Museum Photos

So since I didn't have internet to post these earlier this week, here are a few of the photos I took from MOCA, SAM and Zendai (I tried not to repeat ones people had already posted) - you can see the others here.

(taken at MOCA - Ferragamo's exhibit)




(taken at the Shanghai Art Museum - children's exhibition)


(taken at the Shanghai Art Museum - second floor)


(taken at the Zendai Museum)

Space and function of the art museum

The first idea occurred to me why Shanghai is now attracting more and more eyes from artists all over the world is because that the area itself is relatively a new growing market for contemporary art, that means ,like everything new ,it is full of possibilities to make it a totally specific landmark in art . Shanghai itself bears some special characteristics, favorable geographic location, solid economic support , history of colony and influence by the Chinese cultures as well. Shanghai itself is a mixture of various elements existing not only in China but the whole world as well. To such a newly built kingdom , we are not just curious about its future ,but hope to participate in the construction of its parts, which cater to our needs.

Most the museums in Shanghai exist for only several decades. Specially mentioning, Shanghai Art Museum (1956) was the earliest national art museum in China, which may suggest that Shanghai should have the capacity or more experiences to hold more museums. But compared to Beijing , Guangzhou and other areas in China, we can not find much that can really represent the contemporary art development in Shanghai. Personally speaking, I think the Shanghai Biennale should be a best channel for the rest of the world to know more about what is taking place here, winning public praise home and abroad. Still we can not deny the fact that many shows that we held are not as satisfying as what we are expecting. I think that the concept of space is the most important factor that contributes to any success.

First, building area . A good art museum should have large space that ensures to hold all the items on display. To best present the items , the space plays an essential role in creating the background or atmosphere and won’t miss any important element relevant. Unlike the newly-built art museums in other areas and those under construction with sufficient space, the Shanghai Art Museum covers an area of 18,000 square meters, of which only 5,800 square meters is used as exhibition area. Same situation goes with another municipal art museum------Liu Hai Su Museum, which has just 1000 square meters for exhibition. This can explain why some of us feel there is not too much worth-seeing in these art museums. To make it worse, it leads us to believe that art museum is just a work done by the government to improve the city image rather than a place can provide us with pleasure and inspire us to think. What I argue is not that a small gallery can not have well-known show , but that the lack of space will be a bottleneck for art development. Although I agree that various small galleries can serve for different art themes, I still believe we need more large art museums. That’s why I strongly support the idea that reconstructing those old factories. In addition to Moganshan area, individually , I would like to mention the 1933 old millfun, where Shanghai Creative Industry Center is located .It is not a so-called museum but the whole design and the idea it creates is what I hope to see in the future museums.

Second, the inner and outer space of the museum . Art museum is aimed at attracting more people to know about art and popularizing the contemporary art. It is important to fully use of the inner and outer space of the museum. We usually find art museums around commercial areas. It is hard to say it is the business zone flourishes the museum or the museum brings more visitors to the area. Having visited certain numbers of art museums, I think the location of Zendai MOMA is the most enjoyable. As the semi-community semi-commerce zone becomes more and more popular in Shanghai, it will be a good choice to build it there. Most of us may agree that the operation of an art museum needs popularity and financial support. It is important to make it not only a preference to the public but also to companies, even it is a non-profit museum. As the first non-profit, independent-operated contemporary institution in Shanghai, MOCA has achieved a lot and paid attention to the relations among pure art, design ,fashion, architecture and other fields. But no matter how popular the exhibition held there, MOCA still has to struggle with “money”. The high rent, payment for hundred employers and the expenditure for each exhibition all come from the foundation of its creator. Fortunately, it never limits to the narrow view and looks for sponsor to make it more successful. The exhibition titled “Art in Motion”, cooperating with BMW is a good example. For inner spaces, giving the museum more function also sounds goods. As I mentioned above, the city itself is mixture of various elements, so why not the museum? Leisure zones, small bars or even chatting corners do bring more vitality. But the multifunction of the museum is not easy to carry out because any abuse of it will lead to a david’s dear . We need more space for appreciation , for thinking but not just for fun. Some people often criticize that our city has no distinctive feature. I think this also applies to the museum construction. It will be a catastrophe if we make a museum a space that just assembles all other functional areas together without the art concept running through it.

So, in a word, I think that we need more art museums in Shanghai, bigger and multifunctional.

Some of My Thoughts on Museums

In terms of the main functions of museums, I think that a museum should be a place in the service of society and of its development; it should open to the public, which conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits, for purpose of study, education and enjoyment. Museums exhibit to provide the objects and information necessary for visitors to learn and also enable them to have an enjoyable experience.

In the early period of its development, museums focused on researches, collection and exhibits, but museums are now experiencing the transition from traditional function to social function, and the idea of museums should serve the society is strengthened. Because of the museum’s unique cultural value, abundant educational and cultural information and special education method, museums take the mission to spread scientific knowledge, patriotism education, and aesthetic education.

Museums can be considered as complementary classrooms for students, meanwhile, they also offer opportunities for people from all walks of life to expand their scope of knowledge.

Education and entertainment can be combined together to enable visitors to attain the satisfaction of cultural life. The educating means can be diversified, varying from all kinds of exhibitions to performances, lectures and academic forums.

Last week we visited MOCA, Shanghai Art Museum and Zendai Museum of Modern Art. Generally speaking, the state-owned museums are bigger than privately-owned ones. Both of them hold forums and lectures, but I think that state-owned museums enjoy some advantages. For example, the latest information of the coming show can be publicized through mass media such as TV and radio, but we seldomly hear about exhibitions in privately-owned ones. Before I took this class, I knew little about private-owned museums in Shanghai. I asked some of my Shanghainese classmates about Zendai Museum, but none of them was familiar with it, so I think there are still a lot to do to expand the public participation.

As the first non-profit, independently-operated contemporary art institution in Shanghai, MOCA is devoted to the promotion of Chinese and international contemporary art. It aims to bring to China high quality international contemporary art and design and to collect and research on Chinese contemporary art and design. Evolving Legend, the Ferragamo show inspires visitors’ creativity by showcasing the innovative materials, creative use of color and fine craftsmanship that make each Ferragamo product a work of art, those elements can also be borrowed into the creation of contemporary art. This reminds me of one of the functions of museums, that is to inspire creativity and contribute to the support of creative industries.

Art is not only an important component of our society and life and an important means of intercultural communication, but also a way of learning and understanding the world around us. Museums are not only the places to display antiques, they should also be able to reflect modernity in China. As one of the most dynamic metropolis in the world, Shanghai has undergone significant changes in recent years. Cultural prosperity has offered museums in Shanghai the opportunity of development and transformation.

In Shanghai Art Museum, I saw the photograph exhibition which shows the current development of Shanghai. Also, Shanghai Biennale takes the city itself and its urban conditions as a starting point for its artistic exploration. The forum in Zendai Art Museum focusing on the current and future directions possible for China’s culture deals with a wide range of issues all pertinent to a broad understanding of Chinese cultural development. Through discussing some main issues about future development of contemporary art, and the role of art in culture, we are able to place China’s cultural progress in the context of its reemergence into the world. Wang Jianwei’s Hostage reminds me that in such a society with rapid scientific development, people are enjoying the comforts brought by material life, however, we are gradually falling into victims of material life even if we haven’t realized that. Although it is strange-looking, the installation art inspires visitors to rethink on current living state. So, art is a reflection of the outside world, a reflection of the globalized reordering of the city.

In February2008, the national department of cultural antiques announced that some of the museums should open to public free of charge. This will create more opportunities for people to go to museums to experience the spiritual education, especially young people. Without any entry fees, museums can be less of corporate spaces, however, it is not impossible to open all the museums to public free. Museums should charge fees according to the quality and standards of the exhibition on display so as to protect the exhibits.

Today, there are millions of bloggers, in order to make better use of the internet, museums representing arts and culture in China can also use blog as a tool. Pictures and videos of some exhibitions that were no longer on display can be put on the blog so that people can review those exhibitions at any time. People can also make any comments on the blog. In this way, blogs can become internet-based virtual museums.

In terms of future development of museums, I think more forums and lectures should be held for visitors of all levels, more opportunities can be offered for art audience to have face-to face conversations with artists.

Museums in Shanghai should open a window for audience, both from home and abroad, to experience the tremendous changes Shanghai is undergoing, and inspire people to think what we everyone can do to further the development of this city.

MoCA vs. Shanghai Art Museum

MoCA vs. Shanghai Art Museum by Amanda Pickens

Although in close proximity to one another, Shanghai's MoCA and Shanghai Art Museum share few commonalities. Before class I assumed the two to be fairly similar, yet once stepping into Shanghai Art Museum following our visit to MoCA, I immediately began to compare and contrast them to one another. Due to both ownership (private vs. state) and each museum's chief goals, budget size, projected image, and viewer demographics varied greatly.

Although I enjoyed both the Ferragamo show and Mediengruppe Telekommander's performance at Art Lab, MoCA's feel seems a bit contrived. As we were first introduced to MoCA's upstairs lounge, I could not help but notice the abundance of overly-hip contemporary design. Somewhere amongst the Macaulay Culkin face, giant jellybean chairs, Marimekko-like floor, and repetitiously tiled bathroom, I began to feel lost amid the mishmash of elements. I understand that the museum needs to be somewhat trendy to appeal to a young, contemporary crowd; however, the room felt like a fun house with no particular direction other than drug-induced frenzy.

At the same time, I will admit that the music was a lot of fun and the turn out definitely seemed successful. The crowd, though, was mainly Western, and the night overall had a very hipster, New York feel. I'm not sure if MoCA is concerned about appealing to a more local crowd, yet if the main purpose behind Art Lab is its moneymaking capabilities, they seem to have found the right market thus far.

