Following the ’85 New Wave, avant-garde artists began broadening their consciousness from political ideology to the pursuit of individual freedom. Artists strove to relinquish authoritative confinements and create art that was self-exploratory and non-representational. This gave rise to maximalist art, a sub-movement influenced by Chan Buddhism’s tenet of wu or nothingness. Just as wu emphasizes that enlightenment can only be attained through non-desiring meditative states, maximalists sought to freeze their expressive desire while creating art. Now, the question arises: how can one express nothingness in their artwork? The notion of “expressing nothingness” is almost oxymoronic in that one cannot express the non-expressive. More interestingly, how should a viewer see and appreciate a work that apparently embodies nothingness? Lastly, how is maximalism significantly different from its sister forms such as cynical realism and futile performance art, which parallel some of its conceptual elements? These questions constitute the subject of this essay.

The precise roots of Chan-inspired maximalism are uniquely ahistorical. Most avant-garde sub-movements after 1985 were distinctly rooted in China’s changing sociopolitical landscape. For instance, political pop emerged in 1988 as a response to Deng Xiaoping’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” As his reforms blended mass urban culture with commercial society, political pop juxtaposed socialist symbols with industrial or mass-produced imagery. Similarly, apartment art emerged as the Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign clamped down on Western liberalization. Consequently, artists began to transition from political issues to spontaneous, individual meditations within their personal exhibition spaces viz family apartments. While maximalism is also centered around individual meditation, it is further from apartment art than scholar Gao Minglu suggests—both in terms of its origin and content.

Unlike political pop and apartment art, maximalism was not manifested by contemporary social and ideological trends. Instead, it was born out of a certain ahistoricism. Maximalist artists, being born in the 1960s, lacked the profound historical memories of Red Pop (Yin 155). They also came of age amidst rapidly changing ideas. Consequently, unanimous artistic styles, political beliefs, or life doctrines failed to interest them almost like they were spiritually fatigued. The overheated consumerist economy only exacerbated this spiritual fracture. Under these circumstances, Chan Buddhism’s doctrine of nothingness naturally found its way into maximalism. Maximalist artists became fascinated by the meaningless details of ordinary life, and triviality became an effective tool for representing meaninglessness.

This is best illustrated by Qiu Zhijie’s Object (1997) and Kan Xuan’s Object (2003) [Figures 1 and 2 respectively]. Both video works depict scenes with trivial objects that are assembled to create a chancy audio-visual diary. In the former, Qiu reveals various objects such as shoes, hot water pads, a Budai statue, and calligraphy under a kindled matchstick before fading into darkness. In the latter, Kan drops quotidian items such as cheese, rice, and toothpaste in water, and closely records them sinking out of the frame. The video is monochrome, and Kan succinctly whispers the monochromatic shade of each object throughout the video. Neither video has a logical beginning or end, and the object on the screen changes frequently and sharply. These dramatic altering processes create a chancy audiovisual diary that is devoid of a coherent narrative. By displaying everyday objects in their mundane form against an antiseptic background, both artists imbue their videos with a spirit of meaninglessness and restrain their expressive desires. These elements also make it significantly harder for a viewer to interpret their art or impose a meaning on it, thereby affirming its meaninglessness to the viewer as well.

Video art was naturally better suited for employing dramatic altering processes. Painters and photographers, on the other hand, relied more on laborious repetition to render nothingness. This is grounded in the idea that once something is reproduced several times, its individual occurrences are as good as nothing. This technique is best illustrated by Hong Hao’s My Things No. 1 (2001-2003) [Figure 3]. He used a scanner to create digital images of all the articles that he used every day: toothpaste, Coca-Cola cans, bread, oil, colors, batteries, camera, etc. The single images are then organized and juxtaposed with one another to create a massive collage. The repetition combined with the large quantity reduces each item’s objectivity as well as the force of the creator’s connection with them.

However, these elements also call into question the relationship between the viewer and the work. What does the viewer stand to learn or feel as they see maximalist art? Since maximalist objects were often devoid of meaning themselves (Gao 314), it is unclear how maximalist art fits into exhibition spaces. To appreciate the broader significance of maximalist art, the viewer must look beyond the overarching theme of nothingness that permeates the artistic object. If we pay more attention to the process of creation, we will quickly discover that nothingness is never the end goal for maximalists. Instead, they were seeking an extremely personal experience via their work, and meaninglessness was a tool for achieving that end. Meaningless labor and repetition helped complete these experiences by letting the artist reach the “distillation of meditation and pure spirituality” (Gao 326). Since one’s personal experience can often be dynamic, uncertain, and unstable, the artistic object itself seems meaningless. Yet, the personal experience that inspired the object imbues it with a layer of meaningfulness that the viewer can contemplate, if not see or feel. In doing so, it challenges the beholder to move beyond passive observation and actively engage with the artwork and its creator’s unique meditation.

