December 2007 | Winter Issue

Inside Special Issue on the Chinese Market Interviews with Liu Jianhua and Shan Shan Sheng Dialogue on 12

US$12.00 NT$350.00 square

  Contents

4 Editor’s Note

6 Contributors

8 Contemporary : To Get Rich Is Glorious 11 Britta Erickson

17 The Surplus Value of Accumulation: Some Thoughts Martina Köppel-Yang

19 Seeing Through the Macro Perspective: The Chinese Art Market from 2006 to 2007 Zhao Li

23 Exhibition Culture and the Art Market 26 Yü Christina Yü 29 Interview with Zheng Shengtian at the Seven Stars Bar, 798, Britta Erickson

34 Beyond Selling Art: Galleries and the Construction of Art Market Norms Ling-Yun Tang

44 Taking Stock Joe Martin Hill 41 51 Everyday Miracles: National Pride and Chinese Collectors of Contemporary Art Simon Castets

58 Superfluous Things: The Search for “Real” Art Collectors in China Pauline J. Yao

62 After the Market’s Boom: A Case Study of the Haudenschild Collection 77 Michelle M. McCoy

72 Zhong Biao and the “Grobal” Imagination Paul Manfredi

84 Export—Cargo Transit Mathieu Borysevicz

90 About Export—Cargo Transit: An Interview with Liu Jianhua 87 Chan Ho Yeung David 93 René Block’s Waterloo: Some Impressions of documenta 12, Kassel Yang Jiechang and Martina Köppel-Yang

101 Interview with Shan Shan Sheng Brandi Reddick

109 Chinese Name Index 108

Yishu 22 errata: On page 97, image caption lists director as Liang Yin. Director’s name is Ying Liang. On page 98, image caption lists director as Xialu Guo. Director’s name is Xiaolu Guo.

 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Volume 6, Number 4, December 2007 president Katy Hsiu-chih Chien The art market is currently a topic of heated   Ken Lum discussion, and so it should be. This is an  Keith Wallace unprecedented moment in the history of   Zheng Shengtian contemporary art, one in which the prices of   Julie Grundvig artworks are escalating at an unheard-of pace, Kate Steinmann with some magazines even providing quarterly web site  Julie Grundvig reports about which works and artists are   Larisa Broyde   Joyce Lin increasing in value, and by how much. This has intern Chunyee Li led to confusion about what is determining the real value of contemporary art. Does value lie advisory  primarily within the artwork as a philosophical Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum or perceptual proposition, or is it based on how John Clark, University of Sydney much money it commands? Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation , Art Institute Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Yishu 23 has been guest-edited by Dr. Britta Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China Fei Dawei, Guy & Mariam Ullens Foundation Erickson, who, during this past year, carried Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh out research on the art market in China with Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute Katie Hill, University of Westminster the assistance of a Fulbright Fellowship. Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive Along with her own incisive observations and Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian Sebastian Lopez, Institute of International Visual Arts thoughts, she invited other writers to comment Lu Jie, Independent Curator upon the implications of the current art market. Charles Merewether, Australian National University Their response was so strong that the core Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand of this issue is dedicated to this topic. Dr. Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator Erickson has gathered together writers with Wu Hung, University of Chicago Pauline J. Yao, Independent Scholar varying points of view about the art market and its stakeholders—artists, galleries, auctions,  Art & Collection Group Ltd. and collectors. Yishu extends its thanks to her    Leap Creative Group and all the writers who have contributed to this   Raymond Mah important issue. It is especially appropriate Art Director Gavin Chow that Yishu 23 will be launched at Art Basel/ webmaster Website ARTCO, Taipei Miami Beach, one of the most important  Chong-yuan Image Ltd., Taipei international art fairs, where the market is  - expressed in its full glory. Yishu is published quarterly in Taipei, Taiwan and edited in , Canada. As of 2008 Yishu will be published bi-monthly on the first day of January, March, May, July, September, and On a different note, the staff at Yishu is November. pleased to announce that the journal will To subscribe please go online www.yishujournal.com or call be published bi-monthly as of January 1.604.649.8187. 2008. The encouraging response we are Subscription rates: one year: US $60; two years: US $110. For air- receiving from individuals who want to know mail delivery please add US $18 per year for Asia; US $24 for other regions. about contemporary Chinese art, and the number of writers who want to participate All subscription, advertising and submission inquiries can also be sent to: in a discourse about it, has increased to Yishu Office the point that more frequent publication is 410-650 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC necessitated. We will continue to maintain Canada V6B 4N8 Phone: 1.604.649.8187; Fax: 1.604.591.6392 our intentions of producing a publication that E-mail: [email protected] is not a throwaway, but one that will stay Distributors: on bookshelves and become an important U.S.A. source for future research about the history of Journals Department, University of Hawai’i Press [email protected] contemporary Chinese art. Canada Disticor Magazine Distribution Services www.disticor.com Keith Wallace Australia Selectair Distribution Services www.selectair.com.au

Advertising inquiries may be also sent to: YISHU EDITIONS Art & Collection Ltd. 6F. No.85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Now available. ’s limited edition Phone: (886)2.2560.2220; Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 print of his new project at MOMA/NYC in E-mail: [email protected] the exhibition Automatic Update, June 27- September 10. www.yishujournal.com

Book from the Ground, 2007, digital print, No part of this journal may be published without the written 29.7 X 35.6 cm, produced by Xu Bing Studio, permission from the publisher. New York. Edition Size: 199. For more information please see We thank Mr. Milton Wong, and Mr. Daoping Bao, Paystone www.yishujournal.com Technologies Corp., for their generous support.  Cover: Zhong Biao, Beyond (detail), 2007, charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 380 x 1200 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Xin Dong Space for Contemporary Art, Beijing. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版‧第6卷第4期‧2007年12月5日出版

4 編者手記 典藏國際版創刊於 2002年5月1日 作者小傳 社 長： 簡秀枝 6 總策劃： 鄭勝天 創刊編輯： 林蔭庭（Ken Lum）

藝術市場專輯 主 編： 華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 副編輯： 顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 8 當代中國藝術：致富光榮 史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 林似竹（Britta Erikson）本期特約編輯 行 政： 藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 實 習： 黎俊儀 17 關於剩餘價值積累的一些思考 網站編輯： 顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 廣 告： 林素珍 楊天娜（Martina Köppel-Yang） 顧 問： 王嘉驥 19 2006-2007中國藝術品市場的宏觀描述 安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 趙力 巫 鴻 林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 展覽文化與藝術市場 范迪安 23 招穎思 喻瑜 洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 侯瀚如 29 與鄭勝天在798七星酒吧的談話 徐文玠 林似竹（Britta Erikson） 姜苦樂 (John Clark) 姚嘉善 倪再沁 34 賣畫之外：畫廊與藝術市場規範的建設 高名潞 湯凌雲 費大爲 楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 44 藝「股」熱談 盧 杰 Lynne Cooke Joe Hill Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill 51 日常奇跡：民族自豪感和當代中國藝術的 Charles Merewether 收藏家 Apinan Poshyananda Simon Castets 出 版： 典藏雜誌社 台灣臺北市中山北路一段85號6樓 58 奢盼：在中國尋找「真正」的藝術收藏家 電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 姚嘉善（Pauline J. Yao） 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 電子信箱：[email protected] 62 市場繁榮之後： Haudenschild 收藏的個案研究 編輯部： Yishu Office 410-650 West Georgia St., Michelle M. McCoy Vancouver, BC, Canada V6B 4N8 電話: (1) 604.727.6187 72 鍾飆與「全球在地化」的想象 傳真：(1) 604.591.6392 Paul Manfredi 電子信箱: [email protected] 訂閱、投稿及廣告均請與編輯部聯系。 藝壇聚焦 設 計： Leap Creative Group 印 刷： 中原造像股份有限公司 84 出口—貨物轉運 Mathieu Borysevicz 網 址： www.yishujournal.com 管 理： 典藏雜誌社 90 關於「出口—貨物轉運」— 與 劉建華的對話 國際刊號: 1683-3082 陳浩揚 本刊在溫哥華編輯設計，臺北印刷出版發行。 一年四期。自2008年起改為雙月刊。一年6期。 93 René Block 的滑鐵廬 — 對12届文件展 逢一、三、五、七、九、十一月一日出版。 的一些看法 售價每本12美元。 楊詰蒼／楊天娜（Martina Köppel-Yang） 自2008年起訂閲一年60美元，兩年110美元。 航空郵資亞洲一年加18美元。其他地區一年加 101 盛姗姗訪談 24美元。 Brandi Reddick 訂閱單可從本刊網址下載。

中英人名對照 版權所有，本刊內容非經本社同意不得翻譯 109 和轉載。

封面：鍾飆，出神入畫（局部），2007，布面木炭和壓克力，四幅裝 置，380 X1200公分，程昕東國際當代藝術空間及藝術家提供

 Contributors

Mathieu Borysevicz is an artist, critic, and curator who divides his time between New York and . He has been involved with contemporary art in China since 1994, focusing on the intersections of social transformation and artistic production. His writing has appeared in publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Art Asia Pacific, and tema celeste. His photography and video work has been shown internationally at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Institute of Contemporary Art, , the Bauhaus, the Shanghai Duolun Museum, the Bronx Museum, and the Israeli Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. He is currently working on Learning from , a photographic case study in the form of book and exhibition that examines the relationship between architecture and signage in Hangzhou.

Simon Castets is currently pursuing his M.A. in curatorial studies at Columbia University. He was a recipient of the Louis Vuitton Moët-Hennessy Asia Fellowship in 2006. His recent and current projects include developing corporate partnerships for Palais de Tokyo, conducting the Young ’ Invitational program at FIAC from 2006 to 2007, and completing research for the Georges Pompidou Art and Culture Foundation.

Chan Ho Yeung David is a curator based in and Shanghai. He completed an M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and has been curator at the Shanghai Gallery of Art since 2003. Publications he has written for include C, Flash Art, and Chinese Art News.

Britta Erickson, Ph.D., is an independent scholar and curator living in Palo Alto, California. She has taught at Stanford University and has curated major exhibitions at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West, and she was a contributing curator for the Dashanzi International Art Festival in 2006, and co-curator for the Chengdu Biennial in 2007. She is on the advisory boards for the Ink Society, Asia Art Archive, and Yishu, and the editorial board for Art Asia Pacific. Recently she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research in Beijing on the Chinese contemporary art market.

Joe Martin Hill is the founder of Vision-Connect, a firm providing management consulting and curatorial advisory services to clients in the United States and abroad. He is also writing a dissertation on contemporary art biennials at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, under the direction of Robert Storr. He was a member of Storr’s curatorial support team for the 2007 . He was also the curator of Metamorphosis: The Generation of Transformation in Chinese Contemporary Art, which opened in Tampere, Finland, in June 2007.

Martina Köppel-Yang is an independent art historian and curator with a Ph.D. in East Asian art history and sinology from the University of Heidelberg. She has studied in Heidelberg, Beijing, and , and has written extensively on the subject of contemporary Chinese art. She created Mühlgasse 40, Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art, with her husband, Yang Jiechang, and has curated and co-curated several exhibitions, including Ink—Life—Taste for the Shenzhen International Ink Painting Biennial, 2006, and Ken Lum at Tang Contemporary Art, 2007. Her post-doctoral thesis, “Performing Identity—Political Directives and Contemporary Chinese Art since the 1980s” (working title), concerns the cultural policy of the People’s Republic of China.

 Paul Manfredi is Assistant Professor and Chair of Chinese Studies at Pacific Lutheran University. His research interests include modern and contemporary Chinese , East-West literary influence, modernism in China, and modern Chinese visual culture. His writing has appeared in publications such as Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese and Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. Professor Manfredi is also the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities (2003) and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (2006) fellowships. His current projects concern intersections between visual art and poetry in modern and contemporary contexts.

Michelle M. McCoy is a graduate student in art history at the University of California, Davis. After graduating from Pratt Institute in New York City, she worked as an art writer in Shanghai. She is currently investigating issues of gender and the body in recent Chinese art.

Brandi Reddick has been Art Education and Community Outreach Coordinator for Miami-Dade Art in Public Places since 2003. She holds a B.A. in art history from the College of Charleston, and completed postgraduate studies in art history at Savannah College of Art and Design. Reddick serves on the Board of the Florida Association of Public Art Administrators, and has lectured on public art internationally.

Ling-Yun Tang is a Ph.D. student in sociology at . She worked at the Chinese Contemporary Gallery from 2005 to 2006, and completed two years of field work in Beijing. Currently residing in New York, she is writing her dissertation on contemporary art galleries, spatial culture, and symbolic boundaries in China’s contemporary art scene.

Yang Jiechang is an artist who graduated from the Guangzhou Fine Arts Academy in 1982. He works in painting, video, and installation. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2003), Guangzhou Triennial (2003/2005), the 1st Paris Triennial (2006), the (2006), and the (2007).

Pauline J. Yao is a curator and writer based in Beijing and San Francisco. She is a member of the Yishu advisory board and is an adjunct faculty member in the Graduate Program at California College of Arts, San Francisco. From 2006 to 2007 she was a Fulbright Fellow based in Beijing, researching private and public collections of contemporary art. She has curated exhibitions and written for academic publications on subjects relating to modern and contemporary art in China. She was also the inaugural recipient of the CCAA Independent Art Critic Award in 2007. Yao holds an M.A. in East Asian languages and civilizations from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. from Pitzer College, California.

Yü Christina Yü is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. She received an M.A. in art history from Boston University, and a B.A. from Wellesley College.

Zhao Li was born in Jiangsu in 1967, and graduated with a Ph.D. in art history from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1998. He is Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the Center of Art Market Analysis at the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Art, and member of the Academic Committee of Art Beijing. He is also on the editorial board of ART Value and Art Fortune.

 Contemporary Chinese Art: To Get Rich Is Glorious Britta Erickson, Guest Editor, Yishu 23

I wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Fulbright Foundation, which awarded me a Fulbright Scholar grant to conduct research into the impact of changes in the market on contemporary Chinese art. In addition, I thank the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing for acting as my host institution.

Part I: Issues at Stake in the Investigation of the Relationship Between Contemporary Chinese Art and Money

Without question, the greatest recent change in the field of contemporary Chinese art1 is the market. Over the past five or so years, the market for contemporary Chinese art has heated up spectacularly, with prices doubling, tripling, or more within some twelve-month periods. The expectation has been that prices will continue to rise before stabilizing. Two leading questions are: what are the factors driving this revolution in the market, and how will these dramatic changes affect artistic production?

BACKGROUND: THE CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART MARKET The contemporary Chinese art market has been in a state of rapid evolution since the end of the Great Proletarian (1966–76). During the Cultural Revolution, the art market was minimal, with ink being sold to foreigners to bring in foreign exchange. From ’s death (1976) into the 1980s, the very small market for contemporary Chinese art rested primarily with foreigners visiting or living in China, or with other ties to China. Then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, galleries representing Chinese artists began to open overseas. Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong was particularly successful, promoting “Political Pop” and “Cynical Realist” painters. By the later 1990s, several foreigners had opened galleries in China (China Art Archives & Warehouse, CourtYard Gallery, and Red Gate Gallery, in Beijing, and ShanghART Gallery, in Shanghai), employing different means to operate around the restrictions on foreign-owned for- profit art businesses. The CourtYard Gallery, for example, operated with a restaurant license. Their clientele remained largely foreigners.

China’s two major art auction houses opened in 1993 (China Guardian) and 1994 (Beijing Hanhai), focusing on historical objects. Several years ago, China Guardian, a joint venture between the Ministry of Internal Trade and the Bureau of Cultural Relics, turned to auctioning contemporary works of art. During the past three years, foreign auction houses have been setting up offices in mainland China and are selling contemporary Chinese art in extremely successful Hong Kong auctions.

Since 2000, numerous galleries owned by both foreigners and Chinese have opened in China. In Beijing alone there are dozens of them, with more appearing every month. The demand for works of art is astonishing. Many artists’ studios are empty: everything they create sells instantly, and they have unfilled orders for additional works. Noting the rapidly increasing demand, the Chinese themselves finally are beginning to collect, adding to the momentum of the market. Generally limiting their collecting to liquefiable assets, in the past they had focused on classical paintings, ceramics, and furniture. Now they see the value in contemporary art.

8 One of many directories in 798, Dashanzi art district, Beijing. Photo: Britta Erickson.

Ten or twelve years ago, all but the most famous artists struggled to make ends meet. Now, for many, the favourite topics of discussion are and real estate. It remains to be seen the extent to which their ready ability to exchange works of art for cash will affect artistic production, in terms of either quantity or quality. That there is an effect is obvious, however. Already, some prominent artists have hired “ghost” painters to do much of their work for them, without openly admitting to the practice (since they do not admit to this, I do not mention their names, but the practice is widely known). Others supposedly have increased edition numbers of photographs that already had been sold out. Galleries are even reputed to have reprinted sold-out photographs without the artist’s permission. Top-tier sculptors and painters (Zeng Wang Guangyi, New Coca-Cola, 2002, Fanzhi, Zhang Xiaogang, etc.) have designed prints either on their own lithograph (edition of 199), 86 cm x 76 cm. initiative to satisfy increased demand, or at the behest of galleries eager to stock quantities of less expensive works. Sometimes this involves no additional creative effort, as with lithographic copies that are made of successful paintings; for example, Wang Guangyi’s 2002 New Coca-Cola, a lithograph in an edition of 199 after his well-known painting from a decade earlier, Great Criticism—Coca Cola. On the very low end of the spectrum, paintings superficially resembling works by the blue chip artists are available at Panjiayuan, the giant Beijing flea market, sold in much the same spirit as fake Rolex watches and fake Gucci handbags. A rung above that are third-tier artists producing paintings highly reminiscent of those by the top-selling artists; for example, among Morgan’s paintings are those that come close to the appearance and execution of Fang Lijun’s. The results of such activities range from the amusing (the Panjiayuan riffs), to the felicitous (some of the prints are good), to the illegal. Ms. Wang’s stall, Panjiayuan, 2006. Photo: Britta Erickson.

9 On a positive note, financial security may allow some artists to experiment and to think more seriously about the direction of their career. A few artists are producing smaller numbers of works and are being more careful about placing those works in prominent collections: the sculptor Zhan Wang, for example, plans to sell no more than half of each edition to private collectors; the others must go to public collections.

That we find such a variety of reactions to the situation is testament to power of the market to effect change. The extreme market dynamics at present offer a unique opportunity to investigate the market as catalyst.

Very little research has been done on the market for contemporary Chinese art. Adrian Lloyd’s M.A. thesis, “Chinese Avant-Garde Market” (Oxford University, 2003), outlines the main issues. Iain Robertson’s doctoral dissertation, “The Emerging Art Markets of Greater China, 1989–99” (London City University, 2001), was written before the dramatic changes in today’s market. The time is ripe for serious investigation into the current market for contemporary art and the ways it is affecting artistic production.

Part II: Links Between Art and Money: Artists’ Representations

In China, the rise of avant-garde contemporary art has paralleled the rapid explosion of the post-Cultural Revolution consumer economy that developed in response to Deng Xiaoping’s new economic policies. (He is supposed to have said, “To get rich is glorious.”) The changing relationship between art and money has been reflected in art.

From quite early in Deng’s era, the new availability of consumer and luxury goods has been mirrored in art, but at the beginning there was no sense of a reflection of art itself as a luxury item, because it had very little monetary value. The Coca-Cola cans hung as part of a 1986 exhibition by Cai Lixiong and Liu Yiling, for example, express a fascination with luxury goods—expensive in terms of a Cai Lixiong and Liu Yiling, installation view, 1986. young artist’s income and purchasable only with Foreign Exchange Certificates (FEC)—with a much greater marketability than the work of art at the time. Coke cans make an appearance in quite a few 1980s experimental works of art.

By the late 1980s, avant-garde art was beginning to experience commodification. Wu Shanzhuan’s Big Business performance at the opening of the 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition at the National Gallery in Beijing was a protest against the process that led inevitably to artists hawking their wares: he sold shrimp to the public until two plainclothes policemen closed down the business. The previous year, at the Chinese Modern Art Convention, Wu had stated:

[Starting in 1987] big business has become an affair of all Chinese citizens, and for the first time an overwhelming materialism has been tied to idealistic Chinese intellectuals and business. Soon after, business became unified with art institutions, scholarship, and political authority. . . . “Business art” has lowered art down to a ”business icon” easily recognizable by the masses.2

10 Wu Shanzhuan was prescient in his focus on the commercialization of art. He continued to work on issues relating to the artist as producer of a commodity—for example, hiring himself out as an art labourer, emphasizing the labour rather than the product, as in the Labor at Large, Putting the Money for Art-Material in the Bank series (1992–present).3

As Wu Shanzhuan worked against the enthronement of the artist as privileged agent of creation, other conceptual artists sought symbolically to destroy the institutions of art. Huang Yong Ping and the group with which he was associated, Xiamen Dada, were notable in this regard, having consigned a huge pile of their works to flames in 1986. In general, it was a time when idealists sought to escape the bounds of institutionalization that seemed as if they might enclose an art movement generated largely outside those bounds, and one aspect of this was the bounds of commercialization that were forming around the art world.

In 1988, Yu Youhan, a leading light of the Political Pop movement, painted a group of images of Chinese bank notes, Renminbi. His other paintings of the time frequently reproduced famous photographs of the deceased Chinese leader Mao, employing vivid colours and patterns to break the Yu Youhan, Renminbi, 1988, oil on canvas, 100 cm x 218 cm. solemn charge adhering to the originals. Renminbi similarly employs bright Pop colours and greatly simplified forms to transform the image of the bank note into something playful: apparently currency had achieved an iconic status deserving of sly undermining. From then, the thrall held over people by consumerism became an increasingly popular subject in art.

Wang Jin and Lin Yilin created installation events that highlighted the thirst for consumer goods. For his 1993 performance, 100 Pieces and 1000 Pieces, Lin Yilin framed himself into a wall constructed from bricks and placed bank notes between the bricks so that they protruded, tempting people to remove them despite the fact that disturbing the bricks might lead the wall to collapse, Lin Yilin, 100 Pieces and 1000 Pieces, 1993, 50 minute performance thus harming the artist. The Zhengzhou with bank notes, bricks, and ladder, Guangzhou. Courtesy of the artist. city government commissioned Wang Jin’s Ice to mark the opening of a grand new shopping mall in 1996. The piece consisted of a thirty-metre-long wall built from blocks of ice in which were embedded consumer goods ranging from cosmetics to electronics. People tore at the wall in a frenzy of consumer desire, hoping to free the valuable objects from their frozen casing and take them home. These works underscored the burgeoning thirst for wealth in the new China, encouraging actions that would demonstrate that desire (even though Wang Jin’s original intention was that the ice would symbolically cool the consumerist heat). Wang Jin also took a broader look at the functioning of the economy. His 1995 Wang Jin, Ice, 1996, installation Knocking at the Door suggests the encroachment of global commerce with ice and consumer goods.

11 on the Chinese system, with old bricks from the wall of the Forbidden City painted with dollar bills and then replaced on the wall. That same year, he cooked money in a wok for his performance Speculate in Chinese Money.

In 1995, an art movement arose that was to humorously reflect the new consumerism: Gaudy Art, also known as Double Kitsch. Its proponents, Chang Xugong, Feng Zhengjie, Hu Xiangdong, Liu Zheng, the Luo Brothers, Wang Qingsong, Xu Yihui, and others, glorified the vulgar tastes of the new rich, as in the Luo Brothers’ Welcome to the World’s Famous Brand Series #30, the joy of consuming foreign or luxury goods, as in Wang Qingsong’s Requesting Buddha Series No. 1, and the

Wang Jin, Speculate in Chinese Money, 1995, splendour of wealth in and of itself as in Xu Yihui’s performance with money, wok, and stove. Golden Money, all with a heavy dose of irony—doubly ironic because these works were not at first themselves a hot commodity, and so the commentary on consumerism did not originally link strongly back to the notion of art as ultimate consumer product.

Expressing an increased interest in the workings of the financial infrastructure, artists have created works directly about money and its relation to art. In 1993, Wu Shanzhuan constructed an installation of toy pandas, Missing Bamboo, for an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts titled Fragmented Memory: The Chinese Avant-Garde in Exile. The pandas were to be sold Luo Brothers, Welcome to the World’s Famous Brand Series #30, 1997, lacquer and paint on during the exhibition as a reflection of the Western wood, 65 x 65 cm. desire for “Chinese-ness” in contemporary Chinese art. More and more, artists have chosen to foreground the relationship between consumers and the work of art. In 1999, over thirty artists participated in Art for Sale, an exhibition curated by artists Xu Zhen, Yang Zhenzhong, and Alexander Brandt, and held in a supermarket on Shanghai’s Huaihai Road. A major section of the exhibition was displayed as a supermarket within the supermarket, with shopping baskets for customers to fill with minimally priced works of art selected from the shelves (for example, Liu Wei’s Pigs’ Trotters and Jewelry). As the market has strengthened, artists’ commentary has become more biting, peaking in the year 2006, when record auction prices repeatedly sent waves of both glee and apprehension through the Chinese artists community. Yan Lei’s Dog Year (2006 was the year of the dog) juxtaposes reproductions of a photograph of a record-breaking Zhang Xiaogang sale at Sotheby’s with Wang Qingsong, Requesting Buddha Series No. 1, 1999, photograph, 180 x 110 cm. Courtesy of a still from Cao Fei’s sardonic video Rabid Dogs (2002), the artist.

12 which tracks the daytime activities of Burberry-clad office-dog drones. Perhaps uncertain of their own taste, but with pretensions of higher social status, these drones favour the highly recognizable luxury brand.

In protest against what appeared increasingly to be the buying and selling of his works purely for speculation, Liu Xiaodong decided to disengage from the market for an undetermined period. As a Xu Yihui, Golden Money, 1998–99, porcelain, 30 x 38 x 22 cm. statement of his position, he created an exhibition titled Liu Xiaodong’s New Works: Domino (Xin Beijing Art Gallery, October 8–November 23, 2006), where he painted directly upon the walls of the gallery. Offers were made to buy the walls, but the exhibition concluded with the artist painting them white again, as he had planned from the beginning. Adding interest to Liu’s stance and actions, also in November, Beijing’s Poly Group Auction sold his major work Three Gorges: Newly Displaced Population Wu Shanzhuan, Missing Bamboo, 1993, installation (2005) for over $2.7 million to a restaurant owner- with toy pandas, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University. entrepreneur, Zhang Lan.

Feng Mengbo has headed toward the opposite extreme, deciding to play to the market with his new Built to Order Series. Collectors are encouraged to work with the artist to design a painting within set parameters, choosing from two themes, the ever- popular Chairman Mao—multiplied and posed to the buyer’s liking against a computer-generated Liu Wei, Pigs’ Trotters and Jewelry, Art for Sale catalogue, landscape, or a modified screenshot from the artist’s 1999. Quake-based Q4U (2000–2002). The paintings are designed on a computer and VEEjet printed onto a canvas prepared with a three-dimensional ground of acrylic gel so that the finished product has the feel of an oil painting. Asked if his willingness to comply with a client’s taste would extend to creating a pink landscape background for Mao to match a pink sofa, he replied, “Of course.” These works are quick to produce and theoretically as limitless (and repetitive) as the series churned out by many of the top-selling Chinese artists.

Paralleling artists’ increased interest in money has been the rise in exhibitions touching on the subject, beginning in 1996 with Shanghai Fax—Let’s Talk about Money (Hua Shan Fine Arts College, proposed by Hank Bull and curated by Ding Yi, Shi Yong, Shen Fan, and Zhou Tiehai), which was followed in 1999 by another artist-led initiative, Art for Sale (mentioned above). Professional curators have also taken up the matter with such exhibitions as Tang Xin’s Perceptions of Money—Money Funny Honey, for Taikang Life’s Top Space, Beijing, in 2001, and Martina Köppel-Yang’s theoretically sophisticated exhibitions for Beijing’s Tang Contemporary Art in 2006, Accumulation: Canton Express Next Stop and Surplus Value.

13 Part III: Art—Value—Money; Art—Trust—Money

“The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.” –Samuel Butler (1835–1902)

Yan Lei, Dog Year (diptych), 2006, acrylic on canvas.

Money brings the various factors involved in the art world—including artists, dealers, private collectors, and museums—together into a web where activity in one arena exerts a push or pull in another. It provides a means by which the different parties can interact to the benefit of all—a function that has become absolutely essential as well as increasingly transparent. Since the early twentieth century, beginning in the West but now also in China, Liu Xiaodong paints over works in the Domino exhibition, November 23, 2006, Xin Beijing Art conceptual artists have turned their attention to the Gallery. function of money in the art world, producing works that comment on value in art and underscore the fact that for the most part, art and money have little intrinsic value: for both, the value rests in a community’s shared trust or belief that value exists. As an interesting comparison, if we look at representations of bank notes produced by the artists Liu Zheng and Hong Hao and by the artist couple Shao Yinong and Muchen, we find that neither the materials employed nor the means of production have a direct effect on the works’ value. Liu Zheng creates brightly coloured, beaded versions of contemporary Feng Mengbo, M11102, 2006, acrylic on canvas, bank notes, such as the Chinese one yuan note that is 200 cm x 180 cm. commonly used in daily life, attaching each bead himself, for a “Pop” effect. Shao Yinong and Muchen engage highly skilled embroiderers to recreate in elegant muted tones the (slightly redesigned) image of historical bank notes—for example, the one

14 Liu Zheng, RMB 1 Yuan, 2001, beads on silk, 70 cm x 170 cm. hundred yuan note issued by the Japanese during the 1932 to 1945 occupation. These artists have come to appreciate the original bank notes for their sophisticated design. Liu Zheng enjoys refining his coloured remake, adjusting as he goes along, spending as long as a month on the creation of a single piece. Shao Yinong and Muchen’s pieces require longer hours of outsourced labour overseen by the artists, who, in the meantime, research historical bank notes and determine the design of the next piece. Hong Hao amassed a collection of contemporary international currency that he scanned, arranged meticulously in a digital photo-montage, and reproduced life-sized for his 556,066,729,000 Face Muchen and Shao Yinong, Spring and (2004). The value of the different works lies in the concept Autumn, ongoing series, embroidery on silk. and execution, which can be judged variously, but has nothing to do with production costs, quality of workmanship, or the role of the artist in the work’s production.

With respect to trust in value, with money, there is a logical structure buttressing the belief, while in the case of art there is a kind of structure based on the fluctuating opinion of experts. In neither case, however, is the value not subject to irrational whim.

Hong Hao, 556,066,792,000 Face, 2004, 165 x 270 cm.

15 In 1992, Sun Ping designed a stock certificate,China Sun Ping Art Co., Ltd., RMB Stock (A Share), as testimony to the kinship of art to more customary financial instruments. Five years later, Zhou Tiehai produced a more elaborate work centred around the listing of “B” shares of the artist on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. In this work, an article and graph track the rise and fall of the value Sun Ping, China Sun Ping Art Co., Ltd. RMB Stock (A Share) (edition of of the Zhou at the hands of foreign 3), 1992, C print, 130 x 189 cm. speculators (since only foreigners could buy “B” shares). A stock certificate or bank note, which can read as a printed work of art on paper, is also like a printed work of art on paper, such as Sun Ping’s China Sun Ping Art Co., to the extent that it has no intrinsic value. Its value is dependent entirely on a consensus of trust. In regard to contemporary Chinese art, there is a dearth of experts with a trained eye and a willingness to be critical in a negative manner. This has allowed the values of a raft of mediocre artists to float upward, unchecked. Nevertheless, the text of the Zhou Tiehai stock market article ends with a passage that could be used to sum up the current general feeling about the top five to ten percent of contemporary Chinese artists: “According to market participants, the stock is now valued fairly in the eyes of the big houses and seems likely to remain stable in the foreseeable future. Its fundamentals remain sound, and bullish traders expect renewed interest by overseas buyers to bring [it] higher in the long term.”4 Of course, the identity of the top fraction of the pool of artists is a matter for speculation.

Zhou Tiehai, Press Conference, 1997, 55 x 102 cm, silkscreen, edition of 100. Courtesy of ShanghART Gallery.

Notes 1 By “contemporary Chinese art,” I mean “avant-garde” contemporary Chinese art, to the exclusion of the large quantity of traditional-style ink painting produced in China. This is a common convention in the field, employed for convenience. 2 Wu Shanzhuan, “Cong yuedi kaishi de zainan: Shengyi yishu” (A disaster’s begun since the end of this month: business art), 1989, unpublished; translated by Gao Minglu in “Wu Shanzhuan’s Red Humor Series,” in Susan Acret and Jaspar Lau Kin Wah, eds., Wu Shanzhuan: Red Humor International (Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive, 2005), 63. 3 Gao Minglu and Julia F. Andrews, “The Context in the Text: Meaning in Wu Shanzhuan’s Work,” in Andrews and Gao, Fragmented Memory: The Chinese Avant-Garde in Exile (Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1993), 33. 4 Zhou Tiehai, “New Listing, Zhou Tiehai, Rises on Debut Before Reaching Fair Value,” 1997, ShanghART Gallery, http://www. shanghartgallery.com/galleryarchive/texts/id/136, accessed October 10, 2007.

