A Meeting with Li Xianting
Li Xianting, photograph by Valentina Sartori.
27th April, 2020
Li Xianting has been China’s leading art critic as well as an editor and curator for almost fifty years. During the 1960s he was imprisoned for two years for attempting to foster dialogue between his classmates. He co-organised the seminal Stars exhibition in 1979, as well as the China/Avant-garde exhibition in 1989. He also coined the terms Cynical Realism, Gaudy Art and Political Pop. Here he is interviewed by a University of Western Australia student group in his home in the summer of 2019 through translator Tami Xiang, and in the presence of artist Ai Song.
DJ: What are some of the issues art critics are discussing in China today?
Li: Actually the main issue in China is how art truly responds to reality, and how to respond to the real situation of society. This is because there has been a lot of fake art in China. Take for example since the 1940s, art was used for propaganda purposes by the Chinese Communist Party to show the happiness of people in China. For this purpose they needed to create lots of lies. After the Cultural Revolution people realised and found out the reality, so today the main issue in China is to find the true art.
CA: If the main concern of art critics is to respond to reality, what are the significant trends in contemporary art in China?
Li: Actually it is really hard to talk about the whole history of Chinese contemporary art because it has been more than 40 years, so I will only take about a few key critical moments, for example from the 1980s to 1990s during which the Cultural Revolution and its world of lies was overturned. Actually, Chinese contemporary art really began on May 4, 1919, so in this sense it has more than a hundred years of history. In 1919, China was bitten by Western society and art began then, at the end of the Qing Dynasty, when Chinese intellectuals were educated to give up traditional art and embrace realism. At same time, realism was what Western artists tried to give up.
After 1949, art society in China is actually very similar to the Soviet Union. What they did is similar to the Soviet Union. They created lies to create a perfect and beautiful society. So in those days we believed that we were living in perfect and ideal society except in China two thirds of people were living in misery.
After 1978 and 1979 and the Opening and Reform policy we realised that in the past we were living in a situation and world full of lies, and we start to find a way to receive modernism from the Western artworld. There were two main ways in contemporaneity–the first was modernism, and other is realism. What is modernism is learned from the West and the question was how to create our own modernism.
After the 1990s there’s a social phenomenon that crossed countries. Companies like Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and consumerism became the main trend. I don’t know if you remember that in 1993 I curated a show in the National Gallery of Australia, that is quite similar to art of the post-Soviet Union and Poland, that combines politics and consumerism together. For example take Mao, Mao was treated as a god in China, and now we can print Mao on our T-Shirts and that shows the change in position that Mao has undergone, from a god to being a part of consumerism.
So if we want to we need to talk about more details with examples, but these are the main trends, generally speaking, in Chinese Contemporary art.
LM: How can art transcend the restrictive political circumstances in China?
Li: In China there are still lots of artists working for officials to glorify the system of the Chinese government, and the proportion for those artists is very large, but there are also artists who have conscience. Ai Song for example is an artist who conveys the real feeling of society, but these works and exhibitions are often censored. I was working for Fine Art Magazine in 1978 and I was fired in 1983, then re-fired again in 1989. Now these are vivid examples of this problem.
After the 1980s lots of journalists and art critics came to interview me from America, Australia and elsewhere, and asked what is the official department, and what are the regulations for conducting censorship? For those people who are living in democratic society it is a common way of thinking to ask these questions, but there aren’t any official regulations or department that conducts this. There isn’t any official department but any official in China, no matter how important, even directors of museums can self-censor themselves or censor others according to the ideology of society. Even the smallest official in a police station has the power to censor an exhibition of art.
JE: Have you ever writing been censored, and when you have been writing about censored works?
Li: Yes, lots of times, many times!
There’s lots of situations that I’ve faced, for example in a platform I established in 2006 to support independent film [the Li Xianting Film Fund]. At first we were allowed to show the films [at the Beijing Independent Film Festival], and at this first stage they came and just watched, but during the next stage they interrupted power and chased directors and others away. This was when we went to Hebei province, back in 2014 when we were showing films such as documentary. The police suddenly came [to the Film Fund headquarters] and took more than ten computers away and the original films. More than 250 original films were taken away and one art superintendent and me were arrested. There were more than a hundred artists and lawyers who came to the police station to support us, which was was reported by the BBC. We were released after three hours after that, but have not been allowed to show any films since.
