Nikita Yingqian Cai

The Paradoxes of Autonomy:

A Site of Critique

“We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition,

the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.”
—Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopia and Heterotopias1

A
s part of the seminar Active Withdrawal: Weak Institutionalism
and the Institutionalization of Art Practice, organized by Biljana
Ciric and me, artist Zheng Guogu gave a presentation about his
work and practice. At first glance it might have seemed to be just another
usual artist’s talk, but, in contrast to the conventions of the Western art
academy, Zheng Guogu’s explanation of his artistic ideas was minimal.
After the talk, Camiel van Winkel, an invited speaker from the Netherlands,
put forward a question to the artist in which he claimed that he couldn’t
recognize any of the work in Zheng Guogu’s talk as art. One would have
thought that he might be aware of the unspoken rules of the global
contemporary art scene, in which a scholar from the West should at least
humbly admit insufficient knowledge of other cultures, if not radically
abandoning an intrinsic Western-centric bias. The “political incorrectness”
of Winkel’s statement caught those in attendance by surprise.

An art historian, Winkel is the author of During the Exhibition the Gallery
Will Be Closed: Contemporary Art and the Paradoxes of Conceptualism,2 a
book that cites cases of English and American artists as well as exhibitions
in northwest Europe. To simply negate his question by dwelling on the
differences in the language of art between the East and the West would have
done little to unsettle his biased attitude as a western scholar.

In his lecture, Zheng Guogu showed a picture of a poster hung on the

outside wall of Yangjiang Group’s studio, which is an artist group that
Zheng has been actively engaged in addition to his individual practice.
The asymmetric, futuristic appearance of the studio gives the look of an
eccentric museum building (how global it is!), on which the slogan “58
New Wave, Big Steel Making” was printed. He also mentioned the minor
conflicts that they encountered with local residents while the building was
being constructed, along with the private and public activities carried out
by Yangjiang Group in the studio. One might need contextual knowledge of
the modern history and art history of China in order to identify the double
meanings of the years 1958 and 1985, aside from being able to identify
the appropriated political aesthetic of the socialist regime. Presumably,
the above factors should not have been major barriers to an art historian’s

28 Vol. 14 No. 2
Zheng Guogu in
collaboration with Yangjiang
Group, ’58 New Wave,
Big Steel Making, 2008,
installation, scrap iron,
displayed outside of the
studio of Yangjiang Group.
Courtesy of the artist.
capability to read an artwork; the real obstruction for Winkel, rather, could
have been where the artist lives and works: the town of Yangjian.
This poster has been presented on other occasions, including the exhibitions
Guangdong Station at Guangdong Museum of Art in 2008, and Yangjiang
Group: Fuck Off the Rules at Minsheng Art Museum of Shanghai in 2013.
But Zheng Guogu has not tried to position his works in the contexts of
museums and exhibitions; art is part of his everyday life, and every moment
of his life can be art. If Zheng Guogu’s practice is interpreted as a kind
of resistance against the museum, or an effort toward self-legitimization,
Winkel would have easily recalled canonical cases of institutional critique
in art history, such as MoMA Poll (1970) by Hans Haacke, realized at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, or the gigantic twenty-by-ten-meter
piece by Daniel Buren, Opposite (1971), that was eventually removed
from the Guggenheim Museum that same year. As Simon Sheikh has
summarized, “institutional critique was a practice mainly, if not exclusively,
conducted by artists, and directed against the (art) institutions, as a critique
of their ideological and representative social function(s).”3 Throughout the
history of institutional critique, museums, art institutions, and the capitalist
market have always been the main targets of attack; they are the biggest
threats to the autonomy of art, while aspects of the following cases will
shed light on how the legitimization of contemporary art in China has been
primarily driven by marketization.
As a concept in Western art history, institutional critique was an
important ramification of conceptual art movements in the 1960s
and 70s. It adopted essential ideas from conceptual art practices of the
linguistic turn, the focus on process, the ordinary, and the immaterial.
In his seminal essay “Conceptual Art 1962–1996: From the Aesthetic of
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Administration to the Critique of Institutions,”4 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
discusses the interrelation between institutional critique and the aesthetic
of administration. After World War II, the affluent, developed capitalist
countries, exemplified mainly by the United States, foreshadowed the
emergence of the aesthetic of administration, through which artists
textualized, “documentized,” mediatized, and serialized their works by
taking formal references from the establishment of methods of modern
business management and institutional administration within an
information society. The patronage system of modern museums; the
commercial galleries and art market; the writing of art history and art
criticism; biennials as major exhibition mechanisms—all of these things
ripened and consolidated over the same period of time, and eventually
became targets for critique as initiated by artists. As mentioned earlier, Hans
Haacke’s MoMA Poll adopted the process of a democratic forum within the
capitalist system as both form and critique, with the intention of fighting
back against the rules that very system had internalized. On the contrary,
Zheng Guogu’s seemingly elusive works have nothing to do with the rigid
aesthetic of administration. To claim that the act of building a museum in
Yangjiang is a critique against contemporary art institutions is to recognize
the institutions as having provided the rules and laws that govern his
practice. Just as the title Fuck Off the Rules suggests, he is not trying to
change the general rules of art production and distribution but to merge the
two into one, to stay loyal to his locality while preserving the aesthetic and
social autonomy of art.

