Six 21st Century Chinese Neo-Pop Artists
at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries in Coral Gables
by William Robert DuPriest
Wynwood The Art Magazine, pgs: 35-39
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Six Chinese Neo-Pop Artists, the current exhibition at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries in Coral Gables (Miami), Florida, offers a glimpse into one of the widely varied approaches to contemporary Chinese art.

This show not only is the first of its kind to be held in this region, but also marks the first time several of its artists have been shown in this county. Select works from the Coral Gables exhibition also were displayed at the Art Now Fair in the Claremont Hotel on Miami Beach during Art Basel in December 2007.

The exhibition comes at a time when contemporary Chinese art is in demand by collectors and some major museums are expanding or forming collections of these works. In an article in Time magazine, Simon Elegant wrote that "Contemporary Chinese art is currently one of the hottest genres anywhere. In the past 18 months Sotheby's has created a stand-alone modern Chinese art division, and Christie's showcases the art alongside such modern masters as Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning." His article elaborated on the record prices set by contemporary Chinese painters.

"Prices for these works are zooming upwards like the Chinese economy," said gallery owner and director Virginia Miller, "but he bottom line is that along with the demand by newly affluent Chinese, there is a strong international market for works by contemporary Chinese artists because of their fresh and insightful outlook."

To fully appreciate the pioneering nature of contemporary Chinese neo-pop art, consider its background. For more than 2,000 years, the Chinese viewed themselves as members of a celestial kingdom whose emperors represented heaven itself. All others were barbarians who not only should be avoided, but must not be allowed to learn their language.

The economic, social, and cultural upheaval culminating in the New China began in 1949, with the founding of the People's Republic of China. Its constitution describes the New China as "a socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.

The Chinese economy and freedom of artistic expression plummeted during the "Great Leap Forward" spearheaded by Mao Zedong (sometimes spelled Tse-tung) from 1958 to 1960, when small farms were merged into large communes and inexperienced urban citizens were forced to toil alongside farmers and factory workers. The consequence, exacerbated by adverse weather, was a widespread famine that caused tens of millions of deaths from starvation. During its most militant era, 1966-1968, artistic and intellectual expressions met severe reprisals from gangs of Red Guards supported by the government.

Deng Xiaoping, the eventual successor to Zedong, launched agricultural and economic reform programs in 1978. As these progressed, political reformers - encouraged by events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union - threatened the Communist Party. The result was the Tiananmen Square massacre in May 1989, when hundreds of unarmed demonstrators were killed in a government crackdown on protest.

After the widely publicized Tiananmen incident, economic and political progress came to a near standstill until 1993. When Deng Xiaoping publicly expressed his approval of a special economic development zone, his endorsement was interpreted as a green light by both local government authorities and private business interests. The Chinese economy began to skyrocket to the point that "China presents ecological problems so severe that they constitute a collective crisis with global consequences," according to a recent report by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. As the economy improved, artistic repression continued to ease.

Today a system of people's congresses, multiparty cooperation, regional ethnic autonomy and local self-governance form the fundamental framework of China's socialism. And while surfing the Internet is closely monitored, as the nation's contemporary artists attained international recognition the latitude allowed to their subject matter has broadened to the point where an apparently nude Mao Zedong in a bathtub - as seen in Liu Yan's The Man's World in this exhibition - no longer places its creator in jeopardy of a jail sentence.

According to art historian Lydia Thompson, "Much of the work in this exhibition addresses the double-edged sword of China's new openness to international influences and growing economic and personal freedoms." These Chinese neo-pop works, just as the American pop art movement, reflect the youthful exuberance of the newly affluent, sexually liberated group of artists reveling in their newfound lack of governmental constraints.

Back in 2002, Miller had arranged a show of contemporary Chinese art, but it proved too difficult to get the works out of China. When her longtime associate, art historian Pierrette Van Cleve, approached her about exhibiting a group of Chinese neo-pop artists, Miller didn't hesitate. Van Cleve's contacts in China allowed her to curate works for Miller, who created the exhibition from a selection of their paintings, paper collage and a nine-foot paper scroll.

