The Hooligan and the Entrepreneur: Li Xianting Contra Lü Peng on Cynical Realism
Fang Lijun. Series 2, No. 5. 1992. Oil on Canvas. Location unknown.
Curtsey of the artist.
Discourse on and in China during the early 1990s hinged upon two questions: the issue of authoritarianism after the crackdown on June 4th, 1989, and in its wake, the interdependent issue of the continuation of Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Reform and Opening’ policy. Yet this macroscopic vision of China buries the parallel theorization of the direction and conditions of art’s function in the rapidly changing society.1 Li Xianting, the ‘grand-father’ of Chinese contemporary art was the first to theorize, name and exhibit the new Cynical Realist movement throughout 1989-1993.2 Endemic to Beijing, this ironically detached style provoked international commercial success, spurred by critics such as Lü Peng, a Sichuanese academic who promoted the style by organizing the 1992 Guangzhou Biennale and cemented its significance through his later art historical research. Both men, having witnessed the movement from its infancy in poverty-stricken artist villages, and ensconced in the aforementioned predominant discourses on China, account for the development of the movement in markedly different manners, predicated on contrasting theoretical outlooks.3 Resultingly, this essay argues for the supremacy of theorization of the dialectical reversal argued by Li to critique Lü’s entrenchment in the encyclopaedic historiographic tradition when analysing Cynical Realism. This is evinced in so far as they reach agreement over the stylistic features of Cynical Realism as it broke with previous movements. Nevertheless, Lü fails to conceptualize the nexus between the return of realism as a style, and the ‘loss of innocence’ informed by the Tiananmen Square incident.4 His analysis is sublimated under Li’s paradigm, furnishing stylistic progression with an historical motor. Their division is most glaring when addressing the economic realities as it pertains to Cynical Realism, as Lü not only catches himself in a logical contradiction but given his narrow market economism elides the adjacent social subjectivity of ‘numbness’; an analysis revisable from Li’s vantagepoint. In addressing both authors’ concerns in addition to the contemporary discourses surrounding China, this essay is divided into two sections; political and stylistic concerns before moving to socio-economic realities surrounding the movement’s ascendancy while mobilizing the work of the Cynical Realist Fang Lijun as a test case to add dimension to the argument.
“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”5 – Chairman Mao
Li Xianting welcoming students into his house
Photo by William Bromage, 2024.
The smoking gun of the Cynical Realist movement came from two bullets fired in 1989. The first blast was discharged by Xaio Lu in February during the China/Avant-Garde exhibition at the Beijing National Museum, targeting her own work only two hours after opening prompting officials to shut down the show.6 Xiao’s gunshot was followed four months later from the barrels of the PLA, inaugurating the June 4th crackdown on dissent, with students and artists their cannon-fodder with Xiao’s shot coming to be known as the “first gunshots of Tiananmen.”7 By December the contemporary 85’ New Wave work exhibited in the show was derogated by the Chinese Central Committee as “dead, negative and anti-socialist"8 while the succeeding years were marred by a stalling of Deng’s reform and a deafening cultural silence wrought by the crushing of political dissent.9 Perversely, the committee's signature on the New Wave’s death certificate is warranted, as both Li and Lü argue that these short months signalled its historical moment’s closure and the inauguration of the Cynical Realist movement, distinguished from its predecessor’s idealistic elation for the rejuvenation of Chinese artistic and political culture.10 The New Wave was engulfed in the deluge of western literature during the early stages of opening during the late 1970s and militated liberal humanist theory and praxis against authoritarian restriction.11 Yet postdating the June 4th incident, having witnessed both state brutalization and the disappointment of the New Wave’s programme of revival, the Cynical Realist movement was intuitively sceptical of both state sponsored Maoist lies and the fantasy of historical meta-narratives.12
While recognizing stylistic progression between the movements was not a straight swap, both authors argue Cynical Realism, to some extent, is the negative definition of the New Wave.13 According to their deference to western philosophical ideologies, the New Wave mobilized artistic forms such as Surrealism and Dada in defiance of Maoist Socialist Realism.14 The negative relationship of which the authors speak concretizes in the Cynical Realist dejected retreat from ‘illusory’ metaphysical meta-narratives, informed by their incredulous attitudes, or, as Fang Lijun remarked “all doctrines will be... negated and thrown into a pile of garbage.”15 Moreover, this retreat entailed a return to their academic roots of realism while shifting their subject matter towards the pedestrian with a coextensive adjustment in viewer engagement; from embattled heroics towards passive spectatorship, witnessing the absurdity of the everyday.16 This is realized in Fang’s work Series 2, No. 5 (1992) (fig. 1), depicting four slightly distorted bald men against a cloudy blue sky, all dressed in white collared shirts listlessly regarding the viewer. Abstracted of individuality and contextual markers, Fang traces a strategy of self-effacement as the men stare blankly, without inciting the viewer to engage them. Both parties simply observe.
