It seems appropriate to begin this discussion of the Goddess of Democracy statue erected in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989 with a meditation on discontinuity. The sculpture was, above all, an event: a temporal image that both marked the unceasing passage of time and resisted this same flow. The Goddess of Democracy stood as a marker delimiting a particular point in the chronology of Chinese contemporary art; arguably, it was the only work perched directly upon a turning point of the political and cultural avant-garde. The sculpture represents a rupture that it helped create. It was a confrontation, but also a plea. A spectacular performance, but also a resignation. This paradoxically dual nature defines the historical moment at which it was positioned. But if the Goddess of Democracy stood between the before and the after, it also stood between the inside and the outside. It was a public expression of private desire, a message from the people to an outside audience. The following essay is written in a voice that should evoke the construction, duration, and eventual destruction of the sculpture itself; that is to say, a voice that is aware of its own state of continual construction, a voice that is aware of its own impending failure, and a voice that is aware of the obviously cumbersome but massless structure that underlies it. With such a stylistic intention in mind, this paper will make a series of historical and theoretical moves in an attempt to situate the Goddess of Democracy along the trajectory of the evolution of contemporary art in China. First, I will attempt to establish the field of possibility from which the piece ultimately emerged. This exploration of the cultural matrix available to the cultural producer in the late 1980s will start from the new avant-garde art movements of 1985, paying particular attention to tensions between public and private, commercial and protest, political and aesthetic. Next I will present a series of readings of the Goddess of Democracy itself, drawing on interpretations from tactical political commentary, art history, and later criticism. Through this set of interpretations I will try to establish precisely how the piece grew out of the artistic and political projects of the mid- to late-1980s. Finally, I will discuss the development of contemporary art in Beijing in the years immediately following 1989, considering the role of the Goddess of Democracy as both a discontinuity and a bridge between styles of creation and exhibition, interrogating how the piece may have opened up certain paths for emerging artists while closing off certain others. Through this analytical triptych, I hope to complicate existing analyses of the interplay between the Beijing Spring of 1989 and the changes of process that occurred in Chinese art over the course of the last several decades, ultimately coming to a more complex understanding of the role of aesthetic ideologies in the political and cultural life of contemporary urban China.
We begin in the Beijing of 1985 not because contemporary art reemerged from some imagined hiatus in that year—indeed, avant-garde exhibitions can be traced back at least to the exhibitions of 1979,1 and probably even earlier depending on definition and context—but rather because of all that this iconic date has come to represent in terms of recent art history. In the fall of 2007, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, an important art space in Beijing, staged as its first exhibition a retrospective of the 85 New Wave movement.2 The exhibition raises several important themes concerning the spirit of this movement: among them its filmic aspect, emerging notions of archival memory and trauma, the relationship between art and activism. Ullens hosted a series of screenings of the works of fifth-generation filmmakers, highlighting their role in the artistic movement that has become known as the filmic moment in avant-garde discourse. The movements of 1985 brought to the fore of artistic circles the recent graduates of 1982, the first class to pass through the state arts institutions since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Not least among these young cultural producers were filmmakers such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, whose work enjoyed unprecedented influence over colleagues working in other media. Thematically and stylistically, the installations, video art, performance, photography, and painting of the mid-1980s drew heavily on the nostalgia, cultural nationalism, memory, and spiritual humanism that has come to signify Chinese films of the 1980s, allowing for a shared discourse that brought a fascinating degree of dialogue between artists of varying media and consuming publics.3 This element of the 1985 movements foreshadows the role of televisual media in the construction of Tiananmen 1989 as both political event and media spectacle in ways that cannot be ignored with respect to the Goddess of Democracy as both icon and index of the memory and hope of the protesters.
