Behind the Great Wall, Bugs Bunny and Joe Camel have become the resident martyrs in an artistic revolution led by a media-saturated, tech-obsessed "Cartoon Generation" of China's first independent artists. But despite the raucous energy of their work, they have remained beneath the critical radar of American museum curators, says Barbara London, associate curator of film and video at the Museum of Modern Art.
In the effort to go public with their Sino-pop sensibility, London launched Stir Fry, a travelog-cum-critic's notebook of reports from her month-long expedition in China, which ended Thursday. More than a first glimpse of this new breed of indie artists, the site is a radical Web-exposé on the process of curation.
While museums usually mask the rocky process of selection, London's project lays open the social awkwardness, frustrations, and exuberance involved in drawing new artists out of the shadows. As a precursor to a Chinese video-art exhibition to open in November, London traveled through Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzou, and Guangzhou, "sleuthing" for artists and exhibitions (one was in a bike shop). She includes hotel receipts, personal photos, and even describes the hunt for Net access that skewered a self-aggrandizing Microsoft executive.
Stir Fry provides an unprecedented level of professional "disclosure" found only on the Net, says Benjamin Weil, curator at ada web, which hosted the site. "One day she says, 'I'm tired, I'm looking at art - I want to look at animals for one or two days,'" Weil recalls. "The new media - this new will to reveal - calls for the sharing of information, particularly in intellectual circles."
Beyond the personal effects, London tracks the evolution of an entirely new breed of independent Chinese artists. "To [Americans], 'independent artist' is something we're all familiar with, but in China, there's never been such a thing," says Ralph Samuelson, the director of the Asian Cultural Council, which funded London's voyage. Since 1949, Chinese artists have operated out of schools or "work units," notes Samuelson, but now "you see private business and artists standing on their own."
With their radical chic, the artists are now facing the challenges familiar to their Western bohemian counterparts: paying the rent and making a salary. "[These artists] are working on the fringe," London adds. "The project helps them a bit, but [after Stir Fry] they'll still be ignored."
As the journal entry "9/23," describes, London encountered "an unexpected problem - cannot find a strictly traditional artist." London profiles artist Zhang's performance "coated with honey and fish slime seated near a fly-infested latrine" and examines an installation called "Spielberg" that has an angel mounting a wire-mesh pronghorn. Radical media artists are thriving in the new culture of liberation, notes London. A light-box installation "Made by Human Society" by Weng Fen pushes the edge, matching Playboy centerfolds with photos of "diseased genitalia" on large illuminated cubes. Though most artists have trouble getting their work exhibited, London says that two museums dedicated to contemporary art are slated to open.
Even in shock of such "committed work," the daily pace of her dispatches accelerated the curatorial process, London admits. "A lot of curators spend a long time digesting, and then they do a theoretical article for a magazine," says London. "It was hard to be meeting people and distilling quickly ... but [Stir Fry] forced me to have opinions faster."
