China's Art Market since 1978: Regional Entrepreneurship and Global Impact (Worlds of Consumption) 3031346041, 9783031346040

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Abbreviations
List of Tables
Chapter 1: Introduction
From Regional Entrepreneurship to Global Impact
Institutional Change and Cultural Entrepreneurship
Political Change
Economic Mechanisms
Cultural Landscape
Organization of the Book
Chapter 2: China’s Art Market Before 1978
Imperial China and Globalization
China’s Postcolonial Turn Under Soviet Influence: From Yan’an Forum to the Cultural Revolution
The Decline of a Centrally Planned Economy and Its Art System
Conclusion
Chapter 3: Gradualist Market Reform and Unofficial Art Movements (1980s)
A Little Freedom Goes a Long Way: Postreform Cultural Fever
Formal Institutional Change and Unofficial Art Movements
The Emergence of Local Art Zones and Out-Migration
Conclusion
Chapter 4: Private Entrepreneurship and the Commercialization of Art (1990s)
Chinese Contemporary Art Enters the Global Stage
Learning the Ropes in China’s Evolving Art Markets
Urban Art Zones Amid Urbanization and Demolitions
Conclusion
Chapter 5: “Soft Power” Strategy, Wealth Creation, and Art Consumerism (2000s)
New Buzzwords in Party-State Policies: Soft Power and Creative Industries
Real Estate Boom and China’s Nouveau Riche
Hyperurbanization, Commodification of Urban Space, and Art Branding
Industrial Upgrading: From “Made in China” to “Created in China”
Bubbles and Busts in the Art Economy
Conclusion
Chapter 6: Digitalization, the Rise of Chinese Collectors, and the Nationwide Art Boom (2010s)
The Age of Social Media: Internet-Assisted Art Consumption
The Rise of Chinese Art Collectors: Domestic and Abroad
Overheated Art Auctions and Art Financialization
Affirming Chinese Pride: Global Representation and Repatriating Lost Art
Multicity Art Boom and Revivals
New Global Hurdles: Talent Drain, a US–China Trade War, and Social Movements in Hong Kong
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Pandemic, Exceptional Recovery, and the Ultra-Wealthy in China
Pandemic Challenges, Digitalization, and Adaptation
A New Wealth Map in 2020
New Trends in China: Pandemic-Themed Art Criticism and Nonfungible Token (NFT) Art Fever
Conclusion
Chapter 8: A Trend Toward Pluralism and Inclusion
Preconditions of the Diversity Project in the Global Art World
Pluralism of Artistic Forms since the Economic Liberalization in China
Gender Inclusion in China’s Art World
Conclusion
Chapter 9: Conclusion
China’s Institutional Change and Its Art Economy
Cultural Entrepreneurship and Its Role in Social Order
Cultural Pluralism: A Local and Global Mandate for the 2020s
Glossary
Index

Citation preview

WORLDS OF CONSUMPTION

China’s Art Market since 1978

Regional Entrepreneurship and Global Impact Li Ma

Worlds of Consumption Series Editors

Hartmut Berghoff Institute for Economic and Social History University of Göttingen Göttingen, Germany Jan Logemann Institute for Social & Economic History University of Göttingen Göttingen, Niedersachsen, Germany

This series brings together historical research on consumption and consumerism in the modern era, especially the twentieth century, and with a particular focus on comparative and transnational studies. It aims to make research available in English from an increasingly internationalized and interdisciplinary field. The history of consumption offers a vital link among diverse fields of history and other social sciences, because modern societies are consumer societies whose political, cultural, social, and economic structures and practices are bound up with the history of consumption. Worlds of Consumption highlights and explores these linkages, which deserve wide attention, since they shape who we are as individuals and societies.

Li Ma

China’s Art Market since 1978 Regional Entrepreneurship and Global Impact

Li Ma Grand Rapids, MI, USA

ISSN 2945-6010     ISSN 2945-6029 (electronic) Worlds of Consumption ISBN 978-3-031-34604-0    ISBN 978-3-031-34605-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34605-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Mariano Garcia / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

I dedicate this book to my Chinese calligrapher father who nurtured me in the appreciation for Chinese art, and to my son Calvin, the budding young creative.

Acknowledgments

This book traces more than a century-long social history through China’s creative landscape. The journey behind this project has also been a personal one. I grew up in a family that treasures Chinese literati artworks. My father, a Chinese calligrapher and art collector himself, introduced me to the names and works of many classical Chinese artists. In my childhood memory, he befriended not just big-name artists but struggling artists who lived in crowded alleyways too. Art was the common language that these family friends used. I was familiarized with the Chinese art world in this way. I therefore dedicate this book to my father. I also dedicate it to my son, whose love for creative art is such a gift and joy to me. Since the 2000s, I have observed firsthand how China’s art market has quietly revived. A popular trend, after real estate, became one of art and antique buying. But not until recent years did I begin to toy with the idea of developing this into a new research project. My previous publications all involved China’s market transition and the role of entrepreneurship. In 2021, the news that auction sales in China, a significant part of its art market, has surpassed those in the United States to lead the world. As I was completing this book, China’s art scene was becoming even more prominent on the global stage, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. I am grateful to have learned from Victor Nee and Richard Swedberg, two world-class economic sociologists who specialized in entrepreneurship and China’s market transition. Over the years, I have also benefited from conversations with economists, sociologists, historians, philosophers, art critics, curators, collectors, and average Chinese art consumers. Many vii

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people are not mentioned by name, but their enthusiasm and ideas have helped me understand China’s art world. Last but not least, I thank my husband, Jin Li, who has always been the first reader of all my manuscripts, including this one. I also appreciate the editing help of Harriette Mostert. Grand Rapids, Michigan July of 2021

Li Ma

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 China’s Art Market Before 1978 29 3 Gradualist  Market Reform and Unofficial Art Movements (1980s) 51 4 Private  Entrepreneurship and the Commercialization of Art (1990s) 75 5 “Soft  Power” Strategy, Wealth Creation, and Art Consumerism (2000s)101 6 Digitalization,  the Rise of Chinese Collectors, and the Nationwide Art Boom (2010s)129 7 Pandemic,  Exceptional Recovery, and the Ultra-Wealthy in China167 8 A Trend Toward Pluralism and Inclusion193

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9 Conclusion213 Glossary233 Index237

Abbreviations1

CAFA CCTV CCP FDI GDP PRC SOE TVE

Chinese Academy of Fine Arts China Central Television Chinese Communist Party foreign direct investment gross domestic product People’s Republic of China state-owned enterprise township and village enterprise

WTO

World Trade Organization

Note 1. In dealing with Chinese names, this book uses the pinyin romanization system for the transliteration of Chinese words. Mandarin Chinese names are given with surnames first. Exceptions are made for certain terms that are commonly known by their older forms, such as Confucius. Other exceptions include the names of artists who have been widely known overseas, such as Wenda Gu. Names from Hong Kong and Taiwan have been written in accordance with those regions’ respective conventions. In citations, for the titles of entirely Chinese publications, both the translation and original characters are given.

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List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 4.1 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 7.1 Table 7.2

Number of participants in art activities (1978–1986) 58 Trailblazing art events in the 1980s 62 Notable overseas events featuring Chinese contemporary art by 1999 80 Academic journals in Chinese covering cultural and creative industries107 Exhibition space in China’s art world (2002) 113 Old building space reused as art space in Chinese cities (selection)115 Private art museums in China (selection) 140 2018 ranking of art institutions according to each faculty’s art auction sales 144 Regional distribution of contemporary art cities, galleries, and museums (2021) 149 Global top ten auction houses in 2020 172 The world’s billionaires 174

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In the past two decades, after having survived two major crises in the world economy (the 2008 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic), China’s art market is rapidly evolving to constitute not just an identifiable regional market but a leading one. Take the most recent economic hardship caused by COVID-19, for example. In 2020, as the Art Basel/UBS Report shows, China’s art market sales fell by 10 percent to USD 11.7 billion, compared to the US market, which dropped 5 percent to USD 28.5 billion.1 In 2021, however, auction sales in Greater China overtook those in the United States to become the largest market, with a share of 36 percent.2 According to art economist Claire McAndrew, China fared much better than other major art markets despite its being the first ground zero of COVID-19: “Several successful fairs were held in the last quarter of the year [2020]; … many dealers felt that they might be the only fairs that go ahead.”3 In 2009, while most of the other major art markets were hit by the worst contraction in sales in nearly 20 years because of a worldwide financial crisis, the mainland Chinese auction market experienced an unprecedented boom, where sales values increased by more than 170 percent.4 In fact, following the 2008 Beijing Olympics, there has been an unprecedented surge in demand for works of “Chinese” contemporary art. One art market observer described the appeal of Chinese art in the global market most vividly: “As soon as China takes center stage in the global

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Ma, China’s Art Market since 1978, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34605-7_1

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political arena, … everyone is on a business class flight to Beijing.”5 By 2010, the share of China’s art market managed to surpass that of the United States and that of the United Kingdom, two countries that had previously dominated the market since the 1950s.6 Among 2011’s ten best-selling artists in the global art market, six are Chinese.7 The decade between these two economic crises was a time of rapid developments in the infrastructure of China’s art industry. In 2013, both Christie’s and Sotheby’s held their first-ever sales on the Chinese mainland, further signaling the country’s rising stature in high-end art trading.8 By 2014, according to art researcher and consultant Audrey Wang, “One of the key events in the twenty-first-century Chinese art market is the meteoric increase in Chinese contemporary-art prices, and the rapid expansion of that market.”9 In 2017, the curatorial director of the Lisson Gallery, Greg Hilty, spoke at the London gallery: “We have seen a huge increase in demand for art from China, particularly in the last two years.”10 Domestically and abroad, Chinese fine-art and other collectibles have become investment repositories. But things haven’t always been this way. Knowing the history of China’s art economy before the 2000s helps us appreciate how transformative and unusual the above milestones really are. For a few decades before China opened up its economy in 1978, its art market had languished to near nonexistence. Chinese artists suffered decades of marginalization and political suppression. As art historian Michael Sullivan summarizes, “Their sufferings, which did not end till well after the death of Mao, … left a scar on Chinese cultural life that it will take a generation to heal.”11 The healing of China’s cultural life certainly took a few decades. Even after economic liberalization after 1978, art itself was largely frowned upon as a bourgeois hobby in postsocialist China. How did China’s art market revitalize and regain global prominence despite decades of totalitarian rule? This question is the main research focus of this book. I attempt to tell the story of how an art market has been created in a country with deep authoritarian traditions by drawing from theories of institutionalism and entrepreneurship. How China’s art market rose phoenix-like from the ashes is a very complex story about interplaying forces of government regulations, market mechanisms, and individual entrepreneurship. From the 1940s to the late 1970s, like many other forms of nongovernmental forces, artistic creation has been suppressed under the Maoist regime. After 1978, a gradualist market transition from a centrally planned Soviet-type economy has

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loosened the soil for the re-emergence and trading of diverse art forms. The growth of privately owned businesses and the relaxed social control over the use of urban space slowly led to artists’ “colonies” and new markets for art in urban centers, including Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou.12 On the global scene, the “going abroad fever” (chuguo re 出国热) since the early 1990s gave Chinese artists greater exposure to the global art world. By then, they were no longer looking to the Communist Party or the regime as their only patron; “instead, many seek the attention of collectors in Tokyo, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Paris, New York, or Los Angeles. Even some official artists find national exhibitions uninteresting; their goal is to exhibit abroad.”13 Chinese artists gradually learned the ropes of navigating the art market. As Chinese art critic Gao Minglu (高名潞) wrote in 1998, money became an unavoidable issue,14 and many artists left China to create a “third space” known as post-Orientalism.15 For over a decade, I have personally associated with artists and collectors in China through a family-run art business. While noticing interesting happenings such as handsome investment returns, the lack of transparency at auction houses, and the proliferation of counterfeit artworks, I marvel at how these fascinating specimens of China’s social change were only occasionally reported by foreign media. Even these English publications focus on only a few names, such as Ai Weiwei (艾未未), at the risk of oversimplifying narratives in the massive field of diverse Chinese artistic creation. Existing literature on China’s art market tends to specialize in two opposing directions. The first kind of aesthetic and philosophical approach by art historians focuses mainly on artists and critics, with only brief engagement with social and historical contexts. Furthermore, a historical examination of the most transformative period for China’s art market after the mid 2000s has been lacking.16 Second, recent research often explores this topic through a disciplinary approach in economics or business.17 Its quantitative approach to China’s art market by economists and policymakers tend to focus on pricing, ranking, and sales numbers. Private equity firms and researchers come up with indexes and financial tools—such as the Knights Frank Luxury Investment Index and the Fine Art Fund—to guide the decision-making of art investors.18 Between these two dominant approaches is a huge knowledge gap, which requires interdisciplinary research. This book uses historical, institutionalist, and interdisciplinary approaches to examine how Chinese

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politics, marketization, cultural practices, and global exchanges together shape the trajectory of China’s art market. It seeks to connect broader structural changes to the experiences of ordinary people in the course of these changes.19 In comparison to Western art economies, where political regulations and cultural censorship generally do not interfere with the market, the sophisticated social context in China, one that remains politically conditioned by an official communism and state-directed marketization, calls for an interdisciplinary approach to the topic. But the lack of systematic data on China’s art market has made this task difficult. This is the main reason why I chose a social history approach to present and process art trading– related materials that are available in both English and Chinese sources. These documents include 180 print publications in Chinese, 58 print publications in English, and over 300 online publications. Some Chineselanguage publications have been made possible since 2017. For example, global art news organizations such as Artprice and Artnet have developed their Chinese media content platforms.20 China’s own brands of art news and consultancy services are also maturing. One example is Artron.Net (yachang yishuwang 雅昌艺术网), the nation’s largest art data service.21

From Regional Entrepreneurship to Global Impact The decade after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (2001) coincided with a phase of expansion in the global art industry.22 Economic growth prepared the conditions for cultural entrepreneurship in China’s art world. Some scholars claim that during the years between 1999 and 2008, contemporary Chinese art has passed through a “new context of globalization.”23 The state of China’s art market in this decade or so became one of hopeful excitement as well as frenzied confusion. Its evolution includes the following key milestones, ranging from an updated post-­ WTO cultural guideline to international engagement, greater openness toward the global art economy, and the financialization of the arts. • In 2002 (and again in 2005), the state officially promulgated “cultural industries” (wenhua chanye 文化产业) as a national policy. Experts from leading public institutions promoted a subtle shift in language “from ‘Made in China’ (中国制造) to ‘Created in China’ (中国创造),” one of the important national goals of China’s economic development in the twenty-first century.24

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• In 2003, the first large-scale exhibition of contemporary Chinese art was held in France at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, also organized in association with the Chinese government. • In 2007, one of the largest auction houses, Christie’s, set up a permanent auction site in Shanghai. By 2017, the global art market had revolved around the two major auction markets: New York (with a share of 30.8 percent) and China (accounting for 37.3 percent).25 • In 2009, by launching the Shenzhen Cultural Assets and Equity Exchange, China had a breakthrough for the formal financialization of art. • Also in 2009, China’s State Council decreed that the nation was to build 3500 museums in the next five years.26 It officially elevated the art economy by calling it a “pillar industry.”27 The Economist counted 3866 museums at the end of 2012, citing An Laishun, vice president of the China Museums Association.28 • In 2011, some 33 percent of the global fine-art sales were made in China, which increased to about 50 percent in 2014.29 • In 2012, a Beijing-based art publication, China Pictorial, referred to the increased art exchanges as “A Blooming Cultural Decade” and lauded China’s rediscovery of “soft power.”30 • By 2013, China had over 350 auction houses. In less than a decade, China’s domestic auction revenues have soared by 900 percent, totaling USD 8.9 billion in the latter year, compared to the United States’ USD 8.1 billion (though China’s 2012 total was later subject to downward revision). • Also around 2013, over 20 reality-TV programs featured people collecting Chinese art relics and offering tips on identifying and collecting Chinese art and antiques. Art collecting has become a new form of reserve currency, “quickened by popular distrust of the Chinese stock market and a slowdown in the mainland housing boom.”31 • Since 2013, art institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have shown their first major exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art. At the Venice Biennale (Italy), almost 350 Chinese artists were featured. • By 2019, the financialization of art has increasingly become “a broader trend of development,” according to Chinese art researchers.32 Experts have also compiled textbooks for a fledging doctoral program on this subject at some higher education institutions.33

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Because China’s art market has traveled an unusual path, its development supplies researchers with abundant anomalies. One needs to know that even in a mature market economy, anomalies often exist because the market for art has some inherent structures (such as the primary and secondary markets) that often revolve around multiple layers of production and distribution, and transparency has always been lacking. Because the developmental trajectory of China’s art market demonstrates the same compressed energy as the nation’s economic rise and hyperurbanization, it is bound to have “bubbles.” Globally, researchers find that short-term speculation on contemporary works of art are inevitable.34 A related issue, for example, is art forgery. More often than not, conversations around the monetary returns of Chinese art quickly shift to a central question about whether the artworks are fakes. The proliferation of forged art has undermined public trust in the professionalism of many institutions. For instance, in 2010, an oil painting attributed to the twentieth-­century Chinese artist Xu Beihong 徐悲鸿 was sold at auction for more than USD 10 million. Later, it was discovered to have been produced by Xu’s student 30 years after the artist’s death.35 Although auction houses in China have been hailed as success stories, observers soon learned about persistent nonpayment and forgeries. Lastly, the market has also become inflated through official corruption.36 In fact, bribery through art is so rampant that the Chinese coined the term “yahui” (elegant bribery 雅贿). Since 2012, Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaigns have caused market fluctuations. Below are a few examples of these market anomalies: • Between 2008 and 2011, the government has canceled or suspended the licenses of 150 auction houses for a variety of problems, including the sale of fake items.37 • In 2009, authorities in the city of Chongqing arrested the deputy police chief, Wen Qiang 文强, who hoarded luxury items received as bribes, including a collection of 100 pieces of art. • According to China News and Finance and Investment News, the proportion of fake paintings to sales was nearly 80 percent in 2011. Art China even called 2011 the “year of fake works.”38 • In 2013, a six-month review by the New York Times found that many of the sales—transactions reported to have produced as much as a third of the country’s auction revenue in recent years—did not actually take place.39

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• In 2016, the global art market declined for a number of reasons, including weak sales in China due to Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaigns.40 • In 2018, police in China made a number of high-profile arrests over fake artworks, attributed to Chinese masters, that were sold through auction houses there.41 In response to chaos in the local market and challenges on the global stage, Chinese artists and critics are actively reflecting on new issues. Admitting that “the government and the market worked together to control the ecology of art within China,” some critics also add that “the unspoken rules of market and government in China are different from those of the Western art ecology.”42 A logic of Chinese exceptionalism tends to fill the gaps in such explanations. Other critics lament that the “spiritual modernity of Chinese contemporary art, as well as the innocence of the artists who make it, has diminished in the face of politics, capitalism and industrialization.”43 The result is a “lack of integrity in relation to the making and showing of art.”44 Because China had been closed to the outside world for a few decades before 1978, the Western understanding of the trajectory of anything Chinese has been hampered by its propensity to rely on a Western frame of reference. Chinese artists themselves have also found it challenging to make sense of a wide array of art practices imported from the West. But over the next two decades, as China’s economic openness progressed, the exchanges between China and the West by entrepreneurial artists and other stakeholders have facilitated the restoration of an art market infrastructure. The global, political, economic, and social structural changes entail how we understand this history.

Institutional Change and Cultural Entrepreneurship Far from presenting a comprehensive history, this book examines the multilevel social structures that reshape China’s art market, including politics, economics, cultural trends, and globalization. The writing of this book is also prompted by an interest in the social behaviors among key stakeholders, including individuals and institutions, in China’s art world. As one art historian describes, “Art is a provocation for many forms of social

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behavior, from the primitive to the sublime.”45 Indeed, artistic creations are mirrors of social relationships in a quickly changing society where people’s social identities are being recrafted. In the 2012 book Contemporary Art in 21st Century China, art historian Lü Peng 吕鹏 of China’s Art Academy classified the art ecology in China into three themes: ideological control, artistic space, and market mechanisms.46 Because the arts have historical, economic, and cultural value and because the character of the art world has been formed through these same forces, the study of China’s art market needs to consider these same dimensions. Institutions are formal and informal social structures that have played regulative roles in social life. According to economic historian and Nobel Prize laureate Douglass North, they are “humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interactions,” consisting of “both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, tradition, and codes of conduct) and formal rules (constitutions, laws, and property rights).”47 Changes in these binding rules and norms are known as institutional changes. This concept provides a framework for exploring multiple dimensions of social reality, especially in an economy where the informal sector plays a big role. The phase that sprang from an informal existence in the 1980s and 1990s preceded the clarification of formal rules and institutions. China has had a naturally evolving art market since the imperial era. The Republic of China saw colonial cultural influences taking roots in treaty ports, facilitating the expansion of the secondary art market. Since the founding of the Communist regime, a wave of postcolonial nationalization encapsulated China’s art market into a central planning economy, which provided stability for art production but stifled creativity and autonomy. In subsequent gradual reforms (1979–1992), a trend of informal marketization connected art producers directly with consumers through new pricing mechanisms. From 1992 to 2004, the disintegration of the central planning economy and incremental globalization revitalized the private economy, providing artists with a growing base of consumers, both domestic and international. In both these historical phases, Chinese artists were the cultural entrepreneurs. Assisted by a booming private economy, they came up with self-institutionalizing art practices that organized art exhibitions, lectures, screenings, conversations, one-night events, and publications in experimental, laboratory-like spaces. These self-­ institutionalizing activities are important aspects of “cultural entrepreneurship” that enabled participants in China’s art market to have greater agency.

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The next two decades saw a top-down response to the successful building of a bottom-up spontaneous order in China’s art world. The reinstitution of private property rights in 2004 ushered in an accelerated consumerism, and the rise of the middle class paved the way for the growth of creative industries. The developmentalism of the Chinese state encouraged local governments to compete in this area, giving rise to a revived art scene across the nation. These mutually reinforcing processes helped prepare Chinese art to occupy a significant place on the global stage, where Chinese collectors bid in an international art economy. Political Change What makes the history of China’s art market fascinating also includes how it is affected by geopolitics. Unlike the West, whose small and insular art world is hardly affected by politics, China’s art market has been in a delicate dance with geopolitical forces that sometimes take a firm lead.48 Historical transitions of decolonization, nationalism, neoliberalism, and developmentalism provide the backdrop of the art story. Although markets have been around as long as history, the economy for art has experienced a truncation in China because of communist revolutions since 1949. Chinese politics have determinedly reshaped the fate of artists and their works. As Chinese art critic Liu Yuedi 刘悦笛 argues, “one important theme in Chinese art history is the relationship between individuals and the nation-state.”49 US art historian Laurie Adams also summarized the political scenario: “In China, artists have not only the venerable tradition of their own past art to deal with but also the political present, which is rather changeable, and defying authority can have serious consequences. This state of affairs intensifies the anxiety of influence and shrinks the artist’s creative space.”50 China’s political culture demanded conformity and dictated artistic creation. For example, for three decades after 1949, several generations of Chinese artists were trained to treat Soviet socialist realism as the current mode. Soviet-style art education heralded the end of the “commercial art market … and private patronage.”51 In Soviet schools, traditional Chinese painting was condemned as a remnant of feudalism. Prominent Chinese artists gave in to the trend of adapting the Soviet style. For instance, in 1959, Fu Baoshi 傅抱石 and Guan Shanyue 关山月 painted a huge political picture in traditional Chinese ink and colors on paper for the Great Hall of the People. Entitled This Land So Rich in

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Beauty, the work was a backdrop for political meetings and depicted a snow-covered landscape with a red sun—the symbol of Mao’s rise to power. Superimposed on the surface of the painting was a poem in calligraphy that Mao had written, “Ode to Snow,” which was the inspiration for the image.52 Politics was now the dominant force in the Chinese art world. The Cultural Revolution since 1966 pushed artistic conformity even further. It “consolidated Maoist artistic trends, creating a visual legacy that survived even after its political policies had been reversed.”53 Even today, scholars still observe “ostensible material contradictions of and ideological conflicts between a commitment to ‘free enterprise’ on the one hand and a political state still nominally faithful to a communist path on the other.”54 Such contradictory elements “pervade the official, institutional discourse of China’s art and design higher education and research, as in other academic areas.”55 The 1980s became a decade of cultural intoxication for a younger generation of educated Chinese as they freely embraced all things Western. The normalization of a China–US relationship led to exchanges between Chinese artists and the outside world. For example, by the mid 1980s, around 200 young Chinese artists were studying in the United States.56 Chinese artists were approaching foreign art with the same mixture of curiosity and enthusiasm as that shown by liberal-minded Chinese intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. As Michael Sullivan describes, “the atmosphere for art in the post-Mao era has been reminiscent of that of sixty years earlier, when eager young men and women flocked to Paris, some to get caught up in movements they barely understood. The same issues are being debated once more: the nature of beauty, the duty of the artist to the society, how foreign styles can meet China’s needs, and questions of individualism and abstraction.”57 Since then, the global art market has begun making inroads into China. The art community was revived for a short while, only to be greeted with another political trauma in 1989. The Tiananmen incident brought a chill to China’s art world. Despite pressure from the government, however, few artists were persuaded to “support a return to leftist cultural policy.”58 Many left China for other countries. Artists who remained in China withdrew into their private realms, creating a space of social isolation where they relied on small circles of trusted friends for the distribution and approval of their artworks. These informal practices nurtured the late-­1980s New Wave and the subsequent flourishing of new art forms, such as photography, video, performance, and installation art, in the

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1990s. Although Chinese art moved in another direction, the breaking away from centralized political uniformity, planned economy, and cultural hegemony largely determined the development of Chinese contemporary-­ art practice during this period. Daniel Herwitz describes a “post-­ postcolonial condition of life”: Contemporary art is largely post-nationalist: it is no longer concerned with articulating a long arc of history for the new nation. With globalized art markets, international, style-speak, and high levels of profiling and marketing, the past has again become recessive, returning to its state of being the long ago and far away, central as a source of tradition to be sure, but also alienated from the texture of contemporary implications for the retrieval of the past.59

Within a decade or so, more and more Chinese artists were able to earn independent sources of income outside of the state-run system of art institutions. Since the new millennium, artists have enjoyed a greater range of domestic venues when more physical space opened up through the private economy. Their successes in the international realm led to a different outlook from local government officials.60 But like other market sectors, China’s contemporary-art market is mired in contradictions. For example, by withholding export taxes, local governments created incentives for international art buyers to invest. However, restrictions policing the cultural realm continued. As a result, not until 2005 were international auction houses allowed to operate in mainland China.61 The influence of politics also includes geopolitical history in a globalized context. For example, today, Chinese collectors’ patriotic purchases of ancient Chinese antiques (such as Yuanmingyuan artifacts), apart from their aesthetic sensitivities toward these arts, have to do with the traumatic history of foreign powers that invaded China. Artists and collectors continue to live in the shifting tensions between China and the West, especially the United States. The most recent example is the US–China trade war in 2019, which led to increased tariffs put on artworks effective starting September 1, 2019. The United States put a further 10 percent duty on Chinese artworks and antiques. In response, China placed a 5 percent to 10 percent higher tariff on most artworks from other countries, effective starting December 15 of the same year.62 These changes and the later COVID-19 pandemic have dramatically shifted the parameters of a previously golden era for global art exchange.

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Economic Mechanisms Only a decade after Deng’s full-on market policies did China’s art market flourish. This recovery arose because China’s economic reconstruction under its official communism had an inherent logic that centered on ending private property rights. The informal economic structures in the private sector provided possibilities for Chinese artists and dealers. As some scholars argue, “it is less ideology than opportunism that informs Chinese cultural policy.”63 A social history of China’s art market also needs to consider economic fluctuations. For example, in the early 1990s, with the booming “tiger” economies, the strength of Japan, and the growth of wealth in China, the rest of the world’s gaze was on Asia. Art bureaucracies followed. Exhibitions as well as curatorial, artistic, teaching, publishing, and other events engaged more closely with Asia. Then the 1997 economic crash occurred; this crash more broadly affected the surge of interest in Asia. However, China’s economic integration into the world has not slowed down. Neoliberal economic theories and institutions were welcomed by Chinese economists and policymakers. Pragmatism prioritized technological innovation and its opportunities for an aspiring nation-state like China to generate new wealth and societal development. Meanwhile, interruptive calamities, including the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak and global terrorism, to some extent dampened general confidence in exploring Asian cultures. Economic historian John McMillan claims that the “strength of markets lies in their adaptability, their restless reinvention.”64 Nowhere is this description more applicable than in China’s art market. According to art historians, “as private property was nationalized, the art market almost disappeared” between 1949 and 1952, and “many wealthy collectors and patrons fled abroad.”65 Within five decades, the removal of private property rights in the 1950s and their reinstitution in 2004 have paralleled the death and the resurgence of China’s art market. Private property rights have been central for the art world to perish or flourish, a story that has been embedded in the grand narrative of China’s economic liberalization under its official communism. In the process of market transition, direct producers gain property rights over their products through the market link between producer and consumer. Thus, market power over resources increased compared to the state’s redistributive power. The market also provided incentives to artists who found opportunities to exhibit and transact artworks.

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Market transition creates alternatives to state power so that entrepreneurship becomes a key variable of wealth accumulation. In today’s China, art collecting is also intended primarily to signal wealth and status. An important aspect of research on China’s art market is to apply a lens of social stratification to the wealthy class. According to economists, “as a luxury good, relative art demand is an increasing function of wealth.”66 Some researchers constructed a long-term art price index on the basis of London sales from 1830 to 2007 by running comovement regressions and a cointegration analysis of this index in relation to British stock price returns during the same time. These economists found that because art has been “an instrument of social competition among the rich,” the income of the wealthy (or high net worth individuals, HNWI) is a key factor in the price formation in the art market.67 Because art is a durable consumption good and an investment tool, the art market is often considered a barometer of current and evolutive economic trends.68 The symbolic value of these works of art is decided not just by the artists but also by the dealers, curators, critics, and collectors who support and market the artworks. These trendsetters are cultural entrepreneurs who help define and shift the patterns of taste. As Michael St. Clair writes, “Tastemakers, or trendsetters, are people whose judgment and astute sense of fashion enable them to move confidently away from traditional paths of taste and create a new main road that other people will follow.”69 Local political economies matter in China. China’s major cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, have spearheaded trends in the national art market. For example, the success of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale would not have been possible without the sponsorship of its local government. By then, economic development had become some kind of ideology and guiding principle, and “administrators in the mayor’s office realized that art could convey a positive image of Shanghai’s openness and cosmopolitan attitudes—and of its potential to become Asia’s next global city.”70 Along the same logic, in 2005, the Chinese Ministry of Culture 文化部 established an official Chinese pavilion in Venice. The 2005 and 2007 exhibitions were curated by overseas Chinese. The rise of art markets in China and India in the 2000s was preceded by growing local economies of producers, collectors, and museums. Neoliberalism has replaced colonialism. Regional art markets are looking for new products around the world. Art dealers live in the global hunt for the new, the latest, and the unusual. By reinstituting private property rights into the Chinese Constitution in 2004, China effectively switched to a fast track of state-run capitalism

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that legally guaranteed the accumulation of wealth. This system became a major aspiration for the Chinese. While access to political influence was still highly prized, economic incentives became primary motivators. The “get rich first” (先富起来) mentality was referred to as a “new market ideology” that continues to guide social life. Moreover, since the mid 2000s, a housing market boom has essentially created consumer needs for decorative art. Middle-class income earners also maintained a stable consumer market and population base for China’s cultural consumption. As art critic Huang Du writes, “Everything is commercialized and consumed in the name of art. In this way, art has become a ‘stock market’ and ‘vanity fair.’ [Thus] … the confrontation between the previous avant-garde art and political ideology has been replaced by the alliance of contemporary art and commerce.”71 It was also for this reason that China’s nouveau riche (xinfu 新富 or tuhao 土豪 in Chinese) gained unprecedented confidence and ventured into the global art hunt. The intense enthusiasm in the market for Chinese art can be compared to the “stock market fever” of the early 1990s. The New York Times vividly captures this change: China’s new rich have set out to collect the very best the world has to offer: homes, wines, cars and, with a special passion, Chinese art. They joust with one another at auction houses, where the fevered bidding has driven up prices to the point that some jades, ceramics, calligraphy and paintings now fetch huge sums. In 2011, for instance, a Ming dynasty vase sold for $140 million at an auction in Macau. Partly because of these free-spending bidders, China now possesses the second-largest art market in the world, after the United States.72

Tracing how this factor plays out in China’s art market requires bridging economic history with consumer behavior research in China. Scholars who study the art market have considered it a “symbolic economy,” where the transaction of artifacts embody certain cultural worth and meanings.73 In some social circles, the purchase and possession of art reflects a kind of status anxiety. This is certainly true for China’s nouveau riche, whose behaviors in hunting for the best of the global art manifest what Veblen theorizes about conspicuous consumption.74

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Cultural Landscape Members of China’s art market, including artists, critics, dealers, and collectors had to navigate the market while maintaining their connection to Chinese tradition and the unique Chinese character of the arts. The cultural meanings and significance of Chinese art remain central to this economy. Artists and collectors inhabit a cultural field with a rich range of symbols and rituals that make up a Chinese cultural identity. Artistic creation and appreciation also rely on having access to China’s past. Scholars note that even today, Chinese artists do not want to put the material past behind them. They favor the use of gunpowder, incense, bronze, and Chinese characters. These materials “carry with them the memory of their presence in ancient China.”75 Sometimes, the workings of tradition, politics, and the market clash with such expressions. Thus, traditional culture, political culture, and commercial culture concertedly reshape the making and trading of artworks. In response, artists and other participants engage in bottom-up creative processes. Art making in the Chinese context is sometimes a response to cultural traumas. As sociologist Jeffrey C.  Alexander explains, “Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks on their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in a fundamental and irrevocable ways.”76 In such instances, trauma is often the result of a shattered collective identity.77 For the Chinese, traumatic experiences from Communist campaigns linger in a suppressed shared memory and collective identity. For most artists, today’s art world has become a “Darwinian jungle” where “talent makes way for cunning and vision bows before cynicism.”78 And as Marjorie Garber writes, “artwork and artists are part of a market economy, as well as of a libidinal economy”79 where there is a constant drive for recovering memory and identity. More-recent cultural shifts since the 2000s include materialism, urbanism, and censorship. As Ming Cheung summarizes, “Chinese artists are adopting diversified media forms and artistic/design characteristics as timeless fantasies within the context of crude economic expansionism, urban transformation and censorship politics.”80 Take urbanism as an example. General trends in contemporary Chinese art, including its institutional structure and speed, have much to do with the rapid transformation of Chinese cities.81 Hence, China has seen a proliferation of art colonies in many urban centers since the late 1990s. Notable ones include

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the 798 Art Zone, Songzhuang, and Black Bridge in Beijing, where hypergentrification happened under the combined forces of government regulations and the market.82 Demolition has been a major theme. Chinese art critic Zhu He claims that “the history of Chinese contemporary art is a history of demolitions of art zones.”83 Rapid changes in urban planning also became laboratories for young Chinese artists. As Jia Jiehong points out, “art must confront and respond to the rapid change and creative forces of urban life in China.”84 Megacities such as Shanghai have become experimental sites for futuristic designs created through rapid urban restructuring. The visuality of success and grandeur merges into the new social identity of China’s middle class and nouveau riche, who are learning to enjoy some essential ingredients of a bourgeois lifestyle, including brand-name shopping outlets, art galleries, and luxuriously decorated clubhouses. A new relationship between urban space and art has come into being. The buying and the selling of Chinese art are embedded in a dominant consumer culture. Fine artworks are considered luxury goods just as brand-name bags and jewelry are. This trend came after the frantic trend of buying apartments and automobiles that started in the mid 2000s.85 Behind all these activities is the reality that a new consumerism has become a popular ideology in China. As Lianne Yu summarizes, the “compressed nature of China’s consumer revolution, as well as the contextually unique circumstances of such changes, led to consumer behaviors and expectations that do not necessarily follow the patterns of other developed markets.”86 Art consumers fall into a few subgroups: buyers for personal or corporate furnishing purposes, collectors, speculators, and brokers. As researchers point out, “collecting creates the market, and collectors are the final recipients of the market.”87 It is widely reckoned that the Chinese consumer experience is a unique one that deserves to be explored. For example, unlike other countries, where luxury goods are purchased mostly by the ultrarich, in China, they are consumed by those with average urban professional incomes. A 2012 survey suggested, for instance, that 44 percent of all luxury goods sold in Britain were bought by Chinese visitors with average incomes.88 This again circles back to the need for status through conspicuous consumption. Like luxury goods, works of art satisfy a desire to be compensated for the lack of liberty during China’s past decades. Audrey Wang describes this in terms of social psychology:

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After a generation of restraint from acquiring cultural knowledge and artefacts, the newly rich are fervently collecting art and other heritage items. There seems to be a race to make up for time lost during the hundred years or so, when China was mired in unrest, through foreign threat or extreme political agendas that have limited the attainment of cultural enhancement. … After thirty years of not being able to buy or even appreciate art, the sudden ability to buy and collect is a heady drill for Chinese art-lovers.89

But even the awareness of art consumption as a new fashionable trend among China’s nouveau riche was largely imported: “As Chinese art becomes more accepted in the West, demand for it grows in China.”90 Demand in China has been patiently cultivated over a number of years by dealers and auction houses and by governmental institutions such as the British Council and France’s Ministry of Culture.91 Western auction houses, in China and elsewhere, have cleverly nurtured demand by positioning art with luxury goods and urbane lifestyle. Nowadays, for some wealthy collectors in China, art has even become a kind of alternative religion. Words and phrases such as “belief,” “devotion,” and “spiritual inspiration” often come up in their conversations as they describe their collecting behavior. In fact, a quasireligious function of Chinese art was present even during the Communist regime. Chinese artists have always been asked to carry out an agenda of “this-worldly salvation.” For example, in 1917, Chinese educator Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 came up with a theory of “substituting aesthetic education for religion.”92 Artists as a subgroup of Chinese intellectuals considered themselves high priests of the nation who could enlighten the masses and bring about China’s national salvation from either feudalism or colonialism. The central theme was “Chinese art for the sake of China.”93 Today, the art market is also sometimes referred to as “an economy of belief” because after all “art is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.”94 The expression of “priceless” thus becomes a devotional metaphor. And because the art world relies on a fervent kind of sociality, going to art events and meeting other collectors also generate a sense of community around a shared allegiance to something greater than themselves. Enthusiastic Chinese collectors now go to galleries with the same type of enthusiasm as that of some Westerners who go to church. The same feverish phenomenon happened to Chinese consumers who zealously assembled in stock market exchange halls (the 1990s) and in real estate offices (the 2000s).95

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The role of China’s art market in its cultural landscape continues to be impacted by global trends. As US scholar Jonathan Harris writes, “The global art world system as a whole, then, and global Asia’s sector of it, is always bordering on precariousness—as are globalization processes as a whole.”96 The most recent crisis was the COVID-19 pandemic, during which major museums were closed and art events canceled, including the 2020 Hong Kong Basel, Art Central 2020, and the 2020 JingArt in Beijing. For the first half of 2020, these changes have negatively affected the whole art industry in Asia.97 Nevertheless, a new trend of global digitalization has taken off, where over 2000 virtual exhibits and around 1300 museums have launched events online.98 Early experimenters with and participators in the digitalization of China’s art market were rewarded with larger audience bases. In sum, relaxed ideological control over artistic expressions, a progressive improvement in the financial infrastructure, a global exchange of artists, an increase of wealth, a new means of communication, and a vibrant consumer society all contributed to the growth in China’s art market.

Organization of the Book This book seeks to reconstruct a history of China’s art market through the lenses of institutional change and cultural entrepreneurship. It refrains from searching for Western “influence” in the field of Chinese art because, as historian Paul Cohen critiques, scholarship about modern China has been dominated by this “impact–response” paradigm.99 This volume also offers a rebuttal to the stereotypical view of China’s cultural tradition as normatively dogmatic, inflexible, or servile. Instead, the research for this book relies on much Chinese-language literature about China’s art market while also exhausting past literature in the English-speaking world. In recent years, major Western media have covered a range of phenomena from surging sales and diversity to counterfeit and official corruption. But as historian Richard C. Kraus once wrote, “Western recognition of the reformation of China’s cultural life has been obscured by ignorance, ideological barriers, and foreign-policy rivalry.”100 Art historian Martin J. Powers also pointed out in 2016 that US scholarship often gives in to some “Cold War devices” that characterize the Chinese as lacking individuality and agency because they labored under a “despotic, oriental regime.”101 Vast numbers of texts by Chinese art critics and educators who wrote historical volumes documenting their experiences have scarcely

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been used by English-speaking researchers. Innumerable art catalogs, yearbooks, magazines, and other publications in the Chinese language have proliferated over the past two decades.102 Covering a wide variety of topics, these contents touch the pulse of the ongoing evolution of China’s art market. With regard to what kinds of Chinese artworks are examined in this volume, I focus on transactional artifacts of Chinese visual art (such as painting, calligraphy, porcelain, and other decorative arts) rather than “art” in a full spectrum. Traditional forms of art still account for a dominant share in China’s art market. For example, in 2011, calligraphic works accounted for a huge 88 percent of all Chinese fine-art sales at all auctions in China.103 By “art market,” I mean the social locations where these activities happen, including the displaying, buying, and selling through individuals, dealers, and auction houses. By covering major market segments, this book focuses on the entrepreneurial breakthroughs that have occurred since the 1980s, particularly in the 2010s, a significant period that no other scholarly works have yet analyzed. On the basis of the developmental phases of China’s art market, the main chapters of this book follow a chronological order, covering six historical phases of China’s art market: (1) primitive forms of art trading before 1949 and the politicization of art from the 1950s to the 1970s, (2) the self-institutionalization of artists and the re-emergence of informal art trading in the 1980s, (3) the revitalization of the domestic art market and a new beginning of globalization thanks to the growth of the private sector in the 1990s, (4) a new trend in globalized art trading led by international auction houses and rising demand for art by urban consumers in the 2000s, (5) a wave of art market financialization and digitalization in the 2010s, and (6) new trends in adaptation, innovation, and diversity during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The last chapter concludes that the ongoing evolution of China’s art market is a product of multiple influences, including China’s integration into the global economy, cultural pluralism, the expansion of media and communication technology, a changing distribution of income, and so on. This book leaves out certain sectors of the creative industry, such as the performing arts and filmmaking. Important research volumes have already been written on these topics.104 This volume seeks readership in the community of art historians, cultural sociologists, social historians, economic sociologists, cultural historians, and similar scholars. Because it is also intended to be both academic and practical, its cultural and historical

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contextualization should also appeal to the general audience of dealers, collectors, auctioneers, and curators and to the artistic community at large. On one last note, the publication of this volume has been prolonged partly because of the continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic. By the time I completed the final round of revision, as requested by peer reviewers around late 2022, China’s zero-COVID policy has caused many disruptions to the art scene. For example, when art enthusiasts looked to Shanghai to become the pioneering city in the international art market in November of 2022, its ART021 and West Bund were forced to close after just days of opening.105 Although the central government reversed its COVID policies in late December of 2022, the impact of this prolonged public health challenge on the trajectory of the Chinese art market has yet to be evaluated.

Notes 1. Ibid. 2. Clare McAndrew, The Art Market 2021: An Art Basel & USB Report, online publication, 102. The United States accounted for 29% and the United Kingdom 16%. 3. Clare McAndrew, The Art Market 2021: An Art Basel & USB Report, online publication, 177. 4. Titia Hulst (ed.), A History of the Western Art Market: A Sourcebook of Writings on Artists, Dealers, and Markets (University of California Press, 2017), 352. 5. Daniel Herwitz, Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 17. 6. Tom McNully, Art Market Research: A Guide to Methods and Sources (North Carolina: McFarland, 2014), 5. 7. The list includes Chinese artists such as Zhang Daqian (1899–1983), Qi Baishi (1864–1957), Xu Beihong (1895–1953), Wu Guanzhong (1919–2010), Fu Baoshi (1904–1957), and Li Keran (1907–1989). The fact that most of them are virtually unknown outside Asia is intriguing. 8. Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011), 322. 9. Audrey Wang, Chinese Antiquities: An Introduction to the Art Market (Lund Humphries, 2014), 10. 10. Curatorial Director of Lisson Gallery, speaking at the London gallery, Jan 20, 2017. Quoted in See Georgia Adam, Dark Side of the Boom: The Excess of the Art Market in the Twenty-first Century (Lund Humphries, 2017), 52.

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11. Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 190. Meishu 《美术》 resumed publication in 1976 after Mao’s death, but it took two more years before any discussion of foreign art was permitted. 12. Iain Robertson, Victoria L.  Tseng and Sonal Singh, “’Chindia’ as Art Market Opportunity,” in Iain Robertson (ed.), The Art Business (London: Routledge, 2008), 83–86. 13. Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the PRC, 1949–1979 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 404. 14. Gu Minglu (ed.), Inside Out: New Chinese Art, Catalogue and the Asia Society Galleries Exhibition, New  York (Sept. 14, 1998–Jan. 3, 1999) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Feb. 26–Jun. 1, 1999), 21–22. 15. The term refers to art created by Chinese artists residing outside of China. 16. See works by Michael Sullivan, such as Art and Artists of Twentieth-­ Century China (University of California Press, 1996), and The Arts of China (University of California Press, 1999); Modern Chinese Artists: A Biographical Dictionary (University of California Press, 2006). Also see Audrey Wang, Chinese Antiquities: An Introduction to the Art Market (Lund Humphries, 2014); David Adam Brubaker and Chunchen Wang, Jizi and His Art in Contemporary China (Springer, 2015); Paul Gladson, Deconstructing Contemporary Chinese Art: Selected Critical Writings and Conversations, 2007–2014 (Springer, 2015); Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, The China Collectors: America’s Century-Long Hunt for Asian Art Treasures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Craig Clunas, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences (Princeton University Press, 2017); Anne Gerritsen, The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2020). 17. Works that explore the financial functions of China’s art market include chapters in Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton University Press, 2011); Jonathan Harris, The Global Contemporary Art World (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2017). Works that emphasize the political aspect of China’s art market include Daniel Herwitz, Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011). Works by economists trying to understand “art worlds” are few, and none of them has studied China. See, for example, Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

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18. Most formal studies of the auction market have been limited in their use of auction data because galleries and auction houses intentionally leave no data trail for investigators. 19. Stearns, Peter N. “Social History Present and Future.” Journal of Social History. Volume: 37. Issue: 1. (2003). 20. Xi Mu, Annual Report of China’s Art Market, 2018–2019 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2020), 5. 21. After obtaining authorization for tens of thousands of Chinese artworks, Artron.Net also produced its eight lines of art derivative products. 22. As art historian Noah Horowitz summarizes, “The first decade of the new millennium witnessed one of the greatest booms in the history of the art market.” See Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton University Press, 2011), xiii. 23. Liu Yuedi, “Chinese Contemporary Art: From De-Chineseness to Re-Chineseness,” in Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Leiden: Brill,2011), 63. 24. “From ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China,’” People’s Daily, Feb 6, 2007. http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200702/06/eng20070206_ 347956.html. 25. Titia Hulst (ed.), A History of the Western Art Market: A Sourcebook of Writings on Artists, Dealers, and Markets (University of California Press, 2017), 352. 26. In 1949, China had 49 museums, many of which were vandalized during the Cultural Revolution. 27. The push to build museums was also motivated by the government’s stated desire to catch up with the West for the number of museums per capita. In 2012, Beijing released a ten-year cultural plan, aiming to have one museum for every 250,000 people by 2020. Many real estate tycoons began to build their own art collections and private museums, making it a trend among the nouveau riche. See Georgia Adam, Dark Side of the Boom: The Excess of the Art Market in the Twenty-first Century (Lund Humphries, 2017), 56. 28. “Mad about museums,” Economist, Jan 6, 2014, op. cit. 29. Robert B.  Ekelund, Jr., et  al, The Economics of American Art: Issues, Artists, and Market Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2017), 47. 30. Quoted in Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, The China Collectors: America’s Century-Long Hunt for Asian Art Treasures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 30. 31. Meyer and Brysac, The China Collectors, 446. 32. Xi Mu, China’s Art Market: Annual Research Report, 2018–2019 《中国 艺术品市场年度研究报告》(Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2019).

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33. Xi Mu (ed.), China’s Art Financialization Review 《中国艺术金融评论》 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2019). 34. Codignola Federica, The Art Market, Global Economy and Information Transparency, Symphonya. Emerging Issues in Management (www. unimib.it/symphonya), n. 2, 2003, pp. 73–93. 35. David Barboza, Graham Bowley and Amanda Cox, “Forging an Art Market in China,” New York Times, October 28, 2013. http://www. nytimes.com/projects/2013/china-­art-­fraud/index.html. 36. Elaborate bribery schemes usually feature government officials and businesspeople who make deals through auction institutions. If the schemes were discovered, claiming the artwork to be a fake would eliminate the risk of penalty. 37. David Barboza, Graham Bowley and Amanda Cox, “Forging an Art Market in China,” New York Times, October 28, 2013. http://www. nytimes.com/projects/2013/china-­art-­fraud/index.html. 38. http://www.chinanews.com/cul/2011/03-­25/2930211.shtml and https://stocknews.scol.com.cn/. 39. David Barboza, Graham Bowley and Amanda Cox, “Forging an Art Market in China,” New York Times, October 28, 2013. http://www. nytimes.com/projects/2013/china-­art-­fraud/index.html. 40. Georgia Adam, Dark Side of the Boom: The Excess of the Art Market in the Twenty-first Century (Lund Humphries, 2017), 9. Regarding the relationship between luxury goods sales and Xi’s campaign, see Elizabeth C. Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (Oxford University Press, 2018), 32; Senmiao Qiu, “The Price of China’s Anti-­corruption Campaign,” Waltham Economy of Asia Review, Oct 11, 2014. 41. Enid Tsui, “China Rises to No. 2 Art Market as Billionaires more than Double in 2017, closely watched report says,” South China Morning Post, March 14, 2018. https://www.scmp.com/culture/arts-­entertainment/article/2137 054/china-­rises-­no-­2-­art-­market-­billionaires-­more-­double-­2017. 42. Gao Minglu, “Changing Motivations of Chinese Contemporary Arts since the Mid-1990s,” Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vol. 11, No. 2&3 (2012): 209–221. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Michael Findlay, The Value of Art: Money, Power, Beauty (Prestel, 2012), 81. 46. Lü Peng, Contemporary Art in 21st Century China, 2000–2010 《中国当 代艺术史》 (Shanghai: Century Publishing Group, 2012). 47. Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 89.

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48. With authoritarian centralization and economic decentralization, Chinese politics observes important seasons when social stability is prioritized, ­creating fluctuations in regulatory policies. See, for example, Huihua Nie, Mingjie Jiang, and Xiaohong Wang, “The Impact of Political Cycle: Evidence from Coalmine Accidents in China,” Journal of Comparative Economics, 2013, vol. 41, issue 4, 995–1011. 49. Liu Yuedi, “Chinese Contemporary Art: From De-Chineseness to Re-Chineseness” in Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 68. 50. Laurie Adams, “Contemporary Art in China: ‘Anxiety of Influence’ and the Creative Triumph of Cai Guoqiang” in Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 47. 51. Ibid. 52. Clunas, 212–214. 53. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (University of California Press, 2012), 183. 54. Jonathan Harris, The Global Contemporary Art World (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 129. 55. Ibid. 56. Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, 191. 57. Ibid., 192. 58. Francesca dal Lago, “The Voice of the ‘Superfluous People’: Painting in China in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s,” in Writing on the Wall: Chinese New Realism and Avant-Garde in the Eighties and Nineties, edited by Cees Hendrikse (Rotterdam: Groninger Museum-Nai Publishers, 2008), 24. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (University of California Press, 2012), 257. 59. Daniel Herwitz, Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 149. 60. Paul Gladson, Deconstructing Contemporary Chinese Art: Selected Critical Writings and Conversations, 2007–2014 (Springer, 2015), 6. 61. Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton University Press, 2011), 322. 62. “2019 年度中国艺术市场大事件回顾,”《艺术市场通讯》, 2019 年12 月 17 日. http://artsncollections.com/index.php?r=post%2Fview&f=111& id=827. 63. Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, The China Collectors: America’s Century-Long Hunt for Asian Art Treasures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 29. 64. John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar: An Natural History of Markets (W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), x.

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65. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (University of California Press, 2012), 161. 66. Benjamin R.  Mandel, “Art as an Investment and Conspicuous Consumption Good,” American Economic Review, Vol. 99, No. 4 (2009): 1653–1663. 67. William N. Goetzmann, Luc Renneboog and Christophe Spaenjers, “Art and Money,” American Economic Review 101: 3 (2011), 222–226. 68. For example, see Codignola Federica, “The Art Market, Global Economy and Information Transparency,” conference paper, Emerging Issues in Management (www.unimib.it/symphonya), n. 2, 2003, pp. 73–93. 69. Michael St. Clair, The Great Chinese Art Transfer: How So Much of China’s Art Came to America (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016), 89. 70. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (University of California Press, 2012), 280. 71. Huang Du, “Status of Chinese Contemporary Art: The Transformation in Concept and Language” (transcript of talk given at “Asian Maps” seminar at ARCO Art Fair, Madrid, 2013): np. Quoted in Jonathan P. Harris, The Global Contemporary Art World, 136. 72. David Barboza and Jonah M. Kessel, “The New Collectors,” New York Times, December 17, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/ the-­new-­collectors/index.html. 73. Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), xii. French cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu also uses “the market for symbolic goods” when referring to the same structures. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. by Susan Emanuel (Stanford University Press, 1995), 142. 74. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). 75. Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi, Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), xxi. 76. Jeffrey C.  Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (Oxford University Press, 2003), 85. 77. Ibid., 93. 78. Alice Goldfarb Marquis, The Art Biz: The Covert World of Collectors, Dealers, Auction Houses, Museums, and Critics (Contemporary Books, 1991), 4. 79. Marjorie Garber, Patronizing the Arts (Princeton University Press, 2008), xi. 80. Ming Cheung, “Contemporary Chinese Art and the Dream of Globalisation,” Social Semiotics, 24:2 (2014): 225–242. 81. An art colony refers to a village, residential area, or district where artists and galleries are concentrated. See Meiqin Wang, “Power, Capital, and

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Artistic Freedom: Contemporary Chinese Art Communities and the City,” Cultural Studies, 26 July 2018, online publication, https://doi. org/10.1080/09502386.2018.1497675. 82. The East Village and SoHo area in New York city are well-known examples (Bowler & McBurney 1991, Zukin, 1989). Bowler, A.E. and McBurney, B., 1991. Gentrification and the avant-garde in New York’s East village: the good, the bad and the ugly. Theory, Culture & Society, 8, 49–77. 83. Zhu He, “Farewell, Heiqiao! Another Yuanmingyuan Gone?” (别了,黑 桥!又一个‘圆明园’散了?), Quake and Return: 2016 Annual Report on Chinese Contemporary Art (震荡与回归:2016年中国当代艺术年度报 告)，HiArt magazine, No. 001. (Beijing: Zhongxin Publishing Group, 2016), 55–59. 84. Jia Jiehong, “Chinese art outside the art space,” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Vol. 5, No. 2&3 (2018): 111–117. 85. Carolyn Cartier, “The Shanghai-Hong Kong Connection: fine jewelry consumption and the demand for diamonds” in David S. G. Goodman (ed.), The New Rich in China: Future Rulers, Present Lives (Routledge, 2008), 187. 86. Lianne Yu, Consumption in China: How China’s New Consumer Ideology is Shaping the Nation (Polity, 2014), 6. 87. Codignola Federica, The Art Market, Global Economy and Information Transparency, Symphonya. Emerging Issues in Management (www. unimib.it/symphonya), n. 2, 2003, pp. 73–93. 88. See Yuval Atsmon, et al., Luxury Without Borders: China’s New Class of Shoppers Take on the World (Mckinzie Consumer and Shopper Insights, 2012): 83. 89. Audrey Wang, Chinese Antiquities: An Introduction to the Art Market, 2014, 34, 153. 90. Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 250. 91. Ibid., 62. 92. Cai yuanpei, The Complete Works of Cai Yuanpei, Vol. 3 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Education Press, 1997), 58. 93. Liu Yuedi, “Chinese Contemporary Art: From De-Chineseness to Re-Chineseness” in Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 68. 94. Ibid., 11. 95. China’s market observers often use the notion of “fever” (re) as a thermometer metaphor to refer to a sudden but concentrated interest in certain consumer goods and services. Marketization has unleased great enthusiasm for buying and selling, and the focus is always shifting. So this

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notion has become an important and constant factor in Chinese consumer culture. Compared to fads in Western commercial culture, this phenomenon in China is highlighted because of population density and shifting regulating policies. 96. Jonathan Harris, The Global Contemporary Art World, 145. 97. “The Chinese Art Market under the Epidemic,” Insights, BBART, https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/126682067. 98. Ibid. According to an Impact Survey of COVID-19 on China’s Art Sector, 45.5% organizations and employees have shifted to virtual services. But the digital gap between state-owned art institutions and private museums is also enlarging. 99. This paradigm presumes that China’s history is best understood as a series of reactions to Western stimuli. Paul Cohen, 1984, 151. 100. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), vii. 101. Martin J.  Powers, “Introduction” in Martin J.  Powers and Katherine R.  Tsiang (eds.), A Companion to Chinese Art (John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 6. 102. Take Artron.Net as an example. It is now China’s premier art news group, which provides “comprehensive services to art institutions, collectors and art fanciers of China as well as the whole world through online media and value-added news.” See http://en.artron.net/about/aboutus.php. From 2000 to 2020, Artron.Net has over 100,000 entries categorized under nine sections. See “Art Market,” Artron.Net, https://news.artron. net/morenews/list728/. Founded in 2000, it now has over 2.8 million members, and its Chinese-language website has a daily average of 15 million visitors. See “About Us,” Artron.Net, https://www.artron.net/ aboutus/aboutus.php. 103. Jonathan Harris, The Global Contemporary Art World (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 46. 104. See Ying Zhu, Television in Post-Reform China: Serial Dramas, Confucian Leadership and the Global Television Market (New York: Routledge, 2008); Ying Zhu and Stanley Rosen (eds.), Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010). 105. Vivienne Chow, “Will China’s Zero Covid Policy Tank Its Art Market? The Abrupt Closure of Two Major Fairs in the Country Divides Opinions,” November 14, 2022, ArtNet News, www.news.artnet.com/ market/shanghai-­china-­2022-­2209553.

