Old meets bold

In 1997, the future did not look bright for adventurous Chinese artists. Twenty-one years had passed since the death of Mao Tse-tung had ended the Cultural Revolution and the stranglehold of officially sanctioned Socialist Realism. But emigration seemed to be the only way to forge an international art career, and few expatriates had gained significant recognition.

Then came news that Documenta X, the 1997 edition of the prestigious international showcase for contemporary art, would include no Chinese artists. The slight was particularly painful because of a hoax that had raised, then dashed, Chinese artists’ hopes of participating in the closely watched exhibition in Kassel, Germany. Shortly after learning of their rejection, several artists received a letter, in German, from curator Ielnay Oahgnoh, saying that unexpected funds had been secured to present an ancillary show, “From the Other Shore -- An Exhibition of the Vanguard of Chinese Art,” and naming the day when he would arrive in Beijing to look at their work.

The curator never materialized. In fact, he didn’t exist. He was fabricated by Beijing artists Hong Hao and Yan Lei, who created his name by spelling their own names backward, designed fake Documenta stationery and had the letters mailed from Germany. The prank didn’t endear Hong and Yan to their peers, but it is now regarded as a trenchant conceptual artwork -- documented by a print, with the fraudulent letter superimposed on a map of Kassel.

On view in “On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West,” a current exhibition at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, Hong and Yan’s print and works by other artists indicate how far Chinese contemporary art has come in the last few years. So do two other West Coast shows: “Regeneration: Contemporary Chinese Art From China and the U.S.” at Otis College of Art and Design’s Ben Maltz Gallery in Los Angeles, and “Sui Jianguo: The Sleep of Reason” at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

Arriving on the heels of “Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia” -- a traveling show with a Chinese component that recently appeared at the San Diego Museum of Art -- the coincidental convergence of exhibitions offers Californians an opportunity to catch up with Chinese artists who are making a mark at home and abroad.

In some cases, a very big mark.

Two years after the Documenta debacle, the Venice Biennale featured 20 Chinese artists and granted one of its three awards to Cai Guo-Qiang, who had moved to New York after spending a decade in Japan. Best known for making art with gunpowder and fireworks, he has an installation at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Mass., and a two-part show at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Xu Bing, who also lives in New York, won a MacArthur “genius” award in 1999. His creative adaptations of Chinese calligraphy include “Square Word Calligraphy,” a system of writing that appears to be Chinese but is actually English, with words configured as square-format characters. Baffling to both Chinese and English readers, Xu’s invention is his way of breaking down boundaries of communication while musing on the meaning and structure of language.

In the Stanford show, he has set up a “Calligraphy Classroom,” equipped with desks, chairs, brushes, ink, workbooks and video instruction, where visitors can hone their “Square Word Calligraphy” skills. At Otis, computer software designed by Xu allows visitors to type on a laptop, see the words translated into English calligraphy on the screen and make printouts to take home.

Another successful New York transplant, Zhang Huan, was represented in the 2002 Whitney Biennial with a commissioned performance, “My New York.” Seen in photographs and a video in the Stanford show, Zhang emerged from the museum dressed as a body builder, with muscles made of strips of raw beef. Personifying a superpower that could be a peacemaker as he proceeded along Madison Avenue, he took doves from a cage and gave them to passersby who set the birds free. An earlier performance, “My America,” was inspired by his experience of being mistaken for a homeless person in New York and offered bread. A large color photograph at Otis depicts the climax of the piece, when about 60 nude men and women pummeled the artist with chunks of bread.

Works by celebrated expatriates such as these mingle with pieces by artists who live in China in the two group shows, both scheduled to travel around the country for the next year and a half. Each exhibition offers works by 26 artists, four of whom are represented in both places, but the curatorial agendas are quite different.

“Regeneration,” at Otis, was organized as a survey by Xiaoze Xie, a painter who teaches at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., and Dan Mills, director of Bucknell’s Samek Art Gallery. “We wanted to represent what’s going on in China,” said Xie, who has switched the order of his names, Western style. “The exhibition isn’t comprehensive, but it gives you a good idea.” Regardless of where the artists live, their work is firmly rooted in Chinese culture, he said. And it responds to one of two questions: “How do you deal with a cultural tradition that is several thousand years old and regenerate it into something new?” or “How do you address the reality of China today?”

Drawing upon history

Including himself in the first group, Xie paints stacks of newspapers and rows of books, reducing libraries to abstractions or overlaying symbols of silent knowledge with images of fast-paced urban life. Hong Lei stages photographs of flowers and dead birds in the style of Song Dynasty court paintings, investing gorgeous scenes with violence and political overtones. Ai Weiwei reconstructs Ming and Qing Dynasty furniture in awkward shapes, meant to symbolize the position of traditional Chinese culture in contemporary life.

