State of the Art

State of the Art
Lisa.Movius, 2009-09

Viewed as another commodity during the era of hot money and easy credit, Contemporary Art – particularly from the ‘it’ country of China – was greedily acquired by hedge funds and market players to be quickly flipped, with little interest in the actual art or its background.

Since opening ShanghART, one of China’s earliest Contemporary Art galleries, in 1997, Lorenz Helbling has witnessed Chinese art grow from an infancy of obscurity to a much hyped global frenzy in recent boom years.“There was one guy who stood right in front of a work by Ding Yi,” who paints distinctive repetitions of crosses, “and declared ‘I want to buy a Ding Yi painting. Do you have any?’” Helbling recalls.

Chinese contemporary art experienced, independently, a tremendous expansion of talent and institutions over the past decade. That growth coincided, though, with international factors that created two mutually reinforcing bubbles: the global exploitation of contemporary art as a speculative investment scheme, and the international enthusiasm for all things China making Chinese art very ‘hot’ in the art world. Auction prices sizzled into the multi-millions of dollars for some Chinese works. In particular, the cynical realism and political pop Cultural Revolution tropes in paintings and sculpture by a cabal of art superstars like Yue Mingjun, Fang Lijun, and Zhang Xiaogang racked up sales and spawned a generation of imitators.

"Artists need to have time to experiment, to play around, rather than chase whatever is popular."
Stylistic redundancy and topical predictability ensued. Small and new collectors were priced out. Many installation and video artists switched to the more saleable format of painting. Some artists reaped a financial windfall, but paid creatively. “Even painting students were in auctions,” recalls critic and curator Samantha Culp. “Careers were sped up. They were ruined by success. Artists need to have time to experiment, to play around, rather than chase whatever is popular.”

“An artist, right out of the studio, needs to develop,” echoes Helbling. “We set the price at say US$10,000 for a reason – because at the moment it does not merit US$20,000-30,000. It is easy to get the high price, but then how does the artist go on working?” He says that, for artists to play to the hot market, they had to produce some hundred works per year, all of them recognisably, marketably similar. Now, “the speculators are gone, so life is much easier, we don’t have to be so careful” not to sell to them, because, “a bubble is a bubble, and we didn’t want to feed the bubble. We want to work with artists, and help them develop over many years. And I want to sell to someone who likes the work, who will hang it and defend it, not just on the grounds that they bought it for US$10,000 and now it’s US$20,000, but who will still defend it if the price goes down.”

“The special characteristics of the China boom,” Helbling specifies, “were: Speculation. Money. Big productions. And stupidity.” He stresses that these are elements generally not attributable to the artists, and that many artists – particularly outside of Beijing – opted out of the madness.

Almost all of the high-priced commercial stars of the past five years were Beijing-based; the exceptions being a few émigrés such as Cai Guoqiang and Xu Bing, who had risen to international prominence a decade earlier. Painting, and the political themes and clichéd Chinoiserie popular with foreign art shoppers in China, predominate more in Beijing. The capital has long attracted artists from around China – and increasingly around Asia and the world – creating a much larger scene, but also greater competition.

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"Beijing is a city a lot of artists move to, and they have pressure: they left their village, or left their home town, and have only a little time in which to succeed. There are thousands of artists, it is very competitive. Who is good is measured by who has the biggest car. Shanghai artists discuss a lot, but are not that into money or who has the biggest house,” Helbling explains. “In Shanghai, the artists and galleries here were not so easily absorbed. The boom was a lot of people accumulating works and pushing up prices, and most Shanghai artists refused to participate. One reason is that Shanghai is a commercial city – if people want to be artists, they’ll be artists. If they want to make money, they’ll make money.”

“Shanghai was not so impacted,” concurs Alexia Dehaene, who directs the Shanghai non-profit BizArt Center, established in 1999. She and Helbling both point out that Shanghai has experienced a strange quiet during the Chinese art boom, its growth steady but low key, and with new institutions in recent years limited to the ShContemporary art fair, launched in 2007, and the August opening of the Minsheng Museum. “Beijing is more active, much bigger, more complex … People say Shanghai is more commercial, but during the boom Beijing was way more commercial than Shanghai.”

