“New ink art,” the quasi-traditional painting practice that has enjoyed a critical and commercial resurgence over the past two years, is one side of an awareness of tradition that has never been far out of view in Chinese contemporary art. Although the notion of tradition offered one of the few alternatives to the politics of dissidence that had become the dominant mode of critical currency by the early 1990s in the mainland, it seems to have been forgotten these days that the ’85 New Wave, which preceded the market-driven movements of Political Pop and Cynical Realism, marked a reaction against the traditions of Chinese painting as much as a response to the confines of socialist-realist training in the academy. Now, with the resurgence of a very specific interest in “new ink,” the complex and layered evolution of traditional thinking in contemporary practice has been reduced to very basic terms—the mythology of the meditative but hardly ascetic scholar-painter—held hostage by a deeply myopic focus on particular elite traditions, a turn toward ethnic nationalism, and, not incidentally, a successful attempt to expand the domestic market for contemporary art into the cultural space of antiquities. This has had a deadening effect on an already fragile conversation, as new movements and ways of working struggle to find their footing in the post-boom Chinese art world.

With “Advance Through Retreat,” curator Martina Koeppel-Yang made the case for another side to tradition, one that not only refuses to reaffirm the platitudes of governing ideologies (both in public propaganda and private consumerism) but also offers an oblique angle from which to locate the hidden limitations of contemporary artistic practice. But the main thesis of the exhibition, that a consciously theatrical turn toward the aesthetics of the past contains the potential for a broader shift, was supported only in part by the survey of practices included in the show. Many of the artists here are known precisely for their work in locating the productively dangerous or unstable elements of traditional culture. Huang Yong Ping, for instance, made an appearance with Large Turntable with Four Wheels, 1987, a major work from one of his strongest periods in which elements from the Book of Changes are randomly combined with instructions for making art, an unexpected détournement of both the emotionally charged hubris of Chinese art in the mid-1980s and John Cage’s chance operations, then supposedly entering into dialogue. Similarly, the late street calligrapher Tsang Tsou Choi was represented by one of his most significant surviving pieces, a curbside utility box on which he scrawled his autodidactic writings on the territorial status of Hong Kong (The 19th Ancestor Tsang Pen Kam . . . , 1999)—which he maintained belonged to his family. Zheng Guogu contributed new thangka and chakra paintings on canvas, while his Yangjiang Group installed an alcove in which to sip tea, inhale incense, and otherwise remain out of sight—a far cry from its infamous gambling and philandering performance events, but perhaps a more mature gesture.

Well-balanced in terms of both medium and approach, the exhibition also included strong work from Jiang Zhi and Qiu Zhijie, mid-generation artists represented by celebrated projects in photography and conceptual calligraphy, respectively. A nod toward cosmopolitanism with projects by Jimmie Durham, Andreas Mayer-Brennenstuhl, and Zarina Hashmi, however, distracted from the specificity of the cultural argument being made here, though underlining the fact that the show was not meant to be another reification of Chinese elite culture. “Advance Through Retreat” took as its emblem (on the exhibition announcement, in advertising, and so on) a photograph of Yuan Shikai, the influential Qing general, at a moment when he ostentatiously stepped back from public life to play the part of the hermit in order to avoid execution after the death of the Empress Dowager, his political patron; what seems to have been forgotten is that his next brush with “advance” involved declaring himself emperor and dismantling the nascent republic. Tradition, though a useful tool, all too easily turns to farce or fascism.

—Robin Peckham