This brief and engaging video explores the inward turn of many Chinese visual artists in the years since the 1989 Beijing massacre. It argues that China's avant-garde has shifted away from directly political concerns and is producing a personal, pessimistic, and alienated art that has no precedent in China. Inner Visions is built around interviews with a lithographer and three painters in Beijing. These artists are young, articulate, and immediately appealing. The small cast of characters prevents the video from becoming too confusing for novices to China, although this clarity is achieved at the price of somewhat simplifying the range of visual arts produced in China.
The two best-known artists are painter Xia Xiaowan, whose disturbing oils have something of the flavor of Hieronymus Bosch, and Su Xinping, whose lithographs taunt the viewer with fleeting shadows and enigmatic architecture.
Even though the artists all strike vaguely dissident stances, they reveal diverse backgrounds. Two are state employees, with official housing, studios, and supplies, while the two Sichuan painters who call themselves "Blue Belly" are recent illegal immigrants to Beijing, where they are struggling to support themselves through their art. One wonders how they fared since the making of this video. The various living and working arrangements revealed by these artists encourage student discussion of how market reforms touch the intellectual world: who buys this art, and who supports its production?
The video arrived at an opportune moment, allowing me to take it for a test drive by showing it to a hundred students in my class on Chinese politics. They enjoyed it, and I thought that it illustrated very effectively some often abstract ideas about the role of the arts in contemporary Chinese society.
Inner Visions is too brief to provide much historical or cultural background for new students, although Chen effectively uses a few images early in the video to telegraph some hints of China's arts heritage. These remind more advanced students of earlier styles and issues, while Chen appropriately gives Beijing's 1989 modern art show more exposure.
My major hesitation is about the tone that underlies much of the video, which presumes that the people of China are eagerly awaiting more avant-garde art, only to be frustrated by their government. While the state does isolate adventuresome aesthetic developments and harasses defiant artists, much avant-garde culture is also distanced from ordinary folks by reason of style or the elitism of the artists. But I would not make too much of this criticism; because the video has a point of view, it encourages discussion about the complex and fluid relationship among such categories as official, avant-garde, and popular art.
The video also enables Western students to see the impressive technical skills of Chinese artists, although there is little discussion of the Westernizing style employed in most of the highlighted works. Again, instructors may raise the question of how a Chinese avant-garde has come to be organized around an aesthetic that is so profoundly influenced by the West. So short a video cannot raise all questions explicitly; I am impressed at how many issues Chen documents, even when she does not discuss them directly. For instance, Xia Xiaowan insists too defensively that his work will never become dated, even in the West. This plaintive remark reveals the high level of anxiety about international art trends and markets common among such painters. For classroom use, this can be a provocative moment.
Inner Visions presents its theme of newly individual art efficiently and lucidly, through clear images and with accurate pronunciation of Chinese names in the voice-over translations. The video worked quite well in my class, and I intend to show it again next year. I found it rich for discussing political and social issues; I imagine that someone approaching it from the field of fine arts would discover other strengths.