While agreeing on this historical and stylistic outline of Cynical Realism, the formal techniques’ historical significance arouses contention between the two men. Lü’s historical practice derives from the encyclopaedic historiographies of western art à la Ernst Gombrich, resulting in a tendency towards strictly linear conceptions of formal development, preventing him from theorizing an impetus for the return to realism other than as pure reaction.17 Indeed, Lü proposes the return to realism and noumenal is a backlash against the previous euphoria, decimated by repression.18 Alas, Lü displaces stylistic progression largely onto social relations.
This is precisely where Li’s argument subsumes Lü’s as the former recognizes an internal logical of self-negation entailed within Chinese art.19 It is, therefore, not alien to Li that Cynical Realism instigated a stylistic reaction, since as previously argued, both define Cynical Realism as the negative of its predecessor. Nevertheless, Lü’s narrow reaction curtails his ability to recognize the salience of realism specifically, which constitutes a further negation of Maoist Socialist Realism. From the Yan’an forum in 1942 until the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1978, the hegemony of Socialist Realism compelled artists to communicate the Maoist message and ‘spirit’ under the slogan ‘red-bright-brilliant', accessibly to the masses.20 This too was impressed on the Cynical Realists during their academic training, at the expense of alternative stylistic expression. The smothering of non-conformity led to its self-negation in the artistic rejoinder of an iconoclastic realism, sanitized of both Maoist Ideology and New Wave idealism. Enfranchised through their mimetic training, realism furnished Cynical Realism with two possibilities; a refocusing onto the banal, and interrelatedly, this distanced representation from the metaphysical abstractions to which it had been previously beholden.21 This corruption of the Maoist, in conjunction with the New Wave paradigm through deprecation of ideology and philosophy respectively, is demonstrable in Fang’s Series 2, no. 5, since over the course of the Cultural Revolution, in so far as all depictions were to be a “revolutionary weapon for the broad masses,”22 portraiture was decried as decadence. The irony being that this created an overproduction of the portraits of a single man- Chairman Mao.23 While Fang denies his image is a self-portrait, associates noted the relationship between the bald motif and Fang’s own shaved head.24 Regardless of the figures' identities, Fang bastardises the sub-genre of portraiture within Socialist Realism, reserved for Mao through representing common men. This thereby nullifies its revolutionary value since the abstract valorisation of Mao or the ‘masses’ as a historical subject depreciates into capturing the ‘spirit’ of the concrete, and critically, passive individual. Crucially Fang, therefore, overturns the relationship between ideological conceits and representation.
Ingestion of official style for its own negation, however, is not historically specific to the Cynical Realist movement. Throughout the history of Imperial China, the scholarly literati class, tasked with maintaining social order, were bound by Confucian piety’s norms and regulations under which they were prohibited from expressing discontent with the powers that be, under threat of execution or exile.25 Under these conditions, especially during the Ming and Qing dynasties, just as the Cynical Realists usurped official style, the literati withdrew from court and turned to ink and brush or poetry, coding their disaffection under traditional artistic forms.26 This analysis, taken from Li, may however be extended to encompass modes of display, as following the June 4th crackdown on art by the Central Committee, there was a return to decentralized apartment art, localized around the burgeoning Beijing artist villages.27 While further discussion of the art villages will follow, the return to apartment art was primarily a mechanism to avoid censorship, yet critically, like the literati’s withdrawal from court life, they placed themselves at a remove from state interference and thereby created the physical and metaphorical space for the reclamation of artistic forms.28 In this manner, the pronouncement from the Central Committee that art was “dead” only created the conditions for its reappropriation and emasculation by the Cynical Realists and confirms Li’s comment that to understand Chinese art, one must understand the history of suppression.29 Fundamentally, this means Chinese art history progresses in the return of style for its own negation.
