Category Archives: China Art

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art documentaries : Chimeras in the mix

Another year another China art documentary, focusing on questions of identity, or, as Wang Guangyi asks in Finnish film director  Mika Mattila’s Chimera: “what are our roots?”

The question itself continues to inspire new documentary work, but not, perhaps, much discussion or even interest (at least not for me). I remain intrigued, however, by filmmakers who are able to take this topic as the subject of their art, in other words, film artists who make art the fodder for their art. The arrangement is curious in that so much of what is compelling about such work is derived, if not flat out stolen, from someone else’s creative work. Where would, in other words, Mattila really be without Wang Guangyi and Liu Gang, who in most media reports (LA Times, for instance) are the headliners anyway, with the ‘real’ artist–the filmmaker–relegated to round about paragraph three. Journalists can see proportionality in this case of creative production, anyway.

The question is somewhat personal, I suppose, as I’ve endeavored off and on to tackle Zhong Biao in documentary format. Whether or not the project ever comes to fruition, I am certain that the better part of what emerges as watchable (耐看) will stem from his painting, or other products from his fundamentally creative hand. The structure, rhetoric, even cinematographic dimensions of my work would all rightly be upstaged by the artist or artists in question.

Robert Adanto’s work, discussed elsewhere on this blog, is also a case in point, but in watching that work we are forced to admit a certain spectrum of truth to the proposition that the documentarian of art is a thief of sorts, particularly when compared with Alison Klayman’s work on Ai Weiwei, a more modest, and therefore artistically thin operation. Yet in either case there is something there, in the art of the art, something beyond mere convenience (documentarian travels to locales we cannot in order to bring back the goods of what’s good), something expressive and individual, self-deprecating by design, but occasionally aesthetically there in the mind’s eye of the viewer.

And so it will be with Chimeras, I expect. I’m looking forward to seeing it when it comes to town.

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What goes up, must come….Market update

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Yang Yongliang, ‘A crocodile and shotgun’, 2012, “Silent Valley”, digital print, 66 x 119cm

Inevitably, the time arrives to take notice of the descent of what was for a moment (or perhaps a bit more) seemingly endless upward trend of Chinese art market. Estimates vary (as estimates will), but since a peak in 2011 Chinese art sales on world market have dropped by something like %50. Now comes the interesting game of trying to pinpoint why. While the intelligent, if not just informed, answer is that a number of factors are at work, the tendency to push towards which factor leads the way is strong indeed.  Here are my top three, though I can’t say in which order:

1. The Chinese economy has slowed bringing all activity down a notch or two. Down %50? no, but a downturn in gangbusters economy like China’s would perhaps tend to hit fastest those whose money came the most quickly in recent years, coincidentally the ones (domestically) most inclined to be buying art.

2. Fraud. Chinese cultural scene has been for some time rife with the knock-off. Indeed, so pervasive is this that one might (actually, should) be given to wonder what the “original” really means in this day and age, if in fact it ever meant that much at all. Our fetishistic attention to original object, in my humble view, often if not usually an act of faith. On the other hand (and here’s the one that matters!), “original” does mean a lot monetarily. Everything, in fact, and the ever increasing presence of false merchandise is not helping the Chinese art market much at all.

3. Taxes. The Chinese government is stepping up its game in the tax collection department, with art and real estate taking primary position in the spotlight of national revenue. A new adjustment in luxury goods, which fantastically art belongs, has kicked in, and that is going to send investors in particular, if not the committed collectors, running for some other commodity.

The major caveat in my “report,” here is that this is not the first time pundits have proclaimed the death of the Chinese (art market) miracle, as David Barboza of the the New York Times, wrongly, in 2009 reported.  A bit more judiciously, then, “what comes up, must come down…at least for a while.

Ok, now, for anyone who actually read all the way to the bottom of this post trying to figure out what Yang Yongliang‘s image has to do with current art market I can now tell you: nothing. I just love his work… (sorry?)

