Episode 3 Art of China

I think of Chinese art as a single great scroll of calligraphy,

written by many hands, telling the story

of a 4,000-year-old civilisation's fears and hopes.

At first, there was art for the dead,

created to appease the wrath of the gods,

to take control of the afterlife

or offer consolation through prayer.

Then there was the art of the living -

the art of scholars,

who immersed themselves in nature,

of emperors with an insatiable thirst for exquisite objects,

or for breathtaking architecture, gateway to the divine.

And finally, an art born out of China's contact with the West -

brilliant hybrids, but also portents of disaster,

a humbling end to 2,000 years of imperial power.

The art that emerged from the ruins was one of revolution and rebirth,

but accompanied too by shattering destruction.

And now, China has risen again,

and a new generation of artists

are striving to give it a shape and a meaning.

We've taken away so much, so fast,

that we don't even remember what we had before.

Have they been crushed by the oppression of the past?

Or have they found a way to breathe new life

into China's ancient traditions?

Modern China - it can be a bewildering place.

Gleaming high-rise buildings next to wooden shacks.

McDonald's next to street concessions

selling bowls of steaming noodles.

An uneasy blend of East and West.

What can be more uneasy than a communist capitalist state?

But if you want to understand the history

of China's relationship with the West,

you have to turn the clock back some 400 years

to the arrival of China's last great imperial dynasty -

the Qing.

The Qing were foreigners,

breaching the Great Wall from their homeland of Manchuria,

northeast of China.

They formed the last of China's great dynasties,

but never completely forgot their outsider origins.

Unlike their predecessors, the Ming,

whose great symbol was the Great Wall of China,

who were enclosed, inward-looking,

the Qing looked outwards.

They opened Chinese culture up to the outside world

and, above all, to the West.

Qing cultural policy was two-pronged -

you might say two-faced.

To woo their new subjects,

they commissioned traditional Chinese art,

expanding the Forbidden City and adding to its collections.

But at the same time, they introduced art so foreign,

it seemed positively alien.

When we're talking about the influence of the West on China,

this really is "X marks the spot."

It all began here,

because this was the very first Western-European settlement

in the heart of China's capital city

and this marks the centre of it -

it's a Catholic cathedral.

The Jesuits were allowed to settle here

and to preach the Word of God

by the Qing emperors.

But it was a deal -

what the emperors wanted in return was Western science,

Western technology, Western inventions

and, perhaps above all, Western art.

And one traveller from Europe gave them that more than any other.

His name was Giuseppe Castiglione

and he, almost single-handedly, changed the face of Chinese art.

Castiglione was by no means the only Westerner

to come to China from the Catholic south of Europe,

but he was by far the most influential.

Before he arrived under the Ming,

Chinese court art had continued in a traditional style.

Exquisite, but unadventurous.

Castiglione, with his Western innovations,

shook up this frozen world.

His earliest known work is a scroll of 1723

called Accumulating Fortunes.

On a background of imperial gold,

Castiglione has modelled his bouquet in light and shade,

has used bright, living colours for the blooms,

and painted the vase in perspective -

techniques familiar in Europe since the Renaissance,

but unknown in China.

The symbolism of the flowers was ancient.

Corn and lotus blossom for fertility and good fortune.

Peonies, national symbol of China.

But this Western realism was startlingly new.

Accumulating Fortunes beguiled the emperor

and under his patronage,

Castiglione thrived.

Castiglione is hardly a household name in the West,

but in China, as Lang Shining, he is venerated as a master

and his paintings are national treasures.

The measures taken to protect this work of art may seem extreme,

but this 1728 scroll, 100 Horses In A Landscape,

is considered his masterpiece.

After you.

The painting's got security guards.

I've never seen a painting with security guards before.

-So I have to put on a mask?

-Yes.

OK.

-Like this?

-Yes. Great.

Oh, great, thank you.

THEY LAUGH

How am I supposed to work?

A bigger one?

Oh, thank you.

So, I've got... It wasn't...

I know I've got a big mouth, but..

Wow!

I should explain the symbolism.

