Unpleasant but healing:
Redemption and reflection in art practice during the 20th Century after D.T.Suzuki’s spread of Zen beyond cultural boundaries, a comparison between Joseph Beuys’ I like America and America likes Me 1974 and Tehching Hsieh’s One year performance 1978
MA FINE ART DIGITAL HUA13405289
JIAQI HUANG
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Abstract This paper aims to investigate the relationship between worldwide
dissemination of Zen and growth of contemporary art in the 20th century. A
recent issue is presented at the beginning containing the basic question about
artists’ practice to social revolution, by giving examples of early enlightenment of
Zen in west society to justify the cultural generality in different contexts. And
then through Joseph Beuys and Tehching Hsieh’s specific works to illustrate the
change of method and ideology under the impact of Zen. According to the return
of Zen in China after longtime insulation, to indicate the social value and
direction of contemporary art in the East, it sums up the spirit of Zen plays a
positive role in social revolution.
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Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................. 2
Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 4
The Revolutionaries from The Root ............................................................................ 5
Avant Dadaism: The History .......................................................................................... 5
Zen: Journey to The West ................................................................................................ 6
Contribution of D.T. Suzuki ..................................................................................................... 7
The Chance in Contextual Diversity ..................................................................................... 7
From John Cage to Joseph Beuys .................................................................................. 8
Joseph Beuys’ Healing Room ...................................................................................... 10
We Propose Exchange: Beuys and China .......................................................................... 11
The Living Dead ........................................................................................................................ 12
Tehching Hsieh’s Invisible Cage ................................................................................ 13
After Isolation: Ideology, Self-‐Awareness and Action in China ....................... 16
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 18
Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 19
Photograph ................................................................................................................................. 21
Figure 1 Aiweiwei and blanket, London, 2015 ........................................................................................................ 4
Figure 2 D.T. Suzuki and John Cage, 1962. ................................................................................................................ 8
Figure 3 Beuys’s felt blanket, walking stick and coyote became sculptural props throughout the
performance, 1974 ................................................................................................................................................. 10
Figure 4 Poster of "Social Sculpture: Beuys in China", 2013 ........................................................................... 11
Figure 5 Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance: Cage piece (1978 –1979) .......................................... 13
Figure 6 Tehching Hsieh on Day 1, left, and Day 365, locked up for art, Cage piece, 1978-‐1979 ... 14
Figure 7 Paper-‐cut propaganda poster from the early days of the Cultural Revolution ..................... 16
Figure 8 The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the
Washing Machine for Two Minutes, Huang Yongping, 1987/1993 .................................................. 17
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Introduction At 10:00 a.m. on 17th September, the artists Ai Weiwei and Anish Kapoor joined
hands and each carried a single blanket to start an eight-‐mile walk from Royal
Academy of Arts to the Olympic park at Stratford, what represents the global
crisis that faces 60 million refugees in our world today. Increasing number of
people and journalists joined the action before the artists reached their
destination.
The group was consisted of more than 150 people from different occupations
and fields, to support the cause. From photographers, documentary (film)
makers and installation creators, artists in modern society are engaging with
some of the most pressing issues of this age. As Aiwewei said after the walk:
“We are artists, we are part of the whole situation. This problem has
such a long history, a human history. We are all refugees somehow,
somewhere and at some moment.”(Brown, 2015)
Figure 1 Aiweiwei and blanket, London, 2015
During the four years of 2014 to 2018, First World War Centenary (1914.org,
2015) takes place to mark the 100th anniversary of the First World War. By the
end of WWI, very few survivors were free from that distressing sequel, from then
on, groups of innovators include artists started to take action on relieving and
recovering the world from a long illness as redemption. What brought a query:
How can artists respond with actual discourse on this mobilization and
integration under different social modes and contexts? Debating on regional
phenomenon in the evolution this paper explores the moments of
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enlightenment1 that based on the development history of contemporary art in
the 20th century, addressing the problem of what art was doing or what art was
not doing for a long time.
