New art, new markets [Second edition.] 9781848222816, 1848222815, 9781848222823, 1848222823

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Title Page
Half Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Unsafe Havens
3. East Asian Orthodoxy
4. China
5. Hindustan
6. Aryana
7. Hispania
8. South East Asian Authoritarianism
9. Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

New Art New Markets Iain Robertson

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New Art New Markets

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This edition of New Art, New Markets published by Lund Humphries in 2018 Lund Humphries Office 3, Book House 261A City Road London EC1V 1JX UK www.lundhumphries.com A New Art from Emerging Markets by Iain Robertson first published by Lund Humphries in 2011 This edition of New Art, New Markets © Iain Robertson, 2018 All rights reserved ISBN Paperback: 978–1–84822–217–5 isbn eBook (PDF): 978–1–84822–281–6 isbn eBook (ePUB): 978–1–84822–282–3 isbn eBook (mobi): 978–1–84822–280–9 A Cataloguing-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and publishers. Every effort has been made to seek permission to reproduce the images in this book. Any omissions are entirely unintentional, and details should be addressed to the publishers. Iain Robertson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work. Image credits British Museum: 2, 18; Cynthia Gutierrez and Proyecto Paralelo. Photograph by Francisco Kochen: 3; Damián Ortega and kurimanzutto, Mexico City: 21; Eden Breitz / Alamy Stock Photo: 5; Hanart, Hong Kong and Juming Museum: 1; Iain Robertson: 7; Indigo Gallery, Philadelphia: 16; Ink Studio, Peking: 12; Lisson Gallery, London: 8, 10; Michael Goedhuis, London: 9, 11; Milani Gallery, Brisbane: 20; Myeong Ho Lee and Yossi Milo Gallery, Tokyo: 6; Natalia Anciso: 19; Paz Errázuriz: 22; Rithika Merchant: 15; Ronny Sen: 13; Sotheby’s Hong Kong: 4; Sundaram Tagore Gallery, NY: 17; Tin AW Gallery, Manila: 24;Vadehra Gallery, New Delhi: 14 Copy edited by Ian McDonald Designed by Crow Books Set in Bembo Std and Brandon Grotesque Printed in the UK

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Contents

Acknowledgements 6 1 Introduction

7



2 Unsafe Havens

20



3 East Asian Orthodoxy

35

4 China

61

5 Hindustan

95

6 Aryana

126

7 Hispania

159



190

8 South East Asian Authoritarianism

9 Epilogue

221

Notes

223

Bibliography

236

Index

249

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Acknowledgements

Lucy Myers commissioned this, the second and greatly amended version of A New Art from Emerging Markets.  The title is not all that has changed. I am extremely grateful for the editorial guidance of  Tom Furness and James Piper at Lund Humphries and I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Ian McDonald, the finest copy editor I have worked with. Jos Hackforth-Jones, the joint CEO of Sotheby’s Institute, generously allowed me the time to research and write the book. The book and the ideas behind it have profited enormously from conversations and readings over the years by any number of friends and colleagues: Sylvia Robertson, S.K. Mak, Zhao Neng, Derrick Chong, Chang Tsong-zung, Sundaram Tagore, Roxanne Zand, Edward Gibbs, Robert Bradlow, Colin Sheaf, Marcus Verhagen,  David Bellingham, Amir Gajari, Anne Farrer,  Tom Woo,  Anthony Downey,  Anders Petterson, Claire Brown, Gareth Fletcher, Yasmin Railton, Marios Samdanis, Jeffrey Boloton and Luis Afonso. I also benefited hugely from talks with the Taiwanese sculptor Yang Ying-fen (1926–97) and the art historian Michael Sullivan (1917–2013).  The artists that I have come into contact with during the course of my research have all assisted me in the final realisation of the text. I am particuIarly indebted to Ye Fang, Guan Yong, Shi Guowei, Luo Kuo-sung, Gu Gan, Cao Fei, Li Jin, Lee Jaehyo, Myeong Ho Lee and Han Tao. I am thankful also to the galleries who have tracked down artists who have granted me permission to use their images: Michael Goedhuis Gallery; Lisson Gallery; Larasati auction house; Sundaram Tagore Gallery; Pace-Wildenstein; Hanart TZ; Mary Boone Gallery; and, of course, Sotheby’s. Iain Robertson April 2018

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Introduction: New World Order There are a few foreigners with full bellies who have nothing better to do than try to point their fingers at our country. China does not export revolution, hunger or poverty. Nor does China cause you headaches. Just what else do you want? Xi Jinping, 2009, Mexico The Chinese nation has stood up, grown rich and become strong- and now it embraces the brilliant prospects of rejuvenation . . . it will be an era which sees China moving closer to centre stage and making greater contributions to mankind . . . The Chinese nation is a great nation: it has been through hardships and adversity but remains indomitable.  The Chinese people are a great people; they are industrious and brave and never pause in pursuit of progress. Xi Jinping, 2017, Beijing, 19th Peoples’ Party Congress

It was at a colloquium convened by the Bahrain Ministry of Culture in a hotel off Berkeley Square in London just before Christmas in 2017 that I had an opportunity to ask a panel of art experts the following question: Can they name any collectors today who have good taste? The replies expressed incredulity. Good taste? What is good taste? Taste is relative; one person’s notion of tasteful is another’s idea of gaudy or perverse.  The consensus was that the ownership of taste, good or bad, belonged to another era. Curators and critics today use words like serious, important, ironic and significant to measure the merit of an art object.  The trouble is that this very rarely has anything to do with aesthetics. Beauty, proportion, elegance, skill and intelligence play less and less of a role in the final value of the work of art.  At 7

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New Art New Markets the risk of appearing quaint, there is much to be learnt today from nineteenthcentury aestheticians like John Ruskin, who spoke (A Joy for Ever – 1914) of the prevalence of societal pomp and how an accumulation of gold and pictures would end in these treasures being scattered and blasted in national ruin. Perhaps that time is upon us; certainly, if the art market fails to heed the call for greater universal utility it will become irrelevant. Fashion, which mothballs the collections of previous generations in order that the shock of the new – often constructed in 1 haste and in poor materials – may project a cultured rather than a cultivated self, has impugned artistic integrity.  When a thing of beauty is no longer a joy forever, to corrupt the opening lines of Keats’ poem, its loveliness decreases and it will pass into nothingness. It is not a relative notion of beauty that has replaced a study of aesthetics; it is human pride. Beauty is still created, but today’s buyers prefer to pay for something else. V   ery often too – and here again Ruskin has something very pertinent to add – the sum of enjoyment is measured in quantity and insufficient attention is devoted to a single, wonderful thing for the sake of itself. It was then, and is more than ever today, a symbol of rampant consumerism. ‘For remember’, writes Ruskin, ‘the price of a picture by a living artist . . . represents, for the most part, the degree of desire which the rich people of the country have to possess it.’ The direction of this book is very firmly in opposition to this tendency. It discovers a new art in societies that reach back into the past and reject globalisation and, increasingly, nationalism in favour of deep-rooted, indigenous cultural traits. I will be looking at art that is inspired by an array of notions, from hereditary legitimacy and religious conviction to historical precedent. I encourage collectors to be discerning, and attempt to save them from the barrage of modern platitudes. In this book, the ideas of a global culture and an international artist are regarded as relics of clouded thinking. I have, therefore, decided to banish the term ‘emerging markets’.  This terminology was, after all, a response to globalisation.  A thought occurred to me as I looked out at the educated and sophisticated group that attended our colloquium in Mayfair.  What have the British actually to teach their former dominions about cultivation, good conduct and civil behaviour? And I wondered, how much longer would this elegant group seek approval and take its cues from the West? The philosopher Oswald Spengler, writing during and just after the war to end all wars (1914–18), observed, We men of the Western culture are, with our historical sense, an exception and not a rule.  World history is our picture and not all mankind’s. Indian and 8

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Introduction: New World Order Classical man formed no image of a world in progress, and perhaps when in due course the civilisation of the West is extinguished, there will never again be a Culture and a human type in which “world history” is so potent a form 2 of the waking consciousness. It is ironic that by the time Spengler published his magnum opus on civilisations, the great war for (Western) civilisation had all but ended it. So, was Spengler a soothsayer? Did he sense the underlying fragility of Western civilisation or was he understandably blinded by the senseless carnage of the First World War? His time frame allowed for a far longer decline of the West; he erred on the side of caution. But his prediction of a period of Western globalisation dominated by one powerful nation, before the Fall, appears to have come to pass much sooner than he expected – except that Spengler’s intellectual epiphany imagined a superpower untainted by money. Prophecies that are overly specific run the risk of undermining a valid thesis. Spengler may have been right in his overall assessment of the future: China may be the new America, and money may be a means to an end rather than an end in itself under a Sino World Order. The passage that I have quoted above contains much of his thesis and supports the intention of this book.  The historical sense of the West to which Spengler ­alludes­is the numerical marking of past time and the separation of life from death; the invention of a world of something for the living and a world of nothing for the dead. How inelegant (and bleak) and unusual is that view compared to any other held before. Our picture of world history shows the all-too-human tendency to see it through a European, modern and rational lens.  Where, asks Spengler, is the concept of equilibrium and rest in this assessment of civilisation? He continues, why do cultures have to be interconnected and related? Can they not just expire? In short, the collective principle of globalisation is a fallacy. Instead, it is simply the consequence of illegitimate, maritime conquests. Epochs of far-reaching civilisation are, by contrast, authentic because they connect to a proximate reality. Progress has replaced the notion of a cultural Kunstwollen – an epoch’s tendency to drive artistic development, rather than a series of interconnected links in a chain of cultural evolution – with a feeling of false optimism that anything new, from technical wizardry to malformed ideas, is worth subscribing to.  The faith that we have in human ingenuity to provide solutions to life’s mystery is childlike. Finally, Spengler observes that self-consciousness – the centrality of the self, and the constant restatement of its position within the great pantheon of world civilisations – has never been as acute as it is in the era of Western domination. Spengler asks, what is the value of 9

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New Art New Markets looking at the world from the position of a fixed pole? Today, I would suggest that we may think that we have readdressed the imbalance of cultural perception, but in globalisation we have merely invented another Western pole.Yet the West persists in its delusion that globalisation provides a level playing field on which to evaluate a myriad of human activities.  And what is the ultimate contribution of globalisation to human value? Spengler would say that it is money. Its global economy, he writes, 3 simply wastes mankind away. In place of thinking in goods, we think in money. Hong Kong is one of the world cities in which ‘the remnants of a dying civilisation’s higher mankind’ concentrate.  This is certainly how Spengler saw the global metropolises of his day, most of which still thrive. In a surprisingly prescient commentary, which seems to anticipate so much of the politics of the current moment, he defines an elite as ‘a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful’ and ‘deeply contemptuous of the countryman’ (Spengler 1991 [reprint], p.25). On a stiflingly hot day at the height of a Hong Kong summer, a year before the Crown territory was returned to China, I marvelled at how truly Spengler had hit the nail on the head. Mei Yang and I arrived at the ground-floor entrance of one of the giant skyscrapers in Central, Hong Kong’s business and retail heart.  We had flown from Taipei with a precious cargo and a clear objective.  The gaudy brashness of Hong Kong’s mirrored and gilded high-rises, wrapped in serpentine and aerial walkways reminiscent of ivy clinging to trees, was in sharp contrast to Taipei, which had only just begun work on its massive urban-infrastructure project. Much of  Taipei City would be a construction site for the next decade. In the summer months, the only parts of town that offered any relief from the searing heat were the meandering lanes of Ximending, home to massage parlours (referred to as ‘Barbers’ shops’), wholesale retailers, small fabric vendors and specialist snack bars, while the arcades of the Japanese quarter provided shade to shoppers and thrill seekers. Otherwise, locals were forced to the city’s edges, which had yet to feel the full impact of development. So, the sea breeze and air-conditioned malls of Hong Kong were actually very welcome. Once inside the building’s icy-cold reception area, we asked for the offices of  T.T.  Tsui (Tsui Tsin-tong). Stepping out of the lift onto a level halfway up the tower, we were led into the interior. Behind an imposing desk in a large, light room with views over the harbour sat Mr Tsui. He had a summer cold, the downside of air-conditioning, and two assistants stood on either side of him proffering tissues. He smiled broadly, stood up and moved over to capacious chairs beside his desk, gesturing for us to join him.  We settled down, accepted his offer of tea and admired the Chinese antiques and brush 10

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Introduction: New World Order paintings that filled his office.  At the time,  T.T.  Tsui’s star shone very brightly indeed. He was extremely wealthy and had donated a substantial sum of money to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His eponymous museum in the Bank of China Building housed one of the world’s finest collections of privately owned Chinese art.  There was even a rumour that he would be the first postcolonial Chief Executive of Hong Kong. Mei Yang reached for the bundle beside her chair, placed it on the table that separated us and pushed it in front of Mr Tsui.  An assistant bent down to unwrap the package and reveal a large bronze buffalo head engraved with archaic symbols.  The gift was quietly acknowledged and spirited away. It was only then that I noticed three other bronzes in the room very similar to the one that we had brought.  The Hong Kong oligarch was a collector of the work of the sculptor Yang Ying-feng, Mei Yang’s father, and we had just made a gift to him of one of the most impressive examples from the artist’s middle years. It was only weeks later that I understood the real reason for the visit and the gift.  We received a fax, which simply said that Mr Tsui would be happy to contribute to the success of an exhibition of Mr Yang’s sculptures in London by offering his (financial) assistance.  An art transaction can often be quite oblique, and this is particularly so in Asia.  A year later, at the beginning of the market for Political Pop oil painting in China, trading was more straightforward.  A collector or dealer from Hong Kong,  Taiwan, Europe or the United States might be introduced to a community of artists, dine with them and afterwards visit their studios, often based in an art academy.  Within the hour, the visitor might leave with half a dozen canvases rolled up under his arm and the artist would pocket a bundle of dollar bills. That was Hong Kong and Taiwan then. Mainland Chinese cities were, by contrast, dirty, confusing and troublesome.  That was 20 years ago.  Today, a visit to the best parts of Beijing or Shanghai transports the visitor into another world: not Hong Kong, London or New York, but a monstrous metropolis of fine roads, superb infrastructure and connectivity. But above all, one is struck by a sense of safety and the overwhelming self-confidence, almost insouciance, of its inhabitants. China, one feels, no longer heeds the West; it is set fast to engage and influence the world.  The Chinese era has been 100 years in the making. Now it has arrived and, I argue, will be the bladehead that propels all new markets, influences and revives dormant civilisations and brings to an end the age of globalisation. The early years of the Chinese art market illustrate how the sentiment of exchange in Asia has dramatically altered since the introduction of open-cry auctions to Japan  in the early 1970s and, a few years later, to Taiwan, China and South 11

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New Art New Markets 4

Korea.  Asian art, in common with Western art, now has a precise monetary value and, in addition, anyone – including artists – can see what something or someone is worth. Such a system was anathema to the conservative and protective Tokyo Arts Club, which since the beginning of the century had shielded dealers, artists and even collectors from the market’s inequities.  The traditional Japanese connoisseur expected to make a loss on any art he sold back to his dealer, and it was thought to be distasteful to seek financial gain from one’s collection.  Today this feeling extends to 5 contemporary art, especially the world of the Japanese-dominated Nihonga community.  Taiwan’s Qing Wan Society, a latter-day Society of Dilettanti, also operates behind closed doors, and some of its members are avid collectors of contemporary art. Prices are never revealed. In South Korea, until very recently, art dealers had to agree to honour the high, gratuitous prices that senior artists invented for their work. It was their responsibility as the intermediary to carry the loss that resulted from the differential between the artist’s valuation and the price that a collector was willing to pay. Indonesia’s market for art was ignited by the Dutch auction house Glerum, and India’s by an American who sold his vast collection through Sotheby’s in New York.  The post-revolutionary global Iranian market for art came to life with the aid of Western-style galleries and art fairs operating out of the Gulf states, and the intervention of the two largest international auction houses. Its pre-revolutionary market had been the construction of a proto-Western kingdom that spanned but two reigns. China’s oil painters, the most successful of all, rode a wave of American and European art speculation for half a dozen years.  Wherever you cast your eyes, a different part of the world reveals its ‘treasures’ to the global community, where they are priced, categorised and digested – very often before being cast aside. But today, the mood of these societies has changed, and this is reflected in the work of some of their most interesting artists.  A sentiment that could not have been expressed with any degree of confidence before might now be openly voiced. Societies as large and influential as China’s and India’s are today declaring their cultural independence from the international art market.  The global standard by which 6 their ‘unclaimed’ artists have been judged is being questioned.  The universally accepted ‘gold standard’ that judges the aesthetic properties of international contemporary art and measures those judgements by a market price may not, in future, 7 be the yardstick by which the value of core art from new markets is determined. Two developments over a relatively short period have contributed to this fresh mindset in the societies that comprise the new art markets.  The first is economic.  The city states of Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai and Qatar are highly 12

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Introduction: New World Order efficient conduits for the world’s commodities.  The ‘Asian Tigers’, South Korea and Taiwan, are now very wealthy. China, in particular, has been growing its economy at a rapid pace for 40 years and is now the engine room for international growth. Many states in the Middle East, in common with Asian countries and particularly China, have accumulated vast reserves of foreign capital, which they have invested in overseas assets and in their own cultural and urban infrastructures. Japan, which is clearly not a new market but still an extremely rich and sophisticated nation, sits propitiously close to some of the world’s most dynamic economies. The biggest change since I wrote A New Art from Emerging Markets in 2011 has been China’s desire to engage with the world outside its national borders. China is not about to shoulder the world’s responsibilities, but it is about to substantially increase its influence on its neighbours and on those states that form part of its 8 ‘One Belt One Road’ economic, political and cultural vision. China can expand but still remain culturally insular. It will stay resolutely Chinese but also become an international force. India is the other economic giant.  The chauvinism of India has a religious character, which is mixed with a degree of xenophobia. It is a condition that also colours the politics and culture of Iran, North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf. South America and South East Asia are the losers in this changing order. But they, too, find stability through the legitimacy of religious creed and the hereditary principle enforced by authoritarian rule. In fact, varying forms of authoritarian government are the norm in new markets. The twin forces of a dynamic economy and the disengagement of rising economic powers from their concomitant global responsibilities – which, in 2011, I identified as leading towards cultural protectionism – are now, I believe, directed towards revanchism. China’s art market is nationally led, but its influence will be increasingly felt around the world as its economic and ideological power grows. China’s primary concern is still to funnel the world’s supply of exceptional Chinese works of art to the homeland, but it has much more confidence today in its contemporary expression. India still seeks solutions to its moribund national market, and makes overtures to the West’s cultural specialists. I believe that this approach will fall out of favour on the subcontinent along with that other inherited Western apparatus, liberal democracy. Iran, meanwhile, is being pushed by the United States into the global hinterland.  This can only encourage it to pursue a path that it has followed since the revolution of 1979: a fate beyond the West and towards China.  The future of the rest of the states and regions that I examine in this volume is much less clear.  Taiwan’s destiny will be decided in the resolution that it reaches with 13

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New Art New Markets China, and to a lesser or greater extent this applies to the rest of East and South East Asia.  The Gulf and Iran could be twin beacons: economic and cultural generators in North Africa, the Levant and the Middle East.  The regeneration will have a numinous quality in most of North Africa, the Middle East, parts of South East Asia and in India. South America is beleaguered, more so than ever following the accession of a protectionist President of the United States. Does its future, too, lie with China? The points of Western influence dotted around the world – Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong and Doha – appear more forlorn than at any time since the beginning of the West’s era of colonisation.  They are no longer the cultural or economic reference points for the regions in which they sit. The great upside, I hope, of this new world order is that we will see art that displays integral elements which reflect the civilisations on which respective contemporary cultures are based. Gone will be the art fairs and auctions that dangle a global product with affixed ethnic, national and regional characteristics in front of an avaricious buyer.  The calligraphic bronze sculptures, such as Heech in a Cage (2005) of the Iranian Parviz Tanavoli (b.1937), and the repetitive character exercises of the Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie (b.1969), require a visceral understanding of meaning and practice in Persian and East Asian cultures.  The Korean painter Lee Dong-youb’s (b.1946) minimalist canvases require a prolonged experience of the act of meditation to reveal their fundamental purpose.  The Taiwanese sculptor Ju Ming’s Taichi (Pair) (1996, fig.1) series is admired universally for its sculptural form and the principle of the importance of the flow of energy (chi or qi). But the practice of  Taichi is inextricably linked to the formation of Chinese characters, and ultimately to calligraphy.  A great Chinese brush painter will ensure that the 12 regular meridians that correspond to the body’s main organs are free from obstruction, so that his full energy can be transferred into the formation of his calligraphy.  A work like Ya rahim (Oh Merciful) (2000, fig.2) by the Chinese Muslim, Haji Noor Deen Mi Guangjiang (b.1963), in which ya rahim and asma’ al-husna (the Beautiful Names of God) are written in the style of Arabic known as sini (Arabic script written by Chinese Muslims) means something to Arabs, Iranian and Chinese, but little to Westerners.  The script appears to resemble cursive-style Chinese characters, but is in fact Arabic.  To the left of the script, the artist has inscribed in Chinese the date ‘Winter month 2000’. He has signed his name in Arabic and added his personal seal, which bears his name in Chinese.  There are examples of sini script on Ming-dynasty porcelain and metalwork, and they exhibit, like this scroll, a cultural conversation and exchange between two ancient and sophisticated forms of expression that lie outside the compass of the global market. 14

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Introduction: New World Order The idea expressed in calligraphy made of wood with black lacquer, gold and mother-of-pearl inlay has hung for nearly a century over the Asian galleries in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the United States. It reads in four large characters yu gu wei tu (keeping company with the past). It was created by the Chinese painter–calligrapher Wu Changshi (Wu Changshuo, 1844–1927).  The artist’s avowed aim was not to embalm the past or feel encumbered by tradition but to bring new meaning to antiquity. Ink painting, the world’s oldest painting tradition, provides for increasing numbers of Chinese artists a counterweight to the rapid changes in their lives today, but it is not the only medium in which artists can respond to history. In 2006, the Boston Fine Arts Museum invited ten Chinese artists to examine and create a work in direct response to a painting or object in the museum’s Asian art collection. Xu Bing (b.1955) chose the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (first published in 1679) – a compilation of stock motifs drawn from the painting of past masters. Xu photocopied each page of the manual onto transparent sheets, cut out the motifs and pasted the elements into a landscape design of his own imagination.  The collage was then carved onto woodblocks, which were used to print the final scroll. In the same way that he challenged received assumptions in his installation, Tianshu (Book from the Sky) (1988), which has 4000 false Chinese characters suspended in scrolls above the viewers’ heads, so in Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll (2008–10) he asks his audience not to take anything for granted and to avoid complacency and cultural stasis, but at the same time to learn from the past and seek meaning in their lives from antiquity. Two artists, Liu Xiaodong (b.1963) and Li Jin (b.1958), whom we will encounter in the ‘China’ chapter, responded in very different artistic ways to Xu, but with simil­ar intentions.  The self-taught artist and epicurean Li Jin chose an ink-on-silk painting, Northern Qi Scholars Collating Classic Texts (eleventh century) by the Tang master Yan Liben (c.600–73 CE); Li’s A New Take on Scholars Collating Classic Texts 1–2 (2008) depicts, in diluted ink and colour, one figure from the original painting, a scholar writing with a brush.  With his back to this figure, the artist paints a contemp­ orary man tapping his script onto a laptop keyboard.  To his left stands a disconsolate Daoist wild man, and beside him the twentieth-century giant of Chinese literature, Lu Xun (1881–1936).  At the extreme left of the composition stands a bald-headed Buddhist monk.  The two handmaidens in the original painting are replaced by a couple of gaudily clad, contemporary metropolitan ladies who sit beside their male companions. In the background, a pug dog looks on quizzically at the louche, morally lax scene. Prominent traces of Li’s portrait can be found in each of the characters 15

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New Art New Markets he represents.  The artist is saying that there is a commonality between each of the people on the scroll, now fractured, which he shares. Liu Xiaodong’s approach to his subject, the fifteenth-century hand-scroll, Erlang and His Soldiers Driving out Animal Spirits – a 7.5m-long narrative painting depicting a series of violent encounters between deities, mythological beasts and fearsome animals – is in one respect the same as Li’s, albeit on a much larger scale. Liu also drew inspiration from contemporary subjects – in this case, Boston students.  The artist was intrigued by reports, particularly in the Chinese media, about teenage violence in America. Each student in his painting is clearly characterised in acrylic and charcoal on paper over the 7.5m-long work.  The violence in Liu’s What to Drive Out? (2008) is not expressed as overtly as it is in the scroll, but it is implied, coiled and ready to erupt at the slightest provocation. It is a pointed reference to the United States’ great expectation of individual freedom and wealth, and the potential for an explosion of violence should those presumptions be compromised. While it is certainly true that some artists from new markets feel the weight of tradition to be a burden, there are others who regard the achievements of civilisation as something that should be built on.  The Chinese artist Ah Xian (b.1960), who moved to Australia in the wake of the Tian’anmen Square demonstration in 1989, creates European-style busts in porcelain, decorated in designs typical of Ming- and Qing-dynasty imperial ceramics.  The portrait China China, Bust 36 (2001) shows a red-dragon design encircling the head of a man.  The dragon is the symbol of male potency, but the fact that the beast is quite literally suffocating the man suggests that Ah himself feels smothered by his great cultural inheritance. Not so the artist and garden designer,Ye Fang (b.1962), who has created a traditional Chinese garden behind a terrace of five modern houses in the ancient city of Suzhou. In the construction of his masterpiece,Ye has adhered to archaism. His garden follows 9 traditional Chinese rules on geomancy, feng shui and proportion but serves at the same time as a functional space, used on occasion for performances of Chinese Opera and thereby further deepening our engagement with the past. In a very clever and amusing work, Born Yesterday (2007), the Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri (b.1963) depicts a lurid, pop-art-like, two-layered, pink wedding cake inscribed with the words ‘born yesterday’ in sugary sweets. In this painting, Moshiri has subverted both this commercial,Western symbol of celebration and the international art market in which his own commodity is traded. By contrast the Persian wedding feast has its origins in antiquity. In Iran, a wedding sofreh (spread of food) is still laid out on the floor and each item of food has a symbolic value: flatbread represents prosperity, a tray of spices acts as a guard against the evil eye, decorated eggs and 16

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Introduction: New World Order nuts are symbols of fertility, and pomegranates and apples tokens for a happy future. Honey and sugar, meanwhile, act as the ‘glue’ that seals the couple’s love for one another. The food that the Chinese artist Li Jin depicts so lovingly in his colourful scrolls has great symbolic resonance for today’s Chinese – especially at festivals. Fish is a symbol of abundance and an essential, often untouched, dish at the Chinese New Year feast. Dry bean curd – rather than the white, fresh variety – is selected because white is a colour that the Chinese associate with death and misfortune. Mint-condition banknotes are inserted in hong bao (red bags) in carefully considered amounts, ensuring that the number four (a homophone for death) never appears, depending on the relationship between giver and recipient.  The use of fireworks to frighten off evil spirits is given free rein in Taiwan at this auspicious time of the year, to a degree that is a little unnerving for the uninitiated.  The 12 signs of the zodiac, which characterise each year and in terms of your birth carry more significance than your birthday, have a great hold over the Chinese imagination.  This superstition may have helped to push the price of 12 landscapes (1925) by the modern Chinese artist Qi Baishi (1864–1957) over the $100 million mark in 2016. Handmade textiles are thrust into grooves and sliced into truncated stone column bases by the Mexican artist Cynthia Gutiérrez (b.1978) in a work that she names Cántico del Descenso I-XI (2014, fig.3).  The textiles were created by women originally from the ancient site of Oaxaca, and adept at the Zapotec art of weaving known as telar de cintura.  The stone is typical of the material quarried by the Spanish colonialists in order to build their own edifices.  The conjunction of two very different cultures could not be better illustrated than in these handsome totems. In his immersive Pavilion of Shamans (2017), the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto (b.1964) imagines the Cupixawa (a meeting hall) of the Amazonian Huni Kui Indians.  The Huni Kui conduct repetitive rituals and drink the hallucinogenic elixir nixi pae in their jungle enclosures.  Today, the application of these holistic ceremonies to our broken societies and fractured psyches might help to reassemble embattled souls. Koreans share many of the traditions that endure amongst Chinese communities at their own sut dal kum mum (New Year’s Eve) celebrations.  They, like the Chinese, clean their homes in order to receive the new year afresh, but they also keep the lights on throughout the house in order to stay awake; otherwise, so legend has it, they fear that their eyebrows will turn white. Ducks are often served at Chinese weddings because they represent fidelity, and sticky rice cakes – an acquired taste – are synonymous with a rich and sweet life, the layers symbolising rising abundance 17

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New Art New Markets and the circular shape, family reunion. In Korea, a glass of gui balki sool – a strong liquor that is meant to sharpen your hearing for the year ahead – is imbibed. On the altar table of food that Koreans offer to their ancestors at New Year, dishes are placed in a strict hierarchy.  At a stage in the day known as sebe, the younger members of the family pay their respects to the elders and the youngest receive gifts of money, which would have originally gone towards the purchase of a calf and today teaches them the importance of thrift.  The Chinese yue bing (moon cake), eaten traditionally during Zhongqiu Jie (Mid Autumn Festival), is steeped in symbolism.  The salted egg in the centre denotes the moon, and an imprint of the characters for longevity or harmony appears on the top of the rich and heavy comestible, which may also have a surround of rabbits – a symbol of the moon. In metropolitan, modern Taipei at the time of year set aside for ancestor worship or tomb sweeping, it is thought imprudent to whistle in case you upset the ghosts.  To this day, it is not uncommon for the corpse of the deceased to be laid to rest outside the family house for days until the spirit of the dead person is deemed to have left their body. In what might be regarded as a metaphor for protectionism, the night before the important Korean festival of Chuseok (Autumn Eve), women in traditional hanbok costumes dance the ganggangsullae.  This circular dance requires one of the participants to stand in the centre to act as a look-out for the group, offering them protection and reassurance. Every 18 September, Chileans celebrate their independence from Spain in 1810. On that day, they visit fondas (traditional, palm-roofed shelters) and eat empanadas (meat pastries), drink Chilean red wine and dance the cueca.  The huaso (Chilean cowboy) rides tall amidst the crowds, while the roto Chilano (a classic fool) reminds Chileans of their struggles against the Spanish.  The expulsion of the Spanish col­ onial government did not cleanse the continent of Iberian mores and customs, however. Indeed, to this day, they coexist and intertwine with their pre-Columbian equivalents. On 24 June, an ancient ceremony, Inti Raymi (Festival of the Sun), is re-enacted on the plaza beside the ruined Inca temple of Qorikancha in Peru.  The aromas of hot cocoa, steaming popcorn and roast guinea pig permeate the air.  A rhythmic mass of Quechua humanity dressed in brightly coloured tunics carries their emperor aloft on a golden litter. India has a strong affinity with tradition and the past.  The Mahabharata – a poetical history of mankind, at the heart of which lies the Bhagavad Gita, Hinduism’s most profound holy text – is kept alive for millions in the subcontinent by itinerant and illiterate bards. Between the first and third centuries CE it was composed into 2685 verses.  When it was televised in 93 episodes on the country’s state-run 18

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Introduction: New World Order network in the early 1990s, viewing figures rose to a high of 600 million or 70 per cent of the population.  At the core of the Mahabharata is the dharma, a concept that ‘calls upon widely dispersed cultural assumptions about psychology, concepts of the body, sex relationships between humans and animals, attitudes to money and mater­ial possessions, politics, law, caste, purification and pollution, ritual, social practice and ideals, world renunciation, and worldly aims’ (Doniger 2009, p.201). Today, more in the breach than the observance, the goal of renunciation is integrated into the life of Hindus.  Women throughout rural India create transient designs with coloured rice powder on the earthen floors of their homes; these, Wendy Doniger (2009, p.682) explains, are their equivalent of the Vedic sacrificial hall, which is also demolished after sacrifice.  These women carry the designs in their heads. In the Mithila region in the north of India, the gods are depicted on fragile wall and floor paintings in vivid dyes, fading soon after they are made. The Vedic idea of a non-violent sacrifice, Doniger asserts (2009, p.657), affects contemporary Hindu attitudes to cows, which are allowed to roam free throughout India and are decorated with garlands, fruit and paint at festivals. It is against the law to kill cows in several Indian states because in early Sanskrit texts the animal came to symbolise the Brahmin. Kill a cow and you kill a Brahmin. During the Tantric worship of Shiva in his aspect as Bhairava, even the humble dog is venerated and statues of the god astride a large white dog can be found at the Kal (or Kaal) Bhairava in Varanasi. Dogs wander freely in the temple compound, and worshippers will decorate them with garlands and doughnuts.  A statue of Shiva dancing (Nataraja), which had entered the Norton Simon collection in the United States and was repatriated after a court case in the early 1970s to its temple in Tamil Nadu, was deemed by a state official to have been the Nataraja itself appearing before the courts in the form of an idol. A cultural commonality and shared symbolic order are much harder to imagine in the West than in societies that are encountered in this book.  The global art market certainly threatens the judgements of taste that are often, in the parts of the world that we are examining, intuitive and second nature. It also denudes a culture of its variety and gives rise to a formulaic cultural Esperanto, which speaks only to institutionalised cultural apparatchiks.  This does not mean that the market per se is unhelpful or destructive to the creative process. In its regional and national forms, it can be a vital element in the salvation of a craft, skill or uncalculated and brilliant piece of inspiration.  The following chapters will showcase art that identifies with its community; enjoys a shared language; acknowledges the importance of the past, rather than defying rules for the sake of singularity; and, above all, is created by artists who are highly trained and therefore skilful in their field. 19

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2

Unsafe Havens

The offshore jurisdictions that incur the sporadic wrath of Western economies for having the temerity to implement competitive taxation systems in order to attract wealth are a necessary cog in the global art market. In saying this, I oversimplify the reason for the disapproval of these enclaves by economic trade blocs like the European Union; much of the annoyance revolves around disclosure.  The dichotomy of this judgement is, however, clear to see. On the one hand, financial centres like London require the services provided by such havens while, on the other, democratic politics requires ever-greater levels of transparency.  The global art market is clearly a soldier of economic necessity rather than a convert to openness; in that sense, it is by definition more in tune with neo-classical economics than social democracy. So, art sits within a divided ideology and is itself divided ideologically between those in the art market who espouse libertarianism and those in the art world who treasure socialist principles.  The two sides coexist under the umbrella of globalisation, which basically acts as an economic ‘safety net’ for the West. It allows economically mature nations (and I include East Asia in this designation) to agree to differ without suffering the consequences of their opinions. It is, in short, talk without substance. I would liken it to an increasingly introspective playpen. International contemporary art is the visual and conceptual realisation of this hypocrisy. In the words of Chinese President Xi Jinping (b.1953), ‘there are a few foreigners with full bellies who have nothing better to do than point their fingers at our country’. Is it wise to continue to be critical of your neighbour’s conduct while you rely, increasingly, on his providence? Contemporary art is all too often the mouthpiece of deleterious Western interventionism.  The small offshore centres that trade this commodity are economic and cultural thorns in the sides of the civilisations that I examine in this book. 20

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Unsafe Havens It is efficient to sell contemporary art through city states, which is why Hong Kong, Singapore and the Gulf region have become such influential art conduits. Others prosper within Europe, the Americas and Asia as both small, low-tax jurisdictions and free ports.  They give the global art market liquidity by allowing art to be held and exchanged virtually at the least cost and without trouble.  They enable businesses to conduct affairs in a globally recognised currency, once again at the lowest cost.  Without these organisms it is hard to imagine a global art market, or indeed international contemporary art. But the world is in the process of great change.  Asia, the world’s richest region, has reached a stage where these Westerncentric vehicles should be allowed to fall into desuetude. A well-known Chinese antiques dealer in central Hong Kong, with one of the finest stocks in the territory, confided in me that if he detected a Beijing accent in his shop he would hesitate before completing a sale with that customer.  The reason, he explained, was that once a mainland Chinese client bought something from him that piece was unlikely to reappear on the international market.  The Hong Kong market thrives on the circulation and recycling of the highest quality works of art through its antique shops and sale rooms. China is intent, through its state-owned auction house Baoli (Poly) – which translates, appropriately, as ‘wealth protection’ – on buying the very best works of art that the international market has to offer. It then secretes its treasures away in public and quasi­-p­ rivate museums. China eschews the international market for contemporary art and many of the commodities traded therein for a number of reasons: ideological, aesthetic and because of the patently anti-social nature attached to its value – a fundamental factor that I introduced in the opening paragraph to the Introduction, and which I determined to be pride.  The other new markets will almost certainly follow China’s lead. It is significant that three of the world’s most important trading centres for works of art are former British colonies or protectorates. Hong Kong was ceded by the Qing government (1644–1911) to Britain in 1847 as part of a series of concessions to foreign powers following the forced introduction of opium into China.  The land surrounding Hong Kong Island was leased to Britain for 150 years, although 1 Hong Kong itself was given in perpetuity. When Britain claimed its bounty, the city was regarded as an adjunct to empire. Its economic progress from fishing village to global financial centre was rapid. Its role as a sanctuary for Chinese dissidents, ranging from Sun Yat-sen to Jimmy Lai (the owner of Giordano), has encouraged the international community to regard it as not just a beacon of the free market but also as an exemplar of the rule of law.  Today’s fugitives, as I discover in the ‘China’ 21

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New Art New Markets chapter, are rather less well protected than their predecessors who lived under the rule of Hu Jintao (b.1942) and Jiang Zemin (b.1926). It is important to know, as Randall Peerenboom explains (2010, pp 206–7), that in Asia and the Middle East many of the legal systems that are highly regarded in terms of the rule of law do not belong to democracies – even illiberal democracies. I think it is also significant that most of them were former British colonies or protectorates. During its time under British colonial administration, Hong Kong was given a legal framework that enabled an entrepreneurial society to flourish.  Today, it is home to some of the richest families in the world. Its proximity to the mainland of China, its international culture and its ethnic and commercial links with the Pearl River Delta have all helped to secure its immediate economic future. A fraction of the money from Hong Kong’s vast sovereign wealth fund (Hong 2 Kong Monetary Authority Investment Portfolio) is now funding the large-scale land-reclamation and cultural-development project under way in Kowloon.  This project, albeit fraught with difficulties, will on completion maintain Hong Kong as a global art exchange.  The territory is one of a clutch of new markets that hold most of the world’s liquid wealth. Britain, by contrast, is only now talking about establishing a sovereign fund to pay for upgrading its infrastructure. Hong Kong has in common with other havens a number of shared additional benefits. It is both a city and a free port; it is multilingual; and, through its ‘Basic Law’ constitution (bequeathed to it by the departing colonial administration in 1997), it ensures that executive decisions are not confused with legal ones.  The suitability of its current constitution will be reviewed in 2047, when it is anticipated that the former Crown Colony will succumb completely to Chinese rule. Hong Kong had previously offered a lifeline to traditional Chinese culture. For largely political reasons, it became the centre for the evolution of the Lingnan School of Painting, a Guangdong art movement, which was conceived in the nineteenth century in opposition to encroaching westernisation.  The school has fallen into quiescence in China because of its Republican and Imperial Japanese associations. It is a movement that Hong Kong should encourage China’s art world to re-embrace.  The territory has supported other artistic developments that are home-grown and have gone on to influence revivals on the mainland. In the 1960s, when China’s Cultural Revolution raged, the colonial authorities established a design school to instruct a new generation of industrial designers, who were in demand from the city’s rapidly developing economy. It was in the Hong Kong Polytechnic’s School of Design that the artist Wucius Wong (b.1936) successfully brought together two seemingly alien traditions: traditional Chinese landscape painting and the geometry of early 22

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Unsafe Havens twentieth-century design. His work is particularly pleasing when the rocks and trees in his paintings are precisely articulated and still recognisable as a landscape. But it is the aerial topographies and New Dream series pieces, such as Mountains and Rivers of the Mind (2017, fig.4), that best display his use of a new vocabulary. Here, the landscape is defined within a strict geometric grid that adheres to nature in only colour and texture.  Wong identified two groups of Chinese artists at that time: the one, educated in Western art and trying to find a way back to tradition; the other, steeped in the Classics but seeking innovation from the West.  This xinpaihua (new-style-painting) concept evolved into the Tao (Yuan Dao) Art Association and One Art Society (Yihua hui), whose members sought to remake Chinese culture by introducing to it new styles of painting from elsewhere in Asia and the West.  At the same time, the artist Lu Shoukun (1919–75) preached liberation from the formal constraints of traditional brush painting, establishing a movement known as xinshuimohua (new ink and water art).  The evident contradiction in Hong Kong between the city’s innate cultural conservatism, its libertarian economic practices, vestiges of neo-liberal politics and its recent historical opposition to Chinese interference make it absolutely unique amongst offshore havens. Its future is uncertain, but its destiny lies with China. Britain acquired Penang in 1786 as it encroached into Malaya. It acquired Malacca from the Dutch in 1824. Singapore’s eventual accession to the British Empire was down to the buccaneering activities of the maverick Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles (1781–1826), who established it for the East India Company in 1819. Raffles’ objective had been to introduce free trade into the region, but Singapore became a Crown Colony in 1867, its rule officially transferred to the Colonial Office in London, along with that of Malacca and Penang, forming the Straits Settlements. Rather like Hong Kong, Singapore prospered under a British colonial administration which protected the rights of its subjects and encouraged, as it did in Malaysia, the development of a vibrant, pluralist, economic community – in Singapore’s case made up, principally, of the Fukienese and Hakka peoples of southern China, indigenous Malay and imported Indian labourers. Superimposed on top of this structure was the British administration. Singapore achieved its independence in 1969, a full 28 years before Hong Kong, and evolved, under the strong-arm leadership of President Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015), into one of the world’s largest commercial ports and most dynamic service economies. Singapore, like Hong Kong, also has one of the world’s highest levels of government capital reserves. In terms of the art and antiques trade, it has aspired, as J. Christian points out (2007, p.i), to be a stable regional and economic platform for the international trade of the region’s high-end commodities. It is located in a different part of the world from 23

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New Art New Markets its sister, Hong Kong.  Across the Indian Ocean from the eponymous subcontinent, it sits at the heart of South East Asia.  Amidst the turmoil of a series of bloody late twentieth-­century wars sponsored by the Soviet Union, China and the United States as well as the retreating European colonial powers, Singapore remained untouched. Under the Lee Administration – so admired by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (1904– 97) – it appeared to point the way for all aspiring Asian economic ‘tigers’. Like Hong Kong, it has an independent legislature, which has created a stable, business-friendly environment.  There are similarities in the manner in which South Korea,  Taiwan and Singapore have all developed powerful economies under authoritarian governments and grown into rich societies. Singapore’s measurable quality of life, like those of many countries in East Asia, is very high. But the future of Singapore is as uncertain as that of Hong Kong.  Today, it appears isolated amongst the region’s states, all of which are moving towards a religious orthodoxy predicated on race. It has much less to gain from Chinese investment in the region’s economies and much to fear from capital exported to Muslim-majority states in South East Asia by Saudi Arabia.  The Trump Administration has withdrawn support from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an United States foil to the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Singapore is a core beneficiary of the agreement and ultimately risks forgoing, in the words of Michael Vatikiotis (2017, p.278), its status as a ‘sort of non China’. Against this negative political backdrop, it seems almost incidental to mention one of the most successful museum-conversion projects in the world. In 2015, the French architectural practice Studio Milou unveiled a new National Gallery of Singapore created by utilising two former classical, colonial structures from the 1920s: the Courthouse and the City Hall.  The interior renovation is successful, but it is the central, gracefully curved, dropped frieze – which extends as a canopy over both buildings – that performs the most remarkable feat.  The rooftop allows daylight to flood into the museum, achieving the modulated light effect that Jean Nouvel managed in the Louvre Abu Dhabi. In contrast to the fate of the crumbling colonial structures in Yangon – the former Burmese capital, Rangoon – and elsewhere in South East Asia, Singapore has accommodated its architectural near past with the present.  This subliminal acceptance of its colonial history, however, sets the city state ideologically apart from its fellow states. It is a stance that sends a clear message to its neighbours and to China that Singapore is a failing Janus whose Asian face is rarely seen. Singapore is far too small to operate as a solitary Western proxy in a world of change. Unlike Singapore and Hong Kong, Dubai, one of the seven emirates that comprise the United Arab Emirates (UAE), was not settled until the end of the twentieth century. Until then, it was a desert inhabited by Bedouin nomads and had been a part 24

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Unsafe Havens of the Safavid and then Ottoman empires before its eventual acquisition by Britain at the end of the nineteenth century.  The city of Abu Dhabi is the capital of the UAE and its second most populous metropolis after Dubai. Dubai and Abu Dhabi are by far the most significant of the emirates in the UAE.  The Emirate of Abu Dhabi has most of the nation’s oil and is also home to its ambitious cultural zone, Saadiyat Island, which will soon comprise a number of significant museums.  The two emirates work in tandem towards the development of a regional art world in Abu Dhabi and art market in Dubai. It was not until 1971 that the UAE was created out of the former British-protected (Trucial) States.  The discovery of oil in the Middle East has had a dramatic impact on the wealth of the region, and the UAE is one of the beneficiaries of this bounty. Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who became UAE President in 2004, is also the Emir of Abu Dhabi, and has benefited from his father’s willingness to save the money accrued from the sale of oil. Most 3 of the oil profits since 1976 have gone into the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, a government fund that is the world’s third-largest single sovereign wealth fund. A proportion of Abu Dhabi’s great wealth has gone into the construction of a giant, amphibious cultural city, half the size of Bermuda, named Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness). Dubai, which does not have oil, has embarked on a different path of sustained prosperity to that of its oil-rich neighbour,  Abu Dhabi. Its model also differs from both Singapore’s and Hong Kong’s insofar as its economy has no manufacturing base and is absolutely reliant on foreign expertise. Dubai may aspire to be 4 an international centre for finance and trade, but it has a skill and cultural deficit that will be very hard to offset.  The fact that the city is built on a desert and is dependent on a vast desalination programme for its fresh water puts it in an even more precarious position. Dubai’s aspiration to join Hong Kong and become a major art-market centre is as tenuous as that of Singapore. But whereas Singapore’s fate will take time to unfold, Dubai’s may be decided – albeit contrary to its ambitions – by the current conflict within the Middle East, which, at the time of writing, is worsening. If we turn a blind eye to regional disharmony, then Abu Dhabi holds the key to the future success of the Emirates’ art market. It became the official capital of the Emirates in 1996, and is the political and cultural centre of the UAE.  The Emirates’ political culture is remarkably sophisticated: ‘When the rulers of each emirate convened over thirty five years ago’, writes T. Desjardins (2007, p.5), ‘to discuss the preliminary structure of the newly formed Federal state, they deliberately chose to create a society that would offer a modern administration while simultaneously retaining the traditional forms of government and rule.’ The leader of each emirate would have been the sheikh of the most powerful 25

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New Art New Markets tribe.  The Sheikh’s ‘people’ gained, and continue to gain, access to him through the Majlis (councils), which provide, as they do in Iran, the building blocks of an indirect democracy.  At the foundation of the new state, the sheikhs of each emirate appointed themselves as representatives of their ‘people’ to the Supreme Council, which in turn elected the president to a five-year term.  A Federal National Council, which sits just below the Supreme Council, polices the parliament.  The UAE also has an independent judiciary, and foreigners are entitled to a 99-year lease on land ownership allowing, as Desjardins explains, for the possibility of a permanent overseas-resident community and the establishment of long-term markets.  Although less highly regarded than Hong Kong’s or Singapore’s legal systems, the Gulf states are in the top quartile on the World Bank Rule of Law index. The Abu Dhabi Tourism Development and Investment Company (TDIC) intends to complement Dubai’s programme of mass entertainment with a high-level cultural infusion aimed at the discerning new market tourist as much as the Western variety.  A major part of this initiative is the fight for expensive global ‘baubles’.  The Gulf States’ most notable example of this trend was the acquisition, for $450 million in 2017, of a Leonardo by a Saudi prince in order to reward an ally and to spite his country’s rival, and Saudi Arabia’s enemy, Qatar.  The Salvator Mundi (c.1500) by Leonardo daVinci (1452–1519) was bought by the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and donated to the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi.  This gesture is one of the oddest to be performed in the eccentric history of the international art market: a demonstrably Christian icon has been acquired by a Sunni Islamic state and donated to a Western-branded museum in another Muslim state.  The action is as perverse as the converse ritualistic reassurance that artists and art worlds from the region seek from Western cultural institutions and fixtures. There are some signs that this dependence on Western cultural soft- and hardware is being ameliorated.  Two offshoots of the Abu Dhabi TDIC – the National Media Council and the Ministry of Culture,Youth and Community – have made it their priority to safeguard the Bedouins’ oral tradition. Nicolai Ouroussoff, writing in the NewYork Times, goes so far as to say that the UAE is not an example of another Arab country embracing Western modernity but rather a ‘chance to plant the seeds for a fertile new cultural model in the Middle East’ (Desjardins 2007, p.22).  This vision is still a long way off, but there are signs elsewhere in the region that preparation is at least being made for greater self-reliance. It is too early to say whether the right balance between Western-style international­ ism and local cultural enhancement has been struck with the Saadiyat Island 26

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Unsafe Havens project.  The entire venture comprises 27 km of island turned into a cultural oasis, at the centre of which lie four great museums, 19 art pavilions and a biennial (art) park.  The first of its ‘string of pearls’ opened in 2017.  The just-completed (as of 2018) Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel, draws inspiration from the many roofs of an Arab medina united under a fretted dome (a reinterpretation of the traditional mashrabiya latticework). It is set on the Gulf coast of the emirate, whose various islands are interlaced with canals and waterways reminiscent of V   enice.  The museum will show work from around the world, and has aspirations to become a world, if not an encyclopedic, institution.  The task has been a great cross-cultural success: it links the emirate to France, and the Louvre and some 15 other French museums will lend works to the new complex.  The three other projects – a Guggenheim designed by Frank Gehry, evoking a Bedouin tent in which loosely arranged galleries suggest a souk; the Zayed National Museum by Norman Foster; and a Performing Arts Centre, designed by Zaha Hadid – will complete the set; however, they are far from completion. I am critical of I.M. Pei’s (Ieoh Ming Pei’s) Suzhou Museum in the ‘China’ chapter partly because of its blandness, but mainly because of its insensitivity to its environment. Suzhou is, after all, one of the world’s most ancient and best-preserved cities.  The ‘big name’ architects who have designed museums for the Saadiyat Island project however, have no need to integrate their fantastic designs into a prevailing built structure.  They have instead to contend with the desert and the sea.  The outcome of the first of them to be completed is to be applauded. The question of whether to integrate regional culture into world culture or to retain independence from the international art market does not only affect the UAE. Egypt is perhaps the most conspicuous example of an Arab country that has followed a policy of international cultural integration and has, as a result, posed for itself and its culture a great many questions that the Gulf states should heed. Do cutting-edge art events such as Egypt’s Nitaq Festival cater for the needs of Arab culture or do they dance to the tune of internationalism? Initiatives such as the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum and the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo may assert their grass-roots credentials, but in fact they act as platforms for aspiring local artists and curators intent on securing international recognition for themselves and their work at the expense of their communities. Egypt is certainly a special case, weighed down, as Nat Muller (2009, p.16) points out, by its epic Pharaonic past and the dream of pan-Arab modernity conjured up by President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70). It has a highly institutionalised cultural bureaucracy and is the only Arab or African country with a permanent pavilion in the Venice Biennale Giardini. In 27

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New Art New Markets 2017, the pavilion was subtly transformed into an Egyptian village.  A North African portal opened onto a sand-covered floor, and the smells of rural Egypt permeated the arena.  A 12-minute film,  The Mountain, by the artist Moataz Nasr (b.1961) recorded the conflict between village elders and a woman, Zein, returning to her home from her studies in cosmopolitan Cairo. She climbs a mountain believed to be home to a demon who preys on night-time interlopers. Zein is finally killed by the demon.  The narrative offers two interpretations of her actions.  The consensus at Venice was that this was a tribute to enlightenment: Zein has rid the village of its superstition and fear. But it seems that she has died in the process, which would suggest either her defeat or perhaps her purposeful sacrifice.  A second reading might be, therefore, that superstition in the form of the demon has actually triumphed over human hubris; modern ideas have been defeated by past traditions.  This was clearly not the intention of the artist, but the work is so ambivalent that it opens itself to reinterpretation. Although some way behind the UAE, Qatar’s ruling Al Thani family is swiftly developing an economic, arts and residential infrastructure to challenge that of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, employing the wealth accrued from the kingdom’s oil and gas industries.  The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha is another designed by I.M. Pei. His design is based on a small fountain for ablutions outside the Mosque of Ahmad Ibn Tulun in Cairo. It is part of a huge urban, cultural project that seeks to make Qatar the region’s centre for education and the arts.  The kingdom’s property laws for non-residents have also been relaxed since 2004, and foreigners can now hold property on a freehold basis in select locations. Qatar has been at loggerheads with Saudi Arabia and its fellow gulf allies, the UAE and Bahrain, since 2017.  The Saudi alliance alleges that Qatar supports terrorism.  The isolation of the Kingdom of Qatar comes at a strategic moment for the Middle East. Iraq and Syria, the latter with the help of Russia, are in the process of reclaiming their nations from insurgency, while Iran and Saudi Arabia are in the midst of an ideological war.  The question for us is what will the impact be on the world’s most significant art-procurement agency, Qatar Museums.  The purchase of Salvator Mundi by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman scuppered Qatar’s ambition on this occasion, but the emirate still has four very well-stocked cultural institutions, which rival those in Abu Dhabi.  Will there be an attempt by Saudi Arabia to undermine other investment initiatives by Qatar? The Al Thani family have bought a number of prime assets in the United Kingdom, so their demise would be felt throughout the property and banking sector as well as on the art 28

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Unsafe Havens market.  There is a further question: Does the wealth of Qatar belong to the ruling family or to the state? In short, can its financial assets be moved? And, finally, might the country be pushed into the arms of Iran? As an afterthought, what of the world’s principal source of energy, oil? These are all very recent developments, which during the tenure of Sheikh Hamad Bin Jaber al-Thani, Prime Minister from 2007 until 2013, would have seemed fanciful. But today it is necessary to question how safe a haven Qatar is. Against this backdrop, it scarcely matters that the European Union (EU) has left Qatar off its tax-haven blacklist but has included Bahrain and the UAE.  The kingdom faces a much more pressing threat from its near neighbours.  The marginalisation of Qatar would be more than just a catastrophe for the global art market; it would spell the end of a cultural experiment.  Where else are we able to see how a conservative Islamic state deals with the challenges of presenting extreme contemporary expression on an urban level? Qatari examples include motorway tunnels covered in ‘calligraffiti’ by the French–Tunisian street artist eL Seed (b.1981), and Katara cultural village in Doha, a maze of shaded lanes mimicking a traditional Qatari settlement, in which a national auction house has just been established along with a group of the region’s most architecturally imaginative museums.  This city centre will, judging by the plans, become an urban oasis, in which the new is fused with the old and traditional, narrow, shaded streets are decorated with locally styled screens and interspersed with courtyards.  The area of Doha known as Msheireb will be mid-rise, dense and pedestrian-friendly.  The complex reflects the impetus for the creation of model towns by nineteenth-century British industrialists; it provides a complete and rewarding domestic, cultural and spiritual environment for its residents. But it is precisely Qatar’s open-minded, international approach that is its Achilles heel. By courting the world, inviting criticism from resident foreign exiles and giving oral support to the Muslim Brotherhood, the emirate has angered conservative forces in Saudi Arabia and the military government in Egypt.  The benign and jolly side of its expansiveness has been the employment of international art-market figures like Ed Dolman to help run Qatar Museums; but as a general policy, it is doomed to failure and perhaps collapse. An added complication in the intricate politics of the Gulf lies in the actions of a reform-minded Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In 2017, the Saudi prince undertook a widespread anti-corruption campaign. Members of the ruling family and government have been implicated in this Xi Jinping-style purge.  The over­arching intention of this assault on privilege has much to do with the prince’s 29

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New Art New Markets desire to modernise and liberalise the kingdom. But it also reflects his desire to oppose Iran. The art markets and museums of the UAE and Qatar are crucial as international outlets for Iranian and Egyptian contemporary art. Egypt has joined the Saudi alliance against Qatar. Might it be, in the interim, that Qatar becomes the main conduit for Iranian art and the UAE assists Egypt’s artists? Iran is regionally ostracised for the present, and Egypt suffers monumental terrorist attacks; so the markets in both Tehran and Cairo are closed for serious business – that is, business that does not involve US-dollar cash transactions. Needless to say, all this is speculation. But artmarket observers have a tendency to scrutinise the deckchairs while the ship is listing – or, dare I say it, sinking. The notional Tunisian Pavilion at Venice 2017, its first in 50 years, was apparent in the form of kiosks issuing universal passports.  The most bathetic example was an isolated unstaffed structure, its door flapping in the draught of Adriatic wind sweeping up the waters of the Arsenale, for it suggested the reality of the absence of paths – the title of the project (fig.5).  The act of wishing in this instance trumps the hope that affirmative action might actually rid the world of borders and sanctions. It highlights the specific plight of North African and Middle Eastern refugees, and strengthens the notion of a great divide between the xenophobic assertions of many of the powerful national pavilions in the Giardini and the vapid aspiration of dreamers on the outside. In every sense, this 57th biennale nailed the world’s condition. Storage and dissemination of international art A key question for the world’s rich is: How safe are the offshore havens from Western-backed assaults on their probity? The UAE is on the European tax-haven blacklist.  The free port in Dubai is a regional storage hub for works of art. But the EU’s dissatisfaction is not Dubai’s primary concern. Its worry, and that of the other offshore jurisdictions, is geopolitical in nature.  The West is vacating the world stage and China has just entered from left field. Its performance will be very different from that of Britain in the nineteenth century and that of the United States in the twentieth. Hong Kong, it has been established, is subject to Chinese scrutiny.  Singapore is beached. In 2014, Jack Ma, CEO of China’s largest digital trading and e-commerce platform,  Alibaba, agreed to become Digital Economy Advisor to the Government of Malaysia.  Thailand has asked Ma to set 30

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Unsafe Havens up a global e-trading centre, and Singapore has responded by rushing to establish its own e-commerce platform – but it is too late, according to Michael V   atikiotis (2017). China’s digital economy, led by its WeChat mobile application software, is omnipresent. For Singapore, the gradual, regional retreat of the West has deprived it of its role as transcontinental intermediary.  What is the value of a Western enclave in a Sino zone? Without the protection of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, it will be Singapore – not Hong Kong – that acquiesces first to China’s will. Its splendid free port and its banking towers require traffic in order to survive; how much of that business will be directed elsewhere? A different geopolitical threat casts a shadow over the viability of Dubai and Qatar.  The Gulf states are at political loggerheads.  Which of the smaller members will Saudi Arabia support? To whom will they offer protection? Not to Qatar – that much is clear. Further, will a resurgent Iran offer protection to Qatar in an attempt to undermine the Emirate of Dubai? A weakened West creates extensive problems for offshore havens outside the immediate interest of Europe and the United States.  Within regional economic and political groups, offshore trading hubs will be subject to the demands of their members. So, Luxembourg’s new free port and the existing ones in Switzerland and Monaco will continue to offer transactional benefits to the art trade. In Asia, Hong Kong and, increasingly, Shanghai will be the fulcrum for most of that continent. Other centres may be established in South East Asia but they are more likely to emerge in South Korea, which, incidentally, was also on the EU’s blacklist. Each will attempt to achieve a competitive advantage over those in Europe and the Americas. My view is that China will ensure that its regulatory framework enables its trading hubs to offer more advantages than the rest.  Asia now holds more private wealth and investment than Europe.  The global funds invested in Singapore by banks such as UBS may soon be redirected to Sino-Asia.  Treasure assets are part and parcel of this change in investment momentum. The societies, states and civilisations that I cover in this book stand accused, by and large, of being corrupt.  This is held to be the result of poor governance as much as something implicitly cultural. It is the reason, it is argued, for the huge disparities in wealth in most, if not all, of the countries I introduce.  This is a valid accusation, but it is issued from states that are just as culpable. London, for instance, behaves in many ways like a city state and its competitiveness is driven by the forces that propel offshore centres. It relies on the services offered to the City of London by its small dependencies.  The city’s art trade itself requires the assistance offered by free ports and trading enclaves in Hong Kong, Singapore, the UAE, Switzerland, Luxembourg and yet more opaque jurisdictions. Major international auction houses and dealers 31

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New Art New Markets make much of their revenue at the Hong Kong sales.  They have also carved out positions in the Gulf and in Singapore.  And, let us not forget history. British companies benefited incalculably from the ownership of the resources of their colonies, as did their European equivalents. In the postcolonial period, deals were struck with national strongmen to extend those rights.  A beneficial consequence to London in particular of corruption and security concerns amongst the elite from new markets is their investment in the relative safety of the UK capital’s prime property; investment funds; industry; utilities; and, of course, art acquired on its international market.  The capital exodus from the new markets of South America and South East Asia in particular is replaced by investment in those states by the Chinese Government. If the logic and trajectory of finance and politics is applied to the art market, then we should see new market-elite money paying ever-higher prices for new art in Western financial capitals and offshore jurisdictions. But later, we might also see the retention of new-market capital in regional, Sino economic zones throughout Asia, which may bring with it a new-found political stability. It is far too early to gauge the impact of Saudi and Gulf-state investment in a renewed North Africa, South East Asia and Middle East – but the future is full of surprises. If either or both of these eventualities come to pass, then new art will be bought and sold within new markets and the Western system of enclaves and domestic centres acting as global hubs will evaporate. Hong Kong is already a harbour of Chinese art-market intelligence. In time, the Gulf states may play a similarly prominent role in the Islamic art market. Once the economic conditions for cultural expertise and research have been established in a particular place, responsive changes allow it to retain its pre-eminence. But today, seismic sociopolitical and economic changes are rocking the world on its axis and a dramatic alteration to the balance of power is afoot.  This will inevitably favour the stored wealth in the Middle East and Asia. China entered into a very significant bilateral agreement with the United States in 2009.  The Cultural Property Implementation Act (CPIA) restricted, as J. Bresler and S. Khalifa explain (2009, p.3), the import into the United States of certain cat5 egories of undocumented archaeological materials (Valentin 2009, p.4). The great advantage that China has over other, smaller states with less cultural patrimony is the size of its market and the great number and range of its artefacts. It can, uniquely, adopt protectionism without damaging its commercial self-interest.  Whether China views the accession and disbursement of art in commercial terms is another matter altogether (see ‘China’ chapter). But if it were to have ambitions to extend a cultural trade beyond its borders, it would be according to a new set of rules devised by Chinese apparatchiks. 32

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Unsafe Havens There is a difference between the use of a tax haven as a store for wealth and the dynamic advantages applying to offshore jurisdictions that act as wealth generators. Hong Kong is the most energetic of the offshore wealth generators. It offers arbitrage opportunities for sellers across a number of art-market categories, most notably in the field of Chinese art and antiques. In addition to the advantages enjoyed by other sanctuaries, it has low taxes and – crucially, like other, similar dominions – the international art world is welcomed. Its currency is international, exchangeable, not subject to currency control but pegged to the United States dollar. It is for these fiscal reasons that Hong Kong attracts the world’s wealthiest collectors. Foreign-owned art businesses in China transact a great proportion of their sales under licensed companies in Hong Kong, taking advantage of a ruling that allows for profits to arise where the taxpayer’s contracts of purchase and sale are effected. Singapore’s free port is an important part of its claim to be a vital offshore art centre.  The most significant function of a free port is the time that it gives buyers and sellers to complete a transaction. Free ports are, as Bruno Muheim (2006) explains,‘extremely convenient during negotiations in which the seller does not know at the outset where his work of art will eventually end up’. Singapore’s free port is by no means the only one in the world – Switzerland has four main free ports that 6 specialise in storing fine art, for instance – but it does provide its region’s collectors and businesses with secure storage. Singapore also offers tax incentives to those who make cash donations to museums and towards the creation of public sculpture. Dubai’s tax advantages are similar to Hong Kong’s with small, additional import 7 duties payable on works of art outside the free zone. In 2005, Christie’s opened its first office in the region, in the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC).  The zone offers: ‘One hundred per cent business ownership, a guaranteed 50 years’ tax holiday and freehold property options’ (Carver, 2006). The offshore jurisdictions have to make their tax regimes more appealing to collectors and the art trade than they are in other states.  They face particularly strong competition from Asian countries, most of which are low-tax societies. China operates Special Economic Zones (SPZ) and Free Trade Zones (FTZ) in which certain taxes are not applicable or else significantly lower than elsewhere.  There are 16 FTZs in China that are exempt from sales and import taxes. If a work of art is imported into an FTZ as bonded material, it is exempt from capital gains tax and VAT, but both are triggered if the object is sold outside the FTZ.  Taiwan’s import and export duties are much lower than China’s, and its hundreds of foundations act as efficient ways to exempt an art collection from income and inheritance tax. 33

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New Art New Markets Japan and Korea operate very similar tax regimes to Taiwan although, unlike the United States and the United Kingdom, few if any tax benefits accrue to Japanese who donate work to a public collection. Compared to even the most competitive tax regimes in Asia, Hong Kong in particular stands above its rivals. Dubai is also well insulated and Singapore more attractive than its South East Asian neighbours. But the final consideration is long-term security, and for the series of reasons that I have addressed for each of the major trading hubs, their respective positions appear very fragile. How will indigenous cultures reshape the international art market? The vital role that Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai and Qatar play as procurers and intermediaries within the global art market is under threat.  With uncertainty hovering over the future of its hubs, the ability of the global art market to reach into national markets and influence their direction, and to shape and form their culture, is much less sure than hitherto. The ambitious cultural building programmes – in the Gulf in particular, but also throughout new markets – suggest that the new-market cultural establishment still adheres to the notion of globalisation.  The museums do show a variety of art, but they are still hampered by Western concepts of display and ideology.  A new framework will take time to evolve; at present, the ‘software’ has changed but the ‘hardware’ has yet to be reconfigured. The lessons that new markets can glean from the concentration on national aesthetics in East Asia are profound. East Asia offers a high level of aesthetic integrity but little systemic market reassurance.  The ‘system’ of production, validation and distribution is – like the offshore hubs themselves – uncomfortably, globally, aspirant. I demonstrate that the customised, Western cultural systems of South Korea and Taiwan have worked well up until now, but are ill-equipped to thrive in a new cultural order. Japan alone, in its isolation, suggests a way forward, but it is too insular and its market has been suppressed.  A more self-confident approach by a larger and more assertive entity that will not be contained will upset the apple cart and seed very different trees, which will sprout new fruit. China is at the point of detachment from the value system operated by the global art market.  When it cedes, (all) new markets will follow.