Andy Hamilton provided a succinct definition of autonomy in his essay

“Adorno and the Autonomy of Art”:5 “Autonomy is normally taken to mean
that art is governed by its own rules and laws, and that artistic value makes
no reference to social or political value.” For Adorno, as Hamilton explained,
autonomy and commodification are “not two sides of one coin, but are
irreconcilable,” and, furthermore: “Adorno’s picture is that as artists became
free of church and aristocratic patronage towards the end of the eighteenth
century, their work simultaneously became autonomous and commodified
through entry into the capitalist market-place.”6

Only by way of the income earned through the exchange of artistic labour
can the artist gain a certain social independence, and thus self-consciousness
and critique might be created. Theodor Adorno’s interpretation and analysis
of the autonomy of art also illustrates the trajectory of the development of
contemporary art in China—from the ’85 New Wave Movement, through
the beginning of the processes of internationalization and commodification
in the 1990s, to the take-over by commercial forces and the art market
after 2000. The production and distribution of art in China, respectively,
correspond to what Adorno described as aesthetic autonomy and social
autonomy. Aesthetic autonomy stresses that art doesn’t directly commit
itself to any social or political function; social autonomy designates art’s
functionless circulation in society.

In November 1986, Xiamen Dada burned a number of works of art in front

of the Xiamen Cultural Palace as a performance. In December of the same

30 Vol. 14 No. 2
year, they exhibited in the Fujian Museum of Art found junk. By creating
paradoxes of what art can or cannot be, they challenged the ideology of
the official art system. In 1998, Huang Yongping wrote a statement for the
project Away from Art Museum,7 in which he expressed firmly that “the
biggest limitation imposed on artists by art museums is that artists want to
exhibit their intent and ambition in museums.”8 He also specifically pointed
out that “to not bring the works to the exhibition is more a cost-effective
decision than a special way to participate. The costly approach seems quite
unrealistic nowadays due to the overall inflation in China. (There’s a general
lack of funding for art.) The approach we adopt this time may turn out
to be an effective way for Chinese avant-garde art to survive.”9 It seems
that his allusion to “a general lack of funding for art” can also be regarded
as a conjuring up of a modern patronage system, and he was absolutely
conscious and self-explanatory of Xiamen Dada’s exhibition strategies: “It’s
a gesture to oppose the exhibition-making format that directly transfers
works made in the studio to the gallery space, which completely isolates the
exhibits from their original context.”10 He even related the question of art’s
authority to the rationale of its legitimization: “People tend to pay more
attention to who gets the certificate, what art is and how they can get the
same certificate as well. In the meantime, they forget to ask who issues the
certificate and who authorizes art.”11 Wang Guangyi called the Zhuhai Art
Conference in 1986 “a group show of slides,” since more than a thousand
slides documenting artist works from all over the country were presented in
this conference. The act of showing slides could be understood as a gesture
“to not bring the works to the exhibition,” in Huang Yongping’s words, with
the Conference signifying the local debut of a large-scale contemporary
art exhibition. In fact, the Zhuhai Art Conference did lead to the birth and
realization of the Modern Art Exhibition of China (China/Avant-garde) in
1989. Huang Yongping not only recognized the economic reasons for not
being able to display the works, but also indicated the necessity of relating
an artwork to its context, which was the studio, orthodoxically, instead
of the socialpolitical background. In accordance with his ideas, if artists
can create works but have no control over how the works are distributed,
academically or commercially, or if they are forced to separate the
relationship between production and distribution, then the autonomy of
art is sabotaged.

