Art and Consciousness in China – Cultural Evolution Conditions and Strategies: Contemporary Art Education and Communication Symposium; China Academy of Art – Hangzhou China
MAY 2008
I recently participated in a fascinating conference on the nature of art schools and education in Europe and Asia sponsored by the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. The conference included leaders from elite art schools all over Europe and Asia as well as four from the US. Conspicuous by their absence were any art schools from the third world – none from South America, Africa or the Middle East. Oddly absent too, were representatives from prestigious Australian and New Zealand Art colleges. This visit to China was all about cultural change and institutional prestige, but from its inception it reflected the cultural and political realities still present in the world.
We had all been invited to attend this conference celebrating the 80th Anniversary of the China Academy of Art, with 7,000 students China’s second largest, and arguably China’s most prestigious art college. Over a hundred distinguished art educators from around the world were housed and fed in luxury for three days in China’s most beautiful city, Hangzhou. We stayed in an elegant hotel, generally the domain of high party officials. Facing Hangzhou’s renowned West Lake our hotel was surrounded with fruit trees in full blossom and the unmistakable scent of Chinese Springtime. That week, everything in China seemed to be blossoming.
The stated intention of the conference was to celebrate the anniversary of the China Academy of Art through a meaningful dialogue of contemporary ideas about art colleges and the nature of inter-cultural communication. The subtler agenda was recognition of CAA as a world-class arts institution by the schools whose opinions and relationships China values most, the other elite art schools of the world. CAA had just completed a gigantic new campus which featured a 14-story glass tower, as well as about a dozen other buildings, with commanding views of the Hangzhou countryside, where our conference mostly took place. We were there to be impressed by the sheer spectacle of Chinese wealth and ambition. It had been 16 years since I first visited this art school, and I was impressed by one thing at least. China has really changed!
We saw clear signs that Chinese art students were being encouraged to think independently for the first time in decades, maybe centuries. They are encouraged by progressive faculty, some of whom have recently been imprisoned or qt least marginalized for ter outspoken behavior. for the first time ever to make politically sensitive art works and to challenge repression. First year students were encouraged to express individual ideas and to experiment with surrealist explorations of the unconscious through drawing and painting exercises. In the past they were only encouraged to develop hand skills and to recite the tired old 19th century artistic styles that were associated with Mao and Stalin and to disdain the traditional artistic practices of Chinese Art. Today, even industrial design students are being taught the traditional Chinese practices of ink and brush, calligraphy and landscape painting. “China is clearly acknowledged by his acolytes”, is a popular saying in post Tien An Men China. That real meaning exists in a dimension that transcends reason and language The President of the Academy echoed the previous revolutionary leaders of the school, Lin Feng Mian and Pan Tien Shou who said that everything should be taught as art. Creativity and transformation require entering a dimension of innovation and exploration which are ultimately the domain of art. It means going beyond language and reason and finding the common ground between all living things from which real creativity and profound transformation emerges.
Exploring bold new ideas in art education that are somehow deeply related to the astonishing signs of economic wealth that are everywhere today in China. Where only a few years ago there were modest family-run sidewalk grocery stores, there are now posh new Maserati dealerships -- right next door to the art school. Where once students faced bleak careers as official propaganda artists and designers of dull utilitarian appliances, there is now anticipation of wealth and excitement. Students today talk of multi-media installations and video art. They speak openly of political change in China. Young Chinese art students are frank in expressing their belief that this is their century.
I felt deeply honored to have been among those invited, but a bit out of place among such august institutions as the University of the Arts in Berlin and Rhode Island School of Design, and the Tokyo University of the Arts, to name a few. In my introductory address to those assembled, I acknowledged that my program – Arts and Consciousness at JFK University, with only about 70 students, was by far the smallest school present. ‘We’re small’, I told the group, ‘but we have big ideas, and big ideas are what changes things – not big buildings. I told them I thought we were all there to honor and recognize the China Academy’s achievements and to change the world. I received polite applause and a few gratuitous handshakes afterwards. I had seen profound changes in China and was eager to be a part of them.
