Tuesday, January 30, 2007

SOLO-EXHIBITION with works by LI SHAN

SOLO-EXHIBITION with works by LI SHAN
ShanghART H-Space
February 2 – March 5 2007

"The evolution of human kind has already found its end"
Li Shan on "Reading"

The sur-real universe depicted in Li Shan's paintings is a world
inhabited by magical creatures, half humans – half animals, figures
with butterfly wings and other mutant beings. This imaginary world is
informed by poetic and erotic sensibility along with an undercurrent of
unease and estrangement. Here, the painted world is based on a
principle of ambiguity and questions of what human existance is and
where it is going. In terms of artistic style, the artist has adopted
decorative methods similar to those of folk art, thus creating
intimate, eccentric and oddly organic objects

Most recently in a photographic series entitled "Reading"
(2005-ongoing), he has created imagery of various insects and plants.
Closer viewing reveals that these creatures are composed of human body
parts like fingers, ears and genitalia. Through his uncannily realistic
representation of interspecies insects, Li Shan underscores his
pre-occupation with bio-politics and its consequences. The synthesized
insects are constructions of digital imagery morphed into yet another
crossbreed. He raises the question of whether it is still possible to
identify the boundaries between any particular organism and the world
it inhabits.

Li Shan was one of the leading figures of Shanghai's avant-garde
movement in the 1980s. His work has been exhibited internationally in
solo and group exhibitions such as Painting the Chinese Dream: Chinese
Art 30 Years after the Revolution, that traveled through America,
ending at the Brooklyn Museum, China's New Art, Post 1989 Art Centre
(Hong Kong) and the 45th Venice Biennale. Li Shan was born in Lanxi
County in Heilongjiang province and graduated from the Shanghai Academy
of Drama in 1968.
2007-01-28 18:35

Yang Fudong: No Snow on the Broken Bridge

Yang Fudong: No Snow on the Broken Bridge
ShanghART Gallery H-Space
March 2007

Yang Fudong's film and video work is about the human condition. He
mostly portrays his own generation of individuals in their late 20's
and early 30's, young people who seem confused and appear to hover
between the past and present. Yang Fudong's work epitomizes how the
recent and rapid modernization of China has overthrown traditional
values and culture. He skillfully balances this dichotomy to create
works endowed with classic beauty and timelessness. His works
investigate the structure and formation of identity through myth,
personal memory and lived experience. Each of his films is a dramatic
existential experience and a challenge to take on. His work is
open-ended and inconclusive, therefore open to individual
interpretation. Yang Fudong seeks through multiple vignettes to offer
the poetics of place and existence: Whatever occurs, Yang Fudong's film
work and photography indicate that something remains untouched and
unmoved, and perhaps all the more valuable for that reason.

"Howering between classical Chinese brush-and-ink painting and shanghai
cinema of the 20s, fudong's enveloping eight-screen landscape No Snow
on the Broken Bridge populated by angst-ridden youth, springs eternal."
ARTFORUM International, Best of 2006 Film 

Yang Fudong was born in 1971 in Beijing. He trained as a painter in
China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. Starting in the late 1990's
Yang Fudong embarked on a career in the mediums of film and video. He
is among the most successful and influential young Chinese artists
today. Yang Fudong participated in the 50th Venice Biennale (2003),
First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2005), 1st International
Sharjah Biennale (2005), 1st Prague Biennale (2003) and 5th Shanghai
Biennale (2004), The 5th AsiaPacific Triennial of Contmeporary Art
(2006). He has had solo-shows at most acclaimed institutions such as
Kunsthalle Wien (2005), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 2005), Castello di
Rivoli (Torino, 2005), The Moore Space (Miami, 2003), and ARC/Musee
d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2003).
 

 

Monday, January 29, 2007

Art zones create high rent not talent, says designer

Art zones create high rent not talent, says designer
By Yan Zhen 2007-1-25 Shanghai Daily

ASPIRING artists have been squeezed out of the city's newly created art
spaces because of soaring rents, a top designer has warned.

