TEXTBOOK: LIVELY CHINESE PAINTINGS

                                                                                                                                  Gu Zhenqing

    “Text” is a concept in the context of semeiology and can also be understood as “basic document”, “textbook”. The text we are referring to here is to remind the field experience and spirit accumulation of Chinese paintings nowadays. When all comes to all, contemporary art, in which contemporary painting included, even if with the universal adaptive capacity, is still an out and out import from abroad. However, China has already had a learning process of thirty years, thirty years of practice of borrowing, from copy、imitation、absorption、transplant to grafting、change and reconstruction, Chinese artists have gathered rich experiences of betterment and renovation directed at foreign culture. The violent collision and severe distortion happened when contemporary art was transferred to China should be understandable in terms of the long tradition of cultural integration and the new tradition of absorbing or borrowing the excellent cultural achievement from abroad since the nineteenth century. It should also be understandable that contemporary art takes root in present China, sprouts and blooms lively and produces fruit. However, what matters the most is whether the blooming flower and fruit produced are the miracles or exceptions of this contemporary civilization of mankind and whether they are excellent and advanced enough to lead the forces and relations of production of contemporary art in a global context and guide more people to get out of the spirit predicament under the condition of globalization?

    Based on common human nature and rapid growing modern experiences gathered in the advantage of latecomers, Chinese artists are ceaselessly doing some rethinking, or even trying to reject the aesthetic formulary in the contemporary art system, as well as the habitual thinking and the path dependence. Changes, advance with difficulty through the tidal waves of interaction of critical thinking and meanwhile, the spirit accumulations of artists sprout and thrive both consciously and unconsciously. The proliferation of Chinese contemporary painting has embodied certain site-specific quality of artists living in the present. The experiences of artists have also gradually acquired a double quality of Chineseness in which the individuality and commonness coexist.

    The “Chineseness” of contemporary art and textbook indication of “Chinese value” help to recognize the self development of artists and to wipe out the colored lable of the ideology demonization and the spirit shield of the so-called “CCA” (Chinese Contemporary Art) which already exists abroad. Therefore, to think and rearrange the proper “textbook” of artists and to build cultural critic system of their self consciousness have become the construction cornerstone of the concept of “Chineseness”. To rearrange the mother tongue and grammar of our own culture and the experiences gained in New-Culture Movement and the May 4th Movement has become an inevitable choice for artists living in the present China. Throwing away feeling small, removed the lable of “CCA”, from the trait common collectivism remains to the wave of liberation of personality nowadays, Chinese artists have come a long way and what they are stepping into will be the id nature and real self-realization. The exhibition of “TEXTBOOK” tries to clean up the many bubbles attached to the experiences of Chinese paintings nowadays as well as the derivatives in an imitation show style and in the mean time, it tries to have an insight into the rational basis and the relative context of selfhood of some Chinese artists in order to make the present Chinese paintings tangible and within our grasp.