Hong Kong show of underground 1990s Chinese art offers different perspective on era
Curators at Para Site avoid works by artists usually picked to represent 1990s Chinese art, opting instead for works that, while sometimes political, focus largely on the decade’s get-rich-quick mood
A new show at Hong Kong’s Para Site exhibition space is a reminder that mainstream narratives have a tendency to obscure what artists do during periods of great political change.
Those narratives affect how we see art history. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, it was assumed that the restrictive environment forced artists to either go into exile or express their frustrations by painting in the style of political pop or cynical realism, styles which would meet with internationally success and make them very wealthy indeed.
As the two China-born curators of the Para Site exhibition explain, this show, “That Has Been and May Be Again”, deliberately avoids artists who have come to represent 1990s Chinese art. Instead, Leo Chen and Wu Mo have chosen underground artists who were active at the time.
“The art world was highly fractured. This exhibition is not a retrospective. We just want to tell people that Chinese contemporary art has many different layers,” says Chen.
The title – taken from Yu Dafu’s story, Sinking – refers to the many invasions, civil wars and power struggles that have plagued modern Chinese history. Artists react to external factors, of course, but each in their own way.