The symbolism of the painting is that the horse

stands for talent, a man of talent

and the landscape stands for China under the Qing.

So what the painting expresses as a whole

is the notion that China under the Qing dynasty is full of talent,

full of celebrated, clever, gifted individuals.

This one is especially interesting

-because he is so skinny.

-Yeah.

Skinny horse means something, that they are very...

SHE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

How to say...? They will not obey to the authority.

He is just looking at other horses, and...

"I don't want to join you",

but in the last part, he joined them.

That's fantastic - which symbolises the notion that, under the Qing,

even the rebellious talented will come into the imperial fold.

So it's a great celebration of the emperor's power.

-Yes, exactly.

-Fantastic.

The horsemen represent the officials of the Qing court,

tenderly caring for their happy beasts -

the Qing's loyal subjects.

This is brilliant propaganda.

The painting is over 25 feet long

and its scale drives home the strong, clear message.

It's wonderful, isn't it?

Because you can see Castiglione has looked at Chinese painting.

-He's looked at the imperial collection, I imagine.

-Yes.

Here, this remind me of Guo Xi, and here, he's got the mists

-that represent the chi, the energy, of the landscape.

-Yes.

My understanding is that he could have put more shadow,

but that the Chinese found shadows in painting rather disconcerting,

so he included shadow to allow

-a sufficient Western amount of modelling...

-Yeah.

..but then kept it to a minimum,

not to confuse the Chinese sense of taste.

But it's absolutely beautiful.

Castiglione served three different Qing emperors,

the last of whom came to the throne in 1735 -

the charismatic Qianlong.

Castiglione painted his portrait on horseback,

harking back to the great equestrian portraits

of European Baroque painting.

Never before had a Chinese ruler looked down his nose at his people

quite so convincingly.

Qianlong would reign until the end of the 18th century.

Under him, China enjoyed peace, stability

and agricultural abundance.

The population grew rapidly.

China had never had it so good and to congratulate himself,

Qianlong commissioned one of the most elaborate scroll paintings

in the history of Chinese art.

Completed 1759, it's called Prosperous Suzhou.

This is what the richest town in China looked like

when Samuel Johnson was out and about in London.

The painting includes 12,000 figures and 260 shops -

this is the land of consumer durables,

the land of prosperity.

There are tobacco shops, wine shops,

cotton shops, silk shops,

garden supply shops - you-name-it shops.

Qianlong was very, very proud of how wealthy his China was.

He's competing with the famous Song emperor Huizong,

who'd commissioned the Qingming scroll,

China's most famous painting -

a depiction of wealthy, prosperous Kaifeng back in the Middle Ages.

He's employed an entire team of artists,

whom it took three years to create this 30-metre scroll.

It's a truly extraordinary object.

What it has to say is, basically,

"We are as rich as we have ever been."

Not so much the Qing dynasty

as the "Ka-ching!" dynasty.

Qianlong saw himself as the rightful heir to China

and its most precious traditions.

The transformation of the Qing

from foreign invaders into Chinese rulers

was complete.

Qianlong's vast wealth also enabled him

to pursue a new love of all things Western on a grand scale.

He embraced plans for a European-style quarter

within the Qing's vast Summer Palace estate

on the outskirts of Beijing.

Drawn up by the increasingly influential Castiglione,

ten new European-style palaces would occupy a new garden

within the 800 acres

previously dominated by Chinese wooden architecture.

Little remains, but the drawings reveal stone pavilions

of a dazzling, Frenchified, Rococo elegance.

The effect must have been surprising -

like seeing Marie Antoinette in China.

The one surviving remnant of the great Summer Palace

is the maze and, in many ways, it's a perfect symbol

of the Qing's love

of complexity, intricacy, foreign styles, foreign games.

As Emperor Qianlong's reign continued,

his passion for art became an obsession

and the country began falling behind in science and technology.

Emperor Qianlong loved art -

in fact, he collected and commissioned so much of it

that it is said if you laid his collection end to end,

it would take ten years just simply to walk past it.

It wasn't enough for Qianlong to love art and collect it.

