BizArt, the previous incarnation of MadeIn Space

This past year has seen the consolidation of a number of strategies for adapting to the at times paradoxical but always parallel challenges of survival and production, many of which would be unrecognizable or even barred from the institutionalized cosmopolitan alternative systems by which they are often inspired. Take, by way of example, MadeIn Space, a reincarnation of the storied BizArt project now as a component of the corporate practice of MadeIn, the shell company that produces work for artist Xu Zhen. Although it continues to show work somewhere left-of-center, the organization no longer abides by the necessarily strict non-profit-generating guidelines of its former self. Indeed, it would seem that the more artists and other art workers are given to embrace such alternative functions the less interested in institutional structures they become; at this moment, it would appear that Hong Kong remains the lone bastion of small-scale independent spaces in the form of Para/Site Art Space and 1a Space.

The Shop, a project from Vitamin Creative Space

Artists involved with spaces and collectives out of the mainstream have found new and novel ways to work both in and around the more established commercial gallery world, a relatively recent system dating to several years after 2000 that has nonetheless become strikingly rigid. In terms of artists who could reasonably be called a part of any alternative scene, the majority of those eligible for commercial representation (ethnically Chinese, typically resident in a major city, and willing to produce objects of some kind) tend to circulate throughout a handful of galleries known for a curatorial or artist-centered approach to exhibition programs, namely Beijing Commune, Boers-Li Gallery, Long March Space, Platform China, ShanghART Gallery, and Vitamin Creative Space. While most are now recognized as powerful commercial entities active internationally, increasingly professional management has curtailed any notion of wildly creative tactics of differentiation, conveniently allowing a growing set of artists to avoid the pitfalls of sole representation.

Liang Yuanwei exhibition 'Golden Note' installed at Beijing Commune

In particular, artists of the generation that includes Yang Fudong, Liu Wei, Jiang Zhi, Qiu Zhijie, Zheng Guogu, and Xu Zhen have managed to put this delicately balanced system to work on their behalf, inverting relationships that can be torturous for less experienced artists. Their younger colleagues, significantly more open to alternative strategies from the outset, have taken to accepting the necessity of the gallery model (often for storage and fabrication if nothing else) while speaking realistically about how it actually affects their work: even as their studio production cycles begin to fall into the rhythm of art fairs instead of primary gallery solo shows, artists from Chu Yun to Liang Yuanwei are exploring alternate exhibition possibilities in institutions and other commercial spaces. While very few artists can afford to reject gallery overtures outright, several have begun to look further afield to galleries in other international centers for primary representation while spreading their work around within China across a range of spaces and dealers.

SHIFT in Shanghai

Other organizations and ad hoc groups presenting public exhibitions refuse to focus on models of funding and vetting, preferring to view their projects as extensions of individual artistic and curatorial practices, as with Observation Society, Homeshop, SHIFT, Arrow Factory, Forget Art, Manufactura’s Studio, and the Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art. In many cases, these monikers mark an inertia of self-publicity more than self-organization, as more straightforward artist collectives seem to have sputtered in recent months; the vibe surrounding event-based collaborations of young artists like Double Fly Art Center, Small Productions, Company, and the Shufu Collective has ebbed considerably over the past year.

Jiang Zhi, 'Leaders Go First,' 2009

Further strategies beginning to make inroads via visiting artists and those educated abroad, if not yet accepted universally throughout the portions of the Chinese art world still dominated by the two major art schools, include grant funding and international residencies. Both are supported locally to some degree by organizations like Arthub Asia and the Mommy Foundation, but few artists based within China are able to get by on institutional commissions and foundation sponsorships alone; such attempts may nevertheless begin to gain ground at an accelerated pace as alternative spaces and collective projects are increasingly invaded by cultural workers with experience in the mechanics of this parallel system. Opportunities to bridge the commercial and the critical are likewise well-received, as with the Beijing section of the Artist Pension Trust that holds work from a number of remarkable and considerably undervalued artists from across greater China; as the earliest APT trusts first began selling work over the past year, there has surfaced the question of the extent to which the looming initial sales of work by Chinese artists will affect their markets and practices.

Su Wenxiang, 'The Disappearing 2RMB,' 2007

Finally and perhaps most notably, the bothersome stigma attached to artists with careers outside the studio has begun to fade. Although there has indubitably been a certain aura of romance surrounding the idea of the artist as an outsider cultivated since the image of the aloof humanist intellectual in the 1980s, the past several years have seen a willingness to rely on educational and curatorial work to support a lifestyle of cultural production–a strategy that was once seen as an admission of failure, either old-fashioned or simply embarrassing. Artists of a younger generation like Wang Yuyang and Zhang Liaoyuan, for example, remain dedicated to teaching at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the China Academy of Art, respectively, while a range of players from Su Wenxiang to Zhou Tiehai have accepted significant positions at art spaces and museums.

Zhang Peili with the Pond Group, 'Tai-chi Series,' 1986

The dominant narrative of Chinese contemporary art history in the English language literature has consistently reflected a driving obsession with commercial activity, focusing narrowly on the immense financial movements of the past decade and a tight circle of artists better known through auction catalogues than through exhibitions. But while a handful of artists have found and even concentrated on astronomical commercial success, the full picture has always been more complex: we must recall that the first decade of new art in China, 1979-1989, saw the emergence of a vibrant alternative system marked by pervasive collective action and the absence of a single commercial gallery. Artist groups associated with the 85 New Wave and its precursors like the Stars, the Southern Art Salon, Xiamen Dada, the Northern Art Group, and the Pond Society are by now familiar to general audiences, and successive waves of alternative artist-initiated exhibition projects like Big Tail Elephant in Guangzhou and Post-Sense Sensibility in Beijing have had an immeasurable influence on both the aesthetic content and the working methods of younger artists looking to work in slightly less mainstream directions.

Chen Shaoxiong performs at a Big Tail Elephant exhibition

All of this is simply to say that collective and alternative ways of organizing have, over the past 40 years, been the norm more often than the exception; nevertheless, there has been a recent wave of excitement over the appearance of artist-run spaces and collective production that, coinciding with a period of market recovery after the absurdity of 2008, may seem particularly meaningful to observers entrenched in the curatorial and critical models of the institutional non-profit exhibition culture of other parts of the world.

Lin Yilin, 'Safely Crossing Linhe Road,' 1995

The central question, of course, remains that of striking a balance between the production of critical work and the pragmatic necessity of supporting that work within a fundamentally skewed and necessarily imperfect system. Each new possibility that arises–and there have been many over the past year–allows for slight but significant changes in the forms of artistic practice, an open dialectic process that presents a fascinating case for research into the evolution of contemporary culture.

Literati painting is often viewed within Chinese art history as a highly restricted genre, consisting of monochromatic works of ink on paper involving natural themes interpreted through a subjective or even abstract treatment produced by amateur scholars, officials, and members of the gentry in southern China across almost a millennium of history centered upon the Song and Yuan dynasties. As such, these visual styles probably offer little for artists working in the contemporary milieu today; too much has passed between for the schematics of ink to play a serious role in the global cultures of our time without stereotypical reference to nebulous concepts of Chinese identity that limit methods of reception far more than they are able to define any singular aesthetic. It may be possible, however, to excavate a set of constellations of meaning from the visual cultures that produced literati painting, particularly an approach to artistic production that we might term the literary mode.