Besides these screenings, the Ullens exhibition also coincides with the publication of a series of documents related to the 85 New Wave movement, a self-referential curatorial move that calls to mind the 1985 emphasis on public discourse and temporal communication via the figure of the archive. One obvious example of this trend are the two pairs of serial publications that became the primary lines of communication within the arts community: The Trend of Art Thought and Fine Arts in China, and, to a lesser extent, Fine Arts and Jiangsu Pictorial. The first two began publication in 1985 and were shut down in 1989; the latter two continued publication, but abandoned coverage of avant-garde artistic production.4 This move towards publication and archival that began in earnest around 1985 is important for its several discursive appropriations; through it, contemporary artists began using the language of posterity and inserted their work into the narrative of art history (albeit a narrative that consciously broke from that of ‘classical’ Chinese art), and also began to construct and define the boundaries of their own community. This was the beginning of the formation of a speech community moderated by leading critics such as Gao Minglu, Li Xiaoshan, and Li Xianting and consisting of most Chinese-speaking artists engaging in avant-garde work, a trend that had enormous consequences for the plane of commerce and political action on which the gallery and museum system would later be built, tentatively uniting as it did a variety of first- and second-tier mainland and diasporic cities that would otherwise remain isolated scenes.5 And, perhaps most importantly, it assured a solid-state survival and broad dissemination of contentious works whose public deployments were cut short by authorities.6 The twin roles of memory and trauma are also important here; in addition to the community imagined via these texts, the filmic emphasis on external and imagined history mirrored in this performative publication work set the groundwork for the making public of ostensibly private traumas that were beginning to surface in the genre of scar literature and its visual counterparts.7
The third element emphasized by the Ullens exhibition is the well-documented link between art and activism explored in the 1980s, a trend that persisted right to the threshold of Tiananmen 1989. The China Symposium ‘89, hosted in Bolinas, California “on the eve” of the demonstrations in the square, provides an intriguing window into the attitudes of artists and intellectuals during the last days of this period. A brief glimpse of he conference session entitled “Art and Activism,” moderated by media magnate Hong Huang and including participants as varied as Ni Zhen, Bei Dao, Liu Binyan, Chen Kaige, and Wang Ruoshui, provides ample evidence of this. We find on the one hand Liu Binyan, “China’s foremost literary conscience,” who advocates a position influenced by Mao Zedong’s dictum at the Yanan Forum on Literature and Art—that is to say, that all art should and necessarily does reflect a certain moral and political stance; from his perspective, one that resists the state apparatus and ideology.8 At Bolinas, he met with staunch opposition from the rising generation of cultural producers, who were largely influenced by the academic debates that reemerged in the early 1980s: luminaries such as Bei Dao and Chen Kaige each espoused distinctive goals for art and literature outside of politics, and argue for the position that self expression and exploration—the privileging of experience over ideology—can serve a broader political purpose that rejects narrow categories of oppositional arguments and national concerns. These two positions arguably come together to form the general spirit of the 85 New Wave movement, which both reflected and reconciled this tension by allowing for a category of artistic content that, in its turn away from didactic or protest art, fights the propagandists that prolong and reproduce the cultural struggles of preceding generations. Said Ruan Ming: “Only under the banner of freedom can all forms of art flourish, regardless of whether the aims of that art are the ultimate concerns of mankind, or a strong and prosperous nation, or simply profit.”9 It is this sense of responsibility, if not to ideology in art then at least to ideologies of the production of art, that characterized the discursive field from which the Goddess emerged.
Through an accompanying seminar addressing the themes of “Looking Back/ Moving Forward,” “Art and Activism,” and “The Legacy of the Chinese Avant-Garde,” the Ullens exhibition situates the 85 New Wave movement in an historical context including narratives of both artistic development and the social processes that accompany it. In many ways, the movement did represent a key moment in the shifting paradigms of cultural industries and cultural circles in contemporary China, and the dialogue between public and private that characterized virtually all exhibitions in this period is an unavoidable manifestation of these wider social tensions. As of 1985, there were no private galleries in China; state-managed galleries tended to act as tomblike museums in their ossified displays of socialist realism and official histories. The few official art fairs, such as the Sixth All-Chinese Arts Exhibition of 1984, tended towards these same themes, while legitimately contemporary exhibitions, such as A Modern Exhibition of Five Artists curated by Huang Yongping, involved mandated restricted guest lists and were largely private phenomena.10 As the decade progressed the clamor of artists looking for public exposure in state galleries grew more and more vocal, culminating in the February 1989 exhibition China/ Avant-garde held in the National Gallery in Beijing; it was shut down twice in its brief two weeks of existence on accusations of politically and aesthetically offensive work.11 This back-and-forth was not new: ten years previous, the first Stars exhibition was held on the steps outside the National Gallery, while that of 1980 was permitted a space inside.12 For the next ten years, exhibitions would be held in the polar extremes of public parks and private homes. But this continual conflict became an obsessively contemplated subject in its own right only with the 85 New Wave; until then, it was merely a structural reality of artistic production.