In an interview with Shanghai Daily on Tuesday, Wu Zhiqiang, chief
designer of the Shanghai Creative Industry Center and the 2010 World
Expo, took aim at the old factories and warehouses converted into
upscale art studios, saying Shanghai "misinterpreted" their
development.

"Many of the so-called creative zones have turned out to be
over-luxurious," said Wu, who is also dean of Tongji University's
school of architecture and urban planning. "It seems we have focused
too much on imitating other's form, but we didn't really get the
essence."

Transforming deserted factory buildings and warehouses into modern art
workshops and creative industry buildings proved a popular way to
preserve old architecture in the West during the 20th century.

"Spacious sites with low rent and low labor costs make it possible for
unknowns to produce great innovative ideas. But the model was
misinterpreted in Shanghai," Wu said.

Since 2005, the city has developed 75 creative zones in disused
buildings, including Bridge 8 on Jianguo Road M. and M50 on Moganshan
Road along Suzhou Creek.

Rents in the zones have soared in recent years.

In 2000, daily rent in M50 was only 0.4 yuan (five US cents) to 0.5
yuan a square meter on average. It now stands at about four yuan.

Rents in some of the more well-known zones have even reached eight
yuan to 16 yuan per square meter, on a par with some downtown central
business district office buildings.

"The rent is unbelievably high. Almost no single young artist can
afford it," said Sun Xiaojian, who gave up his studio in a converted
factory to move to an office building in Pudong New Area.

Jochen Schuster, a visiting architecture professor at Dusseldorf
University of Applied Sciences, said it was good for the city to find
connections between old buildings and modern art, but zones should be
made more suitable for young designers, rather than already successful
names.

Friday, January 26, 2007

Jonathan Napack, dead at 39

Jonathan Napack, a correspondent for The Art Newspaper for over ten
years, died unexpectedly in a Hong Kong hospital on 20 January. A few
days earlier Napack had told his friend, the curator Hou Hanru, that
doctors had found "fluid in his lungs". The exact cause of death is
still unknown. He was 39.

Napack started his career writing for a number of publications in New
York including the New York Observer and Spy, before moving to Hong
Kong in 1997 where he became increasingly involved in the Chinese
contemporary art world, championing artists through his journalism, his
contributions to exhibitions, catalogues and scholarly publications,
and most recently as ArtBasel's official representative in Asia.

News of Napack's sudden death, first reported on ArtForum's website,
shocked his many friends in the art world. Hans Ulrich Obrist, director
of exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London, who collaborated
with Napack on a number of projects including the travelling show
"Cities on the Move", described him as "irreplaceable". The London
dealer Maureen Paley said she is "stunned and deeply saddened."

In an email circulated to friends Hou Hanru wrote: "In our memory, he
will always be brilliant, funny and pungent…you'd be pleasantly
surprised by his insightful understanding of things, people, especially
about China, Hong Kong, and the rest of Asia! It's not only about
talent, it's about love and commitment! He's gone; the art community
has lost one of its most wonderful actors, and we have lost a dearest
friend. We'll miss him endlessly."

Cristina Ruiz, editor of The Art Newspaper, said: "Jonathan knew
everything that was going on behind the scenes in the contemporary art
world in Asia. I will particularly miss his frequent updates from every
corner of the world delivered in his inimitable style— a combination of
reportage, connoisseurship, and (unprintable) gossip."

Sam Keller, director of ArtBasel, paid tribute to his friend: "I am
shocked and saddened by the dreadful news of Jonathan's unexpected
death. He was one of my oldest and best friends in the art world. We
often travelled together and had shared wonderful and unforgettable
experiences. Jonathan was a very special person, a truly unique
character and absolutely irreplaceable. Those of us who had the
privilege to know him will miss him deeply. He had a fantastic sense of
humour and told surreal anecdotes; he had a detailed knowledge of the
culture and cuisine of the countries he travelled in. Jonathan's
curiousity was never satisfied and he was always looking for the truth
behind the hype. He was an adventurer, an explorer, an analyst, a
critic and an aficionado. His pioneering spirit took him far beyond the
beaten tracks of the art world. With Jonathan's death we lose a
brilliant expert, writer, and thinker. He connected the art world from
the East to the West. It is tragic that he leaves us just as the
bridges he built are starting to get used. I am grateful to have met
this man who never stopped being a boy at heart."

