M50 vs. 800 Wujiaochang

Shanghai's hot new hub for artists
2007-03-07 Shanghai Daily
http://e.cnci.gov.cn/doce/news/news_detail.aspx?news_id=976

The booming art market needs more space. The newest art center
is Wujiaochang 800 Art Space in the emerging northeastern Wujiaochang
area. Planners aim to attract high-end international galleries, writes
Yao Minji.

Artists and creative people are ceaselessly searching for fresh
new art space. When one trendy center becomes established, they tire of
it and move on.

Meanwhile, the booming art market also seeks more well-planned
space to attract artists, studios, collectors and high-end
international galleries.

To provide more space, art centers have opened in Moganshan
Road, Yangshupu area, Damuqiao area, Taikang Road and elsewhere.

The newest one is the the Wujiaochang 800 Art Space - the only
one planned from the very beginning.

The Wujiaochang 800 Art Space, which was opened in late
January, is in the center of northeastern Shanghai's Wujiaochang
business area in Yangpu District - away from the downtown in an
emerging area. Developers hope it will become a new Xujiahui, with an
artistic atmosphere.

"Among the art centers, Moganshan Road is the only sizable and
established one, but it was not well planned and managed from the
beginning," says Hong Pingtao, president and CEO of Wujiaochang 800 Art
Space Management Co.

Many artists moved their studios to Moganshan Road and
gradually the area has become a gathering spot for artists and hub for
artistic events,'' says Hong.

Unlike Moganshan Road, Wujiaochang 800 has been planned from
the start as a gallery center.

The Yangpu District government hired architect Zhong Song from
Chenyifei Studio to convert the former warehouse.

Hence, compared with Moganshan Road, where galleries and
artists' studios are scattered in former factories, the Wujiaochang 800
Art Space is an enclosed five-story building featuring galleries and
offices.

It occupies 21,460 square meters.

The ceilings are 4.5 meters high, so that large art sculpture,
installations and paintings can be displayed.

The center is rectangular from the outside, with well-planned
areas for galleries on each floor and one three-story multi-function
room in the center.

Zhong did not remove the stone transport system alongside the
interior stairwell. It will be converted to a dramatic aquarium with
gold fish, from the roof to the ground floor.

Wujiaochang 800 is planned and managed by art collectors, not
artists.

Hong, president and CEO of the management company, has worked
in the art market for nearly 30 years.

He started Caves Art Center in Taiwan and was general director
of the Taiwan Art Galleries Association.

He moved to Shanghai in the 1990s and was general manager of
Poly Auction House.

"An international metropolis like Shanghai needs an art center,
centrally located with easy transport. Moreover, this art center needs
organized management from the very beginning to attract high-end
international galleries," says Hong.

Currently, only Dunhuang Gallery on the ground floor, owned and
run by Hong himself, has completed renovation and started having
regular exhibitions.

In the following week, a second group of galleries will move
into the art center.

"Our goal is to make Wujiaochang 800 the art center in
Shanghai," concludes Hong.

Bizart this Fall

9月SEPTEMBER 2007

2007皮埃.埃尔创作奖提名展
2007 Pierre Huber Creation Prize
Nominees Exhibition
Opening: September 4th, 2007, Tuesday 18:30
Press Conference: September 4th, 2007, Tuesday 19:00
Exhibition dates: September 5th to 10th, 2007, from 11:00 to 18:00

Organizer: China Art Academy
Co-organizer: New Media Art Department, China Art Academy
Venue: BizArt Art Center
Nominated artists:
Dong Dayuan, Jiang Zhuyun, Lu Yang, Shi Chuan, Wang Xin, Ma Xiaoxiao,
Sun Huiyuan, Xiao Yuankun

About Pierre Huber New Media Art Creation Prize and Fund

On September 7th, 2006, Mr. Pierre Huber met with the students of the
New Media Art Deparment of the China Art Academy and inquired about the
education situation.
In view of stimulating New Media Art Creation, education and diffusion,
as well as encouraging and supporting creative activities of the new
media art students, Mr. Pierre Huber founded the "Pierre Huber" New
Media Art Creation Prize and Fund.

The grant will finance a small management group in charge of
supervising the use of the fund, and formulate a regulation system.