The next two days consisted of tours of the impressive new campus – the newest and largest of three CAA campuses is over 80 acres and includes massive structures for virtually every form of art and design – architecture, Chinese traditional art and most interesting to me, Experimental Art – a daring new BFA and MFA program that invites political and social commentary as well as the use of new genres such as installation, performance art and social and personal documentary and multi-media. They were clearly proud of their new showpiece buildings and technical facilities which included state-of-the-art digital labs and film and video production studios. One student's artwork was openly critical of Chinese government policy towards Tibet. I commented about the blatant dissidence of the student's artwork to an older faculty member. “Wouldn't this student have been in serious trouble for this kind of work a few years ago?”, I asked. “China has changed”, she told me solemnly, suggesting that she was not entirely pleased with the new openness, and that she basically considered the student a criminal for criticizing the government -- but rather expressing this belief, she simply stared at the work and moved on.
The President of the China Academy is a tall attractive man in his early 50’s, usually dressed in a hip designer leather jacket and blue jeans. Xiu Jiang did graduate work in Germany in the 80’s. He was formerly the chair of the China Academy’s oil painting department and is purportedly the favorite nephew of China’s former President, Jiang Zemin, although that is denied by many American China experts who suggest the title of ‘uncle is often honorary and that Jian Zemin is not related by blood to the President of the China Academy of Art. I have known Xiu Jiang for more than a decade, and it is our personal relationship, and mutual friends, that got me invited to participate in this gathering of elites rather than an acknowledgement of JFKU’s preeminence in the art world. President Xiu is clearly set on the path of opening China to the rest of the world – no longer a matter of East and West. China is participating fully in – maybe even engineering – a new kind of cultural scene that is non-local and non-partisan. Xiu Jiang’s political connections to the Chinese government and his radical ideas about artistic freedom signify an important addition to the world. China has changed, is changing, and doing it in a way that has already subtly eroded the foundations of so-called Western civilization of Asian civilization – of Communism and Capitalism – of everything. Xiu Jiang aims to create a new perspective on world civilization – not dominated by any ideology (China doesn’t really have an ideology anymore anyway) or nation. China seems to be on the verge of re-discovering its own identity at the very moment that the entire idea of national or even ethnic identity is about to vaporize into irrelevance.
In his opening address President Xiu Jiang, challenged those present to open a new dialogue and exchange about art, education and ideas – perilous ground even today for a Chinese artist/educator. Five years earlier at his opening address on the re-building of the school’s main campus and to a largely Chinese audience, Xiu told everyone with great passion that everything would be different from now on – that the old ways of doing things in China were over. He said there would be new art and new educational policies that would encourage artistic expression and innovation even if the government didn’t agree with it. Dean Giaco Schiesser of the Zurich University of the Arts acknowledged that the real conversation about what was happening in art and education was only just beginning. He believed that we hadn’t really even identified the true issues at hand. He quoted Jacques Derrida at length in an essay disseminated at the conference entitled the ‘University without Condition’ (Die Unbedinkte Universität). By interpreting Derrida’s ideas, he named the real issues facing us; re-examination of the function of art schools in a post-industrial society (he forgot the China is still an industrial society) and the inevitability of art and culture in issues of social, economic and political change. He spoke of the importance of “the dimension of not knowing”.
Witnessing the profound changes in Chinese art education is only fully possible when one enters that state of ‘not knowing’. Comprehending cultural transformation from the inside requires an acknowledgment that art itself is a process of change and surprise. In hearing the pronouncements by the cultural gatekeepers of international arts education, I was acutely aware that this is a perfect moment of change. We are right in the middle of an important period of change all over the world. China is trying hard to adjust.
In the conference room atop that spectacular glass art-school tower, twelve stories above the Chinese countryside, I witnessed dinosaurs and newly evolving birds, right in the same room. Some of us were dying – speaking from the extinct paradigms of privilege and self-interest; of material and political power wielded by art ‘academies’ of the past. Some of us were evolving – trying to use our new feathers, words, images and brave new ideas, to fly. The symbolism of meeting in so high a place seemed to accentuate China's awareness of its own evolution. It seemed clear that the leaders of the conference were inviting us to see the world differently We were seeing China in the act of scaling new heights. I left the conference with a great sense of ‘not-knowing’. Maybe that's the only way to really experience real (r)evolution.
Michael Grady, May 2009 © All rights reserved