CHAPTER 2

China’s Art Market Before 1978

Because cultural goods communicate through a symbolic language, they tend to talk “about society and about an individual’s place within it.”1 Art making and trading as forms of conspicuous consumption in the Chinese society have continued throughout Chinese history. I do not claim that China only had an art market in the modern sense after 1978. In fact, as early as the Warring States period (475–221 BCE), merchants in China began to form a new class of art collectors. The ecology of an art market that consisted of all the fundamental parts, including art markers, collectors, sellers, dealers, consumers, and a market, emerged in the eighth century during the Tang dynasty (618–907).2 Around that time, paper- and silk-printing techniques developed, making paintings smaller in size and more easily transportable. During the Tang dynasty, imperial support for religions such as Buddhism also contributed to the flourishing of art across China. Along with this change came a newly risen class of professional art dealers who specialized in trading calligraphy and paintings. Connoisseurship services by Chinese literati also developed to aid in the growth of an active art market in major urban centers. Interlocking webs of artistic innovators and connoisseurship have flourished there since the tenth century. At around 1000 CE, a system of commissions patronized by the elite class came into being. During the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), when the printing technique became more advanced, art making and trading

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Ma, China’s Art Market since 1978, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34605-7_2

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also accelerated.3 Art historians consider artistic agency an important indicator for a regional art market to break free of royal hegemony. In China, this watershed moment occurred in the late eleventh century, when literati artists began to reject the standards of the court academy.4 Later, in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), China’s art market saw expansive growth, including the emergence of professional art dealers. Intermediaries in the ancient Chinese art market included connoisseurship, which existed in late sixteenth century. Art historian Craig Clunas has identified titles such as Eight Discourses on the Art of Living and Treatise on Superfluous Things as texts from that century.5 In those days, foreign travelers to China often failed to appreciate and comprehend the art forms of the Chinese, including calligraphy and painting. It was not until the seventeenth century, when Jesuits presented the first detailed account of Chinese art to Europeans, that the fame of Chinese art spread to Europe.6 Art historians point out that Chinese awareness of different forms of producing art began with the introduction of photographs of artwork from the West in the nineteenth century.7 In premodern China, art making, political authority, and religious rituals are closely associated. In the late imperial times, such as Ming and Qing, merchants collected art to practice a “literati lifestyle so as to enhance their cultural standing in society, at a time when literati both in and out of office maintained cultural hegemony.”8 Emperor Qianlong, for example, documented his daily art-making routines, such as poetry, painting, and calligraphy. As historian Patricia Berger comments, such “personal reverie” was ultimately publicized, revealing how kingly royalty practiced a quasi-religious ritual.9 The art forms favored by these important political figures became vested with powers of cultural hegemony. For a long time, China’s traditional system of art patronage was the bridge between the political elite and artisans. Sponsorship for art production has primarily been provided by imperial Chinese rulers, but many educated Chinese literati, particularly those from the Jiangnan region, also had their own art collections and patronized artists.10 Some palace eunuchs and elite women were also private art collectors.11 As Scarlett Jang writes, “the geographical distribution of private art collections closely followed the movement of the political, cultural, and economic centers, both the dynastic capitals and the commercial centers.”12 This art patronage system continued until the 1930s, until China entered into a state of warfare. Stylistically, the outside world has known Chinese art to be a distinct and valuable form since the nineteenth century.13 Among these forms was

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calligraphy, which has been regarded as a fine art form since the first century in China.14 As a symbol of good education and class, it helped distinguish one social status group from another. For most of China’s imperial phase, calligraphy was also a vehicle of political expression and government style among the intelligentsia.15 When the nation was not ruled by a hereditary aristocracy and the national bureaucracy relied heavily on written documents, skill in calligraphy writing became a critical criterion for selecting government personnel. Furthermore, some dynasties elevated a moral philosophy of calligraphy to be representative of one’s character on top of self-cultivation.16 As the “soul of Chinese art,” calligraphy has become an artistic language in mainstream Chinese aesthetics.17 Before the modern age, it has been the representative form of “indigenous mass art” in Chinese culture.18 Considered an art form that reveals the character of the calligrapher, it has enjoyed a highly moralized status and served as a symbol of moral capital. The imperial exam system that selected government officials to the state bureaucracy was based on one’s rote memory of classical texts by writing them out in well-trained calligraphic form. Hence, being able to practice good calligraphy was also closely associated with the potential of civil servants’ governmentality. Selected officials continued this art because it sustained their claims on moral authority. Thus, calligraphy essentially became a symbol of political power. Historian Richard C. Kraus comments that it has served as a “metaphor for the elite culture of imperial China.”19 Another scholar, Curtis L. Carter, writes that all throughout Chinese history, “public monuments typically feature calligraphy in the form of Chinese characters, instead of a figurative sculpture of a prominent political personage, as would normally be the case in the West.”20 To summarize, Chinese art existed as a measure of social as well as for political and religious distinction. The trading of art has yet to develop into a market in the modern sense, where most transactions have happened within close-­ knit social networks. Late imperial China saw the developments of both the primary and the secondary markets through a wave of globalization following the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860).21 Access to treaty ports were first granted to foreign diplomats and missionaries and later to merchants and art dealers. In 1874, China’s first auction house was founded in Shanghai by a British company, followed by other auction houses from France, Japan, and Denmark.22 But it was not until the late reign of the Guangxu Emperor (1871–1908) at the turn of the century that international

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auction rules (known as an open-outcry ascending dynamic auction) were introduced at Kui Chang Auction in the city of Tianjin.23 For a time, Tianjin became an art auction hub during the same period.

Imperial China and Globalization This wave of globalization brought progressive ideas to China from the West. Political figures also actively engaged with artistic genres as an issue about social progress. Late Qing reformers such as Kang Youwei 康有为 and Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 once advocated for radically changing the Chinese ink-­painting technique (or guohua 国画) by adding realism.24 The ability to critically engage in and reform Chinese art making was considered an expression of one’s political prowess. Chinese intellectuals held heated debates on three strategies that could facilitate the revitalization of Chinese art: continue the traditional ink-painting genre, adapt to modern realism or “scientific modeling” from the West, or use synthetical abstraction informed by Euro-American avant-gardes.25 The turn of the twentieth century saw imperial China’s awakening to a modernizing world: society had a common desire for innovation and progress, so in every field of endeavor, there were people proposing bold theories, from literature and philosophy to history and government, that gave rise to comprehensive and wide ranging debates. … Some people referred to it as a “renaissance,” … the cultural atmosphere was very similar to the period just before and after the May Fourth Cultural Movement when everyone was determined to undertake urgent reforms.26

In the 1920s, the Chinese Republican government supported cultural reforms. It even sponsored the first group of young Chinese artists to study in Europe. Western-trained artists such as Xu Beihong and Pan Yuliang 潘玉良 also gained nationwide fame. Xu Beihong (1895–1953) pioneered in synthesizing traditional Chinese painting with “a realism devoted to scientific truth.”27 In 1929, the Republican government launched a National Art Exhibition where Xu Beihong and the famous Chinese poet Xu Zhimo (徐志摩) debated the meaning of modern art.28 Notably, [t]he transformation of Chinese art from a “classical” or traditional style to a more “modern” form is attributed by art historians to the influence of

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Western missionaries, trade activities, and Chinese students returning from study overseas. The last group took up teaching positions within art schools and played a central role in establishment and development of formal art education in China.29

In historian Jane Zheng’s study of the Shanghai Art College in the 1930s, she comments on the flourishing art scene as a fruit of global exchange and a modern generation’s pursuit for a modern China: The major transition in twentieth-century Chinese art is believed not only to lie in the nature of the art itself, but also in the art world encompassing the majority of ordinary painters, without overseas educational background or political interests. The institutions … including magazines, museums, schools, dealers, and auction houses served the artists and their patrons, represented “modernity in its various guises.”30

In 1935, an exhibition was held in London to showcase China’s accomplishment in keeping up with the development of modern art. This constructive era opened up rich cross-cultural artistic dialogues between China and Europe. Within China, however, the market for Western-­ trained artists stagnated because of indigenous resistance to cultural colonialism and aesthetics. For example, a few artists, such as Lin Fengmian 林 风眠 (1900–1991) and Pan Yuliang (1895–1977), were influenced by Matisse, but China’s contemporary art market did not accept Western realism and nudist art.31 During this time, China also saw the rise of a dozen masters of traditional Chinese ink painting, such as Qi Baishi 齐白 石 (1864–1957), Zhang Daqian 张大千 (1899–1983), and Huang Binhong 黄宾虹 (1865–1955), who have achieved an unparalleled level of artistic sophistication.32 A century later, their artwork continues to enjoy the highest prices.

China’s Postcolonial Turn Under Soviet Influence: From Yan’an Forum to the Cultural Revolution Encroaching colonialism, political corruption, and rising social inequality since the 1920s and 1930s provided favorable conditions for the influence of Soviet communism to become popular among progressives in China. The decade between 1927 and 1937 was a golden age for China’s market economy and for finance to develop under the Republican government.

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Before radical politics under communism overwhelmed Chinese society, various private viewings of artworks still existed as forms of “elite sociability that prevailed between [literati] gentlemen for centuries.”33 International art exchanges were happening. For example, the first time that China allowed its treasured art to be loaned abroad was in 1935, during the International Exhibition of Chinese art in London.34 The earliest generation of Communist leaders was well versed in various art forms. And the growing communist movement also attracted artistic talent for its propaganda and content-creation teams. For example, the young Communist leader Mao Zedong had favored weaving politics and art together since before the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949). He was known to be a poet and calligrapher. In 1942, the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Arts (延安文艺座谈会) officiated Mao’s imposition of rules on artists and creative writers.35 First, all art forms should reflect the life of the working class and serve this same audience. Second, art should serve national politics and the advancement of socialism. Mao’s own speech during this forum became the main text of the later enshrined Little Red Book, a sacred text for Chinese communism.36 According to art historian Julia Andrews, the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Arts ushered in a paradigm shift: “Modernism, dimmed by the Japanese invasion of the late 1930s, was extinguished by communism. Since 1949, realistic oil painting has been fully integrated into the Chinese art world, an attainment that the Westernizers of the early twentieth century would probably have thought impossible.”37 The cultural politics of these developments in China are characterized by postcolonial impulses. The link between art making and nation building was getting stronger. Since the early years of Communist rule in Yan’an, certain art forms became marginalized and others were “made adjunct to movements concerning language reform and the Romanization of Chinese writing (pinyin),” a Communist campaign for national unity.38 Progressivism gave way to populism in the name of “the people.” As Craig Clunas writes, “with ‘the people’ replacing ‘the nation’ as the central enabling discourse of power and culture in the People’s Republic of China after 1949, even better were those works that could be demonstrated to be generated by ‘the people’ themselves.”39 With this transition came a reversal of international art exchange with the West as China gave in more and more to Soviet influence:

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certain forms of international engagement ceased, after 1949, and the flow of students to Paris and Tokyo dried up. … Apart from the increased contact with eastern Europe, there was an enhanced degree of exchange with the artistic circles of what was only then beginning to be called the Third World. The 1950s saw exhibitions from India, Indonesia, Chile, Egypt, and Mexico shown in Beijing. … after 1949 there was almost no scholarly interest in Western Europe or North America in China’s contemporary art.40

The new Communist state of China reinstitutionalized the art market by including more artists under its publicly funded umbrella while producing far less art and art with less variety. The overall goal was to “replace the vast market for unacceptable older types of art with mass distribution of new printed matter made to the Communist Party’s specifications.”41 The Yan’an system of communist propaganda art was promoted to the whole nation. As historian Michael Sullivan writes, “for a short time after 1949 the old Beaux-Arts training continued in the art schools. By 1953, however, the art schools had been ‘reformed,’ their ‘bourgeois’ directors replaced by hard-line wood-engravers trained in the revolutionary Yenan [Yan’an] Academy of Art.”42 Furthermore, as the coauthors of The Art of Modern China note, Developed with the utopian aim of making art available to everyone, the policy complemented the party’s suppression of elite forms of art that had dominated the pre-liberation Chinese art market. In practice, fine art was to be replaced by posters, comic books, and pictorial magazines, thus redistributing power, as defined by ownership of art, to the people. … Between 1949 and 1952, a systemic reform of old art was attempted, leaving only three categories of art approved by the national art establishment: new year’s pictures (nianhua), woodblock prints, and lianhuanhua. … Rejection of the privileged status of the original work of art was almost total: the collectability of art was of little concern, and the mass-produced reproductions of art images became far more significant than any material remnant of the artist’s own handiwork.43

From 1949 to 1955, with the establishment of a new national history, the new regime also quickly set up “a visual vocabulary of national symbols” by relying on the top foreign-trained artists and architects who “understood the conventional visual definitions of the modern nation-­ state, as popularized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America.”44 New China’s first Five-Year Plan, in 1953, centralized art

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education and imported Soviet art, giving birth to a new generation of art students “fully steeped in the ideals of Maoism but infatuated with the Russian language and culture.”45 As Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen write, “This six-year period of construction spanned a shift from an academic mode of art imported into China in the first half of the twentieth century to a new socialist realist art learned from the USSR.”46 By 1957, artists in China became state employees who were both “red and specialized.” What happened was essentially a “patronage revolution.”47 China’s traditional patronage system, which had been interrupted by warfare in the 1930s, was now transformed into a centralized apparatus: First, the state became the major patron, making artistic work both more professional and more bureaucratic than ever before in Chinese history. The model artist became an employee in an urban-centered state network of cultural institutions. Second, the Party built a huge, if unsteady, foundation for political control of the arts, as new cultural bureaucracies competed for authority to supervise the work of artists. Third, the Party destroyed the popular commercial culture of the cities. … These institutions, borrowed directly from Soviet experience and reproduced throughout China, ultimately fell short of securing Party hegemony. Their failure was double. First, the institutions themselves collapsed under political attack during the Cultural Revolution. Second, when these institutions were restored in the late 1970s, they were unable to prevent a remarkable decline of Communist authority as market reforms eroded their administrative powers.48

These institutional changes had positive sides in retaining art talents and stabilizing art production. Richard Kraus points out that because China’s pre-1949 art economy was “too weak for most artists to support themselves through their art,”49 the Communist regime’s cultural policies stabilized opportunities for artists. Although some left the mainland, the vast majority of Chinese artists considered the new regime an improvement on their career. For prominent artists such as Qi Baishi, the new regime granted high honors and provided housing and other benefits. By 1953, each province had set up an honorary cultural system for local artists to receive salaries and painting materials.50 It is fair to say that before the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Chinese artists had enjoyed a respected and privileged status as the traditional court-hired literati class. Their working conditions and social status were improved compared to the pre-communist era. In Richard Kraus’s words, “the arts became more political, but they also became more professional.”51 This was partly the

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byproduct of the new regime’s campaign for legitimacy in contrasting the “New China” with the old one under a Republican government. Meanwhile, art institutions were transformed into socialist work units. As other historians write, with the removal of the art colleges from the city, the structure of schools, publishers, and markets that made Shanghai the preliberation art center of China was systemically dismantled. … Between 1952 and 1956, the CARA East China campus alone published eighty books containing translations, analyses, or surveys of Soviet art and art theory. For the next thirty years most Chinese art students would judge teachers who admired and emulated Soviet art to be far superior to the Europe or Japan-trained elder faculty. … as the American art world was swept by abstract expressionism, China moved in exactly the opposite direction.52

After this honeymoon phase and since the late 1950s, more Chinese artists have realized the political constraints on their work. during the Hundred Flowers movement of 1956 and 1957, they spoke up to criticize the Party’s cultural policies, only to trigger the Party’s Anti-rightist Movement. Some artists who had been recognized by the Nationalist government (e.g., Pan Tianshou 潘天寿) were now condemned as “spies.”53 According to a biography of Pan, the academy campus later became a concentration camp where interrogation and beating continued.54 Richard Kraus also notes that during this time, “Fear of producing incorrect art afflicted the new cultural system.”55 The rearrangement of art institutions had lasting impacts on China’s art scene. As Michael Sullivan writes, The Central Academy, nominally under Wu Zuoren 吴作人, but controlled by Yan’an-trained apparatchiks, became the model for regulated art schools across the country. From 1949 to 1958 Soviet influence was dominant in all fields, and oil painting was taught at the Central Academy by, among others, the Moscow academician Konstantin Maksimov. … The art of these years, although conditioned by Marxist-Maoist ideology, was experimental in a technical sense, when artists were called upon to depict realistically subjects that had no place in the traditional repertory. Even more important for the future of Chinese art was the fact that peasants and workers were now encouraged to take up the brush and depict the world they knew. … In 1958 the authorities launched the nationwide “peasant art movement,” focusing particularly on the peasant painters of Bixian county in Zhejiang. Professional artists from the cities were assigned to help the peasants to improve their technique.56

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Driven by egalitarianism, Chinese communism also took issue with the wealthy class of the country. Land reforms and the confiscation of urban businesses led to the decline of a broad base of art consumers, an entire well-to-do demographic who used to be private patrons of artists. As Richard Kraus describes, “The revolutionary elimination of landlords and capitalists further narrowed China’s aesthetic range.”57 With wealthy Chinese collectors losing their fortunes or fleeing abroad, producers of elite arts and crafts found it hard to continue their trades. The new Communist state came up with plans to utilize this workforce, such as decorating the new Great Hall of the People in 1958, but the entire art sector still suffered an irreversible decline.58 In 1966, at the dawn of the Cultural Revolution, artists and collectors saw the most devastating political campaign to “Destroy the Four Olds” (po sijiu 破四旧). Traditional Chinese paintings, artifacts, and even some families’ long-kept genealogy books were burned and destroyed. In Shanghai alone, the Red Guards confiscated over 300,000 discrete antique artifacts.59 As Wu Hung writes, “The attack on the Four Olds—old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits—also rendered exhibitions and discussions of ancient and Western art non-existent.”60 The devastating impact of Mao’s Cultural Revolution on social morale with regard to traditional art and culture cannot be overestimated. As Chinese scholar Chang Tsong-zung writes, the “seed for the transformation of China’s visual world was implicit in the new ideological visions of society and human order from the beginning, while Mao’s Cultural Revolution can simply be counted as the most thorough and uncompromising shift of all.”61 Art education also became integrated into the state’s public system in order to serve political purposes. By then, China’s 12 art institutions with undergraduate degree programs had been recruiting nationally.62 China’s Artist Association also became part of the Party’s Propaganda Department. Art academies in China’s urban centers suffered vandalism by Red Guards who burned Western and ancient Chinese artifacts and teaching and painting materials. Students and teachers at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing launched an iconoclastic event: The academy’s collection of casts, including reproductions of such works as Michelangelo’s David, the Venus de Milo, and the Apollo Belvedere, were ritually destroyed with axes and shovels and then burned. Red Guards paraded around the fire in a victory celebration. Completion of the ­ambitious

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undertaking required a great deal of physical exertion, and the art students were assisted in this task by students from the Physical Education Department of Beijing Normal University. … Works of art were brought out of the academy gallery for castigation. At least four faculty members, Ye Qianyu 叶浅 予, Luo Gongliu 罗工柳, Li Kuchan 李苦禅, and Huang Yongyu 黄永玉, were beaten with belts and belt buckles by Red Guard students and faculty. After being physically humiliated in front of their students, colleagues, and families, most old artists and administrators were incarcerated in makeshift campus prisons called ox-sheds (牛棚).63

They also forced professors and students in these institutions to witness the destruction. The trauma continued as these artists were later locked up in shabby cattle sheds and were slandered as “ox-demons.” Scholars describe this era as a time of “brutal iconoclasm and radical experimentation in the arts.”64 These violent scenes traumatized at least two generations of Chinese artists, whose “spirits [were] broken” and whose “passion [was] wiped away.”65 As Julia Andrews writes, “the people who practiced and taught traditional forms of art, and who understood the culture of the past, were thoroughly demoralized. … The entire succeeding generation was taught to ridicule tradition rather than respect it.”66 According to Richard King and Jan Walls, “The art of the period cannot be understood without a grasp of the historical and cultural background from which it arose and of the personalities, chief among them Mao Zedong and his fourth wife, Jiang Qing, who shaped the age and the artistic images it left behind.”67 Jiang Qing, who used to be a stage and screen actor in the 1930s, participated in the transformation of an operatic art form known as “the revolutionary model theatrical works” (geming yangbanxi 革命样板戏). Therefore, the ground zero of Mao’s Cultural Revolution was in the performing arts, particularly opera. Some heroic figures of these works became main characters in the visual arts. These images left a lasting legacy for later generations of Chinese artists. Meanwhile, China also saw a surge of Red Guard art, first in Beijing and then in other cities. Exhibits took on politicized titles and content, such as “Smashing the Reactionary Line Advocated by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping” at the Beijing Planetarium or “Long Live the Victory of Chairman Mao’s Revolutionary Line” at the National Art Gallery. Visual artworks produced during this period focused on tearing down the old and codifying Mao. Mao occupied a central place in posters and paintings, where his face must be “red, smooth, and luminescent” (hong, guang,

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liang 红光亮), as prescribed for the artists. The scenes in which Mao appeared range from his years as a youthful revolutionary to a benign middle-aged look as the nation’s leader, often surrounded by enthused crowds with a blend of age groups, men and women, and occupations such as workers, peasants, and soldiers. Across the nation, the demand for sculpture and sculptors also rapidly increased.68 Many universities launched projects erecting vast statues of Mao Zedong and other revolutionary martyrs. This initiative reflected a significant shift in Chinese visual language, which had relied on the written calligraphic word “expressive for the cultivation and character of the person in power.” As gallery director and collector Chang Tsong-zung describes, With the popularization of the iconic portrait comes a new trend of idol worship, in which the individual in power is no longer dependent on the magic of cultural mores, but manipulated and judged by the more sensational and universal language of image replicated through mass media.69

To some extent, the Cultural Revolution gave rise to an enlarged public space for mass-printed artworks, including calligraphy and portraits commissioned by the Communist state. A multitude of state institutions, including the Central Party Ministry for Propaganda (zhong xuan bu 宣传 部), the Ministry of Culture (wen hua bu 文化部), and the Ministry/ Commission of Education (jiaoyu bu 教育部) made up the main artery of control through persuasion and penalties. Some artists considered their tasks to be “serving the people” and the New China. As Michael Sullivan writes, to “be honored with a commission, especially for a large wall painting in a public place, was a step toward the recognition, even fame, that artists so desperately desired, although they had little or no freedom in style or subject matter.”70 Mao Zedong’s own artistic expressions in poetry and his unique style of calligraphy also became widely duplicated on government buildings and murals. From 1971 to 1976, Mao’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, gained control and transformed a system of high art and performance. She effectively transformed herself into a cultural standard-bearer of late Maoism. Apart from opera and sculpture, other artistic genres were also allowed as long as they aligned with the main socialist themes. Ink painting, for example, was found to be instrumental in boosting “the new national consciousness” by praising “China’s great rivers and mountains and also the course of China’s socialist reconstruction then in full swing.”71 As Julia Andrews writes, to

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those viewing the art today, “the bright, confident, and compelling images call to mind the shattered ideals and great human tragedies of the ten-year disaster.”72 Most paintings, posters, sculptures, and political cartoons were attributed to organizations rather than to individual artists. Thus, these artworks were, in fact, created anonymously and collectively. To summarize, art became part of the political apparatus or the central planning economy instead of the market-driven economy, which was efficiently eliminated through socialist construction.

The Decline of a Centrally Planned Economy and Its Art System Since the 1950s, art institutions and galleries in China became state owned. Their main role was to publicize the Party’s art policies and to exhibit artworks that “serve the people.” The Party-state created its own calendar with important dates needing commemorative exhibitions: June 1 for Children’s Day, July 1 for the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, August 1 for the founding of the People’s Liberation Army, October 1 for the National Day, etc. The resources of these art galleries were allocated to best reflect government policies and sometimes new political campaigns. The production of artworks was coordinated by artists’ professional associations. The relationship between the artist, the Party, and the state was a delicate dance: The artists were given the title ‘art workers’, clearly differentiating them from the painters and artists of the old society (who were not under government control), spelling out their status and implying that artists basically obtained their position in society through completing propaganda duties for the Party and state.73

Galleries gave only symbolic remuneration to the artist, who, taught to be a patriot, would view this monetary award as an honor. It was the public art system that allocated employment, wages, housing, and other benefits to these career artists. The government had different demands of art galleries at different times. During the Cultural Revolution, for example, most galleries were not even allowed to collect and exhibit. The central planning system had also stagnated the collection and storage of state treasures. Most urban citizens belonged to work units that not only assigned them job duties but also paid salaries, issued ration coupons for food,

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approved marriage applications, and even granted permission for giving birth. Most Chinese artists lived in this system, relying on work units for art supplies and studio space. Indeed, “[t]he power of the work unit to affect both the daily private life and the creative life of the individual artist effectively prevented extreme forms of professional or social behavior, including open political dissent.”74 Cultural control was maintained through a politics of fear. Within China’s parallel governance bureaucracy (the Party and the civil government), power is held and exercised arbitrarily. Communist cadres acted as gatekeepers in the allocation of resources. To anti-intellectualist Party cadres, the idea of artistic genius seemed not merely too “bourgeois” but also too spontaneous to be compliant with Party rule. The lack of free market mechanisms stifled incentives to innovate. Creativity and freedom of expression through art were not encouraged. As Julia Andrews comments, “The uncertain and unsettled relation between bureaucratic authority and extra-bureaucratic power was perhaps the most difficult problem confronted by any artist of the period.”75 However, this does not mean that the 1970s saw no opposition to political control from among Chinese artists. The disillusionment with Maoism after Lin Biao’s incident in 1972 directly triggered a change in the art world.76 Particularly after 1973, many young artists, both inside and outside of art schools, became increasingly frustrated with the emptiness of Cultural Revolutionary art and began to secretly explore alternative modes of artistic expression. Some of them reembraced the idea of art-for-art’s sake, eagerly absorbing inspiration from Western modern art, including Romantic, Impressionist, and Postimpressionist paintings. Their works, often small, poetic landscapes, demonstrated a radical departure from the idioms of orthodox revolutionary art.77

In 1976, the death of Zhou Enlai, along with Jiang Qing’s prohibition of public mourning, triggered the April Fifth demonstration in Tiananmen Square, which was suppressed by the government. Since then, a group of young photographers who recorded the incident have begun to form an underground network that circulated these visual records. The first group of unofficial art exhibition in public spaces in 1979 marked the re-­ emergence of art-making activities through artists’ self-­institutionalization.

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Despite these progressive efforts to push for change, the inertia of the old regime remained strong. Even after 1976, the cultural authorities continued to act as gatekeepers and held the conservative line by controlling publications and exhibitions.78 It was not until after the death of Mao Zedong and the arrest of Jiang Qing that China made a more decisive break with its past. Art historian Michael Sullivan describes the next phase in China as a “cultural thaw.”79 There was an emotional liberation after decades of political trauma: “All through that year the floodgates of feeling and emotion had been swinging open across China. A hot stream of stories and poems, known as ‘Scar Literature’ (shanghen wenxue 伤痕文学) poured from the presses, exposing not only the tyranny of the Gang of Four but the evils in the system itself.”80 But for two generations of artists who were born in New China and educated in Soviet-leaning art academies, the change was not easy because their understandings of art and skills had become part of the system. By 1979, “most practitioners of unapproved styles had died or were very old and had no followers; only the most elderly of living artists had ever personally experienced the making of serious nonpolitical art, either in its traditional Chinese form or in Western form.”81 Because of the disruption of the communist art era (1953–1978), most living artists had lost touch with their own Chinese art tradition, such as literati landscapes. Such a tradition carried on with strength in the diaspora Chinese communities, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. This truncation of art in mainland China led to three streams of art experimentation in the 1980s: political pop art, avant-garde art, and traditional techniques. The first group of artists rebelled against Communist China while relying on the artistic language with which they had been trained. The second opened up to influences in Western contemporary art. The third camp was arguably the most difficult route: As Julia Andrews describes, “traditional painting, with its rigorous technical requirements, was by 1979 practiced by only a handful of old painters. It had been eradicated as a living artistic tradition.”82 Young artists encouraged by the postreform cultural policies began to experiment with integrating traditional Chinese ink techniques into Western impressionism or academic portraiture. As Daniel Herwitz comments, “The return to tradition was a way of restoring dignity and integrity to a cultural attitude and practice ruptured by totalitarian violence.”83

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Conclusion Ever since China encountered modernity, its naturally evolving art economy has experienced first colonial influences and later a truncation from its traditions under communism. Chinese people who lived through the Mao era share a collective memory ornamented with the same visual and auditory images, all stressing the imminence of a utopian society under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. The communist appropriation of private property involved violent land reforms and the nationalization of key resources, from commerce to higher education. The art system under Communist rule mandated that a centralized association of artists determine how individual artists should participate in creative activities. These Party-controlled “people’s groups” belonged to a multilevel apparatus, branching out to form provincial-, district-, city-, and county-level units. Political ideology granted these institutions a priestly halo. Funded by the state, they had the power to define the sacred and the obscene, the valued and the useless. But the lack of aesthetic autonomy in a centrally planned art economy extinguished any remnants of a healthy art market. As economist John McMillan claims, “If people lack autonomy, then their dealings are not, by this definition, market dealings.”84 Moreover, a few generations of Chinese artists were so disoriented by the authoritarian political mandates of communism that they lost touch not just with the outside world but also with China’s own traditions. The Cultural Revolution targeted Western-trained intellectuals (including artists) who experienced the most intense persecution. As David Herwitz puts it, “Mao sought to devalue China’s great and noble past, to shatter it, thus freeing China from its ruinous grip. In doing so he alienated Chinese society from its millennia of traditions, from its heritage, in one nearly fatal stroke.”85 More specifically, the political campaign suspended all courses in art academies, shut down all art magazines and periodicals, persecuted nine out of ten famous artists and professors, and condemned individual artistic expression as counterrevolutionary bourgeois garbage. … All of this was done under the name of the “proletarian dictatorship,” an extreme means of political control instigated by Mao to safeguard the purity of Communist ideology. The result was a total politicization of art.86

The lasting impacts of this era were evident within a few generations of Chinese artists. It is very important to look at these changes through the art created by these different cohorts whose lives had been reshaped by

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turbulent political events. Economists who study the art market often affirm the “age–creativity relation,” making age cohort an important dimension of analysis.87 The artworks of artists who lived through China’s cultural politics between the Great Leap Forward (1958–1959) and the end of the Cultural Revolution (1976) would in the next decades continue to show elements of radicalism and Maoist symbolism because China’s market transition after 1978 did not mean that the nation had suddenly moved away from the visual imagery under Maoism. These iconic images continued to show path dependence and resilience among Chinese artists, albeit sometimes with an ironic twist. Icons from the Mao era also circulated and became profitable commodities. According to Julia Andrews, such “resilience” may be due to the fact that the “hideous abuse of totalitarian power” during the Maoist era was never brought to swift justice, as it had in post-Nazi Germany.88 As she puts it, “In China, however, political leaders did not confront the Cultural Revolution, choosing instead to use euphemistic labels such as the ‘ten lost years’ and addressing it in the most abstract terms.”89 When the 1980s opened China up to a changing outside art market, artistic pluralism and experimentation became the primary mode. Chinese artists’ interest in Western art piqued, while Westerners also expanded the global art market to include India, China, and Latin America. The global decentralization of the art market had begun.90 International travel provided convenience for Westerners and diaspora Chinese art lovers to begin scavenger hunts for art in China. It prepared the way for the first foreign-­ venture art dealers to open for business on the mainland. Most important of all, the opening up of the private economic sector connected art producers directly with consumers through market mechanisms. Observers of China’s recovering art market were hopeful, but few expected it to over the next decades become the engine of the global art economy.

Notes 1. Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), 1–2. 2. Scarlett Jang, “The Culture of Art Collecting in Imperial China,” 60. 3. Clunas, Art in China, 173. 4. Martin J.  Powers, “Introduction” in Martin J.  Powers and Katherine R.  Tsiang (eds.), A Companion to Chinese Art (Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 5–6.

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5. Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things, 1. 6. Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art (California: University of California Press, 1989), 41. 7. Laurie Adams, “Contemporary Art in China: ‘Anxiety of Influence’ and the Creative Trumph of Cai Guoqiang,” in Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 36. 8. Ibid., 53. 9. Patricia Berger, Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 6. 10. Scarlett Jang, “The Culture of Art Collecting in Imperial China,” in A Companion to Chinese Art, 47–72. 11. One of the most renowned female art collectors was poetess Li Qingzhao (1084–1155) of the Song dynasty. 12. Scarlett Jang, “The Culture of Art Collecting in Imperial China,” 48. 13. But historians also point out that the notion of Chinese art as “having a unifying principle” is a creation of nineteenth-century Europe and the nineteenth-­ century United States. See Craig Clunas, Art in China, 1997, 9–10. 14. Qianshen Bai, “Calligraphy,” in A Companion to Chinese Art, 312. 15. Ledderose, L. (1989). Chinese Calligraphy: Art of the Elite. In I. Lavin (ed.), World Art: Theme of Unity in Diversity, vol. 2. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 291–294. 16. Historian Amy McNair terms this theory as “characterology.” McNair, A. (1998). The Upright Brush: Yan Zhenqing’s Calligraphy and Song Literati Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 17. Liu Yuedi, “Calligraphic Expression and Contemporary Chinese Art: Xu Bing’s Pioneer Experiment,” in Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art, 87–88. 18. Ibid., 61. 19. Kraus, Brushes with power, x. 20. Curtis L.  Carter, “The Political Body in Chinese Art,” in Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art, 112. 21. In the primary market, only new works of art are sold. In the secondary market, previously purchased works of art are bought and sold by consumers, either at auction or though art dealers. 22. Han Xi, “Were There Auction Houses in Republic China?: On Auction Rules” (民国时期有拍卖场吗?——说说拍卖场的规矩), 163.com, August 21, 2020. https://www.163.com/dy/article/FKGU48I50543MG TR.html. 23. Ibid.

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24. David Adam Brubaker and Chunchen Wang, Jizi and His Art in Contemporary China (Springer, 2015), 3. 25. Ibid., 12. 26. Ibid., 3. 27. Ibid., 12. 28. After visiting Japan (1917) and France (1919), Xu Beihong lived in Europe for six years. He returned to Shanghai in 1927 and later became a faculty member at the Nanguo College of Fine Arts and Nanjing Central University. Xu Zhimo (1896-1931) studied in Europe and the United States before rising to fame as a central figure among the New Moon Poets. 29. Xu Hong, “Chinese Art,” in Caroline Turner (ed.), Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific (Sydney: Pandanus Books, 2005), 330. 30. Jane Zheng, The Modernization of Chinese Art: The Shanghai Art College, 1913–1937 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2016), 26. 31. Clunas, Art in China, 1997, 206. 32. David Adam Brubaker and Chunchen Wang, Jizi and His Art in Contemporary China (Springer, 2015), 4. 33. Craig Clunas, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences (Princeton University Press, 2017), 202. 34. Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, The China Collectors: America’s Century-Long Hunt for Asian Art Treasures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 148. 35. Liu, Kang (2000). “Popular Culture and the Culture of the Masses in Contemporary China”. In Dirlik, Arif; Zhang, Xudong (eds.). Postmodernism and China. Duke University Press. pp.  111–112. Mao Zedong’s “Talks At The Yan’an Conference On Literature and Art”: A Translation Of The 1943 Text With Commentary by Bonnie S. McDougall. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1980. MacKerras, Colin (1983). Chinese Theatre: From Its Origins to the Present Day. University of Hawaii Press. pp. 170–171. 36. McDougall, Bonnie. (1980). Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art”: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary. University of Michigan Press. 37. Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the PRC, 1949-1979 (University of California Press, 1994), 401. 38. Ibid. 39. Craig Clunas, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences (Princeton University Press, 2017), 196. 40. Ibid., 210–211. 41. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (University of California Press, 2012), 140.

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42. Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art (University of California Press, 1989), 186. 43. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (University of California Press, 2012), 141. 44. Ibid., 147. 45. Ibid., 148. 46. Ibid., 147. 47. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), 37. 48. Ibid., 37–38. 49. Ibid., 40. 50. See Jerome Silbergeld, Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 59–60; and Jerome Silbergeld, “Art Censorship in Socialist China: A Do-it Yourself System,” in Elizabeth C.  Childes, ed., Suspended: Censorship and the Visual Arts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 299–332. 51. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), 144. 52. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (University of California Press, 2012), 148–151. 53. Shengtian Zheng, “Brushes Are Weapons: An Art School and Its Artists,” in Richard King, Ralph Croizier, Shengtian Zheng and Scott Watson (eds.), Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–76, 97. Because Pan Tianshou was appointed president of the Zhejiang Academy in 1944 by then–Republican government minister of education Chen Li-fu, radical Red Guards at Pan’s academy accused him of being a “Guomindang cultural spy.” 54. Lu Xin, Pan Tianshou (Beijing: China Youth Publishing, 1997), 365. 55. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), 11. 56. Michael Sullivan, The Arts of China (University of California Press, 1999), 286. 57. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), 20. 58. Ibid. 59. Jin San, “Where Did the Popular Appraisal Shows Go?” (红极一时的“鉴 宝”节目都去哪儿了?), Elephant Council (大象公会), March 5, 2019. https://www.sohu.com/a/299295676_383724. 60. Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 5.

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61. Chang Tsong-zung, “Mesmerized by Power,” in Jiehong Jiang (ed.), Burden or Legacy: From the Chinese Cultural Revolution to Contemporary Art (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), 57. 62. Iain Robertson, Victoria L.  Tseng and Sonal Singh, “Chindia’ as Art Market Opportunity,” in The Art Business, edited by Robertson and Chong (), 82–96. Among these art academies was the Central Academy of Arts and Design, which in 1983 began to award doctorate degrees. 63. Julia F. Andrews, “The Art of the Cultural Revolution,” in Richard King, Ralph Croizier, Shengtian Zheng and Scott Watson (eds.), Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 35–36. 64. Richard King, “Preface” in Richard King, Ralph Croizier, Shengtian Zheng and Scott Watson (eds.), Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–76 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), xi. 65. Julia F. Andrews, “The Art of the Cultural Revolution,” in Richard King, Ralph Croizier, Shengtian Zheng and Scott Watson (eds.), Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–76 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 28. 66. Ibid. 67. Richard King and Jan Walls, “Introduction: Vibrant Images of a Turbulent Decade,” in Richard King, Ralph Croizier, Shengtian Zheng and Scott Watson (eds.), Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–76, 3–4. 68. Michael Sullivan, The Arts of China (University of California Press, 1999), 291. 69. Chang Tsong-zung, “Mesmerized by Power,” in Jiehong Jiang (ed.), Burden or Legacy, 60. 70. Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China (University of California Press, 1996), 229. 71. David Adam Brubaker and Chunchen Wang, Jizi and His Art in Contemporary China (Springer, 2015), 3. 72. Julia F. Andrews, “The Art of the Cultural Revolution,” in Richard King, Ralph Croizier, Shengtian Zheng and Scott Watson (eds.), Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 27. 73. Xu Hong, “Chinese Art,” in Caroline Turner (ed.), Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific (Sydney: Pandanus Books, 2005), 342–343. 74. Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the PRC, 1949-1979 (University of California Press, 1994), 5. 75. Ibid.

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76. Lin Biao was a marshal of the People’s Republic of China and Mao Zedong’s most trusted aide. But in 1971, Lin and his family died in a plane crash after a failed coup against Mao. Lin Biao’s death and the scheme behind it became a source of disillusionment for many Chinese citizens toward the cult of personality around Mao that Lin helped to build. 77. Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 5. 78. Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art (University of California Press, 1989), 191. 79. Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China (University of California Press, 1996), 218. 80. Ibid. 81. Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the PRC, 1949-1979 (University of California Press, 1994), 1–2. 82. Ibid., 401. 83. Daniel Herwitz, Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 158. 84. John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar (W.  W. Norton & Company, 2002), 6. 85. Daniel Herwitz, Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 158. 86. Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 5. 87. Robert B. Ekelund, Jr., et al, The Economics of American Art: Issues, Artists, and Market Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2017), 47. 88. Julia F. Andrews, “The Art of the Cultural Revolution,” in Richard King, Ralph Croizier, Shengtian Zheng and Scott Watson (eds.), Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–76 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 27. 89. Ibid. 90. Daniel Herwitz, Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 17.

CHAPTER 3

Gradualist Market Reform and Unofficial Art Movements (1980s)

Modern capitalism has been inherently global. Historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein writes about a modern world system that has been long underway since the late fifteenth century.1 After the colonial era, World War II, and the Cold War, the national boundaries around economic, political, and cultural affairs began to loosen again. The ideals of universalism prevailed in many nation-states’ public cultural policymaking. For the global art market, the 1980s was an important, boundary-­breaking phase. As feminist art theorist Basia Sliwinska writes, the “globalization of the 1980s, migrations within and beyond Europe and increased transnationalism shifted sites of contemporary art production beyond the West.”2 The mainstream aesthetics for Western, academic, and middle-class art has increasingly diversified to include art from other regions. Boundaries erected during the Cold War were also broken. For example, art exchanges had a breakthrough in 1986, when 40 Impressionist and Postimpressionist works from the United States’ National Gallery toured in the former Soviet Union. Works of comparable quality by Soviet artists also toured in major US museums.3 Notable sales included a record high for Van Gogh’s painting Irises (USD 53.9 million) in 1987.4 In 1979, China also refashioned its cultural policy toward the West. Loosening ideological control served as a strong motivation for artists. As Richard Kraus writes, many were encouraged to hear that the government would “do things differently, especially after the 1979 National Arts

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Ma, China’s Art Market since 1978, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34605-7_3

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Congress.”5 It reminded them of the open climate during the Hundred Flowers (baihua qifang 百花齐放) Campaign.6 Some Chinese artists who had grown disillusioned with decades of socialist realism began to actively explore the latest Western art trends. As art historian Julia Andrews writes, “For the first time in many years, Chinese artists could study the art of Europe and North America.” Meanwhile, Western art historians began curiously looking into the art world of contemporary China. The lack of comprehension was mutual and almost total.”7 A two-way process began that allowed a market-based system of art to recuperate. Cultural institutions opened up to new ideas. Art publications were examples. From 1977 to 1987, the number of periodicals published increased from 628 to 5687.8 Transnational agents and networks emerged as the results of the winning neoliberal free market dogmas. Some European scholars observe that “since the 1980s, international or transnational art worlds have strengthened their position in comparison with national art worlds.”9 This chapter examines how the founders and followers of postreform China’s art movements found their creativity confined or shaped by the cultural and social institutions of their respective times.

A Little Freedom Goes a Long Way: Postreform Cultural Fever Since the late 1970s, China’s art scene has seen a few emerging trends, including “an Art Deco–inspired figure painting, a new sympathetic realism, and a politically engaged modernism.”10 Paul Gladson summarizes these developments after 1978 as a “return to the tripartite division.”11 The first category was traditional Chinese art making, such as calligraphy and ink painting. The second included politically endorsed modern art that synthesized Chinese and Western techniques. The last group constituted more Westernized art forms, such as postmodernism. As Julia Andrews describes, the artists were made up of three groups: in the first group, “the most conservative were middle-aged academically trained painters”; in the second were “rusticated youths who had become professional artists”; and in the third were “nonprofessionals, including former Red Guards, who challenged the art world from outside its territory.”12 Each of these camps would usher in a new movement across China during the 1980s, with lasting influence. Take the second camp, for example.

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Along with a new form of “scar” literature, “tongdairen” (同一代人, meaning “artists of the same generation”) emerged as one of the most important unofficial art groups in Beijing. Members of this cluster (whose work was known as scar art) claimed the uniqueness of their collective trauma in the history of modern China. Realistic portrayals of ordinary Chinese people, a style known as native soil art, was also closely related to the experiences of this same time, albeit less politicized. Representing this school of art were Luo Zhongli 罗中立 and Chen Danqing 陈丹青. Distinguishing themselves from the “avant-garde” trend, they maintained institutional ties with the art establishment and generally avoided confrontation with the authorities.13 Compared with artists who were trained in the academies of the 1950s, this new generation who had lived through the Cultural Revolution gained profound insights into human trauma and marginalization, themes that made their art speak volumes and resonate with a large audience.14 The liberal atmosphere of the early 1980s also transformed philosophical discussions on aesthetics into hot topics among Chinese intellectuals and artists.15 Some referred to it as the “aesthetics fever” (meixue re 美学 热). Notable figures included Li Zehou 李泽厚, Gao Ertai (高尔泰), and Liu Xiaofeng 刘晓枫, among others.16 “Aesthetics became an important wing of thought liberation.”17 In this “spring of poetry,” young poets and writers immersed themselves in creative activities. Beijing saw the founding of an unofficial literary magazine, Today (jintian 《今天》). Some retranslated the Western Enlightenment literature for a young audience. As Li Zehou recalls, “Intellectuals, especially young people, poured out their thoughts into literary arts, and all these reminded people of the May Fourth era. … Humanist outcry pervaded every sphere, including visual arts.”18 Australian scholar Michael Keane compares this cultural reopening with the climate of the 1920s, noting the significant differences: The rise of literary culture during the 1980s, in particular the avant-garde modernist schools, recaptured the fervor of the aesthetic renaissance of the first few decades of the twentieth century. However, the 1980s literary cultural revival was short-lived. The principle of “art for art’s sake” found expression during the so-called culture fever movement (wenhua re 文化热) (1985–1986). Echoing the intellectual fervor of the pre-revolutionary period, this “reconstruction of culture” played out on issues of modernity and Chinese identity.19

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, the New Culture movement had ideological underpinnings in Darwinian evolution and civilization discourses. Educated Chinese were hoping to find a new morality for China as it modernized into a new nation-state. In comparison, China’s reopening to the West in the 1980s happened within quite limited cultural confines. Central to this trend was the acutely felt need to embrace cultural diversity and a relaxed public space. The stigma of intellectualism was also gradually receding. The role of knowledge to a nation’s economic and social wellbeing became widely acknowledged. The publication of Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave in Chinese was one example. This book brought to the Chinese public Toffler’s ideas about information technology. Its influence continued until the mid 2000s, when Alvin Toffler was named by Chinese media as one of the most influential thinkers in the world.20 As Michael Keane insightfully points out, these culture debates among Chinese intellectuals constituted “very much a process of self-reflection and an act of self-preservation by a social stratum who several years earlier had been officially designated as ‘stinking number nines’ and subject to ridicule and persecution.”21 These Chinese intellectuals and artists also discussed the autonomy of art as a sphere between money and politics (i.e., elite culture, consumerism, and national culture). It was an important time, a “Golden Age” in art historian Liu Yuedi’s words, when nearly all of today’s successful artists in China grew up and matured their techniques.22 Julia Andrews also points out this significant change: what mattered was not what the artists might be inclined to paint, but instead who would determine which artworks might be exhibited. Most artists hoped that their contributions to Chinese art would be recognized. Such aspirations led many to a certain degree of cooperation with the authorities; as a result, bureaucratic factors became ever more important as determinants of artistic production. Indeed, by the early 1980s most artists simply assumed that one’s career was naturally determined by the art bureaucracy. Complaints might arise, but they generally focused on individual bureaucrats who had failed to recognize the value of a certain artist’s work, not on the system of control itself.23

In May 1979, artist-illustrator for Today magazine Huang Rui 黄锐 and 17 other artists organized an exhibition known as The Open-Air Stars Art Show (lutian xingxing meizhan 露天星星美展).24 They intentionally used “stars” to denote the individuality of each luminous object, compared to

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the only light during the Cultural Revolution—Mao Zedong, who was often referred as the Red Sun. These artists used a slogan with the same emphasis on individual autonomy: “Know the world using your own eyes. Join the world using your own brush and chisel.”25 The first modern art movement was born at the dawn of the economic reform.26

Formal Institutional Change and Unofficial Art Movements After the National College Entrance Exam resumed in 1977, young people in China found their career paths broadened. “Educated youth” (zhishi qingnian 知识青年) who returned from more than a decade of being subject to the send-down movement (shangshan xiaxiang 上山下乡) were allowed to find their own employment opportunities in cities. This phenomenon led to an enlarging population of “to-be-employed youth” (daiye qingnian 待业青年) in the emerging informal economy. Other economic policies also relaxed, allowing individuals to earn their livings outside of work units in the old centrally planned economy. Even after Mao’s death and Jiang Qing’s arrest, art remained relevant to China’s political elites. For example, some art critics associated the political demise of Hua Guofeng, the Interim Communist Party leader and president after Mao, with his “poorly executed calligraphy.”27 As Kraus writes, “Reportedly, Hua’s enemies, in the ensuing struggle for power, used complaints about his calligraphy to diminish his reputation, eventually resulting in his resignation and the forced removal of his calligraphy from public display.”28 Whether this was only hearsay remains unclear; nevertheless, it affirms the importance of certain skills in traditional literati art (such as calligraphy), which “is not only aesthetic, but is a code to authority.”29 Tacit government sanctions for more freedom of speech led to the Xidan Democracy Wall movement and other spontaneous petitions by “educated youth.” These paved the way for the unofficial art movement to appear. In fact, art had always been part of these civil and political pursuits. Its avant-garde nature first took form in the political sense and then in an economic innovation for the re-emergence of the art market. By 1979, the unofficial art scene had gained the capacity for innovation. As one of the main organizers of The Stars Art Show, Huang Rui obtained permission for the exhibit by telling the authorities that it would

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happen in his home. Next, the organizers looked for a larger space. When they could not find public venues, the core members decided to turn the show into an open-air exhibition. Thus, in late September, over 160 paintings and sculptures by 23 young artists were displayed along the fence of China’s Art Museum, attracting a large audience. Some viewers were shocked by its “fierce attack on Maoist ideology.”30 On the second day, local police interrupted the event by demanding the artwork be withdrawn from this public space. Dissatisfied with this short-lived art event, artists put on a public demonstration, where some held sign boards that read “We Want Art Freedom.” Artists continued to display their artworks in other venues, such as Beihai Park. This uninterrupted exhibition sold over 8000 admission tickets in 2 weeks. In 1980, members of this art society held a second exhibition in the China Art Gallery, attracting over 80,000 viewers.31 Later, Art magazine published five articles featuring works from The Stars Art Show. As one participant later recalled, This group of untrained young artists held the earliest art exhibitions by their mere enthusiasm and talent. Freedom was what they loved most. As Li Xianting 栗宪庭 commented, “Art was not the most important thing.” To the members of The Sars Society, success was not even important either. People who have lived through that era would tell you: “In 1979, they just plotted something in the deep alleys. Living on noodle soup, they dared to make some trouble when dawn broke. Just as how the impressionist artists borrowed some venues to display their art only to challenge the authorities. None had expected that their art would one day be invited into a museum.”32

The Stars Art Group and its public art events marked an important milestone for China’s art scene. These artist-entrepreneurs engaged in self-institutionalization, which had a lasting legacy in placing some core Chinese artists at the forefront of pushing for political and genre breakthroughs. Their self-organization, their negotiation efforts with authorities, and their continued initiation of public art events modeled a kind of entrepreneurship that was epoch making.33 By now, the Chinese Communist Party’s official repudiation of the Cultural Revolution allowed for a fundamental conceptual shift among artists whose activities had been confined by the Communist Party for three decades. However, the change happened gradually until the artist community reached a collective reckoning. Political censorship had weakened but was still struggling to exert a last stand of power. Take a famous

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artwork by Luo Zhongli as an example. In 1981, Luo painted a portrait entitled Father, which shows a close-up of a sun-tanned Chinese peasant lifting a bowl to his mouth, with deep wrinkled skin and cuts on his fingers as signs of toil in rural China. The artist broke from both Chinese traditional art and his contemporary styles. Close-up portraiture has never been a traditional genre in Chinese art. Painters always embedded their human figures within a vast landscape or against a natural background. Head portraiture was used only to depict Mao using techniques of Soviet realism. Yet Luo Zhongli’s intent was to center an ordinary peasant from his observation of rural China. Chinese communist cadres frowned on Luo’s portrait and tried hard to minimize individualistic interpretations. The judges of the National Youth Art Exhibition even changed the name of this painting three times, finally settling on an allusion to the collective concept of rural China as the “fatherland.”34 Another example of political intervention into new art trends happened in 1983, when ten young artists held an abstract art exhibition in Shanghai’s top higher education institution, Fudan University. One day later, the event was banned by the university administrators. At the end of the year, Shanghai’s Cleanse Spiritual Pollution campaign also listed it as one event that had a negative social impact. Despite these incidences, however, unofficial art movements promoting new genres that were unhindered have far outnumbered those that suffered an ill fate. Other artists who held exhibitions or produced work in new genres include Chen Danqing 陈丹青, Wu Guanzhong 吴冠中, Zhong Ming 钟鸣, and Li Xianting 栗宪庭. New art societies formed, such as the Wild Grass Art Society (yecao huahui 野草画会) in Hunan, the Grass Grass Society (caocaoshe 草草社) in Shanghai, and the Southwest Art Group (xinan yishu qunti 西南艺术群体) in Kunming. More contemporary art exhibitions took place in Beijing, Xi’an, Chengdu, and Hunan. New informal art groups, including clusters of photographers, musicians, calligraphers, and seal carvers, mushroomed across the nation.35 These events also boosted the number of young participants, as shown in Table 3.1. On average, every year of the 1980s saw 19 art events.36 Art exhibitions and events concentrated in 1985 (39) and 1986 (110), claiming 79 percent of total activities in the entire decade of the 1980s.37 Chinese modern art had a breakthrough in 1985 and 1986, rising to dominance in art circles after ten years of exploration and artists’ efforts. These

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Table 3.1  Number of participants in art activities (1978–1986) Year

Number of Events

1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986

0 37 201 56 56 60 6 926 3475

% of Young Participants (Age 35 and Under) 0 94.6 70.1 64.3 100 48.3 100 94.6 94.5

Source: Tong Dian, “The Landscape of China’s Modern Art Movement,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 67

two years not only mark a peak in modern art activities, but also a turning point in Chinese art. After 1986, an era of one doctrine, one school, and one guiding thought ended, while a new prospect of pluralism and stylistic diversity was ushered in. … [C]hanges in social and cultural values led to interest in the modern art movement, while the social and cultural background prepared the ground for its growth.38

Some formal art institutions also began large-scale art shows. For example, the Ministry of Culture and China’s Art Association organized a national art exhibition in nine cities, displaying over 3700 artworks. The new discourse of this era has become “cultural management” (wenhua guanli 文化管理). In 1983, the Ministry of Culture offered training programs on cultural management, leading to the launch of the first academic journal on this topic in China. Traditional Chinese ink painting began “a prominent revival.”39 The contrast of the cultural mandates of two eras could not have been greater when some famous painters “who only a few years before had been the target of Jiang Qing’s black painting exhibitions are now praised and commissioned to execute the murals for Mao’s mausoleum.”40 By the mid 1980s, however, widespread enthusiasm in art had gradually given way to shared emotions of hesitations and confusion. For example, discussions of aesthetics in the circle of Beijing-based artists began to diverge from the emerging concerns of society, such as economic liberalization and the influence of Western culture.41 At the Sixth National Art

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Exhibition in 1984, more than 1000 works were displayed, but the uniformity of style was almost disconcerting. One needs to know that by then, “the directors of all six major art academies were either Soviet trained or Makismov students.”42 Viewing the stagnation at such a large scale, many young artists were appalled. Some were no longer content to be taught only Soviet-style realist oil paintings by their institutions. As a response to this moment of reckoning, small clusters of reform-­ minded artists formed and began their radical experiments across China. Within a year, over 30 exhibitions of new art forms had taken place. Historians describe this trend as “’85 New Wave” (85 xinchao yishu 八五 新潮艺术). The Jiangsu Art Journal (Jiangsu huakan) began organizing and promoting the ’85 New Wave art exhibition. The peak event to integrate Euro-American avant-garde art into China’s art world, it was also a response to a prior political campaign—“Cleanse Spiritual Pollution”— that aimed at containing openness and change on a societal level.43 The authorities had picked up earlier rhetoric of describing Western artworks as “bourgeois imports,” thereby interrupting aesthetic discussions on formal abstraction and suspending exhibitions of Western modern art. As Wu Hung observes, “While this official campaign halted the development of contemporary art temporarily, it also fueled a stronger desire in many younger artists to pursue alternative routes.”44 As two artists wrote in Meishu magazine (《美术》) in 1985, The “freedom to create” reinvigorates us. It encourages us to boldly wage wars against established artistic modes and conventional restrictions. In recent years, the sheer number of realistic works makes clear the memories of trauma and agony that the past has inflicted on the bodies of our artists. … A new age, new concepts, and new ideas constantly stimulate our minds, and compel us to fundamentally restructure our artistic ideas and to explore new paths in approaching art.45

Although the 1985 New Wave of China’s avant-garde art movement continued to break boundaries and to demand artistic autonomy, some historians consider it more of an “ideological preparation” than a modern art movement in the real sense.46 The infrastructure for contemporary art did not exist, and much of the cultural climate had to be undone. The dissenting spirit proved to be a lasting heritage. Nevertheless, in advocating for replacing emotionalism with rationality in art forms, these New Wave artists began to experiment with Chinese humanism but ended with a new

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tide of cynicism.47 Meanwhile, it opened up China’s art world to a wider spectrum of Western art and reinvigorated Chinese art criticism. For example, artists and critics actively responded to the National Art Gallery’s 1985 exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg’s works. Fine Arts in China published some Chinese art theorists’ respective evaluations of its significance: Shui Tianzhong 水天中 (Research Institute of Fine Arts, China’s National Academy of Arts): This exhibition opens a window through which we can have a deeper and more objective understanding of styles of Western modern art. Gu Shangfei 顾上飞 (Graduate Student in Marxist Cultural Theory): The works of Rauschenberg do not contain any trace of an aristocratic spirit. They are concerned with the everyday life of common people … emphasizing that everybody can be creative and be empowered through this creativity. Fei Dawei 费大为 (Central Academy of Fine Arts): Today even outdated art from the West still has such a strong impact on us. This shows how limited our knowledge is regarding Western concepts and ideas. What has been introduced to China to a certain extent remains at the surface level.48

In the same year, Meishu magazine introduced the 41st Venice Biennial in a special issue. It was the first time that a Chinese magazine had reported on a high-level global art exhibition since the 1950s. Around the same time, more and more art publications expanded their readership and exerted broader influence. Art historians note the unprecedented roles of art publications: Communication between the regional artists’ groups was made possible by regional and national art magazines and symposia that thus played a major role in the propagation of the artistic movement. … Magazines and symposia exerted influence. … [T]hey were powerful and immediate factors in the development of avant-garde art through reviews of exhibitions and single works of art and through their reports on artists’ groups and events. This not only constituted a pool of mutual information, but also created a kind of snowball effect. … Second, they shaped art world opinions. Many debates were initiated by controversial articles in those magazines. … Third, art magazines and symposia generated a general picture of the contemporary art movement. This picture, even though diverse and varied, created a kind of group consciousness and propagated certain concepts with which young artists could identify.49

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Researchers have found that during 1985 and 1986, more than 80 unofficial art groups emerged from 23 regions.50 As Gao Minglu explains, “This kind of ubiquitous enthusiasm for exhibitions throughout the country was rarely seen in previous years and undoubtedly marked a rare and positive phenomenon for the new era.”51 Exhibitions by unofficial art groups, art magazines, and numerous symposia made up a new ecosystem for art production in China. As a result of all these developments, the 1980s saw many “firsts” in China’s art world, as listed in Table  3.2. Western art exhibitions also returned to mainland China. The second half of the 1980s saw the publication of hundreds of art theory books in China translated from other languages. More and more Western art was introduced through reproductions and exhibitions, presenting “diverse content as visual and intellectual stimuli for a hungry audience.”52 New art publications popped up, including The Trend of Art Thought (meishu sikao 《美术思考》), Fine Arts in China (zhongguo meishu bao 《中国美术报》), and Jiangsu Pictorial (Jiangsu huakan 《江苏 画刊》), all staffed by a new generation of art researchers and critics. A collective sense emerged, that of an experimental mission in exploring future paths for Chinese art. Terms such as “enlightenment” and “new era” were often used in these new public spaces for art-related discussions. The organic social networks between these key players and art institutions together fostered a hopeful outlook, pushing the budding avant-garde movement into the national environs. The erosion of ideological control on art genres also happened within the establishment, which still employed a massive labor force. For example, in 1988, China had more than 3000 professional performing-arts troupes, and the majority were state sponsored, employing around 170,000 salaried staff.53 But by then, opera art or figurative poster art with revolutionary realism and romanticism centering on Communist leaders had lost their appeal and no longer functioned as effective symbols of political power. The Party-state propaganda apparatus also went through an abstraction phase, using symbols such as the national flag or landmark sceneries to command a sense of national unity.