Two more broad trends characterize the development of the movement that came into the limelight in 1985, one spatial and one temporal. The first involves the geography of authorship: namely, a trend towards art collectives and cells as the locus of avant-garde production rather than individual artists. Such collectives, including Xiamen Dada, the Stars group, the Pond group, 75% Red 20% Black 5% White, and the Northern Art group, paralleled the development of jointly-edited theory journals with their practical emphasis on a certain degree of anonymity and a submersion of personal interest within a broader desire for public visibility.13 These collectives served several historically important functions: they created regional circles of avant-garde practitioners, allowed for collaborative platforms, contributed to a nascent sphere of civil society, enlarged a sense of oppositional solidarity, and created a space in which artists and academics could critically engage with the social consequences of new aesthetics. This trend, however, interacted only ambiguously with its temporal counterpart, although both have certainly had a lasting impact on the life of new art in China. The move towards collective exhibition on a spatial plane was to some degree countered by the move towards national mobility and regional ephemerality on a temporal plane: as exhibitions became increasingly subject to fleeting displays in public locations and a pressing urge to showcase group work alongside and for the benefit of other groups, the artistic cell began to decline as a feasible unit. Logistically, regionality became less important, and these bases of production were no longer as necessary for dialogue with like-minded artists.14 But the rise of the traveling exhibition was also important for other, possibly more productive reasons. First and foremost, it set the physical boundaries of the discourse of Chinese contemporary art, linking dispersed communities and isolated individuals into a single plane of cosmopolitanism reinforced by the print capitalism of the new publications. As much as the creation of this plane served to homogenize regional products, it also allowed for a heightened visibility on the international scene and a greater sense of solidarity amongst a certain class and generation. If it marked the decline of the cell, it also marked the rise of the national spirit so exalted in the early years of the 85 New Wave movement.
These large trends in the mid-1980s help summarize the field of possibility that made up the background and influences of the Goddess of Democracy, but a more concrete discussion of the exhibitions at stake in these generalizations will be necessary to complete the portrait of this cultural matrix. There were, of course, the Stars exhibitions beginning in 1979, with their bold demands for individual recognition, democratic politics, and public exhibition rights.15 There were the private shows of the Sichuan School, known for their redeployment of realist depictions of minority life, the everyday, traumatic rural memories, and the romanticized countryside. There was the Modern Exhibition of Five Artists held in Xiamen, a show that challenged the potential of the collision between socialist realism and Western European traditions of socially critical realist art. There were the Southern Salon gatherings, which brought together performance events and art objects in a surprising confluence of media. There were the Northern Art exhibitions, which challenged the intuitive theories of the southern schools and argued for a synthesis of Chinese and European traditions. And there was, ultimately, China/Avant-garde, which pushed the discourse of public art to the limits appropriate to its historical context.16 These often colliding styles and exhibitions gave rise to a formative pluralism that helped establish a diverse field of influences from which work of the late 1980s could draw: from the new formalism of the earliest contemporary artists to the the scar art and native soil movements of 1985, from fifth-generation cultural criticism, cultural reconstruction, and “consciousness of the tragedy of life” to their successors with their returns to cultural roots and the pursuit of a universally humanistic “purified language”.17 It was the field composed of these contending schools, depicted here in broad strokes coalescing into the 85 New Wave movement, that gave birth to the Goddess of Democracy long before her physical avatar was erected.
