A 'Domestic Turn'

Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodline: The Big Family No. 3 (1995)

This week's reading, "A 'Domestic Turn:' Chinese Experimental Art in the 1990s" by Wu Hung, offered remarkable insight into the world of 1990s Chinese experimental art.  His ample historical arguments were (thankfully and helpfully) grounded with an extensive, though manageable, list of key figures from this period.  

As the title of the article alludes to, Hung argues that "Chinese experimental art of the 1990s" underwent a "'domestic turn' that transformed experimental art into a powerful vehicle of social critique."  Much of this was related to the rapid political, economic, and social changes that occured after the end of the Cultural Revolution.  Artists were now unchained from making the obligatory propagandistic visuals that were so reminiscent of the Mao era; instead, more leeway (though still under an auspicious government eye) was granted to artists.  And as more rural Chinese found their way to the cities in search of work, artists too were migrating towards urban areas, primarily Beijing, for artistic growth.  This led to the development of "artist villages", residential areas inhabited by many experimental artists, that initially grew out of financial reasons (i.e. living in these communities were cheaper for the artists), but eventually, these "villages" became molded into their artistic identity and community.  However, Hung was quick to point of that these artists "rarely [formed] close groups based on common social or artistic causes", which begs me to ask why these artists failed to "inspire new ways of thinking and expression".  Based on my inferences from the reading, I would think that the commercial competition amongst these artists contributed to this, since the reading mentioned that "freelance artists" working outside the affiliations of government institutions often had to find other (economic) means to support his or her works.

One of the most interesting (and insightful) pieces of information that Hung provided concerning 1990s experimental art was the short discussion on Political Pop:

As an important trend in Chinese experimental art, Political Pop brought post-Cultural Revolutionary art to an end.  its radical fragmentation of Cultural Revolution images exhausted the source of its pictorial vocabulary and reduced it to a number of pre-conceived compositional formulae.  this interpretation corrects a misunderstanding often found in Western introductions to contemporary Chinese art, which tend to identify Political Pop as a "dissident" political art produced under a Communist regime.  In fact, most Political Pop artists were protesting against against any ideological and political commitment; their intention was to de-politicize political symbols--not reinvest them with new political meaning.  Although genuine social and cultural criticism existed in Chinese experimental art in the 1990s, it was related to an observation and representation of reality, not history.

Though what I've quoted is long, I think it's important to understand these works, their artists, and these artistic time periods from their perspectives.  I think one of the primary challenges for us as students is approaching the material in this class from a non-Chinese perspective (one that is rooted in Western ways of thinking and views towards China, American history, etc.).  For example, if we take Hung's above argument to be a good generalization of Chinese Political Pop, then what many in the class (including me) thought of works in this group (including Zhang Xiaogang, whom painting I've included above, and last week's presenter, Yu Youhan) is incorrect in comparison to the artists' own statements concerning these works.

The Influential and Wealthy

I stumbled upon these two links this past week and it got me to thinking about the the current landscape of contemporary Chinese art and its future.  The first link isn't particularly thought-provoking; it's more of a financial news piece, but it does give a three-person list of the "most-valuable living Chinese artists".  Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, and Zeng Fanzhi, are, according to Bloomberg, the triumverate leading the pack of Chinese artists in the high-stakes business of art.  For me, the most interesting aspect of the article was its discussion about the profitability of Chinese artists in the current financial crisis.    According to Hurun Report's (self-billed as the "webpage for China's business leaders) Robert Hoogewerf, "'Chinese collectors had begun to take an interest in contemporary art, which was until then mostly of interest to foreigners'" and that the "demand for Chinese contemporary art grew slightly last year. Auction prices for this category rose in the first half and languished after the latest -- and worst -- round of credit crisis broke out in September."  So, it seems that the market for contemporary Chinese art is okay, at least for now.  At least the market for contemporary Chinese art is better than it is for other parts of the globe (see this Telegraph article for quick insight).

[The original report from Hurun can be found here].

The second link is to a post from Andrew James Art, a London-founded but Shanghai-based gallery space.  It was a response to a Chinese magazine's publication of last year's "most powerful 100" in the Chinese art community and in response, the folks at Andrew James Art came up with their own list, but called it the "most influential 100" to emphasize the influence that these artists/collectors/etc. have upon their peers.  Though I don't know most of the names on this list, it's probably a good list to reference as the semester goes by.

Anyway, these two links (in addition to being informative, quick references) prodded me to think about the commercial viability of Chinese artists.  I think learning about Zhou Tiehai's works probably influenced this vein of thinking, but it's probably something I want to return back to in a future blog post (and perhaps when I'm not feeling so rushed) examining what exactly is influence in the art community.

Zhang Xiaogang in November 2008 issue of W magazine

Zhang Xiaogang in his Beijing studio; in the background, his Green Wall—Two Single Beds, 2008, oil on canvas.
The History Boy
Zhang Xiaogang’s masterly paintings inspired by life under Mao have made him one of China’s hottest exports.
By Michael Donohue Photograph by Mark Leong
November 2008
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.”