“Get Rich First” – Deng Xiaoping
Lü Peng teaching UWA students.
Photo by Darren Jorgensen, 2024.
By the early 1990’s Deng’s reforms, aimed at fulfilling former Premier Zhou Enlai’s ‘four modernizations’, had been churning for over a decade and coalesced at the 14th party congress in 1992, where the CCP declared its dedication to building a ‘socialist market economy.’30 Lü’s argument, however, does not rely simply on stylistic progression but, as previously mentioned, displaces development into socio-economic factors. Endorsing the market, his argument rests on two interconnected theses; (a) art and the market are socially located and intersubjective and, (b) given that all other intersubjective indices of value ascribed to art such as religion and ideology no longer have purchase, Lü concludes that (c) the market should be adopted as the sole determinant of artistic taste.31 Sympathetically, the impulse behind his argument is the theory that the market could elide the state’s punitive authority from artistic expression.32 Superficially this argument is not objectionable; economic reforms released artists from their mandated work units upon whom they were dependant for access to studio spaces and artistic equipment.33 Moreover, from the late 1980s, other east Asian dealers as well as domestic state enterprises thronged to capitalize on the fledgling market, so much so that a Shenzhen newspaper wrote “investment in art will become a new trend following the craze for real-estate and stocks.”34 Lü himself was an active participant in this burgeoning market, organizing the first art Biennale in Guangzhou in October 1992 after a relaxation of political tensions, of which a portion was dedicated to Cynical Realism.35 The city of Guangzhou itself is significant given that it was one of the regions designated a ‘special economic zone’ (SEZ) in 1983, and only nine months prior Deng made Guangzhou a priority on his southern inspection tour, to revitalize the reforms after stagnation following June 4th.
Hence, Lü is not off-base in drawing attention to marketization, yet the Guangzhou Biennale was not without its detractors; infamously Li wept at art’s commercialization and a contingent of artists stormed the main exhibition hall, spraying it with disinfectant, later holding mock wake for artists who fell to the market’s siren song.36 While professing he was inebriated, Li credits this moment for his departure from the art world, believing art had been double-crossed by the market.37 Despite stating he never addresses the market directly; Li’s dialectical method nevertheless holds water contra Lü in two regards.38 Primarily, while artistic expression sought refuge in economic liberty, it was simultaneously reconfined under the logic of commercial success and self-exploitation according to market whims. Artists such as Fang Lijun, who rose to international stardom, were allowed into the ranks of the newly wealthy Chinese, at the expense of their objectification in ideological exoticism.39 For example, The Age referred to his work as “subversive”40 and the New York Times argued his works were “like cries for help”41, denying the self-professed meaninglessness of his canvases. There is, nevertheless, a kernel of truth hidden within the critic’s prattle, which constitutes the second rebuttal which argues that politics does not capitulate to commercial success. Indeed, the Chinese market is largely indistinct from the state and the marketization process was a political gambit rather than economic necessity.42 This is most explicit in China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in late 2001, which had been hampered since the early 1990s by economic structural hurdles, but critically, political paranoia.43 Jiang Zemin argued that the WTO was an imperialist organ to divide and conquer socialist nations, but critically, he argued that China’s accession was politically essential for its own “strategic intentions.”44 Hence there is no externality to state intervention into the market, but more than that, attempts to escape into the market fold back onto the state itself.
Nevertheless, the clincher against Lü’s writing on the Cynical Realist movement’s relationship to the market contains a logical contradiction. Consonant with his previously developed argument regarding the movement’s transcendental nullity, Lü argues that “the development of art according to a metaphysical framework is rapidly coming to an end.”45 Yet he makes the further claim that “art heading towards the market also means heading towards order,”46 and without the market, artistic evolution would be forestalled and “the value of an artwork has no choice but to remain contained.”47 Lü hereby constructs a teleological schematic of art since, no matter if the term ‘value’ is understood in either an economic or aesthetic/ethical sense, the equation of either of these metrics with an intrinsic element of art reinscribes a metaphysical component of art. This argument not only undermines his own writing and betrays the Cynical Realists who themselves insist on the immanence of their pursuits. On both accounts, a contradiction with no escape.