Napack was preparing to celebrate his 40th birthday in Bangkok in
February.

His incisive journalism and irreverent sense of humour will be sorely
missed by everyone at The Art Newspaper.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

50 Jahrs/Years documenta, archive in motion 1955-2005

50 Jahre / Years documenta 1955 – 2005
archive in motion
Exhibition dates: January 21 - February 5, 2007
Venue: Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art (Bd.28, 199 Fangdian
Rd,Pudong, Shanghai 2F)

Http://www.zendaiart.com

The world's most important contemporary art exhibition: documenta in
Kassel. It shows current trends in contemporary art every five years,
offering space for new exhibition concepts at the same time. And it has
been doing this for fifty years. Scarcely anyone imagined that it would
be such a success when the first documenta opened in 1955. Arnold Bode,
who conceived and initiated the documenta world art exhibition, worked
with art historian Werner Haftmann to present the development of art
from the early 20th century onwards, banned under the National
Socialists, in the ruins of the Museum Fridericianum, which had been
destroyed in the Second World War. At that time, Classical Modernism
was deliberately emphasized as a pan-European phenomenon. documenta
still connects a wide variety of art worlds - with a different
artistic director each time – and has made history itself by doing
this. Our major anniversary exhibition unfolds this history for us: the
documenta phenomenon can be experienced and lived through in a variety
of ways.

The story of documenta from its first appearance as an exhibition
accompanying the National Horticultural Show (1955) to documenta 11
(2002) is full of contradictions and breaks reflecting different
artistic and curatorial passions, philosophies and theories just as
much as political and social movements. 50 years of documenta are 50
years of the history of art and of contemporary history that cannot be
grasped in linear sequence.

To do justice to the unique nature of each documenta, the wide range of
documentary material is presented in eleven separate small galleries.
This presentation method makes the archive material directly accessible
and immediately intelligible. The compilation is accompanied by work by
contemporary artists who respond to the archives by addressing one
documenta each. Their work proposes a broader view of things and
shows – alongside the documentary material – how archives can be
handled creatively.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

CHINA'S ART FACTORIES

image:
http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2806/882/1600/992981/

0%2C1020%2C681425%2C00.jpg


http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,433134,00.html
 
CHINA'S ART FACTORIES

Van Gogh From the Sweatshop
By Martin Paetsch in Shenzhen

Southern China is the world's leading center for mass-produced works of
art. One village of artists exports about five million paintings every
year -- most of them copies of famous masterpieces. The fastest workers
can paint up to 30 paintings a day.

A giant hand raises an impressive paintbrush into the sky at the
entrance to the art village. The bronze sculpture outside the gates of
Dafen in southern China leaves no visitor in doubt as to what the
people do here. The "village" is in fact a modern suburb of Shenzhen, a
city with 10 million inhabitants northeast of Hong Kong, and it has
achieved unexpected fame and relative prosperity. But the city's
ostentatiously advertized success has little to do with creativity:
It's based on the reproduction of famous artworks on an industrial
scale.

Photo Gallery: Mass Producing Van Goghs

http://english.people.com.cn/200701/12/eng20070112_340652.html

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Body Talk

EASTLINK G a l l e r y
Press Release
Body Talk
Time:13 January – 10 March 2007
Address:50 Moganshan Lu, Bld 6, Fl 5

China has been a place for a long time where it has been not allowed to communicate.
This exhibition aim to display the power of our body as well as providing an opportunity to look at how our body
talks to us. The show, which began on 13 January, gathered painting, photographs and sculptures from
different Chinese artists.

