Head to the Art Basel Hong Kong to satiate your artistic cravings
Li Jinghu
Joan Miro
Zhang Yirong
Zao Wou-Ki
Adeel Uz Zafar
Jiri Georg Dokoupil
Tao Fa
Pierre Soulages
Michael Zavros
Tim Maguire
Ever wanted to see art from all around the globe but didn’t know where to start from? The Art Basel is here to make your life easy. The Art Basel Hong Kong, now in its 45th edition, presents at one place stunning artworks from the world over – paintings, installations, works in mixed media, sculptures and photographs from Asia, Africa, Europe, North America and Latin America all form a part of the show. That’s not all…to get a complete fix of the arts, one can also attend the salon conversations, talks and films that will be exhibited at the event. So, if you thought Hong Kong was just about Disneyland, the art fanatics will surely tell you otherwise.
Art Basel Hong Kong will take place at various locations in Hong Kong until March 17, 2015.
A man checks his mobile phone next to an artwork by US conceptual artist John Anthony Baldessari during the opening of the Art Basel art fair for a VIP preview in Hong Kong on March 13, 2015. Hong Kong’s biggest art fair, Art Basel, opened its doors with thousands of visitors expected over the next five days. AFP PHOTO/Philippe Lopez
HONG KONG – Hong Kong’s biggest art fair, Art Basel, opened its doors Friday with thousands of visitors expected over the next five days for a city-wide canvas of creativity and commerce.
The sprawling display of artworks took over the city’s waterfront convention centre, as artists, gallerists and celebrities gathered to talk, buy and sell art.
“The Hong Kong art scene is growing so rapidly and robustly… the galleries seem to grow stronger every year,” said Art Basel director Marc Spiegler just ahead of the launch of the show on Friday evening.
The first two days are invite-only, with the fair open to the general public from Sunday.
The whitewashed walls of the convention center display space were crammed with everything from traditional ink paintings to film installations and giant sculptures.
A taxidermy reindeer with sprawling tree branches for antlers greeted visitors to the first floor, with a giant ear and trumpet protruding from a wall nearby.
The Hong Kong edition’s new director, Adeline Ooi, told AFP that the strong showing of Asian artists would be taking a “more daring” approach this year.
“There will be a strong representation of local artists at the show,” she added.
Also central to the display are large-scale “Encounters” pieces, including a suspended forest of olive trees by Irish artist Siobhan Hapaska, a mausoleum made from styrofoam boxes by Hong Kong-based Portuguese artist Joao Vasco Paiva and a giant see-sawing log propped up by Indian Buddhist statues by Indian artist Tallur L.N.
Smaller shows pop up all around town to coincide with the show—many of them throwing the spotlight back on grassroots talent.
Art Basel Hong Kong kicked off three years ago and is the newest addition to the international art show, which started in Switzerland in 1970 and also has a Miami Beach edition.
The Hong Kong edition is attracting celebrities this year such as Victoria Beckham and Hollywood star Susan Sarandon.
Greater China, grouping the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan, maintained its market leader status in 2014, accounting for $5.6 billion in global art sales—closely followed by the United States—according to data firm Artprice. — Agence France-Presse
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One of Jakarta-born Bagus Pandega’s “portraits” at the fair, with ROH Projects (1B34)
There is an extraordinary diversity of art by Southeast Asian artists at Art Basel Hong Kong this year, reflecting the rich cultural heritage of the countries that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean). While artists and dealers proclaim their cultural individuality, they also feel a strong affinity to their regional identity.
The fair features 22 galleries from Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia or with outlets in Singapore, with artists of the region also available on other stands. A Salon event at the fair on Sunday, 15 March, seeks to deepen collectors’ understanding of art from the region.
Institutions in the West are looking eastwards towards the region. Richard Armstrong, the director of the New York-based Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, who was at the fair to announce the shortlist for the BMW Art Journey award, visited Bangkok last September. London’s Tate Museum launched its South Asian Acquisitions Committee in 2012, and the Istanbul-based Arter Foundation brought contemporary art from Southeast Asia to the Turkish city this January.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s M+ museum is planning to collect in this area, and the National Gallery Singapore, due to open in November, will display historical Southeast Asian art.
One of the most unusual offerings at the fair is in the Discoveries section, where Jakarta’s ROH Projects (1B34) has four “portraits” by Bagus Pandega made up of mirrors, guitars or spinning LPs combined with found objects (US$6,000-$7,500 each).
Portraits of another kind feature at Manila’s 1335Mabini (1C26,) where Poklong Anading’s lightboxes feature people photographed in different settings holding up mirrors against their faces to reflect the sun (US$3,500-$35,000). “Initiatives such as the Guggenheim exhibition ‘No Country’ or regional biennales have had a huge share in terms of providing platforms to exhibit Southeast Asian artists in institutional contexts,” says Birgit Zimmermann of the gallery.
Indonesian artists are among the best known in the region. Singapore- and Berlin-based Arndt (3C30) sold Eko Nugroho’s embroidery Anarki Moral, 2014, (priced at US$38,000), as well as his large “Encounters” work, Lot Lost, 2015, bought by an Australian museum at the fair for US$330,000. At Gajah Gallery (1C38), three editions of sculptures by Yunizar sold for US$62,000 each. “We saw extraordinary growth in this market four to five years ago, then it slowed a bit, but prices are still very reasonable,” says Jasdeep Sandhu of the gallery.
The Jakarta-based Nadi Gallery’s stand (3C26) features detailed and delicate works by Handiwirman Saputra (US$150,000 and US$250,000) and a large abstract by Arin Dwihartanto Sunaryo. The well-known collector Deddi Kusuma is a fan of both artists, and he is expected at the fair, along with other prominent VIPs from the region such as Petch Osathanugrah, Jean-Michel Beurdeley, Dr Oei and Rudy Akili.
Philippines-based Silverlens (1D43) features a “scarf” with shoes as a motif— a reference to the Marcos era—by Pio Abad (Every Tool is a Weapon if you hold it right, 2015, US$7,000) as well as Yee I-Lann’s installation, Tabled, 2013, US$29,000, consisting of plates, fired in Indonesia with photographs from across Asia. It was shown in the Museum Van Loon in Amsterdam and sold in a Manila and Singapore gallery—a fitting example of the diverse nature of the art on show
==
GLOBAL TIMES
An eye on Asia
By Liao Danlin in Hong Kong Source:Global Times Published: 2015-3-17 20:23:01
Art Basel sweeps into Hong Kong showing off latest trends in art
An artwork by South Korean artist MyeongBeom Kim at Art Basel in Hongkong on March 16 Photo: Liao Danlin/GTWalking around I saw people walking and pushing baby carriages, children running around and tourists taking photos right next to businessmen in suits and well-dress ladies standing in front of a huge oil painting, examining its every detail and discussing if they should spend the million dollars needed to buy this masterpiece.
This was the scene at Hong Kong’s Art Basel, the city’s biggest international art show for modern and contemporary works of art.
Over 200 galleries from 37 countries contributed to make this year’s artistic feast the biggest ever in the past three years. From Sunday to Tuesday, Art Basel was opened to the public generating a huge number of visitors. Becoming as crowded as a supermarket, galleries were filled with professional curators, artists and collectors as well as travelers that just happened to be in Hong Kong.
Asian Focus
While the original Art Basel (1970) and Art Basel Miami Beach (2002) have been around longer, what makes the Art Basel Hong Kong special is its large number of Asian participants. Half of the galleries this year came from Asia-Pacific regions.
Insights, for instance, was a section developed specifically for galleries based in Asia. One of these galleries, the Michael Ku Gallery from Taiwan, brought Taiwanese artist Luo Jr-Shin’s solo exhibition to the event. His work An Afternoon, an installation made from ready-made items featuring a “yolk” on a pair of broken glasses hanging upon a carpet, caused quite a few visitors to stop and take notice.
The gallery told the Global Times that to better tailor An Afternoon, which was first created in 2013, for audiences in Hong Kong, Luo went to several stores in the city to replace the tissue boxes used in the art work with the most commonly used tissue brand in Hong Kong. “He wanted this work to be able to connect with everyone.”
Other galleries brought works from more than one artist to better represent the wide range of their collections. The Mizuma Art Gallery for example offered works from Japan, Indonesia and China.
Discussions on Asian art went further with salons and other relevant events inviting artists and scholars to discuss certain phenomena or trends happening in Asia at the moment.
During a salon titled Social Engagement Artists/South Asia and Beyond, artist Shooshie Sulaiman from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and artist Mohamad Yusuf from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, discussed how artists have actively become involved in social change or expressing political views through art in their countries.
Venice Biennale/ Focus Pakistan and India was a conversation between independent curator Natasha Ginwala and Indian artist Jitish Kallat about the 56th Venice Biennale Gujral Foundation project “My East is Your West,” and the art scenes in the two countries.
A window to the world
While you could see works by famous names such as Chen Yifei, Zhao Wuji and popular artists like Nara Yoshitomo at Art Basel Hong Kong, emerging young artists also had their chance to shine.
Born in 1988, Lu Chao was the chosen artist for the Hadrien de Montferrand gallery this year. Lu’s works, mostly sketch-like portrayals of a massive number of different faces, quickly attracted a large number of visitors.
The owner of the gallery, Hadrien de Montferrand has lived in China for more than seven years and has worked at various art institutions and auction houses. He described Lu’s works as sensitive, powerful and beautiful, while visitors’ opinions ranged from scary, interesting and eye-catching.
Montferrand told the Global Times that the rapid economic and environmental changes and social pressures that Chinese artists have experienced over the past few decades have made their art work particularly interesting, as they often use their work to express what it’s like to live in this changing environment.
“Older artists are very different from younger ones,” he added, explaining that since the market in China is still young it is mainly dominated by a few well-known artists and as such there is little space for young artists.
However, in the wider market, young artists can take advantage of Western museums, curators, galleries and so on to be seen by international audiences as well as the Chinese crowd.
For Montferrand, whose galleries have held exhibitions for established artists like Liu Xiaodong and young artists like Lu, while the younger generation is more influenced by Western art in terms of creativity and more ideas and concepts are emerging, artists have also managed to keep a Chinese feeling in their works.
“You have very traditional trends going on, but at the same time you have a lot of people going into very different ways, people looking deeply into themselves,” said Montferrand.
Although Lu thinks of himself more as a young man who loves painting rather than a qualified artist, he feels that young artists in Asia seem to have more opportunities than in the West.
“If Chinese go to the West we like to buy famous artworks, whereas most Western collectors coming to Asia seem to be more interested in buying works from talented young artists,” said Lu.
A market with growing potential
Since the artists and works coming to Art Basel change every year, Li Zhenhua, curator for the Film section of Art Basel Hong Kong, finds the art fair a great way to get a feel for mainstream trends. And he feels it is able to fill people in on which artists or galleries they need to know about much faster than museums and or other sources.
As Li sees things, if someone studies the art fair and does solid research, they would be able to gain a deeper understanding of why some galleries make the choices they do and why artists decide to present certain works over others. Art Basel can also help insiders discover trade market trends and see how collectors have changed.
For example, the prominence of Southeast Asian artists seen at the art fair this year is a reflection of international trends. The Tate Museum in London created a South Asia Acquisitions Committee three years ago and the Art Paris held in February also showed a growing trend towards art from these regions.
In the past, Asian artists received most of their attention at biennials. However, usually only artists that have already established themselves are able to make it into these biennials. However, today, with art fairs such as the Art Basel Hong Kong, talented young artists that have yet to make a name for themselves have a way to take part in the international art scene and market.
–
WALLPAPER
Light shows and pink feathers: how Art Basel 2015 took over Hong Kong
Visitors standing next to an artwork by Korean artist Hyung Koo Kang (left) during the opening of the Art Basel art fair for a VIP preview in Hong Kong on March 13, 2015. — PHOTO: AFP
By Deepika Shetty, Arts Correspondent In Hong Kong
In the surest sign of the evolution of Singapore’s gallery scene, the island’s largest contingent of galleries participated in Asia’s premier contemporary art fair in Hong Kong and netted handsome sales.
More than 10 Singapore galleries participated in the packed third edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, up from three in the inaugural fair two years ago.
The fair, which saw 233 galleries from both the East and the West taking up two floors of the cavernous Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, ended on Tuesday with happy faces among gallerists and collectors from around the world, and the Singapore contingent was no exception.
German gallerist Matthias Arndt, who also has a base in Gillman Barracks, had to do a second hanging when all the works he presented in the first hanging sold out by Sunday, just two days after the fair opened with a three-hour private view for invited collectors.
Visitors take photos of the hyper-realist sculpture ‘Untitled (Kneeling Woman)’ created by Australian artist Sam Jinks during the VIP preview of the Art Basel art fair in Hong Kong on Friday, March 13, 2015. Art Basel stages modern and contemporary art shows and is held annually in Basel, Switzerland, Miami Beach and Hong Kong. Kin Cheung
Art Central 2015, Hong Kong. This was its first year as a satellite fair to Art Basel on the island city. supplied
Hiromi Tango, ‘Now’, 2014, neon and mixed media, 93.5 x 98.5 x 27 cm, Detail_2 From Art Central: Hong Kong ‘s first international standard satellite art fair, held alongside the island city’s much-larger Art Basel. Greg Piper
German performance artist of Turkish origin, Nezaket Ekici creates an artwork during the opening of the Art Basel art fair for a VIP preview in Hong Kong on March 13, 2015. Hong Kong’s biggest art fair, Art Basel, opened its doors to an expected thousands of visitors over five days. Philippe Lopez
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ArtMar 21 2015 at 12:15 AM
Updated Mar 19 2015 at 12:50 PM
Hong Kong’s Art Basel: tussle between money and culture
International art fairs are multiplying like billionaires – and the gallery owners showing at Hong Kong’s Art Basel were hoping for rich buyers, writes Katrina Strickland.
Visitors take photos of the hyper-realist sculpture ‘Untitled (Kneeling Woman)’ created by Australian artist Sam Jinks during the VIP preview of the Art Basel art fair in Hong Kong on Friday, March 13, 2015. Art Basel stages modern and contemporary art shows and is held annually in Basel, Switzerland, Miami Beach and Hong Kong. Visitors take photos of the hyper-realist sculpture ‘Untitled (Kneeling Woman)’ created by Australian artist Sam Jinks during the VIP preview of the Art Basel art fair in Hong Kong on Friday, March 13, 2015. Art Basel stages modern and contemporary art shows and is held annually in Basel, Switzerland, Miami Beach and Hong Kong. Kin Cheung
by Katrina Strickland
At every art fair there’s the party to be at, and at Art Basel Hong Kong this year, that party was staged by the Swiss cigar company Davidoff.
Held at the pool house and grill on the roof of the Grand Hyatt, the party celebrated excess in, well, excess. Hundreds of guests sipped on free-flowing French, grazed on food ranging from paella to sashimi and prawn cocktails, and watched Dita Von Teese strut her glamorous, risque stuff.
But what made it really feel like a scene from The Wolf of Wall Street were the cigars; most of the male guests were smoking them, along with a good swag of the female guests – all with a look of “I can’t believe we are able to do this” glee on their faces. The cigar bar on the way into the party was a heady place, manned by staff who were cutting and lighting the fat brown imports as quickly as guests were stepping up to take them off their hands. It was surprising not to see Leonardo diCaprio standing by the pool, surrounded by a bevy of topless women.
It was galling, nerve-racking and thrilling. Galling, because it felt so starkly at odds with the breadline life of so many artists, and such a counterpoint to last year’s Occupy Central protest movement.
Art Central 2015, Hong Kong. This was its first year as a satellite fair to Art Basel on the island city. Art Central 2015, Hong Kong. This was its first year as a satellite fair to Art Basel on the island city. supplied
Nerve-racking, because with so many cigars, so many people and so much excitement in the air, the very act of pushing through the crowd came with the risk – thankfully avoided – of having a lit cigar accidentally shoved in one’s face.
And thrilling, because who doesn’t get a voyeuristic charge from stepping into that kind of hedonistic world every now and again? It doesn’t happen too often in Sydney.
Davidoff was one of a host of international brands massaging the thousands of collectors, gallerists, journalists and – yes, artists – who flew in to the Chinese outpost just over a week ago for Art Basel Hong Kong. The fair opened on Friday the 13th with a VIP preview and wrapped up on Tuesday night, when the weary staff who had manned stalls for 233 galleries from 37 countries and territories got to pack up and have a quiet champagne of their own.
Mood-only works
Hiromi Tango, ‘Now’, 2014, neon and mixed media, 93.5 x 98.5 x 27 cm, Detail_2 From Art Central: Hong Kong ‘s first international standard satellite art fair, held alongside the island city’s much-larger Art Basel. Hiromi Tango, ‘Now’, 2014, neon and mixed media, 93.5 x 98.5 x 27 cm, Detail_2 From Art Central: Hong Kong ‘s first international standard satellite art fair, held alongside the island city’s much-larger Art Basel. Greg Piper
Among the highlights were some of the works designed not to be sold but to create a mood. These included 20 large-scale installations scattered through the fair by Australian curator Alexie Glass-Kantor, and a 10-minute light work projected nightly onto West Kowloon’s International Commerce Centre by the Chinese artist Cao Fei. Standing on a balcony at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre where the fair is held, looking across the water to the ICC building and glittering lights of Kowloon, viewers were instantly taken back to the Pac-Man games played in greasy fish and chip shops and arcades through the 1980s. Those who were old enough to remember greasy fish and chip shops, anyway.
The iPhone was ubiquitous. Sydney gallery Sullivan + Strumpf almost needed security guards, such was the crowd gathered each day at its stand, most taking pictures of its hyper-realist sculptures by Melbourne-based artist Sam Jinks. Another Sydney-based art dealer, Andrew Jensen, was bowled over by the way many people look at art in 2015. In his case, sculptures by artist Sam Harrison attracted the most iPhone clicks.
“If we took a levy on photographs we could have retired,” he says with a wry laugh. “It is extraordinary how mediated through a lens experiences have become.”
Most of those taking photos were what those in the trade derisively refer to as “tyre kickers”; that is, lookers not buyers. Art fairs are curious beasts in that they need the hordes to create an atmosphere and to appear successful, but the sales that make or break the participating galleries come from only a tiny percentage of visitors.
German performance artist of Turkish origin, Nezaket Ekici creates an artwork during the opening of the Art Basel art fair for a VIP preview in Hong Kong on March 13, 2015. Hong Kong’s biggest art fair, Art Basel, opened its doors to an expected thousands of visitors over five days. German performance artist of Turkish origin, Nezaket Ekici creates an artwork during the opening of the Art Basel art fair for a VIP preview in Hong Kong on March 13, 2015. Hong Kong’s biggest art fair, Art Basel, opened its doors to an expected thousands of visitors over five days. Philippe Lopez
Thus while gallery staff watch nervously to ensure the iPhone brigade don’t knock any artworks off their plinths or walls, they are also eagle-eyed for visitors there not to take pictures but to spend thousands of dollars. And desperately hoping they stop by their stand.
This was the third iteration of the Hong Kong fair since it was sold to one of the globe’s most successful art brands, Art Basel, which has run fairs in the Swiss city of its name since 1970 and in Miami in the US since 2002. Art Basel now has a firm foot in Asia, one of the growth regions for a global trade in art and antiques that, according to the TEFAF Art Market Report 2015, topped €51 billion ($70.7 billion) in 2014. China equalled the United Kingdom in accounting for the second-biggest slice of this record turnover, at 22 per cent, behind only the US at 39 per cent.
May better place on fair calendar
European ownership has brought with it a decision to move the fair from May, when it has been held every year since its founding in 2008, to March, when it was held for the first time this year. A welcome upshot for visitors was a cooler climate; for organisers and participants it was a better place on an annual calendar crammed with 180 big art fairs.
At Art Central, Hong Kong, the fair held alongside this year’s Art Basel, watchers and buyers crowded around Sam Jinks and Hiromi sculptures. At Art Central, Hong Kong, the fair held alongside this year’s Art Basel, watchers and buyers crowded around Sam Jinks and Hiromi sculptures. Sullivan+Strumpf
In May, Hong Kong butted up against the Frieze Art Fair in New York, the Venice Biennale this year and Gallery Weekend in Berlin, plus the main, mega Art Basel fair, which rolls around each June. In March, Art Basel Hong Kong competes only with the relatively new Art Dubai and the very old Maastricht fair, the latter not such a problem because it focuses on historical artworks in contrast to Art Basel, which is all about the contemporary. The shift in dates resulted in 29 more galleries participating, of which 20 came from Europe and the US, with more collectors coming from the northern hemisphere too.
That the fair is helping to transform Hong Kong from a city obsessed with money into one with a cultural as well as financial scene is not in doubt, although some query how deep the change is outside of what has now been dubbed Art Week, and whether it isn’t still all about money – namely, the sale rather than the appreciation of art.
Michael Lynch, the Australian who is outgoing chief executive of the giant West Kowloon Cultural District, hopes that when the multiple arts venues in that $HK22 billion ($3.7 billion) complex start opening over the coming years, it will change the balance.
“Progress has been pretty extraordinary over the last four years, [but] the thing that concerns me is too much of it is fundamentally market driven,” he says. “The importance of building new cultural institutions, as we are doing, is that you will get some restoring of the balance between the public and the private.”
Swiss art dealer Dominique Perregaux, who first opened a gallery in Hong Kong a decade ago, also strikes a word of caution about extrapolating too much from fairs. “The city’s cultural scene has not changed much; Hong Kong has just become an art trading hub,” he says. “Once a year, Art Basel brings in the names you would never otherwise get to see. It’s very important to see those works in Hong Kong, but in terms of intrinsic culture, nothing much has changed.”
Permanent spaces in Hong Kong
That said, a lot of big international galleries have opened permanent spaces in Hong Kong in recent years, including White Cube, Gagosian, Pace, Galerie Perrotin and Simon Lee. There are new developments every year – last year’s included PMQ, a joint venture between the government and some philanthropists in which the old “police married quarters” building has been transformed into a hub for local designers, who pay subsidised rent for studios and small shops.
A satellite fair, Art Central, made its debut this year, a 10-minute walk from Art Basel Hong Kong. If anything speaks of the pace of change in Hong Kong it is the walk between the two fairs, alongside a giant construction site full of cranes.
The founders of Art Central started Art Hong Kong back in 2008 before selling it to the Swiss, among them Tim Etchells, who also founded the one-year-old Sydney Contemporary and has the contract to manage the Melbourne Art Fair. Etchells sees the establishment of Art Central, which sits above an affordable art fair but below the Art Basel stratosphere, as another step in Hong Kong’s cultural evolution.
Rebecca Hossack, a London-based, Australian-born art dealer who showed this year in Art Central, is all for it. “These mega fairs are monstrosities, half way through the first floor you’re thinking ‘get me to the VIP lounge and champagne, I can’t go on’,” she says with a flourish. “At Art Central it’s a much more human experience and you can look at art in a non-commodified way.”
The establishment of a satellite fair is good news for Australian galleries, not all of which are accepted by Art Basel. Those hosting stands at Art Central this year included M Contemporary, Metro Gallery and Connie Dietzschold.
As someone who spent 18 years living in Asia before moving to Australia and opening her Sydney gallery in 2013, M Contemporary owner Michelle Paterson sees attending such fairs as mandatory. “We need to make our artists internationally known, Australia is too small a market,” she says.
Art Basel Hong Kong was attended by about 60,000 people this year, 5000 fewer than last year, partly accounted for by running for a day less this year and in a new month, while Art Central notched up about 30,000 attendees. Sales are never independently verifiable and are without fail promoted as fabulous.
Foot traffic brisk
With those riders in mind, foot traffic at both fairs was brisk, particularly at Art Basel, and the atmosphere upbeat in both places. Art Basel’s PR team put out a daily summary of who’d sold what, some of the highlights including an Andreas Gursky photograph at Spruth Magers for €400,000 ($560,000), a Sean Skully painting at ShanghART for $US850,000 ($1.1 million) and a Chen Cheng-po painting at Liang gallery for $US1.3 million.
The benefits of returning year in, year out are paying off for Australian galleries Sullivan + Strumpf and Anna Schwartz – the latter had her property developer/publisher husband Morry on hand to help sell works by the likes of Daniel Crooks, Rose Nolan and Shaun Gladwell.
“This year we noticed a lot more Europeans, a lot of French collectors – Swiss and German,” Sullivan + Strumpf co-director Ursula Sullivan says. “At the moment we price in Australian, US and Hong Kong dollars, but next year we’ll have to add euros.”
Davidoff is one of a handful of sponsors lured to Hong Kong by the Art Basel juggernaut, others include UBS and BMW, all of which leverage their art relationships in ways the Australian arts sector can only dream of. Aside from hosting parties par excellence, Davidoff has art programs ranging from residencies and grants for artists from the Caribbean and the Dominican Republic, to putting artworks on limited edition cigar boxes.
UBS funds a Junior Art Hub offering children free art sessions (while mum and dad are presumably off spending thousands in the fair), an app that collates art news from global media and a menu at the Mandarin Oriental’s Pierre restaurant inspired by works from the UBS Collection.
This year BMW selected three artists from the emerging art section of Art Basel Hong Kong to lodge proposals for a BMW Art Journey. The winner will get to go on “the journey of their dreams” – presumably in a Beamer – which will be documented online, in print and on social media.
If this all sounds like a co-opting of art by commercial interests – well, it is. But it has arguably ever been thus, just to a much lesser extreme. The creation of art has always depended on the patronage of someone.
Katrina Strickland visited Hong Kong courtesy of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office.
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BLOOMBERG NEWS
Hong Kong’s Art Basel Lures Collectors Chasing Warhol
Polychromed wood sculpture by Jeff Koons of Buster Keaton. Source: Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery via Bloomberg
Hong Kong’s Art Basel Lures Collectors Chasing Warhol
4:00 PM PDT
March 12, 2015
(Bloomberg) — Celebrities, billionaires and art moguls have descended on Hong Kong, lured by the chance to buy works by Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso and Jean-Michel Basquiat at Asia’s biggest art fair.
Art Basel Hong Kong, an edition of the fair that started in Switzerland, is selling as much as $3 billion worth of art displayed by 233 galleries from 37 countries, according to insurer AXA Art.
The Hong Kong version has become a major stop on the global art fair circuit of one-stop shopping malls for the mega-wealthy seeking to diversify their stock portfolios with paintings and sculptures by brand names and hot young artists.
First night sales, in a truncated VIP preview that lasted only three hours because the fair format was revamped from previous years, indicated that the economic slowdown in China hasn’t dampened sales.
“We were in China before this for two weeks and it certainly wasn’t palpable to me,” said dealer Sean Kelly, who sold a work by Sun Xun for $145,000, as well as works by James White and by Hugo McCloud.
‘Very Happy’
White Cube dealer Jay Joplin echoed Kelly’s sentiments. “It’s been excellent, I’m very happy,” he said, adding that his gallery sold works by Damien Hirst, Andreas Gursky and Theaster Gates.
Rachel Lehmann, of Lehmann Maupin was more cautious. “You cannot judge the success of an art fair in three hours,” she said. Still, by the end of the evening she had sold two Alex Prager photographs, a work by Tracey Emin, a Hernan Bas painting and several works by Korean artist Do Ho Suh.
It’s common for galleries to pre-sell works to preferred clients ahead of fairs, and dealers expected a flurry of purchases when the doors opened to select guests Friday at 6 p.m.
Art Basel anchors what is informally called art week in Hong Kong, a time when luxury goods companies, private banks and Michelin-starred restaurants are pulling out the stops in their pursuit of the vast amount of wealth pouring into the city as art and commerce converge in Hong Kong.
Tate Modern director Nicholas Serota, Swiss collector and auctioneer Simon de Pury and New World Development Co. scion Adrian Cheng are among the expected fair visitors. Gwyneth Paltrow, Victoria Beckham, Kate Moss and Robin Thicke have been invited to browse the booths since they’re in town for a charity benefit to raise money for amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, on March 14. Actress Michelle Yeoh is being honored at the fundraiser.
Fair Rebranded
The fair, which began as Art HK in 2008, was rebranded Art Basel Hong Kong two years ago after the owners of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach took over.
Mainland collectors are on the prowl for trophy works to adorn the walls of their homes in Hong Kong, Los Angeles and Sydney, or to fill private museums in China.
Billionaire Liu Yiqian and his wife Wang Wei are in town for the handover of a 15th century Tibetan embroidered thangka they purchased at Christie’s Hong Kong for $45 million in November for their private museum in Shanghai.
Wang Zhongjun, chairman of Beijing-based film company Huayi Brothers International, keeps a Vincent van Gogh still life he bought for $62 million at Sotheby’s New York last fall in his Hong Kong pied-a-terre.
Depth, Experience
Asia has 492 billionaires, according to the Knight Frank Wealth Report 2015, 53 of whom live in Hong Kong.
Still, dealers said the market lacks the depth and experience of the U.S. and Europe, where collectors have amassed works for decades. China accounted for 22.4 percent of global sales in the art and antiques market, ranking it second behind the U.S., according to an annual report published March 11 by the European Fine Art Foundation. Yet that’s a decline from 24 percent in 2013, according to the report.
“There is a vibe around Art Basel and lots of clients want to be part of it,” said Edie Hu, art advisory specialst at Citi private bank in Hong Kong. “Though a lot of the cutting edge art might not be to their taste, when they come across something like a Picasso or Warhol they have seen before it’s like comfort food, for them.”
Expanded Offerings
While dealers are expanding their offerings of abstract and conceptual works, blue chip contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons have a captive audience in the region.
“I show Picasso, Basquiat, Henry Moore; they are attracted to this kind of art,” said dealer Christophe Van de Weghe, who is bringing two of Warhol’s works, and a Gerhard Richter with an asking price of about $8.5 million.
London’s Victoria Miro gallery is offering $2 million pumpkin sculptures by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and $225,000 tapestry works by Britain’s Grayson Perry.
Gajah Gallery is returning to the fair with Bali, Indonesia-based American painter Ashley Bickerton’s works, which provide a contemporary take on the fascination that 20th century painters had with Southeast Asian exoticism. The most expensive, “Party Time” is priced at $270,000.
Fair partner UBS Group AG said it expects several hundred high-net-worth private banking clients to fly in from around the region, and the bank expects as many as 8,000 visitors at its fair VIP lounge that displays works from its permanent collection including David Hockney, Hong Kong ink painter Wilson Hsieh and Wayne Thiebaud.
Satellite Fair
Those with more modest budgets can head to a new satellite fair, Art Central, which opens to the public March 14 in a tent on Hong Kong island’s waterfront. With 75 galleries from 21 countries, most works will be priced from $1,000 to $100,000, said managing director Charles Ross, who describes the fair as a “fun, fresh and edgy complement to Art Basel.”
While Art Basel has become increasingly dominated by international dealers, 65 percent of the contemporary galleries are from greater Asia, with 18 from Hong Kong alone.
Each year at this time Hong Kong’s social life goes into overdrive with gallery openings, charity auctions and champagne parties on rooftops, at poolsides and in parking garages.
New World’s Cheng, who hosted a dinner for 90 people Thursday, said he had invitations to 14 other events the same evening.
“That doesn’t even include the private bank requests,” said Cheng, who will try to squeeze in time to look at a dozen works he’s thinking of buying.
Elsewhere on Thursday, guests removed their Christian Louboutin heels to get into the party hosted by Zurich-based Bank Vontobel AG aboard the 27-meter-long (87 feet) Ferretti yacht organized by My Yacht Group founder Nicholas Frankl, who enforced a no-shoes policy.
Now in its second year, Art Basel Hong Kong follows hot on the heels of Frieze New York and a few weeks in advance of its namesake, Art Basel (in Switzerland). Next year, it moves to March in an attempt to space things out for art world jet-setters, but for now, we’ve rounded up some of the highlights from the fair’s 245 galleries.
The fair is split across two floors at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai. As well as hosting the usual suspects—David Zwirner, Hauser and Wirth, Gagosian, and Lehmann Maupin—there is a strong focus on galleries from Asia and the Asia Pacific region in the Insights section.
There’s a lot to see, but we’ve selected some works you definitely shouldn’t miss.
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If you were in L.A., Houston, or New York last summer, you probably saw one ofJames Turrell’s exhibitions. The artist tends to make enormous installations in unusual spaces—most notably Roden Crater in Arizona—which is tricky if you want something for your home. Thankfully Pace Gallery has come to your rescue with its set of three ukiyo-e woodcut prints, available for $20,000.
Vik Muniz is up to his usual trick of assembling images from nontraditional materials (he has previously used diamond dust, honey, rubbish from Brazil, and cigarette butts, among other things). For Ben Brown Fine Arts, he has produced Hong Kong Postcard, assembled from an collage of postcards from around the world that reproduces the Hong Kong skyline.
Japanese artist Mariko Mori has been making deeply meditative works for a long time but has shifted away from mainly video art to producing Zen-like sculptures. Sean Kelly has a collection of her works for sale, including the magnificent Renew III. Ommmm.
New York gallery owner James Cohan is showing British artist Yinka Shonibare’sBallerina with Viola. The sculpture features a faceless figure, wearing an outfit made from material that is popular in Africa, but tends to be made in Holland and sold in England, all of which reflect issues of colonialism and multiculturalism.
Glenn Kaino’sRooftop Studies at Kavi Gupta Gallery are based on photos the artist took in Cairo when he was preparing works for the Cario Biennial (which was postponed as a result of instability in the region). The landscapes have no people in them, and yet people are referenced through the technologies they use, all of which have been covered in gold leaf. In one work, it’s the satellite dishes; in another, the air conditioning units reveal a human presence.
Local gallery 10 Chancery Lane is showing a number of early works by Huang Rui. These early pieces are very minimal. The work Four Purples references quotes from different periods of Chinese history.
Ever wondered what becomes of those abandoned toys you sometimes see lying on the side of the road? Well if Adeel uz Zafar is around, he will pick them up, take them home, bandage them, and use them as models for his art. His works at Gandhara-Art are created by painting the vinyl white, adding a layer of black over that, and then engraving these mummified characters into the surface. They may look creepy, but the gallery owner confided that children love them.
As you enter the third floor, you are greeted by Forever, one of Ai Weiwei’s now well-recognized bicycle sculptures at German gallery, neugerriemschneider. Although Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China, the artist is still not allowed to travel there.
It’s always interesting to see what people love to photograph at fairs, and Taiwanese artist Hsi Shih-Pin’sSymbolic Steed of Memory at Soka Art seems to be one of the most popular works this year. The shiny surface is perfect for #artselfies.
One artist who really understands the selfie allure is Kyoung Tack Hong. The Korean artist’s large painting at Hakgojae Gallery is titled Reflection 1 and shows the artist posing with a camera phone in the various surfaces of the dazzling object.
Perennially hip Arndt Gallery has the perfect piece for the skater in your life. This pop art skateboard is titled Tempus Fugit (Latin for “time flies”) and was created by Indieguerillas, made up of Indonesian artist duo Santi Ariestyowanti and Dyatmiko “Miko” Bawono. The work sold early on to a European collector for $5,000.
More bright and shiny work is on view at Nanzuka Gallery, including The Uncrossable Upswept Bridge by Keiichi Tanaami. The 78-year-old Japanese artist is inspired by anime and pop culture. Although most of his early work is 2D, he made some sculptures in the 1980s and picked the medium up again in recent years.
Kaikai Kiki is showcasing works made by Takashi Murakami’s studio assistants. Mr. is one of their most well-known painters, having worked with Murakami for over 10 years. The artist champions “kawaii,” the Japanese style of work that’s “pretty” or “cute”. Also at the booth is Reminiscence by Ob, which was surrounded by real life Hong Kong school girls.
And this was a scene repeated at Galerie Perrotin, where more school children sat on the floor to sketch a large work by Mr. Perrotin. The Perrotin booth also has a number of Takashi Murakami works on view, including New Red Flowerball and DOB in Pure White Robe.
Lastly, an art fair wouldn’t be an art fair if it didn’t have a spot painting by Damien Hirst. Of course, White Cube obliged, but if you’re looking for something a little more interesting, check out Gilbert and George’sKillers, from their London Pictures series, based on newspaper headlines in a daily London newspaper.
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WALL STREET JOURNAL
Art Basel Sales: Fair Offers Shopping Spree for the Rich
‘Rem(a)inders’ by Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto at Art Basel Hong Kong
European Pressphoto Agency
A massive shopping spree for art is underway in Hong Kong.
The annual Art Basel Hong Kong fair opened its doors to an invite-only VIP list on Wednesday, and wealthy collectors splurged quickly as they perused the booths of 245 galleries at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.
Adrian Cheng, executive director of property developers New World Development Company, said he bought 15 art works on the first day alone. The voracious 34-year-old collector is the grandson of Hong Kong jewelry and real-estate tycoon Cheng Yu-tung.
Among Mr. Cheng’s purchases were a $60,000 sculpture by Adrian Villar Rojas from Marian Goodman gallery and a $180,000 painting installation by Carol Bove from David Zwirner. He also bought works by Toy Ziegler and Valerie Snobeck from Simon Lee gallery.
Galleries reported strong sales on day one. According to a release from the fair’s organizers, Soka Art from Taipei sold a landscape called “Red” by Chinese contemporary oil painter Hong Ling for $600,000.
New York gallery Hauser & Wirth sold three paintings by Chinese artist Zhang Enli to different private collectors from mainland China, the gallery said. Prices for the works ranged from $180,000 to $240,000.
Western works are also proving popular at the fair. At White Cube gallery, an Antony Gormley cast-iron sculpture titled “Rest II” was sold. It had an asking price of almost $420,000. The gallery said it had “exceptionally strong sales” from Asian collectors.
Among the seven works Lisson Gallery sold on the first day were two works by Jason Martin and three pieces by Anish Kapoor. Prices for the works ranged from $67,000 to US$167,000.
Art Basel Hong Kong continues today and ends on Sunday.
ArtBlitz LA had the opportunity to speak with Susanne Vielmetter, owner of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects prior to the gallery’s departure for Hong Kong Art Basel. Though it is the fair’s second rendition in Hong Kong this will be Susanne Vielmetter’s first time participating. We are eager to see how the LA gallery is received. Watch for our follow-up post featuring the gallery’s booth.
Tell me about your program at Hong Kong Art Basel. Who are you bringing?
We will have a focused presentation. We are taking two artists, Yunhee Min and Tam Van Tram, who have Asian roots, they’re not from Hong Kong specifically though. Yunhee Min is from Korea and Tam Van Tram is from Vietnam, although they both live and work in Los Angeles. This is our first time doing the fair, so we don’t know that much yet. It’s a little tricky to access how the audience will interpret our program, but we felt these artists offer a good point of entry. They both focus on painting and we are bringing relatively small work. Whenever we do a fair for the first time and don’t know the audience we bring smaller works because our artists might be completely new to the collectors and it’s always easier to make a first purchase of a smaller work. We also know these artists well, we’ve worked with them for a long time, but their work is still in a good price range because they are both early/ mid-career artists.
We are also bringing two new Mickalene Thomas paintings with higher prices. We feel confident that we will place these paintings, even if it’s here in LA, but we’d like to show them in Hong Kong to see if we can find new collectors and a new market for her work. So even if they don’t sell there we will place them, they’ll just go on a little vacation.
Why do you feel it was important to have a presence at Hong Kong this year?
We do the other Art Basel fairs, we’re doing the big Art Basel for the first time this year, but have been to Miami for many years. These fairs are very well run, the fair management goes out of their way to make it a good experience for the galleries and we felt it would be good for us to add this to our schedule and expand our client base. We have a positive attitude about it. It’s very difficult to gauge what the response will be, as I mentioned, and that response will determine whether we do it again, but Asia is an important market, I’m not sure it is for my gallery specifically, but we’re about to find out.
Is there anything you’re looking forward to either in, or outside the fair?
Food. Everyone says it’s exceptional. We don’t have enough time really to do other things. Which isn’t true for just this fair, we go straight to set up and we’re there to work. Not there for a vacation.
One of the most energetic gallerists bringing the art of Indonesia to the world stage, Berlin-based Matthias Arndt plans a new gallery in Singapore.
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Art Basel: Time Out International Picks
Posted: 14 May 2014
Time Out editors across the world give us their highlights of the global array of galleries gracing Art Basel this year…
HALL 1
Tolarno Galleries (1B19)
This 1967-founded gallery prides itself on unearthing and nurturing young Australian artists. Director Jan Minchin came from the more traditional background of the National Gallery of Victoria, at which she was curator of 20th century Australian art, but at Tolarno she has enjoyed working with rule breakers and subversive thinkers such as Bill Henson and Ben Quilty. Jenny Valentish, editor, Time Out Melbourne
Galleria Continua (1B26)
Galleria Continua, an Italian gallery with outposts in Italy, France and China, is a heavyweight among Beijing galleries. It has featured many high profile artists from China and abroad: Ai Weiwei, Qiu Zhijie and Anish Kapoor are just a few names from a very long list. Tom Baxter, art editor, Time Out Beijing
Yamamoto Gendai (1B30)
This contemporary gallery in Tokyo specifically chooses artists that ‘cross the border of existing art genres’, often hosting live and experimental exhibitions. Their collection of artists at Basel this year covers a wide range of media including the delicate etchings of Etsuko Fukaya, the lighter-than-air sculptures of Motohiko Odani and the puzzle-like paintings of Kei Imazu. Annemarie Luck, deputy editor, Time Out Tokyo
Scai the Bathhouse (1D14)
With a reputation for introducing avant-garde Japanese artists to the world and for helping international artists to establish a presence in Japan, Scai the Bathhouse wonderfully combines traditional and contemporary artworks and installations. They’ve curated a lineup of 10 artists for Art Basel, including renowned Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor and video/photographic artist Mariko Mori. Annemarie Luck, deputy editor, Time Out Tokyo
Rhona Hoffman Gallery (1B10)
This Chicago gallery celebrates Art Basel by featuring the work of Hong Kong-based artist Adrian Wong. The exhibition also includes historical artworks by Sol LeWitt, Gordon Matta-Clark and Fred Sandback. Laura Baginski, editor, Time Out Chicago
Lee Wen: Ping Pong Go-Round at Encounters
iPreciation (1C18)
This Singapore contemporary fine arts gallery represents a range of both prominent and promising artists around Asia, including multidisciplinary Singaporean artist Lee Wen, who is perhaps best known for his Yellow Man series. Works on show at the booth were created between 1992 and 2014, and include a good range of Wen’s performance pieces, installations, paintings and drawings. Gwen Pew, arts editor, Time Out Singapore
Kavi Gupta Gallery (1D18)
Specialising in the exhibition of emerging and mid-career artists, Kavi Gupta displays an exciting range of contemporary multimedia work. Highlights include Roxy Paine’s intriguing acrylic sculpture, Tavares Strachan’s encyclopaedic collage and Glenn Akiro Kaino’s photography adorned with gold leaf. Laura Baginski, editor, Time Out Chicago
Thaddaeus Ropac (1D27)
With two major white cubes in Paris and its suburbs, Thaddaeus Ropac is a reliable source of top-drawer high-profile stuff. The francophile Austrian gallery owner is bringing big fish to Hong Kong this year, including mammoth works by Yan Peiming and Georg Baselitz, some of Alex Katz’s paintings and hybrid organic sculptures by Not Vital. Tania Brimson, art editor, Time Out Paris
Balice Hertling (1D30)
Belleville, Paris’s East End, has become home to some of the city’s most exciting art galleries over the past few years and, among them, Balice Hertling is perhaps one of the most adventurous. This year at Art Basel, look out for fresh work from three young multimedia artists: Sam Falls, Isabelle Cornano and Eloise Hawser. Tania Brimson, art editor, Time Out Paris
Magician Space (1D33)
Magician Space is a tiny gallery in the middle of Beijing’s super-sized 798 Art District. It has a strong commitment to conceptual art and installations, as well as a penchant for radical usage of its two small exhibition rooms. Tom Baxter, art editor, Time Out Beijing
Michael Hoppen Gallery (1D32)
Michael Hoppen Gallery has operated out of its quaint Chelsea space for more than two decades, becoming an essential port of call for anyone in search of contemporary and classic 20th century photography. Hoppen brings historical work to Hong Kong with a display dedicated to the pre-eminent 20th-century British photographer Bill Brandt. Martin Coomer, visual arts editor, Time Out London
Anna Schwartz Gallery (3C03)
The imposing Anna Schwartz opened her Melbourne gallery in 1986 and has represented some of Australia’s most respected contemporary artists, including Callum Morton, Shaun Gladwell and Mike Parr. Jenny Valentish, editor, Time Out Melbourne
Blum and Poe (3D04)
The massive two-storied Los Angeles space of Blum and Poe is almost museum-like in its curation of contemporary pieces from the likes of Yoshitomo Nara and Chiho Aoshima. They bring Takashi Murakami as their showcase artist this year. Ramona Saviss, managing editor, Time Out Los Angeles
Victoria Miro (3D05)
By the time you arrive at Victoria Miro’s stand at the fair, you will already have walked past work by gallery-represented artists Elmgreen & Dragset. This isn’t the first time the Scandinavian duo has shown their VIP door, titled But I’m on the Guest List Too! – it graced the lawn outside Frieze London 2013. But it’s a good art joke worth repeating. Miro will be showing work by her international roster of artists, including Chris Ofili’s stripped back, luminous new paintings. Martin Coomer, visual arts editor, Time Out London
OMR Gallery (3C11)
Founded in 1983 by couple Patricia Ortiz Monasterio and Jaime Riestra, OMR has become one of the most prestigious galleries in Mexico by promoting new trends in contemporary art, both Mexican and foreign artists, and also a variety of media and disciplines. Mariana Guillén, art editor, Time Out Mexico
Sun Xun: 鯨邦是人間樂土 – Jing Bang is a Heaven, 2013 (STPI)
STPI (3C15)
This 14-year-old Singapore institute hosts residencies and exhibitions to help develop and showcase works by some of the biggest names in the genre. At Art Basel this year, viewers are treated to works by Teppei Kaneuji, Haegue Yang and Han Sai Por. Be sure to keep your eye out for Sun Xun’s installation Jing Bang: A Country Based on Whale – he sets up a new country where visitors can purchase citizenship packs or visas. Gwen Pew, arts editor, Time Out Singapore
Poligrafa Obra Gràfica (3C21)
Barcelona’s Poligrafa Obra Gràfica opened its doors in 1960 as a workshop, soon becoming a place where artists such as Joan Miró, Josep Guinovart and Hernández Pijoan attended to develop their projects. At Art Basel, they show the disassembled and abstract furniture of Wang Huaiqing, pop projects by Nelson Leirner and the architectural work of Garth Weiser. Eugènia Sendra, editor, Time Out Barcelona
Art Basel satellite events
Posted: 14 May 2014
All the fun of the fair – but not at the fair. Make sure to venture outside Art Basel for these simultaneously occurring arts satellite events. By Laurel Chor
α (alpha) pulse by Carsten Nicolai
ICC (best viewed from Tamar Park, Sun Yat Sen Memorial Park and the terrace on Podium 3 and 4 of the IFC mall); May 15-17; artbasel.com. 8.30pm-9.20pm. Free.
German sound artist Carsten Nicolai certainly doesn’t lack ambition, what with his next installation taking up the entire façade of Hong Kong’s tallest tower. A commission by Art Basel and Davidoff, Nicolai’s installation, which is inspired by scientific research on neural responses to pulsing light sources, sends light up and down the ICC tower. A downloadable app provides audio to the installation. We hope there won’t be any unintended consequences but a certain scene from Men in Black III, when the Empire State Building is revealed to be a giant memory-erasing neuralyser, comes to mind.
This is the largest edition of the semi-annual Asia Contemporary Art Show yet, with over 3,000 paintings, sculptures, limited editions and photographs coming from 100 plus galleries representing 19 different countries. Emerging artists from places like Brazil, Vietnam and Russia are featured alongside art luminaries Andy Warhol, Banksy and Qiu Sheng Xian. If you can’t make this fair, do not despair – the next one is in October.
Art Basel is a show of global proportions with artwork and collectors flying in left and right to our little corner of the world. But Asia Week makes sure that art from our own continent gets the showcasing it deserves with Asia-focused exhibitions, lectures, book launches and gallery tours scheduled over 10 days. With Asia Week collaborating with the International Antiques Fair, art is represented not only from all regions of Asia, but also from all epochs.
Chai Wan is marked by grit, heavy-duty machinery and large, non-descript buildings. But nestled in ex-industrial spaces across the area are creatives from all fields, and their close proximity to each other often facilitates unusual collaborations. To celebrate this, Chai Wan Mei shows off its vast pool of talent with art exhibitions, concerts, fashion and design showcases, workshops and pop-up installations. Don’t miss the V Art Project, which uses shipping containers as galleries for pop-up exhibitions with open-air screenings of videos as well. The Asia debut of a special dance performance by Ryan McNamara (for our interview with him, check
Conversations and Salon at Art Basel
HKCEC, 1 Expo Dr, Wan Chai; May 15-17; artbasel.com. Free.
Art Basel offers not only the world’s best art for sale, but also hosts a series of events for visitors to further their artistic education and gain a wider understanding of the global arts landscape. The morning Conversation series is more academic, with art professionals like M+ curator Aric Chen and Sydney Biennale artistic director Juliana Engbergs offering an insider’s view on a variety of disciplines and topics. Meanwhile, the afternoon Salons are more informal, ranging from screenings of animation and short films to a panel discussion on Vietnamese art.
Hong Kong Arts Centre Open House
2 Harbour Rd, Wan Chai; Sat May 17, 10am-10pm; hkac.org.hk. Free.
The Hong Kong Arts Centre is the home to many major cultural institutions such as the Goethe-Institut, the Hong Kong Arts School and the Hong Kong Music Centre. All open their doors to the public on May 17 with exhibits, workshops and events that include the launch for William Lim’s book The No Colors, about his collection of Hong Kong art. A street music series of outdoor concerts and a film festival featuring the films of the late Cantonese opera singer Hung Sin-nui are also not to be missed, and Hong Kong singer-songwriter and pop sensation Chet Lam performs for five nights at the Shouson Theatre. There are also guided cultural and architectural tours in the building itself and in the surrounding Wan Chai neighbourhood, where many outdoor art pieces are installed for public appreciation. Make sure to hop on the Art Bus, a free shuttle bringing visitors from the Convention Centre to the less-visited art hubs of Wan Chai, Tsim Sha Tsui, To Kwa Wan, Kwun Tong and North Point. A comprehensive guide is available.
HKWALL(s)
Around Blake Garden, Sheung Wan; Until May 19; hkwalls.org. Free.
Going against the gallery formula, new initiative HKWALL(s) aims to paint up the best canvasses available in Hong Kong: the walls. The paint is still drying at the project’s launch this May, perhaps a fitting metaphor for the nascent state of street art in Hong Kong. Artists paint on the large, usually neglected, exterior walls of galleries and businesses around Blake Garden in Sheung Wan such as Tai Ping Shan Street and Square Street. A neighbourhood block party with live music and drinks is in the pipeline for Sunday, but make sure you check the website for the latest info.
Intelligence Squared Debate:
“Asia Should House Its Poor Before It Houses Its Art”
It’s well known that Hong Kong’s cage homes are a deep shame to our otherwise glitzy city, and also a fact that negative comments about our dearth of highbrow culture are still rolling in. With Hong Kong’s ever-shrinking space, what the government decides to do with every spare square centimetre – whether it’s spent on public housing or an art museum – is everyone’s business. As always, Intelligence Squared chooses a timely topic for thought leaders to duke it out in the debating ring discussing whether ‘the funding of museums is best left to private patrons’. West Kowloon Cultural District CEO Michael Lynch moderates, with debaters including SCMP financial journalist Jake van der Kamp and Jessica Morgan, the daskalopoulos curator of international art at the Tate Modern.
Mapping Asia and Hong Kong Art Quiz by Asia Art Archive
AAA, 11/F, 233 Hollywood Rd, Sheung Wan and Rm N101B, HKCEC;
exhibition and talks: May 15-17; quiz: Sat May 17, 2pm-4pm; aaa.org.hk/HKArtQuiz. Free.
The tremendous Mapping Asia project launches at Asia Art Archive – the research uses a multidisciplinary approach to explore Asian geographical boundaries with academic, historical and artistic references. Meanwhile, at the Convention Centre, Asia Art Archive’s artists-in-residence pair C&G reveal their latest research in the form of an art quiz. Listen and learn – four teams comprising of artists, art professionals and students compete in a live game show-style trivia game on Hong Kong art history. AAA also hosts an ‘Open Platform’ series at their Art Basel booth that brings together art professionals to discuss the art world at large as it stands today.
Market Forces Exhibition and Symposium
by Osage Art Foundation and CityU
Exhibit: 4/F, 20 Hing Yip St, Kwun Tong and 18/F, AC3 Bldg, City U, Kowloon Tong; May 16-Jun 30. Free. Symposium: Wong Cheung Lo Hui Yuet Hall, 5/F, AC3 Bldg, City U, Kowloon Tong; Sat May 17, 2pm-6pm; oaf.cc. Free.
The city’s number of high-end galleries is growing every year, in tandem with the growth of the highly commercial nature of art in Hong Kong. Osage Gallery’s non-profit foundation and City University join forces to offer a non-commercial discourse to explore and break down this phenomenon. Visit an exhibition of concept and object-based art from Asian artists and an open symposium featuring arts professionals and academics like Leeza Ahmady, director of the Asian Contemporary Art Week at Asia Society, and Charles Merewether, former director of the Singapore Institute of Contemporary Arts, discussing the blurred lines between aesthetic and market values in Asian art production through various lenses.
Uli Sigg, ‘China’s Art Missionary’:
Short Film Premiere and Book Launch
At first, Swiss media executive Uli Sigg may seem like an unlikely candidate to be a celebrated collector of Chinese art, but he actually has one of the largest and most important collections of Chinese art in the world. His collection, most of which he donated to our very own M+ last year, is currently housed in a 600-year-old Swiss castle. Independent arts writer and first-time filmmaker Patricia Chen is premiering a short film and launching her book, both about Sigg, at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. Registration is mandatory.
Wong Chuk Hang, an area once dominated by industrial factories, but now a burgeoning arts hub, welcomes visitors to discover the neighbourhood. Thirteen galleries and 12 eateries open their doors, and with a free shuttle bus available, there really is no excuse not to visit. Start at Spring Workshop, where the works of Christoduolos Panayiotou are shown.
Talking Art Basel with…
Posted: 14 May 2014
Magnus Renfrew, director Asia
On Art Basel Hong Kong 2014:
“One of the new developments for this year was the film sector, and we really felt that this was a very appropriate development for the Hong Kong and Asia audience, because of HK’s very established relationship with film. We made some first steps last year in terms of trying to bring art out of the halls and into the public domain, so this year we have Carsten Nicolai’s commissioned work [at ICC]. We’ve also been working with local partners, local galleries, the Hong Kong Art Gallery Association and non-profit institutions, and there’s over 150 different events during the week of the fair. So we’re really able to showcase the very best of what’s happening in Hong Kong both outside of the halls and inside of the halls. And I think that’s a big contribution that we can make and it’s a contribution that we’re keen to make. And that also has longevity beyond the time of the fair. There are many relationships that start in Hong Kong, and many discoveries that happen in Hong Kong that lead on to other things happening in other times of the year or in the future.”
Li Zhenhua, curator Film
On the Film sector:
“Showcasing the playful and the beautiful is the main concern of the Film sector. I have created six categories to group the selected works, and one highlight category is ‘action’, which incorporates issues of activism with a tinge of humour.
To make this new sector open and free is an important step for Art Basel Hong Kong, as art belongs to the people. It is for everyone instead of only a particular group of people, and this is especially true when art, film and video are combined – they should reach more people and go public.
I have always been very interested in the film industry and experience in Hong Kong, so the programme is thus dedicated to Hong Kong first, then to the art world interested in video art history and finally to the international audience.”
The Film sector is at… Hong Kong Arts Centre, May 15-17, various times.
Yuko Hasegawa, curator Encounters
On the Encounters sector:
“Material and social relationships are undergoing a process of complicated diversification due to the fluidity of globalisation and the formation of a new way of relating through social media. Change in the social landscape constitutes miscommunication and cultural breakdown.
Encounters comprises of works that critically reflect this situation, whether proposing to engage these fundamental shifts, or trying to resist them. This can be seen in Homeaway, a work by Tobias Rehberger, who recreates a favourite Frankfurt bar as an environmental installation. Michael Lin’s work Point converts a meeting place into a sculpture that visitors can climb, thus reversing the relationship between the viewer and the viewed.
The second means of thematic expression is to add multi-layered meaning to the memory of objects and the nature of material. For instance, in her work Thousand, Yeesookyung combines fragments of old, broken ceramics to create and regenerate entirely new and different objects. Alternatively, there are artists who discover strong messages within the material itself, as can be seen in Aiko Miyanaga’s naphthalene sculpture, Letter.”
The Encounters sector is at… E1-17, Halls 1 & 3.
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BUSINESSWEEK
Bloomberg News
Art Basel Beckons Billionaires With $10,000 Passports, Hirst (1)
By Frederik Balfour May 14, 2014
Melissa Chiu, director of the Asia Society Museum in New York, left, and Japanese artist Takashi Murakami who was honored at an Asia Society Gala in Hong Kong on May 12. Photographer: Frederik Balfour/Bloomberg
Inside Art Basel Hong Kong at the city’s convention center there’s a booth where guests can apply for instant citizenship to the Republic of Jing Bang.
For $10,000 you can obtain a passport, an aluminum “Citizenship Box” briefcase and national flag from Jing Bang, an ephemeral state created for the fair by Chinese artist Sun Xun, whose installation is a satirical comment on art, commerce and nationhood.
The art world elite including Indonesian collector Budi Tek, New World Group scion Adrian Cheng and Canyon Capital Advisors co-chairman Mitchell Julis didn’t need any fictional travel documents to converge on Hong Kong, where more than $1 billion worth of art is for sale, according to fair insurer AXA ART.
Wealthy collectors snapped up a everything from a $10,000 painting by emerging Chinese artist Yuan Yuan to an 800,000 pounds ($1.3 million) for a scalpel blade painting by Damien Hirst.
Art Week
Anchoring what is informally known as Hong Kong art week, Art Basel opens to the public tomorrow. VIPs got a chance to preview the 245 galleries from 39 countries exhibiting today, featuring primarily contemporary art.
Every year at this time Hong Kong’s social life goes into overdrive with a whirlwind of more than 25 gallery openings, charity art auctions, debates and champagne-fueled parties held on warehouse rooftops, at poolsides and parking garages.
“It’s like the Rugby Sevens for the Hong Kong arts and cultural set,” said Alice Mong, executive director of Asia Society Hong Kong, which hosted a gala dinner for 400 people on Monday night honoring Asian artists Zhang Xiaogang, Bharti Kher, Takashi Murakami and Liu Guosong.
Launched as Art HK in 2008, the fair was re-branded Art Basel Hong Kong last year after the owners of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach purchased a majority stake in 2012 and it is now a major stop on the international art circuit. About half the exhibitors have space in Asia and Asia-Pacific, a deliberate decision to keep the fair’s original regional flavor.
Buying Spree
Half-way through the VIP preview today New World’s Cheng, followed by a staff of four, had bought 12 works and was on the hunt for more. “The good thing about having a team is you buy something and they negotiate” he said while posing beside a Carol Bove painting he bought from David Zwirner.
Zwirner also brought oil-on-canvas works by 28-year-old Oscar Murillo, an emerging artist who catapulted from relative obscurity three years ago to New York’s latest wunderkind. The Colombia-born artist, best-known for his abstract works, has seen his auction prices surge as much as 5,600 percent in two years as a result of frenzied art flipping.
By mid-afternoon of the preview the gallery had sold three paintings ranging from $75,000 to $180,000 to collectors from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Overwhelming Response
“We knew there was interest and he’s newsworthy and they know about his auction prices,” senior partner Angela Choon said about Murillo. “But we didn’t expect the response to be this overwhelming.”
Returning to Hong Kong for the fifth year, New York-based Paul Kasmin gallery is featuring both Western and Asian works to take advantage of buyers’ increasing willingness to stray outside their comfort zones.
“Art Basel has brought more Europeans and Americans to Hong Kong and Asian collectors are becoming more interested in purchasing western art,” said gallery director Nicholas Olney.
Kasmin sold a newly commissioned work by Indonesia’s best-selling contemporary artist, I Nyoman Masriadi, for $350,000 at the VIP opening and is selling a polished bronze modernist bust by Constantin Brancusi and photographs by David LaChapelle.
Balinese Beauties
The works of Ashley Bickerton, who quit New York after 12 years to move to Bali in 1993, provide a contemporary twist on Gauguin’s exoticism. A painting of two topless women with silver bodies astride a scooter, garlands in their dreadlocks, is selling for $190,000 by Singapore-based Gajah Gallery. Another work by the artist sold for $160,000 at the preview.
First-time exhibitor Hannah Barry gallery from London is bringing the work of 27-year-old U.K. artist James Capper in a solo show featuring a hydraulic creature able to claw its way on giant steel talons. Measuring 2 meters (6.5 feet) long, one meter wide and 1.6 meters high, it costs 40,000 pounds.
Whale State
Citizenship to Sun’s “Jing Bang: A Country Based on Whale” is limited to 100 people, though visas can be purchased for $30 each at the fair.
Describing his one-party state (administered by the Magician’s Party), which has a planned life span of just six weeks, Sun writes “If history is a big lie, then the Republic of Jing Bang uses one lie to intercept another lie.” The project is jointly presented by the Singapore Tyler Print Institute and ShanghArt gallery. Fifty passports sold during the VIP preview, prompting Sun to increase the citizenship price to $13,000.
Collectors on more modest budgets can head over to the Conrad Hotel for the Asia Contemporary Art Show where five floors of guest rooms are transformed into temporary gallery spaces featuring emerging artists from 18 countries from May 16 to 18. VIPs get an advance preview tomorrow.
UBS AG (UBSN), which also sponsors Art Basel and Art Basel Miami, has added the Hong Kong fair for the first time this year. “Our private banking clients include people interested in fine art, so it’s a natural fit,” said Chi-Won Yoon, Chief Executive Officer of UBS Group Asia Pacific.
Marble Dust
Local galleries are taking advantage of the influx of deep-pocketed visitors this week to launch new shows. Blindspot Gallery, located in the burgeoning art district of Wong Chuk Hang overlooking the city’s Aberdeen harbor, is showing London-based photographer Nadav Kander’s latest works that feature nudes of sitters covered in marble dust that evoke Michelangelo and Lucien Freud.
Pace Gallery opens its Hong Kong space with oil-on-paper works by Zhang Xiaogang in the heart of downtown on the 15th floor of the Entertainment Building. Next door Antwerp, Belgium-based Axel Vervoordt Gallery is also having its inaugural show with Ghanian artist El Anatsui, who employs youths to weave work with discarded liquor caps and fastenings to create tapestries selling for $1 million a piece.
Blood Bags
Those looking for a break from the hustle of the fairs can seek refuge in another highrise. Hong Kong artist Nadim Abbas has transformed vacant office space on the 17th floor of Soundwill Plaza II in Causeway Bay into a post-apocalyptic bunker-like bar complete with sandbags. In collaboration with Absolut Vodka it will feature themed concoctions including “2666: A Space Cocktail” and a beetroot drink served in a blood bag.
David Zwirner is pleased to participate in Art Basel in Hong Kong (Booth 1C02). 2014 marks the fourth consecutive year the gallery will be at this fair.
Highlights include works made especially for the fair by Oscar Murillo, who will be in attendance at the fair. A Mercantile Novel, the artist’s debut show at David Zwirner, re-creates a chocolate-making factory inside the gallery (519 West 19th Street, New York; on view through June 14).
Also exhibited will be a major work by Donald Judd, one of the most significant American artists of the postwar period. Untitled (Bernstein 90-01), 1990, exemplifies one of the artist’s favored configurations—the stack. Executed in black anodized aluminum with clear Plexiglas, this work is comprised of ten wall-mounted units that are evenly spaced from floor to ceiling. A plank sculpture by John McCracken, another leader of American Minimalism and whose estate the gallery represents, will also be shown.
Other highlights include paintings by Michaël Borremans, whose major retrospective is now on view at Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Carol Bove, whose critically acclaimed presentation of seven new sculptures on New York’s High Line at the Rail Yards recently ended its year-long run; Neo Rauch who will have a show at David Zwirner, New York this fall; and a new painting by Yayoi Kusama, whose first exhibition at David Zwirner, New York in 2013 attracted tens of thousands of visitors.
Also featured will be works on paper by Marlene Dumas, whose museum survey, The Image as Burden, comprising over one hundred drawings and paintings from private and museum collections throughout the world, will open in September at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. The show will travel to Tate Modern, London and Fondation Beyeler, Basel in 2015.
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MUTUAL ART
Art Basel Hong Kong: A Portal to the Asian Market
On the heels of Frieze New York, the art world is not given a chance to breathe as Art Basel Hong Kong launches its second edition this week. As more and more art fairs pop up across the world, each attempts to steal the global art market’s focus with a signature splash. Art Basel Hong Kong already has a strong hold by being a new fair in the mega art capital, but it has also called attention to itself with two special projects that extend the fair well beyond its walls, and across Victoria Harbor. Famed British artist Tracey Emin and German artist Carsten Nicolai have created larger-than-life light installations that will occupy two soaring buildings in Kowloon – visible from not only the fair, but most parts of the city around the waterfront. Art Basel Hong Kong is also significant, in that it highlights the art from the continent, with over half of its 245 exhibiting galleries having a base in the Asia-Pacific region, and 24 galleries from Hong Kong proper. The fair will wow with their “Encounters” section, curated by Yuko Hasegawa, featuring 17 oversized sculptural experiences. Since Hong Kong has long-standing roots in the film industry, the fair has responded with a new section devoted to film that creates a relationship with locals, and was carefully curated by Asian digital art expert Li Zhenzhua . The 2014 Art Basel Hong Kong fair not only presents some of the world’s leading galleries and artists, but also serves as a portal to the sophisticated and thriving Asian art world.
Duane Hanson, Chinese Student, 1989. Courtesy of Van de Weghe.
Art Basel brought its brand to Hong Kong last year giving international galleries a platform in the growing economy and art collector base in the city known as being the gateway between the East and West. The cross-cultural exchange brings six sectors of exciting programming to the fair, including 170 international exhibitors in Galleries, site specific commissions from regional artists in Insights , emerging artists in Discoveries, large scale works in Encounters, important films about artists in Film and international publications in Magazines that includes a Salon series of lectures and discussions.
Tracey Emin, My Heart Is With You Always, 2014. Courtesy of The Peninsula Hotel Hong Kong.
But echoing beyond the pavilion and weaving the fair within the fabric of the city are the projects by Tracey Emin and Carsten Nicolai that light up the shores of the Kowloon district. Emin’s piece has already begun to light up the city, in a collaboration with the 30-story Peninsula Hotel, My Heart Is With You Always features her signature handwriting in neon on the side of the façade from 7pm to midnight each night for 10 days. With an opening that coincides with the opening of the fair, Nicolai’s piece will take over the tallest building in the city, the International Commerce Center. For Alpha Pulse, which was commissioned by Art Basel Hong Kong, Nicolai will reprogram the 118-story building’s existing lighting system to pulse rhythmically at a relaxing, low frequency for two hours over three nights. The light installation will be accompanied by a soundtrack that visitors can access using a smart phone app that will synchronize the soundtrack along with the light pulsations, activated through their phone’s camera.
Carsten Nicolai, a (alpha) pulse, 2014. Courtesy of Galerie EIGEN + ART and The Pace Gallery.
The fair is also attempting to engage the flavor of Hong Kong with the newly created film program, bringing in the founder and director of Beijing Art Lab, Li Zhenhua, as the expert curator. Li has chosen 49 works by 41 artists from a pool of 140 applicants, which he has organized into six themes – “Urban Life”, “Beautiful Visuals”, “Animation”, “Action”, “Performance” and “Fiction Mix.” In order to make the chosen films more accessible to the visiting audience, they are all under 20 minutes, and the roster includes 29 Asian-Pacific artists.
Marta Chilindron, Cube 48 Orange, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Cecilia de Torres.
Lee Wen, Ping Pong Go-Round, 2013. Courtesy of iPreciation Gallery.
The Encounters section, curated for the second year by Yuko Hasegawa, spreads over 60 square meters of exhibition space, and is meant to be truly experiential. Of the 17 oversized pieces, some are interactive, inviting visitors to unfold Marta Chilindron’s Cube 48 Orange, or play an infinite ping pong game on Lee Wen’s Ping Pong Go-Round. Sun Xun plays on the increasing role of globalization with an immigration office for the fictional country of Jing Bang, where fair goers can interact with performers and apply for citizenship. Visitors can become performers themselves for Yu Cheng-Ta’s The Letters (Live Performance). Cheng-Ta has taken something that anyone with an email account can relate to – the often ridiculous spam email. Visitors are invited to read out loud advance-fee fraud spam emails sent to Cheng-Ta while being videotaped. The videos will then be replayed between performances, turning the visitor into art. Rebecca Baumann’s mesmerizing Automated Color Field (Variation V) is like a breathing Pantone color chart, with a motorized grid of colors that flip from one to the next, calmly clicking through an ever changing mosaic of color.
Rebecca Baumann, Automated Color Field (Variation V), 2014. Courtesy of Starkwhite.
Galleries specifically from the Asia-Pacific region spanning from Turkey to New Zealand, and to the Middle East and India make up the Insights section, which also features art-historic, solo and two or three person shows by artists reigning from these areas. This section is meant to bring artists from these regions under the international nose. Jeddah-based Athr Gallery will present a solo booth of Ahmed Mater, Saudi Arabia’s most known artist, whose work is inspired by a fusion of his medical background with his view on modern urbanized society. Hong Kong’s Koru Contemporary Art will take the art-historic route, showcasing a beautiful collection of vintage photographs of Hong Kong by Brian Brake.
Ahmed Mater, Abraaj Al Bait Towers, 2012. Courtesy of Athr Gallery.
Brian Brake, The Great Wall, Chuyun Kuan, North Beijing, 1957. Courtesy of Koru Contemporary Art.
A small lecture program will focus on bridging the gap of the global art world and collecting internationally. Two out of the three talks are in English, literally showing the influence of globalization in the art world. The Salon series is more lax, bringing together several talks per day in English, Mandarin and Japanese, such as artist talks (including Carsten Nicolai), topics such as collecting cross culturally and others of interest to those local to Hong Kong.
Salon talk with Hans van Dijk: Dialogues in the Development of Contemporary Art in China. Courtesy of Thomas Fuesser.
Although the special programming may seem to trump the main fair, Art Basel Hong Kong invites the world’s best galleries to exhibit, including Lehmann Maupin, 303 Gallery, Marian Goodman, Van de Weghe, Zach Feuer and Kavi Gupta. Despite the popularization of the art fair as a selling tool around the world, Art Basel Hong Kong has shown that it has a strong investment in not only fueling the art market economy in Hong Kong, but also educating collectors and encouraging a cross-cultural conversation between the thriving Asian metropolis and the globalized market.
Doug Aitken, You/You, 2012. Courtesy of 303 Gallery.
Jennifer Steinkamp, Bouquet1, 2013. Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin.
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Art Basel Hong Kong Opens with Increasing Asian Focus
2014-05-14 21:19:26 CRIENGLISH.com Web Editor: Guo
The booths of art magazines and institutions at Art Basel Hong Kong. [Photo: CRIENGLISH.com]
The second Art Basel Hong Kong opens at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center on Wednsday May 14, which will open to public from May 15 to 18.
The show presents 245 pieces of the world’s leading galleries, and has attracted more than 3,000 artists, ranging from young emerging artists to the Modern masters from both Asia and across the world.
Art Basel Hong Kong��s debut last year attracted 60,000 visitors. The international art fair made Hong Kong its third location after its original show in Switzerland and Miami Beach in the US.
Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, the Chief Secretary for Administration of Hong Kong Government, delivers a speech Wednsday May 14, 2014, at the opening ceremony of Art Basel Hong Kong. [Photo: CRIENGLISH.com]
Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor communicates with Chinese artist Wu Jian��an about his works. [Photo: CRIENGLISH.com]
Visitors view art exhibits at Art Basel Hong Kong. [Photo: CRIENGLISH.com]
Art Basel Hong Kong is a grand fair for art lovers and art insiders. [Photo: CRIENGLISH.com
An art piece of Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. [Photo: CRIENGLISH.com]
An art piece on display at Art Basel Hong Kong. [Photo: CRIENGLISH.com]
The art works by Chinese oil painting master Chen Yifei. [Photo: CRIENGLISH.com]
Sculptures are on display at Art Basel Hong Kong. [Photo: CRIENGLISH.com]
The clocks represent that Art Basel has been held in three places around the world annually. [Photo: CRIENGLISH.com]
Click to see the next picture
Brochures and books of art works displayed at Art Basel Hong Kong. [Photo: CRIENGLISH.com]
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SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
News›Hong Kong
A bigger, better Basel: Art fair returns to Hong Kong with strong local focus
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 14 May, 2014, 11:53am
UPDATED : Wednesday, 14 May, 2014, 12:27pm
Sijia Jiang
An exhibitor (left) and a worker install artworks at a booth of the Art Basel venue in Hong Kong. Photo: AFP
Art Basel Hong Kong will overwhelm the city with more than 100 art events starting on Thursday but its impact on the local art scene will go well beyond the four-day event, industry insiders say.
Aficionados from around the world are flocking to the city as preparations for dozens of Basel art events get underway.
“One of the things we’ve been most proud about the fair has been its ability to put the spotlight to what’s happening in Hong Kong,” says Magnus Renfrew, director of Art Basel Asia.
Andy Warhol’s Reigning Queen (Royal Edition) Queen Elizabeth 11 at the Asia Contemporary Art Show. The show is returning after last year’s debut that attracted 60,000 visitors. The international art fair made Hong Kong its third show location after its original in Switzerland and Miami Beach in the US when it acquired a 60 per cent ownership stake in Art HK in 2011.
Art Basel’s global director Marc Spiegler said, “There is a much stronger local scene to engage with in Hong Kong compared to Basel or Miami.”
Renfrew said, “In comparison, in Basel we had five or six galleries from Basel and at Miami Beach only two from Miami Beach. That serves as a real testament to the strength of the local gallery scene in Hong Kong.”
“The Guggenheim curators are here, the Tate curators are here, and the Australian museums are coming,” said Katie de Tilly, co-president of the Hong Kong Art Gallery Association. “Art Basel Hong Kong has benefited Hong Kong as a city by bringing more attention to arts and culture.” she said.
Though the tour is a Fotanian initiative rather than an Art Basel invention, Fotanian artist Simone Boon said she had benefited from last year’s tour in collaboration with Art Basel, as her encounter with the owner of Ning Space in Beijing’s 798 art zone during the tour resulted in an exhibition there that just took place in April.
Chow Chung-fai, local artist and chairman of the Fotanian Art Village, compared attending Art Basel and exploring the rest of the city’s art scene to “seeing the end products” versus “seeing where art actually happens”. He said it is a good thing that Hongkongers have a chance to appreciate top notch art from around the world in the three days during Art Basel, “But the development of our art scene is not dependent on the number of local artists that make it to the fair, but on a comprehensive blueprint supporting arts development on a policy level.”“Space Painting by Zhang Enli” with mainland artist Zhang Enli for Art Basel week, Cosco Tower, Grand Millennium Plaza, Sheung Wan. Photo: Dickson Lee
As a centerpiece of this year’s show, Berlin-based artist Carsten Nicolai will take over the city’s tallest building, the 484-metre International Commerce Centre in Kowloon, with his dazzling light installation for three nights. With that described by Renfrew as a visual impact of Art Basel on Hong Kong that is hard to miss, the long-term impact of the show will hopefully be just as remarkable.
‘By the River Neva in St Petersburg’ (2014) by Wang Xingwei, at Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne
The Art Basel Hong Kong fair seems to be having the same effect on the former British colony as Frieze has had on London: triggering a whole swathe of openings and art initiatives.
Just a few years ago the Pedder Building in Central, now the beating heart of the top-end art trade, housed one gallery, alongside cashmere shops and offices. Last year, the joint opening night for the six art dealers now installed in it was so mobbed that guests had to be corralled into a lengthy queue to get in.
This year’s “Art Basel Hong Kong week” kicks off on May 13 with, in Pedder, openings of the Rothko-esque Chinese painter Su Xiaobai at Pearl Lam; Miquel Barceló at Ben Brown; Toby Ziegler at Simon Lee; Hernan Bas at Lehmann Maupin; Giacometti at Gagosian; and Gu Wenda at Hanart TZ. In the nearby Entertainment Building, Pace is showing Zhang Xiaogang, and Axel Vervoordt unveils its new premises with El Anatsui. A hop, skip and jump away, White Cube offers Mark Bradford, while Perrotin, in its breathtaking gallery on an upper floor, shows Jean-Michel Othoniel and Ryan McGinley.
‘Her permanent mark on him’ (2014) by Melora Kuhn, at Galerie Eigen + Art
These are the heavyweight galleries, but smaller ones are popping up everywhere in grittier industrial districts (the rents in Central are sky-high) – and present a chance to see what’s happening on the ground in the territory. On May 15, the Wong Chuk Hang Art Night includes Blindspot and Pékin Fine Arts, and in the Foton area there are 200 artists’ studios to be visited. The Chai Wan Mei festival on May 16 and 17 brings together 60 artists and 40 studios for a weekend of exhibitions, performances, installations and workshops. And not to miss: the always excellent non-profit Para Site – with an intriguing Sex in Hong Kong show – and Asia Society’s exhibition of Xu Bing in its Admiralty building, a former explosives store. Bang!
‘Circus’ by American painter Mark Bradford, on show at White Cube in Hong Kong, was inspired by the city’s public housing.
White Cube
Consider it part of the halo effect of Art Basel, which kicks off Wednesday in Hong Kong: an explosion of gallery openings and art events around town, which Asian-culture watchers say is proof that the city’s art scene has come of age.
“It’s changed so much in just the past three to five years,” said Melissa Chiu, museum director at the Asia Society, which is showing works by Chinese multimedia artist Xu Bing in an exhibition that opened last week. Ms. Chiu is also leading a group of visitors for a tour of some of the city’s private galleries, most of which have opened in the past three years.
“There is so much quality art now in Hong Kong,” she said.
Here’s a taste of what to see this week when you’re not at Art Basel:
Tuesday
Join the legions of art gawkers in Hong Kong’s Central district as galleries unveil their most impressive shows, from boldface international artists to rising Asian stars. The latest entrant to the city’s scene is Pace, which opens its Hong Kong location today with a show of oil-on-paper paintings by Chinese auction favorite Zhang Xiaogang.
White Cube is showing American painter Mark Bradford’s dense, abstract paintings inspired by the floor plans of the city’s public housing, both in its main space and at its Art Basel booth. “Galleries are becoming more confident to show big international artists in Hong Kong, and artists are becoming more excited to show here too,” said Graham Steele, the gallery’s Hong Kong director, who describes Art Basel week as the busiest of the year.
In the nearby Pedder Building, blue-chip commercial galleries are highlighting contemporary Chinese ink painting. Increasingly popular among Asian collectors, the genre includes Beijing-based artist Sun Xun, who also works in sculpture and animation, at Edouard Malingue, and New York-based painter Gu Wenda, whose ink works are inspired by ancient Chinese calligraphy, at Hanart TZ.
Also in the building is Pearl Lam Galleries, where Chinese abstract painter Su Xiaobai is displaying his vibrant, lacquer-finished oil-on-wood works, and Ben Brown Fine Arts, which has a new show by Spanish painter Miquel Barcelo. Meanwhile, Gagosian Gallery is exhibiting lithographs and sculptures by famed Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti.
A stone’s throw away is Galerie Perrotin, which has a two-person show of Parisian artist Jean-Michel Othoniel, whose sculptures feature intertwining strings of outsize beads, and New York-based photographer Ryan McGinley, known for his surreal style of nude photography.
Eschewing contemporary art, de Sarthe Gallery is focusing on the first wave of 20th-century Chinese artists who lived and worked in Paris. The group includes Lin Fengmian, Sanyu and Wu Guanzhong, three artists whose works have risen exponentially in value at auction in recent years.
Wednesday
Don’t have a ticket to Art Basel’s vernissage? Take advantage of the down time to rest up – the weekend is when the crowds flock to the fair.
Thursday
Galleries in Wong Chuk Hang, a former industrial district in Hong Kong Island’s south, are grouping together to promote their off-the-beaten-path location during Wong Chuk Hang Art Night. Shuttle buses will take visitors from the art fair at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre and from the Central piers. Art spaces to check out include Spring Workshop, FEAST Projects and Gallery EXIT.
On the same day as Art Basel opens to the public, Carsten Nicolai will launch his fair-sponsored light installation “Alpha Pulse” starting from 8:30 p.m. Taking over the façade of the International Commerce Centre, Hong Kong’s tallest building, the work is best experienced with a downloadable app that has an audio track to go with the hypnotic lights.
Friday
Styling themselves as “affordable,” two satellite fairs are piggy-backing on the main Art Basel event: The Asia Contemporary Art Show is slated to take place at the Conrad Hotel, in Admiralty, while the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Fair will occupy the Excelsior Hotel in Causeway Bay. Both will last through the weekend. Meanwhile, the two-day Chai Wan Mei Festival, which starts Friday night, will feature 60 local artists and designers in the warehouse district of Chai Wan in the eastern part of Hong Kong Island. A 15-minute taxi ride from the fair, the festival promises everything from pop-up art installations to studio visits and all-night parties.
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, 1 Harbour Road, Wanchai,, Hong Kong, China
May 14, 2014 – May 18, 2014
Art Basel | Hong Kong: User’s Guide
by Peter Augustus
Following a successful launch last year, Hong Kong’s edition of Art Basel is back with a larger schedule of events and even more art than one can see in a week. This year boasts more than 3,000 works of art from over 200 galleries.
Although a welcomed spotlight, Hong Kong was never lacking in the international art show circuit, or arts for that matter—we currently have several a year and even two fairs that proudly share the weekend with Basel (read on to find out who).
While Basel has prepared an impressive schedule of artist talks, public art displays, and exhibitions in addition to their main event held at the HK Convention Hall, local galleries and businesses have been peppering the week with their own celebrations of art, beginning on Monday the 12th.
With a slew of official, unofficial, and underground events happing across the S.A.R., here is our breakdown of how you can enjoy the much anticipated annual event whether you’re a local, a tourist, or an art connoisseur.
MONDAY, MAY 12
Kicking off on Monday, the week starts with the Asia Society’s annual Art Gala, celebrating artists who have contributed to contemporary art. This year the honorees are Bharti Kher, Lio Guosong, Zhang Xiaogang and Takashi Murakami. The evening includes an auction to benefit the many important initiatives the Society puts on throughout the world. If you can’t make it to the gala, start the art week whetting your appetite by attending the opening of The Scarlet Bauhinia in Full Bloom, at the always inspiring Amelia Johnson Contemporary. A group show featuring four local artists, the works speak to the sensitive but important issue of the relationship between China and Hong Kong (through May 31st, G/F 6-10 Shin Hing Street NoHo, Central).
Also of note on Monday is Beijing-based painter Song Yige’s recently opened exhibition Another Dimension at Sotheby’s gallery (10AM to 6PM, through May 18th, 5/F One Pacific Place, 88 Queensway, Hong Kong) and the opening of Space Painting by Chinese contemporary artist Zhang Enli, his first solo exhibition, at the K11 Foundation Pop-up Space (11AM to 7PM, through July 13th, G/F, Cosco Tower, Grand Millennium Plaza, 183 Queen’s Road Central, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong).
Su Xiaobai, Painting and Being New Green, 2013; Courtesy Pear Lam Galleries
TUESDAY, MAY 13
The headlining event on Tuesday is Art Gallery Night, sponsored by the Hong Kong Art Gallery Association. The free event includes thirty-six participating galleries staying open past your bedtime for exploration and discovery, while featuring cocktail parties and artist talks. It’s the perfect way to brush up on your art vocabulary for Basel later in the week (6PM to 10:30 PM). Be sure not to miss the impressive works by French sculptor Jean-Michel Othoniel at Galerie Perrotin (through June 21st, 50 Connaught Road, Central, 17th Floor), or local diva Pearl Lam’s eponymous gallery exhibiting the celebrated Chinese artist Su Xiaobai, featuring his labor intensive painting technique and unique final presentation (through July 15th, Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, 6th floor).
Tuesday also plays host to the debut of Swarovksi’s new installation by Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard of the British design duo, Fredrikson Stallard. Titled Prologue, a symbol of “life and rebirth,” the temporary display will be housed at the courtyard of a former police married quarters, repurposed as the recently opened PMQ, a new creative hotspot in Hong Kong housing design related businesses and shops. Featuring over 8,000 crystals and soaring 12 feet high, this will be a sculpture that Swarovski lovers won’t want to miss (35 Aberdeen St Central, Hong Kong).
And for something really different, check out the Paloma Powers boardroom. Hosted by Focus Media at The Centrium this event features a “corporate environment” designed by Shawn Maximo with a soundtrack by Justin Simon. There will be cocktails and various refreshments, but space is limited, so you’ll want to RSVP or they may turn you away empty handed (60 Wyndam Street, Central Hong Kong, 4 – 6 PM; RSVP to Paloma@palomapowers.com).
WEDNESDAY, MAY 14
Officially, Art Basel kicks off Wednesday afternoon with the invitation only Private View followed by the Vernissage, a preview party complete with a cash bar and celebrity sightings (with tickets available for public purchase and a price to match the fancy name). If you haven’t got the connections to score an invite or the cash to shell out for the party, you can attend the public opening on Thursday, with tickets that start at a reasonable HK$250 from any Hong Kong Ticketing outlet.
Following Basel’s opening, it’s the after party everyone’s been waiting for. Each year, Absolut Vodka chooses one artist to create a theme and installation that will become the Absolut Art Bar. Hosting the opening night’s post-show festivities, it will remain open throughout the week to serve thirsty art lovers. This year Absolut picked Nadim Abbas, a lecturer at the Hong Kong Art School and one of most impressive artists on the local Hong Kong art scene (read our interview with Abbas here). Drawing inspiration from movies like A Clockwork Orange and Alien, Abbas dreamed up Apocalypse Postponed—a science fiction theme which entails a bunker styled setting complete with specially designed cocktails served out of blood bags and an impressive showcase of live music and DJs (Free, open to the public beginning Thursday, 5PM to 2AM, Stonewall Plaza II, Midtown POP, 1 & 29 Tang Lung Street, Causeway Bay).
If drinking and dancing with someone who you’re not sure is a real zombie or just brain dead from viewing too much art isn’t your cup of tea, head over to the Asia Society for Captured in Ink on Wednesday afternoon. Gala honoree Liu Guosong, along with Hong Kong artist Wucius Wong and American photographer Michael Cherney, will be on hand for an interesting discussion on traditional ink drawing and the blending of ancient art practices with modern interpretations. Moderated by M+ curator, Tina Yee-Wan Pang (12:15 PM to 2:15 PM, HK$490 Asia Society members; HK$650 non-members, 9 Justice Drive, Admiralty).
Carsten Nicolai, a (alpha) pulse
THURSDAY, MAY 15
Finally, once Thursday rolls around Art Basel is officially open to the public. In addition to the show, launching today is the impressive list of daily side events, such as Basel’s morning scheduled Conversations (free!), special curated films and afternoon Salon (show ticket required, check website for details). But don’t think the famed art fair rules the day. Also launching today is the Asia Contemporary Art Show at the Conrad Hotel. Promoted as their largest event to date, the biannual fair offers a more intimate setting but equally as powerful a showing as Basel (through the 18th, tickets from HK$180).
Thursday is also the much anticipated launch of a (alpha) pulse, a commissioned audio-visual public installation by German sound artist Carsten Nicolai. Taking place on the outside of the International Commerce Centre building in West Kowloon, and visible from most of western Hong Kong Island, the nightly event will feature a pulsating light based on viewer interaction via a custom designed app which allows the pattern to be affected by the audience. The multi-sensory experience will include sight and sound (free App download: alpha pulse, showing each night from Thursday to Saturday, 8:30 PM to 9:20 PM).
For those saving the light show for another night, be sure to head over to Sin Sin Fine Art, for the opening of Exposure, an exhibition showcasing the works of four talented Indonesian artists. The night includes a special live art performance and wraps with an after party at Hong Kong’s exclusive KEE Club (6PM to 9PM, performance at 8PM, 52-54 Sai Street, Central, RSVP required).
Also on the calendar for Thursday is the Wong Chuk Hang Art Night, located on the south side of Hong Kong Island. A growing art gallery hood, the area features annexes of established galleries as well as the headquarters for local galleries housing some of the most provocative local art. Not to be missed is Gallery Exit’s group show The Bold Sopranos, a multimedia whirlwind of fiction and reality (7PM to 10PM, SOUTHSITE, 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen).
If you’re down for something a bit off the cuff, and want to increase your knowledge by going back to school, head over to famed auction house Christie’s where they’re offering a two day course as an essential guide to post-war art. Taught by NYC based Program Director Robin Reisenfeld, the lectures are designed for those who want to learn more about important contemporary art and is suitable for all levels (HK$9,000, offered in English, May 15th to 16th, and Mandarin, 17th to 18th).
Pio Abad,The Bold Sopranos – Decoy II, 2014; Courtesy Gallery Exit
FRIDAY, MAY 16
With Basel still in full swing, two more important events launch on Friday. Yet another fair, located in yet another hotel, opens today. The Hong Kong Contemporary Art Fair, housed in The Excelsior Hotel, focuses on more accessible modern art from around the world, and with tickets starting at HK$50, it’s worth a visit (May 16th to May 19th).
Following the art fair, head east to the Chai Wan Mei Open Studios. Located in the fast growing center of Hong Kong’s creative scene, the industrial area is home to a number of innovative galleries, artist studios, and secret shops, such as a vertical gallery space in a warehouse stairwell. Organizers are offering a round trip shuttle bus from the HKCEC (where Art Basel takes place), so we better see you there.
SATURDAY, MAY 17
Saturday marks the last day for Basel’s Conversations and afternoon Salon panels, but have no fear, it’s actually when Hong Kong celebrates International Museum Day (who knew?). Take the Star Ferry across the harbor to the Hong Kong Museum of Art for an impressive display of 120 artworks by celebrated Taiwanese sculptor Ju Ming. On show are works made of wood, bronze, stainless steel, and more (HK$20, 10 Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon).
If you want to stay island side, here are two great options: First, be sure to take some time to visit the Hong Kong Arts Centre Open House. The HKAC houses a theater, restaurants, several galleries, indie clothing shops, and a well-stocked book store to keep you busy for hours (Open from 10AM to 10PM, 2 Harbour Road, Wanchai). Second, the Asia Art Archive is hosting a live war of words, with no blood spilled (hopefully). Presented by artists-in-residence C&G (Clara and Gum), the event will be a parody of the local education system—in quiz show format—pitting different local artists and their teams against each other over knowledge (or lack thereof) of Hong Kong’s local contemporary art scene. An impressive list of contestants has been arranged, including Hong Kong artists Kacey Wong, Leung Mee Ping and Law Man Lok. Note: The Quiz will be in Cantonese, but will feature live commentary by sound and performance artist Samson Young. Live action sport sounds like a great way to finish off the week.
M Bar.
SUNDAY, MAY 18
As the week comes to a close, it’s the perfect time to veg out and reflect on the action packed week you’ve had. Luckily, the Mandarin Oriental, Art Basel’s official host hotel, has a few things to help you relax. Of note are the Art Chocolates, on sale in The Mandarin Cake Shop, featuring edible art supplies in the form of brushes and palettes, as well as the Art Cocktails in the M Bar, featuring drinks inspired by Art Basel Hong Kong (5 Connaught Road, Central). Enjoy.
(Image on top: View of Hong Kong Convention Centre, Art Basel in Hong Kong 2013, General Impressions MCH Messe Schweiz (Basel) AG / Courtesy of the artist and Art Basel Hong Kong)
The Chinese market has now become the leading force for Fine Art sales, surpassing companies in New York and London including Sotheby’s and Christies’. In 2011, Asia took home a 43% share of the global market, with China leading the pack, followed closely by Indonesia and Singapore who both have seen tremendous growth in their markets. Chinese artists Zhang Xiaogang and Zeng Fanzhi are among the top ten most expensive artists living today.
Contemporary art has always been a staple of American culture. The rough and tumble, sex, drugs and alcohol approach of the abstract expressionist movement, pioneered by Jackson Pollock and his contemporaries positioned New York prominently on the international art map in the mid-20th century. The concept and style has since permeated Europe and other parts of the world, but it is currently finding a new and pointed life in an unexpected place, China.
