Madhu Jain
In the run-up to India turning sixty this August there has been, and will be a considerable amount of cultural muscle-flexing, amongst, of course, other declarations of self-love — Indian Shining, Incredible India and all that. We may have been a sphere of influence, rippling outwards in our distant golden past. And well may we pat ourselves on the back for that. But, today, we have to watch that back. It’s all boomeranging, especially from the Chinese quarters. More fronts keep opening in the battle between the two biggies in this part of the world. Leaving aside territorial, military or diplomatic fronts — not the purview of this column — the Chinese have taken us on in the commercial and, increasingly, in the creative arena. And let’s not even talk about sports.
There’s been much rah-rah over the soaring prices of Indian contemporary art at Sotheby’s and Christies in their recent New York Spring auctions. Tyeb Mehta’s Falling Figure (1987) went to an Asian buyer for a record $1,160,000 at Sotheby’s. There even emerged a relatively dark horse galloping ahead: Rameshwar Broota’s Captives (1989) brought down the hammer at $779,200, tying in second place with the late VS Gaitonde. The powerful work of Broota, younger by a generation from the acknowledged masters, went for almost twice the higher estimate.
But hold that grin. Zhang Xiogang’s painting sold at Sotheby’s the previous day for almost twice Mehta’s work. Bloodlines: Three Comrades, a stunning 1994 melancholy-touched group portrait, went for $2,112,000. And Yue Minjun’s Goldfish, an amazing surreal painting from 1993 fetched $1,384,000. What makes the heartburn sharper is the fact that the two Chinese artists are much younger than our stars: Xiogang was born in 1958, and Minjun in 1962.
You can’t help asking why the international buzz over contemporary Chinese art is getting louder by the year. Could it be that years of oppression have ignited fires in the bellies of the Chinese artists? That combined with the reality of the ever-present, unpredictable big brother watching over their shoulders forcing them to allegorise or to dissimulate by other means, including surrealism and symbolism. Both artists have lived through the Cultural Revolution as well as seen the death of democracy at Tiananmen Square. Something has obviously been stirred deep down. They are staring the contemporary scene in the eye. Perhaps, the Chinese, unlike most of our artists, have broken away from the past — a rupture no less — to tackle their new world, both shining and brutal.
We Indians have too many skins to shed, too many influences to yoke off— from the colonial that keeps returning in different forms and forums to the indigenous and no less
to the teachers and gurus of our times. But happily, there are stirrings, murmurings of uprisings against the conventions of the past. Over the last few years, and even more discernible during the last year, a few of the younger artists are experimenting with greater confidence, even cockiness.
Not bowed down by their teachers or the past, the younger lot from Baroda and from the new pools of creativity like Cochin and Orissa are addressing contemporary concerns, unafraid to tackle the mundane, indulge in purely material or borrow with abandon from any and everywhere — and more significant not fight shy of being sexually explicit and exploring the darker sides of the human being.
A few younger artists have turned their backs on the high priests of Europe, only to absorb the influences blowing in from the East. Unmistakably, many young Turks of the GenNow are copying Chinese artists — from the mask like faces and compositions of group portraits to the sheen of the painted surfaces.
It’s a case of literally taking the pearl out of the oyster: some of our more successful young artists have begun to copy the Chinese practice of adding crushed pearls into
their pigments to get that ethereal sheen in their portraits and landscapes. If you can’t lick ‘em, well then copy them.
Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com
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