The construction of the doomed monument began on May 27th with a request from the Federation of College Students to the Central Academy of Fine Arts; a group of male undergraduates in the sculpture department adapted the design from a miniature work already in progress, and created it in a brilliant bricolage such that the multi-piece statue, once constructed, could only be destroyed—never dismantled. The statue was unveiled on May 30th. The ceremony, which involved a dedication, an announcement to the foreign media, and a performance of the “Internationale” and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” drew 50,000 spectators into the square and helped revive the flagging movement that had grown into an amalgam of students, workers, and residents. At its very inception, the Goddess was already a “monument to democracy,” already prepared for its eventual ignominious end that would be outlived by “the desire … for the ideals it symbolized”.18
We now return to the statue itself, to its design and construction, or perhaps even earlier, with its influences. Stylistically, the Goddess was heir to a diverse range of predecessors. There is, on the one hand, the obvious comparison with the Statue of Liberty. It has been remarked that this visual citation reflects the media savvy of the student protesters, in their effort to reach out to international audiences via omnipresent satellite television news links. Strangely, Cao Xingyuan, the main advisor to and spokesperson for the group of students from the Central Academy of Fine Arts who designed and constructed the sculpture, has denied this intention, even going so far as to say that they intentionally downplayed the resemblance to the American statue, fearing that the symbol might be interpreted as too blatantly pro-American, and perhaps reflecting negatively on Chinese values.19 Another notable stylistic precursor of the Goddess of Democracy is the school of socialist realism, unavoidable in any art history of modern China. Cao Xingyuan has pointed specifically to Vera Mukhina’s sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman as a model for certain features.20 This influence complicates the question of audience even further. Does a citation of the dominant mode of state-sponsored art imply that the students were attempting to create a dialogue with the culture czars of the Party administration? Or does it simply reflect their own technical training? Given that a multiplicity of audiences—local and international, televisual and immediate, sympathetic and oppositional—ended up viewing the piece, the intention may not matter at all; the effectiveness of the piece in speaking distinctly to these various audiences may be more directly connected to the heart of the matter.
Aside from these two aesthetic influences that seem to be somewhat contradictory on political grounds, the statue was also endowed with certain mythological connotations. Its stance and demeanor cited, for example, southeastern Chinese representations of the goddess of mercy Guanyin and related Buddhist figures.21 Its hollow construction and blank white silhouette call to mind the statuettes of Mao carried through the square on official state holidays.22 And its physical material and composition refer to youthful or scholastic visual production, a very conscious manipulation and exploitation of the creators’ status as students. Pausing here, we may evaluate the sculpture from a purely art-historical perspective (that is to say, not from the disciplinary point of view of an art historian, but rather taking the work as an art-historical one). This first reading of the piece already seems to be a weak one—it is more a symbol than a creative product to be taken as an object of critique. Although it stands at the pinnacle of a specific creative genealogy, this particular tracing can be situated only problematically for a number of reasons: first, its collective production, in line with both the educational system of the time and the emphasis on art collectives inherited from the preceding decade; and second, its cross-cultural legibility. We seem to once again encounter the troublesome problem of audience—intended, imagined, actual, and critical.
The image of this goddess of democracy reached several discrete audiences: student demonstrators, visitors to the square, sympathetic and hostile elements of the government, and remote media consumers. Each one of these involves a relation that could potentially be exploited by the creators of the statue: students could be encouraged to continue rallying; direct spectators could be drawn in greater numbers and convinced to support the students materially; international observers could pressure the Chinese government; the government could be convinced that the students did indeed seek nothing but dialogue. Many of these functions were fulfilled; it seems that only the last achieved little immediate success. The statue does not in itself, however, seem to completely ignore the potential of a government audience. Indeed, it seems to enter into a speaking relationship with power more directly than it does with any of these other involved parties—but in a way that is frictive and confrontational rather than dialectically productive. In its architectonic placement in Tiananmen Square, the goddess positioned provocatively in a stance directly opposed to and exchanging gazes with the portrait of Mao, the monument explicitly addresses the powers that control the design of the square. This message, however, is intended for observing audiences—there is no expectation of an answer sent down from above.23 Its stance is a masquerade of defiance and hope, directed towards those already inclined to support the movement at some undefined future point. The intended audience thus appears to be largely already-sympathetic viewers, both foreign and domestic. This would explain the somewhat muddled and contradictory statements about the role of the Statue of Liberty in the design of the goddess of democracy, in that a wide range of audiences must be addressed to maximize the potential of the piece. This is the work of cultural syncretism as a subversion of cultural genealogy.
