Title: The ’85 New Space exhibition: Radical experiments and the academy
Abstract:The '85 New Space exhibition (bawu xinkongjian huazhan 85新空间画展) opened on 2 December 1985, in the gallery of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (ZAFA, now China Art Academy), Hangzhou. 1 The nine exhib...The '85 New Space exhibition (bawu xinkongjian huazhan 85新空间画展) opened on 2 December 1985, in the gallery of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (ZAFA, now China Art Academy), Hangzhou. 1 The nine exhibiting artists, most of whom were ZAFA graduates, displayed sculptures, prints and oil paintings.Like many in the 1980s, these young artists rebelled against the academy and fine arts establishment through seemingly subtle experimentations with style and form.The graphic simplicity of their works was radical in its considered resistance to socialist realism's exaggerated expressiveness and idealised presentation of the human subject.The New Space artists' disregard for establishment conventions reflected a particular antipathy towards academic procedure and taste.Throughout the 1980s, the academy functioned as the symbol of institutional aesthetic conventions, the inculcating agent of institutionalised practices, and the physical agent of ideological and political enforcement.By electing to work in modernist idioms that depicted the urban everyday, the New Space artists eschewed the customary language of socialist realism in order to craft a wider cultural space in which to work more independently.Their self-conscious disengagement from conventional languages and styles reflected frustration with the ways in which bureaucracy and ideology not only determined artistic taste, value and style but also conditioned the production of and the critical response to art.The '85 New Space exhibition was organised during a time '85 New Space exhibition invitation.Image courtesy Zhang Peili.85新空间画展请柬。张培力惠允。 of intense cultural ferment, resulting from the economic reforms and political liberalisation introduced after the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao Zedong in 1976.The gradual loosening of cultural controls provided access to new and previously banned information on art history and practices that went beyond socialist realism.At the same time, young artists who had spent their adolescence as Red Guards or 'sent down' youth Swimmers in the Water, 1985, oil on canvas, 110 × 135 cm, one of four works exhibited in the '85 New Space exhibition.Image courtesy the artist and Boers-Li Gallery.Read More