As for the Ferragamo exhibit, I was both pleased and disappointed. While I have no problems with museums exhibiting such shows (commercial design rather than conceptual art) I did not find that the initial impact felt in the show's first room carried throughout the exhibit. Once exiting the high heel room, I felt bored and confused. Although much of the exhibition was centered around the display of Ferragamo goods, one room featured artwork relating to the designer's shoes. The exhibited work did nothing more than simply depict high heels; there was no concept, originality, or really anything worthwhile about the room as a whole. Rather, it seemed a last minute addition, as well as a place for one to leave his or her child based on the arrangement of miniature tables and chairs that sat off to the side.

After having seen the show, I left wanting more. Viewing one exhibition was not enough. Does the museum not have a permanent collection? Although larger than the average gallery, MoCA's lack of space leaves the institution in somewhat of a middle ground. Without the power and presence of large, more established museums must MoCA rely on its ability to act as a venue rather than exhibitions alone? Perhaps, they feel that playing the role of museum is too conventional. Based on space alone, MoCA's decision to not show permanent works is probably a good idea; the museum is just too small. Frequent visitors would become bored due to lack of variety. Though, if they were able to amass enough works, the establishment would be able to periodically rotate the permanent works collection as does New York's MoMA. Yet, this would involve a large budget, as well as alter MoCA's image. They want to stray from convention; however I question if they are too concerned with their image.

On the other hand, when compared to Shanghai Art Museum, one must appreciate MoCA's freshness and professionalism. Despite being very impressed by the exterior's architecture, I was shocked upon entry. The museum simply felt dark and dated. While the downstairs exhibit was somewhat interesting to view, (despite the teachers having heavy hands in the children's pieces) I could not have been more let down by the photography being shown upstairs. If I had had to buy my own ticket, I would have wanted to demand my money back. None of the pictures could have been more cliché—landscapes, cityscapes, nude women, still lives. After seeing the first set which looked to be nothing more than car advertisements, I wanted to leave. Showing such works challenges the false assumption many people make regarding art shown in professional museums. Many automatically assume that work displayed in such a setting is highly respected and well executed, but exhibitions like this definitely prove that one should question such assumptions. I only hope the main incentive behind exhibitions such as these is money.

Viewer demographics varied, as well, between the two museums. While MoCA attracts a very young, contemporary, and largely Western/Westernized crowd, Shanghai Art Museum pulls in locals. I noticed many in Shanghai Art Museum to be interested in the clothing on display; it almost seemed as if some were seamstresses who wished to pick up some tips. Due to such differences, each museum in return must appeal to fairly opposite visitors. Luckily, MoCA is able to obtain funding through event hosting and their restaurant, while Shanghai Art Museum must look to other options. Unless the museum changes ownership or is able to gather additional funds, I feel its future is not one of growth, which is extremely unfortunate do to the institution's location and sheer size, both of which are currently being underutilized. Sadly, I feel much comes down to money. While funding seems to be preventing Shanghai Art Museum from becoming a highly respected center of art, the prospect of considerable profit has prompted MoCA to invest in more than just art exhibitions.

NYU studio in action at a Shikumen housing area

Tear
We will "infiltrate" the demolition site at Shi Men Lu and Wei Hai Lu in the early morning, April 27. Beginning in one area and spreading outwards, we will repeatedly paint (chāi) 拆 (tear down) on the remaining shells of the buildings, overlapping our strokes until the surrounding walls and rubble appear whitewashed, "erased". The repetition of brush strokes echoes the ongoing changing geography of urban China; walls are being torn down every day. 拆 questions the value of preservation of the past, modernization, the definition of ownership.

Museums & Shanghai

Helena Zhang / Museums & Shanghai

What I like about the Shanghai art world is that it is less pretentious than New York. In Shanghai the gallery atmosphere is so much more relaxed. We don't feel intimidated when we enter a gallery, and the physical conditions are also more modest, not squeaky clean and white. When I visited a gallery here called Andrew James Art, the owner, Andrew James, chatted casually with me, about the current showing artist, the upcoming ones, his gallery, etc. Would this happen in New York? Hell no.

But I wonder if this friendly atmosphere will change as the art world here develops more, and the art community expands. Is it only that Shanghai is smaller that it's friendlier? Will Shanghai in the future lose sight of showing art and become more and more commercial? Perhaps with more competition between artists and galleries it will, but I don't think it's impossible to balance the two.

In general I am not very fond of art institutions such as museums and galleries (though it is probably inevitable that they develop) because I believe art is so much better when it is surprising, when we don't expect it. The gallery setting is too expected (the image of a perfect framed painting comes to mind). I understand that gallery spaces provide a place for artists to show their work, but when it is in that space it means that someone else with artistic authority is declaring that what is being shown is art, so we are looking at something that is already filtered. This is a bit like a friend sharing with you something that he likes, except here the curator is not your friend but an authority. So there is a limiting quality to galleries. However, we can also view the curator as an artist; as the artist selects his images, the curator selects his artists. From this point of view then, curators are not so bad. It seems it all boils down to one question: is the artwork being shown good art? This is of course problematic because everyone has different standards on what is good.

Another reason I don't like galleries is because they shows shows in a set place and a set time. This means that only very few people are able to see the show. It’s as if the idea is anchored to one place, unable to move. So is there a better means of showing work? This is precisely the strength of the internet, as we can access websites from anywhere, at anytime. Of course you need to have access to the internet first. The only problem with this is that we lose the experiential quality of physically being confronted by the work; experiencing something through the internet is totally different from experiencing it in "real life", for example a painting or sculpture in a gallery. But seeing something on the internet is better than seeing nothing at all, right? Perhaps we should let the medium determine where the work should be shown: videos and digital stuff on the web; sculpture, painting, and more traditional modes in a gallery. But this raises yet another question: is painting and other traditional modes dead? Since they are unique objects and not mass-produced or available to be widely shown like videos, what value do they have other than being a nice object? What if we only saw the painting as a reproduction on the web? What sort of effect would that have?

In any case it seems to me that discussion is just as important (if not more so) as the art itself. If art just sits there what good is it? Everything is better when shared. Discussion brings the artist's inner conversation outward to the audience. The internet can be a great place for discussion, through forums, blogs, etc, even youtube. There is a lot on the web to filter through, but this comes with the advantage of accessibility. Still, the best conversations are probably the ones face to face, in real time. I was surprised so many people spoke and came to listen at Zendai's Cultural Forum, that there was so much enthusiasm. Even though a whole day of discussion is tiring, there were some stimulating speakers, especially the ones in the morning. It's good as well that the speakers were not only limited to ones from the art world but also came from philosophy, history, etc backgrounds. The forum (re)raised for me many ongoing questions I’ve had about art: why make art if it can only “poke small holes”? Why be abstract with art when you can be direct with words? Doesn’t it just increase the distance? (Usually you walk into a gallery and it’s so abstract you don’t absorb anything.) What is the function of art?? Can anything be done about the vast disparity between the intellectual/artistic elite and the masses? Is it just inevitable? What about the never-ending tension between the formal and conceptual? These questions are ones that frustrate me constantly.

More and more, I find that discussion is so much better than the artwork itself. (Do we even need the artwork to incite it?) This is especially makes sense if we consider art as a conceptual practice. But if art is conceptual, what’s the use of making anything? Why not just share your ideas? Only if art is at least some percentage formal/visual can it hold any value. But then where does the concept fit in to the puzzle? Is a concept absolutely necessary?

Isidro Blasco

"WHEN I LOOK AT IT"
NEW WORKS BY ISIDRO BLASCO
AT CONTRASTS GALLERY SHANGHAI
APRIL 26 – MAY 7, 2008

Press Preview: April 25, 2008, 4pm
Vernissage: April 25, 2008, 5-8pm
Contrasts Gallery, No. 181 Middle Jiangxi Road, G/F, Shanghai, China
200002

SHANGHAI – Isidro Blasco's photography-based sculptures and wall
works will be on view at Contrasts Gallery's principal gallery in
Shanghai at 181 Middle Jiangxi Road from April 25 – May 7, 2008. The
exhibition When I Look At It will feature nineteen of the artist's
constructions, using photographs that were taken in Shanghai,
including two large free-standing sculptures. An opening reception
will be held Friday, April 25, from 5-8pm.

Blasco's work combines architecture, photography, and installation to
recreate images of interior spaces and exteriors of buildings. His
photo-sculptures are three-dimensional visual articulations of a
particular place that provide broader insights into how we perceive
ourselves in a man-made environment. Blasco is not interested in the
formal practice of photography, but uses the photographic process to
form the value, shape and density of the final three-dimensional
sculpture. The photo sculptures represent Blasco's personal and
subjective perception of a particular environment. Blasco starts a
piece by taking photographs while standing in a fixed location so
that all of the images taken at a specific site are from one point of
view. He then makes miniature architectural maquettes, before
starting to work on the finished piece. Blasco laminates the
photographs and then mounts the multiple views of rooms or edifices
on complex wooden armatures. Beginning with a single angle in a room
or from the street, Blasco constructs a new spatial experience from a
series of altered perspectives, fragmenting the single viewpoint into
a myriad of possibilities. Blasco's work is very much influenced by
Analytical Cubism.

three openings this Saturday

Saturday openings:

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Zhao Qin

26 April - 17 May 2008

Eastlink Gallery

Floor 5, Building 6

50 Moganshan Lu

Opening: Saturday, April 26, 6pm

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There is also an opening at Ophoto that day at M50.

http://www.ofoto-gallery.com/

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And the most interesting one seems it will be:

Art Multiple

_ first presented art multiple exhibition in China

Art For Everybody

Time: April 26, 2008 – May 12, 2008

Opening: 19:30 April 26, 2008.

