Two Competing Habitus among Hong Kong Art Practitioners

This article offers a comparison of the status of the "traditional" medium of oil painting or acrylic in Hong Kong SAR and in Mainland China. This issue concerns the well-known discourse about the hand as medium; a typical example of what Pierre Bourdieu would call habitus. The representation of art as something produced by the hand has been the only habitus in Euro-America for a number of centuries, and it remains so among many participants of the social field of art. The development of this habitus followed very different paths in Mainland China and in Hong Kong, thanks to very different institutions in those places. Those responsible for their establishment in the 20th century, especially educational institutions, are analyzed and provide the backdrop for the analysis of the field of art in present-day Hong Kong. New institutions and new ways for these institutions to deal with art education are now changing the field of art in Hong Kong, creating new concepts to deal with the issue of forms of art seen as respectively "traditional" and "contemporary." In ways very different than what happens in Europe, for instance, where even media that can be seen as "traditional" like oil painting tend to belong to a single "contemporary art" habitus, Hong Kong has seen the establishment of a state of competition between two habitus seen as unrelated. This article concludes with a brief portrait of the state of struggle between these two habitus within the Hong Kong art field. Notes For a detailed account of the complex relationship between the art practices of Hong Kong-based and Mainland-based artists, cf. Vigneron [Citation2010]. Although the correct plural form of the Latin word habitus is habiti, Pierre Bourdieu chose to keep it always in its singular form in his writings ("les habitus"). Michael Sullivan thus describes how Cai Yuanpei's education in Germany, and his interest in the idealist philosophy that was still mainstream thinking there when he was studying, shaped a new understanding of these art practices: "In the few months that he held ministerial office, Cai published his five principles of education, in which he ranked aesthetic education equal with utilitarian, moral, military, and world-view education. In a speech made in 1917, shortly after assuming the key post of chancellor of Peking University, Cai Yuanpei went even further, proposing that aesthetics be substituted for religion. His wide-ranging thinking was centered on a concept of "world soul" that could be expressed in Buddhist, Taoist, or Western metaphysical terms. He held that the spiritual world could become manifest to man not through religious experience but in the contemplation of beauty, through which the emotions of love and hate, sadness and joy, are transferred to the object of contemplation. To Cai Yuanpei the understanding of beauty, and thus of harmony, was an ethical activity. His view of the ethical purpose of art was thoroughly traditional, but his assertion that artistic values were universal, crossing all national and cultural frontiers, seemed revolutionary, even shocking, to many of his ethnocentric compatriots, who had hitherto regarded Western culture as barbarian and Western art as little more than a useful technique for representing objects. Though his opponents objected that aesthetic education was no kind of solution for China's urgent problems, his concept of universal aesthetic values took hold, proving a powerful tool in bringing about acceptance of Western art in early twentieth-century China and in firing young artists with the desire to go abroad to study it at first hand" [Sullivan Citation1996: 32]. In the context of literati painting the brush-ink (bimo ) is the medium allowing the painter to create a landscape just as Nature is creating landscapes (the fact that the same tool allows for the creation of text and of calligraphy only reinforces this notion). One should keep in mind, when reading the preceding sentence, that there is no separation of Man from Nature in literati thinking: for instance, the most important notion in the use of the brush-ink is that of spontaneity (ziran ), a word that also means "nature" in Chinese theoretical texts on painting (the modern word for "nature" in Chinese is still daziran , an expression that could be loosely translated as "great spontaneity," a concept dependent on the literati philosophical idea that the world is self-generated and not the product of a demiurge or god). The hand (shou )—or wrist (wan ), as it is often referred to in literati art theory—is what allows the brush-ink to function unhindered and is often described as "empty" or "hollow" (kong ) so as to permit the operations of the fundamental forces of nature (namely Ch'i—qi —which is the essential component of everything, from the most subtle to the most concrete—and its ordering principle—li ), to take place on the surface of the sheet of paper or the piece of silk. This idea of emptiness is the one described in such classics of Taoism as Zhuangzi where the utility of such objects as a vase, an axle or a door-frame is described as constituted by their very emptiness. In a social context where literati culture was created and practiced by the civil servants who succeeded at the official examinations, the idea that professional artists were not practitioners of "high art" was widespread in China. A large portion of the painting theory produced by literati (the professional artists, not as comfortable with writing as the literati, left nearly no theory) insists on the necessity to avoid being "craftsmen" (jiang ). It thus created, for instance, concepts like "clumsiness" (zhuo ), which is the sort of quality a literati painter will cultivate in order not to be mistaken for a professional painter. Although the idea of professionalism is not so easy to define in the context of Euro-American painting (the first Academy in Paris was created against the "craft" of the painters' guilds, even though academicians also wanted to become "professionals," albeit of a more intellectual practice of painting), the 19th century in particular saw many artists react negatively against the lack of single-mindedness in the "Sunday painters." In any case, the status of "amateur" claimed by literati painters as a quality would have been difficult to understand for the intellectual artists created by the Renaissance and perpetuated by the Academies, the Romantic movement and the avant-gardes of the 20th century. To avoid the problems attached to use of a word that was already in existence at a time art was something utterly different, I propose to use the name coined in France in the 1980s: instead of artist, I will use the term "plasticien," and even Anglicize it by writing plastician. The use of this Gallicism also has the advantage of allowing us to avoid the term "contemporary." Strictly speaking, "contemporary art" would be all the present cultural activities called "art" by their makers, but in reality "contemporary art" is an expression only used for certain types of art, like installation, performance, video