Dive into the archives.
- Art in Beijing III: Huang Liaoyuan
This is the last interview I’ll post from the research I did for Art Review. (That article should be coming in the October issue…). It’s an e-mail interview which gives its that weird formality, but at least allows me to post it bilingual. Huang Liaoyuan is a part of a growing self-protectionist movement in Chinese contemporary art. Let me know what you think. Also you have an interpretation for his last answer, I’d love to hear. I’m kind of confused…
黄燎原先生您好，
感谢您用您宝贵的时间回答我的问题。
Mr. Huang Liaoyuan,
Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions.
北京现代画廊一直致力于”把中国现在艺术留在中国”。您能更详细地对这一努力以及其动机说明一下吗？
The Art Now Gallery has been attached to a larger effort to “Support Chinese art now in China”. Could you please explain a little about this effort and what the motivations behind it are?这是我针对中国现在艺术的现状提出的阶段性的口号。中国现在艺术的很多经典性作品大量地流到了海外，当中国的美术馆和收藏家意识到它们的价值时，我们要花非常巨大的价钱去买回这些我们其实可以唾手可得的作品，就向国家这两年花大价钱从海外回收古董一样。此其一。其二，我希望更多地培养中国本土的收藏家，我认为只有中国自己的收藏家队伍成长起来，中国的现在艺术才真的有希望。我们不能期望别人来做这个工作。
This is a temporary slogan I came up with based on the current situation in Chinese contemporary art. Massive numbers of classic Chinese contempary art pieces went abroad, and when Chinese art galleries and collectors realized their values, they had to spend much more to get these works back when we could have gotten them easily initially – just as the government is now spending massive amounts of money on buying the antiques back from abroad. Another reason is that I hope China can have its own art collectors. Only when national art collectors have matured, can there be real hope for Chinese contempary art. We can’t rely on others to do this work.Popularity: 4% [?]
- Art in Beijing II: Chaos Chen
Here is another interview I did while researching a piece of art in Beijing for Art Review. Chaos Chen is a curator working mostly with public institutions. This conversation did a lot to undo some of my assumptions about the relationship between China’s government and its contemporary artists…Chinese Art is Undervalued
A conversation with Chaos ChenBM: The Chinese government is generally portrayed in the foreign press as hostile toward contemporary art, but many of the people I’ve met in Beijing feel strongly that this isn’t a fair view. Having worked in the public sphere, I’m curious about your view on the government’s engagement with contemporary art.
CC: China is now undergoing a transformation in the sense that the government has started to consider the positive impact of cultural activities. They are willing to put large of amounts of money into cultivating cultural life here, by paying for international exhibitions to come over and sponsoring exhibitions of Chinese artists abroad – starting from the ["Living in Time"] exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in 2001. That was pretty much the beginning of the Cultural Ministry getting involved in [Chinese] contemporary art exhibitions overseas. Before they only sent Peking Opera and things like that. But after the exhibition in Berlin was such a success, not only in terms of the public’s response but also the collaborative governments from other countries, you started to see an immediate change in the approach to contemporary art, with the government involved in the [2003 Chinese contemporary art] exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, which was curated by [Fan Di'an] from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. And from there they started to really twist the scenario. Before that [the presentation of Chinese contemporary art] was dominated by non-Chinese born curators. So, when China started to get fully collaborative, it showed major progress.
Popularity: 3% [?]
- Art in Beijing I: Brian Wallace
At the moment I’m working on an article about Beijing’s art scene. It’s an intimidating topic, and I’m mostly just running around trying to speak with people who know the situation intimately. In the next week or so I’ll post up a few of the most interesting interviews. This first one is with Brian Wallace, the founder of Red Gate, Beijing’s oldest contemporary arts gallery…
BM: Hi Brian. While I’m in Beijing, I’m trying to assemble a kind of oral history of how the contemporary art scene has developed here. As the founder of Beijing’s oldest gallery, I’m curious about your experience. How did you first get involved?
BW: Well, when we opened Red Gate there was actually one other gallery, the Concert Hall, and that subsequently closed. At that time there were no other galleries, but even before that Beijing was already hosting exhibitions of contemporary art. That’s how I became involved, by organizing some of them, in 88 and 89.
Things were opening up at that time. Contemporary art was still misunderstood or frowned upon, and attracted a lot of negative attention – this was still really early days, in the 80s, after ‘the 70s’. There was no market, there was no interest, people didn’t know what it was. So all of that had to be developed.
But there were still groups of active artists. We – and when I say ‘we’ I mean the greater we – were using places like the Temple of Longevity, the Confucian Temple, the Temple of Wisdom Attained (智化寺), the Ancient Observatory, which were just empty spaces, and surprisingly they let people rent them. And so different artists were getting together, and people like me were organizing events, and then a few people like curators, but I don’t think they used that term back then.
Popularity: 3% [?]
