Winter Reading

'Collecting art does not exist in China, and this may be a good thing, because artists can do whatever they like with their own works and do not have to be careful with them. The attitude an artist has toward his works indicates the extent to which he can liberate himself.' So wrote Huang Yong Ping on behalf of the Xiamen Dada group in 1986 when the collective concluded an exhibition by burning all of the art. Times may have changed but debates concerning the freedom of the artist pervade the art scene in China: individual artistic freedom was outlawed and kept violently in check during the Proletarian Dictatorship of the Cultural Revolution. Even after China's Open Door policy initially softened the state's attitude towards artistic expression, the debate rumbled on from a different perspective at the 2000 Shanghai Biennale--the first that embraced contemporary art and an international perspective--where many Chinese artists protested against the state's legitimising of radical art. One of the protesters was Ai Weiwei, and few are as sharply aware as he is of the Chinese authorities' capricious and conflicting attitudes to artistic freedom. Such debates, and the artworks and exhibitions that drove them, are presented in Wu Hung's Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (Duke University Press), which collects historical texts that trace the birth of contemporary art in China from 1979 through to the millennium. The journey is fascinating, as artists belatedly came to terms with Modernism, which China had previously avoided, and then attempted to produce a specifically Chinese-flavoured experimental art--all while being buffeted by major shifts in the state's cultural policies. Moving geographically north west, Virginia Whiles's Art and Polemic in Pakistan: Cultural Politics and Tradition in Contemporary Miniature Painting (I B Tauris) is a highly readable account of the tensions within the Pakistani miniature tradition, tensions which play out at the only remaining traditional school, the National College of Art in Lahore. Whiles takes the reader through a brief history of Pakistan before focusing on the history of and current practices at the NCA, giving insightful interpretations at every step but also delving into the details of the daily life of the school. Interspersed within the text are cameos: profiles of the leading figures whose work is on the experimental side of the debate. Some of these artists are relatively well-known in the west, such as Mohammad Imran Qureshi and his wife Aisha Khalid (whose portraits of burqa-clad women camouflaged within decorative backdrops brilliantly skewer the society's patriarchal ideals), but several lesser-known artists are introduced in such a way that the proliferation of colour illustrations only partly sates the desire to encounter the artworks discussed. The book succeeds in much the same way that its subject does: a tight focus that belies grand scope.