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Table 3.2  Trailblazing art events in the 1980s Year

Significance

Region

Artists/Art Historians/Art Critics

1982 First Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition in New York 1983 First exhibition of Picasso’s art in China First abstract art exhibition by Chinese artists 1985 As the first Western scholar to lecture in postreform China, US scholar Romain J. Verostko lectured in art academies across the nation Huangshan Conference as the first conference to reject “theme determinism” and to promote “renewed ideas” in art

USA

Qian Peikun, Qu Guoliang, Chen Danqing, Fu Ming, etc. Picasso

Graduation of the first cohort students in art history major (both bachelor’s and master’s degrees) from Central China Art Academy Art magazine reported on the 41st Venice Biennial, first-time coverage of a Western art exhibition The Art Thoughts journal gave out 12 art criticism rewards for the first time since 1949 1986 Precursor of political pop art by using imagery from the Cultural Revolution First national conference on oil painting in China

Beijing

First self-funded abstract art exhibition First Tapestry Art Institute at Zhejaing Art Academy

Beijing and Shanghai Shanghai

Zhang Jianjun, Yu Xiaofu, Li Shan, Zha Guojun, Gao Jin, etc.

Nanjing, Tianjin, Sichuan

Anhui

Beijing

Zhoushan

Beijing

70 artists and art theorists from China Art Research Institute, Central China Art Academy, Beijing Art Institute, Anhui Art Association, and Art History Journal Fei Dawei, Hou Hanru, Wen Pulin, Zhu Qingsheng, Yi Ying, Kong Changan, and Yin Jinan

Zhang Zhiyang, Chen Danqing, Lu Meng, Gu Wenda, Li Xiaoshan, Zhu Qingsheng, etc. Wu Shan and other students in Zhejiang Art Academy

Shanghai

Oil Painting Art Committee of the China Art Association; Shui Zhongtian, Gao Minglu, and Zhu Qingsheng Wan Junyan and Zhu Changyan

Hangzhou

Wan Man (continued)

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Table 3.2 (continued) Year

Significance

Region

First time when Chinese France contemporary art toured around France 1987 First national avant-garde art Beijing conference preparation meeting 1989 First time when Chinese Paris contemporary artists presented their works at a renowned international art institution (Le Centre Pompidou, France)

Artists/Art Historians/Art Critics Fei Dawei, Guang Jun, Cheng Conglin, and Wang Gongyi Gao Minglu Huang Yongping, Gu Dexin, and Yang Jiechang

The Emergence of Local Art Zones and Out-Migration By the mid 1980s, what was left of the art establishment operated with a kind of inertia thanks to the centrally planned economy. For example, ideological control over avant-garde art was in the name of “anticapitalist liberalization” (fan zichanjieji ziyouhua 反资产阶级自由派), a slogan that still held some power among the public. Bureaucracies in the cultural institutions also retained the central-planning work style—museums run by local art academies or associations opened only during hours that they found convenient. Like state-owned enterprises, these art institutions had no market incentive. It was not until the late 1990s that the public education system, which art institutions were parts of, began to marketize. In China’s art economy, institutionalized practices that suffered attacks in the 1980s included permanent employment (the “iron rice bowl”), the egalitarian salary system, state subsidies, and administrative unprofessionalism. Reforms in cultural policy began to emphasize financial self-sufficiency. The state’s art bureaucracies were given the mandate to loosen their grip on China’s art economy, transforming the “art-as-propaganda” mission into “art-as-commodity.”54 Much of the cultural debate in the 1980s had an antiestablishment ethos, exploring what can be done outside of the state apparatus (tizhiwai 体制外). Thus, the term “new civilian culture” (minjian wenhua 民间文 化) was invented and became quite popular. It was oriented toward “human rights, democracy, pluralism, and open-mindedness” in

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opposition to the “old official culture oriented towards authoritarianism, close-mindedness, conservatism and inhumanness.”55 Gradualist market reform generated a hybrid space for Chinese artists. As historian Jane DeBevoise writes, “Neither completely detached from the administration and oversight of the state nor fully embedded in the market mechanism that dominates much cultural activity today, this in-­ between zone represented a fluid yet fertile site of creativity and debate from which emerged some of the most innovative art practice of the period.”56 As she further explains, Prior to 1980, the dominant system of support for and control of the arts was the state. Artists not only were educated and employed by the state but also lived in state-owned housing and produced work in state-owned studios with allocated state-owned art supplies, which was then displayed at state-­ organized exhibitions that took place in state-operated venues. If they were lucky, their work might garner state-sponsored awards and be published in the state-controlled media. …[the reform] created an unstable space, between state and market, from which emerged a new imaginary. This new imaginary energized the arts, generating works of ambiguity and force. It also formed the basis of an alternative system of legitimization and support, which for many artists in the 1990s offered a way out of the institutional cul-de-sac that resulted from the Tiananmen Square incident of June 4, 1989.57

In the wake of the economic reform, outskirts of Chinese cities became experimental sites where new social structures formed. The concentration of Chinese artists in these art zones located around the fringes of cities in fact provided working and exhibition space and opportunities for communal, interactive learning among artists. The historical significance of this phenomenon cannot be overestimated because these early art zones effectively served as the incubators for a reinvented art market that would assume its unparalleled force three decades down the road. The best-­ known artist group was The Stars, which formed near Yuanmingyuan in the urban fringe of Beijing. These young art students and amateur artists lived in ad hoc housing units and were known to be “China’s first hippie atmosphere art commune.”58 The hustle-and-bustle art scene later attracted the attention of authorities who re-claimed the ruins of Yuanmingyuan as a public park. This art colony then relocated to Song Zhuang, a village in suburban Beijing. Later, some found wider space at what was previously a heavy-industrial state-owned factory known as 798.

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Cheap rent and the availability of space enticed more and more artists to join in. The area gained fame as the 798 Art Zone, a Chinese contemporary artists’ premier creative scene, over the next decades. In the first edited volume on China’s contemporary art scene, Wu Hong explains that this scene “is not a purely temporary content but is defined more generally in the context of post–Cultural Revolution Chinese society, politics, and globalization.”59 He further describes its scope: It consists of various trends that self-consciously distinguished themselves from official art, mainstream academic art, and traditional art (although also constantly interacting with these categories). Sometimes called “modern art” (xiandai yishu 现代艺术), “avant-garde art” (qianwei yishu 前卫艺术), or “experimental art” (shiyan yishu 实验艺术), its basic characteristics include persistent experimentation and social engagement, and a strong disposition towards internationalization.60

Some regional art groups or societies provided solidarity when they gathered artists whose “cultural orientation belongs to a completely new domain.”61 The Northern Art Group, for example, enabled artists who grew dissatisfied with the “cultural models accepted by the masses” to discuss, debate, and experiment with new artistic schema. As artist and art critic Shu Qun (舒群) explains, “upon this foundation of mutual self-­ identification, the group is able to eliminate falsehoods and preserve truths through criticism, countercriticism, argument, and debate, ultimately bringing forth a type of cultural model.”62 As one curator writes, “we cannot wait until the populace is ready before presenting it with new concepts. In fact, new ideas have always been imposed by a small minority upon the large majority who then slowly accustom themselves while also developing new powers to adapt.”63 The years after the ’85 New Wave, a spontaneous multifaceted art trend, produced a new internal “rethinking” countertrend that advocated for individual creativity instead of seeking to reconstruct another collectivity: some avant-garde artists and critics made an increasing effort to free artistic creation from collective activities motivated by sociopolitical goals. They argued that it was wrong to use art as a practical tool in any kind of social revolution, and that the true value of modern art resided in its intrinsic creativity and spirituality.64

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In February 1989, the China/Avant-Garde exhibition in Beijing was remembered for its “unprecedented size and comprehensiveness” and for its “enormous social impact.”65 Preceding the tumultuous Tiananmen movement that would break out a few months later, this event became “both the climax and the end of the avant-garde art movement in 1980s China.”66 Economic liberalization provided “educated youth” two pathways for career development: one domestic and one overseas. Some avant-garde artists chose to study or emigrate overseas. Global exchanges between Chinese artists and Western art institutions resumed after a three-decade cultural freeze. In August 1982, for example, the first Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition was held in New York, showing over 300 pieces by Chinese artists, such as Qian Peikun, Qu Guoliang, Chen Danqing, and Fu Ming. Art exchange between China and Japan also restarted in the 1980s. Other East Asian regions, such as Taiwan and Hong Kong, also saw vibrant modernist art movements that experimented with Chinese art forms. The late 1980s also saw the emigration of a few Chinese artists, such as Cai Guoqiang 蔡国强 and Wenda Gu 谷文达, who continued to develop their global brands of Chinese art. Some describe this phase as Chinese artists who “went from an underground existence to overseas development.”67 They soon found out that “the styles and images of Cultural Revolution art could, when given an ironic or satirical postmodern twist, find a ready market in the West.”68 Two pioneering artists in this direction were Zhang Hongtu 张宏图 (b. 1943) in New York and Shen Jiawei 沈嘉 蔚 (b. 1948) in Australia. Zhang was arguably the first Chinese artist to rework Mao’s image for an international art-collecting audience. Like many artists of his cohort who had lived through Maoism as youths, exploring this new way of art making was a liberating and purposeful experience. In 1987, he cofounded the Chinese United Overseas Artists Association along with Ai Weiwei and two other émigré Chinese artists. One of his most notable oil paintings is The Last Banquet (1989), a recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s classic to satirically portray the deification of Mao surrounded by disciplines who had made themselves in Mao’s own image. Shen Jiawei’s fame came later, after the Tiananmen incident of 1989. He made a pop art collage, 1966 Beijing Jeep, portraying the winners and losers of the early Cultural Revolution. Zhou Enlai is driving the jeep with an emotionless face and has Lin Biao grinning beside him. Also in the

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vehicle, Mao stands tall, dressed in a swimming robe as he appeared in pictures of his famous swim scenes in the Yangtze River. Behind them are two major victims of the revolution, Peng Dehuai and Liu Shaoqi, both with placards around their necks as in struggle meetings. Shen’s artwork like this one appealed to a niche in the West during the broader Cold War climate. As one scholar comments, Appropriating, or cannibalizing, famous images from the Cultural Revolution in the same glossy popularized style of that time was fair game in a postmodernist Western art world where originality was no longer indispensable for serious art and Cold War news coverage enabled Westerners to recognize many of the subjects. Even if a Western audience could not identify all the figures in Shen’s Beijing Jeep, a pastiche including celebrated images of Mao and Lin Biao reviewing the Red Guards in Tian’anmen Square, they at least knew it was from a China that no longer represented a revolutionary threat to the West.69

From 1993 to 2015, Shen Jiawei was a finalist for the Archibald Prize, Australia’s most prestigious portrait prize, 14 years in a row. Since the late 1980s, the most influential Chinese artists included Gu Wenda, Wu Shanzhuan 吴山专, and Xu Bing 徐冰. They all embody a vibrant history of China’s unofficial art movement.

Conclusion A leading art publication, Fine Arts in China, said in its 1985 launch, “Art is infiltrating the field of production and the sphere of our lives. At the same time, production and life are orienting themselves toward art.”70 The decade after 1978 was a phase of pragmatic communism when the Communist Party “embraced partial economic liberalization without clearly redefining private property rights.”71 According to art historian Katie Hill, the artistic change in this period was “a move away from the political into the human.”72 Still processing what had happened before the economic reform, Chinese artists actively presented “a unified narrative of post-traumatic expression, which gives the impression of an artistic movement intent on revealing a state of mind for China, by the depiction of self with the face and also in the depiction in (predominantly male) groups.”73 As art critic Xu Hong 徐虹 also describes, “For them, art was a means of social critique. It could give expression to the trauma that they had

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experienced and had been unable to communicate.”74 Art making became a way of unburdening those emotions of the artists that had been suppressed for so long. Some still held back from antagonizing the government; others made bold satirical art in the form of political pop art, which “related to the political reality of China and yet cleverly avoided the most acute and sensitive of issues while accommodating the image and understanding of Chinese culture and ideology that existed in the Western imagination.”75 Although rural communes gradually disintegrated, urban work units remained in place to enable the state’s surveillance of social activities. Even the family home space had been heavily censored. There was little public space for people to freely assemble or express themselves. Some scholars find it necessary to restore the link between Red Guard art movement and contemporary forms of avant-garde Chinese art.76 “Unofficial art” was a major theme characterizing the art worlds in China during the 1980s. It is inherently entrepreneurial, as David Joselit writes: “The aesthetic and political problems faced by unofficial art lies in activating the fundamental freedom underlying a functional civil society … in the absence of any stable social framework for pursuing it.”77 He also frames it as “a third global genealogy of modernism”:78 If postcolonial modernism reverses and redresses the “image imperialism” of the European historical avant-gardes, and cultural revolution creates a mass culture directed toward political identification and solidarity rather than consumerism, [then] official art uses the tool of global modern and contemporary art to build alternative counterpublics. Unofficial art may emerge in authoritarian states when knowledge of “international styles” such as conceptual or body art goes underground either on account of the interruption of modern traditions by politics, as in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War.79

As historian Ying Yi writes in Art and Artists in China since 1949, the 1989 “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition was the end of the ’85 movement, while the political tumult of 1989 also suddenly cooled the fervor of avant-garde art. A new generation seemed destined to emerge on the stage of history at this time. Many… were recently graduated art students. … [T]hey did not have the idealism or critical spirit of the sent-down generation. … The new generation did not have as clear a sense of mission as their predecessors. … China suddenly kicked the machinery of economic devel-

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opment into high gear. … The elites of avant-garde art had not mentally prepared themselves for this sudden change, and while they were still immersed in the ’85 Movement’s glorious and painful search for the lost human spirit, the new generation naturally adapted to this change, because they were in fact the products of this change.80

The Tiananmen incident was a threshold for Chinese artists to further open up to the outside world. It also accelerated the trend of emigration. Even some of the artists who stayed in China developed a “dual track” strategy of making two types of art: “one ‘safe’ kind for exhibition at home, another, more daring, to be shown abroad.”81 China’s market economy did not form its now-supportive ecosystem for artists until the 1990s.82 Chinese artists were concerned about autonomy, not market prices for their work. As one Chinese researcher comments, “No one thought about the market or material benefits of pursuing modern art at that time.”83 As soon as China opened up further for international travelers, art collectors, and art dealers from Taiwan, Hong Kong and other countries came and began their scavenger hunt tours. Some detected local talents and brought their works to art exhibitions outside of China. These informal but pioneering efforts paved the way for the next decade of rebuilding art market infrastructures.

Notes 1. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2000. “Globalization or the Age of Transition? A Long-Term View of the Trajectory of the World-System.” International Sociology 15 (2): 249–265. 2. Basia Sliwinska, The Female Body in the Looking-Glass: Contemporary Art, Aesthetics and Genderland (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 3. 3. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton University Press, 1997), 23. 4. Ibid. 5. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China, 164. 6. Ibid. 7. Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the PRC, 1949–1979 (University of California Press, 1994), 1. 8. Ding, X. L. (1994) The Decline of Communism in China: Legitimacy Crisis, 1977–1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 118. 9. Erkki Sevänen and Simo Häyrynen, “Varieties of National Cultural Politics and Art Worlds in an Era of Increasing Marketization and Globalization,”

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in Samuli Hägg, Simo Häyrynen and Erkki Sevänen (eds.), Art and the Challenge of Markets: Natural Cultural Politics and the Challenges of Marketization and Globalization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 6. 10. Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the PRC, 1949–1979 (University of California Press, 1994), 390. 11. Paul Gladson, Deconstructing Contemporary Chinese Art: Selected Critical Writings and Conversations, 2007–2014 (Springer, 2015), 6. 12. Ibid., 390. 13. Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 19. 14. Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the PRC, 1949–1979 (University of California Press, 1994), 388. 15. Li Zehou, The Critique of Critical Philosophy: A Study of Kant (Beijing: People’s Publishing house, 1979). 16. Li Zehou, “Me and the Aesthetics Fever of the 1980s” (我和八十年代美 学热), Economic Observer 经济观察报, December 11, 2008. Reposted on news.ifeng.com, http://news.ifeng.com/opinion/specials/thinking/200812/1211_4817_917849.shtml. 17. Li Zehou, “Me and the Aesthetics Fever of the 1980s,” Economic Observer, December 11, 2008. 18. Ibid. 19. Michael Keane, Created in China: The Great New Leap Forward (Routledge, 2007), 62–63. 20. Ibid., 64. 21. Ibid. 22. Liu Yuedi, “Chinese Contemporary Art: From De-Chineseness to Re-Chineseness,” Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 62–63. 23. Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the PRC, 1949–1979 (University of California Press, 1994), 400. 24. Huang worked a day job at a leather factory. Other core members of The Stars Art Group were also amateur artists who worked for state-run enterprises. There was one female artist, Li Shuang, among the founding members. Other names included Zhong Acheng, Ma Desheng, Bo Yun, Qu Leilei, Wang Keping, Yan Li, Mao Lizi, Yang Yiping, Shao Fei, Ai Weiwei, Song Hong, Bao Pao, Zhu Jinshi, Wang Luyan, He Baosen, and Zhao Gang. 25. “Introduction to the Xingxing Art Show” (星星画会简介), archived at shigebao.com, January 20, 2010. http://www.shigebao.com/html/articles/hui/3180.html.

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26. Two examples of such reinforcing, intersectional growth were the publication of Today magazine (jintian) and the emergence of avant-garde poetry and art. 27. Curtis L.  Carter, “The Political Body in Chinese Art,” in Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 112. Also see Kraus, Brushes with Power, 130–137. 28. Curtis L.  Carter, “The Political Body in Chinese Art,” in Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 112. Also see Kraus, Brushes with Power, 130–137. 29. Ibid. 30. Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 6. 31. “Second Xingxing Art Show,” digitally archived on Sohu.com, August 14, 2013. http://pic.book.sohu.com/detail-­469392-­0.shtml#0. 32. Lv Peng, “About Xingxing Art Show: We Were No Longer Children” (关 于星星美展: 我们不再是孩子了), digitally archived on Ifeng.com, August 5, 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20160913225224/http://art. ifeng.com/2015/0805/2459188.shtml. 33. Images: http://js.ifeng.com/humanity/collection/detail_2014_10/27/ 3067752_0.shtml. 34. Laurie Adams, “Contemporary Art in China: ‘Anxiety of Influence’ and the Creative Triumph of Cai Guoqiang,” in Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 38. 35. Art historian Wu Hung has recorded over 80 participants by 1986. Wu Hung, Transcience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, 1999), 19. 36. Tong Dian, “The Landscape of China’s Modern Art Movement,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 73. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 77. 39. Richard King and Jan Walls, “Introduction: Vibrant Images of a Turbulent Decade,” in Richard King, Ralph Croizier, Shengtian Zheng and Scott Watson (eds.), Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–76, 17–18. 40. Ibid. 41. Zhang Bing, “From ‘Aesthetics Fever’ to the Revival of Aesthetics” (从“美 学热”到美学的复兴), Journal of Hubei University, August 6, 2018. http://www.isouxun.com/cssn/sjxz/gzdt/zxdt/201808/t20180806_ 4524121.shtml.

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Also see Li Zehou, Dialogues with Li Zehou: The 1980s 李泽厚对话集 (Beijing: Zhonghua Bookhouse, 2014); Gao Minglu, China AvantGuarde Art 中国前卫艺术 (Nanjing: Jiangsu Art Press, 2013). 42. Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (University of California Press, 2012), 151. 43. It was also known as the “Anticrime and Antipollution Campaign” (or yanda) from 1983 to 1986. See Murray Scot Tanner, “State Coercion and the Balance of Awe: The 1983–1986 ‘Stern Blows’ Anti-Crime Campaign,” The China Journal, No. 44 (Jul. 2000): 93–125. 44. Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 35. 45. Zhang Qun and Meng Luding, “The New Era of Art: On Artistic Creation in the New Era” (新时代的艺术:在新时代谈创作), Meishu (美术), 211, No. 7 (1985): 47–48. 46. Li Jiatun, “The Significance Is Not the Art” (1986), in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 62–63. 47. Guo Xiaoyan & Shu Qun, “An Interview about ’85 Art New Wave Movement”, and Gao Minglu, ’85 Art New Wave Movement, Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2008. Quoted in Liu Yuedi, “Chinese Contemporary Art: From De-Chineseness to Re-Chineseness,” Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 68–69. 48. “Beijing Theorists’ Responses to Rauschenberg’s Works” (中国部分理论 家对罗生伯作品的反应), Fine Arts in China (中国美术报), December 21, 1985 (No. 22), 2. Quoted in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 42–45. 49. Martina Koppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979–1989, A Semiotic Analysis (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2003), 51–57. 50. Gao Minglu, Contemporary Chinese Art History, 1985–1986 (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1991). 51. Gao Minglu, “The ’85 Art Movement” (1986), in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 54. 52. Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 35. 53. Ling Yang, “Reform Booms Non-Government Art Troupes,” Beijing Review 31(27) (July 4–10, 1988), 27–28. Quoted in Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China, p. 23. 54. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), 64.

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55. Wang, Jing (1996) High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics and Ideology in Deng’s China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 71. 56. Jane DeBevoise, Between State and Market: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Post-Mao era (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 3. 57. Ibid. 58. Laurence, Brahm, “Eye of the Collector: Curating 30 Years of Transformation,” China Daily, February 20, 2021. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202102/20/WS6030768ca31024ad0baa9e31.html. 59. Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), IV. 60. Ibid. 61. Shu Qun, “An Explanation of the Northern Art Group,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 79. 62. Ibid. 63. Li Xianting, “Confessions of A China/Avant-Garde Curator,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 117. 64. Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 99. 65. Ibid., 113. 66. Ibid., 113–114. 67. Quoted in Lü Peng, Contemporary Art in Twenty-first Century: 2000–2010 (Shanghai: Century Publishing Group, 2012), 24. 68. Richard King and Jan Walls, “Introduction: Vibrant Images of a Turbulent Decade,” in Richard King, Ralph Croizier, Shengtian Zheng and Scott Watson (eds.), Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–76, 17–18. 69. Ibid., 19. 70. “Foreword”(发刊词), Fine Arts in China (中国美术报), No. 1 (1985): 1. Quoted in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 45. 71. Li Ma, Christian Women and Modern China: Reinventing A Women’s History of Chinese Protestantism (Lenham: Lexington Books, 2021), 75. 72. Katie Hill, “Why the Manic Grin? Hysterical Bodies: Contemporary Art as (Male) Trauma in Post-Cultural Revolution China,” in in Jiehong Jiang (ed.), Burden or Legacy: From the Chinese Cultural Revolution to Contemporary Art (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), 71. 73. Ibid., 73.

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74. Xu Hong, “Chinese Art,” in Caroline Turner (ed.), Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific (Sydney: Pandanus Books, 2005), 332. 75. Ibid., 349. 76. Wang Mingxian and Yan Shanchun, The Art History of the People’s Republic of China, 1966–1976 《新中国美术图史》(Beijing: China Youth Publishing, 2000). 77. David Joselit, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020), 71. 78. Ibid., 70. 79. Ibid. 80. Ying Yi, Art and Artists in China since 1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 239. 81. Michael Sullivan, The Arts of China (University of California Press, 1999), 297. 82. Yi Ying, “Political Pop Art and the Crisis of Originality,” in Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 26–27. 83. Ibid.

CHAPTER 4

Private Entrepreneurship and the Commercialization of Art (1990s)

Since Deng Xiaoping’s famous Southern Tour in 1992, China’s market reform has entered a developmental phase toward building a “socialist market economy.” Subsequently, this decade saw the disintegration of the urban work unit system, accelerated rural-to-urban migration, and the rise of entrepreneurship in a growing private sector. The 1990s was also a time when “elite culture, national culture and mass culture constituted three separate yet interactive components” of Chinese society.1 In the art world, the talent of Chinese artists as well as political and social capital have undergone a process of economic capitalization through the fast-expanding market economy. Meanwhile, paths of divergence among three groups of artists became more distinct. First, artists who belonged to artist associations (both regional and national) were considered to be proestablishment national artists. Second, those who were employed by major art institutions, such as the Central Academy of Fine Arts and regional academies, were seen as academy-affiliated artists. These two groups continued to be supported by public funding. The last camp consisted of independent artists congregating in emerging artist communities on urban fringes. Enjoying the greatest artistic autonomy since 1978, all three groups were now at the mercy of market forces and global trends.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Ma, China’s Art Market since 1978, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34605-7_4

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Chinese Contemporary Art Enters the Global Stage If it can be said that contemporary Chinese art was born in the 1980s through the unofficial art movements, then the next decade saw this experiment reach another level—internationalization. The 1990s was a phase when new Chinese art became a stream of international contemporary art. An increasing number of artists who emigrated to the West and to Japan began to serve as cultural bridges. Those who remained on the mainland also had more opportunities to meet foreigners or to travel abroad for exhibitions and art events. While clusters of Chinese art lovers and traders expanded thanks to the Chinese diaspora, artists’ methods also developed in maturity and diversity. Many artists who wrote reflective content liked to discuss a few major themes, including historical memories of the previous decades; China’s social and urban transformation; self-identity; and art by overseas Chinese artists. As art historian Wu Hung notes, A crucial aspect of 1990s contemporary Chinese art is a serious probing into the notion of the self. Beginning with Cynical Realism and throughout the 1990s, many self-portraits showed a voluntary ambiguity in the artist’s self-­ image, as if the best way to realize individuality was to make themselves simultaneously visible and invisible. Paintings by Fang Lijun 方力钧, Yue Minjun 岳敏君, and Zeng Fanzhi 曾梵志, among others, expressed heightened anxiety about the possibility of maintaining an authentic self in a rapidly changing society.2

Political pop art initially had success abroad and then became an acceptable and influential trend within mainland China.3 The popularity of the genres of Political Pop and Cynical Realism was regarded as “a turning point in Chinese oil painting.”4 As researcher Yi Ying 易英 comments, the pop styles that developed by 1992 were in fact “commodities originally produced for export.”5 With the emergence of pluralistic genres by younger artists, its appeal within mainland China has been on the decline. In contrast, the international art world has continued to be amazed by these cynical artistic creations that confirm Westerners’ obsession with the history of communist oppression. Recognition by the global art market granted this art form not only political legitimacy but also high market prices. Critic Leng Lin 冷林 writes that Chinese artists favored “self-­ referential expressions” during this time; this phenomenon may be understood as “an instinctive reaction against the pressure of globalization.”6

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from the early 1990s, contemporary Chinese art has been closely associated with artists’ images of self. This is partly due to the widening gaps among artists, critics, and the art management during the 1990s, and partly due to artists’ isolated penetration into the international art scenes. … This has caused subtle yet substantial changes in artists’ relationship with their regional reality. While artists during the 1980s willingly have instead been trying to join the globalization process, and as a result, have been rediscovering and reaffirming their self-identity in the global sphere.7

As Yi Ying writes, “Political Pop is an artistic activity of civil society. It is not only a reflection of reality, but also the expression of an idea, which provides the art with certain legitimacy.”8 Take Zhang Xiaogang 张晓刚 as an example. In an interview about the meaning of his Big Family iconography series, Zhang explains that his initial motivation to create such art was due to a changed perspective on what “family” and collectivism meant in that particular period of history. In his own words, Zhang describes this process: family portraits should be categorized as symbols of privacy, but they have instead been standardized and turned into ideology. … Through all kinds of “heredity,” the idea of “collectivism” has in fact already burrowed deep into our consciousness and formed a certain unshakable complex. In this “family” where both standardization and privacy convene, we counterbalance each other, dissolve each other, and depend on each other.9

The global art world has always considered China’s art canon to be a central legacy. In 1993, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane presented a terracotta-bell Buddhist sanctuary by leading Thai artist Montien Boonma alongside works by eight artists from China, including Yu Youhan and Ding Yi. Nevertheless, as Alexandra Munroe points out, “Recent art history has been written more as a China story than as a China-in-the-world story. … [I]t has often left this art still branded as ‘Other,’ still orphaned in its own geopolitical and cultural area.”10 This “exclusive framing” of the global art community was to be challenged by Chinese artists in the next two decades.11 Official art institutions in China also began exploring international collaborations. By 1994, for example, the China Academy of Fine Arts (Hangzhou) had set up three studios in Paris for the use of its Chinese staff.12 In February 1995, China’s Museum of Science and Technology (Beijing) loaned over 400 artifacts to an exhibition titled “China: Cradle

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of Knowledge—7000 Years of Invention and Discovery” touring global cities such as Birmingham (UK), Toronto, Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta, Boston, and Dallas, attracting over four million visitors in all.13 These original objects and replicas ranged from textiles, ceramics, paper-making instruments, and traditional medicine to architecture and astronomy. By the mid 1990s, the number of young Chinese artists who had emigrated abroad rose to several thousand. Some were notable “luminaries” of the art movement in the 1980s. Through public exhibitions and awards, they became what the international art world knew as representatives of Chinese artists of mainland origin. Chen Zhen 陈箴, Wenda Gu, Yang Jiechang 杨诘苍, and Wu Shanzhuan, among others, have, directly or indirectly, challenged the global-scale oppressive influences of Western consumerism and other ideologies by resorting to their own cultural heritage, and proposing possible alternatives to Western-centrism. Their work is often provocative and even subversive. They open themselves up to a kind of chaotic vision of the world, or more exactly, the world based on the order of Western rationalism. Such a common strategy, rooted in the dialectics of Chinese philosophical ideas of the world, is also directed towards the development of international communications. Towards finally revealing the truth that the future world order will be born out of a certain entropic rule; that a new internationalism will replace the existing West-centric domination.14

In a letter to a fellow artist within mainland China who discussed whether “art withers upon leaving its motherland,” Chinese artist Fei Dawei 费大为 writes, After disentangling ourselves from decades of being closed to the outside, what we first focused on doing was diligently eliminating the closed nature that contemporary national culture had formed within us. If we were to ask what problems cultural contemporaneity has raised following the second half of the twentieth century, it would say that one of the most important has been the issue of overcoming years of nationalist biases in order to create new dialogues. We have already reached the irreversible phase of a global collective life. What we want to destroy are not the traditional cultures of different peoples; rather, we want to destroy the concept of inequality among all races, as well as the related issues of cultural egotism and narrow-­ minded nationalistic prejudices. We, as elements of non-Western cultures, are melding into the process of the ever-increasing opening up and deconstruction of Western cultures. Our activities are enriching the twin

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­ ovements of the internationalization of Western art and the internationalm ization of Chinese art.15

Another financially successful artist during this time was classic-style oil artist Chen Yifei 陈逸飞 (b. 1946). Chen painted large portraits of Mao Zedong and depicted grand events of the modern Chinese nation, winning him recognition from Chinese authorities. Since 1979, Chen began to integrate fashion, cinema, and design into his oil paintings. He also abandoned his former uncritical glorification of the Party and blended realistic elements into his art. His painting of melancholic women in traditional dresses won him fame as “Romantic Realism.”16 In 1980, Chen Yifei became one of the first artists from mainland China to study in the United States. Three years later, before graduating with a master’s degree, his solo exhibition at the Hammer Galleries was a huge success. In 1990, Chen returned to China and began transforming himself into a style and fashion entrepreneur. Within a few years, Chen Yifei became a millionaire artist by creating fashion brands and decorating hotels.17 In 1992, one painting by Chen Yifei sold for over USD 275,000 by the Guardian Auction in Beijing. This sales record was considered a “watershed” moment for Chinese artists (Table 4.1). A bump in the road was Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997. When art collectors in Hong Kong feared that China would pass tighter laws on the trading of art and antiquities in Hong Kong, a haven for art trading, many quietly moved the art out of the region. Observers saw arguably “one of the largest exoduses of art in recent history.”18 The Art Newspaper reported on this phenomenon: “Huge quantities of ceramics have been moved….one of the most popular collecting areas in Hong Kong and prices are buoyant. … Jade is also being shifted, as well as bronzes and, to a lesser extent, furniture.”19 Notably, Chinese artists who went abroad and won international recognition during this time were almost exclusively men “noted for their bad boy political dissent.”20 Westerners and international media that shone the spotlight on them helped create a “masculinist avant-garde” collective.21 Another globally recognized artist was Ai Weiwei, who made good use of these narratives. Many female artists who had trained alongside them in state-run art academies never had equal opportunities.22 Gradually, the success of this small number of Chinese artists invited strong suspicion and even resentment inside China’s art circles. For example, Chinese researcher Hou Hanru 候瀚如 points out that “[t]hese kinds

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Table 4.1  Notable overseas events featuring Chinese contemporary art by 1999 Time Location

Theme

1

1982 USA

2 3 4 5 6 3 4 5 6 7

1987 1987 1990 1991 1991 1993 1993 1993 1994 1997

8 9 10 11

1998 1999 1999 1999

Painting the Chinese Dream: Chinese Art Thirty Years after the Revolution Artists from China: New Expressions Dangerous Chessboard Leaves the Ground, by Wenda Gu Art Chinois, Chine Demain ou Hier Exhibitions by Yang Jiechang, Chen Zhen Three Installations by Xu Bing China’s New Art, Post-1989 Silent Energy Fragmented Memory: the Chinese Avant-Garde in Exile Heart of Darkness Flying Dragons in the Heavens, Cultural Melting Bath, by Cai Guoqiang Survey exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Art Xu Bing received an award from the MacArthur Foundation Wenda Gu featured on the cover of Art in America Twenty Chinese artists present their works at the Venice Biennale

USA Canada France Europe USA Hong Kong Europe USA Europe USA and Europe USA USA USA Italy

of cynical games of ‘anti-official propaganda’ satisfy a Western public’s expectation for their own ideological superiority as mentioned above. … [It] is actually another form of political propaganda.”23 He adds that sometimes such motivations were paramount in foreign curators’ deciding to organize these exhibitions by artists of mainland Chinese descent.24 Chinese scholar Wang Lin published an article on Dushu (《读书》), China’s premier publication for liberal-minded intellectuals, stating a similar concern: In Westerners’ eyes, China is the last fortress for the opposition between East and West … and a living fossil of the Cold War. … The burden of ideology, a precapitalist mentality and the deconstructive function of popular culture together constitute the power of an alienated avant-garde art.25

Wu Hung also observes that “[s]ome Chinese critics raised questions about the standards used by Western curators to evaluate Chinese art and criticized works by overseas Chinese artists, which in their view catered to foreigners’ penchant for Oriental exoticism and Cold War sentiment.”26

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Moreover, such preferences also brought high monetary gains. As one English journalist wrote in 1997, “Art offers an opportunity to transfer worthless Chinese currency into an international commodity.”27

Learning the Ropes in China’s Evolving Art Markets Inside China, changes were happening, but at a much slower pace. As China transformed from “an enlightenment culture” of the 1980s to “a consumer culture” in the early 1990s, “Chinese artists, still stuck in a tragic mood by the failure of cultural enlightenment, suddenly realized that they were buried in a completely unfamiliar economic world.”28 Richard Kraus also observes that in the 1990s, most Chinese artists “had little experience with how markets work.”29 Some painters were even shocked to learn that their art could be priced according to its size.30 Gradually, they learned how to negotiate with foreign art dealers, local collectors, and museums. Some came up with the idea of developing “double careers” to support their unmarketable experiments with cash earned from selling paintings and photographs.31 Art makers and dealers soon realized that their careers were hampered without a domestic market infrastructure. Some new foundations needed to be laid. In October 1992, some private entrepreneurs sponsored an art fair at a five-star hotel in Beijing, showcasing over 400 works by 350 Chinese artists. The advisory committee had 14 art critics. This groundbreaking collaboration between art experts and private entrepreneurs in China had a very self-conscious goal to achieve—to “establish a market system for contemporary Chinese art.”32 As Wu Hung writes, this unprecedented endeavor was a bold move but ended as a regrettable failure: Its location in an “international exhibition hall” inside a five-star hotel was symbolic. The awards set aside for several prizes was 450,000 yuan (about $120,000 at the time), an unheard of amount of money for any of the show’s participants. Suffering from the inexperience of the organizers as well as antagonism from the more idealistic artists, however, this grand undertaking ended with a feud among the three major parties involved in the exhibition: the organizers, the sponsor, and the artists.33

Researchers also note that more and more small art installations and conceptual art emerged in China around 1993.34 Many artworks were produced and exhibited by independent artists in their own private

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apartments. Again, by then, the urban work unit system had not disintegrated, making studio space a scarce resource. Just as unofficial religious groups had to gather within private homes, artists also made use of the only unmonitored space that they could access. Gao Minglu observes that “[t]he low-key nature of Apartment Art was partly a response to the suppressed art ecology in China after June 4 of 1989, and partly a self-­ questioning and criticizing of the purity of modernism itself.”35 But as Michael Sullivan observes, “What was the intensely idealistic spearhead of the newly liberated culture of the eighties has become marginalized or at least redirected.”36 Many artists were motivated by the lure of money and chose to redirect the purpose of their work. As critic and scholar Oufan Lee 李欧梵 writes, “using their art in order to project a highly personal vision in order to ‘shock’ conventional society, they have become cultural entrepreneurs who join forces with television and other media people in the production of culture.”37 Gradually, these artists became skillful in applying subversive tactics while still making a profit.38 The year 1993 saw two other cultural trends. First, China saw a revived frenzy of art forms, especially music, dedicated to commemorating Mao Zedong for the 100th anniversary of his birth. It became “a grandly orchestrated movement that officially promoted and marketed a new brand of reform-style nationalism.”39 But just as Geremie R. Barme writes, “The widespread condition of nostalgia can be symptomatic of a social interior dialogue regarding the irrevocable past, an identification with what is perceived as having been lost.”40 Second, private entrepreneurs began to exploit opportunities in the art economy. Chen Dongsheng 陈东升, CEO of Taikang Life Insurance, helped found China Guardian Auctions. This occurred five years after he watched a televised auction in London when one of Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings sold for USD 39.9 million.41 The way art and wealth merged in this exciting forum cemented something almost enchanting for Chen. The New York Times quotes his recollection from his memoir: “The images of the auction on television seemed inconceivably distant from my own life. so aristocratic, so refined.”42 The seed of cultural entrepreneurship in the area of art was secretly planted. In later years, Chen Dongsheng quit his job as an editor for a state-run magazine and entered the domain of auctioneering. He intentionally imitated Sotheby’s after visiting its auctions in Hong Kong and recording the proceedings. Next, his team studied the videos and designed their own platform accordingly.

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Meanwhile, art galleries no longer boasted full state funding. They began charging artists to rent space. The notion of private commissions, which were not new in Chinese history, was also restored in art trading. When making art, artists no longer needed to obtain approval from a political body or a professional association. Chinese cities also saw the proliferation of private galleries as licensed “art businesses” (qishu qiye 艺 术企业), which gradually outnumbered public and semipublic galleries founded in earlier decades. They formed key parts of the art market infrastructure (the secondary market), which provided more opportunities for new experimental art forms outside the state-sanctioned official art system. Witnessing profound sociopolitical changes happening around them, Chinese artists began to explore creative work, namely “post-ideological art” that “promotes an integration between art and the processes of social life.”43 Around 1992, a New History Group, founded by nine notable Chinese artists, began a series of exhibitions along the postideological art theme of “disinfecting.”44 Convinced that Chinese society had entered an era of consumption, these artists also advocated for “a new humanist art”: “art had to enter life, become products, be consumed, and consume everyone in turn.”45 With more artists providing pieces for public consumption and with more demand from the emerging middle class, new institutions and professions formed to connect producers and consumers. In 1991, the first issue of a new journal, Art Market (yishu shichang《艺术市场》), was published in Hunan. Professions such as independent curators (duli cezhanren 独立策展人) became novelties. Young people who assumed this intermediary role gradually built an infrastructure for the commercial circulation of artwork in an urbanizing economy. Their active participation in the art ecosystem helped elevate the social status of contemporary art and normalized art consumption as part of urban living. The level of professionalism and the division of labor, however, remained underdeveloped. For example, according to Lü Peng, the organizers of the 1989 contemporary Chinese art exhibitions were regarded as “the last idealists.”46 But their role was far from well defined—it overlapped with their role of also being critics and managers.47 Some gallery owners even acted as curators. These poorly defined roles characterized this transitional period, as old ways of bureaucracy including titles, salaries, and benefits remained hurdles. Meanwhile, foreign curators also began exploring the newly reopened art market in China, searching for new talent. Their participation added a

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model of incentives and sped up the commercialization of art in China. Foreign investors also entered the market. Of particular significance were the foreign-owned galleries that initially served mainly foreigners in China; they now shifted to serve more and more Chinese buyers. Historians Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen mention a few of them: Australian Brian Wallace ran the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing’s China World Hotel throughout the 1990s. … Lorenz Helbling, who studied history, Chinese, and art history in Zurich and Shanghai, opened Shangart at the Portman Ritz-Carlton in Shanghai in 1996. … [I]t established a high degree of professionalism in its catalogs, documentation, and publicity, becoming important in the eventual emergence of some Chinese artists in Europe, … and in bringing Chinese artists to the attention of international collectors at Art Basel and other international art fairs. In 1997, a Chinese American lawyer, Handel Lee, opened the Courtyard Gallery in Beijing. … [A] few galleries owned by individual Chinese also appeared in Shanghai and Beijing, usually run by artists who had returned from Japan or the West.48

These galleries began to populate major Chinese cities.49 Behind these art trading networks were individuals and institutions in Hong Kong, Japan, and Western countries. Some began to “systematically collect contemporary Chinese art.”50 In the international market, they furthered market share for Chinese art and gave more attention to contemporary Chinese artists.51 Art historians in state-run institutions (academies and publications) also began affirming the increasingly important role of market mechanisms for Chinese art. Lü Peng, for example, wrote in favor of “art marketization as investment” over sponsorship, which he criticized as “a vestige of classicism” that was based on “a psychology of begging and searching for alms.”52 He continues: market exchange has become the prerequisite for contemporary cultural production. … [Marketization] also means heading toward order. An artistic environment without a market is a primitive wilderness that is actually harmful … where art can be “disfigured” at any time by boorish administrative options. … [A] regulated and orderly art market has yet to be established in China, but this is no excuse for us to relinquish our responsibility, to drift along, or even to despair or harbor a “resigned attitude.”53

Another important component of intermediary institutions in an art market is art criticism, which remained “the weakest and most

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disheartening part of constructing the Chinese art market.”54 As an insider told the Art Market journal, In China, art criticism has never been an occupation with professional authority. It is either that kind of rambling spiritual analysis by philosophers and aestheticians, or—in most situations—a secret, friendly exchange of favors between the critic and the artist. … This is why places like Sotheby’s— in the international art market—are not interested in auctioning modern Chinese art. To some extent this is because China lacks a tradition of influential criticism that addresses artwork from the dual standpoints of historical positioning and commercial value.55

The latter half of the 1990s saw “a covert restructuring of the system and substance of the Chinese art world.”56 For example, in 1997, China passed the new Auction Law, the first since the founding of the Communist regime in 1949.57 Art critic Gao Minglu connects this process of institutionalization with the emergence of China’s middle class: “As the Chinese economy grew, the art market became one of a number of brutal conduits for the upgrading of social class.”58 Another Chinese scholar also comments: The art market appeared at the same time as the market economy came into being. The impact of an art market to art creation is the great difference between the low level of life of the Chinese people and high art work prices. The art market at that time was mainly an overseas buyer’s market, and once the poor Chinese artists entered the market, they immediately got rid of poverty and became rich. The exhibition post-1989 China’s New Art itself had a commercial background, and the artists who became famous at this exhibition were also the first to enter China’s affluent class.59

China’s new middle class provided a base for the commercialization of art. Increasing foreign direct investment (FDI) also facilitated this growth.60 At the core of this flourishing demographic were businesspeople, lawyers, and professionals in the private sector. China also saw the rise of well-to-do white-collar employees in joint-venture companies. As a New York Times article describes, this growing middle class is defined by “what its members have: cell phones, washing machines, computers and, increasingly, cars and homes.”61 Their consumption behaviors resemble their middle-class counterparts in the West:

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On Saturday nights they go to concerts; in winter they vacation in Thailand. But the rapid accumulation of material things has left its psychological mark as well, infusing this group with a kind of independence and carefree optimism that has not existed in China for decades. … And middle-class Chinese bring with them the same sort of expansive optimism that characterized newly prosperous Americans after World War II.62

In 1998, China’s Ministry of Culture established a new task force to develop cultural policies. Two years later, the Chinese Communist Party’s Fifteenth Central Committee passed a decision for reforming the cultural industry. The trend of commercialized art had now gained official approval. Art businesses gained legitimacy and immediately clung to commercial rhetoric. Here are some telling lines from an “Information for Sponsors” brochure of an art supermarket in Shanghai that opened in 1998: Commerce has become the predominant religion in Shanghai since the economic reforms of the 1980s. Shopping centers are now erected everywhere and in fact have become the city’s new temples. Everything is for sale. Consumption has become the key mechanism of life in this city. Everyone is relocated in this consumer society. … How are art and artists going to function within this system? How is the making of art going to interact with this business-minded era? … There is only one way to find out: To operate the way commerce operates. To look into the act of consumption and to look where it happens. To meet the public in their consumer role. And to consider us artists as salespeople. It is through the act of purchasing that a piece of art becomes part of the real world. … Supermarket is the aperture through which consumers and audience enter into the space of art and become art consumers.63

As this example shows, the public role of art through consumption has by now been widely recognized, marking a significant shift in cultural attitudes from previous decades.

Urban Art Zones Amid Urbanization and Demolitions In the 1990s, Beijing maintained its status as the Mecca of contemporary art, attracting young artists from all over the nation. As a new generation of postreform academic artists who concentrated in Beijing came of age, they held a major art exhibition in 1991 titled “New Generation”

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(xinshengdai 新生代). Most exhibitors were trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, as noted by Yin Jinan: Born in the 1960s, one among this group was a Red Guard or “sent-down youth,” and because they lack profound historical memories or mental scars they embody a distinct spiritual fracture from the generation born in the 1950s. Their collective consciousness has been diluted, and there are no life principles or artistic views that they unanimously uphold. … [They] enjoy depicting trivial matters from daily life, often making the people most familiar to them central subjects in their works.64

The emergence of these artists was “a localized one limited to certain cultural areas of Beijing.”65 Others call this new trend Post-’89 Art, combining the twin styles known as Cynical Realism and Political Pop. Since 1989, without coordination, some leading artists from the ’85 New Wave have one after another abandoned their metaphysical stance and headed toward Pop art. … They are both interested in the dissolution of certain systems of meaning and both attend to reality. Cynical Realism focuses on the senseless reality of the self, whereas Political Pop directly portrays the reality of dissolved meanings. … [They] marked a turning away from the lose attention paid to Western modern ideas and art—a sober awakening from the grandiose questioning of man and art—and a turning toward the real space of Chinese existence. … It is also a milestone indicating the starting point of Chinese modern art in a direction of its own choosing.66

Decollectivization left many old factories in the central-planning economy vacant. Artists began to rent them for a low price. In Beijing, some of these rentals happened incidentally. Consider the 798 factory zone in Beijing, which later was mentioned by Time magazine as one of the world’s most vibrant art centers.67 The earliest artists who repurposed them were a group of sculptors at China’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. They were searching for a larger space for a government-sponsored project to commemorate the anti-Japanese war. As one Chinese artist recollects, “The Department of Sculpture rented a 3000 square meters warehouse for 0.3 yuan per s. m. per day. as their new sculpting workshop. From 1995 to 1998, all faculty and students have worked there.”68 Soon afterward, other artists joined so that these urban sites gradually became the art hubs that they are today.

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At the same time, cities such as Beijing and Shanghai also became sites for perpetual urban planning and construction starting in the 1990s. Romantic ideals about “a better city life” permeated China’s official media’s script. But the massive spatial transition also invited artistic expressions of deprivation, alienation, and confusion. New reflective art forms such as Gaudy art (yansu yishu 严肃艺术) became popular; some term it “a desperate comedy for the end of the century.”69 Social change during the fast pace of urbanization became an emerging theme for Chinese artists: what fascinated these artists most was China’s mind-boggling transformation: the rapid disappearance of the traditional city and its neighborhoods … and the changes in human relationships, lifestyles, taste, and values. … [T]hey attempted to capture their own responses to the social transformation, including their confusion about place in a rapidly changing environment.70

Reliance on informal venues and on social networks was the norm for gaining more autonomy for Chinese artists in the early 1990s. As Wu Hong claims, “the marketization of art” has played a decisive role in this process of gaining artistic independence.71 It was through market mechanisms that artists formed “inner circles,” informal platforms for exchanging information. It was their sole method for maintaining the “industry” connections needed for handling exhibitions and sales. … [O]ne of this “inner circle” is its non-­ organizational and non-institutional nature, which is a consequence of the artists’ abandonment of a “systemized” lifestyle. The “inner circle” is premised on a high degree of freedom for each individual. … [W]ho has the right to designate an “artist”? The inner circle! … [A]s the marketization of Chinese avant-garde art became possible, artists began to stop regarding official recognition as the ultimate objective of their endeavors. … [T]he formation of “circles” leads to the emergence of “smaller circles.” …With art marketization, the distance between individual artists is increasingly widened. This has resulted in the continuous formation of “inner circles” and individualization among artists.72

Artists have also become bolder in bringing their works to the wider public, as social tolerance toward and curiosity about pluralistic art forms increased. They held art exhibitions not only in formal art institutions such as museums and galleries but also in less-formal public spaces, from

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shopping malls, streets, and parks to metro stations and private businesses. Many found these places more accessible because events at museums run the risk of being canceled because of political pressure. The booming private sector, on the other hand, offered more open opportunities. Performance art in these shared spaces also became popular. Art was becoming a more and more public event in China. Whereas small experimental exhibitions often took place in private homes and diplomatic quarters in the early 1990s, many exhibitions were organized from the mid-1990s onward for the larger goal of transforming the existing conditions system. Some organizers devoted themselves to establishing regular venues to show contemporary art publicly, and for this purpose they cultivated supporters among officials and entrepreneurs. Others resisted such efforts to “legalize” experimental art, and showed controversial works privately to keep the avant-garde edge. The result was the further marginalization of “closed” exhibitions.73

The expansion of art in urban space was bound to meet with interventions from local authorities. Local governments’ regulations on art zones in the 1990s show how political actors took this sector seriously to ensure the productivity of Chinese artists while managing the boundaries of this increasingly lucrative market.

