Taking up all six floors of the Rockbund Art Museum, the exhibition Advance through Retreat runs from May 10th 2014 through to August 3rd 2014. The exhibition takes place amid the larger backdrop of recent developments in Chinese society and art in mind. For nearly two decades, traditional Chinese culture and traditional media has been a subject within the field of contemporary Chinese art. Numerous biennials and exhibitions on the topic—like, for example, the Shenzhen International Ink Painting Biennial, the project for the first Chinese Pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 2003, and most recently Yuan Dao—The Origin of Dao (Hong Kong Museum of Art, 2013), or again Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China (Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2013)—indicate the existence of a tendency that is gaining ever greater importance, a tendency which shows the apparent need to rediscover and revaluate Chinese traditional media as a lingua franca. Certainly this interest in autochthonous Chinese culture is due to stimuli from various areas; political and economic motivations play as important a role as cultural and artistic ones, and Chinese players and lobbies are as active as their Western counterparts. But what is especially worth highlighting is the creation of a cultural identity of a new, self-confident, post-WTO-entry China. As a new and economically powerful global player, China seeks to affirm the “cultural position of a native culture with an excellent tradition,” to cite Pi Daojian's introduction to his exhibition Yuan Dao—The Origin of Dao.

Yet up to the present day, most exhibitions on traditional Chinese media in a contemporary context have dealt with the subject through aspects of technique, media, aesthetics and values associated with traditional Chinese literati culture. The subject is tackled either to reaffirm a Chinese cultural identity or to revisit the East/West dichotomy, a spectre haunting Chinese cultural theory and critique since the mid-19th century.

This exhibition aims to look at traditional media from a different angle. It sets out to present artistic positions using traditional media and procedures, such as divination, the game, gambling and traditional strategies—for instance, “advance through retreat”—in order to develop autonomous languages that utter positions of resistance to the assimilating tendency and the power structures generated and maintained by the lingua franca. Advance through Retreat attempts to show, how, in specific historical moments, the use of or the retreat into tradition is employed as an efficient strategy of resistance.

Larys Frogier, the Director of the Rockbund Art Museum notes, “Advance through Retreat brings together Chinese and international artists who distance themselves from considering tradition as frozen time or as an established system. Rather, they question tradition as a way to test the limits and possibilities of contemporary creation, of remembering and remaking histories, and of revisiting certain established codes in order to re-invent today’s challenges of tradition in our urban societies, political contexts and daily lives. Advance through Retreat is thus a project in which tradition is embraced by contemporary artists as on-going living practices—from re-writing different layers of art and social histories to the uses and/or misuses of cultural codes, images and mundane objects. It is thus clear that tradition is not only about a simplistic opposition between past and present; it is about an evolving process of using, transforming, reinterpreting, and developing cultures. Hence in the exhibition Advance through Retreat, tradition is represented, performed and questioned as a whole set of practices, images, and objects based on vernacular, daily activities.”

Indeed, intrinsically linked to the Chinese imperial system and its institutions as well as to power, calligraphy and traditional Chinese painting have been used as a unifying tool throughout Chinese history. In particular calligraphy and its specific styles served as lingua franca not only binding the vast territory with its diverse regional cultures and dialects together and guaranteeing cultural coherence, but also conferring social status and granting access to power for those who had the disposition to use and understand this medium. The written word, as poetry or calligraphy, is therefore also one important focus of the exhibition Advance through Retreat.

The retreat into tradition as a means of resistance and development of an autonomous language is not only a practice in the field of contemporary Chinese culture but also in that of contemporary and modern culture as such. The exhibition therefore includes works by artists of different origins and different times. Marc Tobey's retreat into Arabic and Eastern thought and calligraphy that stimulated the development of his influential white writing in the early and mid-twentieth century, was as significant as Kang Youwei's promotion of ancient metal-and stone inscriptions as models for a reform of Chinese calligraphy and culture in the late nineteenth century, while Zheng Guogu and Yangjiang Group's rediscovery of local traditions and vernacular is as fundamental a tendency in contemporary Chinese art. In her set of woodblock prints "Home is a Foreign Place" Zarima Hashmi attributes as much importance to the retreat into the autobiographic and a personal but yet universal vernacular as does Tsang Tsou Choi—or indeed Jiang Zhi in his "Love Letters" and Wang Qingsong in "Auspicious Snow". Li Zhengtian, Qiu Zhijie, Xiao Kaiyu and Yang Jiechang's works show as much the artists' beliefs in the potential of art and tradition to challenge and transform our vision of reality as does Pablo Wendel's video. Finally, Jimmie Durham's act of smashing objects in his video "Smashing" is as much an attempt to renegotiate modernity as is Huang Yongping's "Big Roulette with Four Wheels" or Andreas Mayer-Brennenstuhl's "Die Moderne redigieren / Editing Modernity", or again Fu Baoshi's album leaves after poems by Mao Zedong.

About the exhibition

Duration: May 10, 2014 - Aug 3, 2014

Opening: May 9, 2014, 18:30, Friday

Venue: RockBund Art Museum, Shanghai

Curator: Yang Tianna

Artists: Du Bianjiang, Jimmie Durham, Fu Baoshi, Zarina Hashmi, Huang Yongping, Jiang Zhi, Kang Youwei, Li Zhengtian, Ma Lin, Andreas Mayer-Brennenstuhl, Qiu Zhijie, Mark Tobey, Tsang Tsou Choi, Wang Qingsong, Xiao Kaiyu, Yang Jiecang, Yangjiang Group , Zheng Guogu

Courtesy of the artists and RockBund Art Museum, for further information please visit www.rockbundartmuseum.org.