Back in the mid-90s, a handful of collectors quietly began buying up contemporary Chinese fine art and photography. Maybe they sensed that China was going to become a major economic force. Maybe they were simply intrigued by what they saw; the Chinese avant-garde was at its peak, led by artists such as Rong Rong, who has been compared with Nan Goldin. But one thing is certain: They got in at the right time. Today, China is hot.
"The market for contemporary Chinese art in general has exploded over the past five years," says Christopher Tsai, who runs the New York investment firm Tsai Capital and has been collecting since 2003.
Paintings are commanding the most handsome sums; works that sold for $500 in the NIneties now sell for $500,000. But photography is charging ahead. "Follow Me," a photo by Wang Qingsong, one of the most internationally well known Chinese photographers, sold for $318,400 with premium at Sotheby's in New York last September, setting a new record for the artist. Christie's sold two self-portraits by photographer Qiu Zhijie Hong Kong last November for $115,681 with premium.
Ingrid Dudek, a specialist in Asian contemporary art at Christie's, notes that most contemporary Chinese photography sells "well below" these figures. But the profit margins for the primary market are still noteworthy: Howard Farber, president of China Avant-Garde, art consultants and dealers with offices in New York and Beijing, estimates that a limited-edition print of Zhang Huan's "To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond" that he bought for roughly $2,000 in 1997 is now worth between $80,000 and $100,000.
Chinese entrepreneurs have been quick to capitalize on the demand, resulting in a surfeit of homegrown auction houses. The two best known are China Guardian Auctions, established in 1993, and Beijing Poly International Auctions, established in 2005, but there are hundreds of others.
The boom has also caught the attention of gallerists around the world. Shanghai-born, New York-based commercial photographer Alex Cao opened the 4,500-square-foot China Square Gallery in Chelsea last month. His first exhibition, "Dragon's Evolution," featured nearly 50 of China's best-known contemporary fine-art photographers. On June 22, Nashville's Ingram Gallery at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts will present a show of 21 Chinese photographers called "Whispering Wind." Through September 23, Artium: Basque Museum of Contemporary Art in Spain is showing "Zhuyi! Contemporary Chinese Photography," a survey of 30 photographers, all of whom were born after 1960. ("Zhuyi" approximately translates to "what about.") And this year, Rong Rong, one of the photographers who started the boom, plans to open the Three Shadows Photography Center. Located in Caochangdi Village, just outside Beijing, the vast center will comprise gallery space, classrooms, a library, and technical facilities.
Changing Medium, Changing World
Rong Rong is not yet 40, but he already represents the old guard in a country where photographers constantly redefine the medium. Unlike many contemporary Chinese fine-art photographers, Rong Rong does his own printing and does not use a computer to manipulate his photos, the most celebrated of them being black-and-white portraits. "Rong Rong is highly prized because he's one of the few artists still working with the traditional method," notes Chris Mao, who founded the China-centric Chambers Fine Art in New York in 2000. "Yet he's very original as well."
Original, distinct, fresh: Everyone PDN spoke to described the photography coming out of China in these terms. This is in part a commentary on method. What's billed as a photograph may actually be a multimedia piece incorporating drawing or painting, a still from a video, a photograph from a performance, or a computer-generated product.
"There are a lot of interesting photographers all over the world," says Ethan Cohen, whose Ethan Cohen Fine Arts in New York represents work by artists such as Xiao Lu, who is notorious for her "15 Shots" series, in which she shot bullets into photographs of herself. "But I think what's happening in China is you're seeing artists with very powerful backgrounds in other areas—sculpture, performance, painting, printmaking, video—who are choosing photography. And what they're coming up with is fresh and significant."
But boundary-pushing in itself is does not explain why contemporary Chinese photography is so coveted. The work itself deals with issues of identity, politics and, increasingly, social and economic change. "I think people are fascinated by Chinese contemporary art right now because it has a unique voice. It has come from the liberalization that took place in the 1980s, which has now reached a level of maturity where we see individual artists respond to the seismic shifts they are witnessing in their society," says Melissa Chiu, museum director of the Asia Society and Museum in New York.
For his "My Things" series, Hong Hao composed jam-packed still lifes of items ranging from Mao buttons to cigarette packs, photographed them, and then produced chromogenic prints. Measuring 22 x 38 inches up to 4 x 6 feet, the images sell for between $6,000 and $15,000 apiece, says Jon Burris, a curator of private collection of Chinese art for 20 years who recently started Chinophile, a consulting company. Hong's new work, a mix of ancient and modern that includes hand scrolls inserted with photos of present-day gallerygoers, went on view this past April at New York's Chambers Fine Art, where it sold briskly, owner Chris Mao reports.
Cao Fei, widely regarded as China's "It Girl," exhibited her series "COSPlayers," featuring photos of young people dressed as videogame characters, at Beijing's Courtyard Gallery and made her New York debut with it at Lombard Fried in 2005. Cao, born in 1978 and an accomplished video artist as well, is among the artists representing China at this year's Venice Biennale.
