Create Dangerously: Faces of Contemporary Chinese Artists

Programmer: Li Xinxin

Every artist today is embarked on the contemporary slave galley. He has to resign himself to this even if he considers that the galley reeks of its past, that the slave-drivers are really too numerous, and, in addition, that the steering is badly handled. We are on the high seas. The artist, like everyone else, must bend to his oar, without dying if possible—in other words, go on living and creating.

—— Create Dangerously, Albert Camus

“Creating Dangerously” can also be written as “Creating Danger,” where “Danger” serves both as a noun and an adverb. Honest creation may invite danger, but the mission of creation is also to generate danger. Danger is both a consequence and a precious motivation borne of courage, often reflecting an artist’s fundamental commitment to truth and freedom. Creating dangerously to confront the dangers of creation, and continuously paying the price for it, represents the tragic cyclical interaction between contemporary Chinese artists and their circumstances. Over the decades, they have endured, doubted, defended, and despaired on the fringes of the avant-garde.

This curatorial project focuses on several faces of contemporary Chinese artists. The program includes three screenings featuring ten films spanning over thirty years, providing a spiritual profile of Chinese artists from the 1980s to the present.

“Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers” was filmed between 1988 and 1990, and “At Home in the World” was shot in 1995, five years apart. At a time when Wu Wenguang was still in the nascent stages of understanding the concept of “independence,” he turned his lens on the lives of five artists, capturing their journey from being “drifters” in Beijing to their eventual exile abroad. These films preserve the vivid “spirit and flesh” of the artistic youth of the 1980s. The great historical turning point of the late ’80s is subtly absent in the films, yet it unavoidably reveals itself through the emptiness of Beijing as the land of dreams in the sequel, and in the diaspora of the protagonists. The subtitle of “Bumming in Beijing”, “The Last Dreamers,” though little known, is steeped in a sense of melancholy and loss. Together with its sequel, this film constructs the classic modern dilemma of the “disillusionment of idealism,” resonating with the shared bewilderment of a generation of Chinese youth.

By the 2010s, art had become deeply entwined with the capital market, and artistic communities began to thrive wildly in Beijing. The wave of commercialization led to a spiritual drift among artists, yet the physical drift had not ceased. The artists, backed by the so-called creative industries, remained sacrificial lambs in the conflicts of interest during the societal transition. ZHENG Kuo’s documentary “The Cold Winter” records the artists’ resistance during the violent demolitions around the 798 Art District in Beijing. In the collective art action “Warm Winter Plan”, artists moved from united action and individual brilliance to disintegration and internal strife, creating a tone of irony from the beginning to the end. This all-too-familiar social allegory reflects the ugliness and sickness of humanity. Artists are no exception.

Experimental moving images are the most revolutionary form of filmmaking. Beyond technique and intuition, it carries the artist’s speculative knowledge systems and profound spiritual experiences. This short film collection attempts to present a historical cross-section of the history of experimental cinema, salvaging fragments of the spiritual journey of several generations of video artists. The seven works by six creators span over 20 years, ranging from conceptual art, performative video, archival footage, hand-drawn animation to 3D animation. The themes explore the deconstruction of state discourse and historical memory, shifting towards the dilemmas of global citizenship, addressing issues from media reflection, the consequences of global capitalism, the pandemic, to race and gender. With the development of media technology, artists continuously seek sincere expression through evolving visual languages, and their concern and reflection on reality has never ceased.

As Camus once said, “To create today is to create dangerously… The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies, the strange liberty of creation is possible.” The pursuit of this “strange liberty” is the artist’s mission. Although idealism aimed at political life may have fallen, the last idealism—individual idealism—endures forever.