Part of the grant will fund the "Pierre Huber New Media Art Creation
Prize" to support over the years the creativity of outstanding
students. Three prizes will be awarded to the students.
Fund will also be used to support students' creativity: students will
directly submit their project which will be examinated and subsidized
by the management group. At last, part of the grant will finance
studies of prominent new media art students with family difficulties.
Reward process will be composed of two phases: first, teachers will
nominate skillful students, who will participate to an exhibition. The
second phase will be the final selection by a jury made of renowned
curators and artists.
Jury will be composed of five members selected each year from a list,
members will change from a year to another.

Jury members list:
Beijing: Fei Dawei, Pili, Karen Smith, Wang Gongxin, Lu Jie
Shanghai: Zhang Qing, Zhou Tiehai, Xu Zhen, Yang Zhenzhong, Lorenz
Helbling, Chen Jieyang, Lin Shumin, Yang Fudong
Guangzhou: Huang Zhuan
Abroad: Hou Hanru (U.S.A., France, China), Hans Ulrich-Obrist (U.S.A.,
France), Barbara London (U.S.A.), Zheng Shengtian (Canada), Yves
Aupetitallot (France), Zhang Ga (U.S.A., China).

韩国艺术家朴芝恩和中国艺术家李平虎的展览
Exhibition of Jee Eun Park (Korea) and Li Pinghu (China)

Opening: September 14th, 2007, Friday (18:30)
Exhibition Dates: September 15th � September 28th, 2007 (11:00 � 18:00)

Exhibition of the artworks produced by Korean artist, Jee Eun Park,
during her residency in BizArt and the works produced by Chinese
artist, Li Pinghu, during his residency in Ssamzie Space, Seoul. The
exhibition will be held in September in BizArt for one week.

10月October 2007
仔细想想，昨天你究竟干嘛去了？ -- 施勇个展
Let's think, where have you been yesterday? --Shi Yong's solo
exhibition

开幕时间：2007年10月12日，星期五 (18：30)
展览时间：2007年10月13日-10月22日 （11：00 � 18：00）

Opening: October 12nd, 2007, Friday (18:30)
Exhibition Dates: October 13rd �October 22nd, 2007 (11:00 � 18:00)

往事 � 被遗忘的时光
6位印尼艺术家阐释的印尼历史， 1930-1960
The Past - The Forgotten Time
Six Indonesian artists interpret Indonesian history, 1930 - 1960

Opening: October 25th, 2007, Thursday (18:30)
Exhibition Dates: October 26th � November 11st, 2007 (11:00 � 18:00)

Introduction:
This exhibition represents a variety of perspectives focusing on the
struggle of "Becoming Indonesia" during the period between 1930 and
1960. Personal stories mixed with formal facts to indicate how the
colonial situation became a major part in the attempt to formulate an
Indonesian identity. Beginning with the visual forms produced by these
artists, we learn to remember and reflect on the past and, together,
oppose forgetting.

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

The problem with a collector-driven market

The problem with a collector-driven market

By Jane Kallir | Posted 12 July 2007

For the past century or so, the art world has been supported by four principal pillars: artists, collectors, dealers and the art-historical establishment (critics, academics, and curators). From a wider historical perspective, the latter two entities are relative newcomers. The development of art history as an academic discipline, and of public museums, dates back only to the 19th century. Only in the 20th century did dealers evolve from passive shopkeepers to pro-active impresarios, promoting the often difficult efforts of the pioneering modernists with missionary zeal. Public resistance to modernism, coupled with the pressures of international capitalism, gave new importance to dealers and museums, both of which played key roles by superintending the distribution of new art and ratifying its seriousness. At varying points in the course of the past 100 years, the weight of the art world has shifted from one of the four pillars to another. Artists made the modernist revolution; dealers recognised and supported it before academia did; in the post-war period, critics became so dominant that Tom Wolfe lampooned their influence in his 1975 book The Painted Word. And now, it seems, collectors have taken charge.

Over the long term, art-historical value is determined by consensus among all four art-world pillars. When any one of the four entities assume disproportionate power, there is a danger that this entity’s personal preferences will cloud everyone’s short-term judgement. Put bluntly, the danger of a collector-driven art world is that money will trump knowledge. Great collectors should ideally become nearly as knowledgeable as the curators and dealers who help them build their collections. But not all of today’s collectors have the passion or the time necessary to develop this depth of knowledge. Collecting, once the pursuit of a relatively small number of driven individuals, has become far more common among far more people.