Positions on Chinese Modernity

List of Articles from Chinese Art Magazine

Leng Lin, 'The China Dream' (vol.1, no.1, 3-5) Pi Li, 'My life, my decision: the political nature of Chinese contemporary art' (vol.2, no.5, 15-18) Yin Jinan, 'What next, Ultra-Postmodernism?' (vol.1, no.4, 9-11) Zhu Qi, 'Do Westerners really understand Chinese avant garde art?' (vol.2, no.3, 13-17) Surveys of issues and tendencies Leng Lin, 'Nine Chinese artists' (vol.1, no.5, 3-7) (Wang Guangyi, Yu Youhan, Li Shan, Yue Minjun, Yang Shaobin, Liu Wei, Qi Zhilong, Zeng Fanzhi, Guo Jin) Liao Wen, 'The turbulent history of Chinese feminist values and art' (vol.1, no.2, 3-7) Li Xianting, 'The pluralistic look of Chinese contemporary art since the mid-nineties' (vol.2, no.1, 3-14) Li Xianting, 'Some more thoughts on the raison d'��tre of Gaudy Art' (vol.2, no.2, 3-14) Pi Daojian, 'The history of black-and-white: fifty years of evolution in ink and wash' (vol.2, no.5, 3-13) Pi Li, 'Threading our way through the images' (vol.1, no.3, 9-11) Shimizu Toshio with Robert Bernell, 'Chinese contemporary photography and video art' (vol.2, no.5, 26-30) Wang Yiyang with Robert Bernell, 'The Collection of Dongyu Museum of Fine Arts' (vol.2, no.3, 19-23) Yang Xiaoyan, 'A glimpse into recent contemporary art in Guangzhou' (vol.1, no.4, 3-7) Yang Wei, 'Chinese contemporary art after the move from Yuanmingyuan to Songzhuang' (vol.2, no.5, 20-23) Yi Ying, 'Bad painting' (vol.1, no.3, 3-7) Zhu Qi, 'Why has art become so pretty of late? : an analysis of Chinese avant garde art in the late nineties' (vol.2, no.3, 3-11) Reviews and Events Yi Ying, 'First annual Chinese Contemporary Art Award: a new perspective' (vol.1, no.6, 3-4) Ai Weiwei with Robert Bernell, 'The first Chinese contemporary art awards' (vol.1, no.6, 7-8) Mathieu Borysevicz, 'On Inside Out' (volume 1, no.6, 22-25) Leng Lin, 'Shi wo / It's Me' (Vol.1, no.6, 28-29) Bull, Hank, 'Second Shanghai Biennale' (vol.1, no.6, 38-39) Stephanie Tasch, 'Fast>> Forward: new Chinese video art' (vol.2, no.2, 34-37) Stephanie Tasch, 'Art for Sale' (vol.2, no.3, 37-41) Li Xianting, from 'Polyphenolrene' (vol.2, no.3, p.43) Chinese Art at the Venice Biennale: Francesca Dal Lago: The Virtual Reality of Chinese Contemporary Art (vol.2, no.4, 3-10) Monica Dematt��: Chinese art...It's dAPERTutto! (vol.2, no.4, 12-23) Materials Artist materials Ai Weiwei with Robert Bernell (vol.1, no.6, 8-11) Cai Guoqiang by Huang Du (vol.1, no.5, 12-13) Cai Guoqiang by Britta Erickson (vol.2, no.4, 29-32) Ding Yi by Monica Dematt�� (vol.1, no.2, 13 ) Gu Wenda by Pamela Kember (vol.2, no.3, 28-33) Hong Lei & Wu Xiaojun by Leng Lin (vol.1, no.5, 9) Huang Yongping by Huang Du (vol.1, no.5, 12-14) Huang Yongping by Mathieu Borysevicz (vol.2, no.4, 33-35) Liu Xiaodong by Yi Ying (vol.1, no.1, 7-8) Liu Wei by Li Xianting (vol.1, no.2, 9-10) Ma Liuming by Mathieu Borysevicz (Vol.1, no.6, 43) Xie Nanxing by Harald Szeemann (vol.1, no.6, 14-15) Xu Bing by Britta Erickson (vol.1, no.4, 13-18) Yang Mian by Harald Szeemann (vol.1, no.6, 15-16) Zhan Wang by Britta Erickson (vol.2, no.3, 24-26) Zhuang Hui by Mathieu Borysevicz (vol.1, no.4, 20-24) Zhang Peili by Mathieu Borysevicz (vol.2, no.2, 31-32) Zhang Peili with Francesca Dal Lago (vol.2, no.4, 25-27) Zhang Xiaogang by Zhang Xiaogang (vol.1, no.2, 12) Zhou Tiehai by Harald Szeemann (vol.1, no.6, 13-14) Zhou Tiehai by Natalie Tasch (vol.1, no.6, 18-19)

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.

hinese artists capitalise on avant-garde boom

By John Ruwitch at Reuters

DAFEN, China (Reuters) - It only takes two days for Chen Quan to crank out a reproduction of a Yue Minjun.

"I have done hundreds of his paintings," says the shirtless 25-year-old, his hair tied in a ponytail, referring to the Chinese artist renowned for his paintings of absurd, grinning faces.

Standing by a half-finished copy that features bald men smiling sardonically while perched in a boat on a lake, Chen adds: "Copies like this aren't really hard at all. It just takes time."

While reproductions like Chen's go for only about 250 yuan ($33) apiece in Dafen, where copies of paintings by anyone from Da Vinci to Norman Rockwell are churned out in the dozens, prices of genuine works by China's top artists are soaring.

At Sotheby's contemporary art auction in London last week seven works by some of China's top painters, including Yue and Zhang Xiaogang, raked in 4.86 million pounds ($9.68 million) -- more than double their pre-sale estimate.

Yue's 1997 oil on canvas entitled "The Pope" sold for 2.15 million pounds ($4.28 million).

Another piece by Yue, depicting an open head with a pool of blue water in which late Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong is having a dip, fetched 692,000 pounds -- almost five times the high end of the pre-auction estimate.

These prices come after previous auction records were set in May at a Christie's auction in Hong Kong.

COPIES POPULAR

"Chinese art these past few years has been extremely hot," says Wei Guangqing, another well-known painter and contemporary of Yue's who serves as dean of the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts.

The appearance of knock-offs of Chinese paintings in Dafen, an urban "village" in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen known for its reproductions of Western oil paintings, is a testament to their blossoming popularity.

The streets here are lined with shops, and on second and third floors, thousands of young artists churn out phoney Van Goghs, Monets, Dalis and generic hotel room art, often in assembly lines that would have made Henry Ford proud.