This cluster of techniques and interests contains a number of memes that remain highly visible in modern and contemporary art and culture: the loaded symbolism of the various plants and locales of literati painting, for example, as with the economical grammar of expression Qiu Xiaofei has come to include in his painting, or a relationship with nature that involves multi-directional processes of influence, molding, and exchange amongst text, viewer, and environment–visible in the work of Myoung Ho Lee, who frames trees within their natural environments as if it were an artificial studio space, as well as Michael Heizer, one of the most significant of the land artists working to embed symbolic language within the landscape even as the conceptual meanings of these works emerged from the earth itself. Zheng Guogu engages in a similar act today when he illegally and stubbornly develops a patch of rural land in southern China according to the strategies of Age of Empires, demonstrating that bureaucracy has become an apt target for land art.

There is also a particular approach to politics that encodes meaning in the most unlikely of places, declaring the loyalties of the painter through the sincere defense of various abstract virtues. Kwan Sheung Chi does something along these lines when he proposes that the Hong Kong Museum of Art collect all of the police barricades in the city to its galleries, helping his activist colleagues to march unimpeded through the symbolic and very physical value of his installation. Ai Weiwei, by introducing the forms of wood appreciated by the literati as instances of natural sculpture, also engages in this political discourse in his preoccupations with counting and individuality. The literary mode also includes, of course, a very specific take on the poetic. Michael Lee sculpts architectural features out of physical books, while critic and musician Yan Jun uses stamps and other common tools to create volumes of poetry in unlikely locations. Charwei Tsai, similarly, writes out calligraphic Buddhist texts on organic objects like leaves and mushrooms, toying with notions of time and the historical pretensions of art.

The literary angle also becomes a signature of reference, particularly in the work of Yang Xinguang, who often titles his work after significant moments in classical poetry in a method highly reminiscent of literati intertextuality. More commonly, this aspect of reference takes the form of allusion to more traditional forms of art in general: Ruan Qianrui and Feng Mengbo both update ink wash painting for a digital era in stunningly simplistic but never forced compositions, while Liu Wei finds aesthetically interesting ways to mix polluted urban skylines and traditional plum branches in his abstract painting. Liang Shaoji literally continues to live out the literati life of the reclusive artist, working with natural materials like weathered wood, silk, and living silkworms to create dynamics and often transient installations that captivate the viewer despite their obvious references. Pei Li uses similar wooden objects and pools of ink–alongside newer materials like speaker cones and mp3 recordings–to create unmistakeably contemporary situations of sonic exchange. Such conversations are visible even in the work of material-oriented abstract painters like James Nares.

Most importantly, the literary mode involves conscious attacks upon point of view, dislocating the viewer and offering alternative tactics for approach to the subject at hand. Gao Weigang demonstrates one such possibility ably in his series of cartographic paintings on objects ranging from wardrobes to stones, creating windows into other possible spaces. Less intentionally, Bojan Sarcevic does the same with his vitrine sculptures of paper terrain and abstracted forms that allow matrices and networks of reference and implication to emerge within the miniature space. Henrik Hakansson, drawing nature into this equation, engages with the literati proposition that nature becomes a form of culture in his drastically updated takes on the literary garden. David Maljkovic presents two-dimensional images–geometric and architectural, far from the literati aesthetic–aside botanical objects, pushing for a reduction to form that passively multiplies meaning in parallel with the multiple subject positions of painting in the literary mode.

This vision of neo-literati art calls for an explosion of sorts, allowing the barbarians into the gates. If it is to survive in any meaningful way, the literati genre must abandon all talk of the relevance of new ink painting, porcelain, and such other obvious signifiers in favor of a more subtle and evolutionary approach to politics, history, literature, and nature. The art is already there; it is merely a question of interpretation.

It has become a truism: Chinese art is big not only in terms of physical scale, but also in the impressions it imparts to the observer. Chinese art, and not just that of the big, red, and shiny variety, tends toward the shocking and the monolithic, qualities established through a sense of illusion that accompanies the often extraordinary production values of fabrication and large-scale craft. Hong Kong art, on the other hand, is small—or so the story goes. Hong Kong critics write that local artists work on a small scale because of their environments: studios and galleries alike are diminutive, so the production of art is spatially constricted. Artists, on the other hand, prefer to believe that their work remains small because of a certain strategy of discursive resistance: having been left out of the mainland contemporary art boom, they now intentionally work in a rhetorical style that desists from the grandiose claims of the public sculpture fabricated in massive workshops just across the border to the north.

Both of these apparently logical statements, of course, contain only half-truths at best. Space itself rarely plays such a defining role in the production of culture; space, after all, is not place, which alludes more properly to the accumulated matrices of social interaction that populate the alternately physical and virtual worlds of spatial constitution. Although contemporary art in Hong Kong and mainland China would seem to have arrived at their current states relatively independently and through different routes, the shared history of development actually extends further back than advocates of colonial cosmopolitanism might care to admit. A porous border, at least for the intellectuals who found themselves so often labeled refugees over the course of the twentieth century, has assured that forms and ideas of modern culture have always found a way to keep the staggered trajectories of Chinese art more or less even across the region. Why, then, such a gulf when it comes to the contemporary? A comparative close reading of certain historical functions of studio practice will reveal that size and scale are not nearly the overdetermined properties of social space they may seem to be, and that notions of place and cultural placement play a much more significant role in the production of space in art.

Wu Hung has advanced a rather singular conception of monumentality that will be useful here. Having developed an art historical methodology for his classic account of the public and historic functions of art and artifact in ancient Chinese society, Wu later applied this same strategy to his exegesis of the planning of Tian’anmen Square, and it is this possibility of an art history of architecture, or an architectural reading of art history, that I am interested in here. The defining properties of monumentality in the classical scholarship, he relates, are almost self-evidently defined through empirical reference to the category of the monument: it is permanent, durable, hard, solemn, and still. We might add to this list that the classical monument bears an implication of the public and defines its own space in a sculptural sense despite its original integration with the architectural grid (indeed, it is this latter property that allows for the collapse of the sculpture-architecture category that proves so productive for Wu Hung in his analysis of contemporary planning). For Wu Hung, however, this set of attributes is competent only insofar as it refers to the intentional monument erected such that it might reflect the properties of monumentality. His work, however, is much more interested in the notion of unintentional monumentality, which occurs when an object—any object, it would seem—acquires the ability to memorialize or commemorate the past, and, most importantly, to bring structure to history. This definition, which I prefer to call weak monumentality in light of the fact that it subsumes a much more general set of objects bordering on the universal, almost unintentionally assigns to the project of Chinese art, from the classical to the contemporary, a project of remembering. Regardless of the historical validity of this application, it does indeed open a new set of readings for Chinese art that we, as external observers, might call monumental on the basis of size, form, location, context, and referent alone.

