Huang Rui, 66, Worker, Founder of the First "Stars" Art Exhibition | Memoirs of the "Stars" Art Exhibition, Part 2

We interviewed five people who lived through the "Stars" Art Exhibition. Their stories carry the marks of their era, and each is deeply personal.

In 1979, more than twenty amateur painters in Beijing launched an unofficial art exhibition and called it "Stars." It began outdoors, then moved into the official National Art Museum of China. Visitors came from all over the country, and it caused a sensation.

After years in which art and literature were made to serve politics, people were astonished by the self-expression of the Stars artists. They painted portraits of ordinary people and ordinary scenery, in styles that were not especially realistic. Only a few works carried an openly critical edge.

The "Stars" Art Exhibition was held twice in all, and there are two ways of judging it. Some art historians argue that the Stars announced the emergence of avant-garde art in China after the Cultural Revolution. Others hold that the works were not contemporary enough — that by the standards of the global art world, what was shown was naive — and that the Stars artists never produced lasting influence.

Still, the "Stars" Art Exhibition did turn out to be a prelude to China's new art market.

Looking back today at an exhibition held 40 years ago, its meaning reaches beyond the art world. What matters is how, in a time of sweeping change, young people took part in it and fought for the chance to speak. We interviewed five people who lived through the "Stars" Art Exhibition. Their stories carry the marks of their era, and each is deeply personal.

This is the second piece in the series.

Huang Rui is 66, with long hair, glasses, and clothes chosen with care. At Art Basel Hong Kong this past March, the works he showed included a large oil painting made up of red squares — an image of the bagua, the eight trigrams, he said. In an oil painting from the year before, he had used a similar method, but the squares were yellow.

Several other pieces dated from the late 1970s and early 1980s, in a style that mixed Impressionism with Cubism. In that period Huang Rui was drawn to Paul Cézanne. An exhibition of 19th-century French rural landscape painting held in Beijing in 1978 was his first look at Western painting outside the Soviet tradition, and it moved him deeply. For about a year afterward, he painted in imitation of Cézanne. Sound of the Qin (《琴声诉》) and Portrait of a Girl (《女孩肖像》), both shown at Art Basel, were the fruits of that imitation.

But because Sound of the Qin was made in 1979 — the year Huang Rui launched the sensational "Stars" Art Exhibition — it was priced higher than the 1982 Portrait of a Girl. The artist himself, and some collectors too, believe the "Stars" Art Exhibition carries a particular historical value. It was held only twice, and ended in 1980.

As one of the main founders of the "Stars" Art Exhibition, Huang Rui is a born organizer and a born mixer. At Art Basel, he bought a bottle of champagne off a drinks cart and went around filling a glass for everyone he met. He never studied English, but he works a room of foreign collectors and curators without an interpreter, his sentences halting and unusually sincere. Huang Rui considers this a gift. After 17 years in Japan, his Japanese is good enough to "fool a taxi driver."

Unlike other Stars members, Huang Rui rarely brings up his family background. That part of his history seems to matter little to the art he went on to make or to the way he carries himself. The Huang family lived in a courtyard house on Zhaodengyu Road in Beijing. In the 1950s, the courtyard walls were covered with propaganda paintings — rockets, blast furnaces, trains, red flags. Several rooms were "taken over" in those same years, and the families who moved in did not leave, one by one, until the 1980s. Huang Rui's father ran a factory starting in 1952 and, after the 1956 shift to "joint state-private ownership," "donated the factory to the state." Because of this history, he was labeled a "capitalist" during the Cultural Revolution.

Huang Rui's mother was hospitable and generous, and never found guests a bother. Huang Rui seems to have inherited that. Around 1978, young people who wrote poetry and painted often gathered in the courtyard of the Huang family home. Later, when he was planning the art exhibition, Huang Rui realized that these people who looked like artists were all "resources" in his hands.

Before launching the "Stars" Art Exhibition, Huang Rui took part in the April Fifth Tiananmen incident of 1976. He posted texts on the base of the Monument to the People's Heroes and recited to the crowd a rhyming poem he had written, The People's Mourning (《人民的悼念》) — and was locked up for four and a half months because of it.