The current generation of rising artists in China, those born in the ‘80s under the single-child laws, is finding new brio for art in the style of contemporary. As the previous generation’s art scene was filled with propaganda and images of Mao, all personal connection and creativity seemed suppressed by the laws of the government. But now Chinese artists are putting the connection back into their work, making art more about personal psychology than societal commissions.
This current generation of contemporary Chinese artists has broken through to a level of artistry that has older critics calling them narcissistic and apolitical.
Political portraits and landscapes of fishing villages appear to be images of the past. No risks were taken in subject matter for the artists working under Mao. But this current generation of contemporary Chinese artists has broken through to a level of artistry that has older critics calling them narcissistic and apolitical. Their subjects and themes run the gamut as they cover former forbidden scenes of sex, sexuality, fashion, popular culture television, etc.
A reason for the innovative vitality of Chinese contemporary art derives from the new level of experimentation at the prestigious Central Academy for Fine Art (CAFA). The academy admits a mere 30 of its applicants and has veered away from its former party-controlled ideals to a more liberal standpoint. The portraits of Mao have been done away in favor of more liberality. They’re less concerned with landscapes now than they are monstrous self-portraits and sculptures that showcase the real emotion of each individual artist. There is a drive to venture away from the colonized idea of China and to a more global point of view.
As this new style, combined with the personal successes of young artists such as Chi Peng, Chen Ke and Ai Weiwei began to surface, the possibility of an art boom in China turned into a reality. An art boom of any size needs an outlet to filter through and to show global presence. With China’s recent foray into the competition, the personal sales of artists out of their own galleries needed to quickly become a thing of the past, left behind with its former government.
The new market had originally received a boost in sales and notoriety when the Swiss ambassador to China, Uli Sigg, began purchasing pieces directly from the artists and displaying them in his own collections around Europe. This trend continued as expatriates in China and visitors would buy up pieces personally from artists and take them back to their homelands. And then in 2005 Christie’s held an auction in Hong Kong exclusively of Chinese art, with Sotheby’s following suite in 2007. From there, the boom caught like wildfire.
Until this boom, the majority of art collectors in China lived in Shanghai, far away from the artistry capital, Beijing. However, a number of collectors—and expatriate artists as well—have relocated to the Chinese capitol as a result to the contemporary renaissance. The result: a burgeoning art district, 798. The district is often compared to Greenwich Village or SoHo and is sports an architectural design that echoes the famous Bauhaus of Germany. It has now become the home for China’s “BoBo” (Bourgeois Bohemian) community.
With the usual suspects of New York, London and Paris close on its heels, China has swiftly become the leading force on the global art scene. With dealers popping up all over the 798 and Western buyers now showcasing contemporary artists of the area in their New York galleries, it is official that the nation’s newfound leadership will not come out to only a blip on the radar of art history sales, but something to be seriously considered for the foreseeable future. In fact, the auction house numbers for 2011 out of London show that powerhouses Christie’s and Sotheby’s have dropped from owning 73% of the art market to only 47% in the span of 10 years. The reason behind this? China’s art boom and it’s ever growing market, acting independently from these Western art world institutions.
About 80 chief and senior curators of top museums, galleries and art institutions from both Asian and Western countries will gather there and have dialogues about art development in Asia. This is the first time that the collective voice of the Asian art community will be heard by the world based on its own land…
This is no small-scale event. Some of the world’s most famous art museums have been invited by the National Art Museum of China to take part in the forum, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in America and the Tate Modern in Britain.
“This is China’s appeal to the world at a high level event about Asian art as well as its thoughts and response to the global focus,” the Times added.
Yet Asian Correspondent wrote an article August 27 titled “Is China’s Art Scene on the Rebound?” In it they spoke with Paolo Mozzo, chairman of ARTantide, who said: “It is more of a cultural than an economic issue, as they are strongly tied to their own traditions.
“In short, it is a form of economic nationalism. But such nationalism could change as foreign customers focus on Asian art and Chinese ones increasingly look at the western market – not least for speculative reasons.”
Mozzo added that the Chinese art market may in fact be doing better than official studies and data implies, and a new push from the Chinese Central Government to “support artistic and cultural enterprises” without any focus on profitability will be welcomed by the country’s art lovers and artists alike.
The GDMA is located on the northern banks of the Pearl River in the centre of Guangzhou’s Tianhe District (the city’s Central Business District), and only finished construction three years ago in 2010. It consists of four large exhibition halls showcasing over 130,000 exhibits.
It is unclear yet whether the forum will offer any kind of public engagement, or whether it will be a strictly closed-door event. Either way, it’s an interesting development for China’s art world, and likely a positive sign of things to come.
Photo credit: thecoolist.com
==FINANCIAL TIMES LONDON
October 8, 2013 8:17 am
Wang Yannan: Daughter of the revolution takes on China art market
When Wang Yannan was growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China, the daughter of former Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang never imagined that one day she would run the fourth-largest auction house in the world.
Speaking in Hong Kong where China Guardian over the weekend sold HK$510m (US$66m) in Chinese art and ceramics, Ms Wang recalls how a family friend whose husband had been jailed struggled to destroy paintings to prevent more problems with the Red Guards.
“Chinese paintings are quite tough to destroy. You cannot burn it, because once you burn, the Red Guards can smell the smoke,” Ms Wang explains. “She soaked [each one] in a bath basin and tried to tear it, but . . . the silk had good starch. It took her quite an effort to destroy these things, piece by piece, and flush [down] the toilet.”
In the years since the violent decade of anarchy unleashed by Mao Zedong in 1966, Ms Wang has moved a long way from a world where art was not taught in school and from a feeling that “these things [art] can only bring you trouble”.
In 1993, she co-founded China Guardian after her partner dismissed her concerns about a lack of training and experience. “In China, nobody had any experience,” she explains. “We didn’t even know [about] Sotheby’s and Christie’s.”
China Guardian is now the world’s fourth biggest auction house, after Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Beijing Poly International, a younger Chinese rival. And art that might have destroyed lives during the Cultural Revolution is now desperately sought by Chinese collectors and investors. CLSA estimates that the Chinese art market has grown from $1.5bn in 2008 to $5.1bn last year.
When China Guardian held its first auction in Hong Kong in 2012, the sale brought in $67m, more than half the amount that Christie’s generated from sales of Chinese art and ceramics at its autumn Hong Kong event.
Even before China Guardian knew the final results of its weekend Hong Kong auction, its third in the city – which coincided with sales by Sotheby’s and Poly – Ms Wang said the results were “way beyond our expectations”, including the $5.4m sale of a piece of calligraphy by Song Lizong, a 13th century Song dynasty emperor.
While China Guardian and Poly are making inroads in Hong Kong, some experts say they do not pose a serious challenge to the international houses yet. Brian Wallace, founder of the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, says they need to put in a “couple of years of legwork” first, but adds that they would be able to use their mainland contacts to bring more Chinese works to auction in Hong Kong.
Chinese paintings are quite tough to destroy. You cannot burn it, because once you burn, the Red Guards can smell the smoke– Wang Yannan
Ms Wang says China Guardian wants to “step out in Hong Kong” to reach more potential buyers. She says the Chinese territory has “more energy, because it has clients not only from greater China, but also from Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and also from . . . Europe and the States.”
But asked if she plans to take the company further afield, she responds: “It took us 20 years to step out to Hong Kong. I think we probably have enough to work with now with Hong Kong and Beijing.”
Speaking in excellent English – learnt in college in Guangdong at the end of the Cultural Revolution and in Hawaii where she studied hotel management – she demurs over the question whether China Guardian poses a threat to Sotheby’s and Christie’s: “I think the market is big enough and everyone has his own strength.”
China Guardian’s rise has shone attention on Ms Wang and her background as a “princeling” – the term given to relatives of senior party members. When she worked at the Sheraton after returning from the US, she says nobody knew who she was.
“I don’t feel that someone should live in the shadow of their family, for good or for bad. I should have my own credit, my own identity.”
But when people found out that her father was Zhao Ziyang, they would become very polite: “Mostly they would say, they respect my father and I appreciate that.”
Zhao served as premier and then general secretary of the Communist party, before he was purged after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre for being too soft. In his last public appearance, Zhao told the protesters in the square: “I came too late”.
Ms Wang says her father showed no interest in art – “he was just work, work, work” – but neither did he discourage her from the career path she took.
“He let me make my own choices . . . It was quite diplomatic in our home around the dining table,” she says. “I cannot remember him ever asking me to work hard, or to do something, or to join the party, or to join the youth league. He never did.”
Additional reporting by Julie Zhu
===
September 20, 2013 7:06 am
Zeng Fanzhi: A wealth of art in China
By Jamil Anderlini
How did a high-school dropout from gritty Wuhan become one of Asia’s most expensive living artists?
It was 1998 and Zeng Fanzhi was struggling to find somewhere to display his paintings. The market for modern Chinese art barely existed. Thanks to help from a fledgling local dealership, Zeng was able to hang a piece in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Shanghai and was extremely pleased when the painting – “Mask Series No 6” (1996) – was sold to a visiting American tourist for $16,000.
Just 10 years later, the same piece was bought for more than $9.7m at a Christie’s auction in Hong Kong, making Zeng the most expensive living Asian artist – and the American tourist who sold it a very happy man.
Today, Zeng is an icon in the art world and his career provides an analogy for the development of modern Chinese art – perhaps even Chinese society – from the utilitarian social realism of his childhood during the cultural revolution to the giddy heights of global art fairs and seven-figure price tags.
I arrive for our interview at his studio in a famous artists’ district on the outskirts of Beijing to find a serene oasis away from the frenetic pollution and noise of the Chinese capital. An inner courtyard of rock fountains and tall trees leads into an entrance hall dominated by an exquisite wooden Buddha that pre-dates the founding of the Tang dynasty in AD618.
The hall opens to the left into Zeng’s high-ceilinged, sunny studio, lined with enormous finished and half-finished canvases, casually strewn with millions of dollars worth of his creations. Puffing on a fine Cuban cigar, Zeng is busy poring over a small-scale model of his latest exhibition with a visitor – a retrospective of 40 of his paintings and sculptures from 1990 to 2012 that will open at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in October.
An assistant makes me a delicious espresso in an adjoining kitchen area and after a few minutes Zeng appears, apologising profusely for making me wait and for the lack of air conditioning in the studio, which he explains is necessary so his paint can dry slowly.
He is studiously polite and almost shy in his quiet, unassuming manner but his eyes look like they are made from granite and, as we sit down in the courtyard garden with a pot of expensive Chinese tea, I have the feeling he is used to people flattering him. “We are now in a period of great artistic flourishing in China,” he says. “In the 1990s there was almost nothing but there are countless artists now. Whether they are all good is not for me to say, only people in the future will be able to tell.”
This is a typically oblique and diplomatic comment from Zeng on the millions of counterfeiters, copycats and opportunists drawn into the Chinese art boom by the promise of great riches. Rather than waste time thinking about the state of the art world or even the state of the wider world, Zeng says he focuses almost entirely on his painting. He insists that every brushstroke must be made by him so he ignores weekends, spending 330 full days a year in his studio, with just one month’s break during the oppressive Beijing summer for travel with his family.
This dedication to art has been the defining feature of Zeng’s life since he was born to workers from a printing factory in 1964 in the gritty central Chinese city of Wuhan. “I was always a bad student; I refused to let people force me to study things I wasn’t interested in and I was only really interested in drawing and painting,” he says.
Wuhan was one of the epicentres of the cultural revolution, which began in 1966 and involved the persecution or death of millions of intellectuals, professionals and officials. Because his parents were designated as working class, Zeng’s family was relatively safe but they were not left unscathed by the convulsions ripping through society.
“At the time everyone wore the same clothes but my mother liked beautiful things and she sometimes wore a bit of colour – some pink flowers on her clothes,” he says. “For that she was persecuted for her ‘petit bourgeois sentimentalism’ – that experience affected my whole family deeply.”
Although Zeng’s mother was not subjected to the violent “struggle sessions” that others endured, the family was publicly humiliated by groups of militant Red Guards who pasted denunciations outside their house and at his mother’s factory in the form of “big character posters” – large handwritten banners of Chinese calligraphy that have been used since imperial times to protest or spread popular messages.
Not long after this, the young boy began to draw for pleasure and for a break from the monotony of formal Mao-era schooling. When he says he was a bad student, Zeng is not exaggerating or dabbling in false modesty. He did not finish high school, dropping out at 16 to work in a printing factory like his parents and taking formal painting lessons in his spare time.
When he discovered there was such a thing as art school he decided to apply but, because of his deficiency in subjects like maths and science, he failed the university entrance exams five years in a row before he was finally admitted to the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in 1987 at the age of 23. “I was lucky that my parents did not pressure me or discourage me; they were very supportive and each year my exam marks got a little better until finally I got in,” he says.
Although all he wanted to do was stay home and paint, Zeng was assigned by the government to work at a fledgling advertising agency when he graduated in 1991. It would turn out to be the dawn of the advertising industry in post-revolution China. “When I started there the only advertising that could be displayed was political slogans but that soon changed,” Zeng says. “I managed to get a big ad contract for the agency and so then I didn’t have to go to the office for a year. I did some of my best work in that period.”
Much of his formal schooling was meant to produce social-realist works in the traditional Soviet style but he also developed an appreciation for German expressionists and, in his brief foray into advertising, he even read books by ad guru David Ogilvy on how to sell beer and shirts. He produced his first major works, including the haunting and grotesque “meat” and “hospital” series, in which his subjects already sported the oversized hands that would become a signature feature of his work.
Zeng was able to quit his job altogether and move to culturally rich Beijing at the start of 1993, after selling his first paintings to Johnson Chang, the renowned Hong Kong collector. Partly on the advice of the influential art critic Li Xianting, Chang paid $2,000 each for four large canvases, an enormous sum of money at that time in China.
Zeng says Chang still has the four pieces, which must be worth multiple millions of dollars today. “At that time those two [Chang and Li] were the most important people in the Chinese art world and they really gave me my start,” says Zeng. “It wasn’t just money, they also gave me confidence.”
In Beijing he found a community he says he could “eat with and play with” and that would later comprise some of the most famous artists in China. He also embarked on a relentless process of renewal and reinvention, adopting and then rejecting new styles at a furious pace. “We consider Fanzhi to be the greatest living artist in China, in part because his visual imagery has changed over and over again,” says Nick Simunovic, director of the Hong Kong branch of the Gagosian Gallery, which represents Zeng outside China. “He’s never satisfied with a single identity and in many respects he’s getting better and better; his art really maps the development of China.”
About a year after arriving in Beijing, Zeng began working on the “mask” series that would eventually make him a multimillion-dollar artist. These pieces used a different style and technique from earlier works and reflected his feeling that people in the capital were hiding their true identities from each other and themselves. Although his mask paintings have been his most financially successful ones, in 2004 his style changed radically again as he directed his efforts to the study of Chinese traditional landscapes and calligraphy.
He lists Romantic painters, German expressionists, Cézanne, Picasso, pop art and Chinese traditional painters as influences but says his own life and experiences are the most important in shaping his work. His latest works are dominated by large, intricately painted landscapes distorted by forests of thorny lines while others contain direct references to some of Zeng’s favourite German painters.
The Chinese art market has been through a few gut-wrenching cycles in the past decade but the prices of Zeng’s work have stayed remarkably stable, Simunovic says. That is partly because he is so well-known in art circles outside China and because the bulk of his works are sold to international collectors.
“The financial crisis [of 2008] was very good for the Chinese art market because it cleared out the speculators and left the real art lovers behind,” says Zeng. “But it had no real impact on me because the price I sell my work for stays about the same no matter what happens in the secondary market.”
In 2011, Zeng’s auction record was eclipsed by a 1988 work from Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang that sold for $10.1m in Hong Kong. But prices for modern Chinese art remain volatile and subject to waves of speculative buying, particularly from mainland China. In post-communist China, anyone who is wealthy is by definition new money, or baofahu (literally, “explosion of wealth people”), with all the materialism and conspicuous consumption that comes with sudden riches.
Zeng has clearly enjoyed the trappings of success – designer clothes, expensive watches – but like an increasing number of the country’s nouveau riche, he seems now to be searching for something more substantive. “When I started out I wanted to earn more and more money and spend it on expensive cars and airplanes but in the last couple of years I’ve really changed a lot,” he says. “I think if everyone is just doing everything for money then this society is finished.”
As he has become richer his life and his tastes have become simpler and these days, he says, his only real indulgences are Cuban cigars and costly Chinese tea. His biggest expense is the more than Rmb10m (£1.04m) he spends each year on running his own gallery, which is intended to support a new generation of young artists by allowing them to exhibit and build their own profiles.
The only point in our interview at which Zeng becomes cautious and uncomfortable is when I ask him about the role politics plays in Chinese art. The world-famous dissident artist Ai Weiwei lives just a couple of blocks away from Zeng’s studio, in a compound that is regularly besieged by goons from China’s ministry of state security. “It’s not that I don’t pay attention to politics, it’s just that I pay more attention to my art; I’m not a political artist,” Zeng says. “Ai Weiwei is my neighbour and I don’t resent or dislike him; he makes his choices and he has his reasons [for doing what he does].”
Zeng’s cigar is almost finished and our interview is drawing to a close but, before I go, I want to know what happened to the American tourist who made nearly $10m from investing in this unknown artist in 1998. “I don’t remember his name but he came to Beijing to see me after he sold the piece at auction [in 2008] and he was very happy because it got such a good price,” Zeng says. “I guess he wanted to see what the artist looked like. I was also happy that he made so much money.”
Picasso and Warhol are being outsold by Chinese painters as a new wave of wealthy buyers reshapes the global market. Inside China’s high-rolling art world.
By
Kelly Crow
January 13, 2012
Yang Bin, one of Beijing’s biggest car dealers, is a major collector of Chinese art. Keith Bedford/Redux for The Wall Street Journal
On the outskirts of Beijing in a private club house called Paradise, there is a large, windowless room where Yang Bin displays his collection of modern and contemporary art.
“Sit down and get ready,” Mr. Yang recently told a few friends visiting from Taiwan. Grabbing a remote control, he turned to a set of wall panels that, with a click, began to slide apart. Each panel revealed a few of his recent acquisitions, from Chairman Mao-era portraits of revolutionaries to brightly colored abstracts by China’s rising stars. As his friends applauded the slide-show, Mr. Yang grinned and lit a cigar.
Purchases by Chinese collectors accounted for roughly a fifth of Christie’s global sales last year, Eben Shapiro reports on Lunch Break. Photo: Liu Wei, “Outcast No. 2.” Courtesy of the artist.
The art market is being transformed by Chinese collectors willing to pay top dollar for everything from Ming vases to contemporary Chinese abstracts. In some cases, these works are outstripping prices paid for blue-chip Western artists like René Magritte and Clyfford Still.
Three of the 10 most expensive art works sold at auction last year were by Chinese artists, according to art-market analyst Artprice. Last year’s priciest painting: “Eagle Standing on Pine Tree” (1946) by self-taught painter Qi Baishi. This delicate scroll rocketed ahead of colorful canvases by Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol when it sold for $65 million at auction house China Guardian in May. Overall, purchases by Chinese collectors accounted for roughly a fifth of Christie’s global sales during the first half of last year; Sotheby’s says mainland buyers also lifted its sales in Asia to nearly $960 million last year, up 47% from 2010.
Photos: China’s Rising Art Stars
Cui Jie’s dystopian scene from 2011, “Bar,” evokes the painterly eeriness of German artists Gerhard Richter and Neo Rauch. Cui Jie/Leo Xu Projects
Welcome to China’s rollicking art world, a marketplace flush with wealthy entrepreneurs who are amassing art at a clip to rival any Russian oligarch. From Beijing to Chongqing, collectors are building private museums, opening galleries and embracing an exuberant art scene, even as China’s economy shows early signs of a slowdown and many collectors elsewhere are buying more cautiously.
Mr. Yang, age 54 and one of Beijing’s biggest car dealers, is emblematic of the new wave of Chinese collectors: Over the past decade, he has collected nearly 1,000 artworks by contemporary heavyweights like Chen Yifei, who paints women in romantic interiors, and Zhang Xiaogang, known for haunting family portraits. Mr. Yang’s art choices are closely tracked by the region’s top collectors and dealers. He has financed the opening of a pair of edgy art galleries in Beijing, one of which is managed by his wife, Yan Qing. Last year he began importing and reselling collectible wines like Bordeaux. (He keeps most of his own 30,000-bottle collection stored in a cellar outside town.)
The sculpture ‘I know, but…,’ by Mu Boyan, greets visitors in Yang Bin’s Beijing apartment. Mu Boyan/Aye Gallery
The collectors in his broader circle include Qiao Zhibing, a nightclub owner based in Shanghai. Mr. Qiao is outfitting his four-story karaoke bar, Shanghai Night, with conceptual sculptures by Ai Weiwei, sleek photographs of Champagne-drinking partygoers by Yang Fudong and paintings of men in suits and smiling face masks by Zeng Fanzhi. Behind Mr. Qiao’s cashier’s desk looms Beijing artist Ji Dachun’s large painting of an eyeball.
Another friend, Beijing hotelier Zhang Rui, has started decorating every room in his new Gallery Hotel with pieces borrowed from a gallery called Tang. He also has an 800-piece collection of his own. The hotel hasn’t opened yet, in part because Mr. Zhang recently spent 18 months in detention for allegedly bribing a Party secretary. Mr. Zhang denies making any bribe but says he did pay a fine as a condition of his release last June, and he’s now seeking the remaining building permits.
“It’s not enough in China to be wildly wealthy,” says Meg Maggio, director of Pékin Fine Arts, a Beijing gallery specializing in contemporary art. “For all these guys, it’s about building a beautiful way of life—they want the nice objects, the good wine, the whole package.”
Nightclub owner Qiao Zhibing with Zhang Enli’s painting ‘The Poor’ Courtesy Qiao Zhibing/Justin Jin
Alan Lee, who runs Beijing gallery Asia Art Center, says one of his clients, a fitness-equipment manufacturer named Chang Chiu Dun, calls himself the “Cover Killer” because he “likes to buy artworks that have been on the covers of auction catalogs.”
The downside, Mr. Lee says, is that this influx of newly wealthy collectors is fueling risky speculation on art, leading to price swings and heavy trading volumes for younger artists like the eyeball painter, Ji Dachun, whose lasting significance is still uncertain. Art advisory firm Artvest says Chinese investors have recently started at least eight art funds, which buy artworks with the aim of reselling them at a profit later. There are only about 20 similar funds elsewhere in the world.
China’s gallery scene is similarly freewheeling, with collectors such as Mr. Yang sometimes serving as stakeholders or co-owners of galleries where they also shop. Such arrangements can spark potential conflicts of interest because the stakeholders might be able to leverage their position to claim the gallery’s choicest pieces. Seven years ago Mr. Yang paid to help his wife open her contemporary art gallery, Aye, but he says he doesn’t manage her artists or get first dibs on any work she shows there. He recently stepped back as a financing partner in another contemporary art gallery he founded three years ago, Eastation, in order to focus on his wine venture. He continues to buy art from both galleries.
Hot Lots
From porcelain to paintings, Chinese works garnering record prices.
Imperial Objects: These imperial cloisonné cranes from 1723 fetched $16.7 million at Christie’s, the going rate for a top Wassily Kandinsky painting. Christie’s
Contemporary Paintings: Sales of Zao Wou-Ki’s abstract paintings topped $95 million last year—including this $8.8 million work, “10.1.68,” which sold for double its estimate at Sotheby’s in October. Sotheby’s
Ming Vases: Collectors still pay a premium for Ming pieces like this vase covered in fruit sprays, which sold for $21.6 million last fall at Sotheby’s. Sotheby’s
Dealers and artists say it’s unclear whether Mr. Yang is trying to build a museum-worthy collection or angling for the right moment to cash out. “China’s market is still so new—it’s hard for us to tell who’s a collector and who’s a speculator,” says artist Zhang Xiaogang.
Mr. Yang isn’t troubled by such ambiguity. “I can’t say if investing in art is good or bad,” he says, “but I know that without money, you can’t make a market grow.”
Within China’s contemporary art circles, Mr. Yang is hard to miss. He’s tall, with a square face and thick head of black hair. He shows acquaintances cellphone images of his art the way others pull up snapshots of their children. More often than not, he turns up at black-tie dinners dressed in a polo shirt, black corduroys, and sneakers.
In Hong Kong, he socializes with collectors like Credit Suisse banker Tony Chiu and BNP Paribas banker Daisy Cheng. Both say they’ve sought his advice about artists to collect. In Beijing, his penthouse apartment doubles as a lunch spot for a growing crop of young entrepreneurs and investment bankers, some of whom half-jokingly call him “President Yang.”
Mr. Yang has rapidly built up his collection in part by maintaining a breathless pace—he sometimes buys dozens of works at a single auction or hundreds of works from a gallery or artist he likes, he says. When he’s not working in one of his six car dealerships in Beijing, he and his entourage are regulars at art fairs and auctions throughout Asia and Europe.
This year, Mr. Yang’s favorite prospect is Liu Wei, a Beijing artist who grew up painting portraits of Chairman Mao and later experimented with abstraction and themes like decay. Two months ago, Mr. Yang flew to Hong Kong and paid boutique auctioneer Ravenel around $123,000 for Mr. Liu’s 1999 canine portrait, “Dog No. 2.” A few days later, several works by the same artist sold for twice as much at an auction back in Beijing.
Mr. Yang says the artist remains undervalued: “Liu Wei isn’t a pop star” like Zeng Fanzhi, a painter represented by New York dealer Larry Gagosian, he says, “but I think he’s as important.”
Mr. Yang has also started offloading a few older pieces by Chinese realist artists like Chen Yanning as demand for their works has climbed. Last month, Mr. Yang arrived at a Beijing luxury hotel and made his way into the packed salesroom of Poly, China’s biggest auction house. He stood in the back, his usual spot. Halfway through the sale, he pointed to a large painting of a boatful of people hanging on the far wall. “That’s mine,” he said. He had paid roughly $60,000 for the 1984 work, “New Wave,” by Chen Yanning seven years earlier, and was ready to sell. Poly priced the work to sell for at least $629,000. When the bidding began, at least five collectors took the bait and the winner paid $1 million, a new price record for the artist.
Mr. Yang bought this Chen Yanning painting seven years ago for $60,000. He resold it last month for $1 million. Beijing Poly International Auction Co. Ltd.
Minutes before the bidding began, Mr. Yang slipped downstairs so he could smoke while watching a live broadcast of the sale on a television in the hotel bar. After the gavel fell, he slapped the shoulder of the man beside him and laughed. Later, he heard that the winner was a “coal boss” from Shanxi province.
At the same sale, Mr. Yang did some potentially strategic bidding of his own—on an artist represented by his wife’s Aye Gallery. Mr. Yang enlisted a taller friend to stand in front of him and bid for one of Chen Wenji’s photorealistic paintings from 1990, “A Piece of Glass Leaning on Wall.” Mr. Yang and his friend bowed out after other bidders pushed the price to more than double the work’s $125,800 high estimate. It ultimately sold to a telephone bidder for $361,663, the artist’s second-highest auction price.
Two days later, “What,” a show of Mr. Chen’s new works, opened at Aye. Mr. Yang says he bid on the work in part because early works by Mr. Chen are rare, and he doesn’t own any, despite his wife’s affiliation with the artist now. In addition, if he could help his wife’s gallery by “keeping prices in a reasonable range, this would be good for the artist,” he says.
Ms. Maggio, the Beijing dealer, says she doesn’t think Mr. Yang follows any pattern intended to boost his works’ values. More often, she says, he seems to bid on a whim, cajoling his friends to join in and reveling in the competition. “He’ll nudge some guy with him and say, ‘Buy it! You just made a lot of money!’ and they’ll put up their paddles,” she says. “It’s done in a spirit of fun—it’s not calculated.”
The grandson of a Shandong farmer and the son of a Beijing factory worker, Mr. Yang grew up in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, he joined one of the first waves of students allowed into the country’s reopened colleges. He studied political economics.
After college, he got a job at the Ministry of Machinery, where he formed ties with foreign banks and car manufacturers so he could help the government import cars for state use. There, he met his wife, who worked as a machinery designer in an office down the block from his communal dorm; they married in 1988.
When the government began allowing individuals to start their own companies a few years later, the couple leveraged their contacts and won a contract with General Motors to sell Buicks, Chevrolets and Cadillacs in China. In 1999, they opened Shanghai’s first GM dealership, Da Shi Hang Auto. In the first year alone, they sold 1,000 Buicks. Ms. Yan began organizing regional auto shows, and the couple bought a big empty house in Shanghai.
“That’s when we realized we needed something for the walls,” says Mr. Yang, who sold around 11,000 cars last year through his seven showrooms in Shanghai and Beijing. He drives a black Cadillac Escalade.
In 2000, he paid a local gallery around $120,000 to fill their home with suitable paintings, but over time he grew curious about the artists themselves. A year or two later, he spotted a roughly $84,000 painting of a starkly lit human figure by contemporary artist Shi Chong, and something clicked: He wanted to own artworks that felt new.
Mr. Qiao’s art-filled club, Shanghai Night Courtesy Qiao Zhibing
By 2004, he and Ms. Yan had moved back to Beijing and his compulsion had reached a point where he decided to sell his newer Toyota franchise so he could use the cash to buy art. Within weeks of closing that deal, he had spent the entire $3.6 million in profits buying art. “When we see something we like, we can’t help ourselves,” said Ms. Yan.
Last month in Beijing, Mr. Yang threw a wine-tasting dinner for more than 100 guests at his friend Mr. Rui’s new hotel. Artworks were tucked into niches throughout the hotel’s white lobby—including an Anne-Julie video of a horse walking on a treadmill—and the upper hallways were dotted with showstoppers like the Yangjiang Group’s drippy candle wax tree. Young men and women clustered around the restaurant’s tables, dining on lamb chops and vigorously swirling glasses of Château Beau-Séjour Bécot.
Mr. Yang’s latest pastime is fine wine. He tried it for the first time shortly after he opened his first car dealership, and he now drinks a glass or two every day. He keeps his best 2,000 bottles, including Bordeaux from Château Latour, in Hong Kong so that he can drink it during business trips there and avoid paying taxes to import it home. Last year, he imported 20,000 bottles of less-expensive vintages so he could try selling them to mainland friends. So far, his wine sales have topped $3 million, which he says he uses to pay his personal wine-drinking bills.
In May, Mr. Yang and Ms. Yan moved into a new apartment, an 18th-floor penthouse in a Beijing neighborhood known as the Embassy District. Throughout their home, artworks are arranged to mix East with West. In the dining room, American artist Roxy Paine’s linen canvas drips with white paint near a life-size sculpture of an obese Asian man belly-flopping onto a waist-high block of faux ice. Embedded in the man’s back are a group of upturned Champagne flutes, one of which accidentally snapped off during a recent party there. The work’s sculptor, Mu Boyan, sent over a replacement flute straight away. He shows at Ms. Yan’s gallery.
In a strange twist, the Beijing gallery district where Mr. Yang regularly trolls for fresh finds is located in the former munitions compound where his father worked decades before. The area still goes by its government nickname, the 798. “My father spent his whole life there,” he says. “Now, I spend my money there.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Liu Wei is a Beijing artist born in 1965 who is known for painting abstracts. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said Mr. Liu was best known for creating a 2005 artwork called “Love It! Bite It!” That work was created by another, younger artist of the same name.
The New Masters
The Matisse of Chinese modernism and the sentimental realist
‘Potted Chrysanthemum in a Blue and White Jardiniere’ Christie’s
Sanyu
Sanyu (1901-66) is the Henri Matisse of Chinese modernism, a painter of lively, color-saturated bouquets and nudes whose works have topped $16.5 million this year. This $6.8 million “Potted Chrysanthemum in a Blue and White Jardiniere” sold at Christie’s in late 2010. The seller had paid $3.7 million for the work five years before.
Pear-shaped famille-rose vase Sotheby’s
Porcelain
Sotheby’s only wanted $800 for this pear-shaped famille-rose vase, thought to be from the early 20th century, but bidders at an auction last March, impressed by the vase’s quality, suspected it might have been made earlier—and shocked observers by bidding it up to $18 million. Other porcelain pieces have sold for up to $83.2 million apiece in recent seasons, buoyed by interest from mainland China.
Chen Yifei
Chen Yifei’s ‘Wind of Mountain Village’ China Guardian Auctions Co. Ltd.
Chen Yifei (1946-2005) grew up painting Cultural Revolution propaganda posters and studying Soviet Realism before getting permission in 1980 to study art in New York. His portraits of bundled villagers can be sentimental, but China’s collectors prize them: In May, China Guardian got $12.5 million for his “Wind of Mountain Village.”
Gilt-bronze figure of Amitayus Christie’s
Buddhist Bronze
This early Ming gilt-bronze figure of Amitayus was made as a devotional object for China’s imperial family. It stands nearly 2 feet high, a hefty size that helped drive up its price at Christie’s Hong Kong to $9 million, a record price for a Buddhist bronze.
Skull sculpture by Zhang Wei Ran at SHContemporary
The New York-based fashion designer and art lover dishes art fairs and multisensory dining in her hometown Shanghai.
The Shanghai Biennale is…
Diverse — a mix of East and West. It’s not just about Chinese art. You really see that at this year’s Biennale, which is the first time you’ll see city pavilions. There are group shows from Berlin, Istanbul, Antwerp, even Brooklyn.
Don’t miss…
Huang Yong Ping’s Thousand Hands Kuanyin in the main exhibit space. It’s a massive 60-foot spike-covered tower modeled after Duchamp’s Bottle Rack. It’s not till you get up close that you realize those spikes are actually the arms of Guanyin, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, all holding various readymades from Chinese folk culture.
The SHContemporary is…
A lively art fair, co-founded by Lorenzo Rudolf (who was behind Art Basel) and now run by Massimo Torrigiani. Keep an eye out for emerging artist Beijing artist Zhang Wei Ran (above).
The Mingshen Art Museum. The director is Zhou Tiehai, a famous artist here in Shanghai who’s best known for appropriating Joe Camel, from the American cigarettes, into his work. In Chinese, Mr. Zhou sounds like Mr. Joe. Right now the museum has a solo exhibit on Geng Jianyi, one of China’s contemporary art stars.
Art collector to know…
Uli Sigg. The biggest Chinese contemporary art collector now, he was the Swiss ambassador to China. He just donated a big chunk of his collection (est. $163 million!) to M+, a Hong Kong museum that’s going to open in a few years. There are works by Ai Weiwei, Ding Yi, Lei Wei and Zhang Xiaogang.
Best party hostess…
Pearl Lam, who owns the Pearl Lam Galleries in Hong Kong and Shanghai. (She’s planning on opening another one in Singapore as well as her own design center in Shanghai.) She threw the best dinner for the Rubell family during SHContemporary. She made sure people moved around and switched seats during dinner so they could constantly meet and talk to new people.
Where to eat…
Ultraviolet, which feels like a culinary art exhibit. From French chef Paul Pairet, it unites food with multisensory technology to create a fully immersive dining experience — each course has its own lighting, sounds, scents, video projections — totally amazing! But make a reservation; there are only 10 seats.
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ART RADAR ASIA
China’s quiet cultural revolution: A guide to 4 art districts
As China’s art scene continues to grow, a real cultural revolution is taking place as famous architects continue to build new art centres.
Beijing’s 798 Art District of art galleries is internationally known, as blue-chip galleries like Pace Gallery have set up shop there. But have you heard of the other cultural districts in China? Here is a look at four ambitious art sites currently under construction and spread throughout China.
Beijing’s 798 Art District. Image courtesy 798 Art District.
Beijing’s 798 Art District of studios, art galleries and shops is well known, having received extensive press coverage since its birth in 1995. However, other cultural sites in China are equally as ambitious, perhaps even more so, yet receive scant attention in the international media.
From Chengdu to Pingtan, Art Radar takes a look at China’s quiet cultural revolution.
Chengdu Contemporary Art Centre by Zaha Hadid. Image courtesy
Zaha Hadid Architects.
Chengdu
Chengdu will be home to the world’s largest building, as the city undergoes a huge cultural rebuilding, according to design blog Arch2o. One of the planned gems is the Chengdu New Century City Art Centre designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. Located in Sichuan Province, the CCAC will span 200,000 square metres, making it not only the largest building in China but across the world. The complex will contain three auditoria, an art museum, centres for art exhibitions, conferences, lectures and workshops, plus a retail area with shops, bars and restaurants.
Plans for a 30,000-square-metre contemporary art museum, a 12,000-square-metre exhibition hall, and a 1800-seat grand theatre will make this the “largest and most comprehensive arts and cultural centre in West China,” writes Arch2o.
The Datong Art Museum designed by Foster + Partners. Image courtesy http://www.dezeen.com.
Datong
The Datong Art Museum in Datong, Shanxi Province is China’s “Museum of the 21st Century” according to an article in Dezeen. Designed by London-based Foster + Partners, the 32,000-square-metre venue is part of Datong New City’s cultural plaza.
Set underground with only the pyramid-shaped roof visible to the sky, the Museum contains a Grand Gallery exhibition space measuring 37 metres high and almost eighty metres wide, designed to accommodate large-scale works of art.
Datong, which is 1040 metres above sea level and perched on the border with Inner Mongolia, is subject to its fair share of extreme weather. The Museum is specially designed to cope with the city’s climate of long winters with minimal sunshine, making use of high-level skylights and a heavily insulated roof.
Pingtan Art Museum will be located on a manmade island accessible only by undulating bridge. Image courtesy MAD.
Pingtan
Pingtan Art Museum plans to be the largest private art museum (40,000 square metres) in Asia, scheduled to open in 2016. Beijing’s MAD Architects designed the three-dune-shaped museum to be constructed on an artificial island in Fujian province, near the soon-to-be-built city of Pingtan. Dezeen adds the museum plans to showcase approximately 1000 works of Chinese art in its debut exhibition, but with no details on the works themselves.
What makes this art zone attractive to emerging artists is that exhibitions and street level auction sales are conducted regularly to promote living artists’ works. In addition, collaboration with foreign embassies helps foreign artists exhibit their art to local Chinese audiences. Wang Xotong, General Manager of the plaza, explained to China Daily that art zone managers “emphasise both art exhibition and sale. We are trying to provide a complete industry chain.”
A new generation of entrepreneurs is snapping up works by international contemporary art stars to amass major and sometimes museum-worthy collections. But the recent arrests of several art-world figures have buyers worried about government scrutiny
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Qiao Zhibing houses his collection, which includes lava machine, 2010, by Olafur Eliasson and Antony Gormley’s Sublimate XXVII, 2009, in his Shanghai and Beijing karaoke palaces.
LARRY XU/COURTESY QIAO ZHIBING, COLLECTION OF QIAO ZHIBING
China’s mainland auction houses, led by China Guardian and Poly International, both of Beijing, brought in nearly $5 billion in sales in 2011, according to the annual report from Artprice, the French art data analysis firm. And Christie’s and Sotheby’s Hong Kong raised another $1.8 billion (Sotheby’s and Christie’s are not permitted to operate auctions in mainland China). These figures were fueled by the rise of a new class of Chinese mainland art collectors, who have made their presence felt both at auction and in galleries throughout the region.
None of this is so surprising, considering that, according to the Hurun Report (China’s equivalent of Forbes), there are now close to a million millionaires in China and some 115 billionaires, second only to the United States. It was just a matter of time before, after purchasing homes and luxury goods, they would turn to art.
“The strong purchasing power of mainland Chinese buyers fueled by their increasing wealth contributes to the persistent, strong art market in recent years,” says Kevin Ching, chief executive officer of Sotheby’s Asia. “Chinese participation started in 2005, and, in terms of percentage by hammer, has increased from 5 percent in early 2005 to nearly 40 percent in 2011.” The reach of Chinese collectors is now extending well beyond Hong Kong, as mainlanders have begun acquiring international art. Christie’s reports that for the first half of 2012, collectors from Greater China (which, for the auction house, includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as mainland China) accounted for 25 percent of sales worldwide—up from 16 percent in 2011.
François Curiel, president of Christie’s Asia, notes that the presence of mainland collectors has been felt in sales of Western art as well, including a painting by Giorgio Morandi in London that went for $3.4 million to a Beijing collector and a $22.5 million Monet, sold in New York in May 2011, with a mainland Chinese collector as the underbidder.
But all this activity has attracted the attention of the Chinese government, which imposes a high import tax on purchases of artworks brought into the country. This past summer, the director of an art-transport company, a German citizen, was arrested for underreporting the value of imported art works. Several leading collectors were also detained, including a top executive of Minsheng Bank, which has been buying heavily in anticipation of opening its new art museum in Beijing in 2013. This has put fear in the minds of many mainland buyers, and had a chilling effect on the spring auction sales, which saw a sharp drop in participation in Beijing and Hong Kong.
Most Chinese collectors are private about their purchases for fear that showing off their treasures might raise a red flag and lead to corruption charges. “I have a warehouse in Hong Kong,” is one of the first things I am told by Yu Mingfang, senior vice president of Belle International Holdings Limited. The company, China’s top shoe manufacturer and retailer, was listed as the eighth largest company in Asia by Businessweek. He wants me to know that his recent acquisitions of valuable works of international art—by artists such as Damien Hirst and Luc Tuymans—have not been brought back to his home in Beijing and are therefore not subject to customs duties.
Still, as he sits in his spacious office decorated with both antiquities and contemporary paintings, as well as his wine collection, Yu is happy to share stories about how he acquired more than 100 world-class artworks in under four years. As he performs an elaborate tea ceremony, one of his recent passions, he explains how the artist Zeng Fanzhi, whose record price is $9.6 million, opened doors for him, enabling him to socialize with people like David Zwirner, François Pinault, Jay Jopling, and Larry Gagosian, who represents the artist.
But Yu, 55, has been looking at contemporary art for almost two decades, visiting museums as he traveled on business. He remembers an early trip to the Pompidou Center—“the museum with tubes on the outside”—and seeing a room filled with works by Raoul Dufy. Now, he has a small Dufy hanging above a mantelpiece in his office. Across the room is a large painting by Zeng of a tiger in the moonlight—one out of ten paintings he owns by the artist. “I loved art for a very long time, but I couldn’t afford it,” he says, “but once I was financially capable, I began collecting.”
Yu is different from the stereotype of the mainland collector, who is focused exclusively on Chinese artists and is avaricious, rapidly buying and selling at auction just to make a profit. Yu has never sold a work; he is saving his collection for a museum he hopes to build one day. “I am looking for a site by a park, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” he says. In China, where private museums are opening in Shanghai, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang, Wuhan, Chengdu, and Nanjing, all in this year alone, Yu is just one of a pack with such plans in mind.
Collector Wang Wei and her husband, Liu Yiqian, are in the process of opening their own exhibition space in the Pudong District of Shanghai. Called the Dragon Museum, the nearly 40,000-square-foot structure is scheduled for completion in November. The couple has reportedly spent more than $31 million on the project. Its anticipated operating budget, expected to exceed $774,000, will be covered exclusively by personal funds. In China, there is no such legal entity as a tax-exempt private museum, and there are no tax benefits for donations to museums, so the founder has to underwrite all operating costs. The museum will house Wang and Liu’s collection, considered by some to be China’s largest. It consists of revolutionary material, modern oil paintings, antiquities and relics, and blue-chip contemporary Chinese art.
While the plans seem ambitious, they are easily within reach of Liu, whose worth is valued at over $540 million by Forbes. The collector, who made his first fortune in the handbag trade, supplemented by stock-market investments, could fund the museum entirely on his own with his profit from the sale of Qi Baishi’s 1946 ink painting with calligraphic scrolls Eagle Standing on Pine Tree with Four-Character Couplet in Seal Script, which he purchased for $2.5 million in 2005 and sold for $65 million at China Guardian in Beijing in 2011. It set a record for a work of Chinese modern art.
Another couple making a mark on China’s art scene is Su Yan and her husband, Li Guochang, chairman of China Forestry Holdings. Their collection of more than 1,000 works ranges from antiquities to contemporary Chinese paintings. Su, 34, recalls that when they first married in 2000, she knew little about contemporary art but did share her husband’s love of collecting antiquities. Then, it all began to change in 2001, when the couple met the artist Chao Ge, a realist painter who is quite popular in China. “We saw a catalogue of his work,” she says, “and it touched me so much that we went to Chao Ge and offered to buy several paintings.” However, she explains, the artist refused to sell because he cherished his works and did not want to sell to strangers. “Before that we thought buying contemporary art is all money, but this taught us that there is something more.”
Now, Su’s activities are all about teaching people to view art as more than an investment. She and her husband founded the China Contemporary Art Foundation in 2008 (in Hong Kong, where not-for-profits are permitted, unlike in mainland China). The foundation is involved in various activities, including supporting forums to encourage art criticism; publishing two magazines, Art Bank and Art Times; and managing the Wall Art Museum, which has operated in temporary locations. Currently, Su is hoping to complete a permanent home for the Wall Art Museum. The $20 million complex is slated to be built in the Sanlitun District of Beijing, an upscale area that already hosts an art hotel, created by fellow Beijing collector Zhang Rui. Former Guggenheim Museum director Thomas Krens, who is now running a cultural-development firm with many projects in China, will serve as an adviser to the Wall Art Museum.
Among the most public collectors in Beijing are Yang Bin and his wife, Yan Qing, who owns Aye Gallery. Not only is the couple planning to build a museum, but Yang has made collecting into an amusing activity that he encourages his friends and colleagues to join. Yang, 55, is one of China’s biggest car dealers, specializing in Buicks, Chevrolets, and Cadillacs. Like many Chinese collectors, he bought his first works in 2000 to decorate his home and office, concentrating on Chinese realist painters, whose works have proved extremely valuable in the Chinese domestic art market. Now, he boasts about his latest purchases, which range from ten new paintings by the Chinese master Liu Wei, whose works sell for over $1 million at auction, to a 1984 painting by Jörg Immendorff, purchased for $1 million from a gallery in Germany.
“I bought Anish Kapoor because he gave me the idea for my ceiling,” says Yang, pointing out the mirrored convex form above his head. “Contemporary art has a connection with contemporary life. Older works have no connection with my life,” he explains. When asked how he learned about contemporary art, he responds, “I have a party at my house almost every day, and I invite a lot of people. They talk about art, and I learn a lot.” He is typical of Chinese collectors in that he has bought and sold a considerable amount at auction, often bringing along friends to bid against him. Sometimes he does it for sport and other times to support an artist he favors. “Some of my friends, I push them to buy some,” he admits. “It is good for them. For investment, at the least, but above that, maybe it changes their life.”
While Yang is not planning to build his own museum, he has taken the unusual step of sponsoring art exhibitions, including one devoted to his collection at the Ludwig Museum Koblenz in 2008, and another, “Dramatic Journey,” a recent show at the Beijing National Convention Center, featuring vintage Cadillacs among artworks by Andy Warhol, David LaChapelle, Stuart Davis, Zao Wou-ki, and blue-chip Chinese contemporary painters like Wang Guangyi, Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang, and Yue Minjun.
Some Chinese collectors remain loyal to Chinese art. Interior designer Tang Ju has more than 500 works by Chinese realist painters, including Xia Xiaowan, Leng Jun, Wang Yidong, and Luo Zhongli, whom many consider the father of contemporary Chinese painting. Tang, 48, whose father was an artist, wants to assemble some 100 works to show in a museum devoted to realism, which he considers an important aspect of Chinese contemporary art. Such works are far more popular in China than are others by artists with international reputations, such as Zhang Xiaogang or Zeng Fanzhi.
Other collectors, like Qiao Zhibing, don’t need a museum. Qiao houses his collection in his karaoke palaces in Shanghai and Beijing. In less than three years, he has put together a contemporary collection that includes works by Olafur Eliasson, Matthew Day Jackson, Antony Gormley, and Damien Hirst, as well as Chinese artists. He was introduced to contemporary art in 2007, when Pi Li of Beijing’s Boers-Li Gallery brought him to Basel, where he purchased a work by Zhang Enli from Hauser and Wirth. “Collecting contemporary art is inspiring,” he says. “If I only collected Chinese art I would be limiting myself to a small region. I don’t want to do that. I want to look out, internationally.”
All of these collectors contradict the Chinese stereotype that has emerged over the past few years—namely, that they are simply speculators who refuse to pay on time for the art works they purchase. Sotheby’s, for example, has had to file lawsuits 13 times since 2006 against mainland buyers for nonpayment. Most recently one was lodged against a successful bidder of HK$34.1 million ($4,383,000) worth of paintings. As a precaution, both Christie’s and Sotheby’s, as well as mainland firms, now require advance deposits from buyers. “There have been ‘teething’ issues when mainland Chinese buyers started participating in our auctions on a larger scale around 2010,” acknowledges Curiel of Christie’s Asia. “Indeed, some collectors did not realize they were legally bound to complete the transaction once the hammer goes down. So in response to that, we developed a deposit system for new clients, at 20 percent of the low estimate of the property clients wish to bid on. This has dramatically reduced the default rate,” Curiel explains.
“The auction houses are still very much a secondary market and very remote from what’s happening in the Chinese art community,” says Meg Maggio of Pékin Fine Arts, who has been a dealer in Beijing since the late 1990s. “I’ve never had a problem with payment. I feel the mainland collectors are still an unknown entity. The mainlanders are a question market; people don’t really understand what they are doing; they don’t know them well; there is a huge language barrier,” she adds. “And the mainland collectors are learning the ropes publicly, but I think they are learning very quickly.”
Total auction sales this spring for Sotheby’s Hong Kong, Christie’s Hong Kong, China Guardian, and Poly International Beijing dropped 32 percent from $2.2 billion in autumn 2011 to $1.5 billion. The overall result is 43 percent lower than the peak of the Chinese art market in spring 2011. Some might attribute this trend to a maturing of the Chinese buyer, who has grown more particular with experience about which works are worth $1-million-plus prices. But others close to the scene are certain that this has to do in great part with the recent government detentions of influential collectors and art handlers.
In April, Nils Jennrich and Lydia Chu, employees of the Hong Kong–based art-handling company Integrated Fine Art Solutions, were threatened with life sentences, accused of helping buyers avoid $1.6 million in import duties. Some observers thought it was politically motivated because the company handled Ai Weiwei’s art. Since then, Wu Jin, editor-in- chief of Hi Art magazine, Huang Yujie, chairman of Beijing Bonwin Contemporary Art Investment Co., and He Juxing, brand manager of Minsheng Bank, were also detained. Sotheby’s Hong Kong and Christie’s Hong Kong were asked to cooperate. Despite reports in the news that the firms turned over client lists, according to Curiel, the extent of cooperation was limited to providing information on prices of certain items. Sotheby’s Kevin Ching confirms that they cooperated, though they were never a target of the investigation. Hong Kong has no import or export duties, making it a free zone for art sales, which is why many mainland collectors keep works in warehouses there. China, on the other hand, applies customs duties of up to 34 percent, making it prohibitively expensive to bring art into the country.
“Auction results were most likely down this spring because of the government’s interest in Sotheby’s and Christie’s clients, and certain shippers were put into jail for misrepresenting the values on imports, which freaked everyone out,” says Peter Boris, who oversees the Pace Gallery’s operations in Asia. “The memory is still too fresh about how the Chinese government can usurp things.” In July, the Chinese government announced plans to open the Beijing Freeport of Culture and erect an 893,404-square-foot facility next to the Beijing Capital International Airport, thereby creating a space where art works can be brought tax-free. Scheduled to open in late 2013, the freeport in no way precludes the payment of custom duties once the artwork leaves the port and enters mainland China.
Acknowledging that some collectors may be mere speculators, while others have a deeper sense of engagement, Boris states, “The great thing is that, whether they are type A or type B, they are supporting artists, and that speaks volumes about what might come in the culture.”
Barbara Pollack is a contributing editor of ARTnews. Additional reporting by Sammi Yiyuan Liu.
Copyright 2013, ARTnews LLC, 48 West 38th Street, New York, N.Y. 10018. All rights reserved.
Traditional Chinese art tempts collectors at Tefaf Maastricht this year
Although China is one of the leading art markets in the world, collecting there is still largely domestic. In one of the most in-depth reports conducted recently, the European Fine Art Foundation (Tefaf) Art Market Report 2013, the economist Clare McAndrew wrote that China’s economic growth “combined with a rich cultural heritage of art and antiques has produced a huge domestic market”. Chinese collectors are mainly interested in buying Chinese calligraphy and paintings and contemporary Chinese art, the report confirmed.
But the arrival of Art Basel Hong Kong and a growing number of museums and commercial galleries showing international art on the mainland and in Hong Kong will change this—or so many believe. “The multipolar and diverse trends of the global art market will extend,” says Magnus Renfrew, the director Asia of Art Basel. “Metropolitan centres, such as New York, London and Beijing, have become international art hubs. In particular, Beijing’s [international] status is supported by China’s powerful domestic auction market,” he says.
Current Chinese taste
A report produced by Art Market Monitor of Artron (AMMA) and Artprice, The Art Market in 2012: a Dialogue Between East and West, shows that Chinese buyers favour fine Chinese calligraphy and painting (traditional, Modern and contemporary). Indeed, Chinese calligraphy accounted for 88% of Chinese fine art auction sales in China last year—and just over half of the country’s $6.9bn total of auction sales, which includes decorative art, jewellery and other luxury items.
Traditional calligraphy and painting are considered “safe havens” in China, because of their rarity. The two leading Chinese auction houses, China Guardian and Poly International, promoted fine Chinese calligraphy and painting when they entered the Hong Kong market in 2012. In Hong Kong’s spring auctions this year, fine Chinese calligraphy and painting sales at Sotheby’s, China Guardian and Poly International were all huge successes: 97% of the lots were sold in Sotheby’s Chinese calligraphy and painting auction, and Poly International and China Guardian sold 80% of their lots. Meanwhile, contemporary ink, which draws on traditional materials and techniques, has become a Chinese art market hot spot.
International contemporary
Although there are collectors across Asia of international (or Western)-style contemporary art, many of whom will be in Hong Kong for Art Basel Hong Kong, “experts in the trade estimate that there are currently only around 30 large collectors of Western art from mainland China”, Clare McAndrew writes.
Galerie Perrotin opened its Hong Kong branch in May 2012 and mainly promotes Western contemporary art. It has exhibited works by several Western contemporary artists in the past year. Alice Lung, a director of Galerie Perrotin Hong Kong (1C37), says the gallery’s clientele is mainly Western, with one or two collectors from mainland China.
International art dealers are in Hong Kong this week partly because they are positive about Chinese collectors’ interest in Western art in the future—as is Eric Chang, the international director of Asian 20th- century and contemporary art at Christie’s Hong Kong. He says that, as they travel overseas increasingly frequently, high-end Chinese collectors’ tastes are gradually changing. As a result, he argues, the Chinese art market will eventually become international.
Confidence
So far, reports from this year’s Tefaf Maastricht suggest that Chinese collectors hardly showed any interest in non-Chinese historic art and antiques at the fair. But Ben Janssens, the chairman of Tefaf, is confident about the growth of the market for European art in China. Tefaf and Sotheby’s are in talks to develop Tefaf Beijing for 2014. He says that time and education are needed before there will be widespread collecting of Western art and antiques.
There has been a deceleration in China’s rate of economic growth (the rise in GDP slowed from 9.2% in 2011 to 7.2% in 2012), but in her presentation about China’s art market at Tefaf Maastricht in March, McAndrew said that 75% of the country’s high-net-worth individuals, who have at least $1m in investable assets, expect to be wealthier in five years’ time. This confidence will inevitably influence the Chinese art market, as high-net-worth individuals tend to buy luxury goods and art.
A few years ago, names such as Zhang Xiaogang, Liu Xiaodong, and Zhang Huan might have drawn blank stares from Western collectors. Now, with an explosion of museums, galleries, and prices, China has become the hottest stop on the international art circuit. In the emerging cultural capitals of Beijing and Shanghai, the author examines the forces in a stampede of new money, unleashed talent, and national pride.
With his closely cropped hair, ever burning cigarette, and trademark round eyeglasses, Zhang Xiaogang has become the face of Chinese art, an unlikely rock-star figure at the head of a mania sweeping auction houses from Beijing to New York. In the mid-1990s, his work was banned in his home country. Now it hangs in state-approved galleries, with his individual paintings fetching between $500,000 and $3 million.
Artist Zhang Xiaogang and two of his paintings in his studio, in Beijing’s Liquor Factory district. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.
Zhang, 49, didn’t come by his status easily. When he was a boy, in the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution, his parents were sent to a “study camp” in the countryside, forced to give up their government posts and leave their children behind. Raised for several years by an aunt, Zhang immersed himself in drawing, only to be sent to re-education camp as a teenager. Following the collapse of the Cultural Revolution upon Mao’s death, in 1976, he made it into the prestigious Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts, where he didn’t really distinguish himself. After hitting upon his mature style in the early 1990s, Zhang ran into another obstacle when authorities deemed his paintings unfit for public display.
As the country gradually opened itself economically and culturally, he found himself back in favor. In 1997, Beijing galleries started showing his work—which mainly comprises large, haunting portraits of hollow-eyed Chinese citizens—and now he is one of China’s highest-earning artists.
Zhang’s big international moment came in 2006, when London gallery owner Charles Saatchi purchased A Big Family for $1.5 million at a Christie’s London auction. Since that sale, Zhang’s prices have continued to explode: his Tiananmen Square fetched $2.3 million at a 2006 Christie’s auction in Hong Kong, and another canvas, Chapter of a New Century: Birth of the People’s Republic of China, went for more than $3 million at a September 2007 Sotheby’s sale in New York. Unlike so many Chinese artists of his and previous generations, Zhang has not had to expatriate to make his fortune. He runs a studio in Beijing, where he smokes and paints like a fiend to keep up with demand.
Once an empire of enforced egalitarianism, this nation of 1.3 billion is waking up from a stupor of isolation as Shanghai and Beijing prepare to become capitals of a China-dominated world culture. And once wary state officials have managed to befriend a few of the country’s most rebellious artists just in time for Beijing’s giant 2008 photo op, the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. “The place is just an environmental disaster, but there’s a kind of energy,” says noted New York architect Basil Walter, who has collected Chinese art during visits to his Shanghai office. “In the art districts, ladies in Bentleys pull up, dressed to the nines, and slog through the mud to get to a gallery where they’re seeing a new artist’s work, while some deranged person is quivering off to the side. There’s a visual bombardment that makes the place really exciting.”
A boom of this magnitude requires distinctive artists and eager collectors with cash to burn. China has both. Consider the case of Newly Displaced Population, a 2004 canvas by realist painter Liu Xiaodong, which presents a critical view of the Chinese government’s displacement of more than one million people as a result of building the Three Gorges Dam. Not only was this painting left uncensored but it sold at the Beijing Poly International Auction in November 2006 for $2.75 million, at the time a world record for a painting by a contemporary Chinese artist. It was snapped up by a mainland collector: Zhang Lan, a female restaurateur who is becoming the Wolfgang Puck of China. Her upscale chain, South Beauty, earned a reported $25 million in 2006, and she aims to open 100 new locations by 2008. Expressionist architect Philippe Starck has designed a showpiece South Beauty restaurant for Times Square, which is to come complete with a gallery to show off her purchases.
Another major Chinese collector is Hong Kong real-estate heiress Pearl Lam. At her penthouse soirées, I have run into American collector Stephan Edlis, Tate Liverpool curator Simon Groom, and Art Basel emeritus Samuel Keller, as well as local stars Lorenz Helbling, founding director of ShanghART Gallery, and Victoria Lu, formerly creative director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Shanghai. “I thought to myself, For Chinese contemporary art to be strong, I had to be a bridge,” says Lam.
Until recently, Chinese contemporary art was purely an export market. Baron Guy Ullens, a Belgian philanthropist, was an early collector, beginning with purchases he made in the mid-1980s on business trips to China. Uli Sigg, Swiss ambassador to China from 1995 to 1998, was another who put together an encyclopedic selection of Chinese contemporary art at a time when most works sold for a few hundred dollars. Another important “foreigner” from this period was David Tang, the entrepreneur who turned Mao jackets into the Shanghai Tang brand. Born in Hong Kong, but the product of a British education, Tang assembled his collection by combing through the squalid studios where Chinese artists worked in the late 1980s.
Tang did everything to promote Chinese contemporary art in the 1990s, even inviting Princess Diana to the 1995 Venice Biennale, which featured several Chinese artists. “I said, ‘Would you please come?’ and she agreed,” Tang says. Just one problem, as Tang recalls: when Princess Di’s private secretary conducted a walk-through of the show, he was stunned by Liu Wei’s graphic paintings. “He wasn’t going to allow the Princess to stand before [works like these] and have her picture taken,” Tang says. With the photographers banned, they took her through the gallery with her back turned to the most scandalous pieces. At a celebratory dinner held afterward, Tang stood on his chair and announced, “This is a new dawn for Chinese art!” The crowd applauded. He remembers thinking, “I’ve got the most famous person in the world to come and give us a lift. If this doesn’t succeed, nothing will.”
More than a decade later, the rest of the world caught on. In March 2006, Sotheby’s held its first New York sale of Chinese contemporary art, attracting both Asian and Western collectors, bringing in $12.7 million, and establishing auction records for Zhang Xiaogang, Zhang Huan, Liu Xiaodong, and Fang Lijun, among 20 other artists. In their springtime 2007 auctions, Christie’s saw $36 million and Sotheby’s $27 million in sales of Asian contemporary art at their Hong Kong branches, with Chinese artists delivering the majority of the lots on offer.
Mainland auction houses have also entered the fray in the last two years. Poly Auctions, the most lucrative auction house in China, is one of a number of cultural enterprises affiliated with Beijing Poly Group, a former unit of the People’s Liberation Army now owned by the state. Its chief competitor, Guardian, opened in 1993. It was founded by Wang Yannan, daughter of Zhao Ziyang, the late Communist Party leader who was deposed and put under house arrest when he opposed the use of armed troops in Tiananmen Square, in 1989.
The Chinese houses seem to encourage speculation. It’s not uncommon to see the same piece sold over and over again in a single year, rising in price at each sale. Nor is it rare for an artist or dealer to place new works directly into auction, then bring along friends and sympathetic collectors to bid up the price. But with the market this hot, buyers from New York and London have been showing little compunction in flipping contemporary Chinese artworks. Today’s $500,000 painting could fetch $1 million tomorrow.
“When people talk about the high prices, I would say that Chinese artists believe that their top artists deserve to be right alongside the best artists from anywhere else,” says Charles Saatchi, who plans to mount a show called “The Revolution Continues: New Art from China” at his new London gallery this spring. “I like to think that any of the works I will be showing could be included in a Whitney Biennial, and you wouldn’t have to stand in front of it and say, ‘That’s pretty good for a Chinese artist.’ ”
A possible Chinese counterpart to Saatchi—someone who can single-handedly send prices skyrocketing—is Joseph Lau, a Hong Kong real-estate mogul, who bought Andy Warhol’s Green Car Crash for $71.7 million at Christie’s New York in 2007. But collectors from the mainland are seemingly more circumspect. Yang Bin, an automotive dealer in China, and Zhang Haoming, owner of Beijing’s upscale Le Quai restaurant, have helped the boom along with big purchases, but they have yet to pay Saatchi prices. And then there is Guan Yi, who has an enviable private collection on display in his Beijing warehouse. Guan refuses to put a cash value to his collection, saying, “I think about art—I care about art.”
Even as late as 2002, none of this seemed possible. Beijing had just begun developing its contemporary-art district, Factory 798, a former munitions plant whose Bauhaus-style architecture attracted dozens of artists and dealers. The most notable gallery in the 798 complex is the Beijing Commune, founded by Leng Lin, a curator who has known artists such as Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Minjun throughout their careers. Today, Factory 798 has been designated a “historic district” by the city of Beijing, and visitors already complain that it has become overgrown and too commercial. And in the few years since Factory 798 established itself, additional galleries have sprung out of the crowded streets. “If you go to the other art centers of the world—London, New York, or Los Angeles—you may hear about a new gallery opening up here or there,” says Basil Walter. “In Beijing, you hear about an entire neighborhood opening up overnight. The construction happens so quickly, and the number of galleries and the amount of art that’s proliferating is just astounding.”
Shanghai’s smaller gallery district, named 50 Moganshan Lu, for the address at which it is located, has begun to spread out to the adjoining neighborhood and is in the midst of an explosion of new museums. MoCA Shanghai (founded by Hong Kong jewelry designer Samuel Kung), the Pompidou Center’s Shanghai satellite branch (scheduled to open by 2009), and the Zendai Museum (backed by Shanghai real-estate developer Dai Zhikang and scheduled to open in 2010) join the state-run Shanghai Art Museum and municipal Duolun Museum of Modern Art.
“It is an extraordinary scene,” says Arne Glimcher, an éminence grise who just returned from a tour of China during which he signed Zhang Xiaogang and Zhang Huan to Pace Wildenstein, his prestigious New York gallery. “It is a little bit like Germany after the Second World War. With the culture being annihilated, it was fresh to start again. Or like America in the 50s, when we didn’t really have an indigenous style, so we were fresh to start from scratch.”
Painter Yue Minjun built a splendid compound for himself on the outskirts of Beijing in the Songzhuang district, a kind of Chinese East Hampton, given the number of artists living there. His neighbor Fang Lijun went further, opening a chain of art-filled restaurants in Beijing. On a recent trip, Agnes Gund, the president emerita of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, feasted on a buffet on Yue Minjun’s lawn. She also stopped by the studio of Lin Tianmiao, the sole female artist in this group of alpha males, whose home and studio are contained within a restored farmhouse.
Back in Shanghai, bad-boy artist Zhang Huan has taken over a vast industrial complex in the southern part of the city, which exceeds in size and scale even the most lavish studios in Beijing. In 1994, this artist covered himself in honey and fish oil at a public toilet, remaining motionless for an hour as insects covered his flesh. Now he has a production line that rivals that of Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons, employing more than 100 craftsmen who live in an adjoining dormitory. Wood-carvers chip away at blocks for prints that will be larger than billboards, and welders work on sculptures more than 25 feet tall. In a room filled with hundreds of canvases, assistants sprinkle ash, like Buddhist monks making sand mandalas, to create photo-realistic images. The powdery substance is created in his studio, as well as collected from temples where people burn incense; the artist has his own truck to drive around to collect it.
Topping the list as the most independent of all of the self-made artists in China, Ai Weiwei was born in Beijing, grew up in Xinjiang, and saw his father, once Mao’s favorite poet, discredited during the Cultural Revolution and forced to clean latrines. He left for New York in 1981, completely pessimistic about the future of art in China, only to return 12 years later, when his father fell ill. During the 1990s, he was the chief agitator in the Beijing art scene, his antics culminating in a show he curated called “Fuck Off,” which coincided with the Shanghai Bienniale 2000. With little hope of a further art career, either inside or outside of China, Ai Weiwei built a home for himself, modeled on the traditional gray brick courtyard houses found in central Beijing, and launched himself as a self-taught architect.
Now heralded as an international artist of the first rank, Ai Weiwei sent 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel, Germany, this past summer as his contribution to the Documenta arts festival. In 2008 he will see his crowning achievement unveiled at the Summer Olympics: Beijing’s new Olympic stadium, often called “the bird’s nest,” on which he collaborated with the architecture firm of Herzog & de Meuron. But he still works with a wary sense of freedom. “It’s like the movie Home Alone,” he told me when I visited his studio. “The parents have gone away … but they can always come back.”
His sense of caution may be justified. Just two summers ago, government agencies in Shanghai and Beijing removed numerous artworks from galleries after a long period when censorship of the arts had seemed to cease. Earlier this year, the staff of the Duolun Museum of Modern Art, in Shanghai, walked out over disagreements with authorities about what art could or could not be shown. Wang Qingsong, an artist who stages large photographic tableaux akin to movie sets that sell for up to $320,000 at auction, was questioned for two days and had his negatives seized after a model complained about the nudity in his latest production.
Yet the feeling of suppression has definitely subsided. Many believe that the Chinese government simply has bigger concerns: the Internet and movies—mass culture that more people see and are influenced by than contemporary art. On a more cynical note, it could be that promoting contemporary art counterbalances China’s human-rights record, in addition to generating lots of cash.
If anything demonstrates a change in mood, it is the inclusion of the iconoclasts Cai Guo-Qiang and Ai Weiwei in the Olympic program. Cai is possibly the most famous Chinese art expatriate, having left his homeland in 1986 and launched a spectacular international career. Despite his status as a “foreigner,” Cai was permitted to be the curator of China’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in 2005. Now he will bring one of his famous fireworks displays—seen in the skies throughout the world—to the Olympics. In acknowledgment of his new role within China, Cai is building a studio within the ruins of a double-courtyard house two blocks from the Forbidden City, the 18th-century imperial residence that was handed over to the mayor of Beijing when the Communists took over, in 1949.
A key player in bringing the often politically inconvenient artists into the state’s embrace is Fan Di’an, head of the National Art Museum of China, in Beijing. He has been selected to orchestrate the cultural activities at the Olympic Village and other key sites in Beijing. In addition to commissioning fireworks maestro Cai Guo-Qiang, Fan has persuaded Chinese film director Zhang Yimou to help with the ceremonies. (Steven Spielberg, a consultant on the project, has threatened to resign over China’s role in the Darfur genocide, but has yet to do so.)
Most established Chinese artists built their careers without the benefit of gallery representation (in contrast to Western artists, who can’t seem to tie their sneakers without a major dealer). Zhang Huan, who moved to New York in 1998 and now has returned to China to set up his studio in Shanghai, jumped from Max Protetch to Jeffrey Deitch to Luhring Augustine, burning bridges along the way. China’s other powerful artists—Ai Weiwei, Cai Guo-Qiang, Yue Minjun, Fang Lijun, as well as Zhang Xiaogang—reached the international market without a gallery. Foreign dealers, while welcomed for sales, were not trusted enough for long-term relationships.
China’s rising art stars are more likely to go the gallery route. Yang Fudong, born in 1971, an artist whose atmospheric films have been featured at virtually every biennial and major art museum in the past five years, has worked with Helbling at ShanghART and more recently with the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York and Paris. Wang Qingsong began his career through his association with Meg Maggio, who brought the artist to the attention of the Albion Gallery, in London, and art dealer Jeannie Greenberg Rohatyn, in New York.
Twentysomething dealer Fang Fang, director of the Star Gallery, in Beijing, has made a specialty of scooping up artists fresh out of school, a generation he calls “the naughty kids.” As opposed to their elders, who often came from poverty, these artists have had travel visas from an early age. Chen Ke, one of Star’s stars, graduated from the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts in 2005 and has already had a gallery show. Her fairy-tale-like pieces, peopled with forlorn heroines and sad-faced clowns, might have come from anywhere. In interviews, she talks about personal expression, apparently seeing no need to define herself or her art as particularly Chinese.
Young Chinese artists are free to think as selfishly as anyone who wields a paintbrush in Brooklyn or on the Lower East Side. It seems the Chinese government has managed to defuse the explosive potential of contemporary art simply by allowing it to flourish.
Barbara Pollack has been covering the contemporary-art scene since 1994 for The New York Times, Art & Auction, and Art News.
Home » Articles » The Rise of the Modern Chinese Art Scene
In 1982, after the Cultural Revolution ended, there were about 100 graduating art majors from universities in China. Today there are over 260,000. The modern art scene began in the 1980s, and became a key period in Chinese contemporary art. New Wave artists included Wang Guangyi, Xu Bing, Geng Jianyi and Huang Yongping, a unifying feature amongst them being their works’ likeness to the Western styles of Picasso, Munch and the Dada artists. International contemporary art styles began to influence the work of Chinese artists. Avant-Garde, in the larger context, is the forward thinking movement in the art world of experimental and innovative styles. The China Avant-Garde show in 1989 at the National Gallery of Art in Beijing became a significant moment in the Chinese art scene. The show was the first contemporary art exhibition permitted in an official forum as well as the first Chinese authority-sponsored exhibition of innovative and new age art. The entire exhibit lasted for a few hours. Due to the nature of the artistic message, the show ended after a performance artist entered the show with a gun and shot two bullets through her work—a pair of mannequins in phone boxes. Although gaining popularity for the event, the artist Xiao Lu said the motivation for her action was not political or aesthetic, as the media had portrayed. Rather it was an emotional action. In shooting the mannequins she was in fact shooting a reflection of herself. Despite the motivation, she still inspired many with her actions. In the early 1990s the art scene in Beijing became centered on artists in Dong Un behind the city’s Third Ring Road. Artists sometimes moved four or five times a year. Shows were held in basements in out-of-the-way areas; at longest their exhibits stayed open for a few days. When not in public areas, art was displayed to small audiences in private homes, leading to the term ‘Apartment art.’ The artist Wang Gongxin told the China Daily, “Young artists of the time were looking for a private space to transform into a contemporary space.” In the early 1990s, a new movement began in the Chinese art world. Known as Cynical Realism, it focused on the already rising trend in the pursuit of individual expression by artists. They broke away from traditional artistic trends, considered to be part of a collective mindset existing since the Cultural Revolution. Through their art they focused on themes of social and political issues, as well as events since the early 1900s. They offered their publics a realist perspective and interpretation of the rapidly changing culture as China. Artists working in the late 1990s and early 2000s explored the social isolation connected with China’s economic reforms, as well as gave a criticism of Chinese icons. In the 1990s, the art scene was still largely underground until an international event moved it into the spotlight. It began with the visit from Princess Diana at the 1995 Venice Biennial. The exhibit was notable for featuring several Chinese artists and brought Chinese art came to the forefront in the art world. On the Chinese modern art scene, Australian writer John Hopkins called it, “One of the most vibrant scenes is contemporary art. New movements multiply with bewildering speed, as cities, artists and international dealers promote their favorites.” Contemporary art grew more accepted by major schools. The Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China’s top art school, has had numerous artist celebrities graduate from its ranks. Less than 10 percent of those who apply are accepted. Among the famous contemporary artists that have studied there are Liu Wei, Fang Lijun and Zhang Huan. In addition to an impressive list of alumni, the school’s teachers are also highly recognized. Faculty members include the artists Liu Xiaodong, whose works have sold for as much as $8.2 million.
Students attending this school have been known to be less interested in politics and more focused on the artist’s personal struggle. Though continuing with the spirit of experimenting with the arts, students are traditionally taught to paint by painting the same figurative many times as a form of honing their skills. Beijing is still the main hub for contemporary art, though the modern art movement has spread all over China. In Qingdao, art clubs have sprouted around the city, particularly with the help of social media. The universities offer art degrees and the local Qingdao Art Museum now features modern art exhibits considered improper not long ago.
THE ECONOMIST LONDON
Contemporary art in China
Chinese checkers
The wild, wild world of the Chinese contemporary-art market
Made in China
BUYING Chinese contemporary art is not for the faint-hearted. There are no museums in China to offer the validation that contemporary-art collectors in the West desire, and few independent critics or curators to judge whether a living artist’s work is good enough to stand the test of time. Yet that is not putting off buyers. Last year Asia accounted for nearly a quarter of global auction revenue, nearly twice what it was two years ago. Some of this can be explained by sales of wine and watches, which have a growing following among the Chinese, but the lion’s share is made up of art. Among the ten most expensive artists working today, two are Chinese—Zhang Xiaogang and Zeng Fanzhi. Yet the Chinese contemporary-art market is extremely volatile, bidding at auctions in mainland China is often rigged and galleries follow the auction houses’ lead on prices far more than they do in the West. So how does the neophyte collector find his or her way through this jungle?
Before 2007, Chinese contemporary art was largely the province of European and American collectors who bought on the cheap and watched as prices went up. Now it is more likely to stay in Asia. Taiwan, which has some of the most mature collectors in the region, has recently acquired an appetite for contemporary art. Taiwanese taste, says Pi Li, co-owner of Boers-Li, a Beijing gallery, is “elegant” and leans towards expatriate artists like Yan Pei Ming (who lives in France) and Zhang Huan and Mr Cai (who live in New York), whereas mainland buyers like “wilder things”. Hong Kong, by contrast, is a hybrid culture, where collectors love international art, particularly Pop.
Most Chinese artists live in Beijing, whereas most collectors come from Shanghai, the historic financial centre. The newly rich from Shanxi province (which derives its wealth from mining) and Fujian (which has grown prosperous through trade) have recently entered the market, but their tastes veer towards the traditional, or what Philip Tinari, a Beijing-based art critic, dismisses as “realist pictures of pretty girls playing blackjack”.
One thing Chinese collectors agree on is the superiority of painting. The highest price ever paid for a sculpture by a living mainland Chinese artist is just over $800,000 (for a stainless-steel work by Zhan Wang), less than a tenth of the highest price paid for a Chinese contemporary picture ($10.1m for an early painting by Mr Zhang). “The Chinese tradition doesn’t see sculpture as real art but as anonymous craft for ritual use,” explains Lu Jie, the owner of the Long March Space, another Beijing gallery.
Beijing is the intellectual capital of China and has a burgeoning gallery scene in its art district, which is known as 798. Contemporary dealers set up shop here to stay close to the many artists that have made Beijing their home. The best local galleries—the Long March Space, Beijing Commune and Boers-Li—are artist-driven businesses. A handful of prestigious international players—Continua, Urs Meile, Jens Faurschou and Pace Gallery—have also opened there, but these are mainly exporters. Pace has shown many Chinese artists in its New York galleries but, until recently, no Western art in China. As Arne Glimcher, Pace’s owner, says: “A Chinese audience is not going to be spoon-fed the leftovers of Western culture.”
Experiments
The artists’ community in Beijing is vibrant and competitive. Some painters and sculptors live in artists’ villages scattered around central Beijing, but many live on the outskirts in Songzhuang, a tolerant municipality where artists without Beijing residence licences or hukouben are not harassed by the police.
Contributing to this vitality is the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). One of two elite institutions (the other is the China Academy of Art located in Hangzhou), the academy admits only one in 30 applicants and has a magnetic pull on ambitious Chinese artists. CAFA used to be the pre-eminent party-controlled school; it now boasts a department of “experimental art” and most staff members lean cautiously toward liberality. Jin Hua, manager of the international office of CAFA, is a rare public supporter of Ai Weiwei. Mr Jin regards the outspoken artist’s recent 81-day imprisonment as extremely unfair and says that excessive government restriction is unsustainable. “If China wants to be the homeland of high-value goods, it has to be a country with freedom,” he says. “How can you develop a brand when you can’t even own your home?”
Many Chinese artists have become known to Westerners through their recognisable signature styles, such as Yue Minjun’s monotonous paintings of pink-faced smiling men. But the popularity of this kind of work seems to be on the wane. By contrast, Mr Zeng, one of China’s most successful living artists, hasn’t become stuck in a single, rigid type of painting. While Mr Zeng’s most coveted works are from his “mask” series, which were made between 1994 and 2004, his self-portraits (pictured above) also fetch high prices at auction and his abstract landscapes sell well on the primary market.
Expert craftsmanship, preferably with an overt display of time-consuming labour on the part of the artist himself, remains a driving force in Chinese contemporary art. Mr Zeng, for example, is adamant that none of his assistants is allowed to pick up a brush.
The way Mr Zeng sells his work is illustrative of a general trend. In the 1990s, Mr Zeng sold most of his paintings directly from his studio. Later he worked with a range of dealers, settling with Shanghart. Now he has signed an exclusive global deal with Larry Gagosian for all sales beyond the mainland.
As Chinese artists come to appreciate the confidence in their work that can be conferred by a strong gallery, they will start seeking integration into the global art world. The endorsement of international collectors with powerful reputations is also essential. For instance, François Pinault, a French collector with two museums in Venice, owns 15 Zeng paintings and says he sees the artist as “the Jackson Pollock of the 21st century”: the great abstract expressionist was the first American painter to gain international recognition. Mr Pinault’s foundation underwrote a solo show of recent Zeng work at Christie’s in Hong Kong and at the new Rockbund Art Museum, part of a commercial property development in Shanghai.
Museums of contemporary art with permanent collections and solid scholarship are the most important ingredient still missing from the Chinese art world. The Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing helped transform the 798 district from a desolate industrial site into a cultural destination, but it lacks the steadfastness expected of a public non-profit-making space. The centre opened in late 2007, but its Belgian benefactor, Guy Ullens, has already sold some of the best works in his collection, and he is now looking to sell off the space itself.
The one museum that could set a new standard is M+, which is due to open in Hong Kong in 2016. Headed by Lars Nittve, a well-respected curator, the project is supported by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Currently, the most professional curatorial institution in Asia is the 21st-century museum of contemporary art in Kanazawa, Japan. M+ could leapfrog Kanazawa and become the Tate Modern of the East. Much like Tate Modern, M+ is looking for collections that need a long-term home.
The most important collector of Chinese contemporary art is Uli Sigg, a businessman and former Swiss ambassador to China. Mr Sigg, who owns 3,000 works and has created the best record of Chinese art history from 1979 to the present, wants to return the art to the region. Securing the Sigg collection would do much to confirm the importance of any new institution.
The Chinese art world is developing quickly. The number of reliable dealers is growing, but the market needs bona fide collectors with the energy to do intelligent research and the commitment to stick to their choices. Buying quality art is rarely a good way to make a quick buck. The true relevance of art reveals itself over time. Good information is the key to success in the art market. In China, a cultural landscape with so few signposts, this knowledge is harder to obtain—but even more essential.
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Food, by He Zubin, 80cm by 80cm, oil on canvas Source: Supplied
CONTEMPORARY Chinese art exploded on to the international scene less than a decade ago.
Celebrity profiles, wild prices, serious collectors and a resulting, equally serious secondary market seemed to come, like all fashions, out of nowhere.
The political, social and artistic conditions had been building, however, and Taree-born Brian Wallace was there from the beginning. He first travelled in China in 1984 and returned to Beijing the next year to pursue language studies. The friends he made were young artists and over the next few years he helped them scrounge spaces for informal exhibitions.
There were no commercial galleries: they would rent a space for a weekend or a week. The Old Summer Palace, a famous bohemian hangout, was a popular venue before the authorities cracked down and threw everyone out. It was a dynamic time.
“These were young people, just out of the academy, living on the fringe around Beijing,” Wallace says. “And everything was raw, everything was new.”
Last year, Wallace celebrated 20 years of his pioneering Beijing gallery, Red Gate. On Monday, an exhibition, titled Two Generations, will open at Sydney Town Hall to mark the anniversary, timed for Chinese new year.
Twenty-eight artists are represented. Wallace asked some of the established names at his gallery to nominate up-and-coming artists they thought should be watched and the result is a survey show, covering the gamut of media, mixing veterans with academy fledglings and some of Red Gate’s own younger artists.
“When we put the idea to the older artists, they were enthusiastic and really took their time thinking about who they were going to nominate,” Wallace says. “They took it really seriously and the quality of the result pleased everyone.”
Wallace arrived in China less than a decade after reformists, led by Deng Xiaoping, had started the process of economic liberalisation at the end of 1978. Dubbed “Reform and Opening” in party style, its aim was to mend the disasters of the Cultural Revolution.
Things were opening up, but in a stop-start fashion. Local authorities still harassed artists and police would regularly raid exhibitions, pulling pictures off the walls.
Political criticism was intermittently allowed in waves of loosening, followed by crackdown. Through it all, Chinese contemporary art was coming of age. An exhibition, now seen as seminal, called China/Avant-Garde, was held at the National Academy of Arts in Beijing in 1989, although the authorities quickly intervened when an artist, Xiao Lu, fired a gun during a performance piece.
But then, also in 1989, came Tiananmen Square. Intellectuals and artists pulled their heads in. Several artists who would go on to big careers left China — some of them, including Guan Wei and Ah Xian, for Australia.
In 1990, Wallace enrolled in an art history course at the Beijing Fine Art Academy to formalise his interests. At the end of it, five years after he had arrived in China, he was wondering what he might do next. Get a job? Go home to Australia? His Australian scholarships had run out. He could find only part-time work.
He decided, perhaps as a stalling measure, to open a Western-style commercial gallery for his artist friends.
In a stroke of luck, he quickly found the perfect venue: the Dongbianmen watchtower, in the heart of downtown Beijing. It was a 600-year-old Ming edifice that had just been restored, all deeply polished log floors and imposing pillars.
Red Gate Gallery, Beijing’s first commercial space, was born. Wallace showed seven artists in his first exhibition in July 1991. One of them, Wang Lifeng, is still with the gallery and will participate in Sydney. That first show was a success — the paintings sold. All the buyers were foreigners. Perhaps it was luck, or the curiosity factor, because there was no market at that stage.
“We persevered,” Wallace says, without a hint of irony. It was five years before another gallery opened, he says, then one opened in Shanghai, and another in Beijing, all run by foreigners. There was no domestic market at all. The Chinese were too poor at first, and even as their economic situation improved, there were other priorities: housing, education for their children. “All of those things came well before putting anything more than a printed poster on the wall,” Wallace says.
The Chinese market has taken off only in the past five years or so, as prosperity skyrocketed and outsiders began to take an interest. Even for traditional art forms such as brush and ink painting, Wallace says, there has only recently been a purchasing, as opposed to a viewing, market.
The domestic market remains deeply conservative: figurative painting generates the most interest. The really big international names — including performance and multimedia artists such as Ai Wei Wei and Cai Guo-Qiang — remain more honoured in the breach. Ai’s treatment at the hands of tax officials last year is notorious.
And yet, Xu Bing, for example — whose large and very beautiful take on power, Book from the Sky, was exhibited at the last Asia-Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery, and who moved to the US in 1990 in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square — has become Chancellor of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.
Thousands of artists now work in the city, including foreigners who come for the atmosphere and the local production skills.
Sculpture and other three-dimensional works can be made “very well, very quickly, at a much lower cost than back home”, Wallace says.
The famous 798 art zone, housed in a decommissioned military complex in Dashanzi, in the Chaoyong district of Beijing, is exemplary. It has morphed as rapidly as the Chinese art scene has.
“The artists moved in, the artists moved out, the galleries moved in, now the galleries are moving out,” Wallace says.
“The management really doesn’t care who pays the rent.”
In the early 2000s, peripatetic artists, always looking for cheap spaces, began to congregate there. It became seriously cool.
“These days it’s the third most popular tourist destination in Beijing,” Wallace says.
“For young people in Beijing, it’s a wonderful bohemian environment, full of coffee shops and bars and restaurants, and you can buy stuff off the pavement, you can buy knick-knacks, all of that.
“But one of my friends who owns a gallery there said a couple of months ago, ‘Well, I had a thousand (visitors) and not one of them looked at the art’.”
Many top-end galleries have now moved out to Caochangdi, where Ai Wei Wei first established his compound in 1999.
Wallace opened a satellite gallery in the 798 zone in 2006. Red Gate Gallery was situated well away from other galleries and he wanted the company.
“It was a happening place and we wanted to be there as well,” he says now.
Then came 2008 and financial disaster. Business slowed, even as rents were spiralling.
“We just walked and consolidated everything back into the main place,” Wallace says.
“It was an important decision and quite a few other galleries did the same thing.”
The financial crisis caused only a pause in the Beijing art market. “You can see it taking off again, but in a more controlled or measured way,” Wallace says.
Meanwhile the art infrastructure continues to flourish.
There is now a busy calendar of art fairs, auctions, biennales, triennials, festivals and competitions.
Curators from around the world cruise through regularly and foreign artists can get breaks they may not have got in the backwaters they came from.
Private museums of contemporary art have sprung up, such as the interesting Today museum, which opened in 2001, and the Ullens Centre for Contemporary art, set up by Belgian collector Guy Ullens in 2007.
The gallery scene, too, is maturing, Wallace says, running more sophisticated programs, including residencies and lecture series.
“And then you still have all these artists on the fringe of Beijing, doing wonderful work and organising outside the system, so it still is a very exciting place,” he says.
Two Generations will be at the Sydney Town Hall from January 17-28.
Chen Wei, Waiting a bird to wake up, 2011, mixed media, dimension variable
These two exhibitions dismantle this fixed impression of Chinese contemporary art. In these exhibitions, China still remains as an unidentifiable country. However, these exhibitions also prove the potential of China as a country that can flexibly supply products for any kind of demand. The artworks in these exhibitions represent ideas ranging from extremely delicate and aesthetic dimensions to a self-consciousness about the violent history of imposed changes. Also these artworks reflect, on a microscopic as well as macroscopic level, the on-going changes in China that made it one of the two giants along with United States, after the fall of other socialist states. By looking at Chinese modern art from various angles, the exhibitions let us know that the artist is the most convincing witness of this age.
By, or against their own will, artists, who have to be the most individual beings, have hypersensitively responded toward totalitarian culture. After the new China was established in the mid 20th century, there was a history of violence and oppression on the other side of the dazzling growth, as it became a rival to Western capitalism. A system that opposes an imaginary or real enemy, needs to strongly crackdown on domestic opposition in order to seize hegemonic control from the external opposition. Whether the state has a credible cause like revolution or for the purposes of enlightenment with a bright vision, an argument based against the opposition is a similar idea to making the enemy into the opposition. In the midst of the conflict with capitalism, Chinese socialism became a capitalist system not be led by the economy but by the state. At here the nation monopolize the capital and even the violence. Not just the reform policy of the Chinese government, but also its role as the world’s workshop in the global market has brought tremendous upheaval to both domestic and foreign policy, revealing the contradiction of capital as being the same as that of Western imperialism.
Beyond Contradiction of Modernity
Reflecting the spirit of the times, the artworks in these two exhibitions share subtleties with the modernization of Chinese society, as they are modern art. In this case, modernity has two faces that developed out of destruction. The equivocal form that not so much as capitalism or socialism has made them stood out both strength and weakness. The contradiction of capitalism like the gap between rich and poor in a classed society meets inefficiency, authoritarianism, and corruption, so social conflicts cannot be hidden but are instead used to create violent effects. Good examples of this can be seen in the Cultural Revolution or Tiananmen Square Massacre. The anxiety and the fear of the change that appears frequently in Chinese modern art reflects the history of the one party system that has tried to conceal the actual violence it has perpetrated as well as the history of coercion suffered by many people. But this severe contradiction in Chinese society and the conflict it enacts prompts artists as the others of society and has therefore, paradoxically, become a fertile ground of content for art making. So, from the diverse possibility of art making itself, which has antagonized and acted against the system, we can identify the capability of the Chinaese people and its true identities.
The Chinese contemporary video works shown in Revolving Stage, at Arario Gallery, are the proper medium to capture the accelerated flow of the time in the Modern era. Yet the exhibition’s title Revolving Stage and the repetitive character of video art change the stairway step-like linearity into a place of eternal recurrences. These works must have been started with an aim towards liberation, but ultimately became a place not only for the contradiction of enlightenment that the oppressing propaganda art illuminated, but also the retrogression towards commercial trends that intensified after their first appearance in the 1990s. Sun Xun’s work, seen immediately upon entering the first floor, is a video made by the woodblock print, which was a long tradition and also modified and adopted for a right use during the Cultural Revolution. With unique strong lines and contrast of the colors of the woodblock prints, leaping between the cuts, is so rough as an animation that we may feel seasick at the drastic changes in the portrayed history. With the strong contrast of black and white and the intensity of sudden changes, the video shows a distance from the water-stream-like natural time flow. As well, in the work of Wang Jianwei, placed at the entrance of the second floor, there is a feeling of chaos on the stage of history. Each of the main characters in this video occupy uproarious stages, in a market fair, wearing traditional, modern and contemporary costumes. In the last part, they all mixed together on one stage. The ideology of the modern paradigm, like progress or development, cannot make things of past disappear completely. The staged scenes the artist directed were already a spectacle, yet he later modified these in the editing to create an even greater sense of chaos and vibrancy, in order to show these mixed realities coexisting.
Wu Junyong’s animation, which depicts nine round moons floating in space, is made from ink-and-wash paintings, and was inspired by a line from a poem about the Buddhist utopia in Sung dynasty. Compared to the long history of China, the modern concept of utopia is blind and imposed as the most severe of changes, which this work compares by decentering it with multiple loci. Another artist Wang Gongxin records the changing process of pigments sprayed on body parts. What is aesthetically appealing here is the interaction between the body as a living organism combined with the refined inorganic substance. It is reminiscent of death as the fragmented body assumes the shape of the inorganic substance. The video repeats a time flow that shows the relationship of death to living on a microscopic dimension. On a screen, slow and calm like an art film, with an unclear narrative, Jiang Pengyi’s work suggests a different pattern of life that tends not to cross the law of nature. It is a return to the value, which was there in each and every bit of tradition, but has been forgotten by due to the abusive qualities of modernization, so Pengyi’s return itself is consistent with modern media, which can handle picturesque scenery or a nature show effectively. The change has been always there, but in the modern era the uncertainty of it has risen as expectation rather than experience, in other words the portion of future is rapidly grown than the past. (Reinhart Koselleck) The uncertainty of the modern era does not originated from chaos but from systematization. Systems, regardless of left or right, or even more when the two oppose each other, operates more as unified force. Here it is clear the new media artists of China are responding to this hostile force.