The Revolutionaries from The Root Since the beginning of 20th century, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and Paul
Gauguin have been regarded as vanguard figure in the history of modern art that
started the early practice against traditions, and these prominent people exactly
inaugurated a new era for the process of growing Fauvism, Cubism and
Expressionism in ten years afterwards. However the War broke off the progress
and caused collective psychological trauma, paving the way for major political
changes, including revolutions in many of the nations involved.
Avant Dadaism: The History During 1916 to 1923, Dada arrived that was associated with artists came from
France, Germany and Switzerland like Jean Hans Arp, Otto Dix and Marcel
Duchamp (Huelsenbeck and Green, 1998) to engage in sabotage, denial, destroy,
subversion and other ‘anti-‐art’ movement. Dada is not only raised for
reconsideration the essence of art and itself forward, it also opens up new
possibilities of how do art intervene politics.
Talking about Dada, Duchamp should be the representative because their spirits
were very similar. In both Duchamp and other Dadaists’ art they all appealed a
kind of freedom to ‘overturn everything’. (Eliot and Rainey, 2006) In fact,
Dadaism cannot go beyond the spirit of Duchamp at any time. Dada was a
campaign that launched by a group of youngsters who had lost confidence in
civilization and escaped from the battle, they did not acknowledge the entire
world, hoping to overthrow everything, deny everything. From here, it is easy to
see, the ideas and intents of Duchamp were familiar with Dadaism, as all of them
1 Enlightenment in Buddhism, the English term enlightenment is the western translation of the term Bodhi, "awakening", which has entered the Western world via the 19th century translations of Max Müller. It has the western connotation of a sudden insight into a transcendental truth. (Gregory, 1987)
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intended to deny everything with established pattern. But Duchamp's ideology
was based on respect for the original life model, in order to achieve ‘spiritual
freedom’. (Paz, 1978) Duchamp said: “I like living, breathing better than
working...my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is
inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant
euphoria.” (Frank, 2014) Coincidentally, from the point of Chinese Zen (Chan
Buddhism)’s view that all objects or movements over the world are the reflection
of people’s heart, Duchamp had not approached any Eastern Zen and he had
never been to Eastern countries, nevertheless he turned his life into art, his
awareness of life and art was inborn.
Indeed the cruel war challenged the original traditions and morals, impacting
people's inherent thinking, which heralded a coming experimental age that
anything can happen. In 1919, The Mona Lisa was added long mustache.
Zen: Journey to The West On might think what is the meaning of overturning the fixed status or authorities?
However, in Duchamp’s term, the change is a change of perspective, he asked in
reply “Why can’t we change the perspective to view "master" works?” Duchamp
questioned the boundary and nature of art, just like Zen explores capacity and
potential of human, what lead Zen integrated into Western culture.
Transferring by Bodhidharma from India to China, Zen was founded in China in
the 6th century C.E., and it was exported to Japan and Korea after 600 years.
"Meditation2" is a school of Buddhism that has had significant impact in Japan
and Europe and America.
Zen disseminates that we are all already enlightened beings, but our true
potential has been clouded by ignorance. In east countries especially in Japanese
culture Zen influenced warrior samurai for its focus on discipline and self-‐
control. Zen also has effect on the practice of various arts, such as calligraphy,
painting, garden design, and archery. Beginning in the 20th century a
2 Meditation is a practice in which an individual trains the mind or induces a mode of consciousness, either to realize some benefit or for the mind to simply acknowledge its content without becoming identified with that content, or as an end in itself. (Alan, 2009)
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popularized version of Zen has become spread throughout the world and
influenced many in both the United States and Europe. (Patheos.com, 2015).
Contribution of D.T. Suzuki D.T. Suzuki was born in a Buddhism family in Japan, who became a Japanese
Buddhist scholar and thinker later and has been widely celebrated as ‘the first
transmitter of Japanese Zen to the west, especially the US and Great Britain’
(Dharmachāri, 2010). In 1893 he went to World Parliament of Religions held in
Chicago, then in 1897 Suzuki started to work with Paul Carus in translating and
preparing Eastern spiritual literature for publication in the West. Afterwards,
Suzuki engaged in teaching, writing and lecturing in Japan and the US, which
promoted the understanding of Buddhism in Western countries, he made Zen
popular and easy to understand by sharing his way of living based on Zen and
transforming the mysterious oriental outcome into an acceptable attitude
towards life for Westerners.
