Optional Exercise 

Gu Zhenqing  

Artists always have their own problems, some of them are related to their cultural context, the other to their survival environment. Those two kinds of problems sometimes go parallel and sometimes go intersected and entangled. At the critical stage of social transition in China, the sublimating melody of a rising great nation and economic growth makes a sharp contrast to the doubling daily pressure and the helplessness of individuals, the survival problem turns into an overwhelming problem, and that lays a profound impact on every individual artist’s logic advance. How shall artists respond to this current predicament? To put in priority the solution of survival pressure problem or to ignore the interference and continue to observe in awe and veneration the sky overhead and the inner moral law, as to go all the way forward on the clues of art reflection and independent innovation? 

In shaping the subjectivity of Chinese contemporary art that is gradually coming into a delightful stage, we have indeed experienced the repeated tempering of form centralism, concept centralism and method centralism. The saying that all art forms and styles in China in the past 30 years could be prototyped in Europe and America has in fact self-devaluated the positive significance of a late-developing subject’s progress in imitating and learning from other cultures. All in all, as every individual grows up in learning, every late-developing subject carves its own spiritual maturation on its way of imitating and learning and then gradually liberates and releases itself to find the opportunity of independent innovation. Art innovation is no other than a kind of common impulse in people’s pursue of spiritual freedom. However, an artist’s optional exercise differs from that of any other artist. Artists shall keep hold of their own cultural context and stick to their value orientation of independent innovation so that they can resist any temptation of opportunism, no matter on what material, method, form or concept. As the situation in China is rewriting the international practice and the cultural context in China is influencing the global positions, shaping the subjectivity of Chinese contemporary art is an unavoidable space for Chinese artists to realize their value. Every artist shall, on logic of his own cultural environment, constantly refresh the direction of his way forward by breaking the existing norms and going beyond the previous experience, the result of which, advance or retreat, gains or losses, will be a real cultural accumulation. A visible predicament is only a realistic challenge but an invisible predicament is no other than a substantial spiritual crisis. 

The problem of survival environment failed in holding back the scientific and technological progress or the evolution of art concept in history and it can not restrain the real maturation of the individual soul of an artist in the present. Facing the problem, to take an optional action in accordance with the existing conditions is a kind of smartness as well as a sense of normalcy. Whatever it may be, barbaric growth, rational conscience or emotional impulse, the importance is the artist’s persistence in personality. Persist in being yourself. Persist in surpassing yourself. Persist in constructing and improving your cultural logic. Persist to the end, everything is but a floating cloud. If you can not persist, you are a cloud.