Since the late 1980s, neighbouring metropolises Shanghai and Hangzhou on China’s east coast have become major centres for the development of video art. Both cities have historically cosmopolitan cultures within which thriving contemporary art communities make innovative use of electronic media in the production of music as well as still and moving images.
China’s first known video artwork, 30x30 was produced in Hangzhou in 1988 by Zhang Peili (b. 1957), a former student of the city’s Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. The video, which records a mirror being smashed repeatedly and then glued back together by the artist, was shot using a Betamax compatible video camera borrowed from local customs officials. 30x30 is open to interpretation in light of later comments by Zhang as a deconstructive allegory critical of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) supported myths of national unity, continuity and progress (1). The title 30x30 refers to the dimensions of the mirror used in the making of the video.
Video art works were produced by other former students of the Zhejiang Academy in Hangzhou and exhibited publicly during the 1990s, including works by Yan Lei — such as Dissolve and Clear Away (1993), and Beijing Haw (1994) — and by Qiu Zhijie — Assignment No. 1: Copying the “Orchid Pavilion Preface” a Thousand Times (1992). Later video-related art works and installations by Zhang Peili such as Uncertain Pleasure (II) (1996) and A Gust of Wind (2008) extend the obliquely critical politicized tone of the artist’s earlier works using the same medium.
At the time of the making of 30x30, Zhang Peili — who is widely regarded as the ‘father’ of Chinese video art — was a member of Chi she (the Pond Association), one of over a hundred ‘avant-garde’ (qianwei) art groups and associations that came together in different locations across China during the mid- to late 1980s as part of the ‘modern’ (xiandai) art movement known as the ’85 New Wave. Chi She watched bootleg videos of European and American movies together, including, on numerous occasions, Fred Zinneman’s thriller Day of the Jackal (1973), which they believed was, in part, a documentary.
The production of ‘modern’/‘avant-garde’ art associated with such groups as well as individual artists in China during the 1980s was made possible by a significant liberalization of culture that took place following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the subsequent acceptance of Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping’s so-called policy of Opening and Reform (Gaige kaifeng) by the CCP in December 1978. Deng’s reforms initiated an increasingly marked shift during the 1980s away from the inward-looking, materially impoverished collectivism of the Maoist period towards the more open, individualistic market-lead economy that has become established in China over the last three decades, and in doing so made it possible for artists to develop contemporary forms of public practice at variance from officially sanctioned art of the Maoist and immediate post-Maoist periods.
Since the founding of communist New China in 1949 artistic production within the People’s Republic has been subject to a government directive that all forms of public art should reflect the view of the masses and support the revolutionary aims of the CCP. The restrictive effects of this directive were exerted most strongly during the Maoist and immediate post-Maoist periods in China from 1949 until the early 1980s, resulting in the dominance of various forms of officially sanctioned ‘socialist realism’ — including, through the initial years of the Cultural Revolution during the mid- to late 1960s, a diverse multi-media visual and performance culture associated with revolutionary activities of Maoist Red Guards (Hongwei bing). The revolutionary activities of Red Guards alongside the appropriation of attitudes and techniques from western(ized) modernist and postmodernist art strongly informed the ’85 New Wave’s avant-gardist departure from officially sanctioned socialist realist modes of artistic practice.
During the brief period of political liberalization and uncertainty known as the Beijing Spring between 1977 and 1978 previously underground forms of cultural expression began to emerge into full public view within China, including the work of numerous unofficial and semi-official art groups. Following the installation of Deng Xiaoping as the PRC’s supreme leader in 1978 all public forms of unofficial cultural expression in China were again heavily restricted as part of a series of government supported campaigns and crackdowns aimed at suppressing open criticism of Deng and the CCP — the last of which was the Anti-spiritual Pollution Campaign of 1983-1984. In spite of these restrictions, in 1979 and 1980 unregistered art groups such as the No Name Group (Wuming huahui) and the Stars (Xingxing) exhibited their work openly in the PRC. The latter’s first unofficial exhibition and a protest march calling for freedom of artistic and political expression after its closing by police are widely (though erroneously) considered to be the definitive starting point for the development contemporary art in China.
With the ending of the Anti-spiritual Pollution Campaign, restrictions on unofficial forms of cultural expression that did not seek to openly criticize the CCP or undermine the integrity and stability of the Chinese nation-state were abruptly lifted, thereby opening up space alongside Deng’s socio-economic reforms for a relatively autonomous cultural sphere subject to vague rather than precise government directives and, therefore, a pervasively self-disciplining panopticism. The opening up of this relatively autonomous, albeit panoptically constrained, cultural sphere brought the already developing avant-gardist activities of the ’85 New Wave into public visibility within China.
The historical context of video art in Shanghai and Hangzhou