The best example here in terms of a brutally explicit relationship to the monument may be the installation “Uprooted Obelisk” (2008) presented by Liu Wei at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art on the occasion of the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards, and consists of a stone obelisk some eight meters tall seemingly balanced with its tip to the ground and suspended from the ceiling. As with the work of the classical monument, which almost always eschews subtlety in favour of accessibility, there are few questions left unanswered here. This is a monument, inverted. Though the conceptual act of approaching the monumental form in such a way within a work of art is highly symbolic, it also appears simplistic and petulant in many ways, depending on visual shock and perhaps a touch of fear (it was eventually exhibited laid out horizontally along the floor out of safety concerns) in order to produce a reaction ideally consisting first of awe that only later shifts to reflection. Armed with the deliberately emboldened definition of monumentality, however, we are invited to inquire into the relationship of this architectural feature to history: which history is memorialized here, and how is this history structured? The first half of this query opens up space for imagination simply because no information is offered. Liu Wei refers, in his own statement about the work, to the origins of the obelisk in ancient Egyptian aesthetics, willfully oblivious to the play of power enacted through the public sites in which such structures stand across the world. The artist thus creates an imagined and engineered history, however ambiguous, that hovers just beyond the available space of the work proper. This gestures toward how history is structured through the act of exhibition—it is quite literally inverted, narrated, and made virtual—but also at how the work seems to be produced precisely in order to provide a scale and a monumental form for a history that would not otherwise exist. The same relationship is evident, though slightly less explicit, in the artist’s “Energy Block” (2008), a room-sized installation of machinery, buttons, lights, and sounds intended to synthesize the anxious sensations of a vaguely menacing piece of anonymous if misunderstood technology.

Something similar happens in the work of Xu Zhen, whose inosaurs” (2007) appears particularly monumental in this context. This installation, positioned outside the exhibition galleries of Long March Space during the exhibition NONO, consists of two glass tanks several meters tall, each filled with one half of a bisected brontosaurus fabricated out of resin and preserved in a liquid like formaldehyde (it was intended to be placed in the gallery, but was ultimately outwitted by its own aspirations to size and glory). The allusion to history here is two-fold: superficially, the reference is to a history even further removed, or, more properly, a prehistory, but the work is conceptually directed at a much more recent historical narrative in the form of the auction-topping taxidermy tank works of Damien Hirst. As art market satire, however, this installation is stunningly hollow and even sterile; here, the joke is on the repetition of form itself. Xu Zhen appears to accentuate and ultimately laugh along with certain tendencies in contemporary Chinese art to exaggerate the most glaringly vacuous aspects of global culture: the big is made bigger, the absurd even more preposterous. The scale is certainly monumental, but its reorganization of history in this work is incidental, serving primarily to position itself within the recent developments of pseudo-conceptual contemporary art. In his project “88418-1.16″ (2005), Xu Zhen again fabricates an imagined history via the form of the monument. Through video, photography, and the installation of an artificial mountain top within a refrigerated glass vitrine, the artist constructs a narrative in which he ascends Mt. Everest and cuts off the top peak at a height roughly equivalent to his own. Historical truth is again doubled here, as the story itself offers a conceptual gesture of the subversion of the relationship between man and nature (not to mention the ambitions of the Chinese cultural elite), but, in another way, the obvious fallaciousness of the story also shifts its focus to the storytelling itself. As such, history is produced through the form of the monument—the piece of mountain that functions as a commemoration of the act of attaining it—as much as it is organized by it, and monumentality is allowed to fill in the gaps of history by virtue of the shock of scale.

The third archetypal approach to the ordering and fabrication of history in mainland Chinese installation art is found in the work of Zheng Guogu. Whereas both Liu Wei and Xu Zhen employ the literal strategies of monumentality in the form of public architecture and museum-style preservation, respectively, Zheng Guogu adopts a more oblique approach to the naturalization of history, though he too does touch upon the forms and fetishes of natural history. In “Hundred-Year-Old Tree Blooms Again” (2008) and several related installations, the artist uproots and transplants an age-old (and possibly legally protected) hardwood tree, shipping it by road across the country and replanting it in a new environment where its odds of survival are relatively slim—perhaps even worse than those of the upstart art district that surrounds it. Through a process of negotiation, purchasing, delivery, and publicity, the artist turns the tree into a spectacle of its own existence, suggesting, due not only to its age and stature but also to his own work, that this living organism is a monument in its own right. He goes a step further in sculptures produced collaboratively with the Yangjiang Group like “Waterfall” (2003) or Garden of Pine Also Fierce Than Tiger II [sic] (2010), pouring liquid wax over smaller trees and other objects in order to capture their likenesses and make eternal the momentary positions of such living things. Resembling Xu Zhen’s process of embalming in some ways, this conceptual technique insists that there is something worthwhile, something long-lasting in the visual appearances of these objects, much like the tree that gains currency as contemporary art only when Zheng Guogu metaphorically packages it and releases it into the world. That is to say, monumentality is not here a goal or even an intention so much as it is a constellation of techniques by which the artist achieves legitimacy for his own practice, allowing installations constructed at scale to demand a certain historical precedent that becomes the aesthetic value of the work far more than its visual appearance.

In the face of work like Liu Wei’s “Uprooted Obelisk,” the critical viewer might be tempted to write off such allusions to monumental forms as manifestations of the harmless ludic desire for humorous satire that marks contemporary art. I would venture, however, that these artists are quite serious when they demand that their works fabricate alternative histories—that this is more facetious than it is playful. Size and scale are almost always intended as mockeries of their own pitfalls, but this strategy rarely succeeds in desisting from its own seductions. No one, it should be said, actually believes that Xu Zhen’s “Dinosaurs” is a humble attempt to point out the absurdity of increasingly larger and ever more expensive pieces of art because it is itself an absurdly large and expensive installation. What makes this fact painfully clear is the extraordinarily high production value of such work, and it is production value that makes the pseudo-historical narratives offered by the monumentality of contemporary art believable or at least viable under the erasure of the exhibition. That is to say, illusion is itself a constituent component of the production process, which has recently come to depend on flawless sites of fabrication and manufacturing in the upper reaches of global contemporary art from Jeff Koons to Zhang Huan. Within contemporary culture, art no longer plays the role of the amateur gadfly, gesturing toward larger phenomena, but rather has come to imitate such phenomena with amazing fidelity. And even as practice expands from the studio into the factory (or, often, the fabrication studio), studio spaces grow to include storage for objects fabricated, work space for assistant labourers, and so on. It is not so much that Chinese art is big because its studios and urban spaces are relatively large, but rather that such spaces of production adjust their own scale to contain the bloated discourse of contemporary Chinese art. The reasons for its affair with size are too complicated to discuss here, but I suspect that the foremost factors are an impatient desire to be noticed globally and a genuine interest in entering into dialogue with the scale of China, particularly as a global factory.

