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Shanghai spring: the launch of a new museum and a major commercial gallery on the Bund have enlivened Shanghai's diverse art scene, creating intense anticipation for this fall's biennial
Art in America, June-July, 2004 by Lisa Movius
For the past 10 years, China's contemporary art institutions have struggled to keep up with the raw talent and energy of its artists. Shanghai has been no exception, its cutting-edge galleries and museums emerging slowly and cautiously. Every year, new galleries open--some crassly commercial, others highly experimental--but few survive. Several established spaces have soldiered on, but Shanghai-based artists, like their counterparts around China, have relied primarily on overseas venues to showcase their works and build their reputations.
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Recent months, however, have seen the inauguration of two new large and highly professional contemporary art spaces. They, along with a handful of older venues, have offered shows that significantly raise the profile and acceptance of contemporary Chinese art in Shanghai, the port city that has long been China's most alluring gate-way to the West.
The long awaited Shanghai Gallery of Art (SGA) opened on Jan. 16 with "Beyond Boundaries." The commercial gallery occupies over 18,000 square feet of the ambitiously upscale Three on the Bund complex, brainchild of Chinese-American businessman Handel Lee, and boasts neighbors such as an Armani boutique, Evian Spa and several posh eateries--all backed, like the gallery itself, by a consortium of foreign investors. SGA aims to transform the grungy, feisty image of current art in Shanghai with high-end style, as evidenced by an interior redesigned by Michael Graves. The glitterati turnout for its first two exhibitions and the fact that 40 percent of SGA's buyers are mainland Chinese, compared to at most 10 percent at Shanghai's other contemporary galleries, hint at potential success.
"We area name-brand gallery, exhibiting name brand artists," explained director Weng Ling, formerly head of the Gallery of the Central Academy of Art in Beijing and an organizer of the 2002 Shanghai Biennale, which SGA co-sponsored. The 26 artists in "Beyond Boundaries" were a who's who of Chinese contemporary art. Sixteen, including Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun and Lin Tianmiao, hall from Beijing, and others, most notably Xu Bing, are based in the U.S. Only two Shanghai artists, video wunderkind Yang Fudong and experimental painter Wang Xingwei, were featured, while nearby Hangzhou contributed painter Xu Jiang and media pioneer Zhang Peili, both China Academy of Fine Arts professors.
The gallery's second show, "Tradition, Poetry and Sensibility," on view from Mar. 27 to Apr. 13, profiled painters Liu Wei, Zheng Zaidong and Zhou Chunya. Sichuanese Zhou Chunya's gleeful green portraits of a favorite German Shepherd proved easy crowd-pleasers, while the paintings of Zheng Zaidong, a Taiwanese artist living part-time in Shanghai, illustrate ancient Buddhist parables in simple and colorful compositions. Liu Wei's impressionistic paintings include still lifes with fruit, portraits and landscapes. As we go to press, "Dialogues," SGA's third exhibition and its first focusing on installation and video art, is slated to open in early May, featuring Zhang Peili and Beijing artists Gu Dexin, Wang Gongxin and Yin Xiuzhen.
A number of artists in SGA's inaugural show, including Zhang Peili and Wang Xingwei, simultaneously participated in "Open Sky," which launched the Duolun Museum of Modern Art on Dec. 28, 2003. Also known as Doland, the imposing seven-story blocklike structure is located in Shanghai's northern Hongkou District on the historic Duolun Road, where many of China's early leftist intellectuals congregated, ironically sale from Nationalist persecution in the then Japanese quarter. Today, the street is a well-preserved strip of old villas and lane houses containing cafes, restaurants, bookstores and antique shops as well as curiosity museums. Subsidized by the district government, the Duolun Museum draws from and perpetuates the street's cultural legacy while providing it with a more modern edge.
Roughly half of the 36 artists featured in "Open Sky" were drawn from the stable of the venerable ShanghArt Gallery, which co-organized the exhibition. For Doland's crammed calendar of subsequent shows, director Shen Qibin and chief curator Gu Zhenqing have heavily emphasized local artists--both established and emerging--and installation works. After an electronic rock concert and "Enter the Screen," an experimental cinema festival featuring Yang Fudong and 15 foreign filmmakers, in February, Doland on Mar. 3 hosted lectures and works by Shi Yong and Du Zhenjun examining "Art in the Interactive Age."
From Mar. 9 to 23, Doland's "Fei Fei Fei" (the title a phonetic rendering of an obscure phrase in Shanghai dialect) featured the sort of creatively physical work typical of China's underground shows--not to be found in mainstream galleries, let alone in government-funded museums. Most of the 20 participating artists were young and unknown. While "young" in Chinese art parlance usually means under 50, only six of the artists in "Fei Fei Fei" were past 30, and almost half were still students. Their diverse origins ranged from Yunnan, Sichuan, Shandong, Anhui and Guangxi to the more typical Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou.