Conclusion Art historian Wu Hung describes China’s art scene in the early 1990s as “somber” and “cynical,” compared to that in the exhilarating 1980s.74 The aftermath of the Tiananmen incident accompanied official bans on unofficial public events. Many young artists became disillusioned again and turned to sarcasm. Meanwhile, art became more commercialized as market mechanisms for art trading became numerous, partly assisted by overseas collectors brought to China by fresh tides of globalization. All these changes in the economic infrastructure made it possible for the relationship between artists (producers) and their audience (consumers) to mature. In this era, globalization took on different compositions, encompassing a heightened awareness of civil society’s role, migration, metropolitan urbanism, global nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), transnational corporations, and other organizations.75 Neoliberalism replaced

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colonialism as the driver of social change and inequality. With more travel and access to different cultures, more and more people thought of themselves as “global citizens.” The former nationalist instinct was subdued. Daniel Herwitz describes it as a time when “[e]veryone becomes increasingly interested in everything.”76 He explains: the world of decolonization is largely over. … The early moment of an art associated with the rise of the new nation gives way to critique, dispirited resignation, combat, and also rapid globalization. The circulation of art becomes more open. … And so neocolonial attitudes fall away.77

According to Michael Sullivan, “Chinese art of the 1990s exudes a sense of vitality, sophistication, and inner confidence that seems to give a foretaste of the dominant role that China will play on the world scene in the twenty-first century.”78 Philip Tinari also notes that the meaning of contemporary for Chinese artists also shifted away from “a teleological, metropolitan notion of a singular, centered Modernism” to “a uniform global temporality inside which works of art from radically different geographical and cultural contexts could appear on purportedly equal footing.”79 It was a “multiculturalist turn,” transforming the art world into something much more open and diverse. As Hou Hanru summarizes, “Experiences of exile, migration, and the reinvention of identity are now the foundation for many artists’ imaginations, while reexaminations of different cultural origins and personal experiences are common. An unprecedented art scene, emphasizing cultural hybridity and change … has been birthed.”80 Moreover, the commercialization of art has gradually gained official approval, as “a process of industrialization and centralization of art districts began to take place supported by local government and real estate policy.”81 Private entrepreneurs pioneered a free space for Chinese art to grow and even compete on the global stage. By “private entrepreneurship,” I refer to Chinese businesspeople’s reliance on social and political capital through informal means of achieving business success despite the absence of a well-defined system of private property rights.82 Two Chinese American scholars use the term propertied class when referring to China’s private entrepreneurs and the middle class.83 Two decades later, founder of China Guardian Chen Dongsheng told the New York Times that “entrepreneurs are the guardian spirits of great art.”84 Researcher Sashan Su-ling Welland also traces this trajectory of private entrepreneurship:

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At the beginning of the 1990s, no named Chinese artist had ever participated in the Venice Biennale, one of the most prestigious and longest-­ running international art shows in the world. In 1999, twenty Chinese artists—the most from any single country—showed more than fifty visual artworks at the Forty-Eighth Biennale. This historic shift reflected the post-1989 circulation of contemporary art from China in Hong Kong, Japan, Europe, and the United States, as well as the erratic but gradual loosening of political control of art in China. By the early 2000s, Chinese cities such as Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, and Shanghai had adopted the “biennale” model, seen as a marker of cultural cosmopolitanism, and began launching large contemporary art exhibits of their own.85

Despite newfound political freedom to try new forms of art, Chinese artists continued to face financial insecurity and the risks of commercial vulgarization. Consequently, the Chinese art world in the 1990s remained significantly different and separate from that of the West. This was due partly to “the bureaucratic habits” established before 1978 and partly to the gradualist nature of China’s economic reform.86 As shown in Fig. 4.1, there has been tension and competition among art-making groups over who has the power to revise or overwrite rules in the political and market spheres. At this point, the prices of even ideological art took off. For example, Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan by Liu Chunhua 刘春华 (b. 1944) sold at auction for USD 1 million in 1995, making it the most expensive Chinese oil painting until that time. After the global financial crisis in 1997, Asia became the fastest-growing economy in the world. Accumulated wealth led to the growth of the luxury goods market. As the Art Newspaper reports, “The new Chinese privileged class of entrepreneurs—particularly in large cities, coastal regions and Special Economic Zones—are flaunting

Fig. 4.1  Art-making institutions and groups in China (1990s)

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their Rolexes, Mercedes and, increasingly, their art.”87 They used these goods as “a hedge against rampaging domestic inflation, or as investments alternatives to the increasingly regulated property and securities markets.”88 In 1996, when the trend of privatizing auction houses was just beginning in China, some observers of China, such as J. David Murphy, predicted that the nation had the potential to become “a leading market”:89 Though art and cultural matters are hardly at the forefront of the development of modern China in the stupefyingly fast-paced capitalist boom of the 1990s, the state is certainly able to recognize the income-generating potential of this sector of the economy. As a Politburo member put it … cultural property matters “should be adapted to the new situation of the market economy and made to serve economic construction.”90

Many among the earliest private entrepreneurs (such as Chen Dongsheng) went into art auctions either by establishing their own brands or by founding joint-venture auction houses. For example, in 1996 and 1997, joint-venture auction houses collaborated with semipublic galleries (the Art Gallery of Beijing International Art Palace, and the Yanhuang Art Gallery) to hold two large-scale auctions. As Chinese American anthropologist Yan Yunxiang summarizes, by the end of the 1990s, the four faces of “cultural globalization” in the Chinese contexts included “business elite, faculty club, popular culture and social movements.”91 By then, both the middle class and the political elite had reckoned that globalization represented “an inevitable stage in China’s modernization as well as an opportunity to catch up with the developed countries.”92 A national consensus was reached for the Chinese state to facilitate this nation’s participation in the global economy, including both economic and cultural globalization. Nevertheless, the prospect of China’s further opening up to the outside world also brought lingering fear, as manifested by the official slogan of “cultural security” (wenhua anquan 文 化安全). The move to liberalize sectors such as advertising and cinema also led to other debates about state sovereignty in strategic industries. Although some Chinese art researchers claim that there was no art market in China before 2000 because artists had not been disturbed by a business mindset,93 the trend of commercialization in the 1990s certainly heralded a new era for China’s art world for the coming decades. Hou Hanru’s prediction gradually came true: “The country has become a real global playground, not simply the biggest factory and market for ‘global

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capitalism’ but also the grandest stage for the ‘global utopianism’ of creativity.”94 Commenting on the way that old masters such as Wu Guanzhong had been earning huge sums for his art through auction sales, Michael Sullivan writes that “political pressures apart, the Chinese art world was coming to look more and more like that of the West.”95 As Britta Erickson puts it, “By 2000, Chinese art had achieved a sustainable profile on the international circuit, and scholars, critics, curators, and collectors had begun to treat it as part of the general scenery, rather than as an exoticism.”96 But even the most optimistic of observers would not have expected the speed of change over the next decade.

Notes 1. Liu Yuedi, “Chinese Contemporary Art: From De-Chineseness to Re-Chineseness,” in Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 26–27. 2. Wu Hung, “Major Trends in Contemporary Chinese Art of the Mid-toLate 1990s,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 185. 3. Yi Ying, “Political Pop Art and the Crisis of Originality,” in Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 21. This researcher defines Gaudy Art as a form of “abused and vulgarized Political Pop Art.” 4. David Adam Brubaker and Chunchen Wang, Jizi and His Art in Contemporary China (Springer, 2015), 16. 5. Ying Yi, “Political Prop Art and the Crisis of Originality,” in Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 26–27. 6. Leng Lin, “Preface,” IT’S MEI (Beijing: China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Publishing, 2000), 293. Quoted in Wu Hung, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2000), 107. 7. Ibid. 8. Yi Ying, “Political Pop Art and the Crisis of Originality,” in Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 21, 25. 9. “Report from the Artist’s Studio: Interview with Zhao Xiaogang,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 190. 10. Alexandra Munroe, “A Test Site” in Alexandra Munroe, Philip Tinari and Hou Hanru (eds.), Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2017), 26.

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11. For example, see Li Xianting, “Apathy and Deconsruction in Post-’89 Art: Analyzing the Trends of ‘Cynical Realism’ and ‘Political Pop’,” trans. Kela Shang, in, Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 158. Originally published as 后八九中的无聊感和解构意识, Art Trends 艺术 潮流, No. 1 (1992). 12. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), 186. 13. Linda M.  Weston, “’China: Cradle of Knowledge’ Officially Opens in Birmingham 25 February,” The Art Newspaper, February 1, 1995. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/archive/the-­very-­inventive-­chinese. 14. Hou Hanru, “Entropy, Chinese Artists, Western Art Institutions: A New Internationalism,” Jean Fisher (ed.), Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts (London: Kala Press, 1994), 79–88. 15. Fei Dawei, “Does A Culture In Exile Necessarily Wither?—A Letter to Li Xianting,” in Jia Fangzhou (ed.), Era of Criticism, Vol. 1 (Guangxi: Guangxi Fine Arts Publishing House, 2003), 153–162. 16. Pollack, Barbara (2010) The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures in China. Beijing: Timezone 8 Publishing. 17. Isabel Hilton, “Chinese Artist Leads Great Leap Forward,” South China Morning Post (August 31, 1997). 18. Martin Bailey, “Vast Exodus of Art from Hong Kong Due to Fears of a Chinese Clamp-down after the Handover,” The Art Newspaper, February 1, 1997. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/archive/vast-­exodus-­of-­artfrom-­hong-­kong. 19. Ibid. 20. Sashan Su-Ling Welland, Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art, 7–8. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Hou Hanru, “Entropy, Chinese Artists, Western Art Institutions: A New Internationalism,” in Jean Fisher (ed.), Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts (London: Kala Press, 1994), 79–88. 24. Ibid. 25. Wang Lin, “Oliva is Not the Savior of Chinese Art,” Dushu 读书, 1993, No. 3. 26. Wu Hung, “Contemporary Chinese Art in the Global Context,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 356. 27. Elspeth Moncrieff, “A Growing and Buoyant Chinese Art Market Suggests ‘No One Should Underestimate the Strength of the Chinese Diaspora’,” The Art Newspaper, January 1, 1997. https://www.theartnewspaper. com/archive/no-­one-­should-­underestimate-­the-­strength-­of-­the-­chinese-­ diaspora.

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28. Huang Zhuan, “The Misread ‘Great Criticism’ (dapipan),” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 168. 29. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), 192. 30. Jerome Silbergeld, Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 189. 31. Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 288. 32. Wu Hung, “Experimental Art Exhibitions and the 2000 Shanghai Bieannale,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 331. 33. Wu Hung, “Experimental Art Exhibitions and the 2000 Shanghai Bieannale,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 331. 34. Gao Minglu, “Changing Motivations of Chinese Contemporary Arts since the Mid-1990s,” Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vol. 11, No. 2&3 (2012): 209–221. 35. Ibid. 36. Michael Sullivan, Review of Inside Out: New Chinese Art by Gao Mingu, The China Quarterly, 162 (2000): 583–585. Accessed February 18, 2021. 37. Quoted in Michael Sullivan, Review of Inside Out: New Chinese Art by Gao Mingu, The China Quarterly, 162 (2000): 583–585. Accessed February 18, 2021. 38. Ibid. 39. Francesca Dal Lago, “Personal Mao: Reshaping an Icon in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Art Journal, 58:2 (1999): 46–59. The same article points out that unlike Stalin’s status in the Soviet Union, Mao was never officially repudiated by the Chinese Communist Party. 40. Geremie R. Barme, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 316–317. 41. Chris Buckley, “Sotheby’s New Major Shareholder is Already a Power in Chinese Art,” New York Times, July 31, 2016. https://www.nytimes. com/2016/08/01/arts/design/sothebys-­c hen-­d ongsheng-­c hina-­ art.html. 42. Chris Buckley, “Sotheby’s New Major Shareholder is Already a Power in Chinese Art,” New York Times, July 31, 2016. 43. Gao Ling, “A Survey of Contemporary Chinese Performance Art,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 180. 44. Ibid., 180–181.

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45. Ibid., 181. 46. Lü Peng, Contemporary Art in Twenty-first Century: 2000–2010 (Shanghai: Century Publishing Group, 2012), 31. 47. Ibid. 48. Julia F.  Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 291. 49. Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 289. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Lǚ Peng, “Heading Toward the Market” (走向市场), Jiangsu Pictorial 江 苏画报, 142, No. 10 (1992): 4. Quoted in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 290–291. 53. Ibid. 54. “Who Is Going to Sponsor The History? Interview with Huang Zhan” (谁 来赞助艺术历史), Art Market 艺术市场, No. 6 (September 1991): 29–31. 55. Ibid. 56. Gao Minglu, “Changing Motivations of Chinese Contemporary Arts since the Mid-1990s,” Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vol. 11, No. 2&3 (2012): 209–221. 57. Auction Law of the People’s Republic of China, Ministry of Commerce, Database of Laws and Regulations, http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/article/policyrelease/Businessregulations/201303/20130300046010.shtml. 58. Gao Minglu, “Changing Motivations of Chinese Contemporary Arts since the Mid-1990s,” Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vol. 11, No. 2&3 (2012): 209–221. 59. Yi Ying, “Political Pop Art and the Crisis of Originality,” in Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 26–27. 60. Starting from a base of less than USD 19 billion in 1990, the stock of FDI in China rose to over USD 300 billion at the end of 1999. See Edward M. Graham and Erika Wada, “Foreign Direct Investment in China: Effects in Growth and Economic Performance,” Peterson Institute for International Economics, working paper, https://www.piie.com/publications/working-­papers/foreign-­direct-­investment-­china-­effects-­growth-­ and-­economic-­performance. 61. Elisabeth Rosenthal, “China’s Middle Class Savors Its New Wealth,” New York Times, June 19, 1998. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/19/ world/china-­s-­middle-­class-­savors-­its-­new-­wealth.html.

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62. Elisabeth Rosenthal, “China’s Middle Class Savors Its New Wealth,” New York Times, June 19, 1998. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/19/ world/china-­s-­middle-­class-­savors-­its-­new-­wealth.html. also see Erik Eckholm, “Emerging Middle Class Hits the Road in China,” New York Times, October 7, 2001. https://www.nytimes. com/2001/10/07/world/emerging-­m iddle-­c lass-­h its-­t he-­r oad-­i n-­ china.html. 63. Xu Zhen, Yang Zhenzhong, and Alexander Brandt, “Supermarket (chaoshi zhan): Information for Sponsors” (超市展:致赞助商) (Shanghai: Privately Published, 1999). Quoted in Wu Hung, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2000), 174. 64. Yin Jinan, “New Generation and Close Up Artists,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 155–156. 65. Ibid., 156. 66. Li Xianting, “Apathy and Deconstruction in Post-’89 Art: Analyzing the Trends of ‘Cynical Realism’ and ‘Political Pop’,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 157–165. 67. Because of 798 art district’s success, Beijing was ranked as among the world’s twelve developmental cities by the News Weekly and Fortune magazine in 2003. Quoted in Lü Peng, Contemporary Art in Twenty-First Century: 2000–2010 (Shanghai: Century Publishing Group, 2012), 57. 68. Shu Kewen, “798 and the City” (798 与城市形态), Sanlian Life Weekly ( 三联生活周刊), quoted in Lü Peng, Contemporary Art in Twenty-First Century: 2000–2010 (Shanghai: Century Publishing Group, 2012), 50. 69. Liao Wen, “Living in Kitsch—The Critical ‘Irony’ of Gaudy Art,” in Liao Wen and Li Xianting (eds.), Oh La La, Kitsch!—Gaudy Art (Hunan: Hunan Fine Arts Publishing, 1999), 2–7. Quoted in Wu Hung, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2000), 204. 70. Wu Hung, Engagement with Social Transformation,” Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 198. 71. Wu Hong, “From ‘System’ to ‘Circle’: An Analysis of the State of Avant-­ Garde Art in the Late 1990s,” a speech at the 2003 First Shenzhen Art Museum Forum, Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 307–310. 72. Ibid.

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73. Wu Hung, “Experimental Art Exhibitions and the 2000 Shanghai Bieannale,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 326. 74. Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 154. 75. Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (New York: Verso Books, 2017), 16. 76. Daniel Herwitz, Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 17. 77. Ibid. 78. Michael Sullivan, The Arts of China (University of California Press, 1999), 299. 79. Philip Tinari, “Between Palimpsest and Teleology: The Problem of ‘Chinese Contemporary Art’,” in Alexandra Munroe, Philip Tinari and Hou Hanru (eds.), Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2017), 51. 80. Hou Hanru, “Theatre Du Monde: To Be Unthought,” in Alexandra Munroe, Philip Tinari and Hou Hanru (eds.), Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2017), 71. 81. Gao Minglu, “Changing Motivations of Chinese Contemporary Arts since the Mid-1990s,” Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vol. 11, No. 2&3 (2012): 209–221. 82. See Kellee Tsai, Back-Alley Banking: Private Entrepreneurs in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 83. Feng Sun and Wanfa Zhang, Why Communist China Isn’t Collapsing: The CCP’s Battle for Survival and State-Society Dynamics in the Post-Reform Era (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020), 138. 84. Quoted in Chris Buckley, “Sotheby’s New Major Shareholder is Already a Power in Chinese Art,” New York Times, July 31, 2016. 85. Sashan Su-Ling Welland, Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 7. 86. Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the PRC, 1949–1979 (University of California Press, 1994), 405. 87. J.  David Murphy, “Chinese Privatise Their Auction Scene,” The Art Newspaper, April 30, 1996. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/archive/ chinese-­privatise-­their-­auction-­scene. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid.

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91. Yan Yunxiang, “Managed Globalization: State Power and Cultural Transition in China,” in Peter L. Berger and Samuel P. Huntington (eds.), Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 20. 92. Ibid. 93. Lü Xiaochen, “Tang Ju: No Need to Look Up to Europe and America, Just Focus on Collecting Chinese Art” (齐心收藏梳理华人艺术，不必仰 视欧美), Hi Art, No. 006, Trailblazing: Forty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art (乘风破浪:中国当代艺术40年), (Beijing: Zhongxin Group Publishing, 2019), 86–89. 94. Hou Hanru, “Theatre Du Monde: To Be Unthought,” in Alexandra Munroe, Philip Tinari and Hou Hanru (eds.), Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2017), 77. 95. Michael Sullivan, The Arts of China (University of California Press, 1999), 298. 96. Britta Erickson, “The Reception in the West of Experimental Mainland Chinese Art of the 1990s,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art, 1990–2000 (Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art, 2002), 105–112.

CHAPTER 5

“Soft Power” Strategy, Wealth Creation, and Art Consumerism (2000s)

In the fall of 2002, Jiang Zemin, then-president of the People’s Republic of China and leader of the Chinese Communist Party visited the United States. Jiang presented a porcelain set as a gift to then–US president George W. Bush who had been delighted by a set of Chinese porcelain during a banquet in the spring of that same year.1 This set of Chinese porcelain was custom-made in the well-known “porcelain capital” Jingdezhen, which had over 1000 years of history as a center for making China’s finest porcelains. Jingdezhen’s development is an excellent case study to show how “global factors” played important roles in the making and trading of Chinese art.2 The turn of the twenty-first century saw China’s economic rise. The regional economic downturn in Asia since 1997 did not stop China’s economy from climbing to double-digit growth in gross domestic product (GDP). The spirit of liberalization was high around the time of Hong Kong’s handover from British to Chinese control. After that, the world saw China make one breakthrough after another. In 2000, a bilateral trade agreement was reached between China and the European Union. The following year saw China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). In 2003, domestic legislations on private property rights were ushered in at the Third Plenum of the Chinese Community Party (CCP), leading to a monumental step in revising the Chinese Constitution the next year. In 2005, China’s GDP ranked fourth in the world.3 By 2006, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Ma, China’s Art Market since 1978, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34605-7_5

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the Economist’s senior editor, Pam Woodall, acknowledged that China was providing “the biggest boost to the world economy since the industrial revolution.”4 By 2009, China’s bilateral trade increased and exceeded that of the United States. China’s “soft power” strategy during this time period integrated economic growth and a cultural mandate. Walking on these two legs, the country steadily accumulated global influence. In 2002, the Chinese government opened its first cultural center in Paris, displaying a wide range of Chinese art, from Bronze Age sculptures to modern-day conceptual art. From 2006 to 2007, China saw the biggest growth in commercial galleries, whose total number reached over 13,800. Online galleries emerged after the global financial crisis in 2008. As the use of mobile phones became more widespread, urban dwellers enjoyed these ongoing feeds of art-related information in their busy lives. In the same year, the Pace Gallery (New York) was among the first of the foreign galleries to venture into China. It represents notable contemporary Chinese artists whose works sold for high prices at auction houses in Hong Kong. By the end of the 2000s, over nine Chinese cultural centers had mushroomed around the world. It is estimated that the volume of China’s art market had grown to over USD 8.2 billion in sales, roughly 23 percent of global sales.5 Overall, the 2000s were also a critical phase for China’s art market to play an increasingly important role in the world. Artists and designers from other parts of the world found China a new hot zone where “culture is becoming the new capitalism.”6 For example, the London Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) launched the Creative Cities project for city-­ states, instead of countries, to partner in cultural entrepreneurship by way of exchange trips. This happened just a few years after the British government created the Creative Industries Task Force in 1998.7 Philip Dodd, the director of ICA, famously told the British media, specifically the Guardian, that “the twenty-first century would belong to Asia, not America.”8 The reporter also seems to expect this scenario: Even the most cursory visit to Beijing, a city changing faster, commercially if not culturally, than any metropolis in history, would seem to bear him out. This is the new frontier for capitalism, a place where Chanel and Prada, as well as McDonald’s and KFC, dot the city centre a few blocks from Mao’s mausoleum. A Starbucks franchise has sprung up inside the Forbidden City.9

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The ongoing evolution of China’s art market is a product of multiple influences, including global cultural trends, domestic political deregulation, economic liberalization, cultural pluralism, the expansion of the Internet and communication technology, the changing distribution of income, and consumerism. As Richard Florida claims, economic growth depends on “technology, talent and tolerance.”10 This chapter traces in detail how the rise of China’s art market materialized in the 2000s.

New Buzzwords in Party-State Policies: Soft Power and Creative Industries In 2002, China issued a new Cultural Heritage Protection Law, allowing private collections of and transactions involving antique artifacts. This reopened the market for antique collections. According to China’s Cultural Industry Annual Development Report, by the end of 2003, the number of Chinese collectors had reached over 40 million.11 Specialized publications in Chinese also became numerous, including Collecting (shoucang 《收藏》), Collectors (shoucangjia 《收藏家》), and Chinese Collections (zhongguo shoucang 《中国收藏》). These new laws and institutions greatly boosted the popular demand for art collecting. One example of the art-collecting trend is China’s imitation of the longest-­ r unning British antique-appraising TV program Antique Roadshow (which began in 1979), where average people bring artifacts from their homes to appraisal experts at the show. Many heirlooms or flea market purchases turn out to be items of high value. This show also educates the public about art history and how to identify fakes. Since 2003, China’s Second Central Television station (CCTV2) has featured a similar weekly prime time show, Appraising Treasures (jianbao “鉴宝”), attracting a large audience. Within a year, this TV show’s rating ranked second among all TV programs in 15 Chinese cities among viewers between ages 25 and 55. Within a few years, a series of TV programs made by regional producers had mushroomed across China. Some episodes invited celebrities to participate in entertaining chatter. One famous actor, Wang Gang, served to “execute” fakes on-site by smashing them with a hammer in a show called Treasures under the Heavens (tianxia baozang 天下宝藏). Sensational gimmicks like this pushed this appraisal show to another level. The topic of appraisal has also attracted the attention of Chinese art market researchers.12 An article that detailed the history of antique appraisal

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shows from one of the largest Chinese history media outlets, Elephant Council (daxiang gonghui 《大象公会》), gained over 280 million views on the Internet.13 Following the fever of appraisal shows, controversies emerged. For example, some collectors brought lawsuits against actor Wang Gang for destroying their collectibles. In 2008, former appraisal expert Cai Guosheng later exposed a fraudulent deal that took place on a show. Viewers also challenged some “historical stories” falsely fabricated by hosts and experts. These scandals compromised the credibility of appraisal shows in the eyes of the public. In 2012, China’s National Broadcast and TV Bureau issued a notice to strictly regulate such programs.14 Around 2005, news came that China had a “cultural trade deficit,” which upset the authorities, including the National Bureau of Radio, Film, and Television and the Ministry of Culture (guojia guangbo dianshi zongju 国家广播电视总局).15 Meanwhile, a Korean wave of TV content was trending among Chinese consumers. The general public began to contrast the predictable Chinese TV and film content with Korean innovations. These discussions pushed China’s media industry to be more open-minded and competitive. By then, the prevailing narrative among cultural policymakers shifted from “upholding the national identity and socialist culture” to “becoming more competitive” in a modernizing global media infrastructure. China’s 11th Five-Year Plan (2005–2010) included bold reform measures in its media industry, signaling a progressive economic approach. As Michael Keane observes, by around 2007, the Chinese authorities had determined that “its culture should now go abroad, to build the nation’s soft power.”16 To politicians, businesspeople, and ordinary Chinese, being a cultural producer in the creative industry became a highly desirable career. As Keane explains, Creative industries quickly became an article of faith among media businesses and among cultural and urban policy makers in China, echoing its popularity at the time in Singapore and Hong Kong. Widespread benefits would accrue from creativity—benefits that were individual, collective and organizational. Creativity was a green idea in a country where the “Made in China” model had turned skies a brownish grey.17

Notably, the concept of “creative industries” originated in the 1890s when advertising techniques emerged for elections. More recently, in 1997, the British Labor Party used it as a new strategy to win the

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election.18 In 2002, the notion of the creative economy trended partly as a result of US urban theorist Richard Florida’s bestselling book The Rise of the Creative Class. Drawing on economist John Howkins’s discussions about the creative economy, Florida argues that “human creativity is the ultimate economic resource.”19 He also emphasizes the importance of the social milieu, which provides an ecosystem for creativity to take root in time and space. Researchers have noticed that by around 2002, cultural and creative industries had become key factors of Singapore’s “renaissance.”20 Taiwan also incorporated this term into its official cultural policies. These successful experimentations in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan provided incentives for Chinese mainland policymakers to become more competitive.21 Moreover, along with the popular use of the term creative industries was another word industrial upgrading (chanye shengji 产业升级)—lifting China’s national profile from the world’s factory to an innovator of products eligible for intellectual property rights (IPRs). According to a 2003 article in the New York Times, Christopher Phillips, a curator at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, once observed that “[t]he Chinese government is investing an enormous amount of money in the new technology for artists.”22 He expressed shocking delight at seeing many Power Mac G4 computers and daring media art by video artists in China. A liberal, depoliticized atmosphere increasingly served Chinese artists of all genres. As the same article describes, “current Chinese painters and installation and video artists said they could work pretty much unfettered. Certainly, direct hits at the political system are forbidden, and homosexuality as a subject is off-limits. … [But] the closing of art shows has been virtually unheard of.”23 According to British researcher Paul Gladston, the Chinese state was now using contemporary art to its political advantage, just as it had done to other digitalized and tech-assisted sectors. He says, The co-opting of contemporary Chinese art to the political interests of the CCP since the 2000s has taken a number of forms. … Chinese higher education institutions involved in the teaching of art and design have become increasingly subject to calls from the CCP to strengthen the PRC’s creative industries sector. In response, many of those institutions have embraced modern modes of cultural production, including the use of new digital and computer-based technologies which are taught alongside more established modern and traditional approaches.24

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As David Shambaugh writes, China’s diplomacy in the 2000s was characterized by the word omnidirectional: “Having forged formal relations with most nations in the world and broadening its international footprint, while becoming gradually more comfortable in multilateral diplomacy, the task before China was to give greater depth to its presence around the world. Thus China embarked on the policy of ‘going out’ or ‘going global’.”25 By the mid 2000s, the economic success of coastal cities proved that innovation and creativity were key for this transformation. Policymakers began to promote the new imperative of “Created in China” to replace “Made in China.” The year after, the Beijing Olympics became known as China’s “year of assertiveness.”26 Art historian Wu Hung notes the impact of liberal policies on the characteristics of Chinese art produced during this time: “contemporary Chinese art has rapidly entered a general state of ‘amphibiousness’ since 2000, characterized by the absence of clear-cut self-positioning and the incessant interpenetration of multiple systems.”27 By “amphibiousness,” Wu Hun refers to its ability to achieve “non-confrontational coexistence of governmental, academic, commercial, and independent undertakings.”28 In this interesting time, all other sectors are now trying to “claim ownership for the contemporary as a marker of progressiveness, cosmopolitanism, globalism, fashion, and a general sense of experimentation.”29 By 2010, the axiom that creativity is essential for the rejuvenation of the nation’s soft power had been widely accepted in China. As Michael Keane writes, “for some it has become a rallying call for nationalism … or a catalyst for institutional reform.”30 Since the Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai World Exposition, local governments have regarded hosting art and creativity-related events as a competitive edge to signal cultural openness. China’s first World Expo in Shanghai, for example, became “an extravagant showcase of the social benefits of urbanization” and the “ultimate proof” of China’s global relevance.31 The art world has not just moved on from being the state’s propaganda arm to a pillar industry—it is now playing a crucial role in national rebranding from “Made in China” to “Created in China” (Table 5.1).32 The Chinese government has identified cultural industries as new drivers for the country’s economic growth. The State Council approved the “Plan to Adjust and Reinvigorate the Culture Industry” in September 2009, making it a national strategic industry.

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Table 5.1  Academic journals in Chinese covering cultural and creative industries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Name

Year

Publisher

Chinese Artists 《中国文艺家》 Art Education Magazine 《艺术教育》 Cultural Monthly 《文化月刊》 New Art 《新美术》 Cultural Management 《文化管理》 China Culture 《中国文化报》 Art Observation 《美术观察》 Art History Research 《艺术史研究》 Art Research 《艺术研究》 Art Market Magazine 《艺术市场》 Cultural and Creative Industries Reference 《文化创意产业参考》 History of Art and History of Ideas 《美术史与观念史》 Cultural Industries 《文化产业》 Cultural Industries Guide 《文化 产业导刊》 International Cultural Administration 《国际文化管理》 Cross-cultural Administration 《跨 文化管理》

1954 China Art and Literature Association 1977 Ministry of Culture 1979 Ministry of Culture and Tourism 1980 China Academy of Art 1983 Ministry of Culture 1986 Ministry of Culture and Tourism 1995 China Art Research Institute 1997 Zhongshan University 1998 Ha’erbin Normal University 2002 Ministry of Culture 2006 Beijing Center for the Promotion of Cultural and Creative Industries 2006 Nanjing Normal University 2008 Shanxi Publishing Group 2010 Ministry of Education, People’s University 2012 University of International Business and Economics 2012 Shanghai International Studies University

Real Estate Boom and China’s Nouveau Riche Historically and across the world, the art market has always been associated with the real estate market, because home buyers often fill their residences with new art. Likewise, art is a parallel form of investment. In China, the rewriting of private property rights into the Constitution was followed by a real estate development fever and then a housing market boom. During this time, more and more real estate developers began using new art museums and galleries to add value to their commercial projects. Commercial galleries were set up as real estate investments in high-end neighborhoods. Examples include Beijing’s Today Art Museum, Shanghai’s Zengdai Museum of Modern Art, and Nanjing’s Square Gallery of Contemporary Art. According to Wu Hung, it was during this

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time that “unofficial art,” which lacked legitimacy in the previous two decades, finally became part of mainstream or urban elite culture: the appearance of these museums and art spaces, along with the transformation of public museums and the flourishing of commercial galleries, has fundamentally changed the meaning of contemporary art in China. If this art was largely synonymous with unofficial or alternative art throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, it entered mainstream culture in the 2000s, promoted not only by foreign curators and galleries, but also by domestic supporters and even the government.33

By the early 2000s, the broadening base of a middle class in China became notable. Researchers and media commentators liked to report on this demographic as one of the new faces of Chinese society. They defined the middle class as those who earn stable incomes and can afford to purchase commercial apartments, automobiles, and their children’s education.34 Quantifying this segment of the population, however, remains a challenge because China’s tax system, cash remuneration in workplaces, and a significant informal economy make it difficult to assess Chinese citizens’ actual earnings. By the late 2000s, however, discussions about the “middle class” had receded, giving way to trendy terms such as xingui (新贵, new aristocrats), xinrui (新锐, new blade) or xinfu (新富, new rich). Those nouveaux riches who do not come from a cultured family background are nicknamed tuhao, a term that sums up their crude dispositions, vulgar tastes, and lack of specialized knowledge. Many of the new wealthy class have profited from ongoing economic policy changes in China. Some were able to be included as significant power holders in different levels of the political apparatus. Researchers David Goodman and Xiaowei Zang list a few prominent groups: scientific development entrepreneurs; Chinese managerial staff working in foreign firms in China; middle and high-level managerial staff in state-­ owned financial institutions; professional technicians in various fields, especially in intermediary firms; and some self-employed private entrepreneurs.35

Since 2003, Forbes magazine has kept a “China Rich List” highlighting the wealthiest individuals in this country. The earliest wealthy individuals were mostly entrepreneurs from the listed companies. As Elaine Jeffreys

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points out, most of the wealth of these Chinese contenders came from business start-ups rather than inheritance.36 This fact speaks volumes about the newness of wealth accumulation in postreform China. The fact that the majority of them were under 40 years of age shows that this wave of wealth has elevated a younger generation of entrepreneurs. A few years later, in 2005, China reported over 236,000 millionaires, ranking it sixth in the world.37 In 2007, 24 Chinese companies, all either owned or controlled by the Chinese state, made the Fortune 500 list. The implications of this enlarging wealthy class for China’s art market is profound. Within a year, prices at Chinese and global auction houses went up, and people noticed more rich Chinese bidders. Some wealthy entrepreneurs became such enthusiastic art collectors that they began building their own private museums or art foundations. The media coverage of their art purchases gradually set the trend for art consumers. Meanwhile, on the basis of where these art-loving entrepreneurs invested, a regional competition for art branding also began. Chinese artists now live and work without fear that their artistic expressions will trigger political persecution. They face new anxieties that are prevalent among the Chinese in an age of affluence and materialism. Financial security, social recognition for their art, and the self-affirmation of the meaning of art became central to their struggles. Rubbing shoulders with peers whose artwork was sought after in the market, some artists also felt a sense of relative deprivation. As Richard Kraus describes, artists of various genres became anxious when comparing their works to those of artists from other genres: “Oil painters presumed that calligraphers were doing better because they could produce a work more quickly; calligraphers imagined that oil painters were prospering because their individual works bore higher prices; both were certain that musicians were the ones really raking it in.”38

Hyperurbanization, Commodification of Urban Space, and Art Branding When referring to China’s massive urban renewal, John Friedman uses the term hyperurbanization; its scale has been mind-boggling.39 For example, since 2000, China alone has used nearly half the world’s cement supplies to form urban infrastructure. More than 100 cities now have a population exceeding one million, a number unparalleled in the world. After almost

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two decades of a thriving housing market, today’s China is leading a global “new urbanism” through the swift and radical commodification of urban space.40 For local governments, land conversion, development, and taxes generated major sources of revenue. One scholar has asserted that the “massive conversion of agricultural land is one of the most significant and conspicuous processes of wealth creation in China’s post-socialist history.”41 By now, the art colonies in low-rent suburban areas have been sucked into this massive urbanization campaign. Art zones located at the “rural– urban continuum” (chengxiang jiehebu 城乡结合部) in Beijing became examples of how the dynamics between the state’s art institutions and independent art communities had changed. Since the 1990s, these artists and art critics in suburban Beijing had hoped for an infrastructure or ecosystem to gradually emerge. As Meiqin Wang finds, residents in these art colonies “were treated with suspicion and hostility by the political and cultural authorities because their artist residents were freelance and thus were not affiliated with any official institutions or under their direct control, which in the Chinese political context was regarded as a potential threat to the social stability.”42 Government evictions and demolitions happened frequently, destabilizing the lives of these artists. But in the 2000s, China had seen “a proliferation of art colonies” in major urban centers.43 The success of some of these art economies even attracted local governments to collaborate with them. They co-opted the already-growing art zones and turned the areas into orderly, uniform, highly concentrated districts. Such interventions still led to demolitions and rising rent in the area, keeping only the successful artists and driving most of the other artists to cheaper locations.44 By now, the establishment of these art districts became “a component of cultural sophistication and a distinct urban feature that many cities wish to incorporate in their effort to upgrade their city images and maximize economic potentials.”45 Take the government-sponsored renewal of Beijing’s 798 art zone as an example. This renewal occurred over a decade after Chinese artists and writers initially congregated at the 798 Art Zone. According to artist Su Ning, “798 relied on the spontaneous work by artists, galleries and art organizations. There was no planning in the beginning, so observers felt a wild-bred chaos there.”46 But it was this kind of “spontaneous order” that enriched the area. Beijing became home to 30 creative clusters, ranging from industrial design and fashion to antiques.47 The success of this organic community was due to “the collective and strenuous resistance of

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artists who floated outside of the official art system.”48 The same fame and market influence even forced the local authorities to change their views on this “area problem.”49 As Lü Peng recalls, “Government organizations and state-owned enterprises began to use slogans such as ‘cultural industry’ or ‘creativity’ to revise and co-opt the fruits of artists towards their socialist market economy ideology.”50 Even after the 2008 financial crisis, the 798 art district continued to garner global media attention. For example, the New York Times reported on how this district escaped much of the economic downturn. As it mentions, unbothered by the financial crisis, “Pace Wildenstein of New York, which now represents Zhang Xiaogang and Zhang Huan, two of the country’s most respected artists, signed a 10-year lease last year and is preparing to open a 20,000-square-foot gallery” in this area.51 The director of the gallery was confident because now the 798 art district had become “a long-term project” authorized and supported by the Chinese government and because “the best-known artists may be insulated from the effects of the downturn.”52 The international reputation of this area (as this New York Times article also helped to fuel) would also likely attract more support from private collectors. Across China, local governments were all faced with the challenge of economic upgrading—to transform urban centers from relying on labor-­ intensive manufacturing industries to incorporating higher-value services, including a bigger proportion of the “knowledge economy.”53 But this long-term vision of industrial transformation sometimes came into conflict with the short-term plans of interest groups, such as real estate developers in urban China. When political power loosened its control, the forces of capital returned. Around 2009, many art zones were disrupted by demolitions to give space for commercial development projects. What cities in the West experienced through in the 1980s, such as New  York City’s urban renewal project in avant-garde art neighborhoods such as the East Village and SoHo, likewise unfolded in Chinese cities.54 Official support sometimes also tended to guide art trends in conservative directions. For example, Beijing’s 2003 Biennale adopted to take a different approach when it collaborated with the “historic fraternal diplomatic partners of the PRC in the former Eastern Bloc” and in developing countries.55 Critics comment that “a basically conservative aesthetic approach—one that might be characterized as ‘academic,’ ‘official,’ or ‘mainstream’—has characterized its selection and awards.”56

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By then, Shanghai was becoming Beijing’s competitor in art branding. When the 2000 Shanghai Biennale took place, many art researchers applauded it as “the first ‘true’ Chinese biennial based on a prevailing international model.”57 It basically led a nationwide trend of art events shifting from “closed” to open exhibition space. For example, Chinese artist Su Ning rates Shanghai higher than Beijing in “public education and interactions.”58 As Wu Hung comments, if Beijing represents the official art system where experimental art originated but also found constraints, Shanghai began to pose itself as a city representing an “innovative model of modernization, a region defined by globally meaningful form of modernity that can only be summed up as the ‘Shanghai spirit.’”59 Some consider it a milestone for the legitimacy of contemporary Chinese art to have established itself.60 Art researchers such as Zhu Qingsheng 朱青生also referred to the Shanghai Biennale as “China’s first public, legitimately organized exhibition of modern art.”61 He claims that it marks an endpoint to a stage in his own life as an advocate for modern art in that “from here on out, modern art is no longer illegal or a ‘crime.’ It will not be denounced or protested against or refuted in the public media. It will no longer stand for the objectionable practices of museums of not displaying installation art, and it will no longer appease the magazines that slander modern art” (Table 5.2).62 By the Third Shanghai Biennale in 2004, its liberal approach had expanded. The Shanghai Cultural Bureau and municipal government enlisted two foreign curators to collaborate with two Shanghai curators to plan this truly international art fair.63 Not only was there official sponsorship, but the government officials of Shanghai also adopted an open mindset toward the participation of foreigners in China’s art scene. By exhibiting different art forms, ranging from installation and video to new media art, this event also “thoroughly” broke down the “academic boundaries that still restricted the contemporary Chinese art world.”64 Nevertheless, these new moves were criticized by two art communities: the Beijing-based Chinese Artists’ Association and independent critics. Both watched the event with open hostility and challenged the organizers for betraying the “experimental spirit of contemporary art.”65 The heated debate and discussions about the Shanghai Biennale reflected how Chinese artists and critics responded to macro-changes, both domestic and global. Art critic Zhang Qing observes that as the art market was taking off throughout China, “groups after groups of artists

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Table 5.2  Exhibition space in China’s art world (2002) Category 1 Licensed public

2 Private “closed”

3 Privately owned

4 Public, nonexhibition

Specific Venues

Timeline

National and municipal galleries University or art school-affiliated galleries Semiofficial galleries Official public exhibition halls Private homes of artists Basements of residential or commercial buildings Individually sponsored “studios” and “workshops” Embassies and foreign institutions Commercial galleries Noncommercial, nontraditional galleries Open spaces (streets, parks, shops, etc.) Commercial spaces (malls, bars, etc.) Mass media and virtual space (TV, newspapers, websites, etc.)

Official since the 1950s

Unofficial since the 1980s

Unofficial and unconventional since the 1990s Unofficial, open access, and tech assisted since the 2000s

Source: Wu Hung, “‘Experimental Exhibitions’ of the 1990s,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990–2000) (Guangzhou: Guangzhou Museum of Art, 2002), 83–97

diligently produced ‘new export paintings’… [which] had an astonishing influence.”66 The awareness that this trend was inevitably controlled by the “supply and demand within the Western art market” retriggered conservative Chinese artists because they perceived the reminiscent “imagination and discourse of cultural colonialism.”67 As a result, they considered the re-entry of foreign curators, who had the backing of “internationalism, postcolonialism, and regionalism,” a renewed threat.68 Zhang considers these sentiments understandable, but she also reminds Chinese artists to be confident of the value of their own art: “Why would one want to have biennale exhibitions in China? Not only for the sake of making apparent one’s international influence or just to join the ranks of international biennials, but also because the one-hundred-year history of modern art in China has already engendered unique indigenous experiences.”69 Furthermore, Zhang also adds a nationalistic spin: “If China did not have the type of internationalized and legalized contemporary art exhibitions

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exemplified by the Shanghai Biennial, then the power to evaluate and choose would have remained in the hands of foreign biennial curators.”70 This sentiment found echoes among other critics at the event. Wang Nanming, for example, delivered a paper titled “The Shanghai Art Museum Should Not Become A Market Stall in China for Western Hegemony.”71 Despite these controversies within China’s art community, Shanghai’s reputation as China’s most international urban art center became established.72 New art zones popped up. For example, Chinese artists and designers also rebranded an old industrial park in Shanghai as the M50 Creative Garden. In 2004, Taiwanese-born architect and designer Deng Kunyan 登琨艳 used factory space along the riverbanks of Shanghai to build another creative cluster.73 Since 2005, the Shanghai government has launched strategic plans to boost the city’s creative industries. These include the founding of a research institute, the Shanghai Creative Industries Research Centre. By 2006, Shanghai had built about 40 creative industry parks. Over two-thirds of these clusters used space in old plant buildings and warehouses. In 2006, the Beijing government followed suit with the First International Beijing Cultural and Creative Industries Expo. Its opening ceremony took place in the Great Hall of the People, China’s very central political organ. Present at the event were senior officials of the Central Propaganda Department and the Ministry of Culture, signaling support for this endeavor. It marked a milestone for the approval of cultural and creative industries.

Industrial Upgrading: From “Made in China” to “Created in China” In 2005, the establishment of the Chinese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale became further “window dressing to showcase China’s progressive image”74 and a landmark for Chinese art to gain global recognition. This installation also pushed public art institutions to “embrace not only contemporary art forms but also the concept and function of the contemporary art museum.”75 In balancing local governments’ cultural demands with artistic and educational programs, these institutions became active players in pushing for a new phase of innovation. From 2006 to 2008, the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou each published policy

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documents opening up the registration of “cultural and creative industries.”76 And because the development of creative industries has much to do with local land-use policies, these documents signaled an opening in a previously stalled issue. Since the mid 2000s, more and more major cities have begun to host large-scale biennials and triennials. Many of these exhibitions were sponsored by local governments. Some attracted collaborations among entrepreneurs, artists, and curators. By mimicking international art fairs, these events became new symbols of urbanism and status. The government-drafted 2007 Development Report of China’s Creative Industries ranks Beijing and Shanghai as the first-tier cities, followed by Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Chengdu, and Nanjing as second-tier cities. Lü Peng points out the enterprising use of space in this developmental landscape: Ever since “the market economy squeezed the old economic system, every city has more and more abandoned old factory warehouses and old building spaces. Once discovered by artists, these spaces naturally became utilized” (Table 5.3).77 New buzzwords such as “biennial” and “triennial” in China’s urban landscape point to the nation’s fresh grasp of trends in the global art community. As Wu Hung comments, “By adopting a globalized exhibition and artistic language, these China-based international exhibitions confirmed the country’s newly gained status as a future-oriented contemporary nation in the making.”78 Attracted by the changing cultural scene in Chinese cities and by the social privilege now enjoyed by artists in China, more and more successful Chinese artists returned from overseas to participate in this renaissance. Because of low labor costs, as the world’s manufacturing center, China also began to produce art for global consumption. The example of Dafen Oil Painting Village best illustrates this trend. Located in Shenzhen, one of China’s earliest economic zones and the destination for rural-to-urban Table 5.3  Old building space reused as art space in Chinese cities (selection) City

Area

New Name

Beijing Shanghai Kunming Chengdu Nanjing

798 Factory Zone Chunming Textile Factory 101 Xiba Rd, Machine Mold Factory Blue-Roof Factory Zone Chang’an Automobile Factory

798 Art District M50 Creative Park Chuang Ku (Creative Warehouse) Blue-Roof Art Center Mufu Art Park

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migration, the Dafen region developed a unique art economy reliant on migrant labor. As early as the 1980s, some art dealers from Hong Kong saw an opportunity to use cheap migrant labor in Shenzhen by setting up art reproduction workshops. Dafen has been transformed from a fishing and agriculture village to a concentrated business center of art-copying activities. In the 1990s, with a population of 10,000, Dafen was home to hundreds of migrant workers in the art-replica business. They labored in the alleyways and slept on the floor of crowded studios, making thousands of replicas every day. By the mid 2000s, it had become known by the following descriptors: “the world’s largest production center for hand-painted art,” “China’s model art industry,” “the Western retailer’s best source for oil reproductions of Western masterpieces,”79 and the “copy art capital of the world.”80 According to Winnie Won Yin Wong, artworks completed by rural migrants in Dafen “were exhibited in venues like Venice Biennale, the Guangzhou Terminal, Art Basel, and the Lisson Gallery, and a handful have since entered into prominent private collections.”81 Local authorities at Dafen Village have ardently supported the art economy. They facilitated licensing and tax policies for these art businesses. In 2004, this special art zone was given the official name of Dafen Oil Painting Village, complete with the status of a cultural industry base (wenhua chanye jidi 文化产业基地). Local officials also added incentives for selecting highly skilled painters among the rural migrant workers. It once held a copying competition in which 110 painters performed imitation works of Russian realist artist Ilya Repin’s Portrait of Vladimir Stasov in a public square. The top ten winners were invited to take additional exams, and those who passed were rewarded with Shenzhen urban hukou status.82 Michael Keane refers to the local government’s policy as “a move curiously reminiscent of the Confucian examination system in traditional China.” 83 Art historian Winnie Won Yin Wong finds this event highly interesting in packaging all the aspects of classism, ideological control, and capitalist market incentives into one place: To win the Dafen Copying Competition would hardly provide the Dafen painter with the kind of social relevance a celebrated artist might have once expected in the past, for the ability to paint a painting with a socialist consciousness had uncertain—if any—value in the new socialist market economy. Instead of symbolizing an uplifting socialist cultural achievement and a redistribution of socioeconomic benefits, the choice of Repin’s Stasov for

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a copying competition could … be little more than a backwards-looking publicity stunt or a cynical bureaucrat’s inside joke: a socialist statement in a postsocialist age.84

By the end of the 2000s, Dafen Village had attracted attention from Western journalists critical of postsocialist China.85 A decade later, the stories of these migrants turned oil painters became the theme of an award-­ winning documentary, China’s Van Goghs. In it, a migrant worker named Zhao Xiaoyong has specialized in faking Van Gogh artworks, producing over 100,000 replicas. After learning the Old Master’s life story of poverty and suffering, this peasant-painter felt a deep affinity with Van Gogh. He wished to see Van Gogh’s authentic art in Europe and was able to make the tour. After that and considering Van Gogh as his spiritual mentor, Zhao was inspired to create his own authentic works of art. His own journey from “Made in China” to “Created in China” was highly emblematic of the nation’s trajectory. Art villages such as Dafen have nurtured a new generation of artists from humble backgrounds. By the start of the next decade, the turnover in painting sales at Dafen Village had reached over USD 65 million.

Bubbles and Busts in the Art Economy Art market researchers use the term art bubble to refer to speculative behavior within a short time.86 It happened to different market segments throughout history, such as the Tulip mania around 1600s and the US stock market trading in the 1920s, both leading to a dramatic collapse known as a “burst.”87 In 2004, at a Beijing auction, a Chinese entrepreneur paid USD 2.7 million for a painting by Liu Xiaodong 刘小东.88 It marked the highest price paid for a piece by a Chinese artist who began working after 1979.89 At Sotheby’s auction in March of 2006, Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang’s work Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 120 sold for nearly USD 1 million. As an article in the New York Times comments, “If China’s art scene can be likened to a booming stock market, Zhang Xiaogang, 48, is its Google.”90 Of the total USD 190 million worth of Asian contemporary art sold at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the world’s biggest auction houses, Chinese art accounted for most of the sales.91 Commenting on these exciting new sales, Michael Goedhuis, a collector and art dealer, told the media: “What is happening in China is what happened in Europe at the beginning

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of the 20th century. … New ground is being broken. There’s a revolution under way.”92 Around this time, Western museums such as the Guggenheim, the Tate Modern, and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) sent scouting representatives to China. When sales numbers reached a historic high, fear loomed that a bust in the art market was around the corner. As art researcher Xi Mu 西沐 recollects, after the global financial crisis in 2008, many were worried that the immature and fragile art market would likely collapse.93 “But contrary to this projection, the global art market did not experience dramatic fluctuations from 2009 to 2011, but rather a steady growth at 10 percent each year,” he writes. Even some old Chinese masters’ artworks sold for skyrocketing prices. This process had an unintended consequence—it educated the wealthy that art as an investment tool has its advantages.94 Not everyone in the art world considers China’s art market overcommercialized. For example, Lorenz Helbling, director of the ShanghART Gallery, told the media that there were simply many Chinese artists who continued to produce impressive works. He disagrees that the market was being too speculative or overrun by commercialism: “Things are much better than they were 10 years ago,” he declared.95 He added, “Back then many artists were commissioned to simply paint dozens of paintings for a gallery owner, who went out and sold those works. Now these artists are thinking more deeply about their work because they’re finally getting the recognition they deserve.”96 Another well-known problem that has been plaguing China’s art market is forgery. Art forgery, sometimes known as the art of emulation, has a long history in China.97 As history indicates, art forgery tends to increase when demand surges and as wealthy consumers seek to own a piece of art by a famous artist. As Scarlett Jang explains, “They wanted to enjoy a sense of pride similar to that enjoyed by those who could afford the real things.”98 So the open secrets of China’s art market include not only the widespread forgeries but also the fact that people are generally forgiving toward forgers.99 Although it is considered an old problem in China, modern-­day technologies have certainly illuminated the scale of the problem. Hence, the new buzzword shanzhai (literally “mountain bandits”), the copycatting of originals, has also been used to refer to fake art. Fan Yang points to two high-profile fakes to describe how prevalent fakes are in China’s public life: the lip-syncing of a young girl and the prerecorded firework display footage by artist Cai Guoqiang at the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. The lack of authenticity of both performances became controversies.100

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Conclusion Over a 30-year span, China’s art market and its artists have slowly been assimilated into the globalized art system, which used to be dominated by “the economic and discursive power of Western art, its host societies’ legal systems, art discourses, and infrastructure.”101 As Paul Gladston writes, “the accelerated development of the PRC’s infrastructure since the early 2000s has not only included manufacturing, finance and communications, but also the art market and creative industries sector.”102 Part of this development included “a major and increasingly large injection of international capital into the indigenous Chinese art market,” manifested by “an exponential growth in prices of works of contemporary Chinese art on the international art market.”103 Meanwhile, norms have shifted to embrace the art sector. As some scholars put it, “the new social spaces were hospitable, the discourses of socialism and capitalism compatible, and Western art theory adequate to the new Chinese art.”104 This decade of foreign investment has enriched individual artists and gallery owners in China. Openness to global art trends also encouraged the production of more-ambitious artwork in terms of scale, artistic genres, and technical sophistication. Institutional rebuilding accelerated as the number of museums and exhibitions increased, including state-funded museums that had previously exhibited only state-designated events. Privately funded art museums also mushroomed in Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities. Meanwhile, China’s art academies also rapidly expanded. As both domestic demand and international demand for Chinese art commodities increased, more and more urban young people saw that the reputation of contemporary Chinese art was ascending. Lucrative careers in the art economy were sought by more and more college graduates. As a result, in the 2000s, China’s art market had become “the single fastest-growing segment of the international art market.”105 Chinese economists and statisticians began tracking the numbers in this sector: China’s overheated auction market created as many as 1600 registered auctioneers, a profession that had barely existed in the 1990s.106 What is more, the number of commercial galleries increased from five to 300 in Beijing between 2000 and 2008.107 Researchers find that China’s share of the global auction market and the global exhibition space leaped from a somewhat-negligible status in 1998 to second place (29.8 percent) next to the United States (29.9 percent) in 2007.108

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The nation has also witnessed the rapid increase of art sales in commercial galleries and auction houses. For example, in 2004, the combined sales of Asian contemporary art by Sotheby’s and Christie’s totaled USD 22 million, and most of the pieces were by Chinese artists.109 Two years later, this sales number rose to USD 190 million. In 2006, before the global financial crisis, China’s share of the global art market was only 6 percent. But by 2011, while other economies were still recuperating, China’s share had increased to over 23 percent.110 In 2012, Chinese art accounted for 41.4 percent of global art auction revenue.111 And among the world’s top-ten-selling artists, six were Chinese: Zhang Daqian 张大 千, Qi Baishi 齐白石, Xu Beihong 徐悲鸿, Wu Guanzhong 吴冠中, Fu Baoshi 傅抱石, and Li Keran 李可染. Since 2006, the trend of global urbanism has swept through China’s cities. With the impending Beijing Olympics, more and more domestic art events included artists and artworks from Italy, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and the United States. Around 200 Chinese cities considered the status of international metropolitan as a developmental goal and competed with one another. Take Zhengzhou, a medium-size inland city, as an example. A few overseas artists first set up their studios at Shifo and named it an art commune (yishu gongshe 艺术公社). They painted the roofs of these apartments red so that visitors could identify the creative clusters. Like other art zones in large cities, this location later attracted more and more artists and held many international events. In 2010, collaborating with the local government and real estate developers, a new project was launched to build a few 30-story-high commercial complexes for residents of the informal art commune. New space for studios, galleries, restaurants, and designer shops opened in 2015.112 Meanwhile, uncertainty around art space from demolition in China’s urban fringes threatened artists’ livelihoods.113 Internationally, a globalized market capitalism has been a double-edged sword for Chinese artists. Although it has granted artistic autonomy, it has also unleashed forces that are no less constraining. After freeing itself from “political uniformity,” China’s art market is now faced with other pressures and tensions in “an aesthetic Utopia.”114 Some observers point to a xenophobic mentality from the West, which is alienating artists of Chinese descent and challenging their collective identity.

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Notes 1. “Jiang Zemin Brought Jing Dezhen Porcelain to Bush on Visit to America,” Xinhua News, July 21, 2002. http://news.sina.com. cn/c/2002-­07-­21/1107643570.html. 2. Anne Gerritsen, The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 7. 3. Xu Binglan, “China’s GDP grows 10.7% in 2006, fastest in 11 years,” China Daily, January 26, 2007. 4. “The New Titans,” The Economist, September 16, 2006. https://www. economist.com/special-­report/2006/09/16/the-­new-­titans. 5. “The Global Art Market 2010—Crisis and Recovery” by TEFAF, Maastricht, March 2011. 6. Sean O’Hagan, “Beijing or Bust,” the Guardian, December 1, 2002. https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2002/dec/01/features. review37?INTCMP=SRCH. 7. Its first report found that creative industries in the United Kingdom accounted for more than 5 percent of its GDP and employed 1.5 million people. Research also show that over 70 percent of college graduates hope to work in the creative sector. See Sean O’Hagan, “Beijing or Bust,” the Guardian, December 1, 2002. 8. Sean O’Hagan, “Beijing or Bust,” the Guardian, December 1, 2002. 9. Ibid. 10. Richard Florida, “The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent,” Liberal Education, Summer 2006, Vol. 92, No. 3, 20–25. 11. Quoted in Jin San, “Where Did the Popular Appraisal Shows Go?” (红极 一时的“鉴宝” 节目都去哪儿了?), Elephant Council (大象公会), March 5, 2019. https://www.sohu.com/a/299295676_383724. 12. Zhang Guozhen, Analyzing China’s Contemporary Collecting and Appraisal based on Art Appraisal TV Programs, a doctoral dissertation, China Art Graduate School, 2007. 张国珍, 《从美术鉴藏类电视节目解 析我国当代鉴藏》, 中国艺术研究院博士学位论文, 2007. Pan Xiaochen, Applicability Research on Appraisal TV Programs’ Use of Space-Time Narratives, a master’s thesis, Central Fine Arts Academy, 2015. 潘晓晨, 《收藏节目借鉴影视剧时空叙事策略的可行性研究》, 中 央美术学院专业硕士学位论文, 2015. 13. Jin San, “Where Did the Popular Appraisal Shows Go?” (红极一时的 “ 鉴宝” 节目都去哪儿了?), Elephantia (大象公会), March 5, 2019. 14. National Broadcast, Film and TV Bureau, “Notice on Regulating Cultural Artifacts Appraisal Shows,” July 6, 2012. http://www.chinanews.com/ cul/2012/07-­06/4012242.shtml. Other reasons for stricter regulations

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also include insider trading and fraud. After these controversies ­subsided, in 2019, Shaanxi Provincial Television station began another show, titled Zhong Hua Lun Jian. This program focused more on “inheriting traditional culture” as a central mission, again attracting a large audience because of the high appraisals given by experts. 15. Zhu He, “China Faces ‘Huge’ Cultural Trade Deficit,” China Daily, April 19, 2006. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-­04/19/ content_571002.htm. 16. Michael Keane, Creative Industries in China: Art, Design and Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 72. 17. Michael Keane, Created In China: The Great New Leap Forward (London: Routledge, 2007), 80. 18. Vivian Yuan, Logic of Chinese Cultural-Creative Industries Parks: Shenzhen and Guangzhou, 14. Dave O’Brien, Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries (London: Routledge, 2014). 19. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, xiii. 20. Michael Keane, Creative Industries in China: Art, Design and Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 41. 21. Taiwan passed its Cultural and Creative Industries Development Act in 2010. The UNESCO and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development also provided their own respective definitions of this term in 2009 and in 2010, respectively. 22. Jane Perlez, “Casting A Fresh Eye on China With Computer, Not Ink Brush,” New York Times, December 3, 2003. https://www.nytimes. com/2003/12/03/arts/casting-­a-­fresh-­eye-­on-­china-­with-­computer-­ not-­ink-­brush.html. 23. Ibid. 24. Paul Gladston, Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (London: Reakton Books, 2014), 279. 25. David Shambaugh, “China’s Long March to Global Power,” in David Shambaugh (ed.), China and the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 15. 26. Michael D. Swaine, “Perceptions of an Assertive China,” China Leadership Monitor 32 (2010). http://media.hoover.org/sites/default/files/documents/CLM32MS.pdf 27. Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art: A History, 1970s to 2000s (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014), 434. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Michael Keane, Creative Industries in China: Art, Design and Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 1.