Beijing’s comparative commercialisation is only one of the urban stereotypes the double bubble inverted. Starting with the opening of Arario Beijing in 2005, the capital has seen an explosion of branches of big international galleries, and increasingly attracts artists from outside of China. It has assumed Shanghai’s traditional mantle of Sino-Foreign arbiter, while Shanghai art remains comparatively introspectively Chinese.

“Shanghai is painfully local,” critiques Meg Maggio, who co-founded Beijing’s Courtyard Gallery in 1997 and launched Pekin Fine Arts in 2005. “Beijing has become the centre for contemporary art not just for China but for all of Asia,” she enthuses “The city has become a wonderful platform for Asian artists, curators and galleries, as well as artists from around China … I don’t know what the ‘Chinese Art Scene’ means; it is this constant conversation with the world. Chinese art has become less inward looking.”

The inaugural private 798 Beijing Biennale, running until 12 September, is premised upon Beijing’s post-boom repositioning as an international art hub for Asia. Materials for the event stay rigorously on-message, declaring Beijing, “ideal for this unique biennale because it is a megalopolis located between the future and the past – a confluence of the pre-modern, modern, and postmodern that, in turn, reconfigures globalisation in a manner more complicated and multidimensional than in other areas of the world” and making much of the inclusion of Beijing-based foreign artists. The open question is whether that trend will continue even as China’s trendiness subsides, and as international galleries’ expansion budgets contract with the global art market.

If Shanghai, and nearby sister city Hangzhou, were shielded in their own bubble of distance from the Beijing-based boom, the sky was higher and the emperor even further away in Southern China. The Guangzhou Triennial debuted in 2002, and in its three installments to date has consistently been heralded as the best official art event in China. The same year, independent gallery Vitamin Creative Space opened in Guangzhou, and it has become the centre of a flourishing, largely experimental scene. More galleries have opened in nearby Shenzhen.

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Samantha Culp, who has worked for Vitamin Creative Space and for acclaimed Guangzhou artist Cao Fei, surmises that the region enjoys a lot of creative freedom due to being comparatively off the national radar. “The Pearl River Delta is a factory, an experiment. Censorship has never been so harsh, and it early on had access to Western, Taiwanese and Japanese pop culture from across the border. Guangdong has more free reign than Beijing … they know they have the leeway to muck around.”

She says that Vitamin Creative Space founders Zhang Wei and Hu Fang chose Guangzhou because, “The risks are less, so you can experiment more and take risks, even do things that are silly or stupid. Beijing art is more serious: serious about money, serious about politics, serious about symbolism. You almost never see those classical Chinese symbols, or Cultural Revolution imagery, in Guangdong art – unless to make fun of their usage” up north, because Southern Chinese prefer more modern, pop cultural references. The art is also distinct, Culp adds, with apologies for the generalisation, because, “The stereotype is that the Cantonese are a very practical people – focused on things like food, money, humour, and everyday life, in contrast to Beijing's reputation for lofty ideals and intellectualism. Cantonese culture seems less concerned with ideology, or approaches it from a different, perhaps more ironic angle.”

Pockets of independent artistic activity have also emerged in smaller Chinese cities, around art schools in Wuhan and Chongqing, and around bohemian communities in Yunnan, doing their own thing regardless of boom or bust.

Apart from a few auction houses, dealers and investors protesting otherwise, most in China’s art industry believe the boom is now over, or at least fizzling out – and that is a good thing, at least for the art. Internationally, prices have fallen, and the art world debates whether the “new China” will be India, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia. However, facing into the autumn – one of Chinese art’s busiest seasons – and beyond, none can say how Chinese contemporary art will fill into the stretch marks of its phenomenal adolescence in the mid-2000s.