In 1978, Huang Rui was an art editor at Today (《今天》). Bei Dao and Mang Ke were the central figures of the literary magazine and handled the text, but Huang Rui recalls that it was he who first proposed starting a poetry journal. And he had a clear sense early on of how the work should be divided: next to Bei Dao, Mang Ke was loose and free-spirited, "hard to turn into an organizer."

In April 1979, Huang Rui settled on the idea of holding an art exhibition. He thought an exhibition could produce a different kind of impact. He also understood how much the right partner mattered. He ruled out several candidates — the cautious ones, the ones who held posts inside the system — and chose Ma Desheng. Ma Desheng was a model worker who walked on crutches, but "flew along on those crutches." Huang Rui believed Ma Desheng's image carried a special power to rally people.

The "Stars" Art Exhibition had no strict process for selecting work — members recall that whatever anyone had, they showed. The others probably do not think Huang Rui played any decisive part in that, but he did set the exhibition's overall character. He cared about whether a piece had "something new" in it, and he kept members from making too many extra demands, since that would only add "centrifugal force" to the group.

In the three decades after the "Stars" Art Exhibition dropped out of view, Huang Rui helped organize more than five commemorative Stars exhibitions. None of them made much of a mark, but they confirmed what other Stars members already thought of him: that Huang Rui is a savvy operator.

Huang Rui doesn't mind that description. When he talks about the 1979 "Stars" Art Exhibition, or the "Rebuilding 798" campaign he later started, he is happy to lay out the complicated calculations behind them. Next to his fellow artists — who tend to be either too radical or too naive — Huang Rui comes across as measured, and sometimes talks like a politician.

At a symposium on the "Stars" Art Exhibition held in 1980 by the official magazine Meishu (Fine Arts), Huang Rui said: "Why did people respond to us so strongly, to the point of frenzy? If it wasn't that everyone carried scars of their own, then people's understanding of society and the times rested on nothing but our artistic expression." He then added that "our artistic expression was very immature," so people might well have misread the works. But in fact, "our work isn't political — it's social." Everyone knew that separating the two was a word game to get past the censors.

After the Stars' open-air show in the garden of the National Art Museum of China was shut down and the works confiscated, Huang Rui was one of the few members firmly opposed to a protest march. "Doing that would hurt our exhibition in October. I think being able to show again is itself a victory. Artists should win by their art." He had learned that Jiang Feng had already agreed the Stars could exhibit at the museum. Jiang Feng was then chairman of the Artists Association, a man who had returned to public life after the Cultural Revolution and argued that painters should be professionals, "actively supporting and promoting talented young people."

Huang Rui has said more than once that he was on good terms with the Artists Association officials of that time. He believes he understood how little room they had to move. His account of the relationship between these reform-minded officials and the avant-garde artists is worth hearing: he says there was an unspoken compact between them, even though their positions differed.

Huang Rui the painter is not nearly as sharply drawn a figure as Huang Rui the organizer and social activist.

At the first "Stars" Art Exhibition, Huang Rui showed Old Summer Palace: Testament (《圆明园：遗嘱》) and Old Summer Palace: Rebirth (《圆明园：新生》). The first was ruins; the second turned the ruins into enormous, distorted figures of a young man and woman. It comes close to a lyric poem, and it was easy to read. Wu Hung has written that this was a common sentiment at the time — that this generation of avant-garde artists and writers "saw themselves both as survivors of national catastrophe and as the vanguard of a new cultural movement."

After that, Huang Rui's work kept changing. He painted a series of courtyard houses in the manner of Cubism, then, before moving to Japan in 1984, turned toward abstraction, mostly in grid forms. In Japan he also tried installation and performance art. After he came back to Beijing from Japan, his more influential works were a collage on the theme of demolition and the performance piece "Chai Na (CHINA)" — a phrase that sounds like the English word "China" and means "tear that down." In his Beijing studio, he had the Chinese text of The Communist Manifesto set in 650 kilograms of lead type and mounted on the wall.