Does this cross-cultural legibility and reception by multiple audiences—both actual and intended—lead to a disparity between the intended and received messages? Perhaps it is misleading to refer to these packets of meaning as messages. There is no theme, no didactic point attached to the goddess of democracy. Rather like the filmic structures of her predecessors, she is a summarizing fragment of a national spirit, the concrete manifestation of a collective desire. The figure is a symbol, an index, an image: it displays itself, spectacularizes its context, provides hope, and legitimates the existence of a defensive solidarity. That is to say, it says nothing, but it offers up a range of meanings. It may be useful to view to this type of non-speech as an “allegorical package,” a “process of unmooring” by which the specific locality—a student work deployed in Tiananmen square, 1989—is interpreted and absorbed into global discourses of democracy and human rights, and eventually reterritorialized into a new locality—an American living room, a public plaza in Hong Kong, or a classroom at Peking University.24 This operation is here evident on several levels: the student designers adapted and appropriated the allegorical signifier of the Statue of Liberty, combined it with the extracted sense of place defined by classical Chinese and socialist artistic themes, and then re-packaged their own allegory for global consumption. But we need not view these tactics purely as the media savvy of the students themselves; rather, meaning is here produced through the frictive articulation of the relationship between the local and the global, and meaning so produced is by its very nature specifically oriented towards a particular territorial audience.
Let us return to the question of the placement of the statue within the political space of Tiananmen Square, a major theme revisited again and again in Western academic discussions of the role of the goddess in the demonstrations. Wu Hung draws attention to the revamped formal composition of the square, with its symmetrical spatial relationships maintained but its psychological landscape entirely dismembered.25 Beyond the simplistic observation that the goddess looks Mao directly in the eye as if challenging his watchful gaze, the statue also adds a degree of disruption and a degree of mediation to the central access of Tiananmen—much as Mao’s mausoleum did upon its addition to the square. More importantly than where the goddess was placed, however, might be the question of how she was perceived as adding to the environment. For this it will be necessary to borrow another concept from Wu, albeit one he did not directly apply to the statue.
Wu notices a transition in the development of the space of Tiananmen during and after the late Deng Xiaoping years: from the construction of ‘hard’ monuments to the installation of ’soft’ monuments. In his view, hard monuments “commemorated history and demanded faith,” while soft monuments are “deliberately short-lived and specific.”26 This transition seems to mirror that from imagining the community of the nation as a political sphere to spectacularizing this same community. The Goddess of Democracy appears to be the first structure placed in Tiananmen to embody the rubric of soft monumentality: it is opportunistic or even spontaneous, short-lived, movable, and primarily immaterial—an almost perfect reference of the performances and parades that took place on the same ground during state holidays. It is an instance of play through time; a movement of temporality at the center of a space collapsed into meaninglessness by its own carnivalesque spectacle. In this reading, the goddess may not have interrupted the symmetry of the square at all; rather, the statue may simply be viewed as an ephemeral actor upon a shifting stage. It is telling that the first soft monument placed in Tiananmen was one of resistance, a spectacle that appropriated and subverted an official system of signs; its tactics, themselves borrowed from the parades organized for Mao and Deng, were almost immediately recuperated and transformed into the innocuous inflatable sculptures and temporary fountains to which the square began to play host every National Day under Jiang Zemin.27 Despite their unavoidable recuperation, however, a view of the art of the goddess of democracy as tactical seems another productive way to approach the question. Following Michel de Certeau, the “tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety,” whereas the “strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper.”28 The strategic is the buildup and defense of the edifices of the square itself; the tactical is the mobile and nomadic response to this architecture of hard monumentality.
If, however, we are to view the goddess of democracy as a response of this sort, we must also interrogate her status as an initiating agent, as a protest or vehicle of communication. Earlier we evaluated the statue’s role as an allegorical package, a self-contained meaning. But how might it produce or transfer meaning through its design? Esherick and Wasserstrom provide one intriguing possibility in their notion of political theater, or political communication that adapts an established or even ritualistic form and then alters or plays with the content in order to advance its own message.29 In this case, the Goddess is both participant and witness in the construction of a monument in the vernacular of socialist realism that fits into the architectonic scheme of Tiananmen while simultaneously using it as a vehicle for radical political demands. But this explanation retains a high degree of ambiguity on a key point: is the formal element of the message intended seriously, a request for the benevolent attentions of the addressed parties? Or is it simply a sarcastic and mocking derision of conservative values? Both readings are available, and the latter becomes increasingly seductive given the disappointing state of the protests by the time the goddess was erected.