The time frame of China’s double bubble depended on the audience. A few art insiders ‘discovered’ Chinese contemporary art in the late 1990s, and its official debut was when Harold Szeemann brought a group of Chinese artists to the Venice Biennale in 1999, recalls Maggio. Helbling identifies a succession of bubbles: one “in 1995-1996 in Hong Kong, when the dollar was up; Europe had a small [Chinese art] boom in 2000-2003. All small waves, but the last one was more uneven.” However, the biggest hype, and attendant price inflation, had its heyday roughly 2003 or 2004 to 2007, and had begun popping by autumn 2008 due to the coinciding global financial panic and post-Olympic China ennui.

However, the deflation remains sporadic and uncertain, and to some boosters and casual observers, the Chinese contemporary art boom is still going strong. Even now, every week brings several new articles rather belatedly celebrating Chinese contemporary as the “hot new thing”. “A lot of people not in the art world don’t know that things have changed,” muses Culp, recounting hearing ideas for yet more general documentaries on Chinese contemporary art and a flow of books on things like ‘Young Chinese Artists’. “Within the art world, China is no longer this big, hyped thing; it will just be one part of the art world.”

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While the glamour is fading and the boom subsiding, both appear to have helped speed up that global normalisation of Chinese contemporary art. “Now we have seen serious galleries doing Chinese artists. Before they were just exotic, and the serious galleries kept their distance,” says Helbling. “Now there are more names [known]: if you asked someone 10 years ago, the only Chinese artist they knew of was Chen Yifei – just the one. Now there are 10, or even 20, names everyone knows, and they are not just ‘Chinese artists’ in general. There will be more and more, eventually 50 to 100 names. Now the pressure is to do interesting works, because with world attention [on Chinese art] you can’t just copy your neighbour, or repeat what you were doing three years ago.”

“China is more important now; China is a part of the world,” he continues. “If an artist says something about the world today, they will matter. Our world is much bigger now, and what artist figures out what matters today will become bigger than Warhol, since the world is bigger. Some just look at what is fashionable, but China is not a fashion that the West can make for two years. Whether the West talks about China or not, it doesn’t matter. Supposedly if the West is talking about China then it’s ‘big’, if next year it’s talking about India or Africa, China gets ‘smaller’. But China, with its one billion people, does not go away if there is not so much noise.”



ShContemporary – 10-13 September

After a stunning opening in 2007 but a sophomore installment that many found disappointing, the ShContemporary art fair aims to regain its legs this year with a new director and a new direction. Beijing-based artist and curator Colin Chinnery brings local experience that previous fair directors lacked. Showcasing the best of galleries from China, Asia and the world at the Shanghai Exhibition Center, the fair is divided into the general Best of Galleries section, Discoveries by a few top galleries presenting their best artists and curated by Wang Jianwei and Mami Kataoka, and Platform for individual emerging artists. A lecture series organised by Anton Vidokle runs throughout; check the website http://www.shcontemporary.info/ for the schedule of talks and additional details.

eArts Festival

Also in its third year, and scheduled to coincide with ShContemporary, which is coorganising one event, this installment of eArts marks yet another reconceptualisation in presenting the electronic arts. While 2007 was diverse and disparate, and 2008 segregated into each district having distinct events, this year eArts comes together into three big events coordinated with local and international arts institutions. The opening extravaganza eArts Beyond, subtitled 'Base Target=New' after an HTML tag, runs 11-20 September at the Oriental Pearl Tower. Fanstasic Illusions, showcasing Chinese and Belgian new media artists, will be at MoCA Shanghai from 13 September to 11 October, before traveling to Belgium. The research-driven New Media Archeology at ddm Warehouse includes a presentation on 10 September, a symposium on the 11th, and an exhibition that runs from 12 September through 11 October.

Shanghai Style by Lynn Pan

A review by Lisa Movius in that's Shanghai Mar 4, 2008

http://www.urbanatomy.com/articles/detail.cfm?aid=1016

the roots of style
" I like looking at what makes Shanghai different. It is something I
have been thinking about for decades," says writer and historian Lynn
Pan 潘翎. Of course, Pan's done more than just think; she's parlayed
her interest into a writing career spanning several decades and
producing many books. Pan left the city in 1955 at age ten and went
on to spend much of her childhood in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Great
Britain, working in Hong Kong as a journalist for the Far Eastern
Economic Review and in Singapore establishing a research center on
the Chinese Diaspora.

