Guangdong contemporary art, in contrast to the art in some other regions, doesn’t seem to have an influence that conspicuous around this country, which, however, only indicates the significant difference between them, with no suggestion that the level and scale of Guangdong contemporary art falls behind that in these regions. As a matter of fact, since mid-1980s, Guangdong has witnessed the emergence of some greatly influential avant-garde artists and arts groups, such as Li Zhengtian’s 105 Studio and Wang Du’s Southern Artists Salon. Many among them participated in the Zhuhai slide exhibition (Zhuhai Meeting) held in the middle of the ‘80s. The followers in the ‘90s were contemporary arts groups and phenomena like the Big Tail Elephants Group, the Cartoon Generation movement, the Yangjiang Group and the Experimental Ink Art movement. Deng Xiaoping’s south China tour in early ‘90s led to a fever of wild geese flying south, attracting talented people to Guangdong from all over China, among whom were quite a number of contemporary artists. For example, South China Normal University(SCNU) took in a group of fine arts talents who were later called the neo-Hakka artists. These newcomers have played a very important role in nurturing Guangdong contemporary art and cultivating the cenozoic powers.
To put it specifically, the Big Tail Elephants Group and the Yangjiang Group set a new fashion by first implanting conceptual connotation into the changing scenes of worldly life and using it as a tool to reflect the urbanization process. Huang Yihan’s concept of Cartoon Generation was inspired by the well-off economic life in Guangdong, which gave him an earlier view of the profound influence marketization has on the styles and forms of our life. Huang then sharply sensed people’s status in this age of marketization, digitalization and informatization, so he tried to express these ideas in a pictorial language. This Cartoon Generation movement, assuming a form of groups, have united a number of artists of common artistic standpoint and perception. This also brought new blood into the later development of new art in Guangdong. Feng Feng, Sun Xiaofeng and Jiang Heng were once the participators in this group, and, obviously, their later creation had changed substantially.
New ink art has an intimate history with Guangdong. South China Normal University in Guangzhou were the place for both the first assembling of Experimental Ink Art movement in 1996 and the holding of the symposium “Towards the 21st Century: A Symposium on Contemporary Chinese Ink Painting”. And today when reviewing the development of new ink art, there is no steering clear of the exhibition “China: 20 Years of Ink and Wash Experiment” organized by Guangdong Museum of Art. In fact, Guangdong has also cultivated many trend-leading artists in experimental ink painting, such as Liang Quan, Wang Chuan, Liu Zijian, Shi Guo, Zhou Yong, Huang Guowu, and Wei Qingji, definitely not a minority compared with other provinces.
In the domain of Guangdong contemporary art, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts can be regarded as the cradle of avant-garde art in Guangdong. Apart from artists of the above-mentioned Big Tail Elephants Group and Cartoon Generation, the current hard-core artists like Deng Jianjin and Song Guangzhi are also related to it. And South China Normal University, ever since the introduction of the fine arts talents from Hubei, has become another important center for Guangdong contemporary art. After the artists came to Guangdong, they imparted some spirit of inland avant-garde art to their teaching. Meanwhile, their personal creation subjects began to change, with a gradual embodiment of localized cultural features. For example, various kinds of modern items Li Bangyao visualizes, Yang Guoxin’s Good Fruits Series and some of Shi Lei’s and Fang Shaohua’s subject matters all show close relationship with their life in Guangdong.
Several clear threads can be sorted out in Guangdong contemporary art, but under the regional influence of the cultural features in Guangdong, the creation of these artists is very individualized, for mainstay as well as for new power, all growing in their own direction, very free and diverse. Different from the ‘80s and ‘90s of last century, today puts us in a consumer society and an environment of maturing commodity culture. Surrounded by such a reality, we should think hard about how to create a good growth environment for contemporary art which faces and reflects the confusion of existence, so as to let art play its very role.
- Pi Daojian, Curator
*image (left)
© 53 Art Museum