16 The Surplus Value of Accumulation: Some Thoughts Martina Köppel-Yang

he art market is a major consideration and concern for most people interested in or participating in the field of contemporary Chinese art today. China is the world’s leading manufacturing centre, its products having begun to occupy and dominate many markets, T 1 and the heading “China makes, the world takes” can also be read as a description of the situation within the art market today. The craze for contemporary Chinese art, nevertheless, is neither a mere fashion nor the result of a late but enthusiastic discovery or the appropriate expression of the great potential for contemporary culture within this growing geopolitical and economical super- power; rather, it is created by diverse lobbies and players with different but distinct aims.

For the Chinese government, contemporary art constitutes a means to regain face nationally and internationally after the Tian’anmen Square massacre in 1989, and it has been an important element in national Chinese cultural policy and diplomacy ever since China attempted to enter the World Trade Organization in the late 1990s. Soon after, contemporary art and culture were designated as part of the “Three Represents” and thus officially considered to be simulating pluralism and liberal and democratic society. China’s Tenth Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development, which was passed in March 2001, several months before China’s entry into the WTO, mentions the promotion of a spiritual civilization and of an advanced culture as crucial. Further, the increase in production of “more and better cultural and intellectual works,” as well as the promotion and the development of “industries related to culture” and the organization and standardization of “the cultural market,” are outlined as important goals.2 Thus, contemporary art has become an increasingly important factor in the inner-Chinese art market, too. It is considered an economic factor, and, as such, its development and propagation is enhanced by the government as part of the newly instigated sector of creative industries. Art, including contemporary art, is seen as a material value, in which one should invest and that one should accumulate. There is the example of the Shanghai city government, which recently proposed to its citizens to invest in art instead of investing in real estate. But the craze for contemporary Chinese art is also the result of the direct intervention of individuals, foreign institutions, and special interest groups—for example, collectors, dealers, galleries, and auction houses—into the Chinese sphere.

Yet here I will provide neither a detailed report nor a thorough analysis of the development of the market for contemporary Chinese art and its influence on the Chinese art scene. Instead, I want to propose some broader reflections. The state of affairs evident in the market for contemporary Chinese art is also the expression of a larger development: the globalization of the art market.

Aspects of this process include what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe as the de- territorialization and the decoding of fluxes,3 which are evident, for example, in the proliferation of biennials, triennials, and art fairs all over the globe, as well as in the accelerated assimilation of marginal and regional trends and cultures into mainstream and dominant culture (which can be read as equivalent to the separation of populations from specifically coded territories).4 As pointed out by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri with respect to the process of accumulation, “traditional cultures and social organizations are destroyed in capitalism’s tireless march through the world

17 to create the networks and pathways of a single cultural and economic system of production and circulation.” They continue, “capital brings all forms of value together on one common plane and links them all through money. . . . Capital tends to reduce all previously established forms of status, title, and privilege . . . to quantitative and commensurable economic terms.”5 By this they mean that the level of quality is reduced to the level of common taste. Originality is replaced by speculation and authentic expression through the use of easily recognizable cultural signs. We all know this and see it in many of the artworks traded in auction houses and art fairs. This finally leads to a third point mentioned by Hardt and Negri: the judging of quality becomes totally relative and dependent on the laws of the market and the logic of surplus value. The development of industries in all sectors of life—health care, as well as communications, education, and culture—is enhanced by the Chinese government today, and this leads to a value system of relative terms and relationships in those sectors. In their analysis, Hardt and Negri further identify capital and sovereignty as contradictory factors in society: sovereignty, which is based on transcendence, stands in contrast to capital, which “operates on the plane of immanence.” If we agree with the above assumption that capital brings all value down to one plane, namely that of immanence, then we have to ask what the validity and the ideational “surplus value” is of sectors such as art that usually deal with transcendence, the other plane. What is the surplus value of art in a society where the accumulation of material goods, the investment in capital goods, and the development of industries are the major agendas? Accumulation easily causes tautology—repetition, empty shells, and redundancy. How can tautology be avoided? How can individual and local positions be articulated without being swallowed, reproduced, and assimilated by a national and global thought, and by the culture industries? Can art refuse ideological models offered by the market? Is art able to disperse the contextual blindness brought about by the culture industries? Is asking these kinds of questions an ideological device itself?6

Yang Jiechang, Artists continue to try hard: 100% permission from R. Martinez, 2007, neon. Courtesy of the artist.

Notes 1 James Fallows, “China Makes, the World Takes,” The Atlantic, July/August 2007, 48. 2 “Report on the Outline of the Tenth Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development (X),” www.china.org.cn. 3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 224. 4 As pointed out in Hardt’s and Negri’s analysis of capitalist sovereignty in global society. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 325–50. 5 Ibid., 326. 6 “Dialogue between Ken Lum and Martina Köppel-Yang,” Ken Lum, Rorschach Shopkeeper Works (Beijing: Tang Contemporary, 2007), 42–43.

18 Seeing Through the Macro Perspective: The Chinese Art Market from 2006 to 2007 Zhao Li

I. The Accelerating Expansion of the Market The Chinese art market has entered a new and critical era. Seen from a macro perspective, what makes this period markedly different is that the growth of both business and trading volume in the Chinese art market from 2006 to 2007 has expanded at such an accelerated rate that much uncertainty has risen.

The Primary Art Market: Art Galleries and Sales of Art and Antiques The overall number of commercial galleries in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, as well as other cities in the Pearl River Delta, the Yangtze River Delta, Jiaozhou Peninsula, and other regions, reached unprecedented numbers by 2007. In the case of Beijing, the newly established galleries during the year 2006 accounted for more than 30% of the total number of galleries in China. Because of this, Chinese art galleries have taken a dominant position as agents in the market for selling and collecting contemporary Chinese art. With this sharp increase in trading volume, these galleries are now entering a so-called “profitable time,” and becoming the new locus for the Chinese art market to thrive and develop.

As the leading centres for the circulation of Chinese art and antiquities, the Beijing and Shanghai art markets experienced their greatest expansion from 2006 to 2007. In Beijing, for example, the annual transaction volume for cultural products and artworks totaled RMB $10 billion in 2006, of which RMB $235 million came from outlets for cultural relics, RMB $1.8 billion came from the antiques market, and RMB $520 million came from the 9th Annual Antiques and Fine Art Exposition. With a transaction volume totaling RMB $2.555 billion, Beijing alone had one quarter of the market share. In 2006, the Beijing Municipal Administration of Cultural Heritage issued fourteen new business licenses, increasing the number of establishments selling cultural relics to forty-six for a growth rate of 43.8%.

The Secondary Art Market: Art Auctions From 2006 to 2007, the Chinese art auction market also vastly expanded. The 2006 statistical data shows there were one hundred auction houses with revenues exceeding RMB $5 million. Among them, four generated revenues surpassing RMB $1 billion—Christie’s Hong Kong ($2.57 billion), Sotheby’s Hong Kong ($1.55 billion), China Guardian ($1.256 billion), and Beijing Hanhai (over $1 billion) . Of the twenty-nine auction houses with revenues ranging between RMB $100 million and RMB $1 billion, most are located in Beijing. In 2006, art auctions in Beijing reached revenues of RMB $ 7.445 billion, taking up a three-quarters share of the Beijing art market, and proving that the booming Chinese art auction industry has risen to a prominent status.

To understand how the art auction industry has affected the market, according to Beijing’s statistics, thirty-one art auction houses were newly certified by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, with the total number of auction houses in operation rising to seventy-three, thereby showing a growth rate of 73.8%. Parallel with this surge in auction houses is a trading volume that reached new heights.

19 In 2006, Beijing had seventy-three auction companies, of which fifty-seven were in operation, organizing 159 auction events of various sizes. Compared to 2005, twenty-two more auctions were conducted in 2006; and in auction sales that year, 89,939 lots were sold, compared to 71,285 lots in 2005, for a growth rate of 26.2%. Among all the items sold, 44,641 were paintings and calligraphy works, accounting for 49.6% of the total sales figure, and 35,746 were antique porcelain and miscellaneous pottery, accounting for 39.7% of the total auction sales.

In Hong Kong, Christie’s and Sotheby’s achieved impressive records, with sale totals of HKD $2.57 billion and HKD $1.56 billion, respectively. Both quickly became the highest-ranking art auction agencies in China. As for Christie’s, there were thirteen auction sales held in 2005, whereas in 2006 the number rose to eighteen, an increase of 38.5%. Compared to a revenue of HKD $1.447 billion generated in 2005, Christie’s achieved a growth rate of 77.6% in 2006—its third consecutive year of reaching a growth rate of over 70%. It’s no wonder that the headquarters of these two international art auction agencies both wanted to adjust their business strategies by increasing support to their Hong Kong branches and targeting the Asian market as their prime focus for future expansion.

II. The Molding of Market Structure The relatively mature art markets in Europe and North America are dominated by the primary market consisting of art galleries, and the secondary market consisting of the auction industry. This market structure allows for organic development as the primary and secondary markets operate at times separately and at times in concert. The many art fairs fall under the category of “quasi-market,” and constitute a sector that has become increasingly important.

From the early days of its development in the 1990s, the art auction industry in China remained ahead of the commercial art galleries. By 2005, the situation began to reverse, and commercial Chinese art galleries developed rapidly from 2006 to 2007.

In cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, the number of commercial art galleries skyrocketed. Such a phenomenon not only affected the local art scene, spurring the establishment of artist villages, but its influence has also extended to national and international levels. Examples of artist communities include: Beijing’s 798 Art District, Jiuchang Art District, Suojiacun Artist Village, Songzhuang Art District, Caochangdi Art District, and Guanyintang Art Avenue, and Shanghai’s Moganshan Art Area, Taikang Road Art District, Wujiaochang of the Yangpu District, and parts of the Pudong Zhangjiang Development Zone. Combining their expertise with backgrounds in finance, investment, and trading, investors in and directors of these new galleries are able to function more efficiently through innovative approaches.

China’s cultural policy since the twenty-first century has made overseas capital inflows into Chinese art galleries a common phenomenon. For instance, Beijing’s Red Gate Gallery, founded by Australian Brian Wallace, has been in operation for more than a decade. Also among the first generation of foreign-invested galleries was ShanghART Gallery, founded in 1996 by Lorenz Helbling, an art expert from . For many art pioneers, finding art venues was a long, drawn-out affair because of the restrictions imposed by China’s domestic policy and other variables. Today, the Red Gate Gallery is housed permanently at an historic site known as the South-East Corner Watchtower, and ShanghART Gallery occupies two spaces, the main gallery and the larger H-space in Shanghai’s Moganshan complex. In recent years, many foreign-invested galleries have chosen to base themselves in Beijing and Shanghai. An influx of investors from varied backgrounds and nationalities has also joined the art scene, including those from Germany,

20 Italy, the United States, Japan, Korea, , Taiwan, and Hong Kong. At present, a substantial number of galleries in Beijing and Shanghai are owned by Hong Kong and Taiwanese investors. To a certain degree, the infusion of these reputable and established art enterprises, such as Taipei’s Lin and Keng Gallery, Dimensions Art Center, Asia Art Center, New Age Gallery, and Soka Art Center, has strengthened the overall development of commercial Chinese galleries. Another phenomenon worth noting is the emergence of Korean art galleries. In the first half of 2007, seven Korean art galleries opened in Beijing. These internationally known galleries, such as Arario Gallery and PKM Gallery, have further improved the quality and management of Chinese art galleries.

In light of current trends, competition between Chinese art galleries is vigorous and diversified. It is composed not only of heterogeneous approaches to developing operations, marketing, and public relations strategies, but also the human resource challenges of staffing with directors of varied backgrounds. Despite the fierce competition, an increasing number of Chinese art galleries are gearing their agenda towards the promotion of exchanges between the Chinese and Western art worlds, as well as developing their profile within the Asia-Pacific region.

III. A Shift in Modality: Chinese Art Galleries in Step with Art Fairs A far cry from the current buoyant art scene, Chinese art galleries had once undergone a long recession. Impeded by this as well as by a lack of market support, the art fair industry soon came to a halt after a long period of inconsistent performance. By 2005, the situation reversed itself, and art expositions such as the Shanghai Art Fair and the Guangzhou Art Fair emerged with new vigour. Hence came the need for expositions— such as Art Beijing and China International Gallery Exposition (CIGE)—to base themselves on contemporary business models. While this shift gave the art fair industry a new face, it also restored its importance in advancing the development of the Chinese art market. In May 2005, the CIGE reached art sales exceeding RMB $50 million, and generated additional revenues of RMB $120 million from related industries.

In November 2005, the 9th Annual Shanghai Art Fair set new attendance and sales records with 55,000 visitors and art sales estimated at RMB $52 million. Compared to the previous year, the number of visitors in 2005 increased by 7,000 and the total art sales increased two-fold. In 2006, Art Beijing and CIGE both achieved good sales records, with an amount exceeding RMB $200 million, and an additional revenue of over RMB $500 million from related industries. In April 2007 CIGE yielded the same gross amount that it had in 2006. Larger in scale and with an international appeal, Art Beijing and ShContemporary in September 2007 achieved a dramatic sales performance and garnered an influential status in the contemporary Chinese art market.

Undoubtedly, the Chinese art auction industry still remains an indispensable sector in the market, even though its influence is slightly subdued by the rapid development of Chinese art galleries and art fairs. Yet it is also evident that the art auction industry has a direct effect upon the success of art galleries and art fairs; a prominent example is the Art Beijing 2006 Contemporary Art Fair, in which the Beijing Council International Auctions Company showcased a group of young contemporary artists. It is now a common practice for art auctions to form professional affiliations with art galleries and art fairs.

IV. Radical Changes in the Art Market Historically speaking, Chinese art had the same status as religious scriptures—both shared an esteemed status. Art appreciation was considered a sacred and solemn pursuit aimed at moral edification. Hence emerged the need for art collections intended to facilitate such activity.

21 According to early historical record, art collecting among court circles initially came in the form of an imperial commendation. At other times earnest advice was offered to rulers with respect to moral and philosophical inquiries. With the three doctrines—Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism—competing for a place of importance in Chinese thinking, Chinese art, along with its principles and values it subscribed to, experienced rapid development especially after the rise of literati painting. Art creation was no longer limited to the imperial circle. In fact, it became a realm wherein members of the court and civilians converged. Art collecting and appreciation slowly assumed its place as a way of living that was worthy of pursuit—for one’s personal enjoyment, expressions of emotions, idealism, values, and social status. As an undertaking becoming part of everyday life, art appreciation received an unprecedented reception as it provided people a means to experience spiritual cultivation and aesthetic pleasure. At the same time, high art collecting was seen as a symbol of prestige, a “reagent” inducing the collector to reveal his or her level of knowledge, status, and refinement of character.

In the modern era, even though there were slight modulations and changes in the practice of art collecting, its purpose and underlying principles remained intact. While great efforts were made to conserve cultural relics, collectors who were in step with the times began to set sights on new artistic creations and art movements, and offered their evaluation and appreciation through art collecting. Their concern and dedication encouraged the development of Chinese art. For some art collectors, art collecting could bring synchronic experiences; with a mere gaze at a painting, they could reach for the past and future and understand how life was conceived and how it ends. Time past and time future converge in the present—where all sense of time and exclusion dissolve.

Following this historical lineage, one might examine the values of art collecting and conclude that the Chinese art market should be, in essence, spiritually and culturally inclined. With the advent of the twenty-first century, however, the Chinese art market has undergone fundamental changes. In a society becoming predominantly driven by economic growth, intellectual pursuits and other endeavours aimed at enlightenment are rapidly being replaced by art investment. The Chinese art market, therefore, has taken a radical turn, adopting operational and financial management models that are tailored to meet the needs of the investment market. While extensively changing the structure of the art market, this shift in the practice of art collecting has been corroding the principle of conserving cultural and historical assets.

There are three types of art investment: rational, emotional, and undefined. Economists at home and abroad generally believe that the current Chinese investment market is still in its infancy. China’s stock and futures markets, for instance, are still primarily composed of a group of investors driven by emotional buying. With little access to mainstream media coverage, these investors can rely only on alternative sources for market updates. Limited in options and possessing a keen sense of financial risk, they tend to display an erratic buying pattern, causing the market to rise and fall dramatically. Art investment, on the other hand, can be categorized as an “undefined” market, one that is, comparatively speaking, even less developed. This type of market is characterized by a group of investors with varied buying patterns and the intent to make maximum profit. Lacking judgment and reasoning, they often fail to make sound financial choices or set reasonable goals. In conclusion, while the Chinese art market is thriving on its merging with the financial world, opportunism and erratic buying patterns can also have a negative impact on the market, causing instability and fluctuation for the future.

22 Exhibition Culture and the Art Market Yü Christina Yü

Song Dong, Art Travel Agency, 1999, performance. Courtesy of the artist.

hen contemporary Chinese art entered the global market during the 1980s and 1990s, it crossed previously well-defined boundaries of artistic practice. Prior to W this, art creation in China was (in theory) only for the purpose of self-cultivation and self-expression, and any mention of market value would be met with disdain. Starting in the 1980s, Chinese artists began to exhibit their works in various exhibitions throughout the world, and their art has become increasingly visible, desirable, and, consequently, marketable as a cultural commodity both inside and outside of China. This crossing of boundaries also brought about changes in ideas and discourses pertaining to art in China, ranging from the artist’s identity and

23 ways of producing art, to questions of audience, and to definitions of art itself. An example of such changes is the various ways artwork is exhibited—more specifically, how one image can take on different interpretations within different exhibition contexts–and how it has become a point of contention in contemporary Chinese art.

Commodification was one of the most conspicuous changes in contemporary Chinese art once it became available to the art market. Within the complex system of the art market, an exhibition can build a crucial link between the artist and a potential collector. Exhibitions bring not only visibility, but also credentials to an artist or to an artwork—perhaps two equally crucial factors that directly influence the market value of that artwork and thus make it more collectible. As exhibitions increasingly play a role in mediating the relationship between artist and audience, they also delineate a different context in which art can be presented and viewed.

In order to survive and excel in the highly competitive art market, artists working within its system must face the issue of negotiation and compliance. In the 1990s, there was a noticeable unease among Chinese artists who were entering the art market. Whether welcoming it and striving within it, or being ambivalent, and even criticizing it, many chose to use art creation as an opportunity to comment on the status of art as a fast growing commodity, something that was unprecedented within the history of art in China. In a 1999 performance, for example, Song Dong solicited a reconsideration of artists and their artworks within a commercial context. In Art Travel Agency, he personified an imaginary art travel agent who would lead a tour for interested audiences of artworks exhibited at an opening of a modern mall. In a self-promotional poster that has become the record of the work, Song Dong stood in front of the high-rise building of a commercial mall and shouted out through a speaker, “Here you’ll find contemporary art for sale!” The sarcastic role he played was staged to attest to the reality that art has increasingly become part of the larger market system and commercial consumption. Moreover, by exhibiting his work in a commercial arena, Song Dong also raised the question as to whether artists themselves often perpetuate the system for art consumption.

This work points to the issue of how contemporary Chinese artists react to the market system with different forms of presentation of their artwork. It is true that more conventional modes of art making such as painting and have been considered by many artists as less sufficient mediums for responding to the complexity of current Chinese society, and that digital imaging technology, for instance, has become an appropriate means to facilitate the varied ways of art making. But it is also true that even previously unsaleable artwork such as performance or textual material can now be recorded through photography, exhibited, and then sold as “documentation” of the original work. It is a conscious choice of the artist in terms of finding ways to present artwork, but this choice also involves consideration of how this work can be re-presented at different kinds of exhibitions and to different kinds of audiences. In fact, examining the ways that artwork is exhibited reveals an aspect of contemporary Chinese art where the relations and tensions among artist, exhibition, and audience in the operation of the art market can be best observed.

To make this point more explicit, there is the example of Li Keran (1907–1989), a traditional Chinese painter who started his career in the early twentieth century, when the idea of the art exhibitions began to flourish in China.1 With the advent of this newly established venue, the exhibition, for artists to showcase their work in public, Li Keran and many other painters of his generation, although still using the tradition of ink, paper, and silk, began to make large-scale

24 paintings that were different from traditional hand-scroll or album paintings. What is striking about this shift is the fundamental change in the relationship between the artwork and its viewer, and the way the painting is viewed within a public space—hung on the wall, framed by the building interior, juxtaposed, and thus “competing” with other paintings. Instead of being enjoyed by a few people in a private, intimate space as in pre-modern China, paintings at this burgeoning period of the art exhibition were made to cater to a new public, that is, to an emerging audience for the art exhibition. The change of presentation, for example, to large-scale painting, is not only a liberating choice, but a decision that restructured the relationship among artist, artwork, exhibition space, and audience.

Compared with the artwork produced in the early history of art exhibitions in China, contemporary art is much more diversified in its forms of presentation. What also distinguishes contemporary art from that of the earlier period is that the way in which an artwork is exhibited has gradually become inseparable from the artwork itself as part of the artist’s creation. As an integral part of the marketable art product, an art exhibition thus obtains a role in determining the marketability of a given work. One way to address this issue is to consider contemporary photography, for the reproducibility of the medium provides different possibilities of altering its presentation. Hai Bo, for example, during 1999 and 2000, made a photo series in which he re- created pre-Cultural Revolution family snapshots with the surviving members of the families in the original photos, and then juxtaposed the re-creation with the original as the artwork. Initially, the work was displayed as paired photos in an enlarged scale, and separate frames hung side by side on the wall. Later, this presentation was reconceived using the same pair of photos, but this time in their original (and thus much smaller) size and placed inside a single picture frame.2 These two kinds of visual presentation tease out different relations between the viewer and the artwork, and, indeed, prompt different ways of perceiving the work. Both works—or, more precisely, the same work presented in two different ways—were on the market at different times and sold for different prices. This relative liberty of contemporary Chinese artists to exhibit artwork in diverse ways—in comparison with their predecessors of an earlier period—is not completely uncontested or met with unconcern by the market system. Indeed, the question for contemporary Chinese artists today is one less of where to exhibit than of how to exhibit. Since the second half of the 1990s, in particular, different types of exhibition venues have multiplied in China’s major cities, and opportunities to be shown in international exhibitions have increased. More than ever, the art exhibition is crucial in carving out a “space” for Chinese art and artists. How art is to be exhibited in this space, however, is not completely under the control of artists, but, rather, is negotiated through consideration of several curatorial issues. By and large, these issues relate to ways of presenting each individual work within the overarching conceptual framework of a given exhibition. Furthermore, although most exhibition spaces are flexible and accommodating, the design of individual exhibitions often calls for particular spatial arrangements that are related to a given curatorial theme and to the need to draw the attention of the audience. The questions an artist faces are often further complicated by problems of how to exhibit “effectively” within different exhibition concepts and their corresponding spaces. Here again, photography and video, as media that are easily reproduced and flexible in scale, are particularly relevant examples. Anyone who frequents exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art can recount experiences of seeing the same photograph or video exhibited in different sizes at different venues.

An interesting example is Hong Lei’s 1998 work An Imitation of Song Dynasty Painter Liang Kai’s Painting of Sakyamuni Coming out of Retirement. In this photographic work, Hong restaged a classical ink painting by Liang Kai in which Sakyamuni appears on a mountain path after coming

25 out of a period of spiritual austerity. To depict the serenity the Sage acquired through this spiritual attainment, Liang Kai, in the original ink-on-silk painting, skilfully portrayed him with soft touches of the brush, focusing on his step as if he were still in meditation. In Hong Lei’s photographic recreation, however, the artist himself plays the unlikely role of Sakyamuni, unkempt in appearance, staring at the viewer in surprise, as if caught off guard. Also, Hong Lei’s Sakyamuni is proportionally larger and more dominant in the composition of the photograph than Sakyamuni is in Liang Kai’s work, reinforcing the sense of displacement of the Hong Lei, An Imitation of Song Dynasty Painter Liang Kai’s Painting of Sakyamuni Coming out of Retirement, 1998, C-print. Courtesy of Chambers Fine classical painting as well as the Art, New York. religious and cultural implications behind it. This photograph has been exhibited at various venues as an autonomous work—that is, without its historical reference. Occasionally, in exhibition catalogues, the original Song dynasty painting is reproduced, but often on a much smaller scale, and placed in an introductory essay that is separate from the reproduction of Hong Lei’s modern photograph.

In 2006, Hong Lei’s work was included in the , held in Gwangju, Korea. Featuring artworks by seventy-two artists and organized under the theme Fever Variations, the Biennale aimed at illuminating an Asian vision of the contemporary art world today. Hong Lei’s photograph was included in a section with a sub-theme that traced the roots of Asian cultures, Myth and Fantasy. An Imitation of Song Dynasty Painter Liang Kai’s Painting of Sakyamuni Coming out of Retirement was enlarged and printed on a transparency that was divided into nine square pieces in a mosaic assemblage and lit from behind. In order to inform the audience of the source of the work, an image of Liang Kai’s hanging scroll painting was digitally projected on the floor in front of the new recreation placed on the facing wall. Never before had the photograph been exhibited side-by-side with its reference. The direct juxtaposition of the reference and the recreation may have helped the audience to read the work in a new way in comparison with only exhibiting the recreation alone. Also, when compared with the original version of Hong Lei’s photograph, the Gwangju Biennale version was evidently different. The earlier one focused on the facial expression of the artist in disguise as Sakyamuni, but this version was divided into two parts in two squares. Indeed, the Gwangju Biennale version was presented in such a different way that it has become a work that is distinctive and localized to that particular exhibition space. It is still a work by Hong Lei, but this presentation represents, or visualizes, a process of consideration that took into account the specifics of the artwork, exhibition, and audience.

The strategies used in the context of contemporary art exhibitions are probably familiar to most artists today. It may not be too far-fetched to suggest that in recent years this practice has given rise

26 to a distinctive exhibition culture. The extent to which this exhibition culture may have specific bearing on contemporary Chinese artwork and its consequences in the art market, however, still awaits a careful evaluation. Here, I want to consider works by another artist, Yu Hong, to offer some suggestions.

Starting in 1999, in a manner close to autobiographical narrative, Yu Hong produced a series of oil paintings entitled Witness to Growth Series. Corresponding to each year of her life, Yu Hong recreated a one metre by one metre oil painting based on old photographs. Each of Hong Lei, Installation view of An Imitation of Song Dynasty Painter Liang Kai’s Painting of Sakyamuni Coming out of Retirement, Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, these oil paintings is paired Korea, 2006. Courtesy of the artist. with a blown-up documentary photograph taken from newspapers of the same year. All oil paintings in the series are of the same size and shape, but the size and shape of the blown-up photographs are determined by the originals found in the newspaper. Although paintings and photographs are grouped as pairs, each individual image, whether photograph or oil painting, can also be viewed separately, since the juxtaposed images are not only framed separately but also differ in size and medium. How the two narratives—Yu Hong’s life and the historical context—should be interpreted and associated with one another is therefore open to the viewer.

Continuing to explore her interest in representing life stories through art, Yu Hong created the She Series between 2002 and 2006. Some strategies of presentation seen in the Witness to Growth Series are applied in these works, but with subtle changes that articulate a different theme. The She Series is about the artist’s own investigation of women who come from different social backgrounds but share the cultural identity of Chinese women. To establish dialogues with the different women in her art, Yu Hong created oil paintings of these women from photographic images and then exhibited each painting side-by-side with a photograph picked by the woman the artist painted. Unlike the Witness to Growth Series, however, the paired images in this series are of the same height and adjacent to each other, and the same sitter appears in both the oil painting and blown-up photograph, thus establishing an intrinsic relationship between the two images. Also unlike the Witness to Growth Series, where a consistent story is represented, in the She Series there lies within each pairing of painting and photograph, and with each revisiting and representing of the sitter’s past, two sides of a visual dialogue: the selected woman herself and the artist. Although these two series created by Yu Hong are considerably different in their content from the previously discussed case of Hong Lei, they do at the same time share certain qualities. The visual effectiveness of both lies in the attention paid to methods of presentation, in the exhibition space, as well as in the interaction of the artwork with viewers.

27 Changing ways of presenting artwork is not unique to contemporary Chinese art but, as suggested here, has become one feature that characterizes it in the growing market system. They also collectively demonstrate an invigorated relationship of artists, artworks, and market in the contemporary context. In the West, an interesting point of comparison can be traced back to eighteenth-century France, when the display of artwork was one of the critical Yu Hong, installation view of Witness to Growth Series, 2003, Hubei Art Institute, Wuhan, China. Courtesy of the artist. concerns in the development of the cabinet de tableaux and salon exhibitions.3 Under a guiding principle of visual symmetry and balance of the art assembled in a display room, individual works might be commissioned for specific locations in the room or as pendants for other works in private collections or exhibitions. Jacques- Louis David (1748–1825), for instance, once exhibited The Death of Socrates and Oath of the Horatii as a pair, one above the other, Yu Hong, installation view, She Series, 2003, Hubei Art Institute, Wuhan, China. Courtesy of the artist. at the Salon du Louvre of 1785. Indeed, as the early market system and the related salon culture emerged in France, artists, collectors, and exhibitions were bound in a new relationship and context that did not exist previously.

It seems that Chinese contemporary art has similarly entered an unprecedented, new context, only in a much more vigorous market and a postmodern circumstance. Without established conventions of displaying art and exhibition practices in pre-modern China, contemporary Chinese artists, as neophytes in the global market, seem to have been able to react in more diversified ways and open themselves to different possibilities. They learn and internalize the norms and languages of exhibition culture in order to create their own positions. As has been argued by scholars, in the postmodern context, the artwork and its meaning are open to more fluid associations, re-significations, and localizations. In this way, the global market in the contemporary art world presents challenges for Chinese artists but also brings forth opportunities for new ways of exhibiting their works.

Notes 1 For a discussion of Li Keran and his role in exhibition culture in early twentieth-century China, see Wan Qingli, “Li Keran and His Exhibition Paintings,” in Chinese Art: Modern Expressions, eds. Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999), 183–211. 2 For a discussion of the different exhibition versions of the series, see Wu Hung, “From Junk to Art and Commodity: How a Discarded Family Photo Entered the Venice Biennale and Was Later Auctioned for 48,336 Yuan as a Print at Sotheby’s,” unpublished paper presented at the conference Art and Commerce: Circulating Cultures of East Asia, held at the University of Chicago, May 13–14, 2005. 3 For a discussion of this issue, see Colin B. Bailey, “Conventions of the Eighteenth-Century Cabinet de tableaux: Blondel d’Azincourt’s La première idée de la curiosité,” Art Bulletin 69, no. 3 (Sept 1987), 431–47.

28 Interview with Zheng Shengtian at the Seven Stars Bar, 798, Beijing Britta Erickson Transcription by Chunyee Li

Britta Erickson: I know there are people following the numbers in the art market, graphing price changes and so on. That’s not so interesting to me because it’s sort of an obvious way of thinking about the art market. I’m interested in the big changes in the art market, the broader and more general effects it’s having on the art world. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Zheng Shengtian: In general, I think this market boom is a positive thing. It’s good to have more money coming to artists or to the art market. It never happened before. Artists are always struggling, trying to sell their work. Only a handful of artists may have collectors, but many skilled artists cannot keep producing or sell their work to support themselves. Now both domestic and international markets are growing for Chinese art. I think this is a very good thing, and this is the best time for Chinese art so far.

For many artists, a good studio guarantees them a good environment to create their work. Because life is becoming more stable, they can think of creating work of better quality. So I think it’s a good thing. From my own experience, like our journal Yishu, in the first three years, our readers mostly consisted of professionals and a small group of collectors who were interested in Chinese art. Then we gained subscriptions from scholars in universities, curators, and critics—so we had a comparatively small readership in the first three years. In the last two years, especially this year, we saw very rapid growth of different kinds of subscribers—lawyers, financial advisors, doctors, and people from all walks of life are now reading about contemporary Chinese art. So to me and to our editors this is really encouraging because we are writing and publishing for a much larger audience. So if the journal itself can expand our readership like this, I believe Chinese art in general also can receive a much wider reception in the world.

Britta Erickson: Can you give me some idea how much the readership has grown?

Zheng Shengtian: Compared to 2004, our readership has doubled. A lot of people have ordered whole sets of previous issues. So our staff has to mail big packages to some places. Fortunately, we still have the earlier issues in stock, but this won’t last long because we printed only very limited copies in the beginning. Anyway, I just want to give you an example of why the boom in the art market is a good thing. Not only people who are specifically interested in the Chinese art are reading about it or coming to China to see the art, but many collectors and art lovers—people who have never had experience with Chinese art—are now looking at Chinese art as part of contemporary art. I think this makes it the best time for Chinese artists because they can now reach a much wider audience internationally. And, of course, as the art market is becoming larger, many artists can now sell their work. The number of galleries since last year has grown so fast. You don’t see such growth anywhere else. A similar situation happened in Taiwan in the 1980s and early 1990s, where there was a kind of market boom, yet it was no comparison to the scale of the current development in Beijing and Shanghai. Over the past three months, several new galleries have opened. And they are not small—they are huge. The galleries are even larger than the ones in Chelsea or in other cosmopolitan cities. Also, the standards of operation have greatly

29 improved. I still remember the first gallery I opened in Shanghai in 1989. It was very difficult at the time when we tried to open the first contemporary art gallery. We wanted to operate the gallery by international standards, but it was very, very difficult at that time. It took me so much time to choose and hire a person who could speak both Chinese and English and also understand art.