Place: Ke Center for the Contemporary Arts

Artists Participating:

Gao Mingyan, Gu Wenda, Hu Jieming, Liu Ding, Birdhead, Sun Ling, Yang Yong, Zhang Enli, Zhang Jianjun, Adad Hannah, Agathe de Bailliencourt, Ho Tzu Nyen, Josefina Posch, Sandrine Ilouquet, Susanne M.Winterling, Vibeke Jensen, Will Kwan, Zulkifle Mahmod, La Mas Bella, Ted Noten, Hannah Louise Lammb, Julia de Ville, Chang young chia, Vincent Leong, Miljohn Ruperto, Wu Gao Zhong, Jin Feng, Hipic

http://www.kecenter.org/mini/multiple/en/a.html

"Art Multiple 2008 exhibition" will be first presented in April, 2008 at Ke Center for Contemporary Arts. Exhibition will present 35 artists from 10 different countries and areas all around the world. Nearly 200 art works will be showed. Which includes artists' exhibited works, specially commissioned works for Art Multiple and multipes of contemporary art works collected by famous international art institutions.

Art Multiple concept refers to the art works with relatively bigger editions determined by artist . This concept of multiple gives possibility of reaching higher audience and appreciation as well as possibility of collecting work for relatively affordable price trying to have contemporary art get out of its small circle of privileged. Abroad art multiple concept developed early in 60's and till today there are many galleries and institutions specialized in presenting multiples

Ke Center for Contemporary Arts through exhibition in April introduces concept to China and establishes first Art Multiple Supermarket in Shanghai hoping to make art for everyone possible

In the period of boom of Chinese art market and price increase from sale to sale, where small group of artists sells work for million dollars, where still collecting is taken for most of the buyers as a short term investment, Multiple provides new possibility in art market and artistic expression, that art works can be affordable to larger group of people and that anyone can be collector

This new concept at the same time works as an educating tool for new collectors in China and new collecting strategies in general.

During exhibition period different lectures and workshop will be held related to Art Multiple concept.

Ke Center for the Contemporary Arts will invite specialists work in the field of contemporary art market research to give talks.

We hope to introduce contemporary art into a larger crowd and to cultivate new collectors and a new way of collection.

Multiple as a type of art making and art collecting is not new concept. Concept started developing with Duchamp's ready mades objects in early decades of twentieth century.

Duchamp developed the term readymade in 1915 to refer to found objects chosen by the artist as art. Produced object-such as his Fountain (1917), a urinal that he turned on its side, signed "R. Mutt," Duchamp asserted that there was no longer a fundamental difference between making art and naming art. By the early 1960s many of Duchamp's readymades had taken the form of authorized, limited edition, handcrafted replicas and were considered valuable works of art that seemed to contradict their original intention.

In the 1950s and 1960s the term multiple came to be applied to a new type of art object that, while intended to be produced in numerous copies, fell outside the parameters of such traditional forms as printmaking and cast sculpture. Often fabricated using the materials and techniques of mass production, these objects typically existed in very large, or even unlimited, editions. Unlike painting and sculpture, or even traditional fine art printmaking, the multiple engaged directly with the conditions of industrial production, mass communication, and an increasingly global economy.

For the artists of the international avant-garde known as Fluxus, the multiple presented a means to revive and reformulate the readymade's critique of aesthetic autonomy. Fluxus sought to dethrone "serious" culture by creating objects and performances demonstrating that, as Maciunas said, "Anything can be art and anyone can do it."

Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) also looked to the readymade as he sought to bring art and life into closer proximity. For Beuys, the readymade became part of a larger effort to reinvest artistic activity with metaphorical, ritual, and even spiritual significance.

Although they often differed in their choice of strategies, Beuys and Maciunas shared many of the same goals including using art as a means of realizing social and political change, recognizing the importance of collective action, and eliminating the boundary between art and life. The production of multiples played a key role these efforts, often acting as a mediator between the production of objects and a growing emphasis on artistic process and action unfolding in real time.

Beuys, for his part, referred to his multiples both as vehicles for the spreading of ideas and as anchors that encouraged people to make connections between objects and across media.

It is certainly true of both Beuys and Fluxus multiples that the significance of a group of objects is almost always greater than the sum of its parts. Efforts of both Beuys and Maciunas to transform the ways in which art is exhibited and distributed."

In 1990's, artists Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin took over a disused shop in London's East End and, with other artists friends including Damien Hirst, sold T-shirts, mugs and other customised items as works of art. This artist-led approach to selling art directly to the public not only re-popularised the artists multiple, but was a key moment in the subsequent Young British Artist era, culminating in the Saatchi collected "Sensation" exhibition.

Art multiple concept is to make contemporary art accessible to more people from collecting art point of view to spreading artists ideas

more between New York and China

PaceWildenstein to Open Pace Beijing in August

- PaceWildenstein will open Pace Beijing, a twenty-two-thousand-square-foot space in a former munitions factory, this summer, reports Carol Vogel in the New York Times. The site is in the heart of the city's gallery neighborhood, the Factory 798 District. The twenty-million-dollar project is scheduled to open on August 8, in time for the Summer Olympics. "Beijing is a crossroads" for Taiwan and Hong Kong, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein. "Shows there sell out to other parts of Asia." Pace Beijing will be in a neighborhood that is the equivalent of New York's Chelsea. "Factory 798 District is the third-biggest sightseeing attraction in Beijing," said Glimcher (after the Great Wall and the Forbidden City). "There are already about two hundred galleries there," he added. "It has ten times the attendance of Chelsea." The new Pace gallery is being designed by Richard Gluckman, a New York architect whose work includes the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the recent expansion of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego.

Glimcher has turned to local talent, hiring the critic and curator Leng Lin, forty-three, to be president of Pace Beijing. Leng founded the Beijing Commune, an alternative art space in the Factory 798 District, in 2004. Glimcher said the Beijing gallery would present four to six exhibitions a year, with a focus on Chinese art. The inaugural show, "Encounters," will be a group exhibition in which Zhang Huan and Zhang Xiaogang will be joined by longtime members of Pace's stable, like Chuck Close, Alex Katz and Lucas Samaras.

Exhibition Opening: New·Classic: Gao Feng and Yang Yongliang

Collision

Part I – New·Classic: Gao Feng and Yang Yongliang

03 May – 26 Jun 2008 / FQ Projects

Opening hours: Wed – Sun 10-6 Thursday late night till 9pm

FQ Projects is pleased to present a two-person-solo-show by two young Chinese artists who live in completely different parts of China. They both chose to combine their personal interests within the composition of Chinese traditional paintings in order to present their own 'New Classic' artistic expression.

Yang Yongliang is a young local artist who studied traditional Chinese art such as shui mo painting and calligraphy from his early age. His teacher was Yang Yang who is the professor of traditional art at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Yang Yongliang cleverly recreated "Cun", the main representation of Chinese Shanshui paintings by using a camera, the contemporary visual device, to express his creativity for the subjects he is concerned with. He combined the traditional Chinese paintings with the modern Shanghai city life and the details reveal current urban culture. The scenes of construction sites, large cranes, traffic signs and fly-overs those all Shanghai citizens are familiar with and all have become critical elements in his artworks. These common objects can be found everywhere in Shanghai, Yang Yongliang has arranged them to fit into the traditional Chinese Paintings' composition. When watching the photographic works at a distance, they are dreamlike Shanshui paintings. On the contrary when looking at them closely, they become shockingly modern city views. He perfectly handles the contradictions between ephemeral and solid, vigor and gentle, sparse and bold, beauty and ugly so as to make the entire picture poetically harmonious, but the details are 'blots on the landscape'. He successfully achieves a perfect balance between fragility and danger, beauty and cruelty. He brings the viewers not only visual enjoyment, but also the contemplation and self-examination of the various social and cultural concerns.

Gao Feng was born in Xinjiang and graduated from the prestigious China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He has drawn inspiration from observing the organisms that make the human form, and his work over the years has developed this inspiration and the reproduction of this in his art into microbial characters, bacterium, viral and microstructures of all kinds. The series of paintings "past existence" is an 'alternation' of the traditional Chinese paitings, reflect both the obsession with the Classic Chinese art, and the interaction between his art theme human organismas and the landscape around it. He creates a fantasy world of the past and the human organism form in order to encourage a new way of thinking to our past and ourselves. The characters only have burrows like acetabulas instead of any facial features. Compared to traditional Chinese paintings, Gao Feng uses plenty of high saturation acrylic to paint the mountains and stones in his series of paintings "past existence", and it enriches the picture dramatically and magically.

NYU group at Shanghai Art Museum

Painting show at Shanghai Gallery of Art

NYU Art & Media class at Zendai Museum

Nyu Art & New media class at MOCA cont.

Nyu Art & New media class at MOCA

congratulations to concept director alicia framis and her team!

A Cultural Forum around Hostage

A Cultural Forum around Hostage：Wang Jianwei Solo Exhibition

Hostage is the grey area among science, history, society and hypothesis and a kind of imaginary relationship between potential knowledge and certain reality. Individual can be regarded as the hostage of history and knowledge, hijacked by the present and the future. Wang Jianwei continues his themes of placing people or object out of contexts.


Forum：What is possible?
A Forum examining the current and future directions possible for China's culture.

Presented by: Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art
Venue of the Forum: Zendai MoMA Shanghai
Art Classroom, Second Floor, No. 28, Lane 199 Fangdian Road, Shanghai, China
Date of the Forum: 20 April，2008，10：00—18：00
Convener: Binghui Huangfu, Deputy Director of Zendai MoMA


This Forum will address a set of cultural and social issues by refocusing art theory and cultural theory upon a set of much broader philosophical questions concerning the role of art in culture. Its methodological innovation lies in its detailed focus on the processes of visual art as defined and developed within a network of (social and disciplinary) relationships and in its use of empirically grounded action-based research. The Forum enables us to examine the way in which art constructs relationships in a number of different registers (cultural, community and disciplinary).


Speakers: Dai Zhikang, Chairman and CEO, Zendai Group
Shen Qibin, Director of Shanghai Zendai MoMA
Marianne Brouwer, Curator from Holland
Andreas SchmidA Gift from Beijing to İstanbul


, Artist/Curator
Jérome Sans, Director of UCCA
Huang zhuan, Director of OCT
Shi Jian, Isreading Culture
Wang Hui, Researcher of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Geremie R. Barme, Australian Academy of Humanity
Wang Min'an, Philosopher/Critic
Jonathan, Scholar
Gary Carsley, curater

Open Studios

Saturday, 19th April, from 14:00 to 18:00.
Weihailu 696's open studio, 40 studios will be open for the public.
FYI.

