Pi Li

"Out of Focus" exhibits the paintings of three artists, Chen Wenbo (Beijing), Yan Lei (Beijing/Hong Kong) and Zhou Tiehai (Shanghai). The exhibition is titled "Out of Focus" because it aims at exploring, through the compositions of the three artists, how to penetrate contemporary life and art where these have gradually become structured by new attitudes and visual language. This being done in painting, a medium that is related to the commercial mechanism of art in innumerable ways.

Since the early 1990s, when contemporary Chinese art made its debut in international exhibitions, it was the styles of "cynical realism" and "political pop" that became representative of the standard image of contemporary Chinese art. Promoters of "cynical realism" and "political pop" believed that such paintings constituted an abandoning of Chinese social realistic painting. It was further seen as the best representation of the chaotic reality in China after 1989. In fact, what these styles abandoned was the creeds of social realism, not its methodology. To be more specific, these paintings, which pursued both the originality of symbols, an urbanity of images, and seized every opportunity to express a distinct point of view, were amazing mixtures of the methodology of social realism and the theory of modernist painting. All these created an image of China, a strange mixture of various exotic symbols, which was at the same time vulgarized and politicized. To Western artistic tourists, the art styles that finally became directed to non-Western ideology became a label and standard of contemporary Chinese art. It was upon this basis, that the process of cultural identification was initiated.

Painting has always been a major medium of social realistic artistic creation within the visual arts: all Chinese artists received their training within such an educational system. Where the moral creeds and methodology of socialist realism were tightly bound together following almost half a century of development, to many contemporary artists, the methodology of realism with its emphasis upon the urbane and clarity of viewpoint, was in their blood. "Cynical realism" and "political pop" only changed the appearance of painting, while almost entirely inheriting the methodology of realism in painting. Their success in the international market actually "delayed" the transformation of a creation methodology for contemporary Chinese art. A multitude of artists demonstrated enthusiasm for inventing an individual iconography, neglecting the issue of creative methodology. On one hand, the success of "cynical realism" and "political pop" inspired Chinese artists to rapidly refine this "internationally best-selling style," and to continually spice it up with political elements; on the other hand, it encouraged younger Chinese artists to devote themselves to the image of "dissidents."

The "Gaudy Art" that emerged in the mid-1990s is one clear proof in this regard. The artists of this school copied Western art language form and mixed it with symbols of Chinese politics and folklore, displaying a "China," which the Westerners liked to see, but which in fact had nothing to do with the China that was changing rapidly in the waves of globalization, urbanization and commercialization. As a matter of fact, their success indicated the tremendous control exerted by the contemporary Western art structure over the art of Third World countries against the background of globalization. And it was "commercialization" that allowed this control to be achieved.

Therefore, since 1995, new mediums of art, led by video and photography, emerged in exhibitions in China on an unprecedented scale. To some extent, this phenomenon was the result of the dissatisfaction of younger artists with an art system in which "being collected" was the guiding force. Perhaps what appealed to young artists was that these non-painting media did not have too many fixed standards, and at the same time avoided the limitation of the "external-oriented" art structure that was guided by collection and sales. The extension of mediums was the deepest change in the 1990s.

For contemporary Chinese art, which was propelled into being in a short time, and which lacked the necessary preparatory knowledge, experimentation with various mediums served as remedial work. The extension of media took place at about the same time as theoretical disputes emerged within experimental art. The discussion about meaning that took place in 1996 was a sign that young artists had begun to reflect upon the relationship between realistic creation methodology and contemporary art on one side, and opportunism on the other. Artists advocated that "art cannot bring us closer to truth"; that "art is but" a presentation that "makes everything more fun"; and that "art is but a pre-thought, a preparation for thought, which refuses to become a thought. It does not help us arrive at a certain angle, but helps us withdraw from any angle."