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3

East Asian Orthodoxy Yueliang daibiao wo de xin (The moon represents my heart) Theresa Teng

Aligning traditions and modern economies Nami Island – at the height of summer, a suffocatingly humid inland islet in South Korea near Chuncheon – is the final resting place of the controversial Joseondynasty general who gave it its name.  The fate of the general was secure under the patronage of King Sejo (1455–68) but under his successor, King Yejong (1468– 9), he was falsely denounced as a traitor and executed. His rehabilitation took almost four centuries. Some 200 years after the exoneration of General Nami, the incumbent South Korean President, Park Geun-hye (b.1952), became the country’s first democratically elected president to be impeached – a victim of her parentage 1 as much as of her actions. Two things can be extrapolated from this vignette: the first is that heads roll in South Korea for reasons that are not always apparent; the second is that forgiveness will be bestowed from above.  The first act of President Kim Young-sam (1927–2015) was to imprison former presidents Chun Doo-hwan (b.1931) and Roh Tae-woo (b.1932) on grounds of high treason and corruption, but he later pardoned both of them on the advice of President-elect Kim Daejung (1924–2009). Nami Island is reached by ferry. It is a short, crowded ride.  The visitor, on docking, is greeted by a faux archway.  After negotiating the raised wooden terrace, a stroll along tree-lined streets interspersed with haphazard and lighthearted sculptures is interrupted at regular intervals by restaurants. Here, my mind drifted back 13 years to 2002 to a bona fide island rather than a patch of earth set in a river, when I had the distinct pleasure of cycling around the mountainous and verdant Jeju Island before the golf courses and casinos had arrived. During that five-day tour, I 35

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New Art New Markets stayed in hasuks (traditional boarding houses), slept on dotjari mats and ate chobap in deserted beach canteens, catching live World Cup football matches on precariously positioned Sony television sets that might have been components of a Nam June Paik (1932–2006) installation. I witnessed the plunges of the last of the octogenarian female pearl divers and dined out in Jeju-si on black pork and salted fish. I did not encounter public sculpture, or much else besides the people and livestock of the island.  These untrammelled experiences that we cherish have almost disappeared from East Asia.  We have to travel deep into the hinterland today in search of solitude.  The Taiwanese brush artist Yuan Hui-li (b.1963) has a studio on the north coast of  Taiwan, which is sunk into a mountain and reached by a rocky path. She lives within her habitat and her work reflects the vibrant colours of her surroundings, spiced by her particular deviation from the traditional approach to Chinese landscape painting. When did it all start to change? For South Korea and the Republic of China on 2 Taiwan (Taiwan, ROC), 1988 was the high-water mark of the cultural capitulation to globalisation.  The Seoul Olympics of 1988 and the inauguration of  Taiwan’s Lee Teng-hui (b.1923) as the first Taiwanese-born leader of  Taiwan in the same year announced the acquiescence of two governments to the global mainstream. But both societies are richly imbued with traditions, and it is the values expressed through those habits and customs that have enabled the two states to weather the storm of westernisation. Taiwan’s ‘bubble economy’ of the mid-1990s was a time when love hotels emptied their night-time guests into the bubbling waters of hot springs in the foothills of  Taipei. Lavish cash offerings to gilded gods in roadside temples underlined the age of speculation – brought to a crashing halt in 1997, when an economic virus hit Asia.  Taipei was at that time a dishevelled city, but one that held promise as much as it threatened danger.  Artists like Lu Hsien-ming (b.1959) recorded Taipei’s modernisation in paintings such as Stroll (1996), in which he draped a canvas portraying the city’s partially completed mass rapid transport project over a portrait of an elderly man on crutches negotiating the perils on a tarmac road. But Taiwan is ‘instant’ – as, indeed, are all the societies of East Asia – and so by the time Yuang Goang3 ming (b.1965) photographed Ximen by Day and Ximen by Night  in 2002,  Taipei boasted tree-lined streets, parks and a first-rate transport system. Yet despite these dramatic changes, the capital of  Taiwan feels like a traditional Chinese city. Choudoufu (‘stinky’ tofu) sellers fight for space beside dumpling vendors and purveyors of snake-blood soup in dozens of specialist food night markets. It is still the best place to drink oolong tea, to eat beef noodles and to experience high Chinese culture in 36

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East Asian Orthodoxy 4

the everyday.  The naming by the Kuomintang (KMT) of four principal roads in 5 Taipei after four of Confucius’ 12 principles reflects, if not a sensitive application of tradition onto modernity, then certainly an assumption that classical precepts have a meaning and a place in a modern Chinese city. In quite an astonishing way,  Taiwan has negotiated modernisation and uncovered in the process its cultural essence.  The de facto state has invested heavily in its arts infrastructure, a process which culminated in the complete refurbishment of the magnificent National Palace Museum.  The objects housed in the museum came to the island with Chiang Kai-shek’s retreating Republican Army in the winter of 1948, and the collection is the personification of power, politics and symbolism. It represents the roots of Chinese civilisation and sits like a colossus over Taiwan’s culture, which was for many decades a safe haven for Chinese culture and customs. As the mainland slipped into cultural anarchy during the 1960s,  Taiwan provided a home for the great brush painters Zhang Daqian (Chang Dai-chien) (1899–1983) and Pu Xinyu (Pu Hsin-yu) (1896–1963) and held onto many of the customs and values rejected by China’s Communist leaders on the mainland. So, this Republican enclave retained many of the ‘old’ traditions but allowed the social and artistic legacies of Japan, a country which had been its colonial master for 50 years, to persist. In 1991,  Taiwan became a constitutional democracy under the Japanese-educated President Lee Teng-hui, and the stirrings of  Taiwanese identity, called nativism, were allowed to surface.  Taiwanese nativism – like Ho Lo, the Taiwanese language – may prove to be cultural and linguistic culs-de-sac, such is the regional omnipresence of China, but their very existence gives hope of a rich, pan-Asian culture that leans towards salvaging what remains of local traditions. Nativism in Taiwan does not carry the xenophobic connotations that have marked the opposition to the waves of immigrants into the United States since the nineteenth century, and which is at the forefront of its politics today, although there is a cultural, nationalistic and even racial component to it.  Taiwan’s journey has been truly unusual and its poly-cultural society, with its many contradictions, belies a unitary identity. Its politicisation of nativism has to do with its multiple allegiances: historically to Japan, currently to the United States and in the future to China. It is keen to ‘mark its card’, to make itself as distinct as possible in order to avoid total assimilation.  Taiwan is culturally and politically defensive because of its situation. Nonetheless, its defences are nuanced and extremely impressive. Japan is by far the most mature of the region’s economies. It is certainly not a new art market itself, but it is of paramount importance to new markets in part because of the internationalist example that it set other Asian states at the outset 37

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New Art New Markets of global modernism. It was then the only non-Western state that effectively performed economically as a Western state.  Today, Japan is one of the world’s core industrial nations.  The modernisation of the country began with the restoration of the Meiji Emperor in 1868.  This soon resulted, as R. Ropner and K. Hirakawa (2008) explain, in the formation of a modern Japanese art market at a time when the international community elected to hold a series of world expositions.  These expos drew Japanese art and craft to the attention of important collectors in America and Europe, and created a craze for all things Japanese. In one of  Vincent van Gogh’s (1853–90) final paintings – Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889) in the Courtauld Gallery in London – the artist paints on the right side of his composition a Japanese woodblock print that shows an idyllic view of Japan.  The original print was published by Sato Torakiyo between 1870 and 1880, and van Gogh must have owned a copy.  The market for Japanese art was vibrant, Ropner and Hirakawa explain, right at the beginning of the development of the international trade, with 85 Japanese companies involved in the export of Japanese artefacts between 1892 and 1921. The formation of the Tokyo Bijutsu (Arts) Club in 1906 drew together a great network of professional dealers within Japan, while the prestige of  Tokyo University as an educator in the technique of modern, Western (oil) painting attracted some of the most highly regarded Korean and Taiwanese artists to study in Japan.  An art dealer’s entry into the Tokyo Bijutsu Club depended on him securing the backing of more than two financial dealer-guarantors.  The very need for an art club in the first place was down to the refusal of banks in Japan to lend money to those who traded in art and antiques – a situation that their successors may have wished still 6 existed when the market opened up in the 1980s, and Japanese art businesses and international corporations borrowed money from banks against the future value of 7 their stock. The plethora of new, Western-style auction houses that sprang up in Japan in the new millennium allowed a speculative market to develop and encouraged high prices, not only for nineteenth-century Nihonga paintings but also for the new contemporaries. Certain entities within the insular Japanese market for contemporary art, which was partially prised open in the 1980s, have sought to develop it into a mainstream art-market centre driven by the global success of artists like Yayoi Kusama (b.1929) 8 and, more recently,  Takashi Murakami (b.1962). So far, the experiment has been relatively unsuccessful and it is to be hoped, for the good of Japanese art, that powerful players within the ‘protected’ Japanese art market, an antidote to the international one, fail in their attempt to align themselves with other global centres. Murakami and a grouping of Japanese manga artists, notably Yoshitomo Nara (b.1959), have 38

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East Asian Orthodoxy changed the complexion of Japanese art today.  The influence of museums such as Mori and curators like Fumio Nanjo (b.1949), aligned with powerful ‘alpha’ dealers like Whitestone and SCAI THE BATHHOUSE which are keen to create a dynamic national art world and art market to compete with the international centres, threaten to undermine the essence of Japanese contemporary creation. Both Nanjo and Masami Shiraishi (b.1948) (Director of SCAI) have expressed their desire to present contemporary art outside the white-cube space and to integrate it into a traditional built environment (Rawlings and Mod, 2010), but they fail because of their overbearing, internationalist ambitions – for themselves and their artists.  Their expansionism, to my mind, dilutes their domestic credibility.  They both fall into the trap set by globalisation: presenting a pared-down version of the vernacular for profitable, cross-cultural consumption. A recent market survey, published in early 2017 and conducted by Art Tokyo Association in collaboration with an organisation called Platform for Arts and Creativity, identified buying patterns amongst a proportionately middle-income group of consumers in Japan.  The sample looked across a broad age spectrum and at incomes from as low as US$10,000 to around $150,000 per year.  While the survey might have widened its parameters to look at high and ultra-high net-worth patterns of expenditure, the report gives a very clear indication of buying sentiment.  The findings support my assertion that the Japanese market is uninterested in investment and also that it shares with China a preference for national art forms.  This data belies the impression that Japanese buyers might give the global art market a ‘fifth front’ to add to the established markets in the United States and Europe and the new markets in China and the Gulf. Yes, there are solitary figures like the collector Yusaku Maezawa (b.1975), who has spent colossal sums on artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88), but the broad mass of art buyers eschew cheaper proxies.  The number of top Japanese collectors as defined by ArtNews, which appears in the 2017 Art Basel art-market report, has fallen from a high of 12 in 1990 to a mere four today.  The most interesting intelligence from the survey is that those who experienced buying a work of art preferred ceramics, Yoˉga (Western-style paintings that I would liken to academic oil works), hanging scrolls and prints. International contemporary art, crafts and Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) each comprise about two per cent of market share.  The results of the survey change when buying patterns are examined over the most recent three-year period. In this instance, ceramics and crafts top the table, followed by Yoˉga, Nihonga, hanging scrolls and contemporary art. Japanese consumers are as happy to buy from department stores as art galleries, and the turnover of   Yoˉga outstrips contemporary art while ceramics and Nihonga are almost as 39

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New Art New Markets popular as these two leading art forms. In the final analysis, and this sets Japan apart from China and the United States, virtually no buyers in the survey considered art an investment; rather, they bought it primarily to decorate their homes.  While it is true that the survey was hampered by the relatively modest levels of income of the participants, it did describe a very different market to the global one.  The most notable similarity was with China, in the consistent choice of   Yoˉga, Nihonga painting and ceramics over contemporary art.  These preferences are reflected in the China market, where brush painting, oil works and calligraphy far outstrip the turnover and value of sales for contemporary art.  The 2016 ArtPrice/Artron survey suggests that calligraphy and brush paintings account for over 80 per cent of the China market. Oil paintings account for most of the remainder, and even within this much smaller percentile a disparate bunch of practitioners, from foreign contemporary-art exponents, home-grown practitioners and traditional oil painters, have been gathered under one heading. It is not Japan’s ‘closed’ art-market model nor its world-class cultural infrastructure that is its gift to the contemporary arts of East Asia and beyond, but its highly developed and prized crafts, which in cities like Kyoto have been instrumental in 9 the revival of something as grand and meaningful as traditional house building. Japan has taken its ‘artistic’, as opposed to industrial, crafts very seriously and has been consistent and assiduous in maintaining traditional skills and practices since the 10 Meiji era (1868–1912), raising craft to the status of art in 1927. Four distinct tendencies were identified as worthy of special attention; two were revivalist, one was concerned with the simple vigour of folk-craft (Mingei) style and one concentrated on those who strove to transform themselves from artisans into artists. There is a distinction made in Japan, according to R. Faulkner (1995), between shokunin (one who pursues a skill), with little scope for creativity, and sakka (one who makes), which implies originality. It is the sakka category that should interest us the most.  The Association of Modern Artist Craftsmen, which was established in 1961, tilted the balance firmly in favour of creativity over tradition by changing the emphasis away from ‘crafts for use’ to ‘crafts for contemplation’ (Faulkner 1995, p.15).  The promulgation, from 1952 to 1954, of a Law for the Protection of Intangible Cultural Property identified as its deciding criteria skills of a particularly high value and skills that, if they were not supported by the government, were in danger of disappearing. Enshrined in the preservation of the craft tradition was the philosophy encapsulated in the haiku verse of the poet Matsuo Bashoˉ (1644–94): fueki ryuko (constancy and change). 11 Bashoˉ’s dictum was invoked in the 1959 Nitten exhibition catalogue to explain 40

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East Asian Orthodoxy the true meaning of the word dentoˉ (tradition) in contemporary Japanese artistic production, a tradition that embraces without contradiction both continuity and change.‘The continuation of an artistic tradition must allow for and even encourage change, to keep that art form vibrant’, explains Nicole Rousmaniere (2008, p.12). Continuity, unlike a fractured tradition, summons up the image of a fast-flowing river in which the waters are in a constant state of transmutation while the source remains immutable.  A perfect example of this creative life force can be seen (and felt) in a white (moon) jar (1998) by the living national treasure (awarded in 1995) Manji Inoue (b.1929). He lives in Arita in northern Kyushu, where Japanese porcelain was first manufactured in the early seventeenth century.  The moon jar is a synthesis of three great East Asian traditions – Chinese, Korean and Japanese – and yet it appears modern.  The white, ceramic art of Inoue is sold through the Ippodo Gallery in Tokyo and New York.  The artist, who has been creating ceramics since 1945, studied under Sakaida Kakiemon XII (1878–1963) in Saga Prefecture. His work appears regularly in group exhibitions at the Saga Ceramic Art Museum. I have described just one of many discrete Japanese micro-markets that have led to perhaps the most sophisticated and highest level of contemporary art accomplishment anywhere in the world today.  There is much that China could learn, and is acquiring, from Japan’s approach to the cultural economy. In Japan, three important criteria are attached to the very best exponents, which become known as ‘Living National Treasures’, of art/crafts: their technique must be of the highest artistic value, it must occupy an important position in the history of Japanese crafts and it must have distinctive regional characteristics.  The last requirement is in many ways the most interesting because it dictates that in order for a craft to be of the highest quality, its creation should be tied to the original source of its inspiration and the materials employed should also be procured locally. 12 In the modern world, and notably with materials like lacquer, this is a difficult demand to fulfil in Japan, but there are many examples of Japanese art/crafts people who have either remained in or moved to the regions to work.  This move by practitioners away from metropolitan and art-market centres is mirrored in the isolation from the commercial world that many of today’s Chinese brush painters seek and secure for themselves in their walled (garden) enclosures. Manji Inoue has spent his entire creative life in Arita, perfecting his skills and understanding the properties inherent in the local materials. The tradition of passing on the secrets of a craft from the master down through the family or to an apprentice is another key element in the process because the 41

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New Art New Markets daily observation and transference of the master’s skills, knowledge and technique to trainees, and the gentle evolution of their experience, are essential to the retention of the spirit of the craft. Miwa Jusetsu (1910–2012), who came from a dynasty of artist potters who lived and worked in Hagi on the western tip of the island of Honshu, was made a ‘Living National Treasure’ in 1970 in reward for reviving the 13 tradition of Hagi ware, which was typified by his rugged, asymmetrical tea bowls. His third son, Miwa Kazuhiko (b.1951), has followed his father but is free from any formal constraints and has developed remarkable sculptural works based on traditional techniques and glazes. Miwa Kazuhiko’s approach to his craft is echoed in the entreaty of Nishizawa Tekiho (1889–1965) in the first issue of Japan Crafts (Nihon kogei) in 1955, in which he says that works should be based on the special character of the Japanese people, with its roots in tradition.  They should be unique objects, whose aesthetic properties are based on strong beliefs and not swayed by fashion.  There should, he continued, be a connection to the present and to new techniques and materials because the Japan Art Craft Association is not about hidebound tradition. ‘Tradition’, Rousmaniere (2007, p.32) concludes, is not simply ‘preservation. It is that element in creative art which does not change at its core but which changes constantly in its expression’. ¯ nishi Isao’s (b.1944) round tray (2000) in ‘hoop built’ (magewa-zukuri) techO nique, made of black translucent lacquer (tamenuri) on wood, is technically highly accomplished.  The four gold circles that surround the rim and base of the artist’s rich, green-tinged lacquered dish bring to mind the rings of Saturn. But the selftaught artist begins the process simply by bending strips of wood and then fitting them into a tight ring. He works from start to finish on all of his large dishes and bowls, even making his own tools and the surfaces on which he works. The Japanese approach to the protection and encouragement of dormant or endangered crafts has influenced South Korea, which set up its own Cultural Assets system in 1962. Soon afterwards, the government recognised (usually elderly) masters in a particular craft, referring to them as ‘Human Cultural Assets’. One of the obligations placed on the holders of this title, which is rewarded with a monthly stipend, is to train and examine apprentices.  The system has created objects and materials of a consistently high quality but with significant variations – noted, as Jane Portal explains (2000, p.148), for their ‘directness, ruggedness, spontaneity, naivety, charm and vitality’. There is a substantial body of Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese contemporary art that builds on the respective traditions of these societies.  This work, a selection of which I look at, is not by any means the largest sample of art and creativity in East 42

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East Asian Orthodoxy Asia. It is in fact dwarfed by ubiquitous international contemporary art, but does offer an alternative to the mainstream production of images, which can at times appear contrived and flamboyant. Its aesthetic properties are attached to ancient beliefs, customs and mores. It is an art that is tangible, often functional, considered and very well made. The work of the self-taught Korean painter Pak Su-gun (Park Soo-gun) (1914– 65), whose depiction, of peasant women – usually based on the artist’s wife – grinding grain, walking or sitting with a child tied to their waist, or selling fruit in a market are some of the most compelling examples of understatement and artistic honesty in art. Pak will often include a simple Korean homestead in his painting with, as Portal explains, the thick impasto texture of the oil paint that is applied to his canvases resembling the earthen walls of Korean cottages.  The texture of his work also echoes the surfaces of Korean Buncheong ware and Japanese raku tea bowls.  The figures, too, are painted in a muted palette of browns, greys and creams, and the forms traced in thick black lines.  The directness and simplicity of Pak’s painting describes his unequivocal relationship to the natural rhythms of life in Korea, while his art, as Philip West and Suh Ji-moon (2001) explain, is a fusion between Western nineteenth-century realism and native subject matter. It is rendered in a unique style that captures the essence of rural life on the peninsula before wholesale international intervention. In this way, Pak is a starting point in the investigation into an artistic tradition that underlies the enduring values in East Asian art. The contemporary Korean artist Myeong Ho Lee (b.1975) takes photographs of trees (fig.6). In preparation for each shot, he employs a crane to suspend a giant cloth behind the tree, creating a silhouette and sharp delineation of its trunk, boughs, branches and foliage.  The artist lives in a traditional, single-roomed house in central Seoul, which has been refurbished – as so many traditional properties in Korea have – to reveal the natural beauty of the internal wooden beams, roof and structural supports, binding him to his country’s heritage. His most recent series of limited-edition inkjet prints is less stark.  I will nail my colours to the mast and say that I am seduced by much Korean art that embraces nature to good effect. I particularly appreciate the lengthy commitment that Bae Bien-u (b.1950) has shown to the filtering of light through the branches and leaves of trees. His Sonamu series (2015) emphasises the sweep and curve of tree trunks.  A good example is snm3a-029 (2015).  This landscape arrangement only makes sense in an Asian context because of its allusion to natural energy and the lines of an ink-laden brush.  Trees are traditionally revered 43

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New Art New Markets in Korea. Before a figure of Buddha is carved from wood, water is placed in front of the tree, a sacred line is drawn in the earth, yellow soil is sprinkled around the trunk and bronze mirrors placed at its base in order to cast out evil. Buddhist sutras are chanted as the tree is felled. Much of this reverence for a living, inert organism is conveyed in the imagery of Bae Bien-u. The Japanese artist Hiroshi Senju (b.1958) paints waterfalls and mountain ranges. He applies white and, most recently, fluorescent coloured paints to paper backed by board.  The colour resonance of these latest works replicates the neon night-time that we experience in our cities today. Senju’s waterfalls, like our cities, come alive at night.  They are in every respect contemporary artistic visions created out of ancient techniques. In his earliest works, he used oyster shells, coral and semi-precious stones to form iwaenogu (Japanese natural pigments), which he attached to rice paper with an animal-hide glue. Senju’s use of natural and traditional materials is driven by the sustainability and versatility of well-tried practices and the beauty of iwaenogu. It is never a slavish revision of tradition for tradition’s sake. His work is the embodiment of Bashoˉ’s dictum of continuity and change.  The Fall (1995) is a large-scale (14 x 3.4m high) installation, which received an honourable mention at that year’s Venice Biennale.  The series of paintings, arranged in the manner of a traditional Japanese screen, contains the natural force that is expelled from a raging waterfall.  The depiction of streaks of frothy foam and droplets of spray has an energy and power that exceeds the limitations of the picture frame. Senju has achieved his great effect by expertly pouring white, industrial paint at intervals down each of his interlocking picture panels. He has then applied black paint with a traditional brush to delineate the white lines and so enhance the dramatic impact on our senses of cascading water. Senju’s inspiration is supported by the long and arduous training that he received in Nihonga painting at Tokyo National University. His is an art rooted in Shinto, the prehistoric Japanese belief system, at the heart of which lies the worship of nature. Shinto is represented by two ideograms that have been translated as ‘the way of the gods’.  And the gods (kami) of Shinto have very strong feelings for nature: ‘Nature’s power’, V   ictor Harris (2001, p.14) explains, ‘may be felt in beautiful scenery, a sense of awe, recognition of nature’s beneficence in providing [for] human wants, or fear of the dangers it can unleash in storm, flood, earthquake, and volcanic eruption.’ The 100m-high Nachi waterfall is one of the three kami of Mount Kumano that represent intellectually comprehensible Buddhism (taizo-kai) as opposed to ‘the 14 void’ (ku). ‘Since Amida Buddha was held to be the Buddhist equivalent of the kami of the mountain, the mountain itself became synonymous with Amida’s Pure 44

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East Asian Orthodoxy Land paradise’ (Harris 2001, p.38).  The crashing falls of Nachi appear to have been 15 transported magically to Terminal 2 in Tokyo International Airport, Haneda. In a giant, curvilinear form suspended over the modern, shiny terminal interior, Senju has brought the spirit of the mountain to the heart of modern Japan. In another installation, his monochrome, predominantly dark, falls create great theatre in Tokyo’s Grand Hyatt Hotel, and in yet another act as the walls to reconstructed temples in the Tokyo National Museum.  The installation of the art of Senju is vitally important to its effectiveness.  The placement in the traditional house formerly owned by the Ishibashi family, part of the Benesse Art Site in Naoshima, is without parallel.  The multi-panel, vertiginous, liquid swirl of mist and water conveyed to us through a glistening, monochrome palette is the paramount contemporary example of a marriage of environment, man-made interior and imagery.  The opposing external walls part onto an oblong of grass and a solitary, rectangular stone slab. In this context, the meaning of the sculpture of Nobuo Sekine (b.1942) – and, in particular, his series Phase of Nothingness (1969–2012) – becomes clear.  The stone slab acts as the keystone of a Shinto shrine to nature. Once again, these sentiments and forms make absolute sense in an Asian context.  The quiddity of the work of art is extracted by the environment in which it is shown.  The key to the success of the Art House Project on Naoshima, of which the Ishibashi house is one example, is its integration of the art, the built environment and the familial.  The result is a series of convincing Gesamtkunstwerks.  To emphasise this point, I would contrast the Naoshima experience with the installation of rocks, Law of Multitude (1975–2012) by Kishio Suga (b.1944), within the walls of a white, man-made cube (the Los Angeles gallery Blum and Poe), which, although impressive, fails to convey the essential meaning of that particular work of art. The photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto (b.1948) shares Senju’s fascination for nature’s power. His attraction to the element of light, which is the artist’s pivotal interest, in his studies of the sea and cinemas dissolves the structures and objects in his photographs.  A perfect example of this effect is the images that he shot of the Richard Serra sculpture Joe in the grounds of the Pulitzer Foundation, St Louis, Missouri. One still, Joe 2026 (2004), renders the sculpture in tonal, architectonic shapes that are formed by and pulsate with the light emanating from an aperture at the top of the composition. Sugimoto, like Senju, has captured the essence of the elements and drawn deeply from the well of Japanese belief in the primacy of nature over man-made structures. The natural beauty of the Korean artist Lee Jaehyo’s (b.1965) ‘icicle & thread variable installation‘ (2001), which he created out of the snow and icicles on the 45

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New Art New Markets overhanging canopy of the Vermont Studio Center, demonstrated the artist’s particular affinity with nature.  The hwaehwa (the notion of painting/drawing) that he subsequently made of the installation captures the fleeting beauty of his expertly cut fan of transparent, vertical ice daggers. His later work maintains his close relationship with nature. In the sculpture 0121–1110 = 1080713 (2009), the planed wood of a chestnut tree is manoeuvred into the shape of a doughnut. In another series, thousands of nails are hammered into charred blocks of wood and then bent and flattened. Lee’s work has a great physical presence, but his enduring concern is with nature’s fragile beauty – best expressed in the icicle installation and in a work such as Fallen Leaves of Oak (2005), in which he suspended thousands of dried leaves from lengths of wire, allowing them to rustle at the slightest movement of air. At the time when the Italian critic Germano Celant first used the term ‘Arte Povera’ to describe the changing physical states of objects, instead of representing things, artists like Susumu Koshimizu (b.1944) started making works like From Surface to Surface (1971, remade 1986), in which 14 cut and sawn planks of wood are stood up against a wall. Koshimizu, who grew up next to a timber mill in his native Japan, intended the work as a meditative aid. Other artists, notably from South Korea, also became interested in a contemplative art that had at its core a belief in the significance of materials.  The Mono-ha (‘School of  Things’) has since become an important part of the art landscape.  The Japanese word utsukushii, Kawakita explains, ‘implies feelings of tenderness towards a certain object that inspires feelings of affection and good will’.  An affinity with natural phenomena such as snow or flowers can be extended to a work of art that leaves the viewer, in the words of Kawakita, speechless. The work of the Mono-ha engages with nature in just this way.  The Korean 16 Lee Ufan (b.1936) is one of its most eminent practitioners. Lee established himself in Tokyo in the 1970s, creating an installation of boulders and metal planes in his garden in Kamakura, just south of the capital. His works of art, which highlight the relationship between river rocks and flat steel planes, emphasise the physical tension between man-made materials and nature’s own. In a work like Relatum - Discussion (2003, fig.8), the four rocks really do appear to be engaged in a conversation with the four stacked, black, iron plates.  The rough-hewn boulders encircle the precision-manufactured metal sheets, manipulating the interior space and acknowledging the void that exists beyond the sculptural island. Lee’s work is directly influenced by Zen or Ch’an Buddhism, in which the power of meditation and embrace of ‘nothingness’ as a way towards Buddha-hood is a central tenet.  The artist’s paintings are made up of horizontal, often blue and white, vertical and gestural paint 46

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East Asian Orthodoxy stripes; small squares; or scattered marks, which act as surrogate rocks and plates.  The other movement to which Lee is aligned,  Tansaekhwa, has received considerable support from globally aspirant and active dealers and collectors in South Korea.  The assiduous promotion of the works of Park Seo-bo (b.1931), in particular, has reached epidemic proportions.  The meaning of his Ecriture works, rather like that of the painterly marks of Lee Ufan, is diminished by over-production, overexposure and poor presentation.  This is a shame because his late écriture (or myo = drawing bop = method in Korean) works, which he began in the early 1980s, adopt the principles of hwaehwa. In these works, Park repetitively marks vertical lines of water-based paint in sections the length of a piece of hanji paper (a highly absorbent Korean material made from mulberry-tree bark).  The lines are painted in alternately different shades and tones.  The artist also marks the spongy paper with pencil strokes, which leave a furrow and raise the paper on either side of the indentation. By allowing his water-based paint and pencil marks to be ‘regulated’ by the physical properties of the paper – in Park’s words, letting the paper speak for itself – the artist is offering his modern grammar to the traditional brush painter’s material.  The Zen principle that it is better to have nothing than something finds its pictorial representation in these mixed-media écriture works of art.  The rectangular strip(s) of monochrome paint applied to the hanji paper act, like the planes of black iron in Lee Ufan’s Relatum - Discussion, as pools of emptiness.  They also illustrate the essential relationship between something and nothing. Lee Dong-youb (b.1946) works in the manner of the Mono-ha artists, and his concept of a ‘zone of nothingness’ is similar.  Although Lee uses oil paint, his work is very Eastern in flavour and can perhaps be best explained with reference to the notion of hwaehwa, which sidesteps the need to acknowledge the picture plane but thinks instead in terms of ‘flats’ and marks or brush strokes.  The canvas to Lee is the space in which he displays a rigorous self-discipline characterised by repeated stroke making.  The depth of vision that the viewer experiences when gazing into the works from Lee’s Interspace - Musing cycle from the early 1990s is the void apprehended as a field of thought. He likens his notion of space to the sound of the moktak (Buddhist, wooden bell), which has a very particular physical resonance.  The fact that his brush creates subtle fissures on the surface of his paintings draws a physical connection between the artist and the outside world, and provides the viewer with the means to enter his ‘zone of nothingness’. Suh Se-ok (b.1929) shares the concern with the spirit and form that lies at the heart of the art of both Lee Dong-youb and Lee Ufan. Suh is the leader of the Mungnimhoe group of abstract brush painters. His elegant brush work People 47

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New Art New Markets (1980) comprises three forms divided by one horizontal and one vertical line into 12 compartments. In the construction of his loosely defined grid, the artist makes the viewer aware of the significance of line in the construction of form while at the same time creating emptiness rather than substance out of his linear structure. In a figural work like Dancing People (1990), the artist refers obliquely to a Shamanist ritual – an ancient form of worship that is still commonly practised in Korea today. Suh’s people are lost in primordial frenzy, summoning up powerful spiritual forces that defy a modern, rational explanation.  They are archetypes, shadow puppets performing on life’s stage. His 2014 recreation of People depicts the multitude of figures in the Chinese character for ‘person’, in the clearest indication that Suh harnesses his creativity to the art of calligraphy. It would be remiss of me not to look at other sensible applications of tradition in Korea.  The inherent properties of Buddhism in art on the peninsula are both pure and corrupt. Cha Youngsoo (2012) has described two systems, which he refers to as the art of Buddhism and the Buddhism of art.  The former, he writes, is concerned with the encouragement to prayer and meditation and ceremony while the latter focuses on technique and impression. Most Goryeo-dynasty (918–1392) Buddhist paintings are silk-based and coloured in pigments drawn from minerals. Red is extracted from limestone, green from malachite and blue from azurite. In total, five colours appear, representing the five cardinal points of middle, north, south, east and west.  A technique known as Bae-Che Bup, which involves painting the reverse of the paper or silk in white before drawing the lines on the front and thereby allowing the colours to shine and the tones to deepen, produces both resonance and depth. Vivid colours play an important role in traditional Korean society.  Within the Korean Buddhist tradition, old temples are repainted to enhance their beauty.  The work, as Jane Portal explains, is carried out by monk painters supported by teams of disciples who paint designs onto stencils which are then pricked with small holes.  A white powder is then applied to the stencil in the area intended for decoration, leaving an outline for the monk painters to apply one of up to ten colours to fill in the patterns. In Bongeun Temple close to Ewha University in Seoul, the abbot, Lee Chiho (1909–2006), created works exclusively for his temple. His highly coloured and detailed paintings of the life of Buddha, his vital and energetic renditions of animals that represent the signs of the zodiac and his gold-point sketches of minor gods accomplished in a few deft strokes of the brush keep an ancient tradition alive (fig.7).  The work has a primarily religious purpose and on important occasions it provides an iconic reference for the multitude of believers. On festival days, crowds of people ascend the temple hill in order to receive the Buddha’s blessing amidst the 48

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East Asian Orthodoxy swirling, painted flags and pendants and temple decorations that the abbot and his monk painters have made for the occasion. Lee Chiho sold his work privately in addition to offering his imagery for temple use. He was a master of Buddhist painting and dan-cheong (Buddhist patterning), but not to my knowledge of sculpture; therefore, according to Cha (2012), he could not be considered a Geum-eo, or complete master. No such complete master is likely to 17 emerge after the separation of skills in 1950. But Lee Chiho was certainly of the generation that trained within the temple and performed the core functions of a monk while also learning to be an artist.  The corruption of Buddhist art per se in South Korea began in the 1980s with the diminution of the significance of Buddhist instruction and immersion, which were only attained through temple life, in favour of the study and application of Buddhist art practice in universities.  The repetition of technique that was compulsory for a Buddhist monk artist and was a part of his everyday routine has been reduced by as much as 90 per cent in the country’s bifurcated, secular university curriculum. If the aesthetic of Buddhist art in South Korea has been corrupted by the dramatic change in the conditions of creation, then the process of exchange has further distorted the experience.  Whereas I acquired the work of Lee Chiho from his residence in the Bongeun Temple, today it is far more common for a dealer to bring a third-party commission to the artist and secure a 60 per cent cut in the selling price (Cha 2012).  The transition from cultural and spiritual integrity to commercialisation was brought about by the culmination in the 1980s of 20 years of economic modernisation. Urban society in South Korea gave rise to a profusion of city temples (and churches), which forsook the systems of creation and exchange that had existed for a millennium. Buddhist art galleries (called studios), specialising in different forms of Buddhist art, collaborated.  They accepted orders for all Buddhist art, and skimmed a percentage of the commission for recommendations and referrals to other studios.  The nadir of the market followed the Asian economic malaise at the end of the twentieth century, when skilled Korean Buddhist art specialists were forced to move to Vietnam and China.  There they produced cheap, mass imagery for import back into South Korea.  Today, the commercial evolution of Buddhist art is almost complete. South Korean art is, as a rule, valued according to its price per a unit of measurement known as a ho (Robertson 2016, pp 232–3). Buddhist art, writes Cha (2012), adopts a different form of economic calculation in which pyeong (dimensions) and ja (length) perform the role of ho.  Within this arithmetic, the cost of expensive materials such as gold, wood and minerals add considerably to the final price.  At the intersection of Buddhist and contemporary art sits a gallery like Seoul’s 49

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New Art New Markets Hakgojae, which represents artists who produce work in a Buddhist idiom for an international consumer. Korea has developed an arts infrastructure and art market that, along with Japan’s, 18 is the region’s most effective. A key to its swift success has been the great sums of government and corporate money pumped into its museum-building programme and into the training of its multimedia artists. Both the National Museum of Contemporary Art and the Samsung-owned Ho-Am (renamed Leeum in 2004) were established in the 1980s.  The other important factor has been the single-minded intent with which South Korea has set about perfecting its internationalist model.  The speed of international success enjoyed by the peninsula’s artists has, however, only been made possible by the importation of Western codes of art-market practice. Members of the tight-knit group of top, Seoul-based dealers each focus on different artists and concentrate on distinct client bases.  When these dealers appear at international fairs, for which Choi and Choi (2008) confirm they receive financial support from the Ministry of Culture, or open premises outside South Korea, they are careful not to trespass on their (Korean) rivals’ territories. It is easy and cheap to join the international art trade in and out of South Korea, which makes it relatively straightforward for the major dealers to export the work of their national stars overseas. South Korea’s internationalist cultural model has been carefully constructed. 19 Seoul is its epicentre and Gwangju, home to its biennale, while anonymous cities like Daegu house some of the country’s most surprising international, contemporary-art collections.  The mass domestic architecture of South Korea, built in the 1960s, and that of  Taiwan, from the 1970s and 1980s, lends itself to Western art forms in rectangular and square frames.  The sprawling mansions that cling to the sides of Yangminshan (Yangming mountain) in Taipei house comprehensive contemporary-art collections like that of Pierre Chen. In South Korea, Cheonan, a satellite of Seoul, is home to the cutting-edge art collection of Chang-Il Kim, the owner of Arario Gallery. But it is in the second- and third-tier cities of both territories that mimetic contemporary-art collections proliferate.  These are not middle-market affairs, but expensive, brand-conscious and fashionable international fodder. If South Korea needs a lesson in the perils of rapid overexpansion, then it need look no further than Japan in the late 1980s. For a brief period at the height of the Tokyo property bubble, the Imperial Palace and its extensive grounds in the centre of the city were reputed to be worth as much as the state of California or a medium-sized European economy. During this time, Japan imported more art (by value) 50

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East Asian Orthodoxy than the United States did. Its corporations acquired second-tier impressionist art at international auctions at prices that have yet to be matched in real terms.  When its overheated economy collapsed, Japanese banks were left with bad debts while the corporations and collectors themselves had storehouses of art now worth a fraction of its purchase value. Exposure to the international art market, even for an art economy the size of Japan’s, is fraught with risk. In a report entitled ‘K-Artmarket’ released by the K Auction house (a leading Seoul-based venture) in 2015, the duplication by South Korea of a Western artmarket system is apparent and to be lamented.  After the 1988 Olympics, the Seoul market opened its doors to foreign dealers and, although few have truly thrived, some have profited and many more have sold predominantly Western contemporary art through domestic art fairs. More dispiriting is the predilection of the top South Korean dealers to represent blue-chip Western contemporary art.  The result today is that the complexion of the market differs from its Western equivalents in only one significant respect: the top ten Seoul-based dealers, in the area known as Sagan-dong, and the top two domestic auction houses together monopolise highvalue sales.  This, Christine Chung (2016) points out, appears to mirror the system in the United Kingdom and United States except that in South Korea the middle market is hollow.  Two other minor differences are a pricing bias in favour of older Korean artists (referred to as Wonro) and the application of the ho system of economic measurement. Koreans, like their Chinese counterparts and in contrast to their Japanese equivalents, are keen art gamblers. But whereas Chinese investors and speculators, according to Jaemin Cha (2016), buy directly from artists’ studios, the Koreans will acquire work on the advice of their dealer.  Art funds have been the bane of both national markets. I have looked at the Buddhist-art market in South Korea, and there are other areas that offer material beyond the global aesthetic, but within the country’s highly lucrative, blue-chip contemporary-art market a handful of dealers dominate the business.  The Park Geun-hye administration prioritised the expansion of the cultural sector and increased government investment in cultural infrastructure. It anticipated that this would grow the domestic art market on the peninsula. It would have been better, I believe, if it had examined how best to enrich the country’s visual art ‘diet’. Some of the best works by the Taiwanese sculptor Yang Ying-feng (1926–97) are the wood and stone animals and Chinese deities that he created in the late 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the semi-abstract sculptures of the 1970s that encapsulated the artist’s fascination with nature’s silent chi, or qi (energy). Yang was educated in art at Tokyo University and later, when he returned to Taiwan, received instruction 51

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New Art New Markets from the great brush painter Pu Xinyu. He developed his affectionate and humorous woodcuts of rural Taiwanese communities and farmyard animals (which were printed on paper made out of compressed sugar cane) into ritualistic bronze totems such as Buffalo Head, which were traced with hieroglyphics and symbols that reflected the artist’s interest in early Chinese bronzes. His move to the spectacular, limestone Taroko Gorge in the mid-1960s gave rise to his sublime stone Buddhas, but the works which followed were his lifetime achievement. Mandarin’s Sleeve (1972), which is a stylised representation of a Taichi practitioner, shows how the artist invented a shorthand sculptural vocabulary for expressing the ancient Chinese belief in a cosmic energy which reverberates throughout the universe and which can, through regular and correct practice – notably, through the exercises in Qigong and Taichi – be channelled into the human body.  The folds of the arching sleeve can just as easily be interpreted as a mountain’s ridges. Yang had an enduring influence on his pupil, the sculptor Ju Ming (b.1938), whom he encouraged to practice Taichi in order to develop the younger man’s physical and mental discipline, and whose own Taichi sculptural series shares the same concerns as Yang’s work from this period. Both artists have rooted their art on Taiwan. Ju, who learnt to carve temple sculptures under the guidance of the woodcarver Lee Chin-chuan (1912–60), is himself a virtuoso. He now works on the island’s wild east coast and is once again sculpting wood into human figures – brightly coloured, wooden icons that form an important part of the artist’s Living World series.  This recent body of work appears to be inspired by the Austronesian mortuary effigies (tau tau) that are still made in the highlands of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.  Tau tau figures are uniquely personal portraits of the deceased, to the extent that the clothes in which the sculptures are dressed are changed by family members long after the burial of the remains. One of Yang Ying-feng’s daughters became a nun, something which is not uncommon in Taiwan, and established a temple order.  Temples (and gods) proliferate on the island; many of them are little more than a means of avoiding tax, but a good many more perform genuine acts of charity. One such temple, Long Fa Tang, in the southern city of Kaohsiung, is part Buddhist temple, part psychiatric hospital and chicken farm.  The temple’s patients are part of a radical experiment at a ‘cure’ – or, at least, at improving their ability to behave ‘normally’. Pairs of inmates (because that, effectively, is what they are) are chained together at the waist 24 hours a day.  The lead person in the pair is deemed to be the most rational, and it is reasoned that his behaviour will slowly raise the standards of his companion.  The Taiwanese photographer Chien-Chi Chang (b.1961) has visited the temple since 1993, and in 52

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East Asian Orthodoxy 1998 he took a series of black-and-white photographs,  The Chain, of the fettered pairs of men bathed in the light from an open door.  The photographs are extremely sympathetic and dignify their subjects, but the harsh realities of the remedy are readily apparent. In another series, Double Happiness (2003), Chang captures the faces of  Taiwanese men and their Vietnamese brides as they request Taiwanese visas for their new spouses in his home town of  Taichung. Chang’s point is that as the educational attainment of  Taiwanese and other East Asian women advances so do their material and intellectual aspirations, leaving a significant number of local men to seek marriage from women in poorer parts of the world. If Chang deals with some of the uncomfortable social consequences of economic development, then Hsu Yu-jen (b.1951) looks wistfully at the changes that industrialisation has wrought on Taiwan’s beautiful landscape, which has been physically blighted by the years of modernisation.  The response to the detritus that now litters Taiwan’s once-pristine coastline, and the unregulated and often abandoned factories that mark its verdant hills and valleys, finds a remarkably restrained response in the artist’s work since 2000. Hsu draws the modern world in pen and ink, but his forms conform to a strict geometry. It is the geometry of a modern, industrial world which now shapes nature that the artist depicts in the finest and lightest of shortstroke brush works, Sea Surrounded by Cement Dykes (2006).  The delicate effect that Hsu achieves with his brush, so that the image appears as in a haze, has been likened by Chang Tsong-zung (2007, p.5) to ‘light leaking through the brushwork’, or by the artist to ‘looking at daybreak through doors and windows’.  The primacy of space and light is heightened by the shifting horizons in a painting like Water Flows to Remain Empty.  A Thousand Mountains Disappear (2001) so that the viewer sinks into the work’s white void, the depth of which is defined by the ink marks on xuan (mulberry-bark) paper.  The ‘reality’ that Hsu depicts in the vertical ink-on-silk painting Leafless Trees Hang Upon the Cliff, Looking Thirstily Towards the Valley (2006) is that of a man-made world sucking at nature’s lifeblood. Hsu has a studio on Taiwan’s scenic east coast, and shares a fascination for the dramatic topography of this part of the island with Ju Ming and Yang Ying-feng. His geometric, linear studies of mountains, cliffs and rocks are close in sense and intention to the stylised lines and ‘spontaneous’ carving that Yang and Ju apply, respectively, to their sculptures.  The Chinese term for landscape is shan (mountain) 20 shui (water), and Daoists maintain that there are good and evil mountains. Out of this belief came Chinese geomancy or feng shui (the study, literally, of winds and waters). Hsu’s sliced and geometrically ordered mountains have been altered and 53

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New Art New Markets wounded by humanity. His faint, barely perceptible brush marks represent mankind’s imprint on nature: scar tissue that can never be erased. In spite of the authoritarian rule of many East Asian governments, particularly on Taiwan and in South Korea, the last decade and a half of civil society has enabled their communities, through social force, to reclaim elements of their past.  They have begun to establish structures and develop trains of thought and modes of practice that seek to preserve, but not embalm, their cultural traditions. By and large, they have been successful in marrying a modern world to a traditional one – and the lessons in evolutionary change that Taiwan, especially, can teach China, but also other transitional societies with a rich and living cultural heritage, are seminal. China’s contemporary culture will be strengthened beyond measure if grass-roots communities on the mainland are encouraged gradually to reclaim their identities through their pasts. The effective and arresting presentation of the Taiwanese ‘archetypes’ of Wu Tien-chang (b.1956) in the unofficial Taiwan Pavilion in the Palazzo delle Prigioni in Venice in 2015 were both a demonstration of ‘soft power’ and an example of cultural acuteness.  Wu Tien-chang was the best choice because, above all artists working in Taiwan today, it is he who captures what it really is to be Taiwanese.  The reviews of the show in the Western media suggested that the artist bemoaned the influence of the West on Taiwan. Such an assessment misses the point of the implicit revisionism in the neon-framed, kinetic character studies in the Venice show.  The revival by the artist of imagery and ideas that were first introduced to a wider Asian public at a series of touring exhibitions at the turn of the millennium was key to the new work in the pavilion. Far from an oblique political commentary, the revised array of familiar characters reflects the assimilation today of Japanese and southern Chinese cultural mores and a filtered Western ideology that gives rise to the poly-cultural confection reflected in Taiwanese nativism. No one who has spied the girls selling betel-nut highs from mobile, neon-clad, glass-boxed chariots on the roadsides of  Taiwanese cities or has listened to the bathetic, lovelorn lyrics and insistent rhythms of traditional Taiwanese songs can fail to see where the inspiration for the current works lies.  The young woman leaning on the silver, stainless-steel shovel in the Beloved quadriptych (2013–15) is the reincarnation in contemporary garb of the qipao (traditional Chinese dress) clad mandolin players in I dream of a past era I (1994).  The current model is truly multicultural – she is dressed in glittering spandex and has an insouciant gaze that disguises the pain of a forlorn love, but the martial posture of a young pioneer. In one figure,Wu has incorporated a Taiwanese sensibility into a pan-Asian cultural affinity. How different from the earlier figure, 54

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East Asian Orthodoxy whose cultural associations are prominently Shanghainese with a strong Japanese overlay. In the earlier example, the frame of crystalline flowers could have been taken from a Taiwanese funeral cortège, and the qipao, hairstyle and nonchalant pose are reminiscent of 1920s Shanghai beauties. I find it hard to uncover any reference to the West. I find it even harder to discover any reference to politics.  This is an affair of the heart. It is not in Taiwan’s best interest, especially today with the rise of China, to court Western art-market players. South Korea embarked on a concerted cultural offensive in preparation for the country’s World Cup in 2002, although the 21 ‘opening up’ of the republic actually began with the Olympics in 1988. In the 22 intervening years, the country has also passed the ‘two turnover test‘, which is seen as the mark of a consolidated democracy.  As a consequence of its compressed industrialisation and late democratisation, Hyug-baeg Im (2010, p.103) explains, ‘[t]he traditional governance of the sedentary Confucian society has coexisted with the modern governance of the industrial society and even the post-modern 23 governance of the “neo-nomadic society”’. This is as far as any form of cultural assimilation should go. It has probably gone far too far in South Korea already. But the current governance is nowhere more apparent, according to Im (2010), than in the resilience of regionalism and a clan-like loyalty to the home town, which reaches down into the family and emphasises the value of education, a secular life, filial piety, an elite paternalism and righteousness (Kwon & Cho 1994, p.8, cited in Im 2010).  Taiwan has reached a similar juncture. In this formative period of a new order in Asia, the political and cultural balance is bound to reinvigorate allegiances to Asian values. Asian ‘Citizens’, Peerenboom explains (2010, p.218), ‘elect imperial presidents with wide discretionary powers whom they can trust to exercise sound judgement because of their moral character – the modern-day equivalent of the sage and virtuous Confucian junzi [superior person]’. Confucianism, Kim tells us (1996, in Im 2010), saturates people’s lives and is at the core of Korean culture. It is at the heart of each one of the rights-based states in this chapter that are opposed to the majoritarian democracies of the West and favour collective rights over individual freedoms.  The particular character of South Korean politics and society has had a great impact on the country’s arts, for while South Korea’s cultural framework appears very modern the forces that determine its direction are hierarchical, illiberal and elitist, and the content traditional.

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New Art New Markets The curse of globalisation and its panacea Japan has, after an extended interregnum, cautiously returned to the international art market, and auction houses like Shinwa now hold auctions in Hong Kong.  The country is fortunate that the great size and diversity of its domestic market has steered it through two difficult decades and also lessened its need to compete so aggressively in overseas arenas. It should be recalled that in the post-war period of global economic expansion in Japan, an extremely influential cultural figure, Yukio Mishima (1925–70), personified the revival of the oppositional ideology of Bushido (the Samurai code of honour).  A group of highly successful artists, who came of age in the 1980s, were intrigued by the martial cult of Mishima, to which they added the stylistic Japanese element of ukiyo-e (mainly woodblock prints; literally ‘pictures of the floating world’) and the cultural trope kawaii (loveable and cute imagery).  The art of Makoto Aida (b.1965) – because of its close affinity to Japanese contemporary aesthetics, which are a reflection of its past as much as its present – is lost in translation.  The yamato-e (‘classical’ Japanese painting) style works of Yamaguchi Akira (b.1969) combine contemporary subject matter with a tradition that dates back to fourteenth-century views of Kyoto. His painting, Department store: Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi (2004) depicts contemporary Japanese consumerism in a traditional idiom. Both these artists demonstrate a strong and growing cultural introspection that is gaining momentum throughout Asia. Even an artist as globally accessible as Takashi Murakami is culturally aligned with the inventor of neo-Nihonga, Hisashi Tenmyouya (b.1966). Taiwan, hampered by its diplomatic isolation, under the aegis of its Art Dealers Association, is forced to attract competition onto its home soil.  When Sotheby’s and Christie’s started to sell, from upmarket Taipei hotels, Chinese and Taiwanese modern and contemporary oil paintings to Taiwan collectors and dealers in the early 1990s, the island’s strategy appeared to have paid off. But the two international houses left shortly after Taiwan’s economy began to falter at the end of the decade.  Taiwanese collectors, in the main, meanwhile resolutely refused to buy from foreign dealers, even those from Hong Kong, so the country’s primary and secondary markets remained the exclusive domain of  Taiwanese dealers.  Taiwan’s composite culture, which at the ‘high end’ is still predominantly Chinese, is vital and uniquely expressive of the great diversity of life in contemporary East Asia. It has assimilated a huge range of the region’s traditions and emerged the stronger and more vital for so doing. Its major cultural institutions have contributed greatly to the export of the island’s culture.  Taiwan’s cultural evolution is a stronger and more 56

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East Asian Orthodoxy fertile conduit for the transfer of a pan-East Asian lifestyle to China than the West. 24 Japanese manga had an immediate impact on the China art scene, but its hold has recently lessened.  The close cultural ties that endure between Japan and Taiwan have meant that the latest art trends out of Japan tend to be adopted first on the island.  The Kawaii doll, re-named ‘A-Bian’ by the Taiwanese, is used to convey political messages and has entered the island’s popular culture.  The Taiwanese artist Hung Tung-lu (b.1968), well known for his ‘Taichi’ holograms, introduced his first manga-style characters to the art world in the late 1990s. His shiny, bronze figurines of Svara, a quasi-spiritual superhero, are drawn from the lexicon of Japanese manga and the world of kawaii. Lee Tzu-hsun (b.1973) managed to amalgamate Japanese pachinko-arcade culture with the overtly materialistic temple life of  Taiwan in The Temple of Love (1999).  There is also a clear reference in this work to the ‘love hotel’ that is a feature of cities and towns throughout Taiwan and Japan. But, perhaps the most iconic work of art to be made during Taiwan’s ‘decade of greed’ is Huang Chin-ho’s (b.1956) Fire (1992). It records one of many incidents in the 1990s in which subterranean Taiwanese nightclubs, most of which flouted all safety rules, burnt to the ground and incinerated revellers. Mechanistic, half-naked hostesses flee the glass-clad structure, which billows smoke from its core.  The rich, tropical fauna that surrounds the building suggests that it is an out-of-town, unregulated club that also serves as a discreet ‘short stay’ hotel. Once again, the cultural anchor is Japan. Taiwan has come a long way since Chin Hsiao-yi (b.1921), the former Director of the country’s National Palace Museum, refused as late as the mid-1990s to acknowledge the existence of the People’s Republic of China. He was a relic from a 38-year period of martial law that ended in 1987, during which time the Kuomintang (KMT) and its army of informers undertook extrajudicial executions – a process re25 counted in Yon-fan’s film Prince of  Tears (2009). The role of voluntary associations and artists’ groups in the erosion of authoritarianism, the awakening of regional and ethnic consciousness and the creation of a poly-cultural society – and the speed with which all this was accomplished – forms one of the most exhilarating political journeys in post-war East Asia. But it too, like the Taiwanese language, may prove to be a cul-de-sac, such is the obloquy towards Taiwan emanating from China. The island’s minchian shehui (civil society) changed the nature of the government on Taiwan.  The KMT had marked the beginning of its rule with the massacre by 26 soldiers of  Taiwanese civilians on 28 February 1947. With the expulsion of  Taiwan from the United Nations in 1971, M. Hsiao and Ming Sho-ho (2010) explain, the KMT’s international standing was undermined and it was forced to look for legitimisation from its citizens.  Artists’ groups such as the Cloud Gate Dance Group and 57

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New Art New Markets indigenous literature and social-science clubs began to explore local cultural identity. By 1986, these Taiwanese cultural concerns had found political expression in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Shortly afterwards, once-marginalised groups such as the Hakka marched to demonstrate in recognition of their specific cultures and mother tongues.  At the same time, the aboriginal movement demanded ownership of its ancestral lands.  The arrival of democracy in 1993 and the passing of the ‘two turnover test’ in 2008, with the re-election of the KMT, has resulted in the raising of environmental consciousness and a heightening of local and ethnic awareness – and has produced, as a consequence, a rich and diverse culture.  This second experiment in Chinese democracy and civil society, however may turn out to have a very short tenure.  Taiwan’s importance to Asian cultural evolution lies in the transmission of its cultural ideas to China by stealth rather than by force, combined with a self-confidence born of hard-fought social and cultural victories. One particular aspect of this can be seen in the revival of belief in the many deities of Daoism and Buddhism. In Taiwan, the worship of the sea goddess Matsu was revived, according to M.R.  Thompson (2010), primarily by middle-class ethnic Taiwanese.  A similar cultural phenomenon is now very evident in China. It was peculiarly evident in 27 Chinese Red painting of the late 1980s and early 1990s, prominent in a work such as The Feast of the Peaches (1991) by the Sichuanese artist LiuYuyi (b.1940).  Taiwanese civil society is a potent cocktail that is no longer threatened from within. But it faces incalculable threats from without. A politics of distrust permeates the region Japan’s forceful projection of its culture across the region (and greatly beyond) in the first half of the twentieth century is well documented, and the enduring legacy of distrust between it and Korea (both North and South) and China is often reasserted by Pyongyang, Seoul and Beijing.  The fact that the Tokyo National Museum holds huge stores of Korean art and artefacts, acquired during its period of occupation of 28 that land from 1910 to 1945, rankles Koreans. The enduring tensions between the two Koreas, which are a daily fact of life in Seoul, cast another shadow over South Korea.  The post-development democracy that came to the country has, on many estimates, reduced political tensions on the peninsula and given rise to pacific and positive nationalism (Acharya 2010). But the succession of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il (1941–2011) by his youngest son, Kim Jong-un (b.1983), has on recent evidence increased the levels of regional conflict. In a unitary state such as North Korea, a desire to legitimise rule by military action is very attractive.  The threat 58

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East Asian Orthodoxy of all-out war between the two states, and its potentially deleterious effects on the region, is ever-present. Cross-Straits relations between the two Chinas are another legacy of the period of twentieth-century internecine struggle in East Asia.  The flames of separatism that 29 Chen Shui-bian (b.1950) fanned for ten years were doused by Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou (b.1950) to the extent that his government accepted the gift of two giant pandas from Beijing, whose names in Chinese characters translate as ‘reunion’ – making Ma’s acceptance the equivalent of a kowtow. Unlike in Korea, democracy in Taiwan has tended to heighten tensions – most notably in the missile crisis of 1995–6, when China reaffirmed its ‘right’ to use direct force to annex Taiwan. Greater economic cooperation has dampened the warlike rhetoric.  There are now direct flights between Taiwan and China, and even limited numbers of Chinese tourists on the island.  Taiwanese businesses are meanwhile active on the mainland.  The level of political anxiety between Taiwan and China will be decided either by military force majeure or, more likely, gradually by a process of cultural integration.  The current  Taiwan incumbent,  Tsai Ing-wen (b.1956), has asserted the popular separatist ambitions of a considerable proportion of the electorate. However, China is not stupid. It will have seen how the West has embroiled itself in a host of sideshow military adventures that have become costly and bloody millstones. I think that a political solution will be found between the two Chinas. Japan has a good relationship with Taiwan. Numerous Taiwanese artists, including the celebrated painter Chen Cheng-po (1895–1947), whose paintings now command millions of dollars, studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Tokyo. Japan has a far less comfortable relationship with both Koreas and with China.  This is a legacy of war and occupation. It mirrors the metaphysical mountains that western European states must climb in order to heal the enduring hurt that their colonial administrations visited on the societies of the world.  These wounds may never heal – particularly if, through interventionism, they are regularly prodded.  The repercussions for the West and Japan are the subject of another book. We might, however, discover very soon that we are at the beginning of these repercussions – and that they are, in fact, economic. If future US economic sanctions are met not with resignation but give birth instead to a replacement reserve currency, a new order will have begun. ‘China’, writes John Dizard (2018), ‘has the explicit goal of turning the Yuan into a major international currency, at the very least replacing the dollar in Asia’. He goes on, ‘China is militarily independent, has substantial gold and forex [foreign exchange] reserves, a large economy and technological capacity’.  The irony is that China may use London to create a traditional 59

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New Art New Markets framework for the yuan as a dollar alternative.  A Euroyuan exchange is a very realistic proposition, especially as Brexit Britain searches for ways to compensate itself for a potential loss of the Eurodollar market.  All this, which extends to the formation of state-owned banks and alternative trading arrangements amongst new markets, has ramifications for the art market. It will see trades conducted in yuan and will also see the Chinese economic, cultural and political will magnified. The politics of distrust can, of course, infect cultural relations. But there is a sense that with so much to lose in the event of conflict, China and its neighbours will grow closer together rather than further apart. China and its neighbours; not China and the West. China will not adopt Taiwanese-style democracy, argues Peerenboom (2010), aware of the plight of India and the remaining examples in South East Asia. But the flow and counter-flow of contemporary culture and lifestyle from East Asia to China and vice versa will be edited and broadly welcomed by Beijing, and China will be transformed by the experience – awaking to become the senior partner at the centre of an art world structured around increasingly authoritarian, communitarian societies.

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4

China

Chinese walls Look at any number of contemporary works by Chinese artists and you will encounter walls.  The young, red-scarfed communist pioneer represented by Cui Xiuwen (b.1970) is trapped between the ochre-red walls of the Forbidden City; the schoolchild by Weng Fen (b.1961) sits astride a wall looking at the new Chinese city from the old, while the naked Ma Liuming (b.1969) is photographed running along the Great Wall.  The artist Zhang Dali (b.1963) was made infamous by the portrait silhouettes that he smashed out of walls and graffiti-adorned palisades bearing the insignia AK-47.  The Red Wall – Coca Cola paintings (1997) of Wei Guangqing (b.1963) are the most literal examples of barriers, but other works – such as the Memory series (2006) by Sheng Qi (b.1965), the Tian’anmen works in the early 1990s by Zhang Xiaogang (b.1958) and the giant woodcuts of the Gate of Heavenly Peace by Han Tao (b.1979) – depict the ultimate walled enclosure: Beijing’s Forbidden City. The bloodlines of Zhang’s Tian’anmen 1 (1993) act like the light darts of a stigmata, attaching the viewer to the yellow gateway and, by association, to Chairman Mao (1893–1976).  The bloodlines became the umbilical links between family members in the artist’s next and best-known series, Family.  This body of work highlighted the impact on Chinese society of the country’s one-child policy, depicting as it did an only child presented as a trophy to the onlooker by his expressionless mother and father. But the Tian’anmen paintings had already defined Zhang and the group of artists that became known as the Political Pop generation as, ironically, apolitical artists who wholeheartedly embraced Deng’s dictum, ‘It’s good to be rich’.  These artists have been a part of the fold their entire careers.  They are rewarded today with exhibitions in the vast new, concrete spaces that festoon Beijing and Shanghai.  The 61

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New Art New Markets Minsheng Bank art gallery opposite the Beijing art-tourist zone, 798, held a retrospective of the work of Fang Lijun (b.1963) in 2017. His pictorial references to the Cultural Revolution are displayed as freely as the stainless-steel sculptures of another Political Pop Artist, Yue Minjun (b.1962), outside the city’s Today Museum.  This is no oversight on behalf of the curator. In 1981, the Party issued a resolution that condemned this aspect of Maoism alone.  There has been another significant social change: the one-child policy has now been expanded to permit the birth of two. China’s horizon widens as its ideology lessens. There are many other themes in contemporary Chinese art, but the wall is one of the most pervasive.  Walls, after all, play a seminal role in Chinese life.  They form a protective shield around the conventional Chinese homestead.  The traditional Chinese garden is a walled enclosure, a world within a world; in fact, the Chinese pictogram for ‘garden’ is in the shape of a square within which sits a phonetic symbol.  Today, in cities all over China, new-build housing developments are constructed with walled perimeters.  Whitewashed walls encase a thicket of song su (pine trees), which lend their name to a private museum, Song Art, opened in the capital in 2017.  The extraordinary reading room of the National Library of China in the capital has at its centre a square chasm, dozens of metres deep.  Walls operate today as information censors on the Internet and as moral censures in the wider community, but with particular application to artists.  They are the squares on a page that provide the grid on which the written language is practised by young children.  The square wall is dismantled in the course of the game of majiang (mah-jong).  And so it is unsurprising that metaphorical walls surround social conduct and interaction in China, from the niceties of human communication to the protocol of official encounters. The walls of the new museums of Beijing and Shanghai show Chinese contemporary art in depth.  They display what is known in the West and what is not.  Three of the finest examples of academic oil painting – Poppy by Chen Yifei (1946–2005), once the most expensive painting by a living Chinese artist; By the Yi River (2002) by Wang Yidong (b.1955) and the emblematic Spring Silkworm (1983) by Luo Zhongli (b.1948) – can be found in Song Art. Elsewhere in the city, at the Chao Printing Studio, an animated film showing the evolution of Chinese script, Character of Characters (2012) by Xu Bing, plays to a group of devotees.  The Conceptualist Qiu Zhijie (b.1969), who was responsible for highlighting at the Venice Biennale in 2017 the great craft reservoir of contemporary China, is another who has joined the Chinese fold. His work and that of Xu Bing are, ironically, still a part of the international contemporary-art dialogue. A casuistic collection of Chinese works of art assembled by the Guggenheim in 62

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China NewYork,  Art and China After 1989:Theatre of the World (2017), presented another view of contemporary China.  The show was the intellectual sequel to the portrait-focused overview of the Chinese avant-garde drawn from the Uli Sigg collection in Canberra and Sydney in 2012. Indeed, the soporific video piece Water, by Zhang Peili (b.1941), in which a journalist reads out the definition of the liquid as if it were a news story, appears in both exhibitions. It is deliberately misleading to explore China’s artistic evolution from an arbitrary date (1989) or, as in the case of the Sigg collection, from the late 1970s, and it is disconcerting to discover how far these aberrant notions – which were triggered by the Western-inspired Xing Xing (Stars) group of Chinese artists, supported by pertinacious European and American international art-world savants – have afflicted the Shanghai art world in particular.  The How Art Museum in that city is just one that gives succour to significant fragments of the international avant-garde. Since 2010, Chinese collectors have been persuaded by Western proxies, notably the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in the capital, to open museums in order to show Western taste to a Chinese audience.  The westernised city of Shanghai, in particular, has embraced the avant-garde as it once welcomed impressionism. So, an armoury of global museums – Himalayas,  Aurora, Long, Chi K11, Powerlong and Yuz – now adorn West Bund.  The Chinese Government is prepared, in return for this display of entrepreneurial acumen, to sanction charitable exemptions to those who share their collections with the public. How the flavour of these collections will alter in the years to come, as the state exercises greater control over cultural industries – perhaps to the extent of acquiring these private initiatives – remains to be seen.  The sole certainty is that culture will be directed from Zhongnanhai, the nucleus of China’s government in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Its market, centred on the Caochangdi area of the city and in significant commercial districts in the nation’s other ‘cosmopolis’, will be authorised by regulators in the capital.  This was defined by the Party Chairman at the 19th People’s Congress (2017) as the continuation of the principle of holding high the great banner of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics for a New Era’, making the institutional system more responsive and effective.  The Ministry of Culture, Poly auction house, Renmin University and the Central Academy of Fine Arts already oversee the conduct of private initiatives such as the data provider Artron and the Shanghai free-trade zone.  These institutions are the vanguard of a major state project of cultural revisionism, which will lead ultimately to a richer, more plausible contemporary expression. A much better representation of China today, Beauty in the New Era at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, which formed the core of the Lao She Collection, went on show at the same time as the Guggenheim retrospective. 63

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New Art New Markets Unlike the self-reflective American show, it cast Chinese culture in an intrinsically meaningful light by highlighting the importance of the Hangzhou reformists Lin Fengmian (1900–91) and Wu Guanzhong (1919–2010) as well as the last great exponents of the brush, Li Keran (1907–89) and Wu Changshuo. Regulation has become much easier since the country collapsed its financial transactions and personal communications into mobile technology.  The technological explosion in China has created a vast digital economy and given birth to most of the world’s ‘unicorns’ (the handful of start-up companies that perform exceptionally well in any given cluster), while simultaneously allowing the state access to the lives of over half a billion citizens.  As the large e-commerce companies in China are obliged to share their data with the state, so China’s auction houses, dealers, art fairs, collectors and high-end consumers are required to share their networks, financial exchanges and relationships. Giving free rein to the private sector does not have to indicate an absence of rigid political control; it can, in fact, allow the tentacles of the state to reach into every aspect of private life. There are ways in which China’s government moderates the behaviour of its artists whenever they do stray over the political boundaries.  A small army of informers, known colloquially as ‘the people who go to everything’, report their suspicions to the authorities.  Those artists who desire to be confrontational have to be subtle.  The uncompromising treatment by the government of petitioners and opposition-party representatives is probably widespread in China, and artists present some of the most visible targets. The recent reforms to China’s censorship laws, which have extended to technically 1 criminalising artists such as the controversial Gao brothers for creating and displaying overtly political images – especially those of Chairman Mao – gave warning of a hardening stance in government towards satire, although the levels of enforcement were often overstated.  The Gao brothers famously made a limited-edition sculpture entitled Miss Mao (2006), in which a bust of the Great Helmsman depicted him as a hermaphrodite.  The brothers cleverly circumvented the censors at a group exhibition in the Shandong Museum in 2007, in which they substituted their Mao figurine with a young girl who was asked to sit on a high stool and hold a kitten. On her T-shirt was written ‘Miss Mao is not in’ and on her leg the brothers’ web address. Zhao Bandi (b.1966) has recorded in photographic stills his own lawsuit during the SARS crisis (2002–4) against two newspapers for printing one of his images without obtaining his permission or crediting him as the author, thereby highlighting copy­r ight infringements in China. He is shown sitting forlornly beside his trademark giant-panda toy throughout the proceedings, getting up at the end of the 64

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China trial to read a letter from his girlfriend saying that their relationship is at an end. So, the artist asserts, reality becomes fiction and returns to reality.  At times, reality seems like fiction in the world of Chinese arts censorship.  At the 2010 Shanghai Expo, a ‘performance’ by the artist Huang Rui (b.1952) of the Yijing (I Ching), which demanded an audience of 64 people for 64 minutes (64 being the number of symbols in the Yijing – The Daoist Book of Change), was prohibited by the censors because of its imagined connection to the Tian’anmen Square incident on 4 June 1989. A tarnished nimbus surrounds the artist Ai Weiwei (b.1957), the artistic advisor to the so-called ‘Bird’s Nest’ stadium constructed for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Perhaps because of his nose for controversy,  Ai has an international profile, personified in his recreation using his own prostrate adult frame of the Syrian child Alan Kurdi, found dead from drowning on a Lesbos beach in 2015.  The artist’s lobbying on behalf of the victims of the Sichuan earthquake resulted in his hospitalisation (in Germany) with suspected brain damage, after allegedly being set upon by Chinese 2 policemen. This did not prevent him from displaying 90 tonnes of straightened steel-reinforcing bars, a legacy of the catastrophe, in London at the Royal Academy’s retrospective of his work in 2015. In another work for the retrospective, he took the trouble to describe the excruciating imposition of closely attended house arrest in a scale model of the room in which he was forced to exist.  Ai is the eternal agent provocateur, oblivious to the consequences of his many acts of political sabotage. His nuanced ‘sculpture’ A Ton of  Tea (2012), which consisted of a square block of Pu-erh and refers to globalisation and the Chinese population explosion, would have escaped reproach as a statement. But, then, reproach is exactly what Ai courts. So were these artists’ premonitions a warning of forthcoming political repression? The West would say yes. But, in a surprising twist, it seems that the West itself now sanctions what may be shown of China’s contemporary export art.  The Guggenheim Museum bowed to the protests of the animal rights lobby when it decided not to show works of art featuring pigs, dogs, insects and reptiles in the aforementioned retrospective of art made after 1989. Many, in the past, have called the West’s position on censorship sanctimonious; they might now also consider it to be hypocritical. There are signs that China – like Iran,  Turkey, South East Asia and parts of South America – is concerned about the invidious affects of consumerism, corruption and political waywardness. Its Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has taken a number of prominent scalps. In 2015, the tycoon Guo Guangchang was detained by the authorities. In 2017, the financier Xiao Jianhua sought sanctuary in Hong Kong but was abducted from the Four Seasons Hotel by Chinese public-security agents. Hong Kong’s legal integrity had been violated for the second 65

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New Art New Markets time; in 2015, the bookseller Lee Bo and four associates were abducted from the city state and taken to the mainland.  Apocryphal tales appear in Hong Kong newspapers and on Weibo (the Chinese Facebook) about billionaires refused exit visas. Bo Xilai, the omnipotent Chongqing Party Secretary, was imprisoned in 2013 after a prolonged investigation into his unilateral fight against inequality in the huge southern metropolis. Bo was cut down for exceeding his authority and threatening the status quo.  When Zhou Yongkang, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2015 for venality, the sullying of China’s internal conduct was on trial.  There have followed a clampdown on money laundering through the casinos of Macao; a tax on luxury imports, notably high-performance cars; and scrutiny of property (the price of Macao real estate is correlated with gaming revenue), financial portfolios and opaque art collections. One of the high-profile casualties, amongst the tens of thousands implicated in the case of Zhou Yongkang, was the Sichuan mining magnate Liu Han, accused of money laundering through gambling rings in Chengdu and the gaming tables of Macao. Even those who marry into communist ‘royalty’ – men like Wu Xiaohui, wed to a granddaughter of Deng Xiaoping – face investigation. It is no longer a guarantee of safety to surround oneself with party princelings or hong er dai (‘second-generation reds’).  The once-normal habit known as yahui (elegant bribery), in which a local government official would offer a senior Party member a work of art with instructions to sell at auction in order that he might buy it back at an inflated price, has been rooted out of the system. In 2010,Wen Qiang, a deputy police chief in Chongqing, was executed for protecting a criminal gang when it was discovered that he had accumulated, courtesy of the gang, a sizeable art collection. Such penalties dissuade others from following suit. It is ironic but not surprising that the purge of elites under Mao Zedong, which was so prominent during the discredited Cultural Revolution, has been revived today under Xi Jinping.  The neo-Maoist movement in China is large and growing. It is at the root of the reforms, and it has alerted the Communist Party to the threat of grass-roots insurrection. One stated priority of the country’s national-security legislation is to strengthen education and core socialist values; another is to encourage ‘the exceptional national culture of China’ and defend it against harmful global imports.  Artists do not threaten the Establishment. Performance art was banned in China after Tian’anmen Square, but installations have been largely ignored by the state. So, maybe Ai Weiwei could have displayed his iron rods in a Beijing museum without retaliation. Chairman Xi, a product of a political meritocracy, believes that China is 30 years away from resuming its paramount global economic and cultural position. He holds 66

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China China up as a model for the new economies of the world, offering speedy development and freedom from the Washington consensus.  This applies in particular to the cultural independence of those nations enshrouded in the One Belt One Road initiative.  The institutionalisation of the ideology of Xi Jinping is akin to the codification of the Rites and Rituals by Confucius during the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE).  While I am not suggesting that there is a moral equivalence between the two, there is a procedural similarity. Other national security laws seek to control civil behaviour and the influence of Western institutions in China. President Xi Jinping, who took office in 2012, is drawing on the precedent set by the Warring States-era legalist Han Feizi (280?–233 BCE), to use the law to enforce his rule and to order the behaviour of each echelon of his government.  This is not repression; it is the prevention of discord and the creation of harmony. Qin Shi Huang (259–210 BCE), the First Emperor, did as much. If China proves a stable alternative to the United States, Chinese wenhua (culture) will be the new world’s soft power. The tradition of calligraphy If the division of a page into squares best fits Chinese characters, then it is also true to say that the character itself forms a self-contained (walled) thought or concept. It is an apparently short – although, in essence, giant – step from literacy in Chinese to bona fide calligraphy, but it is important to know that a great part of Chinese art is expressed in calligraphy, which requires its audience to be literate.  Ai Weiwei even referred to his search for the names of the Sichuan earthquake disaster victims 3 in calligraphic terms: strokes on white paper. A tradition in the appreciation of this art form dates back to the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE).  The work of the earlier, Jindynasty ‘sage of calligraphy’Wang Xizhi (303–61 CE) was collected, carved into stone and circulated throughout the empire.  These works became known as fatie (model letters) and were later transcribed into ten volumes in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Nowadays, over three quarters of the domestic Chinese art market is made up of calligraphy and works on paper, and there has been over the last 20 years a noticeable shift in taste amongst young Chinese collectors towards cutting-edge 4 calligraphy (Art Price 2018).  The turnover and value of these goods almost certainly exceeds that of Chinese antiques and international contemporary art.  The artist Cui Ruzhuo (b.1944) and the Modernist Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) are the most desirable.  Their auction lots vie with the international Modernists, Chu Teh-chun (1920–2014) and Zhao Wou-ki (1921–2013), for the record price. Only 67

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New Art New Markets academic oil painting challenges the position of pen-and-ink art as the cultural asset of choice. Calligraphy in China carries the weight of government and tradition. Mao Zedong – who, explains Gordon Barrass (2002, p.105), disseminated his own calligraphy in giant words on banners, posters and signage to a greater extent even than any Chinese emperor – moulded the art of calligraphy into a potent instrument of political will.  There are three tendencies in contemporary calligraphy that feed off 5 the ‘Grand Tradition’: modernist, neo-classical and avant-garde. The Neo-classicists are essentially pure revisionists and the avant-garde is closer to abstraction than calligraphy, although cho san (abstraction) is a discredited notion in Chinese art.  The Modernists offer an intriguing insight into the future direction of this ancient art form. The classical Chinese brush painter Zhu Qizhan (1892–1996) sums up the essence of great Chinese painting and calligraphy in the following declaration: The ultimate requirement in Chinese painting theory is to bring out the ‘artistic conception’ in one’s work.  The highest state of artistic conception pursued by artists for a thousand years is the vitality of changes and geneses of the universe. I am particular about spirit, strength and momentum. I am in search of thickness, simplicity and unskilfulness . . .  There comes from unskilfulness the real flavour of vitality, and that is the point.  The pen is valued for its strength, while strength is valued for its momentum. Strength is the expression of the spirit while the idea is the root of the spirit.  The spirit is a 6 power that grows out of our thoughts and feelings. Something of his theory is captured in his study of orchids and rocks (1980). Eminent Chinese artists and the roots of Chinese art To a practitioner like Zhu, an artist’s nature or spirit is of fundamental importance to the artistic conception of his work.  A great artist, according to the first principle of the sixth-century art historian and critic Xie He’s six principles of Chinese painting, is expected to nourish his noble spirit to enable him to express himself unskilfully, in the sense of painting without artifice or pretence.  The eminent modernist brush painter Wu Guanzhong echoed this fundamental sentiment when he referred to bi (the brush) and mo (ink) as ‘nothingness’, by which he meant that the essence of great painting lay in the spirit of the artist not in the tools of his 68

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China trade. It should never be forgotten, however, that both these artists had mastered the technical aspects of brush painting through years of practice. Yang Yanping (b.1934) – perhaps better known today for her evocative colour fields, which depict water lilies, such as Autumn Wind (2010) – once searched for the roots of Chinese painting.  This quest resulted in her complex, composite ideograms, in which a dominant emotion expressed in an often archaic written character would be accompanied by other feelings represented by different characters.  The composition of the picture was always harmonious. The single character, boldly committed to paper, was a characteristic of Wang Dongling (b.1945), whose classical training and ‘big character’ experience during the 7 Cultural Revolution are combined with a strong desire to experiment.  Wang is a Daoist and an accomplished practitioner of Gongfu. He is a grounded, self-assured man, and as he crouches over giant sheets of paper wielding his great brush there is a sense that the work and he are one.  The artist’s most stunning works are often his simplest, such as Dragon (1993) – a perfectly balanced, wild, cursive-script character that nevertheless retains what the Chinese call yun (artistic flavour).  Another even looser work, Breeze (1989), has the same sense of lightness and is just about intelligible. It is drawn on heavily patterned paper, which works rather well. But the composition is muddled and the clarity of the image muddied when he uses newspaper and multicoloured backgrounds. His work has evolved in recent years from the presentation of Confucian analects and Tang poetry in an architectural format, which refer to the inscriptions on traditional Chinese gateways, to the ‘entangled’, illegible script in such works as Sandy Creek Washers (2016).  The rhythmic vitality that courses through Wang’s body also touches the hand of the landscape artist Cao Xiaoyang (b.1968). Cao works with charcoal, not ink.  The artist is intent on subduing the white space.  A dense work like Grain Rain (2011) demonstrates two extremely strong qualities: the ingestion of nature and a Romantic spirit.  The complete absorption and digestion of nature’s essence by Chinese landscape painters sets them apart, perhaps, from their equivalents elsewhere in the world. Leung Kui-Ting (b.1945), who came of age in the 1960s at the height of the new ink-painting movement in Hong Kong, expanded the ideas and methodology of ink painting. But the movement’s two key areas of focus, jingying weizhi (compositional structure) and gufa yongbi (bone structure), failed to engage the international art world.  Ting turned inwards and worked on the building blocks of Chinese landscape art, the stroke and the plane. He immersed himself in the physical Chinese landscape and pushed the frontier of compositional structure to its limit.  The fruit of his endeavour can be seen in a work from his digital landscape series, Roaming Vision+Digital 09-2011 (2011).  This painting essentially marries fluid brushwork, which 69

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New Art New Markets traces nature’s architecture, with geometric form to create a formal dichotomy similar to that achieved by the best sculptures of the Korean Mono-ha artist, Lee Ufan. A Book from the Sky or A Book from Heaven (Tian shu) (1987–91) (in Chinese, the character is the same for both ‘sky’ and ‘heaven’), in which the artist Xu Bing carved 4000 invented Chinese pictograms onto wood blocks, takes the concept of the character to a conceptual level.  The characters, set in movable type, were printed onto books and scrolls which were then displayed on the floor and suspended from the ceiling.  A later version of this project – in which the artist laid his nonsensical, square word calligraphy on top of newspaper cuttings, many featuring pictures of real events – introduced subject matter but obscured the image. Xu wished to relay to his audience the notion that politics and economics are as meaningless as his invented and pointless language. The artist Gu Gan (b.1942) stands beside Wang Dongling and Yang Yanping, but has investigated the potential for the development of calligraphy more than these two. He has, as Barrass points out (2002, p.183), experimented with the outer shape of the character, elongating or widening it into a new form, as shown in Extending in All Directions (1990). He has, in short, deconstructed the word, writing each of the ele8 ments of a work in a different script: Seal, Running and Regular. Finally, in his use of coloured ink, employing warm colours for autumn and cool for winter, the artist has added a rich and evocative tonal hue to his paintings.  The Mountains are Breaking Up (1985) draws inspiration from a poem by the great iconoclast Li Bai (701–62 CE). It depicts in the upper left-hand corner a large character for ‘mountain’ overturned by the force of the other main character, cui (destruction). Li Bai’s verse is strung across the ridge of the mountain, and two colophons on the bottom left and top right of the picture frame the writing and balance the composition.  The artist has continued to push the boundaries of expression with his work on unusually thick xuan paper, the highly textured surface of which leads to unpredictable shapes – in the manner of ceramic ‘kiln accidents’. Gu Gan has, more than any other modernist Chinese calligrapher, stretched the limits of the classical tradition to breaking point but stopped just short of unintelligibility. Like Wang and Yang, he has preserved its essence and form.  The Guangdong-born but now Taiwan-based experimental brush painter Liu Kuo-sung (b.1932), addressing his own 1998 tour de force, Universe in My Mind, which represents the peaks of a mountain range across four giant panels, explained to me that the work was an expression of himself through his calligraphy.  And that is Gu Gan’s aim, too: to understand his inner self in every instant. For Liu and Gu, John Masefield’s observation that ‘Time’s an affair of instants spun to days’ holds very true. There is a tactile quality to the work of great contemporary brush painting. In 70

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China Lui Kuo-sung’s Universe in My Mind (fig.9), it is clear that the ink-stained, handmade paper has in places been peeled off to suggest snow atop the mountain range.  The expression of the seasons in a work like Sunshine after Autumn Rain (1997) by Yang Yanping conveys in a xieyi (free) style, in which the paper has been crumpled and layers of inked material pressed onto the already painted surface, the melancholy that she experiences when autumn passes into winter.Yang chooses to express her pensiveness through the lotus. Her aureate colours suggest an eternal feeling and mood, and also capture a single, irretrievable moment. The symbolism of the natural environment There is a tradition amongst Chinese brush painters to cocoon themselves. Zhang Daqian lived in sheltered seclusion next to the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, 9 where he produced some of his most powerful work: giant pictures of lotuses and 10 a 1.8m x 10m panorama of Mount Lu. Li Huasheng (b.1944) lived in one of the last remaining courtyard houses in Chengdu, and the Taiwanese Yu Peng (1955– 2014) in an idiosyncratic dwelling inspired by a traditional Chinese habitation. In what other environment could he have created his fantasy gardens or the Pure, Exotic,  Archaic and Strange series piece Living Room and Courtyard (2000). In the latter work,Yu breaks his living space into four uneven compartments; one shows him seated before a bonsai tree, and the other three depict a tree and mounted lingbi stones. His courtyard is presented as a complex arrangement of walled spaces, rocks and foliage.  The artist’s immediate environment, out of creative necessity, envelops him and acts as a protective shield against twenty-first-century life. Huang Rui, whom we encountered earlier falling foul of the censors, constructed his traditional-style homestead in Beijing out of the bricks that he scavenged from houses in recently demolished hutongs.  This act challenged the destructive instincts of China’s Modernists and, by implication, the government. The most impressive demonstration of artistic ‘insulation’ amongst contemporary Chinese artists is the walled garden that the brush painter Ye Fang (b.1962) created for himself and his four neighbours in the ancient city of Suzhou. Entering the house from the rear, we pass through a pair of wooden doors and see on the right a circular opening with the five characters for the natural elements carved in xingshu (running script) into a stone tablet.  To the left, another, blank plaque awaits a poet’s inspiration. Between the two stone panels, a round window affords the visitor a view of the three ‘companions’: the cherry, bamboo and pine.  A running stream in the shape of a carp links the various elements of the garden together.  The garden’s 71

