Shanghai Vanguard focuses on how modern and contemporary arts in Shanghai originated and developed, geminating following Reform and Opening up in China at the end of the 1970s, creating a powerful impact on the society and culture in the 1980s and completing its phase in the mid-1990s when the society had gone through a transformation. The description in the book of this artistic process closely relates to the social and cultural changes that took place during the time as it not only explores the revolutionary vicissitudes of various artistic genres but also pursues social and political propositions as a metaphor of avant-gardism. Zhao Chuan, author of the manuscript of this book, revised on the basis of Abstract Stories of Shanghai (published by Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House in September 2006), had direct experience in ‘85 New Wave Art Movement’ and is an art critic, novelist and playwright. After he returned to China from overseas in 2001 and settled in Shanghai, his hometown, he paid particular attention to, and was involved in, research and sorting out of the origin and development of modern and contemporary arts in Shanghai, and, for a long time, published a series of articles in important arts magazines in China. It took him over eight months to complete Abstract Stories of Shanghai, in which, in a narrative rich in fictional glamour, he tells how abstract painting of great significance in modern and contemporary Chinese arts geminated and evolved, and he tells of characters, concepts, styles, personalities and indebtedness therein.
Newly revised and re-arranged, Shanghai Vanguard, of nearly fifty thousand Chinese characters, expands its discussion to include figurative, conceptual, performance and installation art that have happened and developed in Shanghai, to which he adds photographs of those artists’ artistic creations, life and work in the past, information that has nearly been buried in the rapid transformation of the Chinese society. The book places the changes in avant-garde arts in the totality of living, in the context of social transformation in Shanghai as well as in China, as stated in the Preface, ‘Even abstractions or concepts have to be concrete when written into a book, with characters, ups and downs, successes and failures, sadness and happiness, awash with time. In such a discussion, avant-garde thought is the longitude going right through whereas social lives of the artists are the latitudes spreading across the board one after another, supported at the base by the city of Shanghai, a place to which these clues return. In this way, my recounting is idealistic, about the arts, at one end, and, at the other end, it is a most ordinary street with signs of human habitation.’
Shanghai Vanguard divides into seven chapters, as follows:
1. Preface
(Chairman Mao’s portrait from 70s’.)
2. Beginning of a minjian(non-offical) Exploration in Public
(Oil on canvas by Chen Junde in ‘Twelve Men’s Art Show’ in 1979)
3. Abstract and New Paintings
(Oil on canvas by Li Shan in 1983. )
(Acrylic On canvas by Yu Youhan in 1987.)
4. Challenge through Concepts and Performance
(Posters of ‘Black, White and Black’ art exhibition and ‘Concave and Convex’ art exhibition in 1987. )
(Performance by Yang Xu at ‘M Collective Performance Art Show’ in1987.)
5. New Authoritarian Ideal
(The ‘Last Super’ art show by Li Shan, Shun Liang, Wu Liang etc. in 1988.)
6. Setback and the Metaphor of Transformation
(Documents of ‘Garage Art Exhibition’ in 1991.)
7. The West Has Come for Real and the Death of Ah Da
(Ding Yi in front of his own painting at Venice Biennial in 1993.)
(Oil on Canvas by Gong Jianqing (Ah Da) after ‘4th of June’ in 1989. )
The author
Zhao Chuan, he was born in Shanghai in 1967, has involvements in the New Wave Art Movements of China in the 80th. Now he is a writer, theatre worker and critic. He writes arts columns and regularly publishes in major newspapers and art press in Mainland and Taiwan. He’s the guest lecturer in the China Art Academy and NYU in Shanghai. He has a book published in Chinese contemporary titled Shanghai Abstract Story in 2006 and a photography collection in 1995. He also published two fictions in 2003 and 2006; three anthologies of essays in 1995, 2000 and 2004. He was awarded Taiwan’s prestigious Lianhe Wenxue (Unitas) New Fiction Writer’s Prize, and received other Residencies and Grants. His theater pieces were performed in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea. Zhao Chuan is the founder member of Shanghai theatre group Grass Stage.