Each of the three artists in this exhibition were mainly engaged in non-media of painting when they first emerged in the mid-1990s. Yan Lei's performance video "Ablutions," Chen Wenbo's video work "Moisture Content" and Zhou Tiehai's "Fake Covers" are typical examples. The direct result of the extension of mediums in contemporary Chinese art in the 1990s was that "cynical realism", "political pop", and "gaudy art" were pushed from the stage of experimental art into the category of "commercial avant-garde." The discussions about meaning in the mid-1990s were initially intended to check the non-art trend in contemporary art and the "vulgar sociological" trend that had already seriously limited the development of contemporary art, and to expose and scorn the catering-to-the-West nature of "cynical realism," "political pop" and "gaudy art." But in another sense this view returned to the modernist cliché of "art for art's sake," simplifying the development of art and artistic creation into mere seeking novelty. On one hand, the "theory of reflection" of the realist methodology of creation was still found in these works; on the other hand, the young artists, trying to figure out the "vogue" of international art via foreign pictures in various art magazines, were attempting to arrive at various novel forms of art.

In the new age, this point of view, which is by nature formalist, actually turned art into an Olympic challenge to scientific and technological inventions and skills. It was with the support of this view that various extreme forms of art appeared. These occurred because this new formalism was essentially driven by aspiring to action, to seeking novelty and excitement, and a hankering for sensation. Contemporary art that is influenced by such impulses will always make "strategies" for gaining fame, and refuse to provide new methodology, eventually becoming another cog in the contemporary art structure. On one hand, the possibilities of art cannot be brought by seeking a way out for art through social taboos, or by flaunting the language of the medium; on the other hand, the issue of new art methodology seemed to be "delayed" once again.

It was against that background that the exhibition "Out of Focus" was conceived. Each of the three artists selected returned to the medium of painting at the turn of the millennium. Chen Wenbo returned to painting because he didn't believe that "the scientific and technological contents of medium would make art more advanced." Yan Lei chose painting following his "question about the essentially modernistic taste claiming to be contemporary art." For Zhou Tiehai, his confusing pictures are merely a "consoling pill" for the novelty-seeking aspects of contemporary art. These artists put themselves in a situation where they had to fight against two sides. On one hand, they use painting to resist the tendency toward systemization in contemporary art. Yan Lei processes photographs with a computer and then hires someone to paint them for him. Zhou Tiehai uses airbrush techniques to eliminate the conventional characteristics of painting. Chen Wenbo traces photos by hand, completely abandoning any production of individual symbols. A common tendency amongst them is to reduce the technical content of painting and eliminate the properties of painting, so as to revoke the privileges of "the artist" in painting and deny any distinctive "branding" in their works.

On the other hand, they attempt to make this simple medium more conceptual and entertaining than non-graphic arts. As a result, their works reveal a common effect of dissociation that is different from vision, therefore different from the high resolution of digital images around us. At the same time, they regard painting as a "tip of the iceberg" in the expression of artistic concepts, thus allowing a certain non-definedness to become the theme. Yan Lei and Zhou Tiehai are both engaged in artistic creation with different medium at the same time, while Chen Wenbo asserts that "the meaning of an artist's work lies in its indefiniteness. I don't know about my future, of which language I'll use or how I'll use it."

All the talk about the decline of painting as a medium and the concision and directness it can effect are clichés. If one feels that the works of these three artists provide some hope against the gradual decline of painting, it is merely accidental. The exhibition "Out of Focus" does not emphasize a revival of the "painting" medium, nor is it focused on painting per se, but it displays an emerging methodology of artistic creation. In bringing these three artists together, the exhibition does not intend to advocate a trend. In fact, these artists have only come together in this moment and at a certain point by chance. Zhou Tiehai's works, more than anything, inherit the tendency toward conceptual art in contemporary Chinese art since the 1990s; Yan Lei tries to add psychological elements to the display of concepts to make the narration of his works more obscure; and Chen Wenbo attempts to extend the possibilities for psychology beyond the structure of conceptualized and iconographic Chinese painting. Therefore, besides being visually obscure, these pictures are "out of focus" in theme and symbolism. Compared with those contemporary paintings with which we are familiar, these works abandon the narrow tendency towards turning ideology into a system of symbolism and blind attitudes and views. Instead, they open up the potential for visual indefiniteness and conceptual forms. They are as the artists' "clicks" on reality and psychology, and each click realizes an excellent "transformation."