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Back from China， ON－OFF

3_Great_Hall_2-150x150

Just back from a few weeks in China where I was well protected from the dangerous platforms such as WordPress and the like. Just checking back in now with Facebook and other friends, and taking note of Evan Osnos recent piece in the New Yorker. Osnos, arguably one of the most persuasive talking heads in the Klayman documentary about Ai Weiwei, is also increasingly one of the most credible voices about contemporary China on a wide array of subjects. Particularly pleased, then, that he’s paying attention to contemporary art.

The context for Osnos’ piece is the new opening at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art. The exhibition (curated by Bao Dong 鲍栋 and Song Dong 孙冬冬) is a major event in its own right, with 50 commissioned works by 50 artists or artists groups, members all born after the end of the Cultural Revolution. As to the Apple performance discussed in Osnos’ piece, it seems to me a continuation of pervious work done by contemporary Chinese artists, but a continuation of a subject that needs to be continued. I have in mind a couple of pieces by Ai Weiwei, but principally the Tate  sunflower seeds that follows a similar thread, although it does so much more obliquely.  Ai is commenting on labor in China, with hands so cheap he could commission the creation of virtually countless hand-crafted porcelain seeds. (Tate purchased only 8 million of them–there were more). Of course, Ai’s piece is about much more than mere labor, with a very wide metaphorical scope  encompassing China as symbol, but the implications of  contemporary art object as concrete commodity are there.  In this case, though, Li Liao 李燎 goes for broke, exhibiting the mechanics of contemporary global capitalism in China from source to destination. He does so by actually getting a job at FOXCON and making the iPads, etc. himself, then exhibiting them in a place where most of the consumers of art are carrying such devices in their pockets anyway.  As Osnos describes:

I watched two young men separately linger over it for very different reasons: one was a hip Chinese gallerygoer in chunky glasses and a camel-hair coat, taking it all in; the other was a gallery security guard in a borrowed suit and white gloves. He was studying the details of the contract.

This is performance art at its best, and the type that China will need more of to keep the scene fresh in the years to come. As that develops, I for one hope Evan will keep reporting what transpires. 

 

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Luo Qing’s Rewrite

Visual artist poet and scholar Lo Ching (Luo Qing) has been now and again inclined to rework famous pieces of the Chinese tradition. In most cases, the “rework” has to do with visual interpretations of the literary tradition, itself much overlapping with visual. In some cases, though, Lo also rewrites the poems, taking one jueju 絕句 line at a time as the basis for his own new poetic line. In the following poem, the very well known “Deer Hermitage” 鹿 柴  by Wang Wei, Lo takes the final image of sunlight penetrating a deep forest and illuminating moss, and militarizes it. Wang Wei’s poem is in bold, and Lo’s lines follow beneath.

空山不見人
　　　　 (Empty mountain, no one seen)

因為我是原始太初
　　　 Because I am the very first

第一個
　　　　                  Primeval animal

自覺為人的
　　　　         To become suddenly aware of my

獸

                                            Humanity

但聞人語響
　　　　 (But human voices are heard)

因為我是大千世界
　　　　 Because I am the last person

最後一個
　　　　                  In the whole wide world still able

還能獸語的
　　　　              To speak

人

                                                Animal talk

返景入深林
　　　　 (Reflected light enters deep forest)

因為世上最後一線
　　　　 Because the very last thread of the world

爆炸光閃
　　　　                  Explodes in a flash

射穿我空洞肋骨的
　　　　 Penetrating deeply

深處                                            My bones and flesh

復照青苔上
　　　　 (Again shinning on green moss)

因為整個黑暗的地球上
　    Because what remains of the dark world

只剩下一小塊彈片
　　　　 Is but a bit of shrapnel, shimmering

在一層薄薄的青苔中
　　　Upon the thinnest layer

明滅                                            Of moss

Among the many versions of visual performance of the opening lines of this poem (empty mountain, no one seen), the one below is my favorites:

I like this image in particular for the way that the word for person (人) appears in the word for mountain (山) –where, in terms of the characters themselves it does strictly “belong”– is a bit lost even so, drifting about the bottom of the word, slightly off kilter. The two characters at the right, in fact, have come apart from themselves more or less entirely, with the center of emptiness falling down on to the mountain, leaving two watery dots above.

