For this publication, Davide Quadrio has been invited to be one of the 40 curators based and working in Asia who will contribute to this book.
Jinsuk Suh, director of Gallery LOOP, is the director of this publication project, Fumihiko Sumitomo, curator of Museum of Tokyo, is the advisory for this publication and Hee-Jung Ryu, curator at the Gallery LOOP is in charge of this project. Book publication is due end 2008.
40 young, active and experimental Asian curators will choose 2 to 5 contemporary artists who are shaping the contemporary Asian art world.
It is not surprising to see that recent Asian artists are entering international biennale and also in competitive markets in American and Europe. Asian contemporary art is derived from Western modernism and has vastly moved and adjusted into digital generation and Globalism that provides future vision, which builds new paradigm of social culture.
The Asian contemporary art has developed its form from the links between Western art history, cultural effect and local characteristics. The Asian contemporary art can be divided into two propensities. Firstly, China and India have high tendency of newly developed contemporary art that is rising from the concept of re-interpretation of traditional art, which developed to fit modern society. On the other hand, there is advanced art tendency that brings experimental media in Korea and Japan, which condemn traditional artistic methods and social structure affected by Avant-garde.
Previously in Korea and Japan, according to the high technology, more advanced and experimental media art have been selling and exhibiting in global art market which then recognized as the representative of Asian art.
It became rather difficult to define the characteristics of current Asia contemporary art. As more dynamic and various communications have been occurred internationally, it made not so easy to define each countries’ own artistic identities. The new standard for Asian Contemporary Art became possible with the economic development, increased support from governments and newly arranged art market in Asian countries. Asian art became multi-cultural and more diverse.
How can we define Asian Contemporary Art of our time, apart from last century’s modern Asian art history which has been defined by western point of view? What is the epicenter of Asian contemporary art? How have Gwangju Biennale and Shanghai Biennale been growing up in its volume very fast, showing their authentic aspects, differing themselves from contemporary art scene in London and New York? Furthermore, how can we categorize and understand identities of Asian artists who are educated and performing in western countries, and consider how their works will have influence on future Asian contemporary art in more actively?
This publication aims Asian Contemporary Art to provide opportunities for public to closely communicate with its unique characteristics of contemporary art by introducing 100 Asian artists. Through this, it will also help to find path of relocating Asian contemporary art and its tendency of contemporary art.
(Jinsuk Suh , Director of Gallery Loop)
Satisfaction - and dissatisfaction: an old story.
By Davide Quadrio“坐井观天 zuo jing guan tian” “Once upon a time, there was a frog who lived in a well. One day, as the frog sat by the side of the well, he met a green turtle from the Eastern Sea. The frog boasted to the turtle: “Look! How nice my well is and how happy I am to live in it! When I’m in high spirits, I jump on the rim of the well. When I’m tired, I’ll find a hole in the well wall to rest inside, or simply float comfortably on the water. If I feel like a walk, I can stroll on the soft mud. Look at those poor crabs, wrigglers and tadpoles! None of them can compare with me. I’m the master here, and my home is the most comfortable and pleasant place in the world. If you like, Mr. Turtle, you’re welcome to have a look down in my well.” The turtle was fascinated by this colorful description. He wanted to see for himself what life in the well was like. But as soon as he moved his legs, he stumbled over the railing. He had to step back very carefully. “It is so narrow and uncomfortable here,” the turtle said. Then he described the vast Eastern Sea and invited the frog to visit. “If you see the Eastern Sea, you’ll know how happy life there can be. You can swim for days without coming to the end. You’ll see loads of other sea life: sea horses, clownfish, sharks, and whales, and eat various types of food.” The frog was dumbfounded. “I don’t believe any other place is better than the well.” He simply could not imagine the scenes the turtle was telling him. He dismissed all thoughts of the sea, and continued to sing the praises of his small home. “Home sweet home. Spacious, comfy, quiet…”
In the past year or so, I have been thinking a lot about who is who and what is what in the art scene in China. I have been asking myself questions about not only who represents Chinese Contemporary art in the latest “now”, but also why it is represented in such a way, what directions it is being in taken, and why.
