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China Time

China Time, Summer 2009, pp. 62-63

Three hours into the grand opening of the new Saatchi Gallery last year, I was a little tired of hearing people praise the space but deride Charles Saatchi’s choice to open the sprawling, converted Georgian site at the former headquarters of the Duke of York with the exhibition “The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art.” For more than a few years, critics had been chattering about Saatchi’s irrelevance, and in the three years since he’d moved the gallery from County Hall on the Thames to Sloane Square in Chelsea, they’d had time to sharpen their knives. The newly renovated building’s soaring rooms are gorgeous and impeccably lit, and in the context of the then-new news of falling world financial markets, many there actually seemed relieved to see such outright confidence from a collector. But that didn’t still the criticism of contemporary art from China, and the unfairness of the remarks made that night still rankles.

For anyone who has been to China, it is a different story. Making one’s way around Beijing to explore artists’ studios, one cannot help but be struck by the city’s ring roads. These are huge circular highways surrounding the urban centre; each newly added ring opens up and yet simultaneously closes off the city. It is hard not to read them as a metaphor for the networks of capital circling contemporary art in China; there has been so much blending of art and investment that it has distracted us from giving the art its due.

When I first arrived in Beijing in 2006, I crashed on the sofa of my artist friends Meng Jin and Fang Er (Jin frequently moved the sofa to make room to paint). On our expeditions through the city, we travelled in taxis, moving in and out of the ring roads to visit studios and scout the 798 District, where my friends were searching for a site to set up a studio/gallery/project space. They eventually found a place, moved in, put on shows and then moved again to a better two-storey location in a more central business district to which other galleries were gravitating. The rate of change in Beijing is mind-boggling. Part of 798 District, for example, was formerly a factory complex used mostly by the military. Since its reinvention as a place where artists gathered, its fate had mirrored that of such districts around the world: the artists come, galleries and services follow, then rents go up. In 798 District they had risen around 900% in five years.

One day, I made a visit to the studio of the artist Shi Jinsong. Well removed from 798 District, his place was located next to that of the artist Bai Yiluo. Both had recently begun to pull in money for their work but this hadn’t yet translated into improved working conditions. They had found these studios in a hurry, after their former premises were demolished by the government. The air in the new place was browner and more full of dust than elsewhere in the city, and every five minutes the ground would shake. In their rush to find a new location, these two had overlooked the fact that their building complex included a test site for new trains. Shi Jinsong showed us about half a dozen of his fantastical stainless-steel sculptures. My friend Fang Er whispered that she’d heard they had all been sold, even though their first public showing was months away. Shi talked a bit about the tractors from the countryside that had inspired their shapes, but I was so in awe of the sums of money that were appar- ently rolling into this unlikely place that it was months before I began to think seriously about his sculptures. Their morphing steel shapes allude to American chopper-style motorcycles, but they are also a loaded reference to and subversion of the tractors so associated with the collective farms of Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

Myopia is nothing new when it comes to Western perspectives on art from Asia. Impressionism wouldn’t have happened if examples of Japanese ukiyo-e art depicting the Yoshiwara district of Tokyo hadn’t made their way into the hands of certain artists in France. In the 20th century, the American Abstract Expressionists were admired for engaging with a calligraphic impulse, while their abstractionist counterparts in Asia were considered derivative. I observed this bias against Asian art while in grad school in London and wondered whether it was only snobbery; one of the most underappreciated dynamics within world culture over the last few centuries has been the back-and-forth exchange between East and West.

A decade ago, I started experimenting with anamorphosis— whereby a distorted image appears normal when viewed from a par- ticular perspective or via a lens or mirror—in my own art practice. According to my initial reading, anamorphic art came to Asia from Europe; it was apparently shown to the Chinese by the Jesuits. Digging further, I found that anamorphic art in China predated the arrival of the Jesuits by centuries. In fact, the earliest Jesuits most likely brought examples of work made in this style from China to Europe and then made anamorphic art of their own, featuring religious iconography where the Chinese art often engaged with sexual content.