He wanted the world to know forever just how much he loved it.

He didn't merely, as emperors in the past had done,

put his own seal on his favourite pieces -

he put his seal plus a word of commendation.

"Sublime." "Marvellous."

"I really like this one."

For me, the ultimate example of his obsessive collectamania is this -

the box for the man who has to collect

absolutely everything in the world.

Well, that's my name for it.

The museum label calls it "curio box with the motif of dragons."

Open it up, and you find a miniaturised version

of Qianlong's favourite things from his collection.

It's like a doll's house version of his universe.

Onyx.

Porcelain.

Knotted strings carved from stone.

Curious religious sculptures.

A bronze chicken.

You name it, it's all here.

Qianlong even collected himself -

well, he collected volumes of his own poetry,

each with a frontispiece portrait,

slowly ageing, rather like Dorian Grey,

from image to image.

If I had to choose a single object to epitomise Qing taste,

it would be this one.

A Qing vase, commissioned by Emperor Qianlong himself,

from the imperial kilns.

You have got lattice-work,

embellished disks attached to the sides,

you've got these fronds, multicoloured,

climbing up the spout.

Such a contrast with Chinese porcelain from earlier dynasties.

Think back to the aching simplicity of Song dynasty Ru ware.

This is the Chinese ceramic equivalent of French Rococo -

both are the styles of frivolity, decadence, overconsumption.

It is the style that perfectly represents

the pride that comes before a fall.

Qianlong is honoured in buzzing virtual reality

here at the National Palace Museum in Taipei.

There's even a cartoon hologram you can queue up

to have your photograph taken with.

There's something apt about enthroning him

in this flickering fantasy land.

He was a man in thrall to the fantasy of his own omnipotence.

"Mine is a celestial dynasty",

he wrote to King George III of England,

"my palace, the centre around which the globe revolves."

In truth, Qianlong took his eye off the globe -

a great collector of Western art,

he didn't realise it was Western science

that was changing the world.

So while Europe had the Industrial Revolution,

new technology, new weapons,

the newest thing in Qianlong's China

was a collection of fragile novelties.

When he waved his last goodbye in 1799,

he left China ill-equipped for the new century.

A particular thorn in China's side

would be the people of a tiny, far-away maritime nation.

Englishmen in unfamiliar woollen clothing

had began arriving in numbers in the mid-18th century.

Chinese tea was what they were after.

It had become an English addiction

and they'd stop at nothing to get it.

The Qing authorities set limits on the trade,

insisting tea could only be bought for silver.

But the English paid with opium

they could pick up for next to nothing in India.

Millions of Chinese became drug addicts,

brain baffled by the foreign devils caricatured in cartoons like this.

The end result? China seized British hauls of opium

and the British retaliated, starting a war which,

thanks to the technological limitations of the Chinese,

was heavily stacked in favour

of His Royal Majesty the King of England's drug dealers.

In 1842, after three years of battles,

Britain was victorious.

Now...

..under the Treaty of Nanjing,

the British were granted - or, rather, took -

a small fortune in silver from the Chinese,

as reparation for their war losses,

they took a small place called Hong Kong in perpetuity,

and the right to trade from and create settlements in five ports,

the most important of which was Shanghai.

This was a huge humiliation for the Qing.

Imagine - a foreign power not only owning property on Chinese soil,

but usurping Chinese trading rights.

And I think the style in which the British chose to build

their consulate here in Shanghai,

with its rampantly colonial style, the finely trimmed lawn,

I wonder if they weren't trying to rub it in a bit?

A fine spot to drink a rather complacent cup of tea.

Over the next two decades,

the Qing began to lose the confidence of their people.

There was popular unrest, uprisings, rebellions,

tens of millions of Chinese lives lost.

In 1860, during a second Opium War,

the British struck a hammer blow

from which the dynasty would never recover.

It was a cold and knowing act of iconoclasm -

an all-out attack on the Summer Palace.

They looted its treasures, they levelled its stone building

and they torched the rest.

Within a month, they had destroyed

the greatest jewel of the entire Qing empire.

