<p>Writer and curator Mia Yu delves into the complex regional relationships that define Chinese art-making today</p>

How artists are reimagining ‘global’ China

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<p>In the late 1990s, Chinese diasporic artists returning to their home country made poignant critiques of its participation in globalization. Taking the ‘global’ as an expansive network in which power emanates from Euro-American centers to reach the peripheries, the structure was understood through binary models such as center versus periphery and east versus west. During the past decade, a new generation of artists in China has been moving beyond this conception by tracing complex transnational and trans-local connections that disrupt essentializing narratives of China and the nation-state, thus reimagining and pluralizing the ‘global’ from multiple geo-cultural perspectives. </p><p>In this short essay, which is by no means a comprehensive picture, I will sketch three of these emerging geo-cultural vantage points through works by artists who highlight the enmeshed positions arising from contexts that articulate the ‘global’ and ‘China’ as complex power structures.</p><p>The first perspective locates China’s northwestern frontier as a historical site of global entanglement. Historically, the northwestern frontier was a heterogeneous contact zone permeated with exchange and conflict between the Han Chinese and nomadic ethnicities. During <span style="background-color: initial;">the second Sino-Japanese War&nbsp;</span>(1937-45), however, a number of highly accomplished academic painters – many of them recently returned from studying in European art academies – made expeditions to the region and drew and painted the majestic landscape and its ethnic minorities, and copied ancient Buddhist murals. Now canonical in Chinese art history, these works, imbued with nationalist sentiments, imagined the region as an integrated component of a unified China.</p>

<p>The renewed interest among artists in China to travel out west, which emerged in the 1990s, did not continue that historical tradition, however. Northwest China appears as a differentiated space in the geographic imaginations of contemporary artists working today, such as Urumqi-born artist and filmmaker&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/34364/Ju-Anqi">Ju Anqi</a> (b. 1975), who filmed <em>Poet on a Business Trip</em> in 2002, which follows a poet’s aimless drift across Xinjiang. Passing through desolate landscapes, meeting strangers and sex workers, he writes 16 poems that give a moving and melancholy account of his journey.&nbsp;The black and white film, completed more than a decade later, in 2014, is an unsentimental portrayal of Xinjiang, documenting the rapid process of its transformation into a tourist destination amidst accelerating ethnic tensions.&nbsp;Following this work, Ju’s experimental film <em style="background-color: initial;">Big Characters </em>(2015) connects gigantic Cultural Revolution-era slogans found on the floor of the Gobi Desert in Xinjiang to a series of local and global events taking place in 1968, paying homage to the radical dimension of the Global 1960s and the interconnected rise and fall of political and technological utopias at the time.</p><p>Shifting timeframes, the video <em style="background-color: initial;">A Brief History of China Northwest Airlines</em> (2018) by <strong>Zheng Yuan</strong> (b. 1988) communicates the tensions and economic power shifts that took place during China’s market transformation during the period China Northwest Airlines had to merge with another airline in the early 2000s. Zheng’s work is representative of an increasing number of artists whose focus moves backwards from 1990s globalism to trace the origins of globalization in connection with the realpolitik of the Cold War. The video <em style="background-color: initial;">The Last Step of Touchdown </em>(2020), for instance, looks at Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972 and the technological advances that followed, addressing how civil aviation, media, and telecommunication impacted on the Chinese people, including Zheng himself.</p>

