Contemporary Art History in the Making:
What really was and is going on?
Another Pan
潘公凯
Selling Out，or the problem of 遗 民
How the present flows seamlessly into the past and back again
Selling Out，or the problem of 遗 民
How the present flows seamlessly into the past and back again
In light of what was (and is still going on) in Hong Kong the day of this conference, it may not have the most auspicious moment to launch an exhibition of a man who epitomizes the sense of build-build-build-at-all-costs mentality of the New China of the 21st century. Pan Gongkai 潘公凯 is in the midst of designing a mammoth cutting-edge Chinese Center for Research in Antarctica. Scholarship seemed oddly flaccid at this conference, which seemed focused on panegyrics.
And as we all "know," there is always a reason (or reasons) for the applause rather than boos or catcalls when it comes to the world of (international) art. China is making inroads here as it is elsewhere.
Despite the congratulatory hoopla surrounding apparently the first exposition of this bureaucrat/professional artist and Renaissance man,, no hard questions were asked of him or his work just on the cusp of the 65th anniversary of the founding of the P.R.C. and three months exactly after the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. This was quite surprising to this observer, not a professional art historian but a thinker nonetheless, as in attendance were at least two academics whose past contributions have focused on social context. The looming larger question has, of course, powerfully ominous art historical antecedents, namely that of Jean-Jacques David, the famous late 18th century painter whose fortunes rose and fell with those of the Ancien Regime, Napoleonic years, and then the Bourbon Restoration, when he was finally exiled from France. In China, one of the most interesting parallels would be that of the Yuan dynasty Zhao Mengfu, who unlike some of his literati compatriots who refused out of principle, chose instead to serve the Mongols.
Eliding this question proved to be a major disappointment and a missed opportunity, which leads this observer to question the relevance of the symposium, which turned into a sometimes rather rote panegyric. Whether Pan Gonkai, the president of the China Central Academy of Painting, has compromised his ideals in his service of the Party - Regime - Nation is still an open question.
In any case, what I was thinking to myself was that he invites the suspicion that in aligning himself so clearly with the regime, serving and advancing in its interests in the construction of modernist gargantuan architecture to better reflect China's insistence on competing on every possible level with the West, he as compromised himself somewhere along the way. To what extent has the trajectory of his artistic career been effected, and when and how, is a fascinating if thorny question.
Much as I, too, would like to celebrate Mr. Pan's achievements I would also greatly appreciate better understanding the difficulties he has faced in reconciling past and present, as well as that of the intellectual heritage of the yimin scholar-painters , which he must be aware of as an educated Chinese, with the major driving forces of contemporary Chinese society.
Obviously, the Frye and the Chinese government cut a deal to promote Mr. Pan and his work in the United States. Ergo, no scholar is, tacitly, supposed to criticize the actual regime or bring up the matter of Mr. Pan's unstinting loyalty to it. Here the government and the state have fused into one, for Pan, and his work, while celebrating the nation and its emergence into the international scene as a major power to be reckoned with, seems vitiated because it does not break new ground, so to speak, except in the sense of its sponsors's push to have it seen around the world.
To have the government of the People's Republic of China behind an artist is no small achievement for some.
I was struck by the beauty of the huge painting the Frye commissioned from him, the eponymous title of the exhibition, "Withered Lotus Cast in Iron" while at the same time feeling uneasy about its indebtedness to Shi Tao石涛 Bada shanren 八大山人 two highly individual painters who lived through the fall of the Ming and beginning of the Qing dynasties.
Apparently, I was the only one in the audience disturbed by what I termed, in the question-and-answer time after Martin Power's talk, "the hole(s) in the individual and collective consciousness" surrounding Mr. Pan's oeuvre over the past decades.
What artistic development has his work traveled? Is there any reflection of the troubled social and political times in his work or has he tried to shield it from external realities that might impinge on it.
Eliding this question proved to be a major disappointment and a missed opportunity, which leads this observer to question the relevance of the symposium, which turned into a sometimes rather rote panegyric. Whether Pan Gonkai, the president of the China Central Academy of Painting, has compromised his ideals in his service of the Party - Regime - Nation is still an open question.
In any case, what I was thinking to myself was that he invites the suspicion that in aligning himself so clearly with the regime, serving and advancing in its interests in the construction of modernist gargantuan architecture to better reflect China's insistence on competing on every possible level with the West, he as compromised himself somewhere along the way. To what extent has the trajectory of his artistic career been effected, and when and how, is a fascinating if thorny question.
Much as I, too, would like to celebrate Mr. Pan's achievements I would also greatly appreciate better understanding the difficulties he has faced in reconciling past and present, as well as that of the intellectual heritage of the yimin scholar-painters , which he must be aware of as an educated Chinese, with the major driving forces of contemporary Chinese society.
Obviously, the Frye and the Chinese government cut a deal to promote Mr. Pan and his work in the United States. Ergo, no scholar is, tacitly, supposed to criticize the actual regime or bring up the matter of Mr. Pan's unstinting loyalty to it. Here the government and the state have fused into one, for Pan, and his work, while celebrating the nation and its emergence into the international scene as a major power to be reckoned with, seems vitiated because it does not break new ground, so to speak, except in the sense of its sponsors's push to have it seen around the world.
To have the government of the People's Republic of China behind an artist is no small achievement for some.
I was struck by the beauty of the huge painting the Frye commissioned from him, the eponymous title of the exhibition, "Withered Lotus Cast in Iron" while at the same time feeling uneasy about its indebtedness to Shi Tao石涛 Bada shanren 八大山人 two highly individual painters who lived through the fall of the Ming and beginning of the Qing dynasties.
Apparently, I was the only one in the audience disturbed by what I termed, in the question-and-answer time after Martin Power's talk, "the hole(s) in the individual and collective consciousness" surrounding Mr. Pan's oeuvre over the past decades.
What artistic development has his work traveled? Is there any reflection of the troubled social and political times in his work or has he tried to shield it from external realities that might impinge on it.
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