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.The modernist tendencyto dissolve the gap between art and everyday life by challenging prescribedsystems and art institutions, cross the boundaries of art, or the question ofhow we define art in the first place comes up against significant hurdlesin the Chinese context.In fact, we must question the very applicationof such modernist tendencies, since Euro-American transferral theories,which view modernity in art in non-Euro-American contexts as importeddiscourse, suggest an ignorant appropriation of concepts and, consequently,periodizations.Favoring a progressive development model that beginswith the pre-modern, followed by the modern, and the postmodern, notonly negates the possibility of synchronous occurrence, but also necessarilyoverlooks the plurality of phenomena that results in modernities existingoutside the grasp of Euro-America.In China, the relatively short history of contemporary art forms andthe messy overlap of disparate art trends and philosophies within a severelycompressed timeframe obscure any clear periodization of the modern and postmodern. If anything, the dominant strain of postmodernism in Chinabreeds a willfully unstable application of the term itself, and of its implica-tions for discourse on art.2 Yet most scholars would agree that the triumph ofthe ideology of consumerism following the break with a revolutionary pasthas yielded a dizzying acceleration of change and fragmentation a centraltheme within postmodern theory.The embrace of new patterns of produc-tion and consumption accompanying the integration of China into a globalcapitalist system has also led to radical instabilities in everyday life and Artists and Contemporary Art in China 61culture.As global contemporary art increasingly moves beyond the wallsof the studio or gallery into public spaces, questions arise over how suchpractices can develop in China, a context in which art remains subject toinscriptions by an authoritarian system.The Chinese contemporary art world is in a peculiar position vis-à-visthe global art world.It has experienced great commercial success but fewhave meaningfully questioned its internal logic, and more importantly,what lies beyond the Chinese art world s tendencies toward professionaliza-tion and systemization.While the global art world struggles to define therole of art institutions, and countless artists and curators appear eager tojettison modernist frameworks and container aesthetics, in China theseconditions are given preference through the establishment of countlessprivate museums, oversized galleries, and dedicated art zones.The legacyof anti-institutional practices that we readily associate with modern andpostmodern contemporary art in the West barely exists in the Chinesecontext.The most visible institutions are State-run and subject to thenation-state occupying a dominating position vis-à-vis interpretations ofthe past as well as social representations of the present.Under such condi-tions, art is not an autonomous realm from which one critiques reality.Therefore understanding and identifying with critical art traditions fromthe West represents a conundrum for artists in China who may wish toadopt a critical stance but find themselves unable to escape the inevitablelimitations of authoritative structures of officialdom. The bifurcation of the Chinese art world along official and unoffi-cial lines that began in the 1980s and grew more polarized in the 1990smight be viewed in far less radical terms than is often portrayed.3 It is truethat over the years artists struggled with the ideologies and prescribedstylistic conventions of the dominant government-sanctioned art forms,and at times fought hard for acknowledgment by the official system.Buteven though they felt begrudged by being denied certain opportunities,their dissatisfaction did little to openly challenge the inequalities of theofficialdom itself.Rather than carving out spaces for free and open critiqueor advocating abolishment of certain key practices that sanctifiedartists approved national fine art exhibitions or the academic systemartists of this era trained outside the official ranks or working in avant-garde styles sought to find ways to harmoniously coexist with otheraccepted art forms and be welcomed into the fold.The formation of the self-organized Stars Group during the late 1970s isan example of a frustrating moment in which only academically trained 62 Art after Modernism and Postmodernismartists were afforded recognition by the official art system.Indeed, theirdecision to stage a group exhibition in an outdoor park adjacent to theNational Art Gallery in Beijing in 1979 might be seen as a symbolic gestureaimed at making this frustration public.Needless to say, their gesture ofwaging an unsanctioned art display in a public space helped them gainexposure, and shortly after they were granted an exhibition inside theNational Gallery
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