Mourning

Art Schooling the Artists’ Republic of China

Art Schooling the Artists' Republic of China
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/arts/design/30barb.html?

ref=arts&pagewanted=print
By DAVID BARBOZA

BEIJING

ON a recent lazy afternoon Wang Haiyang, a student at China's top art
school, was quietly packing away some of his new oil paintings in the
campus's printmaking department. He is 23, and he just had his first
major art exhibition at a big Beijing gallery.

Many of his works sold for more than $3,000 each, he said. And he
hasn't even graduated.

"This is one of my new works," he said proudly, gesturing toward a
sexually provocative painting of a couple embracing. "I'll be having
another show in Singapore in March."

For better or for worse — depending on whom you talk to — Beijing's
state-run Central Academy of Fine Arts has been transformed into a
breeding ground for hot young artists and designers who are quickly
snapped up by dealers in Beijing and Shanghai.

The school is so selective that it turns away more than 90 percent of
its applicants each year. Many of its faculty members are
millionaires and its alumni include some of China's most successful
new artists, including Liu Wei, Fang Lijun and Zhang Huan. And with
the booming market for contemporary Chinese art, its students are
suddenly so popular that collectors frequently show up on campus in
search of the next art superstar. At the annual student exhibition
the students no longer label their works only with their name and a
title. They leave an e-mail address and cellphone number.

"I can say we have the best students and the best faculty in China,"
said Zhu Di, the school's admissions director. "And we give students
a bright future."

Yet as the academy reshapes its mission and campus, its flowering
relationship with the art market is stirring unease among those who
feel that students should be shielded from commercial pressures.

"The buyers are also going to the school to look for the next Zhang
Xiaogang," said Cheng Xindong, a dealer in Beijing, referring to an
art star, one of whose paintings sold for $3.3 million at a Sotheby's
sale in London in February. "And immediately they make contact with
them, even before they graduate from school, saying, 'I will buy
everything from you.' " (A similar phenomenon has been observed in
recent years at hot art schools in New York and Los Angeles.)

"This can be a dangerous thing," he said. "These young artists need
time to develop."

Yet many counter that the school's soaring fortunes also result from
the Chinese government's growing tolerance of experimental art, which
was once banned. While Beijing still censors art that it deems
politically offensive, including overtly critical portrayals of the
ruling Communist Party, economic and market reforms have changed the
way the government thinks about art and the way the Central Academy
trains young artists.

In the 1980s the school occupied a modest plot of land near Tiananmen
Square in central Beijing where the faculty rigidly taught Soviet-
style Realist art to about 200 students, many of whom were destined
to work for the state. Today the school has a new 33-acre campus and
more than 4,000 students. It offers majors in design and architecture
and abundant courses in digital and video art, and some of its
graduates are making millions.

In the old days, Mr. Zhu said, students had a passion for art. "They
viewed art as a way of life," he said, "and Central Academy was a
talent pool. Now, as society has changed, more and more students view
art as a job. Students are more practical."

The nation's other leading art schools are undergoing similar
makeovers. The China Academy of Art, which has trained some of the
country's most inventive artists, boasts a huge new campus in the
eastern city of Hangzhou. (It was formerly known as Hangzhou
Academy.) In western China the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, which has
a reputation for training great painters, received more than 64,000
applications this year for just 1,600 openings.

But no school has as much clout as Central Academy, the only arts
college directly supported by the central government in Beijing. And
recently, academy administrators say, the support has been extremely
generous.

The school's new gray-brick campus, 10 miles north of Tiananmen
Square, has hip cafes, attractive dining facilities, spacious
classrooms and art studios, and sophisticated equipment, including
high-powered computers and Autodesk video editing systems that cost
as much as $200,000 apiece. The campus also has an impressive new
160,000-square-foot museum and art gallery designed by the prominent
Japanese architect Arata Isozaki.

Faculty salaries average just $700 a month, but the pay means little
to most of these teachers, whose canvases might as well be painted in
gold. Liu Xiaodong, a Central Academy graduate who has been on the
faculty since 1994, often portrays China's disadvantaged, for example
people displaced in the Three Gorges Dam area, site of one of China's
biggest development projects. Yet Mr. Liu is among the country's
wealthiest artists; a huge Three Gorges painting sold at auction last
year for $2.7 million, a record for a contemporary Chinese artist at
the time.