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New Art New Markets waterfalls allude to the legend of carp jumping the long-men (dragon gate) in the Yellow River and becoming dragons themselves.Ye’s garden has feng shui.  The flow of the water travels through a small pond before passing into the larger lake, ensuring that those who live next to the garden will retain their wealth and spend it wisely. In a mountain cave that rises above the ten-metre-high walls, the character for ‘mirror’ is cut into the rock, urging the visitor to picture their true self in their mind’s eye. A garden,Ye believes, should provide city dwellers with the essential elements of nature rather than add further to its man-made architecture.  This particular garden has become an oasis for the families who occupy the adjoining properties and a sanctuary for some notable collectors from Taiwan’s famed Qing Wan Society. By creating the environment to enjoy tradition within a historic city like Suzhou, the artist has successfully revived other traditional cultural pursuits such as poetry recital, opera and banqueting.Ye, who grew up in Suzhou amidst the classical gardens for which the city is famed, brings spirit and vitality to his garden in the same way that Zhu breathed life into his paintings of the four seasons. Traditional forms and materials abound in China’s contemporary visual culture, and they are a consequence of living with the past.  The retreat of the former Xing Xing Group artist, Mao Lizi (b.1950), from realistic and figurative oil paintings to oil washes re-emphasises the attention that the best Chinese artists devote to nature. Mao’s series of Ambiguous Flowers has the quality of ink-and-brush works.  The petals articulate the ‘bones’ of the flower. Liu Dan (b.1953) draws on a mineral at the centre of the walled garden, which epitomises wenhua (Chinese culture): the rock.  The sandstone garden rock from Lake Taihu, with its zhou (wrinkles) and lou (apertures), is prized for its naturalness, a condition that is often enhanced by carving. In 2004, Liu Dan drew the rock in the round, an idea that he adopted from Song Di (1015–80), who created The Eight Views of Xiaoxiang [rivers]. Nine years later, Liu Dan held an exhibition in London at the leading Oriental old master gallery, Eskenazi. In an intriguing parallel with Raphael (1483–1520), Liu likens his depiction of the folds and crevices of a rock, its chiaroscuro, to the meticulous reproduction of drapery by the High Renaissance master.  A horizontal depiction of a chasm made of rocks is entitled, significantly, Redefining Pleats of Matter (2015). Its composition is drawn from Raphael’s Saint Benedict receiving Maurus and Placidus (c.1503).  The rocks are animated like Raphael’s company of souls desirous of entering the kingdom of heaven. Liu’s escarpment conjures up the Jin-dynasty prose work ‘Peach Blossom Spring’ by Tao Qian (365–427 CE), in which a fisherman happens upon a cave through which he enters paradise. The petra-pleats that Liu defines in his work raise a delicious aesthetic possibility: 72

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China that classical Greek figure sculptures, long admired for their naturalness, are the equivalent of ancient Taihu rock carvings. Liu is the living embodiment of his practice. He studied the Analects as a boy, and grew to be well versed in poetry and calligraphy. His work is far removed from that of the mainland-Chinese new literati movement, a stage-managed commercial product that came of age alongside Political Pop Art. It is also not to be confused with the far earlier experiments of the new ink movements of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Liu uses a dry brush to make very small – at times imperceptible – strokes, and employs a forensic attention to detail. He pays scrupulous attention to the quality of the paper, the ink and the brush.  We will return to the art of those who have sought to reach the highest cultural ground later in this chapter. If there is a precept that is integral to truth in Chinese art, it is the ability of the artist to ignore temptation, which masquerades as choice, and to follow nature.  This is the view of the brush painter Zeng Xiaojun (b.1954), and it should be regarded as a defining characteristic. Zeng, a collector of ancient tree roots and rocks, lives in a complex of traditional buildings adorned with fine rocks, a lake and pine trees. His spider-line brush marks render the trunks of miniature, manicured trees known in Chinese as penjing. Penjing IV (2012) explores the effect of time and the elements on the gnarled, dying form.  The tree, like a rock, alters inconsequentially in human terms and in doing so provides a universal measure of change.  The mountain is the ultimate expression of nature’s form, and the giant scrolls of Xu Longsen (b.1956) – created in his grand, moated Beijing residence – relay its dynamism and essential, vertiginous certainty. Both these artists give play to the importance of nature – the former with soft, light, wet brushstrokes; the latter with long, wide, wet and dry marks.  Amongst all these works, the monumental Mountains and These Trees (2014) by Xu Longsen is perhaps the most ambitious homage to the passing of time. China is not about to capitulate culturally to the West, in spite of the dispiriting arrival of Disney in Shanghai in 2016.  That year, Shanghai’s Kunsthallen were also host to the work of Alberto Giacometti (1901–66) and Olafur Eliasson (b.1967) and a new commercial jamboree called the ‘Shanghai Project’: an over-exuberant clutch of distractions that set out to gild the image of China’s second city. But that is Shanghai, that is the Eastern seaboard; there it is permissible to build sandcastles on the beach. Elsewhere, the past is salvaged if not revered. On the southern shore of Lake Dushu in Suzhou, a walled palace constructed according to the traditional art of Xiangshanbang, in which the great weight of the roof is displaced through an architectural element known as a dougong onto freely positioned wooden columns, is currently for sale. It carries the price of a modern masterpiece. Siheyuan (traditional courtyard houses) are now offered to the market by specialised estate agents 73

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New Art New Markets for as little as the price of a two-bedroom apartment in west London. Developers and entrepreneurs are today saving domestic architecture and redeploying it for contemporary needs.  The buildings may suffer intrusive conversion, but the fact that there is even a marketplace for the idea of tradition is heartwarming. And for all the acts of natural and architectural sabotage in China, there are significant examples of cultural munificence.  The transport of hundreds of ancient camphor trees and traditional buildings from Jiangxi to the edge of Shanghai by the entrepreneur Ma Dadong (b.1973), is simply the most spectacular example. The principles of Confucius and their influence on Chinese art The conventions of the Wuxia (‘martial heroes’) genre of Chinese cinema – whose films are set in Jianhu, a mythical parallel universe – apply to a particular celluloid homage to archaism: the 2016 film Nie Yinniang (The Assassin) by the Taiwanese director Hou Hsaio-hsien.   The film, based on a Tang-dynasty chuanqi (short story), envelopes the viewer.  The barely perceptible, deliberate movements of its protagonists, the sudden and precise execution of deadly actions accompanied by the audible and deliberate rustle of silk, appear to refer to ritual behaviour that has, since the earliest times, guided the movement and actions of a civilised person in China. It was Confucius who codified an earlier oral law that prescribed the action of a gentleman’s every waking and sleeping moment. Such deliberation might seem restrictive – that is, until it is absorbed.  A gentleman’s virtue was often referred to in terms of the purity of jade, his gait constrained by the sound of the clattering mineral that adorned his clothes.  The artist Yang Xun (b.1981) entices his audience into the claustrophobic Peony Pavilion – his homage to a late-Ming, Kunqu opera – by the use of a solitary light set at the heart of the garden.  We are drawn to the scene of a ghoulish union between the besotted girl, Du Liniang, who dreams of a lover, the scholar Liu Mengmei in Peony Pavilion – Lounge Bridge in Purple Night (2011).  The story is sad, but not a tragedy: Du Liniang pines to death; the Lord of the Underworld arranges for Liu Mengmei to exhume her and bring her back to life; Liu is pardoned for grave-robbing after passing out in first place in the imperial examinations. The foundations of Chinese history rest on an etymological and anthropological unity, and on the ethical precepts of Confucius (552–479 BCE). Confucianism was born of the state and, unlike the world’s principal religions, was not conceived in opposition to the state.  The four Confucian principles of Li (propriety), Yi (equity), Lian (integrity) and Chi (humility) were adopted by Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) and later used as the philosophical basis of the New Life Movement inaugurated in 1934 74

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China by Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975). Despite the Maoist interregnum, it is hard to im11 agine a China in which these principles are absent. Indeed, in 2003, the Communist Government of China inaugurated a Public Morality Day in order to encourage the Chinese to behave better.  There is a strong intellectual, neo-conservative movement in today’s China that imagines a quasi-Confucian, extra-legal, egalitarian apparatus in which a neutral civil service impartially enforces laws, overseen by judges who would be the guardians of the Chinese Constitution. It is difficult at the moment to imagine a China without a strong paramount leader and an omnipresent state.  The primary concern of China’s government is to maintain the integrity of the country’s national borders, which has led to a rise in nationalism. Nationalism is seen by the Chinese as a virtual fortification against cultural interference from the outside, with the country’s borders serving as the physical limits of national consciousness. Today’s New Left Chinese intelligentsia have at their core a notion of China that inhabits, once again, a ‘Walled World’ (Leonard 2008).  The key twin beliefs of the New Left are that they support market reforms but oppose the socially and economically divisive effects of ‘Pearl River Capitalism’.  To that end, Mark Leonard (2008) recounts, the New Left adopted a model village (Nanjie), situated in the heart of China, as the spiritual opposite to Shenzhen, which attempted to synthesise the market with collectivism and welfare, giving rise to the term ‘Yellow River Capitalism’. Crony government is one of the key elements that the New Left wish to see reformed.  They argue for a ‘social dividend’ to be paid to the state by China’s corporations, which can then be channelled into welfare and allow potential consumers to feel less insecure and more likely to consume material goods.  We have seen, in recent years, how well the Chinese leadership has responded to these anxieties. Amongst former communist general secretaries, Hu Jintao’s (b.1942) Tuanpai (Chinese Communist Youth League) was certainly much more receptive to the New Left philosophy than Jiang Zemin’s (b.1926) ‘Shanghai set’. In place of the free market, China’s use of foreign investment and public money to build up capital-intensive industries and push to protect public property is influencing the development of new markets. China’s notion of ‘walled worlds’ preserving their economic, legal and political independence while coming together to exchange goods in a global marketplace flies in the face of Francis Fukuyama’s (b.1952) belief that we have entered the age of ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’.  The problem with the philosophy of China’s New Left lies in the practice rather than the principle.  The process of guojin mintui (the state advances as the private sector recedes), which is the actual result of recent 75

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New Art New Markets increased government investment, also gave rise to crony local government. Once again, this iniquity is being addressed by the current administration. Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) famously described China’s shift towards capitalism in the 1980s as ‘crossing the river by feeling for the stones’, and this ad hoc approach by China in the post-Mao era has characterised many of its decisions. Current policy has been determined by past failures of government. Sun Yat-sen’s (1866–1925) prescriptive vision of a democratic China did not extend to supporting the grass-roots May Fourth (1919) Movement against the increasing power of foreign concessions. Sun tied China’s destiny to Moscow’s by allowing Communists to join the Kuomintang (KMT) – a legacy that bedevilled its government, arguably, until the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. His three principles, adopted by a KMT congress in 1924, of nationalism, democracy and people’s livelihood carried little weight and had even less impact on China’s traditional, autocratic polity. Democracy in today’s China according to Leonard (2006) conjures up images of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the so-called People’s Democracy of the Cultural Revolution and the risk of an independent Taiwan – in short, chaos. In 2015, Chairman Xi met the Taiwan President, Ma Ying-jeou, and declared his recipe for peaceful reunification: one country, two systems.  This break with consensus, both sides maintain that they are ‘China’, might be seen as a line in the sand for Taiwan’s current ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). But in truth, time will dictate in China’s favour – just as it has done in Hong Kong.  The New Left’s ‘Walled World’ idea is a hopeful concept for Hong Kong and Taiwan, because it stands apart from occupation and maybe assimilation; it is an equally attractive proposal for the new economic order. There is another significant cultural legacy that Sun has left his nation. His ‘doctrine of greater Asia’ – which suggested uniting China with India, Russia and Japan in order to defeat Western imperialism – influenced a great Indian artist,  Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951) and a traditional school of painting in 12 Bengal. The Bengal School was opposed not only to British rule but also to international modernism, which became the dominant cultural force in Indian painting and sculpture at the tail-end of the British Raj.  Today, the School is one of India’s most fruitful sources of traditional inspiration, and India’s ancient crafts are a far more truthful and valuable reflection of China’s cultural needs in the twenty-first 13 century than international contemporary art. China’s leaders today wish to develop relations with new world markets.  The wielding of ruan quanli (soft power), both Leonard (2008) and J. Fenby (2008) note, has been the most notable feature of recent Chinese diplomacy.  The government, for instance, has set up an international network of Confucius Institutes and a global 76

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China TV news station, and has opened its universities to the teaching of Chinese to foreigners. Crucially, it is exporting its belief that for new economies, development need not be accompanied by liberal democracy.  Traditionally, Ross Terrill suggests (2003, p.36), Chinese rule at home and its diplomacy beyond the Chinese world has adopted the approach of the iron fist in the velvet glove.  This policy has intensified under Xi Jinping.  The separateness of  Taiwan and Hong Kong, more than anything else, threatens China’s view of itself as an anthropologically unified whole. It also gives rise to three distinct forms of contemporary Chinese culture. Perhaps the many variants of Chinese culture will give birth to disparate, provincial subcultures which will develop into a multitude of regional art economies that become numerous independent, pan-cultural, economic walled worlds. In 2013 the paramount leader, Xi Jinping, announced his aim to encircle most of Asia. So what is certain is that the new cultural economy that will emerge from this initiative will bear a very different stamp to that of international contemporary art and Western modernism. The political picture China is, as J.K. Fairbank and M. Goldman (2006) explain, the world’s oldest successful 14 autocracy and it is only in the last hundred years or so that it has been reimagined as a democratic nation state – a vision of Sun Yat-sen that was snuffed out with the 15 Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949. Crucially, as Terrill (2003) explains, Sun played the ‘Manchu card’ to add fuel to the Xinhai Revolution (1911–12), laying ‘the foundation for [a] modern Han imperial chauvinism that was unlikely to ever 16 bring democracy’ (p.97). Sun spoke of the role cosmopolitanism played in the collapse of Old China and of the need for a racial nationalism in the interests of the survival of the Chinese people. Democracy for him meant national, not individual, freedom. China,  Terrill argues provocatively, is today a ‘civilization pretending to be a nation’ (p.2): the last of the great imperial powers without the ability (or will) to project itself onto the international stage. It is not a federation, but a ‘Great Systematic Whole’ (p.4), wishing to sinocise its competitors and especially fearful of neiluan (disorder from within) and waihuan (external threats) (p.25). Sun would probably recognise this description of China; it was just what he advocated.  To rule a single race was, he felt, quite natural, and for that race to deal with its vassals benevolently was the ideal form of government.  This would suggest that the expansiveness implicit in the One Belt One Road initiative is an act of defensive infiltration rather than a sign of aggrandisement. China today is numerically dominated by its ethnic Han majority, although within this great mass of humanity there are regional cultural differences.  The written 77

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New Art New Markets Chinese language is, along with Spanish and English, one of the true lingua francas of the modern world – and, although the origins of linguistic unity can be traced back to the first emperor, this is really a tribute to the foresight of the Republican Government, which simplified the language’s characters in order to increase literacy.  The Chinese pictogram still has meaning across Asia, despite the adaptation or development of new writing systems in countries like Japan and Korea.  The Chinese have, until the international art market arrived in the 1980s, made much less of a distinction between high art and craft than has the West. China also clearly differentiates the cultural artefacts that it exports from the ones that it consumes. Maoist, and particularly Cultural Revolution-era memorabilia, has failed consistently to attract the interest of the Chinese collector.  The memory of those years is too recent for the scars to have healed, and the Chinese Political Pop Artists of the 1990s 17 made the mistake of opening still-festering wounds. Their brash, brightly coloured work nonetheless had a short-lived appeal for an international audience. But despite the antipathy of the Chinese to the Cultural Revolution in particular, nationalist sentiment can be roused.  A record price was achieved in 2013 for a piece of political propaganda, Red Flag 1 (1972) by Chen Yifei (1946–2005), as it had been in 2007 for Put down your whip (1939) by the academic oil painter Xu Beihong (1895–1953). Xu’s painting describes, in his stiff academic manner, a popular drama in which a dutiful daughter, Lady Shang, forced to flee China after the Japanese invasion in 1931, performs street theatre but fails one day to appear for work. She pleads with her father to turn his angry whip on the Japanese rather than on her. Xu’s painting shows his characteristically meticulous attention to detail. He has depicted a range of Chinese victims of the Sino–Japanese War from small children to the elderly, to a KMT 18 soldier. Heroic narrative painting thus still has a place in China.  The Sichuan oil painters active during the early years of the reforms in the late 1970s and early 1980s extended the life of socialist realism.  Their techniques were borrowed by a younger generation, some of whom, like Luo Fahui (b.1961) and Guo Jin (b.1964), focused on self expression while others, like Hu Jundi (1962), pursued romantic realism. During the years following the collapse of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and the outbreak of civil war, China was a beleaguered polity. During this time, the modernist writer Lu Xun likened the Chinese state to syphilis, ‘congenitally rotten and with dark and confusing elements in its blood which required total cleaning’ (Fenby 2005, p.112). It was not a place in which artists would choose to settle. Most modern Chinese oil painters, like Xu Beihong and Chang Yu (1901–66), emigrated in the first half of the twentieth century and were educated in a European academic style that they acquired in the art academies and ateliers of Paris or Tokyo.  The great prices paid 78

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China for their history paintings reflect this current vehement nationalism.  The fact that the market for the Political Pop Artist Zhang Xiaogang was rescued in 2010 by the overtly patriotic work Chapter of a New Century: Birth of the People’s Republic of China II (1992) suggests that Chinese jingoism has a growing influence on the prices of works of art at auction. It should be remembered that the Nationalist government on Taiwan was ‘at war’ with China until the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s death in 1975. Chiang had planned an invasion of the mainland in 1960 at the height of Mao’s disastrous ‘Great Leap Forward’, and so the fear in modern China of insurrection or invasion runs deep.  Today, however, nationalism is expressed through landscape. In 2016, T   he Grand Snowing Mountains (2013) by Cui Ruzhuo (b.1944) sold for a record price. The greatest and most monumental self-inflicted wound in China’s recent history was visited on it in the mid-nineteenth century at a time when Karl Marx (1818–­83) likened the Chinese Empire to a mummy encased in a hermetically sealed coffin, bound to disintegrate when it met the light of day. Hong Xiuquan (1814–64) led a messianic revolution known as the Taiping Rising, which affected 16 provinces and resulted in the deaths of 20 million people.  Two effects of this uprising, which was put down in 1864, were, according to Fenby (2005), the ceding of much power by the Manchu to the majority Han population and the professionalisation of army commanders, who were advised by foreigners. It should be remembered that the Manchu had culturally subjugated the Han, forcing them to shave their foreheads and wear pigtails (Fenby 2008).  The fact that the Taiping Rebellion coincided with the sacking of Beijing’s Yuanmingyuan (Old Summer Palace) by French and British soldiers has, not unreasonably, cemented the thought in Chinese minds that an internally divided China is highly vulnerable to invasion. It helps to explain the apparently peculiar behaviour of Chinese bidder Cai 19 Mingchao at Christie’s Yves St Laurent sale in 2008, who refused to honour his bid for the two bronze incense burners appropriated by those foreign armies in 1860 in 20 protest at their ‘theft’ 150 years ago at the conclusion of the Second Opium War. ‘Yuanmingyuan’, writes Leonard (2008, p.10), ‘is a physical embodiment of the “century of humiliation” which ran from China’s defeat in the opium wars of 1840, through to the loss of  Taiwan, the various Japanese invasions and the civil war right until the Communist Revolution of 1949.’These are, he neatly explains, open wounds that can be salted whenever citizens need to be mobilised or the Communist Party feels it necessary to reassert its legitimacy. It also helps to explain the desire by Xi Jinping to modernise the Chinese military. Xi’s greatest pain is, after all, said to be to read of the collapse of Chinese civilisation to barbarian invasion for want of adequate armaments. The consequences of the Taiping Rising were even more far-reaching.  They can 79

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New Art New Markets be seen in the warlordism that afflicted the country after the premature death of Yuan Shikai (1859–1916) (the Qing’s most able general, and self-proclaimed emperor 21 from 1915 to 1916), encouraged by his American advisor, F.J. Goodnow (Fenby, 22 23 2005); in Chiang Kai-shek’s enlightened despotism; Mao’s brutal autocracy; and Deng’s decision to deploy the army in Tian’anmen Square in order to put down the student protests in 1989. Chiang, Fenby confirms (2005, p.226), like Deng and all Chinese emperors before them, stressed order and stability and absolutely ruled out democracy. Mainland China, it should be remembered, held multiparty elections only once, in 1912, which resulted in the assassination of the head of the winning 24 party. This may be partly why free and democratic elections held in the neighbouring Republic of China on Taiwan irritate Chinese bloggers as much as they do 25 26 the state’s communist politicians. Chiang’s nationalist Lixingshe movement, on the contrary, ‘presented an authoritarian view of Chinese tradition as a historic justification for dictatorship with a conservative cultural policy to buttress the supremacy of the State and its chief. It was “Confucian Fascism”’ (Fenby 2005, p.266).  Within this historical context, the anti-corruption drive and protectionist position adopted by Xi Jinping make sense. Today’s China bears a closer relationship to Chiang’s and that envisioned by Sun than to Mao’s. Mao was an autocrat, but had faux-internationalist ambitions that were coloured by a Western political philosophy. His rule combined neo-legalism with neo-Confucianism, a hybrid political philosophy that has been described as 27 Tsarist-Qin-Leninism. Tomorrow’s China is more likely to adopt another hybrid philosophy: Confucian-Qin-authoritarianism. Xi Jinping is the first in line of a select few increasingly assertive Chinese paramount leaders. In 2017, his words and his policy of One Belt One Road, the physical and ideological encirclement of 65 countries and 4.5 billion people, were enshrined in the constitution. Xi Jinping’s thoughts for the new era of socialism with Chinese special characteristics brings to an end Deng’s concentration on internal development. It signals China’s desire to expand its soft power deep into the heart of central and South East Asia,  Africa and Europe. Geopolitical friction sadly prevents the formation of the ultimate political, economic and cultural alliance between India and China. In the ‘Hindustan’ chapter, we will see how the cross-cultural project West Heavens, between China and India, envisaged a spiritual union of the two. In one ancient work, the émigré monk Xuanzang (602–664 CE) returns from Hindustan with Sanskrit Buddhist sutras: words that will change an empire.  The words of Xi Jinping may not be spiritually pregnant, but the impact of today’s Chinese thought and its culture on most of the world will be extremely significant. 80

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China International contemporary Chinese art is an export commodity and was never intended for internal consumption The Chinese contemporary art that we in the West have grown accustomed to, and which has achieved record auction-house prices, has relied for its success on the support of European and American investors and the mediation of international auction houses and dealers.  This is, in theory, no bad thing, because those influential collectors have persuaded international Kunsthallen to hold exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art and, through judicious ‘gifts’, have encouraged them to add ‘important’ pieces to their permanent collections. One very significant ‘gift’ was made in 2012 to the Hong Kong M+ museum of visual culture (scheduled to open in 2019) by the biggest collector of international Chinese contemporary art, the Swiss businessman and diplomat Uli Sigg (b.1946). Sigg’s offer of 1,400 works will form the core of the museum’s holdings of Chinese art.  The economic value of these pieces is still high because of reflex purchases by neophyte Chinese collectors. But the ideology, intention and purpose of these paintings and sculptures do not agree with China’s own account of the art of the present. The West’s view of the cultural importance of the work produced for the international market within China was, in the early days, muted. Subsequently, for a combination of economic and political reasons, Chinese contemporary artists 28 have been involved in seminal overseas exhibitions. These have tended to showcase the work of émigrés like Gu Wenda (b.1955) and Cai Guoqiang (b.1957), and those artists who enjoy close ties to the Western art establishment such as Xu Bing (b.1955) and Ai Weiwei (b.1957). But energetic Western and Chinese curators have been keen, in recent years, to make their mark by presenting their own ‘selections’ before a global audience.  Whether their choices end up in Western Kunsthallen, their Chinese equivalents, or are disowned by the Chinese art world, would seem to be fundamental not only to their long-term cultural value but to the future composition of the international art market. If the greater proportion of Chinese international contemporary art is validated, through accession and display, by the host of new Chinese museums then the Western model has, in part, been successfully exported to China. If, on the other hand, the new cultural institutions in new markets like China choose to negotiate the art economy in a different way and treat the international contemporary art museums as only part of a richer picture, then the economic future of this art is much less certain. Its monetary decline will precipitate, I believe, a fast re-evaluation of its cultural merit, delivering a measure of equilibrium between the symbolic and 81

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New Art New Markets economic value of art of this type.  The Chinese painter Wu Guanzhong said, when asked about the international standing of his work, that it was only possible to judge its value over time.  A high price at auction was, he asserted, not necessarily confirmation that the picture was great.  Wu was astute enough to donate a number of his paintings to cultural institutions in Hong Kong and Singapore, showing that he had confidence in the Western model.  Wu may be amongst the last of the significant Chinese artists to express his confidence in this system. A handful of international collectors hold large quantities of international Chinese contemporary art.  The West’s ideology was implicit in the choices that they made.  These beliefs, which form the background to the international contemporary art ‘creed’, have a number of new-world disciples. Hou Hanru (b.1963), a dissident Chinese curator, has recently been made the artistic director of a European Kunsthalle, the National Museum of Art of the 21st Century in Rome (MAXXI). In this role, he is able to impose his sanitised, neo-liberal views, prompted by his negative experience of Chinese authoritarianism, onto the world’s inequalities. One of his first ‘targets’ was the African boat people of the Mediterranean. In 2016, he installed Barka (a ‘boat’), a work of art by the Kosovar Albanian artist Sislej Xhafa (b.1970), replete with mismatched migrants’ shoes. The battle for the hearts and minds of new markets is being fought worldwide by conflicting ideologies. China is steadfast in its beliefs, which is not to say that it brooks no dissent.  The former Cynical Realist Liu Xiaodong (b.1963) adds cutting-edge twists to his depictions of ‘real people’ enduring hard lives. His portraits of Chinese girls – Xiao Yi and Qiqi (2007), for example – fall between the harsh, cigarette-smoking and sometimes eyeless models portrayed by He Sen (b.1968) and the syrupy rosiness of Chen Yifei’s Graces. Liu’s giant scrolls of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (2007) look at the plight of  Tibetans caught up in the wave of Chinese 29 expansion. His work certainly has more feeling than that of the Cynical Realists, with whom he was once grouped – and whose images of a traumatised society played on Western perceptions of a modernising China – but exhibits less sentimentality than oil painters like Chen Yifei and Wang Yidong (b.1955), whose work is drenched in nostalgia. In one of the two scrolls, for example – Sky Burial (2007) – Liu depicts, in a remote place in Tibet called Yushu, a corpse being ritually fed to swooping vultures according to an age-old Buddhist ceremony.  The faint, blue mountains in the background could almost be the work of a brush painter. The Chinese would know that the remoteness of Yushu once made it an attractive base for its government’s military and nuclear facilities. So Liu brings together multiple cultural elements in this monumental, horizontal scroll. In the other work 82

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China in this series, Qinghai Tibet Railway (2007), the artist represents two men of  Tibetan features wearing Western clothes, drawing horses across a vast savannah. In the background, factories spew out smoke and fumes. Liu is questioning the benefits of modernisation, but he retains his neutrality.  The work articulates the artist’s social conscience in the same way that his earlier work on the displaced people of the Three Gorges Dam region described the great movements of humanity in the wake of this giant undertaking.  A mammoth work (8 x 2m), Three Gorges: Displaced Population (2003, fig.10), comprises six life-size workers carrying steel construction poles, two wearing surgical masks and one stripped to the waist.  The painting displays Liu’s virtuoso brushwork and powerful unity of style. In the background, the electric-blue tents of the labourers blend with the clothes and shirts of two of the foreground figures, perhaps in a reference to the characteristic blue Mao jacket. One worker wears an army-surplus, green People’s Liberation Army tunic. It is a desolate scene, in which the once potent force of the Yellow River is reduced to a benign stream.  The unmistakable message of the painting is the barbarism of grand projects and the unforeseen social and natural consequences that will unfold in the years to come.  The workers in Liu’s painting are more than likely migrants, whose lowly status and lack of rights – especially within China’s cities – have created a dissatisfied 30 underclass. Liu’s work seeks not to romanticise the life of China’s Han population or its minorities in the manner of an artist like Chen Danqing (b.1953) – who, according to Liu, depicted Tibetans in order to exhibit his skills as a naturalistic oil painter (Smith 2008) – but rather places them and the realities of the modern world 31 in context. Liu’s work resonates as much with the New Left Neo-Maoists as it does today with Party orthodoxy. It is remarkable how many overseas dealers have successfully transplanted their businesses from the West to China. In the beginning, small operations run by Westerners living in China, like Hans van Dijk (New Amsterdam Agency), Brian Wallace (Red Gate), and Lorenz Helbling (ShanghART), jockeyed for space in hotel lobbies with perfumeries and newsagents. ShanghART today occupies multiple, cloistered properties.  The role of these émigré dealers is to sell Chinese contemporary art to international collectors.  The gallery districts in both Shanghai and Beijing have become magnets for cultural tourists.  These foreign ventures, notably Pace Gallery, have now introduced Western international stock to the market.  Although foreign dealers persist in China’s two largest cities, many have left either because the commercial environment soured after 2011 or because former gallery districts were commandeered by property moguls or earmarked for provincial-government offices. 83

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New Art New Markets To make Beijing an international centre for the sale of international contemporary art would, from the Chinese perspective, make little sense.  There is a vast and varied quantity of images being produced in China already. Recent nationalist sentiment, and a millennia-old belief in the superiority of Chinese culture over others, has conspired with the fear of Western cultural pollution and economic and political interference to direct China’s attention away from this commodity to the roots of its own culture.  This has coincided with an international decline in demand for Chinese contemporary art.  The reasons are twofold: first, prices at source at times exceed the international value; second, the cyclical demand for art from new markets has inevitably moved on. National auction houses in China have sprouted up more rapidly than art dealers.  The China market is a predominantly tertiary-market affair. Contemporary works of art are often thrust onto the national auction market, where they form price bubbles.  There is a law in China that prevents, or at least frustrates, foreign houses holding auctions in the country.  With the exception of Christie’s ‘independent’ op32 eration in Shanghai and Sotheby’s joint venture with GeHua in Beijing, the market is the preserve of domestic businesses.  The law is undoubtedly aimed at preserving the market’s isolation and concealing its more unsavoury aspects. It is hard to imagine a time when China would welcome international competition in this sector. Rather, it is more likely that the two largest Chinese houses, Guardian and Poly, will acquire 33 both Sotheby’s and Christie’s.  The law does not prevent Taiwanese auction houses from operating under joint ventures within China, but then China does not regard Taiwan as a sovereign state.  A strong national auction market is crucial to the nation’s long-term cultural vitality. If China continues to protect this segment of the trade and to conduct its business in its national currency (the Renminbi – RMB) rather than in dollars, the international market will be shorn of a sizeable chunk of trade. China’s protected tertiary market is not designed to discharge the ‘steam’ generated by a boom on the international market. Chinese collectors will not buy back significant amounts of Chinese contemporary art at inflated prices.  Since the state induced market correction in 2011 – which targeted fraudulent art funds, ‘gift’ auctions and money laundering – the China market has retreated still further into itself. There is a revival in academic oil painting in China, and the trade in these works has grown into a large part of its domestic market. Much of this work is in the form of realistic oil painting. Liu Xiaodong, who honestly and intelligently comments on the realities of a nation in transition, will find a future Chinese audience; so will the patriotic Red paintings extolling the virtues of the Communist Party. Younger talents like the artist Guan Yong (b.1974) – whose most recent series of 84

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China oil paintings of a Ming-dynasty Yangshan Stele (2017) come close to abstraction but concentrate on the three virtues of contemporary Chinese art: landscape, rocks and the past – are skilled and intelligent enough to survive.  A photographer, Shi Guowei (b.1977), who paints each of a limited number of images with ecoline, a water-based paint, has produced a vivid array of nature studies.  The Flower (2013) is a mesh of red branches and white flowers that defies objectivity and collapses into abstraction.  Another work,  The Land (2012), depicts a snow-covered ground with blood-red intervals.  The bleeding earth is a commentary on mankind’s abuse of nature, and part of the greater dialogue begun by artists like Liu Xiaodong. Chinese photography, which documents a transforming society, could resonate with a new generation of Chinese collectors.  Wang Jinsong (b.1963) first came to the market’s attention with Standard Family Series (1996), which depicted a mother, father and child in a pointed reference to the one-child policy.  The series My Parents, in which the bedridden parents of Song Yongping (b.1961) are photographed in their dilapidated apartment over two years from 1998 to 2000, presents an equally accurate description of life for some in China today. Famous for his depiction of himself as a disorientated scholar in an urban setting in Seven Intellectuals in the Bamboo Forest (2007),Yang Fudong (b.1971) has also made a series of alluring images of the fictional and glamorous ‘Miss Huang’ in various city hotspots (for instance, Miss Huang at M Last Night, 2006), which have a residual appeal. There is a world of difference between Miss Huang and the hookers depicted by Cui Xiuwen, covertly filmed changing and making up in Lady’s Room (2000), but the fine line between qie (second wives) and prostitutes is brought into sharp focus by the two series as life at both ends of the Chinese social spectrum is rolled out for our inspection.  The recalcitrant youth at home sitting detached beside an uncomprehending parent in Cosplayers (2004) by Cao Fei (b.1978), which derives its inspiration from popular culture but avoids the crassness of Asian anima, may also connect with a younger generation of Chinese. Her recreation of the virtual reality of Second Life in The Birth of RMB City (2009) is an incisive commentary on the hyperreal experiences to be found in contemporary Chinese cities.  The same artist’s Bunny’s World and A Hutong War (both 2006) similarly import outlandish elements that may at any moment de-energise into a rough, urban Chinese landscape. Han Tao – who as we have seen from his Tian’anmen Square series courts political controversy – also works in multimedia. His seemingly innocent painting of pine trees conceals small photographs of the artist standing next to the pro-democracy activist Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017).  The photographs were taken the day the dissident was sentenced to 11 years’ hard labour.  The artist’s photo-documentary of his 85

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New Art New Markets recovery from illness in hospital featuring his girlfriend, Xiao Ling, is another compelling example of a real-life drama. Intimate and direct, what all these works have in common is emotional accuracy. Han’s work is not sensationalist, or gratuitously violent; he offers instead intelligent observations of life. There is, however, a bleak postscript to our discussion of Chinese documentary photography, and one that anyone would find hard to address because, while it has integrity, it is desperately difficult to embrace.  The artist Sun Jingtao (b.1973) depicts the crippled, disfigured and destitute. Ning Zhouhao (b.1975) shows us the deformed and mentally ill. Chang Lei (b.1978) goes a step further and invites us to confront the eyeless.  The subject matter of these artists is the shou hai zhe (the victim) of the Chinese economic miracle.  A work like Sun’s portrait of a burns victim and child or Ning’s old woman clasping a giant rag doll in a deracinated hospital ward are necessary social commentaries, but too heart-rending and raw, I would submit, to appeal to a mainstream collector. Mainland China holds art fairs in Beijing and Shanghai to which the international community of art dealers is invited. International art fairs reverse this equation in favour of European and American galleries.  The notion of a commercial art jamboree held annually in cities around the world has proved so popular that brands such as Art Basel have extended their franchise to Hong Kong. Other efforts to bring China into the global cultural fold have been made through endeavours such as the Private Museum Forum, which sees in China a manifestation of the pre-war United States.  These Brobdingnagian delusions have been fuelled by the appearance throughout China of a plethora of private museums – particularly in Shanghai.  The tuhao (nouveaux-riche) Maecenas collects contemporary art and 34 ­trophies­from the past, from Chenhua ‘chicken cups’ to Modigliani nudes. But why? Nobody really knows.  They have said (Waldmeir 2016) that it is national pride and a desire to educate the public (and themselves) that motivates their acquisitiveness. Perhaps the real reason is that the present economic collateral of these objects will buy political security in the future. The international art fair, it could be argued, encourages domestic expansion.  Would it not be more imaginative to invest in regional fairs, which encourage local cultural differences and exploit the great skill and craft base that survives in China? Why, too, does China persist in constructing Kunsthallen? There are many ways in which to experience culture: museums are the West’s way; why should they be China’s? Oblique messages embedded in international exhibitions fuel the global art market.  A case in point is the work of art shown recently at The Power Station of Art in Shanghai.  The painting For Pol Pot,  Tuol Sleng S21 (1993), by Erro, is a dystopian 86

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China account of the violence perpetrated by the homicidal ‘Khmer Rouge’ regime in 1970s Cambodia.  Today, such veiled critiques face extreme censure in China. Will China’s international attachment to the global art market end with the dismemberment of Hong Kong’s constitution and its Basic Law? In the ‘Unsafe Havens’ chapter, we suggest that Hong Kong would certainly bend to China’s will. I now submit that this points to a shift of even greater significance: that China might even stop engaging directly with the West.  The market commitment that China has demonstrated since 1979 is not an indication of its social and cultural direction. Yang Fudong’s bloodied, bespectacled modern-day scholar literatus depicted in the photographic diptych The First Intellectual (2000) describes this dislocation rather well.  The protagonist is lost and bewildered in one of the country’s faceless new conurbations, unsure as to whom he should throw his brick at.Yesterday’s China is out of kilter, but the new China has a much clearer sense of its destiny. The majority of contemporary art from China will return to tradition Back in 1998, the dealer and curator Chang Tsong-zung spoke to me of his vision for China’s cultural future: ‘I want to find art that will define certain aspects of traditional culture, which I think of as high art,’ he said. ‘We are not talking about international standards but about the Chinese contemporary art scene.’ He went on to declare his disappointment at the eradication of China’s enlightened feudalism by the Communists and the rapid disappearance of good taste and pleasing proportion.  A year later, he confessed to being forced by the international market to promote the work of the young contemporaries, but said that he was actively seeking out a more traditional culture. The path that Chang and the Neo-traditionalists want China to take leads to the revival of antiquarianism rather than international engagement. It is a road from which China has strayed since the Cultural Revolution. In his essay accompanying the exhibition of contemporary calligraphy Power of the Word (2002), Chang reminded his audience that calligraphic inscription once appeared routinely as architectural ornament throughout China: ‘Carved into wood or set into the architecture in brick or stone, calligraphy would appear centrally over the city gates, on beams and pillars of civic and religious buildings, and as poetic decoration in residential and garden architecture’ (p.6). The Neo-classicists wish to preserve the grand tradition of Chinese calligraphy in which four scripts, in use since the fourth century BCE, are employed to articulate classical poetry and in which the good character of the writer is an essential 87

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New Art New Markets ingredient in the finest works.  A master classical calligrapher such as Sha Menghai (1900–92) would train as a seal carver and calligrapher. Sha also demonstrated a talent for big characters, and so received public commissions for such landmarks as the plaque for the Da Xiong Bao Dian Pavilion at Hangzhou’s Lingyin Temple (1955). Five years later, he was asked to create another name plaque for Tianwangdian, one of the main pavilions in the Longhua Temple in Shanghai.  Three elements in Sha’s work – big characters, architectural calligraphy and seal carving – suggest other, untapped alternative markets. Prestigious public commissions such as those that fell to a master like Sha are as likely in the future to be privately secured. Calligraphy appeared in public on Chinese commemorative monuments in the form of an aphorism and short essay, making the art form uniquely and universally accessible.  This shared culture ran deep throughout Chinese civilisation – from the scholar examinations, in which aspiring officials digested and memorised the Confucian classics, to the carpenter who might adorn the roof beams of a newly constructed house with images of the Daoist immortals.  This ‘alert attentiveness to the mundane routine of daily life’ (p.10) that Chang acutely identifies in the Chinese is the Dao (the Way) or enlightenment achieved through an intense focus on one’s chosen task or professional calling: ‘You must be serious in daily life, attentive in your work, sincere in your dealings with others. Even though you may walk among barbarians, you should not let concern slide’ (Confucius,  Analects XIII 19). The break with the tradition of reverence for the past – which at the pinnacle of society took the form of the acquisition by successive dynasties of antiquities, calligraphy and paintings – was, Chang asserts, the final triumph of the icon (starting with Mao Zedong) over calligraphy. Over time, this stigmatisation of the past has given way to a renewed interest in history, although the tendency to think in linear terms backed by shallow ideological constructions endures. Communist commands have been replaced by capitalist entreaties.  The Land of Slogans (2002) by Wu Shanzhuan (b.1960), employs giant, machine-made characters (with the occasional counterfeit) to deliver instructions and orders in an impersonal manner. His message is clear: calligraphy has suffered from the mechanised creeds that have followed the fall of China’s last dynasty, and sustained a catastrophic loss of artistry. Another challenge to calligraphy and tradition arrived at the end of the twentieth century in the shape of technology. How were characters to survive the computer revolution? The monumental technical achievement of Wang Yongmin (b.1943) in developing Wubi, the ‘Five Stroke Character Code’ system that has allowed keyboards to contain brush-stroke characters and enabled the user to work from top left to bottom right without compromising the integrity of the character, has not only 88

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China protected the Chinese character from extinction but enabled a skilled user to type Chinese faster than a counterpart typing in English. There are no inscriptions on the clean, white walls of the Suzhou Museum.  The émigré Chinese architect Pei Ieoh Ming (b.1917), better known in the West as I.M. Pei, who can trace his ancestry back to this ancient cultural and trading en35 trepot, elected to construct a bland, colourless arrangement of planes interrupted by hexagonal apertures. Pei has used glass and slate rather than tiles for the roof, which is inappropriate for a museum that shows light-sensitive brush painting.  To the Chinese, the roof is a symbolic structure that alludes to heaven’s shelter. By cutting windows into his roof, Pei flies in the face of Chinese culture. In his internal garden, the architect has sliced the rocks, which masquerade as mountains, in order to create a dramatic silhouette against the white-wall backdrop, while a foreground bridge creates a horizontal axis.  To one side, a grove of bamboo dominates the ‘mountain’ range. Instead of multiple viewing points, Pei’s garden boasts a single-view panorama, in which each element is incorrect in its scale and proportion.  Water plays a key role in the design, prompting the recollection of an upmarket shopping centre in the American Midwest rather than the glories of the adjoining Humble Administrator’s Garden. In short, Pei has done little for the historical patrimony of Suzhou. The mistaken postmodernist approach to the revitalisation of Chinese culture is encapsulated in buildings like Pei’s Suzhou Museum.  The cement-walled, courtyard structures of Beijing’s gallery districts are further examples of this tendency to mimic the past without investing in craftsmanship or thinking about the context.  The censor-shaped Shanghai Museum, with its interior of polished marble and gilded balustrades, is the most glaring example of a misapplication of the forms of the past onto a twenty-first century Chinese city. It was with that sense of displacement and incongruity that I listened to the critic Li Xianting (b.1949) express his vague hope for a new Chinese language and system to replace that imposed by Western art.  As we sat drinking tea, looking out over snow-covered swathes of the peri-urban corridor of Songzhuang, in the company of the critic’s female acolytes, Li pointed to a work by Mao Tongqiang (b.1960) that depicted a forest of wooden hammers.  The hammers, he explained, were metaphors for the Communist Party. It is this new vocabulary, he continued, that will change the language of contemporary art. Li was less clear about a structure within China to contain its resurgent contemporary art, except to say that it should be based on authentic Chinese culture, but with global ambition. By ambition, did he mean the destruction of large parts of the capital in order to make way for the Olympic stadia, 89

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New Art New Markets to which the Xing Xing (Stars) Group artist Huang Rui (b.1952) responded with the 2005 silkscreen-and-oil work Chai/na/China (Demolish that)? Li is not alone in envisioning essentially a Chinese culture of Han nationalism with internationalist ambitions.  The principle on which this culture rests meanwhile, which is the process by which art is created, is ignored.  The agent provocateur Chang Tsong-zung has, for quite some time, been instrumental in reinvigorating China’s crafts by either commissioning them direct or advising wealthy individuals to patronise artists who work within tradition. His solution to the long-term future of China’s beleaguered culture is more substantial and sensible than Li Xianting’s. Chang has much to say on this subject, and it is a tribute to him that he has spoken openly about the failings of the Chinese avant-garde while he was actively dealing in their work – ‘market forces being’, on his own admission, ‘rather stronger than one’s intentions’ (Robertson 1999). However, some of his beliefs resonate more than others.  The notion of reviving signwriting by encouraging the adoption of these artefacts by small businesses, the restoration of the country’s traditional inns as a way to save domestic architecture, and the reintroduction of natural rocks (Chinese sculpture) into the urban environment are three of his most practical suggestions. It is the realist in Chang who admits that the scholar/apprentice model of brushpainting tuition in China is unlikely to be revived. It is why he has focused so much energy on the China National Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou.  The academy is renowned for its teaching of brush painting, and it is through institutions such as these that Chinese art will be restored to health.  The xin wenren huapai (new literati movement), which came to the fore in China in the 1980s began to address the changes wrought by modernisation, ostensibly on urban life. Li Xiaoxuan’s (b.1959) large painting of passengers squeezed into a city bus, Big Vehicle (1995), drawn in his characteristically dense brushwork, is a good example of this approach to new subject matter. Everyday life is rendered equally expertly by Liu Qinghe (b.1961). His monumental study of a destitute couple, Self-ignite (2003, fig.11), and triptych of three prostitutes drawn with broad brushstrokes in the xieyi (free) style, both of which were propped up against his Beijing studio wall one freezing-cold January evening, are as expressive and emotionally charged as brush works can be. The realist theme runs through the intricate, vertical constructions of Dou Liangyu (b.1976) and his colourful and extremely explicit accounts of behaviour in Chinese saunas.  Above the glittering entrance to Bathhouse I (2007), framed by two qipao-clad girls, naked men are pummelled by masseurs while others luxuriate in a steam bath.  Above, in a dozen square openings, every manner of sexual offering is graphically depicted.  Air-conditioning units are attached to the exterior 90

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China walls as they appear today in every Chinese city. Realism in contemporary brush painting is comically captured by the epicurean Li Jin (b.1958), whose appetite for corporeal pleasures is far removed from the aesthetic concerns of the traditional scholar/painter. Li’s work, which has precedence in Ming and Qing erotic novels, is never painted more lovingly than when his long, colourful scrolls deal with food and sex.  The Spring Scene in the Garden (2007) is a glorious example of these two traits.  We see the artist portrayed playing a traditional Chinese instrument, known as a guzheng, eating his fill at a picnic table and depicting his naked girlfriend, en plein air, in a hot tub. Holiday (2006) is one of his most audacious works and compositionally one of his least traditional. In the painting, Li has inscribed the whole menu as a background on top of which he has placed wine, victuals and a nubile young girl in a floral costume. In the 14 m-long scroll painting Flowered (2009), Li ventures into a fantasy world in which he appears bound and cowed before a gun-wielding Model (Cultural Revolution-era) Opera performer and female soldier, while behind him two partially clad women represent the indiscretion for which he seeks punishment and absolution. He is separated from his girlfriend by a void and, despite returning to his Bacchanalian life at the end of the work, appears reflective and almost sad. Great Chinese artists return to the source of their civilisation towards the end of their lives. Chu Teh-Chun painted Tang-era poetry in grass script for the six years before his death in 2014.  We all wished for Li Jin to experience his own epiphany.  And so it has come to pass in his current series of self-portraits, in which he endorses tonality or what he describes as the five colours of ink.  These expressive, gestural washes culminate in the work Facing the Wall (2015, fig.12). Here, the artist seems to have found peace of mind after a prolonged, redemptive journey. Practice until perfect is a cornerstone of the very best art created in today’s 36 China. It is something that a master like Xie Zhiliu (1910–97) knew all too well. Xie repeatedly traced the works of Song dynasty (960–1279) figural, bird and flower painters in order to become one with tradition. He joined Zhang Daqian in the early 1940s in order to record the Buddhist cave paintings in Dunhuang. He used line in his work rather than shading, which is fundamental to Chinese painting. I sense in Xie’s scrupulous approach to his craft the same dedication found in the woodblock prints of Qiu Anxiong (b.1972). Qiu’s adaptation of the New Classic of Mountains and Seas (2008), a compilation of fantastical beasts and creatures formed between 500 and 200 BCE into the 12 signs of the zodiac, is as exquisite as it is amusing. One of the plates refers to the recent science of genetics, and shows a rat with an ear on its back.  The accompanying calligraphy states, ‘In the middle lands there is a rat. On its back there is a human ear. It is called Nie Jing’. 91

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New Art New Markets The reinterpretation of these historical and fantastical tales, combined with Qiu’s great craftsmanship, is an excellent indication of how tradition can be made relevant in today’s China. But perhaps the clearest act of devotion to rehearsal is Copying One Thousand  Times the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion (1995/1996) by Qiu Zhijie (b.1969).  The Orchid Pavilion, written by Wang Xizhi in 353 CE, is the most famous piece of Chinese calligraphy and Qiu Zhijie’s repetition resulted in a wholly black image. By imitating the hand of the master, Qiu Zhijie, like Xie, has captured the artistic spirit that inspired his illustrious predecessor. A new generation of artists grew up in the 1980s with an interest in China’s native traditions and artistic mediums.  An artist like Wang Chao (b.1964), Farrer (2009) writes, has developed an individual antiquarianism in printmaking ‘through which he uses formats, imagery and techniques drawn from pre-modern China to offer a personal statement about the present’ (p.130).  Wang has, in common with other artists working within tradition since the 1980s, adopted subdued colours and graded ink tones. In one particular work,  The Desk in the Jiuli Studio (2003), he depicts scholarly objects, esteemed by Ming-dynasty collectors, on his desk. By this act, he draws a comparison with his own devotion to the past. It is a zeal that extends to the artist’s printmaking technique.  Wang is alone, Farrer explains, in using the assembled-block (douban) technique printed with water-soluble ink in an unmodified form.  The artist uses multiple small blocks in varying grains to lend a subtle surface texture to his works of art. It is time-consuming labour:Wang carved 23 blocks for The Desk in the Jiuli Studio.  The artist’s subtle gradation of colour and prodigious graphic skills appear in another work,  A Show of Power on the Desk in Jiuli Studio II (2004). Modern toy soldiers are shown attacking a walled, rocky enclosure while black fighter planes fly menacingly overhead, transforming into birds over a square of coloured landscape. China is still in danger of losing its past to modernisation, but there are signs in works such as these that some of the lost territory is being reclaimed. There are a number of quasi-traditionalists today in China who display remarkable degrees of dedication to their work. Ying Yefu (b.1980), who has set himself the task of painting 500 gongbi (realist) paintings before he retires, creates precisely coloured ink studies of young, long-haired girls and a pantheon of local gods on xuan paper, both of which are tinged with nostalgia.  The monochrome rice-paper paintings of Ren Zhitian (b.1968) conceal, in a background filled with the artist’s calligraphy, images selected from the Internet such as war planes or the island territory of  Taiwan, which the artist prints onto the paper using an inkjet process. Shen Chen (b.1955) displays a fanatical dedication to his watercolour-and-acrylic canvases.  The layered vertical strokes of his white paintings have shi (momentum) and, 92

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China in the most intensely worked pieces, an absolute whiteness that the Chinese refer to as yubai (‘beyond white’). Zhang Yu (b.1959) practises his art in the most concentrated way. His coloured xuan-paper, monochrome scrolls are made of thousands of imprints from his fingers.  The repetitive processes involved in all these works draw our attention to the ‘oneness’ and continuity experienced during meditation. The work of both Shen and Zhang has a very clear meditative quality.  The art of Qiu Shihua (b.1940) takes a further step towards ‘oneness’. In his almost blank, oil-on-canvas and fibre-paper paintings, the artist rejects any remaining attachment to objectivity and, like the Korean Lee Dong-youb (b.1946), conveys a sense of ‘nothingness’ to the viewer. Shimmering through Qiu’s canvases is the suggestion of land and sky.  The sky has merged with the land, Chang Tsong-zung explains, and as the image becomes less clear the viewer is asked to focus on the spiritual rhythm of the work, putting aside any desire for representation. Qiu is preparing us not for ascension into heaven but for a transcendent life here on earth, experienced and understood through a deep reverence for nature. 37 China is about to usher in the age of Chinese cultural ‘authenticity’. The intriguing part of this evolution is the political path that the nation will take in the course of its transformation. In East Asia, democratic government has led to significant but reversible shifts in the region’s culture. But prosperity has enabled the ‘Asian Tigers’ (see ‘Introduction’) to conserve and preserve the past. Democracy is not, however, the inevitable consequence of greater material wealth. China will become extremely wealthy because of its political system, and it will continue to revere its civilisation. Given the inestimable economic power of China and the indomitable political will of its paramount leader, the nation is in a position to embrace its past and raise a significant proportion of its population to a high level of sophistication. China embraces its past by making it present Traditional Chinese brush painting and calligraphy have always had a particular allure for Asian collectors.  They appeal as much to the xiaozi (petit bourgeoisie) as to the tuhao (nouveaux riches). In scroll form, they make ideal gifts; when rolled, they are easier to transport and display than Western oil paintings.  They also lend themselves to an alternative form of enjoyment.  Although they are often hung on a wall, they can also be appreciated when laid out horizontally.  As with an illuminated manuscript or a Mughal miniature, the viewer is obliged to scrutinise narrative details in order to get the sense.  They are also vehicles for language, poetry, monumental landscape, realism and abstraction.  The unfurling of a brush 93

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New Art New Markets painting is inextricably linked to the tradition of presenting ‘gifts’ to friends, which forms a significant part of the art economy in Asia. It absolves both the giver and recipient from the need to use money, and it has no need of an intermediary.  This culture of intellectual and artistic exchange will revive the ancient, high-moral conduct of the Chinese art world by negating the role of the intermediary while demanding a heightened aesthetic sense of the collector and his companions. There is today, however, always an economic imperative. It is fulfilled in China by the yaji (literati gathering).  The yaji is at odds with the museum opening and the commercial-gallery private view; it is akin to a gathering of cognoscenti at a nineteenth-century European art academy or salon. It is, in short, civilised.  This social dynamic is employed by Ye Fang in his Chinese Garden (2002). In another event, in 2014, loosely entitled among these mountains and these trees, set in a vast studio within the palatial Beijing quarters of Xu Longsen (b.1956), such a gathering took on a formal aspect.  Against a background of the artist’s monumental landscape paintings, his curator acted as the host and interacted with the artist and knowledgeable, loquacious guests, who were expected to make perspicacious observations on the works of art.  The choreographed artifice that Xu Longsen has imagined here, replete with a natural stage set, adds meaning to his work.  To the grandeur of landscape painting, in which all the elements coalesce and the artist is at one with his subject, Xu has added a participatory dimension, which recalls the gathering of literati on a summer’s day, sharing tea, their scholarship and a mutual respect for nature. The brush painter Shen Aiqi (b.1941) lives the life of a recluse. He paints en plein air. He held the first public display of his work on his seventieth birthday. In 2013, he created The Mystery Beyond the Universe, in which he trailed and dragged his brush over the surface of a suspended fabric sheet, which was hung to resemble a mountain. Shen used his brush to articulate the natural contours of rock in a thicket of lines abbreviated by eddies.  The rich spirit of the work is contained within the formal correctness of the brush strokes. He has made it his life’s ambition to tie himself, in a visceral way, to nature.  This state of tianrenheyi (oneness with the cosmos) is perhaps the ultimate expression of Chinese art. If a sizeable audience values work such as that of Shen Aiqi, the Chinese aesthethic will have achieved a significant international breakthrough.

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1  Ju Ming Taichi (Pair), 1996 Bronze 91.4 x 182.9 cm (36 x 72 in)

2  Haji Noor Deen Mi Guangjiang Ya Rahim (Oh Merciful), 2000 Black ink on paper, mounted on cream silk 230 x 102 cm (90½ x 40⅛ in) British Museum

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3  Cynthia Gutierrez Cántico del Descenso I-XI, 2014 Textile, rock 76 x 40 x 40 cm (30 x 15¾ x 15¾ in)

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4  Wucius Wong Mountains and Rivers of the Mind, 2017 Ink and colour on paper Set of five panels, each: 142 by 69 cm (56 x 27⅛ in)

5  The Absence of Paths, 2017 Curated by Lina Lazaar and commissioned by the Presidency of the Tunisian Republic, Arsenale,Venice Biennale 2017

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6  Myeong Ho Lee Tree # 2, 2006 Archival Inkjet Print 125 x 100 cm (49¼ x 39⅜ in)

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7  Lee Chiho Snake, 2002 Ink and wash on hanji paper 63.5 x 37.6 cm (25 x 14¾ in)

8  Lee Ufan Relatum – Discussion, 2003 Four iron plates and four stones Stones: 50 x 60 cm (19⅝ x 23⅝ in) each; iron: 140 x 130 cm (55⅛ x 51⅛ in) each When installed: 305 x 305 x 61cm (120 x 120 x 24 in)

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9  Liu Kuo-sung Universe in my Mind, 1998 Mounted scroll, ink and colour on paper 176.5 x 339.0 cm (69½ x 133½ in)

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10  Liu Xiaodong Three Gorges: Displaced Population, 2003 Oil on canvas Four panels: 300 x 1000 cm (118⅛ x 393¾ in)

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11  Liu Quinghe Self-ignite, 2003 Ink on paper

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12  Li Jin Facing the Wall, 2015 Ink on paper 180 x 98 cm (70⅞ x 38⅝ in)

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13  Ronny Sen Untitled, from the series End of Time, 2012–13 Archival pigment print 22.9 x 17.1 cm (9 x 6¾ in)

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14  Gulam Mohammed Sheikh In Kavaad:Travelling Shrine. Home, 2008, panels pictured, left: Sadhus, Sufis and Saints, right: Seekers and Skeptics Room with folding doors and walls (made of boards mounted on steel structure) painted in acrylic and oil, and particularly in gouache with melamine lamination; brass strips; digital print on paper and vinyl 34 painted panels, each: approx. 243.8 x 121.9 cm (8 x 4 feet) Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi

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15 Rithika Merchant Blessed Water, 2017 Mixed-media collage with gouache, ink and graphite on paper 76 x 118 cm (29⅞ x 46½ in)

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16 Baua Devi Snake Goddess, late 20th century Ink and watercolour on paper 76.2 x 55.9 cm (30 x 22 in)

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17 Golnaz Fathi Untitled, 2009 Acrylic, gold leaf and pencil on canvas, in three parts 118.5 x 237cm (46⅝ x 93¼ in)

18 Farhad Moshiri Drunken Lover, 2003 Oil on canvas 280 x 175 cm (110¼ x 68⅝ in)

19 Natalia Anciso José, from the Pinches Rinches series, 2011–15 Acrylic, pen, watercolour and plastic flowers on woodblock

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20  Khadim Ali Untitled, Rustam series, 2007 Watercolour, gouache and ink on paper

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21  Damián Ortega Tortillas Construction Module, 1998 Baked corn tortillas Dimensions variable

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22  Paz Errázuriz Evelyn I Santiago, 1988 Gelatin silver print 14.5 × 20.7 cm (5¾ x 8⅛ in)

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23 Suraji Competition of Life, 2002 Acrylic and oil on canvas

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24 Santiago Bose Garrotte, 2000 Mixed media 176.4 x 94.0 cm (69 x 37 in)

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5

Hindustan

Independence The seventieth anniversary of the end of British India was a blunt affair.  The inaugural Raj Delhi Durbar that had marked the beginning of the British imperial period had gone ahead while a raging famine ravaged the subcontinent.  The latest celebrations concealed political friction between India and Pakistan, India and China, internecine religious hostilities and gross disparities of wealth. In an exhibition at a commercial gallery in London to mark the event, 100 drawn maps of India imagined by as many people were projected onto a piece of cloth that created shapes that were as difficult to anticipate as the random movements of gelatin. Shilpa Gupta (b.1976) devised the work in 2007.  This imaginative cartography says much about the impermanence of empire – any empire. It speaks particularly of the hasty and amateur dismemberment of Hindustan by the Raj and its subsequent separation into two Muslim states, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and one predominantly Hindu one.  The border between India and Bangladesh is, today, in part walled. In 2013, the same artist measured it and created a shape in the form of a mango tree from thread and glue at a scale of 1:7,834,000 (the number representing the amount by which the thread has been scaled down in relation to the actual length of the wall).  The thread represented a scaled-down version of the wall. In another reference to boundaries, the textile artist Raisa Kabir (b.1970), in a short film entitled Warping the borders, fringes fractured (2016), pegged out and threaded a rudimentary outline of post-independence India on a patch of lawn. In the course of the performance, she dismantled her map and dragged it away in her wake. Both artists are philosophical about the recent and amended borders of this ancient land, and both, I sense, are aware that the new India, which the West expects to remain 95

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New Art New Markets a nation state and a liberal democracy within its borders, is in fact a fluid cultural and political organism subject to constant change. Contemporary India is the economic preserve of a minority of high-caste 1 Gujarati Parsees and a Delhi elite. It may appear to be a self-confident democracy with scores of political parties, but it is dominated by an ultra-nationalist one, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).  The nation’s leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi (b.1950), was once the Chief Minister of Gujarat, and his reputation is blemished by an event that took place there in 2002.  An estimated 2000 Muslims were killed on his watch in an area of the state’s largest city,  Ahmedabad, called the NarodaPatiya. Modi had become a disciple of the right-wing Hindu organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) early in life, and there is reason to believe that the prime minister’s Hindu India is set on marginalising its Muslim minority.  This falls far short of actually ridding India of its Muslims in the manner of the Burmese authorities and the Rohingya minority, but it is certainly provocative.  The walls that separate castes, conceal wealth and protect Hindu India are less visible than China’s great masonry wall, but they exist and they divide – perhaps more so than they have at any time in the history of this otherwise almost unfathomably rich poly-culture. To mark the anniversary of independence, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge curated an exhibition of Indian coinage. Money is a great social leveller.  The Ambani family, which has been wealthy for only a couple of generations, owns Antilia, the world’s most expensive home, in south Mumbai. Its great bulk can be seen from afar. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala (b.1960) is another of India’s growing community of self-made billionaires – part of a small coterie that controls a quarter of the country’s wealth. He lives in the Malabar district of Mumbai.  The commercial art galleries that cluster around the Colaba district of that city – close to two grand remnants of empire, the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and the Gateway of India – sell art to scions of the property and tech tycoons of the new India. Commercial gallery spaces cohabit with lounge bars in select districts of Mumbai, Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) and Pune – wherever there is money and industry.  The gallery, 1 ShantiRoad in Bengaluru, is typical of the uncommercially-motivated spaces in that city. It supports projects such as the Sethusamudram, a collaboration between the gallery and the Theertha International Artist Collective of Colombo.  This endeavour ponders the mythical bridge between Sri Lanka and India. Unsurprisingly, given the vague nature of their ‘enquiries’, the gallery is heavily subsidised by foreign cultural entities, keen to encourage a reticent local audience to support India’s version of international contemporary art and also to find a market in India for artists from their own countries.  The privileged young are torn between tradition and a westernised 96

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Hindustan lifestyle. Events such as the India Art Fair’s Collectors’ Circle aim to tame and redirect the purely acquisitive instinct of the rich and brash. Despite the absence of a westernised art infrastructure, wealthy private collectors have donned the ‘international-culture cloak’.  Anupam and Lekha Poddar, Rajshree Pathy, Swapan Seth and the Devi Art Foundation soak up the work of India’s avant-garde.  The Kiran Nadar Museum in New Delhi is perhaps at the pinnacle of the avant-garde experiment. Its signature work of art is the mushroom cloud of pots and pans, Line of Control, by the artist Subodh Gupta (b.1964), which refers to the tensions between Pakistan and India.  The collection is a rich mix of Indian Modernists like F.N. Souza (1924–2002) and Maqbool Fida (M.F.) Husain (1915–2011) as well as a range of contemporary creations.  The fact that Husain was forced into exile in 2008 because of his display of religious erotica at the inaugural India Art Summit suggests that topics that infringe Hindu sensibilities are likely to be censored.  A room in the museum showing nudes by Souza is screened off for expressing equivalent sentiments. So what is permitted? This is the question that the internationalist collector in India must answer; the artistic one, of aesthetic quality and value, is, in many respects, supplementary.  There are signs that the international contemporary art contagion is spreading to other centres of wealth such as Kochi (formerly Cochin) in Kerala and Ludhiana in Punjab. But hovering like a thunder cloud over licentiousness and neo-liberal internationalism floats Shiv Sena, the right-wing Hindu nationalist party that renamed Bombay Mumbai and since the 1990s has sowed acrimony between the many faiths of the subcontinent. At the helm of India’s national juggernaut sits Modi, a leader likened by the West to other autocratic figures such as Indira Gandhi (1917–84), Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015), Xi Jinping (b.1953) and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an (b.1954). He is abstemious and as incorruptible as Jean-Jacques Rousseau at a time when Indian politicians are alleged to be especially venal. His government has embraced Hindutva (‘Hindu-ness’). Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs), most rights-based and foreign-funded, offend Hindutva. Its disciples threaten India’s many economic-development programmes.  Their campaigning zeal mirrors the Western media crusades into all that European and American interest groups find distasteful. In truth, India has been slow to assert its authority over its destiny – perhaps because it persevered with democracy in the early years of independence while most of the developing world opted for strongman rule. Perhaps it was overly enamoured with Britain and Britishness. If so, then that time has come to an end. India’s new strategic alliance sees a choice between China, Iran and Russia on the one hand, or Japan and the United States.  The cultural relationship between Japan and India 97

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New Art New Markets extends back to the association between the cultural nationalist and anti-imperialist Okakura Kakuzo (1863–1913) and two Bengal-born nationalists, the Hindu revivalist Narendranath Datta (later to become SwamiVivekananda) (1863–1902) and the poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941).  The nephew of Rabindranath,  Abanindranath (1871–1951), was a painter who established the Bengal School in opposition to the academic style of Western-inspired artists like Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906).  Varma left behind a body of anglicised portraits depicting high-caste Indians during the Raj. He also painted Hindu deities.  These latter works have a religious association, which should ensure their survival, but the rest will become unwanted heirlooms.  Tagore also took exception to the avant-garde, post-independence group of artists known as the Progressives. He believed both styles to be unrepresentative of Hindustan.  Abanindranath befriended Okakura Kakuzo.  They had a shared artistic interest, and together propagated a third way: Asian art for the modern world. The baton of cultural ascendancy in Asia has now been passed from Japan to China. In 2011, the Hong Kong gallery Hanart TZ inspired a project called West Heavens, involving two Indian artists, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh (b.1937) and Nilima Sheikh (b.1945). In many respects, the couple are the spiritual heirs of  Tagore and the Bengal School. In the same way that Rabindranath Tagore viewed colonial Calcutta as a philosophical space divided into a British and an Indian world, but traversable by physical bridges, so Gulam Mohammed Sheikh plots the journey of the monk Xuanzang (Hiuen Tsang) (602–664) from India to China and his return to the Celestial Kingdom with the ideas of spiritual enlightenment encapsulated in the written words of Buddha.  The installation is entitled City: Memory, Dreams, Desires, Statues and Ghosts: Return of Hiuen Tsang. India is the birthplace of three world religions: Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism; its ancient universities also enlightened generations of Chinese scholars. Like Tagore, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh has developed the idea of a metaphysical as much as a physical topography. But today’s nationalist rhetoric and cut-throat economic competition separate an otherwise irresistible alliance of the world’s two largest and furthest-reaching civilisations.  These barriers are, sadly, unlikely to be dismantled soon. The artist Jitish Kallat (b.1974) used a single coin, in Death of Distance (2007), to highlight the case of a young girl who committed suicide because her mother was unable to afford the one rupee she needed for a school lunch.  The themes of poverty, waste and sustainability are also central to the objets trouvés of the sculptor Subodh Gupta, who built a flying-saucer-shaped construction, U.F.O. (2007), out of his trademark brass water bowls.  The best thing about these two works and another, a functioning but stripped-down photocopier for Untitled (Xerox Machine) by 98

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Hindustan Sakshi Gupta (b.1979), is not their aesthetic achievement but the clear picture that they give us of the terrible waste and uneven distribution of goods in our global, consumer society. Master Plan (2008) by Vivan Sundaram (b.1943) is a panoramic view of Delhi made up of the rubbish that the city’s ‘unclean’ collect. Sundaram builds an entire model city out of washing-up-liquid bottles, drinks cans and discarded toys, and draws attention to the ‘Dalits’ (also known as Harijan, and formerly as ‘Untouchables’) who live off its detritus. In so doing, he highlights the mountain of waste produced by the showcase cities of the economically developing world. Just over 480 km west of contemporary Kolkata lies Jharia, a black hell spouting flames, out of which stare the cadaverous faces of coal workers.  The artist Ronny Sen (b.1986) – who is represented by TARQ, one of those aforementioned galleries in Mumbai near to the Gateway of India – has produced a photographic document of this forsaken place.  The series is called End of  Time (2014, fig.13).  We are shown a number of stills – a crouching form and a veined hand about to clasp rubble, and tiered ranks of sari-clad women carrying 50 kg baskets of coal up a cavernous, openseam mine.  They might be paid £6 to £11 a week.  A broken-down mosque speaks of whole villages consumed by subterranean fires, of villagers falling to their deaths in burning sinkholes.  A blighted land and a people forced to relocate to bleak townships like Belgharia, where there is no hospital, market, sewage system, burial ground or work.  The solution for the villagers does not lie in displacement, but removal is the inevitable result if they are to survive.  The artist Rithika Merchant (b.1986) widens the issue of displacement by addressing the broader notion of migration.  The eerily antediluvian world that she imagines in a work called Blessed Water (2017, fig.15) depicts a crystalline people crossing an ocean to a new land.  Another, entitled A Distant Memory, has the words ‘home is but a distant aching memory’ inscribed beneath an ideal city surrounded by a sea of boats and giant fish.  These sentiments are unlikely to be uttered by the beleaguered villagers of Jharia, but they might be on the lips of many of the world’s countless other displaced people. At the risk of appearing simplistic, we get a sense that a significant segment of Indian society is pessimistic about many of the changes wrought by modernisation – which is something that cannot be said of their Chinese counterparts.  This has much to do with India’s political system, which until recently enshrined diversity and embraced all religions.  The triumvirate that formerly governed the country represented three of its minority creeds: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (b.1932) was a Sikh; the President,  A.P.J.  Abdul Kalam (1931–2015), a Muslim; and the ‘power behind the throne’, Sonia Gandhi (b.1946), a Catholic. India had always been a land in which a multitude of faiths and cultures had been accommodated. Still today, 99

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New Art New Markets 2

Muslims, Catholic minorities in Nagaland and Goa, Jains and Buddhists live alongside the Hindu majority.  This tolerance led until recently, says T. Richard Blurton (1992, p.10), to an art that was inherently inspired not only by the Hindu religion but by all Indian religions – in which, for example, we can find the Buddha depicted as one of the incarnations of V   ishnu. Indian polytheism, in giving rise to so much fantastic art and Indian syncretism, has allowed ancient beliefs to survive in the country’s folk culture. Is that vision of Hindustan foresworn today? The current President, Ran Nath Kovind (b.1945), and Prime Minister Modi, who have a clear mandate to govern, hail from the BJP. With both coming from a community described as ‘Other Backward Class’ they have an advanced social agenda – but also a Hindu one.  Their fundamental views reflect those of the country’s Hindu population. In 2016, India’s Custodian of Enemy Property, a consequence of the troubles following the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, held 4800 hectares of land worth some $16 billion and shares in 266 listed companies, as well as art and valuables. Narendra Modi’s government would like to see more assets in India held by Muslims come under this 1960s Act. In 2015, extensive holdings belonging to the last (Muslim) Nawab of Bhopal, Hamidullah Khan (1894–1960), were designated ‘enemy property’ and the rightful heir, an Indian resident whose father had taken up Pakistani citizenship shortly after independence, disinherited.  The retroactive reversal by New Delhi of upheld legal claims on Muslim inheritances, such as the Nawab of Bhopal’s Palace of Mahmudabad, is made legal in an amendment to the Act. India’s enemies are now to include Pakistani citizens and their legal heirs, even if they are Indian citizens.  The Act also retrospectively nullifies the transfer of enemy property. Historical background The earliest settlement in the Indus Valley, at a site called Mehrgarh, reveals that from 7000 to 4500 BCE, an agricultural community thrived that wove cotton; traded in lapis lazuli and turquoise; and made beautiful, geometrically patterned pottery.  This civilisation was an Indian phenomenon. New arrivals from the Iranian plateau entered this culture around 4500 BCE, and from 3500 to 2500 BCE it became part of a greater cultural zone.  Around the third millennium BCE, great cities and a written script (which has still not been deciphered) arose in today’s Punjab, giving rise to the indigenous Harappan age. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archaeologists discovered over 2000 major settlements extending the length of the Indus and as far as the Oxus in today’s Afghanistan. Startlingly, it appears that the Harappan age was both leaderless and non-violent. Climate change, which dried 100

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Hindustan many of the rivers of the Punjab, forced the migration of these peoples to the plains of the Ganges and the Jumna (now Yamuna) around 1800 BCE, forming the sub-Indus phase in Indian civilisation, which remains to this day. What happened next, according to Michael Wood (2007, p.42) ‘is one of the biggest issues in Indian history today, massively controversial in recent years, with heavily politicised debates about Indian identity’.  The Aryan peoples from central Asia arrived, says Blurton – probably during the middle of the second millennium BCE.  They brought with them many new devices: gods, horse-drawn chariots, hallucinogenic drugs and a new language. Sanskrit, the language of the priesthood and Hindu lingua 3 franca – although not related to the tongues of southern India – must have originated outside India, brought to the subcontinent, as well as to Iran and Mesopotamia, by the conquering descendants of a people who lived between the Caspian and Aral Seas over 4000 years ago.  The Sanskrit cosmos, a far-flung realm of shared culture 4 has, in the shape of the Brahmin priesthood, led Indian society ever since. Hinduism itself has assimilated its prehistoric and Indo-Aryan strands and, without a central figure or prophet, has evolved by way of the insights of its many seers. It is clear why the question of the origins of these ‘conquerors’ holds such significance for today’s Hindu nationalists. In addition to language, the Aryans introduced the first text of Indian history, the Rig Veda, and a belief in karma and rebirth, which had the effect of fixing the poor in everlasting poverty and the rich in eternal wealth and power.  The social mechanism developed to contain these beliefs is the caste system, based on colour and birth.  The system operates to this day and still, as it did at its inception, numbers the subcontinent’s aboriginal peoples as an underclass. Cracks are beginning to appear in this theocratic mechanism – a system in which the Brahmin priest, the sole intermediary between the worshipper and his god, passes down his privilege, father to son.  The surge in interest amongst ordinary Hindus in the dark-coloured Vishnu avatar, Krishna, who, with his flute and peacock-feathered crown, speaks of a pastoral and non-Aryan past is a sure sign that deep cultural forces are at work.  The growing popularity of  ‘the Black (female) One’, Kali, one of the manifestations of the goddess Devi, is another signal that Hindus are turning to indigenous, pre-Aryan gods.  The fact that Kali haunts the cremation ground, a place inhabited by the Dalits, again points to a groundswell against orthodox Hinduism.  The description by William Dalrymple of Manisha Ma Bhairavi drinking from a skull – Devi’s third eye – in a cremation ground in Kolkata, in the home of the great goddess Tara, captures an act of religious heterodoxy: ‘the idea of reaching God through opposing convention, ignoring social mores and breaking taboos’ (2009, p.215). 101

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New Art New Markets The disciples of  Tara work in defiance of a cleansed Hinduism that was largely instigated by the British and visualised in works such as Arjun and Subhadra (1890) by Raja Ravi Varma, which became known as the ‘Rama-fication’ of Hindu worship.  The now-debased devadasis, or female servants of God, who are to this day, Dalrymple recounts, dedicated as young children to temples to the Goddess Yellamma in the rural Deccan (south-central India), spend their young adulthood in prostitution. Legend has it that Yellamma was cast out by her husband after having let her mind enjoy illicit sexual pleasures. She was cursed and became sickly and ugly, later beheaded but reprieved and restored to life by the intercession of her son. Like the goddess Tara,Yellamma is a survivor from prehistory and appeals, like Tara, to the outcasts of Hindu society. The persistence in southern India of tribal cults that venerate nature and create shrines to natural forces in an aniconic form, often no more than painted rocks, also harks back to a time before the Rig Veda. In parts of Bihar, a sort of fresco known as Madhubani, painted onto a smoothed plaster wall, is still a feature of the local arts.  The brightly coloured, stylised works, which often depict gods, are painted onto the sides of houses and are very striking.  A particular feature of Gujarat are the block-printed textiles that hang on the walls inside houses.  A remarkable tieand-dye block-print design is still practised in Gujarat and Rajasthan.  The art form known in Arabic as Ajrakh (‘blue’) evokes twinkling stars set amidst the night sky, but the subject will most commonly be the mother of India, the goddess Devi, depicted in her horse-drawn chariot at the head, or at least to the fore, of a vast procession.  The Bengali artist Jamini Roy (1887–1972) looked specifically to Indian prehistory and the rural arts for inspiration – seeing them, as Blurton (p.19) points out, as ‘amongst the most culturally influential in the development of Indian, and specifically, Hindu, culture’. His style of painting was learnt from Bengal village 5 patuas, and his works ranged from the rhythmic Dancer (1932) to the simple and direct Dual Cats with One Crayfish (1968), painted with egg tempera on card. The political and religious context The first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), insisted that Muslims be given equal rights in the new secular state.  This inflamed the passions of fundamentalist Hindus at the time. Since then, there have been significant violent, religiously motivated eruptions, beginning in the 1980s, the effects of which lie simmering in the consciences of India’s many religious communities. Since Partition and Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s rapid sketching of a border 102