This expansion of the art market, made possible by the broader dissemination of concentrated pockets of wealth and by the globalisation of art and related information, has drawn in players who do not have the focused commitment of the traditional collector. The exponential growth of the market, and the genuine gains realised by those who got in early, inevitably fuel the tendency, justifiable or not, to view art as an asset class comparable to stocks or real estate.

Art has also become the greatest common denominator in the new global social order. Today’s rich are an international elite whose members can measure their cachet by the level of VIP services given them at Art Basel and Art Basel/Miami Beach. Anointed by the glamour that today attends the public display of great wealth, the art world has acquired the patina of trendiness that was formerly exclusive to the entertainment and fashion industries. The contemporary focus on trendiness and investment potential, each of which operates on a relatively short timeline, obscures the fact that lasting value in art accrues in the course of generations.

The corollary to a collector-driven art world is that the canon of ostensibly great artists is being largely determined by market forces. The huge prices that have been achieved lately at the top of the market are the result not only of new concentrations of wealth, but of the fact that many people are pursuing the same handful of artists and works of art. Therefore the drop-off from the peak can be steep, becalming the middle market and consigning lesser works and lesser artists to also-ran status.

This is a market with a voracious appetite for alleged masterpieces, and little patience for historical or developmental nuances. It encourages superficiality: rather than collecting a single artist or group of artists in depth, collectors now often prefer to amass scattered masterworks: here a Matisse, there a Picasso, and then perhaps a Schiele. In an overheated environment, the art-historical establishment often finds itself chasing rather than guiding the market. The press must keep up with the latest trends, and coverage of social events and record prices often takes precedence over quiet critical reflection. Museums need the support of trustees, but the most powerful collectors no longer need the imprimatur of an existing museum; they can simply open their own.

If it sometimes seems that the art-historical establishment is missing in action, this is in part because, while the market has been aggressively constructing a new canon, academia has been busy deconstructing the old one. For several decades now, scholars have generally agreed that the white, male, Eurocentric canon that traditionally dominated Western art evolved from historical biases that are no longer morally or intellectually justifiable. Although this change in orientation has literally opened up a whole new world of aesthetic possibilities, it has discouraged academics from making qualitative judgements. Scholarship in areas that are useful to the marketplace, such as provenance and authenticity, has flourished, but overall connoisseurship has declined. Similarly, market pressures push dealers to become generalists, showcasing a hodge-podge of high-ticket items instead of specialising as they formerly did. Auctioneers, operating within a timeframe that seldom extends much beyond the next sale date, focus most of their energies on the highest priced lots. Novice collectors, justifiably wary and insecure, engage consultants who often know far less than the dealers and auctioneers. At every level of the art world, deeper knowledge and principled guidance seem to be in short supply.

The writer is co-director of Galerie St Etienne in New York

Welcome to Birdhead world again!

Welcome to Birdhead world again!
Birdhead 2006+2007

Song Tao & Ji Weiyu's solo exhibition


Opening: June 29th, 2007 Friday 18:30
Exihibition Dates: June 30th - July 20th, 2007 (11:00 - 18:00)
Lecture: June 29th, 2007 Friday 20:00
Venue: Shanghai BizArt Art Center, 4th Floor, Building 7th, Moganshan rd 50
Postcode: 200060
Tel: +8621 62775358
www.biz-art.com

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.

Wu Guanzhong Painting Tops Poly's `Crazy' Beijing Art Auction

Wu Guanzhong Painting Tops Poly's `Crazy' Beijing Art Auction

By Eugene Tang

June 1 (Bloomberg) -- Wu Guanzhong's ``Ancient City of Jiaohe'' sold
for a record 37 million yuan ($4.8 million) last night at Poly Auction
Co. in Beijing, on the day the Chinese stock market recovered from its
worst slump in three months.

The one-square-meter (10.8 square feet) depiction of a ruined city,
painted during Wu's 1981 teaching sojourn in western China's Xinjiang
province, was estimated by Poly to sell for 15 million yuan. The buyer
was identified only by his surname Cai.

Cai was among hundreds of collectors crowding Poly's inaugural night
sale, scheduled to avoid clashing with the spate of summer art
auctions that typically take place on weekends in the Chinese capital.
Of 65 paintings on offer, 48 reached or exceeded their high estimates.
The sale totaled 247 million yuan.

