 fter the“Grand Modern Art Exhibition of China”was rushed to a close on February 19,1989, with the gun shot and the threat of a bomb, and after the inevitable political storm was extinguished several months later, the avant-garde artists who had exhibited works there fled helter-skelter.
In a 1989 poem, the poet Yu Xinjiao declared, “I'll evacuate to a safe place to love you.” However, hardly did the artists who fled abroad or changed their lines get themselves established when China seemed to transform into a "post-modern" society at fortnight, where consuming and popular cultures seized the leadership of public opinion and acquired an absolute hegemony in discourse. Confronted with dramatic shifts in cultural scenes, artists who chose to practice at home had to catch up to escape a crisis of losing speech and falling into oblivion.
 I. Go Abroad or Stay Home?
 oing revolutionary work early or late counts the same,” whereas going abroad early or late doesn’t. Chen Danqing, Ai Weiwei and Yan Peiming were the earliest artists to go abroad in early 1980s, followed by Cai Guoqiang, Gu Wenda and Zhu Jinshi in middle and late 1980s, while Huang Yongping, Xu Bing, Wu Shanzhuan and others didn’t leave China until after 1989.
Actually, non avant-garde artists Chen Yifei, Ding Shaoguang and others went abroad around the same time as the avant-garde artists. They were the ones who won the first applause in the west with their solid techniques. Devoted not to an avant-garde identity, they by chance catered to the tastes of a burgeoning consuming society at home, and were acclaimed and followed by all as “world rank artists” recognized in the west. One of them, Chen Yifei, who returned home to Shanghai in early 1990s, soon profited heartily from fashion consuming areas until he died from overwork with film shooting last year. The dealers in the art markets will never have to worry about the devaluation of his works.
Like his Shanghai native Chen Yifei, Chen Danqing also acquired similar qualities of a star painter. From his self-account we could not ascertain what his “Trilogy” and “Painting Albums Juxtaposed,” the serial paintings created in America, had achieved. His stardom in cultural scenes was built mostly on the publication of his prose works “Notes in New York,” “Surplus Materials,” and the like. Ever since he was invited to teach at Tsinghua University in 2000, he had been widely recognized for his independent views about popular culture. He quit his position in early 2005 in protest against the country’s art education system, which soon evolved into a far-reaching cultural incident. Except for his quality as a star artist always riding the tides in cultural waves, he might have been regarded as the artist who missed the 1989 political test and still kept the spirit of the 1919 May Fourth Movement to voice independent views on current affairs.
 Equally devoted to criticism of current affairs, Ai Weiwei has willingly kept a vague distance from mainstream art ever since his stay in America. So when he returned home to Beijing in the 1990s, no one was sure of his identity. Though he had left his marks in such diverse areas as installation art, film and television, architecture, design and exhibition planning, he acquired power mainly from his cultural criticism. In 2003, when he was appointed a design consultant for the building of the national stadium for the Olympic games, the so-called “Bird’s Nest,” he acquired a slightly more sensitive official identity. In an interview, he assessed himself as a “typical man with a split personality, representing all the weaknesses of the times.”
Among the artists who went abroad, Cai Guoqiang, Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, Yan Peiming and Huang Yongping kept a relatively pure artistic identity, and their success in global art maket after the 1990s rested upon their tactic of unifying the cultural identity with some larger life logic.
Cai Guoqiang experimented with his gunpowder painting and outdoor explosive works when he moved to Japan in 1986, where he carried out a series of outdoor explosive plans and personal exhibitions in 1990s. Some Japanese critics claimed that such explorations might well bring him to the world art scene. He settled in the United States in the mid 1990s, and soon became a ‘Chinese star’ in international art scene, with his "explosive" power, "cultural jumble" notion and "meddling" manner.
In 1989,Yang Jichang, Huang Yongping and Gu Dexin were introduced by the art critic Fei Dawei to show their works at the “Earth Magician” art exhibition at Pompidou Art Centre in France. Greatly impressed, Huang Yongping, who was recognized for his 1987 installation work, “A Chinese Painting History and A Brief Modern Western Art History Stirred Two Minutes in a Washing Machine,” settled in France after that event. He later represented France at the 48th Venice Biennale. Though awarded an “Art Prize for Cultural, Educational and Scientific Extension” by UNESCO in 2000, he often got blamed and even incurred political disputes for themes dealing with cultural criticisms and critical current issues. Yang Jichang also settled in Europe. He had practiced with installation, performance art and film, and also dedicated himself to ink and wash painting to create his “One-Thousand-Layer Ink” series in recent years. His works often dealt with authority, the system and the mainstream, His “Remodeling Dong Cunrui” appeared at the Guangzhou Triennial.