The Chance in Contextual Diversity Suzuki argued that a Zen satori (awakening) was the goal of the tradition's
training, while after centuries of development in China the traditions produced
different results from exactly the same origin.
‘In India, there prevailed the tradition of the mendicant, however in
China social circumstances led to the development of a temple and
training-‐center system in which the abbot and the monks all
performed mundane tasks, including food gardening or farming,
carpentry, architecture, housekeeping, administration (or community
direction), and the practice of folk medicine. Consequently, the
enlightenment sought in Zen had to stand up well to the demands and
potential frustrations of everyday life.’(Ch'en, Suzuki and Humphreys,
1955)
Back to Suzuki’s dissemination in the west, he ever said: “For you Westerners, it
is Swedenborg who is your Buddha, it is he who should be read and followed!”
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Which can be an enormously enlightening point for westerners to understand
basic meaning of Zen. Even so, under different context and background,
Westerners’ traditional way of thinking is rational dichotomy, which becomes
the biggest obstacle to use Zen thinking for creation. The essential difference
between the West and the East in the national character is, Easterners pay more
attention to an intuitive, holistic worldview, while Westerners will focus on the
analysis and conceptualization, with independent worldview. This fundamental
difference makes the western artists cannot completely understand the true
meaning of Zen, the thing what they learned from Zen is the attitude towards life,
"Turn life into art". They feel that this phenomenon can give their art an
unprecedented opportunity for change, which stimulates their pioneering spirit
in new artistic movement.
From John Cage to Joseph Beuys Since the World War II started in 1939, the entire art criticism and its measure of
social value were challenged again. After Suzuki introduced Zen to the West, in
1940s, John Cage, who was one of the leading figures of the post-‐war avant-‐garde.
‘attending Suzuki’s classes and Zen showed Cage his true nature: peaceful, loving,
joyful. His response was immediate: He would put all these soaring insights into
his music.’(Larson, 2012) ‘As he said: “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly
noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it
fascinating.”’(Cage and Gann, 2011)
Figure 2 D.T. Suzuki and John Cage, 1962.
Later on in 1951 Cage began to use chance operations in the course of his
composition, which took him to another direction. ‘His adoption of chance
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techniques is almost always seen as a rejection: a jettisoning of everything
traditionally musical.’(Pritchett, 1993) The promotion caused by Zen Buddhism
which influenced Cage to finally remove any trace of his personality from the
composed work. In Cage’s 4’33’’, which is commonly perceived as "four minutes
thirty-‐three seconds of silence", he clamed that any sounds might constitute
music as a reflection of Zen. 4’33’’ became a representative piece in post-‐war
culture, ‘in the words of one writer, “the authority of the composer (had been)
extinguished.”’(Pritchett, 1993)
Referring to Cage’s another piece 0′00″, without ordering any musical rules what
this piece showed the audiences is only behaviors, completely discarded the
classics and rebelled against orthodoxy, awakening the appearance of
Performance art.
Affected by Cage, Fluxus in 1960s carried ‘overthrow’ to extremes. The
traditional authorities were deconstructed and another discourse was set up, all
the contemptuous of authorities turned to be Fluxusist’s purpose more than
method. Joseph Beuys, as one of the Fluxusist at its early stage, however, he
could not completely agree with Fluxus’ assertion, and then he went at his own
pace. Beuys attempted to overthrow the system in vertical way, away from John
Cage’s aesthetic feeling and gradually decaying value of the sense of form in art.
‘As one acknowledged realization that it is incorrect to describe Beuys as an
artist who also partook of politics. To Beuys, being a member of parliament,
educator, a feminist, an environmentalist, or a person interested in discussion
and reforming university entrance exams, etc. were all equivalent to being a
sculptor, performing challenging actions, and drawing.’(Mizusawa, 1993)
Beuys’ idea of art extends to incorporate all types of activities. In other words, all
liberal and creative activities in pursuit of the ideal human society are art and, in
Beuys’ terms, “social sculpture3”, what interposed art to life and returned art to
3 In 1973 Beuys wrote: “Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-‐revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-‐hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.” (Caroline, 1973)
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the public. In the thinking model of Zen that all the external forms would make
people ignore the essence as well as Beuys’ interpretation of art.
