Michelangelo famously attacked his Florentine Pietà with a hammer, and Monet destroyed several of his Water Lilies.

But when Beijing art collective the New Measurement Group voted to dismantle the entirety of its output in 1995, the group and its radical ideas were mostly forgotten.

Three decades later, its artworks are being recreated in Melbourne at Buxton Contemporary, for the exhibition Poetry goes no further than language: A historical moment of art becoming art again.

Artist Liu Ding, who curated the exhibition alongside the director of Beijing's Inside-Out Art Museum, Carol Yinghua Lu, says artists may need to destroy their work in order to find a new artistic direction.

"To grow up, it's very important to throw things away," he said.

With a core group of three artists, Wang Luyan, Chen Shaoping and Gu Dexin, the New Measurement Group was formally established in November 1989.

It was the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the end of a brief period of relative liberation in China following the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.

Contemporary art in China at the time was expressive, symbolic, humanistic, and very much based on a show of individual artistic skill.

In its six years of existence the New Measurement Group went entirely against this ethos: by using simple yet strict rules, its members aimed to eliminate any traces of individuality from their work.

The group tried to find a new way to approach art by questioning existing values, and it operated in a democratic fashion, making decisions by majority vote.

"In an Australian context, we're not familiar with this discussion about Chinese contemporary art ... this very specific story that gives a much clearer picture of a critical moment," said Buxton Contemporary curator Annika Aitken.

"It's exciting to be able to show this very important period of Chinese art history, and bring more nuance to it."

The exhibition is a departure for Buxton Contemporary, which usually presents solo shows, and it's the first bilingual (English/Mandarin Chinese) exhibition presented at the venue.

New Measurement Group's disciplined approach produced works that were strangely universal - relatable, and even humorous.

One recreation - Tactile Art - consists of white characters written on small black squares, stating a set of circumstances conducive to human sensation.

For example, a temperature of 39C, walking barefoot on cement - or moving through a space filled with balloons.

"The New Measurement Group was a different time, different work ... this early work is very funny, very interesting," said Liu.

Also part of the show is 1990's Ladder Poem by Shanghai conceptualist Qian Weikang, a contemporary of the New Measurement Group.

Qian was working as a boiler operator at the Shanghai Dalong Machinery Factory when he became interested in modernist poetry, and was introduced to avant-garde art - but he stopped practising in 1997 and withdrew from the art world entirely.

Ahead of the exhibition opening, Liu re-enacted Ladder Poem by climbing a ladder holding a handful of paper notes, each marked with a single word, and throwing handfuls of them into the air as he ascended its rungs.

The words fell to the ground, making an automatic poem to be mounted on the wall of the gallery - but who knows whether it will make any sense?

The exhibition also features new commissions from Melbourne artist Darcey Bella Arnold including the sculpture A Pipe is not a Poem.

Liu has researched the New Measurement Group for 15 years, and says there's no definitive explanation why its members voted to destroy their work.

But there's one prevailing story - towards the end of the 1990s the Guggenheim in New York showed interest in exhibiting the New Measurement Group.

Worried about ceding control of their story to a western art museum, the artists decided they would rather dismantle all traces of its existence.

New Measurement Group member Wang Luyan is still an artist and collector, with many works in the exhibition drawn from his collection.

But Gu Dexin stopped making art entirely in the 2000s as China's art world became increasingly commercial.

"He didn't do any work, present any work, do any interviews or come to any openings," said Liu.

"He didn't want to participate in this capitalism game, so he stopped practising."

Poetry goes no further than language: A historical moment of art becoming art again runs until October 3.