Xiamen Dada 厦门达达
From ArtSpeak China (ASC) Wiki
[edit] When
The Xiamen Dada movement took place from the mid to late 1980s.
[edit] Where
The group held exhibitions only in Xiamen and Fujian, but its influence was far-reaching.
[edit] What
The most significant undertakings carried out by the group carried out were its “group exhibitions” of 1986. The first in this series of events took place on November 23, 1986. In front of the Cultural Palace of Xiamen, the artists set fire to all the works that had been shown in their exhibition the previous month, declaring, “Dada is dead; beware of the fire!” In an accompanying statement, Huang Yong Ping claimed: “Artworks are for the artist what opium is for men. Until art is destroyed, life is never peaceful.” [1]
Later, in December of 1986, the group held another exhibition, at the Fujian Art Museum. Instead of showing artworks such as paintings and sculptures, as they declared they would in their application to rent the space, they moved the construction materials from a neighboring court-yard into the galleries and installed them in the same configuration. They announced:
This is a delimited, aggressive, and continuous event. . . . The fact that these objects are flooding the [Fujian] art museum clearly shows that it’s an action of attack. And what is being attacked here is not the audience, but their opinions on “art.” Likewise, it is not the art museum itself that is under attack, but the art museum as an example of the art system. . . . [This artistic event] suggests some radically different concepts and the importance of realizing these concepts quickly. It seems redundant to ask whether or not an object shown officially at the art museum is an artwork, and the producers of these objects also think that it is meaningless to affirm that they are artworks. In this exhibition, we come empty-handed and, in the end, leave empty-handed. This is an exhibition of works without “works.”[1]
Huang Yong Ping and his friends were deeply interested in the issues of emptiness, nothingness, and chance. These elements gave them the greatest possible freedom to depart from any preconceptualized approach and work with the opportunities that arose at the last minute. In this way they were able to transgress the linear order of things, which is the very core of established modernist culture and is also central to the capitalist and socialist reforms that helped reshape the political, social, economic, and cultural landscape in China in the 1980s. They concluded: “Xiamen Dada is kind of postmodern.” Their main point was to emphasize the necessity to turn away from the rationalist, modernist definition of art and the related institutional system as well as, more profoundly, the discursive system. [1]
Huang Yong Ping thus naturally embraces the examples of Marcel Duchamp, Dada, John Cage, Michel Foucault, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Joseph Beuys, Fluxus, the I Ching (Book of Changes), Taoism, Chan (Zen) Buddhism, and other deconstructive strategies that offer alternatives to the mainstream, modernist conception of the world. [1]
