Emphasising art from China

For Qatar, it’s the art tour de force of the year. A prime highlight of the Qatar-China Year of Culture, ‘What About the Art? Contemporary Art from China’, presented by Qatar Museums, has been winning hundreds of jaw-dropped fans by the day at the Al Riwaq gallery.
The man who has painstakingly put together the compelling works of 15 contemporary Chinese artists under one sprawling roof is the New York-based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. Following the immense success of his solo exhibition ‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab’, held at Mathaf in 2011, the acclaimed artist returns to Qatar, this time as a curator, to gift Qatar this overwhelming treat. Featuring 15 Chinese artists and collectives born in Mainland China working in a variety of media, the exhibition runs until July 16.
Having devoted three years to the curatorial research and development of the exhibition, Cai Guo-Qiang has ensured that artworks exemplifying each artist’s unique artistic language and methodology are displayed in individual galleries, and that each of their distinctive artistic voice is heard loud and clear. The artists’ diverse bodies of works traverse the media of painting, sculpture, installation, video, performance and interactive video game design.
A day after the exhibition opened in Doha, Cai Guo-Qiang spoke to Community about the exhibition, what inspired it, the ideas that propel it, and what art really is about:
The way the exhibition is titled is because for a long time, the world’s attention on Chinese art has been on its socio-political background or its booming economy. As a result, the individual creativity and the individual artistic language of the artists have been ignored. By titling the show, ‘What about the art?’ we return the focus to each artist’s individual expressions.
The artists here in Qatar face a similar challenge of how to reconcile with their cultural background and political context while voicing their individual creativity. I hope that this exhibition leaves an impact and inspires the young artists here to pursue their individual expressions.
Today, in the art world, the popular themes that are dealt with are environmental issues, terrorism, refugee crisis, or other social issues. But these themes come and go. What is more important is how the artist who faces these issues chooses to respond to them and answers those questions. That is the artist’s unique expression in art.
As an artist, I don’t think when I curate this exhibition I change my identity and turn into a curator. I have curated this exhibition from the perspective of an artist. Artists discussing about art amongst themselves are almost like animals getting together and discussing about other animals. There’s this blunt, raw energy. However, when you have curators and scholars discussing animals, they are more like zoologists examining them from a distance.
When I talk to artists, I am interested in discovering what challenges they are facing, their source of joy and how they turn their thoughts into form and how they express their concepts, and their attitude. So the question comes down to this – As an artist, what is your unique individual expression of language? What is truly yours? What did you add to art history? This is quite a basic question of art history, actually. However, today, when I ask this question to artists, there’s always a pause. They are unable to answer. That’s because everyone is used to speaking about how their work represents the environment or some socio-political issue; they are not used to talking about how they express these issues.
For this exhibition, after reviewing the works of more than 200 artists, we narrowed down to about 25 artists, and then I visited their studios and eventually chose these 15, whose works we see here. In selecting these artists, I thought about the unique character of their artistic language, and their spirit of exploration. All too often, we seek out the political and social significance in an artist’s work while ignoring the rich significance of the artist’s attention to form. The media would rather discuss the record prices set by a work of art than analyse how it was painted, and how well.
Chinese art is, in itself, quite a popular theme. There have been over 200 to 300 exhibitions on this theme which is in fact, impressive, because very rarely can a country imagine its art, thematically, being exhibited.
In this exhibition, what I have tried to do is cast off the Chinese veil of these artists and return to their individual art. So, returning to my point about the title of the exhibition, it is contemporary art from China, it’s not contemporary Chinese art. So here is the subtle difference: It’s not about China, it’s about art. What I am asking here is can we treat these Chinese artists the same way that we treat an artist from the UK, Japan, or India?
During the era of Soviet Russia, the world devoted a lot of attention to the artists from that region. Later, when it disintegrated and the Russian economy collapsed, the world lost its interest in these artists. The socio-political situation in China faces a paradox. The complex relationship between China and the global world, and the sense of loss that China as a modern, developing country faces is a loss of faith. These are all opportunities for the world to cast its attention on China. And in terms of the attention in art history, what is left in the end is this question – what did you contribute to art history that remained?
We all know that great literature and art has been born during times of drastic change in the history of the world. But apparently, China has a long way to go in terms of this aspect. So this exhibition also serves as a warning to Chinese art.
Artists use their creative voice to talk about their lives. For an artist, emphasising on their individual voice and their personality is not an act of avoiding politics. On the contrary, this is political in itself. If we reach a point in society where everyone has their independent thought and voice and are able to voice it, then the society would be healthy.