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Hindustan between the newly created, predominantly Muslim Pakistan to the west and Muslim Bangladesh and largely Hindu India to the east, religious and political tensions have progressively increased. Jitish Kallat wrote Nehru’s entire inaugural speech onto a mirror, calling the work Public Notice (2003), asking Indians to see themselves in Nehru’s reforming zeal. He then went a step further in the name of tolerance, by building out of bones Mohandas Gandhi’s (1869–1948) Salt March speech of March 1930, in which the Mahatma protested against the British tax on salt, giving it the title Public Notice 2 (2007). Both pieces highlight the novelty of the modern ideals expressed by two of India’s most important statesmen and give little reassurance to their resilience. Modern India faced opposition from the outset.  A strain of radical Hinduism that grew up in opposition to the Raj in the 1920s and modelled itself on European fascism maintained that traditionally passive Hinduism had been subjugated by the Muslims – certainly since the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206, but even earlier when Muslim states were created in what is today Pakistan. One particular figure designed to raise the ire of Indians is Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030), whose name appears on jihadist banners throughout the Muslim world (as well as on some recent Pakistani rockets). He is felt by Indians to have been a Muslim iconoclast, although his violent reputation has been blown out of proportion by both Muslims and Hindus in order to justify their extremist reactions.  The embodiment of this so-called ‘historic shame’ exists in the shape of Pakistan and in the large minority of Muslim Indians. Particularly in northern India, the supreme Hindu god, Rama, has acquired a talismanic quality and his birthplace,  Ayodhya, was the scene of one of the worst atrocities in post-Independence India, when Hindu fundamentalists demolished a Mughal mosque, the Babri Masjid, which they claimed had been built on the precise site of Rama’s birth. Rama, as Wood explains (2007, p.176), is an incarnation of V   ishnu who visits the earth when injustice reigns. In a richly painted homage to Vishnu created in 2011 by Raja Ram Sharma (b.1963), the blue feet at the base of the sacred Peepal tree belong to the god himself, whose head appears atop the tree. Mayura, the peacock created from the feathers of the semi-divine bird Garuda, is a conveyance of V   ishnu and is placed at the centre of the composition.  An expectant Nandi (the sacred bull) waits beside the tree.  The work certainly alludes to the timely return of V   ishnu.  A 1980s television series developed the role of V   ishnu as the ideal, pre-Aryan man and king, and this reading of the god has been 6 used as justification for extremist actions. 7 The British, after the Indian Mutiny in 1857, actively discouraged the Christian evangelicalism that had been a part of its earlier governance strategy and sought to 103

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New Art New Markets rule through a series of political alliances with anglicised princes who might have a different religion to their subjects.  This patchwork realpolitik of semi-autonomous states operated throughout the Raj until Partition – except for evangelical Nagaland in the north-east and Catholic-Portuguese Goa in the west. Incredible as it might seem, the Inquisition was still active in Goa until 1812, and memories of earlier attempts by the Portuguese to forcibly convert Indians in the coastal towns and settlements as well as to abolish Hindu customs and ceremonies have been appropriated by the BJP, the political embodiment of radical Hinduism.  The objective of the BJP, according to Edna Fernandes (2007), is to identify areas in which the local population has been coerced into either the Christian or Muslim faith and use this 8 to radicalise Hindu youth. Initiation ceremonies in which followers of the RSS – the National Volunteer Organisation – swear allegiance to Kali with a copy of the 9 Bhagavad Gita in one hand and a loaded revolver in another are extremely sinister. A further consequence of this aggressive nationalism is the eradication of local cultures, such as the Goan. Nehru reclaimed Goa from the Portuguese by force in 1961 in an attempt to appease hardline Hindus. Indira Gandhi similarly smashed any notions of Sikh separatism and an independent state of Khalistan when she authorised Operation Blue Star – the assault on the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984 – an act that she paid for with her life.  Amritsar had been the site of another massacre, by the British of the Indians under Colonel Reginald Dyer in 1919, which, according to Alex von Tunzelmann, radicalised India’s Congress Party but also prompted some Sikhs to make Dyer an honorary member of their order by staging a ceremony in the Golden Temple (2007, p.48). The more recent massacre has been remembered in a modern masterpiece of the Mughal miniature tradition by Amrit and Rabindra Singh (b.1966), otherwise known as the Singh Twins.  Their large picture entitled Nineteen Eighty-Four (1998) borrows imagery from the Padshahnama, the Chronicle of the Emperor, which depicts the life of Mughal ruler Shah Jahan (1592–1666). It takes a bird’s-eye view of the Golden Temple and tilts the composition to give the sense of a vortex. It shows blindfolded Western-media cameramen taking pictures behind soldiers firing guns and Indira Gandhi facing the viewer from behind a military tank. It depicts graphic evidence of bloodshed and, perhaps most movingly, three terrified women huddled together, but isolated and vulnerable on top of the temple gateway.  The soldiers are dehumanised by the omission of pupils from their eyes, while each victim’s face might be a portrait. A part of Muslim-dominated Kashmir was delivered to India at the last gasp, as its maharajah prevaricated, possibly considering whether to declare independence from 104

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Hindustan 10

both fledgling nations. India felt that it would be unable to defend itself against an attack from China without the state’s mountainous terrain on its northern border. 11 Kashmir was also Nehru’s family’s ancestral home, and had a great hold on him. Indian Kashmir is still claimed by Pakistan, and in 1989 a Muslim insurgency in the state attempted to drive out the landowning Hindu Brahmins known as Kashmiri Pandits.  The result is that both the Congress Party and the BJP appeal to Indian nationalism – the former stresses centrist economics and the latter, Hinduism.  Today in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir state, graffiti threatening the lives of police officers is a common sight. Curfews are regularly imposed throughout the region, and a large pro-Pakistan terrorist group called Hizbul Mujahideen has been in a state of perpetual war with the Indian authorities since 1989. Moves by minorities within India towards autonomy have been settled effectively, but often quite brutally, by the central government. Perhaps because of these strong-arm tactics, radical notions of a land exclusively for Hindus – Hindustan (the Mughal geographers’ name for northern India) – have been allowed to flourish. It should be remembered that both Pakistan and India were conceived of, and are to this day governed as, civil rather than religious polities. It was a great shock, therefore, when in 2002 the Indian police in Gujarat stood by while the Hindu-nationalist ‘saffron militia’ – many from the lowest castes and high on drugs – attacked and killed over 2000 Muslims in the massacre described at the start of this chapter. It was also a shock because the West expected a moderate response from the Indian Government and the application of Indian law.  The massacre was in reply to the incineration of Hindus, allegedly by Muslims, on a train a couple of years after the razing of the 12 Babri Masjid (Mosque of Babur) in Ayodhya. The prelude to the atrocity, Wendy Doniger explains (2009, p.664), dates back to 1990, when L.K.  Advani, the then BJP President, donned the saffron robes of a renouncer (today, a right-wing Hindu) and posed with a bow and arrow on top of a truck made up to look like Rama’s chariot.  Two years later, hundreds of thousands of Hindus took sledgehammers to Babur’s mosque. Over 1000 people died in the riots that followed. It was in response to sectarian violence in Mumbai (Bombay) in 2006, following the bombing of a train, that the artist Atul Dodiya (b.1959), created his Shutter paintings.  The pictures are hidden behind the same type of domestic shutter that protected households from the violence perpetrated by Muslims and Hindus at the height of the troubles in Mumbai.  The skeletal rickshaw,  Autosaurus Tripous (2007), is Jitish Kallat’s rejoinder to the internecine conflict that has blighted Mumbai in recent years and has led to a gang culture akin to that described by Fernando Meirelles (b.1955) in his film City of God (2002), portraying feuding Rio de Janeiro 105

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New Art New Markets mobs. In Mumbai’s case, however, the disputes are stirred as much by religious differences as by territorial infringement and personal vendetta. Mumbai’s mafia, Gunda Raj, is today motivated by money, although religious differences often provide a reason for conflict.  There is a great deal of evidence of an escalation of radical Hindu attacks on minorities, notably Muslims, since the accession of the BJP to sole power in 2014.  A new ban on the consumption of beef (the cow is a sacred beast to Hindus because it is the vehicle of the god Shiva) in Maharastra state has added fuel to the funeral pyre of religious intolerance on the subcontinent. India’s new wealth has brought with it greater political and military status.  When the country successfully tested its first nuclear bomb, the BJP (then in power at the head of a coalition government) swaggeringly asserted that whereas one nuclear attack on it by Pakistan would greatly inconvenience the country, an equivalent attack on Pakistan would destroy India’s northern neighbour. Provocative and bombastic statements such as these betray the fear that has entered the heart of Indian society that it is vulnerable to foreign aggression and acts of terrorism. Shilpa Gupta touched on this primordial fear in 2007 when she and her friends carried white suitcases displaying the words ‘There is no explosive in this’ onto Mumbai buses.  The word ‘no’ was indistinct, whereas the other five words were clearly depicted. In 2008, the grim reality of a terrorist attack was felt by the residents of the upmarket Oberoi and  Trident, the Taj Palace and Tower hotels in Mumbai. Indian democracy has begun to empower the country’s 200 million Dalits.  Their social and economic position within the cities at least is greatly improved.  The days when Dalits had to warn other castes of their approach by sounding a bell may still hold in isolated rural communities, but they are no longer the norm.  They are, therefore, a politically significant group, courted by the Hindu-inspired Congress and BJP parties alike – although the natural faith for the Untouchables would seem to be Buddhism, and many Dalits become Buddhists or convert to Islam in order to escape their caste. Since 1995, the northern state of Uttar Pradesh has elected the Dalit Mayawati Prabhu Das (commonly known as Kumari Mayawati – b.1956), leader of the Bahujan Samaj (Majority People’s) Party, as its chief minister on three separate occasions. It is tempting to envisage a powerful political party comprising upwardly mobile Dalits, successful in the electronics, outsourcing and service industries – all of which are thriving on the subcontinent. In the past, Indian society absorbed and dampened such enthusiasms, secure in the power of the Congress Party, which comprised upper-caste Brahmins and the descendants of the once autocratic and wealthy Indian princes.  In the past, the Congress Party was able to neutralize the power of the Dalits by sowing enmity amongst its multitude of 106

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Hindustan communities. This divide and rule policy is much harder to implement now that Congress is shorn of many of its instruments of persuasion. Rather like the British Raj, Congress divided and ruled.  And not only Congress, according to Edward Luce, but also the Shiv Sena – the ‘army of Shivaji’, a rightwing Hindu party – which filled the political space vacated by an easily fragmented working class by winning power in Mumbai’s civic elections in 1995 as the senior partner in a coalition with the BJP. Shiv Sena and the BJP enjoy an overwhelming majority today in Mumbai. Every village and town in the western state of Maharashtra has a bronze, garlanded statue of Shivaji standing as a symbol of Hindu nationalism. But as Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot (2006, pp 231–44) explain, Shivaji (1630–80), the leader of the martial, Maratha peoples of the Deccan, was in conflict with Aurangzeb’s (1658–1707) Mughal Empire for reasons of power rather than on specifically religious grounds. Shivaji may have been Hindu, and his coronation a traditional Indic affair – and there seems little doubt that he was aware of his Hindu identity in a Muslim ‘universe’ – but he was primarily a warrior seeking to carve out an autonomous state for himself. These radical nationalist strains, therefore, fly in the face of Indian history.  The three most revered leaders of large parts of the subcontinent – Mauryan ruler Ashoka (304–232 BCE), Mughal Emperor Akbar (1542–1605) and Nehru – have all, in the end, been conciliators and moderates.  Their contribution to culturally heterogeneous India can be seen, Wood notes (p.103), in the national flag: Ashoka’s lions are the emblem of modern India, his wheel of the dharma (law) set against a white band (signifying peace) between the orange and green fields of Hinduism and Islam.  The first of this trinity of great leaders converted to Buddhism, the second was a Muslim and the third a Hindu, but none had any interest in promoting a state religion.  A fourth figure, and pillar of Buddhism, Kanishka the Great created the huge Kushan Empire over which he reigned from 127 to 151 CE. His empire stretched from the Aral Sea to the Bay of Bengal, a loosely affiliated, fantastically wealthy polity that marked a high point in Indian religious tolerance.  A silver Buddhist reliquary casket with Buddha on a lotus petal on the lid, worshipped by Brahma, the creator god of the Hindus, and Indra, the sky god of the Rig Veda, testifies to the ecumenical nature of Kanishka’s rule.  The many-headed Brahminical gods also seem to have made their first appearance under the Kushans, evolving out of the confluence of cultures – Greek, Indian and Central Asian – that defined their empire.Yet Kanishka did not preserve a place for himself in the hearts of Indians, largely it seems because he did not obey an ancient civil code of chivalry. It is not to these towering figures of Indian statehood that the BJP and RSS 107

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New Art New Markets look for validation, but to the Machiavellian first emperor of India, Chandragupta Maurya, who is accredited in c.300 BCE with creating one of the world’s first great texts on statecraft – the Arthashastra, in which the caste system was encoded. Seven caste divisions are recorded in the Arthashastra, including the Untouchables (Chandalas), who, being unclean, lived outside the cities. Chandragupta also defined India’s northern borders as bounded by the Hindu Kush, the Afghan mountains and the Baluchi desert. He was a strong and, in BJP terms, patriotic Hindu warrior. The Weltanschauung of today’s India can be summarised pictorially in one half of a pendant depiction of Havelli (the home) of Shrinathji (an avatar of Lord Krishna) by the artist Soghra Khurasani (b.1983). Krishna is present in Havelli 1 (2012) in the form of his giant, solar visage. In his abode, lotuses, symbols of his authority, are scattered throughout an intricate configuration of rooms decorated with frescoes recounting the actions of the faithful.  The ‘lions of justice’ and the ‘elephants of wealth’ are liberally portrayed on the architecture of his realm. Stylistically, the work departs from the decorative border of traditional Indian miniature painting by advancing the content and narrative on the wide margin.  This theocratic view of state and society is surely the model that the majority of political stakeholders in India today would recognise. Cultural influences India has been anything but a static civilisation. It has experienced and, crucially, absorbed the effects of Dravidian,  Aryan, Greek,  Turkic,  Afghan, Mongol, Mughal and British cultures.  Asher and Talbot (pp 5–9) argue persuasively for Europe to be considered a sub-Asian continent comparable in cultural and linguistic differences to India, and for neither to be seen as a monolithic, assimilated entity like China. If 13 Europe is both a region and an idea, then India, as Asher and Talbot (pp 8–9) point out, is also a consequence of millennia of migrant cultures, which left ill-defined borders and consisted, arguably until the British Raj, of a proliferation of polities. The appropriation from history by radical Hinduism of certain southern Indian cultures has resulted in a corruption of the actual events.  The Vijayanagara Empire, for example, carved out by the warlike Sangamas of Karnataka in the western Deccan, south of the Tungabhadra River, was not, according to Asher and Talbot (pp 54–70) set up as a Hindu kingdom in opposition to the Muslim states in the north but as a religiously ambiguous, militaristic entity. ‘For one thing,’  Asher and Talbot explain (p.64) ‘the concept of a unified Hindu religion did not exist in the fourteenth century, nor did that of a nation composed 108

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Hindustan of all the peoples within a state’s borders.  And the Vijayanagara state’s greatest rival for power was not the Bahmani Sultanate but the Gajapati kingdom of Orissa, a state headed by rulers who were Hindu.’ The secular and sacred architecture of V   ijayanagara’s capital city at present-day Hampi was conceived in the Indic style, and so temples of every denomination were constructed with post and lintel.  Where there is Islamic architecture at Hampi, it is interpreted in a highly creative manner.  The culture in Hampi reflects, as Asher and Talbot suggest (p.72), Islamicate rather than Islamic culture – the cosmopolitan, not the intrinsically religious culture of a dominant polity. Perhaps the early medieval, fourth-and fifth-century Guptas, who undertook a revival of the ancient myths and Brahminical religion of India, provide the nationalist model under which today’s nationalists labour.  They were certainly highly regarded by the nineteenth-century British. It was the Guptas who were, according to Wood (p.183), the precursors of modern Hinduism, a term used to define the polymath indigenous religions of the subcontinent only in the nineteenth century. It was the Guptas who, after all, suggested that god’s representatives on earth, such as Rama, were historical beings and it was they 13 who moved their court to Ayodhya, calling it the birthplace of Rama, where once it had been the Buddhist city of Saketa. Like Chandragupta, who renewed the Vedic horse sacrifice, the Guptas continuously renewed the Vedic institutions.  There are, in any number of languages, hundreds of versions of the Rama tale in India.  There is even a Muslim Rama story, according to Wood (p.222), told by the Mopylas boat people of Kerala, and, conversely, a Tamil life of the Prophet Muhammad modelled on the Tamil Ramayana.  Are the strange floating deities riding leonine creatures in K.G. Ramanujam’s (1941–73) ink-and-wash drawing Untitled (Angels) really angels? They may be part of the Hindu pantheon of gods, but if so then they are adapted from the papier mâché puppets processed in Tamil rituals.  The inclusiveness of Rama and the tolerance of India’s past dynasties – foreign like the Aryans, Mughals and British; indigenous like the Guptas and Cholas – could still be the presiding legacy for today’s country.  The societal divisions that are manufactured by radical Hinduism are at odds with this idea of India, and seek to undermine its benign pluralism.  The reason for the dramatic departure from societal benevolence in today’s India has much to do with the corrosive cultural impact of modernism on Indian heritage, manifested in the temporal imagery of the Progressives and their disciples.  The radical religious reaction to its imposition has been marked, and the traditional tolerance and inclusiveness of Hinduism has been damaged as a result.  The response 109

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New Art New Markets to political secularism and to rationalism in general has been religious nationalism filled with vitriol and armed with modern weaponry.  This hybrid form of incendiary reaction to neo-liberalism is extremely potent.  With its many populist social 14 programmes, the BJP party will turn the screw on that inclusive society that was once India’s hallmark, and replace it with a cleansed and dogmatic Ramanised one. The forced departure from India of the artist M.F. Husain, after he was believed to have blasphemed a Hindu deity, was a minor but troubling indication that the country is straying close to censorship on religious grounds. If the religious bigotry remains isolated, then the country’s cultural sector has little to worry about; however, if the intolerance becomes commonplace, the country’s life will change and so will the nature and form of its art. India may be moving towards Hindutva-style cultural nationalism; a step in this direction can be seen in the use made of the ‘Indian-ness’ of the ancient, Indus-valley Harappan civilisation by the RSS, which now boasts between two and six million members. But positive radicalism can also be found, as we have seen, in a renewed interest in the often rural religious and artistic prehistoric traditions of India. Many of these customs and beliefs are frowned upon or ignored by orthodox Hinduism and by the secular government, but within them lies the essence of India.  Their visualisation in the form of paintings, sculptures and re-enactment in the form of ritual and procession are central to the cultural health of this nation. Does India offer a practical solution to the economically and culturally disenfranchised? Almost despite itself, India has grown its economy at an annual rate of over six per cent in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.  The country’s infrastructure is, however, far inferior to China’s, income and social equality are still hampered by the caste system, and the country has been less successful than China at lifting its population out of absolute poverty. But are these weaknesses actually the result of a great strength? India is the world’s largest democracy and – except for a short period in the mid-1970s, during which time Indira Gandhi declared martial, or President’s, rule – followed that system for longer than any other new economy. It has a free press, an established political framework and an independent judiciary that, in principle, observes human rights and acknowledges property and land ownership.  The life expectancy of its people is steadily increasing and literacy in the country is rising.  The comparison between India and the newly formed Muslim states from which it was separated, Pakistan and Bangladesh, is stark.  The 110

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Hindustan former has largely lost sight of the secular ideals of its founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), and the latter is defeated by its geography and climate. India has arrived at its current position as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies without significant amounts of government (or foreign direct) investment – as has been the case in China – but rather through a number of private initiatives and the activities of entrepreneurs. It was 13 years behind China in introducing financial 15 reforms. The country is still a rural society with the majority of its population living in villages, giving rise to two notions – one, that giant metropolises or meta16 cities may not be an inevitable consequence of modernisation; and two, that indigenous culture, as we have seen, is best preserved in the village.  The country is hugely advantaged by having English as its true and practical lingua franca (although illiteracy afflicts 60 per cent of the population), as well as an education system that in many ways mirrors those of the major industrial powers.  We have seen the social disadvantages of what is essentially the Gujarat development model in the coalfields 17 of Jharia, but also, it has to be said, its economic advantages. The world will soon discover whether a huge, imperfect democracy is a match for a gargantuan, centralised, single-party state – although today’s India is actually more centralised than at any time in its long history.  Tied to this question is another important one: does the economic imperative outweigh greater levels of individual freedom and state accountability? In short, at what stage in a society’s economic development do notions of individual liberty excite the population to ask for democracy, if at all? Could it be that the association of democracy with wealth is an accident of the accumulation of capital in the West? It is equally possible, as history has shown us, that prosperity and an equitable distribution of gains can arise under a range of political systems. Similarly, the connection that is made in the West between the incessant voicing of protest in art and politics, and the primacy given to the notion of freedom of expression ignores the many different ancient spiritual, philosophical and cultural responses to the vagaries of personal fortune. In short, there are many ways to be, or to feel, free.  The example of East Asia suggests that as economies mature so do their respective societies, but how much is the association of democracy with economic maturity a legacy of a departing colonial narrative? It is, demonstrably, not inevitable that economic maturity leads to the type of society that we have in the West. V   alues that are not necessarily predicated on economic prosperity may actually trump the artificial and fragile concepts surrounding the individualistic, rights-based societies of western Europe and the United States. In a majority of South East Asian societies, for example, nationalism and centrally driven, societal regulation in the form of strongman government is the norm. None of 111

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New Art New Markets these states can truly be called democratic. In fact, the West’s neo-liberal ideology has found few new adherents since the millennium. Even a mature democracy such as Japan has tilted towards nationalism.  Will India, too, follow a path towards greater authoritarianism? Have the divisive economic effects of globalisation highlighted the absence of a Western panacea. In terms of the commodity, the muted reception throughout India to international contemporary art is an indication that traditional Hindustan rejects the moral and economic manifesto of the international art world. It is the nation’s archaism and its fundamental spirituality that baulk at the surreptitious sundering of its cultural core by the global art commodity market. India, like China, was for millennia governed by autocratic governments. It has only very recently decided upon democracy. Here, the psychological triumph of the British in planting this political structure, amongst other values, in the Indian mind was as significant as the leadership of the three most important political figures of 18 the newly independent state: Nehru, B.R.  Ambedkar (1891–1956) and Gandhi. A constitution for India was not, in the words of Winston Churchill (1874–1965), enforced by British arms. Credit should also be extended to the last viceroy, Louis Mountbatten (1900–79), who, according to von Tunzelmann (2007), orchestrated in the circumstances the most successful retreat from empire in history and achieved the largest and most closely integrated India that there had ever been. India, not the West, is the country to which transitional economies turn when they consider implementing the democratic process.  The subcontinent does, after all, contain all the extreme social and economic conditions that characterise new markets.  The findings are extremely impressive. Dalits and the highest Brahmin caste are as likely as each other to vote. Dalits, in fact, regard their vote as the politicians’ mandate.  They believe that with it comes a right to demand of those politicians that they fulfil their promises, and key to these promises is greater emancipation for the lower levels of society.  This belief in a virtuous, upward political spiral combined with an inherent personal optimism and tolerance of physical hardship characterises India perhaps more clearly than other nations, and sets it apart from Western democracies. India has been ruled by majority governments since its independence.  Today, under the BJP, majority government has become Hindu government.  The minorities (even the Buddhists and recently empowered Dalits) acquiesce in the face of this authoritarianism. If there are slender signs that the Dalits are finding their voice in India, the same cannot be said of the Adivasis (the country’s indigenous people), who live in the hilly forest belt that traverses several states across southern and eastern India.  The armed militia, or Naxalites, who have been waging a bloody guerrilla war against 112

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Hindustan the state are broadly supported by the Adivasis, who are angry about the indiscriminate mining of their land for bauxite and iron ore.  They, who have not experienced the benefits of modernisation, pose a dilemma for developing India: continue with the economic development and take on the characteristics of a police state, or sacrifice the speed of development for democracy. The Indian system of government and law offers new economies a workable model.  The manner in which the country deals with its future social and religious revolutions will be closely watched.  The Indian model has much to lose and much to gain by its future actions. The rising value of international contemporary art from India Sevi Seti, the wife of the Gaekwar (princely ruler) of Baroda, so treasured her bejewelled carpet and 124-carat Star of the South diamond that she took them with her to Monaco shortly before India declared its independence from Britain. Her decision to emigrate says as much about the princes’ attitude to the British retreat 19 from empire as it does about the extravagance of the maharajas. The portrait of the Maharaja Yeshwant Rao Holkar II of Indore (1931–8) – painted in Western, white-tie dress, cape slung over his shoulders – reflects the insouciant sense of patrician entitlement that the elite felt and that was captured by, in this example, the French society artist Bernard Boutet de Monvel (1881–1949).  The silver-encrusted bed commissioned in 1882 from Christofle of Paris by Sadiq Muhammad Khan Abbasi IV, the princely ruler of Bahawalpur State, featured four naked females of varying skin tones who, by an ingenious mechanism linked to the mattress, could be set in motion and fan the recumbent nawab while winking at him, against a 30-minute cycle of music from Gounod’s Faust. Of course, ostentation was nothing new.  The sixteenth-century Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great lived in splendour in the perfectly preserved city of Fatehpur Sikri, collected emeralds and owned the enormous Koh-i-Noor diamond. Indeed, something of the Mughal prodigality can be gleaned from the perfectly preserved pictures of the eighteenth-century Rajasthani Maharajas of Jodpur. In one work in the Delhi style by a court artist, the turbaned Maharaja Abhai Singh sits on a gold, bejewelled throne before a lush Mughal carpet surrounded by dancing girls and musicians.  This gilded world was preserved under the British and in a system known as the ‘Licence Raj’ for a while after Independence, but it was clearly unsustainable in democratic India.  The death of Gayatri Devi, the Queen of Jaipur, in 2009, broke the last physical link with the world of tiger hunts and vast estates. 113

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New Art New Markets The dismantling of the contrived colonial economy has enabled the country to develop new industries and resulted in the transformation of the cityscapes of Mumbai (Bombay) and Delhi, highlighted as they now are by the shimmering forms of luxurious developments, rising like ice sculptures above the squalid shanty towns. Midtown Mumbai, the home of textile mills until the 1980s, has been transformed by a new generation of foreign-educated entrepreneurs into a high-rise city that generates wealth for the nation. A new elite has replaced the old in the fine-art sectors of the Indian modern and contemporary market. Men like the Zoroastrian (‘Parsee’) Ratan Tata (b.1937) and non-resident Indian (NRI) steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal (b.1950) now form India’s wealthy elite.  The multinational ArcelorMittal sponsored the construction of Orbit by Anish Kapoor (b.1954) in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, east London in 2012. Shiv Nadar (b.1945) co-founded the $7.5 billion conglomerate HCL Technologies in a garage in 1976. His wife, Kiran (b.1951), is the most prominent collector of Indian contemporary art in the world. Former Bollywood actress Tina Ambani (b.1957) vies with Shiv Nadar for the accolade of chief benefactor to emerging Indian artists. She also competes for the finest F.N. Souza (1924–2002) pictures: the family acquired The Birth by the Goan artist in 2015 for a record $4 million.  The family of the Indian entrepreneur is the new patron of the arts, and its taste shapes the high-end market for Indian modern and contemporary art.  Tyeb Mehta’s (1925–2009) Falling Figure with Bird (1988), which made over $1 million, was bought by an NRI, New York hedge-fund manager Rajiv Puri, in 2006. He flipped it five years later through Saffronart in Mumbai for a $600,000 profit.  The billionaire Malvinder Singh (b. 1937) paid over $2 million at Saffronart’s auction house in 2011 for the 16-panel Buddhist visual epic Wish Dream (2000) by Arpita Singh (b.1937).  This visionary history painting pays stylistic tribute to Indian folk and Tibetan wall art, the Indian Modernists and Marc Chagall (1887–1985).  The message of adaptability in the face of a brash world is captured best in the sitting figure at the base of the work. He reaches out to caress an aeroplane as if it were a bird.  The Singhs are amongst the most discerning of the great, new collectors of Indian contemporary art.  They are interested in artists who capture the essential Indian-ness of Indian art.  The photographer Raghubir Singh (1942–99) recorded the intimate details of Indian street life from the 1960s until his death. His work and that of the historically acute Gulam Mohammed Sheikh are integral to the Singh collection. This newly affluent community is attracted to auctions held by local houses such as Saffronart and Pundole’s (Mumbai), and the collectibles specialist Bid & Hammer in Bengaluru.  The 50,000 guests at the 2016 wedding of the daughter of mining 114

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Hindustan magnate Gali Janardhan Reddy (b.1967) were treated to lavish displays of entertainment in a Bengaluru mock-Tudor palace once owned by the Maharaja of Mysore. Something of the grandeur of the Wodeyar dynasty, who ruled the Kingdom of Mysore from 1399 to 1947, has spilled into the laps of the nouveaux riches in India.  Art collecting is a way to express ostentation. If not the wealthy themselves, then their children will become future collectors.   Another significant portion of India’s wealth has been expended on its temples and religious effigies. Recent projects suggest that this trend is likely to continue. In a number of instances, these actions are politically motivated – such as the proposed construction of a temple to Rama on the site of the aforementioned demolished Babri Mosque at Ayodhya. Kumari Mayawati, the former Dalit Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, embarked on a monumental, composite-style memorial to Dr B.R.  Ambedkar, India’s campaigner for caste reform, which was made up of Mughal-style pavilions, Buddhist-style domes and neo-classical columns. It is a monument to extravagance and just one of a number of grandiose civic schemes undertaken by the governor in the city of Lucknow – a former home of the extravagant Nawabs of Oudh. The Nawabs were themselves more than capable of creating pastiche architecture in an Indo-European, neo-Palladian style, situated as they were between the twilight of Mughal power in Delhi and the rise of the newly powerful East India Company in colonial Calcutta.  As Sally North explains, the Nawab style has been described as a spectacular fantasy of Englishness confidently amalgamated into a local style. Mayawati’s projects may superficially follow in the Lucknow tradition of a grandiose composite style of architecture, but the motivation behind her architectural fantasies carries a strong political message encapsulated in the new electoral power of her Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Today, the Indian state – but also autonomous states within the subcontinent as well as minority, radical political parties – is influencing the country’s broad political and cultural landscape. It is not in the interests of India’s contemporary artists or market to create pastiche Hindu-type art, but there are signs that this will be their chosen direction.  The financial and ideological incentives to create politically charged Hindu architecture and art may prove irresistible to a new generation of Indian art-school graduates. The ‘Sanskritisation’ of Indian society (Luce 2006) has played into the hands of evangelical Hinduism. It is threatening to overturn the Brahmin ideal of material self-sacrifice.  The social transition brought about ironically by wealth generation favours the radical politics of the BJP. Its anti-corruption drive is encapsulated in the 115

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New Art New Markets success of the Aam Adami Party (AAP) (Common Man Party) in the New Delhi elections in 2017.  The AAP now governs the capital city. It has an alleged attachment to Communists and has pushed Indian politics further away from globalisation. Former Congress Party Chief Minister of Delhi Sheila Dikshit (b.1938) transformed the city into a magnet for foreign investment to rival Mumbai. Dikshit had also set about the task of improving the city’s infrastructure, which suggested that India’s political capital, rather than entrepreneurial and chaotic Mumbai, was also set to become its cultural centre. Historically, this would make more sense; Delhi was, after all, the cultural manifestation of Mughal and British power. Near to New Delhi, the satellite city of Gurgaon has grown into one of the wealthiest and most vibrant metropolises in India, attracting foreign multinationals to the region. It is home to the bulk of the enormous, internationally inspired Poddar art collection. But in 2016, the city was renamed Gurugram in acknowledgement of the guru in whose name it was founded and in a further demonstration of Hindu nationalism. It was impressed on all that the land on which the city was built was mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita and that Gurgaon had been a great centre of Hindu learning. Sanskritisation is threatening the burgeoning micro-economies of Greater Delhi. Mumbai is governed by the Hindu-nationalist Shiv Sena party.  This has not hindered its development as India’s international-art-market omphalos. But it may, in the near future, temper the radical nature of the work shown in its multitude of galleries. Globally minded Bengaluru appears to be the best positioned to evolve into India’s avant-garde art centre. It is host to a number of artist collectives and has a vibrant street-art scene.  The difficulty in this economically divided city is the lack of interest that its tech-industry employees show towards the city’s internationally inspired art. As a result, much of the fledgling cultural industry in Bengaluru is reliant on public investment. Subodh Gupta’s boat filled with a confectionery of utility items from his childhood, What does the vessel contain that the river does not?, was shown at the inaugural 2012 Indian biennale in Kochi in the state of Kerala, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. It was sold the following year through the London dealer Hauser & Wirth to the Qatari royal family. Kochi, in addition to its internationally inspired biennale, also has a great number of commercial galleries. It is a wealthy city that welcomes the languorous and provides a fitting backdrop for the art world and possibly its trade. But, it is a cooperative near Chennai (formerly Madras) which I believe provides the best indication of where the future of Indian art lies.  The Cholamandal artists’ village, established in the 1960s, is home to the descendants of the Madras School.  The Chola civilisation (300s BCE–1279 CE), from which it derived its name, has seen a resurgence in interest in recent years.  The fantastical, 116

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Hindustan sparkling sculptures of S. Nandgopal (1946–2017), the son of the village founder K.C.S Paniker (1911–77), is art in the spirit of the elaborate relief sculptures of south Indian temples. His bronze-and-copper constructions bristle with seemingly random imagery drawn from Hindu mythology. In many respects, his art is the Hindu equivalent of the Iranian sculptor, Parviz Tanavoli (b.1937), whom we shall encounter in the ‘Aryana’ chapter. The non-material values of Indian society, encapsulated in the life of its spiritual leaders – not least Mahatma Gandhi, but also in its multitude of holy men so despised by the moderniser Nehru – are still a part of the country’s social fabric. Luce (2006, p.307) identifies a new middle class that wishes to protect Indian culture and its religious heritage; one that bemoans the disappearance of traditional family values, while also abhorring the idolisation of money.  A rekindled interest in the 3000-year-old curative powers of the holistic medicine Ayurveda (Sanskrit for ‘knowledge of long life’) gives an indication of a civilisation rediscovering itself. Even the arch-academic oil painter Raja Ravi Varma was disposed to paint a cow as a symbol of health and abundance; a woman is depicted bathing at the animal’s udder. Milk, in Ayurvedic texts, is regarded as cleansing.  The inconsequence of earthly possessions and relations reflects the teachings of most of the spiritual guides of the major faiths that coexist in India.  This view of life has always been an important part of sacred Indian art and architecture. John Guy tells a wonderful story of the rediscovery in 1987 of a cache of 23 Chola-period bronzes together with a 15sheet copperplate inscription fastened with the Chola royal seal near the village of Esalam in Tamil Nadu.‘The copper sculptures’, he writes (2006, p.22),‘were washed, clothed and garlanded and reintegrated into the ritual life of the village temple’. The twenty-third in a long, hereditary line stretching back to the Chola Empire, which ruled most of India until the thirteenth century near the great temple town of Swamimalai, is how Dalrymple (2009) introduces Srikanda, a contemporary maker of bronze effigies. Srikanda described his place of work during the making of an icon as akin to a temple – a place where it was important to be kind, polite and speak the truth. He likened the creation of each image to an act of devotion. Each sculpture, he explained, contained the essence of the god and so was much more than just a work of art.  To this day, portable icons are used in processions of deities, empowered by rites on behalf of the immovable objects in the temple.  At the richer temples like Kapalishvara in Mylapur, the ancient quarter of Chennai, Guy (2006) explains, a full set of bronze sculptures of the 63 Nayanmars (Tamil saint-poets) is paraded, decorated and adorned, through the streets at the time of the full moon from March to April.  The god comes forth to see and be seen. 117

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New Art New Markets It is important for Indian society to retain its traditions, much of which are tied to its great religious heritage.  To steal a line from Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (Self Rule for India), we must ‘attain mastery over our minds and passions’ (Guy 2006, p.10).  The cultural fabric of southern India in particular is wedded to religious art, and it would be sad if either economic prosperity or radical politics ended some of the world’s most enduring and meaningful traditions. A revival of Indic culture in the new age of prosperity The market for modern and contemporary Indian art began in 1995 with the Herwitz sale in New York.  The sale grossed over $2 million and set an international price for a generation of Indian moderns.  The Progressive Artists Group was 20 founded in 1947, and comprised artists who very largely trained overseas and practised in a quasi-Indian (figurative) modernist style (Indian-style figures placed on abstract backgrounds).  The movement’s first price spike occurred from 2005 to 2007, by which time its artists had achieved average prices of between $50,000 and $250,000 and occasionally substantially more than that.  A mini-slump affected the market from 2008 to 2010.  This was brought about as much by the global market correction of 2008 as by the vitiated returns of Indian art funds that sprang up at the height of the mania and sought to realise their gains at its trough but instead suffered catastrophic losses. By 2010, Indian collectors had replaced speculators and the leading moderns were recording their highest prices. The modernist tide that swept India, encouraged by Nehru’s Western outlook and acclaimed in Le Corbusier’s modernist city, Chandigarh, eschewed the traditional Indian affection for architectural ornament and paid no heed to local cultural or climatic conditions.  The modernist canon in architecture was challenged in the 1970s by architects like Charles Correa (1930–2015) and Balkrishna Doshi (b.1927), who also sought to address Indian myth and symbolism in their buildings. One of these Indian devices, the open internal courtyard, by the 1980s, had become according to Himanshu Burte (2007), a central feature in the reincarnation of premodern traditions across the country. Architecture has since taken on regional qualities in the hands of important Indian architects. Chitra Vishwanath’s (b.1962) mud buildings in Bengaluru, Samaresh Mukherjee’s low-cost energy-efficient housing in West Bengal, and Dean D’Cruz’s (b.1961) ‘floating’ pavilions in Goa, the roofs of which are constructed out of wood and tiles perfectly suited to Goa’s hot and humid weather, all pay attention to their surroundings.  A textile artist’s response to the increasing urbanisation of the 118

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Hindustan subcontinent is brilliantly realised in Dinabandhu Mahapatra’s Bhubaneswar, commissioned in the 1980s by the enlightened Martand Singh (1923–95). Singh made it his vocation to encourage other collectors to commission India’s great textile artists. Mahapatra’s towering achievement depicts in fine, hand-stitched detail the trees of the eastern state of Orissa (now Odisha) as recorded by the State Library of Bhubaneswar. But the work is far more than a botanical representation of endangered species such as the banyan and palm; it is a rhythmic scheme of subtle monochrome that gently reminds its audience of the fragility of India’s natural and cultural life in the wake of an expanding economy and population. Visual artists like Husain, Souza and Syed Haider Raza (1922–2016) ‘were’, Partha Mitter writes (2001, p.206), ‘inducted into Modernism by three refugees from the Nazis: the Expressionist painter Walter Langhammer, who joined the Times of India in 1938 as art director . . . ; Emanuel Schlesinger, who set up a pharmaceutical concern in Bombay, and who became their main collector; and Rudy von Leyden, who joined the Times of India as art critic’.  These three championed the cause of the Indian Modernists.  The three émigrés joined forces with the radical novelist Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004) and Kekoo Gandhy (1920–2012), owner of the influential Chemould Gallery.  The other members of the modernist group were Sadanand (S.K.) Bakre (1920–2007), H.A. Gade (1917–2001), Krishen Khanna (b.1925) and Vasudeo (V.S.) Gaitonde (1924–2001). Progressive artists, Mitter continues, had kindred spirits, many of them having trained under (the minor French Cubist) André Lhote (1885–1962) – including Akbar Padamsee (b.1928) and Ram Kumar (b.1924). These are the artists that the international (and Indian) art market has embraced since Independence.  Their works feature in nearly all the major collections of Indian art.  The prodigious and experimental Husain and the fashionably provocative Souza have enjoyed exhibitions of their work in prestigious Western institutions, and this has helped to bolster their prices still more. International critical acceptance combined with the great wealth of NRIs and international collectors like the Japanese Masanori Fukuoka very quickly pushed the highest prices over the psychological $1 million mark.  The great event happened in September 2005, when Mehta’s Mahishasura made $1.6 million at Sotheby’s, New York. Not all significant Indian collectors are enamoured with the Bombay Progressives, however.  The Bengali collector Harsh Goenka (b.1957) collects the Kolkata artist Ganesh Pyne (1937–2013). Pyne’s art was part of the anti-modernist Bengal School, but unlike the light and optimistic watercolours of his mentor,  Abanindranath Tagore, Pyne’s art is introspective and physically dark.  Towards the end of his life, he took the gods and myths of the Mahabharata as his subject matter.  The stories he depicts are macabre.   119

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New Art New Markets Another significant artist coterie, the short-lived 1892 Group, which formed in opposition to the Progressives, paid attention to religious and meditational sensations. Jadith Swaminathan (1928–94) made a significant contribution to the diversity of Indian painting with his support for artists from indigenous tribes like the Gond and the Bhil. One particular discovery of his, the artist Jangarh Singh Shyam (1962– 2001), revived the threatened art of the Parhan Gond community of musicians.  The community had been marginalised in the absence of a supporting traditional mechanism of patronage – the Gond rajas, in short. Shyam translated their music into a rhythmic art form, creating a world of stencilled local deities and animals combined with a constellation of dots. His work has even entered the mainstream. It was included in the Magiciens de la Terre show in Paris in 1989. The next wave of Indian contemporaries has been quickly identified by the international art market, backed by an international set (Charles Saatchi, Frank Cohen, Bernard Arnault and François Pinault) and the occasional Indian group of collectors. In 2007, the art world put on international public and commercial shows of Indian contemporary art.  The anniversary celebrations ten years later have encouraged another appraisal.  A decade ago, the art market was fascinated by the new generation’s take on the wealth divide and urban poverty. Subodh Gupta’s Identity of my shoulders (2006) – in which five traditional Indian brass pots are welded together and suspended, lantern-like, by rope – became the seminal image for the new generation.  Today, politics and social division are the chosen topics. From 2007, major Western dealers started to trade in the new work and prices initially exceeded those of the Progressives.  They have since fallen back.  Today, the market value of four leading protagonists is mixed. Subodh Gupta’s value at auction peaked in 2008 and that of Jitish Kallat stalled in 2014, but both Bharti Kher (b.1969) and Raqib Shaw (b.1974) have continued their economic ascent. So much of the value of this work depends on the access that top commercial galleries have to international fairs;  oddly, the overexposure of this art adds to its appeal. The impact of the international market on Indian art has been great. Prices for Indian versions of international art have reached heights, but the allure of this market has taken contemporary Indian art still further away from its traditional roots.  The rejection of the Bengal School by the Progressives in favour of internationalism after Independence was, with the benefit of hindsight, a big mistake. It sidelined the likes of Abanindranath Tagore, who had supported the initiative of the British administrator Ernest Binfield Havell to reinvigorate Mughal painting 21 at the Calcutta School of Art in 1905. The Progressives, one could argue, may have succeeded in freeing today’s Indian art from the shackles of colonialisation, 120

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Hindustan but they have left it at the mercy of the West’s international modernism.  The vast body of  Tagore’s work, meanwhile, forms a part of Rabindra Bharati’s collection in Kolkata and, as a national treasure, is highly regarded in India. But collectors of his paintings and those of his ‘circle’, such as Jamini Roy and Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–41), are few. Sher-Gil’s wartime paintings of women were heavily influenced by both Abanindranath and Rabindranath Tagore. She also drew inspiration for her village subjects from the Pahari School of painting, a Himalayan miniature art form that received the support of Rajput princes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Like the art of Abanindranath Tagore, Pahari painting grew out of Mughal art but its objective was specifically devotional. All post-Independence Indian artists rejected the pastiche, Western-style art of Raja Ravi Varma but they did not eject the religious content of a part of his oeuvre. One of V   arma’s Millais-like ‘beautiful ladies’, the Parsee Vasantasena, stands nonchalantly, resting one arm on a riverside tree, holding a bunch of flowers in the other.  The picture personifies the formal aims of Anglo-Indian academicism.  Another religious work by Varma, the painting Radha in the Moonlight (1890), achieved the astronomical sum of $29.5 million in 2016. Varma’s painting is in stark aesthetic contrast to the light and delicate watercolour by Tagore, Siva Simantini (c.1920s), which sold for a fraction of the price of Radha in the Moonlight. In Tagore’s painting, the branch of a tree forms a natural canopy over a woman intently studying her prize.  Tagore’s tree references Japanese woodcut art and the pastel colour, the art of the Mughal miniature. It firmly rejects Western academic illusionism and embraces not modernism but a pan-Asian modernity rooted in tradition. It also chimed with a concurrent stream of European thought, theosophy, which rejected Victorian materialism and supported Indian spirituality.  The perceived divide between Asian spirituality and European materialism was exploited by the Japanese art theorist Okakura Tenshin, also known as Okakura Kakuzoˉ (1863–1913), who developed a new style of Japanese painting, Nihonga, which accepted elements of Western art but remained thoroughly Japanese in its materials, techniques and subject matter. It satisfied, according to Michael Sullivan (1973, p.124), ‘the Japanese love of fine craftsmanship, yet absorbed enough of Western realism to make it contemporary’. Okakura set up the private Japan Art Academy, which carried the message of new Japanese painting into the twentieth century. He met with Tagore and taught at the Bengal Art School, softening Tagore’s formerly bright Mughal palette in the manner of Nihonga.  The two most significant aspects of the Bengal School, according to Mitter (2001, p.180), are the merging of individual styles within a common language and a nationalist sentiment that privileged the Hindu culture of India over a Muslim one. 121

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New Art New Markets The new pictorialism of the fine-arts department of Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda (now Vadodara) sought to revive figurative art in India in the 1960s and to distance itself from the internationalist stance of the Progressives, championing instead the Bengal School. Sudhir Patwardhan (b.1949), Bhupen Khakhar (1934–2003) andVivan Sundaram insisted that Western modernism had sidetracked Indian nationalism, but might yet be overcome by a return to India’s folk traditions.  Weaving, the 22 Santiniketan mural tradition and Rajasthani painting were introduced to the university’s curriculum.  The observation of rural life, depicted in a thick impasto with the application of rudimentary materials served the group’s proletarian aims.  The artist Narayan Shridhar (N.S.) Bendre (1910–92), for example, painted highly stylised, intimate studies of women engaged in everyday tasks. Today, artists like Raja Ram Sharma paint with bright mineral pigments on cotton cloth, in a tradition known as Pichwai, but they also paint Hindu gods.  The painting Gopasthami-Krishna with Balaram (2013) falls into the category of works depicting mythological scenes in the Vrindavana Forest and Krishna in the form 23 of Shrinathji. In a series known as The Native Types, the feminist photographer Pushpamala N. (b.1956) draws on occasion directly from Varma’s religious studies.  The Lady in Moonlight and Lakshmi (2000–04), self-portrait photographs of the artist as the goddess Lakshmi, are Varma reborn.  The goddess Lakshmi stands on a lotus while an elephant prepares to lustrate her. The multiple viewing points, characteristic of Mughal painting and a feature of cubism, also found favour with leading Baroda School artists such as Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and Bhupen Khakhar. Sheikh’s construction of a Rajasthani shrine, In Kavaad:Travelling Shrine: Home (2008, fig.14), is a topographical mandala of the sanctum and its environs, in many ways similar to traditional schematic temple painting.  There are nuances to Sheikh’s work, such as the employment of major world-religious deities, and of course in the scale of the work.  The artist attached double doors to the side of his shrine, which could be unfolded to reveal other works of art. One of the images is of a tree comprising deities, sadhus and musicians, but also a car. Sheikh’s message is one of religious tolerance and humanism. Yet another group of artists provided an antidote to the internationalist concerns of the Progressives.  They were forced to leave their native Lahore in the Partition of India in 1947, and on arrival in the Indian capital formed the Delhi Silpi Chakra Group, the aim of which was to revitalise the crafts of their former homeland.  The group was a loose arrangement, which petered out in the 1960s. Its ideology was liberal; it believed in enabling those of little means to buy art.  To that end, it accepted payment in instalments.  The work of the members of the group differed 122

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Hindustan dramatically.  The most original practitioner was Pran Nath Mago (1923–2006). His painting Farewell (1945) shows the conscription of Indian men.  The work has pathos and illustrates the artist’s immense technical ability.  A great deal of information, not least the contrast between twentieth-century warfare and rural life, is compressed into one coherent vision.   The encouragement of a consciously indigenous, craft-based training is still to be found in the Cholamandal artists’ village, founded in 1964 by K.C.S. Paniker. Paniker’s vision was to train artists to create works of art within an Indic idiom, and to fund their artistic aspirations by manufacturing craft objects. His early work was inspired by his concern for the welfare of the poor.  The calligraphic line of Devi Prasad Roy Chowdhury (1899–1975), another artist in this mould, is as delicate and assured as that of  Tagore – his light watercolour washes of Indian deities the equal of any Indian post-war practitioner.  The most individual artist to emerge from Cholamandal was the congenitally deformed K.G. Ramanujam (1941–73), who painted oversized figures resembling, Mitter suggests (2001, p.211),‘the papier-mâché puppets carried in religious processions in Tamil Nadu’. His ink painting Fantasy 24 series (1972) is a pathologically detailed description of the Brahmand (the universe). The Bengaluru artist Prabhavathi Meppayil (b.1965) would have appealed to both Tagore and Okakura. Meppayil has become a great exponent of  Tanjore painting. She was raised as the daughter of a traditional goldsmith, and on occasion uses her father’s tools to create her work. In the preparation of her painting surface, she mixes ceramic powder with glue and applies it to plywood to form the background, sandpapering it to a polished finish. She then creates silhouettes of animals, people and gods by the application of dots, fine lines, gold foil and paint. She employs the tempera technique used in southern Indian miniatures and adds natural stones like malachite and lapis to give lustre to her images. Her untitled paintings move in and out of focus as light plays on the metal. Human forms and buildings appear as a mirage – a commentary, perhaps, on the transience of life and possessions but more likely a meditation on the truth of materials. Her work has echoes in the rangoli folk-art tradition (or kolam, as it is known in Tamil Nadu), in which natural minerals are used to create simple geometric shapes, flowers or representations of gods at the time of religious festivals. India is best-placed among the new markets to enhance its rural culture While mainstream Indian modern and contemporary art is not a straightforward cultural export, it has inclined towards European modernism. It has engendered 123

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New Art New Markets an interest in picture speculation amongst Indian neophyte collectors that is unequalled amongst their equivalents in other new markets, but has failed in the main to engage with the heart of Indian culture.  Work started in 2013 on a new contemporary art museum in Kolkata (KMOMA), designed by international museum architects Herzog & de Meuron, devoted to the collection and display of contemporary Indian art. It may choose to follow an internationalist agenda, largely because of the huge amount of financial and cultural capital that is invested in modernism. If it does not, then it will pit itself against New Delhi’s internationally inspired private and public collections. The Progressives and Indian contemporaries continue to play a strong role on the Indian domestic and international art market. But there is a richness and diversity to recent Indian art history and current practice that should encourage collectors to look beyond these modernist-inspired confections.  The art market in the Colaba cultural district of Mumbai is a dedicated commercial location for India’s diverse modern and contemporary art, but it is certainly not the place to discover the richness of Indian contemporary offerings. India’s cultural future lies outside the teeming conurbation. It resides in rural India, where art’s ambition is very different.  The painter Gopal Prasad Sharma (b.1968) is just one artist whose work is not shown in the primary galleries of Mumbai. His picture Mughal wedding procession in Rajasthani style (2013) accurately evokes the finery of this important event by adapting the style of the eighteenth-century Mughal, Mewar and Kishangargh schools in natural pigments and gold on handmade paper to suit a contemporary purpose. Shail Choyal (b.1945) subverts the Rajasthani Mughal miniature tradition even further, but to good effect, in the work Rajaji Ra Roop (2012). Here, turbaned hunters, tigers and lovers are positioned within self-contained pictorial vignettes set amidst a dreamlike, verdant landscape dotted with palaces. In India, it is vitally important that works of art that have a social function continue to be made, and that the artists’ skills are passed on to the next generation. It can be something as simple as the evanescent, terracotta, equestrian figurines that are thought by the people of eastern Gujarat to be a god’s home, with their horses providing night-time travel through the forest.  This particular art form has a very long lineage, and appears in the fragmentary effigies depicting the fertility goddesses of the Indus-valley people of Mohenjo-daro, India’s first inhabitants. It can be as simple as keeping alive the skills necessary to make bronze sculpture in the manner of the Cholas. There are encouraging signs in such ventures as the Cholamandal artists’ village and in institutions such as the fine-arts department of Maharaja Sayajirao University 124

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Hindustan in Vadodara, which suggest an awareness of the country’s future cultural needs.  The intricate designs in rice powder (rangoli or kolam) traced on the floors of houses in southern India and the painted murals of gods on frail paper created by the Mithila women in Bihar and southern Nepal capture, in the words of David Shulman (Doniger 2009, p.681), ‘the momentary, unpredictable reality of the unseen’. In 1966, the All India Handicrafts Board sent the artist Baskar Kulkarni to Mithila to encourage the women to make their work on more permanent material that could be sold to provide them with an income.  The work of the artist Baua Devi (b.1947) elegantly illustrates the transition from ephemeral designs in the sand to a tangible, commercial object (fig.16).  As Doniger points out, the work remains true to itself because to the artist it is still ephemeral. It leaves the lives of the villagers and enters the collections of wealthy Indians and foreigners, just as traditionally it would leave on the soles of the shoes of departing guests. India still has the basis for a mass, religion-based craft culture to prosper.  There are sufficient examples of a revival in tradition and an application of ancient art forms to contemporary life to offer hope for cultural continuity. But the twin forces of religious bigotry and brutal economic practice have conspired to distort not only India’s cultural essence but also its spiritual equilibrium. Globalisation has instructed nationalism in the methods of cultural deracination.

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6

Aryana

Dualism and moderation A great two-metre slab of bronze, with an integral plinth covered in the pictograms 1 of ancient cultures says more about Aryana (later Iran) than any other work by a living artist.   This is the sculptor Parviz Tanavoli’s (b.1937) most irrepressible creation.  The Wall (Oh, Persepolis) (1975) captures the essential elements of Iranian 2 identity: grandeur, internationalism, harmony and luxury. The piece has a sense of physical and cultural permanence. It is a barrier between the viewer and the space on the other side. It demands to be seen and touched, it asks to have its glyphs decoded.  What Tanavoli is saying through this work is, before you can understand the modern state of Iran you must know Aryana. Iranians made Gayomart the first person on earth and the progenitor of the Aryan people; he was the first to worship Ahura Mazda – or ‘God’ in the Zoroastrian religion.  The Ottomans and the Mughals emulated the Iranians; even the Mongols succumbed to the charm of their culture. So, is this chunk of inscribed metal a shrine to this God of gods or a tribute to Darius, the Iranian king who inscribed his victories all over his expanding empire in order to gain legitimacy? Can it be linked to the cuneiform script tablets which Cyrus discovered after his defeat of the Neo-Babylonians? The other direction to 3 which Tanavoli refers is Islam – specifically, Shi’a Islam. The form that he employs to encapsulate this phenomenon is a solitary piece of calligraphy: the Iranian word heech (nothing).  The word appears often in the Sufi verse of Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–73), Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) and Hafez (1315–90).‘Become nothing and he will turn you into everything’, urges Rumi.  The kashgul (begging bowl) is a metaphor for the emptiness (and receptiveness) of humanity faced with God. Nothingness is present in the numinous spaces of the great mosques whose supernal domes grace the 126

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Aryana Muslim world. It is apparent also in the political and social apathy of contemporary Iran, encapsulated in the exhortation, ‘nothing will come of it’.  Tanavoli dresses it in two forms: brash colours and burnished bronze. He thereby appeals to the present and to the past. Iran’s spiritual dualism is united in many ways and throughout its art – in small details such as the floriated, tiled panels in mosques that represent the divinity of Islamic kingship, but also in surviving sculptures of the pre-Islamic winged god,  Ahura Mazda; and in the minaret, which, as manar, is a homophone for ‘light’ (Arabic: nur) and also the lantern used by Zoroastrians to ward off evil. A good place to start this chapter is at the apogee of Iranian might – or, as seen through Western eyes, at the heroic last stand made by 300 Spartan (and, under duress,  Thespian) warriors against the Persian Emperor Xerxes’ vast imperial army at Thermopylae in 480 BCE. A year after this colossal historic event, the largest Spartan-led Peloponnesian army ever assembled delivered the coup de grâce to the invader at Plataea, which ended Xerxes’ plans for a European empire.  The democratic state of Athens had also enjoyed seminal triumphs over the Persian superpower by sea at Salamis and on land at Marathon. Each Greek military victory was achieved against overwhelming odds.  The lasting impression in the Western mind is of the triumph of the world’s first democracy and federation over a decadent, predatory and ultimately soft-bellied 4 autocratic regime that had little to teach the modern world. It is a misconception that Edward Said highlighted in his book Orientalism, in which he maintained that the West has, since Aeschylus, positioned the Oriental mind outside and in diametric opposition to the Occidental one, and viewed it ever since as something not to be altogether trusted.  The division grew, Jason Elliot (2006) argues, with the increasing emphasis placed by the West on the human mind as the universal denominator, rather than an Eastern attention to harmony, cosmic order, rites and rituals. In order to better conceive of the East, the West divided it into spheres with appellations like ‘L’empire du Levant’ or ‘Middle East’. Said bemoans the lack of a vocabulary in the West with which to articulate the richness of these realms.  A consequence of this approach can be seen in the tragedy of the Kurds following the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres.  The Great Powers created Kurdistan out of chunks of  Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.  This act would end in a border dispute and, ultimately, in the Iran/Iraq War (1980–88). Said is right to point out that part of the problem has to do with the reluctance of European Orientalists to engage with artefacts like sculpture and pottery and their tendency to reach conclusions solely by way of books and manuscripts. But there is a broader Western negation of human nature that has left us with hobbled global solutions to societal infractions. 127

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New Art New Markets Nineteenth-century classicists like Adolf Holm (1830–1900) certainly regarded the Persian Wars as the first and amongst the greatest of all those waged by the ‘kingdoms of the East against Europe’ – a conflict in which the East sought ‘to enfold European civilisation in its grasp from two sides, from Asia and from Africa’ (Holm 1902, p.1) and one that pitted a single, despotic power that considered men ‘mere instruments of their will’ against ‘a race in the prime of its strength, full of enthusiasm for the beautiful and gifted with rare refinement of perception’ (1902, p.2). In the end, Holm concludes, mind triumphs over matter, discipline over mere numbers and life over routine.  The Greeks, he maintains, were fighting for freedom and for their religion against a horde of Asiatics, brought together by the caprice of 5 a despot and with no common intellectual tie to unite them (p.57). Yet at the time, and in the eyes of the Achaemenid Empire – the greatest of its day, which could count on the support of Phoenicians and Carthaginians in the West and whose domains stretched from modern-day Pakistan in the east to Egypt 6 in the west and from the Indian Ocean in the south to the Aral Sea in the north – Athens and Sparta were terrorist states that threatened the security of Persia’s empire in the Hellespont (Dardanelles). Iran had already given the world its first Bill of Rights; advanced mathematics; superlative buildings; and the prophets Mani, Zoroaster and the three Magi.  As if to emphasise the inconsequentiality of its failed Greek war of conquest, the great empire continued with the sole loss of the Ionian seaboard (today’s west coast of  Turkey) until Alexander’s successful, brutally efficient but short-lived military offensive at the heart of Iran some 100 years later, which gave rise to the brief reign of the Seleucids (330–247 BCE). But Iran would rise to even greater heights under the ethnic-Iranian Parthians (247 BCE–224 CE), who frustrated the Romans at every turn. It is to antiquity that the Iranian artist Massoud Arabshahi (b.1935) turns for inspiration. In a work like Untitled (1978), in which he has applied oil paint thickly onto aluminium and canvas,  Arabshahi has created the effect of an ancient book on which he has marked with indentations the geometric signs and symbols of an ancient culture.  The work is at once an aerial view of an archaeological site and an archaic language. Shapes such as the circle, which appear prominently in the piece, represented nature to the ancient Iranians while the square, placed in this work in opposition to the circle, stood for human consciousness.  The strong vertical lines, which define the work’s central raised spine, meant to the ancient mind celestial harmony, while the weaker horizontals denoted earthly rationalism.  The placement of circles inside a rectangular ‘citadel’ symbolises either the transformation of the sky into the earth or vice versa.  In this regard, a particularly tragic consequence of the 128

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Aryana civil wars that have erupted across the region in the twenty-first century is the lack of tolerance for difference and the reluctance to live with duality.  The intensification of the persecution of minority faiths – particularly in Iraq, where these include Yazidis, Mandaeans, Druze, Samaritans, Copts and Kalasha – is countercultural.  The living remnants of these faiths trace their origins to a time before Christianity and Islam. Some, like the Yazidis, share a common ancestry with the Roman followers of Mithras, yet have been hounded since the fourteenth century. Iranian thought has encompassed dualism since the time of Zoroaster.  The middle classes of  Tehran, Iran’s capital, share with émigrés a taste for alcohol, Western fashion, art, morality and probably economics as well. If they live in Iran, they are sanguine about their government but probably prefer the last Shah to the ayatollahs.  The faithful of Qom adhere firmly to conservative religious codes of behaviour, but few can really be described as zealots.  The artist Afshin Pirhashemi (b.1974), a member of the metropolitan elite, has been based in Tehran for the last 20 years. One particular work, Dynasty (2015), made in the artist’s signature photorealist style, illustrates this dichotomy. It portrays two women – one armed and clearly contemporary; the other, towards whom a detachment of cavalry is riding, phantom-like, practically invisible. So much of contemporary Iranian life is lived in the shadows, in secret – whether it is the receipt or exchange of foreign currency, the illicit consumption of alcohol and drugs or the congregation of men and women. But Elliot (2006) argues that this societal tension may actually be a strength: dualism has been gradually eroded in the West (and much of the world) by a rational philosophical and linguistic tradition incubated in ancient Athens. In Iran, Elliot continues, the apparently contradictory paths of rationalism and mysticism seem to coalesce into hypostasis.  The resolution of this duality is confirmed by Iran’s ‘active’ remains: Persepolis; Pasargadae, the Tomb of Cyrus; vestiges of Zoroastrianism; and, of course, the Shahnameh (Book of Kings). It persists internally in the adoration that Iranians have for their great poets. The artist Ali Akbar Sadeghi (b.1937) made an animated film from 1973 to 1975 called Boasting and the Sun King. It recounts one of the myths of the Shahnameh.  The story is straightforward: a prince falls in love with a picture of a beautiful girl and travels to seven cities to find her.  What is instructive is the imagery included and the sentiment expressed.  The film opens with a depiction of a walled city and a paradisiacal garden.  The Iranian word for walled garden is pairidaeza, from which the Christian word ‘paradise’ derives.  The name of Isfahan’s central artery, Chahar Bagh, means ‘four-fold garden’.  The visual vocabulary of the garden has been plundered by Iranian artists and craftsmen, from the stylised representations of nature in religious 129

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New Art New Markets architecture to the naturalistic designs on carpets and in miniature painting.  The White Div, or devil, whom the prince encounters is, to this day, a common ogre in Iranian storytelling.  The chimera, into which the princess metamorphoses in order to transport her prince, is taken from Achaemenid sculpture.  The neatly bearded 7 horsemen, whom the last Shah would bring to life again in his 1970s desert feast, appear in serried ranks.  The zurkhaneh clubs that the prince and the White Div use in their first duel are used to this day in martial exercises.  The sparkling jewels and precious minerals that feature in the film echo the vast treasury at Persepolis, which was sacked by Alexander the Great.  The sensuousness and luxuriousness of the feature lend themselves to an understanding of the sumptuousness for which Aryana was renowned – whether it be at the court of Cyrus or Shah Abbas (1571–1629), or the oil-rich extravagances of the Pahlavi family, Iran’s last regal dynasty.  The walls and ceilings of the Pleasure House within one of the royal palaces of Islamic Isfahan were embellished with mirrors; the faceted mosaic-glass ceiling of the Shahe-Cheragh Mosque in Shiraz likewise also glistens. In the 1970s, the international Iranian artist Monir Farmanfarmaian (b.1924) visited the mosque and felt as if she was looking at the sun from inside a diamond. She employed a craftsman to make mirror-mosaics in order that she might turn them into angled sculptures. Her work from the 1970s has an added historical dimension, Qajar-inspired reverse glass painting, and a further parallel in the art of khatam or wood inlay. Her most recent pieces such as Octagon Sculpture (2013) – an elegant, interlocking mosaic-glass mesh – combine two central tenets of the Iranian aesthetic: geometry and refulgence. Monotheism, the concept of a universal state, democracy and totalitarianism can all be traced back to the Persian Wars, says Tom Holland (2005). He describes the country as the axis of world history. John Curtis (Curtis and Tallis 2005) writes that the Achaemenid Empire ‘was the bridge by which the achievements of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires were transferred to Greece and ultimately to Western Europe’. It is worth recounting the wealth of riverine civilisation that, by the time of the Achaemenids, was available for transfer. Egypt was united under one king in 3100 BCE, over 2500 years before the Achaemenid period. Pre-dynastic Egypt extended back further still, with one of the world’s oldest settlements, at Nekhen, functioning as the capital for Upper Egypt until the unification of the land and the establishment of its capital in Memphis. In the second millennium BCE, a number of significant civilisations flourished in the land that today forms the modern states of Syria and Iraq. Sumeria, a collection of city states in which Ur was the central component, developed cuneiform script and even left written evidence of the use of heroin as a recreational drug, referring to the poppy as the 130

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Aryana ‘plant of joy’. Mesopotamia and Assyria were the most resilient states, and Babylon grew to be the capital of a single south-Mesopotamian kingdom.  Tarek-El Komi (b.1962), an Egyptian artist, captures something of the spirit inherent in the material remains of these ancient civilisations. His stone and bronze figurines and shorthand depictions of birds draw the mind back to the pharaonic, static, relief sculptures and monumental effigies that grace the Nile Delta. Further, his winnowed female bronzes describe the timeless acts of women washing clothes in giant steel basins on the banks of the Nile. The great Achaemenid dynasty – although founded on the ‘shock and awe’ evident in the unprecedented size of its armies, the monumental architecture of its cities and the absolute authority invested in its kings – was, in fact, less brutal to its neighbours than was Sparta, and no more exacting of its tribute than Athens after the formation of the Delian League (founded 478 BCE). Iranian statecraft was as successful as the threat of its military machine in securing allies from amongst the many smaller Greek states, while, as Holm explains, the introduction of judicial arbitration and a sound administration protected Ionian interests better than the Ionians did themselves. Indeed, under Mardonius, the young son-in-law of the empire’s presiding potentate, Darius (r.522–486 BCE) – who, according to Holm, made the greatest concessions to Greek ideas – democracies replaced tyrannies in the Ionian cities of the Hellespont.  According to Holland, the model of this Iranian Empire was one ‘that would persist in the Middle East until 1922, and the deposition of the last ruling caliph, the Turkish Sultan’ (2005, p.xxi). The dynasty’s founder, Cyrus the Great (r.559–530 BCE), set the tone for his successors and his name has come to represent, by the standards of the day, moderation and civility.  The Cyrus Cylinder (a barrel-shaped foundation deposit) can rightfully claim to be the first Bill of Rights. Laid in earth shortly after he captured Babylon in 539 BCE, it orders that statues be returned to shrines and deported peoples sent home.  The ‘peoples’ to whom Cyrus refers are probably the Jews, who returned to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple of Solomon, which had been raised by the Mesopotamians in an act for which the Babylonian king, Belshazzar, the Old Testament recounts, was killed and his kingdom annexed by the Medes and Persians. Rembrandt van Rijn’s (1606–69) masterpiece Belshazzar’s Feast (1635) captures the imagined, actual moment when God lets it be known to the king that his days, and 8 those of his kingdom, are numbered. However, despite this history, religious tolerance in fact became a hallmark of Iranian culture. In an act of folie de grandeur, the last Shah of Iran (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, 1919–80), the self-styled King of Kings and Light of the Aryans, invited the heads 131

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New Art New Markets of state from around the world to attend a sumptuous banquet in Paarsa (in Greek, Persepolis) and Pasargadae in the Iranian heartland of Fars. By adopting the monarchic element of Shahnameh author Firdawsi (935–1020), he drew the world’s attention to pre-Islamic Iran. He added to his folly by devising a new calender based on the accession of Cyrus. In another nostalgic nod to the past, his father, Reza Shah Pahlavi (1878–1944), had established a School of  Traditional Arts in painting and calligraphy in order that his lavish Marmar (Marble) Palace in Tehran might be decorated.  The self-aggrandisement of these gestures said more about the tenuous hold on reality of the Pahlavi – and particularly the last Shah – than it did about any conscious shift in the Iranian mindset to embrace a time before Islam. It did, however, distinguish Iran from the Arab world, and this has had consequences for the direction of the country’s contemporary culture. It highlighted, certainly, that the real Iran is to be found outside the grimy capital of  Tehran, discovered instead in the nation’s hinterland. It can be uncovered in the Achaemenid remains of Persepolis, the ancient city of Hamadan, the site of the Gold Tablet of Ariaramnes, the Sassanian palaces of Fars, the Assassins’ castles of Qazvin, the Scythian burial mounds near the Caspian Sea, the shrine of the poet Hafez in Shiraz and the Zoroastrian Towers of Silence at Yazd.  There is, in common with the revolving dynasties that appear all over the world throughout this book, a desire on behalf of Iranian rulers to evoke past masters in order to secure their own legitimacy.  A Qajar stone relief sculpture in the British Museum depicts the Sassanian king Khusraw II (in Latin, Chosroes II) (r.590–628).  This homage to a dead king by a later Iranian dynasty shows an effort to resurrect the authority of Aryana. Of course, it is a flawed discourse because art and culture in this period were syncretic.  We know from sculptural evidence, for instance, that Greek gods were sometimes dressed in Parthian uniforms.  This is to say nothing of the invasion of Eastern motifs into Iranian art: the peony, lotus and chrysanthemum under the Mongol Ilkhanate. Legitimacy sought through a tenuous link with the deep past is the core of revolutionary nationalism. Culture is the most significant constituent of this claim. It is an immensely powerful force, and capable of displacing rationalism and transient democracy with a sweep of the hand.  The Shah roused this beast; the Islamic Republic is quiescent by comparison. Pasargadae holds particular significance as the place to which Persia’s Achaemenid dynasty traces its origin. It was Cyrus’ capital and the place where his tomb is to be found. Persepolis, the decorative schema of its buildings once thought to have been 9 masterminded by a Greek sculptor but now accredited to Iranian artists, evoked an equally powerful feeling of Iranian consciousness. It was, along with Susa, the nerve 132

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Aryana centre of Darius’ administration. Fabulous materials were imported from all over the empire and fashioned by Iranian craftsmen into wonderful artefacts and decorative master plans.  The series of paintings of jars by the Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri (b.1963), which he began in 2001, evokes this past through the simple medium of the vessel.  The calligraphy on the pot, Drunken lover (2003, fig.18), supports a poem by Omar Khayyam: The enchanted lover, always drunk and disgraced, Frenzied, love-mad and crazed. When sober, grieving he will be 10 When drunk again, what will be, will be. Iranians, Moshiri observes, are always quoting verses from the past without necessarily knowing their origins or their authors.  The inscription on another of his jars carries the words of the poet Hafez, which were inspired by the song of the nightingale. Neither Persepolis nor Pasargadae, Holland explains, were cosmopolitan cities in the Babylonian sense; they were not home to the teeming mass of humanity 11 but rather exhibited Persian might in the manner of Hadrian’s Rome. Indeed, Elliot suggests that they may have been ceremonial cities. Iran’s imperial authority could instead be seen in the pronounced use of precious materials from the lands of subject peoples that went into the construction of its major metropolises.  The metaphor was extended even to minerals and elements: after Darius conquered the Punjab, a gigantic jar filled with the waters of the Indus was presented to the king by his victorious armies, to lie in his treasury with the waters of other great rivers from vanquished lands.  This fact may have occurred to Moshiri when he set to work on his series of paintings depicting jars. 12 The internationalism of Aryana, which was later maintained under the Parthians and Sassanians (224–651), was expressed more subtly in the trilingual texts carved into relief rock sculptures of Darius and the subjugated kings at Bisitun (north13 western Iran). Here, it is tempting to think, may lie the metaphoric inspiration for Tanavoli’s The Wall (Oh, Persepolis) or, indeed, his equally statuesque and throne-like Oh Persepolis II (1975–2008). Soft power was expressed in the quality of mercy. It was Cyrus who banished the defeated Median king,  Astyages, rather than putting him to death, and it was this mightiest of monarchs who, after victory over Lydia, allowed King Croesus and his fabulous treasury to remain in Sardis. In so doing, he offered a partnership to the conquered.  The multilingual texts that were either buried in 133

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New Art New Markets the foundations of Persian buildings or marked on columns and cliff faces were, according to Mathew Stolper, intended for posterity and representative of a diverse and complex society that, because of this inclusive approach to communication, failed ‘to spread Iranian languages in Western Asia in the way that Hellenistic rule spread Ancient Greek or Roman rule spread Latin’ (Stolper 2005, p.24). Zoroastrianism – a religion that took root in Iran around the time of Cyrus II in 590 BCE, although some scholars believe that it could have emerged as early as 1200 BCE (Nabarz 2005) – divided the world into a battlefield between the forces of light and dark and, in the later form of Mithraism, permeated much of the Roman Empire. In the early stage of the development of this religion, it is often referred to as Mazdaism (after central deity,  Ahura Mazda) – with other deities incorporated into its structure. Mithra, for example, became the sun god. In Moshiri’s diptych of ceramic bowls in silver and gold with alternating backgrounds (2006), gold representing Mithra, the sun and friend, and silver the darkness beyond allude to the struggle between good and evil that is at the core of Zoroastrianism.  The notion of a free human choice between good and evil was a genuine feature of the religion, and as such Zoroaster/Zarathustra can lay claim to being the creator of the moral world we live in today (Axworthy 2007, p.11; see also Friedrich Nietzsche [1844–1900],  Also Sprach Zarathustra). He was a shadowy figure who is said to have come from either the Steppes or Bactria (today’s Central Asia).  The symbols of the Zoroastrian and Mithraic religions appear in the work of Mansour Ghandriz (1935–65). In the early 1960s, the trademark yellow, circular discs in his paintings were used to symbolise the sun, the most potent element of both faiths. The conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity, and the subsequent official recognition of this act by Theodosius in the Edict of Milan in 313, was a key reason why Christianity rather than an Oriental belief system like Zoroastrianism became the official religion of the Roman Empire and, later, the whole of Europe.  There is material evidence of Zoroastrianism in the form of stone fire holders in Cyrus’ reign. Iranians to this day honour fire in a ceremony known as Chaharshanbe Suri. Darius, the successor and lance holder to Cyrus’ son Cambyses, legitimised his accession to power over Cambyses’ brother Bardiya, whom he assassinated, by laying claim to a divine right to govern represented in Ahura Mazda, the 14 supreme being that Zoroaster had encountered. Darius, in short, came to represent Truth (Spenta Mainyu – Bounteous Spirit), and anything or anyone that opposed him was a lie and a disciple of Ahriman, the embodiment of evil. Carved into the cliffs at Bisitun, Darius is depicted stepping on the prostrate Gaumata, one of the 134

