[Reader-list] Shanghai Biennale

[Vivek Narayanan]

As an interlude-- more reasons to lament the absence of a truly exciting 
art scene in India.  There is also a picture gallery associated with 
this article.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1346573,00.html

*Is Chinese art kicking butt ... or kissing it?*

Collectors are queueing up to buy work by China's bright young artists. 
But while the scene is certainly buzzing, some worry that the domestic 
art world is selling out to the west, says Charlotte Higgins

Picture gallery: Chinese art at the Shanghai Biennale 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/0,8542,1346913,00.html>

*Charlotte Higgins*
*Tuesday November 9, 2004*

*The Guardian*

At 50 Moganshan Street in Shanghai is a clump of dusty warehouses and 
small-scale factories, hedged around by a tall, encroaching thicket of 
tower blocks. Inside the compound can be glimpsed the busy activity of 
small-scale industry. A door lies ajar to reveal a dingy shoebox of a 
room, closely packed with bunk beds to accommodate migrant workers.

The building next door, by contrast, fronts the world with a sparkling 
plate-glass window; behind it is a minimalist office interior, Mies van 
der Rohe chairs set at neat angles. For 50 Moganshan Street is where, 
alongside the low-rent workshops, Shanghai's high-end contemporary art 
world has come to roost. Round every corner you'll find an artist's 
studio, or an exclusive dealer selling Chinese art for thousands of 
dollars out of some glamorously dilapidated warehouse. It's like a wet 
dream of SoHo in the early days.

People talk of an "explosion" of Chinese art. For a country that has 
virtually no contemporary art history, where artists' training is 
dominated by an ultra-traditional grounding in Chinese painting 
techniques, where the first clues as to what was happening in the 
postmodern western art world trickled through as recently as the late 
1980s, the scene has mushroomed and transmuted with staggering velocity, 
artists running through mini-movements (political pop art, the much 
discussed trend for body art in the mid-1990s, through to a strong focus 
today on installation, film and video) with alarming speed. In Europe 
and the US, Chinese art is, as they say, hot. Of the art sold at 
Moganshan Street, the vast majority is to collectors from abroad. 
"Kissing foreigners' arses" is how one young art graduate dismissively 
describes it.

"China keeps being discovered," says Davide Quadrio, a touch wearily. An 
Italian long-term resident of the city, he is a curator who, for the 
past five years, has run a not-for-profit art centre, his current space 
accessible via a juddering goods lift up in a Moganshan Street warehouse.

"Chinese art is overexposed to foreign journalists, curators, dealers. 
And for some young artists it's difficult to deal with the expectations. 
People seem to have an overwhelming need for China at the moment - ideas 
from China, novelty from China. But you can't find 10 or 15 new young 
artists each year."

Quadrio has been one of the chief actors in the drama that has seen 
artistic activity in Shanghai transmute over the past decade "from an 
era of guerrillas to the era of a regular army", as artist Qiu Zhijie 
has put it. He recalls how, from a low-profile underground, with artists 
showing avant-garde work mainly to each other in their studios, a more 
public scene took shape. In 1996, Lorenz Hebling, a Swiss art dealer, 
set up the first private commercial gallery focused purely on 
contemporary Chinese work. A turning point came in 1999, when Quadrio's 
outfit, Bizart, put on an exhibition called Art For Sale. It was 
Shanghai's first large-scale show of avant-garde art outside the nascent 
commercial gallery circuit. "It was closed down after two days for 
pornography," says Quadrio, "but it was illegal anyway - we had squatted 
a mall." Despite its short life and a furious denunciation in the press, 
it was a huge success, ambitious in scale and intent, a call to arms for 
Shanghai artists.

Quadrio was now determined to set up a permanent, not-for-profit 
exhibition space. It wasn't as easy as it might sound. A cultural 
organisation in the city has no legal status unless affiliated to the 
government, thus coming under the power of the Shanghai Cultural Bureau. 
Such control, from a conservative, bureaucratic and extremely 
circumspect body, was never going to be viable for Quadrio. The way 
round it was to create a wholly owned Chinese company, becoming a 
"commercial enterprise in the eyes of the Chinese authorities". The 
numerous events and exhibitions he has held since then fly, mostly, 
below the radar of officialdom. It is one of many subtle accommodations 
Quadrio has come to with the authorities. "You play with the limits, and 
the government lets you play," he says. Money, rather than censorship, 
he stresses, is the biggest headache: Quadrio hires out his curatorial 
and technical skills to help pay for the programme, and works with 
foreign funders and foundations, including Arts Council England.

In one neighbouring warehouse, Li Liang, an artist and dealer, runs a 
gallery called Eastlink. He is an urbane, sleek figure, his office 
cluttered with artworks: 2ft-long rat sculptures by Jin Le, vulgarly 
entertaining multicoloured resin figures by Li Zhan Yang. "I'm doing two 
things," he says. "I have to have something to sell. And then there are 
exhibitions, where we can show more experimental work."