For instance, one of my preoccupations is that, when I think about contemporary art in China, I always think of the same people. The same artists, curators, gallerists, etc. The more I am involved in it the more I find this situation and my practice in this context oversimplified: a bit too easy, superficial and short-sited.
I say so, because there too many questions that have arisen recently for me, like: why is contemporary Chinese art in the international arena always represented by the same symbols/artists/content? Why are the same few curators all over the place? Why are collectors now being presented a history of Contemporary Art in China that is unified, codified and always identical? How do I contribute in doing so with my activities and exhibitions?
Despite a few attempts to represent another contemporary art in China, the more identifiably “Chinese” one (including calligraphic work or more traditional Chinese artistic practices) has been very often put on the side as too ethnic, or segregated as “decorative”, or simply as part of a different artistic category.
These considerations put into the picture a dichotomy of curatorial practices in Asia and the West (as defined in its wider sense which includes Europe and the Americas). As Kim Honghee presents:“As a Korean curator, or as an Asian curator, how should one achieve the curatorial difference? Self-evidently like this phrase that ’there is no nationality in curatorship, but every curator has her/his own country,’ Korean curators working in the international scene have aspirations to assume their own identities through the discourse of difference while acquiring global efficiency. However, the discourse of difference that provides academic survival and the competitiveness for curators results in a kind of discrimination. In particular, Asian curators including Koreans face the dilemmas and frustrations of neo- and post-colonial Orientalism, as expressed in popular exoticism. It is the Korean and Asian curators’ task to escape this dilemma. Due to the fact that there is neither a single solution nor an answer to this problem, curators must navigate the difference in their own curatorial strategy. Rather than resulting in success or failure, the more important element is being conscious of and having the confidence and attitude for curatorial difference. “
It seems to me that this intriguing problem needs to be addressed not only to and by curators and institutions in Asian countries, but also to and by the artists and independent organizations that are shaping the future of contemporary art in Asia.
Same old people, same old story
When I look at the situation of contemporary art in China, I see that, despite the excitement for the art/goods/merchandise that is taking place and taking over, the same few people are carrying on the most interesting and deepest work in the field.
Despite common speculators and international and local amateurs that see China as the new frontier for fame and success, some artists are still fighting to bring to China a possible development.
I am glad that artists like Zhang Peili, Zhuang Hui, Geng Jianyi and Hu Jieming, just to mention few, are still activists and idealistically working in schools and universities to create an healthier environment for creation: “injecting” boring institutions with possible tools to understand how to perpetuate innovative teaching techniques and how to broadly inspire the next generation of artists, critics and intellectuals.
In all this situation, the artists who are most troubled about this displacement that the last few years of wild internationalization and commercialization of Chinese contemporary art has created are the mid-career ones. Some are also the artists with whom I have worked most closely with at BizArt Art Center.
The Chinese environment
In the past 10 years, I saw how the demand of creating art and supporting artists in an “independent” situation laid the foundations for on one hand a sort of China “centralism” which reflects this need of protecting the local artistic environment, while on the other hand created a sort of “glocalism” for external use. Thus, creating a “local” framework created a foundation for an “ethnical” representation of contemporary art in China in opposition to the international art scenes. This “ethnical” representation” suffers not only from a superficial and very often mediocre post-imperialist justifications but also from a lack of interest and understanding of necessary ties with “others” – be they coming from a different background, different region or different country, Asian or not.
I actually saw this progressively happening in the last few years, where exhibitions centered on “China” were considered by audience more appealing or interesting than other exhibitions or educational activities presenting less “local” arts. I heard so many times, even in BizArt’s office, sentences like “people do not come to see shows featuring artists from other countries, we need to have Chinese shows and productions”.
This lack of interest in the unusual, unknown or even for something that we do not understand has been one of the most significant and serious back-fires of the success of Contemporary art in the last decade for this Chinese context.
My feeling is that, after a decade or so when “foreign art” was absorbed by the first generation of “contemporary” artists in the 80’, no matter how good or bad but simply because was “unknown” and different from the art techniques taught in the academic institutions, recent years saw local artists keeping their distance from “foreign art” with the contradiction of using or misusing models and characteristics, languages pertinent to that “foreign art” and isolating themselves in a sort of “local art” inspired by their earlier predecessors but estimated to truly resemble the spectacle of contemporary “Chinese production”.