Joseph Beuys’ Healing Room When Beuys survived in air crash in World War II and saved by Tatars, they
wrapped Beuys in animal fat and felt to keep him warm. Therefore, he continued
to use these materials in his sculptures and performance art, such as his popular
piece ‘Fat Chair (1964-‐1985)’, or ‘PLIGH (1958/1985)’, or ‘Jockey Cap (1985)’.
Figure 3 Beuys’s felt blanket, walking stick and coyote became sculptural props throughout the
performance, 1974
In May 1974, Beuys arrived in New York JFK from Germany in preparation for
his " I like America and America likes Me". He wrapped himself in a felt, and an
ambulance took him to a small room in Rene Block gallery, where he started his
performance. In that room there was a wild coyote, a pile of straw, as well as 50
copies "The Wall Street Journal". Over the next three days, Beuys spent eight
hours per day to stay with the coyote. Initially Beuys was covered by felt with
crutches in hand, standing in the room as a guest, allowed the coyote’s
aggressive behavior, even biting. Afterwards the coyote turned wary, then
gradually became friendly. To got along with in the three days, which was a
symbol of communication between the American spirit (the coyote) and Beuys,
who was transported back to the airport via ambulance. ‘He never set foot on
outside American soil nor saw anything of America other than the coyote and the
inside of the gallery.’ (Tauschinger-‐Dempsey, 2013)
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The coyote had been regarded as god in native Indians’ culture, while the white
settlers treated them as ferocious beasts. Beuys’ art was fulfilled with shaman
spirit, including control and transform nature. Beuys completed this
performance as a penance for the whites’ wrongdoing before. The performance
reflected his original intention that as a healer to visit America.
We Propose Exchange: Beuys and China At the same time, on the other side of earth everything was changing during the
Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution in China. Under compulsory command and
enormous pressure from the Central Cultural Revolution Group, to a certain
degree, the “red, bright, and shining” art had fomented revolution. However, the
priority of art during that period was serving political and propaganda purposes.
‘The Cultural Revolution pitted young people against older generations so that
many revered artists and artistic traditions suffered humiliation and
destruction.’(Avril, n.d.) Political woodblock prints and the Soviet socialist realist
style with Chinese characteristics formed a false dawn to the masses.
Figure 4 Poster of "Social Sculpture: Beuys in China", 2013
As a result, this evolution postponed decades for Chinese to meet Beuys, and his
mysterious room, even Beuys has influenced contemporary Chinese art since the
cultural opening due to economic reform that began in 1978. In 2013, Central
Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) brought Joseph Beuys’ exhibition to China for the
first time, which was entitled “Social Sculpture: Beuys in China”, over 400 works
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were presented in the exhibition, including manuscripts, drawings, photographs,
and videos documenting the influential artist’s performances. The most
impressive work for Chinese visitors was the piece of ‘Chinese Hare Sugar’, the
picture turned out to be the most familiar pattern of White Rabbit toffee candy
wrapper, which was the product as everyone knows in China. In fact Beuys had
showed his special preference to hare in previous works he used the candy
wrapper found in Shanghai to make this screen prints in 1979. Before this he
already produced another two ‘Hare Sugar’ multiples, the first in 1972,
‘American Hare Sugar’ in 1974. During Beuys’ lifetime he had never been to
China, however in this ‘happening’ Beuys bridged himself with the orient.
The Living Dead Hare, honey, fat, felt and confined space had already been the significant
imageries of Beuys’ works, which also reflected in his ‘How to Explain Pictures to
a Dead Hare’, taking place in another Beuys’ “room” in Düsseldorf.
In this performance what Beuys explained was no longer art, neither to instill the
hare to some ideas forcibly, but expressed a relationship, according to his
understanding the relationship between hare and the world was the same as
man and the world is the same, which emphasized the balance between nature.