Hostage：Wang Jianwei Solo Exhibition

Hostage：Wang Jianwei Solo Exhibition

Presented by: Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art
Dates: 19 April – 18 May 2008
Venue: Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art (No. 28, Lane 199
Fangdian Road, Shanghai, China)
Opening Reception: 19 April, 2008 (Saturday), 4pm
Artistic Director: Shen Qibin
Curator: Binghui Huangfu

Hostage is the grey area among science, history, society and
hypothesis and a kind of imaginary relationship between potential
knowledge and certain reality. Individual can be regarded as the
hostage of history and knowledge, hijacked by the present and the
future.

Wang Jianwei was the first Chinese mainland artist attending the 10th
Kassel Document, Germany. Afterwards, he attended the 50th Venice
Biennale, Italy, and the 25th St-Paul Biennale, Brazil. In February,
2008, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in the field of contemporary art
(The prize was awarded by Foundation for Contemporary Arts, US.),
which made him the first and only Chinese artist winning the prize.
On 19, April, his new solo exhibition Hostage will be held in
Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art.

Wang Jianwei continues his themes of placing people or object out of
contexts.

Forum：What is possible?
A Forum examining the current and future directions possible for
China's culture.

Presented by: Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art
Venue of the Forum: Zendai MoMA Shanghai
Art Classroom, Second Floor, No. 28, Lane 199 Fangdian Road,
Shanghai, China
Date of the Forum: 20 April，2008，10：00—18：00
Convener: Binghui Huangfu, Deputy Director of Zendai MoMA

This Forum will address a set of cultural and social issues by
refocusing art theory and cultural theory upon a set of much broader
philosophical questions concerning the role of art in culture. Its
methodological innovation lies in its detailed focus on the processes
of visual art as defined and developed within a network of (social
and disciplinary) relationships and in its use of empirically
grounded action-based research. The Forum enables us to examine the
way in which art constructs relationships in a number of different
registers (cultural, community and disciplinary).

Speakers: Dai Zhikang, Chairman and CEO, Zendai Group
Shen Qibin, Director of Shanghai Zendai MoMA
Marianne Brouwer, Curator from Holland
Andreas Schmid, Artist/Curator
Jérome Sans, Director of UCCA
Huang zhuan, Director of OCT
Shi Jian, Isreading Culture
Wang Hui, Researcher of Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences
Geremie R. Barme, Australian Academy of Humanity
Wang Min'an, Philosopher/Critic
Jonathan, Scholar
Gary Carsley, curater

SEWN + In/Out in Shanghai April 16

You are cordially invited to the opening of SEWN in Shanghai, a
contemporary art exhibition featuring artists from Chile, China and
artists residing in China. There will be live music and performance.
Featured within SEWN exhibition is a video festival called IN/OUT.
Please join us on April 16, 2008, 6pm at East Asia Contemporary,
located 110 Dianchi Road by the Bund, Shanghai 200002. Attached below
is the invite and a map.

We are excited to see you all there. It will be a great show as it
was when it opened in Beijing at Segment Space in October 2007.

Seasons website

Hangzhou's China Art Academy's 80th Anniversary exhibitions took place on April 7,8:
More here.

http://www.artseason.org/

Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China

Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China

By ANDREW SOLOMON;

Published: December 19, 1993

On Aug. 21, the "Country Life Plan" exhibition was scheduled to open at the National Gallery in Beijing. Though the paintings were indifferent, and had to the ordinary eye no hint of political significance, officials ruled that many failed to show the positive side of life in the People's Republic and were therefore unacceptable: the artists were permitted to hang only about 20 percent of their work. The prime mover behind "Country Life Plan," Song Shuangsong, was furious that the exhibition had been edited. He told friends that on Aug. 25 he would go to the gallery and cut off his long hair, a symbol of his individualistic way of life.

At noon that day, Song, a professional barber, friends and a reporter from Shanxi television all gathered in the exhibition room. As the haircut progressed, chance visitors to the gallery stopped to watch. Song faced first in one direction, then in another, holding a solemn expression for a while, then grinning and posing. After 20 minutes or so, the barber soaped Song's face, produced a straight razor and began to shave him. At that moment, the director of gallery security came in and saw the crowd and cameras. "Who is the authority behind this behavior?" he asked, his face tight with rage. "This is my exhibition," Song said, "and I take full responsibility."

You would have thought, to witness the scene that ensued, that the Government of Deng Xiaoping would be destroyed by this haircut; it was as though Song Shuangsong had been caught holding a bomb rather than a performance. Everyone was thrown out of the room. The doors were secured with heavy chains and padlocks. The exhibition was closed down permanently and immediately. Song was led out roughly between two guards.

One Westerner who strayed into the performance turned to me with a shrug and said: "I guess they really get you if you're fighting for democracy here. Doyou think these guys will ever succeed?" He had arrived at the popular Western conclusion that an artist who runs up against the state must be, directly or indirectly, working toward free elections, a constitution and the rest of what we mean when we say democracy.

There is an apparent logic to this conclusion, but it is grounded in a misreading of China and the Chinese. It misses the point that the haircut had in fact been entirely successful. The acts of defiance of the Chinese avant-garde function very legitimately within their system, but are not designed to be interpreted within ours. And the difficulty for the West -- politically, socially and culturally -- is to understand how these passionate advocates have made themselves an integral part of a delicately balanced group enterprise, instead of behaving with what the Chinese would deem coarse Western-style self-interest.

What looks radical often is radical, but not always in the ways you think. In Nanjing dialect, the sounds "i luv yoo" mean "Would you care for some spiced oil?" "What the West does, encountering our art," the artist Ni Haifeng said, "is to think we're saying we love you, when we're only having a private conversation about cooking." Soul of the Avant-Garde

Chinese society is always hierarchical; even the most informal group has a pyramid structure. The "leader" of the Chinese avant-garde is Li Xianting, called Lao Li (Old Li, a term of deference, respect and affection). "Sometimes it's easier to say 'Lao Li' than 'Chinese avant-garde,' " the painter Pan Dehai said. "Both mean the same thing." Li Xianting is now 46 years old, a relatively small man with an eccentric beard and a quality of intelligent gentleness and considered kindness that sometimes borders on radiance. He is a scholar, able to read many characters; he knows the history of Chinese art and is informed about Western art.

Lao Li lives in a small courtyard house, typical of old Beijing; it is the heart of Chinese avant-garde culture. Mornings are off-limits, since he sleeps until lunch, but in the afternoon or the evening you can always find artists gathered there, sometimes 2 or 3, often 20 or 30. Everyone drinks tea; at night, occasionally Chinese schnapps. The conversation can be grandiloquent and idealistic, but more often it is simple and even gossipy: which exhibitions have been good, whether someone is going to leave his wife, a string of new jokes.

Lao Li's house has just three small rooms and, like most courtyard houses, no indoor bathroom and no hot water. But it is a cozy, comfortable place, and once you have arrived and crowded onto the banquettes you can stay for hours. If the conversation goes very late, you can even stay over. Once this summer, a group of us talked until almost 5 A.M.; miraculously, there was room for all eight and we were so tired by then that we slept soundly. If there had been 20 of us, there would also have been room. Lao Li's house is like that.

It's hard to explain exactly what Lao Li does: though he is a fine writer and curator, his main role is to guide artists gently into their own powerful history. He gives them a language in which to experience and discuss their own work. Wherever I went in China, we spoke about Lao Li: his recent essays, whether it was right for one man to hold so much power, whether he thinks himself more important than the artists he discovers and documents, what kind of women he likes, whether he has changed since his travel to the West last year.

"The artists bring him their new paintings the way children bring homework to a teacher," said a member of the Beijing art circle. "He praises or criticizes it, and sends them to their next projects." Artists from every province in China send Lao Li photos of their work, asking for his help. He travels to see them, and wherever he goes he makes slides; his archives document every meaningful artistic effort in modern China. When he finds interesting artists, he invites them to Beijing. Through Lao Li, the art world is kept constantly invigorated with fresh blood.

For all his scholarly accomplishments, Lao Li does not sustain a critic's objective distance, and his detractors fault him for this. His response is always as much empathic as critical, and his pleasure in work comes largely from his sense of moral purpose. Lao Li devotes himself to encouraging those ways of thinking that empower his society. It is an agenda higher than, and different from, the interpretive mission of an art critic.

The artists in his circle define themselves as members of the avant-garde; one gave me a printed calling card with his name and, below, "Avant-Garde Artist." At first, I found the definition bewildering: many of these artists were not, by Western standards, particularly avant-garde. As I talked to Lao Li, I understood that what was radical in this work was its originality, that anyone who cleaved to a vision of his own and chose to articulate that vision was at the cutting edge of Chinese society. Lao Li is individuality's greatest champion. The quality of his singular humanism is to make way for freedom of spirit and expression in a society that, through its official strictures and its internal social mechanisms, does not allow for original thought.

"Idealism?" Lao Li said at one point. "I hope that a new art can appear in China and that I can help it. Pre-'89, we thought that with this new art we could change the society and make it free. Now, I think only that it can make the artists free. But for anyone to be free is no small matter." Some History

"Chinese art rests on three legs," Lao Li explained. "One is traditional brush and ink painting. One is realism, a concept imported from the West at the beginning of this century. One is the international language of contemporary Western art."

The period from 1919 to 1942 brought general disillusionment with traditional Chinese literati, or scholarly, painting; when Mao took power, a heroic style based on the Soviet model became the official language of revolutionary art. It was not until 1979 that the Stars group initiated the avant-garde movement. It was part of the Democracy Wall movement, which brought together social, cultural and political impetus for change. "Every artist is a star," Ma Desheng, one of the Stars group's founders, has said. "We called our group Stars to emphasize our individuality. This was directed at the drab uniformity of the Cultural Revolution."

