 t’s almost impossible to summarize the near three-decade Chinese contemporary art history in several thousand words, at least it’s beyond my reach. It involves numerous artists, art events, and different areas like government cultural policy, news media, donation and collection practices. Its interrelations are so complex and its resource materials are so diverse that undoubtedly it demands re-filtration, demands reexamination based on adequate individual cases. And it needs a reasonable length of time to see the history clearly; twenty-eight years is still too short and it is still continuing. However, a nostalgic recall of the incomprehensible history and a desire to understand the past truth tempt one to have a try; anyway, all the writings of history are expressions of the writers’ views based on records kept by the past generations. As a result, this article provides only an outlined review of the past Chinese avant-garde art, with an eye to give us, who are trapped in chaos and the present goings-on, some lessons to learn from, and provides us with some cue as to our places in contemporary art history.
From “Star Art Group” to “China Modern Art Exhibition”
 Star Group held its first art exhibition on September 27 of 1979 in a road-end small park at the east side of China National Art Museum, and it was banned on September 29. The exhibition’s initiators were art enthusiasts Huang Rui and Ma De, and the participants included curator Li Xianting and artist Ai Weiwei who are still active today, and poets Beidao, Zhong Acheng, Mangke and others. It was launched of their own will; there were no sponsors, no sales; choices of the exhibited works were determined by originality and involved no official will, no political propaganda and illustration, and it was relatively a matter of personal creations. “Kollwitz is our flag and Picasso is our pioneer” – the slogan they used vividly represented those artists’ pursuit.
In a sense, significance of that exhibition stemmed from “the event” its being banned caused. Then the artists held a demonstration on October 1 of 1979, asking for “political democracy and art freedom”, which drew much attention from media in home and abroad. The whole event seemed to provide a scene where contemporary Chinese art fought against the mainstream. Indeed, in the eyes of westerners, contemporary Chinese art would develop like this after that event: there’s a highly centralized government background; the Chinese people were insensitive and dull, and artists were contending against it and striving to achieve the freedom of art and themselves. Undoubtedly there’s a large part of imagination in that but it played a major role in later art market and it was the macro background against which westerners collecting and operating contemporary Chinese art.
The “Star Exhibition” mode was quite avant-garde in China of that time. Meanwhile, the permanent effective system of art colleges, art exhibitions and artist societies also showed their efforts of revolution in their own particular ways. Chen Danqing’s “Group Paintings about Tibet” restarted the Chinese oil painting’s process of learning from western Europe. Artists of the 19th and 20th centuries like Miller, Gustave Courbet, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh reentered visions of Chinese artists. Jin Shangyi, Yang Feiyun, Wang Yidong and others launched a new campaign of drawing on European classical style, which was called by critics as “classical wind”.  According to their views, oil paintings in Republic of China period was plain and natural but not very systematic; New China oil paintings was mostly products from combination of Xu Beihong’s realistic system and Soviet realism (mainly Suricov’s mode). Because of frequent political campaigns, Chinese oil painting was far beyond the standard even in terms of realistic and technical respects, which still needed remedy and re-study too. He Duoling, Ai Xuan and others drew on American native painter Andrew Wyeth’s painting style, building up a slightly melancholy mood on the tableau. In short words, in early and middle 1980s, all “anti-Soviet” arts were pioneers and could be included in category of avant-garde art.
Undoubtedly the above excellent realistic painters’ works enjoyed a wider market in China, and even in 1980s when commodity economy was still not developed, collection and purchase of the high-end commodity – art works began to emerge. Collectors and art dealers adopted mainly a private-style deal by going to select and buy at artists’ homes, and the well-known operations included Taiwan Gaoxiong’s Mountain Art Foundation’s collecting works by Luo Zhongli, He Duoling, Yang Feiyun and other painters. The above earliest founders of Mainland oil painting market were not local Chinese but Chinese buyers in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Relying upon income price margins, currency exchange rates, they bought large quantities of realistic paintings from Mainland China and exerted an influence that last to today. Their collections supported and promoted the development of realistic painting but also showed an obvious bias – due to quite a lot collectors’ lack of better appreciations, the purchased works were usually confined to nudes, portraits, still objects and “local flavor paintings” developed from local realism. That kind of support did not have further positive effect upon art and was liable to a criticism of “middle-class economic strength plus urban petty bourgeois vision”. Nevertheless, realistic paintings were undoubtedly widely regarded and received, and gradually aroused Mainland upstarts’ interest in collection ever since the 1990s, which would last for quite a long time. Some excellent realistic painters would continue to enjoy a long-term market for their works.
