Latest Update on Creative Clusters

http://www.shmag.cn/feature/planning_creativity

Planning for Creativity
Fri, 2007-08-10 12:00 — Renee Chen

Shanghai is awash with creative spaces, part of a plan to develop the
city's creative industries. Renee Chen finds out more about the
makeover.

Although Tianzifang (Taikang Lu), M50 (50 Moganshan Lu), and Bridge 8
are already landmarks on the city map, their relatively recent arrival
marks the beginning of a new era in our cultural development. Until
now, we knew them simply as cool buildings, or areas in which to have
coffee, go shopping, or visit art exhibitions. But today, developments
like these are being heralded as the new seats of Shanghai's creative
industries.

Their growth hasn't gone unnoticed. Shanghai's creative businesses
generated ¥54.91 billion more in 2005 than in 2004, and back in
December 2004, this burgeoning success led the Shanghai government to
announce a policy designed to identify and develop other creative
spaces around the city. According to He Zengqiang, Secretary General of
the Shanghai Creative Industry Center (SCIC), "A creative industry
indicates that it is based on creative thought and an intensity of
knowledge. Supporting them will lead to an increase in job
opportunities in these fields."

In addition to revenue, it is the hope of transforming the local
economy from a manufacturing to a service industry that further compels
the government to push the trend. Shanghai's serious economic
development began with the influx of foreigners during the middle of
the 19th century, and as industry built a solid foundation, a mass
stock of industrial capital was erected, shaping the city's landscape.
But after 164 years of economic ebbing and flowing, many of these once
bustling factories fell victim to what the noted Austrian economist
Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction." They lie dormant now,
but are primed for a new life.

"There are over 30 million square meters of old and idle factory space
in Shanghai, but unlike the newer office buildings, they have a history
that gives a full sense of our culture," says He. The SCIC helps to
invest and renovate this glut of old factory space, while keeping the
cost down to as little as ¥1 per square meter in areas such as Hongkou
district. "We did a study this May which found the average rent for old
warehouses and factories is ¥2.75 per square meter per day, which is
much cheaper than office buildings," says He. "This price is perfect
for those with a creative streak."

Although the big name areas such as Taikang Lu get most of the
attention, there are already 75 such creative clusters in Shanghai,
involving 3,000 companies and 27,000 employees and covering industries
such as R&D, architectural design, art, consulting, and fashion.

When creative types find a home, creative ideas are bound to follow.
Bridge 8, which opened its doors in December 2004, now has a 100
percent occupancy rate with companies from the catering, retail,
interior design, and film production industries. The number of tenants
has risen from 25 to 100, and has drawn many internationally When
creative types find a home, creative ideas are bound to follow. Bridge
8, which opened its doors in December 2004, now has a 100 percent
occupancy rate with companies from the catering, retail, interior
design, and film production industries. The number of tenants has risen
from 25 to 100, and has drawn many internationally famous studios like
ALSOP from the UK and SOM from the US. "My job is just like writing a
play," says Huang Hanhong, the CEO of the Lifestyle Consulting, Ltd.,
the operators of Bridge 8. "I want a play that can bring out the best
from its actors; in other words, its tenants. Maybe that's my
inspiration."

The success of clusters such as Bridge 8 has provided the impetus for
new projects in the city. The hugely impressive former slaughterhouse
Old Millfun, located in Hongkou district, is one of the newer projects
under construction and will be one of the largest creative centers in
Shanghai. "If you want to experience buildings typical of Shanghai in
the 1920s, you have other choices than just Xintiandi," says SCIC
undersecretary Cherry Zhou, pointing to this 1933 slaughterhouse.

And unlike Xintiandi, which razed local buildings to make way for
upscale shopping and dining, Old Millfun will keep and renovate its
original building, a vast network of concrete ramps, bridges, and
staircases, in an effort to maintain this portion of the city's
history. Meanwhile, certain modern elements will be incorporated. Old
Millfun will be finished by the end of next month, and will host the
2007 Shanghai International Creative Industry Week this November.

