and styles for official exhibition did not change. Nor did the use of privileged art forms for civilizational projects sanctioned by the party disappear . Art was not to be a domain of cultural practice autonomous of politics even if the gap between what was sanctioned and what was not sanctioned was looser and less rigorously policed . Into this third space could appear comment on the vacuity of modern consumer culture , or even satirical comment on the iconography of great leader . But in this most mediatized of societies there remained many un-faced horrors of recent history at home , and almost no art was in the public domain which deconstructed or satirized official propaganda .

Official art concerned itself with the aesthetics of the well-made, a performative, academic and ultimately vacuous definition of artistic achievement devoid of the contemporary contestation or at least engagement with the frictions of the modernizing lived world of Chinese which would give it meaning . In addition and in parallel, the 'narrow road to the deep national' was pursued by an unholy alliance of convenience between conservative, and meretricious oil painters who hid their lack of creativity under a mask of stylistic déformation in deference to modernity, with 'chinese-style' artists who had only to lift a brush and use ink on paper to claim the cultural authenticity of their practice. Indeed the miasmic confusion between a spurious cultural or technical authenticity and artistic creativity served to reinforce the confirmation of such artists' legitimacy through restricted access to exhibition locations controlled by the Artists' Association or its cohorts.

The relativity of art to the values at the site of display must have been clear to many in the Chinese official art world when its senior members were completely ignored by a stream of foreign art curators visiting China, as they headed to the studios of artists who in some cases could only exhibit their works abroad . By the end of the 1990s the very international succés d'estime of these artists indicated that both the system of training artists and the 'consecration' of their works through access to public exhibition sites were in dire need of reform if not radical re-evaluation, even from a 'socialist Chinese' position. Conservative if decent academic artists could be heard to publicly complain that 'the views of art at the centre are still very revolutionary', by that meaning, presumably, that those in the party leadership, and particularly those in the party Propaganda Department, were still unsympathetic to modern art .

The works in this exhibition show what can be done by a group of committed Chinese artists and overseas curators and collectors willing to commercially exhibit or collect modern art in China to which they have applied fairly rigorous standards of conceptual clarity and artistic execution. It should be remembered that they are performing a function which might normally be expected by a museum or curatorial culture but in China, with the exception of two or three new Museums, they are doing so on a level scarcely imagined by the official world .

This rigour is immediately shown in the work of Ai Weiwei, son of the early modernist poet Ai Qing who was exiled to Xinjiang and where Ai Weiwei had the opportunity to observe the humiliations meted out during various 'thought reform' campaigns. The cold, implacable irony of Ai Weiwei's surrealist objets seems based on the most intense experience of absurdity. This critical stance led to among the first attempts to displace and empty of significance the mask of Mao Zedong. Such conceptual displacement with the odd combinations of visualized metaphors, mostly physical in Ai Weiwei's play with odd combinations of shoes or weirdly constructed furniture, is also found in the prints of Hong Hao, where incongruous mappings are overlaid with equally estranged captions.

One should not for a moment think that this is all some self-obsessed modernist diversion, despite the occasional flirting with pure style games where Duchamp is always the potent attractor. A very serious concern for art and its critical relation to social life underlies such works. As Ai Weiwei wrote in1997:

'In today's culture and art, we still lack basic attention - lack the artist's professionalism and awareness, lack the independence of criticism. The various kinds of investigation of discourse, the application of proliferant techniques and media, the indiscriminant borrowing of methods and content, all have no way of covering up defects in the artist's own awareness, social criticism and independent creation. This exposes the philistine stylistics of the mechanical and the utilitarian. It reflects the poverty of spiritual values and the lowering of taste. When attention to 'trends' changes to an attention to individual methods and problems, and when the investigation of forms changes to an environment for survival, to the investigation of spiritual values, only then will art have its proper awareness, one which is a long road to travel'

The conceptual emptiness of reprographic life reappears in the clapping hands of Geng Jianyi laid out as if in a taijiquan manual, performing when told and properly instructed without asking what they are clapping about. Similarily for Zhou Yunxia, the pigs look down on the cornfields ever better, ever fatter, where the commemorative pole outside Tian'anmen stands in the centre of the picture like a silent sentinel to an unspoken and now possibly meaningless history. Some artists ostensibly eschew social comment and essay the pure pictoriality of line and colour as in Ding Yi . Some display crudely inchoate viscera, like Gu Dexin, as if the world were a surface of effluvia not noticed by those who exude them, touch them, eat them. Flesh here is bleeding, and apparently lascerated in the surfaces of Guo Wei, or dripping with disgusting fluids in the transmogrified bodies of Liu Wei. I think much of this art is misanthropic or misogynist, but its repulsiveness, and its physical smell in Gu Dexin's installations - one of which was of raw steak, a condom, a plastic dildo, and battery - are not casually or disingenuously so. They are about a negation of power, be it that of the Chinese state and its manic, puritanical blanking out of difference. Be it that of Chinese lifestyles which in Beijing at least can perversely translocate a body from a polymorphously foetid latrine to an exclusivist gastronomic parlour in a few strides. As summarized by Feng Boyi:

'When the ideology of social life becomes an obvious element of installation art, then it becomes difficult to separate art from politics. Gu Dexin's installation piece, comprised of a white curtain, a large table with red table-cloth upon which was place 100kg of pig's brains, and a second red cloth hanging on the wall like a flag. When visitors entered the space, some instantly recoiled from the smell. This piece touched off human reactions of which all people have experience. It was like a bad joke, an assault on the senses and a blasphemy against the language of power all rolled into one' .

It may also be a strategy to paint well and yet depict a mechanical puppet-like viciousness in the subject like the extremely carefully made paintings of Wang Xingwei, combining David's Assasination of Marat with a Chuck Close or a Duane Hanson. Here is much cunning avoidance of direct political critique at the same time as devious insertion of an artistic one through the way celebrated art images are appropriated. Denial of the terms of public political engagement can be countered, as it were, by manipulation of artistic symbols in the domestic space; the father sitting on the sexual mannequin chairs of American pop teasing his implacably moral son in his 'socialist' red tie.

But what empty lives are here displayed. Zeng Hao shows us the absent fields of social life, the posturing moderns with the consumer gadgets of their lives, like playthings in a child's secret garden, but with nothing to connect them. Zhang Hai'er takes us more directly into the pleasure beds of urban dweller, where the frame subtly includes hints of the viewer's own gaze, a scopophiliac hiding from consequences of his own lust.

There is underneath this almost a formalist play with ennui in a false nostalgia for the vanished present that had never been, as if authentic but traduced life was only to be found in the ideological entrapments of the past, or in the fantasy materialist paradise of the future. Only thus can be seen the need to grace so many images with cultural reference to a present in the imagined past as in Wei Dong, or to the fashion consumption of oh-so-modern people in Zhao Bandi.

Finally, humanist nostalgia and conceptual minimalism link in Zhuang Hui's blank, almost nameless portraits of people who are so clearly nameable only to themselves. The records of those whose time has passed, whose system has now denied them the value they once had rather than accept that with the expiry of its term it should now itself 'melt into air'.