Down South

---

Today, Monday, August 21st, we flew south from Shanghai to Guang Zhou to what is called the wild, wild south. During the five days in Shanghai, we interviewed two important figures in the Shanghai art scene: Victoria Lu of Shanghai MOCA and Larenz Helbling of ShanghArt Gallery. Both were excited that an American documentary filmmaker was in China to record the next wave of Chinese artists that are beginning to make a name for themselves on the international stage. There's an art explosion happening here, and I having the time of my life doing what I'm doing. Shanghai has some exceptionally inventive photographers and video artists, many of whom work in both formats. Larenz Helbling provided me with discs with the video work and photos of Xu Zhen, Song Tao, and Yang Zhenzhong and has agreed that I can feature them in the film. Tomorrow is a big day. I get a chance to interview Cao Fei in GZ, before she moves to Beijing. After seeing CosPlayers, she's became one of my favorites. In it she documents a new phenomenon that has taken the youth of GZ by storm. The young adults design elaborate costumes and the weapons of their favorite Japanese anime characters and then strut around town doing movements that provide them with even greater power than before. In the video the young people inevitably return from their fantasy role-playing to resume a mundane existence amongst their parents and extended families. We will be in GZ for three days, and then we will travel to Shenzhen to interview Yang Yong.

Check his photography out. All you gotta do is Google him. I've gotta go to bed. Here's a good article on the art scene in Shenzhen.

The emerging avant-garde of China’s Pearl River Delta is raising eyebrows with multimedia journeys through an urban underworld of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll
by Jonathan Napack
If we can just get the support we need, we will create ten Joseph Beuyses in Shenzhen!" says Yang Yong, who, at 24 years old, is the senior artist of China's youngest city. "This place is China's future."

Zheng Guogu documents the trials of youth in China's sprawling metropolises in collages like this untitled 1999 work.
A native of the south-central Sichuan province who was trained in oil painting, Yang is a man versed in Western contemporary art and not afraid to engage with its most provocative themes. After his arrival in Shenzhen, a booming metropolis on China's south coast, four years ago, he began making videos in the Warhol/Paul Morrissey mode. His 1997.12.20 China Shenzhen is a Factory-esque exercise in real-time banality: Yang and an attractive, somewhat gaminelike Sichuanese girl are featured lounging about his apartment, listening to the Trainspotting soundtrack, and dropping names. Then Yang moved to photography, documenting Shenzhen's underground scene in the manner of his hero Nan Goldin (he lists as other influences Jeff Koons and Wolfgang Tilmans). Most extraordinary, and controversial, are his portraits of prostitutes, exhibited this year at Guangzhou's Librería Borges, a bookshop-cum-gallery, as "Women Are Beautiful, Always and Forever." Neither exotic courtesans nor brutalized victims, Yang's subjects are farmers' daughters drifting in the new urban economy. "This is the reality of China," says Yang. "I don't care if a woman is a prostitute or not. I'm just trying to show how people really live."

In a nation with an almost oppressive sense of conformity, Yang's work stands in gutsy rebellion, against not only official orthodoxy but even the mainstream avant-garde. It has also become symbolic of a new southern avant-garde that has, in recent years, taken root in the fast-moving Shenzhen region. A gleaming toy town of steel and glass that hugs the still-impermeable mainland-Hong Kong border, Shenzhen lies so far from China's established cultural centers as to be considered quasibarbarous. Despite the country's fractious diversity, or perhaps because of it, the artists who cluster in Beijing in the north, or Shanghai on the middle coast, often show an obsession with "the center." Shenzhen, in contrast, has been shaped by stubbornly independent and Western-oriented Hong Kong, which transformed it and the surrounding Pearl River Delta from rural backwater to urban trendsetter.

This process began 15 years ago, when Deng Xiaoping carved out a pair of "Special Economic Zones" from the rice paddies and fish ponds of the delta, drawing billions of investment dollars from the former British colony. By the late 1990s, Shenzhen, which operates one of China's two stock exchanges (the other is in Shanghai), was itself moving into finance and high-tech and had established a reputation for unrestricted Western-style capitalism. New factories sprouted throughout the Delta and the provincial capital, Guangzhou, and the region began to attract the young and ambitious from all over China. For this generation of Chinese in their 20s and 30s, "going south" has meant something like what "going west" once did to Americans-redefining oneself, on one's own, away from family and, in the Chinese context, from the security and regimentation of the Maoist legacy. "Shan gao, huangdi yuan," so the saying goes, or "The mountains are high and the emperor is far away."