Apart from government supported projects, there are still independent
clusters like the Wujiaochang 800 Art Space. This brand new five-floor
building located in the university area of Wujiaochang, was developed
by Shanghai Hanqu Ltd. Besides several urban planning and architecture
design studios, 800 Art Space is mainly for art galleries. "We only
recruit professional artists, which is the very thing we pride
ourselves in, as even M50 has many personal studios," says Judy Yan,
who works for the investment department of 800 Art Space. They have
already recruited 40 studios and galleries, including ShanghART Gallery
and Shine Art Space.

The creative industry in Shanghai is so young that it's hard to compare
it with western cities which have highly developed cultural,
publishing, film, and advertising industries. Intellectual property and
market cultivation are two hurdles the creative industry will have to
clear on its way to development. "The Chinese are quite good at copying
things," says He. "If a new fashion style came out in Europe yesterday,
it will have arrived in Hong Kong today, and will travel everywhere on
the Mainland tomorrow."

Many, including the government, have now indicated that this trend must
stop. As long as the profitability stemming from a company's work is
threatened, the market will never build up the resources necessary for
its own growth – which is why so few foreign creative companies have
been willing to set down roots here.

Regarding homegrown talent, SCIC has done its bit, enacting regulations
that aim to protect the ideas coming from entrepreneurs and other
creatives. But there is a recognition that more must also be done to
nurture creativity at an earlier age. "The interests of students are
ignored by our education system, since there is too much pressure to
get into university and then land a job after graduation," sighs He.
"It just ruins young people's lives."

Fortunately, this may be changing, as educational projects are being
designed to develop students' critical thinking. Shanghai Normal
University, for example, has set up a Cultural Industry Management
course that Shanghai Jiaotong University had already been using for ten
years. A creative institute is also opening for the first time at the
Shanghai Theater Academy.

The hope is that while the government develops the city's creative
spaces into platforms for an emerging creative industry, talent will
also be nurtured to step up onto that stage.
Other creative clusters to check out

Xin Shi Gang
Formally a steel factory, this building now houses the Shanghai
Sculpture Space. Later phases will add a space for multimedia companies
and the Jiangsheng flower and plant market.
570 Huaihai Xi Lu, near Hongqiao Lu, 6280 0789.
淮海西路570 近虹桥路

Yifei Creative Street
Originally conceived by the famed-painter Chen Yifei, this 723 meter
long street on Yanggao Nan Lu will be an upscale leisure center
complimented by several international design studios.
Yanggao Nan Lu, near Jinxiu Lu.
杨高南路, 近锦绣路

Sihang Warehouse
This 1920s warehouse on Suzhou Creek houses a science and technology
cluster, as well as visual arts and architectural design studios.
21 Guangfu Lu, near Wuzhen Lu, 6380 1202.
光复路21号, 近乌镇路

Tianshan Fashion Cluster
This block was designed by the China Fashion Designers Association and
the Fashion and Art Design Institute of Donghua University. It aims to
nurture fashion businesses, as well as professional design, and
training.
1718 Tianshan Lu, near Loushanguan Lu.
天山路1718号, 近娄山关路

Y&G Art Warehouse
This renovated printing press hopes to attract artists seeking personal
studio spaces. Some contemporary painters like Ye Qiang and Liu Hong
have already moved in.
No.2, Lane 295, Xianxia Lu, near Loushanguan Lu, 5206 9176.
仙霞路295弄2号, 近娄山关路

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

Chinese copy-painters come to Zurich

http://www.artworldsalon.com/blog/2007/07/16/chinese-copy-painters-

come-to-zurich/

Chinese copy-painters come to Zurich
Monday July 16, 2007 | 13:10 by Marc Spiegler | permalink

The art scene is slow in Zurich this time of year, like everywhere
else. But there's always room for a little controversy. Last weekend's
concerned the newly established Splügen-Gallery (all text in German),
where the business model runs thus: You give them an image of an
artwork, and they have it painted for you in Shenzhen Dafen, China, at
whatever dimensions you like. The cost? Roughly $450-$900, frame
included.