Technically speaking, the language provided by present-day art cannot match the digital consumer "images" which accord to the logic of industrialization. But in their work these artists demonstrate places such "consumer images" cannot reach. Art seems still able to find its own territory. And the motive behind this kind of search lies in the artist's abandoning of tradition realism and symbolism as a "theory of reflection" and various types of formalism wrapped in various new media. They reset the focus of art on flexible, variable "responses" to reality.

Chen Wenbo: Vision, Illusion and City Poetry

"I have nothing to satirize or to caricature. As an artist, I don't have a definite object of life, or, so to speak, my object is random. Moreover, I find that in many cases where contemporary art is new in style, it remains revisionist in nature. Art, especially contemporary art, should definitely go beyond this. One essential principle of conceptual art is to be simple and direct in the use of materials. There is no so-called "advance" achieved by technological aspects of a medium. I certainly don't believe in that. On the contrary, I believe in new interpretations of the world and life."
-- Chen Wenbo

Compared with most painters, Chen Wenbo increasingly demonstrates a poetic sense of urbanity in his latest paintings. The so-called trait of poetic urbanity refers to a certain sentimentality in Chen's paintings that arises out of the fogginess of the theme, the meaning and the absoluteness of the vision. This sentimentality is exactly that which contemporary art lost in the process of pursuing clear and definite ideas. To a certain extent, he confirms the establishment of a new psychological aspect in China's contemporary art. In these paintings, the scenes contain no trace of any figure, like a stage without performers. Even these scenes are often meaningless. They might be gorgeously, brightly depicted, but they are always "empty."

Chen Wenbo's paintings are derived from city life. In his paintings, most scenes and objects appear under artificial lighting. One essential feature of urban life is that artificial lights prolong "time" and stress the existence of "night." Within the artificially lightened existence of night, human desires are released, and people's attention awakened in a strange way. Night means privacy, intimacy, watching, meditation and silence. One will associate Chen Wenbo's paintings with the gaze in the darkness of night, full of reflection, sensitivity, and fascination. His works are about night and light. In his few landscape paintings, he indicates the joining point of night and day, or the transition from one scene to another. They are like fleeting landscapes seen out of the window of a moving car, upon which it is hard to focus. These landscapes constitute a transition between two scenes, a pause between public places and private space, and an incidental halt between sobriety and infatuation. In his latest paintings, he depicts details and objects from everyday life on a large scale. Common to all these paintings is the light they send forth or reflect. All the objects remain on an uncertain surface, existing in an abstracted situation. They are like actors unrecognized for their talents, performing before an empty auditorium. There is neither plot nor line, but a certain scene seems to be implied. These pictures invoke an uncertain gaze and dreamlike feelings, a visual sliding that occurs on the surface of life. The magnification of objects makes it impossible for us to focus our vision on any place, leaving with us an impression of flowing, yet deceptive light.

The sentimentality in the painting is not directed at anything. Chen Wenbo is a cunning producer of images. He continually alters city landscapes and scenes in the landscapes, and then shifts all the judgment of time, scene, meaning and sentiments to the viewer, freeing himself of any responsibility. This kind of ambiguous approach reminds us of the strange floating shapes and unisex figures in his earlier paintings. In fact, this ambiguity comes from the characteristic of the city. If this "city poetry" is one of the characteristics of Chen's paintings, then it is realized through the unique visual aspects of his paintings. In the process of creating an individual composition, one tends to regard painting as a visual competition, and take the visual aspects of the painting for entertainment and technique. But, in fact, the visual nature of the painting also lies in its alienation from reality and in the reason for this separation. This alienation is what Chen Wenbo's paintings repeatedly indicate to us. We should not interpret this separation as a result of "sentimentality." These directionless, non-referential images are sentimental and illusory. They are produced from impulses in illusions, and at the same time continuously produce illusions in the impulses.