<p>The second geo-cultural perspective I want to highlight is Manchuria, or northeast China, where an interplay of transnational ideologies and nation-building projects during the 20th century unfolded. Japan’s rule of the region from 1932 to 1945, through its creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo there, not only transformed Manchuria into the most industrialized region in Asia but also ingrained colonial violence and trauma into its collective psyche. After 1949, Manchuria served as China’s base for heavy industry, with the Socialist construction of new China extending colonial forms of extraction from people to nature. Manchuria’s colonial trauma was never officially acknowledged or dealt with – it was only after the region crumbled in the 1990s, becoming what is often referred to as the Rust Belt, that this haunting became palpable through its abundant urban and industrial ruins. </p><p>Intrigued by the complex entanglement of post-colonialism and post-socialism, artists have been reactivating Manchuria as a transnational product of layered colonial encounters. In <em style="background-color: initial;">From South Lake Park to Hongqi Street</em> (2018) and <em style="background-color: initial;">Forsaken Landscapes</em> (2018),&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/38251/Hao-Jingban">Hao Jingban</a> (b. 1985) weaves together archival research, fictional narratives, and live performances to reveal the power dynamics, border geopolitics, and conflicting identities being promulgated by the Manchukuo Film Association (or Man’ei), a Japanese propaganda-film company operating in the region during the 1930s and 1940s. <strong>Zhang Wenzhi</strong> (b. 1993) collects local mythologies and folklore from his native Dalian, a port city created by Russia and later colonized by Japan, and reflects them in ink paintings that evoke both colonial trauma and postcolonial fantasy through an animated world of animals, marine lives, medicinal plants, shamans, and other non-human agents.</p>

<p>Confronting unaddressed voids in Northeast Asia’s historical memory,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/34116/Haijiao-Ma">Ma Haijiao</a> (b. 1990) went to Vladivostok in 2017 to research a series of pogroms that were carried out against Chinese immigrants in the Amur region at the turn of the 20th century. He collected a large number of Chinese-language store signs in the city, many of them awkwardly translated from Russian, and printed their legends on logs that he released into Lake Khanka between China and Russia. The solemn black and white photo series <em>Invisible Shore</em> (2018) documents the pieces of wood floating across the fluid border. </p><p>The third geo-cultural perspective moves beyond China’s frontier regions to the planetary-scale Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global development project initiated by the Chinese government in 2013 that consists of a network of commodity exchange, infrastructure projects, and economic and energy corridors. </p><p>As China’s investment in Africa dramatically increases under the initiative, more Chinese artists are becoming interested in the geopolitical, social, economic, and ecological ramifications of the BRI. Based on research carried out in Germany, China, and Togo, the essay film <em style="background-color: initial;">The Sculpture</em> (2018–2020) by the Taiwanese artist <strong>Musquiqui&nbsp;</strong><strong>Chihying&nbsp;</strong>(b. 1985) traces the intricate connections between China’s investment in Togo and the recent transfer of an African art collection from a Chinese private collector to the National Museum of China in Beijing.</p>

<p><strong>Pu Yingwei</strong> (b. 1989) explores Chinese-African relations from a more personal perspective. Pu went to study in France in 2013, which coincided with his uncle’s departure for Kenya to work at the Karimenu II Dam as an engineer. Conscious of his cultural identity in France as well as current geopolitical shifts, Pu began to collect 19th-century postcards and inscribe them with his thoughts. In the 2020 exhibition <em>Photo Ethics: Chinafrica</em> (which I curated), held as part of the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, Pu staged a quasi-ethnographic museum that, alongside his uncle’s cellphone photos and TikTok posts from his time in Kenya, presented Pu’s colonial postcard collection, archival photographs of Chinese officials’ visits to Africa in the 1960s, and images of Chinese and African workers constructing the Tazara Railway in East Africa in the 1970s – all hand-colored by the artist using a technique invented by Felice Beato, an Italian-British photographer who came to China with the invading British Army during the Second Opium War. Taken together, these documents invite a reevaluation of colonialism, questioning how conceptual frameworks around imperialism might be updated based on the shifts of power at play today.</p><p>These artistic investigations and the temporal cartographies they produce point to the inadequacy of both a monolithic understanding of China and binary conceptions of the ‘global’ to analyze the complex power and knowledge structures shaping the world today. Artistic practices mapping multiple geo-cultural perspectives are building a broader sense of the global world as a multi-sited and collaborative engagement with entangled histories, epistemologies, and cultures. It is perhaps through these interconnections that alternate geographies can emerge.</p>

<p>Mia Yu is an art historian, curator,&nbsp;and author based in Beijing.&nbsp;</p><p>Top image:&nbsp;Zhang Wenzhi, <em>The Journal of The Black Dragon</em> (detail), 2019. Copyright Zhang Wenzhi. Courtesy of ART LABOR Gallery, Shanghai.</p><p><strong></strong></p>

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How artists are reimagining ‘global’ China

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