But like many Chinese émigrés, Pan couldn't resist the pull of the
homeland and returned to explore the city of her birth. Her
grandfather was the Shanghainese developer behind many historic
Shanghai landmarks such as the Hengshan Hotel and the Canidrome, and
his legacy forms the narrative of Tracing It Home: A Chinese Journey
(1992). A resident since 1998, she first returned to Shanghai in 1981
and wrote Searching for Old Shanghai, and though stories were
plentiful, she had a hard time finding a willing publisher. "Back in
1981, no one had even heard of Shanghai," she recalls. She found one
in Sanlian Shudian 三联书店 (Joint Publishing Company), which has
seen the book through more than 15 printings.

Pan's oeuvre expanded in 1984, when she penned Old Shanghai:
Gangsters in Paradise after meeting the son of famed gangster Du
Yuesheng 杜月笙during her 1981 trip to Shanghai.
"His wife wore nail polish, and she served cucumber sandwiches with
sweet butter at tea – in 1981!" she recalls.
Not long thereafter, Pan wrote China's Sorrow, concerning the Yellow
River, and The New Chinese Revolution, about Deng Xiaoping's 邓小平
reforms, and in 1990 she released Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A
History of the Chinese Diaspora. She has also edited The Encyclopedia
of the Chinese Overseas and co-written books on Chinese craft art and
on Hong Kong in the 1960s.
Her latest book, Shanghai Style: Design Between the Wars, is the most
extensive and authoritative English-language history of the emergence
of haipai, Shanghai's unique fusion aesthetic, to date. Chinese-
language scholarship on haipai literature, art, design, theater, film
and music is extensive, though for the most part, English-language
pickings are limited to salacious tales of gangsters, bankers, whores
and foreigners, a situation that is perhaps attributable to the
belief that contemporary Western readers are uninterested in Chinese
complexities.
"Foreigners have always underestimated Shanghainese culture," Pan
says, chuckling at British Shanghailander architect George Leopold
Wilson's declaration in 1930 that "Modernism will never go down well
in Shanghai." In fact, it was already popular with Shanghainese
artists, designers and architects at the time, and in 1921, the
city's leading paper, Shenbao 申报, ran an enthusiatic full page
article about Le Corbusier "when he was still considered quite
radical world-wide".

Shanghai Style is an engaging, enjoyable and rigorous academic read,
crammed with illustrations from paintings, books, magazines, comics,
advertising, architecture and interior design.
In the book, Pan differentiates haipai 海派 from what she calls
"Shanghai style" 上海式. Emerging between the wars, the latter,
explains Pan, is Chinese mixed with Western influences, to produce a
period style which was Modernist and commercialized. In the sense of
being bastardized and commercial, haipai shares these
characteristics, though it also encompasses elements of culture and
behavior. What's more, haipai is not period specific; it is
constantly evolving, even today.
One of Shanghai style's best representatives is the accomplished
graphic designer, musician, composer, publisher and entrepreneur Qian
Juntao 钱君??(1906-1998), whose biography launched Pan's
investigation into its origins.
Pan says that "Qian described his style as futurism, or weilai pai
未来派," a unique blend of obscure Russian cubist futurism and
Berlin dadaism. It is likely that Qian studied these two movements in
imported magazines, including Vanity Fair, which in the 1930s was
designed by Russian Mehemed Fehmy Agha and Italian Futurist Fortunato
Depero. Qian absorbed other influences from the set design and
cinematic styles of such films as Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Referring to the influences on artists such as himself and Qian,
cartoonist Ding Cong 丁聪 says they took a bit from here and a bit
from there, digesting and assimilating and translating it so
thoroughly that they completely obscured its origins.

In doing so, they created something entirely new, something uniquely
Shanghai.

Gua'er reopens!

passed on by Lisa Movius:

3/26 8pm on: Gua'er reopens! Let's get a crowd and make it a party!
挂二音乐酒吧在3月26日再开了, 大家都去吧!

Details at: http://www.sus2music.com/bar/index.htm. Hope to see y'all there!