Sui Jianguo, the school's dean and one of the country's most
acclaimed sculptors, has seen his works sell at auction for as much
as $150,000. And Zhan Wang, a professor and sculptor, is successful
enough to employ more than 40 workers in his studio on the outskirts
of Beijing.

The prestige of teaching at the nation's most elite arts school
remains a major draw for such artists, particularly at a time when
China's art scene is flourishing. This year the Central Academy
managed to lure back Xu Bing, 53, a past winner of the MacArthur
Foundation's so-called genius award, from New York, where he had
worked for the last 18 years.

"China is the most avant-garde and experimental site in the world,"
said Mr. Xu (pronounced shoe), now the school's vice president for
international relations. "Everything here is new. There's so much
happening, and I want to be a part of it."

Mr. Xu's work was controversial in the 1980s, when China had just
begun to open up to the West, and his return was a bit of a surprise
to the Beijing art world. His 1988 mixed-media installation "A Book
From the Sky," consisting of hand-printed books and ceiling and wall
scrolls, appeared to replicate ancient literary texts but in fact
contained fake, unintelligible characters. Viewed as a clever
critique of Chinese government propaganda, it created a sensation
when it went on view at the National Art Museum in Beijing. He was
also a popular teacher at the academy in 1989, when many students
were complaining about government restrictions that prevented them
from freely expressing themselves, in art or speech.

When pro-democracy demonstrations broke out in Tiananmen Square that
year, many students and younger faculty members from Central Academy
joined the protests, even making the plastic-foam-and-papier-mâché
sculptures of the "Goddess of Democracy," which became a symbol of
the student movement.

Mr. Xu said he doesn't worry about government interference with
artists or censorship. "The old concept about art and government
being at odds has changed," he said. "Now artists and the government
are basically the same. All the artists and the government are both
running with development."

Many of the changes in the Central Academy's mission grew out of the
efforts to develop a new campus, which also meant rethinking the
school's mission. Some faculty members were leery of the move from
the old campus, which began more than five years ago with a
relocation to a temporary site.

One professor, Sui Jianguo, made sculptures to protest the move, some
of which showed deformed human figures lying in the rubble of the old
campus as it was being demolished. But now he is happy with the
changes at the academy. "The whole education system had to be done in
a new way, which turned out to be better," he said, referring to the
openness to new ideas and new majors.

Some faculty members privately lament the decline of traditional
Chinese painting and disciplined training in centuries-old mediums.
And some complain that today's art students are not as inspired or
idealistic as those in the 1980s.

But other teachers said that their students, largely born in the
'80s, simply reflect the changes sweeping China, which have brought
more wealth to the country and given it more of a global
consciousness. While the enormous growth of the Central Academy has
opened the way for students without a grounding in traditional
mediums, they say, many are highly skilled nonetheless.

"I think the students are more a mix of the best and the mediocre,"
said Yu Hong, a painter who has taught at the school since the early
1990s. "But there are some students better at drawing than when I was
a student."

"Their vision is broader," she said of the students over all.
"They've experienced much more."

Most of the faculty agrees on one major shift: The students seem less
interested in politics and more concerned about their personal
struggles and issues of identity, not unlike artists in the United
States and Europe.

For example Wang Haiyang, who will graduate this year, paints
canvases depicting someone who looks very much like himself: short,
with large, expressive eyes and what might be described as a troubled
soul. He depicts his character with a physical double, in sexual
poses, in violent acts and in women's clothing. "They tell my own
story, my mentality," he said of his works. "The whole process of art
is like a process to cure myself."

Raw expression is on ample display at the academy. Students, once
required to paint the same figurative portrait again and again, are
now encouraged to look deep within themselves and to be creative.
Given that the school is no longer purely about painting and
sculpture, they can find outlets in areas like photography or new-
media art. Majors can eventually lead to career choices like
designing video-game characters for big corporations.

Chi Peng, who graduated in 2005 with a new-media degree, is viewed as
a success story. He broke into the international art market a few
years ago, at 25, with a series of photographs in which his naked
image sprinted through the streets of Beijing with blurry red planes
in hot pursuit.

Today he sells his computer-enhanced photographs for as much as
$10,000 apiece. A decade ago Central Academy graduates who were lucky
enough to sell a painting shortly after graduation would have been
delighted to earn $100.