In the years after the Stars, the work Huang Rui is proudest of may be Beijing's 798. He returned from Japan in 2001, and the following year rented a large workshop in the abandoned factory complex at 798 as his studio, then brought the Tokyo Art Projects gallery into an adjacent space. Before 798 became a famous art district, Huang Rui was the first artist to move in, and Tokyo Art Projects' "Beijing Ukiyo-e" was the district's first exhibition. Huang Rui knew that renting out the factory buildings was only a stopgap for the owner, and that under the plan of the day the site was to be torn down before the 2008 Beijing Olympics and rebuilt as an electronics mall. Even so, in 2003 he and friends launched the "Rebuilding 798" campaign, and in 2004 they staged the "Dashanzi" 798 Art Festival. The owner opposed these moves, but they drew heavy media attention and changed the course 798 took.

"I treated 798 as a work of art, an installation. I put all my savings, the equivalent of 200,000 yuan, into 798... I also thought back over a lot of past events: what causes a thing to fail, what might win public sympathy and concern," Huang Rui said in an interview. But as artists and design studios were "evicted" under a new plan for the district, Huang Rui left 798 himself in 2007.

In 2006, Huang Rui turned a Beijing garbage dump into a studio — a courtyard-house structure built with old Ming and Qing bricks collected from around the city — and named it the Huang Rui Baiyun Guan, the White Cloud Hall. Baiyun Guan received a demolition notice in 2017, but at the end of 2018 Huang Rui signed a handover agreement with the Dongbajianfang authorities in Jiangtai Township, Chaoyang District: the site would be kept permanently, as a public space for cultural and artistic activities. "Both sides in this handover take a positive view of it," Huang Rui said at the handover ceremony.

From demolition order to preservation, Huang Rui says he had help from French President Emmanuel Macron. Huang Rui's current wife and partner, the curator Bérénice Angremy, was cultural attaché at the French Embassy in China from 2012 to 2017.

Unlike the others, who call Huang Rui a savvy operator, Ai Weiwei — who also showed several works at the "Stars" Art Exhibition — thinks his friend, still obsessed with putting on exhibitions, is too conservative. Huang Rui repeats what Ai Weiwei told him: "He said this kind of thing is too traditional, you should drop it, you should do media. He said, I post one Weibo and 80,000 people see it; you spend eight months on an exhibition and 100 people come." Huang Rui did not take the advice.

Below is our interview with Huang Rui.

I Was a Worker, and I Made Today and the Stars Exhibition

Q: Why did you launch the "Stars" back then? In an interview in 2011, you said that being an art editor at Today wasn't a very important position. At a poetry gathering at the Old Summer Palace, the poets took all the glory, and you felt lonely, unseen, so you wanted to "organize an exhibition, an exhibition put on by a Beijinger that could overshadow every exhibition in the country." But there seem to be other versions of the story.

I had been preparing for a long time myself, making creative work. I also got to know a lot of artists, friends who did their own individual work. I joined Today, and in the earliest, founding stage we were quite busy. Once that stage passed, I wasn't so busy. I felt that, within Today, I was the one with a wide-ranging appetite for challenge, someone who wanted to do something in that era — and if possible, to do more.

Q: By a wide-ranging appetite for challenge at Today, do you mean that Bei Dao and Mang Ke wanted Today to be purely literary, and you wanted it to be more than literature?

Right. Sometimes I felt Today should be more varied. But in practice there were a lot of concrete difficulties. Back then I hoped Today could also reach into art, into theater — anything with some connection to it. In the society of that time, there was the wish but no way yet to carry it out: technical conditions, people, all of it. And later, publishing required official registration.

But for myself, I wanted it to be like the early Dadaists, the Cubists we knew about — a more varied, composite thing. So after a few issues of Today, I began to think whether we could do something more direct: an exhibition. And the social conditions then allowed it — there was a very short window when you were allowed to form a private painting society.

Q: In April 1979, Jiang Feng wrote the "Declaration on Opening Up Painting Societies" (《画会开放宣言》).

Right.

Q: Was that declaration meant to encourage, or only to permit?

It actually encouraged innovative people in the art world to form groups freely. It felt like realizing an original socialist or communist ideal — that sense of "let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend." On the government side, Jiang Feng, chairman of the national Artists Association, and Liu Xun, chairman of the Beijing Artists Association, both put it into practice.

Q: Private painting societies were allowed, but they had to register under the Artists Association?

Right. We registered too, and the registration went through.

