UCCA (which stands for Ullens Center for Contemporary Art) opened last November in 798, the Beijing neighborhood famous for gathering most of the city’s contemporary artists and galleries. This is the most exciting and biggest permanent display of Chinese contemporary art in the country (http://www.ullens-center.org) I have seen so far.
It was created and financed exclusively by Guy and Myriam Ullens, a belgian couple who made their fortune in food-related industry. Their business gave them frequent opportunities to travel to Asia and over the years they started buying Chinese arts, progressively focusing on contemporary art.
Cynics say that the main purpose of this museum is to increase the value of their personal collection by exhibiting it. And given how Chinese contemporary art is turning into a very speculative market nowadays, they may not be completely wrong…
Anyway, they turned a former ammunition factory, built by East German engineers in the 50ies, into a great place for art and to me, that’s enough to pay little interest to their fundamental purpose.
The first exhibition, called Chinese New Wave, presents local artists who emerged in the 80ies as China was opening up after Mao died in 1976.
The 80ies where the time when China started recovering from the dire decades of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the country ideology got redefined to ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ as he theorized it then. This was a time of growing freedom, a time of experiment: capitalism started being ‘tested’ in Shenzhen next to Hong Border, media had more freedom, foreign art could be shown in China and artists could express themselves beyond Realist Art and propaganda images (to know more about this period click here).
Through the work of the key artists of this period exhibited in UCCA, you can literally feel the energy that could suddenly be released. But the one thing that moved me the most was the sign poster with the ‘no U turn’ sign shown above.
The exhibition indeed starts with a long wall displaying a chronology of the main events in Chinese Society and Arts in the 80ies. That chronology of Chinese liberalization ends in 1989 with the deadly repression of the students peaceful protests on Tiananmen Square on 4th June.
Because Tiananmen repression is a controversial subject, to say the least, the mention of the ‘events’ is very minimalist in order, I assume, not to hurt Chinese censorship. But as often, symbols can be much more powerful than words. The poster standing right above the year 1989, is a poster for China Avant Garde, a major art exhibition that was held in Beijing… in February 1989.
At the end of a decade of liberalization, this poster was making a bold statement that sounded like a warning to Chinese authorities: there is no come back possible. What happened four months later, made this poster sadly wrong. Yet today in this exhibition it sounds like a premonition and one more warning for today’s authorities.
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