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Travel: In Nanjing,
It's Art for Art's Sake
The
Avant-Garde Fields of China's Ancient Capital
By CRYSTYL MO |
LI CHAOYIN
The Outdoor Art Festival in Nanjing, China
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The peasants are stealing your artwork!" I yelled to Yu Xiao
Yu. I had just run halfway across a tiny, muddy island on the
outskirts of Nanjing, dodging several avant-garde sculptures
and art installations along the way."Really?" asked the artist,
as his round face broke into a smile. "That's great!" A group
of fellow Nanjing artists laughed and pointed at the leather-faced
farmer in a worn Mao jacket who, along with his wife and son,
was cheerfully scooping armfuls of seaweed from Yu's installation:
a giant ditch in the shape of a gingerbread man, which was filled
with water and what was once $50 worth of seaweed.
I had come to Nanjing to join the city's contemporary artists
for an outdoor festival featuring some extremely down-to-earth
and earthy art. Although Nanjing, twice capital of China,
has long been renowned for its artists, they have historically
been more traditional poets, writers and classical painters.
This festival, entitled "Basking in the Sunshine," indicates
that Nanjing's modern artists are coming into their own, with
revolutionary new ideas.
"Nanjing artists are different," says Guo Haiping, a crew-cut
painter and restaurateur in his 30s. "We're not like those
serious, solitary-minded Beijing or Shanghai artists." In
a country where contemporary art is often politically sensitive
and inaccessible, Nanjing's recent crop of modernists stands
out. Their tightly knit community is committed to bringing
art-and a bit of humor-to the common people.
Guo's restaurant-cum-mini-gallery, the Banpo Village Caf?
doubles as a salon for Nanjing's creative population. Painters
and performance artists crowd every table, cracking sunflower
seeds and chatting till the wee hours. While discussions often
center on the struggle to bring modern art to the general
public in a tradition-bound country with a skittish government,
the crowd also dedicates plenty of time to laughing, drinking
tea and making the most of the anti-9-to-5 lifestyle. And
visitors, even nonartists, are readily welcomed. In one evening,
I was invited to four artists' studios as well as to lunch,
afternoon tea, dinner and after-dinner snacks.
Tang Guo, one of Nanjing's most successful contemporary painters,
has a studio that could have been clipped from an architectural
magazine: a polished black brick floor reflects light from
an elegant hanging lamp wrapped in handmade paper. The walls
are a washed-out olive green, and Tang's jewel-toned works
lean against furniture and walls with a deceptive casualness-precisely
where they will be noticed most. In contrast, Guo Haiping's
studio in the city center is haphazardly filled with his signature
finger-painted monochromes and random objects-a toilet hangs
on the entrance room wall, covered from top to bottom with
Guo's red fingerprints.
After my studio tours, I met photographer Li Chaoyin for
lunch. We took a stroll down Shizi Qiao, the lively pedestrian-only
street below his studio, which is Nanjing's choice spot for
people watching. We ate at Nanjing Dapaidang, a vast restaurant
made up of several tiny kitchens. Everything looked and smelled
delicious. We selected carefully: tiny, crisp shrimp in a
mandarin orange juice concentrate; rice and pork steamed inside
bamboo rods; and for dessert, a candy-sweet, whole steamed
pear.
That night, I visited the Double Nine Gallery, which hosts
monthly exhibits of contemporary artwork, to meet up with
my seaweed-artist friend, Yu. "I am so happy that the peasants
took my seaweed," he said. "It adds the final step to the
evolution of life symbolized in that artwork. What more could
an artist wish for but that even a farmer gains something
new from his work?" He paused, and for a moment I wondered
if Yu really imagined the farmer was sitting up thinking about
primordial soup as symbolized in installation art. But Yu,
like many of his Nanjing compatriots, was humorously realistic.
He knows art can be nourishing in many ways. "They'll think
about my artwork," he continued, "every time they eat my seaweed."
  
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