``People have gone crazy,'' said Sun Liangliang, after his 4 million
yuan bid for Shi Chong's ``Contemporary Scenery'' was surpassed by a
rival's 15 million yuan offer. ``They're paying 10 million yuan as if
it's 100,000 yuan. If you want prove that there's too much money in
Beijing, just watch this market.''

Cai, a private collector who declined to give his full name, bought
two of the eight Wu Guanzhong oil paintings on auction, paying 42
million yuan, not including a 10 percent buyer's premium.

``Jiaohe'' was last sold in 1991 by Sotheby's Holdings auction for
HK$2.55 million ($326,900), a record at that time for Chinese oil
paintings outside the country.

``Jiaohe is the epitome of Wu's work,'' said Chang Tiangu, Poly's art
director. ``This is the piece that a true collector and admirer of
Wu's work would aspire to.''

Yue Minjun

Poly's record prices extend a trend that has seen paintings from
China's contemporary artists regularly sell for many times the
expected price. On May 27, Christie's International sold a record $79
million of 20th century Chinese art and Asian Contemporary works. Yue
Minjun's ``Portrait of the Artist and His Friends'' fetched HK$20.5
million, five times the presale top estimate.

At Poly's auction, Yue's ``Untitled'' sold for 1.7 million yuan,
beating the 1.2 million yuan top estimate.

Wang Yidong's ``Innocent Years,'' depicting a newlywed couple's
journey home, sold for an artist record of 8.5 million yuan, beating
the 6.7 million yuan fetched in December for his oil painting of a
girl playing cards.

Wang, 52, paints in a signature style that dresses a maiden entirely
in bright red against a backdrop that's usually a darkened interior or
the stark snow-covered landscape of his native Shandong province. He
began his art training at 17 and has held exhibitions in Tokyo, Paris,
Rome and the U.S.

Zeng Triple

Three oil paintings by Zeng Fanzhi, a favorite among overseas
collectors of Chinese contemporary art, surpassed top estimates. His
``Mask No. 14'' sold for 8 million yuan, his portrait ``Andy Warhol''
fetched 2.4 million yuan, while ``Landscape'' sold at 4 million yuan.

Mao Yan's ``Memory or the Dancing Black Rose'' sold for 9.1 million
yuan, triple the top estimate.

The auction wasn't all smooth sailing. Xia Xing's ``Perfume in
February'' was auctioned twice. The painting depicting a naked maiden
was first sold for 820,000 yuan. Fifteen minutes later the auctioneer
put the painting back on the block. This time the hammer came down at
750,000 yuan -- to a different winner. Poly officials declined to
explain the discrepancy.

To contact the reporter on this story: Eugene Tang in Beijing on
eugenetang@bloomberg.net

Becoming Eurotrash

I was momentarily jolted out of the mindlessness of our usual wednesday lecture yesterday by the guest lecturer introducing us to Shi Yong. Since there's always a high chance that A.) people are skipping the class or B.) no one is paying attention, I thought it might be fruitful for me to share this information with everyone else so that should you fall into category A or B, you can still share a piece of enlightenment. I'll be concise: I think Shi Yong's faux-commercialization is brilliant.

*ahem*


(Note: original image available here). So you're probably wondering who Shi Yong is and what gender he or she might be. Ok, no problem. I have you covered there. You can blame his audience for the gender discrepency as I'll attempt to explain from my understanding. Shi Yong is a Shanghai based artist, and a certifiably male (though you can't necessarily tell by looking at his eurotrash outfit as I'll explain later). From what I can see, I would say he has introduced a fake consumerist grapple over his own image - and subsequently marketed that image by incorporating it into most if not all of his future projects. Here's where the brilliant component comes in (at least I think so): considering that Shi Yong allowed westerners to critique his art by their own sense of aesthetics, he has effectively created a sort of consumer loop in feeding it back out to them. If Europeans find Shi Yong's pieces amusing for their outlandish fashion statements and/or marketing, they have only themselves to blame because they voted on his current outfit.

And about that Eurotrash outfit...




