 HENZHEN: The 1980s. The decade that saw China begin to reform and open its doors to the West; the decade of new possibilities and new freedoms, of passion, social and artistic movements and, inevitably, of chaos and collapse.
 This was a time when people talked about Beijing's Democracy Wall, about the '85 New Wave Art Movement, about disco, "toad glasses," the “Goddess of Democracy” and Tiananmen Square. And it was the period when China broke away from its lingering Maoist models, politically, economically and culturally.
This was also the decade of new icons and idols, like the rock star Cui Jian, fifth generation film makers like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, writers such as Wang Shuo, Su Tong and Yu Hua, and the birth of the avant-garde art superstars of today.
For those who are unfamiliar with Chinese contemporary art, the 1980s were paramount. Before 1980, avant-garde art was virtually non-existent in China. Modern art consisted almost entirely of revolutionary propaganda posters and endless portraits of Chairman Mao.
But by 1989, a group of young, experimental artists emerged in China, largely influenced by Western art and art concepts. Today, they are considered pioneers and the country's leading modern artists, such as Wang Guangyi, Zhang Xiaogang, Xu Bing, Fang Lijun, Cai Guoqiang, Huang Yongping and Gu Wenda.
And they all emerged in the 1980s, a decade that is little discussed today inside of China. The black days of 1989 are buried in the conscience of the nation, forgotten or ignored in the race to get rich and to build a new, modern China, a country that is fast emerging as a global super power.
Yet the 1980s offer a powerful reminder of where China started, and the path that has taken the country to this age of breathtaking economic growth. The decade also gave birth to new forms of experimental art, with Chinese characteristics, one might say.
And now, more than 25 years after the start of that decade, the 1980s are finally beginning to be examined. Zha Jianying, the Beijing born writer, has just published a new book, simply called, “The 1980s.” In New York, the Ethan Cohen Gallery recently held an exhibition of the works of Xiao Lu, the female artist who fired a pistol in her installation at the 1989 China/Avant Garde exhibition.
And last month here in Shenzhen, this bustling southern city that epitomizes China’s opening to the west with its crush of export oriented factories, there was a ground-breaking art exhibition that went almost unnoticed in China.
The show, “Create History: Commemoration Exhibition of Chinese Modern Art in 1980s,” was a remarkable retrospective on the times, and the artists and art movements that sprang out of that decade.
The show, held at the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in Shenzhen, brought together more than 100 art works, photographs, books and even rare video footage from the 1980s art movements as a way of examining and revisiting that age of idealism, anxiety and turbulence.
Wang Keping’s iconic wooden sculptures were on display, as well as works by Wang Guangyi, Zhang Xiaogang, Gu Dexin, Huang Rui, Huang Yongping, Gu Wenda and Wu Shanzhuan.
 Huang Zhuan, the curator of the retrospective, has called 1980s “an era of the strongest reformative significance in the modern history of China,” and said the show was meant to help reflect on what really happened in the 1980s.
In many ways, the 1980s set the stage for modern China, for the unparalleled economic boom, the reforms and the opening up. But to get there, China had to go through a period of chaos, anxiety, uncertainty and disillusion.
The 1980s was also a time when a group of talented young artists and intellectuals, like Wang Keping, Gu Wenda, Xu Bing, Cai Guoqiang and Yan Pei Ming, left the country for Europe and the United States.
Today, in this more commercially oriented age, when Chinese artists are making fortunes and having their works auctioned off by Sotheby’s and Christie’s at astronomical prices, looking back to the 1980s may be particularly striking because even the most optimistic artists could never have imagined just how powerful a force Chinese contemporary art would become on the global market. And yet, many of those same artists might wonder whether the dynamic and innovative artists of that time have lost their ability to challenge conventional thinking.  That, at least, is what some of the country’s leading critics, including Huang Zhuan, the curator of the Shenzhen show, are now saying.
More than 15 years after the close of the 1980s, Wang Guangyi’s iconic portraits that blend images from the Cultural Revolution with Western marketing slogans now sell for over $100,000 a piece. Fang Lijun, who was one of the youngest participants in the 1989 National Gallery show, is now an international art star. And Zhang Xiaogang, rarely noticed in the 1980s, has dominated sales of Chinese contemporary art at Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses this year, topped in late November with the sale of his 1993 portrait, “Tiananmen Square,” for $2.3 million.
All of this raises many questions: Did the 1980s really set the stage for this powerful ascent of Chinese contemporary art? Or was it some accident that art went into sharp decline in the 1990s and then shot to the heavens? And were the 1980s a more pure and idealistic decade before crass materialism and commercialism set in? Or were the 1980s really a period of unusual freedom to introduce new ideas, before the art and political movements went too far with the authorities in 1989?
