Censorship in Consistency: The Case of Chinese Contemporary Art (2004-2014)

Artistic freedom of expression has always been a hot topic both in the West and in the East. It is enough to think about the controversy of Richard Serra against the US government regarding the removal of Tilted Arc (1981) from the Federal Plaza in New York City in 1989 or the shutting down, in 2017, of the controversial Guggenheim “Art and China after 1989: Theatre of the World” exhibitions featuring abused animals. In the case of China, the issue becomes more complicated, because of what some perceive as the systematic censorship of everything that goes against the government’s narrative and criticizes it. But is this actually always the case? During my research, I encountered the book of a New York art journalist, Barbara Pollack, who for a ten-year long research focused on the Chinese contemporary art market. Here, she discussed the case of artist Wang Qingsong, arrested for pornography in 2006 and Chi Peng, an artist who made naked self-portraits having sexual intercourse in...Show moreArtistic freedom of expression has always been a hot topic both in the West and in the East. It is enough to think about the controversy of Richard Serra against the US government regarding the removal of Tilted Arc (1981) from the Federal Plaza in New York City in 1989 or the shutting down, in 2017, of the controversial Guggenheim “Art and China after 1989: Theatre of the World” exhibitions featuring abused animals. In the case of China, the issue becomes more complicated, because of what some perceive as the systematic censorship of everything that goes against the government’s narrative and criticizes it. But is this actually always the case? During my research, I encountered the book of a New York art journalist, Barbara Pollack, who for a ten-year long research focused on the Chinese contemporary art market. Here, she discussed the case of artist Wang Qingsong, arrested for pornography in 2006 and Chi Peng, an artist who made naked self-portraits having sexual intercourse in the same period but was reportedly never arrested. The author also reports of a conversation with former head of the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), Feng Yuan, who specifies the “Four Nos” which would, according to him, always cause the censoring of art in China: “no pornography, no violence, no attacking the government or making fun of political leaders.” From this, a question spontaneously arises: “Why do some artist get censored and others do not, even while violating the Nos in similar ways?” In this research I focused on censored art in the period of the Harmonious Society Policy (2004-2014). Following from this, my research question is “Do censors’ and artists’ discourses from 2004 to 2014 suggest consistency and continuity in the enforcement of the Chinese art censorship or not?” This question’s answer will help define the state of art censorship in China in the abovementioned period, but also its development from the previous decades and into the current state. In order to research this issue, I will have to answer two sub-questions: “What elements of the artists’ and officials’ discourses could have caused the censorship?” This question is aimed at understanding what triggers censorship in controversial cases. The second one is “What elements of the artists’ and officials’ discourses could have helped them in avoiding censorship?” Thus, I will be discussing the possible triggering factors for censoring art works and the elements that saved other artworks from censorship by searching into primary and secondary documents. The case studies are censored and not censored artworks for each policy core concept exhibited in the period between 2004 and 2014. The case studies are solely regarding controversies (or the absence thereof) for artworks exhibited in Mainland China. The case studies are the following: Ren Hang’s Untitled (2012), Liu Wei’s It Looks Like a Landscape (2004) on the topic of pornography, Zhang Huan’s Giant no. 1-2-3 (2008), He Yunchang’s One Meter of Democracy (2010), for the topic of violence and Cao Fei’s RMB City: a Second Life City Planning (2007) and Zhang Dali’s Second History: Chairman Mao Reviews the Red Guards, 1966 (2005), regarding political criticism.Show less

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Censorship in Consistency: The Case of Chinese Contemporary Art (2004-2014)