Artists declaring their individuality, ordinary though they sound to a Western ear, were in the China of the late 70's completely new and remarkable. The members of the Stars group, who had never trained at official academies, could not show their work, so in 1979 they hung their paintings on the fence outside the National Gallery. When they encountered police resistance, they demonstrated for individual rights.

Between 1979 and 1989, as the Chinese Government was liberalizing, exhibitions of Western art appeared at the National Gallery and students would spend days there. In 1977, the art academies, which had been closed down during the Cultural Revolution, reopened, and young artists began to go through the unspeakably grueling application process, taking their exams over and over again for the few places in the Zhejiang Academy in Hangzhou and the Central Academy in Beijing. In China, even those who railed against society wanted the academic formal training that they felt entitled them to speak and to think. In 1985, five critics, including Lao Li, took out a loan and privately set up Fine Arts in China, a magazine that became a voice for new art movements until it was closed down in 1989. These other critics, who were at least as important as Lao Li, have since either emigrated or lapsed into relative silence.

Many artists at this time, as a sign of their disdain for social norms, gave up cutting their hair. Ignoring the prurient repressiveness of Chinese society, they spoke freely of women, did not conceal the details of their personal lives, told dirty jokes. They sat up at night discussing Western philosophers, artists, poets. Much previously unavailable work was suddenly published, and they read voraciously. Despite their general looseness, however, most had jobs and were painstaking in the execution of their duties. Art they made for themselves, showed with great difficulty and sold only occasionally to "international friends" (the phrase, beloved of artists, is Mao's euphemism for foreign sympathizers).

As artists took up arms against their society's values, they tended to use Western language. Some Western critics, looking at this art, have dismissed it as derivative. But that Western language was powerful in China simply because it had been forbidden; the use of it was calculated and meaningful. The artists of the Chinese avant-garde have no more copied Western styles than Roy Lichtenstein has copied comic books or than Michelangelo copied classical sculpture. They have used Western styles cannily and meaningfully to accomplish artistic ends of their own. The form looks similar; the language is imitative; the meaning is foreign.

The last gasp of the exuberant Chinese art movement came just months before the June 4 massacre in Tianamen Square. In February 1989, the "China/Avant-Garde" show opened at the National Gallery under the slogan "No U-Turn." Ten years earlier, the Stars had fought to hang their work outside the gallery, but now the critics of Fine Arts in China joined with others to put on a monumental exhibition of the most radical work of all the new artists of the Chinese avant-garde, a fiesta of individuality. Many artists thought this show would give their work the official imprimatur it needed to reach the population of China.

The show opened in an atmosphere of naive ecstasy, its symbol the Chinese road sign for "No U-Turn." At the opening, two artists fired gunshots into their installation. Officials, shocked by what they had let loose, closed the exhibition immediately, and the dreams of the avant-garde were left in ruins. Today, some artists have seen "confidential" memos in Government files that say no measures will be counted too extreme to prevent another event like the '89 show.

The closing of the exhibition paralyzed Chinese artists; they were discussing the next step when the June 4 massacre took place. Artists and idealists realized that their influence was being ignored. The critic Liao Wen, who is Lao Li's girlfriend, has written: "Today, surrounded by the ruins of bankrupt idealism, people have finally come to an unavoidable conclusion: extreme resistance proves only just how powerful one's opponent is and how easily one can be hurt. Humor and irony, on the other hand, may be a more effective corrosive agent. Idealism has given way to ironic playfulness since 1989. The way artists think and feel, as well as the way they live, have all undergone a transformation. Now when friends get together, they get business out of the way quickly, and then they are only interested in eating, drinking and having a good time. It is hardly and atmosphere conducive to the serious discussion of art, culture and the human condition. People these days find all that stuff irrelevant."

Some artists emigrated in the period before '89; many others, immediately afterwards. Most of the great figures of the old avant-garde have fled the country; only one member of the Stars group remains in Beijing. And yet the idea of "No U-Turn" goes on. Those who have remained, and those who have come of age since, do make art. Dozens go to Lao Li's house every evening without fail. Purposeful Purposelessness

Lao Li's taste in art extends more readily to painting than to performance, conceptual work or installation. Of the six categories of painting that he has defined, the most generally accepted are Cynical Realism and Political Pop.

Cynical Realism is very much a post-'89 style. Its primary exponents, Fang Lijun and Liu Wei, and its other practitioners, including Wang Jinsong and Zhao Bandi (who doesn't like to be called a Cynical Realist), all have high-level academic training and are accomplished in photo-perfect figurative painting. Fang Lijun paints men without hair caught in disconnected proximity: one is in the middle of an enormous yawn; one grins at nothing; black-and-white swimmers float in a blank sea. The characters are always idle, sitting or swimming or walking around with complete purposelessness. Using very sophisticated composition and exquisite technique, Fang depicts an absence of activity that seems hardly worth depicting. The result is often funny, lyrical and very sad, a poignant imaging of what he calls "the absurd, the mundane and the meaningless events of everyday life."

Liu Wei and Fang Lijun are always grouped together, artistically and socially. They went to the same academy and have been friends for years. Liu Wei is the son of a high-level general in the Red Army and he usually paints his family. In the eyes of most Chinese, highly placed army officials live well and are happy; Liu Wei portrays "the helplessness and awkwardness of my family and of all Chinese people" in his work. His pictures are hilarious, brilliant and quite grotesque.

"In 1989, I was a student," Liu Wei said. "I joined the democracy movement, like everyone, but didn't have an important part of it. After June 4, I despaired. Now I have accepted that I cannot change society: I can only portray our situation. Since I cannot exhibit in China, my work cannot be an inspiration here, but painting helps to relieve my own sense of helplessness and awkwardness."

Wang Jinsong conveys this message with almost plastic smoothness. Zhao Bandi's work is very subtle, slightly twisted, a series of meticulous and beautifully colored monumental images of people imprisoned and alone at the edge of tedious despair. The Cynical Realist movement is not entirely cynical; the idealism of these artists lies in their portraying a cynicism their society would deny. These works are like cries for help, but they are also playful and roguish, presenting humor and insight as empowering defenses. "I want my paintings to be like a thunderstorm," Fang Lijun said, "to make such a powerful impression when you see them and to leave you wondering afterwards about how and why."

Political Pop is the most popular with Westerners. Its leading figure, Wang Guangyi, loves money and his own fame, and his work has reached prices in excess of $20,000. He recently rented a $200 hotel room just "to feel what it was like to live like an art superstar." Wang wears dark glasses even when he is inside, has a long ponytail and is always mentioned by other artists as a exemplar of Western values in China. He is currently at work on a series called "The Great Criticism" in which he plays on the comical parallels between the publicity Mao once negotiated for his revolutionary policies and the advertising campaigns of prosperous Western interests. The names "Band-Aid" or "Marlboro" or "Benetton" are placed against idealized young soldiers and farmers wearing Mao caps.

"Post-'89," he said, "I worry that with people so vulnerable, commerce will harm their ideas and their ability to have ideas, much as AIDS can destroy people's love relationships or their ability to have love relationships. Of course, I enjoy my own money and fame. I criticize Coke, but drink it every day. These contradictions are not troublesome to Chinese people."

Yu Youhan, in Shanghai, paints Mao over and over, usually overlaid with patterns of flowers taken from the "peasant art" the Chairman loved. Mao mixes with common people or sits at ease on a folding chair; sometimes his face is clear, but sometimes there is a flower blocking one of his eyes or his nose. One of Yu's recent paintings is a very pop double portrait: on the left is Chairman Mao, applauding one of his own principles; on the right, Whitney Houston applauds her own music. Both are copied from existing photographs, and the similarity between the two is uncanny. Individualism by The Numbers

Traditional Chinese painters trained by copying their teachers; originality was reserved for old age, when you might make changes so slight that they were almost invisible. The history of traditional Chinese art is a very rich but very slow history. The avant-garde movement goes at breakneck pace.

The artists who engage fully with the question of individuality are perhaps the most interesting in China right now. Paradoxically, the New Analysts Group in Beijing, which currently includes Wang Luyan, Gu Dexin and Chen Shaoping, has decided, as an experiment, to suppress the individual in art. After the '89 avant-garde show, it adopted a resolution stating that members of the group cannot sign their work. Shortly thereafter, it established rules of operation. The artists in the group conceive these rules together, pass them by majority vote and agree to be bound by them.

"Facing the rules, we are all equal," Wang Luyan explained to me. "Individuals must put aside their character for the sake of the group. Since we regard the rules as more important than the artists, we express ourselves in a language of regulations. Symbols and numbers best convey our ideas."

So the New Analysts Group has made up complex formulas to express its interrelationship; its members use these to produce graphs and charts. One recent piece begins: "A1, A2 and A3 are individuals before reaching the set quantity, and also stand for the order of action after reaching the set quantity. A1, A2 and A3 set arbitrarily their respective graph for measuring, i.e. graphs A1, A2 and A3. A1, A2 and A3 share a set quantity, i.e. table A." This kind of deliberately arcane absolutism becomes a playful critique of the Chinese principle of conformity, delivered always in the most serious possible manner. The work, regulated though it may be, is some of the most original work I saw in China. "Originality is the byproduct of our cooperating according to rules on which we have agreed," Wang Luyan said.

Mention Song Shuangsong and his haircut performance and these artists shake their heads. "Imagine growing long hair," Gu Dexin laughs, "having hair and clothes such that people in the market or at the bus station could tell you were an artist!" Their individuality is infinitely more powerful because it is camouflaged. When a recent Western exhibition that included the work of Gu Dexin ended, the packers confused Gu's work with their own packing material and his piece was accidentally discarded. "I like for my work to be thrown away," he said. "There is so much art in the world to preserve and study and I don't want to clutter further the history of art." To this, both others nod: nonindividuality here is an almost unconscious impulse, opposite to what Chinese artists see as the appalling self-importance and egotism of Western artists.