This counter argument may be dovetailed with the preceding critique, which argues that there is no externality from political overreach within the market. Through recourse to Li’s dialectical reversal method, Lü paradoxically affirms the state’s own mandates for political reform that he consciously attempts to avoid.48 Given that the economic is inextricable from the political, and Lü accords value to art only in so far as it operates within a market framework, art therefore only has purchase as it exists within the confines of the state’s political purview. Hence the reversal is explicit, since as Lü attempts to divorce art from suppression upon the market, it insidiously returns as the internalized logic within his argument. As entrepreneurs and political functionaries came to embody cultural value for the CCP, so too did commercial artists become the yardstick of value for Lü; the lapdog of the state.49
While interrogation of Lü’s argument cannot stand up to scrutiny, economic modernization is nevertheless a lynchpin of the development of Cynical Realism in Li’s argument, yet the crux of their opposition returns to their respective methodologies. Lü, given his dependence on a linear conception of temporality, dredged from western theory, posits a neat diachronic movement of rationalization, evinced by his comment on the coming ‘order’ of the market.50 Theoretically, development cascades from peasantry to industrial modernity into post- industrial post-modernity. Inflecting art historically, economic growth and market delirium is concomitant with the New Wave’s streak of modernity breaking into post-modern critique of modernism, reflected in Cynical Realism's ironic negation.51 Nevertheless, Li rightly identifies that Chinese ‘modernization’ is not congruent with this epochal conception and each ‘stage’ of development exists synchronously, therefore, the nucleus of his argument recognises that Chinese modernity is spatial as well as temporal.52 This is most apparent in the mass urban migration transpiring across the early adulthood of the Cynical Realist generation, catalysed by reform and opening. In the period between 1978-1991 there was an 80.9% increase in urbanization on pre-reform numbers, while total urbanization increased to 26.9%.53 While the unprecedent growth is coterminous with Lü’s economic liberalization, Li’s broader perspective encompasses the acceleration of social divisions of labour and industry while crystallizing in the concentration of wealth and intensification of class division.54
The figure of social stratification are the masses of ‘floating’ populations of urban migrants in precarious and legally contentious working conditions.55 Embodying the floating population, the Cynical Realists adopted, what Li described as, ‘bohemian’ lifestyles, taking up temporary accommodation in the Beijing outskirts.56 Accelerating urbanization supplanted traditional community hubs with hastily built skyrise apartments, and the rapidity of this metamorphosis was marked by Li saying one “can’t find their home after a couple of weeks away.”57 Resultingly, housing and studio affordability became a financial encumbrance as artists were locked out of urban spaces. Combining with evasion of censorship, this sheer economic reality stimulated the growth of artists villages; the most notorious being Yuanmingyuan occupied by Fang, who moved there in July 1989, facing unemployment after his inclusion in the China/Avant-Garde show.58 Followed by a group of similarly despondent young artists, they were despised by the locals for their drunken hooliganism and later had their residency terminated.59 This vagrancy of both the artists and floating populations is realized in the dissolution of the concept Yundong (运动), a term designating a salient collectivist concept persisting from the May 4th movement in 1919 until the twilight of the New Wave in the late 1980s. Orientated towards ideological unification of the masses in struggle, artists were essential under the propaganda wing, yet circumscribed by a larger organizational political programme.60 Just as Cynical Realism is negatively defined against the New Wave, the artists villages became the site of Liumang (流氓) or the hooligan as Yundong’s negative. The Liumang was a literary conceit of post-Cultural Revolution literature, popularized by Wang Shou, refracting the subcultural movement of disposed youth, intellectuals and itinerants such as the floating population and follows the same trajectory described in this essay of the Cynical Realists; a detached apathy caused by the social-economic turbulence, or as one critic describes the Liumang, “a band of relentless grey”.61