(Note: the original images for the above and to the right available here). Ah post-colonialism and the old world! What the hell were people thinking (specifically in Vienna from 1997-1998) when they chose his outfit? The cat's out of the bag at this point, as Shi Yong has taken his newfound image and run with it as far as he can. And my oh my how far he's gone! Even with my precursory glance there appear to be some really wonderful permutations of this European-bastardized faux-commercial image. Take the image to the right for example. The idea is nothing particularly new - we're all aware that we're slaves to our jobs and that our place in society strangles us by the limitations imposed by collectivization. That's nothing new, but what separates Shi Yong from the many others who have attempted to address this topic is his blatantly artificial image. His implementation is simply suitable for the subject by using a viewer-influenced and obviously artificial image. Rather than rehash the same painting repeatedly into ad-infinium as do some other Chinese painters who shall remain anonymous, Shi Yong purposefully molds his own molded image into new wonderfully urban mutations. This is the first time I've been really intruiged by a Chinese artist for the underlying social "message" as well as aesthetic value of the work itself, and I look forward to finding more satirical Shi Yong pieces in the future. In the meantime, if I hopefully convinced anyone else to check him out, a mini-biography is available at Shanghart, and the Bizart Shi Yong gallery is available here.

3 Solo Exhibitions by Zhang Dali, Ren Hong, Wang Lang/Liu Xinhua

" Three Unities"        3 Solo Exhibitions by Zhang Dali, Ren Hong, Wang Lang/Liu Xinhua

 

Artist s:                        Zhang Dali, Ren Hong, Wang Lang/Liu Xinhua

Curator s:                   Mathieu Borysevicz , Yan Yang

Organiser/Venue:     ddmwarehouse

Exhibition Dates:      May 26^th - June 2 4^th 2007

Opening:                    May 26^th, 2007 (Sat.) 8 pm

Entry:                          Free

 

 

Aristotle articulated the precepts of early Greek drama as the three "unities": unity of place, unity of time and unity of action. Under the roof of DDM Warehouse from 5/26/07 �C 6/27/07 three solo shows by Beijing based artists will be enacted: Zhang Dali, Ren Hong, and Liu Xinhua/Wang Lang. These artists of the Cultural Revolution generation transform the DDM warehouse into a stage where never-before exhibited works will be dramatically presented to the Shanghai audience.

 

Zhang Dali , the bad boy artist whose ubiquitous and mysterious graffiti took Beijing by force in the mid-1990's, and who has since gone on to achieve international fame, proudly presents his powerful new series of bronze sculptural works. Juxtaposing life size animals with human figures, these surrealist unions are rife with symbolic implications of a bestial violence that pervades our society and environment. Zhang Dali has recently been profiled in both ART Forum and Art in America for his participation in The Gwanju Biennial. His "Chinese Offspring" sculptures have also been recently acquired by famous British collector, Charles Saatchi and are profiled on the website:

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/zhang_dali.htm

 

Artists, Wang Lang  and Liu Xinhua pair up for the first time to present their long-term, labor-intensive work "Implemental Photography". Both artists have turned from their performance art backgrounds to work as semioticians in the creation of an extensive image archive. Culling thousands of images from newspapers, pictorials and advertisements this duo has deconstructed the legacy of propaganda and perhaps of photography itself. You will never look at a photograph the same way again.

 

In "Red Romanticism", a new painting series by Ren Hong, the artist presents images from 1960 and 70-era collective consciousness, which are then filtered through kaleidoscopic patterns. Various charged forms such as butterflies, arrows, birds and urns are meticulously repeated across the canvas surface reflecting the artists' childhood and her ambiguous nostalgia for a colorful age of idealism and innocence. These tediously made oil paintings are made to look effortless like soft, hypnotic daydreams.

 

ddmwarehouse

713 Dong Daming Rd. 3F Shanghai, China 200080

Tel: +86 21 3501 3212      Fax: +86 21 3501 3340

Opening Hours: 11:00-19:00 Tues.-Sun. (no fee)

www.ddmwarehouse.org

info@ddmwarehouse.org

 

 

Bus Lines (ddm) ： 13,19,25,33,37,921,922,868,875 to Gao Yang Rd.