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Aryana nine liar-kings (all are depicted) who dared to challenge his legitimacy and whom he in turn destroyed, one by one. Farhad the Mountain Carver, the mythical artist who fell in love with the Christian princess Shirin (the beloved wife of the Sassanian king Khusraw II) often appears in the work of Parviz Tanavoli.  The jealous king in anger tasked Farhad with either carving a mountain or forsaking his love. Just as he was about to complete this superhuman project, the king falsely told the sculptor that Shirin had died. In despair, Farhad threw himself off the mountain and fell to his death.  The dramatic tale of the love between the king and his princess, recounted by the poet Nizami Ganjavi (1141–1209), is elegantly captured in a painting by the Iranian artist Reza Derakshani (b.1952), Khosrow and Shirin (2009), which combines Mughal-miniature-type figures with a mottled, muted-colour background.  Tanavoli faced his own particular challenges on his return to Iran from the West in 1964. Under Islam, three-dimensional representation had virtually disappeared in his home country although the decorative arts still flourished. It was from these artefacts and architectural ornament that Tanavoli would in future draw his inspiration. The historical and political consequences of recent scholarly revisions of the Achaemenid period – in which, in the words of Andrew Meadows, ‘Democratic Athens developed an empire based on conformism and exclusion’ whereas the Iranian Empire was ‘politically, religiously and linguistically inclusive’ – cast both societies and administrations in a new light (Meadows 2005, p.181).‘Such [inclusive] habits’, Meadows asserts, ‘did not necessarily originate with the Persians, but they were embodied in their empire and transmitted by later powers over these regions to the modern world . . . suggest[ing] that this underlying tolerance was among the reasons why the Persian Empire survived for two and half centuries and the Athenian barely a half ’ (p.181). At the very least, the notion of Iran as international cultural conduit and intelligent empire – the model empire, in fact, and one of the longest lasting – questions the economic and politically neo-liberal notion that all states have either acquiesced to, or else have shown little sign of growing to a size capable of challenging, the Western ‘common market’.  Indeed, the threats and challenges to this model are now widespread.  They are prevalent as an amorphous, theocratic force spread across the region; as an economic force; and in the form of state-sponsored cultural conservatism throughout new markets. Conversely, the Islamic world fears the momentum of liberalism and the seduction of consumerism – in short, globalisation.  The metaphysical duality between sensuality and piety, between good and 135

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New Art New Markets evil, which lies at the heart of Aryana, forms the basis of a meaningful discussion of Iranian culture today. The global response Perhaps rock music is still, as Francis Fukuyama (b.1952) writes, ‘enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon and Tehran’ (1992, p.2) and it may still be the staple cultural diet of the multitude, but change is in the air. International contemporary art, which has set the cultural standards by which we judge all art (and its global market, which has set the prices for this commodity), is a Western instrument.  The procession of artists from new markets travelling to the West in order to realise their creative and economic ambitions has been the norm for the last two centuries.  This trend will lessen.  This is why Shirin Aliabadi’s (b.1973) lurid Miss Hybrid series (2006), of photographs of girls in patterned chadors (cloaks) with plasters over their noses, and Youssef Nabil’s (b.1972) tinted ‘Orientalist’ depictions of women are peripheral to more culturally sensitive work that is now being made throughout the region.  Aliabadi’s and Nabil’s work, like the Chinese Political Pop imagery encountered in the ‘China’ chapter, is made for global consumption and pales in comparison with those whose work is guided by the past.  The pseudo-pop-like images of Ghasem Hajizadeh (b.1947), which cross vestiges of Aryana with insipid portraiture, and the perverse investigations into contemporary Iranian sexuality of Amir Mobed (1974), are ‘pulp fiction’.  There are illustrators like Fereydoun Ave (b.1945) who draw distractedly on contemporary Iranian events and those like Parastou Forouhar (b.1962) who conjure designs that look vaguely like the patterns we see in Islamic architecture.  All of these practitioners lack an understanding of the powerful forces that determine cultural direction. Somewhere between the fragile positions taken by these artists and the expansive cultural statements of Parviz Tanavoli lie the internationalist ambitions of photographers Shirin Neshat (b.1957) and Shadi Ghadirian (b. 1974). Both artists have worked consistently with a couple of tropes associated with the Middle East: the veiled female form, and Arabic and florid Iranian script.  Their images arrest our attention. One particular photograph by Neshat acts as a ‘target’: a self-portrait, I am its Secret (1993), which depicts the artist veiled, the exposed part of her face partly concealed by the circular Iranian verse of the liberal, pre-revolutionary poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1935–67) in alternative black and white rings. It is a veiled reference (excuse the pun) to the experience of women who fought in the Iran/Iraq War.  Together with the heavily made-up eyes, it cleverly draws the viewer’s gaze. Neshat’s Stories of Martyrdom, 136

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Aryana from the Women of Allah series (1993–6) show a woman’s palms covered in script with a gun resting on her wrists. Neshat uses political events at home as inspiration for creative projects that she openly admits have little bearing on the events themselves. Ghadirian’s Untitled: from the Qajar series (1988–2001) arranges modern consumer objects in an early twentieth-century Iranian photographic style in an effort to depict the traditional shackles placed on women in spite of the much-heralded benefits of the global, consumer society. Ghadirian’s piece captures the world of young Iranians.  Tehran girls now sport hijabs in a variety of patterns and colours.  The garment has become a fashion accessory to some, coordinated with tailored manteaux and rising hemlines – all of which flout Islamic convention and open the door to a new set of constraints placed on individuals by consumerism. The Pakistani Rashid Rana (b.1968) defines the creative limitations of the chador as a trope. His Veil series (2004–7) presents frontal portraits of women whose faces disappear beneath their heavy shrouds.  The image is constructed out of millions of digital pixels built up into a large print of thousands of hardcore pornographic images. Rana draws a connection between the two male attitudes to women, both of which result in the dehumanisation of females. In one respect, Rana’s intention is underscored by the French-born Kader Attia’s (b.1970) installation Ghost (2007), which depicts dozens of faceless, silver-foil creations representing Muslim women in prayer. However, Rana’s work is consciously international in a way that Attia’s is not, referring as it does so explicitly to a widespread (and unsavoury) aspect of globalisation: the commercialisation of obscenity.  The manufacture of Rana’s prints, which are backed with aluminium and hermetically sealed in ultraviolet-protected Perspex, further supports the view that the artist is intent on producing something that speaks to an international audience.  Another artist, the Turkish hyperrealist painter Taner Ceylan (b.1967), seemingly flouts convention by portraying homosexual erotica. His work has been maligned in the Turkish media.  That fact, more than any other, has escalated his international reputation. In truth, Ceylan follows in an Orientalist tradition established in the late Ottoman period and characterised by demure, chiffon-veiled models painted from photographs by the son of a Chios-born grand vizier, the Paris-trained Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910). Eugène Delacroix’s (1798–1863) The Massacre at Chios (1824), incidentally, was perhaps the archetypal Orientalist painting.  The intention behind that masterpiece and The Lady of Constantinople (1881) by Bey is very different from 1881 (from the Lost Painting Series) (2010) by Ceylan, but the sentiment is comparable: both images are examples of emotional realism. Is it a coincidence that Ceylan refers to the date that Bey completed his masterpiece in the title of his image of a man in a fez? The 137

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New Art New Markets mysterious identity of the sitter complicates the artist’s narrative. Does he refer to a revisionist Turkey, enamoured with its Ottoman past, or is this an indictment of the secular change wrought by founder of the republic Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881– 1938)? One senses that it is neither. He probably refers to the new authoritarianism of  Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an (b.1954), which has accelerated after the protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park in 2013 – of which, more later. 15 An event like the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran elicits an inevitable response from a community of westernised artists. Shahab Fotouhi (b.1980) collaborated with Tehran’s ‘radical’ Azad Art Gallery in 2009 to produce a small, green poster depicting the face of reformist politician Mir Hossein Mousavi (b.1942), which became a talisman for the opposition.  A similar act of defiance was meted out by Neda Razavipour (b.1969) when she installed Persian rugs in a gallery and encouraged visitors to cut and bag a piece.  The bag was adorned with a passage from Plato’s Republic.  The artist wanted the viewer to reflect on the demise of democracy in the wake of revolutions perpetuated in its name. She may also have wanted us to consider the consumption of the vestiges of traditional Iranian culture by the democratic West.  There are many readings; any interpretation is in the mind of the beholder. Both these examples apply postmodern (Western) artistic tools and ideology to a culture detatched from its inherent principles.  The result is Orientalism. There are always exceptions that prove the rule, and today those artists are often the very best photographers – like Kaveh Golestan (1950–2003).  The excoriating photographs of bandaged soldiers, rifle-wielding chador-clad women and a man by his brother’s grave are works that should be seen. Bahman Jalali (1944–2010) recorded the horrors of the 1978–9 anti-monarchical revolution.  The support by the West for an authoritarian Shah and his ousting at the hands of a religious zealot played out Iran’s ageless drama of dynastic power struggles. But Jalali’s images are equally arresting, and their narrative resonates with an art world obsessed with the play of human emotion and individual defiance on a politically charged stage. Each one of these artists has created images that contain sufficient regional cultural elements and an adequate level of dichotomy to deliver enough dissonance to please the international market.  This in itself is a notable achievement – and one for which 16 Rana and Ceylan, in particular, have been commercially rewarded. Answers from the past The Iranian language was transformed by the Arab conquests in the eleventh century, but it still survived.  The Shahnameh (Book of Kings) of Firdawsi sits at the 138

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Aryana crossroads of this famed continuity. It recounts the stories and legends of pre-Islamic Iran in exquisite poetry.  This text has inspired Iranian miniaturists ever since. It is within the spirit and practice of this tradition that the Hazara-born artist Khadim 17 Ali (b.1978) works today. Educated in the art of miniature painting at Lahore’s National College of Arts, in his Untitled, Rustam series (2007, fig.20), Ali depicts the white (Deo-e-Safid) and black (Deo-e-Siyah) ogres of the Shahnameh with white beards, in an oblique reference to the Taliban.  These modern ogres are accompanied by exquisite Iranian nasta’liq script. In the Shahnameh, Rustam, the work’s epic hero, struggles with and finally overcomes the white demon after seven tests of his strength. Sadegh Tirafkan (1965–2013) also pursues cultural succession. He employs photodigital collage to breathe new life into the stories of the Shahnameh. His Whispers from the East series (2006–7) uses for one image the inner lining (doublure) of a midsixteenth-century Safavid leather-and-filigree book binding, with contemporary figures inserted into the design’s cartouches and invading soldiers deployed at the work’s base and pictorial entrance. Both these artists have acquired rigorous skills, and as a result have a sound base to push against and innovate from. Two Iranian approaches to Aryana have grown out of the 1979 Revolution; one is demonstrably well-disposed towards the West and its art world, and the other disapproves. Shoja Azari (b.1958) is the disapprover – a film-maker who distances himself from Western aesthetic solutions to Iranian cultural problems. His 2011 work The Day of Judgment is a celluloid collage of miniatures interspersed with graphic oral and visual testimonies of the recent wars and revolutions in the Middle East, the rise of militant Islam and paltering mullahs. It is difficult to see this work as anything but a critique of Western intervention in the region’s politics. In the eye of this storm, and perhaps in its wake, artists like Farah Ossouli (b.1953) and Negar Ahkami (b.1971) concede that Iranian art is not about rights-based politics, it is about enduring traditions: the garden, nature, geometry, colour and the elevation of the spirit. If there is a message here, it should be dressed in velvet. Ossouli seeks solace in Safavid-inspired miniatures drawn from the classics. In Expulsion from Paradise (1992), a dark screen is drawn by flying devi (goddesses) across a verdant pairidaeza.  This reinterpretation of a Judaeo-Christian story is a disguised reference to the dismemberment of dynastic Iran by the Great Powers after the destruction of the Ottomans and the Qajars. Herein, Ossouli tells us, lies the root of today’s problems.  But the most sensitive engagement with the past can be found in the photographic ‘scrap-sheets’ of Rana Javadi (b.1953). Her romantic realism recreates the aureate glow of the past. Her images of vanished faces, pieces of cloth, mementoes of love and loved ones touch on sentiments expressed vividly in, for example, Orhan Pamuk’s (b.1952) book Museum 139

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New Art New Markets of Innocence (2008).  At the cutting edge of this persuasion, an artist like Khosrow Hassanzadeh (b.1963) acknowledges his international-art-world entrapment and escapes the gilded cage as best he can. In the Terrorist series (2004), the artist, a soldier in the Iran/Iraq War, depicts himself with the only people he is able to trust: his family.  The series questions the label, terrorism.  The pot always calls the kettle black. Iranian culture has been insulated for millennia, protected from Arab influence 18 through the Shu’ubiyya movement, which, through a literary elite, asserted the superiority of Aryana over its rivals. It is the resilience and pliancy of the scholar elite that has secured the survival of Aryana.  The wealth of verse patronised under the Safavids gave rise to major figures such as the poet Rudaki (858–941), who, according to Michael Axworthy (2007, p.89) looked back in the Shahnameh tradition to a pre-Islamic, pro-Mazdaean Iran.  The short-lived Zand dynasty of Shiraz (1751–94) embellished Samarqand.  Travelling Sufi poets known as dervishes were key elements in the spread of Iranian culture to India and beyond. Sufism became renowned through its poetry for speaking directly from the heart, and through this ‘religion of love’,  Axworthy asserts, emerged the Iranian soul. Something of that emotional directness is captured in a work that we will examine later: Farhad Moshiri’s iconic depiction traced in Swarovski crystals of the word Eshgh (Love) (2007). Sufism was at the centre of sixteenth-century Iranian life – but so was jihad, or the holy war against the infidel.  The intellectual and political symbols of this Iran lay in the great shrines, such as the one at Ardabil and later, in the mid-seventeenth 19 century, the shrine of Fatimah Ma’sumeh at Qom. The shrine at Qom has great significance for today’s Iran as the place of study of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–89), and is at the intellectual heart of the current regime.  Theocratic power chooses presidents and directs Iranian policy today.  The kernel of the country’s identity and contemporary culture, you instinctively feel, lies firmly in its past but perhaps not in today’s re-enactment of that past.  What Iran immediately lacks is not a history, but viable economic conduits and a stable political environment. Creating the basis for a regional cultural renaissance Described by Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot (2006, p.2) as either the medieval or Muslim period of India’s history, the years 1200–1750 saw the introduction and assimilation of Iranian-Islamic culture into the existing Indic civilisation, creating a composite culture that by the sixteenth century had grown to form the splendours 20, 21 of Mughal India. The architectural legacy of this period can be seen to this day in grand monuments like tombs and forts, but also in domestic artefacts such as the 140

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Aryana enamelled and filigreed patterns on metal objects and textile designs – for instance, the use of paisley on the salwar kameez (a tunic worn over loose pants). In the same way as Chinese potters created Sassanian-shaped vessels for the Iranian market, so the curved and sinuous, abstract patterns of Iranian-Islamic design appeared in north Indian art. Like their ancestors, the Timurids, the Mughals also believed that a ruler’s authority could be expressed through the magnificence of monumental architecture. The area known today as Old Delhi was the result of just such a mammoth construction project undertaken by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan (1592–1666) from 1639 to 1648 and named Shahjahanabad (the ‘Abode of Shah Jahan’), complete with a tree-lined esplanade through which ran a canal inspired, according to Asher and Talbot, by Isfahan. India‘s infrastructure of roads and inns was dramatically improved, notably by Sher Shah (1486–1545) in the first half of the sixteenth century.  The concept of the chahar bagh (quadrilateral garden), which dates back to Cyrus the Great and can be seen at Pasargadae, was a legacy of this Iranian migration to the Indian subcontinent from Central Asia. Mosques were one of the most important – but also, latterly, contentious – commissions of the period.  The Babri Mosque at Ayodhya was viewed by Hindu fundamentalists, as we learnt in the ‘Hindustan’ chapter, as a legitimate target for an act of terrorism in 1992.  There was a notable occidentalisation of Iranian–Indic culture in the sixteenth century that borrowed such Western religious pictorial devices as halos, which in their Mughal context were used to show the divinity of rulers rather than to mark a step towards their conversion. An Iranian cosmopolis has existed in the greater part of South Asia for 1000 years, although Hinduism remained the dominant, majority religion there.  The Turkman Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) was the first Muslim ruler to successfully penetrate India, and we have already seen how his legacy has divided today’s Muslims and Hindus on the subcontinent. It was, in fact, to him that Firdawsi dedicated the Shahnameh.  The language at his court was Iranian, unlike the other Muslim dynasties of the day in Spain, Egypt and Baghdad, who spoke Arabic. But 1206, and the unification of a series of dynasties into the Delhi Sultanate, is the date that truly announces the arrival of Iranian-Islamic culture in the subcontinent.  This empire, under the great centraliser Ala al-Din Khalji (r.1296–1316), became expansionist and also independent of the rest of the Muslim world – although contacts between Iran and the Delhi Sultanate were maintained through the Sultanate’s warrior families in Central Asia and Afghanistan. Its capital was Delhi, which now took shape as a distinctively Islamic city. Despite the shifting of the capital from Delhi to Agra by the Afghan Lodi dynasty 141

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New Art New Markets in 1506 and Akbar’s new capital in Fatehpur Sikri (see ‘Hindustan’ chapter), Delhi became the symbolic centre of Iranian–Indic culture until the expulsion of the last 22 Mughal Emperor by the British in 1858. It was transformed by the mid-fourteenth century into the largest city in the East.  This world is perhaps best illustrated during the reigns of Akbar (1542–1605) in India and the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas (1587–1629) in Iran, both of whom operated gently expansionist policies throughout their reigns. In its polity, Mughal India, despite its greater size and wealth, recognised the Safavid emperors as the legitimate inheritors of Iranian culture. Large numbers of Iranian intellectuals and administrators found influential positions in Delhi, thereby strengthening the connection between the twin domains.  This tendency was reversed when, in 1739, the Iranian king Nadir Shah (1688–1747) sacked Delhi and brought back to Iran such treasures as Shah Jahan’s Peacock Throne. Such acts gave rise to a taste for opulence that characterised future Iranian Shahs.  The cultural and religious influences from Iran extended southwards in India, into the independent Deccan Sultanates where the Afaqis – Iranian-speaking Iranians – successfully disseminated Shi’ism.  The Rajput courts to the west of Delhi in Rajasthan were, however, politically independent from the empire for most of the Mughal period.  The Kingdom of Marwar in the Thar Desert, for example, was able to negotiate the independence of the Rajput princes from the Mughals, Safavids and Qajars over a 300-year period. But the relationship was, as Jason Freitag (2009, p.6) explains, often quite subtle, with the Rathore clan of Rajputs, for instance, currying favour and gaining external legitimisation as courtiers at the imperial court in Delhi. Mughal power declined in the eighteenth century and something that Asher and Talbot call ‘regional centralisation’ came into being – a process by which independent Mughal successor states, ruled by Shi’a Muslims of Iranian descent, replaced the omnipotent emperor. Sunni Turkey stood in opposition to Shi’a Iran.  The Ottomans recaptured Syria and Egypt from the Mamelukes in 1516–17, which allowed Suleiman the Magnificent (r.1520–66) to resume his advance into Europe, besieging Vienna in 1529. Suleiman’s campaigns against the Safavids throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries led to the gradual decline of Muslim power. So, an Iranian cultural zone is, perhaps, a more accurate frame of reference when discussing the contemporary arts of Iraq, Iran,  Afghanistan and Pakistan than as a division based on national boundaries.  The Iraqi artist Hanaa Malallah (b.1958), whose burned and rolled cloths on canvas – Bullet Traces (2008) – are inspired by the style and imagery of Mesopotamian art but are free of either national or global associations.  They engage, rather, with a grand civilisation.  The strips of cloth may refer to the paper prayers that are stuck to the walls of contemporary homes in Iraq, 142

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Aryana but the origins of this practice run deep across the region. Something of the loss of cultural patrimony through war is expressed in the works of the Bagdad-born artist Firyal al-Adhamy (b.1950). Mesopotamian Inscription (2005), a glyph-inscribed tablet made out of mixed media is an ululation to the cultural and emotional holes that have been punched into Iraq in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  The cultural interaction across West Asia and the Iranian Plateau is millennia old and the artificial division of its contemporary-art production into national departments serves no obvious cultural purpose, but clearly has an economic one.  The result is expensive art with a thin veneer of cultural value and short-lived economic benefit.  A much more sensible cultural dissection would discriminate between the many schools of miniature painting that once thrived in the Iranian cultural zone. Neither East nor West: the demise of the Gulf regional art-market model It was during the internecine struggle between the Seleucids and the Parthians that history’s oldest transcontinental mercantile route took shape.  The Silk Road trade with China benefited Iranian towns, and its economic importance to Iran was to last a millennium. Under the Sassanians, trade was extended by sea to India and China. City bazaars were filled with exotic goods.  The cross-fertilisation of cultural practices between the two empires is illustrated today by the artist Haji Noor Deen Mi Guangjiang (b.1963) who, as we saw in the Introduction, revived sini script as an art form and a means of cross-cultural communication. Hawala, an old financial-transfer system that relies on trusted intermediaries (mainly in Turkey and Dubai) to bypass traditional banks, operates today in lieu of a formal system of savings and credit. Iran is a victim of global sanctions and the rial, its national currency, is weak.  The country’s economic woes are also a consequence of the failed economic policies of the Rafsanjani (1989–97), Khatami (1997– 2005) and Ahmadinejad (2005–13) governments, and their mistakes may have far-reaching consequences.  Today, foreign currency is exchanged on the black market.  Artists accept cash payments in dollars or euros. Opportunist collectors see in the present circumstances a chance to build a seminal, contemporary Iranian art collection.  They may be right.  The longer-term future of art from the region is, however, very uncertain – and there are signs that it will get worse. Today’s China wants to revitalise the Silk Road. It announced its intention to develop land and maritime routes in an initiative that it has labelled ‘One Belt One Road’ (see Introduction and ‘China’ chapter), and art is part of this package. However, art seeks secure harbours, and the hitherto peaceful havens are no more. 143

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New Art New Markets Neo-liberal, corporatist Islam has failed to defeat secular, authoritarian government or to contain reactionary revolts. Iran, says Cihan Tugal (2016), is now occasionally liberal and Turkey increasingly authoritarian. Egypt is held together by its army and military leadership. Following a coup in 2013, it has reverted to the form of strongman government favoured by ex-President Hosni Mubarak (b.1928).  The Sunni Gulf states, erstwhile stable repositories of wealth, have reacted aggressively to the fear of insurrection.  The region is on the verge of cataclysmic internecine conflict.  And yet for the first decade of the new century, the Turkish model of populist Islam was upheld by the West as the way forward.  The summary of the course of events since the Green Movement in Iran – but probably earlier, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution – is that neo-liberalism and democracy work together in the region for a time before Islamic leaders turn to authoritarianism. In Egypt, the latter was the case from the outset.  Since the 1980s, Turkey has had to contain crony capitalists, worker resistance to economic reforms, the Kurds and the fear of an Islamic revolution.  The balance of elements has worked until now but, as Tugal warns, might be about to explode.  The failure of the Turkish model has undermined the already fractured cultural infrastructure of the Levant: look at the assaults on Syria’s physical heritage – Aleppo, Homs, Krak des Chevaliers, Palmyra, Ebla,  Apamea and Dura-Europos.  With its failure to proceed in Egypt, Tugal is right to predict that ‘a liberalising democracy . . . incorporating the challenge of polictical Islam is vanquished’ (p.4). Turkey’s art market grew rapidly until the decade of revolts in the Middle East known as the ‘Arab Spring’.  The populist, consumerist corporatism of its government provided an antidote to Iran’s revolutionary Islamic approach. It offered an alternative to the rigid controls imposed on its people by Egypt and provided a counterbalance to the militarisation of the Gulf.  The country, once stable, has succumbed to regional politics and home-made sectarianism. Until recently,  Turkey enjoyed the unequivocal support of the West and the majority support of the Arab world. Istanbul became the largest conduit for Iranian and Arab art. New dealers and art spaces sprouted in the capital, which was already home to established art businesses.  The city still boasts some half a dozen local auction houses as well as international ones, but its recently founded art fair,  ArtInternational, cancelled its 2016 event citing security fears. Nonetheless,  Turkey has a more robust cultural infrastructure than either India or any potential centre in the Middle East, and Istanbul is particularly well placed geographically between East and West.  The city’s biennale, established in 1973, is, along with those of São Paulo and Venice, one of the world’s three most prestigious – and its nomination in 2010 as the European Capital of Culture, combined with its strong corporate support for the arts, has added to its 144

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Aryana allure. But Turkey has changed. President Erdog˘an is now constitutionally the most powerful president in the country’s history. His populist Justice and Development Party (AKP) is nationalist; it refers to Turks as millet, the ‘people of the nation’. No fewer than 100,000 people have been imprisoned following the country’s July 2016 coup d’état. So the Turkish model is broken. Since the protests in Gezi Park in 2013,  Turkey has withdrawn incrementally from the Washington consensus. Far from the country’s liberal experiment being a prelude to democracy,  Tugal (p.3) argues that ‘Turkish liberalisation paved the way for Islam’s later authoritarian and conservative incarnations.’This, however, is debatable. In 1980, the military launched an earlier bloody coup d’état in which hundreds of thousands were detained.  Turkey’s authoritarianism is therefore cyclical. But what is new to modern generations is the role that history will play in Turkey’s future. On the grass of Gezi Park, Erdog˘an had planned to build a replica neo-Ottoman barracks based on a 1940 original, which Kemal Atatürk had razed to the ground, fearing that it might be used as a talisman for Islamists. Construction has started (in 2017) on a large mosque in Taksim Square, also a scene of protests in 2013.  The current president inhabits a gigantic faux-Ottoman palace called Ak Saray, a play on the party’s name. From his seat of power, Erdog˘ an has surreptitiously demolished modern Turkish social mores.  There is a striking similarity between the theocratic revolution in Iran in 1979, which vanquished an elitist oligarchy, and Erdog˘ an’s triumph over a Kemalist intelligentsia in Turkey. Perhaps Turkey has ambitions to once again rule an ummah, or Muslim ‘Commonwealth’, as it did before the West broke up its empire. The Silk Road Gallery in Tehran specialises in photography. It represents the biggest names in contemporary Iranian art. Many galleries comprise the fissiparous Iranian market.  Azad Art Gallery sells political art, the Shirin offers a reflection of Iran, others show decorative items.  The Mohsen gallery acts as a youth club, a place where the young can ape the conduct of their Western counterparts. Rather like in China in the 1990s, the underground is tacitly accepted by the authorities – if only because many of the children of political leaders are part of its milieu; noisy but harmless. Fortunately (for the government), political change is not what the young want.  They hanker for a social revolution.  The Tehran market, therefore, is hampered less by censorship – indeed, this has been lessened under the successive presidencies of Ahmadinejad and Rouhani (2013–present) – than by international sanctions, which make transactions difficult for foreigners. Iranian artists, in fact most artists from the 23 region, are forced to seek alternative outlets for their work. There have been limited concessions, which, for example, allow jazz to be played in the open.  There are Western-style parties. Not just in Iran but in Saudi Arabia, too, recorded in the 145

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New Art New Markets doctored, faceless photographs of Amirali Ghasemi (b.1980). But the commerce of culture is moribund.  This has pushed artists to address an international audience and encouraged most to jettison or adapt the ideals of the earlier generation. Again, rather like in 1990s China, Iran’s cultural infrastructure is depleted. Islamic art is privileged over pre-Islamic.  The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, founded by Empress Farah Pahlavi (b.1938) and architect Kamran Diba (b.1937), is now an anachronistic institution whose pictures reflect the taste of two Western curators. It is ignored by the revolutionary government. In truth, Iran should sell its contents and reinvest the profits in its cultural monuments and museums of history.  The hobbled national art market has, ironically, fuelled the international art market for Iranian art, but the threat of US and Gulf-states’ sanctions threatens to undermine confidence in the market as a whole.  The provocative Iranian Haerizadeh brothers, Rokni and Ramin (b.1978 and 1975, respectively), symbolic ‘criminals’ who seek to advance a neo-liberal agenda, were offered sanctuary in Dubai in 2010 – the first step in the split in the region’s art world. Given a choice between an imagined past and a fake present, the past, to Iran, appears more predictable.  The conservative Gulf states should take heed. Egypt has been undermined by the top-down neo-liberalism of presidents Anwar Sadat (1918–81) and Mubarak, both of whom excited the Islamic conscience when they felt it expedient so to do. Cairo is a significant art-market centre.  The generous state-welfare philosophy in Egypt has been extended to include significant government art patronage.  The Grand Egyptian Museum sits opposite the pyramids at Giza. Egypt also boasts the Cairo Biennale (founded in 1984), modelled on Venice with equally narrow aesthetic parameters. But the corruption induced by the post-2000 freedoms accorded to the business class has (like in Turkey and unlike in China) been ignored.  This has compromised the integrity of the instruments of trade.  An absence of confidence in commercial tools has seeped into the art market.  The protest graffiti art of  Tahrir Square is as faint as that which graced the buildings of  Tripoli; Daraa; and, in previous decades,  Tehran and Lebanon. Egypt’s art market is in free fall. The primary market for contemporary art from Iran, the Levant, Pakistan and eventually Afghanistan now lies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). If art respects Islamic sensibilities, it can be sold by local and international dealers via an Emiratesbased gallery or art fair.  Wealthy Iranians hold bank accounts and own apartments in Dubai, and they buy art.  Their pictures will, they imagine, be validated at branded, international museums on Saadiyat Island and deliberated over at a regional biennale in Sharjah or on the arcane pages of journals like Abraaj. In due course, they are sold at auction. Further commercial avenues have appeared in Doha and Oman, but 146

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Aryana recent internecine disputes in the Gulf threaten this once-stable arrangement.  There are also indications that the innate Islamic conservatism of the Sunni Gulf sheikhdoms will counter the liberal cultural values of the West.  Their rulers demonstrate their natural piety by endorsing tradition.  The current ruler of Dubai, HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (b.1949) is one of the finest exponents of Nabati verse and a great connoisseur of Arabic calligraphy. His patronage, and that of his circle, is not drawn to the Emirates’ international art fairs.  The daughter of the UAE Minister of Foreign Affairs, Khawla Bint Ahmed Bin Khalifa Al Suwaidi, also composes verse, writes calligraphy and paints miniatures in a restrained manner. In neighbouring Saudi Arabia, the country’s Vision 2030 strategy aims to develop its creative industry. But its objectives, and the intentions of the artists that it supports, are apolitical.  Ahmed Mater (b.1979), whose acclaimed Magnetism (2011), a Ka’bashaped magnet in whose force field iron filings are suspended, set the standard by which art from this region should be judged.  A neo-conservative artistic orthodoxy now emanates beyond these powerful monarchical states and touches its neighbours. On the other side,  Turkey, the home of the last caliph, may yet export a new Turkish model to the Levant and North Africa – one that reverses the modernisation of Atatürk.  Turkey also favours its past over Kemal’s bright new modernist future. Modernism dismissed It was traditional for modern oil painters from new markets who trained in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century to find a market for their work at home as the national economy grew.  Today’s contemporary artists are much less welcome than their predecessors were, and that is because the politics has changed. The price of modern art from this region never approached the values of Chinese, Mexican or Indian twentieth-century oil paintings.  The naive, Mughal-inspired miniatures of London-trained Pakistani artist Tassaduq Sohail (1930–2017), for example, have estimates in the hundreds of dollars.  An important work by the extremely talented Iranian Houshang Pezeshknia (1917–72) and the famous Lebanese artist Paul Guiragossian (1925–93) are measured in the thousands of dollars, although Guiragossian’s pictures of women in chadors fetch a little more. Landscapes by another Lebanese, Saliba Douaihy (1915–94), and a well-painted Cairo Street Scene by Youssef Kamel (1890–1971) – a founder of Egyptian modernism – are in the low thousands of dollars.  Works by the Syrian Nasser Chaura (1920–92), who studied in Italy and was a leading light of Syrian impressionism, and his fellow countryman Louay Kayyali (1934–78), are a little more expensive.  The work of Hafiz al-Drubi 147

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New Art New Markets (1914–91), who was educated at Goldsmiths College in London and was a leading figure in Iraqi modernism, can again be acquired for a few thousand dollars.  This type of Western-style modernism, which did so well in its East Asian manifestation, has failed to impress the Arab and Iranian markets.  The roots for a market in international contemporary art in this region are the shallowest of all the new economies. Mazen Qupty is a Palestinian who lives in Jerusalem. He has established a National Museum for contemporary Palestinian art with the support of the Oslo Art Academy and Norwegian Government. He is at the forefront of a new generation of collectors who have, in effect, rejected the modernist tendency. Mr Qupty has also launched a contemporary art academy in Ramallah. He collects artists like Nabil Anani (b.1943) and Tayseer Barakat (b.1959), who work in leather and wood and are inspired by Lebanese folk traditions and local mythologies. In Turkey, the government protects fast-disappearing skills and traditional art forms such as carpet making. It seeks to revive the use of natural dyes and traditional weaving methods as 24 part of a scheme known as DOBAG. The Saudi-based Al-Mansouria Foundation collects work that embraces local history and traditions.  The huge, site-specific, topographical work The Labyrinth and Time (2017) – a recreation of Al-Balad, Jeddah’s historic quarter, by Zahra Al Ghamdi (b.1980) – constructs the complex street plan by placing bound strips of cloth that have been coated in sand and stone onto wet plaster.  This work personifies the new direction in new markets, reinforcing the past. In his work from the 1990s, Faisal Samra (b.1956) traces a deconstructed Arabic script in oil pigments and gold leaf onto dry clay and wire mesh.  The incomprehensible words recall the scrawl on charms that are intended to ward off evil spirits.  The two elements – script and form – merge together, blurring the borders between sculpture, painting and calligraphy.  All these artists seek their inspiration from their own culture and express their art in a way that is aimed to appeal not to an international market but to local concerns and tastes. An international style does prosper in the region, however.  The Iranian collector Ebrahim Melamed (b.1950) opened the private Honart Museum in Tehran and fills it with modern and international contemporary art. Foreign collectors dip periodically into these markets and buy pieces that conform to the West’s art-world ideology.  The market today is finely balanced between the two tendencies of internationalism and tradition. But it is the paintings and sculptures of the Saqqa Khaneh and Naqqashi Khatt groups of artists – of which, more later – that are proving to be the most potent regional cultural forces.  These works are inspired by the past.  The Sheila and Eric Azari collection incorporates the best of this tendency. It was assembled by the couple during their time in Iran from 1959 to 1964.  The key to their decision to support the fledgling 148

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Aryana Saqqa Khaneh movement lay in their passion for Iranian antiquities. It was out of this profound understanding of Aryana that the couple made astute aesthetic choices.  They acquired works of art directly from the very best artists of the day: Charles Hossein Zenderoudi (b.1937) and Faramarz Pilaram (1937–1982) as well as Tanavoli. There is a market duality in contemporary art from the region. Both internationalism and tradition can be commercially successful, boosted as much by the accommodating international contemporary-art market as by the continual search from within that market for something new and exotic. But the evidence of the previous decade shows clearly that the prices of the work of the international stars of yesterday have fallen.  The art of the émigré Shirin Neshat and her near contemporary, the Moroccan Lalla Essaydi (b.1956), and of the Iranian Shadi Ghadirian have all endured sharp declines in popularity. Others receive the support of the West’s art world.  The Palestinian Jeffar Khaldi (b.1965), the Syrian Sabhan Adam (b.1972) and the Lebanese/Algerian partnership of émigrés Walid Raad (b.1967) and Adel Abdessemed (b.1971) all adopt a provocatively political stance.  The question today is: what role does this work play in societies that no longer heed the West’s message? The answer would appear to be: a tangential one. Eshgh (Love) (2007) by Moshiri is the most famous work of art to embody the revival of tradition in a contemporary idiom.  The picture is as much a commentary on rampant consumerism in the Middle East as it is a reflection on Sufi poetry. It struck a chord with the international market, perhaps because Moshiri placed globalism within tradition.  The glittering Swarovski crystals hint at the hypocrisy inherent in neo-liberalism, with its tolerant platitudes and merciless capitalism.  The character, love, contains these elements within a traditional form. Moshiri’s work is, therefore, a commentary on the transitional state of the Middle East just before its decided lurch towards conservatism. Other artists oscillate less coherently between tradition and globalisation. Parastou Forouhar (b.1962) produces installations of illegible calligraphy, in which she applies her script to the flat surfaces of building interiors. Her most recent, digital drawings form patterned tiles, designed in disrupted arrangements that are made up of guns and missiles.  The Iranian Pouran Jinchi (b.1959) removes the consonants from Qur’anic texts, leaving behind a meaningless, mathematical lexicon rather in the way that the Chinese artist Xu Bing (b.1955), whom we have already encountered, creates a nonsense language out of his square-word calligraphy.   Two Iraqi artists have integrated the past into their everyday lives. Dia Al-Azzawi (b.1939) uses folk motifs; arabesques; Assyrian and Babylonian figures; calligraphy; and, since the late 1960s, poetry and prose – a rich assortment of cultural references – to create vital and energetic canvases. Hanaa Malallah employs the Babylonian 149

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New Art New Markets composite mushussu, a snake-headed lion with an eagle’s talons, as a proxy for the patron deity of Babylon, Marduk.  These works are unashamedly historicist.  The calligrapher Ahmed Moustafa (b.1943), on the other hand, adheres to the principles of a new order. His canvases focus attention on the structure, proportion, geometry and form of his discipline by exploring the building blocks of language, the dot and the cube.  This work conjoins practice with form to create content. It is authentic. How viable is Aryana as a future cultural force? The West has had to come to terms with the death of the Turkish model and, with it, Istanbul’s ambition to be another global art-market centre.  The Gulf states are withdrawing into themselves. Egypt has a military government.  The rest of the region is at war.  What role will Iran play? Jafari Shi’a Islam was first adopted as the state religion in Iran in the first years of the sixteenth century. Shah Isma’il I (r.1501–24), a Safavid whose family headed a militant Sufi order, embraced the religion and gave rise to a flowering culture that reached its pinnacle in the reign of Shah Abbas (r.1588–1629) and with the new capital of Isfahan. For much of the twentieth century, the country employed a secular constitution – modelled, bizarrely, on that of Belgium.  Today’s Iran is a post-revolutionary Shi’a state.  The ‘Shi’a Crescent’ theory, which suggests that Iran is now at the helm of a regional Shi’a resurgence, is outwardly less plausible than Turkey’s Ottoman revanchism. But its mere possibility has done great diplomatic damage to Iran. For every attempt to honour those who sacrificed their lives for the Islamic Republic, there is an outcry. For every re-enactment of the recent past, there is a global intercession.  The anti-imperialist, revolutionary slogans have lost traction in the absence of prosperity; wealth has been denied the Islamic Republic by sanctions. Some Iranians are ultra-religious; they are led by the Basij, a youth militia established by Khomeini. Some in Iran still follow a marjah – a high-ranking Shi’a cleric, who guides their spiritual journey – although many believers refer directly to the Qur’an and prefer a separation of State and Mosque. In the recent past, murders were carried out by hezbollahs (militants) and these were justified under sharia law.  The politicisation of religion may, however, have reached its zenith. What will step into this vacuum? Perhaps another ideology – globalism, consumerism, notions of individual freedom, autocracy.  When the 30-year-old popular singer Morteza Pashaei died in 2014, over 100,000 men and women gathered at his funeral.  The absence of segregation and the object of veneration itself were in direct opposition to the dictates of government. Did this mark the beginning of 150

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Aryana a silent (cultural) revolution? It is likely that Iran will gain more social freedoms, but a dramatic change in political direction is less certain – and if it transpires, how probable is it that this will simply reinstate another orthodoxy? The culture that underpins the new society is unsettled.  The West probably imagines a youth-driven political rebellion aided by technologies like the free texting app Viber. But the fact remains it was a cleric, Hassan Rouhani (b.1948), who was voted into power in 2013. Rouhani’s views are a reflection of the Majles-e Khobregan (Assembly of Experts) dominated by ulema (Muslim scholars) loyal to the second ayatollah,  Ali Khamenei (b.1939).  The first ayatollah, Khomeini, essentially introduced into the political arena a centuries-old notion called velayat-e faqih, or ‘governance of the Islamic jurist’.  The Supreme Leader basically serves in the place of the return of the 12th Imam.  The defeat of the hardline cleric Ebrahim Raisi (b.1960) in the 2017 elections is a sign not that the power of the Qom clergy is in decline but rather that Rouhani is seen as the most effective negotiator in Iran’s nuclear discussions with the West. It is salutary to consider that none of the three plausible future directions for Iran’s polity uttered before the Green Revolution or Arab Spring by a posse of experts (Cockburn 19 June 2009,  Axworthy 15 June 2009,  Axworthy 6 August 2009, Khalaf 27 July 2009, Slackman 9 July 2009) have come to pass.  There has been no ‘velvet’ or bloody revolution, in contrast to Iran’s hapless regional neighbours Iraq, Syria and Libya. No secular, reformist government either – and no military coup. Iran looks (politically) stable. Michael Axworthy argued in 2014 (p.410) that the ideological roots of Islamic Iran are much deeper than those of the innovative European ideologies of the Jacobins and Bolsheviks: ‘In the cultural/intellectual race, it has longer legs’. He continues, ‘Shi’ism more than any form of Islam is traditionally, acutely, almost obsessively sensitive to the abuse of political power.’ I agree. It allows me to say that the deep-rooted culture of Iran will overcome globalism. Iran has sensibly heeded the words of Khamenei in 2009, and saved itself from bloody conflict. ‘Today’, the Supreme Leader began on that occasion, ‘is a sensitive, historic juncture for the country. Look at the situation in the world, Middle East, the global economic conditions, problems of neighbouring countries like Iraq,  Afghanistan and Pakistan.  We are all responsible for remaining cautious now and not making mistakes.’ In short, we must be careful, bearing in mind our tumultuous history, not to usher in the anarchy that afflicts our close neighbours.  Whether Iran’s current and/or future political system is robust enough to avoid a descent into chaos is the most pertinent question, and one which only Iran, free of outside interference, can adequately answer. Iranians are aware of the lessons of history. By 1907, shortly after the declaration 151

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New Art New Markets of its new constitution, their nation was divided into three zones: a Russian sector in the north, a British one next to British India and a neutral portion in the middle. British interest in Iran took a different course when the first oil in the Middle East was discovered in the south-west of the country in 1908, just as its Royal Navy changed its fuel from coal to oil.  The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, in which the 25 British government bought a majority share, was formed in 1914. Constitutional government in Iran was thwarted after the SIS (British Intelligence) and CIA (US Central Intelligence Agency) assisted in the arrest of the prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq (1882–1967), who had threatened British (and American) oil interests by 26 nationalising the oil industry. The coup, named ‘Operation Ajax’, was instigated by the British and the United States against Mosaddeq and his National Front coalition in 1953.  It cemented links between the United States and the Pahlavi regime while alienating the Shah from most young Iranians,  Axworthy explains (2007, pp 242–3).  The Shah’s new prime minister, General Zahedi (1892–1963), worked with British and US propagandists to discredit Mosaddeq in a series of charades worthy of a comic opera. Shirin Neshat saw the debacle as an opportunity to characterise her view on the plight of women in Iran before Mosaddeq. Her film Women without men (2009) implied that women in Iran after the political demise of Mosaddeq were returned to a stoical, mute existence in the face of a renewed tyrannical patriarchy. Neshat was educated at a Catholic boarding school in Tehran before leaving to study in the United States in 1975; she has never returned to Iran. Her pro-Western ideology, encouraged from a young age by her father, cannot be assumed to be the consensus of the majority who live in Iran. The upshot of Western interference in Iran is best expressed by the writer and unconventional Marxist Jalal Al-e-Ahmad (1923–69), who in 1962 coined the word gharbzadegi (‘Westoxication’).  Ale-e-Ahmad attacked the way in which the Western concept of the universal importance of the human mind as the instrument for apprehending reality had been uncritically accepted throughout Iranian society.  Two years later, Khomeini was exiled and developed his premise for theocratic rule. In the years between his exile and the Shah’s forced abdication, thousands of Americans lived with legal immunity in Iran, flouting the country’s culture and laws.  Al-e-Ahmad’s description of the nation’s cultural ills met with an immediate response from the artist Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, whose paintings were shown at the Third Tehran Biennial.  They were described by the critic Karim Emami (1930–2005) as Saqqa-khaneh in style. Saqqa-khaneh literally means ‘water fountain’, and refers to the public drinking fonts made in honour of Shi’a martyrs who were refused refreshment at Karbala.  A shadowy 2000 portrait of Imam 152

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Aryana Husayn – the Shi’a martyr par excellence, who was killed at the Battle of Karbala in 680 – by the Iranian artist Aneh Muhammad Tatari (b.1967) depicts the imam’s face covered in an indecipherable prayer scroll.  Works of art created in the Saqqakhaneh style employ traditional elements within a modern visual language, and often borrow votive elements from Shi’a art.  To this day at the Festival of Ashura, the martyrdom of Husayn is re-enacted by divanegan (crazed ones). The folk element to this art, by which artists were encouraged to seek local sources of inspiration, lost its power through the international style in which it was represented. It is wearisome for non-Western cultures to create plausible, indigenous art in an internationally acceptable manner now that the old cultural markers are apparently redundant and the environment that gave rise to the best of that past art has largely vanished.  The broader context in which this cultural confusion arose in Iran came to the fore in the 1970s when international companies outsourced the production of high-end goods to the country and, at the same time, speculated in property.  The unhappy results were locally manufactured, sub-standard international goods and poorly built tower blocks. Fortunately, Iran’s bazaars sell a wealth of home-produced wares the equal of the craft goods to be found in India and Japan.  These emporiums and the country’s many monuments give creative sustenance to the nation’s best artists. Early Iranian modernists studied in Europe, like most artists from colonial and pseudo-colonial societies in the early twentieth century, ignoring the impressionists in favour of the Old Masters and the art of the salon.  These artists, notably the Iranian Kamal al-Mulk (1852–1940), returned home to teach a generation of local artists European academicism. But this was only part of the story, because another group of Iranian artists resurrected miniature painting in the Timurid and Safavid traditions.  This grew into the Tehran School.  The (fifteenth-century) Timurid style, centred on the town of Herat, is characterised by small-scale and dense foliate forms with a preference for leaf decor and floral patterns held within geometric frames.  The paintings are spatially logical, finely painted and restrained. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the Safavid style centred in Isfahan emphasised the floral and included such nuances as the split-palmette-leaf arabesque; the lotus blossom; the curved, serrated lancet leaf; and a variety of framing devices. Under Shah Abbas, the blue-and-red ground of Persian carpets also changed to warmer hues of yellow and gold, peach and off-white. These conservative trends persisted in twentieth-century Iranian art in opposition to the late introduction of European modernism after the Second World War, which culminated in the 1958 Tehran Biennial. Here, even modernist-style works were, according to Hamid Keshmirshekan (2009, p.15), ‘Iranicized’. Colours were said to 153

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New Art New Markets embody those of Iran’s topography and figures to be inspired by Persian miniature painting, while subjects were supposed to be drawn from rural and nomadic life – its women often depicted in the chador.  The approximate balance between the adop27 tion of international currents in contemporary art and truth to nativism marked the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (r.1941–79), a time when Tehran was culturally connected to the international art community. It is worthwhile highlighting the work of three of the artists who spearheaded the Saqqa-khaneh group – Zenderoudi,  Tanavoli and Pilaram.  The writer Hamid Keshmirshekan describes Zenderoudi’s paintings as reworked Arabic calligraphy and, later, rhythmic compositions of words and numbers in the manner of written prayers which betray his fascination for Sufism. Zenderoudi’s work is, commercially, the most successful of his generation and the most familiar to a Western audience – which suggests a predilection amongst international collectors for calligraphic abstraction.  Tanavoli, Keshmirshekan notes, worked in the manner of traditional Iranian gold and silversmiths. He revived past traditions such as folk art, traditional literary tropes and calligraphy in a modern idiom.  Tanavoli is an exceptional exponent of a modern Iranian aesthetic. He has travelled throughout his homeland, examining incidental artefacts from ancient doors and locks to shrines and religious iconography. This assimilation of the essence of Iranian culture is achieved in extraordinarily simple and unassuming ways.  Tanavoli, whose studio ‘Atelier Kaboud’ was the focus for the Saqqa-khaneh group, offers the most articulate explanation of its objectives: I’ve always been fascinated by the culture of my Persian inheritance: poetry, architecture, and other arts . . . It wasn’t as if there was nothing for me to see [in Iran].  We’ve had art in every century in every place throughout the history of Iran.  The three-dimensionality of Islamic architecture, which is not just seen in the [buildings themselves], but also in details such as doors, doorknobs, grill-work . . .  To me these were all forms of sculpture as good as any in the West. In every aspect of Iranian life there is a touch of religion, traces of mystical elements in everything we experience. Religion never stopped my work . . . on the contrary I’ve managed to adapt my work to my religion and drew my inspiration from it. Every shrine in Iran is like a little museum and I have visited thousands of them.  The best of all artworks – tiles, woodwork, brass-work and textiles – are 28 displayed in these shrines.  These became my sources of inspiration One particular concept in Tanavoli’s art has the value of an over-arching cultural theme.  We encountered his sculptural rendition of the Iranian word heech (nothing) 154

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Aryana at the beginning of this chapter. Its significance, it was suggested, lay in its ability to describe a quiet mind.  The form consists of three letters in the Iranian language. It acts as a talisman to those artists who are disillusioned with international modernism but also dissatisfied by an uncritical and ill-adapted reintroduction of historicism.  There is a shared cultural significance between Tanavoli’s reintroduction of heech into the cultural consciousness of Iran and the description of brush and ink as ‘nothing’ by the modern Chinese brush painter Wu Guanzhong (1919–2010), whom we encountered in the ‘China’ chapter. Further, there is a subliminal connection between the Iranian artist’s interest in the finest Islamic architecture and the content and shape of the sculpture Heech in a Cage (2005).  The caged shrine within the Timurid Gohar Shad Mosque in the Iranian city of Masshad evokes Tanavoli’s own caged heeches.  The artist intended his sculpture to refer to the plight of the inmates of the US detention camp in Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay. His formal and contextual approach has become an inspiration to others struggling to maintain an equilibrium between the twin forces of conservatism and liberalism. In 2003, the Iraqi émigré calligrapher Mustafa Ja’far (b.1952) wrote the Arabic words for the recurrent and horribly descriptive dialogue that filled the airwaves during the Iran/Iraq War. In 2008, these paper memories became his installation Black Words in Red Ink. Whereas the calligraphic works of the Saqqa-khaneh artists paid little heed to the strict rules of calligraphy, those of the Naqqashi-khatt group ‘adhered to the traditional standards of calligraphic form, its anatomical principles and also its legibility’ (Keshmirshekan 2009, p.23).  The term hurufiyya, after the Arabic word harf meaning ‘letter’, which alludes to the medieval Islamic scientific study of the occult properties of letters, V   enetia Porter tells us (2006), is at the heart of the artist’s relationship with the word. But perhaps the main reason for the re-emergence of calligraphy as an important means of contemporary expression lies in pleas from Iranian and Arab writers for artists to express themselves in a visual language that speaks directly to Arabs and Iranians. Parviz Tanavoli warns us to beware the misuse of calligraphy.  At its best it fulfils, like Chinese characters, the ideals of a supra-cultural art form. It can express the static and the dynamic, the cursive and the geometric, the crystalline and the fluid, the angular and the spiral, darkness and light. It explores, in short, the depths of rhythm, space, geometry and mathematics. It is the autonomous instrument of al-ghaib – the language of the unseen. It re-infuses artistic themes with a sense of trascendence. One of the earliest and most interesting modern exponents of this art form was the Iraqi Shakir Hassan Al-Said (1925–2004). In The Envious Shall Not Prevail (1979), he spray-paints this favourite Arab proverb, which is a warning against envy, 155

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New Art New Markets onto painted wood in the manner of graffiti. But the artist’s work has a more fundamental meaning, which can be found in the Sufi belief that one nears God in stages. So,  Al-Said believed, artistic expression developed progressively and out of a mythological consciousness that reached back through Arabic script in its various forms and schools to ancient Mesopotamia. This force inherent in Arab calligraphy, which Ahmed Moustafa has likened (Moustafa 1988, p.12, cited in Porter 2006, p.30) to ‘a finely tuned abstract vocabulary embodying universal mathematical laws’ which ‘therefore has the power to have an objective moral and spiritual effect upon the viewer’, is most effective in a work of art when there is a pictorial balance, harmonious colouring and a spiritual meaning incorporated into the text. But as the Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi has said (Porter 2006, p.17), a painting does not become Arabic because of the use of Arab script. Its Arab quality comes from a group of elements. Mohammad Ehsai (b.1939) fuses modernism and tradition in a fluid calligraphic form. His early childhood memories of sunlight filtering through the stained-glass windows in his house, reflecting its light onto Persian carpets, inspired him to create vibrantly coloured, dynamic calligraphy.  This early influence on the artist’s imagination is apparent in the aureate hue of the painting Mohabbat (the Iranian word for ‘kindness’) (2006), inspired by an extract from a poem by Jalal al-Din Rumi. Gold is synonymous with the sun and with anthropomorphic, solar, Mithraic gods. Something of the sun-drenched carpets of Ehsai’s childhood is captured in the vibrant abstract patterns of the Persian rugs designed by Hossein Rezvani (b.1976). His rugs are named like pictures: Tabriz Lilac, Isfahan Blue, Electric Orange. Each is created using traditional techniques and natural dyes – pomegranate juice for red, its peel for yellow; walnut shell for umber; and the indigo plant for blue.  The natural dyes mellow over time, creating a natural fusion of the artwork’s forms and colours.  A better collaboration of contemporary artistry and tradition is hard to imagine. The tight, calligraphic edifices, akin to carpet designs, that Ali Ajali (b.1939) constructs are testimony to his expertise and position as one of the leading calligraphers in Iran.  Ajali’s paintings are, essentially, flat-image interpretations of applied decoration, drawing inspiration explicitly from the craft tradition.  The repetitive lozenges that border Persian carpets, and which sometimes have a numerical significance, are mirrored in religious architecture.  They are replicated in the art of Ali Ajali.  The artist is a founder of the Gol Gasht School of Calligraphy. His Untitled (2003) painting of interwoven calligraphy creates an abstract design that leaves serrated edges at the borders of the canvas.  The intense colouring of the script hints at a world beyond language.  Ajali’s process, if not intention, mirrors that of the Chinese 156

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Aryana artist, Qiu Zhijie (b.1969), who, as we have seen, repeats a single piece of script a thousand times until the paper is drenched in black ink and the edges frayed into unintelligible strokes and marks. The Iranian Golnaz Fathi (b.1972) is one of the most adventurous of the new calligraphers. She spent six years at the Calligraphy Association of Iran. Her reductive canvases, which are often untitled and support illegible calligraphy, owe much to the American minimalists, but she uses her skill and many of the techniques that she acquired as a calligrapher to enhance their significance. Fathi does not define herself as a calligrapher, citing dance as her main influence, but her canvases – such as the triptych Untitled (2009, fig.17) – convey the essence of this art form. Two further works of art should be mentioned in the context of contemporary calligraphy: the angular, Kufic-script Kun I (2002) and Kun II (2006) by the Jordanian Nassar Mansour (b.1967).  The tension in the design, as taut as a drawn longbow, is dramatised by the clean, black letter, the golden disc and the off-white and white backgrounds.  The dimension of the script and the relationship of it to the rectangular page seem significant.  The tail of the script aligns with the edge of the gold disc; the centreline of the page precisely divides the word into two equal halves; the base is a third of the length of the height.  The result is a satisfying, architectonic work of art. The underpinning of the historical and archaeological approach to contemporary art from this region can only be successful if Islamic and pre-Islamic art is accorded more international attention.  This is why the great collectors – David Khalili (b.1945), Edmund de Unger (1918–2011), Sheikh Nasser al-Sabah (b.1940), Jasim al Homaizi, Hashem Khosrovani (b.1944), the Sultan of Brunei (b.1946) and Sheikh Saud al-Thani of Qatar (1966–2014) – have been so important to its reception.  The British Museum, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha have critically changed the landscape in which art from the Near East is perceived.  They have helped to place Islamic art inside the art-historical pantheon, overturning a perception of it as simply patterned and decorative.  The mathematical and proportional elements of the region’s intricate architecture, calligraphy and objects combined with the mysticism of its verse and inherent spirituality have been made explicit by the proselytising zeal of a few high-profile protagonists.  This will underpin a renewal of tradition in its contemporary art. It was encouraging to learn that some amends were being made for the destruction of Iraq’s cultural patrimony, and subsequent looting of archaeological sites, at the end of the Second Gulf War (2003).  At a meeting in Paris in May 2004, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) experts 157

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New Art New Markets adopted guidelines to help Iraqi officials conserve and protect their cultural assets. Many of the major items stolen from the National Museum in Baghdad have now been recovered and returned. Let us hope that looted artefacts from Syria are also discovered and returned in due course. There are also signs that alongside a renewed international enthusiasm for the scholarly appreciation of Islamic and pre-Islamic art, new approaches to stimulating the region’s indigenous cultural creativity are being explored.  The Jameel Prize, the biennial award for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic traditions, has provided an alternative locus of aesthetic interest to the staple contemporary-art offerings sponsored by institutions representing the international cutting edge.  The Abraaj Group Art Prize for fine art from Islamic countries and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, meanwhile, continue the search for a contemporary Islamic vernacular style. The question is not whether Westoxication is a threat to emerging art markets, but whether the national systems in place at the time are strong enough to resist its most perfidious influences. In Iran’s case the Pahlavis’ search for nationalism in the country’s pre-Islamic past was patently ill-prepared and superficial. In Turkey, today’s protests may well be a prelude to seismic upheaval.  The instinct for most of the region has been to adopt cultural protectionism and promote revivalism in order to develop an indigenous cultural economy. Iran and Turkey have both suffered under the neo-liberal economic model.  The influx of Western goods and services to Iran came in a rush following the oil boom of the early 1970s, creating glaring divisions between a traditional and often impoverished majority and an obscenely wealthy, westernised economic elite.  This gave way to inflation and rise to cultural insensitivity from the hundreds of thousands of Western expatriates there. A viable art market will not operate in Iran while wars rage throughout the region. But it is quite possible to imagine a vibrant national or regional Iranian art market operating in a politically stable Iran once conflict subsides.  The hope for a resurgent Iranian culture – one that can vie with others, one that is able to offer an alternative to the international model – is another matter. Hope lies in contemporary engagement held within a traditional form, and in the intelligent reinterpretation of the pre- and post-Islamic culture of Aryana.  The search continues for a new vernacular that borrows stylistic elements from the region’s ancient histories and remains true to itself. It is the duty of all the states in this region to awaken their cultural apparatuses in order that this goal may be more easily achieved.

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7

Hispania Mexican villager: ‘We Mexicans have our traditions, sure.’ Juan: ‘Go on, tell us about them.’ Mexican villager: ‘Tell us about them.  Which one do you want? The 12th December, I get wasted to honour my Lady of Guadalupe.’

So unfolds a conversation between the rich industrialist Juan, seeking (but not finding) peace of mind with his family in rural Mexico, and a poor peasant.  The film Post Tenebras Lux (After Darkness, Light) by Carlos Reygadas, in which this exchange takes place, is achingly pretentious but there are a couple of insights.  This brief conversation is one instance.  The other is the demonstration of apathy between Juan and his wife. Put the two vignettes together and it becomes evident that the crisis facing both Mexican men – the cosmopolitan citizen and the farm labourer – is one of dislocation. Neither is able to live happily or adequately in a landscape in which their forefathers once could. Gone is Arcadia and fading are the customs, gods and beliefs from which life once spilled into culture. Gone, too, is the confidence derived from exploration, empire and perceived cultural superiority. However, there is hope. It lies in this instance in the exchange of cultural and religious beliefs and symbols. Our Lady of Guadalupe is a Mexican corruption of the Virgin Mary. It already reveals one powerful current in the transmogrification of the cultural landscape in South America: the desire to re-present Spanish values in an altered state.  A particular church commemorating the appearance of the Virgin to a Native Mexican peasant in 1531 is situated on the shrine of the Mexica goddess and Earth Mother,  Tonantzin.  This suggests the likelihood of a second current: the role played by indigenous society in the further adaptation of Spanish culture.  The two cultural strains overlap in El Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), at which time chocolate and sugar-coated, comestible calaveras (skulls) are consumed by children and graves are swept and strewn with fresh flowers. 159

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New Art New Markets La Calavera symbolises the Catholic memento mori and also the mosaic-clad skulls in the Mexicas’ Templo Mayor. It is a rich theme for contemporary artists to mine.  The sisters Lisa and Janelle Iglesias, for example, smashed open a mock skull that spilled forth sugary treats in their performance piece Nothing Lasts Forever (2011).  This act seems almost like sacrilege. The triumph of the past In 1896, the English painter Adela Breton (1849–1923) travelled from her native Bath to South America and visited the Spanish-inspired Hacienda Guadalupe outside the town of Etzatian in western Mexico.  The hacienda by this time had come to represent the remnants of Spanish colonialism, the equivalent to a baronial castle; in fact, one such honour was offered to the modern-day revolutionary insurgent Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919) if he would abandon his campaign against the government. Miss Breton – who arrived just two years before the Spanish– American War, an event that sealed the fate of Spanish rule in Mexico – would have encountered an economic system that had survived since the time of the first viceroyalties in the sixteenth century. She went to see a 1500-year-old burial ground, where she found Mayan grave goods. Later, she recorded in exquisite, life-size, coloured watercolours the Mayan wall paintings of  Teotihuacán from the Palace of the Stuccoes, which was founded in 150 BCE – most of which have since been lost to the ravages of modern life. But other facets of pre-Columbian American life have not only survived, they have been adapted to suit a contemporary world.  The Meso-American ball game devised by the earliest civilisation of the Americas, the Olmec (1500–400 BCE), endures in Mexico to this day although the original representation of the rubber sphere as a symbol of the sun is forgotten. Its successor is clearly soccer, which has a near-mythic hold on Central and South and America’s collective psyche. Maize, which was a staple of Meso-Amercia for 1000 years, continues to be a source of nourishment today. It was so important to the Maya (c.2000 BCE–1697 CE) that it was symbolised by a god and their most prized mineral: jade.  The cassava root has been grown and eaten by Amazonians for 4000 years.  Today farofa – a crunchy, toasted meal made out of its root – is a staple of the Brazilian diet.  Viceroys were proxies for Mexica rulers and blueprints for the South American republics’ modern presidents. In 1680, a triumphal arch erected in Mexico City was adorned with 12 wooden statues, each depicting one of the Mexica kings. Every ruler was accorded a virtue. Meso- and much of South America is a mille-feuille of cultures.  This 160

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Hispania chapter will show how complex the task of cultural identification throughout South America has become, but also how resilient are its indigenous roots. Graves from earlier cultures were ransacked for material, the forms of which often appeared in the art and design of succeeding civilisations. Surely no society has endured, yet assimilated, the superimposition of such a multitude of fundamentally different cultural layers in such a short space of time as have the varied indigenous populations of the Americas. Today, there are three main oppositions in Central and South America.  That is what makes the continent distinct in character from, say, South East Asia or Africa, whose people were colonised in the main by Protestant or, in practice, secular European powers.  These oppositions exist with greater and lesser degrees of intensity in each of the states under discussion in this chapter: indigenista, or the indigenous (Native American) impulse; the global (artistic) ideology; and Latin 1 American values. We will focus on the first and the last. There is a great variance in the application of the term indigenista; it has been used to embody modern ideologies like communism; to condemn the actions of a predecessor, the conquistadors; and to reverse views of racial superiority. It was used by well-intentioned Europeans and Americans between the wars to frame their subjective accounts of the native. Mexico, in particular, drew a number of European intellectuals in search of the licentious life that they were denied at home. D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) and Leon Underwood (1890–1975) created immiserated works of art that caricatured the Mexican. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) better represented the reality of Mexico through the medium of photography. Graham Greene (1904–91) alone, in his book The Power and the Glory (1940), captured the essence of a new country’s ideological struggle experienced through civil war. But has pre-Columbian culture ever been legitimately affixed to Latin American modern and contemporary art? It is the question that demands the greatest attention be paid to all aspects of the history, politics and economics of the Americas.  A few artists come some way towards assimilating these three elements.  The results are culturally relevant works of art that deserve the designation Latin American. The sanction conferred by the Catholic Church on the Spanish conquistadors, who were at best semi-autonomous agents of the Spanish Crown, has left a deep impression on the culture of the three civilisations or states that the conquerors 2 encountered – the Mexica (Aztec), Inca and Maya – and also on the myriad bands, tribes, theocratic and militaristic chiefdoms and semi-sedentary peoples of the tropical forests, savannahs and deserts. It forced them to adapt and adopt or perish. But there are much older cultures, through which the Mexica and Inca sought 161

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New Art New Markets to legitimise their own governance, and that in turn infiltrated the culture of the Spanish invaders. In Mexica mythology, in the beginning there was Aztlan (the ‘place of Whiteness’ or ‘place of herons’).  White was associated with the north, the place of the dead, and was akin to the plumage of the heron.  The Mexica tribe grew to dominate the land that we now know as the Basin of Mexico. But the Mexica would have us believe that the origin of their people is lost in the mists of time.  The centre of the Mexica polity was the ‘floating’ city of  Tenochtitlan, built in the image of Aztlan in 1325 (or the year 2 House, in the Mexica calendar) after their leader,  Tenoch, spied an eagle devouring a serpent on a cactus near to the lake on which they would build their city.  This event was divined by the sun god, Huitzilopochtli.  The centre of the universe lay at the heart of the city, the temple of the gods: the Huey Teocalli (Templo Mayor). It was in this way that the Mexica became the legitimate rulers of the Basin until the demise of their last ruler, Moctezuma II (1466–1520), and the collapse of their world in 1520. It was why the newly crowned emperor, dyed black and draped in a cloak of skull and crossbones, entered the House of Eagles before assuming office.  That legitimacy has been conferred on modern Mexico: an eagle devouring a snake on a cactus appears on a white background at the centre of the nation’s flag.  Tenoch’s place of Whiteness lives on in the culture, life and politics of Mexico City, a place of some 20 million souls. Mexico and Peru both have a rich cultural heritage. In the Preclassic period, the animistic Olmecs (1500–400 BCE) of the Gulf of Mexico and the Chavín (900–200 BCE) in central Peru are the earliest recognisable civilisations. In the Classic period, the Teotihuacános (100 BCE–750 CE) in Mexico and the Moche (100–800) in Peru follow. In the Postclassic era, the Toltecs (1000–1200) assimilated the culture of  Teotihuacán and through their art, architecture and religion influenced the Maya and another northern tribe, the Mexica.  The Mexica Empire was situated throughout modern-day Mexico and the Maya in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador.  The Maya peoples can be traced back to around 500 BCE.  Their world revolved around the sea, which they called ‘fiery pool’.  Their jungle strongholds withheld the Spanish until 1642.  The three major cities of the Basin at the time that made up the Mexica Empire – Tenochtitlan,  Tetzcoco and Tlacopan – comprised different peoples united by a single language, Nahuatl.  The Inca Empire extended from its birth in the Cuzco Valley to encompass the modern states of Ecuador, Chile, Peru, a significant part of Bolivia and parts of Argentina and Colombia. In fact, it may have been the largest territorial empire in the early part of the sixteenth century.  The Inca encountered various societies during their period of 162

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Hispania conquest; older civilisations, such as the Wari and Tiwanaku, existed cheek by jowl but with little to no contact with each other.They conformed to Oswald Spengler’s 3 theory of interdigitisation. Their isolation may have made them vulnerable to the aggrandizement of a large and complex society such as the Inca, which could draw on the vast resources of empire. The lesson for this chapter is that the cultural embellishment and assimilation that were features of the recurring Native American civilisations for millennia also, according to Edwin Williamson (2009), affected the Spanish.  The impact of Spanish colonial government, although brutal and harsh in the early period of conquest, in time gave rise to a syncretic culture in which local gods and customs were allowed to coexist or impersonate Catholic iconography rather than be sundered by a greater doctrine.  The documentary evidence of the depth of conversion amongst Amerindians to Catholicism can be seen in the photograph Burial at Metepec (1932) by Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902–2002).  At the centre, the slender, brilliant-white coffin is held shoulder high by two small children and two older women. In the doorway to the small chapel, it is just possible to see two flaming candles.  A child in the foreground holds a burning censor.  The faces of the mourners, young and old, are of indigenous and mixed ancestry. Graham Greene summarises the same unconditional belief when his ‘whisky priest’ encounters a grove of rood crosses in The Power and the Glory: It was the work of Indians and had nothing in common with the tidy vestments of the Mass and the elaborately worked out symbols of the liturgy. It was like a short cut to the dark and magical heart of the faith - to the night 4 when the graves opened and the dead walked. The Portuguese and Spanish Jesuits were less ideologically destructive than the ‘enlightened’ Bourbon administrators imposed on the Spanish Indies after the collapse of the Habsburg dynasty in Spain.  They were certainly less damaging than the Anglo-American liberal capitalists who undermined Spanish authority (and rule) in the late nineteenth century. One must remember that European notions of legitimacy during the early colonial period were based, like those of the pre-Columbian states, on the hereditary principle.  The only difference between the Mexica succession and that of the Hapsburgs was that the Mexica chose an outstanding warrior from amongst their subjects and the Europeans, to their congenital cost, relied on genetic offspring. Second, that legitimacy was awarded by gods, or a God, not given to a ruler by man. Charles V was divinely ordained 163

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New Art New Markets to rule Christendom. He was the defender of Europe from the northern heretics, the Turkish infidel and from the ignorance of the ‘savages’ of the New World.  The Iberian ‘advance guard’ in the recovery of the lands of Christendom from the infidel were free-enterprise warriors known as caudillos, the same calibre and type of man who would form the backbone of the South American adventure.  The caudillo had markedly less noble intentions than divinely ordained Iberian monarchs of inherited legitimacy; these men were ruthless buccaneers set on attaining legitimacy by the procurement of gold, land and the enslavement of the native.  They were, in short, outsiders.  A Hispanic identity had much to do with the slights borne by the caudillo.  The fact that the creole choice of the Virgin of Guadalupe was preferred to the conquistadors’Virgen de los Remedios underlines this wish for separatism.  The Nahatl god Quetzalcóatl metamorphosed into the apostle St Thomas, who it was said had been first to spread the word of God in the Americas.  This also suggests a desire for exceptionalism amongst the white settlers. The ultimate New World authority was acquired from papal bulls issued by the Spanish Borgia Pope Alexander VI (1431–1503) at the end of the fifteenth century.  The legitimacy of this authority was subject to the satisfaction of Christendom, not the gods of the societies of the New World.  The legal authority that the God-fearing Castilian monarchs conjured up was the Requerimiento (the ‘Spanish Requirement’ of 1513).  This crass document recounted the history of the world since Adam, ending with the grant made by the Pope to the Spanish Crown that every Amerindian should pay homage to the House of Castile.  The Jesuit Bartolomé de las Casas (Spain’s ‘conscience’ – 1484–1566) rightly reviles the document in his vastly influential tract ‘A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies’. He likens the Requerimiento to simply a justification for pillage and carnage. Portuguese Brazil was different from the Spanish dominions. Unlike Spanish America, Brazil was a part of the motherland.  When Napoleon invaded the Iberian Peninsula in 1808, the Portuguese monarch decamped with his entire court to the safety of Rio de Janeiro. Contrast this with the fate of the hapless Austrian Bourbon Maximilian (1832–67), who accepted an invitation from Napoleon III to become monarch of the second Mexican empire in order to legitimise French rule in the Americas. He was executed ignominiously by firing squad and posthumously immortalised in an incomplete painting by the French artist Edouard Manet (1832–83).  The Portuguese adventurers were no less proportionately murderous than the Spanish, however. In the course of the seventeenth century, Portuguese and mixed-race trackers from São Paulo decimated the native Amazonian populations in excursions known as tropas de resgates (‘rescue missions‘).  The territory defined 164

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Hispania as Brazil was without indigenous civilisations; it was home to small communities or tribes.  Perhaps for this reason, the representation in modern and contemporary South American art of the ‘lost’ communities of the Amazon is slight. In 1979, the Chilean artist/documenter Juan Downey (1940–93) spent seven months living and recording on film the life of the Yanomami tribe in Venezuela.  The final work of art took the form of a ring of  TV monitors, which mimicked the layout of the Yanomami homesteads.  The Circle of Fires is one of the few works of art that attempts to assimilate the cultures of the vast array of peoples that once populated South America.   There are other, earlier examples of artists who looked to tribal beliefs for inspiration. One of their most distinctive voices is that of the Peruvian-Japanese Tilsa Tsuchiya (1928–84), who succeeded in combining the Peruvian abstraction of Fernando de Szyszlo (1925–2017) with the indigenismo art of José Sabogal (1888– 1956).  The art of  Tsuchiya plays with Amerindian forms such as textile knottings. She viewed the Amerindian veneration of natural objects – huaca – through her Japanese sensibility. Both she and Szyszlo created objects of great sophistication.  All life to the Indian had a soul according to Elisenda Vila Llonch (2013), and each was awarded an anthropomorphic god.  All Andeans, says Williamson (p.51), built an animistic shrine to their mythical founders, who lived in rocks, lakes and trees. It is conjecture, of course, but what if the Europeans had not arrived in the Americas? Would the largest pre-Columbian empire, the Inca, have grown into a monolithic, ethnic empire like imperial China. Maybe, but it is safer to say that the more unitary culture that a total Iberian conquest brought about would probably have eluded the Inca, whose empire had reached its governable limits when the conquistadors (Francisco Pizarro [1471–1541] and his army) arrived; in fact, its internal strife and European diseases were the two chief reasons it collapsed so quickly. Lastly, the Americas constitute a huge territory; the Iberian portion, which at one time expanded as far north as California and as far east as the Mississippi, is pertinent to this chapter, but the northern part was also home to cultures far more populous and sedentary than Hollywood films would have us believe. Hopewell culture 5 was hierarchic and stratified. Its peoples lived in cities constructed out of huge earthen works. Its counterparts south of the Andes had evolved systems of barter and exchange, which allowed a great variety of goods to be consumed.  The famed innocence, savagery or backwardness of the Amerindians was, both Williamson (2009) and Charles Mann (2006) affirm, the central dialogue of the English and Spanish throughout most of the colonial period.  We are reminded by Mann that the accounts of Native Americans by later colonial writers were based on evidence 165

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New Art New Markets collected after decades or centuries of extermination by war and zoonotic disease. Hernando de Soto’s (1500–42) rampage through the many communities of the Mississippi in the early 1540s had left it desolate by the time the French arrived in the 1680s. There are subtle differences between the behaviour of the Inca, the Mexica and the Maya to the people that they subjugated and that of the Iberian conqueror to all natives.  The Mexica tribute collectors, for example, would expect receipt of a range of luxury goods from defeated populations in the capital,  Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City): jade, gold, turquoise, quetzal feathers and jaguar skins.  The key is that these items were tribute, not economic instruments.  They were expressions of a relationship between the Mexica and the tribe or group of people that they had overcome.  The significance of this relationship far outweighed the value of the gift, which the Mexica could procure for themselves anyway.  There was also a domestic-exchange relationship in the manner of a barter.  The cocoa bean was the most commonly denoted barter good across much of South America. It could be exchanged in universally accepted quantities for almost anything. If gold was teocuitlatl (the excrement of the gods), then cocoa was the prized elixir, often sweetened with honey or spiced with chilli. Gold had a value as an ornament and was associated with the sun and the eagle; silver represented the moon. Nothing else of use might be acquired by the Mexica by changing these goods for something essential or more valuable. Gold, in fact, was used by many Pre-Columbians as a votive offering.  The Muisca people, who inhabited a region now known as Bogotá, floated a raft replete with feathered attendants onto Lake Guatavita.  Their leader would be anointed with sticky earth onto which gold dust was blown.  This ceremony reached the ears of the conquistadors and gave rise to the term ‘El Dorado’. Gold to Pre-Columbians was a metaphor for the sun’s regenerative powers, not a medium of exchange. Jared Diamond (2012) expresses the exchange of goods amongst traditional societies as one that maintains relationships for political and social reasons – and this is essentially how these societies viewed their extended polity. Defeated tribes, Williamson tells us, added Mexica gods to their pantheon and adopted the ancient Nahuatl tongue.  They were also obliged to supply victims for ceremonial sacrifice to the current sun god, Huitzilopochtli, so that the fifth sun might be sustained in a uni6 versal cycle of birth and destruction – a belief shared by the Maya. Hernán Cortés – whom the Mexica believed to be Quetzalcóatl (a plumed serpent god-made-man), the saviour – gained advantage from this characterisation, which was heightened by the utter incomprehensibility of his motivations to the baffled Amerindians.  The 166