The eclectic first show features works "by" Gustav Klimt, Roy
Lichtenstein and Tamara de Lempicka. Naturally, Pro Litteris, the Swiss
artists-rights association, objects strongly, arguing that "to
reproduce an image you need permission from the artist or their
representative." The gallery's owner, Chris Rüegg, counters that he's
checked with his lawyers and it's all perfectly legal.

One thing's sure: Given the predicted vector of the Chinese
contemporary-art scene, Splügen customers might do well to inquire
precisely who painted their duped Picasso, Prince, Weischer, or Wool,
and keep that name in their bank vault. After all, Western art history
is full of people who went from doing commercial art to being canonized
artists. Just look at the recent prices for Warhol sketches from his
illustrator days.

The China Painters by Jankowski

If you missed it!

CHRISTIAN JANKOWSKI: SUPER CLASSICAL

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 24th from 6-9 pm.
Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday, ten to six.

For The China Painters, Jankowski traveled to Dafen, a suburb of
Shenzhen, China that operates like a paintings sweatshop. There,
workshops have been for the last twenty years replicating western
masterpieces, primarily for North American and European hotel lobby's,
producing an estimated 60 percent of the world's cheap oil paintings.
An artisan recently told Spiegel Online he "wants to get into the
business of oil paintings the way McDonalds got into the business of
fast food." The Communist Party of China (CCP) has lauded the
painters' economic boom, erecting an art museum in the village center.
This massive modernist building, which Jankowski visited and
photographed, is currently without a director or a collection, despite
its impending grand opening. Jankowski interviewed artisans, asking
what they would choose for the institution to exhibit on the walls;
none of the participants had been to a museum before. They remade his
photographs of the raw museum interior, inserting their fantasy
artworks. The resulting imagery varies from landscapes to family
portraits, to traditional Chinese works and "sexy" paintings; some
impart political criticism, such as Three Leaders, of former Communist
leader Den Xiaoping in conversation with China's current President and
Vice President, or Liberty, a replica of Delacroix's Liberty Leading
the People (1830). Via Jankowski's invitation to participate in his
own artistic practice, he gives the Dafen painters a voice, and
moreover, a challenge to generate an original painting for the first
time. The project confronts professional boundaries, and highlights
the larger issue surrounding modalities of mass production in the
twenty-first century global marketplace.

hinese artists capitalise on avant-garde boom

By John Ruwitch at Reuters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COPIES POPULAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOREIGN BUYERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

($1 = 7.621 yuan)

From Propaganda to Profit

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

by Rebecca Catching and Anurag Viswanath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Long March

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Yang Fudong: No Snow on the Broken Bridge(ARTFORUM International, Best of 2006 Film)ShanghART Gallery H-Space

Yang Fudong: No Snow on the Broken Bridge(ARTFORUM International, Best
of 2006 Film)ShanghART Gallery H-Space
March 24 - April 30, 2007

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

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

Yang Fudong was born in 1971 in Beijing. He trained as a painter in
China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. Starting in the late 1990's
Yang Fudong embarked on a career in the mediums of film and video. He
is among the most successful and influential young Chinese artists
today. Yang Fudong participated in the 50th Venice Biennale (2003),
First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2005), 1st International
Sharjah Biennale (2005), 1st Prague Biennale (2003) and 5th Shanghai
Biennale (2004), The 5th AsiaPacific Triennial of Contmeporary Art
(2006). He has had solo-shows at most acclaimed institutions such as
Kunsthalle Wien (2005), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 2005), Castello di
Rivoli (Torino, 2005), The Moore Space (Miami, 2003), and ARC/Musee
d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2003).
2007-03-13 12:51

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."

Shanghai Literary Festival at M

THE PROGRAMME

TICKETS

General Sessions: RMB 50, includes a drink
Headline Sessions: RMB 100, includes a drink
Literary Lunches: RMB 200
Students: Half Price
12 Session Pass: RMB 500, includes 10 general sessions and 2 headline
sessions

TO BOOK:

Call (86-21) 6350-9988, 10am - 6pm daily

TICKET COLLECTION:

All tickets must be picked up at least 2 days before the session booked.

A maximum of 4 tickets per person, per session may be purchased.

Tickets can be collected at M on the Bund, 10am - 10pm.

