'Inner World' Art Strives for Acceprance

Despite the mushrooming of art galleries in Beijing in recent years, it can still be difficult to track down outstanding examples of contemporary Chinese works. It is argued that too much display space in galleries and art shops is taken up by mass-produced paintings whose appeal is more about price than artistic merit -- what someone once called blanket commercialism. But all is not lost. There are good contemporary pictures around town, which goes some way to neutralizing the oft-heard charge that Beijing is and always will be a cultural outpost where art generally is concerned.

Currently, the most dramatic fusion can be found at Courtyard Gallery. While you have to literally hack through tangled streets and alleyways to find it -- across the moat from the East Gate of the Forbidden City -- it is an oasis of modernity in a traditional Mandarin setting, in itself the perfect backdrop for contemporary Chinese art.

Its brightly painted, brass-decorated wooden entrance leads to a world that is part East, part West, a square building whose center -- a traditional courtyard -- is covered by a well-designed atrium-style glass roof which allows natural light to pour in. Among decor attractions in the building is a back-lit, frosted glass bar. Track lighting directs viewers' attention to the somewhat avant-garde paintings that hang from whitewashed walls, on this occasion ordinary workers with symbolic numbers in ink and wash on their coarse features.

Heavy timber beams support the sloping roof covering the main dining room, small though it is. A short climb up wooden stairs leads to a cigar divan overlooking the moat and wall that once protected emperors. The divan is furnished with a Tibetan table, and sofas and armchairs whose worn, brown-leather upholstery is somehow intimate and inviting. Two milefos (Happy Buddhas) smile knowingly from a corner.

Such facilities are relevant and practical in the context of such an unique art venue as the Courtyard, a visit to which rates as an "experience" because it is also famed for its superb cuisine.

Art-wise, things hot up in the basement, where the contemporary works of various artists can be seen. As a Courtyard publication notes, after experiencing countless ups, downs and hesitations -- not to mention false starts -- Chinese contemporary art has become increasingly directed toward artists* inner world, with special emphasis on the nature of human existence.

Painters dissatisfied with the simple representation of existence now intentionally aim to get beneath the skin of such an approach, thus sharply reflecting their own psyche and, finally, creating images of their changing times and experiences. These arguably idiosyncratic feelings, combined with the existential experience within their own environment, constitute their individual discourse.

Such an individual track can be found in Qiu De Shu's lyrical treatment of "scar art". It is also demonstrated in Chen Wenji's series of still lives, painted either in his own home or depicting the landscape outside his windows. It's there, too, in Hong Hao's photo-collages on a reproduction of the Song masterpiece Spring Festival on the River. The result is a jumble of parallel images that relay a confused and frenetic atmosphere as society sprints at break-neck pace toward the ever-elusive goal of "modernity".

It would be inappropriate to lump Courtyard painters under the popular heading of "avant-garde". If avant-garde is defined as a rejection of the classical and a rebellion against traditional art then, agreed, the description is at least relative. But it is at the same time inadequate. Compared with modernists, these practitioners are quite humanistic. Compared with realist painters, they are well able to express an internal world in which they can and do refuse to duplicate any patterns of real-life scenes.
These Courtyard-basement artists exist on the edge of Chinese post-modernism, rejecting the allure of commercialization and what they see as meaningless creative activity. They are earnest, with a touch of internalized humanism, and a great desire to return to creative origins that enable a relationship between their painting subjects and their very existence.

Each artist featured at the Courtyard Gallery's winter Group Show has his/her unique form of expression. Chen Wenji directs universal feelings of real and imagined disturbances and helplessness toward ordinary and natural still-life subjects. He uses a classical approach in calmly and rationally expressing the effect that tangled relationships have on himself as an artist. Yu Hong is more intimate and figural in interpreting her daily surroundings, such as the series of morbidly playful images of small boys with guns.

Guo Wei's children are simply a reflection of the painter's inner feelings, while the ubiquitous rust used gives the viewer a sense of fatalism. He works exclusively on his Mosquitoes series, depicting the restless feeling of adolescents while voicing the triviality and dullness he senses from the extremely boring routine of daily life. The title alone implies a sense of nervous discomfort.

Photographic works by He Yunchang, meanwhile, include images from some of his often extremely physically challenging performances. In Emergency Exit the artist, covered in mud, is locked in a cage while under a fiery roof. He crouches down, protecting a pigeon.

His Shanghai Water Story depicts how He collects 10 tons of water from the lower reaches of the Suzhou River, then conveys it five kilometers upstream just to throw it back into the river. Thus, he tells us, a man might step into the same river for a second time.

As a Courtyard artist once commented: "The purpose of art is not only to stimulate and excite people. On a deeper level it is also to help people forget their agitation."
Aware that the main repositories of contemporary Chinese art have so far been Hong Kong and Europe, the managers of the Courtyard Gallery, Ingrid Durek and Marion Bertagna, hope to see"the honor return to China, where it belongs, and eventually to bring Chinese contemporary art to the international stage by merit of its quality and dynamism".

Many would agree that, at very least, it is well on its way.