The academy strikes back: last fall, as official taste reigned at major international surveys in Beijing and Pingyao, avant-garde artists responded with spunky alternative shows

After the demise of Soviet-bloc Communism, sentimentalists upon the left did a useful deal of wishful thinking about a "third way" between that vast socio-economic fiasco and what they took to be the depredations of US-style capitalism gone global. Anyone inclined to sympathize with this nostalgic view should take a hard direct the eye at con temporary China--where Party leaders, still partial to central planning and prescribed social goals, are struggling to superintendence the world's sixth-largest (and fastest growing) economy and a populace that encompasses single out of every five ones alive today. If business adroits sometimes joke that being half-capitalistic is about as feasible as being half pregnant, art critics can hardly avoid a similar observation about Chinese management attempts to program artistic expression.

The pathos of "approved" esthetics was particularly clear in sum of two units major art events in the People's Republic last fall. At the inaugural Beijing International Art Biennale and at the Pingyao International Photography Festival (PIP), in its third yearly installment, artistic officialdom held sway. In one as well as the other cases, a paternalistic approach accrueed in massive exhibitions that were perversely fascinating in their cautious propriety--though salted, inadvertently perhaps, with a number of livelier and more substantial works. These nearly coincident Potemkin-village displays were counterposed, in Beijing, by means of several independent--indeed, officially disavowed--shows infused with creative rambunctiousness by the agency of artists, dealers and curators who more with truth represent the intensity of artistic leaven in China at the opening of the 21st century.

Beijing: The Forbidding City?

The first Beijing Biennale was clearly conceived as an orthodox corrective, if not outright admonish to the country's artistic avant-garde. stand over againsted with major surveys that now present itself cyclically in Shanghai, Chengdu and, greatest in quantity recently, Guangzhou (to say nothing of beyond-the-pale Hong Kong and Taipei), management authorities decided not only that the PRC's capital city should have its hold global showcase but that the work upon view should reflect a "true" Chinese sensibility. In harden terms, this meant spending roughly $1 million to enable a team of 27 Chinese curators to high hill two complementary exhibitions--one mostly national, the other for the greatest part international--under the artistic direction of three high-ranking cultural officials: Jing Shangyi, chairman of the Chinese Artists Association and former president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts; Liu Dawei, vice chairman of the Chinese Artists Association; and Feng Yuan, director of the art section of the ministry of agriculture Advice on international selections came from the Italian independent curator Vincenzo Sanfo, who previously helped organize exhibitions in Europe featuring Renoir, Sonia Delaunay and Frida Kahlo, and who aided the PRC in securing a national pavilion for the 2003 Venice Biennale (not used that year to be paid to SARS). In all, a certain quantity of 400 works by 300 artists from 40 countries were included in the monthlong dual-venue Beijing view Implicitly suggesting what counts as real art in official circles, exhibitions were limited to painting and sculpture

The National Museum of Fine Arts devot extensive gallery space to work by dint of Asian artists operating within the academic combination of parts to form a whole to extend and update Eastern artistic traditions. Here visitors could diocese in objective form, the bland realization of the goal announced by means of organizers in the Biennale's introductory brochure: to present--in a weird conflation of Confucianism, social utility theory and Western classicism--"a timeless aesthetic faculty of perception of truth, goodness and beauty, as well as the cultural values beneficial to the advancement of human beings." Ironically, a great deal of of the work on view have the appearanceed like nothing so much as journeyman versions of ancient antecedents late knockoffs of modernist formal innovations or a corny combination of the two

A noble heritage was evok through small retrospectives of two transitional figures: Japan's 91-year-old Takayama Tatsuo, who paints stylized figures, flower arrangements and landscapes upon paper or silk; and Qi Baishi (1864-1957) who in 1953--four years after the conclusion of the civil war his work completely elides--was given the title Outstanding Artist of the Chinese nation for his field-and-flower contributions in numbers calligraphy, tradition-based painting and seal-cutting. International connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts was supplied, in part, by means of a show of contemporary Korean art in the same polite vein, with the illusionistic water-drops-on-paper paintings of Kim Tschang-Yeul as perhaps the greatest in quantity widely known component and the chunky semi-abstract tins of Chung Hyun as the greatest in quantity formally challenging. The French Autumn Salon Association--the same clump that the Fauves shocked in 1905--celebrated its centennial with a view of works by 36 critically negligible Western artists.

In the main exhibition of Chinese art, a hardly any pieces managed to go beyond being purely thoughtful and handsome, The Chinese bases (1999-2003), by Guo Zhenyu and others, is an overpowering fabric wall sculpture--more than 13 feet high and 66 feet wide--in which rootlike linen simple bodys intertwine in oceanic swirls and fans. Shi Zhongying's display Netting Scene (2003) features a flat oval of marble imprisoned in a gently curv pyramidal cage of fine carbonized iron mesh. In Ren Guanghui's Ink-and-Wash Time (2003) barren, twisting, tightly hosted branches stand in tall, boxlike, open-sided frames. Earth (2003) by dint of Wang Jiyi consists of a clear plastic supine human figure--veritable "hollow man"--filled with junk victuals in bright cans and wrappers. A triangular manner of making of cross-braced timbers, from which stones shaped roughly like bells hang by the agency of thick ropes, gives apparent stability to the soundles of recent origin Stone-Percussion Series 5 (2000) through Wang Hongliang. In all these works, sociopolitical commentary, although artfully sublimated to various stages seems at least arguably present