On the Arts

Disclaimer: In this post I don’t want to seem as though I’m maliciously bagging on Chinese art, it is simply my observation of how my students regard art in China, how Chinese art is often known to the outside world, and the feeling that a country with one of the richest artistic traditions should be better represented in the fields of film, music, literature, etc., in the modern world. I’m sensitive to not wanting to be a foreigner disparaging a nation that I know little about, but I also feel like I should express what I feel and experience during my time here. Onward.

Because artistry, expression, creativity and all processes of this ilk have been so thoroughly repressed over the past 60+ years, China has relatively few modern cultural products of note to hang their hat on. It feels as though between China’s long and rich history of art and this unprecedented body of humans in one country, it should be playing a more prominent role in world art.

What this repression has created is a nation of over one billion people that, bizarrely, has relatively few modern cultural exports of quality. Most of the youth latch on to foreign artists, and there is little sign of this changing unless the government eases or releases its chokehold of Chinese artists; the exact opposite of their recent actions. Though I would not personally initiate a discussion on the sad state of Chinese cultural exports, my students have on many occasions brought up this topic themselves. It usually centers on the desperate movie industry, but it is present in other areas of art as well: their favorite musicians are almost exclusively from USA, South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan; they mostly regard foreign or pre-communist authors; and though there is a high regard for some past artists and thinkers, it had previously been (and sometimes still is) the mission of the communists to stamp out those legacies as well.

If we look at the success of the burgeoning Korean pop music scene or India’s world-beating film industry, we see that the problem is not one of reconciling a modern Asian nation with its Confucian roots, nor is it an issue of whether art can flourish in a massive nation where government institutions are far-reaching and intrusive. If these were the cases, neither Korea nor India would be having the immense success they are enjoying with their respective cultural behemoths. And the fault for anemic artistic production cannot lie with the innate aptitude (or lack there of) of the Chinese people; it would be absurd to argue that it does. Then the accountability for the current state of art in must be the Communist Party’s, with its inherent fear and subsequent repression of art in China.

Repression in the name of harmony is so stifling that even with great technical prowess in a variety of fields (e.g. computer animation, musical proficiency, etc.) little success is reaped and then shared with the world because of the dearth of originality. Most Chinese artists well known in the west are so not only because of the quality of their art, but as often as not they are known for their dissent of the very system that has retarded the artistic output of China for decades. (See: Liu Xiaobo or Ai Weiwei.)

As has been put forth on this blog and elsewhere, compared to their unprecedented gains and growth in a variety of geopolitical arenas, China is miles behind in their spreading of soft power and their methods for growth in this area are antithetical to how art typically flourishes: organically and unencumbered by the heavy hand of the state. (Unless we are talking about art like Mr. Liu or Mr. Ai’s which is sometimes created in direct opposition to the state, but that’s for a different diatribe.)

BEHIND THE POST: That whole post was born out a night I was staying in a hotel in Fenghuang. As KTV (aka: karaoke) songs penetrated the wall of my room into the wee hours, I began writing a scathing attack on the derivative nature of Chinese music. It sounds like the worst of 80's-90's melodramatic, histrionic, soft rock drivel. The stuff sucks. Now imagine it being sung ad nauseam by shameless, drunken amateurs. Do you see what you have wrought, soft rockers? This is your malformed progeny. For shame!