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31. Winnie Won Yin Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 209. 32. Michael Keane, Creative Industries in China: Art, Design and Media, 6. 33. Wu Hung “CODA: Entering the New Millenium,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 398–406. 34. David S.  G. Goodman and Xiaowei Zang, “Introduction,” in David S. G. Goodman (ed.), The New Rich in China: Future Rulers, Present Lives (New York: Routledge, 2008), 6. 35. Ibid., 3. 36. Elaine Jeffreys, “Advanced producers or moral polluters? China’s bureaucrat-­entrepreneurs and sexual corruption,” in David S. G. Goodman (ed.), The New Rich in China: Future Rulers, Present Lives (New York: Routledge, 2008), 229–242. 37. Richard Wilson, “Political Culture and the Persistence of Inequality,” East Asia: An International Quarterly, vol. 22 (Spring of 2005): 3–17. 38. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), 186. 39. Friedmann, J. 2006. “Four Theses in the Study of China’s Urbanization” in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 30(2) 440–50. 40. Wu, Fulong. China’s Emerging Cities: The Making of New Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2007), 16. 41. Zhou Feizhou, “Creating Wealth: Land Seizure, Local Government, and Farmers,” in Deborah S. Davis and Wang Feng (eds.), Creating Wealth and Poverty in Postsocialist China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 112–125. 42. Meiqin Wang, “Power, Capital, and Artistic Freedom: Contemporary Chinese Art Communities and the City,” July 2018, Cultural Studies 33(4): 1–33. 43. Ibid. 44. Wu Hung “CODA: Entering the New Millenium,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 398–406. 45. Ibid. 46. Sun Ning, “The Growth of 798 Was A Natural Process” (798 是自然生 长的), Hi Art, No. 002, 798 Art Zone Move Forward and Backward: How Can Contemporary Art’s First Presence Maintain Its Status? (798 艺术区 的进与退: 当代艺术第一现场的江湖地位何以稳固?), 90–91. 47. Michael Keane, Creative Industries in China: Art, Design and Media, 167. 48. Lü Peng, Contemporary Art in Twenty-first Century: 2000–2010 (Shanghai: Century Publishing Group, 2012), 67–69. 49. Ibid.

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50. Ibid. 51. David Barboza, “China’s Art Market: Cold or Maybe Hibernating?” New York Times, March 10, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/ arts/design/11decl.html. 52. Ibid. 53. O’Connor, J. and Xin, G., 2006. A new modernity? The arrival of ‘creative industries’ In China. International journal of cultural studies, 9 (3), 271–283. 54. About New  York city’s urban renewal and the art scene, see Bowler, A.E. and McBurney, B., 1991. “Gentrification and the avant-garde in New York’s East village: the good, the bad and the ugly.” Theory, Culture & Society, 8: 49–77. Although the tension between short-term economic policies and private property rights exists everywhere, in China, the fuzziness of property rights has exacerbated the problem. For example, some cities have policies demanding that property rights laws yield to societal development. 55. Julia F.  Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 285. 56. Ibid., 286. 57. Wu Hung, “Experimental Art Exhibitions and the 2000 Shanghai Bieannale,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 326. 58. Sun Ning, “The Growth of 798 Was A Natural Process” (798 是自然生 长的), Hi Art, No. 002, 798 Art Zone Move Forward and Backward: How Can Contemporary Art’s First Presence Maintain Its Status? (798 艺术区 的进与退: 当代艺术第一现场的江湖地位何以稳固?), 90–91. 59. Wu Hung, “‘Experimental Exhibitions’ of the 1990s,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990–2000) (Guangzhou: Guangzhou Museum of Art, 2002), 83–97. 60. Quoted in Lü Peng, Contemporary Art in the Twenty-First Century: 2000–2010 (Shanghai: Century Publishing Group, 2012), 25. 61. Zhu Qingsheng, “China’s First Legitimate Modern Art Exhibition: The 2000 Shanghai Biennale” (中国第一次合法的现代艺术展: 关于 2000 上 海双年展), in Jia Fangzhou (ed.), Era of Criticism, Vol. 2 (Guangxi: Guangxi Fine Arts Publishing House, 2003), 347–352. Included in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 351–352. 62. Ibid. 63. Julia F.  Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 279. 64. Ibid., 280. 65. Ibid.

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66. Zhang Qing, “Transcending Left and Right: The Shanghai Biennale Amid Transitions” (超越左右: 转折中的上海双年展), Jiangsu Pictorial 江苏画刊, 240, No. 12 (2000), 4. Quoted in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 347–350. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Zhang Qing, “Transcending Left and Right: The Shanghai Biennale Amid Transitions” (超越左右: 转折中的上海双年展), Jiangsu Pictorial 江苏画刊, 240, No. 12 (2000), 4. Quoted in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 347–350. 70. Ibid. 71. Wang Nanming, “The Shanghai Art Museum Should Not Become A Market Stall in China for Western Hegemony—A Paper Delivered at the 2000 Shanghai Biennale,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Chinese Art at the Crossroads: Between Past and Future, Between East and West (Hong Kong: New Art Media; London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2001), 265–268. 72. The Shanghai Biennials continued for over two decades. 73. “History Recycled: Photographs of Architectural Design by Deng Kunyan,” University of Southern California, US-China Institute, October 8, 2009. https://china.usc.edu/calendar/history-­recycled-­photographs­architectural-­design-­deng-­kunyan. 74. Wu Hung “CODA: Entering the New Millenium,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents, 398–406. 75. Wu Hung “CODA: Entering the New Millenium”, 398–406. 76. Vivian Yuan, Logic of Chinese Cultural-Creative Industries Parks: Shenzhen and Guangzhou (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 1–2. 77. Lü Peng, Contemporary Art in Twenty-first Century: 2000-2010 (Shanghai: Century Publishing Group, 2012), 69. 78. Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art: A History, 1970s to 2000s (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014), 357. 79. Winnie Won Yin Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 5. 80. Michael Keane, Creative Industries in China: Art, Design and Media (London: Routledge, 2007), 135. 81. Ibid., 9–10. 82. Ibid., 3. 83. Ibid., 136. 84. Ibid., 4.

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85. See, for example, Martin Paetsch, “China’s Art Factories: Van Gogh from the Sweatshops,” Spiegel Online, August 23, 2006. https://www.spiegel. d e / c o n s e n t -­a -­? t a r g e t U r l = h t t p s % 3 A % 2 F % 2 F w w w. s p i e g e l . de%2Finternational%2Fchina-­s-art-­factories-­van-­gogh-­from-­the-­sweatshop-­a433134.html&ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F; Kate Palmer, “The McDonald’s of the Art World,” Foreign Policy, August 25, 2006. https://foreignpolicy.com/2006/08/25/the-­mcdonalds-­of-­the-­art-­ world/#!; James Fallows, “Workshop of the World, Fine Arts Division,” The Atlantic, December 19, 2007. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2007/12/workshop-­o f-­t he-­w orld-­f ine-­a r ts-­ division/7859/; Mary Anne Toy, “Van Gogh, Gauguin: Cheaper by the Dozen; Global Village,” Sydney Morning Herald, July 1, 2006. Evan Osnos, “Chinese Village Painters By Incredible Numbers,” Chicago Tribune, February 13, 2007. https://www.chicagotribune. com/news/ct-­xpm-­2007-­02-­13-­0702130004-­story.html. 86. See Robert B. Ekelund, Jr., John D. Jackson, and Robert D. Tollison, The Economics of American Art: Issues, Artists and Market Institutions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 87. Lodewijk Petram, The World’s First Stock Exchange: How the Amsterdam Market for Dutch East India Company Shares Become a Modern Securities Market, 1602–1700 (Columbia University, 2014). 88. David Barboza, “In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism,” New York Times, January 4, 2007. https://www.nytimes. com/2007/01/04/arts/design/04arti.html. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93. Xi Mu, Annual Report of China’s Art Market, 2018-2019 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2020), 66. 94. Ibid. 95. David Barboza, “In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism,” New York Times, January 4, 2007. 96. Ibid. 97. After art catalogs became widely used, starting in the 1600s, many were later found to have included forgeries. The problem became so prevalent that by the late Ming and Qing periods, most art collection catalogs in circulation were “nothing but catalogs of forgeries,” according to art historian Scarlett Jang. Chinese painter in the Song dynasty Mi Fu observed that the art market of his time was being flooded with counterfeits. Among these, Su Shih’s calligraphy was arguably the most widely forged item after a ban on Su’s works, which was due to his dissenting opinions

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in politics. See Scarlett Jang, “The Culture of Art Collecting in Imperial China,” in Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang (eds.), A Companion to Chinese Art (John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 59. The Chinese use distinct terms when referring to different processes in making copies and forgeries of art: mo for ­tracing imitation, lin for copying in the freehand manner, fang for improvising after the style of a master, and zao for invention and improvisation. As Ginger Hsu evaluates, “imitation was the standard method by which artists and calligraphers learned their art; thus, mo, lin, and fang appear in discussions of artistic training as well.” See Ginger Cheng-chi Hsu, “Imitation and Originality, Theory and Practice,” in Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang (eds.), A Companion to Chinese Art (John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 293. 98. Scarlett Jang, “The Culture of Art Collecting in Imperial China,” 65. 99. Artists consider the reproduction or imitation of their art a recognition because it has always happened to some of the most renowned artists in China and Europe. Many court artists also had ghost painters. In daily transactions in an art marketplace, sellers and buyers use “old” versus “new” instead of “authentic” versus “fake” because the latter dichotomy lacks respect for skilled forgers. 100. Fan Yang, Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2016), 1. 101. Jonathan Harris, The Global Contemporary Art World (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 141. 102. Paul Gladston, Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (London: Reakton Books, 2014), 226. 103. Ibid., 230–235. 104. Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi, Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), xxii. 105. Wu Hung “CODA: Entering the New Millenium,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 398–406. 106. Wu Hung “CODA: Entering the New Millenium,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 399. 107. Ibid. 108. Larissa Buchholz, “Beyond Reproduction: Asymmetrical Interdependence and the Transformation of Centers and Peripheries in the Globalizing Visual Arts,” in Victoria D.  Alexander, Samuli Hägg, Simo Häyrynen, and Erkki Sevänen (eds.), Art and the Challenge of Markets: Natural Cultural Politics and the Challenges of Marketization and Globalization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 277. 109. Ibid.

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110. McAndrew, C. (2011) Art Market Report: A New Global Landscape. Available at http://www.tefaf.com/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=78. 111. quoted in Michael Keane, Creative Industries in China: Art, Design and Media, 133. 112. “Shifo: Zhengzhou Presents A Unique Sample of Art District” (石佛:郑 州给出了一个艺术区发展的独特样本), Artron.Net, November 4, 2020. https://news.artron.net/20201104/n1087010.html. 113. Joyce Lau, “A Chinese Artist Consumed by the Idea of Inevitable Change,” New York Times, December 1, 2016. https://www.nytimes. com/2016/12/01/arts/sun-­xun-­a-­chinese-­artist-­consumed-­by-­the-­ idea-­of-­inevitable-­change.html. 114. Liu Yuedi, “Chinese Contemporary Art: From De-Chineseness to Re-Chineseness,” Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 69.

CHAPTER 6

Digitalization, the Rise of Chinese Collectors, and the Nationwide Art Boom (2010s)

The tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2011, attacks also marked a decade since China had joined the World Trade Organization. The Financial Times wrote that “the three most important words in the past decade were not ‘war on terror’ but ‘Made in China.’”1 The rise of the Chinese economy and its “soft power” have been considered challenges to Western domination. Some media also describe 2011 as a “game-­changing year” for the resurgence of China’s art market after the global financial crisis.2 By then, the volume of China’s art market had more than quadrupled. Take auction sales, for example, which increased from a 5 percent (in 2006) to 30 percent share of the global sales, overtaking the United States and the United Kingdom as purportedly the largest auction market.3 By 2012, China boasted seven of the ten largest auction houses in the world (by sales revenue).4 In 2014, 50 percent of global fine-art sales were made in China.5 According to a study by Artprice.com on fine-art sales at 4500 auction houses around the world, artworks by Chinese artists, such as Qi Baishi, Zhang Daqian, and Fu Baoshi, have become more frequently listed among the ten highest-grossing artists.6 The deeper integration of China’s art market with the rest of the world was also evident from the two-way art-buying trend: not only have Western art collectors been buying art from China, but Chinese collectors have also been buying art by Western old masters. To catch up with these demands, starting in 2017, Sotheby’s and Christie’s launched offices in mainland

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China. Meanwhile, Chinese auction houses also set up branches overseas. Global art news organizations, including Artprice and Artnet, have developed their Chinese media content platforms.7 In addition, China’s own brand of art news and consultancy services matured. For example, Artron. net has become the nation’s largest art data service.8 In 2017, the Chinese state-funded media outlet CGTN reported that China’s art market was seeing a “historic change,” one that has caught up with a global trend of contemporary art boom for the first time in “a new era of prosperity.”9 Indeed, more and more urban centers and even small townships in China have incorporated cultural and creative industries into their local development plans.10 What has been the driving forces of this growth during the 2010s? Among many factors, a prevalent social psychology of wealth preservation was key. As one Chinese art consultant told the New York Times, “A majority of Chinese people do not trust the Chinese stock market. The housing boom has slowed tremendously. A lot of people are looking to art for investment.”11 Art financialization and art capitalization have become the new trends. This chapter explores the multifaceted changes during this decade.

The Age of Social Media: Internet-Assisted Art Consumption Since 2008, China has been the country with the largest number of people who have Internet access. In 2011, China also surpassed the United States in terms of installed telecommunication bandwidth. Wireless and mobile phone access to the Internet has developed exponentially. This period also saw the explosive growth of Chinese domestic websites and the proliferation of social media use. A New York Times article claims that social media “have revolutionized the Chinese art world” by closing the time lag between Chinese artists and the world.12 It also created a “digital gap” between young Chinese artists and the older generation. The former group, who have learned foreign languages, are using “all possible available means to attract the attention of curators and galleries.”13 The maturing telecommunication infrastructure has become important for art consumption by the average Chinese citizen. Since 2013, all of China’s major ecommerce giants, such as SuNing 苏宁, Guomei 国美, and Taobao 淘宝, have included visual art into their businesses.14 Auction sales through WeChat, China’s social media super-app, trended upward in

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2014. Because art ecommerce platforms specialize in trading artworks in the low-to-medium price range, they tend to attract a large crowd. Some WeChat-based art businesses turned the super-app into a massive network of potential buyers. From 2018 to 2019, Mini Auction Hall (weipaitang 微拍堂), a WeChat-based auction platform, increased its sales from CNY 24 billion to CNY 50 billion.15 This ecommerce trend also led major auction houses and galleries to expand their online services. By 2015, China has had over 2000 art-related ecommerce businesses.16 In 2018, the trading volume in this category had exceeded CNY 20 billion.17 The market for art derivatives (yishu yanshengpin 艺术衍生品) has also made breakthroughs. Since the early 2000s, the Terracotta Army, a world-­ famous landmark of Chinese cultural heritage, has built a vast cultural derivative market, which is based mainly on imitation techniques.18 However, the precise nature of art derivatives that may enter the market has been controlled by the Chinese authorities. For example, in the early 2000s, when luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton wanted to collaborate with Chinese artists in Beijing, it stirred up some controversy among the Chinese media, questioning whether commercialization costs the dignity of Chinese artists. Just a decade later, such hostility toward art commercialization disappeared. Rather, all forms of art capitalization are considered financial innovation (jinrong chuangxin 金融创新). In 2012, China’s three major Internet companies (Baidu 百度, Alibaba 阿里巴巴, and Tencent 腾讯) and ecommerce enterprises prioritized the cultural industry in their strategic plans. For example, JD.com is China’s leading ecommerce company and a member of the Fortune Global 500. According to a mid-2010s survey (n = 25,000), the majority of JD.com consumers are willing to purchase high-quality art, original art, or artderivative products.19 After this ratio was mapped onto the pool of 290 million annual active users, it appeared to be a huge market waiting to be exploited. In 2018, JD.com launched JD Art, an online platform for art purchases. By bringing art and consumer brands together, it allowed younger Chinese consumers (born after 1980) to explore what the art world has to offer. On its Global Museums Day in October 2019, JD.com partnered with four of the world’s finest museums to produce art derivatives, including 300 products from 50 brands.20 Later, JD.com also built other parts of its art ecosystem, including JD Art Gallery and JD Art Fund. Now, it has a professional team in public art education and that supports young designers.

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Another example is Tmall.com, a business-to-customer (B2C) online retail website in China operated by Alibaba Group. It has over 500 million active users. In 2019, Tmall.com began partnering with Chinese artists and art fairs to target young consumers. Within a year, this art department of Tmall.com became so successful that the Louvre Museum in Paris decided to collaborate with it in launching a flagship online store. One media outlet reports that “[t]o bring the museum’s wonders closer to Chinese consumers, the Alifish team leveraged a combination of Alibaba’s data-analysis capabilities and its licensing expertise to identify the Louvre’s most influential and popular works.”21 The final project included lipsticks in the shape of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, eye shadow compacts themed after the Venus de Milo, and satchels bearing the likeness of the Mona Lisa. Moreover, Tmall.com also used its global website (Tmall Global, since 2013) to connect artists around the world to their Chinese fans.22 The competition between JD.com and Tmall in luxury ecommerce, followed by their competition in art businesses, has become an intense battleground. Both offer a built-in infrastructure that allows a brand to quickly enter China’s vast market made up of young, restless, and curious consumers.23 From 2018 to 2019, the market scale of art and cultural products on Tmall.com had tripled.24 Museum stores’ own product sales increased sixfold. Individual artists also collaborated with fashion brands to produce art-themed goods. Many of them are marketing themselves and selling their artworks via WeChat, JD.com, Taobao.com, and foreign websites such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Global art collaboration and digitalization pushed the market of art derivatives to a new level. In July 2018, the British Museum collaborated with Tmall.com to open its online store. Within a month, it gained over 172,000 followers, and all but three products had sold out. In 2019, Paris’s Musée Rodin announced the opening of a Tmall branch in Shenzhen, funded by a group of Chinese collectors.25 In the area of installation arts and immersion art experiences, Chinese viewers and art consumers are also catching up with the trend of fusing technology and art. In 2010, a viewer-interactive version of the famous painting scroll Along the River during the Qingming Festival (qingming shanghetu 清明上河图), titled River of Wisdom, was presented at the China Pavilion of the World Expo in Shanghai. It also traveled to other events at Hong Kong, Taipei, and Singapore.26 In 2018, Beijing’s National Palace Museum and Phoenix TV produced a new digital version of the

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painting on the museum’s dome-shaped planetarian. This public education project successfully engaged tens of thousands of elementary students and community builders. Another multisensory traveling exhibition came in 2015, when the Australian company Grande Exhibitions organized “Van Gogh Alive,” featuring more than 3000 images at enormous scale in Shanghai’s luxury commercial zone, Xintiandi.27 Within a week, this event attracted more than 20,000 participants. Adjacent restaurants, cafes, stores, and florists promoted Van Gogh–themed products. After this four-­ month event, Taobao.com also began its own online crowdfunding project to design Van Gogh–derivative products. As Chinese society is now becoming more media rich, the boundaries separating the art market from the media-communication-tech industries has become blurry. By the mid 2010s, the art and design world was becoming more multilayered and heterogeneous. Made up of subsectors, both public and private, it was hiring an increasingly diversified labor force of distributors, contractors, and media content providers. Casual art events were ubiquitous in Chinese cities. Some tourist companies also added art zones to their itineraries. Many foreign tourists favored buying art by the Chinese over regular souvenirs, thinking that the former might appreciate in value in the future. While some consider art products “the highest civilization achievements of a nation or a region,”28 others fear that Chinese art has been losing its identity. Some have criticized this “creative industry” trend as a kind of “fetishization.”29 The population of art buyers has expanded and diversified. Previously, foreign diplomats or businesspeople who considered buying a work of contemporary Chinese art during the two prior decades felt that it was like “buying a little piece of history and a window into how society is changing.”30 By the 2010s, with the help of online art sales, the market has targeted “the new generation of high-salaried Chinese professionals who are turning more toward contemporary artworks.”31 By 2012, China is estimated to have a sizable middle class of roughly 500 million people. Owning real estate has become only a baseline. An increasing need for these upwardly mobile Chinese was to express their wealth and status through cultural capital. Some opted for luxury goods, experiences, and art. This trend of popular art consumption continued throughout the 2010s. For example, Art Beijing 2019, a four-day event, attracted not just collectors from over 20 nations but also common visitors looking for home décor.32 As one observer comments, “middle-class collecting began

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with the need to decorate the blank wall in their new apartments. … Usually we don’t ask if spending five million yuan on an apartment is worth it or not. They treat art spending the same way.”33 The growth of this wing of the art market (other than in auction houses) has encouraged emerging artists and dealers. Nevertheless, art transactions have experienced increasing uncertainty. As researchers have found, when “the emergence and widespread acceptance and prevalence of the Internet as a medium for the selling and buying of goods has challenged localized transactions,” the digitalization of art transactions is likely to “disrupt the market, potentially in a fundamental way.”34 For some artists and dealers, language remains a barrier hindering their ability to trade internationally. China’s digital firewall, blocking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, serves as another impediment. Even when trading on Chinese social media, one needs to self-censor any politically sensitive subjects.35 During this art consumption boom, the old theme of political control affecting the art market has not become irrelevant in China. In the latter half of 2013, it suffered a rapid decline owing to a blow to the gifting economy (lipin jingji 礼品经济) brought by Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaigns.36 The market for Chinese calligraphy and painting has long been built upon a gift economy, which takes up to 60 percent of the total volume.37 This gifting practice has kept artworks largely in circulation, but in the hands of few collectors. Government officials and businesspeople have exchanged favors through the gifting of expensive art, known as elegant bribery (yahui 雅贿). China’s auction houses have also been criticized for serving as venues of official corruption.38 The usual practice works as follows: A businessperson gives a work of art to a government official, and the latter puts it in an auction; the same businessperson buys it back at an inflated price at the auction. This practice has the advantage of leaving less evidence related to bribery. Apart from this, the transaction of art was also used as a way to get money out of China. By purchasing art in China and selling it overseas, one also evades the suspicion of bribery.39 The impact of anticorruption campaigns, coupled with turmoil in China’s stock market, lasted until 2015, when China’s domestic art market contracted by 30 percent.40 Around the same time, communist ideology also resurged. Tsinghua University’s department of art history began to require, for instance, that its students “build systematic theoretical knowledge of history of Chinese and foreign art” and that of Chinese and foreign arts and design “with

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basic theory of Marxism–Leninism as guideline.”41 Major art events by state-run institutions also incorporated Xi Jinping’s political agendas, such as “One Belt, One Road.” Xi pushed the “soft power” narrative toward China’s “national rejuvenation,” a long-desired and powerful rhetoric for the Chinese. This vision legitimizes innovation and desires to place China at the forefront of global scientific and technological developments.42 Many conservative and state-funded art events began to use this theme for political legitimacy. For example, in 2017, the Beijing International Art Biennale exhibited “Silk Road and the World’s Civilizations,” a showcase of over 560 artists from more than 100 countries and regions.43 As the media reports, “this event is giving a platform to not only countries where art is booming and highly commercialized, but also countries that are much less developed but want their artists’ voices to be heard internationally.”44 Since then, a new wave of global fusion between Chinese and international artists has arrived. Below are a few of the major art events in sequence from 2018 to 2019: • April 2018 had the National Art Museum in Beijing display Uruguayan art, featuring over 150 pieces that show how Indigenous people of South America lived under colonial rule in the 1400s.45 • May 2018 saw an exhibition entitled “Sino-Nepal Cultural Communication Art” in Nepal, featuring Chinese artists, as part of the International Youth Creative and Cultural Week.46 The organizer was the Shanghai International Culture Association. • In June 2018, the National Art Museum in Beijing hosted an exhibition featuring contemporary Hungarian art.47 • In December 2018, Chinese bronze art master Zhu Bingren had an exhibition in Berlin, Germany.48 • Also in December, two top art education institutions in China and the United States, the China Academy of Art (CAA) and the San Francisco Art Institute, collaborated on an art event entitled “From/ To: The Frontier of Chinese Art Education,” bringing over 40 Chinese art professors to “showcase the distinct Chinese art world and the evolution of traditional Chinese art” in the United States.49 • In January 2019, the Central Academy of Fine Arts held an exhibition titled “Chinese Artists Abroad in France and Chinese Modern Art,” displaying artworks by “founders and drivers of Chinese art’s shift from tradition to modernity” during the early twentieth century, when more than 100 Chinese artists studied in France.50

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• In May 2019, an Asian Digital Art Exhibition in Beijing brought together works by 30 international artists, all using new media and technology.51 Media publicity for events such as these helped further boost the craze of art commercialization. Turning art into a commodity was no longer a taboo. Mingling with artists, especially at international art events, became fashionable for a younger generation of Chinese. An art market report in 2019 estimated that half of art consumers were young people under age 30.52 According to China’s Academy of Social Sciences, among the fast-­ expanding middle class in China, 90 percent of them express interest in collecting art.53 Such a socioeconomic and demographic change may serve as a sustainable base for the continued growth of the art market.

The Rise of Chinese Art Collectors: Domestic and Abroad Today in China, acquiring cultural capital by collecting art has become the latest practice for the upper middle class and the wealthy. Their cultural tastes also reshape the aesthetic preferences of other social status groups, as Veblen and Bourdieu theorize. If the occupation of professional curator (cezhanren 策展人) was a new creation of the 1990s and 2000s in China, a decade later, a widely accepted new title in Chinese society was that of collector (shoucangjia 收藏家). Being known as a collector signals wealth, status, and taste. This phenomenon shows that the high end of China’s art market has grown to be adulated by prevalent sociocultural norms. The practice of building museums as part of some high-end real estate was no longer a novelty, because local governments had long favored these projects as giving a competitive edge to their cities. Some companies have also been acting as collectors, and corporate art is now a widely recognized and reputable practice. Economic growth and wealth accumulation almost always lead to a booming art market. But China’s art market boom also has its own logic. Decades of egalitarian Communist campaigns from the 1950s to the 1980s have precluded the passing down of wealth from one generation to another. According to Chinese art professor Zhao Li 赵力, the fact that “cultural treasures have, in general, not passed down through families” has been driving art collecting.54 She observes that “the vast majority of

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collectors bidding at auction have made their money in the major growth industries: real estate, finance, energy, transportation, commodities and the high-tech sectors.”55 Institutional or corporate collectors have also come from these industries. All these have been pushing the demand for art investment funds. Chinese collectors who were raised under egalitarianism and in poverty have now learned to spend lavishly. The social psychology behind such conspicuous consumption, though typical of the nouveau riche everywhere, has particular traits related to Chinese history. As Lianne Yu writes, “because of the scale of changes to China’s economic, social, and technological structures that have occurred in an extraordinarily short period of time, we can observe radical transformation in people’s everyday lives within just a generation or even half a generation.”56 Today, Chinese consumers’ tendency toward overcompensation can be explained by the contrasting lifestyles of two generations. As Vishakha N.  Desai, the president of Asia Society, told the New York Times, “In China, for 50 or 60 years, nothing happened. … That’s a big break. The last 250 years were years of humiliation. They now feel an obligation to prize art again and bring it back.”57 Some observers compare the Chinese influx into the global art market to the Japanese rush for Impressionist art in the 1980s.58 According to the 2010 Hurun Art List 胡润艺术榜, Chinese collectors were comprising a significant demographic in the global contemporary art scene, a shift from three years earlier.59 Since 2013, Chinese billionaires have started buying expensive Western art at auctions. One needs to know a bit of context for the reversed growth of foreign direct investment (FDI). For a decade since 2002, China had been receiving FDI from the United States; however, this trend later turned the other way around. In 2016, Chinese enterprises acquired 50 US assets worth at least USD 50 million each.60 In the next few years, Chinese-owned enterprises covered most states in the United States, making Chinese entrepreneurs “new neighbors” of US workers.61 Around this time, Chinese buyers also stepped up to “acquire Monet, Van Gogh, Modigliani and Picasso at sometimes eyebrow-raising prices.”62 Below are a few instances that gained wide media publicity: • Wang Jianlin 王健林, founder of China’s largest real estate developer, Dalian Wanda Group, purchased a Picasso painting, namely Claude et Paloma, at Christie’s auction in New York in 2013.63

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• At Sotheby’s New York auction in March 2015, Liu Yiqian 刘益谦, chair of Sunline Group and founder of Long Museum in China, paid USD 14 million for a 600-year-old album of Buddhist art and calligraphy.64 • At Sotheby’s Hong Kong auction in April 2015, Liu Yiqian paid USD 36 million for a rare porcelain “chicken cup” from the Chenghua period.65 His second purchase was a Song dynasty guan vase for USD 14.7 million.66 • At Sotheby’s New York auction in May 2015, Wang Zhongjun 王中 军, founder of the Chinese entertainment company Huayi Brothers Media, paid USD 29.9 million for a Picasso painting, Woman with a Hairbun on a Sofa, from the Goldwyn family collection.67 • At the same Sotheby’s New York auction, Wang Jianlin paid USD 20.4 million for a Claude Monet painting.68 • At Christie’s New York auction in November 2015, Liu Yiqian paid USD 170 million for Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu Couche (1918).69 • At Christie’s Hong Kong auction in November 2015, Liu Yiqian paid USD 45 million for an embroidered silk Tibetan thangka (fifteenth century).70 After Liu Yiqian’s 2015 purchase in New York, this Chinese billionaire boldly declared the following in a New York Times interview: “The message to the West is clear: We have bought their buildings, we have bought their companies, and now we are going to buy their art.”71 A 2016 article in the New Yorker refers to Liu’s purchase as “a demonstration of China’s brute purchasing power.”72 It recounts a conversation with the Chinese collector. Liu said to the reporter, “If a Westerner bought these Western masterpieces, people would think it was very normal. … But because they were bought by an Asian, and not just a Japanese but a Chinese person.” Then he asked, “After all, isn’t that why you are here?”73 As one art critic writes, “Chinese collectors are confident that they are going to have a say as to the value of Chinese contemporary art.”74 The media’s curiosity about Liu brought more publicity to how he manages the Long Museum. The New Yorker article reveals troubling details about the museum management’s lack of professionalism, depicting it almost as a vanity project.75 Apart from patriotic impulses to bring Chinese art home, Chinese collectors also found such artwork naturally appealing to their aesthetic sensitivities. As Michael St. Clair put it, “Now Chinese collectors are active in the market, and some, with the demonstration of the kind of wealth that

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US collectors displayed more than a century ago, are buying back Chinese porcelains and paintings that left China decades ago.”76 Some dealers in the United States are taking advantage of this trend. As one US antique store’s website describes it, “Many emerging wealthy Chinese people have turned their attention to arts and antiques collection. Therefore, market for Chinese antiques have been red hot and many Chinese antiques have seen their values grown substantially. So now is the perfect time to get the best value of your Chinese antiques!”77 Apart from Chinese millionaires, global auction houses are seeing the emergence of a “middle market” made up of buyers purchasing artwork priced under USD 500,000. Most buyers at the Art Basel in Hong Kong, for example, belong to this group.78 They are the “affluent upper middle classes” that will likely become the largest demographic of art consumers by 2022, according to Clare McAndrew’s first art market report for Art Basel.79 Even some middle-class Chinese collectors began to travel around the world specifically for art collecting. For example, of the Louvre’s ten million visitors in 2018, 8 percent came from China.80 As one media article writes, “Chinese collectors—scouring the world for deals … —have become a common sight (or, often, voice at the end of the telephone) at auctions around the world, even in small towns in Europe.”81 In 2019, Chinese art investors were sighted in Canada: “artists in Canada’s art-­ making capital say their work is being supported by a growing group of collectors from China, especially as new speculation taxes in British Columbia ebb at foreign real estate investments.”82 As the New York Times reported, “A wave of Chinese sightseers is sweeping the globe and is set to triple spending abroad by 2020.”83 The rise of well-traveled Chinese collectors led to a fad of “private museum rush” in China. Some have estimated that an average of 100 museums have been built every year since the new millennium began in China.84 In 2012 alone, Forbes reports 451 new museum openings.85 According to a Global Private Museum Report by Art Market Monitor of Artron (AMMA) and Larry’s List, by early 2016, there were 317 private museums around the world, and 26 were in China.86 The following years also saw an increasing number of newly founded private museums in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. By October 2017, for example, Shanghai had around 58 private museums.87 The same report also warned of challenges facing this rising sector: financial instability, a lack of professional curators, and a lack of policy support.88 Many see this trend as “one of the greatest structural changes in China’s entire art industry” (Table 6.1).89

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Table 6.1  Private art museums in China (selection) Name

Year

Location

Founder

Yan Huang Museum 炎黄艺术馆 Guanfu Museum 观复博物馆 Sifang Art Museum 四方美术馆 Long Museum 龙美术馆 M Woods Gallery 木木美术馆 Yuz Museum 余德耀美术馆 Song Gallery松美术馆 Hao Art Gallery昊美术馆 Power Long Museum 宝龙美术馆 Suning Art Museum 苏宁艺术馆 Pearl Art Museum 明珠美术馆 Jingang Museum 金刚博物馆 Star Museum 星美术馆

1991

Beijing

Huang Zhou (artist)

1997

Beijing

2010

Nanjing

Ma Weidu (novelist, editor, and producer) Lu Xun (son of a real estate developer)

2012

2017 2017 2017

Shanghai Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei (entrepreneurs) Beijing Lin Han and Lei Wanying (Hong Kong background) Shanghai Budi Tek (Indonesian Chinese entrepreneur) Beijing Wang Zhongjun (entrepreneur) Shanghai Zheng Hao (entrepreneur) Shanghai Xu Jiankang (entrepreneur of Macau)

2018

Shanghai Suning Group

2018

Shanghai Hongxing Meikailong Group

2018

Shanghai Gangtai Group

2019

Shanghai He Juxing (financial manager)

2014 2014

Note: Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum was founded in 2012 as the first public contemporary art museum in mainland China. It is also the main site of the Shanghai Biennial.

By 2019, China had more than 5000 museums, and around 1500 of them were privately operated.90 British art researcher Georgia Adam calls the trend of private museums “an ego trip” because every superrich person wants to have their own.91 Another foreign media outlet referred to such a museum as “a pathway to a broader artistic conversation about a globalized world where visualizing Chinese artistic significance can help make the connection to masterpieces.”92 Some art professionals also express concern that the private museum boom was due to the founders’ desire to buy land.93 Indeed, many private museums had high-profile openings that attracted considerable early publicity, but some later struggled either to stay afloat financially or to retain professional staff.94 Museum projects attached to real estate, shopping malls, luxury hotels, and the like face similar long-term problems.

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A younger generation has also joined the fad of art collecting and museum building. For example, at Sotheby’s 2018 auction, titled “Contemporary Art: TURN IT UP,” over 40 percent of the buyers were from the under-40 (age) demographic.95 They had more-international education backgrounds and had pluralistic interests in their collecting. In fact, this trend began in the early 2010s. According to Lu Jingqing, the manager of Xileng Auction 西冷拍卖行, a demographic shift had taken place among collectors who bid at its auctions: “In 2012, most bidders were in their 40s and 50s, but now [2019] bidders’ ages range from 18 to 80.”96 Some of them were the second-generation of the wealthy class. English media have often reported on these young Chinese collectors, such as the married entrepreneur couples who founded private museums or business owners who wanted to decorate their spaces.97 Some were newly minted billionaires, described by the New York Times as “young, fast workers with an appetite for risk”98 and as “motivated, well informed and [having] more adventurous taste than the older generation of Chinese collectors.”99 It also compares this young wealthy demographic of China to that of the West: China’s billionaires differ markedly from their global peers. With an average age of 55 years, they are almost a decade younger. They create wealth faster and take their companies public earlier; 17 percent of China’s new billionaires founded their businesses within the last ten years, more than twice as many as in the United States. Chinese billionaires are also bigger risk takers, which resulted in the high turnover in their ranks that saw 51 people lose the title there last year.100

Artsy.net affirms the timely contributions of these younger wealthy Chinese in “fostering growth across the arts ecosystem,” including founding art fairs, setting up museums, and backing young galleries and artists.101 Born after China’s economic reform, they have opportunities that were denied to the older generation. Many of these young collectors have keen interests in Western contemporary artists. They consider themselves global citizens and like to spend time and money abroad. Some are actively seeking out artwork that none have imagined mainland Chinese collectors to pursue. Many feel more comfortable buying art made by non-Chinese artists.102 They have begun to like the “half theatre, half gambling” atmosphere of auctions.103 Some claim that art is the “new religion” for twentyfirst-century modern society,104 a particularly applicable descriptor for the wealthy Chinese who grew up with state-endorsed atheism.

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Overheated Art Auctions and Art Financialization The 2010s was a time of expansion for international auction houses to meet the thriving demand for art by a growing class of wealthy collectors in China and other Asian countries, such as Indonesia and Singapore. Hong Kong had always been the auction hub, largely because of its zero-­ tax advantages. Hong Kong–based Tiancheng International 天城国际 was founded in 2011. By then, the worldwide auction sales of Chinese antiques had reached USD 3.4 billion, surpassing the USD 2.4 billion in Impressionist and post-Impressionist art sales.105 From 2008 to 2013, Hong Kong saw an annual sales growth of between 4 percent and 18 percent.106 In 2013, the organizer of Art Basel rebranded it as Art Basel Hong Kong, a sign of the “growing global significance of the Chinese art market.”107 The same year, China overtook the United States as the world’s largest art and auction market.108 Christie’s also became the first licensed international auction house to operate independently in mainland China. Steven P.  Murphy, Christie’s chief executive, emphasized the strategic importance of China’s market: “In recent years we have seen phenomenal developments take place in the global art market, particularly in China, where the market has grown at an unprecedented rate.”109 The Art Newspaper wrote the following in 2015: “Despite the economic slowdown in China, Asian collectors were responsible for some of the biggest purchases of the auction season.”110 The digitalization of auction houses has also become a trend. Christie’s set up its online-only auction platform, which had 79 sales in 2015.111 In 2016, while unsettling political events (e.g., Brexit and the US presidential election) led to a decline in art sales in Europe and the United States, auction sales for historical Chinese artifacts saw an increase. Chinese investors such as Chen Dongsheng, CEO of Taikang Life Insurance, bought more shares of Sotheby’s and became its largest single shareholder with a 13.5 percent stake.112 At Sotheby’s, Asian collectors paid for 75 percent of all sales.113 Nevertheless, some art market observers sounded the alarm about the overheated Hong Kong market for tending to elevate only a very small number Chinese artists, such as Zao Wou-Ki 赵无极 and Zeng Fanzhi. As one art critic, Liu Xia 刘霞, points out, “the patterns of taste in the international market follow some broader trends, depriving the market’s own understanding and recognition of Chinese contemporary art.”114

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The divide between traditional and contemporary Chinese art sales separates along demographic and regional lines. In mainland China, local buyers focused on the vast majority of Chinese calligraphic works, according to auction houses Poly International 保利国际 and Chinese Guardian 中国嘉德. The Poly Culture Group, which runs the Poly Auction, the world’s third-largest auction house, now dominates China’s domestic art market.115 In the Western art market, the most renowned Chinese artists, namely Zhao Xiaogang and Fang Lijun, were able to sell their artworks at much higher rates, in fact 211 percent higher on average, according to recent research.116 Western buyers still claimed over 90 percent of all contemporary artworks sold at these auctions.117 Meanwhile, a discernable change in global auction sales was that the taste for Chinese art has also soared, as shown in the high prices of even traditional Chinese art. In 2016, according to the art database Artprice, paintings by old master Zhang Daqian (1899–1983) generated USD 354.8 million in auction sales, placing him above Picasso in sales.118 At this moment of cultural shift to Asian art, Clare McAndrew, founder of the consultancy firm Art Economics, also reckoned the following: “The wealth dynamics will play out. … [T]he market will become more dominated by Asian taste.”119 The New York Times reported that “the balance of financial power has shifted to Chinese auctions.”120 During the years of contraction in the global art market, China has sometimes been able to capture over one-third of global fine-art sales. A New York dealer pointed out the significance of this trend: “It’s remarkable when you think that in 1985 it was illegal to sell art in mainland China, and now there are 400 auction houses. The rules are being set by Chinese buyers.”121 High auction prices also became incentives for China’s state-run academies. Art researchers in China began to publish ranking lists of these academies according to each year’s auction sales (Table 6.2). In a time of globalization, when China is not doing well, the world feels it. For example, in July 2015, China’s stock markets had their worst day since 2007. The Shanghai Composite Index and two other indicators fell by between 7 percent and 8 percent, such that most firms lost about 10 percent of their value within a day.123 According to Artnet’s report in that year, the recession in the global art market can be attributed to “a huge drop of activities in mainland China and Hong Kong.”124 This soon led many high-end Chinese art collectors to turn to companies such as Christie’s to diversify their assets.

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Table 6.2  2018 ranking of art institutions according to each faculty’s art auction sales122

Central Academy of Fine Arts 中央美术学院 China Academy of Art 中国美术学院 Sichuan Academy of Art 四川美术学院 Lu Xun Academy of Art 鲁迅美术学院 Tian Jin Academy of Art 天津美术学院 Xi’an Academy of Art 西安美术学院

No. of Artworks per Person

Average Sales Amount (CNY Ten Thousand)

11.4

6127.12

27.1

12322.26

18.0

4831.49

2.4

209.38

1.9

203.59

2.0

168.99

According to art researcher Xi Mu, “China’s art market has a main developmental line: commercialization, capitalization, financialization, and asset securitization.”125 As early as 2008, the Bank of Weifang in Shandong province had a research committee for bank loans and art investment.126 Because art finance in China involves a large number of artists and a wide range of art forms, it was unrealistic to establish a widely accepted authoritative appraisal organization. Subsequently, it was impossible for the banking system to base any loan decisions on art appraisals. Instead, Weifang Bank experimented with an innovative “prepurchase guarantor” mechanism, allowing experienced and reputable collectors to guarantee the authenticity and value of the art.127 Other supportive financial services targeting the art market also gradually developed.128 By the end of 2018, as art researcher Xi Mu estimates, “the sizes of China’s auction sales and the art finance industry have become roughly equal.”129 With the expansion of art financialization came the need to train professionals in both art and finance. Such training began in 2012, when the Graduate School of China’s Academy of Social Sciences collaborated with the China Art Industry Research Center to begin enrolling doctoral students in the area of art finance. Five years later, Xi’an Transportation University collaborated with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to open a doctoral course on art finance.130

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Since 2011, China has also seen the rise of art stock exchanges, such as the controversial Tianjin Cultural Artwork Exchange (TCAE) and the Shanghai Cultural Artwork Exchange. The latter charges a membership fee of around CNY 1 million; still, it attracted around 200 members in one year.131 One art business commentator told the Shanghai Daily that this is a niche submarket for artists whose works were depreciating but who wanted to cash out: “Real collectors won’t buy the shares at an artwork exchange, nor would top artists list their works at an exchange. But inflation plus the slowdown in the real estate area causes a worry about capital flow. The art market is small and it’s very easy to stir big waves.”132 China Daily also reported on the initial offering of two paintings by Bai Gengyan on TCAE, stating that “shares in each of the two paintings soared to 18 times the opening price [in three months], when regulators suspended trading for five days after excessive speculation.”133 Meanwhile, when some hailed it as a milestone in financial innovation for China’s art market, others warned that it might lead to another wave of investment mania. From 2016 to 2018, China’s auction market sales corresponded to the volume of its art finance industry, showing a close correlation between these two developments.134 Founded on two auction houses in Jiangsu province, China Art Financial Holdings Limited (zhongguo yishu jinrong 中国艺术金融), for example, is one among the few art financial service providers in mainland China. Since 2015, it has a live auction portal for bidders to participate simultaneously online with the on-site bidders. In 2016, it was listed on Hong Kong’s stock market. Foreign-funded art investment firms also gained inroads. At the Third Annual Asia Art & Finance Forum (Shanghai) in March 2018, the CEOs of Maecenas and Cadell, two fine-­art investment platforms in the United States, presented on issues such as how blockchain and technological innovation will transform the art market. They highlighted the wealth growth and need for art financialization: “Art finance has a very specific window of opportunity in China right now, with a national $230 trillion worth of wealth onshore, high-net worth individuals are thinking about wealth preservation and inheritance.”135 By 2019, the market scale of art finance had more than tripled over that of 2014.136 China International Capital Corporation’s Wealth Management and Art Market Research Center (AMRC) released an annual China’s Art & Wealth Whitepaper.137 The executive summary of the 2020 report estimates the potential of art wealth management to feature “J-shaped growth.”138 According to a large-scale questionnaire survey (n = 4057),

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over 75 percent of respondents gave a high confidence rating (6–10) for the art market in the next ten years. Over 13 percent of respondents consider buying art as part of their wealth management or investment tools. The wealth map also shows a generational transfer and recalibration of cultural tastes, according to the 2020 China Art & Wealth Whitepaper.139 In recent years, a few regional economies (also known as BRIC countries—e.g., Brazil, Russia, India, and China) have set up branches in Shanghai, as an institutional alternative to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), challenging US rules governing trade and the reserve status of the dollar. As Iain Robertson critiques, “The institutional power of Europe and America is the final instrument on which the West’s authority appears to lie, as transitional economies grow ever richer and compete technologically with the developed world.”140

Affirming Chinese Pride: Global Representation and Repatriating Lost Art A Western audience has a tendency to tokenize just a few Chinese artists: “In Western eyes, a Chinese artist is either a market phenom, like the Gagosian artist Zeng Fanzhi, or a renegade, like Ai Weiwei.”141 Alain Quemin has studied a dozen native rankings of the most recognized artists and has found that the global contemporary art world remains “very territorialized and hierarchized in terms of countries.”142 This observation is particularly true when it comes to Chinese artists, whose success challenged “the eminently strong positions of British, German, and especially American artists in this domain.”143 When it comes to major Western museums and art centers, Chinese artists remain underrepresented. Quemin points out that the reason Ai Weiwei was given such power is mainly because of his activist “fight with the Chinese regime.”144 Although Ai has enjoyed a global reputation as a resister, some point out that he is, in fact, less well known inside China, where it is “hard to find people who wholeheartedly admire his work.”145 By now, Political Pop art and Cynical Realism seem to have lost their appeal.146 This new phase of global integration makes many leading Chinese artists wrestle again with the question of self-identity and artistic integrity. They ask, “What makes contemporary Chinese art distinctively Chinese?” The continued absorption of artistic influences from abroad seems to have swung the pendulum toward the extreme of

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denationalization. The Chinese have always considered the loss of ethnic and cultural identities in art making a critical matter. Full immersion into the global art community opened up their horizons and networking, but the quest for an undiluted “neo-Chineseness” remains a challenge.147 As Jen Webb writes, for the Chinese in particular, “a distinctively ‘national’ body of art was one of the most important indicators of nationhood.”148 They shared a collective memory of how early waves of colonial globalization had forced “cultural homogenization” on them. The fear of repeating that history is always present. Curator and art critic Hou Hanru depicts today’s interactions between Western art and Chinese art as unsatisfying, pushing many Chinese artists to reconsider “their relationship with the international art world.”149 The Art Newspaper also launched its Chinese edition by discussing issues such as “How do artists see the issue of Chinese art getting on to the horizon of world art?”150 Zeng Fanzhi, a bestselling Chinese contemporary artist, points out that “[w]hat China most needs today is still museum-level, high quality, serious, good exhibitions, to sort out and explore the atmosphere surrounding artistic worth and learning.”151 Seeing China’s art market become a power playground for the richest in the country, he asserts, “We’re still very far from creativity itself.”152 When Chinese entrepreneurs began repatriating Chinese artworks, the topic of nationalistic fervor often came up. The Art Newspaper’s analysis in 2011 is clear: “What is striking is how many important imperial treasures have been acquired by Chinese buyers within the past two years. Most were bought for private collections, although ultimately some will end up in museums. Until recently buyers tended to come from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, but increasingly they are from the mainland.”153 UNESCO once estimated that around 1.6 million Chinese artifacts were plundered by the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.154 Many of these artifacts were in museums, and some might show up in major auction sales. More Chinese collectors now favor buying such Chinese art directly from US galleries.155 Today’s Chinese collectors might be bringing about the biggest wave of patriotic art appropriation, partly motivated by China’s changing tax system for imported artifacts. In 2009, the Ministry of Taxation and the General Administration of Customs issued “Temporary Decrees on Tax Exemption of Imported Artifacts by State-Owned Non-profit Units.”156 This edict was followed by the decision to exempt over 200 state-owned work units, including provincial museums, libraries, and galleries, from art

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import taxes.157 According to the Art Basel report, the Chinese government applied a tax cut (from 12 percent in 2012 to 3 percent in 2017) to stimulate the return of Chinese artworks from overseas.158 In 2019 alone, over 600 ancient artifacts from overseas were exhibited in China’s National Museum.159 Nevertheless, China’s tax structure has continued to play a restrictive role in the export of artwork from the mainland.160 According to Wan Jie, member of the National Political Council and CEO of Artron. net, more should be done to welcome Chinese art home. He has used his position to call for new pathways to obtain lost Chinese art.

Multicity Art Boom and Revivals During this decade, China’s art market has evolved from a two-city structure (Beijing and Shanghai) into a trend of multicity revivals.161 Shenzhen is said to have become the third pillar of China’s art market, next to Beijing and Shanghai.162 Adjacent to Hong Kong, Asia’s art hub, Shenzhen has felt the impact of art events held there. In 2018, 60 galleries participated in the Art Shenzhen Expo, up from 33 in 2015.163 Moreover, more second-tier cities across China—such as Chengdu, Hangzhou, and Xiamen—have also been developing their artistic brands. During a time when “every major Chinese city now boasts its own art fair,” as the Art Newspaper reports, “every second-tier Chinese city now wants its own fair, biennale and museum, and they are often indifferent to whether they can be second tier in caliber.”164 Having so many art fairs happening at the same time has made it hard for many Asian galleries to choose which ones to join. Liu Jie, founder of the art space A Thousand Plateaus explains that this explosion of art fairs may be traced to Art Basel’s acquisition of Art Hong Kong in 2011 and Shanghai’s events in 2013 and 2014, all benefiting from “a potentially large buying base.”165 This trend spread to other cities, such as Nanjing and Shenzhen, where a range of art institutions were being built (Table 6.3).166 In 2016, after over 500 townships had been listed as “towns with specialties” by the Ministry of Finance and the National Committee of Development and Reform, an eruption of international art fairs occurred in lesser-known Chinese cities and towns.167 Some settlements specialized in green agriculture, some in cultural tourism, and others in ethnic history and art. Many small towns that had long histories of emigration benefited from international contacts with overseas Chinese when planning the art events so that they would become international in scope. For example,

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Table 6.3  Regional distribution of contemporary art cities, galleries, and museums (2021) Region

North China

South China

Central art city Other art cities

Beijing

Shanghai

Tianjin, Shijiazhuang, Lanfang, Qinhuangdao, and Shenyang, Dandong, Xi’an, Yinchuan, Wulumuqi, and Qingdao Jining (12) 37 6

Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Jiaxing, Wenzhou, Xiamen, Zhangzhou, Wuhan, Changsha, Jingdezhen, Chengdu, Chongqing, Kunming, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Foshan, and Qingyuan (18) 82 2

Beijing (3)

Shanghai (3), Nanjing (2), Wuhan (1), Xiamen (1), Guangzhou (1), and Shenzhen (1)

Museums Auction housesa Art expos

Source: Zhang Chaobei, “North Decline? Understand China’s Contemporary Art Landscape from Ten Maps” (北方全面溃败? 10 组图表看懂中国当代艺术南北格局), HiArt magazine, March 5, 2021 The number of auction houses here excludes foreign-funded entities

a

April 2016 saw the inaugural Wuzhen International Contemporary Art Exhibition in this famous historic water town. The event’s chairperson announced that its endeavor had been motivated by the realization that big cities have monopolized cultural events and that “second-tier and third-tier cities look to compensate for their lack of platforms of art and culture.”168 This trailblazing event showed that small municipalities were also eager to cultivate cultural brands in order to boost local tourism and economic growth. Nowadays, major cities in China each boast their own art zones, such as the M50 in Shanghai, the Red Brick Factory in Guangzhou, and the Chuangkuyuan in Kunming. Art has become a key component of these cities’ rebranding, giving them an aura of idealism and a high quality of life. Functionally speaking, the geographic concentration of these interconnected institutions also promotes collaboration and competition, both of which facilitate the goal of creativity. The nationwide art boom has had mixed results for artist colonies, where some thrive and attract more talent and others are demolished to raise the profile of the urban fringes.169 Just as artist Teng Kun writes, “A massive number of artists are still migrating like birds.”170 New art

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colonies formed in satellite small cities around mega urban centers such as Beijing. Yanjiang is one of them. After the Central Academy of Fine Arts set up a new campus in Yanjiao in 2006, shops offering art supplies from printing and framing quickly sprang up. Since around 2012, graduates from prestigious art institutions in Beijing have favored this location for its art-friendly infrastructure and relatively cheap rent. Some internationally known artists also began to invest in some Yanjiao galleries. Once a “sleeper city” to which Beijing commuters return, it has become the habitat of young and impoverished artists.171 Another famous artist enclave is Caochangdi, a village where Ai Weiwei built a studio in 1999. A prominent example of a demolished art colony was Heiqiao in Beijing, flattened in 2016.