It needs to be emphasized that there were quite a few other conferences

aside from the Zhuhai Art Conference that functioned as selection processes
for exhibitions and that copied the official socialist rituals of that time
in China, such as the People’s Congress, the Communist manifestos and
charters, the collectivist ethos, and the democratic centralism. It was
challenging for artists to offer critique beyond their historical context as
well as the dominating role of institutions, and in some cases their form
of resistance adopted the intrinsic hierarchy of power that characterized
the existing institutions. Other dispersed, small-scale, and self-initiated
exhibitions were often held in the cultural palaces within different cities.
They were part of the basic cultural infrastructure of the socialist country,
which served to enrich the life and amusement of workers and youth

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masses. Even after the Modern Art Exhibition of China at the National
Gallery of China in 1989, cultural palaces remained the major venues for
exhibiting avant-garde art.

The real changes took place after 2000. The critique that Huang Yongping
posed against the authority of museum displays was not targeted at the
established institutions of modern and contemporary art, but was a protest
against the denial and refusal by the official art museums and institutions
to accommodate contemporary art as well as a speculative gesture of
conjuring up museums and institutions that will openly welcome works of
contemporary art in the future. Huang Yongping was an individual artist
struggling to support himself, and art (in the autonomous sense) was as
vulnerable as his own professional life. The lack of art institutions and
financial means was a problem and still is in many non-Western regions.
Huang Yongping came to realize that even with the awakening of the artistic
self (also known as the subjectivity of the artist), in a context in which
contemporary art infrastructures were insufficient or even non-existent,
it was almost impossible to talk about the autonomy of art. This early
sensitivity of Huang Yongping was later shared by many other Chinese
artists; they knew they could continue working in poverty and in an
atmosphere of suppression, but whoever controlled art’s distribution—that
is, those who had the resources for interpretation, display, and marketing—
had the leverage of power.

Joseph Kosuth, the leading figure in the canon of conceptual art, claimed
in his text “Art after Philosophy” that Duchamp’s readymade “changed the
nature of art from a question of morphology to a question of function,”
and thus “all art after Duchamp is conceptual (in nature).”12 What Kosuth
called morphology can be interpreted in a socialist context as the formalist
aesthetic; Kosuth was calling for the shift from art’s language to art’s
content. The argument between form (some Chinese artists use the word
“language” to represent “the form of the language”) and content was a
frequent topic in the period of the ’85 New Wave Movement and is still
present in ongoing conversations among Chinese artists. Shu Qun wrote
an article in the Chinese Art Newspaper of November 23, 1985, titled “The
Spirit of the Northern Art Group,” in which he manifested the idea of what
the concept of art should be:

We are firmly against the so-call purified language of

painting, and the autonomy dictated by the specificities of
its material (medium). To our point of view, the primary
standard of judging the value of a set of paintings is to see
whether they have manifested the genuine concept, which
means whether they have manifested human’s rational
power of will, and the sublime quality and noble ideals of
human beings.13

One can read clearly from the above that the interest in art’s content as
evidenced in the ’85 New Wave Movement was not related to proposing

32 Vol. 14 No. 2
art’s social and political engagement—on the contrary, art was regarded as
the materialization of certain abstract ideals. It revolved around the form of
a language, but also the legitimacy of one language over the other, meaning
the authority of one kind of art over another. Responding to Jean-Paul
Sartre’s argument that “art should be committed,” Theodor Adorno insisted
in his text “Commitment”: “This is not a time for political art, but politics
has migrated into autonomous art, and nowhere more so than where it
seems to be politically dead.”14

After 1990, there was a discursive turn in the cultural arena, and avant-garde
art activities mostly went underground. The shrinking of art’s public sphere
gave way to the emergence of the market, which provided a roundabout way
for contemporary art to be legitimized, especially in the relatively developed
and liberal southern China—the Guangzhou Biennial for Oil Painting, in
1992, being one of these examples. According to its main organizer, Lu Peng,
the purpose of the Biennial was to open up a legal path for art by leading
the art to the market, the market here taken as a critical force against the
suppression of ideology. It served as a contradictory case of the current
critical cliché of biennials looking more like art fairs, while art fairs are
looking more like biennials. Since the public art foundations that support
the production and exhibition of contemporary art still do not exist in
mainland China, and there is no systematic programming and collecting of
contemporary art in most state-owned museums, commodification of art
is (so far) the most immediate tool for Chinese artists to realize economic
autonomy and resist ideological control, even within the status quo. To take
a strong position against the market is unrealistic for most Chinese artists;
they would have to give up any opportunity of being full-time professionals.