The French 19th-century writer Victor Hugo simply remarked,

"We think we are civilised

"and we think the Chinese are barbarians.

"Look around - this is what civilisation did to barbarism."

A century earlier, Emperor Qianlong

had imagined Europe was something you could dally with -

a source book of styles for an emperor

to decorate his playground.

Now, the playground was smashed.

No-one in China was taking the West lightly any more.

In the thriving port of Shanghai,

Britain's international settlements had now been joined

by French and American concessions.

Foreign influence was having a transforming effect

on the city's art and artists.

Shanghai's a city that grew up in the 19th and 20th centuries.

That's why it feels a little bit

like a hybrid between Liverpool and New York.

But thanks to the settlements, from the 1860s onwards,

this was really an urban experience like no other.

Not only did you have Westerners and Chinese living cheek by jowl,

but the indigenous Chinese of Shanghai

developed their own versions of Western architecture.

Town houses, apartment blocks -

they were living in new types of spaces.

And suddenly, they lost their enthusiasm for the old forms

of Chinese art, the scroll and the screen.

What they wanted was pictures in frames to hang on their wall

and lots of bright colours -

a subtle change in taste, but a profound one.

At first sight, this Shanghai School art

can look a bit too pretty -

wallpaper for the new Chinese collectors

of the international settlements

to decorate their Western-style homes.

But it's understandable that they wanted to look

at colourful blooms, cuddly animals.

Many of these new Chinese collectors were traumatised refugees,

fleeing the violence and bloodshed

that had racked China throughout the 19th century -

Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion.

But the presence of foreign powers on Chinese soil

was a continuing cause of confusion and anger,

epitomised in a masterly self-portrait

that the Shanghai School artist Ren Xiong created in the 1850s.

The image of an angry young man in knife-edged clothing

echoes the romantic self-portraits

that European artists were painting at just this time.

But it's hardly a homage -

the scroll bears a pained inscription,

lamenting China's territorial losses

and the indignation of being subjugated to foreign powers.

China's century of disasters came to a climax in 1894

with the loss of the first Sino-Japanese War,

fought over control of Korea.

This was the most humiliating defeat of all.

China had fallen so far behind, it wasn't just losing to the West,

but to its own, far smaller neighbour, Japan,

which HAD embraced Western technology.

At the higher levels of Chinese society,

there was a deep sense of shame and betrayal.

Their rulers had let them down. It was time for change.

1911 was the year of the Great Revolution.

The last Emperor, Puyi, still just a little boy

who could barely reach his throne, was forced to abdicate.

More than 2,000 years of dynastic history had been brought to an end.

Chinese society would be fundamentally altered.

So too would Chinese art. The old skills were no longer encouraged.

Western-style industrial design began to displace

brush and ink painting.

And the Forbidden City, for so many centuries

the principal source of commissions, was closed for business.

After 1911, the new Republic of China would endure

decades of political instability.

The Nationalist leaders struggled to keep the country unified,

as regional warlords exploited the power vacuum.

And how did China's artists respond to these turbulent times?

The more adventurous travelled west in search of fresh ideas.

In 1919, a young painter called Xu Beihong

went all the way to France

and enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.

When he returned to China eight years later,

he adapted 19th-century French ideas

to create a new kind of epic, politically engaged Chinese art.

One, two, three.

The most celebrated of his early paintings lies buried deep

within the vaults of Beijing's Capital Museum.

I think my Chinese is improving.

That was Chinese for, "Whatever you do, don't drop it."

Influenced by French painters' meditations

on their own tumultuous times,

like Delacroix's Liberty Storming The Barricades,

the young painter's new work made him

the most acclaimed and influential artist

within a country still wracked by uncertainty.

Ha-ha!

So, this is the very first example of a fully fledged,

Western European-style narrative history painting

ever created in China, and it's 1928-30.

Xu Beihong, in his own mind, is cutting edge.

He's been trained in Paris.

He's been trained at the Beaux Arts.

He's studied anatomy, he's studied Delacroix, Gericault, Courbet.

He's studied Veronese,

the great tradition of the Italian Renaissance.

