Artlog

Leading the charge

Chinese contemporary art has been flourishing since Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy began in 1979, but its only been the past three years of the Chinese secondary art market’s unprecedented growth that has taken the spotlight.

Yue Minjun’s first museum show in the U.S. opened at the Queens Museum of Art on October 14th, 2007. Two days prior, his piece “Execution” (1995) went for $5.9 mil at Sotheby’s London creating the highest record selling price for a Chinese contemporary artist. Yue told CNN Asia that shortly after “Execution” was finished in 1995, he sold it to a Hong Kong dealer for $5,000.

The Queens Museum of Art notes Yue to be “one of the leading figures in the Beijing-based movement of ‘Cynical Realism’ that emerged following the 1989 student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square”. Later, in an interview with the NY Times, Yue describes his work as a parody. “I’m actually trying to make sense of the world,” he said. “There’s nothing cynical or absurd in what I do.”

In Yue’s portraits, whether he dangles from the Statue of Liberty in “Untitled” (2005), dresses as “The Pope” (1997), or in his most recent record breaker “Gweong-Gweong” (1993) is being dropped over Tian’an men Square’s Gate of Heavenly Peace, Yue is always smiling. The night of May 24, 2008”Gweong-Gweong” (1993) sold for HK $54,087,500 (U.S. $6,963,712), breaking the artist’s personal record at Christie’s Hong Kong.

In the same auction, Zeng Fanzhi’s “Mask Series 1996 No. 6” set the current record for a Chinese contemporary artist and went for HK$75,367,500 (U.S. $9,703,490). Zeng Fanzhi’s “After the Long March Andy Warhol Arrived in China” (2005), an oil painting of Warhol walking a bike down a road, was auctioned at Sotheby’s first Hong Kong evening sale on October 4, 2008. This week, his “Mask Series” (1997) will be at Sotheby’s last Asian Contemporary Art Auction in New York City before the department moves all Asian contemporary art auctions to Hong Kong. (Hong Kong recently surpassed Paris as the third largest art market in the world following New York and London.)

The Olympics’ hyperexposure of China has not just led to rising auction prices; it has also enabled Chinese contemporary artists to communicate with a broader audience. Cai Guoqiang, known for his explosives and gunpowder paintings has become a household name. As told to Chelsea Mason in an article by USC US-China Institute, Project Assistant Alicia Lu and Archivist Bonnie Huie at Cai Studio in New York said, “In recent years, his [Cai Guoqiang’s] visibility has changed in ways that he never would have predicted, and it’s allowed his work to reach an audience beyond the art world.” Cai Guoqiang was director of visual and special effects for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing and his retrospective, I Want to Believe, was the first solo show of a Chinese artist at the Guggenheim.

More and more U.S. museums are dedicating shows to Chinese contemporary artists. Highlights from Kent and Vicki Logan’s Collection, Half-Life of a Dream are being showcased at SFMoMA. A selection from Swiss ambassador Uli Sigg’s personal collection (arguably the largest private Chinese contemporary collection in the world) is at the University of California Berkeley in Mahjong, curated by Julia White. Art and China’s Revolution, a monumental exhibition at the Asia Society Museum in New York curated by Melissa Chiu and Zheng Shengtian, surveys three decades of Chinese art and is not to be missed. (All of the works in the exhibition are from private collections as the Chinese government did not permit its domestic museums to loan works for display.)

Its not just Chinese art being shown here; New York galleries, with the goal of showing their western artists to the Asian market, are opening in China. Chelsea’s James Cohan Gallery opened in Shanghai this past July and Pace opened in Beijing on 8.8.08, the same day as the Olympics’ opening ceremony. This fall in their New York Chelsea galleries, both will showcase Chinese contemporary; Xu Zhen’s installation of a fully stocked Chinese convenience store (one of the highlights of Art Basel Miami 2007) at James Cohan Gallery, and at Pace Wildenstein, Zhang Xiaogang: Revision.

Western artists are also looking East. Tom Sanford’s Mr. Hangover exhibition at Leo Koenig last May illustrates primarily Western pop stars like Paris Hilton, Tom Cruise and David Beckham, yet there is one piece with a Chinese influence. In “Yue Minjun vs. Roger Clemens”, even while being choked by a steroid infused Roger Clemens, Yue continues to laugh. Yue’s symbolic smile extends to work beyond his own, as does his influence on the art world.