Unlike the American pop artists of the 1960s and '70s, whose radical concepts clearly distanced their works from the abstract expressionists, some Chinese neo-pop art includes elaborate references to ancient art traditions, such as personalized calligraphy, Chinese opera and court portraits, which they contrast with films stars and other popular icons. In this exhibition, two of the more experienced artists, Lu Peng and Liu Yan, fall into this category.

The dichotomy becomes apparent on examining the works of Lu Peng, the senior artist in this group in terms of exposure. Although only 40, he has participated in some 70 exhibitions in New York and London as well as in prestigious galleries in Germany, Spain, Switzerland and China.

"Lu Peng mines imagery from pre-revolutionary and revolutionary China as well as the consumer-oriented society of the past fifteen years," Dr. Thompson noted. "His paintings are a chaotic assemblage of people and symbols from China's political and cultural history, evoking chaos, freedom, optimism and dismay."

Represented by two 51-inch square canvases and four 70-inch-tall paintings in gouache on rice paper, each work in this series by Lu Peng is predominately red. "The color red is the quintessential Chinese signifier of good fortune, strength and happiness," according to Dr. Thompson, but Lu Peng's fragmentary images, dismayed expressions and suggestions of chaotic battle lead her to another interpretation: "Here the red wash can be surmised as alluding to China's violent and bloody modern history."

The artist himself states that the titles to his Kung Fu and Fishes series have a dual meaning: the first comes from a local dish called "kung fu fish," which - like mastery of martial arts - requires a lengthy preparation. The term also refers to "individual accomplishment or cultivated skill" and freedom as symbolized by fish. "I challenge the viewer to look closely and to distinguish the difference between the rational and the irrational," he said. "The content of my work expresses the happiness and hope I have for my culture." Liu Yan, who appears more like a 30-something than 42 years old, has participated in 29 exhibitions in Cologne, Paris and in leading venues around China. Her work combines traditional subject matter, such as inset painting of ink landscapes and calligraphy like that of the Chinese "literati," with contemporary images. As described by Dr. Thompson: Liu Yan created a collage-like painting surface from China's cultural detritus: pages of old books, gold foil, mulberry paper and reproductions of famous imperial portraits of a Qing emperor and empress. She then works in a pastiche of imagery and icons from traditional China and contemporary international pop culture, revealing the tensions that lie beneath China's integration into global culture.

In The Man's World and The Woman's World, Liu Yan surrounds the emperor and empress with "a rogue's gallery of modern icons of political and cultural power, including Mao Zedong and his wife, Jiang Qing, Salvador Dali and Madonna," Dr. Thompson points out.

In The Woman's World a female People's Liberation Army soldier aims her rifle in protest at a boy mooning the viewers while young people kiss in the background. Dr. Thomson suggests that the soldier is attacking "the forces of desire that threaten to overwhelm traditional Chinese culture and values."

Some younger artists, such as Xiong Lijun and Yang Na, draw their inspiration from the Japanese animated cartoons called "anime" and from foreign films. Others, like Li Bo and Kang Can, have found their own artistic language.

Xiong Lijun's oversized acrylic paintings feature smiling, cavorting girls with vacuous faces against florescent backgrounds. According to an article in the Dec. 1, 2004 China Daily, "Her works express fresh visual images and a clearly individualistic artistic language, most obvious in her acute attunement with and masterful depiction of modern metropolitan youth culture...Figures in Xiong's paintings are generally young people, aged 16-20, who embody infinite enthusiasm, energy and imagination, as well as boldness and independence of character."

The unsigned China Daily article goes on to state that her images reflect the "representative characteristics of the one-child generation, fostered by a plenteous font of consumerism...Xiong Lijun's works are groundbreaking; they signal a new confidence in Chinese contemporary art and an advance towards a freer, more open creation space."

