From the Glass Archive: The Power of Vision – Part one of a Glass exploration to reveal just how China became the most powerful art market in the world
A sleeping giant has awakened in the East. From the ashes of the economic crisis, Asia rises tall after years of continued economic growth and flourishing luxury goods and fine art markets. With the escalating wealth glistening in the Middle Kingdom, the eyes of the West are now set firmly on China as the artistic flood and record auction prices seem to forecast a new gold rush. “Chinese economy is taken more seriously by the whole world”, explains Wang Qingsong, one of today’s most recognised Chinese photographers, who traded the oil fields for art school. “Because China has been drastically developing its economy, the whole world looks at China, its successes and its fallouts.”
It’s a new, exciting world and it’s changing fast. The booming 798 cultural district, the pre-eminent artistic hub in Beijing, was formerly a Soviet-sponsored Communist factory built in the ’50s, first inhabited by artists in 1995. It still has Maoist slogans painted on the walls which have since come be termed as “Mao kitsch”.
Fang Lijun (born 1963), Series 1, No 5, 1990-1991, oil on linen, (81.3cm x 100 cm)
But now, as it trades its studios and galleries for cafés and restaurants, becoming a commercial tourist attraction, artists have uprooted and set up camp in Caochangdi village, also in Beijing, which has assumed the crown as the artistic place to be, the promised land for the production and exhibition of Chinese contemporary art. The art scene in Beijing, China’s cultural core, is always on the move, just as the art scenes in New York, London and Berlin evolved as they moved around different districts of the city in a bid to outrun gentrification.
Controversial censorship and taboos on politics, violence and sex still lurk in the shadows but Chinese contemporary artists have come to light exploring, criticising and applauding their roots, their present and their future, bringing Western influences and ideas into the explosive mix. And it’s this clash of influences, themes and skills, and a relative approachability that is taking the world by storm: “The art is startlingly different from what has preceded it,” explains Eric Chang, International Director of Asian 20th Century and Contemporary Art at Christie’s.
“Artists take these external influences and reject, accept or contrast them with their own culture. It’s a fine balance of Eastern aesthetics, philosophy and a perspective that intrinsically distinguishes Asian contemporary artists from their Western counterparts, creating new commentaries on a powerful contextual revolution through their art, and thus engaging in a global dialogue between the traditional and the contemporary.”
Ai Wei Wei, Grapes, 2011, 17 stools from the Qing Dynasty 1644 – 1911, (167 x 180 x 157 cm)
According to Chinese art collector Larry Warsh, founder of the publishing house AW Asia and the man behind Ai Weiwei’s Zodiac Heads exhibition now touring the globe, China’s art now is about energy and “energy is a very important concept, because if you can recognise an energy along with the art, then you might be looking at important art of our time.”
A Mixed Past
China is an old country and despite the buzz now surrounding it, China’s cultural background is still mysterious to most. Economically advanced prior to the 19th century, China missed the boat on the European Industrial Revolution and the country declined, suffering further damage by European and Japanese imperialism, civil war and internal weakness, leading to the defeat of the imperial rule.
The story of the contemporary art market in China begins with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution, a period of suppression for China’s artistic freedom, and what remained of the Chinese art world was dominated by revolutionary and native realism. With Mao’s death in the late ’70s and the arrest of the Gang of Four, the end of a turbulent political era was celebrated. Deng Xiaoping assumed power and through the “open door policy” China was introduced to a global market and quickly developed itself into one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
The Stars Group was formed in the same period in Beijing and was amongst the first collective of recognised artists in China, probably more famous today by the involvement of Ai Weiwei and by the illegal show put together outside the China Art Gallery, today National Gallery in Beijing, under the sign ‘Kathe Kollwitz is our banner-bearer, Pablo Picasso is our pioneer’. The exhibition was shortly banned but one year later was granted a permit to reopen at the prestigious state institution. The state was slowly allowing the advance of artistic freedom and the circulation of information.
Zeng Fanzhi, Untitled (Reclinging figure), 1998, oil on canvas, (152 cm x 203 cm).
Courtesy of Private Collection, USA
“In 1979 you had this huge influx of Western culture, so the beginning of the ’80s is quite a fascinating time in China,” emphasises Michael Frahm, a prominent art advisor and collector. “It’s the first time people would listen to Simon & Garfunkel and it’s the first time that Western literature came into China, so as an artist you’d be seeing Warhol, you’d be seeing Rauschenberg, you’d be reading about Western modernism, and that was the first time people were able to do that. In 1982 Warhol came to China as a tourist, and there are actually a lot of funny photographs by him while he just walked around as a normal American.