In truth, Western modern painting has moved on from this style.

We've had Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism is just being born

at the point when this picture is being painted.

But for him and for his audience, this is startlingly new.

Now, what has he done?

He's taken a moment from Chinese history when Tian Heng,

he's the hero of the painting,

he realises that he cannot possibly defeat the Emperor of the time.

Rather than accept surrender, accept defeat,

he is going to kill himself.

This is the moment when he announces

to his 500 followers that he will leave.

He doesn't tell them he's going to kill himself, but they know.

That's why you've got this pervasive sense of melancholy.

These figures reaching out.

And right at the centre of the painting,

as if to sign it with his own identity,

he's placed a self-portrait.

In fact, several of the characters in the picture

represent people he knew. These are his friends.

This rather dignified, solemn figure,

that's actually the security guard at his school.

This is his daughter.

At this moment in time, hostilities between China

and its great enemy, Japan, were deepening.

What he's done is he's painted a collective portrait of China

facing this solemn, sad, difficult moment.

A new kind of art...

for a new sense of national emergency.

In this climate, Xu Beihong's art struck a chord for the Chinese.

But he wasn't the only artist importing alternative Western ideas.

Lin Fenmiang also went to France during the early 1920s,

falling under the spell of a very different

and rather more modern tradition of painting.

The table top Cubism of Braque and Picasso.

Cezanne's still-lives also enthralled him.

And you can see their influence everywhere

in Lin Fenmiang's homages to his heroes.

He also painted Chinese versions of the Odalisques of Matisse.

For all its modernisation,

China wasn't ready for Western-style avant-garde art.

Fengmian's work was seen as weird, outlandish.

And it was deeply unpopular.

Chinese politics was so frenzied during these years

that the Chinese artists were virtually,

and then literally, compelled to take political sides.

A new political force had emerged

and was vying for power with the Nationalists.

The Chinese Communist Party had found its inspiration

in the Russian Revolution.

During the 1930s, the Communists began to challenge the government.

That internal strife was then overshadowed by disaster -

a second major war with imperialist, expansionist Japan.

July 7, 1937, this bridge,

once admired by Marco Polo for its 500 carved lions,

this bridge separates Japanese garrison over there,

a Chinese town over there.

Silly little dispute over a missing soldier, but then it escalates.

Shots are fired. It escalates again.

It turns into full-blown war.

20 million Chinese dead.

95 million refugees.

The country is rocked to its foundations.

In 1941, the death, displacement and atrocious suffering

caused by the second Sino-Japanese War

roused Xu Beihong to create one of his most enduringly famous images.

A work still much reproduced throughout China today.

I met the artist's son who kindly agreed to show it to me.

Merci pour...

Like his father, Xu Qingping studied in France.

So we had one language in common.

TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:

No 100 horses here, just one.

And it's surely significant that, adapting his medium

to his patriotic Chinese message,

Xu Beihong went back to the traditional Chinese scroll.

It's a beautiful image.

Merci, merci.

The Sino-Japanese conflict fused into the global melee

of the Second World War.

And Japan's eventual surrender in 1945 left China free

to resume its bloody internal power struggle.

Four years later, in 1949,

the Communist Party finally took control.

After four decades of chaos,

the Chinese breathed a collective sigh of relief.

There were high hopes for their new leader, Mao Zedong.

The saviour began his radical reforms immediately.

Although Mao claimed to despise the imperial past,

he used art and architecture

to proclaim the legitimacy of his rule

with every bit as much determination

as the Emperors of China's dynastic history.

So this is Tiananmen Square

and it still perfectly reflects Chairman Mao's idea

of how the new Communist state and its powers should be expressed

in the form of architecture and sculpture.

"Tiananmen" means "heavenly peace gate". And there is the gate.

It marks the border between this space and the Forbidden City,

the old arena of imperial power.

In fact, this used to be part of the Forbidden City,

but Mao took it over and made it his own.

At one side you've got the Hall of the People.

And here...

with its great blazon of Communist power at the top,

what used to be the People's Museum of the Revolution,

it's now the National Museum of China.

