From Innovation to Provocation, China’s Artists on a Global Path

Language is a primary medium in an exhibition that , unlike the one at Asia Society, leans heavily toward Conceptualism. In a 1991 video by another pioneering figure, Zhang Peili, he records a popular anchorwoman on state-run television reading, at the artist’s request, a list of Mandarin dictionary words related to water. The performance — nonsense text delivered in newsroom cadences — feels mildly zany until you know the reader’s professional history: as official public mouthpiece for the government, she reported regularly on the Tiananmen crisis, but left out all mention of military violence against protesters.

For an early 1990s performance project called “Assignment No. 1: Copying the ‘Orchid Pavilion Preface’ 1000 Times,” the Beijing-based artist Qiu Zhijie copied a classic fourth-century A.D. calligraphic text over and over on a single sheet of paper until the sheet turned black. It’s not hard to see the work as a symbolic exercise in which single-minded focus on cultural tradition leads to obliteration. This artist, born in 1969, is a polymathic visionary and one of the sparks of his generation. He’s all over the Guggenheim show, with sculpture, video, and a tour de force, six–panel hand-drawn map of the history covered: who knew who, who looked at what, who went where. Fantastic.

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The other medium that dominated the repressive post-Tiananmen period was the human body, often nude. In the early 1990s, a group of young, destitute, anti-establishment types camped out in what was basically a garbage dump on the fringes of Beijing. They called the place the East Village, and did mostly performance work, which they photo-documented. The pictures — of the artist Zhang Huan sitting, smeared with honey, in a fly-infested latrine, and of the cross-dressing Ma Liuming walking the Great Wall nude (he was arrested a lot) — remain some of the signature images from that time.

In the 1990s, China was changing fast, and art registered that. In 1992, at the same time radical performers were squatting the East Village, a young artist named Zhao Bandi was exhibiting at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. He had just one picture, but was a winner: a hyper-realist portrait, hung at a slant, of a friend lounging in bed in front of a television and dreaming of white-collar jobs.

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By the time the Guggenheim show’s single most spectacular work, Chen Zhen’s “Precipitous Parturition,” was completed in 1999, China had fully entered the global economy; the dangers of domestic consumerism had become a subject for art. The Chen piece, which hangs high over the museum’s rotunda, is a writhing 65–foot-long dragon. Its body is woven from hundreds of cast-off bicycle wheel inner tubes; small, sleek toy cars are packed within its belly. The day when China was a pedal-driven proletarian culture were long gone; the era of head-spinning urban speed, pollution, and technological encasement had began.

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The shift is succinctly registered in contrasting works by two of the exhibition’s very few female artists. A 1997 sculptural piece by Lin Tianmiao, consists of a thread-wrapped, child-size, Maoist-era sewing machine onto which a video image of laboring hands is projected. Calm and pristine, it exists in a different universe from Cao Fei’s 2007 video “RMB City: A Second Life City Planning by China Tracy (aka: Cao Fei).”

The video, made when Beijing was pumping up for the Olympics, is a digital tour of a futuristic Money City (China’s official currency is the renminbi, RMB), envisioned as an animated chaos of skyscraping ruins-in-progress adrift on a horizonless sea.

Installations dedicated to group projects on the museum’s top ramp have a comparably buzzy vibe. But in a final gallery, the show — organized by Ms. Munroe with guest curators Philip Tinari of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, and Hou Hanru of Maxxi National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome — resolves itself on a somber note.

The museum’s Tower 7 gallery has just three works. One, a horizontal painting by Yang Jiechang, resembles a calligraphic scroll though its black ink and acrylic lines are based on a map of the paths taken by volunteers carrying injured students to safety after the Tiananmen bloodbath. Placed high on the walls is a second piece: a set of 38 wooden panels, dating from 2009 and inscribed with an unpunctuated text that reads:

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