Chen says reproductions of the works of Chinese contemporary big-hitters make up more than 30 percent of his small shop's sales, although the walls are covered with realist nudes and Renaissance reproductions.

Other art dealers in Dafen estimate contemporary Chinese works make up 10-20 percent of their sales, and say they have been a steady staple since demand for the paintings emerged on the Dafen scene a couple of years ago.

In theory, there are copyright issues in copying, but in reality nobody here has any problems.

"When leaders or cultural officials come they say: 'These items are copyrighted, so just don't put them on top'," says one gallery owner.

FOREIGN BUYERS

The contemporary Chinese knock-offs -- the retro-revolutionary Wang Guangyis, the precocious baby-populated Tang Zhigangs, the colourful Fang Lijuns and the sneering Yue Minjuns -- are popular with foreigners and Hong Kongers.

"These are a little alternative," says Huang Zhenyi, who tends a gallery on one of Dafen's main streets.

Clicking on computer images of Yue Minjun art that customers can order, he adds: "Many foreigners who come here know a lot about this guy, but Chinese people don't know him. They just see all those teeth and the smile and think it's funny."

At Thursday's auction, the Chinese works were bought by Asians, but not mainland Chinese, says Evelyn Lin, head of the contemporary Chinese art department at Sotheby's Asia.

But, she says, there is growing appetite for contemporary Chinese art among mainlanders.

"Chinese consumers have just started to pay attention recently ... the mainland Chinese have learned to appreciate Chinese contemporary art," Lin says.

China's fast-growing economy is buoying the art market from the rarefied stratosphere all the way down to would-be starving art students.

"All my graduate students can sell paintings these days," says Wei. "But I think they are being influenced by the market too soon ... Youth today lack a lot of experience. Their evaluations of things are realistic, practical."

In Dafen, Chen is just focused on cranking out replicas as quickly as he can. He says he doesn't have time to work on his own art but he'd like to because he is under no illusions about what he does.

"This is just a craft," he says. "It's not really art."

($1 = 7.621 yuan)

From Propaganda to Profit

------------------------
From Propaganda to Profit
June 2007

by Rebecca Catching and Anurag Viswanath

This spring at Moganshan Lu, Shanghai's main art district, Beijing Art
Now Shanghai christened their gallery opening with a rather
unconventional exhibition, "Shanghai Now." Viewers entered the
cavernous warehouse and stared blankly at canvases sheathed in money.
Gallery founders Huang Liaoyuan and Zhang Haoming had wrapped each
painting in shiny wrapping paper printed with faces of various
different currencies. In doing so, they sought to remind viewers to
look beyond the commercial value of art and contemplate its intrinsic
value.

Xu Beihong's 1939 work Put Down Your Whip sold at a recent auction in
Hong Kong for a record $9.2 million.

It's a relevant point in the context of the Chinese art market, which
some claim has begun to spin out of control. Last year, Sotheby's and
Christie's sold $190 million worth of Asian contemporary art—most of
it Chinese. Prices reached unprecedented heights, with 43-year-old
artist Liu Xiaodong dropping canvases for a whopping $2.7 million, and
Xu Beihong's The Slave and Lion smashing the record for a Chinese oil
painting at $6.9 million.

Twenty years ago Chinese artists would have had trouble obtaining a
passport, but now they are globetrotters. They have studios at home
and abroad, showcase their art around the world, and are getting very
rich in the process. Why this boom? According to Simon Groom, head of
exhibitions at the Tate Liverpool, the Chinese art explosion "reflects
the interest in China, driven by the growth of its economy, the
emergence of Chinese collectors and an eagerness in the West for new
speculative markets."

Tate Liverpool's current exhibition "The Real Thing: Contemporary Art
from China" features 26 works by 18 leading Chinese artists, including
Ai Weiwei, Gu Dexin, Zhou Tiehai and the Yangjiang group. The exhibit
has been billed as the "show of the year" and is evidence of the
growing influence of Chinese artists abroad. Indeed, many of China's
most exciting artists are now based abroad—for example Xu Bing and Cai
Guoqiang—which puts them in close proximity to their collectors, 90%
of whom are foreign.

Yet mainland Chinese collectors are starting to get into the Chinese
art game, too. Catering to their needs are hundreds of mainland
galleries and auction houses which are springing up, as well as
foreign institutions that are in the process of opening branches in
China, such as the Centre Pompidou and the Guggenheim.

Auction houses, both foreign and local, have begun to deal directly
with the top-tier Chinese artists, snatching up works while the paint
is still wet, rather than going through collectors and galleries. Some
artists have responded to the demand by using teams of assistants to
churn out paintings. For example, Shanghai-based artist Zhang Huan
employs close to 100 workers in a massive studio that would make Andy
Warhol's factory look like a cottage industry.

A Long March

Under Mao, art was meant to "serve the people," i.e., workers,
peasants and soldiers—social groups not known for their inclination
toward the arts. And the bureaucratic controls designed to oversee
Mao's utopian social-engineering projects quickly made art subservient
to politics.

Artists were disseminators of propaganda, celebrating revolutionary
zeal and socialist euphoria through patriotic paintings. Icons of this
era include Dong Xiwen's oil The Founding of the Nation (1953), Jin
Shangyi's painting Mao Zedong at the December Conference (1961), and
Wu Hufan's Atom Bomb (1965), which marked China's coming of age as a
nuclear power.

Woodblock prints and oils done in the Soviet socialist realism style
featured square-jawed men leading China's industrialization, and
robust women harvesting bumper crops of plump rockmelons, while folk
paintings known as nianhua, or New Year's paintings, depicted bouncing
baby boys riding atop golden fish adorned with communist slogans.