Beuys explained:
“(The hare) has a strong affinity to women, to birth and to
menstruation, and generally to chemical transformation of blood.
That's what the hare demonstrates to us all when he hollows out his
form: the movement of incarnation. The hare incarnates himself into
the earth, which is what we human beings can only radically achieve
with our thinking: he rubs, pushes, and digs himself into Materia
(earth); finally penetrates (hare) its laws, and through this work his
thinking is sharpened then transformed, and becomes revolutionary.”
(Phaidon, n.d.)
‘To Beuys, “Even a dead animal, preserves more powers of intuition than some
human beings with their stubborn rationality.”’(Phaidon, n.d.) This performance
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is considered Beuys’ highest interpretation for "What is art", all Beuys did was
using animals to express human’s limitations.
During this special period, the wounds of war were hidden beneath the return of
a stable life, hovering beside loss and hope, and the audiences peered with
curiosity through the obstacles outside Beuys’ room(s), nourishing a variety of
new ways to reflect the social and political culture.
In addition, the political party The Greens/Alliance ’90 was founded in 1980 in
Karlsruhe, as an important figure in the first years who named the party, Beuys
laid the ideological foundations along with other members, proclaiming the
famous ‘Four Pillars of the Green Party: Social justice, Ecological wisdom,
Grassroots democracy and Nonviolence.’(Wall, 2014) Which carried out Beuys’
spirit through to the end.
Tehching Hsieh’s Invisible Cage Tehching Hsieh, born in Taiwan, jumped ship to a pier on the Delaware River,
slipping into the US where he began his new life as an illegal immigrant for
fourteen years.
At first Hsieh supported himself by working in Chinese restaurant and
construction jobs, he felt cooped up in the life of an illegal immigrant, and uneasy
in the unfamiliar surroundings until he locked him up in a cage, without a coyote
or a hare, Hsieh isolated himself from the others, which lasted from 29
September 1978 through 30 September 1979. What was the first piece of Hsieh’s
five One Year Performance.
Figure 5 Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance: Cage piece (1978 –1979)
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Located in a loft in Brooklyn, in that cage of less than six square meters, and
under the supervision of notary, Hsieh were closed off behind walls that built of
his ideology and broke off all communication with the outside world. He neither
talking to anyone, reading, listening to the radio, nor watching TV, during the one
year his friend Cheng Wei Kuong brought him necessities, disposed his waste
and photographed Hsieh to document the project. Occasionally the performance
was open to the public to visit.
Figure 6 Tehching Hsieh on Day 1, left, and Day 365, locked up for art, Cage piece, 1978-‐1979
Unlike Breatharians4, the main issue for Hsieh to consider was not survival, he
consumed food and the project was meticulously arranged, “The room was
divided into different areas, Hsieh named them "home", "park" and so on; Every
two or three days, he would carefully scrub the floor; Adequate sleep of 12 hours
a day; Collecting his pubic hair regularly and carefully counted; Also, he
masturbated every day, in order to fall asleep more easily.” The same as Hsieh’s
all other One Year Performance, his ‘Cage piece’ struggled against exhaustion and
aloneness, taking every minute into practice, rain or shine. Which was associated
to artists who claimed their lives were their art, such as Nam June Paik´s Altered
Piano, John Cage’s 0’00 or Duchamp’s 'Fountain'. Hsieh set up himself unordinary
living conditions and made life a simple form, in terms of Hsieh, art was
inseparably linked with life, however art was a conversion process, rather than a
direct reproduction of life, his work was not directly on the subject of illegal
immigration, and his thought was not limited by that argument. In his first four
years in New York, he always paced in the studio after work, thinking about how
4 Associated to breatharianism, is the belief that it is possible for a person to live without consuming food. Breatharians claim that food, and in some cases water, are not necessary for survival, and that humans can be sustained solely by prana, the vital life force in Hinduism.
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should he do with art, however nothing could be figured out until he suddenly
realized that his thinking and way of spending time itself was an artwork. His
work was exactly talking about this, everyone spent their time in their own way.
