Consolidating the Contemporary: The Socialist Origins of ’85 New Wave Group Art Practice

Abstract

Contemporary Chinese art remains a highly visible, yet highly unstable category. To wit, even the word order of the label is contested (should “contemporary” modify “Chinese art,” or should “Chinese” modify “contemporary art”?) Yet as the boundaries of the field vacillate, scholars and practitioners generally accept a narrative of the genre (contemporary/Chinese art)’s origins that begins in the first moments of the post-socialist experience in the 1980s, when artists formed spontaneous self-organized art groups to pursue shared interests, groups from which many of China’s most well-known artists emerged. Existing scholarship on the 1980s and the ’85 New Wave understands the art groups’ formations as a spontaneous event precipitated by exposure to an influx of foreign, particularly Western, art. Political dissidence is woven deeply into this narrative, resulting in the exclusion of cultural practices developed under state sponsorship from the purview of the contemporary. Yet narratives of the socialist period as aberrational and the post-socialist as a return to normalcy fail to account for the institutional and ideological structures inherited by the contemporary. In this presentation, I seek to connect the group art practice of the 1980s with collective and amateur forms of prevalent during the P.R.C.’s socialist period. By revealing how participants in the ‘85 New Wave drew from collective models of the socialist period, I challenge the temporal boundaries of the contemporary as a concept and label, making a fuller account for how the mantle of the avant-garde passed from the revolutionary guard to its political and cultural dissidents.