all the posts i've failed to post

shanghai sculpture garden review:
Upon entrance: the lawn at Shanghai Sculpture Garden is just a preview of the crazy mismatched conglomerate of ideas going on within the warehouse space. Those who enter the space are immediately greeted by a brick car, 6 characters riding a 6 person bicycle, a piece consisting of metal bars infringing upon a tree, in addition to countless other odds and ends scattered around the compound’s lawn. Inside the actual warehouse, the visitors experience a similar setup- an exact replica of the outside (only different stuff to look at). The space is overwhelmingly cluttered with mismatched sculptures- an enormous overweight sumo wrestler juxtaposed a wavelike floor piece composed of miniature wooden men; a giant cartoon-ish yellow horse trots besides a ceilings length spider like machine. There is no rhyme or reason. The only thing in common to this collection was the artists’ Chinese heritage.
As usual-many of the sculptures were reminiscent of western artworks as well as familiar objects- some pieces could have even been mistaken as a Giacometti, Jeff Koons, or other kitschy enlarged gift shop-looking decorations.
Nonetheless, the space was enormous, and acted as a great showcase for whatever. The fact that the space functioned as a museum as well as office space was pretty impressive.


Art for Sale

Yang Zhenzhong explores the technique of placing artwork out of the context of a gallery/museum and into the context of a place more readily available to the masses- a shopping mall. Knowing that he would reach a different type of crowd, he clears out a store in Shanghai Plaza and revamps it in order to present contemporary artwork to a wider public. Art becomes accessible to all, just like any other readily available coveted product. Various artists stocked shelves with original pieces, mainly: altered items, original ideas, and anything that took the form of knickknacks. However, despite the variety of product, the widest complaint was that the work was not ‘decorative’ enough for certain taste.
Art re-contextualized--this idea has been executed in multiple ways and in multiple forms. As I watched the documentation of Art for Sale, the first thing that I associated this piece with was shop dropping. Those who take part in this particular act usually revamp certain objects to their personal vision and return them to the area from which they purchased it. In effect, the artists aim towards tossing up the usual store display by breaking up the stark display of commercialism. Yang Zhenzong’s show was similar in the sense that artwork was being brought down from the realm hoity-toity art collectors and into the hands of ordinary consumers. Artists were given the opportunity to circulate their products in a different manner. However, instead of taking the title of an impostor product, the show worked in the artist’ favor to openly display their products.


Hangzhou Academy

For China's emerging art scene, Hangzhou Academy seems to be the place to study. In fact, this university had far better facilities than most art schools I've been too-->New York. I may have been so impressed by the architecture and enormity of the place to really notice anything else.
immediate observations:
Pros: 1. Different buildings dedicated to separate studio concentrations- photo, digital, sculpture, etc. –this isolates the students and allows them to be only influenced by people/facilities pertaining to their specific field. 2. Instruction by/ exposure to ‘big name’ Chinese artists. 3. great facilities
Cons: Limitations- 1. University closed on weekends/closing early. 2. Empty rooms that could potentially be used as studio space.
UH? Although the facilities at Hangzhou University kick NYU’s ass, the only reason I would opt for NYU’s education is the freedom of choice in terms of classes. I can’t tell whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. It seems like the students at Hangzhou are pretty much screwed if they want to change concentrations. One student said that he blindly chose to study New Media, even though he had no idea what it entailed. The studio kids are not permitted to switch. On the other hand, by concentrating solely in one area, students are allowed to intently explore that medium in far greater depth than they would have if they were working with a variety of media.

As for meeting Zhong Peili- he provided us with short clips of a number of his videos.—the trend seemed to be one object/scenario shot at three different perspectives such as: washing a chicken, eating a tomato, scratching various parts of the body, etc. These were all simplistic scenes portraying a simple/mundane activity.
The only disappointing aspect was of course the language barrier. Our interview/understanding of his work was inhibited, and the translations seemed terse and tiresome. However, it was rather accommodating to have the Chinese students’ translate his ideas and include individual input.

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."

Class Photos

These are long overdue...
From the class trip to 50 Moganshan Lu two weeks ago.

Here we are at BizArt...

with whatever his name was...
Sorry you're blurry in this picture, Walter. I think there was a smudge on my lens. Though it's hard to tell at 500px.

Here we are at ShanghART...

This Lorenz Helbling character looks like he wants absolutely nothing to do with us. I don't blame him...

at Gu Wenda's Studio...

If you study the compositions of the 3 photographs, Wenda Gu is the only one of these three important people to leave no negative space between himself and the class.