“In 1985 you had Robert Rauschenberg’s first exhibition in China and one of the major exhibitions of Western art in the country, so you had a lot going in there in the ’80s in terms of Western influence.” By the mid-1980s the rise of modernist thought was evident in the ’85 New Wave Movement, which represented a watershed in bringing new maturity and diversity to China’s contemporary scene.
The late ‘80s were also a turning point with the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition at the Pompidou centre in Paris, where Chinese arts were shown abroad for the first time. Back in China, the year of 1989 marked the China Avant-Garde exhibition, a show of over a hundred Chinese artists, which was soon closed down by the police after a notorious performance piece where Xiao Lu shot her phone booth installation Dialogue.
The exhibition was reopened, but permanently closed down again after a series of bomb threats. It was also the year of the Tiananmen Square protests for political and economical reform and liberalisation, after which China’s doors were again shut to the West. As art schools closed and artists fled the country, in the margins of Beijing in 1993 the East Village avant-garde artistic community was formed, when a group of like-minded artists decided to take up residence in a substandard migrant labour housing suburb.
Inspired by the East Village of Manhattan and its experimental aesthetics, the Beijing East Village comprised amongst its residents Ma Liuming, Zhang Huan and the first generation of performance artists and photographers who would document their works.
Zeng Fanzhi (born 1964), Andy Warhol, 2005, oil on canvas, (130cm x 130 cm)
Larry Warsh explains “I think that was the moment in time, in the post-Tiananmen Square, when all the energy was there. There were problems, there was anger, there was depression, there was death… that was an important time that helped fuel a lot of different things.”
But even with a closed country, Chinese contemporary art continued to push further, with the first participation of Chinese artists counting Wang Guangyi and Fang Lijun in the 45th Venice Biennale, the Mao goes Pop exhibition at the Sydney Museum of Art and, in Hong Kong, the China’s New Art Post-1989, organised by Chinese top curator and contemporary art dealer Johnson Chang and renowned critic Li Xianting, responsible for coining the terms Political Pop and Cynical realism – two of China’s most popular contemporary art movements.
“In the mid-1990s, something great was happening in China”, recalls Wang Qingsong. “At that time, all people, artists, intellectuals, poets, writers and musicians, failed to find any directions or solutions. They were all looking for the interesting ideas. It was chaotic but the atmosphere was very healthy.”
Zeng Fanzhi (born 1964) Self-Portrait, 1996, oil on canvas, (200 cm x 168.5 cm)
As Chinese contemporary art was slowly stepping towards international recognition, in 1996 Chinese artists finally came back to the map in China for the first Shanghai Biennale. Its second edition in 2000 was a collision of new media and international artists, signalling the government’s engagement with a new policy of strategic cultural diplomacy.
Even if the West was still sceptical about the significance of Chinese contemporary art in this early state, it was clear that “if you were a bit closer to the whole scene, you could feel that there was this deep interest, this way of behaviour,” remembers Urs Meile, Swiss art dealer and gallery owner with branches in Beijing and Lucerne.
“The artists had to be informed, they wanted to be part of the international scene, so you could feel, less than see, artworks, but you could feel there was a power, there was a big potential. For me one of the main keys I have to say was the first meeting with Ai Weiwei in ’97; there I really was completely convinced that there were things happening in China which could influence, be part of or catch interest from the international scene.”
Yue Minjun, Noah’s Ark, 2005, oil on canvas, (300 cm x 200 cm)
With more and more artists returning to China, the implementation of the Beijing International Art Biennale and the Guangzhou Triennial, the country was promoting an image of cultural openness and ready to fully bloom. Between 2004 and 2006, the market achieved lift off, with the introduction of the first Contemporary Chinese Art auction sale at Sotheby’s and the Chinese 20th Century & Asian Contemporary sale by Christie’s, both in Hong Kong. Michael Frahm marvels, “In 2006, Zhang Xiaogang broke 1,000,000USD on auction in New York. It’s kind of funny that five years later, he then broke 10,000,000USD and if you go back to 1996, he was probably selling for a hundred thousand so every ten years he has increased tenfold.”
A Stable Present
As the information flows and retrospectives of Chinese artists such as Cai Guo-Qiang and Ai Weiwei are featured at the Guggenheim and the Tate respectively, and institutions such as the MoMA put more investment into building important Chinese collections, it is now impossible to dismiss China’s relevance in the art world. “Every time I go back to Beijing I see a different kind of society and a different city, and that also reflects on what I see in terms of investments,” says Frahm.