Among artists who take a sharp look at China’s rapidly changing face, graffiti artist Zhang Dali spray-paints and carves his profile on demolition sites, preserving the images in large color photographs. Liang Juhui makes digitally collaged photographs of the high-rise residences that have transformed China’s urban skylines. Chen Shaoxiong’s video “Anti-terror Variety” equips skyscrapers in Guangzhou with the ability to avoid Sept. 11-style attacks. When low-flying jets approach, the towering buildings bend or split to avert catastrophes.

At Stanford, independent curator Britta Erickson has organized an exhibition steeped in politics. A scholar of 19th century Chinese painting who has become a specialist in Chinese contemporary art over the last 20 years, she has followed the development of avant-garde art on frequent trips to China. Art and politics are inseparable, she said, both for artists who grew up under Mao and for younger ones who concern themselves with cultural politics and China’s place in the global art scene. “I chose the strongest examples I could find for the exhibition,” she said, “making selections economically to avoid redundancy while representing a variety of media and approaches.” Encompassing paintings, sculptures, photographs, multimedia installations and video, the show is divided into three parts: “The West Through a Political Lens,” “Cultural Melange” and “Joining the Game: The Chinese Artist Meets the World.”

Wang Du fires the opening salvo in “Youth With Slingshot,” a huge resin and fiberglass sculpture installed at the entrance. It’s modeled after a news photograph of a protester outside the American embassy in Beijing. In the next gallery, Huang Yong Ping’s installation, “Bat Project I, II, III Memorandum,” was inspired by an international incident that occurred in 2001, when a U.S. Navy surveillance plane collided with a Chinese military aircraft. The story is related in images on a massive roll of paper that simulates film.

As the show progresses, visitors encounter Zhang Hongtu’s Van Gogh-style re-creation of a famous Chinese landscape painting in “Shitao -- Van Gogh #7,” Yan Lei’s conceptual interpretations of Chinese artists’ encounters with Western curators and Sui Jianguo’s lineup of bright red resin dinosaurs, based on mass-produced plastic toys and prominently stamped “Made in China” on their bellies.

Chinese avant-garde artists have been doubly marginalized, by the Eurocentric art community and their own country, Erickson said. But that is changing. “Inside Out: New Chinese Art,” a landmark show that originated at the Asia Society and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York in 1998 and toured the U.S. for two years, effectively introduced the subject to America. Other group exhibitions, such as “Regeneration” and “On the Edge,” indicate that interest is growing. “The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art,” billed as the largest exhibition of its kind to travel beyond China, is scheduled to open in October at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y.

But the wave of the future is best seen at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where Sui -- who lives in Beijing and heads the sculpture department at the Central Academy of Fine Art -- is presented as an individual whose sculpture is worthy of a solo show with a lavishly illustrated catalog. Organized by Jeff Kelley, a Bay Area critic, author and curatorial consultant, the exhibition puts a spotlight on a leading Chinese artist who opposes Socialist Realism by reworking it from inside the academy.

“He’s a postmodern Socialist Realist,” Kelley said.

Mao fixation

The show begins outside the building with a 13-foot-tall, caged version of Sui’s signature red dinosaur. Inside, East meets West in Sui’s white fiberglass copies of Michelangelo’s nude “Bound Slave” and “Dying Slave” sculptures, dressed in oversize Mao suits. Several other works replicate Mao jackets, standing on pedestals or a shelf as if they are fitted to headless men with ramrod-straight postures. Fashioned of gray painted aluminum or popsicle-hued fiberglass, the empty jackets are “anti-monuments,” Kelley said, or “half-buried tombstones” for a leader whose persona still haunts China.

Mao changes from a ghostly presence to material form in the centerpiece of the show, “Sleeping Mao.” The 18-by-23-foot horizontal sculpture portrays him as a traditional sleeping Buddha -- except that he’s wrapped in a blue peasant blanket in the middle of an abstract map of Asia composed of thousands of toy plastic dinosaurs. Wide open to interpretation, the artwork raises questions about whether the rosy-cheeked leader is really dead and relegated to history or simply resting up for the next chapter in the life of China.

Bearing witness to the nation’s economic, social and political transformation, Sui’s work often looks as if it’s fabricated of something other than its actual material. In that sense, his art can be seen as a metaphor for an economic colossus that has built its power on the export of cheap, mass-produced products. But meanings are in the eye and the mind of the beholder.

“Sui’s sculptures embody the ambivalence of his times,” Kelley said, “and the time of his ambivalence.”

At the very least, they offer insight into a genre of Chinese contemporary art no longer contained by national borders.

Contact Suzanne Muchnic at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.