For instance, Kan Xuan often talks about her wish to exist in the distance between ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ (Lu and Watkins 18). This is a highly personal experience, not related to any principle or theory. Since the video is monochromatic, she creates a perceptual gap between her visual experience and her prior knowledge of everyday objects. Repeatedly videotaping these trivial objects dilutes her expressive passions and enables her mind to wander effectively into this perceptual gap that she sought to explore. The meaningful meditative nature of maximalism is also illustrated well by Wu Yiming’s It Looks Beautiful— The Second Performance (2002) [Figure 4]. Here, Wu drew ten identical drafts of the ancient beauties painting unearthed in Hetian. Then he used multiple layers of traditional ink wash techniques to blur out the beauty’s facial features and detailed textile patterns. He wanted to continuously experience a sense of distance from the mysterious past and the impossibility of imitating an artwork from the mysterious past (Gao 323). The process of laborious repetition infused with nothingness helped him gain this experience as he continuously “reexperienced the feelings of the ages being unearthed by his brushstrokes” (Gao 323).

It is important to emphasize that Chan-inspired maximalism and cynical realism interpret meaninglessness quite differently despite having a common origin in spiritual fatigue. Maximalism and cynical realism are similar in that they are both detached from any one belief system. However, in maximalism, the meaning of the artwork exists in the process of creation rather than the canvas. For instance, Fang Lijun’s Series No. 22 (1992) [Figure 5] depicts human figures with absurdly distorted faces, much like Wu Yiming’s overwriting. However, the distorted visualization was an end itself for Fang. It sought to express his boredom with the prevailing political reality, and this idea is well-represented on canvas. However, Wu was attempting to dig out something experienced, not visualized. One cannot engage with this experience by restricting his purview to the artistic object in front of him. Thus, maximalism ran counter to the representational tendencies of cynical realism because the former paid more attention to the process of creation, and the work itself carried little meaning.

The distinction between futile performance art and maximalism is also ambiguous and worth clarifying further. Consider, Zhuang Hui’s Longitude 109.88° E and Latitude 31.09° N (1995-2008) [Figure 6] where he digs several holes in a region planned to be flooded as a part of the Three Gorges Dam project. Similarly, Zhu Jia’s Forever (1994) [Figure 7] captures the streets of Beijing using a relentlessly rotating camera. Both these installations are laborious, repetitive, and are not inherently representational. Akin to maximalism’s focus on the process of creation, the performance itself is considered the art. The site specificity of performance art, however, makes a crucial difference. The environment is an essential conceptual and visual element in both works, and it serves to expose its key political characteristics. By capturing locations from 1990s China in their installation, Zhuang and Zhu are implicitly referencing the artistic censorship, political clampdown, and rapid urbanization surrounding the country. Their ephemeral actions within decided urban spaces are amplifying the diminutive, alienated, and powerless state of the individual in 1990s China. This is markedly different from maximalist video works which are often unrelated to any specific political environment.

Buddhism has been integrated with local Chinese culture for nearly 2000 years. Maximalist artists of China’s avant-garde movement show that they continue to be motivated by Buddhist tenets in ways that are both spiritual and aesthetic. It was born amidst a landscape of rapidly changing socio-political ideas and deliberately rejected universal doctrines. It was distinctly introverted and offered the creator a framework for bridging spiritual gulfs and coexisting peacefully with urban life. Importantly, this framework relied on using meaninglessness as a tool for gaining a more meaningful experience, much like Chan Buddhists who believed that enlightenment can be achieved through non-desiring meditative states. As a meditative artistic phenomenon, it offers an intellectually stimulating perspective on the artistic landscape of the post ’85 avant-garde landscape.

Fig. 1. Zhijie, Qiu. (1997). Object. [single-channel video]. From the Contemporary Chinese Video Art Archive by Wu Hung.

Fig. 2.  Xuan, Kan. (2003). Object. [Single-channel video]. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Accessed Dec. 8, 2023. https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/collection/objects/object-2012527/

Fig.3. Hao, Hong. (2001). My Things No. 1. [photographic print]. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Accessed Dec. 8, 2023. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1318393/my-things-no-1-photographic-print-hong-hao/

Fig. 4. Yiming, Wu. (2002). It Looks Beautiful, The Second Performance. [ink and color on paper, 10 pieces]. From the Chinese Contemporary Art Teaching Collection, by Frank Vigneron.

Fig. 5. Lijun, Fang. (1992). Series No. 22. [oil on canvas]. From Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art: 1990 – 2000, by Wu Hung.

Fig. 6. Hui, Zhuang. (1995-2008). Longitude 109.88° E and Latitude 31.09° N. [Photographs]. From the Collection of Wu Hung.

Fig. 7. Jia, Zhu. (1994). Forever. [single-channel video]. ShangART Gallery, Beijing. Accessed Dec. 8th 2023. https://www.artsy.net/artwork/zhu-jia-zhu-jia-forever