In December last year a little-known pop art duo called the Gao Brothers used the Internet to wrest themselves from obscurity in a small Chinese city. From their home in Jinan, Shandong Province, the brothers, Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang, used Adobe Photoshop and Outlook Express to mail their art work to thousands of people worldwide. They called it an "e-mail exhibition," and, never having been abroad themselves, they gained a global audience overnight for their playfully subversive works of art.
The brothers, although encouraged by the growing domestic Chinese art market, felt they were missing out on access to the international market. Economic reforms in the last few decades in China have meant growing amounts of disposable income for many urban Chinese. Among the luxury items being bought these days in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen are antiques, paintings and sculpture. A recent article in the China Daily estimated that mainland art sales now stand around US$120 million per year, with domestic art fairs and art galleries accounting for most of those sales.
The edgy political pop of the Gao brothers however, is a little too avant-garde for the average Chinese living room wall. The Gao Brothers conceptual photos read like postcards whose images and text pose searching questions to the heart of a culture: "What are we waiting for? What can we get? What can we believe in today?" Their queries are juxtaposed with familiar yet re-engineered images, such as Mao's face on a Kewpie doll or Chinese coins floating in the sky like UFOs.
Recognizing that the best market for their cutting edge art was probably an overseas museum or collector, Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang decided to scan their work, computer enhance it and send it from their desktop PC to thousands of people worldwide, gathering e-mail addresses from artist friends in China and by surfing the net. Working part time on the project from home the brothers use a local Shandong sever (public.jn.sd.cn) to achieve their global marketing objectives.
Aside from being clever artists, the Gao's are also clever spin doctors. Reacting to the fact that some of the strangers on their mailing list won't appreciate large jpeg files gumming up their e-mailboxes, the brothers say what they are doing is also "performance" art and is intentionally intrusive. If a recipient has a strong reaction one way or another, then the Gao brothers feel they are doing good work.
Virtual China interviewed the brothers at their Jinan home via an e-mail conversation. We asked about their projects, their goals, and their aesthetic in English, and they responded in Chinese.
Q: How old are you?
A: If you add up the years between the two of us then we've got more than 80 years. We're already old, how scary! But if you want to count us separately then Gao Zhen is 44 and the Gao Qiang is 38.
Q: Where do you live?
A: We live in Jinan, the capital city of Shandong Province, China which is about 500 kilometers from Beijing. The train from Jinan to Beijing takes about four hours.
Q: Why are you doing an e-mail exhibition?
A: This e-mail exhibition is something of a retrospective. The pieces indicate our conceptual thinking about Chinese culture. The majority of the work would be very difficult to exhibit or publish here [in China] and has just been kept on our computer.
However, since our computer has gone online the Internet has provided us with a kind of exhibition space for these works, as well as a way to communicate with others. In a few seconds, e-mail can cross great distances of time and space. This really intrigued us greatly.
Q: Do you make a living from your art?
A: We both have jobs in the art field. One of us works as a professional painter in an art academy, and the other has a posting in a university. Both of us has a salary. We also do some traditional ink and oil painting to supplement our creativity as well as our budgets.
The more experimental work we do has not really sold that much. That has begun to change somewhat recently. We hope that an even greater number of people will be interested in what we have been doing in the past few years.
Q: Are there many brother artist teams in China?
A: Some, not many. We know of the Song and Luo Brother teams.
Q: What is the goal of your e-mail campaign?
A: The Internet is still new to us and we have not been online long. We hope to use the Internet to have a dialogue with the world outside and through that dialogue and communication to expand our own art movement.
A few Web sites have established relations with us and have introduced our work through their online publications. This is just the beginning. We hope to use the Internet to carry out some interactive experiments as well. We feel there is a huge amount of potential and space for experimentation on the Web.
Q: What do you think of the contemporary Chinese art scene?
A: Basically, since the 1980s contemporary art in China has become more multi-dimensional but actually it also lost a lot of the avant-garde edge it had in the 1980s. It lost the social impact it had too.
The main reason for the change is that after the 1989 "Tiananmen Incident" Chinese officials marketized the economy and at the same time cracked down on intellectual thought. That limited the scope of artistic movements within China and shrunk the spiritual realm. You could also argue though that the marketized economy could not help but internationalize and unify the Chinese contemporary art scene.
Then again you can also say that Chinese artists are also tending to not rely on their own sensibilities and are simply catering to western curators with the artistic equivalents of "Spring Rolls" and "Export Porcelain." Chinese art has in some ways lost direction, and the ability to critique and build on its own mother culture.
Q: Have you ever been abroad? Are you planning to come to go abroad anytime soon?
A: Unfortunately, we have not yet been abroad. Until now we have been landlocked. The reason for that is rather complicated. First, since we are not in Beijing, there have been few opportunities for us. Also, because until now we haven't taken the trouble to seek out opportunities either.
It also probably has a lot to do with a visit in 1994 by (political dissident) Wei Jingsheng when he was paroled. He came to see us as a show of thanks for signing a petition written by Fang Lizhi in 1989 and given to Deng Xiaoping asking for Wei's release.
In China politics is like air, it's everywhere. It's also like sex, in that it is a very sensitive issue. People often suffer from "politicophobia." If you have a connection to someone like Wei then you draw the attention of the authorities and will be treated differently than others. This certainly happened to us.
New York is the capital of the art scene, and having international exchange becomes increasingly important. Of course we want to visit and will if we get a chance soon.
Related Links:
Gao Brothers work and biography on New Chinese Art.com.
Photos of the Shandong Province 2000 Internet, Video and Photo Art Exhibition.
More works by the Gao Brothers.