Illusion is our gift from the city. It causes an extraordinary "displacement" between scenes and emotions. City life, under artificial lighting, glossy chemical materials, the haze of alcohol and tobacco, gives us an illusion at once physical and psychological. This kind of illusion comes from us, but defies meaning. It only provides a transition between some perfect meanings, or a backdoor for the monotony of everyday life. It helps us catch up with time at a certain moment and sensitively savor every physical moment and psychological detail.

Light and illusion are gifts of the city and fascinations of the city. They only exist in our age, the present moment in time, without any direction or judgment. In the development of human civilization, painting has gradually lost its function as a technique and means. Compared with photography, it cannot record scenes and figures objectively; and compared with movie, it is a bad narrator suffering from a functional disorder.. Then what else can painting be? And what is painting? Chen Wenbo's paintings tell us that perhaps it is a kind of visual poetry. In the process of fast operation of city and art, it provides a transition, a pause, a backdoor or a click. There is no record or narration in Chen's paintings. In other words, the artist does not tell us what he knows, but provides a "platform" for transformation, letting all the indescribable things from his or her experiences gradually surface. Just as the documentary director Krzysztof Kieslowski said, "My work isn't 'to know' but 'not to know'."[original words unfound-zsn]

Yan Lei: Converting Behavior [performances] into Action

"Strictly speaking, I'm not an artist as defined by any medium. Since 1996 I have done some works related to contemporary art issues. I didn't choose a fixed pattern or medium where these issues were involved. That was because I was bored with traditional means of expression and I began to question the essentially modernistic taste that claimed to be contemporary art."
--Yan Lei

In a certain sense, Yan Lei's winning the award of Most Outstanding Artist of the 2002 Contemporary Chinese Art Awards was at once the appearance of a "dark horse" and what everyone had wished. And his winning the award served to remind people of several specific works. In 1997, he and Hong Hao sent members of art circles across China an invitation to the Kassel Documenta Exhibition under the name Ielnay Oahgnoh. This was a combination of his name - and that of Hong Hao - in Pinyin written backward. The countless letters of invitation from Kassel became a hot topic in the fine arts community and having been tricked this hoax made people keep a rare silence. They concealed the joke implied in this work and, as revenge, regarded the letter as a hoax, not a work. Perhaps people were more used to discussing the fate of Chinese artists and international cultural power in various academic periodicals at that time than to experiencing a test for the same purpose.

In 2000, when the Annie Wong Leung Kit Wah Art Foundation invited a number of well known international curators and chairmen of foundations to Shanghai, Hangzhou, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, Yan Lei hired some anonymous people to make a monochrome painting of the group photo taken during the trip in a traditional Chinese garden.

It is obviously an underestimation of Yan Lei's works if one regards them as a challenge to the international art community. For Yan Lei does not intend to oppose the status quo of international art, which he cannot change; on the contrary, he regards the status quo as the reality. His work questions this reality and at the same time seeks a language and approach to work that is more suited to this reality. As a reflection on the status quo of international art, Yan Lei adopts a stance against two sides. On one hand, he attacks the international art community's abnormal attention to Chinese art. For example, in "Can I Have a Look at Your Work?" (1997), he replaces the curators and gallery owners with pictures of serious-looking engineers of spy technology. On the other hand, he issues a keen challenge to the outdated practices of the Chinese art community. For instance, he revises Cultural Revolution posters calling for people to do credit to the motherland with such sentences as "Have you been invited to participate in the exhibition in Germany?"