Britta Erickson: What was the gallery called?

Zheng Shengtian: It was the gallery of the Shanghai Drama Institute (SDI), located in a new building on its campus facing Huashan Road. They invited me to set up this new gallery to promote Shanghai artists. It was considered contemporary because at that time painting was still considered the dominant medium. But we scheduled the opening at the wrong time—on June 6th of 1989. When news of the Tian’anmen Square massacre on June 4th came to Shanghai on June 5th, the city went on strike and all businesses closed and all traffic stopped. Opening of the Shanghai Drama Institute Gallery, June 6, 1989. From left: Professor Zhou Benyi, Chair of the Stage And we opened the gallery the next day. Design Department, SDI; Waldemar A. Nielsen; Siobhan Oppenheimer; Zheng Shengtian. Right: Wang Lihua, But it was a very intriguing situation to see manager of the gallery. Photo: Lian Cheng. people still coming from the art community and other areas. Everyone was very quiet and sad. It was like a funeral. People did talk—not politics, but about art. Almost everyone burst into tears. It was a memorable time, and the gallery did not last too long because the situation was not right. So I learned the gallery was closed after a year. I left China earlier, but the manager, Wang Lihua, a former student of mine who was running the gallery, also quit after about a year. She now lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Britta Erickson: It was a commercial gallery?

Zheng Shengtian: Yes, that was our first time running a commercial gallery of modern art in China. And at that time I wrote some texts in art magazines about the art market because China didn’t have a market. So we tried to promote this as the first modern gallery in Shanghai that could reach international standards. We tried to follow the norm of having professional management, bilingual staff, and sales contracts with artists. But of course the project was done prematurely; it was still at an experimental stage. Now seventeen years have passed, and it’s like living my wildest dream. I never thought Chinese art galleries would grow so fast, become so huge in scale. That’s why I’m happy to see this happening. Of course I still have worries, but in general this is what we dreamt about.

Britta Erickson: So what are your worries?

Zheng Shengtian: Art is always about quality. The quality should be evaluated by experts, scholars, curators, and critics. The weakness of Chinese art scene is that critics and curators do not have much power. So their influence is very limited within the recent art market. And I would even say there are not many independent critics who can write about the art produced nowadays. So this raises a lot of questions: What is good art? What is good quality? Why are the prices so high? Why

30 would this painting sell for USD $20,000 or USD $30,000? There is no logic. The only explanation we can come up with could be: this gallery sells this piece for this price, so the auction house records this data and raises the price. But the question follows: does this make for a good painting? Can anyone answer the question of why it is a good painting?

Britta Erickson: Overseas critics don’t seem to be able to properly evaluate contemporary Chinese painting, and even China doesn’t have critics trained in that way.

Zheng Shengtian: Yes, that’s right.

Britta Erickson: They should be able to explain what makes one work of art better than another.

Zheng Shengtian: I think in any art scene, there should be a group of very knowledgeable critics who can write about art. So the first step is to have exhibition venues; the second step is to have critics write about, evaluate, or criticize art. And then those works could be sent to museums, non-profit exhibitions, and galleries or collectors. But China doesn’t have the second step, so when artists produce work, their work immediately goes to the galleries. Of course the people at the galleries may have some knowledge, but we can’t rely only on the knowledge from dealers because they have their own agendas. One needs to be in an objective position in order to critque art. Painting is still considered the major medium in China, so before we even talk about the new media, let’s talk about painting. What does contemporary Chinese painting stand for? We have a history of ink-brush painting, then we have a history of learning Western-style painting. The influences came from Europe in the early twentieth century, and Russia in the 1950s, followed by Western modern and contemporary schools such as Pop art. But how do all these processes lead to the development of contemporary Chinese painting? And why do we say this is a good artist? Or why is this a good work by this artist? Of course one artist cannot do everything good, you know. Even for Fang Lijuin and Wang Guangyi—they have probably made more than one thousand paintings, but their best paintings may have come from one-tenth of their work. And why do their best paintings come from one-tenth of their work and not the other 90%? You don’t read anything analytical about this type of creative process. But we really need this type of discussion. Otherwise it is very dangerous because in the future, when the market collapses, or the economy goes wrong, a large number of artworks circulating in the current market probably will have no value at all.

Britta Erickson: One reason why China does not have this kind of criticism is that to get exposure, to get on the front cover of a magazine, you just have to pay fees. . . .

Zheng Shengtian: I think there’s a lack of criticism in China. In order to have your work evaluated, you really need to be considered by someone, by the leaders of the art community, independent scholars, critics, and curators. They need to discuss this issue. Now the situation looks like it has become a train without a driver. The train goes so fast and there is no driver who can tell you whether it’s the right direction to go. We’ve seen a lot of bad paintings. Although the number of collectors has increased—two years ago we perhaps had less than ten buyers of contemporary Chinese art, and now we have more than one hundred—most of the buyers can’t tell what’s right or wrong and what’s good or bad. They just buy. And we can’t consider many of these people as collectors, but as investors. They see art simply as some kind of a commodity you can make a quick profit from. So they have no idea about quality and will buy really bad paintings at very high prices. If the prices are set by Sotheby’s or some famous galleries, they will buy the works and follow the big names. What if the works they bought might not be good paintings? Someday, when

31 the prices go down and they want to sell the works, nobody will want to buy them because they are bad paintings. I think that’s what worries me.

In school, we need a very strong program to train art critics, and in society, you have to have good media, good magazines, newspapers, or a good critic who does not work only for money but is providing knowledge to readers. Really, this is a very urgent thing China should do. I’ve talked to many people, and this is why I insist on working with Yishu. We feel sorry that this journal does not finance itself and still relies on our publisher’s support. But I think this journal is necessary because at least it provides a platform where people can write critically and analytically. I know we will have more good writers speaking frankly about Chinese art. We’re planning to organize a symposium in the near future to talk about Chinese painting. We want to invite respected experts who may not know much about China but who are knowledgeable about art. We want to invite them to come and see the art but not show them the names of artists. Even if we tell them the names, they may not have heard of them before. We want them to look at the paintings and ask them: do you think this is a good or a bad painting? Why? I think this kind of a discussion is needed.

Britta Erickson: But if you get people who are knowledgeable about contemporary art, I think a lot of them will already have been exposed to Chinese art.

Zheng Shengtian: Yes, of course—we don’t live in an empty space. What we need are more objective opinions. I know some people specialize in Chinese art, like you, for example, so I’m not going to invite you [laughs]. I’m thinking of inviting good critics from countries like Latin America and India. They know about their own cultures. They may not know about China, but there are always comparisons you can draw between cultures. And we can also invite people from the and Islamic cultures and get them to sit together and talk.

Britta Erickson: You should also invite some European critics.

Zheng Shengtian: Yes, of course. I just talked to Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker from Munich. She recently worked on an exhibition, The Art of Tomorrow, of early 20th-century German painters. There was a group of painters who were not very famous in art history, but who are now being re-discovered. What made me interested in this show was the discussion about painting: when did painting change from figurative to abstract? This is the kind of process people talk about a lot: What is the nature of a painting? What can a painter do? A lot of these discussions touch on the issue of how we judge a painting in terms of its quality. I think we could at least introduce to China this type of discussion. And then we could also get some Chinese historians or art historians who know a lot about Chinese painting. Chinese painting has a long history that harbours its own kind of theory. We can bring the experts together and have them meet and discuss art. They do not even need to agree with each other, but at least there are some other views that will be very interesting.

The market itself also has its own rules. The price may continue to increase, and when the economy is going crazy, the market will go crazy. As a result, artists are becoming rich, they can have a comfortable life, and they have enough materials to paint and they can travel. This is new for many artists. When I brought artists from North America or other countries to China, they were very envious of Chinese artists. It’s probably everyone’s dream to have a huge studio space to work in, and I want to have a huge studio like that but have never had one. My students, even my students’ students, are able to have large studios and hire a number of people to make canvases

32 for them. In general it’s good, but of course it’s risky for artists when they become too comfortable because their creative power may become lost. This does not only happen to artists, but everybody. If you’re an entrepreneur or a businessman, when you become too rich, then your life may become decadent. When you have too much ease and fun, your company may go bankrupt. Someone told me once that artists should Artist Zhan Wang’s studio in Shunyi, Beijing. Photo: Zheng Shengtian. be starving because if they have too much money, they will become playboys, because artists know how to enjoy themsleves. And I said this applies not only to artists, but everyone. But I think there are still good artists who are not influenced by this. Some money will help them because they won’t need to spend their time to search for every penny in order to survive or to feed their families. Now their lifestyle has become more comfortable, so it’s good. And there are artists who are not seduced by money and are fully capable of controlling themselves and continue to produce good quality artworks. So I think the future of Chinese art really lies in the hands of these people. These artists are still producing good paintings and are not driven by the market. Some good artists like Gu Dexin and Geng Jianyi have kept producing quality work and keep a low profile, I think they are really good and I like them. They are not chasing after the dealers all the time or repeating themselves. Their main concern is producing good art and maintaining their creative energy.

Britta Erickson: It seems like ideally once you solve the problem of money for general life purposes, and you achieve financial security, you should be able to experiment more. And it’s so disappointing that some people don’t.

Zheng Shengtian: Yes, and there are many young artists who want to make money like the successful ones. So they will copy them. This is happening everywhere. The criticism of artists getting more money—I don’t think you need to criticize that. Everyone wants a comfortable life and security. But as I said we need to pay more attention to how we can encourage artists to concentrate on their work. There are many artists with talent in China, but it is very crucial to help them grow in a healthy way. And we raised this issue when we went to the education forum in Yan’an last year. In this situation, when the market is booming, education becomes the number one thing we have to focus on because we have to train good critics, good managers, and good museum directors. Once we have those people who can guarantee that art goes in a direction that is not too much influenced by money itself, but has its own curatorial direction that encourages creativity and art production, I think all the bad influences of the market will be decreased.

Artists in the West probably are used to this and not so much influenced by the money issue. In China people used to be very poor. People from the countryside and small towns coming to cities like Beijing ended up living in small villages because they couldn’t pay the rent. And now some of the Chinese paintings have gone up to at least USD $10,000 a piece. Can you believe USD $10,000 is equivalent to an ordinary person’s income for five years? So people make outrageous dreams. They want to be an overnight success and make the price jump everyday. But this does not happen very often, and only to one or a few lucky artists. The majority of artists should face reality and focus on what they are producing.

33 Beyond Selling Art: Galleries and the Construction of Art Market Norms

Ling-Yun Tang

This essay stems from my dissertation research on the sociology of the contemporary art market in China. For eighteen months, between 2004 and 2006, I lived in Beijing on a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship and a Yale Council on East Asian Studies grant. During this time, I interned at the Chinese Contemporary Gallery in 798 arts district (Dashanzi) and conducted interviews with about fifty individuals, including artists, gallery owners, curators, auction house representatives, and other members of the art world. Some of these conversations were held in confidentiality, and therefore names are not always mentioned here.

The market for contemporary Chinese art has grown quickly over the past decade. Since the 1990s, the number of contemporary art galleries in Beijing has increased from a small handful to several hundred, representing works that range from the more traditional to the more avant- garde. In supply terms, approximately two hundred galleries selling contemporary art exist in Beijing today, including a sizeable proportion that is Chinese-run. Mainland galleries are also becoming more prominent in the local commercial art circuit; between 2004 and 2007, the number of galleries based in Chinese cities like Shanghai and Beijing at the Chinese International Gallery Exposition, Beijing’s first art fair, has doubled (see table 1). This phenomenal expansion can largely be explained by the easing of governmental restrictions concerning foreign investment in art businesses, which has spurred international art galleries to seek a foothold in the Chinese market and Chinese galleries to compete with them. With commercial success, experimental art activities have also become more legitimate in the eyes of a state that previously forced avant- garde endeavours underground. Where a decade ago contemporary artists largely lacked formal sites to stage art events and sell their work, today the gallery system has expanded the distribution channels into the mainstream art market.

On the demand side, economic growth has also led to the rise of a new class of nouveaux riches seeking ways to show off their wealth. The consumer desires of the upwardly mobile have catapulted the country into third place in demand for luxury goods around the world.1 Art is the ultimate luxury product, and in recent years contemporary art has gained a following among foreign and, increasingly, domestic buyers who want to sink their money into objects of distinction.

Year Number of Chinese Number of Chinese Mainland-based galleries Mainland-based galleries galleries as percent of total

2004 21 68 31 2005 31 90 34 2006 32 97 31 2007 41 118 34

Table 1. Participation of Mainland-based galleries at the Chinese International Gallery Exposition by year (see http://www.cige-bj.com/main_en.html)

34 Caochangdi art district, Beijing. Photo: Zheng Shengtian.

The overpowering logic of market norms in the art world has met with fierce criticism from some observers, who suggest that commercial success threatens the quality of artists’ works.2 In keeping with cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s assertion that the “commodity-hood” of things cannot be taken for granted,3 this article examines how members of the gallery world in China have tried to deal with the paradoxes of art’s multiple value systems in their everyday business practices. Commercial galleries serve as sites where artworks are transformed through the process of commodification into objects with exchange value. At the same time, galleries are also places where non-market values are ritually expressed and defended. The judgments that gallery owners make to differentiate between good and bad practices in the art world reveal how these art market players are constantly confronted with the dualities of art’s status as both “pure art” and saleable commodity. While the art market is now a phenomenon beyond question, gallery representatives defend an ethos of high art in a social context where the unrestrained commoditization of culture has become the norm.

The Love of Art, The Taint of Money

“. . . The market does not judge art: it merely rides the reputation merry-go-round. Good art is art that sells.” –John Windsor4

In the everyday world of gallery operations, the idealized view of “pure art” collides with the practical concerns inherent in the business side of gallery operations. How do galleries reconcile the idealized sublime experience of viewing art with the functional requirement of dealing in art as a commodity for sale?

With market-based art prices serving as the ubiquitous symbols of success, galleries have aimed to balance aesthetic definitions of art against the economic bottom line of profits. Concerns about abusive market practices, such as disingenuous bidding at auctions to drive up prices, have grown steadily in recent years, especially with the rise of a wealthy domestic consumer base that is known more for its speculative interest than its genuine appreciation for, or understanding

35 Arario Gallery, Jiuchang art district, Beijing. Photo: Zheng Shengtian. of, art. Collectors have turned to contemporary artworks as investment instruments in response to downturns in the stock and real estate markets, which in turn have raised prices across the board, especially on the art auction block. As market prices climb, purchasing art has become tremendously popular and profitable among foreign and domestic collectors.

Concerns about unethical practices in the emerging market for contemporary art are compounded by the fact that many artists themselves feel the lure of the market and are looking for a way to profit from their works. The high demand for contemporary art has manifested itself in the material enrichment of a small but growing group of artists who can exercise power of choice in the market. Many of these artists eschew contracts with private dealers or galleries in favour of self-representation, or play galleries off one another during the negotiation process so as to attain higher prices or greater professional control.

Gallery owners, bemoaning this state of affairs, have sought to tidy up messy art world practices by pushing for greater market discipline in their work as intermediaries between the producers and consumers of art. They believe that galleries serve a meaningful role in the creation of a sustainable art world—defined as the nexus of artists, distributors, and buyers of art, and hence far more than just an art market—by helping artists build viable long-term careers that can weather the ups and downs of the market, and by distributing their works to worthy collectors and not mere speculators.5 Some gallery dealers distinguish between those buyers with an authentic appreciation of art and those who see art in more instrumental, investment-based terms. The critical judgments that are made about clients are also made about auction houses, other galleries, and artists as well, and exemplify how galleries have attempted to protect the sanctity of art in a moral universe that places high cultural and aesthetic standards for evaluating art above mere material standards such as commodity status. This is not to suggest that the same individuals who are uneasy about the effects of a runaway market are not also profiting financially from their participation within it; nevertheless the bifurcation of “art” and “market” in the discourse of the gallery world indicates an attempt at idealizing the non-commodity oriented motives that drive the galleries’ work.

36 Courtyard Gallery annex, Caochangdi art district, Beijing. Photo: Zheng Shengtian.

From Peasant Investors to Ideal Collectors

Galleries rely on a core group of regular collectors to keep the flow of art moving. In the early stages of the development of the art market, art galleries selling contemporary Chinese art looked almost exclusively to foreign patrons for support. For some galleries, the heavy reliance on foreign clientele has meant selling works that play to customers’ taste for art products that tend to essentialize the meaning of “Chinese.” A young representative of a Chinese-owned gallery said that a not insignificant number of his clients included tourists who like traditional Chinese New Year’s prints. He confessed to marking up the prices for these cheap prints at least ten-fold at resale since so many foreigners were willing to purchase them.6

In contrast to this more profit-oriented model of salesmanship is a model that strives to appeal to a less commercially minded, more intellectually highbrow audience. Many galleries idealize their relationships with buyers who have a more cultivated understanding of art. They see themselves as playing a critical bridging role between artists and museums or top collectors, who are perceived to be the guardians of the best and most important works of art in a given genre or historical period. A manager at Beijing Tokyo Art Projects says that in providing funding, as well as a venue to show works by interesting artists, “the gallery is the step between ‘zero’ and the museum.”7 Alex Cao, a dealer of contemporary Chinese art in New York, says that he would ideally like to sell all his artists’ works to museums and important collectors so that the works can be shared with the public, and not hoarded by people who are purchasing just for the sake of financial investment.8

Buyers who purchase for investment are scorned and sometimes rejected as clients by gallery owners because they do not exhibit the traits of the “serious collector.” Critical remarks expressed by gallery representatives illustrate their concern over China’s new rich and their lack of cultural sophistication. One Beijing dealer remarks: “The new buyers were originally peasants. My colleagues agree that 90% of buyers are interested in investing in art. There’s no doubt the market has become the new place to invest money. There is no tax, no registration involved, and it’s easy to transfer the art. You can upgrade your class in the meantime. These buyers don’t love or

37 Opening, Xin Dong Cheng Space for Contemporary Art, Beijing. Photo: Ling-Yun Tang. understand art. They don’t even enjoy it. They just put it in the safe . . . and resell it after three years. They’re only buying art because the art market is doing better than the stock market.”9

The opinion of Zhang Li of the Shanghai Gallery of Art is typical. He contrasts his respect for returned overseas Chinese collectors, who seem to “understand what it’s about,” with his dislike of local investors who “look for paintings just to make money.”10 He fears that such practices will negatively impact on the overall health of the art market, and his hope is to promote the connoisseurship of contemporary art, which he believes can convey the deeper significance of the changes taking place in China: “There are creative people creating things and they need an audience for those things.” Thus, despite the fact that commercialization is the current dominant reality, this manager still believes that “very good artists should do good art, regardless,” and that it is the job of galleries to recommend these artists to potential buyers.11 Furthermore, he notes that while many Chinese buyers understand the cultural significance of Chinese antiques and old paintings, few are adequately equipped to understand or appreciate contemporary art. Therefore it is the role of galleries to legitimize the artistic worth of this genre to them. “Their knowledge of the contemporary world is not systematic. Sometimes they understand what is going on; at other times we have to guide them.”12

Indeed, Chinese buyers new to the field of art are often unfamiliar with its pricing structure, and many gallery owners see it as their role to socialize buyers into the culture of collecting. The first time that new buyers approach a gallery to purchase art can be a very intimidating experience. First-time buyers themselves are usually cognizant of the learning process in which they are taking part and generally recognize that they lack the savoir-faire of more seasoned art collectors. One of the functions of galleries is to minimize the educational gulf that separates investors and true collectors. Gallery owners see the cultivation of long-term relationships with aspiring collectors as an important function of their position in the art world. Notes one Beijing gallery director: “Among foreign buyers, even those who are purchasing a painting worth two or three thousand U.S. dollars will consider if it is possible to pay in installments. They might be a low-level employee

38 Auction preview, ShContemporary Art Fair, September 2007. Photo: Zheng Shengtian. in a company with limited income, but they truly like the work. This is the type of investor that is meaningful to us.”13 In this director’s estimation, foreign galleries that maintain long-term relations with their artists are representative of the ideal business model to follow.

To promote the works of artists takes time, and it is a process that requires cultivating knowledgeable collectors. Huang Liaoyuan, manager of Beijing Art Now Gallery, believes that there is definite potential in this direction, remarking that “high cultural attainment is very important” in Beijing.14 Though the market is not yet mature and foreign buyers continue to dominate most of it, a serious domestic audience for contemporary art can still emerge, something many galleries hope to encourage. Moreover, since “culture is the ‘face of a country,’ cultural development should not be behind economic development but be on par with it.”15 In this view, the future development of art is, therefore, not just a matter of high culture but an issue of ethnic identity and national pride.

The Business of Careers and Reputations

The runaway prices at recent auctions of contemporary Chinese art have made art dealers nervous. At Sotheby’s contemporary sale in New York in March 2007, the sales total passed the USD $25 million mark, with each of the top three lots breaking the USD $1 million barrier.16 The establishment of auctions devoted to the contemporary Chinese art scene has meant that galleries and auctions now compete to acquire the same works from living artists and sell to the same collectors. The relatively small number of individuals who work in contemporary art also makes dealers more anxious about protecting their businesses from outsiders whom they claim are not doing any of the work to discover and cultivate the careers of artists, yet are receiving the dividends of galleries’ efforts. Galleries see themselves as being in the profession of promoting artists’ careers over the long run, and the spectacle of bidding wars taking place over individual lots threatens the sense of stability and fairness that they believe should characterize the marketplace. Private dealers and galleries describe the work of auction houses in predatory terms, and though

39 Art Beijing, 2007. Photo: Zheng Shengtian.

they themselves constitute a large portion of consigners and buyers on the secondary market, some gallery managers nonetheless refer to the auction houses as “snakes” and “thieves” who rely on unethical tactics to secure works from the artists.17 Such incendiary comments are best understood in consideration of the clash of value systems at work, as described by Appadurai: “Auctions accentuate the commodity dimension of objects (such as paintings) in a manner that might well be regarded as deeply inappropriate in other contexts.”18

As much as they distinguish their work from the secondary market, galleries still rely on auction prices as industry standards for assessing supply and demand for different artists. Auction prices are widely publicized in the media and on-line, and their transactions are more transparent than what takes place between private dealers and their collectors.19 This makes them a convenient gauge of market transactions in the aggregate, which individual galleries are unwilling to reveal to each other or to the outside world. It is also important to point out that the gallery sector has no doubt benefited a great deal from the auction boom. Gallery owners are active participants in the secondary market and the excitement over contemporary art that auction house sales have helped generate has been good for business overall.

At the same time, the expansion of the secondary market into contemporary art has created some confusion over the division of labour in the retail side of the art market. In response to the uncertainty of their position, many galleries have embarked on a collective mission to reassert their purpose and defend their contributions to the overall growth of the art world. Fearing that auctions might contribute to the unsustainable inflation of art values, some gallery owners have made apocalyptic predictions about the future of their business. Once the 2008 Beijing Olympic games draw to a close and the international spotlight on Beijing fades, some gallery owners and managers worry that all the good works will have disappeared into the hands of speculators, and interest in Chinese art will give way to cynicism or malaise. One such gallery owner despaired over the high prices he saw at auction, leading him to question the fundamental relationship between

40 Fan Lijun exhibition at the Today Art Museum, Beijing, October 2007. Photo: Ling-Yun Tang.

the commodity value and actual quality of a work: “I used to work as a banker. In banking you know what you’re dealing with. In art, you’re dealing in influence. You’re dealing in wind!”20 How, with prices and quality so irrationally paired, is the quality of the art determined?

Because avant-garde art embraces a principal of conceptual openness such that technical skill and content are not inherent indicators of quality, galleries rely on peer reviews and critical mention to establish roadmaps for determining the value of contemporary artworks.21 Gallery owners therefore define their roles in part as service providers for artists, and they speak of creating an environment hospitable to the long-term growth of the artists that they represent. They are proud of taking risks to promote young artists, of having the “eye” to pick out artists with hidden potential, and of their work in assisting these artists in building the credentials that they need to gain recognition from critics, curators, and collectors. As one manager put it, “I believe that artists are at their best before they become famous,”22 exemplifying the belief that galleries have the ability to nurture artists from the very beginning of their careers. Seeing themselves as surrogate families for artists, galleries strive to take care of artists by counselling them on issues of pricing and branding. These relationships are defined by high levels of trust and intimacy, and are rarely defined in purely economic terms. When conflicts do arise, relationships sometimes break down, leaving behind a trail of broken promises and damaged egos that go far beyond what one would anticipate if art production and marketing were merely a set of business transactions.

Disciplining Artists: Reinforcing Market Values

Even though most gallery owners adhere to the belief that art cannot formally be reduced to its exchange value, they must eventually work with their artists to meet a common goal: to sell art.23 Towards this end, galleries see it as their obligation to ensure that artists understand their responsibilities as art workers bound by standardized practices and the rule of law. This duty entails informing them of potential buyers’ interest in their works, pushing them to adhere to

41 quantity specifications by given deadlines, and making sure that artists are faithful to the terms of agreements and contracts with the gallery. When artists fail to meet the terms of contracts, galleries frequently chase artists down on the phone to follow up on works that have not been delivered in preparation for upcoming exhibitions or art fairs. A failure to meet the obligations can tarnish the reputation of the artist and by extension the gallery’s name, which can bring on financial costs and the threat of legal repercussions. Notes one gallery owner: “Seeing an artist violate a contract makes me livid. If there is a problem it can be resolved. . . . This kind of behaviour should be brought to everyone’s attention. Contracts should be protected by law.”24 Another gallery owner explains that a contract is supposed to make things easier, not more complicated, and that contract violations are “not good for Chinese art. . . . These are bad practices.”25

In their relations with artists, galleries balance the simultaneous interests of making enough money in the short run to sustain their operations and promoting the works of artists over the long run. Constrained by the production and consumption sides of the art market continuum, the visible superstars of the art world today are not the galleries—whose historic legacies to the art world are more “transitory” by nature of their structural position—but artists who succeed and the powerful museums that represent them. The irony is that galleries are not making the highest profits as a result, “so that’s why you don’t see gallery owners flaunting their wealth, only artists and collectors do.”26

Conclusion

Galleries have a unique structural relationship within the Chinese contemporary art world. Unlike auction houses, which are not concerned with promoting the careers of individual artists, or collectors, who may follow artists over time but who just as often judge works solely by their rarity and how they will enhance a collection or investment portfolio, galleries are intermediaries that must cultivate relationships on both sides of the production and consumption continuum. They distinguish between their interests as dealers from those of secondary market actors in moral terms and they identify their function as creating values such as art awareness and viable artist careers, whereas the purely market-driven auctions merely profit from the work of galleries. In sum, galleries see themselves in the business of dealing in reputations and careers (on the supply side), and marking art as a viewing experience (on the demand side), not just sellers of pieces of art.

The narratives that gallery representatives employ show that the gallery serves as a site of social value creation and contestation. Through a conscious process of cultivating collectors’ tastes and disciplining artists to become more strategic long-term market players, galleries are in the profession of making the love of art, framed as a viewing experience in the context of the gallery, appear to be a natural social process. The process by which galleries protect artists and their works from shifting into commodity status until the point of sale focuses attention on art’s non- monetary, i.e., aesthetic, cultural, and stylistic attributes. The ideological separation between these incongruous value systems does not always get resolved: “The two worlds cannot be kept separate for very long. . . . Art dealers will name prices, be accused of the sin of transforming art into commodity. . . . What is culturally significant here is precisely that there is an inner compulsion to defend oneself, to others and to oneself, against the charge of ‘merchandising’ art.”27 Thus, although the necessity of making enough money to keep operations running is openly vocalized, the perpetuation of a myth of the internal logic of art nonetheless exerts real power within the art world and sets up a hierarchy between art galleries and auctions; between galleries with varying

42 degrees of market orientation; and between art world insiders and outsiders. In the parlance of selling art, the commerce of art becomes justified because it can serve a higher purpose, for example, to move works into a museum through the choice of the right kind of buyer, thereby assuring the longevity of individual pieces and returning them to the public realm of cultural sacredness.

Notes 1 “In China, To Get Rich is Glorious,” BusinessWeek Online, February 5, 2006, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_ 06/b3970072.htm. 2 See, for example, Barmé, who questions commercial art’s dependence on formulas that sell. Geremie Barmé, “CCPTM and ADCULT PRC,” China Journal 41 (1999), 1–23. 3 Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 14. 4 John Windsor, “Remove the Price Tags and Take Your Pick,” Guardian, March 4, 2007, 19. 5 Joy and Sherry explain that the art market, defined by commercial ends, is just a “sub-category” of the art world, which “represents a universe of discourse of which commerce is only one part, albeit an important one.” See Annamma Joy and John F. Sherry, Jr., “Framing Considerations in the PRC: Creating Value in the Contemporary Chinese Art Market,” Consumption, Markets and Culture 7 (2004), 307–348. 6 Interview by the author with Wu Jiang, Beijing, December 9, 2004. 7 Interview by the author with Takahiro Kaneshima, Beijing, December 28, 2004. 8 Interview by the author with Alex Cao, New York, April 5, 2007. 9 Interview by the author with Lawrence Wu, Beijing, July 23, 2005. 10 Interview by the author with Zhang Li, Shanghai, April 4, 2006. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Wei Wei, L.A. Gallery, Beijing, in “Interview with Five Beijing Gallery Directors,” March 13, 2006, http://www.yahqq.com/master/ view.asp?id=103, translation mine. 14 Interview by the author with Huang Liaoyuan, Beijing, May 10, 2005. 15 Ibid. 16 These works were Zhang Xiaogang’s “Bloodline: Three Comrades” (1994), Yue Minjun’s “Goldfish” (1993), and Leng Jun’s “Five Pointed Star” (1999). 17 Conversations between the author and various gallery owners, New York, March 20, 2007. 18 Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” 15. 19 Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 20 Conversation between the author and a gallery owner, New York, May 19, 2007. 21 Liah Greenfeld, “Professional Ideologies and Patterns of ‘Gatekeeping’: Evaluation and Judgment Within Two Art Worlds,” Social Forces 66 (1988), 903–925. 22 Liu Ying, Creation Gallery, Beijing: “Interview with Five Beijing Gallery Directors,” March 13, 2006, http://www.yahqq.com/master/ view.asp?id=103, translation mine. 23 In a study of objects’ shifts in and out of the commodity sphere, Kopytoff states: “The only time when the commodity status of a thing is beyond question is the moment of actual exchange.” See Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 83. 24 Li Guosheng, China Blue Gallery, Beijing, in “Interview with Five Beijing Gallery Directors,” March 13, 2006, http://www.yahqq.com/ master/view.asp?id=103, translation mine. 25 Ibid. 26 Xiao Fuyuan, Soka Gallery, Beijing, in “Interview with Five Beijing Gallery Directors,” March 13, 2006, http://www.yahqq.com/ master/view.asp?id=103, translation mine. 27 Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” 83.

43 Taking Stock

Joe Martin Hill

he development of the Chinese contemporary art market in recent years has been like a perfect Cai Guo-Qiang explosion event—unmarred by bad weather, technical difficulties, Tor even a curmudgeonly critical voice admonishing the dazzled audience as the spectacle unfolds. Yue Minjun’s infinitely numerous doppelgangers have smiled wider and wider as individual records for contemporary Chinese art have ascended from one month to the next. And scores of Zhang Xiaogang’s extended family of haunting anonyms have been flown hither and thither as special guests at the peripatetic party.

Nowhere is the expansion of the market more publicly evident than in the development of Sotheby’s Chinese contemporary art sales in Hong Kong and the Pan-Asian (primarily Chinese) contemporary art sales in New York. Sotheby’s held its first Chinese contemporary art sale in Hong Kong in October 2004, and between that and its third sale a year later, the total value of lots sold more than tripled, from USD $2,950,712 (HK $22,955,600) to USD $9,019,398 (HK $69,961,201); the total for spring 2006 was USD $16,995,902, an eighty-eight percent increase from the previous fall.1 Sotheby’s sales in Hong Kong have continued to advance impressively, with the most recent sale, on October 7, 2007, grossing a whopping USD $34,240,517 (HK $265,583,250), which more than triples the results from the same sale in 2005. Following the April 2006 Hong Kong sale, the twice-yearly event was split into two sessions, one focusing on high-value but less widely followed modern art, the other on contemporary art.2 For the appropriate comparison with 2005, then, one needs to add the now-modest USD $8,314,034 (HK $64,487,000) realized in the modern session. From the underdeveloped USD $2.95 million market of October 2004, contemporary Chinese art has grown into what must be the most extraordinary story of the art market in decades, with a “same-sale” total three years later of USD $42,554,551— more than a fourteen-fold increase.

