China's art scene burns red-hot, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com
Sunday, August 30, 2009 at 10:00AM GALLERIES GALORE | Contemporary artists find strong new following 
According to the Chicago Sun times, the black Mercedes-Benz sedan, shiny and new, begged for attention as it sat curbside in front of a dingy red, dilapidated, two-story apartment building, where laundry hung from clotheslines across weathered front doors.
Across the street Xin Fu made for a jarring juxtaposition. Smartly dressed in a snazzy vintage, black Chanel dress, fancy Wolford stockings and red suede designer handbag, as if going out for an evening on the town although it wasn't even noon on a Saturday, she looked as out of place in Suzhou Creek as the unattended luxury car. Yet both symbolized what the area has become in recent years.
Not long ago Suzhou Creek was full of abandoned factories, run down and unoccupied since the 1980s. But now the area, just 20 minutes by taxi from the happening Bund, Shanghai's famous waterfront street, attracts tourists -- and serious collectors -- eager to check out the slew of art galleries hoping to capitalize on the explosion of China's contemporary art scene, which Chicago's Zhou Brothers were at the forefront of two decades ago.
Recent reports claim the Chinese art market is estimated to be worth about $36 billion a year when everything from ceramics to modern pop art is taken into account, making the industry just another one of China's hot commodities. While sites such as the Great Wall, Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square in Beijing and the Shanghai Museum, Nanjing Road and the Bund in Shanghai draw throngs of foreign spectators, art galleries in Shanghai and Beijing offer another interesting stop for the culturally-aware tourist.
Reminiscent of London's Notting Hill and New York City's SoHo in their infancy stages as artsy communities, Suzhou Creek and the adjoining M50 Art District have turned into an artistic milieu with studios and galleries. One of the more recent additions is six-month-old Fuxin Gallery, owned by Fu, a blue-eyed Shanghai native married to an Italian with homes here, London and Rome.
I had met her a couple of nights earlier at a weekly aperitif gathering at Shanghai's Westin hotel, where the property's general manager, Peter Alatsas, introduced us. Fu's husband bragged that his wife, a professor at Shanghai University's College of Economics & Management, was preparing to open a gallery in Suzhou Creek. When she asked to show me around the area, I couldn't resist. It's one thing to take a taxi solo to a foreign destination and wander around aimlessly. It's another to have a local such as Fu as your guide.
I exited my taxi, paid the 23 yuan fare (about $3) and spotted Fu, who took me to meet one of her artists, Hebin, a bespectacled, 27-year-old male artist whose tiny studio sits on the bank of Suzhou Creek. One of his most captivating paintings showed large, smiling faces of two young girls in back of tiny images of a gun-toting man dressed in a Chinese guard uniform and a panda bear with a dangerous grin and wearing a shirt with a five-point red star, which symbolizes Communism. In my mind, it was a political statement against still-Communist China.
Our next stop was ShanghART gallery, regarded as one of the country's most acclaimed and innovative spaces for art. Fu introduced me to its founder, Lorenz Helbing, from Switzerland.
When ShanghART opened in 1996 as the city's first independent gallery for contemporary art, the exhibition was on a few walls in a local hotel. Now ShanghART shows works by 30 artists from different media, including video to ink and painting to photo, in an enormous gallery opened in 2005 and debuted a smaller exhibition space in 2004 in the M50 Art District, right next to Suzhou Creek. Although the gallery works with artists from all over China, it focuses on artists in Shanghai, such as Zhang Enli's, whose work most impressed me. Here, pieces go for $2,000 to $500,000 and attract serious collectors.
ShanghART and Art Scene Warehouse, owned by Canadian Sami Wafa, were among the first galleries in the area. Since then, dozens of other galleries have followed. When we strolled around the area I saw just one coffee shop but I imagine in time there will be quite a selection, just like in Factory 798, Beijing's well-known contemporary art district whose name comes from its original home: No. 798 Electronics Factory, a former weapons factory converted into a complex of studios, workshops and galleries beginning in 2002.
While Suzhou Creek is manageable in a day, it might take a week to get through the hundreds of galleries at 798.
One of the latest tenants to move into 798, and with much fanfare, is the whopping 86,000-square-foot Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, a not-for-profit independent art center that includes three galleries, a shop, cafe, auditorium, library and more. Bookstores, ceramics shops, an accessories boutique, cafes and restaurants with signs in English surprisingly, also make up the district.
With 798 bursting at the seams with tourists, artists have moved farther away to Caochangdi Village, still so unknown that even my driver had difficulty finding it even though it is a short drive from 798.