He is profoundly reluctant to talk about it ("that is in the past now"), 
but he was responsible for one of the most notorious events of the 
Shanghai art scene. In 2000, he ran a show on the unofficial "fringe" of 
the city's first Biennale, which operates from the government-run 
Shanghai Art Museum. Li Liang's show was, uncompromisingly enough, 
called Fuck Off, and it featured a photograph of a man eating a baby, by 
Zhu Yu. The work was one of the manifestations of the Chinese body art 
movement, in which, in a manner that makes the most violent excesses of 
the YBAs seem tame, human body parts, corpses, and leavings from medical 
operations were deployed as artistic materials. One artist reputedly 
even committed suicide as a performance work.

Li Liang's show, unsurprisingly, was shut down, and became an 
international scandal. He didn't do the cause of his own gallery any 
favours, but that first Biennale did make an impact, he says. "People 
began to see art in a different way. They started to understand that 
contemporary art won't harm society, particularly since it was coming 
out of the Art Museum. The atmosphere became more open."

Through Li Liang's windows I count eight cranes without turning my head. 
The drilling, hammering, thud and clang of construction is constant. He 
gestures towards the tower blocks: "These have all gone up in the past 
eight months." The onward march of the towers daily threatens the 
artists and curators at Moganshan Street. They have been here a matter 
of months - an earlier base nearby at West Suzhou Road, in a handsome 
1930s British-designed granary, was demolished. It was the sort of 
building that in the west would have been preserved as a crucial piece 
of industrial heritage. "Maybe next year the government will make this 
place permanent as an artists' compound," says Li Liang, more in hope 
than expectation. "The Shanghai government is pushing for culture at the 
moment. In their eyes, there are good economic and touristic reasons for 
culture to be a part of the city ... at the same time, if they get their 
hands on this place, they will fuck it up with framing shops and 
Starbucks. There's a complete lack of imagination."

The Shanghai Biennale is the most obvious manifestation of the city's 
recognition that, as Lorenz Hebling puts it, "a big modern city doesn't 
just have highways, but also culture". Set in the magnificent 1930s 
racecourse club on the edge of Renmin Park, it's an extensive, 
ramblingly curated show with a focus on Chinese and South American work. 
Young Shanghai artists Xu Zhen and Yang Fudong are in evidence, the 
former with a playful installation for the museum's clock tower that 
sets the clock hands spinning wildly out of control, Yang Fudong with a 
haunting evocation on film of the disorientation of urban existence.

Victoria Liu, a chic, energetic Taiwanese curator whose parents left 
Shanghai just before the war, has now returned to the city of her roots. 
Over the past instalments of the Biennale she has seen "tremendous 
improvements from the team's hard work and persistence. It gives me 
great hope. The government - what's the government? It's the people who 
work in it. There's a younger generation in charge now, many with 
international educational backgrounds. The director of the art museum 
has travelled a lot, and he has clear ideas about how the Biennale can 
improve."

With her geometric-cut, scarlet-dyed hair and Issey Miyake trousers, she 
seems the epitome of jetset art-world glamour. We meet at her high-rise 
apartment block, the exotically named Sea of Clouds, and she whisks me 
off into a taxi to visit the huge new space she is about to embark on 
curating, called Bund 18. Housed in the marbled and pillared halls of 
the 1920s Bank of India, Australia and China, it is a splendid setting 
in which, when the builders move out, she is planning art and design 
shows, performance, film and concerts. "We want to generate people's 
interest in participating in art life. This isn't about selling," she 
says. "We'll also do things like print an art map of Shanghai - the sort 
of thing the gov ernment should be doing, to bring more interest to the 
city."

In a few weeks the rest of the building will fill with restaurants and 
boutiques: "Shanghai's most intriguing and beautiful retail, dining and 
entertainment experience" is how the publicity puts it. It's all 
magnificent, but will anyone who's not part of the Shanghainese or 
international super-rich dare venture past Cartier to find the 
exhibition space beyond?

Liu brushes the question away and puts her mind to finding a restaurant 
for lunch. But later, over the Shanghainese version of nouvelle cuisine, 
something seems to drop away. "You won't want to hear this," she says. 
"I teach western art at university, from the Eygptians to Damien Hirst. 
But western curators come here with limited knowledge of our art 
history, and don't bother to ask curators like me what's going on. 
Everything is judged by their own standards. For years we were grateful 
and humble. Now we want to do our own thing. My Korean, Taiwanese, 
Japanese, Chinese colleagues think the same." She believes that Chinese 
artists are in danger of becoming "copycats" of their western 
colleagues, and wants to find ways for them to reconnect with their own 
art history: to find an authentic Chinese voice. "Young artists have no 
idea of art for art's sake - it's art for the market."

It will take years, she says, for interest in contemporary art to spread 
beyond the elite few. Even then, "the divide "is not going to be about 
east and west, but about economics, about massive disparity in earnings 
among Chinese." Less about kissing foreigners' arses, then, than kissing 
the arses of the rich.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004