But if the goings-on in Hong Kong demonstrate the public market’s development from infancy to maturity, the sales in New York represent the debutante’s coming-out party. With the launch of a Chinese contemporary art department in New York in 2005, Sotheby’s held its first pan-Asian contemporary sale on March 31, 2006—a landmark event given its introduction of the category of Asian art in a major Western art market venue. The sale grossed USD $13,228,960, improving Hong Kong’s total from the previous fall and no doubt adding momentum to the eastern port city’s spring sale only one week later. With 245 lots offered at the New York sale, 89.1% of them sold, yielding an average price per work sold of $60,132. As in Hong Kong, the first New York sale—as recent as last year, though we seem to have advanced a decade since—was a momentary benchmark for future development. This year’s September 30 sale in New York grossed USD $38,446,975, with 275 lots offered and 81.8% of them sold; the average price per work sold climbed to $170,875, a 184% increase over March 2006. This September’s sale total was a 191% increase over the first sale in New York, in March 2006.

Full disclosure is a commodity as rare in the art market as Michelangelo drawings; it has its virtues, but so does not biting the hand that feeds. Perhaps this is why many who play a variety of roles in the art world speak of the art market in the same nebulous, generally glib way as they do of concepts like “globalization” or “postmodernism”—ongoing historical transformations

44 that affect us all but the dynamics of which are too complicated for succinct, fixed definitions. Even the market-disdaining art history professor who writes for the occasional gallery catalogue, however, is affected by and plays his or her Lilliputian role in the dynamics of the market. This is unavoidable, particularly in days like these when the market itself leads the way in determining what contemporary art is worthy of note. Everyone needs his or her little piece of the market’s pie, and no one wants to upset the apple cart on the way to the baker’s. But in discussions about “the market,” I often feel as though “the market” is the pet elephant in the room to which each discussant has a closeted relationship that’s best kept secret—unless the speaker is professionally and unambiguously identified as a gallery, auction house, or collector representative. As to my bit part, my company has worked in a limited consultative capacity for Sotheby’s Chinese contemporary art department in New York since 2005. It has been gratifying and fascinating to see Asian contemporary art achieve a stronger foothold in the global contemporary art market.

Writing for Sotheby’s Preview magazine in the spring of 2006, I pointed out four features of the market for contemporary Asian art that differentiated it from its Euro-American counterpart, “all of which,” I wrote at the time, “suggest an optimistic outlook for the market’s future.” They seemed to me as patently obvious as the fact that the first pan-Asian contemporary sale at Sotheby’s New York would blow past its cautiously modest estimates. These features and their implications were as follows:

1) “A comparatively small number of large names have garnered the lion’s share of attention, particularly in Chinese contemporary. . . . Many other influential artists . . . have yet to receive the art historical recognition or visibility in the marketplace they merit. . . . The future will witness an increased number of artists achieving the successes that have so far been the privilege of relatively few.” 2) “While the art historical record is currently correcting past biases to more accurately reflect the geographic diversity of modern and contemporary artistic practice, the auction market has yet to catch up with this development.” I named a number of artists who “made significant contributions not only to regional artistic practices, but also to the history of art more generally” and stated that “recognition and reappraisal of their value is long overdue.” 3) The “stylistic divergence between artists working in recognizably contemporary forms and those who are no less contemporary but continue to mine the veins of traditional media” was identified as a blind spot of underappreciated value in the broader contemporary market. Contemporary ink painting was what I had in mind; “curatorial and collector interest in the ink painting tradition has thus far come primarily from Asia, but this seems destined to change.” 4) “Finally,” I wrote, “what is true of underappreciated Japanese and Korean masters and of contemporary ink painting across the region is true even for those Chinese artists who have achieved spectacular results at auction: they remain undervalued on a comparative basis with their Euro-American peers. This is perhaps the most important distinguishing feature of the emerging Asian market.”

A short eighteen months later, some revision seems warranted. The first point has already proved true; many artists beyond the familiar brand names have now achieved substantial prices in the public market. But this has less to do with parity in value recognition than with the buoyancy of the market as a whole. There remain vast discrepancies between prices achieved (which are pretty objective as public records) and value (which, I understand, some prefer to see as purely

45 subjective). As the influential Beijing-based collector Guan Yi stated in an interview in Hong Kong just before the recent Sotheby’s sales, “Good art is not always expensive, and expensive art is not always good.”3 I am more skeptical now that there will be an increase in the number of artists “achieving the successes that have so far been the privilege of relatively few”—if only because, in monetary terms, the “success” benchmark has increased by as much as a factor of ten in the last eighteen months.

I have mixed feelings about my second point. The artists identified last year have already seen increasing recognition of their “importance” or “value,” and there are many more one could easily identify today—that is, if appreciation in the marketplace and art historical recognition have any necessary correlation. Although I continue to believe in the enduring value of art historical assessment over the long duration which art history records, it is not entirely clear whether one should consider the present euphoria in the broader art market simply an event or, possibly, a paradigm shift in which the winning market writes its own increasingly persuasive art history. The question isn’t one of bubbles or crashes; corrections will inevitably come. It is rather of the overwhelming power of inexpensive and hence “under-valued” money to call the shots.4 Collectors of the traditional variety may buy “history,” but today’s savvy market investors with a lot of liquidity buy brand names and brand images—often with the hope of simply flipping the commodity for an advantageous return. If this has always been so, it seems to me more so today.

As for the third point, I see no need for revision: ink painting seems to me destined for greater recognition in both the market and curatorial communities. One might extend this to other historical forms that continue to be practiced in innovative ways. Whether the marketplace and art historical recognition correlate or not, centuries-old traditions that remain in some way vital today have no place to go from relative obscurity except towards greater recognition.

The last and “most important distinguishing feature” of the emerging Asian contemporary market identified eighteen months ago requires the most revision; the data points have shifted so dramatically as to render last year’s analysis all but a quaint historical relic. Among the many who “remain undervalued on a comparative basis with their Euro-American peers,” I included “even those Chinese artists who have achieved spectacular results at auction.” The results are now more spectacular, and, in some cases, the gap has closed entirely.

Before pursuing that thought, a few points of reference from the world beyond contemporary Chinese art are warranted. First, something Chinese from an alternative marketplace. The iShares: FTSE/Xinhua 25, an exchange-traded index fund that tracks the Chinese stock market (New York Stock Exchange ticker “FXI”), closed at USD $74.28 on March 31, 2006, the date of Sotheby’s first pan-Asian contemporary sale in New York. As of October 5, 2007, the Friday before the most recent Hong Kong sale, the FXI closed at USD $191.60. The increase in this China index in the same eighteen months was therefore about 158%—not quite as impressive as the aggregate results for Sotheby’s New York pan-Asian contemporary sales, but a remarkable advance for a stock index by any measure. Plus, the FXI shares are available at a fraction of the cost of the average unit price at Sotheby’s and are highly liquid; although share volume (the number of shares traded) can vary from day to day, on March 31, 2006, it was 267,100; on October 5, 2007, it was 5,824,300— more than a twenty-fold increase. The point here is not to compare the stock index fund with contemporary Chinese art as an investment; both have their benefits and risks. Rather, the heady advance in the index and the explosive growth in share volume during the same eighteen-month period indicate that it’s not just Chinese contemporary art that’s hot. It’s virtually everything

46 Chinese—particularly things mainland Chinese, so long as they aren’t the tainted consumer products of recent headlines.

Now back to things “art.” I was present at Sotheby’s on the evening of November 9, 2004, when Mark Rothko’s vast, beautiful No. 6 (Yellow, White, Blue over Yellow on Gray) of 1954 sold for USD $17,368,000 (including Sotheby’s premium), far beyond its estimates of USD $9 to 12 million. It seemed a stunning sum; the seller (Robert Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive turned art dealer) was pleased, indeed. The work had last been publicly offered at Christie’s in May of 1987 where it sold for USD $924,000, yielding an enviable annualized rate of return—if one wishes to besmirch such an ethereal picture with the crass facts of its value—of 18.2% for the 17-year period. That evening’s sale took in USD $93.5 million, the highest total in fifteen years. The past sale total record was November 1989—right before the art market took a memorable, long-lasting nosedive.

Of course, the Rothko buyer of November 2004 has something to be pleased about, too: to the increasing number of people with the means to acquire one, a major Rothko for USD $17.4 million now seems a veritable bargain! Rothko’s slightly smaller White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) of 1950 from the collection of David and Peggy Rockefeller sold this past May 15 at Sotheby’s for USD $72,840,000. The work had been acquired from the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1960 and had since been in the Rockefeller family collection. Although White Center is unquestionably the finer and more important of the two works, one can nevertheless use the two figures as a rough, ballpark estimate for the increase from 2004 to 2007 in the “value” of a major Rothko: about 319%.

The May 15 Sotheby’s sale took in the giant sum of USD $254.9 million, a 172.6% increase on the record-breaking November 2004 sale, though many records had been broken in between. I can’t remember whether the May 15 sale was a record, but, as the numbers just keep growing, it hardly seems worth keeping score any more. The following evening, Christie’s held its competing sale and took in USD $384.7 million on 74 lots sold. Most spectacular in that sale was Andy ’s Green Car Crash—Burning Car I of 1963, a classic work measuring ninety by eighty inches, which sold for USD $71,720,000 against an estimate of USD $25–$35 million. Also in that sale was Warhol’s Lemon Marilyn of 1962, a twenty-by-sixteen-inch canvas that went for USD $28,040,000 (estimate undisclosed). By the time the evening of May 16 wound down, the ten Warhols offered had brought in a staggering USD $136,704,000, two exquisite Rothkos from 1961 together brought USD $49,360,000, a de Kooning went for USD $19.1 million, a small Jasper Johns for USD $17.4 million. . . . Twenty-six artists’ auction records were made, sixty-five lots sold for more than USD $1 million, 74% sold above their high estimate . . . and so the story goes.5

The point here is not to compare the stratospheric prices of a Rothko, de Kooning, Warhol, or Johns with the comparatively low prices of even high-flying contemporary Chinese artists. That specious comparison, to which I’ll return momentarily, strikes me as utterly ridiculous from an art historical point of view. Instead, the point with the emphatic number of 000s is that it’s not just contemporary Chinese art that’s hot; significant chunks of the modern and contemporary art market as a whole are hot. Within the last few hundred years, contemporary art has never interested so many at a time when money has been in such seemingly endless supply. “The only thing cheap these days is money,” as an esteemed colleague quipped to me some time back.

47 In sum, the broader fascination for things Chinese, the wide-spread interest in contemporary art, the bottomless pits of money in the marketplace, and the appearance to speculators of an undervalued emerging market asset in the process of blasting off have created absolutely perfect conditions for the development of the Chinese contemporary market. Where it goes from here is anybody’s guess, and some will guess—and others will reason—better than others. But the pace of development we have witnessed over the last three years is without doubt unsustainable. No asset class can continue indefinitely to expand by more than 30% every six months. That level of momentum—moving so far so fast—eventually runs out of steam. This is not to say that prices will necessarily fall or that they will not continue to increase; at some point, however, they will not continue to increase as fast as they recently have. And in this heady market, when things simply level off, it may seem to some that the sky is falling.

So if a Rothko or a Warhol sells for USD $72 million and plenty of others for well above five or ten, should anyone bat an eye at a multi-million dollar price tag for a Zhang Xiaogang or a Yue Minjun? Certainly not when taken as specific, discrete events. But comparing Warhol to, say, Yue Minjun or Wang Guangyi isn’t specious just because Warhol is Warhol and the others aren’t; that doesn’t tell us much. It is silly because although apples and oranges are sold in the same currency in the local market, their relative pricing isn’t particularly useful in judging the intrinsic qualities of a specific apple or orange. Warhol is of such enormous and enduring importance to the development of art since the 1960s—art around the world, as Wang Guangyi’s work (and Ai Weiwei’s working methods) attests—that few artists of the twentieth century, and certainly of the latter half, are comparable. Warhol is important because one sees his legacy consistently in the formal strategies and working practices of countless later artists internationally. Does this justify a USD $72 million price tag? I’ve no idea. But, like him or not, Warhol’s work and life are foundational bedrock for what came after, and they seem ever more relevant today. As Warhol said, “I like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.”6

Warhol died, at the age of fifty-eight, in 1987. The superstars of the Chinese contemporary art market—most born in the late 1950s and early 1960s—have a few years to go before we can compare their output with Warhol’s oeuvre. But we should also remember that Warhol’s market was itself in the dumps in the 1980s and early 1990s. So it may well be another twenty years before we are able to see on a comparative basis the appropriate place of specific contemporary Chinese artists in the market and their resonance and importance in the international community—that is, the degree of their impact upon their peers and future progeny. This is the principal reason that price comparisons to Rothko, Warhol, or Johns are specious: it’s not Chinese apples and Western oranges, but entirely different generations of pickings, regardless the country of origin.

When one sets one’s sights on more appropriate comparables, however, the results are indeed revealing. Let’s look instead at the relevant generation of artists—say, artists born after 1950 anywhere in the world—whose work has reached USD seven figures in principal public sales venues—let’s say Christie’s and Sotheby’s in London and New York. This limits our search to what may unquestionably be called “global contemporary art” and provides a sample set of market comparables to Cai Guo-qiang (b. 1957), Yue Minjun (b. 1962), Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958), and others who sell for more than a million bucks at auction.

48 I might have missed a few, and it will probably change next week, but as of this writing, I can count only thirty such artists, including Chinese artists—a surprisingly small number given the overwhelming numbers habitually forked over for artworks these days. The “million dollar club” includes obvious characters like Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88), Keith Haring (1958–90), Jeff Koons (b. 1955), Takashi Murakami (b. 1963), and Damien Hirst (b. 1965)—all direct heirs and protégés of Warhol in one way or another—as well as American “bad girl” painter Lisa Yuskavage (b. 1963) and her British peers Jenny Saville (b. 1970) and Cecily Brown (b. 1969), the youngest members of the club. German photographer Andreas Gursky (b. 1955) makes the cut, as does his famous American colleague Cindy Sherman (b. 1954). Belgian painter Luc Tuymans (b. 1957) is also there alongside South African-born Marlene Dumas (b. 1953) and the Scot Peter Doig (b. 1959).

As of this writing, there are nine Chinese artists born after 1950 in this million dollar club—all of whom have joined in the last two years, most within the last eight months. They are: Cai Guo- qiang (b. 1957), Chen Danqing (b. 1953), Fang Lijun (b. 1963), Leng Jun (b. 1963), Liu Ye (b. 1964), Yan Pei Ming (b. 1960), Yue Minjun, (b. 1962), Zeng Fanzhi (b. 1964), and Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1957). Several more are poised to join their ranks in the weeks and months to come. What is most remarkable is how quickly the club membership has changed from being predominately Euro-American to approximately one-third Chinese.7 And for comparative newcomers to the market, the brightest stars have achieved remarkable repeat results: as of this writing, twenty works by Zhang Xiaogang have sold beyond a million dollars in 2006 and 2007, ten by Yue Minjun (all in 2007), five by Liu Ye (all in 2007), and six by Zeng Fanzhi (again, all in 2007). These figures will rise in the weeks to come, I am sure, and it is possible that more artists, both Chinese and other, will join the ranks.

Based on the data as it stands, I see three possible interpretations. First, one might say there are now some artists of non-Chinese origin whose works trade at a comparative discount to that of their Chinese peers; this takes the prices recorded for contemporary Chinese artists as the benchmark for comparative analysis of the international peer group and would suggest there are unrecognized ‘other’ artists of equal or greater “value.” Alternatively, one might argue that the brightest stars of contemporary Chinese art (or at least some of them) are currently overvalued; this takes the prices recorded for contemporary international artists in the generational peer group as the benchmark. Finally, one might suggest that although we did not know it even a few years ago, a full third of the most significant artists born after 1950 internationally are, in fact, Chinese; this interpretation takes market values as proxies for “significance” and the demographics of the “million dollar club” at face value. While each of these interpretations may be partially true, and one or another must be mostly true, none is entirely satisfying.

As the vast array of moving targets that constitute the market continues to evolve, the reader may choose which, if any, of these interpretations seems most convincing in light of the data. Where we go from here is anybody’s guess. What seems clear is that we are unlikely to be in the same place eighteen months hence—and that some will interpret better than others.

49 Notes 1 All auction house figures cited herein include the auction house premium, which is added to the hammer price on each lot sold. For both individual works and sale totals, advance estimates do not include premiums; as a result, for both individual works and sale totals, the added premiums provide an otherwise unacknowledged boost to totals eventually realized. 2 Particularly in the Chinese context, one needn’t quibble with the historical nomenclature. Although there is clearly an overlap between the Modern and the contemporary, as in the Euro-American context, it is comparatively easy given the historical convulsions in the Chinese context to assign a work to its appropriate historical/aesthetic moment. 3 The interview with Guan Yi (October 5, 2007) was held on location and in conjunction with Sotheby’s seasonal sales at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. 4 My editor wondered what I meant by these unusual adjectives—“inexpensive” and “under-valued”—with respect to money. Until quite recently, money was widely available at very low interest rates to borrowers both qualified and unqualified; low interest rates and low borrowing hurdles means money is, comparatively, “inexpensive.” Although the sub-prime lending debacle is this money lending party’s headline-grabbing bad hangover, “inexpensive” money also fuels a variety of corporate activities on a vast scale, the pace of which decreases with a tightening of the money supply (as, for example, with leveraged buyout activity). At the same time that money has been inexpensive, the pain of earning money in sweat equity—that is, what was traditionally known as a “decent wage” in exchange for “hard work”—has decreased for a substantial number of people; many have been making (I am not opposed to calling it “earning”) very large sums for themselves. As it’s been cheap to borrow and for many spenders there’s been lots to spend, “to know the value of a dollar” has become less necessary—or maybe it’s just unfashionable or a buck is just too small a unit. The point is that when an increasing and increasingly diverse number of potential high bidders can write checks for many millions of dollars without giving it much thought, the impact on the market and on the market’s relationship to art historical assessment can be quite dramatic. This situation is made more complicated by the fact that nonprofit institutions must of necessity bid for the attention and patronage of these same high bidders. 5 So far as big numbers go, we shouldn’t forget Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe of 1905—(lot 15), Sotheby’s New York, May 15, 2004 —which sold for $104,168,000. Nor should we overlook the June 2006 private sale (brokered by Sotheby’s) for a reported $135 million of Gustav Klimt’s extraordinary Adele Bloch-Bauer I to Ronald Lauder for his Neue Galerie at Fifth Avenue and 86th Street in Manhattan. One painting among a small group constituting one of the most spectacular restitution cases of recent years, the picture also still has the distinction of being “most expensive.” 6 The Philosophy of —From A to B and Back Again (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1975), 133–34. Of course, what Warhol could not have foreseen at the time—though he is undoubtedly chuckling from the beyond now—is that with prices for contemporary art escalating so rapidly, the opportunity cost of hanging simply the money on the wall is rather high. 7 With respect to ethnic or national diversity in the “million dollar club,” it is significant that the careers of Indian-born Anish Kapoor (b. 1954) and South African-born Marlene Dumas developed in Britain. Beyond these, the only other members of the “million-dollar club” who hail from beyond the shores of Europe and America—as of this writing—are the Japanese artists Takashi Murakami (b. 1963) and Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959).

50 Everyday Miracles: National Pride and Chinese Collectors of Contemporary Art

Simon Castets

Shi Yong, Yearnings 1, 2000, 85 x 100 cm, C-print (ed. 10). Courtesy of ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai.

veryday Miracles, the title of the Chinese Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale, could also stand for the spectacular, fast-paced evolution of today’s Chinese contemporary art scene. EArtprice recently reported a 440% rise in the prices in the field, with twenty-five Chinese artists included in its 2007 100 Top Artists Ranking (by sales revenue)—in contrast to only one in 2001. In June 2007, Yue Minjun’s The Pope sold in London for USD $4.3 million, $1.6 million over the previous auction record for a work by a contemporary Chinese artist. In October 2007, the London contemporary art auctions concentrated unseen numbers of contemporary Chinese works, and Yue beat his own record with Execution, sold at Sotheby’s for over USD $5.9 million. These past two years have been the most frenzied to date for contemporary Chinese art, witnessing the concentrated development of an international auction market, ambitious institutions, a massive network of galleries, comprehensive festivals, reputable biennials, cutting-edge nonprofit spaces, and in-demand fine arts schools. This rapid construction of a systemized art world in China has been fueled by a thriving demand from collectors, both foreign and, increasingly, Chinese. Within a few months, Chinese artists have moved from the fringe of the international art world to become the hottest sector of an already soaring contemporary art market. Mirroring the economic boom in China, its contemporary art is very likely to sustain its growth, thanks to a growing number of increasingly wealthy Chinese collectors. The national pride of the “New Chinese” generation is stimulating the market for contemporary Chinese artists, offering protection from any future drop in interest from Western collectors. Contemporary Chinese art often appears as a market driven by foreign money. For the last few years, key players such as Uli Sigg, Guy and Myriam Ullens, and, more recently, Charles Saatchi, have unintentionally

51 contributed to building such an image. While famous “mega-collectors” have been hesitant to join the stampede, the support of certain dedicated Westerners, often with a museum-style approach, has played an important role in developing the market and ushering in the current sales peak. Until lately, most mainland China galleries reported over 80% of buyers to be Western, giving the impression that contemporary Chinese artists were not supported by their compatriots. However, contemporary Chinese art is now far from being exclusively sustained by exporting.

An even less fair association is that of the “Chinese” label with low-quality, large-format oil- on-canvas paintings with post-communist imagery and a hint of scandal. To Fortune Cookie Projects’ founders, Mary Dinaburg and Howard Rutkowski, the record prices commanded by now unavoidable artists such as Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Guangyi, or Yue Minjun have conflicting consequences: “This is a good thing in that it has drawn attention to art being produced in China today, but is ultimately a bad thing in that the international market only views contemporary Chinese art through the lens of the artists that are part of the art tourist caravan.”1 As in the rest of the world, the markets for video, installation, and photography remains largely behind compared with painting, but they are kept at a lower level than they are capable of attaining because Chinese contemporary art is too often identified with bankable works created with the usual “oriental recipe.” Dinaburg and Rutkowski note that, “These artists [the painters] will be remembered for their serious contributions post-1989, but are hurting their place in art history by churning out studio-produced versions of their greatest hits.”

“It is a stereotype that only Westerners buy Chinese contemporary art,” says Christie’s Asian contemporary art specialist Ingrid Dudek. With China’s double-digit economic growth, its upper classes are at a turning point, and the growing sector of wealthy 30-to-40 year olds has adopted a system of cultural references that is dramatically different from that of the older generation. Today’s Chinese contemporary art market boom is in large part a result of the expression of the “new Chinese taste,” accompanied by seemingly endless means of outbidding the fiercest Western collectors. As Dinaburg and Rutkowski put it, “while Western collectors might have been the first to pick up on [blue-chip contemporary Chinese artists], it is now only Chinese collectors (Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and elsewhere in the diaspora) who are willing to pay six or seven figures” for the same works. The head of Sotheby’s Chinese contemporary art department, Zhang Xiaoming, is noticing that the highly publicized New York auctions are attracting unprecedented numbers of Chinese collectors: “there are lots of new buyers I don’t know, both individual and corporate.” On March 21, three of the top ten lots from the Sotheby’s New York Contemporary Art Asia sale, including Leng Jun’s Five Pointed Star from 1999 (USD $1.2 million), sold to Chinese buyers.

Although considered by Art & Auction’s Barbara Pollack to be “the largest group of collectors ever to enter the contemporary market,”2 the new Chinese collectors share the striking feature of a seemingly exclusive focus on their contemporary art. This could be in part because, to the disadvantage of Western galleries, they tend to cultivate their existing relationships with Chinese dealers like Star Gallery or China Blue, but perhaps above all because Chinese people tend to be mostly interested in Chinese art, as was expressed by a gallery director. This undeniable penchant, although overestimated, can be partly explained by a de rigueur fervor for Chinese success stories. The Chinese press regularly boasts about the country’s fantastic economic upheaval with headlines such as “Millionaires from prosperous southeastern China are striving to buy private yachts,”3 or “China’s private plane owners reaching the sky.”4 While in 1979, only 19% of China’s population was urban, demographers estimate that 65% of the Chinese will be living in cities by 2025.

52 According to a September 2005 report by Merrill Lynch, there are more than 300,000 millionaires (in U.S. dollars) in China and more than five million inhabitants with a revenue above $30,000. With basic living costs much lower than those of Western countries, these consumers share the living standards of the 2.5 million American citizens earning $140,000 a year. To compare it with another Asian country, in 2002, Hu Yang, Shanghai Living (H107), 2005, 45 x 60 cm, C-print (ed. 8). China’s richest 10% earned more money Courtesy of ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai. than the entire South Korean population. In November 2006, China’s 400 richest represented a combined net worth of $38 billion, against $26 billion a year before. Forbes recently counted fifteen Chinese billionaires. By 2014, the country should be the luxury industry’s primary client, accounting for 25% of total worldwide sales.

The “New Chinese,” a target shared by fashion brands with the art market, work for multinationals or the entertainment business. They travel from Shanghai to New York, and are constantly seeking new ways to express themselves through consumption. One of the main gaps between them and the older generation is to be found in their attitude towards Western models. Although often raised abroad, the “New Chinese” have developed a strong ability to be critical about the Western world. The shift is summed up by the Chinese public relations manager of a prominent European luxury brand: “ten years ago, everybody thought that everything was better in the Western world, but those who recently reached a certain social status are not in that mindset anymore.” Not only has the taste of the “New Chinese” evolved toward goods that are less Western-oriented, but it is also turning into a more individually defined approach to style and urbanity. “They are not this generation of nouveaux riches that wants to get what is in the magazines,” says curator Beatrice Leanza. “This new generation looks for something that reflects their character.” Perhaps provoked by the fear of an economic collapse anchored in the history of China’s strokes of bad luck, they are doing so quickly.

After having been almost ignored for twenty years, contemporary Chinese art is now highly sought after by a rising class of young, successful professionals to whom China’s economic boom is a source of national pride. To Ingrid Dudek, “what is happening now in China is comparable to what happened in the United States after World War II. [In China], there was a radical break in artists’ practices in the late 1980s, along with a major economic shift.” As China becomes a central force in the world economy, the new generation’s move into this emerging yet highly advertised market corresponds to a self-rewarding collecting pattern, a way to participate in the international recognition of Chinese artists that corresponds to the rise of China on the world’s stage. So far- reaching is this national awareness of contemporary art successes that “now, every taxi driver in Beijing knows Zhang Xiaogang’s name!” says Ingrid Dudek.

Willing to buy back their own history, Chinese collectors compensate for the lack of governmental support—and often-outright opposition—for contemporary art during the past two decades, and build private exhibition galleries. Like the prominent collector Guan Yi, the main common feature of younger Chinese buyers is considered by Zhang Xiaoming to be “the dream to have one’s own museum.” Private collectors are likely to be able to react more quickly to the fast-paced production of contemporary Chinese art and to not repeat the past mistakes of publicly subsidized

53 institutions. According to Beijing Art Now Gallery manager Helena Wang, it is upsetting for many of her compatriots to see Chinese art in museums abroad: “When Chinese people see their art in a foreign museum they feel very bad.” Although he probably would disagree with the above statement, Guan Yi, with his 1,400-square- metre Beijing warehouse hosting over five hundred works, participates in this archive-like collecting scheme: he is said to Zhang Xiaogang, Blood Line: Three Comrades, 1994, oil on canvas. have purchased every piece selected by Hou Auctioned at Sotheby’s New York Contemporary Art Asia, March 21, 2007. Estimated at USD $1.5/2,000,000, sold for USD $2,112,000. Hanru for the 2003 Venice Biennale. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

However foreign China may look to one’s eyes, its art market is far from being systematically different from markets elsewhere. Although today it seems incongruous for a country’s galleries and collectors to be focusing on “their” own art, art dealer and successful ShContemporary Art Fair creative director Pierre Huber recalls how “twenty years ago in Switzerland, almost all galleries were only showing Swiss artists. When I showed Sol Lewitt at the beginning of the 1980s, almost nobody came to the opening!” China’s apparent rejection of foreign contemporary art is only a temporary matter. “Chinese galleries are small companies as are Western galleries,” says Huber. “They have to show what they are going to sell. In the current context, it is obviously more difficult to find local collectors for Western artists. If you have never tasted a Chateau Pétrus, how would you know if it is good or not?” Slowly, Western and Asian contemporary artists’ works are discovered by Chinese collectors, who one day “will be buying both without distinction,” according to Huber. Throughout art history, early buyers have often been foreigners, recalls ShanghArt gallery founder and contemporary Chinese art pioneer Lorenz Helbling: “the Guggenheim missed out on American Minimalist art; they had to buy back later from an Italian collector.”

The current frenzy surrounding the Chinese contemporary art market is often wittily criticized, and Chinese collectors are blamed for their allegedly speculative motives. However, China’s newborn contemporary art market often appears as the scapegoat for the world’s increasingly buoyant and investment-oriented scene. To Lorenz Helbling, there is not indeed “much experience in collecting, but a lot of experience in investing and making money. These ideas often mix quickly into collecting art, producing strange results. Unfortunately, the Chinese are in this regard not the backwater of the world, but they seem on the forefront of an international trend, where art investors, art funds, crude art speculators, etc., are getting more and more influential, and the ‘art loving, connoisseur collector’ becoming a rare species also in the West.”

Although still focused for the most part on “their” contemporary art, Chinese collectors are gradually starting to appear on the international scene. Seen in large numbers at the last edition of Art Basel, they are steadily developing their level of expertise along with their appetite for blue-chip Western artists. Continua’s exhibition of Daniel Buren’s work succeeded with the purchase by Guan Yi of a major installation from the French artist, while a Shanghai collector recently acquired a major piece by Damien Hirst. Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips de Pury all recently included major works by Chinese contemporary artists in their evening sales, notably aimed at attracting Chinese collectors’ attention also to other works by international artists. In China, F2 gallery opened in Beijing with a Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat show,

54 Arario presented Jonathan Meese’s work, and PKM Gallery’s inaugural show was curated by New Museum’s Dan Cameron. Although extremely young compared with its Western counterparts, the Chinese contemporary art scene has impressively opened itself to international art, thanks in a large part to foreign galleries. “The Chinese contemporary art scene is international today as it was international in the first place,” says Zhang Xiaoming. Ties with a foreign country are indeed commonplace for China’s galleries: pioneering galleries such as ShanghArt, Red Gate and BTAP were founded by foreigners, Art Seasons was originally based in Singapore, White Space is German, Chinese Contemporary originated in London, L.A. Beijing is a branch of Lothar Albrecht’s Frankfurt gallery, and Dashanzi’s primary bookstore and meeting place, TimeZone 8, was founded by American Robert Bernell. However, the success of foreign artists in China remains at its earliest stage of development, concomitantly with increasing knowledge on the part of Chinese collectors. In an interview with Journal des Arts in May 2006, Continua co-director Lorenzo Fiaschi admitted to not having sold a single piece to a Chinese collector: “They can spend $400,000 on a post-Pop Chinese painter, but not on Anish Kapoor, whom they do not know. In the next two to three years, when the Chinese will have caught up on their own culture, they will be willing to open up to the Western sensibility.”5 Not catering to the market, the highly anticipated Ullens Center for the Arts should be able to increase interest in foreign artists with a deliberately international curatorial program directed by Colin Chinnery. It should also, as Art Basel’s late Jonathan Napack believed, “raise the bar” in Dashanzi, “where low-quality artist studios and tacky fashion/souvenir shops infiltrate the galleries’ domain.” The leading roles of Jan Debbaut and Fei Dawei, the former acting as Artistic Consultant and the latter as Artistic Director for the Ullens Center for the Arts, are impressive indications of the Chinese contemporary art scene’s move toward greater institutionalization.

Another long-awaited innovation was the newly created ShContemporary Art Fair, held in Shanghai September 6 to 9, 2007. The first contemporary art fair of an international standard on Chinese soil, ShContemporary is led by former Art Basel director Lorenzo Rudolph and Pierre Huber. As the Creative Director of the fair, Huber is pursuing a two-way pedagogical mission: “We are bringing more Asian artists to the international market and bringing Western artists to Asia. We want to show Chinese collectors that there is something else to Anish Kapoor, Ascension, 2003, mixed media. Photo: Keith Wallace. Courtesy of Galleria Continua, Beijing. art than just auctions.” And beyond mere art fairs, as ShContemporary proposed “Best of Artists” and “Best of Discovery,” to “introduce artists whose works have been selected outside of the race to acquire the best-sellers on the ‘art of the moment’ market.” Arrived a year after Art Basel’s well attended Conversation and Cocktail, in Beijing, ShContemporary created a visible precedent in the field with an obviously more ambitious project. With rumours about Art Basel’s implantation in China remaining extremely dubious and both CIGE and Art Beijing lacking high-profile international galleries, ShContemporary catches the market at a still-early stage. Although sales were not considered excellent, ShContemporary gave Western galleries their first opportunity to experience the fantasized development of a large contingent of Chinese and, more generally, Asian collectors. On the other hand, Asian artists found a platform for broader international exposure at the fair.