Wang Jianwei, Gaze, 2009, single channel video, 13min 25sec
Art, Reflection of Uncertainty
The artworks in New Contemporary Art from China show the intense wave of change to Chinese society are not a variable any more, but a constant. These changes, like them or not, right or wrong, have become a standing condition of living, so people just have learned how to live with them. Another characteristic of our time, is that the present is regarded as a transition period. Contemporary artists mix the uncertainty derived from the system with the internal workings of art making. The impact is internalized which then reverberates through varied formal devices. Upon entering the exhibition, Li Hui’s laser installation is just inside, with its red lights pouring into the space, symbolizing the dynamic changes in China. The numerous sacrifices made by the Chinese people that created dark shadows upon Chinese modern history, are reflected the flow of the red lights, which then are reminiscent of both energy and death. This cosmic human epic is also the subject of Miao Xiaochun’s animation. Miao expresses the multiple timelines coexisting in modern China, by using the icons of the Western art history. While the circle of time repeats, its cycles leads us to an unknown world, yet in Miao’s work he revives human history in a compressed form by showing the endless creation and extinction in the context of Chinese history. On Wang Wei’s shining propaganda pavilion, largely occupying the width of the room, he has grafted the past onto the present of China. Both physical and psychological, Wang’s structure obstinately takes up space in the present, but eventually it too will fail the test of time. Wang’s mixed monument of traditional architecture and political propaganda is a paradoxical historic monument that paradoxixally betrays the very thing that it memorializes.
The work of Xu Bing looks like vintage calligraphy, but is made up of signs that cannot be read. Xu seems to follow a traditional style, but there is a contemporary aesthetic in his piece that puts signified and signifier in parentheses, while experimenting with the structural elements of language. In this formulation the structure generates the meaning. In contrast, Yuan Yuan arranged sparkling youths as though they just stepped out of a fashion magazine into a bubble shaped structure. The structure itself is similar to a space where merchandize is arranged. At a glance, the colorful consumer society brought about by the open economic reforms seems far away from the dreary authoritarianism of the past, but is really equivalent in that consumer society is a voluntarily agreed upon totalitarianism. The sketches of daily life by Wen Ling have the light touch of a comicbook. Different from ordinary artists, Wen says often he indulges in publishing comic books, Internet community and social media, which can be an entry point for the capitalist consumption, but also a powerful influence in transforming a closed authoritarian society. The media Wen indulges in have potentials to disperse power from the party and the nation to citizens and society. In Song Yige’s painting the modern ego is shown as having the frailty of the naked life on a flat background which is a space of confinement or fear. The bird or angel, which Chen Wei installed in a dark space can neither step on the ground nor fly up to the sky, but instead merely floats. Maybe it has been hanging there for a long time in between the lucent spiritual world and the material world’s gravity. This omnipotent being who could once cross many universes, now elegiacally looks down at the one-dimensional world, which is buried under materiality, the only value.
Since the end of the 1970s, Chinese contemporary art has always been entangled with the western art.
Robert Rauschenberg Works
Since the end of the 1970s, Chinese contemporary art has always been entangled with the western art. In fact, this entanglement started when China began to modernize under the western influence. In this condition, the intellectuals’ attitude towards the local culture swings back and forth between conceit and inferiority, similarly, the attitude towards western changes between admiration and resistance. During the Fine Art New Tide in 1985 when China began to be open to the world after the culture shortage, Chinese people were eager to cure the “disease” with the help of western culture. Therefore, it is evident that Chinese contemporary culture followed the western as an example. Here is a case in point. After the Robert Rauschenberg Exhibition hold in China, many followers appear in China. Though this kind of imitation is immature; it is still an indispensable step in the growth of the Chinese contemporary art. In addition, faced with various western cultural resources, Chinese contemporary artists chose to imitate. The imitation with individual and local experience indicates that the imitation is based on the demand of the local culture. Meanwhile, it is undeniable that there are accidental and blind imitations. Just as what Shang Yang told to me, “Someone came across an idea in a book and felt greatly inspired to practice it and make speeches according to it, thus, others followed and imitate him to create a theory in China. There is a phenomenon from 1980’s to now.” “Actually, it is accidental. If the book is not picked up or translated, it is impossible for the idea in it to develop in China. For instance, a large number of people follow the style of Freud Lucian. What’s more, a common painter, was the most popular one in China and had a great influence on the Chinese art. It is ridiculous.”
In the entanglement of imitation and alienation, as well as admiration and resistance, Chinese contemporary art in 1990s saw the post-colonialism market. Then, a sharp and serious problem arose: which way we should choose to go, returning to the local culture and facing the rigid ideology, strict control and sluggish market, or producing paintings in large quantities to meet the demand of the western post-colonialism. The Chinese overseas artists, on one hand, had no choice but to accept the inferior situation, on the other hand, they tried hard to take advantage of the cultural background and resolve the problem in the perspective of the local culture and on the basis of the local resources (Huang Yangli defined this way as Using Eastern Culture to Win Western Culture). Chinese contemporary art distinguished itself rapidly and degraded itself ideologically so that it is far from resolving the problems of the local culture. Its pioneering quality is fading gradually. At present, indulging in culture thievery is evident and serious. The reason why people feel puzzled about the definition and orientation of art lies in the value of the artists.
Since 2005, a large amount of capital was put into the Chinese contemporary art market. The Chinese contemporary art, once a borderline category, became popular so rapidly that the old artists who are busy to summarize the victory still have doubts and puzzles. First, we have to admit that the Chinese contemporary artists are pride of self-control. The fact that Chinese contemporary art can draw so much attention is closely related to the economic and political development of China. Second, the sudden prosperity of the Chinese contemporary art market has something to do with the non-academic tendency, such as the current financial policy. Third, the price of the contemporary works is soaring. However, the art value is not table. Some people buy the works with the intention of seeking profit by short-term investment instead of collecting. The buyers use a series of propaganda activities to increase the price and then sell them. Nobody wants to be the final owner of the works of the highest price. Because they will lose every cent they invested if the market collapses. Finally, with the increasing of the price, artists become more and more confident. And the western culture which was the model is ignored and despised. Actually, there is no direct relation between the academic value and the market value. If artists can gain confidence because of the price increase, they also can lose it because of the price decrease. It is the truth that the works with the highest price were the ones with a strong sense of post-colonialism created in 1990s. The value of the mainstream of the Chinese contemporary art is not high.
Generally, it is self evident that academic value is more important than market value. Capital investment in the Chinese contemporary art market has its advantages. In the current situation of China, it can help the Chinese contemporary art to free from the authoritative ideology. With the capital assistant, the Chinese contemporary art with the foundations and galleries can gain its academic value. But the current situation is worrisome, because the Chinese contemporary art is entangled with profit. The different categorization is originated from the problem of the independence of the Chinese contemporary art which is the main problem that artists face. Faced with the temptation of fame, many people can not stick to his belief. However, it is the serious problems of the local environment that the Chinese contemporary artists should face. Artists shouldn’t do some vulgar things in the name of contemporary art.
China’s Artistic Diaspora
For sixty years, upheavals in Chinese politics have not only remade the country’s economy–they have remade Chinese art
Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky(1987-1991), hand printed books, ceiling and wall scrolls printed from wood letterpress type using false Chinese characters, dimensions variable, installation view at “Crossings,” National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (1998). (Courtesy Xu Bing Studio)
Xu Bing’s sunny art studio in Brooklyn, with spacious ceiling-to-floor windows and reassuring domestic touches—including a purple plastic slide in one corner for his seven-year-old daughter—is worlds away from the desolate labor camp where he toiled as a teenager during China’s Cultural Revolution. Yet, as the 52-year-old artist told me when I visited his studio earlier this year, the tensions and turmoil of recent Chinese history continue to fuel his artwork.
Like many artists and intellectuals of his generation,Xu left China shortly after the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square. After moving to the United States in 1990, he began to explore the theme of“living between cultures,” as he puts it. One of his first stateside exhibits showcased his invention of something called “New English Calligraphy,” an elaborate system of writing that fuses the linguistic and visual conventions of Mandarin and English. In 1999, he won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, which firmly established his standing in the international art world.
Throughout history, periods of religious and political repression have provoked an exodus of creative and entrepreneurial talent from various countries—from 17th century Huguenots fleeing France (after the king revoked religious freedoms), to 20th century Russian writers evading the Kremlin, to Jewish intellectuals escaping Nazi Germany. Likewise, many prominent Chinese artists and intellectuals who came of age during the Cultural Revolution later left China to garner fame and fortune abroad. Artists such as Xu Bing constitute what Melissa Chiu, the Museum Director of the Asia Society in New York, refers to today as “the Chinese artistic diaspora.”
For sixty years, upheavals in Chinese politics have not only remade the country’s economy—they have remade Chinese art. During the Mao era, Soviet-inspired “socialist realism” was the only acceptable style in the strictly controlled authoritarian society. However, in 1979 Deng Xiaoping’s monumental economic reforms also paved the way for the emergence of contemporary Chinese art. Over the next decade, Chinese artists had much greater access to international news and scholarship, allowing them to take inspiration from a panoply of global art movements.
The 1980s saw the advent of Chinese versions—and subversions—of everything from Renaissance portraiture to Andy Warhol-esque pop art to Dada philosophy. In the city of Xiamen, for instance, painters burned their canvases after exhibitions to enact “creative destruction.” In this period, Xu became active in Beijing’s new bohemian art scene. As he told me, “Like someone who was starving, suddenly we feasted—we ate everything, at once, almost until we were sick. It was a very experimental time.”
After this period of relative openness, 1989 marked a turning point. Following the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, state-run museums imposed new restrictions on free speech and public art exhibitions. Subsequently, many avant-garde artists and curators left China to form new creative communities abroad, particularly in Sydney, Paris, and New York. In the United States and elsewhere, legislation in the wake of the massacre made it easier for Chinese citizens to obtain refugee status and work abroad.
But the fact of geographical separation did not constitute psychological detachment for most artists. In fact, something like the reverse occurred. While living overseas, many actually felt a heightened need to define and distill “essential Chinese identity” through their art. For a plurality of diaspora artists, “historical and cultural references to China are more overt in their work today than when [they] lived in Beijing,” observes the Asia Society’s Chiu.
In New York, a fifteen-minute drive from Xu Bing’s workspace is the studio of another prominent Chinese artist, Zhang Hongtu. Zhang moved to the United States in 1982, deeply disillusioned with the propagandist art of the Cultural Revolution. Initially he hoped that living abroad would allow him to “avoid mixing politics and art.” (“I wanted only to paint things because they were beautiful,” he told me, “not to have a message.”) However, the Tiananmen crackdown touched a nerve, and Zhang’s international reputation gave him a platform not available to artists inside China. During the 1990s, he completed a series of politically charged portraits of Chairman Mao—including a famous painting of Mao sporting Stalin’s mustache, and another in which Mao is depicted with Cubist multiple faces.
Today another era in contemporary Chinese art is beginning. After two decades in which artists primarily left China, the Middle Kingdom is starting to exert a greater gravitational pull. In recent years, Beijing has stopped enforcing some restrictions on public art displays, and a growing number of regional governments now see creative industries as potential economic engines. The government of Shanghai, for example, recently gave avante-garde artist Cai Guo-Qiang the opportunity to do something impossible in virtually any other major metropolis—to stage a massive pyrotechnics display on the downtown waterfront—for the purpose of impressing visitors to that year’s APEC summit.
International galleries, meanwhile, are now deliberately showcasing the work of more artists who reside inside China. In February, the Chinese Contemporary Art Gallery in Manhattan hosted an exhibit opening for Tu Hongtao, a 31-year-old painter from southwest China. When Tu explained his work to prospective collectors, he didn’t talk about politics, but instead about the cultural ramifications of how “China’s cities are growing so quickly.” (Pointing to one painting of a woman lying on a steel-frame bed in a vast snowy landscape, he said, “I try to understand how we can find ourselves inside the city, and outside the city.”) The gallery’s director, Ludovic Bois, refers to younger Chinese artists interpreting the country’s current social and economic upheavals as members of the “cartoon and chaos generation.”
Indeed, the exhilarating pace of cultural combustion in modern China is even luring some diaspora artists back home. In January, Xu Bing accepted a post as a vice president of his alma mater, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Although he will still maintain a studio in New York, he says he will now spend the majority of his time in China. Reflecting on his time abroad he told me, “I’ve been able to do things outside China that I couldn’t have otherwise done,” but now it is time “to return to Chinese soil … that is where the energy is, where history is happening. There are so many multiple cultural layers—it is something really new.”
1 This article is based on Emmanuel Lincot Culture, identité et réformes politiques : la peinture en (…)
1Studying contemporary art in China is not an exclusively aesthetic choice. In the context of an emerging market, art is as much a matter of cultural economy as of socio-politics. Thus art is not the product of an independent condition. In its imagination, as well as in its own diversity and its transformations, it encompasses and summarises the changes of a culture which is appropriating the schemes, images and notions inherited both from an age-old tradition and from the West (a West which is sometimes in close proximity, as in the case of Muslim Central Asia or Buddhist India). Artists reinterpret the original meaning in order to arrive at a proclamation of their own difference, which is usually held up as cultural nationalism. In order to understand the evolution of contemporary Chinese art, we will examine some salient facts of artistic life in the country, which was profoundly changed by the reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping. These changes have not stopped uniting or dividing the Chinese cultural scene in its relations with a government engaged in a constant search for legitimacy, the guarantor of order, and of an orthodoxy which has been shaken by the economic opening up of the country and by globalisation 1.
2 Cf. Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China (1949-1979), Berkeley (…)
2Art in China since 1979 and the first reforms, is a space where two major aspects of Chinese history at the end of the twentieth century intersect, under the two-fold aegis of political orthodoxy and of a multifarious culture (duoyuan wenhua), which oscillates constantly between the endogenous and the exogenous, between native traditions and imported cultural practices, while calling into question the aesthetic criteria of what is called the socialist-realist period 2. This enormous and tumultuous mixing, often linked to acute political crises, lies at the source of a huge iconography which exercises its power over successive generations, and reveals itself as the arena of intense rivalries where the most diverse temporalities clash. One cannot understand, in hindsight, either the emergence of a political and reactionary pop art (the critique of mass consumption, the ironic and playful extolling of Maoism…) or the popularity of kitsch, without taking into account the irresistible infatuation, in China, with enchantment (qiguan), the post-revolutionary sentimentality. This is, by definition, one of the most anecdotal aspects, and thus the most dated, of a period marked by a sudden acceleration of history. An art of transition, kitsch in its Chinese version, marks the beginning of a concensus established between the government and public opinion about the value of money. Thus art, which was essentially, in China, that of painting and calligraphy, has become a plural phenomenon: there is not art, but arts.
3 Hung Wu, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2000.
3The first national and avant-gardist retrospective, China/Avant-garde (Zhongguo xiandai yishu zhan), which took place at the Peking Palace of Fine Arts in 1989 3, constituted a precursory event. The artistic community, on the eve of the repression of the Tian’anmen movement, gave meaning, its own meaning, to ten years placed under the sign of a self-proclaimed avant-gardism, which the successor generation was to recognise only in order to distance itself from it more effectively, thus laying claim to a total break from it and the gap between it and the traditional world of art, and in particular that of painting. The values of painting—linked to those of the scholar and the age-old myth of state culture—on which rest the framework of debate and political choice lead to the definition of new frontiers. While information—which was scattered from the 1980s onwards—and the transformation of Chinese society do not allow the historian to envisage, for the moment, an all-encompassing analysis, covering all the events which were part of the new languages of art, it does seem possible, however, to focus on the exhibitions and the new artistic professions which created the new face of a society seeking to legitimise both its Chinese identity and its contacts with the outside world.
Peking, 1989. China/Avant-garde (Nu U-Turn).
In Hung Wu, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China, op. cit., p. 16
4 On these artists, and the period concerned, a number of journals and books in Chinese are available (…)
41989 was the year of a failed revolution. It was also that of a successful aesthetic putsch, with the exhibition China/Avant-garde which opened on February 5th and brought together 293 paintings, sculptures and videos by 186 artists—among them Wang Guangyi, Xu Bing, Wu Shanzhuan, Huang Yongping and Gu Wenda 4.
5The event was prepared for a long time, within the framework of so-called “modern Chinese art” (Dangdai yishu yantaohui) convention, whose principles were established in November of the previous year in Tunxi in the province of Anhui. This exhibition was the result of a collaboration between three art critics: Gao Minglu, Peng De, and Li Xianting. Gao Minglu, who now teaches in the United States, was the editor at the time of the magazine Meishu. Peng De, Vice-President of the Hubei Artists’ Research Institute, edited the most independent art magazine Meishu sichao, which was published in Wuhan until it was definitively censored from 1987 onwards. Li Xianting is attached to the Art Research Institute of Peking. Co-founder and editor of Zhongguo meishubao until his resignation in 1989, he remains one of the most influential critics in China.
6China/Avant-garde did not show the public any traditional Chinese painting (guohua, literally: national painting) or calligraphy. The exhibition expertly summed up the climate of tension which, for several years, had constantly divided the art scene. China/Avant-garde was the first national exhibition of experimental art (shiyan meishu). This is the name given to any exhibition which allows the works to produce their effect on their own, eliminating any rooting (of the work, of the criticism, of the institution) in a cult. China/Avant-garde was precisely a challenge placed in opposition to any form of cult. The event was marked by a performance by Tang Song and Xiao Lu: shots were fired at point-blank range on their installation, a telephone booth ironically entitled “duihua” (Dialogue). The organisers aimed, at those who were willing to see, tangible signs of the break between the moment of the exhibition and the public, using streamers stamped with the label “No U-Turn”.
7This mode of artistic expression was to become predominant during the following decade. The exhibition of experimental art goes against the repressive state (an expression equivalent to a pleonasm in the case of China, which has never been a liberal state). The clash between these two entities which are opposed in every way (an abstract organisation versus a concrete manifestation) could only be head-on. China/Avant-garde was censored. The event preceded the repression of the Tian’anmen Square demonstrators, which took place three months later.
5 Cf. Kraus Richard Curt, Brushes with Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy, Ber (…)
6 Francis A. Yates, L’Art de la mémoire, Paris, Gallimard, 1975.
8If we consider that an art as overwhelmingly cult-bound as painting—and its corollary, the veneration of an image which corresponds as much to that of the scholar as to the culture of which he is the guardian—was suddenly made available to all, one can understand that, in parallel with museum exhibition, the Chinese visual arts went into crisis (weiji). This crisis in art—and in particular in painting and calligraphy, which are considered, in China, to be at the summit of the hierarchy of aesthetic and social values 5—consisted in fact in the invention of it. Where before there had been no art in the strict meaning of the word, but an object of or for worship, from then on there was art, because a question had been asked about the gesture that founds it. Each exhibition of contemporary art reinvents art by asking again the question of art, of its boundaries, and, a novelty in China, of memorisation, or of what Francis A. Yates, in a completely different context, called the art of memory, emphasising the value and the anamnestic role of history 6. It took the transformation of an ancient religious art into an exhibition art, before the question of what was religious in it—its aura—could at last be asked.
9The exhibition, as place, as work, and as event, has since become a space for the transformation of the traditional categories in the domain of the visual arts. As happened in the United States and in Europe almost forty years ago, the frame, both literally and figuratively, is being shattered before our eyes, shaking up the elements of a visual language which, in the past, had assigned to the visual arts (calligraphy and painting) and to their supports (the guohua scroll, the stretcher for oil on canvas) their specificities in terms of domain: materials, hanging, places of exhibition, modalities of diffusion borrowed from Western practices. It is the work which, as is the artists’ wish, leads very directly to the questioning of its exhibition, and more generally questions the role of exhibition.
10In the wake of these upheavals and the profusion of experimentation, a growing number of artists abandoned the base, the frame and the scroll; the wall, the table (the conventional support for the Reading—nian—of a calligraphy or of a shanshui) were no longer pre-eminent for the presentation of works, and many of them now occupied the floor or the ceiling. The archetype of the museum, an inheritance from nineteenth century Europe and before that from the early curiosity rooms of the Renaissance, with its cultural and political implications, as well as in its very architectural configuration, was disputed; artists like Zhang Dali or Rong Rong turned to the ruins of the workers’ housing estates, the disused industrial sites, an urban space which had been disrupted and which itself simultaneously disrupted the choice of exhibition venues.
Rong Rong, photograph, untitled.
In Emmanuel Lincot, L’Invitation à la Chine, op. cit.
7 China’s New Art, Post-1989, organised by the Hong Kong gallery Hanart TZ, 1993.
11The exhibitions of experimental art in the People’s Republic were discovered by art professionals from the West, Taiwan or Hong Kong at the beginning of the 1990s. The success of the international exhibition China’s New Art, post-1989, organised by the Hong Kong gallery Hanart TZ 7, and the considerable attention attracted by the first participation of young Chinese artists in the 1993 Venice Biennale, as well as the publication of articles in Flash Art and The New York Times Magazine, explain the growing interest of the foreign media in the Chinese art scene, as well as the enormous prestige which artists acquired by becoming, sometimes against their will, the flag-bearers of their country.
12Exhibition venues diversified. They tended to oppose the persistent collusion between state interests and the members of the juries, which is rarely propitious to the development of original creation. After 1989, exhibitions retreated from the art galleries and the commercial spaces, sometimes to spaces in private houses or in diplomatic compounds. Beginning in 1993, the galleries affiliated to institutions, such as those of the Teacher Training College or the Central Fine Arts Academy, became major sites of experimental exhibition in Peking, mainly because of the open-mindedness shown by the directors of these establishments. These were not, however, isolated examples. Thus, Guo Shirui, director of the very official Contemporary Art Centre in Peking, began, in 1994, to organise a series of highly important artistic events. With time it became clear that these galleries and the art world in general were subject to the play of competition and to a strategy of modulable discourse which sought to transcend the constraints of government censorship and to seek public and private subsidy. This competition was at the source of the development of a contemporary art market which began with the first Canton Biennale (in October 1992). Then came Shanghai (1996), the stakes of which, on the world art scene, were upped by the French art critic Pierre Restany when he presided over the event four years later.
13At the heart of this decision-making process was the author, at one and the same time set designer, director, interpreter and creator of the exhibition, which was conceived as a work of art where the artist, the organiser and the public met; the events became a performance. The word recalls the variety of meanings, the differentiation and the multiple temporalisation of social phenomena. The performance and its objects refer us as much to the subject as to the venue, which is to be considered as a site where the work is made, is consulted, is even booed at, and never ceases to build and rebuild itself. The fact that the work and the exhibition were constantly evolving gave the organisers a variety of ways to circumvent the constraints of censorship, for example by transferring their exhibition from China to one or several foreign countries. It was in the microworld of the experimental exhibition that were developed the newest ideas and the most powerful images, which were less and less often those of painting. The government’s reluctance to facilitate these artistic events was all the more understandable in that they perturbed political arrangements and age-old cultural codes. Censorship or self-censorship leading to the cancellation of an event, constituted the symptomatic realities of a culture held in an ideological yoke which continued to exercise a fearsome constraint in the era of Deng Xiaoping.
14However the real revolution in Chinese contemporary art was to be found in its integration into the logic of the market, which the national economy as a whole was then tending to embrace. This evolution was accompanied by the emergence of new socio-political categories, centred on the individual and situated on the frontier between the professions of information, of art and of politics.
Ai Weiwei, Spider table.
In Emmanuel Lincot, Avant-gardes (Xianfeng yishu), op. cit.
15A new profession appeared: that of critic-dealer or cultural mediator (in English “independent curator”; in Chinese “duli cezhanren”). The cultural mediator is a freelance professional who combines several functions. He is the obligatory intermediary between the Ministry of Culture, its éminences grises, the exhibition commissioner, the artists, the public, and the potential consumers. He “manufactures” opinion, describes current trends, travels, and negotiates between the parties concerned, in particular with the collector who, by means of his financial assets and social position—he is often a diplomat or an industrialist—spreads rumours, destroys reputations, drapes himself in the prestigious role of patron, of defender—on occasion—of human rights, of freedom of expression in a country where, it is true, society does not much appreciate independence or the right to be different.
16The major factor in this evolution of the art scene was the appearance of selective events, in the form of performances or of exhibitions in private spaces, which tended to vary their participants and their venues without it being necessary to obtain, in a systematic way, the permission of the authorities. As this trend developed, not without coming up against real reservations (sometimes on the part of the artists themselves who preferred, for career strategies, the exclusive recognition of official circles), the field of artistic experimentation broke up into very diverse groups (in the 1980s) and then into individuals (after 1989) on the edges of the system, which increased their dependence on critics, dealers, and on a range of opinion, which was no longer restricted to the conurbations of Peking and Shanghai. Willingly or not, they were integrated into a micro-society where imagination met the internationalist economy. Virtual processes like the Internet, and other communication media, sometimes had the effect of shifting the attention of the critics and of the public onto the identitarian and even the nationalistic specificity of both the work and its producer.
17There were many examples of brilliant artistic careers. These successes were undoubtedly linked to the utilisation of the new communication media, which the artists of the new generation ingeniously turned to their advantage. The most remarkable archetype of this new kind of artist was the Pekingese Ai Weiwei. Artist, dealer, gallery owner, collector, publisher, he embodied to an extent previously unequalled, the most diverse functions which correspond to the key axioms of art communication, then still in its infancy. His way of working and his libertarian attitude made him an artist of a new kind, on the frontiers between the art world, assumed poetic dissidence, commercial opportunism, and scholarly aristocracy. As the son of the poet Ai Qing, a supporter of the regime, his pedigree opened the doors to a broad social recognition. He chose to attend the Film Institute which reopened in 1979, having been closed because of the Cultural Revolution. But neither the cinema nor China could hold the young Ai Weiwei, and after joining the Xing Xing group, he opted for expatriation in New York. There, he attended the Parsons School of Design, traded in antiques for a living, and frequented both the museums and the underground, as well as one of his mentors, William Burroughs. His reference in art was and has remained Marcel Duchamp: a choice which is symptomatic of a generation which finds its marks not in a formalist debate, but rather in the distinction between the sphere of art and of aesthetics.
18In relation to this model, the journey of a work to its presumed consumer is no longer linear but forms a loop; in this it resembles a practice which existed in scholarly circles in the China of the old school. The scholar, as both man of action and man of letters, was a cultural mediator as well as an essential conveyor of the production and transmission of knowledge. For Ai Weiwei’s generation, however, which stands halfway between a claim to modernity and the disenchanted ideal of the scholar-peasant which Mao Zedong embodied in the iconoclastic and revolutionary mode, the path to follow is that of consumerism and, springing from this, of the inauthenticity of works of art and their reducibility to the level of language (whether that of advertising, of the classical, of the universal or the cryptic) becoming the driving force of a reality which needs to be reinterpreted. The artist broke new ground when he suggested to the collectors and dealers Hans Van Dick and Frank Uytterhaegen that they set up a foundation in Peking, The China Modern Art Foundation, of which he is now co-director. This venue exhibits his own works (paintings, installations and sculptures), and functions as a venture in social advancement, in keeping with the nature and ambition of artistic marketing on an international scale between Peking and New York.
8 A number of exhibition catalogues have been published in the West which make it possible to become (…)
19The novelty in China was not the marketing of works of art—which is doubtless as old as the invention of collecting―but rather their integration in the international art market. The craze for contemporary Chinese art was in keeping with a media movement with strong exotic inclinations which first began in eastern Europe, before and especially just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and which continues to this day. At first it was private initiatives, on the part of art lovers such as the Swiss ambassador Uli Sigg, which attracted the attention of the media. Then various governments organised, with some difficulty, major retrospectives in Europe, in Australia, in the United States and in Japan. There were few galleries in China until the early 1990s—except for those established in Hong Kong. The reason for this was the endless harassment and administrative threats faced by the owners of these spaces (which were moreover much coveted by artists), most of whom were of foreign origin. These galleries, mostly situated in Peking and Shanghai, nevertheless had a considerable impact, for they set the prices of works of art for those who aspired to an international career 8.
20The critics often reported a perversion of the art school system and the increasing unease of the public, who assessed the works only in terms of the market speculation to which they were then subjected. This unease encouraged the authorities to adapt the art school system to the norms created by the market. Structural reforms as well as the overhaul of the training courses for students (including work experience in advertising agencies or abroad) opened up the art schools to new possibilities. The overhauling of the art schools in China (the merging of several academies, the creation of galleries with joint public and private funds), which came into effect only after the death of Deng Xiaoping, called fundamentally into question one of the canonical principles, once defined at Yan’an: art only in the service of the people.
21The deep unease felt by a large number of artists and intellectuals in China in the face of this upheaval, is better explained by the fact that the last twenty years produced an extraordinary confusion in people’s work and in their minds; the egalitarian and communist philosophies were succeeded by nationalistic and even xenophobic ideas of resistance to “spiritual pollution”. And yet Deng Xiaoping’s China was no longer, if indeed it had ever been, a cultural loner. It followed and accompanied globalisation, and, at the same time, offered resistance by the reinterpretation of a living tradition which was its own, while fundamentally calling into question the structures of the art world inherited from the Maoist period.
1 This article is based on Emmanuel Lincot Culture, identité et réformes politiques : la peinture en République populaire de Chine (1979-1997), doctoral thesis in process of publication, University of Paris VII, 2003.
2Cf. Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China (1949-1979), Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994, and Ellen Jonston Laing, The Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Republic of China, Berkeley, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1988.
3 Hung Wu, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2000.
4 On these artists, and the period concerned, a number of journals and books in Chinese are available. We should mention in particular the book by Lu Peng and Yi Dan, Zhongguo xiandai yishu shi (1979-1989) (A History of Contemporary Chinese Art [1979-1989]), Changsha, Hunan meishu chubanshe, 1992. A journal offers a trilingual presentation (in French, Chinese and English) of these artists: Emmanuel Lincot, Avant-gardes (Xianfeng yishu), published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Peking, 1997.
5Cf. Kraus Richard Curt, Brushes with Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy, Berkeley, University of California, 1991; James Cahill, The Painter’s Practice. How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China, New York, Columbia University, 1994.
6 Francis A. Yates, L’Art de la mémoire, Paris, Gallimard, 1975.
7China’s New Art, Post-1989, organised by the Hong Kong gallery Hanart TZ, 1993.
8 A number of exhibition catalogues have been published in the West which make it possible to become more familiar with the work of some artists. In particular: Emmanuel Lincot, L’Invitation à la Chine (Biennale d’Issy-les-Moulineaux), Paris, Beaux-Arts, 1999 (one of the very first retrospectives of contemporary Chinese art in France); Marie-José Mondzain, Transparence, opacité ? 14 artistes contemporains chinois, Paris, Cercle d’art, 1999 (a remarkable reflection by a philosopher who specialises in the image); Jean-Marc Decrop and Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Modernités chinoises, Paris, Skira, 2003 (the collection of a Paris gallery owner with a commentary by an academic); Made by Chinese, Paris, Galerie Enrico Navarra, 2001 (a practical inventory and biographies of major contemporary Chinese institutional artists); Paris / Pékin, Espace Cardin Asiart archive, Paris, 2002 (a superb inventory of the private collection of Baron Ullens).
Post Avant-garde: An Issue About the Stance of Chinese Contemporary Art
The rapidly developing economy of China with its population of 1.3 billion has fueled not just economy , but also the growth of an important cultural industry, contemporary art Since the debut of Chinese artists on the international art stage in 1993 at the 45th Venice Biennale, Chinese participation has become a regular feature in all major international exhibitions.
However, in sharp contrast to the success of artists，Chinese curators，collectors，art media and art institutions are still not truly engaged with the international art system. On the occasions when they do get involved，they mostly play minor roles，or at worst serve as“spicing”for diversification. No matter how many international exhibitions have been held in China，and how many overseas artists invited，Chinese contemporary art remains primarily a target for western curators，collectors，art media and art institutions Something can be said about such kind of integration with the world：it benefits the opening up of Chinese culture and society, and provides opportunities for artists；however, other serious problems have risen：it encourages opportunism and fosters a type of post—colonial mentality. Furthermore，due to the restrictive selection of the cultural Other, and the institutionalized role of international exchange，this also obscures serious local cultural problems. With the establishment of the official China Pavilion at the Venice Biennale，the presence of Chinese contemporary art in the becomes increasingly the sounding board of official tome.
Under such a“conspiracy”，what Chinese contemporary art lacks is critical thinking，a thinking based on local context and indigenous issues. Without a freely critical thinking supported by academic knowledge，there is no way to precisely interpret and understand Chinese contemporary art. The collective muteness of Chinese critics leaves our art defenseless on the international stage.
In 1993 when Achille Bonito Oliva invited 14 Chinese contemporary artists to the Venice Biennale in the name of Wandering in Orient Land，I published one article titled Oliva Is No Saviour of Chinese Art. Why not? The reason is：Oliva’s selection did not reflect the real dilemma in the life of Chinese people. China’s main dilemma is the widening economic gap caused by the collusion of market economy and bureaucratic power, which has fundamentally shaken the traditionally accepted ideological premise of equality. Faced with the collapse of traditional values，what can China do to regain its footing? How should it revive its culture in this new age? This is a critical issue for contemporary Chinese art，and an issue shared by every nation regardless of historical cultural differences，whether East or West .
In today’s world，dominant modes of production still allow Capital to claim unfair majority of surplus value created by Labour. In China，such capital is further strengthened by the power of institutionalized bureaucracy. In my understanding，the“cultural nomadism”promoted by Oliva is not a sort of cultural tourism taking pleasure in spectacles of nomadic shepherds grazing their herds along the streets of Paris or New York，but a sharing of artistic creations from various cultural backgrounds. We must realize that there is no ‘internationalization’ that can transcend regionalism. Even the Trans—avant-garde Movement promoted by Olivia himself originated from the regional art of Italy．Hence，Chinese artists only have a true presence，and significance as artists，when they return to current social and cultural problems in their own society.
Due to the volatile political system and the abnormal development of consumer culture in China today, the entire society is pervaded by commercialism and utilitarianism. In art this can be evidenced by artists‘ evasion of social issues，avoidance of historical memories，and lack of humanitarian concern for those abandoned by the current social system. Their concern is catering to the needs of domestic and overseas art markets and pandering to communication media. In fact，since the 1980s，there has been no fundamental change in the historical context of Chinese contemporary art .While we deal with modernist issues about individualism and formalism，and post modern theme of cultural identification, the pre-modern theme of enlightenment has still not been resolved. Under such circumstance，official recognition of contemporary art is more like a form of baiting，luring with personal benefits，with the aim of enticing avant-garde art to give up its critical stance.
A key problem here is the attack on Chinese avant-garde art by post-modern scholars as they wage war against modernism‘s universal principles. In fact，when post-modern scholars like Foucault or Lyotard reflected on the principle of equity of Enlightenment philosophy, they did not challenge the basis of modernity, namely, the primacy of individual freedom and a related legal system for establishing a sound society and new national culture. What they condemn is precisely the regressive absolutism in society, and the application of the power of knowledge，cultural industry and ideology to manipulate individual minds .The importance of China’s avant-garde art movement since the 1980s lies precisely in its persistent pursuit of individual values.
There are at least four reasons that justify the assertion of individual values: firstly，we can note the inherent difference of each individual，based on his physical and psychological make-up; secondly, the special personality and temperament resulting from individual experience；thirdly, factors natural and social that combine to make an infinite diversity of people；fourthly, different expectations and inclinations affecting every person’s growth and development.
The importance of art rests upon the foundation of individual values.
Regional diversity should always be accounted for in the discussion of individual consciousness and individual values. Cultural heritage also plays an important role. For this reason Chinese artists should not ignore indigenous roots for the sake of‘internationalization’，neither should they discard history for the sake of being ‘contemporary’. Regional characteristics are integral to individuality. Therefore，individuality，‘regionality’ and internationality should constitute the three different levels of discussion about contemporary art. ‘Regionality’ is the embodiment of internationality and a deepening of individuality．In this sense，our emphasis on individuality is not only a critique of collectivism within China，but also a critique of the international structure of collective power．For this reason the pursuit of individual values by Chinese avant-garde artists does not fundamentally change with the new context of post-modernism. However, today the ideals of avant-garde art a re facing challenges from two sides. On the one hand there is the seduction of fame and acceptance when entering the circuit of international art. On the other there is the similar seduction when it is accepted by the Chinese official cultural institution.
The novel situation facing contemporary art today is the increasing necessity for art to open up to social reality and mass culture，this means it is necessary for artists to depart from the modernist ideal of formal，individual pursuit，and emphasis instead the need for interaction，both with people and with society as a whole. Through interaction each artist brings forth their individuality and special character．Interactivity is not just a call for art to step outside its boundaries，but also a call to change its artistic character. This means artists must not look at themselves as omniscient cultural revolutionaries who enforce their wisdom on society. Instead，they must open up to other people and to society so as to experience social reality，history and existence，so that they may realize their own potentials and contribute to the history of contemporary culture. Contemporary art should not simply pay lip service to social reality, but must seek to expose all hidden impediments to spiritual growth as it engages the social world Comparing‘modern’art and. ‘contemporary’art: while both point toward the depth of social and spiritual experience, the only difference is the angle each takes；contemporary art aims to be open and interactive，rather than closed and solitary．
For artists, reflections on real life and popular culture should embody their engagements with and critique of social reality and history. This constitutes the heterodoxy and heterogeneity(namely the avant-garde nature)of art. Contemporary art is not the self—righteous prophet described in Kandinsky’s Spiritual Triangle，who takes upon himself the mission of directing the spirit of the age. A contemporary artist is one who is immersed in social reality, yet maintains alertness against the alienating forces of totalitarianism，cultural industry and ideologically induced habits. His mission is to expose the methods of these alienating powers，and to critique accepted cultural methods so as to pave the way for new cultural practices .If the Hong Kong exhibition‘China’s New Art Post 1989’of1993 was a pioneering event in showing the achievements of new art since the 1980s New Wave Movement, which was then announced to the world through the platforms of Sao Paulo Biennial and Venice Biennial，then the most important things to look for today,10 more years later, are related but alternative post avant-garde artworks. By the‘post avant-garde’is not meant a difference in temporal period；it refers to a creativity that embodies a different creative consciousness and involving alternative artistic alligances. When the ‘post avant-garde’comes to maturity and is ready to display its achievements，that is the time when international exchange and historical manifestation are ready to unfold. On the one hand this will be an international exchange based on individual expressions of the Chinese situation；on the other hand it will be a manifestation of contemporary China through a fresh ‘historicism’.
Likewise for critics，if their ambition is independent artistic and critical insight，their mission would be the research and promotion of the‘post avant-garde’，an art that grows out of the historical situation of contemporary China. What should be done mainly are the followings:
1. For Whom Does History unfold
The global economy has brought about the globalization of consumer culture, and under the overwhelming dynamism of mass culture intellectuals can only but step aside to the fringe. This is not necessarily a bad thing for them, as it allows them to think and ponder the social, cultural, spiritual and individual ethical issues facing their time. They are made to history from within. History is the last stand that cannot be robbed from intellectuals. It is to them that falls the privilege of inspecting history and analyzing the root cause of things. It is to them that is given the opportunity to write history, preserve the memory of its experience as a nation and a people; then finally to create history and within the resigned determinism of current reality, to ponder the possibilities for humanity. Just as artists and art can only hope to seek solace in art history, the enquiries of intellectuals can only be historical; and because of this, these enquiries must be directed at present realities.
2. Living Within Problems
We call the young art movement of the 1980’s ‘avant-garde’ because the participants identified themselves under this banner. They challenged the dominant official artistic tradition, and made their marks as pioneers of diversity in contemporary art. The ‘self’, as a heroic personality supported by the general principles of Enlightenment, was regarded as self-evident and true. But, into the 1990’s after Chinese society entered a market economy, we discovered that we are all living within problems; we are all part of the problems. So heroes turn into dwarfs, dwarfed by financial capital and privilege capital, and this is the sadness of intellectuals and avant-garde art. The problem is not just that we live within problems, but that we must reflect on ourselves before we can face these problems, especially reflections about the responsibilities and conscience of ourselves as ones who have benefited, and consider the relation of our existence to those still on the fringe of society, at the dredge and in the wilds. A true artist is one who would definitely defend awareness of the self, and not a selfish individualist desperate for gains.
3. Enquiry From an Alternative Position
Market economy, cultural industry, dominant ideology and their public media not only attempt to control our needs, they even try to control us by making us willingly want what they want. Individual rights and spiritual liberty is today more seriously challenged, in more intense and more complex ways, than any period since the Enlightenment. Chinese society has not stepped into a ‘post-industrial’ era with the arrival of global economy and information revolution, we are in fact caught within a cultural matrix of pre-modern era, problems about personality and formalism from the modern era and issues of cultural identity have not been resolved. Therefore Chinese contemporary art should not simply take at face value the looks of post-modern art, and get unduly excited about ideological cross-over and iconographic interpretation. Art must enquire from an alternative position: choosing to remain non-mainstream when culture is officially controlled, become an anarchist when the spirit is restricted, and stand for the negation of negation when life is alienated. Art’s enquiries should adopt an alternative way, an anarchistic and non-mainstream way, to confront raw life, cultural context and spiritual pursuit.
4. Difference Within Interaction
If we say the human spirit needs to constantly enrich, deepen and transcend, that it needs a rounded development, then we would have full reason to argue for cultural diversity. The principle of difference in contemporary art is built precisely upon such a basis. In contrast to the general principle of modernism, this does not imply negation; instead this is built upon the modern individual’s principle of liberated thinking that came about from the Enlightenment. Difference is not simply the distance between cultures; it is also the distance between social groups within the same culture. In a manner of speaking, the individual’s specificity is the result of crossing different social groups and diverse cultures. Therefore a person’s cultural identity is determined by his social group belonging and cultural belonging. What we call ‘individuality’ is the accident, and the possibility, of such belonging. There is no such thing as a pure individual, there is only a responsible individual within human relationships. Therefore the individual is always interactive, and his counterpart can either be other social groups or ethnic groups, or historical memory and cultural reality. Interactivity is the unavoidable outcome of difference, and this truth is evidence of the wisdom of dialectics: true specificity arises from the crossing of generality; true individuality comes out of the richness of specificity. Specificity, as the mediator of generality and individuality, is that which we most treasure in art.
“Chinese painting already reached a dead end” has become the talk of the painting circle. However, people with such a view are by no means looking at the existing state of Chinese painting from this perspective. The truth is a little bit more complex than we can imagine. Contemporary Chinese painting has arrived at a crossroads where it is presented with these mutually opposing choices: crisis or new life; destruction or creation. Contemporary Chinese artists find themselves in frustration and anxiety as well as introspection and contemplation, which is a reflection of the characteristics of our historical development. It is toughest to be a Chinese painter now than in any other historical periods, as his creative talent is significantly stifled by objective pressure and subjective dissatisfaction. Indeed, for contemporary Chinese artists, it is a baptism to face up to the challenges of the times.
As one aspect of the feudal ideology，traditional Chinese painting is deeply rooted in an absolutely closed authoritarian society. According to the feudal cardinal guide of “the Invariable Heaven, and the Invariable Tao”, Chinese feudal society which lasted 2000 years demonstrated astonishing stability from Confucius to Sun Yat-sen, which restrict the development of art as Ideology. Both from form and content, Chinese paintings maintained a balance with the social process from the formation, development to the decline and did not show any mutation or leap. The history of Chinese painting is actually a process of unceasingly perfection of formal artistic medium adopted to pursue the so called ‘artistic conception (yijing)’ on techniques, and one that is continuously narrowing down on artistic concepts and aesthetic experiences.
It is not difficult to understand that from early Chinese paintings(silk painting, fresco, relief stone sculpture)to later ones, the evolution of form in painting is to gradually phase out the kind of pure point, line, color, black way to mould, but gives these formal symbols with Abstract aesthetic mean. It is safe to say that the stronger the abstract aesthetic tastes emphasizing brush work of calligraphy is, the better it is to indicate the stricter rule in the form of Chinese painting. Following this, the apex of technical perfection therefore led to a sheer and rigid abstract form. Thus Chinese painters began to focus on painting techniques in pursuit of ‘artistic conception (yijing)’, which is the most conservative elements in later Chinese painting, rather than on exploration of artistic concepts.
Of course, the “stagnation” of traditional Chinese painting development is not simply a result of the conservative feudalism; the weakness of Chinese painting theory also stifled the practice of Chinese painting in a considerable extent. The ultimate meaning of Chinese painting theory is not how to guide the painting to observe and grasp the changing beauty of life by the roots, but empirical talk which is dominated by the national characteristics of “take methodology more seriously than theory” and collected on the foundation of large amount of painting practices. Among which some of the valuable and essential parts are often lost in numerous lengthy and repeated methodology. The “Six Codes” has actually become the highest standards of Chinese painting both in Aesthetic judgments and creative methods. (Although many ancient painters and theorists have made complements to this “Six Codes” after it was proposed by Xie He, but the theory was not largely modified by them). If painting theory does not provide dialectical epistemology to painting practices, and does not guide practices fundamentally to open up new aesthetic concepts but remain in the low-level emphasizing teacher-student relationship, and specific skills of painting, or proposes some vague ideas (sometimes may be classic too), it will not be helpful to provides guidance on painting practice to make continuous innovation. As you know, the history of development is a dialectical integration of succession and intermittence, gradual progress and revolution. When the social progressive accumulation reached the breaking point, brand new, epoch-making theory, namely the revelation and foresight made standing on the peak of intellectual and social development is needed to promote the rapid expansion and carrying out of social practices. However, the leading nature of theory is not only stifled by objective conditions, but also the tradition of theory itself. Under the historical condition of today, Chinese painting theory need to be fundamentally changed, rather than be revised or complemented.
So, we must discard the old theoretical system and cognition of the arts and pay more attention to emphasize conceptual issues in modern painting. Painting concept is a series of constructive factors dominating paintings: painter’s understanding of the subject, the approach to objects to represent with technology and how to constitute a unique “visual language” which is different from other sensory stimulation etc.
Changes in concept are the beginning of painting revolution. We must recognize and evaluate contemporary Chinese paintings according to this basic point. The new viewpoint of painting was not fabricated; it would for sure absorb from the outstanding traditional heritage. The so-called artistic heritage is certainly not a bunch of dead goods which lined up for people to pick and use whenever they need and mix them up randomly according to temporary needs. The outstanding heritage of Chinese painting refers to the spiritual essence which integrated space, time, and observer himself. On the point that painter project ideal and mood to the objects he painted as an observer, the practice of Chinese painting highly matches the modern scientific spirit( such as the relativity theory, principle of quantum theory, etc.). As the German physicist Heisenberg said: “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to us through our method of questioning.” Indeed, it is just the superior oriental artistic spirit that modern Chinese painting needs to carry forward. By understanding this, no one shall misunderstand new painting concept to be abstract stereotype
So, which aspects of Chinese painting should we reform？We show our admiration to Fan Kuan and Zhu Da when we read the album of their paintings or in the museum, it shows at least two things: first, preconceived aesthetic concepts are controlling us when we appreciate pictures, second, these works are indeed able to arouse echo in our hearts both in aesthetic sentiments and forms. We are willing to acknowledge the greatness of ancients and insignificance of ourselves. It clearly revealed the fact that as long as we are infatuated with the ancient art forms and perceive Chinese painting with a traditional view, we will have no choice but to acknowledge that ancients are smarter than us and worship the ancient on our knees. So it can be seen that the primary task of reforming Chinese painting is to change our worship to the strict formal standards and break through the old fashioned formal restrictions.
The Chinese painting reached an end-stage of development in the age of painters such as Ren Bonian, Wu Changshuo and Huang Binhong.( there are already great heroes in figure, flower-and-bird and landscape painting) Although contemporary Chinese artists did not give up to continue the diligent work in the garden of Chinese painting, but they obtained little success. When we see a large number of talented artists are still defending the obviously outdated artistic concepts, and have indeed wasted so much energy in practice, the only thing we can do is to show our deep sorrow and sympathy; When we see some painters who consider themselves quintessence school painters above politics and worldly interests, especially some of the once famous old painters despising the reform movement of art, we believe that this is not lofty, but stupid and lazy. He who wants to be Don Quixote would make themselves the laughing-stock of the afterworld. Schiller said that the dangerous threat is the extreme vulgarness, while the most detestable vulgarness is loafing about and muddling along. The nature of art is to create continually, without it, art will become merely manual skills that make ends meet.
It should be admitted that the efforts of contemporary Chinese artists are not entirely in vain. They recognized that the traditional Chinese painting has been senile, and is trying to catch up with the times breathlessly and only could absorb some leavings of cultural heritage. Painters like Liu Haisu, Shi Lu, Zhu Qizhan, Lin Fengmian and others are those who began their art career under the influence of trend of thought in the new era. They didn’t lift their voice to clamor the urgency of reform in art, yet they played the role of a link between past and future in practice. Their conception in painting was limited in the scope of traditional thought, but this did not obstruct their practice in exploring new aesthetic experiences. What promoted them to do so was the talented artistic insight and irresistible creative spirits of these artists. As the outstanding representatives of contemporary Chinese painting, they could certainly not be regarded as epochal masters; yet as artists who have led Chinese paintings to go on the way of modern art, they should enjoy the highest honor. To evaluate the position of an artist in the history of art, we should mainly see whether he had made any breakthrough in the form of art and any exploration in the concept of art. So the basis to confirm Liu Haisu and other artists as outstanding ones is that their created had added to the continuation of Chinese painting.
If Liu Haisu, Shi Lu, Zhu Qizhan, Lin Fengmian and others are more inclined to the modern aspects in painting（of course, views on modern painting were merely seen in their works）, then Pan Tianshou and Li Keran’s works contained more rational elements, they have not exceeded the track of traditional Chinese painting yet, and they only wanted to put their effort in finding new subject matters in life. They moved toward the extreme in some traditional technique, namely they paid too much attention to the pictures, which influenced the direct reveling of sentiment in pictures. Thus their way of art became even narrower. Their shortcomings did not affect themselves that much (Their diligence, hard work and talent helped to make it up) but the disadvantages have been largely magnified on their students. We can say that, most influenced of Pan Tianshou and Li Keran’s achievements in Chinese painting are negative for the later generations. Compared with them, Fu Baoshi also had something in common. His painting was unique. He has a unique way to perceive tradition. The biggest characteristic of him was his great attention paid to life experience, so when you see his painting you can actually smell the real life. However, he inclined too much to naturalistic style. Among all famous contemporary artists, he was one who used least traditional methods; He fell into the convention of old bottles for new wine while rebelling against tradition. Painters influenced by Fu Baoshi, not only lost the vigor of Fu’s works but also completed his artistic exploration which he hasn’t done and fixed it rigidly to be a normalized mode.
Certainly, explorations on Chinese painting by Pan Tianshou, Li Keran and Fu Baoshi are noteworthy. However, Li Kuchan， Huang Zhou and others are much more inferior . In fact, Li Kuchan’s works were the typical sample of putting pieces together. He didn’t fully understand the spirit of traditional Chinese painting by root and he just drew out the advantages on some skills and even the disadvantages from senior painters and then moved them into his works with hardly any changes. He’s adept skill in brushwork did not upraise his art, but caused the loss of his personality instead. Huang Zhou and Cheng Shifa’s works are monotonous repetition. Their early works did show some talent with a kind of passions of young artists. However, they soon came to a stagnation; specifically, churning out is their main problem which showed that their understanding of art was too inadequate. Many figure painters similar to Huang Zhou and Cheng Shifa are all incapable of not making their mistakes——their figure paintings have already become the game of brushwork with the pure goal to develop the characteristics of ink and wash.
Make a general survey of the current Chinese painting, we can not find a leader of art reform movement which is quietly launched before our eyes at present among the numerous famous painters. This era doesn’t need artists who could only inherit cultural tradition, but artists who can make epochal contribution. We should create such an atmosphere: each artist can abandon the strict specifications in technique and rigid aesthetic standards to create a colorful and varied art form on the basis of free exploration. Don’t worry, real artists who are living in modern China will neither be “westernized” nor cling to the “national essence”. National life customs and modern concepts open to international world would bring unlimited prospects to contemporary Chinese painting. Courage, nerve and strength are basic requirements of artists who have the lofty ideal to bring out a new situation for contemporary Chinese painting. We use the words of Epicurus to end this article: people who agree with God may not be sincere, while people who disagree with God may not be insincere.
Looking forward to the Establishment of New Critical discourse
——Also discuss the issue of how to establish the measure of value in criticizing Chinese contemporary art from 2000 to 2009
He Guiyan
In the conception of “Reshaping History — Chinart from 2000 to 2009” exhibition, two critics, Lv Peng and Zhu Zhu wish to make a comprehensive review, sorting and summarization of Chinese contemporary art since 2000, in an attempt to display some typical phenomena and works of art through exhibition, thereby to construct a basic theoretical framework and a narrative context of art history, and provide some necessary texts and visual materials for arts researchers. We can say that this work is full of challenge and has a constructive significance. But, whether or not can we use “Chinart (New art of China)” to refer to the typical works of this period is still debatable. For “Chinart” as a brand-new concept, we not only need to define the border of its form clearly, but also to provide a set of discourse about its own connotation and denotation from perspectives of art and culture, especially the narrative of art history. That is to say, we need to sort out how critical discourse and theoretical system of “Chinart” were established? In my opinion, if we want to use the concept of “Chinart”, we need at least to make necessary definitions from perspectives of time dimension and culture connotation. For example, could art post 2000 be defined as “new art”? If it is not bordered by time, then does “new art” have requirements in artistic form? Does it have clear cultural demands? And how could it keep a contextual relation with the previous contemporary art history? Obviously, if we do not define “Chinart”, then this concept will eventually become meaningless for being vague and general.
However, discussions about “new art” can not avoid a core issue: what is the measure of value for Chinese contemporary art? In other words, as for artistic creations from 2000 to 2009, we can by all means use other concepts to replace “Chinart”, but, no matter what concepts we use and choose, we will need to show the basic appearance or trend of the creation in the recent 10 years through an exhibition. Meanwhile, we must answer a basic question that what on earth is the value of contemporary art creation in this period. The reason why we agree with contemporary art is actually an agreement of value. Even though this value can emphasis on different connotations due to different contexts, such as on culture, politics, the history of arts, spirits and the history of thought, but this does not stop us from finding a value orientation with universal meaning or dominant role. Therefore, if we would discuss creations of Chinese contemporary art in the recent 10 years, we must discuss whether they have represented the problem of new value and if we discuss this problem, we would also need to go back to context of the development of Chinese contemporary art.
Briefly, in 1980s, value demands of Chinese contemporary art are mainly reflected in two aspects: one is to emphasize the critical standpoint of avant-garde art. In the whole historical context of art in 1980s, contemporary art and mainstream system kept an encouraging and struggling relation. No matter “Stars Art Society”, “Anonymous Painting Society (wuming huahui)”, or folk art groups emerged during ’85 thought trend period, most artists adopt ways of “Civil vs. Official, Avant-garde vs. Conservation, Marginal vs. Mainstream, Elites vs. The public” to instruct their own creations. Another is to realize the contemporary reformation in artistic language. This can be seen in the popular saying that “we used less than ten years to go through the 100-year artistic style of the West”. Of course, no matter pursuing the rebellious characteristics of avant-garde art or realizing the construction of modern language, Chinese contemporary art in 1980s still set foot on localized cultural context and was seeking for a transformation in cultural modernization, namely to achieve ideological liberation, to comply with the creative freedom of individual and to defend the independence of art.
In 1990s, Chinese contemporary art developed in an almost brand-new context of society and culture. Compared with 1980s, other than emphasizing its own rebellious characteristics, Chinese contemporary art is also confronted with an erosion of post-colonial trend of thought due to globalization, and multiple shocks of popular culture and culture of consumption. At present, issues such as arts and market, cultural identity against the background of globalization, survival strategies of avant-garde art, system of international exhibition, are directly or indirectly affecting the evolution and development of Chinese contemporary art itself. Therefore, value demands of Chinese contemporary art in this period are mainly about emerging issues such as localization vs. globalization, eastern vs. western, cultural conservatism vs. post-colonialism. By the end of 1990s, inner value measurement of Chinese contemporary art has basically formed, which was its anti-official status, and avant-garde nature, experimental nature, elitism and critical characteristics reflected in both artistic language and cultural demand – they together bestowed “contemporary” with rich humanistic meanings of history, reality and art.
From 2000 onwards, Chinese contemporary art entered into a brand-new developing period and faced with a situation of artistic history which is different from that of 1980s and 1990s.In this situation, new realistic circumstance and artistic ecology will definitely change our way of expression when we discuss the value demands of Chinese contemporary art. If we observe it roughly, there is some changes claim attention. 1. Both connotation and denotation of “contemporary art” have changed a lot. In 1980s and 1990s, the connotation and cultural orientation of contemporary art are its avant-garde nature and rebellious characteristic. However, since the end of 1990s, avant-garde and rebellious characteristics of contemporary art started to be spalled and swallowed by various opportunism, cynicism and utilitarianism. 2. Exhibition system and external living condition changed fundamentally. This is mainly reflected in three aspects: (1) In recent years, China has established its more mature biennale mode; (2) International exhibition platforms are gradually increasing in number; (3) Solo-exhibition or joint exhibition held by galleries, art museums and art Expos have realized diversification in exhibition modes. We can easily find that, different from early Chinese contemporary art seeking for an entry to public space [1], craving for shifting from “underground” to “stage”, today’s contemporary art already has a certain degree of legitimacy, with a large number of opportunities of international communication. However, the formation of all kinds of exhibition systems not only changed the external living environment of Chinese contemporary art, but also imperceptibly affected artists’ adjustment in creative strategies. 3. Chinese contemporary art entered a comprehensive marketized phase. Marketization played an active role in promoting contemporary arts while also brought about great negative effects. For example, since 2004, one of the results brought by the integration of art capital and market is the overflow of iconized and symbolized creation of contemporary art, as well as the prevalence of kitsch-oriented and anti-intellectual aesthetic appreciation. Of course, another result is that, relevant art institutions formed a series of comprehensive operational plans from packaging, promotion, and auction to collection and others by controlling a variety of funds; they took contemporary art works as an important tool to operate art market. This transformation would naturally draw people’s attention to re-trial the function and value of contemporary art. 4. Since 2007, some art institutions of the government accelerated the incorporating and accepting process of contemporary art, and tried to integrate contemporary art with the development strategy of national culture to promote. It is for sure that this transformation does not only neutralize the rebellious and independent spirits of early contemporary art, but also, would have lasting and profound influences on the future development of contemporary art.
Under these new contexts of history and reality, how to rebuild the measure of value criterion for contemporary arts becomes a hot potato. Especially when facing creations of contemporary art since 2000, we can’t help wondering, what are their value demands? What kind of relation should they keep with the surrounding culture and reality? Through ten years of creation, perhaps, we can reach the following consensus. 1. Contemporary art should inherit their avant-garde and rebellious spirits. Here the avant-garde and rebellious spirits are mainly reflected in two aspects: one is to take against that rigid, archaic mainstream culture, as well as the popular, kitsch mass culture; another one is that contemporary art is in need of self-denial as well, which is to overturn pre-fixed avant-garde spirits with an avant-garde spirit. The Significance of the former one is to keep the independent, self-disciplinary elitism stance of contemporary art and that of the latter lies in maintaining vitality and promoting continuous developments of contemporary arts. 2. Contemporary art shall comply with the development logic of local culture. Meanwhile, artists should keep sensitivity to social reality, and defend the criticalness of contemporary art. Even though the value of contemporary art is also reflected in the renewal and experiments of artistic language, but its core value still lies in its critical function on society as well as the irreplaceable “Chinese experience” inside the works. It is necessary to point out that, “Chinese experience” does not originate from cultural conservatism and cultural strategy of “post-colonial” which is to please western countries here, but aims to really set the foot of “contemporary” in the stance of China, with new meanings derived from categories like sociology and culturology and others. 3. Contemporary art should comply with existing tradition of art history, and artists should be able to propose new possibilities on methodology of artistic creation while maintaining an independent creation state. Whereat, individual independence is not taken into account from aesthetic category of modernism, on contrary, it focuses more on the political meaning reflected in the creative activity itself, namely to put creative freedom of individuals into the category of democratic politics for measuring, and enabling creations of contemporary art to become an important part of the democratization process of China. 4. Contemporary art should insist on pluralistic development, meanwhile, artists adhere to an open cultural standpoint and possess the insight and capability to participate in international dialogue. We should say that, from 2000 onwards, no matter taken into account in perspectives of time or creative conception, one of the characteristics of Chinese contemporary art is that it can keep pace with Western contemporary art and its development. Although above points can not cover all aspects of contemporary art, but they can at least give us a basic idea to understand and comment on contemporary art.
In a word, due to the great changes taken place in the history of art since 2000, development of Chinese contemporary art and the criterion to measure its value would definitely be affected and changed. Of course, it is not important whether the representative works emerged during this period are called “Chinart (New Art of China)” or not, because, the real key point is that whether we could find a critical discourse to state, descript and summarize these works according to them, and then to combine them with the narrative of art history and construct a brand-new system of theory. Only under such a condition could tradition and cultural spirits of contemporary art be inherited and continued, so that a dominant, universal measure of value for contemporary art could be finally established.
This is a collection of images and articles that cover the astounding new museums of art being built or already built-in China over the last few years. The startling rise of China’s gigantic economy is being matched by their movement and presence on the global stage. China has both centers for art production in Shanghai and Beijing, and a dazzling new international art market that will also be the third reveal of the phenomenal Art Basel art fair, which debuts in Hong Kong in 2013. No where else on earth is as fast-moving as the exponential growth in the China art scene and art worlds. China already has world-class collectors and collections, and is repatriating art purchased in the West back into its country of origin. China also is positioned in the secondary markets with its own global branded auction houses. China is building remarkable and gorgeous, stunningly beautiful museums that represent everything from a region to the nation to a single person contemporary artist. Yet what will further ground all the cultural movement are these new and amazing super-large scaled museums of art. Take for example the Chinese Museum of Wood. It is both spiritual and everyday, and holds most rewarding examples of works created in the woodworking tradition. Fortunately for us in the West, and in the US in particular, we will finally get to see China showcase itself in all of its cultural manifestations – no different than has Paris, with its various historic museums both small and enormous, that are markers of civilization for all the accomplishments of humanity.
CHINA DAILY RECENTLY reported that 100 new museums open in China every year. Some are private, some are linked to upmarket shopping malls, and others are public institutions established by a government that seems suddenly to be aware of the cultural deprivation it has imposed on its citizens over recent decades. Since 1949, a lot of Chinese culture simply just disappeared.
Now suddenly Chinese contemporary art has become a hot commodity with records being broken at auction almost every week and official institutions running hard to catch up with collectors who are opening their own private museums and galleries.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Shanghai a city of 25 million people and one clearly making a play to become the cultural centre of China; in the previous 12 months alone Shanghai has seen the opening of China’s largest private contemporary art museum – The Long Museum – and two monolithic public art spaces, the Power Station of Contemporary Art and the New China Art Museum in the refurbished China Pavilion on the 2010 China Expo site.
The Power Station of Contemporary Art, on the banks of the Huangpu River, was converted over a frenetic nine months from the Nanshi Power Plant into mainland China’s first state-run contemporary art museum at a cost of US$64 million. It may not be the equivalent of London’s Tate Modern, yet, but its conceptual heart is beating confidently within its 41,200-square-meter space which itself is dwarfed by the 62,000 square meters of the colossal New China Art Museum.
Museums both private and public seem to be sprouting everywhere. But it is an activity that requires big bucks; the infrastructure is staggering, the ongoing costs breathtaking and the cost of the art beyond the reach of all but the über-rich.
Chinese property developer Dai Zhikang is currently putting the finishing touches to a huge US$480 million development in Shanghai’s rapidly expanding Pudong District. The Himalayas Centre designed by acclaimed Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, includes conference facilities, luxury hotel, restaurants and shopping spaces; located on the top floor of the development is Zhikang’s soon-to-be-opened vast curvilinear Shanghai Zendai Himalayas Art Museum in which he will show his own art collection.
Across Shanghai and located in the equivalent of London’s Bond Street, is billionaire Adrien Cheng’s newly opened K11 shopping mall. Known as the ‘Art Mall’, K11 specialises in high-end Western brands. Burberry and Valentino are already in place but the mall is so new that many of the shops are vacant. It still smells of fresh paint and plastic and the highly polished floors are as yet unscuffed. The basement is a dedicated low- ceilinged art gallery that will show work by the country’s leading artists. Last month’s inaugural Shanghai Surprise exhibition was a group show with work from several local art stars including, Yang Fudong, Qui Anxiong and Birdhead.
Close by in the famous Bund area of the city is billionaire Thomas Ou’s Rockbund Art museum housed in an exquisitely restored 1933 Art Deco building that was at one time home to the Royal Asiatic Society. Ou’s large contemporary art space which opened in 2010 has no permanent collection but hosts impressive contemporary shows by leading Chinese artists.
Wang Wei, wife of billionaire entrepreneur Lui Yiqian, has recently opened (December 2012) the largest contemporary art museum in China in Shanghai’s Pudong district. The 10,000-square-meter Long Museum was built to showcase her collection of contemporary and revolutionary Chinese art with the upper floor devoted to ancient Chinese art and antiques which are her husband’s preferences. Wei plans a second museum later this year, part of the West Bank Cultural Corridor in Xuhui District, and will show even more of her collection of contemporary Chinese art.
Not to be out done Budi Tek, an Indonesian-Chinese agribusiness billionaire and Shanghai resident, will also open his Yuz Museum Shanghai on the same Xuhui site to accommodate his personal collection of international and Chinese contemporary art.
Lorenz Helbling, who owns the commercial ShangArt Gallery, has lived in Shanghai since 1995 and has witnessed the growth of private museums in the city. ‘In 1995, no one came to Shanghai to look at art. Now Shanghai is a contemporary city, a city of today and people here are interested in contemporary art even though they are still trying to understand what it art is all about,’ he said dryly.
There are a million millionaires in China but it is only the billionaires – of which there are 122 according to Forbes Magazine – who can afford the private galleries and the art to put in them. Their wealth has grown in parallel with an economy that has embraced, ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics.’ These nouveaux riches are, a ‘fast-growing thicket of bamboo capitalism,’ as The Economist magazine labelled them, with a cashed-up status that has in effect, allowed them to corner the contemporary art market during a period when government cultural institutions seemed uninterested.
Some critics have labelled private museums as vanity projects and a flaunting of wealth. But Wei and Tek, both of whom spoke to Asian Art Newspaper last month in Shanghai, see such accusations as short-sighted. Their galleries are precisely planned philanthropic endeavours which come with clearly defined social responsibilities which include educational and lecture programmes.
Wang Wei’s Long Museum which opened last December in Pudong, cost of 271 million Yuan (US$43 million) to build and is bank-rolled by her billionaire industrialist husband, Liu Yiqian. The 10,000 square-meter space will cost 7 million Yuan annually to run Liu told CCTV recently. But the sobriquet of the Long Museum being China’s largest private museum will be short-lived. Later this year, Wang Wei will open her second even larger 16,000-square-meter, contemporary art space on an abandoned airfield that is being turned into the West Bank Cultural Corridor (WBCC) in Xuhiu District on the banks of the Huangpu River. The WBCC is being pioneered by local Party Secretary, Sun Jiwei and will comprise tourist attractions, restaurants, commercial space and parkland. DreamWorks Animation has already signed a multi-million dollar deal to build a movie studio and entertainment zone on the site.
Wang Wei’s museum will not be the only one on the site either. Tek is building his own privately financed Yuz Museum Shanghai there too. ‘Right next door to DreamWorks,’ Tek said. Tek’s 8,000-square-meter building designed by acclaimed Japanese architect, Sou Fujimoto is the first phase of a development that will eventually take in adjacent land and add a further 20,000 square meters of exhibition space. Wang Wei and her husband Liu Yiqian have been collecting Chinese art for over 20 years. Liu, who is 171 on Forbe’s Magazine China Rich List with an estimated fortune of US$790 million has a passion for ancient and antique Chinese art while Wang Wei has preferred to concentrate on Chinese contemporary and modern and in establishing a museum quality narrative collection of Revolutionary Chinese art that covers 1945 to 2009. Fifteen minutes spent inside the Long Museum is long enough to realise that no expense has been spared; from its soaring 14-meter ceiling of the Central Hall to the unpolished marble flagstones of the stair well to the fastidious nature of the displays, all speak of a high degree of finesse rarely seen in private or public galleries.
News China reported that Lui Yiqian and Wang Wei spent US$139 million on art in 2009 the same year Yiqian set an auction record for a piece of Chinese furniture when he paid US$11 million for an 18th-century Imperial Qianlong period zitan throne, which is now displayed on the third floor of the Long Museum alongside ancient scrolls and fine porcelain all of which are bathed in pools of soft light triggered by the movement of visitors through the gallery. Annual running costs of seven million Yuan have led commentators to question the sustainability of private museum. But Wang Wei dismisses concerns about sustainability and points out that the name, Long Museum, was chosen because its Chinese pictogram means long-lasting. ‘The Long Museum will last for one hundred years,’ she said.
Budi Tek, whose Shanghai Yuz Museum will be the second museum to carry this name, the first opened in Jakarta in 2008, while happy to stump up the cost of both the building and establishing the collection, remains all too aware that the museum’s long- term viability lies in making it sustainable. He, like Wang Wei, will charge a small entrance fee somewhere between 50 and 100 Yuan he says and which visitors will be able to redeem against other onsite purchases. He plans to generate income from other elements of the development. For example, there will be design and furniture stores, restaurants, book shops and residences onsite which will be available to the public when not being used by artists. But he insists everything will be art-related and all profits will be returned to the museum.
Tek believes there is now too much money chasing too few works of contemporary Chinese art leading to a dearth of affordable museum quality pieces coming on to the market. ‘In China the most important pieces of contemporary Chinese art are already held by us collectors. There are no major museum collections yet,’ he said. Which of course begs the question, what will the mega-public exhibition spaces such as the PSA put on their walls?
More recently, Tek’s collecting has turned away from Chinese contemporary to international installation artists such as Fred Sandback, Antony Gormley and Adel Abdessemed, works that require a lot of space. He is an intuitive and slightly impulsive buyer and while he is happy to defer exhibition decisions to a curator he insists the decision about what he buys is his alone. ‘No one advises me. I see something and I buy it. No one advised me when I bought Maurizio Cattelan’s olive tree. No one advised me when I bought Adel’s plane.’
For her part, Wang Wei is adamant that her collecting policy is driven by a desire to reclaim her culture. It is a philosophy she has pursued resolutely throughout her 20 years of collecting. She insists that Chinese art should remain firmly in Chinese hands and it is this philosophy that has driven her definitive collection of Revolutionary Art. And she does not share Tek’s concerns about the dearth of good contemporary art coming onto the market. For the Long Museum’s opening exhibition 15 leading Chinese contemporary artists including Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun and Zeng Fanzhi created work to hang in the Central Hall. When asked if she owned the 15 works, a spokeswoman for Wang smiled and said, ‘Not yet!’.
Many commentators who question the sustainability of the private museums are also sceptical as to whether they can successfully operate in a climate where the commercial, cultural and political so closely overlap.
The shifting line between what can and cannot be shown in China was highlighted in May this year when Chinese censors excised several Andy Warhol images of Chairman Mao from a touring exhibition 15 Minutes Eternal, of 300 Warhol pictures before it reached Shanghai’s PSA. The images had already been seen in Hong Kong, but were deemed to be irreverent and unsuitable for mainland consumption. The Mao pictures will be reinstated when the exhibition moves on to Tokyo. While the Chinese government is happy to pursue its ‘soft culture’ push overseas, it remains highly sensitive to images that could offend at home.
There are few images in Wang Wei’s collection of Revolutionary Art, with its litany of happy smiling peasant faces and images that extol Chairman Mao’s achievements over half a century of communist party control that would offend the Party hierarchy. Even so Wang Wei takes a cautious ‘softly, softly’ approach and sees her collection in broad terms as, ‘complementary to national collections which for historical reasons cannot present certain art,’ she said enigmatically. Shanghai citizens however are flocking to the new cultural icons throughout the city. Helbling says that since the first Shanghai Biennale in 1996 there has been a steady and growing interest in contemporary art and that now, the big problem for Chinese public galleries is ‘trying to sort out what type of contemporary art they will have’.
The building was designed by MAD Architects, as proposal for the international competition for the future National Art Museum of China in Bejing. Their concept is based on an elevated public square which is protected by a floating mega volume above.
The original structure of the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) built in 1962, houses one of the country’s largest art collections and has played host to some of the influential exhibitions as recorded in contemporary Chinese history. The current plans are to move the institution into a new building, situated within a designated ‘art district’ on the central axis of the 2008 Olympic site.
MAD’s design is organized into three layers, where programs are divided by each level. The one-storey ground floor houses all ancillary functions and is conceived in such a way that it can be operated independently from the museum in off hours. Above this, a 20,000 square meter urban plaza program acts as the main gallery for permanent art collections and exhibitions. The arrangement of this hall gives visitors the opportunity to decide how to engage with the works on show, while simultaneously being surrounded by outward views of the surrounding cityscape courtesy of windows that wrap around the perimeter of the structure. This level is also directly connected to the former Olympic park via a bridge, thus making use of an area of the urban plan which would otherwise be ignored.
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This is design of a Beijing based architecture firm named MAD, they unveiled their new museum for Chinese wood sculptures. The museum is located in Habrin main city in Northern China. The city itself is currently trying to defining itself as a regional hub for the arts at a time when the historic city is rapidly expanding. That’s why they choose to build this museum right there right now. The main idea of the Chinese wood sculptures museum is inspired by the unique local landscapes of the city. The museum is a contrast between the elegance of nature and the speed of daily life. The museum is about 200 meters long and for the concept is shaped to explore and reflect the relation between the building and the environment as a big frozen fluid. The interior of the museum is separated on two general parts. Each one represents an expedition. They are connected mutually by a centralized entrance which separates the two museums while simultaneously joining them. This is used to make the impression of symbiotic relationship between the two expeditions. Another good idea by the designers is the full glass roof, this not only make the outside of the building outstanding and looking futuristic, but also helps for the sunlight to lighten the entire museum and helping for the viewing atmosphere inside.
City Sets Ambitious Goal To Open 16 New Museums By 2015
The China Pavilion Will Reopen as the China Art Palace next fall
Shanghai may be known as a city obsessed with the pursuit of money, but in recent years China’s most populous metropolis has busied itself with another obsession: rivaling Beijing as a cultural and artistic hub. As Jing Daily noted this past May, while Beijing still enjoys its status as China’s cultural and political capital, the city’s rampant growth over the past decade has cannibalized many of its vibrant arts districts and threatened many others, alienating the creative community and, in some cases, pushing artists to relocate.
This shift in Beijing, and Shanghai’s well-capitalized initiative to foster a more creative environment in the city, has invigorated Shanghai’s cultural ambitions. Over the last few years, new creative/lifestyle venues like 1933 (a restored Jazz Age abattoir), the Shanghai Songjiang Creative Studio, and the Rockbund Art Museum have opened their doors. Though red tape and fly-by-night private gallery owners continue to plague the industry, by 2015, Shanghai plans to open 16 more large-scale museums and galleries.
As Shanghai Daily writes this week, one of these 16 planned museums and galleries, the massive “China Art Palace,” is attracting particular attention. For the art “Palace,” the China Pavilion from last year’s Shanghai World Expo is being transformed into an art museum “on a par with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musee d’Orsay in Paris,” according to a senior official. From the article:
The China Art Palace will collect top-level art from home and abroad, primarily to showcase the origins and development of China’s modern arts.
It is part of a plan by the city government to build 16 new major museums and art galleries and many smaller museums by 2015 and make Shanghai an “international cultural metropolis,” said Zong.
“In the future, Shanghai residents will be able to find a museum and cultural venue within a 15-minute walk of their homes,” she said.
“The number and quality of art galleries and museums is an important measure of cultural standing – cities such as New York and Paris are famed for their top-level galleries,” said Teng Junjie, art director of the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture Radio Film and TV.
The palace, which will cover an area of 70,000 square meters, will open on a limited basis next October, Zong said.
Most facilities from the former China Pavilion can be retained, bringing considerable savings, she said.
The three levels of the former main exhibition hall of the Expo pavilion will showcase the history and development of modern art of Shanghai and China, while the former joint pavilion for Chinese provinces and municipalities will have separate exhibition rooms for famous Chinese modern artists, including top Shanghai painter Cheng Shifa, said Teng.
As Teng Junjie added this weekend, the aim for cultural officials is to establish three major museums in the city by 2015: “the existing Shanghai Museum, the Shanghai Art Palace and the China Contemporary Art Museum – for historic, modern and contemporary artworks.” But, large scale public projects aside, more museums and galleries won’t do much to transform Shanghai into a cultural hub to rival New York, Paris or even Beijing unless, as Jing Daily pointed out earlier this month, the regulatory environment for private museums and galleries is transformed as well.
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Super-Collector Wang Wei’s Dragon Art Museum Hits Construction Milestone
12,000 Square Meter Museum Located In Shanghai’s Pudong District
Zhong Song’s exterior design, featuring a projection of Chen Yifei’s 1987 painting, “The Flute Player”
This past February, Jing Daily covered Chinese art “super-collector” Wang Wei’s long-discussed private art museum in Shanghai, which Wang and billionaire investor husband Liu Yiqian plan to open next year. The “Dragon Art Museum” (龙美术馆) will showcase Wang and Liu’s extensive collection of blue-chip Chinese contemporary art on the ground floor, Wang’s Mao-era “Red Classics” from 1949-1979 on the second, and traditional works and ancient artifacts on the third floor.
Taking over a section of the former Tomson Centre (汤臣别墅商业中心) building in Shanghai’s Pudong district, near the Shanghai New International Expo Center, Wang’s museum will expand the original 8,000 square meter space to 12,000 square meters. With around 15 months to go until the museum’s planned November 18, 2012 grand opening, last weekend construction teams hit a milestone, starting work on the building’s facade.
Designed by Zhong Song (仲松), a “post-70s generation” artist and architect who started off his career at the studio of the late Beijing artist Chen Yifei, the museum’s facade is at tasteful and minimalist, going against the current preference for all things large and loud in the world of Chinese architecture. According to Zhong, the concept of the building’s facade is “clean and quality,” adding that he will use only light-colored granite for the exterior, installing fewer and smaller windows in order to give “a feeling of wholeness” to the building.
Based on an artist rendering of the exterior, which shows a projection of Chen Yifei’s 1987 work, “The Flute Player” on the museum’s facade, expect some high-tech features to be worked into the low-key granite-and-glass design. In addition to the facade currently under construction, crews will soon start work on the auxiliary warehouse, with all construction expected to be complete by the end of this year.
As Wang Wei told the Chinese art magazine Art Finance earlier this summer, she and Liu Yiqian have already invested over 200 million yuan (US$31 million) in the project, and are projecting an annual operating budget of 5 million yuan (US$774,000).
dutch practice MVRDV has won the international competition for the ‘china comic and animation museum’
in hangzhou, china. composed of eight balloon shaped volumes, the design looks to create an internally complex
experience measuring 30,000 square meters in total. fantastical and whimsical in its approach, the proposal is
part of a larger master plan that will include a series of parks, a public plaza and an expo center.
comic book library with view into interactive exhibition zone
set to break ground in 2012, the museum seeks to create a platform which will unite the evolving worlds of art
and entertainment. the application of one of the most iconic cartoon motifs – the speech bubble – allows the unit
to be instantly recognized as a place for comics, animation and cartoons. as text is projected onto the
monochromatic exterior surface, the forms come to life, further transforming the two dimensional motif into a
three dimensional reality.
interactive exhibition space
each of the eight volumes, occupied by unique and independent functions, are interconnected allowing for a
circular tour of the entire building. large voids at the point of interception provide visual connection and access
between the dynamic programs, which include a comic book library and three cinemas.
exhibition space
accommodating a range of versatile exhibition spaces, the museum will feature a permanent collection that is
presented in a chronological spiral along with smaller, adaptive halls for temporary displays.
construction has begun in datong, china on the ‘datong art museum’, designed by london-based practice foster + partners.
four pyramidal roof peaks interlock to define the exterior form, evoking the imagery of an erupted landscape. the external surfaces
are clad with corten steel, a material with earthen hues and will continue to weather over time. one of four new buildings bordering
a new cultural plaza, the 32,000 square meter center will be slightly sunken into the earth, matching the scale of its neighbors.
visitors descend through a stepped courtyard of sculptures to enter the museum.
at the ground level, a grand gallery with a 37 meter tall atrium with a clear span of 80 meters provides a centerpiece area
for large-scale installations and exhibitions. skylights within the high ceilings introduce northern and north-western daylight,
creating an optimal environment to display artworks with natural illumination and minimal solar gain.
aerial view of the entry plaza at night
perimeter exhibition spaces will contain state-of-the-art climate controls. artificial lighting runs along tracks within ceiling recesses
and a 5 meter grid along the floor integrates security, data and power. with 70 percent of the structure formed from a roof,
the building is insulated almost twice more than code requires, reducing the presence and necessary maintenance with only
10 percent overall glazing.
scheduled to open in 2013, the venue will represent the country in the ‘beyond the building’ basel art international tour.
The architectural design concept for The National Art Museum of China by UnStudio reminds the artifact of ancient Chinese “stone drums”. Historically, the Stone Drum bears inscriptions that represent precious piece of the fragmentary puzzle of the Chinese script. This special form of the museum highlights the identity of the country, its spirit and essence. Moreover, the design concept is based on the duplicities that complement each other: day and night, inside and outside, fast and slow, dao or tao, individual and collective.
The main aim of this design concept is to give diversified and visible spaces for pieces of art. Also, the role of light is extremely important in the design of this building. The edifice is constructed in such a way that gives more opportunities for artists and curators in displaying their works and showing their ideas. Designers of the museum creating their work did not forget about the visitors. So, internally it is organized in such a manner that gives visitor a possibility to explore the museum by different paths around thematic consistencies of art.
Museum is greatly involved in urban context and provides the strong cultural presence for the area.
Museum Lighting: National Museum Of China – Art and culture iGuzzini
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About the project
One of the most ambitious project for the museum lighting made by iGuzzini is certainly the National Museum of China, completed in 1959 as one of ten important public buildings in Tiananmen Square, in direct proximity to the Forbidden City, the museum is still a milestone in the history of modern Chinese architecture.
The conversion and extension of the Chinese National Museum combines the former Chinese History Museum with the Chinese Revolutionary Museum. Outline plans were invited from ten international architectural firms and the project was awarded to Gerkan, Marg & Partners (gmp) for its submission, together with Beijing’s CABR, ahead of Foster & Partners, Kohn Pedersen Fox, OMA & Herzog & de Meuron.
The original GMP submission envisaged gutting the existing museum. The aim was to join the northern and southern wings in a single complex, by removing the central structure. The 260 metre long hall acts as its central access area. It widens to embrace the existing central entrance which opens onto Tiananmen Square. The ‘forum’ thus created acts as an atrium and multi-functional events area, with all services for the public, that is to say, cafes and tea shops, book shops and souvenir stores, ticket offices and toilets.
The museum lighting for the coffered roof extending along the entire forum and in the central Hall was designed by the lighting design office conceptlicht. A key feature of the concept is a special luminaire, developed by conceptlicht and produced by iGuzzini, which creates a welcoming atmosphere throughout the building.
This project required a customized solution to conceal the lighting source into the coffers. The project utilized down light optics with both traditional and LED sources.
Studio Pei-Zhu, a Beijing-based firm, has designed a museum that will house the work of Yue Minjun, a Chinese contemporary artist known for his repetitive images of large, smiling figures.
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“While the devastating Sichuan earthquake in May left a large portion of Western China in ruins, signs are emerging that some notable building projects in the area are pushing forward. One of these projects is the Art Museum of Yue Minjun, designed by Beijing-based Studio Pei-Zhu, a 2007 Design Vanguard winner.
Located near the Qingcheng Mountains, and adjacent to the Shimeng River in Sichuan Province, the 10,700-square-foot museum will house the work of Yue Minjun, a Chinese contemporary artist known for his repetitive images of large, smiling figures. It will be one of 10 new museums on the same site, each dedicated to the work of an influential Chinese artist. Zhang Xiaogang and Wang Guangyi are among the other artists to be showcased. The complex, which is being developed by the local government of Dujingyuan, is the brainchild of Lu Peng, an art professor at the China Central Academy of Fine Art.
Images courtesy Studio Pei-Zhu
The Yue Minjun museum will contain exhibition space and a small artist’s studio. According to Pei Zhu, one of the firm’s principals, a river rock that he picked up one day inspired the building’s form—a large, oblong sphere. “Everything is based on the natural stone, which has a very strong relationship between the creek and the mountain and nature,” explains Zhu.
Image courtesy Studio Pei-Zhu
On the exterior, curvilinear walls will be clad in highly polished zinc, a soft metal that blends in with the natural surroundings while also giving the building a futuristic look. “Normally, architects will use a local material and vernacular language,” says Zhu. “We believe we needed to make something both futuristic and very natural.” It’s a striking departure from another recent project designed by the firm for the 2008 Summer Olympics: Digital Beijing, a control center whose façade resembles computer circuitry.
Image courtesy Studio Pei-Zhu
Work is already underway on the art museum. Site preparation began earlier this year, and the building should be completed by early 2009. Zhu says the earthquake delayed the project a mere three months, at most. “The developer still really wants to push this project [forward],” he says, “and we think that this will still benefit the society and the city.”
CAFA Art Museum, located at the northeast corner of campus CAFA (China Central Academy of Fine Arts), is set from curvilinear walls covered with traditional Chinese slate.
The walls are separated at the ends to which natural light enters the building through skylights and large windows.
From the main entrance, located in the center of the building, access to a large atrium in height with long straight ramps that ascend gradually to the various floors of the museum. Natural light spreads throughout the museum through the membranes of fiberglass skylights.
The ground floor can accommodate large installations that can be seen from the different levels of the ramp. The permanent collection, focusing on traditional Chinese art, is located on the first floor galleries, temporary exhibitions in the second and third floors.
Large open spaces with natural light, curvilinear walls, allow many different kinds of contemporary art installations. The exhibition space on the third floor is open to the double volume of the second floor.
There are four floors above ground, two below ground. The library and cafeteria are located in the main space on the ground floor. Basement 1 includes a reading room, a study room and a conference room. 2 In the basement offices are located in conservation of paintings and calligraphy, including the restoration room, laboratory and warehouse of temporary and permanent collections. Technical equipment protected stairways and elevators are located in rectangular volumes, covered with marble.
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Ningbo Historic Museum / Wang Shu, Amateur Architecture Studio
In Iwan Baan‘s website, we found one of the latest works he photographed, the Ningbo Historic Museum designed by Wang Shu, Amateur Architecture Studio.
An amazing stone work, more pictures after the break:
Organized by the Chengdu Ministry of Culture and the Chengdu Culture and Tourism Development Group, the Competition for the Chinese MoMA was part of an initiative for creating a double ring of public facilities around the Tianfu Square in Chengdu. The first ring is supposed to consist of cultural facilities. The second and larger one is planned for highrises.
Designed by Studio Ramoprimo, the winning entry proposes a dialogue with the surrounding, drawing physical references from the existing urban and architectural condition. The basic idea is to enlarge the existing public space of Tianfu Square and make it “climbing” on the roof of the new building. The new museum is a group of volumes creating a small cultural city.
Two main axis cut the site area defining a comfortable pedestrian island where people can walk away from cars. The new urban situation is also establishing new visual and physical connections between existing parts of the city. People can pass through the plot and easily come from the Tianfu square and reach the surrounding museums. The four museum blocks create an arising slope on which people can walk, seat, play, have a rest, enjoy the view to the central square like in a open public theater. The whole shape according the function is rising step by step from the earth to the sky, while the ending corner of the building replaces the original position of the ancient and forgotten city wall.
The Museum Of Contemporary Art & Planning Exhibition proposal is located at Futian District, Shenzhen’s most important central region for administration, business and culture. The building functions as part of Shenzhen’s civic centre, where the City Library, Opera House, Central Bookstore, Youth Activity Hall (YAH) and other civic building have been built. The international competition held in 2007 required The Museum Of Contemporary Art & Planning Exhibition (MOCAPE) to include two independent and yet inter-connected parts: The museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and Planning Exhibition (PE). Designed by Rome-based LABORATORIO 543, the proposal is a 90.000 square meter structure that aims to enhance the service of Shenzhen’s new civic center.
The building is divided into two parts: the first rests on the ground and the other is suspended on the upper level. These undulating segments have multiple connection points, ensuring the overall stability of the structure and facilitating communication between different programs. The structural frame, which is required to support the suspended level, can be compared to a cantilever. Located at ground level, the main entrance belongs to a composition of
Studio Pei-Zhu, a Beijing-based firm, has designed a museum that will house the work of Yue Minjun, a Chinese contemporary artist known for his repetitive images of large, smiling figures.
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“While the devastating Sichuan earthquake in May left a large portion of Western China in ruins, signs are emerging that some notable building projects in the area are pushing forward. One of these projects is the Art Museum of Yue Minjun, designed by Beijing-based Studio Pei-Zhu, a 2007 Design Vanguard winner.
Located near the Qingcheng Mountains, and adjacent to the Shimeng River in Sichuan Province, the 10,700-square-foot museum will house the work of Yue Minjun, a Chinese contemporary artist known for his repetitive images of large, smiling figures. It will be one of 10 new museums on the same site, each dedicated to the work of an influential Chinese artist. Zhang Xiaogang and Wang Guangyi are among the other artists to be showcased. The complex, which is being developed by the local government of Dujingyuan, is the brainchild of Lu Peng, an art professor at the China Central Academy of Fine Art.
Images courtesy Studio Pei-Zhu
The Yue Minjun museum will contain exhibition space and a small artist’s studio. According to Pei Zhu, one of the firm’s principals, a river rock that he picked up one day inspired the building’s form—a large, oblong sphere. “Everything is based on the natural stone, which has a very strong relationship between the creek and the mountain and nature,” explains Zhu.
Beijing To Build “World’s Largest Art Museum”: What’ll They Fill It With?
Source:Jing Daily
Date: 2011-03-18
Size:
This week, as part of its 12th five-year plan, Beijing announced a new phase for the National Art Museum of China, a massive, glass-covered structure that is being touted as “the world’s largest art gallery.” Currently in the design process, the new National Art Museum will be located next to the current museum and near the Beijing National Stadium, with construction expected to begin next spring.
Chinese Contemporary Art Getting Scarcer; Can Auctions Be Museums’ Only Source For Top Art?
Preliminary design for the National Art Museum of China new phase
This week, as part of its 12th five-year plan, Beijing announced a new phase for the National Art Museum of China, a massive, glass-covered structure that is being touted as “the world’s largest art gallery.” Currently in the design process, the new National Art Museum will be located next to the current museum and near the Beijing National Stadium, with construction expected to begin next spring. While the new National Art Museum sounds like another example of the Chinese government building a mammoth public venue for the sake of getting another “world’s largest” title under its belt, as museum director Fan Di’an told delegates at the recent National People’s Congress, China’s public art facilities haven’t lived up to the promise of the country’s burgeoning interest in the arts.
As Fan pointed out last week, the current National Art Museum — which was built in 1963 in Beijing’s Dongcheng district — is a meager 8,300 square meters in size. Compare that to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, at 58,529 square meters, and the Louvre, which boasts over 60,000 square meters of exhibition space. Since attendance became free at the National Art Museum on March 2, according to Fan Di’an, it has clocked nearly 6,000 visitors at peak times, “nearly hitting capacity,” according to Xinhua. Clearly, the current digs are inadequate, certainly for a city that most consider to be the cultural heart of China. But how will director Fan Di’an fill the 130,000 total square meters of exhibition space he’ll have when the new phase is complete?
