What is Bentu?

Bentu: Chinese Artists in a Time of Turbulence and Transformation
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
27.01.16 – 02.05.16

Translated by Daniel Szehin Ho

Bentu: Chinese Artists in a Time of Turbulence and Transformation was a group exhibition of contemporary Chinese art, jointly organised by the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art ( UCCA ) in Beijing. It was an exhibition not of artistic movements/currents and theoretical terms, but one with a very sociological title, ‘Bentu’ ( ‘native soil’ ). According to the organisers’ official explanation, ‘bentu’ is opposed to the ‘global’ and does not refer to nationalistic ideas – even if the suggestion of such a dichotomy might arouse one’s suspicions.

It was a rather ambitious exhibition. Although the official material clearly states that it was different from previous exhibitions in France, which have sought to introduce Chinese contemporary art in a comprehensive way, this exhibition still unfolded around grand narratives: taking the immense transformations in Chinese society as a backdrop, it sought to deal with the question of the ‘native’ ( ‘bentu’ ) in the context of globalisation. This meant that the exhibition fell into the usual trap of seeming to offer some kind of panoramic, or all-encompassing, overview.

Despite being slightly conservative, the exhibition was excellent. Although the curators, wanting to shake off China’s position as an ‘other’ within the Western context, chose twelve artists, born mainly in the 1970s ( the oldest being Xiaodong Liu, born in the 1960s, and the youngest, Hui Tao, born in the 1980s ), to reflect the ‘spirit of the times’, this made little difference to the final outcome. In fact, from the perspective of institutions in France, it is only meaningful for Chinese artists to be packaged within a set geographic and historic context. Even if we disregard the political aspects, from both a social and a cultural point of view China is still seen in the West as the ‘other’.

In rough terms, the works presented in the exhibition dealt with the following topics:

– Urban space( s ) and individuals: Chuang Liu’s BBR ( Blossom Bud Restrainer No. 1 ), Xiangqian Hu’s The Woman in Front of the Camera, Zhen Xu’s Confucius PE, Cao Fei’s Strangers.

– Nostalgia after urbanisation: Xiaodong Liu’s Hometown Boy series, Xiangqian Hu’s Speed at the End of the World.

– Rural space: Hui Tao’s One Character and Seven Materials, Fudong Yang’s Blue Kylin.

– Economic and social globalisation: Qu Xu’s Currency Wars, Shiyuan Liu’s From Happiness to Whatever.

– Appropriation of We Liu’s Purple Air; tribute to traditional Chinese art: Zhijie Qiu’s Map of the Third World, Liang Hao’s The Virtuous Being.

This is categorisation for the sake of categorisation. It cannot summarise what is subtle and particular about each work, but from it we can catch a glimpse of the curators’ reason for grouping all these works under the common ‘bentu’ label.

Certainly, if we tacitly agree that works of art are embedded in the social contexts in which they are born, and that they always reflect their society, whether consciously or unconsciously, then these works, without a doubt, reference China’s current conditions of rapid ‘urbanisation’ and gradual ‘globalisation’. However, any conclusions we may reach about China’s ‘urbanisation’ and ‘globalisation’ do not derive from the works themselves, but rather from a broader understanding that draws on other disciplines, such as economics and sociology. These works merely happen to lend weight to the argument.

This, then, raises a number of interesting questions. Firstly, when the exhibition adopts this dichotomous discursive system of the ‘global’ and the ‘native’ as a way of conceiving and understanding contemporary Chinese art ( regardless of any kind of post-colonial critique ), does it come from a preexisting system of knowledge, informed by first impressions? Or is it based on an understanding of China’s conditions and artistic environment? It was the curators’ stated aim to explore questions about the nature of the transformations currently affecting China. And yet, this would seem to reduce the exhibition to the status of an illustration of an academic thesis.

Secondly, even if the curators of contemporary Chinese art have already abandoned intensely ideological art, such as Postsocialist Pop, in the end are they not being even more blatantly ideological in resorting to a discursive system rooted in ideas of the ‘native’ and the ‘global’?

