Exhibiting Experimental Art in China.

• Author: Harrist, Jr., Robert E.
• Position: Book Review

Exhibiting Experimental Art in China. By Wu HUNG. The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. Chicago: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2001. Pp. 224, illus. $40 (paper).

Over forty years ago the critic and art historian Leo Steinberg wrote that modem art "always projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed."' Contemporary art worldwide continues to inhabit a crepuscular aesthetic and ideological space closed to viewers unwilling to take the risk of grappling with work that may turn out to be historically significant or may sink into the rapidly forgotten detritus of contemporary junk culture. In China it is not only the objects, installations, and performances of contemporary artistic practice that create a zone of uncertainty in which no fixed standards of critical evaluation or appreciation seem valid. Equally confusing are the shifting relationships between censorship and official sanction, institutional support and commercial enterprise, curatorial hubris and artistic independence that define the conditions under which art is exhibited. Based on extensive interviews with curators and artists, and on recent catalogues and exhibition ephemera, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China by Wu Hung offers an extraordinary guide to the cultural politics and personal ambitions shaping the production and presentation of recent art.

According to Wu's definition, "experimental art" displays new forms and materials, attempts to reinvent the language of artistic expression, and positions itself in opposition to official or academic art. Though not a conventional exhibition catalogue, Wu Hung's book did accompany an exhibition titled "Canceled: Exhibiting Experimental Art in China" at the University of Chicago's David and Alfred Smart Art Museum. This exhibition was a partial representation of another exhibition that was to have taken place in November of 1998 in the Main Ritual Hall of the Ancestral Temple, adjacent to the former Imperial Palace in Beijing. Organized by Leng Lin, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and an independent curator, with the support of Guo Shirui, director of an officially sanctioned cultural agency, the exhibition was titled It's Me and included works by twenty-six artists that dealt with ideas of self-representation and self-identity. On the day the exhibition was to open it was canceled on o rders from the local police. Leng Lin and Guo Shirui have offered different...