One clue comes from an interview Fan Di’an recently gave at the “Art Power” awards in Beijing, where he was named “Best Museum Administrator.” Speaking to Sina, Fan said that the Chinese contemporary art world is becoming stronger as more artists become globally recognized, more curators have the ability to promote Chinese art, and more (and better) museums are built across the country. Fan’s interest in contemporary art and the priority he places on public arts education have made him something of a star in the Chinese art world, a break from the stereotype of the stodgy apparatchik or stuffy administrator. Fan also counts many first-generation Chinese contemporary artists as close friends, such as his former Central Academy of Fine Arts classmate Xu Bing. With the ample room he will be afforded with the new National Art Museum, expect to see Fan display an impressive array of contemporary Chinese works alongside his other interests, which include everything from 1950s Chinese prints to artifacts from Dunhuang in Xinjiang province.
With so much room to fill, not just in Beijing but in new provincial art museums throughout mainland China, it won’t be surprising if we see museum and gallery representatives showing up at the upcoming Sotheby’s spring auctions in Hong Kong, where works by some of China’s top artists will be on the block. Directors like Fan Di’an would almost certainly love to get some pieces from the Ullens collection on the walls and prevent them from leaving the country once and for all. Now that new Chinese private collectors are getting more involved with the auction market and works by blue-chip Chinese artists are getting scarcer and scarcer, it’s no surprise that excitement is growing in China for the upcoming spring auction season.
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New Abstract Paintings: The Cosmos suite (2012)
Cosmos. Oil on canvas 2012 by Vincent Johnson
Cosmos Red Yellow Green. Oil on canvas 2012 by Vincent Johnson
Green God. Oil on canvas 2012 by Vincent Johnson
This new painting series is part of my ongoing exploration of painting materials and techniques from the history of painting. The works combine knowledge of painting practices of both abstract and representation paintings. The works concern themselves purely with the visual power that paintings can do through the manipulation of paint. Some of the underpaintings are allowed to dry for months; some of those are built dark to light, others light to dark. None are made in a single setting. Most are worked and reworked using studio materials. Each new series takes a different approach to the painted surface from how the paint is applied, to varying the painting mediums. This suite concerns itself with the layering of paint by building up the surface and altering and reworking the wet paint with studio tools.
Two larger paintings will be completed and photographed on Sunday, July 15, 2012 and posted here.
Vincent Johnson is an artist and writer in Los Angeles
Vincent Johnson’s Nine Grayscale Paintings – installation shot – 2
Vincent Johnson’s Nine Grayscale Paintings – studio shot – 1 (Silver hand)
Vincent Johnson – in my studio working on my Nine Grayscale Paintings
Vincent Johnson’s Nine Grayscale Paintings – first stage of grayscale painting
Los Angeles based artist and writer Vincent Johnson
Vincent Johnson received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California 1997 and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Painting 1986. He started out as a student in Pratt’s painting department. He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was nominated for the Baum: An Emerging American Photographer’s Award in 2004 and for the New Museum of Contemporary Arts Aldrich Art Award in 2007 and for the Art Matters grant in 2008, and in 2009 nominated for Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists project artist. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Slant and many other publications. His photographic works were most recently shown in the inaugural Pulse Fair Los Angeles. His most recent paintings were shown at the Beacon Arts Center in Los Angeles.
Although everyone’s favorite dissident Ai Weiwei steals most of the headlines, China is home to an explosive contemporary art scene. Though as diverse as its billion-strong population, contemporary Chinese artists often grapple with convergence and upheaval, exploring the intersection of tradition and technology, Communism and Capitalism, and Eastern and Western styles. Here are the ten most popular on Artsy.
10. Zhu Jinshi: Influenced by German Expressionism (and a co-founder of the avant-garde Stars group along with Ai), Zhu produces abstract paintings whose surfaces are built up with thick, near-sculptural layers of oil paint.
9. Zhang Xiaogang: Best known for his “Bloodlines: The Big Family” series of the 1990s, Zhang draws on memory to paint portraits that fuse his personal history with the legacy of the Cultural Revolution.
8. Li Shan: A founding member of Political Pop, Li is best known for his Warholian portraits of Chairman Mao from the 1990s, as well as his more recent “biological art”—semi-abstract images of plants and animals.
7. Yang Fudong: A pioneering filmmaker known for his dreamy, ambiguous films, Yang also photographs staged tableaux that carry his signature surrealistic aesthetic.
6. Mao Yan: In his luminous, soft-toned oil portraits, Mao uses as few brushstrokes as possible in an effort to capture an essence rather than likeness. “Excessive attention to representation could only lead to narrow-mindedness,” he has said.
5. Xu Zhen: No stranger to controversy, Xu is notorious for The Starving of Sudan, a live tableau he constructed in a gallery that featured a live African toddler and a mechanized vulture. In more recent works he has explored Japanese BDSM culture.
4. Yue Minjun: Influenced early on by Surrealism, Yue is best known for inserting himself into canonical works from art history via grotesquely grinning, vibrantly exaggerated self-portraits.
3. Liu Xiaodong: Strongly influenced by Lucien Freud, Liu paints his intimate portraits spontaneously from snapshots of friends, family, and everyday life.
2. Zhang Huan: Perhaps China’s best-known conceptual artist, Zhang rose to prominence in the 1990s with his performances involving the masochistic treatment of his naked body. His works in sculpture and other mediums further explore his interest in the human form.
1. Zeng Fanzhi: Inspired by German Expressionism, world-renowned painter Zeng explores alienation and isolation through his references to historical figures and dark aspects of humanity (as in his famous “Meat” series), often rendered in grotesque exaggeration.
Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road London SE1 8XX, 27 Sep 2012
Art of Change
Art of Change
Review by Rebecca Newell
Since Ai Wei Wei’s detainment in 2011, the international arts community has been looking for a way to understand better the spirit of dissent and antagonistic non-traditionalism that seems to characterise contemporary Chinese art. In an attempt to locate these strands in a shifting socio-political climate, the Hayward Gallery and the Southbank Centre, ever keen to engage with transience and change in their artistic programme (I’m thinking here of the thematic festivals that form the backbone of the Centre’s annual offering), have opened the first major exhibition to focus solely on contemporary performance and installation art from China.
Work from nine contemporary artists active in the last two decades is presented together, to consider themes of process and on-going transformation in both a site-specific and general way. Site-specificity plays out in works that alter in appearance over time, or are interactive, volatile and ephemeral: the first work to confront the viewer is Xu Zhen’s ‘Untitled’ (2007), a selection of fitness machines that are operated by the viewer via an exertion-free remote control. Sun Yuan & Peng Yu’s leaning tower of human fat – ‘Civilisation Pillar’ (2001) – is constructed from siphoned-off fat, extracted during liposuction treatments. Liang Shaohi’s beautifully woven web constructions are co-authored by silk worms. Materially speaking, the space is unsound: a conservator’s nightmare.
But the work is profound and says something more general: vanity, and the nature and passage of time are not small artistic preoccupations. In fact, they are amongst the most trumpeted of the more familiar Western art-historical themes. Elsewhere, the works confront notions of wakefulness and sleep, the creative process and the participatory role of the art viewer. Even Zhen’s redundant gym equipment seems to address ‘wei wu wei’, or ‘action without action’, a fundamental principle in proverbial Chinese discourse, but it could easily be seen as commentary on the something-for-nothing culture we hear so much about.
Of the nine presented, most of the artists here are looking for new ways to express themselves as well as reconfigure materials and themes. It is obviously not irrelevant that China is a country undergoing dramatic transformation, and artists, as others, have been deeply affected by such change. The mid-1980s and 1990s brought with it a State rejection of much experimental art, and many of the avant-garde set that had been at the helm of a previously more open and progressive Chinese art scene left the country. For the Chinese contemporary artist that remained, it mattered less what the work looked like in the end, and more if and how they might get to finish a project. MadeIn Company, a creative corporation established by Xu Zhen, is a collective of artists, technicians and administrators that still operates in this way, embracing process and project over finish and presentation. The corporation is represented in the Hayward show by several on-going artworks. In ‘Revolution Castings’ (2012) concrete ‘memorials’ are cast on site and include contributions by visitors to the gallery. The on-going creation of an artwork is then the whole creative output, meaning the work deftly sidesteps the traditional mechanisms of both critique and the art market.
A middle space of three sleeping performers, for works entitled ‘Sleeping’ ‘In Between’ and ‘Patience’ (2004/2012), surprises. Each scenario involves interaction between the body, and white shelving fixed to the gallery walls. The artist, Yingmei Duan, explains that her concepts explore the fleeting visions experienced in the gap between wake and sleep, and that ‘sleep brings me many of my creative ideas’. The work seems to explore another threshold: that between socio-cultural acceptance and marginalisation. It could perhaps also be applied to the margin between comfort and discomfort in the viewer as they encounter a dreamscape slap bang in the middle of the contemporary gallery space.
The best work in the exhibition is Xu Zhen’s illusory ‘In Just a Blink of an Eye’ (2005/2012), the striking image of which is used for press and publicity materials produced by the Southbank for the show. In it, a person, dressed in what can be described as contemporary urban attire (all parka, tracksuit and canvas high-tops), appears suspended in mid-fall, no strings, no wires, no anything. Faced with this odd and transfixing work, social vanities and failings resound, and though they are often seen in a Western framework, they are here posed as an Eastern question. ‘The Starving of Sudan’ (2008), nearby, poses altogether different, and serious, questions about moral decline, human exploitation and the limits of voyeurism in the art gallery.
An interactive digital archive forms an axis for this exhibition, available for browsing or for in-depth study. Structured around a sequence of some 130 key events, exhibitions and performances, it aims to anchor contemporary Chinese art in a sweep of other cultural development and a broader context of artistic production. If a major aim of the curators of this show is to reposition such production in a framework that is understandable, rather than unintelligibly rooted in something ‘other’, for Western gallery goers, it does put the viewer back in control. As Xu Zhen points out, ‘people have to decide where they stand’.
It happened a long time ago, so we may have forgotten. The United States was initially cool towards France’s gift of the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of friendship between the two countries. In time, of course, “Miss Liberty” would become one of the icons of the American dream, the veritable symbol of that country of “all possibilities”, including free speech. Today, 125 years later, would China accept the gift of a Statue of Liberty after it destroyed the Tiananmen Statue of Democracy? A Chinese artist, newly released from prison, has offered his country two. As Brice Pedroletti reports from Beijing…
At the foot of a public housing building in the northern suburbs of Beijing, a sign announces the “Garden of Steel Roses”. To enter, you must squeeze between the fence and the wall of the building to reach a small space in front of a flat on the ground floor. Two giant busts stand on their bases. The first is of Lin Zhao. In the late 1950s, Lin protested in writing against the abuses of the anti-rights campaign, submitting a petition to the Great Helmsman himself in support of Peng Dehuai. (Peng, a plain-spoken Marshall of the People’s Liberation Army, had been imprisoned for criticizing the Great Leap Forward.) Lin Zhao’s protest earned the young woman a 20-year prison sentence in October 1960. On April 29, 1968, at the age 36, she was executed and her body was never found. The second bust is that of another young woman, Zhang Zhixin, executed in 1975 at the age of 40, another denouncer of Maoism. Both fervent Communists, the two women persisted in their criticism of Mao from their prison cells and to their last moments.
The painter Yan Zhengxue, 66, created this strange sculpture garden upon his own release from prison in late 2009. He sculpted, in his tiny apartment and in secret, these two statues of liberty based on photographs and testimonials from people who had known the women. The work was both therapy and tribute, Yan Zhengxue says. “I told myself that I was lucky to have survived. They were not,” he explains, sitting in his small living room, the walls covered with paintings in black ink. In 2006, Yan Zhengxue was sentenced to three years in prison for subversion. His crime: helping peasants of his native region, Zhejiang, near Taizhou, defend their land rights. It was not the first time that Yan had been locked up. To be exact, it was the 13th. In 1995, he had been sentenced to three years in a re-education camp for launching a lawsuit against Public Safety, which he turned into “performance art”. At the time, Yan Zhengxue was head of Yuanmingyuan Village, Beijing’s first artists’ community, which the authorities wanted to evacuate. The case caused an uproar in the Chinese media with cultural and artistic figures signing petitions in his support. Deported to the far north, Yan was tortured with electric prods by prison guards and seriously injured.
When he was arrested again in 2006, he warned the police that he would rather commit suicide than return to prison. Suicide would be “my final art performance,” he said, but the provincial authorities were unmoved. From his cell, Yan Zhengxue began writing the story of his life. A cell mate, a common criminal, helped smuggle out the manuscripts, tiny rolls of paper inserted into soap. “At the time, I thought that both the actions I had taken to defend human rights throughout my life and my artistic activity had come to an end. The curtain had fallen. The democracy movement in China was being torn apart by its differences. It was the war between the ‘sheep’ – moderates who advocated cooperation with the authoritiesand the ‘goats’ – advocates of a more active defence of rights, like the lawyer Gao Zhisheng, and the activists Guo Feixiong and Hu Jia (all imprisoned for their commitment to defending human rights). I considered myself as part of the ‘goat’ camp.”
Having completed his autobiography, “The (Art) Performance is Over”, Yan tried to put his suicide plan into action but failed. In any case, “Given my condition, doctors said that I had three months to live,” he says. The book manages to make its way to Hong Kong and is published by Sibixiang Editions. Upon Yan’s release in 2009, his publisher encourages him to do a project on Lin Zhao. Yan Zhengxue begins work on the sculptures of the two women who were less fortunate than himself. The creation of the statues is phantasmagoric. In January 2010, the convalescent painter goes to work in a small room of his apartment in Beijing. When the police make their rounds, Yan’s wife, also an artist, does calligraphy in the doorway to the room. “They suspected that I was creating something, but they didn’t know what or where,” says Yan Zhengxue. “They never imagined that such large statues could be hidden in a small room.” The moulds are taken in secret to a foundry in Hebei. The statues are set in Yan’s garden, as the district authorities forbid their transport for exhibition. The authorities regularly ask Yann to put the statues inside his apartment, but he holds firm. “I said that my apartment was too small. Then they asked me to put bed-sheets over them. I said that it would be disrespectful. Then they demanded clear plastic. I had to accept,” he says. On April 29, the anniversary of the death of Lin Zhao, visitors, on hand to honour her, tear off the plastic covers.
Since then, many people regularly visit the Garden of Steel Roses, including activists and figures of the pro-democracy movement. Given the heightened surveillance in this season of the Nobel Prize ceremony, the commemoration of Lin Zhao’s birthday on December 12 was scheduled for three days earlier. But Yan Zhengxue is picked up at dawn by agents, and carried around all day in their car. His dozen guests are not worried. For Lin Zhao has become an icon of the democracy movement, saved from the dustbin of history by the director Hu Jie’s 2004 documentary film, “Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul” wherein were revealed the secret letters, written in Lin’s own blood, to the man she loved.
The case of Zhang Zhixin, another executed young woman, has been made part of official propaganda. The Chinese government has “turned her into a martyr: through her example we repudiate the Cultural Revolution and non-Maoism” writes the historian Youqin Wang, a specialist in the Cultural Revolution at the University of Chicago. Yan Zhengxue’s project to donate the two statues of the young women to their alma maters, Peking University and Renmin University, is blocked, despite broad support within the two prestigious institutions. For the artist, the ghost of Maoism acts like a black sun. “The black sun absorbs the light. That’s what prevents the Chinese from getting democracy,” he says. A black sun sculpture hangs on the wall next to the statues. Yan also puts black suns in his paintings.
In 1965, while still an art student, Yan Zhengxue, quickly perceived the darkening atmosphere as the Cultural Revolution began. “We only had the right to paint cadavers,” he recalls. “Posing models was denounced as bourgeois.” The young man took to his heels, wandering to the far reaches of western China. He found himself in Xinjiang, in a collective farm where he began painting nature and animals. Noticing Yan’s talent, the director of the farm asks him to make a few portraits of Mao. As a reward, the painter is allowed to bring out his girlfriend and marry her. But the Cultural Revolution soon arrives as well. In 1968, the couple is in Lanzhou, in nearby Gansu. Yan receives the order to paint an eight-meter-tall portrait of Mao on the facade of the city’s civil aviation office. City managers have fled to this office, trying to escape the harassment of the Red Guards
Some of them criticize the profile of the great leader that Yan Zhengxue, perched on his scaffold, has begun to paint. An argument breaks out. The painter explains that he cannot start over, as he would have to cover Mao’s face with white paint. At this point, one of the Guards notices a cross that Yan has drawn on his drawing as a guide for reproducing it to scale. Yan Zhengxue is accused of being contra-revolutionary and arrested. He thinks it is a joke, but the flood of prisoners suggests otherwise. A peasant who carried a bust of Mao on a yoke. A Hong Kong man accused of homosexuality. A child who made a paper bird from a picture of Mao. Yan and the child escape summary execution. The interrogating officer confirms Yan’s story and orders his release. The artist later learns that a five-percent quota of executions had been set for the city. In this same year, 1965, Lin Zhao, who is languishing in a prison in Shanghai, is killed by a bullet in the head.
“And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?” In the contemporary art lexicon, most would seem to like to ask this question of the multi-millionaire Zeng Fanzhi, an artist whose career began in 80s China…
“And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?” In the contemporary art lexicon, most would seem to like to ask this question of the multi-millionaire Zeng Fanzhi, an artist whose career began in China in the 1980s with unsettling and often politically charged paintings. In Britain, we have a tendency to distrust any artist who has had a lucrative career (we are, after all, the founders of the build-them-up-to-knock-them-down school), and after a certain point editors and journalists tend to prefer to discuss an artist’s material wealth and lifestyle, rather than their creative output. However, it would be grossly unfair to take such a tawdry view of Zeng, whose current exhibition at Gagosian Britannia Street – his first on these shores – deals with mortality, sacrifice and reflection, proving beyond a doubt that he is not an artist in danger of selling his soul. Taking as its source material the story of Albrecht Dürer’s brother sacrificing his own artistic ambitions to allow Albrecht to go to school and learn to paint (the hard physical toil he undertook causing him to suffer arthritis in his hands), the show exhibits huge, fascinatingly detailed homages to Dürer – hands locked in prayer, an old man in deep contemplative meditation – and endlessly complex spider-like scenes of dense woodland, through which distant glimmers of light shine. AnOther took some time to talk to the strikingly composed, modest and self-effacing artist to find out why, despite his well-documented wealth, it is a simple, Buddhist-like spiritual communication he seeks to have with the world through his art production.
What concerns have carried through your career – what has remained the same and what is fundamentally different now? I think what remains unchanged is my pursuit of beauty.
What is your definition of beauty? I think everyone has their own definition of beauty, but as far as I’m concerned beauty means staying true to what touches you, whatever moves you and whatever brings up your feelings and emotions – this is my definition of beauty. Also, beauty is not just about being beautiful, it is about being everlasting. I experience a forward mobility of my inner mind and my inner state while I’m making these paintings.
There is an intense complexity of line in these works, are you fascinated by the minutiae of the world?
I am always very fascinated by delicate and micro-aspects of the world, and usually when I discover the beauty of these aspects I will amplify and multiply the effects of what I see into the paintings. This is why I make such huge paintings. I want to exaggerate and underscore the beauty of these delicacies and these minor aspects. I believe that many artists are moved by the micro-aspects of the world and this is what inspires them.
“As far as I’m concerned, beauty means staying true to what touches you, whatever moves you and whatever brings up your feelings and emotions…”
Is there any specific thing from your youth you can remember that inspired you to paint? I think I was influenced and inspired by many aspects but I couldn’t name a specific one. It was through a gradual process that I found myself gifted in art and painting. When I was young, life was so tough that it was difficult to think about one’s future. At the time, the most important thing was whether we could make ends meet and feed ourselves. I think before my 20s the most important thing to me was whether I could feed myself. Now, living in such a comfortable environment, I can, of course, discuss art, but it is still very difficult to do so – it is very difficult for me to talk about art. I’m better at communication with people and the world with my artwork than I am with language.
The lines in these works make me think of the lines on the palm, do you believe in predestination? I believe more and more in the notion of fate and how what we call chance plays a role in that. I have begun to believe that there is a predestined life for everyone, and sometimes I feel like it is by fate that I was guided in a certain direction, instead of me choosing one direction initially and of my own volition. I believe that sometimes even though I make a plan there may be other changes that will overtake the plan completely – sometimes a very minor aspect can change the whole plan.
What is the most important thing for you in terms of your legacy? Do you think in terms of leaving a legacy as an artist? Admittedly, all artists want their work to be immortal and everlasting, and I hope that my work can be appreciated when I’m deceased. I hope that when people look at my work they can find something new, and they can find something they wanted to see within the paintings; the things they are looking for. However, I think in terms of the word legacy, I would say it is important to leave a spiritual legacy to the world instead of a materialistic one.
How has fame affected you, and have the projections of ‘the most important artist in the world’ and so on made it more difficult to create art? No. I am secluded from the world when I go to my workshop in Bejing, and as soon as I close the door and am in the workshop on my own, I feel secluded and am able to focus on my creation. If you ever come to Bejing and my workshop and have a chance to see how my life is lived, you will notice such a situation.
Zeng Fanzhi is at Gagosian, Britannia Street, until January 19 2013.
Text by John-Paul Pryor
John-Paul Pryor is European Editor at Flaunt Magazine, Editor-at-large at Port Magazine and Editor, Contributing Art Editor to AnOther Magazine and Art Director at Topman Generation. He writes for Flaunt, Dazed & Confused, Port,Tank, AnOther, Nowness and directs fashion shoots for Topman Generation. His debut novel Spectacles is out now.
Zeng Fanzhi’s aesthetic restlessness epitomizes the evolution of Chinese contemporary art in the post-1989 era, grappling with local history and tradition in the face of external influence and accelerated change. Since the beginning of his career, he has presented a succession of powerfully introspective subjects, from the haunting Hospital paintings to the visceral Meat paintings that juxtapose human subjects with butchered flesh; from the enigmatic Mask paintings to candid and startling close-up portraits; from intimate, existential still-lifes to depictions of pivotal Western cultural figures such as Francis Bacon, whose psychic portraits altered the status of the human figure in twentieth century art. Charged with an underlying psychological tension, Zeng’s oeuvre reveals the place of the unconscious and the aberrant in the construction of human experience.
For the past decade, landscape has been a central focus of Zeng’s art. In highly tactile scenes, the details of representation often overlap seamlessly with qualities of abstraction, as in certain traditional Chinese aesthetic objects. Zeng’s fictitious place is at once luminous and bleak, where unearthly bursts of vivid color are trapped in snaking brambles that obstruct yet hold the gaze.
The artist says: “They are not real landscapes. They are rather about an experience of miao wu [marvellous revelation]. Miao wu constitutes a restless journey of discovery.”
November 29th, 2012 – January 19th, 2013
6-24 Britannia Street
London WC1X 9JD
UK
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ARTIST ZHANG HUAN
NEW YORK TIMES
A Hallucinatory Blaze, via Tibetan Ritual
Zhang Huan’s Colorful Skull Paintings at the Pace Gallery
Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery
The Poppy Route: The artist Zhang Huan paints vibrant skulls in a new solo show at Pace Gallery.
By BARBARA POLLACK
Published: September 12, 2013
Damien Hirst once encrusted a skull with diamonds, and Takashi Murakami has turned out canvases with cartoon versions of skulls. But when the artist Zhang Huan addresses similar iconography, he creates paintings in a style all their own. Sitting in his Shanghai studio one day recently amid dozens of Tibetan death masks, he was busy preparing for the opening on Friday of “Poppy Fields,” an exhibition of new works at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea.
“½ (Meat + Text),” a chromogenic color print from 1998.
“Poppy Fields” is a fresh direction for an artist whose studio is much like a factory, with over 100 assistants churning out monumental copper sculptures of Buddhas, paintings made of ash collected at temples, doors carved with scenes from the Cultural Revolution, stainless-steel pandas, stuffed cows and horses and, on one occasion, a version of a Handel opera. His notion is that he can produce anything he imagines without regard for consistency.
“Unlike Western masters, who will stick with one style their entire life until they reach maturity, I am in a constant state of transformation,” said Mr. Zhang, interviewed via Skype with the aid of a translator. “I am constantly abandoning old things for new ones, but there is always a thread behind these changes, and that is my DNA.”
His latest transformation may be the biggest one to date: turning himself into an oil painter with a keen sense of color after a career that has so far been mostly black, white and gray. The new “Poppy Field” works are a striking departure, for example, from those shown in a retrospective at Asia Society in 2007, two years after he moved back to China after almost a decade in New York.
In the new paintings, the canvas’s surface is covered with hundreds of skulls modeled after Tibetan masks that look like grinning faces with bulging eyes and Cheshire cat smiles. From a distance, the canvases blur into misty fields of color, in white, pink and blue in one instance, and black, red and gold in another. Yet up close, you can see each face in the crowd, as if zooming into a packed stadium from outer space. “The paintings represent the hallucination of happiness and the hallucination of fear and loneliness in this life as well as the hallucination of happiness in the next life,” Mr. Zhang said.
Asked about his bright hues, he said, “If there’s no color in your hallucination, it won’t be heaven. It would be hell.”
Arne Glimcher, Pace’s founder, recalls a conversation two years ago in which Mr. Zhang told him that he was working on oil paintings. “I thought it was such a conventional medium for him,” he said. “But he told me, ‘I will make oil paintings that look different from any other oil paintings.’ ”
It was nearly as big a surprise as when Mr. Glimcher first visited the artist’s Shanghai studio in 2006. Mr. Zhang was primarily known then for his visceral performances of the late 1990s, first in the bohemian enclave of Beijing East Village and later, in museums around the United States. (One of his better-known works required him to sit motionless in a public latrine for 10 hours, covered in fish oil and honey, as flies gathered on his body.)
Mr. Glimcher was astounded to discover the scale of Mr. Zhang’s production line in a studio teeming with sculptures, paintings and installations. This time around, he was equally surprised that the artist could pull off the new paintings with minimal support from his assistants.
According to the dealer, Mr. Zhang started each work by creating a computer drawing, planning out the placement of each mask. Given that approach, the paintings look remarkably spontaneous, as if they had evolved organically.
Buddhism and death rituals have been abiding subjects for Mr. Zhang, who was ordained as a Buddhist monk eight years ago. During the antireligious oppression of the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Zhang, born in 1965, remembers watching his grandmother go to the temple and burn incense before a statue of a Buddha. In his adulthood, he went regularly to temples; even after moving to New York in 1998, he studied every weekend with the venerated monk Sheng Yen at the Dharma Drum Mountain Center in Queens and later donated statues to the Chuang Yen Monastery, designed by I. M. Pei, in Kent, N.Y.
In her catalog essay for “Altered States,” the 2007 retrospective at Asia Society, Melissa Chiu, the museum’s director, wrote, “Zhang Huan’s works from the past 15 years reflect one artist’s search for an artistic voice, first in Beijing, then in New York, and finally in Shanghai.”
Mr. Zhang has placed “a progressive emphasis on Chinese sources with which he finds great inspiration in the shared memory of symbols, stories, and materials of his homeland,” she noted. Yet it is his embrace of Tibetan Buddhism, a rare choice in Chinese contemporary art, that distinguishes him from other artists.
In 2005, a trip to Tibet irrevocably altered Mr. Zhang’s thinking and his art making. “One day in Lhasa, I got up at 4 a.m. and went to the Jokhang Temple, the biggest one in Tibet, and I saw men and women already lining up for miles,” Mr. Zhang said. He said he was amazed by the sight of pilgrims crawling to the site in the middle of traffic, in a seeming clash between modernity and ancient tradition. “I have been to the most famous museums in the world, and I have never seen a sight as striking as this,” he said.
He also witnessed the Tibetan Sky burial, in which a monk eviscerates the human corpse, leaving the flesh as food for vultures and smashing the bones into a grainy dust. The process is supposed to liberate the spirit from the body for peaceful transport into the next life. “Most people, when they see this ceremony, think it is gross and they cannot bear to watch,” Mr. Zhang said. “But, when I watch the ceremony, I feel this hallucination of happiness, and I feel free.”
He promises that at his death, the ritual will constitute his last performance piece.
Asked whether Americans would understand his “Poppy Field” paintings, Mr. Zhang said: “If they are alive, they will love these works. But if they are dead, they will buy them.”
A version of this article appears in print on September 15, 2013, on page AR19 of the New York edition with the headline: A Hallucinatory Blaze, via Tibetan Ritual.
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12M2, 1994, documentation of a 40-minute performance. In the height of midsummer heat, the artist covered himself in honey and fish oil and sat unmoving in a public latrine in Beijing’s East Village, allowing swarms of flies to crawl all over his body.
TO RAISE THE WATER LEVEL IN A FISH POND, 1997, documentation of a performance, in which the artist and 40 participants stood in a pond to raise the water level by a meter.
FAMILY TREE, 2000, documentation of a performance staged in New York, in which three calligraphers wrote Chinese proverbs on the artist’s face over the course of a day.
ART ASIA PACIFIC
Outside China, few artists are as synonymous with the rise of contemporary Chinese art as Zhang Huan. With his career having taken him from Anyang in his native Henan province to Beijing, New York and Shanghai—transforming him from a pessimistic iconoclast in the early 1990s to a Newsweek cover boy in 2004—and his practice ranging from oil painting to performance, photography, sculpture, installation and, most recently, set design, it is difficult to pin down consistent themes in his work. Though his career began with visceral performances staged in self-exile from the predominant trends of China’s cultural institutions, his rise to fame coincided with commercial and geopolitical shifts that have softened the intensity of his approach.
Much of the writing about Zhang begins the narrative of his career with his involvement with the Beijing East Village artist community in the early 1990s, where he and a handful of other artists and poets collaborated on a short-lived flurry of challenging performances that have since become a storied chapter in China’s history of contemporary art. Yet Zhang’s beginnings as an artist had taken root before his arrival in the East Village. Born in 1965 into a family of workers, Zhang developed an early interest in the arts. He entered Henan University in 1984, where he was a classical enthusiast who identified with the romanticism of the 19th-century French painter Jean-François Millet, whose work depicts the life of peasant farmers; Zhang’s admiration perhaps stemmed from his own rural upbringing. His graduation piece was a painting entitled Red Cherries (1988), which portrayed a mother peacefully nursing her baby next to a bowl of cherries. After concluding his studies, he remained at Henan University, teaching for four years in the art department.
Zhang arrived in Beijing in 1991 for a two-year program of advanced training at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), one of the country’s most prestigious institutions, whose program he was attracted to for its emphasis on European classical tradition. When he moved into Dashanzhuang—the ramshackle collection of some 65 farmhouses bordering a garbage dump that came to be known as the East Village two years later—there was very little in the fabric of his life that might have predicted the violence and masochism of the performance work that was to establish his career. In interviews, Zhang has described seeing Tseng Kwong-Chi’s performance photographs—portraying the artist in famous sites all over the world—in the CAFA library, but that otherwise he had minimal contact with experimental art.
The genesis of Zhang’s career as a performance artist can be traced to Weeping Angels (1993),his unannounced contribution to a showcase of advanced works by the 13 students in his CAFA class at the National Art Museum of China, all of whom had contributed to the exhibition hall’s rental fee by pooling their meager finances. Five minutes before the exhibition’s opening, Zhang stood on a white sheet laid at the venue’s entrance, dressed only in his underwear, and poured a jar of red paint over his body. He then kneeled to pick up an assortment of plastic baby doll parts, which he reassembled into a complete child before heading into the exhibition hall where he tied the doll to a rope. Critics have interpreted the performance as a protest against various forms of state-inflicted violence, from forced abortions to the traumas of modern Chinese history. Zhang’s intervention caused the museum staff to shut down the exhibition (although it should be noted that submissions from two fellow artists, Ma Baozhong and Wang Shihua, had been rejected before the opening), and earned him the indignation of his student peers, most of whom had little interest in experimental art.
Just a few days later, Zhang met and posed for Rong Rong, the Fujianese photographer whose documentation of and eventual collaboration with Zhang during his early performances have played an essential and often uncredited role in cementing Zhang’s reputation. Like Zhang, Rong Rong had moved to Beijing from the provinces to pursue his craft, and in Dashanzhuang the burgeoning clique came to share a camaraderie born of the common squalor of their living conditions and a sense of exile, rejecting not only the mainstream but also Beijing’s Yuanmingyuan artist colony, where other artists had taken up residence.
The East Village cast of characters quickly came to include Ai Weiwei, who had just returned to Beijing in 1993 after living in the United States for just over a decade. At the time, Ai’s own practice was still emerging, yet to Zhang and the East Villagers, his interest in their work was immensely validating. Ai was admired for many reasons: for being the son of Ai Qing (1910–1996), the poet whose fame made him a household name in China; for his involvement with the Stars, widely considered the first avant-garde art collective in China; for his time in New York, where he hobnobbed with Chinese and American intelligentsia alike; and for his sage and contemplative poise. On June 2, 1994, Zhang performed 12m2, which remains perhaps the most iconic performance of his career. He would later describe it to Rong Rong as a tribute to Ai, who was made to clean filthy public toilets as a child during his father’s exile in the western Xinjiang autonomous region.
Zhang’s execution of 12m2 sparked off the string of performances for which the East Village is best known. The images that survive today are largely Rong Rong’s documentation of the event, a performance for only a handful of people that has since become legendary: naked and slathered in honey and fish oil, Zhang sat stationary in a festering public latrine during the height of the Beijing summer, unflinching as flies flocked to his body. “The worst was watching flies trying to get into his ears,” wrote Rong Rong, describing the stench and silence of the intervention. “All I could remember was the noise of the flies and the sound of the shutter lens. . . I felt that I couldn’t breathe, it felt like the end of life.”
Zhang’s own statement of the event was later published in Ai Weiwei’s agenda-setting avant-garde journal of contemporary art in China, Black Cover Book (1994).Edited with artist Xu Bing and curator Feng Boyi, the book featured Zhang’s performance among a selection of others. “The creative inspiration for my work comes from the most ordinary, easily overlooked aspects of life,” wrote Zhang. “For example, we eat, work, rest and shit everyday—the banal aspects of quotidian existence that allow us to observe the most essential aspects of humanity, and the conflicting relationships within our environment.”
Most art-historical accounts of the performance include Zhang’s emergence from the toilet, from where he walked into a nearby pond until fully submerged, the flies on his skin drowning on the water’s surface—a powerful and cathartic gesture of closure. Yet Zhang’s original statement detailing the specificsof the event does not include walking into the pond, and the water coda exists today only because Rong Rong’s gaze followed.
Although separated from 12m2 by only a few days, Zhang’s next performance, 65 KG (1994), articulated a shift from corporeal concerns to a more metaphysical confrontation with death. Naming the work after his own body weight, Zhang suspended himself with chains—naked and facing the floor—from the ceiling of an East Village home, where he had three doctors from a nearby hospital insert a plastic tube into one of his veins, allowing his blood to splatter and burn on a hot-plate on the ground below. In addition to the East Village artist community, a wider group of art critics and photojournalists had been invited. The visceral effect of the hour-long performance was overwhelming, the smell of burnt blood mingling with Zhang’s dripping sweat caused several audience members to pass out.
Zhang performed 65 KG the same weekend as part two of Ma Liuming’s Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch. Ma began by cooking fish in front of an audience, but instead of eating it, he attached a long plastic hose to his penis, then sucked and blew through the other end. Both of these nude performances shocked what was otherwise a small community of migrant workers. The fallout from the weekend was severe, and the police arrested Ma and forced others, including Rong Rong and Zhang, to abandon their modest homes and go into hiding. A brutal anonymous attack the day before the 45th anniversary of the state on October 1 put Zhang in hospital with head injuries, and when the shaken East Village community re-emerged months later, its members settled in various locations across the city. But although this marked the end of the two-year existence of the East Village in its Dashanzhuang incarnation, the community grew as word of its experimental practices reached similarly invested ears elsewhere in Beijing.
ZHANG HUAN performing Pilgrimage: Wind and Water for “Inside Out: New Chinese Art,” at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, 1998.
MY NEW YORK, 2002, documentation of a performance, in which the artist wore a suit of raw meat and walked the streets of New York, handing white doves to onlookers.
SEMELE, 2009, still from a rehearsal for Zhang’s production of the 1743 opera by Handel, depicting a scene in which sumo wrestlers compete and yet fall in love.
Despite the setback, Zhang continued his confrontation of death in his contribution to the group performance Original Sound (1995),a collaboration between 12 artists—including Ma Liuming, Rong Rong, Cang Xin, Wang Shihua, Curse, Song Dong and Zhu Fadong—in which each contributed an individual performance in an attempt to embody primordial sounds. Zhang emerged naked on the side of a slow highway in the middle of the night, laughing hysterically. Standing up and falling down until he reached the edge of the road, he jumped down into a corner beneath the highway, where he stuffed handfuls of earthworms into his mouth, and then lay motionless on the ground, allowing them to crawl out before he finally turned over on his side and sobbed.
If 65 KG was an escalation of the confrontation with mortality that Zhang had begun in 12m2, his performance in Original Sound embodied a sense of hysteria provoked by the prospect of death and articulated the physical decay that ensues. He was only shaken from this line of morbid inquiry when complications surrounding his preparations for a performance entitled Cage(1996)resulted in a terrifying experience that served to confirm his lust for life: while practicing for the performance, in which Zhang was to ride around Beijing’s subway system in a human-sized metal box with only a small window on its side, Zhang accidentally locked himself inside the container. In a statement in Rong Rong’s East Village 1993–1998 (2003), a photo documentation of the community, Zhang describes his elation after being released from the container: “After I finally walked out of the box . . . I felt that I had experienced a state between life and death . . . Nothing is more precious than being alive. This scary metal box—I will never go near it.”
As the output of the East Village artists grew, the authorial voices of individual artists became stronger and more identifiable, contributing to performances in greater and more independent capacities. Zhangcontinued to make collaborative works, such as To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain (1995), in which he and nine other East Village artists gathered on Miaofeng Mountain on the outskirts of Beijing and stacked their naked bodies on top of each other with the aim of adding a meter to the mountain’s height. Later that day they staged Nine Holes (1995), with the men lying prostrate with their penises inserted into holes that they dug in the ground while the women aligned their vaginas with earthy protrusions. But Zhang’s appetite for pursuing projects as an independent authorial voice was growing. In 1997, he realized his first commission abroad, at the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, where he staged 3,006 Cubic Meters/65 KG, an attempt to pull down the museum using a system of plastic tubes running from his body to the building’s exterior. Where the authorship of To Add One Meter has subsequently been disputed by its participant artists, the equally iconic performance To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond (1997), in which Zhang and more than 40 men entered a pond in an attempt to displace the water by one meter, stands largely as an epilog to this brief period of collaborative works. By this time, it seems Zhang had learned how to protect the sovereignty of his work—he hired migrant workers to enter the pond instead of collaborating with his peers.
Perhaps because tales of New York loomed large in the consciousness of an artist community named after one of its neighborhoods, or perhaps because it offered greater financial opportunities than China’s still-nascent gallery scene, Zhang moved to the United States in 1998, catching the tail end of a precedent set not only by Ai Weiwei, who moved to the US in 1981, but also Gu Wenda (1987), Xu Bing (1990) and Cai Guo-Qiang (1995). In New York, Zhang quickly fell into a schedule of performances and commissions from top cultural institutions, due partly to the reputation he had built in China, as well as the changing appetite of a cultural establishment that was beginning to look outside its own context for artistic talent.
Zhang began to incorporate explicitly Chinese objects in his performances, such as in Pilgrimage – Wind and Water, his first major work in the city, staged at P.S.1 in 1998 for the Asia Society exhibition “Inside Out: New Chinese Art.” Lying on a sheet of ice placed on a traditional wooden Chinese bed, Zhang attempted to instantiate the cultural shock he felt upon arriving in the city. With nine pedigree dogs of different breeds tethered to the bed, the performance presented a stark contrast between the pampered animals and Zhang’s discomfort as he attempted “to feel [the fear and culture shock] with my body, just as I feel the ice.”
Over the next few years, the focus of Zhang’s works began to shift from internal matters of the body to external matters of culture and state. In a similar vein to Pilgrimage, the artist’s performance of My America (Hard to Acclimatize) registered hisdiscomfort, even humiliation, with the difficulties of assimilating into the US.Staged at the Seattle Asian Art Museum in 1999, he had 56 naked American volunteers stand in tiered rows on a scaffold and throw stale bread at him. However, by 2002, Zhang was assimilated enough to strike a nerve among American audiences with My New York, a post-9/11 performance for the Whitney Biennial, in which he walked through the streets of Manhattan in a bodysuit made of raw meat—shaped to make him resemble a Hulk-like superhero—handing out white doves to onlookers who then released them in an immediate evocation of the US as a superpower. In a reference to the US bodybuilding culture, he struggled under the weight of his raw musculature in a false display of strength that spoke to the geopolitical and psychological anxieties of the time.
Zhang’s exhibition schedule began taking him to increasingly remote cultural contexts and institutions in Europe and the Asia- Pacific region, and the focus of his performances became more scattered. In My Rome (2005), he bafflingly climbed around a white marble statue, while in Seeds of Hamburg(2002)the artist appeared in a large, square birdcage at Der Kunstverein, naked and covered in honey and sunflower seeds. Seeds of Hamburg was reminiscent of 12m2—this time, the concoction he wore was designed to encourage 28 doves and pigeons to peck at his body—and yet the performance had none of the socio-political relevance or raw intensity of the earlier work in the East Village latrine.
But Zhang was increasingly working less with performance and more with material forms of art practice, and often in mediums such as installation and printmaking. The transition is most clearly illustrated in works such as Family Tree (2000), in which he invited three calligraphers to write proverbs and fables in Chinese ink on his face until it was completely covered, obscuring his features in an attempt to invoke his own anonymity that was nonetheless clearly evocative of the use of blackface makeup in 19th- and 20th-century US theater and television. The work was not staged as a performance event complete with an audience, but instead for the camera, and it exists as a limited-edition series of prints of which Zhang is the sole author. In keeping with the performative but not collaborative spirit of his early works, Zhang has defined these working methods as “performance-based concept photographs.”
By 2006, both Zhang’s practice and ambitions outgrew the US, and he moved to Shanghai, a city he had only visited once before. In its southern suburbs, he set up a massive, highly departmentalized studio, occupying 75 acres, where he employs more than 60 assistants. There, he oversees the fabrication of a wide variety of large-scale works, such as monumental installations of animal skins, sculptures in copper and paintings made of the ash from burned incense, depicting everything from anonymous flags rippling in the breeze to fashion designer Christian Dior “in the comfort of his country home,” as was explained on the wall text at an exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in 2008. The studio is prolific, fabricating works in media with which Zhang had never previously worked, a reflection perhaps of the boundless opportunity and cheap labor and material offered in his home country, itself now a rising superpower.
Zhang’s return to China, however, is by no means a rejection of his relationship with the US, as he continues to mount ambitious shows in New York, as well as in Europe. Increasingly, Zhang has turned to Buddhist themes, such as in his giant sculptural series of fragments of the Buddha’s body re-created in ash and copper. He is also currently engaged as the director and set designer of an experimental production of Händel’s 1743 opera Semele, which premiered in September at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels and is due to travel to China in 2010. Despite the apparent lack of congruity—Semele is a comedy based on an ancient Greek tale of deities and adultery—Zhang says he is intrigued by the plot’s relation to Buddhist ideas of reincarnation and karma.
To many of Zhang’s East Village peers, the changes in the tone of his work have been stark and even disappointing. But to Zhang, it is a question of developing expertise and savvy. In a catalog essay for his major retrospective at the Asia Society in 2007, he wrote, “At the time, I was simple and naive; my only goal was to realize the performance. Afterward, I signed contracts with photographers and videographers for every performance piece . . . I believe that my experience is a good example for my colleagues and younger artists to be more professional.” Zhang’s involvement with Semelelooks to sustain a performative element in his work, even if he is not the protagonist, and yet his original stake in the presence and simplicity of his own body as a medium for direct action appears to have been lost.
Poppy Field No. 12, 2012, detail (all photographs by the author for Hyperallergic)
Zhang Huan’s new exhibition at Pace Gallery, his first since 2010, revels in the artist’s newfound love of lush dollops of creamy oil paint. He’s not the first one to slather on thick and buttery pigment, but his Poppy Field canvases evoke an abstract impressionistic feel; the effect is akin to Pointillism gone wild. Viewed from a distance, they break down like molecules into the sum of their atomic parts.
Huan’s palette ranges from black and white to hues of grey, or a riotous festival of clashing colors. It’s astounding that according to his dealer the layout of these images was originally computer generated, as they appear spontaneous and unforced. Viewed up close the pointillist dots transform into arcane adamantine grins of the Chitipati (Lords of the Funeral Pyre), skeleton dancers common throughout the sacred Tibetan cham practice and various other aspects of folk dance. This choice of content emphasizes his fascination with aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, particularly the practices of “sky burial” and chöd, wherein skeletons and skeleton faces figure prominently.
Poppy Field No. 14, 2011 viewed from a human scale
Repetition is an undercurrent in these paintings. It’s not the same as the repetition employed in Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s, but the structural elements of another Tibetan art, that of the minutia of sand mandalas.
Huan, a member of the East Village artists’ community in Beijing, was originally known for his ascetic, monk-like piece “12 Square Meters,” where he sat in an outhouse slathered in honey attracting and retaining flies all over his naked body. More recently, in an interview with Pernilla Holmes, Huan stated he became a Ju Shi or “householder” Buddhist about eight years ago receiving the name ci ren’ or Sky Human. He has also studied Chán Buddhism, the Chinese precursor to Zen, with Master Sheng Yen in Queens, New York.
Detail of Poppy Field No. 14 from above
It is uncommon but not unknown for Chinese contemporary artists to incorporate aspects of tantric Tibetan Buddhism in their work. Those who do rarely achieve the fame or access to the West that Huan enjoys. Its a theme he has been exploring for decades, and includes his 2002 Whitney Biennial performance piece “My New York” where he strode through the city in a raw meat suit (before Lady Gaga poached the idea), and “Pilgrimage—Wind And Water In New York” his 1998 performance at PS 1 where he enacted the traditional Tibetan full-body-prostrations, or ngondro, before stripping naked and laying facedown on a block of ice surrounded by a cluster of yapping pet dogs.
Huan has jumped into the discipline of oil painting in a refreshing, and for him, sensuous style. He has softened his hard-fought austerity the only way an artist really knows how, by working it out through his art. Along the way he has reinvigorated a medium, avoided imitating his predecessors, and stuck close to his roots.
Zhang Huan’s Poppy Fields continues at Pace Gallery (534 West 25th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through October 26th.
Chinese painter Liu Xiaodong built a reputation among Chinese collectors by using Soviet-style realist techniques to portray the effects of China’s industrialization on its citizenry, most notably in his 2006 “Three Gorges” series.
But to win over Western collectors at his first solo show in the U.K., Mr. Liu opted for subtle depictions of two sometimes thorny topics: immigration and pub life.
Liu Xiaodong’s ‘Green Pub’ (2013) is part of his solo show at London’s Lisson Gallery. Liu Xiaodong/Lisson Gallery, London
“Half Street,” his debut show at Lisson Gallery that opened Sept. 27 and ends Nov. 2, features three oil paintings and 24 photos altered with acrylic paint that portray two English pubs, an Egyptian restaurant and the locales’ occupants, many of them immigrants. Mr. Liu chose the sites for their unpretentiousness: “I don’t like painting extravagant places.”
Not all went according to plan. At his chosen Egyptian restaurant, an irate imam told him to delete photos he had taken for his painting, an event he details in his diary on display at Lisson.
“There are all these Middle Easterners living, existing and facing contemporary life in London, and it’s difficult” for them, Mr. Liu said in an interview. So instead of customers, Mr. Liu depicted empty chairs and a table.
Mr. Liu’s works are coveted by elite financiers in China. At Chinese auctions, his prices exceed $2 million. The paintings in the show run around $500,000, and the photos—”a new species of works,” said Lisson dealer Greg Hilty—are around $15,000.
For “White Pub,” Mr. Liu painted French chef Sebastién Lambot, his Polish wife and his toddler, who posed for four hours. “I started snoozing. There was nothing to do,” Mr. Lambot said. But he added, “I want to take my baby to the Tate one day, point at the painting and say ‘Look, that’s you when you were young.'”
On the face of it, Liu Xiaodong’s latest exhibition at the Lisson Gallery in London reinforces usual descriptions of the artist’s work as ‘realist’. At the exhibition’s core is a series of large-scale paintings depicting the interiors of two public houses and a restaurant that have been rendered with a distinctly under-idealising eye for detail.
In one painting a large dog slumps over a bar counter while its presumed owners stand in attendance, dressed in stained chef ’s whites and scruffy summer working casuals. In another, an oriental style interior, uncannily empty of people, is represented; its kitschy petrolite surfaces and serpentine decorations contrasting with the sentinel presence of two starkly black, symmetrically counterposed electric fans.
Liu’s work is open to differing socio-cultural perspectives
In yet another, a vampirically grey-skinned and sclerotic-eyed couple, again dressed in working clothes, preside bathetically over a pub interior in which a young child at play on a roughly boarded wooden floor seeks to return our gaze.
For those familiar with the urban interiors of London this is the instantly recognisable territory of the quick (or not so quick) after-work drink and the drunkenly impulsive late night curry or kebab – a world of intensely cosmopolitan babble and conversational telegraphings of almost certainly exaggerated urban professional lifestyles. Impressively, Liu has the visual semiotics of this intensely mixed-up gentrified ‘spit and sawdust’ world down more or less pat.
Liu’s capacity to render the ripped backside of London life in such apparently knowing detail was aided not only by the artist’s now well-established method of painting in situ, but also by his interacting actively with the individuals and communities he depicts. This signature approach no doubt enables Liu to gain far greater insights into the significance of the social milieus into which he enters than any amount of anonymous sketching or photograph taking.
It is also one well in tune with the persistence of realism as a dominant aesthetic within the mainstream (officially supported) artworld of Liu’s home territory – the People’s Republic of China – where he is a professor at Beijing’s prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts. That aesthetic was self-consciously adopted during the early twentieth century as a culturally distinct framework for the development of a socially inclined and progressive modern art.
Yet Liu’s actively engaged approach also allows his work to be aligned with the current international fashion for an art of social intervention and relationality. That sense of relationality is further supplemented by conspicuously unfinished passages throughout Liu’s painting , passages that are left as metaphorical invitations to the viewer to ‘complete’ the work.
As is the artist’s sometimes visually disjunctive use of multiple panels as part of the making of a single image, both of which suggest a contemporary ‘conceptual’ re-motivation of conventional realist techniques (a reading that Liu himself actively resists).
In short Liu’s work is open to differing socio-cultural perspectives: including one that enables him to work successfully within the prevailing socio-political conditions of the PRC and another conferring critical credibility within western(ised) contexts.
Like other contemporary ‘realist’ artists from China, a searching understanding of the multiple significances of Liu’s work lies beyond a single gallery visit. Liu’s current and highly engaging exhibition at the Lisson Gallery is, though, a very good place to start.
This article was first published in the November 2013 issue of ArtReview Asia
For decades celebrated painter Liu Xiaodong has been searching for new ways to broaden the scope of his work beyond the confines of the two-dimensional canvas. In the 1990s Liu painted scenes of his family and friends, becoming a leading figure in a generation of Chinese painters which was interested in producing intimate depictions of the day-to-day reality of their immediate surroundings. Their perspective was not necessarily ideological; they neither glorified the working class and the peasants – as some revolutionary realist painters once did – nor approached their subject with condescension, guilt or curiosity borne out of class difference. They sought objectivity; their depictions were lively and contagious, sometimes focusing on the individual but often in a way that was relevant to the lives of most Chinese people. Liu’s 1996 painting Disobeying the Rules, for example, shows a group of naked workers crowded onto the back of an open-topped truck together with several large gas canisters. Most of them turn their faces towards the viewer, grinning. When I first saw the painting, I could almost feel the familiar sensation of a van rumbling past me on the road.
Since then, Liu has continued to turn his gaze towards those pushed to the margins of society: migrants, sex workers or residents displaced or made homeless by the Three Gorges Dam project. He has often painted them from life, a strategy interpreted by some critics as a conceptual ploy and by others as evidence of an emotional commitment. In many of these paintings his subjects appear indifferent and unengaged, perhaps all too conscious of the social problems he seeks to portray through their presence, and therefore take on an image of ‘otherness’.
Liu’s latest project, Hometown Boy (2010), which was also the title of his exhibition at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, brought these two interests together. Last year the artist spent two months in his home town of Jincheng, a small city in the Liaoning Province of north-eastern China, which he left in 1980 to attend art school in Beijing. Liu spent part of the spring and summer with his family and childhood friends, eating at their homes, drinking, playing football and singing karaoke. He painted them at home or at work, as they sat, stood and modelled for him. Liu documented his journey in a loose-leaf diary produced by the local paper factory, where his parents used to work. The project was also recorded in a documentary film, also called Hometown Boy, by famed Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien. The film, together with Liu’s diary entries, old photographs of his family and childhood, photos he took of his return home and the dozens of paintings he made during his stay, comprised his solo exhibition.
The hour-long film was more than a mere footnote to the exhibition: it explored a small industrial town left behind by the rapid pace of modernization and urbanization – despite which Liu’s childhood friends live not very differently from their parents’ generation. The film offers a glimpse of the lives of the subjects of his paintings, enticing us to invest emotionally in the details of their stories and the artist’s relationship to them. Its inclusion added crucial context and power to Liu’s figurative portraits, which might have otherwise fallen a bit flat.
At the beginning of the film Liu confesses that he feels anxious about the project, worried that his fame and commercial success as an artist may have affected his relationship to his childhood friends. And indeed the fact that his life has taken a completely different trajectory from theirs was visibly an obstacle for the artist – more so than for his friends. As it turned out, both they and his relatives obviously enjoyed spending time with him and appeared to regard his success with nothing but enthusiastic admiration. Liu, however, saw himself as an intellectual confronted by the reality of a disappearing working class – a phenomenon he clearly intended to illustrate in this project. Thus, by engaging with them as his artistic subjects, Liu himself remained irretrievably ‘the other’.
Last week, Fondation Cartier in Paris opened their doors to a selection of works from seminal Chinese contemporary artist Yue Minjun entitled L’ombre d’un fou rire (The shadow of a laugh). Featuring nearly 40 paintings from collections around the world, as well as a set of drawings that have never been shown in public, the showing marks his first solo exhibition at a European museum. Fans who can’t get enough of his colorful characters with the signature frozen grin have several months to stop by for a look as the show runs through March 17th, 2013. Check out some photos as well as a video below…
The Beijing branch of Pace Gallery is currently showing a selection of new works from Chinese contemporary artist Yue Minjun. Exhibiting in his home city, the painter famous for his smiling self-portraits has included Christian iconography in this latest set of canvases as well as recent work leading the viewer to think about the role of Western influence in China. Is the ubiquitous grin pervading these works laughing at or laughing with the religious symbolism or is it just the Minjun’s signature imagery innocently translated into a new setting? Even more interesting, rounding out the works for The Road are a series of pieces re-appropriating classical Christian paintings like The Annunciation except the main characters are missing leaving empty structures and buildings.
More after the jump…
WALL STREET JOURNAL – CHINA REALTIME REPORT
November 3, 2010, 11:43 AM
China Art Star Yue Minjun Goes Celluloid
Alexi Tan
‘Color Me Love,’ a new movie by director Alexi Tan produced by John Woo’s Lion Rock Pictures, features works by artist Yue Minjun.
Alexi Tan
Artist Yue Minjun, right, makes a cameo in ‘Color Me Love.’
Followers of Chinese contemporary art know Yue Minjun for works that feature his wide-smiling likeness.
Now Mr. Yue’s familiar mug will be seen in a new medium: film. He makes his debut movie appearance in the new Chinese movie “Color Me Love,” which opens in China Nov. 9.
Says director Alexi Tan, a former fashion photographer in New York who now lives in Beijing: “This film focuses on the beautiful side of Beijing: art, fashion and entertainment. All these key industries that are in Beijing.”
The movie, a love story that also has been compared to “The Devil Wears Prada,” is about the relationship between an artist (played by popular actor Liu Ye) and a fashion-magazine editor (played by actress Yao Chen).
Mr. Tan met Mr. Yue at a party in Beijing – Mr. Liu introduced them — and they became friends. “Aside from myself being a fan of his art, when we were doing this film, one of my concerns about portraying art in the film is that the audience would be too distanced from contemporary art. So I wanted his images in the film because they are so strikingly memorable,” said Mr. Tan, speaking on the phone from Beijing.
Mr. Yue’s “Gweong-Gweong,” a painting he made in 1993, grabbed headlines for when it sold at a Christie’s Hong Kong auction in 2008 for 54,087,500 Hong Kong dollars (US$6.9 million). It depicts fighter jets alongside dozens of figures, representing Mr. Yue, flying over Tiananmen Square.
Mr. Yue, who Mr. Tan describes as a “lovely, low-key man,” became something of a visual leitmotif in “Color Me Love.” The artist has a cameo at the end of the movie (it required many takes, according to Mr. Tan, because Mr. Yue was uncomfortable being in front of the camera). A scene in the film was shot in his studio; he is also portrayed in a dream sequence as an animated figure in the film; and a number of his artworks can be seen in the story’s key moments.
Mr. Yue, 48 years old, even lent a small portrait of himself to be used in the magazine office of a character played by Joan Chen. Mr. Tan, 40, says: “I had to bring that piece home with me every night. Then, I’d bring it back to the set the next day. No one else wanted to be responsible for it.”
The movie, backed by John Woo’s Lion Rock Productions, was made for 12 million Chinese yuan (about US$1.8 million), far less than the going price for Mr. Yue’s best-known works.
Xu Zhen, the former Shanghai based, now Bejing residing artist, has been called an ‘enfant terrible’ more than once with his boundary pushing art which encompasses sculpture, multimedia and installation. Having exhibited a huge, imposing leather cathedral, dripping with bondage accoutrements, entitled Play201301, at Hong Kong’s Art Basel, that stopped us in our tracks Fiasco had to find out more about this charismatic Chinese artist.
There was the 2005 installation 8848 Minus 1.86, which consisted of a video of Zhen climbing Mount Everest and cutting off the tip (1.86 metres, also the artist’s height) and a refridgerated unit containing the frozen peak. The video is said to have been done in a studio; creating the question of it being more stunt than art. In 2008 he exhibited The Starving of Sudan, a recreation of photojournalist Kevin Carter’s image of a young, starving child being watched over by a waiting vulture whereby Zhen placed a real African child on a straw covered floor with a large animatronic bird, allowing viewers to take their own version of the iconic image. Needless to say it created huge controversy.
In 2009, Zhen created MadeIn, an “art corporation” of which he was CEO and left the making of his art to his crew while ideas were generated in a think-tank manner with Zhen giving the final go-ahead. The company focused not just on creation but curation and has continually produced works since conception, however this year MadeIn Company became ‘Xu Zhen by MadeIn Company’, reverting a focus back onto the artist. We talk to Zhen about the transition of his company and his, often satirical, art.
Play-(201301) Installation
Genuine and artificial leather, BDSM accessories, foam, metal, wood ropes
545 x 300 x 330 cm
2013
Seeing Play201301 at Art Basel HK was what lead me to discover more about you and MadeIn Company. It was the first thing I saw as I came in and it practically blocked me from going further due to its scale and the intricacy that commanded my attention. Having since seen Safe House A and Play 4, is this piece connected and evolving from their creation? (If not, how did it come into being?)
There are indeed some visual connections between these different pieces, but not only these particular ones. Generally speaking, our recent creations are all related to one common large structure, this structure or ‘self created language’ constitutes a background for all our works. “Safe House” is a series of works especially created to respond to some social values and purposes. This series of works also refers to the cultural fitness exercise “Physique of Consciousness”, the installation “Revolution Castings”, etc. While the series “Play” consists in an exploration of various cultural characteristics and visual symbols intertwined together. It isn’t merely a relation based on symbols, it is issued from the whole creating direction.
I walked around it for such a long time that I got to overhear people’s reactions to it – my favourite was “like if Louis Vuitton owned a sex shop” – but many, once they’d worked out it was a cathedral, seemed to be struck by a blasphemous overtone. It certainly generated a lot of whispers. Is this a desired reaction to MadeIn Company’s output? What kind of reaction/comment do you want the viewer to have with regards to your art?
Different reactions reflect different experiences, we cannot control the way people react, but we believe that these attitudes and comments are part of the work. We are always providing a certain “possibility” for discussion and memory.
Given the church and their history of attitudes towards sex but also the proliferation of sex abuse/paedophilia, was any of this part of Play201301′s original idea/end result?
The interpretations that can be imagined for these symbols are very broad, part of our goals when creating is how to use symbols to go further than what we can already imagine.
Play 20121109
Silicone, iron, hemp cordage, feathers and shells
Although previously there was the Hong Kong International Art Fair, how important is it for Chinese artists that Art Basel HK now exists, particularly with its remit that 50% of the show must be regional? Was there any doubt in your mind that you wanted to be a part of it?
For us, art fairs are a very good opportunity to realize our creations, we frequently participate to various art fairs in the world, including Art Basel in other countries.
After you started MadeIn you stated that you rarely got involved in the hands-on element and instead approved ideas and concepts. Has that changed in any way over the past few years, in either moving closer to certain projects or removing yourself further?
Most of the effort is spent on thinking. Part of the work also consists in the conceptual development of “MadeIn Company” and “Xu Zhen, produced by MadeIn Company”. “Xu Zhen, produced by MadeIn Company” is a project that just started this year and a lot of new creations will be revealed soon.
Much was made of the freedom that doing MadeIn allowed you as an artist, but freedom always, eventually, finds new boundaries to be overcome. Have you encountered this yet and in what way?
To obtain more freedom, and develop the whole system’s freedom, we can change the understanding of its notion. Our creations and development are based on long term regular work, this is also a basis to create a freer system.
The change from MadeIn Company to Xu Zhen by MadeIn Company – how long did you consider that and why was this the right time?
This is one of the multiple projects that MadeIn Company has been working on, this project started this year, in fact from the beginning when MadeIn was launched, the definition of the company as a multi-functions creating corporate was established, therefore aside from the fact that we are a creating group we even have more possibilities. Three years before, we set a frame for “MadeIn Company”, now it is the most appropriate moment to develop its content, and “Xu Zhen” is part of it.
You seem to have a vested interest in how Chinese artists, including MadeIn, can prosper given that there is little support from private or government funding. As the head/mentor/director of a company that wants to expand as well as all create the other projects that interest you, is there the feeling that you are not only (or less) ‘artist’ than when you began, and more in the role of a ‘producer’?
This might be related to my working experience, from the beginning as the art director of BizArt Art Center, to the establishment of MadeIn Company, I have always both created works and curated shows, sometime my work also include writing, coordinating, etc. Perhaps my early years of working experience made me realize the necessity of working with a team. The difficulty of art today for me isn’t only about producing a situation, it is also to propel a situation in a way it can have more influence and lead to challenges. I see all this work as creation.
Your work has been pointed out as satirical of the world it inhabits and you’ve referenced what MadeIn do as a “game” that everyone is still playing along with… is this a sign that despite the art world being seen as quite po-faced there’s a healthy dose of self-deprecation within it? Why do you think your jabs at the art world and other artists are accepted?
Many people think my works are humoristic, but I think that I am a very serious artist. Including MadeIn, many people see it as something serious, but I actually think that it carries the fun and the risks of a game, everyone likes adventures and get together. The openness in the art field makes it accept things that have an adventurous spirit, enlarge this ‘openness’ is also part of our exploring area, because we are part of this system.
In moving from Shanghai to Bejing has this given you a new or re-energised vision for MadeIn? What do you hope to gain, both professionally and personally, from the move?
Wherever we are, we don’t wish to be limited to a ‘location’, we need now a wider field to attract talents. We will need more people to realize our ideals in the future. This game requires more people to be involved, our work will be simultaneously carried on in different place all over the world.
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FRIEZE MAGAZINE
Postcard from Shanghai no. 2
September 21, 2009 by Jörg Heiser
Artist Xu Zhen currently is the top dog in the Shanghai art scene, an energetic young artist bound to play the game of a media-savvy eclecticist who doesn’t shy back from any displays of frivolously ironic conceptualism and cynical provocation. He’s working under several aliases now, and also runs a website. But his show at Beijing’s Long March Space last Winter also exposed the shortcomings of his game: the mother of a Guinean toddler was paid for her daughter to appear in a gallery scenario including an animatronic vulture, recreating the infamous 1994 photograph of a starving Sudanese baby girl stalked by a real vulture (a video version was shown in Basel’s Art Unlimited this June). Layering levels of voyeurism, exploitation and shock on top of the ones already associated with the original photo does nothing to actually allow political or aesthetic insight – it just serves to create, so to speak, the animatronic imitation of an actual debate. Where censorship and a lack of platforms for critical exchange prevent this debate from happening, this kind of stuff fills the void. Just compare Xu Zhen’s piece to Alfred Jaar’s The Sound of Silence of 1995: the latter’s is a filmic-textual essay set in a kind of choreographed installation, based on the story of the same photograph, also working with shock and voyeurism. Jaar shows you the original photograph, combined with a blinding flash of lights, as if burning it into your brain tissue. He’s not however out to just feed on the shock value and heightening it in terms of exploiting yet another person (and by way of that making the exhibition visitor an unwillingly complicit as well), but actually creates a thought-provoking collision of political engagement, ethical guilt, and aesthetic analysis.
I could go on but back to Shanghai: here, Xu Zhen – having renamed himself into an artistic entity called ‘MadeIn’ – dominated the central hall of the ShContemporary Discoveries section with what seemed a piss-take of the typical Expo or Olympics sculpture involving fake grass, decorative columns and odd mannequins – but again one couldn’t help but think that he fed on the logic of hugeness rather than deflating it. Even more ambitious was his show at Shangart Gallery, spread over several spaces. Again authored under the alias ‘MadeIn’, he created a fake group show displaying works of Mid-Eastern artists. And again he pulled the registers on the pipe organ of grand gestures, and pushed the usual buttons: one space is a swimming pool with doodled paintings placed around it, another space features Styrofoam pieces reminiscent of the kind of bulky packaging material used for TV sets etc. But here, the cut-outs are not for home entertainment but for miniature mosques and life-size machine guns. As said, the usual buttons. There is also a miniature oil well pump made of barbed wire.
Rumours abound that supposedly the show was threatened with being closed due to diplomatic concerns and/or, simply, censorship, but one can’t help but think that that is yet another button being pushed. Even if true, how frustrating it must be if one feels obliged to show solidarity with a censored artist or writer whose work one otherwise isn’t necessarily convinced of. All of that said, Xu Zhen remains an active force in Shanghai, and there are certainly more, and possibly better, things to come (Hans-Ulrich Obrist, for that matter, in conversation said something along these lines).
The most talked-about group show was ‘Bourgeoisified Proletariat’, organised in a new building, the Songjiang Creative Studio, on the outskirts of Shanghai, just across from Ikea (press release here). Everything, not necessarily in a bad way, looked slightly improvised, although the show included large ambitious installations. And – surprise, surprise – a certain ‘MadeIn’ was listed as one of the co-curators, and one of the artists in the show. Here, Mr. ‘MadeIn’ created a disco-space with a huge dopamine-molecule in the middle entitled Love in Fact Results from an Excess of Dopamine in the Brain (2009), plus all sorts of (English) sentences on the floor made of necklace chains (_Metal Language_, 2009), including banal stuff such as ‘did you bring the DVDs I asked you’ next to more implicational-sounding ones such as ‘job what job?’ But what got us more talking on the way back in the car was Kan Xuan’s sound installation Dead, which we all felt wasn’t maybe 100% fully convincingly realized on the aesthetic-technical level, and certainly also we didn’t fully understand (where were the sources from, what was it really about?), but in any case the screams and voices in it created a haunting sense of urgency. Same for Zhang Peili’s Unnecessary Collision (2009), an installation involving two bones clashing through a remote-controlled mechanism, accompanied by a literally bone-shaking sound. This may sound wannabe-spooky, but was in the best sense deadpan. (Peili is a super-important veteran of Video art in China, and is heading the leading video department at the China Art Academy of Hangzhou.) Yang Fudong’s video installation My Heart was Touched Last Year (2007) involved two glamorous-looking (Shanghai?) ladies looking at the camera on two screens in separate rooms, back to back. In both scenes the punch line was that they never, by way of editing manipulation, blinked. A bit too one-liner for my taste, but others liked the piece.
Third and last postcard from Shanghai will include a studio visit with Zhang Huan, who is more than just a sort of hardcore no-nonsense forerunner to Xu Zhen, and a short discussion of the best group show currently on show in Shanghai, ‘History in the Making: Shanghai 1979-2009’. Bear with me.
About the author
Jörg Heiser is co-editor of frieze and co-publisher of frieze d/e. He is based in Berlin.
Mao Yan’s luminous, soft-colored oil portraits place his sitters in quiet abstract settings, capturing them without any prominent emotion or expression and often only simple outlines for clothing. Mao attempts to use as few brushstrokes as possible in an effort to simplify form and capture an essence rather than a likeness. “I don’t pay more attention to representation of individuality; excessive attention to representation could only lead to narrow-mindedness,” he has said. Mao is perhaps best known for his “Thomas Series” (1998-2009), a collection of nearly 100 portraits of a close friend and Luxembourgish expatriate named Thomas who, by the end of the series, resembles an ethereal shadow, his likenesses bathed in so much light and movement as to verge on abstraction.
THE NATION
Talent and instinct
Zhang Zixuan
China Daily
Asia News Network
Beijing July 1, 2013 1:00 am
China’s Mao Yan says his work reflects his own state of mind
With centre-parted short hair and baggy old jeans, 45-year-old Mao Yan looks more like a rebellious youth with the bearing of a sharp and sensitive artist. The vanguard painter is said to be the most difficult to define among today’s Chinese art icons. His works are extremely contemporary, though the artist claims to have a serious classicism complex.
He has stayed in Nanjing for years, while other artists proceeded northward, flocking to the capital.
Despite the multifaceted symbols and concepts emerging in the endless stream of contemporary Chinese art, he sticks to portraits, the most traditional subject of easel painting that has gradually been pushed aside by newer art forms.
“Painting to me is an instinct,” Mao says. “I don’t like doing things ‘on purpose’ and I have no need to prove myself just for a trend or an idea.”
At Pace Gallery in Beijing, Mao is presenting his first solo exhibition after signing with the gallery.
Featured works include several pieces from his best-known Thomas Series from the late 1990s and a few unconventional portraits of animals. Two large-scale portraits of naked women painted this year are the artist’s first-ever showing of this kind.
Mao was named the most influential oil painter of 2012 at the Seventh Award of Art China in May. He along with three others were also named the Martell Artists of the Year last month.
“I heard many fellow artists highly praise Mao’s superb technique, but what is most precious is his earnestness in work, which is like a mirror that shames those pretenders,” comments artist Li Xiaoshan.
Studying painting with his father since the age of three, Mao quickly showed his precocious ability and was labelled a genius even before he entered the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1988. In 1992 the then-24-year-old achieved national fame at the 1990s Art Biennale held in Guangzhou for his work “Portrait of Xiaoshan”.
He continued to portray his friends until the late 1990s, when he met Thomas, an overseas student from Luxembourg. For the next decade Thomas was the only subject on Mao’s canvas.
“Subjects depicted during Mao’s ‘pre-Thomas period’ had faint social identities, age characters and completed postures. Later these elements were simplified yet the personality became stronger,” comments writer Han Dong.
“Thomas is only a cover – it could be anybody, including myself,” says Mao, who intended to escape from the booming cluster of Chinese symbols at that time by portraying a foreigner.
These finished portraits are therefore a far cry from the original model. “There is surely resemblance in appearance and character, but I endow the figures with extra features through the eyes and facial expression, and through the tone,” Mao says.
Mao also likes to infuse instant feelings into every stroke of the brush. For example, if he is obsessed with Song Dynasty (960-1279) poetry during a certain period
of time, his inspired sentiment will be reflected in the following works.
Since the mid-1990s, colours of flame and warm brown in his works have gradually been covered and replaced by a much calmer tone of grey, which has lasted till today.
He brushes each canvas with multiple thin layers, which creates a progressive visual that prints fail to capture. But such a method of painting slows down the process and limits him to a few pieces per year. “Every piece deserves years of efforts,” Mao believes, stressing that even this must be after “good communication with the model” – otherwise the process “is very likely to continue infinitely”.
The market has corroborated his pursuit of perfection. In 2007 Mao entered the million-dollar club when his oil painting “Memory or Dancing Black Rose” nearly twice that at the Beijing Poly Spring Auction. And in 2011 Mao’s “Portrait of Xiaoka” set his highest record at an auction house.
Aside from the Thomas series, which will continue, Mao says, he is preparing a new portrait project studying the images of Chinese people. That, he says, “will be a lifetime project”.
“I enjoy spending a long time doing one thing without giving much thought to its meaning or result,” he says. “It is my painting principle as well as my attitude toward life.”
OFF YOU GO
Mao Yan’s solo exhibition continues at the Pace Beijing Gallery until July 20. It’s in the 798 Art Zone on Jiu Xian Qiao Road.
At the inaugural Art13 contemporary art fair, the Chinese abstract artist presents a monumental 12-metre installation composed of bamboo, cotton and 8,000 sheets of rice paper for Pearl Lam Galleries, creating a dense and sensuous field of colour.
During the recent inaugural edition of the Art13 London art fair, Chinese abstract artist Zhu Jinshi presented Boat, an installation for Pearl Lam Galleries composed of bamboo, cotton and 8,000 sheets of rice paper in a striking 12 metre-long structure.
Zhu Jinshi began creating abstract works in the late 1970s. In order to exhibit in an “official” capacity, he joined the Stars (Xingxing), a group of Chinese artists that included Ai Weiwei and Ma Desheng, and participated in their seminal Beijing exhibition in 1979. At Art13, Zhu Jinshi’s work was represented alongside another major Chinese abstract artist, Su Xiaobai. The work of both artists attempts to illustrate that Chinese abstract has been a major, undiscovered force in contemporary art.
“Zhu Jinshi and Su Xiaobai are radically different artists, yet each exemplifies the essence of contemporary Chinese abstract painting,” stated abstract art expert Paul Moorhouse, former curator at Tate Britain and now Senior Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London, who visited the artists’ studios last year said. “Working spontaneously, Zhu creates impossibly dense, sensuous fields of colour. Su develops his paintings patiently, slowly refining their exquisite, veneered surfaces. This profound feeling for evocative materials, and their shared emphasis on creating an abstract physical reality, is entirely distinctive — and completely compelling.”
On top and above: Zhu Jinshi, Boat, Art13, Olympia Grand Hall, London, 2013
“Zhu Jinshi and Su Xiaobai are Chinese artists who deconstruct Western theory of art and visual language by rooting them to Chinese traditions and philosophy,” said Pearl Lam. “This year, both artists have important solo shows at Pearl Lam Galleries and I am proud to bring this selection of works for their London debut. Zhu Jinshi’s rice paper Boat, which is instilled with cultural resonance and embodies the artist’s personal voyage, will be journeying from Shanghai to London for the first time.”
Zhu Jinshi, Boat, Art13, Olympia Grand Hall, London, 2013
Zhu Jinshi, Boat, Art13, Olympia Grand Hall, London, 2013
November 2013
Gallerist Pearl Lam docks Zhu Jinshi’s ‘Boat’ at Art13 London
art / 4 Mar 2013 /By Ellen Himelfarb
Zhu Jinshi’s ‘Boat’, a 12m-long cylinder of rice paper and bamboo, came to London for Art13, the city’s newest art fair
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An ambitious paper and bamboo installation by Chinese artist Zhu Jinshi was the centerpiece of Art13 London, a new international art fair that launched last week with a similarly impressive scope.
‘Boat’ is the masterwork of Zhu Jinshi, one of two contemporary Chinese artists brought to London by the Hong Kong- and Shanghai-based gallery Pearl Lam (the other is Su Xiaobai, a disciple of the late Joseph Beuys). The 12m-long cylindrical vessel was docked at the heart of Olympia’s Grand Hall and echoed the space’s heroic arched-glass ceiling.
Pearl Lam made, perhaps, the biggest splash at Art13, the largest art fair to launch in London in more than a decade and a spin-off of Art HK, the fair that helped shape Hong Kong into a world-class contemporary-art hub. Unlike Frieze, that other ambitious London art fair, Art13 had a decidedly international presence, with about half its content coming from non-Western artists and a significant delegation from Asia.
This, according to Lam, stems from an effort to demystify Asian cultures and philosophies for the Western consumer.
‘To understand us, you really need to know about our roots, our art, how we behave. Everything is rooted in 5,000 years of culture,’ said Lam. ‘A fair for me is not just about buying art but understanding other cultures.’
‘Boat’ was assembled over three days by an army of workers imported from Hong Kong. It constitutes 8,000 sheets of rice paper, a medium with cultural and historical resonance in China. The delicate layering of the paper, supported by 800 slender shafts of bamboo, belies the sheer size and visual impact of the work.
The piece can be seen as a metaphorical arrival of Chinese culture to the world stage and the implications of its arrival for East and West. This cultural conversation is a recurring theme of Lam’s artists, even those she brings back from the West to her galleries at home in China. ‘Our gallery has always been about cross-cultural exchange,’ she says. ‘It’s about cross discipline. It has always been that way.’
Romance of the West Chamber 3西廂記 三 (2012) Oil on canvas 布面油畫 100 x 80 cm (39 2/5 x 31 1/2 in.)
A major exhibition of works by Chinese Abstract Master: Zhu Jinshi is currently on show in Hong Kong, until July 13th.
Zhu Jinshi: The Reality of Paint, at Pearl Lam Galleries, is curated by Paul Moorhouse, Abstract Expert and Curator of 20th Century at the National Portrait Gallery London, and features 26 new strikingly dense and abstract oil paintings. It is also Zhu Jinshi’s first solo show in Hong Kong.
Who Will Be Li Bai 誰演李白 (2012) Oil on canvas 布面油畫 180 x 160 cm (70 1/10 x 63 in.)
During the Cultural Revolution, Zhu Jinshi was an active participant in underground cultural and literary activities, and in the late 1970s emerged as a member of the renowned and groundbreaking ‘Stars’ (Xingxing) avant-garde artist group alongside Ai Weiwei and Ma Desheng.
Working in Berlin in the 1980s and influenced by Kandinsky, Zhu began his lifelong commitment to the language of pure abstract form. It was in 1980s Berlin that Zhu was exposed to German Expressionism, while the speed and spontaneity of his brushwork is attributed to influences by xie yi ink-and-brush paintings.
Highlights of the exhibition include Water Lilies, 2006, which curator, Paul Moorhouse has included deliberately for its importance in the stylistic and material evolution of Zhu’s work; it marks his move towards a more vibrant palette whilst hinting at his preceding work. The series of three paintings Hard Roads in Shu, will also be on show for the first time at this exhibition. Inspired by the literary works of renowned Tang dynasty poet Li Bai (701 – 762 AD) that describe the sublimely majestic mountains and impassable valleys in Sichuan (Shu).The influence of traditional Chinese landscape genre paintings can also be seen here with large areas of blank canvas left (liu-bai), a noticeable departure from his previously covered canvases. Zhu Jinshi said of his series “Although these painting are not able to move mountains or break stones, the exceptional power of these paintings lies in their ability to clear the mind of all worries… creative and spiritual pathways.”
The Reader’s Words 閱讀者的字 (2012) Oil on canvas 布面油畫 100 x 80 cm (39 2/5 x 31 1/2 in.)
“Zhu Jinshi is one of China’s leading contemporary artists. His highly distinctive approach was apparent from the early 1980s, when he made his first abstract paintings…Colour, light, texture and atmosphere are vital elements that animate these extraordinary works, informing them with the mysterious aura of life.” – Paul Moorhouse
Zhu Jinshi: The Reality of Paint
Until July 13, 2013
Monday-Saturday, 10am–7pm
Pearl Lam Galleries, 601–605, 6/F, Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong
Thanks to Pearl Lam Galleries for the private dinner surrounded by the amazing contemporary painting works by Chinese Abstract MasterZhu Jinshi, at his “Reality of Paint” exhibition. Being one of the revolutionary Chinese artist, Zhu Jinshi began painting abstract works in the late 1970s, and participated in the Stars group exhibition, the first avant-garde art exhibition after Cultural Revolution.
His use of colors, free-flow brush strokes, and the thick oil on canvas technique is absolutely mind blowing. The painting is not 2D but 3D and each of them gives you a totally different interpretation.
The richness of the details and the effects of shadows are all different in each piece. You can take a closer look at the zoom-in shots below.
God Particle B
This red piece is totally captivating. The epitome of the power of red.
Tone on tone is not boring with all these textures.
The side shot of this piece gives you a different impression from the front – the flow is almost like the power of tsunami and movements in the ocean.
The overwhelming flows and colors are never boring to look at. You can totally imagine the piece will give you a completely different impression if it is placed in another space or matching with other decors.
The amazing floral arrangements on the dining table, with the beautiful piece at the back.
This piece is showing a varying brush strokes with a differing color combo from the other pieces. The story is that Zhu Jinshi received a piece of news that his friend in Germany had a stroke and therefore his sad emotion is expressed through this piece, with the Chinese word for “stroke” as shown here below.
Hard Roads in Shu 1
This is another famous piece that Zhu has created a different feeling by using a Chinese traditional painting technique of leaving some blank space on the canvas.
And we have sneaked in to the office space and saw this cute “East meets West” chair designed by Danful Yangat Pearl Lam Design. Incorporating the monogram materials from fake branded handbags and the traditional Chinese chair, it comes to this interesting 2-seater chair.
After dinner, we all had a little bit of fun with our GLUSH/Grassy Clutch =)
Thanks Althea, International Director of Pearl Lam Galleries, for modelling!
ZHU JINSHI, Qinggong (Light Body Martial Art), 2006, oil on canvas, 180 × 160 cm. Courtesy Pearl Lam Galleries.
QIU ZHEN ZHONG, Work 0019, 2000, ink on xuan paper, 45 × 68 cm. Courtesy Pearl Lam Galleries.
ZHU JINSHI, Black Zen No. 1 (left), 1991, oil on canvas, 65 × 55 cm. Courtesy Pearl Lam Galleries.
LI HUASHENG, 0305, 2003, ink on xuan paper, 148 × 365 cm. Courtesy Pearl Lam Galleries.
ZHANG JIANJUN, Noumenon (Existence) Series, 1989, acrylic, ink, xuan paper, wood, stone and papier mache on canvas, 84 × 75 × 8 cm. Courtesy Pearl Lam Galleries.
Exhibition view of “Chinese Contemporary Abstract, 1980s Until Present,” Hong Kong, 2012. Courtesy Pearl Lam Galleries.
Chinese Contemporary Abstract, 1980s Until Present: Mindmap
Following the whiff of recent blue-chip vendors, Shanghai-based Pearl Lam Galleries (PLG), formerly called Contrasts, opened a space in the Peddar Street building in May, representing a return of sorts for their eponymous socialite cum curator and director, the Hong Kong-born Pearl Lam.
PLG opened with what may seem an unlikely show, given the gallery’s taste for fusion and flare—an exhibition of Chinese abstraction, curated by veteran theorist and curator, Gao Minglu. Gao’s essay on the works and artists, available at the gallery, is titled “A Return to Humanity and the Natural World—An Introduction to Chinese ‘Abstraction’.” Gao has worked with PLG on projects before, and here he presents a trusted band of artists, representing a trend he terms “maximalism” (jiduo zhuyi) referring to a group of such painters as yi pai—which he sometimes translates problematically as “mindmap,” or more fittingly as “school of notion.” Gao uses the term yi pai, as he argues “abstraction” to be inherently associated with a Western current—from the Enlightenment through the industrial revolution and contemporary capitalism, via Euro-American modernism and Abstract Expresionism—and unable to adequately describe the underpinnings and culturally specific dynamic of the so-called Yipai painters.
Galleries seem to like using scholarship as pseudo-marketing—certainly if your product, whatever the professor says, appears to prospective Hong Kong clientele to be thoroughly foreign to their conception of what Chinese art is. What better way to garner interest than to argue: this looks the same as that (which is foreign), but it is doing something entirely different, which in fact continues and develops “China’s” (untainted) tradition and cultural ésprit. This leads Gao—respected for coining the term “apartment art” to describe the post-1989 turn in contemporary Chinese practice, and a seasoned curator—to make facile blanket assertions, such as: “In China, traditional poetry, calligraphy and painting all advocate togetherness, not differentiation. Therefore, art is not a reflection of the outer world, but is a restoration of a shared idea.”
But the sheer diversity of the works—in scale, materials, energy and technique, for example—prompts a glance at the artist’s CVs, in turn urging one to cast aside a sui generis frame of “Chineseness,” and perhaps, more humbly, appreciate the nature of these painterly explorations on their own terms. In his effort to de-Westernize our gaze, Gao imposes his own monolithic “Chinese” filter on artists working in oils and ink, on canvas or rice paper, in their fifties or thirties, having lived overseas or not, and so on. Oddly, it seems the “look” of twentieth 20th century Western abstraction remained in the curator’s mind. Were it not for the Chinese ethnicity of the painters, and the formally abstract look of their works, how could this diverse group find itself in the same, apparently thematic exhibition?
How else might one lump together, for example, the deconstructive “ink plays” on mulberry paper of Qiu Zhenzhong (b. 1947), with the almost sculptural canvases of Zhu Jinshi (b. 1954), with their inches-thick lashings of brightly colored oil paint? For his part, Gao discusses Zhu’s work only as an example of the Yipai artists’ alleged rejection or deconstruction of Western rationalism—without entertaining the idea that other “abstract” artists, regardless of nationality, have undertaken much the same thing. Neither does this address the formal differences between exhibited works.
Referring again to the artists’ biographies: though from a similar generation, Qiu has a masters in calligraphy from Tianjin and subsequently spent two years in Japan, known for its postwar development of avant-gardist calligraphy. On the other hand, after his studies, Zhu gained a residency in Berlin in the late 1980s and lectured in Germany in the 1990s, and has recently undertaken a BANFF residency in Canada. Nature or nurture? The pragmatist says both, hence to ignore one or the other seems dogmatic or idealistic.
To typecase artists as collectively representing the 1980s is obviously reductive, yet to overlook the issue of age or generation is particularly problematic in the case of those born and raised in China. One of the exhibition’s strengths is its presentation of work by artists born between the 1940s to 1970s—a turbulent thirty-year period, in which each decade must have left different impressions and experiences on the painters. For example, the vast, strenuously handpainted ink grids of veteran Li Huashan, were developed by Li after a career of painting in revolutionary, realist styles, through which he attracted official favor. Only in the 1990s did Li adopted this angular, matrix-like motif, constructed from intensely controlled brushwork.
The choice, made by most of the artists in this show, not to commit to any formal representation, may also be approached from other, more pragmatic angles, such as in terms of China’s art infrastructure or its ideological climate. Huge, time-consuming abstract paintings, in ink or oil, bring to mind villages of relatively cheap warehouse studio residences, where artists might make a living from painting thanks to a keen market, as long as they have space and time. Non-figurative art can also be viewed as blurring the line between modernity and tradition, particularly in cultures with a calligraphic tradition—such is the case for Islamic societies too, and the experiments of modern Malaysian painters come to mind. The ideological position of such work is no longer clearly manifest at the surface level. The surface is a record of something else, of other thoughts and actions, accumulated elsewhere before painting, so to speak. In this sense, it might be interesting to approach abstraction in China today in terms of the historical literati culture, for instance, with its lofty aspirations towards aesthetic reclusion, which were, more often than not, thoroughly urban reactions to social and political excess.
Another blindspot is somewhat typical of Mainland scholars: Gao does not explore the critical relationship to neighboring artworlds. Yet, how should we understand the tactile surfaces of Zhang Jianjun (b. 1955), which sometimes become embodied objects jutting from the canvas, or hanging in front of it, rendered in primitive earthen tones, with Zhang sometimes burning the painting’s surface—for example, without considering art informel in Japan and Europe, or the Korean “tachiste” monochrome painters, in vogue when Zhang would have been in his late twenties and thirties? None of this rich ambiguity or confusion in the very notion of a “Chinese abstraction” is explored in the exhibition framework, yet this does not detract from the works themselves, which impressively range from the mid 1980s down to the present.
According to the director of the PLG Shanghai space, Harriet Onslow, the concentration on abstraction also signals recognition of this as a key growth area in the market. With a new gallery dedicated to design set to open in Shanghai soon, and another space in Singapore’s Gilman Barracks earmarked for 2013, evidently ”Asia’s most dynamic art gallery”—as PLG bills itself, with characteristic pomp—has its sites, and purse, set on the region’s burgeoning art marketplaces.
He is one of the most renowned contemporary artists in China. His ongoing solo exhibition at Pace Gallery Beijing is creating a huge buzz. He was featured on the cover of the anniversary issue of Bazaar Art, published a few days ago. He has gained a significant international reputation through countless exposure in western media, including British art magazine “Glass” and W magazine. His works have passed through prestigious galleries and auction houses such as Pace Gallery and the Saatchi Gallery.
He is Kunming-born Chinese painter – Zhang Xiaogang.
This 55-year-old painter was born in southern China’s Yunnan Province, and graduated from the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts. From the mid-1990s, he started to paint portraits of people from the era of the Cultural Revolution, exploring the notion of identity within a culture of collectivism and expressing the emotions behind that. Zhang is best known for his Big Family series, which was inspired by his discovery of old family photographs. The Bloodlines – Big Family series was debuted with much acclaim at the 1995 Venice Biennale. Two years later, Zhang received Britain’s Coutts Art Foundation Award.
Having grown up during the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Xiaogang made surrealist-influenced works that focuses on the after effects it brought to the family today.
His works have a profound meaning through those melancholy and isolated figures with pale and emotionless faces immersed in contemplation. It has been interpreted by the Western world as the epitome of modern China.
Also noteworthy is the high price Zhang Xiaogang’s art works command. In recent years, his works have led the price for Chinese contemporary paintings at international auctions:
three comrades of Bloodline Big Family series
In 2007, at Sotheby’s New York spring auction, Zhang’s painting titled “three comrades of Bloodline Big Family series” was sold for US$2.11 million.
In October 2010, at Sotheby’s Hong Kong autumn auction, the painter’s work “Chapter of a New Century – Birth of the People’s Republic of China II ” was sold for HK$52.18 million.
(Chapter of a New Century – Birth of the People’s Republic of China II.）
At the April 2011 Sotheby’s Hong Kong spring auction-“The Ullens Collection – The Nascence of Avant-Garde China”, the work named Forever Lasting Love was sold for HK $79.06 million, breaking the record for the world’s contemporary art price!
(Forever Lasting Love)
…
Yet these are but a small selection of Zhang’s work. Based on data from Artnet.com, the number of artworks sold from Zhang Xiaogang has reached 633.
In Zhang Xiaogang’s on-going Pace Beijing solo exhibition, the artist again returns to his old acquaintance the oil painting and continues his stylized tone with stains of time and warmth of life; there are also new works exhibited for the first time.
This solo exhibition of Zhang Xiaogang, which runs at Pace Beijing until February 28 2013, serves as the opening show of his global solo exhibitions. After this, his works will be exhibited at PACE New York in April 2013, followed by PACE LONDON later in the year.
The bad news is that, since last year, the health of China’s most expensive artist is causing concern. According to the Wall Street Journal reporting in July 12, “for the past year, China’s most expensive living artist hasn’t been allowed to paint, doctor’s orders. Zhang Xiaogang, age 54, a Beijing-based painter whose hypnotic portraits have topped $10 million at auction, recently suffered a pair of heart attacks, and his doctors told him—for the first time in his three-decade career—to rest.”
As for how his health condition will impact the art market, it remains to be seen.
“Beijing Voice” Pace Beijing: Zhang Xiaogang
Date: Dec 13, 2012 – Feb 28, 2013, Tues – Sat 10 to 6
Place: 798 Art District, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015
Tel: +86 10 5978 9781
Fax: +86 10 5978 9781-818
Pace Beijing (798 Art District, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road Chaoyang District, Beijing). Dec 13, 2012 – Feb 28, 2013
Contemplating Zhang Xiaogang’s works always leads us down two paths. The first is artistic: you hear the name Zhang Xiaogang, and immediately think — The Big Family series, collective consciousness and national psyche; the second drifts to the realm of pure commercialism — Zhang Xiaogang, auctions, record bids, private collections. However you think of it, neither path negates the link between Zhang and his classic works — the standard Cultural Revolution portraits of individuals without any defining individuality, with their ubiquitous bright black pupils, red scarves and armbands, and the geometric red lines on the lower sections of his compositions. Of course, more essential are the flares of light in nearly every one of Zhang’s works. Though the pieces exhibited in his current solo show at Pace Beijing appear to differ from his signature works, their inextricable links to his past works can be picked up at a mere glance. Modern art criticism has interpreted — or rather, over-interpreted — Zhang’s patches of light and his red spots to such a degree it seems they could reflect or symbolize virtually anything, and thus their meaning become exceedingly obscure. Fortunately, we can attempt to use the pieces in Beijing Voice as a sort of “decoder” to the twin mysteries of Zhang’s light refractions and the ever-present red lines, though we might soon find ourselves standing at the entrance of a new labyrinth.
