Melbourne exhibition revisits the pioneers of Chinese conceptual art
A major exhibition at Buxton Contemporary in Melbourne is bringing early Chinese conceptual art back into focus by reconstructing works that were long at risk of slipping from view. Poetry Goes No Further Than Language: a Historical Moment of Art Becoming Art Again, on view from May 1 to October 3, is curated by Carol Yinghua Lu, director of Beijing’s Inside-Out Art Museum, and artist Liu Ding.
The exhibition centers on the full artistic output of New Measurement Group — Chen Shaoping, Gu Dexin and Wang Luyan — together with four conceptual experiments by Shanghai-based artist Qian Weikang. It also situates their work within a wider field of the mid-1980s New Wave movement, including Southern Artist Salon, Xiamen Dada and M Art Group, while adding paintings and prints by individual members of New Measurement Group and three new commissions by Melbourne-based contemporary artist Darcey Bella Arnold.
Lu has argued that the historical visibility of these artists diminished after both Qian and New Measurement Group stopped making art in the mid-1990s. Qian destroyed all of his work in 1995, while the collective’s practice ended after a brief but influential six-year period. New Measurement Group also produced five dense publications explaining its methods, a paper trail that has become essential to understanding the group’s thinking.
Locating the material for the exhibition proved difficult. According to the curators, none of the group’s members owned all five books, and one copy was tracked down through eBay in Europe. That search led Lu and Liu to form what they describe as a “quasi New Measurement Group,” using the collective’s own rules, measurements and analysis as a way to test how the works might be reactivated without losing their conceptual rigor.
Among the works being re-enacted is Tactile Art (1988), originally conceived by Gu Dexin. The piece proposed experiments in which sensations produced by touch would be translated into drawings or text. During development, Wang Luyan suggested replacing actual touch with a subjective understanding of touch, resulting in 16 drawings that describe sensations such as “bubbles on face” and “temperature 39,” written in white Chinese characters on black photographic paper.
Qian’s four installations were rebuilt from photographs and notes. For Ladder Poem (1990), the curators recreated the original process of dropping paper slips with randomly selected Chinese words onto lines on the floor, then transcribing them onto corresponding lines on the wall. In Melbourne, the work will appear twice: once on the ground floor in Chinese, and again upstairs using words selected from Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary.
Lu says Qian never considered Ladder Poem a finished artwork, but rather an experiment in writing methods within his poetry and art criticism practice. That distinction matters here. The exhibition is not only recovering a neglected chapter of Chinese art history; it is also asking how conceptual works survive when their original forms have vanished.