In terms of self-referentiality, a feature notably most out of sync with the Chinese literary-art tradition, there is the obvious presence of Lo’s ink stamp, again not where it “should be,” appearing in the center of the painting. This bold demonstration of self is deftly mitigated, however, by the even more central location of the word NO () that separates the two characters of Luo Qing’s name, becoming something like “Lo NO Qing,” or “Qing NO Lo,” or simple graphic (non-sequential) demonstration of negation.

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The Joys of Being Ai Weiwei

News of late of end of Ai Weiwei’s probation, and thus release from non confinement, which means that he is free (not exactly) to do as he likes (certainly not), unless that involves leaving the country (for instance to appear at his “Ai Weiwei: According to What?” retrospective).

Official documentation of such a momentous not-so-entire event is dropped to the ground in this photograph:

My thought is what a joy it must be to be an artist who can say so much by merely dropping a piece of paper to the ground and photographing it. The “series,” like his nude series, middle finger series, and others, plugs in to a repertoire of political performance art that seems so effortlessly meaningful.

This particular series (dropping) has been my favorite for its clever and so to-the-point exploration of value in contemporary Chinese setting, something which is also key to Ai’s legal troubles in terms of tax evasion. What, in other words, is the worth of a given Ai Weiwei artwork, who is decide, and what is to become of the fetishized object itself? One way of looking at contemporary Chinese experience, in fact, is a massive shift in value (UP) of a wide array of material objects, among them, and to return to the beginning of the series, antique Chinese art:

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Midnight in Paris-Beijing

Just watched Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris again (first time was on an airplane en route Beijing, as it turns out) and thinking of what no doubt would strike many as a radical if not ridiculous idea. Namely, how does the Paris of the 1920s compare with contemporary Beijing. Of course, for those who have seen the film, there’s more than one ‘scene’ at work–I’m talking Hemingway/Picasso, not Lautrec, for what its worth–and the strength of Allen’s script no doubt is its clever take on nostalgia for what may never have existed.  Still, the depiction of a vibrant cultural scene, with artists and writers debating the aesthetic way forward as if to be looking for the one and only point of egress to proper being itself does bear some interesting similarities with what’s happened in China in contemporary period.  To put this mostl bluntly, then, can we view present-day Beijing as THE global cutting edge?

In suggesting this I am also aware that the very notion of a “cutting edge” may well be passe (strikes me suddenly that that sentence required a French word). In fact, it may never have had validity in the first place.  On the other hand, viewing Allen’s film is only one additional reminder that the idea of some geographical CENTER housing the most current form of expression continues to have strong showing in the cultural imaginary, right or wrong.  Moving forward, I suppose, might entail establishing the criteria for arriving at identification of such a center, from which point we would “measure up”  the Chinese scene.

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Zhong’s visit, a series

[following will be a number of posts about having Zhong Biao and his wife Tiantian at the house over holiday season.]

What’s Zhong up to?

As I’ve noted elsewhere, Zhong Biao is a thoughtful painter, to put it mildly.  Engaging him on just about any topic leads to summary comments that are pithy, “definitive.”  Like a philosopher, he seems determined to nail down the shortest but still generally true observation, one not bogged down by, for instance, particulars of political policy or even historical events.  His notions of “xing” 形 and “tai” 态  (underlying force of the universe and its occasional and ever adjusting manifestation in the phenomenal world–in reverse order that is) are a good case in point.

So what’s an excessively philosophical visual artist to do with all these ideas?  Obviously, define them.  Thus, coming shortly will be the Zhong Biao Dictionary in which, in just under 200 pages, he’s going to finally put all of this in print.  I’m inclined to wonder whether or not the project stems in part from attending so many openings of his works and being faced with so many on-the-spot questions that run gamut from cogent to utterly confused.  From now on when engaged by viewers of all sorts about new works hanging on a wall he can conveniently reply: “page 23.”  Or, and just starting at the beginning:   “A is for…”

ai

爱的誓言【.i de sh. y.n】

①爱的，[形]；②誓言，[名]；

，爱的誓言是为了当下的渴望

而透支未来的情感，虽给力却不

能寄望。

Ai

The Vow of Love

The Vow of Love borrows against future emotion

for present desire. It gives power,

but can never be anticipated.

