Cui Guotai's canvases, exhibited last month at ChinaSquare NYC, are particularly timely in this context — for Guotai makes his intervention precisely on the level of the economic imaginary. What is remarkable about his work is that it does not articulate a counterargument. He does not challenge industrialism by making reference to a reified, Rousseauist nature (except as a thin green ring around the baleful truck in Into Tibet); he appeals neither to humanity nor to humaneness; he does not even point to an apocalyptic or a utopian futurity. In fact, he scrupulously follows Marinetti's instructions: airplanes and locomotives, bridges and factories, form the subject matter of his work. His is an almost realist expressionism.

Cui Gutai, National Celebration, 2007, oil on canvas, 130 x 236 in. Via ChinaSquare.

What is the aesthetic significance National Celebration, a triptych depicting a gigantic rust-colored locomotive? Nothing about the painting explicitly suggests that a judgment is being meted out — were the outline a little sharper, the colors a little brighter, it could be called Socialist Realism. Yet, of course, we cannot but read the title as ironic. Heidegger wrote that though the objects in a museum remain for us to look at, they are no longer what they were: their world is gone. It is in this sense that Guotai's cars and trains are the evidence of a lost era: by appearing to us in all their drabness and lostness, they show us what we can no longer think.

Guotai's cityscapes — Our May 12th and Beijing Bridge — are near mirror-images of one another. Beijing Bridge is a landmark of the infrastructural self-overcoming of a newly muscular China; May 12th is the date of the horrifying 2008 earthquake in Sichuan. In each painting, what looks initially like the outline of a concrete built environment collapses into wild expressionist abstraction, though without implicating any sort of accompanying liberation. There is a contradiction here, but there is no resolution. In On Contradiction, Mao defined “the emergence of a new process” as follows: “The old unity with its constituent opposites yields to a new unity with its constituent opposites, whereupon a new process emerges to replace the old. The old process ends and the new one begins. The new process contains new contradictions and begins its own history of the development of contradictions.” But the constituent opposites of Beijing Bridge do not yield to any new unity. The dialectic of creation (Beijing Bridge) and destruction (May 12th) never forms a synthesis, and neither does that of realism and expressionism. The “Lost Era,” here, is a time when some teleology could have organized these disjunctions into a semblance of meaning; today, they are as senseless as the locomotive.

Some still appear to believe that the economic crisis will be the rupture that exposes the contradictions of capitalism and allows us, thereby, to transcend them. Guotai shows the fatal flaw in this hypothesis: it still imagines the economic (either in its growth or its collapse) as filled with a productive potentiality, an ability to overcome contradiction. A look at any of his paintings drives the point deeper still: the more dead and monotonous they appear, the farther we are from their world.