art and a very narrow range of paintings. In fact, unsurprisingly, nobody seems to agree on a definition of what "contemporary art" covers, but it remains true that it is the only type dealt with in magazines like the American publication Artforum, for instance, where specialists often use complex ideas to analyze certain types of artwork, ignoring others as being unworthy of their attention ... This word also takes into consideration the fact that "artist" was far too much associated with the idea that art had to be painting or sculpture; today's plasticians often have no such specialization and are using an increasingly varied number of media, from painting to video and from sculpture to installation (whatever sense you give to the term "installation"). To make sure the reader understands what is meant by "postmodern art" here (a term that has actually gone out of fashion because of the way the term "postmodern" has been applied to almost everything, a habit that has thankfully disappeared) we can turn to an influential text written by Craig Owens [Citation2003: 1051–1060]. In this article he follows the philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), noting that modernist critical theory rejected allegory as a mode of conveying meaning. He then claims that it was the re-emergence of allegorical modes in the art of the 1950s and 60 s which made that art incomprehensible according to the modernist canons of artistic quality. For Owens, allegory occurs when one text is doubled by another, and he next shows that it appears everywhere in contemporary art but on strictly visual grounds. Since allegory consists in doubling an image with a secondary meaning, he shows that it can be found in the work of Sherie Levine (born 1947), the artist widely acknowledged to be the creator of the concept of "appropriation"... This process of appropriation, also found in the work of major artists like Robert Longo (born 1953) and Gerard Richter (born 1932), is therefore called "postmodern" because it does not fit within any of the concepts of modernism ... Postmodern art uses the whole spectrum of possibilities that allegory offers. In a sense, Owens recognizes a superiority of contemporary, "postmodern" art over modernist art in that the theory underlying it is conceptually more consistent than the formalist theory of modernism. After considering the effects of this return of allegory in the art of the 1950s and 1960s, Owens treats us to one of the most concise definitions of the characteristics of postmodern art: "Appropriation, site-specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridization—these diverse strategies characterize much of the art of the present and distinguish it from its modernist predecessors." The 1970s in Euro-America saw the emergence of questioning on the practice of art that took the form of new art practices usually referred to as Conceptual art. Disappointed with what was construed as a lack of involvement of painters with the social issues of the time, Conceptual artists predicted the "end of painting." Not surprisingly, the 1980s saw a reaction and a renewed interest in painting thanks to these movements—Transavanguardia, the New Fauves or New Expressionism and Bad Painting (that these movements were launched as much by gallery owners and collectors as much as by the artists themselves obviously derived from the fact that painting can be easily commoditized, whereas Conceptual art cannot). Since that time the practice of painting has been caught up in the debate on art institutions, never to regain the aura it was given after the Renaissance. This debate, born in Euro-America, took some time to be raised in China, but is emerging with more and more insistence in academic and curatorial debates. Hong Kong artists and art critics have been playing an important role on this front. The impact these questions will have on the present art market of Mainland China, still dominated by the commerce in painting, is still very difficult to assess. It often takes the shape of video, but it can also be found on the electronic dance music scene where clubbers enjoy creating new lyrics, often political in content, to famous songs [Chew 2012]. In April 2012 a petition against the "Second Public Consultation on the draft Code of Practice for Online Service Providers" was launched by a large group of Hong Kong artists. The petition—demanding a re-evaluation of the right to create, no criminal sanctions for the appropriation and modification of Internet content, a recognition of Net culture and respect for intellectual sharing and, finally, a reform of the existing copyright bill—thus defined the attempt made by the government: "According to the draft, criminal sanctions will be introduced against so-called 'unauthorized communication of copyright works.' In other words, any form of creation (namely literature. drama, music, architecture, sculpture, photography, film, broadcasting, graphic design, computer programming, sound recording and artwork creation) regarded as affecting 'prejudicially the copyright owners' could be illegal and charged straight by the government. Once the draft is passed, not only netizens, but all art and cultural practitioners at large will be affected, the right to create will be deeply threatened ... We find it particularly disgusting that the government pays no attention to these contemporary situations and the voices against this bill, but intends it is rushing [sic] to pass the unjust bill now, and will only consider adjusting its details later. The legislative procedure is groundless, yet its impact will be devastating." This text could be found on a variety of websites in April and May 2012. Additional informationNotes on contributorsFrank Vigneron FRANK VIGNERON received a Ph.D. in Chinese Art History (Paris VII—Denis Diderot), a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Paris IV—Sorbonne), and a Doctorate of Fine Arts (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology). He joined the Department of Fine Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong, in 2004, teaching the History of Western Art, 20th-century Chinese art, and Chinese and Western comparative aesthetics. E-mail: [email protected]

Art · Ethnography · Habitus · Media studies · Sociology · Visual arts · Anthropology · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Management and Organizational Studies · Social and Cultural Dynamics

• Amateur, professional and proto‐practices

  Open Access•Janet Banfield•Area•2017

  Add to list

• Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China

  Michael J Sullivan, Michael J L Sullivan et al.•Art and Artists of Twentieth-Centur…•1996

  Add to list

• Langage et pouvoir symbolique

  Pierre Bourdieu, John B Thompson•Langage et pouvoir symbolique•2001

  Add to list

• Hybridity, Empowerment and Subversiveness in Cantopop Electronic Dance Music

  Matthew Ming-Tak Chew, Matthew M Chew•Visual Anthropology•2011

  Add to list

• Hybridity and the Politics of Desertion

  Kwok-Bun Chan, Kwok‐bun Chan et al.•Visual Anthropology•2011

  Add to list