Coming Home to the City: Four Forms of Return in Contemporary Chinese Painting and Poetry.
This presentation begins with the question or problem of location; where do we find the Chinese city? As a methodological maneuver I endeavor to observe artists themselves seeing themselves at home in urban environments. By doing so in more than one medium I hope to identify underlying orientations which underlie urban-inflected contemporary Chinese art. For added clarity, I rely specifically on the maneuver of coming home as a thematic orientation point.
One problem with coming home for Chinese artists resident in urban centers is that the Chinese city is erasing itself under their feet. Thus the concept and the material fact are both fugitive, running around each other in amidst globalization and increasing pressure of commodity and material culture. Each artist finds innovative ways to stave off the elimination of authentic space, often by ever more direct appropriation of change itself. Zhong Biao, who features urban landscapes in most of his paintings, is perhaps the most conscientious documenter of erasure and urban flux, and amidst these collapsing and otherwise disappearing structures names some of his paintings “Coming Home.” Yan Li, whose home remains both in New York and Shanghai, is concerned in recent work, both poetic and visual, with exodus from urban centers into a natural world that remains nonetheless fugitive. An Niu's strategy is most direct: that of an emphatic though complex return to the body. And finally Zhang Er, who is the one artist residing entirely outside of China (having moved from Beijing to New York in the 1986), long ago adopted the strategy of merging cultural material of her homeland with North American urban experience.
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