Dubai Art Fair Notes by Liu Yingmei

Time: 19-22, March

In March 2008, Liu Yingmei traveled to the Dubai Art Fair, sharing her thoughts and experiences below:

As the capital of United Arab Emirates, Dubai is the hottest city on the tongues of men, a brand new city built on the desolate desert, a golden rush city, and a modern city with exotic flavor of Arabs.

From March 19th to 22nd, Dubai Art Fair 2nd session was held in Madinat Jumeirah Hotel in Dubai. With the curiosity for the city and fair, I flew Emirate Airline directly from Shanghai.

Seeing for oneself is a hundred times better than hearing. Looking up into the sky — the brand new freeway, shining with gray asphalt, cut out an endless string on the orange desert. Modern technology is definitely the marvel of omnipotence, providing so many possibilities to our daily life. Traveling across the desert by camel became the entertaining activity for tourists only.

Dubai is world famous for the luxury hotels here. However, luxury enjoy should be reserved beforehand. The hotels you may know were full to bursting point, especially the ones along the sea-shore, and both the 5 stars ones and the 7 stars. And so, I tried to find a room in downtown or the vicinity of airport.

Finally, I got a room nearby the World Trade Center. On the way to the hotel from the airport, I found that the service business here were from India and Pakistan mostly. Near 30% of taxi drivers were unfamiliar with the local transport. Perhaps bottom manpower is one of factors attracting people by the world to make money here.

I also got a chance to know Dubai better on the way to Fair from the hotel. It is totally new without the burden to preserve historical buildings. The city was planned by function kind of like Beijing, with highrises built along the wide road. There was no transition between ages. The highrises with post-modern style seemed to be the works in the exhibition, some of them were still under construction. Scanning widely to the whole city, it is a tremendous construction site full of timbering machines and unfinished buildings. In the recent years, people were talking about the construction projects in Beijing and Shanghai that were numerous and fast. Actually, Dubai, a relatively small city, has surpassed our cities with huge quantity in limited area.

The opening began at five in the afternoon. I arrived at a hotel like an Arab castle. When I stepped in the hall, I was drunk from the luxury design mixing with modern and traditional Arabian style: open and squared courtyard, elegant golden brown floor and pillars made of granite, smiling and genteel staff wearing gorgeous traditional costume, and gentlemen from all over the world. This is modern Arabian country — noble, peaceful, luxury.

The Fair had four sections and the main exhibition hall was for galleries. Besides that there were 3 independent art projects, one being a pavilion exhibition from Pakistan, Pursuits For Paradise. In the parking area, a video hall named Art Park was organized by Tirdad Zolghar and Nav Hag. Tirdad Zolghar was a professional curator and also the editor of Bidoun. Global Art Forum, held a series of speeches in the camps along the seashore in Arabian gulf.

The Fair was on the first floor — opposite to the VIP resting area, on the other side of the hall — it was the exhibition space for the art project from Switzerland Bank. Passing by several booths of art magazines, we came to the main hall.

There were 65 galleries from the world attending this fair. It was twice more than last year. Most of the Galleries were well-known, such as Continua from Italy, Yvon Lambert and Enrico Navarra from France, Thomas, Michael Shultz, Volker Diehl, and Taint from Germany, Albion and Aicon from the UK, Max Lang and Kukje from the USA. Although, the leading galleries from nearby countries such as India and Iran played the key roles this time. The Arabians wearing white gowns seemed to prefer visiting their own countries galleries over others. Besides, there were several local galleries dealing in the works of the Middle Eastern contemporary artists including The Third Line, Flying House, Art Space, and others. Other than business men and art journalists, local Arabians and foreigners living or working in Dubai came as well.

For the sake of religion, the fair had strict rules, prohibiting works involving sensitive political issues and nudity. Almost all attending galleries were relatively conservative and neutral. Most of the works were famous. What caught peoples’ eyes were the works by local contemporary artists in the vicinity, including India, Iran, Lisbon and Egypt.

For galleries, attending the Art Fair in Dubai is expensive. Including the transport charges and the daily expense there, it’s even more expensive than attending the art fair in the EU and USA actually. However, the market was still under testing. Most galleries held a promising hope here without knowing the local market specifically. They thought there was abundant money here and the only problem was time. Although they had no profit this time, they at least knew the situation better and opened up the local market first. Some attending galleries said, to their surprise there were local Arabians coming to try to buy the works, even the foreigners living here. They had no such clients before.

Dubai is a extremely international city, 17% of the resident population are local Arabians and 83% are foreigners living here from different countries. Most local Arabians are rich enough and have no need to work… They pay a fat salary, hiring foreign professional managers to operate their companies or just ask the investing consultants to manage money. For foreigners, the tax-favorable policy is attractive.

In the recent two years, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams auction houses all opened branches in Dubai and the auction record is exciting. Farhad Moshir, a Tehelanian artist living in Dubai, improved the auction record in Middle East for 10,480,000 dollars.

The VIP evening party after opening was held in the camp on the ground of Ritz-Carlton hotel, entertaining 25 tables of guests. All was supported and sponsored by Middle Eastern art magazine CANVAS.

The workshop and speech section were organized well, most of the discussion were on pointed issues.

The first two days were for business, discussing how to combine and keep a balance between art and art collecting. The third day went to artists, introducing their works and having a dialogue with the curators, including 3 well-known artists such as Ai Weiwei, Tony Cragg and Daniel Buren. The hottest presentation was brought by Rem Koolhaas. He had taken part in the city planning of Dubai and was having lots of local project here. The last two days were for the workshop about pubic art museum. Obviously, the organizing committee paid much attention to the local galleries, there was presentation by one local gallery each day. Some galleries even organized buses, showing people the exhibition in their galleries and art spaces around.

Creek Art Fair was people-organized peripheral fair, located in an old area along the river band of Dubai. It’s a building with Arabian architecture style in 1970s, having center courtyard like the quadrangle in China. There were a lot of local and nearby countries’ galleries opened here. Most of the works were moderate and decorative. We could tell the contemporary art here is still on the primary stage, the art works never touched the international market. The collecting market are also under development.

The art director this time is John Martin, a gallery manager in Britain. The key corporation partner and sponsor to the fair is 阿布拉阿之, reported to own 5 billion in the Middle East.

It said, the total business volume this time is 25-35 million dollars. Comparing to the others matured fair, it’s not huge but still over the organizer’s expectations. The countries in the Middle East are skilled in using experts from around the world, this is also true in culture business. The government of Dubai invited Michael Schindhelm, the former theater director in Berlin, to be the consultant of culture ministry in Dubai. Sharjah, half hour away by car, was holding a international art Biennial, curating by an Israelite guy Jack Persekian.

Abu Dhabi, one and a half hour away by car, was establishing a world famous leading art zone designed by 10 excellent architects. The former director was Charles Mereweather form Australia. He was also the former curator of Sydney Biennial and knew Chinese contemporary art well.

Art business in the Middle East is promising.

Liu Yingmei, 2008

Translated by Alexia Dehaene