As I walked around the spacious exhibition complex of the Ninth Shanghai Biennial in 2012, I noticed a group of young students with sketching pads in hands. The biennial, like most contemporary art exhibitions of its caliber, features more large-scale installations and displays of research-based art than conventional easel paintings.1 A few students, after wandering around and searching for subjects, finally settled down to sketch Simon Fujiwara’s Rebekkah, which features an army of life-size terracotta sculptures modeled on a young woman, displayed along the long, three-story-high stairs (fig. E.1). Although the piece is composed of highly naturalistic sculptures, the point of the work is hardly verisimilitude. The artist asked sixteen-year-old Rebekkah, one of the protagonists of the 2011 London Riots, to travel to China, where she visited factories of clothing, mobile phones, and TVs, while being restricted from accessing social media. The trip ended with a visit to Xi’an’s Terracotta Warriors. Rebekkah was then taken to a factory, where she was made into terracotta sculptures. The artist’s hand and eye had little to do with the terracotta sculptures, which were cast and assembled by factory workers experienced in making reproductions of the Terracotta Warriors. The sculptures are objects that conclude a social experiment that is the true artistic innovation of this piece.2 As exemplified by Fujiwara’s piece, the international contemporary art world has long since entered the age of conceptualism, the belief that all artistic creation—no matter what its material bases or technical approaches—is meaningful because there is a meaningful idea. Nonetheless, the students in Shanghai did not hesitate to use Fujiwara’s work as a good subject to hone their representational skills, which is the foundational training promised by “sketching from life” (xiesheng). A few particularly astute
Students sketching at the 2012 Shanghai Biennial. Courtesy of the author.
Had Qiu Zhijie (b. 1969), the chief curator of the biennial, seen these students, he would probably have sighed at the extent to which sketching from life has become embedded in Chinese artistic training. In the English-speaking world, Qiu first became known for his conceptual artworks that often reengage with calligraphy. His 1986 piece Copying “The Orchid Pavilion Preface” a Thousand Times, for which he copied the most iconic piece of Chinese calligraphy a thousand times on the same piece of paper to the point that it became a block of
This book began with the rise of open-air painting, which resulted from Republican-era Chinese painters’ painstaking pursuit of a proper way to see as a modern subject. The political turmoil of modern China increasingly welded this artistic self-reform with national salvation. This book labels this development the “ocular turn”: modern Chinese painters anxiously sought, revised, and reflected on ways of seeing, as perception lay at the core of how they defined their own professional expertise, how they understood and revived tradition, and how they positioned their individual pursuits in relation to the nation-state. These artists took great pride in their skills of representation, which were anchored in Cartesian perspectivalism. The Chinese academy curriculum throughout the twentieth century, of which open-air painting tours are a main component, has guaranteed the continuation and consolidation of the results of this ocular turn.
This book ends with Qiu Zhijie because he is one of the most outspoken voices to question the ocular turn. The period between the beginning of Qiu’s exploration of Total Art, which occurred shortly after China entered the World Trade Organization, and the 2012 Shanghai Biennial is a decade often associated with the rise of China. As a major and active player in the increasingly globalized world, China enjoyed dramatic economic growth during that decade. Despite its many problems—ever-widening inequality, environmental deterioration, and ongoing human rights violations, just to name a few—China of the 2000s is no longer a nation in danger of loss of sovereignty. Whereas in the past the economic and political disadvantage of modern China brought great shame, anxiety, and patriotism to its modern artists, Qiu’s generation faces a drastically different
Total Art: Perception as Critical Thinking
By the time Qiu Zhijie became a student at the China Academy of Art in the 1980s, open-air painting along with other aspects of China’s art world had already recovered from the temporary disruption of the Cultural Revolution. To young students like Qiu who were more fascinated by conceptually innovative art than by formal experiments in easel painting, open-air painting ceased to be the center of attention for artistic exploration or debate. Nonetheless, open-air painting trips remained an indispensable component of the curriculum in China’s reform era art academies, which continued to emphasize representational skills acquired by rigorous training based on the beaux-arts model.