55 The frantic pace at which contemporary Chinese art has been developing over the past two years raises suspicion within the art world, some fearing a bubble burst, some awaiting “maturation.” As Mary Dinaburg and Howard Rutkowski put it, “There is a certain obscenity in the market that these artists, with no curatorial track record, can command these prices, which are two, three, four, or five times what major international artists bring.” While Chinese gallery owners are certainly benefiting from the influx of enthusiastic mainland collectors, many express concern about their lack of education or experience in the art world. Critics accuse both Chinese and Western collectors of looking for art in Dashanzi or Moganshan as they would for items at the supermarket with a wish list of “hot” artists. For China’s nouveaux riches, contemporary art is not always only a passion, but also a Top and bottom: ShContemporary Art Fair, September 2007. classy form of asset, less risky than other Photo: Zheng Shengtian. holdings. This new need is catered to by “local galleries [that] are targeting buyers more than collectors,” says Beatrice Leanza. The allegation that Beijing’s Poly International Auction House was never paid the record-breaking $2.7 million for Liu Xiaodong’s Three Gorges: Newly Displaced Population in November 2006 did not seem to disrupt the turmoil. The potential for speculation in contemporary Chinese art was acknowledged with the launch by London Fine Art Fund LP of a $25–50 million Asian contemporary art fund, from which a 10 to 15 percent return is expected. In Asia, the Art Fund also aims to fetch returns from $7.5 million worth of works by contemporary Korean and Chinese artists.

Despite the presence of promising institutions such as Shanghai’s MOCA and exciting projects such as the Ullens Center for the Arts, China still lacks a strong pool of contemporary art museums and curators, and no tax incentives are designed to encourage philanthropy. Conversations among local collectors remain mainly market driven, and most information comes from auction catalogues. However, to Ingrid Dudek, this investment-oriented, nationalistic collecting pattern is only temporary: “If Chinese collectors buy mostly Chinese artists, it corresponds to their level of exposure to contemporary art. They are new to this market.” Already, dedicated individuals, both Chinese and Western, are trying to progressively invert the trend through the development of pedagogical tools that are not necessarily exclusive of market strategies. In case of a bubble burst, the inevitable corrective of the prices fetched by top artists could be counterbalanced or at least minimized if collectors have developed over time a sufficient level of expertise and market ethics. As Dudek puts it, “[Christie’s] is looking forward to establishing connoisseurship in Hong Kong; we are focusing on building fundamentals that go beyond the art market.”

Works of greater ambition than clichéd examples of contemporary Chinese art are slowly finding their public in both mainland China and abroad, giving hope for a critical re-evaluation within the field. To Mary Dinaburg and Howard Rutkowski, “Most Chinese collectors of contemporary art

56 have started with big names but are becoming much more savvy and are turning to new media. Their taste is evolving and they are now moving very rapidly to collect younger, more edgy works.” Slowly catching up to the bandwagon, “Western museums are now also looking at that type of work because paintings have become too expensive.” Foreign curatorial recognition should therefore be arriving for

“those artists who understand the international Opening of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, November 2007. Photo: Keith Wallace. art vernacular, whose work is not dressed-up by babies in Mao jackets or pretty young pioneer girls or an endless rendering of Mao wearing lipstick, but who address the very important issues of history, tradition and social and economic changes,” continue Dinaburg and Rutkowski.

Although a market correction is very likely to occur for second- and even third-tier works from today’s stars of Chinese contemporary art, the sustained interest of both Chinese and foreign collectors will foster the demand for artists who have already won critical recognition and who should command higher prices. If concept-driven works manage to pique the attention of the “New Chinese,” Ai Weiwei, Wang Qingsong, Cao Fei, and Yang Fudong could be the next “Gang of Four” by setting more discreet milestones for the future avant-garde.

Ai Weiwei, Fragments, 2005, iron wood, tables, chairs, Qing dynasty pillars. In Art Unlimited, Art Basel 2007. Photo: Keith Wallace.

Notes 1 All quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from interviews conducted by the author, 2006 and 2007. 2 Peter Plagens, “Hot Properties,” Newsweek (international edition), May 15 –22, 2006. 3 South China Morning Post, October 31, 2006, incompletly reported by chinanews.cn. 4 Xinhua, June 15, 2006. 5 Roxana Azimi, “Lorenzo Fiaschi, codirecteur de la Galerie Continua: Notre galerie de Pékin a renforcé la confiance,” Journal des Arts, no. 238, May 26, 2006, 29.

57 Superfluous Things: The Search for “Real” Art Collectors in China

Pauline J. Yao

The practice of collecting art has long held an esteemed position with respect to Chinese art history and cultural tradition. Centuries of imperial collecting, from the Tang to the Qing dynasties, remain intricately linked with political power and notions of “cultural capital.” As witnessed in the middle of the twentieth century, these collections also carry potent symbolic power, since to possess them is to lay claim to history, to assert authority and legitimacy in the eyes of rulers. Collecting at the private level, outside the imperial realm, relied upon a different kind of power—the power of the individual and the bolstering of personal values and taste. Historically speaking, art collecting belonged to the domain of the educated elite and registered among the many leisurely pursuits aimed at personal enjoyment and scholarly edification. More often than not, artists were collectors and collectors were artists, and collecting facilitated creative collaboration, since artworks were often made specifically to be given to fellow artist-collectors. In the modern era, as these literati traditions carried into the twentieth century, private collecting took on an increasingly political role as it became enmeshed in the formation of intellectual circles and artistic societies. More often than not, these artists/intellectuals/collectors became swept up in the sociopolitical building of a new China. Today, with the rise of experimental contemporary art—art made within the last fifteen years using non-traditional media like installation, video, and new technologies—art collecting in China is experiencing a new upswing influenced by successes in the domestic business sector. Previous models of collecting based on personal pleasure or study have given way to a new paradigm that is progressively dominated by individual wealth and investment.

Collecting art is a highly subjective activity that invites multiple levels of interpretation. Intricately shaped by individual preference and judgment, collections are both portraits of personal taste and self-contained entities that can inform and educate us about the time and place in which they were formed. They are not only a way of viewing and thinking about the past, even the recent past, but are deeply shaped by human and social factors in a contemporary context. A collection is reflective of the goals or aspirations of the given collector who shaped it, and these goals and aspirations are, in turn, influenced by his or her cultural environment. Collecting and collections can thus be situated within a larger cultural and symbolic system that extends far beyond the day-to-day concerns of the art market—pricing, profit margins, and auction results—and the ways collectors go about forming collections can therefore indicate surrounding cultural shifts and permutations.

The overwhelming amount of activity in the current contemporary art market in China has recently turned attention to the new crop of domestic collectors and their enthusiasm to assert their buying power. If one were to follow the gist of mainstream media reports, there would appear to be an abundance of serious art collectors in China who are all interested in building collections of contemporary art. Indeed, it is clear there is a lot of art being bought (and sold) at rapidly escalating prices within China. What is less clear, however, is how to distinguish the “buyers”— those who buy and then sell within a matter of months for quick profit—from the so-called “real” collectors who bring expertise, knowledge, and an organizing agenda that signals a stake in the long term.

It was not that long ago that there was virtually no domestic market for experimental contemporary art in China. What did exist in the 1970s and 1980s—occasional exhibitions and

58 some commercial outlets—was heavily reliant upon foreign interest and support. The 1990s and 2000s was a period in which unprecedented attention was placed on the West for exhibition opportunities, market share, and general international exposure. And as artists took aim at social issues, consumerism, and cultural politics, international collectors took notice. It was in this climate that several important collections of contemporary Chinese art were formed by foreigners, among them Uli Sigg, Guy and Miriam Ullens, Kent and Vicki Logan, and Eloisa Haudenschild. The work of these and other major collectors single-handedly raised the profile of contemporary Chinese art around the world and helped to secure an international market for contemporary artists based in China. It is in large part due to the efforts of these foreign collectors that galleries, museums, collectors, and even government entities within China have come to support and value contemporary art to the extent that they do today.

However, the age of the foreign collector seems to be something of the past. With a steady base of individuals and companies in China supporting contemporary art projects, the domestic scene is poised to take over. Just over a year ago I traveled to China on a Fulbright Fellowship, dedicated to researching this new wave of domestic collectors and their thoughts on collecting and forming collections of contemporary art. I was deeply curious to witness this generation of domestic collectors gaining speed and perhaps striving to define themselves against the host of foreign collectors that came before them. I proposed to set out to meet and talk to these collectors in person and learn firsthand about their ideas and criteria regarding collecting art and about what sort of thinking or thought process lies behind their collecting. How do these collectors approach the conceptual underpinnings of collecting as a practice, and what are the challenges they face in building collections of art? Collections are sites that conjure the past, but also the future. I chose the topic of collecting and the logic of forging links between past and future as a lens through which one could approach and investigate how contemporary China looks at its future. Looking at the ways in which traditions and practices of collecting have shifted and migrated into the present strikes me as a valuable way to look at perceptions of modernity within contemporary China and to assess the changing role of art within society.

This initial project proposal, submitted to the Fulbright committee back in fall 2005, relied on many common perceptions regarding collectors in China that still exist today: that is, that there are lots of them, that they are financially well off, and, well, that they are buying up art like crazy. If anything, views on collecting in China have become even more overstated during these past two years, in part due to the frenzy of Western media coverage touting the booming Chinese art market and rising auction house prices.1 Certainly, separating the topic of collecting from its inherent links to the market is not an easy task. Where possible, I have tried to look at the practice of collecting and its attendant features outside the immediate scope of money and investment. What is more at stake is the attempt to locate serious collectors who have a well-developed eye and a defined direction for their collecting. It is only through this perspective that it is possible to explain how there can be such a healthy market for contemporary art in China and yet, at the same time, few serious art collectors.

As I set out to meet as many interesting Chinese collectors as possible and to talk to them about their ideas on collecting, I quickly came up against the first hurdle of my research: how to define a collector. The label of collector is one easily conferred upon anyone who buys art, and no hard and fast definition exists. However, the collector has often been associated with certain ideals such as connoisseurship, taste, knowledge, and an embedded sense of self-satisfaction or personal knowledge. In the context of today’s China, however, nearly none of these ideals remain. The

59 overwhelmingly predominant model is based on short-term investment aimed at accumulating personal wealth and status, so much so that very few individuals I came across in China would qualify as “serious” collectors in my assessment. As I continued to search for interesting private collectors to talk to, it occurred to me that I was encountering the same handful of names over and over. Gradually it became clear that the pool of collectors that I had thought to be edgeless and bottomless was in reality quite shallow and confined. The questions I had been posing—about what ideas were shaping private collectors and where their motivations came from—were actually quite simple, and not nearly so pressing as the other question I kept coming up against—why were there so few collectors in China in the first place? As I discovered that I wasn’t finding what I had been looking for, I realized I had come across something else. The shortage of collectors in China actually pointed to other larger deficiencies particular to the Chinese art world, deficiencies that undermine common assumptions about the current market for Chinese art.

First, the history of contemporary art in China is comparatively short—approximately thirty years—and, therefore, has not provided extended time for people to become acquainted with contemporary art forms, much less to have the personal resources to collect it. In this short history dating from the 1970s, a canon is just now emerging, and artists active in these early periods are beginning now to hit their stride internationally. This brief history of contemporary art in China poses very real challenges to collectors who require a lengthy relationship with art in which to develop their own knowledge and taste. Moreover, even among those who took an interest in contemporary art from this early period, the opportunities for exposure to it through exhibitions, publications, and so on were limited at best. The prevalence of “underground” or “unofficial” activities with scarce documentation and word-of-mouth publicity suggest that these events rarely circulated beyond artistic circles to draw in members of the general public.

Second, the nature of the economic and political environment over the past thirty years in China made it barely possible until quite recently for anyone to accumulate any wealth or disposable income that could be directed toward collecting. Economic reforms in the late 1970s may have been the precursor, but it is only in the last seven to ten years that we have witnessed the exponential growth of private enterprise and the rise in individual wealth and the emergence of a so-called middle class able to afford non-essential luxury items. Most recently, we find it is the real estate developers, restaurateurs, venture capitalists, and other entrepreneurs who have the necessary resources to become major players within the collecting and art business world. Thus emerges a major strand of difference between traditional and contemporary collecting practices: the practitioners (people doing the collecting) have entirely different backgrounds. In the past, collectors were artists, intellectuals, and occasionally members of the merchant class or active in aspects of commerce. Today, they are businessmen with little or no relationship to art or art history. This is not unlike the situation in America or Europe, in which major collections of contemporary art have been formed by business people of all stripes. But in the business-saturated environment of contemporary China, and without the backbone of history, speculation takes over and decision-making becomes based not on aesthetic or artistic judgment but on terms of investment and return. The dangerous outcome is the formation of a collection more heavily informed by auction catalogues and price lists than art history books and a predisposition toward name recognition over representative artworks of the artist’s oeuvre. Paid advisors and consultants are still essential even for the most promising collectors, and very few rely on their own eyes in making choices.

60 Lastly, for reasons that have to do with either lingering remnants of Chinese pragmatism or the fact that China is currently experiencing early stages of capitalism, a pronounced lack of long- term planning and vision has greatly affected the ways collectors think about collecting and approach the topic of future preservation. Collecting is a practice that intersects with fundamental concepts of art and time. By and large, what we know of Chinese art is that which has survived either through entombment, preservation in imperial collections, or acquisition by collectors who exited China. From this point of view, it would seem that art is not what the artist makes but what the collector collects.2 The important factor is that what the collector collects is often preserved—it survives over time. Without collectors or collecting institutions, important artworks would languish and would probably not be able to enter the long arm of history. Collecting can thus be seen as a gesture against the weakening effects of time and decay, a temporary exercise with possibly permanent consequences. But what happens when no attention is paid to time and the future status of art, if all collecting is done for the present? There has yet to develop an awareness for artwork conservation and proper storage facilities, an ongoing concern that carries serious repercussions as contemporary art increasingly interfaces with the international world. But even more pressing is the fundamental question of “why collect?” Outside of China, collecting is often contingent upon other institutional systems and infrastructure such as museums and tax benefits. With little or no faith in state-run Chinese museums and no tax incentive for donating artworks to institutions, it is difficult for collectors in China to remain motivated about long-term collecting and preservation for the sake of art. Because many collectors have not turned a mindful eye toward education and the future, collecting has become overly individualized and primarily directed at private gain and personal fame.

In the end, we can easily conclude that the collecting of contemporary art is in its nascent stages in China. The small group of individuals making a concerted effort toward collecting today can be counted as the first generation of collectors in China. With no predecessors and very little experience to draw upon, some will succeed, but even more will fail. The constant upward swing of the art market may generate a lot of positive interest for contemporary Chinese art, but the chaotic atmosphere surrounding it—speculation, short-term investment, and maximized profit margins—is an undesirable environment for intellectually charged endeavours. Though it might mean an economic downshift, one can only hope that this current “investment phase” of collecting will soon be replaced by one with more altruistic motives. Only time and perseverance will allow for significant developments, for more lasting and meaningful encounters with contemporary art history, and for the circumstances under which a visionary second generation of collectors can emerge.

Notes 1 For some examples, see Francesco Bonami, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda,” New York Times Magazine, February 25, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/magazine/25Style.China.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin; David Barboza, “In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism,” New York Times, January 4, 2007, http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/arts/design/04arti.html; Carol Vogel, “Art—China Celebrates the Year of the Art Market” New York Times, December 24, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/arts/ design/24voge.html; David Barboza, “Chinese Art is as Hot in the East as it is in the West,” New York Times; November 29, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/arts/design/29pric.html; Carol Vogel, “China—The New Contemporary Art Frontier,” New York Times, April 1, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/01/arts/design/01auct.html. 2 Max Yeh, “The Yeh Family Collection,” in Michael J. Knight, ed., The Elegant Gathering: The Yeh Family Collection (San Francisco: The Asian Art Museum, 2006).

61 After the Market’s Boom: A Case Study of the Haudenschild Collection

Michelle M. McCoy

Yang Fudong, Honey 2, 2003, video. Courtesy of ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai.

Introduction

Located in the hills of La Jolla, a seaside resort community near San Diego, California, the residence of Chris and Eloisa Haudenschild is home to a major U.S. collection of contemporary Chinese video art and photography. It includes the work of roughly twenty-eight Chinese artists, including, significantly, Song Tao’s Life is Wonderful (2003), a large floor-top photo installation; Honey 2 (2003), a video by Hugo Boss Prize-nominated Yang Fudong; and Xu Zhen’s 1999 photomontage Sewer. In addition, the Haudenschild collection includes roughly one hundred and twenty holdings by ninety artists from the Americas, Europe, and other parts of Asia. Notable pieces include a triptych from Francis Alÿs’s series of paintings titled The Liar (ca. 1995), a photograph of Kristof Wodiczko’s Tijuana Projection (2002), and a painting from Komar & Melamid’s Most Wanted series dated at 2000 by the collector.1

The Haudenschilds began collecting contemporary Chinese video and photography in the late 1990s, when these mediums were beginning to become as widely used and important as they are today, and just before the beginning of the market’s current boom. Since then, prices for paintings by a few Chinese artists have topped two million dollars,2 and domestic collectors have entered

Xu Zhen, Sewer, 1998, photograph, 30 x 250 cm. Photo: Monica Jovanovich. Courtesy of the Haudenschild Collection.

62 the market in a significant way.3 In November 2006, for instance, a Chinese collector purchased a Liu Xiaodong painting at a Beijing auction for $2.7 million, the highest price paid at auction for a painting by a Chinese artist who began working after 1979.4

The current overall global art market also finds that contemporary art has, for the first time, “truly begun to rival the historically dominant Impressionism and Modern categories” at auction.5 Evidence to the overall market’s growth, The Financial Times has recently been publishing how-to articles about art collecting in general and at least one art hedge fund has been established. Situated Cao Fei’s and Pi Li’s presentation at the Political Equator Garage Talk, within this historic global market growth, June 2006. Courtesy of the Haudenschild Collection. expansion into China and other regions is seen as having contributed significantly overall. In addition to the work having dramatically appreciated, China has a new class of art collectors, with new levels of wealth among them. In fact, expansion into China and other “new” regions is often used in the case against the market’s potential crash.

Within this, the private collector maintains a unique position. On the one hand, as Britta Erickson writes, “Private collections are well suited to capturing the life of a vibrant art movement, driven as they are by passion, unencumbered by institutional impedimenta.”6 Not necessarily affixed to any institution or gallery, today’s private collector has the flexibility to build a historically complete collection, so long as he or she has the means and access to do Participants in the symposium “Distance—A Discussion on Contemporary Chinese Photography and Video” at the China so. On the other hand, private collectors Art Academy, Hangzhou, March 2004. Left to right: Pi Li, Eloisa Haudenschild, Waling Boers, Martina Koppel-Yang, Laura Zhou, are not under any obligation to remain Evelyne Jouanno, Hou Hanru, Jonathan Napak, Rudolf Stoert, Anna Haudenschild, Chris Haudenschild, Rita Haudenschild, Gridthiya loyal to any particular mission. As Lu Jie, Gaweewong, Wang Gongxin, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Wang Du, Zhang Peili, and Zheng Shengtian. Courtesy of the Haudenschild Collection. founder and director of the Long March Project, said, “. . . we’ve observed that many [collectors] started out building a big collection and ended up selling the artwork in auctions. . . . It really takes time to get to know what the real agenda is that a collector has.”7 However, there are standards and traditions by which collectors are judged, which the late Jonathan Napack, former Asia adviser to Art Basel describes: to be considered a “collector,” one must have a certain amount of commitment and knowledge.8

Chris and Eloisa Haudenschild’s level of commitment and knowledge is evidenced by the way they support contemporary art beyond collecting. The Haudenschild Foundation supports exhibitions and sponsors artists’ and scholars’ projects and programs such as symposia and residencies at the haudenschildGarage. Perhaps their most ambitious project yet was an exhibition entitled Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection, which took place from 2003 to 2005 and travelled to venues in San Diego, Shanghai, Tijuana, Singapore, and Beijing.

63 Eloisa Haudenschild, Laura Zhou, and Ma Shulin (Deputy Director, National Art Museum of China) at the opening of Zooming into Focus, November 2005, National Art Museum of China, Beijing. Courtesy of the Haudenschild Collection.

In her catalogue essay for this exhibition, Erickson addresses the collection’s strengths: “Representing a personal vision, it has not been expected to present a complete or historic view of the field. Nevertheless, it has captured a major slice of Chinese photography and video, representative of a signal moment”9 in the field’s entrance onto the global stage. Scholar Martina Köppel-Yang recognized it as the first collection of its kind,10 and Tina Yapelli, Director of the University Gallery at San Diego State University and the exhibition’s organizer, lauded it as “the most important collection of contemporary Chinese video and photography in the world.”11 Lorenz Helbling, the Haudenschilds’ longstanding dealer, writes, “The collection is a very ‘open’ collection. . . . It doesn’t aim to fix images people should have of China, or to transmit stereotypes of China. It’s not about ‘signature works’ or ‘trophy pieces’—it’s more about a spirit, about involvement.” The Haudenschilds, he writes, are “great collectors.”12

The Collection

To date, in addition to work by Yang Fudong, Song Tao, and Xu Zhen, the Haudenschild collection consists of works by Cao Fei, Chen Shaoxiong, Feng Mengbo, Geng Jianyi, Gu Dexin, Hai Bo, Hong Hao, Hu Jieming, Kan Xuan, Liu Wei, Lu Chunsheng, Shi Yong, Tang Maohong, Wang Jin, Wang Youshen, Weng Fen, Xiang Liqing, Yang Yong, Yang Zhenzhong, Yu Youhan, Zhao Bandi, Zhao Nengzhi, Zheng Guogu, Zhou Tiehai, and Zhu Jia. All of the works in the collection are photography, video/animation or computer graphics, or photo-based installations, except for two oil paintings and one print. The photographs Yang Zhenzhong, 922 Rice Counts, 2000, video (7 minutes). are from editions of one hundred or smaller, with Courtesy of ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai.

64 the majority of them from editions of ten or fewer. All of the videos are from editions of fewer than ten.13

Of these seventy individual works produced by twenty-eight artists, two of the works were produced by women artists: Cao Fei and Kan Xuan. Three of the artists are thirty years old or younger, while ten are between thirty-one and forty, fourteen are between forty-one and fifty, and one artist is over sixty. Most of them are based in Shanghai, with a few based in Beijing, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Yangjiang, Guangzhou, and Haikou, Hainan. Only Kan Xuan maintains a residence both in Beijing and abroad, in .

Eloisa Haudenschild said she is primarily interested in collecting as a way to assist and connect with emerging artists. She explained that when artists have been recognized and supported by other collectors, she maintains relationships with them, but her interest shifts from collecting their work to assisting them in other ways, such as funding projects. With charismatic ebullience, Haudenschild said she has never sold a work, nor has she bought work by an artist she has not met. She has never attempted to acquire work from an artist directly and has always used an agent or dealer. She said she has never asked the price of an artwork. The works have been acquired through studio visits and meetings with artists, stories she recounts with pleasure. Haudenschild refers to the first trips in which she began to acquire Chinese artwork as “my love affair.”14

Background

Eloisa Haudenschild, née Rodriguez-Carbornell, was born into an affluent family in Buenos Aires, Argentina, who were involved in real estate and politics. When asked, she said she probably could be considered a third- or fourth-generation collector, and keeps some of her family’s paintings and antiques in the La Jolla estate. She met Chris Haudenschild, an astrophysicst-entrepreneur and native of Los Angeles, skiing in Portillo in 1973. Chris Haudenschild, who has roots in Iowa and Indiana, is a first generation collector. Together they have two daughters, Rita and Anna, whose artwork is also listed in the collection’s catalogue.

Eloisa Haudenschild’s educational background is in psychology. She was involved in dance and choreography before pursuing her interest in contemporary art. She cut her art-collecting teeth in the early 1990s with contemporary work from Latin America. At that time, she was president of the bi-national board of inSite, a network of contemporary art programs and commissioned projects that map the liminal border area of San Diego and Tijuana.

Haudenschild said, “I travelled with the board and the directors to Mexico City every two months or so, visiting artists and studios, travelling with them and having fun. That afforded me the opportunity of meeting some extraordinary artists like Francis Alÿs, a good friend, who together with other good friends have since become international figures in the art world. There, I really got a firsthand experience of the situation. I saw firsthand their need of support.”

When Chris Haudenschild, founder and president of CliniComp, a healthcare information management system, began expanding his business into China, the couple began making regular trips to Shanghai. As she had done in Latin America, Eloisa Haudenschild sought to investigate the local art scene in Shanghai.

65 Approach

Fueled by passion and confidence, she says, they acquired twenty works with their first purchase of Chinese art. Her husband was very supportive, encouraging her to take those twenty and, in her words, “double it up—go for forty or fifty.”

Haudenschild recounts the late 1990s as an environment very different from the art world in the large urban centres of today’s China. “I spent a lot of time looking around,” she said of her first trips. “My husband and I went to the and saw a show of work by the Corsinos, a brother and sister who live in France. I was so moved by the work, and was bummed about not being able to share it with anyone. It was so nice to see something besides calligraphy and ink washes. I thought, ‘Somebody did this, some curator—someone has this sensibility,’ but I didn’t know who it was. So, I saw this guy walking around [the Shanghai Art Museum] who looked a little like Salvador Dali. I thought, ‘I’m going to ask this guy.’ And of course, it was Dadou.”

Dadou, or Davide Quadrio, founded BizArt, a self-supported non-profit gallery, in Shanghai in 1998. Along with ShanghART, it shares billing as one of the oldest contemporary art institutions in the city.

“I said [to Dadou], I’ve been coming here for three years, where is the artwork?’ He said, ‘Go to ShanghART and see Lorenz.’ So, my husband and I immediately caught a cab and went to [the gallery in] Fuxing Park. As you may know, getting around in those days wasn’t as easy as it is now.”

“I walked into [ShanghART]. Then, I met Laura Zhou,” Mr. Helbling’s partner at ShanghART. “It was genius from that moment on with Laura. . . . We are very close. She calls me ‘mommy.’”

Previously, Mr. Helbling had been showing work at the Portman Ritz-Carlton Hotel, a massive hotel, convention centre and residence in Shanghai. “He used to carry paintings around on the back of his motorcycle trying to sell them, because at that time he didn’t have a space,” recounts Haudenschild. Since then, ShanghART has moved from its Fuxing Park location and expanded into three different spaces within Shanghai. A fourth space opened this year in Beijing.

“I loved the continual excitement. The best part was going to studios and apartments to look at the work,” Haudenschild says. Effusive with praise for Mr. Helbling, she said, “[Lorenz] is so good. If I wanted something and he wasn’t working with that artist, he’d get it for me. For instance Cao Fei. He facilitated that . . . . You know, Lorenz wouldn’t sell to just anybody. He’s not as concerned with making a profit. We work together; he really wants to support the artists.”

She said he has never given her explicit advice, saying, “You know how it is with Lorenz, you never know [what he’s really thinking]. He’ll listen, smoking, with his coffee. And then he’ll say, ‘Eloisa, I think it’s time to think.’” Helbling and Zhou did, however, encourage her to look at certain artists.

After that initial trip, Haudenschild says she did a fair amount of research, contacting and meeting with scholars and curators in the field. She went to Paris and met with Hou Hanru, and exchanged emails with Britta Erickson. Perhaps in testament to the perceived need for a studied, serious, aesthetics-based treatment of contemporary Chinese art, Haudenschild said her queries to these noted curators and scholars—“from me, this little collector”—were enthusiastically received. Meantime, she continued collecting on her regular trips to China.

66 Yang Fudong, City Light, 2000, video (6 minutes). Courtesy of ShanghART Gallery.

Collecting Video And Photography

In general, photography and video, like other edition-based media, have traditionally sold for less than paintings. Despite their lower value within the market, however, these media, as previously mentioned, are important to contemporary Chinese art and often become vehicles for highly conceptual projects. Critic and scholar Lu Leiping describes photography and video as the “most experimental and pioneering media today,” and “the media that more strongly maintain the Chinese characteristics.”15 Indeed, many artists represented in the Haudenschild collection work solely in photography and video, and several are now highly sought after in large international exhibitions and biennials.

Haudenschild describes the process of arriving at the collection’s focus on video and photography as a product of following her own instincts. “You have to trust your eye,” she said. “I just get what I like, and the video and photography were what I liked. . . . There’s no one telling me what to do.”

“I did not initially intend to collect video and photography,” she said, asserting that certain works she selected, such as Yang Fudong’s The First Intellectual photographs, did not initially appear collectible. When asked why more people don’t collect video, her response was, “I don’t know. Maybe they just haven’t warmed up to it yet.”

Art: The “Alternative Asset Class”

Mainstream media outlets have described the recent growth in art investment in the overall market. “Art has emerged as a serious alternative asset class in the past few years, in spite of the disdain of art lovers and the skepticism of many dealers and collectors,” wrote Deborah Brewster

67 in an article about art collecting that appeared in the July 13, 2007 issue of the Financial Times.16 She continues:

“Randall Willette, who advises collectors, says: ‘There are increasingly two types of buyer in the market. The idea that you should buy purely because of your passion is becoming less common. More buyers are coming from a financial background and people want to support their buying decisions with financial information. Increasingly, art is part of the balance sheet of private clients.’”17

Indeed, much of the current dialogue surrounding contemporary Chinese art, and contemporary art as a whole, is in the language of finance.

Texas-based venture capitalist and wildcatter oil tycoon Robert Chaney speaks in such financial terms about his extensive contemporary Chinese art holdings. On the eve of the current exhibition of his collection at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Red Hot: Asian Art Now, Chaney described his strategy for “acquiring masterpieces,” using a method that is, in his words, a studied adaptation of the Warren Buffet model for investing. In the meantime, Chaney invited art dealers to sit on a panel in conjunction with the exhibition and encouraged Houston galleries to hold concurrent exhibitions of Asian art. Chaney seems determined to establish himself as an important, involved collector who also vocalizes his financial interest in the art world.18

Haudenschild, on the other hand, downplays herself as an investor. “I think I am not a good collector,” she joked, pausing in front of I Usually Wait Under the Arch Roof for Sunshine, a 2001 photograph by Hong Hao, who is well known for his photographs of densely accumulated objects. “For instance, the smart collector would’ve gotten [the accumulated object photos]. But me, I liked this one.”

Mrs. Haudenschild stands apart from the object-focused connoisseur as well, giving importance instead to her relationships with artists and members of the community. “For me, the collecting is just a token, a way to support these young guys . . . . The reward is that I have the opportunity to be part of their path.” She affectionately Eloisa Haudenschild with Chen Shaoxiong, Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen, describes the relationships among the Shi Yong, Yang Fudong, and Song Tao, February 2003. Courtesy of the artists represented in her collection, Haudenschild Collection. noting that they have maintained their integrity and loyalty to one another as friends in spite of experiencing unequal degrees of recognition. “You know, there are many collectors who are buying pieces and then putting them away until they become valuable—they don’t even show the work. And that is such a waste—these people need exposure,” she said.

Future Of The Market

Speculations on a crash or correction in the global and Chinese contemporary art markets circulate. Commenting on the market in general, Los Angeles-based billionaire collector Eli Broad was quoted in the New York Times in August 2007 as saying, “We’ve seen an unprecedented

68 appreciation of contemporary art in the thirty-five years that I’ve been collecting . . . . We’re bound to have a correction. I don’t know if it will happen at the November auctions, or it will happen next May.”19 Other recent articles have described the Chinese market as “bubbly,”20 and the overall Li Xu (Curator), Zhang Peili (Artist and Director, New Media Department of China Art Academy), Eloisa Haudenschild, Li Xiangyang (then Executive Director, Shanghai Art market as “overblown,”21 and Museum), and Lorenz Helbling (Director, ShanghART Gallery), Shanghai Art Museum Press Conference and Opening for Zooming into Focus, February 2004. Courtesy of the “showing signs of a bubble.”22 Haudenschild Collection.

Jonathan Napack wrote of a grim future, with a specific focus on China: “The current ‘boom’ in the Chinese economy is all about positioning and manipulating perceptions to help attain certain short-term goals. This infects the art world as much as anybody else.” He wrote, “It will one day crash, when the speculators who are now blindly following their ‘advisors’ realize prices have started to fall and dump their collections on the market.”23

Echoing Broad’s sentiments about the overall market, Eloisa Haudenschild commented on the contemporary Chinese art market’s future, saying, “I’m worried about the market. Will there be a crash or a correction? Hopefully it will be a correction. But [regardless, as a collector,] you either have integrity or you don’t.”

Questions Remain

Art collected by individuals from a different country than the origin of the artist is now a common practice. Today, there are numerous galleries dealing exclusively in contemporary Chinese art in cities around the Western hemisphere. The question of what influence the foreign collector of contemporary Chinese art has on the globalized art world is a complex one.

Lu Jie put foreign collectors in a positive light, saying, “[the artists] feel more confident to have their works sent abroad. They respect the international collectors more and believe they are the real collectors. The local collectors very often use the building of a collection as an introduction or entry into the market. The artists feel safer with their work in foreign collections.”24

There is also the idea that foreign collectors have helped contemporary Chinese art to be seen as valuable within China. Haudenschild said that the most important works in her collection have been shown at the Shanghai Art Museum and the National Museum of China in Beijing because she knows “how important it was for these young artists to get there.”