Sotheby’s woos buyers from mainland China

Art.view

Asian spring

Mar 24th 2007
From Economist.com

Sotheby’s woos buyers from mainland China

ALL manner of wonderful wares have been on sale in New York during Asia Week, which ended yesterday. Cups and bowls and vases and vessels, made of everything from rhinoceros horn to porcelain, celadon and jade. But it was the auction of contemporary art, more than any other, that demonstrated how Asian buying is changing.

The contemporary auction market has expanded fast in the past two years. In 2004 Sotheby’s and Christie’s between them sold $22m-worth of contemporary Asian art, which included photography and paintings. Two years on that figure had jumped ten times, to $190m. The growth was especially steep for Sotheby’s. In 2004 its contemporary Asian art sales totalled just $3m. By 2006 they had leapt to $70m.

It was only a year ago that Sotheby’s held its first sale of contemporary Asian art in New York. Both auction houses had hosted sales in Hong Kong before that, but these offered mostly local art to local buyers.

Selling Asian art in America posed quite a different challenge.

On the one hand there were Western buyers, with a different aesthetic and history. A small number had already begun buying Chinese art in Shanghai and Beijing. But their aim was often speculative. Who knew how many more collectors might be interested, if any? And then there were the Asian, particularly mainland Chinese buyers. Sotheby’s was keen to attract more wealthy mainlanders to New York. But how?

In the event, Sotheby’s March 2006 sale brought in $13.8m, and 20 of the artists represented saw their work sell for record prices. Some pieces went for more than ten times the pre-sale estimates, though it is unclear whether this was the result of new-won popularity or a sign of Sotheby’s inexperience at setting estimates.

This year’s sale nearly doubled the 2006 figure, bringing in $25.3m, and the market is visibly more mature. Buyers were pickier, happy to bid high for select works while refusing others. A small number of artists again saw their work sell for record prices. Yue Minjun’s “Goldfish” (pictured below) shows 16 identikit Chinese men standing in line at the balustrade of a white bridge, laughing as they look down into the water at a solitary goldfish. Six bidders fought for this 1993 work, which was sold eventually to an anonymous buyer on the telephone for $1.38m against a pre-sale estimate of $700,000. None of Mr Yue’s four other pictures in the sale fetched more than $240,000. Buyers were equally particular about other lots; many sold within the estimate, while some did not sell at all.

Mr Yue’s laughing men, Zhang Xiaogang’s creepy pink babies with their outsized genitals and Zeng Fanzhi’s cartoon twins with their mask-like faces have all been bought by Westerners and Asian collectors alike. But one school—the photorealists—has an almost exclusively Chinese following. By offering 41 paintings of this kind, Sotheby’s was taking a gamble that it could attract new buyers from the mainland to New York.

To Westerners, who value the many innovations of modernist painting, such realism may seem sentimental, slavish and retrograde. But to Chinese collectors, these technically skilled artists, many of whom came of age in the 1970s, tried to see past the propaganda and capture the essential beauty of Chinese life.

Not surprisingly, women and the countryside feature strongly, but even here the images vary enormously. Works by Shanghai-born Chen Danqing depict tribal women with yaks, long woollen dresses and elaborate hairdos; prices for the artist ranged from $90,000-168,000. Wang Yidong’s “Yi River”—which fetched $801,600, more than twice the low estimate—depicts a young woman with pigtails standing on a flat stone as if edging across a river. Above her, in almost Freudian counterpoint, lies another woman (or perhaps it is the same one), asleep and possibly dreaming.

Leng Jun’s “Five Pointed Star” proved the realists’ stellar offering, realising $1.22m against a pre-sale estimate of $350,000-450,000. Painted against a black background, the star appears to be made of bits of rough scrap metal that have been folded and soldered together. The surface is depicted in minute detail, but it is the star’s symbolism that gives real feeling to the painting. It might be old and wrinkled, but despite its battered condition the star resiliently holds its form.

Sotheby’s chose well. Mainland Chinese collectors bought 22 of the photorealist paintings in the sale. Half of those lots, 11 in all, went to six mainland Chinese buyers who had never bought art in New York before.

The “Contemporary Art Asia: China, Korea, Japan” sale was at Sotheby’s, New York, on March 21st

Collector sells £15m Turner collection to buy Chinese contemporary art

Baron Ullens is acquiring new works for his Beijing gallery
By Georgina Adam |
Posted 22 March 2007
LONDON. The Belgian collector Baron Guy Ullens
has consigned 14 Turner watercolours to auction, because he wants to
focus on contemporary Chinese art. The works, which will be sold at
Sotheby's London on 5 July, are expected to fetch £10m-£15m
($19.7m-$29.55m).