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Hispania Inca operated a similar system of tribute and assimilation of existing tribal hierarchies to the Mexica.  They established a system of forced labour called mita, which required defeated chiefs to offer manpower to serve the Inca, his dynasty and the sun god – whose centre of worship was the capital, Cuzco. The great divide was not so much cultural or even political according to Williamson (2009); it was the economic modus operandi.  The livelihood of all the New World’s indigenous people would forever be at odds with the Western system of exchange.  The culture of tribute in return for ‘rituals of reciprocity’ (Williamson, p.88) and redistribution was replaced by one-way traffic, intensified by the fourteenth-century gold famine in Europe. Money, John Julius Norwich (2016) reminds us, bought empires, and precious metal was as sought after as hereditary ‘matches’; in fact, the one bought the other.  The discovery of gold for Spain in New Granada (today’s Colombia) in the sixteenth century, coupled with its absence in New France (today’s Quebec and the Canadian maritime provinces) when the French arrived in the seventeenth century and its scarcity in Brazil, to the disappointment of Portugal, in the early sixteenth century, were the reasons for Spanish might between 1580 and 1630, as well as the country’s great wealth. Indigenous Americans were treated as commodities.  The conquistadors, Las Casas recounts, employed every authority that they could call upon to subjugate them – sharing them out amongst each other, a procedure known as repartimiento, and finally condemning them to at best a feudal serfdom known as encomienda and at worst transportation into slavery or horrible death.  These acts flouted the Natural Law (and Medieval ‘Common Weal’) defined by the Church and the School of Salamanca, which questioned the legitimacy of the Spanish in conquering the Indies. But, no matter, the ‘natural slaves’ of Aristotle, subhuman Taino, were ethnically cleansed from Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic).  To the Amerindian the very concept of organised labour was largely anathema.  The convert writes, They [conquistadors] have set out to line their pockets with gold and to amass private fortunes as quickly as possible so that they can then assume a 7 status quite at odds with the one into which they were born. The rape of the West Indies by the Spanish was exploited for propaganda purposes by the Dutch and English. In 1535, the Lowland painter Jan Mostaert (1475–1555) imagined in paint a paradisiacal setting, Landscape with an episode from the conquest of America, populated by naked ‘innocents’ on the point of violation by an evil Spanish conqueror. In diametric opposition to these practices, a significant body of 167

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New Art New Markets the Catholic Church in South America came to regard the ‘native Indians’ as ‘God’s innocents’, and in some ways spiritually superior to their Iberian counterparts.  This belief was perhaps the earliest expression of Latin American identity. It was this notion of uniqueness that the nationalists revisited at the start of the twentieth century, stimulated by Oswald Spengler’s book The Decline of the West (1918). Spengler, as we discovered in the introduction, spoke of the uniqueness of cultures and also the cyclical rise and fall of civilisations. It was a fundamental thought that chimed perfectly with the magic-laden, subconscious imagining of the Americas. Perhaps, it was felt, Latin American culture had something very different to offer modernism. Spengler’s view on the uniqueness of each civilisation played to the continent’s creative and intellectual strengths. Much later, the Mexican Minister for Culture José Vasconcelos (1882–1959) would argue that true Mexican culture could only rise out of an ethnic mix described as mestizo – an idea that grew to embrace a universal culture made Mexican.  To my mind, this suggests not an extension to modernism but a new cultural beginning. It is an idea that is worth retaining because of its broad application to the rising power of new markets today.  The wilful misunderstanding of the nature of the pre-Columbian American and, in particular, of Amazonian society in general by today’s environmentalists, Mann reminds us, compounds the fallacy that the indigenous Americans left their natural environments untouched.  This is just one modernist paradigm that is, by extension, erroneously applied to mestizo culture.  Another is the distorted belief that because much pre-Columbian art and architecture is geometric, the culture of the Americas is suited to the modernist aesthetic grid.  These logical fallacies pepper modernist commentaries and discredit the entire ideology of modernism.  This is unfortunate because there is much that can be learnt from the modernist reaction to the past. The legitimacy conferred on the Habsburgs by the Catholic Church throughout the reigns of successive Castilian monarchs gave the South American viceroyalties legality in the eyes of the mixed populations of the Indies.  This sanction was eroded after the death of Charles II in 1700, whereupon a reformist French Bourbon dynasty preferred absolutism to religious legitimacy – and failed.  The invasion of Spain by Napoleon in 1808, which put an end to the Catholic monarchy, represented the physical triumph of the Enlightenment in Europe but carved a deep divide in the Spanish Indies between reformist creoles on one side and religious white traditionalists allied with Amerindians on the other – a fissure which exists to this day.  The Jesuits suffered particularly from the new, regalist approach, since they reserved their allegiance for Rome.  The reformist creoles were the victors. For them, it was a short 168

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Hispania step from regalism to republicanism and so to the independence movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Political change was accompanied by cultural transition; Paris replaced Madrid and Lisbon as the creoles’ art-world ‘Mecca’.  The same pattern of economic and social ‘modernisation’ was replicated in Brazil, directed from Rio de Janeiro by the Marquis of Pombal (1699–1782).  The fundamental difference between Spanish America and Portuguese Brazil during the 8 Napoleonic period was the demise of Spanish viceroyalties loyal to ‘free’ Spain and the continuation of Portuguese mastery in Brazil. It is rare that significant political change is bloodless. Modernisers believed that ‘barbarism’ – in short, anarchy – could only be overcome by the imposition of a civilisation. In the minds of the creoles, only two civilisations counted – and they were opposed: the Catholic Church and the French-led Enlightenment.  The peasant risings of Mexico and the republican oligarchy of V   enezuela, headed by Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), became norms. In Mexico, independence in 1821 led to a Spanish Bourbon constitutional monarchy, in which the Church retained its power and possessions and all were equal in the eyes of the law.  This would have been the ideal arrangement for Mexico, and in fact it was one that came to pass in Portuguese Brazil under the regency of the king’s son, Dom Pedro (1798–1834). But Madrid refused to endorse this formula, and the Bourbons’ short-sighted vision was made untenable by a mutiny in Cadiz in 1820. In the end, a creole reinvented himself as Augustin I of Mexico (1783–1824).  This attempt failed because, as Napoleon I discovered, it is difficult to conjure dynastic legitimacy out of thin air. For the next 50 years, Mexico would be ruptured by coups d’état. His Most Serene Highness, Santa Anna (1794–1876), tried to revive the idea of monarchy in the middle of the century but was overthrown – and so we arrive at the execution of the aforementioned Maximilian, an Austrian prince installed by a French army in a South American republic. In an amusing but ill-conceived act of intervention entitled Turistas, the Colombian artist Iván Argote (b.1983) clothed statues of the King of Spain in Madrid with Amerindian, patterned ponchos. He did the same with a statue of Queen Isabella in Bogotá.  This simple action was intended to highlight the illegitimacy of Spanish monarchs in South America. In truth, the rule of the Spanish Crown in the Americas followed a pattern of legitimate dynastic accessions.  The Bourbons, it might be argued, introduced an alien ideology to South America, but they did so in Spain as well. Brazil did not escape the century of revolution in South America, succumbing to its own coup d’état in 1889; thereafter, the army became its symbol of legitimacy.  This would be the rule throughout South America. Elsewhere 169

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New Art New Markets amongst Spain’s American dominions, Simón Bolívar began a series of revolutions. It was the Bourbon reforms that weakened colonial jurisdictions, as Williamson astutely observes.  These fissures, exploited by Republicans, led to the formation of nation states and nationalism. Ironically, nationalism would stimulate an interest in indigenous culture. In the case of Mexico, these forces were heightened by intermittent territorial conflicts with the rising power of the American Republic – notably, the Anglo-American Texas ranchers – which, over the years, led to the erosion of a greater part of its territorial extent. In a series of coloured pen drawings on cloth named the Pinches Rinches series (2011–15), the Tejana (Texan of Mexican ancestry) artist Natalia Anciso (b.1985) visits the plight of her minority, a legacy of the Spanish/Texan wars. Mayan floral designs are expertly interwoven with exquisitely executed, poignant social vignettes on virginal white cloth. Her art is testimony to the consequences of European intervention in Meso-America. In one work, the portrait of a forlorn José enthroned like a Mayan king, clasping a bunch of lilies and sporting a ten-gallon hat, speaks of failed integration and discrimination rather than the triumph of cultural syncretism (fig.19). The awakening of indigenous sentiment amongst the creole oligarchs by the independence movements was hypocrisy.  The very people who had denied the Amerindians equal rights and status under the Pax Hispania now adopted the feathered ‘Indian’ as a symbolic talisman. It is notable that other than exceptional figures like the priest Manuel Hidalgo (1753–1811), who put indigenous people first, independence, Dawn Adès et al. conclude (1989), was for the creoles, not the Amerindians. In his effort to create a united federation of Gran Colombia, Bolívar had employed French revolutionary ideology, unsuited to nations which had been victims of European colonisation.  The question of legitimacy was once again sought in monarchy and in one short-lived experiment: the resurrection of an Inca monarch in Peru in the late eighteenth century, based on an Inca sociopolitical structure. In the twentieth century, it was fashionable to regard the Inca Empire as the first communist state, which, like any attempt to use the past to fulfil a current need or justify a particular ideology, says more about the arrogated desires of the current dominant clique than about the truth. The fact that Amerindians perished in colossal numbers under European mastery encouraged the colonial societies to import slaves from Africa to support their economic system.  This added a further dimension to society, which would ultimately make itself felt in the culture of most of the New World. Race and colour became extremely important elements in both Spanish and Portuguese Latin American society. It had particular significance in Brazil.  This social order was made exotic in 170

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Hispania the eighteenth century, at which time the insistence on cultural separateness in Brazil elevated the Amerindian to nobility.  We see this tendency elsewhere in the Indies. It is expressed in paintings by two Peruvian artists: The Indian Potter (1855) by Francisco Laso (1823–69), in which a near-messianic figure holds a Moche pot; and a work that we look at in more detail later on in this chapter, Indian Mayor of Chincheros:Varayoc (1925) by José Sabogal. In both cases, the ‘Indian’ is treated as detached from Western society or as its silent witness. But it should never be forgotten that this was sanctimonious. The Americas are unique in the sense that while the rest of the world’s civilisations exchanged ideas across the millennia, their people were left, until the end of the fifteenth century, to their own devices. So the wheel was used by them not as a means of transport or manufacture but as a child’s toy.  There were no horses before the Iberians arrived.  There was no immunity to the pestilence which had ravaged Europe,  Asia and Africa. Later, the viceroyalties of Spanish America and Portuguese Brazil were isolated to an extent from the trading hegemonies of the Netherlands and Britain, protected by Iberian proxies supported by local populations of Amerindians and creoles who were fiercely loyal to the Catholic Church. Only in the twentieth century, with the demise of Spanish power, did secular politics erode the region’s unique religious character. Governments attempted to negotiate the self-inflicted, antagonistic path to independence with the twin, extreme, foreign concepts of Marxism and fascism. Both these ideologies, Williamson points out, were symbiotically attached to social Catholicism (that is, the notion that aspects of the teachings of Christ can be reinterpreted in a socialist or paternalistic fashion).  The Church was still present throughout, but the nationalist revolutions following the end of empire were usually extreme and beholden to external economic and political forces. Can Latin American culture establish itself as something more than a proto-Western derivative? It is hard, but not impossible, to imagine so. It would involve unravelling the use made by Marxist, fascist and neo-liberal ideologies not only of social Catholicsim but also of indigenismo, a concept we have yet to address. It is a daunting task, as we can see by the following two examples.  The first is the murder by the Spanish in 1572 of  Túpac Amaru, the last free Inca chief; the spirit of  Túpac Amaru was exorcised by the Amerindians in a rebellion against the Spanish in Peru in 1780 and again by the Tupamaros, Marxist guerrillas, in Uruguay in the 1970s.  The second, in diametric contrast, is the legend of the vainglorious crusader, Portuguese King Sebastian (1554–78).  The king was appropriated in the distant Brazilian province of Canudos, in support of the monarchy and in opposition to 171

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New Art New Markets the newly proclaimed Brazilian Republic.  Today, extreme left-wing groups like Sendero Luminoso (‘Shining Path’) find common ground with indigenous peoples­ in South America.  Manichaean expressions of rage such as Sendero Luminoso, which employ Western models and symbols to corral the forces of opposition, have created many of the social and political dystopias of South America. There are sensible and productive alternatives to a global culture in South America. In the Americas as in South East Asia, European invaders were succeeded in the twentieth century by totalitarian dictatorships. But in South America, at least, the illiberal governments observed their respective constitutions.  This had much to do with their need for legitimacy in the face of growing government apostasy.  The new regimes faced overwhelming economic pressures, which required the adoption of an alien ideology: the neo-liberal capitalism of the Chicago School.  The result was the penury that South American presidents were obliged to visit on their citizens in order to repay International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans that had been opposed in the first place by the Church. The South American culture we encounter today is the result of these cataclysmic forces acting on thousands of ethnic groups and languages. It is, in fact, remarkable how much has survived.  The Catholic legacy, which assimilated much of the continent’s indigenous culture, is the most reliable filter through which these primordial beliefs and customs have been digested.  The degree of integration differs, from ‘closed’ Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and Ecuador to ‘open’ Argentina and Venezuela.  The states that are the most intriguing are those that exhibit a taut relationship between ‘open’ and ‘closed’.  The states that equivocate reveal the most to us about contemporary art and culture because they are heterodox; they deliberate before declaring an old idea to be a shibboleth.  These cultures are, in short, authentic.  The dashing, traditionally clad figure of Angel Woman (1979) in Mexico’s Sonora Desert, clutching a portable radio in her right hand, by the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide (b.1942), conjures the happy collision of modernity and locality that defines true Latin American culture.  The silhouetted musical troupe processing across a stage in Frevo (1951) by the Brazilian photographer Gaspar Gasparian (1899–1966) salutes another identity, that of the multi-ethnic carnival.  This is a joyous Hispanic image.  We concentrate on Mexico and Brazil, the two largest and economically most proficient South American nations, but we do not ignore the others. Both these states are successful today because of their political sagacity.  This has gifted them a degree of economic independence, which allows them to develop and showcase their cultural uniqueness.  The revitalisation of an idea that had been brewing since the early twentieth-century archaeological excavations in Mexico and the first murmurings 172

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Hispania of independence gave both states a platform on which to build a unique cultural identity: indigenista. Indigenista is a term coined in 1900 by a Uruguayan journalist, José Enrique Rodó (1871–1917) in his book Ariel.  Ariel is someone who sacrifices material wealth for spiritual pleasure. It is tempting to visualise the coup de main by Cortés and his brigands, the imprisonment of Moctezuma, and the massacre of Inca ruler Atahualpa (c.1502–33) and 7000 Inca Americans by Francisco Pizarro (c.1471–1541) as a backdrop to explain the behavioural chasm that divided Europeans and Amerindians in the sixteenth century.  This is perhaps the genesis of the term, but Rodó’s application was contemporary. He intended to draw a line between the epicurean world of the United States and the lofty concerns to be found in local tradition.  The book contrasted two societies; Ariel questioned many of the advantages of Anglo-American capitalism and his alter ego, Caliban, supported a form of consumer barbarism. It led to the advance of Latin values and a rejection of the positivist economic ideology – a predilection that persists in South America to this day. A series of key images painted by the Mexican muralists build on this resentment following the political hiatus of the Mexican Civil War. José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) in his 1932–4 mural for Dartmouth College contrasts the chaos, corruption and bloodshed that positivism has brought to South America in his panel Hispanoamerica with the orderly, sober but dehumanised America in the section Angloamerica.  The division of the continent, Orozco shows us, is irreconcilable now that the Latin American soul, Quetzalcóatl, has been exiled. In David Alfaro Siqueiros’ (1896–1974) Cuauhtemoc against the myth, the last Mexica ruler appears as a symbol of contemporary resistance. Cuauhtémoc (1496–1525), the nephew of Moctezuma, stood up to Cortés, refusing to accept that he was Quetzalcóatl.  The consequence of this act of defiance was torture and death at the hands of the invaders. Diego Rivera (1886–1957), in his History of Mexico: From the Conquest to the Future (1929–30) in the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City, drew his composition from a pre-Columbian screen-fold, according to Adès et al., but chose to refer to the suffering of the mass of Mexican people. His saviour was Karl Marx rather than an indigenous god, but the visceral strength of the Catholic faith and indigenous beliefs have outlived extreme post-Enlightenment ideologies, though extremism of every hue shimmers in the background. In the 1990s, a neo-Marxist group with Mayan characteristics, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, terrorised Mexico.  They used as their symbol of unity the Virgin of Guadalupe. The inability of the new South American republics to devise a national culture in tune with the modern world, Williamson suggests, is at the root of their search 173

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New Art New Markets for their respective indigenous values. Nothing in liberal-democratic doctrine came close to the reconciliation of unity and diversity or the mix of high and low culture managed by the Catholic Church.  The Church was able to assimilate an array of spiritual needs into a complex patchwork. It succoured the orphaned child of South America; it shielded it from the harshness of the modern world. It was a surrogate mother.  When its ‘old world’ was denigrated by Liberals, nationalism and authoritarianism filled the void. Pop art, that definitive commentary on the post-war United States, found little traction in South America beyond spasmodic, ironic references best described as ‘anti-pop’.  Antonio Caro’s (b.1950) 1976 adaptation of the Coca-Cola logo to read ‘Columbia’ and Octavio Blasi’s (b.1960) caustic depiction of Anglo-American capitalism, Christie’s (1990), depicting a crucified Mickey Mouse, show that the revitalisation of tradition has little to fear from this creative impulse.  The interpretation of the past is subject to prejudice and misinformation.  There is no absolute reinterpretation.  The key to its success and authenticity is its successful reappearance in contemporary colours. In Mexico, indigenista was widely adopted following the bloody revolution of 1910–20. But twentieth-century modernism refused to go away.  Within its ideology there existed the belief in a solution to dictatorship.  At bottom, there persisted the notion of progress outlined in the Bourbon regency in Spain and its French-inspired doctrine of enlightenment.  This lay uncomfortably beside the mystic and prophetic cultures of the indigenous civilisations – and, indeed, the faith of professed Catholics in South America.  Those modern states whose pasts grew out of the Mayan, Mexica and Inca civilisations seemed best placed to combat or mollify the deleterious effects of modernism. But a robust defence of ‘authenticity’ requires other (modern) tools: a strong economy and a stable government to boot. By the late nineteenth century, South America was a locus for political, urban ideologues who challenged the role of the Church.  The infection spread to culture.  Artists were labelled Surrealist, Constructivist or Expressionist, and this was reinforced by the return of émigrés to their impressionable homelands, replete with recently acquired Western stylisations.  This and academic realism informed the art of Hispanic America. Los Tres Grandes – Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros – have reactionary (academic realist) qualities.  Their work is very direct and comprehensible – attributes that Orozco, in particular, felt that modernism lacked. It was a style that gave rise to the neo-classical paintings of the émigré Argentinian Ricardo Cinalli (b.1948) and the Colombian Ramiro Arango (b.1946).  The representation of an outsized, reconstructed Las Meninas (1989) by Arango anticipates the 174

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Hispania late twentieth-century ironic homages to Western Renaissance masterpieces of the Chinese Political Pop generation. In ‘Las Meninas’, we can see that the rotund vessels are inanimate substitutes for the plump women of fellow-Colombian artist Fernando Botero (b.1932). On another level,  Arango acknowledges the clustered still lifes of Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), particularly evident in the precariously placed foreground jug balanced improbably on its waist and lip. One thing that both China’s pop generation and the two Colombians,  Arango and Botero, share is wit; both camps, through their irreverence, have prepared the ground for a subsequent generation to disregard the Western canon as a shibboleth. Modernism does not fit South America.  When it arrived, it was filtered through an Iberian sieve and stirred into a South American stew.  The Uruguayan émigré artist Joaquín Torres García (1874–1949) perfectly illustrates the metamorphosis of modernism into indigenista. He alluded to a space outside the cosmopolitan art world of Montevideo when he created the glyph-inscribed stone wall and basin Cosmic Monument (1939) in Parque Rodó. His sculpture highlights the sensible use of indigenous symbolism.  The numerous circles on the wall may refer to the Mayan invention of the mathematical concept of zero or, in one case, a circle topped with a cross: an orb.  There is a ship, perhaps representing the arrival of the Portuguese (or Spanish) conquerors; a shooting star, maybe a premonition; and an SOS – commentary, perhaps, on the primordial cry uttered by the indigenous peoples as the Iberian conquest began in earnest.  A cross is carved inside a circle at the bottom right-hand-side of the monument. Could it refer to the crossroads that the Mexica so feared and regarded as a sign of instability? Or might it represent the cross on the turtle’s back, which divided the Mayan world into quarters? Although TorresGarcía lived on the Atlantic side of the continent, it is tempting to link his depiction of a sun and stars to Inca astrology. Both he and the contemporary Mexican artist Damián Ortega (b.1967) play with the modernist grid – a device that is also very evident in the relief decoration on pre-Columbian stone sculpture and the geometric architecture of buildings such as the Templo Mayor in downtown Mexico City. In his Tortillas Construction Module sculpture (1998, fig.21), Ortega invents out of local ‘materials’ a form that can be ordered in a number of ways like the interchangeable symbols and shapes that lie on a grid. Roberto Matta (1911–2002), another exile, who returned to Chile after extensive travels in Europe and the United States, invigorated modern art with his biomorphic compositions, which encompassed his interest in surrealism; comic strips; and pre-Columbian, Olmec-inspired astrological calendars. His art has been called ‘Indo-American abstraction’ because of the use he made of a grid in which to place Latin American symbols. His grid acknowledges, 175

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New Art New Markets rather, I believe, his debt to the geometric logic of the architecture of  Tenochititlan and Chan Chan, the capital of Chimor, a Peruvian culture that existed from the ninth to the fifteenth century. Surrealism alone was successfully grafted onto Latin America because its inherent aim was to recontextualise the modern world.  This encouraged artists to imagine irrational spaces.  The origins of the collaboration of nativism and surrealism can be traced back to the 1920s, and to the magical-realist writings of the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974). However, none of this makes pre-Columbian art modern or modernism a universal language.  In their minds, the Muisca people (800–1600) flew like birds after taking a hallucinogenic called Yopo. Dream-like experiences were commonly induced states for millennia amongst the many peoples of South America.  A latter-day ‘prophet’ like the twentieth-century Peruvian writer Carlos Castaneda (1925–98) implied that these practices had been extended.  They are recorded in his many books recalling the  Toltec-inspired, shamanistic visions of Don Juan. So it was that twentieth-century psychoanalysis came to emphasise the importance of the subconscious by recourse to the drug-fuelled ceremonies of indigenous people. The formation of a distinct Latin American culture is as much a rejection of the notion of progress as it is an immersion in the static.  The impossibility of discovering unblemished indigenous culture on a significant scale means that local culture is inevitably mestizo (mixed-race).  The Bicycle Race,  Texcoco (1938) by Antonio Ruíz (1892–1964) shows, in the naive style, the stark contrast in social status and wealth between a Europeanised audience beneath the canopy and the traditionally clad majority perched precariously on walls, in trees or else huddled near to the road, which serves as a cycle track.  The origins of this racial division occurred when the necessarily urbanised sixteenth-century Amerindians, mixed-bloods and black-African immigrants were initially housed in barrios – poor districts on the fringes of Spanish-style cities.  They were the bottom of the pile.  Amerindian social hierar9 chies were levelled by the forced urbanisation of the ecomenderos, creating a distinct mestizo culture. In Mexico, retablos, or small votive pictures painted in memory of a miraculous recovery or the survival of a perilous event, were incorporated into the visual diaries left to us by Frida Kahlo (1907–54) and Antonio Ruíz.  To this day, the moradas (churches) in the pueblos of New Mexico house an array of culturally distinct, carved and painted, wooden Christian effigies.  To add to the visual chorus,  African animistic beliefs, totems and rituals survived their transference across the Atlantic and fused to Christian traditions that are now practised throughout Latin America.  The Mexican artist Linda Lucia Santana (b.1980), joins 176

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Hispania fictitious ballads known as corridos to fictional portraits, thereby demonstrating the objective and wider application of these poetic stories to the community. Latin American artists were far enough away from the Paris art world to escape capture; not so, their Iberian cousins Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and José de Almada Negreiros (1893–1970). Insidious ideologies The success of the modern economy speeds the path to cultural orthodoxy.  The duration and scale of that success determines the nature of that orthodoxy. Under the authoritarian governments of Porfirio Díaz (intermittently, from 1876 to 1911), Mexico grew its economy at a colossal rate.  The creole elites benefited most, and spent lavishly on consumer luxuries. In this period of crony capitalism, Diego Rivera drew his inspiration from European art history.  The revolution that brought to an end the 34-year tenure of Díaz was fought under the slogan Tierra y Libertad (Land and Liberty).  The far-reaching reforms that it hoped to achieve were only begun in 1920. Siqueiros – a proto-Futurist with, as Adès et al. (1989) point out, a strong interest in social protest – also called for the restoration of ‘old values’ endowed with ‘new values’.  This attitude would be defined by a modernist approach to form, which Siqueiros believed to be a universal language.  The artist Saturnino Herrán (1887–1918) exemplified this direction. He had an interest in the Mexican Native American as an economically disenfranchised social outcast, not a native American. Siquerios’ pictures owe more to the social vision of Herrán than to his own, elevated view of the syncretic capability of modernism. His visions of indigenista, such as Peasant Mother (1929), were salted with European social ideology.  The artist’s epic mural The March of Humanity (1964) on the Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros cultural centre in Mexico City is social-realist graffiti art writ large. It is a fact, says Edward Lucie-Smith (2004), that muralism prospered in Latin American states which retained a significant Amerindian element. I might add that it was employed in those states, such as Mexico, where excavations of Amerindian sites in the early part of the twentieth century revealed the mural art of the Mexica. Indigenous Mexicans had also been employed by the Spanish mendicant orders in the early years of the conquest to decorate the new churches and convents.  The hybrid schemas they conjured up must be the earliest examples of Latin American art.  All this material was now available to inspire a new generation of practitioners. Rivera – who had a significant collection of mestizo artefacts,  Amerindian sculptures 177

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New Art New Markets and ceramics replete with Mexica imagery, as well as models of figures from street festivals – was more in tune with his surroundings than Siqueiros.  A significant aesthetic, and perhaps philosophical, principle that Rivera shared with pre-Columbian Meso-Amercians was a tendency to construct images out of blocks of colour. It is something that engages Spengler, and a way of seeing that he attributes to the geometry of the ancient Greeks, who conceived of form and thought as finite.  The Meso-American peoples, Daniel Finamore and Stephen D. Houston tell us, treated all elements that could be labeled with words . . .  As discrete and defineable So that the sky appears not as a limitless but as a horizontal rectangular band 10 embellished with celestial symbols with distinct edges and ends. This may be a basic principle of indigenista. It is adopted, for example, by Rivera throughout much of his art. Stylistically the geometric and bounded quality of the elements within such compositions point to a pre-Columbian understanding of the visual image.  A painting from the Lily series, Flower Day (1925), by Rivera stylistically symbolises a type of indigenista.  The subject-matter itself can also be read as a cultural duality.  Two Amerindian women bend in supplication.  They are reminiscent of the kneeling, stone representations of the Mexica deity Chalchihuitlicue, and appear before the bending figure of the lily seller, who is part-shaman, part-Christ.  The substantial volume of the figures gives the work the quality of a painted relief sculpture from recently excavated Teotihuacán, but the figure of the lily seller and his burden describe the True Cross and, to my mind, allude to the fourteen Stations of the Cross. But once again,  Adès et al. explain, the burden of flowers perhaps also has its source in Mexica poetry. Rivera, Dawn Adès (1989) points out, ingeniously connects the popular, revolutionary art of engravings (in Mexico) to the significance of the equilibrium of chiaroscuro to the Pre-Columbians.  The most renowned printmaker in Mexico at the time was José Posada (1852–1913), and Rivera owned thousands of his engravings. In Mexico during this period, the association of foreign values with wealth and indigenous culture with poverty was a recurring feature, but its compositional, cultural balance was hotly disputed.  The third of Los Tres Grandes, José Orozco, should have the last word. He maintained that the people should make their own art, and that artists and the state should be restrained from making art for the people. 178

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Hispania The wholesale absorption of modernism by a local culture is rare.  Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973) managed it when painting works under the title of Antropofagia. One work in particular,  Abaporo (meaning ‘man eats’ in one of Brazil’s indigenous languages, Tupi) (1928), quite literally devours the European style. Her anthropomorphic figure stands outside any European canon. Once again, we encounter simple coloured shapes. But the accolade in a modern Latin America goes to Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991).  Tamayo, unlike his famous contemporaries, Los Tres Grandes, did not pander to the ideological aims of contemporary politics. He felt instinctively that revolution would harm Mexico. Instead, he envisaged a traditional country, a humane state, and he saw life through the eyes of humanity. His depictions of Mexican street life are close in spirit to the clangorous fish markets recorded by the Indonesian painter Hendra Gunawan (1918–83).  An umbilical chord of intention ties the locally inspired art of  Tamayo, who identified pre-Columbian characteristics in Mexican folk art, to the cultural excavation of Amerindian art in Oaxaca of Francisco Toledo (b.1940). Both artists quarry their respective cultures for current meaning. In yet another approach to indigenista, Sabogal shows us the nobility of the native. In the aforementioned Native American Mayor of Chincheros Varayoc (1925), the figure is the noble savage – or else, a Greek god. But it is also apparent that Sabogal saw Peruvian culture in carved, wooden kero beakers that had been made in a fashion unchanged since Inca times, rather than in oil paintings.  And so his statuesque Inca, with his ceremonial staff, is depicted as a reluctant performer on a Hispanic stage.  The Spanish Church, the plaza, Iberian religious ceremonies, processions and festivals have all left an indelible mark on Amerindian culture.  This collision of cultures, which also included African tradition, became known as mestizaje. Mestizaje is a distinct, syncretic entity and a consequence of Amerindian performances of  Iberian history plays. It employs its own iconography and, later,  Amerindian and African Caribbean voodoo and Amerindian animistic magic.  What emerges from this cultural and religious alliance is a rich hypostasis, mined in the late modern world by artists like Gabriel García Márquez (1927– 2014) and Frida Kahlo. Kahlo was herself a mestizo, and her self-portraits represent the organic pluralism of Mexico, expressed through the retablo and allusions to Mexica gods; in fact, the number of seemingly disconnected objects in her paintings encouraged European artists to consider her a Surrealist.  The objects in her still lifes encompass everything from Toltec figurines, a Mexican flag, a skull and a Mexican monument to modern American factories.  Within the context of modern Mexico, these elements are real – part and parcel of daily life. Latin American art of the twentieth century was able to keep modernism at arm’s length, Lucie-Smith 179

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New Art New Markets (2004) observes, because of the proximity, access and functionality of its material and wider indigenous culture. In the late twentieth century, the fifteenth-century Mexica Templo Mayor ruin was unearthed in the heart of the capital, next to Zócalo Square. Its main altar is decorated with stone reliefs of human skulls; it was clearly a temple whose gods demanded human sacrifices. It reinforces the idea in the minds of Mexicans that their capital city is built on the ruins of  Tenochtitlan. It also gives plastic meaning to the El Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), and helps to explain the origins of the calavera (skull) in contemporary life. Miraculous events with a basis in truth are commonplace in Mexico.  As the congregation in a small church in Tepeyac were roused to fever pitch in the 1920s, their statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe fell to the ground revealing beneath her garments the Mexica rain goddess, Chalchihuitlicue. It is a fruitless task today to attempt to separate the cultural layers upon which mestizaje sits. However, the past has been repressed in Mexico, so at intervals, like a determined plant, it breaks through the moraine floors of Western notions of civilisation.  The Peruvian artist Antonio Huillca Huallpa (b.1942), known as ‘Huillca’, encapsulates the spirit of mestizaje. It is strange, in fact, to see the modernist grid that the artist imposes on his work The Three Cultures (c.1980).  This belies the increasing integration of the individual cultures that make up Hispanic civilisation, and which Huillca also captures in his other paintings.  The brightly patterned, painted and collaged canvases of the Brazilian Beatriz Milhazes (b.1960) bring us up to the present day.  These works effectively reference the traditional female acts of sewing and embroidery, spinning, weaving and decorating textiles.  They also refer to the indigenous character of wood and metal carvings created from the earliest colonial period for the churches of South America.  They look beyond these art forms, however, in order to express the festivals and carnivals that characterise Brazilian popular life. Art-world colonialism There is a point at which the art of the indigenista meets the work of the Mexican muralists: their shared animosity towards internationalism.   Western avant-garde movements were paraded before the South American art world in genuflection.  The São Paulo Biennale, in particular, is to this day a global entrepôt in the heart of Latin America for the dissemination of the global aesthetic.  The exception that proves the rule is the art of  Tomie Ohtake (1913–2015) of the Seibi Group of Japanese émigré artists, part of a huge and distinct Japanese community that emigrated to São Paulo from the 1930s to the 1960s. Ohtake’s take on South 180

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Hispania American abstraction greatly softened its edges and anticipated the bulbous, biomorphic sculptures of Ernesto Neto (b.1964). Ohtake’s art was influenced by the Tokyo-based Gutai Group (founded in 1954), although it draws ultimately from international cultural currents.  The results are an often satisfying, eclectic response to international, Japanese and South American art. The enduring success of conceptual and site-specific art in South America, and particularly in Brazil and Cuba, is reflected in the the São Paulo and Havana biennales.  The Havana Biennale is supported by European foundations keen to inculcate a notion of shared experience amongst New World nations.  These periodic moments of self-examination in the West are usually accompanied by altruistic gestures.  The disingenuous opposition to the international art market, which employs a Western critical vocabulary to disapprove of Western hypocrisy, fails because successful exponents of its imported artistic language choose to emigrate as soon as they gain an international reputation.  Westernised artists in the multiple societies that comprise new markets have all chosen to be either symbolic prisoners of conscience or to escape west and claim their financial or moral rewards.  When an international system is applied to a new market, the consequence is not emendation but opposition or surrender.  The exception really is Spanish hereditary kingship in South America, mediated and underpinned as it was by Roman Catholicism. It worked uniquely well after a period of gross adjustment in many of the civilisations and cultures of Meso- and South America. By this I mean that it didn’t eviscerate local traditions. If xenophobia in South America was largely cultural in the early part of the twentieth century, it became economic and political with the onset of the Great 11 Depression.  The United States employed the Roosevelt Corollary to its Monroe Doctrine – the right of a ‘civilised state’ (i.e.  The United States) to intervene with alacrity in another state’s affairs when it felt justified in so doing.  With the death in 2017 of the erstwhile President of Panama, Manuel Noriega, we were reminded how it worked. President George H.W. Bush (b.1924) had authorised the invasion of Panama at the end of 1989 on a pretext, accusing Noriega of infringing the rights of the country’s democratic opposition. He dubbed the invasion, without irony, ‘Operation Just Cause’. Most Latin American countries have suffered the iniquity of foreign interference in their government.  The result in the first half of the twentieth century was the formation of despotic regimes followed by a spate of civil wars and growing xenophobia, enhanced by the influx of immigrants drawn by the economic expansion of South America in that period.  This condition was aggravated when multinational 181

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New Art New Markets North American companies turned small Central American states into ‘banana republics’, and Cuba and Brazil into sugar and coffee states, respectively. In Latin America today, because of the long-standing cultural and economic fragility of states weakened by centuries of single-commodity colonisation and, latterly, cash-crop capitalism, none is as developed as any of its Western counterparts. It is little wonder that Latin American states fail to share the West’s optimistic view of progress.  The humorous uns trocados series by the Colombian artist Rodrigo Torres (b.1981) – in which, in one example, he transforms a Cuban peso bill into one Disney dollar authorised by the wealthy-businessman character Scrooge McDuck – perfectly describes Latin American economic reality. As a direct consequence of these induced domestic economic failures, a number of national artists sought success abroad.  They adopted an international artistic language taught to them by the Western art world.  They then used their fame to voice their disapproval of the conduct of their homeland governments, on platforms familiar to an international audience and a global media. In Colombia, this stage is the Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá. In 2002,  the Colombian conceptualist Doris Salcedo (b.1958) lowered 280 empty chairs from the roof of the Palace of Justice in order to honour the dead from a siege led by a faction loyal to drug baron Pablo Escobar (1949–93), 17 years earlier. In 2016, she used the square once more – this time for a work entitled Sumando Ausencias (Adding Up Absences).  Two thousand pieces of white cloth, with the name of a victim sewn into each, were laid out on the square to commemorate the dead in Colombia’s war against the FARC guerrillas of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).  The Mexican photographer Rubén Ortiz Torres (b.1964) speaks to an international audience, rather than a Mexican one, through the shared cultural stereotypes of the soap opera, tabloid imagery and pop music. He uses the language of consumer prosperity to address a poor populace already afflicted by layers of indoctrination from alien powers. Do these ‘statements’ add to the rich mille-feuille of civilisations that have given rise to Latin American culture, or are they further evidence of Western interference in the region’s affairs? Other artists comment acutely and factually on the condition of their fellow citizens – but, again, to what end? The Colombian Carlos Motta (b.1978) produced a series of single-sheet, foolscap-sized news bulletins between 2005 and 2009 (reprised in 2014 for a show at the Guggenheim, New York) that recorded, on the one hand, examples of US intervention in Latin America since 1946 and, on the other, leftist atrocities. On the reverse, he reproduced two handprints and the symbol of the Mano Blanco death squads of El Salvador. One bulletin begins: 182

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Hispania 1946 The US Army School of the Americas, Panama The US army opened the school of the Americas (SOA) in Panama to ‘modernize’ and ‘professionalize’ Latin American armies. It ends: 2013 End of the Monroe Doctrine? In a speech at the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C., U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” The Monroe Doctrine has formed the backbone of U.S. foreign policy since it was delivered in December 1823. The twentieth-century political history of Latin America was especially marked by the early involvement of the United States in its internal affairs; nowhere was this more the case than in Cuba. Following the Spanish–American War of 1898, in which Spain was defeated, the United States effectively ran the former Spanish island colony.  A degenerate government allowed radicalism to thrive.  In 1959, the Leninist Fidel Castro (1926–2016) wrested power from the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista (1901–73), holding on to the reins of power until 2008.  A byproduct of Castro’s government was the decampment of wealthy Cubans to Miami, a city that acquired the honorific title of ‘the new capital of Latin America’. Miami’s newly acquired status and wealth attracted the world’s leading art fair,  Art Basel, in 2002. In the installation Letter to the Censors (2003), Carlos Garaicoa (b.1967) addresses, by way of contrast with the United States, censorship and cultural impoverishment at home under Fidel Castro. His work of art is a model of an early twentieth-century island cinema house; many of these ‘symbols of decadence’ were demolished during the Castro years. Garaicoa urges the viewer to consider, further, that revolutionary societies erase prior histories. One cinema in Havana that was spared the wrecker’s ball, however, has been reimagined in the thaw that followed the Obama–Raúl Castro accord of 2014. It now houses a branch of the international dealer Galleria Continua. In the gallery’s first group exhibition of Cuban art, Garaicoa took pride of place. It is certainly the intention of the international art market to extend its tentacles to Cuba from Miami. But Cuba’s suitability as an art-market centre is far less assured than Mexico’s, whose economic, historical and political credentials project self-confidence. 183

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New Art New Markets Mexico is the most stable of Latin America’s republics. It has been free of insurrection from the 1930s onwards. Crucially, its governments, alone among sister republics, were able to affix sufficient quantities of indigenista to a revolutionary creed to convince the majority that they had legitimacy.  The policy of cultural inclusion orchestrated by Mexico’s Minster of Culture, José Vasconcelos, led to the direct support by the state of the country’s aforementioned three great muralists – a case study in supremely effective government arts policy. Mexico’s corporate-state-style governments have steered it through the post-war period far better than those of other Latin American republics.  The fruits of this sustained period of economic and political stability can be seen in such cultural symbols as investor Carlos Slim Helú’s wedge-shaped Soumaya Museum of pre-Columbian art and the environmentally harmonious Jumex Museum, placed side by side in the upmarket suburb of New Polanco in the nation’s capital.  The Jumex Museum is owned by the collector Eugenio López Alonso (b.1967), who also runs a large art space in a Grupo Jumex factory in the suburb of Ecatepec.  The Soumaya Museum was designed by Fernando Romero, the architect also selected to build a proposed new Latin American art museum in Miami, which would house the collection of the dealer and son-in-law of Slim Helú, Gary Nader (b.1962).  The significance of these events is twofold.  Their validation will enhance the prospects of blue-chip Latin American art. But they may also bear witness to a commercial bubble. Private museums lack sustainable credibility because of the perceived corruption of symbolic value by private vested interests.  The relationship between collectors, dealers and investors is narrowly distinguished in new markets, and changes to the cultural landscape can dramatically shape the short-term monetary performances of the top names. Brazil provides the stiffest challenge to Mexico’s ambitions to be a regional artmarket omphalos.  The country was easily established as a federal republic in 1889, and was dominated from the outset by an economic elite based in São Paulo and the province of Minas Gerais.  This arrangement collapsed under the 1937–45 authoritarian, corporate government of Getúlio Vargas’ (1882–1954) Estado Novo. In 1960, Brasília, a vast modern metropolis, was built in the country’s hinterland. It became the seat of government and symbolised the aspiration of Brazil to be a modern state. But four years later, a coup reinstated a military junta that was to govern for 20 years.  The economy during this period enjoyed record growth, which obviated the need for political reform. But by the 1980s, a financial crisis and four-figure inflation led to the army stepping down to make way for a representative government. Social inequalities in Brazil were scarcely concealed by the authorities during the 2016 Olympics.  The plight of its underclass, those who live in the favelas, has 184

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Hispania been recounted by film-maker Fernando Meirelles in City of God (2002) and in a documentary by the artist Vik Muniz (b.1961), in which he portrays the life of the catadores, those who live off mountains of waste. His film, Waste Land (2010), records the lives of this underclass at the end of the consumer chain by assembling their portraits out of the detritus in which they live and work.  The work echoes an earlier, bathetic painting, Man seated on a Trash Heap (1926–7) by the Mexican artist Francisco Goitia (1882–1960), whose subject the artist calls, with a spoonful of irony, the happiest man in the world. Social commentary represented on celluloid is not new to Brazil. One of the most coruscating artistic moments in its history can be found in the images made in 1979 by Miguel Rio Branco (b.1946) of prostitutes and the extremely poor in the Pelourinho district of the city of Salvador de Bahia.  Their plight is in stark contrast to the art district of Ipanema in the country’s capital.  What emerges from these works is a powerful sense of the silent deterioration of life.  This stubborn and extreme social iniquity will inevitably lead to future political unrest. Brazil’s political agony is also South America’s.  This simple fact casts a shadow over the entire continent’s cultural capital. South America has endured coups d’état aplenty: in Chile in 1924, in Argentina in 1930 and again in 1943.  The second of these ushered in the Juan Perón government from 1946 to 1955. In Colombia, internecine struggles led to a period of sustained violence, known as La Violencia, and authoritarian government from the 1940s to the 1960s.  The country endured a bloody civil war that lasted over a decade from 1949 to the 1960s.  The Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz (b.1951) created a work,  Ambulatorio (1994), in response to the carnage. It consists of a large, aerial photograph of a city printed onto a shattered pane of security glass. Moñoz was inspired by his discovery of glass splinters following one of many explosions that rocked the city of Santiago de Cali in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1973, President Juan María Bordaberry Arocena (1928–2011) of Uruguay closed parliament and ruled with the support of a military junta.  The photo-journal El Popular was shut down in the same year, but a significant cache of photographic negatives was secreted away by its editor before he fled the country. In 2005, those negatives, charting social protest from 1957 to 1973, were rediscovered.  Ten years later, the Brazilian artist Rosângela Rennó Gomes (b.1962) employed a variety of vintage projectors acquired in Montevideo and Rio flea markets in a slide show of those forgotten events. Chile’s long experiment with communism was brought to an end in 1973, after US intervention had weakened the Salvador Allende (1908–73) government, by the actions of one of its generals,  Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006). Dictatorship was often a popular form of government as long as the economy was thriving. In 185

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New Art New Markets Chile, under Pinochet, the short-term benefits wrought by the free market walked hand in hand with acquiescence. But at the fringes of society lie those who suffer because of their inability to conform.  The photographer Paz Errázuriz (b.1944) documented the outcasts of Santiago in a 1980s series called Adam’s Apple.  The photograph Evelyn I Santiago (1988, fig.22) shows a transvestite on a bed.  The pose struck by the model is a mirror image of Diego Velázquez’ (1599–1660) The Rokeby Venus (1647­–51). In Velázquez’ painting, the subject has her back to us and her face is revealed in a mirror held up by a putto. In Errázuriz’ photograph, the protagonist faces his audience and his silhouette appears in a half-length mirror affixed to the wall.  The Faenza series by Colombian artist Miguel Ángel Rojas (b.1946) has a similar slant. Rojas secretly filmed surreptitious night-time homosexual liaisons in Bogotá B-movie cinemas in the 1970s. Homosexuality was not decriminalised in Colombia until 1980. The greatest wealth after the Second World War was concentrated in Argentina and Venezuela, in spite of recurrent dictatorships in both countries. It was in these two states that the international movement of geometric abstraction prospered.  Art for art’s sake characterised the colour rhythms of the Venezuelan Alejandro Otero (1921–90), who exercised a great influence on the kinetic work of his fellow countryman, Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005). Both these artists spent their careers in Paris.  Are these geometric patterns, which order space and connect planes, escapist? Do they produce harmony and create stability in the midst of a chaotic reality – as the art world claims? The São Paulo Biennale in Brazil and the middle-of-the-road Mexican government of President Miguel Alemán Valdés (1902–83) both leaned towards the United States and ushered in a period of internationalism from the 1950s to the 1990s.  The political climate was harsh in Chile, Cuba, V   enezuela and Argentina for much of the second half of the twentieth century, but the ideology of abstraction still managed to infect their national cultures. New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art reinforced the significance of this type of work with a show in 2016 of Cuban-born centenarian, the hard-edged practitioner Carmen Herrera (b.1915), and another exhibition the following year of the Brazilian ‘iconoclast’ Hélio Oiticia (1937–80). Both these events define the West’s twin obsessions: the politics of gender and the politics of intervention. The reassessment of the art of the arch-Modernist Carmen Herrera is in accordance with today’s reappraisal of female artists in the twentieth-century avant-garde and beyond. Helio Oiticia is associated with the 1960s Brazilian movement known as Tropicalia, which continued Modernism’s cannibalization of indigenous cultures for its own ends. The final chapter in this process of appropriation can be seen in the contemporary works by 186

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Hispania Latin Americans who make art that is critical of their homelands. Other examples of this tendency have proven, thankfully, ephemeral.  The trite beach set,  Tropicalia (1967), which Oiticia constructed as an ironic commentary on the glossy cultural makeover of the US-backed Brazilian government of the day, is as fragile an artistic statement as the flimsy materials from which it is made.  A public sculpture in Caracas by the Venezuelan abstractionist Carlos Cruz Diez (b.1923) received its just deserts from its public: it had suffered over many years at the hands of graffitists and was finally demolished by the government to allow for a scenic view of the port. The subject matter that presents itself to contemporary artists from Latin America, in common with those from other parts of the non-Western world, has very often been violent. Intra-continental wars, such as that between Paraguay and Bolivia in the 1930s over imagined oil fields, furthered the distress of many states.  An artist like Francisco Goitia paints death.  The hanging, skeletal corpse in Landscape at Zacatecas I (1914) records the murder of a general (and another man) during the protracted Mexican Civil War. It is as stark and emotionally excoriating as Menin Road (1919) by Paul Nash (1889–1946). Both pictures treat trees as metaphors for crucifixion, but their landscapes are hosts to sacrifice without redemption. In 1989, the West realised that it had to write off substantial amounts of Latin American debt and later stimulate its many economies by creating free-trade zones.  This created immediate relief for beleaguered societies in the region and added the finishing touches to globalisation. It is unsurprising that from this point a number of international South American artists began to achieve record prices for their work. Foreign direct investment was reflected in the art market as South American collectors based in Miami, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro began to build collections.  The politics of South America favoured a ‘delegative democracy’, in which power is given to a single national leader through the ballot box. Such a system has proven to be highly supportive of art markets. Important Kunsthallen sprouted as national economies were released from debt peonage: the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (founded 1991); the Museo Jumex (f.2013), based on a collection built by its founder, Eugenio López Alonso, in the 1990s; the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (f.1970s); and the Museo Minas Gerais (f.2006), housing the collection of Bernardo Paz (b.1949). In Brazil, in particular, in the 1990s a change in the law allowed companies to fund art through tax exemption.  The export of the Latin American ‘aesthetic’ to Europe coincided happily with the 500th anniversary of the ‘discovery’ of America by Christopher Columbus (1436–1506).

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New Art New Markets A revanchist Mexico and Brazil hold the keys to a Latin American cultural renaissance The individual story of each South American republic since the ending of what Márquez has called ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is different. It has given rise to a wide range of contemporary cultures. Cuba appeared to have come in from the cold; as late as 2002, it had been part of then-Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton’s expanded ‘axis of evil’ (building on President George W. Bush’s [b.1946] original trio of Iran, Iraq and North Korea). President Barack Obama (b.1961) extended the hand of friendship at the end of 2014, but the Trump Administration has retracted this overture. Chile is a fragile political state with pockets of wealth. Its ‘democracy’ is vulnerable to a global downturn. V   enezuela under the Nicolás Maduro (b.1962) government is a virtual dictatorship: the independence of the country’s legislature is now compromised, and the state is absolutely reliant on external financing, notably Russian, and primarily on its key asset: oil.  The Rio Olympics (2016) showed Brazil to be an economic tiger with global ambitions but with insurmountable social divisions.  Today, Brazil wrestles with corruption at the highest level of government. In spite of bloody drug wars and the threat posed by President Trump (b.1946) to cross-border trade, Mexico has a thriving economy and is a functioning democracy. Colombia and the Andean states rely on strongmen to deliver stability.  This creates uncertainty, because all power is vested in a single personality.  The Andes is also relatively impoverished.  The most significant sociopolitical development in Peru in the 1980s was the peaceful opposition of the indigenous population.  The autonomy that its indigenous people have won has made Peru a virtual moiety state. Such a system provides a blueprint for the ‘closed republics’ of South America. Bolivia, because of its indigenous majority (and the continent’s sole Amerindian president), has drawn up a new constitution in which customary law operates beside an established legal system. It has reserved political representation for non-immigrants and self-governing homelands for 36 indigenous nations – all under the umbrella of state ownership.  A similar vision is planned in Ecuador but, as in Venezuela and Cuba, the difficulty of asserting indigenous values in a world that observes clearly articulated Western norms of land ownership and property rights is a problem. It is made harder by the passing of so much time since the official end of Western colonialism. Post-war prosperity in Latin America was an illusion, built on import-substituting industrialisation – in short, protectionism. High tariffs were levied on imports and capital was lent by central government to local industry.  The money was 188

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Hispania borrowed from Western banks that had become repositories for Middle Eastern oil money.  When interest rates rose in the 1980s, Latin America found itself unable to service interest payments on its loans.  The result was debt and inflation.  The wealthy took flight and evacuated with their capital.  A number of internationally successful artists joined them to become émigrés.  There were social consequences, such as the migration of peasants to the cities, the creation of slums and the evolution of drug farming. In politics, a natural corporatism led to populism. Populism and bubble economics are recurring themes in contemporary Latin America.  Artists, part of the intelligentsia, moved away from overt criticism of this system, preferring to employ oblique forms of expression through performance and conceptual art.  This may have been in response to the political censorship that characterised many of the regimes of the time – most notably, that of Pinochet. Prosperity has come at a price to Latin America and, like its culture, it is still controlled by foreign ‘instruments’ – today, Chinese and Russian as much as American and European.  As Williamson explains, the productive resources of all Latin American states for most of the twentieth century were developed in order to supply external markets.  Art follows capital.  A Western aesthetic was re-exported with Latin American characteristics, and, crucially, the national art economies soiled their own marketplaces with the same commodity.  This undermined their culture. Most states lacked the capital and systems to compete with the West even as their capitals aped European cities.  Their well-being was as shallow as the window-dressed shops in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Lima and Mexico City. As the world is today, the art markets of Mexico and Brazil have benefited from illiberal and stable government.  They and other Latin American states have negotiated varying degrees of political and historical integration. Mexico, in particular, has operated a stable economy for some time.  The questions for this book are: how much remains that can be called Latin American, and how long can Mexico and Brazil remain productive and economically self-reliant? How long will they be in a position to salvage and stimulate their sister states economically and culturally? In the case of some artists – and the state of Mexico, in particular – the moment of assimilation has arrived. But in common with all new markets, the moment will be fleeting unless and until those states take responsibility for their own fates. Latin America is not a political union, but it is more than an economic confederation – it is a sensibility which needs to be grasped and nurtured by its governments.

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8

South East Asian Authoritarianism The colonial history of the greater part of South East Asia, and its bloody aftermath, is traumatic and recent.  The people of this region share, with one exception, a common experience: Western colonialism, anti-colonial revolution, the horrors of the world war in Asia, martial rule and dictatorship.  The vast majority are unsympathetic to Western-style democracy.  The independent states that once comprised Indo-China have been formed out of genocide; others, like Indonesia (created out of Dutch arrogation) and Thailand, have yet to achieve political and economic stability. History has left these states with an impoverished cultural legacy and an anguished contemporary expression, which records the journey of a people from subjugation towards embitterment or amnesia. Mention the names of the Indonesian artists I Nyoman Masriadi (b.1973) and Agus Suwage (b.1959) and the art world sits up and takes notice.  The paintings of both men are highly political. Masriadi, in particular, has explored fearsome political collisions illustrated by works such as Don’t ask me, ask the president (2008).  Their work is similar in intention and effect to the work of China’s Cynical Realists of the 1990s, but in the case of Masriadi is located in the work of post-war American Pop Artists like Jasper Johns (b.1930), which he adapted to the demons and heroes of Hindu and Balinese mythology.  The artist’s pumped-up cartoon-like characters in Mobster Culture (2002) paint a gruesome picture of the brutal gang culture that blights Indonesia’s cities.  A muscular arm pulls at the hair of a cowed, crouching figure, while a foreground gang leader, eyes shielded by blue-tinged sunglasses, barks his instructions. In the background, men stand wielding semi-automatic weapons. Suwage’s interpretations of life are equally dispiriting. In Only Demonstrating (2004), he depicts an execution by asphyxiation.  A younger artist, Eko Nugroho (b.1977) – based, like Masriadi and Suwage, in Indonesia’s artistic capital,Yogyakarta – sums 190

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South East Asian Authoritarianism up the resignation of its urban population in a fibreglass sculpture of a masked man sitting propped up against a wall; the work is entitled Overwhelmed (2011). Do these works truly characterise Indonesian city life? If Andre Vltchek (2012) is to be believed, the entire urban population inhabits cities polluted by chemicals; burning rubbish piles; fume-expelling traffic congestion; expensive and poor-quality goods and food; and a bigoted, racist, openly hostile, uneducated majority.  A tiny, wealthy minority suffers the deleterious effects of the capital, Jakarta, on their lives by enclosing themselves in gated complexes serviced by an army of impoverished servants.  Their gilded plight is captured in a bronze, painted sculpture, Cage Bag (2012), by the artist Sri Astari (b.1953), in which a disconcerted doll looks out from behind the bars of her prison cell in the shape of a Hermès Kelly bag.  There is, V   ltchek writes, a general mood of fear, which stems from a repressive authoritarianism that has held sway since the 1965 revolution.  The artist Sindutomo Sudjojono (1914–86), in his work Preparation for Guerilla (1964), depicts one amongst a seemingly endless series of modern Indonesian struggles. Lest we forget, between two and three million people were killed during the Suharto-led holocaust of the 1960s.  There is a deep-rooted sense of shame, V   ltchek continues, perhaps inculcated in the peoples of the islands from the outset by the Dutch colonists, who were fearsomely repressive. Maybe it extends from something that existed before: ‘Javanism’, a rigid conformity that has permeated every aspect of Indonesian life. Shame should have been felt by the Indonesian authorities for their ethnic cleansing in the province of Aceh on the island of Sumatra, and in North Borneo – and for the religious intolerance shown to those of other faiths. It is illegal to be a Communist or an Atheist in today’s Indonesia. Even after the ousting of President Suharto (1921–2008) in 1998, the promised reformasi (reforms) have been lost in political bribery.  The artist Haris Purnomo (b.1956) responded directly to the disappearance of numerous activists in the lead-up to the political crisis in 1998. His portrait of a man with a dragon tattoo on his head, Orang Hilang (2012), depicts someone literally plastered with the names of the hilang (‘disappeared’). In common with other developing nations that became laboratories for neo-liberal economics, Indonesia has sold its physical assets to foreign interests and allowed its mineral wealth to be irredeemably decimated.  The damage that uncontrolled logging has wrought on Sumatra and palm-oil plantations on regions of Borneo such as Kalimantan is irreversible. In the photograph The Forest is Watching You (2012), by the artist Dhanank Pambayun (b.1978), a deer carries between its horns the foliage of dying trees, which have made way for a suppurating city sprawl.  The key to this depiction of Indonesia is that it is shared by a number of commentators 191

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New Art New Markets less ideologically driven than Vltchek, who wears his Marxism on his sleeve. It really does seem as if Indonesia has, but for a brief post-war respite, suffered useless or downright evil leaders. It is not authoritarian government per se that blights the archipelago; it is those who wield its absolute power. South East Asia, Michael Vatikiotis (2017) argues, has a propensity to cause large-scale and unimaginable suffering for largely selfish and mundane reasons. Culture has suffered a similar fate.  The region’s cultural industry has profited, but this is a market-driven machine that has given rise to the excoriating social commentaries of Masriadi, Suwage and Heri Dono (b.1960).  The puppet Garuda Soldier (2005) by Dono is a good example of the corruption of tradition.  The artist has utilised a traditional art form in order to convey a disingenuous message for the present. It depicts a tumescent, grimacing soldier in the form of a puppet from the Wayang Kulit tradition.  While there is room for innovation within the shadow-puppet tradition, this creation strays into the realms of popular anger – which is a feature of the commercialisation of sensations. Ketoprak (traditional theatre) has disappeared from Indonesia’s villages, and Javanese and Balinese gamelan music plays to tourists at extortionate prices; only the temple performances relieve the spirit. Bandung, a contemporary artistic hub, is primarily a scabrous holiday resort for the international set.  There is an attempt by an artists’ group defined as ‘post-new order’ to find merit within the burgeoning cultural industries in Jakarta and Yogyakarta. In Bandung, a body of artists gather under the umbrella of the Common Room, a creative space intended to improve the quality of research into creative production.  These are significant initiatives, but there is a tenuous engagement between the various groups and the forces of mass entertainment. Meanwhile, five-star hotels sprout on top of the teeming mass of migrant humanity that seeks its livelihood in the capital. Blighted corners of Jakarta – like the dilapidated old Dutch quarter, Kota, and the formerly vibrant Chinatown – coexist with the hollow, new symbols of cultural modernity, the Museum MACAN (Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara [a Malay-Indonesian name for the archipelago]) and the commercial galleries in and around the city’s upmarket malls, Plaza Indonesia and Grand Indonesia.  The loss or debasement of cultural forms like the traditional theatre form ketoprak limit the depth and subtlety of expression in Indonesia. Ubud in Bali, once a locus for the Balinese dance forms barong, legong and kecak and the regenerator of these traditionally rooted art forms has become a tourist resort dealing in pastiche.  This former artists’ haven was once a subject for the paradisiacal visions of the Dutch émigré Rudolf Bonnet (1895–1978) and the Indonesian Abdullah Suriosubroto (1878–1941). It is now a travesty of its former self. 192

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South East Asian Authoritarianism Yet Indonesia is still one of the most recognisable of the region’s art mar1 kets.  The nation’s two principal auction houses, Larasati and Borobudur, hold sales 2 throughout Asia. Today, however, the majority of the country’s contemporary artists exhibit their work in Singapore galleries, where the most prestigious auctions are held.  Wealthy expatriates also choose to live in the city state, or else Kuala Lumpur, and commute to Jakarta for business.  The city’s once pre-eminent cultural position has been eroded by other new nations.  There are many reasons for Jakarta’s decline, but at bottom it has to do with the country’s slide towards poverty. It was all so different in the beginning, when young artists from Yogyakarta and Bandung organised a protest against the traditional and decorative art on show in 3 the 1974 Jakarta Biennale. Powerful paintings by artists like Djoko Pekik (1938) from the pre-1965 era that responded to an earlier protest, the Sanggar Bumi Tarung, are now concealed behind the gated communities of Jakarta’s establishment. In their place, insipid, contemporary material can be seen in new, private museums. Dr Oei Hong Djien (b.1939) houses a body of trite new Indonesian works in a pseudo-traditional museum bearing his initials, OHD, in Magelang, central Java. On a much larger scale, the ethnic Chinese collector Budi Tek showed off Asian contemporary art in the Yuz Museum in Jakarta, a companion to his larger operation in Shanghai.  The themes of protest and angst are still evident, but they appear insincere. At its heart, Indonesia’s artists’ rebellion should have been something more than just a hackneyed attack on conservatism. It should have been an attempt to reassert kagunan (the country’s classical, native culture) over European nineteenthand twentieth-century cultural orthodoxy. It was not as if the extensive period of Western cultural saturation interrupted the indigenous culture significantly enough to stall its evolution; it was not dismembered like so much of pre-Columbian South America. It was, however, wounded in the process. Western orthodoxy had run so deep in Indonesian cultural life by the second half of the twentieth century that a term like seni rupa (fine art), a European notion that divided the arts into different disciplines, had been in use in Indonesia since the eighteenth century.  As Takashi Shiraishi (1995) writes, a (Dutch) world was transplanted to Java in the first decade of the twentieth century that was more modern at the time than Japan, the most advanced country in Asia.  Although Indonesia is not a blueprint for South East Asia, it shares a long and protracted colonial experience with most of its neighbours. Its relationship with modernism and with its own culture is, as a result, harder to disentangle than it is in other new markets. So, a diluted form of Javanese culture has held sway in the polity known as ‘Indonesia’ ever since. The Indonesian people’s struggle for independence between 1942 and 1950 was 193

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New Art New Markets two-pronged: they fought against the Japanese invader in the Second World War and, in earnest, against the Dutch colonisers in the aftermath of the Allied victory. Radical political and social reform had been a rallying cry of the earliest anti-colonial artists’ movement, the Union of Indonesian Artists (PERSAGI), founded in 1938 by Sindudarsono Sudjojono.  This group of artists was the first to break free from the aesthetic shackles of the Mooi Indies (‘Beautiful Indies’) School, a European institution in Indonesia that had a tendency to romanticise the land and its people. Instead of idealised landscapes, they portrayed guerrilla fighters, farmers, the Kampong people and market vendors with an expressionist fervour. Indonesia’s post-war governments, following a bitter period of decolonisation, were as blighted and bloody as any in the region.  The subjugation and slaughter of the East Timorese Catholics by Suharto only ended in 1992, when the former Portuguese territory was handed over to the United Nations. It became the independent state of  Timor-Leste in 2002. Indonesia is the South East Asian state that most clearly articulates the condition of a tenuous alliance of different races, languages and religious beliefs.  The nation is home to over 300 different ethnic groups and more than 250 distinct languages are spoken on the archipelago.  The main world religions are represented in addition to a wide range of indigenous ones. Much of the world’s ethnic and linguistic diversity, in fact, survives here and in the wider region of south-eastern Asia: in Indonesia; the central highlands of V   ietnam and Laos; China; Thailand; Myanmar and north-east India. According to Max Lane, the great difficulty that Indonesia faced, in common with many of the former South East Asian European colonies, is that it arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century with a ‘diversity of defeated cultures’ that became ‘virtual museum cultures’ (Lane 2008, p.13).  The government at one point, through Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat (the Institute of People’s Culture – LEKRA), gave support to ketoprak. Ketoprak is, essentially, social/political theatre that allows its audience to participate in the issues of the day. The close attention it has paid to the incidentals of life has had a profound effect on the islands’ culture. Its debasement in recent times has shorn Java, in particular, of its cultural essence. In its place, the state has provided such kitsch recreations as the North Sumatra Pavilion at Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (‘Beautiful Indonesia Miniature Park’), a culture-based recreational area located in East Jakarta. The extent to which its culture was defeated can be seen in the syrupy, academic nudes of Raden Basoeki Abdullah (1915–93), which are very like the realistic Hindu deities that Raja RaviVarma (1848–1906) was painting in India a century earlier.  The 194

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South East Asian Authoritarianism Western notion of ideal feminine beauty is something that Abdullah absorbed from 4 European émigré artists such as Adrien Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès (1880–1958). Le Mayeur de Merprès was part of the Mooi Indies tradition. Like France’s Indochina Union and British Malaya, Dutch Indonesia was a manufactured polity. It appeared on maps as a nation, but it was not.  The 100,000 Dutch colonialists held sway over millions of natives by centralising power in Batavia (Jakarta) and confining knowledge of the Dutch language to the Dutch minority and Malay elite.  The immediate consequence of this inheritance, following a bloody anti-colonial war, was a brief period in which radical politics, enshrined in the word aksi (action) and inspired by other revolutions, attempted to reverse – in the words of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno (1901–70) – the creation of ‘a nation of coolies and coolie among nations’. Sukarno’s master stroke was, according to Thomas Crump (2007), to establish Bahasa Indonesia as the national language at the outset.  The fieldwork for a modern Indonesian identity had begun in the Youth Pledge in 1928; for the first time, there was talk of a single people, language and nation.  The new Republic of Indonesia, 5 declared in Yogyakarta in August 1949, was enshrined in a new constitution the following year as a non-federal, non-communist and non-Islamic representative democracy.  The distant and undeveloped island of New Guinea, with its hundreds of feuding tribes, was added to the republic in 1955.  This had not been the intention of the outgoing Dutch colonialists, who recognised the island’s marked distinction 6 from the rest of the new nation. Art became a political instrument for the new and dominant Indonesian polit7 ical parties. LEKRA and the Lembaga Kebudayaan Nasional (National Cultural Association) were the first to be directly associated with radical nationalism and a rejection of all Western cultural influences.  Two ‘official’ art institutes also developed dramatically different ideological approaches to the new nation’s postcolonial art.  The ASRI – Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia (founded in Yogyakarta in 1950) – propagated the importance of an attachment to regional cultural tradition.  The art academy in Bandung, on the other hand, adopted an internationalist outlook and orientation that favoured abstract art.  The Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia (Indonesian Art Academy) and another in Bandung were established shortly afterwards and received the support of the new state, while artists like Sudjojono rejected the Mooi Indies’ beautification of Indonesia in favour of an uncompromising realism. In a blow to radicalism and radical expression, Sukarno’s ‘guided democracy’ was derailed and Indonesia began 40 years of military rule. General Suharto took control of a disintegrating state in 1965, and held absolute power until his ousting 33 years 195

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New Art New Markets later. His Orde Baru (New Order), a byword for cronyism, has governed Indonesian society ever since. In response to this destructive social charter, a group of artists set up Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Movement) in 1975. F. X. Harsono (b.1949) an ethnic Chinese Catholic, felt the repression in particular. His community had been intermittently slaughtered (specifically in 1946, 1965 and 1988) and those of his faith ostracised. His digitally manipulated quadriptych of self-portraits, Open Your Mouth (2002) has disguised the artist’s appearance.  The work is, nevertheless, a blatant commentary on the fear, shame and resulting self-censorship that, V   ltchek believes, stalks the archipelago. Suharto created, in Lane’s opinion, a complete rupture with the recent past and a return to ‘perceived’ traditional cultural forms – in other words, cultural revisionism – encapsulated in the aforementioned Indonesia Taman Mini Indonesia Indah theme park, sponsored by the Yayasan Harapan Kita (Our Hope Foundation) headed by Suharto’s wife,  Tien. Suharto used oil revenue and foreign investment to bolster Indonesia’s economy, and so secured his multiple re-election.  The general eliminated left-wing cultural organisations like LEKRA. His accession to power marked the end of the equality of experience that had characterised the New Life Movement. One of Suharto’s first acts was to allow the free-market Indonesian economists who had returned from scholarships at the University of California, Berkeley free rein to prise open the country for foreign companies. During his time in power, he managed to contain religious and ethnic tensions – notably, between Muslims and the cukong (top ethnic-Chinese entrepreneurs) – although these occasionally erupted into violence, such as in 1985 when the ninth-century Buddhist monument Borobudur was bombed. In the painting Borobudur in The State of Contemplation (1999), the Bandung School artist Srihadi Soedarsono (b.1931) has depicted the temple without evidence of the bombing incident.  The structure is shown, instead, as an integral part of the landscape.  The empty stupa at the very head of the monument is isolated in order to highlight the spiritual significance of the stone chalice as the highest spiritual realm, a state of nothingness – beyond life and suffering. Soedarsono painted a more dramatic version of the temple in 2001, in which moonlight cradles the structure in a perimeter 8 of translucent light. The absence of common decency that was a hallmark of Suharto’s regime was recorded in an uncharacteristically embittered painting by Hendra Gunawan (1918– 83), created during the artist’s time in prison. In Si Kukut (This is Kukut) (1975), he shows a prison guard with the head of a dog and a spanner for a penis (perhaps a reference to the colloquialism ‘screwing’), drooling from its mouth. Inscribed onto 196

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South East Asian Authoritarianism the picture are phrases like ‘who harasses other people’s wives’ and ‘victimised by harassment’, which recall the sexual favours that guards demanded of prisoners’ spouses in return for inmates’ special treatment. The pillage of Indonesia has afflicted its environment as much as its people. Its ferocity was heightened by the deleterious impact on its economy of the 1990s 9 Asian Economic Flu. In a monumental painting,  Tales of the Gold Mountain (2012) by Maryanto Gergasi (b.1977), giant drills wound and scar the earth.  This stark image refers to the actual plundering of a mountain of copper and gold that was, effectively, leased by the Suharto government to multinationals. In other cases, opencast mines have led to volcanic eruptions which have dramatically damaged large swathes of land. Indonesia is mired in corruption. It is, as Crump points out, a very poor country with vast economic potential locked within its plentiful natural 10 resources. Jakarta is its urban consequence. ‘Imagine an enormous city’, writes Vltchek (p.65) ‘one of the most polluted in the world, without public parks, with hardly any usable sidewalks, where shops and services are behind walls instead of on the street, where ugly billboards and terrible architecture are the major visual feasts available.  A city with no waste management.’ Something of the country’s disillusionment is captured in the monumental painting Competition of Life (2002, fig.23) by Suraji (b.1971). In this nightmarish vision of twenty-first-century meta-city life, a sea of humanity and fantastic creatures rolls across the canvas. Office workers, protesters, ox-carts, cars, vans, a train and a plane sweep all before them. Flying in the opposite direction, camera-wielding tourists record the mayhem.  A monumental figure, drawn perhaps from the bare-torsoed, muscular, stone-sculpted guardians of East Asia, exhorts the crowds to greater effort through a loudspeaker. Indonesia’s true plight is in being a diminishing entity. Its infrastructure and industrial base are crushed. Its inexorable descent afflicts it at a time when the progress of other nations, notably China and Vietnam, astound the world. In one of the most intelligent and far-sighted pieces of cultural policy, the Thai Government commissioned the artists Panya Vijinthanasarn (b.1956) and Chalermchai Kositpipat (b.1955) to paint the murals for the recently built Wat Buddhapadipa Temple in Wimbledon, south-west London.  The project took four years, from 1983 to 1987, and succeeded in conveying the timeless universality of Buddhism to a new public by introducing into the schema contemporary (British) symbols and icons.  Thailand benefited from the physical expansion of this symbol of the nation’s faith, and ‘New/Traditional’  Thai art received a lift from this seal of government approval.  The temple murals, which are beautiful, are the culmination 11 of  Thailand’s policy of ‘soft’ cultural engagement with the West. 197

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New Art New Markets Only Thailand amongst the countries of South East Asia retained its political 12 13 independence throughout the age of European empires (1487–1947). This fact certainly mitigated the impact of modernism on the country’s traditional culture. The other reason for Thailand’s cultural exceptionalism was the presence of the 14 Florentine sculptor Corrado Feroci (1892–1962), who was invited to Siam in 1923 to teach Siamese students Western techniques of sculpture and make statues and monuments for the ‘modern’ state. Feroci never returned home, eventually taking Thai citizenship and a Thai name: Silpa Bhirasri. His statue stands outside Bangkok’s main university for the arts, Silpakorn, opposite the Royal Palace. Feroci’s creed, which was ahead of its time, was to urge his students to respect and nurture their own traditions. Universalism in art, he argued, led to monotony and insincerity.  Thai art, he insisted, must be different from European art, and the difference would cor15 respond to the ‘individuality of the race’ (Junichi 1995, p.241, footnote). The arrival of Feroci followed the officially sanctioned visit to Italy of King Chulalongkorn’s (Rama V – 1853–1910) court painter Luang Soralaklikhit (1875–1958).  This event 16 was a part of the king’s policy of westernising Thai art in order to better represent the will of the monarchy. Thailand, like Indonesia, holds elections – but bribery buys votes, and intermittent coups interrupt the democratic process. In 1932, a coup d’état by a secret cabal of 141 European-trained army officers calling itself the People’s Party, brought to an end Siam’s progressive monarchy, but it did not weaken the resolve of the Feroci faction to retain the essence of  Thai art.  The Italian’s favoured pupil, Fua Haripitak (1910–93), spent time in Rabindranath Tagore’s University of V   isva-Bharati at Santiniketan in 1941, where he was influenced by Gaganendranath Tagore’s (1867– 1938) paintings, which drew inspiration from Indian mysticism. He returned to Thailand, inspired by Tagore’s instruction to Indian students to record their heritage before it disappeared. For the rest of his professional life, Haripitak copied decaying Thai temple murals and restored the very finest of them, leaving behind one of the 17 most comprehensive pictorial records of  Thai mural art. His art and deeds mirrored those of his contemporary, the Chinese artist Xie Zhiliu (1910–97), whom we encountered in the ‘China’ chapter.  Another artist – Surasit Saokong (b.1949), who lives in Chiang Mai in the north of  Thailand – shares Fua’s reverence for the nation’s Buddhist heritage. His still-life paintings of the interiors of temples, taken in candlelight, are acutely observed. But the large landscape,  The Realm of Serenity (1995), which depicts a temple and a pair of giant stone chimeras set between two raging rivers, is a much more ambitious work.  The painting steers the viewer through a fantastic landscape and projects onto its audience a spiritual sphere that lies beyond 198