Under the oppressive Cultural Revolution, a new genre, a variation on
socialist realism described as "red, bright and luminous" (hong,
guang, liang), celebrated the accomplishments of the Cultural
Revolution with the use of theatrical illumination and garish colors.
The fall of the Gang of Four in 1976 brought new beginnings, as both
artists and art schools were rehabilitated.

Deng Xiaoping's "opening and reform" in 1978 and the preoccupation of
the state with economics allowed for expanded realm of individual
freedom and space. The officially sponsored "New Spring" art
exhibition in February 1979, followed by an exhibition by the Stars,
paved the way for the rise of the Contemporaries, which included
artists such as Wang Huaqing, Sun Weiman and Zhang Hongtu. The
establishment of Fine Arts in China (Zhongguo Meishu Bao) in 1985, a
Bejing-based weekly arts newspaper; the formalization of official
channels for sale of art by the New York-based Hefner Gallery in
1987-89; and the Chinese Nude Oils exhibition in 1989 were important
milestones which led to the culmination of what some consider the
Tiananmen of the art world: the highly controversial, socially
critical "China/Avant Garde" exhibition at the Chinese National Art
Gallery in February 1989.

Following Tiananmen, the art scene limped back to normalcy after a
brief hiatus. In the following decade, the first art galleries, such
as Red Gate Gallery and Courtyard Gallery in Bejing, and Shanghart and
Eastlink in Shanghai, began to pop up, with clients including
influential foreign collectors such as Uli Sigg and Pierre Huber.

In the years that followed art was no longer used to further the aims
of communism, rather communist imagery was used further the aims of
individual artists who made a fortune off of genres such as political
pop.

Artists such as Wang Guangyi and Xue Song, produced technicolor images
of Mao and graphic paintings of workers. While cynical realists such
as Liu Xiaodong, Yue Minjun and Zhang Xiaogang employed both
hysterical and forlorn human figures in everyday scenes, giving visual
expression to the moral vacuum left behind by communism.

Towards the late 90s, artists began really test the limits of their
freedom with exhibitions such as the "Fuck Off" biennale satellite
exhibition curated by Ai Weiwei at Eastlink in 2000, and Cang Xin's
performance piece To Add One Meter to an Unknown Mountain, where he
piled the summit of a mountain with the bodies of his friends—an
oblique reference to the terror induced by the Cultural Revolution.
Though artists experienced a palpable growth in artistic freedom
through out the 90s and onwards, plainclothes spies from the cultural
bureaus made their presence felt, asking to speak to artists, removing
works, shutting down exhibitions and occasionally holding artists in
prison.

In 2006, the Hei Shehui collective—literally "hey, society" and also a
pun on the Chinese word for mafia—organized the controversial "38 Solo
Exhibitions" in a former army barracks in Shanghai. The exhibition
featured Jin Feng's provocative performance piece An Appeal Without
Words, which comprised a group of actual peasants covered head to toe
in a layer of gold paint, brandishing empty placards—a reference to
their compromised status in appealing land disputes. Such incendiary
work caused the show's closure and landed two of the artists in jail.
New-art observer Geremie Barmé likens the situation to Miklos
Haraszti's Velvet Prison. In such an environment, the majority of
artists choose not to test the limits, and social critique often takes
a back seat to profit.

In some ways, profit poses a more pernicious threat to creativity than
government censorship, as galleries pressure artists to create works
to feed the market. "Now that [the art world] has become
commercialized, these commercial forces inform artists if something
has commercial value," opines controversial conceptual artist Xu Zhen.
Mr. Xu, who spends much of his time working at nonprofit experimental
art center BizArt, pays little attention to the market. Rather he
chooses to raise questions about transparency and China's growing
military ambitions—filming videos of himself driving remote control
tanks into China's neighboring countries and staging mockumentaries of
engineers lopping off the top of Mount Everest.

While the success stories, such as Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Minjun,
dominate the business pages of the Western press, many critics see
them as examples of how Chinese art has failed to innovate. Outside of
the works of a small group of exceptional conceptual artists, much of
what lines gallery walls is uninspiring and derivative. Pia Camilla
Copper, a Chinese contemporary art specialist at the Paris auction
house Artcurial, says, "The painters, sculptors and conceptual artists
from [China's top academies] are technically skilled, they only lack
imagination. A sort of Turner Prize should be created for Chinese art
to encourage young artists to break free from academic rules, the
scourge of the Chinese art academy, and innovate."

At the same time, experimental art is stifled by the lack of
institutional resources. Museums are underfunded, as are nonprofit art
centers such as Shanghai's BizArt and Yunnan's Lijiang Studio. Serious
art criticism is also compromised by corruption amongst journalists
and critics who offer coverage and praise for a fee.

Ms. Catching is the arts and entertainment editor of that's Shanghai,
and the Shanghai correspondent for Art Asia Pacific. Ms. Viswanath is
a free-lance journalist based in Bangalore.

Once hated, now feted - Chinese artists come out from behind the wall

Charles Saatchi joins the swell of collectors beating a path to the east

Jonathan Watts in Beijing
Wednesday April 11, 2007
The Guardian


Art world turned upside down ... Charles Saatchi has bought 15 of Zhang Dali's Chinese Offspring. Photograph: courtesy Saatchi Gallery

The naked Chinese migrant workers were dangling on hooks and ropes from a ceiling in north-east Beijing until a few months ago, when they were bundled up in bubble wrap, crammed into a container and shipped off to London.

They are not desperate Chinese peasants seeking illegal entry into the UK. Far from it. Their arrival in Britain is part of a cultural invasion, paid for by the UK's most famous art collector, and signalling a surge of interest in Chinese sculpture, painting and photography.

The life-sized resin figures are the work of Zhang Dali, one of China's leading artists. To highlight the role played by countryside labourers in his country's rapid urbanisation, Zhang took casts of 100 of them, substituted numbers for their names, signed the figures and offered them for sale like pieces of meat hung in a window.