Hsieh said: “You are your own world's dominator, how to choose what way to
spend time? Kings and beggars, they do a lot, or do nothing, for me, there is no
difference, both of them are spending time, spending life. “ As Cynthia Carr wrote
in her book (after Hsieh’s last artwork, Thirteen Year Plan 1986-‐1999):
“When Tehching then came forward to answer questions, he said
first that he had always done his art ‘from instinct,’ that it was very
personal, and that from now on he would not do art at all. Life had
become his art.”(Carr, 1993)
Familiar with Franz Kafka’s themes of death, art, isolation, asceticism, spiritual
poverty, futility, personal failure and the corruption of human relationships, but
differ from the ‘hunger artist5’, Hsieh finally stepped out of his cage while the
protagonist in Kafka’s short story was buried with a pile of decaying straw.
Through Hsieh’s works, including Time Clock Piece, Outdoor Piece, Rope Piece,
No Art Piece and Thirteen Year Plan, the artist attempted to examine the most
essential of human beings, the issue of "the existence of life” and "the passing of
time”, ‘as the three goals of Zen: development of concentration, awakening,
realization of Zen in daily life.’(Kapleau, 1989) For public what Hsieh presented
was his self-‐discipline, self-‐isolation, and even self-‐destruction, comparing with
Duchamp’s Zen of porcelain urinal and Beuys’ healing of banded knife, which
were happened with great social vicissitudes background, Hsieh’s personal
experience were more associated with society nowadays, furthermore, from an
illegal immigrant to a “master” Tehching Hsieh realized his self-‐salvation.
5 A Hunger Artist is a short story by Franz Kafka first published in Die neue Rundschau in 1922. The protagonist, a hunger artist who experiences the decline in appreciation of his craft, is an archetypical creation of Kafka: an individual marginalized and victimized by society at large. (Kafka, Crick and Robertson, 2012),
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After Isolation: Ideology, Self-‐Awareness and Action in
China Based on several decades of development that Zen had inspired a number of
Western and some Asian avant-‐garde artists to take action in art movements,
meanwhile, ‘the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution in China sought to build a
new socialist nation without reliance on the values of foreign societies or
previous corrupt domestic ones.’(Cushing and Tompkins, 2007) Because of the
authorities accepted narrow range of forms and the artistic creativity was
strictly in controlling by Party politics, ‘in that circumstance, numerous of
examples of artwork were destroyed, academic departments were dismantled,
personal careers were ruined, and even brought imprisonment and
death.’(Cushing and Tompkins, 2007)
Thus, either contemporary art or Zen spirit remained stagnant at that time until
the "Gang of Four6" was crushed.
Figure 7 Paper-‐cut propaganda poster from the early days of the Cultural Revolution
Soon afterwards China began to reshape its own culture, turned back to re-‐
examine the artistic value and its direction from the pursuit of economic
development. The exhibition ’85 New Wave represented a resounding reply to
the Cultural Revolution, since China had been cut off from the outside for years,
suppression of such a powerful culture could only be met with an equal and
opposite force, the result of this explosive reaction was the ’85 New Wave
Movement. In the next few years, the artists brought the avant-‐garde
experimental spirit and philosophy of contemporary art to this grandiose and 6 The Gang of Four, was a political faction composed of four Chinese Communist Party officials. They came to prominence during the Cultural Revolution and were later charged with a series of treasonous crimes. (Buckley, 2012)
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rigid socialist country. Everything was reinvented from scratch, but seemed
vibrant.
Many Chinese artists of the ’85 New Wave, such as the Xiamen Dada group in
Fujian and the rational painting movement in Northern China, were inspired by
innovations in art happening in Europe and America. In 1986 Xiamen Dada was
built up by artists Huang Yongping, Lin Jiahua, Jiao Yaoming, Yu Chengang,
Linchun, Cai Lixiong. This Chinese art group protested the influence of socialist
realism art from the Soviet Union, through absurdist artworks and performances.
‘Inspired by the relationship between European dada and Zen Buddhism, and
embraced absurdity. They were particularly interested in the concept of chance,
using it to determine the making of the artworks.’(Tate.org.uk, n.d.)