The reality of the status quo of international art has made Yan Lei conscious of the complicated nature of the issue, i.e., if we cannot find an effective pattern of language, then contemporary art from China and even all non-Western countries may be confined to a false framework forever. Even those works making fun of the status quo of international art may end up to be mere comic shows and trivialities, which Westerners smilingly accept: such artists will only end up as buffoons. It was from this point that Yan Lei started his reflection on the methodology of symbolism in contemporary Chinese art. To him, only by shaking off the methodology of symbolism can art achieve an unprecedented tension and keep a distance from the form and language of earlier contemporary Chinese art. Artistic creation cannot gain new energy without "truthfulness"; whereas the symbolist current permeating the contemporary art simplified readings of art and made art something simply corresponding to life, ridding it of depth and a broader outlook. Symbolism relates to the acts that artists put on in their work, or to contradictions that exist between the artist's life and real life. In this situation, artistic creation frequently becomes a "performance" completed through a symbolism applied to adaptations of appropriated compositions; such has little to do with the artist's personal life, nor does it produce any real effect.

As an artist of the younger generation, Yan Lei hit the road in search of a more penetrating language in two aspects - rewriting the meaning of art in terms of the medium used, and "turning to life." He began with breaking through the limitation of the medium as a challenge of symbolism. He said, "Strictly speaking, I'm not an artist as defined by any medium. Since 1996 I have done some works related to contemporary art issues. I didn't choose a fixed pattern or medium where these issues were involved. That was because I was bored with traditional means of expression and I began to question the essentially modernistic taste that claimed to be contemporary art." Yan Lei chose a graphic approach, which in the eyes of contemporary artists is over commercialized. He started to take photographs, all of which lacked a unified or sequential theme. The lack of a theme makes the system of the works incomparably strong. For the same purpose Yan Lei invented a technique of monochrome painting: he delineated different areas in each photograph according to the different depths of tone, and marked them with numbers. Then he matched these with different shades of gray. Thus a work could be completed by applying a color of a certain number to an area of a certain number. He invented this technique so that he could hire anyone to complete the monochrome painting in "Yan Lei's style."

Meanwhile, the photographs he chose for this purpose had been taken without any meaning attached. These photographs included various city scenes, a dining table after a meal, landscapes, and so on. Yan Lei tried to completely eliminate the meaning of an artist's existence and the rationality of his or her work. Eliminated at the same time was the symbolic meaning arising from either the subject matter or the method of painting. To China, a country with a rich tradition of painting, these strange pictures constitute a challenge in concept. And the reason for the invention of this technique lies in the artist's bitter resentment of the tendency of contemporary Chinese art towards symbolism.

Rejecting "acting," Yan Lei started to work along a track closer to everyday life. He set up a second-hand store in various exhibitions, selling his own belongings at discount prices to visitors. In this way, he cleansed both his own and his spiritual space ("Second-Hand Store," 1999); he decorated a dormitory of artists in Hong Kong with pink lights, making fun of those artists' state of existence ("Red-Light District," 1999). In 1998, Yan Lei migrated into Hong Kong and moved five times within three years. As a result of these shifts of space of existence, demands for spiritual and material space became the main threads of reflection in his real life and artistic creation. On one occasion he duplicated the frames of the eight doors along the corridor leading from his home to the street, space them a distance apart according to the real distances between the doors, and cover them with military camouflage, forming a flexible passageway resembling a boarding gate ("International Passageway", 2001). He regards this passageway as a link between the internal and external spaces, and compares it to the "international passageway" he has gone along as an artist from his studio to exhibitions. His works include a monochrome painting with the landscape in the Central Business District of Beijing as the subject matter, which was done by someone he hired; and a floor laid after the layout of his apartment in the Central Business District. By shifting his own life space, he attempts to test new experiences in vision, space and psychology that metropolitan life provides for the individual.

Being a forward-looking artist, Yan Lei pays attention neither to composition nor meaning, but to methodology. He tries to use this methodology to rewrite the weak, monotonous, limited aspects of contemporary Chinese art. All the rewriting proceeds along a basic axis, which turns behavior into action. Consequently art is no longer a reflection of reality, but a means able to change our life and alter the angle of our vision. It is because of such changes that Yan Lei's works gained an unprecedented power, which is presented in his freedom of using various fashionable and outdated languages and resources without being swallowed up by them. Faced with various standards and rules, he retains a smile of a vindictive pleasure.

