China
Beijing is a safe and predominantly clean city, relatively easy to navigate by taxi (as long as you have your destination written in Chinese, or can get someone on the phone to explain to the driver). But when it comes to art, it’s a buzzing hotchpotch of sheer pomposity and chaotic energy.
Uli Sigg, the former Swiss ambassador to China, who has arguably the most internationally renowned collection of Chinese contemporary art (some 1300 works), has initiated the annual Chinese Contemporary Art Award, as well as the first Chinese Art Critic Award, for which I was invited to be on the jury, together with Georg Schöllhammer (documenta and Springerin editor) and two Chinese critics. To give us a crash course in how things work in Beijing, Sigg took us to an opening at Arario Gallery.
Founded by Ci Kim, a Korean businessman, Arario has three huge, Gagosian-style spaces - one show from Korean minimal painting veteran Park Seo Bo, and the other by Xiao Yu. The latter is a notorious figure in Chinese art, having caused several scandals by using animal carcasses and, once, a stillborn foetus in his freak show pieces. This still seems to be one of the favoured models in Beijing and huge mutated animal/human sculptures abound. Yu’s exhibition was akin to a fairground ride: a succession of walk-through sensations, from a coffin to a rubber-floored maze to a steel wall shot through with flowers. The final room (the only one with convincing jokes) sported a sculpture that crossed Herzog/de Meuron’s nest-like stadium with the egg-form of the city’s opera house; an adjacent model wore an arena-shaped hat, and there was a mock-political stage complete with a lectern; elsewhere a dummy tried to adjust a flower arrangement on the stage – the Mao-period ‘March of the Athletes’ played.
The area where Arario is situated is typical of the new art districts in the city: low brick buildings in warehouse-type compounds, vaguely reminiscent of Los Angeles. Other galleries in the area are a little tacky though interesting enough to visit: PYO housed a show of artist duo They, who paint ugly scenes in interior tableaux settings – paintings that were on the market only a few years ago for about 4,000 US-dollars, now worth 20 times that amount. Given the extremely low cost of living, even some third-rate artists are very wealthy in Beijing. Later, at the home of an artist, we watched Summer Palace by Lou Ye, shown at Cannes in 2006. At times touching, the film follows a young student couple during the 1989 uprising, the boy eventually moving to Berlin to study. The connection made between its numerous sex scenes and its political stance caused it to be banned from being released in China, the director banned from making films for five years. This is what seems to get the censors started: the idea that individual desire might have something to do with social freedom
The National Art Museum is something of a disaster: displays of traditional-style writing paintings and Chinese painting, but by young artists, depicted in cheesy portraits next to the works. There was also a show of contemporary South Korean installation and photography to mark the fifteenth year of diplomatic relations (interestingly announced as Korean rather than South Korean).
Which brings me to the show of contemporary Japanese work at Longmarch Space and two other venues (Inter Arts Center and BTAP Beijing Tokyo Art Projects) in the 798 art district, located in a former GDR-built electronics factory. The exhibition celebrated another political anniversary – 45 years of relations between China and Japan - and was initially planned to take place at the National Art Museum. It showed the usual mix of Japanese computer- or robot-art, plus a few well-known photographers, the odd legend represented by a minor work (Yayoi Kusama’s bubbly dot sculptures, Naoya Hatakeyama’s explosion photographs, and Tatsuo Miyajima’s neon digits). Atelier Bow Wow’s library structure for mangas was rather tame, but still the show was notable for purportedly being the first survey of Japanese contemporary art in China.
798 district is vast and rather chaotic. There is no comprehensive gallery map and you stumble from dodgy gallery to bad gallery, occasionally finding something OK. In between there are tattoo shops, bustling building work, cafés and artists’ studios. I must say there wasn’t a single show that truly grabbed me, but an honorable mention is Anish Kapoor’s large-scale, but simple and elegant show at Continua, an Italian gallery – a snail-white maze structure ending in a central circular space, where moisture seeps from the wooden floor, sucked up by a pipe under the ceiling to create a long, elegant hose.
Bigger is better is an underestimation of the local aesthetics in Beijing. In the showroom of Long March Space is a display explaining that they show work that ‘wouldn’t be shown otherwise because of its magnitude’. Clearly pointing to the failure of the museum to acknowledge this work, but also a skewed understanding of what makes a piece worth showing in a museum context. Heavy concrete, steel or fibreglass sculptures abound, or else vast four-by-eight metre paintings. Long March is anything but a non-profit space, and though they don’t actually represent artists, they do sell work (director Lu Jie apparently also runs the Beijing branch of Artist Pension Fund). Jin Shan at Platform wasn’t very good, but at least attempted something different, a weird video with a bishop stranded at a beach, another with workers lying in the grass at night around a huge copy of Das Kapital, and someone hitting a snare drum. Beijing Commune showed work by Yue Minjun (famous for his laughing pink men), normally a terrible artist, but this was quite a daring show consisting of nothing but a catalogue placed on a pedestal and a single painting only visible on turning a corner. The latter was not so visually intriguing, a painted maze-like museum structure with favourite artworks by Minjun also shown as cut-outs in the catalogue, accompanied by short remarks, including everything from Cosima von Bonin through Janine Antonie to Damien Hirst and Fischli/Weiss. A sort of imaginary group exhibition, neatly reflecting what seems in short supply in Beijing: a lot of shows are cobbled together rather than installed, display still playing a minor role as a means of conceptual-perceptual reflection. Tang Gallery had a show of Shen Shaomin, who had three (!) simultaneous shows in different galleries, accompanied by no less than five catalogues. More is more: It’s not uncommon for a well-to-do artist to have several gallery shows simultaneously and to publish three catalogues a year.