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South East Asian Authoritarianism us. Saokong’s ability to manipulate light is the key to the painting’s ethereal colour effects, and the religious conviction that he attained as a novice monk emboldens his palette and composition to create a rich, dense canvas. Thailand may have escaped European colonialism and the worst excesses of military dictatorship, but the country is regularly plunged into political turmoil. Some Western commentators, such as Andrew Marshall (2015), suggest that Thailand is hostage to an elite class that seeks a pliant monarch and subservient majority. Marshall argues, for instance, that in the current political stalemate, the Yellow Shirts, who appear to agitate on behalf of the royal household, are in fact acting for the Privy Council: senior military officers and the upper class. He asserts further that the rival Red Shirts, a grass-roots, rural movement that is loyal to ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra (b.1949), have been denied democracy by staged insurrections orchestrated by the Palace. Shinawatra was overthrown in a coup in 2006, and later convicted of corruption. He agitates in exile via his sister, who leads the Pheu Thai Party. He is a self-made, ethnic-Chinese Thai businessman from Chiang Mai. His motivation – which drives his search for power, and for which he has effectively rallied the masses in successive, successful election attempts – may stem from his desire to change the conservative networks that originally excluded him.  The future electoral success of the Pheu Thai Party is today thwarted by a new constitution that renders it impossible for one party to win an overall majority. The views of outside commentators are usually marred by an ideological and outmoded faith in the efficacy of Western-style democracy for South East Asian polities.  Thai-style democracy, in which an enlightened monarch governs with the support of a supposedly morally superior elite, is one of many regional variations – notable amongst the others is China’s ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’. Such systems prevent seismic upheavals.  Thailand experienced its own (democratic) uprisings in 2010, but unlike the North African Muslim states of the ‘Arab Spring’ it did not collapse into violent anarchy. Instead, the protests – chiefly remembered for their display of red ribbons, daubed red walls and a red-bicycle rally – were put down by an army chief, General Prayuth Chan-o-cha (b.1954). Marshall acknowledges that Thailand has avoided the horrors of both a world and a civil war. Surely these two acts alone far outweigh the kingdom’s relatively bloodless internecine struggles. In 1947, Colonel Sarit Thanarat’s (1908–63) coup d’état brought the army to power under Khuang Aphaiwong (1902–68), and in 1971  Thanom Kittikachorn (1911–2004), who succeeded Sarit Thanarat, staged an autocoup and re-established the military government. It was a general – Prem Tinsulanonda (b.1920) – in 199

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New Art New Markets collaboration with the monarch, Bhumibol Adulyadej (King Rama IX) (1927–2016) of the Chakri dynasty, who established sustained economic growth for the country. During the third decade (1970s) of the reign of King Rama IX (1950-2016), a significant level of political instability permeated every level of  Thai society. In a blatant appeal to nationalism, a military junta imposed its authority on the people by accentuating the importance to Thais of Buddhism, the monarchy and development. Generals Thanarat and Kittikhachorn used the power of the military to suppress the rights and freedoms of the people, and in 1973 this led to mass protests at the Democracy Monument in the capital, which effectively brought down the government and bequeathed to the king a supra-constitutional position. Severe political conflict continued in Thailand for some time after the 1973 protests.  A worse event took place in 1976, when student protesters were attacked by the military in the grounds of  Thammasat University in Bangkok.  Throughout these political struggles, socially engaged works by the artists of the Art for Life Movement formed 18 a strong current of expression until electronic and multi-media artists’ groups began to establish themselves in the following decade, responding to more stable government. In October 2016, the bejewelled body of King Rama IX was laid in state beneath a gold, pyramidal spire under a nine-tiered white umbrella. His bodily fluids dripped into a silver urn, from which they flowed by tube into a golden vase that was collected daily by a Buddhist monk.  The king is not dead; he has gone to a higher plane, where he will fulfill his destiny as a bodhisattva (one who has achieved nirvana, but who delays transcendent departure out of compassion for suffering beings).  The ceremony is unchanged since the days of Ayutthaya, capital of  ancient Siam.  The continuity of succession, which perhaps appeared uncertain, has fallen naturally to the king’s eldest son, Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn (b.1952).  The semi-divine notion of Hindu kingship that Thailand inherited from the Khmer Empire and the monarch’s great spiritual merit, which is ordained in Buddhism, has been upheld, buttressed by the nation’s strong lese-majesty laws as much as by the people’s genuine love and reverence for the Crown. Royal legitimacy has lasted, largely unbroken, since the foundation of the Siamese Kingdom of Ayutthaya in 1351.  The countries of the West are impatient for states like Thailand to embrace full democracy.  They assert that information technology has led to an enlightenment elsewhere, and that an individual’s delivery lies in liberal democracy.  Thailand is a deeply religious, traditional country which has avoided not only war but also the worst ravages of Americana.  The country is not unaffected by globalisation, as the photographer Maitree Siriboon (b.1983) attests in Inside Out Isan Disco House 200

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South East Asian Authoritarianism (2011).  Traditional ways of living have been compromised.  The country is still reeling from the expansion of the sex-and-drugs industry, which was conceived to serve US soldiers stationed in the country during the Vietnam War, but it is less fundamentally altered than most countries in the region. The myth of tradition can be employed to comic effect.  The former Thai Queen Sirikit (b.1932) was delusional when she masqueraded as the legendary Queen Suriyothai, who rode into battle dressed as a man on an elephant in defence of fabled Ayutthaya.  At one point, Sirikit even imagined herself to be the future power behind her grandson’s throne.  The feudal system bequeathed to Thailand by the Ayutthaya dynasty – which asigned to each person a ranking number, in a system known as sakdina – is arcane, and even more specific than the caste arrangements in India. It explains the ingrained system of personal loyalty and favour that characterise human interaction in the country. But is it wrong, and should it be replaced? It can give birth to a tyrant like the seventeenth-century ogre Prasart Thong (1600–56), but, equally,  Thailand’s careful negotiation of its own independence and neutrality throughout mankind’s bloodiest century suggests that the system works better than most.  The fact that independence was achieved by recourse to a piece of history – the Ramkhamhaeng Inscription, which portrayed the (pre-Ayutthaya) Sukhothai dynasty as a proto-democracy – and that Siam disarmed nineteenth-century European powers demonstrates brilliant statecraft and great kingship.  The Cyrus Cylinder (see ‘Aryana’ chapter) failed to do as much for Iran. The economic gains of the post-war years were lost through corruption during Thailand’s period of civilian government, which culminated in 1997 in the floating of the baht and the resulting collapse of the Thai stock market and its currency. Part of the blame for this seismic economic shock is attributed to crony capitalism, and to the alleged corruption of the Crown Property Bureau and the relationship between a wealthy, ethnic-Chinese cabal and the Thai elite. But the ultimate responsibility lies at the feet of globalisation. In the same year, the Thai photographer and social agitator Manit Sriwanichpoom (b.1961) produced a series of works lampooning the conspicuous consumption of  Thais. One still from This Bloodless War – greed, globalization and the end of independence (1997) replaced the screaming child and other fleeing victims of a napalm-bomb attack in Nick Ut’s (b.1951) famous 1972 photograph, with today’s Asians holding and wearing Western-branded goods. Following the economic disintegration of the Thai economy, the government inaugurated Amazing Thailand Year, which promoted the benefits of  Thai tourism. Sriwanichpoom’s response to this initiative was a series of photographs depicting a man dressed in a pink suit pushing an empty pink trolley, which was inserted into 201

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New Art New Markets urban squalor or Western-style food and retail outlets. In the work, Pink man on tour no 4 – Amazing billboard Pepsi hill-tribe conservation village (1998), the pink man stands with his trolley in front of a shack that sports the livery of the well-known drink.  Thai men no longer wear the traditional silk mor hom shirts.  A Chinese company has built one of the largest shopping centres in South East Asia in Bangkok. Foreign cars excrete pollutants, spluttering bumper to bumper in snaking traffic jams; but amidst the superficial ornaments of globalism,  Thailand is still a conservative society. Vasan Sitthiket (b.1957) articulates the economic inequalities that plague new markets. He was one of a number of  Thai artists who participated in the pro-democracy, student demonstrations in Bangkok in 1992. He has remained true to his early idealism and continued to make provocative art. In the artist’s All for me shit for you (2009), a khaki-clad, zoomorphic figure with the body of a man and head of a wolf suspends two plates of faeces above the imploring hands of three starving, naked human beings, painted in red for South America, yellow for Asia and black for Africa. A radical statement against the development-at-all-costs formula that has bedevilled modern Thailand is envisioned by a project overseen by Kamin Lertchaiprasert (b.1964).  The artist founded a project called Land, which provides for an alternative, self-sufficient lifestyle in Chiang Mai. Established at the time of the Asian economic ‘flu’, it encompasses art, V   ipassana meditation and organic farming.  The complex contains structures that fulfil specific low-energy functions that it is hoped will provide the seed for alternative, economically viable and ecologically sound living outside the city.  The power of contemplation might appear to be under threat in teeming and congested Bangkok, but the artist Somboon Hormtientong (b.1949) demonstrates his equipoise in spite of the city’s clangour and visual dissonance.  Through his selection of mundane objects presented in the Thai Pavilion in Venice in 2017, Hormtientong stresses his relationship with each piece. He explains how he sees the district of Krung Thep conjointly through the eyes of the past and the present, and how each act and object is venerable. ‘Without the monarchy, Bangkok is not Bangkok’, the artist declares. His declaration grows out of a profound Keatsian belief that each thing has an inner life – its own past, quality and purpose – which can be perceived by those who are sufficiently sensitive. His testimony is a far truer characterisation of  Thailand and its culture than any account of social acrimony. Vietnam was gradually consumed by France from the mid-nineteenth century 19 until it became part of French Indochina at the end of that century. The French 202

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South East Asian Authoritarianism republic replaced a short-lived Vietnamese monarchical state that had adopted its independent title under duress from China, which had occupied the territory for 20 a millennium. Significant remains from that nation’s Sui dynasty (581–618) were recently uncovered behind the National Assembly in Hanoi, buried in the ancient Citadel of  Thang Long, from which the kingdom had been ruled from 1010 to 1802 before the capital’s move to Hué.  This discovery was laden with auspicious elements.  The most significant factor in its preservation was the fact that the move of the seat of government had precipitated foreign invasion.  The citadel became the physical embodiment of V   ietnamese nationalism. V   ietnam was formed out of an 21 ancient Hindu polity, later Islamic – the Cham (200–1471) and the Khmer.  Today the descendants of these two groups form marginalised minorities in Vietnam, with little remaining of their material culture.  The Kinh majority dominate the nation.  We speak of legitimacy and myth a great deal in this book, and I think it is safe to say that Vietnam has been very adept at inventing a story to justify its cultural and ethnic uniqueness.  The state is tolerant of the myriad hill tribes and other races that live amongst the Kinh, but as a national unifying device Vietnamese racial distinction has been a tool of survival. The sheer horror that Vietnam and Cambodia endured throughout the 1970s can be measured in the half a million tonnes of bombs that had been dropped on both countries by the United States by 1973 and the one million deaths and half a million refugees created by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.  Ten million landmines have left Cambodia, proportionally, the country with the most disabled subjects any­where in the world. In spite of its experiences, the country has retained its faith in Khmer culture and, with the lifting of US sanctions in 1992, enjoyed a return to economic normality. Central to the country’s stability after the abdication of Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) in 2004 has been the former prime minister, Hun Sen (b.1952), whose People’s Democratic Party of Kampuchea provided the main opposition to the Khmer Rouge.  The participation of former Khmer Rouge in Cambodian politics until the late 1990s (Pol Pot did not die until 1998) has made the trauma for the many who suffered under its direct government intense. In a ceremony at the end of 2017 held before a huge audience, including thousands of saffron-robed monks, Hun Sen, who has held power since 1985, confirmed the continuing stability of the country in the wake of the abolition of its main opposition party. Cambodia has become another de facto one-party state, with the support of the majority.  The impoverished country has turned to China for cheap loans and support with developing its infrastructure.  This makes a particular work by the Cambodian artist Leang Seckon (b.1974),  The New Phnom Penh (2010), particularly 203

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New Art New Markets pertinent.  The work is essentially a collage of patched-together historical memories – not so much a vision as a disorientated, waking dream. Vietnam has suffered as much as Cambodia. Since the ending of the Second World War, it has fought wars of liberation against the French and the United States. It has defeated Cambodia and China in late twentieth-century conflicts.  A collective amnesia has been its panacea, writes Bill Hayton (2010).  The desire to forget, if not to forgive, has been encouraged by economic and political needs, but the stoicism of this impulse reaches deep into the nation’s psyche. It was an essential quality during the times of conflict.  The country’s strategic location has made it a Big Power pawn. Since its independence, it has courted relationships with the United States, China and now India. Its vertiginous economic growth is, in part, the result of a rapprochement with the United States, but China stands in the wings and the Indian Navy sails into its ports.  This refusal to recollect the horrors of war in art is a remarkable feature of V   ietnam. The defoliation of much of the country was in great part a consequence of war, but the post-war socialist-orientated market economy has blighted its seas, particularly in the Gulf of  Tonkin; its rivers, in particular the Red River; and its forests. In the Arsenale in Venice in 2017, the artist Thu Van Tran (b.1979) presented a group of simulated, rubber tree trunks resting on purpose-made wooden containers.  The symbolism of French colonial exploitation of rubber made possible by gigantic plantations is in danger of being repeated today by the logging industry. Elsewhere, peri-urban corridors throughout the industrial north of V   ietnam are engulfed in toxic air and lubricated by septic water. Budget tourism, especially from China, has destroyed natural glories such as Ha Long Bay.  The country has suffered the blight of the mass slaughter of endangered species in order to supplement the tables of nouveaux-riches East Asians and Chinese. Pham Huy Thong (b.1981) is an astute visual, social commentator. He depicts this act of barbarism in Eating Competition (Hands series, 2011).  The picture is an allegory of pride. Hubris excites the host to order ever-more expensive and therefore rare offerings for his table.  The consequence is the demise of a species. Perhaps worse is to come. V   ietnam is very vulnerable to rising sea levels – especially in the Mekong Delta, but also in Ho Chi Minh City itself. Such a disaster would spell the end of its economy. On France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu in spring 1954, the United States set about constructing a bulwark against the threat of communism in South East Asia. By 1961, the strategy seemed to have worked. South Vietnam had become an economic miracle. For three years from 1965,  American bombing of North Vietnam – Operation Rolling Thunder – resulted in a greater tonnage of munitions being 204

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South East Asian Authoritarianism dropped on that country than on the whole of Europe throughout the Second 22 World War. Post-Tet Offensive US policy was to ‘Vietnamise’ the war – a euphemism for American strategic withdrawal – while providing the South Vietnamese with the means to prolong the civil war. At the height of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, a group of young artists in Saigon formed the Hoi Hoa Si Tre Viet Nam (Vietnamese Young Artist Association), which provided a fresh direction for contemporary painting in South Vietnam.  The group consisted of graduates from the Gia Dinh and Hué national colleges of fine arts.  They experimented with abstraction, and have had an enduring influence on the 1990s generation of V   ietnamese cutting-edge artists.  The north of the country endured the ideological re-education inherent in socialist realism, which replaced the internationalist precepts taught in L’École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine, renamed the Hanoi University of Fine Art. By 1974, the unfolding Watergate scandal had paralysed the US Nixon Administration, and the North Vietnamese, in violation of the Treaty of Paris (1972), conquered the South the following year. In common with most new communist states in the region, the Socialist Republic of V   ietnam relied on Soviet aid. It also began the systematic destruction of traditional culture.  The aftermath of the North’s victory caused almost a million Vietnamese to seek refuge outside 23 the country. Vietnam’s communist government was more flexible on economic matters, however.  After the failure of its planned economy, the Doi Moi policy in 1986 introduced liberal laws that permitted foreign investment, with a proper legal framework for property rights and commercial transactions. In 1991, foreign banks were permitted to operate in the country. V   ietnam is now a member of all the international ‘clubs’ that it is entitled to join.  The country’s economy was, until 1997, based primarily on natural commodities like rice and coffee, which are subject to dramatic price fluctuations, and oil, which, being located in the South China Sea, is 24 subject to territorial disputes with surrounding states. Today, V   ietnam has become a significant manufacturer of branded goods, replacing China as the ‘workshop of the world’. A middle class has grown rich on these spoils, and the state, as is so often the case in Vietnam, has been ambivalent and contradictory in its attitudes to the ensuing corruption.  The ‘relationship culture’, based on Party hierarchy and provenance, is as strong in Vietnam as it is in China. Nong Duc Manh (b.1940), head of the Vietnam Communist Party, announced in 2007 that the elite’s morality must advance as societal individualism retreats. ‘The real elite’, writes Hayton, ‘is known as 5C: they can get away with absolutely anything’ (p.23).  These government officials 205

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New Art New Markets might receive apartments, pictures or cash in exchange for their connections and the approval that companies seek from the state. Since economic liberalisation in 1991, the practice of pha rao, fence-breaking, has allowed foreign and Vietnamese companies to exploit the country’s natural resources.  The law is at the behest of government, and this makes the arrangement tenuous and tense. Dissent has broken out only once, in Hué in 2006, since the formation of the communist state. It coincided with the country’s hosting of the World Trade Organization.  The dissent sought global publicity and international attention. It modelled itself on Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy in Myanmar. In a televised trial, its chief protagonist, the Catholic priest Father Ly, was publicly silenced.  A hand was placed over his mouth.  That was the end of the country’s protest movement. The distribution of the wealth generated after the 1991 reforms was evenly spread. V   ietnamese society has not materially diverged to the degree that it has in Thailand or Indonesia. But senior government figures and some captains of industry have been disproportionately favoured. Pham Huy Thong, in his Dong Bao series (2009–10), dramatically portrays that division. Status and wealth, the picture tells us, is built on the backs of our children and imprinted on our devastated landscape.  This is an unusually stark view of the country. But Vietnam must guard against inequality if it is to avoid the pitfalls of its neighbours and much of East Asia. Like the communist authority in China, its Party governs as a moral elite that listens to a range of voices but whose word is ultimately law. V   ietnam is, along with China, another example of contemporary Confucianism.  This may become, along with theocracy, one of the leading political ideologies of the twenty-first century. Cultural conservatism has been fostered in Vietnam in the twentieth century. L’École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine was founded in Hanoi in 1924 and became 25 a laboratory for cultural fusion.  A first generation of V   ietnamese artists trained in the Hanoi Academy and learnt Western oil-painting techniques, but was encouraged to acquire or retain traditional Vietnamese craft skills such as silk- and lacquer-painting.  The most successful went on to further study and commercial success in France, where there was a deep appreciation for the region’s decorative arts. Pham Hau (1903–95) was one of a number of important first-generation 26 Vietnamese artists who worked in lacquer. His six-screen view of either the Red or Day river,  Alentours Du Fleuve Rouge,  Tonkin (1939), depicts, in a rich umber, a luxuriant tropical landscape in which the shimmering foliage and boats are picked out in gold and silver leaf and mother-of-pearl, and the rock faces of the distant mountains delineated in black.  The process by which Pham Hau arrived at his masterpiece was long and arduous.  The wooden surface needed to be perfectly 206

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South East Asian Authoritarianism smooth to receive the first layer of lacquer, which was then left to dry, a process that was repeated several times before a final application of several layers of black lacquer completed the work.  The red lacquer was made from mixing natural lacquer with candlenut or tallow-tree oil and vermilion, and the black lacquer manufactured by mixing turpentine and a small amount of iron or copper sulphate with the natural material. Traditional attitudes, particularly to the position of women in society, informed the work of the Vietnamese artists painting before the war. It was rare for one of the first generation to paint a nude, for example. In this respect, the group of  Vietnamese artists who studied in Paris differ wildly from their near contemporary, and fellow émigré, the Chinese oil painter Sanyu (1901–66), who drew and painted thousands of nudes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. V   u Cao Dam’s (1908–2000) Conversation D’Élégantes au Jardin (1939) – a gouache on silk in which five elegant, archetypal Asian beauties wearing traditional hair bands that act as nimbuses sit composed in a semicircle in the midst of a verdant landscape – acknowledges the conservative, Confucian morality that permeates Vietnamese society. Le Pho (1907–2001), one of the most successful artists of his generation, absorbed Western art during his time studying in the Hanoi Academy and then in Paris. However, he successfully incorporated this knowledge with the lessons he learnt from Chinese and ancient Vietnamese art, which he acquired from visits to Beijing and a stay in Hué in the 1930s. His Jeune Fille Aux Fleurs (1938–9) shows a demure young lady with downcast eyes, a high forehead, porcelain skin and straight nose, inclining her head to form a graceful arc. She brings a transparent silk scarf to her lips, and the slight pink blush that colours her cheeks is reflected in the warm, tonal qualities of the background. Both Le Pho and Vu Cao Dam created their quintessentially first-generation pictures after the mood of the nation had dramatically changed. Progressive elements in Vietnamese society called on France’s Popular Front Government, which came to power in 1936, to extend its social and political advances to Vietnam.  The new spirit of political activism is recorded in Nguyen Phan Chanh’s (1892– 1984) painting La Marche (1937), which depicts, in the foreground, three children and a mother and child with their backs to the viewer gazing with intent at a passing crowd.  They are witnesses to the beginnings of social and political change in Vietnam. The ingrained conservatism that operates throughout Asia can be felt in the village-derived communalities and hierarchies that the Communists were unable to eradicate, and which the Vietnamese Government now adapts in order to cement society. It is particularly evident in the economically advanced South.  The Gia Dinh 207

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New Art New Markets Van hoa (‘cultured family award’), which judges a family on the merits of its social conduct, and for which the grandfather is held responsible, sums up the adaptation of Confucian societal mores to socialist principles.  The determining position of the Communist Party of V   ietnam in every aspect of V   ietnamese life, explains Hayton, is accepted by the general population.  The Party controls access to all information and its Internet firewalls are as effective as those of China.  This societal restraint extends to exhortations for the country’s army of motorcyclists to wear helmets for their own safety.  The key to its success is the national fear of the tyranny of the majority. For instance, the Chinese inspired ho khau system of regulated household registration prevented the mass immigration and formation of shanty towns that blight Jakarta.  The fear of slums developing in major conurbations prompted the Vietnamese Government to give aid to support 1000 craft villages across the Red River Delta.  These communities specialise in a range of items, from conical hats to food.  They have also, rather sadly, pioneered industrial techniques for applying varnish to objects, in place of labour-intensive lacquers. Other contemporary techniques are used to simulate antiquity. Much of the architecture in colonial Hanoi survives, and so the country is gifted the experience of the naturally cooling ‘tube’ houses, with their top-lit central courtyards. Other aspects of life, however, have fallen by the wayside. Few girls wear the traditional ao dai long tunics; street vendors have been replaced by restaurant chains; and motorbikes proliferate, bringing with them an American-style youth culture.  The artist Nguyen Quang Huy (b.1971) appealed to the desire of the young for privacy and romance in his artwork Temple of Love (2007). Quang Huy took one of the thousands of swan boats that glide across city lakes, decorated it in traditional shades of lacquer and placed it in a sanctuary beside a statue of a devout monk.  The purpose of this act was contradictory, like so much in Vietnam. It was an admonishment but also a lighthearted observation of the commercialisation of love.  The discrete practice of immorality in Vietnam is overlooked, but when it becomes common knowledge, for instance, that karaoke bars are fronts for brothels, the government takes steps to regulate the industry and punish select offenders. In Vietnam, democracy functions at a local, operational level – and in that sense, it is similar to the dictates of a mandarinate.  The General Secretary of the Communist Party, like the king, is always right, but the implementation of his judgments may be wrong. The country’s greatest political achievement has been its rapprochement with the West – and, in particular, with the United States. V   ietnam is now the region’s fastest-growing economy, but, as we have seen, its social fabric has begun to unravel.  Women, millions of whom were involved in or affected by the country’s wars, 208

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South East Asian Authoritarianism are portrayed very differently to the way they were before. On the one hand, Nguyen Quang Huy’s Indochina Girl no 48 (2006) is a strong, forceful independent member of a post-revolutionary society. On the other, Do Hoang Tuong’s (b.1960) Sleepless Night (2005) shows a tormented creature lying on a mattress (the bed of society), afraid and isolated. How different both these representations of females are from Nguyen Cat Tuong’s (1912–46) tender Mother and Child (1940) portrait, in which an adoring mother wearing the latest, redesigned ao dai watches over her child, who sleeps beneath the ornate bed canopy. Somnolence hovers over Vietnamese society today, but the nightmares of the past prevent restfulness. Its society is a patient suffering from convulsive shock, contained within a paternalistic, political cocoon. The former New Spain colony of the Philippines, which the Spanish regency in today’s South America ruled from the sixteenth century until 1821, reverted to the United States in 1898 and remained a virtual US protectorate after the Second World War.  The Spanish Catholic legacy was predominant until the 1950s. Fernando Amorsolo’s (1892–1972) tableaux vivants show a world of sunlit rice fields and contented peasantry.  They used imagery that he drew from the works of Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), which he had encountered during his term of study at the Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. It was a style that the new American colonialists also appreciated, so much so that Amorsolo – who, as a 16-year-old, had led a successful campaign to persuade the new government to incorporate the Academia de Bellas Artes into the newly established University of the Philippines – later secured the post of professor of painting in that institution, a position that he held for 38 years. From that moment,  Amorsolo held sway over the course of Philippine art.  The Americans were enchanted by the artist’s dalagas/dalagangs (beauties), which were, as Alice Guillermo explains, idealised types tailor-made for American-style advertising imagery.  Amorsolo described his perfect Filipina beauty in the following way: My conception of the ideal Filipina beauty is one with a rounded face, not of the oval type often presented to us in newspaper and magazine illustrations.  The eyes should be exceptionally lively, not the dreamy, sleepy type that characterises the Mongolian.  The nose should be blunt form but firm and strongly marked . . .  The ideal Filipina beauty should have a sensuous mouth . . . So, the ideal Filipina beauty should not necessarily be whitecomplexioned, not of the dark brown colour of the typical Malay, but of the clear skin and flesh-coloured type which we often witness when we see a 27 blushing girl. 209

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New Art New Markets The artist’s images of bucolic bliss became increasingly hackneyed as he grew older, although towards the end of his career he began to realise that the cultural mood had changed. In The Burning of the Idols (1955–60), he depicts, in a grand mural 28 style, the Austronesian-speaking people summoning their gods to protect them from the invader. In the background, a crucifix signals the imminent approach of the conquistadors. The Amorsolo school of painting, although dominant, was not the only style that competed for attention in the post-war period.  A group of Filipino abstract painters, the Neo-Realists, challenged the status quo.  Their explorations in abstract art triggered a debate amongst young artists, which was reflected in future practice for decades to come.  The Modernists – who included artists such as Vicente Manansala (1910–81), Cesar Legaspi (1917–94) and Hernando R. Ocampo (1911– 78) – worked in a quasi-cubist manner, which emphasised colour relationships and patterns. Manansala looked beneath the surface of everyday life in the Philippines and depicted a darker world of rural poverty and shanty towns, which laid the foundation for the Social Realists of the 1960s and 1970s. The Philippines represents the perfect example of the short-lived benefits to the general population of global capitalism. Subsequent US-backed presidents – Ferdinand Marcos (1917–89), Corazon Aquino (1933–2009), Fidel Ramos (b.1928) and Joseph Estrada (b.1937) – were all guilty of corruption and mismanagement on a colossal scale.  A better illustration of the corrosive effect of poor government on the economic health of a nation is hard to find. Compared to the rapid post-war development of  Taiwan, which shared with the Philippines an American influence, the stark contrast in ‘character’ between East and South East Asia is brought into focus.  The pain of family separation in Rodel Tapaya’s (b.1980) Farewell to Father (2007) captures the plight of Filipinos forced to work overseas in order to support their families at home.  The net contribution of these migrants to the national economy is very significant. In the picture, the migrant worker is visited in his dreams by the ghostly spectre of his family, house and the physical landscape of his homeland. The Philippines endured three decades of extortion by President Ferdinand Marcos.  The parallel between Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan and Marcos’ Philippines is marked, although it has to be said that Imelda Marcos (b.1929) invested a great deal in revitalising the contemporary arts.  Two of her lasting legacies are the Cultural Center of the Philippines and a resurgent internal art market.  The United States viewed both the Philippines and Taiwan as essential anti-communist bastions at a time when Asia showed all the signs of embracing communism, and in return 210

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South East Asian Authoritarianism guaranteed the security of both islands – a policy that has left if not an indelible then certainly an enduring American imprint on both states. Its Spanish heritage and the moral authority exercised by the Catholic Church to this day make the Philippines a uniquely Christian society in a part of the world dominated by other religions.  Again, the corollary with Taiwan (and in this regard, 29 South Korea) is remarkable. In Cardinal Jaime Sin (1928–2005), the head of its Catholic Church from 1974 to 2003, the Philippines had an outspoken critic of Marcos who was hugely influential in the election of Corazon (‘Cory’) Aquino and the first of a series of reforms. In what can be interpreted as either an affirmation of the sanctity of Christ’s suffering or a commentary on the futility of blind faith,  Alfredo Esquillo (b.1972) represents in Tanggulan (Sanctuary) (1996) Christ crucified and tormented.  The proliferation of crucifixes and the desperate prayers of the believers in the picture highlight the necessity of the Catholic faith to ordinary Filipinos as they face daily injustices and economic privations. Unfortunately, corruption is endemic in Philippine politics because of the strong ties between wealthy families (ilustrados) and their political appointments – a situation that is exacerbated by the low salaries paid to officials. 30 So, as the Marcos era faded from memory – leaving behind colossal debts – and Aquino’s and Ramos’ governments fought, respectively, a disaffected military and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, they were replaced by the inexperienced 31 Joseph Estrada, who resigned after a coup d’état in 2001. Antipas Delotavo (b.1954) illustrates the gross inequalities between rich and poor in the Philippines in Inaasamasam (Covet) (2005) by viewing the isolated and impoverished through the lens of a sumptuous interior.  The tension in the work is expressed in the envious stare of the woman at the very centre of the composition.  The Philippines today, in common with all the states that we have examined in this chapter, has a very narrow power base. Its oligarchs have evolved over the five centuries of Spanish rule, like the mestizo in Spanish America, out of an indigenous clan structure overlaid by feudal Catholicism.  As a result, a tiny minority control the country’s wealth, nullifying any sign of democracy from its national Congress.  The sons of the key families have fuelled a buying spree in Philippine contemporary art. It is fed by excessive supply, spurious galleries and marketing events such as Art in the Park and the Art Fair Philippines. It signifies very little except an opportunity to speculate in paintings that, but for a handful, will dissolve into the market ether. The popular revolution that preceded by many decades the assumption of power by the outsider Rodrigo Duterte (b.1945) in 2016 was received by the West as another societal epiphany.  That was until it became apparent that the new incumbent 211

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New Art New Markets regarded an attack on him as an affront to Philippine sovereignty. In 1986, the Catholic Church had supported the people against Marcos following a disputed election. Ubiquitous yellow ribbons launched Corazon Aquino into power – the same colour of ribbon that could be seen in the student protests in Hong Kong in 2014. But thirty years later, Duterte has become, in many respects, a second Marcos. He has reintroduced martial law, reviving memories of Marcos in 1972. His extrajudicial executions of drug addicts and pushers add to the society’s trauma. Malaysia appears to be the region’s success story, but appearances can be deceptive. British rule ended there in 1957 after Sir Gerald Templer’s (1898–1979) administration had made sufficient provision for both the economically dominant Chinese minority and the Malay majority, with institutionalised Islam as the state’s creed. Britain saw its three protectorates (North Borneo, Brunei and Sarawak) 32 and the Straits Settlements as economic and military assets; yet outside the main rubber- and tin-producing federated states and Straits Settlements, the kampung (Malay village culture) was allowed to continue – as was the local power of the (Muslim) sultanate.  As a result of this policy, the disparate elements that make up the Malayan Union have arrived in the twenty-first century with far fewer mental and physical scars than the rest of South East Asia.  The Malaysian Federation may not have included Brunei (which declined to join at its inception in 1963) or Singapore (which was expelled in 1965), but Sarawak and Sabah (North Borneo) as well as the Malay Peninsula comprised the union. The racial consciousness and nationalism that is now a part of Malaysian society was introduced during the colonial period.  The ‘racialisation’ of politics in the newly independent nation was therefore extremely marked, and the region’s immensely diverse cultural origins were forsaken. Malaysia had been home to a variety of ethnic, cultural and religious communities for centuries. Indian culture, in particular, had a strong influence on the Malay archipelago and on a number of important Malay Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms such as Majapahit, Mataram and Srivijaya, although as Fiona Kerlogue explains (2004, p.12), the ‘Indianization’ of South East Asian cultures is now regarded as far too sweeping. Chinese modes of living were also blended with local tastes and habits, and the presence of both Indian (Hindu and Buddhist) and Chinese (Daoist and Confucian) culture is evident in the art and architecture of the archipelago up until the nineteenth century. Much of this cultural richness, although it survives in the crafts and in rural traditions, has been lost in the country’s efforts to modernise. Mahathir Mohamad’s (b.1925) government broke the power of the establishment in Malaysia.  The sultans lost their status and the country’s hi-tech exports rose to 212

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South East Asian Authoritarianism exceed those of oil and tin. Malays were also integrated into the economy.  A period of excess saw the construction of the Petronas Twin Towers (completed in 1996) and the beginnings of reactionary extremism in the form of the Pan Malaysian Islamic Party. Malaysia succumbed to the Asian Economic ‘flu’, but under its new prime minister,  Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (b.1939), corruption has been tackled and Islam 33 Hadhari embraced. But how deep an effect has economic success had on Malaysia, asks the artist Nadiah Bamadhaj (b.1968) (in collaboration with opposition politician Tian Chua – b.1963), in a series of photographs entitled 147 Tahun Merdeka (147 years of Independence). She imagines the country’s institutions, such as the 2004 Palace of Justice buildings, in 100 years time, stripped of their glossy veneer – empty relics to ostentation and greed. Both Mahathir Mohamad and Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) in Singapore pursued a postcolonial policy of promoting Asian values: hard work, a disciplined workforce and consensual decisions made in the national rather than an individual’s interest.  The economy was steered to new highs under the Second Malaysia Plan (1971–5), which, through affirmative action, succeeded in redressing the country’s economic imbalance in favour of the Chinese community towards the Malay majority.  This has proved very divisive.  The British left a pluralist society made up of imported Indian labour, Chinese entrepreneurs and a Malay majority. In 1969, violence between Malays and the large Chinese minority erupted following the gains made by the largely non-Malay opposition.  The event is marked by a coffin-shaped sculpture, decorated to resemble the republic’s flag, May 13th 1969 (1970) by the artist Redza Piyadasa (1939–2007).  The antipathy between the Chinese community and Malays has since grown.  The current government has decreed more separatism based on ethnicity; Malays are prohibited from converting from Islam to another religion.  The state is gradually introducing aspects of Islamic law into its system, while a strong current of Sunni Islamic thought has been fostered by Saudi investment.  The Religious Affairs Department punishes small transgressions, such as the public expression of affection for those out of wedlock, and Muslims can be arrested for eating bacon. In an echo of the lese-majesty laws in Thailand, it may soon be made illegal to insult the President of Malaysia.  The country’s Chinese population has declined dramatically amid fears of racial segregation. The institutional amnesia that afflicts the Malaysian Government when asked to address civil violence that resulted in slaughter, as it did on 13 May 1969, is mirrored in other states – notably Indonesia, where President Yudhoyono (b.1949) cited national security when requested to address the 1965 killings. Of course, these memory lapses afflict all governments – and the West’s habit of highlighting the 213

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New Art New Markets transgressions of other states is de trop.  An old form of government with a racial twist is reasserting itself in South East Asia come what may. It will be endorsed by the new superpower, China, which is itself an ethno-civilisation (as we saw in the ‘China’ chapter). China is now a net investor in Malaysia. Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak (b.1953) faced corruption charges for embezzling a significant amount of funds from a state-investment vehicle called 1 Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) in a joint venture with oil company PetroSaudi. China acquired this debt in exchange for assets. In tandem with this largesse comes protection for overseas Chinese, who are all, irrespective of whether they have taken foreign nationality, now the ultimate responsibility of China.  The work of art Chinese Man (Always be by my side) (2005) by the Chinese-Malaysian artist Ivan Lam (b.1975) was, in that respect, a premonition.  The reapplication of the Monroe Doctrine (encountered in more detail in the ‘Hispania’ chapter) – this time, by China – comes with the confidence that great power bestows.  The multi-ethnicity of Malaysia, which is gently lampooned in Simryn Gill’s (b. 1959) photographic series A Small Town at the Turn of the Century (1999–2000), in which the artist sticks various items of fruit onto the heads of her subjects, is today an explosive combination.  The British model of pluralism, which was based on an interdependence of races coming together in the marketplace, has actually made democracy as the British undertand it impossible in a society in which religious values and ethnic traditions have become much more important, perhaps more significant than making money. China, meanwhile, is exporting its labour and tourists but, crucially, it is also investing and thereby holding all South East Asian governments to its account.  The Malay, meanwhile, is fuelled by fear of a loss of status and wealth, and this anger is supplemented by a religious ideology that emanates from the Gulf.  The record price for a work of Malaysian contemporary art is currently held by a colourful, octagonal abstract with Islamic overtones by Ibrahim Hussein (1936–2009), Red, Orange and Core (1984).  The next record will surely be for a nanyang (overseas-Chinese) market scene by the ethnic-Chinese artist Chuah Thean Teng (1914–2008). The weakness of South East Asian art markets lies in poor governance – a lack of respect for the institutions that create value. In addition, racial segregation and religious fervour could lead to internecine violence.  We have seen the consequences of this in North Africa, the Levant and the Middle East.  The outward signs of a stricter adherence to religious orthodoxy can be seen in the dress and behaviour of the young of South East Asia, from Yogyakarta to Bangkok.  The tiny state of Brunei now operates sharia law, East Java has banned alcohol sales and Malaysia 214

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South East Asian Authoritarianism wishes to implement Islamic criminal law.  These social changes will have an impact on creativity.  The predominantly Buddhist central-South East Asian states will respond in the manner of  Theravada Buddhist Myanmar towards the minority Rohingya. V   atikiotis (2017) notes how the ritual and practices of Sufi mysticism have grown amongst Muslims in South East Asia, in part as a reaction to consumerism.  This movement away from Asian values also has consequences for the consumption of visual images.  As it stands, power in the market is dictated by major collectors who establish their own museums for invariably eclectic collections.  The new direction in taste is towards an ethnic and theocratic persuasion. The consequence of this change in societal direction will determine the economic value of regional art.  Those South East Asian artists schooled in late Western modernism will be discarded in favour of those rooted in the pre-colonial Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic and polytheist past.  This process mirrors the region’s broader political evolution, which the West finds unprogressive.  The emphasis on enhancing the integrity of individual states, which was central to the 2008 ASEAN Charter of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, will be reflected in culture by protectionism. ‘The Javanese elite’, notes the Indonesian intellectual Soedjatmoko Mangoendiningrat (1922–89) (Vatikiotis 2017, p.123), ‘is not really concerned about what is imposed on them, so long as they can preserve the cultural context’ – as good a reason as ever to search for traditional expressions of Indonesian culture in Java.  Today’s cultural waves crashing onto the shores of South East Asia begin in the Middle East and China, not in the West.  They bring with them approaches to life that sit easily with the region’s many polities. Artistic integrity in fractured societies Revolutionary Indonesian artist Sudjojono said that European-style painting during the years of colonisation was, to him, like looking at his land through the mental world of the tourist. In the course of his career, he tried to break free from the constraints of the Mooi Indie school.  This proved rather harder to execute than he’d imagined. Sudjojono’s landscapes from the 1960s are similar to those of the artists that he was rebelling against.  They illustrate a problem that all twentiethcentury artists from cultures in transition faced: cultural ‘dizziness’. Sudjojono’s later landscapes, especially those from the 1990s, mark a departure from the past but, like his portraits of dancers, lack a particular cultural reference. It is as if having freed himself from the bondage of Western academicism, Sudjojono does not now know where to turn. 215

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New Art New Markets Sudjojono’s dilemma is easy to understand. South East Asia is a cultural melting pot. Hinduism and Buddhism arrived from India, Islam from the Middle East and Christianity on board European merchant ships.  Arab and Chinese traders introduced parts of their vocabularies to the regional languages, while Sanskrit was once the preserve of the elite.  This has led to a ‘Janus’ culture – one in which Western consumerism and licentiousness are enjoyed by an elite, but the social expectations of a democratic state are ignored. Self-reflection and a critical commentary need not be as bereft of meaning as Sudjojono’s paintings or as confrontational as the work of Masriadi and Suwage.  Artists from an earlier generation, like the self-taught Indonesian Gunawan, 34 managed to overcome their misfortune and reveal the essence of their own cultures – in this case, Javanese culture. Some of the artist’s strongest works are landscapes, painted from memory while he was in prison. In Java, the gunungan (mountain) and kekayon (tree) are, like the mountain and water in Chinese art, metaphors for landscape. Gunawan’s most striking landscapes show a blue (volcanic) mountain and meandering river framed by trees and small groups of people undertaking simple, traditional tasks.  The artist also excelled in depicting the rakyat kecil (common people). Papaya Seller (1970s?), in which the brightly clothed, lascivious tradesman offers his fruit to a batik-clad, flirtatious woman whose ample bosom strains at her slight support, contains all the elements of humour, detailed observation and riotous colour of the best of Gunawan’s genre paintings. Drawing on his experience as a traditional dancer, the artist paints a squatting man in Fish Seller (1970s?), whose seated posture resembles that of a Javanese dancer.  The man’s legs, like those of the papaya seller and in order to acknowledge the underlying poverty, are covered in 34 sores. Gunawan, like Affandi (1907–90), worked as a puppeteer for many years. In Melasti (1958), he records an episode of the Balinese barong dance-drama at the moment when the barong (mythical lion) is about to confront the Rangda (the witch).  The artist revels in the masks, parasols and costumes of the procession, and in the drama of the occasion. Java has a particular hold over the soul of Indonesia. A sultan who resides in Yogyakarta, the island’s cultural heart, acts as the people’s moral authority in a similar manner to the Thai king.  The current incumbent, Hamengku Buwono X (b.1946), is also Governor of Yogyakarta Special District, which comprises Yogyjakarta and much of the surrounding area. His position is therefore both modern and arcane; he runs a large city and is also believed to possess sekti (supernatural powers) and be capable of wahyu (divine inspiration). It is said that the sultan communes with Nyai Roro Kidul, the goddess of the Southern Seas. Kingship is alive elsewhere, too. 216

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South East Asian Authoritarianism In Malaysia, it is shared amongst the federation’s nine Malay rulers. In Cambodia, Norodom Sihamoni (b.1953) occupies a position first established by Khmer kings in the ninth century. His office is steeped in a Brahminical caste system that was also adopted by Thailand in the earlier Angkor period, when the latter territory was a western province of the Khmer Empire.  These monarchs are voices of moderation; they are listened to attentively. Perhaps their authority will grow. There are overtones of the traditional Balinese Batuan and Ubud styles in the preoccupation with masks and the focus on village scenes and market life in both 36 Gunawan’s and Affandi’s art. But their work is far removed from the stylised images of a genuine Ubud artist like Dewa Putu Bedil (1921–99) or Dewa Putu Mokoh (1934–2010), who work in the traditional manner with egg tempera on canvas and show how characterisation and individual expression can enliven Balinese art while at the same time retain its essential pictorial elements.  Anak Agung Gde Sobrat’s (1912–92) Ngaben Procession (1991), another Ubud-style work, shows all the qualities of the consummation of a tradition. But Sobrat’s serpentine, vertical procession of carefully articulated effigies and worshippers, despite being painted over 30 years after Gunawan’s Melasti (1958), makes no attempt to situate the scene in the ‘modern’ world. Gunawan’s great achievement was to reinterpret tradition. Djoko Pekik (b.1937) is able to reveal the changes that modernisation and the downside of capitalism are bringing to the remnants of tradition in Indonesia. His records of dancers capture the drama of the event but also the brutal reality of an art form that caters solely for tourists.  After the Performance (1988) depicts two exhausted, skeletal forms with painted faces, collapsing into crumpled heaps after an evening’s performance. Street Girls (1996) – in which two prostitutes theatrically smoke cigarettes beneath two neon streetlights, observed by a solitary client – makes an unsavoury connection between the two professions (dancer and sex worker). Pekik exhibits a patent disillusionment with the modern world throughout his work.  As a trained textile weaver – he used to make a cotton cloth known as lurik, which is characterised by stripes and quiet hues – his fight is with the ills of standardisation and economies of scale that have marginalised his industry and many of the country’s once buoyant crafts. Bekas Setasium Ngabeam (former Ngabeam village station) (1988), painted in oil and employing the wet-on-wet Chinese brush technique in muted tones, attests to the inequalities in his society, in which the super-rich travel in air-conditioned limousines and planes, and the poor endure the privations of underfunded public services. In the picture, two solitary figures squat under the canopy of a disused railway waiting room, their senses dulled by disappointment.  Three rail tracks partition the foreground from the rest of the work, indicating the absence of trains and the collapse of a system. 217

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New Art New Markets Thailand’s cities, towns and villages have been spared the worst excesses of modernisation.  The artist Damrong Wong-Uparaj (1936–2002), in Traditional houses on stilts (1962), gives form and colour to Thai identity in very much the same way as the Taiwanese painter Chen Cheng-po’s (1895–1947) Sunset at Tamsui (1935) roused self-awareness amongst the Taiwanese. In this work, Wong-Uparaj has transcended tradition and produced a balanced, harmonious painting that recalls, without sentimentality, the simplicity and beauty of rural life in Thailand. Every object and structure that he depicts is handmade: the fine wicker baskets; red, blue and white dyed clothes; and the bamboo, wood and grass houses. The artist Montien Boonma (1953–2000) reinterpreted Wong-Uparaj’s Traditional houses on stilts in the large steel-and-graphite sculpture Breathing House (1996–7).  The cluster of geometric boxes resting on thin steel poles conveys the sense of village life and community in spite of the man-made materials used to represent them.  The baskets in Wong-Uparaj’s work find sculptural expression in Jakapan Vilasineekul’s (b.1964) The Ancestor (2005), in which a stack of six baskets with a single base has been placed beside a solitary, copper basket; the art of traditional basket making has been elevated to fine-art sculpture.  The Chiang Mai-based artist Den Warnjing (b.1967) presents a snapshot of village comings and goings in Thai Rural Life I (1995). His patterned, diagrammatic picture is viewed from multiple points. It is divided into sections, each of which tells its own story.  A white-haired man with a stick is shown beside his daughter in different situations: comforting, directing or simply passing the time of day. She, like he, appears in different clothes in each episode. Perhaps she is preparing for marriage.  The entire saga melts into the landscape. Found materials fashioned into Philippine proletariat icons characterise the work of Rey Paz Contreras (b.1950). Modern waste has been utilised to reconstruct, in the artist’s Homage to the Sacred Land series, a pre-Magellan past. Sinulog is an ingenious collage in which native masks, a tomahawk, an advertisement for Coca-Cola and a wooden statue of a Christian figure wearing a crown are attached to a natural rattan ground. Contreras’ life-size public sculpture The Trees (1997), made out of textured steel, highlights the artist’s concerns with the detritus of industrialisation and its impact on the environment. It also shows, perversely, how forgiving man-made materials can be when bent to the service of nature. Santiago Bose (1949–2002) was another Filipino artist who worked with discarded materials. In the painted collage Garrotte (2000, fig.24), he depicts a Spanish-style execution by strangulation.  Above the throttled, hooded figure floats the Virgin Mary, while elsewhere American cartoon characters and corporate icon Ronald McDonald perform inanities. In the foreground, the artist has located the figure of someone very like 218

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South East Asian Authoritarianism Imelda Marcos – while in the background, Japanese soldiers feast. Bose has created a ‘history painting’ for the people, leaving his audience in no doubt that he sees all foreign intrusions in the Philippines, especially those achieved with the compliance of its own government, as pernicious. In The promise land: the moon, the sun, the stars (2016), Rodel Tapaya describes the moment of creation through the eyes of the Moro-Isolan tribe in Mindanao. Buwan, a winged creature, looks out; Araw, the fierce warrior holding his sword, emanates from fire; while an indigenous figure bleeds from the face. It is a trypich that announces the rebirth of nativism in all new markets. The V   ietnamese artist Bui Huu Hung (b.1957) refers to the early development of art in his country. Huu Hung creates simple works in lacquer on wood and canvas. He portrays seated women in traditional clothes, adorned with green-jade necklaces and gazing into the middle distance. He often adds poems to his pictures in Chu Nom – an ancient Vietnamese form of Chinese script. Huu Hung’s family used to make lacquer statues for temples, and the artist prepares his materials in the traditional manner.  This gives his panels a deep lustre. His subjects are often devotional. One work depicts a slight, female figure dressed in a traditional, loose, white robe decorated with black circular discs, a string of black beads around her neck and her hands clasped in prayer. Behind her lies a Chinese scroll on which rests a blueand-white stem cup. Beyond these items, a giant bronze censer breathes smoke. Huu Hung’s picture brings us full circle to a world before the age of European intervention. ‘It’s common for foreigners to assume that the reformers’ victory is inevitable,’ writes Bill Hayton (2010, p.111), ‘that the great march of History will take Vietnam into the promised land of free markets and, later, to political pluralism. In Vietnam that appears to be no more than a mirror-image of Karl Marx’s belief in the inevitable victory of the proletariat.’  The same can be said of every nation and society that we cover in this book; it is particularly true of Indonesia,  Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines and Myanmar.  The irony is that most of these governments have, in their early postcolonial manifestations, received the West’s support.  And yet it was inevitable that Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, regalism and local beliefs and traditions would be reincarnated and reconfigured by authoritarian systems to meet the challenges of a contemporary world.  A million visitors a year now pray at the shrine of Ba Chua Xu, the ‘Lady of the Realm’ outside Chau Doc in Vietnam – one of 75 mother goddesses that attract the masses in that supposedly socialist republic. Buddhist temples are packed with the devout in Cambodia,  Thailand, Myanmar and Vietnam; mosques are full in Indonesia.  Why would these nations operate systems 219

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New Art New Markets preferred by departing former colonialists? ‘But looking ahead to what the future holds in South East Asia,’ writes Michael Vatikiotis (2017, p.282), ‘one underlying assumption must be that the power and interest of the West to counterbalance the rise of China, despite the rhetoric, is probably in decline.’ It is quite possible today to integrate a national economy whose government is authoritarian into the international system; but the international system must also change.  As China’s power grows, this situation will become more common and the international system will reflect the values espoused by authoritarian states to a much greater extent. China has a long history of engagement with the states of South East Asia, dating back to the migration there of the rice-growing populations of Yunnan, an area secured for China by the Mongols.  The tendrils of the ‘belt’ and ‘road’ (see Introduction and ‘China’ chapter) will once again snake through South East Asia – this time in the form of sea lanes, railways and the various branches of ASEAN.  The use that will be made by China of the South East Asian Chinese diaspora – men like the politician Thaksin Shinawatra, the entrepreneur Robert Kuok (b.1923) and the collector Budi Tek – in order to facilitate allegiances should not be underestimated.  The culture that comes to represent these revived polities will have little in common with the ideology of the international market.  The Chinese cultural model will meet opposition, and this will come from religious and ethnic sources.  Will the states of South East Asia choose to integrate their art markets into the international system? The question is not so much that but rather: are the new market societies from which artists draw their inspiration likely to stimulate the creation of art that reflects the will of the global neo-liberal elite? I think not.

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9

Epilogue

In 2010, when I submitted my manuscript for A New Art from Emerging Markets, the Arab Spring had yet to come to pass, the European Union was unified and the West spoke with one voice. But something fundamental and systemic had changed in 2008.  The world, and the West in particular, was in enormous debt.  The lifestyle of the ‘First World’, we now know, was basically being financed by others.  The sudden rise to power of China and Russia has changed the world’s economic, political and, as I have argued in this book, cultural direction.  The decided shift in economic and political power towards Asia in particular is today reflected in the high monetary and symbolic value placed on classic works of Chinese art.  The illiberal democracies and authoritarian governments of Asia, South America and the Middle East, which we have seen grow and harden in their orthodoxy, have exported their ideologies to Europe and the United States. Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Austria have all voted for hard-line, nationalist governments since 2010.  There are now powerful nationalist movements in Germany, Italy, France, Greece and the Netherlands.  This has made commonplace national laws prohibiting the export of works of art from states that were once mainstays of the international trade. It has made many art markets protectionist, even isolationist. In 2010, much of Asia and the Middle East also pursued a nationalist agenda. But today, regions such as North Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia, India and China have moved still further away from a modern political classification.  They are, instead, held within the grip of belief systems that are often diametrically opposed to neo-liberalism and a global culture. In short, these are cultures that question a Western way of life – or, at least, a way of life determined by the West.  These regions may no longer require the global art market. In 2018, there are paramount leaders in China, Russia and Turkey. Most 221

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New Art New Markets governments in South East Asia and the Middle East are led by strongmen. South American politics is in flux.  The political destiny of India is balanced on a knife edge; it is not unlikely that a radical form of Hinduism will prosper in that country and rise to challenge its democratic system, if not evolve into theocratic rule. The deep cultural reservoirs that have fed these civilisations for millennia are in the ascendant.  A system that began with Spain’s lust for gold and Europe’s use of the world’s mineral wealth and the art and artefacts created in its empires may be about to end.  The West’s global institutions are shorn of their potency, and the rule-based, global society that it nurtured is disintegrating before our eyes.  The message that has underpinned the post-Second World War consensus has, today, a very hollow ring. This is the way our world ends – not with a bang, but with a whimper. Culture, in its broadest sense, will change to accommodate this new political direction. Popular art forms will certainly become more Asian in flavour and, crucially, religious and other ideological principles will restrain conduct and behaviour. Our museums and galleries will show more art inspired by non-Western traditions, and at times this will be difficult for a global art consumer to digest and for a market to process. Contemporary art language will slowly change to reflect the impact of the past on great civilisations. In this book, we have called the art ‘new’ but it is, in fact, old art reborn. 

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Notes Chapter 1 – Introduction

1. 2 3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

Cultured in the sense of an awareness of global (neo-liberal) values. Spengler 1918, reprint 1991, p.12. The form world of economic life: Money (Spengler, 1918, pp 398–408). Taiwan’s most influential auction house, Ching Shiun, was founded in 1994 in the southern city of  Taichung, although the territory’s oldest such house is Chuan jia yi su, established in 1990 in the same city. International auctions did not come to Taiwan until the arrival of Sotheby’s and Christie’s in 1992. South Korea’s Seoul auction house was established in 1998. Est-Ouest auction house in Tokyo was set up in 1984 and Mainichi Art Auction, also in Tokyo, in 1973. Japanese-style paintings made in accordance with traditional Japanese conventions, techniques and materials. Japanese anti-imperialist Okakura Kakuzo made it his life’s work to unite Asian culture in opposition to the impact of westernisation. He reinvigorated Nihonga and through his text,  The Book of  Tea (1906), brought Japanese aesthetic concepts such as the worship of the imperfect to the foreground of aesthetic consciousness. Those Indian and Chinese modern and contemporary artists who have profited from the global market in the past will stay within the system.  Those who have been rejected by the global market, and whom I describe as ‘unclaimed’, will carve out a fresh future for themselves from new markets. ‘Core’ in this case refers to work that is representative of the culture or civilisation in which it is made. This political and economic masterplan is the invention of Chinese President Xi Jinping. It imagines a Sino maritime and land hegemony that extends west from the eastern seaboard of China deep into the heart of Europe and far into Africa. Divination by figures or lines.

Chapter 2 – Unsafe Havens

1. The fact that Hong Kong Island needed ‘New Territories’ in order to survive – there being the only available sources of water, amongst other necessities – made the fact that

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New Art New Markets ‘technically’ Hong Kong itself could have been retained by Britain in 1997 just that: a point of academic interest. 2. Seventeen of the world’s 20 largest sovereign wealth funds are in Asia and the Middle East.  The largest is in Norway ($1 trillion) followed by, in descending order: China Investment Corporation ($900 billion); Abu Dhabi Investment Authority ($828 billion); Kuwait Investment Authority ($524 billion); Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority ($494 billion); Hong Kong Monetary Authority ($457 billion); China’s SAFE Investment Company ($441 billion); Government of Singapore Investment Corporation ($359 billion); Qatar Investment Authority ($320 billion); China National Social Security Fund ($295 billion); Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund ($223 billion); Investment Corporation of Dubai ($209 billion); Singapore-based Temasek Holdings ($197 billion); UAE’s Mubadala Investment Company ($122 billion); South Korea Investment Group ($122 billion); Abu Dhabi Investment Council ($110 billion); Australian Future Fund ($105 billion); National Development Fund of Iran ($91 billion); Russia’s National Welfare Fund ($72 billion); and Libyan Investment Authority ($66 billion). 3. Abu Dhabi is the wealthiest of the emirates and holds the UAE’s oil reserves. 4. See UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, ich.unesco.org/en/functions-00586 (accessed February 2018). 5. The agreement is designed to limit entry into the United States of archaeological material illegally excavated and exported from China, thereby discouraging trafficking in China’s cultural patrimony. 6. Geneva, Zurich, Basel and Chiasso.  A free port is a zone where goods may be stored free of tax.  Two state-of-the-art free ports, in Singapore and Luxembourg, have created competition for the Swiss ports. 7. The Free Trade Zones (FTZs) are special economic zones set up with the objective of offering tax concessions and customs-duty benefits to expatriate investors.  There are more than 30 such free zones operating in Dubai.

Chapter 3 – East Asian Orthodoxy

1. Her father, Park Chung-hee, was president of Korea from 1963 to 1979. He seized power by force and became a dictator until his assassination in 1979. His assailants were tortured and executed.  The Park family has a legion of enemies. 2. The Republic of China on Taiwan will be referred to as ‘Taiwan’ from here on.  The republic’s status is complex. China and, officially, most of the world regards it as a renegade province; Taiwanese nationalists think of  Taiwan as an independent state. Both sides have agreed for the present to refer to the two entities as ‘the People’s Republic of

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Notes China’ and ‘the Republic of China’.  The situation is a legacy of the Chinese Civil War, which resulted in the establishment of the fleeing Republican Government on Taiwan and the victorious Communist Government in China proper. 3. The full titles of the two large photographs were City Disqualified: Ximen by Day and City Disqualified: Ximen by Night (both 120 x 150 cm [47 x 59 in]). 4. The Nationalist party formed in China in August 1912 to replace other revolutionary groups. 5. Ba de Rd (Chinese education), Zhong Xiao [bei] Rd (loyalty and filial piety), Ren Ai Rd (generous heart) and He Ping [dong] Rd (harmony and peace). 6. Mainichi was the first open, public auction house in Japan. It set up business in 1973. It was joined by Est-Ouest in 1984.  The collapse of the international art market halted the creation of other Western-style auction companies. It was not until 2005 that Mallet was founded, followed by Augur in 2006, i.Art Auction in 2008 and SBI Auction in 2011. By far the largest Western-style auction house in Japan is Shinwa Wise Holdings. It was established in 1987. 7. The international market for art collapsed in 1990, slashing the value of works of art held by Japanese corporations, collectors and dealers. 8. Fairs like Murakami’s own GESAI (Art Festival), the rebranded Art Fair Tokyo and its satellite,  Tokyo Contemporary Art Fair – as well as a host of triennials and biennales – aim to internationalise Japan’s art market. 9. Kyo machiya, literally translated as ‘city craftsmen’s houses’, dating from the Edo period (1603–1867) to the Showa (1926–89). 10. At the Teiten Exhibition in 1927, a specific art crafts (bijutsu kogei) section was established.  The beginnings of individual artistic craft production occurred in 1920–21, when Tomimoto Kenkichi (1886–1963) started to exhibit his work. Kusube Yaichi (1897– 1984) and the Sekidosha Society also began to hold exhibitions of their work. 11. Government-sponsored craft exhibitions. 12. There are currently only 20 kakiko (sap gatherers) for lacquer production in Japan, so 90 per cent of the liquid lacquer used to produce finished products in Japan today is sourced in China. 13. Hagi ware was known throughout the Edo period for its straw ash glaze, distinctive body and Korean influence. It went into eclipse in the first half of the twentieth century. 14. The void or hollow can be applied to an ontological feature of reality, a state of meditation or a phenomenological analysis of experience.  The absence of self and the simulanteous awarenes of the moment separate the void from intellectually comprehensible Buddhism, which makes a distinction between mind and body and is – in that respect – Cartesian. 15. The Japanese animistic belief in the gods of nature (Shinto) is evident throughout contemporary, man-made Japan. It often appears in the form of idols. Senju has deepened the integration by drawing the kami of the mountain closer to the representation of artificial flight, the modern airport. In that sense, he has annointed or blessed the airport and its planes. 16. The art informel movement in the 1940s and 50s, and the monochrome movement in the 1970s, the latter led by Park Seo-bo (b.1931), drew on Western abstract expressionism and minimalism respectively, despite Korean artists’ assertions that they were home-grown movements. Mono-ha is, on the other hand, demonstrably Eastern in flavour.

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New Art New Markets 17. Buddhist painting in South Korea was integrated into the formal art-education curriculum following the Second World War as part of the process of centralisation, in which power was concentrated in a central Ministry of Education. 18. General Park Chung-hee (President from 1963 until 1979), like Deng Xiaoping in China from 1979 onwards, shifted South Korea’s policy from an inward-looking economicgrowth model to one based on exports. 19. The Gwangju Biennale, founded in 1995, is in many ways an antidote to the dominant art market in Seoul.  A massacre of protesters in Gwangju from 18 to 27 May 1980 (known as ‘5:18’) highlighted the non-conformist and oppositional political position taken by Korea’s sixth largest city. 20. Chinese Daoist deities, a little like their Shinto equivalents, can be benevolent or confrontational. For example, the god of thunder in both beliefs behaves questionably. 21. Following the Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, led by the democratically elected Roh Tae-woo, sought to engage with the communist world for the first time. His government was widely seen as reformist. 22. S.P. Huntington,  The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, 1991, pp 266–7: ‘the party or group that takes power in the initial election at the time of transition loses a subsequent election and turns over power to those election winners, and if those election winners then peacefully turn over power to the winners of a later election’ then the so-called two-turnover test has been passed. 23. Im (2010, p.113) refers to the nomadic army of Internet aficionados who have paradoxically taken Koreans back to their pre-settled horse-riding, itinerant roots. 24.  The origins of the manga and anime craze in East Asia can be traced back to the outsourcing of design work by American animation studios, first to Japan and then to South Korea and Taiwan, establishing the region as the world centre for animation. 25.  The artists Chen Cheng-po (1895–1947) and Huang Jung-tsang (1918–52) were two of the most prominent victims of this period of martial law. 26.  As many as 21,000 people were killed in what is known locally as the ‘2:28’ incident, and a further 5000 during the martial-law government between 1954 and 1955 (R. L. Silvard, World Military and Social Expenditures, World Priorities Inc., Washington, DC, 1996, p.19). 27.  The Red,Yellow, Blue Painting Society flourished briefly in the southern Chinese city of Chengdu.  The society was formed after a joint show of the work of oil painters from the Central Academy of Fine Art and the Lu Xun Academy in 1986. 28. Choi and Choi (2008) estimate that the Tokyo National Museum holds more than 1000 gold, bronze and celadon artefacts: a total of 35,000 Korean objects, 30,000 rare books and 80 per cent of all Korean Buddhist art. 29. Chen Shui-bian (b.1950) was the 10th and 11th president of the Republic of China from 2000–08 and leader of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Ma Yin-jeou (b.1950) is the 12th president of the Republic of China and chairman of the Kuomintang.  Tsai Inwen (b.1956) was the 13th president of the Republic of China, the second president from the DPP and the first to be of mixed Hakka and aboriginal blood.

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Notes Chapter 4 – China

1. Gao Zhen (b.1956) and Gao Qiang (b.1962). 2. A number of families of victims of the earthquake in China’s southern province are seeking redress for the shoddy way in which schools and other municipal buildings had been constructed.  This has led to thousands of unnecessary deaths when buildings have collapsed like packs of cards. 3. ‘I Don’t Think Anybody Can Protect Me’, Financial Times interview by D. Pilling, 24–25, April 2010. 4. The size of the ink-painting market in China is estimated by Zhang Xiaoming – of the Guardian auction house – to be in excess of $100 million (in conversation, Beijing, January 2010). 5. Chinese calligraphy appears in a number of forms: oracle bone (jiaguwen) from the thirteenth to the eleventh century BCE; bronze script (jinwen) appears on bronze vessels and metal weapons from the eleventh to the third century BCE. In 1952, a modern, simplified script (jiantizi) was adopted in mainland China, although not in Hong Kong or on Taiwan. 6. Zhu Qizhan, declaration, Zhu Qizhan Art Museum, Shanghai, 2010 7. Big Characters are associated with the propaganda, dazibao (big-character posters) popular throughout the Cultural Revolution in China (1966–76). 8. There are five types of Chinese calligraphy: Seal, Clerical, Regular, Running and Cursive. Seal script was standardised under the Qin (221–206 BCE). It is long and angular, and evokes the primitive writing of China’s Neolithic and Bronze ages. Clerical script was dominant during China’s second imperial dynasty, the Han (206 BCE–221 CE). It is characteristically squat, square and wide with heavy, precise brush strokes. Regular script reached maturity during the Tang period (618–906 CE). Regular script is the most recognisable Chinese script and the basis for contemporary Traditional (Taiwan, Hong Kong) and Simplified (mainland) characters. 9. Zhang Daqian was granted the services of Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s (Soong Meiling’s) (1897–2003) personal photographer to take pictures of his magnificent lotus pond just before his death. Chiang signed each image. 10. One of China’s most renowned peaks. Zhang Daqian was born in China, moved to Taiwan, then to South America, then back to Taiwan. 11. The Confucian notion of a harmonious mass-behavioural pattern, which must result in a consequently good individual emotional pattern, is at the centre of the thinking of China’s neo-conservatives. 12. Abanindranath Tagore’s painting Bharat Mata (Mother India) (1905), which depicts an Indian woman with four arms, refers to a Hindu deity. 13. In conversation with dealer and curator Chang Tsong-zung in January 2010 in Hong Kong, Mr Chang declared, ‘In order to develop creativity in China we need to reexamine the past and this will allow us to look at ourselves, rather than through a Western or Soviet prism. India holds the key to this process.’ This view is a development of the passionate beliefs held by Chang that he first expressed to me in 1998, 1999 and 2000 (See I.A. Robertson articles for the Art Newspaper, 1998, 1999 and 2000). 14. Not, however, an autocracy in the European sense of the word: China has never had a hereditary aristocracy or caste system like those that operated in India and Japan.

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New Art New Markets Egalitarianism and mobility were both present in ancient Chinese society (Linebarger 1937, p.90). 15. Sun’s vision of democracy in China was justified through four key elements (Linebarger 1937, pp 88–121). 16. It was Sun who,  Terrill tells us (p.107), ‘made a fiction of the Han race for political purposes, declaring that the realm of China was composed of five races: Han,  Tibetan, Manchu, Mongol and Hui (Muslim)’.  An examination of Han funerary figures suggests that the early Yellow River civilisation comprised ethnically diverse peoples rather than a single racial group. 17. The French nineteenth-century artist Paul Delaroche (1797–1856) waited some 50 years after the Jacobin terror had ended before representing some of the horrors of its government. See Marie-Antoinette before the Tribunal (1851) and The Girondins’ Last Farewell, 31st October 1793 (1856). 18. In this picture, Xu uses the famous actress Wang Yin (1913–74) to represent Lady Shang.  Wang Yin and her theatre troupe were staying in Singapore when Xu Beihong made his sixth visit to the British colony. 19. Cai made a winning bid of €31.5 million (US$40 million), but refused to pay and effectively sabotaged the auction.  The bronze incense burners in the shape of a rat and a rabbit were sculptures that once adorned a fountain at the Old Summer Palace and were the work of a Frenchman. 20. It was the 8th Lord Elgin who ordered French, British and Punjabi soldiers to destroy the Old Summer Palace and loot its contents. 21. A core and efficient Chinese army grew up after the first conflict with Japan, which resulted in the ceding of  Taiwan to Japan by the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895). 22. Yuan Shikai commissioned a 40,000-piece porcelain service from the imperial pottery to mark the occasion of his inauguration. 23. Chiang followed the example of Zeng Guofan (1811–72), who had transformed the Qing’s leadership and ruthlessly put down the Taiping and Muslim revolts of the late nineteenth century, which led to the short-lived Tongzhi Restoration (Fenby 2008, chapter 2). 24. Song Jiaoren’s Kuomintang Party won sufficient seats in the lower and upper houses to form a government, with Song as prime minister.Yuan Shikai had him assassinated. 25. By the same token, the Chinese Government fears the independence of bloggers, and their ability to communicate rapidly en masse. In response, it has created firewalls around such social interaction sites as Twitter. 26. Lixingshe was set up in 1932 by Chiang’s supporters from his Whampoa Academy days, giving rise to political shock troops known as the ‘Blue Shirts’. 27. Edward Friedman in conversation with Ross Terrill (Terrill 2003, p.136). 28. Australian museums provide an interesting departure from the norm: they have been assiduous supporters of the new art emerging from China. 29. Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, Zheng Fanzhi and Yue Minjun. 30. The household registration, or hukou, system in China may be a legacy of the past but it is still a fact of life in seemingly modern cities like Shanghai. 31. Qinghai Tibet Railway and Sky Burial sold for $2 million each at Mary Boone Gallery, New York in 2007. 32. Christie’s was granted an independent licence to auction in China in 2013.  The

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Notes company operates out of Shanghai. Sotheby’s/Beijing was established in 2012 in collaboration with the state-owned company GeHua. GeHua has developed a free-port project in the Tianzhu Free Trade Zone in Beijing. 33. Guardian auction house, a subsidiary of  Taikang Insurance acquired the largest single stake in Sotheby’s in 2016, and now holds auctions that are the equal of Sotheby’s in Hong Kong. 34. The term denotes tiny, porcelain wine cups painted with cocks, hens and chicks – traditionally one of the most desirable possessions of Chinese-porcelain connoisseurs. 35. Suzhou is regarded as the cradle of Wu culture. It was founded by King Helu, who died in 496 BCE. During the Song dynasty, it was renowned for its handicrafts (particularly silk production) and was home to artists, poets and opera singers. 36. Xie He’s (479–502 BCE) ‘Six Canons’ constitute good painting; in his sixth canon, he recommends ‘transmission’ (of the experience of the past) in making copies. 37. For the purposes of this book, ‘authenticity’ should be taken to mean cultural continuity.

Chapter 5 – Hindustan

1. Refers to the larger of the two Zoroastrian communities in South Asia, the other being the Irani community. 2. Nagaland is a semi-autonomous Baptist Christian state in northern India, inaugurated by the Indian Government in 1963. If the government cedes the territory, other states might follow and the country would disintegrate.  There are 25 million Indian Christians. 3. The southern languages of India are Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu.  All belong to the linguistic family known as Dravidian. 4. C.B.  Asher and C.  Talbot (2006, p.13) quoting Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock. 5. The patuas of Bengal are itinerant artist/storytellers who go from village to village and house to house offering to paint scrolls (patas) made of pieces of paper sewn together, while narrating the pictorial narrative in song. 6. ‘Rama’, like ‘Krishna’, means the black or dark-skinned one.  The time of Rama’s birth is in the Treta Yuga, which is the second of the four eons (Yuga) of Hindu chronology, during which time Rama is said to have been born to King Dasaratha.  The four Ages (Yugas) are a series named after the four throws of the dice (Doniger 2009, p.5). 7. One of the reasons for the Indian Mutiny was the East India Company’s adoption of the Enfield rifle on behalf of its sepoys (native troops).  The cartridges were supplied in greased paper which had to be bitten in order for the cartridges to be used. Rumours spread that the grease contained tallow derived from cow or pig fat, thereby deeply offending both Hindus and Muslims. 8. The Cuncolim campaign in Goa is a good example of this approach. Cuncolim was the site of a massacre of village elders by the Portuguese in 1583. 9. In the holy field of battle (dharmakshetra) the god Krishna, disguised as a charioteer, revealed himself to the hero Arjun before battle and uttered the words of the Bhagavad Gita. 10. Hyderabad, Bhopal and Travancore also wanted to become independent nations. 11. Britain had acquired Kashmir following the First Sikh War in 1846, and sold it under the Treaty of Amritsar to Gulab Singh, the Raja of Jammu. 12. Doniger (2009, p.679) writes that one advocate of Hindutva has argued that the Taj

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New Art New Markets Mahal in Agra is not an Islamic mausoleum but an ancient Shiva temple that Shah Jahan appropriated from the local maharaja. 13. R. Bartlett (1993, p.1) The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton University Press, 1993), quoted in Asher and Talbot (2006). 14. A number of populist initiatives have been instigated by the Modi government since 2014: Jan Dhan Yojana (the ‘Prime Minister’s People Money Scheme’), for instance, saw the creation of millions of new bank accounts. LPG subsidy reforms have cut back on fuel subsidies for the better off, and the Swachh Bharat Mission is a sanitation initiative. 15. Deng Xiaoping initiated reform in China in 1978. India only began to abolish the ‘Licence Raj’, a series of quotas dating back to the British that necessitated avoidance and bribery, in 1991. 16. Cities with a population in excess of 20 million people. 17. The Gujarat Model refers to a period between 2002/03 and 2011/12, during which Gujarat experienced a quantum jump in its rate of growth.  The driving force was the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s innovative interpretation of neo-liberal economic policies. 18. The 1937 Government of India Act brought the vote to nearly 35 million people.  A few years before, the Poona Pact between Gandhi and the representative of the Untouchables – B.R.  Ambedkar – had guaranteed a number of seats for the Dalits. Britain weighted the electoral system in favour of the Indian princes, caste and creed in 1942. 19. The British administration in India propped up the 565 princely states while ensuring paramountcy of the Crown over India’s affairs.  The Jam Sahib of Nawanagar, for instance, had 157 cars and a wife who owned 1700 saris, while the Nawab of Junagadh spent £21,000 on the wedding of two of his dogs in the 1930s. 20. Progressive Art Group (PAG): 1947–56: Francis Newton Souza (1924–2002), Maqbool Fida Husain (1915–2011), Krishnaji Howlaji Ara (1914–85), Syed Haider Raza (1922–2016), Kattingeri Krishna Hebbar (1911–96), Hari Ambadas Gade (1917– 2001).  Associates of PAG: Krishen Khanna (b.1925), V   .S. Gaitonde (1924–2001),  Akbar Padamsee (b.1928),  Tyeb Mehta (1925–2009), Ram Kumar (b.1924), Bal Chhabda (1923–2013). 21. In 1854, the British East India Company set about ‘improving’ Indian taste with new art societies and art schools – the main ones being in Kolkata (Calcutta), Mumbai (Bombay) and Chennai (Madras) – to train artisans.  This extended to instruction in naturalist drawing. 22. Santiniketan is the embodiment of an ideal which was part of a cultural renaissance in India in the early twentieth century. Under its ideology, all arts and crafts were viewed as a single art form in order to revitalise the roots of their traditions.  Art was to be a part of daily life, not simply preserved in museums or exhibited in galleries. 23. Vrindavan, or Vrindavana, is a small town where the Lord Krishna spent his childhood. Shrinathji is a manifestation of V   ishnu aged seven. 24. Vishnu created Brahma, who created the Brahmand.  The Brahmand is, to the Hindu, the highest level of consciouness.

Chapter 6 – Aryana

1. Iran for the purposes of this book. ‘Aryana’ is the classical description of a large area of Central Asia as far as the Indus. It is derived from the Sanskrit,  Aryan, the name of the Iranian peoples’ motherland.