Zhang Peili and Geng Jianyi, based in Hangzhou, also play with these questions. Hangzhou is a beautiful city, an ancient capital of China, set beside the famous West Lake. Artists have a more relaxed time there than in Beijing or Shanghai: they are less frequently interrupted by international friends or by local dramas. Most Hangzhou artists are graduates of the Zhejiang Academy, and like Ivy League students who remain in Cambridge or New Haven, they have an ambivalent but affectionate relationship to their old student haunts. In the mode of students, they preserve an emphatic connectedness to abstract principles, but they bring a mature sagacity to these abstractions. They think more than artists elsewhere, and perhaps produce less. When I was in Hangzhou, I lived in the academy, surrounded by students and student work. When I wanted some quiet time to talk to Zhang and Geng, we took a boat for the afternoon and paddled around the West Lake, eating moon cakes and drinking beer and looking at the view of mountains in the distance. In the evenings, we would eat fish and seafood and dumplings at outdoor tables set up in small market streets. Once or twice, we were joined at dinner by the artists' old teachers from the academy. There was, in Hangzhou, an atmosphere of sheer delight in art that was quite different from Beijing or Shanghai.

Zhang and Geng's identity was transformed after June 4. "Before the massacre, there was so much noise," Zhang said, "a deafening roar of protest. Then the tanks came and everyone immediately fell silent. For me, that silence was more terrifying than the tanks." Zhang and Geng made an enormous painting of a massacre victim, mutilated and bloody, and hung it by night on a pedestrian bridge. "Perhaps if you see someone being killed on the other side of the road," Zhang said, "you will run across to stop the murderers, without thinking. It was like that." Fearful after that, they went into hiding in the countryside, expecting all the time to be imprisoned.

Before the '89 exhibition, Geng Jianyi sent a questionnaire to a long list of avant-garde artists. It went in official-looking envelopes, with a return address to the National Gallery, and purported to be one of the many bureaucratic papers that are an inescapable part of daily life in China. The first questions were standard -- name, date of birth, etc. -- but then "What are your previous exhibitions?" might be followed by "What kind of food do you like?" or even "What kind of people do you like?" Some of the artists understood at once that this was an artist's project and gave creative answers and drew funny pictures, but others, eternally paranoid in the face of bureaucracy, took it seriously and answered every question. For the '89 exhibition, Geng posted these forms.

"It is not just that our society does not encourage or support individuality," Geng said. "We do not allow for it where it clearly exists." He is now a teacher at the Institute of Silk Technology, where he teaches painting and design. Last year, Geng suggested that instead of teaching technique the staff should teach the reasons behind that technique. He was allowed to outline his proposals to the staff of the school, who, having said they were interested in innovation, rejected them on grounds that they were incompatible with established teaching standards.

Geng has a great lightness of touch and a quality of gentleness. Zhang Peili is much harder, much tougher. And though his work is also often humorous, it has an edge of brutality. "There has always been anger in my work," he said. "I need to make the work, but it does not relieve my anger. It's not like going to the toilet."

Zhang has worked in video, performance and painting. Before the '89 show, he cut up white plastic medical gloves and sent pieces of them to various artists. Sometimes these were caked with red and brown paint. The artists who received pieces of apparently bloodied gloves were horrified and bewildered; more and more of these strange packages began to arrive in their households. Then one day, everyone who had been on Zhang's mailing list received a formal letter, explaining that the gloves had been sent completely at random, that they had spread like a hepatitis epidemic and that the whole matter was now over. No further gloves were sent.

During the Hygiene Campaign of 1991, when everyone in China was instructed on cleanliness, when an absurd and patronizing bureaucratic language was used to interfere with the most personal aspect of people's lives, Zhang Peili did his classic video of "The Correct Procedure for Washing a Chicken." The video is two and a half hours long. It is appalling and fascinating to watch the sufferings of the poor chicken as Zhang repeatedly covers it in soap and rinses it down and lays it out on a board. It is an enormous relief to see the chicken go free at the end of the sequence, but you cannot help suspecting that it will never again be the same chicken. Zhang's flat delivery masks a profound empathy; the ethical manner of these Government campaigns is revealed through such work in all its hypocrisy, shallowness and cruelty.

The installation artist Ni Haifeng lives (in principle) on a rather remote island off the coast of southern China, but he is among the most social figures of the avant-garde scene and is often in Beijing, Hangzhou or Shanghai. Ni is laid back and very humorous, with a broad-ranging if sometimes unfocused intelligence. He is in some ways the freest spirit of all, making art when and as the mood descends, going where he feels like going, a gypsy king in the avant-garde.

Ni receives a salary as a teacher at the Zhoushan Normal School, but has been relieved of teaching responsibilities because in the eyes of his peers he is too weird. In 1987, he began to paint on houses, streets, stones, trees and he covered his island with strange marks in chalk, oil paint and dye. He has said that he wished to reduce writing to the "zero level" where it is without meaning. "When culture invades private life on a large scale," he said, "the individual cannot escape being raped. From this viewpoint, my zero-level writing can be taken as a protest against the act of rape. I also want to warn people of the dangers inherent in cultural rape." An Artists' Village

In China, your housing is ordinarily provided by your work unit; if you strike out on your own, you give up many protective services and must find yourself a place to live, which is both expensive and difficult. Officially, you cannot move without Government permission. Many avant-garde artists therefore work at least part-time in official jobs; others manage to live just past the edge of legality.

One place they live is the village, commonly called Yuanmingyuan, about 45 minutes from central Beijing. Built by local farmers about five years ago, it has dirt roads and a traditional layout -- rows of one-story houses, each with a small courtyard and a tiled roof. There is one toilet shed and one telephone for everyone. Vines grow on some of the houses and screen doors are always slamming. Nearby there are farms and a park. In one direction are the vast grounds of Beijing University and in the other, the Summer Palace itself.

The village is a mecca for Western tourists and journalists. There have been articles in dozens of countries describing the village as the center of the Chinese art scene, because its blend of freedom and accessibility makes it look like a center to a Western sensibility. The Chinese are not an immediately open people: many of the artists of the avant-garde are secretive, elliptical to the point of obscurity and emotionally inaccessible. In contrast, the artists in the village are an easygoing lot and have a kind of casual professionalism in their presentation of their own work. You can wander along knocking on doors and any of various locals will volunteer to be your guide. It has now reached the point at which some artists say they have no time to work any more.

With one or two notable exceptions -- particularly Fang Lijun -- artists in the village are not particularly distinguished. Many imitate each other, unimaginatively combining Cynical Realism and Political Pop. In fact, when you look closely at the paintings produced there, you feel that most of these artists are only a half step away from jade carvers or other practitioners of local handicraft for foreign consumption. Certainly it is the steady influx of Western money and Western interest that allows the artists to live like this.

"We're part of the post-'89 phenomenon," the painter Yue Min-Jun said to me. "Before '89, there was hope, political hope, economic hope, all very exciting." Yang Shao-Bin, another painter, picked up the thread. "Now there's no hope," he said. "We've become artists to keep busy." Talking to them, you feel that this rhetoric, too, is fashionable and that it sells well. Cynicism is much the fashion in the village, but it is a flattened cynicism, more the stuff of student coolness than of despair. Missing Mao

One thinks of the Cultural Revolution as a terrible time for intellectuals: many were killed, others sent to hard labor in mines, in factories or on peasant farms. But you do not hear in China the tones of horrified disgust that Russians use when they speak of Stalin or the Romanians when someone mentions Ceausescu. In avant-garde artistic circles, there is a love for Chairman Mao that is ambivalent but incontrovertible.

"Even those of us who were opposed were believers, at least part way," Lao Li said late one night over tea. Branded a counterrevolutionary at the beginning of the revolution, he was imprisoned for most of it. "Mao was a very convincing man," he continued, "and we intellectuals felt we were sad figures. In the Cultural Revolution, the people thought only of building a pure and perfect society. I disagreed with their particular idealism and fought against it, and would fight against it again, but I can say without hesitation that there is nothing in our commercialist society today that is equal to it. A misguided idealism is better than no idealism at all."

I went to see the painter Yu Youhan in his mother's apartment in Shanghai, a few rooms at the top of the house that once belonged to his family. His father, a banker, was killed during the Cultural Revolution, and he went through re-education after being denounced in school. But when I probed for anger in him, in the face of these events, he shook his head. "When we reject Chairman Mao, we reject a piece of ourselves," he said. The Hong Kong dealer Johnson Chang, who represents almost all of these artists, said: "It's like an unhappy childhood. You cannot dwell on it all the time and impose it on others, but if you disown it completely, you will be an artificial or incomplete person."

Fang Lijun does not, in general, care to talk about politics, but late one evening we somehow got onto the subject of Mao. Fang's family were once landowners, and they had as bad a time as any during the Cultural Revolution. Fang once said he had become an artist because painting kept him busy at home; he could not go out because everyone felt entitled to attack him if the mood struck. "I will never forget the day that Mao died," he said. "I was at school when they announced it, and everyone broke down immediately and began to cry. And though all of my family hated Mao, I too began to cry, and in fact I cried loudest and longest of all." When I asked him why he had cried, he said, "It was in the program, and we lived by the program." And when I asked him whether he had felt sad, he smiled and said, "That too was in the program."

The Chinese impulse toward conformity runs very deep, and the Cultural Revolution, which Westerners would have found intolerable, had a luxurious quality for many Chinese people, who did not have to consider what to do, what to say, what to think or even what to feel. Surely, I said to Fang, you must look back on that period with horror. "With some horror, yes," he said. "But I am glad to have been through that. I think that younger people are jealous of me. Younger artists are trying to make themselves part of a history that never included them. Do you know, I went on June 4 to Tiananmen Square with a friend? We saw the tanks coming and heard the sound of shots, and he ran away immediately, but I went to the Square. Not to be heroic, but because I was drawn there, because I had to see what was happening. I've always thought that my friend must regret forever having run away. You cannot run away from the Cultural Revolution either. Maybe it's a very Chinese way of thinking, but I think you can have a happy present only if you have an unhappy past."