The training students received on open-air painting trips in the 1980s and 1990s was not vastly different from that of the Republican academies in the 1920s and 1930s. Instructors still took the opportunity to consolidate the students’ hand and eye coordination, hone their understanding of composition, and, for those who majored in oil painting, strengthen their use of color.6 The excitement of the trips—as a diversion from the daily routine and an opportunity to spend time with instructors and classmates outside of the context of the classroom—also remained the same. However, the decades of intense socialist reform did bring certain differences. Unlike Republican-era faculty and students, who imagined their open-air painting activity and the subsequent display of works presenting a new mode of perception as education for a general public in need of enlightenment, the art academies of the 1980s and 1990s could hardly claim such a lofty position. Even the new terminology for open-air painting tours—often known as
The first attempt to change this long-standing practice in the art curriculum came around 2003, when the China Academy of Art gave Qiu Zhijie the responsibility for launching a new program of experimental art. By that time, contemporary art in China was no longer an underground force of rebellion in danger of suppression, but commercially viable production, the profit-producing potential of which the government was attempted to harness.7 The top art academies in China, such as the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, began to launch pedagogical reforms by creating teaching programs specifically reserved for experimental art, which would satisfy the increasing call for training in experimental art without overturning the overall structure of the academy.8
Qiu Zhijie named his program The Studio for Total Art. Qiu’s conception of Total Art was deeply influenced by a variety of sources, especially Adrian Henri’s Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance, a 1970 book the Chinese translation of which was published in 1990.9 Henri’s book champions performance art and “environments” created by contemporary artists, arguing that these new forms of art are as important as painting or sculpture. It is not surprising that Henri’s book resonated well with Qiu and many Chinese experimental artists of his generation, who had been exploring ways to break away from the dominance of figurative easel painting and sculpture. Although Qiu explicitly acknowledged the influence of Henri’s book on his own pursuit of “Total Art,” he was also clear about their differences. First, whereas Henri featured pop art along with futurism, constructivism, Dada, and works by Beuys and Kaprow, Qiu found this inclusion a dilution of the fundamental innovation of Total Art. Qiu’s rejection of pop art demonstrates his understanding of Total Art as highly conceptual, decidedly anticommodification, and fundamentally merging life and art. Second, Qiu repeatedly emphasized that Chinese artists could not simply borrow methods of Total Art evolved from Euro-American art movements but instead had to create a framework based on their own cultural traditions and experiences.10
The essence of Qiu’s Total Art is succinctly stated in the title of one of his articles: “Total Art Based on Social Investigation.” The training Qiu and
Qiu and his colleagues have carried out their pedagogical experiments in Total Art in the setting of the art academy, where the open-air painting tour is still a central component of the curriculum. Qiu is explicit about the relationship between his experiments and open-air painting, describing the social investigations as “using the notion of anthropological fieldwork to supplement the traditional idea of going to the countryside to paint from life.”12 Although social investigation did not necessarily require out-of-town trips, the open-air painting trips—well established in the academy’s calendar—gave students more than two weeks of intense fieldwork, which enabled Qiu to develop, adjust, and reflect on the teaching of Total Art.
Such teaching ultimately prompted Qiu and his students to question the very practice of open-air painting. In 2006, Qiu assembled a team of forty people, mostly second- and third-year undergraduate students, to engage in a month-long project on Tibet.13 The first stage came before the trip. Students combed the library at the academy and collected artworks on Tibet to understand the history of the representation of Tibet in modern China, which, as discussed in chapters 4 and 5, started with open-air painting tours during the War of Resistance and continued into the socialist era. The students printed reproductions of these works and brought them on the road. The second stage was a tour of Tibet, where students launched temporary exhibitions of these reproductions—many of which had never before been seen by people in Tibet—in public spaces such as temple fairs, middle schools, and public basketball courts. Students engaged with locals at these exhibitions, developing interview questions and eventually questionnaires. While seeing Tibet and listening to the local responses to these earlier artworks
Throughout these trips, Qiu required students to write brief statements in the format of “I used to think … and now I have discovered. …”16 In other words, stark conceptual changes were the expected result of such a trip. The purpose of social investigation in the field is not merely to facilitate observation or analysis of various subjects of the artist’s choice. Instead, Qiu believes that social investigation inevitably leads to a critical reflective gaze that scrutinizes the very order that the artist has operated under and taken for granted. This reflective observation championed by Qiu is essentially critical thinking. If the purpose of the open-air painting trips of the 1910s and 1920s was to shape the Shanghai Art Academy students into modern citizens conversant with perspectivalist vision, the trips led by Qiu were designed to reshape students into free-thinking individuals who are capable of looking beyond the comfortable space of common sense and seeing the limits of social, political, and artistic norms.
In 2012, at the time of the Ninth Shanghai Biennial, Qiu had been promoting Total Art for almost a decade. Although research-based art had become a regular presence in the contemporary Chinese art world, the critical reflection so central to this approach hardly prevailed in art education or mainstream art production supported by the state. Unlike the artists of the 1920s, whose embrace of perspectivalism aligned seamlessly with the state’s efforts at modernization, the epistemological self-reform by Qiu and like-minded artists was at odds with the state’s pursuit, even though these individual artists occasionally received recognition and even honors from the state.17 Not surprisingly, Qiu’s bold pedagogical experiment found institutional support only within the experimental art programs at the top academies. Ultimately, Total Art did not bring change to the way open-air painting trips were practiced in Chinese art education. On the contrary, while Qiu was urging young artists in training to reflect critically on their own perception, an unprecedentedly ossified view of Chinese landscape was being promulgated on an extensive scale.
