Between Selling Yourself and Selling Out: Thoughts from Chinese Artists

You’re the illustrator who doodles on office stickies or the writer that sneaks in an occasional chapter between typing up reports. The musician that makes fliers at the copy machine when your boss isn’t looking. Or maybe you found someway to be yourself, the creative person you are, within that system—without leading a double life. Is it possible to be an artist and still eat your cake?

Chinese artists are increasingly developing businesses and jobs around their creative talents. This represents a departure from an earlier time when art was something to pursue in the hours when one was not earning a living, simply for the love of doing it. Instead of starving for their art, many young creative people have opted to bring their insight to big brands. But are you still an artist if you make your art to please the man instead of yourself? Doesn’t that change the way we make art? Or is working with a big corporation a pragmatic way of using the system to follow your creative dreams?

A designer on the NeochaEDGE creative collective nicknamed Elephant works for the advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy. Abby Lavin sat down with him for an interview with CNNGO. Artistic expression isn’t lost when Elephant works with brands. He combines the two seemingly competing goals to tell his own story in a way that infuses many elements from traditional Chinese culture and art.

“As Elephant will tell you, he’s not just an artist. He’s a Chinese artist. He undertakes each of his projects with one goal in mind: to ignite “the new beginning of Chinese old culture.
This is evident in all of his illustrations, many of which look like elaborate series of interlocking doodles, where traditional Chinese elements — Tang-dynasty style patterns and Buddhist Mandala circles — mingle with turntables, sneakers and other street-culture accoutrements.”

Elephant decided to work for the agency because it gives him the access to make a bigger impact with his art—he’s in position to design visual personalities for the likes of Nike and Coca Cola. In his mind, this is an opportunity for his art to reach many more people.

Takashi Murakami, best known as Japan’s Andy Warhol, has blurred the boundary between fine and commercial art. He studied traditional Japanese painting but more recently designed a candy-colored line of bags for Louis Vuitton. Is he just providing art at every price range whether it be a sculpture or a keychain? Is it still art if it’s wrapped up and packaged? Can you still be an artist if you play by the rules instead of trying to change them (like Warhol did)?

Popil (aka 糖果猫猫, Tangguo Mao Mao which translates to “Candy Cat” in English), also on Neocha, is a whimsical illustrator and graffiti artist that has been approached by agencies like W+K and Ogilvy. She is happy to support herself by drawing but still enjoys her personal work more and hopes to eventually have enough money to draw for herself according to another article by CNNGO.

These artists and many others seem to have found a compromise between art and economic reality. An art student myself, weighing the risks and fulfillment of a life in fine arts compared to say graphic design, I relate to this debate. I wonder if Elephant ever wishes he could do his own thing full time. What would Popil create if she could spray paint all day? At the end of a day in front of a computer toiling on Adobe Illustrator, does she still have the energy and inspiration to create art for herself’? I understand the logic—not many fine artists really make it. It’s risky. I have to wonder though if these brand designers are really making art that we can connect to on a human level. Old Chinese calligraphers and even Yue Minjun have said that they never thought they would be famous or had an interest in making art for money. They made it for themselves, to explore questions about the human condition that they were grappling with. That’s what makes your stomach jump when you admire Zhang Xiaogang’s portraits from the Cultural Revolution. The haunting vacant eyes of his characters bring you in. You relate to their story. You could know these people.