The group sculptures on the Monument to the People’s Heroes and the sculpture of “Rent Collection Courtyard,” and the large number of formulary sculptures that appeared afterwards, respectively represented two aspects of Chinese sculptural art in that particular historical period. The significant changes in sculptural techniques and forms reflected a big change in social ideology. Such sculptures showing great revolutionary passion gradually faded away after the 1970s and became a special memory for the Chinese people.
From 1980–the early 21st century: Conceptual sculptural art showing public awareness
Since the 1980s, sculptures have been designed to be more and more plebeianized and diverse in contents. Sculptors started to pay more attention to real life as well as experiences and expressions. Public art began to rise; more materials were adopted and expressive forms were diversified. In 1982, the National Urban Sculptural Planning Team and the National Urban Sculptural Art Committee led a nationwide campaign of urban sculptural creation, which marked that China’s sculptural creation entered a new stage of official participation. The sculptors summarized the lesson drawn from the “cultural revolution” when a great many sculptures of leaders were made and the quality of art was ignored, and built a number of sculptures intended to beautify the urban environment, which included those for monuments and garden decoration. Urban sculptural parks of different sizes were also constructed in many cities, offering lots of works that represented art of different levels. In 1984, the Sculptural Park of Shijingshan was launched in Shijingshan District, Beijing, which was China’s first sculptural park and served as a reference for the establishment of sculptural parks nationwide.
As of the middle 1980s, excellent artworks that were well integrated with the urban environment included: i) The stone statue of “Fisher Girl of Zhuhai” erected on the coast in Zhuhai, Guangdong Province. Taking the images in Dunhuang frescoes for reference, the sculptors created a fisher girl who holds a shining pearl high above her head, which symbolizes the beautiful city of Zhuhai; ii) The alloy group sculpture of “Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter” placed on the end of the Yangtze River Bridge in Chongqing in 1984; iii) The bronze sculpture of “Dove of Peace” built at Hepingli, Beijing, and the stone sculpture of “Reading” at Zhengyi Road; iv) The stone “Fable Group Sculptures” created in Donghu Scenic Spot, Wuhan, Hubei Province; v) The bronze sculpture of “the Willing Ox” placed in front of the complex of CPC Shenzhen Municipal Committee, which was once considered as the spiritual symbol of the emerging city and represented the pioneering spirit of the first batch of the city builders. Nowadays, it has become a symbol of Shenzhen.
A “frontiers” movement initiated by young Chinese artists who advocated the western realism once appeared in the middle 1980s. With the passage of time, the Chinese artists, whose horizons gradually expanded, began to absorb the western style in a critically way rather than totally accept, and tried to introduce the western art based on their local culture. A contemporary Chinese historian in fine arts said, “The culture and art of any nation has its own ‘feature of modern days’ during its transition process from traditional forms to modern forms. China has entered a modern period since 1979, and it has its distinctive ‘features of the modern days,? too…But such features of China’s fine arts were different from those of other western countries given their apparent Chinese characteristics known as ‘reality.?”
Under the background, most of the sculptors have made tentative effort to interpret traditional sculptural languages in a new way since 1990s, hence the presence of contemporary conceptual sculptures reflecting public awareness. The language forms of the artworks turned to be more and more novel and pioneering, and sculptors began to focus more on self-reflection and self-awareness as well. In the mean time, a sculptural wave called as “pop style” or “vulgar style” arose, which was not necessarily the feature typical of sculptural art in the early 1990s, but that of many kinds of contemporary Chinese art that includes paining and photographing. Most of the “pop” sculptors were not originally sculptors but painters, represented by Liu Jianhua, Liu Liguo and Xu Yihui. The porcelain sculpture of “Treasureable Memory,” created by Liu Jianhua, was among the representative artworks. He sculptured female bodies, dressed in bright Chinese Cheongsam, on colorful porcelain plates or sofas to symbolize the state of the post-colonial culture and reflect the problems arising from various sorts of lives in modern consumer culture as well.
Since the 1990s, some contemporary sculptural artists with certain international reputation have appeared at home, including Sui Jianguo, Li Xiangqun, Zhan Wang in Beijing, Zeng Chenggang in Zhejiang, Fu Zhongwang in Hubei as well as Huo Boyang and Wang Hongliang in Shenyang. Their sculptural works not only represents the high level of art in today’s China to a certain extent, but also manifests the fresh, diverse concepts manifested by contemporary Chinese sculptural art and the local cultural awareness that was being restructured.