We should look again, then, at the notions of scale and space in Hong Kong art. It would be easy to point to factors exactly opposite to those affecting Chinese art discussed above, claiming that underground culture seeks to avoid attention (an obvious falsehood) and that, with its manufacturing industries relocated to the mainland, there is no inherent interest in examining the issues of production and circulation. But absence does not constitute a reason for disinterest any more than the traditional complaints hold: that space in Hong Kong is too expensive, leading to relatively small studios, galleries, trucks, and elevators. The latter is true, of course, but large-scale fabrication may be even cheaper and easier in Hong Kong than in Beijing. With a high concentration of skilled factories and workshops, many owned by local businessmen and management chains, located within several hours by container truck, it would actually be exceedingly simple for local artists to manipulate and take advantage of these systems of production. There is a reason that artists, working in formerly industrial spaces on the outskirts of the city, instead turn towards craft and work at the scale of the human hand, and I suspect this reason relates more or less to the rejection of the trading lifestyle of commercial Hong Kong business in the Pearl River Delta. That is to say, the ideology of art in Hong Kong insists on its difference from secular life, retaining an almost premodern attachment to the aura of studio practice long abandoned in the post-globalization ideologies prevalent on the mainland and elsewhere—a phenomenon of difference that owes more to the recent social history of the development of Hong Kong industry in the mainland and the ensuing political battles with the central government than to any imagined divergence in art historical trajectories. In many ways, studio practice in Hong Kong entails the creation of a single private space of the purely personal, a space for expression rather than for conceptual engineering, in response to crowded residential conditions and an ever diminishing quantity and quality of per capita public space. Although there is a nascent movement towards both community art, which here typically emphasizes the involvement of non-art participants with art world activities not necessarily taking the form of art practice, and street art, which inserts works of art edging closer to popular culture in public spaces, this movement remains far and away secondary in significance to the private culture of the studio.

Lee Kit is probably the clearest representative of this trend, turning his entire practice into an event showcasing the alternative lifestyles of the artist and using exhibitions as a platform to proselytize or at least demonstrate the seductions of studio practice. He is a consummate painter outside painting, with no interest whatsoever in the historical explorations of painting as a medium of image and process, but he does mark his hours by painting layer upon layer of lines and stripes on thin pieces of cloth draped over a table in the middle of his studio. In his most recent series, “Stories” (2010), Lee Kit downloads photographs involving cloth found through targeted keyword searches on the Internet, studying the resulting images of families picnicking or of linen tablecloths over dining tables in order to synthesize a narrative for each of the figures pictured and its background environment. He then reproduces the patterns of these textile objects, often pictured crumpled or folded, on a flat piece of blank cloth, typically painting patterns of stripes, plaids, and solids before hanging the piece, as if it were a canvas, on the exhibition wall. Projects like this one would appear to be fundamentally anti-monumental, not in the satirical mode of the mainland artists discussed above but in actual form; there is very little space for anything less substantial than pure sincerity in such work. Similarly, although this work does construct narratives for the figures it touches upon, it does not have anything to say on an historical level, or, more appropriately, it does not make any claim to history. Monumental form is unnecessary here, not because its presence would be impossible but because the actions of artistic practice function on a different register. For Lee Kit, stories exist on a human scale. His earlier work brings this mode of production into the public sphere, as with “A perfect ending for a perfect day” (2008–09), in which he built a bed for himself on the floor of the gallery space out of mattresses, sheets, and pillows on which he had painted phrases like “Pour yourself a hot bath, pour yourself a drink.” The artist then proceeded to live in this environment for the duration of the exhibition, attempting to demonstrate the possibility of a private, personal space even in public through the work of his own body.

One can note in the work of Nadim Abbas a similar relationship to scale, albeit one that functions beyond the space of personal lifestyle. If Lee Kit’s nest-like environment, developed in “A perfect ending …” and elsewhere, is concerned with the generation of a social place for interaction and comparative aesthetics, Abbas is more interested in the essential properties of space as a dimension in which such events unfold. “Perspective Study” (2001), for example, consists of a wheelchair parked on a black-and-white checkered floor within a semi-cylindrical warped mirror, resulting in a range of diverse visual effects of perspective from different viewing positions inside the assemblage. Other installations of that period turn marks of degradation on old photographs into actual interventions in real space and replace mirrors with glass in order to test the ability of the eye to distinguish here from there, while more recent projects like “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Again (Given: 1. Pornography 2. Electricity 3. Water)” (2007) tend toward less formal questions of assemblage. This latter work consists of a framed page from a pornographic magazine, two steel window frames enclosing a photograph of a waterfall, an accompanying soundtrack of falling water, and a wooden chair with its seat replaced by a tray of living cacti. As with the best of any contemporary art form, Abbas makes reference to a world beyond the immediate space of the exhibition experience—here, the reference is primarily of an art historical nature—but, without the techniques of either monumentality or documentary, it is difficult to actually construct a history, false or genuine. The artist is here more fundamentally interested in how history functions within space, creating a situation and then drawing in a broader set of aesthetic elements intended to manipulate the aesthetic sensibility of the viewer. Nevertheless, Abbas continues to work at the scale of personal space, even if he does revel in games of perception and participation. Studio practice functions as an activity of scholarly craft, and issues of production—physical or historical—never come into play.

Somewhat uniquely among Hong Kong artists, Adrian Wong does step beyond the confines of the studio and into the territory of fabrication and production; fittingly enough, his work also deals with historical subject matter in a way that the work of Lee Kit and Nadim Abbas do not. Projects like “From the Annals of the Harmony Jade Roast Meat Society” (2009), for example, begin from a kernel of history: in this particular case, Wong attempts to reconstruct one of the first films ever shot in Hong Kong through anecdotal notes from those involved in its production or reception. The installation takes the form of two animatronic ducks engaged in a humorous conversation atop modernist Formica pedestals encasing restaurant plateware, a tableau that comes close to suggesting monumentality by virtue of its plinth-like treatment of historical figures and vitrine preparation of artifacts of the past. Here, however, the aspect of performance keeps the assembly as a whole active in a way that precludes it from offering a distinct organization of history; without the intention of permanence, sculpture is unable to make a serious claim for the shaping of the past. Wu Hung might disagree here, citing the capacity of even ancient parchment to function as monument, but I would argue that, in that particular case, it is the mode of preservation of the object that allows it the properties of the monumental, not any intrinsic quality. In addition, Adrian Wong injects a measure of humour into his work that serves to redouble the vitality of performance, seemingly admitting that he has no designs over the rewriting of history (and functioning to subvert a quality of production values to rival the massive installations of the mainland). Instead, it is the reanimation of history that is expanded into spatial practice such that the artist implicates a readymade historical place (or referent of place) within the architectural scene he constructs in the exhibition space. Wong has applied this strategy in other cases as well, as with pieces like “Sang Yat Fai Lok” (2008), in which the artist reenacts children’s television shows from the 1960s and 1970s, the original versions of which were hosted by a distant relative, and creates an appropriate theatrical set. In this case and elsewhere, however, Wong records and exhibits the project primarily through video (although the monitor is typically installed within a portion of its set), abstracting the performance and inserting another layer of the object or artifact within what might otherwise appear as a dangerously historicizing interpretive display.