This tactical move did have at least some sincere intentions, however. Its very spectacle—one of fleeting temporality set against a backdrop of monumental space—allowed the sculpture to attract the attention of an enormous number of spectators, probably upwards of 300,000 over a period of several days.30 This resurgence of interest in the demonstrations at Tiananmen gave the students an organizing locus and activity around which to regroup, and probably also brought them material aid. Unfortunately, the added attention may also have caused authorities to move more quickly towards a crackdown. For a brief moment, the students finally moved towards a small-scale, well-organized, and democratic structure, the most representative element of which is the “Democracy University” founded at the base of the goddess of democracy the day the military began to open fire along the Western reaches of Changan Jie.31 The failure of organization, however, gave way to the final performance of the goddess of democracy: the denouement of its forcible removal, which had been expected from the very unfolding of the monument.
It was a moment witnessed across the world, the perfect complement and closing element to the arc begun with the spectacular unveiling ceremony marked by its admittedly futile optimism and the flavor of an open international community. Pushed from the side by a tank, it fell forward and was subsequently smashed. If Cao Xingyuan is to be believed, however, its ghost lives on, a collective memory of a submerged desire.32 Indeed, its design has already been adopted almost precisely in iterations from Hong Kong to San Francisco, across Asia, Europe, and North America.33 These copies represent not so much the success of a particular artistic model, but rather the distributed quality of a redemptive hope; the Goddess has become the icon of the entire process of the Beijing Spring. As such, its very victory lies in its failure to materialize in the space for which it is supposedly destined. Drawing from an account of a recent mass movement in another Asian city, it may be useful to apply to the figure of the goddess a model of justice that comes by never arriving.34 Cao Xingyuan, in her editorial published in June 1989, expressed the hope that a permanent replica of the statue will one day stand in her place;35 if this ever occurs, the justice sought by the students and workers of 1989 will be emptied of its future promise and instead brought to bear on the present, thus diminishing the work of all those who looked to the future for strength and destroying the sense of responsibility for further action that the destruction of the statue enforced in the witnesses of June 4th. Monumentality, in this sense, is the death of the ghost of justice that must always remain in the future in order for the promise of the Goddess of Democracy to remain intact.
We have strayed far afield from our analysis of the conditions of the production of the Goddess of Democracy—perhaps too far. But the sheer variety of the readings presented here may indeed be useful in marking out the space of cultural possibility opened up by the statue and its performance. It seems that the most dramatic features of the piece were its intended ephemerality, its figuration as a haunting always simultaneously in the past and in the future, its performative and performance-based monumentality, its cultural and historical pastiche, and its public expression of private desires. In retrospect, it is obvious how these elements have been absorbed into the dominant mode of discourse on contemporary Chinese art, but a more rigorous interrogation of the consequences of the Goddess is in order. Many key questions have yet to be asked: how are geographies and genealogies of 1990s Chinese art defined by the relationships brought to bear on the figure of the Goddess of Democracy? What other trajectories of artistic evolution did the process of her creation and destruction shut down? Why were only certain elements of her construction retained in the post-1989 art explosion?
There can be no definitive answers to these problems. At best, we can only hope to map out a sketch of the art scene in Beijing in the three or four years after June 1989, perhaps framing the developments therein in terms of the discursive formations set in motion in 1985 and carried to their peak by the Goddess herself. On the level of content, two major schools of visual art assumed positions of primary influence in the early 1990s: cynical realism and political pop.36 Arguably, these styles were already in place during China/Avant-garde, and their rise may have had little to do with the events in Tiananmen—although they certainly did nothing to rekindle the feelings of nostalgia and idealism so dominant in 1985. Movements of cultural resurgence, too, became impossible after 1989; the objects of artistic critique were externalized, alienated from the field of culture and assigned to the spheres of national government or international economics. The neo-conceptualism of the mid-1980s was replaced with a flattening of tone, and nostalgia was overtaken by the primacy of the empty image. Satire and banality became the order of the day. However, it must be emphasized that these developments had already been set in motion long before June 1989; the constant battle between public and private had already created a discursive environment so rife with tension that an event as politically insignificant as the China/Avant-garde exhibition probably played as large a role in its implosion as the popular movements of protest later that year.37