The “1985 New Wave” was a critical moment for contemporary art development. The so-called “1985 New Wave” was a title given by then art scenes, referring to the vigorous modernistic art movement in China around 1985. During that period, a new trend or a new declaration would be launched almost every few weeks, and artists drew greatly on various styles and schools of western modernism. The “progressing Chinese youth art exhibition” in 1985 was one of the best-known exhibitions during that time. The famous work “In A New Age – Revelations From Adam and Eve” by Meng Lvding and Zhang Qun vividly depicted that period and even the whole reform and opening-up times: rules were broken continuously, the doors to art and to the country were opened step by step, and the future was full of temptations … exhibitions during that period were based essentially upon the goal of pure art expressions; there were no donations and no sales of works. And activities of Xiamen Dada in 1986 fully interpreted that idealistic age: all exhibited works were set to flames after the exhibition. In 2006, the work of “In A New Age – Revelations From Adam and Eve” surprisingly re-emerged in auction market with a high price of 6.27 million RMB yuan, which seemed to contradict downright the ideal of Xiamen Dada and effected a sharpest contrast between art and art market of two different times.
In 1989, art critics Gao Minglu, Li Xianting, Fan Di’an, Zhou Yan, Wang Mingxian and others curated the “China Modern Art Exhibition”, an all-round demonstration of modern Chinese art, which, however, with a gunshot by the woman artist Xiao Lu, turned China National Art Museum into a miniature “Tian An Men Square” for art scenes, and contemporary Chinese art came to a halt soundlessly. That exhibition once secured a donation of 50,000 RMB yuan from a small restaurant boss, but it never wholly came in place. It was a time when consciousness of donation began to emerge but channels for it lacked. The exhibited works in that exhibition were later scattered about; some were ruined, some were never heard of ever since. In the spring of 2005, a group of exhibited works in that exhibition re-appeared at Christie’s oil painting special auctions and was sold out at a price of 1.1 million RMB yuan. Soon, one of their authors filed a lawsuit against that, which showed the problem left by then flawed exhibition proceedings.
In the “1985 New Wave”, diversified activities were launched in places like Hangzhou, Xiamen, Shanghai, Kunming and Beijing; even in Taiyuan, Xuzhou and other so-called art-poor places, art activities were also vigorously going on, then western art schools of a century were repeated once in a short period of a decade in China. Meanwhile, though some famous works, like Xu Bin’s “Warning from Examining the World” and Huang Yongzhi’s “‘A History of Chinese Painting’ and ‘A Brief History of Modern Painting’” came out, most of the other works were simple imitations of western modern art and no large number of classical works passed onto next generations. In today’s art market, except for Xu Bin’s “Warning from Examining the World – Last Volume of Heaven Books” turns up frequently, the others seldom show up.
“New Generation” and “Post 1989”
After the 1989 Tian An Men Square Incident, the government enforced the “anti-bourgeois liberalization” campaign, and avant-garde contemporary art activities in art scenes were also driven down. Meanwhile, neo-academism began to ascend onto stage of history and was later called “the New Generation”. It began with “Liu Xiaodong’s Solo Exhibition” in May of 1990, continued with “Woman Artists’ World”, “Close Distance – Wang Huaxiang Art Exhibition”, “Yu Hong Art Exhibition”, “Shen Ling Art Exhibition” and others, and ultimately got established in art history in 1991 with the “New Generation Art Exhibition” held in China’s National History Museum. New Generation, or the geologic concept of Neozoic era, refers to those who did not experience the “Cultural Revolution” and did not acquire a strong sense of historical responsibility. They mostly concentrated in Central Academy of Arts and did not participate in the “1985 New Wave” – they were still in college, and had exquisite academic skills; their visions stopped around themselves, around their college mates and urban youth life, with no themes but short-distance horizontal views. New generation art was regarded as another true art wave of realism after the neo woodcut art.
 On September 30, 1991, Christie Hong Kong held the “Contemporary Chinese Oil Painting Auction”, where Chinese oil paintings began to enter the international auction market under a unified image, and among the auctioned articles there were works by Liu Xiaodong, Yu Hong and other well-known artists. It was already 15 years ever since works of New Generation representatives like Liu Xiaodong were publicized and privately bought for collections. Though it was works by the New Generation that first turned up in auction markets, the prices of works by (except Liu Xiaodong) Yu Hong, Wei Rong, Shen Ling, Wang Yuping and others were much underestimated.
Almost at the same time with creations of “new generation” and “short-distance” concepts, critic Li Xianting created the concept of “cynical realism”. In an introduction to “Liu Wei and Fang Lijun’s Oil Painting Exhibition” in April of 1992, he wrote: “I call the neo-realistic trend that emerged after 1988 or 1989 and that concentrated mainly in Beijing as cynical realism; ‘cynical’ is an English word, and we take up its connotations of ridicule, sarcasm and cold views on reality and life.” The sale records of works by cynical realistic painters were incessantly broken, and those works were already the most favored articles in art market. The cynical realistic artists still included Yue Minjun, Yang Shaobing, Song Yonghong and Wang Jinsong. There were conventions in art history that we need caution against –mature art styles often ended up as constraints on innovations of later artists, and it was the case with those artists and the following pop art and gaudy art, and perhaps it was brought about by the inertia money acquires.
