CHINA, THE EMPIRE OF ART? (Sheng Zhimin, Emma Tassy). 52 minutes. Some subtitles. Saturday (February 26), 9 pm.
REEL ARTISTS FILM FESTIVAL at the TIFF Bell Lightbox to Sunday (February 27). canadianart.ca/raff. See listings. Rating: NNNN
Can so-called official art ever be truly powerful? How do politics change the way a people see and make art?
These are some of the pointed questions posed by China, The Empire Of Art?, a survey of China’s art scene from 1988 to the present day.
It traces the surge of Western interest in China’s vibrant contemporary art scene in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre – such strong interest that it has started to piss off some Chinese artists.
As the international audience for Chinese art grew in the 90s, artists worried that the West was having way too much influence on how they pursue their work. A video by Shang Huan, for example, shows a sow being persistently mounted by a boar. Both have words written on their bodies, the sow’s in Chinese, the boar’s in English.
Now that the country is starting to “open up,” young people are flocking to art schools, where they can tell you the name of every Western master but can’t name-check a single Chinese artist. The film’s feast of images of contemporary Chinese works created in the wake of Tiananmen demonstrates exactly what these kids are missing and how easily China could be stripped of real knowledge about its cultural development.
Superb.