In this body of work, Adrian Wong opens up for the viewer several possibilities of visual culture for Hong Kong. The artist mines the source material of historical and street culture in order to construct a relationship between the spaces created in his work and the actual social places of the site, but these new spaces of installation in turn transform the general cultural identity of Hong Kong, exploding it outward into a hybrid of globalized visual production. The general visual culture of Hong Kong is determinedly insular, naturally adopting elements of both Western design and Chinese tradition but adapting them into something new entirely. Now that this language of street culture has been codified through decades of film, fashion, theatre, comics, architectural preservation, and other facets of mass media, nostalgic cultural producers are loathe to allow its delicate balance to be disrupted by external factors (most typically in the form of immigration, investment, and intervention from the mainland). Hong Kong culture, this logic holds, is fundamentally Chinese but resides in an already internationalized form that must not be infiltrated by either base Chinese culture or purely global culture; unfortunately, this is a stagnant logic that bars cultural innovation from within as stringently as it blocks new influences from the outside. Of the many possible routes out of this situation, that which has so far proved most productive is the fabrication of spaces of potential and virtuality (that is to say, spaces that create potential for an altered actual environment through the virtual). Installations by the artists discussed here represent such a possibility: conceptual interventions in real space offer visions of an alternative present that stands within the range of reason, ready to be realized if the artist can collapse the marked space of artistic discourse. While Liu Wei and Xu Zhen accomplish this collapse, or, more properly, its reverse, through high production values that create the illusion of semblance, Lee Kit does so by inserting himself into his work and by bringing his finished work back into his studio practice. In one infamous project, Adrian Wong invited Daoist priests to exorcise his studio to similar effect, drawing the actual space of the exhibition into the imagined places of superstition so as to deny any originary difference between the two—between contemporary art and belief. Nadim Abbas, in his latest work, “Cataract” (2010), turned a small gallery space into a shower, creating a scene of indefinite suspense that quoted horror films even as it gestured toward the artist’s own work with the psychoanalytical language of water. Importantly, no major renovation work was necessary to do so—production value was moderate, the illusion was marginal, and the potential place offered through the space of the work remained within the work rather than in the audience perception of the installation.

Whether or not they are related to actual structures or buildings, these are fundamentally projects of architecture, and the design of such spaces of potential emerges particularly clearly in the work of architects influenced by the Hong Kong regime of urbanism. MAP Office, a conceptually oriented studio known for its explorations of the “lean planning” of the Pearl River Delta and the corridor-based component flows of the Hong Kong pedestrian environment, has created such a space in its latest video project, Runscape (2010). Accompanied by the solemn voice of a narrator holding forth on the theoretical implications of the imagery, the video follows young men running through public areas of the city: across pedestrian bridges and rooftops, up outdoor stairs, and down streets, attracting attention not for the novel nature of their antics (this is definitively not parcour) but rather for their sheer speed, for their willingness to activate the horizontal flows of the street without regard to its typical pace. The body is a “bullet that needs no gun,” creating within the urban environment new spaces of action characterized by the body as place.

The designs of Gary Chang, known for his renovation of a reconfigurable apartment that squeezes several dozen possible room configurations into a space of some 300 square feet, accomplish a similar feat. Such an approach to urban density quite literally compresses physical space into a set of layered virtual striations, assuring that the place of the home retains the capacity to expand outward into new territories at any given moment. For his participation in the 2000 Venice Architecture Biennale, Chang engineers a structure of cage houses (stacked metal cages rented by impoverished single senior citizens) and fluorescent lights (used to indicate the locations of prostitutes), using the intangible materials of light and context to build a mental architecture of the underground that comes to stand in place of the physical structure of the unit. In both cases design is a living entity that is constantly transforming, never allowed the opportunity of monumentality. Intriguingly, it is Douglas Young, a designer and the founder of lifestyle brand Goods of Desire, who applies this strategy most directly to the visual culture of Hong Kong discussed above. Young designed for the global coffee chain Starbucks a restaurant interior that mimics the canonical styles of the local cha chaan teng, a sort of diner characterized by very specific menu styles, flooring, booths, and other architectural features, embedding this new interior environment within a typical Starbucks branch. This explicit commodification of Hong Kong visual identity as novelty implies the packaging and virtualization of its archetypal architectural space, preparing this specific visual style for a global journey through the very products produced by Young’s own design firm (and, of course, film, fashion, and so on). Whatever our qualms, we cannot deny that the creation of a virtual space with the characteristics of actual Hong Kong—and within real Hong Kong—suggests its potential realization elsewhere.

Such modes of production, of course, are far from unique to Hong Kong. The core figures of the short-lived Shenzhen art scene at the turn of the millennium engaged equally with such games of space, working in a mode with even lower production values. This makes sense: Shenzhen popular culture, too, was once strongly influenced by that of Hong Kong, and its forms of urbanization once resembled an understanding of international street life based on the visible features of Hong Kong film and television. Chu Yun’s “Constellation” (2006) has been previously interpreted from this formal angle: the indicator lights of various electric appliances, running silently in a dark room, appear like so many multi-colored stars until the lights turn on and the viewer sees the composition of the scene. Here it is imagination rather than history that fills the void of virtual space created through the formal arrangement of the work, but the effect is similar. In “Unspeakable Happiness 2″ (2003), again, the artist strung the multicolored flags typically used to announce a sale at a mall or car dealership over the space of an exhibition opening, both physically adding new elements to the space (and creating a new space with the triangular geometry of the pyramid) and drawing in new meaning to the event at hand. Key here is the fact that the intervention on the part of the artist was absolutely minimal, operating on the economy of the gesture rather than that of the illusion. Liu Chuang, another core artist of that Shenzhen circle, explored the systemic consequences of such virtual spaces in his installation “Untitled (History of Sweat)” (2007), by which an air conditioner installed in the exhibition gallery drew out and collected the sweat of the audience in a pool on the floor. Viewers were here made aware not necessarily of another space but rather of an alternative dimension—something more corporeal than visual that might still best be described as the virtual. This minimal gesture on the part of the artist, manifested in the reversal of an air conditioner, called in to being an entirely new register of spatial perception suddenly no longer dependent on place, creating not an imagined or fabricated history but rather a new possibility of becoming for the present.

It is tempting to find, in this striking confluence of work from Hong Kong and Shenzhen, a quality of blandness perhaps native to the culture of South China, a distinctly Cantonese property that somehow infects its art; it was, after all, the misty landscapes of the south and their distance from political power that inspired the most minimal painting and poetry in past eras. In the scenario of the contemporary, however, distinctions of regional culture are no longer able to exert such universal influence. Zheng Guogu, still based in his hometown of Yangjiang, just west of the Pearl River Delta, remains within the sphere of cultural influence of Hong Kong but displays none of the gestural subtlety found in Shenzhen. More strikingly, the artists of Guangzhou who once set the agenda for artistic practice oriented around the urbanism of the region work almost entirely in rather different modes—though this transition typically occurs after they have left the regional art circles and begun to exhibit nationally and internationally. Cao Fei, for example, has moved from scrappy videos researching the quasi-global youth culture that first infected Guangzhou via Hong Kong and theatrical stagings like “PRD Anti-Heroes” (2005), which resembles the dramatic adaptations pioneered in Hong Kong by Adrian Wong, to the polish and finish of “RMB City” (2009–11), a massively expensive engineered virtual platform for explorations of fictive Chinese urbanism. Lin Yilin, who came to global attention with the performance “Safely Crossing Linhe Road” (1995), in which he moved a brick wall from one side of a road to the other piece by piece, has most recently been crafting larger-than-life sculptures of Mao Zedong wielding an AK-47. Clearly, the spirit of intervention that characterized the bland economy of virtual spaces has given way to a need to finish, a desire for a very certain sort of illusion able to completely hoodwink the spectator into undying trust in a fictional history. Such monumental installation is a totalitarian art in many ways, refusing visual ambiguity even as it embraces the notion of unyielding belief in the invisible promise. This is a transformation of rhetoric, though one that clearly requires something more than geography and space for its completion.