Accompanying the ascendances of New Generation and cynical realism onto Chinese art stage was reopening of China’s economy. Deng Xiaoping’s “speeches in the south” restarted China’s all-round economic reform. With art scenes, the year of 1992 was equally important. In that year, Cai Guoqiang, Lv Shengzhong, Wang Youshen and others began to exhibit their works in a peripheral exhibition of Kassel Documents Exhibition – “the Epochal European Peripheral Exhibition”. Then, “Guangzhou: First Biennale of 1990s Art” brought out by home critics in alliance with entrepreneurs strove to build up China’s own avant-garde art market, and the exhibition itself was following a commercial mode: artists supplied their works, entrepreneurs provided money and critics directed and commented; the works were available for sale, and 95% of the artists set a price for their own works; as commentators and appraisers, the critics each got a payment of 3,000 yuan. In that year, Hanart T Z Gallary of Hong Kong and Shui Yuan Art Center of Taiwan also began to represent contemporary Chinese art, whose overseas first-order market began to take shape.
In 1993, the “Post 1989: New Art In China” curated by Li Xianting and Zhang Songren made a exhibition tour successively in Hong Kong, Australia and the US. After that, Zhang again supported the participating artists Wang Guangyi, Li Shan and others to exhibited their works in significant international exhibitions such as the Saint Paul圣保罗 Biennale. Actually, Zhang had bought most of the exhibited works before the exhibition, thus, Hanart T Z Gallary, as the first-order market, would spare no efforts in promoting the collections in their gallery, so contemporary Chinese art, by Hanart T Z Gallary’s efforts in a way, was successfully introduced into the mature western art system. In the same year, Mainland artists Fang Lijun, Yu Hong, Geng Jianyi, Zhang Peili, Wang Youshen and the like entered their works at Venice Biennale that was the longest in history and the most influential art exhibition in the west. There we could see a clear operating process: contemporary art concerned not only with issue of good or poor painting – at least it was already reduced to a second position; what mattered then was the operation, namely, how to enter the established international art rules and system. Generally, it was believed that international art scenes’ formal recognition of Contemporary Chinese art happened in the San Paulo Biennale that was held in Brazil in 1994. In the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, Shic, the former Switzerland ambassador to China brought out contemporary Chinese artists on a large scale through curator Harald Szeemann, and a total of twenty participating Chinese artists exceeded the number of Italian or American artists and, in consequence, contemporary Chinese art gained an even wider recognition.
New Art System Gradually Taking Shape
When Chinese artists began to enter international exhibition system, contemporary Chinese art also encountered its new puzzles, which had an effect lasting to today: one was the impact of a commercial wave, the other was a post-colonial-style passive choice. In the 1980s when systems of gallery and art donations were extremely inadequate, idealism of art first could be called the mainstream, and artists’ creations in simultaneity with the reform and opening-up process could be regarded as part of the ideological emancipations. Nowadays, contemporary Chinese art began to ascend to the international stage which, however, was put up by others and its regulations and standards were set by the west, then contemporary Chinese art was operating in a mature western system which went like “artists – curators – critics – media – galleries – auction houses – collectors – art museums”.
Fortunately, that system would have its positive effect on Chinese soils. Since Shanghai Biennale in 2000, local Chinese contemporary art stages began to be put up, and exhibitions like Chengdu Biennale and Guangzhou Biennale also kept in step with Shanghai Biennale in efforts made to promote contemporary Chinese art. And large-scale folk donations to contemporary Chinese art also began to unveil; for example, the successful Chengdu Biennale was just dependent upon the donation from local businessman Deng Hong.
Government supports to contemporary art also tended to grow actively: in 2002, Fan Di’an, director of China National Art Museum, curated the Chinese hall of Biennale of Sāo Paulo; in 2003, Chinese government was officially invited to Venice Biennale in the name of a national art museum, and was planning to set up a permanent Chinese art hall there; in 2003, Ministry of Culture asked Fan Di’an, Hou Hanru and Ke Jiabi to curate the “Life At This Moment” exhibition in Contemporary Art Museum of Hamburger Railway Station in Berlin, Germany, and that was the first time Chinese government held a large-scale contemporary art exhibition on foreign soils. Soon, a series of governmental contemporary art exhibitions were held in Paris, Croatia and other places, and Ministry of Culture was also institutionally invited to important international Biennales like Venice Biennale. With regard to art museums, as Wang Huangsheng, Fan Di’an and Li Lei began to take charge of key national art museums like Guangdong Art Museum, China National Art Museum and Shanghai Art Museum respectively, the many sorts of work they already began showed that government was beginning to enforce the research, exhibition and collection of contemporary art, that the academic nature of national art museums was being established anew, and that their impact upon contemporary art was recapturing attentions of all walks of life.