In the area where Universal Studios is located – right across the street from one of Ai Weiwei’s many studios – the overall make-up of the spaces is closer to the western white cube, though with the local style that Weiwei himself introduced: dark grey, brick buildings in western-modern-meets-Chinese-minimal. In fact, Weiwei has built several of these spaces, notably Urs Meile’s (the dealer from Switzerland), and his own mansion (more on which later).
Urs Meile had a rather bad show by Swiss artist Rémy Markowitsch (who also shows with Eigen+Art), trying to cater to local tastes with images of big flowers and a tacky video installation of a running shower surrounded by red silk. But a pretty beautiful Weiwei space (at least from outside), with the latter’s tall ceramics columns in the garden. At Platform’s second space was German artist Julian Rosefeldt, and the second show of Shen Shaomin, who showed a detailed model of a fighter aeroplane. Across the street at Courtyard Gallery was the third of the latter’s shows, intricate metal constructions binding Bonsai into weird shapes. –
When it comes to Universal Studios, I may be biased as I have known co-director Waling Boers for years, but to me it seems to have the best programme of Beijing galleries. It’s a commercial space and, while they started as a sort of non-profit, ‘non-profit’ doesn’t really exist in Beijing; even museum shows are often essentially exhibitions ‘rented’ (expensively) by commercial galleries. In any case, Universal Studios do have a bunch of interesting artists: Kan Xuan (a video artist recently featured in frieze), Liu Wei (paintings and installations; he starred in Jonathan Monk’s Chinese Crackers film), Qui Xiaofei (pretty good paintings somewhat reminiscent of the Polish ’Pretty Group’ school), and Qui Anxiong, a young artist who studied in Kassel, pulled off the best way to play it big. He found an original train cabin from somewhere in the west of China, had it cut into five sections, transported to Beijing and put back together in the gallery. You enter the carriage almost unawares, as a tunnel from the entrance leads directly into the Cultural Revolution-era cabin. All of the windows were projected onto from outside, with black-and-white archive footage shot through with super-short abstract animation sequences. Music played from underneath the seats, mixing ambient sounds, free jazz and Chinese folk music. It’s maybe a slightly empty, but simple, stunning, immersive piece – not rocket science, but effective.
Ai Weiwei built his own private compound some seven years ago in the area now developing into the new art district, opposite Universal Studios, and new galleries are opening up all the time. The building is enclosed by a high wall, as is common in Beijing, and includes a large studio space, a private section, and a large office where Weiwei’s assistants work. The architecture is a kind of Chinese brutalism, made with black bricks, and allegedly built at the time for 50,000 dollars (the same in Europe or the US would cost millions). Though prices have gone up substantially since then, building material and labour are still exponentially cheap in China. (However, as with all the gallery and studio spaces popping up, the site is on a 20-year lease from the city.) After having built Urs Meile’s space and China Art Archive & Warehouse’s (co-founded and co-run by Weiwei but closed when I tried to visit), there is also now a major investment of new spaces in the area, all of which either are built by Weiwei or in-the-style-of – all uniformly minimal-brutalist black brick, with white cube spaces inside.
The studio space in Weiwei’s mansion, roughly as big as a decent kunsthalle space, now seems to be more a kind of private showroom, his actual production outsourced to other locations (the studio model of the Olafur Eliasson-type artist-as-architect augmented by the opportunities of cheap space and labour). Here Weiwei stores the remaining dozen or so trunks of extremely rare ironwood secured from an old temple that had been dismantled, from which his expert carpenters have built some of the artist’s most well-known pieces, namely the map of China as a wooden sculpture, and some of his Artschwager-in-Qing-mode table sculptures.
I met Zhao Bandi, whose studio is in 798, an artist who has done a couple of interesting media stunts. In 2003, during the SARS crisis, he published a photograph of himself and his panda ‘logo’ wearing masks and guerrilla gear. The (uncredited) photo was subsequently used by a national newspaper to illustrate coverage of the crisis, and Bandi took the newspaper to court for copyright infringement, resulting in a hilarious video document of the ensuing case. The artist remains seated and silent throughout, hugging his panda, until finally reading out a letter from his girlfriend, stating that he is a disturbed fetishist without any connection to reality. This move obviously shouldn’t have been helpful in supporting his case, but Bandi ironically won (even though the compensation he received was smaller than his lawyer fees). Another amusing piece involved the artist officially opening the Beijing Olympics 2008, three years before the fact, in Bern, Switzerland. The video comes close to slapstick, Bandi running across China carrying a plastic torch, the panda sitting on his shoulders, only to arrive in Bern’s football stadium, with the city’s mayor opening the games. (The piece may sound harmless, but given the local intolerance to criticism of the Beijing Olympics it is anything but). A big part – and maybe the most politically interesting aspect – involves Bandi making visits to old people’s homes in the provinces with a delegation of Panda party members (wacko weirdos that have joined him through his busy website), aping the kind of propaganda visits the prime minister regularly makes, but actually pointing to the abject conditions many in the provinces live in. Maybe what Bandi does is not always visually or conceptually stunning, but, operating under the veil of naivety, he is one of Beijing’s most politically interesting figures.
Jörg Heiser
Jörg Heiser is co-editor of frieze.
Responses
Added by james280170,
Fascinating article. I recently did a post on my blog about Chinese contemporary art and until then I had no idea just how fantastic it was. I posted about Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Opening in Beijing, where I read about a couple of contemporary artists; Wang Guangyi, Xu Bing, Geng Jianyi, Huang Yongping and Zhang Peili, and because of that I have gone back again and again to look at their works. I especially liked the work of Wang Guangyi, who mixed pop art with the images of communism. Brilliant to see more on these talented people.