New Global Hurdles: Talent Drain, a US–China Trade War, and Social Movements in Hong Kong In the 2010s, the global art world faced many hurdles, old and new, when accommodating the rise of the market for Chinese art. Take the field of Chinese painting conservation in US museums as an example. There has long been a talent drain in hiring conservators who specialize in Chinese art. Just a decade ago, there were only four senior museum conservators in the United States with the needed expertise. They were all Chinese born and trained in formal academies in the 1970s.172 These retiring specialists are not likely to find successors, because China truncated art education, especially in ancient and traditional art forms. A lack of art professionals like conservators can have lasting implications. On the political front, following Brexit in Europe and Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States, economic nationalism became a countercurrent to neoliberal globalism. When the US–China relationship was strained from 2018 to 2020, censorship again became a problem for artists wanting to exhibit some of their politically sensitive art in China.173 In 2018, during the US–China trade war, the Trump administration implemented a new tax increase (10–15 percent) on Chinese-made goods, including art and antiquities more than 100 years old. A protrade Committee for Cultural Policy said the following in a newsletter alert, which was quoted by the Art Newspaper: Ordinarily, there are no customs duties on art or antiques. It is considered in the public interest to bring art and literature to the US, so in the past, no

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duties were imposed on foreign art or books. … The Trump administration is changing that, at least for art and antiques from China. This is one of the more bizarre stories in the tariff saga since a tariff on antiques will please the Chinese government and reinforce its global dominance and monopoly on Chinese art.174

As ArtForum reports, “Many galleries are preparing for the hit their businesses may suffer once the tax takes effect. … Auction houses will also have to plan the best way to cope with the tax and may start advising international collectors to sell their Chinese artworks at locations outside of the US.”175 English-language art news outlets all covered this alarming downturn.176 In the end, this abrupt change did become a blow to US dealers and auction houses. Gallery owners in the United States that deal with Chinese art have suffered financial losses.177 Some call the taxing of art “a self-inflicted wound” on the US market because art buyers will look elsewhere.178 Christie’s predicted that this change “will severely impact the US art market as a whole, drying up any ability to purchase Chinese artworks outside the United States. … Punishing the US art market in this manner flies in the face of an important American value of support for the art world.”179 Art organizations in the United States joined other businesses at public hearings when they opposed tariffs on art before the United States trade representative.180 Widening wealth inequality also “helped starve out many modestly sized dealers and mid-career artists” in the United States.181 US–China tensions and the trade war led Pace Gallery, the first US gallery to open in mainland China, to close its Beijing outpost.182 In 2019, the unrest in Hong Kong also had a negative impact on its art market. According to the Art Newspaper, “the closing down of public transportation, unsettling social sentiments and demonstrations, all these invited caution from global businesspeople who worry that Hong Kong’s status as the global financial center might be shaken.”183 According to Artron AMMA’s statistics, Hong Kong’s art sales dropped by 21.24 percent in the second half of 2019.184 Many art events relocated to Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and other adjacent cities, bringing local sales benefits. Huayi International, an auction house based in Guangzhou, for example, saw a 73.8 percent increase in total sales in 2019.185 Because protests happened at night or on weekends, Hong Kong’s major auction houses did not find their weekday events disrupted.186

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Conclusion With the expansion of urban space, changes in cultural values, and technological advancements, Chinese cities and townships each began their own local art experimentations to boost tourism. Even when compared with the growth of private wealth, China’s art market has had a late start and thus much room to develop. Despite these hurdles, it is estimated that by 2019, China’s art market had grown to a CNY 400 billion (USD 61 billion) business. The total number of employees and private collectors may be around 100 million.187 Researchers also estimate this market to have the potential to grow to CNY 2 trillion in the future.188 This potential demand is likely to encourage more policymakers and tech entrepreneurs to enter into the area of art capitalization.189 Other statistics also indicate a mismatch between wealth and art consumption: From 2010 to 2018, the collective volume of the ultra-net-­ worth population had quadrupled, but the size of the art market had shrunk by 2 percent.190 Chinese entrepreneurs and collectors’ confidence in the nation’s policies toward the wealthy is not always steady. A Chinese writer describes how “capital flight” happened in 2018, when wealthy Chinese moved money abroad after the stock markets tumbled during an economic slowdown.191 Market fluctuations tend to follow. As one curator comments, “China is parting from a chaotic gilded phase. All chaos is gradually forming a certain order. Conflicting forces are coalescing. Divisions are mending. This is a time for some down-to-earth work.”192 The art ecosystem is far from complete. For example, art critic and curator Lü Peng laments that art criticism has yet to play a public role in China’s contemporary art scene: “Curators are increasingly commercialized under the patronage of certain organizations.”193 Other challenges to China’s art market also remain, including tax laws, the withering of the gifting economy, and the flow of capital from China to the global market. But Jonathan Harris predicts that the “effective Western dominance of the Chinese art market could stifle and restrict the further emergence of autonomous private organizations on the mainland.”194 Meanwhile, many people remain optimistic about the future. According to Chang Tianhu, “The entire volume of China’s art market has not amounted to a level that can be changed by the political climate unless there are policies that directly intervene with the art market.”195

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Notes 1. Barber, Lionel. “The End of US Hegemony: Legacy of 9/11.” Financial Times, September 5, 2011. 2. Alexandra Bregman, “China’s Billionaires Set to Dominate the World’s Art Market,” Nikkei Asia, December 4, 2020. https://asia.nikkei.com/ Opinion/China-­s-­billionaires-­set-­to-­dominate-­the-­world-­s-­art-­market. David Barboza, Graham Bowley and Amanda Cox, “Forging An Art Market in China,” New York Times, October 28, 2013. 3. Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton University Press, 2011), 322. The US auction market share decreased from 46 percent to 29 percent. 4. “Big Chinese Auction House Looks to Open Office in New  York,” Forbes, 5 May 2011. 5. Peterson, 2014. 6. Quoted in David Barboza, Graham Bowley and Amanda Cox, “Forging An Art Market in China,” New York Times, October 28, 2013. 7. Xi Mu, Annual Report of China’s Art Market, 2018-2019 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2020), 5. 8. After obtaining authorization for tens of thousands of Chinese artworks, Artron.net also produced its eight lines of art-derivative products. 9. “Contemporary Art Boom Is ‘Historic Change’ in Art Market,” CGTN, August 4, 2017. https://news.cgtn.com/news/31556a4d78557a63 33566d54/index.html#. “China Overtakes UK in Art Market League,” BBC, March 14, 2011. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-­ arts-­12737022. 10. Vivian Yuan, Logic of Chinese Cultural-Creative Industries Parks: Shenzhen and Guangzhou (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 5. 11. David Barboza, Graham Bowley and Amanda Cox, “Forging An Art Market in China,” New York Times, October 28, 2013. 12. Ella Delany, “To Get Noticed, Chinese Artists Look to Internet,” New York Times, December 5, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/ 12/06/arts/06iht-­rartmedia06.html. 13. Ella Delany, “To Get Noticed, Chinese Artists Look to Internet,” New York Times, December 5, 2012. 14. Xi Mu, Annual Report of China’s Art Market, 2018-2019 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2020), 56. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 52. 17. Ibid. 18. Xingwei Qu and Qinchuan Zhan, “Research on Creative Derivative Creation and Brand Operation Strategy of Terracotta Army Cultural

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Heritage from the Perspective of Cultural Renaissance,” Advances on Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, Vol. 200, 2018 International Worship on Education Reform and Social Sciences, 2019. 19. Xi Mu, Annual Report of China’s Art Market, 2018-2019 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2020), 469. 20. “As Young Chinese Go Crazy for Art, JD Partners with Museums to ‘Bring Art to Life’,” JD Corporation blog, October 21, 2019. https:// jdcorporateblog.com/as-­young-­chinese-­go-­crazy-­for-­art-­jd-­partners-­with-­ museums-­to-­bring-­art-­to-­life/. 21. Cecilia Li, “Louvre Joins Force with Alibaba to Bring Great Works of Art to Chinese Consumers,” Alizila, October 12, 2020. https://www.alizila. com/louvre-­alibaba-­tmall-­alifish-­art-­to-­chinese-­consumers/. 22. “Tmall Global is Connecting Artists to Worldwide Fans,” Marketing to China December 22, 2020. https://marketingtochina.com/ tmall-­global-­is-­connecting-­artists-­to-­worldwide-­fans/. 23. Wenzhou Wu, “JD.com VS.  Tmall: China’s Luxury E-Commerce Battleground,” Jing Daily, April 12, 2020. https://jingdaily.com/ jd-­com-­vs-­tmall-­chinas-­luxury-­e-­commerce-­battleground/. 24. Xi Mu, Annual Report of China’s Art Market, 2018–2019 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2020), 431. 25. Lisa Movius, “Why Museum Partnerships between China and the West Are Booming,” the Art Newspaper December 4, 2019. https://www. theartnewspaper.com/analysis/partnership-­craze-­continues-­in-­china. 26. Amanda Lee, “Art and the City: The Song Dynasty as a Living Art,” Yahoo Style, December 14, 2011. https://sg.style.yahoo.com/news/art-­ city-­song-­dynasty-­living-­art-­021030368.html. 27. Ozgur Tore, “Shanghai Hosts Van Gogh Alive Exhibition,” FTN News, April 30, 2015. https://ftnnews.com/tours/27051-­shanghai-­hosts-­van-­ gogh-­alive-­exhibition. 28. Qian Jing 錢競 and Hu Bo 胡波. “Chuangyi chanye fazhan moshi jiejian yu tansuo—yi Shanghai wei li” 創意產業發展模式借鑒與探索: 以上海為 例 (Modeling and exploring the development of creative industries: Using Shanghai as an example). Jingji luntan 經濟論壇 (Economic Tribune), April 2006, 47–48. 29. Laikwan Pang, Creativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offenses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 2. 30. Vanessa Able, “Beijing’s Art Scene Raises Its Profile,” New York Times, December 30, 2014. 31. Ibid.

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32. Li Qiong, “Art Beijing 2019 Embraces Art Pieces from Around the Globe,” CGTN, May 2, 2019. https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d51 4e7749444e34457a6333566d54/index.html. 33. Luo Ying, “Five Million-Yuan Apartments, Fifty Thousand-Yuan Art and Five Hundred-Yuan Decor” (五百万的房子, 五万元的艺术品和五百元 的装饰画), Hi Art, No. 002, 798 Art Zone Move Forward and Backward: How Can Contemporary Art’s First Presence Maintain Its Status? (798 艺 术区的进与退: 当代艺术第一现场的江湖地位何以稳固?), 148. 34. Mukti Khaire, “Art without Borders? Online Firms and the Global Art Market,” in Olav Velthuis and Stefano Baia-Curioni (eds.), Cosmopolitan Canvases: The Globalization of Markets for Contemporary Art (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 102–128. 35. Ella Delany, “To Get Noticed, Chinese Artists Look to Internet,” New York Times, December 5, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/ 06/arts/06iht-­rartmedia06.html. 36. Xi Mu, Annual Report of China’s Art Market, 2018–2019 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2020), 33. 37. Ibid. 38. Gareth Harris and Georgina Adam, “Chinese Auction Data Lacks Credibility,” The Art Newspaper, April 30, 2011. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/archive/chinese-­auction-­data-­lacks-­credibility. Ling Li, “Performing Bribery in China: Guanxi-practice, Corruption with a Human Face,” Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 20, Issue 68 (2011): 1–20. 39. Georgia Adam, Dark Side of the Boom, 63. 40. Stephen Heyman, “A Major Player in the Topsy-Turvy World of Chinese Art,” New York Times, August 12, 2015. https://www.nytimes. com/2015/08/13/arts/international/a-­major-­player-­in-­the-­topsy­turvy-­world-­of-­chinese-­art.html. Others have also mentioned forgery and economic slowdown as contributing factors. See David Barboza, Graham Bowley and Amanda Cox, “Forging An Art Market in China,” New York Times, October 28, 2013. 41. Jonathan Harris, The Global Contemporary Art World (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 129. 42. Elizabeth C.  Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (Oxford University Press, 2018), 3, 123. 43. Shen Li, “Beijing International Art Biennale Showcases Works from Silk Road,” CGTN, September 25, 2017. https://news.cgtn.com/ news/77557a4e77597a6333566d54/index.html. 44. Ibid.

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45. Zhang Ke, “Art Exhibition Marks 30 Years of China-Uruguay Ties,” CGTN, April 26, 2018. https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d51 4d7845544d77457a6333566d54/index.html. 46. “Exhibition Held in Nepal to Showcase Traditional Chinese Art,” CGTN, May 28, 2018. 47. Zhang Ke, “Modern Hungarian Art on Display in National Art Museum of China,” CGTN, June 21, 2018. 48. Zhang Mengyuan, “China’s Bronze Art Master Takes His Works to Berlin,” CGTN, December 2018. https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d 3d774d34556a4d31457a6333566d54/index.html. 49. “Chinese, US Art Schools Jointly Explore the Role of Art in Modern Age,” CGTN, November 21, 2018. https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d 3d414e33636a4e30457a6333566d54/index.html. Founded in 1928, CAA was known as “the cradle of modern art education in China.” Today it has over 9,000 students. 50. Li Qiong, “Chinese Art Students in France Influence Modern Art in China,” CGTN, January 21, 2019. https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d 3d414f3259544d32457a6333566d54/index.html. 51. Yu Fengsheng, “Art Embraces Technology at Asian Digital Art Exhibition,” CGTN, May 21, 2019. https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d 3d674e7849444f34457a6333566d54/index.html. 52. Quoted in Xi Mu, Annual Report of China’s Art Market, 2018–2019 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2020), 331. 53. Ibid. 54. Zhao Li, “Booming Chinese Economy Boosts Art Market,” The Art Newspaper, April 30, 2011. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/ archive/collectors-­booming-­chinese-­economy-­boosts-­art-­market. 55. Ibid. 56. Lianne Yu, Consumption in China: How China’s New Consumer Ideology is Shaping the Nation (Polity, 2014), 6. 57. Robin Pogrebin, “China’s New Cultural Revolution: A Surge in Art Collecting,” New York Times, September 6, 2014. 58. Ibid. 59. He Qian, “2010 Hurun Art List” (2010 胡润艺术榜), Sichuan Daily, April 1, 2010. 60. “Chinese Investment in the United States Database,” Public Citizen, https://www.citizen.org/article/chinese-­investment-­in-­the-­united-­states-­ database/. 61. The 2019 documentary American Factory offers a glimpse into this development.

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62. Georgina Adam, “2015’s Biggest Art Market Developments and What They Mean,” The Art Newspaper, December 23, 2015. https://www. theartnewspaper.com/news/2015-­s-­biggest-­art-­market-­developmentsand-­what-­they-­mean. 63. David Ng, “Wang Jianlin Buys (and Overpays for) Picasso Painting at $28.2 Million,” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2013. https://www. latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-­e t-­c m-­w ang-­j inglian-­ dalian-­wanda-­picasso-­20131106-­story.html. 64. Eileen Kinsella, “6 Revelations about Billionaire Art Collector Liu Yiqian from His Lengthy New  Yorker Profile,” Artnet, October 31, 2016. https://news.artnet.com/art-­world/6-­things-­liu-­yiqian-­726845. 65. Ibid. 66. Richelle Simon, “Chinese Billionaire’s Buying Spree Continues Unabated,” The Art Newspaper, 2015. https://www.theartnewspaper. com/news/chinese-­billionaire-­s-­buying-­spree-­continues-­unabated. 67. Sarah Cascone, “Chinese Movie Mogul Wang Zhongjun Snaps Up $30 Million Picasso at Goldwyn Sale,” Artnet, May 7, 2015. https://news. artnet.com/market/wang-­zhongjun-­goldwyn-­picasso-­295411. 68. Russell Flannery, “Chinese Billionaire Wang Jianlin Adds $20 Million Monet Painting to Growing Collection,” Forbes, May 11, 2015. https:// www.forbes.com/sites/r ussellflanner y/2015/05/11/chinese-­ billionaire-­wang-­jianlin-­adds-­20-­mln-­monet-­painting-­to-­growing-­collec tion/?sh=50ddd45044dc. 69. Eileen Kinsella, “6 Revelations about Billionaire Art Collector Liu Yiqian from His Lengthy New Yorker Profile,” Artnet, October 31, 2016. 70. Ibid. 71. Amy Qin, “With Modigliani Purchase, Chinese Billionaire Dreams of Bigger Canvas,” New York Times, November 17, 2015. https://www. nytimes.com/2015/11/18/arts/international/with-­m odigliani-­ purchase-­chinese-­billionaire-­liu-­yiqian-­dreams-­of-­bigger-­canvas.html. 72. Jiayang Fan, “The Emperor’s New Museum,” New Yorker, October 31, 2016. 73. Ibid. 74. Liu Xia, “Has Adjustments in the Past Five Years Made the Future Five Years of the Contemporary Art Market Clearer?” (过去五年的调整让未 来五年的当代艺术市场更明朗了吗?), Hi Art, No. 004, Nine Questions in Contemporary Art Market (当代艺术市场九问), 2018, 55. 75. Jiayang Fan, “The Emperor’s New Museum,” New Yorker, October 31, 2016. 76. Michael St. Clair, The Great Chinese Art Transfer: How So Much of China’s Art Came to America (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016), 207.

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77. “We Buy Chinese Antiques,” a dealer’s website, http://www.orientalheritageinc.com, accessed on March 21, 2021. 78. Anny Shaw, “Never Mind the Billionaires—Dealers at Art Basel in Hong Kong Target the Middle Market,” The Art Newspaper, March 23, 2017. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/never-­m ind-­t he-­b illionai resdealers-­at-­art-­basel-­in-­hong-­kong-­target-­the-­middle-­market. 79. Ibid. 80. Elizabeth A. Harris, “As Virus Tightens Grip on China, the Art World Feels the Squeeze,” New York Times, February 13, 2020. 81. Didi Kristen Tatlow, “Seeking Visibility for China’s Art,” New York Times, May 6, 2013. https://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/ 05/06/seeking-­visibility-­for-­chinas-­art/. 82. Hadani Ditmars, “Vancouver’s Art Market Sees Influx of Chinese Cash,” The Art Newspaper, June 4, 2019. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/ news/vancouvers-­art-­market-­sees-­influx-­of-­chinese-­cash. 83. “China’s New Middle Class Has Cash, Will Travel,” New York Times, February 6, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/video/multimedia/10 0000002691682/chinas-­new-­middle-­class-­has-­cash-­will-­travel.html. 84. Alexandra Bregman, “China’s Billionaires Set to Dominate the World’s Art Market,” Nikkei Asia, December 4, 2020. https://asia.nikkei.com/ Opinion/China-­s-­billionaires-­set-­to-­dominate-­the-­world-­s-­art-­market. 85. Cited in Alexandra Bregman, “China’s Billionnaires” set to dominate the world art market, Nikkei Asia, December 4, 2020. https://asia.nikkei. com/Opinion/China-s-billionaires-set-to-dominate-the-world-s-artmarket. 86. “China Sees Another Wave of Private Museums with More Emphasis on Visitor Experience” (中国再掀私人美术馆热潮, 更注重体验), Twentyfirst Century Business Herald (二十一世纪经济报道), December 14, 2017. This article is reposted on Artron.net. https://news.artron. net/20171114/n968261.html. 87. “Myths about China’s Art Organizations: From Private-run to Non-­ profit” (国内艺术机构的迷思:从民营到非营利之路), Sina Collecting 新 浪收藏, January 31, 2018. http://collection.sina.com.cn/yjjj/2018-­01-­ 31/doc-­ifyqyuhy7874959.shtml. 88. Ibid. 89. “Museums and Galleries under the Pandemic” (疫情之下的美术馆与画 廊), Art Market (艺术市场), a WeChat public forum, June 24, 2020. Reposted on Artron.net, https://news.artron.net/20200624/ n1080515.html. 90. Gareth Harris, “Powerful Collectors Open Up in Tefaf Maastricht’s Chinese Art Market Report,” The Art Newspaper, March 15, 2019.

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https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/powerful-­collectors-­open-­ up-­in-­tefaf-­maastricht-­s-­chinese-­art-­market-­report. 91. Georgia Adam, Dark Side of the Boom: The Excess of the Art Market in the Twenty-first Century (Lund Humphries, 2017), 56. 92. Alexandra Bregman, “China’s Billionaires Set to Dominate the World’s Art Market,” Nikkei Asia, December 4, 2020. 93. Yang Wei, “The Building of Private Museums Should Cool Off” (个人美 术馆建设热应降温), Chinese Art (中国美术报), October 6, 2020. Reposted by Artron.net, https://news.artron.net/20201006/ n1085535.html. 94. Lisa Movius, “Chengdu MoCA Quashes Rumors of Demise but Its Problems Are Endemic in China’s Art Museums,” The Art Newspaper, August 8, 2018. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/business-­as-­ usual-­at-­chengdu-­moca-­but-­for-­how-­long. 95. Xi Mu, Annual Report of China’s Art Market, 2018–2019 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2020), 112–113. 96. Art Market Research Center, China’s Art and Wealth White Paper 2020, 64. 97. “Famous Chinese Art Collectors to Follow,” ChinaArtLover.com, November 18, 2018. https://www.chinaartlover.com/famous-­chinese-­ art-­collectors-­to-­know. In Beijing, a married young couple, Lin and Lei, founded the M Woods Museum (https://www.mwoods.org/). In Shanghai, an entrepreneur couple, Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei, set up Long Museum (http://www.thelongmuseum.org/) and made shocking purchases at auctions. 98. Sharon Lam, “China’s New Billionaires Are Young, Fast Workers With an Appetite for Risk,” New York Times, October 29, 2018. https://www. n y t i m e s . c o m / 2 0 1 8 / 1 0 / 2 9 / b u s i n e s s / d e a l b o o k / c h i n a -­n e w -­ billionaires.html. 99. Amy Qin, “Art Basel Hong kong Opens to Less Frenzy,” New York Times, March 23, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/24/ arts/international/art-­basel-­hong-­kong.html. 100. Ibid. 101. Frances Arnold, “12 Collectors Shaping the Chinese Art World,” Artsy. net, November 2, 2016. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-­editorial-­12-­ collectors-­shaping-­the-­chinese-­art-­world. 102. Amy Qin, “Art Basel Hong kong Opens to Less Frenzy,” New York Times, March 23, 2016. 103. Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 2. 104. Philip Hook, Rogues’ Gallery: The Rise (and Occasional Fall) of Art Dealers, the Hidden Players in the History of Art (The Experiment LLC, 2017), 3.

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105. 2016 Art Market Report, Tefaf. Quoted in Scott Reyburn, “Cozying Up to Chinese Art,” New York Times, September 23, 2016. https://www. nytimes.com/2016/09/24/arts/design/cozying-­u p-­t o-­c hinese-­ art.html. 106. Desiree Au, “Niche Auction Houses Thrive in Hong Kong,” New York Times, October 3, 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/ arts/international/niche-­auction-­houses-­thrive-­in-­hong-­kong.html. 107. Jonathan Harris, The Global Contemporary Art World (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 11. 108. David Barboza, “Christie’s Is Poised to Auction Art in China,” New York Times, April 9, 2013. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/arts/ design/christies-­is-­poised-­to-­auction-­art-­in-­china.html. 109. Ibid. 110. Charlotte Burns, “Chinese Buyers Are in the Game,” The Art Newspaper, December1,2015.https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/chinese-­buyers­are-­in-­the-­game. 111. Conrad De Aenlle, “Sotheby’s and Christie’s Adapt to Digital Age,” New York Times, March 11, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/12/ arts/international/sothebys-­and-­christies-­adapt-­to-­digital-­age.html. 112. Dan Duray, “Auction House Results Confirm Global Art Market Downturn,” The Art Newspaper, August 31, 2016. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/auction-­h ouse-­r esults-­c onfirm-­g lobal-­a rt­market-­downturn. 113. Scott Reyburn, “Cozying Up to Chinese Art,” New York Times, September 23, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/24/arts/ design/cozying-­up-­to-­chinese-­art.html. 114. Liu Xia, “After Spring Auction, Should Chinese Contemporary Art and Collecting Return to the Domestic Market or Continue to Wonder?” (春 拍之后, 中国当代艺术标准和收藏接力棒回到国内还是依旧迷惘?), Hi Art, No. 002, 798 Art Zone Move Forward and Backward: How Can Contemporary Art’s First Presence Maintain Its Status? (798 艺术区的进 与退: 当代艺术第一现场的江湖地位何以稳固?), 20–21. 115. ArtTactic, Poly Culture Group’s 2014 annual report. 116. “China’s Billion-dollar Domestic Art Market”: 2 and “China’s New Art Sold for 200% More Outside China,” The Art Newspaper International Edition, May 22–24, 2013: 4. On Christie’s in Shanghai, see “First in China: Christie’s to Hold Sales Independently in Shanghai,” A.M. Post 95, May 2013: 7. 117. “China’s Billion-dollar Domestic Art Market”: 2, and “Arts Globalized,” A.M. Post 95, May 2013: 19. 118. Quoted in Scott Reyburn, “The Biggest-Selling Artist at Auction Is a Name You May Not Know,” New York Times, June 2, 2017. https://

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www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/arts/china-­a rt-­a uction-­z hang-­ daqian.html. 119. Scott Reyburn, “What’s the Global Art Market Really Worth? Depends Who You Ask,” New York Times, March 23, 2017. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/03/23/arts/global-­art-­market.html. 120. Scott Reyburn, “The Biggest-Selling Artist at Auction Is a Name You May Not Know,” New York Times, June 2, 2017. 121. Ibid. 122. Source: Xi Mu, Annual Report of China’s Art Market, 2018–2019 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2020), 288–290. 123. Ricardo Martinez, “China’s Crash Effect on Art Market: Could China’s Stock Market Collapse Bring Down the Global Art Market?” Widewalls magazine, July 31, 2015. https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/ chinas-­crash-­effect-­on-­art-­market. 124. Ibid. 125. Xi Mu, Annual Report of China’s Art Market, 2018-2019 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2020), 3. 126. Shi Yuefeng, “The Innovative Logic of Art Finance” (艺术金融的创新逻 辑), in Xi Mu (ed.), China Art Finance Review (中国艺术金融评论), China Economic Publishing House (Beijing: 2019), 33. By 2019, Weifang city of Shandong province had an active art market with over 2000 galleries and museums. 127. To the bank, these collectors/appraisers shouldered legal accountabilities and thus served as risk buffers. From 2009 to 2011, Weifang Yinhang gave out eight art mortgage loans to four enterprises and three legal individuals (faren). See Wang Yuanjun, “Research on Weifang Bank’s Art Finance Praxis” (潍坊银行艺术金融实践研究), in Xi Mu (ed.), China Art Finance Review (中国艺术金融评论), China Economic Publishing House (Beijing: 2019), 149–155. 128. Ibid. 129. “Trends and Prospects of China’s Art Finance in A New Era” (新时期中 国艺术金融发展的趋势与前沿), in Xi Mu (ed.), China Art Finance Review (中国艺术金融评论), China Economic Publishing House (Beijing: 2019), 11. 130. The earliest attempt to train professionals in art and finance began in 2012, when the graduate school of China’s Academy of Social Sciences collaborated with the China Art Industry Research Center to begin enrolling doctoral students in the area of art finance. 131. Wang Jie, “Stock Markets for Art Stir Controversy,” Shanghai Daily, August 16, 2011. https://archive.shine.cn/feature/art-­and-­culture/ Stock-­markets-­for-­art-­stir-­controversy/shdaily.shtml. 132. Wang Jie, “Stock Markets for Art Stir Controversy.”

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133. Li Jing, “Art: Experts Put Little Stock in Exchange,” China Daily, April 8, 2011. http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2011-­04/08/content_12291774.htm. 134. Xi Mu, Annual Report of China’s Art Market, 2018–2019 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2020), 54. 135. Maecenas, “The Future of Art & Finance in China,” Medium.com, April 24, 2018. https://medium.com/maecenas/the-­future-­of-­art-­finance-­ in-­china-­4fa372dc28ae. 136. Ibid., 26–27. 137. Founded in 1995, China International Capital Corporation (CICC) is China’s first joint venture investment bank. See “CICC Releases 2020 China Art & Wealth Whitepaper: What Are Six Findings in China’s Art Market?” (中金财富发布《2020 中国艺术财富白皮书》:中国艺术市场 六大发现有哪些?), November 5, 2020. http://art.china.cn/txt/2020­11/05/content_41349392.shtml. 138. Quoted in “Release of 2020 China’s Art & Wealth Whitepaper” (《2020 中国艺术财富白皮书》发布), qq.com, November 12, 2020. https:// new.qq.com/omn/20201112/20201112A0AL8P00.html. 139. Quoted in “Release of 2020 China’s Art & Wealth Whitepaper” (《2020 中国艺术财富白皮书》发布), Ifeng.com, November 11, 2020. https:// cci.ifeng.com/c/81JLLF5YMFR. 140. Iain Robertson, Understanding Art Markets: Inside the World of Art and Business (New York: Routledge, 2016), 17. 141. Barbara Pollack, “Redefining Chinese Artists, in Qatar,” New York Times, March 18, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/arts/ design/redefining-­chinese-­artists-­in-­qatar.html. 142. These rankings include the Kunstkompass, the Artfacts, and the Power 100. Alain Quemin points out that there is a strong and growing demand for rankings of artists and other players in the contemporary art world. See Quemin, A., and F. van Hest. 2015. The Impact of Nationality and Territory on Fame and Success in the Visual Arts Sector: Artists, Experts and the Market. In Cosmopolitan Canvases: The Globalization of Markets for Contemporary Art, ed. O.  Velthuis and S.  Baia Curioni. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 143. Ibid. 144. Ibid. 145. Sam Gaskin, “10 Artists Who Defined Chinese Contemporary Art,” Artsy.net, July 31, 2018. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-­editorial-­ the-­top-­10-­chinese-­artists-­not-­named-­ai-­weiwei. The fame of Ai Weiwei within China derived from that of his father, a patriotic poet whose poems were included in school textbooks for recitation. Ai’s art career exempli-

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fies a successful transformation of social and political capital into the art market, especially in the overseas art economy. 146. Apart from political censorship, which sometimes brought uncertainty to the making of political pop art, another challenge has been the boycotting of certain foreign luxury products by Chinese netizens against their China-­ bashing comments or stances. See Elizabeth Paton, “Versace, Givenchy and Coach Apologize to China after T-Shirt Row,” New York Times, August 12, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/ fashion/china-­donatella-­versace-­t-­shirt.html. 147. Liu Yuedi, “Chinese Contemporary Art: From De-Chineseness to Re-Chineseness,” in Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Leiden: Brill,2011), 59–62. 148. Jen Webb, “Art in A Globalized State,” in Caroline Turner (ed.), Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific (Sydney: Pandanus Books, 2005), 30. Also see Anne-Marie Willis, Illusions of Identity: The Art of Nation (Marrickville: Hale and Iremonger, 1993), 27. 149. Hou Hanru, “On the Mid-Ground: Chinese Artists, Diaspora and Global Art,” in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Catalogue, scholarly editors Caroline Turner, Rhana Devenport and Jen Webb), Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999, 191. Quoted in Caroline Turner, Art and Social Change. 150. Quoted in Didi Kristen Tatlow, “Seeking Visibility for China’s Art,” New York Times, May 6, 2013. 151. Ibid. 152. Ibid. 153. Martin Bailey, “Many Chinese Collectors Use Their Wealth to Repatriate Once-looted Objects,” the Art Newspaper, April 30, 2011. https:// www.theartnewspaper.com/archive/the-­c ollectors-­w hy-­b ringing-­i t­back-­home-­is-­a-­mark-­of-­respect. 154. Quoted in Jiayang Fan, “The Emperor’s New Museum,” New Yorker, October 31, 2016. 155. Elizabeth A. Harris, “As Virus Tightens Grip on China, the Art World Feels the Squeeze,” New York Times, February 13, 2020. 156. “How to Bring Overseas Chinese Art Back Home?” (中国流失海外文物 如何回家), China News Web (中国新闻网), June 1, 2020. Reposted on Artron.net, https://news.artron.net/20200601/n1078341.html. 157. Ibid. 158. Scott Reyburn, “What’s the Global Art Market Really Worth? Depends Who You Ask,” New York Times, March 23, 2017. 159. Ibid. 160. Robertson, “‘Chindia’ as Art Market Opportunity,” 87.

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161. Art Market Research Center, China’s Art and Wealth White Paper 2020, 50. 162. Lv Xiaochen, “Shenzhen, The Next Stop for Contemporary Art. Has it Come True?” (深圳, 当代艺术的下一站, 期望实现了吗?), Hi Art, No. 004, Nine Questions in Contemporary Art Market (当代艺术市场九问), 2018, 18–22. 163. Ibid. 164. Lisa Movius, “Two New Art Fairs Hope to Tap into Mainland China Market,” The Art Newspaper, April 27, 2018. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/new-­art-­fairs-­tap-­into-­mainland-­china-­market. 165. Ibid. 166. Lisa Movius, “Rich Inland Cities Become Players on Chinese Art Scene,” The Art Newspaper, April 30, 2012. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/ archive/rich-­i nland-­c ities-­b ecome-­p layers-­o n-­c hinese-­a rt-­s cene-­ alongside-­coastal-­cities. 167. “Small Towns Saw An Eruption of International Art Fairs” (小城镇国际 艺术节井喷), Hi Art, No. 001, Fluctuations and Return: 2016 China Contemporary Art Annual Report (震荡与回归: 2016 中国当代艺术年 度报告), 148. 168. Lisa Movius, “Art Wuzhen Is A Model Show for Smaller Chinese Cities,” The Art Newspaper, April 30, 2016. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/ news/art-­wuzhen-­is-­a-­model-­show-­for-­smaller-­chinese-­cities. 169. Lisa Movius, “Two Beijing Art Districts Abruptly Evicted to Make Way for Demolition,” The Art Newspaper, July 11, 2019. https://www. theartnewspaper.com/news/beijing-­arts-­districts-­evicted. 170. Teng Kun, “Beijing Is Always There” (北京始终都在), Hi Art, No. 002, 798 Art Zone Move Forward and Backward: How Can Contemporary Art’s First Presence Maintain Its Status? (798 艺术区的进与退: 当代艺术 第一现场的江湖地位何以稳固?), 62. 171. Emily Feng, “Seeking Lower Rent, Chinese Artists Cut Path for Themselves Outside Beijing,” New York Times, October 20, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/31/world/asia/yanjiao-­chinese-­ artists-­lower-­rent.html. 172. Nancy Kenney, “Fragile Inheritance: US Museums Bridge Skills Gap in Conservation of Chinese Paintings,” The Art Newspaper, March 25, 2019. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/fragile-­inheritance-­ grants-­bridge-­us-­skills-­gap-­in-­chinese-­paintings. 173. Amy Qin, “A Prominent Chinese American Artist Is the Latest to Fall Afoul of China’s Censors,” New York Times, November 20, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/ar ts/design/china-­ censorship-­arts-­hung-­liu.html. 174. Helen Stoilas, “US Dealers Move Against Trump’s Proposed 10% Tariff on Chinese Art and Antiques,” The Art Newspaper, July 20, 2018.

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https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/us-­dealers-­move-­against-­trump-­s­proposed-­10-­tariff-­on-­chinese-­art-­and-­antiques. 175. “10 Percent Tariff on Chinese Art and Antiques Will Take Effect September 1,” ArtForum, August 15, 2019. https://www.artforum. com/news/10-­p ercent-­t arif f-­o n-­c hinese-­a r t-­a nd-­a ntiquities-­ will-­take-­effect-­september-­1-­80503. 176. The Art Dealers’ Association in the Unites States repeatedly voiced concerns about how the tariffs would harm small and mid-size dealers in the United States. See Payal Uttam, “Trump Tariffs Loom Large in Current Chinese Art Market Uncertainty,” Artsy.Net, August 30, 2019. https:// www.artsy.net/article/artsy-­editorial-­trump-­tariffs-­loom-­large-­current­chinese-­art-­market-­uncertainty. 177. Elizabeth A. Harris, “As Virus Tightens Grip on China, the Art World Feels the Squeeze,” New York Times, February 13, 2020. 178. Scott Reyburn, “Will Art Become a Casualty of the U.S.-China Trade War?” New York Times, August 24, 2018. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/08/24/arts/will-­art-­become-­a-­casualty-­of-­us-­china-­trade-­ war.html. 179. Niquette, M. (2019), “Christie’s Seeks Relief from Trump’s ‘Punishing’ Tariffs on Art”, Bloomberg News, October 31, 2019. https://www. bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-­10-­31/christie-­s-­seeks-­relief-­from­trump-­s-­punishing-­tariffs-­on-­art. 180. Peter K.  Tompa, “The Trump Administration’s Tariffs Will Not Hurt China but They Will Hurt the US Art Trade,” The Art Newspaper, Jun 19, 2019. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/the-­trumpa d m i n i s t r a t i o n -­s -­t a r i f f s -­w i l l -­n o t -­h u r t -­c h i n a -­b u t -­t h e y -­w i l l -­ hurt-­the-­us-­art-­trade. 181. Tim Schneider, “The Gray Market: Why the Trump Tax Cuts Are Killing the Art Market Despite Coddling the Richest American Families (and Other Insights),” ArtNet News, October 14, 2019. https://news.artnet. com/opinion/gray-­market-­trump-­tax-­cuts-­1678015. 182. Anny Shaw, “US-China Trade War Proves the ‘Last Straw’ for Pace Beijing,” The Art Newspaper, July 9, 2019. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/us-­china-­trade-­war-­proves-­last-­straw-­for-­pace-­beijing. 183. Art Market Research Center, China’s Art and Wealth White Paper 2020, 51, 53. 184. Ibid. 185. Ibid. 186. Interview with a long-term employee of Christie’s in Hong Kong. 187. Xi Mu, Annual Report of China’s Art Market, 2018–2019 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2020), 4. 188. Ibid.

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189. Ibid., 4–5. 190. Quoted in “Release of 2020 China’s Art & Wealth Whitepaper” (《2020 中国艺术财富白皮书》发布), QQ.com, November 12, 2020. 191. Murong Xuecun, “China’s Middle-Class Anxieties,” New York Times, May 10, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/ chinas-­middle-­class-­anxieties.html. 192. Liu Xia, “Optimists and Pessimists on 2017 Art Confidence Index” (2017 艺术信心指数大调查乐观者与悲观者说), Hi Art, No. 002, 798 Art Zone Move Forward and Backward: How Can Contemporary Art’s First Presence Maintain Its Status? (798 艺术区的进与退: 当代艺术第一 现场的江湖地位何以稳固?), 62. 193. Liu Xia, “Optimists and Pessimists on 2017 Art Confidence Index” (2017 艺术信心指数大调查乐观者与悲观者说), Hi Art, No. 002, 798 Art Zone Move Forward and Backward: How Can Contemporary Art’s First Presence Maintain Its Status? (798 艺术区的进与退: 当代艺术第一 现场的江湖地位何以稳固?), 61. 194. Jonathan Harris, The Global Contemporary Art World (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 145. 195. Chang Tianhu, “Shrewd Chinese Collectors Rarely Bet on Small Probabilities” (精明的中国收藏家很少去赌小概率), Hi Art, No. 001, Fluctuations and Return: 2016 China Contemporary Art Annual Report (震荡与回归: 2016 中国当代艺术年度报告), 38.

CHAPTER 7

Pandemic, Exceptional Recovery, and the Ultra-Wealthy in China

When the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, China was the hardest-hit country. Most museums were closed down, and major art fairs were canceled. Although dealers sometimes sold art through online venues, Chinese buyers’ habit of actually seeing what they are bidding on beforehand made postponing most auctions optimal. The New York Times reported a bleak prospect for China’s art market: “the country is essentially closed for business to the global arts economy, exposing the sector to deep financial uncertainty.”1 An educator at the International Society of Appraisers listed two risks for China’s art market: the ongoing pandemic and the political unrest in Hong Kong.2 Soon, the global art world would feel the same freeze. As a result, in the first half of 2020, global commercial art galleries’ sales declined by nearly 40 percent.3 Many art venues closed, merged, or succumbed to takeover. Unemployment hit some links in the chain of art trading hard. But in the latter half of the year, when the United States and other countries became enmeshed in prolonged crises due to COVID-19, China had largely recovered from it. Public museums had already opened in early May, and private ones opened a few weeks later.4 According to art economist Clare McAndrew, “Despite dealing with multiple waves of the pandemic, the Chinese market was slightly ahead in terms of a return to more normal functioning, with successful fairs held within mainland China in the

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second half of the year.”5 Some auction sales also saw unprecedentedly high individual sales. Greater China overtook the United States to become the largest auction market, with a share of 36 percent.6 Clare McAndrew also predicts that “Asia will also lead the timeline of live events in 2021,” because “many dealers felt that they might be the only fairs that go ahead until the second half of the year.”7 This chapter details how China’s art market not only survived the pandemic but also thrived thanks to technological innovation, the country’s continued wealth generation, and a changing demographic of art consumers.8 Thanks to new government policies that encourage the use of 5G and virtual-reality technologies, these welcoming gestures have greatly boosted digital creativity and art entrepreneurship.

Pandemic Challenges, Digitalization, and Adaptation According to a report by Artnet News, in the first half of 2020, global fine-­ art auction sales dropped by 60 percent.9 Many auction houses had to reschedule their sales until further notice. But after a three-and-half-­ month hibernation due to COVID-19, many auction houses resumed their global livestreamed summer sales in June. With the biggest auction houses (Sotheby’s, Phillips, and Christie’s) generating a combined USD 825 million,10 the art market presented a surprising success. The global art market seemed to show some resilience against this major setback. Among many factors, “COVID-boredom-induced buying” seems to explain rising online art sales.11 As stay-at-home orders and quarantine continued, many people felt the need to seek comfort by shopping online, which grants them a sense of control. For some people with financial means, it may even develop into a kind of “soft addiction.” Art purchases are among the many commodities that people tend to consume more of because of boredom. Thus, since the start of the pandemic, Phillips auction house saw a 140 percent increase in the creation of online accounts and a 50 percent increase in web traffic.12 Other online art auction platforms, such as Artnet, also saw a nearly 50 percent increase in new buyers.13 Art sale experts predict that once these formerly in-person buyers migrate online, there is a high chance that they might enjoy the benefits of virtual sales and stay online for good. Another art researcher, Julia Halperin, also observes that “one of the most enduring impacts of the shutdown may be the permanent migration of smaller sales—the kind that might have drawn only a dozen bidders to the auction room in the past—to the web.”14

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The pandemic pushed global auction houses and dealers to further digitalize and adapt for the long haul. Artprice also points out that the digital transformation of auctions was a “revolution” in the global fine-art market.15 As one media outlet reports, “digitalization has opened up auctions to a huge new customer base, particularly 30- and 40-year-olds, who rarely dabbled in the market previously.”16 David Norman, chairperson of Phillips’ in the Americas, claims that he has never seen such an external shock that “forced immediate change.”17 Norman compares the pandemic challenge to all previous external crises: “Art-market veterans said the sector has never faced a challenge on the scale of this one—not when Japanese buyers disappeared from the high-flying Impressionist market in the 1990s, not during the first Gulf War, not in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, and not in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.”18 Indeed, when compared to other market segments, the art world has been relatively resilient. Art writer for the Economist and author of Seven Days in the Art World Sarah Thornton summarizes as follows: “The global art market is a $67 billion-a-year business and has been growing steadily in recent years, alongside the stock market and the housing market. But unlike some other markets, the COVID-19 pandemic has had less of an economic impact on the art market.”19 Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart also said he was “surprised by the art market’s resilience in 2020.”20 While museums and fairs still struggled, many secondary market institutions proved their ability to adapt. Citibank also published a report with this summary about how the global art market met the pandemic challenge: “Rapid digitization in response to the crisis is laying the foundation for a deeper, more permanent shift as the industry adapts to changing preferences and demographics.”21 The COVID-19 crisis has effectively led to a digital transformation in the art industry. Galleries and auction houses around the world have increased their digital outputs. This “digital awakening” also appealed to more and more millennials (young consumers born between 1980 and 1996) who boosted online-only auction sales.22 Investment portfolios also performed strongly. For example, in the first seven months of 2020, the Masterworks.io price-­ weighted All Art Index—something that tracks the global art market as a whole—went up 5.5 percent, outshining ten other major asset categories.23 Artprice Global Indices also confirmed this successful rapid digitalization. As one art market watch website puts it, “As at 1 January 2021, the Artprice Global Indices are actually stronger than twelve months

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earlier when the health crisis was still (almost) unthinkable. Six months ago no-one would have predicted such an outcome!”24 Right before the COVID-19 crisis, China saw “an unexpected rapid rise of a new digital economy,” estimated to be around USD 3 trillion, a third of national output.25 Nine of the 20 largest Internet companies in the world are now Chinese.26 Ruchir Sharma at Morgan Stanley provides an explanation for this “tech revolution” made possible by two social forces that were expected to slow the economy: an aging population and a new middle class. But quite surprisingly, China’s digital economy has fared well. As Sharman explains, “though growth normally slows when countries attain a middle-class income, in China the new middle class provides the main customers for new mobile Internet services. No other country has this combination.”27 One English-language media outlet highlights how China’s success in containing the COVID-19 outbreak “propelled it back to the top of the [art] sales charts, dominating the market with 39 percent of global fine art sales by value.”28 A report from Artprice in late 2020 also points to “a booming domestic art scene” as China’s secret to success.29 Both policymakers and art professionals entered a reflective phase, hoping to learn from the pandemic. By the end of 2020, China drafted its 14th Five-Year Plan, emphasizing an innovation-oriented development strategy. A researcher highlights that this was motivated by “external downside risks [that] now dominate due to the COVID-19 pandemic and trade tensions.”30 A popular Chinese-language art media outlet, Hi Art magazine, conducted an interview series with 11 Chinese collectors to ask how the pandemic had affected their views on the art market.31 Many of them indicated the silver linings of this crisis: The influence of COVID-19 on collecting are not all negative. For example when the crisis first began, some best-selling artists’ works became more accessible in the primary market. (Guan Dongyuan, investor and collector) The pandemic did impact the real, industrial economy. But as banking systems around the world have been pumping money into their economies, many collectors gained wealth in the financial markets. So they were more willing to invest through collecting, and that partly boosted the art market. (Zhou Chong, principal of ArTy ReTro and collector) A statistical estimate says that China’s economy will surpass that of the US by 2035. Despite the pandemic, China’s economic growth has been good.

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This shows the health of the overall economy. Besides, the state’s cultural policies now include many developmental guidelines for the art market. And more millennials have studied abroad and returned to China. Many now work in art-related sectors. All these are positive for the market. (Cheng Shoutai, lawyer and collector)

China managed to get the COVID-19 outbreak under control in March 2020. As early as April, Shanghai’s galleries reopened with optimism, although visitors still needed to submit to strict health quick-­ response (QR) code checks at the entrance.32 By May, China Guardian’s e-bidding platform totaled CNY 33 million, four times its size in 2018.33 As the Art Newspaper describes, “It seems that even a pandemic and political tumult cannot dull the appeal of Asia’s expanding market.”34 By August 2020, a new wave of Western gallery expansion to Greater China had resumed its momentum. In the second half of 2020, many art publications began publishing content about the “postpandemic transition.”35 Asia’s success in containing the virus in the fall of 2020 contributed to a quickly recuperating art market. As the Art Newspaper reports in early September, “the majority of the Asian art fair calendar is going ahead.”36 In October 2020, 14 government policymaking bodies released the Short-Term Working Plan for Stimulating Domestic Consumption. Among these new policies, a few were designed to promote the sales of culture and creativity products (wenchuang chanpin 文化产品) at online museums.37 Revenues from this segment are covered online museum’s daily expenses. This change was a benefit for many noncommercial museums that had struggled financially. Shanghai became the strongest postpandemic art center. In its November art week of 2020, more than 100 art exhibitions took place in Shanghai.38 As the Art Newspaper reports, these events became “a counterweight to the Art Basel–centered Hong Kong art week.”39 China Culture News also reported on the significance of Shanghai as the new art center: “In the global economic downturn, Shanghai’s consecutive moves not only create opportunities in the midst of crisis, but also increased the confidence of the global art market even in the midst of an ongoing pandemic.”40 Thanks to preferential policies, Shanghai’s art exports had exceeded USD 73.7 billion by the end of October.41 In late 2020, Beijing also saw an art festival at the 798 Art District, featuring over 40 artworks by 22 artists on three themes: pandemic heroes, poverty relief, and environmental protection.42

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As a result, in 2020, although art sales in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States dropped by 30 to 39 percent, China and Germany saw some minor growth (2 percent and 11 percent, respectively).43 More specifically, China’s number of art sales dropped by 40 percent, while the total sales volume slightly increased. The second half of 2020 saw an economic recovery, and China’s share of the global art market reached 39 percent, which is roughly the combined total of the US and UK markets (27 percent and 15 percent, respectively).44 Among the world’s top ten auction houses in 2020 by total sales, three were based in China (Table 7.1). Some observers in China also compare the 2020 downturn to what happened after the SARS epidemic crippled the art economy in 2003.46 Back then, the volume of China’s art market was much smaller, as was its integration into the global art economy. For example, in 2003, China had only a handful of foreign-invested galleries. That number increased to 16 in 2020. Karen Smith, a historian and curator who has been based in China since 1992, shared some contrasts: back in the 2000s, there “was no social media, we had mobile phones then but not smartphones, and everyone in the art world was working independently.”47 Internet use was just beginning to spread in China, a contrast to its ubiquity in the late 2010s. Long-term professionals in China’s art world, from both public art institutions and private art institutions, attribute China’s successful control of COVID-19 to the lessons learned from coping with the SARS outbreak. As the Art Newspaper writes, back then, it was “the dawn of China’s private museum boom,” and the majority of today’s active Table 7.1  Global top ten auction houses in 202045 Name 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Sotheby’s Christie’s Poly International (Beijing) Phillips China Guardian (Beijing) Yongle Auction (Beijing) Artcurial (Paris) Ketterer (Munich) Lempertz (Köln) Grisebach (Berlin)

Total Sales (in millions USD) 2614 2150 502 469 446 362 68 67 42 41

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museums had not yet been established.48 So the COVID-19 pandemic was in fact the “first public health crisis” that many museums had to face.49 There was also a difference in chronology—China’s control of COVID-19 proved to be effective in March, when the rest of the world was deep in the raging pandemic. Lastly, the trend of digitalization accelerated in China, helping thousands of museums and galleries to expand their user bases. The Internet also changed how public knowledge about art is transmitted. The cyber-accessibility of art events created profitable businesses among the younger and wealthier demographics. Both providers and consumers of the global art market realized that virtual has become the new global. As one media story says, “Online also means more global, with auction houses in Belgium or Sweden now able to easily tap clients in Singapore or Indonesia.”50 In China, the summer of 2020 saw TikTok’s collaboration with multiple art museums and organizations in China to produce a series of livestream shows called “Under the Sky of Art.” During a single week, 14 artists livestreamed, and almost a million viewers participated.51 New online auction apps were invented. Among these, Dongjia became very popular, replacing WeChat auction platforms.

A New Wealth Map in 2020 The decade of the 2010s has seen a global trend of wealth accumulation. As the 2020 Artnet Intelligence Report describes, “While GDP has increased, the global equity market has accelerated, generating wealth for those who participate in the financial markets.”52 The same report associates this new wealth map with the rise of the art market and the increased value of privately held art.53 It also points out that although the art market echoes trends in the financial markets, because of art’s “characteristic illiquidity,” it often does not see the effects of a downturn for years.54 As a rule, although the art market may experience steeper declines than many financial markets, its recoveries are also often swifter, because this takes only a few high-value sales (usually over USD 100 million).55 It has been widely known that the pandemic year has aggravated income inequality by making the rich richer. With the soaring stock market, many already-­ wealthy people made significant gains in the space of a few months (Table 7.2). Meanwhile, cross-generational wealth accumulation was also happening. According to cultural sector observers such as Melissa Cowley Wolf,

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Table 7.2  The world’s billionaires Year

2009

2011

2013

2015

2017

2019

2021

Total number

793

1210

1426

1826

2043

2604

2755

Source: Forbes billionaire lists, 2009–201956

who founded an art consulting firm in New York, we are seeing “what is likely the greatest intergenerational wealth transfer in history.”57 Chinese art researchers are pointing out the same phenomenon among their wealthy class. Some are advising these wealthy families to consider art investment. For example, one article in Hi Art magazine writes, “Chinese private entrepreneurs have participated in the China Miracle. But how much of that legacy can be passed on after a hundred years? Very few enterprises can survive a century. … Passing art as wealth down to their families and children seems the best option.”58 This same article also points to the trend of private museums as “a new battlefield for family businesses” whose passion for social responsibility has also found an outlet.59 The strange dynamic of online art auction sales during the pandemic had much to do with the stock market and the closure of in-person art fairs, all diverting the purchase demand for high-­ value artworks to auction houses’ online platforms. As many countries continue to struggle with controlling the virus and traditional art events unlikely to happen, this pattern is likely to continue. Economists define individuals with net worth over USD 50 million as the “ultra-high net worth” population (UHNW). In 2020, most of them are concentrated in the United States and Greater China (66 percent).60 Year-on-year data show that China is seeing the greatest increase (23 percent), leading the United States (19 percent).61 Also in 2020, the Hurun Rich List (胡润财富榜, the equivalent to the Forbes Rich List in the Chinese-speaking world) estimated that China has 878 billionaires, with a combined wealth of USD 4 trillion.62 As Hunrun’s chief research analyst states, “The world has never seen this much wealth created in just one year. China’s entrepreneurs have done much better than expected. Despite COVID-19, they have risen to record levels.”63 The statistics are staggering given that there was not a single billionaire in China before 2000.64 Likewise, just a decade ago, China boasted only 189 billionaires.65 Chinese wealth kept accelerating after the nation contained the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, Hurun listed 1058 billionaires from

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China, compared with 696 in the United States.66 This was the first time that China surpassed the United States to become the first country with the most ultra-wealthy. China now has six of the world’s top ten cities with the highest concentration of billionaires.67 Among them are Beijing (145), Shanghai (113), Shenzhen (105), and Hong Kong (82).68 This regional wealth distribution also maps onto the nation’s multicity art revivals. In December 2020, an English-language media outlet assessed the importance of wealthy Chinese buyers to the global art market: “those stereotypically brash, overzealous Chinese buyers crowding auction houses in New York and London—deemed an ignorant yet indispensable part of the burgeoning new art market—were tolerated.”69 This trend happened much earlier, of course: after the 2008 financial crisis. The pandemic accelerated wealthy Chinese collectors’ “at-home buying behavior.” Pandemic-suppressed US businesses existed in sharp contrast with Chinese art sales, which “boomed in the annual September auction cycle.”70 Sotheby’s Asia Week reaped USD 36.4 million compared to only one sale at Christie’s London auction, worth USD 15 million.71 According to a Wall Street Journal article analyzing how Chinese collectors went into hyperdrive mode in 2020, They battled the virus earlier and emerged from lockdowns sooner than their counterparts in Europe and the US. The Chinese economy also held its own, buoying regional collector confidence, market watchers said. As a result, Christie’s said, Asians outspent US collectors for the first time in the company’s history—a potential sea change for an art market that US collectors have dominated for decades. Asian collectors also accounted for more than a third of Sotheby’s world-wide auction sales last year, taking home nine of the house’s top 20 priciest works.72

Inside China, entrepreneurial builders of the art market were advocating for more-favorable policies for the sector. During the Thirteenth National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (March 4–10, 2020), the nation’s top political meeting, chairperson of Artron Art Group Wan Jie 王建 submitted various proposals to promote the growth of the art market. Among these was a tax cut to facilitate the return of cultural relics.73 Policymakers in China are revising laws and regulations to keep up with changes in the cultural landscape. In November 2020, China amended its copyright law for the third time since 1990. This amendment sought to strengthen intellectual property rights

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(IPR) clauses and better balance between ongoing cultural exchange and IPR protection. It also expanded the scope of copyright beyond just the authorship of literary, artistic, and scientific works. Three months later, in early February 2021, the Shanghai police invoked this law to detain 14 individuals for pirating more than 20,000 Chinese and foreign television programs.74 Some people were also pushing for an inheritance law, which was proposed in the 1994 tax reform but never materialized. On May 28, 2020, a new civil law was passed by the National People’s Congress. The Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China replaced the 1985 Inheritance Law, effective as of 2021. The new law included the protection of property and inheritance. In the articles on inheritance, digital property and virtual property are now specifically included.75 This was a key milestone for China’s economy, next to writing private property rights into the Chinese Constitution in 2004.