The artists show how the body is portrayed at different moments through the artists’ imaginary which links
human figures to protest topics. While the exhibition itself mingled works of different origins, the picture that
emerges provided a variety of explanations for the use of the body, from performance-art, body- art to painting
language.

These works instigate a dynamic point of view with regards to how look and understand our body to engage the
viewer through a complex thought revealing different meanings.
The show includes famous pieces by Huang Yan, Yang Zhichiao, Wang Qiang… and features new talented
artists as Zheng Huan, Zheng Dagong, etc…

Thursday, January 04, 2007

In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism

In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism
By DAVID BARBOZA
Published: January 4, 2007

Images:http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/01/03/arts/20070104_ARTI_SLIDESHOW_2.html

SHANGHAI, Jan. 3 — After the peppered beef carpaccio and before the pan-fried sea bass there were raucous toasts and the clinking of wine glasses in the V.I.P. room of New Heights, a jazzy restaurant in this city’s most luxurious location, overlooking the Bund.

Wang Guangyi, one of China’s pioneering contemporary artists, was there. So were Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, Zeng Fanzhi and 20 other well-known Chinese artists and their guests, many of whom had been flown in from Beijing to celebrate the opening of a solo exhibition of new works by Zeng Hao, another rising star in China’s bubbly art scene.

“We’ve had opening dinners before,” said the Shanghai artist Zhou Tiehai, sipping Chilean red wine, “but nothing quite like this until very recently.”

The dinner, held on a recent Saturday night in a restaurant located on the top floor of a historic building that also houses an Armani store and the Shanghai Gallery of Art, was symbolic of the soaring fortunes of Chinese contemporary art.

In 2006 Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the world’s biggest auction houses, sold $190 million worth of Asian contemporary art,

most of it Chinese, in a series of record-breaking auctions in New York, London and Hong Kong. In 2004 the two houses combined sold $22 million in Asian contemporary art.

The climax came at a Beijing auction in November when a painting by Liu Xiaodong, 43, sold to a Chinese entrepreneur for $2.7 million, the highest price ever paid for a piece by a Chinese artist who began working after 1979, when loosened economic restrictions spurred a resurgence in contemporary art.

That price put Mr. Liu in the company of the few living artists, including Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, whose work has sold for $2 million or more at auction.

“This has come out of nowhere,” said Henry Howard-Sneyd, global head of Asian arts at Sotheby’s, which, like Christie’s, has just started a division focusing on contemporary Chinese art.

With auction prices soaring, hundreds of new studios, galleries and private art museums are opening in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Chinese auction houses that once specialized in traditional ink paintings are now putting contemporary experimental artworks on the block.

Western galleries, especially in Europe, are rushing to sign up unknown painters; artists a year out of college are selling photographic works for as much as $10,000 each; well-known painters have yearlong waiting lists; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Pompidou Center in Paris are considering opening branches in China.

“What is happening in China is what happened in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century,” said Michael Goedhuis, a collector and art dealer specializing in Asian contemporary art who has galleries in London and New York. “New ground is being broken. There’s a revolution under way.”

But the auction frenzy has also sparked debate here about whether sales are artificially inflating prices and encouraging speculators, rather than real collectors, to enter the art market.

Auction houses “sell art like people sell cabbage,” said Weng Ling, the director of the Shanghai Gallery of Art. “They are not educating the public or helping artists develop. Many of them know nothing about art.”

But the boom in Chinese contemporary art — reinforced by record sales in New York last year — has also brought greater recognition to a group of experimental artists who grew up during China’s brutal Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

After the 1989 government crackdown in Tiananmen Square, avant-garde art was often banned from being shown here because it was deemed hostile or anti-authoritarian. Through the 1990s many artists struggled to earn a living, considering themselves lucky to sell a painting for $500.

That has all changed. These days China’s leading avant-garde artists have morphed into multi-millionaires who show up at exhibitions wearing Gucci and Ferragamo.

