But I found the quality and methods akin and equitable to what we see here. The main difference was one of attitude. There was less cynicism in the art and the artists. Part of the Postmodern attitude currently running through the West is a cynical aesthetic which negate's art's ability to create change, and a belief in art's hopeless cultural impotence in an image glutted world. For the first time, in China, I had enough space and distance to see that the relativism and nihilism affecting Western art at the end of the 20th century is the result of growing accustomed to living out an isolating, alienating worldview.
Life is more fundamental and interrelated in China.
Most of the contemporary art I saw unconsciously maintained that reality. The images, the metaphors were all keenly relevant, basic and vital in a way that felt miles away from the way art often operates here. Yin Shi Zhen, untitled installation, shoes and fat, 1996. To make art in a country not yet isolated from all the materials and actions that make metaphor a living experience is to get valuable distance from the insular quality of the way we live our lives. Walls dyed with local pigment profoundly unite architecture to body and earth.