Will it exist before it’s over? The rise and ‚fall‘ of the Chinese art hype ( de )
The Asia Pacific Times. A monthly newspaper from Germany, 2007-12
China today, India tomorrow? Barely had the broader art-loving public registered the arrival of Chinese contemporary art before insider circles began speculating when the ever-hungry international art market would start searching for the next exotic thing. Still, some collectors, gallery owners and curators remain undeterred by this fast-food attitude, always having focused instead on the artists − even when doing so was still an act of idealism, not commerce.
The work of a Chinese artist from the post-Mao era broke the € 4 million barrier when Yue Minjun’s “Execution” sold at Sotheby’s for € 4.2 million on Oct. 12. In two-dimensional poster style, the artist depicts two groups of seemingly cloned young men in front of a red wall. Both groups – one lined up against the wall facing death, the other gesturing as if aiming rifles – laugh raucously from perversely toothy mouths. The scene obviously uses Francisco de Goya’s The Shootings of May 3, 1808 to refer to the bloody suppression of the June 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square. The work, produced in 1995, may have been painted with critical intent. Viewed today, however, it has little credibility, at least among those who followed Yue’s subsequent career and watched him constantly re-stage his alter ego to laugh at everyone and everything. This has not been the only instance in recent years of an artist obviously playing to the tune of a marketing strategist, whose repertoire includes the all-too-familiar flirt with censorship – even today, the Tiananmen massacre remains a taboo subject.
Anything one says about the Chinese art scene’s infrastructure has a short shelf life. Both the numbers of artists traded at international auctions and the range of galleries and collectors representing them have been growing steadily. If, until a few years ago, patrons and buyers of contemporary Chinese art came almost exclusively from the West, the first trade fair for contemporary Asian art, ShContemporary in early September at Shanghai Exhibition Center consigned this arrangement to the dustbin of history. An increasing number of Asians – including Chinese – are showing an interest in the young art of their homelands. Also, art has simply become a chic investment.
The Berlin-based artist, curator and art critic Andreas Schmid belongs to the pioneers who began exploring China’s art scene in the 1980s. On his travels through the provinces of China with the Belgian authority on Chinese modern art Hans van Dijk, he selected the artists for the China Avantgarde exhibition held in 1993 at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. “No one at the time guessed it would generate so much hype,” said Schmid. “There were often works that were very difficult to sell: temporary installations, performance photography and videos. What set it apart was its euphoric sense of a new beginning and its socio-political commitment. Money played a very minor role.”
Since 1997, Berlin gallery owner Alexander Ochs’ fascination with Chinese art has also driven him to concentrate on Chinese and other Asian artists. In 2004, he established “White Space” in Beijing, which is run by the artist Tian Yuan. With a force of conviction, Ochs promotes the widely clamored China art boom. China has only now captured the position in the international market to which it is entitled, he says. “If we accept that China is part of the world, we must also accept the wealth which is made and spent in this part of the world,”
he added, noting that gone are the times when the direction of the Chinese art scene was dictated from abroad.
Ochs put his money where his mouth is and now works as part of a European-Chinese team. And he is not alone. In the mid-1990’s, Swiss gallery owner Urs Meile traveled to China for the first time. Meile’s long-time friend, former Swiss ambassador to China, Uli Sigg, whose collection of Chinese modern art now comprises more than 1,600 works, initiated the trip. Through Sigg, Meile met his current partner, the artist, architect and curator Ai Weiwei. “Ai Weiwei is one of the founding fathers of Chinese contemporary art,” said Meile. “Without strong Chinese partners, you have no chance here. You would stop at the surface and gain absolutely no access to Chinese culture or its artists.”
Ai Weiwei presented three projects at this year’s Documenta in Kassel. With Fairytale, he invited 1,001 Chinese to Kassel for a week, calling the culture crash it provoked a “socio-political readymade” event. As analogies, he grouped 1,001 antique chairs as oases of calm and recalled the hollows of a temple pavilion using 1,001 doors and windows from traditional buildings from the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911) – the sculpture collapsed, perfect for publicity, in the opening days of the event.
The pace at which Beijing’s appearance changes and people’s lives there are profoundly rewritten is practically without parallel. Again and again, discussions with artists return to the same dramatic events. They talk of their illegal underground activity before and in the first years of China’s reform policy, the sense of a new beginning that it fostered, and then the trauma of the armed crackdown against protesters at Tiananmen Square. Afterward, many artists left China for the West. Those who remained withdrew from public life. The YuanMingYuan artists’ colony near the old Summer Palace in Beijing became a creative haven for Yue Minjun, among others. Together and individually, they sought expression for an existential discrepancy that could not have been more glaring: rampant power coinciding with outward petrification. The stylistic movement this condition gave birth to became known as “Cynical Realism,” a label penned by China’s best-known art critic, Li Xianting. Loud colors and hysterically exaggerated human figures – as exemplified in Yue Minjun’s Execution – are typical characteristics of this phase of Chinese art.
For the newest names on the Chinese art scene, however, that is yesterday’s news. Artists such as Cao Fei, featured in nearly every exhibition of Chinese art today, focus their projects on the China of here and now: What remains of young people’s dreams when they are rooted in front of a conveyor belt on an assembly line? How do virtual worlds such as Second Life affect the everyday world of Chinese youth and others? Shrill, full-color Chinese manga and anime art springs from perceptions found, essentially, all over the world.
When asked to forecast the way forward for the boom in Chinese art, not one gallery owner or collector would dare to venture more than five years into the future. It is unanimous that international interest will hold at least until then. What, however, do current developments mean for Sigg, whose unique collection, cultivated with an art historian’s eye and stretching as far back as the Cultural Revolution? He owns Chinese propaganda posters and films as well as work from the latest generation of artists. The fact that there has been a revival in interest in China in the past few years and that almost no items remain from the 1970s, 1980s and even the 1990s has made Sigg very conscious of his responsibility: “I would like to give the collection back to China sometime,” he said. “But I have not yet found the necessary conditions in which to do so.”
However, Sigg remains essentially optimistic when it comes to the future of Chinese art. “Some art in China is simply outstanding and of lasting significance,” he said. “Of course, there are also those who are just part of a trend. There will be a natural selection process, after which the works of Chinese artists will become a completely natural part of the international art scene.”
First published: The Asia Pacific Times. A monthly newspaper from Germany