For the first two decades of the twentieth-first century, China witnessed an explosive expansion of higher education, including higher education in art.18 Qiu’s first home institute, the China Academy of Art, enrolled fewer than 90 students in 1996. The number had skyrocketed to an annual enrollment around 1,500 by 2006, although enrollments were intentionally limited in highly prestigious and highly selective art academies like the China Academy of Art. The expansion since 1998 also engendered many new art departments in universities as well as in specialized colleges. According to national statistical data, there were a total of 825,133 art students in 2008, and the number had grown to 1,489,311 in 2015.19 Although these numbers also include students majoring in performance and music, a considerable part were enrolled in various visual arts majors such as painting, sculpture, graphic design, and animation. All these visual arts students were required to experience at least one open-air painting tour as an indispensable part of their art training. In Hubei Province alone, 40,000 art students from universities participated in open-air painting trips each year.20
Before the expansion of higher education, a few scenic locations were favored by painters and instructors in art academies. Following the Cultural Revolution and the resumption of open-air painting trips, Hongcun in Anhui Province
The radical growth in art programs since the higher education expansion of 1998 brought an overwhelming number of visitors to these open-air hot spots. This new demand led to a new hosting business known as “bases for open-air painting.” At first, villagers developed small-scale hostels that boasted tidy bunk beds and modern bathrooms. But the number of visiting students quickly surpassed the hosting capacities of these facilities. As a result, since 2005, large facilities have been developed, and accompanying services such as the rental of portable easels and stools have become the main business of many scenic villages (fig. E.2). This development was quickly approved and applauded by local governments, which were largely at a loss regarding how to revive the economy of rural China. To everyone’s delight, it turned out that there was still something left to be sold in these scenic villages: their views. The mom-and-pop shops of the 1980s were replaced by larger facilities, some of which were the result of government planning and development. The large base in Hongcun, which could host two thousand students at one time, became the envied model for aspiring bases all over China.22
An art supply store at Pingshan Village serving the bases for open-air painting in the village. Courtesy of the author.
Art instructors seem to have embraced this development. The rise of the bases for open-air painting brought comfort and convenience: wifi is now standard; each eight-person dorm is equipped with a bathroom with a flushable toilet and a hot-water shower, and instructors have one- or two-person suites comparable
Plaques hung at the dining hall of a base for open-air painting near Hongcun, Anhui Province. Courtesy of the author (deliberately blurred).
The rise of bases for open-air painting is more than just another story in which market demand and business logic play out their course. In fact, the rise
During the era of the War of Resistance and the early decades of socialist China, painters were pressured to see the homeland as productive and industrialized. This pressure seems to have evaporated as China has truly entered an unprecedented period of industrial development. In China’s mainstream art world, not only are a considerable number of painters enthusiastic about depicting the landscape of the underdeveloped countryside as an escape from reality, but the nation-state has also become confident enough in its full-blown
The timeless, picturesque landscape requires deliberate maintenance. Commenting on the changes at Ezhuang, a once-popular open-air painting spot in Shandong Province, an art instructor lamented that “in the past it was very easy to find breath-taking ‘model landscapes’ like the one in Corot’s View of Volterra and Bridge at Nani, [but] these days [one] has to double or triple the time he spends to look for [such views], which is much less efficient.”24 Although occasionally overzealous desire for expansion by local managers of the bases or by government officials has resulted in the construction of eyesores such as modern roads and large cement buildings, corrections have often been swift, as all the forces involved quickly understood that the selling feature of the place was the illusion of a scenic landscape of premodern China—or, in some cases, premodern Europe—free of the complications of history or reality. When helping the cadres of a poor county in Henan Province to locate a village suitable to be developed for the coveted new economy of open-air painting trips, Liu Jie, the chair of the provincial association of Chinese artists, emphasized “mountains, streams, brooks, and rivers.”25 Finally, an impoverished village with “old houses, old buildings, and old flavor” was chosen as the most suitable location for the development of a base for open-air painting.
With this understanding of what amounts to a proper landscape, the majority of art students in today’s China are learning to look at landscape in a highly controlled manner. Open-air painting trips continue to be used to hone the representational skills of students, who are not encouraged to question why the views at the bases are worthier for depiction than other common scenes—for instance, vast manufacturing complexes, new cities built for cars instead of pedestrians, towns abandoned owing to national industrial restructuring, or ghost cities caused by real estate speculation. Calling passionately for a new kind of perception, Qiu Zhijie declares: “A passive way of seeing can no longer hold onto its claim of bias-free objectivity. Instead, the social investigation we champion seeks to walk beyond a passive state of looking or narrating, requiring observers to adjust their own beliefs, biases, and modes of seeing through the