So what transpired at the Saatchi opening in London last October was nothing new. Art is a dialogue. I believe that painting has its own distinct language. We think about it in the studio, we argue about it with other painters over pints of beer and we recognize it in the paintings of others. The paintings of Zhang Xiaogang, who was included in the Saatchi show, have elicited a lot of negative commentary. When I looked at them in person, I thought of Gerhard Richter, a painter who hadn’t come to mind before I saw the work first-hand. But Xiaogang’s horizontal blurs were pleasingly subtle and seemed more about setting a mood than anything formal. The simply formed white highlights in his figures’ eyes reminded me of Svetlana Alpers’s writing on Dutch still-life painting; white blobs of paint were seen for the first time in these works as artists made use of the newly invented optical lens. Art shows us not just what we see but more importantly how we see, which is important to note as technology constantly changes our ways of seeing the world. An image may sit squarely in front of us or have been filtered endlessly before reaching us. Zhang Xiaogang’s work, for example, starts with the detritus of faded photos of Chinese families, while the arresting figures in the paintings of Feng Zhengjie have been borrowed from fashionable advertising. Xiaogang’s source material in particular is interestingly loaded; family portraits were banned in the time of Mao.

Noticeably absent from Saatchi’s show was much of the new photography coming from artists in China. Wu Xiaojun’s photos of geckos standing up to toy tanks would have been perfect for this show, as would have Ai Weiwei’s works giving the finger to the White House as well as Tiananmen Square, or Han Lei’s figurative studies, or the posed scenarios of Li Wei. An image of a work by Wu Xiaojun—an installation featuring a giant neon lightning bolt— could have served as an elegant comment on the current boom moment in Chinese art and would have been a welcome inclusion. The paintings in Saatchi’s show were dismissed by their critics as illustrative and repetitive. One overheard the often-used refrain: “It’s derivative of art from the West.” Yet what was likely making people cringe when they thought about an artist like Zhang Xiaogang was the issue of money, especially Charles Saatchi’s money. Saatchi doesn’t play by the art world’s rules. He doesn’t operate discreetly or manipulate markets from behind the scenes, sitting quietly on boards of directors and advising public institutions on what to buy. He puts the art up in his own grand space, where his interests are out in the open.

Many prominent Chinese artists don’t play by Western rules either. Many, like Ai Weiwei, spent years in poverty in the West and then returned to China, where they later became successes. Ai left China in 1981 and returned in 1993, a few years after Tiananmen Square, into what he described as a period of spiritual pollution. He put on a show entitled “Fuck Off” as a response to the Shanghai Biennale in 2000 and told me that he never sold an artwork until 2004, making a living instead via his architectural practice (Ai worked on Beijing’s National Stadium—known colloquially as the “Bird’s Nest”—but refuses to visit it, and designed most of the gal- leries in the Caochangdi neighbourhood where he lives and works).

It is tempting to generalize about artists we view as a group and to look for commonalities. It is also easy to confuse the world of the market and commerce with issues in art criticism and theory. Lived experience keeps us in touch with the truth: I’ve been in such unlikely locations as the backlots of Singapore’s Little India, where, one night, artists gathered in a group to talk about their work as they projected it on cinder-block walls. At the beginning of the evening someone had the task of making an announcement that this was an informal grouping of friends; the government bans unauthorized public gatherings. We were only a kilometre or two from the office towers of some of the world’s most powerful investment bankers, who were possibly inquiring right at that moment about auction prices for the latest paintings of Zhang Xiaogang. But in the backlot there was talk about the video work being made by Vietnamese artists, and the exciting painting scene in Manila, where one sees Catholic iconography subverted with sexual content and pop sensibilities. The dialogic nature of art persists, markets notwithstanding.

It will be interesting to see how the boom/bust cycle we are currently in affects not only what we see in terms of art in China but how we see it. The artist Han Lei told me in 2006 that the boom repre- sented a very important phase in the development of the Chinese art scene. It was a mess, he said, but there were so many different artists working and such a vibrancy to the scene that it wasn’t all that impor- tant why curators and collectors were coming to seek out the art.

During my most recent trip to Beijing, in January, 2008, some friends took me to see the studios of the art students at the China Central Academy. Room after room was filled with precise, some- what stiff photorealist paintings. It was only as we entered the rooms of the second- and third-year students that the work loosened up. I’d make a joking comment about a still life: “Was Giorgio Morandi here last week?” “Yes,” came the sincere reply, “he was a big discovery for some last year...If you look over there, you’ll see how much of an influence Marlene Dumas was recently too.”

Downstairs, the bookstore was a hub of activity, with students poring over recently arrived monographs on Western artists. Globalization isn’t just for the West—the 4,000 fortunate art students at the China Central Academy may be struggling to find their own styles and voices, but thousands and thousands of other Chinese art- ists struggle with poverty; only a few succeed commercially and can command Saatchi-level prices. The young artists in the bookstore can draw upon Western art just as freely as we’ve been pulling from Asian art for centuries. There is no question: if art is a dialogue, these young artists want in. The question is whether the West is ready for it to be a two-way discussion.

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