7/F, No. 5 The Bund

silf@m-onthebund.com This email address is being protected from spam
bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

*Programme changes do happen - please check the website for changes and
updates.

WEEKEND ONE

Saturday, March 10

10am Love and Erotica in French and Chinese Poetry

Qiu Xiaolong and Tang Loaec

RMB 50

Shanghai-born Qiu Xiao Long is a poet, writer, translator and the
creator of the Inspector Chen mystery series. He is the translator of
Treasury of Chinese Love Poems.

Tang Loaec is a writer, editor and literary critic, whose published
work ranges from literary novels to geopolitical conflict and erotica.
He is the founder of La Venus Litteraire, a website devoted to the
review of literary erotica.

12pm Theatre & Scriptwriting: An Asia-Pacific Perspective

Wang Xiaoli and Katherine Thomson

RMB 50

Beijing-based playwright Wang Xiaoli is a graduate of the Central
Academy of Drama and a former journalist. Recent projects include In
the Bag, the first contemporary Chinese play to be performed in the
U.K., and the screenplay for Return in Winter.

Australian playwright Katherine Thomson co-wrote Answered by Fire, for
which she won a major AWGIE award, Diving for Pearls and Change in the
Weather (for which she also wrote the screen adaptation), among other
plays.

2pm From Shanghai to Hong Kong: Women's Friendship and Writing

Susanna Hoe

RMB 50

Susanna Hoe was born in England and lived in Hong Kong from 1987-97, a
period she describes in Watching the Flag Come Down. She also focuses
on women's history with a special interest in women in China (Chinese
Footprints; Women at the Siege, Peking 1900).

4pm Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend

Graham Hodges

RMB 50

Graham Hodges is a Distinguished Fulbright Professor of History at
Peking University the author of several books on New York City and
African-American history. His new book, Taxi: A History of the New York
City Cabdriver is coming out this month in the U.S.

6pm Headline Session: Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal: In Conversation with Bob Carr

RMB 100

Widely considered America's finest man of letters, Gore Vidal is a
novelist, essayist, playwright and provocateur - and a shrewd,
uncompromising observer of American political history and world
culture.

Bob Carr is the former Premier of New South Wales, an author and an
acknowledged expert on some areas of U.S. History, notably Abraham
Lincoln.

Sunday, March 11

10am - CHILDREN: The Cat in the Hat Birthday Party ~ Crystal Room

Various readers, famous and not yet famous

RMB 50

Storytelling, activities and 50 candles for the Cat in the Hat (who
turns 50 in March)

10am - Inspector Chen: The Shanghai Story ~ Glamour Bar

Qiu Xiaolong

RMB 50

Shanghai-born Qiu Xiao Long is a poet, writer, translator and the
creator of the Inspector Chen mystery series, which is set in Shanghai.

12pm Literary Lunch: The Rise of India

Pankaj Mishra

RMB 200

Pankaj Mishra is a writer and literary critic. His latest book,
Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and
Beyond, describes his travels through a changing subcontinent.

2pm Headline Session: Madhur Jaffrey

Taste Memories with Madhur Jaffrey

RMB 100

Bestselling cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey introduced home-cooked
Indian cuisine to food lovers around the world. An award-winning
actress, her recently published memoir, Climbing the Mango Trees,
describes a childhood filled with remarkable tastes.

4pm New Writing from Ireland

Double Session

Claire Kilroy: The Last of the Old Irish

Claire Kilroy will read from her literary thriller, Tenderwire, which
has been shortlisted for the 2007 Irish Novel of the Year.

Mike McCormack: The Rural Postmodern

"The best kept secret in Irish fiction," Mike McCormack is the author
of an award-winning collection of short stories (Getting it in the
Head), a New York Times book of the year, and two novels. He will read
from his latest novel, Notes from a Coma.

RMB 50

Thursday, March 15

6pm Headline Session: The Man Booker Prize Lecture: Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai, Winner of the 2006 Man Booker Prize for The Inheiritance
of Loss

RMB 100

Kiran Desai is the author of Hullaballo in the Guava Orchard, which
critics praised for its prose and the potential of its author. Eight
years later, she published The Inheiritance of Loss, an extraordinary
novel that explores, with intimacy and insight, nearly every
contemporary international issue: globalisation, multiculturalism,
economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence.

