At the outset of this article, I would like to describe a metonymy: The ocean is dotted with islands. A writer visits the islands one by one. He is drifting among them. This metonymy applies to some painters and poets in early 1990s, when they noticeably discontinued their artistic exploration and left behind their glorious achievements for installation and performance art. Ni Weihua is one of them.
He wrote some Avant-Garde poems and painted for a while in the 1980s. In the 1990s, he turned to, unexpectedly, make red basins and distribute them on the streets. Later, he posted many obscure posters in the public. He returned to the art museum after 1995, where he stacked some desks and chairs at corner of his offices. In 1996, he made two bronze characters, which had been reported by almost all key artistic magazines in China. Nonetheless, installation art failed to become the mainstream like mystic poem in the early days, nor did it become meaningful against certain political background as the national artistic ideological trend in the mid-1980s, when youngsters dissatisfied with the progressive artistic views, tired of Russian stereotypes and traditional values, with an attempt to seek for new inputs from modern western arts. It is main reason is that such mainstream magazines as Jiangsu Art Monthly and Gallery had been marginalized. On the other hand, marketization and pop culture, rather than elite art, were accessible to the general public.
Such kind of background has resulted in a feature unique to Ni Weihua and other artists of his generation, i.e. drifting. They explored arts that appeared to be exotic to the society, from poetry to painting, from performance art to installation art. There is something in common between arts, yet there is also boundary between different types of media and arts. In terms of form, the planar vision of their drift has transcended the text of poetry, their performance has transcended planar surface, and conceptual art, their body. Basically, they follow a clue of modernism with internal logical linear relations. Ni’s first work to gain people’s attention is Continuously Spreading Event-Red Boxes series, which, strictly speaking, belongs to conceptual arts.
His idea of red boxes originated from characters dismembered by the computer virus. It is just a symbolic action to distribute those boxes in shops, squares and busy streets. It actually stands for a horrible process of multiplication of both symbols and meanings. The virtual characters in the red boxes have served as the starting points for his Continuously Spreading Event-Posters series, with which he expressed his resistance to explanation and symbol decoding. But it seems that that work is symbolic. After all, his performance can only be non-political, leading to his schematic performance and failure to influence the mainstream media and public opinions with a widespread effect. It will take effect by resorting to professional magazines, while public space can only serve as the background for his conceptual performance. On the other hand, the public might mistake his works for games or tricks. Therefore, in 1995, Ni Weihua had his first work displayed in exhibition hall, which was a controversial one, entitled Dividing Line-A Stack of Non-exhibits. It is quite clear that his artistic works are created against the backdrop of professional artistic history. His work created in 1996 named Meishu(Art): A Legitimate Presence of Word and Its Objects aims to illustrate what is art? I consider his two above-mentioned works as some of the best installation artistic works in the 1990s thanks to their pure and precise language. But these two works fail to distinguish themselves clearly from some cultural concepts, thus not belonging to pure conceptual thoughts, strictly speaking.
What is art? It has been a focus of contemporary art community. In terms of western arts, the philosophy of modernism traces back to the concepts of “pure reason” and “discipline” proposed by Hegel and Kant. Modernism has reduced art to religion, making it independent from society, politics and life. Post-modernism strives to break the constraint on artistic thoughts by logistical linearity with fragment, but it is still limited to the discipline of modernism. To some degree, post-modernism after the second world war all belong to conceptual art. In addition, the resources along the boundary of its core concepts have been exploited. The third world, including China, has raised such a question after they have transplanted the concept chain from western artistic history in the early days, in particular, after they have seen the internal resistance between western concepts and regional context and the difficulty to find its meaning. Logically, a statement of “my art is...” can be deduced from such a question-what is art? Maybe Ni’s works are meaningful in that it has arrived at a border. Perhaps he has not yet crossed the border and made the breakthrough, where he can open up new worlds of arts.
When he was attempting to reach a peak through this single path of pure happiness, it dawned on him that it is impossible to do so by himself, since he cannot move on without basic remarks. It calls for basic texts written by others in this era to serve as a tool for artists to think and state. As a result, only a few people who understand artistic history and share the same background with him find his works readable and understandable. He has to explain with many words. The materials and shapes of his works cannot speak for themselves. When we are able to relate his materials with history, it is just because it has been used in history. The concept of Ni’s works seems to outweigh its form. Ni might feel upset about it. Humanistic touch stems from the physical media that have all been transformed by scholars and their artistic thoughts. But such kind of transformation of modern materials and physical media has just begun in China. So it is difficult to extend the meaning of objects. That is the feature of his art, and the art of other artists of his generation. They explore arts without their personal modern roots and space. It has go much to do with the social background as they were born in the 1960s. They are placed in a dilemma beyond the imagination of their successors, as they are now living in a commercial society with the memory of ideology dating back to the 1960s and 1980s. They fail to find their identity in the 1960s nor can they integrate into the modern commercial society. It takes them a long time to integrate into this society while maintaining their own cultural belief and habits. Artists of this generation, including Ni Weihua, might go on drifting outside the mainstream art for some time.
Ni Weihua began to devote himself to the Internet and computer arts since 1997. It might mark the beginning of another drift. It is still too early to judge the value of this drift. It takes time for its value to emerge; it is the same for his paintings. Anyway, his drifts have reflected the will, wisdom and emotional affliction of artists of his generation. The affliction finds expression in his drifts in a peaceful and secular manner, rather than in a confrontational manner against modern system.
May, 1997