Chinese art goes global

Chinese artists are ready to prove that the country can produce more than just cheap goods.

Once renowned as a country that stifled individual creativity and independent thought, China is repositioning itself as a creative powerhouse.

With Chinese artists selling for record prices at auctions, big-name institutions and international art fairs coming in and scores of new galleries opening every month, China is out to show the world that it can do more than produce cheap goods. Chinese art and artists, unheard of a few decades ago, are selling, and how.

The market is bursting at its seams with a bewildering array of art and artists, some accomplished and some not, but all selling at fantastic prices.

Artists who made $100 or less a few decades ago now match the prices of the two most expensive living artists today "" British artist Damien Hirst and the controversial American conceptual artist Jeff Koons, who sell for $2 million or more.

Video, performance and installation art by contemporary avant-garde artists such as Xu Zhen, famous for his attempt to chop off the top of Mount Everest in a staged mockumentary, and Xu Bing, renowned for his monumental work "Blue Sky", have proved that contemporary art transcends traditional forms of scroll paintings and calligraphy.

Earlier in 2007, the "show of the year", Tate Liverpool's "The Real Thing: Contemporary Art From China", featured 26 works by 18 leading Chinese artists, including Ai Weiwei (known for the "Bird's Nest", the latticework of girders at the Olympic Stadium), Gu Dexin (known for his installations involving apples), Zhou Tiehai (airbrushed works featuring Joe Camel) and the Yangjiang group (which brought a pyrotechnic homage to artist Cai Guoqiang).

Especially commissioned for this show was Ai Weiwei's "Fountain of Lights", a spectacular floating crystal chandelier of light inspired by Tatlin's Monument to the Third International.

In what seems a tacit recognition of coming of age of Chinese art, the Guggenheim is hosting its first solo show of a living Chinese artist, "Cai Guoqiang: A Retrospective", later this year. Cai, known for his brilliant installations and experimentations with the quintessential Chinese medium of fireworks, is overseeing the opening and closing ceremonies at the 2008 Olympics.

The Guggenheim has also laid plans to set up their own museum in Beijing, while the Shanghai Pompidou Centre plans to open in the next year or two. On the home-front, Shanghai will open a contemporary art museum in the Himalayas Center in 2009 and Beijing will open a new MoCA Moon River Museum of Contemporary Art next year.

This September brought the world to Shanghai's doorstep for the S H Contemporary art fair, organised by Lorenzo Rudolph (the former director of Art Basel) and curated by heavyweight collector Pierre Huber.

The fair, housed in the neo-classical Shanghai Exhibition Center, received much critical acclaim and was the first art fair of international calibre hosted in China; it attracted big names in Asian art such as Chambers Fine Art and Marlboro Gallery. Business cards and champagne corks were flying as the world's art-istocracy descended upon Shanghai for the five-day show.

Hot commodities
Deng's China rehabilitated both art schools and artists. Today, almost thirty years later, the art market is flourishing. Auction houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's are vacuuming up all the Chinese pieces they can get their hands on and making money in the process.

This May, Sotheby's sold cynical-realist Yue Minjun's 1997 oil painting entitled "The Pope" for $4.28 million. This surpassed the $2.7 million price of "Newly Displaced Population, 2005" by the 44-year-old figurative painter Liu Xiaodong.

This painting was from his series of evocative paintings concerning the human costs of Sanxia (Three Gorges). Others such as Zhang Xiaogang, known for his family portraits set during the Cultural Revolution such as "Bloodline Series: Comrade 120", sold his "Tiananmen Square" for a cool $2.3 million.

As if this wasn't enough, local auction houses are feeding the fire employing the illegal practice of allowing clients to put their works on auction and buy them back in order to jack up the price.

As prices continue to go through the roof, the competition for works becomes fierce. Shanghai has seen at least 30-40 new gallery openings this year. Galleries and collectors are starting to sit on their works in anticipation that their value will rise even further.

Auction houses which normally rely on the secondary market (dealers, galleries and collectors) are cutting out the middle man and going straight to the artists.

This means that galleries which normally invest in building up an artist and supporting them, are being cut out in the bargain by artists who sell works on the side to save themselves the 50 percent commission which would normally go to the galleries.

Art in the age of mass production?
After long years of utopian idealism under Mao, in Deng's China wealth creation was made a priority. Like the economy, the art boom has been driven by foreign investment.

Joining the game are artists motivated by overriding goals of profit and increasingly rolling off their work in assembly line "" with studios supporting up to 100 assistants, working on various stages of the work.

Artists such as Zhang Huan and Yue Minjun are employing small armies of assistants to help them produce their works. Such modes of production are common in other parts of the world yet the low cost of labour makes for high profit margins.

The problem, however, is not the means of production, but the products themselves. Chinese artists, dazzled with the celestial auction prices, continue to churn out pieces of "political pop" and "cynical realism", movements which hit their peak in the 90s.

Bordering on sensationalism, these pander to Western stereotypes. Young artists emulate these styles in the hopes of striking it rich "" a phenomenon which brings new meaning to the term cynical realism.

Demand for Chinese art is so great that artists fresh out of the academies can often land themselves a show at a gallery often selling out in the first show while established foreign artists are passed over, "I have great foreign artists who have shown in over ten museums abroad, but no one in China is interested in buying their works," says Thomas Charveriat, the energetic founder of Shanghai's ISLAND6 Art Center.

"[There is] no other criteria beyond money by which to evaluate good art, as there is no developed infrastructure of museums in China, no national collection, little curatorial knowledge and new private galleries eager to maintain the price of their artists' works by ensuring their prices don't fall at auction," says Simon Groom, curator of the Tate Liverpool show.

Fame, says Pia Copper, a 20th century Chinese art specialist for Artcurial auction house, can be a dangerous thing for young artists: "Instant fame is terrible for art. Chinese artists have not yet seen the market crash. This could happen to some artists despite their increasing arrogance, just like the '80s superstars abroad who saw their prices plummet."

The very specific demands of the market are stifling creativity and few are focusing on building the necessary infrastructure needed to sustain creative growth.

China lacks the necessary government-funding agencies and non-profit organisations, which normally sponsor art outside the market, and educational institutions focus largely on technique, ignoring the conceptual side.

Indeed, China has still a long way to go, but considering its 25-year-long artistic hiatus, the recovery is nothing short of miraculous.