This is the architecture of 1950s Communist Russia.

With its rectilinear, seemingly endlessly repeating columns,

its daunting scale.

The individual is nothing,

the communal is everything.

It's impressive.

But more than a little forbidding.

Mao's new state buildings had to be huge

to accommodate the teeming masses of the Chinese people.

But having built this enormous stone box,

his next problem was what to put in it.

Now, they call this the Hall of Chinese Classical Modern Painting.

But I think what it really represents

is Mao's almost frenetic attempt

to fill the void of all that imperial history

he'd done away with at a stroke

and to commission new paintings of his era, his time,

his party, his China.

There he is, Mao with his comrades,

gathered around a table discussing the works of Karl Marx.

Very serious expressions on their faces.

There he is, the young scholar, with a vision,

standing on top of a mountain.

Here, planning the great victory against the Nationalist Party,

the victory that will seal Communist success.

See how he's represented,

in a simple room, in plain clothes, in drab light.

This is the victory of absolutely the opposite of ostentation,

it's the triumph of the simple.

This wall reaches its conclusion with...

..a moment of perfect unity.

This is the moment when the pincer movement,

the two forces of the Red Army, met,

the moment when they felt sure

they would get victory over the enemy, the Nationalist Party.

And everybody, every single person without exception,

has got a beaming smile on their face.

Collective unity, Communism, happiness.

Sadly, the reality would not turn out to be like that.

Mao saw himself as the great moderniser,

a man whose mission it was to drag China

from the feudal, imperial past into the modern world.

He did some good.

Emancipating women from the harshly patriarchal Confucianism

that had restrained their ambitions for millennia.

And allowing peasants to own their homeland.

But he also did an awful lot of bad.

The great leap forward was meant to accelerate industrial progress.

Farmers were encouraged to produce steel in so-called back yard furnaces

instead of tending their crops.

With catastrophic results.

Food production plummeted.

Between 1958 and 1961,

around 30 million Chinese people starved to death.

And as the country lurched into chaos, what did the great leader do?

He did what so many 20th-century leaders have done.

He cranked up his propaganda machine.

Some 2.2 billion images of Mao were created during the Communist era.

That's why...

the stalls of today's street markets

are full of Chairman Mao propaganda.

These must be among the least rare collectable objects

in the entire world.

In 1966, to galvanise his waning support,

Mao called on his young Red Guard to join him in a new mission,

a cultural revolution.

Old scrolls, old paintings, old porcelain,

anything from the imperial past or the decadent West,

all were condemned, their owners liable to be tortured...

or worse.

Countless millions of works of art

and literature were smashed or burnt.

Nine out of ten artists were put on trial.

Many were jailed, or "re-educated" in the countryside.

Lin Fengmian was a case in point.

He was subjected to forced labour and torture, despite destroying most

of the evidence of his wrongdoing, namely his own paintings.

What we see here is almost all what they have about him from that era.

-Wow, c'est tout?

-C'est tout. Terrible, huh?

-That is terrible.

Terrible, terrible.

You cannot imagine Picasso destroying his own painting.

Or Matisse, you know, even. It's quite amazing.

It's something very specific about...

..what happened for Chinese artists in the 20th century.

It's truly awful that when he was actually in, you know,

the work camp, all they gave him was a brush to sweep.

And when he was sweeping...

sweeping the leaves, or whatever he was doing with his brush

to clean, he would paint pictures in his imagination,

-cos it was the only way he could paint pictures.

-It's terrible.

But the problem we have is destruction of the biggest part of

the artwork, the problem for China, which is a problem for art historians

because we have to guess what they have done before, for example.

Well, I'm used to that with ancient Chinese art.

You know, there are only 73 pieces of Ru ware left.

-Archaeological, archaeology.

-Archaeology of the recent past.

It reminds me of a phrase of Andre Malraux.

"Le musee imaginaire."

A sort of terrible Chinese version of the imaginary museum

where you have to remake the pictures

that you've painted in the past.

I just still can't get my mind around the horror of that situation.