WEEKEND TWO

Saturday, March 17

10am Stranger in a Strange Land: On Writing in a Foreign Land

Guo Xiaolu

RMB 50

Guo Xiaolu is the author of two semi-autobiographical novels, Village
of Stone, contrasting the life of a girl from a small southern Chinese
fishing village with life in modern Beijing, and A Concise
Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, a love story in the form of a
dictionary.

12pm Surviving Iraq: High Tea in Mosul and the Human Face of Iraqi
Suffering

Lynne O' Donnell

RMB 50

Lynne O'Donnell is a journalist, formerly based in Beijing, and now
Hong Kong, whose first novel is about two Englishwomen who married
Iraqi men and settled in Mosul over 30 years ago.

12pm Shanghai Writers on Shanghai Writing [session in Mandarin, no
translation]

with Qiu Xiaolong, Chen Danyan and other writers of, and from, Shanghai

Shanghai-born Qiu Xiaolong is a poet, writer, translator and the
creator of the Inspector Chen mystery series, which is set in Shanghai.
His latest book is Case of Two Cities.

Chen Danyan is a writer of fiction, non-fiction and children's
literature, who is well known for her Shanghai stories. She is working
on an in-depth book about the Bund.

2pm La Verite de l'autre [session in French, no translation]

Arlette Shleifer and Joseph Vebret, moderated by Tang Loaec

RMB 50

Arlette Shleifer is a painter, novelist and the author of four books,
including one set in Taiwan.

Joseph Vebret has published essays, anthologies and a novel (Souffre
Plaisir) , which received an award from the Societe de Gens de Lettre.

Tang Loaec is a writer, editor and literary critic, whose published
work ranges from literary novels to geopolitical conflict and erotica.

4pm Headline Session: John Ralston-Saul

RMB 100

John Ralston-Saul is a world-renowned Canadian essayist, author and
philosopher. His most recent work is The Collapse of Globalism, a
critique of the international financial system.

Sunday, March 18

9.45am - Abracadabra! Books, Writing and the Magic of it All ~ Glamour
Bar

Gail Carson Levine

RMB 50

Gail Carson Levine writes fairy tales with a twist. These include Ella
Enchanted, which won a Newbery Honor award. She is also the author of
Writing Magic - Creating Stories That Fly.

10am - Passion: Themes of love, family and relationships

Celestine Vaite

RMB 50

Celestine Vaite is a Tahitian novelist and the author of short stories
and two novels, Breadfruit and Frangipani, centred around a large,
extended Tahitian family and the universal themes of love, family and
relationships.

12pm Headline Session: Jan Morris

Sunday Brunch with Jan Morris, in conversation with Simon Winchester

RMB 200

Born James Humphrey Morris in 1926, Jan Morris began her career as a
journalist, later becoming a full-time traveller and writer. Her works
include the Pax Britannica trilogy, Hong Kong and her latest, Trieste
and the Meaning of Nowhere.

2pm Fiction Writing Master Class with Romesh Gunasekera ~ Glamour Bar

Romesh Gunasekera

RMB 50

Romesh Gunasekera was born in Sri Lanka and moved to London in 1971. He
is the author of Reef, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

2pm Poetry From Two Worlds: American poet Daniel Hall and Chinese poet
Wang Xiaolong, translated by Qiu Xiaolong ~ Crystal Room

RMB 50

Daniel Hall is an American poet, the author of two collections of
poetry, and is currently Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College.

Wang Xiaolong is a Chinese poet whose work reflects contemporary China.

Shanghai-born Qiu Xiao Long is a poet, writer, translator and the
creator of the Inspector Chen mystery series. He is the translator of
Treasury of Chinese Love Poems.

4pm Beasts of No Nation ~ Crystal Room

Uzodinma Iwaela

RMB 50

Uzodinma Iwaela was born of Nigerian parents in Washington, D.C. His
outstanding first novel, Beasts of No Nation, relates the experiences
of a young African boy, conscripted into an army of guerilla fighters.
The book won the four major "first fiction" prizes in the U.S.