Baron Ullens has founded the first private museum for both Chinese and
international contemporary art in Beijing, which is to open in
October. Titled the Ullens Centre for the Arts, it is located in
Beijing's Dashanzi art district and its first chairman is Jan Debbaut,
former head of collections at Tate.

Guy Ullens, whose fortune derives from the food industry,
lived in China in the early years of his career, and collects
classical Chinese landscapes as well as his newest interest,
contemporary Chinese art. He acquired the Turner watercolours over the
past 20 years, some at auction, and some through dealers. Most were
kept in store at the Geneva Free Port and according to Sotheby's
specialist Henry Wemyss, there will be no problems exporting the works
out of the UK should they go to foreign buyers. Indeed, Sotheby's is
taking the group around the world, including Hong Kong and Los
Angeles, before the sale. "Turner is such an international name and
his technique of brush on paper resonates with Chinese buyers, as well
as the more traditional American collectors of his work," says Mr
Wemyss.

The Ullens collection covers everything from early, naturalistic
renditions of British coastal scenes to late, impressionistic views in
Switzerland, Germany, France, and Italy. Among the most expensive
works is a large Swiss view, The Lake Lucerne from the Landing Place
at Fluellen, probably 1807-10, estimated at £2m-£3m ($3.95m-$5.91m).
This last appeared at auction in the Wills sale at Sotheby's just two
years ago when it made £1.86m ($3.35m). Another work, Oberwesel, 1840,
carries the same estimate.

Last year saw new Turner records established for an oil and
for a work on paper: a Venetian oil, Giudecca, La Donna della Salute
and San Giorgio sold for $35.86m at Christie's New York while the
watercolour The Blue Rigi sold for £5.83m ($11m) at Christie's London.
Christie's has traditionally dominated the Turner market so the sale
of this collection, which is the biggest to come to auction since the
Munro sales in 1878 and 1879, is a coup for Sotheby's, which offered a
guarantee on the group.

"IMAGE-NATION: Works by New Generation of Chinese Artists"

"IMAGE-NATION: Works by New Generation of Chinese Artists"

Featuring works by: Chao Ziyi & Chao Ziwei, Chen Yun, Chen Yunquan, Guo Peng, He Jia, He Jiandan, Jiao Xingtao, Liang Binbin, Liu Danhua, Liu Lifen, Ren Zhe, Wang Mian, Wang Zi, Xia Hang, Xue Tao, Yang Bo, Yin Yanhua, Zhang Hua, Zhao Guanghui

Exhibition: 18 March till 10 May 2007

Vernisage/ Opening party: 17 March with the attendance of several artists

IMAGE-NATION is an exhibition which reflects the interests of a younger group of artists who no longer take as their subject the political content which widely characterises the western view of the work of their predecessors of the 1980s and early 90s. Political art produced today has at times recently become a parody of itself and no longer holds the significance or impact that work from the 80s and early 90s did. Collectors are becoming more discerning and are less easily swayed by images of pandas, Mao or the colour red; and seasoned auction goers are becoming more selective when it comes to political art post-1997. The artists in the present exhibition were too young to feel directly the impact of Tiananmen Square, and are rather affected by the new commercial and cultural openness, the rapid urbanisation and transformation of the cities, the incessant bombardment of consumer culture and the influence of mass media. The present exhibition takes as its starting point three different categories of cars, cartoons, and daily life. Through each of these subjects artists give an independent insight into life in China today.

The aim of the exhibition is to show that although the main collecting base for young Chinese artists for the short term remains in the west, that artists are no longer merely pandering (no pun intended) to a Western preconception of China or cynically producing political pop for the export market (although this clearly persists). There are artists who are exploring their own cultural identity, engaging with popular culture, reflecting the contemporary experience of daily life in China, and concerning themselves with issues and influences that directly affect them - an engagement which brings about an art with an independence of outlook and one which will in time bring them a domestic as well as international audience.

Contrasts gallery Principal: 181 JiangXi Middle Rd, Shanghai 20002

Gallery Hours: Monday to Sunday 10am -10pm

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.