The British Museum Xu Bing (1955-) Xu Bing grew up during the Cultural Revolution. He created a stir in 1988 with his dramatic installation 'Books from Heaven'. The work was made up of thousands of volumes of traditional woodblock printed books, which at first sight look genuine. In fact, they are full of unreadable characters.

The British Museum Pu Lieping (1959-) Pu is a professional artist and leading member of the Avant-Garde. He is inspired by Picasso's contention that calligraphy is, at least in part, an abstract art. He also makes clever use of symbols and titles to give meaning to his works, and of Western materials to create colourful images. See an example of one of his gold-flecked works.

The Avant-Garde has remained controversial ever since its emergence in 1988. It began with the dramatic installation work 'Books from Heaven' by Xu Bing (b. 1955), which was made up of thousands of volumes of traditional woodblock-printed books full of unreadable characters.

The British Museum

Zhang Dawo has created a new and distinctive form of abstract art that is deeply rooted in the traditions of Chinese calligraphy.

Few people regarded the work as a simple play on the well-known Chinese concept that Heaven had first given mankind characters that could only be understood by those with divine powers. Most saw Xu Bing's intent for what it was: to present a powerful negation of Chinese bureaucracy, history and literature. His installation was all the more an affront to Chinese culture because China prides itself on having the longest continuously used system of writing in the world.

The Avant-Garde soon became engaged in a heated debate as to whether it was possible to have an art called calligraphy in which the characters were meaningless. In 1995, however, Zhang Qiang had some success in reframing the debate. He argued that if a painting without a representational image can still be a painting, then calligraphy without readable characters can still be calligraphy. He pointed out that it was possible to create effects with Chinese brushes, inks and papers that could not be matched by those used in Western art. Even unreadable calligraphy could strike deep cultural chords and make statements conveying an artist's views about the age in which he was working.

The British Museum Wei Ligang (1964-) Wei has been rigorous in his efforts to turn Avant-Garde calligraphy into a purely abstract art. He seeks to compel the viewer to marvel at his artistic transformation of an ancient tradition through his brushwork and by keeping his works deeply rooted in Chinese culture.

The British Museum Zhang Qiang (1962-) Zhang Qiang is an artistic revolutionary who has a deep understanding of traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy. He is the founder of 'traceology', an entirely new genre in which he enlists the help of a female partner in creating each work. He is professor of calligraphy at the Shandong Academy of Fine Arts. See an example of his innovative style.

The British Museum Wang Nanming (1962-) Wang is one of the pioneers of the Avant-Garde and has extensive links with artists overseas. In his works he uses balls of calligraphy to make people think about the heavy burden imposed on modern Chinese society by the country's culture and traditions. Such balls are created when a calligrapher screws up a sheet of his work and throws it onto the floor, rejecting what he has done. See an installation by Wang Nanming.

In 1999 a major exhibition called the 'Retrospective of Chinese Modern Calligraphy at the End of the Twentieth Century' was staged in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in western China. The local governor opened the exhibition to demonstrate Sichuan's enthusiasm for all things modern. Some of the visitors supported the assertion of one critic that the event was 'the last insurrection in Chinese contemporary art this century', but others did not. They felt that more needed to be done to reflect modern Chinese society and the issues faced by people today. Yang Yingshi, an art editor of The China Daily, suggested that the way forward for modern calligraphy was to make a more determined effort to question the culture of the past and the present and to look to the future.

Since the early 1990s personal freedom in China has increased. A growing number of issues are discussed openly in public and people vent their feelings more freely in private. Within the confines of Beijing nightclubs, young women wearing miniskirts and studded leather collars sing songs that are renowned for their biting critiques of life in modern China. Many calligraphers express their views with equal impact, but they do so to a different audience, by selecting quotes from the respected classics and then exploiting the rich ambiguities inherent in the Chinese language (see, for example, Qi Gong, Han Yu, Gu Gan, Huang Miaozi).