No one really seems to know the answers to these questions. But the decade of the 1980s is now clearly seen as the time when all the experiments were hatched, when artists welcomed influences from the west, and then went about creating -- and even burning -- their art works in a wild frenzy of creation and destruction.
When it all seemed to come to an end in 1989, with the landmark China/Avant Garde exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Beijing, many artists fled the country or went underground. The art collectives fell apart; many aspiring artists turned away from art.
But for the few who kept producing art, quietly but diligently, the payoffs have been huge. Artists who were once banned in China are now being allowed not just to be shown but to be celebrated and honored, even in Beijing. Last October, for instance, Fang Lijun had his first solo show in China, even though he was an international star as early as 1993, when he graced the cover of The New York Times Magazine. And so while the government does not promote avant-garde art neither is it banned or heavily censored.
Indeed, out of the embers of 1989, critics say a new individualism was born in the world of Chinese contemporary art. Rather than continuing to form art collectives, artists began creating their own distinct styles -- and they began marketing those styles to a global audience.
Art critics say that the 1980s really set the stage for all this. The National Gallery exhibition -- with its “No U-Turn” banner -- was really a symbol of the new China trying to burst out from the old one. There was no turning back, as the sign implied. Huge obstacles were ahead, and things got ugly, but art progressed into more sophisticated forms, borrowing symbols, ideas and materials from around the globe.
II. Beginnings: The Stars Group
 he 1980s really began in late 1979. And that’s not so odd. Decades are imperfect markers of historical and cultural movements. But this one is quite close, since most art critics agree that the bookends of the 1980s (at least when it comes to Chinese contemporary art) were 1979 and 1989.
 On September 27, 1979 -- just three years after the end of the Cultural Revolution -- a group of self-taught artists calling themselves the “Stars” held an exhibition of contemporary or avant-garde artwork in Beijing.
The exhibition was considered a landmark event, with media coverage from around the world. For the first time, young artists were challenging Maoist models and the government’s official policy on what constituted art.
Mao had once declared that art should “serve the people,” and for decades that officially sponsored art was mostly rosy-cheeked propaganda art featuring heroic workers, farmers and soldiers.
But by the late 1970s, art academies had reopened, western influence was creeping in, and the Stars group was showing off its own critique of the Maoist age.
Wang Keping’s wooden Mao sculpture, which showed Chairman Mao as a Buddha-like figure with one eye open and one closed, was a shocking revelation in China, where deviating from Mao's official portrait was taboo and possibly punishable by a prison sentence or death.
Deng Xiaoping's reforms were hardly smooth. There was a push and pull inside the government over how fast to go. One day the opening up was going full speed ahead, the next it was being attacked by more conservative camps within the government. One day there was talk about “spiritual pollution” seeping into the party apparatus, the next day the government was allowing artists to express themselves with remarkable freedom.
But for the most part, the door opened, wider and wider. Western novels, philosophy and modern art works were imported into China. Dada, Pop art and Surrealism were favorites among a group of young Chinese artists seeking a new direction to follow, one that was decidedly against party doctrine.
After the Stars group held their exhibitions in Beijing in 1979 and 1980, art movements popped up all over the country. And when Robert Rauschenberg visited Beijing in 1985, his visit created a stir.
By then, the Stars group had already begun to fade, as many of them left the country to experiment with art elsewhere. Wang Keping went to France and Ai Weiwei ended up in New York. But in 1985 there was already a new and better trained group of artists emerging. They had grown up during the Cultural Revolution, and were the first  enter the nation’s leading arts academies once they had reopened in 1977.
These artists were more attuned to what was happening in the west; they devoured western philosophy and were determined to create new type of modern art in China, though initially much of it would look like a mere imitation.
When the New Wave Art movement emerged in 1985, Chinese artists like Gu Wenda and Wu Shanzhuan and Huang Rui were already experimenting with combining eastern and western forms, and toying with Chinese symbols and language.
By 1986, there were more and more artist collectives, and some of the leaders of the art movement were preparing for another assault on the nation’s cultural institutions. They were lobbying to hold a major show of their radical, experimental, avant-garde art works in Beijing’s National Gallery, where the Stars group had once exhibited. And they would eventually get their way.
III. “No U Turn.”
 n 1989, a group of curators headed by Li Xianting and Gao Minglu helped put together a historic show of avant-garde art works by the country’s leading young artists, many of them fresh out of the the country's leading art academies, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou Academy and the Sichuan Academy of Art.
