Xing Danwen

These studies in alienation have earned Xing exposure in many international galleries as well as major institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Whitney Museum, New York; the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark; the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; and the National Gallery of Contemporary Art, Seoul. Yet the pictures’ anomie, like the wanderings that engendered them, is far from the cultural rootedness in which Xing began and the artistic communality in which she originally thrived.

Perhaps that is why the artist has now decided to exhibit her earlier, Nan Goldin-style images that record China’s 1990s underground arts ferment—first in a solo show (focusing on Beijing’s famous East Village performance art scene) that opens this month at Haines Gallery in San Francisco and, later, in an exhibition and book titled Xing Danwen: A Personal Diary—China’s Avant-Garde in the 1990s (covering experimental film, theater, rock ’n’ roll and dance, as well as the visual arts) to be launched at Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, in spring 2011.

Xing was born in the provincial city of Xi’an during the second year of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). In the spirit of the times, her parents (both engineers at a state energy company) gave her a personal name, Danwen, that she says translates as Red Culture. Growing up near the tomb of China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi (259-210 b.c.)—with its famed terra-cotta army [see A.i.A., Mar. ’09], discovered in 1974, when Xing was seven—did not inspire a love of ancient artifacts and tradition in the future artist. In fact, she came to feel strongly that “we must make our own history now,” a sentiment common at the time of Mao’s concerted push to eliminate the “four olds” (old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas), though Xing would eventually give the directive an avant-garde spin that the Great Helmsman would not have welcomed.

Xing studied oil painting (aka Western painting) at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, graduating in 1992. There, as in Xi’an, instructors encouraged students to go out with sketchbook or camera to document the noble “hard life” experienced by workers, peasants and soldiers—still considered, a decade or more after the death of Mao, suitable subjects for carefully elaborated studio paintings.

The young Xing elected to travel alone to remote regions, seeking to capture images of coal miners, Tibetan villagers and other members of China’s 56 ethnic minorities. Her biggest fear, she admits, was rape. Schoolmates urged her to master kung fu or to carry a knife. “But I was not a large girl,” she says. “I knew that any man who wanted to could turn my own knife against me. So I decided to take condoms instead.” Fortunately, the precaution proved to be unnecessary. “The people were unsophisticated, even crude by city standards,” she recalls, “but also tremendously welcoming and sweet.”

Xing obtained her first camera—purchased secondhand, by a friend, at a street market in Hong Kong—in the spring of 1989. Immediately, like most of her CAFA colleagues, she was caught up in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests. Yet the pictures she managed to take, she considers worthless. “I didn’t even know how to load the camera properly. My first roll of film came out blank.” Her subsequent shots have been packed away, unseen, for 20 years. “Maybe,” she muses, “I should dig those boxes out and take another look sometime.”

After her graduation, Xing (who did not have a Beijing residency authorization) was obliged to return to Xi’an and begin work in a government agency issuing arts-and-entertainment permits. As always, her official file—a school and employment record, supplemented by character assessments from state authorities—preceded her unseen, a procedure known to every educated Chinese citizen. The bureaucratic assignment in Xi’an, in return for the “free” college education Xing had received, was slated to last five years. “I knew I would go mad,” she says, “if I had to spend every morning in an office, drinking tea and reading the paper—the usual government clerk way—and every afternoon stamping application forms.” Instead, she struck a deal with her supervisors. Her name remained on record as an employee, but she departed, a free woman, for illegal residency in the capital—while the Xi’an “office” kept her salary.

The following year (1993), Xing married a German engineer who worked for Lufthansa Airlines in Beijing. During a three-month stay in Germany, she shopped her work around, selling four paintings and securing her first solo photography exhibition (at Gallery Grauwert, Hamburg, 1994) as well as the first publication of her images (a cover story in the Hamburg-based, black-and-white arts weekly Photo News). In addition, she won freelance commissions from such large-circulation German magazines as Stern and Geo. (Her initial assignment for the latter, a 12-page photo-and-text account of young people training for the Beijing Opera, enabled Xing to buy her first new camera.)

Before this time, Xing had, she says, no notion that photography could be construed as high art. She had been raised first on propaganda imagery, then on workaday photojournalism. Her schools had a half dozen serious photo books but no art photography courses. It was only in the early 1990s, when she was around 26 years old, that three encounters drastically altered her view: a Henri Cartier-Bresson show at China’s National Art Museum, a Sebastião Salgado display at the World Photo Press Exhibition in Beijing and a book featuring the photographs of Wolfgang Tillmans. The Tillmans volume, with its casual-seeming shots of youth and drug cultures, finally galvanized her: “If his pictures could be art,” she says now, “maybe mine could be, too.”

At the time, Xing and her husband were living in a Beijing apartment building near the East Village. The name of the enclave, where young artists shared cheap space with farmers and migrant workers near a large garbage heap, was an homage to New York’s bohemian mecca of the 1970s and ’80s, but its history was uniquely Chinese.