While this description of the hooligan sits appositely with Li’s own description, and this essay’s emphasis on the Cynical Realist subjectivity, adopting Li’s own method of dialectical reversal, he may be surpassed to explain the very loss of the metaphysical touchstones alluded to throughout this essay. Just as the return to realism was the iconoclastic inverse of Socialist Realism, so too is Liumang the countercultural rejoinder to both Maoist and New Wave collective Yundong.62 The conformity to the transcendental virtue of the Maoist and New Wave movement, for communism and liberalism respectively, conditioned its own demise, since the sociality of Liumang is located within the rejection of the collectivist Yundong therefore severing any relationship between the individual and metaphysical meaning located within ideology. This is precisely because artists were no longer foot soldiers of a cause or historical subjects, but instead as the previous participants in these causes (artists, intellectuals and lumpen) they transformed into spectators of history.63 In other words, the agents became cynics, just as the vernacular of realism was appropriated by the Cynical Realists for its ironic sanitation. Yet further than this, the stylistic return to realism allowed for the conditions to investigate the mundane and capture the true ‘spirit’ of dejection.64 Hooliganism for the Cynical Realists became their embodiment of the mundane and pedestrian. This interpretation finds resonance in Fang’s Series 2, no. 5 as, while all four men are depicted as close to carbon copies of one another and could almost be a collective, with similar white outfits, blasé expressions and shaved heads, there is nevertheless no sign of their interaction. Moreover, Fang’s use of perspective is telling, since each figure exists within their own perspectival system supplying a disjointed composition in which each figure has their own singular plane of atomized existence. In this it is secure that this image is not Fang’s self-portrait, since he is not depicting himself, but disclosing the subjective irony and inverse of the Yundong.65 These figures are the hooligans; they are all the Cynical Realists in their artist villages and the totality of the floating populations; while they should be unified, they may as well be alone.
Just as Fang’s work regards the viewer with an enigmatic smile, so too does the Cynical Realist movement itself, inverting Chinese art history only to reach the death of its discourse. Yet this is not without precedent as artistic progression throughout Chinese art history is empowered through its own self-negation; overturning historical and ideological significance while paradoxically affirming its forbearance.66 The Cynical Realist movement encapsulates this in two manners, stylistically and subjectively in correspondence with political and economic modernization respectively. On account of the former, Cynical Realism appropriated the vernacular of Maoist Socialist Realism in a return to the everyday, yet as Li reminds us, the history of Chinese art is ineluctable from its political context of suppression. Hence the return to the mundane through realism generated a vantage point from which the metaphysics of the New Wave liberalism and Maoist ideology, having been exposed on June 4th as treacherous delusions, may be made tabula rasa.67 This disconnect from the metaphysical in style, coincides with a similar subjective dejection, only strengthened in recognition of the developments of reform which oversaw economic infrastructural and social confusion.68 Large swathes of the Chinese population, as with the Cynical Realists, were forced into precarious situations which crystalized in a reversal from the association in Yundong into Liumang: the dislocation of not only individuals from a collective but from a transcendental association altogether.69 Yet, just as Cynical Realism engaged the operative mode of socialist realism (the realist style) for its own negation, so too was the operative mode of Yundong (the artists) usurped by its opposite. This analysis betrays Lü Peng as the Judas to the Cynical Realist movement as, given his dependence on a teleological conception of style and modernization in terms of increasing rationality, he circumvents the ironic motor of Cynical Realism, and indeed Chinese art history, to displace style and development onto social relations.70 This theoretical outlook forces him into contradictory positions and ultimately, he reinscribes metaphysical value into the work of the Cynical Realists disregarding its metaphysical void.
Figure List
Figure 1. Fang Lijun. Series 2, No. 5. 1992. Oil on Canvas. Location unknown.
Figure 2. William Bromage. Li Xianting welcoming students into his house. 2024. Photograph. Beijing
Figure 3. Darren Jorgensen. Lü Peng teaching UWA students. 2024. Photograph. Chengdu
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Footnotes
(1) Wu Hung, Making History: Wu Hung on Contemporary Art (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2008), 31.
(2) Svetlana Kharchenkova and Olav Velthuis, “An Evaluative Biography of Cynical Realism and Political Pop,” in Moments of Valuation: Exploring Sites of Dissonance, ed. Ariane Berthoin Antal et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 116.
