After Exoticism - review of art festival, Shanghai, China

Art in America, July, 2001 by Richard Vine

"Lights Are On But Nobody Is Home," sponsored by Hanart Gallery in a two-level studio space called ddmwarehouse, featured a cheerier mix that included Zhao Liang's static cascade of broken green beer bottles on the entrance stairs, Gu Dexin's floor-mounted "painting" composed of (you guessed it) raw meat, Yu Youhan's Warhol-print pastiche fusing images of Marilyn and Mao, Yue Minjun's small army of sculptural figures vaguely reminiscent of smiling Big Boys in white T-shirts, and Shao Yinong's photographic Genealogy scroll depicting himself and his relatives at various stages in life.

Next door on the same floor was the three-person photo-and-video exhibition "Useful Life." Yang Zhenzhong, who curated the selection, presented black-and-white, multiple-exposure shots of a bedded couple's heads, along with a haunting documentary-style video that features everyday people of all ages looking straight into the camera and stating simply in Chinese "I will die." Xu Zhen contributed color butt-and-legs photo studies examining the streaked evidence of bleeding hemorrhoids and a video showing both interior and exterior views of five people thrashing about and clutching at each other inside a huge plastic sack. Yang Fudong offered a lyrical video installation evoking a meditation garden, offset by his staged photos mimicking the tedious daily-life activities of back-alley hookers. The show's artists are all represented by Swiss dealer Lorenz Helbling, whose ShanghART Gallery is currently the city's leading commercial venue for international-style contemporary art.

An exhibition of 80 works by 36 artists, curated by Hans van Dijk at the BizArt warehouse, kept its titular promise of concentrating on "Portraits, Figures, Couples and Groups." Among the standouts was Yang Fudong's color photograph The First Intellectual, depicting a male Chinese yuppie, bloodied and disheveled, standing in the middle of a wide city street with a brick in his hand, howling at his unseen muggers. (The appearance of a given artist or even a given work, particularly this image, in multiple simultaneous shows was common during the Biennale.) Zhou Tiehai, meanwhile, provided some cross-cultural satire with a mock Art in America cover sporting an image of Joe Camel and teaser lines like "Barbara London Stir Fries" (London is a MOMA curator who has traveled extensively in China) and "Glory Splendor Wealth and Rank."

The business of marketing advanced Chinese art is an exercise in foreign trade. Most avant-garde works, if they sell at all, go to expatriate business-people and diplomats--and now to Western art dealers and museum curators on buying trips. For years, the most prominent single collector was the Swiss ambassador to Beijing, Uli Sigg, who eventually started his own foundation and internationally juried Contemporary Chinese Art Award, which continues despite his recent return to Switzerland. That the market is expanding rapidly was perhaps best evidenced during the Biennale by the festive preview (with works by Zhang Dali, Chen Wenji and Guo Jin) of a forthcoming new branch of Beijing's Courtyard Gallery in 6,000 square feet of space overlooking the Bund. All these developments, and virtually every contemporary-art event and news item, receive thorough and nearly instantaneous coverage on the Chinese-art.com Web site founded and run by Robert Burnell, an American-born scholar, collector and new-media entrepreneur based in Beijing.