Except, of course, they are a lot more expensive. Thanks to the booming market in Chinese art, the price for a single figure has doubled in the past two years to £10,000. That value is likely to increase further if they are shown at the opening of Charles Saatchi's new gallery in the King's Road this year.

Saatchi snapped up 15 of Zhang's Chinese Offspring in a shopping spree that has also seen him spend more than a million dollars each on two huge paintings by Zhang Xiaogang, the hottest property in the Chinese contemporary art scene, as well as works from at least 18 of his compatriots.

The UK buyer, whose patronage helped to establish the careers of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin in the 1990s, is now paying increasing attention to the east. This year he launched a Mandarin version of his website, which gets more than 4m hits a day.

"I have been looking at lots of contemporary Chinese art in the past few years and find that a small percentage of it is world class and as good as the best contemporary art anywhere else," he told the Guardian. "There is a huge gulf, though, between the small amount that is world class and the majority, which is derivative and kitsch."

Saatchi is a late but influential arrival. Thanks to a near eightfold increase in the market in only two years, Sotheby's in Hong Kong recorded Chinese contemporary art sales of $21.9m (£11m) in 2006. It is a similar story at auction houses from London to New York, many of which started only recently to offer modern Chinese work but now find it their biggest driver of growth.

It has bordered on a frenzy. During the first auction of Chinese contemporary art in New York last April, so many bidders were calling in that Sotheby's ran out of telephones.

Among the most sought-after works was Lions, the roaring, guffawing multiple self-portrait by Yue Minjun, which eventually sold for more than half a million dollars. Yue's paintings and sculptures of garishly coloured laughing men are seen as symbols of China's consumer culture. This is one of the central themes for contemporary artists, along with reflections on materialism, the loss of traditional values, environmental destruction and the political legacy of Mao Zedong and Tiananmen Square.

Most of the headlines have been made by Zhang Xiaogang, whose giant family portraits and split-focus images from the Cultural Revolution era have generated the biggest interest among buyers. Last April, his Bloodline Series: Comrade No 120 sold for $979,200, almost three times Sotheby's high estimate. It was a record for Chinese contemporary art, but one that lasted only until October, when Saatchi paid £769,600 for another work by Zhang Xiaogang at a London auction.

With auction sales of $23.6m last year, Zhang Xiaogang was narrowly second to Jean-Michel Basquiat in the ArtPrice ranking of the 100 top-selling artists. But he was far from alone on the chart. There were 24 Chinese names last year, up from almost none five years ago.

This represents a huge change in attitudes and lifestyles. Ten years ago, avant-garde artists were on the fringe of Chinese society. Their works were often banned, exhibitions were shut down and, for most, the sales of their work were barely enough to make ends meet. Today, however, a growing number of artists own villas, foreign cars and apartments. "Cynical realist" Fang Lijun is said to own six restaurants in Beijing and a hotel in Yunnan province.

Among the newcomers to the top-seller list is Su Xinping, an artist from Inner Mongolia. Su said the price of his work had tripled in the past three years. "My life has changed a little. I still eat simple food and lead a simple life, but I have a more convenient house and a more convenient car. I have several homes, and I bought a studio in the city last year."

Su is one of many artists who struggled after their participation in the Tiananmen Square protests. But now he sees greater opportunities to do the work he wants to do, and to get paid for what it is worth. He received a call from New York recently to say several of his works had just sold for almost $400,000. "I won't get any of that money," he grinned. "I sold those pieces years ago." But he will benefit from now on. "The price for Chinese art was too low before. Even now some fine pieces have not reached their true value."

Zhang Dali agrees. "I expect the price will keep rising for at least five years because more and more people want to buy Chinese art, but there are not that many Chinese artists. The demand is increasing, but the supply is limited so the price will keep rising."

The reasons for the boom are manifold. The establishment of the Dashanzi art district in Beijing three years ago attracted many foreign buyers, who account for about 80% of sales. A government crackdown on property speculation and unease about stock market prices have also pushed many investors to consider art. But many overseas purchasers are motivated by a desire to grab a piece of history.

"I think the rise of the art market is highly related to the rising interest in China," said Jonathan Wong of Sotheby's in Hong Kong. "We observe money comes from all over the world and new buyers keep emerging in every auction."

Amid concerns about a speculative bubble, insiders say the boom is a mixed blessing. "For big-name artists, the price of works has gone up dramatically - by 10 to 20 times in some cases," said Brian Wallace, whose Red Gate Gallery was the first to show contemporary works in Beijing. "If you were in it for the money 10 years ago, you would be very well off today. But it is not easy. With all the new entrants into the market, more galleries are taking up more artists. So the overall quality is not as high as before. There are many good artists out there, but a lot of them are now painting for the market - even some of the big names."

Great leap forward

Their work is utterly shocking - but they just can't get arrested. Alfred Hickling on how China learned to love its young artists

Wednesday March 28, 2007
The Guardian


Helter skelter ... Ai Weiwei's Working Progress ... Fountain of Light. Photograph: © Ai Weiwei

Ten years ago, Xu Zhen was the archetypal garret-dwelling artist, scraping a living in a Shanghai apartment with barely room to swing a cat. To prove the point, he found a cat and swung it. The artist claims that the animal was already dead when he made the 45-minute performance video, which shows feline entrails being spattered across the walls. But the piece established Zhen as the rising star of the new generation of Chinese artists whose work now features in The Real Thing, an exhibition at Tate Liverpool that is the most comprehensive show of contemporary Chinese art ever staged in this country.

The Liverpool show opens at the same time that a group of Young British Artists make their first appearance in China. Aftershock: Contemporary British Art 1990-2006 brings items such as Tracey Emin's bed and the Chapman Brothers' Stephen Hawking statue to the Capital Museum in Beijing. But while these pieces have a retrospective feel, China arguably has the most vital, imaginative and uncontainable art scene in the world today.

