The China Academy of Art’s Review for the period 2003-2012 

Introduction

Scanning the review for the last ten years at the China Academy of Art (CAA) is like walking a familiar route through ones hometown. The scene is just as vivid, its features as clear as if they were right before ones eyes. 

In 2003, following a long summer awaiting construction, the CAA’s Nan Shan Campus was finally complete. In November, two years of planning and orchestration in preparation for the exhibition Borderlines: A Survey of Contemporary Asian Art was finally complete, with the exhibition being installed in the academy’s new art museum. The opening of the museum released an air of innovation. I still remember clearly today the occasion of the museum’s opening and recall the excitement of the Asian artists and international critics who had gathered together for the occasion. At the beginning of the Century, in China, the phenomenon of the urban art museum had yet to really emerge. The three thousand square metres of the Academy museum’s exhibition spaces were already the best Hangzhou had to offer. Situated alongside the West Lake and the surrounding mountains, the new museum exuded a refined atmosphere capable of calming the soul. The museum’s establishment signalled the beginning of a new era of innovative practice in exhibition making at the CAA. 

Going back to 1927 and Cai Yuanpei’s outline for his Scheme Establishing National Universities for Education in Art, in which he touches on the circumstances necessary for establishing art universities, he says: From among those sites seen fit, none surpasses the West Lake. The area encompasses all of the aforesaid historic sites and is capped with exquisite waters, mountainous relief and endless meandering trails, more than compensating for any imperfection … If in the future it is possible to return the lakeshore area to the dominion of the arts, engaging in the alterations necessary for establishing there museums of art, concert halls, theatres and so on, it would turn the area into a cultural quarter and impact upon the progress of a social art. How could the results be anything but profound and far-reaching? At the 75th anniversary meeting of the Academy, I myself once wholeheartedly implored: How are the new academy and museum to provide the spirits of our predecessors with some solace? 

In what seems to have been no time at all, ten years have already gone by since the museum’s inauguration and already it has staged hundreds of exhibitions both large and small. The museum of an art academy can be paralleled with the auditorium of a music conservatoire or the theatre of a performing arts school, that is, a place for screening the fruits of practice, a place for research and interaction, an important window for the academy’s expressions; at the same time presenting opportunity for reflection. Firstly, the last decade of exhibitions has opened a window onto the museum and the academy’s collective sense of mission. In the same year, Cai Yuanpei said: Establishing a national art university means taking beauty to awaken the spirits of the people, truly completing their lives. Taking beauty to awaken the spirits of the people is the mission of the academy. 2008 was the CAA’s eightieth anniversary. From 2007 until the end of 2009, the CAA’s museum orchestrated a series of exhibitions given the collective title The Power of the Academy. Painting Transience: Wu Guanzhong was the first exhibition in the series. It stimulated reflection on history within the academy, reflections on the previous generation’s consciousness of the transience of things, along with their pastoral, poetic sentiments. Following this, exhibitions such as Inheritance and Mission and Inspired Production displayed traditional media such as sculpture and calligraphy, continuing along established trajectories, whilst at the same time establishing a new sense of mission. Exhibitions such as International Posters and Keys and Boards exhibited the graphic arts, investigating issues at the forefront of both digital technology and contemporary print-making. Other exhibitions such as Mixed Grains and Eighteen Cases showcased the CAA’s innovative experimental credentials, along with the academy’s interactions with other institutions around the Chinese mainland. In addition to the aforementioned exhibitions, in 2008 on the occasion of the CAA’s anniversary, The Power of the Academy: Documents of the CAA, a large scale exhibition, provided a stirring impression of thirty years in the academy’s development, social engagement and successive generations’ relative struggles and triumphs and, following this, the sixth cycle of the Biennial of Young Contemporary Chinese Ceramic Artists, along with 2009’s Maryn Varbanov Song – an exhibition focusing on the display and research of Maryn Varbanov’s work and its relationship to the new wave of Chinese art, establishing for this a new art historical definition. A serial exhibition of this sort, lasting for a total of three years, including a great variety of art objects, addressing the spheres of both tradition and innovation and touching on the providence and sentiments of both the individual and the collective, all as a means of exposing fully the revolutions and innovation occurring in the academy, in the context of the history of exhibitions in China, is a rare thing indeed. More importantly, regardless of whether these exhibitions sought to inquire or to break new ground, not one of them fails to direct us to the spirit of the academy, its engagement in its missions, criticality of method, pastoral-poetic sentiment, the media revolutions effective in the academy, the demarcation of its identity and characteristics. This series of exhibitions connected the mission of the academy with its various distinct departmental divisions, connecting also with the local, history, suffering, preservation and rebirth, developing a profundity of thought and dedication to the missions specific to the academy’s collective consciousness. If one were to group together the monographs connected to these exhibitions, represented in this array would be a revolution in contemporary academic thought, a grand voyage, constantly expanding and renewing its implications, at the same time permitting one sense profoundly the creative history bound up in the unique intellectual community of the CAA and the arresting force of its missions. 