More interesting than these matters of ideological content and artistic form, however, are the structural changes undergone by the Chinese contemporary art scene after 1989. The China/Avant-garde exhibition also played a large role in the closing of the public galleries to contemporary art, but it was definitively the link between this exhibition, art students, and the spring protests—a link drawn but perhaps not imagined by the government—that sounded the death knell for legal public art in Beijing.38 It was, after all, students at the Central Academy of Fine Arts who erected the statue of the Goddess of Democracy, which became the prime emblem of the movement and a bridge between public and private art. And it was these same students and sympathetic artists who carried banners reading “No U-Turns,” an iconic phrase borrowed from the February exhibition.39 Once these connections were made, virtually all of the state-managed galleries returned to strict portrayals of official histories and socialist realist propaganda. Public parks no longer hosted avant-garde exhibitions, and the less strictly supervised art journals were ordered to cease publication. Artists were forced to return to the underground, and, because of the stylistic shifts mentioned above, public protest art lost its appeal. But perhaps as a measure of appeasement, or perhaps as an emergency-release pressure valve of sorts, or perhaps merely as an attempt to stimulate the cultural economy, the government simultaneously authorized the opening of private art spaces. In trends that would continue well into the new millennium, these private galleries joined an international network of Chinese artists in the diaspora and foreign artists working across the globe. This networking resulted in several most likely unintended results that the government found politically expedient, at least at that time: first, politically dangerous contemporary art was funneled out of the country and directly into the hands of foreign buyers and collectors, while foreign capital flowed right back into the country; second, a discursive space distinct from that of the intellectual academy and large publications was created, such that critics and theorists no longer diluted the official debates of the legitimate intelligentsia. Many artists of the time found this arrangement amenable to their needs as well, for precisely the same reasons. The system took hold, and the next generations of artists have been raised and educated entirely within a gallery system, never needing to negotiate the boundaries of public exhibition. Naturally, the process would have been largely unavoidable given the current development of channels of capital flow through China anyway, but the interplay between art and policy is an interesting one indeed. This sketch is, of course, a gross oversimplification of the structural development of the art market, but it is nevertheless a useful one in terms of evaluating how the Goddess of Democracy may have played a direct role in the contemporary solidification of the eternally fraught boundary between public and private, inside and outside, before and after—the very themes addressed by the work itself. Perhaps, as galleries begin to return to the movements embodied by 1985 and many pieces initially sold to foreign buyers return to the mainland, we will bear witness to another transformation, another reterritorialization and reabsorption of the political and the public into the nihilistic and oneiric images that dominated the 1990s. Or perhaps, as the dominant cultural authorities of the United States art markets seem to think, “the Chinese government has managed to defuse the explosive potential of contemporary art simply by allowing it to flourish.”40
1Valerie Doran, China’s New Art, Post-1989 (Hong Kong: Hanart T Z, 1993) XV.
2Fei Dawei, “’85 New Wave – The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art.” Current Exhibitions. 2007. Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. 10 December 2007. <http://85.ucca.org.cn>.
3Zou, Yuejin, Xin Zhongguo Meishu Shi: 1949-2000. (Changsha: Hunan Meishu Chuban She, 2002) 187.
4Wolfger Pohlmann, China Avant-Garde. (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 1993) 27.
7Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. (New York: Verso, 1991).
8Lee Ou-fan Lee, “Art and Activism.” On the Eve: China Symposium ‘89. 1989. The Long Bow Group. 10 December 2007. <http://tsquare.tv/film/Bolinas7lee.html>.
12Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 212.
14Richard Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) 87.
15Hilary Binks, “The Stars Group of Artists.” Commentary. 2006. Zee Stone Gallery. 10 December 2007. <http://www.zeestone.com/article.php?articleID=16>.
18Cao,Xingyuan, “A Goddess Old in Form, New in Spirit.” Los Angeles Times, June 18 1989: Opinion Desk, 1.
20Louisa Schein, “The Consumption of Color and the Politics of White Skin in Post-Mao China.” Social Text, no. 41 (Winter 1994), 147.
21Joseph Esherick and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “Acting Out Democracy: Political Theater in Modern China.” In Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China. Ed. Elizabeth Perry and Jeffrey Wasserstrom. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994) 34.
22Wu Hung, “Tiananmen Sqaure: A History of Monuments.” Representations, no. 25 (Summer 1991): 93.
23Ma Shu-Yun, “The Chinese Discourse on Civil Society.” The China Quarterly, no. 137 (March 1994), 181.
24Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) 238.
28Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) xix.
29Esherick and Wassterstrom 33.
30Roderick MacFarquhar, The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 455.
31Catherine Ingraham, “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” Assemblage, no. 20 Violence, Space (April 1993), 45.
34Vicente Rafael, “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines.” Public Culture, vol. 15 no. 3 (Fall 2003), 425.
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