The freedom of the south coast, qualified as it is by Western standards, has created a culture of sex, drugs, nightclubs, and avant-garde fashion-driven to a large degree by easy access to Hong Kong's uncensored television. Guangzhou has China's liveliest press, although that means chatty lifestyle coverage not political debate. In more controlled cities like Beijing, most affluent people subscribe to Guangzhou newspapers. Fueled by this budding counterculture, the once-rustic frontier region has also become a center for artists seeking to break away from the northern avant-garde that has long been the representative face of Chinese contemporary art to the West. At such events as the Venice Biennale, China has usually been represented by artists like Chen Zhen, Wang Du, Huang Yong Ping, and Zhang Peili, most of whom made their names in Shanghai and Beijing in the 1980s and have since either relocated to or been active in Western Europe. But recently, younger artists like Yang have created something of a southern school, which, in its open examination of modern urban life, has begun to attract attention in such places as Finland and Switzerland.

Among the other prospectors of the new South China subculture is Zheng Guogu, 29, who lives in Yangjiang, a sleepy coastal town that rarely makes the news except to showcase People's Liberation Army drills to invade Taiwan. Like Yang, Zheng went to a traditional art school-he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Guangzhou in 1992-but became known through his experimental work. In 1996 he started making large photocollages, some of them similar to contact prints, others with jigsaw puzzle-like paper cutouts. They take the form of fictionalized "documentaries" about the trials of youth with such titles as Ten Thousand Customers and Life and Fantasies of Youth in Yangjiang. Recalling the Japanese "print club" machines so popular in Asia-which dispense instant souvenir photo stickers with "cute," kitschy backgrounds-Zheng's works build up a meticulously banal but ultimately authentic picture of private life on the South China coast. A similar photographer is Feng Qiangyu, who also lives in Yangjiang (although she studied in Beijing) and deals with personal identity and female sexuality in her work.

Chen Tong's Librería Borges is the crossroads of the southern avant-garde. In addition to his role as critic and curator, Chen, 37, publishes the magazine Vision 21 and edits art theory books. "Guangzhou is small enough for people to meet one another," Chen says, noting that official restrictions are looser than in the north. "The politics here isn't real-just for show. The police never come to my openings. They mostly deal with traffic problems." He adds that, paradoxically, local insularity makes it easier for the avant-garde artists, most of whom come from elsewhere. The Cantonese who predominate in both Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta have their own distinct language and ethnic consciousness, although they still consider themselves Han Chinese. "They don't really like foreigners," says Chen, who comes from Hunan, the province immediately to the north of the delta. "They don't even like other Chinese. That gives us some space. We're not suffocating under a microscope like in Beijing."

The core of the Guangzhou scene is the group Da Wei Xiang, or Big-Tailed Elephant, a loose collective of four artists who have set out to rebel against the deadness of the new urban landscape. The varied output of the group, which was founded in 1990, constitutes virtually the only avant-garde work in the region to have received international attention, including a 1998 show at the Kunsthalle Bern. With the exception of the concept-minded Lin Yilin, the Big-Tailed Elephant artists have focused on photography and video, although much of what they have shown abroad has taken the form of installations. Two of the "elephants," Liang Juhui and Chen Shaoxiong, document urban change and desire, using photography, video, and other media in a conscious departure from the heavily cerebral and symbolic Beijing artists. Chen's "sight adjuster" pieces, little dioramas made from photographs thrust into the view frame of other photographs, give a toylike feel to the metropolitan panorama, while at the same time exploring how city dwellers perceive their environment.

The fourth "elephant," 42-year-old Xu Tan, has moved into multimedia with his CD-ROM movie Made in China. Xu knows better than anyone that the delta's relative freedom is just that, relative-he lost his job at the Guangzhou Academy two years ago for dealing with homosexuality and prostitution in his video work. "After that, my ideas changed," Xu says. "Now that people have computers at home, I can reach them that way, rather than through exhibitions. You can put anything on a CD. The democracy of the medium is the beginning of political democracy. If everyone has a video camera and a computer, you can't control them the same way anymore."