Mr. Chi calls himself an "80s boy," part of a new generation that
grew up in a freer, more consumer-oriented society. "It's hard to
define the 80s generation," he said. "Our generation is a little
tender but not spoiled."

As for the pressures of the fast-moving art marketplace, which
encourages artists to brand themselves for big collectors, he
acknowledges some ambivalence.

Reflecting on his career ascent, he said: "It's fast, really fast. I
never could have imagined this, and I'm not sure it's a good thing
for me."

A visit to QiuAnxiong's solo exhibition of “Nostalgia”

When you think of Shanghai, perhaps the first thing that pops into your mind is the Bund.

From my perspective, Bund 18,which locates on the opposite of the famous Oriental Pearl TV Tower, is actually a place where history and modern life combine.

On the weekend, I made my way to QiuAnxiong's solo exhition named"Nostalgia"which is set on the forth floor of Bund 18 Creative Center.

In fact, the exhibition hall is very small, with only few exhibits. Here are some pictures I took to share with you.
In the center of the exhibition hall, there is a root of a tree hung on the ceiling, behind it, a picture of the tree and its reflection in the water is projected on the wall.
The following picture shows a root of a tree in the deep soil. Root is the image frequently appears in the exhibition, the image os root is always related with the relationship between people and their motherland, their hometown, the name of the exhibition is "Nostalgia"which clearly show the emotion Qiu wants tho concey in his works.
I have found some information about Qiu, he went to the Univerisityh of Kassel in Germany before returning to China in 2003, basing himself in Shanghai, and became a professor in the department of Art and Design in East China Normal University. Perhaps the power which called Qiu back to China is the emotion of nostalgia.
After many years of studying abroad, Qiu combined Eastern and Western cultures in his creations, and has carried on his own analysis of the two, especially of their two different systems of thought. Some of the exhibits show the typical image of villages in Sichuan Province in China, which is Qiu's hometown, through these works, we can clearly feel his nostalgia.

Asian Art Standing Apart

Asian Art Standing Apart
Auctions

By MARION MANEKER
September 20, 2007

"Everywhere I go, dinner parties, benefits, the Hamptons, people only ask me about Chinese contemporary art," an art adviser, Kim Heirston, said. In what feels like a blink of an eye, Chinese painters have become a focal point in the art world: Just last year, Sotheby's started holding its main sale of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese contemporary art in New York. Today, Sotheby's will sell 275 works estimated at between $19 million and nearly $28 million. Two weeks ago, Pierre Huber, the influential Geneva-based dealer and Lorenzo Rudolf, the former director of Art Basel, held their inaugural Contemporary art fair in Shanghai, which was widely judged to be a whopping success. And next month, Phillips will sell the Farber collection of Chinese contemporary art in a single sale of 44 works of contemporary Chinese art that were acquired from the seminal exhibitions and gallery shows mounted since 1986 that introduced these painters to the West.

What is so fascinating about Chinese contemporary art is that much of it was produced under the radar in the past 20 years — and it is now bursting into view as a newly rich society supports its own artists with high prices and museums. Over the summer, it was announced that Sichuan province offered personal museums to eight of the biggest names in Chinese contemporary art — including Yue Minjun, Zhang Xiaogang, and Wang Guangyi. The Chinese contemporary collector, Baron Ullens, announced his own art space in Beijing that would house Chinese and foreign art.

Though these developments point to the emergence of a domestic market for living Chinese painters, until now the bulk of the sales have been overseas. Last year, Sotheby's sold $70 million worth of Asian contemporary art. Also, 2006 was the first year the auction house brought Chinese contemporary painting to New York as its own sale. They broke 20 artists' records in the process. Sotheby's and the houses haven't suffered for including Chinese painters in their Contemporary art sales here in New York and London. In June, Yue Minjun's "The Pope" (1997), a clever allusion to both Francis Bacon and Velázquez, was sold for an astonishing $4.2 million.

This week's sale also features a Yue Minjun after Velázquez. "Infanta" (1997) is estimated at between $1.8 million and $2.5 million. The other Chinese superstar Zhang Xiaogang is represented by several works, but the most significant is "Chapter of a New Century — Birth of the People's Republic of China" (1992), which is estimated at between $1.5 million and $2.5 million.