This new labyrinth sits within a temporary room at the center of Pace Beijing’s exhibition space, since Zhang’s six featured works cannot fill up the massive exhibition hall at Pace. The walls of the exhibition room are spray-painted with quotes from Zhang Xiaogang which only serve to veil the meaning of the pieces in mystery.
Zhang Xiaogang, “The Book of Amnesia,” oil on canvas, 130 x 162 cm, 2012.
张晓刚，”遗忘之书”, 布上油画, 130 x 162 cm, 2012。
Zhang Xiaogang,”Big Woman and Little Man,” oil on canvas, 140 x 220 cm, 2012.
张晓刚，”大女人与小男人”, 布上油画, 140 x 220 cm, 2012。
Overall, Zhang cannot exorcise The Big Family from his mind, and seems unable to relinquish the trappings of his “pictorial identity.” The rays of light shining from the flashlight in “Four Sons” (2012) satisfy his desire for flares of light. While an extension cord plugged into the lower left-hand corner of the painting recalls the use of red lines. This method of conversion is equally deployed in the remaining five pieces: the electrical wires found in “Big Woman and Little Man” (2012), “My Father” (2012), and “White Shirt and Blue Trousers”, and the sprig of plum blossoms seen in “the Book of Amnesia.” From a representational perspective, these are different incarnations of his red lines. Though they are an exception to his usual themes, the significance of the aforementioned plum blossoms goes far beyond any association with revolutionary romanticism. Additionally, the physical images in these paintings reference the objects found in The Big Family series. An old-fashioned double bed, a Soviet-style sofa set, a porcelain spittoon, a miniature pine tree Bonsai, or a waist-high section of wall painted green — each of these elements tugs at the collective memory of several generations of people. We associate this with The Big Family series, with its iconic images of the Cultural Revolution embodying the collective atmosphere of the time — not to mention the familiar yellow child seen again in “Big Woman and Little Man.”
Installation View of Zhang Xiaogang
Zhang Xiaogang,”Four Sons,” oil on canvas, 300 x 500 cm, 2012.
张晓刚，”四个儿子”, 布上油画, 300 x 500 cm, 2012。
Those familiar with Zhang’s body of work will feel a slight shock when they view these new works. We see some different features: the entire forms of his human figures are depicted; rooms are even devoid of people. But soon, we sense he has been able to reinvent the images from his 1993-1994 works. He confers both the presence and absence of his human figures through the use of standardized clothing in “White Shirt and Blue Trousers” (2012), using the clothing as a sort of metonymic device. As Zhang explained in a 2007 interview with Oriental Art, “When I was working on The Big Family, I endeavored to create a minimalist effect on the canvas, but what I truly focused on was inclusiveness. I wanted it to be inclusive in all aspects — graphic, linguistic, cultural, and informational.” Consequently, by no means should these paintings be seen as “de-Zhang-Xiaogang-ed” by the artist; it is more fitting to see them as a variation and natural progression of The Big Family series. He has kept the essential elements: the smudges of light, the geometric lines, the standard cultural revolutionary style (including clothing and facial expressions), but he has found a way to reincarnate all of these elements within the graphic environment of the paintings. But the question remains: what does it mean? Suddenly, we find ourselves retracing the familiar grooves of the critical discourse of the 90s.
Zhang Xiaogang,”My Father,” oil on canvas, 140 x 220 cm, 2012.
张晓刚，”我的父亲”, 布上油画, 140 x 220 cm, 2012。
Zhang Xiaogang,”White Shirt and Blue trousers,” oil on canvas, 140 x 200 cm, 2012.
张晓刚，”白衬衫与蓝裤子”, 布上油画, 140 x 200 cm, 2012。
Certainly, whether in terms of influence, critical literature, or scale of exposure, Zhang Xiaogang enters the annals of art history as a matter of course — at the very least, he has a firm footing in Chinese art history. But what if we perform an audacious thought experiment and project ourselves far into the future? What would the generations in the distant future think “archeologically” of the works we have in the present? How would they describe the art of our times? How would they explain Zhang’s depiction and reflection of his past and our collective history? How would they explain his commercial success? When the majority of the texts and interpretations related to his work fades with the erosion of time, perhaps Zhang Xiaogang will become truly as enigmatic as those meandering red threads and intermittent flashes of light.
“Hmm, shall we adopt him?” A pair of guests seem to be saying.
The Zhang Xiaogang opening last night at Chelsea’s Pace Gallery was the event of the young spring season. Under threatening skies, and with throngs spilling out into 25th Street, the hangar-size space was thronged with art hangers-on — but it was also thronged with the artists’ latest work, a series of busts and monumental heads, their dress and eyewear recalling the 1960s.
With a translator standing by, the 56-year-old Chinese artist held court in the front room, in front of a 4-foot-tall head that looked suspiciously like a self-portrait, glasses and all. Not far away, Chuck Close sat in his high-tech wheelchair. It was an evening to remember, and here’s some of the evidence.
Zhang (center, with glasses) among his admirers in front of a giant bust that might have been a self-portrait.
Portrait of the artist as a young man? (With apologies to James Joyce.)
Do plaid pants go with pigtails?
Hey, maybe all the heads are self-portraits.
Chuck Close made an appearance.
A rear gallery featured large-format painting on similar themes.
Some of the guests seemed to almost become part of the paintings . . .
. . . while other viewers recoiled.
BROOKLYN RAIL MAGAZINE
ArtSeen
May 4th, 2013
ZHANG XIAOGANG
by Robert C. Morgan
PACE GALLERY | MARCH 29 – APRIL 27, 2013
Zhang Xiaogang’s recent exhibition captures a singular moment within the four decade-long stretch of China’s Post-Maoist history. His sculptures of children’s heads and paintings of interior family habitats are ambiguous snapshots of the psychology of many Chinese people today. The paintings especially focus on shifting social nuances of recent years, including generational differences and feelings triggered by memories of family life at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Such intimate recollections are juxtaposed with the acceleration of entrepreneurial strategies that have led to China’s economic growth, albeit at a great social cost.
What are these social nuances exactly? Zhang Xiaogang is clearly not looking at sociological demographics to find out. These works are consistent with Zhang’s reach toward intimacy in painting over the past two decades, beginning with Bloodlines: Big Family series in the early 1990s. The sculptures, ranging from tiny child’s heads measuring six inches in height to busts of adolescent boys and girls reaching five feet, have a striking affinity with the painted Bloodlines series that evolved more than 20 years ago. By employing intimate subject matter related to the changing appearance of Chinese “middle class” families, the artist has opened a window whereby Chinese people might reflect upon their recent history and their future. The Mao suits are vestiges of the past. According to the artist, his intention was to paint the appearances of the past from a contemporary point of view, thus connecting two periods of history, in order to distill memory. Rather than despairing of the past, he wants to discover more open possibilities for the future of China.
Zhang Xiaogang, “My Mother,” 2012. Oil on canvas, 6′ 6-3/4″ × 8′ 6-3/8″. Photo: Wang Xiang / Courtesy Pace Gallery.
In the painted sculptures—all done from the imagination, rather than from live models—his youthful subjects are difficult to associate with a specific time period. According to Zhang, his portrait sculptures are entirely made-up. They are—to use his word (in translation)—his “ideal subjects.”
Aware of Renaissance and Baroque art from his travels to Europe in 1992, the artist has clearly acculturated his method to Classicism. Yet he adds touches of paint here and there on the face, cheek bones, ears and forehead to augment the emotional power of the work, as in “Young Girl No.1” (2012).
The latest portraits, all painted in 2012 – 13, include four paintings of rooms, often painted in green, similar to the ones in which the artist lived until late adolescence. The subject matter of the four paintings is as follows: a young boy sits on a couch with his mother (“My Mother”); a young girl sits in a chair adoring her father, who sits in a separate chair (“My Father”); an infant is propped in a chair in a wool suit with a cut-out section revealing his genitals and an empty chair across from him on which a streak of light can be seen (“The Position of Father”); and finally, an unoccupied bedroom in which a cut plum blossom tree mysteriously lays across the bed adjacent to a clean white shirt and blue trousers (“White Shirt and Blue Trousers”). According to the Artist, the latter symbolizes a poignant memory of his adolescent self.
These paintings undoubtedly allude to the position many ordinary Chinese families might be in today, as children and adults attempt to evaluate their prospects for the future. A prevailing concern lingers as to how and when the quality of life under the current regime will improve. The ambiguities expressed in these paintings are both profound and deeply felt. Through their ability to project meaning that brings together a dialogical view of China’s past and present on a personal level, these paintings constitute some of the strongest works in the artist’s career.
Many of the sculptures appear as if they were based on family snapshots taken in the early years of the Cultural Revolution that the artist discovered one day in a cookie box, hidden away in his parent’s attic. To hide such photographs was typical during that era. Although Zhang used some of these images to spark his famous Bloodline series, he claims they were not the basis for the sculpture. Even so the atmosphere in the gallery seemed to equivocate between uncertainty and hope. Will these imagined images of children reveal the possibility of fulfillment in ways their parents never did? Rather than suggesting despair, which he is careful to avoid, Zhang is interested in portraying memories that will awaken a more challenging, if not more optimistic view of life for China in a new global environment.
The author wishes to thank Pace Gallery for its help in arranging time with the artist, Zhang Xiaogang, for purposes of clarifying many of the points raised in this review, and for the indispensable translations of Ms. Echo He.
510 W. 25th St. // NY, NY
W MAGAZINE
Zhang Xiaogang in his Beijing studio; in the background, his Green Wall—Two Single Beds, 2008, oil on canvas.
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The History Boy
Zhang Xiaogang’s masterly paintings inspired by life under Mao have made him one of China’s hottest exports.
One afternoon in Amsterdam 16 years ago, Zhang Xiaogang came out of the Van Gogh Museum and had to sit down: He was so depressed that he thought he might collapse. For three months the Chinese artist, then 34, had wandered the museums of northern Europe, seeing for the first time the actual canvases he’d spent much of his life studying in books. Ever since 1979, his second year of art school—when China’s opening to the West first exposed him to painters like van Gogh, Picasso and Magritte—Zhang had looked to Europe for a way around the staid socialist realism favored by his teachers. In the decade after leaving school, despite finding it hard to show his work in a climate that still preferred party-line art, he had slowly begun to make a name for himself as a painter of startling, melancholy dreamscapes, an artist who shunned explicitly Chinese subjects in favor of surrealist, Expressionist explorations of his own mind.
That afternoon at the Van Gogh Museum, however, he had an epiphany. “I realized, I have no connection to these artists,” he remembers today,sitting in the enormous Beijing studio that he moved into last year. “And suddenly I felt very hopeless.” He returned home and didn’t paint for a year.
That Zhang is now a leading figure in the recent explosion of Chinese art onto the international scene—and the subject of a solo show at PaceWildenstein gallery in New York, beginning October 31—is a direct result of that crisis in Amsterdam. “I saw then that I had to return to my own living environment and find my own source,” says the artist, a bespectacled 50-year-old with a shaved head and a cerebral manner. In mimicking European painters, he had overlooked the one subject that provoked his deepest feelings: living through the confused ecstasy of China in the Sixties and Seventies and then seeing that past buried during the new age of China’s reform and economic boom.
The particulars of Zhang’s childhood in Cultural Revolution–era Chengdu, in central China, sound shocking to foreign ears, but his trials were fairly standard for a person of his generation: the years without schooling, the parents shipped off to re-education camps, the Red Guard factions fighting in the streets. Because almost no one was spared, Chinese looking back on that time don’t often dwell on tales of individual suffering. Making art about the period would demand a way of integrating private experience with collective memory.
His first attempt to “face our history,” as he puts it, was “Tiananmen Square,” a 1993 series of paintings presenting a shrunken, pastel-colored Gate of Heavenly Peace—where Mao led major rallies and where his huge portrait still hangs—dwarfed by a foreground of the square’s richly textured pavement. He’d taken on one of Communist China’s ultimate symbols, one that was just as central to the fervor of the Sixties as it became to the protesters of 1989, but Zhang still didn’t feel he’d cracked the problem of how to capture Chinese history.
Then later that year, while visiting his parents, he came across an old photograph of his mother and father posing stiffly with him and his two olderbrothers. Such studio portraits had been extremely popular in China in the Fifties and Sixties, and the shot of the Zhang family was typically imprinted with ideology: The artist’s father wore a Mao jacket and, though he was a party official, a workman’s cap. Here was the quintessential image of life under Mao, offering unimagined possibilities to a figurative painter. “It’s as if you pushed open a door and suddenly found yourself in a garden,” he says.
Thus began “Bloodlines,” a series of grave, disquieting canvases—“false portraits,” Zhang once called them—showing wet-eyed parents and children gazing blankly out of gray-toned backgrounds. Red lines run in and around the figures, and occasionally a blemish appears, like the wearing away of paper in a photo album. The portraits, which can be as large as eight and a half feet in width, don’t depict any one particular family, Zhang says, least of all his own. He never paints from photographs or live models, and his fictional families often consist of multiple versions of the same pensive face.
With its complicated, subtle melding of nostalgia and grief, “Bloodlines” gained Zhang immediate notice: inclusion in the 1995 Venice Biennale, a 1997 solo exhibition at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, and two shows at Max Protetch gallery in New York, in 2000 and 2005. Last year he was scooped up by PaceWildenstein, the first blue-chip New York gallery to open a branch in China. A solo Zhang show is now being planned at Pace Beijing for 2009. His work has also taken a sudden leap in auction value. In 2006 a “Bloodlines” portrait fetched $979,200; this year Sotheby’s sold another for $6 million.
In keeping with his new prominence, Zhang moved from Chengdu to Beijing in 1999. But other than the size of his studio—which fills a converted motorcycle-helmet factory—he seems little affected by his success. “The first time I heard that my art sold for so much, it really scared me,” he says, laughing. As in Chengdu, his studio is decorated with pictures of his daughter, now 14. (Divorced from the girl’s mother for almost 10 years, he remarried in 2007.)
Zhang’s current exhibition, at PaceWildenstein’s West 25th Street location, is called “Revision”—a loaded word in the China of the artist’s youth, where being branded a “revisionist,” someone who distorted Marxist fundamentals, could mean one’s ruin. In this context, the word takes on an alternative meaning. “These are all new works,” Zhang explains, “and they’re completely different from the stuff that everybody’s known me for.” He’s showing sculpture for the first time, including babies based on photos of himself and his daughter as infants, and his new paintings are almost devoid of human figures. One shows a pair of twin beds, a ragged lightbulb illuminating a pillow embroidered with a political slogan. Another depicts a gigantic dam, an image that, he says, “in the Chinese consciousness of the Fifties and Sixties was considered to be the most beautiful landscape.”
Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, says the new pieces are a natural outgrowth of, rather than a departure from, Zhang’s earlier work. “I think he’s continuing to rebuild the past,” Glimcher says. “But what strikes me the most is that they are without irony. There’s almost no Western figurative art dealing with subjects like he does that is not ironic.”
As an artist so steeped in historical feeling, Zhang now finds himself in an odd position. Westerners, who represent the majority of those collecting his work, are the least able to feel the full depth of meaning in it. “The source from which I draw my inspiration for these pieces is very difficult for Westerners,” he says. “Misreading is unavoidable.”
Some mistakes are simple: People assume the dam in his recent painting must be the controversial Three Gorges Dam, but, says Zhang, it is just a generalized, imagined dam, not any one in particular; critics invoke China’s one-child policy in discussing “Bloodlines,” though the policy came well after the period that series portrays. But there’s also a quieter, deeper divide between Western and Chinese perceptions. The Westerner looks at a rendering of Tiananmen Square and thinks it’s “about” the 1989 massacre, says Zhang. The Chinese viewer has a “more complicated emotion,” driven by the square’s association with multiple events, including hopeful rallies from the early Mao era, hysterical Red Guard meetings and the mass demonstrations of grief after the death of Premier Zhou Enlai.
Still, Zhang says, Westerners, like Chinese observers of European works, access foreign art mainly through aesthetic feeling, not historical thought. “We never lived in America or Europe, but pieces by their artists are emotional for us,” he says.
Riitta Valorinta, director of Finland’s Sara Hildén Art Museum, which last year became the first European museum to hold a major show of Zhang’s work, agrees that pinning down every historical reference isn’t essential. She points to the mastery of detail in the artist’s lightbulbs, his loudspeakers, his beds. “It is not necessary to understand everything,” she says. “What we see is enough.”
And, Zhang notes, the difference between China and the West is diminishing anyway. When he travels to New York for the opening of his show, it will be his third trip to the city. On his first visit, in 1996, he wandered around, marveling at all the galleries and artists. But when he came again last year, he wasn’t as excited by what he saw. “I had changed, and China had changed,” he says. “Now China’s more and more like America.”
As demand explodes for Chinese art, the country’s most expensive living painter copes with fragile health and staying relevant
By
Kelly Crow
Updated July 13, 2012 12:01 a.m. ET
As demand explodes for Chinese art, the country’s most expensive living painter, Zhang Xiaogang, copes with fragile health and staying relevant. Kelly Crow has details on Lunch Break. Photo: Mark Leong/Redux for The Wall Street Journal.
For the past year, China’s most expensive living artist hasn’t been allowed to paint, doctor’s orders.
Zhang Xiaogang, age 54, a Beijing-based painter whose hypnotic portraits have topped $10 million at auction, recently suffered a pair of heart attacks, and his doctors told him—for the first time in his three-decade career—to rest.
Few artists embody China’s art boom better than Mr. Zhang, who grew up amid the Cultural Revolution and gained fame for his large, haunting depictions of families dressed in Mao jackets and comrade’s caps. Yet his desire to keep breakneck pace with China’s developing art scene has taken a toll.
Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei is one of China’s superstar artists. Reuters
Mr. Zhang still spends his days at his soaring studio in a traditional village on the city’s outskirts. His major collectors include former Swiss ambassador Uli Sigg, Beijing entrepreneur Liu Lan and Chinese-Indonesian farming tycoon Budi Tek. His earliest works fetch higher sums than ever at auction: In April 2011, “Eternal Love,” a 1988 painting that he originally sold for $2,000, resold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong for $10.2 million, an auction record for Chinese contemporary art.
But he said he’s still learning how to navigate the pressures and expectations of the job. Six weeks after that record sale, Mr. Zhang was sitting in his studio with his 18-year-old daughter when he clutched his chest, struggling to breathe. Soon after, he underwent emergency bypass surgery to repair a blocked artery in his heart, his second heart surgery in 10 months. Afterward, his doctor told the artist he had to dramatically alter his lifestyle: No more whiskey or cigarettes (he was smoking two packs of Zhongnanhai a day) and no work-related stress for a year.
When artists break out in art hubs like New York or London, they can usually look to experienced galleries to broker their sales and help manage their careers. China didn’t have a single privately run art gallery when Mr. Zhang got his start in the early 1980s. For a long stretch, he single-handedly managed his own career, juggling demands from dealers and collectors and occasionally making artworks on commission. (Mr. Zhang is now represented by Pace Gallery.)
Zhang Xiaogang in his Beijing studio in June. Mark Leong/Redux for The Wall Street Journal
Now, his health scare has given him an excuse to slow down and reassess his art. Of his roughly 600 oil paintings, a third are part of “Bloodlines,” a series he began in the early 1990s inspired by the kind of quasi-patriotic family portraits that were popular throughout China during the Cultural Revolution. In Mr. Zhang’s versions, these clusters of men, women and children appear glassy-eyed and unsmiling—bound by blood but possibly little else. Mr. Zhang has become indelibly linked to this series, and he continues to paint these works on occasion, even though they serve to criticize China’s Mao era more than its current political situation. But there are signs that demand could be tapering off: Dealers say an early “Bloodline” from 1994 can sell for as much as $8 million, but his recent versions of couples have sold for around $1.5 million. Mr. Zhang said some of his stress has come from his attempts to find his next big idea.
Mr. Tek, a collector who has paid as much as $6.7 million for Mr. Zhang’s work, said, “Getting a Zhang Xiaogang is like buying a historic movement frozen in art—he’s classic. But he should slow down on the ‘Bloodlines’ because they’re not as relevant anymore.”
During his hiatus from painting, Mr. Zhang is turning to a different medium: bronze. He is casting groups of large figures in bronze and will paint them by hand—a nod to the colorful polychrome statues that popped up throughout ancient Egypt and Ming-era China. Though he has dabbled in bronze occasionally, he has never tried this technique before. The figures themselves comprise his usual cast of “Bloodlines” characters—a boy in glasses, a girl with pigtails. Gary Xu, a cultural historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has seen the clay models and calls them “fantastic.”
Mr. Zhang is part of an elite group of painters—including Fang Lijun, Zeng Fanzhi, Yang Shaobin, and Yue Minjun—who were once ignored by China’s political leaders but are now hailed as cultural success stories. Beginning in the late 1980s, they experimented with modernism, expressionism and Pop at a time when Soviet Realism still held sway. Eventually, they helped kick-start a lasting conversation about what China’s new art could look like. And as China’s economy skyrocketed, so have their asking prices and reputations. Now, film director Zhang Yang said, these artists are “better known in China than most movie stars.”
Mr. Zhang’s friends say he has never felt entirely comfortable in the role of celebrity. He doesn’t wear designer clothing, preferring jeans and Converse sneakers. For his part, he said one reason he started drinking heavily years ago was so he could shake off his natural shyness.
In May, Mr. Zhang sat in a hotel overlooking the vast Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, which had become a warren of art-filled booths for the region’s major contemporary-art fair, Art HK. Glancing at the crowds, he said, “You have to use your imagination to conjure how it was before all this.”
Anyone who visits Mr. Zhang’s Beijing studio will likely notice his “idea board.” This wall-size panel is covered with items he has pinned up for inspiration—from photos of artists he admires, like Franz Kafka and singer Sinéad O’Connor, to movie-ticket stubs and photos of his first studio apartment in Kunming, the city in southwestern Yunnan province where he was born in 1958.
Memory is the central theme of Mr. Zhang’s art—what we choose to remember, forget or distort. In 1966, Mr. Zhang was 8 years old and living with his family in Chengdu in southwestern China when Mao Zedong ushered in the Cultural Revolution, a decadelong attempt to rid China of anything antique or foreign. Schools were shut down and his parents were sent away to separate work camps to be “re-educated,” leaving him and his three young brothers to fend largely for themselves. Their mother, who was later diagnosed as schizophrenic, left them pencils and a sheaf of paper with instructions to doodle whenever they felt bored or tempted to roam outside.
Eventually, Mr. Zhang befriended a former art teacher who taught him the basics of watercolors. At 17, he took his pens and paper with him when he was assigned by the government to plant potatoes and wheat at a mountainside re-education farm. By the end of his two-year stint, a local party official had pulled him from the fields to paint revolutionary slogans. “Art helped me transcend the miserable situation,” he said.
‘Bloodline: Big Family No. 1,’ from 1994, which Sotheby’s sold for about $8.4 million last fall in Hong Kong. More works by Zhang Sotheby’s
When China reopened its colleges in 1977, Mr. Zhang was one of only two students in his province admitted to the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing. He was a decade younger than his 20 classmates. There, he first encountered images of Western art—Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, modern abstract painters—along with Soviet Realists. “It was like going from hell to heaven,” he said.
After graduation, though, he spent a decade in an existential, creative funk. He married an outgoing woman in Chengdu who loved rock music and later owned a bar. He spent his days teaching art at his alma mater and his nights drinking. His mother’s schizophrenia worsened. At age 26, he suffered a gastric hemorrhage and he was hospitalized for two months.
Weng Ling, artistic director of New York’s China Center, met him in Chongqing in 1986. He was an “angry artist, writing poems and painting pieces that looked like sad songs,” she said. Leng Lin, an art-history student at the time who has since become his dealer at Pace, also saw a show of Mr. Zhang’s art around that time and said the artist was primarily painting figures in toga-like robes surrounded by symbols culled from pagan, Christian and Buddhist faiths. “He was wrestling with Europe,” Mr. Leng said.
In 1989, Mr. Zhang painted a red woman sitting on the banks of the Lethe, the mythical Greek sea of forgetting. Several months later, he watched the student protests at Tiananmen Square. By that point, he had decided to abandon the Western motifs he had been exploring and go hunting for some way to capture China’s collective identity.
He found it in an empty box of cookies. While visiting his parents in 1992 after his first trip to Europe, he noticed his mother dumping a batch of black-and-white family photographs into a leftover bakery box. As he sifted through the images, he realized he had never seen these pictures of himself as a baby or his parents as their younger, livelier selves. He had just become a father himself, and he felt bound more closely to the unfamiliar faces in the photos. The juxtaposition proved to be his epiphany: China, after the Cultural Revolution, was one big dysfunctional family, too.
He started amassing family photographs from friends, even peddlers, paying a yuan or two apiece. Some patterns began to emerge: The families rarely smiled, and their flat features and workmanlike attire stood apart from the centuries of sensual Western portraiture he’d studied. If anything, their stoic expressions evoked scroll paintings of Ming-era warriors. He began painting a series of large family portraits. Since one of Mr. Zhang’s brothers suffered an eye condition, the boys he painted were often cross-eyed. He also started threading a red line between his characters. He called his paintings “Bloodlines.”
In 1994, he sent a few images to Johnson Chang, a dealer in Hong Kong. The dealer wrote back: “These pictures are the very best I’ve ever seen from you. Do more.”
Mr. Sigg, the Swiss collector, also visited Mr. Zhang in Chengdu around this time. He immediately commissioned a “Bloodline” for his dining room. Mr. Sigg said he realized the series would be a hit because whenever he threw a dinner party, his guests from both East and West gravitated to the piece, mesmerized. “After those paintings, he was on top,” Mr. Sigg said. “Suddenly, he was the new face of China.”
In 1995, Mr. Zhang was invited to exhibit his “Bloodlines” at the Venice Biennale. The following fall, Sungari Auctions organized the first-ever auction of contemporary Chinese art in mainland China, and one of Mr. Zhang’s “Bloodlines” adorned the catalog cover. The work sold to a dealer for several hundred dollars, and was later bought by Guy Ullens, a Belgian collector who made a fortune in the food industry.
The artist kept painting new variations on the theme, but by 1999 he began to worry he was repeating himself. Things in his personal life also declined: He got divorced, packed a duffle bag with $3,000 in cash, moved to Beijing, and threw a mattress on the floor of his empty apartment. He started drinking heavily again. He was 41.
His sales were picking up, though. New York dealer Max Protetch showed his new paintings—mainly close-up portraits of people’s sleepy faces—and sold out. In 2001, Mr. Zhang was featured in 14 gallery and museum shows around the world. To keep up with demand, he started working on fresh series exploring ideas about amnesia and memory. But that year he also painted around 10 “Bloodline” works “to satisfy the dealers.”
The first sign of heart trouble hit in 2003, when he returned from visiting his parents and felt dizzy for a week. Initially, he blamed the city’s high altitude, but when a doctor took his blood pressure, it was 180/140. He started taking medicine to treat it.
“I just felt like a machine, forced to work,” he said recently, in an interview conducted through a translator. “I felt like I could not decide things for myself.” He moved studios five times between 2000 and 2005, in part to accommodate more visitors. Western collectors who were increasingly following China’s economic rise were also discovering Chinese contemporary art, and it wasn’t unusual for him to have eight delegations a day filtering through his door. Some sought favor by bringing him expensive wine or inviting him on vacation. A few cried and told him they were so moved by his art. He began to wonder if he should get a steady gallery to handle his sales.
Pretty soon, newly wealthy industrialists and entrepreneurs from China were stopping by in addition to the Western collectors—further evidence that the global wealth boom that had pushed up prices for all sorts of contemporary art had also hit home.
In March 2006, Sotheby’s held its first sale of contemporary Asian art in New York. Mr. Zhang’s portrait of a young man, “Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 120,” sold for just under $1 million, nearly tripling its high estimate. That fall in London, British collector Charles Saatchi paid a record $1.5 million for a 1995 “Bloodline.” Mr. Saatchi resold the same work five years later for $7.2 million, nearly quadrupling his investment.
By 2008, Mr. Zhang decided to exert some more control over his circumstances. He got remarried. He also signed a contract with PaceWildenstein (now Pace), one of the first New York galleries to open an outpost in Beijing. For his first solo show there, he decided not to include a single “Bloodline.” Instead, he tried to visualize what happens to memories that get revised and distorted, particularly troubling ones. These canvases included delicate still-lifes of light bulbs, beds, pens. Most sold for around $500,000 apiece, according to Pace.
Feeling Stymied?
Some expert advice on powering through a creative dry patch
Examine Your Vices. People often rely on alcohol, drugs or even workaholic habits to fuel their creativity, but too much will “drag you down,” says Jeffrey Kottler, author of “Divine Madness: Ten Stories of Creative Struggle” and a professor of counseling at California State University in Fullerton. “Ask yourself if the price you’re paying is really worth it.”
Say “No.” Sometimes people churn out the familiar for fear of being unable to come up with anything new, says Barry Panter, director of Los Angeles’s American Institute of Medical Education, who studies the psychology of artists. Next time someone asks for more of the same, turn them down and start experimenting.
Embrace the Fallow Season. People who feel stuck creatively tend to think long and hard about their circumstances—a state of dissatisfied solitude that often leads to change and a creative reboot, says Mr. Kottler. “The best work often comes to you while you think you’re doing nothing.”
The artist’s pace didn’t slacken until the end of the year, around the time Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and the art market began to slow in response to global economic turmoil. In 2009, only 16 of his paintings came up for auction, compared with 64 the year before, according to auction database Artnet. That year, the top auction price for one of his works—$2.5 million—was paid by a collector from Asia, not the West. The art market experienced a similar shift overall that year, with buyers in New York remaining wary even as art sales perked up across Asia. Prices for Chinese antiques and scroll paintings particularly ballooned: A Qing vase sold for a record $86 million in 2010, and a watercolor of an eagle by Qi Baishi fetched $65 million in 2011.
In the spring of 2010, Mr. Zhang’s mother died in her sleep. Mr. Zhang said he started drinking more heavily. That November, he suffered his first heart attack. Three days later, he was back home from surgery and hurrying to finish eight paintings he wanted to include in a show set to open the following month at Beijing’s Today Art Museum. He wasn’t fully rested, though, and the workload quickly caught up with him. He intended to fill three galleries with work but only wound up using two. At least one large work from that period—an aerial portrait of four boys lying in separate beds—still sits unfinished in his studio.
On May 22, 2011, his chest started to tighten again. Three days later, he was rushed to the hospital. His doctors insisted he put his career on pause.
Mr. Zhang set out to devote his hiatus year to reading. He started with a doorstop-size tome on Chinese art history. (He read as far as the Song dynasty.) He said he has quit smoking, rarely drinks alcohol and spends his mornings walking several miles around his neighborhood.
He has flouted his doctors’ orders a few times, painting another “Bloodline” for Pace’s fair booth in Hong Kong and a portrait for the gallery’s booth at Art Basel in Switzerland. He has also begun plotting out a series of parent-child portraits, arranged so that the viewer can sense the child’s perspective, the parent looming large.
But he has funneled most of his creative energy into the new bronze sculptures. He began experimenting with the form five years ago and still finds the format challenging—his studio is spotted with rejected bronzes. Last year, he hired a pair of young sculptors to help him mold 10 figures, from a 4-foot-tall bust of a sailor boy to a larger-than-life baby. A few weeks ago, he sent their plaster casts to a foundry in upstate New York; this winter, he’ll come to the U.S. to paint a few before Pace unveils them to the public next spring. “Maybe my new stage is just beginning,” he said.
Heather Russell, senior specialist of Contemporary and Modern Asian Art, interviews Political Pop artist Li Shan, a leading figure in the Chinese avant-garde movement. Li is best-known for his provocative portraits of Mao Zedong, and his work has been featured in art exhibitions worldwide, including at the 1993 Venice Biennale, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai.
Heather Russell: I know that you went to secondary school and university in Shanghai during the era of Mao Zedong and the Red Guards, before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution. Did this affect your work as an artist? If so, how?
Li Shan: I dropped out of Heilongjiang University in 1963, and was admitted to Shanghai Theater Academy to study Fine Arts in 1964. During that time most major art schools had stopped enrolling students, and Shanghai Theater Academy was the only one that was still open for enrollment. It was my first formal Fine Arts training.
In 1966, the Cultural Revolution broke out. Classes were suspended and all of my peers joined the Red Guards. No matter what you thought about the Revolution, you had to participate, otherwise you risked becoming the target of criticism. At that time, I already had a strong interest in art, and becoming an artist was my dream. That was also the reason why I chose to study at the Shanghai Theater Academy. But during the Cultural Revolution, the intellectuals and artists were the first to be attacked. Many intellectuals such as Wu Han (Chinese, 1909–1969), Deng Tuo (Chinese, 1912–1966), and Liao Mosha (Chinese, 1907–1991) were severely criticized and imprisoned. It was under these difficult circumstances that I realized the risk of pursuing a career in art. Historically, the artistic and cultural communities are always among the first to be affected during major political upheavals.
I was very young at the time, and I had thought about changing my career. During the Cultural Revolution, students from major art academies, including Shanghai Theater Academy, the Central Academy of Drama, Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and the Central Conservatory of Music were not safe places to work post-graduation, because many of them were considered to be 516 Members, or the “black sheep” of society. I graduated in 1968 and remained unemployed until 1972. One of my high school classmates studied in the Harbin Institute of Technology, and he graduated the same year I did. He arranged for me to get job at the Chongqing Arsenal right after graduation. I remember writing him a letter asking if he could he find me a job in the Arsenal, hopefully designing propaganda paraphernalia, because I was an art student. Even though it ultimately didn’t work out, the experience of working there greatly influenced me.
During the Revolution, artistic practice was standardized throughout the country. Individuals were not allowed access to certain forms of artistic expression, so I had to suppress my own creative impulses for a long time.
HR: I know that from an early age, certain intellectual texts, such as books on quantum physics and Western writing, which were prohibited during the Cultural Revolution, have been very important to you as an individual and as an artist. What books, authors, and theories do you think have affected your work the most? And why?
LS: I have had different spiritual mentors at different stages in my life. When I was in junior high school, I had read some Fine Arts books that mentioned Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452–1519). His masterpieces had all deeply impressed me, especially TheLast Supper and the Mona Lisa. He was not only a master painter, but also an accomplished scientist, architect, and anatomist. I admire him a lot.
During my college years, I was introduced to various books about different art schools and movements. I especially came to appreciate the works of Henri Rousseau (French, 1875–1933), the Primitivist artist, and his life story. Rousseau’s works are extremely pure, real, and primal. I believe that paying attention to primal instincts is very important for artists.
The artwork that we see is often an artificial construct that has been carefully refined by the artist.
In addition, I had also read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and a few other books about quantum mechanics. In 1993, for my experiments in BioArt, I started to read Gregor Johann Mendel’s works. He was a Catholic priest, but he was also the founder of genetics. Although many of the books I’ve mentioned are scientific texts, I believe that the ability to challenge traditional thinking, like Stephen Hawking and Werner Heisenberg did, and the courage to explore the unknown, like Gregor Mendel, are both key characteristics of all great art.
HR: You are known as one of the most influential and famous Contemporary Shanghai artists. Do you feel that living and painting in Shanghai, versus Beijing, has impacted your work and philosophy as an artist?
LS: There are many differences between Shanghai and Beijing, including politics, economy, history, culture, etc.
Politically speaking, the biggest difference between Shanghai and Beijing is that because Shanghai was once a colony, Western influence has had a profound cultural impact on things like lifestyle and interpersonal relationships. But in Beijing, traditional Chinese culture is much more prevalent. Comparisons have often been made between the two cities: Shanghai is typically seen as representing the bourgeoisie, while Beijing is thought of as the proletariat. But Shanghai is also viewed with a lot of mixed feelings.
Economically speaking, before the Chinese economic reform in the 1970s, xenophobia was very much a part of the Chinese mentality. Shanghai used to be a dream for many people. They wanted to go there to drink coffee and shop for clothing and shoes. After the economic reform, many major cities in China developed rapidly, and people became wealthier and wealthier. The xenophobic mentality that had persisted for so long gradually died down, as did the admiration for Shanghai.
In terms of culture and history, Shanghai is the gathering place for an older generation of artists, including writers, painters, musicians, etc. The majority of the first generation of artists who studied abroad came back to Shanghai, even if they left from other cities, they chose to move here after they returned to China. After the Chinese Civil War, there was a nation-wide turn towards the Soviet Union as a source of cultural influence. Artists began using the Chistyakov system, and drama students followed Stanislavski. But Shanghai was different. Shanghai attracted many Modern Chinese master painters such as Liu Haisu (Chinese, 1896–1994), Lin Fengmian (Chinese, 1900–1991), Wu Dayu (Chinese, 1903–1988), Guan Liang (Chinese, 1900–1986), and their students. At that time, the artworks being shown in exhibitions everywhere else mostly featured themes of workers, peasants, soldiers, and revolutionary heroes. Shanghai was the only place where you could still see paintings of osprey, reeds, and hydrangeas. It was also the only place where the Chinese tradition of Modern Art wasn’t interrupted. These masters and their students formed an underground community in Shanghai. I felt very lucky to have been able to live in such an atmosphere, and be exposed to what we called ‘Modernism’ when I came to Shanghai in 1964.
During the Cultural Revolution, the library of the Shanghai Theatre Academy was known for its rich collection of books. Professor Min Xiwen (Chinese, b.1918), who oversaw the library, was the area’s leading authority on Impressionist Art. Nearly all of the Chinese translations of Western texts on Impressionism were done by him. And he himself was a master of still-life painting. Thanks to Professor Min, I was exposed to Western classics through the books that he had secretly lent to me in the reading room. I would not have had that kind of opportunity if it wasn’t for the general cultural environment in Shanghai at that time. If I had gone to Beijing instead of Shanghai, the Li Shan (Chinese, b.1942) you see today would have been completely different.
As for the difference between the artistic communities in the two cities, artists in Beijing like to live close to each other, and their works tend to look similar. If one artist’s works were shown in an exhibition and gained a buyer’s market, other artists would begin emulating that particular style. But the artists in Shanghai are very scattered and individualized. Shanghai artists focus on developing their own styles, and they express their personal dreams and ideals in their work. As a result, Beijing artists pay closer attention to the choice of subject matter in art creation, whereas Shanghai artists focus more on the exploration of different artistic languages. That’s why it’s harder to curate an exhibition in Shanghai than it is in Beijing and Chengdu. Critics and curators often feel frustrated when they come to Shanghai, because it’s too difficult to find different artists creating works around the same theme. They can’t find what they are looking for.
HR: Your work is often referred to as Political Pop Art. Do you accept or reject this label? Do you associate your art with a specific movement?
LS: The term Chinese Political Pop was initially proposed by Li Xianting during the late 1970s in order to better sort and classify Chinese Contemporary Art, and to facilitate artistic discussion. It was chosen mostly because there was no alternative. There was a long debate about the term, and it was decided that Political Pop Art would be used temporarily; little did we know that it would be written into history.
On the surface, Chinese Political Pop Art is similar to Western Pop Art. They have the same artistic language, and both appeal to the general public. Much like the works of Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987), they are very straightforward, and directly comment on the present commercial and political environments.
However, comparatively speaking, Chinese Political Pop Art has a deeper meaning. The movement is about artists expressing their thoughts on Chinese history, culture, and the social environment, as well as their feelings toward their personal experiences. So each artist and each work is distinct.
I have no complaints about being labeled as a Political Pop artist, but I think having a conversation directly with the artist is necessary if one wishes to acquire a deeper understanding of the work.
HR: Your most internationally acclaimed series of paintings belongs to your decades-long Rouge series that features a young, effeminate Mao Zedong with a lotus flower in his mouth, as well as other political leaders, such as United States President Ronald Regan. Can you explain how you were inspired to create this series and what the message is behind these works? What does the title mean? Why did you focus on a younger Mao, and only create a handful of paintings of an elderly Mao?
LS: Concepts like “effeminate” and “unisex” are unique in China because defining them falls into a cultural gray zone. Regardless of time or place, there are always particular cultural ideas that can’t be easily explained in black and white terms. It feels contradictory because we are so used to defining things in extremes: left versus right, good versus bad, right versus wrong, etc. However, this gray zone is a constant state of affairs in Chinese society.
For artists, this gray area creates a very interesting environment. This uncertain state is usually linked to phrases like melancholy and ambiguity. I used the image of Mao Zedong in my paintings as a cultural symbol. People have an ingrained impression of older Mao, one that’s powerful and authoritarian. However, middle-aged and younger Mao is not attached to the same kind of preconceived historical, cultural, and social signals. I feel that the image of middle-aged Mao always has a trace of melancholy and ambiguity, while younger Mao is ambitious and vibrant, which leaves a clear image in peoples’ minds. It returns Mao to the primitive state I mentioned previously. This unfamiliar image can lead audiences to rediscover that grey area, separate them from the extremist historical period that they are familiar with, and change the “cultural genes” of that age.
HR: You often create Mao Zedong portraits with images of geese or psychedelic versions of the lotus flower in your Rouge series. Can you explain what the geese and lotus represent?
LS: Geese are lazy, and the lotus flower is tacky. I feel that both of these symbols match the theme of “rogue” perfectly.
HR: You have worked on several highly acclaimed works in your Reading series, including large-scale paintings of animals typically covered in fish, dragonflies, or butterflies, painted in an almost naíve manner. What can you tell us about the inspiration and meaning of this series?
LS: On Wikipedia, these pieces are categorized as BioArt. These works apparently have a certain connection to advancements in biology. In the 1950s, scientists discovered the fundamental element of the life, the gene. At the same time, they discovered the mechanism of heredity. When a human being masters the technology that could potentially enable us to create new lives, this poses a huge challenge to traditional ideology, religion, and cultural history. These kinds of events are too significant for anyone, including artists such as myself, to ignore. It’s natural that artists would start associating this event with their artistic creations, and that BioArt would become a new category within the field of Contemporary Art.
I started to think about BioArt when I came back from the Venice Biennale in 1993. From 1994 to 1996, I had the opportunity to stay in New York to start preparing for my own BioArt projects. I read books in related fields, including college textbooks. My basic concept for BioArt is that it must be living. Some of my paintings that you’ve seen are actually proposals and drafts of a new species that I want to create in a lab. I spent two or three years on the preparation, until early 1998, when I wrote my first essay about BioArt and completed a proposal on how to create a living artwork. I named this proposal Reading. But, as you can imagine, it was very difficult to find a scientist in China who wanted to work with an artist to create a new species. It was not until 2007 that I found an expert at the Shanghai Agricultural Science Academy to collaborate with me in cultivating a batch of pumpkins. That was my first living BioArt piece. I found that project to be very meaningful because I was able to present the basic concept of BioArt, the process of making BioArt, and the form of BioArt through the project. Reading is also the first BioArt proposal in history.
At this point, people might not be familiar with BioArt yet, in which case, they can use Reading as an example. The defining characteristic of BioArt is that the work must be living, it should experience the entire process of conceiving, being born, growing up, aging, and passing away. It should also be able to reproduce. Therefore, it’s completely different from the art that we’re used to. BioArt work has to be created through genetic alteration, designed by artists, and executed by scientists. In the current state, it’s very hard for artists to complete a BioArt work by him or herself.
At the end of last year, I had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taiwan. One of the works exhibited was called The Possibility of Random Expression. This is a project that I did in collaboration with a professor at Tsinghua University. The project took a year to complete, but it was very unsatisfying. What I most wanted to learn about in the lab was the process of genetic alteration. But for safety purposes, I wasn’t given access to that information. In the end, I was only able to see the 72-hour growing process of the embryo after genetic alteration. This experience made me realize the difficulty in working with scientists. It would be wonderful if I could have my own lab.
I travelled to Beijing three times for this project, to communicate with the scientist I was working with. And during the discussion, I raised a new concept. Based on my understanding of molecular biology, gene expression is divided into two main parts, Transcription (DNA to RNA) and Translation (RNA to protein). Both of these processes are regulated by a control system, which determines the appearance of each life created. I wondered, if we could disable this control system, and let genes express randomly, what would the end result look like? It could be something unimaginable, but in theory, this is the only way a life could gain freedom. Would you be willing to see a life that’s created through this random gene expression? It could be a monster, but it’s a life that’s completely free.
HR: Yes, absolutely! I think it’s very exciting. A monster can be beautiful. Who is to define what a monster is?
So I guess our final question is, what is your next step, where do you go from here, and where is your next gallery exhibition or museum show?
LS: Early next year, I will have an exhibition in Singapore. This exhibition will show my early Extension series. Many important works in this series had been destroyed many years ago, so I wanted to take this opportunity to recreate these works. The curator of this exhibition will probably be Gao Minglu.
Although I have run into many obstacles in the process of creating BioArt, and none of my previous works, except for the Pumpkin project, was truly satisfying, I would still continue to create works, most likely in labs. I’m also going to continue with the painting and photography side of BioArt. These are all proposals for my future BioArt projects. But the sad news is that, according to one scientist, it would take 100 years to complete all of these projects.
This interview was originally conducted in Chinese, and was translated by Ning Lu, associate manager of the artnet Price Database Fine Art and Design and Chunmei Jia, intern at artnet Price Database Fine Art and Design. Click here to read the Chinese version.
Heather Russell is a senior specialist in Asian Modern and Contemporary Art at artnet Auctions.
Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, part V, 2007, 35 mm, black-and-white film transferred to DVD. Total running time: 91 minutes. Images courtesy of the artist; Shanghart Gallery, Shanghai and Beijing; and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.
I curated Yang Fudong’s work for the first time in 2004 when I was an associate curator of an exhibition in Japan. I invited Yang Fudong to preview his film Backyard—Hey! Sun is Rising. Since then, he has asked me to write about his work—for his solo shows at GL Strand Gallery in Denmark (2008) and at the Hara Museum in Japan (2009). In 2010, Zhang Yaxuan and I put together screenings of Yang Fudong’s films and related seminars at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, and the Beijing Film Academy.
In this interview I sought to push the envelope by examining his mise-en-scène techniques in The Fifth Night, part I. In addition, I wanted to set the anchor in the question “does spiritual life exist at all?” because it is what concerns Yang Fudong the most.
When I watched The Fifth Night in the exhibition Useful Life 2010 at the ShanghART Gallery, I was very moved by it. Seven screens formed seven scrolls and they each seemed to start at a different point in time. The stories of seven young people, with their footsteps and dreams, were told in a calm yet complex fashion. It was Yang Fudong’s unique calmness. It was still his own escapism, the dreamlike quality of his other works. There were still mixed time periods and characters, and mixed sets—artificial and real locations. And it was still beautiful and elegant. The stories were told from seven different perspectives and jumped from one to another. What happened a second ago became the past. It felt familiar in that sense. The Fifth Night is not only about Yang Fudong’s aesthetic preferences, but also about his new approaches to time in narrative. Through this interview I discovered his intentions for The Fifth Night, part II, as well as the artist’s ideas behind the making of both works.
Li Zhenhua Can you briefly talk about the relationship between the film installation The Fifth Night (2010) and the video installation The Fifth Night, part II (2010)? Part one was exhibited at the ShanghART Gallery and part two at the Eighth Shanghai Biennial. You mentioned that part two was a by-product of part one. I’m curious about how the two pieces came about through different forms.
Yang Fudong I should start by talking about the film Dawn Mist, Separation Faith (2009). During the shooting of this film, I wondered if, and how, I could make another art piece out of the same production. I realized that a lot of takes were simply discarded in the editing room, like in Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (2003–2007) and some other shorts I did. I would shoot the same shot five, ten, 20, or more times. At the end of the day, I would pick the best take and edit it into the actual piece. Why did it have to be that particular take? Where did all the bad takes go? Shouldn’t they exist even if they were not perfect? In other words, should I reveal my working process by showing multiple takes as well as the mistakes I made? I pondered over different possibilities. So I chose to make Dawn Mist, Separation Faith only out of takes that were “no good.” It was shot in the summer of 2008. It is a film that consists of only nine shots, or, say, a film installation with nine projections. So even before making The Fifth Night, I considered trying out different lenses and perspectives that I had never used before. But none of the ideas were very concrete until I was asked to participate in the show Useful Life 2010. It was around the Chinese New Year in 2010 that I decided to make The Fifth Night.
LZ The Fifth Night is very different from Dawn Mist, Separation Faith.
YF Yes. Seven parallel screens form a line, and they connect with one another, imitating traditional Chinese long-roll painting.
LZ It feels like seven scrolls too.
YF I was trying to avoid it being like seven separate scrolls. The first version of The Fifth Night at ShanghART was more like a live film on multiple screens. It made use of camera movements and mixed lenses with a variety of depths of field, including wide-angle, standard 35 mm, and long lenses. It created what I call a “little midnight theater” feel by slight and gradual shifts in the framing, and slow dolly movements. My first instinct then was to shoot from different angles simultaneously so that, when projected, it would look like a live feed.
Yang Fudong, The Fifth Night, part one; 2010; seven-channel film installation, black-and-white, sound. Total running time: 10 minutes, 37 seconds.
LZ Do you allow rehearsals during the shoot? Do you let your actors run through the action? Are there technical rehearsals for camera positions and such? How similar are yours to the theatrical kind?
YF I definitely do rehearsals. I need them to take into account all of the details. I chose a relatively empty location at the Shanghai Film Shooting Base, the famous film-production factory in Chedun. It appears to be a city plaza surrounded by 1930s-style buildings. I chose to shoot at night because it feels more like a theater stage with its fake scenery and artificial lighting. Before I settled on this idea, I was fantasizing about moving the production to a beach, to shoot a group of boys, their youthful bodies in the sun. Their body and muscle movements as they work, play, and make love. But considering the budget and resources we had at the time, it was not practical. However, I found that night shoots in an artificial set suited my taste and temperament. It actually worked out for the atmosphere I wanted to create; it also added drama and disguised some clumsiness.
Yang Fudong, Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, part IV, 2006, 35 mm, black-and-white film transferred to DVD. Total running time: 70 minutes.
LZ I noticed that since Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (SIBF), you seem to be increasingly interested in utilizing artificial scenery. In SIBF, part V, the only real location was Xian Qiang Fang Restaurant, one of Shanghai’s colonial places that serves traditional food. But the sets in The Fifth Night and Dawn Mist, Separation Faith were either preexisting at the shooting base or you had them artificially constructed. How would you account for that?
YF In Chinese, there is an idiom “真情流露” [similar to the English idiom “to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve”]. The “heart” is not only transparent and open, it also has to be true. It is always a challenge to direct actors to express believably “true” feelings on screen. This is something I am slowly coming to realize. Another strange phrase evolved from that same idiom: “真假流露” [an alteration: “to wear one’s ambivalent heart on one’s sleeve”]. What if we expressed our true and fake emotions at the same time, in order to reach what we ultimately desire? Mixing both yin and yang is like painting truth and lies. I wondered how to achieve such imagery and how to show this thin line between the real and unreal through film techniques: set design, characters, costumes, and music. Is seeing really believing? After SIBF, I realized that the most important goal for me was to create a psychological experience. Estranged Paradise (2002) is what I call a “little intellectual film”; it involves people with knowledge and education. SIBF is more of an abstract one. They both interested me and made me excited. I can breathe their existence, be moved by them, and have a small telepathic moment with each, but I feel I cannot comprehend them 100 percent. I am deciphering more in the works I am making now; it’s an interesting change in myself.
LZ You mention “little intellectual films,” which reminds me of your Library Film Plan, your Museum Film Plan, and so forth. How would you describe the relationship between what you focus on for your films and the focus of narrative films in general? Also, what are the connections between the Library and Museum films and your film installations?
YF I’ll have to bring up The Fifth Night. The ways it was presented in the Useful Life 2010 show and in the Shanghai Biennial were very different. Even though they share the same subject, their concepts stand far apart. I call the second version in the Shanghai Biennial a “preview film,” while the version in Useful Life 2010 is a “compound-eye film”; a visual experiment to examine how an eye changes in reaction to images. The idea for part two matured before the initial production: capturing the video output from seven monitors that were connected to seven film cameras. Rather than the recorded film stock, this comprised the body of the piece on exhibit. That is what I meant by “preview film”—its raw-image quality, which included viewfinder frames, contradicts the actual results. I mentioned before how the making of Dawn Mist, Separation Faith inspired my artistic evolution: I found that what attracts me the most, and becomes my material, is the process of filmmaking itself. So for The Fifth Night, part II, I also included the last rehearsal and a bad take of each scene, in order to structure the work around the idea of a preview. In terms of content, part one and part two are very similar. Part one is a ten-minute, seven-screen film installation (it follows a clear, standard thread). Part two is a seven-screen video installation running for about 50 minutes—its narrative ends with the failure of the production. Additionally, there are three screens of photo documentation and a documentary projection, for a total of ten screens of content.
In this sense, the idea of “library films” arose in my mind after completing SIBF. On one hand, I felt that I should be more down-to-earth, avoiding forcing merely fantastic, beautiful expressions, or searching for utopian situations. Utopia is everywhere—it exists without our noticing. The Library Film Plan consists of shooting 22 films within the next ten to 15 years. Those films can be like books in a library, stored on bookshelves. I don’t mind if nobody ever opens them. But when opened, they should be interesting to “read.” So this gives me some pressure, goal, and direction. On the other hand, I want to know if spiritual life exists at all. Where is everyone’s spiritual life? I hope these films will help me find some answers. I especially want to make long films. The Library Film Plan should contain really long films, or feature-length films, some sort of forms that can hopefully be called films—film titles with colons, films resembling the idea of films or lengthy documentaries, and so on. I hope to look into people’s spiritual life by presenting and developing these ideas.
LZ You have a concept of reading film by watching it, but your final concern is whether people have a spiritual life. What you do drastically clashes with traditional film education. You challenge film conventions in your own unique way. Can you elaborate on your choices?
YF I have had an increasingly bigger budget, and thus a larger crew, each time, from SIBF to Dawn Mist, Separation Faith to The Fifth Night. My production teams look more and more like a standard-size, professional film crew. Sometimes I joke with my DP and other crew members, “Hey guys, looks like we are making a movie! We totally look like a professional film crew!” But I also keep asking them: “Do you think we are making a movie?” They say, “Of course we are making a movie.” I highly doubt everyone believes it, though. Here is what gets tricky: it’s a rhetorical question. Even though people who have collaborated with me for the longest time might still possess their own ideas of what a movie should be, I hope they are on the same page with me. If we see The Fifth Night as a little midnight theater, then part one should show the night before midnight, while part two should show the early morning after midnight. It’s the same location. The same time. The same theater. The focus of part one is to create a world where boys and girls meet and part randomly, like in a dream. We achieve this by applying regular shooting techniques, including sliding, panning, tilting, pushing, and pulling. The camera constantly moves to show individual young boys and girls in a meditative state in the middle of a small plaza at night. Moving cameras enhance this sense of loneliness: every night, there is only one person. Every night, there is only one soul wandering. The boys and girls meet with and part from one another through writing. Their encounters are brief, without deep exchanges. Maybe it is just part of the fantasy. What happened exactly? Or does it just look familiar?
LZ Why did you decide to use seven cameras and monitors for shooting The Fifth Night? Why not ten, or five?
YF Five is an odd number. Does a night look familiar? The piece is led by questions like these in order to build a particular atmosphere. On set, except when directing my actors and coordinating with my DP, I spent a long time gazing at all the monitors to oversee what was going on. But when I looked at them, I felt like I was watching a different movie. This excited me, because all the imperfections seemed to belong there. Booms in the shot, noises on set, bloopers, and mistakes mixed with actual dialogue became glamorous on the monitors. So I couldn’t help but wonder: What are we really monitoring? Why do we need to decide what’s good or bad? What are our standards?
LZ This takes us back to our discussion of the discarded takes from Dawn Mist, Separation Faith. Are these thoughts related?
YF Of course. However, The Fifth Night pushes this thinking further by making certain narrative changes. One change was driven by an alternate use of rehearsals. As directors, we judge what works by referring to what’s on the monitor—this is why there is always something fake about a piece of work. In rehearsals, we refer to actors’ performances on the monitor to make sure they work and end up in the final film. Yet the process itself can actually be part of the piece. I am interested in the realistic documentation on the monitor, before the real shoot. It inspires me. The best energy is there.
LZ But then why would you still make a version—part one, for the Useful Life 2010 show—that does not include any bad takes? I feel it is quite standard. It looks like a narrative film presented in the form of a seven-screen installation.
Yang Fudong, The Fifth Night, part two, 2010, seven-channel HD-video installation, black-and-white, sound. Total running time: 50 minutes.
YF I did this group show, also called Useful Life, with Xu Zhen and Yang Zhenzhong in a warehouse on Dongdaming Road in Shanghai, in 2000. It was a critical show for us. Ten years later, Lorenz Helbling, the owner of ShanghART, proposed that the three of us do a show again called Useful Life—it seemed timely to me. It was an opportunity to showcase our creative energy, ideas, inspirations, and potential. What were the other two artists doing? Would it be a show filled with everyone’s current work or a retrospective and nostalgic show? Each of us followed our conceptual and artistic development and presented something that made me very proud. The Fifth Night is a conceptual breakthrough for me; it’s more than just any piece of work.
LZ To be honest, I have mixed feelings about your work’s qualities. On one hand, I am very impressed by how smooth and slick your films look. Your seven screens unfold in front of an audience, neatly resembling seven scrolls. Your technical sophistication, mise-en-scènes, and skill directing actors are just amazing. Yet here lies my confusion: if you are already perfect technically and conceptually, are there other possibilities we can see in your work? I remember our previous conversation about Estranged Paradise (1997–2002), which carries a particular aesthetic: your very own signature work with the lens and soft-focus issues. However, we do not see anything like that in The Fifth Night.
YF Like you said, I produce images that “carry a colon.” If I make more or less the same work within a number of years, then how would those who are familiar with my body of work overcome their aesthetic fatigue? Going back to my previous state of mind and the methods I used in Estranged Paradise is absolutely impossible for me. Right after shooting each film, including SIBF, I suddenly become aware of the fact that the internal state I am in at that time is never going to return. The only way is to keep going forward. But how? It makes it feel necessary to overcome my fear, face reality, and gradually experiment with what I have never before tried.
LZ And this strengthens your style and aesthetics?
YF Yes. Does The Fifth Night look like No Snow on the Broken Bridge? Or is Dawn Mist, Separation Faith stylistically linked with SIBF? Such worries are warnings to me. My audience sees my work and reacts to it in a direct way. If I pretend that I am moving forward stylistically but actually am not, it doesn’t work for me. I have to be honest. I do not want to just talk about how I innovate when I move forward. What’s important is to truly reflect on my process, interests, and advantages and think about how I can apply them to my art.
LZ I would like to talk about synchronization in your work. In First Spring (2010), the program you collaborated on with Prada, you mixed up different time periods as well as different people’s identities, while in The Fifth Night, in the same location, seven young people pass by one another briefly and appear on separate screens. Did you purposefully conceive of the design for both pieces before the shoot?
YF When I produce visual work, I can barely make out what exactly is in my head. I want to make sense of it, and capture it with some clarity, even though it is full of ambiguity. When I was working with Prada, I vaguely sensed an urge to improvise. At the beginning, I was not sure what time frame to choose. It could span from hundreds of years to thousands. Would it be long enough? In this undetermined time frame, what kind of people would come out? Are they from the Song, Yuan, Ming, or Qing dynasty? What about modern youth? They would be on set with these “period people.” The set is such an artificial environment that there must be a key to breaking down its essence and mystery. Maybe the key was a suspension wire for Geng Le (the mainland’s famous lead actor) and some of the foreign models. It wasn’t only for the sake of safety; it was something penetrating the line between reality and fiction. A lot of my friends argued that they were not convinced by the mixed time periods; they experienced difficulty entering the story in order to believe it. But why believe it? That is my point. I don’t feel like explaining it too much. Let the suspension wire explain it. It is totally inevitable to see the impossible and the fake coexist on set. This approach was carried into the production of The Fifth Night.
In college, I worked on a set as an assistant art director. We turned a Western chapel into an elementary school, a school that transitions from the pre-liberation to the post-liberation era. The set was entirely fake, but, mixed with the original old campus, it appeared very real. It took a couple of days to achieve each look: before the liberation, during the Cultural Revolution, and during the ’80s opening-up policy. One rainy day, during a break from working on the set, it suddenly turned sunny. The sunlight shined on the wall of the fake school. It looked so fake that it looked real! That incident stirred a lot of things inside of me and has inspired me since. Regarding creative aspects, sets explain the awkwardness of a narrative. There is no distinction between the real and the unreal. They are equal. A lot of things are so unspeakably evasive . . . but you can feel them.
LZ Do memories affect your creativity?
YF Each time I’ve decided to make a project, I have had a vague conception of the general direction I’d like to take. For example, during the shoot of Dawn Mist, Separation Faith, I knew I wanted eight or nine shots, but I was unsure about their cinematic feel. Maybe I was uncertain of how it would feel to escape from a city, as those young people do in the film. Instinctively, I have a tendency to go for perfection and beauty. That is why I wanted to create the feel of a stage at the plaza between the two buildings at the Shanghai Film Shooting Base before I figured out what I was doing on set. I have a lot of appreciation for Yin Xiaoming, my excellent production designer, who built a lighthouse-style structure with a spiral staircase. He was able to design a set based on my ideas, which weren’t clear until much later. I also had hoped to shoot night scenes in the woods so that it would look like a prop forest. Again, it was a matter of budget. I also wanted synchronic and fluid images, which could be moving cars, horses, pedestrians, lights, sound, or whatever. It was very vague. Images of young blacksmiths setting up the fire and pounding on the steel came much later. At that point, I only knew that there would be a few boys and girls walking around. But I had not yet decided how to shoot it.
Yang Fudong, Dawn Mist, Separation Faith, 2009, 35 mm, black-and-white film.
LZ It took you three days to complete the shooting?
YF The preparation of the shoot took about 20 days. Finalizing ideas and pre-production did take some time, but it went by really fast. We rehearsed for two days and started shooting on the second night of rehearsal. We shot for a whole night. The first two days were very tiring; we did not get much rest. Coordinating, preparing, and adjusting took a lot of energy since we had seven cameras, seven cinematographers, a DP, and additional crew members.
LZ Did you shoot the seven screens separately or all together? How many individual takes did you do for each shot?
YF They were shot simultaneously. About four takes for each shot. Once we did one take, it seemed impossible for us to stop. No matter if we were ready or not, we would play back the first take and check for problems. And there could be a lot of problems: the dolly track was in the shot, actors missed their cues, or the composition was not right. We stopped then, made adjustments, and did the second take around midnight.
LZ In the final cut, did you pick the best moments from those four takes and mix them together, or did you pick the best take?
YF I picked the best take.
LZ Which take was that?
YF The third one. Actors’ performances and the images seemed to breathe. It was relatively difficult to get something like that with very complicated mise-en-scène and coordination between the seven cameras shooting simultaneously. In my previous experience, usually the best take has been the first or second one. It is incredible how my judgment evolved from one take to the next: I would feel secure at take two, but I would hardly stop there. I’d do a new take. Then I’d start forcing things to happen. When I was doing SIBF, I did 20-something takes for a shot and ended up picking the third one for the final film—actors’ performances and energy would go downhill at a certain point, even though we assume it has ups and downs. It is very subtle. A good take is not achievable through the director’s pursuit only; it also depends on the actors’ contributions. They are humans and they express their emotions and feelings in acting. It would not work if the energy were flat. In some way, the performances became even more important than in traditional narrative films. For one scene, one of my actors was supposed to walk alone at night. I told him that walking was his “dialogue.” His lines were his body, his eyes’ expressions, hand movements, and breathing. He had to understand this in order to “say his lines” with grace and rhythm in front of cameras for ten minutes. You see, making a successful picture really depends on an actor’s understanding and talent.
LZ I was very moved when the girl in The Fifth Night walked out of the willow forest.
YF If there is an invisible script, every character has his or her own individual story. The girl on the fourth screen slowly walked down the spiral staircase and occasionally stopped to look down to the plaza. Then she resumes her walk and eventually sees two elderly people on a sofa. To me, this has a sense of narrative. Here, everyone is alone at night, thinking. It is as if everyone wanders around a gallery in solitude. Everyone sees one another. Yet they look at each other as if they were just staring at statues. The girl keeps walking toward a young blacksmith and an old man. She walks by the willow trees and looks out into the distance. She leaves a trace the way a brush leaves a stroke on a long-roll painting. A boy standing by a horse near the willows approaches two other young men in the plaza. They just met two girls who did not stop for them. Yes, everyone walks in his or her own orbit at night. There is no real communication; no words are exchanged at all. What links all this together? It is the sound of footsteps, hammering, horses’ hooves, and street traffic.
Yang Fudong, Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, part III, 2005, 35 mm, black-and-white film transferred to DVD. Total running time: 53 minutes.
LZ Your work usually unfolds from a freeze-frame, but this was not the case in The Fifth Night. You mentioned before that the freeze-frames had something to do with painting and photography.
YF Yes, I do feel that a painting or a photograph is like a frame from a movie, or a movie with only one frame. I used to be a painter. Making paintings is like directing a film in a personal style. I wanted to visualize a frozen second of my heart. Would the remnants of that second attract me more? I feel the need to dig deep and figure out what I really like. It is important for me to know what I should do with images and how I can move further.
LZ From my perspective, your shooting process is a filmmaking process, while your way of conceptualization and presentation challenges conventional film-watching experiences. SIBF and some of your older short films are definitely in the experimental-film category because of their length, narrative and nonnarrative content, and presentation. Yet your more recent works are film installations. The way they were shot is their only connection to film; it would be difficult to identify them as films in the traditional sense in light of their viewership and exhibition format.
YF I have been thinking about the idea of a film for a specific exhibition space and what form it would take. What makes me happiest is people’s acceptance and understanding of films with unlimited formal possibilities. My films are open to interpretation, like Cubist paintings. Some Cubist works share qualities with Futurist works. Then they are Futurist Cubist, right? Can we use similar terms when it comes to films?
LZ Maybe what is important is not whether your films should be called films or some other thing. Perhaps it is more critical to find guidelines and boundaries within your own work, or in relation to other people’s work, which I find that you seem to have great interest in. Otherwise you would not keep asking yourself, Are they films? Especially when it comes to the Library Film Plan, the term itself cannot be a flat one. It is not as simple as if we were to go to a library to pick up a book.
YF The unknown down the road interests me and gives me energy. What more can I do? I am curious about the answer. The Library Film Plan is a broad term. The underlying question I want to ask is whether people have spiritual life or not. That is something that constantly gets me going. Personally, I hope ideals and beliefs exist.
For instance, there are three spiritual states I was trying to articulate in Dawn Mist, Separation Faith—the belief in faith, the escape from faith, and the loss of faith. I also wanted this to relate to the danger of approaching a poisonous snake and the uncertainty that the morning mist brings. I wanted to know if such danger and uncertainty had anything to do with spiritual life.
LZ There is another hidden theme in several of your works, that of “returning to reality.” What is the reality you are facing, let alone the spiritual life you are talking about?
YF First of all, what is reality? What is reality to you? What’s surrounding you? What are your thoughts on reality? What’s your inquiry into reality? There is a lot that we can digest and reflect on. In terms of paintings, are those orchids in Chinese paintings real? What do you see besides orchids? From ancient through modern times, what metaphor do orchids embody? Sadness, loneliness, worries about the country and people? This makes things interesting. How can we make sense of reality? We might imply certain things, beat around the bush, or throw in thoughts from a completely different angle. All these approaches are valid and have a lot to do with our daily life.
—Li Zhenhua is a writer, curator, producer, and artist living in Beijing, Shanghai, and Zurich. He is a founder of Laboratory Art Beijing and Mustard Seed Garden Productions. He has participated in numerous new-media art symposiums and has curated exhibitions for galleries and museums worldwide, including the ZK M Karlsruhe, the Walker Art Center, and the Guangzhou Museum. A recent art project of his can be seen in the online exhibition Beam me up, organized by plug.in, a new media art institution based in Basel, Switzerland. Visit his website here. Photo by Marianne Burki.
ART.SY
Yang Fudong
Chinese, born 1971
Available works
Yang FudongThe Evergreen Nature of Romantic Stories (5) (情氏物语之四季青 5), 1999
Yang Fudong is a pioneering Chinese filmmaker best known for his “Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest” (2003-7), a series of silent, multi-part, black-and-white films that follow a cast of attractive Chinese youths through several surrealistic scenes. Drawing influence from his training as a painter and photographer, as well as the work of Jim Jarmusch, Yang’s films are sequences of slow-moving, tableau-like dreamscapes, more evocative of moods and impressions than any clear narrative. As he says: “There is no result, no answer.”
W MAGAZINE
Yang Fudong in Shanghai.
Beyond Tomorrow: Yang Fudong
Beyond Tomorrow: Coming soon to a biennial near you, five up-and-coming artists attracting international attention.
As the son of an army officer, growing up in a military compound on the eastern edge of Beijing, Yang Fudong didn’t get much exposure to art. “I wanted to be a soccer star,” the soft-spoken 36-year-old explained recently, while chain-smoking Double Happiness cigarettes at a café on Shanghai’s gallery-lined Moganshan Road. “But one day when I was eight or nine the ball hit my eye, and I got badly hurt. While it healed I couldn’t do any physical activity, so I calmed down and started to draw.”
Yang is now one of China’s most sought-after artists. In the past five years his photographs and film installations have been the subject of solo exhibitions in nine different countries, including a show last year at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. His most significant project to date, the five-part film Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, is prominently featured at this year’s Venice Biennale. Pensive and elliptical, it’s shot on 35mm in black and white and follows a group of melancholy young Chinese as they linger in various settings, from a mountaintop to the seaside to Shanghai, creating an effect that New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl has called “part scroll painting, part neo-Antonioni, and altogether entrancing.”
Many Western critics have interpreted Yang’s art as expressing the uncertainties of young people in a country where the past is quickly vanishing. The artist himself, however, resists such analysis. “It’s great that China is developing so fast—great for everyone. Why wouldn’t it be?” he says. “I think what’s important is to face life earnestly, and that has something to do with my films.”
Robert Storr, curator of the Biennale and dean of the Yale School of Art, thinks Yang’s films hark back to the French New Wave of the Sixties. “There’s a kind of poetic naturalism in what he does,” Storr says, “that one doesn’t often see in Western art these days.” Yang admits he was affected by auteurs like Truffaut, Godard and Fellini, his favorite, but not in the usual way. Even as a student at the elite China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, he rarely had access to European films. Instead, he says, “I read a lot about them in books, and had to imagine what the films would be like. Before I saw Fellini’s 8½, I had my own 8½ in my head.”
It was at Hangzhou, from which Yang graduated in 1995 with a degree in oil painting, that he first saw the possibilities of the new media. “All I knew before Hangzhou was realistic painting,” he recalls. “Then, in my first year there, a visiting German art critic gave a seminar on modern art, including a lot of photography and film and video art, and it opened my eyes.”
In 2000, after a few years working for a video-game company, Yang was able to focus on his art full-time, buoyed by the increasing international demand for contemporary Chinese works. In the new entrepreneurial China, even Yang’s father, who the artist says raised him with strict military discipline, approves. “He used to be against my being an artist,” Yang says. “He thought I wasn’t doing the proper thing with my life. But when my art started making money, he started to feel that it was a good thing.
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DB MAGAZINE
Yang Fudong
Contemporary Elegies
He’s taken part in documenta and the Venice Biennale, he’s shot clips for Prada: Yang Fudong is considered to be one of the most internationally prominent Chinese artists working today. Even while they address contemporary social issues, his elegiac images seem to spring from dreams. Kito Nedo met with Yang Fudong in his studio in Shanghai.
Passersby float gracefully in the air; holding umbrellas for balance, they teeter on streetcar cables: when you do an Internet search for Yang Fudong, one of the first things you find is the ten-minute film he shot for Prada. In First Spring, created for the spring/summer collection of 2010, Yang uses perfectly arranged, cool images reminiscent of the black and white aesthetic of thrillers from the 1930s or 1940s or the films of the Nouvelle Vague. At the same time, Yang’s protagonists, dressed from head to toe in Prada, assume delicate dancers’ poses as they move around the cityscape of Shanghai. Yesterday and today become superimposed: two young western dandies, alienated and arrogant, stumble like somnambulists through streets, restaurants, and stores populated by eunuchs, court ladies, and post-communists. Contrasting with their uncertainty is a pair of Chinese lovers seemingly imbued with tragedy beneath their obviously elegant exterior. In the midst of expensive fabric, looks are exchanged between East and West in surreal slow motion. In evocatively lit spaces, old and new China seem interwoven, united in a palimpsest. A place so thoroughly different from the soulless luxury malls of the fast-paced Chinese metropolises, where one can always count on finding a Prada boutique.
For the production of First Spring, the artist, who was born in 1971 in Beijing, entered the realm of fashion and advertising and took the various motifs in his work to the extreme: the youth and beauty of his actors, a black and white aesthetic borrowed from film noir, the references to the various ancient Chinese traditions of calligraphy and ink painting, Zen philosophy and the grace of bodies engaged in martial arts. First Spring, however, also envisages another phenomenon: the symbiotic relationship between the luxury goods industry and the art establishment so blatant these days in China’s museums and magazines.
Something of the playful, enigmatic aura of his film works also surrounds the artist himself, who, after some hesitation, invited me on a May afternoon to his huge, grandly empty studio in Shanghai. “Art and fashion make up a big family, but their backgrounds are different”, explains Yang. He’s wearing a simple black T-shirt and a silver tank chain bracelet; he speaks quietly and concentratedly, with his long hair falling into his face. Now and again he lights a cigarette or pours some more green tea into two small bowls. To some critics, Yang is the Chinese video artist familiar even to those who know nothing about Chinese video art. But what does this actually say about his work? In any case, no one is as good at the retro-futurist game with a sublime pop idiom as he. That’s the secret of his success. Yet Yang does not seem in the least bit arrogant; he’s all understatement, a cross between confidence and introversion.
Although Yang works primarily with video and photography, his works often have that undefined quality and emptiness of the landscape paintings of old Chinese masters. Yang, however, admits that “tradition is not one of the things I think about from day to day. Sometimes it influences my work—sometimes, certain decisions depend on completely different things. Right now, for instance, I’d like to film a boat on the Suzhou River in Shanghai. Why? It’s simple—because the flowers are in bloom on the river banks.” That might sound pretty mystical at first, but this work stands far above the mere satisfaction of a western public’s exotic cliché. In fact, the success of Yang’s films and photographs is based on their roots on both sides of the divide: in a Western and an Eastern aesthetic, in the present as well as in the past.
Yang had his international breakthrough in 2000 with his three-part photo series The First Intellectual: the work portrays a young disheveled office employee in a suit standing on the median of a busy street. In all three images, he’s holding a brick in his hand—the gesture, however, remains ambiguous. Is he about to throw the brick? Did someone just throw it at him? Is he threatening someone, or is he himself being threatened? The man’s face is smeared with blood, the direction of the aggression and its motivation remain unclear. Who is this intellectual represented here as the first of his kind? The idea seems vague. Making art in China means “to hold onto one’s ideals”, says Yang. The ones who do can be called “intellectuals or artists.”
Critics soon regarded Yang to be an artist who investigates the lifestyles and problems of China’s new young middle class: “His characters are slaves to feelings of uncertainty and vagueness that they don’t know how to react to because they don’t know whether the problems stem from society or from themselves,” wrote the Italian sinologist Claudia Albertini. Yet Yang’s films and photographs are neither sociologically nor politically offensive. His characters are sketched in a way that remains far too undefined to be pinned down in that way. Yang’s work does not embody the harsh criticism of the Chinese political system to be found in the work of his colleague Ai Weiwei, who aggressively investigates the results of corruption in the construction industry or the manipulation of Internet forums on the part of the state security.
It soon emerged that Yang resists any direct interpretation of his work, for instance in the case of An Estranged Paradise, which premiered in 2002 at documenta 11 in Kassel, curated by Okwui Enwezor. With its spare dialogues and atmospheric images, the 76-minute video tells the story of a young couple in Hangzhou, a city of six million inhabitants that lies south of Shanghai; the couple is driven by a perplexing agitation. It is the story of a society that, since it was opened to the world by Deng Xiaoping in the late seventies, has undergone “three revolutions at the same time” (Konrad Seitz): industrialization, urbanization, and the transformation of a socialist planned economy into a free market economy. One of the film’s central questions seems to address the price individual human beings have to pay for these gigantic social upheavals. Their perception of the paradise dawning as the country enters a Chinese century is that of the disenfranchised.
Yang had already begun this work in 1997, when after finishing his art education in Hangzhou he returned to the capital Beijing for three years, where he had grown up as the son of an army officer. A lack of funds finally forced him to put the film project aside until the documenta invitation gave him the opportunity to finish An Estranged Paradise at last. “As a young artist, I didn’t place very much importance on the market at the time. The public’s expectations weren’t very important. The idea I had at the time was that when I want something, I’ll make it.” It came close to being the early end of an artistic career. After three years of unemployment, in search of money, Yang went to Shanghai in 1999 to work as a programmer for a French software firm.
What made him start working in film right after graduating from the academy in Hangzhou, where he was trained as a painter? “All paths lead to Rome,” Yang says. To him, images are the expression of passion. “Originally, the drive to express something led me to study oil painting. But I quickly realized that video and photography were better media for me.” The fact that Yang had an experimental relationship to the curriculum already while studying can be gleaned from the notorious action Living in Another Space from 1992: in his sophomore year, Yang remained silent for three months, communicating only through messages written on all sorts of surfaces. The experiment is said to have inspired very little enthusiasm among his professors at the time. Since last September, Yang has himself been teaching at the art academy in Hangzhou. He doesn’t care to pass judgment on the younger generation he teaches at the academy. Today’s students have completely different options and are confronted with entirely different questions than his generation was. As the head of the “Experimental Image Studio,” he mainly tries to train the students’ aesthetic consciousness. “Two methods are important to educate an aesthetic consciousness: you have to develop independent thinking and you have to have a positive attitude towards the work. That not only means hard work, but stamina, too.”
Yang himself is the best example for developing stamina. His most important work to date, the five-part film opus he has been completing since 2003, Seven Intellectuals in the Bamboo Forest, comes across like a Chinese interpretation of a Beckett piece. Yet the films and photo series of the same name from the Deutsche Bank Collection are based on an old legend: seven wise men retreat to lead an ideal life far from all worldly temptations. This time, however, the artist has transposed the story into today’s China. For the “Intellectuals”, Yang sent a group of young urbanites to climb the Huangshan, the holy “Yellow Mountain” in the Anhui Province, to the sea, and to work with farmers in agriculture. Thus, his elegiac images function as metaphors for inner and outer emigration, like the dreams of a society that no longer has any time to dream.
Yang himself calls his films “abstract cinema.” He’d like to conjure up thoughts and emotions lying dormant in his viewers’ minds and souls. Hollywood was also once called a dream factory—so what sets his work apart from commercial film? “In Hollywood, films are produced to keep the factory running. The director is just another worker in this factory. On the other hand, as an artist, he has to do what he believes in. There’s a huge difference in that.” Does this mean he would never show his films in a cinema? Yang laughs at this question. Is it because it implies an old-fashioned separation between art and film and the artist’s impotence in the face of commerce? Or, perhaps, because it insists on the (typically western) dissolution of contradictions, for instance between clever critique and opportunism? Who knows? Where else but in process-oriented China can the old dichotomies become mixed up again—and by whom, if not someone like Yang? The options are there, and the artist keeps them open.
YANGFUDONG, No Snow on the Broken Bridge, 2006, 35 mm film transferred to DVD. Courtesy the artist and ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, and Marian Goodman, Paris/New York.
Yang Fudong’s films are best characterized by their understated elegance and the range of narrative strategies they employ. “No Snow on the Broken Bridge” at Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) was an austere, thoughtful look at a pair of works by the celebrated 40-year-old Chinese artist. The exhibition, striking in its attentiveness to design and the particular needs of the works displayed, paired No Snow on the Broken Bridge (2006), a series of eight screens placed in a semicircle in the foundation’s main gallery, with the single-channel Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003–07) in its theater annex.
Drawing on traditional Chinese literature, philosophy and art, Yang rejects linear storytelling by creating a collage of imagery that leads in many directions at once. Visual threads feed in and out of themselves or between multiple screens, generating a reverie in which time slows, and small details, such as a leaf trailing across water, become significant as the camera pans across distant horizons. Yang’s contemplative and extravagantly layered style reveals his original training in painting, which he pursued before taking on film in the late 1990s. In his fusion of tradition and modernity, one might also read something of the tussle with globalization in China today.
No Snow on the Broken Bridge takes its title from a popular touristic view on Hangzhou’s West Lake commonly referred to as “Lingering Snow on the Broken Bridge.” For Yang, the city has nostalgic significance as the place where he spent his formative years as a student at the Zheijang Academy of Art (now known as the China Academy of Art) between 1992 and 1995. He notes in the exhibition catalog that Hangzhou is renowned for its breathtaking mountain scenery, and its reputation bears out in the finished work. Filmed in black-and-white 35 mm, No Snow comprises loosely interconnected scenes and narrative fragments. Interpretation is left open to the viewer.
During the 11-minute film, eight young men and women take a meandering walk, admiring the surrounding scenery. Nothing definitive occurs. Without narrative resolution, one might become frustrated, but it is this very sense of expectation and longing that sustains the film. “It is what is going on in their hearts and minds that is important,” Yang explains. With the thawing of the snow, spring’s arrival becomes a metaphor for the budding hopes and ideals of the young protagonists. There is an elegiac nostalgia to the film—17th-century Chinese gowns, worn by the cast members, are interchanged with suits, with both sexes made up to resemble 1920s dandies—yet the film is firmly rooted in the present. No Snow draws parallels between Yang’s characters and modern Chinese youth; both groups drift between past and present, seeking relevance in a rapidly evolving China.
Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest takes its title from “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove,” a folk narrative in which a group of third-century CE Taoist scholars, artists and musicians would gather at a bamboo grove and enjoy each other’s works, escaping everyday life. Created in five parts over five years, Seven Intellectuals was presented at SCAF on a single screen, with one part shown each week through the exhibition’s run. The film follows seven characters disillusioned by urban life as they set out to change their identities and move to a rural village, and then to an isolated island. In the final chapter, the intellectuals return to the city, resigned that it is where they belong, but also hopeful about overcoming their disillusionment.
Yang describes the completion of Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest as a turning point, and his subsequent works have grittier frames of reference. In 2007, Yang shot East of Que Village, a menacing film about starving wild dogs living in desolate areas of northern China—focusing on a grim present rather than an idyllic past. “I can no longer make films with that utopian feeling,” Yang explains. “How to give thickness to the work is what I will be giving thought to in the future.” In some ways, Yang’s artistic trajectory mirrors that of his protagonists—maturity brings with it complexity and greater awareness about life. To maintain one’s youthful courage in a new social realm is the challenge that lies ahead. This exhibition faithfully teed up that future for him.
CURRENT ISSUE
YANG FUDONG
essay by Davide Quadrio and Noah Cowan
Yang Fudong, New Women, 2013 (production stills)
It seems easier for Yang Fudong to speak about what he is not rather than determine the elements that define him and his work. Critics and scholars, however, continue to insist on identifying potential influences and historical motivations within his work, often spanning through the history of visual culture in China. The fervor he inspires becomes especially fraught when we try to speak of him simultaneously as a filmmaker and a visual artist, participating in various schools of aesthetic creation, perpetuating and enlivening various traditions in both roles. Yang Fudong himself has strongly suggested in recent interviews that a great deal of current scholarship around him may well be ill-founded, if not misleading. This problem has many sources, not least of which involves exhausting taxonomic issues between film and visual art, born from a crucial half century developing separate critical and analytical tools, a situation still hobbling European and American thinking about the relationship between the art forms. Artists like Yang Fudong, by their example, continue to shatter these barriers but scholars have, sadly, yet to catch up.
Confusion around Yang Fudong’s work also springs from the unusual nature of his practice. He truly does occupy a world “between,” and not just between the traditions of cinema and visual art. Even within contemporary art he sits uneasily between the sculptural practice of an older video art tradition and the attention to visual detail associated with many current media art makers, alternating straightforward single-channel installation with the invention of complex sculptural environments where the moving image functions within a larger structure. Consider I Love My Motherland (wo aiwo de zhu guo) (1999), an early work exhibited as part of “Art For Sale,” the 1999 show that launched a renaissance in Shanghai’s contemporary art world. The multi-channel installation features five television sets and a small booklet. The spatial relationship between them appears casual at first but the elements, upon further reflection, take on richer meaning only within their spatial environment. A year later, he presented Tonight Moon (Jin Wan De Yue Liang) (2000), a big screen with small monitors embedded and surrounded by reverberating televisions, creating a powerful audio-visual experience, but within a sculptural context. Another more recent example is General’s Smile (2009), a key work from his first solo exhibition in China. He fuses a new multiple-channel installation with older works to create a composite historical narrative that hangs together with spatial logic. The negation of space is also a tool for Yang Fudong, as in his most recent installation, New Women (2013), which demands a museum-style approach, with screens flush to the wall, erasing the sculptural tri-dimensionality to (mis)direct us towards the painterly.
This unusual practice created tension between the artist and the Chinese art world. His early work lived in the underground with many others until the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, the first time video art was presented in a Chinese public institution. The work was marginalized into an offsite exhibition space (“Useful Life” was presented at a temporary space on Dongdaming Road), alongside Xu Zhen and Yang Zhenzhong. Soon after he became an international art star, but despite winning the top prize for Flutter, Flutter… Jasmine, Jasmine (tianshang tianshang, moli moli) (2002) at the 2002 Shanghai Biennale (where his work was highly popular with throngs of young audiences), Yang Fudong did not receive a solo show until 2009, at the private Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai. The entirety of his photographic works were only brought together in 2012 by Shanghai’s OCT Con-temporary Art Terminal (OCAT), also a private institution. Why was his work so resisted in China? We contend that Yang Fudong is that rare animal — a self-conscious hybridizer of form who is not interested in contemporary obsessions with collage, pastiche, appropriation and conceptualist pranksterism, hallmarks of much celebrated contemporary art associated with China. Film — its history and cultural specificity — is not a distanciated object of contemplation or satire for him, but rather represents a series of instruments in his toolbox, neatly alternating and blending with similar devices from the visual arts. This forces him into a subtler interplay between the political and the abstract compared to many of his peers.
Yang Fudong, East of Que Village, 2000
Yang Fudong began his career making highly political work, such as the above-mentioned video installation I Love My Motherland and the photo series The First Intellectual (2000). Even some of the more rarely seen works such as City Light (cheng shi zhi guang) (2000) or Robber South (Dao Nan) (2001), and the sublime 35mm piece Backyard—Hey! Sun is rising (hou fang—hei, tianliang le) (2001) carry a political charge. However, his political approach does not relate especially well to the more radical activist stance assumed by artists like Ai Weiwei. The politics present in these early works is an echo, a distant discomfort submerged into a narrative of poetic images. Back then, Yang Fudong was working in a very primitive context, with tiny budgets and myriad technical problems related to 35mm film. And yet there is a clear sense that he managed to create a genuine break with the still-predominant political pop and cynical realism styles of the 1990s.
These works reveal not only an uneasiness related to contemporary Chinese society, but also his role as an artist and intellectual within it. Politics would gradually recede into a gentle undercurrent within his production in the years to come, freeing him to adopt a more rarified approach to the haunting questions of contemporary life. In this gradual drift, he resembles artists of the past, the scholar-painters retreating to the mountains during the Ming Dynasty or a more contemporary artist, such as the early 20th-century painter Pan Tianshou, who situated himself within the world — we are not discussing hermits here — while standing apart from it. As Yang Fudong’s work progressively moves away from the immediacy of volatile early Chinese video art, he finds solace in the world of pure aesthetics and a passionate attraction to beauty. His work re-sonates with pre-1949 Shanghai, namely the cinematic and photographic tropes of a city and society “in between” — colonial and colonized, modern and feudal, progressive and nostalgic. This brings Yang Fudong into dialogue with the concept of haipai, a term associated with the decadent aura of Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, a city of transgression: Chinese yet international, a place of contradictions. It was a place where art, culture and political liberties commingled with corruption, brutality and decadence. The exhilarating combination of the seamy with the sublime made the city a magnet not only for entrepreneurs but also lost souls and refugees from around the world. Pushing the limits of tolerance and freedom, Shanghai defined a certain kind of a social, political and creative culture of the 20th century. Its creative energy, sexual charge and political ferment were a crucible of change for a society tentatively emerging from the stagnation and humiliations of the imperial era. The haipai style is typically set against the more traditional, Beijing-centred and inward-looking jingpai. Yang Fudong sits uneasily between both; he continuously distances himself from Shanghai, claiming that he always feels like a Beijing-born foreigner in the city, while nonetheless embodying its most treasured historical tropes. Talking about haipai is to state a historical connection with the past spirit of the city. But, even when we speak of Yang Fudong as a haipai artist, we acknowledge how difficult it is to trace his artistic lineage and the motivations for his practice. At this stage of his development as an artist, he has in effect built an island of silence around his work, far away from the noise of contemporary Chinese life, and only tentative and occasional in its more obvious political connections to today.
But where did this impulse originate? There are some very important clues in the most unusual and striking work of his career, an actual film conceived to be screened in a movie theater, the only one in his canon with that provenance. Estranged Paradise, produced between 1997 and 2002, sees Yang Fudong challenged by longer-form narrative storytelling, looking back at the history of representation in Chinese art for visual tools to evoke an enigmatic yet critical representation of China’s rapid modernization and the internationalizing currents that came in its wake. These tools, deployed often tentatively here, will form the core of his more famous, bold installation works that follow. Estranged Paradise premiered at Documenta 11 in 2002. It features many of Yang Fudong’s signature motifs — crisp black-and-white 35 mm cinematography, storylines that blur contemporary visual tropes with more traditional aesthetics, as well as homages to and revisions of genre cinema, referencing the early work of his influences Jean-Luc Godard and Jim Jarmusch. The film also reflects his early studies as a painter, and functions to bring the principles of painting into the cinematic form through a long prologue concerning subjectivity in Chinese landscape painting. After that moment of rich misdirection, the narrative begins, set in the city of Hangzhou where Yang studied at the China Academy of Art. Estranged Paradise takes as its focal point a restless young man, Zhu Zi, following him as he aimlessly wanders through the city. Through a series of distinct vignettes, Yang depicts Zhu Zi’s inability to find comfort in friends, lovers or his environment as a reflection of the existential difficulty of China’s “nameless generation,” cast adrift during the rapid changes at the turn of the millennium.