Ni Haifeng said: "Of course, many were killed. But many are killed in every era. These people were seized with a kind of fever and could not see that what they were doing was wrong. They gave up a great deal to join the revolution and kill those they thought had to be killed, and that was courageous. I admire that courage." Later, we spoke of Tiananmen Square. "We all demonstrated," he said. "And what happened was terrible. But if it hadn't happened -- then maybe there would have been civil war in China, with hundreds of thousands of people killed. Maybe the country would have fallen apart like Russia. You cannot say absolutely that what happened there was wrong."

The performance artist Liu Anping, branded as a leader of the Hangzhou democracy demonstrations, was imprisoned for a year. "No one at Tiananmen understood or was interested in the principle of free elections," he said. "To be free in how and where we live, what we do -- that's what we really want. We'd like an end to corruption and to be able to make whatever art we like. But China is too big and too difficult to manage for free elections and they would not work here. We are a xenophobic culture. We are nostalgic for the Cultural Revolution because it was so Chinese. We could never accept Western-style democracy -- simply because it is Western. We must arrive at a Chinese solution, and the Chinese solution is never as free as free elections. Nor would we want it to be."

Among the youngest of these artists at 26, Feng Mengbo has an unusually sharp understanding of the relation between Eastern and Western dynamics. Chinese kids today spend much time and money in video arcades, where they play Western games in which they take the part of good guys trying to kill off evil. Feng has suggested that this is not far from the behavior of young people in the Cultural Revolution, who similarly took a stance as the force of good and similarly blew up anyone they thought was bad and similarly got lots of points for killing lots of bad figures.

He has done paintings that are stills from a series of video games he would like to produce, based on Mao's Revolutionary Model Operas. These games brilliantly conflate Western commercial iconography with the symbols of the Cultural Revolution and turn the ethical battles of a tortured society into a series of games. In the eyes of many Chinese, the Cultural Revolution was like a game; interaction with the West is another version of the same game, perhaps a less interesting one.

Most of the artists in the Chinese avant-garde are below the age of 40, and so their relationships to the events of the late 60's and early 70's are passive. Yang Yi Pin, the only member of the Stars group still in China, was the son of a well-placed party member, and when the Cultural Revolution came, he got a position in the army, the safest place to be. Yang stayed in Beijing, doing propaganda paintings for the military and discussing ideology with friends until he recognized the disastrous side of the Cultural Revolution and joined the Democracy Wall movement.

The paintings he does now are enormous black-and-white images of young people, their faces suffused with idealism, walking out of the canvas toward the viewer. They are set in Tiananmen Square, and Mao's portrait, at the gate of the Forbidden City, is always at the center of the picture. They are achingly sad paintings, the color and mood of faded snapshots; they bear witness to a youthful clarity of purpose that seems, in retrospect, to be almost unimaginable.

I stood in Yang's studio and looked for a long time at those shining, almost implausible faces rising above the collars of their Mao suits; then, turning away, I saw a small black-and-white photograph -- a very young Yang Yi Pin, wonderfully handsome in his army uniform. I saw in those eyes too the unthinking self-assurance of young people ready to save the world. "I believed in it all so ardently," he said. "And then there was the Democracy Wall, and the Stars." We stood looking at his paintings. "That was my youth," he said. "I didn't understand what I was doing; now I'm sorry that I did it -- but how happy I was then. I couldn't give it up, nor would I."

Jiang Wen, 30, China's leading young actor, is directing for the first time. He has chosen to adapt "Fierce Animals," one of the best-selling novels in China last year. Echoing a sentiment that I heard many times, Jiang said: "People in the West forget that that era was a lot of fun. Life was very easy. No one worked; no one studied. If you were a member of the Red Guards, you arrived in villages and everyone came out to greet you and everyone sang revolutionary songs together. The Cultural Revolution was like a big rock-and-roll concert, with Mao as the biggest rocker and every other Chinese person his fan. I want to portray a passion which has been lost."

I had dinner at the apartment of Wu Wenguang, a film maker who recently completed a documentary called "My Life as a Red Guard." For the film, he found five men who had once been Red Guards, interviewed each of them at great length, then edited the footage to show the curious mix of nostalgia and shame and pride and anger that these men felt about their own history. He allowed their description to show how that history had shaped everything that followed in their lives.

It was a good dinner, with an interesting assortment of guests, including Zhou Bandi, the Cynical Realist painter; a director who had just finished doing the first productions of Sam Shepard in Beijing and would soon open his adaptation of "Catch-22"; Ni Haifeng, and various others. I asked Wu Wenguang what he had thought of these Red Guards, whether he had felt disdain for them or horror at the role they had played in the murderous history of their era.

"Look around this table," he said. "We're all at the cutting edge of new thought in China. We're the avant-garde, the ones who are pushing toward the next wave, believers in democracy, helping to build China into a better society." I nodded. "How can we feel disdain or horror?" he said. "If we'd been born 20 years earlier, we would have been Red Guards, every one of us." Old-Timers

In Shanghai, I visited Zhu Qizhan, who, at the age of 102, is widely regarded as China's greatest traditionalist pen-and-brush painter and one of the country's greatest scholars. "In my youth," he said, "I studied oil painting also and it touched and influenced my work, especially the strong colors. I would say of the West that Chinese artists can use it, but for Chinese purposes. A Chinese man can ignore Western art, but he cannot ignore Chinese art. And if he sets out to mix up both forms and both kinds of meaning, he will be neither fish nor fowl."

The Chinese painting tradition is a form based on the principle of escape. Literati painting raises the viewer's soul to new heights. Perhaps the greatest difference between Chinese traditional painting and avant-garde art is that traditional painting takes you awayfrom your problems; the avant-garde work forces you to look at them. Zhu Qizhan's eloquent and remarkable pictures command the respect of younger artists, but they demonstrate how much a departure, both in form and in meaning, the work of the younger avant-garde represents.

The vogue for realism began in China in 1919, and it thrives today. The work of the greatest realist, Chen Yifei, is by Western standards too hackneyed for greeting cards. Chen has emigrated to the United States, but the meticulous craftsmanship of his paintings of young girls in turtleneck sweaters playing the flute still exerts its powerful fascination, primarily on Asians -- in Hong Kong, his work can fetch $250,000.

I went to see Yang Feiyun, a portraitist of Chen's school. His women, without flutes, have the photographic sharpness and plastic smoothness to which Chinese academic training aspires. "I was influenced most by Botticelli, Durer and Leonardo," Yang said. "Perhaps in the West it is too late to have a fresh response to this work, but for me it was easy and natural. Until recently, this work was unknown here. My work is contradictory to Western taste. I cannot accept the Western way of rejecting the past, or even of rejecting your own past, of starting anew all the time. The pursuit of perfection is more important than choosing many ways. People have said that art has no limit, but this is true only when art stays in its own hemisphere. When West and East meet, art does have limits." Why Gilbert And George?

In recent years, there has been increasing openness in China to exhibitions from the West, which are accepted so long as the West pays for them. For about $25,000, you can take the upstairs rooms in the National Gallery for a month and, subject to certain approvals, you can hang whatever you like. Since Robert Rauschenberg broke the ice in 1985, there have been a few one-man shows sent by obscure artists with sponsorship from their own governments, a few international student projects, a big Rodin exhibition which opened in June.

Gilbert and George, British avant-garde artists, have made a point of exhibiting their enormous, brightly colored, highly politicized photo montages internationally. Their Moscow show in 1990 is still discussed in Moscow artistic circles. That exhibition was organized by a very savvy and enterprising Englishman named James Birch; when it ended, he said to G & G, "Where next?" And they said, "China!"

So Birch began organizing. Of course by the time of the Moscow show, Russia was in the throes of glasnost and perestroika and the decision to show art that, even in the West, has provoked hostile comment for its cultural, political and sexual radicalism -- some of it highly homoerotic -- fit with a general agenda of "nothing's too extreme for us." In China, many things are too extreme, and the decision of the Chinese Government to host an exhibition of Gilbert and George seems at first glance to be startling.

Though the Chinese officials were won over in part by Birch's charm and enthusiasm, other factors carried the day. First was Chinese greed. Not only did G & G and their London dealer, Anthony d'Offay, rent the gallery, but they also promised to bring Westerners for the opening, stage banquets and television presentations and pump money into the local economy.

Second was Government blindness. "You don't imagine," said Lao Li in an amused voice, "that these officials understand what this work is about? It's famous from the West, and that's as much as they know." Third was the need to appear open before the Olympic Games site was chosen, not out of an interest in Western approbation per se but because the Olympics would result in great wealth. Fourth was a "what the West says doesn't affect us" mentality that discounts the influence of anything foreign. And fifth was that the Chinese knew that by running the opening they could control the media image of Gilbert and George.

The exhibition was opened on Sept. 3 by the British Ambassador and the Chinese Minister of Culture with a high level of pomp. About 150 people had come from the West; a myriad of high Chinese officials flocked to the event. The British got in touch with Lao Li, who was given invitations to distribute to artists, but the Chinese avant-garde deplored the tolerant enthusiasm that officials exhibited toward Gilbert and George. At the opening banquet, someone looked at them at the head table and described them as "a pair of blockheads among the rotten eggs." In the eyes of the Chinese, the circumstances of the opening almost defeated the meaning of the work; it had the same ring of hypocrisy that might be noted if Mother Teresa came on a good-will mission and spent her whole visit with Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley.

Nonetheless, what G & G did in choosing to exhibit in China was groundbreaking. Unlike most Western artists who exhibit in the third world, they insisted on showing new work. They also made a point both of hanging the exhibition and of speaking at the opening and at the many banquets associated with it and of giving interviews everywhere. They insisted that cultural activity can speak not only within its own culture, but also beyond it.