"It's so exciting to see great works," Sotheby's expert Xiaoming Zhang, who put the sale together, said. Working in the Chinese contemporary field is still a journey of discovery because so many of the painters were previously working in obscurity to avoid the interference of censors. Others were simply overlooked until increasing value brought the work to market. "You don't know these paintings existed," Ms. Zhang said.

Chen Yifei is a prime example of the kind of painter and painting that one never knew existed. His numerous landscapes and city scenes painted in a misty realism are incomparable. But "The Cellist" (1983), estimated at between $800,000 and $1 million will be the star of his lots.

Other works not to be missed include Liu Dan's monumental "Dictionary" (1991), estimated at between $250,000 and $350,000, which depicts in massive photorealist splendor the open pages of a dictionary. Ai Weiwei's "Chandelier (2002)," estimated at between $400,000 and $600,000, is just that — a massive crystal and metal chandelier that seems suited in size, scale and opulence to a European opera house. A more whimsical work comes from Liu Ye: "The Little Mermaid" (2004), estimated at between $1 million and $1.5 million, is childlike in the way that Yoshitomo Nara's work represents children with wide eyes and expansive foreheads.

Don't let the bigger names distract you from the depth of the show. There is something in almost every style of contemporary painting from abstraction to graffiti-inspired work such as Wu Shanzhuan's "Today No Water–Chapter 29" (2007), estimated at between $30,000 and $50,000. There's even the Mark Tansey-like paintings of Shi Xinning, especially "Pride and Prejudice" (2004), estimated at between $40,000 and $60,000.

This sale makes a very good case that contemporary Chinese painting is better seen separately from the marquee sales in November where the biggest names jostle with their European and American counterparts. If nothing else, this sale will impress you with the variety and vibrancy of Chinese painters and surely justify the accelerating prices.

A Gift Offer for Artists in China: Museums

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/25/arts/design/25muse.html

A Gift Offer for Artists in China: Museums
Xiao Quan

Eight contemporary Chinese artists have been offered their own personal
museums in Dujiangyan, in Sichuan Province. The city plans to begin
construction on an 18-acre plot of land soon.

By DAVID BARBOZA
Published: August 25, 2007

SHANGHAI, Aug. 24 — For years their work could not be exhibited in
China, but now the country's leading contemporary artists are being
courted by major art collectors abroad and their paintings set records
at international auction sales. A local government in Sichuan Province
— the area in western China known for its natural beauty, spicy food
and talented painters — is taking notice.
Skip to next paragraph
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Zhang Xiaogang is one of eight artists who have been offered their own
museums as contemporary art flourishes in China.
The New York Times

Sichaun Province is known for its spicy food and, now, its art.

It has offered to give eight contemporary artists, all under 60, their
own personal museums to operate. The group includes some of China's
best-known avant-garde artists: Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Guangyi, Fang
Lijun, Yue Minjun, Zhou Chunya, He Duoling, Zhang Peili and Wu
Shanzhuan. All have accepted, and Dujiangyan, a city near the
provincial capital, Chengdu, will soon begin construction on an 18-acre
plot of land. The museums are scheduled to open in October 2008.

In a country with no major museum of contemporary art — not even in
Beijing, where most of the eight artists work — this is a novel
development. But in China, everything is changing at warp speed:
artists who sold works for $100 in the 1990s have become
multimillionaires operating huge studios and driving BMWs. They are
helping to transform the style of the country's biggest cities.

"Modern art used to be neglected," said Lu Peng, an associate professor
at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, who selected the artists.
"Then modern art became popular in the market."

The new project, which will also include a public museum, is expected
to bolster tourism and to benefit a group of real estate companies that
are redeveloping the provincial area. In addition to providing the
land, Dujiangyan's government is investing around $13 million in the
museums.

The eight artists, ranging in age from 42 to 59, include a few from
Sichuan, but the others come from all over China. They rose to
prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s by producing paintings,
installations and multimedia pieces that were often radical. Some of
the work was viewed by the Chinese government as distasteful or
antiauthoritarian.

But in recent years Beijing has significantly loosened restrictions on
what can be exhibited in China as the global art market has fed a boom
in new studios, galleries, museums and art districts in many of its
cities. Today only the most controversial works — those with explicit
sexual images or harsh depictions of high-ranking Communist Party
officials — are banned.

