China’s art scene – thriving or cashing in?
Posted: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 1:20 PM
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Beijing, China
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
A lot of things come to mind when visitors think of Beijing: the Forbidden City, Peking duck, urban renewal, traffic, and pollution. But modern art probably isn't one of them.
It turns out, however, that it has a vibrant arts community, with one of the capital's biggest recent draws being avant-garde art communes, which group studios, workshops and galleries in industrial spaces.
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| Chinese contemporary art has become so popular in the west that copies of famous works are available on the streets of Beijing. |
The best known of these is 798 Art District or Dashanzi in East Beijing, where artists and dealers work out of Bauhaus-style factories built in the 1950s. Since it surfaced six years ago, Dashanzi has grown so popular that traffic jams spring up on weekends as locals and tourists flock to the area, seeking not just art but also commerce – trendy cafes and teahouses, the odd nightclub and antiques shop.
Now it faces the growing pains and soul-searching encountered by similar districts across the world. Critics now decry Dashanzi for having succumbed to rampant commercialism, driven in part by an international market looking for the next big trend and eager to snap up anything Chinese. Those making money, of course, welcome its financial success.
The signs, certainly, are everywhere. On Monday, for instance, at the start of a four-day auction of modern Chinese art at Christie’s auction house in Hong Kong, a painting by artist Zao Wou-ki netted $3.8 million. The 1959 painting, "14.12.59," had phone bidders vying with viewers in a packed convention hall, according to local reports.
Another artist, Zhang Xiaogang, is perhaps the most successful of his peers on the auction circuit. "Tiananmen Square," a 1993 painting, sold for $2.3 million in Hong Kong late last year. His work has become so popular that you can buy reproductions of his Bloodline series – disturbing portraits of blank-faced Chinese families from the Cultural Revolution era – at the local antiques market for a fraction of auction prices.
‘The Great Chinese Art Swindle?’
Sky-high prices have prompted some commentators to wonder whether there isn’t a bubble in the making. Earlier this year, for example, a review of a major Chinese contemporary art at the Tate Liverpool called the displayed work derivative – material and ideas that had already been thoroughly mined by western artists decades ago.
"For years now we've been hearing about the vibrancy of the art coming out of Beijing and Shanghai - and it's all baloney," said the review in the Daily Telegraph newspaper. The article also called the boom in sales of contemporary Chinese art "The Great Chinese Art Swindle."
Wang Weiwei, the director of collections at Universal Studios, a cutting-edge gallery in Cao Chang Di, home to a handful of avant-garde art galleries and workshops, says "many Chinese artists these days seem to be driven by making money."
But she also thinks there’s a lot of good work being produced and, more important, interesting ideas being generated. "Chinese contemporary artists are very conceptual," said Wang. "And they are very open to using different types of media."
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| Contemporary Chinese artists are conceptual and tend towards multi-media forms, as seen here with work by Peng Rong. |
A New York-based art critic, Barbara Pollack, told me the problem is not the artwork itself, but its curation. "There aren't enough well-trained curators who know contemporary Chinese art," she said. Essentially, she said, there are not enough people qualified to sort the wheat from the chaff.
China’s avant-garde scene gets Saatchi’s support
But things may be changing, as witnessed by two noteworthy events that took place in Beijing last week.
First, the Saatchi Gallery launched a Chinese-language Web site for artists to display and discuss their work. It was set up after Charles Saatchi, the British advertising executive and major art collector, noticed that Chinese artists – mostly non-English speakers – wanted to interact with each other online but were struggling with his English-language Web site.
It may prove to be a smart move for Saatchi – who is famous for having promoted contemporary British artists such as Damien Hirst (he of the dead shark in tank of formaldehyde). There are more than 20,000 artists in China, and the Saatchi gallery estimates another 1,000 students graduate every year from art schools.
Until now, Saatchi has been a quietly avid collector of contemporary Chinese art; later this year, he plans to launch a new gallery in London with a major exhibition of contemporary Chinese artwork.
Second, the widely-respected Pekin Fine Arts gallery opened its new digs way, way out in Cao Chang Di, in northeast Beijing, near the Fifth Ring Road.
The art consultancy-cum-gallery's location is between Dashanzi and Jiuchang, the latter being a relatively new artist’s commune that a local paper has billed as the anti-Dashanzi. (The area is so remote – and unknown to Beijing cab drivers – that visitors would do well to arm themselves with a cell phone, gallery phone numbers, and some patience.)
Ai Weiwei, the patriach of Chinese contemporary art, designed the gallery’s minimalist 650-square foot space. And the owner is Meg Maggio, a 20-year China resident who has a keen eye for good work she wants to introduce to the world.
Market means a place to ‘flourish’
The two artists showing work at the moment are Zhang O, a young woman who divides her time between China and overseas, and Huang Zhiyang, a rail-thin native Taiwanese.
In one room hang three rows of large square color photographs of young Chinese girls crouching on the ground and staring into the camera lens – an interplay of themes on rural life, girls in China and the Chinese landscape.
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| Adrienne Mong/NBC News |
| Zhang O's "Horizon" photographs at Pekin Fine Arts. |
The other main room features Huang's long scrolls with animated black ink-wash paintings, whose patterns are inspired by whatever the artist puts under a microscope.
Huang, who works out of a large studio nearby, moved to Beijing almost a year ago. "The market in Taiwan is too small," he explained. "Here, with all the interest in Chinese artists, you have support. You have opportunities to flourish, and you get exposure."
Maybe there are advantages to rampant commercialism after all.