But you know, by 1982 it had been decided that forming associations was illegal. So it was only that short window that gave us this possibility, that let us run an experiment like this. At first we weren't in a hurry to register the painting society, but I felt the possibility of organizing freely already existed. So I went and found Ma Desheng first.

In Beijing I was a young painter, and I knew some of the artists in the No Name Group well, as well as some other independent painters. Like Guan Naixin and Zhou Maiyou, who were later in our group.

But Ma Desheng stood for something upright — more upright than me. He was disabled, and his spiritual strength was enormous. There was even a saying: "Look far and learn from Iron Man Wang; look near and learn from Ma Desheng." So I thought he might have a different kind of pull. He was the most fitting choice. You wouldn't pick anyone else. Of course I wasn't going to pick someone as hesitant as Zhong Acheng, and I wasn't going to pick Qu Leilei — the son of Qu Bo, already inside the system, who also contributed to Today. I felt the best choice was Ma Desheng, as co-founder with me. And that is what I did.

That's where the Stars came from.

Q: How did you describe your idea to Ma Desheng?

Just what I told you a moment ago: now we have this possibility, are we doing it or not? We should do it, right? I have the resources in hand right now.

Q: You knew some painters?

Right. Ma Desheng knew other painters too. So the two of us went out and rallied people, went looking. We drew up a list and got started. Ma Desheng was a very action-driven, very emotional artist.

Q: Around the time the "Declaration on Opening Up Painting Societies" came out, were there a lot of groups like this in Beijing? The ones mentioned most often later are your group and the No Name Group.

Later there was also the Beijing Oil Painting Research Society and the "Contemporaries Painting Society." At the time I heard there were more than a dozen, no more than that.

Q: The "Contemporaries Painting Society" came after the Stars, in '81?

Right.

Q: Before the Stars, in 1978, you took part in the Beijing Workers' Art Exhibition. What kind of exhibition was that?

I was a worker then. Ma Desheng was at a factory research institute, so he belonged to the industrial system too. Back then it was "workers, peasants and soldiers," right — the army of course had its own system, with the Military Museum, where it could show works by artists who served the army's propaganda needs. The military system had a lot of backing. You couldn't say the worker system had none at all.

The exhibition I took part in seemed to be the first one after the Cultural Revolution. Whether there had been a precedent before that, I can't say, since I wasn't there.

What valuable resources or returns did it bring? You were an amateur, but at your work unit you could turn into a professional — you'd say, I'm applying to go out and make work, my subject is such-and-such, I need more time, say two months, and they'd approve it.

Q: So you didn't have to show up for work?

Right. And from then on, I really did stop showing up.

Q: The painting you showed was called The Accused (《受审者》), a very charged subject about the April Fifth Movement of 1976. How were you allowed to show it?

That was a matter of social conditions at the time. The work of clearing the names of the people who took part in and sympathized with the movement of April 5, 1976 had in fact begun in the spring of '78. The central government didn't announce it publicly until nearly a year later, probably the end of '78, but by early '78 the word had already come through — back-channel information, as we called it then — and we knew the political winds inside the government had shifted.

The painting I made then was outstanding, and they were genuinely surprised. My choice of subject was a real challenge to them. But it was a creative work, and it stood for a breath of fresh air, so they accepted it.

Of course, at that point I still couldn't produce anything like Sound of the Qin, because my technical ability hadn't reached that level. But that was fine — my inner need had already reached it.

Q: Apart from your work, what were the other pieces in that exhibition like?

I don't remember them. And I wasn't especially interested in the other work. I just felt mine was fine — the best there.

Q: Did the exhibition have any impact?

It was all right. It was held at the Confucius Temple in Beijing, which was a fairly popular venue.

A Not-So-Radical Organizer

Q: You just said that doing an exhibition directly seemed like a way to realize your idea. Where did that thought come from?

Because painting is direct expression, and also fairly indirect. By "direct" I mean it embodies personal feeling directly — it's the creation of a mental, spiritual concept. And since it isn't language, it also cuts down the danger of political censorship somewhat; the reading stays wide open. So I felt an exhibition held many kinds of possibility. That included, on the official side, the "New Spring Exhibition" (《新春画展》) in February of that same year, which showed work official artists had made during the Cultural Revolution but had not been able to exhibit — landscapes, still lifes, portraits and so on.