How the artists plan to operate their own museums remains unclear.

"I was very happy when I heard that they were going to give me my own
museum," said Mr. Wu, 47, whose radical red character paintings and
nude performance art are well known here and abroad. "Right now, I have
no idea what I'm going to do with it. In the future all the artists
will sit down and discuss how these museums will be operated."

If the artists choose to display their own works, the museums will have
an enviable collection. Prices for art from many of them have
skyrocketed on the auction market. Individual pieces by Zhang Xiaogang
and Mr. Yue, for example, have sold for more than $2 million.

The Fusion on the Menu Is Art and Food

Asia > China > Beijing
The Fusion on the Menu Is Art and Food
By JULIA CHAPLIN
Published: August 19, 2007

IT was a familiar art-world ritual. Mint BMWs and Audis snaked down a
dark alley off the Second Ring Road in Beijing and pulled up to a gray
industrial bunker. Samuel Keller, the director of Art Basel Miami
Beach, had just jetted in from Switzerland. The local hotshot painters
Liu Ding and Liu Wei were huddled with the Svengali-esque curator Pi
Li, and in one corner would-be collectors were chatting with one of
China's most renowned contemporary artists, Ai Weiwei.

Insiders could be forgiven for mistaking this as yet another gallery
opening in art-crazed Beijing, with free-flowing Yen Jing beers, an
international crowd and a minimalist interior of stark white walls and
bare concrete floors. But then the kitchen doors swung open, and a
banquet of Zhejiang province dishes like steam-dried yellow croaker and
a wild-mushroom casserole in a fragrant broth poured forth.

The place was Qu Nar, a restaurant owned and designed by Mr. Ai as a
kind of dining club for his creative circle. "The restaurant actually
loses money because we don't promote it," said Mr. Ai, who opened Qu
Nar (16 Dongsanhuan Bei Road, Chaoyang; 86-10-6508-1597) in 2005 with
several bohemian friends. "But it's worth it because now we have a
place to hang out."

Mr. Ai is among a growing number of Beijing artists who are stepping
outside their studios and into the kitchen to open some of the most
talked-about restaurants in the city. These
artists-turned-restaurateurs are introducing cuisine from their
ancestral provinces — albeit with a nouvelle twist — to a city where
local Mandarin cooking has had a lock on upscale dining.

The current market for Chinese art has turned a handful of struggling
artists into overnight multimillionaires, with their works commanding
as much as $2.3 million at auction houses like Christie's. Along with
their newfound fame, some of these Beijing artists are now rolling in
the materialist trappings of a rap star, with their Range Rovers,
Ferragamo suits and, now, their own cult-of-personality restaurants.

That's not to say these places don't serve a more communal function. As
new art districts pop up along the industrial outskirts and dirt-road
villages off the Fifth Ring Road — often with no discernible center —
the restaurants have also emerged as a kind of ad hoc salon.

At the Dashanzi arts complex, housed in a defunct military factory near
the airport, artists and dealers can be found during lunch at Tian Xia
Yan (4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, 798 Factory District, Dashanzi;
86-10-6432-3577), a casual Sichuan cafe opened five years ago by the
photographer Cang Xin, known for his provocative self-portraits. Tucked
in a back alley behind a maze of galleries, boutiques and coffee shops,
the homey cafe has a red, Cultural Revolution-style décor and serves
Sichuan standards like spicy tea-mushroom pork pot and red-hot sesame
noodles.

By far the most entrepreneurial of the new artist-cum-restaurateurs is
Fang Lijun, a cynical-realist painter known for his canvases of eerie
bald men floating in space. Mr. Fang opened six upscale restaurants
around the city, each displaying important artworks that Mr. Fang and
his curator friends pick.

"It's a business, but it's also a place for the art world to meet and
gather," said Mr. Fang, who can often be seen holding court at Yuelu
Montain's Qian Hai Branch (10 Lotus Lane, 51-10 Dianmen Xidajie,
Xicheng District; 86-10-6617-2696).