(3) Peggy Wang, “Responding to the World: Contemporary Chinese Art, Exhibitions, and Criticism in the 1990s,” (PhD diss. University of Chicago, 2008), 10.; Li Xianting, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art,” in China’s New Art, Post-1989: With a Retrospective from 1979-1989, ed. Tsong-zung Chang, Li Xianting and Valerie C. Doran et. Al. (Hanart T Z Gallery: Hong Kong, 1993), 10.
(4) A Julia F. Andrews, and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (Berkely: University of California Press, 2012), 259.
(5) Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 61.
(6) Li Xianting (Chinese Art Critic), in discussion with a University of Western Australia Student group. Translated by Tami Xiang, June 2024. Unpublished.
(7) Xiao Lu, Dialogue (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 8.
(8) Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 277.
(9) Paul Gladston, Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 171; 214.
(10) Wu Hung, “The Case of Being ‘Contemporary’: Conditions, Spheres, and Narratives of Contemporary Chinese Art,” in Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader, ed. Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2011), 393.; Xianting, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art,” 20.
(11) Chi Zhang, “Contested Modernity: The Emergence of the Chinese Contemporary Art World and its Struggle for Meaning, 1990 to 2008,” (PhD diss. Yale University, 2009), 222.; Xianting, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art,” 10
(12) Li Xianting, “Apathy and Deconstruction in Post-’89 Art: Analyzing the Trends of “cynical Realism” and “Political Pop” 1992,” in Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents, ed. Wu Hung and Peggy Wang (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 159.
(13) Xianting, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art,” 21.; Lü Peng, A History of Art in 20th-Century China (Milan: Charta, 2010), 924.
(14) Xianting, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art,” 18.
(15) Fang Lijun quoted in Xianting, “Apathy and Deconstruction in Post-’89 Art,” 159.
(16) Xianting, “Apathy and Deconstruction in Post-’89 Art,” 162.; Xianting, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art,” 20.; Peng, A History of Art in 20th-Century China, 931. Andrews and Shen, The Art of Modern China, 259.
(17) Peng, A History of Art in 20th-Century China, 931. To quote him directly ”This was the true background that produced the New Generation and Cynical Realism, and therefore interpret the New Generation as a reaction to the essentialism of the 85’ ideological trend in art, regardless of whether or not the artists themselves believed this to be the case, should be judged in terms of the basic historical context”
(18) Peng, A History of Art in 20th-Century China, 924.
(19) Xianting, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art,” 13.
(20) Xianting, “Apathy and Deconstruction in Post-’89 Art,” 162. Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong‘s “Talks at the Yan‘an Conference on Literature and Art“: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, 1980) 60-61.
(17) Peng, A History of Art in 20th-Century China, 931. To quote him directly ”This was the true background that produced the New Generation and Cynical Realism, and therefore interpret the New Generation as a reaction to the essentialism of the 85’ ideological trend in art, regardless of whether or not the artists themselves believed this to be the case, should be judged in terms of the basic historical context”
(18) Peng, A History of Art in 20th-Century China, 924.
(19) Xianting, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art,” 13.
(20) Xianting, “Apathy and Deconstruction in Post-’89 Art,” 162. Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong‘s “Talks at the Yan‘an Conference on Literature and Art“: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, 1980) 60-61.
(21) Xianting, “Apathy and Deconstruction in Post-’89 Art,” 161.
(22) Mao Tse-Tung, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, 299.
(23) Hung, “The Case of Being ‘Contemporary’,” 403.
(24) Andrews and Shen, The Art of Modern China, 263.
(25) Gladston, Contemporary Chinese Art, 175.
(26) Xianting, in discussion with a University of Western Australia student group, June 2024.
(27) Gladston, Contemporary Chinese Art, 270.
(28) Andrews and Shen, The Art of Modern China, 257.
(29) Li Xianting (Chinese Art Critic), in discussion with a University of Western Australia Student group. Translated by Tami Xiang, June 2024. Unpublished.
(30) Gladston, Contemporary Chinese Art, 181.
(31) Lü Peng, “Heading Towards the Market,” in Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents, ed. Wu Hung and Peggy Wang (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 290-291.; Wang, “Responding to the World,” 10.
