Chinese Contemporary Art

Introduction

My intention with this essay is to provide a holistic understanding of the contemporary art industry in China by analyzing empirical examples. I also wish to investigate why the Chinese contemporary art is becoming increasingly more commercialized and how this comes to show in the art produced? I also wish to shed light on whether or not this increase in prices of Chinese contemporary is actually turning the Chinese contemporary art market into an artificially inflated bubble?

Artistic products in China during the Maoist regime were tightly controlled by the Social Realist Program. It wasn’t until after the “open door”-policy during Deng Xiao Ping in the late 1970s that China experienced an explosion in the visual art form. Some groups of Chinese artists were bringing up daring political themes and addressing the damages done during the years of the Cultural Revolution. During the 1980s and 90s Chinese artists have gone from producing visual political and critical art to adapting western styles of art which in the late 80-90s only was sold through art-houses outside Peoples Republic of China. But in concurrent with the economic boom in China, the Chinese artists are changing lanes from aiming at social and political change to instead adapting their art to fit a more consumer based market.

“China has made a remarkable transformation to a diverse market economy during the past two decades, and nowhere is this change more dramatically expressed than in the visual arts that are booming in China today” says Zhu Qi.”

By the early eighties many experimental and political work of art were produced in different places around China. Around the mid eighties art groups arose and their primary aim was nothing but the strive for social and political change.

"They [felt] a very strong responsibility for the social reform," Gao Minglu recalled. "This movement [was] not just for creating an art form or style, rather, the artists' concern [was that]...