 A mixed identity of Chinese and Western backgrounds was a feature of the artists who went abroad. Many of them wielded a flag of native cultural symbol and ideological language. Successful applications of those tactics were demonstrated by Xu Bing’s depiction of the ruthless violence a male pig printed full with English words was doing to a female pig printed full of Chinese characters in his work, “Cultural Animal.” Or by Gu Wenda’s writing of huge Chinese characters with a writing brush made of human hair from different races; or by Yan Peiming’s painting of a gigantic image of Mao Zedong’s head in black and white; or by Cai Guoqiang’s gun-powdered “Great Wall Extended Another Ten Thousand Meters.” Represented in entirely new forms, those symbols or languages were popular with both Chinese and western audiences, which has brought many of these artists numerous prizes or awards, at home and abroad. Cai Guoqiang won the International Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale, and Xu Bing’s won a MacArthur genius award. Cai Guoqiang’s prize-winning work, “Venice Taxation House,” even incurred a copyright dispute, but that has ruined neither his fame abroad nor his glory at home.
Overseas Chinese artists had also become the major focus of various domestic exhibitions in late 1990s, just before the Shanghai Biennale in 2000. With frequent themes of Sino-Western cultural conflicts in their works, they fully embodied the avant-garde changes from an attitude to a profile. Xu Bing’s “Dust,” created out of the dust from ruins after 9/11 disaster, helped him win the British Artes Mundi International Contemporary Art Prize. His work bore a Chinese epigraph translated into English as, “All is void. Where stay the dust?” One wondered, then, stripped of Chinese elements, would the dust on these works come off as well?
Apart from the current celebrities, artists who chose to practice abroad in the 1980s also included Zhu Jinshi, Wang Keping, Huang rui, Guan wei and others. Huang rui went to Japan in 1984, he is one of the initiators of "Stars" exhibit, and now is the organiger of 798 art District.Wang Keping, who made a stir at “Stars” art exhibition in 1979 with his wooden sculptures of the absurd, was one of the earliest artists to moveto foreign soil. Though scarcely known at home over the past 20 years, he was actually practicing sculpture abroad all the time, and cooperating well with galleries in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He also exhibited his works at the Beijing Art Expo earlier this year.
 Another artist, Zhu Jinshi, one of the organizers of Stars exhibition, went to Germany in 1986. After a dramatic life of overseas art practice, Zhu came to Beijing with his wife, Qin Yufen, in 1994. At Guangzhou Art Triennial, Zhu put thousands of pieces of wrinkled Xuan paper over trellises made of hundreds of bamboo poles, rendering it like an oriental fortress.
II. No More Politics In Pop Art
 n an Interview about the 1980s, Chen Danqing observed, “The critical art works in the 1980s seemed novel and rebellious, but actually they’re rebellious only in content. The situation didn’t change until the 1990s.” Before the 1990s, a breakthrough in taboos or constraints counted as the core value of avant-garde art, and the novelty of art language ranked only secondary. Into the 1990s, when taboos or constraints at different levels in the planned economy system had been cleared up, the pure radical art lost its domestic grounds.
Quite a few avant-garde artists of the 1985 generation chose to stay home and by the 1990s, they could still get exposed to the latest western art trends via numerous channels. Those who stuck to art had become the mainstay in various art categories like installation, performance art, video and photography.
American pop art master Rauschenberg’s art show at National Art Gallery of China in November of 1985 had deeply influenced Chinese artists, among whom Gu Wenda and Wu Shanzhuan were the early ones to adopt a pop art style, followed by Wang Guangyi, Li Shan and Yu Youhan, representative of pop art in Hubei and Shanghai respectively. They shared more or less the same strategy in borrowing of symbols of historical or political implication to mock the “myths” upheld by the people.
 The influence of pop art also extended to other art categories. From the middle of 1990s up til now, Zhang Xiaogang, an artist living in Chengdu, has been dedicated to a style of caricaturing of old photographs from the 1950s and 1960s. In“Bloodline”series of family photographs, he adopts an evident political pop art manner. He was also one of the contemporary painters who kept to an invariable “personal image.”
Similar styles appeard in Beijing. When Yuanmingyuan Garden began to attract artists during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, Liu Wei and Yang Shaobin lived and practiced there and began to employ bright cartoon-like images of folk personalities to mock the Chinese who are confronted with a dramatically changing social environment. The art critic Li Xianting called this kind of art “Cynical Realism.”
Political pop art elements are still manifest in works by Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun; however, in a new cultural environment, they serve only as labels for a western audience. Domestic art circles now care more about artists’ consolidation and finalization of art styles, so they still play a mainstay avant-garde role in the new times.
III. From Underground To Contemporary
 ontemporary Chinese art forms of installation, performance art, video and others forms began to take shape around 1985. When installation art grew mature in the 1990s, performance and video artists also rose from “underground” and converged into the mainstream of contemporary art.