(32) Lü Peng, “Heading Towards the Market,” 291.; Wu Hung, Making History, 40.; Jane DeBevoise, “Big Business, Selling Shrimps: The Market as Imaginary in Post-Mao China,” E-Flux 71 (2016): no pages given, accessed July 12, 2024, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/71/60526/big-business-selling-shrimps-the-market-as-imaginary-in-post-mao-china/.
(33) Andrews and Shen, The Art of Modern China, 264.
(34) Quoted in Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China, 278.
(35) Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth Century China, 278.
(36) DeBevoise, “Big Busines, Selling Shrimps,” no pages given.
(37) Carol Yinghua Lu, “What is Important,” Frieze, 10 Aug 2016. No pages given, access July 10, 2024, https://www.frieze.com/article/what-important.
(38) Yinghua Lu, “What is Important,” no pages given.
(39) Lotte Philipsen, “Exceptions to the Rules of Chinese Art: Interview with Hou Hanru,” In China Onwards: The Estella Collection- Chinese Contemporary Art, 1966-2006, ed. Britta Erickson (Humlebæk: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 333.; Hung, “The Case of Being ‘Contemporary’,” 402.; Zhang, “Contested Modernity,” 206.; Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, “Art, Culture and Cultural Criticism and Post-New China,” New Literary History 28, no. 1 (1997): 115.
(40) Quoted in Karchenkova and Velthuis, “An Evaluative Biography of Cynical Realism and Political Pop,” 119.
(41) Andrew Solomon, ”Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China,” The New York Times Magazine, Dec 19, 1993.
(42) Carol Yinghua Lu, “The Missing Front Line,” E-Flux Journal, 80 (2017): no pages given, accessed July 12, 2024, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/80/102559/the-missing-front-line/.
(43) Pi Li, “Chinese Contemporary Art: Towards Diversity,” In China Onwards: The Estella Collection- Chinese Contemporary Art, 1966-2006, ed. Britta Erickson (Humlebæk: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 193.
(44) Jiang Zemin Quoted in Henry Gao, “China’s Changing Perspective on the WTO,” in China and the WTO: A Twenty-Year Assessment, ed. Henry Gao, Damian Raess and Ka Zeng (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 49.
(45) Peng, “Heading Towards the Market,” 290.
(46) Peng, “Heading Towards the Market,” 291.
(47) Peng, “Heading Towards the Market,” 291.
(48) Yinghua Lu, “The Missing Front Line,” no pages given.
(49) Yinghua Lu, “The Missing Front Line,” no pages given.
(50) Hung, “The Case of Being ‘Contemporary’,” 392.; Peng, “Heading Towards the Market,” 291.
(51) Lü Peng, A History of Art in 20th-Century China (Milan: Charta, 2010), 941.
(52) Hung, “The Case of Being ‘Contemporary’,” 392.; Xianting, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art,” 22.
(53) China Development Research Foundation, China’s New Urbanization Strategy (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), 14.
(54) Li, “Chinese Contemporary Art,” 140.
(55) Hung, “The Case of Being ‘Contemporary’,” 398.
(56) Xianting, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art,” 11.
(57) Yinghua Lu, “What is Important,” no pages given.
(58) Andrews and Shen, The Art of Modern China, 263.
(59) Andrews and Shen, The Art of Modern China, 263.
(60) Hung, “The Case of Being ‘Contemporary’,” 397.
(61) Geremie Barme, “Wang Shou and Liumang (‘Hooligan’) Culture,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 28, no. 28 (1992): 27.;Quoted in Barme, “Wang Shou and Liumang (‘Hooligan’) Culture,” 28.
(62) Zhang, “Contested Modernity,” 201.
(63) Hung, “The Case of Being ‘Contemporary’,” 398.
(64) Britta Erickson, “Introduction: An Explosion of Possibilities,” In China Onwards: The Estella Collection- Chinese Contemporary Art, 1966-2006, ed. Britta Erickson (Humlebæk: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 17.
(65) Andrews and Shen, The Art of Modern China, 263.; Hung, “The Case of Being ‘Contemporary’,” 403.
(66) Xianting, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art,” 13.
(67) Li Xianting. “A Meeting with Li Xianting,” Interviewed by a University of Western Australia student group. Translated by Tami Xiang. Guan Kan: Thinking with Contemporary Chinese Art, summer 2019, issue no. 3.
(68) Li, “Chinese Contemporary Art,” 140.