New Trends in China: Pandemic-Themed Art Criticism and Nonfungible Token (NFT) Art Fever China’s postpandemic economic recovery relied on its massive informal economy. For example, in June, the government began a campaign to encourage street vending, an area that had previously been considered “chaotic and backward” before the pandemic.76 In the next few months, street vendors increased, easing the pressure of unemployment and stimulating China’s economy. Many artists used the stall economy to market their artwork.77 The summer of 2020 also saw a range of art events that used COVID-19 as a theme. For example, Qinghua University’s Art Gallery held a pandemic-­themed exhibition with over 200 artworks, including installation, photography, and video art.78 In Tianjin, there was an exhibition titled “Out of Control: Post-City Crisis” of artwork by 14 Chinese artists who reflected on the ecological challenges of global urbanism on social relationships.79 In June, Hangzhou Renke Art Center held an exhibition titled “Post-Epidemic Era: Western Classics, Eastern Contemporary,” displaying 47 works by 19 Western artists and 25 by 15 Chinese artists. As one news reporting describes, it “symbolizes the common human fate in a time when globalization sped up.”80

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Smaller outbreaks also interrupted this recuperation. On June 14, Beijing reported 42 COVID cases, leading to a systemic closedown of museums, galleries, and religious spaces.81 Before this change, a dozen museums had just reopened for a week. Around the same time, Zhejiang Art Museum held an exhibition titled “See Her Face” with 110 artworks to commemorate frontline healthcare workers and first responders during the pandemic.82 As the manager of Xiling Auction, Lu Jingqing, observes, “the pandemic has forced people to empathize and to think. Many, when considering the ultimate value questions of life, have walked into the world of art.”83 For example, in May 2020, the Shanghai Design School of China Art Academy held a digital art fair, “Catastrophe Variable: Solo Vision of Digitalism,” showing 50 young design artists’ works online.84 Topics such as post-traumatic stress disorder, contagion and infectivity, and the pandemic in time and space were visually represented and critically engaged with. As one artist writes, “with the spread of the virus, more and more rumors are spreading. Controlling the virus and rumors became a process in people’s cognitive journey, a game theory of trust versus fear.”85 Art media like Artron.net has been helping online platforms improve and become more user-friendly.86 Very honest, self-reflective conversations such as the following were happening: The pandemic has forced major cultural organizations to think: how should they explore new and sustainable ways outside of a brick and mortar model so that new audiences can join? With maturing digitalization techniques, people’s expectations for digital museum experiences have gone higher and higher. If we only pay attention to the upgrading of content, but not the official website itself, this may lead to “malfunctions” of many supporting online services. Official websites are the “faces” of online museums. They should become accelerators of pluralism, not “stumbling blocks.”87

In the fall of 2020, Wuhan, the first epicenter of COVID-19, held its East Lake International Ecological Sculpture Biennale, six months after the city ended its lockdown.88 The preface to this art event captures a shift to more crisis-informed themes, such as ecological art: “In the post-­ epidemic era, how to strengthen the promotion of ecological culture and ecological art, and advocate the concept of ecological civilization in our culture, art and daily life in a better and more consciously manner is a long-term task. … After being tested by the epidemic, Wuhan has every

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reason to raise up the banner of ecology and turn Wuhan into a city of ecology.”89 Discussions about what this pandemic means for artistic creation continued for more than a year, because the world has yet to recover from COVID-19. Chinese media outlet Art News had an interview series with 20 active curators in China.90 They commented on topics such as the art market infrastructure, digital technology, distortions in art prices, the social function of art, the role of the curator, etc. Cui Cancan: The monopoly age of the art circle has begun, and resources have become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few. … In such a bad economy, it is abnormal and shocking to see sky-rocketing auction sales. … This trend of stratification will continue, alienating artists from each other. Ou Ning: When art has become full-on marketized, I am more interested in how art relates to society. This is not a simple “art serves society” relation, which turns art into an instrument. It is rather about how art triggers social transformations and how society changes art. … Regional research and praxis become relevant in the post-pandemic era. A curator should become a place-maker, and the key is not to host an exhibition, but to curate a place. He Jing: The shock and change brought by the pandemic to the art sector is fundamental. Can we continue to rely on some guiding ideologies in contemporary art, such as neoliberalism and temporality? … This also exposed the fatigue and irrelevance within the art circle. … But the reality of this crisis can also be forceful to bring change. Most of these curators reckon that the pandemic has brought fundamental challenges to China’s art sector, including its infrastructures and morale. The openness and depth of these reflections mark a maturing crowd of art criticism. China has also developed a ranking system of art researchers that is based on Chinese-language publications in academic-­ indexed journals.91 The list shows that over 41 percent of the “most influential art researchers” are from institutions in Beijing and from leading regions such as Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang.92 In the postpandemic

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scenario, China Daily’s culture section also seems to have included more and more content on the nation’s art scene: • “South Korea to See Cultural Activities on Chinese Modern Art” (Oct. 30, 2020) • “Year-Ender: Top 10 Art Exhibits in China” (Dec. 28, 2020) • “Ancient Murals Restored in Labor of Love” (Jan. 14, 2021) • “Dance Show on Tang Dynasty Wins Hearts” (Feb. 22, 2021) • “Australian-Chinese Violinist Releases Tambourin Chinois at Age 13” (Feb. 26, 2021) • “Rare Chinese Bowl Bought for $35 Could Fetch up to $500,000 at Auction” (Mar. 4, 2021) • “Classical Flower-and-Bird Paintings Bloom at Nanjing Museum” (Mar. 4, 2021) • “Paintings from Shanxi on Show in Slovakian Embassy” (Mar. 4, 2021) China’s private museums, which were already struggling financially, were also most affected by the pandemic. As they tried out creative projects to stay relevant and connected to their audiences, some private museums became resilient against external shocks and eventually more resourceful. Some expanded their virtual ecommerce platforms. Others coordinated charity auctions. For example, the HOW Art Museum coordinated a charity auction project to donate children’s masks, digital thermometers, and other protective equipment to over 100 schools.93 More than 80 art institutions and hundreds of artists participated. The optimism of this kind of event was much appreciated by the public. As one museum director comments, “Art is by no means a vaccine, but it gives people hope.”94 Moreover, COVID-19 may have delayed the launching of new private museums in China; it hardly dissipated the trend. In May 2020, a millennial couple, Michael Xufu Huang 黄勖夫 (26) and Theresa Tse 谢 其润 (27), opened their private X Museum in Beijing.95 Its real-life exhibition went live on March 6, attracting over 20,000 visitors within weeks. It featured over 30 young artists representing diverse gender and sexual identities, “unusual for a Chinese group show,” according to news coverage.96 Since 2021, the collaboration between China’s art institutions and tech companies grew with the trend of digitalization. For example, the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, through its interdisciplinary platform (education, art, science, and technology, or EAST), held the fourth Tech-­Art

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Fair, featuring the role of art in virtual learning and industrial innovation.97 This art fair’s Enterprise Innovation Forum included themes such as artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality. Collaborating with Sina. com, China’s earliest and largest website, this series of virtual events gained millions of views within weeks. Another digital art trend in China after the pandemic is crypto art, or NFT art.98 China had, in fact, banned crypto exchanges in 2017. The success of Bitcoin and the auction of Beeple’s art proved this area to be a cutting-edge game, and China did not want to be left out. In late March 2021, Beijing saw the opening of the world’s first major crypto art show, “Virtual Niche.”99 Hosted by China’s first crypto art brand, BlockCreateArt (BCA), which desires “to close the distance between the crypto-art ecosystem and the Chinese public,” this exhibition featured works including 20 images from Beeple’s famous USD 69 million crypto art, “Everydays— The 2020 Collection.” Most art was projected onto screens, but there were also virtual-reality artworks and light designs. As one media outlet reports, NFTs present unique opportunities for freedom: Just like in the West, NFTs have penetrated every corner of the Chinese crypto community. … The Chinese crypto community is pretty much interested in the speculative aspect of it all. They’re more curious about the next platform token to purchase than the next great emerging artist. …for the first time, artists can plug into a permissionless network that allows them to freely express sensitive topics such as power, regulation, subculture, authority, individualism, and collective vulnerability. They are not restricted by physical space nor censorship. … For Chinese artists, crypto is the perfect weapon to guarantee free expression.100

This event was considered boundary breaking because China has strictly regulated token trades, cryptocurrency mining, and NFTs. On March 25, 2021, 200 NFT-savvy artists participated in “DoubleFat Win-Win: First NFT Art Exhibition” in Beijing Yue Museum.101 Holding a painting by Chinese artist Leng Jun that has been fashioned into NFT art, the organizers set it on fire and held an auction. In the end, Leng’s NFT painting was sold for CNY 400 thousand. The fever of NTF art is likely to continue in the near future. As one outlet reports, “Despite the regulation uncertainty in China, many still believe that cryptocurrency is the wave of the

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future. According to Deloitte’s 2020 Global Blockchain Report, 94% of mainland Chinese interviewees strongly or somewhat agree that digital assets will be an alternative to or replacement for fiat currencies in the next five to 10 years.”102 The recuperation of China’s art sector was largely a domestic operation without much international help. Philip Dodd, curator and chair of Made in China (UK), wrote with a tone of sarcasm about the lack of solidarity from the Western art world for its Chinese counterpart: “I must have missed the public acts of solidarity from Western galleries towards their Chinese peers in the wake of the cancellation of Art Basel in Hong Kong amid fears of the spread of COVID-19. … I probably just missed them.”103 He then laments that too many Western galleries and art professionals see China primarily as a market, not as a community that should be included, especially during the pandemic. As China fully reopened its economy, international collaborations resumed. For example, in September 2020, Christie’s and China Guardian Auction teamed up for the first time to launch a series of postpandemic events to “broaden the market in the region.”104 Guillaume Cerutti, Christie’s CEO, says the two houses “are on the same wavelength to leverage our collective expertise and reach.”105 Hu Yanyan 胡妍妍, the director and president of China Guardian Auctions, also reckons that the collaboration is “a good opportunity to learn from Christie’s” and will deepen “cross-cultural dialogue.”106 A few months later, Philips and Poly Auction also entered into a collaborative relationship, this time in Hong Kong.107 Philips considered its presence in mainland China still “in its infancy” and thus needed a partner to expand.108 Chinese cities also opened up to host international artists’ works. For example, Kunming Museum launched the Global Art Competition to Support Biodiversity in January 2021.109 As the organizers claim, it was a response to Xi Jinping’s speech on biodiversity at the United Nations. Global events with Chinese art and artists also continued. For example, in March 2021, the Art Institute of Chicago held an exhibition titled “Cosmoscapes: Ink Paintings by Tai Xiangzhou 泰祥洲.”110 The China Center and School of Traditional Arts at the Prince’s Foundation sponsored an online seminar titled “The Constitution of Shanshui Landscape and Geomancy,” taught by Chinese artists and art historians.111

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Conclusion The COVID-19 pandemic has since the end of 2019 posed an unprecedented challenge to the global art market and to China’s burgeoning art sector. Among the 365 global art fairs scheduled in 2020, most of them (61 percent) were canceled.112 But technological innovation saved the industry. Despite the contraction, the overall online art sales of 2020 doubled in value compared to those of 2019.113 Although the Trump administration implemented customs tariffs of 15 percent on the import of Chinese artworks, this rate was reduced to 7.5 percent in January 2020, weeks after the new Biden administration took power.114 The US art market could recover. Sotheby’s released a prediction for trends in the 2021 art market: “The audience for buyers will continue to expand in 2021 as rapid technological transformation and the embrace of digital channels will remain ever present.”115 The Artprice 2020 Art Market Report also highlights that “the art market has adopted a new economic model and reached a new equilibrium that the most optimistic projections were not expecting to see before 2025.”116 This report pays special attention to the sustained Asian market where, despite the pandemic, there has been “a steady influx of new, younger buyers and a radically expanded buyer base with greater cross-category participation.”117 By the time of writing, China’s control of the COVID-19 crisis has proven to be successful. Even dissident artist Ai Weiwei had to agree. In a recent interview, Ai compares the morale in China to that of the rest of the world: China has once again proved itself to the world that with its authoritarian rule and militarised management, it has minimised the threat of the epidemic to the regime. It has successfully frozen the whole country for two months, with quarantine, confinement and blockade, controlling the virus as well as public opinion. Things have developed in a direction that is conducive to the stability of the regime. Today China is in a cheerful mood after surviving a great catastrophe. It proves to the world the effectiveness of authoritarian rules and exposes the disadvantages and malpractices of free and democratic societies in controlling the epidemic. Obviously, many countries with freedom of the press and social security measures have reacted to this epidemic helplessly, and even ridiculously.118

Despite the high-profile retreat of Pace Gallery from Beijing in 2018, today, even more Western galleries are expanding into China, including

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Lisson, Perrotin, Almine Rech, Villepin, and Flowers, in art hubs such as Shanghai and Hong Kong.119 With a quick economic recovery, China is likely to play an even more important role in the global art market. While the United States suffered a 39 percent drop in auction turnover sales, China rose to the top by adding 2 percent.120 According to art economist Clare McAndrew, “Despite a difficult start of the year, some strong auction sales in the last quarter helped boost Greater China to a position of parity with the UK art market, and second in the global ranks.”121 Nevertheless, when it comes to US–China relations, the damage done by the Trump administration continues to affect cultural exchanges and the art sector. The Art Newspaper calls these areas “casualties” and “collateral damage” from the previous administration’s poor foreign policy.122 One important change has been the reversal of visa rules for mainland Chinese students into US universities. The talent flow stoppage has affected fine-art and art history programs, “a trend that had been shaping the rising generation of Chinese artists, curators, scholars, gallerists, and collectors.”123

Notes 1. Elizabeth A. Harris, “As Virus Tightens Grip on China, the Art World Feels the Squeeze,” New York Times, February 13, 2020. https://www. nytimes.com/2020/02/13/arts/coronavirus-­art-­market.html. 2. Susan Lahey, “The Uncertain Chinese Art Market,” International Society of Appraisers website, March 10, 2020. https://www.isa-­appraisers.org/ about/blog/details/402/the-­uncertain-­chinese-­art-­market. 3. This comes from a reported titled “The Impact of COVID-19 on the Gallery Sector” by Art Basel and UBS.  Quoted in Scott Reyburn, “Pandemic Has Cut Modern and Contemporary Gallery Sales 36%, Report Says,” New York Times, September 9, 2020. https://www. nytimes.com/2020/09/09/arts/design/gallery-­sales-­art-­market-­virus. html?referringSource=articleShare. 4. Lisa Movius, “Beijing Reopens Forbidden City in Time for May Day Holiday,” The Art Newspaper, April 30, 2020. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/beijing-­reopens-­forbidden-­city-­in-­time-­for-­may-­day-­ holiday. 5. Clare McAndrew, The Art Market 2021: An Art Basel & USB Report, online publication, 41. 6. Ibid., 102. The US accounted for 29 percent and the UK 16 percent. 7. Ibid., 177.

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8. Zhang Kun, “Long Museum Debuts Three Solo Shows,” China Daily, February 22, 2021. http://epaper.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202102/22/ WS6032f4d7a31099a234354177.html. 9. Artnet Intelligence Report (Fall 2020), released by Artnet News in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, online publication. https://www.artnet. com/artnet-­intelligence-­report/. 10. Eileen, Kinsella, “How COVID-19 Pushed Auction Houses Into the Future,” Artnet Intelligence Report (Fall 2020), released by Artnet News in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, online publication, 58. 11. Artnet Intelligence Report (Fall 2020), released by Artnet News in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, online publication, 5. Here, “Woodlam” refers to an art and financial consultant: Doug Woodlam. 12. Eileen, Kinsella, “How COVID-19 Pushed Auction Houses Into the Future,” Artnet Intelligence Report (Fall 2020), released by Artnet News in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, online publication, 60. 13. Ibid. 14. Julia Halperin, “Here’s What Really Happened to the Art Market during Lockdown,” Artnet Intelligence Report (Fall 2020), released by Artnet News in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, online publication, 84. 15. Quoted in “Online Sales Save Art,” Kuwait Times, March 16, 2021. https://news.kuwaittimes.net/website/online-­sales-­save-­art-­market/. 16. “Online Sales Save Art,” Kuwait Times, March 16, 2021. 17. Artnet Intelligence Report (Fall 2020), released by Artnet News in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, online publication, 59. 18. Ibid. 19. Sarah Thornton, “How Has 2020 Impacted the Global Art Market?” Brink News, September 10, 2020. https://www.brinknews.com/ the-­pandemic-­hasnt-­greatly-­affected-­the-­global-­art-­market-­but-­the-­blm-­ movement-­has/. 20. Kelly Crow, “Millennial Buyers Help Global Art Market Survive the Covid Pandemic,” Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2021. https://www. wsj.com/ar ticles/millennial-­b uyers-­h elp-­g lobal-­a r t-­m arket­survive-­the-­covid-­pandemic-­11609779511. 21. Susane R. Gyorgy, Dominic Picarda, Fotini Xydas and Steven C. Wieting, The Global Art Market and COVID-19: Innovating and Adapting, Citi Bank, December 2020. https://www.citivelocity.com/citigps/the-­global-­ art-­market-­and-­covid-­19/. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Notizia Fornita DA, “Artmarket.com: Artprice Global Indices show the strength of Contemporary Art and Drawing in 2020: both segments adapted particularly well to rapid digitization,” PR Newswire, January 19,

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2021. https://www.prnewswire.com/it/comunicati-­stampa/artmarket-­ com-­artprice-­global-­indices-­show-­the-­strength-­of-­contemporary-­art-­ and-­drawing-­in-­2020-­both-­segments-­adapted-­particularly-­well-­to-­rapid-­ digitization-­806755514.html. 25. Ruchir Sharma, “How Technology Saved China’s Economy,” New York Times, January 20, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/ opinion/china-­technology-­economy.html. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. “Online Sales Save Art,” Kuwait Times, March 16, 2021. 29. Quoted in “Online Sales Save Art,” Kuwait Times, March 16, 2021. 30. Xun Wang, “Financing Innovation in China,” East Asia Forum, December 29, 2020. https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2020/12/29/financing­innovation-­in-­china/. 31. Lv Xiaochen, “Eleven Collectors on Future Collecting Strategies” (剧透 11 位藏家新动向:未来的收藏策略是什么?), Hi Art magazine, March 19, 2021. 32. Lisa Movius, “Shanghai’s Galleries Reopen after Covid-19 with Optimistic Spate of Spring Shows,” The Art Newspaper, April 17, 2020. https:// www.theartnewspaper.com/news/shanghai-­g alleries-­r eopen-­a fter-­ covid-­19. 33. Hu Yanyan, “The Sensible Art Market is a ‘Big Society’” (感性的艺术市 场是个“大社会”), Artron.Net, May 26, 2020. https://news.artron. net/20200526/n1077895.html. 34. Lisa Movius, “Undeterred by Pandemic and Political Tumult, Western Galleries Expand to Greater China,” The Art Newspaper, August 27, 2020. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/ressle-­gallery-­opening. 35. “How Do Art Museums Make A Post-Pandemic Transition” (后疫情时 代艺术博物馆如何转型), Meishubao (美术报), May 21, 2020. Reposted on Artron.Net, https://news.artron.net/20200521/n1077154.html. 36. Lisa Movius, “The Fairs Are Back in Town: Greater China Reopens for Business,” The Art Newspaper, September 16, 2020. https://www. theartnewspaper.com/analysis/the-­s hows-­m ust-­g o-­o n-­f airs-­u nroll­in-­greater-­china-­despite-­travel-­r estrictions-­shipping-­woes-­and-­covid­fears. 37. “Fourteen Government Committees Release New Policies: Culture and Creative Income May Cover Museums’ Daily Expenses! Online Museums Are Encouraged!” (14 部委发文:文创收入可用于文博单位日常支出!鼓 励开发线上博物馆!), Artron.Net, October 31, 2020. https://news. artron.net/20201031/n1086835.html.

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38. Lisa Movius, “’Dealers Are Smiling under Their Masks’: Shanghai Art Week Pulls in Art-Starved Collectors,” The Art Newspaper, November 13, 2020. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/analysis/china-­shanghai-­ art-­week-­2020-­fair-­report. 39. Lisa Movius, “All Eyes on Shanghai as City Hosts Multiple Fairs despite First Coronavirus Case in Months,” The Art Newspaper, November 10, 2020. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/shanghai-­s-­new-­art­tower-­hub-­of-­busy-­fair-­week. 40. Li Yifan, “How the Art Market ‘Break Ice’ after the Pandemic” (后疫情 时代, 艺术品市场如何“破冰”), China Culture News (中国文化报), November 25, 2020. Reposted at Ifeng Art (凤凰艺术), http://wap.art. ifeng.com/?app=system&controller=artmobile&action=content&conte ntid=3511272. 41. Ibid. 42. “Sound of Life China Modern Ecological Art Exhibition: 2020 Beijing 798 Art Festival” (“生声”中国当代生态艺术展” 2020 北京 798 艺术节 主题展开幕), Artron.Net, November 10, 2020. https://news.artron. net/20201110/n1087335.html. 43. “Bid Data Reveals: Who Are the Trendy Artists in 2020?” (大数据揭秘: 2020 年风口上的艺术家都是谁?), Artron.Net, March 30, 2021. 44. Artprice.com. 45. https://www.statista.com/statistics/272983/market-­share-­of-­art-auctionrevenue-­and-­lots-­sold-­by-­auction-­house/. 46. “In-Depth: China Art Market Report during the Pandemic” (深度 | 一份 疫情下的中国艺术市场报告), BB Art (芭莎艺术) magazine, March Issue of 2020. Reposted at https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/126682067. 47. Lisa Movius, “Coronavirus Impact on China’s Art World Now Eclipses SARS,” The Art Newspaper, February 24, 2020. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/coronavirus-­impact-­on-­china-­s-­art-­world-­now­eclipses-­sars. 48. Yaqi Tong, “How Chinese Museums Are Coping with Coronavirus: An In-Depth Report,” The Art Newspaper, March 4, 2020. https://www. theartnewspaper.com/analysis/behind-­closed-­doors-­how-museumsin-­china-­are-­coping-­with-­coronavirus. 49. Ibid. 50. “Art Market Buoyed by Online Sales,” ENCA.com, March 21, 2021. https://www.enca.com/business/art-­market-­buoyed-­online-­sales. 51. “Virtual Art Party Post-Pandemic” (后疫情时代下的线上艺术聚会), Artron.Net, June 16, 2020. https://news.artron.net/20200616/ n1079794.html. 52. “Art Is An Asset. Here’s How to Make It Work for You,” Artnet Intelligence Report (Fall 2020), released by Artnet News in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, online publication, 93.

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53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 94. 56. Online resources. Forbes 2019 Rich List, https://www.forbes.com/ billionaires/#698401a8251c; Forbes 2017 Rich List, https://www. forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2017/03/20/forbes-­2017-­billionaires-­ list-­meet-­the-­richest-­people-­on-­the-­planet/#156b0fe262ff. 57. Artnet Intelligence Report (Fall 2020), released by Artnet News in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, online publication, 42. 58. Liu Man, “Art Wealth and Entrepreneurship: Legacy of Chinese Private Entrepreneurs” (艺术财富于创业精神: 中国民营企业家族的传承之道), in Art Market Research Center, China’s Art and Wealth White Paper 2020, 76, 78. 59. Ibid. 60. Clare McAndrew, The Art Market 2021: An Art Basel & USB Report, online publication, 274. 61. Ibid. 62. Karen Gilchrist, “China’s young billionaires are riding the tech boom. Here are the 20 richest,” CNBC News, October 27, 2020. https://www. cnbc.com/2020/10/28/chinas-­youngest-­richest-­billionaires-­and-­how-­ they-­made-­their-­money.html. 63. Ibid. 64. Jane Li, “China is Rapidly Producing New Billionaires Despite Covid-19,” Quartz, October 20, 2020. https://qz.com/1919974/china-­created-­a­record-­number-­of-­billionaires-­despite-­covid-­19/. 65. Karen Gilchrist, “China’s young billionaires are riding the tech boom. Here are the 20 richest,” CNBC News, October 27, 2020. 66. Cheryl Heng, “China overtakes US to host most dollar billionaires as 2020 stock market rally defied COVID-19 and minted wealth at a record pace,” South China Morning Post, March 2, 2021. https://www.scmp. com/business/money/wealth/article/3123716/china-­overtakes-­us-­most-­ dollar-­billionaires-­2020-­stock-­market. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. South China Morning Post also quoted the Hurun report’s wording, where China was “the first country to exist from a nationwide pandemic lockdown and the major economy to have expanded last year.” See Cheryl Heng, “China overtakes US to host most dollar billionaires as 2020 stock market rally defied COVID-19 and minted wealth at a record pace,” South China Morning Post, March 2, 2021. A media outlet in France also used a similar title—“China’s Billionaires Club Swells as Market Rally Offsets Virus Pain”—emphasizing the increase in Chinese wealth despite the pandemic-­induced economic crisis. See “China’s Billionaires Club

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Swells as Market Rally Offsets Virus Pain,” France 24.com, March 2, 2021. https://www.france24.com/en/live-­news/20210302-­china-­s­billionaires-­club-­swells-­as-­market-­rally-­offsets-­virus-­pain. 69. Alexandra Bregman, “China’s Billionaires Set to Dominate the World’s Art Market,” Nikkei Asia, December 4, 2020. https://asia.nikkei.com/ Opinion/China-­s-­billionaires-­set-­to-­dominate-­the-­world-­s-­art-­market. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Kelly Crow, “Millennial Buyers Help Global Art Market Survive the COVID Pandemic,” Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2021. 73. “Wan Jie: Decrease Tax and Encourage Return of Cultural Relics to Promote the Nation’s Cultural and Art Market Development” (2021 两 会|万捷:继续减免税收 鼓励文物回流 促进我国文物艺术品市场发展), Artron.net, Two Sessions of 2021 Special Report, March 4, 2021. https://news.artron.net/20210304/n1092306.html. 74. Qiao Xinsheng, “Renren Case Shows China’s Path on IPR Protection,” China Daily, February 4, 2021. https://global.chinadaily.com. cn/a/202102/04/WS601baf69a31024ad0baa74e9.html 75. Hongyu Chen, “China’s Civil Code Allows In-Game Virtual Items to Be Inherited,” Pandaily, May 22, 2020. https://pandaily.com/ chinas-­civil-­code-­allows-­in-­game-­virtual-­items-­to-­be-­inherited/ 76. Frank Sieren, “Can Return to Street Vending Save Jobs?” DW.com, June 18, 2020. https://www.dw.com/en/sierens-­china-­can-­return-­to-­street­vending-­save-­jobs/a-­53864073. Li Yuan, “China’s Street Vendor Push Ignites a Debate: How Rich Is It?” New York Times, June 11, 2020. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/06/11/business/china-­street-­vendors-­stall-­economy.html. 77. “When Will Art Vending Join the Heated Street Vending Economy during the Global Pandemic” (地摊经济火爆，全球疫情 “日常化”，“艺术 地摊” 何时重现江湖?), Artron.Net, June 8, 2020. https://news.artron. net/20200608/n1079029.html. 78. “Qinghua Art Gallery ‘Window 2020’ Inside Out: 200 ‘Me and Covid’ Stories” (清华艺博”窗口 2020” 内外: 200 个”我与新冠”的故事), Artron.net, April 29, 2020. https://news.artron.net/20200429/ n1076865.html. 79. “Out of Control: Post-City Crisis” (失控:后城市时代危机), Artron.Net, June 2, 2020. https://news.artron.net/20200602/n1078647.html. 80. “Post-Pandemic Special Exhibition: The Pluralism and Tolerance of Art” (后疫时代特展:艺术的多元性与包容性), Artron.Net, June 16, 2020. https://news.artron.net/20200616/n1079854.html. 81. “Pandemic Escalates, Beijing Closed A Dozen Museums, Again” (疫情升 级 北京十余家博物馆已再度闭馆), Artron.Net, June 15, 2020. https:// news.artron.net/20200615/n1079463.html.

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82. Zhejiang Art Museum, “Exhibition: See Her Face” (“看见⋅她们的面 容”——疫⋅情绘画主题展 即将开幕), June 14, 2020. Reposted on Atron. Net, https://news.artron.net/20200614/n1079592.html. 83. Art Market Research Center, China’s Art and Wealth White Paper 2020, 65. 84. “China Art Academy Explores Digital Art Online in May: Catastrophe Variable” (中国美术学院 5 月线上集体数字艺术探索:灾难变数), Artron. Net, May 12, 2020. https://news.artron.net/20200512/n1076788.html. 85. Ibid. 86. “Digitalization of Museums is the Trend, but Why Did Official Websites Become Plagued with Problems?” (博物馆数字化建设如火如荼, 官网为 何成了“重灾区”), Artron.Net, June 8, 2020. https://news.artron. net/20200608/n1079170.html. 87. Ibid. 88. “A Call for Global Art Work: 100% @Wuhan 2020 East Lake International Ecological Sculpture Biennale,” Artron.net, September 1, 2020. https:// news.artron.net/20200901/n1083965.html. 89. Ibid. 90. “A New Era for Curators: Interviews with 20 Active Curators in China’s Contemporary Art Scene” (一个新的策展人时代的到来, 与 20 位活跃 在中国当代艺术现场的策展人打开 2021 年), February 27, 2021. Reposted on Sohu.com, https://www.sohu.com/a/453130050_256863. 91. “Ranking of Art Studies, Most Influential Scholars in Chinese Philosophy and Social Sciences base on Chinese Academic Publications (2020)” (艺 术学排行榜 |《中国哲学社会科学最有影响力学者排行榜:基于中文学术 成果的评价 (2020 版)》), Humanities and Social Sciences Evaluation Center (人文社科评价中心), June 23, 2020. Reposted on Artron.Net, https://news.artron.net/20200623/n1080214.html. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid. 95. Lisa Movius, “X-Appeal: Millennial Collectors Open Private Museum in Beijing,” The Art Newspaper, May 26, 2020. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/beijing-­x-­factor-­museum. 96. Ibid. 97. “The Fourth CCAFA EAST-TechArt Fair Launches Virtually” (第四届中 央美术学院EAST-­科技艺术季将于2月26日线上举行), Artron.Net, February 22, 2021. https://news.artron.net/20210222/n1091913.html. 98. An NFT (nonfungible token) is a digital asset that represents real-world objects. NFT artworks are traded online, often with cryptocurrency. 99. Kelly Le, “World’s First Major Crypto Art Show Opens in Beijing,” Forkast.news, March 26, 2021. https://forkast.news/crypto-­art­beijing-­nft/.

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100. Shuyao Kong, “NFTs Are Hot in China, but With A Difference,” Decrypt, March 16, 2021. https://decrypt.co/61537/nfts-­are-­hot-­in-­china-­but-­ with-­a-­difference. 101. “Leng Jun’s First NFT Art Sold for 400 Thousand Yuan” (冷军首幅 NFT作品拍出 40 万), Artron.net, March 28, 2021. 102. Kelly Le, “World’s First Major Crypto Art Show Opens in Beijing,” Forkast.news, March 26, 2021. 103. Philip Dodd, “Where is the West? Art World Should be Supporting China during Coronavirus Crisis,” The Art Newspaper, Feburary 24, 2020. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/philip-­dodd-­western-­art­world-­should-­support-­china. 104. Anna Brady, “Christie’s and China Guardian Auctions Team Up for Sales and Exhibitions Series in Shanghai,” The Art Newspaper, May 7, 2020. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/christie-­s-­and-­china-­guardian-­ team-­up-­for-­sales-­and-­exhibitions-­series-­in-­shanghai-­this-­september. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 107. Vivienne Chow, “Philips and Poly Auction Set Their Sights on Hong Kong,” The Art Newspaper, August 21, 2020. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/analysis/poly-­phillips. 108. Ibid. 109. “Opening of 2021 Protect Biodiversity Global Art Competition” (2021 保护生物多样性全球艺术大赛启幕), Artron.Net, January 18, 2021. https://news.artron.net/20210118/n1090669.html. 110. “Art Institute of Chicago Opens Exhibition of Tai Xiangzhou’s Ink Paintings” (芝加哥艺术博物馆即将开幕 “天道幽明:泰祥洲的水墨画 展”), Artron.net, March 5, 2021. https://news.artron.net/20210305/ n1092363.html. 111. “The Prince’s Foundation Seminar: Feng Shui and Shan Shui” (英国王储 基金会传统艺术学院中国中心短期研学招募:风水与山水), Artron.net, March 1, 2021. https://news.artron.net/20210301/n1092190.html. 112. Clare McAndrew, The Art Market 2021: An Art Basel & USB Report, online publication, 30. 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid., 39. 115. “2021 Art Market Trends and Predictions,” Sotheby’s, https://www. sothebys.com/en/articles/2021-­art-­market-­trends-­and-­predictions. 116. “Artmarket.com Publishes Artprice 2020 Art Market Report Highlighting A Veritable Paradigm Shift: The Pandemic Imposed An Unprecedented Digitalization of the Market … that Saved Auction Turnovers,” PR Newswire.com, March 15, 2021. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-­ releases/artmarketcom-­p ublishes-­a rtprice-­2 020-­a rt-­m arket-­r eport-­

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highlighting-­a -­v eritable-­p aradigm-­s hift-­t he-­p andemic-­i mposed-­a n-­ unprecedented-­d igitization-­o f-­t he-­m arket-­t hat-­s aved-­a uction-­ turnovers-­301247231.html. 117. Ibid. 118. Ai Weiwei, “’The Real Ideological War Has Just Begun and COVID-19 Is Only the Starting Point’: Ai Weiwei on China’s Response to the Outbreak,” The Art Newspaper, March 27, 2020. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/ai-­w eiwei-­e xpanding-­o n-­c ovid-­1 9­18-­march-­2020. 119. Lisa Movius, “Beijing Gallery to Open Near Old Streets Putting Unsung Chinese Artists on the London Map,” The Art Newspaper, June 22, 2020. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/beijing-­gallery-­to-­put­unsung-­chinese-­artists-­on-­london-­map. 120. Ibid. 121. Clare McAndrew, The Art Market 2021: An Art Basel & USB Report, online publication, 41. 122. Lisa Movius, “’A Win for Internationalism’: What A Biden Presidency Will Mean for the Chinese Art World,” The Art Newspaper, January 20, 2021. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/analysis/china-­biden. 123. Ibid.

CHAPTER 8

A Trend Toward Pluralism and Inclusion

What is happening in China’s art ecosystem now? Two important themes have been diversity and inclusion. Chinese artists and curators are now among the most active progressive voices, resonating with their Western counterparts. The end of the Trump administration did not end the global health crisis or hyperpoliticized rhetoric in US–China relations. Ironically, Chinese intellectuals and academics had failed to guide Chinese society toward openness; instead, many of them had endorsed Trump, stigmatized the Black Lives Matter movement, and even embraced US right-­ wing conservatism.1 Nevertheless, in the broader cultural realm, a mandate of pluralism and inclusion for intersectional identities has been presented to the art world, globally speaking—first by the #MeToo movement in 2018 and then by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Museums and galleries have received public backlash for lacking representation for female and ethnic-­ minority artists. Many have since become more aware of including wider representation for art and artists. This chapter is just the beginning of a conversation in this direction in that it highlights how China’s art market engages with diversity, pluralism, and inclusion. Rather than providing an all-encompassing evaluation, it focuses mainly on the unprecedented plurality of art forms and gender inclusion.

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Preconditions of the Diversity Project in the Global Art World A careful diagnosis of the main factors related to the notorious lack of diversity in the global art market is needed. First of all, one needs to come to terms with the reality that the art world has always lacked transparency in decision-making. As cultural historian Alice Goldfarb Marquis points out, unlike markets that operate under stringent regulations against insider trading and conflicts of interest, the art marketplace “tolerates—indeed fosters—a sleazy, robber-baron style of capitalism not seen on Wall Street since the Great Depression.”2 Consequently, secrecy and mythmaking often surround the question of decision-making. The morals of the art world have always been concerning for critics. As cultural scholar Marjorie Garber writes, “publicity, flattery, and celebrity were part of the habitual currency of the art market.”3 Second, even a progressive improvement to the status quo that challenges the entrenched structures of inequality may not produce long-term, institutionalized results. For example, according to a report by Artnet, in the first half of 2020, 15 of the 100 top-selling artists at auction were women, a number that has doubled from 2019. This report also quotes Christopher Gaillard, deputy chair of Gurr Johns, who affirms the potential market value in art by women and artists of color: “those two markets have been in their ascent but are in no way approaching what the market is for men.”4 Lastly, the media world has always been inclined to elevate a few celebrities or big names, a habit that is hard to change. According to Antonia Carver, a director of art programs in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, much of what the general public know has always been about “the 1 percent of the 1 percent.”5 While some want to push for change toward more accessibility, transparency, and inclusion, others insist that this sector was designed to be elitist. In the end, although artistic expressions give ample opportunities for a variety of art forms by artists from different backgrounds, the artworld has always failed at the challenge of true diversity. Sociologist Sarah Thornton writes that “the resurgence of Black Lives Matter has had a profound effect on people’s perceptions of what will be relevant in art in 20 years.”6 Before the BLM movement, it could have been “uncool and unsophisticated” to have a collection made up entirely of white male artists. But after the summer of 2020, the prevalent attitude regarding a lack of diversity was “completely unacceptable” or even “a

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racist embarrassment.”7 The price mechanisms are also changing with these cultural attitudes. So we now see the market prices rising for artists who have “historically been undervalued.”8 The Art Newspaper interviewed art dealers around the world, and many mentioned that one of the legacies of 2020, a year of social movements highlighting inclusion and antiracism, was the mandate for inclusion:9 • [F]emale and other underrepresented artists are now being fully recognized for their contribution to art history. (Alex Logsdail, executive director of Lisson Gallery) • [T]here have been some real positives that have shone through. … For example, the acknowledgement that we are a community and that it is collaboration that will get us all through this period in good shape. (Victoria Siddall, board director of Frieze) • The art world woke to greater racial and gender equality and the advent of technology—better late than never on both fronts. I have been in ten industries professionally, and by far the art world is the most conservative and backwards looking. (Kenny Schachter, writer, artist and art dealer, New York) • Key priorities for 2021 should therefore be to continue to expand our client base, especially through innovation, but also more transparency and more diversity. (Guillaume Cerutti, chief executive of Christie’s) Western stereotyping has created a diversity dilemma for China’s art community. For example, for a very long time, only a few Chinese-born artists have become known to the world at large. From 2011 to 2016, Ai Weiwei has been named many times by Western media outlets as among the top-ten-most-influential artists in the world.10 Some call him “a late Cold War symbol of resistance to communist power in China.”11 Since then, the Guggenheim Museum wanted to correct the Western perception that China has only one artist, Ai Weiwei, and held an exhibition titled “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World.”12 It showcased 70 Chinese-born artists and their works, the largest of its kind in two decades. However, the vast majority were male artists of Han ethnicity. In a time when even Western curators and art institutions lack the awareness of intentional inclusion, the earliest cohorts of Chinese artists who gained international attention and fame were nonetheless a reflection of that exclusivism.

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Pluralism of Artistic Forms since the Economic Liberalization in China When the word pluralism is used in this chapter, I refer to the coexistence of multiple cultural representations. The use of this term is never meant to mean political pluralism, because China remains to this day an authoritarian party state. But this does not mean that Chinese society still operates under one stream of party cultural mandate. Younger generations who pick up cultural buzzwords such as #MeToo and #BLM are actively adopting new cultural genes from these cross-border movements. Some initiatives have even taken intersectional identities further to new areas, including technology and biodiversity. As early as 2011, China’s National Art Museum (NAM) in Beijing hosted the International Triennial of New Media Art titled “Translife,” exploring a rethinking on the very notion of life as we enter into “a post-­ human era.”13 This deliberately provocative art event included 53 works by more than 80 artists from around the world. Digital technology was used in every boundary-shattering way. Interestingly, just weeks ago, this same museum has just displayed a major commemorative art exhibition to celebrate the ninetieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Socialist artworks were exhibited to the public with the purpose of “strengthening their faith” in the salvific contribution of the CCP to China’s modern existence. These two consecutive exhibits that happened in the same space seem to have ushered the public into two parallel realities that embody a trend toward artistic pluralism. As the director of NAM, Mr. Fan told the New York Times, “Art is at a crossroads. It has exhausted its possibilities and needs to expand. Even the most avant-garde art is past. New media art is real-time art.”14 He likes to use the prefix trans- when describing this versatile time: “Translife, transtime—these are especially relevant in China because it is changing so fast.”15 Since the early 2010s, artwork related to intangible cultural heritage (ICH) has also had the potential to diversify the art market. This rich tradition encompasses a wide range of art forms, including traditional performance art and artisanship, that are organically related to communal living. In 2011, ICH art entered the auction market, at which point Beijing Hanhai launched a special auction, followed by the Beijing Cultural Bureau and Rong Baozhai’s second auction. The latter completed total sales of over CNY 5 million.16 In 2012, Shanghai Duoyunxuan’s ICH art auction achieved total sales of nearly CNY 8 million.17 Recent years also

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saw more and more innovative collaborations between ICH-derivative art and ecommerce platforms, such as TikTok, WeChat, Taobao, JD.com, and Weipinhui. While the gifting segment of ICH art has declined, its investment market segment has gradually expanded. Artifacts such as Jingdezhen porcelain, Zisha kettles, and Duan inkstone, for example, have gained value as symbols of social status, attracting both individual and corporate collectors. By 2018, China’s ICH art market had reached an estimated total volume of CNY 135 billion.18 The participation of young Chinese collectors helped the art market to diversify. Many of them desired to see “new blood” in the artistic landscape. For example, in 2016, Adrian Cheng, founder of the K11 Art Foundation, told the New York Times that China’s art scene “needs to be more diversified.”19 His organization specializes in counterbalancing the overheated Chinese art market by nurturing and connecting young artists with international museums and artist residencies. It serves a network of curators and helps them find emerging artists worthy of support. An entrepreneur himself, Cheng plans to invest over USD 2 billion in the K11 brand in China, which now operates a K11 Art Village in Wuhan. The inclusion of pluralistic art genres also became a trend where more and more Chinese collectors were sponsoring art events. Du Yan, founder of the Asymmetry Art Foundation, refers to 2020 as “a revolutionary year” when “everything will change.”20 In March 2021, China and the United Kingdom opened up joint exchange channels for the first Asymmetry Curatorial Writing Fellowship, supported by the London-­ based Asymmetry Art Foundation and Chinese collector Yan Du.21 The first six-month residency opportunity was given to Huang Li, a young female researcher born in 1990.22 Around the same time, an exhibition themed “A Snapshot of Globalization,” by French-trained artist and collector Cheng Xindong, opened at Qinghua University’s Art Museum through March 2021.23 China Daily reported on the rich significance of this exhibition: a once closed traditional society moving from planned economics to market from agriculture to industry and now high tech within the span of just three decades is expressed in the power, convolution and sometimes stark extravagance of colors and objects that form the exhibition. … [It] offers sharp insight into the history of China’s reforms and opening during which massive transformations occurred in all aspects of society within a historically unprecedentedly compact period of time. This vicissitude of the past decades

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have witnessed changes in attitudes, views and roles of the artistic community resulting from interplay of internal and external factors, cultural exchanges and social realities constituent in the context of artistic creation, ideas and materials. In many ways China’s modern artists have been vanguards, pace setters, iconoclastic social commentators and critics. 24

In 2020 and 2021, the new avant-garde art in China resembled the creative experimentation found elsewhere in the world. Emerging interest in quantum art was one example. China’s Academy of Social Sciences published one article reviewing how quantum art as a trend in Europe has influenced science-savvy young artists in China.25 Li Shan 李善, a pioneering figure in the avant-garde movement of the 1980s, now devotes more of his energy to creating BioArt (shengwu yishu 生物艺术). One of his installations consists of 60 life-size sculptures that are half human and half dragonfly.26 Li works with bio-scientists and has experimented with similar projects to “develop new life forms.”27 Savoring some utopian ideals about biological engineering, Li Shan has shown a lack ethical reflection on the dangers behind such experiments.28

Gender Inclusion in China’s Art World As the authors of a new book, The Art of Women in Contemporary China, write, “In the history of the visual arts in China only a few women’s names have been recorded, and they are described as members of their fathers’ or husbands’ atelier, achieving little in their own name.”29 Motivated by the need to address this neglect in the present day, this book introduces 75 female artists in China. As art historian Phyllis Teo also stresses, “To this day, there has been a general marginalization of Chinese women in art history and an accompanying lack of historical research and critical scholarship of their work.”30 Nevertheless, the past few years have seen a general trend toward gender inclusion and diversity in China’s art world. For example, in early 2021, China’s state-run English-language media outlet, China Daily, covered female artists as well as gay art.31 Before this, themes such as gender fluidity rarely emerged in any Chinese state media. State-run media China Daily also discussed how some young female artists are pursuing an unusual path in China’s booming art-making economy after the COVID-19 crisis.32

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In China’s art world, like the respective art worlds of Western countries, gender has always mattered for gaining access to resources and recognition. Art making and art trading have also reshaped people’s understanding of femininity. According to art historian Mary H. Fong, in ancient China, “artistic creativity was gender specific, exclusively masculine, and the female image that emerged is not what it purports to represent but rather a signification of male power.”33 In the 1950s, Maoism promoted a puritanical aesthetics that manifested in women’s and men’s wearing dark blue, genderless suits. This gender indifference also influenced artistic representations of some art makers. In the postreform era, a new trend of professionalism in China’s creative sector did not help the inclusion of women and minorities. The Writers Association is a case in point. As Richard Kraus writes, the number of female members declined from 115 in 1981 to 41 in 1988 and minorities from 130 to 39 during the same period.34 A turning point for women’s rights came in 1995, when Beijing hosted the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women. A revived embrace of feminism under a market economy provided the cultural milieu for feminist art to emerge.35 Since then, women’s art (nüxing yishu 女性艺 术) emerged as a response to the status quo. It was also during this time that feminist art criticism had a rebirth. In an article titled “Walking Out of the Abyss: My Feminist Critique” (1994), art critic Xu Hong sharply criticized the Chinese art world as “a narcissistic abyss of homogeneous magnetism” dominated by men.36 She writes that despite the positive developments, the Chinese art world was “still a continuation of obsolete and sexist traditions.”37 She describes how male artists impose their standards on women and then choose works by female artists who conform to those rules and tastes: such a coarse attitude in the treatment of female artists is an extension of a longstanding patriarchy. When this disregard for the very essence of art is visited upon the female sex and art, female artists are actually confronting a dangerous situation—they must eradicate their selves and put their trust into predetermined artistic regulations, allowing men to take the place of women, to ensure this world’s standard of a singular male voice. … [Men] chastise with comments such as: “female painters don’t concern themselves with culture at large or society, they are only concerned with the trivialities that surround them and personal emotions.” … Such arguments are used to negate works by female artists and to dismiss their voices, to place them in a

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state that makes it impossible to find their own footing—suspending them in a state of confusion somewhere between person and object.38

Xu Hong further asserts that “modern art, without sober and self-­ knowledgeable feminist art, is only a half-baked modern art.” This article has been considered the first feminist manifesto in the world of contemporary Chinese art. Another well-known figure was photographer Xing Danwen (b. 1967). Her 1995 exhibits depicting her own generation of women born during the Cultural Revolution presents a strong nostalgia for gender equality under Maoism, a sharp contrast to the later-frustrated ideals of such equality in a market economy. Amid this trend, however, was a common obsession by Chinese artists with the “oblique reference to the body as a vessel in order to express the situation of women and their emotions.”39 There are also works that “probe the relationships between women, the family and the environment.”40 Two other small-scale exhibits also took place in two Chinese cities: Natural Feminine Art, organized by Lin Zi 琳子 in Kunming, and Women’s Approach to Chinese Contemporary Art, curated by Liao Wen 廖雯 in Beijing. While in Europe, one Chinese art exhibition encountered pushback for its lack of female representation. Protesters blocked the China! (1996) exhibition at Bonn’s Museum of Modern Art carrying a sign board adorned with the following: “One cannot visit this museum! We protest against the lockout of female Chinese artists.”41 In response, the museum’s director affirmed that there were simply no female artists in China, causing an even worse public relations controversy.42 An outcome of this incident was the Half the Sky exhibition at Bonn in 1998, as a “rebuttal” to that director’s claim.43 In the same year, Beijing’s National Art Museum showcased work by 70 Chinese women under the rubric of “women’s art.” As one art historian comments, “This flurry of activity brought recognition to female artists marginalized by post-1989 international art market trends.”44 In 2003, China’s state-run Museum of Women and Children (Beijing) held its second Chinese Women Artists Exhibition.45 According to art researcher Francesca Dal Lago, “globalization and these new configurations of power paradoxically contributed to the marginalization of female artists in China.”46 This pattern has continued. In 2008, a New York Times article described the recurring lack of women’s presence in China’s newly forming art market:

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Contemporary art in China is a man’s world. While the art market, all but nonexistent in 1989, has become a powerhouse industry and produced a pantheon of multimillionaire artist-celebrities, there are no women in that pantheon. The new museums created to display contemporary art rarely give women solo shows. Among the hundreds of commercial galleries competing for attention in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere, art by women is hard to find.47

This article also featured a few female artists. Among them was Lin Tianmiao 林天苗 (b. 1961), who briefly lived in New York. Lin’s husband is also a conceptual artist. In an interview, Lin “acknowledges that women are treated like second-class citizens in China—like ‘inactive thinkers,’ as she puts it. Yet she is cautious about applying the term feminist to herself or her work.”48 Since then, Lin has continued to enjoy the attention of Western media. In 2010, Lin Tianmiao was the only Chinese female artist listed by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as among the most important female artists since the twentieth century.49 As she said in an interview, “It is difficult for Chinese artists to be written into global art history. Not many careers of my contemporary female artists survived the last thirty years.”50 In 2012, the Asia Society exhibited works by Lin and introduced her to be “one of only a handful of female artists of her generation born in the 1960s to have emerged during the 1990s when the Chinese art world was coming of age and gaining substantial international recognition.”51 Lin had a desire to articulate broader social issues through her focus on the female experience. Even in the 2010s, English-language art websites often listed an all-­ male crew of “popular” or “must-know” Chinese artists.52 English-­ language media outlets began introducing a wider range of female artists in China around 2016.53 For example, artist Cao Fei 曹斐 is known for capturing China’s transformative changes by using multimedia, including photographs, films, and sculptures. Her work presents “both a tour and a critique of contemporary China, its rapid urbanization and the impact globalization has had on it.”54 Cao once revealed in a 2016 New York Times article a kind of “positive discrimination” in the male-dominated art circle: “I am quite independent and not really involved in the art circle in Beijing. …When they introduce me there, they sometimes say, ‘She is the most important female artist in China’—not artist, female artist.”55 Cao also gained more visibility through Art Basel in Hong Kong.56 In 2018, Artsy describes her in the following way: “Cao is perfectly positioned to

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comment on the emerging techno-authoritarian China enabled by ubiquitous e-commerce, oppressive social credit systems, and new identification technologies.”57 US art curator Philip Tinari comments that Cao “stands out as an example of a Chinese artist working in a global context.”58 Cao Fei describes herself as “keen on social shifts,” which led to her many creative projects.59 Artsy.net lists three female artists as among the ten people who have “defined Chinese contemporary art,” naming Cao Fei as well as Miao Ying and Lu Yang as “leaders among China’s generation of emerging artists.”60 The few most famous Chinese male artists have failed to practice authentic inclusion. Tokenizing has been their best gesture. For example, in 2016, artist Cai Guoqiang visited over 40 studios and surveyed works of over 200 Chinese artists before launching an exhibition known as “What About the Art? Contemporary Art from China.”61 By highlighting individual creativity, Cai also lamented its lack in the broader Chinese artist community. A second regret in the Chinese art scene, according to Cai, is the absence of female artists. For this reason, he included two women among the 14 artists in this exhibition, but both were Cai’s assistants. Since 2020, this situation began gradually changing. Aside from the previously mentioned global social movements, the empowerment of female entrepreneurs and collectors counts as another important factor. For example, in March 2021, Jiemian News (界面新闻), one of China’s largest financial media groups, reported two findings from a recent financial market survey: first, Chinese women on average have 7 percent more savings than their male counterparts; second, women are more prone to make long-term, stable investments.62 The following is an excerpt from that report: According to Fuda International’s first Global Women Investment Survey, Chinese women are the only female demographic in the world who have more savings than men. Over 73 percent of Chinese women say that they are actively making investment decisions. Around 60 percent of women in China identify themselves as investors, compared to 33 percent from the global population.63

Although no research or statistics have shown that this growing demographic of female investors and collectors is now conscientiously supporting women’s art, it can be inferred that the increase in wealth among

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women may be positively associated with their demand for art that addresses gender inequality. One direct example is Wang Wei 王薇, wife of billionaire collector Liu Yiqian and cofounder of the Long Museum. In 2016, the Long Museum hosted its first female-themed exhibition of 108 artworks by 100 women from both the mainland and the diaspora.64 Its four sections spanned ten centuries, with the earliest work by a Southern Song calligrapher and art by today’s female Chinese trailblazers, such as Lin Tianmiao, Xiao Lu 肖鲁, and Duan Jianyu 段建宇. Wang Wei spoke at the opening ceremony, commending these women for their contributions to society.65 Similar events happened more frequently after the #MeToo movement. In September 2019, three female artists who conserve traditional ink-­ painting methods, Zhang Yirong 张艺蓉, Qiao Yuan 乔圆, and Chu Chu 储楚, exhibited their works in Hong Kong.66 The curator, Daphne King Yao, said that its “Women + Ink | China + Hong Kong” theme intentionally paid tribute to female artists who integrate contemporary art into ink painting. The same year, some #MeToo-themed art events were able to evade the censorship of political authorities in major cities such as Shanghai.67 The exhibition The Voiceless Rise Up: #MeToo in China successfully finished its five-day run today at the British Centre Shanghai, attracting more than 800 registered visitors, after previous iterations of the show in Chengdu and Guangzhou were forced to close early by authorities. The exhibition, which opened on 30 November, was organised by a group of activists and featured mostly community sourced work about sexual assault in China. It was backed by the consulates of the UK, Canada, the Czech Republic, Norway and Sweden. … [It] included a large painting that listed major Chinese #MeToo cases, and a history of the movement in China on the adjacent wall. An enormous photograph composites seven of the most famous accused rapists in China, including the founder of the e-commerce site Jingdong, Liu Qiangdong.68

In July 2020, Wu Hung curated an exhibition titled “Female Space: Peng Wei” at Guangdong Art Museum, featuring 60 artworks by female artist Peng Wei 彭薇. As one article on Artron.net suggests, “the artist integrated life experiences, dreams, societal expectations of women and historical memories.”69 In November 2020, Chinese artist Chen Zihao 陈

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子豪 and Singaporean investor David Su launched the Longlati Foundation in Shanghai to support under-recognized art talents in China, including young artists born after 1990 and female artists.70 To promote this endeavor, the foundation hosted a joint exhibition of works by feminist artist Judy Chicago and Black artist Stanley Whitney. In 2021, starting on March 8 (the International Women’s Day), the Contemporary Art Committee of China’s Collectors Associated hosted an “Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary Female Artists of China,” featuring over 60 individuals.71 The preface to this exhibition was written as follows: In the past four decades, women’s art has seen development, especially after the widespread use of the Internet and our convenient access to Western art. Many Chinese female artists emerged with a wide variety of artworks. Their sensibilities and unique artistic perspectives also went beyond “common” art, creating their own unique artistic styles. From self-consciousness to self-­ expression, from everyday issues to social reflections, female artists have promoted social progress.72

China’s state-run English media has also begun to include more biographies of female artists. This kind of media often takes a closer look at Chinese-language social media to decide who has become “influential.” For example, CGTN features Beijing-based female artist Zhao Xiaoli 赵小黎, who uses recycled materials to create decorative artworks: “Zhao’s work has been popular on social media, with many of her clips getting viewed over one million times on platforms like Weibo and TikTok.”73 In many unconventional art themes, progress and pressure now coexist in China. For example, in 2019, queer art and LGTBQ shows still ran into official censorship that happened alongside local anticrime campaigns.74 The Art Newspaper covered a local event in Shanghai: “The annual crowd-­ sourced Pride Art exhibition, part of Pride Shanghai, lost its nightclub venue under government pressure just days before its 8 June opening. At the last minute it had to relocate to Polar Bear Gallery in M50, a contemporary art district, leaving no time to secure the necessary permits, which resulted in fines.”75 The authorities also removed some artworks. However, the fact that another queer-themed exhibition in Shanghai was able to successfully proceed in the same month shows that such an official crackdown may not be targeting the queer community per se.

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Conclusion Enduring structures of inequality along gender, class, and racial lines in the broader international art world have continued to shape China’s domestic art sector. Informal social norms work powerfully in the Chinese art world, which is rife with unwritten rules and conformity. Museums and curators also tend to favor a small number of artists. Media outlets gravitate toward a few stars. But pro-inclusion activism is also happening in China, where conscientious artists and curators practice intentional advocacy for diversity. Meanwhile, the Western influence of white male dominance is also expanding into China’s art institutions.76 The topics of diversity and inclusion are important for China’s art ecology. As Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels puts it, “The more voices we hear, the more complex, the more thoughtful we can be, the more impact we can have.”77 A new generation of educated artists, curators, and collectors now appreciate a greater variety of artistic pursuits toward wholeness in the human experience. This domestic trend is resonating with the global art community’s progress toward deeper reflection and inclusion. As one long-term art manager in the area of Asian art told me, even during these conversations, many have commonly observed that only Black female artists are receiving more attention, while representation for Asian women remains minimal. As the Art Newspaper reports, in 2019, female representation among artists in Asian galleries was at 19 percent, lower than the global average.78 This manager also raised the following questions: “How do you democratize the ecosystem of art if the only things that hit the news are a few major artists?”79 This relatively shorter chapter tries to address a few similar questions: How should the cultural sector make room for more and more artists in new or previously ignored categories? How should the art world facilitate creativity that traverses genres, identities, and social relationships? These are valuable questions for art market researchers as well.

Notes 1. Yao Lin, “Beaconism and the Trumpian Metamorphosis of Chinese Liberal Intellectuals,” Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 30 (2021), Issue 127, pp. 85–101. 2. Alice Goldfarb Marquis, The Art Biz: The Covert World of Collectors, Dealers, Auction Houses, Museums, and Critics (Contemporary Books, 1991), 3.

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3. Marjorie Garber, Patronizing the Arts (Princeton University Press, 2008), xiv. 4. Artnet Intelligence Report (Fall 2020), released by Artnet News in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, online publication, 5. 5. Artnet Intelligence Report (Fall 2020), released by Artnet News in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, online publication, 42. 6. Sarah Thornton, “How Has 2020 Impacted the Global Art Market?” Brink News, September 10, 2020. https://www.brinknews.com/ the-­pandemic-­hasnt-­greatly-­affected-­the-­global-­art-­market-­but-­the-­blm-­ movement-­has/. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Anna Brady, “‘One of the most shocking, tumultuous years on record’: art market figures reflect on 2020—and guess at what 2021 might hold,” The Art Newspaper, November 25, 2020. https://www.theartnewspaper. com/analysis/what-­they-­said-­the-­art-­market-­in-­2020-­and-­2021. 10. See https://artreview.com/power_100/2011// (accessed April 6, 2017). 11. Jonathan Harris, The Global Contemporary Art World (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 142. 12. Holland Cotter, “From Innovation to Provocation,China’s Artists on a Global Path,” New York Times, October 6, 2017. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/10/06/arts/design/guggenheim-­museum-­art-­and-­china-­ review.html. 13. Sheila Melvin, “A Beijing Exhibition on Art for the ‘Post-Human Era’,” New York Times, August 11, 2011. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/ 12/arts/12iht-­translife12.html. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Xi Mu, Annual Report of China’s Art Market, 2018–2019 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2020), 338. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 355. 19. Barbara Pollack, “How a Nonprofit Cut a Global Path for Young Chinese Artists,” New York Times, September 23, 2016. https://www.nytimes. com/2016/09/25/arts/design/adrian-­c heng-­k -­1 1-­a rt-­f oundation-­ chinese-­art.html. 20. Quoted in Artnet Intelligence Report (Fall 2020), released by Artnet News in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, online publication, 34. 21. Julian Shea, “Art Foundation Forges New Sino-British Relations,” China Daily, March 1, 2021. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202103/01/ WS603c447ea31024ad0baabb62.html. 22. Ibid.

