The art of circumventing Chinese censorship at the Center Pompidou

“New Gate” (2021), by Chen Wei. CHEN WEI Just because Chinese artists can’t say everything doesn’t mean they can’t say anything. The exhibition dedicated to them at the Center Pompidou in Paris bears witness to this. Twenty-one years after the legendary “So, China?” », which, for the first time, offered the French public an overview of contemporary Chinese art, the museum offers us the opportunity to update our knowledge by showing around fifty works that could not be more current, since the oldest dates from 2016 and the most recent from August. In itself, this is good news. Even under Xi Jinping, creation continues. How could it be otherwise? In the cities of Hangzhou and Shanghai alone, no less than 10,000 students are registered at the Academy of Arts, recall, in the catalog, the two French curators of the exhibition, Philippe Bettinelli, curator at the National Museum of Art modern, and Paul Frèches, deputy director of the Center Pompidou x West Bund Museum Project, in Shanghai. You only need to open the doors of a museum of contemporary Chinese art to be surprised by the youth of the public and feel the energy that drives them. However, any visitor who has opened a newspaper or turned on the television over the last twenty years knows full well that Xi Jinping’s China no longer has much in common with that of the beginning of the century. Moreover, major exhibitions on the Middle Kingdom seem to have gone out of fashion. Next to her older sister (50 artists were invited in 2003, and the catalog contained no less than 448 pages), the younger sister is more frail: 21 artists, born between the end of the 1970s and the 1980s, and a catalog 120 pages. Serious warning. Wise too. We would search in vain for the slightest work relating not only to the “Great Leader” but also to confinement during the Covid-19 epidemic, the conflicts shaking the planet or global warming, themes tackled by many artists from around the world. . The arrest, on August 26, of Gao Zhen, a refugee in New York, who readily mocked Mao in the 2000s and had the imprudence to temporarily return to China, constitutes a serious warning to artists. The law on “attack on the reputation and honor of heroes and martyrs” is all the more detrimental to freedom of expression as it is retroactive. Read the story (2022): Article reserved for our subscribers From zero Covid to the sudden lifting of restrictions, three years of abrupt health management by China Add to your selections Nevertheless, the exhibition shows that artists know how to circumvent censorship, less partially. It’s difficult, when looking at Qiu Xiaofei’s painting A Pillow for Eating Dreams and observing a man lying on a bed who seems to be floating on a dreamlike landscape, not to think of these young Chinese people who were so disillusioned that they decided to do nothing . A generation that sociologists describe as “tang ping”, literally “staying down”. You have 53.73% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.



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