“Foreign collectors held out [the] olive branch,” according to critic Lu Leiping, in influencing the establishment of serious interest in contemporary Chinese new media art such as that in the Haudenschild Collection.25

Jonathan Napack wrote: “That is not to say that there is no real basis for the current foreign interest in Chinese art. This huge country, for so long off the map, is producing artists who can draw on a wellspring of images, concepts, and issues that are totally unique to China and produce

69 works that have that elusive ‘local flavour’ increasingly rare in a globalized world.”26 However, an often-discussed problem is that the possibility for this “local flavour” is diminished once the artwork is brought to market.

A less-discussed question, whose answer remains to be seen, is, as they become part of the global art market, how are China and other “new markets” for contemporary art changing it? Will contemporary Chinese art be subsumed by the same practice seen in the Euro-American art market of limitation and marginalization of different groups, such as women and minority artists? Consistent with Western art, works by male Chinese artists generally sell for more at auction than those of women. Living Han male artists have appeared much more prominently in the exhibitions of important collections. This also fits with the Western art historical tradition of marginalizing, ignoring, and dismissing women artists within Chinese art history.27 Just as Chinese art, which has not reached the heights that Euro-American art does at auction, is marginalized by art world regionalism, female Chinese artists may be marginalized even more.

Here again, private collections occupy a unique space. Private collections, “driven as they are by passion, unencumbered by institutional impedimenta” (as Erickson was quoted as saying in the introduction to this essay), are truly private in nature, and do not fall under the type of public scrutiny that attempts to address and confront the gender- and ethnicity-based biases about an artwork’s value that is at work in public collections. In addition, through the funding of exhibitions, the establishment of art centres, and the lending of artworks, private collections may indirectly promote the marginalizing practices of the institutional and historical art worlds. On the other hand, private collections also present the possibility of freely challenging and questioning such biases, which, as attested to by Lorenz Helbling, is perhaps what Eloisa Haudenschild has attempted to do.

The impact an individual collector can have on the market is another question. One of the indicators by which to measure the success of an artist is his or her inclusion in important and well-known collections. It follows that the larger and more important the collection, the more influence on the market the collector has. As Napack wrote of the recent inflation, “It prices younger or novice collectors out of the market, leaving many artists vulnerable to the whims of a few deep-pocketed collectors.”28

Finally, it remains to be seen how the market’s inflation will affect the artworks themselves. Napack wrote, “The current infusion of cash into the market brings [first-rate galleries] some short-term profits, but it is also destructive in the long run. It inflates the expectations of artists and makes them even more exploitative of their galleries.”29 Marc Spiegler of New York magazine wrote, “Historically bad markets tend to produce better art—there’s less pressure on artists to produce and fewer temptations to sell out, and they’re dealing only with collectors and galleries willing to ride out the hard times.”30

Haudenschild stressed that ultimately what remains important to her is having the ability to support emerging artists and connect people in dialogue. She said, “The inflation of the market is problematic. When I was starting to collect, it was like these guys could really benefit from my collecting their work . . . . A lot of bad work has come to auction recently.”

She said, “You know, Chinese art has become this kind of cliché.” Gesturing around the garage that houses many of the collection’s significant photographs, including Yang Fudong’s The First

70 Intellectual series of photos (2000), Song Tao’s In Loud Crowds I Dream of Hanging Myself (2002), and Lu Chunsheng’s Water photos (2002), she said, “I’m thankful I was able to get these pieces, but I know it’s become a little bit like a fashion show.” Expressing an increased interest in funding projects, she said, “I’m not even sure I want to be a collector anymore. But I have to make a choice that I can live with.”

Notes 1 Plates of much of the Chinese collection can be found in the exhibition catalogue, Zooming Into Focus: Contemporary Photography and Video Art from the Haudenschild Collection, Shi Yong and Laura Zhou, eds. (Shanghai: ShanghART Gallery, 2005). Images of the Haudenschild’s other holdings may be found at www.haudenschildgarage.com. 2 David Barboza, “In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism,” New York Times, January 4, 2007, http://www.nytimes. com/2007/01/04/arts/design/04arti.html. 3 “Chinese art is now beginning to be aggressively collected by the Chinese themselves,” said Boriana Song, manager of the Chinese-owned Beijing Art Now Gallery. ”But now Chinese buyers are hungry for culture, and they see contemporary art as fashionable. The market is maturing, tastes are changing, and more than 60% of our clients are local Chinese.” Pallavi Aiyar, “Modern art scene grabbing investors,” Asia Times Online, April 11, 2006, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/ HD11Cb05.html. 4 Barboza, “In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism.” 5 Marc Spiegler, “Five Theories On Why the Art Market Can’t Crash (and Why It Will Anyway),” New York, April 3, 2006, http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/16542/. 6 Britta Erickson, “Zooming Into Focus, Sliding Into History,” in Zooming Into Focus, 14–15. 7 Lu Jie, “Contemporary Art in Greater China: Under Pressure, A Discussion at the 52nd Venice Biennale,” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (September 2007), 8–24. 8 Jonathan Napack, “An Art Market With Chinese Characteristics,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (March 2006), 16–17. 9 Erickson, “Zooming Into Focus, Sliding Into History,” in Zooming Into Focus, 14–15. 10 Martina Koppel-Yang, “Compelling Images of a Distant Life, Video as Expansion of Reality,” in Zooming Into Focus, 71–72. 11 Erickson, “Zooming Into Focus, Sliding Into History,” in Zooming Into Focus, 14–15. 12 Ibid. 13 Information about the collection provided by the haudenschildGarage. 14 Statements by and biographical information about Mrs. Haudenschild based on a conversation at the haudenschildGarage on September 5, 2007, a telephone conversation on September 12, 2007, and e-mail exchange. 15 Lu Leiping, “When Experiment Encounters Classics,” in Zooming Into Focus, 19–21. 16 Deborh Brewster, “Investing in the art market,” Financial Times, July 13, 2007, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a531d0d2-3153-11dc-891f- 0000779fd2ac.html. 17 Ibid. 18 Kelly Klaasmeyer, “RED HOT: Asian Art From the Chaney Family Collection,” Houston Press, September 13, 2007, http://www. houstonpress.com/2007-09-13/culture/red-hot-business/. 19 Robin Pogrebin, “Volatile Markets? Art World Takes Stock,” New York Times, August 29, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/ arts/design/29mark.html, accessed 08/24/07. 20 Barboza, “In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism.” 21 Spiegler, “Five Theories On Why the Art Market Can’t Crash (and Why It Will Anyway).” 22 Sharon Reier, “Contemporary Art: Follow the Money—The Latest Status Investment is Showing Signs of a Bubble,” International Herald Tribune, January 27, 2007, http://w4.stern.nyu.edu/news/news.cfm?doc_id=6894. 23 Napack, “An Art Market With Chinese Characteristics,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (March 2006), 16–17. 24 Lu Jie, “Contemporary Art in Greater China: Under Pressure, A Discussion at the 52nd Venice Biennale,” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, September/Fall 2007, 8–24. 25 Lu Leiping, “When Experiment Encounters Classics,” in Zooming Into Focus, 19–21. 26 Napack, “An Art Market With Chinese Characteristics,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (March 2006), 16–17. 27 Marsha Weidner, preface to Flowering in the , Women in the History of Chinese and Japanese Painting, ed. Marsha Weidner (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), xi–xiv. 28 Napack, “An Art Market With Chinese Characteristics,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (March 2006), 16–17. 29 Ibid. 30 Spiegler, “Five Theories on Why the Art Market Can’t Crash (nd Why It Will Anyway).”

71 Zhong Biao and the “Grobal” Imagination

Paul Manfredi

n light of the recent success of the Chinese art market, two issues seem of ongoing concern to artists, observers, and scholars of the subject. The first is the way Chinese art is “selling Iout”—both figuratively, in terms of artistic practice corrupted by global market concerns, and literally, in terms of locally produced and immediately exported art that often never sees the light of day in the land of its production.1 The second relates to the first as it involves artists’ dialogues with an international art market, an involvement that sees them turning away from a Chinese audience for the sake of satisfying the tastes or assumptions of a global marketplace alien to local concerns. These issues bedevil accomplished artists in particular, as their success in the international art market threatens to become the very mark of their failure at home.2 Naturally, none of this would be a problem in the absence of the spectacular success of China’s art market as a whole.3

As we look at work produced by accomplished artists, though, thorough appreciation of the kinds of pressures generated by the success of the Chinese art market will require a more subtle view of interior/exterior dynamics on a theoretical level. In other words, the critic, no less than the artist, must be aware and prepared to analyze the aesthetic impact of these high economic stakes on the creative process.

The focus of this essay will be one such globally successful artist, the Sichuan painter and professor of painting at the Sichuan Academy of Art in Chongqing Zhong Biao.4 Zhong’s work demonstrates a quality of acute , one that is derived from both a considerable innate talent and his methodology of working with digital photographs. His approach is to assemble a database of digital photographs—random snapshots of his experience in the world—and distill significant or compelling fragments from them, and then reproduce those fragments in novel juxtapositions using paint, acrylic, or charcoal.

To help explore the ramifications of Zhong Biao’s work, particularly in light of the high-stakes art market mentioned above, I rely heavily on sociologist George Ritzer’s work The Globalization of Nothing (2004). In this work, Ritzer provides a useful framework for understanding global consumerism, one that identifies forces at work that put at risk aspects of human culture many consider to be of high value, or at least substance.5 Ritzer does so by establishing a continuum, placing the “social form” of “nothing” at one end and “something” at the other, and arguing that what is often vaguely described as “globalization” is in fact a global drift away from localism (and “something”) towards an ever-expanding global bounty of “nothing.”6 In this view, what is produced locally by real people for local consumption occupies one end of the spectrum, and what is centrally managed in transnational board rooms and disseminated world-wide by a globalized system of advertisement and trade is the other. The reason, in essence, that “nothing” succeeds in the global system and “something,” by and large, does not, is that “nothing” is far easier to package, transport (translate), and receive. Each of these—“nothing” and “something”—Ritzer explains, are in their purest form impossible; they occur in reality at varying points upon a continuum.7

A more specific focus in applying Ritzer’s analysis, and the one that appears in the title of this paper, arises from Ritzer’s concern with the inadequacy of, particularly, the global/local dichotomy.

72 As Ritzer explains, the notion of the glocal “ignores global processes that tend to overwhelm the local.”8 In response, Ritzer coins the term “grobalism,” which he describes as follows:

the process in which growth imperatives (e.g., the need to increase sales and profits from one year to the next in order to keep stock prices high and growing) push organizations and nations to expand globally and to impose themselves on the local.9

The notion of the “grobal,” then, takes the matter a step further; it is the vanquishing of the glocal by the global in any given local context. In other words, where the hybridity of all glocal interaction begins to give way to mono-formulas of centralized global authorities, the grobal has won the contest. “Nothing,” exemplified in credit cards, the Disney corporation characters (and experience), and the Coca-Cola Company, sells primarily because it is able to establish itself in a greater variety of contexts (the bottom line), its lack of substance the very heart of its success.

One can well imagine that the increasing prominence of “nothing” would be a problem for artists, whose creations attempt if nothing else to be substantive, and also to be sold as such. Yet, what is at issue in this paper is the very question of the relative “nothingness,” in Ritzer’s terms, of this particular instance of global consumerism, and the degree to which Zhong Biao both foregrounds this type of emptiness in his own work and does so while infusing a new “something” into it in the process. My argument is that Zhong Biao illustrates Ritzer’s theory of the grobal drift towards “nothingness”—and in fact reaps the benefits of the effective functions of the global market where the sale of his paintings are concerned—even as he refutes the basic assumption about how grobal, glocal, and global relate to one another. Zhong’s images, particularly those of urban China, which on one level depict a flattening out or emptying out of local experience under pressure from global systems, also frequently contain clear and substantive glimpses of a local “something” in the process of its own erasure, and in this respect Zhong refutes Ritzer’s notion that “nothing” circulates where “something” does not.

Grobalism at Work

Zhong Biao’s own view of his artistic process, expressed in a 2005 statement “What is Great Art,” seems a good starting point for exploration of his work in relation to Ritzer’s theory of globalization:

For art to be great, it must possess the following three qualities: accuracy, realism, and freedom.

Accuracy is the ability to express your aim with concision. It incorporates the combination of your knowledge, technique, intelligence, and experience.

Realism does not refer to form, but to the fusion of artistic reality and the truth of life in the deepest parts of your heart. It rejects the traps of the insubstantial, utilitarian, and foolish; it is the pursuit at the beginning and the end of art, even the reason to exist as an artist.

Freedom is the territory that finds comprehension and realization along the path of constant breakthrough from the boundaries of “self” and ”history.” It is the ambition of art.10

The English-language version of the second quality (realism) belies what in Zhong Biao’s original is a striking, even somewhat audacious appeal to the importance of “truth” in the artistic process. Given the post-socialist, post-ideological, economic free-for-all that is today’s China, Zhong Biao’s goal seems at least a tall order. In the context of Ritzer’s analysis, such a word as “truth” could

73 readily stand in for the “something” on the “something/nothing” axis. How an individual artist manifests that substance while the forces of grobalism exert constant pressure toward “nothing” presents the major problem, and it is one not lost on the artist. Thus, for Zhong Biao the notion of a “foolish entrapment” follows directly from an attempt to apprehend the “real,” demonstrating his appreciation of the phantasmagorical quality of development now according to market principles where one-time political directives once ruled the day. In the current context, an ambitious artist must, according to Zhong Biao, endeavour to resist “the insubstantial” circulated in the barrage of novel commodities in order to protect the “deepest parts of your heart.”

In looking at Zhong’s work, we find that part of his strategy is to join with the forces of commoditization on an aesthetic level. The fact that, to begin with, the above quote comes from a collection of post-card reproductions of the artist’s work, with detachable bond at the spine to allow easy removal and delivery into the global system, suggests at least that Zhong is engaged in the commoditization of his own work. Beyond the literal strategy of marketing, though, there is a deeper layer of the commoditization process circulating meaningfully throughout Zhong’s opus. The most startling example of this is surely a series of art-advertisement images Zhong produced for Dragon Airlines.11 Executed in 2004, the title of this series of four paintings, The Beauty Zhong Biao, Everywhere, No. 2, 2004, oil and acrylic on canvas, of Flying, is a new advertising slogan for 130 x 97 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Dragonair. This “hybrid” form of ad-art was used in various brochures, with the images in some cases also enlarged to dimensions appropriate to the scale of China’s contemporary urban scene—large enough to cover the sides of buses and even buildings in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and other cities around China. Their purpose is described on the English-language version of the Dragonair Web site: “The works—entitled You, We, Everybody, and Everywhere—respectively represent the world-class in-flight service, the warmth and attentiveness of the cabin crew, and the greater choice of frequencies that travelers enjoy with Dragonair.” With this manoeuvre, Zhong would appear to have taken himself directly into the void of Ritzer’s grobalization, aiding and abetting a company with necessarily global/grobal aspirations.

Of the images, the most poignant in this respect would be Everywhere No.2, an additional painting which Zhong Biao executed but that was never utilized in the advertising campaign.12 Here, we find Zhong Biao’s characteristically complex juxtapositions of old and new, central and peripheral, foreign and domestic, substantive and frivolous at work. Framed in terms of the global local dialectic, we observe what I would call a kind of glocal geographical collapse, drawing together the figures of the two women, with Shanghai at left, Hong Kong at the right, and the two bridged by the iconic Temple of Heaven pavilion of Beijing in the centre. The singularly important airplane, from the point of view of the advertisers, takes off from all three at once, its trajectory a typically Zhong Biao geometrical configuration—uncanny in its ability to recapitulate the impossibly contiguous shapes provided by architects of Chinese structures past and present (e.g., Shanghai’s Pearl Tower, Hong Kong’s Bank of China, each of the late twentieth century, and, again, the Temple

74 of Heaven of the early fifteenth century). Even the bodies of the “attentive cabin crew” are drawn into vaguely meaningful shapes. The message is an apt affirmation of Ritzer’s grobal idea: the more connected these lines of intersection, the smoother, more rational, streamlined, and convenient the global processes, the more thoroughly vacated the semantic structures, the better the flying experience will be.

The image is, as promised, an encouragement to purchase a Dragonair ticket; it is an advertisement. We might take the Hong Kong company’s successful contracting of a contemporary Chinese artist to do the work of an advertising unit as the vanquishing of local artistic impulse, at least in this isolated case. If, however, we look more widely into the history of Zhong Biao’s work, we find a more subtle phenomenon at work. We note, to begin with, that the artist has been producing advertisements for global corporations since quite early in his painting career. Viewed over time, though, the images function more as meta-advertisement, one that at once advertises and provides commentary.

Zhong’s Passer-by of 1996 is a case in point. In this painting, a quality of geographical collapse similar to that of the Dragonair image mentioned above becomes even more expansive, yoking Japan’s iconic Mt. Fuji together with Beijing’s Forbidden City. Meanwhile, a kind of synthesis offsetting this imaginative act of dislocation occurs in the telecommunication device central to the painting, providing the means by which global unity through communication might be achieved. In terms of Ritzer’s analysis, the image provides instead a snapshot of the grobalizing tendencies of global corporations, a strangely dominant Coca-Cola logo on the telephone booth, and the considerably more subtle but nonetheless distinctly Disney Mickey Mouse on the Zhong Biao, Passer-by, 1996, oil on canvas, young man’s shorts. The way the global brand circumscribes 130 x 97 cm. Courtesy of the artist. the human experience of the scene is suggested as well in the black-and-white human (and animal) figures juxtaposed with the vibrancy of the inanimate world.

As an instance of geography flattened by grobal forces, it seems appropriate to wonder about the titular “passer-by”—the boy with the baby? The baby itself? The grandfather (we presume)? The young woman or bicyclist in the distance? Or perhaps the viewer him- or herself? In other words, the very situatedness of visiting suggested in the Chinese term guoke (passer-by) is coming apart at the seams, as no interior/exterior binary offers itself in the context of the image. The painting’s imagery amounts to an undoing of space and time as we know it, not symbolically, but in fact. As the telephone disembodied voices early in the twentieth century, so does the iconography of global advertising dislocate space in the twenty-first. The artistic strategy is one of substitution, depicting the triumph of touristic abstractions over human experience, just as Ritzer describes the global dynamics between grobal and glocal forces. The spaces opened by Zhong Biao’s images are thus uninhabitable, unless of course one is a centrally conceived, globally distributed brand image. The field of meaning is as open to the advertiser as to the artist, a canvas that has the blessing of a high degree of visibility due to the worldwide attention paid to China now, and a curse or crisis of meaning. Zhong Biao’s command of design (or “accuracy” from Zhong’s three qualities of great art quoted above) serves him in the composition of images that plug easily into the circuits of global circulation—his paintings, even those not created on commission by major corporations, look like

75 advertisements—but they can also be said to short-circuit the very global flow in which they travel. In his Space of Life, the artist’s product placement generates a resonant tension that entreats the viewer to partake of the grobal experience just as its casualties pass into silence and invisibility.

This particular “combination of your knowledge, technique, intelligence, and experience” is uncommonly accurate; the artist, not unlike one of the myriad builders of modern China, places a young, vibrant, ethnically indecipherable woman into a grobal context. She occupies the space with an angular corporality, consuming a large quantity of some indecipherable liquid (clearly not Coke—is it beer with a straw?) while a peddler looks on; she consumes him just as she erases him visually, metaphorically, and in fact. In the urban China of today, it is perhaps less a question of have and have not than it is of on the way in and on the way out. In this contest, she and the grobal corporation that frames her are the winners.

Search for the Glocal Dimension: Coming Home to the Contemporary Chinese City

At the root of Zhong’s juxtapositions, the contradictory elements found in his meditations on the “truth of life,” is a dynamic human experience set in the contemporary Chinese city, the situs of change on an unprecedented pace and scale. As hutong restoration, which follows closely on the heals of demolition, continues apace in Beijing, and massive expansions of infrastructure continue in Shanghai, new projects also spring ex nihilo from formerly rural or in some respects Zhong Biao, Space of Life, 1996, oil on canvas, unsatisfying urban spaces everywhere in China, 130 x 97 cm. Courtesy of the artist. including Zhong’s former place of residence, Chongqing, Sichuan. This restlessly built environment is, for an artist like Zhong Biao, a tableau of impermanence, a study in human endeavour apprehensible only if it can be slowed down enough to be perceived. By zeroing in on images of home in this urban context, we are focusing on a restless and dynamic city culture when it is arguably most rooted and “solid,” the Zhong Biao, Coming Home, 2004, charcoal and acrylic on moment of return. canvas, 150 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

To begin with, a 2004 painting with the title Coming Home. Here, Zhong Biao’s return is an appropriately fleeting moment, arrested only by the overcrowded street that ferries the figure to his/her home. In this respect, the image can be considered characteristic of Zhong Biao’s experience and method, one that involves constant domestic and international travel and constant use of a digital camera to document the process of travel.13 This image is, however, uncharacteristic of Zhong Biao’s work as a whole. As previously mentioned, the artist works clearly in terms of juxtaposition, placing unlike elements side by side in a way that calls attention to their dislocation. These juxtapositions express, according to the artist himself, patterns that have been culled or distilled after long periods of time compiling visual diaries.14 What is uncharacteristic about this image, then, is that it juxtaposes nothing; as a scene, it stands alone. As a painting, it is part of a

76 Zhong Biao, On the Way to an Appointment, 2004, charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhong Biao, Traffic Jam, 2004. Charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist. group of three images, all of which Zhong produced in 2004. The other two works are On the Way to an Appointment and Traffic Jam.

The three versions differ principally in colour, shading, distribution, and intensity, as well as in the dimensions of the figure driving the car. Being larger in the second image, this figure clearly breaks through the frame established by the darkness surrounding the windshield. Apart from this, the three states are closely related, comprising the same image even if parts of its rendering are not identical. The titles as well would seem to take us in different directions, so to speak: to an appointment, or home, or no place. But these are, in Zhong Biao’s world, overlapping, complete,

77 Zhong Biao, February 14, 2003, Chongqing, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist. and not in contrast to any alternative space, state, or time that might be suggested by, for instance, Beijing Opera performers, Ming dynasty vases, Chinese Communist Party cadres, or impoverished peasants, the types of juxtaposed elements seen often in Zhong’s paintings. In this series, the artist is content to work on developing the tangibility of a material texture—the “feel” of the car’s interior is entirely clear in the image—that is arguably “homey,” a world unto itself nestled almost by intention in slow-moving traffic. The reason for the self-sufficiency of the car as subject matter in each of these paintings may relate at least in part to its association with the new-found wealth of contemporary China. In this respect, the act of driving is, for those not employed in the transportation industry, a fundamentally nouveau riche activity. Thus a correspondence is struck between the phantasmagorical materialism predicated on novelty—advertisement, desire—and the successful navigation of the same. In order to be successful, the driver hones perception, selecting the relevant, discarding or circumventing all the rest. In the wider scheme of restless and mercurial Chinese urban spaces, Zhong Biao’s paintings can be said to do the same. There is no suggestion of subjugation here, and possibly dystopic visions of change are replaced with a wide- eyed, if vigorously framed, vision of beauty, wealth, and light.

An even more vivid example of an interior car image emerged in a 2003 painting entitled February 14, Chongqing. As a group, these car paintings suggest a theme: the view of a shifting contemporary state seen through the eyes of the car owner, in this case herself strangely caught in her own external, horizontal, and sleepy-eyed gaze. The extraordinary geometry of these intersecting views, when coupled with the blonde-wigged model above the McDonald’s, and of course the rear-view- mirror-attached figurine, establish the subject with almost gravitational integrity despite the fact that angles of vision are clearly awry. Nonetheless, the driver moves through the scene, wending her way through one of Zhong’s many urban-scapes, a nighttime sunglassed eye on pedestrian

78 traffic of which she is also curiously a part. She is securely positioned as both object and subject, acutely alone save for the company of the vapid and over-eager tissue dispenser. From this secure position, she, and, by extension, we, have a powerfully demarcated interior experience of two worlds: the world of the car and world of the street.

None of these images is of “home” per se. They are, instead, snapshots that arrest urban experience as one moves through transitions of the built world. The importance of the intimate automobile interior to Zhong Biao’s world is no accident. Zhong Biao’s car images represent a distinctly grobal mode of coming home. Indeed, in the current Chinese city, there’s arguably less and less to which one can hope to return to. The artist instead depicts his subjects driving on through, touching material objects, aspects of human form, finely-wrought details of signage, and other urban text (the English-language “TRPE” for “tape” and “tupso” for “turbo” are interesting slips) in passing. Zhong comes grobally home in/to a car, and then moves on. In this respect, the artist’s glocal Zhong Biao, Insomnia, 2004, charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 150 x engagement is a matter of perpetual motion. 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist. In his own words:

My art is in pleasure, in bed, in deep and sound sleep, in the bursting warm tears, after drinking, in Marilyn Monroe’s philosophy, in others’ eyes upon me, on the cattle Lao Tzu rode when he left home, in the moment when the train started and the lamps outside the window began moving, in the inconspicuous glamour of Chinese blue and white porcelain.15

This is more than a mere question of the here and now, as the here and now, at least in many Chinese cities of the early twenty-first century, is the there and gone. The glocal-grobal oppositional scheme presented by Ritzer negates the possibility that the glocal could indeed be the accurate and compelling form of grobal processes caught in the act. The intolerable emptying out of human experience that comes with grobal processes (such that his figures, though often compelling, are more often turning into figures of mass marketing campaigns) does not entirely negate the satisfying quality of the designs themselves. Zhong Biao’s comfortable interiors and acutely juxtaposed but somehow altogether harmonious fragments of contemporary experience seem almost to revel in their own vacuity.

Bed

To push the search for the glocal a bit further, we may leave behind a hopelessly fugitive home and try at least to discover where the artist lays down his head. Here Zhong Biao’s vision is characteristically vivid, as in his Insomnia of July 2004. Zhong Biao’s powers of selection draw the tussled and chaotic lines of bedding (rendered with charcoal and acrylic paint) together with the smooth, complex, and impossibly envisioned angles of Shanghai cityscape. The line dividing them is a precipice of alarming implications for the would-be sleeper (even the pillows themselves

79 seem in danger of falling over the edge). The mirror-image recapitulation of the sleepless predicament—an unsurprising theme in Zhong Biao’s work given the breakneck speed of China’s current development generally, and with respect to contemporary art in particular—reinforces the psychological state of the one (or ones) who have vacated the bed, perhaps themselves having fallen “back in line” with the city.

In two subsequent images, Body Temperature of 2006 and Industry of 2005, the collapse of the local comes most clearly into view. The walled precipice separating the humanity of a tussled bed from the grobal systems (city of Shanghai) that appear in Insomnia is removed entirely in these two pictures. There is now no public/private dichotomy, but, instead, a strangely intimate heap of demolished concrete and billowing smoke stacks. These images are of course exemplary of Zhong’s juxtaposition method, positing two stock images in his symbolic system— the first is the city in transformation and the second is one of Zhong’s attractive young women, perhaps his single most depicted human subject. In the latter case, the human figure is typically arrayed, herself a material object (right down to Zhong Biao, Body Temperature, 2006, charcoal and acrylic on the boots) signifying, among other things, canvas, 280 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist. consumption and desire itself, setting off typically phallic arrangements (buildings, trees, and, increasingly in recent years, guns) that bring “colour” or motivation to the whole operation of “industry.” In short, she is most meaningful in the context of a grobal system.

In all three images, the beds are the orphans of the city—their naked humanity at best an impression, a fleeting memory to turn away from once the “job” is done or the day begins. The inter-permeated spaces become sites of temporal and symbolic hybridity, layers of discourse and history caught by the painter in the act of exchange. As we look through Zhong’s work, we discover that it is the exchange itself that drives matters, the underlying principle that emerges Zhong Biao, Industry, 2005, charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 200 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist. in the process of the artist’s creation. If there is something local to be discovered, it is already well on the way to transformation, and its transformation will occur according to principles discovered in the process of creation.

80 Zhong Biao, Midday Sun, 2006, oil, charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 280 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

“Internal Order” in the Grobal System

In a 2004 interview with scholar, curator, and critic Gao Minglu, Zhong Biao summarized his efforts as an artist in terms of the pursuit of an “internal order,” a principle or power that drives the changes of our contemporary physical and social environment.16 The changes on the material level are easily discerned in Zhong’s work, an ever-accelerating cycle of tearing down and constructing China’s built environment generating an endless array of images of new products, new structures, and new modes of contemporary living. Amidst these, however, are fragments of a different kind, referred to by Zhong in his own writings as “History” (mentioned above in “What is Great Art”). It is in these fragments, or symbols, that Zhong Biao’s art of specifically glocal expression hits its mark. As the critic Pi Li, in his article included in Zhong Biao’s collection and

81 entitled “Visual Archaeology,” points out, Zhong Biao’s symbolic language includes mass culture from both China and abroad, but most crucially appeals to a local context:

As a sensitive artist, Zhong Biao has captured the pulse of China’s social reforms through the visual symbols Chinese people are familiar with. He takes all the visual experiences from an era and uses them as the main images of his works.17

Indeed, one immediately observes a rich collection of Maoist-era symbols (cadres, model peasants, young People’s Liberation Army soldiers, propaganda posters, and other accoutrements) and even larger frames of reference (images of China’s cultural tradition) that draw on Chinese experience. Far more than Orientalist window dressing, these figures remind his viewers of the ways meaning itself has come loose from these symbolic containers, now empty and adrift in an increasingly meaning-challenged environment. Combined with the occasional appearance of world historical figures (among them Benjamin Franklin, Che Guevara, and John F. Kennedy), Zhong’s works read well, and sell well, in a global market place.18 But those actually reading his works are only those able to experience the full ambivalence present in his juxtaposed imagery, an implied viewership that is Chinese and at least as old as Zhong Biao himself. The internal order at work may well be the domination of Ritzer’s “nothing” in the global context.

But amidst this, something is happening, and Zhong’s works stage that occasion for the viewer, as can be seen in his 2006 canvas Midday Sun. Taken as their constituent elements, Zhong’s re- presentations of contemporary Chinese experience appeal widely, which is to say grobally, and in some respects to the lowest common denominator (he paints appealing young women). Each fragment, be it a recognizable historical figure, a Chinese Communist Party official, or a globally recognized name-brand product, is yet in summary view both muted and made more vibrant through Zhong’s method of juxtaposition. The fragments of Zhong’s visual spaces are in a sense cut down to size, of equal weight (which is to say no weight at all) and open to exchange at the highest bid. They parallel successful products in the grobal system, topically relevant and easily consumed. Unlike the grobalism described by Ritzer, though, Zhong’s is not designed to merely maximize profits. His work presents instead an opportunity for the minute sites of resistance, like the human figures the artist depicts, gazing back from the canvases in defiance of grobal domination. This may be the artist’s most compelling achievement, to allow the individual visual slices of human experience that he has culled over time (his digital photographs) to articulate themselves with such independent clarity as to actually arrest the processes of change in their tracks. In other words, the artist’s subjectivity can be seen to give way mid-way through the process of creation, leaving surprising room for the dialogical engagement with his subject matter he has only incidentally assembled. Whether or not the artist is thus truly able to “transcend history and self,” as his third component of great art dictates, is surely debatable. Nonetheless, Zhong’s work is an instance and illustration of the strength of the grobal force of “nothing,” substantially connected, imaginatively at least, to the very local “something” of human experience.

As a kind of canvas to be written upon by grobalizing forces, China is at the moment uncommonly blank. As authors of a new order, those who commandeer the built environment—not to mention the helicopters that surveil it—are no doubt little concerned with glocal responses, resistant or not. Nonetheless, there is always something in the interstices between what has been and what is to become of China’s built environment. The ones able to actually fit the pieces of this mercurial and often traumatic experience together into a meaningful whole, even for a moment, are few and far between.19 To accurately apprehend the changing Chinese landscape—to, as Thierry Raspail puts it,

82 “step into the void of the present”—requires the kind of subtle perception at which artists excel.20 To be able to reproduce aesthetically and even pleasingly the often traumatic experience of this changing landscape requires a powerful imagination, the likes of which Zhong Biao demonstrates in his work.

