Visiting China, Hanna Scott finds a country forging a fresh path through the mores of the contemporary art world.
Li Hui's V at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing
Two weeks of art tourism in the People’s Republic of China have an aspect of visiting the frontier, even if you do not step outside a city of fewer than 6.4 million people. It’s a frontier fuelled by economic growth, as the balance of economic power shifts toward China. The relentless Survivor brand of capitalism that exists there has created a fascinating approach to the art industry.
As early as 2006, the Serpentine Gallery in London was involved in an ongoing project, China Power Station, in which Red Mansion Foundation director Nicolette Kwok acknowledged that “over the past four years China has become the darling of the global art scene, while economic growth and a stock market boom gave rise to a group of home-grown collectors”. Fast forward to 2011.
The dividing line that exists in the West between public art gallery and private commercial dealer space evaporates in China. The Today Art Museum in the Chaoyang district of Beijing runs on a fundamentally different model. Instead of receiving state or city funding, the museum – established in 2002 – is privately owned and non-profit and emphasises collecting, researching and exhibiting Chinese contemporary art.
The Today Art Museum operates more like London’s Saatchi Gallery, founded in 1985 to make Charles Saatchi’s personal collection of contemporary art available to the public. True to its name, the emphasis at Today’s substantial spaces is very much on now – New China. It is a small step from there to developing the new avant garde in the Far East. In hindsight, it was astute positioning when the Saatchi Gallery reopened in 2008 with the exhibition The Revolution Continues: New Art from China.
This merger between public museum interests and private investment creates unusual challenges for generating exhibition programmes. Is this the future direction of philanthropy?
In New Zealand, eyebrows rose when City Gallery Wellington installed Roundabout last September. The collector and benefactor behind the exhibition, David Teplitzky, was, in the words of Wellington collectors Jim and Mary Barr, “being treated by the City Gallery much more like an institutional colleague or partner than a private individual”. The Teplitzky team received extensive credits in the exhibition space, but City Gallery was politely opaque about the nature of this collaborative partnership.
Locally, the convention has been that public institutions retain an editorial mandate with acquisitions, exhibitions and publications. But even close to home, there are signs that philanthropy is on the move. In Hobart, Tasmania, Australian millionaire David Walsh earlier this year opened a A$76 million (NZ$99.5 million) gallery, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), to display his collection.
Like MONA and the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the museums in China have changed gears. Building, financing and programming your own museum takes philanthropy to a different level. The impression is that China is big enough and smart enough to forge another path through the mores of the contemporary art world.
In Beijing, a visit to Today is followed by a tour of the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA), a non-profit venture founded by Belgian art collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens in 2007. This vibrant full-service institution has a cafe, runs workshops, hosts films and concerts and “develops a platform of dialogue between China and the rest of the world”. UCCA is in the heart of Beijing’s Dashanzi Art District, in the art and design precinct known as 798, which was an integral part of Beijing’s urban renewal for the 2008 Olympics.
But that was then and this is now. Reports are that the Ullens are withdrawing from the centre, seeking new governance for UCCA and private partnerships within China that can take over the management of the gallery. In April, they sold 106 pieces from their extensive collection of Chinese contemporary art at auction for four times the presale estimates, netting a record-breaking HK$427 million (NZ$67.6 million). The Ullens have indicated they plan to sell the entire collection eventually. This shift is just one example of the disorienting pace of change in China. Adaption has become such a way of life that it is enshrined in China’s contemporary artwork.
For example, new media artist Cao Fei has built an entire alternative city in the online virtual world Second Life, and named it RMB City after China’s currency. The project started in 2007, and its montage method of city planning reflects the dizzying pace of transformation in urban Chinese life.
Similarly, photographer Zhou Jun is best known for his black and white images of city skylines, iconic buildings and construction sites, marked up with brilliant red colour notes to emphasise the process of construction. His Red Reconstructs series highlights scaffolding and work in progress to emphasise the three decades of rapid urbanisation and economic growth. The red colouring is read in many different ways, depending on the context, and the simplicity of this gesture creates a complex result across a vast output.
Unlike other rapidly evolving parts of the city skyline, the 798 precinct has staved off demolition – despite the intense pressure of Beijing’s real estate boom. The original 1950s factory architecture of 798 echoes the ethos of Bauhaus and the arcing ceilings are the product of East German architects. Artists eventually adopted and colonised the disused factories in the 1990s.
The interconnectedness of art and real estate is tangible in the 798 precinct. The transformation and rehabilitation of raw real estate by artists and the effect of this gentrification on property values are not lost on developers and landlords. A similar process is under way in another Beijing arts district, Caochangdi, with a precinct constructed along the design principles of artist Ai Weiwei, whose recent arrest and detention by Chinese authorities prompted international outrage and demonstrates the unsettling limits on artistic expression in China.
In Shanghai, commercial dealer spaces are also clustered together, gathering in pockets like the ones dotted along Moganshan Rd. Shanghai also demonstrates the elasticity of public-private partnership. Minsheng Art Museum was established in September 2008 and opened to the public in April 2010. The museum is both sponsored and funded by the China Minsheng Banking Corporation.
Its opening exhibition, 30 Years of Chinese Contemporary Art, acknowledged the anniversary of contemporary art in China: just 30 years young, emerging from the political, economic and social restraints of the Cultural Revolution. It feels slightly surreal to be surrounded by a contemporary idiom that sometimes seems so without history, or with peculiar voids in places where history should be.
The generational shifts from senior artists to emerging artists are intriguing. Senior artists have lived through the privations of the Cultural Revolution. Some are now experiencing unprecedented wealth. In the words of Zhu Wei, one established Beijing painter, “artists are the new rock stars”. Beijing boasts some of the most glorious artist studio spaces, both in their proportions and in their fit-out. But that affluence also comes with a pervasive humility at the transience of such wealth. Emerging artists are more likely to have been born under China’s one-child policy, and articulate the alienating conditions of contemporary China.
One young artist who makes an impression is Hu Xiangqian. Born in 1983 in Guangdong, he now lives and works in Beijing, one of many echoing the migration patterns of urban China. His video works have a keen eye for the absurd. One shows people dancing dressed as traffic lights at an intersection. In his more contemplative work Sun, he lies nude on a sun-lounger on his studio rooftop. Filmed from above, the video takes an almost voyeuristic bird’s-eye view. He tans himself, front and back, to the same shade as two of his African friends. The intense heat is palpable. Xiangqian’s works amplify minor incidents into bigger, more significant moments and translate across culture: global warming, racial undercurrents, anyone?
As in the contemporary art sector anywhere, video has a tendency to dominate. Jin Shan’s solo exhibition, One Man’s Island, at Platform China is a veritable library of personal video works that record him doing repetitive, at times quixotic, actions. The project comes with an elegant blue book that reinforces the diary-like nature of the series.
What is compelling, however, is not just the private poetic performances in each video, but the resolution of the exhibition space. Jin clearly draws a strong connection with his audiences by installing a battery of monitors and projectors at various heights in the upstairs gallery. He establishes in One Man’s Island a real connection to the viewer’s body, either seated or standing, that is rarely mastered on such a scale.
A fortnight in China is only long enough to scratch the surface of this burgeoning contemporary art scene, but it leaves you in no doubt this is an industry on steroids, as if making up for lost time, and that anything is possible for it.
Hanna Scott travelled to China with the support of the Asia New Zealand Foundation and Creative New Zealand.