When Mao died in 1976, the government scapegoated other

senior figures for the worst of his policies,

preserving Mao's reputation

and ensuring the survival of the Communist Party.

In 1978, the new leader, Deng Xiaoping,

made a symbolic journey to America, even donning a Stetson.

The Wild West photo opportunity meant that China was

open to the West once again.

The impact on art and artists was immense.

And it can still be felt today, for better and for worse,

here at the 798 Art Zone in Beijing.

This contemporary art playground was dreamed up in the late 1990s,

in a complex of obsolete factories,

once the epicentre of Mao's industrialisation programme.

Artists set up their studios.

Galleries opened for business.

The place is still lively

but rather commercialised.

Much of the art on display is eclectic,

often positively manic.

But while it delivers a frisson, there's rarely a real shock.

But away from the 798 Art Zone's sea of white noise,

there are a number of artists creating work that speaks

eloquently about the predicaments of modern China.

One of them is Xu Bing, whose 1988 installation,

A Book From The Sky,

was created from block printed scrolls of calligraphy.

Ancient technique, modern twist.

Xu Bing's writing was gibberish,

a bitter parody of Communist propaganda.

A lament for the decades when all of China had to live

inside a world of nonsense,

the loopy proclamations of Chairman Mao.

Xu Bing's work made such an impact,

it even spawned a range of nonsense clothing.

But it was criticised by the Communist Party for expressing

unacceptable sentiments.

Shortly afterwards came the crackdown of 1989,

the brutal suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square.

Since then, there's been little room for doubt about

the true nature of the modern Chinese state.

It remains what it's been for thousands of years -

a highly centralised machine

for controlling untold millions of people.

The soldiers marching in Tiananmen Square today are just the modern

flesh and blood versions of the first emperor's terracotta soldiers.

Artists can still get in trouble if they overstep the mark.

Ai Weiwei, and all that. But most are left to get on with their work.

Xu Bing's still working in a hybrid of oriental

and western styles, looking back to the art of China's past,

even as he addresses the issues of the present.

His new work is the Tobacco Project, a sardonic reflection on

global capitalism and China's new cult of money.

Bing.

-Hey.

-Hey.

I've never seen so many cigarettes in one place.

What does it symbolise to you, or what does it say to you?

You seem to be implying that there's something not entirely healthy

about all this, that it might be bad for our health.

THEY LAUGH

Yeah, yeah!

The Tobacco Project strikes me as a very traditional Chinese

work of art, in sentiment if not appearance.

After all, what could be more Chinese than worrying about materialism?

Chinese thinkers have been worrying about that

for more than 2,000 years.

And the tiger economy is hardly new.

Capitalism's not a Western import, but a Chinese invention.

Visit the financial heart of Shanghai,

gaze up at its towering monuments to getting and spending,

and what do you see?

A bold new skyline, yes.

But expressing an ancient Chinese impulse to make money.

Modern Shanghai is just another version

of Emperor Huizong's city of Kaifeng

immortalised in the Qingming Scroll

where paper money changed hands back in the 11th century.

It's just another version of Emperor Qianlong's

prosperous Suzhou, with its 260 shops.

Perhaps someone should paint a scroll of modern Shanghai.

There is, of course, a flip side to all this wealth,

this economic miracle, this new modern China.

Yu Hong was born during the Cultural Revolution and trained

in Western-style oil painting at Beijing's Academy of Fine Arts.

Reacting against the hollow cheer of the Communist propaganda

paintings she grew up with, her new works focus on those who've been

psychically disturbed by China's gold rush.

A lot of your work seems to be about...

the state of anxiety, particularly among young people.

What do you think will happen in China?

What do you think the future holds?

You can see in the newspapers, it is a change every day.

Many people move from the countryside to the city.

Apartments are very expensive. The living costs are very expensive.

And the people everyday want to earn money. It's a pressure.

So I have painted this series.

-So, it's about the pressures faced by young people?

-Yes.

About the problem of depression

-or melancholy in contemporary China?

-Yes, yes.

This is my close friend. She's a writer.

She had tried suicide two times.

-Oh, dear.

-And she had burned her face.