Xu Zhen and his peers represent a new wave of firebrands set to make the Tate Liverpool show go off, quite literally, with a bang. Tomorrow evening, the exhibition launches with an explosive piece by the Yangjiang Group entitled If I Knew the Danger Ahead I'd Have Stayed Well Clear. The work takes the form of a massive firework battle worth £50,000.

If the YBAs are set to be supplanted by YCAs in terms of talent and notoriety, Xu Zhen is arguably the Chinese Damien Hirst. In June 2006 he organised a warehouse show of 30 young artists in Shanghai, of which the centrepiece was a video of a panda being masturbated for artificial insemination. The show was forced to close on its opening night.

It is, however, now quite difficult to provoke the authorities into closing an exhibition, as the Chinese government seeks to co-opt contemporary art to advertise the productivity and tolerance of the new China. In 2006, the Shanghai Biennale became the first major state-sponsored exhibition of contemporary art - even the fringe show, entitled Fuck Off, was left to run unimpeded. The Beijing exhibition of Young British Artists is another example of this eagerness to embrace international influences.

The U-turn in the official attitude can be gauged by the fate of Beijing's avant-garde in the wake of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, when Beijing's radical artists relocated to an area beyond the city's third ring road, known as the East Village. With no money or conventional outlets for their work, the artists began to conduct increasingly extreme experiments on themselves. One, Zang Huan, covered himself in fish paste and honey and sat for several hours in a public toilet in 100-degree heat. The piece - a comment on the fate of the poet Ai Qing, who was forced to clean toilets during the Cultural Revolution - provoked the police to raid the East Village and evict its inhabitants. In 2001, the area was bulldozed to make way for a public park.

A new artistic community sprang up in the north-east of the city at Dashanzi, centred on a former machine tool plant known as Factory 798. This time, the government sanctioned the area as a cultural quarter, opening up a flood of international investment. Today, Dashanzi is a hub of international galleries, plush apartments and restaurants, with few practising artists left.

The official acceptance of the avant garde is a paradox for Chinese artists. Beijing-based critic and curator Pi Li identifies the emergence of "a kind of official, harmless contemporary art" which leaves artists in danger of losing their identity. "Their position had been the underground. Now they are widely shown and can sell their work very successfully. This has not brought about a good situation for Chinese art; on the contrary, it made the art lose its energy."

Works by Chinese artists have recently changed hands for as much as $1.5m - the amount paid recently by Charles Saatchi for a painting by Zhang Xiaogang - but The Real Thing's curator, Simon Groom, hopes the exhibition will re-establish Chinese art's radical edge. He has taken the bold, possibly even foolhardy, step of inviting Xu Zhen to collaborate in the selection process. "Some of his initial suggestions were a little unworkable," Groom says. "He proposed that we kidnap a drunk, lock him in the gallery and witness his reactions when he wakes up." Zhen also suggested handing out knives to exhibition visitors. One piece that did make the display is the tip of Mount Everest, lopped off by the artist during an expedition to the mountain and mounted in a glass case.

The Liverpool show also features a mammoth engineering project by Ai Weiwei, now China's best-known artist. Ai Weiwei recently collaborated with architects Herzog and de Meuron on the innovative "bird's nest" design of Beijing's Olympic Stadium. For Liverpool, he has created a soaring, illuminated spiral floating outside the Tate in the Albert Dock. "It's the kind of piece that could only be realised in China, where material and labour costs are low," says Groom. "But you cannot underestimate the speed of change in China. Young Chinese artists are less interested in politics than their own dreams and desires. That has never happened in China before, where art had always been a response to the state."

Groom still doesn't know if Zhen plans to attend. "In some ways, I'm rather hoping he doesn't. He's more likely to show up in disguise, or try to sabotage the show in some way. He might even try to close it down." That could be seen as the ultimate irony - once, the Chinese authorities used to shut down exhibitions. These days, the artists do it themselves.

The Real Thing: Contemporary Art From China is at Tate Liverpool from Friday to June 10. Details: 0151-702 7400

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."

Francesco Bonami on Chinese Art

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/magazine/25Style.China.t.htmlr=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

For every Koolhaas the West produces, [China] can produce 10 very good young Chinese architects able to deliver the same project, at the same level of quality, for about a third of the price. This doesn't mean, of course, that China is immune from nouveau riche posturing.

Published: February 25, 2007

Recently I received an e-mail message from a curator friend inquiring about a painter and sculptor named Liu Wei. I had included his work in a show I organized in Turin called "AllLookSame?" that featured pieces by young Korean, Chinese and Japanese artists. "Do you believe that Liu Wei is just a good artist or a very good artist that will be famous in the future like Zhang Xiaogang?" my friend asked. (Zhang Xiaogang is a Chinese art star whose paintings fetch six figures.)

I am a curator, but I am not a clairvoyant. The word on Chinese art right now is "Buy!" but I'm not convinced that we really understand what's going on there. Ten years ago, a few Chinese artists, like Chen Zen or Huang Yong Ping, appeared on the West's radar screen, satisfying a certain outdated "Orientalist" craving among some collectors. People like Uli Sigg, the former Swiss ambassador to China, who counts some 1,500 pieces of Chinese and Asian art in his collection, and another Swiss citizen, Lorenz Helbling, who opened his gallery, ShanghART, in China more than a decade ago, are reaping the profits of their foresight. But now Western collectors and dealers are descending on China like a swarm of annoying and aimless flies. Actually, today's burgeoning Chinese art world depends very marginally, if at all, on the gallery establishment in New York and London. Huge crowds may jam the Miami Basel and Frieze
art fairs, but those numbers are nothing compared with the potential size of the art market within China itself.