“If you go back to the ’80s and you look at something like the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, which is the best school for the Arts in China, first of all it is extremely difficult to get into the school, but at the beginning of the ’80s you had 200 students, now you have 4,000 students. To give you an idea, in 2010 you had more than 200,000 students enrolled in China in some kind of art degree and more than 6,000 students graduating as artists, so there is a huge amount of potential with the local art in China in terms of education, and that of course is also a reflection of the market.”
Although the numbers are growing, art education still needs a lot of work, as Larry Warsh argues: “I think the system in China is not developed yet, which gets us to other point, which is why you need history books to help us know where museums, when they are set up, can help us later. It takes time for these things to develop in a country like China. Art education is a problem everywhere, and the system in China probably has bigger priorities than art that they have to deal with: basic literacy and basic essentials, then you can put art in there.”
Still, that so many young people are inspired to become artists is encouraging, with the likes of Wang Guangyi, Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Minjun among their role models. Art is now seen as an honourable profession and as the country has come to understand it as a potential export, investments are being made. “There’s a scaling issue,” explains Warsh, “as well as an overconfidence for artists in China, because I’ve heard so many times that parents want their kids to be artists instead of doctors.”
Wang Guangyi (born 1957), Great Criticism – Art and Power, 2005-2006, oil on canvas,
(triptych, 300 x 600 cm overall)
So the million-dollar question, quite literally, is how will this generation of artists impact on the art market in China? It is certainly a topic that generates divisive answers. “For the upcoming graduating artists/students, this is more like a business, an industry that produces so many students since they have to pay for their high tuition” says Wang Qingsong. “Their graduation means that they owe a lot of money either to their parents or their school already before they can make any money. Hence under such pressure, they cannot freely do their art works. Many of them cannot find any jobs.”
Eric Chang, on the other hand, sees the influx of new artists as “definitely positive. New blood can give strength and provide variety. The post-’80s generation is a new breed of artists, born after the Cultural Revolution and therefore had completely different life experiences from the earlier artists. Their works show promise in several media and greater individuality.”
This could also question the connections with Chinese tradition, as Chang continues, “The contact with Western concepts and ideas has sparked Chinese artists to new heights of creativity by introducing them to new materials, forms and art movements, making the Chinese art market extremely vibrant and lively.
Liu Ye (born 1964), Bleah!, 1999, oil on canvas, (169.5 cm x 199.8 cm)
These artists’ quickness of mind allows adaptation and, combined with the discipline required to learn the traditional Chinese ink and brush techniques, a high quality is ensured. Whether the post-’80s generation will continue to be fascinated by Chinese art traditions and take time to learn them remains an open question.”
Frahm also expresses concern over the challenges this could present in the future: “The first challenge is how the artists from the ’90s are going to sustain themselves in terms of the art they are going to be producing from now on, whereas the new generation of artists are looking into something completely different. It’s yet to be seen; the artists out of the ’90s were extremely good and strong in their work, and there was also a moment in history which allowed them to produce very emotionally powerful works.
At the end of the day, whether there’s 6,000 students coming out of school or 60,000, it has to be good art before it survives the test of time. Right now we’re not seeing a lot of young artists making it in the global art market, which is interesting because if you think about the global art market right now, it’s the artists from the ’90s. It’s not so strange why this is so, but it’s a challenging thought why you are not seeing more young Chinese artists making it globally.”
Zhang Xiaogang (B1958), Bloodline – BigFamily – Father and Son 2001,
oil on canvas, (150 cm x 190 cm)
For Warsh, it’s an issue of size, not only in terms of new artists but also a bigger demand in production that will certainly affect the art business, which also opens the question of regional markets within China. “The art business is huge, and so much bigger than art history. Let’s imagine one out of every home will need a painting, it becomes a decorative conversation. There will be more niche markets coming out, same as in the United States. I think regional and global will become very important in China, more than in most countries.”
In effect, before you rush forward into the future, you have to look back to the past. “If we did not know what has been happening in the past, we would never know where to go,” explains Qingsong “It might happen that we will go on somebody else’s road. Now I think to slow down our steps, think more about our own past and create artworks associated to our own life, our own traditions, our own present history and future dreams. Then we can seek for newer developments.”
by Bruna Volpi
From the Glass Archive – Issue Seven – Power
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