This decade of exhibitions has at the same time also created another window of sorts, a window for the intellectual revolutions that took place at the academy during this time. Today, the relationships connecting global contexts and local sentiments are key in the strategies at play in Chinese culture’s continued development, broaching issues of identity and difference, the universal and the regional, amongst many other cultural topics, engraved also with the marks of the nation’s opening to the outside, the resultant reconfigurations, inheritances and expansions, amongst other measures influencing the intellectual sphere. International perspectives and local sentiments provide the academy’s development with a dual impetus; it is this also that drives the museum’s exhibition programs, its cultural background and roots in the collective spirit of contemporary China, taking an open, international perspective to guide the local sentiments employed in visual art practice, with everyday life and its associated sentiments encouraging the emplaced reconstruction of cultures. These things have already become important components in the exhibitions program and academic activities of the CAA. Borderlines: A Survey of Contemporary Asian Art is most representative in these respects. In the historical circumstances of both East and West, dialogues taking place in the Asian context have been effectively masked. How does one overcome the framework of an East-West dialectic; in the process developing an understanding of East Asian cultures and politics that takes contemporary art as a subject for cultural dialogue and inquiry, clarifying mutual experiences of antagonistic adversity and shared experience? It is precisely these things that best illustrate the inclinations of this project. In just two years, Chinese artists have left their mark in Istanbul, Bangkok, Teheran and Nara in Kyoto, along with Hangzhou and other East Asian cities, entering into their cultural ranges, academies and creative communities, investigating a range of different cultural scenes, highlighting issues touching on secular society, image taboos, everyday life, ambiguities of identity, historical memory and so on. At the same time, taking double-time as a theme, their activities present reflections on asian modernity, alluding to an experience of the different characteristics of life in various regions of Asia. The final manifestations of this survey project came in the form of a comprehensive report and an exhibition, inviting numerous artists from across Asia to participate. The local surveys incorporated in this exhibition reflected specific places, at the same time presenting various richly creative responses to the spirit of Asian cultures. This survey is noteworthy and the results it produced deserve constant recapitulation and consolidation. They are also a timely and profound manifestation of the CAA’s intellectual spirit. Today, a number of the project’s investigative methods and survey topics live on in cultural dialogues in Asia, as well as continuing to exert an influence in the cultural reflections driving the reconstruction of China at a local level. In addition to this, the project also stimulated the CAA’s involvement in a series of subsequent contemporary exhibitions including the Shanghai Biennial, Guangzhou Triennial and From West to East, becoming a key reference for reflections on post-colonial Asian culture, its critique and for intellectual dialogue in Asia as a whole. 

Perhaps more than anything, this decade of exhibitions has made the CAA’s art museum into a window for innovation, a portal shared by both the tutors and students of the academy. In September 2009, the inaugural exhibition for graduating PhD students from the department of Chinese painting opened to mass acclaim. This was the first thematic exhibition displaying work by PhD painting students in China, perhaps even in the world, reinforcing the traditions of Chinese painting and lifting fine art research to a new pinnacle. As of 2011, the CAA took the lead in facilitating exhibitions of work by graduating students to occur simultaneously during a set period, transforming the entire academy into a rich creative pasture and making the graduation period into a festival for the civilian population of Hangzhou. Every year at this time, our profound sense of youthful, creative passions is redoubled, as too is our sense of the powerful results of educational reforms that have taken place in the academy.  The large volume of visual, intellectual interaction and encounters these bustling exhibitions make available could only possibly occur in a university art museum. 

Mission, intellect, innovation, these things lie at the core of the academy. This core is best promoted and expressed via the exhibitions program of the art museum, producing an important emblem for the intellectual activities of the academy. In conjunction with changes in the basic significance of the university itself, the CAA’s art museum is part of a collective of museums including the China International Museum of Art and Design, the Zhejiang Folk Art Museum and the Pan Tianshou Memorial Museum and Art Museum; possessing objects from the Bauhaus, along with traditional Chinese shadow puppets, amongst other important collections. With the CAA’s theatre and auditorium being converted into a circular gallery space, the establishment and utilisation of the museum itself will enter into a new stage. The museum’s intellectual, academic nexus is not easily shaken. There is an old saying: Face to face, neither recoils; there is only respect, as the pavilion and the mountain. The prospect the university presents in fact resides in two districts, one is that of the natural environment, the other is the human, the creative.  The art museum of the CAA is truly a towering peak within the academy’s human, creative vista; a sense of mission imbuing it with majesty, intellect providing it with breadth and innovation achieving its intriguing aspect. So, let us work together industriously, making this peak higher and more expansive. 

Xu Jiang

22nd July 2013