On Being a Conscientious Collector Zhang Rui in Conversation with Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker Zhang Rui: I was born in 1962, so this year I’m 46. I graduated from middle school in 1980. This was a very important period in my intellectual development and actually perfect timing, because simultaneously—at the end of the 1970s and at the beginning of the 1980s—contemporary Chinese art began to emerge. Just as my eyes were beginning to open to the whole world, so was contemporary Chinese art. At this time I immersed myself in literature in the hope of finding inspiration for my own writing, and I lived for a period of time as a rootless wanderer. I began to look at everything in different ways, interacting with new kinds of things through literature. At that time we weren’t really paying any attention to the expansion of Chinese contemporary art. All we heard was that there was an artist group or community at Yuanmingyuan. At that point, we didn’t connect painters to contemporary art. In fact we didn’t know what contemporary art meant. So we just communicated and interacted with the artists in Yuanmingyuan. That was how we touched upon contemporary art. It wasn’t really clear to me what those guys were up to, what they were doing. Actually we really weren’t so keen on taking notice of the artists in Yuanmingyuan or their exhibitions. What really inspired us were the foreign exhibitions coming in to China. It was the foreign exhibitions that really made an impression on us. Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker: Where were these exhibitions taking place? Zhang Rui: One was the Rauschenberg show1 at the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) in 1985. We didn’t even know that some of these Chinese artists were actually exhibiting; we just thought of them as carefree spirits. It wasn’t something that we understood was taking place on the world stage. Three painters—Yue Minjun, Fang Lijun, Yang Shaobin—were in Yuanmingyuan. They are all the same age as I am, all born in 1962 or 1963, so there was this common age, and common lifestyle. Money was not an issue because everyone was poor. So, at the same time, we were all experiencing coming to terms with our own selves, and coming of age. In 1988 I started my own mobile technology business and from then on spent the greater part of my time and energy investing in this new business. This meant that I stopped paying so much attention to literature as well as to the art scene. From 1988 to 2000, I was focused on the business. At this time, art wasn’t really having an impact on the lives of people such as myself; for my generation the real cultural stars at this time were the rock stars. Cui Jian2 was a super famous rock star in China. He influenced many generations, and even today he’s still very much respected. From 1988 until 2000 he was the most recognized, famous artist, and he was loved by Chinese people all over the nation. So if you talk about artists like Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun, if you look at them during the time between 1988 and 2000, they were all big fans of rock-n-roll. Zhang Xiaogang’s ex-wife was also at the forefront of the rock-n-roll scene and opened Little Bar 8 in Chengdu. Nobody knew who Zhang Xiaogang was, or Fang Lijun. They only knew the names of these famous rock-n-roll stars. In 2000, I started to represent a French fashion label in China. I had two shops—one in the Palace Hotel and one in China World Hotel. Because of this French label, I gained exposure to other things. The owner of this line invited me to his home in Paris, and through this visit I received something like a lesson in art. Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker: Was it contemporary art that he had, or historical? Zhang Rui: That’s not the point. It’s not important whether it’s classical or modern. I want to tell you this story because it had such an influence on me. I was invited to his home as a guest, and in France to be invited into a person’s home as a guest is such a huge honour. They lived in the sixteenth district in Paris, and so basically the boss wanted to let me know that he lived in the hottest district in Paris. This is where the most well-off people in Paris live, and so they introduced me to this world. From their window in the kitchen, they could actually see the Eiffel Tower. The boss said, “So you see, my house does have some value because you can see the Eiffel Tower from the kitchen.” “But,” he added, “nothing is as expensive as the painting hanging behind you.” I was really struck by this experience. In the past I had only seen artworks hanging on the walls of a museum. I had never imagined that this artwork could actually enter a private house. It doesn’t matter whether it is expensive or inexpensive; you would think such work belongs to the nation, and not be for private consumption. So until 2001 I had no idea that one could have art that would be treasured more than a house. It was unimaginable to a Chinese at that time. When I returned to China—I had bought a place in 1999—it occurred to me that I could actually design a new house. Up until that time, I used to go to Ikea to buy ready-made, little prints for my house. But after this experience of going to France, I was inspired to keep artworks at home. I started to visit art galleries and purchase art. But I purchased artworks only to enhance the aesthetics of my home. I didn’t consider what I should, or should not, purchase as long as the work was aesthetically attractive to me. At the end of 2002, it was the first time that I came into contact with an artist from the artists’ village of Songzhuang [located in Tong Zhou District, an eastern suburb of Beijing]. His name was Wang Qiuren. And so at a mutual friend’s party—since I had started to purchase art, I felt that I had a bit of knowledge—Wang Qiuren and I got into a debate about painting. But he felt that I didn’t understand art at all, and wasn’t willing to continue the conversation. Through his friend, he passed on a book to me titled Songzhuang. It was through this book that I first encountered the names of contemporary artists and what art could be. So actually I found my way to these artists from a map in this book. I started to collect their works. And it was through knocking on the doors of these artists in Songzhuang that I reconnected with some of my former classmates from my high school days. For example, I reunited with my collaborator who also runs a gallery [BANG—Beijing Art Now Gallery], Huang Liaoyuan.3 At the time, Huang Liaoyuan was the manager of a lot of the rock-n-roll artists. Because of the emphasis on rock music at that time, his position in society was pretty high, and many famous rock stars were his good friends. Coincidentally, a lot of the artists who were emerging at this time were also good friends of Huang Liaoyuan and fans of these rock stars. Through Huang Liaoyuan, these artists were able to have contact with rock stars. At that point these artists had no money, so to thank Huang Liaoyuan for his introduction and support they’d give him artworks every year— at least six hundred paintings. And among his collection, Huang had twenty-four paintings by Zhang Xiaogang. 39 The way I connected with Huang Liaoyuan was that I noticed he was writing critical essays on music, rock-n-roll, and the art scene. In 2002, after reconnecting with Huang Liaoyuan by knocking on his door, I realized he was very knowledgeable, and we started talking about opening a gallery. We started to pro-actively set up the gallery in 2003. Although China reached a low point that year because of SARS, it was actually an optimal time for artists because there was nothing to do during the SARS epidemic, so they all sat together talking, drinking, and learning from each other. It was really an optimal time to think about opening a gallery. From that point in 2003, Huang Liaoyuan started to bring me to studios to meet artists. Through this I started to buy artworks systematically. The reason I decided to do this was very simple: I wanted to give the contemporary Chinese art scene support because at the time when we were starting to build the gallery, I thought that by acquiring their works this would give them confidence to know there was a market among local collectors. Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker: This was certainly very important. Zhang Rui: Because at that point the majority of collectors were from abroad, only very, very few local Chinese collectors were buying. I actually acquired works that were quite large in size. The most significant works of a lot of the artists were very large-scale, but for some reason or other, foreign collectors were not acquiring them. I was driven to collect these large pieces, and I wanted to find a place for the collection that would be very significant and monumental in size and concept.