Art College 1994: Liu Jian’s sharp-toothed yet loose-limbed film animates an important juncture in Chinese art history

• Reviewed from the 2022 Berlin International Film Festival

Six years ago, an animated feature by an obscure Chinese filmmaker named Liu Jian was one of the sleeper hits of the Berlin International Film Festival. Set in a third-tier Chinese city, Have a Nice Day somehow managed to bypass the increasingly rigid standards of Xi Jinping’s censorship machinery in its darkly comic depictions of life in the petty criminal underworld. Though it slipped under the radar in the West, where Chinese cinema generally struggles to attract large audiences, the film went on to amass a cult following (and earn the praise of auteur Jia Zhangke) for its punkish realism and Liu’s masterful one-liner-studded script.

Expectations, then, were rather high for Art College 1994, Liu’s follow-up feature, which premiered at this year’s Berlinale. The exact setting of the art school is unnamed – scenes set on a surrounding lake would suggest Hangzhou, home of one of the country’s top art academies – though the animation renders its interior and exterior architectures with cartoon realist exactitude in a style reminiscent of the TV series Beavis and Butt-Head (1993-). The 1990s saw the Cynical Realism movement begin to take hold in Chinese contemporary art, and Art College 1994, true to Liu’s previously honed aesthetic, very much embodies that aesthetic. Its wandering narrative charts the exploits of art school students Xiaojun, a chain-smoking long-haired major in the traditional Chinese painting department who idolises the recently deceased Kurt Cobain and attracts his professors’ ire with his darkly expressionistic approach to ink painting, a medium traditionally confined to rigid genres such as landscape, bamboo, and bird and flower; Zhifei, who aspires to start a money-making venture called Idea Art after graduation; and Youcai, who has consistently failed entrance examinations to the school but hangs around anyway, staging sporadic stunts of performance art, much to the chagrin of the older conservative professors, among others. The students eventually come into contact with two female music majors, Gao Hong and Hao Lili, who each have different stances in the marriage-versus-career conundrum that was only then beginning to confront so many young Chinese women. Xiaojun and Hao Lili go on a few dates, and a romantic subplot begins to take shape – but Liu is too much of a realist to allow for its full florescence: unable to resist the combined gravitational weight of pragmatism and tradition, Hao Lili ends up entering into an early marriage with a wealthier student of French literature.

Of course, as one might expect from any film with such a blunt title, much of the narrative is given over to philosophical discussions on the nature and philosophy of art, as well as on the role of the artist in society, voiced with naïve sincerity by its twentysomething protagonists. This produces moments of genuine hilarity – such as a classroom scene in which a student interrupts a professor’s lecture on ‘Western Liberalism and Chinese Tradition’ to ask whether God is still dead; or when Jia Zhangke himself takes a voice cameo as a pompous alumnus returning home from abroad, informing the students that he had indeed seen van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ during his travels, though he couldn’t quite remember the name of the museum.

But despite all these sardonic vignettes – which, for anyone who has spent time in the Chinese art and/or academic worlds, have a ring of authenticity – Liu is never condescending toward his characters’ stances. Instead, by giving their at-times pretentious and empty-headed ramblings free reign, he manages to capture the essence of an important debate in intellectual history that preceded the international art market’s preoccupation with Chinese contemporary art – namely, the synthesis of traditional approaches to art-making and the Western imports that arrived under the banner of globalisation, a discussion that began in the early twentieth century and had only recently been renewed after the interruptions posed by the Communist revolutions of the middle decades. This plays out as a generational split, between the westward-looking students and the conservative-minded professors, who are resistant to the idea that any such synthesis might take place. It suggests that modern China’s ideology has always been more nationalistic than communistic, while highlighting Xiaojun’s existential struggle to determine just what kind of artist he intends to be.

In what was an otherwise disappointing program for the Berlinale, with a rather tepid selection of competition entries, Liu Jian once again provided one of the stronger entries. Masterfully evading the trappings of the corny nostalgia flick, Art College 1994 attains a perfect balance of humour, thoughtfulness and heart.