Yang Fudong, Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest Part 2, 2003 (production still)
Although made independently of them, Estranged Paradise shares many clear and precise congruencies with the early films of the so-called Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmakers. In particular it shares an enormous affinity with Wang Xiaoshuai’s The Days (1993), which is about an intellectual couple deciding if they should stay together, and He Jianjun’s Red Beads (1994), which chronicles a young man’s psychotic breakdown. These films are both considered seminal works in contemporary Chinese cinema. Their status comes in large part from what came before them — the increasingly opulent, largely rural-based and highly abstracted films of Fifth Generation masters such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Tian Zhuangzhuang. The international success these filmmakers enjoyed allowed them to exploit larger and larger budgets, despite their vigorous critiques of Party behavior during the Cultural Revolution. However, their historical and geographical focus meant that they ignored the new realities of China’s rapidly evolving urban environments. Party studio heads did not encourage films and television shows on the subject either, aware of the sensitivities around mass migration and the end of guaranteed employment, although a few films were produced that portrayed the cities, most notably Xie Fei’s prescient Black Snow (1990). After the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989, all portraits involving the life of cities came to an end and the result was the creation of a vibrant underground scene still present today. The Days and Red Beads, like Estranged Paradise, were made on shoestring budgets and relied on the skills and cooperation of friends. They are shocking works for a student of Chinese cinema: they don’t draw on established precedents from Chinese film genres and instead borrowed far more heavily from the black-and-white European cinemas of Alain Resnais and Michelangelo Antonioni to create an overwhelming sense of malaise and ennui — truly the first time China can be said to have had a haipai cinema since the 1930s. Their lo-fi, grainy aesthetics and casual approach to synched sound were also something new; Chinese cinema before that was extremely precise, even when resources were scarce. But more importantly, and most saliently, their politics differ radically. These films jettison the metaphor of an individual standing in for all of society, instead identifying characters in uniquely imprisoned circumstances that force them to retreat from engagement with the world and focus on their own less-than-satisfying inner lives. When collective politics enter the equation, they do so unheralded, through the inaction of characters and the subtraction of meaningful interactions in their lives, their languor a murmured contemplation of an imagined utopian moment hazily located in the past. They take at their core the duty, or lack thereof, an intellectual must assume in a society found wanting, a society that pushes him away. In Estranged Paradise, we see Yang Fudong picking up on these same themes, but through the lens of a visual artist, a painter enthralled with cinema but prevented from making films due to the economic and political circumstances of his age. By the time he made Estranged Paradise, Chinese underground filmmaking had moved on from the stripped-down thematics of the early 1990s to re-embrace traditional genres (He Jianjun’s Postman, 1995) and social activism (Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu, 1997), but through a similar low-key, gritty lens. Yang Fudong brings much to this conversation; by announcing a need for structure in their artistic enterprises in the prologue that begins Estranged Paradise, he challenges his contemporaries in Chinese filmmaking to strongly reassert an aesthetics of beauty into their practice while also calling for the reintroduction of Chinese cinema history through his casual referencing of pre-1949 masterpieces Spring In A Small Town (1948) and Street Angel (1948) in the scenes that follow. The films that follow his intervention, though it is less than clear that any of them would have seen it, indeed broaden their aesthetic scope to feel the influence of Chinese cinema, from Wong Kar-wai’s Hong Kong baroque styleand Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000) to post-1949 “17 years” Mainland cinema like Jia Zhangke’s Platform (2000).
For Yang Fudong’s own personal practice, the film appears to reorient him in a new direction, amplifying the themes proposed in Estranged Paradise to create his signature large-scale installations like No Snow On Broken Bridge (2006)and Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003–2007). He now seamlessly marries artistic tropes of the past to the present, but increasingly works from the position of the distant scholar with a mission to discover new and innovative ways to connect to forgotten Shanghai, and its cinema, in order to make sense of today. His new work, New Women, presented at and commissioned by TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, suggests an end to this process and perhaps a new direction. This multi-channel silent movie is an ode to the erotica of the haipai moment, but also connects it to a greater history of visual art from ancient Greek sculpture to 19th-century Classicism and up to the modernist flourish, captured in its essence by Polish deco painter Tamara De Lempicka and her circle. The pastiche is disturbing and seems to confound the artist’s careful interplay between past and present. But in fact it opens it up, freeing the artist again from the shackles of his own practice to consider a greater range of historical experience. This poem through images in a sense forms a new, broader tableau, leaving haipai behind for something both more ethereal and worldly.
The October Painting 1 and 2, Los Angeles, California by Vincent Johnson
The October Paintings – numbers 3 and 4 – The October Paintings (a new paintings project by Los Angeles based artist Vincent Johnson) – the paintings are at the underpainting stage. They will be allowed to dry in my studio and then a layer of white glaze will be added. That will dry. Then I will work on each work, layer by layer, allowing each layer to dry, or be worked or added to as I desire. Our car Roxy is in the background, her back arched as she defies a mushroom to move.
The October Paintings (a new paintings project by Los Angeles based artist Vincent Johnson) – paintings 3 and 4. Taking advantage of the fabulous weather in LA.
The October Paintings – paintings 1 and 2 (a new paintings project by Los Angeles based artist Vincent Johnson) – with our cat Roxy playing in the back yard.
October Paintings 5 and 6, underpainting – layer one – October 31, 2013. Van Nuys, CA
The October Paintings, 2013, paintings one and two, under painting layers, Los Angeles, California, by Vincent Johnson
The October Paintings – paintings one and two (a new paintings project by Los Angeles based artist Vincent Johnson)
The October Paintings are comprised of nine 4×4 foot oil on canvas paintings. These are the largest canvases I’ve worked on since my return to painting after two decades of working with photography. I was trained as a representational painter at Pratt Institute and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. My graduate degree is in critical theory and painting from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The works are a continuation of my exploration of the history of art materials, combined with using the layering techniques of representation to create singular new abstractions. This is my first time working on several large-scale canvases at once. What I’ve noticed over the years is that every significant work I’ve made eventually finds its way into the world, often through unanticipated opportunity. The works are visceral, visually rich, emotively engaging. They follow the six large-scale paintings in the COSMOS SUITE that is also ongoing and was started in 2012, and the NINE GRAYSCALE PAINTINGS in LOS ANGELES that I completed in 2011. In my work I have always sought to reach for and produce imagery that lends itself to a serious consideration of the ideas that come to the mind when approaching the image. For me these works seek to substantiate themselves in the world, to be both evocative and provocative, beautiful and remarkable in both concept and realization. As these works are fully developed I will continue to record the journey am taken on with them, until they are complete.
OCTOBER PAINTING – Scumble glazing, second phase of the paintings.
October Paintings – scumble glazed and drying in studio.
During the scumble glazing layer of the painting, where I knock down the underpainting colors so that the next layers can deliver a fabulous punch, I thought about the magnificient, enormous paintings I saw this summer at the Menil Collection in Houston, by Cy Twombly and Mark Rothko. The high seriousness of Rothko’s chapel paintings was amazing. Yet on that day it would be my discovery of the excellence of Cy Twombly as a painter of the primordial and playful sublime that captivated my attention in his purpose built stand alone large gallery space that showcased his work far beyond the circular swirls I know but care nothing for at all. It seems that when Twombly switched to specific subject matter – whether it be abstract landscape paintings, where he had simply marvelous deep rich green works, or his overall giant abstractions, filled with playful and powerful singular and exciting moments, both satisfied in wonderful ways. I was fortunate to make two trips to Houston this summer. The Late Byzantine to Today was a marvel to behold; I also had no idea that the Menil is a world class repository of Surrealist art. I was also privileged to see the James Turrell retrospective at the MFA Houston, which itself will be expanding soon with a major new building devoted to modern and contemporary art. The Menil Collection itself will be adding seven new individual artist showcase galleries, which combined with their traveling shows will make Houston as important a center for seeing art as anywhere in the US outside of New York. I am looking at the nine 4×4 foot October paintings in my studio. Its the largest body of work I have ever produced as a painter. I can see so many possibilities in this new direction. It gives me reason to continue to push to get my work into the world, despite all of the difficulties I have experienced. Painting makes me see beyond my own being.
Vincent Johnson
Los Angeles, CA
Vincent Johnson: CV
Vincent Johnson received his MFA in Fine Art Painting from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California 1997 and his BFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986. He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was selected for the Baum: An Emerging American Photographer’s Award in 2004 and for the New Museum of Contemporary Arts Aldrich Art Award in 2007 and for the Art Matters grant in 2008, and in 2009 for the Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists project artist. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Art in America and Art Slant, and in over fifty differen publications in total. His photographic works were shown in the inaugural Pulse Fair Los Angeles. He has shown recently at Soho House (curated by ForYourArt, Los Angeles) and at Palihouse (curated by Los Angeles Nomadic Division), West Hollywood, and most recently in Photography 2013 at Another Year in LA gallery, West Hollywood. Johnson’s work has appeared in numerous venues, including The Studio Museum in Harlem (Freestyle (2001, The Philosophy of Time Travel, 2007, and The Bearden Project, 2011-2012), PS1 Museum, SK Stiftung, Cologne; Santa Monica Museum of Art, LAXART, Las Cienegas Projects; Boston University Art Museum; Kellogg Museum, Cal Poly Pomona; Adamski gallery of Contemporary Art, Aachen; Lemonsky Projects, Miami. His work has been published in over a dozen exhibition catalogs. He is currently working on a series of self published photography books that will focus on the U.S. cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Cleveland, Ohio, Miami, Florida and New Orleans. Johnson is also creating abstract paintings for his Cosmos Suite, that explores the practice of painting with the knowledge of historical painting practices. He is using the techniques of representation to create remarkable works of abstract art. At Beacon Arts Center, Los Angeles, he recently exhibited an entire suite of grayscale paintings. In the Spring of 2013, he exhibited a series of edgy photographic works at Another Year in LA gallery, West Hollywood, California. His work will be exhibited in the inaugural Open Project exhibition at the Palace of the Inquisition, Evora, Portugal, opening July 15, 2013.
Vincent Johnson lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Here are three new paintings are added to my Cosmos Suite of paintings 2.24.2013. These are the 7th, 8th and 9th paintings created in the Cosmos Suite. They are also the 4th, 5th and 6th large scale paintings in this body of work.
These Cosmos Suite paintings are created using various experiments in media and paint application. Johnson has done substantial research into the area of the history of painting materials and there use, and employs this knowledge in the production of his work.
There are now a total of nine paintings in the Cosmos Suite. Six of the nine paintings are thirty by forty inches in size. Three of the paintings – the originals in the suite, are twenty by twenty four inches in size. Each painting takes about a month to create as there is a three week drying time between the first and second layers of the painting. As the suite grows there will be additional sizes including larger works.
Cosmos Suite: A Meeting Between Two Figures in Space
30×40 inches, oil on canvas by Vincent Johnson in Los Angeles (2013)
Poured Liquin in center of painting, added stripes of pure paint color to canvas, mixed with paint rags, dabbed till thick paint areas are leveled out.
Large areas of vertical yellow in painting. Layered canvas in thick paint in certain areas. Reminds me of seeing Gerhard Richter’s painting retrospective in London in the fall of 2011.
Cosmos Suite: State and Grace
30×40 inches, oil on canvas by Vincent Johnson in Los Angeles
Used sponges on face of painting. Layered canvas in thick paint.
Poured Liquin in center of painting, added stripes of pure paint color to canvas, mixed with paint rags, dabbed till thick paint areas are leveled out.
Reminds me of Florida’s mysterious beauty
Shape is of Florida in part
Cosmos Suite: State and Grace – final – complete 2.25.2013
30×40 inches, oil on canvas by Vincent Johnson in Los Angeles (2013)
Cosmos Suite: State and Grace – final – complete 2.25.2013
30×40 inches, oil on canvas by Vincent Johnson in Los Angeles (2013)
Cosmos Suite: Astral Melodies
30×40 inches, oil on canvas by Vincent Johnson in Los Angeles (2013)
used sponges on side and surface of the painting. used large brushwork. Layered canvas in paint.
Poured Liquin in between stripes of pure paint color to canvas, mixed with paint rags, dabbed till thick paint areas are leveled out. Started out with thick brush in corner to mix, abandoned this quickly.
Sensing jazz standards here – floating fields of opulent pure romantic color
Vincent Johnson received his MFA in Fine Art Painting from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California 1997 and his BFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was selected for the Baum: An Emerging American Photographer’s Award in 2004 and for the New Museum of Contemporary Arts Aldrich Art Award in 2007 and for the Art Matters grant in 2008, and in 2009 for the Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists project artist. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Slant and many other publications. His photographic works were most recently shown in the inaugural Pulse Fair Los Angeles. His most recent paintings were shown at the Beacon Arts Center in Los Angeles. His 2010 photo project – California Toilet, Filthy Light Switch, is in exhibition at Another Year in LA gallery in West Hollywood through early March 2013. His work has appeared in several venues, including The Studio Museum in Harlem (Freestyle (2001, The Philosophy of Time Travel, 2007, and The Bearden Project, 2011-2012), PS1 Museum, Queens, NY, SK Stiftung, Cologne, Germany, Santa Monica Museum of Art, LAXART, Las Cienegas Projects, Boston University Art Museum, Kellogg Museum, Cal Poly Pomona.
Below are some of the other paintings I have completed since returning to painting in the summer of 2011.
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Vincent Johnson is an artist and writer in Los Angeles
New Abstract Paintings: The Cosmos suite (2012)
Golden Dream (2012), part of the Cosmos Suite of paintings
California Toilet, Filthy Light Switch (2010) by Vincent Johnson. Archival Epson print (Private Collection, Miami, Florida). I provided this image as I realized its clear similarity to Golden Dream, which I completed a week ago in my studio in Los Angeles.
Two at Night (2012) from the Cosmos suite of paintings, Oil on canvas, 30×40 inches
Cosmos. Oil on canvas 2012 by Vincent Johnson
Cosmos Red Yellow Green. Oil on canvas 2012 by Vincent Johnson
Green God. Oil on canvas 2012 by Vincent Johnson
This new painting series is part of my ongoing exploration of painting materials and techniques from the history of painting. The works combine knowledge of painting practices of both abstract and representation paintings. The works concern themselves purely with the visual power that paintings can do through the manipulation of paint. Some of the underpaintings are allowed to dry for months; some of those are built dark to light, others light to dark. None are made in a single setting. Most are worked and reworked using studio materials. Each new series takes a different approach to the painted surface from how the paint is applied, to varying the painting mediums. This suite concerns itself with the layering of paint by building up the surface and altering and reworking the wet paint with studio tools.
Two larger paintings will be completed and photographed on Sunday, July 15, 2012 and posted here.
Vincent Johnson, Grayscale painting: The Storm (2012). Oil on canvas, 30×40 inches, created in studio in Los Angeles, California
Vincent Johnson, Grayscale painting, Snow White/White Snow (2012). Oil on canvas, 30×40 inches, created in studio in Los Angeles
Vincent Johnson is an artist and writer in Los Angeles
Vincent Johnson, Nine Grayscale Paintings, Beacon Arts Center, Los Angeles, (2001). Oil on canvas. Each panel is 20×24 inches.
photograph of silver paint on my hands in studio, Los Angeles, during the creation of Nine Grayscale paintings.
Vincent Johnson – in Los Angeles studio working on Nine Grayscale Paintings, 2011
Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi poses in front of one of his paintings, entitled Autoportait, on Oct. 17, 2013 at the Museum for Modern Art in Paris, ahead of the first restrospective of his work in France.
Ahead of his extraordinary solo exhibition in London, we put our hands together for expressionist Zeng Fanzhi. No longer just the superstar of New China, he’s now one of the most important artists in the world…
It is easy – at a quick glance, but too fast for a quick study – to look at the work of the recent generation of Chinese artists, and see generic paintings full of representations of Chinese citizens beleaguered by the state. I remember walking around the first Saatchi show of Chinese art in its new space in Chelsea in 2008, and thinking how similar many of the figurative images of people were. These artists all shared a childhood spent deep in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, and it showed.
Then, when I first saw the work of Zeng Fanzhi a short while later, I was mesmerised by the mad, gurning faces of the people in his pictures. Their eyes looked like the eyes of Asian Bratz dolls, like images from a comic-horror graphic novel. They looked as though they were in pain, as though there was no other way to feel. If you looked closer, Zeng’s characters all appeared to wear the same uniform, too, or at least versions of the same type of uniform. Then I found out why: most of the suits his male characters wore were based on a Tom Ford Gucci cut. Even his 2010 portrait of Francis Bacon sees the painter standing, facing forward, dressed in a blue Tom Ford suit. Look at the images from his famous “Mask” series – where the figures look anxious and fretful, scared of their own shadows – and you see men in beautifully tailored Tom Ford suits, for all the world looking as though they’re dressing for their own funeral.
When I asked Zeng about this, when I met him in his enormous, modernist studio on the outskirts of Beijing this summer (he is a neighbour of one of China’s other famous contemporary artists, Ai Weiwei), he nodded, thought a while, and then said, in the considered manner he has, “When I was 20, in 1984, everyone in China wore a Mao suit and nobody wore a [Western] suit, so that’s why at that time they were a very curious thing for me. At the end of the Eighties and at the beginning of the Nineties, everyone began to wear [them] and that’s why in my ‘Mask’ series, a lot of people wear suits. Also, at that time even the leader of China, for example, began to wear suits and ties, so that is basically a reflection of that.”
Zeng surrounds himself with beautiful things, and to walk into his studio is to immerse yourself in the good life. When you enter you’re crossing a Rubicon, walking from a world that is very quickly learning to adapt to intense consumerism, to one where the transaction has already been made. You can smell the luxe. A slight man, Zeng dresses soberly in designer polo shirts, black Armani slacks and the most expensive limited-edition Nike training shoes. He wears a Rolex Submariner with a green dial, smokes Cohibas (he has designed his own humidor) and drinks vintage Bordeaux (the empty bottles line up across the top of his wall-long fridge). He has Hermès soap in his lavatories, and plays Mozart and Bach whenever he has visitors. On his bookcases are little framed photographs of the artist from the likes of Robert De Niro (a huge fan of his work), the Hong Kong businessman and socialite Sir David Tang, basketball player Kobe Bryant, restaurateur Richard Caring and the chief executive of ICAP and former treasurer of the Conservative Party, Michael Spencer. Not for him the grabbed sandwich or cappuccino while he paints; every meal is prepared by his resident chef. In his self- portraits, of which there are many, Zeng stands proud, stoic, with characteristically oversized hands and head. In his paintings, as in real life, he has immaculate fingernails.
He is surrounded by the trappings of success – there is a framed cover of Chinese GQ which has him on the cover – and it is a success he wears lightly. The New China might be rapidly overtaking the Old West, but the surface smarts and the new money indicators of wealth are all here to see. He has what you could call a healthy obsession with sophistication.
“I am very curious about fashion, about style, especially in the Nineties, because at that time everything was new to us. Before the Nineties in China, there were virtually no fashion magazines here and the fashion magazines that we got were usually out of date, and some were more than a year old. At that time those magazines were very new and we were very curious about it all, because we didn’t have the opportunity to go abroad and see what things were like for ourselves. Now, gradually, we have started to have many more choices. You come to a point where there are so many choices that you don’t know how to make a choice.”
Speak to any contemporary art panjandrum and they’ll tell you that the art world has moved on from China, but no one appears to have told Zeng Fanzhi. Fêted by the rich and the powerful, right now Zeng is one of the most important artists in the world. In May 2008, “Mask Series 1996 No.6”, a large oil-on-canvas diptych of youths wearing absurd masks and Red Guard scarves, was auctioned for £6.2m, one of the highest prices ever paid for contemporary Chinese art.
Stylistically he is an expressionist (he studied the German expressionist painter Max Beckmann at art school, and fell in love with the way in which he worked), and unlike the didactic work of many of his artistic peers – Yue Minjun, Zhang Xiaogang or Zhang Dali, say – Zeng’s work is introspective, reflecting psychological pain instead of projecting political statements. His early works were often brutal metaphors (as in his pessimistic “Hospital” series), but his “Mask” series, for instance, represents the existential isolation that many of China’s white-collar city dwellers felt during the Nineties, one of the most turbulent periods of social churn in the New China. His work in those days could easily be described by one word: trauma.
“I do not want to focus on the political elements of my artwork,” he says. “In my work, I would like to focus on diversity, not only political ideas. The ‘Hospital’ paintings were more political, as I was living in that kind of environment [he lived opposite a hospital, inspiring him to paint harsh, ugly representations of the way in which China was changing]. And at that time I was an angry young man, so that’s the way I looked at the world, that’s the way I expressed the world in my painting.”
In these paintings I’m trying to focus on a belief in love, because I think China needs this right now
Zeng Fanzhi
He has hardly become emasculated, though, and his recent work is as dense and as haunting as ever. It is certainly more complex. In some respects, he is a chameleon of styles, chopping and changing to suit his mood – something that is obvious from the new works on show at the Gagosian Gallery in London next month. His current style is one that owes as much to symbolism as it does to expressionism, although it is very much the artist’s own. These paintings involve layers and layers of extraordinary washes and carefully woven lines, an intricate, fascinating process that Zeng has captured exhaustively on film. The work is dense, immersive, and is a world away from the cartoon-like images of his early pieces. They are huge – intense, beautiful, occasionally monstrous. There is violent tension in them, and what initially look like benevolent landscapes are soon shown to be anything but. They are gargantuan, noisy pictures, the kind that in the wrong hands could cause you to die of decibelic exposure.
However, there is another twist in these pictures, another layer of meaning as, having experienced the turbulence, what Zeng wants you to take away is something else again. These works are almost of a religious nature. “These paintings are different because my heart has changed, or at least my understanding of it,” he says. “In this series of paintings I’m trying to focus on a belief, not just a religious belief or the belief of beauty, but a belief in love, because I think China needs this right now.”
These newer pictures are some of the most labour-intensive I’ve ever seen. It might seem silly to say so, but you can see the enormous amount of work involved, you can see the whole process in front of you, begging to be admired. It’s almost as though he were building a forest right in front of you, from scratch, from the undergrowth to the trees, filtered through the eyes of Steven Spielberg.
“They are not real landscapes,” he said, when quizzed about them by art website ArtZineChina.com. “They are rather about an experience of miao wu [marvellous revelation]. Miao wu does not fall into the common categories of cognitive process. Neither has it anything to do with reason. Instead of making something obvious, miao wu brought about an unmarked world, which underlies the deep strata of life, both novel and familiar. In this respect, the miao wu type of revelation concerns a disclosure of what is already embedded in the artistic ego – the revealed world is there, but it is unfamiliar and amazing. Miao wu constitutes a restless journey of discovery.”
The inspiration for these works – and especially for the new “Praying Hands” painting – comes from Albrecht Dürer, the German painter who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the Northern Renaissance, and whose work involved highly detailed preparatory drawing. Dürer came from a large family in Nuremberg, and had 17 siblings. He had an equally talented brother, although the family could only afford to send one of them to art school. Albrecht’s brother decided to stay at home, so the painter was forever in his brother’s debt. “Dürer’s brother made a sacrifice, going to work in the mines instead,” says Zeng. “He worked in them for so long that eventually his hands became almost handicapped [crippled with arthritis]” – making it impossible for him to follow in his brother’s footsteps.
This is a famous story, and one that resulted in a famous picture, Dürer’s best-known work, “Study Of The Hands Of An Apostle”, an homage to his brother that immediately became known as “The Praying Hands”. It is Zeng’s version of this painting that is the centrepiece of the London show, a beautiful, recalibrated interpretation of one of the most famous images from the Renaissance. Zeng’s is a lush affair, a vast expressionist jungle of colour and line, the result of months and months of painstaking brushwork, with the artist working up to 12 hours a day. It is one of the most extraordinary things he has ever made.
Zeng is as excited by the growth of the art scene in China as he ever was, although he is circumspect about the huge numbers of artists now plying their trade in the galleries in Beijing’s famous 798 art district, and in the major galleries in Hong Kong.
“I think China is more a centre of excellence than ever before,” he says, “and is much richer and much more diverse, not like in the past. This world used to be kind of simple; now there are a lot of contemporary artworks, although the quality is not always what it could be.”
Zeng is now a very rich and famous man, and keeping the world at bay becomes ever more problematic. He enjoys his spoils, but lives a relatively quiet life. He’s only done three interviews in the past year, and has become obsessive about guarding his work from the media. He knows how much his reputation is worth, and knows not to flood the market. He has reached the stage where he no longer has to explain his work – he reckons this happened about two years ago – and spends most of his time in his studio, going over his paintings with ever more intricate brush strokes.
Zeng’s work is introspective, reflecting psychological pain
“I hope to give people a view of my work while they are looking at it so I don’t have to explain to them what it means,” he says. “Death obviously plays a huge part in my work, because that is everyone’s abiding fear. Which is why expressionists used it so much. Death is truth, one of the few undeniable truths. It is one of the classic themes, and every artist feels differently about it, as every person does.”
Zeng Fanzhi enjoys his success, and uses that success to push himself. You can tell that he is as worried about complacency as he is about the effects of fame.
“In our country, I like to think we will still focus on the energy of creating. That is so important. Because here in China, when you have fame, people will try to destroy you. For example, if you look at Weibo [China’s Twitter], there will be some very horrible things on it. So fame and the larger environment is not always that helpful. You have to stay true to your heart, and try to ignore the outside world.”
Having said that, the outside world has informed all artists of Zeng’s generation, because without that world, he wouldn’t be an artist at all.
“Sometimes the feeling of repression can motivate my desire to create, that is to say, there is a feeling of rebelliousness and I can express these kinds of rebellions in my artwork in a much more positive way, conducive to my creation. Living in an environment like Europe where everyone is free, where is your motivation? My national identity is everything. In terms of inspiration and creativity. These days, my life here in Beijing is more important than ever.”
Zeng Fanzhi’s solo exhibition runs from 20 November 2012 – 26 January 2013 at the Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London WC1. gagosian.com
read our profile on the artist and collector, from the November 2013 issue
By Aimee Lin
Fly, 2000, oil on canvas, 200 × 179 cm. Courtesy Fanzhi Studio, Beijing
Interior view of the artist’s studio in Beijing, Photography by Wang Tao
Hare, 2012, oil on canvas, 400 × 400 cm (in 2 panels). Courtesy Fanzhi Studio, Beijing
Zeng Fanzhi’s studio is situated in the northeastern suburbs of Beijing, in Caochangdi, where he has a small and quiet courtyard of his own. The studio is luxuriously spacious. Adorning one wall is a 4 × 4m oil painting, Praying Hands (2012), that was shown as part of the artist’s solo exhibition at the Britannia Street branch of Gagosian Gallery London in 2012.Another canvas, recently finished, has been crated up for shipment to Paris, where Zeng’s next solo show, at the Musée d’Art Moderne opened in mid-October. And while this is by no means his first solo museum show, it is his first midcareer retrospective and will present, in reverse chronological order as you walk through the exhibition, more than 40 of his paintings and sculptures from 1990 to the present day.
Zeng has always been a media favourite. Over a dozen awards and trophies are lined up under his studio window
Zeng enjoys considerable fame in China as a result of the prodigious numbers his work has managed to realise at auction. In Sotheby’s 2008 Hong Kong spring auction, a 1996 oil painting from his celebrated Mask series was sold for the astronomical price of $9.66 million. According to ArtPrice’s latest tally, of the ten highest-priced contemporary artworks sold at auction in Hong Kong between July 2012 and June 2013, three were by Zeng.
A few days before the writing of this article, Sotheby’s Hong Kong announced that the Belgian collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens had put Zeng’s The Last Supper (2001), the largest and best-known painting from the Mask series, up for auction. Most of Zeng’s highest-selling works have come from this series.
Zeng has always been a media favourite. Over a dozen awards and trophies are lined up under his studio window, while photos of his appearances at various commercial events frequently appear in a range of magazines. A year ago, however, Zeng grew tired of the excessive social appearances and media exposure, and has since made a successful effort to keep a lower profile.
Indeed it was only via social media postings that we found out that this May he flew in a cinema magnate’s private jet to Venice, where two large-scale – 2.5 × 10m – oil paintings from his 2010 Landscape series are on show in the central hall of François Pinault’s Punta della Dogana, a showcase for the Frenchman’s private collection of contemporary art.
It’s become widely known that in early 2012 Zeng rented the top floor of one of Beijing’s many highrises, and subsequently converted it into a 1,000sqm art space called Yuan Space. In old Chinese, the word yuan means the origin, the beginning and the source – a concept that one may project the idea of art onto. Several important shows have already been held there. The latest was a group show featuring young, local, experimental artists curated by Chinese contemporary art expert Karen Smith.
The summer slot featured painter Yu Youhan, who, despite having played an integral role in the development of contemporary Chinese art (from his early Expressionist painting in the 1970s and 1980s to his Pop art in the 1990s, as well as his significant abstract painting throughout his career), for political reasons has never had a large-scale retrospective.
At the beginning of 2013, Yuan Space exhibited more than 30 works from Zeng’s private collection. These included drawings on paper by masters such as Balthus, Caspar David Friedrich and Giorgio Morandi. This show, Dancing with Virtuoso, has now toured to the Nanjing University of the Arts.
Indeed, Zeng is a prolific collector, with an interest that spans multiple fields. In addition to paintings, drawings and photographs, he also collects furniture, picture frames (dating from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century) and objects that were popular with ancient Chinese literati for their ludic and relaxing qualities (writing instruments, rocks and ‘natural’ sculptures such as root formations).
While deeply infatuated with traditional Chinese culture, as an oil painter Zeng is profoundly influenced by Western art. Accordingly, he owns three oil paintings by Morandi and over 100 drawings by European artists from various periods. Zeng has a photograph of a small oil painting in his Samsung mobile. It’s a recent purchase – an 1880s painting by Paul Cézanne that was once owned by Paul Gauguin. After several changes in ownership, the little painting is now on its way to China.
The exhibition space and Zeng’s collection are a rehearsal for a larger dream: to build a museum (also to be called Yuan). The seeds of all this were sown over 20 years ago, when the artist, in the company of prominent collector Uli Sigg, visited the Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland.
There he saw, for the first time, art lovers entering an open and friendly space in which they could appreciate art at their own leisure. It was “extremely beautiful and very moving”, he tells me. Of course, during the 1990s, Zeng couldn’t, in his wildest dreams, have imagined that he might one day build a museum of his own.
Things are different now. I pick up a copy of Japanese architect Tadao Ando’s latest monograph from Zeng’s coffee table; a rendering of the Yuan Museum is on its front cover. It is to be built beside the Liangma River, next to the Embassy District of Beijing, with Ando’s signature plain concrete adorning the riverside facade. The museum differs from Ando’s earlier, more disciplined neomodernist works, however, in that the surface features a curve that is sober, calm, but extremely difficult to construct.
“I had planned to announce the museum project next year, but Ando couldn’t wait to publish his architectural design in his new book. Many people who’ve seen the book have come asking questions,” Zeng says. This single building, situated among high-end hotels in the middle of the city, is currently under construction but due to be structurally complete by 2014 and open a year later.
There is an elaborate scale model of it in Zeng’s studio that can be deconstructed layer by layer like a Lego castle. Zeng holds a red laser pen and excitedly explains the design and future plans for each section of the building.
‘I expect that over the next 20 years, half my income will be invested in this museum’
What’s more surprising to me is that the construction of this 8,400sqm building (with three floors above ground and three below) is being funded in full by Zeng. Ando’s designs are known for their technical complexity and the difficulty of their subsequent construction. Zeng, on the other hand, expects the absolute best in everything he does (when he needs anything, such as security, lighting, or museum-quality elevators, he typically requests quotes from the three top companies in the world).
As a result, and even as the construction progresses, it is no longer possible to estimate the total investment. “I want to invest on my own, I won’t seek sponsorships and additional investments from my friends until they see the building is up. That way I can be more convincing. On the other hand, I expect that over the next 20 years, half of my income will be invested into this museum.”
Finally, he has made mention of his friends. Arguably, in China Zeng is the artist with the largest group of wealthy friends. He consults for art collections of the superrich – both in mainland China and in Hong Kong – and frequently advises them to buy Western classics from auctions. He has influenced a number of the region’s wealthy who have no prior knowledge of art to begin their collections with classics from the canon of Western art-history that are valued well beyond the means of ordinary collectors.
Upon completion, the temperature- and humidity-regulated Yuan Museum would be the perfect place to exhibit the masterpieces he helped others to collect. Indeed, he has made detailed plans for the museum’s long-term operations. He wants it to be home to Chinese, Western and contemporary art (as well as a section dedicated to experimental art), and he wants to accomplish this without state sponsorship.
For any institution in China to hold an exhibition of classical Western oil paintings, the country’s current laws require an astronomical sum in customs bonds alone, which is why the vast majority of such exhibitions are organised by official cultural institutions backed by diplomatic assistance and state guarantees. For Zeng’s dream to come true, he and his friends must create a heretofore nonexistent art sponsorship tradition among the nouveau riche, where wealthy individuals provide sustainable support for expensive but nonprofit museum projects.
Strangely, my conversation with Zeng rarely broaches the subject of his own art. Zeng, like many other painters, is cautious when talking about his own work. When it comes to specific works, he prefers to talk about techniques. People have described different phases in his work with statements such as ‘mixing a contemporary history of China with the artist’s personal history’, ‘signs of Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Balthus and Jackson Pollock may be found on his canvas’, or ‘a combination of Expressionism, abstractionism and traditional Chinese landscapes’.
A constant sense of loneliness and tragedy may be found throughout Zeng’s paintings and sculptures, perhaps reflecting a sliver of his innermost world. And no matter how hard he works to expand China’s collection of Western classics, Zeng prefers to think of his style as an extension of traditional Chinese paintings. People are whispering that he has created a series of paintings on paper, which, while unseen by the world, are a combination of Chinese literary painting traditions and his unique brand of abstractionist language.
Zeng has said in another interview that he ‘[likes to] wander outside of the physical world, to be mired in his own thoughts, while still facing this world with sincerity. When [he] was still a student, life was simple. There was no marketplace or galleries… it was a wonderful time.
To Zeng Fanzhi, it is still a wonderful time, maybe a better one, with the marketplace, the galleries and a midcareer retrospective in an art museum. Zeng, as a sensational individual case study, demonstrates how a Chinese artist, starting with paintings, conquered the modern art marketplace and galleries to become a worldwide influence, and further exerted his personal wealth and authority among the superrich to realise his dream of building a world-class museum.
Zeng proclaims that in the library of the future Yuan Museum, visitors, especially students, will be able to view original paintings, sketches and photographs by Western masters up close (as long as they make an appointment), because to his mind there simply is no replacement for seeing originals up close.
When he talks about the library, just as when he talks about his museum and collection, I can almost imagine the Zeng Fanzhi of his youthful years, when he started to study oil painting with a neighbour in his hometown Wuhan. That young man, full of energy and passion for art that borders on zealotry, is a distant memory. But the same spirit is still very much alive in the middle-aged man, as he sits quietly beside me.
It was 1998 and Zeng Fanzhi was struggling to find somewhere to display his paintings. The market for modern Chinese art barely existed. Thanks to help from a fledgling local dealership, Zeng was able to hang a piece in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Shanghai and was extremely pleased when the painting – “Mask Series No 6” (1996) – was sold to a visiting American tourist for $16,000.
Just 10 years later, the same piece was bought for more than $9.7m at a Christie’s auction in Hong Kong, making Zeng the most expensive living Asian artist – and the American tourist who sold it a very happy man.
Today, Zeng is an icon in the art world and his career provides an analogy for the development of modern Chinese art – perhaps even Chinese society – from the utilitarian social realism of his childhood during the cultural revolution to the giddy heights of global art fairs and seven-figure price tags.
I arrive for our interview at his studio in a famous artists’ district on the outskirts of Beijing to find a serene oasis away from the frenetic pollution and noise of the Chinese capital. An inner courtyard of rock fountains and tall trees leads into an entrance hall dominated by an exquisite wooden Buddha that pre-dates the founding of the Tang dynasty in AD618.
The hall opens to the left into Zeng’s high-ceilinged, sunny studio, lined with enormous finished and half-finished canvases, casually strewn with millions of dollars worth of his creations. Puffing on a fine Cuban cigar, Zeng is busy poring over a small-scale model of his latest exhibition with a visitor – a retrospective of 40 of his paintings and sculptures from 1990 to 2012 that will open at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in October.
An assistant makes me a delicious espresso in an adjoining kitchen area and after a few minutes Zeng appears, apologising profusely for making me wait and for the lack of air conditioning in the studio, which he explains is necessary so his paint can dry slowly.
He is studiously polite and almost shy in his quiet, unassuming manner but his eyes look like they are made from granite and, as we sit down in the courtyard garden with a pot of expensive Chinese tea, I have the feeling he is used to people flattering him. “We are now in a period of great artistic flourishing in China,” he says. “In the 1990s there was almost nothing but there are countless artists now. Whether they are all good is not for me to say, only people in the future will be able to tell.”
This is a typically oblique and diplomatic comment from Zeng on the millions of counterfeiters, copycats and opportunists drawn into the Chinese art boom by the promise of great riches. Rather than waste time thinking about the state of the art world or even the state of the wider world, Zeng says he focuses almost entirely on his painting. He insists that every brushstroke must be made by him so he ignores weekends, spending 330 full days a year in his studio, with just one month’s break during the oppressive Beijing summer for travel with his family.
This dedication to art has been the defining feature of Zeng’s life since he was born to workers from a printing factory in 1964 in the gritty central Chinese city of Wuhan. “I was always a bad student; I refused to let people force me to study things I wasn’t interested in and I was only really interested in drawing and painting,” he says.
Wuhan was one of the epicentres of the cultural revolution, which began in 1966 and involved the persecution or death of millions of intellectuals, professionals and officials. Because his parents were designated as working class, Zeng’s family was relatively safe but they were not left unscathed by the convulsions ripping through society.
“At the time everyone wore the same clothes but my mother liked beautiful things and she sometimes wore a bit of colour – some pink flowers on her clothes,” he says. “For that she was persecuted for her ‘petit bourgeois sentimentalism’ – that experience affected my whole family deeply.”
Although Zeng’s mother was not subjected to the violent “struggle sessions” that others endured, the family was publicly humiliated by groups of militant Red Guards who pasted denunciations outside their house and at his mother’s factory in the form of “big character posters” – large handwritten banners of Chinese calligraphy that have been used since imperial times to protest or spread popular messages.
Not long after this, the young boy began to draw for pleasure and for a break from the monotony of formal Mao-era schooling. When he says he was a bad student, Zeng is not exaggerating or dabbling in false modesty. He did not finish high school, dropping out at 16 to work in a printing factory like his parents and taking formal painting lessons in his spare time.
When he discovered there was such a thing as art school he decided to apply but, because of his deficiency in subjects like maths and science, he failed the university entrance exams five years in a row before he was finally admitted to the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in 1987 at the age of 23. “I was lucky that my parents did not pressure me or discourage me; they were very supportive and each year my exam marks got a little better until finally I got in,” he says.
Although all he wanted to do was stay home and paint, Zeng was assigned by the government to work at a fledgling advertising agency when he graduated in 1991. It would turn out to be the dawn of the advertising industry in post-revolution China. “When I started there the only advertising that could be displayed was political slogans but that soon changed,” Zeng says. “I managed to get a big ad contract for the agency and so then I didn’t have to go to the office for a year. I did some of my best work in that period.”
Much of his formal schooling was meant to produce social-realist works in the traditional Soviet style but he also developed an appreciation for German expressionists and, in his brief foray into advertising, he even read books by ad guru David Ogilvy on how to sell beer and shirts. He produced his first major works, including the haunting and grotesque “meat” and “hospital” series, in which his subjects already sported the oversized hands that would become a signature feature of his work.
Zeng was able to quit his job altogether and move to culturally rich Beijing at the start of 1993, after selling his first paintings to Johnson Chang, the renowned Hong Kong collector. Partly on the advice of the influential art critic Li Xianting, Chang paid $2,000 each for four large canvases, an enormous sum of money at that time in China.
Zeng says Chang still has the four pieces, which must be worth multiple millions of dollars today. “At that time those two [Chang and Li] were the most important people in the Chinese art world and they really gave me my start,” says Zeng. “It wasn’t just money, they also gave me confidence.”
In Beijing he found a community he says he could “eat with and play with” and that would later comprise some of the most famous artists in China. He also embarked on a relentless process of renewal and reinvention, adopting and then rejecting new styles at a furious pace. “We consider Fanzhi to be the greatest living artist in China, in part because his visual imagery has changed over and over again,” says Nick Simunovic, director of the Hong Kong branch of the Gagosian Gallery, which represents Zeng outside China. “He’s never satisfied with a single identity and in many respects he’s getting better and better; his art really maps the development of China.”
About a year after arriving in Beijing, Zeng began working on the “mask” series that would eventually make him a multimillion-dollar artist. These pieces used a different style and technique from earlier works and reflected his feeling that people in the capital were hiding their true identities from each other and themselves. Although his mask paintings have been his most financially successful ones, in 2004 his style changed radically again as he directed his efforts to the study of Chinese traditional landscapes and calligraphy.
He lists Romantic painters, German expressionists, Cézanne, Picasso, pop art and Chinese traditional painters as influences but says his own life and experiences are the most important in shaping his work. His latest works are dominated by large, intricately painted landscapes distorted by forests of thorny lines while others contain direct references to some of Zeng’s favourite German painters.
The Chinese art market has been through a few gut-wrenching cycles in the past decade but the prices of Zeng’s work have stayed remarkably stable, Simunovic says. That is partly because he is so well-known in art circles outside China and because the bulk of his works are sold to international collectors.
“The financial crisis [of 2008] was very good for the Chinese art market because it cleared out the speculators and left the real art lovers behind,” says Zeng. “But it had no real impact on me because the price I sell my work for stays about the same no matter what happens in the secondary market.”
In 2011, Zeng’s auction record was eclipsed by a 1988 work from Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang that sold for $10.1m in Hong Kong. But prices for modern Chinese art remain volatile and subject to waves of speculative buying, particularly from mainland China. In post-communist China, anyone who is wealthy is by definition new money, or baofahu (literally, “explosion of wealth people”), with all the materialism and conspicuous consumption that comes with sudden riches.
Zeng has clearly enjoyed the trappings of success – designer clothes, expensive watches – but like an increasing number of the country’s nouveau riche, he seems now to be searching for something more substantive. “When I started out I wanted to earn more and more money and spend it on expensive cars and airplanes but in the last couple of years I’ve really changed a lot,” he says. “I think if everyone is just doing everything for money then this society is finished.”
As he has become richer his life and his tastes have become simpler and these days, he says, his only real indulgences are Cuban cigars and costly Chinese tea. His biggest expense is the more than Rmb10m (£1.04m) he spends each year on running his own gallery, which is intended to support a new generation of young artists by allowing them to exhibit and build their own profiles.
The only point in our interview at which Zeng becomes cautious and uncomfortable is when I ask him about the role politics plays in Chinese art. The world-famous dissident artist Ai Weiwei lives just a couple of blocks away from Zeng’s studio, in a compound that is regularly besieged by goons from China’s ministry of state security. “It’s not that I don’t pay attention to politics, it’s just that I pay more attention to my art; I’m not a political artist,” Zeng says. “Ai Weiwei is my neighbour and I don’t resent or dislike him; he makes his choices and he has his reasons [for doing what he does].”
Zeng’s cigar is almost finished and our interview is drawing to a close but, before I go, I want to know what happened to the American tourist who made nearly $10m from investing in this unknown artist in 1998. “I don’t remember his name but he came to Beijing to see me after he sold the piece at auction [in 2008] and he was very happy because it got such a good price,” Zeng says. “I guess he wanted to see what the artist looked like. I was also happy that he made so much money.”
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ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST
Musée d’Art Moderne Launches a Retrospective of Zeng Fanzhi’s Politically-Minded Oeuvre
Chinese political history meets Pop Art and surrealism in a major retrospective of Zeng Fanzhi’s work now on view at Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne. Coming of age under the shadow of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, Zeng places his personal narrative against the backdrop of China’s fragile relationship with its growing artist community and the influx of Western ideologies. At the exhibition, 40 of Zeng’s paintings and sculptures are arranged in reverse chronological order, ending with the artist’s earliest works created while he was still living in his home city of Wuhan in 1990.
Portrait, 2004
The specter of China’s political instability is everywhere in Zeng’s work—in Tian’An Men, Mao’s abstracted face almost completely obscures Tiananmen Square, the site of the 1989 student protests; in Mask Series No. 6, Chinese students, all sporting the ubiquitous red scarf, wear grotesque masks with absurdly large smiles. But Zeng also draws much of his imagery from the history of Chinese decorative arts, with his landscapes and portraits taking on a fantastical sensibility.
Untitled, 2012
Through February 16, 2014, at Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; mam.paris.fr
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ARTASIAPACIFIC
ZENG FANZHI,Self-portrait, 2011, oil on canvas, 150 × 100 cm. Photograph by Wei Leng Tay for ArtAsiaPacific.
ZENG FANZHI,A Man in Malancholy, 1990, oil on canvas, 110 × 90 cm. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.
Gagosian’s first exhibition by Zeng Fanzhi—incidentally the first Chinese artist to enter the blue-chip stables—provided a surprising overview of recent and early paintings, many from the artist’s collection, ranging from 1989 to several new works completed this year, shown at the gallery’s spacious, new Hong Kong branch.
Zeng, well-known for his series of “masked” figures from the 1990s, continues to set auction records. At Gagosian, the inclusion of earlier works, not for sale but simply exhibition, may have been to offer some background to the auction hype. At Sotheby’s “Contemporary Asian Art” auction on October 3, just a week after the artist’s solo show opened, five of the top ten lots were by Zeng, including Mask Series 1998 No.5, which sold for a reported USD 3.96 million. Previously bought by European collectors, the work of Zeng, alongside Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun and others, is now a firm favorite amongst a burgeoning group of Chinese speculative collectors, who lack diverse local investment options for their sizeable, rapidly-made fortunes and hence are putting money into art.
At the gallery entrance a mature Zeng greeted viewers in Self-portrait (2011), standing confidently in a blue tailored jacket and bright red pants, with characteristically oversized head and hands, his fingers striking a casually interlocked pose. The brushwork is confident, the somber grey-brown tones of the background contrasting the intense oily red—an effect repeated in other portraits where figures are often dressed in some article of eye-catching red. However, the depicted man standing before us, half life-size, seems distant, unable to project his inner world. The characteristic motifs—the mask-like face, smeared quality to the paint, atmospheric drips or washes, as well as heavy, oversized head and hands—signify it is “a Zeng Fanzhi”; but otherwise the academic and distant quality of the work feels like it could be painted by someone else, reminiscent of aristocratic portraits at the root of the genre in Europe. Here the artist becomes just another character in a largely European canon. Similar recent works were portraits of Pablo Picasso and Lucien Freud both from this year, as well as two earlier portraits of Francis Bacon, from 2010 and 2008. In the ostensibly anonymous, Portrait (2009), one also finds patron-collector Uli Sigg, a great supporter of Chinese contemporary artists, in a pale pink shirt.
The eye skimmed easily over such slick portraits, their rich whites, reds and greens, and their lavish frames creating a formal contrast to the raw brown canvas backgrounds, which Zeng has begun to leave untouched. This contrast demonstrated the almost decadent skill of an established artist, sure of his style and prestige at home and abroad.
Yet the highlights were elsewhere, in early works from the late 1980s and early 1990s. A Man in Melancholy (1990) is a classic portrait of angst, of a man slumped in a chair, holding his head in his hand, painted in a loose impressionistic style, which might be read as a portrait of many artists in the years immediately after the Tiananmen incident of 1989. In the large triptych No.1 Hospital Triptych (1991), different stages of medical diagnosis, surgery and recovery are depicted in strong lines on bleak backgrounds. In a small but beguiling canvas, Meat (1993), a naked man’s pink flesh blends into a piece of meat he is laying astride, suggesting some desperate, carnal emotion. This visceral quality is even stranger in the larger painting, Man and Meat (1993), showing a frenzied abattoir, with butchers handling meat while large fleshy tigers devour carcasses in the foreground.
These works appear less technically accomplished, with rough clunky lines and muddy colors, and less complex handling of space and symbolism, yet they nevertheless have an ambitious energy, urgency and intrigue. If there is more introspection in the “mask” series, as Zeng’s symbolism matured, it seems to have evaporated from the most recent portraits. Though he is no doubt one of the most significant Chinese contemporary painters, Zeng may be burdened by such success, now replicating and refining a signature style that eclipses his subject. Like a number of his compatriot artists who have been favored by the market, perhaps he faces the dilemma of how to meaningfully reflect or comment on the forces of rapid social and material change in China, while being symptomatic of them.
Elusive and something of an outsider in the Beijing art world, painter Zeng Fanzhi has shot to the head of the class.
On a drizzly spring day in Beijing, Zeng Fanzhi is serving espresso in his studio, looking every bit as serene as the Tang dynasty stone Buddha stationed cross-legged on a nearby pedestal. As raindrops tap the skylights 25 feet overhead, Italian opera fills the newly built 5,000-square-foot space designed by the artist himself. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows is a Suzhou-style garden with an array of monumental scholar’s rocks surrounding a goldfish pond.
Inside the studio several of Zeng’s latest paintings are propped against the wall, most depicting wild, almost menacing nighttime landscapes overlaid with dense thickets. “I think they are peaceful,” Zeng says somewhat cryptically through a translator, looking at scenes that seem anything but. A group of these works will be included in a show later this year at Acquavella Galleries in New York, the blue-chip dealership that recently signed Zeng to what is rumored to be a multimillion-dollar two-year contract.
The deal is the latest step in the 44-year-old artist’s ascent from newcomer in the Beijing art scene 15 years ago to his position as a leader in the Chinese market. In May, only days after our meeting, his painting Mask Series 96 No. 6 sold for $9.7 million at Christie’s Hong Kong, a record for any contemporary Chinese artist.
Handsome and somber, Zeng answers questions with carefully measured words. He’s still something of a loner in Beijing’s lively social network of artists, and he is reluctant to share personal information or give opinions on the changes in China over the last three decades. And he seems uninterested in discussing business, though he’s not entirely free of arrogance about his success.
“Sometimes these supercollectors come to my studio and say, ‘I own every bit of Chinese art except your work,’ but I will never sell to this kind of buyer,” says Zeng. Such collectors, he believes, lack the taste or connoisseurship to truly appreciate him as an artist. “Though I have deep regard for Chinese culture, as you can see from my garden, I never wanted to be merely a Chinese artist in my paintings.”
Zeng grew up in Wuhan, in the central province of Hubei, where his parents worked at a printing house. As a student at the nearby Hubei Academy of Fine Arts, Zeng found himself drawn toward Western masters such as Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Raoul Dufy, and Max Beckmann. It is this amalgam of influences that resulted in his expressionistic paintings, which were quite different from the Pop Art styles of many of his Chinese contemporaries in the early nineties.
In the beginning Zeng painted slabs of meat as if they were human characters and, later, people as if they were piles of meat—two series inspired by a butcher shop and a hospital near where he lived. One of his first major works, Hospital, a triptych depicting a group of the dead and suffering in an arrangement modeled on Michelangelo’s Pietà, was painted for his senior show at the academy in 1992. It caught the attention of Li Xianting, the country’s leading art critic of the period, who brought it to Johnson Chang, owner of the Hong Kong gallery Hanart TZ. Similar early works were featured in Chang’s 1993 exhibition “China’s New Art, Post-1989,” which essentially introduced this generation of Chinese artists to the outside world.
In 1993 Zeng left Wuhan for Beijing, which he’d visited several times to see exhibitions like the influential 1985 Robert Rauschenberg show at the National Art Museum. Once there, in a huge city full of strangers, he experienced profound loneliness and alienation, even as the country embarked on its tremendous economic advances of the post–Tiananmen Square period.
Instead of moving to the artists’ village near the Old Summer Palace in northwest Beijing—where Yue Minjun, Fang Lijun, and other now–art stars had formed a bohemian outpost—Zeng found a small courtyard-style residence in the embassy district, then a quiet part of town. There he began his famous “Mask” series, paintings in which the characters wear skintight white masks, their huge, bulging eyes staring out from behind.
In early paintings from the series, the figures are dressed in school garb, including the famous red kerchief, occasionally in groups coalescing as a team. Zeng had grown up at a time when every schoolchild aspired to receive the red kerchief, a sign of acceptance and achievement in the Little Red Guard. Years later Zeng still felt the sting of being denied this reward by a cruel teacher at his elementary school, leaving him as one of the only children without it.
In later Mask paintings the dress shifts to the latest fashions, reflecting the emergence of young yuppies in Beijing by the late nineties. Throughout the series the figures appear happy and relaxed, superficially, at least. But they seem distanced from each other, bound by social conventions that make it impossible for them to be genuine. These works were a personal statement of Zeng’s emotional state at the time. “I was lonely and a total stranger in this big city, which led to very introverted feelings,” he recalls. “These paintings were about being afraid to show myself, about hiding, so that I wouldn’t get hurt.”
For most of the nineties, Zeng worked without much recognition. A 1995 solo show at Hanart TZ in Hong Kong generated only modest sales at very low prices. A couple of years later Zeng began his long association with Lorenz Helbling of Shanghart, essentially the only contemporary art gallery in Shanghai then.
Around 2001 Zeng began to move away from the “Mask” series and started doing large-scale portraits. Sometimes he painted close-ups of faces composed of circular brushstrokes not unlike Chuck Close’s famous portraits. In others he painted Communist icons such as Marx, Engels, and Chairman Mao with stray lines and expressionist brushstrokes nearly eclipsing their visages. While many Chinese artists repeat themselves as their work gains in popularity, Zeng is a rarity, constantly experimenting and pushing his imagery in new directions.
“Zeng Fanzhi’s works often have to do with the society he lives in, the situation in China for his generation,” says Helbling, who showed the artist’s latest works this summer at Shanghart’s new Beijing gallery, right next door to Zeng’s studio in Caochangdi Village. “I think he follows this sensibility quite accurately yet with a lot of intuition.”
The artist’s recent works are his most imaginative and abstract yet. The scenes are desolate—glowing landscapes glimpsed through dense thickets. Wild animals have also crept into his paintings. “The elephant, in particular, is a symbol of stability,” says Helbling, suggesting that these works may be about a hope for inner stability amid China’s relentless economic boom and Zeng’s own surging career.
In 2006 his Mask Series 99 No. 3 brought $816,400 at Christie’s Hong Kong. Just a year later his 1992 Hospital triptych fetched $5.7 million at Phillips de Pury in London. Around the same time Zeng had solo shows at the Singapore Art Museum, the Musée d’Art Moderne in St.-Etienne Métropole, France, and Gallery Hyundai in Seoul. As a result of his success, he was able to lease the plot of land in Caochangdi and build his new studio.
Collectors have been coming ever since. New York collector-dealer José Mugrabi, who met the artist through Fabien Fryns of F2 Gallery in Beijing, had bought few Chinese works. “Honestly, I received many propositions from Chinese artists,” Mugrabi says, “but the only one who really interested me was Zeng Fanzhi.”
Mugrabi played a key role in Zeng’s deal with Acquavella. The gallery would seem a great fit for the artist, who first visited it two years ago to see a Lucian Freud exhibition. Only when he returned to the gallery in December to negotiate his own show did Zeng remember it was where he’d first encountered the British master, another key influence on his work.
Tentatively slated for December, the show will cover all periods of the artist’s career. “Serious collectors are likely to find it much more compelling than they expect, given their wariness about Chinese contemporary art being trendy,” says gallery director Eleanor Acquavella. “Zeng Fanzhi is above and beyond the trend.”
Zeng Fanzhi is represented by Shanghart in Beijing and Shanghai (shanghartgallery.com) and Acquavella Galleries in New York (18 E. 79th St.; 212-734-6300; acquavellagalleries.com), which is planning a show for December.
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NEW YORK TIMES
Zeng Fanzhi: Amid change, the art of isolation
By Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop
Published: Thursday, May 3, 2007
SINGAPORE — Many Chinese artists have embraced American pop culture and fused it with social realism to develop their own artistic style of social and political commentaries on the fast-changing Chinese society. Among the crowd, however, Zeng Fanzhi stands out for the introspective nature of his work, which often reflects his personal life and emotions.
From the red scarves – a symbol of achievement in Communist China, something he yearned for as a child, but never got – to his famed “Mask” portraits, his take on Chinese society in the mid-’90s, Zeng’s work has always portrayed his own feelings.
The Beijing-based 43-year-old artist was recently in Singapore for the opening of a major retrospective of his work. In an interview, he pointed out, with the aid of a translator, that the ideological changes in China have clearly influenced him, but his work remains personal: “I grew up in the environment of the Cultural Revolution and all these ideologies take a lot of space in my mind, but when I paint I just want to portray my inner feeling and the people around me. I’ve never been interested in my art becoming symbols of political ideas.”
In the current frenetic Chinese contemporary art market, where many artists are happy to stick to a working “formula,” Zeng frequently alters his work and style.
“Zeng Fanzhi is one of the major artists shaping Chinese culture of today,” said Lorenz Helbling, director of ShanghART Gallery, one of the galleries that represents the artist. “He is reinventing himself all the time, not afraid of letting/leaving behind great and successful works, which may now sell for a lot in auctions, to develop ever new, surprising, more mature works even if they often confuse people at the beginning.”
“Idealism” – running at the Singapore Art Museum until June 3 – shows Zeng’s artistic evolution through 36 paintings that have been chosen to reflect his entire body of work, from his graduation piece in 1991 to several new, never-exhibited paintings. “We chose the theme of idealism because there is a certain celebration of ideals in many of his works, yet a certain sadness it might not be achieved,” said Kwok Kian Chow, the museum’s director.
Zeng, who was born in Wuhan in Hubei Province in 1964, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, said that his family encouraged him to take up painting “to keep him off the street.”
While at the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts, he studied German Expressionism, which would have a strong influence on his work. The expressionistic style of his 1991 graduation piece, “Hospital triptych No. 1,” with its wild strokes and fleshy colors, attracted the attention of the Chinese art critic and curator Li Xianting and was selected by Johnson Chang of the Hong Kong-based Hanart TZ Gallery to appear in “China’s New Art, Post-1989” at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, a 1993 exhibition now famous for having brought several new contemporary artists international attention.
“I lived next to the hospital and because my house didn’t have any toilets I had to use those of the hospital everyday. What I saw there left a strong imprint on me,” said the artist, who used these memories for his Hospital series, which portrays doctors and scared patients in operating theaters and emergency rooms.
His second series, the Meat series, was also inspired by everyday experiences. Passing by a nearby butcher, he often saw workers laying on top of the frozen meat to cool down and sleep during hot summers. The artist remembers intense, mixed emotions: “Some feelings were of hunger, because I was hungry in those days, others were of horror, as the blood of the meat would stain the people laying on them. I think this is why I use a lot of red in my work, it fascinates me,” he said.
In 1993, Zeng moved to Beijing. “I felt Beijing was the place where I could create art and where my work would be taken seriously,” he said. “In Wuhan, when people looked at work they would smile, and in their smile I could see they thought I was crazy. In Beijing they saw I was a person with ideas.”
Yet after he arrived, the introvert found it difficult to make friends and his feelings of solitude and isolation became the main theme for his next series, the Mask series, where the well-dressed urbanized population wear white masks, looking at the viewer with blank stares or puzzled eyes. “In the mid-’90s, China was transforming very fast. Chinese officials started wearing suits and ties,” he said. “Everybody wanted to look good, but it also looked a bit fake. I felt they wanted to change themselves on the surface, and these are the feelings that I represented in the earlier Mask series. Later on, the series used more vibrant colors; I think it makes people look even more fake, as if they are posing on a stage.”
The Mask series, which first appeared in 1994 and continued until 2000, brought Zeng to international prominence. “Mask 1999 No. 3” set the artist’s world record at auction, selling for $816,400 in November 2006 at Christie’s Hong Kong. But it also pigeonholed him. “I didn’t want to be tied down and I wanted to paint freely, which is why I started the chaotic strokes style,” he said.
In 1999, Zeng started to paint people without the mask and by 2004 he had introduced helical strokes into his portraits, as evidenced in the exhibition in the Great Men portraits: five panels representing Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao.
Most recently, Zeng has turned his interest toward landscape, which he is exploring in the Untitled (Night) series. Painting thick woods with or without people, Zeng is now using a technique of frenzied and animated lines.
“Sometimes I paint with two hands. Sometimes I use two brushes, sometimes four,” explained the artist. “With this new technique, I create and yet I destroy. One of the brushes is creating, while the other three have nothing to do with me. I like such creation which happens by chance. Sometime I will loose control over the image, but after you loose control you look at what you have and you try to get it back again.”
While his earlier work was influenced by German Expressionism, he said he has become more interested in Chinese cultural art since the late ’90s, especially the paintings of the Song dynasty, which influence this latest work.
“Having moved away from the more rigid model of European Expressionism,” Kwok said, “Zeng’s recent works combine a calligraphic touch with a more romanticist view of man and his relationship with nature.”
Zeng Fanzhi is a Chinese artist whose work looks kind of like a cross between Francis Bacon and Tim Burton. On Wednesday, a smattering of art world types and fellow Chinese A-listers showed up to fete him at the Acquavella galleries on the Upper East Side before a dinner at Phillipe on 60th Street. Despite the recession, the gallery sold nearly a dozen paintings at prices that ranged between $100,000 and $2 million each. Before the market collapsed, Fanzhi’s work was selling for as high as $9 million, but everyone professed to being pleased with the evening’s results – from the Acquavellas to the artist himself. “I’m very content,” said Fanzhi, speaking thorugh his translator as guests like Zhang Ziyi, Vivi Nevo and Wendi Murdoch munched on steamed dumplings, spare ribs and sauteed string beans. (Get it? Chinese artist, Chinese food.) But Murdoch said she was holding out on buying because the paintings were still awfully expensive. “I’m hoping to get the one I want at a better price,” she said with a laugh. As for Ziyi, she was feeling a lot of pride for her fellow countryman. “Whenever I have a movie here, someone else from China gets quoted saying ‘I’m so proud of her as a Chinese person. It’s great for our country.’ Well, tonight I’m thrilled to say that as a Chinese person, ‘I’m so proud of him.’” Go China!
Chinese contemporary art was sold just like hotcakes in 2008. Looking back over the past, collectors used to buy their artworks and resold them; however, Chinese contemporary art entered a new phase after this 4 years. The days people trade at a high were gone and truly valuable artworks have been demanded. We visited Mr. Zeng Fanzhi, who is well known with his Mask Series that had a strong impact on the world.
A New Expression Over East and West
Ichii: You are going to have an exhibition in Basel in September, and also a solo exhibition in London this autumn.
Zeng: Yes, I participate in Art Basel every year, but I will have only one artwork for this group show. I am looking forward to the one in London because it is going to be a solo show.
Ichii: At Gagosian Gallery?
Zeng: Exactly. I am going to exhibit some new landscapes, instead of portraits. I need some large works too as Gagosian Gallery in London is huge.
Ichii: As I see those landscapes you have here, they are all mysterious that branches and treetops look like they are singing together.
Zeng: Oh yeah? That is a new opinion.
Ichii: You have various artworks such as Balthus here in your studio. This Buddha head was made in around Tang or Sui, right? Do you like this kind of works?
Zeng: Yes, this is from Tang. The Buddhist statue in front of the entrance is made before Tang.
Ichii: I saw your works for the first time at preview of Asian Contemporary Art Auction in Christie’s Hong Kong held at Hermes in Ginza in 2008. “Mask Series No. 6” had a strong impact that I was impressed. I sometimes recalled your masks after that and that is why I wanted to see you.
Hospital Series
Ichii: You had Hospital Series that have doctors and patients before Mask Series. When did you start them?
Zeng: Started in 1991, I made them as my graduation work for bachelor degree.
Ichii: It feels like there is a lonely spirit just as Picasso’s Blue Period in your Hospital Series. You express the spirits of patients confronting their terrifying diseases or death, and doctors helping them, not just a portrayal of hospitals. The scene of nurse holding a patient at the middle of the painting reminds me of The Descent of the Cross.
Zeng: I was just expressing what I felt, what I saw and what happened around me at that time.
Ichii: And it seems to be influenced by Steen as well.
Zeng: Indeed, I did get influenced by him. I got to know of him thanks to a Japanese book called “Asahi Weekly Encyclopedia: Arts in the World”. I read that in a library in the university in 1987. It had his artwork of a chunk of meat, which had a great impact that I never forget. I was really impressed when I saw the original in Switzerland later on.
Ichii: You were able to see Japanese publications at that time.
Zeng: There was only one set in the university that we could neither borrow nor read alone. So we gathered to go to the library and read it together. There was no other way to read it due to the strict control in China those days.
Ichii. You were 23 in 1987, weren’t you?
Zeng: Yes. I was young, defiant, and so-called an angry youth! Schools at that time taught socialistic realism, which is totally opposite from my artworks. We had to include a story in socialistic realism.
Ichii: Steen is one of the artists in School of Paris that had lonely artists such as Picasso, Modigliani or Pascin. I assume that you used to be a lonely rebel against socialistic realism.
Zeng: Schoolteachers at that time did not want us to paint this type of works. We could not attend any important exhibitions with them due to the poor demand. Any artworks cannot be accepted as long as you cannot attend an official exhibition. Teachers kept saying that you have to master the fundamentals of art before painting different types of art; however, in the end, we wanted to express ourselves.
Ichii: Works by Steen have an attractive movement and texture of oil paintings. The movement of crooked branches in your landscape looks similar to his.
Zeng: Artists who inspired me were not only Steen but also Francis Bacon, German expressionists and American abstract expressionists such as Willem de Kooning. I learned various types of art when I was a student in order to find my way to express myself. I painted this one in 1990, when I was a student.
Ichii: Such a great work. 1990 is before you graduate, or before you started painting the Hospital Series. There definitely is the similar spirit to Beckmann, Nolde and Kirchner.
Zeng: I got to be conscious to express my internal spirit with this work as a start.
Took an University Entrance Exam Having a Job
Ichii: You graduated from university when you were 27, which is, generally speaking, a little bit late. What were you before you got into the university?
Zeng: You generally graduate from university when you are 22, but I got into the university when I was 23. I started working when I was 16 without going to high school. I did not even finish middle school!
Ichii: So you liked painting since you were a child?
Zeng: Yes, I liked painting since I was little. There was not such a job as professional painter in China around 1980s. I had to have another job creating artworks. I got into a printing company in the end even though I wanted to have a job somewhat relating to arts or painting.
Ichii: Did the job sort of relate to art?
Zeng: Just a little bit. I sometimes drew a cut inserted within text or designed a book.
Ichii: When did you decide to get into a university while you were working?
Zeng: I did not even know that there was such a thing as art school when I started working. I got to know of it when I was 17 or 18. And I started to take an entrance exam after that; however, the academic exam was too hard to pass. Since I have not studied in high school, it was probably harder for me than others feel. That is why I spent 5 years to finally pass it and it was when I was 23.
Ichii: I heard there were only 8 students per a grade in oil painting department of Hubei Art School.
Zeng: Yes. Oil painting department was the most crucial one that teachers made the students painters. There were more teachers than students. We were proud of ourselves to get into the department then.
Ichii: The elect few, you all were the elites.
Zeng: All the teachers and students were always excited about freshmen in that department every year. Actually, we had to have an athlete ability as well to get into Hubei Art School.
Ichii: What do your parents do?
Zeng: They both used to work at a printing company.
Ichii: How old are they?
Zeng: My mother is 68 and father is 73.
Ichii: So are you the oldest child?
Zeng: Yes. I have a younger sister and brother.
Ichii: I have read an article saying your mother influenced you, but how?
Zeng: My parents were typical employees in 1970s and 80s, and both liked literature. My father was a young lover of literature who loved “Paintings of the Four Elegant Pastimes”. My mother also has more knowledge on literature and arts compared with others. I think it was rare for people to read all those famous novels like my parents did. So I guess they partially have influenced me. I still remember that they used to sing a song together because they also liked a Beijing opera.
Ichii: I can tell that people used to be able to enjoy various genres of arts in China before the Cultural Revolution.
Debuted in the World with Mask Series
Ichii: Cultural Revolution started 2 years later you were born in 1964. 10 more years later, in 1976, it ends due to the death of Mao Zedong. You were 12 years old then. And there are Junior Red Guards in “MASK SERIES NO. 6”. Is this because of your experience on Cultural Revolution?
Zeng: I surely did paint what my memory had in the Mask Series: for instance, red scarf, an old memory and some important incidents that I remember. In fact, Cultural Revolution is what I was told by adults rather than what I experienced directly on my own. The faces, behavior and actions of people scared me. For example, when I said something that went too far, my parents got confused and told me not to say such a thing in front of others. I think tension that was running through everyday influenced me.
Ichii: It feels that you simply painted your spirit itself in your Hospital Series that you started creating as the graduation work. On the other hand, you viewed yourself objectively in the Mask Series. Therefore, the Hospital Series is your portrait in a way, while the Mask Series has an objective view.
Zeng: Exactly, right.
Ichii: You changed your theme after debuted with the Mask Series.
Zeng: Next stage comes naturally after you finish up what you wanted to express in one series. I don’t want to stay at the same place. I always want to go forward to move on. I don’t think it is cool to express the same thing on and on tied up with old memories because I am still young. I want to express something new that nobody has done before. All the works including the Mask Series are the past for me.
Keep Everything in Nature Inside Himself
Ichii: A large number of landscapes have been painted in China since the Northern Song Dynasty, though there is not an old tradition of landscape paintings in Europe.
Zeng: Landscapes of nature were the most popular in the Northern Song Dynasty in China. I would say that all my works and contexts were more westernized; however, what I have been working on is rather Chinese traditional arts. I have been looking for an original technique that I can mix both western oil expression and eastern artistry.
Ichii: Guo Xi or Fan Kuan tried to have a dialogue to express what landscapes were, not copy the landscapes they see like a photo. So I think the way you think what the Earth is or how to have a dialogue with nature seems to be similar to theirs.
Zeng: Artists back in the Northern Song Dynasty lived in nature to produce artworks. My works could be recognized as both landscapes and abstract paintings. These landscapes I paint are the ones what my soul saw, not the reality. They are invisible landscapes.
Ichii: I have got an impression on your landscapes that the world exists inside your heart, not outside of you. They seem that you hold everything in nature inside of you even though you used to express what you had in your mind to emit them outside.
Zeng: Indeed.
Ichii: You have used a word “miao wu” in the interview on Michael Findlay for Acquavella Galleries in the states. What does that mean?
Zeng: I have been thinking about how to mix western techniques and eastern grounds since I read a Chinese traditional book. That word means to realize it.
Ichii: What is this song you are playing here, by the way?
Zeng: This is an opera called “None shall sleep” by Turandot.
Ichii: This music makes these branches look like they are dancing in your painting.
Zeng: I like to paint listening to music. Sounds influence my works. Good sounds help me to come up with a clear image. I look for my inspiration picturing a figure with sounds when I am drawing. Listen to this sound, for example. Let me just tap it. *Tapping something like a drum or cymbals*
Ichii: What a beautiful sound.
Zeng: Right? This sound reminds me of a religious sound from a temple in Tibet, or a ritual sound. Even a statue in the yard can make a sound that seems to be what you hear in an old western church.
Want to Paint with a Simple State of Mind
Ichii: When you had an interview and were asked when and where you wanted to be born if you could have chosen, you answered that you wanted to work with Cézanne.
Zeng: Hahah, yes. What I wanted to say in that interview was how a genuine state of mind is important. It is important to have a genuine condition that you are painting apples and cans as if you were a teenager. I guess Cézanne was painting like that. I want to do it in that way too, back in those good old times instead of in this complex society these days.
Ichwan Noor’s Beetlesphere at Art: 1 by Mondercor Gallery, now on view at Art Basel Hong Kong
Courtesy Hanart Square
“Forty-four Sunsets in a Day” by Jennifer Wen Ma
An inflatable sculpture called “Lethargic Aesthetics” 2012 by Guan Huaibin, represented by Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong
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Art – Art Basel Hong Kong 2013
There is a new Art Basel show! With half of the participating galleries coming from Asia and Asia-Pacific, Art Basel in Hong Kong assumes a significant role in the international artworld, providing a portal to the region’s artists. The new show gives galleries from around the world a platform in Asia to demonstrate the way they work with artists, and bring their highest quality work and contemporary art to Hong Kong.
Known as the gateway between the East and West, Hong Kong ranks among the world’s most dynamic international capitals. A 21st century metropolis, it is a port city with a vast skyline rising above its bustling Victoria Harbour. In addition to the many museums, concert halls, and performance spaces, a vibrant melting pot of cultures makes Hong Kong a place of endless exploration.
The show’s four exhibition sectors are designed to present an exceptional selection of works, including museum-quality pieces by proven masters and new artworks by emerging artists. Additional exhibitions and events, timed to coincide with Art Basel’s Hong Kong debut, will take place across the city’s thriving gallery scene and in its growing array of cultural institutions.
May 20, 2013 |
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Here is a small sample of Vincent Johnson’s Strange Los Angeles Pictures photography program
Vincent Johnson Artist and writer in Los Angeles
Vincent Johnson Artist and writer in Los Angeles
Art Basel Hong Kong is clearly the most important new major global event on the international art circuit. It will held in one of the world’s most luxurious cities, that is also one of the top dining destinations on the planet. This edition of Art Basel is already showing waves of difference in that it is anticipated to exponentially raise the stature of Hong Kong based artists who have been overlooked because of the phenomenal attention paid to mainland China’s art scene in Shanghai and Beijing. Except for a few artists, this has not been the case with artists based in Miami, evidenced by the recent moves of several of Miami’s young art stars to Los Angeles. Local Miami artists claim that they have been energized but largely overwhelmed and swept aside by the tidal wave of Art Basel Miami Beach and its sometimes over twenty satellite fairs. This edition of Art Basel is also drawing international attention to the existing and expanding Hong Kong art scene. The debut of the 645,000 sq. ft. exhibition museum space M+ in 2017 will transform Hong Kong into one of the must visit global destinations for viewing contemporary art year round. One other key difference between the Miami Art Basel and that of Hong Kong, is that over half of the galleries showing in Art Basel Hong Kong are based in the Asia-Pacific region. Whereas Art Basel Miami Beach has seen no more than three Miami art galleries at this fair at any given year, with many years having only one Miami based gallery. Another key difference is that the Art Basel Kong Kong is specifically and definitively dedicated to empowering the Asia-Pacific Rim artworlds, from centers of production, to centers of distribution such as the gallery cluster of international commercial galleries in Singapore. The Asia-Pacific Rim region already has a spectacular number of world-class art fairs, superior and vast in size contemporary and historical art museums, and serious publications on art. It will be interesting to watch up close and from afar as Asia’s impact on the global art economy escalates and shocks. This blog post will be updated during Art Basel Hong Kong’s debut week.
Having been to the last nine Art Basel Miami Beach fairs, I dare say the Hong Kong Edition might be the most exciting and sought after new art fair worldwide.
Here is a small sample of Vincent Johnson’s Strange Los Angeles Pictures photography program
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Art Basel debuts in Hong Kong
May 23, 2013
The high-art event that started in Switerland in 1970 debuts in Asia
Art Basel, the modern art festival that began in Basel, Switzerland in 1907 and expanded to Miami in 2002 is debuting in Asia this year. Each year, Art Basel attracts many of the wealthiest modern art collectors in the
Above:’The Pilgrim and the Pirate’ by Samsul Arifin, represented by the Nadi Gallery, Jakarata, at Art Basel,
Photo By Jessica Hromas/Getty Images
“Periphery” 2013 by Seung Yul Oh, represented by One and J. Gallery, Seoul at Art Basel, May 22, 2013 in Hong Kong.
‘Encounters’ by Wang Yuyang and ‘He Tao Yuan’ by He An, represented by Tang Contempory Art gallery, Bejing and Bankok at Art Basel, May 22, 2013 in Hong Kong.
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VEGAS MAGAZINE
The Debut of Art Basel Hong Kong
by sue hostetler
Next
To Be Titled by Dan Colen, 2011.
“Hong Kong is the gateway to China,” says renowned local interior designer and architect Todd-Avery Lenahan, explaining why the cosmopolitan city has been anointed the newest host of Art Basel, the most esteemed art fair in the world. “The demographic of buyers is diverse and highly sophisticated, with tremendous interest in Western artists, as much from young collectors as from established ones.” Currently working on the new Wynn Cotai resort in Macau for Steve Wynn, Lenahan is one of many high-level art connoisseurs looking forward to the premiere of Art Basel in Hong Kong. Almost two years after the company behind Art Basel bought a majority stake in Asian Art Fairs Ltd., which founded the Art HK contemporary art fair, the newly rechristened Art Basel in Hong Kong will open May 23 to much international fanfare, boasting work from more than 3,000 artists and 245 of the world’s leading galleries. This expansion into Asia gives the storied fair an unparalleled three-continent, year-round engagement with the art world’s cognoscenti (Art Basel’s other shows are the Switzerland behemoth and its Miami Beach spin-off).
Magnus Renfrew, Art HK’s original fair director and now director Asia of Art Basel, has overseen the transformation. A longtime believer that Hong Kong is a natural home for a major international art fair, he is confident that both attendees and participants will be blown away. “We are geographically positioned at the heart of Asia, and we are the region’s financial center,” Renfrew says. “There is no tax on the import or export of art, and Hong Kong has an increasingly expanding cultural sector and culturally interested population.”
Art Basel’s shows are perhaps most renowned for each selection committee’s unflinching rigor in choosing galleries to participate, as well as for the curation of the fairs’ various sectors. In Hong Kong, more than 170 exhibitors of modern and contemporary art will show work in the main sector, including New York’s Dominique Lévy gallery and 303 Gallery. Many eyes will be on the Insights sector, which will present projects devised specifically for the fair from 47 galleries in Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. The Discoveries sector will likely be the most experimental, with solo and two-person exhibitions by emerging artists and, in an exciting twist, a $25,000 prize.
Special exhibitions and events at local galleries will also be of immense interest, as the arrival of blue-chip international players like Gagosian Gallery and White Cube—joining local stalwarts such as Hanart TZ Gallery and Osage—has invigorated the Hong Kong gallery scene in recent years. The multitude of events and special exhibitions at Hong Kong’s cultural institutions and nonprofits is dizzying, including a parallel program of talks presented by Asia Art Archive. Widely regarded as the most important collection of source material on the recent history of art in Asia, Asia Art Archive has grown from a single bookshelf in 2000 to a trove of more than 35,000 records with thousands of physical and digital items. And the government is getting in on the art act, too, by celebrating the opening of its new Artspace @ Oil Street, a 1908 heritage building that has been converted into space for working artists, curators, and the public.
Not surprisingly, Art Basel in Hong Kong has proved attractive to corporate sponsors looking for a foothold in this fast-growing, significant region. Deutsche Bank has signed on as lead partner, joining associate sponsors such as Davidoff, Audemars Piguet, and Absolut Art Bureau, all of which also support the shows in Switzerland and Miami Beach. In fact, many people have compared today’s Hong Kong art market to the one in Miami Beach 10 years ago. “The market is in a relatively early stage of development here, much like the atmosphere in Miami when we opened there,” Renfrew says. “We want to be part of the cultural surge in this dynamic city, and the show provides the perfect global platform for that.”
The Bernier/Eliades galleryat Art Basel Hong Kong 2013
After Frieze New York and before the Venice Biennale, the tireless and likely jetlagged international art clique has touched down en masse in Hong Kong, where the first Art Basel outpost in Asia opened to the public on Thursday. Here, we’ve assembled a cognoscenti’s guide to where the insiders are eating, partying, and sleeping it off–including picks for both the elegant classicist and those willing to brave sweaty dance floors and no-reservation policies.
The Upper House’s lobby
HOTELS
Mandarin Oriental: The Original. Initially known simply as The Mandarin, the hotel was recognized as one of the best in the world when it opened in the 60s. A recent and quite pricey facelift has added some polish to its old glamour. This is actually the official hotel of Art Basel HK, where a slew of events are happening, although expect most of the deal-making to occur over martinis at M Bar or beers at the more casual Captain’s Bar. mandarinoriental.com
The Upper House: In a city that can’t get enough ostentatious luxury, the newish Upper House has set itself apart with its tasteful and subtle interiors–nary a touch of red or gold in sight. The top floor bar and restaurant, Cafe Gray Deluxe, boasts some of the best views in Hong Kong, and was the venue of an intimate cocktail party that Net-a-Porter threw for the artist Terence Koh. upperhouse.com
Amber at The Mandarin Oriental
RESTAURANTS
Amber: Back to The Mandarin. San Pellegrino’s highly influential, annual World’s 50 Best Restaurants list recently ranked Amber as Hong Kong’s number 1–an impressive honor in a city rightly known for its many dining options. In an elegant setting best enjoyed on expense accounts, feast on French fare with a nod towards the east/west crossover culture unique to Hong Kong’s history. amberhongkong.com
Ronin: At the cusp of Hong Kong’s culinary scene, Ronin is billed as a Japanese izakaya with a speakeasy feel, but don’t roll your eyes–there are no comically elaborate cocktails here. This tiny, no-reservations eatery is located behind an unmarked door on a quiet side street–and it’s nearly impossible to score a table there, especially this week. But of course there’s also Yardbird, a yakitori in Sheung Wan from the same owners that feels like Ronin’s louder and more fun little brother. roninhk.com
The lounge at Kee Club
NIGHTLIFE
Kee Club: Picking up where the infamous China Club left off–it’s still open, but now irrelevant–this members only-ish club (annual dues aren’t exactly required) is Hong Kong’s answer to Soho House, and host to a recent Saint Laurent soiree. The upstairs has a dinner-club vibe that subtly turns into a bottle service situation, while downstairs it’s dance-y and dark. Appropriately, Kee’s chef has concocted a Swiss-themed Basel menu that is available all week. keeclub.com
Salon Number 10: This little gem is quickly shaping up to be Hong Kong’s version of Rick’s Cafe Americain–minus the fascists, of course. One will encounter distinguished travelers of all nationalities here, and the owners Alec and Ellis (who also run the men’s boutique Moustache) are the most gracious of hosts, DJ-ing, suggesting drinks, and generally making you feel like you’re at a great house party. facebook.com/SalonNumber10
Art Basel stages global Modern and contemporary art shows, held annually in Basel, Miami Beach, and Hong Kong. Founded by gallerists in 1970, Art Basel supports the role that galleries play in the nurturing of artists, and the development and promotion of visual arts.
NEWS›HONG KONG
CULTURE
Art Basel wraps up in Hong Kong after show of world’s finest
Competition between Western artists and Asian works ‘very positive’, Art Basel organisers say
More than 240 galleries from around the world showed their works at Art Basel’s Hong Kong debut which closed yesterday. Mainland artist Zhang Xiaogang’s works, above, were among the many on show. Galleries from the West brought in major works from big-name artists and reported strong sales last Wednesday. It was also reported that deals were still being negotiated by regional galleries in the minutes before the show closed. Photo: Jonathan Wong.
A week of art madness ended yesterday with the closure of exhibition Art Basel’s Hong Kong debut, which turned into a showdown between 245 galleries from around the world.
Galleries from Western nations – making up half of the total number exhibiting – pulled out the big guns, bringing over major works by big-name artists, and they reported strong sales last Wednesday on “VIP day”.
Galleries from the Asia-Pacific region, including Hong Kong, said business was slow the first couple of days and they had to work extra hard to draw attention from collectors. Some said sales began to pick up towards the end of the fair and that deals were still being negotiated 30 minutes before the fair closed.
Gallery Hauser & Wirth sold SP234 by Sterling Ruby to an art foundation on the mainland for more than US$250,000. Pearl Lam from Hong Kong soldFour Noblemen by Zhu Jinshi for US$195,000. London’s Victoria Miro, co-presenting with Asia’s Ota Fine Arts, sold the 1988 Yayoi Kusama workFlame of Life – Dedicated to Tu-Fu (Du-Fu) for US$2 million to an Asian collector.
Taiwanese dealer Tina Keng sold eight works from the series Eight Tall Sunflowers by Xu Jiang for US$2.6 million and Wang Huaiqing’s abstract workChinese Emperor for US$2.6 million.
Keng said the competition was particularly keen.
“All the big [Western] artists are here. So you must bring the Asian equivalent,” Keng said.
One Asian dealer said their gallery was like a monster in their home country, “but here compared to these big Western galleries, I’m like an ant”.
Art Basel Asia director Magnus Renfrew said many collectors had gone home to do some research into artists whose work they had seen at the fair before returning on the final day to buy.
“The competition has been very positive and it helps drive up the standard of the presentation across the board,” Renfrew said. “Western galleries feel the pressure as much as the Asian ones.”
Originally known as Art HK, the fair has run since 2008 under this name and became the largest in Asia. In 2011, Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach organisers MCH Swiss Exhibition (Basel) acquired a 60 per cent stake in Art HK organisers Asian Art Fairs, leading to the event’s transformation into Art Basel this year.
Despite the change, there was no drop in participation by local artists, with some 26 Hong Kong galleries exhibiting to the fair’s 60,000 visitors.
Hong Kong artist Stanley Wong, who was showing at local gallery Blindspot, said the fair this year had become more sophisticated with improvement in the standard and calibre of work on show. “But at the same time, I don’t see anything very edgy and powerful,” he said.
This article first appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition on May 27, 2013 as Art fair wraps up after show of world’s finest
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Art Basel fair in Hong Kong attracts global celebrities
Western art dealers focus attention on wealth of Chinese buyers
‘Aztec Pattern’ by South Korean artist Osang Gwon displayed at Art Basel in Hong Kong. Photograph: Alex Hofford/EPA
The branding hits as soon as you leave Hong Kong International airport and spot two huge billboards heralding the Asian debut of the world’s most prominent art fair, Art Basel. Amid a PR frenzy that drew the likes of supermodel Kate Moss and Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, it seemed that even the torrential rain and 18,000 lightning strikes across the territory hours before the VIP preview on Wednesday were just part of the city-wide spectacle.
There is much familiar about Art Basel in Hong Kong, which joins the original fair in its namesake home city in Switzerland and a sister event in Miami Beach – not least the sponsors. Trolleys of Ruinart champagne stalk the aisles at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. A BMW “art car” brightly painted by Spanish artist César Manrique is displayed outside one entrance. Absolut ArtBureau, an offshoot of the vodka drink company, has commissioned an “art bar” by Adrian Wong, in which a Cantonese lounge singer performs with an animatronic band of multi-limbed manga-like creatures, evoking a mix of colonial kitsch andBlade Runner.
Art Basel’s purchase of the previous Art HK fair two years ago led some locals to question whether Hong Kong’s art scene was becoming a post-colonial venture for importing western art into Asia. With China now the world’s second-largest art market after the US, and Asia home to more billionaires than North America, the attraction seems obvious.
In recent years, several top commercial western galleries have set up outposts amid the Louis Vuitton and Prada stores in the city’s central business district, including American Larry Gagosian, the world’s richest art dealer, in 2008 and London gallerist Jay Jopling’s White Cube in March 2012.
At packed-out private views, both galleries brought out their big guns. White Cube showed the Chapman Brothers’ macabre new installation,The Sum of All Evil, vitrines packed with thousands of miniature figures in violent torment; and Gagosian presented paintings by the late New York graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
But the wooing of the Chinese collectors and their vast wealth is a long, slow process. Most western galleries have yet to convince the big buyers of mainland China, whose taste for contemporary art remains patriotic, according to market analysts.
Graham Steele, director of White Cube Hong Kong, said: “The barriers are coming down, but not as fast as western dealers would like them to. There isn’t the cultural momentum yet. The major Chinese collectors come to Hong Kong for Christie’s or Sotheby’s auctions of Chinese art.”
US gallery Pace’s Beijing branch, which explicitly declares itself an Asian gallery and runs a different programme from the US and UK branches, has found success by becoming a major dealer for Chinese contemporary artists. Its stand at the fair included work by Zhang Xiaogang, whose paintings have fetched multimillion-pound prices at auction.
Several British dealers said that Singapore, Taiwan and the Philippines, which are more familiar with western culture, were their most important markets in Asia. Australians are also major collectors. Ellie Harrison-Read, sales associate at Lisson Gallery, said: “Big names such as Anish Kapoor and Marina Abramovic, people who are familiar, sell well. Brand is very important here.”
This seemed to be apparent in big sales of the fair’s first day. London’s Victoria Miro gallery sold a wall-sized painting by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama for £1.32m and White Cube sold a Gary Hume sculpture for £66,243, while 15 sculptures by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, depicting a cartoon version of the artist and his dog, sold for £89,428 each.
The local art scene, which has long felt overshadowed by the Chinese contemporary art boom, has mixed feelings about the influx of international dealers. Pui Pui To, director of 2P gallery, one of Hong Kong’s few art spaces to represent local artists, said: “Now that the blue chip galleries have arrived, it’s become much tougher for us to survive.”
Spiralling rents have pushed younger galleries further from the city centre. Pui Pui To’s gallery, which is showing in Art Basel, is on a backstreet in Sai Ying Pun in the city’s western district. “The only brand names round here are McDonald’s and KFC,” she said.
However, she praised Art Basel in Hong Kong’s director, Magnus Renfrew, who founded Art HK for supporting the local art scene through educational programmes and collaboration with non-profit, artist-run projects. Renfrew said that when he first arrived in Hong Kong it was referred to as a “cultural desert” with little audience for contemporary art: “Since the fair opened, the number of visitors has grown from just 19,000 in 2008 to 67,000 last year and the gallery scene is more sophisticated.”
He believes that the current imbalance between the art market, which has long had a big presence in the territory with Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction houses, will change with the construction of the West Kowloon cultural district, which will include the M+ museum of visual culture, twice the size of Tate Modern, and 16 performing art museums. An outdoor exhibition of inflatable sculptures on the site, M+ mobile, which includes a giant upturned cockroach, a suckling pig you can walk into and British artist Jeremy Deller’s bouncy castle version of Stonehenge, has drawn 130,000 visitors in just three weeks.
Lars Nittve, executive director of M+ and the founding director of Tate Modern, compared the exhibition to the sensation caused by Carl Andre’s bricks when they first were shown at the Tate. “Really for the first time in Hong Kong it has provoked public debate about whether something that looks ugly can be art. Can you jump on art? Can art be fun?”
Harriet Onslow of Pearl Lam Galleries, based in Hong Kong and Shanghai, thinks there will be room for a wider range of galleries as the art scene diversifies. “Collectors are not going to decide against buying one of [the smaller galleries’] artists for HK$5,000 just because I’ve sold them something for HK$200,000,” she said.
However the work of one of the local artists in the Pearl Lam booth suggests that Pui Pui To is not alone in her ambivalance towards the internationalisation of Hong Kong’s art scene. Tsang Kin-wah offers a tongue-in-cheek critique of the art fair system in a text installation in which scathing comments in vinyl lettering spread across the floor like the tentacles of an octopus:
Onslow said: “It’s about how fucking awful art fairs are and how it’s no longer about the art but the fair. The text is etched on glass because that signifies how the art and the artist is disappearing.”
Yet in the Deutsche Bank’s exclusive VIP room another work by the artist, best known for painting words in English and Chinese in seemingly floral patterns, offers a more positive if rather cynical take, with the phrase “Making Art, Making Money” discernible in the grey text. It seems unlikely that Tsang Kin-wah at least will be disappearing any time soon.
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FINANCIAL TIMES LONDON
May 24, 2013 6:39 pm Miami, now they take Hong Kong
By Georgina Adam
Basel brand hits HK; one fair in, one fair out in California; massive deflation for sculpture
Apowerful battalion of the art world’s grandees jetted in from New York, London, Beijing and many other points to attend the new Art Basel in Hong Kong, which launched this week and ends on Sunday.
This is the first truly “Basel” edition of the Asian fair, which the powerful Swiss firm acquired two years ago. And anyone who knows the other two fairs in its portfolio – Basel and Miami Beach – will have recognised the “brand”, with every detail, from typeface to maps, now homogenised throughout.
While the transformation from the ArtHK fair is not radical, the new owners have smoothed some things out, for instance distributing stands better between the two floors and placing the VIP lounge upstairs. The fair is spacious and well lit, flattering the art on view. But with “Basel Basel” round the corner, some galleries have not brought their best works, and others are frankly a muddle. But there are high points, among them Peter Blum’s marvellous offering of early Kusama works including “Phallic Bowl” (1965) in the $300,000 range – showing up the brash, garish offerings of more recent Kusama works. And the small Australian gallery Sullivan and Strumpf is showing subversive tableaux of figurines by Penny Byrne – “iProtest” – inspired by political unrest across the world.
Some exhibitors, including Blum, are attending for the first time, specifically because it is now a Basel event. Other newbies at the opening were the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, his partner Dasha Zhukova, Wendi Deng Murdoch and posses of collectors and museum directors including Lacma’s Jeffrey Deitch. Artists – Fernando Botero, Takashi Murakami, Abbas Kiarostami and many of the best-known Chinese names – had also hotfooted in.
As for sales, Hauser & Wirth reported a shower of deals and Arndt immediately sold a flowered puppy by the hot Indonesian artist Eko Nugroho, “Flower Generation II” (2012), to Adelaide’s South Australia Museum for $54,000 and a Jittish Kallat to the Belgian collector Guy Ullens, tagged at $180,000, while Hanart quickly placed four ink paintings by Qiu Zhijie with a big New York museum for $20,000 each. “There’s a dramatic difference in sales this year,” said a beaming Tim Blum. while Paul Kasmin also said business was “excellent”.
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Along with the new fair, the week marked an extraordinary change in Hong Kong as an art hub. The night before the fair opening, the six galleries in the Pedder Building staged a joint vernissage and were so mobbed that a sign outside announced “Queuing time approx 30 minutes”; once in, visitors could see Basquiat at Gagosian or the new Lehmann Maupin space, showing a quintessentially Hong Kong scene by Zheng Guogu. The same crowd then packed into White Cube and Perrotin nearby. All of this was inconceivable just two years ago before the Basel juggernaut, with its 50,000-plus list of VIPs, rolled into town.
