About a year ago in a Shanghai shopping mall three young artist-curators opened an experimental exhibit called “Supermarket,” consisting of two spaces: a large one with a number of original works, including video installations and photographs, and a smaller “supermarket space” in which related works–“multiples”–were for sale. In a statement, the organizers declared that “commerce has become the predominant religion in Shanghai….Shopping centers…have become the city’s new temples. Everything is for sale.” Scheduled to last for two weeks, the exhibit closed in three days following a visit from the police. There were questions about permits, about whether a video showing a young man and woman sniffing each other was “vulgar,” about the selling of jars containing a paste made from human brains.
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“China has become one huge market,” says University of Chicago art historian Wu Hung. He spent a year in China on a Guggenheim fellowship that ended just six months ago. “The whole society is changing,” he says. “Because of ambition or because they want to change the art system, artists are not satisfied to exhibit privately or to find a space on the periphery–they all try to get into the heart of the city.” The show “Canceled,” which runs through Sunday at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, was curated by Wu and partly reconstructs another closed exhibit staged next to Tiananmen Square.
The 1980s saw many more unofficial shows, and even official exhibits began including nudity, long banned in China, thereby attracting huge crowds. By the late 80s numerous art “clubs” had formed, and many artists were doing avant-garde work. “Some very important artists emerged,” Wu says, but he thinks a lot of the art was “directly modeled upon Western precedents” and that the artists were creating not so much as individuals but as participants in a “mass movement.” The 1989 Tiananmen massacre led to another period of repression, but “there were still exhibitions in private homes and other exhibits supported by foreigners, sometimes in embassies.” By the mid-90s, Wu says, artists had begun to “explore more individual styles and newer media.”
