I had wanted to curate an exhibition of Bu Hua’s digital paintings and video since way before the global pandemic derailed all our lives. I first met her in Beijing in 2012 or 2013 when I was researching ‘Half the Sky’, and then again a few years later, when she took me to her new studio, which I discovered was filled from floor to ceiling with her collection of toys both old and new, from Barbies and Bart Simpson figures to battered teddy bears, antique tin toys and porcelain dolls. These are some of the characters that populate the surreal narratives we see in her work, along with the small girlin the red scarf of the Communist Party youth organisation, the Young Pioneers, who represents the artist herself.
In some ways this is a historical as well as a contemporary exhibition, revealing an important part of the history of contemporary art in China since the 1990s. Bu Hua is one of the significant pioneers of digital media, vector graphics and video in China. Trained as a painter and printmaker, and the daughter of a very famous artist, she told me that she ‘learned the language of lines’ at a young age. Her transition from painting to video and digital graphics and animation came about in an interesting way. She had travelled to Germany to represent her father at an exhibition of his work, and while she was there, she went to Kassel, to Documenta. She saw the work of South African artist William Kentridge and his wonderful stop-motion animations using his charcoal drawings. From that experience came her first video using Flash animation software, ‘Cat’ in 2002.
‘Cat’ propelled her to fame –it was downloaded more than a million times, and became a viral sensation. People were moved to tears by the tragic tale of a little cat searching for its mother. She became immediately very famous. This was the early days of content being shared on the internet, and Flash was huge in China; it was a massive, generation-defining creative outlet – in fact it is now said that it was the Flash scene, its adoption by young, cutting-edge artists and animators that gave birth to today’s Chinese animation. ‘Cat’is in the White Rabbit Collection, along with many of Bu Hua’s videos and digital paintings – Judith Neilson saw the potential of Bu Hua’s work very early on in building her own collection of contemporary Chinese art. We have selectedseveral animations for this show, and we are also premiering a new work – Planet of Giants was only completed a few weeks ago!
For me, the really compelling thing about Bu Hua’s work is its mixture of sweetness and nostalgia with a very dark edge. Visually the works are so appealing, her training as a printmaker so evident in their bold aesthetic. She is also influenced by the fantastic animations produced by the Shanghai Film Studios in the 1960s and 1970s, and, she says, by her memories of the crisp lines and strong colours of the propaganda posters of her youth. Yet Bu Hua is always, always focused on expressing emotional truth. It’s the most important thing to her, from the earliest works, such as ‘Cat’ and the 2008 ‘Beijing Babe’ series, through to her most recent works, both still and animated.
They create an imaginary world that is, weirdly, at once uncanny and familiar. I think it’s because, as she told me, the little girl character who has appeared and reappeared in her work for almost 20 years represents herself as a child. She is nostalgic, she says, for the slower Beijing she remembers in the 1970s and 80s, a city of grey walls, red courtyard doors, white bridges, willow trees and bicycles, a time long before the city was essentially ripped up and rebuilt in the leadup to the 2008 Olympics. But her nostalgia is also clear-sighted, and she is very aware of the dark undercurrents of that past world as well as the present day – we just have to look at The Water is Deep Here in Beijing to see the ominous shadow overhead, or the raw meat that features in some of her work.Bu Hua told me that to her, meat represents how the lowest layers of society are eaten away in a competitive, dog-eat-dog world. But on the flip side there is so much beauty. It’s complicated!
The thing that most stands out for me in the end, though, is that all of her works are in essence exploring ideas about courage. Her feisty schoolgirl protagonist (sa mi in Beijing dialect, which she translated for me as ‘a girl with swagger’) is, she says, a braver version of herself. I know that like all parents she fears for the future of her child in this increasingly fractured and dangerous world. Yet her little female character fights monsters, strides over mountains in Spring Breeze Blowing, sails a tiny boat through a dark forest, and then lies down casually on a couch in that same dark spooky forest in Light of Human Civilisation.
Hence the title of the show. ‘Brave New World’ is of courseriffing on Aldous Huxley’s speculative dystopian novel, but is also recognising that the phrase originally comes from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ – two literary predecessors who also created strangely beguiling worlds that are more allegory than fantasy. Bu Hua’s works reveal more than meets the eye, suggesting innocence betrayed, a dystopian fairy tale. ‘On the surface it’s very cute and very lovely,’ she told me in our first conversation many years ago, ‘but underneath there is anxiety and pressure.’ They represent the bravery of those willing to move beyond predetermined pathways, to challenge their limits and truly chart their own journeys, both spiritual and physical.
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