Art Chinois, Chine Demain Pour Hier (Chinese Art, China’s Yesterday for Tomorrow, 1990): The Ambition of Fei Dawei as a “Middle Man”

This paper explores the exhibition Art Chinois, Chine Demain Pour Hier held in 1990 in the small town of South France, Pourrières. Co-curated by the Chinese art critic Fei Dawei and the then president of Les Domaines de l’Art, Michèle Cohen, the exhibition stood as the first exhibition in West Europe to focus exclusively on Chinese contemporary art. The six participating artists included Cai Guo-Qiang, Yang Jie-Chang, Yan Pei-Ming, Huang Yong Ping, Chen Zhen, and Wenda Gu. The French curator’s vision for the exhibition was for new works created “in situ,” responding to what she regarded as the “blank slate” afforded by its location in a “banal village of South France.” For the Chinese curator, this “blank slate” served as an ideal foundation for his ambition to entrepreneurially launch and define Chinese contemporary art.

Situating the exhibition within a broader historical context of the late 1980s, this paper pays attention to the timeliness of the exhibition’s collaborative curatorial practice. I am particularly interested in examining how Cohen’s emphasis on the location’s “remoteness” met with Fei’s curatorial strategy, focusing on the ways in which Fei leveraged his acute knowledge of the specific modality of the 1980s French conception and cultural imaginary of contemporary China. In so doing, the paper sheds light on the exhibition site as a strategic point for Sino-French cultural diplomacy in relation to late 1980s global circumstances, and as a node in the network of global artworld interlocutors building on Fei’s established role as a “middle man.”