During an interview that I undertook with the artist Xu Tan, he talked

about the reasons the several members of the Big Tail Elephant group got
together to organize their own exhibitions. He said they were fed up with
the ideological art charters and movements. Entering the 1990s, most artists
realized that changes on a state level would not happen over night, and they
turned their critique toward the nascent art system. Through the previous
efforts of self-legitimization, which mostly took the form of collective
movements in the 1980s, certain stakeholders were established within the
art system, and the competitive environment around the development of
discourse and exhibitions revolved around the evolution of these authorities.
Decentralization, de-collectivization, and de-ideologicalization became
the focus of art practice at that point, while the social visibility of art in a
broader sense was still in question. In the 1990s, the market economy had
taken hold early in Guangdong province, especially in the city of Guangzhou.
Young artists like those from the Big Tail Elephant Group managed to
gain legal income from other areas, such as interior decoration design,
commercial photography, and custom-made sculptures to support their
own art production and to organize exhibitions. According to Xu Tan, he
would save up his teaching fee to buy the production materials for his own
works, which could cost up to 8,000 to 10,000 RMB per project (about
1,000–1,200 USD), while around that time China’s GDP per capita was only

Vol. 14 No. 2 33
300 USD. One might notice that economic development in southern China
provided the artists a certain level of economic autonomy. With the premise
of de-ideologicalization, the Big Tail Elephant Group solved the problem of
art production and distribution by self-organizing its own exhibitions. For
the purposes of locating and securing possible venues for these exhibitions,
they organized their activities in a way similar to those of a civil society by
communicating and negotiating with property owners. The projects and
activities of the Big Tail Elephant Group were not intended primarily to
criticize, challenge, or intervene in the social, political, and economic context
of the day, but they were naturally intertwined with those social relations.

In the aforementioned quote from Kosuth, the English word “function”

was used in the original text. To directly interpret it as gongneng in Chinese,
which means a designated role or action given to a person or a thing, would
be misleading. What Kosuth might be emphasizing was that the content
of art should be related or dependent upon other factors. Compared with
socially engaged practices and activist art that evolved at a later stage, the
early practice of institutional critique in the West was still more or less self-
referential, but they valued the political and social meaning of art, namely
the function of art in general. By relocating art and rethinking its legitimacy
and constructive function within the sociopolitical context, these early
practices of institutional critique aimed at making changes in art and in
society in general. In reinvestigating certain aspects of art practice in China,
the intuitive responses of Chinese artists within the totalitarian atmosphere
could have been projected as a form of critique, which was not distancing
from the modernist idea of autonomy but aspiring to it. The precondition
of this critique was not the canons of the consolidated contemporary art
institutions, nor the erosion of art’s commodification, but the anxiety induced
by ideological suppression and economic and institutional deficiency.

By taking control over art production and distribution, artists could thus
construct sites of autonomy in a guerrilla-like manner; this was described
by Adorno as a situation that is socially critical because of art’s apparent
lack of practical and social functions. The critique of aforementioned artists
and their projects was dispersed and subjective, yet constructive, and it was
projected into the future; that is to say, the institutions of contemporary
art to come. For the majority of young Chinese artists today, their priority
is still the independence of the artist-subject, including economic and
social independence. With the development of a civil society, where art
production and circulation unavoidably become part of a larger social,
political, and cultural landscape, art practices relate to other social activities
(such as those on the everyday level, and in the public sphere, or even in
the marketplace) by being engaged while not completely being ruled and
regulated by them, the institutions of art and the mechanisms of society in
general, thus can be defined more as targets of artistic critique.

In 2013, the documentation of One Year Performance 1980–1981, by

Tehching Hsieh, was presented in its complete form for the first time in
mainland China at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. Thirty

