China's new media art more media than art
(China Daily)
Updated: 2004-06-11 08:47

People still habitually stereotype art students as people who are romantic but hardly able to count to more than 100, and science students as boring sorts who convert everything in life into numbers.

"New media art" exhibition displays creations by teachers and students from 28 prestigious institute around the world. [China Daily]

However, the differences between arts and science students are diminishing, with majors combining arts and science flourishing in many of the world's universities and colleges as a result of the unprecedented technological revolution that has been going on since the 1980s.

The "marriage" between the arts and science is demonstrated at the ongoing exhibition about "new media art," which is on at the Millennium Art Museum of the China Millennium Monument in western Beijing.

Teachers and students from 28 prestigious universities around the world, including 11 Chinese institutions of higher learning, are showing their "new media art" works, which range from video art, digital art and animation to flash art and sound art.

"Reflective design: technology for new museum experience," by Kirsten Boehner, Xiaowen Chen and Geri Gay from Cornell University HCI Grooup. [China Daily]

The students whose works are being shown are studying for degrees in a variety of disciplines, such as arts, communications, design, electronic engineering, fine arts, music, science and software engineering, depending on the universities or colleges they are from.

The exhibition, organized by Tsinghua University, the ZKM Art and Media Centre of Germany and the V2 Art Exhibition Association of Netherlands, includes the work of students from the nine most important Chinese art academies and Peking and Tsinghua universities.

Overseas institutions involved include big names such as Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University, the University of California at Berkeley, the New York Visual Art Institute, Tokyo University, and the Koln Media and Art Institute.

The exhibition has been attracting a lot of attention in Beijing where the arts are very big at this time.

New media art works, which allow for more interaction between art and the viewer than does traditional art, make it fun to visit the exhibition, said Wang Yudong, deputy curator of the Millennium Art Museum.

"Each era has its own art. Oil painting on canvas is not the creation of our era, but the new media art can be," he noted.

New media art emerged in the West as early as the 1960s. In China, it is thought to have first appeared in 1988 when Hangzhou-based artist Zhang Peili used a video camera to record a performance show he staged in the city.

In the following decade the phrase "new media art," which was borrowed from abroad, was synonymous with "video art" in China.

Around 1988 Chinese new media art experienced a major breakthrough when personal computers and DV cameras were already widely used and CD ROMs and the Internet entered our daily lives.

A lot more artists have since then found more freedom in artistic expression with the aid of computer software such as "Painters."

However, Chinese new media artists were criticized by both domestic and foreign art critics for focusing too much on the conceptual side of their work and not enough on grasping the new technology, said Zhu Qingsheng, an art professor at Peking University, in 2002.

"Few artists here can design software for their works, but artists in the West quite commonly can do so," he said at that time.

But the situation has changed rapidly in the past two years, as majors in new media art are now offered in almost all important Chinese art academies and more and more universities in the country, following the example of the China Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou, which in 1996 was the first Chinese academy to open a new media arts studio, winning it a leading position in the field.

"Emerging young Chinese artists, especially those who have received university education, can make really cool things using the most advanced technologies," said Chen Yang, curator of contemporary art at the Millennium Art Museum.

"When organizing the exhibition, I was pleasantly shocked to see the great progress that has been made in the last two years," she added.

The problem now lies not in technologies but in ideas, said Zhang Ga, a professor with the renowned Parsons School of Design, New York, who is one of the two curators of the exhibition.

"The new media works of Chinese teachers and students can be clearly distinguished from those of foreigners at the show. The former are dazzling in appearance, but often naive in content," he said.

"New media art is only a medium through which artists express themselves. We have to bear in mind that it is the idea conveyed, not the technique that makes the fundamental difference between good art and bad art, and this is true of all forms of art, including new media," said Lu Xiaobo, vice-president of the Art Academy of Tsinghua University, who has been Zhang's partner in curating the exhibition.

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