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While there is certainly a lot of buzz about the growing art market in California, fairs there are not gaining any traction. The third edition of Art Platform Los Angeles, one of a portfolio of fairs owned by Chicago’s Merchandise Mart Properties, has just been cancelled. Held in a hangar in Santa Monica airport – where it had relocated last year after being held downtown – the fair had failed to attract enough support for its upcoming September edition.
But as one dies, another is born: Silicon Valley Contemporary, planned for April next year in San Jose Convention Center. The founders, who already organise other fairs in upscale locations such as Aspen and the Hamptons, come from the technology sector and say they will revolutionise the fair model. “We will look for the intersection between a physical art fair and a virtual one with online auctions,” says executive director Rick Friedman, adding that he will “introduce basic Valley tenets such as open systems, transparency in pricing and art value, full disclosure and ease of transaction.” About 60 international exhibitors are being sought for the first edition, which is slated for April 10-13 2014.
. . .
Inflation art is the newest thing – blow-up sculptures. Cynics who dismiss such works of contemporary art as “just a lot of hot air” are delightedly pointing to the fate of a number of these pumped-up monsters. In Hong Kong, a crowd-pleasing exhibition – called Inflation! – on the site of the future M+ museum in West Kowloon was recently hit by heavy rainfall. McCarthy’s “Complex Pile”, a giant brown simulacrum of excrement (you read that right, sadly) as well as a flower sculpture by the Korean artist Choi Jeong-hwa, “Black Lotus”, were punctured and collapsed. And the much ballyhooed giant rubber duck floating in the harbour, the work of Florentijn Hofman, popped and flattened into a yellow omelette. They have all been pumped back up now.
Georgina Adam is editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper
Art Basel highlights Hong Kong’s new statusMay 24, 2013 12:52 AMBy Aaron Tam
HONG KONG: The first Art Basel to be hosted by Hong Kong boasts a prestigious array of international art. Staging the art fair here highlights the city’s new role as an arts hub amid an explosion of personal wealth in mainland China.The annual four-day show is the world’s premier art fair and has until now only been held in Switzerland and the United States. Wealthy VIPs flocked Wednesday to the waterfront exhibition center hosting the fair, which opened to the wider public Thursday. Dressed in glamorous outfits and against a backdrop of popping champagne corks, they perused an eclectic mix of works from more than 3,000 international artists exhibiting through 245 of the world’s leading galleries. The main section showcases work from an international group of 171 modern and contemporary art galleries, with selections of paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and video. In one room a Volkswagen Beetle had been compressed into a giant sphere. Another installation drawing crowds featured a dishevelled human-sized rabbit sitting on a log, created by the U.S. artist Marnie Weber. Internationally renowned artists whose work is on display include Britain’s Damien Hirst, French artist JR and the German photographer Andreas Gursky. Other sections feature selections from the Asia-Pacific region curated for the show, large-scale sculptures and a section with solo and two-person exhibitions from emerging international artists. The boom in Hong Kong’s international art market is largely a result of the fast-growing wealth of mainland Chinese, some of whom are investing heavily in art. “Having seen the high quality and vast range of presentations from galleries across the globe,” Art Basel director Marc Spiegler told reporters, “I can assure you that the first edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong promises many discoveries and delights.” Art Basel ordinarily exhibits at home, in the Swiss city of Basel, as well as in Miami Beach in the US, but, Spiegler said, the Hong Kong show will emphasise works from Asia. Hong Kong is “a place where all Asia feels at home and with many bridges to the west,” he continued. “Here in Hong Kong, we will provide a global stage of international exposure for galleries and artists in Asia.” There is also a growing interest among Asian collectors in different types of art aside from traditional works. Gagosian, White Cube, Acquavella, Lehmann Maupin and Galerie Perrotin are just some of the big-name galleries to have arrived in the city in the past two years despite sky-high rents. “Art Basel in Hong Kong is evidence that Asia is becoming paramount to the international art world,” said Pearl Lam in a statement for Art Basel’s opening. Lam runs galleries of the same name in the southern city and in Shanghai. Art Basel replaces Art HK, Hong Kong’s former art fair, which was set up in 2008. It was recently taken over by Switzerland’s high-profile Art Basel franchise, which has been showcasing modern and contemporary art since 1970. “This is a truly historic moment for the art scene in Hong Kong and in Asia,” Art Basel Asia director Magnus Renfrew said. “The arrival of Art Basel in Hong Kong strengthens the city’s position as the leading art hub in Asia.”
THE Hong Kong art market is strong and prosperous, buoyed by low taxes and free of the censorship that inhibits much of the art on the mainland. But the local scene has long felt overshadowed by the big-name Chinese contemporary artists. So many were jittery at the opening today of the inaugural Art Basel Hong Kong, concerned that an influx of big galleries from New York, London and Paris would crowd out the booths peddling home-grown talent. There was little need to worry. “Competition drives up the standards. It already has after five years,” said Magnus Renfrew, the Asia Director for Art Basel Hong Kong. He is well placed to know, having spent years running Hong Kong’s art fair when it was an independent, scrappy event. Art Basel bought the fair last year, and its first Hong Kong incarnation runs until May 26th. Of the 245 galleries showing at the Hong Kong Convention Centre, over half are Asian. Of these, 26 are from Hong Kong, the strongest showing for any city except New York. This week Hong Kong is filled with art events, talks and the usual high-flying parties. To expose Hong Kong’s contemporary art scene to international buyers, Art Basel invited its top dealers and collectors to a special tour of the Wong Chuk Hang area on the waterfront of Aberdeen, where old warehouses have been renovated into new galleries. Some of Hong Kong’s most venerable art galleries have been decamping to Aberdeen to escape the exorbitant rents of the central district and to inhabit a livelier, younger area. Among those with branches there are Alisan Fine Arts, the first professional gallery in Hong Kong to show contemporary art, and Pekin Fine Arts from Beijing. So what are Hong Kong artists producing? Mostly art that feels very Chinese.
The booth of Schoeni Art Gallery is dominated by a video installation by Hung Keung (pictured). Trained at the Chinese University in Hong Kong, Mr Hung also studied art in London, Germany and Switzerland. Yet his piece “Dao x Microcosmic Play and Appreciation” feels rooted in Chinese culture. It features three round tables topped with black glass arranged a few feet apart. Tiny cameras circulate around the tables, their images projected on white screens. One table holds a black Buddha, small but his presence looms. Another is scattered with black toy-like tanks, helicopters and jet fighters. The third features a solitary small stone. This work is about peace and calm in an era of violence, explains Mr Hung. Traditional Chinese art views the white colour of rice paper as “an infinity surface,” he adds. “Now I am saying the screen represents white paper. The black toys on black glass give the feeling of black ink.” The booth of Gallery EXIT, a local gallery based in the Wong Chuk Hang neighbourhood, features the work of Ivy Ma, a Hong Kong-based artist. Her piece “Mother” is a large, hanging portrait of her mother carved in plywood. Measuring one meter by two meters, the image is from a photograph taken in the early 1950s, when Ms Ivy’s mother arrived from southern China as part of a wave of immigrants escaping the Communist revolution. “Mother” smiles pleasantly at passers-by, her face brimming with hope, her hair fashionably styled in a ‘50s bob. The work feels quintessentially Chinese, but with a wider contemporary appeal.
Artists from Guangdong province in southern China have long influenced art in Hong Kong. At the Pekin Fine Art space, works on paper by Chen Shaoxiong capture images of protests, such as democracy advocates who oppose Beijing’s efforts to restrict political freedoms in Hong Kong. His sweeping brush strokes on white paper give these pieces an unusual intensity, though they are not much larger than a legal pad. “He is making ink relevant to contemporary society,” said Meg Maggio, the founder of Pekin Fine Art. “Not many can do that.” In the confines of the exclusive VIP room run by Deutsche Bank at the fair, a large wall length work by one of Hong Kong’s best-known painters, Tsang Kin-Wah, is the star piece. The artist is known for painting words in English and Chinese in patterns that evoke wallpaper. In this piece, the phrase “Making Art, Making Money” is easily discernable in grey against white. Like a growing number of Hong Kong artists, Mr Tsang is happy to embrace the creed.
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Art Basel Prepares To Open Its Doors To The Public
By Jessica Hromas (GETTY) – 5/22/13
HONG KONG – MAY 22: A woman looks at work by Yayoi Kusama, represented by Victoria Miro, London, and Ota Fine Arts, at Art Basel, May 22, 2013 in Hong Kong. (Photo by Jessica Hromas/Getty Images)
Art Basel, an international art show that has been held annually in Basel and Miami Beach, made its debut in Hong Kong Thursday. Here, artworks by Ugo Rondinone. ====
After a strong showing by VIPs on Wednesday, Thursday saw more swift business in the aisles and booths of the inaugural Art Basel in Hong Kong fair (the best of which ARTINFO has highlighted in this video). During its first day of being open to the general public, fair heavyweights like Hauser & Wirth, Paul Kasmin, and Arndt made major sales, while a slew of Asian galleries also made big moves. New York’s Paul Kasmin Gallery sold three pieces from Francois-Xavier and Claude Lalanne’s “Famille De Moutons” series of sheep sculptures for a total of $650,000 to a Hong Kong-based collector. The gallery also sold the Ivan Navarro neon and mirror works “Sway (Grand Gateway)” (2011) and “War Hole” (2012), the latter fetching $20,000 from a Swiss collector. Hauser & Wirth had another big day, selling two works on paper and four paintings by Zhang Enli at prices ranging from $25,000-$180,000, as well as Michael Raedecker’s “suspended” (2008) for $200,000. Arndt, of Singapore and Berlin, sold Jitish Kallat’s “Prosody of a Rising Tide” (2011-12) for $180,000, two editions of Entang Wiharso “Feast Table: Undeclared Perceptions” (2012) for $90,000 each — one of them to Berlin’s Thomas Olbricht Collection — Eko Nugroho’s “Flower Generation II” (2012) for $54,000, which was acquired by an Australian museum, and Jiechang Yang’s “Burning Tree” (2009), which was snapped up for €70,000 by a German collector. Long March Space from Beijing sold Made In Company’s “Play 201301″ (2013), which is featured in the fair’s Encounters section, for $325,000 to Australia’s White Rabbit Collection. The gallery also sold Wang Zhan’s “Artificial Rock No.146″ (2011) for $280,000. The Taipei- and Beijing-based gallery Tina Keng sold eight works from Jiang Xu’s “Eight Tall Sunflowers” series for a total of $2.6 million. Tokyo’s SCAI The Bathhouse sold Daisuke Ohha’s “BUKKA” (2011) for $22,000. ShanghART sold Yang Fudong’s “Forest Diary” (2000) for €45,000. And Sao Paulo’s Mendes Wood sold three untitled works by Lucas Arruda in the range of $10,000-20,000 each. A few galleries also reported additional sales from Wednesday’s VIP preview. Local gallery De Sarthe, did especially well, moving works including pieces by Alexander Calder and Lin Jing Jing for a total of $4 million in sales, all of the to Asian collectors intending to open private museums. Also on Wednesday, Sao Paulo’s Casa Triângulo sold two untitled works by Mariana Palma for $14,000 each to Hong Kong-based collectors. ===== OCULA
FACING OFF AT ART BASEL IN HONG KONG: A CULTURAL COMMENTARY OF A VERNISSAGE
23 May 2013
Stephanie Bailey – Hong Kong
When it comes to art fairs these days, it’s not just about selling. With collectors being extra cautious and new collectors (and new money) entering the art market, art fairs are also about building relationships, tastes and, in the 21st Century, more expanded notions of object-based art. Indeed, with art fairs and biennales proliferating around the world, there is not one art centre, but centres.
That Art Basel has come to Hong Kong to occupy two halls of the Hong Kong Exhibition Centre – (the world’s most occupied convention centre) – is a case in point. It is a clear indication of a certain global expansion taking place in the contemporary arts, mirrored by the sheer number of artists and galleries operating globally, each with their own approach, style and focus.
In reflection of this, Art Basel, which has always predicated itself on a certain globalism, is moving with the times. During Art Basel in Hong Kong’s press conference on Vernissage Day, Art Basel’s Director Marc Spiegler noted that 2013’s inaugural Art Basel in Hong Kong (ABHK) was not only a historical moment because Art Basel has come to Asia, but also because there has never been such a strong combination of eastern and western galleries presented together at an art fair. More than fifty per cent out of the 245 presenting galleries come from Asia and the Asia-Pacific region, from Turkey, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent to Australia and New Zealand, with twenty-six alone coming from Hong Kong. The result is eclectic (35 nations in total are represented), with styles intermingling but not necessarily blending. Some visitors commented on the mixed quality at ABHK during the preview. But perhaps this is not so much about good or bad art as it is about different art(s). In this, naming the sectors complementing the main Galleries section Discoveries, Insights, and Encounters, is telling if not instructive. Curated by Yuko Hasegawa, Encounters presents large-scale installations installed in various “plazas” within the fair halls. It aims to explore the ideas of “East” and “West,” looking at memory, history, and social contexts from a transcultural perspective. Works showing in Encounters include Jitish Kallat’s bamboo scaffolding encasing a large square column, Circa (2011), MadeIn Company’s leather-clad cathedral hung from the ceiling with rope, Play (201_B01) (2013), and a series of coloured venetian blinds arranged to produce a hanging mobile by Haegue Yang. Like the fair itself, Encounters is a patchwork of cultural (con)fusion. It is a state most clearly illustrated in the Discoveries section. Here, Kalfayan has presented photographs by Syrian artist Hrair Sarkissian against a series of vases produced in China in the Ming style, depicting scenes from the Lebanese Civil War in Raed Yassin’s, China. The work was produced as part of the 2012 Abraaj Capital Art Prize of which Yassin was a recipient. In this work, the global clusterfuck produced by the constant circulation and trade of objects and people is made apparent. The precision of Yassin’s statement is a testament to the artist’s sharp response to the notion of global culture and historical heritage in the 21st Century. This same kind of clarity is evident in other artists presented in Discoveries; a vibrant mix of emerging talent, from Brendan Early at Dublin’s mother’s tankstation, Tang Kwok Hin at Hong Kong’s 2p Contemporary, Becky Beasley and Matthias Bitzer at Milan’s Francesca Minini and Sanné Mestrom at Melbourne’s Utopian Slumps. Meanwhile, in the Galleries sector, there is a dynamic show of cultural range. Tokyo’s Gallery Koyanagi presents a mixed roster, including Olafur Eliasson, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Marlene Dumas, while Seoul’s PKM has opted for a selection of works including Minouk Lim’s Portable Keeper_White (2012) and a pair of Paradise Pies by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen. Of course, there are those who have made safer bets: Pace presents paintings and sculptures by China’s most expensive contemporary artist, Zhang Xiaogang, and Victoria Miro has brought Yayoi Kusama, who is everywhere. But not all choices have been so conservative (or calculating). Japan’s Mizuma provided a refreshing presentation showcasing new works including Yoshitaka Amano’s epic (and dirty) acrylic on aluminium panel Spring (2013), teamLab’s intriguing interactive animation installation, United, Fragmented, Repeated and Impermanent World (2013), Jane Lee’s deliciously textural oil painting, Fetish series-RB I (2013) and Makoto Aida’s ironically named, The Non-Thinker (2012). In this, ABHK isn’t just about cultural (or market) encounters. There are artistic face-offs happening everywhere, most of them unexpected. Take Haim Steinbach’s Untitled (plant, artichoke) (2012) at Lia Rumma: a green plastic form resembling a bonsai tree and an artichoke resting on a book. Steinbach’s green object immediately recalled a Tony Cragg sculpture, probably because I saw so many at the fair. Later, I chanced upon a Cragg bronze painted literally the same colour as Steinbach’s green plastic bonsai at Marian Goodman, aptly titled Versus (2012). It was a perfect moment of accidental (dis)unity. These relations make ABHK a promising space with which to assess global artistic practices, trends and tastes. Jose Davila, a favourite at 2012’s Art Basel Miami Beach, for example, is showing at both Mexico’s OMR and London’s Max Wigram, and his work chimes well with Seher Shah at Nature Morte. Similarly, The Breeder, presenting Greek artists Antonis Donef (ink drawings on archival paper), Andreas Lolis (marble carved to look like a pool of oil) and Stelios Faitakis (iconographic revolutionary paintings) are shown with Tao Xue’s paper sculpture, Socrates in China (2012), producing a synergy between two very different (yet wholly related) cultures. At the end of ABHK’s preview day, and after thinking about the significance of the fair from a cultural perspective rather than from buying and selling art (or lack thereof, given it is still early days), fair fatigue set in. I had become embroiled in Tang Contemporary Art’s installation of Yan Lei’s Limited Art Project (2012), exploring the complex narratives (and political ideologies) that have fed into the discipline of painting on canvas, a westernised tradition. Upon leaving, the only words I could muster to describe all that I had seen and thought in a day at the fair were those used in a work by Newell Harry, showing in a stellar group presentation at Australia’s Rose Oxley9 Gallery: “This Dam Mad Shit.” – [O]Tomorrow, Stephanie will assess the debates and discussions taking place at the fair, while reviewing the hotly anticipated opening ceremony, Paper Rain.
Lui Chun Kwong, Au Hoi Lam Osage Gallery Yuko Hasegawa giving a curator’s tour, standing with Haegue Yang’s Encounters installation, Journal of Mundane and Uncertain Days, 2013 Haegue YangJournal of Mundane and Uncertain Days, 2013 Martin Bell Tolarno Galleries Sehar ShahMammoth – Aerial Landscape Proposals, 2012 Nature Morte Brendan Early Presented by Mother’s Tankstation as part of DiscoveriesMatthias Bltzer and Becky Beasley Presented by Francesca Minini as part of DiscoveriesHrair Sarkissian and Raed Yassin Presented by Kalfayan Galleries as part of InsightsTony CraggVersus, 2011 Marian Goodman Gallery Barbara Kruger at Sprüth Magers Berlin London, and Kohei Nawa at Arario Gallery Madein CompanyPlay (201B01), 2013 Part of Encounters
At Art Basel Hong Kong, International Dealers Bet Big on Asian Market
By Barbara Pollack7:51am
Boers-Li Gallery’s booth, with ‘Fondle’ (2009–13) by Yang Xinguangon on the ground. (Jessica Hromas/Getty Images)
“We are really an Asian gallery,” said Pace President Arne Glimcher on Wednesday evening at the opening of the very first edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, at the Hong Kong Convention Centre on Victoria Harbour. Pace may be based in New York, but the gallery has run a Beijing outpost for the past five years, and that counts as a major plus at an art fair like this one, where dealers compete to make an impact in a burgeoning Asian market.
Technically, this fair has been taking place annually at the convention center for the past six years, bearing the name Art HK. But two years ago it was purchased by MCH Group, owner of the 43-year-old Art Basel, the world’s most prominent modern and contemporary art fair, and that fair’s wildly successful, 11-year-old sister event, Art Basel Miami Beach. This year’s edition, which runs through May 26, is the first under its new Swiss management, and although the morning of the opening on Wednesday brought torrential rains, the weather cleared up by the afternoon and collectors, sometimes accompanied by art advisors in stiletto heels, streamed in to tour the booths of 245 dealers.
Works by Andy Warhol at the booth of Dominique Lévy Gallery. (Jessica Hromas/Getty Images)
Certain improvements could be immediately felt, such as the floor plan, which is more open and spacious, and gives the lion’s share of space to blue-chip international dealers and major players from Japan, Korea and mainland China. There are also sections, called “Discoveries” and “Insights,” devoted to more recently established Asian galleries showing younger artists. The new management promised a boost in European and American collectors at the fair, and though a few could be spotted in the crowd on the VIP preview day, including Miami’s Debra and Dennis Scholl as well as the London-based Roman Abramovich and Dasha Zhukova, the heavy hitters at this fair are collectors of Chinese contemporary art like Baron Guy Ullens and Uli Sigg, as well as Asian collectors, like the Indonesian-Chinese businessman Budi Tek, who is building a museum for international contemporary art in Shanghai.
For dealers from the West, a working knowledge of the market in the region comes in handy here. Building on its Asian client base and cultivation of Chinese artists, Pace brought “what we know appeals to Asian collectors,” as Mr. Glimcher put it, and that strategy met with success early in the day. Pace’s booth was consistently crowded with visitors clamoring for million-dollar examples of work by Chinese artists like Zhang Xiaogang, Zhang Huan and Li Songsong, whose works have seen soaring sums in the auction houses. Gagosian Gallery, whose two-year-old Hong Kong branch had opened a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition the evening before (it’s the first major Basquiat exhibition in Hong Kong), was also busy at the fair. Too busy to talk to a reporter, said gallery director Nick Simunovic as he pointed out details of a Damien Hirst piece to a group of Asian collectors.
Works by Basquiat, Hirstt and Calder at Van de Weghe Fine Art’s booth. (Jessica Hromas/Getty Images)
But most New York dealers come to this fair with low expectations. “If I was doing this amount of business anywhere else, I’d shoot myself,” said Sean Kelly, who has scored a major coup recently in selling an archive of work by Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh to Hong Kong’s mega-museum project M+, which isn’t scheduled to open until 2017 but is already spending its sizable acquisition budget.
“This fair you can’t judge in four hours,” Mr. Kelly continued. “It’s a much slower affair than that. People come, they look, they ask questions, they return. So it’s a different rhythm.”
By contrast with other major contemporary art fairs, like New York’s Armory Show and Frieze New York, Frieze in London or Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Basel Hong Kong doesn’t have a collector feeding frenzy on opening day. Here buyers from throughout Asia were much more laid back, taking their time to familiarize themselves with European or American artists whose names were new to them. One artist every Chinese collector I’ve spoken with has told me that they want is Gerhard Richter—not so surprising, as his market is surging internationally at the moment—and the artist’s agent, Marian Goodman Gallery, which has branches in New York and Paris, managed to sell a major painting on 16 panels to an Asian collector in the opening hours of the fair.
Works by Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins Co.’s booth. (Jessica Hromas/Getty Images)
Other New York galleries brought more challenging material. Brent Sikkema spread across two walls of his booth a series of silhouette pieces by Kara Walker, whose work deals specifically with African-American imagery, much of it deriving from the era of Reconstruction after the Civil War. But Mr. Sikkema said he’d found that a surprising number of visitors to his booth were already familiar with Ms. Walker’s work. (As a kind of insurance, there were also the European visitors that the fair’s organizers had promised him would be on hand.) Like most New York dealers at Art Basel Hong Kong, Mr. Sikkema signed on to the fair with the understanding that patience will be required—it will take some more time before Hong Kong becomes an international art hub along the lines of Basel or Miami.
Hong Kong has, however, come a long way. Six years ago, the city was a sleepy backwater, art-wise, with only a handful of galleries and no major contemporary art museum in the works. At that time it appeared that Beijing—with its 100,000-plus artists and 400 galleries—would be the art capital of Asia, with Shanghai, which had its own burgeoning art fair and gallery district, in second place. But the mainland market faced two major obstacles. First, sales of art in mainland China incur a whopping 34 percent value added tax (VAT), making it almost impossible for foreign dealers to make a profit at mainland art fairs. Another hindrance was government censorship—the Ministry of Culture regularly plucked works out of booths. And hence, the rise of Hong Kong. In no small part due to the success of Art HK, the Hong Kong government started putting substantial muscle into the local art scene, first and foremost into the massive West Kowloon Cultural District with its $2.8 billion budget and planned M+ museum. That infusion of money and interest attracted Western dealers like White Cube, Gagosian, Emmanuel Perrotin and Lehmann Maupin, all of whom have opened galleries here in the past two years. Meanwhile, Christie’s and Sotheby’s have been holding auctions here since the late-1980s, more aggressively in recent years, and Hong Kong is now the third-largest auction market in the world.
Works by Yayoi Kusama, shown by Victoria Miro, and Ota Fine Arts. (Jessica Hromas/Getty Images)
The question for Hong Kong going forward is whether it will function more as a kind of post-colonialist art enterprise, importing Western art into Asia, or as a gateway for Asian buyers to have an impact on the global art dialogue. Ideally, it will do both. The Art Basel organizers have said that they will maintain a 50-50 split between Asian and international galleries—mainland Chinese galleries like Shanghart, Boers-Li, Pekin Fine Arts and Long March Space make a strong showing at this year’s fair—a sign that the fair will continue to have local character. Meanwhile, most galleries from New York and Europe, especially those that do not have a regular presence in the region, are still learning how to tailor their approach to Asian preferences, and to take things slow. “This is about us showing up, showing face, answering questions and taking inquiries seriously,” said Sean Kelly. “But it is equally about us learning from their culture. It’s a two-way street.”
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Westerners and Easterners Alike Flock to Art Basel In Hong Kong
Art Basel in Hong Kong, formerly known as Art HK, is the place to go for East-meets-West-style work like Wu Di’s Plaything (2013). The painting shows a monkey-headed human figure in Western Renaissance garb on the end of a leash held by a human-headed monkey, all against a background of old master-style gold leaf.
View Slideshow Wu Di, Plaything, 2013. Courtesy of Shanghai Gallery of Art.; Zhuang Hui and Dan’er, 11 Degree Incline, 2008, lacquered metal sculpture, dimensions variable. Courtesy Magician Space, Beijing. ;
The artist, who is represented by the Shanghai Gallery of Art, showed A.i.A. an image of the print that had inspired the work on her phone. She didn’t know its origins or date, she said, speaking through a translator: “I downloaded it from the Internet.”
Overall, Tuesday’s preview of the inaugural Art Basel Hong Kong (May 23-26) saw steady sales and increased numbers of visitors from outside the region.
Major area collectors such as Budi Tek and Uli Sigg were in attendance, along with museum directors from near and far, such as the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art’s Philip Tinari and Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles’s Jeffrey Deitch.
This is the first year that the five-year-old fair is under the management of Art Basel. With the Swiss conglomerate newly behind it, the fair drew visits from many more European dealers than in past years, according to several gallerists who spoke with A.i.A. during the fair’s first hours.
The fair’s 245 exhibitors, hailing from 35 countries and territories, are spread over two floors of the gigantic Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, on Victoria Harbor. Younger galleries, in the Discoveries section, paid as little as $14,000 for their stands, while larger booths ran into the upper tens of thousands.
Dealers were reporting sales by the end of the first day, though the VIP preview wasn’t marked by the feeding frenzy that sometimes characterizes Basel’s home fair in Switzerland or its 11-year-old outpost in Miami Beach.
Victoria Miro (London) and Ota Fine Arts (Singapore and Tokyo), which are jointly exhibiting Yayoi Kusama, sold the artist’s 1988 painting Flame of Life-Dedicated to Tu-Fu (Du-Fu) to an Asian collector for $2 million. Galerie Gmurzynska (Zurich, Zug and St. Moritz) sold Fernando Botero’s painting Quarteto (2012) for $1.3 million to a Malaysian collector.
Dealers told A.i.A. that an already well-run enterprise is only getting better under new management.
“The fair’s layout is more orderly and calm than in past years,” said Daniel Lechner, of New York’s Cheim & Read Gallery, which has participated in the Hong Kong fair in the past, though not this year.
The question on many minds has been whether Art Basel’s acquisition of a 60 percent share of the fair would lead to it becoming more generically global. The organizers are keen to emphasize that over 50 percent of the participating galleries are from the Asia-Pacific region. Some 26 exhibiting galleries have spaces in Hong Kong, though a few of them are outposts of global enterprises like Gagosian.
Though attendance figures built slowly over the day, Arnold Glimcher, of Pace Gallery, which has had a venue in Beijing since 2008, told A.i.A. that a large part of the fair’s audience would attend over the weekend, when businessmen from Malaysia, Taiwan and Indonesia come into town.
Magician Space, from Beijing, is showing a work by Chinese artist duo Zhuang Hui and Dan’er in Encounters, a selection of large-scale sculptures curated by Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. The artists’ 11 Degree Incline, a giant black-lacquered metal sculpture of classicizing architectural ornaments, is based on garden architecture from the Qing Dynasty Summer Palace that was designed by an Italian, Giuseppe Castiglione.
While the uptick in Western visitors was the most salient first impression for many exhibitors, different dealers come to Hong Kong looking for different things. Simone Battisti, of Gladstone Gallery, New York, more highly valued the Malaysian and Chinese collectors he was meeting during the preview. “Why come to Hong Kong to talk to European collectors?” he said.
Rose Lord, of New York’s Marian Goodman Gallery, hadn’t noticed a significant increase in American visitors this year compared to the previous two trips the gallery made to Art HK. “Frieze New York was just last weekend,” she said by way of explanation. “And 15 hours is still a very long flight.”
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Sean Kelly Announces Acquisition of Work by Tehching Hsieh
Sean Kelly announces a major museum acquisition of work by gallery artist Tehching Hsieh to the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority/M+ Museum in Hong Kong.Michael Lynch (CEO of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority) and Lars Nittve (Executive Director of the M+ Museum) announced the acquisition this morning in a press conference held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center, timed to coincide with the opening of the Art Basel art fair in Hong Kong.
This acquisition is the largest to date of Hsieh’s work and will be the most comprehensive collection of Hsieh’s work to be held in a public institution. The acquisition comprises a complete editioned set of the One Year Performance works and Hsieh’s final long-duration performance, which lasted thirteen years.The years from 1978 through 1999 witnessed Hsieh’s development of six individual performance works- all but one lasted for periods of one year at a time-which are informally referred to as:Cage Piece, Time Clock Piece, Outdoor Piece, Rope Piece (with artist Linda Montano), No Art Piece and Thirteen Year Plan. During this 22-year period, his contribution to long-form durational performance art is the most profound of any artist. M+ has acquired a complete set of these works:One Year Performance 1978-1979 (Cage Piece) One Year Performance1980-1981 (Time Clock Piece) One Year Performance 1981-1982 (Outdoor Piece) Art/Life One Year Performance1983-1984 (Rope Piece) One Year Performance 1985-1986 (No Art Piece) Tehching Hsieh 1986-1999 (Thirteen Year Plan)The West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong is one of the largest arts and cultural projects in the world. A centerpiece of Hong Kong’s future West Kowloon Cultural District, M+ is a new museum for visual culture, encompassing 20th and 21st century art, design, architecture and the moving image from Hong Kong, China, Asia and beyond.Tehching Hsieh (b. 1950, Taiwanese-American) has been represented worldwide by Sean Kelly Gallery since 2009. Work by Hsieh will be on view this week at the gallery’s booth at Art Basel in Hong Kong (1D08).
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SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
All eyes on Hong Kong as Art Basel hits city, bringing tourism boost with it
Hong Kong’s newest arts fair may reflect the cultural and economic value of art, but also a globalisation of culture that can stifle artistic expression
An visitor at Sotheby’s Hong Kong Gallery in Admiralty inspects 556,066,792,000, a work by Hong Hao, on display in the Boundless: Contemporary Art exhibition. Photo: Felix Wong
As the curtain goes up on the first Hong Kong excursion of the Art Basel international art show today, it will become the focal point not just for the art world, but for the city’s tourism efforts. The Tourism Board is promoting the Asian outpost of the world’s largest contemporary art fair as the centrepiece of an “Art Month”, which also includes a range of satellite fairs and the irrepressible, inflatable Rubber Duck. Even Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying will attend the fair’s opening ceremony this morning – the first time the city’s top leader has presided over the opening of a major art fair. The dramatic boom in Hong Kong’s art fair business since the forerunner to Art Basel – Art HK – made its debut in 2008, has resonated across the region. So also has the emergence of the city and the West Kowloon Cultural District as centres for art auctions. Cities from Singapore to Tokyo and Abu Dhabi to Manila, are embracing art fairs not just for the lucrative business opportunities they create, but also for their power in branding the city and bringing in affluent visitors. But as more Asian cities rush to join the game, there are growing warnings of the key risk from the trend; the globalisation of culture via contemporary art. “Culture is very important in marketing a city,” says cultural critic and consultant Desmond Hui. “Similar to the construction of cultural districts and the cultivation of a creative economy, art fairs are part of the equation.” Unlike art biennales – which are organised by the authorities as an official presentation of arts and culture – art fairs are engineered by market forces and have a different role, and can forge a close relationship with a city. Governments should recognise the fact that art fairs play an important role in cultural and creative industries, Hui says. “In Hong Kong everything is market-driven, so the government doesn’t have to think. But if the government can provide appropriate support and let the private sector grow, the impact could be bigger,” Hui says. “A city’s cultural infrastructure does not equal the commercialisation of art.” Hong Kong government statistics released this month shed light on the attraction of building a cultural industry. Cultural and creative industries were worth HK$89.6 billion in 2011, 4.7 per cent of gross domestic product and a marked increase on their 3.8 share in 2005. Amid general growth in the number of art fairs, the Art, Antiques and Crafts sector was ranked as the third most lucrative cultural and creative industry, generating just over HK$10 billion – almost double the HK$5.4 billion recorded in 2007, the year before Art HK made its debut. It’s inevitable that other cities are doing their best to replicate such growth. Taking Singapore as an example, the government proactively supported the Art Stage Singapore fair in January. The Singapore government also offers overseas galleries the use of the historic Gillman Barracks, a contemporary art site put together by the government’s Economic Development Board. A tax-free zone has been created to draw auction business away from Hong Kong, while government bodies such as the National Arts Council and the Singapore Tourism Board actively co-operate to generate a creative buzz. Art critic John Batten says an art fair can draw the attention of outsiders and also takes on a wider public perception – thereby adding something to the city. But while a successful fair can serve as a branding tool for a city and draw cultural events to take place around it, it also needs the city, he adds. “The art scene wants to associate with Art Basel. But a good art fair also wants to associate with a city – an art fair wants to be seen as part of the fabric of a city,” Batten says. Art Basel Asia director Magnus Renfrew says that rather than simply being a forum for the trading of artworks, an art fair shares both cultural and commercial functions. He wants the art fair to form a positive relationship with Hong Kong, and even serve as an ambassador for the city. “Art fairs can help promote a city as a cultural destination. We want to benefit the cultural scene in Hong Kong. We are not just bringing audiences to discover the city, but also curators and museum directors,” he says. “There is this increasing recognition of Hong Kong as a major centre, not just for the trading of art, but also as a networking and meeting place for the international art world. The fair helps build the brand of Hong Kong as a cultural and financial hub.” Renfrew recognises that cities also hope to ride on the back of art fairs to promote themselves. “It’s very natural for a host city of an art fair to use this opportunity to demonstrate their cultural strength. Governments are more aware of the importance of art fairs [as] key events of the cultural calendar. Culture is an important part of the identity of a city, and art fairs can play a strong PR role,” he says. But, Hui says, other cities such as Taipei and Tokyo, which host art fairs on a different scale, can benefit from a more established cultural infrastructure – the network of public and private institutions that cultivate creativity – than Hong Kong, Singapore, or mainland Chinese cities. Take, for example, March’s Art Fair Tokyo. It may not be the most glamorous event on the arts calendar, but it is able to showcase local art to a local audience already familiar with the subject from the city’s museums and other cultural institutions. Surrounding the fair is the Roppongi Art Night, an all-night art happening in the hip Roppongi Hills area. A smaller contemporary art fair, G-Tokyo, is held concurrently. These events, crowded with local youngsters, offer a different side of Tokyo to visitors. “There’s a long history of art in Japan. The Japanese like to appreciate art with their own taste. We don’t have to follow the global trend,” says Art Fair Tokyo’s executive director Takahiro Kaneshima. Kaneshima says many young art fairs in the region look up to Art Basel and Frieze, a contemporary art fair in London and New York. But by achieving a “global standard”, he says, they end up featuring the same galleries and the same artists. “We try to make our own style of art fair. It doesn’t make sense to have just another Art Basel,” he says. “The rich can go to Switzerland and Hong Kong. We feel that we should make a fair that is more interesting locally.” Kaneshima says he wants his fair to be a platform for local artists and collectors, and make art accessible. This year’s fair attracted 44,000 visitors viewing art works brought by 136 galleries – almost all of them from Japan. The balance is in stark contrast to Art Basel Hong Kong, where half of the galleries came from the West. “I always think; why doesn’t our fair have big international galleries? But the truth is, few people here are interested in them,” he says. “We should learn about the global context, but Asia has different aesthetics. We want to show and create our own. For Asian people, it’s nice to have this kind of ‘global’ art fair …but isn’t such a Western-style strategy some kind of colonisation?” Kaneshima says it is inevitable that art fairs will follow a western model. But he believes creating a uniquely Asian system is important. Japan’s economic troubles of the past two decades have been a wake-up call to collectors and artists, he says. They now take time to sell works of art through galleries and there is more effort to cultivate talent. “It takes five years to sell an expensive sculpture, and it takes 20 years to make an artist,” he says. Internationally popular Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is in Hong Kong for a solo exhibition of his new works at Central’s Galerie Perrotin Hong Kong. He says that today’s art fairs and the market are vibrant. “When I debuted [in the international scene] 20 years ago, I hoped for such conditions,” the artist says. “But young people mi
sunderstood the concept of making money. Auctions put up the prices [of art works] in a short time, but there’s also a short lifespan for artists.” Murakami is helping the next generation of artists. He “coaches” emerging artists under his company, KaiKai Kiki, ensuring they create art with a “healthy” mentality so that the money goes into the pockets of the artists’ families as well as the artists themselves, reducing the temptation for them to blow their new-found wealth. In 2002, he founded the GEISAI Operation, an art fair offering emerging Japanese artists a taste of the art market. The development of Tokyo’s largely homegrown art fair scene contrasts starkly to that of Hong Kong and other cities, which have a weaker cultural infrastructure and rely on foreign-run fairs. The concern is that the interest of foreigners in a city can be transient. “Foreigners bring the Western style to Hong Kong, which serves as a platform for them. But what if they move away from Hong Kong?” Hui asks. This worries artist and critic Anthony Leung Po-shan. She believes the vibrant art scene – a parade of glamorous openings, parties and free-flowing champagne – is in fact sending an alarming signal to the city. “It is a new form of globalisation,” Leung says. “Contemporary art becomes a tool, the best social occasion for global elites. It is not about the cultural diversity that [UN cultural body] Unesco advocates. Contemporary art becomes a new label, like Louis Vuitton, that people are after.” Leung worries that such globalisation of culture through the contagious art fairs obsession will eventually undermine or even extinguish most indigenous local craft and cultures in Asia in the long run. In fact, Britain is already experiencing such a phenomenon, with officials deciding that the country’s age-old craft industries no longer warrant inclusion within its creative industries. While the British contemporary art scene has blossomed, last month Britain’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport released a consultation paper proposing to remove craft as a category within the creative industries as “most craft businesses are too small to identify in business survey data … we’ve not been able to provide gross value added data”. Leung says the growth of the culture sector in Hong Kong is mainly in contemporary art, while traditional art forms stagnate. “Will it kill the local art forms? It depends on the local authorities,” she says. “Art fairs create great synergies. The positive side is that these fairs help widen the spectrum of arts and culture. But with this developmental-state mentality dominating Asia, and creative industries becoming state policy, Asia becomes a place that is just about making money. Art fairs then become a merger not just of culture, but also of capital. Cities have to beware of art fairs.”
This article first appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition on May 22, 2013 as Drawing a line between art and money
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A sculpture by French artist Fabien Merelle at the Hong Kong Statue Square. It sold for 250,000 euros to a Southeast Asian collector. Photographer: Frederik Balfour/Bloomberg
Jolie Gems, Warhol, Wine Lure Billionaires to Hong Kong
Hong Kong is taking center stage on the global conspicuous-consumption circuit this week as billionaires descend on the city to choose from Angelina Jolie’s diamonds, Andy Warhol’s paintings and bottles of Romanee-Conti.
In what promises to be a champagne-fuelled 10 days, the city will see billions of dollars of contemporary art, wine, jewelry and snuff bottles go on sale.
Anchoring, what is informally referred to as Hong Kong art week, is Art Basel Hong Kong which opens to the public tomorrow. VIPs at today’s preview included Kate Moss; Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and his girlfriend Dasha Zhukova; and Jeffrey Deitch director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
“I am very happy this year,” said gallery owner Emmanuel Perrotin who was beaming after spending time showing works of Takashi Murakami to Abramovich. Though the Russian hasn’t yet settled on a purchase, Perrotin sold out 10 Murakami fiberglass figures in the first few hours of the preview at $135,000 each.
Others share his enthusiasm.
“There is high anticipation as opposed to last year when everyone was holding his breath,” said Jasdeep Sandhu, director of Singapore-based Gajah Gallery, which is selling a new painting by I. Nyoman Masriadi for $350,000.
Dozens of galleries are taking advantage of the influx of well-heeled visitors to host openings, dinners and parties.
Four Dinners
“I’m attending four dinners tonight but I won’t sit down at any of them,” said Art Basel director Marc Spiegler. “I’ll eat while I’m in the car.”
At the Pedder Building, six galleries held simultaneous vernissages last night. Gagosian opened with a show of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings, Pearl Lam has Chinese abstract painter Zhu Jinshi. Hanart TZ Gallery is featuring ink-on-paper works by Qiu Zhijie, while Lehmann Maupin has hung embroideries and neon by Tracey Emin.
“We’ve got a security guard to manage the crowd,” Lehmann Maupin partner Courtney Plummer said before yesterday’s opening. “It’s a great problem to have.”
A few blocks away, on two floors of a retro-1930s building designed by Robert Stern, White Cube held a party to mark the opening of a show by Jake & Dinos Chapman. On the 17th floor, Murakami held court at his opening at Galerie Perrotin.
Balancing Act
Earlier, Galerie Malingue put on show in Hong Kong’s Statue Square a larger-than-life statue by Fabien Merelle. The French sculptor portrays himself balancing an elephant on his back. Numbered one in a series of three, it has already been sold to a private Southeast Asian collector for 250,000 euros ($322,770).
Wendi Deng Murdoch is hosting a party tonight at the Asia Society to promote her art website Artsy, while New World Development scion Adrian Cheng is holding a party at the swimming pool of the Grand Hyatt hotel(owned by his family) in honor of his K11 Art Foundation.
Ground zero for the week’s selling extravaganza is Art Basel Hong itself which opened its doors to VIPs at noon.
Rebranded this year as Art Basel Hong Kong, the fair formerly known as Hong Kong International Art Fair, is trying to maintain its distinctly regional flavor, with more than 50 percent of the 245 exhibitors coming from Asia and Asia-Pacific while focusing more attention on deep-pocketed visitors.
“Three years ago we had one person handling VIP relations,” said Art Basel Director Asia Magnus Renfrew. “Now we have 25 around the world and nine in Asia.”
Warhol Dollars
The fair features a strong showing of European and U.S. heavyweights too. First-time exhibitor Dominique Levy Gallery from New York is selling Warhol dollar-sign works priced from $500,000 to $6 million and Zurich-based Galerie Gmurzynska is featuring pneumatic figure paintings by Colombian artist Fernando Botero.
Christie’s is holding its spring marathon of eight sales including contemporary Asian art, ceramics, jewelry, watches and wine from May 23-29 with a presale estimate of HK$1.3 billion ($167 million).
On May 24, Hong Kong-based Tiancheng International sells an antique diamond choker belonging to Angelina Jolie estimated at HK$4 million to HK$6 million in a charity auction to benefit Education Partnership for Children in Conflict.
Sotheby’s (BID) is selling 270 lots of snuff bottles on May 27, and fine watches on May 28.
At tonight’s Bonhams wine sale at the Island Shangri-La Hotel, an estimated HK$12 million of wine, cognac and whisky go under the hammer, including a bottle of Macallan 1946 (aged 56 years in oak barrels) that may fetch as much as HK$320,000.
The top lot of the sale contains six bottles of Romanee-Conti with a high estimate of HK$620,000.
Art Basel Hong Kong runs from May 23 to May 26 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. The lead sponsor is Deutsche Bank AG.
(Frederik Balfour is a reporter-at-large for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)
Muse highlights include Ryan Sutton on New York dining and Amanda Gordon’s Scene Last Night.
Editors: Mark Beech, Richard Vines.
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INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE./NEW YORK TIMES
Hong Kong Finds Its Footing in Art World
Thomas Lee for the International Herald Tribune
Visitors at the booth of Galerie Gmurzynska at last year’s Art HK fair, the precursor to Art Basel Hong Kong.
By XHINGYU CHEN
Published: May 22, 2013
As Art Basel inaugurates its first fair in the Far East on Thursday, it will not only be staking its claim to a growing market for contemporary and modern art, but also bolstering Hong Kong’s position as the dominant art hub of Asia.
Courtesy of Jitish Kallat and ARNDT Berlin
Jitish Kallat’s “Allegory of the Unfolding Sky” is on display at Art Basel’s inaugural fair in Hong Kong.
With the show, which features 245 galleries at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center through Sunday, the Art Basel Group has not strayed from its predecessor’s goal of staging an Asia-focused event. “I know there was an initial fear that Basel would just make a copy of what they do in Switzerland and Miami,” said Magnus Renfrew, Art Basel’s director for Asia and the founder of Art HK, the precursor to Art Basel in Hong Kong. “But we’ve maintained our original mission. A majority of galleries are still from the Asia-Pacific region.” Many galleries in the region had indeed expressed fears that they would be pushed out of the event in favor of bigger, global names in the art world. While the presence of international galleries has certainly increased, the fair has put a spotlight on regional galleries in its Insights section, which features projects developed specifically for the Hong Kong show. Art Basel is also continuing its tradition of presenting large-scale works from leading international artists in the Encounters section. This year’s selections, curated by Yoku Hasegawa of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, will feature 17 artists, including the Shanghai-based MadeIn Company, the Indian artist Jitish Kallat and the New Zealand-based artist Seung Yul Oh. There was little a decade ago to presage that Hong Kong would draw so many galleries, artists and collectors. When Art HK, the precursor to Art Basel Hong Kong founded by Mr. Renfrew, had its premiere in 2008, much of the art world viewed the city as little more than a gateway to the more artistically flourishing centers of Beijing and Shanghai. Demand for Chinese art was soaring at the time, and although Sotheby’s and Christie’s had already established presences in Hong Kong — international auction houses were not permitted to operate independently on the mainland — many of the city’s arts representatives were turned toward the blossoming arts centers of mainland China. The Hong Kong gallery offerings were little better. Save for a few veterans like Hanart TZ Gallery, which opened in 1983, and Osage Gallery, established in 2004, contemporary art galleries in the city were dealing largely with commercial art and offering few platforms on which artists could thrive. But Hong Kong has experienced an arts renaissance in the past few years, and the city now has 80 contemporary art galleries, according to Art Asia Pacific Magazine, with reputable dealers including Ben Brown Fine Arts, Gagosian, White Cube and Lehmann Maupin opening outposts in the city. For the economist Clare McAndrew, the author of a market report for the European Fine Art Fair this year in Maastricht, the Netherlands, Hong Kong’s free market and its lack of taxes on imports or exports of art have contributed to drawing these foreign galleries. The local government, meanwhile, has announced plans to invest 21.6 billion Hong Kong dollars, or about $2.8 billion, in a new arts hub, the West Kowloon Cultural District, where the M+ contemporary art museum is scheduled to open in 2017. Some of these developments have been in play for years, but many arts specialists credit the success of the Art HK fair, and its takeover in 2011 by the international giant Art Basel, with strengthening Hong Kong’s position as the artistic hub of Asia. “The acquisition of Art HK by Art Basel has unquestionably cemented the city’s position as a mandatory destination for collectors, curators and critics in the global art circuit,” said Nick Simunovic, director of the Gagosian Gallery in Hong Kong. For Courtney Plummer, director of Lehmann Maupin’s Hong Kong space, which opened in March this year, the idea of a Hong Kong gallery matured over time. “It really was a natural progression,” she said of the gallery’s decision to open in the city. “But we did notice that Hong Kong was in the air a lot, with the auctions, the opening of the Asia Society and the fair itself. The fair did not directly influence our decision to come, but it certainly made it clear to us that people love coming to Hong Kong.” In 2012, China had a 25 percent share of the global art market, much of it based in Hong Kong. The city is now the third-largest art auction center in the world, after New York and London, and Sotheby’s Hong Kong alone had sales of more than 7.8 billion dollars in 2011. Some major players in the Hong Kong art world caution against overstating the reputation the city had for many years as a “cultural desert,” however. Mr. Renfrew of Art Basel said that this “was the prevailing thought” when he was scouting in Hong Kong in 2007 but that it “was an unfair assessment.” “There were many different organizations, like Asia Art Archives and Para/Site, who were contributing to the city’s cultural life,” he said, referring to a regional cultural research organization founded in 2000 in Hong Kong and to a contemporary space founded in 1996 that is run by artists. “There were also a number of strong galleries, like Hanart and Osage, who had strong programming that was different from the purely commercial objectives of the city’s established antiques galleries,” he continued. “I see the city’s artistic developments as happening more in parallel with the fair.” Central to that development are Hong Kong’s protections of free speech and a culture of openness and critical thinking, said Robin Peckham, the founding director of Saamlung, a small project space and gallery in the Central district of Hong Kong. Mr. Peckham moved to the city from Beijing in 2009. “I was attracted by the more scholarly approaches in the working methodologies of artists in Hong Kong, and the broader culture of research in the art world,” he explained. “Hong Kong is already more significant than Beijing and Shanghai: the transparency of the gallery and auction business, the possibilities of serious curatorial research offered by M+ and AAA — none of that exists elsewhere in China.” Once Hong Kong’s art fairs and galleries shined a global spotlight on the city, the local government took notice. “We were seen mainly as a commercial enterprise, so they were not familiar with the cultural significance of an event like ours,” Mr. Renfrew explained. “But I think the local government has since been greatly encouraged by the success of the fair. Fair attendance has risen from 19,000 visitors our first year to 67,000 visitors last year. They realize now that there is a hunger for contemporary art from the local populace.” The city, which posted a surplus of 64.9 billion dollars in the most recent fiscal year, has embarked on an ambitious plan for the West Kowloon Cultural District, which will include 60,000 square meters, or 645,000 square feet, of exhibition space at the M+ contemporary arts museum. Lars Nittve, a former director of the Tate Modern in London and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, has been appointed executive director of the museum and Pi Li, a major figure in the Chinese art world, a senior curator. “The interest in Hong Kong developing a major institution has become stronger as a result of the fair and all the other developments throughout the city,” Mr. Nittve said of Art HK and its successor. “The perception of Hong Kong, and its position in the region as a major art hub, has been strengthened.” For some, however, the influx of international galleries like Gagosian and White Cube presents a risk to local artists and galleries because they often focus on global heavyweights like Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol, rather than on local artists. While this is sometimes true —
Gagosian did have a Damien Hirst show last year at its space in the Pedder Building — the galleries are generally viewed as bringing fresh air, money and new collectors to the city. “The increased presence of international galleries is a very positive thing for Hong Kong,” Mr. Renfrew said. “They have raised the level of artistic programming and introduced major international artists to the city.” Not least, the changing landscape has encouraged local galleries to deepen their programming in the city. Tang Contemporary and 10 Chancery Lane are just two of the driving forces behind Art East Island, a series of exhibitions held in a warehouse building on the eastern reaches of Hong Kong Island. Past exhibitions have included an Ai Weiwei show and a Dinh Q. Le solo project. The spotlight that comes with each gallery opening, and with prominent fairs like Art Basel Hong Kong, could also presage good things for local artists. “There are dozens of great artists working in Hong Kong who for many years were more or less overshadowed by the developments in mainland China,” said Mr. Simunovic of the Gagosian Gallery. “As the cultural community grows,” he continued, “I think you will see Hong Kong-based artists rise to greater prominence.”
A version of this special report appeared in print on May 23, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune.
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Arts & Leisure
BUSINESSWORLD ONLINE
Posted on May 21, 2013 05:34:52 PM
Art Basel to bring international flair to Hong Kong
HONG KONG — Art lovers, collectors and gallerists will gather on Thursday for Hong Kong’s inaugural edition of Art Basel, sealing the city’s status as an international art hub and Asia’s leading art destination.
The Hanart TZ Gallery, which showcases Chinese contemporary art, will be exhibiting at Art Basel Asia, in Hong Kong. — AFP
The four-day annual show is the world’s premier art fair and has until now only been held in Switzerland and the United States each year. More than 2,000 international artists and 245 leading art galleries will come together for the event to be held in the city’s waterfront convention center. “Art Basel really helps to affirm in people’s minds the status of Hong Kong as the art destination in Asia,” Art Basel Asia Director Magnus Renfrew told AFP. It replaces Art HK, Hong Kong’s former art fair which was set up in 2008 and recently taken over by the high-profile Swiss Art Basel franchise which has been showcasing modern and contemporary art since 1970. “It really helps to take this from being a fair of regional significance to one of global significance,” says Renfrew, who also headed Art HK. “The quality of application this year was far greater than what we received previously, it’s getting more difficult to get in.” Renfrew and his team are predicting huge growth potential in the Asian art scene and are expecting a greater presence from collectors from outside Asia. “There’s clearly a huge potential in Asia, there are now more billionaires in Asia than there are in Europe,” says Renfrew, adding that 25 VIP relations managers have been deployed around the world to drive VIP traffic to the fair. Better known as a fast-paced commercial hub which is home to global banks and designer brands, Hong Kong’s reputation as a thriving center for art collectors has only been established in the last few years. It has surged to third place in the global art auction market behind New York and London and Western galleries are falling over each other to open franchises in the former British colony. The sudden boom in the international art presence in Hong Kong has come largely thanks to the explosion of personal wealth among mainland Chinese who are investing in art and a growing interest among collectors for different types of art aside from traditional works. Since Art Basel acquired Art HK in 2011, 11 galleries have opened up in Hong Kong hoping to tap into the growing international art presence, Renfrew said. “I think the cultural ecology of Hong Kong is really starting to come together,” he said. Gagosian, White Cube, Acquavella, Lehmann Maupin and Pearl Lam are just some of the big-name galleries to have arrived in the city in the past two years, despite sky-high rents. The local art scene is also buzzing with the government’s development of a massive art and culture district on the harbor in Kowloon where contemporary art museum M+ is expected to boast a world-class art selection. International art stars are launching shows at major galleries in the city to coincide with Art Basel and tap into the current cultural buzz. Controversial British siblings Jake and Dinos Chapman — known as the Chapman brothers — will be opening an exhibition at White Cube on Tuesday, their first exhibition in China. Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami will launch a show at the French Galerie Perrotin on the same day. Art Basel’s four main sections at the Hong Kong show will focus on significant works from the past 100 years, projects specially developed for the show and large-scale sculptural and installation pieces. Selected emerging contemporary artists will also vie for a $25,000 prize. The city’s Hanart TZ Gallery, which showcases Chinese contemporary art, will be exhibiting at the show and is hoping to push its own reputation beyond its regional fan base. “With Art Basel, the promise is that the international is being brought to Hong Kong,” Johnson Chang, the gallery’s curatorial director, told AFP. Chang is hoping the show will help his artists reach global collectors and spark “new interest, new business and new connections.” Hong Kong has already made international art headlines this year with thousands of people flocking to see a giant rubber duck created by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman floating in the city’s famous Victoria Harbor. It also hosted a major Andy Warhol exhibition which received more than 200,000 visitors during its three-month run. — AFP
Manila galleries participating in Art Basel HK
FOUR MANILA galleries will be participating in Art Basel Hong Kong which will run from May 23 to 26 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. They are: Silverlens and The Drawing Room under the “Galleries” category, and Manila Contemporary and ArtInformal in the “Insights” category. Silverlens will be presenting five of its represented artists: Mariano Ching, Patricia Perez Eustaquio, Gary-Ross Pastrana, Rachel Rillo, and Maria Taniguchi. The Drawing Room will be presenting new works by Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, Gaston Damag, Kawayan De Guia, Jose Legaspi and Mark Salvatus. Manila Contemporary will present new works by painter Winner Jumalon, while ArtInformal will be presenting works by Pam Yan Santos and Marina Cruz.
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BANGKOK POST
Chapman brothers unveil diabolical art in Hong Kong
The Chapman brothers presented their latest epic installation featuring thousands of little figures in violent conflict Tuesday at the sidelines of Art Basel in Hong Kong, but dismissed the renowned fair as a “shop”.
A close up view of “The Sum of all Evil” by British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. The installation — which showcases miniature Nazis soldiers in various states of diabolical torment — is on display at Hong Kong’s White Cube gallery from May 21, 2013.
“The Sum of all Evil” by Jake and Dinos Chapman builds on previous works such as “Hell” (1999) which showcased innumerous miniature Nazis soldiers in various states of diabolical torment.
Their ambitions to use themes of war, genocide, the apocalypse and the evils of mass consumerism come in the form of tiny, tortured Nazi soldiers, skeletons and bloody corpses, and crucified Ronald McDonalds, the mascot of the fast food giant.
“I don’t want to think that making art or works of art are the pioneering objects of capitalistic markets, which ultimately they are, but I don’t really want to think about that,” Jake Chapman told AFP at Hong Kong’s White Cube gallery, as he unveiled the siblings’ first exhibition in China.
“One of the ways in which we proof our work from being implicated in that process is to make the work as awful as we can, so it can’t be mistaken for anything positive — it’s as cynical and pessimistic and anti-human as possible,” he said.
The four-day annual Art Basel show, the world’s premier art fair that is enjoying its inaugural showing in Hong Kong, is offering a crowded platform for around 2,000 international artists to promote and sell their work.
Nothing could be further from the artistic vision of the London-based pair, Jake Chapman insisted to AFP.
“If you’re an artist I think you allow yourself the privilege of believing that what you do is something to do with producing culture, rather than commodities,” he said, adding it was “best (to) keep away” from the massive fair happening nearby — dismissing the gathering as “a big shop”.
Art is, in fact, “to do with producing commodities and not culture”, he admitted, “but you don’t have to force yourself into the awful truth of it by going to art fairs”.
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May 21, 2013, 7:18 PM
Roast-Duck Vodka, Anyone?
By WSJ Staff
Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong
Skull for dessert? A Damien Hirst-inspired creation at the Mandarin Grill in Hong Kong
Where to eat, drink and be merry during Art Basel in Hong Kong? We pick three artful spots:
In a Fringe Club basement formerly used for ice storage, experience the world of artist Adrian Wong at his immersive installation “Wun Dun” (“cosmic gour in Cantonese). The Absolut Vodka pop-up bar shakes up visitors with drinks inspired by Hong Kong flavors (try the stiff roast-duck vodka served with a fresh bok choy leaf), colorful neon fish tanks, a cast of characters that includes a Star Ferry captain, a soundtrack courtesy of a furry robot backing band and an elderly Cantonese opera singer turned karaoke crooner.
The Mandarin Oriental hotel isn’t just sponsoring Art Basel; it’s also hosting works from “Hong Kong Eye” at its mezzanine Clipper Lounge. Over at the Mandarin Grill, chef Uwe Opocensky is serving up culinary homages to artists from Andy Warhol (Campbell’s-based tomato soup) to Damien Hirst (a chocolate-skull dessert sprinkled with hundreds and thousands).
Looking to run into a billionaire art lover or gallery owner at Hong Kong’s new Art Basel? Much of the air kissing and champagne swilling takes place off site, as VIPs land in the city in droves.
By Jason Chow
In Hong Kong, Art Basel organizers hope to replicate the social scene of its Miami Beach and Basel events. Here, Paris Hilton, left, poses at a Moncler anniversary party in December at Art Basel in Miami Beach.
Getty Images for Moncler
In case you missed rubbing elbows with superdealer Larry Gagosian and Indonesian collector Deddy Kusama at the Asia Society’s Art Gala on Monday, you’ll find much of the same crowd at Duddell’s, where a high-end Cantonese restaurant and Ilse Crawford-designed lounge meet exhibitions curated by the likes of Ai Weiwei (works aren’t for sale). Booked back-to-back throughout the fair, the space this weekend sees a private dinner hosted by Beijing’s Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art and an after party hosted by Paris’s Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. Meanwhile, high-rolling individuals are pulling out the stops for their own fetes, from Adrian Cheng’s Art Basel vernissage after party at the Grand Hyatt on Wednesday to collector Richard Chang’s Thursday event at club-lounge Fly. Co-hosted by Dee Poon, daughter of Harvey Nichols department store owner Dickson Poon, the evening will also feature Chinese art duo Birdhead as the official photographer of the night. While most Hong Kong galleries unveil their exhibitions on Wednesday, Galerie Ora-Ora is staging a yacht party for the Art Basel elite the next day. Owner Henrietta Tsui said response has been so strong that she’s now taking two trips, each a group of 50, on her family’s 80-foot yacht to cruise Victoria Harbor and take in Hong Kong’s skyline. “I’m a local gallery trying to reach out to the international crowd,” she said. The most coveted invitation of the weekend? Saturday’s Art Basel closing party hosted by Yana Peel, founder of the debate series Intelligence Squared. The event takes place at the Jumbo Seafood Restaurant, the gilded floating palace in the middle of Aberdeen Harbor on Hong Kong’s south side.
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May 21, 2013, 11:20 AM
Where to Find Hong Kong Art During Art Basel
By Lara Day
Getty Images
‘House of Treasures’ by Chinese contemporary artist Cao Fei, part of the Mobile M+: Inflation! exhibition at the future West Kowloon Cultural District. See more photos
Years before the West Kowloon Cultural District opens, Hong Kong’s art scene is still something of a treasure hunt.
Start at West Kowloon’s harborfront site: The city’s museum for visual culture M+ (projected opening: 2017) is making its presence felt with “Mobile M+: Inflation!” (through June 9), a crowd-drawing exhibition of six large-scale inflatable sculptures that include an outsize suckling pig by Cao Fei, a giant cockroach by Otto Li and Paul McCarthy’s scatological “Complex Pile.”
Para/Site, Yale University, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library
‘Portrait no 48.Yang Kang,’ 1830-1850, by Lam Qua, part of a Para/Site exhibition marking a decade after SARS.
Next, head to a former abattoir in Kowloon’s old town center, where the Burger Collection has joined forces with artist-run collective 1a Space for “I Think It Rains” (through June 30), the second of four experimental shows in its “Quadrilogy” series. On display are works by 20-odd artists and writers, from pop lyricist Chow Yiu Fai to conceptual-based artist Vittorio Santoro, while Friday sees a full day of “real time” art, including participatory performances by Wen Yau, Reds Cheung and Lau Ching Ping.
Back on Hong Kong island, “A Journal of the Plague Year” (through July 20) marks the 10th anniversary of the SARS epidemic, as well as the suicide of Cantopop star Leslie Cheung, with a series of installations that have already generated headlines. Among them are Lee Kit’s melancholy karaoke room dedicated to Mr. Cheung, a ghostly video by Apichatpong Weerasethakul screened in a 1970s tenement, and Ai Weiwei’s baby milk-formula bottles configured as a floor-based map.
Over in the corporate Island East complex, survey show “Hong Kong Eye” (through May 31) spotlights more than 60 works on home turf after debuting at London’s Saatchi Gallery last year. Pieces on display range from Chow Chun Fai’s painted film stills to a warped life-size taxi sculpture by Amy Cheung, but the real gem is the hefty 408-page catalog, complete with essays by curator Johnson Chang and critic Anthony Leung.
On nearby Oil Street, just a stone’s throw from the erstwhile Oil Street artist village, new government-run space Oi opens on Wednesday in a red-brick building that dates to 1908. Works by four artists explore themes of water and space (through Aug. 18), including a mist installation by mainland Chinese artist Yuan Gong and a video and sound work by Tsang Kin-Wah that uses footage from Japan’s 2011 tsunami.
Back west, conceptual artist Warren Leung Chi Wo occupies tiny 2P Gallery with “Bright Light has Much the Same Effect as Ice” (through June 11), a tongue-in-cheek look at Hong Kong’s coldest recorded temperature in 1893. For the record, it was zero degrees Celsius.
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TIME OUT HONG KONG
Is Hong Kong ready for contemporary art?
Posted: 22 May 2013
That is the question. At a time when our city has been taken over by art more passionately and comprehensively than ever before, Edmund Lee takes stock of the conflicting notions that are shaping our future. In Hong Kong, circa May 2013, it seems reasonable to start the exploration of any topic with reference to a rubber duck. But in the context of our city’s art scene, it takes on a relevance all the more poignant than a mere passing allusion to Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s 16.5m-tall Rubber Duck, which is presently braving the polluted waters of Victoria Harbour. In the glorious days of our toy industry in the 1970s, rubber ducks were one of the major earners for Hong Kong, yet conspicuously absent from the homes of 99 percent of our population. And so it is the case with our abrupt rise towards the pinnacle of the global art market in the past few years, which certainly hasn’t been sufficiently reflected in the maturity of the art-viewing public. Hong Kong is a great gathering point for money, which art always follows. The odyssey for it to become a legitimate art capital, however, is only starting now. Here are some of the major issues that we must address, negotiate or generally begin to grapple with… Being a leading art market vs Becoming an art-conscious city As if you didn’t know, Hong Kong’s art market is flourishing. Some 67,000 people flocked to last year’s ART HK, compared to 19,000 during its first edition in 2008. There has been an expanding army of smaller fairs, like the recent Affordable Art Fair, to offer ‘cheaper’ pieces that are priced below $100,000. And our fair city has, somehow, grown to become the world’s third largest art market by auction sales. Indeed, in terms of business, it has been a period of exponential growth. But does this boom necessarily coincide with an increase in public awareness when it comes to contemporary art? “Absolutely,” says Claire Hsu, co-founder and executive director of the Asia Art Archive. “When we began over a decade ago, we had to beg people to come to our programmes and were lucky to get 10 people for a talk. Now we can easily get a full house with one email to the mailing list. We had about 7,000 people visit the Song Dong exhibition in January in under three weeks, and the staggering [attendance] figures at the art fair every year show people’s hunger to see contemporary art.” Magnus Renfrew, the director Asia of Art Basel who has closely witnessed our evolving art market over the past few years, agrees that things are turning for the better: “One learns about art through having the opportunity to see it, and I think historically in Hong Kong, there had been very few opportunities to see modern and contemporary art in an institutional setting. But that’s changing.” It is indeed a great time to be an avid art audience in Hong Kong. Aside from the fairs and auctions, local galleries specialising in contemporary art are growing more established by the year, while more multinational galleries are opening branches here than ever before. Just as an impressive diversity of non-commercial exhibition producers are emerging across the city (from the Asia Society to Oi!, the awkwardly titled new community art space at 12 Oil Street), the curatorial team behind M+ – the visual culture museum to be opening in late 2017 at the 40-hectare West Kowloon Cultural District – has been making great strides in assembling a collection to rival some of the world’s best. So all in all, what else could hold back Hong Kong’s ferocious climb up the art world ladder? An open mind vs The legacy of Hong Kong education When the M+ museum acquired 1,510 artworks from Swiss collector Uli Sigg’s legendary collection of Chinese contemporary art in September, the irrefutable coup was met with generally positive responses from most cities in which art matters – except right here in our city, where the reception was decidedly mixed and more than a few people questioned the quality of the works. Putting aside the debatable view that we might have overpaid for the collection, it’s hard to shake the impression that any informed and sensible discussion is simply way off the cards as our city continues to be run by generations of people who finished their education without ever encountering the notion of art history. In the February 2 episode of leading channel TVB Jade’s programme News Magazine (which was subtly titled Art – Rubbish), the oil painter Lin Minggang – the chairman of the Hong Kong Oil Painting Research Society who issued an open letter to condemn the Sigg Collection as ‘rubbish’ – elaborated on his philosophy. “Some of these works are nonsensical. Some are the opposite of art. There are, however, some people who do their utmost to promote and push these works,” bemoaned the conservative artist, who later added: “An artwork should give pleasure to the viewer. It should make you feel comfortable.” If Lin’s understanding of modern art is outdated by a century, so it appears to be the case of the television programme’s writer, who at one point enlightened the public by declaring – with reference to a Zhang Peili glove painting – that ‘one of the major characteristics of contemporary art is perhaps its incomprehensibility’. As if confirming that we’re indeed far behind the rest of the art world, the show then channelled Duchamp and played party pooper at this year’s Fotanian Open Studios by asking the visitors – including a bemused William Lim, the dedicated collector of Hong Kong art and co-chairman of Para/Site Art Space – if a mug for brushing teeth was an artwork. The casual preference of this mainstream television programme to find a clear-cut definition of the object over considering its origin, context or even the creative process reflects the jarring lack of art knowledge even in the most prominent of media. To the cynics, this is but a natural extension of our ingrained culture to find a model answer in everything. You see a porcelain urinal and you get a porcelain urinal. Simple. Artistic excellence vs Political consideration The stilted perspective presented by the programme didn’t end with its meditation on a ready-made object, however. After highlighting the negative coverage on the Sigg Collection in the Mainland and the pro-Beijing local press, it went on to pull out a controversial quote from the respected cultural critic Oscar Ho, who went on camera to dismiss the importance of Chinese contemporary art. “With a collection of such things, how meaningful would it be to put them in Hong Kong?” he asked, before adding: “Not only to Hong Kong, but these works are meaningless to the Chinese people too. Most of the people in China have no idea what these works are about.” The mainland Chinese population has certainly had little appreciation of the politically sensitive works on Mao and Tiananmen. But even if we pretend for a moment that artists such as Ai Weiwei, Fang Lijun and Zhang Peili weren’t already notable throughout the art world, is it by itself a valid reason to dismiss the group of historically important works that are finding a home here – precisely due to our freedom of expression – solely because they were severely censored in their place of
origin over the decades? What are the odds that one can tie up art and politics in any constructive conversation when the country in question is still prohibiting the showing of iconic works like Andy Warhol’s silkscreen paintings of Mao – as is the case with the touring exhibition Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal, which is currently at Shanghai’s state-owned Power Station of Art before its next stop in Beijing? It’s disheartening to see the way our art development is scattered with comical putdowns by people in power, who, despite being well into middle age, may be coming across contemporary art meaningfully for the first time in their lives. Following the claim of Christopher Chung Shu-kun, chairman of the Joint Subcommittee to Monitor the Implementation of the West Kowloon Cultural District Project, that dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s middle finger to Tiananmen ‘can’t be considered art because even children can do that’, lawmaker Chan Kam-lam merely added to the idiocy by stating that political works ‘are not works of art’. If half of these many outrageous claims were meant for building up Hong Kong art instead of putting it down, we could well be in for something special. In a society that’s accustomed to polite applause instead of true and informed critical voices, however, it’s reasonable to conclude that Hong Kong simply doesn’t have the mature cultural atmosphere for its own art scene to really blossom yet. At a recent forum in Wan Chai’s Foo Tak Building to discuss the obstacles facing Hong Kong contemporary art, artist/scholar Anthony Leung Po-shan cited the 2009 transformation of the Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibition to the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Biennial Awards as an illustration of the effects of the colonial political principle of ‘fairness’. By turning the biennial into a competition, it ensures a sense of fairness to the selection process. And where will that lead us? Artist development vs A lack of meaningful critique While there’s an enviable degree of artistic freedom in Hong Kong when compared to the Mainland, what we lack sorely is a culture of professional art criticism that could effectively give the artists an honest assessment on their practice – an essential part of the art ecology to situate the art created into a larger discourse. Good critics usually make good curators, but when critics are largely absent and artists begin to regard staying in the profession as a triumph in itself, it becomes increasingly difficult for Hong Kong art to rise above its sideshow status to the city’s prospering market. According to Cosmin Costinas, the executive director of Para/Site Art Space, there’s been a sense around here that the recent growth in our art scene ‘can lead to other opportunities – and not just in terms of [the operation of] commercial galleries’. “For some of the artists in Hong Kong, I think they need to make bolder decisions,” says the curator. “Now, both the galleries and all of us – including the non-profits and institutional – are trying to build something in Hong Kong. But I think it’s important to hear more loudly the voice of the artists.” And it’s not like a platform hasn’t been set for Hong Kong art to finally take the spotlight. As the first major Hong Kong contemporary art exhibition outside the city since 2007’s Horizons at Shanghai’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the recent Hong Kong Eye showcase at London’s Saatchi Gallery attracted more than 200,000 visitors over its duration. The show’s co-curator Johnson Chang, who famously brought Chinese contemporary art to the world with his landmark exhibition China’s New Art Post-1989 in the early 1990s, told us ahead of the London showing last December: “The ‘export’ of art suggests influence. It builds self confidence and builds bridges of connection, which are very necessary for Hong Kong art now.” Speaking of the fundamental improvements that are required of our art scene, artist Lam Tung-pang says: “I believe the turning point could arrive when local entrepreneurs and private foundations – together with the support of the government – make a long-term goal to develop our local art and collecting culture.” The good news is that a concerted effort to contextualise Hong Kong art looks to be happening through a variety of different channels. Of the 867 works of visual culture that M+ has acquired outside of the Sigg Collection and that may be exhibited prior to the opening of the museum building, 700 are from Hong Kong and are mostly either collected from the artists directly or through their local galleries. More than three books have been published inside the past 12 months on the subject of Hong Kong contemporary art, while the growing interest in writing about our art history has also seen the AAA and the Hong Kong Museum of Art collaborate on an Oral History project with Hong Kong artists. Gallerists advocating conceptual art vs Prohibitively expensive overheads It’s one thing for a gallery to focus on selling wall-hanging pieces that go nicely into any living room; it’s quite another to be dedicating your space to conceptual art installations which are sometimes practically ‘unsellable’. When we talked to Nigel Hurst in late 2012, the gallery director and chief executive of Saatchi Gallery observed that many of our homegrown artists are not ‘particularly market-engaged’, which ‘makes their works more appealing to the art market in the first place’. Tell that to the resolute gallerists who are striving to carve out a place for our emerging artists with limited international reputation and non-existent secondary market potentials. “Hong Kong has a good, interested audience for contemporary art, but I don’t think there’s enough of an educated audience for conceptual art [yet],” says Pui Pui To, the Central Saint Martins graduate who founded 2P Contemporary Art Gallery in 2010. “We make exhibitions with works that nobody really needs or wants to buy. The biggest challenge is how you try to keep your gallery if you have nothing to sell – or if nobody wants to buy anyway. Our programme is extremely experimental, risk-taking and progressive. A lot of people who come by the gallery would be like ‘what’s this?’ The educated audiences are usually those who are already involved in the art world, like curators and writers; many of them come from overseas.” While a whole heap of overseas galleries are expanding into Hong Kong, galleries which are more committed to Hong Kong or Asian contemporary art have seemingly found the need to adjust their strategies. Just as Gallery Exit moved from Central to Tin Wan and Osage closed its Soho space to concentrate on its Kwun Tong galleries, Saamlung ceased operating as a commercial gallery and will move forward as a non-commercial project. Magnus Renfrew of Art Basel describes the environment for young galleries in Hong Kong as being ‘very challenging’. “The overheads for galleries are very, very high here, and the price point for emerging artists or perhaps other conceptual artists tends to be relatively low,” he says. “So to make it viable, you need to sell a huge quantity of work.” Given that it normally takes at least HK$2m to start a gallery, and that every exhibition costs about $15,000 to set up, a good and regular audience base appears to be the very least that a gallerist should be hoping for. “The rental in Hong Kong is just way too high for us to survive,” says To. “People can see that [2P] is not like those galleries on
Hollywood Road. There are people coming to the gallery who want to know and take the time, listen to the audio, watch the video properly from the beginning to the end. Sometimes you put art in a context, and it’s not [about finding] any conclusion. Art doesn’t always have a conclusion. You can give the audience a direction but not a certain interpretation.” Rubber Duck vs Complex Pile Since late April, the imagination of the Hong Kong population has been ruthlessly captured by various large-scale inflatable sculptures around town. A few days after the exhibition Mobile M+: Inflation! was unveiled at the West Kowloon Cultural District, featuring such controversial pieces as Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy’s poop-like Complex Pile and Chinese artist Cao Fei’s roasted pig sculpture House of Treasures, Florentijn Hofman’s Rubber Duck arrived at the harbour to put the snap-happy public into a craze. The number of visitors to the M+ exhibition had topped 100,000 at the time of press, whereas nobody can really keep count of all the duck photos floating – or, indeed, otherwise – on the internet. The phenomenon for artists to scale up their works in order to grab attention is usually reserved for the more prominent art markets in the world, although, in Hong Kong’s case, the impressive sight couldn’t have planned for a better time to deputise here. To many people in the crowds, the question ‘is it art?’ may well be their first ever art awakening. “I think it’s a great show,” says Renfrew of Inflation!, probably no pun intended. “There’s a lot to debate about what art should be, what art could be. There had been other similar debates in other places around the world historically, as well. It’s a very important part of raising people’s awareness. It’s really quite an important moment.” Now that everyone is going to see the gigantic works, does it matter if quite a number of them have no idea whatsoever that they’re actually looking at, uh, art? “That’s a very good question, very interesting,” says M+ curator Tobias Berger, who goes on to distinguish Inflation! from works of public art, such as Rubber Duck. “Public art is the kind of art you talk about, you encounter it on the way to work and you cannot get around it. It’s public, it’s there, and I cannot choose not to go there. [As for] what we do with Inflation!, everybody who goes to that exhibition, they [have to] go there on purpose. We don’t really talk about our exhibition as a public art exhibition; it’s a sculpture exhibition for us. It’s basically like going to a museum. You would not use Complex Pile as a public art piece, because people would misunderstand it. But you can show it in an exhibition.” Ironically, the remarkable thing about our city’s burgeoning awareness towards art appreciation is that SK Lam – the AllRightsReserved creative director who has previously presented well-received showcases of the works by Yue Minjun and Yayoi Kusama for Harbour City’s marketing campaigns – has almost been forced to apologise for the inflatable duck’s immense popularity. “At first, we were only trying to avoid the typhoon season. We were also hoping to coincide with Art Basel and to take advantage of its momentum,” says the celebrity designer. “It’s an artwork after all. It’s not a toy or a prop. It’s not Doraemon. It’s not a licensed [cartoon] character.” He then turns whimsical: “It’s funny to say. Someone told me the other day that the rubber duck piece doesn’t inspire much introspection. I didn’t know what got into me but I just spontaneously replied ‘when it’s gone, you’d be thinking about it for a long time’.” Lam chuckles. “It’s not going to be here forever, you know.” Is that a threat to the unsuspecting public, the local art scene, or the precious overlapping section of both?
With 245 galleries, including 48 that have never shown in Asia, the event will rival Miami’s iteration of the fair in size.
First it was Switzerland. Then it was Florida, with a 2002 expansion that brought art-world glitter to Miami. Now, on Thursday, Art Basel arrives in Hong Kong. With 245 galleries, including 48 that have never shown in Asia, the event will rival Miami in size but remain smaller than the Swiss fair, which hosts 300-plus exhibitors. One big reason for the debut: China is now the world’s second-largest art market, after the U.S. The Art Basel network draws some of the world’s wealthiest collectors and bon vivants—including (at December’s Miami fair) Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton. “It’s parties, food, companionship,” said Graham Steele, Asia director of the gallery White Cube, with sites in London, Brazil and Hong Kong. “This is a lifestyle for certain people.” The Asian iteration is a rebranded version of the large Hong Kong International Art Fair, often called Art HK, which launched in 2007. Art Basel organizers are making sure the VIPs are attended to. Art HK had just one person dedicated to important clients; Art Basel has 25. Many collectors are squeezing in the event, coming as it does just after New York’s Frieze and before Venice’s Biennale and Switzerland’s Art Basel in June. Collector Richard Chang, who splits his time between Beijing and New York, plans to be at all four events. “It’s a marathon,” he says. –Jason Chow
FINANCIAL TIMES LONDON
May 17, 2013 6:51 pm
East, west and points in between
By Caroline Roux
Super-curator Yuko Hasegawa’s flair for fusing cultures and disciplines is ideally suited to Hong Kong
Horizontal: it’s one of curator Yuko Hasegawa’s preferred words, though she is anything but. When we catch up over Skype in the week before Art Basel in Hong Kong, it’s 10.30pm in Tokyo, and Hasegawa, in fluent English, launches into an energetic discussion on the shifting geopolitical and cultural landscape and what this means to the wider art world. “Different methodologies, different cultural ideas, and a horizontal approach,” she says, leaving the high v low and east v west orthodoxy trailing in her wake.
Hasegawa is one of the contemporary art world’s global super-curators, popping up everywhere from São Paulo to Kiev, ushering artists from everywhere into a position that she hopes runs counter to what she calls the “west-centrism of knowledge in modern times”. In March this meant assembling the work of more than 100 artists and architects (a third of them from the Middle East) for the 11th Sharjah Biennale in the United Arab Emirates. She included critical work, such as a piece by the young Saudi Sara Abu Abdallah of a veiled girl staring at a written-off car. “It’s the nearest a Saudi woman will ever get to having a car,” explained Abu Abdallah at the time. “Icons of Christianity are taboo there,” says Hasegawa, “and nudity and pornography. But politically, it’s very free. I was surprised.”
Last year for Art Hong Kong (which has since become Art Basel in Hong Kong following its acquisition by Art Basel owner MCH), she curated a Projects programme of larger-scale work. This year it is reprised as Encounters, with 17 galleries delivering weighty installations that will appear in two piazzas that have been designed into each floor of the fair by architect Tom Postma. While these works – which include a series of brightly coloured acrylic boxes by New York-based Brit Liam Gillick, a Venetian blind installation by the Korean Haegue Yang, and a suspended sculpture by Beijing-based Wang Yuyang, who has been known to create vast spheres from energy-saving lightbulbs – are for sale, their presence is equally intended to widen the visitors’ vision and liven up the show. Magnus Renfrew, one of the fair’s four directors, says: “In a relatively new market like Hong Kong, it’s important to show the full perspective of what art can be.”
‘Visibility is a Trap’ (2013) by Laurent Grasso
This is all extracurricular for Hasegawa. She has a full-time job as chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (MOT) and is professor of curatorial and art theory at the city’s Tama Art University. At the museum she has just presided over the opening of an exhibition of the Mexico-based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs, and is working on an autumn show that will blur the boundaries between art and design.
‘Complete Bin Developments’ (2013) by Liam Gillick
“I’m interested in cross-disciplinary work. I’ll be working with 25 to 30 artists and designers with a focus on how data and information can be visualised,” she says. Among them will be Ryoji Ikeda, a Japanese musician/artist/mathematician who creates challenging imagery and music out of binary code. “I’m less concerned with art historical positions and more interested in creating a platform,” she says.
Jitish Kallat’s ‘Allegory of the Unfolding Sky’ (2012)
Hasegawa has been a name to reckon with since the late 1990s – she was on the jury of the Venice Biennale in 1999 – but made her mark with the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, where she was chief curator and founding artistic director from 1999 to 2006. She commissioned the Japanese architects Sanaa to create the museum’s exquisite circular glass building, and introduced 10 site-specific installations by artists including James Turrell and Anish Kapoor that are integrated into the architecture.
Since its opening in 2004, Kanazawa has been an extraordinary success (and also put Sanaa on the international architectural map). “Everything there is horizontal,” says Hasegawa. “There are no borders. The museum is a part of the city and the city is a part of the museum. People come as though they’re visiting a shopping mall. They don’t know anything about contemporary art. In Japan, there is not such a hierarchical divide. High and low culture are on the same plane.”
‘La Rite Suspendue/Mouille’ (1991) by Chen Zhen
It’s this that has drawn her to Hong Kong, where last year she sat on the advisory board of the HK$21bn West Kowloon Cultural District project, which by 2018 will deliver a new arts complex to the city. “In Hong Kong and mainland China, people don’t have much opportunity to see big institutional presentations. In Hong Kong until now there’s been little cultural provision, though the film industry is really important. That’s the local culture. If I make the right selections for Encounters, it will really expose people to this kind of work. People come to the art fair out of curiosity, and it’s an open entry point.”
Hasegawa’s curation of Encounters does, in fact, have a historical viewpoint. There is an eight-metre wide 1991 installation by Chen Zhen. A Chinese artist who grew up during the Cultural Revolution and emigrated to Paris as soon as Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1986, he represents the artistic diaspora of that decade.
“Haegue Yang lives in Germany,” says Hasegawa. “There’s a cultural hybridity there, and an artist making their own reality.” And as for Turner Prize-winning Scottish artist Susan Philipsz, Hasegawa sees her sound art – in this case a piece called “It Means Nothing to Me” in which she sings a traditional Welsh folk song – as perfectly tailored to the Asian sensibility. “Asian people like performance, sound, music and memory. We are interested in temporality. Take calligraphy, for example. A western person will see the final form. But an Asian person will see the process and the work as something imbued with time.”
And with that, Hasegawa has leapt seamlessly from a Turner Prize winner to calligraphy; a woman who, rather like Hong Kong itself, can synthesise west and east.
All works shown above are in Encounters at Art Basel in Hong Kong
The numbers are impressive. Almost dauntingly so. Visitors to this week’s first Art Basel in Hong Kong will have as many as 250 galleries, originating from some 35 countries, to relish. The organisers make much of the fact that almost 50 per cent of the participants are from Asia and the Asia-Pacific region, as well they might: one of the strengths of their December fair in Miami is its distinctive regional nature (in that case, its relation to its Latin American neighbours), and the last thing we want from a fair is globo-blandness.
At Hong Kong, along with three other distinct sections – Galleries, for 170-plus mainstream international players; Encounters, for large-scale work; and Discoveries, for budding hopefuls – is the Insights section.
This features work that has been made specially for the event, from galleries in the Asia and Asia-Pacific region, and its inclusion reinforces the emphasis on that chunk of the globe – a vast and varied part, but united in its determination to make concrete its not-western identity.
‘Komedi Mafia Peradilan Indonesia’ (2008) by Heri Dono at Art:1 by Mondecor Gallery
‘Saturday Night’ (2007) by Insook Kim at 313 Art Project
‘Frida in Green’ (2012) by Chen Ke at Star Gallery
‘Untitled’ (2012/2013) by Brendan Huntley at Tolarno Galleries
‘Sèvres Vase à Bobèches’ (2012) by Francesca DiMattio at Houldsworth
‘Beetle Sphere’ (2013) by Ichwan Noor at at Art:1 by Mondecor Gallery
‘Horse with Bridles’ (2009) by Fernando Botero at Galerie Gmurzynska
‘Tribute to Thomas Struth’ (2010) by Tang Kwok Hin at 2P
‘Madame Zoo Zoo’ (2005) by John Chamberlain at Timothy Taylor Gallery
‘Contemporary Terracotta Warrior No. 10’ (2007) by Yue Minjun at Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013. You may share using our article tools. Please don’t cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.
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WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 17, 2013, 12:21 PM
A New Art Basel for Asia
By Jason Chow
de Sarthe Gallery
de Sarthe Gallery will exhibit Zhen Chen’s ‘Le Rite Suspendue/Mouille’ installation at the new Art Basel in Hong Kong.
Just as the jet set leave one art fair in New York, they descend on Hong Kong for the next.
Art Basel in Hong Kong, the latest in what has become an international circuit, kicks off on Thursday. The fair comes at a busy time for art lovers, just two weeks after Frieze New York and a week before the Venice Biennale. Art Basel, in Switzerland, takes place later in June.
“It’s a marathon—really intense,” said Richard Chang, a collector who splits his time between Beijing and New York and plans to attend all four events over two months.
Despite the crowded calendar, the international art world is making room for the Hong Kong fair, which represents Art Basel’s first foray into Asia. The region has never been more important: China is now the world’s second-largest art market after the U.S., according to an annual survey conducted by the European Fine Art Fair, and Southeast Asia’s wealthy have grown into voracious collectors of regional art, pushing the value of Asian works ever higher.
White Cube
Damien Hirst’s ‘Ptolomeo, 2012′ appears at White Cube’s Art Basel booth.
A newcomer in name, Art Basel takes up the mantle from the Hong Kong International Art Fair, often called Art HK, which became the continent’s biggest art event since its 2007 launch.
Eyeing its growth, MCH Group, Art Basel’s owner, bought a majority stake in 2011, and is this year rebranding it in line with the fairs it has held in Basel since 1970 and Miami Beach since 2002.
Art Basel draws some of the world’s wealthiest collectors and bon vivants—Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton were among the attendees of December’s Miami fair—and organizers hope that the same will be true of its Asian edition.
“Before, the spotlight was already on Asia and Hong Kong,” said Art Basel Asia director Magnus Renfrew, formerly director of Art HK. “With Basel’s resources, that spotlight is so much brighter.”
With 245 galleries, including 48 who have never shown in Asia, the Hong Kong event rivals Miami in size but remains smaller than the Swiss fair, which hosts 300-plus exhibitors. It already looks set to trump both fairs in terms of attendance: Last year’s Art HK counted more than 67,000 visitors, a figure that exceeds Art Basel numbers and which organizers expect to match this year.
The new fair will maintain Art HK’s focus on Asia: More than half of the galleries attending will be from the region, Mr. Renfrew said.
But the most deep-pocketed attendees are likely to notice one change: Art HK had just one person dedicated to VIP clients, which typically include major collectors, museum curators and gallery owners. By contrast, Art Basel has 25.
Among the institutions confirmed to attend are the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and the Dallas Museum of Art, while the guest list for a gala at the Asia Society on Monday includes the dealer Larry Gagosian, Blackstone Group Vice Chairman J. Tomilson Hill and philanthropist Fayeeza Naqvi.
Meanwhile, the fair has attracted Western galleries looking to tap into the growing ranks of Asian collectors, including Budi Tek, a Chinese-Indonesian tycoon who is building a private museum in Shanghai, and Qiao Zhibing, a Shanghai-based nightclub owner who decorates his establishments with works by Damien Hirst and Antony Gormley.
“The goal is to explore new markets,” said Marina Schiptjenko, director of Andréhn-Schiptjenko in Stockholm, which is exhibiting in Hong Kong for the first time. She added that the Art Basel name “guarantees quality” and was a major factor in convincing her to commit more than $90,000 to cover booth fees, transportation of the art, and travel expenses.
Artists are also making their first trip to the city. Brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman will attend their own exhibition at White Cube’s Hong Kong branch, where dioramas mixing Nazi soldiers and Ronald McDonald will be on display, and Berlin-based British artist Angela Bulloch will hold a solo show a few blocks away at Simon Lee Gallery.
“As artists, we’re hearing more about Hong Kong,” said Ms. Bulloch, whose “Short, Big, Yellow Drawing Machine” scribbles yellow ink on the wall in response to sound and will appear the fair. “When they asked me, I leapt at the chance.”
Basel organizers don’t track sales among exhibitors, but big spenders have come to Hong Kong in the past. At last year’s Art HK, gallery owner Pascal de Sarthe sold “No. 313,” a nearly 9-feet-tall oil painting by Chu Teh-Chun, for more than $3 million during the early hours of the fair.
As White Cube’s Asia director Graham Steele noted, however, Art Basel isn’t just about the art. “It’s parties, food, companionship,” he said. “This is a lifestyle for certain people.”
Hong Kong may have an edge on Switzerland on the cuisine front. “A lot of Asians come to Hong Kong because of the food,” Mr. Steele added. “They’re not so excited about restaurants in Basel.”
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FINANCIAL CHRONICLE INDIA
Asian artists’ insights and discoveries to be unveiled at HK fair
Art Basel, the famous art fair that attracts art lovers from all over the world is set to launch its first Asian event in Hong Kong in the coming week (May 23 and May 26). The art fair will present 245 galleries from around the world with half of the exhibitors coming from the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia and New Zealand. Art Basel Hong Kong 2013, offers four distinct sections to showcase four different moods. Titled Insights, Encounters, Discoveries and Galleries, the first three offer visitors a sense of anticipation and expectation, whereas the section on Galleries is a viewing of artworks of artists represented by various Asian galleries along with others across the globe offering works of Asian artist.
Among the well-known Indian galleries participating from Delhi are the Vadehras, Nature Morte and Delhi Art Gallery. From Mumbai, there are Sakshi Gallery, Chemould Prescott and The Guild. We can expect today’s better-known painters such as Anju and Atul Dodiya, Jagannath Panda and Zakkir Hussain to be seen in this circuit. What caught my eye was Delhi Gallery Exhibit 320’s presentation of some very interesting work by Nandan Ghiya, a Rajasthan-based self-taught artist.
The Encounters section curated by Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and Curator of the Sharjah Biennial 13 and promises to be exciting, with 17 ‘large-scale sculptural installations’ by leading artists from Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, China, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the UK. A variety of materials are used in these installations — traditional materials such as marble and bronze as well as wood and natural substances to highlight the need for conservation. Chinese artist Chen Zhen is one of these and will explore the earth’s physical forces in his natural media installation, Le Rit e Suspendue/Mouille, with disparate material including metal, plexiglass, water, earth, sand, found objects and pigment. There are other installations that might be very popular as the cry out for ‘audience participation’. Some of these major artworks are more than five metres in height and others may even stretch across more than 70 sq metres, on the two floors where they will be located.