Wang Guangyi, best-known for his Great Criticism series of Cultural Revolution-style paintings emblazoned with the names of popular Western brands, like Coke, Swatch and Gucci, drives a Jaguar and owns a 10,000-square-foot luxury villa on the outskirts of Beijing.

Yue Minjun, who makes legions of colorful smiling figures, has a walled-off suburban Beijing compound with an 8,000-square-foot home and studio. Fang Lijun, a “Cynical Realist” painter whose work captures artists’ post-Tiananmen disillusionment, owns six restaurants in Beijing and operates a small hotel in western Yunnan province.

If China’s art scene can be likened to a booming stock market, Zhang Xiaogang, 48, is its Google. More than any other Chinese artist Mr. Zhang, with his huge paintings depicting family photographs taken during the Cultural Revolution, has captured the imagination of international collectors. Prices for his work have skyrocketed at auction over the last two years.

When his work “Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 120” sold for $979,000 at Sotheby’s auction in March, many art insiders predicted the market had topped out and prices would plummet within months.

But in October, the British collector Charles Saatchi bought another of Mr. Zhang’s pieces at Christie’s in London for $1.5 million. Then in November at Christie’s Hong Kong auction, Mr. Zhang’s 1993 “Tiananmen Square” sold to a private collector for $2.3 million. According to Artnet.com, which tracks auction prices, 16 of Mr. Zhang’s works have sold for $500,000 or more during the past two years.

Are such prices justified? Uli Sigg, the former Swiss ambassador to China and perhaps the largest collector of Chinese contemporary art with more than 1,500 pieces, calls the market frothy but not finished.

“I don’t see anything at the moment that will stop the rise in prices,” he said. “More and more people are flocking to the market.”

Mr. Goedhuis insists that this is the beginning of an even bigger boom in Chinese contemporary art.

“I don’t think there’s a bubble,” he said. “There’s a lot of speculation but no bubble. That’s the paradox. In China there are only a handful of buyers — 10, 20, 30 — out of a billion people. You only need another 10 to come in and that will jack up prices.”

He added: “Another astonishing fact is there is not a single museum in the West that has committed itself to buying Chinese art. It’s just starting to happen. Guggenheim, the Tate Modern, MoMA, they’re all looking.”

Representatives from those museums, as well as others, have made scouting missions to China. A growing number of international collectors are looking at Chinese art too.

“After the 2005 Sotheby’s show I just jumped in,” said Didier Hirsch, a French-born California business executive who has long collected American and European contemporary art. “People said the next big run-up in prices would be at Sotheby’s in March so I said, ‘Now or never.’ ” Mr. Hirsch purchased nearly his entire collection — about 40 works — by phone after doing research on the Internet. He said he went first for what he called the titans — the original group of post-’79 painters — including Wang Guangyi and Liu Xiaodong.

Some critics here say the focus on prices has led to a decline in creativity as artists knock off variations of their best-known work rather than exploring new territory. Some are even employing teams of workers in assembly-line fashion.

Christopher Phillips, a curator at the International Center of Photography in New York, has become a regular visitor to China, scouting young artists for the center and other places. On a recent trip “I went to visit the studio of a well-known Beijing painter,” Mr. Phillips said. “The artist wasn’t there, but I saw a group of canvases being painted by a team of young women who seemed to be just in from the countryside. I found it a little disconcerting.”

There are also complaints that some artists are ignoring international standards by selling works directly into the auction market, rather than selling first to collectors. And many experts here say that some gallery officials and artists are sending representatives to the auctions to bid on their own works to prop up prices, or “protect” the prices of some rising stars.

But Lorenz Helbling, director of the ShanghART Gallery here, said Chinese artists continue to produce an impressive array of works, and that talk about the market being overrun by commercialism is exaggerated.

“Things are much better than they were 10 years ago,” he said. “Back then many artists were commissioned to simply paint dozens of paintings for a gallery owner, who went out and sold those works. Now these artists are thinking more deeply about their work because they’re finally getting the recognition they deserve.”