4pm Headline Session: Dai Sijie

Depuis la petite tailleuse chinoise [en francais]

After the Little Chinese Seamstress [session in French, no translation]

RMB 100

Novelist and filmmaker Dai Sijie was born in China in 1954. He left for
France in 1984, and has lived and worked there ever since. Dai, who
writes in French, is the author of Balzac and the Little Chinese
Seamstress, Mr Muo's Travelling Couch and Le nuit ou la lune n'est pas
levee.

6pm The Pleasures of A Wandering Life

Simon Winchester

RMB 50

Simon Winchester is an adventurer, author and award-winning foreign
correspondent (for The Guardian), whose books include River at the
Centre of the World - a journey up the Yangtze - and his latest, Crack
at the Edge of the World, about the California earthquake of 1906.

WEEKEND THREE

Friday, March 23

6pm Headline Session: Amy Tan

An Evening with Amy Tan: Musings on Joy, Luck and Fate

RMB 100

Amy Tan is the author of several novels, including The Joy Luck Club,
the internationally best-selling novel about mothers, daughters,
culture and identity. Her latest novel, Saving Fish From Drowning, was
published in 2005.

Saturday, March 24

10am The Adventures of a Wildlife Photographer

RMB 50

Jan Latta is an author and wildlife photographer whose encounter with a
mountain gorilla in Rwanda inspired her to create a series of books for
children on endangered animals.

12pm Literary Lunch with Amy Tan: The Journey to Becoming a Writer

Amy Tan, in conversation with Charles Foran

RMB 200

Amy Tan is the author of several novels, including The Joy Luck Club,
the internationally best-selling novel about mothers, daughters,
culture and identity. Her latest novel, Saving Fish From Drowning, was
published in 2005.

Canadian author

2pm Writing China: Stories, Real and Otherwise

RMB 50

Canadian author Charles Foran, a regular visitor and occasional
resident of China for the past 18 years, reflects on writing fiction
and non-fiction about the country.

4pm Namu: Wisdom From the Land of the Daughters

Namu Erche Yang

RMB 50

Namu Yang is from the matrilineal Moso ethnic group. She left her
village on the shores of Lugu Lake to attend the Shanghai Conservatory
and later became a professional singer, top model, and a prolific
author. She tells her remarkable story in Leaving Mother Lake: A
Girlhood at the Edge of the World. Her latest book is Being Born
Beautiful is not the Same as Being Beautiful.

Sunday, March 25

10am Die Tradition der Singvogelhaltung in Beijing – eine literarische
Reise ins alte Peking [auf Deutsch]

The Birds of Beijing - A Journey Into Old Peking [in German, no
translation]

Rainer Kloubert in conversation with Professor Hans Heindrischke

RMB 50

Rainer Kloubert on the history of birds in Beijing, and the insights it
gives into the life, times and culture of old Peking.

Hans Heindrischke is the Head of the School of Modern Languages at the
University of New South Wales, and the reader for all Rainer Kloubert's
drafts.

12pm Getting It Published

Jo Lusby, Tim Murray, Benython Oldfield

RMB 50

Jo Lusby, General Manager of Penguin (China), Tim Murray, Managing
Director of Ringier Publishing, and Benython Oldfield, literary agent,
on the nuts and bolts of getting that book published.

2pm The Post-Amy Tan Generation

Globalisation, technology and the changing Chinese diaspora - and its
impact on young Chinese writers

Tze Ming Mok

RMB 50

Described as a new critical voice from the New Zealand Chinese
community, Tze Ming Mok will speak on globalisation, technology, the
changing Chinese diaspora and its impact on young Chinese writers.

The Bund from a Chinese and Western Perspective

It's Shanghai's most famous street - but does everyone look at it the
same way? Two writers with books on the Bund - one Shanghainese, one
British - share their views.

4pm The Bund: A Chinese Perspective

Chen Danyan

RMB 50

Chen Danyan is a writer of fiction, non-fiction and children's books
and is well known for her Shanghai stories. She has just completed an
in-depth book about the Bund.