Q: So the New Spring Exhibition really jolted you?

Yes. That exhibition paved the way. What they did, especially the preface Jiang Feng wrote, saying the exhibition would not be censored — his exact words were: "The works of these freely assembled painters are shown without any censorship system, by common agreement, in order to better strengthen each painter's sense of political responsibility toward society and the people" — that was extraordinary! Everyone contributed a work, we gathered and discussed which pieces would go into the show. That was a very good model to learn from.

Q: I saw you mention that you and Jiang Feng later became good friends. How do you become good friends with an official like that?

His thinking was very open. I felt he wanted to accomplish something.

Q: Did you know each other before the "Stars" Art Exhibition?

No. Liu Xun and Jiang Feng both turned up at the exhibition in September of '79. Before that they didn't know about it. We started applying in April to hold the Stars painting society's exhibition.

Jiang Feng later promised us an exhibition, and delivered it — the Stars' second show, in 1980.

He was surprised too. He felt the young people had gone too far. Jiang Feng was a man of real ideals, someone branded a rightist in his early years. He had a real sense of a contract. You know, from start to finish we didn't have to be censored, but he did raise three works with us — this is my recollection — three works, including Wang Keping's Idol (《偶像》), that weren't suitable for showing at the museum, and I accepted that. I dealt with it. But Wang Keping said that when Jiang Feng said "not suitable," that meant "no," "not allowed." And Jiang Feng had added, "This is my personal opinion."

Later, when Idol was shown at the National Art Museum of China, it drew a lot of abuse. In 1982, Jiang Feng died of anger over it. It amounted to the political legacy he had laid down — a more tolerant political legacy — being wrecked by the people who came after.

The same with Liu Xun. He ended up in a wretched position — it finished his political career. We stayed in touch until he died in 2007. But he was never able to forgive me, never able to forgive the Stars, because we grew more radical later.

They believed we had betrayed the spirit of cooperation of that time. We believed cooperation was an attitude of mutual recognition — that once they had granted the recognition, it meant letting us do as we liked. They were inside the system, under more pressure than we were, so they sacrificed more than we did.

Q: When was this cooperation, this compact you're talking about, established? What did it mean?

There was never a real compact. It was just that they felt we needed to recognize the relative possibilities of the political situation against artistic freedom. But we had no such political judgment — or rather, I had a little of it, and most of the artists took no responsibility for it.

And the Stars painting society also stood for a spirit that they — Jiang Feng and Liu Xun — had opened up. We weren't their outright spiritual heirs, but inside the open context they created we won a great deal of freedom to act — which is to say, we made use of some of their efforts. In fact, though, most of that freedom we fought for ourselves. You see? So on one hand we had a deep relationship with them, and on the other we were completely independent. For people inside the political system, that is hard to read. But my own attitude was that I didn't want to make them so unhappy. That's how it was.

Q: It seems Liu Xun came to you at some point, hoping you could talk things through.

Liu Xun came to me and asked for a few representatives to talk it over together, and in the end more than a dozen of us showed up. After that he always came to me alone. I was willing to talk with them — I took the initiative, I respected them. Because Liu Xun and people like him were not like ordinary officials. It's not that the others were disrespectful — I just felt the others leaned more toward confrontation.

Q: You held out against the march, and most people were for it. Ah Cheng once wrote: "Faced with his friends' moral coercion, Huang Rui was the bravest person that day — at that moment the radicals needed no courage at all." But you still turned up in the march.

As the person in charge, if I weren't there, there would have been more danger. So in the end it was: fine, I'll take part, I'll join, but my objection stands. I don't agree with the march, but I'll walk with you.

"Am I Really That Commercial?"

Q: People often gathered at your house back then. Even before the Stars, a circle had already formed, including people from Today and other unofficial journals. How did it come together?

Because my family had a big courtyard. And I was the one who called people together. You know, I'm somewhat hospitable by nature. Probably from my mother — she was very hospitable, good with people. Generous too, because even if you're hospitable, having not even tea to offer doesn't work. At my house, if someone turned up and hadn't eaten, they could have a bowl of noodles or something.