Yang Na's subject matter is an "ideal woman drawn from a global cultural landscape of mass media and consumption, cartoons, movies, videos, Internet games and toys" states Dr. Thompson, who goes on to explain that the woman in her painting resembles the avatars of virtual games, where participants create their own identity from a menu of features, hairstyles, and clothing. "Yang Na's alter ego...is a composite of a commercial visual language of what is considered 'sexy' and 'trendy'."

With their gargantuan heads and minuscule hands and bodies, Yang Na's characters "caricature the women of sexual fantasy," according to Dr. Thompson, who points out that their exaggerated false eyelashes and nails, plucked and penciled-in brows, deeply shadowed eyelids and plumped, heavily lipsticked lips, along with their unlined, porcelain-like skin, give them a doll-like appearance.

But the art historian stresses that Yang Na takes anime-inspired subject matter a step beyond the melodramatic comics and animated cartoons. In the artist's painting A Cup of Yang Na, which depicts tears streaming down her character's cheeks into a pair of teacups emblazoned with hearts, "the teacups are a metaphor for the vulnerability and loss of innocence hidden below the glamorous sheen and sexual power," Dr. Thompson said.

This exhibition is the first one outside China for Li Bo, the youngest and most innovative of the artists in the exhibition. Discarding conventions of composition, he renders his subjects along the mid-line of his horizontal canvases. Whether a human heart, schoolgirl or potted rose, each is given the same space against a neutral gray background.

The artist characterizes himself as "part of a new generation in China." All his images are appropriated from the Internet and reassembled in a systematic way, he states. Individually, these images seem to have no particular resonance," Dr. Thompson writes, "but when considered in relation to one another, their sinister tones are revealed."

That interpretation, clear to those familiar with current affairs in China, includes the marketing of organs from prisoners, prostitution of young girls, and men in pajamas, their ears reddened from the constant propaganda of the Chinese government. "Much like the literati paintings of China's ink painting tradition," Dr. Thompson said, "Li Bo's works are an encrypted language, reminding us of the anxiety that accompanies artistic commentary."

In this series of paintings by Kang Can, babies become metaphors for China's infancy relative to the culture and economy of the West. Dr. Thompson points out that the absence of references to China's traditions, so evident in works of older artists like Lu Peng, "suggests a further anxiety, the obliteration of Chinese culture in the face of Western consumerism."

In Don't Wake Me Up Kang Can's infant is sleeping on an enormous lit cigarette, a reference both to the nation's mounting pollution problem, described by Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley in the New York Times as "like a teenage smoker with emphysema," and its 350 million smokers, "a state industry that is generating more taxes in China than any other industry," according to a recent article by Tim Johnson in The Miami Herald. In Fast Food III a baby struggles to extricate itself from beneath a giant hamburger, perhaps a reference to the hazards of Western-style fast food and the threat of Western culture overwhelming Chinese traditions.

"Kang Can's paintings," Dr. Thompson said, "ask this newest generation to consider the physical and psychic danger posed by the ready embrace of globalized consumer culture."

Gallery owner Virginia Miller views the Chinese neo-pop art with the perspective of 34 years of introducing historically significant artists to South Florida and the United States.

"Just as the subject matter and artistic styles of our nation's pop artists of the 1960s developed from tectonic societal shifts at that time, the viewpoints of these contemporary Chinese artists reflect their relatively recent cultural upheaval as well as their personal histories," said Miller.

"Liu Yan, for example, remembers her grandmother, who made wonderful noodles and was the last woman in her family to have bound feet. While on the Long March, she escaped by running away - a very painful thing to do on her bound feet, with their broken toes. With memories like that, it's no wonder that works by her and her one-time professor, Lu Peng, include so many references to the past.

"It's exciting to see these works by the pioneers in this generation of contemporary Chinese artists," the veteran gallerist added. "From our perspective, they are at a pivotal moment in the evolution of art in their ancient country."