6pm The Bund ~ A Chinese and Western Perspective

Peter Hibbard

RMB 50

Peter Hibbard studied city planning and urban sociology before shifting
his focus to the study of the historical development of tourism in
China. His book The Bund will be launched at this session.

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.

Guggenheim mulls museum project in Beijing

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?

type=worldNews&storyID=2007-02-09T055820Z_01_PEK217870_RTRUKOC_0_US-
CHINA-GUGGENHEIM.xml

BEIJING, Feb 9 (Reuters Life!) - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
is considering developing a museum project in Beijing, its director
said on Friday during a visit to China.

The foundation is looking at several possibilities, including a
five-year museum collaboration that could be located at a converted
factory adjacent to Beijing's 798 art district, said Thomas Krens,
director of the New York based foundation.

Other possibilities could include cooperation with Chinese government
bodies along the lines of an existing partnership with the State
Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

On Saturday, the Guggenheim premiers in Beijing an exhibition of 130
works of American art, from the Colonial era through contemporary art.
The exhibition will travel to Shanghai in May and June.

The foundation said in July that it would build a museum in the Arab
Gulf city of Abu Dhabi, to be designed by Frank Gehry. It already has
museums in New York, Bilbao, Spain, Venice, Berlin, and Las Vegas.

The Parisian modern art museum, the Pompidou Centre, plans to open an
annex in Shanghai by 2010, its president said in a January interview
with French newspaper Le Monde.

Yang Fudong: No Snow on the Broken Bridge

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

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

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

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

 

In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In and Out: Exhibition on Contemporary Chinese Art

Art is extremely complex in a country with rapid social transformation and imbalanced social development. Gradual acknowledgement and adjustment is necessary of contemporary social development and art media from a government perspective awareness and structured policy alteration. As for the people, history still dictates and directs society’s understanding of the value of art to the aesthetic desires of the common individual. China exemplifies this situation with its continuous progression of art history throughout the years. In contemporary China, traditional aesthetic perception and historic models of art have a strong presence whether it is an artist’s creation or the public’s acceptance of art.

However, since the 1980’s, new artistic conceptions are born and new artistic explorations occur. This new wave of ideal illustrates the passionate pursuit of expression, the clear recognition of modernity and cultural relevancy. It endlessly crashes against convention and established boundaries to break through and reveal a vastness of possibilities. While reflecting Chinese social transformations this new wave of ideal promotes and increases the expansion and revolution of Chinese art to uncharted horizons. In the rigidity and boundaries of history and tradition, a group of young Chinese artists surpassed the chains of culture and established their authority in individuality. Through the representation and expression of individualistic intellect and experience, these courageous challengers exemplify the spiritual prowess that is now known as “avant-garde.”

Art history is made when individuals transcend rooted restrictions and plant a new milestone in the course of artistic expression. The impact that they make in a social and aesthetic context to present a cultural representation through multiple facets of perception allows them to relate globally. The Stars Exhibitions of 1979 and 1980 are both indicative examples of highlights in Chinese and global art history. By freely articulating their voices and ideals through art, the members of the Stars Movement such as Huang Rui, Ai Weiwei, Ma Desheng, Huang Yongping and many more surpassed the great walls of Chinese culture and tradition. Their resonance of individuality excels the restraints emplaced. Works such as Huang Yongping’s installation “The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes” (1987) shows his transcendence beyond traditional Chinese art in the illustrative methods and the ideals embodied.

To translate and represent an art exhibition so that it may communicate with a global audience with different and independent backgrounds, the art exhibit must portray itself through multiple angles and perspectives utilizing manifold methods and media. The Alors, La Chine? Exhibition (2003) illustrates the works from two perspectives: looking outwards from a familiar standpoint and looking inwards from a foreign standpoint. Using buildings, film, music, and other media to strengthen and improve the exhibition, the curators allow for the art to embrace audiences of any context. The emphasis on integration is representative of contemporary Chinese art. It encourages Chinese to see and reach beyond to the boundless world beyond and it welcomes foreigners to witness China’s exotic appeal. Jia Zhangke, a Chinese director, films his individual experience and details in daily life and appeals to the audience with his individual emotions and experiences. By presenting all of this in a Chinese context, he addresses the cultural significances in Chinese society and sheds light on the good and bad while trying transform Chinese society away from the bondage of all the negatives of tradition. And since the film focuses on the experiences of individuals, it connects with a global audience—Western especially—and opens China to them.