Seven years ago Ai Weiwei, one of China's finest artists, moved there and opened the gallery China Art Archives and Warehouse. A community was born, giving credence to the saying, "If you build it, they will come."
Vanguard photographer Rong Rong recently opened his 14,000-square-foot Three Shadows photography studio. Helbing plans to open an outpost, called ShanghART@Beijing, before the year is up.
F2 Gallery, owned by Belgian Fabien Fryns, debuted two years ago. Although F2 shows about 60 percent Chinese art and 40 percent Western, the former accounts for 90 percent of its sales.
Many Chinese artists are far from starving as prices have soared for their works. Helbing says five years ago $10,000 might have been a high price but now $100,000 is common.
Fryns, who has been in the art gallery business for 20 years and moved to Beijing in 2004 after working in London and Spain, says there has been a 2,000 percent increase in the prices of top quality works by Chinese artists.
He also is of the opinion that the top tier of contemporary Chinese artists, such as Zhang Xiaogang, Yui Minjun and Zheng Fanzhi, are on the same level as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.
Today's Chinese artists can thank the Zhou Brothers, who were pioneers. Shan Zhou says neither he nor his brother DaHuang Zhou are surprised at the growth of contemporary art in China. The brothers, who were born in China in the 1950s, studied drama and painting at the University of Shanghai and the National Academy for Arts and Crafts in Beijing, where they earned MFAs and became leaders of China's contemporary art movement before moving to Chicago in 1986.
"We are happy to see the growth," Shan Zhou says. "It's about time. In the '80s, the more important artists left China. They were looking for more freedom."
They say today's Chinese artists are much more aggressive than those 15 years ago. Previously, artists stayed in their countryside provinces hoping a foreign art collector happened upon their work. Now they go to Shanghai and Beijing to make it happen for themselves. DaHuang Zhou says there's a Chinese expression that translates to once in 100 years and that is how he describes today's movement.
The duo recently spent a month in China, where a retrospective exhibition "Zhou Brothers: 30 Years of Collaboration," which was shared by the Elmhurst Art Museum and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs three years ago, was on display at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. In September they gave a well-attended lecture at Beijing University called "From Fantasy to Reality."
"China today is fully open and in the spotlight," DaHuang Zhou said. "All the attention is on it in every field. Contemporary art has a very special advantage. Today's China is more open politically and in many different ways they have much better conditions than any other artists from any other place. I'm very excited for that."
Feature
Reader Comments (2)
What is the DSL collection?
The dsl Collection was created in 2005 and focuses on contemporary Chinese art. It is a private collection currently representing 90 of the leading Chinese avant-garde artists, most of whom have a major influence on the development of contemporary art in China today. Even though it focuses on the contemporary production of works of art of all media of a specific culture, the collection is not guided by the search for an ‘otherness’. It admits basic cultural similarities and dispositions and goes beyond the simplistic approach of looking for typical cultural signs and symbols.
The collection is not only significant on a personal level, but also on a larger scale. We start from a museum approach, which means that we are collecting a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, installation, video, and photography. Furthermore, the choice of works is not oriented on the trends of the market. To choose this kind of approach implies making the collection accessible for the public, as well as documenting the featured works.
The major tools to achieve these goals is the use of new technologies, such as the internet and interactive programs and supports, like for example electronic books. These tools provide the means to share the experience of contemporary culture and to make it more accessible and meaningful for a broader public.
How did we become interested in Chinese art?
Art is the mirror of a Society.
When my wife and I came to Shanghai for the first time in 2005, I felt that there was another logic existing here; something that speaks of a very schizophrenic attitude towards economic development. The city embodies a ceaseless pursuit of the “superhuman” that redefines traditional definitions of humanity, sustainability, scale, and speed. Somehow these feelings were very inspiring and we wanted to find art and artists that express the relationships between contemporary art production and society. We are also interested by the Chinese artists who are living outside mainland China, in Taiwan, for instance, and mainly in the Chinese Diaspora in Europe and the United States. These artists have played a decisive role in defining Chinese contemporary art to audience outside China.
One should also not forget that apart from having a 6000 (5,000?) year-old cultural history, China is the biggest cultural space in the world.
How is our collection different than other collections?
We never compare our collection with others because every collection is by nature unique. However, we follow strict personal guide lines in building our collection.
About Collecting, how do you approach it?