Zhou Tiehai: The Strategy of Contemporary Art

"Because I wanted to prove how simple and easy art is."
--Zhou Tiehai

Liang Shiqiu (Liang Shi-chiu), a well-known Chinese scholar, once said that it was good luck to live in the same age as a poet, but bad luck to live next door to one. This witty remark fully shows the "magnification" of artists by the media and history. Whereas Zhou Tiehai is an artist trying to drag the artist down the altar of art, being persistent in the work of "lowering the status" of the art community.

Graduating from the Institute of Fine Art, Shanghai University, at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, Zhou Tiehai and his former classmate Yang Xu engaged in contemporary artistic creation wearing Western suits and ties. The two playful, cynical young men carelessly made drawings on old newspapers that they pasted together. They were greatly different inside and out to other pioneers of contemporary art in the 1980s, who wore their hair long with serious expressions as if they were shouldering all the sufferings of humanity. In 1991, still fresh from school, the two were excluded from the half-underground exhibitions held by the artists' groups of that time for "reasons of age" amongst others. At that time, such exhibitions were practically the only channel for artists to reach society. To this, Zhou Tiehai and Yang Xu responded with their work "Rupture." In this work of jumbled drawings, they borrowed the form of the "big-character posters prevalent during the Cultural Revolution, and added many classical political quotations: "The tranquility is full of kinetic potential, and the bourgeois liberalization is corrupting the young generation"; "Those who resent new things will blow some fits of sinister wind and throw some black bricks. The struggle has never ended." "All this made her think with double seriousness about how to take her journey and how to do her paintings." Then he answered with a classical socialist realistic quotation: "Gather up such phenomena seen every day and make the contradictions and struggles within them typical."

After the rupture with contemporary art, Zhou Tiehai sent himself into "exile" in the real world. His former classmate and cooperator Yang Xu opened a decorating company, and he was engaged in commercial photography until 1994, when he resumed his artistic creation. Today, when asked why he returned to the art circle, Zhou Tiehai will answer with an earnest but disdainful expression: "Because I wanted to prove how simple and easy art is."

Before "Rupture," Zhou Tiehai had believed that art meant "painting as Van Gogh did." But now this illusion has broken. Within three years, Zhou Tiehai experienced a mental "zero filling", perhaps as a result of the treatment he received years ago, or of his experience in the business world. To him, art no longer means painting as Van Gogh did, but has been transformed into a kind of strategy centering on the triangle relationship between artists, galleries and museums, or between painters, dealers, curators and critics.

He photographed the process of the Chinese artists showing their works to foreigners as one of a patient seeing the doctor; he designed an airport for the artists frequently participating big international exhibitions, where the flights to New York, Venice, Kassel and Sao Paulo are always late; he also showed the art market using stock share charts and in the form of financial and economic commentary. On one hand, he expressed the pride of an artist: "My paintings should be carried in a Louis Vuitton bag"; on the other hand, in his scenarios he depicted those artists making calls standing in chilly wind("I'll participate in all the exhibitions you curator."), or a curator who says "he betrayed me" when an artist participates in another exhibition. In spite of the remarkable depth of the works in presenting the game rules in art, the art community has kept silent about Zhou Tiehia. Before his work, viewers smile with closed lips. The more this situation remains this way, the more determined Zhou Tiehai is in taking the "rupture" attitude.