34 Vol. 14 No. 2
Li Liao, Spring Breeze, 2011, years after this performance, punching the clock
performance, single-channel
digital video, 126 mins., 39 has become a routine obligation commonly
secs. Courtesy of the artist.
enforced on Chinese people, from officers in a
government institution, to white collar workers
in the central business districts, to waiters serving
in small restaurants. The symbolic meaning
of this action, which is a form of discipline
and enforcement of capitalist labour relations,
can thus be recognized by many as a shared
experience. One day in 2011, artist Li Liao asked someone who worked in
a commercial building in Wuhan to lock him up somewhere downstairs
in the same building for a whole day; he was only to be released when
that person got off work. The whole performance, documented as a video
titled Spring Breeze (2011), runs for 126 minutes and 39 seconds and was
presented for the first time in an exhibition titled Things are Changing in
the K11 Space, Wuhan. Before this, Li Liao had barely participated in any
exhibitions; neither did he create artworks as a full-time artist. Just two
years after that exhibition, in August of 2013, Li Liao was nominated for
the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award, and his works were shown in the Rockbund
Art Museum, Shanghai. Before this latter exhibition, he came into conflict
with his girlfriend’s father, who had been strongly against his daughter’s
relationship with Li Liao. According to the father, artists are morally and
financially untrustworthy. In response, Li Liao applied for a production fee
of 40,000 RMB from the museum and gave the money to his girlfriend’s
father. This work, titled Art Is Vacuum (2013), documented a personal
situation but touched upon a series of social relations related to the
institutions of art, including the contemporary art museum, art awards,
production fees, “artist” as a professional position, and so forth, all of which
are developed mechanisms within the global contemporary art context and
all of which have been instituted in China during the past decade. What
was unique about Li Liao’s approach was that he established an end to the
universal circle of art production and distribution within the context of
his own private life and essentially closed off further possibilities for the
consumption of his art. His acute critique was seemingly targeted at his
own life instead of the other contexts, and in the process he challenged and
enriched the earlier canonical concept of institutional critique. When the
fight for legitimization exceeds the internal circus of art and its discourses
and enters the realm of an ordinary family, we realize that our reflection on
the relation between art and the everyday has really only just begun.

Again, partly because of the deficiency of institutional and economic

means for China’s belated modernity, a mix of modern and contemporary
aspirations can be found in institutional critique and the related practices
and projects therein. Following three decades of avant-garde movements
in China, the art market and the process of commodification have
completely taken over as dominant forces. Some artists therefore remain
reluctant and suspicious in adopting the exhibition as a platform for art
production and distribution, and dichotomies between the individual
and the collective, private and public, art and non-art, and China and

Vol. 14 No. 2 35
the West still prevail. One cannot help but wonder whether these all have Li Liao, Art Is Vacuum,
2013, performance, sweater,
to do with the anxiety of an unfulfilled autonomy for the artist and the remote control, audio,
document, letter. Courtesy
uncertainty of creative subjectivity. Over the past ten years, China has of the artist.
finally reached a golden age in terms of art museums with the massive scale
of spatial production motivated by capital, yet a lot of “counter” spaces
have been created from which the agenda of capital might be deviated
or ideological control inverted. These spaces can be understood as those
Foucault called heterotopias. To apply the term institutional critique, which
originated in the West, to a contradictory context doesn’t mean to map, to
categorize, or to define art practice in another geographic locality, but to
produce a different narrative according to different kinds of practice and
to reinvestigate paradoxes of modernity and contemporaneity, such as the
autonomy of art, through another set of lenses.

The Chinese edition of this essay was published in Active Withdrawals—Life

and Death of Institutional Critique, eds. Nikita Yingqian Cai and Biljana Ciric
(Shanghai: Shanghai Scientific and Technological Literature Press, 2014).

Notes
1. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces, Utopias and Heterotopias,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, in
Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984), 46–49.
2. Camiel van Winkel, During the Exhibition the Gallery Will be Closed—Contemporary Art and the
Paradoxes of Conceptualism (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2012).
3. Simon Sheikh, Notes on Institutional Critique, January 2006, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0106/sheikh/
en/.
4. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Conceptual Art, 1962–69: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the
Critique of Institutions," October 55 (1990), 105–43.
5. Andy Hamilton, “Adorno and the Autonomy of Art,” in Nostalgia for a Redeemed Future: Critical
Theory, eds. Stefano Giacchetti Ludovisi and G. Agostini Saavetra (Newark: University of Delaware,
2009), 251–66.
6. Ibid.
7. Away from Art Museum was a proposal for an unrealized act involving the dragging away of the
National Art Museum of China.
8. One Step Forward, Two Steps Back—Us and Institution, Us as Institution, ed. Biljana Ciric
(Guangzhou: Guangdong Times Museum, 2012), 74–76.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy, Part I,” Studio International (October 1969), 134–37.
13. The Dialectics of Image: Art of Shu Qun, ed. Huang Zhuan (Guangzhou: Lingnan Art Publishing
House, 2009), 465.
14. Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. A. Arato and E.
Gebhardt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 300–18.

36 Vol. 14 No. 2