EAST MEETS WEST A Ne\/V Yorl<er'sEncOu11ter vvith Chinese art

Chiu-Ti Jansen

ANY NEW YORKER who wants to understand what's happening in China must first encounter its contemporary art. Contemporary Chinese art embodies all of the exploding promises and brilliant contradictions in Chinese society-a society full of raw energy but unsure about its materialistic transformation,haphazard ",rjth rough edges but tremendously fascinating. ContemporaryChinese art is leading the lifestyle-industry revolution in China-ahead of fashion, design, architecture, music, dance and literature, all ofwhich are attempting to replicate the contemporary art's Cinderella rise from obscurity and marginalization to the central stage. Each of these fields is wrestling with the same transition-from "Made in China" to "Created in China."

What does the rise ofcontemporary Chinese art mean to New York? Look at the Art Dealers Association ofAmerica Art Show, at which the Pace Gallery is dedicating its entire booth to 12 new ash paintings byShanghai-based Zhang Huan. At the Armory Show, Carolina Nitsch and Galerie Urs Meile are among others to show New York veteran Ai Weiwei's iconoclastic, conceptual 34 , l'"1ARCt 201

works, Marble Chair and Sunflower Seeds. Ai Weiwei, who lived in the West Village

in the early '90s, seems to be constantly in the spotligh-from the "Bird's Nest" Olympic Stadium in Beijing, which he co-designed, to his politically charged blogs to his recent house arrest. He studied and lived in the United States, mostly in New York, from 1981 to 1993, where he found inspiration from Duchamp's conceptual art based on altered ready-made objects. In October 2010, he carpeted the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London with 100 million porcelain "seeds," each individually sculpted and hand-painted in the town ofJingdezhen in China by 1,600 Chinese artisans. The miniature version ofSunflower Seeds shown at Carolina Nitsch consists ofa handful ofseeds contained in an air-sealed, wire-bail glass jar that is more commonly seen in the United States than in China_ It is as if the work is trying to demonstrate how content can be repackaged and re-contained in a foreign context; the sunflower seeds are the mlll1dane objects re-manufactured through traditional Chinese craftsmanship in an ancient city rich in imperial patronage of its porcelain productiolL

By playing with the concept of"Made in China," the artwork is where "Made in China" and "Cre-ated in China" converge.

Outside the art fairs, downtown's Chambers Fine Art, a gallery focusing solely on contemporaryChi-neseart, is showing in its New York gallery recent paintings and an installation by Xiaoze Xie. "Wang Qingsong: When Worlds Collide;' currently on view at the International CenterofPhotography in mid-town Manhattan, showcases photographic works by Qingsong that capture monwnental staged cinematic settings, often embedded in grotesque allusions to classical artworks.

Surprisingly, only one of the 272 galleries at the Armory Show is an indigenous Chinese gal-lery. Chinese dealers are staying home, probably because while many Chinese power players in various fields have entered into the art business, the industry is not mature enough for these new-comers to venture outside China_

Last year while attending a reception, I met a hedge fund managerwho mentioned a few minutes into our conversation that he had collected aJew pieces ofcontemporaryChinese art He must have thought that it was terribly sexy to mention that he

collected contemporary Chinese art. Yes, contemporary Chinese art is sex·y.

After a1l, in our society, anything that is close to money and its attendant power can be considered so. According to the Arlprice survey,

behind the revival ofcertain segments ofthe auction markets.

I t doesn't take an economist to figure out the math-the rise of the Chinese economy, in full swing following China's entrance into the

1. Song Dong's Waste Not 2. Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds in Glass Jar 3. Wang Qingsong's Competition

Having spent an equal anl0unt of time in prior to the most recent financial crisis set offby the Lchman Brothers' bankruptcy, 11 Chinese artists accOllJ1ted for the world's top 20 best-selling contemporary artists based on results from 2,900 auctions. Although Chinese art was not immune to the downturn of the art markets, at least the works by certain Chinese artists actively traded in the auction-driven secondary market have recovered handsome-ly-they have routinely surpJssed the highest estimate as well as the highest price achieved by the same artist prior to the financial crisis. In the 12 months ending in June 2010, 15 of thc top-selling 50 contemporary artists in the world were Chinese.

As contemporalY Chinese art has gained currency in China, the prices ofcontemporalY artworks are no longer quoted in U.S. dollars or euros but in renminbi (Rl'vlB). This clearly re-flects a gradual shift of the buyer base from the non-Chinese to the Chinese. March 2011 marks the fifth anniversary ofSot he by's seminal sale ofcontemporary Chinese art in New York, the first of its kind to focus solely on contemporary Chinese art. But since the fall of 2009, when the art. market seemed to be in a free fal.l following the financial crisis, major international auc-tion houses have shifted their contemporary Chinese art auctions to Hong Kong- where the mainland Chinese buyers are the drivers

36 1 I"1ARCIi lOil

World Trade Organization in 2001, means that the purchasing power of the emerging wealth in China wiU dictate the shift of tastes in certain cultural consumption.

Since "Inside Out: New Chinese Art" opened at the Asia Society in 1998, contemporary Chi-nese art has come a long way in New York City. In the past, we have witnessed group shows where art.ists ofdisparate styles were lumped together under a China label with little or no emphasis on individual artists' idiosyncrasies.

By the time Zhang Huan had his solo show "Altered States" at the Asia Society in 2007, Yue I\,finjun his solo show "Yue Minjun and the Symbolic Smile" at the Queens Museum ofArt in 2007 or Yin Xiuzhen his "Collective Subcon-scious" at MoMA in 2010, these exhibits were more than a ride on the China brand. They were viewed as individual artists, each with their own visual language and artistic vision. In 2010, MoMA published Contemporar)' ChineseArt: Primmy Documents, which injected scholarly rigor into the field ofshldies of the contempo-rary Chinese art.

I am an art collector myself, and one ofthe first assumptions about my art collection is that I collect only Chinese art. I often thought to myself, "Collecting only the art, especially only that produced from one's own country -how boring is that?"

American and Chinese culture, J often wonder what is so compeLling about contemporary Chinese art. For mc, it's refreshing that, unlike a debate that plagued the intellectual discourse in early-20th-century China, many post-Cultural Revolution artists are no longer obsessed with the binary opposition between the Western and Eastern mediums.

Chinese artists are still trying to make sense of the spectacular historical changes that are happening to their lives and society. China is happening, and so is its art scene. And it is still happening. I'd like to think that there is lllore than an economic force behind New York's fascination with the Chinese art scene. Beyond the simple economic motivations and WHAT TO REAl blind trend-chasing, there is 1. Chinese CO!1lempo. also a fundamental human Art: 7 Things You Sh desire to be part of the next Know, b.Y Melissa Chil big thing-and New Yorkers 2. New Chine. New A would naturally not want Richard Vine, 2008 to be left out of the next big 3 . Ma}1jong, Conterl1fll thing that is New China. Chinese Art From Th

Collection, by Feng Chiu-Ti Jansen is thefounder al, 2005 ofCHINA HAPPENINGS, a ... Young Chinese Art!: multimedia and advisor)'platform The Next Generation.l thatfocuses on the lifestyle and Christoph Nee et al.. cultural industries in China.