Made in China is a dense, interactive journey through the maelstrom of urban China. There are endless scenes of night markets and city streets; a lovemaking scene featuring a 17-year-old prostitute ("she's only been doing this for a month," Xu explains); interviews with the novelist Mian Mian, who writes about her years of sex, drugs, and rock and roll in Shenzhen, and Coco Zhao, a Shanghai deejay who is one of China's few gay public figures; and haunting images of planes screaming over perfume bottles (it so happens that Guangzhou's airport is built next to a cosmetics market brimming with fake Chanel No. 5).

"The northern sensibility is analytical, while southern art is sensual," explains Huang Zhuan, a professor at the Guangzhou Academy. Huang is often described as the city's critical guru and, despite his loathing of the comparison, is likened to Beijing's Li Xianting or "Lao Li," who has achieved international renown as the arbiter of the Chinese capital's avant-garde. "The fundamental difference is that Beijing artists think of the world as structured, and that structure is in their artwork, with a specific aim in mind," says Huang. "The southerners pay more attention to lived experience. When artists deal with sex or use their body in a performance, northerners will use it as a political symbol, for example, but southerners take it as part of nature, of being alive. They focus on their own personal experience as a form of deeper social change." While Beijing's artists may daringly critique politics and society, Huang adds, they still show habits ingrained by 2,000 years of autocracy. Foreigners saw the irony behind "Political Pop" paintings satirizing Maoist propaganda, but never saw the ambivalence, the attraction to such representations of incredible power (albeit a power enjoyed by one). In contrast, despite lacking overt politics in their work, these southern artists are more subversive in asserting the value of the individual as an autonomous, sensuous being. If the breakaway southerners are still little known to the local public outside of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, their work is attracting critical notice farther afield, including in northern China. In recent years, Zheng Guogu and Yang Yong have been invited to take part in Beijing underground shows-informal exhibitions held in temporary spaces that are excluded from mass-media coverage-like "The Corruptionists" in 1998 and last year's "Post-Sense, Sensibility, Alien Bodies, and Delusion." Along with several of the "elephants," Zheng and (in Helsinki) Yang were also included in Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru's "Cities on the Move," an interdisciplinary look at urbanism and the experience of contemporary city life that has traveled to the Vienna Secession, Bordeaux's Museum of Contemporary Art, London's Hayward Gallery, New York's P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and Helsinki's Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. Commercially, however, things have been tough. "We have the worst of Hong Kong and the worst of Beijing," says Xu Tan, referring respectively to indifference and politics. While subculture in lazy, dreamy Beijing is big business, with its thriving underground scene in art, jazz, rock, and fiction, the insular, business-minded Cantonese mostly ignore the artists in their midst. Commercial galleries abroad have yet to discover these artists, although Zheng Guogu did take part last year in group exhibitions at the Takashimaya department store's gallery in Tokyo and at Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong (pieces sold for $1,950 to $5,800).

Meanwhile, the Pearl River Delta has generated interest in itself as an urban laboratory for top planners and architects from around the world. Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has just completed a Harvard Design School research project on the delta, which will be published in June by Monacelli Press as Pearl River Delta: Project on the City. Based on fieldwork conducted between 1996 and '97, the project consists of a series of interrelated studies on the region, which is predicted to have a population of 36 million by 2020. Closer to home, Shenzhen's state-owned He Xiangning Art Gallery is quietly collecting contemporary art, and the mayor commissioned Japanese architect Kisho Kurokowa to develop plans for a new city center. Not to be outdone, the mayor of nearby Zhuhai has engaged Arata Isozaki to design an artificial "intelligent island," a utopian urban development in the Pearl River Estuary.

But for Yang and his friends, perhaps all of these big projects are irrelevant. "I came here because I needed a job and wanted to make money," says Yang. "I wanted to see reality, to learn about those things you can't learn about in school."

Jonathan Napack is a Hong Kong-based independent correspondent for The International Herald Tribune and The Asian Wall Street Journal. He is currently writing a book on youth culture and new media in Asia.

PHOTO CREDIT: COURTESY THE ARTIST

---

Comments

[geoff]

I checked out the exhibit at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and highly recommend it to all who don't mind a beautiful ride up the coast, a sunny stroll down Main Street in downtown Santa Barbara, and a provactive display of the burgeoning art scene that is taking fligh out of China. Yang Yong's work was one of my favorites as was one by the name of Dali (eponymous homage to Salvador?) and a few others, of whom I can't remember their names.