Li Xianting at home, photographed by Eloise Viney.
CA: Historically how has Chinese art contributed to social reality? Has it incited positive change within China or speculated on China’s future? How has this relationship to society worked?
Li: I think the most important thing is self-expression for artists. It’s not representing others, and not to serve others. After forty years, young people’s aesthetic taste has changed. They don’t like those pseudo-subjects, they don’t paint Mao any more, and what are they painting is their own real feeling, because China was a society constructed as lies.
JC: Can you comment on the use of the iconography of Chinese history as a way of commenting on the past and current reality of China?
Li: Chinese contemporary artists are interested in history and use the iconography of history to represent what they want to say because in China, attitudes cannot be expressed directly, so they need to borrow something from history in order to express what’s going on. Meaning and metaphor becomes important in reading iconography.
DJ: Is water and ink painting still a relevant form of art in twenty-first century China?
Li: Ink painting from 1919 until the Cultural Revolution borrowed Western forms but used the Chinese materials of water and ink. Take Xu Beihong as an example—he is using Western forms with ink and water to paint Chinese history. In the 1980s, there was a group who began to oppose what he did –they opposed their artist feelings but did not respond to real society, those artists went back to tradition.
DJ: Can ink painting ever be political or radical today, as it was for Xu Beihong?
Li: Yes some ink painters paint more mundane subjects because traditional ink paintings express more graceful feelings. But those artists paint more mundane objects such as prostitutes.
DJ: What is the role of art critic in China? How does art criticism fit into the system of the Chinese artworld?
Li: There are lots of art critics, and different kinds of critics. Some art critics act like officials, and others who are like me are on completely the opposite side to the officials.
I think the education of our generation has been very limited. The way we express ourselves is limited and poor, and our ability to say things is limited, but what I emphasise is that artists need to face society and be honest to personal experience.
HP: Having friends who are artists and a job to speak critically on artists, is it challenging to write negatively on artists?
Li: Criticism is a Western term that we’ve borrowed, maybe from the French language. Whether it is traditional or new types of art, if they are good artists I think their art already has the meaning to be critical, so I don’t criticise art but I discover good artists. I don’t criticise Ai Song for example, but agree with him, therefore I am standing on the same side of his criticism.
DJ: I want to go back to your comments on artists expressing reality, or truth, because these terms carry different meanings in the West. I wonder if your interest in this reality is produced out of the situation here in China?
Li: It’s hard to quantify or qualify how much. I shall show you something [points to image]. I think for example this work uses the tools of the farmer, and workers, but there are 30,000 of these tools here. In the twentieth century, the two most important moments are socialism and the Second World War, but these tools have been abandoned used by famers so they are hard to quantify. It becomes a metaphor, and that’s the reality! During socialism’s movement, workers and farmers played a large role but were abandoned, and the reality here is of workers and farmers facing this material being abandoned.
DG: How has international art and its society played a role for Chinese contemporary art?
Li: I don’t know about it! I never think about this question, and what I want to do is do a good job on my work. What I need to do is to discover good artists.
SB: What are some of the common misunderstandings that art writers outside of China have about Chinese art?
Li: I have done lots of communication with the West, and they think Chinese art is like a platter, like spring rolls on a platter, but how they choose, they give ten minutes to the documents and materials. In this way it is very difficult to select what is good art and who is a good artist. Take a seminar I participated in in Venice. One of the curators they were talking about and I presented there. They think Chinese contemporary art is for three year olds, but this is their misunderstanding. The Chinese contemporary artworld, are we going to be spring rolls on a Western platter or we are going to be ourselves, and lots of art critics quoted this when I said it in Venice.
CA: Is your theory of art related to spirituality, or is there a relation between Chinese contemporary art and spirituality?
Li: So actually what is spirituality? It’s hard to tell and is complicated, is hard to say. I oppose the use of philosophy to interpret art. I think art is unexplainable, and art is equal to philosophy. Art is a way to express your feelings and sense—art is a flower but philosophy is the fruit of tree. It is hard to describe art with philosophy.
The interview was conducted by Chandler Abrahams (CA), Sam Beard (SB), Debbie Gilchrist (DG), Darren Jorgensen (DJ), Harry Price (HP), Jessica Cottam (JC), James Enderby (JE) and Levi McLean (LM). It was transcribed from a digital recording by Darren Jorgensen.