This essay offers no answers to this question; I seek only to trouble the notion that scale is a secondary factor in the production of contemporary art that depends entirely on environmental variables. Despite all this, Hong Kong art is small, and Chinese art is big. That we feel the need to differentiate between these two modes of production, separated by far more than a border and a language gap, speaks volumes about the ongoing changes in the relationships of greater contemporary Chinese art. It is my hope that, understanding the problem of scale as it functions variously in space and place, the production of spaces of potential, a routine reflected in the practices of leading artists in Hong Kong but also in the work of several internationally minded and rarely bombastic mainland artists, might become something of a shared vocabulary able to explode the highly limited visual cultural identity of Hong Kong—and any other similarly situated environment. The notion of a potential monument is almost preposterous. While the artists discussed here have demonstrated the capacity of the monument to create a fabricated ideological and historical background, this equation does not flow in the opposite direction; spaces of potential do not produce monuments. If contemporary art can put aside the art historical pretensions of the avant-garde, engaging instead with the present moment in the constructed cultural environment that surrounds it, a form of potential space—a space that is not yet real and thus is neither virtual nor actual—can emerge in even the smallest studios, and in even the miniature galleries of downtown Hong Kong. This is meant as an infectious proposition, one poised to intervene in the currently overdetermined relationship of space to output. Potential awaits.

International visibility for contemporary Chinese art arrived more or less in a flash over the last half-decade, fueled both by a global fascination with the re-emergence of the Chinese underground in the leadup to the Beijing Olympics and by the unprecedented popular appeal of art within Western culture in general. While the recent credit crisis and ensuing recession have curbed the influence of these elements, they have also encouraged Chinese collectors and art investors to assert their presence in these markets, bringing further definition to the function of art as investment and confirming the already established hierarchy of investment-friendly artists. This list, however unfortunately, continues to be almost inexplicably dominated by kitschy painters of little or no interest to the narratives of international contemporary art, though a set of up-and-coming major artists is looking to change all that. Recent major sales at auction in Hong Kong, largely now the center of the secondary market trade in Chinese art, have seen an emergence of noteworthy names alongside the stable standbys of Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, and Zeng Fanzhi, many of whom offer serious potential for interested collectors.

Liu Wei (b. 1972) may be the best representative of this new wave, regularly drawing bids between USD$60,000 and USD$80,000 in 2009 and 2010. Most commonly seen on the auction block are his bold paintings, particularly the extensive series entitled “Purple Air” (2005-), which depicts somewhat abstracted landscapes of urban Chinese as if these cities were the sites of some neon cyberpunk fantasy. In Beijing, he is equally respected for his work as an installation artist, presenting large-scale architectural configurations like “Outcast” (2007), a building constructed from old glass-and-wood windows and doors with high-powered fans blowing sand, furniture, and other detritus inside. His latest work has been shown in venues from the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art to the Saatchi Gallery, a mainstay in many such rigorous collections

Zheng Guogu (b. 1970) has been similarly prolific over the past several years, largely offering an examination of the conditions of rural China complementary to Liu Wei’s investigation of the urban. Typically selling for a similar but slightly wider range between USD$35,000 and USD$80,000, his paintings in the “Computer Controlled by Pig’s Brain” (2003-) series the inanity of local gossip and popular culture media as filtered through the small town in which the artist resides. Though it generally only appears in institutional exhibition settings, Zheng Guogu’s major project is “Age of Empire” (2001-), a massive undertaking in multiple media that takes the form of a building site in southern China as well as paintings, videos, and installations; this body of work attempts a variety of feats, from materializing the video game after which it is titled in real space to illegally purchasing and developing land as a way to confront the rule of law.

Yan Lei (b. 1965) is another member of this group known as a prankster within the art world, notorious for an early series of satirical actions that caused much consternation amongst his peers, who found themselves invited to imaginary international exhibitions and shamed by their lack of knowledge about the wider art world. Regardless of the reception at the time, these projects now propel his wickedly clever paintings to sums between USD$10,000 to USD$40,000, including a range of image-based compositions that detail liminal spaces, from airports to forgotten portraits. Most significant are his recent series “Color Wheel” (2006-) and “Sparkling” (2007-), both of which play with pictorial conventions and the roll of light and color in the framing of the subject; the former accomplishes this through abstract concentric rings of colors, while the latter places sometimes obscene and always profane objects and models at the center of radiating beams of celebrity in a contemporary take on the color by number game.

These three artists may be the core names to watch over the coming years, both critically well-received within the art world and important to private collectors and other buyers alike. Within the ring of already fully established artists visible at auction, many are already extremely overvalued and priced far out of proportion to their historical and aesthetic value, though there are exceptions to this rule. Liu Xiaodong (b. 1963), one of the few significant realist painters to emerge alongside the more graphically oriented artists of his generation, may be the most important of these: his set of paintings “Eighteen Arhats” (2004) sold at the peak of the market for almost USD$8 million, and demand for such work has demonstrated no sign of receding. With his cinematic yet painterly gaze firmly trained on the social ills of development, Liu is, in terms of quality, worlds away from the other competitors for the title of most expensive living Chinese artist at auction. Another key artist of this generation is Zhang Peili (b. 1957), often referred to as the “father of Chinese video art” but severely undervalued on the auction market. From his earliest documentation of broken mirrors and wandering hands “30×30″ (1988) to his latest large scale self-reflexive video installations like “Mute” (2008), this work is making it into the most important institutional collections.

The center of the commercial Chinese art world has long been Beijing, home to the country’s foremost art academy and museums, but Shanghai too hosts a robust system of artists, private museums, and galleries. ShanghART, founded by Swiss dealer Lorenz Helbling some 15 years ago, has long been the leading space, representing a long list of artists from established painters like Zhou Tiehai and Zeng Fanzhi to emerging young new media and conceptual artists like Zhang Ding. Recently, Shanghai has also seen an influx of competitive new multinational galleries, like the local outposts of New York dealer James Cohan and Hong Kong gallery chain Osage, all of which are known for introducing important international work to the local art scene.

Ultimately, it is the growth of this infrastructure, and particularly the intellectual and critical regard for contemporary cultural production that insulates it, that will continue to propel Chinese art on a forward trajectory despite the variations of the market. The world is waiting for an understanding of recent cultural history in China that transcends the easy stories of success and investment that have so far commanded the majority of media attention, an understanding that will only come from greater familiarity with artists and the broader political and economic systems that produce them. Fortunately, curiosity towards the contemporary remains unabated, and growing interest in art from both the emergent intelligentsia and individuals of leisure in China and international observers indicates that this will remain a category to watch as it evolves into ever newer and more intriguing territory.

