ART: 5,000 Years of China on Show in New York

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Feb 10 1998 (IPS) - From the Neolithic period to the rise of the Communist People’s Republic, China has offered rich and distinctive art forms for five millenia and now this vast diversity of Chinese art is on display in one New York museum.

From February until May, the city’s Guggenheim Museum will offer an exhibit, titled ‘China: 5,000 Years’, at its two installations in the city, comprising more than 500 works from Neolithic jades (dating as far back as 3,600 years before the Christian era) to the ‘socialist realist’ murals of Communist China.

“By uniting art from China’s antiquity with art from the modern era, this exhibition represents a unique opportunity to deepen our collective understanding of Chinese culture, past and present,” says Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which runs the museum.

The exhibit, however, has already run into controversy, particularly because it ends with the stereotypical images of happy workers and the iconic figure of Mao Zedong favoured by the current Communist Party ruling elite.

Some critics have attacked the Guggenheim for excluding the most recent art produced over the past decade in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, much of which subtly criticises post-Maoist China. Guggenheim spokespeople, however, contend that the museum ran out of money intended to provide a few samples of such recent art, and they say the museum will host a separate exhibition of modern Chinese works by the summer of 1999.

In any case, what the Guggenheim is offering in its current exhibition is plenty – more, in fact, than many viewers may be able to digest in one sitting.

Terra cotta warriors from the Qin dynasty (before 200 BC) patrol the bottom floor of the Guggenheim’s spiralling architecture, while higher floors feature the colourful, brightly ornamented Ming vases (from the 14th through 17th centuries), and the sensuous, curved sculptures of the Tang dynasty (which ended in the 10th century).

The older Guggenheim works are intended to display not only the various historical epochs which China experienced, but also the diverse cultures of the various regions of the Chinese empires.

A selection of bronzes from the Shang and Zhou dynasties (from 1600 to 256 years before the Christian era) display the differing technical and aesthetic styles of China’s rural bronze-making centres – part of the exhibit’s argument that Chinese art is not a monolithic, urban-based tradition.

“This exhibition seeks … to demonstrate the artistic diversity rather than unity in China, and to identify periods of heightened activity and creativity in the arts,” explains the show’s curator, Sherman Lee.

For many viewers, however, the most fascinating – and revealing – contrasts are offered in the small Guggenheim Soho branch, which displays a selection of modern art from the 1850s to the present era. From daring, expressive portraits to experiments with Western- style modernist art to the socialist realist murals, the past century shows a series of differing Chinese responses to other cultures.

The influence of the emerging urban merchant class can be seen in the rise of the ‘Shanghai School’ of the late 19th century, in which artists combined traditional Chinese scrolls or albums with more consciously modern touches, including striking portraits and imaginative narrative formats. By contrast, Paris-influenced modernism and Moscow-derived socialist realism vied for primacy during the first part of this century – with socialist art, along with Maoism, winning out after the 1949 revolution.

It is the last genre which has predictably drawn the critics’ wrath. A reviewer for The New York Times scorned a 1964 painting of tourists at Tianenmen Square – notable for its cheery kitsch at the same time that the more ironic Pop Art style was emerging in the United States – as “an early-warning sign of disasters yet to come.”

Inevitably, the show cannot avoid skepticism over its politics – particularly when two of the four members of the exhibition’s honorary committee are China’s Ambassador to the United States, Li Daoyu, and former Secretary of State (and longtime booster of trade ties with Beijing) Henry Kissinger.

Following the protest-marked visit by Chinese President Jiang Zemin to the United States last year, the Guggenheim show is bound to be perceived as an advertisement for the Beijing regime – even though the Communist-era works often suffer in comparison to the rest of the exhibition.

Perhaps the best defense of the Guggenheim show is that it is simply too vast to be seen as a statement in favour of any one tradition or conception of China. China, the exhibit makes plain, is too large to be contained by any one paradigm – or any one museum, for that matter.