Figure 8 The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the
Washing Machine for Two Minutes, Huang Yongping, 1987/1993
The same year in Zhejiang, Zhang Peili combined some other artists conferred
and decided to build a smaller group following the work of the Zhejiang Youth
Creation Group, which could support them in making and exhibiting art pieces
outside the China’s official party system, and named it The Pond Association (Chi
She).
In early 1990s, affected by Pop, Cynical Realism and Political Pop arose as forms
of "unofficial art" in China, and Gaudy Art also developed of the creative impulses
of those art movements. During the late twentieth century, while accepting the
influence of Western culture, China persistently sought its own path. Which parts
of Western culture should China accept, and which parts of Chinese culture
should she reject? In the process of accepting contemporary Western culture,
how does one “separate the wheat from the chaff”? For more than a century now,
this has been an incessant debate among Chinese intellectuals and theorists. In
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some ways, Dada brought the series of questions into China, making people to
face the fact that the whole social system began to be challenged under the
influence of the art movements.
Conclusion In sum, Zen had undergone a century to be spread from the East to West, and
eventually affected the East from West, to a large extent it influenced the
development of contemporary art, creating a thinking model for the masses with
collective trauma after World War II to regain freedom and hope, especially for
Western contemporary art to obtain a new perspective on artistic creation.
Take the United States for example, in the early 20th century Abstract art in the
US began to integrate Eastern artistic conception into its expression, just like
Abstract Expressionism directly drew on the brush stroke and technique of East,
but only similar in form. However, during the 1950s when the avant-‐garde
artists in the United States started to extensively contact with Eastern
philosophy and religious thought, they began a profound evolution, which led the
artistic creativity and vitality after the 1960s, making the United States become
the world leader of contemporary art.
In the process of my research, I found it could be such a valuable point, which
was the reason that I chose Beuys and Hsieh’s performance art in New York as
two significant examples in this paper. However, it is noteworthy that, Zen did
not sway Western art from then on, since ancient ages East and West were
different in the national character and cultural context, therefore it was
impossible to be convergence in each development. Nevertheless, since the
history has produced the intersection of the opposite, at least it indicated that
the division between human cultures could still grow freedom beyond
boundaries.
This research paper is a study and argument that established on the timeline,
explaining how the West and the East interrelate, and what the feedback is
afterwards. In general, it helps to collect my specific concerns of art. Personally,
through better understanding of past records, as well as reflection on nowadays
practice, the outcome will contribute to keep my sense of perspective, which is
the extension of my approach.
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Photograph Figure 1: Jiaqi Huang, (2015), Ai Weiwei and blanket, London Figure 2: John Cage and D.T. Suzuki. (1962). [image] Available at: http://www.yishushijie.com/sesquiton/article/?type=detail&id=84 [Accessed 4 Oct. 2015]. Figure 3: Fifty new copies of the Wall Street Journal were added to the closed space, which the coyote acknowledged by urinating on them. (1974). [image] Available at: http://www.kidsofdada.com/blogs/magazine/35963521-‐joseph-‐beuys-‐i-‐like-‐america-‐and-‐america-‐likes-‐me [Accessed 8 Oct. 2015]. Figure 4: Social Sculpture: Beuys in China. (2013). [image] Available at: http://news.artron.net/20140422/n594643.html [Accessed 1 Oct. 2015]. Figure 5: Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, (1979). Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1978 – 1979 Life image. [image] Available at: http://theculturetrip.com/north-‐america/usa/new-‐york/articles/tehching-‐hsieh-‐when-‐life-‐becomes-‐a-‐performance/ [Accessed 2 Oct. 2015]. Figure 6: The New York Times, (2009). Tehching Hsieh on Day 1, left, and Day 365, locked up for art. [image] Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/arts/design/19perf.html [Accessed 4 Oct. 2015]. Figure 7: paper-‐cut propaganda posters. (n.d.). [image] Available at: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/13443 [Accessed 10 Oct. 2015]. Figure 8: Huang, Y. (1987). Putting Herbert Reed s Concise History of Painting, and Li Yu s Concise History of Chinese Painting into Washing Machine for Two Minutes. [image] Available at: https://quizlet.com/5199153/361-‐flash-‐cards/ [Accessed 7 Oct. 2015].