Notes 1 Part of a general critique of both globalization and postmodernism is the assumption that we—the pronoun itself is perhaps the issue—share in a single global experience, when, in fact, as Jonathan Hay observes, “we are still very far from the degree of integration suggested by the word globalization.” See Jonathan Hay, quoted in Tsang Reliang, “Palpitating a Different Center: Three Exhibitions of Contemporary Chinese Art in the United States, 1990–2000” (M.A. Thesis, San Francisco State University, 2002), 10. 2 According to Asiatimes, annual art sales grew from USD $26 million in 1996 to roughly USD $1.3 billion ten years later. The number of Chinese, as opposed to foreign or overseas Chinese, collectors is currently estimated to be nearly 70,000,000. “Turning Canvas into Cash in China” Asiatimes online edition, by Robert Hartmann, January 5, 2007, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/ IA05Cb02.html. 3 Though international awareness of Chinese contemporary art has expanded steadily since the early 1990s when it began to appear in more international venues (the 1999 Venice Biennale in particular), it was the March 2006 sale at Sotheby’s of Zhang Xiaogang’s painting for close to USD $1 million that catapulted Chinese artists to the top of the proverbial heap. The trend has moved sharply upward ever since. The New York Times reported recently that a Yue Minjun painting as an auction at Sotheby’s London was sold for USD $5.9 million. See David Barboza, “Chinese Art Prices Soar,” Arts Brief section of the New York Times, October 15, 2007. 4 Zhong’s works have appeared in many galleries and museums worldwide. His solo exhibitions include the 2004 Ubiquity (Art Scene Warehouse, Shanghai), the 2001 A Chance Existence, (Art Scene China Gallery, Hong Kong), and the 1996 Fable of Life (Arts Museum of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Chongqing). His United States debut took place at the Frey Norris gallery in San Francisco on May 3, 2007. 5 This paper is not an argument for the unassailability of Ritzer’s argument in the sociohistorical context. A useful and in many respects persuasive critique of Ritzer’s method is provided by Andrew Austin (“The Globalization of Nothing by George Ritzer,” Teaching Sociology 32, no. 3 (July): 339–341. Austin argues that Ritzer’s analysis could benefit from further engagement with well- established critiques of global capitalism. For my purposes, though, the language expounded by Ritzer provides useful terminology for schematizing and understanding trends in contemporary Chinese art. The question of whether or not Ritzer’s theory is the best for elucidating socioeconomic phenomena within the global system is not at issue. 6 George Ritzer, The Globalization of Nothing (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press), 3. 7 Ibid, xii. 8 Ibid, xiii. 9 Ibid. 10 The statement appears in English and Chinese on the inside cover of a collection of postcard reproductions of Zhong’s paintings, produced by the artist in 2005. The work is entitled Zhong Biao Space 2005. 11 Subsequent to his work on this project, Zhong Biao has become a juror for the Dragonair “Emerging Chinese Artist Awards,”a competition established in cooperation with ArtScene China in 2005. This program is clear indication of Dragonair’s commitment to supporting contemporary art in China. 12 In fact, Zhong Biao produced five paintings for Dragonair, the fifth of which was an amended version ofEverywhere . According to Zhong Biao, he was still at work on a new Everywhere when Dragonair began the advertising campaign, and therefore had no need of an additional painting. As a consequence, Everywhere No. 2, which is the one pictured in this essay, remains in the possession of the artist. Conversation with the artist, August 2007. 13 On one leg of a four-city tour of the U.S. in 2005 (Zhong Biao’s first), the artist logged roughly 200 digital photographs in a 48-hour period. This digital file was shared with the author. Some of these images appeared in new paintings by Zhong within a matter of weeks. 14 Conversations with the artist, May 2006. 15 Zhong Biao, Ubiquity: Zhong Biao’s Works 1994-2004 (Shanghai: Art Scene China, 2004), 2. 16 Zhong Biao and Gao Minglu, “Looking for Order: A Dialogue between Zhong Biao and Gao Minglu,” 5. The article appears in Ubiquity, 4–7. 17 Pi Li, “Visual Archaeology,” 3. The article appears in Ubiquity, 2–4. 18 Indeed, the majority of Zhong’s work, according to the artist himself, has sold to foreign collectors in the West. In terms of price, Zhong Biao’s value is rising steadily. At the 2006 Christie’s Hong Kong auction, the artist’s paintings were priced on average at roughly USD $30,000, and, in June 2007 at Christie’s London, at roughly twice that amount. 19 Zhong’s most recent exhibition, at the Cheng Xingdong gallery in the 798 Art District in Beijing (which opened September 1, 2007), comprises a single painting entitled Beyond Painting. This work, composed of smaller images assembled onto a single canvas, is roughly 3 meters tall and 12 meters wide. 20 Thierry Raspail, Monk and Demon: Chinese Contemporary Art, exhibition catalogue of Guy and Myriam Ullens Foundation (Guangdong: Guangdong Museum of Art, 2004), 9.

83 Export—Cargo Transit

Mathieu Borysevicz

Liu Jianhua, Yiwu Investigation, 2006, installation at . Courtesy of ARTCO, Taipei.

“Garbage is not what we cast out, but the prime locus of meaning in our lives: we arrange our existences so as to make room for garbage.” –Don Delillo, Underworld

ccording to the U.S.-based Clean Air Council, only two manmade structures on earth are large enough to be seen from outer space: the Great Wall of China and the Fresh Kills A Landfill in Staten Island, New York. These two structures, merely little grey impressions from a zillion miles away, are perhaps the oddball duo that has come to define an important aspect of our current global condition.

It’s actually surprising that at the current worldwide rate of garbage production, the Fresh Kills Landfill is the only depository visible from the cosmos. In the U.S., the average person creates 4.39 pounds of trash per day and up to fifty-six tons of trash per year.1 China’s city waste production is also increasing dramatically. According to statistics, current annual waste production in China is at 150 million tons and increasing eight to ten percent each year. This cumulative waste storage would cover an area of over 300,000 acres,2 and, certainly, like Fresh Kills, be big enough to see from the heavens.

The Fresh Kills Landfill closed in late 2001 after specialists looking for signs of human remains used it as a laboratory to sift through the charred ruins of the twin towers. The dump is now the resting place of all that was destroyed during the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster. Fresh Kills has been closed for several years now, but the citizens of the U.S. continue to fill enough garbage trucks to form a line that would stretch from the earth halfway to the moon. It’s an image that recalls lower Manhattan in the months after 9/11, when monstrous trucks laden with torqued

84 steel became the ultimate caravan, testimony to an insecure world that lay ahead and, behind, modernity, rotting.

It is here, in modernity’s final crescendo, that a new epic has begun, what U.S. President George W. Bush calls the “New World Order.” It is a world that is reconfigured in terms of terrorism, the global market, and the emergence of new economic powers. Yet what we have seen in the wake after 9/11 seems like an endless cycle of diatribe, extremism, consumption, pollution, apathy, Liu Jianhua, Yiwu Investigation (detail), 2006, installation at spectacle, etc. A world whose ideologies, Shanghai Biennale. Courtesy of ARTCO, Taipei. once containing assorted pretenses to idealism, are now transparently mired in profit margins. China, quickly becoming the world’s largest economy, is at the epicentre of this debacle. A nation that has hastily left its agricultural roots in the dust to join hyper-modernity and its discontents, China is the world’s last hope and biggest threat. It has triumphantly lifted millions out of poverty, entered the World Trade Organization (WTO), and will host the upcoming , all in a remarkably short period of time. Yet many ruptures have been left in the course of China’s rise to stardom. Severe environmental pollution, precarious economics, and an increasingly tenuous class structure have come to plague China and influence its international relations. In the conundrum of globalism, where boundaries between nations are evaporating on the one hand and nationalism is building on the other, China will have to quickly define its aspirations in order to continue its rise. It is here, in China’s ill defined but rapidly changing set of global ambitions, that the artist Liu Jianhua makes his move. In his last two installation projects, Liu Jianhua has confronted China’s role in the global market head on.

At the 2006 Shanghai Biennale, Liu lodged the back end of a big red shipping container into a wall of the gallery. At the other, open end, a landslide of whizzing plastic toys, tools, lights, and electronics pushed out onto the floor and washed up at the viewers’ feet. Yiwu Investigation, as the piece was titled, simply presented the fruits of Yiwu, China’s largest commodity producer and exporter, en masse to the viewer. Liu’s presentation, besides being dazzling—the kind of brilliance that makes the supermarket far more exciting than any art space—was also very pointed. The city of Yiwu is the primary mass-manufacturing base of cheap goods on the planet. Over one thousand containers full of this hodgepodge are exported from Yiwu’s shores daily. They fill up dollar stores, flea markets, and, sooner than later, garbage dumps worldwide. However, Liu Jianhua’s argument is not (yet) about growing landfills. It’s about the dynamic of the world market and, thus, Yiwu’s, as well as China’s, position in it.

The six thousand plus foreign businessmen who live in Yiwu testify to the root of this dynamic. Yiwu’s success is based on the outside world’s insatiable appetite for economical little plastic things. The market boats 320,000 varieties of goods from 1,502 categories. According to the Yiwu International Commodities Fair, there are only 500,000 varieties of goods in the world. So almost everything in the world is produced in Yiwu and then exported to almost all points in the world.3 Two hundred and twelve countries receive regular shipments of plastic photo frames, lighting ware, hosiery, slippers, handy tools, imitation jewelry, make up, artificial hair, and dry flowers. The U.S. is one of the main recipients of these goods. Chinese-made products have become so ubiquitous in the U.S. that it is not only rare to find items made anywhere else, but it may be next

85 to impossible for Americans to do without them. In Sara Bongiorni’s book A Year Without “Made in China”, the author’s experiment of trying to live an entire year without any Chinese-made goods ends in near bankruptcy. China’s exportation of cheap products basically allows the poor in developed countries to continue their materialistic pursuits. This is not only an empowering position for China to be in, but also one that puts the country in a constant state of compromise. Ever since China joined the WTO in 2001 and began its spectacular transformation into a trade superpower, the chorus of complaints about its low-priced goods has swelled. China has been blamed for everything from the massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S., to using unfair trade practices to capture an ever-increasing share of the world market, to high levels of toxicity in Chinese-made Barbie dolls, Polly Pockets, and other playthings that eventually prompted the suicide of a Chinese factory owner. Not only does the world demand cheap goods, but it demands safe and clean ones as well. This is China’s relationship to the rest of the world. It is a relationship mediated by the need for need: the need for economic growth and the need for cheap little plastic things that eventually fill up places like the Fresh Kills Landfill.

Liu’s gesture is one that swipes the manifold arrangements of an increasingly accelerated global market past our eyes. The avalanche of cheap, candy-coloured items that he puts before us comprises the kaleidoscope of consumption, trade imbalances, and late-capital activity that has defined the twenty-first century. It also poses questions of civilization in general; for example, how did we get to this point? How is it that global culture is caught up in a bunch of little, disposable, artificialities? In the Biennale’s exhibition catalogue, Liu’s endeavour as artist is equated to that of sociologist or anthropologist. He displays his fieldwork not as documentation but as artifact. The evidence of China’s increasingly powerful role in the global market bellows out as harvested treasures from a shipping container, anticipating their exported destiny. Liu does not make a complete argument with his work, but he poses an inquiry. What is China’s relationship with the rest of the world? How is this relationship defined?

One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure

In September 2007, when the international art world was descending on Shanghai for the prestigious SHContemporary Art Fair, Liu Jianhua was busy answering the above-mentioned questions with more questions. Whereas Yiwu Investigation showed the front side of China’s exportation equation, Export—Cargo Transit, at the Shanghai Gallery of Art, shows the rear.

Not only does product go out of China, but once used, it often returns. In order to feed its forceful manufacturing sector, China’s recycling industries are some of the most competitive in the world, importing some forty million metric tons of scrap materials annually. It is part of a sixty-five billion dollar industry that employs 50,000 people.4 To add another twist to international trade imbalances, the U.S.’s biggest export to China is scrap paper, which, reciprocally, often goes back in the form of shoe boxes and other product packaging. It is not unreasonable to assume that many of the products in Yiwu are made with recyclable materials imported from abroad. While there are many benefits to a vibrant recycling industry, with a developing market and vigorous competition come dangerous loopholes that often produce harmful results. In the waste trade lies another complicated global dynamic that echoes colonial exploits of yesteryear. It is here, with site-specific poignancy, that Liu aims to catch our attention.

In an elegant, post-Renaissance building along the historic Bund sits the Shanghai Gallery of Art. Erected in 1916, during the heyday of capitalist expansionism into the Far East, the building

86 Liu Jianhua, Export—Cargo Transit, 2007, installation at Shanghai Gallery of Art. Courtesy of ARTCO, Taipei. originally housed international banks. Today, the building embodies Shanghai’s new-found extravagance, a situation often considered a sequel to that turn-of-the-century jazz age. Recently renovated by Michael Graves, Bund No. 3 hosts such luxury stores as Armani and Hugo Boss, as well as Jean Georges Restaurant. On its third floor, in the exalted halls of Three on the Bund’s gallery, Liu Jianhua has installed over ten tons of recyclable foreign waste. Bound in stacks, scattered along the floors, piled under the windows, and pushed tightly into Plexiglas cases that line the atrium, this imported garbage is literally everywhere. Field recordings of shipyards and processing plants play from overhead speakers. A dysfunctional compactor rises from the mess. Plastic medicine bottles, shiny foils, fibres, abstract packaging material, shredded resins, and adhesive backings all congeal to produce one extraordinary allover composition. As in Yiwu Investigation’s wholesale market aesthetic, Liu once again, through the captivating qualities of industrial debris, achieves the dazzle that the fictional domain of the art space usually doesn’t allow for.

In news quotes printed on the walls, another type of garbage is addressed:

Most of the world’s electronic trash, especially old computers, is dumped in China, causing severe environmental problems and illnesses among residents...5

Britain is shipping a record 1.9 million tons of rubbish eight thousand miles across the world to be dumped in China. . . . Campaigners fear vast amounts of the waste, including potentially lethal chemicals, are ending up in illegal landfill sites instead of being recycled.6

The quotes go on to paint a sinister picture of the electronic trash trade wherein developed countries dump lethal goods on developing countries, wreaking environmental havoc and irreversible health problems:

Because processing this e-waste tends to employ very basic technology, large amounts of dangerous materials end up getting released into the environment. Environmental inspections have shown that the town of Guiyu has no potable water. More than eighty percent of the town’s children are suffering from lead poisoning. . . . .7

87 The quotes are nauseating. Not only is this waste coming from so-called developed nations, but these are nations that have all signed the Basel Convention—a pact of wealthier nations that agrees to stop exporting garbage to poorer nations.8 The convention is proving difficult to enforce. “The waste is illegal, but somehow,” the artist fumes, “it evades customs agents on both sides.”9

In his introductory essay, curator Cao Weijun equates the situation with a form of neo- colonialization. “Liu’s use of foreign rubbish has everything to do with the literal translation of ‘foreign,’ which [in Chinese] suggests colonialization and Chinese history.”10 This aspect is surely heightened by the site of the gallery itself, a structure that once banked the profits of Western businesses in Asia and that today represents the pinnacle of luxury à la Western name brands. The fact that southern Guangdong, where much of the trash trade occurs (and where the installation materials originate), is the same territory that once hosted the Opium Wars also helps to embellish the colonial picture. But to portray this situation entirely as a return of past exploits is denying China’s own tenuous struggle with economic development. Cao goes on to expound the dilemma as a cause for self-reflection. “While investigating the colonizer’s crime, to what extent is it necessary to review ourselves? From being colonized to self-colonization, from feeling the pain of the lack of our own spirit and cultural identity to deriving pleasure by consuming the colonizer’s food and money, this has been the spiritual journey for the individuals and also the whole nation”11 According to government statistics, China itself disposes of at least five million television sets, five million computers, and tens of millions of cell phones every year.12 Many of these, like foreign rubbish, once stripped of valuable materials, are discarded along riverbanks, polluting the earth and groundwater. While the global market for foreign scrap is dominated by China, it is in China that businesses looking to increase earnings violate safety regulations at the expense of their own country’s environment and health. But no one escapes this dilemma free of blame. Complicity stretches to both sides of the global divide. While Liu’s gesture is an open platform for co-existing debates, it once again raises the same fundamental questions. How did we get here, besieged by all this garbage?

Liu’s action is based in a world of art. But does such a discourse, in an arena of luxury and fiction, have any real capacity to affect change, and to what extent? Garbage, as political provocateur, has often found its way into the art world. As early as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, it has served as an avant-garde destabilizer of the fine arts, bridging low culture with high culture and constituting one of the fundamental tenets of postmodernity. Marcel Duchamp was of course the main instigator, presenting trash with negligible transformation to a bewildered public. Robert Rauschenberg exploited its beauty as a means of formal expression. Arman sliced it, diced it, and sometimes bronzed it as a way to demonstrate against the useless waste of “unfashionable” items in the consumption-driven society of the 1960s and 70s. Allan Kaprow had his used tire installations, and David Hammons had his bottle caps, which copied folk artists from all over the world whose only materials were recycled ones. Certainly throughout Export—Cargo Transit, one cannot help but be reminded of Barry Le Va’s early scatter pieces. But perhaps more aligned with where this article is going is “The Social Mirror,” a twelve-ton, twenty-eight-foot long New York City Department of Sanitation collection truck reconfigured with mirrored panels. This piece, by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, was a highlight of the inaugural New York City Art Parade in 1983, and is a permanent, mobile public art work that continues to mirror our garbage-spewing society.

But for Liu Jianhua’s garbage, the most interesting thing that ties itself back to the art world is its newly contextualized status as a consumable luxury item. In containers marked Art Export, the stuffed trash prepares itself for repatriation back to its Western origins. This is part of Liu’s

88 program, to see this foreign refuse re-enter the global market as a Chinese high-art commodity. Like much of China’s trade balance with the rest of the world, the country’s contemporary art market has been, almost exclusively, an export business. Since the early 1980’s, the primary patronage for Chinese avant-garde art has been from collectors and venues outside of China. This has of course affected the development of contemporary Chinese art in many ways. Countless accusations have been made that Western patronage and palates helped to produce work that catered to Western tastes. Today, Chinese art market performances have bewildered even the most seasoned of speculators. Some attribute this market phenomenon to a growing Chinese collectorship. Here, in this erratic market transformation, Liu also takes a stab. He aims to tie the market of “foreign trash” to the market for valuable, Chinese high-art collectables, therefore adding one more loop to the cycles of global commerce. His exhibition couldn’t have come at a better time. SHContemporary Art Fair brought collectors and gallerists from across the globe to Shanghai, willing to consume, sometimes, it seems, blindly, the next Mainland craze; —in this instance, piles of trash.

Notes 1 Clean Air Council, “Waste Facts and Figures,” http://www.cleanair.org/Waste/wasteFacts.html. 2 Sino-Italian Cooperation Program for Environmental Protection, “Training program in Italy helps China advance environmental policy and technology,” http://www.sinoitaenvironment.org/ReadNewsex.asp?NewsID=1519. 3 China Yiwu International Commodities Fair Introduction, (http://www.chinafairs.org/intro/en/yiwuguide/yiwuguide_market-c.asp. 4 Daniel Gross, “The Tao of Junk: Pundits Bemoan Our Trade Deficit with China. But those Container Ships Aren’t Heading Home Empty,” Slate, Saturday, September 8, 2007, http://www.slate.com/id/2173594/fr/rss. 5 “China a Global Dumping Ground for Electronics,” ABC News, December 3, 2003, http://www.abc.net.au/news/ stories/2003/12/01/1001169.htm, (printed on the gallery wall). 6 “Britian Ships Rubbish to China,” Sunday Mirror, January 21, 2007, (printed on the gallery wall). 7 “Overseas Rubbish Threat Looms Large,” China Daily, January 23, 2007, (printed on the gallery wall). 8 See Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, http://www.basel.int. 9 Liu Jianhua in conversation with the author, Three on the Bund, Shanghai, September 12, 2007. 10 Cao Weijun, “Export—Cargo Transit,” Shanghai Gallery of Art, September 2007. 11 Cao Weijun, “Export—Cargo Transit,” Shanghai Gallery of Art, September 2007. 12 “Million Tons of Electronic Waste Dumped every Year,” Xinhua News Agency, September 23, 2005, http://www.10thnpc.org.cn/ english/environment/143262.htm.

89 About Export—Cargo Transit: An Interview with Liu Jianhua

September 4, 2007

Chan Ho Yeung David

Liu Jianhua, Export—Cargo Transit, 2007, installation at Shanghai Gallery of Art. Courtesy of ARTCO, Taipei.

Chan Ho Yeung David: After reading the statement by Cao Weijun for your exhibition at the Shanghai Gallery of Art (September 6 to October 26, 2007), do you have anything to add?

Liu Jianhua: Cao’s clearly stated text is quite close to my original idea. Since last year, I have been conducting research for this project, and my previous works already focused on social problems. China is developing very fast now—way too fast. With economic globalization, there emerges a different system/institutionality and also a different economic relationship between the West and China. However, China has produced something quite different from the West. In many Western countries, they go according to existing public systems and established modes of economic development; thus they can compare and learn from their past experiences. However, in China, everything is brand new. I think this is something quite significant. My work is divided into two parts. One part pays attention to our psychology as a form of potential that is concealed; the other part focuses on dealing with social problems. I think we need to pay closer attention to social problems in order to create more relevance for contemporary art. This is where my interest lies.

Chan Ho Yeung David: Can you elaborate on your choice of using imported industrial waste as the base material for this exhibition? What does it represent? What kind of meaning can the audience deduce from it?

Liu Jianhua: This is a problem with China. Other countries may have similar problems, but it is more pronounced in China. I think “foreign rubbish” is a unique problem connected with rapid economic growth that has no historical precedence. On the one hand, Western countries have always interfered with the affairs of developing countries. As stated in the book Empire, authored by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, the concept of empire is not expressed with military power as it was before, but with the integration of economy, trade, and other forms of expression. China,

90 as the fastest-developing country in the world, is not competing with Western countries. The use of “foreign rubbish” may expose some inherent social problems. The reason I chose the Shanghai Gallery of Art (SGA) has everything to do with the site and its history. The history of the Bund makes this place an ideal venue to illustrate the historical background Liu Jianhua, Export—Cargo Transit, 2007, installation at Shanghai Gallery of Art. of colonial culture from early last Courtesy of ARTCO, Taipei. century. Pudong, which is facing directly across from the Bund, is an outcome of China’s new economic development. It follows that the colonial history and culture of the Bund, together with the rising new culture of Pudong, are blended into one space. In my mind, SGA is the ideal place to exhibit this installation, because it makes the work more powerful and broadens its readings. “Foreign rubbish” is not a superficial phenomenon. It contains a lot of information. I didn’t know whether I would be able to realize this project when I had this idea in the first place.

Chan Ho Yeung David: How does the artwork relate to the given site? How are decisions made in terms of the placement of “waste” in the gallery?

Liu Jianhua: After all, we were not doing an exhibition that deals with sciences or environmental protection. We were doing an art exhibition. But since we have chosen this topic, we inevitably have to face the issue of reconstructing this space. A number of influential exhibitions have been held here. The atrium is the most interesting part to my mind. The atrium is a floating space with a sense of movement. By bringing “foreign rubbish” into this space, I hoped that it would suggest a warehouse to some extent. For those who are familiar with this architectural landmark, they would feel suffocated by this situation. For those who come for the first time, they are looking at a painting made with rubbish and Plexiglas. The title Export—Cargo Transit suggests two meanings. First, “export” here means importing “foreign rubbish” into China from foreign countries. For outsiders, it is export. If this artwork is purchased by a collector from the West, the artwork will then be re-exported from China. Another meaning is the concept behind this project. Can rubbish be identified as art? I want to propose such a question for art through my exhibition. Contemporary art depends upon its experimental nature. It does not possess a literal concept or a standard form. This is a very important concept for this project. The material in the space facing the atrium has to cohere with what is inside the atrium. The rubbish in the atrium has been classified, which brings pleasure to the viewers. Outside the atrium is a baler, which functions as a machine that processes the rubbish into art for export. This project simulates a complete system, which includes a warehouse, an assembly line, and a rubbish embankment with the Bund scenery as the backdrop. The whole space is floating and constantly shifting. There is a random characteristic to this work that is acting according to different environments. It is a huge challenge for me.

Chan Ho Yeung David: How do you pick those words on the wall for “foreign rubbish?”

91 Liu Jianhua: It is very simple. I put in information I have gathered instead of a description. I wish to strengthen the impression of the foreign rubbish with the texts, and the viewers would only be made aware of the hidden issue by this information. Then, the audience would start to think about the intention behind the artwork. In the middle of the gallery, I opened up a window which acts as a line of demarcation, and from where we can see the restaurants along the Bund [often patronized by Westerners] which are representative of the current life style. The words to the left side of the window are in Chinese and to the right side are in English, to suggest the difference between China and the West. The words I put there are from local and foreign media, which propose different takes on foreign rubbish.

Chan Ho Yeung David: This exhibition presents an open platform, one that establishes an equilibrium where different cycles are co-existing and are in active negotiation with one another. Specifically, cycles of classification, history, interpretation, goods, power, production, and so forth. . . . Can you elaborate more on this scenario?

Liu Jianhua: I have no idea. Every viewer may bring a different feeling to the work. Chinese and Westerners hold very different value standards. It is impossible to judge art with a standard now. However, the work would be enriched if it is displayed as a concept. Thus, the viewers still find their own answers and meaning in the artwork. I trust my work evokes thinking and translation in terms of culture.

Chan Ho Yeung David: In terms of the power relations between China and the West, one potential reading of this show is that you are painting a rather binary picture, specifically on the foreign exploitation of China. To what extent are you interested in exposing the faults of this society and the emergence of another form of negotiation with economic globalization in this context?

Liu Jianhua: First, western countries must have problems because “foreign rubbish” goes through their customs department. If their customs departments had been responsible, this wouldn’t have happened. On the contrary, if Chinese customs had controlled this issue as well, this also wouldn’t have happened here. I did research in Guangdong province and witnessed the transport of the rubbish there with huge trucks. The materials that can be recycled are picked out, while those that cannot will be buried. And the rubbish that is buried or burnt must be doing great damage to the environment and to the public. I saw with my own eyes that the rivers are so black that it was impossible to see through the water and the workers, without any protective gear, were picking up rubbish along the river. My installation is intended to reflect on the relationship between developed and developing countries. Although China has entered the WTO, we are still not able to talk to the West as an equal partner. National confidence needs a strong system and economic base to support itself. But it will take more than one hundred years for its arts and culture to reach this point.

Chan Ho Yeung David: Personally it will be very provocative to “export” this project to the West so to speak, to see what other readings for this exhibition are possible, and also to see the audience reactions from a different geopolitical context.

Liu Jianhua: I will have to think about it. This work is a milestone for me. I hope, during the next few years, all my works will be come out of a longer term commitment. I’ve spent a really long time on this work. Now I feel happy to see it finally realized.

92 René Block’s Waterloo: Some Impressions of documenta 12, Kassel

Dialogue between Yang Jiechang and Martina Köppel-Yang, July 7, 2007

Conference of the ZKM, Karlsruhe and the Kassel Fine Arts Academy, Kassel, July 14, 2007. Photo: Yang Jiechang.

Yang Jiechang: Martina, on July 13th and 14th, you took part in a conference on documenta 12 organized by the ZKM Karlsruhe and the Art Academy in Kassel, Germany. I assisted and found the meeting rather interesting. I think it is a good starting point for us to elaborate on this event in more detail. We both visited the exhibitions in Kassel and Münster from July 12th to July 15th, and on the occasion of the conference, we also had the opportunity to meet with some of the top figures in the German contemporary art scene, like, for example, the editor of Kunstforum International, Amine Haase; and René Block, member of the committee that chose the documenta 12 curator; Lothar Ledderose, Professor at Heidelberg University; Beat Wyss, and others. I first met René Block in Paris in 1989. Nam June Paik introduced me to him at the opening of the exhibition Les Magiciens de la terre. At the time he was the head of the DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Organization. He is an internationally recognized and influential curator. When he was young, he was a close friend of artists like Joseph Beuys. He helped him to realize the project with the wolf, I Like America, America Likes Me, in his gallery in New York. Block also introduced Nam June Paik to Germany. He has been working in Kassel for the last ten years, and he told me that he is going to leave next week for Berlin to continue as an independent curator. He had come for documenta. I think both of us, including the specialists who took part in the conference, had the same feeling concerning this year’s show: it was rather disastrous, very bad.

Martina Köppel-Yang: I think the word “disastrous” is too much. In the end it is only an exhibition. Nevertheless, for me it is very evident that the subject of our conference, globalization and regional strategies, post-colonialism, actually should no longer be a topic. To include Asian, African, and other non-Western artists in an exhibition like this is not new. It is very common and even less an invention of documenta.

93 Yang Jiechang: According to you, what was the focus of the curator-team Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack?

Martina Köppel-Yang: First, I feel their position is very Eurocentric. Second, they want to disturb our aesthetic habits, our perception of modernity and of the contemporary. Therefore, they try to employ aesthetic strategies: mal-positioning and a kind of disruptive aesthetics in the display of Curators of documenta 12, Ruth Noack and Roger Buergel. the works and the design of the exhibition Courtesy of documenta 12. spaces. If you look at the four or five venues this becomes evident. In the Aue Pavilion that was constructed specifically for the exhibition, the curators chose a very rough kind of display, resembling more or less that of an art fair.

Yang Jiechang: Even rougher than an art fair.

Martina Köppel-Yang: Seen from the angle of aesthetic experience or of exhibition practices, they eliminated ideal conditions of display on purpose. In another venue, the Neue Galerie, they chose a contrary kind of display: they created a classical museum space, with coloured walls and rather dramatic lighting. They further closed up the windows to create separate rooms for every artist in the style of a cabinet of curiosities. In the Fridericianum, they established an archive-like exhibition. Most of the works shown there take society as a topic, or are related to the notion of myth. In the documenta Halle, they devoted one part to the press centre. In the other part were several big installations. In the Wilhelmshöhe castle, they inserted contemporary and modern works into the ancient history collection and in an exhibition of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century paintings. Detached from any relevant context, as they are, these confrontations transform the contemporary and modern works into a kind of illustration of the curatorial concept. I feel in this venue that the curatorial concept is expressed most clearly. The curators try to demonstrate the obsolescence of the concept of Western modernism by showing its origins. They do it with a most dogmatic, art historical approach, showing origins in Africa, India, Asia, and the Near East.

Here lies a problem: First, documenta is an exhibition of contemporary art and contemporary thought. It is not an art historical show. Second, the question of the origins of Western modernity had already been discussed in the 1950s and 1960s. I can’t see the point of re-examining this question. The curators show Western works from the 1960s and 1970s—for example, early collages by Martha Rosler A Persian calligrapher’s journey to Mogul India,1573. © Bildarchiv and drawings by John McCracken—next Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin 2007; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Museum für Islamische Kunst. to Persian miniatures from the fourteenth Photo: Ingrid Geske. century, with a Chinese lacquer work panel from the eighteenth century and Indian folk paintings from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries to demonstrate correlations and possible origins. What is the difference here from shows that have focused on the relation between modernism

94 and primitive and African art? The works in the open space in front of the Fridericianum, on the contrary, have a more participating, open character. As you see, the curators use different types of display and rhetoric. They also approach a large variety of subjects: from old to modern, from South to North, from questions of gender—more than half of the artists are women—and immigration to the question of cultural origin. They cover all subjects that are ideologically correct. The result: what is missing is intensity, excellence, and creativity.

Yang Jiechang: Not only this, they showed works by the same artists in every venue. Yet, they don’t seem to be interested in the artists, and not even in the art. It is evident that there was no intensive discussion between them and the artists, or real cooperation. Artworks turned into a commonplace, into a cure-all. Moreover, in the biggest of the three publications of documenta, one can’t even find names of the artists or of the works featured.

Martina Köppel-Yang: It is clear that they want to overcome cultural characteristics and practice a kind of universalism, but I think this is a myth.

Yang Jiechang: I think this is kind of arrogant. The Chinese artists who have been invited to participate in the exhibition received a very late confirmation. It was all very secret; for example, the artists could discuss their project or pose conditions only with difficulty. But for some artists the curator chose a totally different attitude and procedure: for example, Ai Weiwei, who was supported with a large budget from Uli Sigg and other big foundations, could realize his project as he wished; even his big gate that did not correspond to the security regulations could be realized. 1001 traditional Chinese chairs are scattered over all exhibition venues and disturb the whole exhibition.

Martina Köppel-Yang: Well, that’s something else. Actually, using Ai Weiwei as he does is also part of his aesthetic procedure. Ai’s works play an important part in the show. They are everywhere. They constitute a de-constructive factor from an aesthetic point of view and from the perspective of exhibition practices. They are a kind of cliché. The curators use this kind of cliché, and Ai Weiwei’s work is the best example as it represents the most typical clichés about . Another aspect of this attitude is, as you mentioned, the fact that works by Gonzalo Díaz, Eclipsis, 2007, installation. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2007/Gonzalo Diaz. Photo: Egbert Trogemann / documenta some artists reappear in every exhibition venue. GmbH. From a cliché, one does not learn about the subject of the cliché, but rather about the ideology of the one who uses the cliché. During the conference, Kunstforum editor Amine Haase stated a similar feeling. She said that in the three exhibitions she had visited so far, Venice Biennale, Münster, and documenta, she had the strong feeling that art had disappeared, and that only the work of art, the object was left. I agree with her, but I’d like to add that not only has art disappeared, but the artist also becomes more and more invisible, which means that the individual is no longer important, which is linked to a very scary ideology that promotes the disappearance of the individual in the process of globalization. This is controversial to what many intellectuals aim for: developing new concepts starting from local and individual positions with a new and strong voice. But what is left after art and the artist have

95 disappeared? The only things left are art objects, and these objects are used as illustrations, clichés, and fixed ideas about culture and art. I find this is very dangerous. It is like one of the participating artists Gonzalo Díaz states in his piece: “We search everywhere for the unconditional; however, we find always only things. (Wir suchen überall das Unbedingte, finden aber immer nur Dinge.)”