 With regard to collection and market, China’s local collecting force of contemporary art already began to build up slowly in early and middle 1990s when contemporary Chinese art began to attract international attentions. In 1991, an Australian – Brian Wallace initiated the Redgate Gallery in Beijing, and soon Hanmo Gallery, CourtYard Gallery and others were also successively founded, who then made distinctive contributions to the promotion of first-order market for contemporary Chinese art. After more than a decade of hard pioneering work, China’s gallery industry also ushered in its age of profit, and they would become the major force in the future to advance the contemporary art. With respect to the second-order market, Christie Hong Kong had begun Chinese oil painting auctions as early as in 1985, and it produced complete auctions of works by Liu Xiaodong, Yu Hong and other contemporary artists in 1991. Years later, Guardian Auction House initiated in Mainland China a special auction of oil paintings in 1994, which symbolized the beginning of a local second-order market for contemporary Chinese art. After that, Hanhai, Huachen, Rongbao, Poly and Chengxuan also brought out their special oil painting auctions. The deal volume of Guardian’s first auction was only 1.96 million RMB yuan in 1994, whereas in 2006, even only the total volume of the above auction houses’ spring auctions had approached 500 million RMB yuan. Then, the second-order market for contemporary Chinese art had been in a relatively dominant position in its initial ten-odd years, and was once denounced as “the super-gallery”.
In December of 1996, art critics Leng Lin, Gao Ling and others produced for the first time a special auction of contemporary Chinese art, which, however, did not achieve a desirable result because the whole contemporary art market had not taken shape at that time. A decade later, in the spring of 2006, Sotheby in New York brought out the “Asian contemporary art special auction” that mainly featured contemporary Chinese art, and the sales volume exceeded one hundred million RMB yuan for the first time; further, in the first half of that year, the total sale volume of contemporary Chinese art reached a record high of 10 billion RMB yuan, and artists’ personal auction records were also broken one after another. Contemporary Chinese art became the hotspot of world’s attention immediately, even in auction area, a multi-party competing situation had formed, with Beijing and Hong Kong being centers, New York important observation window, and Taiwan, Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou the regional centers. And outside China there were still Koller in Switzerland and others who were doing special auctions of contemporary Chinese art.
In 1999, Taida Art Museum in Tianjin held the exhibition – “Rainbow of the Century: Gaudy Art”, summing up a sort of previously existing phenomenon, which was the last school in twentieth century history of art that showed up collectively before the public. Obviously, gaudy art summarized a mere sort of phenomenon instead of the whole face of art in the 1990s. Actually, long before the birth of the name “gaudy”, conceptual, performance, installation, video and photographic pictures were already expanding the scenes of contemporary art, enfeebling any naming ambition in such a plural reality. Into the new millennium, though there arose still renaming attempts like “youth cruel painting” and “cartoon generation”, it was obvious that our age was going far beyond the coverage of any particular styles. In a way, the so-called critical aphasia was perhaps the very good fortune for art.
As art styles collectively fell into stalemate, artists and art districts were concentrating, and art communities that centered round studios and galleries in different places emerged one after another, which were either formed naturally or worked out schematically. The Moganshan 50 bordering on Suzhou River in Shanghai, the Tank Storehouse Art District in Chongqing and Blue Roof Art Center in Chengdu were all places densely populated with artist studios and galleries. In Beijing, even more art districts were formed, in which the “798” was most well-known, most complete and most complex, including in it studios, galleries, bookstores, periodical offices, cafeterias and office rooms. Brewer Art District was reshaped out of an abandoned brewer factory, loosely organized like “798” but without its mess, looking carefree and exquisite, where Arario Gallery seriously and carefully introduced into China international artists, European art, and Indian art that was strange to our eyes, which were communicating intimately with art people, and that was the goal even the national art museums did not accomplish.  And others, like Fresh Grassland, Suojia Village also projected the seemingly peripheral but vigorous true state of contemporary art in China.
Contemporary Chinese art has come to a new threshold and built up an elementary art ecosystem that can regenerate by itself. Though young and naïve still, it has alighted on ground and begun to move forward steadily. We are now facing with an opportunity – to push forward a genuine local Chinese contemporary art instead of one that was chosen by others. All this needs efforts of all parties and it cannot be accomplished at one stroke; it needs us who get involved to contribute in all respects, and it is itself a happy venture to get involved in it and take part in history.
Translated by Hu Zhu
 Li Feng, art critic. He worked at an auction house for many years. He now studys for his M.D.at the Centre Academy of Fine arts and he's helping an organization to build a museum in Beijing.
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