All of these things make it hard for me to answer my friend's question about Liu Wei. But the real difficulty has less to do with the dangers of market speculation than with the fact that I haven't quite figured out how a Chinese artist thinks, creates and produces a work of art.

A studio visit to an artist in Beijing is often like 10 studio visits in Brooklyn. In China, you don't find a painter, and a sculptor, and a video artist, but rather one artist who is working on painting, sculpture, photography, video and (why not?) performance all at the same time. When I visited Liu Wei in Beijing to select works for my show in Turin, he offered me not only beautiful cityscape paintings but also architectural models of famous buildings, like St. Peter's
Cathedral and the Empire State Building, made from the same rubber used to make fake dog bones. (I chose a painting.) In Europe, an artist that looks for inspiration in both a pet shop and the early work of Gerhard Richter would most likely be dismissed as lacking a consistent point of view. But in China the same criteria do not apply.

European artists often develop different bodies of work. Many Chinese artists seem to develop different bodies for each work. A great chaos under the sky was supposedly an excellent sign for Chairman Mao Zedong, and the same may be true for today's Chinese artists. Complexity and change is part of Chinese philosophy. To favor one medium over the others would be to impose a silly constraint. If all is possible in contemporary art, why limit yourself?

Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts currently receives applications from some 17,000 aspiring artists annually. Maybe a third of these will be accepted. But even if only 10 percent of those succeed in some way, there will be plenty of Chinese art to collect. What and by which ones has yet to be determined. But there is less and less doubt that the future, in some form or shape, will belong to the Chinese — not only as producers of art but also as consumers of it. Their capacity to devour and digest global ideas in order to create their own new aesthetic is
simply astonishing. It's happening already with architecture. After overcoming their initial inferiority complex, the Chinese are realizing that they don't need to buy into the Western star system. For every Koolhaas the West produces, they can produce 10 very good young Chinese
architects able to deliver the same project, at the same level of quality, for about a third of the price. This doesn't mean, of course, that China is immune from nouveau riche posturing. Louis Vuitton and Prada bags are as avidly consumed there as they are everywhere else on the planet. But a new, more sophisticated generation of creative people and style makers seems to be taking control.

Today, even government censorship has become a sort of performance art. During my visit to Shanghai last year, the government closed down a weeklong exhibition of ambitious installations in a newly renovated factory — some of the art was said to contain pornographic content — and a mild protest followed. But it all seemed to be part of a continuing game of cat and mouse, if not even a weird new form of art marketing.

They say that if you show a video of a tiger running in the jungle, a person from the West will focus on the tiger while a person from China will take in the whole image. There's no question that while Americans and Europeans are looking at individual artists or individual works of
art, the Chinese are seeing a cultural transformation of enormous proportions. Some Chinese artists will no doubt get eaten by the tiger. But perhaps it's the dealers and the collectors in the West who are missing the big picture.

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.”

Chinese Art in the news

Art in the news from Artzinechina.com

A painting by Liu Xiaodong sold in November for $2.7 million, shattering the record set by Zhang Xiaogang to become the most expensive Chinese contemporary art work ever sold at auction. The painting, "Three Gorges：Newly displaced Population," was sold to a Singapore collector in 2005. But the piece was put up for auction and the Chinese Poly auction house sold it today. The buyer was Zhang Lan, the founder of the South Beauty chain of expensive Chinese restaurants.

A conference called“The Reality and Dream of Chinese Contemporary Art” was held on November 17 at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Artists Liu Xiaodong, Xia Xing, Cui Xiuwen and the critics Yi Jinna, Zhao Li, Yu Ding and Feng Boyi discussed the topic “Can artists create artworks freely when they live in the market”drew lots of attention from the audience.

The Shanghai Art Fair arranged 2000 square meters space for 50 Young Chinese Contemporary Artists under 35 years old. Ma Liang, Han Zijian, Zhanghua, Xiang Qinghua, Zhou Jianhua, Liang Haopeng and Shen Na attended this special exhibition.

Zhai Mo, a 35-year-old abstract artist, will set out alone by sailboat from Shanghai for his around-the-globe voyage on January 1, 2007. His press conference was held at Chang An Club in Beijing last month. Zhai is hoping to become the first Chinese to travel around –the globe by sailboat.

Gu Ya, A 32-year-old woman from Yi Liang village in Yunnan Province, has created more than one thousand abstract pen–and-ink paintings in past three years, but she was only educated as high school level and never received art training. When asked to explain the meaning behind her images, Ms. Gu spoke in a language no one was able to decipher. The artist strange art and language has drawn enormous coverage from the media and on the internet. Now, CCTV – the national television network – plans an interview in the hopes of figuring out what this woman is saying and drawing.

Now in his 80s, famous Chinese abstract artist Zhao Wuji, who lives in Paris, was named last month an honorary professor of Fudan University. Five of his traditional art works have recently sold at auction for over $1 million, the highest being a 1958 composition that sold for $3.1 million – the highest price ever fetched by a living artist in China. Among contemporary artists, Liu Xiaodonghas sold for the highest price.

“Visible-Invisible”Chinese abstract painting exhibition was opened in One Moon Art Gallery which was located on Beijing Ditan Park on Dec. 2. Based on this exhibition, the seminar named “Chinese abstract painting” was held on Dec. 3. The artists of the exhibition were Chen Ruobing, Li Yang, Lin Yan, Tan Ping, Tang Kaizhi, Wang Guangle, Xu Hongming, Zhang Fan, Zhou Yangming.And the attendees of the seminar were: Gao Minglu, He Guiyan, Huang Du, Lei Hong, Li Xu, Liu Libing, Shao Yiyang, Sheng Wei, Wang Dunting, Wang Luyan, Wang Nanming, Wang Xiaojian, Zhu Jinshi, Zhu Qingsheng, Zhao Xun.