Compared with other people's homes, mine was fairly large. It had been a small courtyard house belonging to our family. Then during the Cultural Revolution three other families moved in. Once policy was set right in '78, they moved out one after another over '79 and '80. One room was as big as three rooms this size — thirty or forty square meters or so. It was normally in use, not empty, but other families didn't have that kind of space.

The people who came to my house were all young. At first they were classmates of my older brother, who entered university the last year before the Cultural Revolution. But his classmates weren't as many as the friends I made later. They were mostly young people into poetry, young people into music. Reading poems, playing guitar — that was a regular thing. My mother didn't much mind any of it; up to ten o'clock it was generally fine. But that sort of thing was rare in most families.

Q: Ah Cheng's home was also a gathering place back then. What was different about these places?

The scene at Ah Cheng's wasn't on the scale of mine. But people came prepared — to spar with Ah Cheng, to discuss particular questions. My place was more casual.

Q: Was there much overlap between the people who later made up the Stars and the group that used to gather at your house?

Pretty much. On the Stars side they were all artists, but poet friends came often too. My own poetry stank, though — I couldn't get a second line out. Yesterday at China Club someone asked me how I came to paint Old Summer Palace. I said, that came from a poet's inspiration, something Symbolist, with a thread of poetic logic running through it.

Q: Among the works you showed at the "Stars" Art Exhibition, Old Summer Palace is the one people bring up most. But around 1982 and 1983 you began painting abstract work. That looks like a big change from what came before.

I really am a rebellious person. I started the courtyard-house series in 1981. My finances were decent then. I painted a lot of them, most around 80 centimeters. Six months in, suddenly — word passed around and people wanted to buy my work. There was no collecting boom in China yet; it was all foreigners, all embassy people, mainly French tourists or French businesspeople in China introduced through the French embassy. Of course they all knew about the Stars.

One day I ran into someone who wanted to buy several pieces. I said, am I really that commercial? Fuck it, I'm not painting this anymore. Another six months later, I worked out how I could move toward abstraction. That's how it went.

Q: Back then it was shameful to be commercial.

Right. A lot of the work from the courtyard-house period was very beautiful, and it came out of Sound of the Qin. I studied Cubism, and I turned Beijing's courtyards, Beijing's streets, corners of the Forbidden City, all into Cubism. At the time I didn't think of it as a shortcut, but later everyone found it easy to read, and it turned into a symbol. That was rather frightening.

The Lead Role in a "Scandal," and Going Abroad

Q: At the start, what did you expect the exhibition's impact to be?

I didn't foresee the risk at the time. I tried to steer clear of risk. We were mainly trying to show art. I did think our sharpness might set off a dispute — that was possible. But my own attitude was to avoid those disputes as much as I could. And in the end I couldn't control it.

Q: In the two official Stars exhibitions at the museum, in 1979 and 1980, how did your role change?

First, I pulled our group into shape as "Stars," made it a whole. You know that wasn't easy. There was a lot of centrifugal force. For instance, Wang Keping liked the limelight back then, though he has toned it down a great deal since. He liked mixing with foreigners, and a lot of artists couldn't stand it and came to me about it. These are small things, just one example — and there were plenty of examples running the other way. We had our own internal economic arrangement inside the Stars: how much to pay someone for writing an ad, how much for taking a photo, how much we made from selling photos. In the end the Stars' exhibition at the museum's Huafangzhai hall came out with a surplus of a bit over 100 yuan. We went out to eat, and donated the round remainder to Today.

Q: The Stars painting society formally registered with the Artists Association in March or April of 1980. Did the registration create any centrifugal pull?

Not much. Once registration went through, the Beijing Artists Association promptly admitted me, Wang Keping and Ma Desheng as members. But the next year they threw us out again, because of the 1981 Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign.

Q: Were a lot of people thrown out at the time?

Just the three of us.

Q: In 1983, Li Xianting edited an issue of Meishu magazine made up entirely of abstract paintings, and was removed from his post over it. By then you'd already turned to abstraction. Did you know about that?

I had three works in the color pages of that issue. That was one instance of "spiritual pollution" in the art world.

It wasn't only being expelled from the Artists Association — it was a whole series of things. We were also brought out as a stick to beat Jiang Feng with: the argument that Jiang Feng had taken the wrong road, that he had tolerated something like the Stars. The exhibition we had put on at the museum turned into a scandal.

