Salon, Salon

Salon, Salon: Contemporary Art Practices from 1972 to 1982 in Profile - A Beijing Perspective is the third exhibition of the research project From the Issue of Art to the Issue of Position: The Legacy of Socialist Realism in Chinese Contemporary Art. Initiated by artist Liu Ding and art critic Carol Yinghua Lu, this ongoing project seeks to differentiate, analyze and reflect on historical narratives and ideological construct of “contemporary art” in China through exhibitions and writings. Taking Socialist Realism as a historical narrative, this project re-examines and re-evaluates how it affects and shapes our cultural value orientations as a guiding principle of socio-cultural organization, and how it continues to exist as a basis in artistic practices and criticism today.

The exhibition focuses on a ten-year period from the year of 1972 after Lin Biao’s botched coup against Mao and airplane crash in 1971 to the year of 1982, marked by The Summary of the Fifth National Trial Conference on the “Two Cases” approved and issued by the Central Government, as a chosen time period for research and a space for historical imagination. It considers this decade not only as a critical transition in China’s political history, but also as a relatively cohesive artistic period. By studying the detailed features and multi-layered art practices within this period, we reconsider the mentality of artists in a period of dramatic political changes and the issue of judgments in existing historical narratives of art.

Salon Salon zooms in on artistic phenomena in Beijing, to observe the creative works and practices of the older, middle-aged, and young generations of artists active then. It displays a number of pieces created by relevant artists in the period of 1972–1982, and also uses archival materials to examine the historical context of these pieces and their artistic practices. We discuss in particular the contradictions, conflicts, entanglements, reconciliation, and deviation between mainstream ideology and the modernist experiences left behind by the Republican era of China, within the framework of New China. It is also of practical significance in examining Chinese contemporary art and practice to trace the contemporarization of art in China to the years before and after 1949, juxtaposing such a historical course of art with the modernization of China, as well as taking a holistic perspective to study it.

In this exhibition, we draw on details and materials, examining specific cases to recontextualize abstracted experiences in contemporary art, amplifying the sense of historical presence and displaying scenes that have been generalized, omitted, and obscured, including concrete thoughts, emotions, ambiance, and other factors.

It has been three and a half years since this exhibition was held at the Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum in January 2017. Thanks to the invitation from Director Wang Huangsheng and Deputy Director Hu Bin, we are able to present and share our research in south China at the Art Museum of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (GAFA Art Museum). Not only do we customize and adjust the original exhibition contents according to the space at the GAFA Art Museum, but also add a small group of works by Guangdong-based artists as well as archival materials, all created in the same period. In doing so, we are able to get a glimpse of how the nationwide artistic movement in this period where Beijing was one of the epicenters, spread across different regions. Although we have made it clear at the first exhibition in Beijing that we consider art of New China since 1949 as part of the formation of contemporary art in China, as this exhibition travels to Guangzhou and provides an opportunity for further reflection, we change the wording of the original title of the exhibition from “modern art”(in Chinese and fine art in English) to “contemporary art,” so that we can express our historical views more clearly, opening them for discussion and criticism.