“Collecting,” is not “accumulating.” and it is not “investing.” It is acquiring objects that have some relation to each other and putting those objects into the kind of order that reflects the collector’s response to them. Each true collection achieves a personality beyond and apart from the sum of the objects. I feel also that diversity is one of the main strengths of a collection.
What role does the Collector play?
The Collector should not take centre stage himself and should let the art itself be at the centre of the collection. Artists should be given the maximum spotlight. My role, my real power is to make that happened (My role and my aim is to make this happen. Its what the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist calls “the fundamental invisibility.”
What is the the dsl Collection viewpoints?
- A museum approach
At first we looked at Chinese art according to our personal tastes, but we very soon realized that very few people were systematically collecting Chinese contemporary art, either in China or outside -- neither institutions, nor individuals had a museum approach and even less so a university museum approach.
And why this kind of approach?
University museums are unlike other museums. They are not intended to have a powerhouse of masterworks on display, though some have their share of these. They are, before all else, teaching instruments intended for students and scholars to use in a hands-on way. As such, they often house objects that are considered of second- and third-tier value at auction but that fill out a deep and detailed account of cultural history. Intellectual adventure is privileged over box-office appeal.
- Education and entertainment
Entertainment and education have quite different intents, but they can be integrated to achieve both aims. Certainly the demand from younger people has shifted strongly to only paying attention if content is truly entertaining. Beyond that, Art is fundamentally about providing experiences. People today seek engaging and powerful experiences.
In such a large country, how do you choose your artists?
We try at the same time to acquire new works from emerging artists and maintaining interest in the works of China’s more established big names. We are always keen to find individuals who are interested to see where the prevailing boundaries lie, either in terms of content, of materials, of disciplines and how they can push these open; I respond most to art that has powerful links to both the times and the context in which it was created.
We think also that chinese contemporary art at the moment is in the process of breaking away from the Western art canon, which has sort of hit a dead end.
What is our focus?
In this New Age, a private collection is also about inspiring people.
Dsl collection would like to become a platform that is accessible to everybody from everywhere. A place where people can have exciting experiences, build their knowledge and actively participate. With the help of curators and critics we try to get the audience engaged and, consequently, move ideas forward and extend interest in Chinese contemporary art. We see the dsl collection as a place that provides experiences with content and also enables participatory experiences--with other people, both visitors and experts.
Consequently, apart from building the collection, dsl is carrying two strategies aimed at increasing and deepening participation and developing education.
Why is the internet platform interesting in our collection?
Having chosen a museum approach, we felt an obligation to make the works available to the public. The challenge of attracting audiences is hardly new.
We have to admit that many brick and mortar museums for the most part are kind of hidden jewels .They do not have great foot traffic and often they are unable to exhibit many of their important works at the same time.
That is why, as for showing the works we have decided upon, to primarily use technology by creating a website: dslcollection.org. Nevertheless, nothing will ever replace a direct contact between the audience and an artwork.
dsl collection has also adopted many of the internet tools to increase the audience. This is done by creating interactive and participatory forms of engagement and altering the traditional relationship between art and its audience. The online technology allows this flexibility. Our daughter Karen is more and more involved in the collection is focussing in particular on social networking tools like Twitter, Facebook and Second Life.
These latest online services are creating new, more interactive and participatory forms of engagement and altering the traditional relationship between art and its audience.
Does the internet platform play a larger role in China than in the West , and why?
The internet is important because It renders possible an ” EVERYBODY, EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME” experience!
This choice is even more important in the case of China where you currently have 300 million people connected and 100 million personal blogs.
Will there be a space to eventually view the collection?
We are working on the concept of a nomad collection that could go from China to Europe and the United States. Meanwhile many works are on loan to museums or biennales. We are of the principle that whenever an artist wants to have his work exhibited, it should always be made available. We would like to have the first exhibition of the collection in a museum in the United States
How will the collection evolve?
The collection is limited to a specific number of art works - about 150 pieces – that, as an entity, is open to constant redefinition. Openness, movement and communication are basic qualities we want to promote. Another important point: When we collect a work of art, you are essentially acquiring not just one work of art but a part in the artist’s entire body of work which is known as an oeuvre. It means that if this oeuvre evolves in a direction that is not the good one for us we decease the work.
We shall focus more and more on education by being ever more present in China in particular. In 2010 dsl collection will be in charge of an Art Management course at the Shanghai University.
Why is art important? What inspires us?
Art is a way to make our life better. It is not about inanimate objects, but about connecting to people. Thanks to this collection we discovered a great country with great people and a great culture
Hello from Russia)