Q: So there was a very sharp turn between 1980 and 1981? In 1980 even People's Daily covered it, with praise — a lot of people came in from out of town to see it after reading about it in People's Daily. Then by '81 it suddenly became a scandal?

Yes. The political winds changed.

Q: Would you say the Stars' influence peaked in 1980, and was never that great again?

You could say that.

Q: By the summer of 1984 the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign had basically ended. That was the Stars' fifth anniversary. Did anyone bring the Stars up again?

No one brought it up again.

Q: When you left the country in 1984, what was the mood at home?

It was a craze for going abroad. With markets and information opening up in the '80s, we came to see that Chinese people actually lived very poor lives. Everyone felt this general envy, this wish to switch to another kind of life, one with opportunity and security. It was a new challenge — otherwise you would never come to know the world. And it wasn't until the summer of 1984 that the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign stopped. It had a fairly big effect on artists and cultural figures.

Q: In 1979, was there still not much information coming in from abroad?

Reform and opening only began at the end of 1978. In 1979 there still weren't many forms of it. In the cities a lot of people had televisions, but they still weren't widespread, and there were still two channels — Beijing Television and CCTV, say. And whatever media you did reach was one-sided domestic reporting.

Q: How did you end up choosing Japan? The others all went to the US or Europe.

Actually it isn't something you decide — a lot of it is chance. Trying to get abroad, I got to know a few French women at the time, but none of them were to my taste. Then there was a Japanese woman, we got together, and so I went to Japan.

A Man Who Knows How to Operate

Q: In your interview yesterday you mentioned that by the '90s you already wanted to go back to China. Why did you want to go back?

Because by the '90s Japan's art market, and the whole economy, had begun to stall and slide — the stock and property bubbles — and that meant galleries held exhibitions less often, and tended to favor local artists. My work with galleries slowed down, and a lot of museums closed too, including the very famous Seibu Museum of Art I had once worked with.

Then a lot of news started coming out of Beijing, and many of my Beijing friends were passing through Japan. In the early '90s there was a Chinese contemporary art exhibition in Osaka. There was also another one curated by Fei Dawei called Emergency Exit (《非常口》) — the artists in it included Huang Yong Ping, Gu Wenda, Yang Jiechang and Cai Guo-Qiang — in Fukuoka and Tokyo. I went to see them all. I found them fresh, forceful, with a sense of cutting into something real.

Of course a lot of them were new artists, though I already knew some of them. Being in touch with them at that time was genuinely exciting. It was a moment on the rise, about to break open. I wanted to go back. On top of that, my Japanese wife at the time and I decided to divorce. I filed in 1992, and the divorce came through in 1994.

Q: By "on the rise, about to break open," do you mean the market was gradually forming?

No. There was no market then. For me the market is optional, take it or leave it. What matters is whether there's a stage to act on.

Q: Several Stars members think you're someone who really knows how to operate. I have the same impression. Take last year's handover ceremony for Baiyun Guan — it looked like a piece of performance art, and it had a social effect as well. What do you make of that assessment of you?

I don't overpackage myself, but I do package myself to a reasonable degree. An artist's identity is in fact very weak. If you can't protect the value of your own work, then when society passes you by, you have nothing to regret.

When we did the Stars, for instance, it came about naturally. But later on there were things worth guarding. Including the argument about the march — I didn't agree with it either. I voted against it. I felt that protecting the Stars first, protecting most of the artists first, was the right thing.

Another example: I got a chance to meet Emmanuel Macron, and I wanted to make sure the chance produced some value. Macron wanted to see my work, wanted to talk about my work. But since the embassy told me I'd have only a minute or two, I didn't talk about my work — I talked about Baiyun Guan.

All images in this article were provided by Huang Rui. The cover image comes from Huang Rui's Sound of the Qin, cropped. The banner image shows Huang Rui with his Self-Portrait, photographed by Joan Cohen, also cropped.

Next, we'll introduce Wang Keping, another artist who took part in the "Stars" Art Exhibition. Friends say Wang Keping "doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks." In 1979, not long after he began carving wood, his work caused a sensation.