Doreen Heng Liu, the principal of NODE Office and a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, began her architectural career with something rare in that field: a blank slate for the design of a new urban space, located on the Nansha peninsula south of Guangzhou. Now, she maintains a level of independence for her Shenzhen-based office, investigating and responding to the changing conditions of urbanism in the Pearl River Delta through urban planning, building design, installations, and research. Her work is based largely around a series of keywords that delimit the theoretical problematic of her practice: abstraction, antigravity, assemble, average, collage, concrete, contradiction, contrast, critical, crowded, dimension, double meaning, experiment, frame, installation, lightness, multi-viewpoints, neutralism, node, research, slowness, solid, space, temporary, texture, transparency, uniform, and void.

Your office begins geographically, conceptually, and technically with the Nansha area at the very center of the Pearl River Delta, unique for its status as both a gateway and border left largely untouched despite the rampant urbanization occurring around it. Besides the elements of vernacular architecture and location, can you tell me how your practice has grown out of the development of Nansha as a so-called new town? What further work will you do with the Nansha development project?

I started working on Nansha as an in-house architect for the Hong Kong-based Fok Ying Tung Group, which approached the development project during the phase of rapid construction in the Pearl River Delta, seeing it as a blank slate to engage in. Nansha represents a certain desire for Guangzhou, which has always been a river city that nevertheless desires some relationship to the ocean, imagining itself in competition with places like Shanghai and Hong Kong. So Nansha is a container port in some ways, and Guangzhou’s maritime link to the outside world, but it is also seen as an international leisure town with many second homes for people from Hong Kong and across the Pearl River Delta. Nansha had a clear vision at the very beginning on what it would look ultimately, but the developer lacked an experience and a knowledge of “infratructure” to execute and construct a city. For many years, I was involved with the development of Nansha Fok concession, but mainly designing single buildings for them, like a museum, a bookstore and an apartment building and so on, out of the local context. Many years after, Nansha is stilll an empty city, remaining a conceptual city of utopia without any real life. That condition has made me reconsider my design practice and the way to approach architecture. I often asked myself at that time if architecture as object is a main reason and drive to make a city work. Of course the reality at that time gave me a negative answer, leaving me with a desire to understand what makes a city work and the way it could be, and what relationship architecture plays and could play in the process of making a city. So I decided to go back to school and pursue my study in urbanism. In 2008, I finshed my DDes in Harvard and came back to the region. Those few years away have given me a new perspective on my practice, especially in Nansha. In March this year, together with Shenzhen Planning Institutes, my office won the Nansha Jiaomen River Central District Urban Design Competition. It was a great win with good timing. The local government has finally come to realize that the social infrastructure and industry, along with public space, perhaps, are more important forces and elements to shape a city than a pure bedroom community or fast built-up architecture without content. And I am glad we are able to work on these issues side by side with them.

One of your recent projects is an urban planning design for Yangjiang South. Yangjiang is familiar to many outside of the Pearl River Delta solely because of one of its most famous artistic residents, Zheng Guogu. How do you see his ongoing “Empire“ piece, which illegally and somewhat virtually develops a physical proeprty on the edge of the city? How would you compare and contrast your approach to redesigning Yangjiang with his?

Zheng Guogu and I met very early on, working on the “Canton Express,” Guangzhou Triennial, and other major projects during that period when so many of the figures that have become known for their work on the Pearl River Delta were just emerging. Though we are good friends, we had some disagreements at that time, mainly because we have different ways to approach and process design. We were all young, naive, and ambitious. Perhaps we were coming from very different backgrounds. I, as an architect with formal training, tended to think more rigidly, whereas he, as an artist, comes from a rather informal but more free perspective. There was a period of little contact until recently my office was awarded a contract to design the new city of Southern Yangjiang. Yangjiang is approximately the same scale as Nansha, and we came back into contact, hitting it off right away. Especially for a portion of the design including four exisitng villages, I would like very much to work together with Guogu. The government sees villages in the path of development as a cancer of sorts, wanting to exterminate them outright, but I disagree. As an architect and urban designer, I consider respect for existing conditions always as an important stand to take. And these villages represent an important history of the place that we can not ignore and delete as if they were never there. Both the government ambition and the will of the local people l have to meet and evolve into a form of new design. I believe in process and I have great respect for Zheng Guogu’s insightful practice of many years in this region. Zheng Guogu and I of course have very different understandings of design, and his architecture is far from the urban planning in which I have been involved, but we are all working on similar and interesting problems, especially responding to the local conditions. But my idea of working with him was short-lived. The government was not interested, preferring to get the planning job done as soon as possible. They could not tell the difference and they have no time to wait, I suppose. Our many initial expectations fell short in this case due to the speed of project. We were not able to exchange ideas with the government and local people; our investigation is incomplete; and an international forum on “new city design” turned out to be a local design jury. We quickly wrapped up our master plan and possible scenarios and left the place. I don’t know when we will ever have a chance to come back again and work on the same level of work. I guess this is the typical situation of China practice today: big ambitions, but with no tangible method to guarantee the quality of the work. Being an architect in China requires a lot of negotiation with this kind of bureaucratic vocabulary and mentality, but the result is often trivial.

You have also recently completed work on the Guangxi Museum in Nanning, in addition to other art and science museums in Shenzhen and Nansha you had previously completed. What special factors must be incorporated into museum design? Hong Kong is currently preparing to choose a design for its upcoming West Kowloon Cultural district projects, with the solicited proposals made public this August. If you were given the commission to design the museum, what unique features would you bring to the project?

The Guangxi Museum was a competition project, which, as is a normal practice these days in China, gave us only two weeks. The site is prominent, and the government would like to make it an iconic object (as usual). The form-making is more important than anything else in our mind, and dominant through our design process. However, in recent years, my office has already started to shift. I have also been influenced by another process of museum design, which is more about the process of art: how is the art of today different from the past, and how does the space affect the city and its neighborhood. It eventually will reshape the form of the museum today, sometimes perhaps formless. For example, take the Times Museum, a collaborative project with Rem Koolhaas and Alain Fouraux, which we completed two years ago. It is, a branch of the Guangdong Museum of Art located in the north of Guangzhou. In that case the developers had requested an iconic design and chose a significant site in the center of their housing development, but Koolhaas resisted, complaining that he could build that kind of museum as a single object anywhere in the world, why did he have to come here? He was more interested in the nature of such a neighborhood museum, located in a typical housing development like this. It is generic enough for him to test some of his new ideas of museum making, I would guess. The concept became most important, and the form could be fluid and uncertain according to the concept. Ultimately the museum space was distributed in fragments over the “excess space” of several floors in one single residential tower, a unique model for a museum. I think a new concept like that could be interesting for West Kowloon.

Unlike many architects who begin working with interiors and only later graduate to buildings and then urban planning, especially in Hong Kong, where opportunities are few, NODE began by directly engaging with government commissions for major urban planning projects. How does this affect your relationship to building design, and what role does scale play in your practice?