Interesting installations include Japanese artist Takuma Uematesu’s agate set in shards of mirror to create chandeliers of reflections. Chinese artist Qin Chong’s 18 six-metre-high paper scrolls with paintings in soot is a giant installation. Perhaps the most unique one is Chinese artist Guan Huaibin’s somewhat eerie artwork, in which he creates a three-metre-high inflatable sculpture of a garden rock that expands and contracts to recreate the act of breathing.
What may be of particular interest to our Indian readers is that Berlin’s Arndt Gallery will present Circa 2011 by Indian artist Jitish Kallat (1974). The 120-part sculpture, which has been an on-going activity for the artist involves the painstaking recreation of ‘real bamboo scaffolding’, thus evoking what he calls ‘the transitory image of Mumbai as one sees it today: caught in a state of perennial (re)development’.
Peter Nagy of Gallery Nature Morte, was the very first from India to be invited to participate at the prestigious Art Basel in 2006. It was there that Nature Morte made one of the biggest sales at the fair, when Nagy sold Subodh Gupta’s acrylic on canvas for Rs 1.2 crore. This time, however, Gupta is being presented by Hauser and Wirth. As usual, we can expect that his tall creation of utensils moulded into an enormous vase-like structure with a long neck, will again attract plenty of attention.
(The writer is a winner of many advertising design awards and a painter of repute)
Four distinct divisions of exhibition ideations bring together a diverse reckoning in this year’s Art Basel Fair at Hong Kong (May 23-26, 2013). Galleries, Insights, Discoveries and Encounters promise to create more than a murmur of appreciation and candor.
Among galleries are Indian galleries of long standing repute and integrity-Chemould Prescott Mumbai, The Guild Mumbai, Vadehras Delhi, Sakshi Gallery Mumbai and Nature Morte.
At Hall 3, in Booth C24 Vadehras will showcase the best names in the Indian art circuit with the likes of works by Anju Dodiya , Atul Bhalla , Atul Dodiya , Faiza Butt, Jagannath Panda, Jitish Kallat, Juul Kraijer, Nalini Malani, Paribartana Mohanty, Shibu Natesan, Shilpa Gupta and Zakkir Hussain.
Interestingly two galleries that will showcase works by Indian artists will be Hauser and Wirth Switzerland and Arndt Berlin. Hauser and Wirth will showcase Subodh Gupta’s work and Arndt will showcase Jitish Kallat. Subodh Gupta’s untitled work with utensils moulded into a vessel with a long neck stand tall and draw eyeballs.
The second group called Insights has solo exhibitions and Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke will showcase the works of artist Manish Nai. Insights presents projects developed specifically for the Hong Kong show. These galleries must be based in Asia or the Asia-Pacific region – from Turkey to New Zealand, including Asia, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent – and exclusively present works by artists from that region. Solo shows, exceptional art-historical material, and thematic exhibitions of two or more artists are selected on the strength of the proposed project.
Discoveries gives a global platform to emerging contemporary artists from all over the world, showcasing work by the next generation of talent at an early stage in their career. Galleries present an exhibition of work by either one or two artists from their gallery program, preferably new and created specifically for the show. The prestigious Seven Art run by Aparajita Jain will showcase the works of artist Rajorshi Ghosh-while Bangalore’s Gallery SKE will present Mariam Suhall.
The fourth group Encounters is dedicated to presenting large-scale sculpture and installation works by leading artists from around the world, Encounters provides visitors with the opportunity to see works that transcend the traditional art fair stands. The sector presents these works in prominent locations throughout the exhibition halls. Encounters is curated by Yuko Hasegawa, Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo and Curator of the recent Sharjah Biennial 11. The Indian gallery will be Project 88 who will present the Raqs Media Collective.
Among magazines of repute there will be Bhavna Kakar’s TAKE a magazine that portrays Indian contemporary art and its happenings at its zesty best.
Organisers are stating that this fair is very Asian; it had previously been criticised for neglecting its regional roots before its collector base was ready for the gloss (and prices) of the international art market. This year, organisers say that over 50% of galleries are from Asia and the Asia Pacific region—although this includes Western galleries that have set up shop in Asia, such as Gagosian and White Cube, both of whom recently opened in Hong Kong. But of the 171 galleries in the main section the percentage of Asian galleries has risen, from 40% last year to 43% in 2013, considerably higher than at other international fairs.
Atul Dhodiya, Churning
Atul Bhalla, Two chairs in Johannesberg
Zakkir Hussain Man with a Public Telephone
Paribartana Mohanty, Different Jobs (Two)
A Cafe at Thiruvannamalai
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OCULA: INTERVIEW WITH ADRIAN WONG
Adrian Wong is an artist, born and raised in suburban Chicago, who left to pursue undergraduate studies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Wong completed his first Masters degree in developmental psychology, splitting his time between the Bay Area and Armenia, where he was studying the development of metacognitive awareness in residents of the orphanage system. Throughout his research, Wong used art as a means of establishing a rapport with subjects fuelled by his limited ability to converse in Armenian. “But at some point, — Wong notes, “I shifted my focus to my art practice and completed an MFA in sculpture in 2005.” Soon after that, he wound up serendipitously in Hong Kong on what was initially planned to be an extended vacation. In Wong’s words, “A three month trip became six months, six months became a year, and I’ve been here ever since.”
You live between Hong Kong and Los Angeles, where you also teach sculpture and theory at UCLA. Does this living ‘between’ affect your approach to your own practice both formally and conceptually? What sort of theory do you teach your students?
Being constantly in transit allows me to see both places with fresh eyes. Conceptually, this has been incredibly useful, and has helped me to develop several research based projects from, Orange Peel, Harbor Seal, Hyperreal, which focused on the architecture of Chinese diasporal communities in California, to my current project, Wun Dun which draws inspiration from “soy sauce Western” restaurants and cafés in the Pearl River Delta. Formally, it’s been somewhat difficult, simply due to the logistics of international freighting. It’s led me to rely on on-site fabrication and modular modes of construction to allow for easier shipping and install.
I teach a range of topics in my classes. Most recently we’ve been working through a great deal of material reassessing social practices and dialogical/relational aesthetics. I also like to integrate a fair amount of material from outside of the field of art, from social psychology to comparative literature to experimental cookbooks.
Your work is often irreverent – exploring the cultural dynamics of Hong Kong. Exhibitions such as A Fear is This (Fountain – Tuhng Ngoh Dei Wan) at 1a Space, exploring the ‘vivid’ anxieties of Hong Kongers; superstition, public health, the mainland threat. But you mediate these fears (or horrors) with humour at all times so as to temper and perhaps mediate the irrational aspects of urban life and the impact 21st century city living has on cultural identity. Why is this sense of play so important to you?
Play has always been important to my way of making, because it allows me to maintain a healthy dose of uncertainty in my practice. I find that when playing, I can surprise myself, while planning often leads to a different kind of decision-making. It’s the difference between digging for treasure and searching for Easter eggs. It’s my constant hope that viewers of my work can engage with the materials and ideas in an analogous way.
You are doing a project for Art Basel Hong Kong in May 2013 – the Absolut Art Bar, which has sponsored such artists as Los Carpinteros, who produced the Guïro at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2012, and Jeremy Shaw, who produced the Kirlian Bar at Art Basel 43 in 2012. Your bar will be staged in the basement of the Fringe Club from the 22nd to 25th May, during the inaugural edition of Art Basel Hong Kong. Can you describe the idea behind this project and what intentions you have for it as (quoting from the statement on the piece) a performative and participatory piece drawing inspiration from Hong Kong’s history?
The term Wun Dun comes from Taoist cosmology, and refers to the nebulous state of the primordial universe before the celestial and terrestrial realms were demarcated. Depending on which text / translation is used, it is referenced both objectively—as a “cosmic gourd”—and subjectively—as a deity who “looks like a yellow sack” with “six legs and no eyes,” partial to singing and dancing. As the previous two bars were designed with in-built references to critical theory, I found it particularly interesting that the Eastern concept of Wun Dun nicely parallels a range of Western analogues: George Bataille’s writings on the informe: “All of philosophy has no other goal [than to give the universe shape]…affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit;” Jacques Lacan’s Object Petit A, an object of desire which facilitates our participation in the symbolic order—the most significant being the phantasy of a coherent mirror-self; Julia Kristeva’s description of the processes of abjection as caused by the primal repression of “the archaism of pre-objectal relationship…the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be;” among others.
For the bar, my aim is to create a fantastical space, infused with the “feeling” of Hong Kong’s history, untethered from its “real” history. A city with a notorious poor record of historical preservation, modern Hong Kong is as close to a city built on a “feeling” as any other that I’ve ever visited. It is populated with simulated historical facades and materials, reproductions, and reproductions of reproductions. Essentially, I want to concentrate this “feeling” into the venue, which will be populated with iconic architectures, performers, animatronic lounge musicians, exotic sea creatures, and the smells—both metaphorical and physical—of my adopted home.
What cocktails have you designed and what performances can we look forward to?
I’ve designed four cocktails in collaboration with Andres Basile-Leon, each drawing from the flavor profiles of southern Chinese cuisine. For one of them, we worked very hard to infuse the flavor of roast duck into Absolut vodka to create an elixir that is closer to an old, complex whiskey than a traditional vodka cocktail. In another, we incorporated a rare monkey-picked oolong, which is married with egg white. It should be a very exciting and unusual menu.
Each of the nights that the bar will be open, we’ll have a series of live performances by operatic lounge singers, accompanied by six-limbed animatronic musicians from 6:00 PM to 11:00 PM. Then from 11:00 PM to 2:00 AM, several invited musical guests will be performing, including electronic music pioneer Christiaan Virant and sound artist Alok Leung.
In terms of audience, the Absolut Art Bureau, which organises the Absolut Art Bar series has stated an interest in producing bars so as to create a space solely for the artists – how would you respond to this relationship between artists and alcohol…or artists and Absolut?
I like to think of Wun Dun as an art installation that happens to serve alcohol, rather than a bar that happens to have art in it. And I believe that my sentiment is in synch with the way that the Absolut Art Bureau has managed the project. The entire team has been incredibly generous and supportive of my ideas from the get-go, and set out very few restrictions on what I could realise for my version of the Art Bar. (My original idea was to take over a section of the Hong Kong Zoo and Botanical Gardens, possibly even encroaching on a section of the orangutan habitat. This was only set aside after every possible effort to secure the venue was made.)
I guess I see the intent of the Absolut Art Bar series as an initiative to produce “installations” more so than “bars,” and as a sculptor I find this incredibly exciting. It marks a shift from a historical focus on two-dimensional works to more immersive modes of making.
Aside from Art Basel Hong Kong (and the Fringe Club’s basement), what else would you recommend for visitors to the city during the art fair? What is it that makes Hong Kong, well, ‘Hong Kong’?
I’d strongly recommend taking an afternoon to get away from the island, to explore the incredible diversity of the rest of Hong Kong. Over the past few years, I’ve led a number of excursions to the outer reaches of the city—hikes with wild macaques on Monkey Mountain in the New Territories, dining at the Sai Kung Public Pier, squid fishing off the coast of Lantau, night-swimming on Lamma.
If you were to introduce Hong Kong to visitors in five words, what would they be?
Adrian Wong was in conversation with Stephanie Bailey
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OCULA: THE NEW ART BASEL HONG KONG
9 May 2013
Diana d’Arenberg – Hong Kong
Only two weeks to go before the inaugural Art Basel HK kicks off and it feels like the circus is coming to town. Inboxes are flooded with invites to art-related and art-themed bars, restaurants, new art clubs, pop-ups, collaborations and art retail and luxury events, ready to capitalize on the anticipated flood of international art visitors to the city. Art, art, art everywhere! What a difference a few years makes.
Held from 21-25 May Art Basel HK comes two weeks after Frieze NY and will be followed by the Venice Biennale, with a week rest before Art Basel opens in Basel. It will be an exhausting month of art, and with more and more art fairs and events crowding the annual art calendar, galleries and dealers will increasingly have to become choosier over which fairs to attend. But the importance of having a reach beyond the West, and a presence in a rapidly growing Asian market — particularly for European galleries doing business in an increasingly fiscally austere environment– is not lost on many international galleries, with a number already opening branches in Hong Kong and investing in building an audience in the region. It will be the “strongest ever line up, anywhere in Asia to date”, says Asia Director Magnus Renfrew, “with works from emerging young artists to the modern masters of the early 20th and 21st centuries on show”. Demand for booths at the transformed Hong Kong fair has been great and countless galleries didn’t make the cut with the selection committee. The number of exhibitors has been whittled down from a total of 266 in 2012 to 245 this year, allowing for larger booths and larger works. It will be the “strongest ever line up, anywhere in Asia to date”, says Asia Director Magnus Renfrew, “with works from emerging young artists to the modern masters of the early 20th and 21st centuries on show”. Although the list of galleries reads like the Debrett’s of the art world — lots of familiar established blue chippers and important heavy hitters — there are also a few newcomers this year including Tina Keng gallery from Taipei, New York’s 303 and Peter Blum galleries, and Wentrup and Johnen Galerie from Berlin, OMR from Mexico and Nara Roesler from São Paulo. Like Art Basel Miami Beach, which emphasises galleries from the Americas, and Art Basel, which largely features European galleries, Art Basel HK will stay rooted in the region and maintain a distinctly Asian flavour. Asian galleries will make up 50% of the exhibitor line-up, and the fair will feature 28 galleries with exhibition spaces in Hong Kong, including Platform China, Blindspot Gallery, Gallery Exit, and Grotto Fine Art as well of course as Western galleries who have recently set up in HK. Art Basel Director, Marc Spiegler, stresses that, “The selection confirms Art Basel’s commitment to Asia. The Hong Kong fair will look very different to Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel,” a prospect that many are looking forward to and counting on. “It will be a refreshing treat to Art Basel followers worldwide!” states gallerist Katie de Tilly of 10 Chancery Lane Gallery. “There is such a small presence and understanding of Asian art in the Western art fairs.” The fair will be divided up into four sectors: Galleries, the main wheeling-and-dealing sector of the show with modern and contemporary galleries; Insights, which will present 47 galleries from Asia and Asia Pacific with specially developed curatorial projects; Discoveries, a showcase of solo or two-person exhibitions by emerging contemporary artists from around the world; and Encounters, a presentation of large-scale installation pieces from around the world, which will become a key feature of the fair. This year will include works galleries including ARNDT (Germany) who will present a 120 part sculpture by Jitish Kallat; Long March Gallery (Beijing), who will show a suspended sculpture by MadeIn Company; Edouard Malingue Gallery (HK) who will showcase a neon text installation by Laurent Grasso; and Kerlin Gallery (Dublin) who will showcase a new commission by British artist Liam Gillick. A parallel program of talks and panel discussions, long a feature of the Art Basel fairs, will also be presented in collaboration with Asia Art Archive (AAA); the Asia Society; and M+, Hong Kong’s future museum for visual culture, which is currently exhibiting an installation of monumental inflatables at the site of the future West Kowloon Cultural District promenade. Para/Site Art Space and Spring Workshop, will offer an associated program of events throughout Hong Kong that will take place during the week of the shows. Hong Kong Eye, a curated group show of contemporary Hong Kong art which opened earlier this month and debuted at the Saatchi gallery in December, will be showing at ArtisTree until the end of May. The Art Basel Program will also be supplemented by gallery tours hosted by the Hong Kong Art Gallery association; Fotan Studios, a complex of industrial buildings housing dozens of local artists’ studios; and the Hong Kong Museum of Art, which will be featuring an exhibition of Chinese contemporary art. Meanwhile, for an off the beaten track look at the Hong Kong creative community, check out Chai Wan Mei: Art and Design Weekend, which will take place in the industrial suburb of Chai Wan on 24-25 May. The weekend will consist of exhibitions, performances, pop-up installations, video screenings, design, fashion, and more. It will be an exciting year not only for many galleries exhibiting at a Hong Kong fair for the first time, but also for Hong Kong which has been itching for greater international cultural visibility. The Art Basel brand’s global reach and reputation will no doubt provide greater exposure for local artists and institutions. Many hope it will also kick-start this city’s cultural evolution, stepping in where Hong Kong’s politicians and wanna-be Medicis have failed to step up. “Art is becoming an international language and at this particular time we’re developing an artistic and cultural scene in Hong Kong,” says HK artist and architect, William Lim. “It’s a great opportunity and a great time.” [O] Ocula affiliate galleries participating at Art Basel Hong Kong 2013:10 Chancery Lane Gallery2P ContemporaryArario GalleryArataniuranoArk GalerieARNDTBeijing CommuneBlindspot GalleryBoers-Li GalleryChambers Fine ArtChemould Prescott RoadGalleria ContinuaHardrien de Montferrand Galleryde Sarthe GalleryThe Drawing RoomEslite GalleryExhibit320Gallery ExitGagosian GalleryGajah GalleryGaleristHakgojae GalleryHanart TZ GalleryTaka Ishii GalleryTomio Koyama GalleryLong March SpaceMagician SpaceGalerie Urs MeileGalerie Mirchandani + SteinrueckeMizuma Art GalleryNanzukaNature MorteNeon ParcGaleria OMROne and J. GalleryOta Fine ArtsRoslyn Oxley9 GalleryPékin Fine ArtsPi ArtworksPlatform ChinaProject 88Ryan Renshaw GalleryGaleria Nara RoeslerSCAI The BathhouseSchoeni Art GalleryShanghai Gallery of ArtShanghARTMisa Shin GalleryShugoArtsGallery Side 2Sprüth Magers Berlin LondonStarkwhite GalleryTake NinagawaTang Contemporary ArtDianne Tanzer Gallery + ProjectsTimothy Taylor GalleryThe GuildTolarno GalleriesVolte GalleryWhite CubeMurray White RoomWhite Space BeijingGallery x-istLeo Xu ProjectsYamamoto Gendai
OMR, Mexico City Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo 10 Chancery Lane Gallery Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong Gallery Exit, Hong Kong Platform China, Hong Kong Spring Workshop, Hong Kong
ARNDT, Berlin Long March Space, Beijing Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong Asia Society, Hong Kong Para/Site, Hong Kong Hong Kong Museum of Art
When looking at the work of Ai Weiwei, what first comes to mind is the incredible degree of refinement of his sculptural objects, and the great expensive and time that each work must have cost to produce. Where I a led then is not into his discourse on his pursuit of a Western style freedom to critique the the Chinese government, but the immense power he has to be able to cause exquisitely refined ideas for a work of art to come into existence by the hands of others. This astonishing level of artistic production power places Ai Weiwei in the same league as the American Jeff Koons and the British Damien Hirst, as that power has positioned those artists and himself at the highest positions of artistic achievement in China, America and Britain. So Weiwei is not concerned then or suffering from a lack of economic power; or running from sexual freedom. That he worked with Herzog & Meuron on designing the Bird’s Nest for the Olympics in China speaks to his royal position in Chinese society. What is also of great interest to me is how Weiwei’s works appear to be unaffected in terms of style or taste in their capacity to be from the Nowhere That Is Everywhere, the part of the world that controls the world through vast accumulations of wealth and power. Were Weiwei able to speak out and be a critical agent for the commencement of Western style freedom of speech and of the press, as versus being beaten by the local authorities for doing so, how would this new political philosophy affect his aesthetic position and future decision making as an artist? How would it affect his agency as a creative being – were he to critique the production of wealth itself, for example? Ultimately I ask is Weiwei’s deepest concern with wanting one part of the world to operate and have rules and laws and codes like another part of the world, without him organizing hoards of like minded citizens who would at some point be asked to pay the ultimate price for attempting to radically transform their society. Just look at America during the 1960’s for how difficult that can be, from the assassinations of both the president, and his high ranking brother, to the murdering of the chief civil rights advocates in the U.S. at that time. Weiwei is able to have a dream and have it become an actual object of art in the world. That is a degree of freedom most persons will never know, or even know that this form of freedom ever existed on this earth.
Ai Weiwei: a selection of work by the Chinese artist and political activist
The London gallery has bought around eight million of the 100 million porcelain seeds, which covered the floor of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2010, for an undisclosed figure.
What is to be Done? by Ai Weiwei
from Ai Weiwei’s Perspectives exhibition
Monumental Junkyard by Ai Weiwei
Forrest Gospel by Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei’s Animal Heads in New York City
HHF Architects + Ai Weiwei Guest House
Stacked by Ai Weiwei
Bicycles Taiwan Absent by Ai Weiwei
Forever by Ai Weiwei
Fuck Off by Ai Weiwei
Never Sorry by Ai Weiwei
Naked Ai Weiwei supporters with his face covering their genitals and nipples
Ai Weiwei’s studio was crushed by the Chinese government for his dissent and independence.
If Ai Weiwei, the much admired Chinese dissident artist, were a character in a novel, I would know exactly what to think about him. I would regard him as a fascination, at once formidable and absurd, courageous and disingenuous, unquestionably brilliant and downright moronic. I would take in stride the outlandish paradoxes that are integral to his reputation. I would cheer his stirring advocacy of the victims of Mao’s successors and recoil at the terrible brain injury he suffered at the hands of the Chinese police, while discerning a streak of ugly nihilism in some of his best-known artistic acts, such as smashing an antique pot for a photographic triptych titled Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn and dipping Han dynasty vases in garishly colored industrial paint for a work known as Colored Vases. I would go wherever the novelist who had invented this fierce, funny, bearded, barrel-chested impresario wished to lead me, and in the end I would have a tremendous picture of a man with a quick mind, indomitable energy, and no particular aptitude for art.
I wish I could leave it there. But of course Ai Weiwei is anything but a fiction, and the contradictions between his life and his art—and perhaps within his art as well—are as real as real can be. He is currently the subject of a large exhibition called “Ai Weiwei: According to What?” at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. My sense, at least on the weekday when I visited the show, was that visitors welcomed the opportunity to focus on the hardships of life in contemporary China as well as on Ai’s extraordinary courage as a social activist. Although some museumgoers may be surprised to discover that Ai often favors a chaste minimalist style as he spotlights some of the horrors visited upon the Chinese people by the country’s authoritarian regime, others will take the style in stride, regarding it as a generic documentary approach perfectly appropriate for Ai’s torn-from-the-headlines subject matter.
Certainly one need know nothing about Robert Morris and Donald Judd and the other 1960s artists from whom Ai takes many of his formal strategies to get the point of Straight. This arrangement of steel rebar recovered from the rubble of collapsed schoolhouses in Sichuan, following the earthquake in 2008 that killed more than five thousand children, is strikingly austere. Ai has been an outspoken advocate for the children’s parents as they seek at least some modicum of justice. At times the Hirshhorn exhibition is close to pure documentary. There is a list of the names of the children who died in Sichuan posted on a wall. And Ai includes an ink-jet print of an MRI of his brain, after his beating by police in 2009. In the face of such facts, some will wonder if there is any point in discussing the art historical background or in determining exactly what belongs in an art museum. At this late date, wouldn’t only a philistine question whether a list of names or an MRI of a swollen brain counts as a work of art? A work of art is whatever anybody says it is. Why even bring it up?
Pull up a chairGrapes by Ai Weiwei, 2010.
I wish I could leave it at that. But the problem with simply saluting Ai as a political activist is that he insists on pleading his case in the art museums. The Hirshhorn exhibition—which originated at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2009 and will conclude a five-city North American tour at the Brooklyn Museum in 2014—takes its title from a 1964 painting by Jasper Johns, According to What. The Ai Weiwei who admires the conundrums of Jasper Johns, that most beloved of contemporary aesthetes, is very much in evidence at the Hirshhorn in a work such as Surveillance Camera, a white marble simulacrum of one of the tools of the police state (which is also ubiquitous in democratic societies). Whatever the message Ai means to send with Surveillance Camera—and the Chinese autocrats certainly have many cameras trained on Ai—it is notable mostly as an example of made-to-order ironic neoclassicism, and for all intents and purposes it is indistinguishable from the marble rendering of a garbage can by the New York bad boy artist Tom Sachs. (Some may recall that Sachs got the gallerist Mary Boone into trouble a few years ago when he placed live ammunition in a vase in her gallery and invited visitors to take cartridges as souvenirs.) With Ai, one wonders where the political dissent ends and the artsy attitudinizing begins. At least that was what I found myself wondering at the Hirshhorn, where Ai marries his somber subject matter with a slyly luxurious less-is-more aesthetic. I suspect that this synthesis is part of what museumgoers find so satisfying about the show. Some visitors seem awfully pleased with themselves, as if by coming to see Ai Weiwei at the Hirshhorn they are doing the right thing and killing two birds with one stone: acquiring both art cred and political cred.
I admire Ai’s courage. As the son of a well-known poet who suffered enormously during the Cultural Revolution, he is perfectly aware of the dangers of confronting a powerful regime that has little or no interest in human rights. In the months leading up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Ai was something of a political insider, working with the architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron on the design for the Bird’s Nest Stadium. But even before the Olympics opened, Ai had become an outspoken critic of the regime, using whatever partial protection his international fame accorded him at home to shed light on the darkest corners of contemporary China. Since then he has been hounded, investigated, jailed, and refused permission to leave the country, but not silenced.
In interviews, statements, and writings—many for a blog that he maintained from 2006 until 2009, when the Chinese government shut it down—Ai speaks with eloquence about the struggle for justice and the impossibility of developing an expansive cultural life in China while living under an authoritarian regime. Writing on his blog in 2006, Ai announced that “China still lacks a modernist movement of any magnitude, for the basis of such a movement would be the liberation of humanity and the illumination brought by the humanitarian spirit. Democracy, material wealth, and universal education are the soil upon which modernism exists.” These are stirring words, suggesting that in Ai’s view China remains more than a century behind the West, its cultural development hopelessly crippled by its economic and political systems. (The artist’s writings are collected in Ai Weiwei’s Blog, published by MIT Press in 2011. I find the new Weiwei-isms, from Princeton University Press, less satisfying, an ironic riposte to Mao’s Little Red Book.)
Ai’s meditations on the nature of modern culture can also sound strangely old-fashioned, their talk of “humanity” and “spirit” a bit fulsome to Western ears. And here we come to the poignancy of Ai’s situation. While Ai’s socially engaged art has emerged in a country where modernism has never taken hold, he finds his most responsive audience in the West, where the core principles of modern art–its fervor, its independence, its individualism–are increasingly imperiled. So Ai turns out to be both pre-modern and postmodern, which probably explains how neatly he fits into our current artistic free-for-all, uniting as he does an early modern evangelism and a postmodern irony. Invited to contribute to Documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007, Ai dreamed up Fairytale. This quintessential work of social engagement involved bringing to Kassel 1,001 Chinese citizens who under normal circumstances had little or no chance of ever leaving the country to spend some time in Germany. Were these Chinese citizens being turned into a living work of art–a kind of performance piece? Was Ai liberating them, or using them as pawns in his own bid for fame? The novelistic possibilities are endless, suggesting an exploration of the vanity of good works worthy of Dickens or Tolstoy.
Table or chair?Table with Two Legs on the Wall by Ai Weiwei, 2008.
With socially engaged art now a global phenomenon, some practitioners worry that the “activist art milieu” is all too often “simply digested by the conditions of power,” as Nato Thompson puts it in a new book, Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art From 1991-2011 (MIT Press). I imagine that Ai’s Fairytale might be open to this line of criticism. In the context of the localized cottage-industry character of a lot of socially engaged art, Ai has set himself apart by taking as his canvas a country even larger than Russia, which was in some sense the very starting point for modern political art, when once upon a time Tatlin, Malevich, and El Lissitzky imagined that they might unite radical art and radical politics. Remembering how the Russian avant-garde was crushed by Lenin and then expunged by Stalin, Ai’s supporters can hail him as the inheritor of the socially engaged avant-garde, now rising against the inheritors of Mao’s China.
Which is not to say that Ai will not meet some resistance on the left, where his taste for the bold gesture may not sit entirely easily with those who disdain the international art world’s addiction to spectacle. The Hirshhorn has recently purchased Ai’s more than thirteen-foot-high Cube Light, which, with its row upon row of jazzily back-lit gold-toned crystals, suggests the retro-glam décor for an upscale bar or nightclub. While a wall label explains that Cube Light “interrogate[s] conventions of culture, history, politics, and tradition,” it seems to me that the only reasonable response to this caramel colored concoction is to order a martini and make it extra dry. I confess that Ai lost me completely with Cube Light, part of what the people at the Hirshhorn refer to as his “celebrated chandelier series.” The glitz of Cube Light reflects a side of his sensibility that some progressives will dismiss as high bourgeois kitsch, although at times it is unclear whether Ai is parodying a taste for swank Chinese porcelains and beautifully crafted wood furniture or celebrating it. The truth is that he may not be entirely clear about this himself.
Ai is probably at his best when he works as a designer, considering form in its social aspect. From what one can gather from photographs, the studio that he designed and built for himself in Shanghai—which the authorities bulldozed in 2011—was eloquently straightforward, in a style reminiscent of some of Judd’s architectural works, of which Ai is surely aware. In recent years, one of the most attractive aspects of Ai’s activity has been his engaging various craftspeople—especially workers in wood and ceramic—to create works that Ai designs but hands over to others to produce, in keeping with tried and true post-Duchampian practice. At times he suggests a Dadaist William Morris, corralling skilled woodworkers to make absurdist constructions out of antique tables, stools, and doors, or overseeing the creation of millions of tiny porcelain sunflower seeds that filled the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2010—the seeds evoking the Cultural Revolution, when the Chinese people were said to be sunflowers turning toward Mao even as the seeds themselves provided much needed nourishment.
When Ai, who as a boy lived through the terrors of the Cultural Revolution, dreams up projects for skilled workers, he seems to be designing the monuments for a luxurious utopia, with his Moon Chest (elegant boxes with openings related to the phases of the moon) and Map of China (a construction of salvaged wood from Qing Dynasty temples). He has long been something of a collector, a frequenter of antiques markets in China. And his work often has a curatorial character, the gathering together (or the purposeful distortion or transformation) of found objects, or of objects made to his specifications that he regards in the spirit of Duchamp and his readymades. “My work is always a readymade,” Ai has said. Such readymades, he argues, “could be cultural, political, or social, and also it could be art—to make people re-look at what we have done, its original position, to create new possibilities. I always want people to be confused, to be shocked or realize something later.”
Whatever the admirable consistency of Ai’s stand against the Chinese regime, when it comes to art he is a little too fond of jokes and ironies that have a way of multiplying into inanities. Could it be that the 1,001 Chinese citizens he brought to Documenta were somehow regarded as readymades? And to the objection that nearly everything he has done seems a version of something already done by an American artist—whether his boxes that suggest Judd’s boxes, or his ambiguous furniture that suggests Richard Artschwager’s furniture, or his piled pieces of steel rebar that bring to mind Robert Morris and Carl Andre—would he reply that this is precisely his point, that the American “original” idea becomes for him a readymade? And when he breaks or otherwise transforms what we are told are genuine antiquities, is this his version of what Duchamp once called a “readymade aided”?
A splash of color Colored Vases by Ai Weiwei, 2007-2010.
I have no idea what to make of Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads. This is a set of twelve animal heads representing the signs of the zodiac, realized in editions in bronze and in bronze with a gold patina. Ai closely based the heads on originals, some of them lost, made in the eighteenth century for the pleasure palace of the Qianlong Emperor, by Jesuits living in China. (A substantial book about the project, Ai Weiwei: Circle of Animals, was published in 2011.) Once part of an elaborate water garden that was left in ruins after the Opium Wars, the site on the outskirts of Beijing was a haunt for bohemians when Ai was a young man. (Two of the original heads have in more recent times been in the news, included in an auction of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent.) Ai, on his blog in 2009, had some rather scathing things to say about the originals, arguing that they “are not Chinese culture and they have no artistic value.”
So why, you might ask, did he go to the trouble of creating replicas or reconstructions of these heads, which have now been exhibited in London, New York, and Washington? Asked more recently about the project, Ai had this to say: “Because the Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads is animal heads, I think it’s something that everyone can have some understanding of, including children and people who are not in the art world. I think it’s more important to show your work to the public. That’s what I really care about. When Andy Warhol painted Mao in the 1960s and 1970s, I don’t think many people understood Mao, either—it was just this image that people knew, like Marilyn Monroe or somebody. So they might see these zodiac animals like that—like Mickey Mouse. They’re just animals.” Ai may be a hero when it comes to speaking out for the victims of the Sichuan earthquake, but when he talks about his art he is jeeringly manipulative. It is hard to have patience for an artist who justifies his work with references to Mickey Mouse.
Much of the fascination of a substantial survey of an artist’s work consists in the ways it deepens our understanding of origins and evolutions, but the Hirshhorn exhibition offers only the sketchiest sense of Ai’s early years. The problem may be that his artistic beginnings are pathetically thin, at least that is what I surmise from the little early work included here and what I have seen in reproductions. As a young man Ai spent a decade in New York, from 1983 to 1993, returning to China when his father became ill. At the Hirshhorn a good deal of space is given to photographs he took while hanging out in Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side, and they are nothing more than the snapshots of a somewhat aimless fellow: he meets Allen Ginsberg, witnesses the Tompkins Square Park riots, passes the time with friends from back home.
One work from those years that has received some attention—although it is not in the Hirshhorn show—is a wire coat hanger that Ai manipulated so as to replicate the profile of Marcel Duchamp as seen in his Self-Portrait in Profile. What other work there is from the 1980s strikes me as only more of this highly diluted Dadaism: Château Lafite, a bottle encased in two shoes; a book with a half of a shoe attached to it; a violin with two shoes clamped to its body; and another violin with its neck replaced by the handle of a shovel. Is the shovel an homage to Duchamp’s readymade that consists of a snow shovel? Does the violin have something to do with Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres? Or with the French artist Arman’s interest in violins? Whatever the answers, Ai’s Dadaism never strikes with a personal force, the way Robert Gober’s sometimes does. The work is pale and derivative, after which it becomes loud and political without ceasing to be pale and derivative.
Although Ai is a darling of journalists and editorialists around the world, his work may be a little overly explicit for some connoisseurs of late modernism or postmodernism, better suited to Art and America and The New York Times than to the pages of October. I suspect that many museum professionals in Europe and the United States who have supported Ai’s projects also regard him with a slight condescension, as something of an artistic naïf, albeit an extraordinarily self-possessed naïf. His paradoxes lack the house-of-mirrors richness that is admired in Bruce Nauman’s Clown Torture videos, in Cindy Sherman’s recent photographs of aging upper-class suburban housewives, and in William Kentridge’s scratch-pad films. There is much that is blunt and programmatic about Ai’s ideas about the relationship between art and social action, which perhaps explains his appeal for the audience that only occasionally goes to museums and galleries and so admired his millions of sunflower seeds in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.
For Ai, there is not even a question as to whether the artist can simultaneously be a social activist, because art is not a separate arena with its own laws and logic. All actions, whether compiling a list of children killed in an earthquake or dipping Han dynasty vases in industrial paint, are related in that they are expressions of “creativity.” Creativity, Ai explained in a blog post in 2008, “is the power to reject the past, to change the status quo, and to seek new potential. Simply put, aside from using one’s imagination—perhaps more importantly—creativity is the power to act.” What is lost in this talk about creativity and action is the ancient requirement that a work of art be realized in a particular medium. That does not seem to matter to Ai. Asked by an interviewer whether the millions of porcelain sunflower seeds at Tate Modern “relate[d] back to China,” he argued that “mass production is nothing new. Weren’t cathedrals built through mass production? The pyramids? … Paintings can be painted with the left hand, the right hand, someone else’s hand, or many people’s hands. The scale of production is irrelevant to its content.” This is an extraordinary comment. If the scale of a work and the way the work is produced are irrelevant to its meaning or its content, then what on earth is a work of art? Isn’t a work of art by its very nature a matter of particulars, of size and scale, of who does what and how?
When Ai complains that China has never developed a modernist culture, he surely regards himself as an exception. But the crudity with which he connects creativity with action and action with art reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of modern art, and indeed of all art, that is as pervasive in democratic societies as it is in countries with authoritarian regimes. Artistic crudity knows no national borders, and while I would never discount the importance of the freedom to create whatever an artist wants, I would insist that art proceeds according to laws that politics can at times thwart or control but never fully contain or comprehend. It is tempting to say, in summing up “Ai Weiwei: According to What?,” that I admire the politics and am left cold by the art, but that lets the art off too easily. When Ai hangs an MRI on the wall or places thirty-eight tons of steel rebar on the floor, he fails to meet, much less to grapple with, the challenges of art. In this way, he creates his own kind of political kitsch. It is not the kind with muscular working men that Stalin and Mao preferred, but it is kitsch nonetheless—postmodern minimalist political kitsch, albeit in the name of a just cause.
The political causes that Ai embraces are noble. This cannot be said often enough. But when he takes his place inside the Hirshhorn Museum, with its Matisses and Brancusis and Mondrians, I cannot help but feel that he poses a threat to the artistic universe he dreams of inhabiting. This is not a question of left versus right, or of communist versus capitalist, or of political art versus art for art’s sake. It is a question of what an artist is actually doing when he makes a work of art. I am reminded of something that John Berger, himself a fervent leftist, wrote in 1978 in an essay called “The Work of Art,” arguing against a rigid Marxist interpretation of art: “When a painter is working he is aware of the means which are available to him—these include his materials, the style he inherits, the conventions he must obey, his prescribed or freely chosen subject matter—as constituting both an opportunity and a restraint. By working and using the opportunity he becomes conscious of some of its limits. These limits challenge him, at either an artisanal, a magical or an imaginative level. He pushes against one or several of them.” Berger is writing about a painter, but what he says holds true for any artist. What never happens in Ai’s work is this pushing against limits, this sense of the means as constituting an opportunity and a restraint. With Ai, the means are purely instrumental, just a way to get to an end.
The trouble with most critiques of political art is that they pay too much attention to the politics. This is not to say that an artist’s politics do not matter; not at all. But the great challenge today, at least for those who find themselves in a museum wanting to take full advantage of what an art museum has to offer, is how deeply the artist is exploring the means that are available. Therein lies artistic freedom. As an artist, Ai Weiwei remains imprisoned, unable to speak in the language of forms, which is the only language an artist can really know. A novelist might make something exciting out of Ai’s predicament. But Ai, as I say, is not a character in a novel. He is a man who makes works of art. They are bone-chillingly cold, the thoughts or attitudes of a great political dissident who remains untouched by even a spark of the imaginative fire.
Last year, the editors of ArtReview magazine named the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei the most powerful artist in the world. It was an unusual choice. Ai’s varied, scattershot work doesn’t fetch the highest prices at auction, and critics, while they admire his achievement, don’t treat him as a master who has transformed the art of his period. In China, Ai—a brave and unrelenting critic of the authoritarian regime—has spent time in jail, was not allowed by the government to leave Beijing for a year and cannot travel without official permission. As a result, he has become a symbol of the struggle for human rights in China, but not preeminently so. He is too quixotic a figure to have developed the moral gravitas of the great men of conscience who challenged the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.
So what is it about Ai? What makes him, in Western eyes, the world’s “most powerful artist”? The answer lies in the West itself. Now obsessed with China, the West would surely invent Ai if he didn’t already exist. China may after all become the most powerful nation in the world. It must therefore have an artist of comparable consequence to hold up a mirror both to China’s failings and its potential. Ai (his name is pronounced eye way-way) is perfect for the part. Having spent his formative years as an artist in New York in the 1980s, when Warhol was a god and conceptual and performance art were dominant, he knows how to combine his life and art into a daring and politically charged performance that helps define how we see modern China. He’ll use any medium or genre—sculpture, ready-mades, photography, performance, architecture, tweets and blogs—to deliver his pungent message.
Ai’s persona—which, as with Warhol’s, is inseparable from his art—draws power from the contradictory roles that artists perform in modern culture. The loftiest are those of martyr, preacher and conscience. Not only has Ai been harassed and jailed, he has also continually called the Chinese regime to account; he has made a list, for example, that includes the name of each of the more than 5,000 schoolchildren who died during the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 because of shoddy schoolhouse construction. At the same time, he plays a decidedly unsaintly, Dada-inspired role—the bad boy provocateur who outrages stuffed shirts everywhere. (In one of his best-known photographs, he gives the White House the finger.) Not least, he is a kind of visionary showman. He cultivates the press, arouses comment and creates spectacles. His signature work, Sunflower Seeds—a work of hallucinatory intensity that was a sensation at the Tate Modern in London in 2010—consists of 100 million pieces of porcelain, each painted by one of 1,600 Chinese craftsmen to resemble a sunflower seed. As Andy would say, in high deadpan, “Wow.”
This year Ai is the subject of two shows in Washington, D.C., an appropriate backdrop for an A-list power artist. In the spring, “Perspectives: Ai Weiwei” opened at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery with a monumental installation of Fragments (2005). Working with a team of skilled carpenters, Ai turned ironwood salvaged from dismantled Qing-era temples into a handsomely constructed structure that appears chaotic on the ground but, if seen from above, coalesces into a map of China. (Fragments embodies a dilemma characteristic of Ai: Can the timber of the past, foolishly discarded by the present, be recrafted into a China, perhaps a better China, that we cannot yet discern?) And the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden will present a wide-ranging survey of Ai’s work, from October 7 to February 2013. The exhibition title—“According to What?”—was borrowed from a Jasper Johns painting.
The question that is not often asked is whether Ai, as an artist, is more than just a contemporary phenom. Is Sunflower Seeds, for example, more than a passing headline? Will Ai ultimately matter to China—and to the future—as much as he does to today’s Western art world?
Ai lives in Caochangdi, a village in suburban Beijing favored by artists, where, like an art-king in exile, he regularly greets visitors come to pay homage to his vision of a better China. A large, burly man with a fondness for the neighborhood’s feral cats, Ai, who is 55, is disarmingly modest for one who spends so much time in the public eye. He recently told Christina Larson, an American writer in Beijing who interviewed the artist for Smithsonian, that he remains astonished by his prominence. “The secret police told me everybody can see it but you, that you’re so influential. But I think [their behavior] makes me more influential. They create me rather than solve the problems I raise.”
The authorities keep him in the news by, for example, hounding him for tax evasion. This past summer, during a hearing on his tax case—which he was not allowed to attend—his studio was surrounded by about 30 police cars. The story was widely covered. In 2010, he established a studio in a proposed arts district in Shanghai. The regime, fearing it would become a center of dissent—and claiming the structure violated a building code—destroyed it early in 2011. According to Ai, “It made every young person who may or may not have liked me before think I must be some kind of hero.”
Ai lives well enough, even under house arrest, but there’s little about him that’s extravagant or arty. His house, like many in the district, is gray and utilitarian. The neighborhood doesn’t have much street or café life; it’s the sort of place, one Beijing resident said, where people go to be left alone. His courtyard home consists of two buildings: a studio and a residence. The studio—a large space with a skylight—has a gray floor and white walls and seems much less cluttered than other artist studios. Both the studio and the residence have a neutral air, as if they have not yet been filled, but are instead environments where an artist waits for ideas, or acts on impulse, or greets cats and visitors. Like Andy Warhol, Ai always has a camera at hand—in his case, an iPhone—as if he were waiting for something to happen.
His life seems steeped in “befores” and “afters.” Before the modern era, he says, China’s culture had a kind of “total condition, with philosophy, aesthetics, moral understanding and craftsmanship.” In ancient China, art could become very powerful. “It’s not just a decoration or one idea, but rather a total high model which art can carry out.” He finds a similar and transcendent unity of vision in the work of one of his favorite artists, van Gogh: “The art was a belief that expressed his views of the universe, how it should be.”
His more immediate before, however, is not ancient China but the totalitarian culture into which he was born. Ai’s father, the renowned poet Ai Qing, ran afoul of the regime in the late ’50s and he and his family were sent to a labor camp. He spent five years cleaning toilets. (Ai Qing was exonerated in 1978 and lived in Beijing until his death in 1996.) To Ai Weiwei, there was also another, less personal kind of emptiness about the China of before. “There were almost no cars on the street,” he said. “No private cars, only embassy cars. You could walk in the middle of the street. It was very slow, very quiet and very gray. There were not so many expressions on human faces. After the Cultural Revolution, muscles were still not built up to laugh or show emotion. When you saw a little bit of color—like a yellow umbrella in the rain—it was quite shocking. The society was all gray, and a little bit blue.”
In 1981, when it became possible for Chinese citizens to travel abroad, Ai made his way to New York. His first glimpse of the city came on a plane in the early evening. “It looked like a bowl of diamonds,” he said. It was not the city’s material wealth that attracted him, however, but its dazzling freedom of action and speech. For a time Ai had an apartment near Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, where young Chinese artists and intellectuals often gathered. But he had no particular success as an artist. He worked odd jobs and spent his time going to exhibitions. The poet Allen Ginsberg, whom he befriended, told Ai that galleries would not take much notice of his work.
Although he has a special interest in Jasper Johns, Warhol and Dada, Ai is not easily categorized. He has a wandering mind that can embrace very different, sometimes contrary, elements. The same artist who loves the transcendental oneness of van Gogh, for example, also admires the abstruse and sometimes analytical sensibility of Johns. Much of Ai’s best-known work is rooted in conceptual and Dadaist art. He has often created “ready-mades”—objects taken from the world that an artist then alters or modifies—that have a strong satirical element. In one well-known example, he placed a Chinese figurine inside a bottle of Johnnie Walker Scotch. Yet in contrast to many conceptual artists, he also demonstrated, early on, a keen interest in a work’s visual qualities and sent himself to study at the Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League in New York.
Ai’s interest in design and architecture led him, in 2006, to collaborate with HHF Architects on a country house in upstate New York for two young art collectors. The house is four equal-sized boxes covered on the outside in corrugated metal; the small spaces between the boxes permit light to suffuse the interior, where the geometry is also softened by wood and surprising angles. The award-winning design is both remarkably simple and—in its use of light and the grouping of interior spaces—richly complex.
But Ai’s interest in design and architecture has less to do with being a conventional architect than with rebuilding—and redesigning—China itself. Returning to China in 1993, when his father fell ill, he was discouraged by two new forms of oppression: fashion and cronyism. “Deng Xiaoping encouraged people to get rich,” he said, adding that those who succeeded did so through their affiliation with the Communist Party. “I could see so many luxury cars, but there was no justice or fairness in this society. Far from it.” New consumer goods such as tape recorders brought fresh voices and music into a moribund culture. But rather than struggle to create independent identities, Ai said, young people instead settled into a new, easy and fashion-driven conformity. “People listened to sentimental Taiwanese pop music. Levi’s blue jeans came in very early. People were seeking to be identified with a certain kind of style, which saves a lot of talking.”
Ai responded to the new China with scabrous satire, challenging its puritanical and conformist character by regularly showcasing a rude and boisterous individuality. He published a photograph of himself in which he is shown naked, leaping ludicrously into the air, while holding something over his genitals. The photo caption—“Grass mud horse covering the middle”—sounds in spoken Chinese like a coarse jest about mothers and the Central Committee. He formed a corporation called “Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd.” He mocked the Olympic Games, which, in China, are now a kind of state religion. The CCTV tower in Beijing, designed by the celebrated Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, is regarded with great national pride; the Chinese were horrified when a fire swept through an annex and a nearby hotel during construction. Ai’s response? “I think if the CCTV building really burns down it would be the modern landmark of Beijing. It can represent a huge empire of ambition burning down.”
Ai’s resistance to all forms of control—capitalist and communist—manifests itself in one poignant way. He refuses to listen to music. He associates music with the propaganda of the old days and prefers the silent spaces of independent thought. “When I was growing up, we were forced to listen to only Communist music. I think that left a bad impression. I have many musician friends, but I never listen to music.” He blames the Chinese educational system for failing to generate any grand or open-ended sense of possibility either for individuals or the society as a whole. “Education should teach you to think, but they just want to control everyone’s mind.” What the regime is most afraid of, he says, is “free discussion.”
Ai will occasionally say something optimistic. Perhaps the Internet will open up the discussion that schools now restrain, for example, even if the blog he ran has been shut down. For the most part, though, Ai’s commentary remains bleak and denunciatory. Few people in China believe in what they are doing, he says, not even the secret police. “I’ve been interrogated by over eight people, and they all told me, ‘This is our job.’…They do not believe anything. But they tell me, ‘You can never win this war.’”
Not soon anyway. In the West, the artist as provocateur—Marcel Duchamp, Warhol and Damien Hirst are well-known examples—is a familiar figure. In a China just emerging as a world power, where the political authorities prize conformity, discipline and the accumulation of riches, an artist working in the provocative Western tradition is still regarded as a threat. Chinese intellectuals may support him, but the Chinese generally have no more understanding of Ai than a typical American has of Duchamp or Warhol. “There are no heroes in modern China,” Ai said.
The West would like to turn Ai into a hero, but he seems reluctant to oblige. He lived in postmodern New York. He knows the celebrity racket and the hero racket. “I don’t believe that much in my own answer,” he said. “My resistance is a symbolic gesture.” But Ai, if not a hero, has found ways to symbolize certain qualities that China may one day celebrate him for protecting and asserting. Free discussion is one. An out-there, dark and Rabelaisian playfulness is another. But the most interesting quality of them all is found in his best works of art: a prophetic dream of China.
Much of Ai’s art is of only passing interest. Like so much conceptual art, it seems little more than a diagram of some pre-conceived moral. Art with a moral too often ends with the moral, which can stopper the imagination. Consider Ai’s amusing and well-known Johnnie Walker piece. Is it suggesting that China is enveloped within—and intoxicated by—Western consumer culture? Of course it is. Once you’ve seen it, you don’t have to think about it anymore. Jokes, even serious jokes, are like that. They’re not as good the second time around.
But several Ai works are fundamentally different in character. They’re made of more than morals and commentary. They’re open-ended, mysterious, sometimes utopian in spirit. Each calls to mind—as architecture and design can—the birth of the new. The oddest instance is the “Bird’s Nest” stadium of the 2008 Olympics. While an impassioned critic of the propaganda around the Olympics, Ai nonetheless collaborated with the architects Herzog & de Meuron in the design of the stadium. What kind of China is being nurtured, one wonders, in that spiky nest?
According to Ai, governments cannot hide forever from what he calls “principles” and “the true argument.” He decries the loss of religion, aesthetic feeling and moral judgment, arguing that “this is a large space that needs to be occupied.” To occupy that space, Ai continues to dream of social transformation, and he devises actions and works that evoke worlds of possibility. For the 2007 Documenta—a famous exhibition of contemporary art held every five years in Kassel, Germany—Ai contributed two pieces. One was a monumental sculpture called Template, a chaotic Babel of doors and windows from ruined Ming and Qing dynasty houses. These doors and windows from the past seemed to lead nowhere until, oddly enough, a storm knocked down the sculpture. His second contribution was a work of “social sculpture” called Fairytale, for which he brought 1,001 people from China—chosen through an open blog invitation—to Documenta. He designed their clothes, luggage and a place for them to stay. But he did not point them in any particular direction. On this unlikely trip through the woods, the Chinese pilgrims might find for themselves a new and magical world. They too might discover, as Ai did when he went to New York, “a bowl of diamonds.”
Sunflower Seeds, his most celebrated work, yields similar questions. The painting of so many individual seeds is a slightly mad tour de force. But the scale of the work, which is at once tiny and vast—raindrop and ocean—seems no crazier than a “Made in China” consumer society and its bottomless desires. Does the number of seeds reflect the dizzying amount of money—millions, billions, trillions—that corporations and nations generate? Do the seeds simultaneously suggest the famines that mark Chinese history? Do they evoke China’s brief moment of cultural freedom in 1956 known as the “Hundred Flowers Campaign?” Do they represent both the citizen and the nation, the individual and the mass, endowing both with an air of germinating possibility? Will China ever bloom, one wonders, with the joyful intensity of van Gogh’s sunflowers?
Christina Larson in Beijing contributed reporting to this story
Mami Kataoka, Kerry Brougher, Charles Merewether Ai Weiwei: According to What?
(Prestel Verlag, 2012)
Visitors to the Ai Weiwei retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D. C. are offered two varied forms of learning additional information: a traditionally produced hardcover book ($39.95) and a double-stapled magazine format ($5). Beyond an omitted index and curriculum vitae, there is little difference in the less costly version other than distribution and physical constituent parts. You can only purchase the magazine format at the exhibition. Is there a preference? According to a museum shop employee, the hardcover has sold approximately 500, while the magazine, says the Hirshhorn press officer, has been reordered after exceeding the expectation of selling the initial printing run of 10,000. All of this is to say that the exhibition is extraordinarily popular and timely . The catalog formats readily evoke the complexities of information flow between the United States and China, and may be seen as modeled after Ai Weiwei’s collaborative underground distribution of Black, White and Grey cover artist books in the Chinese art world in the late 1990s. Greg Lindquist and Mary Mattingly read the catalogue before visiting the Hirshhorn Museum exhibition.
Greg Lindquist: Ai Weiwei’s angular, blocky forms of American Minimalism seem to rely on a recontexualization with China’s cultural histories. For example, Ai Weiwei uses a cube made of rosewood, a favored material of traditional Chinese artisans, or arranges glass crystals into a cube of light. Both recall formal strategies used by Donald Judd, among others.
You have some misgivings about the role of these forms in relationship to American art history and culture. Do you think these sculptures are pandering to our nostalgia for this time in art history or our cultures’ love for the perfection of this Ikea-like reductionist design?
Mary Mattingly: Yes, I found this work to be heavily dependent on our knowledge of the work of artists like Judd, Andre, Holt, and Morris, to name a few. Perhaps Ai Weiwei saw it as a way for the art world to couch the political content and charged materials he uses in art. Or maybe it was a response to China’s own process of industrialization (as Minimalism is said to be partly a response to industrialized factory production in the U.S.). Critical to understanding the politics of Minimalism are the questions that were being asked through the works of participating artists about assembly-line fabrication and materiality through increasing mass production in the U.S. and the Vietnam War.
Unlike past works by Ai Weiwei (such as “Sunflower Seeds,” 2010) where the relationship between forms of production, material, and the message of his work resonate with me, I had to reconcile the use of Minimalist tropes with materials that are steeped in dynastic histories or tragic current events. Ai Weiwei’s work in this exhibition becomes formally reliant on these tropes and therefore disconnected from the potent meaning of his materials and the stories behind them.
I don’t think that you felt this way. I think you wanted to come away with the greater messages of his work and therefore didn’t get caught up in the same details I did, would you agree?
Lindquist: I experienced the forms and the content simultaneously without as much conflict about the derivation you speak of. Broadly, Minimalism was as much about artists exerting the power of a physical object as it was about a search for ideal forms and purity. It was about removing the narrative from the experience of the object, as well as emphasizing formal elements of repetition and symmetry. Of course, the deeper one goes in examining Minimalism, the more contradictions and complexities are imminent.
Yet, for these reasons, Ai Weiwei’s homage to Minimalism is an effort of recontexualization and strategy in order to critically question tradition in China. He also intends to fully reinstate narrative to these geometric forms. I think it was the most successful the more immediate the viewer’s relationship to the material and its inherent narrative. For example, “Snake Ceiling,” (2009) the sculpture memorializing with almost identical backpacks the more than 5,000 students who died in the Sichuan earthquake, was extremely powerful. Also, “Teahouse,” (2011) the Monopoly-like cube of compressed tea, was pan-sensory. You could actually smell it as well as physically and visually experience it.
Even more formidable were Ai’s various attempts to destroy or transform various authentic vase and urn artifacts. Whether he was breaking them or painting them with Coca-Cola labels, they were visceral and offensive, an act of cultural defiance. The works are more immediate the more transparent the signifiers are, too. But, maybe also the most memorable work Ai has done has no centralized form, such as “Fairytale,” (2008) in which he brought 1,001 Chinese citizens to Germany for Documenta 12.
On the other hand, the work that felt the most flaccid was “Moon Chest,” 2008, which was a clever contemplation of lunar phases, but so politely stated and overtly crafted with intricate inlays. It resembles a lot of work prevalent in recent New York institutional shows. Ai’s woodwork on the inner ring of the Hirshhorn seamlessly blended into the museum’s permanent collection. At one point, I mistook a Barbara Hepworth sculpture for another Ai work, which was a problematic aspect of presentation.
Having acknowledged your skepticism, can you say what work had the most impact and why?
Mattingly: When political artwork such as this is institutionalized and purchased by U.S. museums I can’t avoid being more interested in the current power dynamics between the U.S. and China and, furthermore, the back seat democracy inherently takes to capitalism. The object-based work in the exhibition is heavily reliant on Ai Weiwei’s stories of political activism and tragedies in China. While the personal stories behind his work are alarming, powerful, and even empowering, I wasn’t moved by the work itself. My favorite piece in the exhibition itself was the book documenting his blog, Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006 – 2009 a window into the life of Ai Weiwei through blog entries (until it was shut down by the government in 2009), which brings his activism to the forefront.
Lindquist: Wait, that book was in the exhibition?
Mattingly: Yes, in the inner ring on a table with other catalogues.
The According to What? catalogue was more thorough than the exhibition could be, though. It depicted pieces like “Installations for Venice Biennale” in 2008 (in collaboration with Herzog and de Meuron), and “Through,” (2007 – 08) with tables and parts of beams and pillars from dismantled temples from the Qing Dynasty: abstract interpretations of architecture gone wrong that were experiential and impactful, as well as a brief description of “Fairytale” at Documenta. The catalogue also documents two collections of fragments of stone Buddha sculptures the artist amassed in 2003 titled “Hands” and “Feet” from the Northern Wei and Northern Qi Dynasty displayed on thick blocks of wood, poetic and understated.
What did you enjoy most about reading the essays and interviews inside of the exhibition catalogue?
Lindquist: In re-reading much of the text after the show and our debates about the role of Minimalism, I grew tired of the overt imposition of the American art historical narrative on Ai’s work, which tried to also align with the time he spent in New York in the 1980s. As the photographs attest, this time had little to do with Minimalism of the 1960s and reveal more of the political climate of that time. The catalogue also downplays the influence of Dada and the idea of postmodern appropriation.
At the heart of the catalogue was an Ai interview with Kerry Brougher that was excellent. The interview was so dense and potent that the Hirs hhorn reconfigured it into an artist statement for the exhibition. Ai is serious and intense, and his voice is philosophical in tone and ambitious in scope. I was inspired by Ai’s discussion of the Internet as not only a tool, but also a condition of life that has much unrealized potential for art and political change.
Ai also has a good sense of humor, such as in the “Study of Perspective” series in which he extends his middle finger to the Eiffel Tower, White House, and Tiananmen Square. Of course, there are critical implications in each of those images, they are not simply one-line jokes. Maybe we Americans love that defiant attitude directed at ourselves and especially a t China. For example, in the political debate of the last election, both Obama and Romney agreed there was a need to have China play by certain economic rules of trade, but little acknowledgment of our continued dependency on China for manufacturing. In that sense, Ai Weiwei may be seen as a sort of American hero and martyr against Chinese oppression and censorship, but this posture also serves certain economic and political motivations for us.
Mattingly: I agree, he does claim to be a brand for liberal thinking and democracy and it does seem like his role could easily become that of a martyr figure for a United States wrestling with its own position as a superpower that needs China economically while being simultaneously undermining and wary . A conceptual thread running throughout the exhibition and catalogue is one of destruction and rebuilding, a cycle repeated anywhere there is opportunity for a rush of development, something that the housing boom in the United States shares with China’s megacities-to-be. Ruins are not nostalgic but rather the motivation for newer, larger building projects, cities, and in this case, artworks.
About the Author
GREG LINDQUIST and MARY MATTINGLY are artists, readers, and writers who share a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. They met at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council exhibition space at Governors Island in 2010, thanks to Melissa Levin and Omar Lopez-Chahoud.
This is a collection of images and articles that cover the astounding new museums of art being built or already built-in China over the last few years. The startling rise of China’s gigantic economy is being matched by their movement and presence on the global stage. China has both centers for art production in Shanghai and Beijing, and a dazzling new international art market that will also be the third reveal of the phenomenal Art Basel art fair, which debuts in Hong Kong in 2013. No where else on earth is as fast-moving as the exponential growth in the China art scene and art worlds. China already has world-class collectors and collections, and is repatriating art purchased in the West back into its country of origin. China also is positioned in the secondary markets with its own global branded auction houses. China is building remarkable and gorgeous, stunningly beautiful museums that represent everything from a region to the nation to a single person contemporary artist. Yet what will further ground all the cultural movement are these new and amazing super-large scaled museums of art. Take for example the Chinese Museum of Wood. It is both spiritual and everyday, and holds most rewarding examples of works created in the woodworking tradition. Fortunately for us in the West, and in the US in particular, we will finally get to see China showcase itself in all of its cultural manifestations – no different than has Paris, with its various historic museums both small and enormous, that are markers of civilization for all the accomplishments of humanity.
Vincent Johnson
Los Angeles
10.9.2012
Two at Night (2012) from the Cosmos suite of paintings by Vincent Johnson in Los Angeles
The building was designed by MAD Architects, as proposal for the international competition for the future National Art Museum of China in Bejing. Their concept is based on an elevated public square which is protected by a floating mega volume above.
The original structure of the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) built in 1962, houses one of the country’s largest art collections and has played host to some of the influential exhibitions as recorded in contemporary Chinese history. The current plans are to move the institution into a new building, situated within a designated ‘art district’ on the central axis of the 2008 Olympic site.
MAD’s design is organized into three layers, where programs are divided by each level. The one-storey ground floor houses all ancillary functions and is conceived in such a way that it can be operated independently from the museum in off hours. Above this, a 20,000 square meter urban plaza program acts as the main gallery for permanent art collections and exhibitions. The arrangement of this hall gives visitors the opportunity to decide how to engage with the works on show, while simultaneously being surrounded by outward views of the surrounding cityscape courtesy of windows that wrap around the perimeter of the structure. This level is also directly connected to the former Olympic park via a bridge, thus making use of an area of the urban plan which would otherwise be ignored.
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This is design of a Beijing based architecture firm named MAD, they unveiled their new museum for Chinese wood sculptures. The museum is located in Habrin main city in Northern China. The city itself is currently trying to defining itself as a regional hub for the arts at a time when the historic city is rapidly expanding. That’s why they choose to build this museum right there right now. The main idea of the Chinese wood sculptures museum is inspired by the unique local landscapes of the city. The museum is a contrast between the elegance of nature and the speed of daily life. The museum is about 200 meters long and for the concept is shaped to explore and reflect the relation between the building and the environment as a big frozen fluid. The interior of the museum is separated on two general parts. Each one represents an expedition. They are connected mutually by a centralized entrance which separates the two museums while simultaneously joining them. This is used to make the impression of symbiotic relationship between the two expeditions. Another good idea by the designers is the full glass roof, this not only make the outside of the building outstanding and looking futuristic, but also helps for the sunlight to lighten the entire museum and helping for the viewing atmosphere inside.
City Sets Ambitious Goal To Open 16 New Museums By 2015
The China Pavilion Will Reopen as the China Art Palace next fall
Shanghai may be known as a city obsessed with the pursuit of money, but in recent years China’s most populous metropolis has busied itself with another obsession: rivaling Beijing as a cultural and artistic hub. As Jing Daily noted this past May, while Beijing still enjoys its status as China’s cultural and political capital, the city’s rampant growth over the past decade has cannibalized many of its vibrant arts districts and threatened many others, alienating the creative community and, in some cases, pushing artists to relocate.
This shift in Beijing, and Shanghai’s well-capitalized initiative to foster a more creative environment in the city, has invigorated Shanghai’s cultural ambitions. Over the last few years, new creative/lifestyle venues like 1933 (a restored Jazz Age abattoir), the Shanghai Songjiang Creative Studio, and the Rockbund Art Museum have opened their doors. Though red tape and fly-by-night private gallery owners continue to plague the industry, by 2015, Shanghai plans to open 16 more large-scale museums and galleries.
As Shanghai Daily writes this week, one of these 16 planned museums and galleries, the massive “China Art Palace,” is attracting particular attention. For the art “Palace,” the China Pavilion from last year’s Shanghai World Expo is being transformed into an art museum “on a par with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musee d’Orsay in Paris,” according to a senior official. From the article:
The China Art Palace will collect top-level art from home and abroad, primarily to showcase the origins and development of China’s modern arts.
It is part of a plan by the city government to build 16 new major museums and art galleries and many smaller museums by 2015 and make Shanghai an “international cultural metropolis,” said Zong.
“In the future, Shanghai residents will be able to find a museum and cultural venue within a 15-minute walk of their homes,” she said.
“The number and quality of art galleries and museums is an important measure of cultural standing – cities such as New York and Paris are famed for their top-level galleries,” said Teng Junjie, art director of the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture Radio Film and TV.
The palace, which will cover an area of 70,000 square meters, will open on a limited basis next October, Zong said.
Most facilities from the former China Pavilion can be retained, bringing considerable savings, she said.
The three levels of the former main exhibition hall of the Expo pavilion will showcase the history and development of modern art of Shanghai and China, while the former joint pavilion for Chinese provinces and municipalities will have separate exhibition rooms for famous Chinese modern artists, including top Shanghai painter Cheng Shifa, said Teng.
As Teng Junjie added this weekend, the aim for cultural officials is to establish three major museums in the city by 2015: “the existing Shanghai Museum, the Shanghai Art Palace and the China Contemporary Art Museum – for historic, modern and contemporary artworks.” But, large scale public projects aside, more museums and galleries won’t do much to transform Shanghai into a cultural hub to rival New York, Paris or even Beijing unless, as Jing Daily pointed out earlier this month, the regulatory environment for private museums and galleries is transformed as well.
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Super-Collector Wang Wei’s Dragon Art Museum Hits Construction Milestone
12,000 Square Meter Museum Located In Shanghai’s Pudong District
Zhong Song’s exterior design, featuring a projection of Chen Yifei’s 1987 painting, “The Flute Player”
This past February, Jing Daily covered Chinese art “super-collector” Wang Wei’s long-discussed private art museum in Shanghai, which Wang and billionaire investor husband Liu Yiqian plan to open next year. The “Dragon Art Museum” (龙美术馆) will showcase Wang and Liu’s extensive collection of blue-chip Chinese contemporary art on the ground floor, Wang’s Mao-era “Red Classics” from 1949-1979 on the second, and traditional works and ancient artifacts on the third floor.
Taking over a section of the former Tomson Centre (汤臣别墅商业中心) building in Shanghai’s Pudong district, near the Shanghai New International Expo Center, Wang’s museum will expand the original 8,000 square meter space to 12,000 square meters. With around 15 months to go until the museum’s planned November 18, 2012 grand opening, last weekend construction teams hit a milestone, starting work on the building’s facade.
Designed by Zhong Song (仲松), a “post-70s generation” artist and architect who started off his career at the studio of the late Beijing artist Chen Yifei, the museum’s facade is at tasteful and minimalist, going against the current preference for all things large and loud in the world of Chinese architecture. According to Zhong, the concept of the building’s facade is “clean and quality,” adding that he will use only light-colored granite for the exterior, installing fewer and smaller windows in order to give “a feeling of wholeness” to the building.
Based on an artist rendering of the exterior, which shows a projection of Chen Yifei’s 1987 work, “The Flute Player” on the museum’s facade, expect some high-tech features to be worked into the low-key granite-and-glass design. In addition to the facade currently under construction, crews will soon start work on the auxiliary warehouse, with all construction expected to be complete by the end of this year.
As Wang Wei told the Chinese art magazine Art Finance earlier this summer, she and Liu Yiqian have already invested over 200 million yuan (US$31 million) in the project, and are projecting an annual operating budget of 5 million yuan (US$774,000).
dutch practice MVRDV has won the international competition for the ‘china comic and animation museum’
in hangzhou, china. composed of eight balloon shaped volumes, the design looks to create an internally complex
experience measuring 30,000 square meters in total. fantastical and whimsical in its approach, the proposal is
part of a larger master plan that will include a series of parks, a public plaza and an expo center.
comic book library with view into interactive exhibition zone
set to break ground in 2012, the museum seeks to create a platform which will unite the evolving worlds of art
and entertainment. the application of one of the most iconic cartoon motifs – the speech bubble – allows the unit
to be instantly recognized as a place for comics, animation and cartoons. as text is projected onto the
monochromatic exterior surface, the forms come to life, further transforming the two dimensional motif into a
three dimensional reality.
interactive exhibition space
each of the eight volumes, occupied by unique and independent functions, are interconnected allowing for a
circular tour of the entire building. large voids at the point of interception provide visual connection and access
between the dynamic programs, which include a comic book library and three cinemas.
exhibition space
accommodating a range of versatile exhibition spaces, the museum will feature a permanent collection that is
presented in a chronological spiral along with smaller, adaptive halls for temporary displays.
construction has begun in datong, china on the ‘datong art museum’, designed by london-based practice foster + partners.
four pyramidal roof peaks interlock to define the exterior form, evoking the imagery of an erupted landscape. the external surfaces
are clad with corten steel, a material with earthen hues and will continue to weather over time. one of four new buildings bordering
a new cultural plaza, the 32,000 square meter center will be slightly sunken into the earth, matching the scale of its neighbors.
visitors descend through a stepped courtyard of sculptures to enter the museum.
at the ground level, a grand gallery with a 37 meter tall atrium with a clear span of 80 meters provides a centerpiece area
for large-scale installations and exhibitions. skylights within the high ceilings introduce northern and north-western daylight,
creating an optimal environment to display artworks with natural illumination and minimal solar gain.
aerial view of the entry plaza at night
perimeter exhibition spaces will contain state-of-the-art climate controls. artificial lighting runs along tracks within ceiling recesses
and a 5 meter grid along the floor integrates security, data and power. with 70 percent of the structure formed from a roof,
the building is insulated almost twice more than code requires, reducing the presence and necessary maintenance with only
10 percent overall glazing.
scheduled to open in 2013, the venue will represent the country in the ‘beyond the building’ basel art international tour.
The architectural design concept for The National Art Museum of China by UnStudio reminds the artifact of ancient Chinese “stone drums”. Historically, the Stone Drum bears inscriptions that represent precious piece of the fragmentary puzzle of the Chinese script. This special form of the museum highlights the identity of the country, its spirit and essence. Moreover, the design concept is based on the duplicities that complement each other: day and night, inside and outside, fast and slow, dao or tao, individual and collective.
The main aim of this design concept is to give diversified and visible spaces for pieces of art. Also, the role of light is extremely important in the design of this building. The edifice is constructed in such a way that gives more opportunities for artists and curators in displaying their works and showing their ideas. Designers of the museum creating their work did not forget about the visitors. So, internally it is organized in such a manner that gives visitor a possibility to explore the museum by different paths around thematic consistencies of art.
Museum is greatly involved in urban context and provides the strong cultural presence for the area.
Museum Lighting: National Museum Of China – Art and culture iGuzzini
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About the project
One of the most ambitious project for the museum lighting made by iGuzzini is certainly the National Museum of China, completed in 1959 as one of ten important public buildings in Tiananmen Square, in direct proximity to the Forbidden City, the museum is still a milestone in the history of modern Chinese architecture.
The conversion and extension of the Chinese National Museum combines the former Chinese History Museum with the Chinese Revolutionary Museum. Outline plans were invited from ten international architectural firms and the project was awarded to Gerkan, Marg & Partners (gmp) for its submission, together with Beijing’s CABR, ahead of Foster & Partners, Kohn Pedersen Fox, OMA & Herzog & de Meuron.
The original GMP submission envisaged gutting the existing museum. The aim was to join the northern and southern wings in a single complex, by removing the central structure. The 260 metre long hall acts as its central access area. It widens to embrace the existing central entrance which opens onto Tiananmen Square. The ‘forum’ thus created acts as an atrium and multi-functional events area, with all services for the public, that is to say, cafes and tea shops, book shops and souvenir stores, ticket offices and toilets.
The museum lighting for the coffered roof extending along the entire forum and in the central Hall was designed by the lighting design office conceptlicht. A key feature of the concept is a special luminaire, developed by conceptlicht and produced by iGuzzini, which creates a welcoming atmosphere throughout the building.
This project required a customized solution to conceal the lighting source into the coffers. The project utilized down light optics with both traditional and LED sources.
Studio Pei-Zhu, a Beijing-based firm, has designed a museum that will house the work of Yue Minjun, a Chinese contemporary artist known for his repetitive images of large, smiling figures.
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“While the devastating Sichuan earthquake in May left a large portion of Western China in ruins, signs are emerging that some notable building projects in the area are pushing forward. One of these projects is the Art Museum of Yue Minjun, designed by Beijing-based Studio Pei-Zhu, a 2007 Design Vanguard winner.
Located near the Qingcheng Mountains, and adjacent to the Shimeng River in Sichuan Province, the 10,700-square-foot museum will house the work of Yue Minjun, a Chinese contemporary artist known for his repetitive images of large, smiling figures. It will be one of 10 new museums on the same site, each dedicated to the work of an influential Chinese artist. Zhang Xiaogang and Wang Guangyi are among the other artists to be showcased. The complex, which is being developed by the local government of Dujingyuan, is the brainchild of Lu Peng, an art professor at the China Central Academy of Fine Art.
Images courtesy Studio Pei-Zhu
The Yue Minjun museum will contain exhibition space and a small artist’s studio. According to Pei Zhu, one of the firm’s principals, a river rock that he picked up one day inspired the building’s form—a large, oblong sphere. “Everything is based on the natural stone, which has a very strong relationship between the creek and the mountain and nature,” explains Zhu.
Image courtesy Studio Pei-Zhu
On the exterior, curvilinear walls will be clad in highly polished zinc, a soft metal that blends in with the natural surroundings while also giving the building a futuristic look. “Normally, architects will use a local material and vernacular language,” says Zhu. “We believe we needed to make something both futuristic and very natural.” It’s a striking departure from another recent project designed by the firm for the 2008 Summer Olympics: Digital Beijing, a control center whose façade resembles computer circuitry.
Image courtesy Studio Pei-Zhu
Work is already underway on the art museum. Site preparation began earlier this year, and the building should be completed by early 2009. Zhu says the earthquake delayed the project a mere three months, at most. “The developer still really wants to push this project [forward],” he says, “and we think that this will still benefit the society and the city.”
CAFA Art Museum, located at the northeast corner of campus CAFA (China Central Academy of Fine Arts), is set from curvilinear walls covered with traditional Chinese slate.
The walls are separated at the ends to which natural light enters the building through skylights and large windows.
From the main entrance, located in the center of the building, access to a large atrium in height with long straight ramps that ascend gradually to the various floors of the museum. Natural light spreads throughout the museum through the membranes of fiberglass skylights.
The ground floor can accommodate large installations that can be seen from the different levels of the ramp. The permanent collection, focusing on traditional Chinese art, is located on the first floor galleries, temporary exhibitions in the second and third floors.
Large open spaces with natural light, curvilinear walls, allow many different kinds of contemporary art installations. The exhibition space on the third floor is open to the double volume of the second floor.
There are four floors above ground, two below ground. The library and cafeteria are located in the main space on the ground floor. Basement 1 includes a reading room, a study room and a conference room. 2 In the basement offices are located in conservation of paintings and calligraphy, including the restoration room, laboratory and warehouse of temporary and permanent collections. Technical equipment protected stairways and elevators are located in rectangular volumes, covered with marble.
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Ningbo Historic Museum / Wang Shu, Amateur Architecture Studio
In Iwan Baan‘s website, we found one of the latest works he photographed, the Ningbo Historic Museum designed by Wang Shu, Amateur Architecture Studio.
An amazing stone work, more pictures after the break:
Organized by the Chengdu Ministry of Culture and the Chengdu Culture and Tourism Development Group, the Competition for the Chinese MoMA was part of an initiative for creating a double ring of public facilities around the Tianfu Square in Chengdu. The first ring is supposed to consist of cultural facilities. The second and larger one is planned for highrises.
Designed by Studio Ramoprimo, the winning entry proposes a dialogue with the surrounding, drawing physical references from the existing urban and architectural condition. The basic idea is to enlarge the existing public space of Tianfu Square and make it “climbing” on the roof of the new building. The new museum is a group of volumes creating a small cultural city.
Two main axis cut the site area defining a comfortable pedestrian island where people can walk away from cars. The new urban situation is also establishing new visual and physical connections between existing parts of the city. People can pass through the plot and easily come from the Tianfu square and reach the surrounding museums. The four museum blocks create an arising slope on which people can walk, seat, play, have a rest, enjoy the view to the central square like in a open public theater. The whole shape according the function is rising step by step from the earth to the sky, while the ending corner of the building replaces the original position of the ancient and forgotten city wall.
The Museum Of Contemporary Art & Planning Exhibition proposal is located at Futian District, Shenzhen’s most important central region for administration, business and culture. The building functions as part of Shenzhen’s civic centre, where the City Library, Opera House, Central Bookstore, Youth Activity Hall (YAH) and other civic building have been built. The international competition held in 2007 required The Museum Of Contemporary Art & Planning Exhibition (MOCAPE) to include two independent and yet inter-connected parts: The museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and Planning Exhibition (PE). Designed by Rome-based LABORATORIO 543, the proposal is a 90.000 square meter structure that aims to enhance the service of Shenzhen’s new civic center.
The building is divided into two parts: the first rests on the ground and the other is suspended on the upper level. These undulating segments have multiple connection points, ensuring the overall stability of the structure and facilitating communication between different programs. The structural frame, which is required to support the suspended level, can be compared to a cantilever. Located at ground level, the main entrance belongs to a composition of
Studio Pei-Zhu, a Beijing-based firm, has designed a museum that will house the work of Yue Minjun, a Chinese contemporary artist known for his repetitive images of large, smiling figures.
—————————————————————————————-
“While the devastating Sichuan earthquake in May left a large portion of Western China in ruins, signs are emerging that some notable building projects in the area are pushing forward. One of these projects is the Art Museum of Yue Minjun, designed by Beijing-based Studio Pei-Zhu, a 2007 Design Vanguard winner.
Located near the Qingcheng Mountains, and adjacent to the Shimeng River in Sichuan Province, the 10,700-square-foot museum will house the work of Yue Minjun, a Chinese contemporary artist known for his repetitive images of large, smiling figures. It will be one of 10 new museums on the same site, each dedicated to the work of an influential Chinese artist. Zhang Xiaogang and Wang Guangyi are among the other artists to be showcased. The complex, which is being developed by the local government of Dujingyuan, is the brainchild of Lu Peng, an art professor at the China Central Academy of Fine Art.
Images courtesy Studio Pei-Zhu
The Yue Minjun museum will contain exhibition space and a small artist’s studio. According to Pei Zhu, one of the firm’s principals, a river rock that he picked up one day inspired the building’s form—a large, oblong sphere. “Everything is based on the natural stone, which has a very strong relationship between the creek and the mountain and nature,” explains Zhu.
Beijing To Build “World’s Largest Art Museum”: What’ll They Fill It With?
Source:Jing Daily
Date: 2011-03-18
Size:
This week, as part of its 12th five-year plan, Beijing announced a new phase for the National Art Museum of China, a massive, glass-covered structure that is being touted as “the world’s largest art gallery.” Currently in the design process, the new National Art Museum will be located next to the current museum and near the Beijing National Stadium, with construction expected to begin next spring.
Chinese Contemporary Art Getting Scarcer; Can Auctions Be Museums’ Only Source For Top Art?
Preliminary design for the National Art Museum of China new phase
This week, as part of its 12th five-year plan, Beijing announced a new phase for the National Art Museum of China, a massive, glass-covered structure that is being touted as “the world’s largest art gallery.” Currently in the design process, the new National Art Museum will be located next to the current museum and near the Beijing National Stadium, with construction expected to begin next spring. While the new National Art Museum sounds like another example of the Chinese government building a mammoth public venue for the sake of getting another “world’s largest” title under its belt, as museum director Fan Di’an told delegates at the recent National People’s Congress, China’s public art facilities haven’t lived up to the promise of the country’s burgeoning interest in the arts.
As Fan pointed out last week, the current National Art Museum — which was built in 1963 in Beijing’s Dongcheng district — is a meager 8,300 square meters in size. Compare that to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, at 58,529 square meters, and the Louvre, which boasts over 60,000 square meters of exhibition space. Since attendance became free at the National Art Museum on March 2, according to Fan Di’an, it has clocked nearly 6,000 visitors at peak times, “nearly hitting capacity,” according to Xinhua. Clearly, the current digs are inadequate, certainly for a city that most consider to be the cultural heart of China. But how will director Fan Di’an fill the 130,000 total square meters of exhibition space he’ll have when the new phase is complete?
One clue comes from an interview Fan Di’an recently gave at the “Art Power” awards in Beijing, where he was named “Best Museum Administrator.” Speaking to Sina, Fan said that the Chinese contemporary art world is becoming stronger as more artists become globally recognized, more curators have the ability to promote Chinese art, and more (and better) museums are built across the country. Fan’s interest in contemporary art and the priority he places on public arts education have made him something of a star in the Chinese art world, a break from the stereotype of the stodgy apparatchik or stuffy administrator. Fan also counts many first-generation Chinese contemporary artists as close friends, such as his former Central Academy of Fine Arts classmate Xu Bing. With the ample room he will be afforded with the new National Art Museum, expect to see Fan display an impressive array of contemporary Chinese works alongside his other interests, which include everything from 1950s Chinese prints to artifacts from Dunhuang in Xinjiang province.
With so much room to fill, not just in Beijing but in new provincial art museums throughout mainland China, it won’t be surprising if we see museum and gallery representatives showing up at the upcoming Sotheby’s spring auctions in Hong Kong, where works by some of China’s top artists will be on the block. Directors like Fan Di’an would almost certainly love to get some pieces from the Ullens collection on the walls and prevent them from leaving the country once and for all. Now that new Chinese private collectors are getting more involved with the auction market and works by blue-chip Chinese artists are getting scarcer and scarcer, it’s no surprise that excitement is growing in China for the upcoming spring auction season.
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New Abstract Paintings: The Cosmos suite (2012)
Cosmos. Oil on canvas 2012 by Vincent Johnson
Cosmos Red Yellow Green. Oil on canvas 2012 by Vincent Johnson
Green God. Oil on canvas 2012 by Vincent Johnson
This new painting series is part of my ongoing exploration of painting materials and techniques from the history of painting. The works combine knowledge of painting practices of both abstract and representation paintings. The works concern themselves purely with the visual power that paintings can do through the manipulation of paint. Some of the underpaintings are allowed to dry for months; some of those are built dark to light, others light to dark. None are made in a single setting. Most are worked and reworked using studio materials. Each new series takes a different approach to the painted surface from how the paint is applied, to varying the painting mediums. This suite concerns itself with the layering of paint by building up the surface and altering and reworking the wet paint with studio tools.
Two larger paintings will be completed and photographed on Sunday, July 15, 2012 and posted here.
Vincent Johnson is an artist and writer in Los Angeles
Vincent Johnson’s Nine Grayscale Paintings – installation shot – 2
Vincent Johnson’s Nine Grayscale Paintings – studio shot – 1 (Silver hand)
Vincent Johnson – in my studio working on my Nine Grayscale Paintings
Vincent Johnson’s Nine Grayscale Paintings – first stage of grayscale painting
Los Angeles based artist and writer Vincent Johnson
Vincent Johnson received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California 1997 and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Painting 1986. He started out as a student in Pratt’s painting department. He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was nominated for the Baum: An Emerging American Photographer’s Award in 2004 and for the New Museum of Contemporary Arts Aldrich Art Award in 2007 and for the Art Matters grant in 2008, and in 2009 nominated for Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship, Los Angeles. In 2010 he was named a United States Artists project artist. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Slant and many other publications. His photographic works were most recently shown in the inaugural Pulse Fair Los Angeles. His most recent paintings were shown at the Beacon Arts Center in Los Angeles.
An artwork by South Korean artist MyeongBeom Kim at Art Basel in Hongkong on March 16 Photo: Liao Danlin/GTWalking around I saw people walking and pushing baby carriages, children running around and tourists taking photos right next to businessmen in suits and well-dress ladies standing in front of a huge oil painting, examining its every detail and discussing if they should spend the million dollars needed to buy this masterpiece.
©Ben McMillanZeng Fanzhi in his Beijing studio, July 2013
©Zeng Fanzhi Studio. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery’Self-Portrait 09-8-1′
©Zeng Fanzhi Studio. Courtesy Gagosian GalleryA new painting, ‘Inner Peace’
©Zeng Fanzhi Studio. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery1991: ‘No 1 Hospital Triptych’
©Zeng Fanzhi Studio1993: Zeng Fanzhi in the year he moved to Beijing
©Zeng Fanzhi Studio. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery1996: ‘Mask Series No 6’
©Zeng Fanzhi Studio. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery2012: ‘Hare’
©Zeng Fanzhi Studio. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery2011: ‘Artist series Lucian Freud’
©Zeng Fanzhi Studio. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery2005: ‘Night’
Artist Zhang Xiaogang and two of his paintings in his studio, in Beijing’s Liquor Factory district. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.
Made in China
English
For decades celebrated painter Liu Xiaodong has been searching for new ways to broaden the scope of his work beyond the confines of the two-dimensional canvas. In the 1990s Liu painted scenes of his family and friends, becoming a leading figure in a generation of Chinese painters which was interested in producing intimate depictions of the day-to-day reality of their immediate surroundings. Their perspective was not necessarily ideological; they neither glorified the working class and the peasants – as some revolutionary realist painters once did – nor approached their subject with condescension, guilt or curiosity borne out of class difference. They sought objectivity; their depictions were lively and contagious, sometimes focusing on the individual but often in a way that was relevant to the lives of most Chinese people. Liu’s 1996 painting Disobeying the Rules, for example, shows a group of naked workers crowded onto the back of an open-topped truck together with several large gas canisters. Most of them turn their faces towards the viewer, grinning. When I first saw the painting, I could almost feel the familiar sensation of a van rumbling past me on the road.
Jörg Heiser is co-editor of frieze and co-publisher of frieze d/e. He is based in Berlin.
On top and above: Zhu Jinshi, Boat, Art13, Olympia Grand Hall, London, 2013
Zhu Jinshi, Boat, Art13, Olympia Grand Hall, London, 2013
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Dylan Jones is the editor in chief of British GQ and British GQ Style. Follow him on twitter at @dylanjonesgq.
Mask Series No. 6, Zeng Fanzhi,1996
Portrait, 2004
Untitled, 2012
© Courtesy of Shanghart Gallery
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HONG KONG – MAY 22: A woman looks at work by Yayoi Kusama, represented by Victoria Miro, London, and Ota Fine Arts, at Art Basel, May 22, 2013 in Hong Kong. (Photo by Jessica Hromas/Getty Images)
After a 
The Tourism Board is promoting the Asian outpost of the world’s largest contemporary art fair as the centrepiece of an “Art Month”, which also includes a range of satellite fairs and the irrepressible, inflatable Rubber Duck. Even Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying will attend the fair’s opening ceremony this morning – the first time the city’s top leader has presided over the opening of a major art fair. The dramatic boom in Hong Kong’s art fair business since the forerunner to Art Basel – Art HK – made its debut in 2008, has resonated across the region. So also has the emergence of the city and the West Kowloon Cultural District as centres for art auctions. Cities from Singapore to Tokyo and Abu Dhabi to Manila, are embracing art fairs not just for the lucrative business opportunities they create, but also for their power in branding the city and bringing in affluent visitors. But as more Asian cities rush to join the game, there are growing warnings of the key risk from the trend; the globalisation of culture via contemporary art. “Culture is very important in marketing a city,” says cultural critic and consultant Desmond Hui. “Similar to the construction of cultural districts and the cultivation of a creative economy, art fairs are part of the equation.” Unlike art biennales – which are organised by the authorities as an official presentation of arts and culture – art fairs are engineered by market forces and have a different role, and can forge a close relationship with a city. Governments should recognise the fact that art fairs play an important role in cultural and creative industries, Hui says. “In Hong Kong everything is market-driven, so the government doesn’t have to think. But if the government can provide appropriate support and let the private sector grow, the impact could be bigger,” Hui says. “A city’s cultural infrastructure does not equal the commercialisation of art.” Hong Kong government statistics released this month shed light on the attraction of building a cultural industry. Cultural and creative industries were worth HK$89.6 billion in 2011, 4.7 per cent of gross domestic product and a marked increase on their 3.8 share in 2005. Amid general growth in the number of art fairs, the Art, Antiques and Crafts sector was ranked as the third most lucrative cultural and creative industry, generating just over HK$10 billion – almost double the HK$5.4 billion recorded in 2007, the year before Art HK made its debut. It’s inevitable that other cities are doing their best to replicate such growth. Taking Singapore as an example, the government proactively supported the Art Stage Singapore fair in January. The Singapore government also offers overseas galleries the use of the historic Gillman Barracks, a contemporary art site put together by the government’s Economic Development Board. A tax-free zone has been created to draw auction business away from Hong Kong, while government bodies such as the National Arts Council and the Singapore Tourism Board actively co-operate to generate a creative buzz. Art critic John Batten says an art fair can draw the attention of outsiders and also takes on a wider public perception – thereby adding something to the city. But while a successful fair can serve as a branding tool for a city and draw cultural events to take place around it, it also needs the city, he adds. “The art scene wants to associate with Art Basel. But a good art fair also wants to associate with a city – an art fair wants to be seen as part of the fabric of a city,” Batten says. Art Basel Asia director Magnus Renfrew says that rather than simply being a forum for the trading of artworks, an art fair shares both cultural and commercial functions. He wants the art fair to form a positive relationship with Hong Kong, and even serve as an ambassador for the city. “Art fairs can help promote a city as a cultural destination. We want to benefit the cultural scene in Hong Kong. We are not just bringing audiences to discover the city, but also curators and museum directors,” he says. “There is this increasing recognition of Hong Kong as a major centre, not just for the trading of art, but also as a networking and meeting place for the international art world. The fair helps build the brand of Hong Kong as a cultural and financial hub.” Renfrew recognises that cities also hope to ride on the back of art fairs to promote themselves. “It’s very natural for a host city of an art fair to use this opportunity to demonstrate their cultural strength. Governments are more aware of the importance of art fairs [as] key events of the cultural calendar. Culture is an important part of the identity of a city, and art fairs can play a strong PR role,” he says. But, Hui says, other cities such as Taipei and Tokyo, which host art fairs on a different scale, can benefit from a more established cultural infrastructure – the network of public and private institutions that cultivate creativity – than Hong Kong, Singapore, or mainland Chinese cities. Take, for example, March’s Art Fair Tokyo. It may not be the most glamorous event on the arts calendar, but it is able to showcase local art to a local audience already familiar with the subject from the city’s museums and other cultural institutions. Surrounding the fair is the Roppongi Art Night, an all-night art happening in the hip Roppongi Hills area. A smaller contemporary art fair, G-Tokyo, is held concurrently. These events, crowded with local youngsters, offer a different side of Tokyo to visitors. “There’s a long history of art in Japan. The Japanese like to appreciate art with their own taste. We don’t have to follow the global trend,” says Art Fair Tokyo’s executive director Takahiro Kaneshima. Kaneshima says many young art fairs in the region look up to Art Basel and Frieze, a contemporary art fair in London and New York. But by achieving a “global standard”, he says, they end up featuring the same galleries and the same artists. “We try to make our own style of art fair. It doesn’t make sense to have just another Art Basel,” he says. “The rich can go to Switzerland and Hong Kong. We feel that we should make a fair that is more interesting locally.” Kaneshima says he wants his fair to be a platform for local artists and collectors, and make art accessible. This year’s fair attracted 44,000 visitors viewing art works brought by 136 galleries – almost all of them from Japan. The balance is in stark contrast to Art Basel Hong Kong, where half of the galleries came from the West. “I always think; why doesn’t our fair have big international galleries? But the truth is, few people here are interested in them,” he says. “We should learn about the global context, but Asia has different aesthetics. We want to show and create our own. For Asian people, it’s nice to have this kind of ‘global’ art fair …but isn’t such a Western-style strategy some kind of colonisation?” Kaneshima says it is inevitable that art fairs will follow a western model. But he believes creating a uniquely Asian system is important. Japan’s economic troubles of the past two decades have been a wake-up call to collectors and artists, he says. They now take time to sell works of art through galleries and there is more effort to cultivate talent. “It takes five years to sell an expensive sculpture, and it takes 20 years to make an artist,” he says. Internationally popular Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is in Hong Kong for a solo exhibition of his new works at Central’s Galerie Perrotin Hong Kong. He says that today’s art fairs and the market are vibrant. “When I debuted [in the international scene] 20 years ago, I hoped for such conditions,” the artist says. “But young people mi
A close up view of “The Sum of all Evil” by British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. The installation — which showcases miniature Nazis soldiers in various states of diabolical torment — is on display at Hong Kong’s White Cube gallery from May 21, 2013.
Culture Night Los Angeles 
