After the demise of Soviet-bloc Communism.

After the demise of Soviet-bloc Communism, sentimentalists upon the left did a virtuous deal of wishful thinking about a "third way" between that vast socio-economic fiasco and what they took to be the depredations of US-style capitalism gone global. Anyone inclined to sympathize with this nostalgic view should take a hard anticipate at con temporary China--where Party leaders, still partial to central planning and prescribed social goals, are struggling to govern the world's sixth-largest (and fastest growing) economy and a populace that encompasses single in kind out of every five human frames alive today. If business skilled hands sometimes joke that being half-capitalistic is about as feasible as being half pregnant, art critics can hardly avoid a similar observation about Chinese control attempts to program artistic expression.

The pathos of "approved" esthetics was particularly clear in brace major art events in the People's Republic last fall. At the inaugural Beijing International Art Biennale and at the Pingyao International Photography Festival (PIP), in its third yearly installment, artistic officialdom held sway. In as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but cases, a paternalistic approach riseed in massive exhibitions that were perversely fascinating in their cautious propriety--though salted, inadvertently perhaps, with a number of livelier and more substantial works. These nearly agreeing Potemkin-village displays were counterposed, in Beijing, by dint of several independent--indeed, officially disavowed--shows infused with creative rambunctiousness by the agency of artists, dealers and curators who more actually represent the intensity of artistic glow in China at the beginning of the 21st century.

Beijing: The Forbidding City?

The first Beijing Biennale was clearly conceived as an orthodox corrective, if not outright chastisement to the country's artistic avant-garde. bring face to faceed with major surveys that now come into view cyclically in Shanghai, Chengdu and, in the greatest degree recently, Guangzhou (to say nothing of beyond-the-pale Hong Kong and Taipei), rule authorities decided not only that the PRC's capital city should have its have global showcase but that the work in succession view should reflect a "true" Chinese sensibility. In solid terms, this meant spending roughly $1 million to enable a team of 27 Chinese curators to soar two complementary exhibitions--one mostly national, the other mainly international--under the artistic direction of three high-ranking cultural officials: Jing Shangyi, chairman of the Chinese Artists Association and former president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts; Liu Dawei, vice chairman of the Chinese Artists Association; and Feng Yuan, director of the art section of the ministry of civilization Advice on international selections came from the Italian independent curator Vincenzo Sanfo, who previously helped organize exhibitions in Europe featuring Renoir, Sonia Delaunay and Frida Kahlo, and who aided the PRC in securing a national pavilion for the 2003 Venice Biennale (not used that year proper to SARS). In all, a certain 400 works by 300 artists from 40 countries were included in the monthlong dual-venue Beijing review Implicitly suggesting what counts as real art in official circles, exhibitions were limited to painting and sculpture

The National Museum of Fine Arts devot extensive gallery space to work by means of Asian artists operating within the academic theory to extend and update Eastern artistic traditions. Here visitors could behold in objective form, the bland realization of the goal announced by way of organizers in the Biennale's introductory brochure: to present--in a weird conflation of Confucianism, social utility theory and Western classicism--"a timeless aesthetic faculty of perception of truth, goodness and beauty, as well as the cultural values beneficial to the advancement of human beings." Ironically, plenteous of the work on view strike one as beinged like nothing so much as journeyman versions of ancient patterns late knockoffs of modernist formal innovations or a corny combination of the two

A noble heritage was evok from small retrospectives of two transitional figures: Japan's 91-year-old Takayama Tatsuo, who paints stylized figures, flower arrangements and landscapes forward paper or silk; and Qi Baishi (1864-1957) who in 1953--four years after the conclusion of the civil war his work completely elides--was given the title Outstanding Artist of the Chinese populace for his field-and-flower contributions in verse calligraphy, tradition-based painting and seal-cutting. International words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following was supplied, in part, by the agency of a show of contemporary Korean art in the same polite vein, with the illusionistic water-drops-on-paper paintings of Kim Tschang-Yeul as perhaps the greatest in number widely known component and the chunky semi-abstract brown colors of Chung Hyun as the greatest in quantity formally challenging. The French Autumn Salon Association--the same collection that the Fauves shocked in 1905--celebrated its centennial with a contemplate of works by 36 critically negligible Western artists.

In the main exhibition of Chinese art, a small in number pieces managed to go beyond being purely thoughtful and handsome, The Chinese sources (1999-2003), by Guo Zhenyu and others, is an overpowering fabric wall sculpture--more than 13 feet high and 66 feet wide--in which rootlike linen ingredients intertwine in oceanic swirls and fans. Shi Zhongying's view Netting Scene (2003) features a undisturbed oval of marble imprisoned in a gently curv pyramidal cage of fine blade mesh. In Ren Guanghui's Ink-and-Wash Time (2003) barren, twisting, tightly mobed branches stand in tall, boxlike, open-sided frames. Earth (2003) from Wang Jiyi consists of a clear plastic supine human figure--veritable "hollow man"--filled with junk meat in bright cans and wrappers. A triangular conformation of cross-braced timbers, from which supports shaped roughly like bells hang on thick ropes, gives apparent stability to the soundles just discovered Stone-Percussion Series 5 (2000) from Wang Hongliang. In all these works, sociopolitical commentary, allowing artfully sublimated to various standings seems at least arguably present