Supported by exhibition catalogues, art magazines and journals, and the extensive online database provided to me with media instruments such as Google, I present the exhibition research I have here.

Contemporary Chinese Art - Piecing it Together

Last Thursday we were privileged to have three active members of the contemporary Chinese art scene who live in Shanghai arrive and present our small class with a lecture on the emerging and evolving performance art scene in Shanghai and China today.
The first of these specialists was Yang Zhanzhong, who was the curator an exhibition “Art for Sale”, which was compiled over half a year in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. The exhibit resembled a supermarket, offering up art in wholesale quantities. One could possibly imagine Wal-Mart adding an art arm, as it were. After discussing the “Art for Sale” exhibit for a short while, and presenting a film highlighting his role as an “employee”, he showed a short film entitled “I Will Die”, in which people are recorded saying, “I Will Die”. This work, like the rest of Yang Zhanzhong’s work is rather lighthearted, and simply asks us to examine death from a less morbid sensibility.
The next speaker was Philip Tinari, a writer living in Shanghai, although he also has extensive experience living in Beijing. Philip’s lecture highlighted “The Long March Project” (www.longmarchspace.com), in which various artists retraced the stops during Mao’s own Long March. These artists often created site-specific pieces along the way. In an exampled that remembered the violence that occurred in one stop, knives were used to highlight the events at that locale. The key element for the artist involved has been to keep a unique Chinese social tradition as an intrinsic part of their works, going back to the Chinese countryside to find “roots”. Lastly Philip brought up the Yan’An Project, which has set out to help future artists in China, as an adequate art education system is something that has been seriously lacking in China today. This education system will become increasingly important as China moves towards a goal of creating one thousand museums by 2015.
The last speaker, Liu Ying Mei, is another curator who has lived both in Shanghai and Beijing, and is well known for working with artists who push the limits of what is to be tolerated in modern China. Liu began by presenting us with a history of modern art in China, starting in 1750 with an Italian priest, moving towards the 1979 Stars Exhibition, the 1989 Modern Art Exhibition, and finally into the 1990s with the beginning of solo exhibitions as a way to present contemporary Chinese art. After giving us a general history of art in China, she moved on to discuss the creation of Shanghai’s first art school, an oil painting school in Xu Jia Hui. The Catholic Church can be attributed to the creation of the school, which was founded in 1860 as an orphanage, but was converted to an art school in 1864 by Juan Ferrerra. Shanghai’s first art school lasted around ninety years, from 1864 – 1949, ending with the accession of Mao.
Interspersed between illuminating us with the fascinating history of contemporary art in China, Liu presented us with pictures from the various art exhibits she has been associated with. Her most fascinating story comes from 2002, when during one of her works at a library, eight artists had to removed their works and offer less “offensive” creations, due to disapproval from the organizer.
Although these three speakers touched on different topics, all wove together to give an underlying presentation of what is happening today in contemporary Chinese art. Liu Ying Mei highlighted the history of the contemporary art movement, as well as serious issues facing the Chinese gallery scene, where an organizer has too much power over their sponsored artists. This strangulation of artistic creativity is a worrisome possibility in some of Shanghai’s new museums, such as the Zendai. This new building spree is also worrisome because of an acute lack of art education in China, upon which Philip touched upon, as well as the attempt by contemporary Chinese artists to find their own, indigenous inspiration with his discussion of the Long March Project. Finally Yang Zhanzhong highlights issues of China’s inflated contemporary art market with his work “Art for Sale”, which while being shut down shortly, also highlights the still restrictive nature of China in relation to allowing artist freedoms. These three artists brought together all of the critical issues facing Chinese art through their own personal experiences of working in China in a thoroughly thought provoking manner.