Zhang Peili and Geng Jianyi were both members of “Pond Society” in Hangzhou in the 1980s. They chose to stay in Hangzhou after that vigorous art movement faded. Zhang, who now works in the New Media Department of Fine Arts College of China, occasionally shows his works at art exhibitions home and abroad. Whereas Geng, whose name, in contrast, was often ignored, acquired international fame with his 1980s’ massive oil paintings of hysterically laughing faces; later, he produced lots of conceptual works based on themes about “books.” When Geng’s“Book Without Words” series was exhibited at New York’s Chambers Fine Art last September, the exhibition’s planner, Zheng Shengtian, said,“In the last 20 years or so, he has explored, doubted, experimented and transcended; all this has demonstrated his valuable qualities as an avant-garde artist.”
Wang Youshen, a Beijing newspaperman who called himself a “professional newspaperman and amateur artist,” was one of the earliest artists experimenting with photography as an art medium. In a massive work, “√，” which was shown at the “1989 Grand Exhibition,” he superimposed on a huge law court notice numerous human photographs shot at Wangfujing Boulevard. His recent“Nutritious Soil”and“Purgation” series continued with the means of photo messages.
 Chen Shaoxiong, who lives in Guangzhou, was one of the initiators of new art movement in south China. He employed video works to project the radical changes of social environment and urban appearance in Guangzhou, the capital of southern China’s Guangdong Province. He joined together with Xu Tan, Lin Yilin and Liang Juhui to form the “Big Tail Elephant”team in 1990, a group of artists whose installation, videos, photography and performance works dealt with themes of “Care For Spaces (Public, Private and Cultural,” which attracted wide attention.
On the 10th anniversary occasion for “Grand Modern Art Exhibition” at the Beijing Designing Museum of China in 1999, Zhang Nian, who had performed the “Floating Egg” at that exhibition, asked the artists and visitors present at the occasion to hurl eggs at a wooden board with the writing“1999 Zhang Nian.”Zhang was one of the earliest artists to practice in the Yuanmingyuan Garden after the 1989 Movement. He also produced “Drop Blood”and“Net”series afterwards. “Doing this and that, I have done only one work, that is myself.” Zhang now says. After been a director of a design company, he came back to the art world again, and will hold a solo show named "pearlescent”in Beijing.
Like Zhang Nian, Ding Fang also practiced early at Yuanmingyuan Garden. He seemed to keep a silent profile in the 1990s. He was even rumored to have become a monk or gone into business. After the 1989 Movement, he assumed a life in contemplation and introspection; he also toured the world, continuing his probe into “souls” for his art creation.
IV. Avant-garde No More
Seventeen years ago, Xiao Lu’s "last gunshot" led to the temporary closuree of the “Grand Modern Art Exhibition of China.” This October, the 44-year-old Xiao presented her first personal exhibition at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts Gallery in New York. The exhibited works included the “Gunshot” affiliated with a series of photographic pictures; it was claimed that artist Tang Song, who put his signature next to Xiao’s, wasn’t actually involved in the creation of “Dialogue.” In that manner, Xiao dedicated the exhibition to her failed love with Tang, and also to that vigorous avant-garde movement of the 1980s.
 In 2005, the art critic Lu Hong entitled her new book on the history of modern and contemporary art as “Going beyond the Limits.” Actually in a “post-modern” cultural context, those shocking rebellions of previous avant-garde artists are now only “cool” actions free to everyone’s emulation, and whatever art styles China has lost, there is still the potential to exert the same impact as before by “going beyond the limits.” It is meaningful for Xiao’s installation, “Dialogue," at which Xiao fired a pistol in the National Gallery in 1989, to appear in the China Guardian Auction with a price of as much as $250,000. Really, nostalgia for the 1980s and the high-priced tribute to 1980s’ art works have created a new trend at the beginning of this century, whereas all these have come as a result of the double encouragement from international capitals and domestic art speculators.
Recollecting the 1980s’memories, avant-garde artist Wen Pulin could not help sighing, “All of a sudden, it strikes me that our romances, ideals, dreams and hopes are all gone now …”In“An Interview About The 1980s,”Li Xianting made a more direct remark, “When it finally occurs to you that art’s actually a vanity fair, you would feel all you have pursued is indeed absurd.”
But, for the passed-away Chen Zhen and Liang Juhui, all has long been over.
translated by Huzhu
Top Image：Zhao Xiaogang Bloodline: Big Family
Image1：The 1980s
Image2：Ai Weiwei's work
Image3：Xu Bing Cultural Animal
Image4：Fang Lijun Series 2 No.11
Image5：Wang Guangyi Great Criticism：R
Image6：Zhang Nian Hatching
Image7：China Avant-Garde Art
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