Yang Jiechang: This means disregarding contemporary art.

Martina Köppel-Yang: On the other hand we can see that the curators use what is convenient to obtain. Many of the Chinese artists’ works in the show come from private collections or commercial galleries like, for example, Uli Sigg, Urs Meile Gallery, Vitamin Creative Space, and Gallery Loft. Moreover, each of the nine participating Chinese artists work either with Galerie Urs Meile or Vitamin Creative Space. I remarked that this kind of triangular relation exists for artists of other nationalities, too. In a high-profile exhibition like this, which is considered the platform of contemporary art, works should be selected differently. One result of this is an imbalance in what concerns the visibility of the artists. Again, I want to mention Ai Weiwei’s example: One reason he became so prominent is that he could work in situ and could realize his work with a large budget. This is an enormous difference from those artists who are only represented through works, or work fragments, chosen from a collection. With Zheng Guogu and Yangjiang Group, for instance—such creative and innovative artists—the curators only exhibited parts of one of their installations, and borrowed them from a private collection. Further, one of the participating artists, Danica Dakic, told me that until very late, about only one month before the opening, documenta invited the media to report in more detail about the exhibition and the participating artists. Ai Weiwei had his own press team and thus directly addressed the media. Therefore, the media reported widely on his work and he became the real star. Most of the other artists did not work that closely with the media; therefore, their work stayed rather unremarked upon. Danica Dakic realized a site-related video for the exhibition with the title El Dorado. She realized her work in relation to the collection at Kassel’s Tapestry Museum and in cooperation with an organization for under-aged immigrants. Her work is an outstanding piece in this year’s documenta.

Yang Jiechang: The curators have little international exhibition experience. They adopt a rather simple position facing many artists from different cultural backgrounds.

Martina Köppel-Yang: They do not rely on any founded theory. They apparently don’t want to. Buergel only contributed a short text to one of the three documenta magazines and several short introductions to participating artists in the catalogue. His text focuses more on exhibition practices and questions of display than on theory. Further, there is no dialogue—neither with the artists, nor with art critics and theorists, nor with the public. He did not propose any constructive theory. He instead wanted to rely on the poetic relations of unexplicable realities. Therefore he assembled artworks to incite a kind of relation between them. This attitude is too indistinct, too diffuse.

Yang Jiechang: I think it is not on purpose that he has no interest in theory. This is just his level. He was not able to formulate any relevant questions. You see, he tried to arrange every venue very convincingly, and he certainly wanted to make a very special edition of documenta. But it did not work.

Martina Köppel-Yang: I think this is an expression of his taste.

96 Yang Jiechang: I feel he really does not have a clue. It would be evident if he understood and did it on purpose.

Martina Köppel-Yang: Do you know that he is also a painter? I feel he considers the exhibition a work of art, like a kind of huge installation. He assembles many objects to create a whole and to generate meaning. But to do this, you need to act within a certain discourse, with a certain theory, and for theory you need to go beyond the mere field of aesthetics.

Yang Jiechang: Buergel’s taste is very messy. For example, he puts a ceramic object resembling a penis with phimosis in front of every exhibition venue. In every venue there are works concerned with male and female sexuality, as if someone planned some indecent, immoral behaviour. That these images appear and re-appear in such a high-profile platform for contemporary art seems rather childish. This exhibition feels like conceived by a person Ceramic penis, documenta 12, in front of the Aue Pavilion. from a remote mountain area who has been cut Photo: Hou Hanru. off the world for thirty years and now wants to make a revolution. The whole seems very bourgeois, a petit bourgeois who thinks small. Maybe René Block’s choice for a position that sees through a small looking glass has certain relevance in a period when the art world is ruled by big curators, like now. He hoped to promote an alternative to the mainstream. Of course, this kind of position exists, but unfortunately he chose the wrong person. Moreover, Buergel asked his wife, Ruth Noack, to participate in the curatorial aspect of the show—small and even smaller, restricted to the view and circle of a family. You are right. The exhibition looks like an event in his private living room. Compared to documenta X, curated by Catherine David, this is really a big difference. She invited three of the most well-known and critical French philosophers to assist her as advisers.

Martina Köppel-Yang: Of course, the documenta committee had its own strategy. They certainly wanted to go beyond post-colonial theory and discourse. But then you have to be able to propose another theory. Yet, this year’s curators start from a very individual position. We all hope to meet new concepts, new positions. But such a new theory cannot start from mere aesthetic perception— even more so as the curators start from a very Eurocentric position and apparently did not care much about post-colonial theory. There is not much reference in the exhibition to these theories and yet, if you want to go further, they somehow should serve as a stepping stone.

Yang Jiechang: Their exhibition actually resembles that of a tourist guide. The pedagogic motivation seems very strong.

Martina Köppel-Yang: During the conference, one of the guides pointed out that at this documenta the vistors are satisfied with the exhibition and have not made aggressive comments. I think what you just mentioned Kerry James Marshall, The Lost Boys, 1993, installed among old paintings in Schloß Wilhelmshöhe. © Kerry James might be one reason—the exhibition is Marshall. Photo: Frank Schinski/documenta GmbH.

97 conceived according to aspects of common knowledge and education. Their points are always very obvious and simplistic; for example, they hang paintings by Kerry James Marshall, showing his typical black figures, next to a sixteenth-century painting showing black people.

Yang Jiechang: There are many such examples: they hung a reproduction of a small drawing by Paul Klee facing the entrance of the main exhibition hall, and they put a black-and-white collage showing a figure wearing a hat with feathers opposite a painting by Rembrandt, a portrait with a helmet with feathers. Yan Lei’s small landscape paintings were hung next to western landscapes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and a video showing young people jumping around a fire and burning fashion models was put next to a sixteenth-century painting of man-eaters; these are all very simplistic illustrations. The curators’ understanding of a pluralist culture is extremely superficial. And apparently for them this means dialogue.

Martina Köppel-Yang: I think dialogue is rather absent in the exhibition. Behind the curatorial concept there seems to be a closed, conservative attitude and ideology. Firstly, by relying on private collections and galleries, the curators follow the logic of the art market, even though they wanted to overcome it. Secondly, they mainly did not choose Euro-American A-list figures, and among those Euro-American artists they did choose, they often picked the one second in rank. For example, they chose John McCracken instead of Donald Judd. To have one’s choice mainly guided by the wish to avoid the New York-London-Berlin-Paris trade route reveals a rather chauvinist attitude.

Yang Jiechang: Yet, the Chinese artists they chose are basically the most famous ones. But the problem is, as there was no real dialogue or discussion, as most of the artists did not create works for the show, as you say, the art and the artists disappeared. I think the situation is similar for artists from other countries. They chose an installation with masks made from plastic bottles by African artist Romuald Hazoumé—masks that resembled the art and crafts objects sold outside the exhibition venues. They apparently have no historical consciousness whatsoever.

Martina Köppel-Yang: They also are acting outside of contemporary discourse. For the participating artists, this is a shame. Only the ones who worked in situ and those who showed videos did not totally fall into the curatorial trap.

Yang Jiechang: Facing such curators, artists have to react. They have to have an attitude, some daring, like Zheng Guogu did in 2002 during the Gwangju Biennial, bargaining with the curator and the organizational system of the biennial. Here, too, the artists could have worked together to discuss their position with the curators. China once again missed a good opportunity. Actually, Hu Fang as an assistant to the curators of documenta was already part of the curatorial staff, and nine participating Chinese artists is also a rather high percentage. But the artists did not communicate with each other to unite and discuss on an equal level with international curators. They did not dare to bargain and maybe withdraw. Had they chosen Zheng Guogu’s 2002 Gwangju strategy, things would have turned out differently.

Martina Köppel-Yang: I also don’t want to see mainstream exhibitions all the time. But Buergel and Noack are just not at a level to develop new positions, and, anyway, they did not go far enough. This exhibition is a very personal statement and choice and does not implicate other autonomous instances.

98 Yang Jiechang: The curators were very lazy and just believed a few people who could bring some money to the show, like Sigg. They were afraid of big stars and tried to avoid them. As such, they actually were betrayed by the market.

Martina Köppel-Yang: Sigg just used the same strategy as in 1999 with Szeemann’s Venice Biennale. He proposed works from his collection to the curators. This time he proposed many artists from his collection, including a young artist, to re-evaluate her, but her works in the show are qualitatively not good enough. The curators did not use their critical judgement.

Yang Jiechang: What I find most ridiculous is that the curators even appreciated the result of the collapse of Ai Weiwei’s big gate. Buergel said, “it looks better like this.” They are lucky no one got hurt. Here again we can see their attitude, shabby on purpose, messy on purpose. There is no progress, only regress. Ai Weiwei’s chairs appeared at about fifty different locations in the exhibition. Ai Weiwei was everywhere, also in the media or in the conference. Even the ice-cream seller near the Ai Weiwei, Template, 2007, after collapse in front of the Aue Aue Pavilion had a postcard of Ai Weiwei’s gate. Pavilion. Photo: Yang Jiechang.

Martina Köppel-Yang: Well, Ai Weiwei’s method appears rather undemocratic, a kind of feudalist revival. He invited 1001 Chinese people to visit Germany in five groups, but once they arrived, their passports were taken away. My professor, Lothar Ledderose, who wanted to visit them, was not allowed into the building where they stayed.

Yang Jiechang: Ai Weiwei’s strategy within and outside of China is that of building up the sphere of influence of a local tyrant. This feudalist attitude is contrary to a contemporary consciousness. It will be disastrous if he uses the renown he gained at documenta to influence contemporary discourse and consciousness in China. Here again, we see the curators’ lack of historical and contemporary consciousness. Again, the curators have no experience with big exhibitions. Firstly, they René Block and Lothar Ledderose. Photo: Yang Jiechang. apparently did not closely follow the realization of the works. For example, on the hill in front of Wilhelmshöhe castle, one artist designed a rice paddy field. But no one checked if the soil was okay for such a project, and the result was that the water seeped into the ground. Secondly, the arrangement of the works—the relationship of the works with each other, the walls, and the distribution of the space, especially in the Aue Pavilion, even this whole new space and the choice of the construction materials—were very problematic. The transparent building material protects neither the artworks nor the visitors from light and summer heat. Therefore they had to install sun sheds that interact with the works and the space in a disturbing way. Further, they did not calculate the mass and flow of visitors. We visited the exhibition after the opening, but still we had to queue up, as many works obstructed doorways

99 and passages. On the first floor of the Fridericianum, they put a big installation made of ropes and clothes that was the background for a continuous dance performance. As many people stayed and watched, it was difficult to pass through.

Martina Köppel-Yang: Another problem is that many of the artworks are very small—collages or assemblages—and with that many visitors, they were difficult to look at.

Yang Jiechang: They actually eliminated the professional position and authority of the documenta—this is their achievement. Actually, these kinds of big exhibitions and biennials have already lost their vitality.

Martina Köppel-Yang: I feel it is the sad result of a larger development within the globalized art world where the power of the market becomes more and more important, especially that of the secondary market, where the auction houses start influencing contemporary art in a more and more direct way. Actually Buergel’s and Noack’s method of curating not only diminishes the importance of art and the artist, but also of the curator himself, as they too relied on the power structures of the market system. They weakened the power of a third influence—the autonomous positions of artists, theoreticians, and thinkers. They underestimated the role of artists in society, as well as their influence as individuals. Art should not be pragmatic; once pragmatic, it disappears. Actually, the situation of the art world does not differ from that of the field of politics and economy. With globalization, the influence of politicians and leaders from democratic countries becomes less and less important, and that of financial interests, on the contrary, increases. In the art world there is a similar development, and I feel that the curators with their choices, with their curatorial practice, promote this kind of development in the art world: the loss of spirituality, of a critical attitude, of art, of the disappearance of the individual, the artist. We should ask what kind of ideology is behind their position. It certainly is an extremely conservative position. This is the drama of this year’s documenta. What we do not need now is that kind of position. We instead need to strengthen and to promote individual positions and spirituality. There has to be a clear reaction.

Yang Jiechang: I totally agree with you. The last question is still linked to René Block and his generation. In their youth, these people had another kind of attitude. Consider again, for example, Block’s relationship with Beuys and Nam June Paik. Today’s situation is not comparable; then, they really had influence. I think that today Block has closed himself up in his world. Facing mainstream curators like Charles Esche, Francesco Bonami,Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Jerôme Sans, Okwui Enwezor, or Hou Hanru, he feels uncomfortable. Anyways, he thinks they cannot surpass the achievements of his time. Therefore he was looking for another kind of tendency, one that does not belong to the mainstream. Theoretically and sentimentally, I understand his strategy, his revolutionary spirit. But, unfortunately, he lacks communication and interaction with people and elements that do not belong to his field of knowledge. He relied on his experience to choose a kind of antagonism. He chose a kind of Dadaist, family-style element to take on this huge challenge and responsibility, which does not match the circumstances. On June 14th, we had dinner with Block and others. I told him, “I am sorry, but I feel ashamed for your choice.” He just said that he had left Kassel and returned to Berlin to work as a freelance curator. Ledderose was very cool. He said to me in Chinese, “freelance means leaving office, retiring.” Waterloo happened because of a fault of judgement. Napoleon thought iron couldn’t swim. We are rather close to Belgium here.

100 Interview with Shan Shan Sheng

Brandi Reddick

During her prolific career, which spans close to three decades, artist Shan Shan Sheng has created large-scale paintings and for three of the world’s tallest buildings and has installed monumental public artworks throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. With over thirty solo exhibitions, representation at numerous international art fairs, and works in the permanent collection of major institutions, including the China National Art Museum, Shanghai Art Museum, and Harvard University, she has undoubtedly flourished as a painter and sculptor. Most recently, Sheng’s site-specific installations, acclaimed for their ability to transform public spaces, are gaining international exposure and securing her position as one of the most acclaimed public art artists of our time.

Initially trained as a painter, Sheng’s signature abstract paintings are easily identified by her luscious use of colour and eloquent brush strokes. Her works are energetic and fluid, reflecting her early studies in traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy techniques. In the late 1990s, Sheng discovered glass as the ideal medium to transform her paintings into three-dimensional works, resulting in translucent sculptures that delicately reflect her aesthetic and capture the painterly quality of her work.

Sheng was born and raised in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. In 1982, she relocated to the United States to advance her studies in the visual arts. Although she lives and works in San Francisco, much of her time is spent travelling the world and immersing herself in the creation of site-specific works of public art.

Brandi Reddick: The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) was a tumultuous period in Chinese history marked by shifts in economic policy, a decline in the education system, political instability, and the persecution of many artists, scholars, and religious figures because of their “traditional values.” This was a sensitive time in Chinese history and is regarded as a great period of bitter factionalism. Growing up in this environment, did the Cultural Revolution influence your decision to become an artist?

Shan Shan Sheng: When the Cultural Revolution began, I was very young. I remember the Red Guards and rebel groups coming into my home, destroying many things, and taking away all of the books my father owned. My father, who is an intellectual expert on Russian literature, has translated more than sixty Russian literature classics, encompassing the entire collection of Tolstoy’s novels, into twelve Chinese volumes, which include Anna Karenina, War and Peace, and Resurrection. In 1987, he became the first Chinese to receive the Gorky Prize, the most prestigious award in literature given by the Soviet Union. In 2006, he was again awarded the same prize by the current Russian government. Millions of copies of his works have been published in China. Also, my mother is the chief editor for a literature and art publishing house in Shanghai.

Due to the work of my parents, my family owned many books and works of art, including art books from the West, ancient Western sculptures in bronze, and marble replicas of Greek and Roman sculpture that they collected in the 1930s and 1940s. I remember one of them was a white marble replica of Venus. When the Red Guards seized our home, the sculpture was broken into two pieces and discarded near a trash bin. It was too big to be placed inside the trash bin, so the pieces

101 were carelessly thrown on the ground. The image remains vivid in my mind . . . a white marble Venus broken into two pieces, left to deteriorate in the streets of Shanghai during the autumn of 1967. It was such a beautiful piece, and I really liked it, but now it is gone. Just as Shakespeare said, “the tragedy is a beauty destroyed in front of your eye.”

Eventually, even more tragedy followed my family after our home was seized. My parents were taken away. We did not know where they were and no one would tell us. Most of the possessions in my house were taken away in big trucks. They left us with very few things, and they locked all of the rooms, except one room where I stayed with my older brother and sister. A year later, my brother and sister were sent to the countryside, far away from Shanghai. A few years after that, I also was sent to the countryside, where I worked in a factory for a short period and trained in “re- education.” During this time, all I could think of was attending school. After two or three months of living in the countryside and working in factories, I knew that this was not the kind work I wanted to do. I did not want to be a farmer or a factory worker. It was not interesting to me.

I have painted since I was six years old. The night my parents were taken away from our home, I stayed in the only room my brother, sister, and I were allowed to stay in. On the wall was an oil painting the Red Guards and rebel group forgot to take. The painting, by an unknown Western artist, depicted a sailboat in a stormy ocean. I stared and stared at it, thinking about my parents. Where are they? When will they be able to come home? I was afraid, but the painting somehow gave me comfort. I finally fell asleep. I was only nine years old.

This was the moment I kind of knew I would like to become an artist. Over a year later, my parents briefly returned home. We learned they were locked up at a publishing house. Shortly after their return, they were once again sent off to the countryside, where they worked as coal miners for “re-education.” Before my mother left to work as a coal miner in Nanjing, she asked me if I would prefer to study art or music. Maybe she could find a teacher to teach me privately? I told her Shan Shan Sheng, Barefoot Doctor, 1976, 185 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist. I would like to study art. So, my mother found an old master of Chinese painting and calligraphy.

My teacher was one of a very few female masters in Chinese traditional painting and calligraphy working in China. Her name was Jiang Nan Ping. I was very lucky to study under her. Once a week, I went to her home to study. She gave me a lot of homework to do. I wrote ten sheets of Chinese traditional calligraphy every day and produced one or two paintings per day. Since we did not have too much home work from middle school—we only studied Mao’s writings, quotations, and some mathematics—I was able to do all the homework for painting and calligraphy. That is how I began to study art.

Brandi Reddick: Does this period of time influence your Shan Shan Sheng painting in Shanghai when she current work? was 19 years old. Courtesy of the artist.

102 Shan Shan Sheng: I think this period of upheaval influences my work only indirectly. I began to work on a larger scale during this period. I started painting large-scale propaganda paintings during the Cultural Revolution, which made it easier for me to handle painting on a large-scale as my work developed.

Brandi Reddick: You came to the United States in 1982 to pursue academic and artistic interests by attending Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where you earned a Master of Fine Arts. What artistic influences did you find in the United States and how do they differ from your experiences of studying in Shanghai?

Shan Shan Sheng: In early 1982, I applied to Mount Holyoke College to study art. In the spring of that year, I received a telegraph from America. It stated, “You are accepted with full fellowship; the detailed admission information will follow via mail.” I was very excited. The next morning, I went to the Consulate General of the United States to obtain a visa. They looked at my paintings and said I appeared too young to be doing this type of work. They asked me to make a painting in the Consulate compound that afternoon. So, I went home and returned to the Consulate with some art supplies and made a painting in front of them. When I was about seventy percent complete with the painting, I heard the pounding sound of seals. I knew they had granted my visa to America.

I have always liked the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, like Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Matisse. They work with strong colour, and it influenced my early work when I came to the United States. My graduate school teacher was John Grillo, who was a student of Hans Hoffman. My colour theory teacher was John Roy, whose portrait was painted by Chuck Close and was recently sold at Sotheby for a few million dollars. Roy was a student of Josef Albers’s at Yale. He instructed me on Albers’s “interaction of colour theory,” which had a big influence on my work.

Brandi Reddick: What aspects of your work make it appeal to people from different cultural backgrounds?

Shan Shan Sheng: I think one aspect of my work that makes it appealing is the combined use of colour and movement with shape and form.

Brandi Reddick: Over the past two decades, you have become an accomplished artist in many mediums, including painting, sculpture, and architectural glass. Your paintings have become easily identifiable with your use of rich colours, abstract style, and thick, powerful brushstrokes. On the other hand, many of your small-scale glass sculptures are more realistic, often referencing ancient Chinese objects. Is there a relationship between your paintings and small glass works?

Shan Shan Sheng: The colour in my paintings and glass works are similar. My abstract paintings, especially from the past few decades, have referenced ancient Chinese cultural heritage and objects. My glass work is a three dimensional version of my paintings. Maybe the objects in my paintings are not very visible, but they are there. In my small glass sculptures, the shape and form need to be clear in order to convert the ideas.

Brandi Reddick: Artists must constantly refine their techniques, execution of media, and consistently produce works that foster the development of their artistic style. Looking back to your

103 Left: Shan Shan Sheng, Ancient Bronze Vase, 2005, oil and mixed media on canvas, 127 x 127 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Shan Shan Sheng, Bronze Object, 2000, Venetian hand blown glass, 60.9 x 60.9 x 25.4 cm. Photo: Francesco Ferruzzi. Courtesy of Berengo Fine Art, Venice, Italy. earlier body of work, do you feel there was a logical progression in evolving to the style you have today, and how did this develop?

Shan Shan Sheng: When I first started, my art was traditional Chinese brush and ink painting as well as calligraphy. Then I studied Western-style drawing and painting, from realism to semi- abstract, then total abstraction. In my art, I still reference traditional Chinese brush work. I started working with glass sculpture to create three-dimensional works, in small and large-scale. It made sense to me. I am planning my next step, which will develop into more complex media, and I may try a new direction, but within a logical manner that will at least make sense to me.

Brandi Reddick: Why did you start working with glass?

Shan Shan Sheng: In 1999, when I finished a large-scale painting for the Jin Mao Tower, Grand Hyatt Atrium, in Shanghai, I started thinking about working in glass. The painting was one of largest paintings I had ever done, measuring seven metres by sixteen metres. Once it was installed, the painting was surrounded by two hundred and eighty degrees of glass, which reflected each section of the painting. It had a great visual effect and inspired me to think about my painting as glass.

I was working with strong colour in my paintings when I started to think about making sculpture. I kept thinking about how I could make three-dimensional works that relate to my paintings and transform my paintings into sculpture. Glass was the only choice, certainly not marble, steel, or bronze. Only glass could transform my paintings beautifully into sculpture. Hand-blown glass is a wonderful and spontaneous process and closely relates to how my paintings work.

In 1994, during the Holland Art Fair, I met Dr. Berengo, who owns a Venetian glass studio and gallery. After viewing one of my semi-abstract horse paintings, he invited me to make glass sculpture at his studio.

104 Shan Shan Sheng, A Winged Steed, 1991, oil on canvas, 106.6 x 167.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Brandi Reddick: You still produce much of your glass work in Venice. Tell me about your relationship with the city and about your work with the master glass blowers of Murano.

Shan Shan Sheng: I started working with hand blown glass. The island of Murano, Venice, is world famous for its master glass blowers and has a long history of glass blowing, over twelve hundred years. I have worked with them for eight years. All of my blown-glass sculptures are made there. At first, I began working with small pieces. Gradually, I began creating large-scale outdoor glass sculptures in Venice. I have also been exhibiting Shan Shan Sheng, Tang Dynasty Horse, 2000, Venetian hand blown glass, 60.9 x 60.9 x 25.4 cm. Photo: Francesco Ferruzzi. Courtesy of Berengo Fine there. Art, Venice.

Recently, I have been working more than ever in Venice. I am not only working more with the glass blowers, I am participating in many art events and have become involved with the local artists’ community. I have met many artists, critics, curators, art historians, architects, film-makers, and musicians from all over the world. Venice is the birthplace of the Venice Biennale, one of the most prestigious and avant-garde cultural events in the world. The city also hosts one of the oldest film festivals, the Venice Film Festival. The city is like a magnet, attracting all kinds of artists.

My most recent large-scale sculpture, entitled Abacus, debuted at Venice’s OPEN, an International Exhibition of Sculptures and Installations held in a series of open-air exhibition spaces at the Lido. OPEN, which is in its tenth edition, was held at the same time as the Venice Film Festival, from August 30th to October 14th, 2007. The exhibition gives space to artistic creativity from all over the world. I represented both China and the United States in the OPEN exhibition.

105 Shan Shan Sheng working with glass master Silvano Signoretto, island of Murano, Venice, Italy. Photo: Renzo Andreon. Courtesy Berengo Fine Art, Venice, Italy.

Abacus is part of my larger Chinese Ancient Inventions Series, which focuses on reviving often-overlooked objects from the past. Abacus utilizes vivid brushstrokes of colour suspended in translucent glass and recalls the ancient Chinese counting machine. I recast the abacus as a kind of vast, pre-digital computer, and it evokes the constant numbering of modern life. Shan Shan Sheng, Abacus 1048-771 (West Zhou dynasty), from Chinese Ancient It re-interprets ancient symbols into Invention Series, 2007, Venetian hand-blown glass, stainless steel, wood. Courtesy of OPEN: 10th International Exhibition of Sculptures and Installations, minimal, contemporary forms. Venice, Italy.

The sculpture is quite large, measuring four and a half metres long and just over two metres high, with sixty-three glass balls supported by stainless-steel rods. It invites viewers to see through time and material, integrating visions of art and life. Abacus addresses the past and present. Still used to teach children how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, the abacus need not become obsolete in the rush of data and technology that now consumes society. The gem-like beads of an abacus evoke smooth transitions, without glossing over the complexities that inform our vivid globalized world.

Brandi Reddick: For many artists, translating their work from small scale to large scale can be quite intimidating, and too often the intent of the artist gets lost in the transformation. Yet, your work reads beautifully in both contexts. Do you prefer working in small or large scale?

Shan Shan Sheng: Thank you very much for the comments, but I do prefer working in large scale during this period of my life.

Brandi Reddick: When did you realize you wanted to start competing for public art commissions? What was your first commission?

106 Shan Shan Sheng: In 1991, I received a request for a proposal for a large-scale painting in one of the tallest buildings in Hong Kong from an art consultant. I have been painting large-scale works in my studio since I was in graduate school. I submitted a small painting for this project, and I got it.

Brandi Reddick: Receiving a public commission is a highly competitive process. Is there a strategy or thought process you go through when applying for a commission?

Shan Shan Sheng: To compete for a public art commission is a highly challenging but very rewarding process. First, I carefully study the request for qualifications to see if the project is suitable for Shan Shan Sheng, Bamboo, 2007, Venetian hand- my work. Many times they are looking for something blown glass and stainless steel. Photo: Francesco Ferruzzi. Courtesy of Design-e-space, Palazzo that is not my cup of tea. I look to see if the project Velutti, Venice, Italy. can give me an opportunity to create a piece that can allow me to integrate artwork into the architecture, complementing and enriching it, and at the same time provide original art pieces that are educational and meaningful.

Then I will visit the site. All my public art projects are site-specific. I work with architects to create a model and a computer artist to make digital renderings. When I present the proposal, I will try to maximize my capacity to give the selection committee a clear vision of what the artwork will be. It is as close to reality as possible. My proposals are very realistic and are not abstracted like my paintings.

Brandi Reddick: One of your most recent public installations was Ocean Wave I and II, commissioned by the Miami-Dade Art in Public Places Trust for the Port of Miami, Cruise Terminal D. How did Miami’s landscape and climate influence your concept for this piece?

Shan Shan Sheng: For each public art project, I take an individual approach to creating a unique piece for the site. The suspended sculptures Ocean Wave I and II for the Port of Miami, Cruise Terminal D, focus on water and light. These two elements are typical of the area and reflect Miami’s landscape. The sculptures represent water and light in an abstract form of travel, referencing the purpose of the terminal building. The bright South Florida sun reflects on the water and sends fragments of light traveling across Shan Shan Sheng in San Francisco studio, Sunrise Tai Lake, oil on canvas, 6.7 x 5.4 m. Photo by Yuri Shiller. the suspended panels, casting colours throughout the building.

107 Shan Shan Sheng, Ocean Wave I, 2007, suspended sculpture, 64 x 12.1 x 11.6 m, Port of Miami, Cruise Terminal D. Commissioned by Miami- Dade Art in Public Places Trust. Photo: Robin Hill.

Brandi Reddick: Was your decision to work with glass influenced by the nature of the site?

Shan Shan Sheng: I use the translucent material to reflect water and light. Light passing through the glass panels casts patterns and pools of coloured light on the walls and floor. A vibrant flow of red and blue, with hints of violet, evokes the sense of an ocean wave. It transforms the site and gives visitors a sense of place.

Brandi Redddick: Due to its apparent location, is the Miami piece meant to mimic the feeling of being under water?

Shan Shan Sheng: Ocean Wave I and II can be interpreted in many ways by the viewer. The viewer may feel as if they are swimming under the water or even floating above the ocean. It can read simply as an abstract form, colour, or movement. That is why my public art pieces can be appreciated by different people from different cultural backgrounds.

Brandi Reddick: Do you ever feel as if you are being categorized as a “female” or “Chinese- American” artist?

Shan Shan Sheng: I am just an artist. I do not need a label. I am not comfortable with it. When I compete for pubic art projects, they look only at my artwork, not who I am. I think that is good.

Brandi Reddick: Creating works of public art often requires the artist to combine art, design, and architecture. As a public artist, how do you approach this?

Shan Shan Sheng: I am constantly pushing the boundaries of art, architecture, and design. I am happy to incorporate all of these aspects into my artwork. I also try to find new media and new methods to realize my artwork, so there has to be an innovative approach to every piece that I create. I seek opportunities to activate space with colour and unexpected form. There is this element of surprise awakened by experiments in colour and material, and as a visual artist I embrace a combination of the organic and the structural in my sculptures, installations, and paintings.

108 Chinese Name Index

Ai Weiwei Hou Hanru Pi Li Yang Fudong 艾未未 侯瀚如 皮力 楊福東 Cai Guo-Qiang Hu Fang Shao Yinong Yang Jiechang 蔡國強 胡昉 邵逸農 楊詰蒼 Cai Lixiong Hu Jieming Shen Fan Yang Yong 蔡禮雄 胡介鳴 申凡 楊勇 Cao Fei Hu Xiangdong Sheng Shan Shan Yang Zhenzhong 曹斐 胡向東 盛珊珊 楊振忠 Cao Weijun Huang Liaoyuan Shi Yong Yangjiang Group 曹維君 黃燎原 施勇 陽江組 Cao, Alex Huang Yong Ping Song Dong Yao, Pauline J. 曹國鋒 黃永砯 宋冬 姚嘉善 Chan Ho Yeung, Jiang Nan Ping Song Tao Yu Hong David 江南萍 宋濤 喻紅 陳浩揚 Kan Xuan Sun Ping Yu Youhan Chang Xugong 闞萱 孫平 余友涵 常徐功 Leng Jun Tang Ling-Yun Yü, Christina Yü Chen Danqing 冷軍 湯凌雲 喻瑜 陳丹青 Li Keran Tang Maohong Yue Minjun Chen Shaoxiong 李可染 唐茂宏 岳敏君 陳劭雄 Liang Kai Tang Xin Zeng Fanzhi Deng Xiaoping 梁楷 唐昕 曾梵志 鄧小平 Lin Yilin Wang Guangyi Zhan Wang Ding Yi 林一林 王廣義 展望 丁乙 Liu Jianhua Wang Jin Zhang Lan Fang Lijun 劉建華 王晉 張藍 方力鈞 Liu Wei Wang Lihua Zhang Li Fei Dawei 劉煒 王麗華 張利 費大為 Liu Wei Wang Qingsong Zhang Xiaogang Feng Mengbo 劉韡 王慶松 張曉剛 馮夢波 Liu Xiaodong Wang Youshen Zhang Xiaoming Feng Zhengjie 劉小東 王友身 張曉眀 俸正杰 Liu Ye Weng Fen Zhao Bandi Gao Minglu 劉野 翁奮 趙半狄 高名潞 Liu Yiling Wu Shanzhuan Zhao Li Geng Jianyi 劉一菱 吳山專 趙力 耿建翌 Liu Zheng Xiamen Dada Zhao Nengzhi Gu Dexin 劉錚 廈門達達 趙能智 顧德新 Lu Chunsheng Xiang Liqing Zheng Guogu Guan Yi 陸春生 向利慶 鄭國谷 管藝 Lu Jie Xu Yihui Zheng Shengtian Hai Bo 盧杰 徐一暉 鄭勝天 海波 Lu Leiping Xu Zhen Zhong Biao Hong Hao 陸蕾平 徐震 鐘飆 洪浩 Luo Brothers Yan Lei Zhou Tiehai Hong Lei 羅氏兄弟 顏磊 周鐵海 洪磊 Muchen Yan Pei Ming Zhu Jia 慕辰 嚴培明 朱加

109 110 111 112 Insert in Taiwan