Mr. Fang's flagship — South Silk Road in Soho New Town (3/F, Building
D, 88 Jianguolu Road; 86-10-8580-4286) — is the Beijing art world
equivalent to the Ivy in Los Angeles, where power curators and
collectors from Hong Kong, Seoul and the West wine and dine with the
art elite. Set on an upper floor of an office tower, the room is a
soaring loftlike space with black lacquered furniture and chic
waitresses in brightly colored folk outfits.

On one wall, behind a banquet table for 18 people, is a
floor-to-ceiling painting by the leading artist Wang Guangyi that
depicts, in pop yellow and red, retro-Communist workers with the word
"art" stamped in the corner like a corporate logo.

Viewing the painting on a winter afternoon was Meg Maggio, the director
of the Pekin Fine Arts gallery and a consultant for the Gagosian
galleries. "China is a country where relationships are best built over
a good meal," Ms. Maggio said, as she entertained a museum group over
glasses of rice wine and dishes like caterpillar fungus chicken soup in
steam pot, made with four varieties of Yunnan mushrooms.

Three years ago, an artist collective from Guizhou — a poor province in
south central China — arrived in Beijing to sell their paintings. To
pay the bills and to keep from getting homesick, they opened a 24-hour
restaurant named after themselves, Three Guizhou Men (1-2/F, Building
7, Jianwai SOHO, 39 Dongsanhuan; 86-10-5869-0598). The sleek gray
dining room served nouvelle Guizhou specialties like sour fish soup,
lavender tea with milk, and mango and ice purée.

Their art careers never took off, but their restaurant now has five
branches. And they are always packed

Let 10,000 Young Artists Bloom, Saatchi

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/magazine/11wwlnQ4.t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

Among the young artists whose work can be seen on Charles Saatchi's new
Chinese Web site are two who posted self-portraits: Huiyuan Sun, who
posted a series of photographs called "A Little Matter and My Face,"
above.

Stephanie Hueon Tung describes herself as a "fan of adrenaline and
adventure" on the Saatchi site, on which she has posted her "Light
Writing No. 1" and five other images.

PERUSING the student art on his Web site recently, as he does somewhat
obsessively throughout the day, the British collector Charles Saatchi
happened upon an entry from a painter named Liu Yang. This artist had
posted images of seven of his works, including a painting of a factory
set against a haunting gray background and a work on paper depicting a
woman's elongated torso.

But unlike European, American or Australian users of the site, who use
their Web pages there to tell the world everything about themselves —
their favorite artists, what movies and books inspired them, their
convictions about art or politics — Mr. Liu, a student at the Sichuan
Fine Arts Institute, simply wrote: "I can't speak a lot English. Sorry.
But love. ..." His message trailed off in a few lines of Chinese that
read in part: "I admit that my knowledge of art is limited at present.
However, I am sure I can learn quite a bit from your Web site."

Soon Mr. Saatchi began to notice that Mr. Liu was not alone. Every day
more art students from China were posting their work at Stuart (short
for Student Art), a popular nook of Mr. Saatchi's recently reinvented
Web site, saatchi-gallery.co.uk).

Known a decade ago for spotting talent and turning his discoveries into
superstars, as he did with so-called Young British Artists like Damien
Hirst and Rachel Whiteread, Mr. Saatchi is fixated these days on
Chinese artists, the hottest sector of the global market. And when he
saw these shyly tentative Web postings, something clicked.

"There are so many artists in China who want their work to be seen," he
said in a recent interview at his London home, pausing every now and
then to scan the large computer screen on his desk. "These students,
like all the others, want to know what's going on around the world."

So in January he decided to create a Chinese version of his Web site to
cater to that audience. Working in a warren of makeshift offices in the
basement of his Eaton Square home, 16 experts now oversee both the
popular Saatchi Gallery site, which is getting more than six million
hits a day, and a site in Mandarin, accessible from the home page, that
went online two weeks ago.

"Our goal is to break down language and cultural barriers," said Neeraj
Rattu, who is leading the site's technology team. Having compiled a
considerable amount of data, the team estimates that 20 to 30 art
schools operate in China; that about 10,000 students will graduate from
such schools this year; and that some 14,000 artists in China are
represented by galleries.

"That leaves roughly 10,000 unrepresented artists," said Kieran McCann,
who is in charge of the site's content and creative development.

About 300 art galleries operate in Beijing and about 300 in Shanghai: a
relatively small number, Mr. Saatchi said, considering the surge in
interest in Chinese work. China also has 100 to 200 auction houses,
many of which sell contemporary works.

