Children of the revolution

NAPOLEON is said to have compared China with a sleeping giant. When China woke, he predicted, the world would tremble.

NAPOLEON is said to have compared China with a sleeping giant. When China woke, he predicted, the world would tremble.

The China Project, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Until June 28.

But China slumbered on through the 19thcentury, even after Japan began its breathtaking transformation from 1868. Although the moribund imperial system was finally replaced before World War I, between the wars the Chinese were the victims of Japanese aggression. But if the Chinese as a nation and a people seemed relatively passive alongside the martial Japanese, the individual Chinese who migrated throughout Southeast Asia as well as to Australia and elsewhere were anything but inert: industrious and adaptable, they soon became capitalists in countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia.

Perhaps the paradox is only apparent. Chinese culture is founded on a symbiosis of two distinct but complementary ways of thinking: Confucianism, with its emphasis on family and duty, and Taoism, which is a semi-mystical philosophy of nature. Neither of these philosophies is strictly speaking political, nor did they develop within a culture that had any idea of democratic or parliamentary government. No doubt this is one reason why communism succeeded in China, as in Russia: it appealed to a politically inexperienced population and offered a seemingly uncomplicated way of improving their lot.

It was never likely, however, that the clever and enterprising spirit of the Chinese would be satisfied with communism in the long run. This was why, within less than two decades of seizing government in 1949, Mao Zedong was obliged to launch the hysteria of the Cultural Revolution, bolstering his power by whipping up the lowest social classes into envy and hatred of those more intelligent or more capable. There was a terrible cost in human suffering, destruction of art and cultural treasures, and in more intangible but enduring damage to the social fabric. This horrible episode, which lasted from 1966 to Mao's death in 1976, was applauded at the time by many Western intellectuals: exactly the kind of people who in China might have been humiliated and brutalised by the bands of thugs called the Red Guards.

Since the death of Mao and the arrest of the Gang of Four, China has moved quite rapidly towards economic liberalisation, but far more slowly towards social and political reform. It remains to be seen whether the Chinese regime can sustain its so-called "socialism with Chinese characteristics": economic liberalisation generally undermines authoritarian government, but the Chinese Government seems to be counting on the nation's lack of any tradition of civil society or political institutions, hoping that its citizens will be content with prosperity and not seek freedom as well. China did allow some liberalisation in the mid-1980s, but that came to a brutal end in June 1989 with the events of Tiananmen Square, ironically, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

All of this is the background to a fascinating exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. The China Project, which sounds rather like a working title that stuck, is really three exhibitions rolled into one package. The main show is a survey of the gallery's own holdings of Chinese art produced in the past 30 years, including works given by Nicholas Jose and Claire Roberts, and with the addition of a number of loans. The second exhibition is a retrospective of one of the most prominent contemporary Chinese painters, Zhang Xiaogang, and the third is a smaller selection of works by the Australian-born photographer William Yang.

Most of the artists included in this exhibition were children or teenagers during the Cultural Revolution and some of them were deeply disturbed by the abuse suffered by their parents. But one set of works in the show brings back the dark years with absolute matter-of-factness. Li Zhensheng was a young photographer for a regional newspaper at the time and he shot countless rolls of black-and-white pictures: Red Guards marching through the countryside, workers huddled around to hear an edict from the party, individuals being tormented and humiliated for their allegedly counter-revolutionary activities. All his negatives were carefully hidden and preserved, and now they tell the story plainly, without rhetoric, with the deadly weight of fact.

Many other artists entered the art schools when they were allowed to reopen after the Cultural Revolution. In the late 1970s and early '80s, most young Chinese artists were struggling to define their position between the two great traditions they had inherited: classic Chinese ink painting and the Western oil medium that they generally first encountered in the methodical but coarsened and ideological Soviet version of the academic tradition. Access to the great works of the European heritage was only through books, and even then it was extremely restricted: Zhang recalls that students were allowed to read one page of the art history textbook a day; he would copy it out in its entirety. This story, which he related in a talk at GoMA, gives a poignant sense of the intense isolation and the thirst for knowledge of history, the outside world and modern culture that animated this generation.

A number of paintings belong to this period, but it is best illustrated by the early work of Zhang, much of which has never been exhibited before: scenes of rural life alternate with searching self-portraits -- his favourite author at the time was Nietzsche -- and small paintings combining elements borrowed from Cezanne, expressionism and surrealism. All this belonged to the new wave of the second half of the '80s; but then, as he related in the same talk, "What happened in 1989 woke everybody up; you could not separate yourself from reality, you couldn't live in a world of books."