Hai Bo, another of China's big names in contemporary fine-art photography, drew praise for a series in which he re-created 1930s-era family snapshots with the surviving members of the families, then exhibited the original and re-creation side by side, as with 2000's "They No. 7 (Three Sisters). Weng Fen has produced highly collectible chromogenic prints (measuring 31 x 39 in an edition of 10 that sell for $25,000 to $30,000) of young Chinese girls looking out over a city or a body of water: an image of the next generation wondering what the future holds.
New Venues
Beijing is still considered China's art capital, with major players like the 798 Gallery; Art Scene China (which also has an outpost in Shanghai); the Courtyard Gallery; Beijing Commune, which New York's Max Protetch Gallery, an early supporter of contemporary Chinese art, launched in early 2006; Galerie Urs Meile, whose headquarters are in Switzerland; and Red Gate Gallery, the city's first contemporary art gallery (it opened in 1991). Shanghai is a close second. (ShanghART, that city's first contemporary gallery, plans to open a space in the Caochangdi Village, outside Beijing, this fall.)
But the scene is now expanding. Ai Wei Wei, perhaps China's preeminent artist, opened China Art Archives and Warehouse roughly 30 minutes outside Beijing in 2000; earlier this year, The New York Times reported that Meg Maggio, a well-known contemporary art dealer in Beijing (her gallery is Pekin Fine Arts), is relocating to the same town. "So far, Western collectors have only really tapped those artists that are based in [big cities like] Beijing and Shanghai," says Phillips. "I think this whole process has quite a lot further to run."
It's stunning to think that as late as 1999, artists relied on word of mouth and apartment exhibitions to get their work seen. "If I had just landed at Beijing Airport [in 1999] wanting to look at artists or photographers, I probably wouldn't have gotten very far," says the ICP's Christopher Phillips, who co-curated the museum's groundbreaking 2004 exhibition "Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video From China." He recalls, "It was still very much an insider's situation then."
By the late 90s, artists were able to travel outside China to see works they had only been able to view online or in books. Clearly, one of their observations was that large-scale pictures dominated international galleries. "They immediately started scaling up their work and doing technically and artistically impressive work," says Phillips. At the same time, digital photography was coming to the fore. Japanese manufacturers, explains Phillips, were dumping their older models of cameras and printers on the Chinese market. "For the first time, Chinese labs were able to make large-scale digital C-prints," he says. And that brought them attention from collectors. Notes Burris: "The Chinese have learned that big is good, color is good and limited editions are necessary."
Educating Photographers
Where there are photographers, there are portfolio reviews, and China is no exception. The People's Republic hosts two major festival, both government sponsored: Pingyao International Photography Festival, which launched in 2001 and has drawn Western photographers like Susan Meiselas and Sebãstiao Salgado; and Lianzhou Photo Festival in Guangdong, on China's southern coast. When FotoFest launched Meeting Place FotoFest Beijing last October, more than a thousand photographers tried to register for the 240 slots, recalls FotoFest co-founder Wendy Watriss.
Watriss says FotoFest will award scholarships to Chinese photographers to attend next year's portfolio review in Houston. Last month, FotoFest was due to launch photo.eye, a "gallery-Web site" (the site is accessible through fotofest.org) boasting work by 34 Chinese photographers.
All these factors have created a greater openness in China to photography. Censorship is not quite the problem it once was in China. Through the year 2000, recalls the ICP's Phillips, "it was totally normal for exhibitions in Beijing and Shanghai to open and be immediately closed by various police officials for all kinds of quirky reasons."
And the public at large, so accustomed to government-sanctioned, propagandistic work, is warming to the possibilities of contemporary art, even if only because it is so in demand.
"Most average people and older people don't understand contemporary art and see it as ugly, grotesque and weird. But it's catching on quickly, largely because it's so hot with foreign collectors and wealthy Chinese intellectuals," says Lynn Zhang, publisher of Artzine China, a new online Shanghai- based arts publication (artzinechina.com). "The art schools are packed, and the Shanghai Biennale last year set records for attendance." Artzine China also has a shopping site. "And," says Zhang, "we're receiving lots of orders from overseas."
Commercial Pressures
Not everyone is thrilled with the growing market for contemporary Chinese fine art. Wang Qingsong, who gained international attention through the ICP show, has profited from the sale of his work: He was hired by English department store Selfridges last year to decorate 19 windows in its London story during Chinese New Festival, and he says he's also been approached by companies like Volvo and Fendi. But he worries that artists are now making work that they know collectors will want to buy.
"On the surface, the market is booming and fine-art photography as well as other forms of art are all being well received by collectors worldwide," he tells PDN through a translator in an e-mail interview. "This is an exciting time because we don't need to worry about making a living, as ten years ago. However, many artists think less of creative works; rather, they repeat themselves and follow the market trends."
Qingsong's concern was echoed by many of the people PDN spoke with. "Everything is moving at a breakneck pace, and I fear that the critical appraisal is not what it should be," says Burris. "Galleries are opening and closing quickly because so few actually know how to operate an art business. Everyone thinks short-term because so much money is changing hands, and they don't want to miss out on a part of it."
And yet, some would say they already have missed out. When Howard Farber started buying contemporary Chinese art after a mid-90s trip to Hong Kong, his accountant told him he was nuts. "Last year," recalls Farber, "he asked me if I could get him something. I told him, 'You're too late.'" |