Wang Guangyi’s painting of Mao, boxed, examined and jailed behind bars or grids, was not just a political statement about whether the old ideas should be re-examined and perhaps locked away, it was a way of signaling that art too had to be re-examined and rethought, hence the grid lines to figure out how to paint each box. This kind of thinking set the stage for the new cultural revolution that was taking hold.
 Xu Bing’s remarkable,“A Book from the Sky,” a beautifully executed book of fake Chinese characters foretold that the language of yesterday was deemed meaningless by the younger generation, that many of them only read nonsense into the era that gave birth to many of them: the Cultural Revolution, which spanned 1966 to 1976.
The exhibition, China/Avante Garde, was held at the National Gallery, and was quickly closed down after the artist Xiao Lu fired a pistol, sending two bullets into her installation, breaking glass and shocking visitors.
The exhibition later reopened, only to be closed down again by a bomb threat, but the energy and excitement was obvious to all who attended.
The Gallery was filled with paintings, installations, performance art shows, people hanging art works on the fences outside and market stalls, which is why Zhang Peili later told Time magazine,“More than your typical art show, it really looked more like a farmer's market. What mattered that day wasn't the art, or the show itself. Everybody knew that we were making history. We were totally invested in our roles as actors on a stage where anybody could suddenly become a star.”
The show also foreshadowed the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square after the death of Hu Yaobang. Many artists and faculty members from the Central Academy of Fine Arts had joined in the demonstration, and some members of the sculpture department at the school even helped build the large“Goddess of Democracy” statue that was carried through the square.
Today, Many artists like Yue Minjun, Xu Bing, Fang Lijun and Ai Wei Wei talk about that period as a turning point, when all their hopes and dreams were destroyed or deflated, when they were forced to retreat from the excitement of the age -- and hide or leave the country. After that, many exhibitions were banned or simply shown underground, in private homes.
 In the aftermath, many artists created art pieces that were more subtle, that hinted at the times but only indirectly. Fang Lijun’s bald-headed, moping, indifferent young men were really images of young people who were lost and disillusioned by what happened in the late 1980s; Yue Minjun’s smiling legions of young people were really cynical portraits of young men who were laughing deliriously because, perhaps, they had gone insane after all the turmoil.
Many art experts say the 1980s also signaled the end of the collectivist art groups -- that artists became individuals, they began formulating their own styles, looking inward and producing art that was more personal.
Zhang Xiaogang began taking up his “Bloodline” series of Cultural Revolution portraits era portraits in the early 1990s; Wang Guangyi’s clever blend of Communist and capitalist imagery was produced; and Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, Cai Guoqiang and Wu Shanzhuan would thrive abroad, as international artists.
For those who stayed behind, like Fang Lijun and Liu Wei, a rich body of work was produced in the early to mid 1990s, setting the stage for perhaps the most remarkable turnabout in the history of contemporary art. Dozens of artists began to emerge: Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, Zhao Bandi, Yang Shaobin, Ding Yi and Liu Xiaodong. Artists who struggled in the early 1990s, and could barely sell a work for $1,000 in 1993, are often producing works that sell for over $300,000 at auction -- sometimes (as in the case of Liu Xiaodong) as much as $2.7 million!
 In a peculiar way, some critics say, the 1980s -- and the ban on many of these artists inside China during the 1990s, actually made their works more subtle, more powerful and perhaps more in demand.
The artists who continued to produce, to create, to agitate often avoided very direct attacks on the country’s leadership in the 1990s. but they made their statements in their art. And now, more than 15 years after the close of that turbulent decade, the times may have changed but the people who mounted the first experimental art works are now being heralded as cultural heroes, icons for a new more commercial age.
The country, some might say, chose economics over politics back then. And today, revisiting the 1980s one can’t help but feel that some of the biggest beneficiaries of this market-focused approach are the very same artists who, at the close of the 1980s, had imagined that experimental art in China was dead.
Image1: Cui Jian in the 1980s
Image2: Create History: Commemoration Exhibition of Chinese Modern Art in 1980s
Image3: Gu Wenda's work
Image4: Wang Guangyi
Image5: Zhang Xiaogang Tiananmen
Image6: The Stars Exhibition
Image7: Gu Wenda Jing Ze Sheng Ling
Image8: Xu Bing A Book from the Sky
Image9: Yue Minjun's work
Image10: Huang Yongping The oil painting painted in 1980 After five minutes in the Washing Machine on Nov.1st 1987
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