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23. “A Snapshot of Globalization: Xin Dong Cheng and His Contemporary Art Collection” (东张西望三十年: 程昕东当代艺术收藏), Tsing Hua University Art Museum, December 12 of 2020 to March 12 of 2021. http://www.artmuseum.tsinghua.edu.cn/cpsj/zlxx/zzzl/lszl/202012/ t20201208_5102.shtml. 24. Laurence, Brahm, “Eye of the Collector: Curating 30 Years of Transformation,” China Daily, February 20, 2021. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202102/20/WS6030768ca31024ad0baa9e31.html. 25. “Sun Xiaochen, “’Quantum Art’ Is A New Research Area” (“量子艺术”一 个亟待研究的领域), Journal of China’s Academy of Social Sciences, November 11, 2020. https://www.zzhynh.com/m/view.php?aid=32703. 26. Zhu He, “Li Shan: He Moved An Experimental Field into the Museum” (李山: 他将试验田搬进了美术馆), Hi Art, No. 004, Nine Questions in Contemporary Art Market (当代艺术市场九问), 2018, 28–31. “Li Shan,” Asia Art Newspaper, September 30, 2019. https://asianartnewspaper. com/li-­shan/. 27. “Li Shan,” Asia Art Newspaper, September 30, 2019. 28. Ibid. 29. Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky and Zhang Er, The Art of Women in Contemporary China: Both Sides Now (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), 3. 30. Phyllis Teo, Rewriting Modernism: Three Women Artists in Twentieth-­ Century China, Pan Yuliang, Nie Ou and Yin Xiuzhen (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2016), 8. 31. “Flowers Blossom Young Chinese Artist’s Career,” China Daily, February 5, 2021. https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202102/05/WS601ce3a8 a31024ad0baa7881.html. Joyce Yip, “Goodwill Ambassador of Gay Art,” China Daily, January 1, 2021. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202101/22/WS600ade1ca31 024ad0baa487e.html. 32. “Flowers Blossom Young Chinese Artist’s Career,” China Daily, February 5, 2021. 33. Mary H.  Fong, “Images of Women in Traditional Chinese Painting,” Women’s Art Journal, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1996): 22–27. 34. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), 172. 35. The term feminist art refers to “works of art that reflect feminist perspectives and intellectual positions that place emphasis on the identity of women,” as defined by art historian Xu Hong. See Xu Hong, “Chinese Art,” in Caroline Turner (ed.), Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific (Sydney: Pandanus Books, 2005), 356.

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36. Xu Hong, “Walking Out of the Abyss: My Feminist Critique” (走出深 渊: 我的女性主义批评观), Jiangsu Pictorial 江苏画刊, 163, No. 7 (1994): 17. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Xu Hong, “Chinese Art,” in Caroline Turner (ed.), Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific (Sydney: Pandanus Books, 2005), 357. 40. Ibid., 357. 41. Werner, Chris. “The Half of the Sky.” In Die Hälfte des Himmels: chinesische Künstlerinnen der Gegenwart (Half of the Sky: Contemporary Female Chinese Artists), ed. Chris Werner, Qiu Ping, and Marianne Pitzen, 32–7. Bonn: Frauen Museum, 1998. 37n3. Quoted in Sashan Su-Ling Welland, Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 20. 42. Ibid. 43. Originally, the expression half the sky was coined by Mao Zedong, who credited women with holding up “half the sky.” 44. Sashan Su-Ling Welland, Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 19. 45. “Chinese Women Artists Exhibition,” China Daily, March 22, 2013. http://www.china.org.cn/arts/2013-­03/22/content_28324834.htm. 46. Francesca Dal Lago, “Personal Mao: Reshaping an Icon in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Art Journal, 58:2 (1999): 46–59. Also see Sasha Su-Ling Welland, Experimental Beijing: gender and globalization in Chinese contemporary art (Durham, Duke University Press, 2018), 7. 47. Holland Cotter, “China’s Female Artists Quietly Emerge,” New York Times, July 30, 2008. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/arts/ design/30arti.html. 48. Holland Cotter, “China’s Female Artists Quietly Emerge,” New York Times, July 30, 2008. 49. Connie Butler (ed.), Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010). 50. Zheng Xiaochuan, “Lin Tianmiao: Will Continue until I Am 100 Years Old” (林天苗: 继续做到100岁), Hi Art, No. 006, Trailblazing: Forty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art (乘风破浪: 中国当代艺术40年), (Beijing: Zhongxin Group Publishing, 2019), 70–71. 51. “Bound Unbound: Lin Tianmiao,” Asia Society exhibition, September 7 of 2012 to January 27 of 2013. https://asiasociety.org/new-­york/exhibitions/bound-­unbound-­lin-­tianmiao-­0. 52. “5 Chinese Artists Every Collector Should Own,” Artnet News, September 2, 2015. https://news.artnet.com/market/chinese-­artists-­to-­watch-

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­329513. Ben Rush, “Top 20 Contemporary Chinese Artists,” Asian Art Platform, May 18, 2016. https://asianartplatform.com/contemporary­chinese-­artists/. Henri Neuendorf, “Who Are the Most Popular Living Chinese Artists? The biggest names in Chinese art, ranked,” Artnet News, January 12, 2017. https://news.ar tnet.com/market/most-­p opular-­l iving-­c hinese-­ artists-­813356. “10 Chinese Contemporary Artists You Need To Know,” Christies.com, September 5, 2017. https://www.christies.com/features/10Chinese-­contemporary-­artists-­you-­need-­to-­know-8504-1.aspx. 53. Luise Guest, “10 Contemporary Chinese Women Artists You Should Know,” Culture Trip.com, January 12, 2017. https://theculturetrip.com/ asia/china/articles/ten-­c ontemporar y-­c hinese-­w omen-­a rtists-­y ou­s hould-­k now/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_ campaign=13011chinaart. 54. Barbara Pollack, “As China Evolves the Artist Cao Fei Is Watching,” New York Times, April 2, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/02/ a r t s / d e s i g n / a s -­c h i n a -­e v o l v e s -­t h e -­a r t i s t -­c a o -­f e i -­i s -­w a t c h i n g . html#:~:text=Fresh%20off%20the%20plane%20from,to%20warrant%20 an%20extensive%20survey. 55. Ibid. 56. Chris Horton, “Opening Doors in China for Creations Old and New,” New York Times, March 11, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/ 12/arts/international/opening-­doors-­in-­china-­for-­creations-­old-­and-­ new.html. 57. Sam Gaskin, “10 Artists Who Defined Chinese Contemporary Art,” Artsy. net, July 31, 2018. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-­editorial-­the-­top-­ 10-­chinese-­artists-­not-­named-­ai-­weiwei. 58. Deng Zhangyu, “Focus on the Ordinary,” China Daily Global, April 19, 2021. http://epaper.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202104/19/WS607ccacfa310 99a23435581c.html. 59. Ibid. 60. Sam Gaskin, “10 Artists Who Defined Chinese Contemporary Art,” Artsy. net, July 31, 2018. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-­editorial-­the-­top-­10­chinese-­artists-­not-­named-­ai-­weiwei. 61. Barbara Pollack, “Redefining Chinese Artists, in Qatar,” New York Times, March 18, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/arts/design/ redefining-­chinese-­artists-­in-­qatar.html. 62. Ma Xiaotian, “Financial Report ‘Her Power’: Chinese Women Have 7% More Savings Than Men,” Jiemian News, March 4, 2021. https://www. jiemian.com/article/5760828.html. 63. Ibid.

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64. Lisa Movius, “Shanghai’s Long Museum Takes Aim at Female Artists,” The Art Newspaper, August 2, 2016. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/ news/shanghai-­s-­long-­museum-­takes-­aim-­at-­female-­artists. 65. Ibid. 66. Snow Xia, “Chinese women artists challenge male-dominated ink painting with traditional and modern styles,” South China Morning Post, September 6, 2019. https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-­culture/article/3025984/ chinese-­w omen-­a rtists-­c hallenge-­m ale-­d ominated-­i nk-­p ainting?utm_ term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=article&utm_source =Twitter#Echobox=1567756663. 67. Lisa Movius, “#MeToo Show Manages to Evade Authorities in Shanghai,” The Art Newspaper, December 4, 2019. https://www.theartnewspaper. com/news/metoo-­china. 68. Ibid. 69. “Artron Index: July of 2020, Curator Wu Hung, Female Space: Peng Wei” (雅昌指数 | 月度(2020年7月)策展人:巫鸿 女性空间:彭薇), Artron.Net, January 15, 2021. https://news.artron.net/20210115/n1090574.html. 70. Elaine Yao, “Judy Chicago and Stanley Whitney art show in Shanghai promotes new foundation to support young Chinese artists and women artists,” South China Morning Post, November 13, 2020. https://www.scmp. com/lifestyle/arts-­culture/article/3109577/judy-­chicago-­and-­stanley-­ whitney-­a rt-­s how-­s hanghai-­p romotes?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_ medium=Social&utm_content=article&utm_source=Twitter#Echo box=1605244436. 71. “The Peach Blossom Land: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary Female Artists of China” (桃花源-中国当代女性艺术家邀请展), Yi Ciyuan (艺次元), reposted on Artron.net, March 14, 2021. https://news.artron. net/20210314/n1092676.html. 72. Ibid. 73. Shen Li, “From Trash to Art: Chinese Artist Redefine Old Items with Paintbrush,” CGTN, July 1, 2020. https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-­ 07-­0 1/From-­t rash-­t o-­a rt-­C hinese-­a rtist-­r edefines-­o ld-­i tems-­w ith-­ paintbrush-­RM4EQdywHm/index.html. 74. Lisa Movius, “LGBTQ Exhibitions and Works that Are Explicitly Out and Loud Are Magnets for Official Ire in Mainland China,” The Art Newspaper, July 1, 2019. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/pride-­shanghai­shows-­are-­hampered-­by-­venue-­issues-­and-­censorship. 75. Lisa Movius, “LGBTQ Exhibitions and Works that Are Explicitly Out and Loud Are Magnets for Official Ire in Mainland China,” The Art Newspaper, July 1, 2019.

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76. See “Why Are Western White Dues Getting So Many of China’s Top Museum jobs?” Artnet News, July 6, 2021. https://news.artnet.com/art-­ world/art-­industry-­news-­july-­6-­other-­stories-­1986177. 77. Quoted in Artnet Intelligence Report (Fall 2020), released by Artnet News in collaboration with Morgan Stanley, online publication, 50. 78. Anny Shaw, “Faire Share: Parity for Asia’s Female Artists Gains Ground at Art Basel in Hong Kong,” The Art Newspaper, March 29, 2019. https:// www.theartnewspaper.com/news/abhk-­female-­artists. 79. Interview with LC, March 24, 2021.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion

When anthropologist Ellen Hertz did her fieldwork on the Shanghai stock market in the late 1990s, she wrote that the particularity of the phenomenon “stems not from its immaturity or from lack of experience on the part of its participants but from its insertion within a complex and quite particular political economic system.”1 This observation aligns with what I am trying to describe in this book about China’s art market. The art market’s development has been profoundly shaped by the nation’s political and economic trajectories and by global art trends. Since the early 2000s, more observers have pointed to China’s fast-­ growing art sector as one that was blending into the “increasingly globalized arts fraternity.”2 In 2010, US art critic Barbara Pollack wrote that “some sort of future of the art world will undoubtedly take place in China.”3 Although the world’s interest and disinterest in Chinese art has fluctuated, depending on the global economic climate and the strength of China’s regional economies, a general trend has been that China’s art market and Chinese art are gaining prominence on the global stage. Therefore, I intended to write a history of China’s art market that included not only the nation’s economic, social, and cultural history but also a global history of art consumption. Just as Noah Horowitz once argued, the flourishing of art collecting has been “inseparable from the global art museum boom” since the late 2000s, including the formation of new art institutions around the world.4

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Ma, China’s Art Market since 1978, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34605-7_9

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How China’s art market, as a product of a central-planning system, made its comeback to the global stage is a fascinating story to tell. It is also a contoured one that involves understanding the shifting structures of modern Chinese society and the radical changes that it underwent. This book paints a broad picture of the main players in China’s art market, including policymakers, artists, traders, curators, collectors, and critics. Over the course of four decades, a new art ecosystem emerged and developed into its sophisticated contemporary form. Most importantly, the experience of viewing and consuming art and the relationships between art professionals and political authorities have been transformed. Today, the local sites of China’s art market have diversified to include not just the flower-and-bird market (huaniao shichang 花鸟市场), including dealer shops in each city, galleries, auction houses, and the Internet. China’s art market has become embedded in an elaborate and powerful complex of artists, commentators, dealers, collectors, scholars, and museums that provide interlocking support for cash and assets to change hands. Regional, cultural entrepreneurship through unofficial art movements and trading (as shown in Chaps. 3 and 4) has accumulated to such a critical mass that it has pushed local governments to revise policies and reckon with new cultural values (Chap. 5). Even the central government as a whole engaged with global art exchanges (Chap. 6). Although art market researchers claim that the contemporary global art scene is “postnationalist,” the unexpected and prolonged COVID-19 crisis has significantly altered this narrative arc as nations defended their own interests in closing borders and competing for vaccines. While the global pandemic is still ongoing as I finish this volume, it has certainly reshaped China’s art industry in profound new ways that require further research. This book also argues for the importance of cultural entrepreneurship for contemporary Chinese society. Along with the growth of China’s private economy, artists and traders learned new ropes of the market and adapted their ways to new demands, both domestic and international. Their self-institutionalizing efforts and experimentation in the informal economy provided successful paths for more to follow suit, leading an entire art ecosystem to flourish. Sometimes local authorities also exhibited entrepreneurial potential, making space for the market’s spontaneous order. Moreover, a cultural understanding about art or “a belief in art” has also shifted. Sociologist Sarah Thornton describes the contemporary art world as “a loose network of overlapping subcultures held together by a belief in art.”5 This depiction also characterizes the Chinese art market in

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the most recent decade. Art appeals to today’s Chinese consumers with its promise of creativity, excellence, and inclusion. Like the West’s, China’s current art world is structured around “nebulous and often contradictory hierarchies of fame, credibility, imagined historical importance, institutional affiliation, education, perceived intelligence, wealth, and attributes such as the size of one’s collection.”6

China’s Institutional Change and Its Art Economy Art markets in the West have long benefited from established infrastructure. Participants, from artists to curators, from dealers to critics, have together nurtured social norms of evaluation. In comparison, China’s art market had a truncated history until postreform cultural entrepreneurs reinvented its formal and informal institutions. From the late 1950s to the 1980s, China had been deprived of the economic infrastructure to manage interactions between artists, traders, and consumers. The central-­ planning economy incorporated art professionals and institutions into its grid-like control, leaving little room for market-pricing mechanisms. What used to flourish in China’s art market before 1949 had all but vanished, including agents to negotiate terms for artists, intermediaries to appraise artworks, dealers to exhibit art, and legal professionals who were acting as agents between art sellers and buyers. Since the reform began in the 1980s, Chinese artists had been left to discover for themselves how to work in the newly restored market economy. Incrementally, informal activities in the art sectors regained vitality in the 1990s. These included artists and traders’ self-institutionalizing efforts and experimentation. They often relied on social networks to exhibit and promote art. But such activities eventually reached a critical mass, making unofficial art a fad for a younger generation. Like the developments of other market segments in post-Mao China, the expansion of the art market is closely related to land and property, which fundamentally reshape the state–society relationship.7 Since the 2000s, local government officials have also encouraged more market-oriented entities to facilitate the interactions and exchanges between art producers and consumers. Eventually, the central government’s body of legislation related to property rights and promotional strategies for the creative industries pushed the art sector on the fast-track to development. As two scholars of China’s market transition summarize,

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The emergence of markets played a crucial role in enabling entrepreneurial activities. First, the gradual replacement of bureaucratic allocation by market mechanisms involves a shift of power favoring producers relative to redistributors. Most importantly, the emergence of markets gives producers a greater set of choices. They can develop new organizational and ownership forms and can informally work out new institutional arrangements for cooperation and exchange outside the socialist system of state allocation. … [T]he greater autonomy afforded by decentralized markets enables and motivates entrepreneurs to develop informal arrangements that build from the ground up the economic institutions of a private enterprise economy.8

The reinvented art market in China is unlike the art market of ancient days because artists have since lost the “privileged status of the literati tradition and its moralizing art.”9 Contemporary Chinese society has been largely disenchanted with either spiritual, moral, or political forms. The average Chinese no longer expects ideals of morality from the nation’s artists as ancient Chinese did with the literati. The days when zealous Red Guards looked to Soviet-leaning artist-intellectuals for profound values are also passed. All art forms have been encompassed in a bigger game of postmodern consumerism, in which artists now compete with video game producers and pop singers for consumers’ attention. But even today, China’s art market remains a largely gray market, where the majority of selling and buying happens in the informal economy. Recent dynamics in China’s art market have been closely related to its economy. As one scholar writes in 2005, “It is hardly possible to overstate the growing economic power of China. It produces more steel than the United States and Japan combined; it is the world’s largest recipient of foreign direct investment; it has the world’s fastest-growing car market; it is developing the world’s largest electricity grid.”10 China’s economic infrastructure has been improved to accommodate growth of the creative industries. As Terry Smith summarizes, “The privatization of contemporary art infrastructure is a striking feature of Chinese developments, reflecting the fact that art galleries, museums, and art districts were conceived in the 1980s and went live in the 1990s, when neoliberalist economics, conservative politics, and specularist values dominated public sphere throughout the world, as visual arts fell under the spell of a burgeoning market for contemporary art.”11 A better term to understand the change is the development of “intermediaries.” Mukti Khaire distinguishes between two types of formal intermediaries: market intermediaries and

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nonmarket intermediaries. The first kind are “directly involved with the market and incorporated into production and distribution systems and decisions.”12 Art critics, reviewers, and publishers belong to this category of people who shape the perceived value of artworks in the market. The second kind are “responsible for reproducing stable tastes and preferences among consumers.”13 This group of entities includes museums and art education institutions that “engage in discourse that shapes the general dispositions and norms in society.”14 Social networks and norms from these intermediaries make up the informal institutions that influence the entire ecosystem of the art market. They make up the intangible but indispensable part of the cultural economy. As philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto famously writes, “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.”15 The commercialization of art as a global trend gave Chinese artists their long-desired autonomy; thus, the possibility for international collaboration became limitless. By the time of writing, neither chronic political censorship nor a global pandemic has appeared to stall mainland Chinese art professionals from furthering ongoing partnerships with their international counterparts. People may find the art space in China surprisingly open and fluid. Or to put it another way, international capital seems to be a more powerful force for China’s art market than political censorship by the Chinese regime. In fact, many one-off exhibitions, exchanges, and training programs have been developed into long-term collaborations. Chinese art institutions have embraced foreign expertise, whose advice helps remedy structural problems caused by the former’s lack of experience and stagnant organizational culture. For example, in early 2019, the Tate in London signed a memorandum of understanding to provide management support to the future Shanghai Pudong Museum of Art, which opened in July 2021.16 But marketization has limits in every country. Globally speaking, resistance to the marketization of art has been driven by a range of cultural factors. As a few European scholars have pointed out, in European countries where the size of the art market is small and unable to offer a basis for a well-functioning art world, states and the public sector have remained central players.17 In larger European countries such as France and Germany, where the art sector has been at the mercy of free market forces, many point to “fundamentally incompatible” pathways between market capitalism and the art world.18 They argue that market forces have harmed

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artistic autonomy. As sociologist Arnold Hauser also points out, the trading of art is most susceptible to “the fundamental evil” of a market economy: “It changes the work of art … into the substratum of a barter value. It is no longer judged by its aesthetic quality or by the artistic rank of its creator but according to the economy and exchange value of the particular artist, style, or genre on the art market.”19 Besides, apart from its aesthetic function, art also has economic value or serves political ideals. The production and circulation of art is often embedded in structural changes in a nation’s political economy. As Janet Wolff puts it, “Culture is not just a reflection of economic and social structures. … It is mediated by the complexity and contradictory nature of the social groups in which it originates; … it is mediated by the nature of operation of aesthetic codes and conventions, through which ideology is transformed and in which it is expressed.”20 According to similar discussions in the West, we see that it would be impossible to expect China’s art market to help artists and traders achieve the best outcomes without the regulation and intervention of political actors. After all, China’s economic reform has been a gradualist one under the guidance of the governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The challenge of reinventing China’s art market, therefore, lies in how its participants maintain aesthetic autonomy despite twin forces: the political constraints imposed by Party bureaucracy and the unrelenting forces of a postsocialist market economy with its accompanying consumeristic trends. Bestselling Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang 张小刚 also describes the experience as a dilemma: “Art needs a real market. The rise of contemporary art market has indeed disintegrated some kind of power in art forms and promoted the value of art. But the market later expanded quickly … [and] has enabled opportunism in the form of being obsessed with success.”21 He even claims that “[a]fter marketization, the belief in art has been destroyed.”22 According to the official rhetoric of the Chinese government, however, autonomy is never mentioned. Rather, the emphasis has been on unity, harmony, and national development. As Laikwan Pang argues, A simple discourse of cultural freedom tends to dichotomize the state and the private sector, and it ignores the state’s active participation in the forging, as well as the control, of the domestic creative industries. Creative industries are increasingly highlighted in the development discourse not only in terms of their contributions to the GDP, but also in terms of their

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overall functions of originating, selecting, and retaining new ideas, which ultimately facilitate the flow of information and ideas and promote the development of open systems of coordination.23

As Richard Kraus points out, the fact that Mao’s successors have shown no particular interest in the arts actually helped the new developments in the art world after the 1980s.24 In addition to this lack of aesthetic ambition, Joel Andreas also points out that these later leaders were mostly technocrat-engineers, as the majority of the members of the Standing Committee of the Party’s Political Bureau were.25 Kraus also further rebukes “those who argue that China has had only economic reform, but no accompanying political reform, have too limited a conception of politics.”26 Western researchers neglect the fact that even within the Chinese Communist Party are conservative and progressive wings. The former faction tends to reinforce legitimate boundaries and considers “creativity” and “pluralism” risky agendas for a color revolution. CCP-affiliated think tanks and the Ministry of Propaganda are the main contributors to this fear-driven discourse. But the progressive, reform-oriented wing seeks to integrate China’s own cultural history into modern-day aspirations by encouraging more spontaneity in the creative sector. Researchers note that in postcommunist countries, like today’s Russia, “culture ceases to be either the cement that secures the ideology of the state or the axe that breaks it down; it becomes instead an aspect of lifestyle and consumer choice.”27 Therefore, the artist’s role shifted from the extremes of “the upholder of the regime or prophet of doom” to “a minor part of the economy.”28 Kraus also insightfully highlights the main story of artists in mainland China, like those of the rest of the Chinese intellectuals, as “a protracted struggle for professional status and security.”29 Although still ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, a good measure of pragmatism is guiding cultural policies toward favoring economic gains. This shift does not mean that politics no longer commands art making or trading. In today’s China, while “art for the Party’s sake” may have become an outdated slogan, “art for the nation’s sake” would still command some enthusiasm from both Chinese intellectuals and average consumers.30 Nationalism also provides Chinese artists a solid and much-needed collective identity. For some, this means boosting China’s new image and identity. According to Wang Meiqin, “Cultural nationalism, like marketization and globalization, has played an important role in the overall transformation of the Chinese art world. Essentially, it brings unofficial

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contemporary art into the scope of official art while challenging the definition of the art establishment in China.”31 Indeed, works of art have always served as “vehicles of social meaning” that both represent and realize these collective identities.32 Influenced by a rich but no less traumatized history, Chinese artists’ creative expressions have a cultural unconscious, a term coined by Pierre Bourdieu.33 Appreciation for their aesthetics requires interpreting the ideological, historical, social, and material processes behind such expressions. As Mary Bittner Wiseman writes, even this search for “Chineseness” in art making, a response to the global ascent of China’s art world, is also a reflection of complicated historical reckoning: It is an art that has lost its moorings in its own history and in Western modern art. Functioning below the level of discourse, where the murmurings of classical China and the modern West can be heard along with the gradually fading voice of Mao, it is the laboratory in which criteria for something’s being art and someone’s being Chinese are being forged.34

Moreover, when opening up to the world and all possibilities of syntheticism, there is also the risk of “more conspicuous entanglement with Western and other outside cultural attitudes and practices” and profit-­ driven opportunism.35 As Gao Minglu comments, “Chinese contemporary art became subject to the opportunism of the market and the curatorial vision of foreign countries. … [It] entered into a world in which the rich competed savagely for reputation and where artistic spirit had been abandoned. Flexibility of political structure and the power of capital tamed the artist.”36 Another Chinese scholar hopes that Chinese art “represents a unique visual discourse that challenges both the mindless pursuit of modernity and the shackles of government surveillance.”37 In sum, for art makers and dealers in China, paradox seems to characterize the relationships between the political and the economic; the international and the local; and the trendy and the truly creative. Liu Kang argues that China’s new cultural formation should be understood “as a hybrid postrevolutionary culture that embodies the fundamental tensions and contradictions of globalization.”38 Terry Smith also writes that “thinking about art in China today might usefully acknowledge its location within a third discursive space, that of postcolonial and transnational art theory and criticism,” because this cultural landscape happens in “a nation in transition in the context of all other nations also in transition.”39

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Cultural Entrepreneurship and Its Role in Social Order A central thesis of this book claims that the fate of China’s art market has been shaped by both institutional change and cultural entrepreneurship. The latter concept and its impact on China’s social order is crucial to this book. One equivalent example in the Western art world is the story of how Impressionism was first frowned upon and even banned for its deviation form conventions but later became accepted and coveted. Cultural entrepreneurship is “a particular form of cultural agency” and “a pluralistic approach to the art and business of culture characterized by active participation in multiple modes of cultural production.”40 As economist John McMillan writes, “spontaneous evolution is the main driver of markets[, whose] strength … lies in their adaptability, their restless reinvention.”41 This applies to cultural entrepreneurs in China. In addition, the history of cultural entrepreneurship in China’s art world is intertwined with the processes of postcommunist liberalization and a renewed wave of global integration. Pierre Bourdieu uses the concept of “the cultural field” to address the same dynamic.42 The structure of a field is constituted by the social relations among its participants. A cultural field is thus dynamic and fluid because of its participants’ successes and frustrations and because of the natural mobility caused by age and death. Equally important is the inherent logic in a cultural field that values artistic creativity above financial success. As Bourdieu puts it, “The literary and artistic world is so ordered that those who enter it have an interest in disinterestedness.”43 Nonmonetary rewards, such as peer recognition and artistic quality, often play important roles in the cultural field. This logic distinguishes the art market from other sectors. It also complicates the workings of mere price-­ related mechanisms. With regard to the art market as a field of power, there has been a constant struggle “for the monopolistic power to impose the legitimate categories of perception and appreciation.”44 Because symbolism is inherent to cultural goods such as works of art, consumers rely on intermediaries (art critics, reviewers, and awards) to interpret and evaluate these cultural goods. The transformation of symbolic value to commercial value, known as the “value-construction” process, is also influenced by cultural trends and social norms.45 Therefore, “the successful creation of a market for a radically new cultural good is indicative of the occurrence of a cultural change.”46 This applies to the

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emergence of art intermediaries in China, including professional curators, professionals at private museums, and art critics. Together, they have produced a cultural shift. What was derided in the 1950s had become acceptable and even cosmopolitan by the 2010s. That is why this chapter reflected on the interplay between the state, market forces, artistic entrepreneurship, and popular taste patterns. Art researcher Xi Mu writes that the Chinese need to be reminded that “market mechanisms can be used to promote social aesthetics for the general public.”47 As Alexandra Munroe writes, “Art’s role as a catalyst to unmask the mechanisms of power and authority, including text and image, shifted art’s status from object to idea to action and recast the artist as an agent of social change.”48 Art professionals as cultural entrepreneurs may bring positive change to a social order, according to Izabel Galliera’s analysis: “consciously collective and, most often, horizontal modes of organization, involving collective decision-making processes and participant-led programmes … are visible and powerful enough to enact and pursue their own goals within the space of civil society, together or in parallel with official institutions.”49 Informal social networks served as catalysts of these processes. Artistic creativity demands expressive means that utilize informal social networks to fulfill the public function of art making. East or West, we all expect art and artists to deliver something substantial, but in reality, all artists dance with chains. Just as Richard Kraus argued in 2004, China as a society has moved toward “a new cultural order in fits and starts, interspersed with occasional retreats.”50 Participants in China’s art market have always faced constraints. Their ability to “creatively destruct” is subject to the institutional environment. As Leung and Wang put it, “Individual creativity only moderately corresponds to cultural differences in innovation at the firm and national levels.”51 The growth and the disturbed development of artists’ colonies as negotiations of urban space for art serve as the best examples. For artists and art traders to act as trailblazing cultural entrepreneurs, their acts of “destructive creation” entail disrupting the equilibrium in an interlocking network of culture, commerce, and consumption. It means changing the “cultural status quo.”52 China’s “soft power” strategy will continue to impact the art market. Creativity as a social process is “premised on the idea that exposure to and interaction with others stimulates the generation of new ideas.”53 Artists have the best potential to practice such creativity with no consumer or market in mind.54 The artist-entrepreneur must apply innovation, branding, and social networking to the artistic creation process.55

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Furthermore, the fusion of technology and art, which is taking the art world by storm in China these days, is likely to revolutionize the cultural sphere. Take crypto technology, for example. As German filmmaker Hito Steyerl puts it, “Blockchain governance seems to fulfill the hopes for a new social contract.”56 Technology is now playing a big role in the ways that art makers in China produce and present their works.57 First, with new developments in image technology, computing technology, and even biotechnology, the scope of new media art has lately always been in a flux of change and expansion, using new visual techniques, such as video, new materials, interactive, game play, bio-art, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and so on, which supply young art consumers something more accessible than what traditional art forms used to provide. Major events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo have become the largest stages to display new art media (e.g., interactive picture scrolls, movable type printings, and 3D animation artworks) since the 1960s. Second, apart from inspiring artistic creation, multimedia, Internet, and communication technologies also assist in the circulation of artworks, pushing boundaries and bringing new vitality to the market. A large consumer base promises the continuation of this technological innovation trend. Since the late 2010s, China has seen a distinctive ecommerce culture assisted by the widespread use of the Internet via smart phones. In 2018, for example, Alibaba’s Taobao platform (with 620 million users) recorded over USD 30 billion in sales on a consumer holiday known as Singles’ Day (November 11), dwarfing Black Friday sales in the United States. Meanwhile, some artists also critique this trend of hyperconsumerism through their new art.58

Cultural Pluralism: A Local and Global Mandate for the 2020s The idea of global cultural pluralism is premised on the assumption of a “common humanity,” according to Martin J. Powers.59 This foundation is particularly important to the history of art because the works of art are “artifacts of human consciousness” that embody a range of rich substances, including “the conundrum of personhood, or creativity,” and the “structural dynamics giving rise to each.”60 Chinese art and artists are also faced with the lesson of self-­identification in the global art market. This era of China’s art market is marked by a

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transformational change in connecting with the world that is reminiscent of the way local art markets in Europe developed a century ago, when transportation infrastructure connected the continent like never before.61 In an interview with the New York Times, an art market consultant, Thomas Galbraith, referred to China’s art market as follows: “There couldn’t be a clearer indication of the globalization of the market.”62 But according to Lü Peng, Chinese artists are faced with unusual challenges in this new phase of postneoliberal globalization: “When they lose opportunities in the West, Chinese artists feel a loss of value. But when it is up to the Westerners to choose, they are suspicious of ‘cultural colonization.’”63 The double fear of devaluation and deculturalization have always occupied their consciousness. Many are trying to address the following question: What does a healthy relationship between China’s art market and the West look like? Many historical questions remain to be explored: How can fine art produced during China’s Cultural Revolution be evaluated, and how can the United States’ Cold War–style historiography of Chinese art, which art historian Craig Clunas points out as “seductive but ultimately dangerous,”64 be tempered? The international art world has become habituated to criticizing the Chinese regime’s authoritarianism, and it is now time to change that perspective. The same applies on the other side of Chinese art professionals. Some argue that the Western art world has been constructing a postcolonialist identity for Chinese artists.65 Others suspect a political agenda behind museums’ and foundations’ practices of collecting Chinese art: “Cold War America gave immense support to abstract art and artists because it promotes freedom, creativity, vibrancy and advocacy, which were on the opposing ends of Soviet Socialist Realism.”66 As Michael Sullivan correctly summarizes, for the Chinese, their pride in China’s heritage is “strong and deep” and could not be ignored.67 Indeed its tendency toward “more narrowly-conceived nationalist or culturally-­essentialist accounts” should not be minimized either.68 But as many Chinese scholars propose, there are opportunities for both dimensions of a two-way cultural exchange to become constructive and pluralistic.69 Like their Western counterparts, artists in mainland China now face challenges once they begin engaging with daily social life: yielding to commercialization versus artistic autonomy and tailoring their art to the practical needs of the masses versus nurturing like-minded groups.70 These common struggles may help the Western art community engage more

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with Chinese artists and traders. Indeed, national boundaries are becoming more and more porous. Because the first two decades of the new millennium saw one of the greatest booms in the history of the global art market, Noah Horowitz points out the “calculated entrepreneurialism and international arc” of this landscape: a global contemporary art economy in which boundaries between collecting and investing are increasingly blurred, throwing the art market’s value-­ added machinery into plain view: a business strategy is identified (in New York); inventory is bought at a trade discount (in China); provenance, visibility, and critical legitimacy are secured through museum exhibitions (in Denmark and Israel); the body of work, now a museum-quality “collection,” is sold at a premium (to a New York dealer and a leading international auction house); and this collection is quickly resold at auction (in Hong Kong and New York).71

Technology also helps not just by bringing Chinese art to the world but also by correcting some Western biases toward cultural pluralism. In 2018, Google Arts and Culture (GAC) collaborated with the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing to launch an online collection of 300 digitized artworks by masters such as Xu Beihong: “GAC uses powerful photographic technology that allows users to zoom into artworks at brushstroke-level detail, allowing users to explore the hidden depths of works much more closely than they would in a museum or gallery.”72 GAC director Amit Sood thinks that this project may correct “a very American and European bias” in the cultural sector.73 Other scholars, such as Dave Joselit, also affirm that the globalization of art could “redress Western modernism’s cultural dispossession of the Global South.”74 Joselit further analyzes the prospect of this positive change: Fundamental to globalization … is a highly consequential cultural recalibration: the West “regains” its heritage as a particular rather than universal set of traditions, while the Global South reasserts its dynamic traditions as contemporary. Global contemporary art is one primary focus of this recalibration, and thus, … it is an arena in which “cognitive justice,” understood as engagement with and respect for myriad ways of knowing and experiencing the world, may be demanded.75

Domestically, Chinese art researchers are pushing for more transparency in art trading. Many art investment platforms now promise

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transparency, to attract new consumers. It is also a sign that China’s art market has become less elitist and more pluralistic.76 For positive changes to happen more organically, many art professionals now realize that pluralism is a must-have strategy.77 Social norms currently value diversity in every sector. This also applies in the area of art museums. As Karen Smith, director of OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal at Xi’an, told the media, Recent decades have seen a proliferation of new museums in cities across China, with varied impacts. Examples such as Chengdu’s A4 Museum, Guangzhou’s Times Museum, our own multi-city OCAT group, Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum and Beijing’s UCCA Center for Contemporary Art are defining the ways in which “museum” can transpose from the Western origin to a functional present-day iteration that works for China. … We believe in building a truly globalised world; China’s fifth of humanity must be a full part of it.78

Young artists in today’s China are developing a global identity. As Barbara Pollack, author of Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise, writes of her observation after having interviewed over 100 young Chinese artists, these individuals insist on being “global artists” partly because they have grown up during a time when China was increasingly becoming the center of globalization. The theme of social progress also characterizes them. As Pollack describes, They have experienced their country changing from an agrarian society to a land of mega-cities, and even within those cities the neighbourhoods of their childhoods have been redeveloped beyond recognition. As globalisation hit home, family traditions were supplanted by bootleg DVDs and Starbucks coffee. To embrace a “post-passport identity” was not a capitulation to the West but an embrace of a transformation that occurred specifically in China.79

The younger generations of China’s cultural entrepreneurs are also taking on more social responsibilities on behalf of the rest of the world. After all, China’s art economy affects raw materials in other parts of the world. For example, the demand on China’s furniture-making industry led to overdeforestation in the countries that provided its raw materials. Over the past two decades, for example, the demand for expensive and collectible mahogany or sandalwood furniture has exhausted the wood of Laos, Burma, and Cambodia, including both legal logging and illegal logging.80

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Award-winning Chinese photographer Lu Gang spent a month documenting the African deforestation crisis and realized that the wood cut by African laborers ended up in China, where it was sold for a much higher price.81 In tangible ways like this one, the growth in China’s art market has created ripple effects on the rest of the Global South.

Notes 1. Ellen Hertz, The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market (Cambridge University Press, 1998), xi. 2. Alison Caroll, “Choppy Waters: Arts Infrastructure and Networks in Asia,” in Caroline Turner (ed.), Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific (Sydney: Pandanus Books, 2005), 548. 3. Barbara Pollack, The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures in China (Timzone 8, 2010), 21. 4. Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton University Press, 2011), 14. 5. Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), xi. 6. Ibid., xi. 7. You-tien Hsing, The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5. 8. Victor Nee and Sonjia Opper, Capitalism from Below: Markets and Institutional Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2012), 12–13. 9. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), 205. 10. Glen St. J.  Barclay, “Geopolitical Changes in Asia and the Pacific,” in Caroline Turner (ed.), Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific (Sydney: Pandanus Books, 2005), 15–16. 11. Terry Smith, Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019),140. 12. Mukti Khaire, Culture and Commerce: The Value of Entrepreneurship in Creative Industries, 57. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 58. 15. Arthur Danto. 1964. The Artworld. The Journal of Philosophy 61(19): 571–584. 16. Gareth Harris, “Tate to Send Its Collection to Shanghai’s Forthcoming Pudong Museum of Art,” June 11, 2019. https://www.theartnewspaper. com/news/tate-­will-­send-­its-­collection-­to-­china-­under-­new-­partnership-­ with-­the-­pudong-­museum-­of-­art.

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17. Victoria D. Alexander, Samuli Hägg, Simo Häyrynen, and Erkki Sevänen (eds.), Art and the Challenge of Markets: Natural Cultural Politics and the Challenges of Marketization and Globalization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), viii–ix. 18. Ibid. 19. Arnold Hauser, The Sociology of Art, trans. by Kenneth J.  Northcott (Routledge, 1982), 506. 20. Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), 71. 21. Liu Xia, “Zhang Xiaogang: I Had Nothing in the First Half of My life, and I Tasted the Cruelty of the Art Industry in the Past Decade” (张晓刚:前半 生一无所有, 后面十年体会尽艺术行业的残酷), Hi Art, No. 006, Trailblazing: Forty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art (乘风破浪:中国当 代艺术40年), (Beijing: Zhongxin Group Publishing, 2019), 68–69. 22. Ibid. 23. Laikwan Pang, Creativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offenses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 93. 24. Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China, 22. 25. Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers, 1. 26. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), vii. 27. Linda Moss, “Encouraging Creative Enterprise in Russia,” in Colette Henry (ed.), Entrepreneurship in the Creative Industries: An International Perspective (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007), 145. 28. Ibid. 29. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), 143. 30. Ibid., 205. 31. Wang Meiqin, “The Art World of Post-Deng China: Market, Globalization, and Cultural Nationalism,” in Jason Kuo (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art and Film: Theory Applied and Resisted (Washington, DC: 2013), 25–48. 32. Cesar Grana, Meaning and Authenticity: Further Essays on the Sociology of Art (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1989), 21. 33. Bourdieu, 1971, 180. 34. Mary Bittner Wiseman, “Gendered Bodies in Contemporary Chinese Art,” in Mary Bittner Wiseman and Liu Yuedi (eds.), Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Chinese Art (Brill, 2011), 127. 35. Paul Gladston, Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (London: Reakton Books, 2014), 243–244. 36. Gao Minglu, “Changing Motivations of Chinese Contemporary Arts since the Mid-1990s,” Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vol. 11, No. 2&3 (2012): 209–221.

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37. Ming Cheung, “Contemporary Chinese Art and the Dream of Globalisation,” Social Semiotics, 24:2 (2014): 225–242. 38. Liu Kang, Global and Cultural Trends in China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 2014), 4. 39. Terry Smith, Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 128. 40. Christopher Rea, “Enter the Cultural Entrepreneur,” in Christopher Rea and Nicolai Volland (eds.), The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900–65 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015), 10. 41. John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets (W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), x. 42. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, Randal Johnson, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), with a useful introduction by the editor, Randal Johnson. See also Helmut K. Anheier, Jürgen Gerhards, and Frank P. Romo, “Forms of Capital and Social Structure in Cultural Fields: Examining Bourdieu’s Social Topography,” American Journal of Sociology 100(4) (January 1995), 859–903; and Michel Hockx, “The Literary Association (Wenxue yanjiu hui, 1920–1947) and the Literary Field of Early Republican China,” China Quarterly 153 (March 1998), 49–81. 43. Bourdieu, Field, 40. 44. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Production of Belief: Contribution to An Economy of Symbolic Goods,” Media Culture Society (1980) 2: 261. 45. Mukti Khaire, Culture and Commerce: The Value of Entrepreneurship in Creative Industries, 10. Also see Pierre Bourdieu. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. 46. Mukti Khaire, Culture and Commerce: The Value of Entrepreneurship in Creative Industries, 22. 47. Xi Mu, Annual Report of China’s Art Market, 2018–2019 (Beijing: China Economic Publishing House, 2020), 7. 48. Alexandra Munroe, “A Test Site” in Alexandra Munroe, Philip Tinari and Hou Hanru (eds.), Art and China After 1989: Theatre of the World (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2017), 30. 49. Izabel Galliera, Socially Engaged Art after Socialism: Art and Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe (I. B. Tauris, 2017), 435. 50. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Rowan & Littlefield, 2004), viii. 51. Kwok Leung and Jie Wang, “A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Creativity,” in Christina E.  Shalley, Michael A.  Hitt, and Jing Zhou (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 261–278.

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52. Ibid., 30. 53. Jill Perry-Smith and Pier Vittorio Mannucci, “Social Networks, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship,” in Christina E. Shalley, Michael A. Hitt, and Jing Zhou (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 205–224. 54. Mukti Khaire writes that as a norm, participants of the art market as a whole see “a somewhat romantic sheen to the concept of the solitary artistic genius creating masterpieces without regard to the market.” See Mukti Khaire, Culture and Commerce: The Value of Entrepreneurship in Creative Industries, 136. 55. Javier Hernandez-Acosta, “Cultural Entrepreneurship: Building from the Artists’ Experience,” in Giep Hagoort, Aukje Thomassen and Rene Kooyman (eds.), Pioneering Minds: On the Entrepreneurial Principles of the Cultural and Creative Industries (Delft: Eburon Academic Press, 2012), 31. 56. Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (New York: Verso Books, 2017), 80. 57. Liu Xia, “Many Think Technology Is the Breakthrough Point for Contemporary Art” (科技, 很多人认为这是当代艺术的一个突围点), Hi Art, No. 004, Nine Questions in Contemporary Art Market (当代艺术市 场九问), 2018, 12–18. 58. Josh Feola, “China’s Tech Boom Has Inspired A Wave of Internet-­related Art,” MIT Technology Review, December 19, 2018. https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/19/239766/chinas-­tech-­boom-­has-­inspired-­ a-­wave-­of-­internet-­related-­art/. Richard James Davis, “Five Chinese Artists Question Future of Technology in New York Guggenheim Exhibition,” South China Morning Post, May 20, 2018. https://www.scmp.com/culture/arts-­entertainment/ article/2146813/five-­c hinese-­a rtists-­q uestion-­f uture-­t echnology-­ new-­york. 59. Martin J.  Powers, “Introduction” in Martin J.  Powers and Katherine R.  Tsiang (eds.), A Companion to Chinese Art (John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 11–12. 60. Ibid. 61. Jan Dirk Baetens and Dries Lyna, “Towards an International History of the Nineteenth-Century Art Trade,” in Jan Dirk Baetens and Dries Lyna (eds.), Art Crossing Borders: The Internationalisation of the Art Market in the Age of Nation States, 1750–1914 (London: Brill, 2019), 1–2. 62. Chris Buckley, “Sotheby’s New Major Shareholder is Already a Power in Chinese Art,” New York Times, July 31, 2016. https://www.nytimes. com/2016/08/01/arts/design/sothebys-­c hen-­d ongsheng-­c hina-­ art.html.

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63. Lü Peng, Contemporary Art in Twenty-first Century: 2000–2010 (Shanghai: Century Publishing Group, 2012), 1. 64. Craig Clunas, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences (Princeton University Press, 2017), 216. 65. Wang Yuechuan and Ding Fang, “Overseas Hype about Contemporary Art and the Chinese Identity: Dialogues on the Syndrome of China’s Contem porary Avant-Garde Art” (当代艺术的海外炒作与中国身份立场——关于 中国当代先锋艺术症候的前沿对话), Art and Literature Research (文艺研 究), 5 (2007): 63–73. 66. Yuan He, How A Nation Intervenes into Art: A Study of the National Endowment of Art in America, a master’s thesis, Southwestern University, 2021, page 36. Quoted in Ding Yuehua and Huang Zuolin, Choices Given and Made in China’s Contemporary Art: Market, Understanding and Cultural Psychological Analysis 中国当代艺术的被选择和选择: 市场、理解 与文化心理分析 (Chongqing: Southwestern Universtiy Press, 2016), 68. 67. Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art (University of California Press, 1989), 188. 68. David Clarke, Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 4. 69. See, for example, Xinmin Liu, “Spectacles of Remembrance: Nostalgia in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Journal of Contemporary China, 13:39 (2006), 311–321. 70. Gao Ling, “A Survey of Contemporary Chinese Performance Art,” in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 181. 71. Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market (Princeton University Press, 2011), 19. 72. Yang Jing, “When Tech Meets Art: Google Brings Chinese Art to the World,” CGTN, June 22, 2018. Reposted at ECNS.cn, http://www.ecns. cn/news/feature/2018-­06-­22/detail-­ifyvmiee7352760.shtml. 73. Yang Jing, “When Tech Meets Art: Google Brings Chinese Art to the World,” CGTN, June 22, 2018. 74. David Joselit, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020), xvii. 75. Ibid., xviii. 76. Zhao Li, “Market Change under the Pandemic” (疫情之下的市场之变), in Art Market Research Center, China’s Art and Wealth White Paper 2020, 98. 77. Dong Mengyang, “China Needs Shanghai, and the World Needs Beijing” (中国需要上海, 世界需要北京), Hi Art, No. 001, Fluctuations and Return: 2016 China Contemporary Art Annual Report (震荡与回归: 2016 中国当 代艺术年度报告), 137.

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78. Karen Smith, “We Cannot Build a Truly Globalised Art World without China,” The Art Newspaper, September 1, 2020. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/we-­c annot-­b uild-­g lobalised-­a rt-­w orld­without-­china. 79. Barbara Pollack, “Quintessentially Chinese Art Gives Way to a Global Identity,” The Art Newspaper, September 14, 2018. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/from-­chinese-­ness-­to-­a-­global-­identity. 80. Lisa Movius, “Photographer Lu Gang Reveals How China’s Love of Bloodwood is Destroying African Forests,” The Art Newspaper, November 24, 2017. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/photographer-­lu-­ guang-­r eveals-­h ow-­c hina-­s -­l ove-­o f-­b loodwood-­i s-­d estr oying-­ african-­forests. 81. Ibid.

Glossary

Personal Names Ai Weiwei  艾未未 Cai Guosheng  蔡国庆 Cao Fei  曹斐 Chen Danqing  陈丹青 Chen Dongsheng  陈东升 Chen Duxiu  陈独秀 Chen Yifei  陈逸飞 Chen Zhen  陈箴 Ding Yi  丁乙 Fang Lijun  方力钧 Fu Baoshi  傅抱石 Gao Ertai  高尔泰 Gu, Wenda  谷文达 Huang Binhong  黄宾虹 Kang Youwei  康有为 Li Keran  李可染 Li Xianting  栗宪庭 Li Zehou  李泽厚 Lin Fengmian  林风眠 Lin Tianmiao  林天苗

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Ma, China’s Art Market since 1978, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34605-7

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GLOSSARY

Liu Xiaofeng  刘小枫 Lü Peng  吕澎 Lu Yang  陆扬 Luo Zhongli  罗中立 Miao Ying  苗颖 Pan Tianshou  潘天寿 Pan Yuliang  潘玉良 Qi Baishi  齐白石 Wu Guanzhong  吴冠中 Wu Hung  巫鸿 Wu Shanzhuan  吴山专 Xi Mu  西沐 Xu Beihong  徐悲鸿 Xu Zhimo  徐志摩 Yang Jiechang  杨诘苍 Yu Youhan  余友涵 Yue Minjun  岳敏君 Zao Wou-Ki  赵无极 Zeng Fanzhi  曾梵志 Zhao Xiaoli  赵小黎 Zhang Daqian  张大千 Zhang Huan  张洹 Zhang Xiaogang  张晓刚 Zhang Yirong  张艺蓉 Zhong Ming  钟鸣

Movements and Institutions Yan’an Forum on Literature and Arts  延安文艺座谈会 “Destroy the Four Olds” (po sijiu)  破四旧 Scar Literature (shanghen wenxue)  伤痕文学 Great Leap Forward  大跃进 Cultural Revolution  文化大革命 The Open Air Stars Art Show (lutian xingxing meizhan)  露天星星美展 The Sent-Down Movement  上山下乡 Xidan Democracy Wall movement  西单民主墙运动 Wild Grass Art Society (yecao huahui)  野草画会 Grass Grass Society (caocaoshe)  草草社 Southwest Art Group (xinan yishu qunti)  西南艺术群体

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“85 New Wave” (85 xinchao yishu)  八五新潮艺术 Central Academy of Fine Arts  中央美院 China Guardian Auctions  中国嘉德拍卖 China’s National Broadcast and TV Bureau  中国国家广播电视总局 Xileng Auction  西泠印社拍卖 Poly International Auction  保利国际拍卖 Tiancheng International  天成国际拍卖 Yongle Auction  永乐拍卖

Journals in Chinese China Pictorial  《中国画报》 Hi Art  《Hi 艺术》 Today  《今天》 Jiangsu Art Journal  《江苏画刊》 Meishu  《美术》 Fine Arts in China  《中国美术报》 Economic Observer  《经济观察报》 Dushu  《读书》 Art Market  《艺术市场》 Collecting  《收藏》 Collectors  《收藏家》 Chinese Collections  《中国收藏》 Elephant Council  《大象公会》(digital) China Daily  《中国日报》 Jiemian  《界面》(digital)

Internet, Ecommerce, and Social Media Terms Artron.Net  雅昌艺术网 SuNing  苏宁 Guomei  国美 Taobao  淘宝 Tmall  天猫商城 JD.com  京东 Mini Auction Hall  微拍堂 WeChat  微信 Alibaba Group  阿里巴巴集团

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Glossary

Special Chinese Terms chuguo re  出国热 (going abroad fever) wenhua chanye  文化产业 (cultural industries) yahui  雅贿 (elegant bribery) xinfu  新富 (nouveau riche) tuhao  土豪 (vulgar and rich) guohua  国画 (Chinese ink-painting technique) meixue re  美学热 (aesthetics fever) wenhua guanli  文化管理 (cultural management) yishu qiye  艺术企业 (art businesses) duli cezhanren  独立策展人 (independent curators) wenhua anquan  文化安全 (cultural security) Jianbao  《鉴宝》电视节目 (appraising treasures) Tianxia baozang  《天下宝藏》电视节目 (treasures under heaven) chanye shengji  产业升级 (industrial upgrading) xingui  新贵 (new aristocrats) xinrui  新锐 (new blade) chengxiang jiehebu  城乡结合部 (rural–urban continuum) yishu yanshengpin  艺术衍生品 (art derivatives) lipin jingji  礼品经济 (gifting economy) wenchuang chanpin  文创产品 (culture and creativity products) huaniao shichang  花鸟市场 (flower-and-bird market)

Index1

A Aesthetic/aesthetics, 3, 11, 17, 31, 33, 38, 44, 51, 53, 55, 58, 59, 68, 111, 120, 136, 138, 199, 218–220, 222 Art zone/colony, 15, 16, 25n81, 63–67, 86–89, 110, 111, 114, 116, 120, 133, 149, 150 Auction, 1, 3, 5–7, 11, 14, 17, 19, 22n18, 23n36, 31–33, 46n21, 79, 82, 91–93, 102, 109, 117, 119, 120, 129–131, 134, 137–139, 141–147, 149, 151, 153n3, 167–169, 172–175, 177–181, 183, 194, 196, 214, 225 C Central planning, 8, 41, 63, 87, 214, 215

Chinese artists, 2, 3, 5–12, 15–17, 20n7, 21n15, 32, 36, 37, 39, 42, 44, 45, 52, 56, 64, 66, 67, 69, 75–81, 83–85, 87–91, 102, 105, 109, 110, 112–115, 117, 118, 120, 128n113, 129–132, 135, 142, 143, 146, 147, 176, 180, 181, 183, 193, 195, 200–203, 215, 217–220, 224–226 Chinese politics, 3–4, 9, 24n48 Collector, collecting, 3, 5, 9, 11–13, 15–17, 20, 29, 30, 38, 40, 46n11, 69, 79, 81, 84, 89, 93, 103, 104, 109, 111, 117, 129–152, 170, 171, 175, 183, 197, 202, 203, 205, 213, 214, 224, 225 Colonialism, colonial, colonialist, 8, 13, 17, 33, 44, 51, 90, 113, 135, 147 Commercialization, commercialized, 14, 75–93, 135, 136, 144, 152, 217, 224

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. Ma, China’s Art Market since 1978, Worlds of Consumption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34605-7

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INDEX

Communism, communist, 4, 8–10, 12, 15, 17, 33–36, 38, 40, 42–44, 56, 57, 61, 67, 76, 85, 134, 136, 195 Consumerism, consumer culture, 9, 16, 26n95, 54, 68, 78, 81, 101–120, 216 Consumption, 13, 14, 16, 17, 29, 83, 85, 86, 115, 130–137, 152, 171, 213, 222 Contemporary Chinese art, 4, 5, 15, 76, 77, 81, 83, 84, 105, 106, 112, 119, 133, 143, 146, 200 COVID-19, pandemic, 1, 11, 18–20, 27n98, 167–183, 198, 214, 217 Cultural policies, 10, 12, 34, 36, 37, 43, 45, 51, 63, 86, 105, 171, 219 Cultural trends, 7, 82, 103, 221 D Diversity, 18, 19, 54, 58, 76, 193–195, 198, 205, 226 E Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial, 2, 4–19, 56, 68, 75–93, 168, 175, 214, 216, 221–223 F Financial crisis, 1, 91, 102, 111, 118, 120, 129, 169, 175 Financialize, financialization, 4, 5, 19, 130, 142–146 Foreign investment, 119 G Gender, 179, 193, 195, 198–204 Geopolitics, geopolitical, 9, 11, 77

Globalization, globalized, 4, 7, 8, 11, 18, 19, 31–33, 51, 65, 76, 77, 89, 90, 92, 115, 119, 120, 140, 143, 147, 176, 197, 200, 201, 213, 219, 220, 224–226 Gradualist reform, 51–74, 91, 218 H Housing market, 14, 107, 110, 169 I Inclusion, 193–205, 215 Inequality, 33, 78, 90, 151, 173, 194, 203, 205 Institutions, institutional, 4–18, 23n36, 27n98, 27n102, 33, 36–41, 44, 52, 53, 55–61, 63, 64, 66, 75, 77, 83, 84, 88, 91, 103, 105, 106, 108, 110, 114, 119, 135, 137, 144, 146, 148–150, 169, 172, 178, 179, 195, 205, 213, 215–222 L Luxury goods, 13, 16, 17, 91, 133 M Mao, Maoism, Maoist, 2, 10, 21n11, 34, 36, 38–40, 42, 44, 45, 50n76, 55–58, 66, 67, 102, 199, 200, 219, 220 Market reform, 36, 51–69, 75 N Neoliberalism, neoliberal, 9, 12, 13, 52, 89, 150, 178 Nouveau riche, 14, 16, 17, 107–109, 137

 INDEX 

P Patronage, patron, 3, 9, 12, 30, 33, 36, 38, 152 Pluralism, pluralist, 19, 45, 58, 63, 103, 177, 193–205, 219, 223–227 Political culture, 9, 15 Private economy, 8, 11, 214 Private entrepreneurs, 81, 82, 90, 92, 108, 174 Private museum, 27n98, 109, 139–141, 172, 174, 179, 222 Propaganda, 34, 35, 41, 61, 80, 106 Property rights, 8, 9, 12, 13, 67, 90, 101, 105, 107, 124n54, 175, 176, 215 R Real estate, 17, 22n27, 90, 107–109, 111, 120, 133, 136, 137, 139, 140, 145

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S Soft Power, 5, 101–120, 129, 135, 222 T Trade war, 11, 150–151 Trauma, 10, 15, 39, 43, 53, 59, 67 U Unofficial, 42, 51–69, 76, 82, 89, 108, 214, 215, 219 Urbanization, urbanism, 15, 86–89, 106, 110, 115, 120, 176, 201 Urban space, 3, 16, 89, 109–114, 152, 222 W Wealthy class, 13, 38, 108, 109, 141, 174