Similar to what Zhao Chuan describes as the art of nalai, artists are unequivocally using instruments of contemporary art that, after being adopted uncritically from the ‘80s on, soon become part of the language of contemporary art in China, but without a critical or profound analyses of why this happened.
So we get back to the problem of critical discussion and critical approach that seems so necessary and yet gets pushed back to a sort of “next future” after all the craziness of the art market in China eventually calms down (sic!). This is not an urgent matter even though more and more artists are addressing the belief that we are entering a different, new moment in China. There is an atmosphere of a “sold” season among the artists and the professionals, and anxiety that expresses the fact that everybody want to have a slice of cake before the shops close or a new season come in.
This feeling stays there, as Uli Sigg says in his last conversation with Nataline Colonnello.
“Identifying prime artworks is not more difficult than before; it is rather that the background noise emanating from some bad and much average art is simply more reverberating than in the past. Even though there are so many more artists, and thus so many more works, not many more very good works are being produced, whether this is surprising or not. This background noise does not influence me personally, but the problem inheres in another direction (and you touched upon this point): these legions of new so-called “collectors”, and this plethora of new galleries that are spawning all of a sudden – Chinese and foreign - all want to put their fingers in every pie, irrespective of whether good or bad. Everything thus gets ramped up to an irrational price that bears no relationship to quality. For me, as a collector looking for certain works, this has made things quite difficult, because these works now tend to be snapped up together with the bad works, and in just the same manner. Therefore, the main issue here is: How can one get ones hands on a good work before some ignoramus has already collared it in company with some bad work?”
So, to go back to the central part of this text, putting in consideration all that was said above, I found myself choosing once again the same names which pop into all conversations, in all catalogues and articles that describe the “emerging” artists from China. My choice returned to five artists whom I know quite well, whom I saw growing and making choices, who are part of my professional life whilst in Shanghai and with whom I am still working or have projects with.
The selected artists are: Yang Fudong, Xu Zhen, Kan Xuan, Zheng Guogu and Liu Wei.
Of those, excluding Liu Wei, whose work I know a bit less than the other four’s, I decided to show their oldest and newest works in an attempt to research what has been changing in their attitude, what has been compromised and what still shines as truly as their souls. Looking at those images I feel like taking out the skeletons hidden in the closet (my personal one) and I feel, now that I have decided to live outside China for a while, that what Hou Hanru once said at a conference it is actually true: if you want to have the possibility of thinking things over and have a critical approach on the Chinese situation, it is better to stay out of China and go back to China only for research.I won’t analyze all aspects of the artworks selected, but I will try to generally write some consideration that I think link all five artists and their attitudes towards their work. One of the main discussions I had in confronting the oldest and newest works is around the duality of satisfaction and dissatisfaction: were the artists satisfied about the works? Of course the characters of the five artists selected are very different, but, for me, what matters is that they all are honestly connected to their work as an evolving process. This is does not mean that I always understand their choices or concepts undertaken, but, knowing them well, I am sure about the intellectual honesty of their work or the evident “cynical” choice to make a work for selling (sic!). The only common risk that I see in their artworks and that sometimes compromise the result of a new piece is the lack of thoughtful time: the stress of production for an up and coming artist can make them fail. It is so important for me to quote what Kan Xuan told me most recently:
“I would like to go back to my secret privacy in Amsterdam or elsewhere, but China, when I am here, I feel like I am restless and unfocused. I can not produce work or it takes a hell of concentration and discipline to do so. I want to go back to what is important to me, making good artwork, despite any pressures from galleries, dealers, producers, etc. It is only me that counts, and my art. That is what I value the most”.
New and old, the first and the last works
The five artists chosen are all working in multi-media. Zheng Guogu , Liu Wei and Xu Zhen sometimes used painting/sculptures in their work but most of the time in a wider context, where these traditional mediums are part of a bigger conceptual installation or, in the case of Xu Zhen (only in his case?), to try to sell to make easy money.
