Asian Art in London

Commercially, Chinese art did fairly well. Among the galleries, special notice is due to the seven classical Chinese paintings at Eskenazi Ltd., the Song ceramics at Priestley and Ferraro, and the lacquerware at Ben Janssens. Bloomberg assessed the key lots at all five auctions of Chinese art as imperial pieces that were particularly attractive to the nouveau riche Chinese buyers. The power and presence of Chinese buyers was also felt at Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Sale, where a mysterious Mandarin-speaking phone bidder concluded the sales for several works including the so-called ‘irrevocable bid’ Picasso, Claude a deux ans (1949).

But these buyers, so enthusiastic in New York, were more discerning this time: the Economist attributes the failure of fully one-third of Christie’s 3 November sale to “sellers who are too greedy or catalogers who are too enthusiastic in their assessments.” Some of the very same works that garnered buyers’ interest also raised strong sentiments among netizens. This confluence of desire, connoisseurship, and nationalism that seems to be fueling the new raft of Chinese buyers is something to be watched closely in the future.

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Top-grossing auction lot: Sotheby’s, Qianlong Imperial Jade Seal – £3.6 million

Bonhams, Knightsbridge: 2 November 2009, Chinese and other Asian Works of Art

Sale total: £3.2 million          Catalogue and Sale Results

Christie’s King Street: 3 November, Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art

Sale total: £5.7 million          Catalogue and Sale Results

Sotheby’s New Bond Street: 4 November 2009, Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art

Sale total: £8.3 million         Catalogue and Sale Results

Bonhams, New Bond Street: 5 November 2009, Fine Chinese Art,

Sale total: £4.9 million         Catalogue and Sale Results

*Zhang Xiaogang has been replaced as #1: based on sales from July 2008 through June 2009, Zeng Fanzhi is now the highest-selling contemporary Chinese artist.

*The director of the Princeton University Art Museum argues for the critical role the university museum plays in the university.

*The first European preview of the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale took place in London.

*Asian Art in London runs 29 October – 7 November, confirming London’s role as the capital of the Chinese art trade. But the British aren’t the ones buying Chinese art.

*Web addresses can now include Chinese characters: internet regulator Icann approved web addresses in multiple languages.

*The CCTV tower, burned in February by an unlicensed New Year’s fireworks display organized by CCTV itself, has officially been approved for reconstruction.

*Secrets of the Forbidden City opened at Casa dei Carraresi and runs through 9 May 2010. It includes a special section on Matteo Ricci at the Ming Court, with objects and documents from Rome and Ricci’s hometown of Macerata to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Ricci’s 1610 death in Beijing.

*Hong Kong and Singapore are battling it out for the title of Asia’s regional arts hub.

*The new “it” restaurant in my Chinese hometown of Beijing is Capital M, the new Beijing venture by Michelle Garnaut’s M Restaurant Group. Recent local reviews are very positive, and although the New York Times is reserving judgment for the moment, they can’t deny the steady flow of visitors. Located in the newly-restored Qianmen Dajie area, Capital M would be a great place to end up after a long afternoon wandering the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.

*Inside Higher Ed offered some innovative ideas on how to nudge your students out of their midterm doldrums.

*Have you considered that Project Runway might be an idealized metaphor for graduate school?

*Ai Weiwei’s So Sorry opened at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, including two new works created specifically for the show – “Remembering” (2009) about the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and “Soft Ground” (2009), a reproduction in carpet of the 969 stone floor tiles on the floor of the exhibition space.

Ai Weiwi, "Soft Ground" (2009), "Rooted Upon" (2009), "Fairytale" (2007)

*Although full financial support and intelligent policies will help reform and streamline the process for earning a Humanities Ph.D., according to the new book Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the Humanities a good humanities dissertation will still likely take at least six years.

*Beijing may be lending to Taiwan, but Taiwan feels it can’t reciprocate for fear the pieces won’t return.

*Sotheby’s Hong Kong sale returns this week were very impressive: contemporary Asian art made nearly $15 million, 20th-century Chinese art made $14 million, and Fine Chinese Paintings took in $23.5 million. Just like in New York, it’s the Chinese who are buying, and buying in a big way.

*Stan Katz asked the provocative question of why do universities support museums?

*Female Chinese contemporary artist Cao Fei was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize 2010.

*Ai Weiwei’s So Sorry opens tomorrow, 12 October, in Munich.

*China Design Now, the first exhibition to examine contemporary Chinese design from the Victoria and Albert Museum, has moved from the Cincinnati Art Museum to the Portland Art Museum. It will run from 10 October 2009 to 17 January 2010.

*The New York Times profiled the Gao Brothers’ underground art openings and their statue Mao’s Guilt as examples of the steps needed to elude the authorities when a work’s subject is politically sensitive. The video included with the article includes some intriguing comments on the Gao Brothers’ work by local Chinese visitors.

The second work mentioned specifically in the article, their Execution of Christ, riffs on Goya and Manet – just like Yue Miinjun’s Execution that I mentioned last month in The Art of Tiananmen. There’s an interesting question: why the perpetual repetition of this composition in particular?

*The most famous Chinese painting – the portrait of Chairman Mao on Tiananmen – was replaced just in time for the National Day festivities.

*Ai Weiwei spoke out in Time Magazine about just how far he thinks China still has to go.

*China Merchants Bank introduced an art investment scheme with Chinese contemporary art.

*Artdaily.org reported that the first book on collecting Chinese contemporary art, Chinese Contemporary Art: 7 Things You Should Know by Asia Society Museum Director Melissa Chiu, has been published in Chinese by AW Asia.