Fate seems to favor Zhou Tiehai, though. Since 1993, when Chinese artists started to participate in important exhibitions such as the Venice Biannual, such issues as "internationalization and the value of contemporary Chinese art" have emerged and endured to this day. The dream of "painting like Van Gogh did" broke and not only for Zhou Tiehai. Going abroad time and again to the West they dreamed about, contemporary Chinese artists suddenly found it difficult to determine their own artistic value. On the contrary, the West they used to dream of seemed as "dirty" as the Chinese art community. No matter how friendly foreign curators, collectors and dealers appeared the people suddenly found that the value of contemporary Chinese art actually lay in the adjective "Chinese," not in the word "art." The matter is whether you express an innocent "optimism," or pretend to be ignorant like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. But to Zhou Tiehai, these issues are probably unavoidable. At least, simple scorn of the abnormity of the Chinese art system is not enough to show his dignity and intelligence as an artist. From 1994 to 1999, Zhou Tiehai produced some fake magazine covers and photographic pieces. The "famous quotations" appearing in these works include "the relationship inside the art community is like that between countries during the Cold War," "contemporary art needs care of its god parents," etc. Toward the end of the 1990s, the completed "Fake Cover" series was the greatest scorn of the mechanism of presenting contemporary Chinese art. In these works he puts himself together with contemporary art on the covers of various influential magazines, pretending to express self-satisfaction in the most inciting language, creating a false impression that contemporary Chinese art has caused one after another international sensation. To Zhou Tiehai, the purpose of producing these works or a false impression is to indicate that avant-garde art only exists in the West, or, so to speak, in the Western news media. They imply that contemporary Chinese art has not entered the Chinese society, nor has it been discussed as art in the Western society; whereas the Chinese artists are intoxicated with the false revelry created by the media.

Once Zhou Tiehai stated his view on the art community, his works started to take on a special meaning. At least he provides the art community with a special paradox. Permeating his works is an ironic question of the existence of culture and of artists themselves. Zhou Tiehai's works are made from various media, but their core is the artist's own position. Determinedly and cunningly, he demonstrates to us that the artist is actually never free. The contradiction between the artist and curator or critic is in fact between the artist and a cultural system. Once it enters the international community, this system turns from the original Chinese underground "commonwealth of art" consisting of avant-garde artists into an international cultural power. Like any post-colonial discourse, artists struggle for their freedom and at the same time cater to a certain power, just like Zhou Tiehai jestingly presents in his works that the Chinese artists need to shake off the slavery of criticism, but are unable to do so without the care of their god parents.

In a sense, the paradox presupposed by Zhou Tiehai started to affect himself. Since 1998, he has drawn wide attention from the overseas art community. Those works mocking the art community have frequently appeared in important international exhibitions. Reality seems to have become a vicious circle: the more he makes fun of international art powers, the more the latter pay attention to him. It is like what happened years ago to abstract art, which tried to challenge the conservative tastes of middle-class culture but ended up a new cultural power. The international cultural power smilingly exhibits its omnipresent "great energy-absorbing power." Zhou Tiehai won the 1998 Chinese Contemporary Art Award. He has held solo exhibitions in Switzerland and Japan, and established his reputation in a series of major international exhibitions. However, given the original intention of Zhou Tiehai's work, we cannot help but question his success: is such a success in the international art community success or failure in art?

We don't know whether this question bothers Zhou Tiehai. In 2000, he started work on the "Placebo" series. When testing the effect of a new medicine, doctors do tests that include the use of placebos against the control group to preclude the "power of suggestion" affecting results. In this series, Zhou Tiehai directly puts ready images on traditional tough paper made of bast fiber. These works, produced with an airbrush, lack detail and texture close up, and make the viewer dizzy. While producing a novel visual effect, they actually reflect the artist's question. Society always requires a successful artist to go on and create new things. On one hand, Zhou Tiehai regards these works as a placebo to counter this situation; on the other hand, he questions whether the West is our placebo, or whether the contemporary Chinese art a placebo of the West. Is continual innovation a placebo to the artist? The significance of Zhou Tiehai's "Placebo" series lies in that he shows the structural dilemma of contemporary art with an extremely brilliant visual form. This is a topic of globalization he has picked for himself. For showing this dilemma of this "contemporary worship" with a visual form is not the end of the question. What matters is whether he can go on and provide one or some new cultural solutions with his indomitable attitude. "No" is already a cliché of modernism, and "destroying beautiful things before the people's eyes" does represent the IQ and unique charm of contemporary art, but what should we do after the destruction? Will contemporary art become nothing but a placebo? Zhou Tiehai has raised the question, and wishes to find the answer.

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