Most Chinese artists have seen Western contemporary work primarily in books. In the painter Ding Yi's studio, I leafed through a volume called "Western Modern Art" that included a reproduction of one of G & G's monumental color photomontages, reproduced as a scratchy black-and-white plate two inches square. You could not find in that reproduction any of the power or drama of the work. During their tour, Gilbert and George said repeatedly: "Our art fights for love and tolerance and the universal elaboration of the individual. Each of our pictures is a visual love letter from ourselves to the viewer." What higher message could there be, really, for Western art now in China? "I think," Lao Li said, "that what is important in this work will get through to the people who are interested in understanding it." The opening was only like bad static. East Meets West

"The West tends to equate civilization and modernization and Westernization," Zhang Peili said. "But it is only in this modern period that the West has arrived at new ways before China has. In past eras, we were the more advanced civilization." Westerners who visit China casually often dismiss Chinese work as derivative. "We must as artists solve the problems of China, even if they're boring for the West," said Wang Yin, a painter. Lao Li added, "Contemporary Chinese art is no more Western than Picasso's work is African or the Impressionists' pictures Japanese."

The extent of Western freedom -- that natural corollary of democracy -- is a subject of constant discussion among the Chinese. Gu Wenda, who now lives in New York and is a leader of Chinese art abroad, told me: "In China, I made exhibitions that the authorities would not tolerate. I used made-up characters, and they told me my work had inappropriate political meaning, something about a code for political secrets. In New York, I did exhibitions with Chinese medicines and used a powder made of human placenta. And the authorities told me my work had offensive religious meaning, talked about abortion, and sometimes they didn't let me show."

The Chinese are amused by Westerners' inability to understand their cultural standards. One evening in Hangzhou with Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi and other friends, we got onto the subject of two women from their school who were "like unsellable goods from an old department store." Both had found happiness with Western boyfriends. Zhang and Geng described having dinner with the family of one of the boyfriends, whose mother kept whispering that she'd never met a girl "so beautiful." "Our next big export," they said, "will be the ugliest women in China. They can all marry attractive rich Americans." Then they put me through a sort of quiz. "Look there," they'd say. "One of those women is pretty and the other plain. Can you tell which is which?"

Despite the insatiable appetite of Chinese consumers for Western products, the West, in the eyes of the Chinese, doesn't really count. I had dinner one night with the wife of an artist. She said, "You know, my husband would be furious if I went out for supper with a Chinese man." "But dinner with me doesn't matter?" I asked. "No," she said. "Of course not."

I was similarly struck by the availability of The International Herald Tribune, by the fact that many people get the BBC World Service, by the tolerance for the Gilbert and George show. At first, I supposed that this represented a real loosening of ideological barriers; it was only later that I understood that it was possible because the West doesn't count, that for ideas to appear as an import from the West cannot really affect anyone, whereas for something much slighter to appear in a Chinese forum -- a haircut, for instance -- could trigger a revolution.

China officially ended its isolationist policies in 1978, but the isolationist mentality lives on. "We were so cut off for so long," Zhang Peili said, "it's as though you are in a dark room and suddenly the curtains are opened. You cannot see the view, because your eyes are still adjusting to the light."

The Shanghai artist and critic Xu Hong said: "People speak all the time of mixing Western and Eastern influences, as though it were like mixing red and blue ink to paint pictures in purple. They do not think of what it means to understand these two cultures and to try to incorporate their different ways of thought." Every artist I met explained why his work was really not as Western as it looked. "And how can it be Western?" asked Zhang Wei, a university teacher who lives in the village at Yuanmingyuan. "Of course, we have come of age in the era of the so-called open-door policy, but we all understand that it is at best a door-ajar policy. And we know that that door will never really stand open, that people will never be allowed to pass back and forth through it as they choose."

Lu Shengzhong studied folk art at the Central Academy in Beijing and his specialty is paper cutting. Traditionally, a rural woman should be able to cook, sew and cut paper; Lu Shengzhong tells of old women who, having lost all other facilities, can do nothing but cut paper and who express themselves with their elaborate narrative paper cuts. He is a master paper cutter, author of several books on the subject. In his recent work, he has limited himself to the single form of the "universal man" and he cuts it over and over in different sizes, always from red paper, to create mystical enormous installations in which you feel connected through some primal force to all the variety of humankind. Lao Li dismisses such work. Many Chinese resent the West's enthusiasm for material that looks so Chinese but is so connected to Western thoughts. It is as though Lu Shengzhong has prostituted himself and the culture, has given something to the West that they should not have, has sold something off too cheap and without enough grounds.

A voice of nationalism is part of the persistent, strong Chinese rejection of the West. The Chinese, competitive always, will take from the West whatever they can put to their own use. "Western culture reigns," Lao Li said. "In a past era, Chinese culture was the highest. Right now, the West is in a state of decline and China in a state of ascendancy. Soon, we will cross paths. We all accept that Western modern language is the international language of art; that is because the West has the most economic and political power right now. But that will all change." Gu Wenda said simply, "If China had been the strongest after World War II, artists of the West would use my language and not I theirs." A Dangerous Idea

In the artists' village at Yuanmingyuan, everyone calls Yan Zhengxue the Mayor. At 49, he is older than the others and has been in the village longer. Yan does not look particularly like an artist; he has short hair and ordinary clothes. His big ink paintings are decorative and traditional; his manner, unassuming.

On July 2, Yan took bus line 332 from central Beijing to Yuanmingyuan. He tried to get off just as the conductor closed the door and a minor argument ensued. The conductor was aggressive and Yan was annoyed. At the next stop, the conductor deliberately closed the door just as Yan tried to exit and so Yan was carried to the last stop, where the conductor accused him of having taken items from his money bag and summoned the police. The area is under the same police jurisdiction as the village, so the three policemen who came all recognized Yan Zhengxue as the Mayor. He recognized them as the policemen who had closed down an exhibition that artists in the village had tried to mount. Yan said he had never touched the conductor's bag, but the police pulled him out of the bus, beat him and threw him on the ground. Some local residents stood watching, too afraid to interfere.

Then the police dragged him to the station and beat him with electric night sticks. "I did not fight back," Yan said, "but only kept asking, 'Why are you beating me?' But they didn't stop." We were talking in Yan's small courtyard house in the village and he produced photographs of himself, beaten, burned, covered in blood and oozing blisters. "They hit my groin repeatedly," he said, holding out a particularly grotesque photo. "The electric sticks burn badly. They told me to kneel down, but I refused and then they beat me even harder. They said: 'If you vomit, you will clean the floor with your tongue. We know who you are. Artist, who made you Mayor of the village?' " Then they asked him to sign a confession that he had stolen from the bus conductor, and when he refused, they beat him unconscious and dumped him, at midnight, outside the station. At 4 A.M., one of the local residents wrapped him in a blanket and took him to a hospital, where he was treated for severe beating, bodily injuries and loss of hearing.

A few days later, one of the village artists recounted this story to Wang Jiaqi, a lawyer who ordinarily works in a Beijing real-estate firm. "I came to Mr. Yan and told him this fierce event violated the law. Our central Government does not like such petty police violence. I suggested that we bring a lawsuit."

Yan asked artists to sign a petition protesting his treatment. Fang Lijun was among the first of the Yuanmingyuan artists to sign; Lao Li kept a page of the petition at his home, asking those who visited to sign as well. Some Chinese journalists agreed to write about Yan's lawsuit. As publicity spread, Yan got hundreds of letters from victims of similar violence. "Some asked how to bring a suit; others warned me that I would meet with a 'sudden accident' if I didn't take care."

Wang submitted papers to the courts. "They agreed to hear our case. We won't get any money, I don't think, and the police won't be punished, but if we can get them to admit that they committed a crime, that will be something. I avoid speaking publicly of human rights and democracy. It's too dangerous. I work on individual cases in legal terms. The Chinese people have no idea of using law to protect themselves; they imagine that laws exists only to constrain them. We want to stand against that."

As we talked, I flipped through the snapshots in front of me, showing Yan Zhengxue's injuries in horrible detail. "It's funny," I said, "that I am in China to write about art and about artists and that I have found myself listening to a story about civil rights and personal freedom. It almost belongs to another project."

"This is a story about art and about artists," Yan said. "The police hate me because I am an artist, disobedient, free in what I do. They resent their lack of control over this village, these unregistered people living here without work units, without schedules, with Westerners wandering through. I was a natural target. We want to live quietly," he went on, his voice lower, "away from politics and commerce. We don't want art to die in the hands of the Chinese people. In this country, you can seek money, have women, drink -- and as long as you are registered in a unit it's O.K. But to be an artist" -- he gestured at his big ink scrolls -- "this is a problem."

"Because he is a strong individual, Mr. Yan was beaten badly," said Wang, "and as an individual he is not simply accepting this."

I thought of the response to Song Shuangsong's haircut, which I had in fact seen that afternoon, and understood that the radicalism of Chinese artists does not lie in the explicit content of their works. There is less danger in the specifics of Lio Wei's images of helpless, awkward officials, in Fang Lijun's disconnected lost youths, in Wang Guangyi's portrayals of Western consumerism, in Feng Mengbo's video games or Zhang Peili's videos than there is in the simple fact of all these people holding visions of their own and undertaking to express them.

"Whether we win or lose," Wang Jiaqi said, "I hope we will give to people this idea, that they can protest, that they can find a way to stand up for what they believe, so that they can live as human beings." I thought again of Song Shuangsong's haircut and I understood then why it had generated so much anger and I saw in what terms it had been a success. I saw that even this self-important event was, in its way, far more dangerous than a simple car bomb. So long as art can assert its own danger, it succeeds. For this whole concept of individuality, this humanism of which Lai Li is the epitome, is something almost unknown in the People's Republic. And if the idea of it were to penetrate to the vast population of that country, it would lead them to self-determination. That would be the end of central Government, of control, of Communism -- it would be the end of China. With luck, this struggle between humanists and absolutists will never stop: for either side to win absolutely would, in fact, be tragic. Injustice is terrible, but the end of China is also something that no one wants, neither Deng Xiaoping nor Lao Li and his circle.

Andrew Solomon is a frequent contributor to this magazine.