Like Stuart, the Chinese site is designed to be as navigable as
possible, so that posting work will be as easy as opening an e-mail
account. So far 23 Chinese students have posted work on the site.

Each has a distinct personality. Kang Can, a serious-looking young man
photographed in sunglasses, writes, in perfect English, that he was
born in 1982 in Chongqing and graduated from the Sichuan Fine Art
Institute, and that he has already shown his work at Art Basel Miami.
Among the 15 images he has posted are a series of paintings in which a
sleeping infant is variously depicted in a chewing-gum wrapper, on top
of a gun, on the rim of a KFC plastic cup and in other poses.

"Babies as a symbol of human purity came to this world simple and
unadulterated," Mr. Kang writes.

Some of the pages are more cosmopolitan than others. Stephanie Hueon
Tung, a student at Peking University, writes that she recently
graduated from Harvard. "Now living and working in the wonderful city
of Beijing," her posting says. "Fan of adrenaline and adventure. Olé!"

Ms. Tung shows six images from her "light writing" series, in which she
scrawled in light on photographs ranging from a still life of a park
bench to an image of a closed-up shop that she embellished with a
heart-shaped graffito. Another student, Huiyuan Sun, has posted a work
called "A Little Matter and My Face," a series of 10 photographic
self-portraits in which he depicts himself in many guises.

In a few weeks the Saatchi team hopes the new site will be as
interactive as the English-language one, with a chat room in Mandarin
and a forum encouraging artists to debate current issues. The team's
eventual goal is to make its chat rooms seamlessly international, so
that students from all over the world can talk to one another in many
languages.

As it did for Stuart, the Saatchi team is reaching out to art schools
in China to let them know that their students can post pages at the
site. "It's all been word of mouth," Mr. Rattu said.

One looming concern is potential censorship by the Chinese government.
In recent months China has aggressively brokered controversial accords
with Google and Yahoo to filter the search-engine services they offer
in China and blocked access to some material offered by the Chinese
version of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Mr. Saatchi's team knows it may encounter problems if work posted on
the site is overtly political or directly critical of the Chinese
leadership. Its pioneering effort is likely to be closely monitored by
Western dealers and auction houses in the months ahead.

Pressed on that possibility Annabel Fallon, a spokeswoman for the
Saatchi Gallery, played down the potential for conflict. "After
discussions with the Chinese Embassy here we don't believe censorship
will be too much of a problem," she said in a written statement.
"According to the dealers and artists in China we are in contact with,
government interference in the arts seems to be at a very low level in
the last 10 years."

She added, "We don't foresee our site becoming a platform for
anti-government propaganda, but we do of course aim to be respectful to
the wishes of our host nation if our site starts being abused."

In remaking his Web site nine months ago to appeal to artists and
students and to be more interactive, Mr. Saatchi says, he resolved to
buy nothing posted there for the site's first year. Nonetheless he has
already bought works elsewhere by popular Chinese artists like Wang
Guangyi, Yue Minjun and Zhang Xiaogang. And when his new gallery, a
50,000-square-foot space on Kings Road in the Chelsea section of
London, opens in the fall, its first show will be devoted to
contemporary Chinese artists.

In the meantime he and his Internet team spend their days pondering
ways of attracting more artists to the site. In addition to Stuart, for
art students, and Your Gallery, a separate area where artists of all
ages can post their work and sell it directly without relying on a
dealer or other middleman, the site offers links to museums around the
world and a magazine with art world news and feature articles.

It is also sponsoring a six-month competition called Showdown, the art
Web equivalent of "Pop Idol" in Britain or "American Idol" in the
United States. Artists registered at the site can enter works on which
the Internet public will vote; the winner will get £1,000 (about
$1,930) and a chance to show his or her work at the Saatchi Gallery
when it opens. The runner-up will get £750, or about $1,450.

After posting its first call for submissions last week, the site
reported nine million hits over a 24-hour period. The team will soon
post the contest instructions in Mandarin so that Chinese artists can
compete.

But Mr. Saatchi says he won't stop with China. Over the next six months
his team hopes to draw in artists from India, Russia, Spain and South
America.

"My aim," Mr. Saatchi said, " is to do everything I can to maximize the
site's exposure."