The past two years have not been particularly good for China’s global image. The repugnance of Trumpian references to “the China virus”, thick with yellow-peril bigotry, made many of us err on the side of resisting the denigration of Chinese people — perhaps at the cost of criticising the Chinese government. But there’s no question that the authoritarian regime’s prevention of Chinese scientists from sharing what they knew about SARS-CoV-2 resulted in thousands of deaths and aggravated the many severe consequences of the subsequent Covid-19 pandemic.
Aside from a reignited Sinophobia via the joking-not-joking discourse of the “Wuhan Flu” (thanks Borat), there are other reasons for China’s branding problem. When I heard about the participation of SA gallery Guns & Rain in an exhibition taking place at the Qingdao Art Museum — Qingdao is a large port city midway between Beijing and Shanghai — a series of unflattering associations came to mind.
The most common response to the pairing of “China” and “art” is to invoke the spectre of censorship, ranging from exhibition closures to arrest; the treatment of an artist-activist like Ai Weiwei is a prominent example, but there are many others.
Moreover, African artists and gallerists, eyeing an enormous potential market, may be reticent to participate in what could be perceived as acquisitive ambition in line with Chinese economic imperialism — and expansion across Africa in particular (though here one should emphasise that this is not comparable to the Western imperialism of centuries past, where land and art objects alike were stolen rather than bought).
I had cause to question my prejudices when I found out more about the W Art Foundation, which staged the Qingdao exhibition in November. Established by Will Wang in Hong Kong in 2019, the foundation is less interested in art as an aspect of “soft power” than it is in cosmopolitanism: the aesthetic, cultural and intellectual opening-up of the world to China, and of China to the world.
Under the title Running — The New Contemporary, the exhibition aimed to educate visitors from throughout the Qingdao region about the “richness and diversity in global contemporary art”. I asked Wang for examples of the assumptions that he hoped to disrupt or challenge. He affirmed that, “In China, exhibitions often focus on Western artists, especially male artists. But I believe that Chinese audiences have the capacity to learn and quickly adapt to new visualities, tastes and culture. I hope that the exhibition sends out a signal to artists and art institutions around the world that there’s rising interest in China towards non-Western contemporary art.”
Wang was phlegmatic when I raised the Chinese government’s record of suppressing art, ideas and access to information: “Chinese audiences have the ability to think independently. My intention has never been a complicated one — to present the artworks to the audience as objectively and authentically as possible. That is also the core of this exhibition, diversity not only in terms of the artworks on show but also in terms of approaches to interpretation.”
There are three Southern African artists included in Running — Thebe Phetogo from Botswana, Helen Teede from Zimbabwe and Thina Dube from SA — along with artists from across the continent and around the world. Wang paid tribute to gallerists such as Guns & Rain’s Julie Taylor, who facilitated the Southern African artists’ involvement: “The African contemporary art scene is flourishing, whether in SA, Ghana, Nigeria or Uganda, thanks to the efforts of galleries in discovering and supporting new talent.”
Yet he was careful to avoid Running perpetuating the notion that artists selected for the exhibition were “representative” of national or regional artistic styles and traditions. “I don’t think there are any artists who produce works only using ‘local’ practices,” Wang rightly insists; and he also acknowledges that Western art, in whatever way that phrase is understood, continues to have “a huge impact” on artists regardless of where they are based.
The triangulation of Africa, the West and the East is necessarily reductive when it comes to understanding artistic exchange — just as it is when analysing economic activity or political action. Nevertheless, with adequate caveats, this framework can also be instructive. Just ask a recent visitor to the Qingdao Art Museum.
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