___________

Of course, each of these definitions will be accompanied by an image.  In fact, Zhong is rather adamant that this is a work of art, and not a “dictionary.”  The above definition, for instance, is paired with the perhaps still less definitive image (in regrettably poor reproduction):

 

 

Regardless, the Dictionary is slated for publication in early 2012.  I will say more about it in coming posts.

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Zhong Biao’s “Complex”

Here is the one completely abstract image from Zhong’s recent exhibition.  The element of abstract expression in Zhong’s work is particularly interesting given the acute realism of the better part of his art.  The realism, a result of his use of digital photographs which he projects on to canvas, and then paints in acrylic with or on top of charcoal rendering, is the mainstay of his imagery.  In recent years, though, these realist slices of life are increasingly accompanied by non-representational imagery, masses of colors, swaths of texture.  This is a bold maneuver for an artist who was already completely successful with his method.  In other words, continuing indefinitely on the path he’d pioneered was not only a viable option, it was the obvious choice.  Nonetheless, he undertook a new direction, albeit on which is entirely integrated into his juxtapositionary method.

The San Francisco exhibition (mentioned below) contained one purely abstract image.  Even with the departure, entirely abstract pictures are still very rare in Zhong’s work.  They are a rarity, indeed, at all in artistic practice, and China is no exception.  Indeed, given the fact that the value of Chinese art on the market of late–and by that I mean now already a few decades, though the recent surge is worthy of note–has mostly to do with the fact that these are Chinese art works.  Once an artist begins to work in the solidly abstract mode, though, such “Chineseness” falls out of view.  Below is “Complex”

I find his abstract work successful, and this painting especially. (Its worth noting that the lighting at the top of the image and blurriness center left is due to my bad photography and not the canvas itself).  This is because I still se a good deal of Zhong’s stock imagery, the flowers blooming, the explosions, human flesh both adorned and not, and so many material objects of the “solid poetry” of China’s built environment. Yet, of course, there is nothing here to actually suggest this much less represent this.  It is, instead, a representation of “complex,” in the psychological condition sense, and as such remains subterranean.  Such representation properly defies symbolic treatment, something which we do not expect to emerge until figures provide avenues of legibility.  The gesture is thus a purifying one, opening a clearing in preparation for the next time meaning comes around.

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of intellectual properties

Of course we have ongoing and by now rather tired conversations concerning China’s (collective) theft of the world’s intellectual properties.  Certainly, the postmodern notion that origins are pointless, and authors are themselves more the product of textual production than the agent does not resonate well in global commerce law offices contracted by Microsoft, Miramax and the like.  (We may be tired of hearing about intellectual property infringement, but the corporations’ prosecutor divisions are not likely to let up the hunt for perpetrators anytime soon.)

Nonetheless, the newer chapter in this conversation is the China-on-china copying, pilfering, our out and out stealing that seems very much on the rise.  So much for the well-rehearsed notion that to copy is to pay a form of respect.  A notable instance of such borrowing with which I’m familiar is the Sichuan artist Wang Niandong 王念东.  When I first encountered his work roughly two years ago, I was simply flabbergasted by the clear similarity (not the best word here) to Zhong Biao’s work.  More striking is the fact that Wang is a graduate of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, where Zhong Biao is on the faculty.  According to Zhong, Wang (who is 10 years younger than Zhong) came to him for some guidance and direction.  It would appear that Wang listened intently to what Zhong had to say.  Or, he just looked at what Zhong was doing, and, shall we say, followed suit:

Wang Niandong (link here to his Hallmark Gallery in Calfornia)

Urban Cries, 24 x 18 1/8 inches, 61 x 46 cm, 2006, Oil on Canvas

Urban Cries, 24 x 18 1/8 inches, 61 x 46 cm, 2006, Oil on Canvas, WND1

Urban Desire

artwork: Wang Niandong Urban Desire

Put next to some famous work Zhong Biao:

黑镜头Dark Lens 200 x 15 cm 2002
福到广州 Happiness Arrives in Guangzhou
130 x 97 cm 2001
All I can see that distinguishes them, apart from an intellectual and aesthetic program which to me seems much richer in Zhong’s work, is the fact that Wang works more or less constantly in oil, and Zhong, since about 1996, in acrylic.  Hardly enough to warrant the blatant infringement that Wang’s work demonstrates, in my view anyway.
Most notable, though, and no doubt highly uncharacteristic of others in China, much less the rest of the world, this is not a major concern for Zhong. Though he didn’t say so explicitly, I did get the sense that he was almost flattered.
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Project 798: New Art in New China

August, 2010 brings the arrival of a new and quite excellent documentary video by Lucius C Kuert focusing on nearly 20 artists currently (or recently) working at 798.  The content, which apart from a few shots of 798 grounds, with outdoor installations, tourists milling about them, and a few workers delivering supplies to worksites, etc., is comprised entirely of individual artists talking about their work and about 798. The only exception is David Ben Kay, who rather delightfully introduces his gallery Yuanfen in a number of installments over the course of the piece. In April Project 798 was awarded a Golden Ace from the Las Vegas Film Festival 2010.  The project website here, with a finely produced trailer that gives a good sense of the entire hour-long piece.

Yet, it is clearly the cumulative effect of this video that makes it valuable.  The multiple voices, in three different languages (with Italian added to the English-Chinese mix) provides a form of automatic resistance to reductive readings of the meaning, importance, relevance of this place.  The variety of views and approaches combine to attest, if nothing else, to the richness of China’s contemporary art scene.

Two themes, politics and market, run through the work, in parallel but also intersecting, and often quite ironically (as in the notion that Chinese artists who display images of government oppression are well positioned to be rewarded financially by global art interests). No one bothers to point out the irony that a Chinese Communist Party is managing an artistic community, but I expect that what was left on the video-editing floor contained much commentary on this subject.  Even with what does make it into the video, though, we can see the twin (and largely negatively construed) forces of CCP, which, for instance, won’t allow taboo subjects of Tiananmen Square demonstrations, Tibet, Religion, … (and so on) and the market, which forces less marketable artists to relocate to cheaper environs.  Of the two, the ambivalence towards the market is more clear, with Chen Wenbo declaring that decorative art has no place in society, and others like Hong Hao, who has made a career out of commenting on the marketization of Chinese art, a bit more nuanced.

The video, in other words, really allows us to look at the forces inherent in Chinese society today, from the point of view of artists, who are highly sensitive both to the strangely parallel winds of shifting political policy and market conditions.

Though it is the variety of voices that I find most compelling, to the extent that artists speak of economic dimensions of their creative experience, the prevailing view of the recent financial crisis is that it is a highly good development for Chinese art.  (It might be worth noting that those for whom the financial crisis was more clearly bad are not the type who could afford the rents at 798 and therefore be interviewed for this project.)

Zhang Xiaogang

As to highpoints in these interviews, there are principally two for me, and both come at the end of the piece.  The first is to see Zhang Xiaogang, who has the distinction of being not only the most richly compensated Asian artist alive (with “Bloodline #3″ selling for over $6,000,000 in 2008), is also highly articulate and thoughtful, providing a candid and quite compelling description of those strange bars of light that creep across his campuses. The next is the artist who strikingly concludes the work, is He Yunchang, who flatly reports that he’s never been involved in an “important” exhibition. The Project 798 itself is an important exhibition of sorts, and He’s privileged position at the end of the video (the last word!) provides a kind of artistic grit to the overall polished (and by some accounts ‘sanitized’) view of 798.  He Yunchang is a performance artist known for encasing himself in concrete, or bleeding himself (literally) into major Chinese rivers and the like.  The moment when he claims to not like artistic theatricality 表演性 is both genuine and also knowingly ridiculous for a man whose performances have a decidedly Houdini-esque quality.  He Yunchang provides the edge that the video needs to retain its own expositionary value, and perhaps also the continued value of 798 itself.

 

He Yunchang

Project 798: New Art in New China
2010
Distributed by Microcinema International/Microcinema DVD, 1636 Bush St., Suite #2, SF, CA 94109; 415-447-9750
Produced by Lucius C Kuert
Directed by Lucius C Kuert
DVD, color, 62 min.