-Oh, no.

-That's why she wears the glasses.

-Dear, dear.

When I interviewed her, she said that when she feels depressed,

she always has a feeling she was in a hole.

Nobody knows that she was there, nobody can help her.

So I want to paint the...

the deep pond as something like a hole.

She is in the middle.

-Who's this here?

-He is one of my students.

He's a performance artist.

And he makes performance art with drawers?

The drawers are something like box of memory.

-Box of memory?

-Yes.

So, it's another kind of feeling. Maybe he wants to protect himself.

Maybe he wants to separate from the other part of the world.

-He wants to hide...

-Yes.

-..in this sort of cabinet of memory?

-Mh-hm.

Yu Hong's works hark back to Xu Beihong's

Beaux Arts history paintings of the 1920s

but the melancholy she describes has still older roots.

China's spent much of the last 300 years lurching from

one disaster to another,

from military crisis, to crisis of identity.

Yet, perhaps because China's past IS so full of loss,

and its future so uncertain, many artists seem passionate

to preserve their Chinese sense of identity.

Bingyi is one of many who keep up the venerable elegant gathering

where artists join to practise calligraphy,

and brush and ink painting.

For her, it's spiritual nourishment, reviving old skills

'and subtleties of perception,

'just as the literati painters did in the 12th century

'when they fled the Mongols to create an art of disaffection.'

Bingyi and her friends see themselves as custodians

of their culture,

an idea foreign to most contemporary artists in the West.

In the deconsecrated Taoist Temple that's her Beijing studio,

Bingyi's created a no-man's land between past and present.

Her latest piece is a traditional scroll smoked by abstract forms that

evoke destruction and the beauty that can emerge from it.

-So, it's called the Shape Of The Wind.

-Yes.

So, I'm meant to follow it with my eye. I am the wind.

How did you create it?

It looks to me like you threw it or you poured it.

-It's got quite an action painting feel about it.

-Absolutely.

First of all, you burn paper to paint this.

So it's an image made on a scroll of paper created from another

-burnt scroll of paper?

-That's right.

-Ah! So, it's ashes?

-Yes, it's ashes.

-So, what do you do? You mix the ashes with water?

-And ink.

-And ink!

-Yes, and ink.

So, there is a traditional calligraphy scroll Chinese element,

-so to speak, lurking within it?

-Yes. Originally,

this piece was going to be shown in the National Cathedral in Berlin.

That cathedral went through a fire during the war.

So we decided to use fire as a thematic choice.

Much of the creation of the world, especially of the recent centuries,

was done through destruction, or through catastrophe.

-And this is precisely about that.

-A little bit like China.

-It's just China.

-It's just China.

It's the allegorical expression of what we know, or what I know

of a certain time, perhaps the perpetual time of this country.

It's interesting you say that because I've been

reflecting on Chinese history while I've been here.

And, on the one hand,

you have people who are constantly emphasising the unbroken continuity

of Chinese civilisation, and I was thinking, "Hang on!"

The history of China is full of

vast, cataclysmic moments of destruction.

It's one of the reasons why

there are so few historical buildings left.

It's very hard to find a capsule of the past that is intact in China

-because it's been repeatedly swept away.

-That's true.

We've taken away so much, so fast...

..that we don't even remember what we had before.

Nonetheless, we can't just lament the loss of that.

We have to come to terms with that by realising such powers

bear all kinds of results.

It turned us into the possibility we are today.

China is an example of such radicalism at work.

It's bubbly, it's expressive, it's alive.

If there's one moral to be drawn

from the last 4,000 years of Chinese history,

it's that no matter how appalling the catastrophes

that befall the Chinese people, they always find a way to recover.

A long time ago, the sage Laozi wrote,

"Water is fluid, soft and yielding.

"But water will wear away rock which is rigid and cannot yield.

"What is soft is strong."

Despite these cycles of destruction and obliteration,

the creativity of China's artists has never been stemmed

and still continues to flow,

adding to the great scroll of Chinese art.

But how could it be otherwise in a society so enchanted by images

that even its language is a form of picture making?