And then, if the dichotomy between the ‘global’ and the ‘native’ ( ‘bentu’ ) really reflects a universal paradigm capable of transcending ‘nationalism’, should it not be equally valid in the case of exhibitions of contemporary art in India, Brazil or, for that matter, any other ‘Third World’ country? If so, where exactly does the distinctiveness of China lie? Or could it be that contemporary Chinese art is not really so distinctive after all?

Returning to the discursive system itself: although these broad sociological classifications may offer a simple, general, and seemingly reasonable interpretative framework, they cannot explain the individual choices behind each artist’s work, or the subtleties of each individual work of art. Of course, one of the limitations of any large-scale exhibition is the need for a congruous logical thread, in order to link the works together.

Today, with all the recent developments in art history and curation, we already have too much art research that is bound up with paradigms – not to mention whole sets of ‘regional knowledge’ drawn from other disciplines. This makes it possible for people to write confidently, and at length, about any foreign culture ( and who defines foreign culture? ), yet neglect the dynamic particularities of the individual artist. What kind of specific contexts do artists inhabit? What do they read and listen to every day? Whom do they talk to? Why might they want to go back to their place of origin, to express their emotions in paint in front of their parents and relatives? Why might they want to go and deliver a passionate speech at their old primary school? This cannot all be boiled down to examples of ‘going native’ ( ‘bentu’ ) in the face of globalisation. It is not enough, for example, to mention – as the exhibition’s curator does in the catalogue – that Xiaodong Liu’s Hometown Boy was basically created at the invitation of the UCCA, in 2010! This means, effectively, that we cannot have looked in any depth at the artists’ motives for making their works, and goes no further than asking the usual kinds of ‘chicken-and-egg’ question.

Speaking of artists’ motives, this calls forth yet another question: the choice of artists to be in the exhibition. As ‘successful people’ among their colleagues, to what extent do their works actually reflect the ‘native’ ( ‘bentu’ ) conditions of China – assuming, for the moment, that we accept the proposition that China is the ‘other’ in Western parlance? Apart from being of an approximately similar age, practically all twelve of the participating artists live and work in Beijing and Shanghai, the two most developed cities in China, which are also the most immediately affected by globalisation. In anthropological terms, the artists could very well be ‘self-othering’, creating different forms and stereotypes of Chinese society – in other words, producing the ‘other’ of the ‘other’ by, for example, returning to their places of origin, sketching from life and collecting samples from minority areas.

At the same time, artists now also have more international experience, even experience of studying abroad. With the globalisation of the Chinese art market, all this makes their ideas and forms of expression adhere even more to international standards – and this fact was also noted, and praised, by the French curator in the exhibition catalogue. This, perhaps, reflects another embarrassing truth, which is that the ‘native’ ( ‘bentu’ ) artists and works of art in China can be known and understood by the artistic mainstream, only if they look sufficiently ‘globalised’.

In this regard, no exhibition can surpass Magiciens de la Terre, which took place in Paris in 1989. This first appearance of contemporary Chinese art administered a powerful shock to viewers, who were at a loss to know how to react: ‘Oh, so ink abstraction is still going strong!’ Although the artists who participated back then did not completely share similar concerns, and although they were certainly not representative of all Chinese art ( how could they be? ), their very diversity acted as an incentive to unprejudiced viewers to get closer to the work itself.

Of course, if we insisted on pushing the comparison further, we might feel obliged to ask ourselves whether the shock effect for audiences owed more to a hunger for novelty or to quest for a deeper form of understanding that might even carry ideological implications. There is no way of answering this, even if it provided for a more satisfactory artistic experience. But at least we can say that, in exhibitions where the curatorial discourse is excessively dominant, a strongly coherent curatorial grand narrative will only intensify existing understandings, instead of sparking off something new. The Bentu exhibition also reflected this limitation.