Christie's completed a record breaking auction of 20th Century Chinese art today with sales of $67.9 million worth of Asian contemporary and 20th century Chinese art works. Zhang Xiaogang's 1993 work, "Tiananmen Square," sold for $2.3 million, the second highest price ever paid for a work by a Chinese avant garde artist. Zhang Xiaogang had another work sell for $2.3 million and two other paintings sell for close to $1 million, making him easily the most sought after Chinese contemporary artist. Also, Yue Minjun's 1993 piece, "Kites," sold for $962,000 -- a record for a work by the artist. And a Zeng Fanzhi piece, "Mask 1999 No. 3," sold for 816,400 -- a record for the artist.

Two works by Chinese contemporary artists were banned from the Shanghai Art Fair held this week at the ShanghaiMART. The works were by Huang Rui and Cang Xin. The Cang Xin work portrayed him licking a Mao figurine. The works were being shown by the Hong Kong gallery 10 Chancery Lane. The gallery's other images -- including photographs of Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming undressing and standing naked with a large group of artists and other people -- were not taken down.

The latest issue of Time magazine features an article about the boom in Chinese contemporary art. The article, by Simon Elegant, is called "The Great China Sale," and it explains how hot the art market is right now. The article also mentions that Christie's auction in New York last week, one of Zhang Xiaogang's paintings sold for $1.36 million. The article also says that the British collector Charles Saatchi paid $1.5 million at a London auction for another piece by Zhang Xiaogang.

A man calling himself the “Yanan Clay Sculpture King,”Wang Wenhai, has accused the well-known Beijing sculptor Sui Jianguo, who is the professor of Central Academy of Fine Arts, of violating the copyright by creating a sculpture called Sleeping Chairman Mao. Wang, who worked in the Revolutionary Museum in Yan'an, the central province of Shaanxi, has devoted much of his life to creating sculptures of Mal. In 2002, Wang said he created a sculpture of Mao sleeping. Mr. Wang,who says Mao is his hero, also say Sui Jianguo's Mao in his work "Nightmare," also depicts Mao as the devil. Wang told one Chinese newspaper he was so angry about the image he fainted. This case was heard at a court in Beijing Chaoyang District People Court on November 21 2006. No word yet on the verdict.

In 2006 Taipei Biennale, the young artist from Guangzhou, Cao Fei, created what is being called her National Father project. As a curator, Cao Fei planned the whole sculpture solo exhibition for her father, the sculptor Cao Chongen. At the exhibition, she exhibited six small bronze sculptures of the famous Chinese leader Sun Yat Sen in his different time such as youngster Sun Yat Sen, the Great President, Great Marshal, etc. Cao Chongen, Cao Fei’s father, created many of the Sun Yat Sen sculptures that are now displayed in China.

Zhang Xiaogang: I can't be happy-happy-joy-joy.

Here's part of something I flipped to while reading the newspapers this morning (the Oriental Morning Papers). It's basically an interview between that newspaper agency and Zhang and post.
Xiaogang (the artist who drew the Bloodline series). Here are some excerpts I chose to translate
Press: for an artist, there usually is a primary creative masterstroke, what do you think is yours?
Zhang: From an artistic perspective, there is a keynote that I have not changed, that is, I can't draw vibrant and radiant things and I also can't draw pure abstract art. I've always been keen on my inner emotions or an individual in a unique social background and the mutual relationship formed. Sometimes it leans towards collective memory, sometimes it leans towards private individual space.

Press: Many people are interested in your 1998 "Big Family" series. They believe that this is your best series of works and critics also believe that during this period your creative talent was at its zenith. What do you think?
Zhang: For me, I will earnestly and wholeheartedly complete each painting, and the artworks around 1994-5 were the ones I spent most effort on. But my technique wasn't mature yet. In comparison, works produced after 1998 all have matured techniques and ideas and after 2000 I drew less. Personally Speaking, a collector's evaluation may have a certain purpose behind it. However, speaking as an artist, if I draw "Big Family" now, I believe I would do a better job because I have matured more in all aspects.

Press: During the 90's your creative style was always changing, "Big Family" series seemed to be the turning point.
Zhang: I have a habit. At the end of every year I will look back and see what aspects need improvement. After many years of such self-reflection, especially after 1990, I realized that I had too many previous styles and that I should find a suitable path for myself. I am not suitable to be a cultural artist or one who expresses himself only through material language. That is why during the whole year of 92 I did not draw at all, rather, I took this opportunity to visit Europe for 3 months. I visited museums and galleries every day trying to find feeling. It was then that I realized, after seeing Western masterpieces up close, that my own experience, cultural background, and artistic understanding are all completely different. I decided to stride a relatively Chinese path. I also enjoy superrealism and pay attention to human experience and subconcious. Since then I've followed this train of thought, but it sure was a challenge for me. By incorporating completely private and public things and bringing a relationship between the two, I returned to China and it became the "Big Family" series.

Press: Do you believe art can also be made into a brandname?
Zhang: When your art is exhibited, everyone is walking and looking, so you need to let others know in 1 minute what you are drawing, how to attract their attention, how to explain clearly what you drew in a brief moment, now that is what I mean. But more importantly for me, making art into a brandname lets others remember you and that is how you can express yourself. In 1999 I suggested artistic brandnames during an interview. Many people didn't agree when I used this marketing term, they still believe art is something solemn.

There are more segments to the interview but the above ones I believed had a lot of relevancy to our course and relevant issues. That, and the fact that some of the remaining interview segments I had a hard time understanding, much less translating.

P.S. I wasn't sure about this, so I translated his series "Da Jia Ting" literally to "Big Family," but I think Defne mentioned in one class that for marketing purposes it is called "Bloodline." I would love it if Defne can confirm this (unfortunately I don't think Comment works thanks to PRC censorship).