Collaborative Contemporary Chinese Art

Tamen, Shanghai Night from the Same Room Series, 2009

This summer was supposed to be dedicated to thesis research and writing. Instead I took a bit of an academic hiatus, hightailed it to Italy for a week in June, backpacked a bit through Thailand with my brother in July and then came back and started to piece my domestic life back together in August. So here I am, thousands of frequent flier miles later, post-sun tan, post-summer vacation, post-health insurance, still trying to get it together. While I sit in NYU’s Bobst library on a Saturday night during Labor Day weekend, eating Goldfish, thinking about my next globe trotting adventure, instead of finishing the book I’m currently reading (The Third Hand, by Charles Green) for my thesis, I’m dedicating a blog post to the little bit of what I’ve nailed down so far.

Thesis Topic: Collaborative Contemporary Chinese Art

Chinese Artists:

Tamen: (Work pictured above). Chen Li, Lai Shengyu and Yang Xiaogang function as a collective known as Tamen (meaning “they” in Mandarin). Known for “wacky” and kitschy contemporary scenes juxtaposing Eastern and Western Culture (as in their “Same Room Series”) they oscillate between painting and photography.

Birdhead, From The Song of Early Spring, 2012

Birdhead: The Shanghai duo formed by Song Tao and Ji Weiyu in 2004 work in the photographic medium capturing the everyday documentary images of their city employing a post-punk aesthetic.

The Luo Brothers, Welcome the World Famous Brand Name, 1993-94

The Luo Brothers: Classified as Political Pop, these three brothers from Beijing mock the Eastern consumption of Western brands (such as Coca-cola) by incorporating acid colors, impish Chinese babies and depictions of Chairman Mao.

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Old Persons Home, 2007

Sun Yuan & Peng Yu: These guys a probably my favorite collective because they’re the most outlandish and may be the “most controversial artists working in China today” (says multiple sources). This duo based in Beijing, deals with conceptual art and work in installation and performance art. They’ve incorporated live animals (fish, crustations, dogs), baby cadavers, among other things in their works. In Old Persons Home, shown at the Saatchi Gallery in London, the duo used motorized wheelchairs with hyperrealistic silicon sculptures made in the likeness of elderly folks who were supposed to represent the U.N. (dead). The wheelchairs were placed on an automatic setting at a very low speed and were sent on a collision course, bumper-car style.

So what I’m trying to explore here is what exactly is achieved through collaborative efforts by these artists working in a post-Cultural Revolution, post-Mao, post-open trade contemporary China. As a point of comparison, I will also incorporate works by Russian and Western collectives. I originally wanted to explore Chinese art because contemporary art is taught (at least in my program) as being fairly Western-centric and while BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and MINT (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey) countries are incorporated to a small extent, there are tremendous gaps in my knowledge about Chinese contemporary art. The idea for my thesis was also spurred by the premise that Burning Man was founded on– the idea of working together to produce art instead of perpetuating the artist as genius idea.