As an outgrowth of Nansha development, in recent years my office has been more and more interested in the urban issues and how our design practice situated and responded to various urban conditions today in China. It was only later that NODE was officially founded as an independent practice, and we have become smaller since recently moving our main office from Nansha to Shenzhen. People often ask me why we would move now. I have to say, we did not give up Nansha. This is still a place that has great potential, and we still expect a lot of changes in the next five to ten years. Nansha, eventually, is a city to come, but not yet. The office has been detached from a normal world for a long time, and I think a design office, at least part of it, can only grow and mature out of an urban reality, not an isolated setting like Nansha currently, and we need to mature desperately. Therefore, I see the move to Shenzhen as a way to test ourselves. If my office is able to survive in a cruel reality, it means we are strong enough to be sustainable. Architecture is not only a beautiful concept, but also a social work. So I have to have an alternative place suitable for the nature of my office today. Shenzhen, perhaps, should be considered a better place for now. Named as a “Capital of Design” in 2008 by UNESCO, Shenzhen seems like the place to be. The government has been quite supportive and willing to accommodate and nurture such smaller practices like ours, compared to Guangzhou and Hong Kong, which I think are both more difficult environments right now. There is a trend that more and more employees and contracts will end up with the large and state-owned enterprises, especially in this region. The small practices like us, who wish to spend more energy on creative, avant-garde projects, will shrink. Who knows. We would like to stay small and innovative, but we also need to grow strong and competitive against bigness and monopoly. Of course, we also hope the government will be open and accommodating to practices like us, hopefully able to provide some tangible assistance. Even so, we still have our competitive edge and there are a lot of other design opportunities out there in this region and China. To me, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou form a grouping of cities in line that makes the Pearl River Delta a very interesting and dynamic system in which to work, live, and experience. This region is the root of our practice and continues to give us inspirations. We are happy to stay here and be part of its growing process.

Thirty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art
Minsheng Art Museum
570 West Huaihai Rd., Bldg. F, Red Town International Art Community, 200050 Shanghai, China, China
April 19, 2010 – July 18, 2010

Last week saw the grand opening of the Minsheng Art Museum, an institution owned by a private bank that has been producing exhibitions for almost two years. The proper opening was given over to an exhibition entitled Thirty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art, 1979-2009, a multi-generational survey of the development of oil painting apparently devised without the help of a curator, as none was credited anywhere within the space or in the catalog. The narrative largely stuck by the now-canonical mainstream mythology of artists and their collectives, leaning heavily towards a Beijing-centric view especially in the chronologically later galleries. Despite of or perhaps even because of this strategy, a number of the individual works exhibited truly belong to the category of contemporary masterpieces–the majority of which were borrowed from private collections rather than the more typical Chinese practice of borrowing directly from artists and galleries. Nonetheless, for the casual observer the true pleasure of the exhibition lies in an art historical rendition of the guessing game “Where are they now?” Indeed, how did the Zhao Bandi transform from a realist painter to a panda performer? And how did Leng Jun move from anti-humanist technical collage to textbook oil painting?

Beyond the overall narrative offered by the exhibition, however, it may also be possible to track the trace of several other sets of ideas through the work on offer. Most interesting of these alternative readings may be the development of “experimental” or “alternative” art, which begins here with the cold white glove paintings of Zhang Peili and Qiu Zhijie’s landmark conceptual work “Writing the ‘Orchid Pavilion Preface’ One Thousand Times” (1992), a framed sheet of paper on which he carried out the titular action in his messy calligraphic style. The culmination of this arc is unfortunately absent from the exhibition, which ends with an awkward periodization choice that points to a problematic split between conceptual and sentimental contemporary art: Zhang Enli and Zheng Guogu are here opposed to Wei Jia and Song Kun. While the former grouping, which also includes Liu Wei and Xu Zhen, might be said to represent the heirs to the alternative Hangzhou school so well represented in the late 1980s and early 1990s, here they appear to yield to the cartoon fantasies of another world entirely.

Exhibition runs through 5 December 2009
Tang Contemporary (Gate No. 2, 798 Art District, Beijing)

As usual with such group shows in Beijing, it is unclear what exactly Tang Contemporary and curator Wei Xing attempt to do with their new exhibition “The New Attitude of Image” The incoherent but indubitably grandiose title seems to suggest a meditation on visual culture and affect in art, a survey of image-making in China, or something of that ilk. Indeed, the gallery has even organized an “academic discussion” between the participants in order to legitimize the selection of work and accumulate critical capital for the program. In reality, the exhibition is a survey of new work by several leading painters, including Chen Wenbo, Liu Wei, Qiu Xiaofei, Wang Xingwei, Wang Yin, Xu Zhen under the alias MadeIn, Yan Lei, Yang Yong, Zheng Guogu, and Zhou Tiehai. The work included is wildly uneven and spans multiple genres of contemporary painting, hardly warranting evaluation as a single project.

Wang Xingwei, Wang Yin, and Zhou Tiehai are included under the rubric of conceptual painting. All three artists emerged under this banner with bitingly satirical and occasionally surreal painting in the 1990s, and have continued to pursue highly specific and rigorous forms of practice since then. In this exhibition, Zhou Tiehai’s “Uli Sigg” (2009), depicting the collector carrying a fish, seems to have allowed the thinness of humor to get the better of him, while Wang Yin’s faceless “Self Portrait” (2009) has veered towards a worrying pretension all too common in artists with limited domestic audiences relatively ignored by the international critical and market complexes. Wang Xingwei emerges on top of this bunch with his “Sell Eggs” (2008), a remarkably funny composition that incorporates geometric forms and text. The work nevertheless feels dated despite its recent vintage, belonging to an older discourse of painting that fits better with the critical modes of the 1980s than this exhibition.

Qiu Xiaofei’s sole painting in the exhibition, “Stiffness of the Limbs 1,” may be the most visually interesting work. Depicting an inverted architectural scene, a geometric model, a reclining figure, and the titular text in intriguingly disparate registers on a painterly black background, it belongs to a project that interrogates the connections between political utopia, history, memory, and insanity. The influence of Kippenberger is obvious, but the work nevertheless fits seamlessly alongside the artist’s earlier explorations into the work of memory in the processing of reality.

The other standout works come from Liu Wei, whose series “Yes, That’s All!” is based on a failed video signal–a body of work that has earned him the moniker “Caochangdi Nam June Paik.” The two canvases appearing here are largely abstract renditions of the theme marked by white, yellow, and black bands across the face of the work. Improbably, the artist has managed to sidestep the high-stakes debate between supporters of automated conceptual painting and painterly work that plagues the contributions of Xu Zhen, Yan Lei, Zheng Guogu, Yang Yong, and Chen Wenbo to this exhibition.

It would be fantasy to call for the abandonment of assistant-dominated painting studios in contemporary China, but the current economic and creative climate has led to decreasing interest in painting that reproduces image-as-image without interpretation. Liu Wei avoids this predicament by moving into abstraction, while Qiu Xiaofei insists on a painterly filtration of memory. The older generation of conceptual painters–who have carried on a more or less uninterrupted vision of the painter’s studio for several decades–envision themselves as creators rather than producers or even reproducers. The remaining artists leave themselves open to a form of criticism that would have been unimaginable two years ago, but such painting simply feels excessive within this recent discourse of image-based art.