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Notes 2. The Wall (Oh, Persepolis), 1975 (181 x 102 x 23 cm) was sold through Christie’s in Dubai on 30 April 2008 for $2.5 million against an estimate of $400,000–$600,000. 3. In Shi’a Islam,  Ali is the first Imam; he was the Prophet’s first cousin. His younger brother, Imam Husayn, was cut down by Umayyad Caliph Yazid on the plain of Karbala 1,300 years ago. Iran adopted Shi’ism under the Ilkhanid Sultan Uljeitu in the fourteenth century. It only became the official religion of Iran under Shah Ismael, the founder of the Safavid dynasty. 4. The Persians were rich beyond the dreams of avarice; they were perfumed and effeminate; why, ‘they even fought in trousers’ (Holland 2005, p.157, from Herodotus, 5.49).  The Persians were, according to Tom Holland, obsessed with their physical appearance (p.206) and the first to regard bed linen as an art form (p.282). 5. Herodotus gives a graphic description of the multicultural complexion of Xerxes’ army of invasion (quoted in Holm 1902, p.42). 6. The Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE) encompassed present-day Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt,  Turkey and Cyprus as well as parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan,  Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan,  Armenia and Greece. 7. The Shah introduced mounted warriors dressed in the regalia of the court of Cyrus at his lavish opening ceremony in the ancient city of Persepolis in 1971.  The event, which was attended by heads of state from around the world, marked the 2,500-year anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire. 8. The blasphemy for which Belshazzar was punished was to drink wine from the sacred cups plundered from the Temple in Jerusalem.  The Hebrew inscription in the painting reads Mene mene tekel u-parsin, which Daniel interpreted as ‘God has numbered the days of your reign and has brought it to an end – you have been weighed in the balance and have failed in the test – your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and the Persians.’ 9. It is thought that there was probably a Persian influence on the Parthenon Marbles (Curtis and Tallis 2005).  The building programme at Pasargadae also shows Assyrian and Egyptian influences (p.31). 10. Omar Khayyam, translated by Farhad Moshiri (Porter 2006, p.44). 11. For example, the columns holding up the portico to the Pantheon, completed under the Emperor Hadrian, were quarried in Egypt. 12. The Parthian Shah, Shapur, was tolerant towards Jews and Christians. He was mistakenly protective of the universally despised Mani, an Iranian of royal ancestry, who gave rise to an eponymous, dystopic religion. 13. The words of the inscription appear in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. Elamite remained the administrative language in the Persian centre; further West,  Aramaic dominated; and in Egypt, Egyptian and the demotic and hieroglyphic scripts were adopted. In Greece and the western satraps (governed provinces of the empire), Greek was the lingua franca (Meadows in Curtis and Tallis, p.84). 14. The assassins kept the body of Bardiya from public view, and announced that he had been killed by his brother Cambyses several years earlier.  The man that they had executed, they lied, was in fact a usurper to the throne. 15. The Iranian Green Movement refers to a political movement that arose after the 2009 Iranian presidential elections, in which protestors demanded the removal of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from office. Green was initially used as the symbol of Ahmadinejad’s rival

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New Art New Markets Mir Hossein Mousavi’s campaign, but after the election the colour came to represent a symbol of hope for those asking for the annulment of a fraudulent result. 16. Rashid Rana’s Red Carpet I (2007), one of a series of five, was originally sold privately for €30,000. It was on sale at the Chemould Prescott Road gallery at Art Dubai in 2008 for €90,000.  At Christie’s, New York in May 2010, Red Carpet III (2007) made $150,000. 17. The Hazaras are an ethnic group native to the region of Hazarajat in central Afghanistan, who speak the Hazaragi variant of Dari – itself an eastern variety of Persian. 18. The title refers to the 49th Sura of the Qur’an, in which Allah demands mutual respect between different peoples (shu’ub) (Axworthy 2007, p.82). Shu’ubiyya refers to the response of non-Arab Muslims to the privileged status of Arabs within the ummah (Islamic community). 19. It was for the Great Mosque at Ardabil that the magnificent carpet now housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London was commissioned.  The carpet was woven elsewhere, probably in Kashan (central Iran). 20. ‘Mughal’ is a Perso-Indic corruption of ‘Mongol’. Early, but not the first, invaders of the Indian subcontinent were a Turkic people who converted to Islam. 21. Asher and Talbot write that by 1600 virtually all the northern half of India had been brought under a unified Mughal Empire (2006, p.115). 22. Babur, a Central Asian prince who defeated the last Lodi Sultan at the Battle of Panipat in 1526, became the first Mughal Emperor. 23. The creative environment in Iran has oscillated between significant cultural liberalism at the turn of the millennium and a return to strict Islamic cultural norms under the Ahmadinejad regime in 2005. 24. DOBAG (Dogal Boya Arastirma ve Gelistirme Projesi).  Turkish rugs were the first to be imported into Europe and made famous on the Continent by their appearance in paintings by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543). Some of the finest examples of  Turkish carpet making can be seen in the Gulbenkian Collection in Lisbon. 25. Iran has the world’s second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia. 26. Gamal Adbel Nasser of Egypt followed Mossadeq’s example in 1956 when he nationalised the Suez Canal. 27. Nativism is a term that we have already encountered. It was coined in Taiwan in the 1970s to refer to art that is ethnically, culturally and politically nationalist in nature. 28. Parviz Tanavoli, quoted in Keshmirshekan 2009, pp 274–5.

Chapter 7 – Hispania

1. The term ‘Latin America’ is used specifically to refer to the Spanish cultural attributes that inform the culture of South America.  We will adopt the umbrella term, South America, in all other contexts. 2. Referred to throughout as Mexica. ‘Aztec’ is a nineteenth-century corruption of Mexica. 3. Spengler thought that mankind was largely aimless.  A number of mighty cultures grow up together and stamp their own mark on their own land and people (and do not necessarily affect other cultures). He argues that ‘[e]ach Culture has its own new possibilities of selfexpression which arise, ripen, decay and never return’. Spengler 1991 (reprint), p.17. 4. Greene, 1940, pp 154–5.

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Notes 5. Hopewell culture describes the common aspects of the Native American culture that flourished along rivers in the north-eastern and mid-western United States from 200 BCE to 500 CE in the Middle Woodland period. 6. Ometeotl was at the head of the celestial hierarchy. He had four sons, one of whom was Huitzilopchtli.  The brothers were always at war with each other, but one controlled, or else became, the sun for one of five cycles.  When Cortés arrived, Huitzilopchtli was the fifth sun.  The sun’s fuel was chalchihuatl, a fluid obtained by human sacrifice. 7. Las Casas 1992 (reprint), p.13. 8. A Spanish government operated out of Seville and Cadiz in southern Spain during the French occupation. 9. The ecomenderos were those who received grants from the Crown to a conquistador.  The recipients of the grant could exact tribute from the Amerindians in the form of gold, in kind or in labour. 10. Finamore and Houston 2010, p.68. 11. The Roosevelt Corollary announced that European countries could not use force to collect debts from South America. It soon became a policy to enforce order in South American states and a justification to create a series of semi-protectorates.

Chapter 8 – South East Asian Authoritarianism

1. Larasati partnered with the Dutch auction house Glerum in 2000, after the latter had discovered a market for Indonesian art in the Netherlands. 2. Other Indonesian auction houses are MASTERPIECE and Sidharta. Sotheby’s and Christie’s entered the market for Indonesian art in the mid-1990s. 3. The artists published their criticisms in the Black December Statement. 4. Adrien Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès, who spent the latter part of his life in Bali, is the highest-priced South East Asian artist at auction (Sotheby’s and Christie’s press releases). 5. On 20 August 1945, the Soeara Asia newspaper ran the headline, ‘Proklamasi Indonesia Merdeka’ (Declaration of Indonesian Independence). Immediately preceding the proclamation, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta had signed a document and declared that they were assuming office as president and vice-president. Four years of colonial conflict were to follow. 6. East Timor, Portugal’s last East Indies colony, was added in 1974. It gained its formal independence from Indonesia in 2002, after a long and bloody struggle. 7. LEKRA was associated with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). 8. Rudolf G. Usman (b.1953), who has been painting Borobudur for decades, made a very similar moonlit image of the temple, Borobudur in Black Night, in 2007. 9. The Asian Economic Flu was a period of financial contagion that gripped much of East Asia beginning in July 1997. It raised fears of a worldwide economic meltdown, which did not in the end materialise.  The crisis originated in Thailand. 10. The fact that Indonesia is not considered one of the ‘BRIC’ (Brazil, Russia, India and China) pack, some analysts argue, is due solely to its low foreign-currency reserves. 11. Despite the modernisation programmes of King Rama IV (r.1851–68), King Rama V (r.1868–1910) and King Rama VI (r.1910–25),  Thailand was spared the rampant westernisation of neighbouring states.

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New Art New Markets 12. As Shiraishi (1995, p.259) points out,  Thailand was, for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fettered to British economic and maritime power. 13. The European voyages of discovery began in the early fifteenth century when Portuguese navigators went in search of gold, slaves and spices on the African coast. In 1487, Bartolomeu Dias (1450–1500) and Pêro da Covilhã (1460–1526) arrived in the Indian Ocean.  Thereafter, the open-sea voyages of discovery multiplied – encouraged by the resurgence of Islam, which made the old route east of Alexandria and the Red Sea precarious (Winkleman 1979). 14. The country’s name was changed from Siam to Thailand on 23 June 1939. 15. Taken from Silpa Bhirasri, ‘Thai Culture’, New Series No. 8: Contemporary Art in Thailand, 1959, 6th edition 1989, Fine Art Department Bangkok. 16. The Poh Chang School of Art, which laid the foundation of modern Western art in Thailand, was established in 1913. 17. Very few examples of  Thai mural painting before the eighteenth century survive. 18. Lanna Group (founded 1978),  Thai Art 80 (f.1980), E-Sam Group (f.1981) and the Four Artist Group (f.1981). 19. In 1887, the Khmer Empire of Cambodia became, with Vietnam, part of French Indochina. It gained its full independence from France in 1953 and would be inextricably linked to the irrational behaviour of King Sihanouk until ‘free and fair’ elections in 1998 (see Crump 2007, p.168). 20. Vietnam was mostly under Chinese rule from 111 BCE–938 CE. 21. The Chams are an Austronesian people.  The Champa kings converted to Islam in the seveneteenth century. 22. The Tet Offensive of 1968 demonstrated the ability of the ‘Viet Cong’ (the country’s National Liberation Front) to attack the Americans and the South Vietnamese Government at its heart in Saigon. 23. The international community referred to them as the ‘boat people’ because they often arrived in foreign harbours in ships. 24. For instance, the Spratly Islands, which lie partly off Vietnam’s southern coast, are disputed by China,  Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia. 25. Before this time, artists in Vietnam were largely anonymous. 26. The technique of lacquering was introduced to Vietnam from China in the mid-fifteenth century, although lacquered utensils had been made in Vietnam long before this time. 27. Alfredo R. Roces Amorsolo Filipinas Foundation, Manila 1975, quoted in Guillermo 1995, p.90. 28. The Austronesian-speaking people are a population group present in Oceania and South East Asia who speak, or had ancestors who spoke, one of the Austronesian languages.  The language comes from the same source as Malay, Formosan (Taiwan’s aboriginals are divided into ten distinct clans, each speaking a different dialect from the other), Micronesian, Melanesian and Polynesian. 29. Both Taiwan and South Korea have large Christian communities. 30. Marcos was deposed after the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue Uprising in February 1986. 31. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was sworn into office in 2001, and was faced with a military rebellion in 2003. 32. The Straits Settlements were defined by the three harbour cities of Penang, Melaka and Singapore.

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Notes 33. Islam Hadhari is a doctrine that allows Islam and technological development to coexist. 34. Gunawan was one of the central figures in the Indonesian People’s Cultural Organisation, which was closed down by Suharto in 1965 after the anti-Communist purge. He was imprisoned without trial and held for 13 years at Kebon Waru prison in Bandung, during which time he painted some of his most tranquil, optimistic and beautiful works. 35. Affandi, like Gunawan, was an idiosyncratic artist who, despite his debt to modernism, pursued an individual style of multicoloured scenes and exaggerated expressions, and often portrayed masks or performers in masks. 36. This extends to the sinuous movement of the body in the art of Gunawan and the bold characterisation of expressions in the masked faces of Affandi.

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Bibliography Chapter 1 – Introduction

Books Acharya,  A., ‘Democracy and disorder: will democratization bring greater regional instability to East Asia?’ in Chu Yin-wah and Wong Siu-lun (eds), East Asia’s New Democracies, Routledge, 2010 Bary de, W.T., Sources of East Asian Tradition, vol. 1, Columbia University Press, 2008 Carino, L.V., ‘Devolution and democracy: a fragile connection’, in Chu Yin-wah and Wong Siu-lun (eds), East Asia’s New Democracies, Routledge, 2010 Doniger, W.,  The Hindus:  An Alternative History, Oxford University Press, 2009 Fuller, P., Images of God:  The Consolations of Lost Illusions, Chatto, 1985 Hewison, K., ‘Thailand’s conservative democratization’, in Chu Yin-wah and Wong Siu-lun (eds), East Asia’s New Democracies, Routledge, 2010 Howell, J., ‘Social and political developments in China: Challenges for democratization’, in ibid Hsiao, M.  and Ming Sho-ho, ‘Civil Society and democracy-making in Taiwan: re-examining the link’, in ibid Im, Hyug-Baeg, ‘Development and change in Korean democracy since the democratic transition in 1987: the Three Kims’ politics and after’, in ibid Ruskin, J.,  A Joy For Ever, Everett & Co. Ltd., 1914 Spengler, O.,  The Decline of the West, Oxford University Press, 1918 (reprinted 1991) Thompson, M.R., ‘Modernization theory’s last redoubt: democratization in East and Southeast Asia’, in ibid Yin-wah, Chu and Wong Siu-lun, ibid Articles and reports Scheier-Dolberg, J. ‘Li Jin’, Orientations, vol.41, no.7, October 2010 Sheng, Hao, ‘Keeping company with the past: “fresh ink” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’, ibid ———, ‘Liu Xiaodong’, ibid ———, ‘Xu Bing’, ibid

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Bibliography Chapter 2 – Unsafe Havens

Books Au-yeung, H., ‘Design, landscape and modernity: reflections on the paintings of Wucius Wong and the role of design in modern Hong Kong art’, Wucius Wong:Visions of a Wanderer, Plum Blossoms, 1997 Christian, J., ‘Singapore’s role in the development of South East Asian art markets’, unpublished MA dissertation, Sotheby’s Institute of Art (SIA), 2007 Desjardins,  T., ‘The Guggenheim/Abu Dhabi’, unpublished MA dissertation SIA, 2007 Muller, N., ‘Introducing Complicity’, in Paul Sloman (ed.), Contemporary Art in the Middle East: Art World,  Artworld, Black Dog Publishing, 2009, pp 12–25 Peerenboom, R., ‘Rule of law and democracy: lessons for China from Asian experiences’ in Chu Yin-wah and Wong Siu-lun (eds), East Asia’s New Democracies, Routledge, 2010 Ruskin, J.,  A Joy for Ever, Everett & Co. Ltd, 1914 Tregear, M., Chinese Art,  Thames & Hudson, 1997 Vatikiotis, M., Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017. Articles and reports Adam, G., ‘Fireworks as Qatar Steals the Show’, Financial Times, 29 November 2008 Bresler J.  and S. Khalifa, ‘US import restrictions imposed on certain archaeological material from the People’s Republic of China’, Withersworldwide, October 2009 Canvas Supplement, ‘The Creative City’,  Art Paris, 2007 Carver,  A., ‘Dubai,  an art scene in the making, out of the desert’ Art Newspaper, September 2006 England,  A.  and R. Khalaf, ‘Abu Dhabi multiplies investment arms’, Financial Times, 6 May 2009 Groves, C.  and P. Munro, ‘The UK as a jurisdiction for the international art collector’, Withersworldwide, March 2009 Heathcote, E., ‘A monument to the possible’, Financial Times, 17–18 May 2008 ———, ‘Art is the new power’, Financial Times, 21–22 November 2015 ———, ‘Island of urbanity in an urban desert’, Financial Times, 10 August 2016 ———, ‘The Gulf ’s Louvre has landed’, Financial Times, 11–12 November 2017 Houlder, V   ., ‘Fears over CGT crackdown’, Financial Times, 26 November 2007 ———, ‘London fears fall from arts pedestal’, Financial Times, 23–24 February 2008 ———, ‘Tax havens in retreat as Swiss capitulate’, Financial Times, 14–15 March 2009 Itoi, K., ‘Japan, a low rate of sales tax, but little incentive for art collectors to add to public collections or protect the national heritage’,  Art Newspaper, September 2006 Kay, J., ‘Tax havens exist because of the hypocrisy of larger states’, Financial Times, 21–22 March 2009 Kerr, S., ‘An enemies’ stress test’, Financial Times, 10–11 June 2017 ———, ‘A “cultural revolution” unleashed’, Financial Times, 11–12 November 2017 Khalaf, R., ‘We created a lot of jealousy’, Financial Times, 16–17 April 2017 Muheim, B., ‘The most inaccessible museum in the world’,  Art Newspaper, September 2006 Oakley, D.  And G.  Tett, ‘Sovereign wealth funds courted in debt sales’, Financial Times, 25 March 2010 Robertson, I. A., ‘Taiwan’,  Art Newspaper, September 2006 ———, ‘China’, ibid

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New Art New Markets Valentin, P., ‘Illicit trade in cultural property: Switzerland and Italy agree to cooperate’, Withersworldwide, November 2008 ———, ‘Art and Cultural Assets’, Withersworldwide, 2009 Valentin, P.  and C. Stripp, ‘Free ports in the UK, Switzerland and Singapore’, Withersworldwide, Spring 2010 West, B., ‘Wealthy isolation’, Financial Times, 10 October 2009

Chapter 3 – East Asian Orthodoxy

Books Acharya,  A., ‘Democracy and disorder: will democratization bring greater regional instability to East Asia?’ in Chu Yin-wah and Wong Siu-lun (eds), East Asia’s New Democracies, Routledge, 2010 Albritton, K., ‘Evolution of the Japanese contemporary art market: From Eastern to Western practices’, unpublished MA dissertation, Sotheby’s Institute of Art (SIA), 2008 Baum, R., Hiroshi Senju’s Alternative Materialism.  The Waterfall Paintings in Contemporary Art Historical Context, Sundaram Tagore Inc., 2007 Cha, Jaemin, ‘Dynamics of the Korean Art Market: focusing on the external & internal factors of Korea, unpublished dissertation, SIA, 2016 Chang,  Tsong-zung,  ‘The Sky in the Landscape’, in Qiu Shi-hua: Landscape Painting, Galerie Rudolfinum, 2000. Chang, Tsong-zung et al., Man and Earth: Contemporary Paintings from Taiwan,  Asian Art Coordinating Council, 1994 Chang,  Tsong-zung et al.,  A Translucent Dawn: Ink Paintings by Hsu Yu-jen, Hanart TZ Gallery, 2007 Choi, Sunhee and Byongsik Choi, ‘South Korea’, in  The International Art Markets:The Essential Guide for Collectors and Investors, Kogan Page, 2008 Choi,  Taeman, ‘Reconciliation between Material and Shape’, in Lee Jaehyo: Return to Nature,  Touch Art, 2007 Chung, C., ‘Going Global: An Analysis of the Validation Process for Contemporary Korean Artists within an International Context’, unpublished dissertation, SIA, 2016 Faulkner, R., Japanese Studio Crafts:  Tradition and the Avant-Garde, Laurence King, 1995 Harris, V   . (ed.), Shinto:  The Sacred Art of Ancient Japan, British Museum Press, 2001 Hsiao, M.  and Ming Sho-ho, ‘Civil society and democracy-making in Taiwan: re-examining the link’, in Chu Yin-wah and Wong Siu-lun (eds), East Asia’s New Democracies, Routledge, 2010 Hsun, Jiang, Return to the Native Soil – Directions in Taiwanese Art in the 1970s,  Taiwan Art (1945– 1993),  Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1993 Im, Hyug-baeg, ‘Development and change in Korean democracy since the democratic transition in 1987: the Three Kims’ politics and after’, in Chu Yin-wah and Wong Siu-lun (eds), East Asia’s New Democracies, Routledge, 2010 Kenji, K., Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan, British Museum Press, 2007 Kim S.J., ‘The genealogy of Confucian moralpolitik and its implications for modern civil society’, in C.C.  Armstrong (ed.), Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy and the State, Routledge, 2002 pp 57–91 Lai, Chi-tim,  ‘The Nature of Dao’, in Qiu Shi-hua: Landscape Painting, Galerie Rudolfinum, 2000

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Bibliography Lee, Dong-suk, Park, Seo-bo Ecriture: 1967–2001, Gallery Hyundai, 2002 Lin, Hsing-Yueh, Setting the Historical Stage for the Taiwan Art Exhibition,  Taiwan Art (1945– 1993),  Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1993 Liu, C., Place/Displace:Three Generations of  Taiwanese Art,  Taiwan Fine Arts Museum, 2003 Lu, V   ., New Art, New Tribes – Taiwan Art in the Nineties, Hanart,  Taipei Gallery, 1993 ———,  The New Wave of Contemporary Taiwan Art 1983–1993: A Decade of Metamorphosis,  Taiwan Art (1945–1993),  Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1993 Lu, V   . et al.,  Visions of Pluralism: Contemporary Art in Taiwan, 1988–1999, Council for Cultural Affairs and Council for Mainland Affairs, 1999 Park, Myung-ja, Park Soo Keun, Gallery Hyundai, 2002 Peerenboom, R. ‘Rule of law and democracy: lessons for China from Asian experiences’, in Chu Yin-wah and Wong Siu-lun (eds), East Asia’s New Democracies, Routledge, 2010 Portal, J., Korea: Art and Archaeology, British Museum Press, 2000 Rawlings,  A.  and C. Mod,  Art Space Tokyo: An Intimate Guide to the Tokyo Art World, PRE/ POST, 2010 Robertson, I.A.,  ‘Taiwan’, in  The International Art Markets:The Essential Guide for Collectors and Investors, Kogan Page, 2008 ———, Understanding Art Markets: Inside the World of Art and Business, Routledge, 2016 Ropner, R.  and Hirakawa, K., ‘Japan’ in  The International Art Markets:The Essential Guide for Collectors and Investors, Kogan Page, 2008 Rousmaniere, N., Bijutsu=Âto dewa naku, Kurafuto=Kôgei dewa nai: Bijutsukan ni okeru tôjiki no tenji ni tsuite no kôsatsu (Bijutsu is not Art and Craft is not Kôgei: Thoughts on the Display of Ceramics in Art Museums), 2008  Rousmaniere, N. (ed.), Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan: Celebrating Fifty Years of the Japan Art Crafts Exhibition, University of Washington Press, 2007 Thompson, M.R., ‘Modernization theory’s last redoubt: democratization in East and Southeast Asia’, in Chu Yin-wah and Wong Siu-lun (eds), East Asia’s New Democracies, Routledge, 2010 Watkins, J., Facts of Life: Contemporary Japanese Art, Hayward Gallery, 2001 West, P.  and Suh Ji-moon (eds), Remembering the ‘Forgotten War’:The Korean War through Literature and Art, a Study of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center, East Gate Books, 2001 Yamaguchi,Y., Warriors of Art:  A Guide to Contemporary Artists, Kodansha International Ltd, 2007 ———,  The Power of Japanese Contemporary Art,  ASCII, 2008 Youngsoo, Cha, ‘Korean Buddhist Art wWork: An Observation of the History, Past and Current Trends, V   aluation and Its Forecast in Art Business’, unpublished dissertation, SIA, 2012 Articles and reports Dizard, J. ‘London may be key to Euro-Yen Rival to US dollar’, Financial Times, 7 January 2018 Downer, L., ‘Shogun time’, Financial Times, 14–15 August 2010 Duffles, M., ‘An elegant dedication to ancient crafts’, Financial Times, 20–21 August 2005 Fakhr, L., ‘Rhyme and reason’,  Abraaj Capital Prize, 2009 Garnham, P., ‘Beijing seeks an escape from the dollar trap’, Financial Times, 31 July 2009

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New Art New Markets King, S., ‘China takes small steps towards breaking the sway of the US dollar’, Independent, 13 July 2009 Kwon, T.H.  and H.I. Cho, ‘Confuciansim and Korean Society: a historical basis on democracy and democratization’, paper presented to Conference Université catholique de Louvain, 30 May–1 June 1994 Kwong, R., ‘A delicate détente’, Financial Times, 7 May 2009 Nakamoto, M., ‘Bizarre world of the collectors’, Financial Times, 12 October 2004 Oliver, C., ‘Young Kim no guarantor of long-term stability’, Financial Times, 2–3 October 2010 Radlauer, S., ‘Universal waterfalls’,  Asian Art News, November–December 2008

Chapter 4 – China

Books Aldrich, M.  and R.J.  Wallis (eds),  Antiquaries & Archaists:  The Past in the Past,  The Past in The Present, Spire Books Ltd, 2009 Barrass, G.,  The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China, British Museum Press, 2002 Boers-Li Gallery, Qiu Anxiong: About – New Classic of Mountains and Seas II, Boers-Li Gallery, 2009 Bonhams, Contemporary Asian Art Hong Kong, Bonhams, May 2007 Chang, J.  and J. Halliday, Mao:The Unknown Story, V   intage, 2005 Chang,  Tsong-zung,  ‘The Sky in the Landscape’, in Qiu Shi-hua: Landscape Painting, Galerie Rudolfinum, 2000 ———, Xu Longsen, Hanart, 2014 ———,  The Changing Geometry of Landscape:The Shanshui painting of Leung Kui Ting, Hanart, 2016 Chang, Tsong-zung et al., Half a Century of Chinese Woodblock Prints, Museum of Art Ein Harod, 1999 Chang, Tsong-zung et al., Power of the Word, International Curators International, 2002 Chun-Yi-lee, Liu Kuo-sung: Universe in My Mind, Michael Goedhuis, 2010 Clements, J., Confucius: A Biography, Sutton Publishing, 2004 Colman, J., Chinese Contemporary.Year 10, Chinese Contemporary Ltd, 2006 Cooper, R.,  The Paintings of Yang Yanping, Michael Goedhuis, 1999 Duff, S., ‘Ren Zhitian Script & View’,  Art Labor, 2008 Ehrmann,  T. (ed.),  The Art Market in 2017,  ArtPrice, 2018 Eskenazi, D., Recent Paintings by Zeng Xiaojun, Eskenazi, 2017 Fan, Jingzhou, Wang Dong-ling: Calligraphy and Painting, Machteld Stikroort, 1994 Fairbank, J.K.  and M. Goldman, China: A New History, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2nd enlarged edition, 2006 Farrer,  A., ‘Continuity and Revival in Modern Chinese Culture: the Woodblock Prints of Wang Chao’, in M.  Aldrich and R.J.  Wallis (eds),  Antiquaries & Archaists:  The Past in the Past,  The Past in the Present, Spire Books Ltd, 2009 Fenby, J., Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He lost, Free Press, 2005 ———,  The Penguin History of Modern China:  The Fall and Rise of a Great Power 1850–2008, Penguin Books, 2008 Gao, Minglu,  Thirty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art 1979–2009, Minsheng Museum, 2010

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Bibliography Gao, Shiming, Sharing Silent Secrets, Hanart, 2014 Goedhuis, M., Yang Yanping, Beadleston Gallery New York, 1998 Hall, R. and Miller, E., Lo Shang Tang: Contemporary Chinese Paintings, 1988 Hao, Jing, ‘An Overview of Contemporary Chinese Antique Market’, unpublished MA dissertation, Sotheby’s Institute of Art (SIA), 2007 He, Xu, ‘Contemporary Chinese Ink Painting – Marginalised or the Next Boom?’ unpublished MA dissertation, SIA, 2009 Huang, Bingyi, ‘Unbounded You Si’,  Art Labor, 2007 Hutton, W.,  The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century,  Abacus, 2007 Kemble, M., ‘No Show Ying Yefu’,  Art Labor, 2009 Kemble, M., ‘Ren Zhitian – Everywhere is Here’, ibid Kuo, J.C., Chinese Ink Painting Now,  Art Publishers Inc., 2010 Leonard, M., What Does China Think? Fourth Estate, 2008 Linebarger, P.M.A.,  The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-Sen, Johns Hopkins Press, 1937 Lu, Datong,  The Pond, Jiang Shanqing, Culture & Art Publishing House, 2010 Pi, Daojian,  ‘Transmuting Qi into form’, in Painting with Qi: Shen Aiqi, Hanart, 2014 Saatchi, C.,  The Revolution Continues: New Art from China, Saatchi Gallery in partnership with Phillips de Pury & Company, 2008 Salisbury, H.E.,  Tiananmen Diary:  Thirteen Days in June, Unwin Paperbacks, 1989 Smith.K., Nine Lives:  The Birth of the Avant-Garde in New China,  Timezone 8 Ltd, 2008 Snow, E., Red Star Over China, V   ictor Gollancz, 1937 Sotheby’s, Contemporary Art Day Sale, Hong Kong, Sotheby’s, 5 October 2008 Sullivan, M.,  The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, From the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day,  Thames and Hudson, London, 1973 ———, Luo Kuo-sung, National History Museum Taiwan, 1990 ———, Paintings by Yan Yanping, Michael Goedhuis, 1997 ———,  Art and Artists of  Twentieth Century China, University of California Press, 1998 Terrill, R.,  The New Chinese Empire and What It Means for the United States, Basic Books, 2003 Wu, Chao-jan,  Two Worlds in the Paintings of Yu Peng, Hanart (Taipei) Gallery, 2001 Zhang Xin, Suzhou Museum, Great Wall Publishers, 2007 Articles and reports Adam, G., ‘The long view’, Financial Times, 10 May 2014 ———, ‘A bridge to culture – before the deluge’, Financial Times, 26–27 March 2016 Ahmad, S., ‘China goes shopping’, Financial Times Magazine, 22–23 August 2009 Anderlini, J., ‘China set for Renminbi policy shift’, Financial Times, 7 April 2010 ———, ‘Bo Saga captures Chinese public’s imagination’, Financial Times, 10–11 March 2012 Anderlini, J.  and L. Hornby, ‘Captured in a tiger hunt’, Financial Times, 1 April 2014 Anderlini, J. et al., ‘China’s ever tighter embrace’, Financial Times, 7 and 8 November 2015 Aspden, P., ‘Cultural evolution’, Financial Times, 30 June–1 July 2012 Battle, L., ‘Macau’s wild card’, Financial Times, 8–9 March 2014 Bland, B., ‘Hong Kong in a corner after Xi’s raid’, Financial Times, 4–5 February 2017 Blas, J., ‘A market re-emerges’, Financial Times, 14 April 2010 Dinmore, G.  And G. Dyer, ‘China “increasingly hostile” to foreign groups, says GE chief ’, Financial Times, 2 July 2010

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New Art New Markets Dyer, G., ‘The Beijing bronzes expose a faultline with the West’, Financial Times, 7–8 March 2009 Gill, C., ‘Shanghai Expo Censorship Rows’,  Art Newspaper, July–August 2010 Harris, G., ‘Shanghai switches on’, Financial Times, 5–6 January 2013 Hastings, S., ‘Keeping it at home’, Financial Times, 12 May 2012 Hille, K., ‘Inside China’s censorship machine’, Financial Times, 18–19 July 2009 ———, Financial Times, 5–6 September 2009 ———, ‘Showing the strain’, Financial Times, 29–30 May 2010 Hille, K.,  T. Mitchell and G. Dyer, ‘Striking out’, Financial Times Magazine, 17–18 July 2010 Huang, Ching-Yi, ‘Chinese art market’,  Art Market Report, 3rd quarter 2009 Kynge, J., ‘China harnesses big data to buttress the power of the state’, Financial Times, 28–29 October 2017 Melikan, S., ‘New Chinese buyers redefine the market’, International Herald Tribune, 26–27 September 2009 Mitchell,  T., ‘Invisible “fetters” cling to migrants’, Financial Times, 16 April 2010 ———, ‘China’s latest revolutionary hero’, Financial Times, 21–22 October 2017 Mitchell,  T.  and P.  Waldmeir, ‘The party versus the elite’, Financial Times, 19 and 20 December 2015 Moore, S., ‘I love this language of ink’, Financial Times, 31 October–1 November 2015 Pierce, S., ‘Creative differences’, Financial Times, 7–8 May 2016 Pilling, D., ‘I don’t think anybody can protect me’, Financial Times, 24–25 April 2010 Rachman, G., ‘America is losing the free world’, Financial Times, 5 January 2010 Robertson, I.A., ‘Watching proportion and good taste die’,  Art Newspaper, January 1998 ———, ‘We must salvage what remains of the past’,  Art Newspaper, March 1999 ———, ‘My strategy to rescue traditional Chinese culture’,  Art Newspaper, March 2000 Sebag-Montefiore, C., ‘The age of opulence’, Financial Times, 12–13 May 2012 Sotheby’s, ‘Contemporary Chinese Art Part I’, Hong Kong, 7 April 2007 ———, ‘Contemporary Chinese Art Part II’, ibid Spence, R., ‘Flesh, blood and spinning silkworms’, Financial Times, 8 and 9 September 2012 Waldmeir, P., ‘Bund Bull signals Shanghai’s charge against Wall St dominance’, Financial Times, 24–25 April 2010 ———, ‘Shanghai learns to value and save its heritage’, Financial Times, 23–24 February 2013 ———, ‘China lacks something when it comes to art’, Financial Times, 30–31 January 2016 Wilson, E., ‘The power of Poly’, Financial Times, 29 May 2010 Winchester, S., ‘Cultural capital’, Financial Times, 20–21 June 2009 Wrathall, C., ‘A Moveable Forest’, Financial Times, 25–26 November 2017 Zhuang,Yumin, Gao Changzi and Huang Jun, ‘The China Art Financing Annual Report:  Art Finance’, Renmin University, Beijing, 2017

Chapter 5 – Hindustan

Books Asher, C.B.  and C.  Talbot, India before Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2006 Blurton,  T.R., Hindu Art, British Museum Press, 1992 Dalrymple, W., Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, Bloomsbury, 2009

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Bibliography Doniger, W.,  The Hindus:  An Alternative History, Oxford University Press, 2009 Essl, K. et al., Chalo! India:  A New Era of Indian Art, Prestel, 2008 Fernandes, E., Holy Warriors: A Journey into the Heart of Indian Fundamentalism, Portobello Books, 2007 Fisher, R.E., Buddhist Art and Architecture,  Thames & Hudson, 1993 Guy, J et al., Chola: Sacred Bronzes of Southern India, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2006 Imbert, M., Sayed Haider Raza:  The Five Rays of Raza, Kings Road Gallery, 2010 Jackson A.  and A. Jaffer (eds), Encounters:  The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500–1800, V   ictoria and Albert Museum, 2004 ———, Maharaja:  The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts, V   ictoria and Albert Museum, 2009 Luce, E., In Spite of the Gods:  The strange Rise of Modern India,  Abacus, 2006 Mitter, P., Indian Art, Oxford University Press, 2001 National Portrait Gallery, Contemporary Connections:  The Singh Twins, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2010 Saatchi Gallery,  The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today, Saatchi Gallery in partnership with Phillips de Pury & Company, 2010 Singh. S., India,  ‘The International Art Markets’, in  The Essential Guide for Collectors and Investors, consultant editor J. Goodwin, Kogan Page, 2008 Sullivan, M.,  The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, From the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day,  Thames and Hudson, London, 1973 von Tunzelmann,  A., Indian Summer:The Secret History of the End of an Empire, Pocket Books, 2007 Wood, M.,  The Story of India, BBC Books, 2007 Articles and reports Art India, vol.XII, issue IV, ‘Changing languages of place’, H. Burte; ‘Hyphenated worlds’, L. Gupta, 2007 Art India, vol.XIII, issue I, ‘Feeding the very hungry god’, L. Harris; ‘Looking for value’, L.  Williams; ‘Better late than never’,  A. Chari; ‘The Bubble’, S. Bordewekar; ‘Show me the money’, Q. Mirza; ‘High flyers’, G. Grewal; ‘The craft of art’, R. Maitra, 2008 ArtTactic, ‘Emerging art markets: India’, July 2007 ———, ‘Indian modern and contemporary art market’, March 2008 The Economist, ‘India’s jumbo election’, 18–24 April 2009 Holmes, P., ‘Is art having an Indian summer?’ Financial Times Magazine, ‘Spend it’, 2 August 2008 Kazmin,  A., ‘Palaces of the Untouchables’, Financial Times Magazine, 23 May 2009 Lamont, J., ‘Obituary: Indian queen who epitomised glamour of the Raj’, Financial Times, 8 August 2009 Pilling, D., ‘Progress and democracy collide in India’, Financial Times, 8 April 2010 Robertson, I. A., ‘All the Raj’,  Australian Art Market Report, winter 2008

Chapter 6 – Aryana

Books Alizadeh, S. et al., Iran,  A Chronological History: History, Culture,  Architecture, designed and published by authors, 2002 Amirsadeghi, H., Different Sames: New Perspectives in Contemporary Iranian Art,  Thames & Hudson, 2009

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New Art New Markets Asher, C.B.  And C.  Talbot, India before Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2006 Axworthy, M., Iran: Empire of the Mind:  A History from Zoroaster to the Present Day, Penguin, 2007 ———, Revolutionary Iran:  A History of the Islamic Republic, Penguin Books, 2014 Borchardt-Hume,  A. and Raad, W., Miraculous Beginnings, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2010 Brotton, J.,  The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo, Oxford University Press, 2002 Canby, S.R., Shah ‘Abbas:The remaking of Iran, British Museum Press, 2009 Curtis, J. and N.  Tallis, Forgotten Empire:  The World of Ancient Persia, British Museum Press, 2005 Diamond, D. et al., Garden & Cosmos:  The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, British Museum Press, 2009 Eigner, S.,  Art of the Middle East: Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World and Iran, Merrell, 2010 Elliot, J., Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran, Picador, 2006 Freitag, J., Serving Empire, Serving Nation: James Tod and the Rajputs of Rajasthan, Brill, 2009 Fukuyama, F.,  The End of History and the Last Man, Penguin Books, 1992 Holland,  T., Persian Fire,  Abacus, 2005 Holm,  A.,  The History of Greece Volume I. From its commencement to the close of the independence of the Greek nation, Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1899 ———,  The History of Greece Volume II. From its commencement to the close of the independence of the Greek nation, Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1902 Keshmirshekan, H., ‘Modern and Contemporary Iranian Art: Developments and Challenges’, in H.  Amirsaeghi, Different Sames: New Perspectives in Contemporary Iranian Art,  Thames & Hudson, 2009 Lawrie, W.,  ‘The Middle East and North Africa’, in  The International Art Markets:The Essential Guide for Collectors and Investors, consultant editor J. Goodwin, Kogan Page, 2008 Madani,  A.,  ‘Thinking Inside the Box: 6 Notes on Rashid Rana’, in Rashid Rana, Chatterjee & Lal in association with Chemould Prescott Road, 2010 Meadows,  A.R., ‘The Administration of the Achaeminid Empire’, in J. Curtis and N.  Tallis, Forgotten Empire:  The World of Ancient Persia, British Museum Press, 2005 Mirza, Q. et al.,  ‘A World Apart’, in Rashid Rana, Chatterjee & Lal in association with Chemould Prescott Road, 2010 Muller, N. et al., Contemporary Art in the Middle East,  Artworld Black Dog Publishing, 2009 Nabarz, P.,  The Mysteries of Mithras:  The Pagan Belief That Shaped the Christian World, Inner Traditions, 2005 Nanji.  A. et al., Spirit & Life: Masterpieces of Islamic Art from the Aga Khan Museum Collection, Aga Khan Trust for Culture, 2007 Porter, V   ., Word into Art:  Artists of the Modern Middle East, British Museum Press, 2006 Saatchi, C., Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East, Saatchi Gallery in partnership with Phillips de Pury & Company, 2009 Stolper, M.W., ‘Achaemenid languages and inscriptions’, in J. Curtis and N.  Tallis, Forgotten Empire:  The World of Ancient Persia, British Museum Press, 2005 Tugal, C.,  The Fall of the Turkish Model: How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism, V   erso, 2016

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Bibliography Articles and reports ArtTactic, ‘Middle East modern and contemporary art market overview’, October 2007 ———, ‘Turkish modern and contemporary art market’, February 2009 Atwood, R., ‘Restoring Iraq’s cultural legacy’,  Art News, summer 2004 Atwood, R.  and A. McCord, ‘Recovering Iraq’s past’,  Art News, November 2003 Axworthy, M., ‘Crisis of legitimacy leaves reformers few choices’, Independent, 15 June 2009 ———, ‘This inauguration did little to hide the scars that still divide Iran’, Independent, 6 August 2009 Bailey, M., ‘Syrian war’s devastating toll on antiquities’,  Art Newspaper, October 2013 Bonhams, ‘Modern and contemporary Arab, Iranian, Indian and Pakistani art’, Bonhams Dubai, 3 March 2008 ———, ‘Modern & contemporary Middle Eastern & South East Asian art’, Bonhams London, 3 June 2009 Bozorgmehr, N., ‘Pressure on Khatami to run again’, Financial Times, 29 December 2008 ———, ‘Police clash with mourners of Iran protesters’, Financial Times, 31 July 2009 ———, ‘Iran’s exchange traders feel Rial pain’, Financial Times, 27–28 October 2012 ———, ‘Iran’s clergy fear influence is slipping away’, Financial Times, 13–14 May 2014 Butler, K., ‘As Ahmadinejad is anointed, his victims pay the price of dissent’, Independent, 3 August 2009 ———, ‘TV blackout and boycott mar Ahmadinejad’s swearing-in’, Independent, 6 August 2009 Cockburn, P., ‘History suggests the coup will fail, Independent, 19 June 2009 Fifield,  A., ‘Iranians mix fervour with fever’, Financial Times, 10 June 2009 Fisk, R., ‘Ahmadinejad whips crowd to frenzy as opposition muzzled’, Independent, 15 June 2009 Harris, G., ‘Andy meets the Ayatollah’, Financial Times, 18–19 January 2014 ———, ‘Upfront and personal: Turkish artist Taner Ceylan’, Financial Times, 12 September 2014 ———, ‘Beyond the Veil’, Financial Times, 25–26 February 2017 Khalaf, R., ‘Iran triggers a touch of hypocrisy’, Financial Times, 6 July 2009 ———, ‘Iran’s anti-reform cleric’, Financial Times, 27 July 2009 ———, ‘Iran’s “Generation Normal”’, Financial Times 30–31 May 2015 Khalaf, R.  and N. Bozorgmehr, ‘Risks growing for opposition’s reluctant leader’, Financial Times, 22 June 2009 ———, ‘At a turning point’, Financial Times, 20 July 2009 Kirsanova, D., ‘Articulating Dissensus: Contemporary Artistic Practice in Iran at a Revolutionary Moment’, Ibraaz, 28 August 2013 Mohammed,  A., ‘Iran and the art of étente’, Financial Times, 5–6 December 2015 Moore, S., ‘The collection is a symphony’, Financial Times, 15 March 2008 ———, ‘A Leap of Faith’, Financial Times, 12 May 2012 Sami-Azar,  A., ‘Poetry in bronze’, Canvas, March/April 2008 Shaw,  A.  and G. Harris, ‘Arab protesters put their art on the streets’,  Art Newspaper, January 2012 Slackman, M., ‘Amid Iran’s unrest, a battle for the state’, International Herald Tribune, 9 July 2009 Somers Cocks,  A., ‘Are we colonialising Middle Eastern art?’ Art Newspaper, July/August 2009 Sotheby’s, ‘Contemporary art, Doha’, 18 March 2009

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New Art New Markets ———, ‘Contemporary art,  Arab & Iranian’, London, 20 October 2010 Srivastava, M.  and D. Gardner, ‘Erdogan’s machine cranks up pressure’, Financial Times, 12 April 2017 Stein, D., ‘Monir Sharoudy Farmanfarmaiain: empowered by American art: an artist’s journey’, Women’s Art Journal 33.1, Spring/Summer 2012 Thomas, K.D., ‘A bit of a hiccup’,  Art News, November 2005 Thomas, K., ‘The mission of Mathew Bogdanos’,  Art News,  April 2006 Ure-Smith, J., ‘Politics comes first’, Financial Times, 25–26 April 2015

Chapter 7 – Hispania

Books Adès, D.  and A. McLean, Revolution on Paper: Mexican Prints 1910–1960, British Museum Press, 2010 Adès, D. et al.,  Art in Latin America:  The Modern Era, 1820-1980,Yale University Press, 1989 Carmen Ramirez, M.  And T. Papanikolas (eds), Collecting Latin American Art for the 21st Century: International Center for the Arts of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2002 Diamond, J.,  The World Until Yesterday:  What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Allen Lane, 2012 Finamore, D.  and S.D. Houston, Fiery Pool:The Maya and the Mythic Sea,Yale University Press, 2010 Foner, E.  and J.A. Garraty (eds),  The Reader’s Companion to American History, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1991 Greene, G.,  The Power and the Glory, Penguin Books, 1940 Las Casas, Bartolomé de,  A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1542, reprinted in English, Penguin Classics, 1992 León de la Barra, P. et al., Under the Same Sun:  Art From Latin America Today, Guggenheim, New York, 2014 Locke,  A., Mexico: A Revolution in Art, 1910-1940, Royal Academy of Arts, 2013 Lucie-Smith, E., Latin American Art of the 20th Century,  Thames & Hudson, 2004 Mann, C.C., 1491: The Americas Before Columbus, Granta Books, 2006 McEwan, C.  And L. Loez Lujan, Moctezuma:  Aztec Ruler, British Museum Press, 2009 Motta, C., Brief History of US Interventions in South America since 1946, 9th edition, Guggenheim New York, 2014 Norwich, J.J., Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe, John Murray, 2016 Serota, N.,  Tate Latin American Acquisitions Committee. Celebrating 10 Years,  Tate Publications, n.d. Spengler, O.,  The Decline of the West, Oxford University Press, 1918 (reprinted 1991) Vila Llonch, E., Beyond El Dorado: Power and Gold in Ancient Colombia, British Museum Press, 2013 Williamson, E.,  The Penguin History of Latin America, Penguin Books, 2009 Articles and reports Budick,  A., ‘Finally, we get it’, Financial Times, 1–2 October 2016 ———, ‘Vision of an Ironic Paradise’, Financial Times, 22–23 July 2017 Harris, G., ‘Jumex fortune bears fruit’,  Art Newspaper, October 2013

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Bibliography Heathcote E., ‘A Solid Achievement’, Financial Times, 23–24 November 2013 Juste, C., ‘Already rich. Miami art dealer Gary Nader wants what’s next: a museum’, Miami Herald, 15 April 2016 Leahy, J., ‘Brazil’s scandal-hit Temer pushes on with reform’, Financial Times, 31 May 2017 Murray Brown, G., ‘Cuba comes in from the cold’,  Art Newspaper, 28–29 November 2015 Rathbone, J.P.  and A. Scipani, ‘Maduro tightens grip after court “coup”’, Financial Times, 1–2 April 2017 Smart,  A., ‘Doris Salcedo treats it like her own personal studio’,  Apollo, March 2017

Chapter 8 – South East Asian Authoritarianism

Books Akira,  T., ‘Art as Criticism’, in Tatehata,  A. et al.,  Asian Modernism: Diverse Development in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, Japan Foundation, 1995 Becker, J., Rogue regime: Kim Jong II and the Looming Threat of North Korea, Oxford University Press, 2005 Binks, H., Bui Huu Hung, Kings Road Gallery, 2000 Chu, M., Understanding Contemporary Southeast Asian Art,  Art Forum Pte. Ltd, Singapore, 2003 Crump,  T.,  Asia-Pacific:  A History of Empire and Conflict, Hambledon Continuum, 2007 Fisher, R.E., Buddhist Art and Architecture,  Thames & Hudson, 1993 Guillermo,  A.G., ‘The History of Modern Art in the Philippines’, in Tatehata,  A. et al.,  Asian Modernism: Diverse Development in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, Japan Foundation, 1995 Hayton, B.,  Vietnam: Rising Dragon,Yale University Press, 2010 Junichi, S., ‘Bangkok and Chiang Mai: Ways of Modernity’, in Tatehata,  A. et al.,  Asian Modernism: Diverse Development in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, Japan Foundation, 1995 Kerlogue, F.,  Arts of Southeast Asia,  Thames & Hudson, 2004 Lane, M., Unfinished Nation: Indonesia before and after Suharto, V   erso Books, 2008 Marshall,  A.M.,  A Kingdom in Crisis:  Thailand’s Struggle for Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, Zed Books, 2015 Nguyen, Ngoc Dung, Bui Huu Hung,  Art House Consultancy, 2013 Rodboon, S., ‘History of Modern Art in Thailand’, in Tatehata,  A. et al.,  Asian Modernism: Diverse Development in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, Japan Foundation, 1995 Shiraishi,  T., ‘The Modern in South East Asia’,  in Tahetata, A. et al., Asian Modernism: Diverse Development in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, Japan Foundation, 1995 Short, P., Pol Pot:  The History of a Nightmare, John Murray, 2004 Stevenson, W.,  The Revolutionary King:  The True-life Sequel to the King and I, Robinson Publishing, 2001 Supangkat, J., ‘The Emergence of Indonesian Modernism and its background’, in Tatehata,  A. et al.,  Asian Modernism. Diverse Development in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, Japan Foundation, 1995 Tran, Luu Hau and Hoang Duc Dung, Poetry of the Motherland, Contemporary Vietnamese Art, vol. 2,  Apricot Gallery, 2010 Tran,  Tuy et al., Bui Xuan Phai (1920–1988), Hanoi Fine Arts Collectors’ Club, 1993 Tsutomu, M., ‘Whispers of a lost child: The heritage of Realism’, in Tatehata,  A. et al.,  Asian

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New Art New Markets Modernism: Diverse Development in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, Japan Foundation, 1995 Vatikiotis, M., Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia, Orion Books, 2017 Vltchek,  A., Indonesia:  Archipelago of Fear, Pluto Press, 2012 Winkleman, B. (ed),  The Times Atlas of World History,  Times Books Ltd, 1979 Zandvliet, K.,  The Dutch Encounter with Asia, Rijksmuseum, 2002 Articles and reports Aglionby, J., ‘Economists split on Jakarta’s Komodo power’, Financial Times, 10 September 2009 Borobudur Auction Pte. Ltd, ‘Southeast Asian contemporary’, 28 October 2007 Christie’s, ‘South East Asian pictures and Straits Chinese ceramics, gold and silver’, 27 March 1994 Guillermo,  A.G., ‘A harvest of paintings’,  Asian Art News, November/December 2008 Kazmin,  A., ‘Vietnam’s inflation rate surges above 25%’, Financial Times, 28 May 2008 Larasati, ‘Pictures of Asia: modern and contemporary art’, 21 October 2007 Lombardo, F., ‘Vietnam builds a future for itself ’, Financial Times, 8–9 March 2008 Peel, M., ‘A punisher who has people hooked’, Financial Times, 8–9 October 2016 ———, ‘Thailand’s monarchy: Where does love end and dread begin?’ Financial Times, 12 October 2017 Sochua, Mu, ‘The demise of the opposition sounds the death knell for democracy in Cambodia’, Guardian, 17 November 2017 Sotheby’s, ‘South East Asian Paintings’, Singapore, 4 April 2004 ———, ‘South East Asian paintings’, Singapore, 10 October 2004 ———, ‘South East Asian Paintings’, Singapore, 10 April 2005 ———, ‘An important collection of V   ietnamese paintings featuring the Philip Ng collection’, Hong Kong, 8 April 2008 ———, ‘Modern and contemporary South East Asian paintings’, Hong Kong, 8 April 2008 ———, ‘Modern and contemporary South East Asian paintings’, Hong Kong, 6 October 2008 ———, ‘Modern and contemporary South East Asian paintings’, Hong Kong, 5 April 2010

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Index Bakre, Sadanand 119 Bamadhaj, Nadiah, 213 Bandung School 192, 196 Bangladesh 95, 103, 110–11 Barakat, Tayseer 148 Baroda School 122 Bashoˉ, Matsuo 40–1 Bedil, Dewa Putu 217 Beijing 55, 62, 63–4, 65, 84 Bendre, Narayan Shridhar 122 Bengal School 121 Bengaluru 116 Bey, Osman Hamdi 137–8 Bharati, Rabindra 121 Blasi, Octavio 174 Bo Xilai 66 Bogotá 166, 182 Bolivia 187, 188 Boonma, Montien 218 Borneo 191 Bose, Santiago 218–19 Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 15 Botero, Fernando 175 Bourbon dynasty 163, 164, 168, 169–70 Boutet de Monvel, Bernard 113 Brazil art market 189 economic development 182, 184–5 historical and political development 164–5, 170–1, 184–5, 188 Breton, Adela 160 Buddhism 46, 47, 107 Bui Huu Hung 219

Abdel Nasser, Gamal 27 Abdessemed, Adel 149 Abdullah, Raden Basoeki 194–5 Abraaj Group Art Prize 158 Abu Dhabi 24, 25, 26, 27 Achaemenid Empire 128, 130–1 Adam, Sabhan 149 Adhamy, Firyal al- 143 Affandi 217 Afghanistan 100 Ah Xian 16 Ahkami, Negar 139 Ai Weiwei 65, 67, 81 Ajali, Ali 156 Al Thani family 28–9 Ale-e-Ahmad, Jalal 152 Ali, Khadim 139 Aliabadi, Shirin 136 Almada Negreiros, José de 177 Álvarez Bravo, Manuel 163 Amaral, Tarsila do 179 Ambani, Tina 114 Amorsolo, Fernando 209–10 Anand, Mulk Raj 119 Anani, Nabil 148 Anciso, Natalia 170 Ángel Asturias, Miguel 176 Ángel Rojas, Miguel 186 Arab Spring 144–5 Arabshahi, Massoud 128–9 Arango, Ramiro 174–5 Arario gallery 50 Argote, Iván 169 Arnault, Bernard 120 Art Basel fair 183 Arte Povera 46 Astari, Sri 191 Attia, Kader 137 Ave, Fereydoun 136 Azari, Sheila and Eric 148–9 Azari, Shoja 139 Azzawi, Dia al- 149, 156

Cai Guoqiang 81 Cai Mingchao 79 Cairo 30, 146 calligraphy Arabic 147, 149, 150, 154–7 Chinese 14–15, 67–8, 87–8, 93–4 Cambodia 203–4, 217 Cao Fei 85 Cao Xiaoyang 69 Caro, Antonio 174 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 161 Castaneda, Carlos 176

Bae Bien-u 43–4 Baghdad, National Museum 157–8 Bahrain 29

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New Art New Markets D’Cruz, Dean 118 Delhi 99–100, 114, 116 Delhi Silpi Chakra Group 122–3 Delotavo, Antipas 211 Den Warnjing 218 Deng Xiaoping 24, 76, 80 Derakshani, Reza 135 Devi, Baua 125 Djien, Oei Hong 193 Do Hoang Tuong 209 Dodiya, Atul 105 Doha 14, 29, 146, 157 Dolman Ed 29 Dono, Heri 192 Doshi, Balkrishna 118 Dou Liangyu 90–1 Douaihy, Saliba 147 Downey, Juan 165 Drubi, Hafiz al- 147–8 Dubai 14, 24–6, 30, 31, 33

Celant, Germano 46 Ceylan, Taner 137 Chang Il-Kim 50 Chang Lei 86 Chang Tsong-zung 87, 90, 93 Chang Yu 78 Chaura, Nasser 147 Chen Cheng-po 218 Chen Danqing 83 Chen Shui-bian 59 Chen Yifei 62, 78, 82 Cheonan 50 Chien Chi-chang 52–3 Chile 18, 185–6, 188 Chin Hsiao-yi 57 China art market 11, 13, 21, 31–3, 61–3, 67, 81–7 art traditions and styles 23, 58, 68–71, 87–93 auction houses 21, 84 Buddhism 80, 82 calligraphy 67–8, 87–8, 93–4 Confucianism 67, 74–7 Daoism 88 economic development 59–60, 73–4, 220 Free Trade Zones (FTZ) 33 historical and political development 22, 59–60, 63, 64, 67, 74–80 and Iran 142–3 national-security legislation 65–6 walls, significance of 61–2 Cholamandal artists’ village, Chennai 116–17, 123 Chowdhury, Devi Prasad Roy 123 Choyal, Shail 124 Christian, J. 23 Chu Teh-chun 67, 91 Chun Doo Hwan 35 Cinalli, Ricardo 174 Cohen, Frank 120 Colombia 182, 185, 186, 188 Confucius and Confucianism 55, 67, 74–7 Constructivism 174 Contreras, Rey Paz 218 Correa, Charles 118 Cruz Diez, Carlos 187 Cuba 181, 182, 183, 188 Cui Ruzhuo 67, 79 Cui Xiuwen 61, 85 Cynical Realists (China) 190 Cyrus Cylinder 131, 201 Cyrus the Great 131, 132, 133, 134

Ecuador 188 Egypt 27–8, 30, 130, 144, 146 Ehsai, Mohammad 156 eL Seed 29 Errázuriz, Paz 186 Erro 86–7 Esquillo, Alfredo 211 Essaydi, Laila 149 Expressionism 174 Fang Lijun 62 Farmanfarmaian, Monir 130 Farrokhzad, Forugh 136 Fathi, Golnaz 157 feng shui 53 Feroci, Corrado 198 Forouhar, Parastou 136, 149 Foster, Norman 27 Fotouhi, Shahab 138 free ports 30, 31, 33 Free Trade Zones (FTZ) 33 Fua Haripitak 198 Fukuoka, Masanori 119 Gade, Hari Ambadas 119 Gaitonde,V.S. 119 Gandhy, Kekoo 119 Ganjavi, Nizami 135 Gao Qiang 64 Gao Zhen 64 Garaicoa, Carlos 183 García Márquez, Gabriel 179 Gasparian, Gaspar 172

Damrong Wong-Uparaj 218 Daoism 53 Darius 126, 133, 134–5

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Index Hou Hsaio-hsien 74 Hsu Yu-jen 53 Hu Jintao 22, 75 Hu Jundi 78 Huang Chin-ho 57 Huang Rui 65, 71, 90 Huillca Huallpa, Antonio 180 Hung Tung-lu 57 Husain, Maqbool Fida 97, 110, 119 Hussein, Ibrahim 214

Gehry, Frank 27 Gergasi, Maryanto 197 Ghadirian, Shadi 136, 137, 149 Ghamdi, Zahra Al 148 Ghandriz, Mansour 134 Gill, Simryn 214 Goitia, Francisco 185, 187 Golestan, Kaveh 138 Goodnow, F.J. 80 Great Depression 181 Greece, ancient 130 Greene, Graham 161, 163 Gu Gan 70 Gu Wenda 81 Guan Yong 84–5 Guiragossian, Paul 147 Gunawan, Hendra 179, 196–7, 217 Guo Guangchang 65 Guo Jin 78 Gupta, Sakshi 99 Gupta, Shilpa 95 Gupta, Subodh 97, 98, 116, 120 Gutai Group (Tokyo) 181 Gutiérrez, Cynthia 17 Gwangju 50

Iglesias, Lisa and Janelle 160 I.M. Pei 27, 89 Inca civilization 161, 162–3, 165–6, 167, 170, 173 India art market 12, 96–7, 113–18, 118–25 art traditions and styles 116–23 Bengal School 76, 98 caste system 96, 108 cultural influences 108–10 economic development 99, 106, 112, 114, 115 historical and political development 18–19, 95, 97, 99–102, 104–8, 113, 115–16 religion 96, 98–103, 105–9, 117–18, 121–2 indigenista (Latin America) 161, 173, 174, 177–9 Indonesia 12, 191–7, 193, 195 Inoue, Manji 41 Iran art market 12, 143, 147–9, 158 art traditions and styles 132, 136–40, 152–3, 154–5 economic development 96, 143 historical and political development 28, 126–36, 150– Islam 126, 150 Sufism 139, 150, 154 See also Persia Iraq 28, 129, 155 See also Mesopotamia Istanbul Biennale 144 Iturbide, Graciela 172

Habsburg dynasty 163, 168 Hadid, Zaha 27 Haerizadeh, Ramin 146 Haerizadeh, Rokni 146 Hajizadeh, Ghasem 136 Han Feizi 67 Han Tao 61, 85–6 Hangzhou 88, 90 Haripitak, Fua 198 Harsono, F. X. 196 Hassanzadeh, Khosrow 140 Havanna Biennale 181 He Sen 82 Helbling, Lorenz 83 Herrán, Saturnino 177 Herrera, Carmen 186 Hinduism 19, 101–3, 107, 108–9, 115–16, 121–2 Holm, Adolf 128, 131 Hong Kong art market 21, 33, 56 art traditions 22 historical and political development 10, 21–2, 65–6 museums and galleries 81, 98 Western influence 14 Hong Xiuquan 79 Hormtientong, Somboon 202 Hou Hanru 82

Jack Ma 30–1 Ja’far, Mustafa 155 Jakarta 191, 192, 193, 197 Jakarta Biennale 193 Jalali, Bahman 138 Jameel Prize 158 Japan art/crafts traditions and styles 38–41, 41–2, 56 art market 12, 34, 37–41, 50–1 economic development 51 manga 57 Nihonga 38, 39, 121

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New Art New Markets Lee Myeong Ho 43 Lee Teng-hui 36, 37 Lee Tzu-hsun 57 Lee Ufan 43, 46, 70 Legaspi, Cesar 210 Lertchaiprasert, Kamin 119, 202 Leung Kui-Ting 69–70 Lhote, André 119 Li Bai 70 Li Huasheng 71 Li Jin 15–16, 17, 91 Li Keran 64 Li Xianting 89 Li Xiaoxuan 90 Lin Fengmian 64 Liu Dan 72–3 Liu Han 66 Liu Kuo-sung 70–1 Liu Qinghe 90 Liu Xiaobo 85 Liu Xiaodong 15, 16, 82–3, 84 Liu Yuyi 58 London art market 31–2 museums and galleries 11, 65, 132, 157 Olympic Games (2012) 114 López Alonso, Eugenio 184, 187 Lu Hsien-ming 36 Lu Shoukun 23 Lu Xun 15, 78 Luo Fahui 78 Luo Zhongli 62

Shintoˉ 44 Yoˉga 39–40 See also Tokyo Java 193, 194, 215, 216 Javadi, Rana 139 Jhunjhunwala, Rakesh 96 Jiang Zemin 22, 75 Jinchi, Pouran 149 Johns, Jasper 190 Ju Ming 14, 52 Kabir, Raisa 95 Kahlo, Frida 176, 179 Kallat, Jitish 98, 103, 120 Kamel,Youssef 147 Kapoor, Anish 114 Kayyali, Louay 147 Khakhar, Bhupen 122 Khaldi, Jeffar 149 Khalili, David 157 Khanna, Krishen 119 Khayyam, Omar 133 Kher, Bharti 120 Khurasani, Soghra 108 Kim Jong-un 58 Kochi-Muziris Biennale 116 Kolkata KMOMA 124 Korea see North Korea; South Korea Koshimizu, Susumu 46 Kositpipat, Chalermchai 197 Kulkarni, Baskar 125 Kumar, Ram 119 Kusama,Yayoi 38

Ma Dadong 74 Ma Liuming 61 Ma Ying-jeou 59 Maezawa,Yusaku 39 Mago, Pran Nath 123 Mahapatra, Dinabandhu 119 Maharaja Sayajirao University 124–5 Makoto, Aida 56 Maktoum, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al 147 Malallah, Hanaa 142, 149–50 Malaysia 23, 30, 212–14, 217 Manansala,Vicente 210 Manet, Edouard 164 manga 57 Mansour, Nasser 157 Mao Lizi 72 Mao Tongqiang 89 Mao Zedong and Maoism 62, 64, 66, 68, 78, 80 Masefield, John 70 Masriadi, I Nyoman 190, 216

Lai, Jimmy 21 Lam, Ivan 214 Langhammer, Walter 119 Laso, Francisco 171 Latin America art market 187 art traditions and styles 175–6, 177–9 historical and political development 161, 167–8, 170–2, 181–4, 188–9 religion 171 Lawrence, D.H. 161 Le Corbusier 118 Le Mayeur de Merprès, Adrien Jean 195 Le Pho 207 Leang Seckon 203–4 Lee Bo 66 Lee Chiho 48–9 Lee Chin-chuan 52 Lee Dong-youb 14, 47, 93 Lee Jaehyo 45–6, 46

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Index Muniz,Vik 185 Muñoz, Oscar 185 Murakami, Takahashi 38 Murakami, Takashi, 56 muralism 173, 177

Mater, Ahmed 147 Matta, Roberto 175–6 Maya civilization 161, 162, 166, 175 Mayawati, Kumari 115 Mehta, Tyeb 114, 119 Mei Yang 10, 11 Meirelles, Fernando 185 Melamed, Ebrahim 148 Meppayil, Prabhavathi 123 Merchant, Rithika 99 Mesopotamia 101, 131, 142–3 See also Iraq mestizaje (intercultural mixing) 179 Mexica (Aztec civilization) 160, 161–3, 166 Mexico art market 189 art traditions and styles 159–60, 173–80, 179 economic development 166, 177, 188 festivals 159 historical and political development 160–3, 168–70, 180, 184, 188 museums and galleries 184 religion 159–60, 163–4 Middle East 13, 25, 28, 136, 149, 151 Milhazes, Beatriz 180 Mishima,Yukio 56 Mithraism 134 Mittal, Lakshmi 114 Miwa, Jusetsu 42 Miwa, Kazuhiko 42 Mobed, Amir 136 Modernism China 68 dismissed 147–50 India 97, 118–19 Iran 153 South America 175, 179, 186, 210 Modi, Narendra 96, 97 Mokoh, Dewa Putu 217 Mono Ha 70 Monotheism 130 Monroe Doctrine 181, 183 Mooi Indie school (Indonesia) 194, 195, 215 Morandi, Giorgio 175 Moshiri, Farhad 16–17, 133, 140, 149 Mostaert, Jan 167 Motta, Carlos 182–3 Mousavi, Mir Hossein 138 Moustafa, Ahmed 150, 156 Mughal Empire 140–2 Mukerjee, Samaresh 118 Mulk, Kamal al- 153 Muller, Nat 27 Mumbai 96–7, 114, 116, 124

Nabil,Youssef 136 Nadar, Kiran 114 Nadar, Shiv 114 Nader, Gary 184 Nami Island 35–6 Nandgopal, S. 117 Nanjo, Fumio 39 Naqqashi-khatt Group 148, 155 Nara,Yoshitomo 38 Nash, Paul 187 Nasr, Moataz 28 Neo-Realism 210 Neshat, Shirin 136–7, 149, 152 Neto, Ernesto 17, 181 New Literati Movement (China) 73, 90 New York Guggenheim Museum 63–4, 65 Whitney Museum of American Ar 186 Nguyen Cat Tuong 209 Nguyen Phan Chanh 207 Nguyen Quang Huy 208 Nihonga 38, 39, 121 Ning Zhouhao 86 Nishizawa, Tekiho 42 Noor Deen Mi Guangjiang, Haji 14, 143 North Korea 58–9 Nouvel, Jean 27 Nugroho, Eko 190–1 Ocampo, Hernando R. 210 Ohtake, Tomie 180–1 Oiticia, Hélio 186–7 Okakura, Kakuzoˉ 98, 121 Olympic Games Beijing (2008) 55, 65 London (2012) 114 Rio de Janeiro (2016) 184–5, 188 Seoul (1988) 36, 55 Oman 146 One Belt One Road (China) 13, 67, 77, 80, 143 ¯ nnishi, Isao 42 O Orientalism 127, 137–8 Orozco, José Clemente 173 Ortega, Damián 175 Ortiz Torres, Rubén 182 Ossouli, Farah 139 Otero, Alejandro 186

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New Art New Markets Political Pop art (China) 11, 62, 73, 78, 79 pop art 174–5, 190 Posada, José 178 Progressive Artists Group (India) 118, 120–1, 124 Pu Hsin-yu 37 Puri, Rajiv 114 Purnomo, Haris 191 Pushpamala N. 122 Pyne, Ganesh 119

Ottoman Empire 142, 145 Ouroussoff, Nicolai 26 Padamsee, Akbar 119 Pahari School (India) 121 Pahlavi dynasty (Iran) 130, 131–2, 154 Pak Su-gun 43 Pakistan 95, 97, 103, 110–11 Palestine 148–9 Pambayun, Dhanank 191–2 Pamuk, Orhan 139–40 Panama 181 Paniker, K.C.S. 117, 123 Paraguay 187 Paris, L’Institut du Monde Arabe 157 Park Seo-bo 47 Pasargadae 132 Pashaei, Morteza 150 Patwardhan, Sudhir 122 Paz, Bernardo 187 Peerenboom, Randall 22 Pekik, Djoko 193, 217 Persepolis 129, 130, 132, 133 Persia art traditions and styles 138, 153–4 historical and political development 127–8, 135, 140–2 language and literature 138–40 Zoroastrianism 129, 132, 134 See also Iran Peru 162, 188 Pezeshknia, Houshang 147 Pham Hau 206–7 Pham Huy Thong 204, 206 Philippines 210–12 photography Chile 186 China 61, 64, 85–6 India 99, 114, 122 Iran 136–7, 138 Japan 45 Korea 43 Malaysia 213, 214 Mexico 161, 172, 182 Middle East 136 Pakistan 137 Taiwan 36, 52–3 Thailand 200, 201 Uruguay 185 Picasso, Pablo 177 Pilaram, Faramarz 149 Pinault, François 120 Pirhashemi, Afshin 129 Piyadasa, Redza 213

Qatar 26, 28–30, 31 See also Doha Qi Baishi 17 Qin Shi Huang 67 Qing Wan Society (Taiwan) 12, 72 Qiu Anxiong 91–2 Qiu Shihua 93 Qiu Zhijie 14, 62, 92 Qupty, Mazan 148 Raad, Walid 149 Ramanujam, K.G. 109, 123 Rana, Rashid 137 Raphael 72 Raza, Syed Haider 119 Razavipour, Neda 138 Reddy, Gali Janardhan 115 Rembrandt 131 Ren Zhitian 92 Rennó Gomes, Rosângela 185 Reygadas, Carlos 159 Rio Branco, Miguel 185 Rio de Janeiro 184–5, 188 Rivera, Diego 173, 177–8 Rodó, José Enrique 173 Roman Empire 134 Romero, Fernando 184 Roy, Jamini 102, 121 Ruíz, Antonio 176 Ruskin, John 8 Russia 28 Saadiyat Island 25, 26–7 Saatchi, Charles 120 Sabogal, José 165, 171, 179 Sadeghi, Ali Akbar 129 Said, Shakir Hassan Al- 155–6 Salcedo, Doris 182 Salman, Mohammed bin 26, 28, 29–30 Samra, Faisal 148 Santana, Linda Lucia 176–7 Sanyu 207 São Paulo Biennale 180, 181, 186

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Index Buddhism 46, 48 Buddhist art 48–9 Confucianism 55 economic development 13, 24 festivals 17–18, 48–9 historical and political development 35–6, 55, 58–9 See also Nami Island; Seoul Souza, Francis Newton 97, 114, 119 Spanish conquistadors 161–5, 167 Special Economic Zones (SPZ) 33 Spengler, Oswald 8–10, 168 Srikanda 117 Sriwanichpoom, Manit 201–2 Sudjojono, Srihadi 191, 215–16 Sufism 139, 150, 154 Suga, Kishio 45 Sugimoto, Hiroshi 45 Suh Se-Ok 47–8, 48 Sulawesi 52 Sun Jingtao 86 Sun Yat-sen 21, 76, 77 Sundaram,Vivan 99, 122 Suraji 197 Surasit Saokong 198–9 Surrealism 174, 175–6, 179 Suwage, Agus 190, 216 Suwaidi, Khawla Bint Ahmed Bin Khalifa Al 147 Suzhou Museum 27, 89 Swaminathan, Jadith 120 Switzerland 33 Syria 28 Szyszlo, Fernando de 165

Saqqa-khaneh Group 148, 152, 154, 155 Saudi Arabia 26, 28, 148 Schlesinger, Emanuel 119 Seibi Group (São Paulo) 180 Sekine, Nobuo 45 Sen, Ronny 99 Senju, Hiroshi 44–5 Seoul 36, 48, 49–51, 55 Serra, Richard 45 Seti, Sevi 113 Sha Menghai 88 Shanghai 62, 65, 73, 86, 88 Sharjah 146 Sharma, Gopal Prasad 124 Sharma, Raja Ram 122 Shaw, Raqib 120 Sheikh, Gulam Mohammed 114, 122 Sheikh, Nilima 98 Shen Aiqi 94 Shen Chen 92–3 Sheng Qi 61 Sher-Gil, Amrita 121 Shi Guowei 85 Shi’ism 126, 150–1 Shintō 44 Shiraishi, Masami 39 Shyam, Jangarh Singh 120 Sigg, Uli 81 Silk Road 143 Singapore 14, 23–4, 31, 33 Singh, Amrit and Rabindra 104 Singh, Arpita 114 Singh, Malvinder 114 Singh, Martand 119 Singh, Raghubir 114 Siqueiros, David Alfaro 173, 177 Siriboon, Maitree 200–1 Sitthiket,Vasan 202 Slim Helú, Carlos 184 Sobrat, Anak Agung Gde 217 Soedarsono, Srihadi 196 Sohail, Tassaduq 147 Song Yongping 85 Soralaklikhit, Luang 198 Soto, Jesús Rafael 186 South America 168–76 art market 187 economic development 181–2 historical and political development 160–1, 186 religion 161, 163, 168, 171, 173–4 South Korea art/crafts traditions and styles 42, 43, 46–9 art market 12, 49–51

Tagore, Abanindranath 76, 98, 121 Tagore, Gaganendranath 198 Tagore, Rabindranath 98, 120, 121, 198 Taipei 10, 36–7 Taiwan art market 33, 56 Buddhism 58 Confucianism 55 Daoism 53 economic development 13, 24, 36 festivals 17 historical and political development 36, 37, 57–8, 59 Nativism 37 temples 52 Tamayo, Rufino 179 Tanavoli, Parviz 14, 126–7, 133, 135, 154–5 Tao Qian 72 Tapaya, Rodel 219

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New Art New Markets Wei Guangqing 61 Wen Qiang 66 Weng Fen 61 Wong, Wucius 22–3 Wu Changsi (Wu Changshuo) 15, 64 Wu Guangzhong 64, 82, 155 Wu Shanzhuan 88 Wu Tien-chang 54 Wu Xiaohui 66

Tarek-El Komi, Tarek-El 131 Tata, Ratan 114 Tatari, Aneh Muhammad 153 Tehran 30, 132, 145–6, 148, 153 Tehran School 153 Tek, Budi 193 Tenmyouya, Hisashi 56 Tenshin, Okakura 121 Thailand 197–202, 218 Thu Van Tran 204 Tibet 82 Tirafkan, Sadegh 139 Tokyo 12, 38, 44, 45, 58 Toledo, Francisco 179 Torres García, Joaquín 175 Torres, Rodrigo 182 Tropicalia group (Brazil) 186 Tsai Ing-wen 59 Tsuchiya, Tilsa 165 Tsui, T.T. 10–11 Tunisia 30 Turkey 144–5, 147, 148, 158

Xhafa, Sislej 82 Xi Jinping 20, 66–7, 77, 79 Xiao Jianhua 65 Xiao Ling 86 Xie He 68 Xie Zhiliu 91, 198 Xing Xing (Stars) Group 63, 72, 90 Xu Beihong 63, 78 Xu Bing 15, 62, 70, 81, 149 Xu Longsen 73, 94 Xuanzang (Hiuen Tsang) 80, 98 Yamaguchi, Akira 56 Yan Liben 15 Yang Fudong 85, 87 Yang Xun 74 Yang Yanping 69, 71 Yang Ying-feng 11, 51–2 Ye Fang 16, 71–2, 94 Ying Yefu 92 Yōga 39–40 Yon-fan 57 Yu Peng 71 Yuan Hui-li 36 Yuan Shikai 80 Yuang Goang-ming 36 Yue Minjun 62

Underwood, Leon 161 United Arab Emirates (UAE) 24–5, 29, 30, 146–7 See also Abu Dhabi; Dubai Uruguay 185 Ut, Nick 201 van Dijk, Hans 83 Van Gogh,Vincent 38 Varma, Raja Ravi 98, 102, 121, 194 Vatikiotis, Michael 24, 31 Velázquez, Diego 186 Venezuela 186, 188 Venice Biennale 44, 54, 62, 202, 204 Vietnam 197, 202–9 Vietnamese Young Artist Association 205 Vijinthanasarn, Panya 197, 218 Vilasineekul, Jakapan 218 Vishwanath, Chitra 18 von Leyden, Rudy 119 Vu Cao Dam 207

Zen Buddhism 46, 47 Zenderoudi, Charles Hossein 149, 152, 154 Zeng Xiaojun 73 Zhang Dali 61 Zhang Daqian 67, 71, 91 Zhang Peili 63 Zhang Xiaogang 61, 79 Zhang Yu 93 Zhao Bandi 64–5 Zhao Wou-ki 67 Zhou Yongkang 66 Zhu Qizhan 68 Zoroastrianism 126, 127, 134

Wallace, Brian 83 Wang Chao 92 Wang Dongling 69 Wang Jinsong 85 Wang Xizhi 67 Wang Yidong 62, 82 Wang Yongming 88

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