Zhang had the opportunity to go to Germany in 1992. This allowed him to study, for the first time, the masterpieces of Western art he had only known in reproductions; but it also made him understand that he had to find his own way, a specifically Chinese way. Whereas his 1983 self-portrait is hardly oriental at all, he now realised that "Chinese faces are unique and different". The result was his best known series of work, in which young men -- as in Three Comrades (1994) -- in Maoist costume stare out at the viewer with smooth, unlined faces and blank eyes. In subsequent paintings, these haunting figures of alienation and wistful, almost imperceptible longing, reappear in pairs, in male and female forms, with a child or a baby. Sometimes, more recently, single faces float in isolation, their disconnection verging on ecstasy or swooning.

The pressure of reality and the urgency of the response to oppression are, of course, what give Chinese art of the '80s and '90s a much greater authenticity than the largely effete and commercial contemporary art of the West. This is not to suggest that one must live under tyranny to produce great art; but there must be some kind of tension and necessity in the relation of artist to society. Contemporary art in the West exists in a depressurised milieu in which almost every gesture is gratuitous. The trouble with more recent Chinese art, predictably, is that since it has been embraced by the all-devouring international art market, commercial imperatives have taken over. Zhang's pictures now sell to immensely wealthy collectors for vast sums of money, and the recent work is beginning to look as vacuous as most things in that market.

The world of Maoism seems in some ways unimaginably remote from the China of today, and yet memories of the man, the regime, and the principal events in its history, particularly the Long March of 1934-36, are pervasive. One notable work in the exhibition is a set of photographs by Mu Chen and Shao Yinong, of rooms and halls used for Maoist meetings and teaching. They are like historical palimpsests -- converted temples, schoolrooms, dining rooms -- hung with red flags, filled with worn furniture; rooms that were taken over by the revolution but now are forgotten, or turned into museums, or in some cases perhaps destroyed in the tidal wave of demolition and redevelopment that has transformed China's cities.

Another set of photographs shows us this new world: Hu Yang has taken pictures of 500 Shanghai residents in their homes -- mostly tiny flats -- asking them at the same time to answer three simple questions about their living conditions, dreams and sufferings. Three walls are covered with a selection of 75 prints, and the result is absorbing. As in the city itself, wealth is cheek-by-jowl with poverty, consumerism with subsistence, self-indulgence with resignation. The storm of economic activity outside is evoked in Wang Qinsong's immense installation in the main hall of GoMA: thousands of handwritten posters for an interminable range of consumer goods, including well-known Western names. The work reminds us how much the prestige of brands depends on the polish of their packaging and advertising: these rough and handpainted versions of the names and logos strip off the glamour and reveal the tawdriness of consumer fetishisation with almost shocking directness.

Very far from this striking but ephemeral installation is a work that already stood out when it was first shown in Australia in 1992, and can now plausibly be considered one of the most significant works of conceptual art of the later 20th century. Xu Bing's A Book from the Sky looks at first sight like a collection of ancient Chinese annals, beautifully printed in the classic characters of the Sung dynasty. Above our heads two long scrolls are unfurled like a canopy. The trouble is that the characters are unreadable; composed of the elements of real characters, butmeaningless.

There is something sublime and yet terrifying about the idea of an unreadable language. Xu spent about five years carving the blocks for the characters and then meticulously printing the books by hand, and it is this consummate craftsmanship that lends the work conviction. This is not a flippant gesture; had it been done more quickly or carelessly, it would lack weight. What does it mean? The poetic resonance is too deep for any facile decoding, but among the connotations that can be sensed beneath a serene surface are anger at the perversion of language by systematic lies and manipulation and lamentation for the lost integrity of the millennial tradition of Chinese scholarship.

There are many more artists worthy of consideration in this show, and on the whole their work is interesting not only for the quality of motivation mentioned above, but also for the sense of cultural memory and the sophistication with which aspects of Chinese tradition are woven into modern and contemporary forms of expression. The exhibition concludes, or perhaps begins, with a small survey of William Yang's photographs, in which the Australian-born photographer shows the members of his extended family, today spread across the world and often merged with other peoples. As though in counterpoint to this diffusion, a second series reflects on his own gradual rediscovery of the culture of his forebears, a process he refers to as "coming out as Chinese". But obstacles will always remain for a boy who grew up in a Queensland country town: living between two cultures is never straightforward.