Kan Xuan and Yang Fudong, although they draw or paint as integral part of their filming process or as a private “exercise”, seldom reproduce painting work. Yang Fudong, most recently, claimed that he would like to get back to painting but he is afraid that this “passage” will be misunderstood by people as going commercial.
In this sense Zheng Guogu’s “Miami” series (2006) and “Basel” series (2008) present a very interesting case. As we can read in the press release of the presentation for his exhibition in Zurich, Grace Lee says:
“You may find yourself in these paintings, being part of this dynamic contemporary art world. The artist’s observation of the international contemporary art world has turned into a mirror to the audiences. From a distance, these paintings appear to be photography. The paintings are indeed highly photo-realistic painted, some of them with detailed expressions of hundreds of people. And they are so well painted that even when you stand in front of the paintings closely, you would still be amazed that it is not photography but painting. The bigger surprise is the hidden texts in the paintings. The artist painted the entire official press release of Art Basel and the press quotation praising Art Basel in all different languages into the images. The sizes of the texts vary from tiny as ants to normal computer text sizes. The texts are spread out in different parts of the paintings. And the color of the text is always the same color as the background of the painting. The result is the texts are hidden and well integrated with the images. One extraordinary characteristic about these painting is: taking any part of the painting, it can be another painting itself. “Despite the fact that this body of work responds to the previous works created throughout the 90’s where contact prints were puzzled together to create a micro element (one contact print) that compose a macro complex image, the use of the medium of “painting” corresponds to his nonchalance on using text and images for a wider artistic scope. This is what we can also find in the on going project on calligraphy called “Calligraphy” that was shown in Shanghai (together with Sha Yeya, Chen Zaiyan, Sun Qinglin) in 2002, at Shanghart in one of its first presentations and then all around the world in solo or group exhibitions.
All this to say that the artists I choose for this publication are artists able to use mediums that responds to the artistic endeavor specific for that precise moment. If this seems obvious at first, I actually think that we still need to make this explanation - especially in the context of Contemporary China that, I believe in my experience, has been able to ‘adjust’ to new technologies in the arts with a sort of unrestrained and at times simply direct attitude.
So despite the resistance of some curators towards thinking of new media art as equal to the more “traditional” category of fine arts, I believe that I chose these artists based on the quality of their work and not on the specific medium which they used. As I tried to explain in the above introduction, is only an instrument they use to achieve the specific result they aimed for.
This attitude it is clearly visible when we juxtapose images of the oldest and the most recent work. I invite the reader to look at the images knowing how there were chosen. I will not get into comparison or lengthy explanations about the nature of these works, but I think that this temporal gap reduced into two adjacent pages that represent the past and the present/future gives much more food for thoughts than protracted analyses.I would like to add only a short consideration and to do so, I will choose the images that belong to Kan Xuan. In her work this feeling of psychological “transfer” effect between the artist-I and her artwork testify to a sort of strong and powerful mission that the artist indulges in - and responds to an attitude that I, as curator and art activist, respect a lot.
When “Kan Xuan, hei!” was first presented in Art For Sale, Shanghai, 1999, the video installation was hardly visible on the two monitors separated but ideally linked by a double mirror, where the two monitors were reflected. This looking into herself, dispossessing her self-experience to create highly refined and “concentrated” artworks dissimulated in a playful result, which can be still seen in her latest work, “A pound! A pound!” (2008). In this work, her presence is felt in the minimalist, highly precise filming technique and the simple yet intense visual result: the esthetics of the artwork created with a serious handling and controlling of the medium - techniques shaping the form.
Satisfaction and dissatisfaction
All this to get to a very final yet simple question: do the artists presented here satisfy or “un-satisfy” the criteria necessary to be considered “representatives” of this generation of artists? Is their artistic practice respectful in the given timeframe of their still young career? Did they satisfy or not a principle of quality, seriousness of the work and esthetic peculiarity? Looking again in all my data and the artists around, I can still not find any better than this selection that, I apologize, can out-strike them for originality or for unexpected new information for hungry experts, speculators or serious collectors!
Written between Beijing, Bangkok and Phnonpenh , 2 October 2008