Take a look at Dr. Chiu’s crash course on the thirty-year history of Chinese contemporary art:

*My panel was accepted at AAS! “Picturing the Foreign: Images of East and West in Visual and Literary Culture from 1400 to Present” will run on Sunday 28 March from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m.

*Souren Melikian’s analysis of last week’s art auction successes chalks everything up to new Chinese buyers who aren’t bothered by the usual aesthetic concerns and period stigmas.

*chinaSMACK posted about the coiffures designed to celebrate National Day (国庆节) on October 1. The Great Hall of the People never looked so good.

*Sinosplice caught sight of a brilliant bit of signage.

*An unprecedented double whammy: Beijing has loaned artifacts to Taiwan for the first time since 1949, and Emperor Yongzheng (r. 1723-1735)  will finally get a decent dedicated exhibition.

Yongzheng is rather an enigma: his is overshadowed as a ruler by both his father and his son, reigned amid suspicion and fear, and died in mysterious circumstances. But he loved art, and certainly laid the foundation for his heir’s art patronage. From the portrait below, you can also see he had an eccentric sense of humor and didn’t take himself too seriously in private. This quirkiness seen in his art, which so blatantly contradicts his persona as a ruler, is what keeps me awake at night. And another book idea is born…

*It was a great week to buy and sell Chinese art in New York! Sotheby’s sold $15.5m, but Christie’s topped that with total Chinese sales of $23.9m. The most surprising result was the eighteenth-century imperial desk set estimated at $30,000 that sold for more than $1.4m. But despite all the good news, the Wall Street Journal still called the sales “pared-down.”

*Danwei reported on an illustrated article in fashion magazine 1626 that mix text and image to simultaneously mock and clarify Chinese mispronunciations of global fashion brands.

*RedBox Review is “China. Art. Current. Concise.” If you don’t already read it, you’re missing out on thoughtful, well-written posts about the latest Chinese contemporary art from a Beijing perspective.

*ChinaLuxCultureBiz commented on the rising numbers of Chinese graduates pursuing careers in arts administration. According to the original article, the young female arts administrator who was interviewed advised students to develop “strong background knowledge” for success in the field. But notably absent was any discussion of studying art history, because the field does not really exist in China.

*Did you know that the creator of the pop culture icon known as the Twitter “fail whale” is Shanghai-born artist and designer Yiying Lu?

In a dress rehearsal for the upcoming military parade to celebrate both the  October 1 National Day Holiday and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC,  a number of tanks rolled down Dawang Lu toward Changan Avenue and Tiananmen Square.

Personally, I thought the blue tanks (first seen at 2:28) added a nice splash of welcome color. They will go beautifully with the uniforms worn by some of the female soldiers who will also be marching in the parade.

It is a sad fact that the words “tanks” and “Beijing” in the same sentence conjure up images of Tiananmen and 1989. As one of the “Three T’s,” Tiananmen is one of the topics my students have been most curious about. After all, when they have seen it, it is nothing but a large empty space paved in concrete. If you haven’t been to the Square yourself, how about a virtual visit?

An incredible amount of art and visual culture has been inspired by the 1989 events in the Square. But four works stand out above the rest. Two have become iconic references to what took place that day. The other two reflect the global fascination with those events and with Chinese contemporary art, particularly art that is perceived as political. I believe that these four are the images to know.

Jeff Widener, Tank Man, 1989.
At least four photos as well as video footage exist of the “Tank Man” standing in front of the four tanks rumbling down Changan Avenue. The sight of this single man actively preventing the tanks from entering the Square is the most widely-recognized image of what happened that day. It is so well known that it even appears in pop culture.

Anonymous Beijing students, Goddess of Democracy, 1989.
Despite its striking resemblance to the Statue of Liberty, this 10-meter (33-feet) high sculpture of foam and papier-mâché over a metal support was inspired by the Socialist realist work of Russian sculptor Vera Mukhina. Although Goddess only stood in the Square from May 30 to June 4, 1989, its legacy lives on in reproductions around the world. Perhaps most notably, a reproduction of Goddess was chosen to represent the 100 million people killed in the name of Communism for the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C. that was dedicated in 2007.

Zhang Xiaogang, Tiananmen Square, c. 1993.
Selling for $2.32 million in 2006, this radically simplified depiction of Tiananmen Square set auction records at the time. Arguably China’s most famous contemporary artist, Zhang publicly states that there is no connection to the June 4 events in this painting. But because of Chinese policy against depicting political events in art, the associations the Square has acquired dramatically increase the price of any politically-related works.

Yue Minjun, Execution, 1995.
Selling for $5.9 million in 2007, Cynical Realist painter Yue Minjun uses his trademark grinning self-portrait to depict “only his feelings about the future rather than actual events from the past” in this work. What conjures up the specter of Tiananmen here are the yellow-roofed red walls of the Forbidden City and the invisible rifles implied by the postures of the men facing away from the viewer. However, Yue borrowed the composition from The Third of May, 1808 by Francisco Goya and Execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico (1867) by Edouard Manet.

Are there other works that you feel should be included in “the art of Tiananmen”? Please leave me your suggestions in the comments below.

I’ll be blogging about modern Chinese visual culture from 1700 through today from the perspective of a researcher and a teacher. Topics will include Chinese art during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Sino-European artistic exchange, the Forbidden City and Beijing, contemporary Chinese art, teaching East Asian art history, using technology and social media in the classroom, and the relationship between the Chinese art market and art history.

Here you can also read about about my research and teaching interests, and download information like my CV, dissertation abstract, and course syllabi.

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